There is a story for very young children called “The Carrot Seed” where a little boy plants a carrot seed and waters it and pulls out the weeds around it, and keeps on doing so even though everyone keeps telling him nothing will grow. At the end, of course, a giant carrot comes up. I’ve always had mixed feelings about reading that story. On the one hand, you don’t want to send the message that things are true just because you believe, and that evidence to the contrary doesn’t matter. On the other hand, you do want to innoculate the kid against excessive self-doubt and against taking too seriously people who, out of malice or out of instinctual aversion to different ideas, or because the idea of someone else succeeding is an implicit rebuke to them for not having tried, love to tell people what they can’t do.
David_J._Balan
There is no doubt that politics gets people fired up, which makes dispassionate reasoning about it hard. On the other hand, politics is important, which makes dispassionate reasoning about it important as well. There is nothing wrong with deciding that this particular blog will not focus on politics. But to the extent that we do want to talk about politics here, I don’t think the trick of finding some neutral historical example to argue about is going to work. First, historical examples that are obscure enough not to arouse passions one way or the other are exactly those things that most people don’t know much about. Second, it’s usually pretty obvious which side in the “neutral” example corresponds to the arguer’s preferred side in the contemporary example, so the arguer is likely to just adopt that position, and then claim to have derived it from first principles based on a neutral example. I agree that neutral exercises can have some usefulness as they might be helpful in uncovering subtle biases in people who are sincerely trying to avoid them, but it won’t get rid of the flamers.
The same idea goes for insisting that the charity you donate to is actually good at its mission. If you get your warm glow from the image of yourself as a good person, and if your dollars follow your glow, then competition among charitable organizations will take the form of trying to get good at triggering that self-image. If you get your glow from results, and if your dollars follow that, then charities will have much better incentives.