It don’t get the impression you’re making an effort to understand my position.
Ok, well first let me correct that misconception: I am definitely making an effort to understand. Knowledge is the only thing I get out of this. If you feel I’m being insincere about any specific point, feel free to ask about it. But I think the difficulty in communication really just shows exactly that: real communication is difficult.
You misunderstand me completely. I was criticizing your description.
I interpreted your initial “That makes it sound like I’ve done something I think I should to feel bad about.” to mean “It sounds like you are implying that my reason for supporting Trump is bad” (I took the word ‘judged’ from your original post, btw), so this reply was saying “no, I am not implying that it is bad”.
Apparently, you were actually criticizing my description. By that, do you mean that you do think “not feeling judged” is a bad reason to support someone, or do you mean that it’s not an accurate statement about you. If the former, why do you think that it’s a bad reason, and what in general do you consider acceptable reasons? If the latter, how is me saying I don’t view it as bad “doubling down”?
For your next objection to my “it doesn’t make sense to like someone for both their morality and amorality”, perhaps I should have paraphrased less as directly quoted you with “the Kavanaugh thing wrecks that narrative”.
I also don’t think it’s “theoretical” or “eventually.”
This implies you think it is actual and current. Do you think we currently have a thought-policing dystopia?
politics is distinguishing between friend and enemy
That’s reasonable. I would like there to be no enemies. Now, obviously that’s not the case, but it is almost never true that an entire group is an enemy, and it is often true that calling people enemies creates and perpetuates enmity.
Broadly, my suspicion is that you trust the establishment news media too much, and let their description of events affect your perceptions the way they intend. That would explain the difference adequately. Here’s a good test: do you believe Trump called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017 “fine people”?
You’re correct that I trust the establishment, though obviously not to a degree that I think is too much. I also think that you’re correct that this may be a crux. For your test, without Googling, my belief is that Trump said “there are fine people on both sides” in reference to the Charlottesville protests. Even if I’m incorrect about that though, I don’t think that it measures how much trust I have in the establishment news, since you haven’t measured my confidence in that belief or how resistent it would be to counter evidence. If some random person on the street tells me they just ate a bagel, I will believe they just ate a bagel, despite a relatively low level of trust. But that doesn’t mean I would stake much on that belief or resist counter-evidence. I don’t know if my current belief on this is true, but if not, I guess you can test how I react to counter-evidence (though you may have to distinguish between my resistance to changing my belief and my level of trust in the source of whatever counter-evidence you provide).
I was recently thinking about how I would explain my general trust in the established systems (science, education, free press, democracy) to someone who didn’t share it. It’s quite difficult, because I think at core it comes down to beliefs about what other people are like. Perhaps the best way to explain it is that my base assumption is that other people are like me, and when I think about how I would act in these systems, the result of them being filled with people like me is that they would be fallible but reasonably reliable. The other reason it’s hard for me to explain why I don’t distrust them is that trust seems like the default to me. Like I said, I’d believe a complete stranger’s claim about what they ate. When I ask a cashier the price of an item, I’ve never once thought they might lie to me. The vast majority of things I hear people say (and the things I say to others) line up with reality, so against that background prior of P(statement|human said it)~=0.99, it feels like I would need to understand why someone else think P(statement|human said it & establishmentIndicator)<50%, before I could begin to explain why I haven’t reached that conclusion.
I’m curious, do you have any beliefs that others label as conspiracy theories? How do you determine which sources to trust? Do you trust any of our established systems in (science, education, free press, or democracy)?
Late to the party here, but I thought I’d share my experience in case it is helpful data to anyone. I’ve been dumb luck, the clear eyed-fool, and the chosen one at different points. Here’s what it felt like internally:
Dumb luck—
What I said: “I haven’t tested for statistical significance yet, but the correlation is just so dang uncanny. I’m looking into how I can test if it’s actually significant, but I’m hopeful that I’ve actually stumbled on to something.”
The situation: I had only conjectures for how I was achieving success, but nothing solid or obvious. My choices and timing were extraordinarily bad, and I was hopeful that I had found a way to consistently underperform the market and that I could have someone short my choices with significantly larger capital.
Aftermath: Over the next 2 years I made it all back and ended up ahead of the market, basically killing my hope of having some sort of intuitive edge for good.
Clear-eyed fool—
What I said: “I believe the EMH. I still invest more in some stocks I like, because if true, the EMH implies that I won’t get worse returns, so my only loss is a slightly higher return variance, which is pretty small, given that they represent small portions of my total wealth.”
The situation: I was no longer actively trading and I was putting new money into index funds, but let myself keep my previous intuitive decisions.
The aftermath: They basically kept up with the market if you exclude NVDA, which pulled up my average.
Chosen-one (2x) -
What I said 1: “Ok, well the EMH obviously doesn’t apply here. And I’m not getting rich off it, but I’ll take the extra money.” 2: “I’m not saying that I know better than anyone else, but I’m just looking at this and it looks really solid to me. I’m just surprised that this isn’t already corrected.”
The situations: 1. I decided to buy individual stocks as a tax optimization strategy. Specifically pairing it with donating appreciated stock, you can get a decent tax advantage from individual stocks over index funds. 2: I was making bets on a small betting site.
The aftermath: 1. I pay less in taxes and donate more to effective causes. 2. Not crazy piles of money, but more than my day job.