= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jack comments on Rational Repentance - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (150)
It seems to me that many of the arguments made on this site based on or referring to the Politics is the Mind-Killer article are based on extrapolations from a single well-known highly-polarized (essentially) 2-party system, i.e. the USA.
I am from a country with many political parties. No party ever gets more than 50% of the votes, in fact it is rare for any party to get over 20% of the votes. The parties are always forced to form a coalition to make a majority government. This system is not without its flaws, and far be it from me to argue that it is superior to the American system.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that many of the failure modes of 'politics', as often described of this site, are actually failure modes of present-day American politics, and not of politics in general.
For example, I encounter the argument described above, that "other side are ignoring obvious facts, and so failing to behave rationally, because they're blinded by their ideology" very rarely, even in political discussions. Politicians saying such things would find it hard to negotiate with other politicians to form a government, and are mostly smart enough to not say such things. They would have no difficulty admitting that other politicians/parties behave differently simply because they have different goals (they represent the interests of a different set of voters), while still acting on almost the same set of evidence.
This is an interesting theory and the two-party system may exacerbate the problem. Great Britain, however, has essentially a two party system (Clegg's relatively new, barely relevant, ideologically indistinct party doesn't really count) and they seem to have about the same level of rationality in their politics as most of multi-party Europe. As others suggested, I suspect the difference has much more to do with the United States cultural, economic and racial diversity than anything else. America is a single tribe to a far lesser extent than other countries- even our white majority, which is smaller than it is in most of Europe consists of four genetically and culturally distinct traditions (and that isn't including Hispanic). This kind of diversity means that we have less in common to start from and have resolved fewer basic issues. We've never gotten around to European style social welfare for much the same reason- that kind of altruism isn't supported for those outside of the tribe. We're also large enough and wealthy enough to support more fractured news media environment- which lets people insulate themselves from opposing view points.
This does suggest that discussion of politics could be more successful on Less Wrong (given how much we all have in common) but having to work over the internet involves other difficulties.
I would be interested to see, however, whether the differing political climates influence the way people talk about politics. We could select some posters from Northern Europe and some posters from America. Have them discuss a series of emotional and controversial political issues. Have another group evaluate their comments (with the anti-kibitzer on) and grade them by degree of motivated cognition and mind-killing rhetoric. See if the Europeans do better.