= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
DBreneman comments on Should LessWrong be Interested in the Occupy Movements? - 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 (63)
A fundamental value of the political left is multiculturalism and egalitarianism -- the notion that "everyone ought to be 'equal'": equal in personal value, equal in economic outcome, equal in productivity and talent, equal in rank. These simply aren't values of the right. And from that root extends the notion that all beliefs are "equal".
In that sense, post-modernism is a 'core value' of the political left just as much as 'tradition' is a core value of the political right.
... The one thing protestors definitely have in common is the existence of strongly-held beliefs and/or opinions. They're not there to have their minds changed; they're there because they believe -- strongly -- that "the truth" is being ignored.
That's not exactly a hotbed arena for rational discourse.
That is a damn good point, and I don't know if I can entirely counter it, because as far as I can tell it's pretty darn true. I do think that there are arguments that will work for some of the less hippie-esque protesters though, the ones who are there more because of economic issues rather than moral ones.
A major part of what drove the economic recession that lead to most all of the problems that these people are protesting was speculation on subprime mortgages. These are mortgages that are plain-to-see crappy to everyone. However, ratings agencies gave the vast majority of these mortgages very high ratings. When speculators came to purchase insurance on these loans, they would see a AAA rating, no indication the loan was subprime until it comes crashing down upon them.
The ratings agencies have argued in court that they were merely giving their opinion about these mortgages, that it didn't necessarily have to have anything to do with what was actually in the mortgages. They argue that their opinion is 'true' because it's what they believe, and everyone else just chose to accept that.
Now, these ratings agencies were paid to analyze loans. Their word was used to price transactions on the market. There were literally in some cases lives on the line (in the case of medical loans.) Does this mean their opinion is worth two shakes? How about when their 'truth' causes the entire country to crash?
I think that argument would get a lot of people angry, but would also be a good setup for convincing them that objective truth not only exists, but should be priority when you're negotiating economic and political deals.
I do not think you have really addressed Logos01's point, which I understand to be that the OWS folks are characterized by epistemic zeal for existing beliefs. Your strategy does not seem designed to alter that.
Instead, you suggest starting by affirming a bedrock zeal-inducing belief, making sure it pisses them off, and then (somehow) getting them to apply the insight that admitting that they are wrong about a lot of things is one of the keys to becoming less so.
A bit late to the party, but I wanted to point out that this is a very inaccurate view of how the subprime mortgage thing went down. I would know; I used to be a wire transfer auditor for a subprime correspondent loan company (Bear Stearns Mortgage, in fact.) I was also in a committed relationship for about ten years with a woman who worked as a loan coordinator. I ate, breathed, and slept mortgages for a sizable chunk of the window for which these things occurred.
The thing is -- what the ratings agencies were ensuring wasn't the loans themselves, but the expected payout rate of the loans, when bundled into aggregate products. (I.e.; if 20% default each loan that doesn't default brings in 25% profit, then the aggregate is worth 5% more than its invested value. This is a VAST oversimplification.) It's worth noting that subprime loans were very often amortized in such a manner that the first few years of their existence, they were pure interest payments. People were sold on the notion of buying a house as a way to improve/repair their credit; spend five years on a subprime and then refinance into a better mortgage. The single most common loan product out there in many areas was a 5-year Option ARM. This was a mortgage that was termed for five years, with a balloon payment due at the end of the five years for the remainder of the note. It was designed to be refinanced away.
So from the ratings' agencies perspective, these products were pure gold at the time. Of course, that was only true because the housing market kept going up -- but it was the genuine widespread belief of nearly everyone in the industry that housing prices could only keep going up. Homes were described as one of the best/easiest possible investments.
( It's also worth noting that some of this came down from Federal statutes coming out of the Clinton administration's push to increase homeownership in the US. The lending regulations were adjusted for political reasons and... well, we've all seen what happened. Not quite related to the ratings agency thing, but... this is a complicated and nuanced topic. You did start it out by mentioning that the economic recession was associated with this, and that opens the floor to further root-cause analysis.)
At the end of the day, though, the people who need to hear that it was a Democratic usurpation of a Republican talking point that "caused" the housing bubble -- are the same ones who, insofar as I can see, won't hear it.