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Multiheaded comments on Help, help, I'm being oppressed! - Less Wrong
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I saw you arguing with someone here about the possibility of being "apolitical". Suffice to say, I agreed with them and not you; already forgot how their line went, though, d'oh!
I didn't know anything I could be pointing at by saying that. Turns out that neither do you :)
It's probably impossible to be apolitical in the sense of being innocent of political influences, and it's definitely impossible to be apolitical in the sense of avoiding action with political implications. But it's probably not impossible to be apolitical in the sense of rejecting political identity (though it is a lot harder than that makes it sound), and even that helps eliminate a lot of important biases.
How would we know if this were true or not? Isn't there motivated cognition to support all social norms, not simply the explicitly political moral posturing?
By checking the domain-specific predictions of politically motivated people against future results, and by comparing them to the predictions of less politically motivated people. Self-assessment is probably good enough to establish political motivation, although you could probably do better with enough cleverness. If I'm not mistaken this has been done a couple of times, although I unfortunately can't find the links right now.
And yes, motivated cognition does exist to support all social norms (or at least all those incorporated into people's identities), but I'm not sure how this bears on the original point. Politics (or explicit politics, if you prefer) is a special case of that more general principle, but it's an especially salient one thanks to how intensely people cling to their political identities.
My impression is that people cling to their identities equally strongly whether or not the identities can be described as explicitly political.
Sexist (or feminist) people have just as little sense of how mindkilled they are in their own domain as Democrats or Republicans have in their domain.
I don't disagree. Politics doesn't need to be a uniquely strong source of bias to be worth looking at, it just needs to be a strong one.
It's a fairly mainstream thought - for not-very-mainstream feminists.
And I concede to Konkvistador that the definition of "political" in the saying is not the mainstream definition that references only participation in political parties and the electioneering process.
Yeah, half the people in my LJ friends feed probably think so, though; I feel at home with a crowd like that for some reasons :)
Well apolitical as in not seeing my personal actions through a political lens first but rather primarily guided by my virtue ethics approach (regardless of political strategizing). Not ignoring political consequences, but not letting politics affect my identity.
And naturally in the conventional sense of abstaining from conscious political acts like voting, supporting candidates or talking about politics in everyday life. I also avoid consuming information about current political events, since it is just brain candy, delicious but rots your teeth.
Heh, it's simply hard to visualize that; here in Russia everyone has been talking very loudly about politics to everyone else 24/7, since around 1987. I'm into that too; at least I abstain from vodka :)