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Multiheaded comments on To like each other, sing and dance in synchrony - Less Wrong
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Strong agreement with your disagreement. I just finished Haidt's The Righteous Mind and observe that rationalists seem to gravitate towards a liberal, individualistic moral foundation, while the rest seem to automatically balance that with, or favor, group binding moral foundations. Thus, we rationalists (and liberals in general) are seen as immoral because of our tendency to disregard others' crucial moral foundations of ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity. Thus, this has never been a disagreement over facts at all, but rather, a moral loathing of our very kind.
I'm definitely a "liberal" (among other things), but I'm by no means excluding group values and group interests from my ethics. I see the question of individual rights vs group-ism, cooperation, etc as a 90% false dichotomy of the worst and most damaging kind. Liberals are silly and near-sighted enough for letting this shit go on, but hard-line conservatives are arguably even worse (and more guilty) for stirring up the hostility and moving the focus from entirely solvable, compromise-accepting practical issues (e.g. abortion) to some metaphysical conflict of responsibility vs selfishness.
I do not deny the essentially adversarial nature of differing values' and attitudes' interaction in society, but it doesn't mean we should escalate the inevitable debate to an all-out war.
(Sorry for blatant meta-politics, but I'm trying to call out mind-killing here, not increase it.)
I do kind of agree that the statement was mindkilling because it was (and this is pretty ironic considering its content) rather tribal in nature. At the very least I pretty much felt excluded from the intended audience.
Hey, dude, I'm 100% cool with what you are saying! My criticism relates to those benighted heathens who engage in mainstream political debate, and not to anyone who has joined the wise and glorious LW community and adopted our enlightened ways!
;)
The funny thing is that this actually makes it better.
The dichotomies are always rationally solvable, but we are hardwired to loathe compromise on moral issues.
I think it is possible to interpret my comment is saying something bad about conservatives and good about liberals. However, what I wanted, rather, was to make the point that we (as liberals or liberal rationalists) need to think about taking group binding moral foundations as seriously as conservatives do, because if we dismiss them as outdated evolutionary vestige, that will definitely not solve social and political polarization (which in the US, at least, is at record levels).
What "taking seriously" should mean I'm not completely sure. But I think it starts at understanding and using what is known to work while attempting to avoid the known pitfalls (much like the OP suggests). And as this comment thread demonstrates, that seems to be a bit of a tightrope.