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David_Gerard comments on Politics is hard mode - Less Wrong
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While "politics is hard mode" is technically closer to the truth than "politics is the mind killer", it fails to serve the phrase's social function as well.
There is a common adage that good startup ideas are worthless. This is false. However, there are a lot of people with bad or not-unusually-good startup ideas, which they think are great, but which aren't worth spending time on. It is usually bad to tell people that their ideas suck, or that they aren't even worth listening to. So instead, we have a standard piece of wisdom that all startup ideas are worthless, and use this to deflect frustrating conversations in a way that won't cause offense.
When a political topic comes up, I look around the room. I predict who is likely to be triggered, I check my own mental state, and I predict how the conversation is likely to go. If I expect it to go badly, I say: politics is the mind killer. It's not you, it's everyone, now let's talk about something else.
(Sometimes I forget to do all that, and regret it. And sometimes "the room" is a public thread on the internet, which usually means fools will come crawling out of the woodwork.)
(Please don't explain this to people who would be hurt by that knowledge.)
I concur with the problem assessment: its social function in practice is to assure the group that other people's politics are mindkilled, whereas their own politics are just the normal background.
This has a number of fairly obvious problems.
Being mindkilled feels from the inside like clear thinking.
Seems to me that being mindkilled feels from the inside like being so sure about something that no thinking is necessary.
Yeah, I mean it feels like the obvious results of clear thinking, even if it was effectively cut'n'pasted in.
Not exactly. Clear thinking often has all those telltale feelings of humility where I change my mind and learn new things. Unfortunately most of our conclusions are cached and being mindkilled makes us incapable of (or uninterested in) distinguishing between cached clear thoughts, cached mind-killed conclusions or new mind-killed reasoning created on the fly.
Maybe not. Only slightly more charitably, they may admit that they get mind killed in political arguments as well. Everyone does, there's no point in discussing it, no one will ever change their minds, etc.
That would be the usual taboo against arguing about strongly held views, whether religion, politics, morality, etc.
I'd emphasize that the phrase tends to only be applied to arguments with The Other, not discussions with Our Side, though logically the other side of the pancake would have the same issue. I predict that a lot of people who use the phrase against political discussion here, still have tons of political discussions with like minded people.
Fundamentally, it's a general memetic protection tactic, that successfully prevents serious encounters with conflicting memeplexes. Christianity has "never argue with the Devil, he's smarter than you and has had more practice in arguing". Other ideologies find similar strategies to keep the Bad Ideas away. The ideas that possess people, are the ones that work to keep them.