I actually had to struggle to get them to put in as many links as they allowed. They wanted links to Salon pieces, while I kept insisting on making more links to academic pieces. It's always a trade-off when going to a popular source like Salon, and James is right, it is about as rigorous as one can get in a venue like Salon. These are the trade-offs that are required if one chooses to spread rationality broadly.
Nancy, I could have certainly made similar points about Sanders, although less emphatically. To some extent, all candidates are appealing to anger and fear, although Trump is the clearest and most strident example. This is why at the end of the article, I noted that "he is not the only candidate doing so. Whatever candidate you are considering, my fellow Americans, I hope you deploy intentional thinking and avoid the predictable errors in making your political decisions."
Good question on checking whether I'm right. I didn't go into this in depth in the source, due to space limitations, but I read quite a bit of primary sources of why people are voting for Trump. I have a scholarly background in studying emotions and deployed that methodology for studying this topic.
If you think my goal is to get people on Less Wrong to change their minds about Trump, you're modeling me incorrectly.
I shared my goal in the post, namely to use topical news events - whether Trump or anything else - to promote rationality. If Trump is the button to push that gets rationality out there, then that's the button I push.
This comment was -3 karma last time I looked. Now, it's +6. Given its extremist language, I decided to look up this account. Having looked at the history of this account, I'm pretty since it's another Eugene Neir sock puppet. Hope you had fun voting down this post, Eugene Neir - reported to the admin.
Yup, Scott Adams and I have been making similar points for a while now. The Salon editors didn't want a link to that source, though.
Also, the problem with all the pieces that focus on Trump's style is that they completely ignore his substance. Trump's position on immigration is only "controversial" in the sense that the elite are against it while everyone else is for it. Thus it's not surprising that Trump is doing well. In fact looking at other western countries we see parties with similar positions doing well despite having styles that are all over the place.
Original thread here.
According to Pew Research Center, "More than eight-in-ten Republicans (84%) say the nation should impose tighter restrictions on immigration, compared with about six-in-ten Democrats (58%)."
Okay, so it's not "everyone", but it's a majority.
So you have a majority of voters wanting something, a politician saying he will deliver, the politician has wide support... and this all makes the voters irrational because... uhm... because neuroscience explains that the voters actually have emotions, oh the horrors!
I suppose next time I care about something, I should vote for a politician who promises the exact opposite, so that no neuroscientist can suspect me of being a helpless victim of my own opinions. /s
I think we have some slippage of concepts here. The majority of voters want tighter restrictions, but only half agree with Trump's position on a ban on Muslim migration.
Well, the "rationality" of the piece is rather dubious. For example consider your description of the "backfire effect":
For instance, Mitt Romney condemned Trump as a “phony” and “fraud” shortly before the March 15 primaries. This type of attack only strengthens the emotional desire to vote for Trump among anti-establishment voters by triggering a thinking error called the backfire effect — a tendency for our beliefs to grow stronger when they are challenged by contradictory evidence.
Except Romney wasn't presenting evidence, he was making an assertion. And in a lot of circumstances it is perfectly rational to update away from assertions.
More generally, in a lot of cases you describe acting on fear as irrational even though the fear in question is perfectly rational.
Original thread here.
In his persona as VoiceOfRa and Azathoth123 and The_Lion, he was heavily involved with criticizing InIn-related posts. Heck, he even tried to wipe the Intentional Insights wiki entry.
Romney was presenting evidence of his viewpoint on Trump, and was expecting voters to trust his viewpoint as it was evidence of what a mainstream prominent Republican thought about Trump. How is that not evidence?
Yes, if you look at it that way it is indeed evidence. In particular it's evidence of Trump's claim to be anti-establishment.
I'm curious about your thoughts on my piece in Salon analyzing Trump's emotional appeal using rationality-informed ideas. My primary aim is using the Trump hook to get readers to consider the broader role of Systems 1 and 2 in politics, the backfire effect, wishful thinking, emotional intelligence, etc.