= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RobinZ comments on The Sin of Persuasion - Less Wrong Discussion
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)
What else causes people to depart from the factual level?
Yep, I had that in mind. And I have noticed a trend (both in person and in the psych literature) to treat political orientation as more of an identity than as a set of ideas that may be true or false. Studies that show liberals and conservatives have different core moral values, different patterns of brain activity, etc. That's a model of politics as a kind of overall temperament. Maybe in the future we'll be as tolerant of political differences as we sometimes are of religious or sexual orientation differences -- and it will come to be taboo to investigate or challenge them. I'm still on the fence as to whether I like that or not.
That doesn't sound to me like a very viable arrangement. People control the direction of the country on the basis of their political beliefs (their religious beliefs too, to an extent.) I think that would make them top priorities for making them things that are rationally discussed. It might be difficult to train people to discuss them rationally, but the payoff is high.
If political persuasion heads the way of religious tolerance, I sincerely hope it is after we find a better model for running nations than politics.
Not in China they don't. And this last decade, the Chinese government seems to have been doing a better job than say the government of Greece.
The country is doing better, but many of the government's policies are comparably unsustainable. In theory you might be able to restrict all political decisions to a class who actually know how to work things out in a rational manner and run things properly, but I would not regard China as a good example of this.
Don't forget that some people in China are still controlling the country on the basis of their political beliefs, the majority of the country simply has no power and thus little incentive to be politically active.