> "Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion."
I agree that this is how people tend to see it. But it isn't really true. Like JavaScript or auto mechanics or animal husbandry, there is indeed a threshold of expertise for expressing a meaningful opinion.
The value of somebody else's commentary on political issues is pretty much directly proportional to their understanding of the political system and their command of objective facts. This is true even if they subscribe to political ideals diametrically opposed to your own.
Personally speaking, this is why I have been so sad about the political discussion on HN since SOPA and Snowden. I thought it might be one of those rare forums where empirical facts and "evidence-based" thinking prevailed -- but it really hasn't. People still seem mostly trapped in their private little jihads, just like they are in the youtube comments section.
To me that's disappointing because government is something so fundamentally amenable to hacking, and the stakes are so incredibly high. The state of the art is so so sad and primitive, with so much low-hanging fruit. (The state of the art in governance, that is, at least if you accept at face value the objective of representing the interests of the electorate; the state of the art of getting elected is actually incredibly advanced, but rarely publicly talked about in earnest.)
> The value of somebody else's commentary on political issues is pretty much directly proportional to their understanding of the political system and their command of objective facts.
I think this is objectively wrong for the specific case of politics; unlike, say, analytical chemistry, politics has an active opinion on how each of us live our lives and can't be "left to the expert" (the latter being what the political and legal experts would love everyone to accept).
Concrete counter-examples to your claim:
1) Does a homosexual couple with no knowledge of US marriage law not have a valid opinion on whether they should be allowed to marry?
2) Did poorly educated blacks or women need training in the subtleties of constitutional law before they could have a valid opinion on universal suffrage?
Politics, by its nature, shoves itself in everyone's face. Thus everyone has a legitimate basis on which to argue about how they are to be governed, even if they are ignorant of the details of the governance mechanism.
>1) Does a homosexual couple with no knowledge of US marriage law not have a valid opinion on whether they should be allowed to marry?
No, that couple doesn't have a valid opinion. How could they? They don't understand that marriage is in the United States. That conceptualization of "togetherness" as a couple doesn't exist in their minds. The threshold at which they can form a valid opinion is, therefore, at the entry-level of understanding United States marriage laws.
>2)Did poorly educated blacks or women need training in the subtleties of constitutional law before they could have a valid opinion on universal suffrage?
Depends on what you mean by "training" - they need to understand what suffrage is, so in that sense, yes, they do need training. This is the threshold for having a valid opinion.
Here are concrete counter-examples to your counter-examples:
1) If a gay couple were asked if they wanted the right to be married without first being told the sociological context and culture of marriage in the United States, and without understanding the legal ramifications of being married, their opinion would be null and void - just noise. They don't know what they're agreeing/disagreeing with.
2) If you asked women if they'd like the ability to vote, and they said yes, but couldn't answer you when you asked them what a democratic republic is, or how representation works in the United States, their opinions would be meaningless. It would be equivalent to pathos-driven desire to be able to do something - ultimately, a useless opinion.
Understand - I'm not being pedantic. Your examples may show a somewhat low threshold for meaningful opinions, but the parent is correct in that you need some threshold for every opinion.
I was tempted not to reply because I think we're just arguing over the many possible definitions of the word "valid", and that can quickly become uninteresting. Here's a stab at not being too much of a hair-splitter.
In a nutshell, it sounds like your definition of "valid" (and parent's) refer to some frame of objectively true facts and a commonly accepted value system. I agree that one would have to take such a definition in order to find intellectual value in a person's opinions on political matters.
My definition of validity (in the context of the previous comment) has to do with recognizing subjective individual value systems that must occasionally be trampled upon in order to have a functioning state. By their nature, political institutions touch your life whether you want them to do so or not.
So my view is that all people affected by a political institution have valid opinions on the actions of said institution, even if those opinions are not particularly well informed or even logical. If an institution forces something into (or out of) your life, I take the position that you have a valid voice with which to support or oppose that action, even if I might find that support or opposition to be unpersuasive from a logical or evidentiary frame of reference.
To close the loop of example/counter-example, I think your two counter-counter-examples demonstrate opinions of low intellectual validity, as they do not stem from a body of knowledge. However, I think they are fully politically valid, because I don't see any way to have a politically legitimate institution while invalidating the opinions of those whose individual values are violated by its actions.
> They don't understand that marriage is in the United States. That conceptualization of "togetherness" as a couple doesn't exist in their minds.
Can you explain what these sentences mean in clearer language?
If you're saying what I think you're saying, then I think you may have it precisely backwards. Those individuals are the only credible experts on the particularities of their relationship, which has little, if anything, to do with the United States; from their perspective, it's the current legal status quo that lacks validity. (nb: there aren't actually "United States marriage laws" - the recent attempt to assert federal influence over the legal definition of marriage was ruled unconstitutional.)
Politics is about "ought", not "is", and understanding the nuances of established policy isn't a necessary precondition for proposing replacing it with some other policy.
You're right to say that the gay couple would be credible experts on their own relationship.
The problem is that people tend to confuse their own personal experience with broader expertise about a subject. For example, the gay couple would not necessarily be credible experts on all, or even most, gay relationships.
Membership in a group doesn't qualify us to speak on behalf of all the group's members; the same is true for issues concerning race, gender, etc.
In other words, everyone is entitled to strong opinions based on personal experience — the "ought" part, as you put it — but they should be careful not to presume that others share their views and experiences.
> For example, the gay couple would not necessarily be credible experts on all, or even most, gay relationships.
So?
> Membership in a group doesn't qualify us to speak on behalf of all the group's members
The boundaries of groups are usually pretty arbitrary in the first place.
No one is ever speaking on behalf of anyone else, unless that someone else explicitly invited them to do so. When people express their opinions, they're expressing their opinions, so it's likewise an error to interpret one party's opinions as necessarily being those of anyone else.
I agree that no one should presume to speak for others, but this has nothing to do with the notion I'm arguing against here, that being that people's political views must somehow be validated by data in order to be credible.
No one is ever speaking on behalf of anyone else, unless that someone else explicitly invited them to do so.
I beg to differ. In fact, it's very common for people to extrapolate based on their own experiences and speak for others whom they see as being in the same situation, whether the situation has to do with race, economic status or sexual orientation.
Therefore, if people are arguing for a policy that affects many people, not just themselves, their proposal should be backed by some expertise other than just personal opinion.
> it's very common for people to extrapolate based on their own experiences and speak for others
No; it's very common for people to presume to extrapolate based on their own experiences, and to presume to speak for others. But they're not actually speaking for others.
unlike, say, analytical chemistry, politics has an active opinion on how each of us live our lives and can't be "left to the expert"
That's true of computing also, though, which is why you have a lot of non-techies with opinions about computing. Even if you aren't a technologist, you will likely be impacted by technology whether you want to be or not, because it structures a large amount of daily life, at least unless you are a hermit in the mountains. From that perspective, it's perfectly reasonable for everyone to have opinions on technology. Unfortunately, as with politics, the opinions not based on any kind of understanding of how things work tend not to be as useful in figuring out how to improve them.
Ted Nelson's version of it [1] is something like: technology is too important to be left up to the techies, but if nobody but techies understands technology at all, it will by default be left up to them, because nobody else will be able to say anything sensible about it. Therefore regular people need to learn at least something about technology, enough to analyze it intelligently and make decisions for themselves. That's how I view politics as well.
I tend to agree with the GP. No matter how strong someone's opinions on, say, the US Iraq invasion are, they're not worth much if they're not grounded in some notion of world history since WWI.
"Does a homosexual couple with no knowledge of US marriage law not have a valid opinion on whether they should be allowed to marry?"
They have an interest in the marriage laws, but that doesn't make their opinions more interesting or well-founded. In fact, because of the obvious conflict of interest, it makes them suspect.
Politics is about "ought", not "is", and policy is entirely about the interaction of people with divergent interests. Your point of view make it seem like there's some objective context for politics in the first place, but there isn't: the entire context in which politics takes place, the substance that defines it, and the objects it pursues are created by people and their interests. Having an interest is having an opinion.
In light of your points, which I appreciate, perhaps I should recast my point of view this way: a person's opinion about politics is interesting or not (perhaps we could even say valid or not) to the extent that he is able to generalize his interests far enough to place them in a context informed by general principles and relevant domain knowledge, and beyond narrow self-interest. "Virginia should allow Gays to marry because I'm Gay and I want to live in Virginia and get married" is as meaningless, as a political opinion, as me saying "Everyone in the US should give me a dollar because I want a lot of money." Socrates took the hemlock not because he thought it would be good for him personally, but because he thought it was a good thing for citizens to obey the law.
Any statement that contains the word "should" is inherently a normative claim, which exists outside the scope of empirical data.
When people articulate their own interests - of which they are the most credible experts - and then say "the current policy framework is damaging to my interests/rights", they're articulating a far more valid position than someone who is trying to abstract their own hypothetical understanding of the world into some set of universal principles.
"General principles" don't actually exist - principles only exist in the minds of people, and there are many people, each with his or her own own worldview. Attempting to treat politics as a means of perfecting the world in accordance with putatively universal principles can lead to only one outcome: an escalating cycle of ideological conflict.
The relevant "domain knowledge" here would apply to the proper domain of politics: reconciling the disparate interests of actual people.
> Socrates took the hemlock not because he thought it would be good for him personally, but because he thought it was a good thing for citizens to obey the law.
Then Socrates was as much a victim of his own defective ideals as he was a victim of the Athenian establishment. Law is a tool we use to mitigate and restrain conflicts among actual human beings. If the law is perverted into something that harms the rights and interests of actual human beings, then it shouldn't be called law at all; it becomes merely a weapon, and remains so, no matter what grandiose ideals are appealed to as justification for its excess.
Say we are in the US before the Civil War. Since we can't, according to your methodology, insist on the general principle that slavery is wrong (because general principles don't exist) then the proper role of politics, in your view, is to reconcile the interests of the slaveholder and the slaves. The non-slaveholders who want to eliminate slavery don't count, because they don't have a direct interest, in your analysis. They only have an interest in decency, but that is just another general principle. So how to we reconcile these opposing interests? Abolishing slavery would seem to be off the table, because that just benefits one side. Limit the number and severity of beatings?
> Since we can't, according to your methodology, insist on the general principle that slavery is wrong (because general principles don't exist)
No - we can insist on anything we want. There's just nothing general about it. Our principles are ours, not the universe's.
You've actually picked out a great example: that one generated some absolutely immense conflict.
Maybe most of us share an opinion that we feel so strongly about that we're willing to accept and to engage in that level of conflict in order to ensure that our position dominates. When matters of life and death, freedom and slavery are made into political questions, then the possibility that the political process will succumb to violent conflict certainly increases. Perhaps you feel that the cost is worth it to eliminate slavery or to destroy tyranny, and I'd agree with you. But how many questions is it really worth it for? Can you name a single modern political issue that you'd think was worth a civil war?
I'm merely pointing out that principles aren't general: they belong to people in particular, and when people with conflicting principles attempt to universalize their values in the same space, the result is escalating conflict. For the vast majority of modern political controversies, I prefer the "agree to disagree" approach, finding viable ways for people with incompatible values to live by their own values within their own space, enabling them to peacefully coexist with each other, and to enjoy the benefits of interacting with each other to the extent where and when their values don't conflict.
NB: the example of slavery is actually even more interesting here, because in a famous ruling in 1772 (in a dispute known as Somersett's Case), slavery was determined to have always been illegal under the common law. It took positive law enacted by colonial and, later, state legislatures to legalize it where it historically existed.
I think that the main thing this misses is the words "directly proportional".
There's a threshold of expertise, which is ridiculously low, but as someone who keeps an eye on the polyamory community, one of the things being bandied about right now is that the legal concept of marriage is problematic for certain definitions of polyamory, and people who want to advocate polyamorous marriage have a far less valuable opinion because they haven't been able to make clear what they intend to advocate as a group.
>> "Politics, like religion, is a topic where
>> there's no threshold of expertise for expressing
>> an opinion."
> I agree that this is how people tend to see it.
> But it isn't really true. Like JavaScript or auto
> mechanics or animal husbandry, there is indeed a
> threshold of expertise for expressing a *meaningful*
> opinion.
But that's the entire point. Lots and lots of people feel that they have something to say, and they say it, whereas very few actually have a meaningful opinion, and they get drowned out.
Although you say "it isn't really true" you have, in fact, agreed entirely.
Right, I am not disagreeing with the OP's premise.
I'm more just lamenting the truth of it -- and expressing disappointment that we haven't seen better discourse here on HN (where actually I think the signal to noise on stuff like node vs go, should you ever use rails for anything, etc, is actually pretty good, all things considered...).
Edit/Addition: What I mean to say is, the article isn't wrong, but the people it describes are wrong. Wrong to think that weighing in on a serious topic with essentially zero knowledge is acceptable, and wrong to conflate their politics with their identity. There is a bedrock of objective truth underlying virtually any political discussion, and it is just as stupid to conflate your own individual identity with a political party or TV station as it is to do the same thing with your smartphone OS or web app framework.
> The value of somebody else's commentary on political issues is pretty much directly proportional to their understanding of the political system and their command of objective facts.
Politics isn't about objective facts. Politics deals with ought, not is. There are certainly objective, measurable facts relevant to any particular question, but political debate rarely focuses on those; it's usually a contest among people pursuing different ends, not arguing over which means best effect ends that everyone agrees on. Even what appears superficially to be an argument over facts is usually just rhetorical cover for contesting underlying values and intentions.
> There are certainly objective, measurable facts relevant to any particular question, but political debate rarely focuses on those; it's usually a contest among people pursuing different ends
That is true only for a few set of issues, like abortion, immigration, etc. I'm socialistic-inclined and my neighbors are mostly republicans, I usually start conversations with them by saying "Look, we both want the same thing: we want the greatest amount of people in America to be eating well, being well-educated, living in dignified places... we just disagree on how we can get there". Then we discuss -- and we get along surprisingly well.
But you're (a) making an assumption that the full set of end-goals that your neighbor desires aligns exactly with yours, and (b) speaking in very generalized terms about what those end-goals are, without making reference to details of questions that people might evaluate differently.
Your attempts to build common ground with your neighbor will approximate tautologies as the actual intersection of your respective value systems shrink. You can say "Look: we all want more good things and less bad things", but what are you actually proposing?
If I asked you and your neighbor a more particular question, i.e. "should the state intervene to ensure that the greatest amount of people in America are well-fed, well-educated, etc., in its own judgement", I might get different answers from you and your neighbors. If I asked you to define what constitutes "well-fed", "well-educated", etc., I'll likely get different answers. If I asked you whether it's desirable to allow top-down, universalized definitions of these terms to form the basis of public policy, I'll likely get different answers.
All of these are questions of desired ends, answered differently due to different hierarchies of values, and not due to divergent interpretations of empirical data.
People need some notion of the current state of the world in order to have a meaningful opinion of how to change it. Most people think that income taxes on the rich ought to be raised and most people think that 33% is an ideal marginal tax rate for the rich, but the rich already pay more than 33% on their marginal income.
Or there's the position that we ought to balance the budget by cutting foreign aid.
Or the idea that we shouldn't accept any level of radioactivity in our food.
> People need some notion of the current state of the world in order to have a meaningful opinion of how to change it.
It goes without saying that if you want to get from here to there, you need to know where 'here' is. But I'm arguing that political debate is rarely about how to get from here to there, but rather is about which 'there' we should be heading for in the first place.
Do you think the commonplace opinions that you've described are the result of people misjudging circumstances, and drawing incorrect conclusions about them, or do you think they're not even evaluating circumstances, but merely projecting values onto the world?
Politics in this country (U.S. -- especially, if also elsewhere) has been coopted by a... "religious fervor". To our detriment. It appears, at least in the reported news, to have drowned out the rational thought and decision making that are central to an effective political environment.
We have a similar relationship to professional sports teams. For many, it is of paramount importance to "root" for "your team". And... many of these people do not actually play, themselves.
There may be "no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion". But we should all seek and use such thresholds when accepting political opinions.
Just in many professional areas of life, your success or failure will be marked not by blind obeisance but rather by critical thinking.
People's right to have their interests and values weighed in communal decision-making does not (in principle) deserve any "threshold of expertise" requirement. When discussions (quite necessarily) move into precisely how that translates into policy there quite definitely is a demand for expertise. Unfortunately, our systems don't do a very good job pulling those apart.
It makes for an interesting read concerning speculation as to why HN is becoming less and less technical over time, and more about politics.
Technical issues and articles take time to read, digest, and understand. It takes a minimum level of expertise to be able to comment usefully on technical issues, so by the time a technical submission has been read properly, it's too late for it to reach the HN front page.
I believe there's a bit of a false dichotomy implied here that there exists a contrast between things that people identify with and things people must have expertise in.
I'd argue that anybody spending dozens of hours studying Haskell innards is probably heavily emotionally-motivated to learn Haskell. We just don't know what that motivation is. So it's not tech stuff on one side, fluffy emotional stuff on the other. Much more complicated than that.
But yes, HN rewards things that receive quick votes. Any article requiring more than 20 minutes to consume, by definition will never reach the front page. That's why it's always the same cast of clowns who write things with emotional appeal that end up getting on the front. It's the combination of hero worship, easy-to-digest subject, emotional impact, and big fan base. I think PG is way off-base here about the ease of commenting. Commenting doesn't drive articles to the front. Voting does. Popularity on HN and quality of comments are two different subjects. Related yes, but separate.
It's always been that way, just in the past the smaller group was much more diverse. Now it's reached the mob mentality point. Small mobs get really upset about chickens in functional testing or gotos in COBOL and easily sway the entire board because they can hit a new submission with so many votes so quickly.
It's not the entire problem, but posting about politics is low-effort content. It is easy to produce and easy to consume.
It's possible to have a good political discussion, but you need really good and hard-working moderators. If HN wants to have political discussion, it would more moderation than it seems to have right now in total, but devoted entirely to that, not to anything else.
Definitely interesting. I'd say if we want to actively fight the entropy of the social news mechanic (ie. the feedback loop of popularity winning and slight dumbing down of anything increasing popularity), then perhaps we should glance quickly at an article and then jump back and upvote it based a snap judgement of its technical depth.
Of course we run the risk of upvoting well-dressed crackpot nonsense, but that's probably a lesser risk than becoming reddit.
I don't know if you guys proceed the same as me, but I merely open a tenth of links on home or new page.
Actually, when doing so, you can consider any opened link deserves an upvote, provided that at first glance, it is what the link title promised : it attracted your attention so may attract other people.
Nevermind if the point made in the linked article you upvoted is valid or not after a detailed review, the subject is interesting and may lead to interesting discussions - and top comments will instantly warn if the point is not valid.
When going slightly against common sense, people tend to randomly add Chinese quotes, usually from Lao-tzu, and it is almost always a bad idea. But here this text is vibrating strongly with one of the core idea of daoism, it is impressive.
It could be found more closely in Zhuangzi or even Lizi. These guys were living in a time when many have been killed for their ideas, and many had strong beliefs. Their solution for survival was to be an empty vase, a useless tool.
A good example is the tree: a straight trunk is the sure path to death for a pine tree, while if you are twisted in a way that makes you useless you survive much longer.
There is also this empty boat story. If a big vessel sees a small boat in her way the captain will shout at the small boat, but let the small boat be empty and the captain will just move around.
Daoism is all about being this empty boat. And it is it's limits: society also need people with strong belief and ready to die for them.
Just take slavery; it is a moral belief and duty to be against slavery. Even if by some rational reasoning slavery was proven a better solution than freedom, we would still have to stand against it, and some have died for this moral belief.
So I think I cannot fully agree here.
Edit: Or to be more precise, there is a limit to the reduction of one's identity. Maybe this limit is just that common identity we all share: humanity.
The Taoism analogy is an interesting one. Underpinning much of it is the idea that there is a time to move and a time to stand still. iow it's useful to learn when to resist and when to yield.
Many times when people express opinions, they are given with the urgency of "this needs to be done, now!" e.g. we need to stop them from stoning women to death Right Now(!), we need to let gays marry, now.
But the belief that we can do these things right now is an illusion. That would be like me walking out of my office to the airport, buying a ticket in cash to Iran, finding someone who stoned a woman to death, and killing him with my bare hands. It's not strategic.
The Tao is a collection of wisdom of strategy that says, "Don't do everything that you feel right now, right now." Instead, "Find the right time to act." And you don't always act all of the way. You have to figure out how much when to act and how much.
So it seems to crass to sit still while listening to stories of gut-wrenching atrocities, but at least one school of ancient wisdom teaches us we have to be strategic and flow when the time is right, when others are moving at the same time and our force is multiplied, when the "bad guys" have their guard down, etc. And we need to learn to perceive these conditions.
And we need to tame this urge to railroad our opinions into other's actions and forced agreement. In the slavery and suffragist examples, their opinions were much more powerful as they gained domain knowledge and when they coordinated their efforts, becoming the smoothly flowing, powerful water, instead of a disparate cloud of angry electrons.
I'm not particularly gung ho about humanity as identity. That concept has very often been used as a carrier of more or less conscious prejudices and ideals.
Some philosophers (Agamben among others) make the case that humanity traditionally defines itself as the animal which goes beyond animality. This means that humanity is not a simple essence, but a process of separation and an attempt at transcendence. Which is obviously kind of messy and complex.
Plus, what's the reason to identify as human rather than mammal, animal, or simply life?
Yes, this differentiation between humans and other animal is kind of axiomatic here, but I fear that if you remove it the consequences are too dangerous. I believe that exploiting crops or cows in a field, and killing them, is morally acceptable, while exploiting fellow humans in a factory is not.
Keeping your identity 'small' is really easy when you're rich and don't need to team up to effect change.
Identities are what form motivated groups, and groups -- or parties -- are, for better or for worse, what our form of democracy runs on.
Rich dudes can keep small identities and still make shit happen; poor everyone-else has to form teams, and with a diversity of levels of education, talent, intelligence and common sense, that will invariably mean pandering and WOOOOing a bit. Why? Because not everyone is smart enough to be affected by rhetoric. Ex hypothesis everyone else has already been 'taken', i.e. has considered opinions, so by elimination it's the aggressive, passionate idiots who play kingmaker. Thus explaining US politics.
So, Paul Graham, keep your identity small, but please enlarge your perspective. People are getting irrational because they're getting riled up, and they're getting riled up because riling-up is what gets the Irrational Vote, and that's the only one that's not already either bought or reasoned into passivity.
It's game theory, in other words. Like most human suffering.
I like pg's theory here, it's definitely something I try to live by (keeping my identity small), but I think he missed a key observation:
Religion (perhaps moreso historically) and especially politics are mine fields because there are so many inputs and so many outputs. That is to say almost any policy decision will affect a lot of people in a lot of different ways. He touches on this by discussing vague and definite questions, but he doesn't really explore that avenue.
For instance, consider the evaluation of how much a government program is going to cost. It doesn't matter how precisely you can answer that question because it just leads directly to other questions such as where the money will come from and what the results of the program will be. Even if the follow up questions are precise as well, they bloom out into innumerable consequences far and wide. It's not just that the bar of having an opinion is low, it's because these decisions actually affect all these people, and all in different ways. The fact that they may not have the expertise or knowledge to know the true affects and are easily manipulated by identity-appealing propaganda just exacerbates the problem, but it's not the root cause.
The more fundamental problem is that politics is a direct view into the massively interdependent organic ecosystem of large-scale human society. Even if you are the foremost expert on the implications of some political issue and your facts are indisputable, people will still (with good reason) disagree on the merits of those indisputable implications.
>It's not just that the bar of having an opinion is low, it's because these decisions actually affect all these people, and all in different ways. The fact that they may not have the expertise or knowledge to know the true affects and are easily manipulated by identity-appealing propaganda just exacerbates the problem, but it's not the root cause.
You make it sound like people end up voting to protect their own interests. A lot of studies show this is frequently not the case: Far more frequently they vote their values, which ends up with a very different result. This is why the Republican "Family Values" theme has been so effective.
>Even if you are the foremost expert on the implications of some political issue and your facts are indisputable, people will still (with good reason) disagree on the merits of those indisputable implications.
George Lakoff talks about two major philosophies in the US that define the Liberal and Conservative movements, respectively. [1] I think he gets to the heart of the disagreement between these two sides, explaining why large groups of poor people, for instance, vote Republican despite this being against their own self interest (workplace safety, minimum wage, workers' rights, etc.).
That said, it seems sometimes that even indisputable facts (dangers of cigarette smoke, seriousness of lead poisoning, and more recently, anthropomorphic climate change and the proven failures of "trickle-down" economics) are frequently politicized such that people end up believing that there's still a debate among experts, and that all politicians are lying to support their own side. Propaganda at its best (or worst, I suppose).
I think his 'theory' that discussions have more potential to be divisive when they involve our identity is dead on. His advice to 'keep your identity small', follows on from that premise well. Many people let their identity get polluted by what they do for a living to such an extent that they find it very difficult to cope when that is taken from them.
I have always been opinionated - I'm analytical and I enjoy forming opinions. Since moving to Europe, I have learned not to let political opinions become so ingrained that they become part of my identity. I have seen so many things done differently and still done well.
My question is this: Which things are worth being part of my identity? Values I esteem? Relationships I hold dear? Family roles? I think it is fair to say that belief (or disbelief) in God is a foundational human issue. If you are a believer, I think that belief demands something - it necessarily becomes part of your identity. I am a believer, so I don't know if same is true for non-believers.
I am a believer, so I don't know if same is true for non-believers.
Well, everyone is a non-believer in something that others believe. Assuming you don't believe in, say, Isis, do you think that non-belief becomes part of your identity?
This is an excellent point. I find it interesting that so many things that I use in my own life for orientation are not even noticed by a broad section of humanity. Philosophy, technology, religion, politics, these are often monumental issues to certain people while rarely even noticed by others. It's interesting that the human experience is so diverse especially intellectually. It's hard to escape the belief that what I follow is IMPORTANT though. As well as the follow up thoughts of "If only more people paid more attention to X the world would be a better place...".
No. I realise that I over-simplified that part by highlighting only two opposites: belief and unbelief. I do realise there are degrees of distinction between belief in a deity and atheism, and there are polytheism and agnosticism as well.
I could have asked a question: for those who don't believe in god(s), is your Atheism a significant feature of your identity?
To answer that question: yes, but I wish it didn't have to be. The only reason atheism is a part of my identity at all is because it makes me a minority, and one that public opinion in the US ranks below even rapists[1]. If atheism were the norm and the religious were a minority, atheism would no longer have to be part of my identity, which I would greatly prefer.
> I think it is fair to say that belief (or disbelief) in God is a foundational human issue.
I think it is quite a bit of a stretch to call something a foundational human issue when there is no consensus agreement as to what the words involved even mean, even among members of the same sect. If you could define the term 'God' in a meaningful way which all humans agreed upon, then we could maybe start to discuss whether belief in God were a foundational human issue. As it stands currently, the phrase 'God exists' is nothing but a shibboleth.
I think that the fact that people have been looking for meaning to their existence in God, Gods or other higher beings for years even when separated by oceans shows that this is a fundamental human issue.
While the execution of this is different in many ways, monothiestic - polythiestic it does show that human beings strive for a knowledge about things that are beyond our understanding. And it isn't like there haven't been Athiests all along http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_atheism. I think that this shows that the curiosity of "where do we come from" is fundamentally built into the human psyche.
I agree that there are many questions that any given human will be very likely to ask itself at some point in its life, and perhaps to dwell upon at some length. The example you gave of "Where do we come from?" is one, along with "Why am I here?", "What am I meant to do?", and many others.
Where I disagree is your leap from those questions to some notion of a "higher being". First, as mentioned previously, this term is undefined and you cannot have a meaningful conversation without defining the terms. Second, we have already answered some of the "big questions". We know where we come from: billions of years of evolution through natural selection. No "higher beings" necessary. And third, for the questions that still lack satisfactory answers, in most cases that is because they are wrong questions (http://lesswrong.com/lw/og/wrong_questions/).
There may very well be "big questions" that actually merit being asked and that may rightly be considered foundational human issues, but that does not by any means lead to the conclusion that the question of the existence of some undefined "higher being" is a foundational human issue.
Saying that evolutions answers where we come from is a little like traveling to another country, and when a local asks "where did you come from?" answering "the airport".
The idea, much less the concrete evidence, that science (evolution) can explain everything is about five minutes old compared to humanity - and humanity has looked to the super-natural to answer the big questions for as long as they have been able to express those questions. It doesn't get much more fundamental than that.
Fundamental does not mean old, it means essential. Age has very little to do with it. Never leaving Earth is a part of human life as old as humanity itself, and yet we have proven that it is not an essential one.
> There may be some things it's a net win to include in your identity. For example, being a scientist.
I know a lot of people who would consider this wrong, and I've noticed that sometimes, this is correct. I look at things from a scientific point of view, and because of this, I have a hard time understanding and empathizing with people with a religious background in discussion on religion.
I think it would be wrong of us to consider science as a concept above the scrutiny we eagerly apply to religion and politics in this article. Who says us scientists can't be wrong on an important level about certain things?
I think you're missing the point here. pg's saying the scientist identity is useful here, not because of science, but because it reminds you not to take any other identities.
Yes. Moreover, relativism has its limits, science and religion cannot be said equal before scepticism: if you have doubts about a theory or some experimental results you can and should investigate their truth. While it is not possible to falsify religious beliefs, or most political views.
First: notice how we are all expressing our opinions :)
I think what religion and politics have in common is that they
become part of people's identity, and people can never have a
fruitful argument about something that's part of their
identity. By definition they're partisan.
(NOTE: I'm not rigorously defining the word "governance" in this
response, I can expand on my meaning further if people are
interested)
Paul Graham is on to something in this essay. I think, however,
that Carl Jung pinpointed the exact mechanism with far more
accuracy.
Politics and Religion (for many people) in Jung's system of
thought are often vehicles of "transferance", or, the transferring
of one's spiritual principle or governance principle to a receiver
(a priest, or politician, or guru) because people's psyche's are
largely unconscious and rarely question or examine their own
identity (consciousness, although Jung has a much deeper
definition of identity). People "transfer" to the closest external
match for that which their unsconscious wishes to have integrated.
Paul's statement about it being a part of their identity is
inaccurate because it's actually the opposite. If the person in
question were not transferring their spiritual principle it
would actually be an integrated peice of their identity and
consciousness. There would no longer be an imperative to defend
the vehicle that carries such an important peice of their
"self". As people integrate more of their transfers and projections they have less and less need to justify their existence because that existence is self-contained rather than fragmented.
Understanding that the spiritual and governance principles within
the psyche are actually subjective and not objective experiences
is a sign of someone that has truly identified those
components. I say "truly identified" not because truth is defined
by an authority or natural principle but because the person has
identified the truth of it in relationship to their own
non-physical (mental/psychological) experience.
I think pg is using the word identity differently than you (or Jung) here. He doesn't attempt to explain the source of the "strong convictions" that drive political or religious beliefs. He simply observes the connection between the case where people think of themselves as a certain type of person and consequently will defend the associated beliefs regardless of evidence.
So there's something about peoples minds that makes it costly for them to accept certain facts. For a long time now, professing a certain belief with conviction has been a way of associating yourself with a certain group has had and continues to have direct implications on a person's physical well-being. Given acting is hard and cognitive-dissonance is nasty, actually adopting the belief makes sense.
A more precise way express the essay's thrust might be "don't get attached to your beliefs."
Your opinion on politics reveals how you think, which is why people tend to be defensive of their opinions: They don't know any better -- anything that directly challenges how they perceive the world is too threatening to be the subject of a rational conversation. If you talk to someone on a similar wavelength who has similar experiences, you can probably have a meaningful conversation. In this case, politics is like music: Not everyone has the same taste or understands/appreciates the same things, so it's hard to explain the virtues of Radiohead to someone who only gets a buzz from the best classical or, forgive my elitism, someone who can't see past Lil Wayne. It's hard for polar opposites to hold meaningful conversations for the same reason it's hard for a super smart person to hold a stimulating conversation with an idiot, or for an old person to do the same with a young person (they're effectively from different worlds). People on significantly different areas of the spectrum perceive the world very differently and have dramatically different experiences to draw on.
> A scientist isn't committed to believing in natural selection in the same way a bibilical literalist is committed to rejecting it. All he's committed to is following the evidence wherever it leads.
At the risk of responding out of identity, but also with the hope of contributing constructively despite having some identity at stake:
A literal interpretation of the bible doesn't preclude accepting natural selection as an ongoing, observable process. It may reject that process as the explanation of our species' origins. Those two are often conflated, contributing to the identity-driven, emotion-filled discussion that PG describes.
Regarding the main premise of the article, I think it's possible to have rational, logical discussions about topics in which identity is involved. They are more challenging than, say, discussing Javascript. But I don't think those discussions work well on the internet. They require trust (that both parties will be heard in good faith) careful check of emotions, motivations, and reasoning. Those are even more challenging without high-bandwidth communication aids like facial expressions and tone of voice.
It's quite possible to see flamewars when discussing javascript, e.g. ember vs angular, OO-style or functional, etc. Or the classic emacs vs vim. So I don't think argumentativeness is exclusive to politics and religion by any means.
Should this "identity" definition also include possible (conscious) vested interests in the subjects of these discussions? E.g. when people defend various corporations against their better knowledge, simply because they own a few shares or their business depends on them. I suspect this to be the case frequently when, for example, Google's wrongdoings lead to heated discussions here on HN and elsewhere.
One critique - a scientist's identity can be in science itself (or its latest set of widely-held beliefs), which itself can also result in a essentially political/religious response wrapped up in scientific garb. I am thinking of periods of time leading up to a paradigm shift where there can be significant resistance to "where the facts lead" by those invested in defending the status quo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...).
Certainly, this not the same situation as a purely political or religious issue. It is worth noting though, since everyone works off of a basic set of assumptions that are not provable. Each person has a philosophy - a practical "religion" or "political party" regardless of whether they are officially associated with any public entity or institution.
In terms of being rational, identity is just a kind of bias (among many) that needs to be removed.
I think a slightly more accurate generalization of PG's point is that many beliefs and belief systems permit learning (changing the belief) in the face of new evidence or perspective.
The things we most often consider "identity" oriented beliefs are the things that people are unable or unwilling to question (or to consider that they might be wrong about).
So a good way to find you own rationality limiting beliefs is to ask "What am I certain about?".
Politics attempts to solve the coordination problems around use of force, coercion, bribery, money, and infrastructure.
Identity is simply a useful way to rally voters for a political cause, which is why it's used by political and religious charlatans alike.
Seems Paul "rediscovered" what Buddhism teaches us: You need to loose your ego to achieve Nirvana. With the difference that the Buddhists also tell you a method for going about this... :)
Heh, don't you see? By identifying as a Buddhist and classifying a particular bit of wisdom as "belonging" to that religion you are falling into exactly the trap that he described. I grew up in the Buddhist community and ironically the greatest trap that Buddhists fall into is pride. Similar to the technology community ;)
This reminded me of point #2 of a comment I just read [1] on mistakes journalists make:
> "Mention every possible debate on the subject, without attempting to either offer a conclusion or a new set of arguments for any of them."
Keeping your identity small may prevent you from participating in certain arguments but it doesn't make for a good story. I'd rather hear a spirited debate between proponents of radically different ideas than bland statements that scrupulously avoid engaging anyone's identy.
The more I think about it the more ridiculous it sounds to exclude things from one's identity. An exclusive identity is not any smaller than an inclusive one--it's just identified by its exclusions. Identity is who you are and thus can be no larger or smaller than the whole of you.
I think the real argument here is one for skepticism as can been seen in the second footnote:
> "A scientist isn't committed to believing in natural selection in the same way a bibilical literalist is committed to rejecting it."
Really?? First, I don't think biblical literalism requires a rejection of natural selection (unless that's shorthand for a naturalistic origin of life). Secondly, this statement itself seems like a religious argument in the sense that it implies scientists are somehow more detached and objective than biblical literalists.
From context it's clear that by "scientist" pg means an idealized scientist, i.e. a disinterested empiricist. Actual scientists are fallible humans who may indeed get caught up by identity.
Where politics really differs from JavaScript is that we are taught from a young age that it is important to hold strong opinions about it even if we know nothing about it. Flaunting one's ignorance is celebrated as civic engagement. Hell, when politics comes up at holiday dinners, my family gets more worked up if I recuse myself from discussion than if I say something that violates their most cherished beliefs.
This also applies to professional growth. People often have a hard time receiving negative feedback because they experience it as an attack on their identity/ego rather than as an opportunity to learn.
The ability to take feedback constructively is probably one of the most important traits to hire for.
Evolutionary history probably plays a role here. Science has given evidence that our faculties of reason are probably meant to persuade and not to reason about the world in an abstract manner.
We probably evolved in hunter-gatherer tribes of 150-200 people where voice counted for a lot. You can influence by arguing within a group that small. And losing an argument could mean expulsion from the group leading to a low-chance of survival.
The problem is that this simply doesn't scale. Arguing political questions feels as real to us as it did to our hunter-gatherer ancestors whose lives literally depended on it. But this is just not the case in polities of a few hundred million. Hence it's likely beneficial to reduce political bickering for those not involved with politics.
Some observation on HN these days: Many threads about PERL vs Python ... etc, .Net, Java, or whatever programming languages some people really hates are just moving towards polarizations as religion/politics discussions.
In my opinion, he describes a basic mechanism of survival for cultures. Cultures that inspire such defensive "inability to think clearly" about the subject have increased survivability (social propagability).
But in order to survive, cultures must also change over time. I see the mechanism for this change as the individual's improvement of the culture for oneself, and then attempting to propagate it to insiders and outsiders. Triggers of this modification include conflicting experience, either direct or indirect via dialogue/argumentation with others.
Both discussions are fine way to learn. You always learn, even from stack full of "meaningless" comments. Either you accept it or nor, makes no difference, you have learned something.
Learned to not read comments or proceed reading and absorbing other people expressions that you adopt/use willingly/unknowingly.
To decide importance, scale, seriousness or whatnot of discussion, it is up to individual and for his needs.
Some are more defensive of set value and want to preserve idea. Some give up ideas to change perspective and understanding regularly. Diversity makes it all interesting.
Matters of Fact, vs. Matters of Opinions. I cannot recall which of Socrates' discourses goes into this in detail (I think Symposium), but it was a nice read. It makes you really stop and evaluate whether there is a point in having an argument or not, because when things are matter of opinions you may as well just accept and respect what the other party says.
I really loved the article, but would go furthermore and say like Mooji find out what you really are, ask the question who is I behind a thought based identity. More on yt:
So this raises the question: "How do you coax someone into questioning their own identity, or perhaps questioning whether they should consider themselves an x?"
Hmmmm. I agree that you shouldn't identify with notions and ideas and labels, because that's just dumb and putting the cart before the horse. But generally, and ignoring the sensibilities of HN? No to most of that.
I started to care about politics since I saw corpses being shoved into a mass grave with a caterpillar while switching TV channels when I was a kid, and it hasn't let up since. Why should it? Politics by definition affects everyone, in ways that actually matter. Just take the web; it matters because it allows people to communicate, the people make it matter. Even more so with politics, which doesn't just affect everybody, everybody owns an equal share of it. Most people let theirs rot, but they still own it, and if the circus around it has been made that complex and hidden among many bloated layers of euphemisms and misdirection, to encourage apathy and and facilitate deception, then those layers need to be removed, instead of removing the "uneducated" from the debate. If a simple but adult mind can't understand it, something is fishy. Politics really isn't that complex as some people would love to make it out to be, or at the very least, sophistry is not complexity, and this makes for a huge chunk of political debate and opinions. As Chomsky said in some talk or other.. when he talks with intellectuals they have a hard time understanding even the most basic stuff, while some peasants in South America for example get it right away. I guess their being on the receiving end of it, instead of trying to rationalize the bloodshed their own gloved hand is doling out (or the hand of the uncle in whose lap they're sitting), helps.
Also, it reminds me of this quote:
The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.
-- Sophie Scholl
Safe from what, indeed? From being incorrect? From being inefficient? From raised blood pressure? Why not try to be safe from standing for nothing? I don't mean to be polemic but I truly don't get it. What is a "useful conversation"? Useful for what, exactly? Talking about Javascript is terribly useless when it comes to being a decent person. Talking about being a decent person is terribly useless for debugging Javascript. If it has no potential to make anyone sad, angry or happy, it's likely a gimmick in the bigger scheme of things. Which is fine for HN I guess, but not for general advice on what kind of person one should be. Thanks, but no thanks.
He's right that people think they can have an opinion on politics or religion without actually knowing anything, but this is something they are taught to believe in school and church. It's a result of widespread poor upbringing and education, it's not an issue of "keeping your identity small".
I agree that this is how people tend to see it. But it isn't really true. Like JavaScript or auto mechanics or animal husbandry, there is indeed a threshold of expertise for expressing a meaningful opinion.
The value of somebody else's commentary on political issues is pretty much directly proportional to their understanding of the political system and their command of objective facts. This is true even if they subscribe to political ideals diametrically opposed to your own.
Personally speaking, this is why I have been so sad about the political discussion on HN since SOPA and Snowden. I thought it might be one of those rare forums where empirical facts and "evidence-based" thinking prevailed -- but it really hasn't. People still seem mostly trapped in their private little jihads, just like they are in the youtube comments section.
To me that's disappointing because government is something so fundamentally amenable to hacking, and the stakes are so incredibly high. The state of the art is so so sad and primitive, with so much low-hanging fruit. (The state of the art in governance, that is, at least if you accept at face value the objective of representing the interests of the electorate; the state of the art of getting elected is actually incredibly advanced, but rarely publicly talked about in earnest.)