The good part of this: don't fall into the trap of believing the proposition "an idiot disagrees with me, so I must be right". That's solid advice, idiots believe countless true things and geniuses believe innumerable false things. The intelligence of a random interlocutor has nothing to do with the validity of their opinions, really, so it shouldn't serve as evidence one way or another. Generally, I try to pay attention to good arguments against my ideas, not good arguers.
I think the advice for who to listen to is very bad, though. He calls it being "slightly elitist", but his bar is beneath the ground. The example for discussing politics is knowing what the three branches of government are - I knew that when I was 8 and I don't think I had anything interesting to say about politics back then. I definitely couldn't have given a meaningful critique on the latest policy debate, and neither can anyone possessing merely the most basic knowledge of rudimentary facts on the topic.
I think knowing about the branches of your government is a prerequisite to having an opinion or good argument about it. It’s not sufficient to just know that but it’s a good filter in the USA where a surprising number of people have “opinions” but lack the most basic knowledge.
It's a prerequisite, but so is breathing. It's necessary but not sufficient.
The bar I like to use is pretty simple: do you know who represents you in Congress (I am American so this is my bias, but substitute your country's equivalent if there is one)? As in, your state's two Senators and your district's Representative? If not, you probably don't vote or don't pay attention when you do, and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes, so you probably don't really care that much about whatever it is you say you care about, since you haven't done the easiest thing you can do to make a change.
It's not perfect, and no criteria will be, but there are tons of people who can rattle off "executive, legislative, judiciary" who nevertheless don't know ball.
Having valid opinions about politics and engaging with the existing political system are not the same thing. I am super happy to chat about political questions (of all sorts) irrespective of my interest in voting.
Note that when I say "talk politics" I really mean "discuss things controlled by politicians", not "discuss politicians". If you mean the latter it is a super fair bar to set!
This particular test might be reasonable, but at some point you're just filtering out anyone who's not in your bubble, which is a problem when your beliefs are extreme because your bubble is tiny.
Imagine a Marxist who refuses to discuss economics with anyone who can't explain dialectic materialism or enclosure.
Even in his particular test, he's filtering out people who are quite well informed on political topics but also feel that the input of the average person has effectively 0 impact. And this is quite a huge blindspot because political understanding/knowledge tends to precisely trend towards that worldview for many. A sack of money goes much further than a phone or picket.
> and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes
Or, you know, you haven't lived at the same address for twenty years. In your imagined world where every single citizen either has something so pressing to call their representatives about or is just ignorant, you're still basically filtering out everybody who moved for a job/college/SO/whatever recently. I guess in your mind it's only fitting that they're disqualified from having an opinion? For reference about 12% of Americans change residence each year.
Feels a little disingenuous to quote this line and not the full section where OP was just asking you to know your local representatives.
I've never called anyone about anything political, and I also haven't lived at the same address (or even in the same state) for 20 years but I still know at least who my senators are and some of my representatives. State elections are every two years; you have to almost actively not pay attention to not know anything about yours.
> Feels a little disingenuous to quote this line and not the full section where OP was just asking you to know your local representatives. [...] you have to almost actively not pay attention to not know anything about yours.
Feels disingenuous to ignore the fact that what I said applies to the rest of the comment too, don't you think? If it isn't obvious: typically the first year after a move - likely more, at least until House elections - most people will have zero reason to know their representatives' names, let alone keep remembering it for years. Who ever forgets a name they learned during a campaign a couple years ago, right?
For starters, something like almost ~half of students move away from their families to attend college. And then look at moves for jobs and retirement and everything else. And then when an incumbent leaves, all of their constituents end up in a similar boat as someone who just moved. And I'm not even beginning to touch the fact that a lot of people's unawareness of politics is (spoiler, I know) due to them not having the luxury to be able to devote as much bandwidth to it as HNers do. All these people shouldn't have any political opinions whatsoever until they figure out their representatives because... some wise guy on HN thinks knowing your representative's name is a good litmus test for whether you can tell good from bad? Do you expect any other response than "screw you"?
> I've never called anyone about anything political
Quite a confession given the side you're standing on. You'd think such a model citizen would've at least cared to contact their rep one damn time to suggest something about such a serious issue. Like maybe helping educate people about the government and politics better so they become as enlightened as the others.
If you (and/or parent, whoever feels this way) genuinely want a good outcome for something so serious instead of standing on a high horse and looking down on the uneducated, maybe actually go campaign to put your lovely literacy tests in the constitution, or whatever else would advance your cause forward. If you have some integrity, perhaps also campaign to fund the education system better and make it easier for citizens to vote in the same amendment, so that you're actually helping the people you presumably care about. Until you actually do something meaningful about this, I hope you can understand that your opinions about who should have opinions really won't come across the way you'd presumably hope they do.
This one for me. I have my own viewpoints and when elections come around I look up the candidates to see who best matches, then once the election is over forget pretty quickly. Unless politics is your entertainment it seems completely normal to not keep their names in mind.
> Feels disingenuous to ignore the fact that what I said applies to the rest of the comment too, don't you think?
Then quote the whole thing your responding to, otherwise your response seems disproportionately overreacting.
> For starters, something like almost ~half of students move away from their families to attend college. And then look at moves for jobs and retirement and everything else. And then when an incumbent leaves, all of their constituents end up in a similar boat as someone who just moved. And I'm not even beginning to touch the fact that a lot of people's unawareness of politics is (spoiler, I know) due to them not having the luxury to be able to devote as much bandwidth to it as HNers do.
I am very aware of that situation. I moved away from my home town and state for school, I moved cities post college three times, and I am now quite literally in the middle of a move to another state. While I won't pretend that I'll immediately get into the weeds of local city politics, I've still participated in local politics and I will participate in politics in my new city/state come this fall.
>All these people shouldn't have any political opinions whatsoever until they figure out their representatives because... some wise guy on HN thinks knowing your representative's name is a good litmus test for whether you can tell good from bad? Do you expect any other response than "screw you"?
Consider the context of the comment: "do you know who represents you in Congress [...]. If not, you probably don't vote or don't pay attention when you do, and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes, so you probably don't really care that much about whatever it is you say you care about, since you haven't done the easiest thing you can do to make a change."
If you don't know the names of your representatives you can't vote for them. Seems pretty straight forward to me. I think it's pretty fair to say if you're complaining about a political situation but haven't even voted about it you probably haven't tried that hard.
> Quite a confession given the side you're standing on. You'd think such a model citizen would've at least cared to contact their rep one damn time to suggest something about such a serious issue. Like maybe helping educate people about the government and politics better so they become as enlightened as the others.
To be clear, I've contacted my representatives plenty of times, I just haven't called them. I hate phone calls. But I have written emails, physical letters, and on several occasions spoke to them in person at events to express my issues.
> If you (and/or parent, whoever feels this way) genuinely want a good outcome for something so serious instead of standing on a high horse and looking down on the uneducated, maybe actually go campaign to put your lovely literacy tests in the constitution, or whatever else would advance your cause forward. If you have some integrity, perhaps also campaign to fund the education system better and make it easier for citizens to vote in the same amendment, so that you're actually helping the people you presumably care about.
1. I have campaigned for better education funding; I used to work in higher education.
2. No one mentioned literacy tests, so I have a suspicion there's a lot of background context in your head that you're imposing here. Either way, I have no interest in them.
Just like how sometimes I consider how little I should care about a social media frequenter’s opinions. I am, for better or for worse, getting near the last willing comment I am going to leave on this, or any, social media site.
That is not due to age or illness, it is due to enshittification. Not by the admin but by the populace.
Very bottom of the page, you can see links to the long and storied history of people saying “HN is bad now,” and why it’s an opinion you don’t really need to share.
I’d throw in for free that when you’re done at a party… say goodbye to your friends and leave. The party in general doesn’t need an announcement of your dissatisfaction and departure. Safe travels.
We all learned what the 3 branches are in grade school. Some people forgot it. Liberals are more likely to remember it because liberal discourse (this thread for example) reminds them of it. It's a biased litmus test in other words.
It's inconceivable to me that you could forget the three branches. There are still headlines and news articles about the president , congress, and the supreme court. Those three things , talked about constantly, are a basic reminder of the most visible aspects of each branch.
That's because your experience is siloed. People in other silos are seeing other headlines and other news articles, and wondering how you could not see them.
It is indeed important to know about ones government - not just its branches, but also its misdeeds and crimes.
The national secrecy is a cess pool of corruption in any and all governments - the corruption of all government begins with its secrets - a truly free people don't allow their governments to keep secrets, but encourages governance to have a responsibility of protecting the truth over secrecy - and this, under the knowledge that absolutes are unattainable. Of course, nuclear codes need to be made inaccessible; the more the people know about their government, the less corrupt it is, however.
After all, do you know why your government hates Russia, like, legislatively - as opposed to culturally and all the other distractions from governance.
The issue is, the overlying principle is that modern governments must allow the people to survive extremism. Political systems, designed to combat the extremes of mass survival, reach a point where they, too, are extreme. As is also born in the history of other forms of human organization - religion, and so on. The very thing the subject was started to address, becomes it in the end.
Basic knowledge is one thing. But constant awareness is something else. We must always hold our governments and their agency, accountable. It is true of priests and politicians and scientists and icons, alike.
It’s probably not necessary to know what the administrative structure of your government is in order to hold an opinion on politics. It’s more important to understand things like the different ideas and ideologies, and what concrete evidence actually exists to support whatever legislation you’re interested in. And pretty much nobody has sufficient political knowledge to do this.
If you want to read someone the article author characterizes as #1 (Objects to Marxism) and #2 (Knows enough to carefully and reasonably refute Marxism) I'd recommend James Lindsay's New Discourses podcast and website. He's read all the leftist books and is deeply familiar with all their ideas and terminology, but is about as anti-communist as they come. Interestingly, he has a lot of people on what he calls the "Woke Right" (e.g Tucker Carlson) who also hate him.
> Lindsay has promoted several conspiracy theories. He is a proponent of the LGBT grooming conspiracy theory and has been credited as one of several public figures responsible for popularizing "groomer" as a slur directed at LGBTQ educators and activists by members of the political right. Lindsay has referred to the Pride flag as "the flag of a hostile enemy".
> In 2021, Lindsay wrote on Twitter that "there will be" a genocide of whites if critical race theory "isn't stopped." His statement was met with widespread criticism, including from founder of libertarian anti-identity politics magazine Quillette Claire Lehmann who wrote: "James Lindsay is now peddling White Genocide Theory. Implying that a genocide against whites in the U.S. is imminent has the potential to inspire racist violence. Such comments are extreme, reckless, and irresponsible. They should be denounced." Lindsay has also promoted the far-right Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, which alleges a concerted effort by Marxist critical theorists to undermine Western civilization using Marxism.
Anti-Marxists really aren't sending their best. I don't see how this guy can produce a thoughtful response to Marxism if he believes that there exists a secret cabal trying to push "Cultural Marxism" on the West to destroy it.
To respect TFA's point, I will not use this moron's existence as evidence that leftist economics are correct.
He reads difficult dense books that are the academic foundation of leftism all the way through and takes them seriously. When prominent theorists write books and these books are taught to 10s of thousands in universities, this is what leftists actually believe.
Leftists make the stuff in their dense jargon heavy books so extreme that it becomes anti-mimetic. People say that the statements he reads out of these books, once translated from very dense jargon, are conspiracy theories, but that's basically gaslighting to get people to not pay attention to acknowledged leftist tactics and to disbelieve what's actually in the books they are teaching to kids and are using to train the next generations of teachers and leftist policymakers.
Communists get voted in because people don't really think their extreme rhetoric is serious, but once they seize power they actually behave just like they say they would in their books.
You're also not engaging with his argument. You're just saying someone said he said a category of things I don't like, but if he read it out of a popular leftist theory book then that's just reporting on what the actual left is saying and to say that repeating that is somehow being a conspiracy theorist is how this stuff comes into actually being implemented. People refuse to believe communists like Hasan Piker are serious until it's too late.
For the past few years, I've seen a dozen of friends or acquaintances turn "ideologically crazy", and they can be roughly grouped into:
A) Onset of schizophrenia or other serious mental illness, followed by psychosis. This is actually the most common I've seen. But it is also the easiest to spot.
B) Some crisis event in life, followed by finding / joining a community. Some were hit hard by this during COVID.
I've yet to personally see people that have their, well, shit together and live busy lives turn into ideological crazies or extremists - where there is no mental illness. Of course, it could be that they just hide it better. Don't use their public accounts, etc.
I also think it is much easier to become radicalized today. Once you search for any extremist views on say social media, you'll be bombarded with it. Just belonging to a certain demographic could trigger a non-stop barrage of extreme wing influencer content in your feed.
I think the advice at the end of this post is essentially sound: you should pre-filter your evaluation of others’ opinions through their understanding of related topics. But that isn’t elitist, and I think we shouldn’t call it that! It’s a form of media and cultural literacy we should be encouraging people to have; there isn’t (and shouldn’t) be anything elite about it.
> it’s very very easy to be negatively polarized by a ton of bad conversations with normal people about it, until you feel like the whole rest of the world is crazy
Why wouldn't the world be crazy, though? What reason do we have to assume that the world is not crazy? Most reasons are tautological when you really unpack them.
It's correct to say something like "the world is dysfunctional as a system for surfacing truth", and that's kind of like saying the rest of the world is crazy.
On the other, you shouldn't assume "the rest of the world is filled exclusively with incompetent people who lack basic truth-finding skills and that's why they don't agree with me" which is what people usually mean when they say the rest of the world is crazy.
Life has taught me that the vast majority of people out there are in fact average at best.
Competence (let alone extreme competence) is kind of rare actually, and accepting that that is “fine” is part.
That’s why you engineer a car to be driven by a dumb and abusive driver; airplanes are designed to be flown by pilots on their worst days; houses are built with large safety factors; code should be written to handle bugs gracefully. It’s not that anyone is being intentionally malicious, it’s that even competent people sometimes make mistakes so the rest of us should expect to screw up.
For awhile in my life, I was highly competent at what I did. It was awesome - but the altered reality this can engender - the idea that “since I am competent everyone else should be too, I’m just average” has it’s own dangers.
Depends, if we're being pedantic crazy implies you get some stuff wrong, due to not "being" fully there.
This world is a messy complicated place and I tend to think in percentages about everything. Guarantees are rare, I usually think of events as probabilistic, and likewise what other people say.
Now, these probabilities can change based on who's saying what. Theoretically someone who specialized in that topic has a higher chance of "getting it right", or sussing it better than people who aren't as versed in that subject. That's what academia is, and if it wouldn't work we wouldn't do it.
So, for me it does matter who's saying what, but only to some extent. That means even the most educated, smart and focused individual can get it wrong, and some nobody with no training on the subject can get it right, for various reasons, even pure chance.
So I'm never discarding someone's opinion based on who the are or their training, but I do consider the chances of them being right or wrong. There was a recent discussion about Nobelitis.
> Theoretically someone who specialized in that topic has a higher chance of "getting it right", or sussing it better than people who aren't as versed in that subject.
Exactly so. The qualifications are a heuristic, not a rule. That said - There are billions of ill-informed halfwits on earth and all or most have opinions.
People need some way to filter all of those opinions, especially now that the media doesn't do it for us. A lossy heuristic that only works most of the time beats the heck out of drowning in an endless sea of babble.
I agree with a lot of this, and the framing is new to me and I really appreciate it. I especially appreciate the acknowledgement that there isn't necessarily anything wrong with having extreme beliefs; "extreme" is a label most often applied by antagonists of such beliefs. But I definitely feel like there can be a pipeline where one extreme belief may lead to others simply because they are also labelled extreme and not for a more recognizable reason.
> I definitely feel like there can be a pipeline where one extreme belief may lead to others
Once you accept a premise that majority consensus of well informed people can be drastically wrong, it's not hard to then transfer that horizontally from one domain to another. So if you accept the possibility that scientists made up climate change - why wouldn't they also make up COVID? or falsify risks associated with vaccines? or any other number of things.
Underpinning all of this is some basic elements of humility and empathy - willingness to accede to a greater authority of others, and to weigh others experience that is different to yours as important in informing your views. Cutting those tethers gives your own belief system a new degree of freedom.
I would counter with people who believe the earth is flat. This is in fact an extreme belief. The best part is, I don’t care if people believe this, not even a little a bit.
I care when they start arguing with me and trying to jam their belief down my throat. I didn’t even ask, you brought it up and you’re mad at me because I disagree.
I think this is the more interesting point to consider. Having a belief, any belief, is probably just fine. It’s the second part that’s the issue.
Where would you draw the line between someone advocating for their belief vs shoving it down your throat? Does the "extremeness" of the belief factor into the judgement? If so, how are we not back at the original question of the definition of what an extreme belief is?
Oddly though beliefs like “the world is flat” are tied up in other beliefs that actually cause harm. Flat-earth leads to the firmament leads to Christian god did this leads to ((those people)) killed Christ and control the banks that want you to believe in a spherical earth and get vaccinated.
One of the most depressing things about exploring the conspiracy world is that all roads tend to get co-opted into hateful rhetoric - I miss the days when I believed that one could hold a rather silly belief and have it just be benign.
Pretty good. I have something to say about this part:
> most people are in fact “asleep” about most things most of the time, not super thoughtful in how they develop beliefs
Which is later echoed, but differently, as:
> the average person just doesn’t know much about your hyper specific thing
This is skirting around whether they have a duty to know about your thing. The first phrasing suggests they do, the second suggests not.
Given that your thing is probably stupid and wrong, and life's too short, it seems reasonable to me that most people can't give you good arguments about it unless you invite them to take a pleasant and entertaining walk around your reasoning and maybe sleep on it and come back later. If the subject can't be made pleasant and entertaining, you're probably out of luck. This unfortunately still applies even when your thing is genuinely a great insight.
I think the problem here is that we have a bias for those who agree with us that outweighs our patience in searching for oppositional opinions that are well founded. From a liberal bubble it is quite hard to find conservative viewpoints that aren't based on unobserved apriori belief or strawman arguments. It feels like being a heavyweight surrounded by lightweights and it makes me feel like I need a better sparring partner, I just can't find one...
> I think the problem here is that we have a bias for those who agree with us that outweighs our patience in searching for oppositional opinions that are well founded.
This is a very agreeable statement, but I'd add that politics is not about finding the Kantian truth of what's best for everyone (inside the country? globally? also immigrants? lazy and ugly natives?).
It's about balancing interests. Of course, the idea of free market democracy was/is that both goals eventually converge.
At the risk of sounding AI pilled, I find LLM's are fairly good sparring partners if you instruct them well. At least they're more capable of giving you the best arguments against your position than the average bar patron.
Almost all of my non-professional prompts are of that nature.
I don't know. AI are basically trained to tell you what you want to hear, including when they're disagreeing with you. If you come off of your conversation with AI with a stronger belief than when you went in, is that merited?
"AI Advice Suppresses People’s Willingness To Say “I Don’t Know”, Even When The Advice Is Wrong And Accuracy Is Incentivized" https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5y6m4_v1
> Don't update positively on your extremist beliefs whenever you hear a bad argument against them
Two problems:
1. There are beliefs people hold approximately as strongly as they hold "the Sun will rise tomorrow", so "updating" is kinda irrelevant.
2. How many people actually think any of their beliefs are "extremist"? And if they don't, they won't consider the warning to apply.
And after digging in further:
3. Many people reasonably believe that their discussion circles already filter out a lot of "average people" and thus expect a higher standard of discourse from their ideological opponents. When that still doesn't happen, it naturally seems like stronger evidence.
4. (Insert generic annoyance at veganism discourse here.)
One big problem is that lately this kind of extremism has become more like a cult: even considering the idea that the “others” might have some truth (while being wrong about the rest) is treated like blasphemy
I am vegetarian, not vegan. I am so because it is something I can do about the state of animal welfare. I don't engage in discussions about my eating with people outside my immediate family. My immediate family are all omnivores. I sometimes, but rarely, choose to eat meat because it is served to me by someone who doesn't know my preference. Animal welfare remains my top priority and concern.
> Their disagreements are also very visible entirely rooted in their pre-existing social identity.
This is such a nuanced point. I think that's why it's difficult to get a Jewish person to admit that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
> The reason it’s so easy is that most people are in fact “asleep” about most things most of the time,
Bingo against. I first had this exact thought in the context of people losing more and more time to distractions like Instagram tiktok etc. At the time people around me thought I was crazy (it's changing now). Such an insightful post.
> Many people adopt beliefs because it seems like the people they think of as good adopted them too
And not just beliefs. Fashion and all sorts of mannerisms. What is it with a certain segment of the population using their pants at the bottom of their asses? Did they all decide to do this independently? Or do look around and see that all their favourite gangstas do it?
One thing that I think would be helpful for anyone is to think about a contentious issue you hold a very strong opinion on. Consider what would make you change your mind on this issue. If there is literally nothing anyone could say to you (no new information, no perspective) that would make you change your mind, maybe you should ask yourself why...
> The person [is not super fired up and] doesn’t just want to act as a soldier for their team
This pulled me into a tangential thought:
Has anyone else noticed that a lot of people just CAN'T be wrong? They might be contrarian, cynical, narcissists, experts in their field, experiencing PTSD or other emotional disregulation, extremely online, ... Then the team-based things: political entrenchment, [colour]-pilled, conspiracy theorists, religious, Collingwood supporters (kidding) ...
Finding people who are genuinely interested in learning about things that might change their views in substantial ways is very hard. Even when you find people genuinely interested in learning, it's so common to see evidence take a back seat to political or religious views. It makes you feel crazy sometimes.
It’s not that you’re crazy, it’s that human beings are not actually rational most of the time.
More intelligent human beings can do a better impression of rationality but in most situations they’re still using their intelligence to post-rationalise some existing feeling.
Once you recognise that you’ll see that it’s true even in yourself
I think this is a good observation, but I think the diagnosis is slightly wrong. I don't think the process of becoming dismissive of opinions different to yours is limited to those with "extremist" views.
The people who agree with you are a biased sample of the population. But so are the people who are willing to openly disagree. So we have both a "bubble" and an "anti-bubble". This is especially true for people with unusual views, but it's also true for everyone.
I had a colleague who was part of an idiosyncratic religious denomination, which believes in the literal truth of the Bible etc. He was a nice guy and mostly we avoided talking about this. The one person who raised it in social conversation was the most tactless guy in the office. (To be fair he wasn't that tactless. Someone has to be last). Lots of people online are looking for a verbal fight. The decent people who know you socially or via work, but disagree with you over some political or religious issue, will usually avoid talking about it with you. That applies just as much if you have a mainstream but not universally held belief, as if you have an extreme one.
The problem here is that there's not really any incentive to seriously engage with a person with opposing views, even though our society would be a lot better if people did it. Lots of people seem to think that freedom of speech just means freedom to harangue those you disagree with, and aren't interested in the search for truth.
Falsifiability - misunderstood idea that's often used to discredit string theory, for example.
As stated on Wikipedia:
> Falsifiability is a standard of evaluation of scientific statements, including theories and hypotheses. A statement is falsifiable if it belongs to a language or logical structure capable of describing an empirical observation that contradicts it.
I only recently learned that most peoples beliefs are not "factual beliefs". Since most of mine are, I thought that's how other people work. I think Popper may have made the same mistake by assuming "correctness" is always the primary value a belief offers.
The other kind of beliefs are "Symbolic beliefs." Symbolic beliefs are not held because they are true, or because they are useful on their own. They're held because they signal that you belong to the tribe. They are similar to the "Alief", which is an automatic unequestioned belief. Most Symbolic beliefs are aliefs, but not all.
Since learning about this I've been trying to identify my own aliefs and symbolic beliefs and question them. It turns out I have more than I'd realized. We probably all do.
> I only recently learned that most peoples beliefs are not "factual beliefs".
I think this greatly underestimates the number of completely mundane, innocuous factual beliefs that everyone, or at least everyone who is able to get through their lives without serious mishap for any length of time, has to have. For anyone in that position, most of their beliefs have to be factual beliefs, and have to be true at least to a good enough approximation to allow them to function. We tend to ignore such beliefs in discussions like this, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.
The key problem is social media feed boosting “engagement”. Balanced, well thought comments don't bring much engagement so they end up being ignored by the algorithm while outrageously stupid takes generate a lot of (negative) engagement, some of which being equally stupid which will bring more engagement than the sensible responses and so on. And at the end if the day, all you see in your social media feed is stupid people sharing at least some of your values arguing with even stupider people (or so you think, at least) who have the opposite views.
This is obviously harmful for society but also obviously the best outcome for the platform who wants to sell your attention to advertisers.
> Suppose you become politically radicalized and become a Marxist. You get convinced that the labor theory of value is correct.
> The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect,
He's correct most people don't know about labor theory of value. Which is why it's easy for him to categorize those who believe it as "radicalized" and "Marxist" versus the minority of calm, rational, objective people who can discount it.
Marx did follow the labor theory of value - as did virtually every major economist (or as they put it probably better back then, student of political economy) before Marx, who also believed it. Marx credits another revolutionary for discovering the labor theory of value - Benjamin Franklin. There were a few proto-papers on subjective theory of value, but an alternative theory of value did not even really exist before Capital was published.
Labor theory of value was the theory of Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and all the major economists before Marx. And Marx accepted what they accepted.
Alternative theories of value were not really fleshed out until after Marx published Capital.
So consider all of this when he categorizes the idea of the labor theory of value as extremist, radical, Marxist etc.
According to this article, believing that a carpenter banging wood and nails into a table creates value is an extremist belief. Even though pretty much every major economist before Marx believed the same thing.
Ps. This was told to you by myself - from one the 1% of people who know this stuff
Pps. If you didn't read the article, you would not know I am referring to myself as part of an elite 1% of knowledge sarcastically
The important issue to focus on isn't that long ago people had a model that was not a good model of reality. The issue is that now we have better models and the person who claims they have an educated opinion should know it. Blindly holding to a model that has been shown to be inferior is what makes it an extremist belief.
The geocentric model was thought to be true for literally thousands of years by every astronomer and scientist. Today if someone claimed the geocentric model was true, we would consider it an extremist belief - even though pretty much every major astronomer believed it for thousands of years.
Yes, I was considering making the same point, but in fairness to him, the vast majority of the millenial marxists and beyond don't know this either, nor that marxism doesn't mean "no profits or reinvestment or insurances, all value goes to workers".
I am with the author on how people get radicalized, but he could not have picked a worse example that Marxism as an example of extremist idea.
Equating Marxism to labor theory of value is akin to maybe equating economics to a supply/demand curve.
There are unequivocally true parts of Marxism, such as surplus value of labor, and the fundamental incentive conflict between a capital owner and laborer (which Marx deems exploitation)
The labor theory of value is also I think misinterpreted by modern economists as a price-setting mechanism, which it isn't. It's a mechanism to show that there is a certain floor on value of an economic good, which is raised every time constructive labor is applied to a product.
In the pie chart 100% of people one meets disagree with ”extremist” belief of Matxism. I guess, if you move in very conservative right-wing circles, but I still doubt if this fella understands how pie-charts work.
On the general topic, most people do not have arguments and they do not know how to construct one. They cannot articulate what they believe, since they don’t really know what they believe. Most things people say are just stuff copied from whatever TV-show or meme they saw last. However, if you go around starting discussions on politics with ”what are the three branches of government” most people who actually understand the topic just walk away. I also don’t think ”hey everybody must he stupid except me” explains how people radicalise - or whatever ”idelogically crazy” means. Rather it tells more about the writer and his… problem.
I have another suggestion: just fuckin listen. A truck driver or a cleaning lady might have very original and interesting ideas about the world, if you just shut the fuck up and let them talk. Then there’s about quadrillion firebrands across the internet shouting at a video camera almost none of which are worth your time.
Information hygiene is important if you don't want to go "crazy" in this sense.
Be careful about what news you consume, even if it appears to agree with you. Check sources. Check facts. Try to work up to your beliefs from direct observation and basic principles whenever possible. Question your beliefs. Maybe they're wrong!
e.g. It's easy to get worked up about Trump. There's an awful lot bad press out there about him. Ask yourself, can a human being really be that vile? Maybe I'm just being misled by the media and partisan politics. Go watch some uncut speeches and press conferences. Pay attention to what the man actually does. Oh, he wants to place tariffs on my country because smoke from forest fires sometimes crosses our shared borders*? He actually said that? Yes. Yes he did. That's directly observable scumbag behaviour. If a romantic interest acted that way I'd break things off immediately. Huge red flag. Maybe the negative opinions about him check out.
I like that the author doesn’t clarify what constitutes an extremist idea aside from suggesting that he doesn’t believe in any. “Extremism is when people, who are dumb, don’t know facts unlike me, who is very smart” is a kick ass theme for an essay
"I’m not against extremist ideas on principle. I have my own, the main one being that animal welfare is a much larger urgent catastrophe than most people believe."
This is clearly a cool take though and author knows it. This is not a polarizing view in the sense that anything about Epstein / Gaza / Trans athletes would be.
Maybe not as polarizing as those, but by "animal welfare" he doesn't mean volunteering at the local animal shelter, he's a vegan. That's pretty polarizing to a lot of people who see veganism as an attack on their whole existence because they like meat.
The author makes some good points, but imho undermines his argument by leading of with concepts like 'you come to believe in an extremist idea'; extremism is a word heavily freighted not only with meanings of intensity, inflexibility, or relative unpopularity but also with the implication of exceptional consequences that follow thereon, like rounding up perceived enemies of the state or overthrowing the social order. It might have been better to start from a perspective of unpopularity or rigid belief in a particular principle, which then hardens into an extremist position following the process of rejection and retrenchment the author describes.
On a side note: Suppose you become politically radicalized and become a Marxist. You get convinced that the labor theory of value is correct.
Marx did not believe in the Labor Theory of Value, although the above is a very common misconception because a lot of self-avowed Marxists do. On the contrary, Marx believed that some things had inherent value, like an oasis in the desert which provides a much-needed resource without any investment of labor. The LTV was adopted as part of the platform at the inaugural conference of the German Social Democratic Party in 1875. At the time, socialism was split between followers of Marx on one side, and followers of socialists like Ferdinand Lasalle on the other. The differences are too complex to delve into here, but you could say that Marxian socialism was more revolutionary and aspired to a general reorganization of society, while Lasallean socialism was more reformist and oriented around securing rights around pay and working conditions via collective bargaining, rather than having a general hostility to the economic order of the time.
Anyway, Marx did not attend this conference but when he was subsequently sent a copy of the program adopted there, he was so annoyed that he wrote a blistering critique, attacking the what he saw as the weak intellectual foundations of the plan and arguing that that they would fundamentally undermine the socialist project. You can read the cirique here, along with a much more comprehensive introduction that provides a lot of additional context: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index...
Marx's writing has a reputation for being turgid and difficult, which I think is somewhat undeserved. But lest people think think I'm just doing the academic or political trick of telling you what I think it means, here's the opening couple of paragraphs, in which Marx gets straight to the point:
First part of the paragraph: "Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture."
Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.
The whole thing is fairly short, maybe 8 or 10 pages though obviously the prose of 150 years ago is rather dense; also Marx was writing to argue with an expert audience rather than to explain to a general one. Nevertheless, it's pretty readable and probably the clearest articulation of how Marx anticipated a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would operate on the way to full Communism (where Marx imagined all economic productivity would be owned and operated by workers in general, and envisioned everyone working part-time for 20-30 hours a week and having abundant time left over for education, entertainment, time with family, or whatever they happened to enjoy).
I think it's easy to give correct arguments, it's just easy for you to dismiss them.
For example if i say "we're not on the back of a giant turtle, because humans went into a rock ship, went all around the planet and checked there's no turtle", is absolutely correct. But then you'll say something like "how do you know, were you yourself in the rocket ship?".
And this is how normal people see extremists: "I just addressed your point, but you choose to hold a ridiculous position"
Rational people will pick the ideology which has the fewest contradictions. Irrational people will choose that which serves them best.
People who benefit from a system are unlikely to look for problems with it and unlikely to notice any contradictions. Anything which appears as a contradiction gets shrugged off as "Well, there must be a good reason, I'm not an expert. I will trust the experts."
These people corrupt Occam's Razor that the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. "The experts say ..." becomes the ultimate simplest explanation to everything... And the experts that they choose to listen to are those who are aligned with their existing beliefs.
Then you have people who notice the contradictions but they see so many from first-hand experience that they don't trust the experts and they don't have access to enough different information to be able to choose a good one; so they just adopt the least-bad one as their own... The one which best protects their self-image and whose (comparatively) few contradictions can be plausibly explained away by corruption, conspiracy or dishonesty.
But I think the latter group is in fact one step closer to the truth. The truth is there is no conspiracy (at least no grand, all-encompassing one), it's worse than that; systemic incentives create alignment and remove the need for intentional coordination. The coordination, the illusion of conspiracy is just a byproduct of incentives. The second group of people are wrong about the mechanism but their view of reality leads to the same outcome... So with each passing year, their views are being reinforced by more "proof."
The system which manufactures the incentives which create alignment is itself probably not the product of conspiracy; it's just a system which evolved slowly over time to subtly serve its operators and their supporters. They don't want to change it, not out of nefariousness, but out of justified fear of what havoc any change might wreck... Bureaucracy also plays a part.
It's very difficult to co-ordinate a lot of people to agree on anything, let alone act on it. This is one thing that the mainstream anti-conspiracy folks are completely right about.
I'm a global top-50-university-credentialed expert in Information Technology who majored in System Design and has worked for a wide range of companies of different sizes, in multiple industries (education, remote work platforms, social media, banking/finance), in multiple countries including in highly political areas like crypto... So the "trust the experts" folk can trust me when it comes to information flows and system design...
Try this: take a position you hold that you are sure is rational but that a number of people disagree with, and pretend it is wrong and look at it from the opposite perspective. Steelman it and honestly take that perspective as true and argue it in your head. You might still not agree with it, but you can make it rational. So, how certain are should we be that our positions are the rational ones if we can do this?
That's not to say my beliefs are exhaustively battle-tested and correct; maybe other people have information that I'm missing but in my role as a software engineer working across multiple industries and some politically sensitive projects, I've had access to information and first-hand experiences that most other people haven't.
The thing is; if I told the average person what I witnessed without providing any interpretation, they would doubt the basic facts because some of what I experienced doesn't make sense when measured against mainstream narratives and most people's day-to-day experiences.
For example, about the crypto/blockchain sector; when I tell people about my experiences, outsiders often say stuff like "The founders behaved this way because of hype and irrationality of the markets" but when you've been through it every day for 2 years and experienced the taboos inside the company, seen the suppression of projects and community members, following a clear, predictable, repeated pattern, it's impossible to believe that it is random or irrational.
Yes, it's a spectrum. The best test to figure out the extent of your own bias is to make a list of ways which in which a particular ideology benefits you.
For most of my contrarian ideologies, they are harmful to me in most ways except "Protects my ego by redefining personal failings as system failings." Most of my contrarian ideologies have this characteristic but this point has been getting weaker over time; I don't have much pride left. I'm literally working for a bank now.
Or maybe I work for a bank just to prove to myself that I don't care about pride? Getting kind of elaborate.
1. The number of people in the general population who will object to neoliberalism.
2. The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why neoliberalism and the trickle down theory of economics is incorrect, and can speak to your very specific concerns about government bloat and over-regulation in a way that gets across how modern social theorists and economists give a more compelling and ethically coherent account of the way the world works, and do so patiently and thoroughly.
This is some pseudo-profound Third Way radical centrist horseshit.
> Consider two categories of people:
> 1. The number of people in the general population who will object to Marxism.
> 2. The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect, and can speak to your very specific concerns about worker power and class conflict in a way that gets across how modern social theorists and economists give a more compelling and ethically coherent account of the way the world works, and do so patiently and thoroughly.
Really this is: let's consider one possibility, that I am right and that you are extreme and wrong. Everything is going well, except for the radical weirdos trying to stop me from doing what I want.
Congratulations on being a vegan. 20% of the population doesn't have health insurance.
I'm no Marxist, but this regurgitation of neolib talking points is not being smart enough to refute a Marxist. The problem with today's "Marxists" is that they don't know enough to defend their own positions, and react with rage when the holes in their absurdly shallow knowledge gleaned from social media posts, Jacobin articles and hipster podcasts are confronted by simple, direct, good faith questions that they don't have answers to. It's not that people aren't well-studied enough to refute their extremism.
I'm curious what the author means by: "Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect". First of all isn't that the wrong way around and should be the value theory of labor? But that aside: what is wrong about the concept of surplus value and labour power? (Which I assume would form the core of a marxism and be the value theory of labour; or vice versa) Aren't those generally accepted concepts? The entirety of marxism, especially its teleologial argument/eschatology is a different story, but what social/economic theory falsifies or even contradicts the concept of labour power and surplus value and in what way?
If you're not an extremist at this point relative to everyone else, the vast majority of whom have beliefs that are incompatible with the existence of other life on this planet, then you're probably a moron.
The good part of this: don't fall into the trap of believing the proposition "an idiot disagrees with me, so I must be right". That's solid advice, idiots believe countless true things and geniuses believe innumerable false things. The intelligence of a random interlocutor has nothing to do with the validity of their opinions, really, so it shouldn't serve as evidence one way or another. Generally, I try to pay attention to good arguments against my ideas, not good arguers.
I think the advice for who to listen to is very bad, though. He calls it being "slightly elitist", but his bar is beneath the ground. The example for discussing politics is knowing what the three branches of government are - I knew that when I was 8 and I don't think I had anything interesting to say about politics back then. I definitely couldn't have given a meaningful critique on the latest policy debate, and neither can anyone possessing merely the most basic knowledge of rudimentary facts on the topic.
I think knowing about the branches of your government is a prerequisite to having an opinion or good argument about it. It’s not sufficient to just know that but it’s a good filter in the USA where a surprising number of people have “opinions” but lack the most basic knowledge.
It's a prerequisite, but so is breathing. It's necessary but not sufficient.
The bar I like to use is pretty simple: do you know who represents you in Congress (I am American so this is my bias, but substitute your country's equivalent if there is one)? As in, your state's two Senators and your district's Representative? If not, you probably don't vote or don't pay attention when you do, and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes, so you probably don't really care that much about whatever it is you say you care about, since you haven't done the easiest thing you can do to make a change.
It's not perfect, and no criteria will be, but there are tons of people who can rattle off "executive, legislative, judiciary" who nevertheless don't know ball.
Having valid opinions about politics and engaging with the existing political system are not the same thing. I am super happy to chat about political questions (of all sorts) irrespective of my interest in voting.
Note that when I say "talk politics" I really mean "discuss things controlled by politicians", not "discuss politicians". If you mean the latter it is a super fair bar to set!
You are filtering out politically engaged people who have assesed the current mechanisms of state to be too flawed to be worth continued interaction.
This is likely quite a large group.
This particular test might be reasonable, but at some point you're just filtering out anyone who's not in your bubble, which is a problem when your beliefs are extreme because your bubble is tiny.
Imagine a Marxist who refuses to discuss economics with anyone who can't explain dialectic materialism or enclosure.
IMO. It is ok to filter them out.
One simply does not have infinite time and resource to engage with everybody.
Aware what you have filtered and don't treat them like idiot
Even in his particular test, he's filtering out people who are quite well informed on political topics but also feel that the input of the average person has effectively 0 impact. And this is quite a huge blindspot because political understanding/knowledge tends to precisely trend towards that worldview for many. A sack of money goes much further than a phone or picket.
> and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes
Or, you know, you haven't lived at the same address for twenty years. In your imagined world where every single citizen either has something so pressing to call their representatives about or is just ignorant, you're still basically filtering out everybody who moved for a job/college/SO/whatever recently. I guess in your mind it's only fitting that they're disqualified from having an opinion? For reference about 12% of Americans change residence each year.
Feels a little disingenuous to quote this line and not the full section where OP was just asking you to know your local representatives.
I've never called anyone about anything political, and I also haven't lived at the same address (or even in the same state) for 20 years but I still know at least who my senators are and some of my representatives. State elections are every two years; you have to almost actively not pay attention to not know anything about yours.
> Feels a little disingenuous to quote this line and not the full section where OP was just asking you to know your local representatives. [...] you have to almost actively not pay attention to not know anything about yours.
Feels disingenuous to ignore the fact that what I said applies to the rest of the comment too, don't you think? If it isn't obvious: typically the first year after a move - likely more, at least until House elections - most people will have zero reason to know their representatives' names, let alone keep remembering it for years. Who ever forgets a name they learned during a campaign a couple years ago, right?
For starters, something like almost ~half of students move away from their families to attend college. And then look at moves for jobs and retirement and everything else. And then when an incumbent leaves, all of their constituents end up in a similar boat as someone who just moved. And I'm not even beginning to touch the fact that a lot of people's unawareness of politics is (spoiler, I know) due to them not having the luxury to be able to devote as much bandwidth to it as HNers do. All these people shouldn't have any political opinions whatsoever until they figure out their representatives because... some wise guy on HN thinks knowing your representative's name is a good litmus test for whether you can tell good from bad? Do you expect any other response than "screw you"?
> I've never called anyone about anything political
Quite a confession given the side you're standing on. You'd think such a model citizen would've at least cared to contact their rep one damn time to suggest something about such a serious issue. Like maybe helping educate people about the government and politics better so they become as enlightened as the others.
If you (and/or parent, whoever feels this way) genuinely want a good outcome for something so serious instead of standing on a high horse and looking down on the uneducated, maybe actually go campaign to put your lovely literacy tests in the constitution, or whatever else would advance your cause forward. If you have some integrity, perhaps also campaign to fund the education system better and make it easier for citizens to vote in the same amendment, so that you're actually helping the people you presumably care about. Until you actually do something meaningful about this, I hope you can understand that your opinions about who should have opinions really won't come across the way you'd presumably hope they do.
> let alone keep remembering it for years.
This one for me. I have my own viewpoints and when elections come around I look up the candidates to see who best matches, then once the election is over forget pretty quickly. Unless politics is your entertainment it seems completely normal to not keep their names in mind.
> Feels disingenuous to ignore the fact that what I said applies to the rest of the comment too, don't you think?
Then quote the whole thing your responding to, otherwise your response seems disproportionately overreacting.
> For starters, something like almost ~half of students move away from their families to attend college. And then look at moves for jobs and retirement and everything else. And then when an incumbent leaves, all of their constituents end up in a similar boat as someone who just moved. And I'm not even beginning to touch the fact that a lot of people's unawareness of politics is (spoiler, I know) due to them not having the luxury to be able to devote as much bandwidth to it as HNers do.
I am very aware of that situation. I moved away from my home town and state for school, I moved cities post college three times, and I am now quite literally in the middle of a move to another state. While I won't pretend that I'll immediately get into the weeds of local city politics, I've still participated in local politics and I will participate in politics in my new city/state come this fall.
>All these people shouldn't have any political opinions whatsoever until they figure out their representatives because... some wise guy on HN thinks knowing your representative's name is a good litmus test for whether you can tell good from bad? Do you expect any other response than "screw you"?
Consider the context of the comment: "do you know who represents you in Congress [...]. If not, you probably don't vote or don't pay attention when you do, and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes, so you probably don't really care that much about whatever it is you say you care about, since you haven't done the easiest thing you can do to make a change."
If you don't know the names of your representatives you can't vote for them. Seems pretty straight forward to me. I think it's pretty fair to say if you're complaining about a political situation but haven't even voted about it you probably haven't tried that hard.
> Quite a confession given the side you're standing on. You'd think such a model citizen would've at least cared to contact their rep one damn time to suggest something about such a serious issue. Like maybe helping educate people about the government and politics better so they become as enlightened as the others.
To be clear, I've contacted my representatives plenty of times, I just haven't called them. I hate phone calls. But I have written emails, physical letters, and on several occasions spoke to them in person at events to express my issues.
> If you (and/or parent, whoever feels this way) genuinely want a good outcome for something so serious instead of standing on a high horse and looking down on the uneducated, maybe actually go campaign to put your lovely literacy tests in the constitution, or whatever else would advance your cause forward. If you have some integrity, perhaps also campaign to fund the education system better and make it easier for citizens to vote in the same amendment, so that you're actually helping the people you presumably care about.
1. I have campaigned for better education funding; I used to work in higher education.
2. No one mentioned literacy tests, so I have a suspicion there's a lot of background context in your head that you're imposing here. Either way, I have no interest in them.
As always everyone is entitled to their opinions, the question is how much should the rest of us care.
Just like how sometimes I consider how little I should care about a social media frequenter’s opinions. I am, for better or for worse, getting near the last willing comment I am going to leave on this, or any, social media site.
That is not due to age or illness, it is due to enshittification. Not by the admin but by the populace.
Very bottom of the page, you can see links to the long and storied history of people saying “HN is bad now,” and why it’s an opinion you don’t really need to share.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I’d throw in for free that when you’re done at a party… say goodbye to your friends and leave. The party in general doesn’t need an announcement of your dissatisfaction and departure. Safe travels.
We all learned what the 3 branches are in grade school. Some people forgot it. Liberals are more likely to remember it because liberal discourse (this thread for example) reminds them of it. It's a biased litmus test in other words.
It's inconceivable to me that you could forget the three branches. There are still headlines and news articles about the president , congress, and the supreme court. Those three things , talked about constantly, are a basic reminder of the most visible aspects of each branch.
That's because your experience is siloed. People in other silos are seeing other headlines and other news articles, and wondering how you could not see them.
It is indeed important to know about ones government - not just its branches, but also its misdeeds and crimes.
The national secrecy is a cess pool of corruption in any and all governments - the corruption of all government begins with its secrets - a truly free people don't allow their governments to keep secrets, but encourages governance to have a responsibility of protecting the truth over secrecy - and this, under the knowledge that absolutes are unattainable. Of course, nuclear codes need to be made inaccessible; the more the people know about their government, the less corrupt it is, however.
After all, do you know why your government hates Russia, like, legislatively - as opposed to culturally and all the other distractions from governance.
The issue is, the overlying principle is that modern governments must allow the people to survive extremism. Political systems, designed to combat the extremes of mass survival, reach a point where they, too, are extreme. As is also born in the history of other forms of human organization - religion, and so on. The very thing the subject was started to address, becomes it in the end.
Basic knowledge is one thing. But constant awareness is something else. We must always hold our governments and their agency, accountable. It is true of priests and politicians and scientists and icons, alike.
It’s probably not necessary to know what the administrative structure of your government is in order to hold an opinion on politics. It’s more important to understand things like the different ideas and ideologies, and what concrete evidence actually exists to support whatever legislation you’re interested in. And pretty much nobody has sufficient political knowledge to do this.
If you want to read someone the article author characterizes as #1 (Objects to Marxism) and #2 (Knows enough to carefully and reasonably refute Marxism) I'd recommend James Lindsay's New Discourses podcast and website. He's read all the leftist books and is deeply familiar with all their ideas and terminology, but is about as anti-communist as they come. Interestingly, he has a lot of people on what he calls the "Woke Right" (e.g Tucker Carlson) who also hate him.
> Conspiracy theory promotion
> Lindsay has promoted several conspiracy theories. He is a proponent of the LGBT grooming conspiracy theory and has been credited as one of several public figures responsible for popularizing "groomer" as a slur directed at LGBTQ educators and activists by members of the political right. Lindsay has referred to the Pride flag as "the flag of a hostile enemy".
> In 2021, Lindsay wrote on Twitter that "there will be" a genocide of whites if critical race theory "isn't stopped." His statement was met with widespread criticism, including from founder of libertarian anti-identity politics magazine Quillette Claire Lehmann who wrote: "James Lindsay is now peddling White Genocide Theory. Implying that a genocide against whites in the U.S. is imminent has the potential to inspire racist violence. Such comments are extreme, reckless, and irresponsible. They should be denounced." Lindsay has also promoted the far-right Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, which alleges a concerted effort by Marxist critical theorists to undermine Western civilization using Marxism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Lindsay?wprov=sfla1
Anti-Marxists really aren't sending their best. I don't see how this guy can produce a thoughtful response to Marxism if he believes that there exists a secret cabal trying to push "Cultural Marxism" on the West to destroy it.
To respect TFA's point, I will not use this moron's existence as evidence that leftist economics are correct.
He reads difficult dense books that are the academic foundation of leftism all the way through and takes them seriously. When prominent theorists write books and these books are taught to 10s of thousands in universities, this is what leftists actually believe.
Leftists make the stuff in their dense jargon heavy books so extreme that it becomes anti-mimetic. People say that the statements he reads out of these books, once translated from very dense jargon, are conspiracy theories, but that's basically gaslighting to get people to not pay attention to acknowledged leftist tactics and to disbelieve what's actually in the books they are teaching to kids and are using to train the next generations of teachers and leftist policymakers.
Communists get voted in because people don't really think their extreme rhetoric is serious, but once they seize power they actually behave just like they say they would in their books.
You're also not engaging with his argument. You're just saying someone said he said a category of things I don't like, but if he read it out of a popular leftist theory book then that's just reporting on what the actual left is saying and to say that repeating that is somehow being a conspiracy theorist is how this stuff comes into actually being implemented. People refuse to believe communists like Hasan Piker are serious until it's too late.
For the past few years, I've seen a dozen of friends or acquaintances turn "ideologically crazy", and they can be roughly grouped into:
A) Onset of schizophrenia or other serious mental illness, followed by psychosis. This is actually the most common I've seen. But it is also the easiest to spot.
B) Some crisis event in life, followed by finding / joining a community. Some were hit hard by this during COVID.
I've yet to personally see people that have their, well, shit together and live busy lives turn into ideological crazies or extremists - where there is no mental illness. Of course, it could be that they just hide it better. Don't use their public accounts, etc.
I also think it is much easier to become radicalized today. Once you search for any extremist views on say social media, you'll be bombarded with it. Just belonging to a certain demographic could trigger a non-stop barrage of extreme wing influencer content in your feed.
I think the advice at the end of this post is essentially sound: you should pre-filter your evaluation of others’ opinions through their understanding of related topics. But that isn’t elitist, and I think we shouldn’t call it that! It’s a form of media and cultural literacy we should be encouraging people to have; there isn’t (and shouldn’t) be anything elite about it.
> it’s very very easy to be negatively polarized by a ton of bad conversations with normal people about it, until you feel like the whole rest of the world is crazy
Why wouldn't the world be crazy, though? What reason do we have to assume that the world is not crazy? Most reasons are tautological when you really unpack them.
It's correct to say something like "the world is dysfunctional as a system for surfacing truth", and that's kind of like saying the rest of the world is crazy.
On the other, you shouldn't assume "the rest of the world is filled exclusively with incompetent people who lack basic truth-finding skills and that's why they don't agree with me" which is what people usually mean when they say the rest of the world is crazy.
Life has taught me that the vast majority of people out there are in fact average at best.
Competence (let alone extreme competence) is kind of rare actually, and accepting that that is “fine” is part.
That’s why you engineer a car to be driven by a dumb and abusive driver; airplanes are designed to be flown by pilots on their worst days; houses are built with large safety factors; code should be written to handle bugs gracefully. It’s not that anyone is being intentionally malicious, it’s that even competent people sometimes make mistakes so the rest of us should expect to screw up.
For awhile in my life, I was highly competent at what I did. It was awesome - but the altered reality this can engender - the idea that “since I am competent everyone else should be too, I’m just average” has it’s own dangers.
Of course the world is crazy. But so are you
Agreed, but also: Just because they're crazy, it doesn't mean they're wrong.
Depends, if we're being pedantic crazy implies you get some stuff wrong, due to not "being" fully there.
This world is a messy complicated place and I tend to think in percentages about everything. Guarantees are rare, I usually think of events as probabilistic, and likewise what other people say.
Now, these probabilities can change based on who's saying what. Theoretically someone who specialized in that topic has a higher chance of "getting it right", or sussing it better than people who aren't as versed in that subject. That's what academia is, and if it wouldn't work we wouldn't do it.
So, for me it does matter who's saying what, but only to some extent. That means even the most educated, smart and focused individual can get it wrong, and some nobody with no training on the subject can get it right, for various reasons, even pure chance.
So I'm never discarding someone's opinion based on who the are or their training, but I do consider the chances of them being right or wrong. There was a recent discussion about Nobelitis.
> Theoretically someone who specialized in that topic has a higher chance of "getting it right", or sussing it better than people who aren't as versed in that subject.
Exactly so. The qualifications are a heuristic, not a rule. That said - There are billions of ill-informed halfwits on earth and all or most have opinions.
People need some way to filter all of those opinions, especially now that the media doesn't do it for us. A lossy heuristic that only works most of the time beats the heck out of drowning in an endless sea of babble.
I agree with a lot of this, and the framing is new to me and I really appreciate it. I especially appreciate the acknowledgement that there isn't necessarily anything wrong with having extreme beliefs; "extreme" is a label most often applied by antagonists of such beliefs. But I definitely feel like there can be a pipeline where one extreme belief may lead to others simply because they are also labelled extreme and not for a more recognizable reason.
> I definitely feel like there can be a pipeline where one extreme belief may lead to others
Once you accept a premise that majority consensus of well informed people can be drastically wrong, it's not hard to then transfer that horizontally from one domain to another. So if you accept the possibility that scientists made up climate change - why wouldn't they also make up COVID? or falsify risks associated with vaccines? or any other number of things.
Underpinning all of this is some basic elements of humility and empathy - willingness to accede to a greater authority of others, and to weigh others experience that is different to yours as important in informing your views. Cutting those tethers gives your own belief system a new degree of freedom.
What's also crucial is having your beliefs be backed by reality, and tossing away beliefs that aren't.
I would counter with people who believe the earth is flat. This is in fact an extreme belief. The best part is, I don’t care if people believe this, not even a little a bit.
I care when they start arguing with me and trying to jam their belief down my throat. I didn’t even ask, you brought it up and you’re mad at me because I disagree.
I think this is the more interesting point to consider. Having a belief, any belief, is probably just fine. It’s the second part that’s the issue.
Where would you draw the line between someone advocating for their belief vs shoving it down your throat? Does the "extremeness" of the belief factor into the judgement? If so, how are we not back at the original question of the definition of what an extreme belief is?
Oddly though beliefs like “the world is flat” are tied up in other beliefs that actually cause harm. Flat-earth leads to the firmament leads to Christian god did this leads to ((those people)) killed Christ and control the banks that want you to believe in a spherical earth and get vaccinated.
One of the most depressing things about exploring the conspiracy world is that all roads tend to get co-opted into hateful rhetoric - I miss the days when I believed that one could hold a rather silly belief and have it just be benign.
Pretty good. I have something to say about this part:
> most people are in fact “asleep” about most things most of the time, not super thoughtful in how they develop beliefs
Which is later echoed, but differently, as:
> the average person just doesn’t know much about your hyper specific thing
This is skirting around whether they have a duty to know about your thing. The first phrasing suggests they do, the second suggests not.
Given that your thing is probably stupid and wrong, and life's too short, it seems reasonable to me that most people can't give you good arguments about it unless you invite them to take a pleasant and entertaining walk around your reasoning and maybe sleep on it and come back later. If the subject can't be made pleasant and entertaining, you're probably out of luck. This unfortunately still applies even when your thing is genuinely a great insight.
I think the problem here is that we have a bias for those who agree with us that outweighs our patience in searching for oppositional opinions that are well founded. From a liberal bubble it is quite hard to find conservative viewpoints that aren't based on unobserved apriori belief or strawman arguments. It feels like being a heavyweight surrounded by lightweights and it makes me feel like I need a better sparring partner, I just can't find one...
> I think the problem here is that we have a bias for those who agree with us that outweighs our patience in searching for oppositional opinions that are well founded.
This is a very agreeable statement, but I'd add that politics is not about finding the Kantian truth of what's best for everyone (inside the country? globally? also immigrants? lazy and ugly natives?).
It's about balancing interests. Of course, the idea of free market democracy was/is that both goals eventually converge.
My favorite intellectual conservative sparring partner became a progressive.
Great points and nice write-up.
At the risk of sounding AI pilled, I find LLM's are fairly good sparring partners if you instruct them well. At least they're more capable of giving you the best arguments against your position than the average bar patron.
Almost all of my non-professional prompts are of that nature.
I don't know. AI are basically trained to tell you what you want to hear, including when they're disagreeing with you. If you come off of your conversation with AI with a stronger belief than when you went in, is that merited?
"AI Advice Suppresses People’s Willingness To Say “I Don’t Know”, Even When The Advice Is Wrong And Accuracy Is Incentivized" https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5y6m4_v1
> Don't update positively on your extremist beliefs whenever you hear a bad argument against them
Two problems:
1. There are beliefs people hold approximately as strongly as they hold "the Sun will rise tomorrow", so "updating" is kinda irrelevant.
2. How many people actually think any of their beliefs are "extremist"? And if they don't, they won't consider the warning to apply.
And after digging in further:
3. Many people reasonably believe that their discussion circles already filter out a lot of "average people" and thus expect a higher standard of discourse from their ideological opponents. When that still doesn't happen, it naturally seems like stronger evidence.
4. (Insert generic annoyance at veganism discourse here.)
One big problem is that lately this kind of extremism has become more like a cult: even considering the idea that the “others” might have some truth (while being wrong about the rest) is treated like blasphemy
I am vegetarian, not vegan. I am so because it is something I can do about the state of animal welfare. I don't engage in discussions about my eating with people outside my immediate family. My immediate family are all omnivores. I sometimes, but rarely, choose to eat meat because it is served to me by someone who doesn't know my preference. Animal welfare remains my top priority and concern.
> Their disagreements are also very visible entirely rooted in their pre-existing social identity.
This is such a nuanced point. I think that's why it's difficult to get a Jewish person to admit that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
> The reason it’s so easy is that most people are in fact “asleep” about most things most of the time,
Bingo against. I first had this exact thought in the context of people losing more and more time to distractions like Instagram tiktok etc. At the time people around me thought I was crazy (it's changing now). Such an insightful post.
> Many people adopt beliefs because it seems like the people they think of as good adopted them too
And not just beliefs. Fashion and all sorts of mannerisms. What is it with a certain segment of the population using their pants at the bottom of their asses? Did they all decide to do this independently? Or do look around and see that all their favourite gangstas do it?
One thing that I think would be helpful for anyone is to think about a contentious issue you hold a very strong opinion on. Consider what would make you change your mind on this issue. If there is literally nothing anyone could say to you (no new information, no perspective) that would make you change your mind, maybe you should ask yourself why...
> The person [is not super fired up and] doesn’t just want to act as a soldier for their team
This pulled me into a tangential thought:
Has anyone else noticed that a lot of people just CAN'T be wrong? They might be contrarian, cynical, narcissists, experts in their field, experiencing PTSD or other emotional disregulation, extremely online, ... Then the team-based things: political entrenchment, [colour]-pilled, conspiracy theorists, religious, Collingwood supporters (kidding) ...
Finding people who are genuinely interested in learning about things that might change their views in substantial ways is very hard. Even when you find people genuinely interested in learning, it's so common to see evidence take a back seat to political or religious views. It makes you feel crazy sometimes.
It’s not that you’re crazy, it’s that human beings are not actually rational most of the time.
More intelligent human beings can do a better impression of rationality but in most situations they’re still using their intelligence to post-rationalise some existing feeling.
Once you recognise that you’ll see that it’s true even in yourself
I think this is a good observation, but I think the diagnosis is slightly wrong. I don't think the process of becoming dismissive of opinions different to yours is limited to those with "extremist" views.
The people who agree with you are a biased sample of the population. But so are the people who are willing to openly disagree. So we have both a "bubble" and an "anti-bubble". This is especially true for people with unusual views, but it's also true for everyone.
I had a colleague who was part of an idiosyncratic religious denomination, which believes in the literal truth of the Bible etc. He was a nice guy and mostly we avoided talking about this. The one person who raised it in social conversation was the most tactless guy in the office. (To be fair he wasn't that tactless. Someone has to be last). Lots of people online are looking for a verbal fight. The decent people who know you socially or via work, but disagree with you over some political or religious issue, will usually avoid talking about it with you. That applies just as much if you have a mainstream but not universally held belief, as if you have an extreme one.
The problem here is that there's not really any incentive to seriously engage with a person with opposing views, even though our society would be a lot better if people did it. Lots of people seem to think that freedom of speech just means freedom to harangue those you disagree with, and aren't interested in the search for truth.
Here's One Weird Trick™ to avoid being an ideologue: be ok with being wrong.
Flipping that over: aspire to be correct in your beliefs, not in "being right".
Karl Popper (the man behind the Intolerance of Intolerance "paradox) identified it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Falsifiability - misunderstood idea that's often used to discredit string theory, for example.
As stated on Wikipedia:
> Falsifiability is a standard of evaluation of scientific statements, including theories and hypotheses. A statement is falsifiable if it belongs to a language or logical structure capable of describing an empirical observation that contradicts it.
I only recently learned that most peoples beliefs are not "factual beliefs". Since most of mine are, I thought that's how other people work. I think Popper may have made the same mistake by assuming "correctness" is always the primary value a belief offers.
The other kind of beliefs are "Symbolic beliefs." Symbolic beliefs are not held because they are true, or because they are useful on their own. They're held because they signal that you belong to the tribe. They are similar to the "Alief", which is an automatic unequestioned belief. Most Symbolic beliefs are aliefs, but not all.
Since learning about this I've been trying to identify my own aliefs and symbolic beliefs and question them. It turns out I have more than I'd realized. We probably all do.
> I only recently learned that most peoples beliefs are not "factual beliefs".
I think this greatly underestimates the number of completely mundane, innocuous factual beliefs that everyone, or at least everyone who is able to get through their lives without serious mishap for any length of time, has to have. For anyone in that position, most of their beliefs have to be factual beliefs, and have to be true at least to a good enough approximation to allow them to function. We tend to ignore such beliefs in discussions like this, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.
"Correct" is a synonym for "right". What you need is unrefuted.
Sure, the same intention is to not hold refuted or refutable beliefs.
No, they must be refutable! Otherwise you're stuck with them forever. This is all about ongoing error correction.
As the article talks about Marx, let us consider the falsifiable predictions of Narx, who died in 1883.
* Economic crises (recessions, depressions) would continue, and becone worse over time (example: subprime crisis of 2008)
* profitability rates would go down over time
* wealth would concentrate more over time
* middle class would be slowly shrunk - say, doctor's losing their own offices and made to see people in 15 minute appointment blocks
* real hourly wages would fall
* proletariat will revolt and displace the bourgeoisie, in the manner the bourgeoisie overthrew the feudal order
These predictions are all falsifiable
Your daily reminder that Andy Masley lives on a grant from the effective altruist cult.
What a breath of fresh air! If only people were in control of their own selves to stick to this kind of balanced and open-minded disposition.
The key problem is social media feed boosting “engagement”. Balanced, well thought comments don't bring much engagement so they end up being ignored by the algorithm while outrageously stupid takes generate a lot of (negative) engagement, some of which being equally stupid which will bring more engagement than the sensible responses and so on. And at the end if the day, all you see in your social media feed is stupid people sharing at least some of your values arguing with even stupider people (or so you think, at least) who have the opposite views.
This is obviously harmful for society but also obviously the best outcome for the platform who wants to sell your attention to advertisers.
> Suppose you become politically radicalized and become a Marxist. You get convinced that the labor theory of value is correct.
> The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect,
He's correct most people don't know about labor theory of value. Which is why it's easy for him to categorize those who believe it as "radicalized" and "Marxist" versus the minority of calm, rational, objective people who can discount it.
Marx did follow the labor theory of value - as did virtually every major economist (or as they put it probably better back then, student of political economy) before Marx, who also believed it. Marx credits another revolutionary for discovering the labor theory of value - Benjamin Franklin. There were a few proto-papers on subjective theory of value, but an alternative theory of value did not even really exist before Capital was published.
Labor theory of value was the theory of Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and all the major economists before Marx. And Marx accepted what they accepted.
Alternative theories of value were not really fleshed out until after Marx published Capital.
So consider all of this when he categorizes the idea of the labor theory of value as extremist, radical, Marxist etc.
According to this article, believing that a carpenter banging wood and nails into a table creates value is an extremist belief. Even though pretty much every major economist before Marx believed the same thing.
Ps. This was told to you by myself - from one the 1% of people who know this stuff
Pps. If you didn't read the article, you would not know I am referring to myself as part of an elite 1% of knowledge sarcastically
The important issue to focus on isn't that long ago people had a model that was not a good model of reality. The issue is that now we have better models and the person who claims they have an educated opinion should know it. Blindly holding to a model that has been shown to be inferior is what makes it an extremist belief.
The geocentric model was thought to be true for literally thousands of years by every astronomer and scientist. Today if someone claimed the geocentric model was true, we would consider it an extremist belief - even though pretty much every major astronomer believed it for thousands of years.
Yes, I was considering making the same point, but in fairness to him, the vast majority of the millenial marxists and beyond don't know this either, nor that marxism doesn't mean "no profits or reinvestment or insurances, all value goes to workers".
I am with the author on how people get radicalized, but he could not have picked a worse example that Marxism as an example of extremist idea.
Equating Marxism to labor theory of value is akin to maybe equating economics to a supply/demand curve.
There are unequivocally true parts of Marxism, such as surplus value of labor, and the fundamental incentive conflict between a capital owner and laborer (which Marx deems exploitation)
The labor theory of value is also I think misinterpreted by modern economists as a price-setting mechanism, which it isn't. It's a mechanism to show that there is a certain floor on value of an economic good, which is raised every time constructive labor is applied to a product.
Freedom of association is kind of a mistake, as it encourages these bubbles to form.
In the pie chart 100% of people one meets disagree with ”extremist” belief of Matxism. I guess, if you move in very conservative right-wing circles, but I still doubt if this fella understands how pie-charts work.
On the general topic, most people do not have arguments and they do not know how to construct one. They cannot articulate what they believe, since they don’t really know what they believe. Most things people say are just stuff copied from whatever TV-show or meme they saw last. However, if you go around starting discussions on politics with ”what are the three branches of government” most people who actually understand the topic just walk away. I also don’t think ”hey everybody must he stupid except me” explains how people radicalise - or whatever ”idelogically crazy” means. Rather it tells more about the writer and his… problem.
I have another suggestion: just fuckin listen. A truck driver or a cleaning lady might have very original and interesting ideas about the world, if you just shut the fuck up and let them talk. Then there’s about quadrillion firebrands across the internet shouting at a video camera almost none of which are worth your time.
Information hygiene is important if you don't want to go "crazy" in this sense.
Be careful about what news you consume, even if it appears to agree with you. Check sources. Check facts. Try to work up to your beliefs from direct observation and basic principles whenever possible. Question your beliefs. Maybe they're wrong!
e.g. It's easy to get worked up about Trump. There's an awful lot bad press out there about him. Ask yourself, can a human being really be that vile? Maybe I'm just being misled by the media and partisan politics. Go watch some uncut speeches and press conferences. Pay attention to what the man actually does. Oh, he wants to place tariffs on my country because smoke from forest fires sometimes crosses our shared borders*? He actually said that? Yes. Yes he did. That's directly observable scumbag behaviour. If a romantic interest acted that way I'd break things off immediately. Huge red flag. Maybe the negative opinions about him check out.
---------
* It crosses both ways, BTW.
> Pay attention to what the man actually does.
Pardoned a lot of the highest profile criminals of the past decade.
Started a war with Iran.
I like that the author doesn’t clarify what constitutes an extremist idea aside from suggesting that he doesn’t believe in any. “Extremism is when people, who are dumb, don’t know facts unlike me, who is very smart” is a kick ass theme for an essay
Read: "I did not even attempt to read the article"
"I’m not against extremist ideas on principle. I have my own, the main one being that animal welfare is a much larger urgent catastrophe than most people believe."
This is clearly a cool take though and author knows it. This is not a polarizing view in the sense that anything about Epstein / Gaza / Trans athletes would be.
Maybe not as polarizing as those, but by "animal welfare" he doesn't mean volunteering at the local animal shelter, he's a vegan. That's pretty polarizing to a lot of people who see veganism as an attack on their whole existence because they like meat.
I don't have a problem with vegans because that just means more meat for the rest of us.
The author makes some good points, but imho undermines his argument by leading of with concepts like 'you come to believe in an extremist idea'; extremism is a word heavily freighted not only with meanings of intensity, inflexibility, or relative unpopularity but also with the implication of exceptional consequences that follow thereon, like rounding up perceived enemies of the state or overthrowing the social order. It might have been better to start from a perspective of unpopularity or rigid belief in a particular principle, which then hardens into an extremist position following the process of rejection and retrenchment the author describes.
On a side note: Suppose you become politically radicalized and become a Marxist. You get convinced that the labor theory of value is correct.
Marx did not believe in the Labor Theory of Value, although the above is a very common misconception because a lot of self-avowed Marxists do. On the contrary, Marx believed that some things had inherent value, like an oasis in the desert which provides a much-needed resource without any investment of labor. The LTV was adopted as part of the platform at the inaugural conference of the German Social Democratic Party in 1875. At the time, socialism was split between followers of Marx on one side, and followers of socialists like Ferdinand Lasalle on the other. The differences are too complex to delve into here, but you could say that Marxian socialism was more revolutionary and aspired to a general reorganization of society, while Lasallean socialism was more reformist and oriented around securing rights around pay and working conditions via collective bargaining, rather than having a general hostility to the economic order of the time.
Anyway, Marx did not attend this conference but when he was subsequently sent a copy of the program adopted there, he was so annoyed that he wrote a blistering critique, attacking the what he saw as the weak intellectual foundations of the plan and arguing that that they would fundamentally undermine the socialist project. You can read the cirique here, along with a much more comprehensive introduction that provides a lot of additional context: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index...
Marx's writing has a reputation for being turgid and difficult, which I think is somewhat undeserved. But lest people think think I'm just doing the academic or political trick of telling you what I think it means, here's the opening couple of paragraphs, in which Marx gets straight to the point:
The whole thing is fairly short, maybe 8 or 10 pages though obviously the prose of 150 years ago is rather dense; also Marx was writing to argue with an expert audience rather than to explain to a general one. Nevertheless, it's pretty readable and probably the clearest articulation of how Marx anticipated a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would operate on the way to full Communism (where Marx imagined all economic productivity would be owned and operated by workers in general, and envisioned everyone working part-time for 20-30 hours a week and having abundant time left over for education, entertainment, time with family, or whatever they happened to enjoy).This is great. The error it highlights would work for anything.
The Earth is on the back of a large turtle. Prove me wrong.
Most of the arguments you hear will be deeply flawed.
Therefore we are on the back of a giant turtle.
I think it's easy to give correct arguments, it's just easy for you to dismiss them.
For example if i say "we're not on the back of a giant turtle, because humans went into a rock ship, went all around the planet and checked there's no turtle", is absolutely correct. But then you'll say something like "how do you know, were you yourself in the rocket ship?".
And this is how normal people see extremists: "I just addressed your point, but you choose to hold a ridiculous position"
Rational people will pick the ideology which has the fewest contradictions. Irrational people will choose that which serves them best.
People who benefit from a system are unlikely to look for problems with it and unlikely to notice any contradictions. Anything which appears as a contradiction gets shrugged off as "Well, there must be a good reason, I'm not an expert. I will trust the experts." These people corrupt Occam's Razor that the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. "The experts say ..." becomes the ultimate simplest explanation to everything... And the experts that they choose to listen to are those who are aligned with their existing beliefs.
Then you have people who notice the contradictions but they see so many from first-hand experience that they don't trust the experts and they don't have access to enough different information to be able to choose a good one; so they just adopt the least-bad one as their own... The one which best protects their self-image and whose (comparatively) few contradictions can be plausibly explained away by corruption, conspiracy or dishonesty.
But I think the latter group is in fact one step closer to the truth. The truth is there is no conspiracy (at least no grand, all-encompassing one), it's worse than that; systemic incentives create alignment and remove the need for intentional coordination. The coordination, the illusion of conspiracy is just a byproduct of incentives. The second group of people are wrong about the mechanism but their view of reality leads to the same outcome... So with each passing year, their views are being reinforced by more "proof."
The system which manufactures the incentives which create alignment is itself probably not the product of conspiracy; it's just a system which evolved slowly over time to subtly serve its operators and their supporters. They don't want to change it, not out of nefariousness, but out of justified fear of what havoc any change might wreck... Bureaucracy also plays a part.
It's very difficult to co-ordinate a lot of people to agree on anything, let alone act on it. This is one thing that the mainstream anti-conspiracy folks are completely right about.
I'm a global top-50-university-credentialed expert in Information Technology who majored in System Design and has worked for a wide range of companies of different sizes, in multiple industries (education, remote work platforms, social media, banking/finance), in multiple countries including in highly political areas like crypto... So the "trust the experts" folk can trust me when it comes to information flows and system design...
Try this: take a position you hold that you are sure is rational but that a number of people disagree with, and pretend it is wrong and look at it from the opposite perspective. Steelman it and honestly take that perspective as true and argue it in your head. You might still not agree with it, but you can make it rational. So, how certain are should we be that our positions are the rational ones if we can do this?
I do this already with all of my beliefs.
That's not to say my beliefs are exhaustively battle-tested and correct; maybe other people have information that I'm missing but in my role as a software engineer working across multiple industries and some politically sensitive projects, I've had access to information and first-hand experiences that most other people haven't.
The thing is; if I told the average person what I witnessed without providing any interpretation, they would doubt the basic facts because some of what I experienced doesn't make sense when measured against mainstream narratives and most people's day-to-day experiences.
For example, about the crypto/blockchain sector; when I tell people about my experiences, outsiders often say stuff like "The founders behaved this way because of hype and irrationality of the markets" but when you've been through it every day for 2 years and experienced the taboos inside the company, seen the suppression of projects and community members, following a clear, predictable, repeated pattern, it's impossible to believe that it is random or irrational.
> Rational people will pick the ideology which has the fewest contradictions. Irrational people will choose that which serves them best.
Perhaps everyone is irrational?
How we would know otherwise if we can make irrational things rational just by thinking about them hard enough?
Yes, it's a spectrum. The best test to figure out the extent of your own bias is to make a list of ways which in which a particular ideology benefits you.
For most of my contrarian ideologies, they are harmful to me in most ways except "Protects my ego by redefining personal failings as system failings." Most of my contrarian ideologies have this characteristic but this point has been getting weaker over time; I don't have much pride left. I'm literally working for a bank now.
Or maybe I work for a bank just to prove to myself that I don't care about pride? Getting kind of elaborate.
Consider two categories of people:
1. The number of people in the general population who will object to neoliberalism.
2. The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why neoliberalism and the trickle down theory of economics is incorrect, and can speak to your very specific concerns about government bloat and over-regulation in a way that gets across how modern social theorists and economists give a more compelling and ethically coherent account of the way the world works, and do so patiently and thoroughly.
This is great! It works with everything.
This is some pseudo-profound Third Way radical centrist horseshit.
> Consider two categories of people:
> 1. The number of people in the general population who will object to Marxism.
> 2. The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect, and can speak to your very specific concerns about worker power and class conflict in a way that gets across how modern social theorists and economists give a more compelling and ethically coherent account of the way the world works, and do so patiently and thoroughly.
Really this is: let's consider one possibility, that I am right and that you are extreme and wrong. Everything is going well, except for the radical weirdos trying to stop me from doing what I want.
Congratulations on being a vegan. 20% of the population doesn't have health insurance.
I'm no Marxist, but this regurgitation of neolib talking points is not being smart enough to refute a Marxist. The problem with today's "Marxists" is that they don't know enough to defend their own positions, and react with rage when the holes in their absurdly shallow knowledge gleaned from social media posts, Jacobin articles and hipster podcasts are confronted by simple, direct, good faith questions that they don't have answers to. It's not that people aren't well-studied enough to refute their extremism.
> Congratulations on being a vegan. 20% of the population doesn't have health insurance.
These two things are completely unrelated.
I'm curious what the author means by: "Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect". First of all isn't that the wrong way around and should be the value theory of labor? But that aside: what is wrong about the concept of surplus value and labour power? (Which I assume would form the core of a marxism and be the value theory of labour; or vice versa) Aren't those generally accepted concepts? The entirety of marxism, especially its teleologial argument/eschatology is a different story, but what social/economic theory falsifies or even contradicts the concept of labour power and surplus value and in what way?
If you're not an extremist at this point relative to everyone else, the vast majority of whom have beliefs that are incompatible with the existence of other life on this planet, then you're probably a moron.