I got to the end and realized I'd been reading Robert Sapolsky.
His "Biology of Human Behavior" Stanford lecture course in about 25 parts is on youtube. It's absolutely amazing; he's a great lecturer, articulate, funny, fascinating, a great storyteller about remarkable experiments and legendary scientists. It starts with evolutionary biology/sociobiology and goes down via a dozen levels of explanation ('buckets' he calls them) to brains and genes and how they work, in quite a lot of detail. I couldn't recommend it any more highly. p.s. My girlfriend (very non-sciency) loved it too.
This would be easier if We and Them simply differed in arbitrary preferences. But I fear that when We and Them disagree on basic epistemology, we simply sound crazy to each other.
And this irreconcilable difference, if it exists, will eventually always come out if you talk long enough.
The problem with Us vs. Them thinking isn't that there is a group of people that you fundamentally disagree with, but rather that you've constructed a somewhat nebulous "them" which you've ascribed all negative qualities about "them".
The way to recognise this is to ask yourself if you can actually name any particular example of the "them" you're arguing against. Because if not, you risk arguing against a straw man you yourself created.
We're at the point where whole communities are being erected to argue against a "them", usually with an opposing community arguing against a similarly distorted image of the "us".
> The way to recognise this is to ask yourself if you can actually name any particular example of the "them" you're arguing against.
Unfortunately, I think what can often compound this line of thinking is a willingness to speculatively ascribe qualities to people we've just met in an attempt to put them into a box we can relate to (either positively relate or negatively relate).
Asking someone to think of a particular example of "them" might simply lead to an example of someone they've judged on first impressions.
That's a fair point. I guess the real problem is that any claims about "them" can't really be refuted by anyone. So a better method would be to ask yourself if there's someone who could reject your claims. If not your statements are not falsifiable, which makes debating them somewhat pointless.
Perhaps along the same lines, elimination of us vs. them thinking shouldn't be predicated on elimination of all differences. Mainly because it's totally unrealistic to think that will ever happen.
Instead, we should be able to move beyond the us vs. them approach to the world without first making sure that the "them" are exactly like"us".
Perhaps we should come up with better methods that people can use to critique/improve their own epistemology as needed, and spread the idea that it is highly worthwhile to do so? The mindset that "realizing you are wrong" can be a joy, not something to fear.
After reading Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", it seems to me this difficulty could also be described as people operating from different base layer paradigms.
E.g. "Natural laws are sufficient to explain everything we see" vs "A supernatural element is needed". Or "Power dynamics are the primary force that steer human activity" vs "There are many important factors to consider".
This exactly. Critical thinking, psychology, and interpersonal communication (with emphasis on building shared understanding) need to be explicitly taught in schools. We already have children memorize state capitals: they can memorize cognitive biases, mental models, meta-models/heuristics, empathy/communication techniques, and the a basic explanation of the psychology/neuroscience that backs them up. This will allow children to effectively deal with their own flaws, and those of others. Combining that with practical online/offline research skills and more hands-on experience of macro/microeconomics would leave children much more equipped to deeply and intuitively understand people and the world.
It's definitely not beyond their capacity either, all children figure out a smattering of these for themselves anyways, they just don't learn the names. Even the rather sharp ones only have a few more, or maybe one especially-honed one, but that's all it takes to make a big difference.
"A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points" - Alan Kay
As an aside, children that develop significantly advantageous models early on often end up over-relying on them later, another potential-wasting issue we could avoid by making those children aware of what's going on in their brains.
> they can memorize cognitive biases, mental models, meta-models/heuristics, empathy/communication techniques, and the a basic explanation of the psychology/neuroscience that backs them up. This will allow children to effectively deal with their own flaws, and those of others.
This reads like a parody.
Memorizing a list of definitions isn’t going to accomplish much of anything, any more than memorizing a list of equipment names will turn someone into a doctor or engineer. These are tricky concepts/tools, and wielding them properly takes serious expertise.
Students need (years of copious) experience reading, making, and analyzing increasingly subtle and sophisticated arguments with significant amounts of feedback from other students and expert teachers/mentors to come to a journeyman-level understanding of logic and rhetoric. Critical introspection is even harder; adults have trouble with it after decades of liberal arts education, professional school, work, personal relationships, meditation, therapy, ....
Adults have trouble with all this stuff because mostly they don't learn it at all, even with a liberal arts education or any of the other things you mention. The entire rationalism movement is essentially founded based on the fact that ostensibly educated people don't realize how badly their brains work by default.
The greatest superpower we have as humans is that we have the ability to introspect, and second guess our immediate responses in light of what we've learned. That allows us to jump to conclusions much quicker on shoddy evidence, because we can course correct later as we gather more, and it's super effective as a learning strategy. Learning how to better correct our initial hypotheses helps us perform even better, but it requires us to actually study the things that humans tend to get wrong. Most education, professions, and life experiences do not support that goal, so it's an easy win if you go outside the system to do so.
Judging from the people I know who identify themselves with the “rationalism movement”, occasionally reading topical blog posts doesn’t inherently teach introspection (or even reasoning) any better than high school, though its adherents are pretty good at rattling off lists of logical fallacies and getting distracted by meta-arguments about which particular one applies in a given situation.
[Or by “rationalism movement” are you talking about, say, philosophy / sociology / anthropology / behavioral economics / history Ph.Ds or licensed psychiatrists? That would be something like the years of dedicated training I was talking about, though those fields have different modes of inquiry and different subjects of study, and some are surely better at reasoning / rhetoric / self reflection than others.]
You're right, reading occasional blog posts doesn't do anything for anyone, on pretty much any topic. I'd argue that anyone professing to be a rationalist on those grounds is lying to themselves.
Also worth pointing out that the rationalist community has a lot of issues and biases that mostly spring from focus problems - like any group, they tend to hyper-analyze a few pet issues that draw their attention and then ignore the rest of the world. Even if they're correctly analyzing those issues, the social problem of biased community focus ends up thwarting the goal of overall rationality. I don't think this is a problem specific to rationalists, rather a general failure of human communication (for any -ism, you'll find that people have tunnel vision and tend to force everything they see and hear through the lens of that -ism), but it is rightly criticized more there because the movement claims to be better at seeking truth than others. I have no idea how to solve that problem, it's really an emergent result of what gets people hot and bothered and draws their attention and analysis, which is an innate human irrationality and extremely hard to think your way around.
I'm not trying to say that if they memorize some definitions they'll have a deep understanding of the human condition. I'm saying that by simply normalizing that level of analysis and understanding of human behavior, we can begin shaking off a lot of unproductive cultural baggage. It helps to know to categorize the ineffective behavior you experience as pathological as opposed to attribution to gender, race, religion, political persuasion, or other culturally-encouraged fallacies.
Also, it's not like being better able to understand people is an unattractive concept to kids: most of them naturally attempt to make sense of the world, and helping them internalize the completely natural multi-faceted fallibility of humans (including themselves) will pay off enormously in their future interactions with people.
How do you get to the years and years of focused work?
Vocabularies are the building blocks and mapping points of our knowledge stores. I think the suggestion is that emphasis on awareness and, at least some symbolic reverence to the concepts in grade school may offer a better path that what is traditional now.
Memorizing state capitals won’t make anybody Governer, but skipping that step early on can be a major derailment from path. Memorizing the capitals offers one of many maps to understanding more about what America is, and how it’s government works. Knowing the names encourages curiosity and inspires asking questions that otherwise could not be asked.
It sounds entirely reasonable to me that this could be what we need. I agree years and years is what is required, but I notice many people my age (early 30s) still lack basic vocabulary of these topics, so I have a hard time opposing teaching exactly that, but certainly agree many years, and a significant curiosity seems necessary. How do help that along?
> Memorizing state capitals won’t make anybody Governer, but skipping that step early on can be a major derailment from path.
“Major derailment”? You can’t be serious. Nobody at my school ever memorized state capitals, and as far as I can tell they’re all doing about as well as you would expect (a couple decades later) in their various careers, including careers as lawyers, activists, policy analysts, journalists, politicians, scholars of political science, ...
Anyone who does the real work (reading hundreds of topical books, keeping up with current events for decades, getting involved in political activism, engaging with peers in years of university seminars about related topics, ...) is going to end up having a reasonable grasp of the names of most states and their capitals, but being able to rattle off a list is mostly useless, except as a stunt.
> Knowing the names encourages curiosity and inspires asking questions that otherwise could not be asked.
Memorizing lists of random trivia engenders boredom and makes kids think school is bullshit. The questions they ask are things like “why are we doing this pointless busywork?” and “why doesn’t my teacher respect kids’ intelligence?”
I think your point is good, and I would restate my assertion. As trivia without context, it’s useless, I agree.
Knowing what a capital is and how to find the name when needed is important. But, history is much more important.
I never memorized state capitals as an assignment in school, but I do know most of them from my interest in the nation’s history and geography. I correlate these things but not in the rigorous trivial way I think my earlier comment suggested. Your input brings clarity to that.
People with sub-100 IQs are probably not going to be able to achieve the level of critical thinking you're talking about. There's a genetic component to that level of intelligence, and it's not an easy problem that can be solved by teaching people a few tips and tricks. On top of that, the public education system is not designed to produce critical thinking people, but rather people who can memorize and follow orders. Not that things can't ever change, but there's a lot more work to do than making a few tweaks to a curriculum.
Remove control of education from the federal level and return the money and decision-making power to the local levels. Stop all the one-size-fits-all programs that don’t work and make schools highly competitive and merit-based.
If the federal level is involved it should be to grant scholarships to high performing students, and invest more in trade schools for students that may not achieve high academic marks but have other talents that could be developed.
End welfare programs that subsidize r-selected birth rates, and give tax cuts and incentives to R-selected birth rates, with the goal of boosting the national average IQ. Finally, invest heavily in genetic testing and editing research which would allow parents to select or modify embryos to have genes that correlate with higher intelligence, like China has promised to do.
Basically, go all in on intelligence and address the issue at the biological rather than the cultural level.
>"Natural laws are sufficient to explain everything we see" vs "A supernatural element is needed".
Both of those positions share the base epistemology of seeing and explaining, fortunately for discussions between the two very large groups that believe each of them.
It depends on the religion. The modern Catholic Church now accepts that evolution through natural selection occurs, and they no longer claim that the Earth was created in 6 days a few thousand years ago.
Yes, it is official position, confirmed in a few documents by Pope John Paul II (google "Fides et ratio"). But of course you can still many priests arguing against that :)
Religious texts can be revered studied like mythology (because they are). Critiques of biblical literalism are already fairly old-fashioned and surprisingly unnecessary.
I have a very religious family, which was uncomfortable for me when I was younger. But, that didn’t last long. Once I began studying more art history, mythology and theology, the ‘Us vs. Them’ around the topic has largely dissipated. I participate in all the happenings and have helped my cousins of similar age in contextualizing it all. I feel like I am ushering a healthy shift forward and new atheism now feels old. I’m open to critique of this, of course.
I just recently read a bit about different ways that human understand and I think there is an interesting point you can make in this 'us vs them' in relation to this. I'm still digesting it but it's a very interesting view of the mind.
I will try to keep this short, so bare with the simplifications. The idea is that humans understand in many different types of ways and they are connected/overlapped. These ways are: mythic, romantic, philosophic, ironic and somatic. Mythic understanding comes out of oral culture and brings along with it narrative, fantasy, metaphors, binary structuring, etc. Romantic understanding came out of literacy and brings romantic rationality, humanized knowledge, transcendence within reality, etc. Ironic understanding brings self-reflection, and so on. One type of understanding is not better/worse than the other, they are important in different ways. For those who are interested, check out "The Educated Mind" by Kiearn Egan.
So, us-vs-them comes out of a mythic understanding of the world. The gut reaction is often to reject the source from which the bad behaviour comes from completely. But mythic understanding and it's binary structuring (along with fantasy, metaphors, abstract thinking) is crucial for human sense-making. So I don't think we should suppress mythic understanding and all that comes along with it, we need to have a balance between these different ways of understanding. Just imagine how many great things invented started as fantasy and strange metaphors in someones head!
That's the epistemological view of it, then you have the political one, that's a totally different beast and so I will end my comment here.
If states secede why not parts of a state? Why not cities? Why not neighborhoods. You're pretty much advocating the end of civilization and the return to tribal groupings. But tribal warfare was actually much more violent and unstable than the nation state.
That's a reductio ad absurdum. There are reasonable levels of division well above tribal levels. Singapore is basically a city state, and I don't notice a collapse of civilization there.
Territories with strong social identity would maintain political union, territories with weak social identity and severe political disagreements would split. As much as is possible, no one is ruled by people they hate.
I don't understand the downvoting of this comment. What is being described is effectively tribalism.
Tribalism worked well for humans for roughly 350,000 years. Then we idiots come along and think that we've got a better way that is already showing its weaknesses and strain after just a couple of thousand years. Really? Maybe, just maybe our ancestors were on to something and there's something we can learn from them. No that couldn't possibly be it.
Tribalism is red in tooth and claw, it's the culture of might makes right. Technology stops tribalism being a viable or desirable culture today. Tribalism scaled up as technology necessarily permits and forces it be scaled up is fascism.
Those are some pretty extreme claims that have no basis in fact. I tend to look at the other way around: tribalism becomes viable (again) because of technology.
Because of course, today's society is completely free of violence now that we've eliminated tribalism?
I have noticed that nothing that I say on HN, except for saying that the scientific evidence is that intelligence is mostly genetic and heritable, gets more downvotes more quickly than discussing secession.
I think the topic has been successfully in the mind of college educated people, so any mention of it immediately brings to mind both slavery and, somewhat amusingly, fascism.
It is too bad. As I said above, I see it as the best way to avoid violence.
Because they won't want to. Breaking down at that granular level would be too inconvenient to be worth it, even before considering the issues you laid out yourself.
If we all believe that government requires consent of the governed, why structurally require violence to achieve that state? That's the status quo you're defending.
Meta: this is how a real-life slippery slope argument and response should go. It's not a fallacy, it's just not always applicable, just like every other concept
It has little to do with epistemology. The main cause for human conflicts is the fact that we are playing zero-sum games. Humans are constantly fighting/jockeying for status, acquiring resources for themselves, and simply getting ahead of the others.
Depends on resources. When resources are plentiful, we happily work together to maximise them. But when you're starving, you'll kill your siblings and eat them.
With inequality rising, expect more anti-social behaviour.
Inequality will by itself fuel resentment even if the number of people in absolute poverty is low. And resentment causes people to disengage from the political process or to be more extreme in their politics.
In America today, you've got multitude of "us vs them" dynamics - anti-terrorist, liberal-vs-conservative, rich-vs-poor, black-vs-white, etc.
And at lot of this comes because, as the article says, "us versus them" is a powerful psychological dynamic. Given that that current American society is hyper-competitive, it seems likely this situation will continue. If pulling "us versus them" is akin to chemical warfare - a toxic affair for all concerned that only nets a marginal advantage, it will be used when actual chemical gets used - when one player is losing everywhere and no longer has to care. But that "pulling out all the stops" situation now happens ... always. When will politicians "go the low rout"? Always. When will media? etc.
Which goes back to hyper-competitive. When will it end? I don't know. How will end? Probably in tears but otherwise also hard to say.
My assessment is that we've been building tech to help us FIND one another, but rarely building tech to help us BRIDGE with one another. With the former, we build ubiquitous messaging platforms, and so we can now find and spend time with more people who are more like us than ever before -- engaging in "candy" conversation with very similar people for more and more hours of our waking life. The latter, BRIDGING tools, would instead encourage and help us to break down those silo's that we're creating -- the silo's which are leaving us less and less prepared to engage with folks unlike us, who have perhaps developed whole other forms of language and culture in their own silos.
But as I said, Taiwan is experimenting with some really interesting processes that are breaking that down. Definitely worth reading the article :)
Unity against a common enemy has historically put an end to such internal strife. The Second World War wiped away domestic conflicts in the face of an existential threat, and gave a generation of men so much valor as to put them beyond reproach. It was unthinkable to target the men of the Greatest Generation with the kind of attacks and vicious reporting we are used to today, whether they deserved it or not.
Edit: I'm not saying we should go to war to solve our problems. I'm just observing something that is demonstrably true: groups unify in the face of external threats.
>The Second World War wiped away domestic conflicts in the face of an existential threat, and gave a generation of men so much valor as to put them beyond reproach.
This comment is ignorant of the reality of black military members, both during the war and after.
Research generally shows that working together voluntarily to solve a common problem, where each side needs the others' skills, really does reduce polarization.
> This comment is ignorant of the reality of black military members
Sure, but the major internal strife within America in the late 20's wasn't based upon race, but upon economics and inequality. Just because it didn't remove _all_ strife within an entire nation(which will never happen) doesn't mean that it didn't smoothe things over for most Americans.
> . Given that that current American society is hyper-competitive,
There is slight snag in there I think, because the level of competitiveness is also determined by culture, media, propaganda, education etc.
In other words it is not something that's just there, perceptions of competition is easily manufactured. Think of telling black people that illegal immigrants are taking their jobs. There is all of a sudden a politically motivated competition presented which can be used to make the two groups hate each other.
Of course competition isn't just-there. But that hardly means it's not there. Apartment rents don't go up whatever large percentage in a vacuum, for example, they have a context. But whatever the context, the competition for apartments if that happens is going to become more intense as more people fight for the fewer apartments that are in their budget.
Broad brush conclusions, of course, are hard to give full support to but I would still expect a large number of folks would say the US is now extremely competitive and has become more competitive over the last twenty and fifty years.
Edit: Also, competition is a bit like fame (if many people believe someone is famous, by the definition of fame those people can't be wrong). If many people believe a society is competitive, it makes the society more competitive because it impels the people to compete more.
"Us vs them" certainly isn't a weapon of last resort. White identity politics was at its peak when whites were least threatened by minority groups, and the same is true today with leftist identitarians. I wouldn't go so far as to say identity politics is caused by a powerful ingroup, but it certainly isn't caused by an oppressed ingroup.
Isn't this just the nature of reality though? A never-ending battle for resources and territory?
On time lapse, even tree roots are fighting for water, and leaves are fighting for sunlight.
I feel like this article might as well be called, "Overcoming Reality." Which the article basically admits, since these in-group / out-group distinctions are so deeply hardwired into our neurology.
Yes, cooperation works sometimes, but it's usually to beat out another cooperative group.
Levels of competition within a given collection of organisms is relative - the cells of the human only occasionally compete directly - in the rebellion known as cancer (which clearly isn't the norm).
Not all societies compete at the same level but levels of competition also depend on the level of technologies and resources available. English society didn't stay in permanent civil war when muskets were introduced but you can see situations where the introduction of muskets and potatoes cause civil wars in societies where they were introduced [1].
Now, in the US since WWII and especially since the 1980s, an increase in resources has been channeled to allow society to become more competitive. One could easily imagine that if this trend continues indefinitely, things may well reach the level of something akin to civil war.
Edit: whether one see cooperation as a mean of competition or competition as means of cooperation is kind of a matter of taste. An army facing another army can experience toxic levels of internal competition that prevents it from being effective against an enemy (or oppositely, it might experience a lack of "killer instinct" before the key moments I suppose).
I think most of them are caused by the two-party political system in the U.S., where parties do make everything seem like an "us vs them".
For every proposal one party has, the other party tends to have the opposite proposal. Except when it's about giving the military bigger budgets, the NSA more surveillance powers, and expanding U.S. military operations in more countries. On those issues both parties are BFFs.
The two party system has got to go, if for no other reason than that it leaves very little room for the competition of ideas.
I think a preferential voting system would be the first step to dismantling the two party regime.
It would make it "safe" to vote for an independent candidate without people feeling like their vote was being thrown away. In time, that would lead to more specialized parties running.
I think for the most part it's the two party system that causes us to see the separate solutions as opposite rather than the other way around. It's hard to think of the trump tax plan as the exact opposite of a democratic solution because it has some measures democrats originally liked and some they originally proposed (although the core thrust of it is quite republican). We also still have it be the case that the majority of motions in house or senate get bi-partisan up-down votes.
Or perhaps most convincingly, as a former Canadian living in the US, I see the democrats as far to the right of the Canadian Conservative party (Canada's right wing party) on healthcare and the Republicans as some radical far-right. It's hard to think of the two solutions as opposites in any meaningful way because from a global perspective it seems like the Republicans want to do 3/100 on healthcare and most of the democrats try and stretch that to maybe 10/100.
This is often overstated. While there's certainly a lot of aspects of American government where both sides are to the right of Canada (or whatever social democracy you want to insert), it's by no means completely universal.
Take immigration - Canada has merit-based immigration with language requirements, and not a lot of tolerance for illegal immigration, which is considered firmly a right wing position in the states.
I think this is going to be the next big challenge in social tech:
Contact: The consequences of growing up amid diversity just discussed bring us to the effects of prolonged contact on Us/Theming. In the 1950s the psychologist Gordon Allport proposed “contact theory.” Inaccurate version: bring Us-es and Thems together (say, teenagers from two hostile nations in a summer camp), animosities disappear, similarities start to outweigh differences, everyone becomes an Us. More accurate version: put Us and Thems together under narrow circumstances and something sort of resembling that happens, but you can also blow it and worsen things.
Some of the effective narrower circumstances: each side has roughly equal numbers; everyone’s treated equally and unambiguously; contact is lengthy and on neutral territory; there are “superordinate” goals where everyone works together on a meaningful task (say, summer campers turning a meadow into a soccer field).
How do we bring people who disagree back together? Technology is really good at getting people to do things which are individually gratifying so how do we encourage individuals to do something which is individually difficult but will have a strong positive effect on society?
Forced anonymity perhaps? Suppose you're a Striper and I'm a Dotter (from the deadly enemy Stripe and Dot tribes), but we both like to play guitar. Well if you show up on my guitar forum I'll be 'who let that filthy Striper in here?!' and will interpret even innocent participation as attempts to stripe up the place, regardless of whether I have been trying to take it over for the Dots or not.
But if we're just Guitarfan_1172 and Guitarfan_3654 then we can chat about guitars and build bonds that transcend the decor war, as long as neither of us goes off topic and starts discussing patterns. Of course the problem is that the positivity is latent and confined to the interior of the guitar forum, unless we meet in battle and then become aware of our mutual guitar friendship which will cause us to re-evaluate our whole worldview.
Think of it as a poker-like game where you have public and private cards. Your public dot or stripe cards are your loyalty to your design tribe, and the # of stripes or dots across all your cards indicate your degree of group identification. But you also have hidden cards reflecting various private interests.
Let's say when you battle another player you're required to reveal one set of hidden cards if any other have the same or more points (or some other ratio) than your public loyalty cards. In this example you really love guitar and have to reveal your guitar cards. If the other player has the same cards they must also reveal theirs, or perhaps the revelation depends on the strength of their affiliation. Of course, by revealing your similarity of interest maybe you lose points among your own (stripe/dot) peer group because you have something in common with an enemy player...
You see where I'm going with this. Of course, any modeling of relationships and disruption built on this framework assumes that tribal affiliation is fundamentally arbitrary, eg as an accident of birth. If it turns out that the Stripers really and truly want to slice up their enemies or that the Dotters really and truly want to punch holes in them then mutual interest in guitars/crochet/pokemon may never be sufficient to overcome their differences. Thus a good deal depends on whether the enemies are opposed to each other by default or have made a conscious choice to fight each other, in which case that's likely to predominate over all other factors.
"Forced" anonymity exists in some online communities today. If most participants maintain and assume good faith, and are tolerant of some efforts by bad actors to troll, then it works remarkably well. Problems tend to emerge once these assumptions no longer hold true.
Anonymity allows the content to be judged by every reader on the content's own merit, and colored solely by the reader's perception.
However, it's also rather depersonalizing, as every participant will often interpret the others as manifestations of a generic individual, based on their own mental model of what generic individuals look, act, and sound like. It therefore creates the illusion of homogeneity from every point of view, where in truth the real membership might be quite diverse.
The resulting interaction means that over time, the community will develop a sort of institutional identity, complete with etiquette, mannerisms, and tropes they are expected to adhere to to be welcome in the in-group. Some people will don the institutional identity despite it being radically different from their own, just to feel part of a community.
I remember internet forums as a teenager. Back when people didn't use real names and profile pics were of random characters or celebrities not our faces.
It honestly never crossed my mind that the people I was talking to could be anything other than white and mostly guys. I come from a country where races basically don't exist so that worldview made sense kinda.
Sometimes I wonder how many racist jokes I made to people who were black or asian and I had no idea. In my defense, those were just jokes/opinions I picked up on the internet, completely learned behavior as I was trying to learn how this "American Society" thing works because most of the internet seemed to follow american society rules.
Anonymity is great, but it has its drawbacks. Had I known the people I'm talking to are black/asian, I would've asked about their cultures and how they perceive this American Society thing I was exploring.
There's an interesting contrast between completely-anonymous communities (like the chans) and pseudonymous communities (like forums where people have usernames). The issue is that people tend to want to not be constantly on guard in all their interactions, and if they chat about subject A they will often want to chat with the same people about subject B. This is why forums so often have an "off-topic" section that tends toward flamewars.
One issue with the sort of pseudonymous communities, where there is a common identity that persists across discussions, is that once someone is "outed," they can never be un-outed. Systems that rely on forced anonymity assume a single communication channel and no leaks. Also, if a group of dedicated people wants to subvert a community, they can easily do so in a group where their opponents are "playing fair" under completely individual/atomized notions that "we're all just guitar fans!" If a collection of Stripers is able to know that they are Stripers beforehand, or tend to have certain ways of talking about things that secretly reveal their Striperness to each other but not to Dotters, then they can coordinate and increase their own influence to drive Dotters out of the community.
At the end of the day, these systems require some sense of common civility where enough people on both sides are wanting to have the system actually work. If you have to design the system to be completely trustless, that's a hard thing.
Hmm that's interesting. I could imagine some social network which asks you for basic but controversial details about yourself and treats those as your hidden cards, say religious affiliation, political beliefs, etc. and non-controversial details about yourself. It would match you up with potential friends based on the "seen cards" (non-controversial facts) and would schedule the release of hidden card information to the match over time. In that sense it would be almost like forcing the progression of friendship, sometimes your hidden cards match and you're both happy, sometimes they don't and you have to work through it.
Even when staying on-topic, shibboleths will still leak through. The discrimination rate will remain above zero, especially for motivated participants.
Part of me wonders whether separating parts of identities through multiple accounts could be a solution for doing this on future social media sites.
You'd have one login, but the ability to set a different persona for certain audiences, like on specific subreddits, Twitter hashtags, etc. That way, the people who want to talk about gaming or TV or movies won't also be able to go through your history and tell that you also post about say, politics or personal fetishes or whatever else.
And bots couldn't be developed to auto ban people for 'wrongthink' based on the other parts of the network they post on.
Yes, although I like the idea of superordinate goals because I think it eliminates a lot of attempts at bad faith participation. Republicans and Democrats can be aware of their differing views and meet together and get along and chat about their families and maybe a policy decision if they're meeting at church or to play recreational kickball or whatever, if you put those same people together in line at the polling station you'd get a very different result. Maybe the problem is that we have a tendency to only discuss our differences under the worst possible circumstances. But how do you overcome that? I'm not sure, this article gave me a lot to think about.
(One incredibly minor detail that emerged during the Scalise shooting incident is that Congressional Democrats and Republicans play baseball together... but each party gets its own team. A better way to overcome division would have been to have teams composed of a mix of parties)
The first thing to always keep in mind is that intentionally attempting to engineer social behaviors has historically been the single most devastatingly destructive motivation. Far more destructive than war, famine, disease, or other means of human suffering and death. It gave us eugenics, concentration camps, political purges, the obesity epidemic, and all manner of other ills. It backfires consistently and almost always. It is quite literally the most dangerous game that you can play. Unintended consequences are only something you can ignore if you can claim ignorance of their possibility head of time. We do not have that luxury. We have history.
That being said, the solution is a fairly simple one. Stress critical thinking. In all things. In personal life most especially, but also in other actions. Encourage people to recognize their inescapable biases and to resist them because those biases are irrational and provide no actual benefit.
There are unfortunately strong indications that this might not work, however, and that differing brain structures might actually be at play. Some people might have brains that are essentially hard-wired into an in-group/out-group way of processing the world which is inescapable. And seeking to change that would be seeking to change their fundamental character as people, clearly a morally wrong thing to do. But, we were never guaranteed that this whole 'society and civilization' thing was going to be simple or easy... so I guess we can't ask for our money back.
>That being said, the solution is a fairly simple one. Stress critical thinking. In all things. In personal life most especially, but also in other actions. Encourage people to recognize their inescapable biases and to resist them because those biases are irrational and provide no actual benefit.
That's the simple solution?
I have two things to say about it:
First, there are many, many traps to fall into when you develop critical thinking. The way out of those traps is to refine your understanding of critical thinking even more and be more aware of biases. Frankly, this is sustainable only for those who are strongly interested in it - which in my experience is probably less than 10% of the population. Hardly "simple".
Also, having spent time amongst top scientists in academia, and seeing how irrational they can become outside of their field of expertise, I have little faith that critical thinking alone is a solution.
Second, there is a fair amount of research that shows that rational thinking devoid of emotions is infeasible. People with brain injuries where emotions essentially go away (perfectly "logical" creatures) can barely function. Every decision had to be justified. Like why you chose to eat an orange instead of an apple.
This may be an argument from extreme, but the consensus appears to be that a full emotion free approach to problem solving is less than ideal.
You are right. It is simple only in so far as it is simple to state. It does require of the populace a lifetime of exertion of effort. It is certainly sustainable by most of the population in principle, we know that from history and from situations of deprivation where existential or other dangers forced populations to exert that effort in order to avoid danger. Civilization itself is the act of removing such dangers, and when they are removed, the society often then begins abandoning the exertion of effort as it provides no real benefit to larger and larger numbers of the population. Unfortunately this eventually results in the population being unwilling to sustain or expand the infrastructure that protects them. As far as I can tell, this is the largest problem that faces the human species as a whole. Civilization brings about its own undoing.
Emotion and rational thinking are not opposites. I am aware of the neurological cases you're likely referencing, and think that they are extremely important to understanding the interplay of emotion and reason. Without emotion, it is impossible for people to make decisions regardless of the amount of information or understanding available about a situation. Even with a list a mile long of "pro"s set next to a list with only a single "con", a person without emotion can not make the decision to act. It is indeed debilitating. Emotion certainly doesn't need to be eliminated or anything of the sort. It doesn't have to be misleading, it simply can't be relied upon in the absence of reason. Emotions are a basic trained response, and inexplicably linked to the physiological processes of their manifestation. They would probably be extremely useful if we lived in an illiterate possibly pre-lingual tribe on the savannah in Africa where they evolved as an important tool. Our world is far different from that, though, and so we have some baggage we have to deal with. As far as I'm aware, critical thinking is the only tool we've got to recognize and deal with that baggage intentionally.
I will take obesity epidemics over famine, war or some of historical epidemics. Also, holocaust was extension of war itself - the ultimate attempt to kill perceived enemies. For that matter, so was Rwanda genocide.
Why would you think that there are such choices? The obesity epidemic did not come about out of a desire to avoid famine. It came about because the American Heart Association took flimsy scientific evidence that high levels of saturated fat in the diet increased risk of heart disease and then sought to reduce the American intake of saturated fat. They succeeded. They successfully reduced the percent of the average Americans dietary calories which came from saturated fat by 15% which was their goal. Unfortunately, removing saturated fat from foods makes them taste like cardboard. So to combat that, food makers added salt and sugar to restore some flavor. As a result, the total amount of calories consumed on average ballooned, diabetes became an epidemic, and even the heart disease they were intending to avoid through their efforts reached all-time high levels along with a host of other health problems.
No one was starving, and famine wasn't the alternative. The alternative was educating the public and leaving them with the choice, a situation which is less totally effective but more flexible and seemingly less prone to large scale unintended consequences.
I won't get into genocides in too much detail, but the concentration camps were an outgrowth of eugenics, an attempt to improve human health and well-being through "scientific" engineering of the gene pool. It was based, however, upon fundamentally incorrect ideas about how genetics and evolution work, flaws which were known at the time but which were ignored because the idea of rounding up anyone not liked and wiping them out was apparently too alluring for them to step back and say 'we don't have sufficient evidence this would even work'.
I think the answer is partially in your quote: emphasis the similarities.
Women of all colors, backgrounds, and economic statuses are sexually harassed and assaulted.
Men of all colors, backgrounds, and economic statuses are sexually harassed and assaulted.
These are facts of reality.
Our culture makes it such that women are more likely to be on the receiving end. But it doesn't make the fact that both sexes in various backgrounds are victims.
How do we help people with emotional or health issues? We don't unless they can pay for it.
Oh, you mean wealth inequality may play into "Us vs Them?" mentalities?
Another example:
Everyone race, gender, and creed has been some victim of society in the past. Irish slaves, African slaves... I knew my great-grandfather on my dad's side; 100% Chippewa Indian with papers to prove it, family documents that went back 3 generations prior to HIM being born, not me.
When suddenly everyone has a historical claim, but society only recognizes the claims of a minority because it can be traced back along arbitrary legal lines (which include by todays standards some pretty horrific violence and theft)... well you have a ripe field for "us vs them" when it comes to which claim.
But since almost anyone can make a claim, and since the special elite we do "prefer" can't show except through cherry-picked historical examples, any reason they should be lifted higher than others. Or that they're divine...
Change all conversations to focus on the similarities.
> I think the answer is partially in your quote: emphasis the similarities.
> Change all conversations to focus on the similarities.
> (GP) I think this is going to be the next big challenge in social tech:
But so far social media is completely reliant on us-vs-them, in- vs out-group differentiation. It would seem that social media already changed dozens of societies across the globe to the worse in the matter of a just few years.
At this point it would probably be a huge success if "social media" were able to heal the massive damage it has caused so far.
One interesting thing I took away from the article - most of the scientific evidence cited by Professor Sapolsky is built on fMRI analysis of reactions to faces.
Given that most of our online interactions are completely text-based, what cues are we using to determine if someone is Us or Them? Do the same emotion-first impulses apply when our entire perception of another person's identity is based on the content of their written words?
I think this is like saying gasoline was a contributing factor to a house fire. Social media and its constant bombardment of drama, stress, and politics has done more to amplify divisions within our country than anything ever before seen in the world.
Why would I want to integrate them? They have some insanely hurtful views, which they stick to no matter the evidence, and society doesn't need them, they need fewer of them and more of us.
>In other words, our visceral, emotional views of Thems are shaped by subterranean forces we’d never suspect. And then our cognitions sprint to catch up with our affective selves, generating the minute factoid or plausible fabrication that explains why we hate Them. It’s a kind of confirmation bias: remembering supportive better than opposing evidence; testing things in ways that can support but not negate your hypothesis; skeptically probing outcomes you don’t like more than ones you do.
So this is the challenge, then, probably no different than most "human condition" type challenges - to what extent do we let our subconscious thoughts drive out conscious ones?
Without consideration, we are slaves to our unconscious thoughts and instincts. As philosophers and religious leaders have demonstrated for millennia, however, we can wrestle our quick shot subconscious into relative submissions with enough application of conscious thought. Say, mindfulness, meditation, consideration.
So the article alleges that as a white male my amygdala is gonna fire off an aggression response when I see a black male, microseconds before my conscious brain can grab the wheel and apply my hard-fought-for values (non racist ones). Is this just how it's gonna be for me, or can I subvert even that initial, lizard brain initial response to be in line with my value that all humans are equal?
Only if you believe Obiwan when he says it. The line is more or less pointing out the arrogance of the Jedi with Obiwan's hypocrisy. It comes up a few other places too, but like the rest of the prequels, messages aren't delivered very well.
These two phrases are actually almost equivalent. Both say "I divide people into two groups: bad people who divide people into bad and good people, and good people who don't."
komali2's point is that the phrase is self-referential: someone saying "only a sith deals in absolutes" implies that they're also a sith, even though presumably being a sith is a bad thing here.
It isn't self referential though. Lets diagram a little, as only a surface level of contemplation could arrive at that viewpoint.
Possible sets of people:
- sith
- non sith
Known attributes sith have:
- deals in absolutes
Presumption of the phrase being used is that the phrase itself is an absolute, thus meaning the person speaking has to be a sith even if they claim not to be a sith.
But that is flawed, as there are more than just those sets of individuals as we well know. There are non sith that also deal in absolutes, so thus the statement can't be taken at face value. Thus cannot be self referential.
But as with all of this, it also misses the mark by ignoring that describing a state doesn't necessarily mean your state has changed. Its also nonsensical in that if the only definition needed to be in the sith set is to deal in absolutes, the category is likely overbroad and meaningless.
Think about it, if we take the statement at face value, everyone is a sith, as everyone at some point will deal in absolutes. Even yoda uses do or do not, there is no try. So we arrive at the fundamental flaw in attributing a description of a thing or group, to the thing being described.
Unpopular opinion - Is this something that we should seek to overcome entirely? These judgement calls are hard-wired into us for a reason. Whilst there are scenarios in which it is bad, there are scenarios in which it is good.
"From massive barbarity to pinpricks of microaggression, Us versus Them has produced oceans of pain. Yet, I don’t think our goal should be to “cure” us of all Us/Them dichotomizing (separate of it being impossible, unless you have no amygdala).
I’m fairly solitary—I’ve spent a lot of my life living alone in a tent in Africa, studying another species. Yet some of my most exquisitely happy moments have come from feeling like an Us, feeling accepted, safe, and not alone, feeling part of something large and enveloping, with a sense of being on the right side and doing both well and good. There are even Us/Thems that I—eggheady, meek, and amorphously pacifistic—would kill or die for.
If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s challenging to always be on the side of angels. Distrust essentialism. Remember that supposed rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces we never suspect. Focus on shared goals. Practice perspective taking. Individuate, individuate, individuate. And recall how often, historically, the truly malignant Thems hid themselves while making third parties the fall guy.
Meanwhile, give the right-of-way to people driving cars with the “Mean people suck” bumper sticker, and remind everyone that we’re in this together against Lord Voldemort and House Slytherin."
There's a more practical question here. Perhaps it's possible that such biases could be totally overcome, i.e. requiring no conscious effort. But clearly we're not on the verge of doing so. So, if we accept that our society is going to be composed of Us-vs-Them tribalists for the time being... what implications does that have for social policy?
For example, our "rational brain" tells us that racism is bad, but our "lizard brain" is still going to fail the implicit bias test every time. We can consciously override that bias some of the time, but it's still there. Even if you believe that you can consistently override your bias, surely you don't expect that the average person could. So how can a society comprised of "average" people avoid being plagued by racial bias?
Our rational brain -- the part that tries to overcome bias -- is also the part that is responsible for designing our society. And the people designing society tend to be more rational than most. As a result, society is in direct conflict with our lizard brain. If you are not adept at suppressing your automatic responses, you are a bad citizen. For the most part, this is what we want; after all, your lizard brain generates a lot of unsavory impulses, like the desire to enact violence. But I think it's a mistake to disregard the lizard brain entirely. "Whatever your lizard brain says, do the opposite" is unlikely to result in a perfect society. We should continue to push the limits of what we can successfully repress, but we should also be willing to admit when repression has failed.
Thousands of years ago, we began to experiment with repressing our urges to murder, steal, commit adultery, etc. That experiment was largely successful. In modern times, we are launching new experiments, many of which concern implicit bias. We don't know yet whether we can suppress those impulses. And we don't seem to have very good criteria for deciding whether the experiment has succeeded or failed. That concerns me, because it likely means that things have to get really bad before the experiment can be deemed a failure.
> For example, our "rational brain" tells us that racism is bad, but our "lizard brain" is still going to fail the implicit bias test every time.
This is not true. People vary in how much they are biased about race. I normally think of myself as fairly free for innate racism (largely because my early schooling was very multicultural). When I took a light-dark skinned association test, I go a neutral result.
Though to be clear, I don't think I am free from such innate biases in general, but I am fairly unbiased from on race.
> Even if you believe that you can consistently override your bias, surely you don't expect that the average person could.
I don't expect people to completely override their biases, but I do expect that people could mostly eliminate bias for important decisions (hiring, court, etc).
First off, I really like your framework of "lizard brain"/"rational brain"
>We should continue to push the limits of what we can successfully repress, but we should also be willing to admit when repression has failed.
I think we are there already to some extent. This movement to try and repress implicit bias, and to hold people accountable for their implicit bias is a radical failure. Consider that since this movement got started in the West we have become more divided, and more militant about it. Micro-aggression, sexual harassment (becoming very broad and ill defined), and the general expectation that everyone be hyper-PC has riled up the lizard brains of many and even the rational brains of some. You could argue that this is an application of tribalism for good, but I think the problem is that it is too much too fast and is therefore a force of evil. Gay marriage just became legal. Now a certain population wants to normalize in-your-face transsexuals, a spectrum of genders, and social slights as criminal behavior amongst a slew of other wants; hard pushes like this radicalize people, and that's what we are seeing on the right at the moment.
This sexual harassment campaign is especially alienating for a lot of people specifically because sex requires you to disengage your rationale brain and give over to your animalistic desires. I'm not saying all of these men should get a pass, some of them appear to have committed truly heinous acts, but when things are said like "Even though my situation with Matt was consensual, I ultimately felt like a victim because of the power dynamic." [1] It is going to alienate a lot of people who would call that poor willpower. Like, Mr. Lauer is giving in to his lizard brain when he does this and cheats, but so is she when she accepts his offer.
Going back to the main point, I think that this in particular is driving a huge wedge between the sexes in America because it comes across as a double standard, and I think that in order to effectively utilize tribalism for the social good, it is critical to eliminate double standards.
We can overcome them without removing them, by extending "us" widely enough. This is how a number of religions handled it, leading to their expansion over large swaths of diverse nations.
Seeing most everyone on Earth as ingroup improves collaboration and thus propels culture / prosperity.
But what if there is a group whose strategy is to take advantage of the trusting nature of everyone else for its own gains? In that case it would be advantageous to unite against them. Universal cooperation and trust is great when there are no attackers but it needs to be hardened against attacks somehow.
Also, does universal collaboration necessarily bring the best results? Seems like there might be a number of people over which universal coordination becomes infeasible.
If you mean a culture war scenario, this was discussed briefly in the article - do you focus on the success of your Us, or on the relative success of your Us as compared to your Them?
I prefer the former, because it is a pure "improvement" mindset, whereas the latter allows for "success" via subjugation of other people while your Us stagnants.
>Ingroup favoritism raises a key question—at our core, do we want Us to do “well” by maximizing absolute levels of well being, or merely “better than,” by maximizing the gap between Us and Them?
Universal individualism and distrust is great when there are no attackers but it needs to be hardened against cooperative attacks somehow.
Also, does universal individualism necessarily bring the best results? Seems like there might be a number of people over which universal individualism becomes infeasible.
>Seeing most everyone on Earth as ingroup improves collaboration and thus propels culture / prosperity.
Not when this isn't a shared sentiment. Whites are resented, not praised, for their anti-identity politics and inclusiveness. Now we're called racist for trying to ignore race or judging people based on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin.
Also it's a pretty radical proposition to overcome nature regarding in-group preferences, since that has a genetic component.
The "you're my ingroup by default" approach works best when reciprocated. It still works tolerably well when not, as long as overt hostility is met with an adequate reaction.
Otherwise it still works with those who agree to collaborate, and ends up in a disappointment with those who don't. (Moral panic that can grow or not from such a disappointment is another issue.)
I can't think of any examples in which it is good.
I also think that is a mischaracterization of the problem, and of the solution.
Our instinct is to trust those in our communities, and distrust those outside our communities.
While that was useful in the past, two significant things have changed:
1. We are in a civilized society where it is to our advantage to begin relationships with trust rather than distrust.
2. We are not in separate communities fighting over basic resources, but in a large community where smaller parts work together.
These changes mean that the problem stems from us not trusting each other, and fragmenting the larger community.
The solution is for us to realize our limitations, and overcome them, by trusting those with whom we are unfamiliar, and working together as a larger community.
Both are effectively stable equilibria, so it's hard to upgrade trust across a society. And where it's possible to profit from breach of trust it becomes profitable for a few to turn a society from high-trust into low-trust, which I suspect is happening at the moment in the West.
I’ve come to the exact opposite conclusion. We live in a world driven by marketing/advertising, hyper politicalization of all things, dark user patterns, spy-ware, government agendas...
Entering any relationship with a default of distrust and allowing trust to be earned seems very prudent in 2017 (and probably any other time period).
I think we can differentiate between trusting people's words and trusting individuals themselves.
The distinction is that people who disagree with us are not out to do us harm.
We can disagree and work together.
Trust is a nuanced subject, which is the very fact the "Us vs. Them" attitude ignores. If we clump everyone who disagrees with "us" into one group, we turn a prudent critical attitude into blatant distrust.
It is important for us to be critical of ideas, but not of people.
Interesting. Again, I have the polar opposite position. I can trust an idea because I can evaluate it on its own merit. I can’t trust a person because they’re inherently driven by emotion instead of logic. I may trust someone in some capacity but not another. For instance I might trust someone to feed my dog but not invest my money.
I also see the problem with “us vs them” with the “us” side of the equation. I’m a unique individual who’s thoughts, wants and needs don’t overlap with any group. To me everyone else is a “them” until I build a personal relationship with them.
> I also see the problem with “us vs them” with the “us” side of the equation.
As someone who is often mischaracterized in a "them" category, I have the same frustrations.
For example, my dad, rather often, dismisses real conversation as me being a "liberal", a group which he refuses (possibly cannot) define. Rather than tackle the ideas themselves, he chooses to dismiss them, and, whether he recognizes this fact, uses "Us vs. Them" as a personal excuse.
Because this is an instinct, we are all susceptible. I certainly do not want to blindly consolidate individuals into an undefined group, and dismiss their ideas. I would much rather trust a person's ability to have honest perspective that is different from mine, and learn from that perspective.
At a certain point, other people's ideas just don't matter that much.
For someone who has years of expertise, or who has spent decades fine-tuning his or her worldview based on real evidence and life experience... what need to they have of uninformed opinions or debate.
At some point, it only slows you down.
All that matters is what you can or can't achieve, and that comes down more to persuasion.
I can't think of any examples in which it is good.
Bad actors exist in the world and can and do team up. If you adhere to the view that Nobody Is Truly Bad that's nice but you won't be able to defend yourself or anyone else when attacked and thus raise the incentives for non-cooperators.There's a reason your body has an immune system.
> If you adhere to the view that Nobody Is Truly Bad
I do.
It is their actions and ideas that are bad.
Even if you do not agree with me, I think it is important to show others trust until you have a real reason not to.
What the "Us vs. Them" attitude does is ignore the potential for people in the "Them" group to have anything of value to the "Us" group, or the potential for both groups to work together.
OK, but I'm talking about those cases where people have already provided reasons not to trust them. And I don't mean people who are affiliated with their group by default, such as people who happen to have been born in North Korea and whose opposition to the United States is thus an inherited position, but people who choose to affiliate with other actors.
Put another way, sure, people are products of their circumstances to some extent, but they do also have agency, and insofar as they choose to be aggressive I consider them 'bad people' until they abandon such choices.
> OK, but I'm talking about those cases where people have already provided reasons not to trust them.
That's perfectly reasonable.
I was still focused on the "Us vs. Them" attitude, which doesn't apply here.
If you haven't met or interacted with someone, but you choose to categorize that person in the "Them" group, that is unreasonable.
It can be tricky when individuals seem to put themselves in your "Them" group. When that happens, it's probably a good idea to stop, and take care to define what "Them" entails, and how that individual fits there. If you don't, that person may be unjustly labeled by you, and you by them.
When we label each other, and create meta-groups to dislike, that creates a divide that isn't helpful for either side, because each side is mischaracterized, and all nuance is ignored.
> until they abandon such choices
My advice is to be careful not to judge others solely by the things you dislike about them. The details you focus on are not the entirety of their character.
If someone only finds friendship in a group that promotes ideas that you are opposed to, that person is likely to promote those ideas. If you befriend that person, you can begin on common ground, and work together toward ideas that you agree to be worthwhile. That person will thereby have less focus on the idea you don't like.
None of us is perfect, and we can certainly all find faults in one another. If we all reject others for the faults we find in them, we will all be rejected.
I've always been aware I have these subconscious biases. At a fundamental level, I think we are all racist and sexist.
But the special thing about being human is that we have higher level thought. When I see a black person at a party, I acknowledge my bias and remind myself that there is every chance this person would be interesting to get to know.
But not everyone does this, and many people "go on their gut". And ironically, this is one of the most significant us/them divisions; between head-rules-heart and heart-rules-head.
Yet there are differences between people, and between groups of people. Different cultures have different values, and social pressures push those values onto those around them. It's important to recognize those differences.
For example, I recognize that Nazis are people too, but that doesn't mean that I want to support them in our society.
If we can determine that Nazis are bad due to their toxic culture, then that shows that certain cultures are bad. Where do we draw the line? How do we determine what cultures are good and what aren't?
Feel this is very appropriate after the net neutrality thread. Top comment was a very blatent red-vs-blue characterisation, which of course is not the right mentality.
If we want to build a better world, we need to work together instead of target eachother.
>Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we've got to stay together. We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery.
The decision was made out of greed. And for a person who is not greedy it is a clear us v them. I don't understand how can we put pro-greed and anti-greed into the same 'us' basket.
I'm just beginning my recovery from whatever makes "us vs. them" turn into "everyone vs. me" at a young age, I guess.
I'm pretty sure this way of thinking isn't being instilled systematically from the top down, but it is happening at a very large scale. What's creating this "us vs. them" which kids often interpret as "everyone vs. me," is that there are so many easy ways out of feeling pain (and thus, ways out of learning how to live as a basic human) that we're in the process of forgetting how to deal with our emotions. We opt for solitary escape early on, because that's how our parents dealt with their issues too (their parents likely believed in pulling up bootstraps, or something). And then we/they continue to opt for escape via any sensory experience available in consumer capitalist society, most recently in socially acceptable life-escape games like Facebook and Twitter. We know it's not an authentic social feed, that it's actually designed to be a game you play with yourself where your social circle makes up the characters. What happens if that real-life game turns against you though, or if your mind simply starts to think they're turning against you? Mass shootings[1], terrorism[2], and Trump[3], I think.
If the horrors of modern American childhood don't happen at home, by the hand of adults who also sought solace from their fears in similar ways, these horrors usually happen in school, where they spend the rest of their time. From fellow classmates who figure out that bullies get their way, and clever bullies get their way even more. Us vs. them happens very early on, and when kids seek out solo escape via phones, games, whatever, well that's the beginning of a neverending search via consumer society for some answer that can allow them to live with the thoughts in their head.
A sidenote on one thing brought up in the article, it's worth noting that the implicit association test (IAT) is of highly dubious utility, despite common use. While it measures something (as does any test), there are very serious questions about what it actually measures, how reliably it measures it, whether what it measures actually correlates with real world bias, etc. There are very good reasons to think that, however clever the test may sound, and however real implicit bias is (its existence is almost indisputable), the test doesn't accurately measure it.
We, the people with ADHD are always annoyed by them, people writing 25-page-long articles and we are also very jealous of others capability to read them :-)
Really? I could never find it. Perhaps you've got an extension of a sort installed. Nice idea anyway, I'll give it a try, thanks! I doubt it sounds great but maybe the things have actually improved since the last time I've tried a text-to-speech tool.
The article mentions studies done with fMRI on people recognizing "Us" vs. "Them".
Anyone know of similar studies done on neuro-atypical people? I'm particularly interested about studies for people on the autism spectrum and people with anti-social personality disorder.
This is also my meta-answer for those who think that even today the us/them mechanism has no value. I've read some accounts of trying to raise children with Williams Syndrome. Truly defaulting to 100% trust is pathologically dangerous even in the safest places you can imagine in the US. People who are imagining that they are open and trusting still don't realize how much they are defending themselves, until they compare themselves to someone who seems to truly lack those mechanisms.
Which doesn't invalidate the idea that we may need less us/them than we currently have, but that doesn't prove or even provide a lot of evidence for the idea that the correct amount is zero.
(Long before the singularity arrives to wipe us all out, we face a greater danger from someone managing to successfully socially engineer the population, and in their infinite wisdom, doing something very, very stupid, such as setting our outgroup trust to 100% all the time, with no way to modify it based on experience, and rendering the entire population trivially exploitable by the first parasite that comes along or something.)
They reference the implicit bias tests that have now been widely debunked (to the best of my knowledge). This makes me question the other psychology studies they cite as well. The whole psych field is notorious for unreproducibility. How seriously should we take an article that relies on such studies as the basis of its thesis?
Us vs Them happens when there is competition. Competition happens when there is demand for limited valuable resources and not all that demand can be satisfied.
We bring the people of the world and the people within our nations closer together by eliminating absolute poverty.
Eliminating inequality is neither necessary nor even desirable, but the floor of our economies must be such that those sitting upon it enjoy a certain minimum acceptable level of comfort.
>>Eliminating inequality is neither necessary nor even desirable, but the floor of our economies must be such that those sitting upon it enjoy a certain minimum acceptable level of comfort.
Behavioral economic research shows this isn't how humans think, particularly Americans. They are naturally competitive regardless of their base level of comfort and "fairness" is inherently very important to them. If one would get 1 unit of free utility and another person gets 5 units of free utility, but the person who gets 1 unit has unilateral control over whether or not anyone gets anything, a startlingly high percentage of people in the 1 unit group will completely axe the deal entirely despite being better off.
Just a small caveat that the amount of wealth inequality does matter as well. Less so than having a livable floor, but nonetheless. Anyone who watched outraged as Ajit Pai reverted NN yesterday should understand why implicitly.
There's still competition among the wealthy for limited resources. There will always be limited resources (for example a promotion, a love interest, dominant market share, a political position, etc).
Its too late, tech is growing more divided in hiring and its customer base.
Now that google and other tech startups make blacklists of "them" that they want to block promotions and ban from working with people and groups, it seems us vs them is well embraced by the tech community.
And left-leaning google/facebook/youtube/twitter using alt-right as a banner to ban conservatives, then using "Truth masters" like snopes/politifact to confirm a viewpoint as the only truth, then SPLC/RightWingWatch to confirm anyone not spouting the common truth must be outcasts, and all followers of them are also "them". Easier for patreon/kickstarter and other crowdfunding to avoid supporting "them".
Then when programmers are on a list, or a project doesn't support the diversity license, you get banned from github, hackathons or talks.
Tech is sick with "us" vs "them" mentality and its spreading.
> left-leaning google/facebook/youtube/twitter using alt-right as a banner to ban conservatives
What? Citation needed. I haven't heard of any conservatives getting banned from these services due to their political affiliation.
> Then when programmers are on a list, or a project doesn't support the diversity license, you get banned from github, hackathons or talks.
Again, what? Has this happened? I've never heard of this, and this seems like fairly extreme hyperbole.
What is your argument here? Tech companies are against conservative americans? If reading HN has taught me anything, the tech scene is full of conservatives and libertarians.
James Damore was fired from Google for posting his opinion to a mailing list about the topic in question.
Brendan Eich was forced out of Mozilla for voting the “wrong” way years earlier.
Look into “opal-gate” or “dongle-gate”.
Look into Strange Loop banning speakers.
The threat of being fired or hurt professionally for not being left leaning is very real.
EDIT:
My comment providing the requested citations is now being aggressively downvoted. Just further proof that it’s most definitely not ok to question the left in this industry. I simply listed incidents that have happened.
Even on YC. For a long while, you couldn't adopt any sort of conservative stance without a moderator (who is a self-admitted socialist on his startup bio) potentially banning you for being "inflammatory."
Unless I'm missing something that's not true at all. Who are you talking about?
We ban accounts when they break the site rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We don't ban people for ideological reasons. That has the ironic effect of leading most partisans to see us as secretly aligned with the opposite ideology, but what can you do.
I had an account before this one that was shadowbanned one day with no notification at all.
I hadn't broken any stated rules. I had posted some points about IQ, which would be considered offensive or "harmful" from the leftist viewpoints that dominate the San Francisco tech overculture.
Probably this rule was the excuse: "We ban accounts that use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle, regardless of which politics they favor."
However, it seems very unlikely that this rule is enforced in an even-handed manner.
Thankfully, I haven't had this account banned yet, which is nice at least. But it does happen.
When people post comments like this they never supply links. Usually this is because what actually happened doesn't fit their narrative. What actually happened is almost always that they violated the site guidelines in a way that is plain to the majority of the audience here.
Certainly I made points that are culture war relevant a few times, but I think that account is clearly still within the rules. Certainly no rules were blatantly broken. I am human, but I've always engaged in good faith.
A warning, at least, would've been appropriate. But, it just got flat silent shadowbanned after a decent history of participation. I'd still love to know why.
Side note: "the majority of the audience agrees it's rule-breaking" should not be the standard you apply to determine what's rule-breaking. That's just a recipe for ideological uniformity; an obvious slippery slope into the space being being under the exclusive power of one tribe or another. A healthy discussion space needs moderators who will take unpopular positions and stick to the rules as written, in an even-handed way.
> Again, what? Has this happened? I've never heard of this, and this seems like fairly extreme hyperbole.
There is this tweet from the npm CEO, which I subjectively find quite disgusting. Not that it affects me, but I care about javascript and node, not the identity or background of the speaker. I would even listen to Pol Pot if he gave a good talk on these subjects. https://twitter.com/izs/status/911105515798720513
Then there was this incident - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868. The link of the submission is no longer relevant, but the first comment is consistent with how I also feel about the subject. It covers what happened as well.
> What is your argument here? Tech companies are against conservative americans? If reading HN has taught me anything, the tech scene is full of conservatives and libertarians.
That does not counter the points made. They exist, but they are censored, so it is not in anyone's interest in terms of job security or career advancement, to express their conservative views. Diversity and multiculturalism is essentially the equivalent of halal or kosher now. If it isn't there, seemingly nothing can be done. In general, conservatives these days don't subscribe to these ideas of classification on the basis of various identity properties, but if you do not think this way, there seems to be no place for you. James Damore is a good example of this as well. You are apparently not allowed to think differently, which is sort of ironic, coming from the birthplace of Apple.
Would you believe that if I cherry picked a few examples of left-leaning people being censored or harassed out of their company that there exists large, right-leaning groups and companies whose sole purpose is to censor people even slightly left of center?
For example, there are a fair amount of liberal channels being demonetized on youtube as well.
You are free to make that case if you believe it has merit. I can reinforce mine with plenty of examples and lots of other evidence. I am for freedom of speech in principle. Nobody should be censored for discussing a political opinion.
> You are apparently not allowed to think differently, which is sort of ironic, coming from the birthplace of Apple.
I hate to be "that guy", talking about the "normies" invading his favorite community, but I feel like this is essentially what happened in tech. The shear value of the industry has mandated the involvement of more conventional groups. It's no longer a space of cold logical computer nerds, emotion and ideology has crept in.
My main point is, I don't think that the innovators, or the "different thinking" is gone at all, it's just been overwhelmed by the cookie cutter college intellectuals we churn out these days. I mean lets face it a College education isn't what it used to be...
I'm not trying to say that computer nerds are somehow smarter than other people, or that College grads today are idiots. My College GPA alone would suggest I'm the idiot. I'm more talking about the death of cold logic, doing whats effective, and living ones own life, which seemed to be the mantra of the old school libertarian "big thinkers".
And yes, I do hate myself for using the term "normies". I'm washing my keyboard with bleach as we speak.
> If reading HN has taught me anything, the tech scene is full of conservatives and libertarians.
In my experience, libertarians yes, conservatives not so much. Also, libertarians have to tread extremely carefully in tech. The true libertarian perspective doesn't fit with the new left at all, and can be easily misinterpreted as supporting racism/harassment etc... Try making a joke about dongles with a friend at a conference (totally fine from the libertarian perspective), and watch the dominate ideology of the left in tech crush you...
Wasn't an argument, but I seem to have ruffled your feathers with my statement. I can tell you are a tad upset by your tone and inflammatory argumentive leaning questions.
Instead of countering my statement, you implied since you never heard of such things happening, it doesn't happen. This is the same argument the left uses for whites not knowing about police violence on minorities. Which is true, minorities are pulled over more by police and have a different viewpoint, just because I/we don't see/know about it, doesn't mean people need to be called out as liars.
This is exactly the "us" vs. "them" in action. Since it doesn't fit your view, its a "them" Argument.
But to answer you for some examples, not sure if you really asked in good faith, but here are some.
Check out Google engineer ousted, James Damore a liberal engineer spoke out about diversity and now is classified as alt-right hero. I would clearly say hes no alt-right or even conservative, but he is now "Them".
Now I won't say google these topics, because google will return from the anti-right viewpoints. Example, If you tried to google gamergate you would think gamers hate women. Try reading /r/KotakuInAction/ over on reddit for these types of stories, they happen all the time. The sub is very middle of the road and will call both sides bullshit out. Which is refreshing.
The "US" vs. "Them" has invaded all my hobbies, news, and entertainment. And I'm sure I'm not the only tech person around who feels the same. Facebook alone has turned to shit.
> Perhaps in your case, a little introspection will reveal an "us" vs "them" attitude which you already hold.
Sure, it's self referential to an extent, but it's literally impossible to criticize someones behavior without defining two categories. The point as I see it is, a large minority of libertarians/conservatives in tech are arguing for "live and let live", but the dominate left won't give up forcing their ideology on the industry.
"Live and let live" at it's core tries to eliminate the "us vs them" mentality, but there is still always a "them". In this case it's the people who don't "live and let live"...
Edit:
Self referential seems wrong... I think I meant it's a paradox? Even in acknowledging the category "us vs them believer" as existing, makes you an "us vs them" practitioner.
This is where countries with some sort of mandatory service may have us beat. And maybe it explains why American policy was so focused after the big national wars. I don't think there's a better way to force camaraderie. But then it becomes Us vs Them on the other side of the border.
I am very in favor of mandatory service as a strategy to improve nations but I do want to point out that some of the most impressive ones (South Korea and Israel come to mind) are extremely homogenous.
- Enemy nations will be somewhat less motivated to invade if they know they will be facing a population that is entirely armed and ready to resist.
- Putting the population into the service of the country helps build a sense of national cohesion by giving a shared sense of mission and duty.
- Training the citizens to fight could also be a tool to help prevent dictatorships where the military persecutes the people; a military of citizen-soldiers would be less likely to see their own people as a "them" and more as an "us."
I work with some people in Armenia (which has mandatory conscription) - and from what I've observed that military service made the Us v. Them between Armenians and Azerbaijani stronger than perhaps it would have been without said military service (a drunken encounter between one of said Armenians and an Azerbaijani person outside of Armenia literally came to blows for no real reason I could observe except Us v. Them (well, and alcohol)).
Oh, that is fascinating! I had never heard of anything like that, and that actually sounds like a wonderful idea. Especially for areas where there are underserved regions (rural areas that might not have a high enough population to support a fire department or police or something like that) that could be supported by conscripted people. And unlike with military training, the training would leave participants both with a willingness to help their neighbors and skills to do so. I'm going to have to read up more about nations which do mandatory civil service rather than just military.
>This is where countries with some sort of mandatory service may have us beat.
I doubt it. Turkey has it yet there are plenty of problems between religious people and secular people, as well as between Kurds and other Turks.
The book Influence by Cialdini dives deep into some of the elements needed. Some takeaways that I remember:
Forcing people to be together in unpleasant circumstances, without a common goal they can work towards, does not reduce the us vs them mindset. His example was school, but anything "mandatory" would qualify.
If people are forced to be together, and they work together voluntarily to solve a problem (e.g. by one side needing the other side's skills), then you have reduced polarization.
I disagree - at a gym, the experience is completely voluntary and the group is self-selecting. You may be bonding, but with people already like you.
The key with military is being forced to do something you hate alongside complete strangers with little opportunity to socialize outside of the group, under threat of court martial for leaving. And the group of strangers may change at any time. You really have to learn to get along, or work people you don't respect or hate.
Everybody is like you in some way or other but in a BJJ gym, for example, you will be forced to engage with people of different genders, ages, political affiliations, religious beliefs, intensity, IQ, toughness, education. I do not discount the diversity of the military - if service is mandatory - but in civilian life a BJJ gym might be the most practical analogue.
>But then it becomes Us vs Them on the other side of the border.
Yeah, maybe that's better on the other side than inside though. Like if President Trump started a huge "Beat China" campaign all about making sure America stays the world hegemon, that could bring a lot of neighbors together even if it widens the gulf between me and someone on the other side of the world. It's hard to say.
I think this phenomenon is the fundamental problem of any two-party system and is one of the issues in American politics. The "us vs them" feeling is a lot less strong when there are multiple parties. This feeling leads to more divisiveness in politics and eventually trickles down to the whole population.
No, the biggest thing we're missing in the fight against 2-party system is an actual representative voting scheme.
A first-past-the-post [1] voting scheme will always result in 2 parties (assuming it doesn't collapse into a single-party autocracy) due to the spoiler [2] 3rd party vote problem.
It's not psychology but basic probability math and game theory.
Why is not fixed? Because this is the cheapest way for the moneyed elite to both a) wield power, and b) prevent that power from getting concentrated (which could result in a powerful dictator who doesn't listen to them).
Although I agree with you that the plurality voting system (aka FPTP) is a big problem, I think your theory of why it isn't changed is silly and overlooks the very real difficulties.
One of those difficulties is that there isn't a clear winner among the alternatives. Approval voting, the STV(/IRV), and the Borda Count all have adherents, who disparage the other two.
Worse, none of them is perfect. For example, STV and BC are both susceptible to strategic voting. I recall reading about some municipality that decided to try STV. IIRC, in the very next election they had two competent but extreme candidates at opposite ends of the political spectrum, and a centrist generally regarded as less competent (and who got a much smaller number of first-place votes than either of the others). The electorate was so evenly divided that the centrist won; the voters were so upset with this outcome that they ditched the STV and went back to PV (plurality). Evidently they would have been happier with one of the two extremists, even though that would have been the "wrong" choice for almost half of them.
We could object that none of the three candidates was obviously a great choice, and that if voters really preferred their opposite-extreme candidate over the centrist, they should have voted that way. But it's easy to see why they didn't. We could also object that AV would have given a better result in this case, picking whichever extreme candidate got the most votes and ignoring a widely-disliked centrist. But STV tends to be an easier sell, perhaps because it maintains the notion of "one person, one vote". And finally, we could object that they were too quick to pull the plug and should have given STV another chance, having learned a lesson about the importance of finding competent centrist candidates.
But their conclusion was, they tried an alternative system and it didn't work.
I tend to favor AV personally, as it's relatively resistant to pathological outcomes, but have to admit that it has another problem: it's the least tamper-resistant. With PV and STV, the total number of votes counted shouldn't be greater than the number of voters. AV has a much looser and less useful bound: the total number of votes shouldn't be greater than the product of the number of voters and the number of candidates. That leaves a lot more room for manipulation. In a world where our voting systems are already not as trustworthy as they should be, this is a problem.
Range voting and approval voting are closely related; approval voting is just the limiting case of range voting where there are only two values on the scale.
My take is that range voting is useful when you have a relatively small number of voters, but once that number gets into the thousands, its advantages over AV fade. Instead of one voter rating one candidate a 7, say, instead what you have is 100 voters of whom 70 vote yes on the candidate and 30 vote no. Once you have enough voters that that effect is statistically reliable, there's no further need for the added complexity of allowing more scale values.
And as you add scale values, tampering gets even easier. How would we notice it if someone went in and changed a bunch of people's 6 votes to 7s?
What I was unclear about is that our best method for fighting the current system is to convince a significant portion of the electorate to vote for a third party candidate.
Because we all know the system is against us, we are afraid to work together to circumvent it.
We can't replace the system until we use our votes to do so.
A third party is always a spoiler in the current electoral system. We can only fix the problem by using the current system or exploiting it to apply the agenda.
We need main 2-party candidates like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders (who understood that running as an Independent is mathematically impossible in any meaningful election so switched their party affiliations).
> “It's not psychology but basic probability math and game theory.”
while it’s true that a system set up that way with the given behavioral preconditions likely devolves into those stable solutions, you have the causality backwards. the math is descriptive of a behavioral phenomena, rather than prescribing the outcomes. human behavior seems fixed but it’s highly adaptive. just when you think you’ve figured it out, the system changes on you.
I think Us-Them is much larger than two-party. When you look at countries with multiple parties it doesn't seem their political systems are wildly more efficient.
I think US vs THEM is incomparably bigger than the question of politics. Would 9/11, Vietnam, Iraq, hollocaust, or most wars for that matter have been possible without Us vs them? What about most corruption? What about class systems?
Wow, liberal fascism distilled, pretty much a call to arms for the destruction of individual cultures and global imposition of wrongthink. South Park's Death Camp of Tolerance comes to mind. I await the introduction of the reeducation gulags.
Edit: I'm just amazed that people cannot see this guy is blantantly arguing for the exact thing he claims to despise:
'Meanwhile, give the right-of-way to people driving cars with the “Mean people suck” bumper sticker, and remind everyone that we’re in this together against Lord Voldemort and House Slytherin.'
He goes on at length about why us and them is bad and then LITERALLY ARGUES FOR an us and them attitude :|
Since we've asked you repeatedly not to take HN threads into ideological flamewar, and you're still doing it, I've banned this account. We also ban accounts that use HN primarily for political battle, which you have. Given that your profile references "things geospatial" and not "liberal fascism" I'm sorta sad about that, but a fireman must do his job.
Sapolsky is just arguing for us to understand each other a little bit more, recognize unconscious biases, and move towards judging one another on individual merits rather than groupthink. These are basic free-society, founding fathers kind of ideals. I think you're projecting modern (maybe justified) worries onto these old and common ideals.
> and then LITERALLY ARGUES FOR an us and them attitude :|
I'll argue that he doesn't refute his own point by closing with a claim that we're all the US against a THEM of eternal evil embodied. It's like the non-overtoned version of saying "it's all of humanity vs satan".
To say bluntly -- Sapolsky was not arguing for us to strive towards including the principalities of timeless spiritual evil in the _us_ group.
OK, but look at the context - out of nowhere we have obvious diversity at all costs propaganda. I'm watching the BBC's Christmas trailer now which involves a brown skinned single father and his daughter. This in no way represents the average in the UK in fact the UK is almost 90% white - so what message is the BBC trying to send? Am I one of the bad guys to recognise the colour of the skin? Because you can bet that whoever came up with the idea certainly had race at the front of their minds. Is the UK really so racist that we deserve to be subjected to this type of manipulation? Is it beyond the realms of possibility that the people behind this agitprop are in fact the very same nefarious forces you mention?
>This in no way represents the average in the UK in fact the UK is almost 90% white - so what message is the BBC trying to send?
"Hey brown people. You're not being completely ignored by our society. When we have to make decisions based on arbitrary characteristics like race, we prefer to occasional choose people you might be able to relate to on the bases of colour, rather than trying to appeal to some obviously incorrect notion that we should only relate to 'the average UK citizen' (which doesn't exist)."
Or maybe those actors just worked best? Or maybe they drew straws. Either way, there's no reason to believe that the skin colour of the actors on your screen is some kind of manipulation/propaganda against you. That's an irrational leap.
>Am I one of the bad guys to recognise the colour of the skin?
No. You're one of the bad guys for failing to recognize that the colour of the skin is an arbitrary choice and thus not relevant. The only thing about a person you should consider relevant is their ability to make good decisions.
The BBC will not occupy any moral high ground by using only white actors. (Which is what you're saying they should do, on account of some frankly stupid appeal to 'averages.' The 'average' UK citizen is riddled with disease and missing most of their limbs. So maybe don't try to tacitly substitute 'average' for 'ideal/typical/most common'. And why does the BBC has any obligation to represent any of these anyway?)
Maybe that's a harsh-seeming way of putting it, but that's the logical alternative you imply by using crappy metrics.
His "Biology of Human Behavior" Stanford lecture course in about 25 parts is on youtube. It's absolutely amazing; he's a great lecturer, articulate, funny, fascinating, a great storyteller about remarkable experiments and legendary scientists. It starts with evolutionary biology/sociobiology and goes down via a dozen levels of explanation ('buckets' he calls them) to brains and genes and how they work, in quite a lot of detail. I couldn't recommend it any more highly. p.s. My girlfriend (very non-sciency) loved it too.