Yeah, I totally left that part out. I don’t remember the specific situation, but it had to do with starting from a base assumption of factors like institutional inadequacy meaning I expect lots of seriously suboptimal decisions that lead to bad results that no one wanted, and public figures often being incompetent at their supposed jobs because they’re picked by selection criteria force them to optimize for something way different from the supposed job requirements, and everyone just constantly talking past each other without even trying to really understand the other side (either due to ignorance, lack of interest, or various forms of group identity signaling).
For context, on an individual level, she’s vastly better than me at intuiting what other people are thinking and how they’re likely to act. And she does understand the social psychology of groups of people very well. She just doesn’t instinctively consider politics in terms of the dynamics and evolution of systems.
Also note: after years of grappling with ideas like that, I’ve gotten much closer to not always being depressed by this kind of thing, or seeing it as an inescapable trap (and trying, whenever possible, to focus on the side of “Wow, look what we managed to accomplish anyway!”). But it definitely had that effect on me for a long time.
I’m not quite sure that the “this” is in that sentence. You think about politics all the time how?
Yeah, I totally left that part out. I don’t remember the specific situation, but it had to do with starting from a base assumption of factors like institutional inadequacy meaning I expect lots of seriously suboptimal decisions that lead to bad results that no one wanted, and public figures often being incompetent at their supposed jobs because they’re picked by selection criteria force them to optimize for something way different from the supposed job requirements, and everyone just constantly talking past each other without even trying to really understand the other side (either due to ignorance, lack of interest, or various forms of group identity signaling).
For context, on an individual level, she’s vastly better than me at intuiting what other people are thinking and how they’re likely to act. And she does understand the social psychology of groups of people very well. She just doesn’t instinctively consider politics in terms of the dynamics and evolution of systems.
Also note: after years of grappling with ideas like that, I’ve gotten much closer to not always being depressed by this kind of thing, or seeing it as an inescapable trap (and trying, whenever possible, to focus on the side of “Wow, look what we managed to accomplish anyway!”). But it definitely had that effect on me for a long time.