Sure, I have seen people say that, and usually it’s strong evidence that what is going is tribal politics, not someone having any real model of morality that indicates someone is likely to be bad ally, or of low integrity, or beliefs things that are important and you have actually strong justified belief in that they are wrong.
Maybe you disagree? Again, I would be fine just going into the object level.
No I basically agree that such people are doing silly tribal partisanship and in some sense “not actually thinking about it”. I’m not sure if our disagreement is semantics or theory of mind, but I think that whatever pejoratives we throw at that kind of cognition, it still outputs real conclusions that people really believe.
“This person’s politics mark them as morally unqualified to work in this career” is an argument people sometimes make, and whatever is going on in their heads seems closer to sincere belief than “I am playing a Machiavellian power game in which I say whatever it takes to secure political advantage by getting this guy fired”.
Cool, yeah, then I think we are just arguing semantics. I was intending to include that in this second sentence:
Or if so, I would strongly suspect the perceived reprehensibility of it would be downstream of a rationalization, not actually thinking about it.
I think people’s rationalization can result in things pretty reasonably described as “sincere belief” so I don’t disagree. I just also think it reflects badly on you if you end up doing that. Hence my belief “I don’t really see a strong case for his views on these things being morally reprehensible in any substantial magnitude”.
Without going into the object level, per your own number, “the 35% most extreme members of the ideological camp you disagree with are being outright reprehensible” doesn’t seem like an insane thing to believe at all?
I don’t think that’s insane! But I think at a policy level refusing to coordinate/work with 70%-ish of the population (if you are being symmetric about it) is probably a pretty bad mistake? At least for this kind of stuff.
Like, seems like this would be an orthogonal dimension from competence, intelligence, integrity and other things you also want to select on, so seems like you would be very heavily constraining the set of people you would want to collaborate with. Which I mean you can do, there are a lot of people, but does seem like it would be super costly, and in some sense non-viable (like, it’s hard to maintain any kind of cooperative stance towards the world if you consider the majority, or close to the majority of people to have opinions so reprehensible you need to actively distance yourself from them).
I appreciate your sincere and principled engagement, but I also want to note that there’s something oddly mistake-theory-ish about a bunch of your comments. I first noticed it with the “reprehensible” comment, where it seemed like you were assuming a bunch of common knowledge that didn’t actually exist—like you were using terminology that doesn’t make sense to use when talking to an audience that would downvote that comment to −61.
And now here, where you say “seems like this would be an orthogonal dimension from competence, intelligence, integrity and other things you also want to select on” as if that’s something other people will nod along to, whereas it seems more likely that most people who read this will think “no it’s not, my political enemies are actually just low-integrity and incompetent and dumb”.
It seems like there’s something important about the dynamics of leftists and liberals that you’re not modeling right now. It’s a bit analogous to a thread I had with Kelsey where I called her out for continually using the phrase “I don’t understand why” because it seemed obvious that she was doing motivated cognition to block out her actual hypotheses. My best guess is that you’re trying to maintain some attitude of “we’re all reasonable people here” which is in fact no longer true about LessWrong with respect to modern politics (and also that updating on this would gradually lead you to a strategy much more similar to mine than your current strategy is).
(Flagging that this is a somewhat low-effort comment because I’m feeling a bit lazy right now, so please don’t take it as me expressing strong/robust opinions about your internal state.)
? Where are you getting the 70% number from? If we’re ‘being symmetric around it’ then the 35% most extreme of both ideological camps cannot combine to be more than 35% of the general population. Obviously?
Ah, sorry, that was me being unclear/being bad at writing. I intended to communicate “he seems to have opinions milder than what like 35% of Americans (e.g. most on the conservative right) believe”.
Your read of my sentence is definitely more natural though, so this was definitely me failing to communicate, sorry for the confusion!
Oliver meant the (35% of Americans) [who are] on the conservative right, presumably referring to President Trump’s approval ratings, not 35% of (Americans on the conservative right).
Without going into the object level, per your own number, “the 35% most extreme members of the ideological camp you disagree with are being outright reprehensible” doesn’t seem like an insane thing to believe at all?
If we assume the camps (left/right) are split 50⁄50, then it would follow that 35% (35% of 50%, the 17.5% most left-wing plus most right-wing fraction) of the population “are being outright reprehensible”, i.e. more than a third of the entire population. That seems to be a rather extreme view.
For example, most academics and journalists are far more left-wing than the general population, so most of them would fall into the 17.5% (35% of 50%) of the most left-wing fraction of the population. Therefore, most academics would be “outright reprehensible” according to your view.
Most academics and journalists are Democrats, but “most of them would fall into the 17.5%” doesn’t follow. I’m not particularly interested enough in this tangent to dive in the FEC data myself, but per the articles Claude found about it, academics and journalists disproportionately did not donate to Sanders among the presidential primary candidates.
Sure, I have seen people say that, and usually it’s strong evidence that what is going is tribal politics, not someone having any real model of morality that indicates someone is likely to be bad ally, or of low integrity, or beliefs things that are important and you have actually strong justified belief in that they are wrong.
Maybe you disagree? Again, I would be fine just going into the object level.
No I basically agree that such people are doing silly tribal partisanship and in some sense “not actually thinking about it”. I’m not sure if our disagreement is semantics or theory of mind, but I think that whatever pejoratives we throw at that kind of cognition, it still outputs real conclusions that people really believe.
“This person’s politics mark them as morally unqualified to work in this career” is an argument people sometimes make, and whatever is going on in their heads seems closer to sincere belief than “I am playing a Machiavellian power game in which I say whatever it takes to secure political advantage by getting this guy fired”.
Cool, yeah, then I think we are just arguing semantics. I was intending to include that in this second sentence:
I think people’s rationalization can result in things pretty reasonably described as “sincere belief” so I don’t disagree. I just also think it reflects badly on you if you end up doing that. Hence my belief “I don’t really see a strong case for his views on these things being morally reprehensible in any substantial magnitude”.
Without going into the object level, per your own number, “the 35% most extreme members of the ideological camp you disagree with are being outright reprehensible” doesn’t seem like an insane thing to believe at all?
I don’t think that’s insane! But I think at a policy level refusing to coordinate/work with 70%-ish of the population (if you are being symmetric about it) is probably a pretty bad mistake? At least for this kind of stuff.
Like, seems like this would be an orthogonal dimension from competence, intelligence, integrity and other things you also want to select on, so seems like you would be very heavily constraining the set of people you would want to collaborate with. Which I mean you can do, there are a lot of people, but does seem like it would be super costly, and in some sense non-viable (like, it’s hard to maintain any kind of cooperative stance towards the world if you consider the majority, or close to the majority of people to have opinions so reprehensible you need to actively distance yourself from them).
I appreciate your sincere and principled engagement, but I also want to note that there’s something oddly mistake-theory-ish about a bunch of your comments. I first noticed it with the “reprehensible” comment, where it seemed like you were assuming a bunch of common knowledge that didn’t actually exist—like you were using terminology that doesn’t make sense to use when talking to an audience that would downvote that comment to −61.
And now here, where you say “seems like this would be an orthogonal dimension from competence, intelligence, integrity and other things you also want to select on” as if that’s something other people will nod along to, whereas it seems more likely that most people who read this will think “no it’s not, my political enemies are actually just low-integrity and incompetent and dumb”.
It seems like there’s something important about the dynamics of leftists and liberals that you’re not modeling right now. It’s a bit analogous to a thread I had with Kelsey where I called her out for continually using the phrase “I don’t understand why” because it seemed obvious that she was doing motivated cognition to block out her actual hypotheses. My best guess is that you’re trying to maintain some attitude of “we’re all reasonable people here” which is in fact no longer true about LessWrong with respect to modern politics (and also that updating on this would gradually lead you to a strategy much more similar to mine than your current strategy is).
(Flagging that this is a somewhat low-effort comment because I’m feeling a bit lazy right now, so please don’t take it as me expressing strong/robust opinions about your internal state.)
? Where are you getting the 70% number from? If we’re ‘being symmetric around it’ then the 35% most extreme of both ideological camps cannot combine to be more than 35% of the general population. Obviously?
Ah, sorry, that was me being unclear/being bad at writing. I intended to communicate “he seems to have opinions milder than what like 35% of Americans (e.g. most on the conservative right) believe”.
Your read of my sentence is definitely more natural though, so this was definitely me failing to communicate, sorry for the confusion!
Oliver meant the (35% of Americans) [who are] on the conservative right, presumably referring to President Trump’s approval ratings, not 35% of (Americans on the conservative right).
If we assume the camps (left/right) are split 50⁄50, then it would follow that 35% (35% of 50%, the 17.5% most left-wing plus most right-wing fraction) of the population “are being outright reprehensible”, i.e. more than a third of the entire population. That seems to be a rather extreme view.
For example, most academics and journalists are far more left-wing than the general population, so most of them would fall into the 17.5% (35% of 50%) of the most left-wing fraction of the population. Therefore, most academics would be “outright reprehensible” according to your view.
Most academics and journalists are Democrats, but “most of them would fall into the 17.5%” doesn’t follow. I’m not particularly interested enough in this tangent to dive in the FEC data myself, but per the articles Claude found about it, academics and journalists disproportionately did not donate to Sanders among the presidential primary candidates.
Most people don’t donate to anyone, so this is not informative. We know that there is a heavy imbalance between left/right faculty in academia. For example, [29% of Harvard faculty say they are “very liberal”, while only 1% say they are “very conservative”](https://www.foxnews.com/media/fewer-harvard-faculty-members-identifying-liberal-although-staff-still-strongly-left-leaning-survey). [Many departments employ zero registered Republicans or show heavy imbalance in registered Democrat/Republican ratio.](https://www.ff.org/nearly-four-in-five-college-departments-dont-employ-a-single-conservative/) [Journalists also heavily lean left.](https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/)
Notably, 29 is a lower number than 35.