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).
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).