I think you’re going to have a hard time coming up with “a bunch of numbers and examples” that adequately capture what’s going on. Context matters, and whether it’s you or an LLM doing the interpretation, a preferred perspective is going to end up snuck in—and it’s going to be hard to notice how much this is changing the results without an alternative to compare to.
That seemed… like it was approaching a methodology that might (with addititional workshopping) be cruxy for some Trump supporters or Trump-neutral-ers.
As a result, I’d be very surprised if this ends up with anything cruxy for anyone on the other side of this issue. Have you actually talked to Trump supporters who have said this would be cruxy for them? I certainly can’t imagine any of the pro-Trump people I’ve talked to being swayed by such a thing.
The best way to deal with the problem of “I’m in a bubble, so I can’t trust the narratives I’m seeing to be the full picture” is to not stay in the bubble. The question I would be asking is “Hey Trump supporter. What am I missing, when it comes to Trump?”
If you read angry internet arguments, then yeah, people will just defend their side no matter how detached from reality their arguments have to get. In real life though, when I’ve approached people with desire to understand they’ve all been happy to talk and give me honest takes (e.g. I don’t think I’ve ever heard “Vaccines definitely cause autism, bro!”, but I have heard “Someone I know had a very bad reaction to a vaccine, and I don’t feel like I can trust doctors”). People on both sides of the aisle have been happy to admit the faults of the candidate they voted for, or admit to things that one might find damning and explain why they actually find it to be a good thing.
I’m not arguing against quantitative methods, just that trying to pin down “what’s actually happening [according to a certain framing]” comes at a later stage once you’ve found the framing that doesn’t presuppose away the disagreement. Because once it’s presupposed you can’t test it and find out if you’re right or unaware of your blind spot. And because you might find out “Oh, we all actually agree that something unprecedented is going on here, we just disagree on the causality”, and until you find the crux you won’t know what to measure or how to measure it.
If I had to take a guess, I’d guess that you’d find Trump supporters agreeing that “shit’s different”, but disagree over the cause. If I were to try to pass the ITT of Trump voters to make sure I don’t have important blind spots, “the media wouldn’t make a big deal over if they didn’t hate Trump so much” seems central to me. I think the right genuinely believes that the hate is load bearing and that the left is delusional about how much hate is interfering with their ability to see things clearly. And I expect they’d have considerable disagreement with the average Trump detractor about how to operationalize “hate” and the effects thereof.
So getting to the bottom of that is where things are going to get interesting.
Having sat on this for a night, I think basically yeah this posts’s framing doesn’t make sense as a way to engage with active Trump supporters.
Right now my main question is “should I spend more time thinking about this or go back to ignoring it and hope it isn’t too bad?”. I think if I decided to do that I’d probably expect “solve political polarization” to be a major piece of it and yeah I’d want to talk to a wider variety of people qualitatively.
I agree that baking in the framing into the initial question is bad, but, like, the framing is the reason why I’m even considering thinking more about this in the first place and I’m not sure how to sidestep that.
The point about “online arguments” vs “chatting with individual people” is well taken though.
Right now my main question is “should I spend more time thinking about this or go back to ignoring it and hope it isn’t too bad?”.
It seems like you’re curious and find it interesting, so why not? There are probably worthwhile things to learn.
I think if I decided to do that I’d probably expect “solve political polarization” to be a major piece of it and yeah I’d want to talk to a wider variety of people qualitatively.
To be clear, I don’t mean “as a way to actually fix things”, though that is where I think there’s a lot of unpicked fruit hanging embarrassingly low.
I just mean as a personal epistemics thing. If I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, and I don’t trust my feeds to be delivering the necessary perspective, I’d want to probe what people think just to make sure there aren’t some obvious counterarguments that my current perspective is blind to. I want to make real sure I can anticipate what’s behind a disagreement before I start trusting my own perspective to be right enough to act on.
I agree that baking in the framing into the initial question is bad, but, like, the framing is the reason why I’m even considering thinking more about this in the first place and I’m not sure how to sidestep that.
We’re always going to have framings that make less sense in hindsight. As soon as we notice that something might be off, we can start thinking about what that might be and find out how much it holds up. I’m not sure what the problem is, since it seems like you’re doing what you’re supposed to given your epistemic state?
Oh. Is it like… if I’m overcome with “Holy fuck, how are antivaxxers so dumb” and it motivates me to look into it, I can’t just “not have” the motivation and ignoring it would mean I don’t look at all, but if I act within that framing then everything comes out like “Why are you so dumb, anyway?” which isn’t exactly epistemically helpful?
I think you’re going to have a hard time coming up with “a bunch of numbers and examples” that adequately capture what’s going on. Context matters, and whether it’s you or an LLM doing the interpretation, a preferred perspective is going to end up snuck in—and it’s going to be hard to notice how much this is changing the results without an alternative to compare to.
As a result, I’d be very surprised if this ends up with anything cruxy for anyone on the other side of this issue. Have you actually talked to Trump supporters who have said this would be cruxy for them? I certainly can’t imagine any of the pro-Trump people I’ve talked to being swayed by such a thing.
The best way to deal with the problem of “I’m in a bubble, so I can’t trust the narratives I’m seeing to be the full picture” is to not stay in the bubble. The question I would be asking is “Hey Trump supporter. What am I missing, when it comes to Trump?”
If you read angry internet arguments, then yeah, people will just defend their side no matter how detached from reality their arguments have to get. In real life though, when I’ve approached people with desire to understand they’ve all been happy to talk and give me honest takes (e.g. I don’t think I’ve ever heard “Vaccines definitely cause autism, bro!”, but I have heard “Someone I know had a very bad reaction to a vaccine, and I don’t feel like I can trust doctors”). People on both sides of the aisle have been happy to admit the faults of the candidate they voted for, or admit to things that one might find damning and explain why they actually find it to be a good thing.
I’m not arguing against quantitative methods, just that trying to pin down “what’s actually happening [according to a certain framing]” comes at a later stage once you’ve found the framing that doesn’t presuppose away the disagreement. Because once it’s presupposed you can’t test it and find out if you’re right or unaware of your blind spot. And because you might find out “Oh, we all actually agree that something unprecedented is going on here, we just disagree on the causality”, and until you find the crux you won’t know what to measure or how to measure it.
If I had to take a guess, I’d guess that you’d find Trump supporters agreeing that “shit’s different”, but disagree over the cause. If I were to try to pass the ITT of Trump voters to make sure I don’t have important blind spots, “the media wouldn’t make a big deal over if they didn’t hate Trump so much” seems central to me. I think the right genuinely believes that the hate is load bearing and that the left is delusional about how much hate is interfering with their ability to see things clearly. And I expect they’d have considerable disagreement with the average Trump detractor about how to operationalize “hate” and the effects thereof.
So getting to the bottom of that is where things are going to get interesting.
Having sat on this for a night, I think basically yeah this posts’s framing doesn’t make sense as a way to engage with active Trump supporters.
Right now my main question is “should I spend more time thinking about this or go back to ignoring it and hope it isn’t too bad?”. I think if I decided to do that I’d probably expect “solve political polarization” to be a major piece of it and yeah I’d want to talk to a wider variety of people qualitatively.
I agree that baking in the framing into the initial question is bad, but, like, the framing is the reason why I’m even considering thinking more about this in the first place and I’m not sure how to sidestep that.
The point about “online arguments” vs “chatting with individual people” is well taken though.
It seems like you’re curious and find it interesting, so why not? There are probably worthwhile things to learn.
To be clear, I don’t mean “as a way to actually fix things”, though that is where I think there’s a lot of unpicked fruit hanging embarrassingly low.
I just mean as a personal epistemics thing. If I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, and I don’t trust my feeds to be delivering the necessary perspective, I’d want to probe what people think just to make sure there aren’t some obvious counterarguments that my current perspective is blind to. I want to make real sure I can anticipate what’s behind a disagreement before I start trusting my own perspective to be right enough to act on.
We’re always going to have framings that make less sense in hindsight. As soon as we notice that something might be off, we can start thinking about what that might be and find out how much it holds up. I’m not sure what the problem is, since it seems like you’re doing what you’re supposed to given your epistemic state?
Oh. Is it like… if I’m overcome with “Holy fuck, how are antivaxxers so dumb” and it motivates me to look into it, I can’t just “not have” the motivation and ignoring it would mean I don’t look at all, but if I act within that framing then everything comes out like “Why are you so dumb, anyway?” which isn’t exactly epistemically helpful?