I’ve read previously about a heuristic to only talk about politics when absolutely necessary and use historical or culturally insulated examples when doing so, but I still wonder what can be done in the receiving end of a potentially political debate:
Just to make sure I understand, your question is what to do when object-level politics is in some sense necessary to discuss? (E.g. because someone is directly talking to you about it, or because in this case it’s actually quite relevant to something you and your community wants to do, or… [insert other examples here if you had any in mind, e.g. being on the receiving end of a debate, what does that mean?]) Or is your question more like “In what circumstances is it necessary (i.e. worth it) to discuss politics?”
Brainstorming some ideas, not sure if any of them are good:
2. Protective words for the group: Like the above, except you do it as the beginning of the conversation and you ask the other interlocutors to do it too, or at least approve of your choice to do it. If they don’t understand, explaining all this “politics is the mind-killer” stuff is probably more important than what you were about to talk about anyway. If they do understand but refuse, that’s probably a bad sign and it’s valuable info for you going into the conversation.
3. Agree to (or at least resolve that you will) talk entirely about the probabilities of various consequences of the various proposals under consideration, rather than e.g. talking about non-consequentialist concepts like fairness, appropriateness, justice, offensiveness, honesty, etc. To be clear I’m not a consequentialist and think that those concepts are important, but I suspect that political discussions would nevertheless go a lot better on average if people followed this rule, especially if people FIRST had a conversation following this rule before gradually relaxing this rule.
4. Discover who your interlocutor’s outgroup is and then gleefully bash them for a few minutes to signal tribal loyalty (or at least non-enemy status) as a warm-up to the actual conversation. [I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, obviously. It seems icky to me. But it seems like it might work. Another version is the classic “say what you like about their ingroup; this seems less icky to most people but I think it’s icky too, just in a different way.]
I do like the classic heuristic you mentioned. I try to follow it myself. It helps to know lots of history. I know some history but not as much as I’d like. In a pinch one can use fantasy/sci-fi examples but those are less trustworthy because less realistic.
Thanks for this post! This is an important topic.
Just to make sure I understand, your question is what to do when object-level politics is in some sense necessary to discuss? (E.g. because someone is directly talking to you about it, or because in this case it’s actually quite relevant to something you and your community wants to do, or… [insert other examples here if you had any in mind, e.g. being on the receiving end of a debate, what does that mean?]) Or is your question more like “In what circumstances is it necessary (i.e. worth it) to discuss politics?”
Brainstorming some ideas, not sure if any of them are good:
1. Protective words: When you decide to engage in discussion (or even thinking?) about a political topic, notice when you are doing so, and take a quick break to run through various rituals that hopefully will help your mind stay in the right frame of mind: Confess the Litany of Tarski applied to the topic of debate, maybe read or remember this short story to prime your mind to be self-suspicious in the appropriate ways and engage your emotions to help out… Other things along these lines: “Let us be guided by the beauty of our weapons,” “What am I thinking about and why am I thinking about it?” “If you attend only to favorable evidence, picking and choosing from your gathered data, then the more data you gather, the less you know.” “Almost no one is evil, almost everything is broken.”
2. Protective words for the group: Like the above, except you do it as the beginning of the conversation and you ask the other interlocutors to do it too, or at least approve of your choice to do it. If they don’t understand, explaining all this “politics is the mind-killer” stuff is probably more important than what you were about to talk about anyway. If they do understand but refuse, that’s probably a bad sign and it’s valuable info for you going into the conversation.
3. Agree to (or at least resolve that you will) talk entirely about the probabilities of various consequences of the various proposals under consideration, rather than e.g. talking about non-consequentialist concepts like fairness, appropriateness, justice, offensiveness, honesty, etc. To be clear I’m not a consequentialist and think that those concepts are important, but I suspect that political discussions would nevertheless go a lot better on average if people followed this rule, especially if people FIRST had a conversation following this rule before gradually relaxing this rule.
4. Discover who your interlocutor’s outgroup is and then gleefully bash them for a few minutes to signal tribal loyalty (or at least non-enemy status) as a warm-up to the actual conversation. [I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, obviously. It seems icky to me. But it seems like it might work. Another version is the classic “say what you like about their ingroup; this seems less icky to most people but I think it’s icky too, just in a different way.]
I do like the classic heuristic you mentioned. I try to follow it myself. It helps to know lots of history. I know some history but not as much as I’d like. In a pinch one can use fantasy/sci-fi examples but those are less trustworthy because less realistic.