Good post. As a solution to the problem, it helps to model LW as already being aware of a given tribal position, and aiming instead to provide meta advice on the relations between the tribes’ positions that is useful to the reader.
The first step, of course, is having an accurate enough model of both tribes that one can right useful meta advice that involves modeling their future behavior. Most people who can thoroughly dismiss the impulse to call the other tribe “stupid” will reach this point pretty quickly, and the rest follows naturally so long as one always remembers that the goal of writing on contentious issues here is not to persuade, but to make the reader more informed such that they will be more successful in all of their endeavors, whatever they may be[1].
This is broadly beneficial because positive-sum outcomes are often low-hanging fruit once tribalism intensifies enough that the average partisan can’t model his opponent’s goals well enough to see them.
Good post. As a solution to the problem, it helps to model LW as already being aware of a given tribal position, and aiming instead to provide meta advice on the relations between the tribes’ positions that is useful to the reader.
The first step, of course, is having an accurate enough model of both tribes that one can right useful meta advice that involves modeling their future behavior. Most people who can thoroughly dismiss the impulse to call the other tribe “stupid” will reach this point pretty quickly, and the rest follows naturally so long as one always remembers that the goal of writing on contentious issues here is not to persuade, but to make the reader more informed such that they will be more successful in all of their endeavors, whatever they may be[1].
This is broadly beneficial because positive-sum outcomes are often low-hanging fruit once tribalism intensifies enough that the average partisan can’t model his opponent’s goals well enough to see them.