I think that there’s such a thing as party discipline among politicians, such that breaking with one’s party is a career risk, but ordinary folks can believe whatever they want to believe with little cost.
I don’t want to eliminate polling and replace it with something else. Polling describes people’s opinions; my “graph” describes the logical and causal relationships between policies. They describe different things. Also, making a graph for all of politics is impossible—you’d have to be Laplace’s Demon to do that. I could imagine making a very small toy example on a very specific project.
I agree that the graph setup is useful for analyzing disagreements and value differences in general, not just political ones.
The “fallacy” isn’t exactly a fallacy in reasoning, but it’s instrumentally irrational. One example would be infighting between very similar groups: “People’s Front of Judaea” versus “Judaean People’s Front.” It’s tempting to spend all your time fighting your friends—but if you focus on fighting over which anime shows are best, you won’t get across the message to people outside your subculture that anime in general is a good medium.
It’s tempting to spend all your time fighting your friends—but if you focus on fighting over which anime shows are best, you won’t get across the message to people outside your subculture that anime in general is a good medium.
Indeed. The value of which depends on why you’re arguing, I suppose—you might be artists trying to gain acceptance, but you might just be trying to decide what to watch tonight.
I’ll reply to a few of your points.
I think that there’s such a thing as party discipline among politicians, such that breaking with one’s party is a career risk, but ordinary folks can believe whatever they want to believe with little cost.
I don’t want to eliminate polling and replace it with something else. Polling describes people’s opinions; my “graph” describes the logical and causal relationships between policies. They describe different things. Also, making a graph for all of politics is impossible—you’d have to be Laplace’s Demon to do that. I could imagine making a very small toy example on a very specific project.
I agree that the graph setup is useful for analyzing disagreements and value differences in general, not just political ones.
The “fallacy” isn’t exactly a fallacy in reasoning, but it’s instrumentally irrational. One example would be infighting between very similar groups: “People’s Front of Judaea” versus “Judaean People’s Front.” It’s tempting to spend all your time fighting your friends—but if you focus on fighting over which anime shows are best, you won’t get across the message to people outside your subculture that anime in general is a good medium.
Indeed. The value of which depends on why you’re arguing, I suppose—you might be artists trying to gain acceptance, but you might just be trying to decide what to watch tonight.