Merge Blues and Greens and Coalitional Instincts; they’re about basically the same thing. I don’t like either name; “Tribalism” would probably be better. Blues and Greens is jargon that’s not used enough, and coalitional instincts is too formal.
I don’t have an opinion on the Blues and Greens merge—I wouldn’t expect anyone to be specifically interested in posts that happen to use that particular analogy—but I would somewhat lean towards keeping the Coalitional Instincts term.
I considered several terms for that tag, including “Tribalism”, but I feel like there’s an underlying concept cluster that’s worth carving out and which is better described by Coalitional Instincts. Though this feels like a somewhat subtle difference in what I feel that “Tribalism” connotes, and if others disagree with me on those connotations, then I’m certainly willing to switch.
Basically, it feels to me like “Tribalism” generally refers to a somewhat narrow set of behaviors, whereas Coalitional Instincts includes those but also includes the underlying psychological mechanisms and somewhat broader behaviors. For example, Eliezer’s post Professing and Cheering includes this excerpt:
But even the concept of “religious profession” doesn’t seem to cover the pagan woman’s claim to believe in the primordial cow. If you had to profess a religious belief to satisfy a priest, or satisfy a co-religionist—heck, to satisfy your own self-image as a religious person—you would have to pretend to believe much more convincingly than this woman was doing. As she recited her tale of the primordial cow, she wasn’t even trying to be persuasive on that front—wasn’t even trying to convince us that she took her own religion seriously. I think that’s the part that so took me aback. I know people who believe they believe ridiculous things, but when they profess them, they’ll spend much more effort to convince themselves that they take their beliefs seriously.
It finally occurred to me that this woman wasn’t trying to convince us or even convince herself. Her recitation of the creation story wasn’t about the creation of the world at all. Rather, by launching into a five-minute diatribe about the primordial cow, she was cheering for paganism, like holding up a banner at a football game. A banner saying Go Blues isn’t a statement of fact, or an attempt to persuade; it doesn’t have to be convincing—it’s a cheer.
That strange flaunting pride . . . it was like she was marching naked in a gay pride parade.1It wasn’t just a cheer, like marching, but an outrageous cheer, like marching naked—believing that she couldn’t be arrested or criticized, because she was doing it for her pride parade.
That’s why it mattered to her that what she was saying was beyond ridiculous. If she’d tried to make it sound more plausible, it would have been like putting on clothes.
To me, “believing in something because it is outrageous, and not even trying to make it legible according to the other people’s epistemology” is a phenomenon that’s covered by coalitional instincts—it’s holding up the standards of explanation of your group and flaunting the fact that you don’t care about the other side’s. But it doesn’t quite fit tribalism as I usually understand it? I feel like “tribalism” usually refers to things that are more explicitly about “explicitly attacking anything that is seen to support the other side”, and not so much about “simply being proud about your side”.
But I’m not completely certain of that myself, and if others disagree with this assessment, then I’d be willing to change the name to tribalism.
People knowing what a tag is about straight away is quite valuable. Tribalism is very close to the broader thing. What if was “Tribalism” and the description was changed to:
Tribalism, or more broadly Coalitional Instincts, drive humans to act in ways which cause them join, support, defend, and maintain their membership in various coalitions. These concepts...something, something in-group/out-group
I think that people knowing what the tag means right away, is potentially a problem if that instant understanding is slightly wrong. E.g. if people only look at the tag’s name (which is what they’ll generally do if they have no reason to explicitly look up the description) they might feel that some posts that fit CI but not Tribalism are mis-tagged and downvote the tag relevance. Coalitional Instincts being less self-explanatory has the advantage that people are less likely to assume they know what it means without looking at the tag description.
I see the argument. I do think that people downvoting in order to maintain the tag are much more likely to have read the text vs people adding the tag.
But I predict the largest effect is most people don’t look at descriptions they don’t recognize and therefore don’t look at the tag at all, which is a shame because I think a lot of people are interested in the topic. Gut feeling is a 2-5x reduction in how much the tag gets looked at with the unfamiliar name, and I think that matters.
PS: I don’t want to make the decision here, I have enough tagging decisions to make already, so I’m leaving it up to others even though I’m offering some thoughts.
I don’t have an opinion on the Blues and Greens merge—I wouldn’t expect anyone to be specifically interested in posts that happen to use that particular analogy—but I would somewhat lean towards keeping the Coalitional Instincts term.
I considered several terms for that tag, including “Tribalism”, but I feel like there’s an underlying concept cluster that’s worth carving out and which is better described by Coalitional Instincts. Though this feels like a somewhat subtle difference in what I feel that “Tribalism” connotes, and if others disagree with me on those connotations, then I’m certainly willing to switch.
Basically, it feels to me like “Tribalism” generally refers to a somewhat narrow set of behaviors, whereas Coalitional Instincts includes those but also includes the underlying psychological mechanisms and somewhat broader behaviors. For example, Eliezer’s post Professing and Cheering includes this excerpt:
To me, “believing in something because it is outrageous, and not even trying to make it legible according to the other people’s epistemology” is a phenomenon that’s covered by coalitional instincts—it’s holding up the standards of explanation of your group and flaunting the fact that you don’t care about the other side’s. But it doesn’t quite fit tribalism as I usually understand it? I feel like “tribalism” usually refers to things that are more explicitly about “explicitly attacking anything that is seen to support the other side”, and not so much about “simply being proud about your side”.
But I’m not completely certain of that myself, and if others disagree with this assessment, then I’d be willing to change the name to tribalism.
People knowing what a tag is about straight away is quite valuable. Tribalism is very close to the broader thing. What if was “Tribalism” and the description was changed to:
I think that people knowing what the tag means right away, is potentially a problem if that instant understanding is slightly wrong. E.g. if people only look at the tag’s name (which is what they’ll generally do if they have no reason to explicitly look up the description) they might feel that some posts that fit CI but not Tribalism are mis-tagged and downvote the tag relevance. Coalitional Instincts being less self-explanatory has the advantage that people are less likely to assume they know what it means without looking at the tag description.
I see the argument. I do think that people downvoting in order to maintain the tag are much more likely to have read the text vs people adding the tag.
But I predict the largest effect is most people don’t look at descriptions they don’t recognize and therefore don’t look at the tag at all, which is a shame because I think a lot of people are interested in the topic. Gut feeling is a 2-5x reduction in how much the tag gets looked at with the unfamiliar name, and I think that matters.
PS: I don’t want to make the decision here, I have enough tagging decisions to make already, so I’m leaving it up to others even though I’m offering some thoughts.
That’s a reasonable point. After this discussion, I think that I do lean towards just renaming it after all.