Why are professional football players better paid than truck drivers? Because the truck driver divides the world into Favorite-Team and Rival-Team. That’s what motivates him to buy the tickets and wear the T-Shirts. The whole money-making system would fall apart if people started seeing the world in terms of Professional Football Players versus Spectators.
I think this point is off the mark. Even if the truck drivers of the world did not divide the world into in-group and out-group (which they do in pretty much every aspect of life, not just politics and sports), the football players would still be paid thousands of times more. You certainly know why this is the case, and it doesn’t have much to do with the way people in general—and we dumb plebes in particular—divide the world into mine and theirs.
Is there a political divide—a divide of policies and interests—between Professional Politicians on the one hand, and Voters on the other?
Of course. The divide is between the privileged few who live the high life at the expense of the many, and the rest of us who allow ourselves to be manipulated and coerced into supporting them. The politicians are the puppets of their respective parties, and their parties care about nothing so much as the perpetuation of the party and vanquishing of foes (which leaves more at the trough for the party and party loyal).
And I dare say the Big Mess is not likely to be cleaned up, until the Republifans and Demofans realize that in many ways they have more in common with other Voters than with “their” Politicians; or, at the very least, stop enthusiastically cheering for rich lawyers because they wear certain colors, and begin judging them as employees severely derelict in their duties.
I agree with you that it is not going to be cleaned up any time soon. However, I believe that the necessary but unfulfilled condition for things improving is not that voters self-identity with other voters, irrespective of party allegiance, but that voters have the ability to think critically about the issues that concern them and to distinguish between pandering bullshit and a substantive position (and that they actually hold their politicians to their promises). As long as we all remain stupid, it doesn’t much matter with whom we identify.
For as long as a politician can rally up a frenzied, rabid herd with a 15-second sound-bite appealing to God and country and all that is good and holy about our righteous American way of live that is founded on freedom, liberty, and justice for all, and which ‘they’ will certainly destroy and replace with its very antithesis, we will remain just as well and truly fucked as we are currently.
This post makes a valuable point, but the point is weakened by too much hyperbole—or rather by hyberbole that seems like a plausible non-hyperbolic statement that the writer might actually believe.
Whenever I hear someone describe quantum physics as “weird”—whenever I hear someone bewailing the mysterious effects of observation on the observed, or the bizarre existence of nonlocal correlations, or the incredible impossibility of knowing position and momentum at the same time—then I think to myself: This person will never understand physics no matter how many books they read.
I take the last clause (“This person will never understand physics no matter how many books they read”) to mean “will never understand physics no matter what they do”, since nobody seriously thinks you can really understand physics by just reading books, and there is no special relation between books and the other point being made, so I take that as evidence that ‘books’ is incidental and not intrinsic to the point.
If that is the case, then Eliezer would be committed to the idea that Einstein and Feynman, no matter how long they lived, would not be capable of understanding physics. Which is absurd! Yes, Einstein had intuitions that he found very hard to give up; yes, Feynman was limited to the theory of his day; but you still cannot mean that they would not have ever been able to understand physics, no matter how long they lived and what they did.
Surprise and weirdness are not qualities of the world but of model-making monkeys in the world. This is a valuable point. And thank you for it.