After a recent argument with my brother in which he kept insisting we lived in different moral and factual realities, I've become much more interested in who and what we allow to form our worldview than what it ends up being. I realized during our conversation that he was citing mainstream media news sources, whereas I was citing primary sources. For example, we were talking about a change in a law and I was comparing the actual text of the law before and after the change, and he was citing commentary on it, or he was telling me he didn't believe certain things ever happened, and I was citing research data that said they actually happen consistently.
I don't know how to speak to what someone has allowed to create the "reality" they believe they live in when it's abstracted away from primary sources. It would be one thing if he were citing different studies, different research, different legal records, but he's not. He's saying if a commenter he likes/trusts interprets something one way, it doesn't matter if there are facts that prove otherwise.
Ironically, our dad is the same way, just with the politically opposite set of non-primary sources my brother relies on, and it frustrates my brother to no end. But if the foundations of each of their worldviews are several levels abstracted from the original source material, how are they ever going to live in the same "reality"?
It was the first time in a long time that I've realized just how removed from what actually happens so many people are. So few people are actually even looking at primary sources anymore, and partially because they've become so hard to find beneath all the layers of commentary on them. But how are we ever supposed to talk about reality if we can't even agree what counts?
> But how are we ever supposed to talk about reality if we can't even agree what counts?
One of my tactics here is to refuse to discuss politics at all, but to encourage any/all discussion of economics and philosophy. One effect of this is to remove lots of trigger words and names, which helps those who feel persecuted or embattled to take a step back. Another effect is you get a much more clear perspective on how they actually operate wrt to belief and evidence.
If you find an economic or philosophical/ethical/moral POV that’s directly contradicting a persons stated political views, don’t just leap on the opportunity to point it out. First realize that the person you’re talking to is probably in a significant amount of psychic pain already from shouldering this kind of cognitive dissonance for decades. Activate your compassion/empathy. This way you can twist the knife better when you do leap on the hypocrisy to try and kill it! Soon you’ll have no friends left and that solves the problem of dealing with political discussions
This took a turn that feels inevitable now that I see it, but I did not see coming, and made me laugh out loud. Thanks for this!
My best friend recently said microeconomics is "bullshit" and I don't know how to handle that. I take it for granted, like algebra, it's like saying gravity is bullshit. What other model is there? They didn't propose one.
> Soon you’ll have no friends
At the rate I'm going. Of course this could all be fallout from the biggest Shiri's Scissor ever fired, hitting the US.
>What other model is there? They didn't propose one.
Start with Praxeology (the methodology of Austrian economics). Specifically, Mises’ Human Action.
The simple axiom that all preferences are subjective instantly eliminates a lot of the foundation of micro (and macro) economics as it is typically taught today.
In other words,
“All preferences are subjective but some ikigais locally align (or at least have positive inner product*)”
In yet further words, Each of us would like to find our ikigai-trading neighbors so as to figure out the pareto-optimal way to move forward in cluster[-fuck]s [for that profane diversity-curious outsider take]
*i see that theHeisenberg uncertainty principle was codependency injected[0] into section 5[1] — a negative example of the very point?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Action#Summary
[1] 5 Causality as a requirement for human action
There was an interesting thread in reddit's /r/AskHistorians about common mistakes amateur historians make, and the top comment was this
> Valuing primary sources over secondary, and first person accounts over records. Primary sources are great in that they are created in or near the moment; however, the lack the scope and broader understanding hindsight provides to secondary sources. First person accounts are great until you start accounting for perspective bias, mirror imaging, qui bono, intended audience, and time between experience and narration; all of these can have drastic effects on first person accounts.
See the whole thread here: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16d474n/what...
Now, the context of the OP is less about history and more about contemporary events, but the key point here is that there is different value in primary vs secondary sources, and that primary sources aren't always categorically better.
As a personal example, I grew up not knowing a lot of racist dog whistles that some politicians use, something I would have missed if I had only read or listened to the primary source (ie the politician). Having secondary sources interpret and explain things was highly valuable to me.
However, the OP also has a really good point that sometimes these secondary sources can't always be fully trusted. It's a tough epistemological problem about who and what you can trust, interleaved with social influences, mass media, and personal worldview.
And I didn't do a good enough pointing out that my complaint was focused on mainstream news media as the secondary source, not expert commentary.
I don't think primary sources are some be-all, end-all, standalone authority. I'm just concerned that mainstream news media is so many layers abstracted from them, but people rely on them as though they have some sort of firm enough grounding in "reality" to support a worldview.
On a practical level, some reliance on commentary is necessary, no? Or at least a combination of commentary and curation of the constant firehose of new information, which feels like a form of implied commentary itself.
Primary sources are only an improvement on commentary if, between you and the commentator, you are the one with the combination of expertise, time, and objectivity better suited to extract truth from the source, and this weighing of suitability is going to vary from source to source.
New Computer Science research? Maybe I can parse it better than some. New novel treatment for insert-disease-here? I need some help.
For some areas you need expertise. But some areas can be checked by everyone. Affirmations like "according to the sources politician X was accused of fraud" and "during president X, the economic sector Y experienced a growth of Xyz %".
That still takes time, though.
Very true! But I’d still argue the idea that (partially) relying on commentary is what causes bias is hubristic; in practice, it usually just means that you’re relying on commentary without realizing it. Like, take the instance mentioned in the original comment: reading “the text of a law”. This is a great thing to do, but assuming you’re not a legal scholar and a political expert specializing in that field, it’s no reason not to also seek out commentary that explains the intent and likely impact of the law. To say the least, laws are not objective — that’s why we need the judicial system.
In my experience, this overall rhetorical tactic is often pulled out by people who pride themselves on some variety of centrism/moderation, and are trying to dismiss the worries of others. This is good when they do it to beliefs like “crime is going up” or “criminal immigrant are invading our country”, but not so much when it’s used against “yes, he really does endorse P2025 even though he claims not to”.
Plus cmon it’s gotta just infuriate any interlocutor. I’ve never dealt with “well you’re just not smart enough to understand why I’m right”, and this focus on reading primary sources seems like a variety of that.
Again, not at all saying that they’re wrong to read primary sources, or that it’s not sometimes absolutely necessary; just that the “worldview”-based confidence stemming from such a practice is misplaced.
Commentary has its place, but it's in the context of primary sources. It can't stand on its own. And there's a vast quality chasm between expert commentary and mainstream news commentator commentary.
I can't speak to everyone's experience, but I have never been to an event later reported in the news where the news report corresponded to what I witnessed enough for me to believe the reporter was even there. And anymore, they aren't. They're trying to synthesize observations from dozens of different people, who themselves may or may not have been there, and doing it so fast they don't have a chance to verify whether they were. It's like a giant game of "telephone," but it's presented as though it's all fact.
In the specific example of the law, I was specifically saying, "[Politician] approved the change of a law from saying X to saying Y," so the text of the law before and after the politician's approval was the specific issue in question. I can see why there would be lots of situations where expert legal commentary would be important to understanding the impact of the change, but in this case, my brother was trying to say that politician hadn't changed the law at all, which just plain wasn't true.
> my brother was trying to say that politician hadn't changed the law at all, which just plain wasn't true.
And there’s a good chance that he rejects evidence to the contrary, or if finally faced with evidence beyond refute, it changes nothing, right?
One possible explanation for stuff like this is that you’re dealing with someone that has an anti-realist meta-ethic, which is not so unusual, but what is new is the blurred boundary between factual questions and ethical questions. Something like “Fair election?” would seem to be a clear and concrete question about the world, but the answer you’d get is always for a different question, and so it amounts to boo or hurrah. Even asking a simpler question about a specific policy changing or staying the same cannot untangle the discourse if that question is perceived as too close to an ethical one.
See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressivism , https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism , https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cognitivism , etc.
> And there’s a good chance that he rejects evidence to the contrary, or if finally faced with evidence beyond refute, it changes nothing, right?
It actually wasn't even rejection. It was this pivot to, "You live in a different moral reality than I do, and therefore your assessment of factual reality is morally bankrupt," even though I thought we were talking about whether the law had changed, not the moral value of a change.
It got ugly really fast, and frankly I'm still bewildered by it. It would have been one thing if he didn't think there was a reality to appeal to. This was just, "You have a fact I don't like, and therefore are evil."
> On a practical level, some reliance on commentary is necessary, no?
Oh yes, very much so.
Which is why it's so deeply concerning that media has become terribly consolidated and controlled by capital. The shareholders interests diverge significantly from those of humanity and the planet, and they hire commentators who align with their views [0].
Examples: Illegal wars, the holocene extinction, climate change - in each case you can point to massive disparities in what media commentators present as important, and what genuine experts believe is important.
One very recent example is how media across the West presented Israeli football fans as victims of roaming gangs doing 'pogroms' in Amsterdam, when in fact, the footage shown was very clearly of the Israeli fans terrorizing residents: [1]
>The shareholders interests diverge significantly from those of humanity and the planet, and they hire commentators who align with their views
How can we even be sure what are the interests of the humanity and the planet? Why shouldn't everyone ask if those interests are align to own goals?
> How can we even be sure what are the interests of the humanity and the planet?
Sometimes it's really easy, and yet we're still failing.
Say a community is deciding whether to clean up a polluted river, and prevent the polluter from dumping chemicals in it that are killing fish and leaving residents with foul water.
Person A says: "The polluter's interests conflict with the community's need for clean water."
Person B says: "How can we even define what the community needs? Maybe some people don’t mind foul water. Maybe a little PFAS pollution and pesticide runoff is fine actually. We've no firm evidence that these chemicals cause harm. There's no proof that the rise in cancers since GreenWashCorp moved to town isn't just coincidence.”
I would say that person B is ignoring a clear, shared need (clean water). The appeal to the status quo will do real harm to people if they listen to it.
... Flint still doesn't have clean water. Like many parts of the US.
Which collective goods do you consider disposable - clean air, water, food? A livable climate?
How sure do you think we need to be of what the "interests of humanity" are, before we defend them?
Flint has had clean water since ~2018 and there are ongoing state and federal efforts to remove all lead from water systems in Michigan (and the rest of the country of course).
Is there some specific criteria you have in mind when you say that Flint doesn't have clean water?
"Ongoing efforts". Great.
> a federal judge recently found Flint in civil contempt for failing to meet a deadline to remove all of the city's lead service lines.
> There are an estimated nine million lead service lines in need of replacement across the U.S.
- https://www.npr.org/2024/04/25/1247095068/its-been-10-years-...
> Flint residents have yet to see a penny of the $625 million class-action settlement that came from a lawsuit against the state
- https://eu.freep.com/story/news/local/2024/04/25/flint-water...
And it's not just Flint, like I said:
> CR and the Guardian selected 120 people from around the US, out of a pool of more than 6,000 volunteers, to test for arsenic, lead, PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), and other contaminants. The samples came from water systems that together service more than 19 million people.
> A total of 118 of the 120 samples had concerning levels of PFAS or arsenic above CR’s recommended maximum, or detectable amounts of lead.
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/31/americas-tap...
Specific criteria you ask: How about just living up to our own standards, for a start. Holding polluters and enablers accountable.
Then we can get those standards up to where other, more densely populated, less wealthy countries already have them.
So that study uses limits set by consumer reports, it's a misrepresentation to use it to argue that water doesn't meet standards. And it's not clear if they included private wells (where things like arsenic levels may be naturally high).
The EPA hadn't even set limits for PFAS at that time.
They only got around to it earlier this year - after the "forever chemicals" were detected in the water systems of nearly 200 million Americans.
So I guess you're right - technically, you can't meet standards that don't exist. Not sure that helps your argument that we have safe water though!
> It was the first time in a long time that I've realized just how removed from what actually happens so many people are
This is your fundamental mistake. These are not people. They don't have personhood.
Nothing will ever change that.
Unless you are an extremely astute observer of every human endeavour, relying on primary sources like this is a way to bake in your biases. Of course relying on a small number of specific commentators is as well. But don't pretend you are being more rational here.
Maybe both your brother and father expect the influencers whom they trust to not break their trust. Which should be a decent expectation. Not everyone has the time and energy to dig after primary sources of truth, sometimes multiple sources of truth, read, comprehend and summarize what happened. They rather depend on someone to distill the whole thing for them.
I think the trouble was that it didn't take any time to pull up the facts. A quick search for the text of the law before and after the change, for example, on the phone already in my hand, to show the difference, easily happens in real time during the conversation. That should be enough to make someone stop and think, shouldn't it? When you think something is true about the world and someone can show you it's false in real time? How do you not even stop and consider that information?
I think "trust" is the wrong word I see for how commentators are treated. It's more of a blind faith.
I can think very specifically of an example where a political commentator, in private, said what they were publicly saying was crazy garbage. When I brought that up to my parents, it did not change their view of him. Effectively the response was "Well, all commentators lie" and they continued following him.
At least in my case, I think this is mainly a religion thing. I grew up mormon and one quote that sticks in my mind is the following:
> When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done. When they propose a plan–it is God’s plan. When they point the way, there is no other which is safe. When they give direction, it should mark the end of controversy. God works in no other way. To think otherwise, without immediate repentance, may cost one his faith, may destroy his testimony, and leave him a stranger to the kingdom of God.
I've seen this sort of mentality extend in non-religious contexts. Basically "Well, don't you think X would have already thought about Y? Why are you questioning?"
This is in concept a great point and may actually be what’s happening but as you allude to with “should” in “Which should be a decent expectation.” sadly that isn’t the case anymore, when a good chunk of listened to influencers are more driven by the money and/or power (where basically money is just an abstracted form of power) conveying what really happened is less of a concern to them, at times they tend to not even look at primary sources either (depending on which influencers we’re talking about here).
Of course. But many people are wired to usually assume good intentions from other people.
I'm not sure the reliance on primary sources is necessarily superior - or at least results in less of a reality "creation".
I would say the important thing is to have trust in who or what is curating/filtering and commenting/interpreting your inputs (which in itself is a very challenging problem), whether primary or secondary.
Part of what scared me was that his "authorities" on the matter were mainstream news commentators. It would have been one thing if he had been pointing to experts who actually knew the topic.
"mainstream news commentators" but alternative news commentators would be fine?
What is mainstream news? Joe Rogan? Rachel Maddow?
Who are the experts? Ex-FBI and CIA agents, or Vivek Ramaswamy and RFK Jr?
Why are your sources better?
I didn't say that, because I didn't mean that.
In this case, it was a newscaster on CNN. Couldn't tell you who.
The question, specifically, had been whether a politician had or had not authorized a change to a law. My primary sources were the law before he changed it and the law after he changed it, which had different text. It wasn't even a situation that required interpretation. My brother wasn't arguing that the change was meaningless. He was arguing that the law had not changed.
I appreciate that there are nuanced situations where interpretation matters a great deal, but newscasters are not experts on the things they report. That's not their job. Their saying something did or didn't happen when they don't even pretend to have been there, read the documents, or informed themselves about the situation isn't authoritative.
What other people think shapes our reality, more so than the other way around. Because of that, the primary sources are barely relevant.
Our thoughts are our lives. Other's thoughts shape our society, as we elect the people in power.
Just as in the stock market, the people can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent (sane?).
This makes the "reality" of today the collective minds of the people in our society. We're all on stage together and there are no rules.
Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan might have some insight that you might find usefull.
Yeah I mean no matter how you look at it, it comes down to the individual ability to appraise the quality of something. You're always going to be bottlenecked by that. Its hard to talk someone out of their own judgment because you have to pass their test at the same time. Also you're assuming everyone values the cold hard truth above all else. They're probably getting more emotional validation out of their sources.
Interesting. Maybe there is space for a newspaper that links to primary sources, with minimum commentary.
I can recall an article about the famous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. It pointed out that millions watched Barack Obama opine on the situation. And further noted that millions watched a guy by the name of Bobby Jindal chime in as a sort of rebuttal/response to Barack Obama’s opinions. But during this time there was one channel CSPAN, that ran geological physicist, after petroleum engineer, after geological physicist to get their opinions. Needless to say, almost no one tuned in.
All that to say, there is some evidence out there that even if such a newspaper were to exist, most of us wouldn’t read it.
> if such a newspaper were to exist, most of us wouldn’t read it.
This isn't a reflection on humanity, but rather on the culture we live in. There are countries where people value higher quality media. They have better education, higher equality, more accountability in government and business, more diverse media ownership (not hard), etc. They are not perfect - that's not the point.
Point is, there are many, many factors we can improve on before throwing in the towel. I really dislike seeing people blame the population for watching media that uses every psychological trick to blast bombastic propaganda and bullshit into people's brains from birth; it's truly victim blaming.
I do lean on commentary a bit. Primary sources tend to be dense, or rely on specialist knowledge. But the key difference, I think, is I prefer commentators who refer to primary sources, explain what it means, and explain the ways it could be or is misunderstood. So my main input on a subject I'm not invested in enough to be knowledgeable about might be (for example) Abigail Thorn or LegalEagle, but they don't stand in for the source with their own heavily biased spin.
I think the main difference is how seriously an entertainer takes the material. Even John Oliver cites sources and has a team of researchers and writers who try to make sure they represent the source material accurately.
It's the problem of human culture, not of the world. Today all astronomers agree in what position the Sun will be in a particular time. On the other hand, humans can't agree on basic facts which are heavily politicized (e.g., how immigration affects economy). In such questions people don't care about respecting the truth, they care about what would be more profitable to them.
The word that stands out to me most in this comment is "mainstream" where it appears before "media". If the issue is primary sources vs commentary, it shouldn't matter if the person is listening to NBC, CNN, FOX, or Joe Rogan Experience -- those are /all/ commentary.
And by the way, which ones are mainstream? What does "mainstream" even mean? The only people I ever hear complain about the "mainstream media" are on one side of the political spectrum and who somehow always fail to notice that their media is actually more popular. More mainstream, if you will.
> It was the first time in a long time that I've realized just how removed from what actually happens so many people are.
"Wake up sheeple!"
Give me a break, lol.
In this case, it was a CNN newscaster, which is about as "mainstream media" as it gets, but I would extend the same criticism to anybody else who doesn't even pretend they have any background knowledge or research supporting their claims, just a teleprompter to read it from.
The comparison was between source material and commentary, specifically commentary by people who don't even claim to understand the topic in any depth.
As I get older, the nuances of linguistic meaning of words and the personal variation of the linguistic deconstruction across political viewpoints, sometimes individual, is becoming apparent.
"Freedom" for example in the political sphere ultimately comes down to what aspects of opposed politics you want to oppress. Like the actual fictional meaning of libertarianism, it really is defined as the freedom to do what you want, but regulate anything that people may do to you.
So much of rhetoric is linguistically clarified by gender swapping to reveal sexist double standards, or appending "white" to key words to make the racist undercurrent component more apparent.
I know this is incendiary, but for example in huge amounts of right wing rhetoric like something as basic as "I'm voting for America", a classic vapid pseudo patriotic statement that somehow marks a divide between parties, if you translate it to "white America" on the right vs "multicultural America" on the left, all of a sudden the organizing emotional undercurrents become clear.
Obviously loaded rhetoric exists on the left. Oh course my opinion is that it is far more pervasive on the right however.
Such is the media universality we exist in, the assault of media advertising, we often aren't even aware of the loaded meanings.
So let organizing linguistic phrasings, which becomes psychological worldviews, are compounded with deeply complex and layered visual and audio aspects: stalwart conservative white man with authoritative voice., for example. A picture is worth a thousand words after all.
I find Trump's often smorgasborg of word political salad instructive often because such ramblings are actually a mass deconstruction of right wing rhetoric. It removes the framing and just goes to the loaded words
>personal variation of the linguistic deconstruction across political viewpoints, sometimes individual, is becoming apparent
I don't particularly like or trust people who try to deconstruct language, Derrida style. I don't like how they take words, turn them around, and proclaim they have a different meaning than they used to. The white is black and red is blue kind of guys.
They only do that to manipulate naive people and gain power from promoting lies.
Deconstructing language like this can’t give you extremely clear signals, but it’s still information, so ignoring it is not the best idea. Think of it like body language. We don’t condemn or acquit based on that, but if you were a detective looking for clues, or just a friend or lover navigating difficult conversations, then of course you can’t ignore it.
Unlike body language though, linguistic stuff changes faster and moves virally through populations thanks to ubiquitous media, etc. but that extra noise doesn’t mean there’s no signal.
And word meanings do change based on usage of course.. I won’t demonstrate the deconstruction but if you look at a label like “operation enduring freedom” and you refuse to even try to read between the lines.. you’re going to have less understanding of the world than someone who can read between the lines.
If someone says he votes for "America" why should we assume it's "White America" or "Multicultural America" unless we want to introduce a divide and fuel hate.
In the 1970s and 1980s when someone said he "voted for America" that affirmation was taken at face value, no one asked "which America" and no one assumed that there is more than one American.
I am not an American, so please correct me if I am wrong.
In the political sphere of America, It echoes back to the southern strategy all the way back to the civil war, slavery, and the fundamental racial divide.
Staunchly racist Americans have alls existed as large key demographic for coalition building. I used to be in the '70s and '60s. It was in the Democratic party, simply because Republicans were the ones that invaded the South and the civil war.
Around the time of the Nixon election, Republicans pivoted to the southern strategy to use the civil Rights act of of the Lyndon Johnson administration to turn racist Democrats into racist Republican voters.
To do so such large shifts in voting allegiance requires substantial election/ linguistic /propagandistic engineering over decades.
Trump is AMAZING at such linguistic engineering, amazingly while making no actual structural linguistic sense. It's abhorrent to smart people,but speaks right to the core of dumber voters.
Rational voters are succumbed by other means ...
I mean, there were literal white supremacists back then; not in a pejorative sense, but, like, in the “white people are genetically superior” sense. There were absolutely people voting for a non-Irish, Italian, catholic, Jewish, or god-forbid dark-skinned America, in direct contradiction to the state’s founding principles.
> in direct contradiction to the state’s founding principles
"adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
(I mean, I'm on the side of "all men are created equal, ... with certain unalienable Rights,... among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" but it's hard to deny that that other language is right there as well. Logical implication and noncontradiction do not seem to have been among the founders' strong suits.)
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lMOL7GaPWI
And while anyone can observe the very significant differences in income and wealth among individuals, on its own that observation implies nothing under the constrained vision in which “equality” is seen as a “process characteristic” (everyone is treated equally), but is proof positive of injustice in the unconstrained vision, where equality is seen as a “result characteristic” (everyone achieves equal outcomes).
Going a little further with this idea: how well do unequal outcomes reflect equal treatment? People like Pareto would say some people get better outcomes only because they make better life decisions; people like Veblen would say some people get better outcomes because they make better life decisions, like the decision of which parents to be born to.
It's highly likely that outcomes reflect both decisions and chance (including initial aptitudes for decision making), but I'm unsure anyone to this point has been able to demonstrate what the breakdown between those two factors might be.
(and indeed Pareto predicted that people will tend to fundamentally lean to favouring one or the other explanation, and only secondarily come up with rationalisations that support their basic worldview)
What is the difference between 'decision' and 'chance'? What 'decisions' we make are illusions created by chance; discourse is saturated with this false dichotomy.
Are you suggesting that all is predetermined? Or have I misunderstood?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyrd#Fate_in_Germanic_mytholog... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus#:~:text=Democritus%... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus#Fire_as_symbolic or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination#Hinduism or ???
In fairness, honest evaluations of those factors is nearly impossible for humans. We all have some level of emotion that affects our thinking in this regard.
I’ve not seen anyone convince the girl who got into Stanford or Harvard with straight A’s and a 36 ACT; that the girl who also got straight A’s and a 36, but didn’t get in, was less privileged. (After all, the girl that didn’t get in likely landed at Northwestern or Duke, or what have you.) The Harvard/Stanford person will almost always reliably come up with reasons outside of privilege that they were selected.
As would most of us if we were in that position. It’s almost human nature level impulses evoking our thoughts in these kinds of situations.
Every ___ & their mother has a worldview…
I submit that what pple should focus in trading are ikigais… (although i suspect Pareto could have hidden a hint or two. — here , i have a set of locally pareto-optimal short term life goals, how to make a market?)
(Previously i had wanted to trade experts’ (meta)underwear, but that turned out more to be like the market for million-dollar abstract art which nobody has seen in person! The seller of ikigais, otoh, has almost certainly a glimpse at the very least — Citoyen, dissect his favorite joke!)
EDIT: do. Not. Trust a physicist who tells you that the calculation (or optics alignment) was fun. However. Trust a mathematician (or economist) who happily flips burgers to support their habit. Informatiker/logician: depends on how alexithymic they are, the correlation may surprise you :)
Update: eg Kip Thorne highlighted the joy of having detractors eat crow. Thankfully did not pass on the bag of having “his intuition shredded” or “trying his best to stay away from being bored” or some such inanity :)
Doesn't pareto-optimality require first agreeing on which cone be the positive one?
A market for million-dollar abstract art which it's possible[0] to see in person: https://www.artbasel.com (also suspected by artist friends to be a good way to reward questionable deeds with KYC-friendly[1] gains — pecunia non olet)
KST as a Bartle Killer[2]? That, more than "low stakes", might explain the apparent knife-fight-in-a-phone-booth nature of academic strife?
What is the physicist's equivalent of a favourite wheelbarrow? Best quick and dirty breadboard damping kludge? Honeycomb vs sheer mass?
[0] ok, I haven't been, but I was in town during it once, so I'm pretty confident it exists and is visible.
[1] let's not even mention the cash-onion that is the restaurant business.
[2] there is a theory that all the working dog breed behaviours can basically be explained by selecting for overexpression of a particular phase of prey drive and underexpression of the rest. I guess Nobel Prizes in Physics grew out of some small ur-mammal wanting to model its meals well enough to figure when it'd zig and when it'd zag, and overexpressing this to the point that humans attempt to model the whole damn universe?
It would appear that our cones align well enough to keep the intersection positive (the conversation semiprocrastinative)
I shant say that artbasel doesnt exist. Shall we align yet more finely to note that the various subtypes of the highest level “markets” serve to distort the market so as to stay (mildly) (dys)functional? A taxonomy of the various markets for lemons/_lemons is in order? Restnt biz is further enough off the manifold that i might not find it that interesting, convince me.
>honeycomb… sheer mass
It might be nice to expand on what senses of these words are alluded here.. “honeycombs“ are nice skeletons that (math)phykers found they cud feed into the vN (inker) blackbox & get out some interpretable Rorschach zombies. (Plausibly) Marketable Schlep to put off the potentially ikigai busting hard thinking ?
[2] coevolution? The mainstream, prodded by NPs, might evolve towards dropping the interpretability/identifiability reqs?
KST?
‘views can’t be reconciled’ doesn’t leave room for much nuance or contextualising
This article is attempting just that.
I think it’s trying to explain why there’s no room. There’s only so much room in the grab bag. Or only so many nodes on the tree.
I see where you’re coming from on this one but what is the other option?
A certain subset of conservative evangelical Christians have this whole shtick in which they construct a typology of worldviews – see for example "Hidden worldviews : eight cultural stories that shape our lives" (IVP Academic, 2009), by Mark Sanford and Steve Wilkens, both Azusa Pacific University professors. I can't remember if I've read that specific book, but it was either that book or a similar entry in the genre.
In the abstract it is an interesting idea, but their approach to it is very tendentious. But this post reminded me of it, because it is gesturing in the same direction, even if it never proposes a specific listing of worldviews.
A flagged/dead comment alleged that this was written by an LLM.
While I disagree, I don't think that their accusation was made in bad faith. This article reads like someone whose only human interactions are borne from text books and discussions with others about what comes from the text books.
What if "worldviews" are simply a cheating mechanism invented by the brain to (ex-post) explain, organize and rationalize more innate responses?
Hence, no point to try to deconstruct them because they have no internal consistency whatsoever. E.g., a person lacking in empathy (and acting on it) will find a mental scheme to justify the validity of their actions.
> help to explain seemingly unrelated differences among groups of individuals
I always try to be sceptical of explaining behaviours by certain traits of people because it feels like sooner or later you’re gonna assume things about people which are moreso leaning on the trait than on the person and I think that’s a slippery slope.
I wonder if other people feel like this too sometimes and how they deal with it
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
If you’re discussing large groups of people, you have to somehow compress the data. On the other hand, yeah, you probably shouldn’t prefer things like this to explain your neighbor/friend/in-laws over personal interactions with them.
For me there were two key parts of this post:
1. On prediction: If you had a maximally detailed model of someone's worldview, you would be able to predict their views accurately at a given time. I'm sympathetic to this in principle, because people are often very predictable and stick within their rubric. I would add, though, that worldviews change and evolve in weird ways, and sometimes people also have views that ... don't seem entirely predetermined by their worldviews or their own history? I think there can be something situational and emergent about our views, and this isn't completely predetermined by a worldview. (Let's leave aside that we don't have enough data to accurately construct the originally suggested model — we aren't omniscient, but I for one am OK with that.)
2. On hidden premises: Sometimes you try to have a conversation with someone and find out that they have some basic differences in their theory of knowledge such that you can't get through to them at all. Like "No matter what you say is true, I will hypothesize that evil hidden forces are misleading us." (It's kind of the postmodern version of Descartes' evil demon hypothesis, if you like.) I don't find this claim too surprising in the general case, but I do think, in the specific political context of the USA at the moment, it's worth remembering that it is a nation divided not only by political but also by epistemological differences.
It's a long post but these were the parts I found the most interesting.
I don’t see how a maximally detailed model of someone’s worldview isn’t just a list of their views. Or at least it would be inclusive of their views. And so by definition you’d be able to predict them, as you already have them.
1. This was a hypothetical situation where perfect prediction were possible, explicitly stated as an assumption. Not as fact, but as the basis of a thought experiment.
2. I'm not sure what part of the article you're referring to here, because as far as I understand it, the author is speaking about political and epistemological and every other possible difference, framed as axes in a worldview space.
Not the person you're replying to, but I rolled my eyes and had trouble taking the rest of the article seriously when such an implausible thought experiment came so early in the article without being criticized for the deep flaws in this assumption.
I don't think anyone is internally consistent all the time (yes, including me). Whatever principle or set of principles someone thinks they have, there's always some conceivable situation where we could line them all up so there should be an obvious "right" conclusion, but the person will still instinctively react against it and feel it's wrong.
This is why we won't ever be able to, for example, train up AI surrogates to go have all our arguments for us, on a societal level, faster and in more depth than we ever could since we have to worry about things like continuing to eat, and let them make decisions about agreements that should govern our actions. The agents would run into our self-contradictions all the time, and have to point them out to us to try to get clarity, and then we'd get so frustrated with their pointing this out all the time that we'd turn them off and abandon the whole endeavor.
Since our actions, thoughts are results of complex physical systems within our body, trying to abstract away to some worldview space will always be just that, an abstraction. The only space in which we could make accurate predictions as to a persons viewpoints in different situations is within the mind of Laplace's Demon.
>This is why we won't ever be able to, for example, train up AI surrogates to go have all our arguments for us
Some AI models like those from OpenAI or Anthropic are biased to the left. Anyone can test that. So actually people thought asking machines build arguments for them and trained them accordingly.
Sure. I just mean it won't ever be possible, because we humans are full of contradictions.
> I rolled my eyes and had trouble taking the rest of the article seriously when such an implausible thought experiment came so early in the article without being criticized for the deep flaws in this assumption
The thought experiment wasn't supposed to be 'plausible'. It's purpose was to introduce the concept of worldviews residing in a high dimensional space, which could perhaps be approximated. It was also actually a quote from an earlier article, with more context.
> I don't think anyone is internally consistent all the time
I agree. Only a moron or a God could accomplish such a feat. However, this doesn't invalidate the thought experiment - all you need to do is add a time axis.
"On this particular morning, the Judge had dreamed that she sat in a beautiful parlor while doves fed grain to her kittens. Her general amiability is notably up, and she will deliver far less lenient verdicts all morning because of her contrarian tendencies. Then, a bone in her smoked haddock sandwich triggers repressed childhood memories, leaving her 31.64% more disaffected and apathetic." - The thought experiment could encompass full knowledge of all of this, from moment to moment.
> This is why we won't ever be able to, for example, train up AI surrogates to go have all our arguments for us, on a societal level ... and let them make decisions about agreements that should govern our actions
Is that why? Or is it because by the time AI is that advanced the likelihood of our being able to control it is virtually nil, thanks to a breakneck developmental arms race...
Besides which, being frustrated with clarity is something of a contradiction in itself, lol. I imagine a hyper-intelligent being could teach us to be better people in a way we'd actually like, if they were into that sort of thing. The Culture books explore this quite well.
I like to think of world view as Weltaunschauung. A framework that is less defined by individuals but more by big and small power brokers, media, social media, hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, activists, entertainment industry, celebrities, influencers, activists, academics.
In most of the West, this people create the world view the society is supposed to adhere. By that they are the de facto policy makers, not the government.
When regular people, simple people refuse to vouch for that world view, then there will be tensions.
Yeah I actually read just about all of this. It’s amusing to me because the language used to express banal ideas is so over the top but the subject matter borders on pseudoscience. “Cultish academia”? Not sure. I’m still trying to determine if this is an elaborate troll.
My thoughts are similar. I don’t think it’s a troll, this type of thing is very common.
You don’t have to engage or understand a topic if you can intellectualize it and create “theories” about it.
It’s like when you read blog posts on dating filled with game theory and statistics.
I would have liked to see the author try to spend a year or more trying to earnestly adopt an opposing worldview. Not to try to model another worldview from within their own, but to know what it’s like to be another way.
That would have been more interesting.
it’s the work of criticism, which often seeks to reframe an entire topic or institution by questioning assumptions girding legitimacy and asserting systemic contradictions.
just as valid an approach as immersion into the domain in discussion.
tbh indulgence in both practices is pretty revealing and eye opening for the earnest
I agree. To me it's trying to promote nonsense as scientific truth by using great words.
> the subject matter borders on pseudoscience
The subject matter being "fundamental worldviews"? How is that pseudoscience?
The "Big Five personality traits" is apparently scientific and meaningful, while the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is pseudoscientific nonsense that people used post to their Myspace.
Ironically this is exactly what the article points out in the trait that primarily sees frameworks as the result of power struggles as opposed to a meaningful progression to the truth.
I suppose out of any two things, one is closer to the truth than the other. Take any two giant piles of crap, and you can order them in a way that suggests they're part of progress.
This is quite interesting. I'm not convinced of the core hypothesis, ie. "Psychological Progressives" and "Psychological Conservatives" based on desire to create vs. a desire to preserve.
People who are associated with the current "Progressive" culture are in a lot of cases involved in the project of preserving a number of traditions which have persisted for some time, e.g. access to abortion, or "centralised control of education policy". In this instance, "Conservatives" here are the ones calling for a change.
I think that Carl Schmitt's view of politics as a set of interest groups which are naturally opposed to each other is much more valuable. The middle classes are now default-progressive, whereas the working classes are now default-conservative. Why has this changed? It's changed because the interests of these groups are now served by different policies than was the case 50 years ago as a result of structural economic changes, not because the big-5 personality characteristics of the working class have changed en masse.
access to safe abortions has less tenure as a ‘tradition’ than the previous policy of only unsafe and illegal ocurring. not sure how advancing an enlightened society stands to be categorized as stubborn and traditional resisting change when progress is sought to be repealed.
I'm not sure I'm totally convinced by the overall political analysis either. It can be both, though, right? There's a material-interests part of politics and there can also be an epistemic culture or worldview part of political divides.
Yes. There's an interesting question here of how basic realpolitik interacts with existential priors.
Is it a question of "who does this belief serve?" In other words, socialism served the working classes in the 20th century. It was in their interest to hold the beliefs which underpin it.
Is it simply that a intersectional coalition of the newly-empowered find postmodernism the most plausible philosophy to explain their new-found virtue?
Perhaps that's too cynical. It probably works in both directions.
>I think that Carl Schmitt's view of politics as a set of interest groups which are naturally opposed to each other is much more valuable.
I think that is the marxist view of politics, where society is divided in classes that have different views, different interests and a struggle appears between them.
I never seen this theory work in practice.
I don’t think that the theory is meant to hold true across individuals or betweeen societies/cultures, but rather meant to explain differences. I suppose that is not my point, which is, what views do you hold if you disagree?
I don't have a model which is supposed to describe how society works. I do believe that individuals can share some views and beliefs on some matters and have different views and opinions on some other matters.
Trying to divide society into categories and assigning strong views, beliefs and interests to each category and explaining everything trough that lens might be easy and comfortable but not right.
I appreciate your candor. Your points seem simple and are yet worth noting. I appreciate the way you framed and worded your reply, as it takes a difficult topic and explains the issues without resorting to generalities. It gives more light than heat, to invert the common expectation.
The current mode of public discourse incentivizes reactionary rhetorical swipes at the expense of debate itself. Wedge issues perform an alarming amount of work under these conditions, and once constructed, they continue working even in the absence of effort by their originator.
Do you have any recommendations for readings on topics that seem relevant to your views or points made in this discussion, or that are perhaps adjacent?
The Marxists do take alot from Schmitt, as is Schmitt taking another angle to the same response as the Marxists to the same "problem", towards Liberalism.
The related articles are wild. Looks like a crazy person for me. They are very well trying to disguise as a scientist though.
glad to see people thinking metacognitively, and now meta-ideologically about these things. while the author concludes there isn't a lower dimensional model of worldviews that is analogous to the big-5 personality traits yet, my pet theory is that there in fact one available that comprises at least some types of views, and it's made up of categories of rules.
there is a set of what I can only think of calling synthetic ideologies, which someone produces as a way to entrain others. they're basically mystery cults, where someone finds a recipe for internally consistent complexity based on an explanation, presents it as a model, and then acts as a gatekeeper to the model. my favourite version is ancient astronaut theory because it's a perfect instructive model, but things like astrology, critical theory, antisemitism, the occult, strains of esoteric conspiracy theory, some deep ecology, and transhumanism, are all analogs of each other in that they are predicated on the same iterative loop. string theory begins to look like a fancy one after listening to anyone talk about it at length at all as well.
does the system have predictive power about the physical world, or does it just generate evidence for itself and non-contradictions of it's unfalsifiable premises, and centralize the "guide" to its mysteries? some ideas are filters that are structured very much like comedy, but for credulity instead of laughter. (hate figures fit into this meta model as a pattern of idolatry as well.)
you can generate these logics of ideas and mystery cults with literally anything, and they are interpretive patterns over some legitimate or real things. critical theory appeals to a sense of unfairness, conspiracy theories are often predictive, racism uses a sense of other, the stars imply a sense of place and order, but it's the entrainment step into the promise of transformation and enlightenment that draws people into a worldview.
"here is a solipsism with a seeming paradox that produces uncertainty, nobody has satisfying explanations, could it be our brainworms? virtuous people are open to the possibility!" etc...
Maybe we're turning a corner where we can reason about why we believe things and how to evaluate the quality of a given belief. praise Bob, I am hopeful.
Ancient Aliens is interesting precisely because it doesn't explicitly advocate Ancient Astronaut Theory. Sure, there's a lot of weasel-wording and implication, but they regularly go up to that line without ever crossing it.
I think it ought to be required viewing in elementary schools: spot the point in each episode where they jump the shark.
see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42094214
EDIT: > the stars imply a sense of place and order
that order changes every now and then; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574 (in conjunction with https://xkcd.com/3012/ ?)
A) love to see some serious philosophy on hacker news! Well argued, and impressively interdisciplinary. Of course, this also means I’ve just gotta nitpick.
B) The analytic mindset (worldview, even) rears its head yet again, with the same old “I’ll ask a question, list the possible answers, and select the best one” paradigm as always. It’s an understandable urge of course, but when it comes to philosophy it’s often applied to questions we should not feel quite so confident about our answers to.
More specifically: the idea that worldviews exist as a thing is, IMHO, what the Churchlands (famous philosophy of mind duo in their 90s) would pejoratively call a “folk psychology” concept, a category that also includes Free Will, True Belief, Conscious Awareness, and other things that we feel like should exist but don’t really have a scientific way to phrase, much less prove the existence of.
In this case, what makes it so obvious that worldviews exist in a “high dimensional space” that’s not simply the vector space representing each persons entire cognitive apparatus? You can construct models for this like you can construct models for anything, but the article talks like there really is an underlying structure that we just need to find, both for Personality and Worldview. This quickly leads us astray; rather than starting with political/philosophical/sociological goals and constructing one or more models accordingly, shes seemingly trying to build an argumentative decision tree and arrive at an ultimate conclusion. And it’s not that I don’t like her approach therein, I just don’t think that conclusion exists.
This brings me to the most provocative part of the essay, the discussion (and quick dismissal) of postmodernism. Sure, some artists and Foucaultians can be read as having embraced the “there’s no true reality, all knowledge is derived only from power” thesis discussed here, but I think that’s mostly done for rhetorical and/or political effect. I prefer the “Standpoint Theory”/“Feminist Epistemolgy” phrasing: as imperfect cognitive apparatuses, we are all necessarily and inherently biased. This isn’t to say that we should abandon the (folk?) concept of “truth”, because it’s obviously insanely useful on an instrumental level, and hard to imagine a world-without on a metaphysical one; rather, it’s just to say that we should be realistically humble therein.
*TL;DR:* there is no such thing as worldview or personality to discover, only to engineer. This essay is a great start on that, but seemingly too ambitious in scope.
C) this quote made me throw up in my mouth a lil:
the old vicissitudes of hard work, discovery, improvement, and fecundity.