Before making moral evaluations, it's really useful to look at these situations, and try to automatically reverse the "polarity" of the actors involved. If you see people doing something and you think they're on your side, imagine a similar scenario in which people are taking the same actions for a cause you are violently opposed to, or on behalf of a group you find deplorable. And vice versa. This helps reduce the chances you'll get confused and take a hypocritical position.
or even simpler, stop being on a side, then you don't have to do mental tricks like "reversing the polarity". you can just see things for the way they are, without personal identity invested in the situation. this is exactly what being independent is.
This isn't just partisan "sides." It's also sides of specific legal questions.
I don't think "just stop picking a side regarding abortion, gun ownership, or gay marriage" is a reasonable solution. These are political wedge issues, but they are also legal questions with answers that can affect your daily life. Of course you want it to go a certain way!
If you've got an opinion on some issue, especially a strong one, then you're on a side, and there is an 'other'. Be careful not to conflate a sense of your own independence with a sense of your own lack of biases or immunity to human irrationality.
No it's not. Being independent just means your personal identity isn't "My political party is X." There's still your mental image of yourself and it shapes your opinions ("What would do I think the kind of person I want to be would think about an issue like this?"). This is pretty much inescapable.
Not having a side is a nice idea until your opponent forces you into a side. Then they complain when you defend yourself or you must give into their side.
Like when someone is arguing that people with your attributes should be killed or should have less rights than other people you don't have a choice in the matter. If you have a coworker yelling about how gay people are inferior to their openly gay coworker, there's no getting out of choosing a side.
I think of the abortion issue as like a necker cube. You can view the optical illusion as extending inward or outward. But it is difficult to see it both ways. You could easily see it as flat, but then you aren't really seeing it at all.
Partisans may object "but in the abortion case it is objectively extending inward and the other perspective is the optical illusion". But that objectivity is a moral illusion.
> Subjects of opposing cultural outlooks who were assigned to the same experimental condition (and thus had the same belief about the nature of the protest) disagreed sharply on key “facts” — including whether the protestors obstructed and threatened pedestrians.
That's scary, but it's potentially really helpful in understanding the connections between language and belief.
I know there's some controversy about the validity of the so-called Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, but the idea that language and perception affect political culture was well understood by George Orwell, and I'm not surprised if the idea intersects well with the "ultimate attribution error" phenomenon from social psychology.
I think the problem with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (aside from being poorly named) is that it seems to posit that the lack of a word for a thing, prevents you from perceiving that thing (as for example not having fifty words for snow means you cannot perceive different kinds of snow). This is pretty clearly incorrect, since it is the very lack of a word for a thing that you perceive (and want to talk about) that leads us to invent new words (or repurpose old ones). Thus, English-speaking skiers come up with a new use of the term "powder" to refer to a particular kind of snow, once they have a reason to care about it and want to discuss it with one another.
The more general idea that language and perception affect political culture is not as controversial, although the degree to which the tail wags the dog or vice versa is still debated.
I thought the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis only predicted that the difficulty in understanding certain things would be language dependent, not that it would be impossible per se. To make an apt analogy, some languages force you to declare a whole bunch of factory methods and boilerplate bloat before you can express a program that prints "hello world", others simply let you write print("hello world").
The authors also give the paper some motivation at the outset by referring to a dispute between Supreme Court justices about what should be obvious to a viewer of a video of a protest. One justice said that the video depicted protected speech activity, while another said that it didn't.
This is why it's so important to deliberately escape any filter bubbles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble) you may be in.
Pre-2015 reddit's r/all was a reasonable, if lazy way to do this. After their free speech bait & switch it became mostly useless for anything but entertainment and establishment/Democrat propaganda.
Here's a subset of my "daily" bookmark folder that at least attempts to do this for me when combined with honestly too heavy reddit/facebook usage:
Are some of them controversial? Of course, but that's the point. The wildly authoritarian left leaning sites that comprise big tech as a whole represent a single filter bubble. Staying in any particular bubble (right wing ones exist too) is a great way to turn yourself into a useful idiot/cultists/NPC.
Because the difficulty of tuning into a site that only leans in one direction isn't that you'll get biased news coverage, but whole entire stories are completely left out if they're bad for that side, and stories that are eventually found to be wildly incorrect, or even completely false issue only the quietest of correction edits while the untrue memes repeat ad infinite, but sites that lean the other way will ruthlessly correct their opponents.
The most important things to be reading are the things that are never talked about in your bias-confirming sources of infotainment.
tl;dr: filter bubbles bad, they'll turn you into a cultist
Readit News
I don't think "just stop picking a side regarding abortion, gun ownership, or gay marriage" is a reasonable solution. These are political wedge issues, but they are also legal questions with answers that can affect your daily life. Of course you want it to go a certain way!
"I think that, a) you have an act, and that, b) not having an act is your act."
-- Linda Powell, Singles [1992]
Like when someone is arguing that people with your attributes should be killed or should have less rights than other people you don't have a choice in the matter. If you have a coworker yelling about how gay people are inferior to their openly gay coworker, there's no getting out of choosing a side.
Partisans may object "but in the abortion case it is objectively extending inward and the other perspective is the optical illusion". But that objectivity is a moral illusion.
That's scary, but it's potentially really helpful in understanding the connections between language and belief.
I know there's some controversy about the validity of the so-called Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, but the idea that language and perception affect political culture was well understood by George Orwell, and I'm not surprised if the idea intersects well with the "ultimate attribution error" phenomenon from social psychology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error
The more general idea that language and perception affect political culture is not as controversial, although the degree to which the tail wags the dog or vice versa is still debated.
https://poetry-contingency.uwaterloo.ca/fifty-five-english-w...
https://www.farmersalmanac.com/how-many-words-snow-16650
Here's a subset of my "daily" bookmark folder that at least attempts to do this for me when combined with honestly too heavy reddit/facebook usage:
* http://news.ycombinator.com/
* https://poal.co/
* http://slashdot.org/
* https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
* https://gab.com/
* https://www.unz.com/
* https://gettr.com/
Are some of them controversial? Of course, but that's the point. The wildly authoritarian left leaning sites that comprise big tech as a whole represent a single filter bubble. Staying in any particular bubble (right wing ones exist too) is a great way to turn yourself into a useful idiot/cultists/NPC.
Because the difficulty of tuning into a site that only leans in one direction isn't that you'll get biased news coverage, but whole entire stories are completely left out if they're bad for that side, and stories that are eventually found to be wildly incorrect, or even completely false issue only the quietest of correction edits while the untrue memes repeat ad infinite, but sites that lean the other way will ruthlessly correct their opponents.
The most important things to be reading are the things that are never talked about in your bias-confirming sources of infotainment.
tl;dr: filter bubbles bad, they'll turn you into a cultist
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