brightlancer (u/brightlancer)

brightlancer commented on Why I don't discuss politics with friends shwin.co/blog/why-i-dont-... · Posted by u/shw1n

> Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us

I didn't say that you shouldn't bother with people. I said that discussing _policy_ is not useful if you don't agree on _values_. It's the wrong level of abstraction. To put it in a plain analogy: discussing the best route to get to your destination isn't useful if you don't agree on where you are going.

If you want to engage with someone with different values, then the values are where you need to start. If you want to engage with someone on the best way to get somewhere, you need to start by making sure you both agree on where you want to go.

brightlancer · 5 months ago

"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" is a value statement; in the US, some folks agree with it, some do not.

Under your argument, folks who disagreed about that value statement shouldn't bother discussing criminal justice policy; I think that's erroneous and part-and-parcel of Don't Bother With Those People.

Yes, _some_ policy conversations might be futile if folks have completely opposed values, but I don't think we should apply that generally.

We MUST work with people who hold different values than us, without trying to change their values so that they become part of Us.

brightlancer commented on A university president makes a case against cowardice newyorker.com/news/q-and-... · Posted by u/pseudolus

necubi · 5 months ago

Oh hey, Wesleyan on HN! I’m an alumnus (matriculated a year or two after Roth became president). Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).

I’ve had a few opportunities to speak with Roth since the Gaza war started, and I’ve always found him particularly thoughtful about balancing freedom of expression with a need to provide a safe and open learning environment for everyone on campus. In particular, he never gave in to the unlimited demands of protestors while still defending their right to protest.

In part, he had the moral weight to do that because—unlike many university presidents—he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020, which then were turned against the left over the past year.

I don’t see any particularly good outcome from any of this; the risk of damaging the incredibly successful American university system is high. Certainly smart foreign students who long dreamed of studying in the US will be having second thoughts if they can be arbitrarily and indefinitely detained.

But I hope the universities that do make it through do with a stronger commitment to the (small l) liberal values of freedom of expression , academic freedom, and intellectual diversity.

brightlancer · 5 months ago

> Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).

Arson is not protest. Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.

Trump (or anybody) shouldn't be allowed to punish folks for speech or peaceful protest. Unfortunately, folks are calling VIOLENT acts like arson and battery "protest", and threats of bodily harm "speech" ("harassment" or "assault" under most US criminal law) -- we should be in favor of the government stepping in to protect people from arson, battery, and assault/ harassment.

> he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020,

Roth has been president since 2007. What was his response to Nick Christakis's struggle session (plenty of video of that) or Erika Christakis leaving Yale, after she penned an e-mail that students should be able to handle Halloween costumes they find offensive?

The American Left has been illiberal and going after speech for decades; it didn't start post-2020.

brightlancer commented on Why I don't discuss politics with friends shwin.co/blog/why-i-dont-... · Posted by u/shw1n

potato3732842 · 5 months ago

>In other words, a politically thoughtful and independent person probably has a basket of opinions that don’t fit into neat left or right, liberal or conservative, etc. categories.

That doesn't stop them from voting a straight red or blue ticket every time if that's what they've been indoctrinated to do.

We've all encountered some old man who by all accounts should be a republican. They own a small business, have conservative social views, like their guns, minimize taxes, etc, etc. But they vote a straight blue ticket because that's what they learned to do back in the 1960s. And on the other side is the stereotypical southern white woman who believes in every social thing the democratic party has but still votes red because she was raised in a religious household and came of age during the peak of the right's lean toward peddling to christians.

brightlancer · 5 months ago

This is such a great contrast:

> But they vote a straight blue ticket because that's what they learned to do back in the 1960s.

and

> but still votes red because she was raised in a religious household and came of age during the peak of the right's lean toward peddling to christians.

There's no explanation for why the old man votes "blue" other than he learned it in the 60s. OTOH, the woman votes "red" because "she was raised in a religious household" and started voting when The Right was "peddling to christians".

"peddling" -- that's a pretty negative term.

I don't know if it's ironic or demonstrative that an article about how difficult it can be to have political conversations produces a comment thread with such biased viewpoints.

brightlancer commented on Why I don't discuss politics with friends shwin.co/blog/why-i-dont-... · Posted by u/shw1n

nickff · 5 months ago

Kling and Haidt would agree with your respective paragraphs, though they do add a lot of color, and their books are worth reading.

brightlancer · 5 months ago

I've listened to Haidt speak about it and his book is in my tall stack to read; I don't think I'd heard of King but I grabbed the PDF. Thank you.

brightlancer commented on Why I don't discuss politics with friends shwin.co/blog/why-i-dont-... · Posted by u/shw1n

pixl97 · 5 months ago

I mean it is a good filter to understand someone with. When I moved from the midwest to the south as a teenager and learned there are still plenty of people that were unhappy the south lost the civil war and want to remedy that you begin to understand there are some people that are deeply entrenched in their views and you have to make a judgement on how much time you're going to spend dealing with that.

brightlancer · 5 months ago

> learned there are still plenty of people that were unhappy the south lost the civil war and want to remedy that

Did you peel that back to the next layer? Did they want to reintroduce slavery? Or did they want independence from a distant government?

I knew folks in the South who thought some of the craziest racist things and probably would've been OK with slavery (I did hear them promote segregation).

At the same time, the vast majority folks I knew who defended the Civil War or wanted secession didn't want slavery or segregation, but local (and often less) government. Did they misunderstand the role of slavery in the Southern secession? Usually. Does that change their _current intent_? No.

The latter group (which was much larger) should be engaged with on the issue of local government and secession, especially in the context of folks in Blue States who've been rattling about secession under Trump.

brightlancer commented on Why I don't discuss politics with friends shwin.co/blog/why-i-dont-... · Posted by u/shw1n

nixonaddiction · 5 months ago

"healthcare should be for everyone" is a great claim to make. but then the question is implementation. how will you get rid of the current system and replace it with a more equitable one? people are generally hesitant to make changes unless things are really bad. i like to think of this in terms of chemical bonds - people are bonded to their current systems, and wont break those bonds unless they are under enough stress that bond breakage is favorable. and once you start arguing for destruction of the current system, the morality gets fuzzy. do you support accelerationism, or a more gradual change? and then once you are in the weeds of implementing a fairer healthcare system, things are just genuinely terrible. i am very uninvolved in the healthcare system, but you need organizational structures, supply chain, etc. someone somewhere will probably try and be selfish about things which will make everything harder. structures will have to be built to deal with legal minutia. and meanwhile there are all these other preexisting systems used to the former system that struggle to make the switch instantaneously? every question is complicated and awful once you think about implementation. nothing is ever self evident. imo!

brightlancer · 5 months ago

> "healthcare should be for everyone" is a great claim to make. but then the question is implementation. how will you get rid of the current system and replace it with a more equitable one?

And as importantly, what does "more equitable" or "fairer" mean? More broadly, how do people define "better"?

In the US, a major issue is that The D and The R have radically different ideas of what those words mean, even though they agree on the high level objectives like "healthcare should be for everyone".

brightlancer commented on Why I don't discuss politics with friends shwin.co/blog/why-i-dont-... · Posted by u/shw1n

nickff · 5 months ago

Even the language that the different parties use is targeted at certain sets of values; Arnold Kling wrote this short book on the subject ("The Three Languages of Politics"): https://cdn.cato.org/libertarianismdotorg/books/ThreeLanguag...

"The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt is another, more nuanced (and complicated), but extremely interesting take on the subject of how values drive political affiliation.

brightlancer · 5 months ago

Framing has always been used in political debate just to target certain values; what may have changed (or not) is as a deliberate tactic to keep people divided: folks who do not speak the same language cannot communicate.

On a lot of issues, I think 80% of folks are in 80% of agreement, but the partisans (whether politicians or activists) are framing the issue to prevent that consensus, because the partisans want something in the 20% that 80% of folks don't agree with.

brightlancer commented on Why I don't discuss politics with friends shwin.co/blog/why-i-dont-... · Posted by u/shw1n

rebeccaskinner · 5 months ago

For all of the author's bloviating and self-congratulating navel gazing, the article manages to largely overlook values, the only mention of them being to dismissively reduce them to irrational tribalism.

In truth, values and ethics are fundamental to effectively discussing politics. After all, all political decisions are ultimately about how we want to shape the world that we as humans live in. There can be no agreement about economic policy without a shared understanding of the ultimate goal of an economy. No agreement about foreign relations without a shared understanding of the role of nations as representatives for groups of humans, and how we believe one group of humans should interact with another group of humans through the lens of nations.

For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent. The policies are different too, but over time we've gone from a world where there were at least some cases where the two parties had different policies for how to reach the same goals, and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.

In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values". If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values.

brightlancer · 5 months ago

> For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent.

Except that the "values" each promotes are often inconsistent with other "values" they promote, sometimes to the point of absurd irrationality, e.g. marijuana vs tobacco or alcohol.

And other "values" are completely independent, but correlate so highly that "tribalism" is a much better explainer, e.g. abortion and guns.

> and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.

That's not new.

On a very high level, the two major parties do want everyone to be healthy, wealthy and wise -- the issue is that they disagree on what those words mean, and what should be sacrificed (and by whom) to achieve it, which means the two major parties have always had very different visions of the future.

> If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values.

And that right there is a call to tribalism: Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us.

brightlancer commented on Why is the world losing color? culture-critic.com/p/why-... · Posted by u/trevin

crazygringo · 5 months ago

> that dark and washed out TV is just a choice everyone's making for... unclear reasons.

It's just a question of aesthetics. TNG was lit almost more like a sitcom, with bright even lighting coming from all directions. In the 1990's, that made TNG look like a TV show, and look very different from dramatic movies.

Then with the rise of TV as an art form rivaling movies, certain dramatic TV shows have been lit more like dramatic, dark movies. Lots of highlights and shadows, instead of even lightning. It's meant to seem more sophisticated, serious, and artful. It also demands that you be watching in more of a cinema-like environment -- a bright, high-contrast TV in a dark room, so you can see the darks. Not a crappy low-contrast screen in a bright room.

But again, this is only certain types of shows. Comedies and "lighter" dramas are still lit more like TNG. It really depends on the show, and what mood the creators want to evoke throughout.

brightlancer · 5 months ago

TNG was lit much like other action/adventure shows when it debuted in 1987, e.g. MacGyver, Magnum PI, Simon & Simon, The A-Team (which ended that spring) -- the Bridge and hallways were much brighter than even a sitcom, I'd bet as a specific aesthetic choice of The Future Is Bright.

When DS9 debuted a few years later, it was stepping into a cultural mindset that had embraced Dark And Gritty in broader entertainment. That series is still much brighter than many shows today, but that's because of a technological revolution (including costs) rather than a change of "TV as an art form rivaling movies".

Yes, there is a mindset within Hollywood circle(jerk)s that so-dark-I-cannot-see is "more sophisticated, serious, and artful", but viewers broadly think it is idiotic. (Also, 2-and-a-half or 3 hour movie runtimes.)

brightlancer commented on Most people don't care about quality shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/12/... · Posted by u/ColinWright

jonahx · 8 months ago

> There's nothing we can say about a thing with "quality" we couldn't also say by tediously listing every single property it has. The only thing that only "quality" can add is information about what the speaker thinks is good.

In most fields (film, painting, music, etc), there are standards -- agreed upon to varying degrees, sometimes almost unanimously, sometimes with only a plurality -- based on objective or almost-objective criteria. In other words, there are "measurable" criteria that expert or even merely good practitioners can agree on. In these cases the word "quality" is often used as a shorthand for possessing these kinds of properties. In this sense, ascribing quality is functionally different from a mere opinion, linguistically and technically.

Of course, you can argue that all those experts have no priority over anyone else's opinion -- nevertheless, the usage distinction remains. In addition, I think that point of view is either trivially true (because sure, no we can't ask God to tell us who's right) or meaningless (because there are many differences between experts and non-experts, even if you have contempt for expertise).

brightlancer · 8 months ago

> In most fields (film, painting, music, etc), there are standards -- agreed upon to varying degrees, sometimes almost unanimously, sometimes with only a plurality -- based on objective or almost-objective criteria. In other words, there are "measurable" criteria that expert or even merely good practitioners can agree on. In these cases the word "quality" is often used as a shorthand for possessing these kinds of properties. In this sense, ascribing quality is functionally different from a mere opinion, linguistically and technically.

Could that be selection bias, where people who think X is "quality" promote other people who agree and push down those who disagree?

At that point, it may be true Agree X has found something objective and measurable, but they're using circular reasoning: these metrics are important because they show "quality", and we know it is "quality" because of those metrics.