41–50 of 249 posts
If you haven't seen it yet, Nautil.us has a very spotty record of paying their workers over the last year at least.
https://nwu.org/an-open-letter-from-freelancers-at-nautilus-...
This is where countries with some sort of mandatory service may have us beat. And maybe it explains why American policy was so focused after the big national wars. I don't think there's a better way to force camaraderie. But then it becomes Us vs Them on the other side of the border.
I am very in favor of mandatory service as a strategy to improve nations but I do want to point out that some of the most impressive ones (South Korea and Israel come to mind) are extremely homogenous.
The article mentions studies done with fMRI on people recognizing "Us" vs. "Them". Anyone know of similar studies done on neuro-atypical people? I'm particularly interested about studies for people on the autism spectrum and people with anti-social personality disorder.
This is also my meta-answer for those who think that even today the us/them mechanism has no value. I've read some accounts of trying to raise children with Williams Syndrome. Truly defaulting to 100% trust is pathologically dangerous even in the safest places you can imagine in the US. People who are imagining that they are open and trusting still don't realize how much they are defending themselves, until they compare themselves to someone who seems to truly lack those mechanisms.
Which doesn't invalidate the idea that we may need less us/them than we currently have, but that doesn't prove or even provide a lot of evidence for the idea that the correct amount is zero.
(Long before the singularity arrives to wipe us all out, we face a greater danger from someone managing to successfully socially engineer the population, and in their infinite wisdom, doing something very, very stupid, such as setting our outgroup trust to 100% all the time, with no way to modify it based on experience, and rendering the entire population trivially exploitable by the first parasite that comes along or something.)
Unpopular opinion - Is this something that we should seek to overcome entirely? These judgement calls are hard-wired into us for a reason. Whilst there are scenarios in which it is bad, there are scenarios in which it is good.
I can't think of any examples in which it is good. I also think that is a mischaracterization of the problem, and of the solution. Our instinct is to trust those in our communities, and distrust those outside our communities. While that was useful in the past, two significant things have changed: 1. We are in a civilized society where it is to our advantage to begin relationships with trust rather than distrust. 2. W…
Both are effectively stable equilibria, so it's hard to upgrade trust across a society. And where it's possible to profit from breach of trust it becomes profitable for a few to turn a society from high-trust into low-trust, which I suspect is happening at the moment in the West.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't think of any examples in which it is good. I also think that is a mischaracterization of the problem, and of the solution. Our instinct is to trust those in our communities, and distrust those outside our communities. While that was useful in the past, two significant things have changed: 1. We are in a civilized society where it is to our advantage to begin relationships with trust rather than distrust. 2. W…
I’ve come to the exact opposite conclusion. We live in a world driven by marketing/advertising, hyper politicalization of all things, dark user patterns, spy-ware, government agendas... Entering any relationship with a default of distrust and allowing trust to be earned seems very prudent in 2017 (and probably any other time period).
The distinction is that people who disagree with us are not out to do us harm.
We can disagree and work together.
Trust is a nuanced subject, which is the very fact the "Us vs. Them" attitude ignores. If we clump everyone who disagrees with "us" into one group, we turn a prudent critical attitude into blatant distrust.
It is important for us to be critical of ideas, but not of people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what if there is a group whose strategy is to take advantage of the trusting nature of everyone else for its own gains? In that case it would be advantageous to unite against them. Universal cooperation and trust is great when there are no attackers but it needs to be hardened against attacks somehow. Also, does universal collaboration necessarily bring the best results? Seems like there might be a number of peop…
If you mean a culture war scenario, this was discussed briefly in the article - do you focus on the success of your Us, or on the relative success of your Us as compared to your Them? I prefer the former, because it is a pure "improvement" mindset, whereas the latter allows for "success" via subjugation of other people while your Us stagnants.
This is where countries with some sort of mandatory service may have us beat. And maybe it explains why American policy was so focused after the big national wars. I don't think there's a better way to force camaraderie. But then it becomes Us vs Them on the other side of the border.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the biggest thing we're missing in the fight against 2-party system is an actual representative voting scheme. A first-past-the-post [1] voting scheme will always result in 2 parties (assuming it doesn't collapse into a single-party autocracy) due to the spoiler [2] 3rd party vote problem. It's not psychology but basic probability math and game theory. Why is not fixed? Because this is the cheapest way for the mo…
I think it's both. What I was unclear about is that our best method for fighting the current system is to convince a significant portion of the electorate to vote for a third party candidate. Because we all know the system is against us, we are afraid to work together to circumvent it. We can't replace the system until we use our votes to do so.
We need main 2-party candidates like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders (who understood that running as an Independent is mathematically impossible in any meaningful election so switched their party affiliations).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am very in favor of mandatory service as a strategy to improve nations but I do want to point out that some of the most impressive ones (South Korea and Israel come to mind) are extremely homogenous.
Is Israel really homogeneous?