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The Two Kinds of Moderate

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#191

Post by morelisp »

redisman wrote: post #145
nottorp wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, what left in the US? They have no idea what "left" is...

The "extreme" left in the US system maps (policy-wise) almost exactly to center-right in most other western democracies. Talking about viable politicians not twitter creatures by the way.

This was true 10 years ago, but the US finally has a few genuinely left politicians (firmly center-left outside the US), and many European democracies drifted to the right (liberals to differentiate from 15 years of neoliberal center-left parties, center-right to head off the far right).

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#192

Post by zozbot234 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #184
zozbot234 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best argument for Marxism isn't the USSR - it's China. They've actually managed to turn into a modern, mostly-developed country, though the process is most likely far from complete. The USSR was a dismal failure by comparison. BTW, they're even launching their own space satelites, men in space, moon probes and whatnot lately.

But the way China turned into a modern, mostly-developed country was to turn away from what Marxism said about how to run an economy, and turn back at least part of the way to capitalism. What they kept from Marxism (or at least the Soviet Union) is the one-party dictatorship. So not that great an argument for Marxism after all.

Hey, I never said that this would be a great argument; I just think that it's the best available one.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#193

Post by asdfman123 »

roenxi wrote: post #187
asdfman123 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tons of people out there "can't join any tribe" because their belief systems are sufficiently different than those of people around them, and the way this is written suggests that it's almost a novel idea to Paul Graham. Has anyone cornered him and beaten him up for having moderate beliefs? And having beliefs across the political spectrum hardly makes him novel. I'm probably a classic left leaning liberal. I'm in fav…

> Has anyone cornered him and beaten him up for having moderate beliefs? Going again to the 'not actually reading the article' point, he has sneakily defined a moderate as someone potentially only holding extremest beliefs and probably as likely to be beaten up as anyone else. An extremist moderate, say. > I'm in favor of ... but I refuse to vote for Republicans There are good and bad people in every part of the spec…

I have a Republican in my district who I quite like but cannot vote for because congresspeople aren't able to vote for themselves, but with the rest of their party. The Republican party consistently votes against, and does damage to, many things I hold dear, so voting democrat is the lesser evil unless the democratic candidate is corrupt or inept.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#194

Post by SkyBelow »

asdfman123 wrote: post #135
karl11 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My takeaway from this comment is that you didn't really read what he wrote. An accidental moderate, by his definition, could hold zero moderate opinions. E.g. it is possible all of their opinions are 0 or 100 on a left/right spectrum. It requires courage because they cannot join any tribe, because enough of those opinions would be heretical to a given tribe to prevent acceptance.

Tons of people out there "can't join any tribe" because their belief systems are sufficiently different than those of people around them, and the way this is written suggests that it's almost a novel idea to Paul Graham. Has anyone cornered him and beaten him up for having moderate beliefs? And having beliefs across the political spectrum hardly makes him novel. I'm probably a classic left leaning liberal. I'm in fav…

>Has anyone cornered him and beaten him up for having moderate beliefs?

The question would be has anyone beaten him up for having conservative or liberal beliefs when in a group who has the opposite.

But then I wonder about this judgment in general. How political groups are generally getting beaten up for their political opinions. Back in my college days I use to try supporting some really out there views as experiments in taking human stances to their natural conclusions, and while I did have a few professors sit me down and have a talk to determine if I was being serious, I was never beaten up for any of them. The entire metric of if people use physical violence against you is partially dependent upon a person's ability to know when they are crossing a line or not, much like how I stopped this behavior after college because it would get me fired.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#195

Post by slashdev »

asdfman123 wrote: post #109

Ah yes, the old "No one thinks for themselves except people like me" argument. > openly being an accidental moderate requires the most courage of all If he thinks that having middle-of-the-road opinions requires the most courage of them all, he has had an extraordinarily easily life in which he is used to be hailed as brilliant. It seems as though due to his comfortable position in life he has never faced any signifi…

As an accidental moderate myself, it does take courage. You don't belong on the right or the left. I'm too liberal for conservatives, and too conservative for liberals. I'm not even part of my parent's political or religious tribe. An accidental moderate means being tribeless.

It doesn't surprise me that those kinds of people would be more impressive, since anyone who describes themselves as right or left, democrat or republican, liberal or conservative, inherits their opinions instead of choosing them one-by-one on the basis of merits. I mean accidental moderates are pretty much the only adults in the room, and everyone else are child-like in their beliefs. Why should it surprise anyone that the adults accomplish more impressive things?

EDIT I should add that I think everyone is really some level of accidental moderate, because there are not too many pure ideologues and not too many pure free-thinkers out there. But I think it is fair to say that the average person on the street is mostly not free-thinking about tribal things like politics or religion. And I'm sure I'm not fully-free thinking either.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#196

Post by sagichmal »

war1025 wrote: post #23
msla wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think another way to slice this is, if you think of the Overton window shifting along the axis of time, the “accidental moderate” does not shift their opinion by the same factor as the ends of the window shift. You can see this with the Republicans who turned into Democrats once the Republicans shifted far enough right that there were no more Rockefeller Republicans and Bill Clinton ran as a Democrat. If you're a…

> You can see this with the Republicans who turned into Democrats once the Republicans shifted far enough right that there were no more Rockefeller Republicans and Bill Clinton ran as a Democrat. If you're an accidental moderate, you run the risk of involuntarily changing party affiliation. I think this is interesting because it's been exactly the opposite for me and many of the people I know. At some point over the…

This political perspective is completely incoherent. Democrats have shifted rightward since WWII, along with every other political group in the country. Former Democrats who become Republicans because they feel the party has shifted out from under them are creating excuses to mask their own changing opinions.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#197

Post by morelisp »

hindsightbias wrote: post #166
wbronitsky wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is Hillary Clinton a Marxist? That seems like a pretty outlandish statement directed towards someone with so much money and power

You’re not aware of Hillary as Saul Alinsky’s disciple? It was a right wing staple for the entire campaign.

(Upvoted on the assumption that you're trying to educate people about the right's tactics rather than actually advancing this position - unfortunately a lot of people genuinely believe this, even upthread, so it's hard to tell from short comments.)

((And meanwhile, Alinsky's playbook did actually work wonders for the Tea Party.))

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#198

Post by ineedasername »

I understand the concept of intentional moderate as he explains it, but I honestly have never met anyone who formulates their beliefs that way, who deliberately tries to find a middle point on the spectrum regardless of the specific details. Of course that could be my social circle, which is why it would be a lot more constructive if Graham had given a bit of concrete example on this. Especially given that just about everyone on any side of the political landscape will assert that they do in fact think about each issue independently. I doubt many people would say, "I believe this because it's a conservative belief and I am conservative so I must believe it". No, they will say, and believe, that they have formed their own opinions, and they just happen to align pretty much exclusively with conservative (or liberal) ideology.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#199

Post by phnofive »

youdontknowtho wrote: post #108

"and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong" I disagree with this in the strongest terms. I realize that the people on this site lean right, and arguing politics isn't really cricket, so I won't go into to why. The "center" is a political ideology that pretends that it's something else. Also, being good at one thing doesn't make someone's opinion about everything else important.

In context:

> Accidental moderates end up in the middle, on average, because they make up their own minds about each question, and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong.

I disagree as well, but it could be revised to:

> and the [accidental moderate believes that] far right and far left are roughly equally wrong.

This would make the definition somewhat more sensible, though I'd still disagree with it.

I wasn't able to turn up demographics for the site, so I can't outright disagree with you on the political leanings of HN, but I'm curious to know what they are.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#200

Post by itronitron »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #74
pjc50 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To use a perhaps extreme example: there's lots of injustice happening right now in China, and not a lot can be done directly to fix it. Well, that's fundamentally the tradeoff that China (and quite a lot of the other Asian states e.g. Singapore) have made; their ruling class picked stability over freedom, and hoped that the economic growth would keep everyone happy while at the same time preventing organisation out…

Yes, and I'm not totally comfortable with their trade-offs. I feel they're on the side of "too much order, too little justice". So this already establishes a ceiling along some dimensions. > I agree that needlessly destabilising situations is bad, but also that very large injustices can persist in the name of stability. It's not a simple problem. My point exactly. And I bring this up because I see the MLK quote you p…

'too much order, too little justice' is never a conclusion that is made by the people in charge
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