My granfalloon is anyone who knows the meaning of granfalloon.
I thought it was the name of a bar.
Granfalloon technique
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: Granfalloon technique
#12This phenomenon is root of all evil in modern day America. People identify with political parties as though they are sports teams. Team R or Team D. If you're one of such people (and there seem to be relatively few of them on HN), please consider where this will lead the country.
Why do you believe that is not a rational way to act in this environment?
Paul Graham explains it well: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
Re: Granfalloon technique
#13This phenomenon is root of all evil in modern day America. People identify with political parties as though they are sports teams. Team R or Team D. If you're one of such people (and there seem to be relatively few of them on HN), please consider where this will lead the country.
PG's "Keep Your Identity Small" should be required reading in high school / college: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
Unfortunately, humans are to some extent intrinsically tribal (when Haidt calls us "90% ape, 10% beehive", I think he's being exceptionally generous). This is so pervasive in our nature, it tends to be unconscious: if I consider an existential crisis for the opposing political party to win, I'll likely filter my thinking to that end, minimizing faults and maximizing virtues in my party, and doing the opposite with my opponents. As they do the same, it creates a race to the bottom, and all norms and decorum and fairness go out the window, in pursuit of victory and raw power.
Jason Brennan makes a compelling case [0] that democracy makes this problem worse. A lot can be chalked up to our electoral process being an utter failure of implementing democracy, from campaign finance corruption to First-Past-The-Post (to say nothing of more advanced ideas like holacracy, liquid democracy, public choice econ, etc); nonetheless, there's a case that the tribal dynamics inherent to politics creates perverse incentives for truth-seeking and sense-making.
I'm starting to think that democracy is only the second-worst system (except for all the others), and we'd get better results with a completely random lottery [1].
Re: Granfalloon technique
#14My granfalloon is anyone who knows the meaning of granfalloon.
I love these sorts of "conceptual onomatopoeias" :)
- "word"
- every Audible book begins with: "this is audible"
- "shibboleth" works perfectly well as a shibboleth
Re: Granfalloon technique
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you believe that is not a rational way to act in this environment?
Paul Graham explains it well: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
He suggests keeping your identity small. There is only so much you can do on that front. Some potential government policies are beneficial for people with certain characteristics, including immutable ones or ones that are difficult to change, and harmful for other people. Why would it not be rational for people to align politically along the lines of those characteristics to push for policies that benefit them on that basis, especially if they believe people who don't have those characteristics are aligning to push against them?
Re: Granfalloon technique
#16Hoosiers! (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3789074-hazel-obsession-wit...)
Scroll up in the linked Wikipedia submission, and read Cat's Cradle if you haven't. This is nothing new - Cat's Cradle was published in 1963 - just looked back to Seuss and star-bellied Sneetches. It's simply become magnified w/ self-reinforcing social platform dynamics.
Re: Granfalloon technique
#17My granfalloon is anyone who knows the meaning of granfalloon.
No, that is actually a perfectly reasonable karass.
Re: Granfalloon technique
#18An implication of this is that labeling groups you disagree with may actually serve to strengthen their commitment to that disagreement. I.e. calling someone a climate change denier or an anti-vaxxer, groups them with other people with the same misconceptions, and strengthens their commitment to the ideas because it's now a commitment to their group.
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Re: Granfalloon technique
#19I'm reminded of the experiments where camp kids were randomly given blue and red shirts, and it took them less than an hour to form in-group/out-group dynamics and tribal loyalty based on shirts alone. The thing is, from a game-theoretic standpoint, tribal loyalty is a Schelling focus [0]: your calculation about what alliance(s) to invest in, are inherently influenced by your calculations of the calculations of other…
From the perspextive of evolutionary game theory, right? I don't remember exactly what was Schelling's approach, but "game theory", without qualifiers, usually refers to games between given rational players as opposed to say populations with predetermined strategies.
Re: Granfalloon technique
#20"They had found a can of white paint, and on the front doors of the cab Frank had painted white stars, and on the roof he had painted the letters of a granfalloon: U.S.A."
– Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
The COVID-19 pandemic will test the assertion that the USA is a granfalloon. And presage our ability to tackle climate change.