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How can we break our addiction to contempt?

freakonomics.com

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Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#141

Post by dragonwriter »

shaldjfb wrote: post #10
panzagl wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right because conservative = bad and deserving of contempt. This is exactly the type of kneejerk reaction that he is talking about. The 1% do just as well when Democrats are in office, but keep on playing the game ruled by tribe and emotion, see where that gets us.

The Democratic Party is conservative by any popular measure outside of the insular American worldview. In many European countries, the Democratic Party’s politics would be considered far right.

> The Democratic Party is conservative by any popular measure outside of the insular American worldview

Its mostly a center-right / center-left coalition with the center-right currently slightly stronger (until very recently much stronger). While it leans right, it isn't coherently conservative, even by international standards.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#142

Post by maxerickson »

caylus wrote: post #68
Pxtl wrote: post #34

What's notable is where you can see reality come crashing into people who treat policy like it's a simple team sport. COVID doesn't care about your feelings, and the very real impact of higher infection rates and lower vaccination coverage is demonstrating who exactly has so dug-in on their position so far that they've become utterly disconnected from reality.

Are you implying that areas of lower vaccination coverage are seeing higher infection rates? That does not seem to be the case under rigorous analysis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/ That's the problem with "reality" - the reality you see is driven by the media that reports the reality to you. Presumably the media you read likes to run stories like "lots of cases in Florida" to score points aga…

"rigorous analysis"

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#143

Post by dang »

alexfromapex wrote: post #3

"Arthur Brooks is an economist who for 10 years ran the American Enterprise Institute, one of the most influential conservative think tanks in the world. He has come to believe there is only one weapon that can defeat our extreme political polarization: love." ... in other words, we're all doomed.

"Don't be snarky."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#144

Post by dang »

registeredcorn wrote: post #47

How can one break an addiction to contempt? The answer is dead simple. Follow the Prince of Peace. > Living the New Life > Therefore, I say this and testify in the Lord: You should no longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their thoughts. They are darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them and because of the hardness of their hearts. They bec…

Please don't post religious flamebait to HN. We're trying to avoid religious flamewars, which is what this very likely leads to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#145

Post by dang »

at_a_remove wrote: post #13

What's the Matter with Kansas? is a lovely example of contempt disguised as gentle inquiry, with a touch of worry over another, and it starts even with the title itself. "Why those poor, naive, uneducated conservatives in the flyover states, they simply do not understand that they are voting against their own interests." It's concern-trolling with a mask of pity. Once you begin looking for it, you can see it more and…

I haven't read that book but I think you may be misassessing Thomas Frank, who of course is from Kansas and whose main interest is rehabilitating progressive populism. Wasn't the title ironic? Having read/heard other things, I assumed he was really trying to explain what was the matter with the people who ask that.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#146

Post by dang »

Pxtl wrote: post #33
at_a_remove wrote: post #13

What's the Matter with Kansas? is a lovely example of contempt disguised as gentle inquiry, with a touch of worry over another, and it starts even with the title itself. "Why those poor, naive, uneducated conservatives in the flyover states, they simply do not understand that they are voting against their own interests." It's concern-trolling with a mask of pity. Once you begin looking for it, you can see it more and…

It's nice to know the actual factual content of "What's The Matter With Kansas" is completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter who's correct, it matters who hurt their feelings. Which is pretty consistent - conservatives have become utterly disconnected from reality, and their absurd COVID policy has demonstrated what happens when reality doesn't give a crap how you feel.

Please don't take HN threads further into political or ideological flamewar. All those flames burn the same, and they're destructive of the place we're trying to have here.

The goal is curious conversation. That means optimizing for interestingness—not for being right, and definitely not for smiting enemies.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've done this repeatedly recently, and we've had to ask you multiple times before. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit more to heart? We'd be grateful.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#147

Post by dang »

Pxtl wrote: post #34

What's notable is where you can see reality come crashing into people who treat policy like it's a simple team sport. COVID doesn't care about your feelings, and the very real impact of higher infection rates and lower vaccination coverage is demonstrating who exactly has so dug-in on their position so far that they've become utterly disconnected from reality.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28948984 and marked it off topic.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#148

Post by dang »

DFHippie wrote: post #81
at_a_remove wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, there's that contempt again. You should know that this is what began to pry me away from being your basic leftist template. I said, "Wow, I better make sure I am not voting against my own interests. Wouldn't I feel like a fool if I supported people who had contempt for me." After that, I would hear "Ugh, men are awful" in a curious new light. Or someone would say "White people ruin everything" and I would realiz…

The two sides don't react to contempt symmetrically. The left doesn't care if Trump insults them. It only has any bearing if it leads to policy changes they hate. The right, on the other hand, really, really hates to be made fun of, to the point where they'd rather destroy the country (see the Civil War or the Jan 6 insurrection) than leave an insult unaddressed. The right believes the left is as sensitive as they ar…

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. I realize the topic has a lot of ideological overlap, but that makes it more important to avoid flamewar and stay focused on what's intellectually interesting and curious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#149

Post by dang »

iammisc wrote: post #99
DFHippie wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two sides don't react to contempt symmetrically. The left doesn't care if Trump insults them. It only has any bearing if it leads to policy changes they hate. The right, on the other hand, really, really hates to be made fun of, to the point where they'd rather destroy the country (see the Civil War or the Jan 6 insurrection) than leave an insult unaddressed. The right believes the left is as sensitive as they ar…

> The left believes compassion, ideals, rational argument, and consideration of material self-interest My goodness.. this comment is so full of itself I can't even. Yes, us right wingers believe it's good to be uncompassionate. > they write endless tracts trying to prove their point, appealing to science and founding principles and so forth And yet, most left wingers are so disconnected from the reality of people on…

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. I realize the topic has a lot of ideological overlap, but that makes it more important to avoid flamewar and stay focused on what's intellectually interesting and curious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#150

Post by coffeecat »

coffeecat wrote: post #107
CoastalCoder wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find those two forms of contempt to be equally frustrating, because (AFAICT) they have the same root cause: Judging an un-nuanced, possibly straw-man version of another's views. Without any effort to check that they truly understand what the other person believes, let alone what reasons that person has for holding those views. I've seen this from both conservatives and liberals, and especially from those with mass-…

It's impossible for us to understand the beliefs/priorities/values of others from any perspective other than our own. Actually, my conjecture is that the only way to see things from another perspective is to internalize some aspects that perspective. Let's say Alice holds some internalized ideal of traditional family values, and Bob holds some internalized ideal of tolerance and inclusion of LGBT people. When Alice l…

Building on my previous comment, I think it's more useful to say not that we caricaturize opposing viewpoints, but that we compress them using our own internal, lossy compression algorithms. And the original viewpoint is inaccessible to us; we only have access to the compressed representation that our minds generate.
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