Keep Your Identity Small • Hacker News Board

Re: Keep Your Identity Small

#141

Post by Eliezer » Sun, Feb 08, 2009, 11:22 AM UTC

"One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs."

Mentioning this view should always, I think, be accompanied by a disclaimer. As Michael Rooney wrote: "The error here is similar to one I see all the time in beginning philosophy students: when confronted with reasons to be skeptics, they instead become relativists. That is, where the rational conclusion is to suspend judgment about an issue, all too many people instead conclude that any judgment is as plausible as any other." http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/04/knowing_about_b.html#c...

When evidence is weak or conflicting, there's still a particular correct state of uncertainty you should be in as a result. So even those who (incorrectly) assert that agnosticism is the correct response to religious teapots are still asserting the atheists and theists to be wrong.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small

#142

Post by conskeptical » Sun, Feb 08, 2009, 11:29 AM UTC

Maybe there's an assumption here that identity has to be constant. If we erase that assumption and accept our identities as a continuous transformation throughout our lives... :

Perhaps keeping your identity flexible can be better at protecting against useless discussion. And the key thing above any consideration of identity is to focus on receive as well as transmit, and to remember to couple the two with some sort of processing. The key point about identity isn't particularly its size, but its flexibility.

A small, inflexible identity is simply a harder target to hit, but when you hit it you'll still find useless discussions there. A large, flexible identity is easy to hit, but when you hit it, you're very likely to find interesting discussions. A small, flexible identity is hard to interest, discussions will fizzle uninterestingly long before the religious war, unless you happen to hit the right topic in which case you'll find a good discussion. A large, inflexible identity is easy to hit and the main cause of pointless discussions.

The best discussions are where flexible identities meet, regardless of their size. A useless discussion is one where the participants come away unchanged. A good discussion is one where the participants come away changed (ie, with something that they didn't have before). You need to be flexible for that.

Of course, there is such a thing as being too flexible...

Re: Keep Your Identity Small

#143

Post by timcederman » Sun, Feb 08, 2009, 11:55 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #88

irrelative wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for some context, are people much more religious than when you were a kid? I had figured this was a relatively stable number. Or maybe you were referring to how fervent people have become with their religious views? I'm curious about the actual trend of religiosity, and I'm somewhat skeptical of anecdotal data (for the very reasons in your article). What is the general trend from someone who's been following thi…

are people much more religious than when you were a kid? Yes. It was very noticeable when I went back to Pittsburgh recently. When I was a kid, people went to church, but it didn't spill over into everyday life. They did it more as a matter of form. Now people's conversation is filled with religious references. Someone who 30 years ago would have said "we have two children" now says "we've been blessed with two child…

Are they more religious, or are they more open with religion?

Re: Keep Your Identity Small

#144

Post by mighty » Sun, Feb 08, 2009, 12:03 PM UTC

adsyoung wrote: post #85

adsyoung wrote: post #15

Its posts like this and Paul's "How to Disagree" that remind me of an idea that I keep coming back to again and again. I've often wondered what would be possible in terms of designing a website that aims to moderate debate in a way that leads to new ideas and conclusions and attempts to negate as many of these types of effects as possible. Some formal system, that the users would have no choice but to follow, that be…

To go into a bit more detail of this likely pipe dream... One approach could be to have a group of site moderators who make it their mission to, as Paul said, keep their identities as small as possible and simply judge the logic and biases of peoples arguments. Perhaps their vote is what locks in a statement to be taken as true or false and then everyone has to then play by the rule of accepting their judgment on the…

It's not a pipe dream. There are some folks out there working on this kind of stuff, and I prototyped one for my master's project. However, I didn't go the route of having propositional-level granularity, because I'm aiming for Wikipedia levels of participation, and it's understood in HCI that the more structure you impose on input at the interface level, the lower the adoption.

Some stuff you may want to look up (all but the first are actually online):

  MIT's Collaboratorium (should be an article in Sloan)
  DebateGraph
  TruthMapping
  DebateWise
  Debatepedia

There are also a bunch of other more commercial attempts whose names I can't recall. ReadWriteWeb or a similar site did a roundup of them last year. But they suck. Even the listed examples have probems insofar as they screw up the interface, interaction design, and/or information architecture. (That is, if the goal is to achieve widespread use.) Within small, interested communities, there may be sufficient motivation to use them. In Collaboratorium's case, they had a class at MIT use it w/r/t climate change.

If you're really interested in tackling this problem, let me know. I'm too busy working on a for-profit venture to keep developing my MS project, but my design doc might give you some ideas, even if you don't go the route I did.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small

#145

Post by robg » Sun, Feb 08, 2009, 12:40 PM UTC

The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

Great quote.

Agreed on the essay. But the question I'm left with: Can you debate religion and politics if you have some refined knowledge on the topics? For instance, I took a bunch of religion and political science courses. The former seems much more tractable to me not because I have a religious identity, but because when I look across the scope of religious identities, I see some common, and wide, themes of humanity. In politics I only see the accumulation of power (no doubt a human trait, but one that doesn't do much good all by itself). Of course, organized religious involves politics too, but I'm much more interested in what it means to be religious (or not) in every day lives. There it's less about a particular religious identity than an identification with the religious.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small

#146

Post by DanielBMarkham » Sun, Feb 08, 2009, 1:20 PM UTC

yters wrote: post #125

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #37

It might not just be identifying with something. It doesn't seem that it's completely identify based, at least to me. I drive a Jeep -- love old Jeeps. It's part of who I am. But if somebody started ragging on Jeeps in a forum I was in I don't think it'd matter. I wouldn't feel threatened. I like Jeeps. So what. I also like puppies. Some subjects make people feel threatened because to talk about them, in any fashion,…

I think it is more than just having one's sanity questioned. Speaking for myself, I react this way not because I don't value rationality over what feels good, but its that it seems there is knowledge behind my belief and I'm being forced to reject it because I am not articulate enough to defend it. This can be a major problem if the cultural context of the debate does not contain the right words and concepts to expla…

I look at politics and religion as deeply personal choices. I also think they are somewhat "beyond reason" -- I don't want to use the term irrational because my point is that the rules of rationality don't apply. Perhaps trans-rational? And when I mean religion, I include the atheists here. They're as impervious to reason as any of the others, but mostly can't see it, which makes them a bit humorous to deal with.

The problem is that most folks are 1) very uncomfortable with this situation, and 2) can't find the words to express the "why" of what they are saying (except for the rationalists, who will use reason ad infinitum regardless of which side of the issue they stand)

I think the most honest responses are, like yours, where you say that there's good reasons that you just can't get to. I also respect people who say "beats me" -- the agnostics. I'm more of an agnostic these days when it comes to religion, and for a long time I've realized that politics is completely non-rational.

That's not to say you can't use logic and reason in the discussion: I think they provide tools to meet in the middle and share equally. But logic in these discussions has a completely different purpose than it does in say, a geometric proof. It's a flashlight in a dark, constantly changing room. It's not the light switch. Most people miss that point.

I enjoy seeing people talk about religion and politics (as long as it's civil) because it gives me an idea of how they think. It's neat to watch people struggle with really tough questions. Who knows? There might be something I could learn there. But I can see where it can destroy a forum.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small

#147

Post by lisp_padawan » Sun, Feb 08, 2009, 1:40 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #88

irrelative wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for some context, are people much more religious than when you were a kid? I had figured this was a relatively stable number. Or maybe you were referring to how fervent people have become with their religious views? I'm curious about the actual trend of religiosity, and I'm somewhat skeptical of anecdotal data (for the very reasons in your article). What is the general trend from someone who's been following thi…

are people much more religious than when you were a kid? Yes. It was very noticeable when I went back to Pittsburgh recently. When I was a kid, people went to church, but it didn't spill over into everyday life. They did it more as a matter of form. Now people's conversation is filled with religious references. Someone who 30 years ago would have said "we have two children" now says "we've been blessed with two child…

Kierkegaard had some interesting views on this very subject, that a belief system such as Christianity requires a greater life involvement than the common 'Sunday Christianity' of 30 years ago. I think now we find a larger number of 'genuine believers' whereas 30 or more years ago people went to Church because that was the thing you do. Now, as people have a greater freedom to NOT go, so the remaining attendees probably become more devoted. A kind of evolutionary process, where the selection method is self-selection of attendance based upon initial belief.

As a rationalist/atheist/whateverlabel of course I'm not sure I'm altogether comfortable with the rapid increase in religious adherence in recent years but that's a different discussion.

Very interesting essay PG!

Re: Keep Your Identity Small

#148

Post by Jd » Sun, Feb 08, 2009, 1:44 PM UTC

mighty wrote: post #144

adsyoung wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To go into a bit more detail of this likely pipe dream... One approach could be to have a group of site moderators who make it their mission to, as Paul said, keep their identities as small as possible and simply judge the logic and biases of peoples arguments. Perhaps their vote is what locks in a statement to be taken as true or false and then everyone has to then play by the rule of accepting their judgment on the…

It's not a pipe dream. There are some folks out there working on this kind of stuff, and I prototyped one for my master's project. However, I didn't go the route of having propositional-level granularity, because I'm aiming for Wikipedia levels of participation, and it's understood in HCI that the more structure you impose on input at the interface level, the lower the adoption. Some stuff you may want to look up (al…

I'm interested in your design doc and future discussion on this topic.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small

#149

Post by Jd » Sun, Feb 08, 2009, 1:51 PM UTC

immad wrote: post #8

I think I concur that in educated discussions Identity does not help, but I have been thinking through the importance of identity for a while. I think in many situations identity gives you strength. I have an identity within Y Combinator, with my family, with people that went to my University, in the countries I have lived in etc. These fragments of my identity all give me strength, it means I would help people out t…

To complicate things: What if I have a kid. Then being a father becomes part of my identity. Perhaps I might even think that people should have kids. If someone suggests that all children should be killed, or that debt should be added to the State I live in that presumably my children would have to pay off, I might react to these statements with more than disinterest and perhaps even with anger, since they conflict with my identity as a father.

'Open mindedness' may be a help navigating some problems regarding differing identities, but certainly not all.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small

#150

Post by silentbicycle » Sun, Feb 08, 2009, 2:08 PM UTC

DaniFong wrote: post #72

silentbicycle wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buddhists aren't immune to squabbling about ideological differences, either, of course. (But meditation helps.)

Buddhist practitioners are human too, of course, but a central practice in Buddhism is to dissolve and refute concrete belief in a persistent self and consciousness.

I know. Anatman. I had disagreements between Buddhists in the Mahayana and Theravada schools in mind, though: I don't know of any escalating to violence(!), but the former calling the latter "Hinayana" (which is kind of like "The Inferior Way (to enlightenment)") is pretty petty. Nobody is immune to "my school of thought is better than yours" identity squabbling, unfortunately.

I think that some Buddhist practices are a pretty direct attempt to keep this sort of behavior in check, but still the old habits take a long time to simmer down. I think the central problem is when something in the animal brain mistakes criticism of identity for a physical threat. Meditation helps to see this for what it is and let it go, most of the time.