Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

Yes, this differentiation between humans and other animal is kind of axiomatic here, but I fear that if you remove it the consequences are too dangerous. I believe that exploiting crops or cows in a field, and killing them, is morally acceptable, while exploiting fellow humans in a factory is not.

Keeping your identity 'small' is really easy when you're rich and don't need to team up to effect change.

Identities are what form motivated groups, and groups -- or parties -- are, for better or for worse, what our form of democracy runs on.

Rich dudes can keep small identities and still make shit happen; poor everyone-else has to form teams, and with a diversity of levels of education, talent, intelligence and common sense, that will invariably mean pandering and WOOOOing a bit. Why? Because not everyone is smart enough to be affected by rhetoric. Ex hypothesis everyone else has already been 'taken', i.e. has considered opinions, so by elimination it's the aggressive, passionate idiots who play kingmaker. Thus explaining US politics.

So, Paul Graham, keep your identity small, but please enlarge your perspective. People are getting irrational because they're getting riled up, and they're getting riled up because riling-up is what gets the Irrational Vote, and that's the only one that's not already either bought or reasoned into passivity.

It's game theory, in other words. Like most human suffering.

The Taoism analogy is an interesting one. Underpinning much of it is the idea that there is a time to move and a time to stand still. iow it's useful to learn when to resist and when to yield.

Many times when people express opinions, they are given with the urgency of "this needs to be done, now!" e.g. we need to stop them from stoning women to death Right Now(!), we need to let gays marry, now.

But the belief that we can do these things right now is an illusion. That would be like me walking out of my office to the airport, buying a ticket in cash to Iran, finding someone who stoned a woman to death, and killing him with my bare hands. It's not strategic.

The Tao is a collection of wisdom of strategy that says, "Don't do everything that you feel right now, right now." Instead, "Find the right time to act." And you don't always act all of the way. You have to figure out how much when to act and how much.

So it seems to crass to sit still while listening to stories of gut-wrenching atrocities, but at least one school of ancient wisdom teaches us we have to be strategic and flow when the time is right, when others are moving at the same time and our force is multiplied, when the "bad guys" have their guard down, etc. And we need to learn to perceive these conditions.

And we need to tame this urge to railroad our opinions into other's actions and forced agreement. In the slavery and suffragist examples, their opinions were much more powerful as they gained domain knowledge and when they coordinated their efforts, becoming the smoothly flowing, powerful water, instead of a disparate cloud of angry electrons.

Counters to your counters:

>1) Does a homosexual couple with no knowledge of US marriage law not have a valid opinion on whether they should be allowed to marry?

No, that couple doesn't have a valid opinion. How could they? They don't understand that marriage is in the United States. That conceptualization of "togetherness" as a couple doesn't exist in their minds. The threshold at which they can form a valid opinion is, therefore, at the entry-level of understanding United States marriage laws.

>2)Did poorly educated blacks or women need training in the subtleties of constitutional law before they could have a valid opinion on universal suffrage?

Depends on what you mean by "training" - they need to understand what suffrage is, so in that sense, yes, they do need training. This is the threshold for having a valid opinion.

Here are concrete counter-examples to your counter-examples:

1) If a gay couple were asked if they wanted the right to be married without first being told the sociological context and culture of marriage in the United States, and without understanding the legal ramifications of being married, their opinion would be null and void - just noise. They don't know what they're agreeing/disagreeing with.

2) If you asked women if they'd like the ability to vote, and they said yes, but couldn't answer you when you asked them what a democratic republic is, or how representation works in the United States, their opinions would be meaningless. It would be equivalent to pathos-driven desire to be able to do something - ultimately, a useless opinion.

Understand - I'm not being pedantic. Your examples may show a somewhat low threshold for meaningful opinions, but the parent is correct in that you need some threshold for every opinion.

> There are certainly objective, measurable facts relevant to any particular question, but political debate rarely focuses on those; it's usually a contest among people pursuing different ends

That is true only for a few set of issues, like abortion, immigration, etc. I'm socialistic-inclined and my neighbors are mostly republicans, I usually start conversations with them by saying "Look, we both want the same thing: we want the greatest amount of people in America to be eating well, being well-educated, living in dignified places... we just disagree on how we can get there". Then we discuss -- and we get along surprisingly well.