He's right that people think they can have an opinion on politics or religion without actually knowing anything, but this is something they are taught to believe in school and church. It's a result of widespread poor upbringing and education, it's not an issue of "keeping your identity small".
Keep Your Identity Small (2009)
91–99 of 99 posts
Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)
#92Keeping 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 comm…
Forget about politics. Forget about rich people. Most change comes from artists and science/technology folk.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)
#93> "Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion." I agree that this is how people tend to see it. But it isn't really true. Like JavaScript or auto mechanics or animal husbandry, there is indeed a threshold of expertise for expressing a meaningful opinion. The value of somebody else's commentary on political issues is pretty much directly proportional to their…
> The value of somebody else's commentary on political issues is pretty much directly proportional to their understanding of the political system and their command of objective facts. I think this is objectively wrong for the specific case of politics; unlike, say, analytical chemistry, politics has an active opinion on how each of us live our lives and can't be "left to the expert" (the latter being what the politic…
I think that the main thing this misses is the words "directly proportional".
There's a threshold of expertise, which is ridiculously low, but as someone who keeps an eye on the polyamory community, one of the things being bandied about right now is that the legal concept of marriage is problematic for certain definitions of polyamory, and people who want to advocate polyamorous marriage have a far less valuable opinion because they haven't been able to make clear what they intend to advocate as a group.
Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The value of somebody else's commentary on political issues is pretty much directly proportional to their understanding of the political system and their command of objective facts. I think this is objectively wrong for the specific case of politics; unlike, say, analytical chemistry, politics has an active opinion on how each of us live our lives and can't be "left to the expert" (the latter being what the politic…
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 opinio…
Ask the same questions similarly of a hetero couple and a white male property owner, and consider the meaningfulness of their opinions.
Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right to say that the gay couple would be credible experts on their own relationship . The problem is that people tend to confuse their own personal experience with broader expertise about a subject. For example, the gay couple would not necessarily be credible experts on all, or even most, gay relationships. Membership in a group doesn't qualify us to speak on behalf of all the group's members; the same is tr…
> For example, the gay couple would not necessarily be credible experts on all, or even most, gay relationships. So? > Membership in a group doesn't qualify us to speak on behalf of all the group's members The boundaries of groups are usually pretty arbitrary in the first place. No one is ever speaking on behalf of anyone else, unless that someone else explicitly invited them to do so. When people express their opini…
No one is ever speaking on behalf of anyone else, unless that someone else explicitly invited them to do so.
I beg to differ. In fact, it's very common for people to extrapolate based on their own experiences and speak for others whom they see as being in the same situation, whether the situation has to do with race, economic status or sexual orientation.
Therefore, if people are arguing for a policy that affects many people, not just themselves, their proposal should be backed by some expertise other than just personal opinion.
Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a believer, so I don't know if same is true for non-believers. Well, everyone is a non-believer in something that others believe. Assuming you don't believe in, say, Isis, do you think that non-belief becomes part of your identity?
No. I realise that I over-simplified that part by highlighting only two opposites: belief and unbelief. I do realise there are degrees of distinction between belief in a deity and atheism, and there are polytheism and agnosticism as well. I could have asked a question: for those who don't believe in god(s), is your Atheism a significant feature of your identity?
To answer that question: yes, but I wish it didn't have to be. The only reason atheism is a part of my identity at all is because it makes me a minority, and one that public opinion in the US ranks below even rapists[1]. If atheism were the norm and the religious were a minority, atheism would no longer have to be part of my identity, which I would greatly prefer.
Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For example, the gay couple would not necessarily be credible experts on all, or even most, gay relationships. So? > Membership in a group doesn't qualify us to speak on behalf of all the group's members The boundaries of groups are usually pretty arbitrary in the first place. No one is ever speaking on behalf of anyone else, unless that someone else explicitly invited them to do so. When people express their opini…
No one is ever speaking on behalf of anyone else, unless that someone else explicitly invited them to do so. I beg to differ. In fact, it's very common for people to extrapolate based on their own experiences and speak for others whom they see as being in the same situation, whether the situation has to do with race, economic status or sexual orientation. Therefore, if people are arguing for a policy that affects man…
> it's very common for people to extrapolate based on their own experiences and speak for others
No; it's very common for people to presume to extrapolate based on their own experiences, and to presume to speak for others. But they're not actually speaking for others.
Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)
#98> "Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion." I agree that this is how people tend to see it. But it isn't really true. Like JavaScript or auto mechanics or animal husbandry, there is indeed a threshold of expertise for expressing a meaningful opinion. The value of somebody else's commentary on political issues is pretty much directly proportional to their…
Dujdjdfjshjx
Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)
#99Seems Paul "rediscovered" what Buddhism teaches us: You need to loose your ego to achieve Nirvana. With the difference that the Buddhists also tell you a method for going about this... :)
Heh, don't you see? By identifying as a Buddhist and classifying a particular bit of wisdom as "belonging" to that religion you are falling into exactly the trap that he described. I grew up in the Buddhist community and ironically the greatest trap that Buddhists fall into is pride. Similar to the technology community ;)
Interesting assumption of yours - where in my post did I identify [myself] as a Buddhist?