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The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)

blog.andymasley.com

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Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)

#171

Post by zahlman »

Gormo wrote: post #163
benj111 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you any examples? I'm kind of in the same boat as I don't agree with the identity politics, but I still count myself as left of centre.

> Have you any examples? Much of the "alt-right" narrative seems to revolve around embracing identity politics but siding with the outgroup in the left's version of the group-conflict story. The traditional right rejects that entire narrative. My perspective is that someone rooting for Darth Vader is still a Star Wars fan. Another example is the economic thinking that has become pervasive in MAGA circles. Zero-sum th…

> an "abundance agenda" that sounds a whole lot like a reframing of traditional conservative and libertarian economic arguments.

I'm going to need you to be a lot more concrete about this.

Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)

#172

Post by mrguyorama »

DavidPiper wrote: post #65

> The person [is not super fired up and] doesn’t just want to act as a soldier for their team This pulled me into a tangential thought: Has anyone else noticed that a lot of people just CAN'T be wrong? They might be contrarian, cynical, narcissists, experts in their field, experiencing PTSD or other emotional disregulation, extremely online, ... Then the team-based things: political entrenchment, [colour]-pilled, con…

Remind yourself that every single comment, post, video, update, whatever on the internet is already a selection bias for people who either aren't deterred by the fact that shouting into the void like that is inherently low value and stupid, or reject it and believe a tweet is inherently valuable.

IE, you should never ever ever treat an average of online discourse as a representative average of humanity. It is already a niche cohort before you get into specific groups.

That alone means you will see more of people who strongly believe their opinions, see more of people who like to hear themselves talk, see more of people who unironically state that "I am never wrong", etc. The comment format of the internet is also pretty much perfectly designed to support the absolute wrong kind of discussion if you want actual productive discourse.

Instead of two people going back and forth and building up that context of "Heres what I mean when I say X" and being able to ground discussion on that shared context, there is no shared context and every dumbass can leave a large drive by argument that is not in the same shared context as the rest of the conversation, leading to vacuous "point scoring" and "um akshually" and talking past each other.

Online discourse just doesn't progress, because there's nothing that drags my ass back here to respond to your point, like I would feel compelled to in reality.

Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)

#173

Post by mrguyorama »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #27
pstuart wrote: post #21

Here's One Weird Trick™ to avoid being an ideologue: be ok with being wrong. Flipping that over: aspire to be correct in your beliefs, not in "being right". Karl Popper (the man behind the Intolerance of Intolerance "paradox) identified it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

I only recently learned that most peoples beliefs are not "factual beliefs". Since most of mine are, I thought that's how other people work. I think Popper may have made the same mistake by assuming "correctness" is always the primary value a belief offers. The other kind of beliefs are "Symbolic beliefs." Symbolic beliefs are not held because they are true, or because they are useful on their own. They're held becau…

These unstated beliefs make up a lot of "Common Sense", which is reliably invoked as a means of outing someone for not being in the same "Tribe".

There's no such thing as "Common Sense", and every single niche, culture, demographic, etc has their own set of things that "Everyone knows"

Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)

#174

Post by zahlman »

thrance wrote: post #70
narrator wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Dumping quotes from a Wikipedia article, in the post-OWS era, is not at all a reasonable way to assess the political position of an individual. In practice, WP:BLP is just a mask.

I would engage with the specific misrepresentations made here, but that is clearly outside of expected HN discourse. If you care enough, feel free to email me. I use this username, on the Proton email service (the short version of the domain).

Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)

#175

Post by mindslight »

zahlman wrote: post #168
mindslight wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> his bar is beneath the ground I agree. In general you're pointing out one failing of this post, but I think there are a whole host of things that are missing from it to be anywhere near a substantial guide. Don't fall into the trap of " an idiot disagrees with me, so I must be right " is a great observation/rule! But it's like the first level of the reasoning game (if the game even has linear levels). There is valu…

> ... and find their more-reasoned arguments refreshing, you're right back at... emotionally attractive rather than rationally considered. How do you figure?

Just because someone can find or create lengthy logical rationalizations does not mean they're arriving at universal truths.

Gödel's first theorem says that a logical system can either be incomplete or contradictory. The comprehensiveness of natural language (our primary tool for communicating), especially with the prevailing over-reliance on Boolean logic, points to the results from our use of them being readily contradictory.

So with Internet forums (especially when you're first exposed to them), you switch from getting half-baked reasoning in meatspace interactions (the focus of this article, and easy to spot!) to long chains of fully-baked reasoning that are logically consistent. But yet they ultimately still lead to some pretty terrible places - due to what they've left out of their starting assumptions, and then tacitly reject by closed-world-optimizing for the assumptions they did make.

Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)

#176

Post by anonymous_user9 »

harvey9 wrote: post #158

Having similar diet and politics as the writer, I remember years ago falling out with a socialist acquaintance because he thought it was ok for farm workers to go on strike and leave animals to starve. His commitment to never crossing picket lines was absolute.

But that implies being a farm worker turns you into a sort of indentured servant

Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)

#177

Post by zahlman »

inigyou wrote: post #129
miyoji wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite intellectual conservative sparring partner became a progressive.

[flagged]

We're talking here about the same intelligence metrics constantly attacked by progressives as supposedly a tool for promulgating racism?

Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)

#178

Post by zahlman »

DavidPiper wrote: post #65

> The person [is not super fired up and] doesn’t just want to act as a soldier for their team This pulled me into a tangential thought: Has anyone else noticed that a lot of people just CAN'T be wrong? They might be contrarian, cynical, narcissists, experts in their field, experiencing PTSD or other emotional disregulation, extremely online, ... Then the team-based things: political entrenchment, [colour]-pilled, con…

> learning about things that might change their views in substantial ways

The core problem is that the only people who have any interest in teaching about those things are doing so specifically because they want to recruit others into their political camp. "Education" is conflated with agreement with someone else's conclusion.

(And even then, sometimes they disclaim responsibility, and just seek to morally bully you into agreement.)

Often, you already know about the thing, and this knowledge hasn't changed your view; and then the people who call you ignorant of the thing are just annoying. Sometimes, you conclude that the thing has been completely misrepresented anyway.

Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)

#179

Post by zahlman »

mrguyorama wrote: post #172
DavidPiper wrote: post #65

> The person [is not super fired up and] doesn’t just want to act as a soldier for their team This pulled me into a tangential thought: Has anyone else noticed that a lot of people just CAN'T be wrong? They might be contrarian, cynical, narcissists, experts in their field, experiencing PTSD or other emotional disregulation, extremely online, ... Then the team-based things: political entrenchment, [colour]-pilled, con…

Remind yourself that every single comment, post, video, update, whatever on the internet is already a selection bias for people who either aren't deterred by the fact that shouting into the void like that is inherently low value and stupid, or reject it and believe a tweet is inherently valuable. IE, you should never ever ever treat an average of online discourse as a representative average of humanity. It is already…

> aren't deterred by the fact that shouting into the void like that is inherently low value and stupid, or reject it and believe a tweet is inherently valuable.

What is high value; and how are you supposed to find it in this environment?

Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)

#180

Post by blks »

narrator wrote: post #41
miyoji wrote: post #11

The good part of this: don't fall into the trap of believing the proposition "an idiot disagrees with me, so I must be right". That's solid advice, idiots believe countless true things and geniuses believe innumerable false things. The intelligence of a random interlocutor has nothing to do with the validity of their opinions, really, so it shouldn't serve as evidence one way or another. Generally, I try to pay atten…

[flagged]

My guy, I think you got hooked by a grifter’s sales funnel.
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