Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The notion “he read all the leftists books” is so childish.
The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
181–190 of 219 posts
Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
#182The 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…
>Generally, I try to pay attention to good arguments against my ideas, not good arguers.
I agree, but it’s so much harder, you have to evaluate every argument, you can’t outright filter out idiots. I admire you, but I can’t manage this, it’s exhausting.
Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
#183Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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 domai…
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Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think knowing about the branches of your government is a prerequisite to having an opinion or good argument about it. It’s not sufficient to just know that but it’s a good filter in the USA where a surprising number of people have “opinions” but lack the most basic knowledge.
It's a prerequisite, but so is breathing. It's necessary but not sufficient. The bar I like to use is pretty simple: do you know who represents you in Congress (I am American so this is my bias, but substitute your country's equivalent if there is one)? As in, your state's two Senators and your district's Representative? If not, you probably don't vote or don't pay attention when you do, and you've definitely never c…
> The bar I like to use is pretty simple: do you know who represents you in Congress (I am American so this is my bias, but substitute your country's equivalent if there is one)? As in, your state's two Senators and your district's Representative? If not, you probably don't vote or don't pay attention when you do, and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes....
I see what you're getting at, but I think you need to refine your test a bit. I don't know who my representatives are off the top of my head, and I actually have contacted them within the last 6 months! It's just not information that has stuck in my brain. Likewise, I both vote and pay attention when I vote - I do some research on candidates' policy positions and (if applicable) their track records on issues that matter to me. But if you asked me to name them, I would still be helpless without looking that info up.
I think what you're trying to get at is "does this person actually engage with representatives and pay attention when voting", but memorizing the names of your representatives is not 1:1 with that. Some people will be engaged and not have the names memorized, and others will have the names memorized but be disengaged.
Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, it looks almost identical, just mirror imaged. Lots of anger and fear, a strong certainty that they know the full story about every issue and that the other side is evil or idiotic. No grace or space in their hearts to consider that many of today's contentious issues are actually complicated, with overlapping and conflicting ethical arguments.
I'm noticing a lack of any concrete examples of left wing extremism in this comment. Right wing extremism is like, that lady from the UK who made a tweet asking everyone to burn down a hotel full of migrants.
There are some other examples in the thread, but two that come to mind for me are Charlie Kirk's killer and the guy who shot the cop in Alvarado, Texas after the ICE protest.
Arguable another example is the guy who killed the United Healthcare CEO.
But that said, most people who have drunk the kool-aid of one party or another are not nearly this extremist. Most of them just post nonsense on social media or even keep their views to themselves but still hold extremist views.
Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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 domai…
It's not hard to confirm the stuff I quoted from Wikipedia. The guy has multiple episodes of his podcast dedicated to promoting the idea of "Cultural Marxism": a ludicrous conspiracy theory.
So, in the context of finding someone both willing and knowledgeable enough to "debunk" Marxism, I think we can find better than a guy clueless enough to fall for such theories. Note that this says nothing of Lindsay's other views, and I couldn't care less for them.
Thanks for the offer, nevertheless.
Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If you don't know the names of your representatives you can't vote for them. Seems pretty straight forward to me. The names are printed on the ballot, along with party affiliation. No memorization needed. In a primary there may be a bit of research needed, but even then you get a sample ballot beforehand so you can research the alternatives, but when the final election happens you generally only have two choices in…
> The names are printed on the ballot, along with party affiliation. No memorization needed. ... > but when the final election happens you generally only have two choices in the US per position and you simply vote for your party of choice. I want to discourage voting blindingly by party affiliation. Personally I think you should at least know the general ideas and policies of the candidate(s) you're choosing, even th…
> I want to discourage voting blindingly by party affiliation
This seemed wise thirty years ago. I'm in a blue state that never had much of a problem electing republican officials up to and including the governor, and that worked well for us because every politician clearly and obviously put the state ahead of their party.
> given the current political state the US it's foolish to vote for one of the parties
It worked well for us until now. Today your call for ignoring party affiliation asks us to also ignore insurrection and child rape. That's asking too much, and I'm surprised you had the gametes to even float the idea.
Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
#189> it’s very very easy to be negatively polarized by a ton of bad conversations with normal people about it, until you feel like the whole rest of the world is crazy Why wouldn't the world be crazy, though? What reason do we have to assume that the world is not crazy? Most reasons are tautological when you really unpack them.
It's correct to say something like "the world is dysfunctional as a system for surfacing truth", and that's kind of like saying the rest of the world is crazy. On the other, you shouldn't assume "the rest of the world is filled exclusively with incompetent people who lack basic truth-finding skills and that's why they don't agree with me" which is what people usually mean when they say the rest of the world is crazy.
A core point of the article is that the vast majority of the world is filled with incompetent people who lack basic truth-finding skills, but that you shouldn't inform your opinion of your own correctness based on that fact.
Maybe, being exceptionally generous, you could posit that any given individual only is informed enough about some small subset of things that they hold opinions about. But in my experience, "believing you should have good reasons for the beliefs you hold" is a pretty all-or-nothing affair. Some people will have well-thought out justifications for pretty much any belief they hold, more will have no justification for any belief the hold. It's pretty well-correlated with intelligence, which is backed up by studies that have found that more intelligent people are better at coming up with justifications for their actions. It's not unreasonable to assume that carries over to beliefs.
The core takeaway is to ignore the drooling masses that disagree with you (or agree with you!). Their beliefs have no correlation with truth, and thus do not provide additional evidence for nor against a given belief. You should only adjust your priors based on interactions with people who actually know what they're talking about.
Re: The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe not as polarizing as those, but by "animal welfare" he doesn't mean volunteering at the local animal shelter, he's a vegan. That's pretty polarizing to a lot of people who see veganism as an attack on their whole existence because they like meat.
Veganism is so polarizing because on some level I think most if not all people understand that they are philosophically correct and that veganism is thus the morally right thing to do and those (like me) who still refuse to do it must live with themselves and their immoral choices every time they are confronted by a vegan or reminded of the feasibility of veganism
The pigs that my family eats have a short but happy life. I'm not so sure that no life at all is objectively better.