Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Overcoming Us vs. Them

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 249 posts

Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them

#221

Post by otakucode »

BeetleB wrote: post #132
otakucode wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never understood this idea. Why would it be beneficial to have your citizenry trained to kill?

Not all mandatory service involves the military. I believe Singapore has/had one where you are part of their civil service (firefighters, etc).

Oh, that is fascinating! I had never heard of anything like that, and that actually sounds like a wonderful idea. Especially for areas where there are underserved regions (rural areas that might not have a high enough population to support a fire department or police or something like that) that could be supported by conscripted people. And unlike with military training, the training would leave participants both with a willingness to help their neighbors and skills to do so. I'm going to have to read up more about nations which do mandatory civil service rather than just military.

Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them

#223

Post by ClayShentrup »

ScottBurson wrote: post #142
smichel17 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the downside to score/range voting? Voters give each candidate a score (say, from 1-10), and the highest average wins. I've no particular expertise in this area; I know about it from http://rangevoting.org/

Range voting and approval voting are closely related; approval voting is just the limiting case of range voting where there are only two values on the scale. My take is that range voting is useful when you have a relatively small number of voters, but once that number gets into the thousands, its advantages over AV fade. Instead of one voter rating one candidate a 7, say, instead what you have is 100 voters of whom 7…

Fraud is a small problem compared to not having Score Voting.

Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them

#224

Post by otakucode »

watwut wrote: post #82
otakucode wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first thing to always keep in mind is that intentionally attempting to engineer social behaviors has historically been the single most devastatingly destructive motivation. Far more destructive than war, famine, disease, or other means of human suffering and death. It gave us eugenics, concentration camps, political purges, the obesity epidemic, and all manner of other ills. It backfires consistently and almost a…

I will take obesity epidemics over famine, war or some of historical epidemics. Also, holocaust was extension of war itself - the ultimate attempt to kill perceived enemies. For that matter, so was Rwanda genocide.

Why would you think that there are such choices? The obesity epidemic did not come about out of a desire to avoid famine. It came about because the American Heart Association took flimsy scientific evidence that high levels of saturated fat in the diet increased risk of heart disease and then sought to reduce the American intake of saturated fat. They succeeded. They successfully reduced the percent of the average Americans dietary calories which came from saturated fat by 15% which was their goal. Unfortunately, removing saturated fat from foods makes them taste like cardboard. So to combat that, food makers added salt and sugar to restore some flavor. As a result, the total amount of calories consumed on average ballooned, diabetes became an epidemic, and even the heart disease they were intending to avoid through their efforts reached all-time high levels along with a host of other health problems.

No one was starving, and famine wasn't the alternative. The alternative was educating the public and leaving them with the choice, a situation which is less totally effective but more flexible and seemingly less prone to large scale unintended consequences.

I won't get into genocides in too much detail, but the concentration camps were an outgrowth of eugenics, an attempt to improve human health and well-being through "scientific" engineering of the gene pool. It was based, however, upon fundamentally incorrect ideas about how genetics and evolution work, flaws which were known at the time but which were ignored because the idea of rounding up anyone not liked and wiping them out was apparently too alluring for them to step back and say 'we don't have sufficient evidence this would even work'.

Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them

#225

Post by quantumofmalice »

RonanTheGrey wrote: post #193
quantumofmalice wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a reductio ad absurdum. There are reasonable levels of division well above tribal levels. Singapore is basically a city state, and I don't notice a collapse of civilization there. Territories with strong social identity would maintain political union, territories with weak social identity and severe political disagreements would split. As much as is possible, no one is ruled by people they hate. https://en.wik…

I don't understand the downvoting of this comment. What is being described is effectively tribalism. Tribalism worked well for humans for roughly 350,000 years. Then we idiots come along and think that we've got a better way that is already showing its weaknesses and strain after just a couple of thousand years. Really? Maybe, just maybe our ancestors were on to something and there's something we can learn from them.…

I have noticed that nothing that I say on HN, except for saying that the scientific evidence is that intelligence is mostly genetic and heritable, gets more downvotes more quickly than discussing secession.

I think the topic has been successfully in the mind of college educated people, so any mention of it immediately brings to mind both slavery and, somewhat amusingly, fascism.

It is too bad. As I said above, I see it as the best way to avoid violence.

Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them

#226

Post by otakucode »

BeetleB wrote: post #131
otakucode wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first thing to always keep in mind is that intentionally attempting to engineer social behaviors has historically been the single most devastatingly destructive motivation. Far more destructive than war, famine, disease, or other means of human suffering and death. It gave us eugenics, concentration camps, political purges, the obesity epidemic, and all manner of other ills. It backfires consistently and almost a…

>That being said, the solution is a fairly simple one. Stress critical thinking. In all things. In personal life most especially, but also in other actions. Encourage people to recognize their inescapable biases and to resist them because those biases are irrational and provide no actual benefit. That's the simple solution? I have two things to say about it: First, there are many, many traps to fall into when you dev…

You are right. It is simple only in so far as it is simple to state. It does require of the populace a lifetime of exertion of effort. It is certainly sustainable by most of the population in principle, we know that from history and from situations of deprivation where existential or other dangers forced populations to exert that effort in order to avoid danger. Civilization itself is the act of removing such dangers, and when they are removed, the society often then begins abandoning the exertion of effort as it provides no real benefit to larger and larger numbers of the population. Unfortunately this eventually results in the population being unwilling to sustain or expand the infrastructure that protects them. As far as I can tell, this is the largest problem that faces the human species as a whole. Civilization brings about its own undoing.

Emotion and rational thinking are not opposites. I am aware of the neurological cases you're likely referencing, and think that they are extremely important to understanding the interplay of emotion and reason. Without emotion, it is impossible for people to make decisions regardless of the amount of information or understanding available about a situation. Even with a list a mile long of "pro"s set next to a list with only a single "con", a person without emotion can not make the decision to act. It is indeed debilitating. Emotion certainly doesn't need to be eliminated or anything of the sort. It doesn't have to be misleading, it simply can't be relied upon in the absence of reason. Emotions are a basic trained response, and inexplicably linked to the physiological processes of their manifestation. They would probably be extremely useful if we lived in an illiterate possibly pre-lingual tribe on the savannah in Africa where they evolved as an important tool. Our world is far different from that, though, and so we have some baggage we have to deal with. As far as I'm aware, critical thinking is the only tool we've got to recognize and deal with that baggage intentionally.

Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them

#227

Post by contravariant »

lucideer wrote: post #216
contravariant wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Us vs. Them thinking isn't that there is a group of people that you fundamentally disagree with, but rather that you've constructed a somewhat nebulous "them" which you've ascribed all negative qualities about "them". The way to recognise this is to ask yourself if you can actually name any particular example of the "them" you're arguing against. Because if not, you risk arguing against a straw man y…

> The way to recognise this is to ask yourself if you can actually name any particular example of the "them" you're arguing against. Unfortunately, I think what can often compound this line of thinking is a willingness to speculatively ascribe qualities to people we've just met in an attempt to put them into a box we can relate to (either positively relate or negatively relate). Asking someone to think of a particula…

That's a fair point. I guess the real problem is that any claims about "them" can't really be refuted by anyone. So a better method would be to ask yourself if there's someone who could reject your claims. If not your statements are not falsifiable, which makes debating them somewhat pointless.

Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them

#228

Post by Kinrany »

mitchty wrote: post #10
komali2 wrote: post #6

>“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.” "Only a sith deals in absolutes" I love phrases like these. Not sure what to call them but they're fun. Recursive contradictions?

Its just a False Dilemma. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma More an artifact of our language and people wanting to condense/compress ideas down too far.

komali2's point is that the phrase is self-referential: someone saying "only a sith deals in absolutes" implies that they're also a sith, even though presumably being a sith is a bad thing here.

Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them

#229

Post by Kinrany »

komali2 wrote: post #6

>“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.” "Only a sith deals in absolutes" I love phrases like these. Not sure what to call them but they're fun. Recursive contradictions?

These two phrases are actually almost equivalent. Both say "I divide people into two groups: bad people who divide people into bad and good people, and good people who don't."

Is there a more general formulation?

Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them

#230

Post by qwerty456127 »

bornonline1 wrote: post #222
qwerty456127 wrote: post #148

We, the people with ADHD are always annoyed by them, people writing 25-page-long articles and we are also very jealous of others capability to read them :-)

Internet browsers have text to speech built in. It's really helpful for me.

Really? I could never find it. Perhaps you've got an extension of a sort installed. Nice idea anyway, I'll give it a try, thanks! I doubt it sounds great but maybe the things have actually improved since the last time I've tried a text-to-speech tool.
Post reply on HN