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Post by unkleE on Sept 12, 2013 0:53:41 GMT
This thread begins with some extracts from another discussion that I thought were worth separating out. I think we all need to go away and read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind which is an excellent primer on why we humans never seem to agree. James, I am interested to think why it is we see even the facts so differently here. I wonder whether we see the "centre" as being in very different places? (And hence you would see the ABC as much further from the centre than I would.) It is worth noting that I don't always vote ALP/Green - i.e. leftist - though that is my general view. (In the past 7 Federal elections I have voted Liberal twice, and I voted Liberal in the last NSW election. So I think I am genuinely attempting to not have a fixed view.) Psychologists call it mitigated reasoning. Most of what we believe is instinct and reason is only used to rationalise what our instincts have already decided. If instinct tells us X is true (ABC is left wing) we only need a little evidence to cement that belief (some of the programmes, or just a news story, are left wing). However, we will only change our minds if we have to because the contrary evidence is overwhelming. So we will follow our instincts if we can and only defy them if we must. So if your instinct is that Murdoch is a badass, then you'll see all evidence through that lens and that evidence will reinforce your instincts. You will get hot under the collar about stuff that in another context you wouldn't care about. Likewise, if I think that climate change is overrated, I'll privilege the reports that there is lots of ice in the arctic this year over dozens of stories about global warming. We get the same thing with Jesus Mythers and creationists; conflict Mythers and people with a beef about Apple or Microsoft. The worst thing is I know I am doing this, but I still think I am right. With politics, it is particularly intractable because opinion is divided about 50/50. You never get to that critical mass of evidence that compels you to defy your instincts. So we can never agree. As I said above, a really good book on this stuff is Haidt's The Righteous Mind. The poor man had to accept conservatives sometimes have a point and it clearly shocked him. I have gone away and read a bunch of reviews of that book, and found them most interesting. I think a key issue is the definition of "conservative" because I think the word is used in several different ways. (For example, as a christian, I suppose I would be "conservative" on some aspects of morality and the place of loyalty, authority and sanctity in morality, but I tend to be "liberal" in political preference.) I think I may start a new discussion topic on all this. True, there's somewhat of a mix-up between "conservatism" as a center-to-medium-right political position, "conservatism" as traditionalism, and "conservatism" as a personal characteristic/trait of cautiousness. They do not perfectly correlate, if only because political conservatism, as practiced today, is much younger then the latter two - an ancient Roman would not understand 'political conservatism' at all. And even the definition of an existing political position is flexible enough to change with political culture and material conditions of a society...
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Post by unkleE on Sept 12, 2013 1:21:00 GMT
The first thing I did was read a few reviews of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt - e.g. Thomas Nagel in the NY review of BooksIan Birrell in The ObserverNicholas Lezard in The GuardianReflection blogReggie's blogThey all gave fairly consistent summaries, including the idea that there are six basic ethical values or foundations - Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, Sanctity/degradation - and that modern conservatives emphasise all six values whereas modern liberal emphasise only the first three. (I can't help feeling the truth is more nuanced than this, not least by the different uses of the word "conservative" as noted by mt.) So I went to Haidt's YourMorals.Org website and did a few of the tests. I thought they were a little simplistic, but then how could they really be otherwise without being terribly long-winded? But I found my suspicions about the word 'conservative' confirmed. The Moral Foundations Questionnaire tests against 5 of the 6 'foundations', and uses slightly different names, but the meanings still seem clear. I came out as follows: Strongest (3.2 out of 5) for Harm, Fairness and Purity, and closer to conservatives that liberals for each of these. Far lower on Loyalty (1.5/5) and Authority (2.3/5), and closer to liberals on these. From discussions James and I have had here, I think there is little doubt I am politically liberal - my natural instinct is to vote either Labor or Greens though I sometimes choose against that instinct. Yet my morality results are very mixed and overall closer to conservative. Perhaps most confusing is the fact that I scored high on Harm & Fairness, which are 'liberal' values, yet was still closer to conservative scores. My guess is that I avoided the more extreme options in most answers, and so received a quite bland set of scores. I'd be interested to see the results of anyone else doing this test, or comments generally. I think Haidt's ideas are interesting, and worth discussing (even if I haven't read the book yet!)
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mt
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Post by mt on Sept 12, 2013 12:35:31 GMT
An important thing that these summaries ignore, I think, is the way politics affects people's material interests. To take a non-controversial example, if you're an aristocrat of the ancien regime, you are very likely to be against these nasty republican revolutionaries who are going to take your titles, your income and your land away from you and then send you to the guillotine if you are even suspected of wanting to overthrow them. True, some aristocrats, motivated by altruism or by the feeling that History itself works for the republicans, will betray the ancient regime, but in general, an aristocrat will be disgusted by the republicans' politics, and the ultimate reason why is not his score on the Haidt test, but the fact of what the republicans will do to him (though that fear can, I guess, affect his Haidt test scores).
People's mentalities and political views are not sorely determined by their material interests, but they possess a powerful pull.
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Post by James Hannam on Sept 12, 2013 15:54:56 GMT
People's mentalities and political views are not sorely determined by their material interests, but they possess a powerful pull. That's sort of one of the central findings of the book: people's material circumstances are much less important to politics and morals than you might thing. J
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mt
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Post by mt on Sept 12, 2013 16:24:53 GMT
Does he actually attempt to deal with the material circumstances at all, like asking in his surveys whether his survees think that policies they advocate are beneficial to them, and how important for them this benefit is? From all these reviews and tests, it seems that he doesn't actually consider it, assuming a detached universality on part of both policy makers and policy voters, who only care about the good of wider society (as opposed to caring about themselves, or subconsciously equating benefits to themselves with benefits to society in general)? His thesis, like I understand, is about "heart" overruling the "head", not the "stomach" (or the links stomaches have with both heads and hearts). Reggie the Reviewer actually touched on it when he noted:
so it probably wouldn't be my rights that ended up being traded off to achieve a more cohesive conservative consensus
So, if you are afraid that you are going to be actually harmed by a policy, you'll stand against it, whether you're a "traditional Orissan" immigrant to Britain or a liberal in Southern USA.
Did the North and the South in the USA came to a civil war because of different "Haidt ethical foundation priorities"? Did the Russian Civil War happen because of it? Speaking of India, is it in the root of, say, the conflict between the dalits and the higher castes? And yet, I daresay that all these conflicts had personally decent people fighting on both sides.
Haidt's theory may work when it comes to political table-talk. When it comes to actual politics, I fear that it has much less value.
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Post by metacrock on Oct 12, 2013 12:14:38 GMT
This thread begins with some extracts from another discussion that I thought were worth separating out. I think we all need to go away and read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind which is an excellent primer on why we humans never seem to agree. James, I am interested to think why it is we see even the facts so differently here. I wonder whether we see the "centre" as being in very different places? (And hence you would see the ABC as much further from the centre than I would.) It is worth noting that I don't always vote ALP/Green - i.e. leftist - though that is my general view. (In the past 7 Federal elections I have voted Liberal twice, and I voted Liberal in the last NSW election. So I think I am genuinely attempting to not have a fixed view.) Psychologists call it mitigated reasoning. Most of what we believe is instinct and reason is only used to rationalise what our instincts have already decided. If instinct tells us X is true (ABC is left wing) we only need a little evidence to cement that belief (some of the programmes, or just a news story, are left wing). However, we will only change our minds if we have to because the contrary evidence is overwhelming. So we will follow our instincts if we can and only defy them if we must. So if your instinct is that Murdoch is a badass, then you'll see all evidence through that lens and that evidence will reinforce your instincts. You will get hot under the collar about stuff that in another context you wouldn't care about. Likewise, if I think that climate change is overrated, I'll privilege the reports that there is lots of ice in the arctic this year over dozens of stories about global warming. We get the same thing with Jesus Mythers and creationists; conflict Mythers and people with a beef about Apple or Microsoft. The worst thing is I know I am doing this, but I still think I am right. With politics, it is particularly intractable because opinion is divided about 50/50. You never get to that critical mass of evidence that compels you to defy your instincts. So we can never agree. As I said above, a really good book on this stuff is Haidt's The Righteous Mind. The poor man had to accept conservatives sometimes have a point and it clearly shocked him. I have gone away and read a bunch of reviews of that book, and found them most interesting. I think a key issue is the definition of "conservative" because I think the word is used in several different ways. (For example, as a christian, I suppose I would be "conservative" on some aspects of morality and the place of loyalty, authority and sanctity in morality, but I tend to be "liberal" in political preference.) I think I may start a new discussion topic on all this. True, there's somewhat of a mix-up between "conservatism" as a center-to-medium-right political position, "conservatism" as traditionalism, and "conservatism" as a personal characteristic/trait of cautiousness. They do not perfectly correlate, if only because political conservatism, as practiced today, is much younger then the latter two - an ancient Roman would not understand 'political conservatism' at all. And even the definition of an existing political position is flexible enough to change with political culture and material conditions of a society... the problem is people who made up that theory thought of it first instinctively and used just a bit of evidence to back it up.
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Post by unkleE on Oct 13, 2013 9:59:31 GMT
the problem is people who made up that theory thought of it first instinctively and used just a bit of evidence to back it up. Yes, like logical positivism, if carried too far, the theory refutes itself. But maybe it still has merit if not made too absolute???
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mt
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Post by mt on Oct 13, 2013 12:23:10 GMT
Well, confirmation bias is a Real Thing. Haidt seems to add quite a lot of socio-political theorizing on top of confirming its existence.
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Post by metacrock on Oct 13, 2013 16:38:14 GMT
Well, confirmation bias is a Real Thing. Haidt seems to add quite a lot of socio-political theorizing on top of confirming its existence. Real thing that is also a buzz word for message board denizens. It means when the other poster has evidence that disproves my claim that's what his evidence is. My evidence is evidence.
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