Ya know what? I’d like to take a survey, of people in general, after a quick perusal of this:

https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~vadim/Classes/2012f/vertex.pdf

.....followed by a quick perusal of this:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4280

.....with the survey question being, which one of these is the least useless, with respect to a theoretical description of goings-on between the ears of the human rational animal. — Mww

What measure of utility would you want to use?

Therefore ideas are empirical, and can be considered as physical. — Olivier5

Yeah, that's the idea.

Okay so you don't know how it's done. — Olivier5

Well, I wouldn't go that far, we've got some very strong theories, but yeah, I don't know everything there is to know about how the brain functions. We don't know everything there is to know about how the eyes, nose or ears function either. The point is that your distinction is illusory, we detect ideas with our senses to no less an extent that we detect objects.

How do you detect ideas? — Olivier5

Are you unsure as to whether or not you have ideas? If the answer is no it follows that you must have some means of detecting them. My money is on the hippocampus.

Not 'hear', but we can detect they're there. How is that different to any other 'sense'?

the very definition of 'physical' in regular English is 'empirical, confirmed by the senses', — Olivier5

...

You of course define 'physical' in a different manner, which appears to include ideas. — Olivier5

...

the obvious logical contradiction of 'strong materialism' (=the idea that ideas don't exist). — Olivier5

I don't see the contradiction. If I have 'an idea', is not some part of my brain sensing that? Or are you suggesting that only two or three 'senses' are involved in detection of physical reality? If so, why the limitation?

the real-world consequences of such membership are likely going to be severe (e.g. losing your job) — baker

Possibly true. You should read Grabe, I think she'd be right up your street.

They change behaviour as well. Online everyone's an individualist at the centre of their own virtual world. Real groups have real group dynamics. — Kenosha Kid

True, that anonymity of online discourse also allows multiple personalities, so they're not just one individual, but several. I actually think this might be a good thing for adolescents, but coming into the adult world needs to have the reality of a groups you can't so easily re-form. Oddly (or perhaps obviously) it ties in with your line of thought about hunter-gatherer moral and economic decision-making. The less flexible and easily replaceable the social group around you is, the more effort it is advisable to but into social relations and proportionately less into individual self-construction. Social media seems to be the pinnacle of a move away from focus on the network links and more toward the nodes.

Anyone not addressing the relationship between the shift in social dynamics and the failure to tackle issues with socially-owned resources is just pissing in the wind as far as I'm concerned, but then I'd be naive to think they were doing so out of a strong desire to solve the problem.

WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?!? I've been worried SICK!

Been at a work conference, drunk as a skunk, catch you tomo bro-mo! — Kenosha Kid

Ha! Just noticed this^ (I don't always get notified of replies for some reason). I'm touched that anyone even noticed I was gone. I've been a bit unwell, recovering now (similar story as for your last 24hrs, I suspect - depending on how much you had to drink)

So is there something in the research that tells us how we increase pressure to become a member? — Echarmion

Quite a lot, yeah. Most popular theories are based on the social capital costs of available identities (after Henri Tajfel) - polarise the range of available social identities such that fewer intermediary positions are available. People will be pulled to one or the other. Personally, I look more at narratives than social identity, but it's not the most popular position. Like Tajfel, I agree that in times of social stress options become polarised, but I think support for any 'identity' theory is sketchy (and that's me being polite about it), rather we take part in narratives which become available as part of our cultural milieu, it's these which become polarised such that we face a choice of becoming part of a narrative that's a little outside of our comfort zone, or being without a culturally available narrative to locate our behaviour in, and most people find the latter position quite uncomfortable.

I'd recommend having a look at the work of Shelly Grabe, she's extensively studied women's empowerment movements in Nicaragua from a social narrative perspective and gives a really good account of how the approach works using a concrete example.

Most accounts, however, muddy the distinction between being part of a protest movement and making sacrifices (which is why I like Grabe's work). The reasons people join social change movements where there's little risk to their own social status in doing so will be quite different from the reasons people join groups where the risk is higher.

One of the areas that's of interest now is the effect of mass social media on social group membership A few interesting studies have shown how the ability of social media to build opinion-based social groups very quickly (way beyond what was previously possible) can lead to these ephemeral motivators for action which don't have long-term robustness because the opinion-based social group dissipates as rapidly as it was formed. In a kind of 'perfect storm', opinion-based social groups are also far more strongly associated with political action than class or functional groups (see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.334). The result, so the theory goes, is that we have a load of flash-in-the-pan mass protests which achieve virtually nothing long-term because no-one involved had a strong social identity to motivate their actions (or a distinct narrative, as I would prefer to see it).

The upshot is that in the modern age, polarising available narratives might be just too easy and so not really apply the pressure they used to. It's just too easy to find a group to join these days so little pressure to join one slightly outside of your comfort zone. so we need more real-life social groups rather than virtual ones as they are less flexible, and so more able to pull in the direction of social change. Can't see it happening though...

I didn't really talk about what's popular. I only said that individual consumer level actions are unlikely to be adopted by enough people on their own initiative to make a difference. You could take that to mean such measures aren't popular enough. — Echarmion

That's right. It's kind of where I was going. If the measures necessary are not popular enough, then protesting to persuade a democratic government to adopt them is self-defeating, especially given the recent rise in populism, but even without it...

The government already know that a vocal minority are willing to shout about climate change, they also know their key demographic are unwilling to adopt the measures necessary to combat it, so 'awareness' - the metric protestors are so enamored with raising - is not what's lacking, willingness is.

Protest would, therefore, only be useful if it were to raise willingness. So...

I think you're discounting the psychological effects that very visible movements have. The first goal would of course be to get enough critical mass going that the protests shift the general mood of the electorate. — Echarmion

... We'd need to look closely at those effects. Studies on the effect of protest give mixed results. The key takeaway seems to be that some protests work and others don't, but that very few change people's minds simply by virtue of the awareness raised. The best study I've seen recently was this one https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/13457753/TeaParty_Protests.pdf?sequence=1 which undermines Lohmann's informational idea of protest effectiveness in favour of a more social group theory (which, full disclosure, is my specialism, so I'm going to be a bit biased). So the issue then with any protest is the effect it has on local social groups, particularly on criteria for membership (what one has to do to be accepted as a member). There's a good study here https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(18)30017-2, though I think it might be paywalled for most, which goes through some of the ideas.

Briefly, membership criteria are signalled by the protest group and when this is something like attending political rallies, voting, or (especially) hustling others to do so, one cannot gain membership without actually taking part, non-members are freely encouraged to join by the very token of membership.

Contrastingly, movements which identify an outside actor whose actions they seek to alter, whose membership criteria and hierarchy are measured by the degree to which one is willing to take that actor to task, create barriers to entry, and very little normative pressure to join (so long as you're not personally that outside actor, membership seems entirely optional). High entry barrier and little reason to join. Not an appealing recipe for attracting members.

Hence the appeal of the Disney-themed toothpaste dispenser - high membership reward, little expense in joining. The expense in joining bit is insurmountable - what we want to achieve with something like climate change is going to require sacrifice - whether that's in terms of reduced consumption or in spending to fund community solutions. So social pressure to become a member needs to be higher. What we see in protest movements around climate change is the exact opposite. Basically, unless you're a government minister or the CEO of BP, you're not the target and so membership is optional. Middle class householders only need to take one glance at the giant leap they'd need to take feel members of the circus troop protesting outside their window, realise that non-membership will have no impact on their lives at all, to sit comfortably and watch the show.

What we're seeing at the moment, is high risk - high reward membership (arrests, violence, etc) where the high risk membership criteria are unrelated to the sacrifice the cause actually requires (reduced consumption, increased community spending) or low risk - low reward membership (so called clicktavism) where membership is easy but membership is disconnected from the actual cause. These are basically useless as engines of social change.

Both are, however, extremely useful engines of consumer management...

we're both aware of the basic reasons behind why many reasonable and scientifically well supported policies aren't enacted by governments around the world — Echarmion

Indeed, and yet above we were talking about 'popular and sought after' policies, not 'reasonable and scientifically well supported' ones. That the two are not the same is the crux of the problem.

A government has three main priorities - to remain in power, to benefit from the privileges that being in power bring, and to make necessary decisions about the running of the country (I think it would be excessively cynical not to at least include that last, but let's not pretend it's a priority). So what of those three does a protest scare them into thinking is at risk? Remain in power? Well, unless the various jugglers and street performers of the protest movements swap their batons and guitars for Kalashnikovs, I don't think their power (mandated by a very specific demographic of swing voter) is a risk. Benefit from privileges? Obviously not. Make decisions about the running of he country? Well, here the one thing we don't want them to do is listen to the hysterics of the latest fad, so why would we encourage such a course of action?

Protests need to properly threaten the group they are protesting against, otherwise they're nothing more than virtue signalling. Governments have some quite well-developed means of gauging the mood in their key demographics - sophisticated multi-metric tools. Do you think they're going to throw those away because they see a few hundred hipsters having a street party?

The "It's not practical to make the necessary changes" excuse is a fairly limp one. That there are limits to what can be done by individual choice is incontestable, but equally incontestable is the fact that most people are absolutely nowhere near those limits, sending the various governments a very clear message indeed that issues like climate change score slightly below issues like who's going to make it to the next round of the FA cup (swap in your sport/cultural event of choice).

So the question should not be "how do we make governments listen to the scientists?" - that's a cause we lost four hundred years ago, governments listen to the people (or at least a key sub-section of them). we quite deliberately designed the system that way. The question should be "Why, when faced with such an obvious prospect of harm to the next generation, do people still consider their replacement Disney-themed electric toothpaste dispenser to be more important?" That's not even a political question, and I suspect it has more to do with the very same reason why people join protests than it is actually opposed by protest.

We don't have a governing system whose goal is to determine what services are required though. — Echarmion

No, but I didn't refer to the services that were 'required'. I was talking about the services that are desired. So...

I'm suggesting that the only way to get the powers that be to move is to properly scare them. — Echarmion

Why would they need to be scared into providing a really popular and sought after solution?

I get the theory, but doesn't it leave a rather unconvincing model of a governing system that somehow has no way of determining what services are required other than by waiting for the information to be painted onto a placard?

If people are willing to travel long distances without their cars, as in the example you give, but can't simply decide as an individual to do so, are you suggesting that information wouldn't come to light without a protest?

The best way is probably to organise and join in mass protests. No individual consumer level decisions are likely to be very effective. Or rather the effective decisions are very impractical and so unlikely to be adopted by enough people to make a difference. — Echarmion

What would be the object of these protests if the changes required are considered too impractical to be adopted? Presumably, living in a democracy, such changes are going to be ephemeral at best, window-dressing at worst if the population hasn't the stomach to adopt them.

Interesting story, thanks for sourcing it. My twopenneth - I think it might be related to the concept of Cultural Lag (Richard and June Brinkman - can track down the reference if you need it). The idea is that material condition move faster than cultural change so we often end up with cultures better suited to conditions some years back. With slow moving changes, this hardly notices, for fast moving changes, it's a shock, but eventually the matter resolves. Where I think it's interesting is in situations where a culture 'goes through' a kind of blip in material circumstances. Cultural Lag can mean that the effect simply doesn't register, it just isn't around for long enough to impact the culture before reverting to the circumstances that culture evolved in. I wonder if some of what's happening with modern hunter-gatherers (it's quite common that they move to quite a different culture from most Western ones on encountering 'development') is that they are essentially skipping the stage where the future (of improved technology/control) seemed rosy and uncomplicated, and going straight from not having that option to having that option but with the knowledge that it comes with complications (and opportunities). So with the Cree, they were able to transition straight from a state where their culture worked in a limited environment, to one where it was again useful in the new environment - equally limited, but this time by law and government grants etc.

It may be that Western Culture is now the one 'Lagging'?

I don't know if it is de rigueur to resurrect such old threads, but I was quite interested in your thought process here prior to being knocked out of action these past months.

Anyway...

Well communism obviously. — StreetlightX

...isn't quite what I wanted to know about. When I asked what you would replace psychology with I didn't mean psychology as a political system (god knows what dystopia you had in mind if you thought that), I meant psychology as a means of estimating how people might respond to some action or circumstance. Presumably you don't go about acting toward others as if their responses are random and unrelated to your actions? Nor do I assume you advocate something like communism out of idle aesthetic preference. Rather, in both cases, you have some model in mind of how people are likely to respond to both your actions and to the circumstances of their environment that leads you to choose actions and advocate political systems.

I want to know how you think you've developed this model. I presume by experience (not yet excluding the possibly you think we're just born with it, but I'm going to at least put that possibility as unlikely). Your experience, however, is obviously that of a your particular culture, upbringing and disposition - a filtered, biased and confounded view.

Psychology, is an attempt to reach the same types of model, but via methods which minimise the biases of one's culture, limited personal experience and confounding factors (the latter being the easiest to tackle, but the former two, arguably most important).

I could see a very strong argument being made that psychology had failed manifestly in removing these problematic modelling factors, but I struggle to see how you might arrive at the conclusion that it shouldn't even try, that it's actually better to have those models based in the ad hoc reckoning of highly specific individual experiences. That's the part I'd like you to explain, if you've the inclination. Do you really imagine that despite the strong influence of our varying (and at times quite unpleasant) cultures, we all nonetheless arrive a a pretty accurate model of how other people respond, including all the various neuro-diverse people we may never have even met. Seem monumentally unlikely to me.

we can replace all psychologists with a coin flip machine considering you guys can replicate only about half of what happens in that 'science' anyway. — StreetlightX

I'm sure I don't need to tell someone as well-read as you that this does not make any statistical sense. A 50% replicability rate means that 50% of experiment results can be replicated (ie have a particular measure of robustness), the others lack such a measure (although they may be robust in other ways). It doesn't measure the probability of any particular model being right. Notwithstanding, my main point here is that you are using a model right now. Just in deciding if and how to respond to me you are using a model of human behaviour. You system has 0% replicability, so I fail to see how 50% isn't a massive improvement.

(On a side note, 50% is also about the replicability rate of the pharmaceutical and medical sciences - I don't think this is really the political environment in which to be claiming that we might as well disregard any results arising from fields of research with 50% replicability)

what if instead of connecting such complex ways of thinking with reductive causes like lesions in the brain, or reinforcement contingencies, we saw them as akin to scientific theories? That is, if we saw every social-political-ethics stance as the manifestation of an underlying ‘scientific’ theory that was constructed by the person on the basis of the evidence as they interpreted it? Would you then agree that coercion, condemnation, peer pressure and violence would not be particularly effective in changing their theoretical view? — Joshs

No. I have no doubt that there's a 'theory-building' element to one's political worldview, and if you still think I'm a reductionist about these matters then you haven't been reading what I've written. But the problem is that theories are massively underdetermined by the data, more so the more complex the data set. So I don't see much being resolvable by this process.

Group rules and ostracization only work when those being ostracized have enough overlap of their thinking with the dominant group. It has the opposite effect when the two parties have profoundly different worldviews. — Joshs

The effect is either to re-integrate or to eliminate, so I think it works still.

Conservatives and liberals interact online all the time in the U.S. on comment sections and blogs, but studies have show that rather than causing them to come closer to the other’s point of view, it simply reinforces their differences. — Joshs

Indeed. That's the point of the interaction. To cement who is in who's group. We polemicise precisely to more firmly define the boundaries of our groups when they seem too permeable. No-one wants to find the middle ground of agreement because there's too much competition there to maintain one's own utility in that group.

All you will end up with, at best, is a clever soul who learns how to ape the superficial aspects of your ways of acting in order to keep out of trouble. — Joshs

And if we've learnt anything from the success of CBT, that will not be an insignificant win.

in the meantime that person will strategize how to gain power in order to overthrow what they never bought into to begin with. — Joshs

Everyone will do this anyway, the trick is to give them that power via egalitarian social structures, but there's little enthusiasm for that in such a complex social environment, it's just too risky for most.

Even pigeons have been known to outfox reinforcement contingencies. — Joshs

Indeed, but it depends heavily on the circumstances, it's not like reinforcement just fails, it's like almost everything else in psychology - it's just more complicated than a simple rule can capture.

Considering psychology is largely a garbage science anyway, one has to admire the foresight of philosophers in ditching it early on. — StreetlightX

Well, if replication is an issue for you, what's your alternative?

If I'm supporting an argument for mitigating circumstances to reduce the sentence of a young offender the crown want to make an example of, on the ground that his behavioural choices were affected by his social environment, what exactly do you think I should bring to bear in that? Žižek? You think the judge is going to give a shit what some random polemicist thinks? What about government policy, risk analysis, charitable intervention strategies...

What exactly is your brilliant non-psychological solution to the questions which inevitably hinge on how people are likely to react to their social and environmental circumstances? Guess? Use our brilliant 'gut feelings' (which mysteriously vary depending on how much power we wield)? Trust to philosophers who we, for some reason, assume immune to bias and just 'tell it how it is'?

All these digs at the old linear models you and Maw think are these fantastic coup de grâce are thirty years out of date. Even the standard textbooks warn against them, let alone any serious researcher.

Just because our models have to be non-linear, stochastic, and break down completely at higher levels of integration, doesn't mean we throw them away. Models of weather and climate are likewise non-linear stochastic and break down at higher levels of integration. The weather forecast for next week is little better than guesswork. It's influenced by too many factors that cannot be included in the model, but if I'm climbing a mountain tomorrow I'd be an idiot not to take it into account.

I’m not sure I understand how one can authorize violence and condemnation against an other while at the same time considering their perspective and actions to be legitimate. As Ken Gergen wrote “ those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy.” — Joshs

Because contextual legitimacy doesn't mean that resolution is reachable. Just because I can see how someone might have arrived at a position, it doesn't have any bearing on the methods by which I'd have to bring about a change. I can understand how a psychopath ended up that way if I see a lesion in the vm prefrontal cortex, that doesn't mean I can now diffuse his rage with talking.

One can defend oneself against a wild animal without condemning them , because we see their behavior as legitimate and natural. — Joshs

Indeed, but that's because the condemnation would have no effect on an animal. We're a social species, ostracisation is our main tool for setting group rules, so condemnation works. Look at how riled neo-liberals on this site are that we don't take their arguments seriously, they shouldn't care to debate with such obvious moral reprobates, but they do, because they want to be in the beard-stroking intellectuals gang.

For you the idea of a legitimate perspective , an internal logic to a worldview , is incoherent There are only fragmented and arbitrary bits of conditioned habits, so a ‘tough love’ is justified to change the reinforcement contingencies , habits, propositional narratives. — Joshs

Yeah, that's not far off.

It’s been awhile since I read Righteous Minds but I seem to recall the ‘foundations’ being regarded as social constructs. Constructs that are based on moral intuitions that we all possess. You’re against this intuitionism? — praxis

Yes. I'm not quite sure my full critique of Haidt's position is quite appropriate here, but in summary, I think he's right to invoke the factors he has in playing into political decisions (though that's pretty self-evident), but he's wrong to treat them as foundational.

The problem is that we're already interpreting behaviours (and self-report) from within a cultural context, so to say "X behaviour is innate" is to identify behaviour x as an instance of X (where x is the instance and X is the model of instances). That very identification is culturally mediated. So when you say

We each have particular conditioning or ingrained habits. I can't see how that's disputable. — praxis

I don't really agree. We have instances of specific behaviours, but identifying them as examples of trait X depends on our model of X which itself is formed by our language and cultural upbringing.

Haidt's 'moral tastes' are an attempt to classify behaviours (and self-reports) as if such a classification could be done outside of the history and speech acts that each of those terms have attached to them. For 'harm and 'care' to have any meaning (to take his fist axis as an example), they have to already accept the identification of those terms with behaviours. They don't come empty first for us to then say "I wonder what might fit in these categories".

So rather than some set of tastes existing as natural kinds which then inevitably lead someone to some behaviour exemplary of a particular political persuasion, I'd say that a person's political position will dictate how they interpret the behaviours an assign them to motivating morals according to publicly available narratives. I can't find a free copy, I'm afraid, but if you have any institutional access, you might be interested in Stephen Reicher's paper rejuvenating Moscovician social representation model for political psychology.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2011.00834.x

Maybe you're misunderstanding what I'm specifically I'm targeting here. — Maw

It wasn't so much a misunderstanding as a declining of your opening gambit.

I'm talking about political psychology that says liberals are liberals and conservatives are conservatives because of they have X Y Z behavioral or personality traits. — Maw

Indeed. As I said to Frank above, I don't even hold that there are such things as 'personality traits' in the sense of something one 'discovers' of oneself, so the entire question is meaningless, but such questions do not exhaust political psychology, at least half of which (in England anyway) is about disproving such nonsense.

Now we could do so by just blowing raspberries at it, but I prefer a more methodical approach.

By 'psychology' you mean modeling similar to climate models or models of the earth's em field, or the Yellowstone Caldera.

The OP is obviously not using the word that way. — frank

Maybe. I wasn't really responding to the OP by then (which turns out to be just a thinly disguised repetition of the all-to-common neo-liberal whinging about not being taken seriously).

I assume you're referring the use of 'psychology' to mean a person's personality traits, yes? I mean, it's still the case that methodical study is the best way to answer the question, it's just that in that case the study's been done already and the answer is no.

I don't personaly hold that there even are such things as personality traits. I think any 'traits' we identify are socially mediated constructions, not features of the psyche that can be 'discovered' by any experimental set-up. So the premise is flawed from the start, but this has been at issue for over twenty years, so the likes of Klein and Haidt are just being disingenuous pretending otherwise. But then they're flailing, so will clutch at anything.

Would it be that it was it's only sin. — StreetlightX

The same would be true of field's sins, no? Reductionism is not a flaw limited political psychology, nor is it a flaw which exhausts political psychology.

You're giving me contradictory answers. — frank

Am I? One says that psyches needn't be same, the other that some methodical study might be the best way to find out if they are or not.

I'm sorry to see you on the side of Nazi sympthsizers who babble shit like 'the left is characterized by high degrees of narcissism' — StreetlightX

If a field of study committed one to all the output of that field we'd both be Nazis.

Could you go into a little more detail here? I'm not quite sure what your point is. — frank

I could, but I fear I'd run out of hair, there's precious little left as it is.

to psychologize a political movement, we'd need to first show that the people in the group have similar psyches. — frank

Why? Saltpeter, charcoal and sulphur are dissimilar yet we can model the resultant mixture as a system containing all three.

Do they? — frank

That's the point of the study. Of course we could always just guess.

Precisely because they are irrelevant. Which is the point. — StreetlightX

I said ecologists are not expected to know the biology of the individual species to any lesser extent. Clumsy wording.

One cannot study the ecology of owls, voles and shrews without knowing some facts about the biology of each (specifically in this case, I believe, that owl's digestive systems extract fewer nutrients from shrews). Biology and ecology are not exclusive of each other, it would be ludicrous to suggest they had a relationship characterised by mutual irrelevancy.

So your point is that a single failure doesn't indicate that the whole endeavor has failed. — frank

Yes. If by 'point' you mean much the same as the 'point' that trousers go on button-frontwards, or the 'point' that one shouldn't piss upwind, then yes, my 'point' is that some people are sometimes wrong.

I think the reason that attempting to describe the left psychologically is bound to create false conclusions is that the left, wherever it appears, represents a fusion if diverse agendas arising out of contemporary circumstances. — frank

Why would the environmental embeddedness render any conclusions false? I can see why it would render conclusions which failed to account for it false, but not simply all conclusions tout court.

Streetlight's point was little more than a derogatory assumption that psychologists were incapable of contextualising their models. As if such fields were exhaustive. Ecologists are not expected to know the biology of the individual species to any lesser extent just because their models are of the networks rather than the nodes.

What are you talking about? Are you an expert in the psychology of politics? — frank

This entire sub-topic has already had more serious consideration than it deserved, I'm not going add the deconstruction of a sarcastic rejoinder to that trend.

Maw showed us an article from political psychology that made politically motivated post hoc rationalisation in place of good theory. From that we're supposed to conclude the entire field of study is nonsense. It's an argument too stupid to even consider, let alone respond to seriously.

If anyone's interested in discussing the flaws of the many, many, wrongheaded theories in political psychology I think that'd be very interesting, but interest is not the intention here.

I think only some people are like that; in fact, possibly the minority. A case can be made that a psychologically normal person does usually not reflect upon their choices at all, and this is actually preferred both by psychologists and people at large.

In fact, someone who reflects on their choices like you suggest, someone who wonders about their motivations that way is likely to score highly on the neuroticism scale (at least that), and render themselves somewhere in "mentally unwell" territory.

What you describe as "humans have to constantly buffer why they do anything", normal people would classify as "doubting oneself, second-guessing oneself", and thus as "lack of self-confidence", "lack of belief in oneself". A more charitable normal person would tell you that you "think too much". — baker

I think this is a good analysis. what's happening in antinatalism is the consequence of seeking some foundational principle behind a set of moral intuition which in all likelihood has no such principle. That it leads to odd, even repugnant conclusions shouldn't surprise us, and certainly shouldn't guide our actions. There'll be no end to@schopenhauer1's ability to provide post hoc rationalisations because data underdetermines theory. The relevant point is the one you've made here - theory also predates data. It is all seen already interpreted.

Beating up a “stupid” article, what is it kill the scarecrow day where you live?

The article is worthless. I’m not just saying that because I find foundation theory compelling and given that you also find it worthless there’s no point in bothering to explain. — praxis

No, @Maw's got a point. I'm personally giving up work and retraining as a philosopher - I can't believe some people in my profession say things which are wrong. What with this example, and @StreetlightX's indirect reference to that classic paper "People fight poverty because they're Sagittarians" which we all studied at university as if it was gospel. I thought every single one of them was 100% correct all the time and never showed any political bias...damn. Oh well, moving over to philosophy now where I don't expect to find any ridiculous ideas at all, otherwise we'd have to abandon that entire method of analysis too...

n the U.S., side A and B inhabit different universes of thought. don’t think there is a single rhetorical game, but different games played in parallel universes. — Joshs

I was referring to the expression of belief when I talked about rhetorical games, the reason why we think the two sides are different is largely the expression of their belief, not the belief itself (as in 'a tendency to act as if...').

Furthermore, these universes tie together and inform a multitude of specific political positions: gun control , climate change , views about covid danger and mask wearing , abortion, death penalty , immigration , terrorism, identity and gender politics, patriotism, economics, religion. — Joshs

I don't think they do. Certain beliefs act as membership badges for social groups, they're simply tokens to identify you as a member, I don't see any reason to think they cohere, nor that they were even derived from 'first principles' in any way. Most people when interrogated about their beliefs can't provide coherent arguments form some mythical foundational principle - conservatism, libertarianism, compassion, whatever. The beliefs appear more like off-the-shelf position statements, often about situations they'll never even face, nor have to change their behaviour to comply with in any way. The justifications are post hoc, themes like conservatism or libertarianism are there as narrative prompts to reach for when required, off which a good story can built to explain that particular belief's place in the system.

It can allow side A to see the logic of side B’s positron from their vantage even when side A continues to prefer their own viewpoint. — Joshs

As I said, I really don't see any reason to think that Side A or B have any kind of 'logic' to their respective worldviews at all, so there's nothing to see in that respect. There are collections of positions which are generally mutually exclusive sets (though some overlap) that are adopted out of habit, conformity, personal narrative building...

To succeed at this means to no longer have to delegitimize B’s thinking. What fuels today’s polarizing political scene is not simply that the opponents see the world differently , it’s that they cannot fathom how one could in good conscience hold the views of the opposing side. This leaves only delegitimizing explanations for the other’s behavior. — Joshs

Yes, I agree, though obviously for different reasons. But delegitimising is itself a tool to shore up the boundaries of one's own group membership. If the other views seemed like other tins on the shelf at the supermarket then one's own collection would seem ad hoc and the social boundary looks vague and insecure. We need to see the other's beliefs as not-even-options, "how could one even think that?" to make the boundary of our social group seem more secure. I'm not even sure it would be a good idea to 'understand' the political choices of one's opponents in any given struggle. As you say...

Its advantage is to protect you from reacting violently, punitively, condemningly, toward the other. — Joshs

...which seems to me to be a disadvantage. Where groups are oppressed and have been serially so for decades - the poor, minorities, modern day colonies of TNCs...what's needed is more violence and condemnation. We're not going to sit round a table and resolve this.

Are you making a distinction between being aware of the other side’s argument,and understanding that argument in the way that they intend it? Or are you assuming that to parrot back to the other their talking posts is equivalent to sharing thr other’s interpretation of the meaning of the political stance? Are opposite sides in today’s polarized political scene misreading each other, or reading each other accurately and disagreeing about other issues (namely moral stance and motivation) ? — Joshs

I don't really think either apply. It's pretty clear that the arguments put forward by either side are moves in the rhetorical game, so I think if one were to 'understand' their intentions the only understanding to be had would be of the expected impact the argument would have, rather than anything much relating to deeper intentions. There's understanding how the other side functions, and how their belief systems evolve, and then there's the arguments they put forth. I don't see any reason to believe the two are the same.

But let's assume they are for a second. What would it take for you to feel content that side A had 'understood' side B? As I (and the rest of my profession) have but recently learnt from reading Streelight's post, side B's 'understanding' would only ever be a state of their network, it's not like it could ever be some kind of photograph of side A's True Position.

That just describes other lucrative, but bullshit industries such as economics, evolutionary psychology, neuromarketing, etc. How much do you think Larry Summer gets paid despite constantly being wrong? Either way, what's the problem? You get paid good money from clueless individuals or corporations to produce nonsense. I think that's great. — Maw

Politics is an ecological phenomenon first and foremost, and the idea that it is built up of units of psychologies - as it were - is to completely misunderstand both the mind and politics. — StreetlightX

As I said, I wasn't discussing the matter seriously. It's like trying to have a serious discussion with a child about the virtues of bedtime. I get it, you hate reductionist and evolutionary psychology - what's not to hate. The idea that us poor psychologists are too anal (ref), to think about their models in terms of the ecologies and environmental networks within which they're embedded would be naive if it wasn't in this case rather just a cliched Danish Gambit.

There are highly paid economists too, so... — ssu

Indeed. And Astrologers no doubt. wasn't treating the matter as a serious discussion.

Though one wonders whom it is we should be consulting in matters of economics, psychology, or sociology. Roll dice presumably...

You're welcome. — StreetlightX

I doubt that. But hell, I'm paid an awful lot of money for my moronic guesswork so at least I've got something to cushion the blow... it's a wonder there's not more astrology consultants in the courts, corporations and civil service, they too could benefit from whatever mass deception I've inadvertently manged to weave.

Maw is entirely right and anyone who looks to psychology to explain politics is a moron. — StreetlightX

Ah, well, that's cleared that up. 25 years of wondering whether I and my colleagues were morons and I could have just asked...

any attempt to psychologically map out an explanation for why and how conservatives and liberals or whatever political appellation believe what they believe is nonsense. It's about as vague as astrology and just as predictive. — Maw

Brilliant idea. Next election we'll let the fascists and Neo-liberals use psychology to target advertising to directly appeal to their core supporters and the left can use astrology. I'm sure it'll work out just fine, what with them both being equally vague and non-predictive. What nonsense. There are positions on the scale between uncontrovertible fact and complete guesswork, matters needn't be one or the other.

I am not sure this is a definition of morality other than your definition. — schopenhauer1

What definition of morality are you working from?

the idea of preventing unnecessary suffering while also not violating someone's dignity can apply in a multitude of ways.. Wake a lifeguard (small violation) but don't force the lifeguard into a lifetime of lifeguarding school EVEN if you KNOW the best OUTCOME is this person being forced into teaching lifeguarding lessons for the rest of their life. There is something about caring TOO MUCH about greatest good that is nefarious in itself when balanced against individual dignity. — schopenhauer1

We've already agreed to this. I was just correcting the simplistic analysis presented. A morality cannot simply be about preventing harm, because a moral action sometimes involves harm, it would be a direct contradiction. Of course you could have a moral maxim about minimising harm, one where you consider the net harm (the harm of refraining from procreation is smaller than the harm from doing so). But then you have to accept that we're now measuring harms. Which raises questions about whose measurement criteria we use.

Odd that you should cite the mere addition paradox when you use it in reverse. One fewer averagely suffering person does not make the world a better place by exactly the same logic as one more averagely happy person does not make the world a better place. It's not about total quantity of happiness or suffering, it's about our relationships with others. We should be appalled to see people suffer beyond our expected amount and want to do everything we can to help (including suffering more minor harms ourselves, and expecting others to do so too).

when someone is born, things like taxes, making people go to school, etc. can be a consideration because as to survive, we live in a society and is necessary for the maintenance of that survival. If it isn't an industrialized form, it will simply take other forms, as in some way people will have to get together to get stuff done for survival's sake. — schopenhauer1

Well yeah, that then is exactly what I'm talking about. You put all stuff that your have to do for others in terms of your own benefit. "I have to pay my taxes becasue it contributes to the general governance from which I benefit". I don't think anyone suggests neo-liberals are fanatically opposed to helping others even when it directly benefits them to do so.

Dignity being violated is if in some sense a negative that will befall someone is being completely overlooked in an egregious manner — schopenhauer1

It's not being overlooked at all. I know that if I have another child they will suffer many of life's challenges, I'm not overlooking it at all. I expect a person to tolerate such harms for the greater good. I expect it of my children and I expect it of any imaginary future child when I'm contemplating what their existence would be like when considering bringing it about.

It's a reasonable expectation because normal human beings do indeed tolerate minor harms to benefit others, it's part of being human - or at least it was until you and your neo-liberal buddies tried to drive it out of everyone so as to make them compliant little consumers.

the straightforward case of procreation is like the lifeguard being condemned to lifeguarding school to me whereas..

The small violations that we balance with unnecessary suffering we must do once born is likened to lightly tapping on the lifeguard to wake him up to save the child... — schopenhauer1

This makes no sense at all. The harms are the same in both cases. The harms brought about from procreation are exactly and only the "small violations that we balance with unnecessary suffering we must do once born".