Comments on: Good sentences

By: Tom DeMeo

Tom DeMeo — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 13:16:48 +0000

We all only have so much bandwidth. No one person can express a rational distribution of responses to diseases overall.

No one has made a great case here (particularly Heumer) that our aggregate efforts are all that far off, either.

You are implying with the language you are using that group alignment is an accident of circumstances. I see more personal choice in the narratives we align with, and narratives are a fundamental tool for how we operate collectively.

Another example of the same thing would be that in cases where we have well understood language to describe a problem, we do better than when we don’t. We all need tools to act.

By: Handle

Handle — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 10:55:27 +0000

Good point, one sees this in the way politics now works in many developed counties with very boring parties chronically unable to articulate any compelling and purely positive agenda. Instead they rely on negative blame games and the swing voter population’s fickleness, general sense of malaise, restlessness, ignorance, and impatience, and play the pendulum game using cliches from “A Face In The Crowd”: e.g., “it’s time for a change”, and, “the mess in Washington.”

By: andrewknorr

andrewknorr — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 10:49:54 +0000

The Christians are “failing to cooperate” in the joint venture of reciprocating equal dignity to each member of society, and likewise gays fail to uphold sexual norms that maintain the moral tone of society. Each group is trying to punish defectors or broadly ‘freeriders’ from group norms. You can tell the same story about Muslims, illegal aliens, communists, libertarians, etc. This works along all the axes – oppressor/oppressed (capitalism is theft), freedom/coercion (taxation is theft), or civilization/barbarism (your unmowed lawn is lowering my property values).

By: Octavian

Octavian — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 09:34:31 +0000

But the “enemies” are not necessarily (or even usually) people who ‘fail to cooperate’ in some hypothetical joint venture. They’re people with different values, goals, or preferred methods of accomplishing a goal.

By: djf

djf — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 09:28:20 +0000

“It seems that one of the tools for getting a large group to cooperate is to identify and demonize an enemy.”

There’s not much alternative to identifying and demonizing an enemy if those trying to generate the cooperation have no positive content on which to center a group identity and thereby generate cooperation.

It also would not hurt to admit that sometimes different groups have genuinely conflicting interests and to acknowledge the legitimacy of the political working out of these conflicts.

By: Weir

Weir — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 00:42:38 +0000

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.” Mark 6:1.

But that’s typical of Jesus, always quick to dismiss the people he didn’t approve of.

Plus it was two thousand years ago, so it’s hardly enlightening to point out, again, that people blow their own trumpets.

By: andrewknorr

andrewknorr — Sun, 08 Oct 2017 23:20:31 +0000

Friends:enemies::cooperators:freeriders

By: Octavian

Octavian — Sun, 08 Oct 2017 21:20:11 +0000

Why equate enemies with free riders?

By: Octavian

Octavian — Sun, 08 Oct 2017 21:19:36 +0000

It is actually enlightening to observe that our political behavior (and in the case of donating to charities, even our valuation of human lives and wellbeing) are motivated are motivated largely by (illigical) social impulses rather than rational analysis or even basic principles. Do we not aspire to be rational or principles in politics?

You don’t think that it’s at least interesting, if not a problem, that one cares more about saving one person than saving another because saving the former has more social currency in the political narrative in which one believes oneself to be situated?

By: andrewknorr

andrewknorr — Sun, 08 Oct 2017 15:18:40 +0000

It’s troubling that humans cooperate by identifying enemies? Let’s replace “identifying enemies” with “punishing freeriders” and so “it’s troubling that humans cooperate by punishing freeriders.” Of course, why would anyone cooperate if freeriders would reap all the benefits? Cooperation and enmity are a duality, like up and down.