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I think the advice for who to listen to is very bad, though. He calls it being "slightly elitist", but his bar is beneath the ground. The example for discussing politics is knowing what the three branches of government are - I knew that when I was 8 and I don't think I had anything interesting to say about politics back then. I definitely couldn't have given a meaningful critique on the latest policy debate, and neither can anyone possessing merely the most basic knowledge of rudimentary facts on the topic.
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, so you probably don't really care that much about whatever it is you say you care about, since you haven't done the easiest thing you can do to make a change.
It's not perfect, and no criteria will be, but there are tons of people who can rattle off "executive, legislative, judiciary" who nevertheless don't know ball.
Or, you know, you haven't lived at the same address for twenty years. In your imagined world where every single citizen either has something so pressing to call their representatives about or is just ignorant, you're still basically filtering out everybody who moved for a job/college/SO/whatever recently. I guess in your mind it's only fitting that they're disqualified from having an opinion? For reference about 12% of Americans change residence each year.
The national secrecy is a cess pool of corruption in any and all governments - the corruption of all government begins with its secrets - a truly free people don't allow their governments to keep secrets, but encourages governance to have a responsibility of protecting the truth over secrecy - and this, under the knowledge that absolutes are unattainable. Of course, nuclear codes need to be made inaccessible; the more the people know about their government, the less corrupt it is, however.
After all, do you know why your government hates Russia, like, legislatively - as opposed to culturally and all the other distractions from governance.
The issue is, the overlying principle is that modern governments must allow the people to survive extremism. Political systems, designed to combat the extremes of mass survival, reach a point where they, too, are extreme. As is also born in the history of other forms of human organization - religion, and so on. The very thing the subject was started to address, becomes it in the end.
Basic knowledge is one thing. But constant awareness is something else. We must always hold our governments and their agency, accountable. It is true of priests and politicians and scientists and icons, alike.
In other words, reversed stupidity is not intelligence[1].
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-s...
Once you accept a premise that majority consensus of well informed people can be drastically wrong, it's not hard to then transfer that horizontally from one domain to another. So if you accept the possibility that scientists made up climate change - why wouldn't they also make up COVID? or falsify risks associated with vaccines? or any other number of things.
Underpinning all of this is some basic elements of humility and empathy - willingness to accede to a greater authority of others, and to weigh others experience that is different to yours as important in informing your views. Cutting those tethers gives your own belief system a new degree of freedom.
I care when they start arguing with me and trying to jam their belief down my throat. I didn’t even ask, you brought it up and you’re mad at me because I disagree.
I think this is the more interesting point to consider. Having a belief, any belief, is probably just fine. It’s the second part that’s the issue.
> most people are in fact “asleep” about most things most of the time, not super thoughtful in how they develop beliefs
Which is later echoed, but differently, as:
> the average person just doesn’t know much about your hyper specific thing
This is skirting around whether they have a duty to know about your thing. The first phrasing suggests they do, the second suggests not.
Given that your thing is probably stupid and wrong, and life's too short, it seems reasonable to me that most people can't give you good arguments about it unless you invite them to take a pleasant and entertaining walk around your reasoning and maybe sleep on it and come back later. If the subject can't be made pleasant and entertaining, you're probably out of luck. This unfortunately still applies even when your thing is genuinely a great insight.
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.
This world is a messy complicated place and I tend to think in percentages about everything. Guarantees are rare, I usually think of events as probabilistic, and likewise what other people say.
Now, these probabilities can change based on who's saying what. Theoretically someone who specialized in that topic has a higher chance of "getting it right", or sussing it better than people who aren't as versed in that subject. That's what academia is, and if it wouldn't work we wouldn't do it.
So, for me it does matter who's saying what, but only to some extent. That means even the most educated, smart and focused individual can get it wrong, and some nobody with no training on the subject can get it right, for various reasons, even pure chance.
So I'm never discarding someone's opinion based on who the are or their training, but I do consider the chances of them being right or wrong. There was a recent discussion about Nobelitis.
At the risk of sounding like an AI pilled bozo, I find LLM's are fairly good sparring partners if you instruct them well. At least they're more capable of giving you the best arguments against your position than the average bar patron.
Almost all of my non-professional prompts are of that nature.
The people who agree with you are a biased sample of the population. But so are the people who are willing to openly disagree. So we have both a "bubble" and an "anti-bubble". This is especially true for people with unusual views, but it's also true for everyone.
I had a colleague who was part of an idiosyncratic religious denomination, which believes in the literal truth of the Bible etc. He was a nice guy and mostly we avoided talking about this. The one person who raised it in social conversation was the most tactless guy in the office. (Even then he wasn't that tactless). Lots of people online are looking for a verbal fight. The decent people who know you socially or via work, but disagree with you over some political or religious issue, will usually avoid talking about it with you. That applies just as much if you have a mainstream but not universally held belief, as if you have an extreme one.
The problem here is that there's not really any incentive to seriously engage with a person with opposing views, even though our society would be a lot better if people did it. Lots of people seem to think that freedom of speech just means freedom to harangue those you disagree with, and aren't interested in the search for truth.
Two problems:
1. There are beliefs people hold approximately as strongly as they hold "the Sun will rise tomorrow", so "updating" is kinda irrelevant.
2. How many people actually think any of their beliefs are "extremist"? And if they don't, they won't consider the warning to apply.
And after digging in further:
3. Many people reasonably believe that their discussion circles already filter out a lot of "average people" and thus expect a higher standard of discourse from their ideological opponents. When that still doesn't happen, it naturally seems like stronger evidence.
4. (Insert generic annoyance at veganism discourse here.)
This is a very agreeable statement, but I'd add that politics is not about finding the Kantian truth of what's best for everyone (inside the country? globally? also immigrants? lazy and ugly natives?).
It's about balancing interests. Of course, the idea of free market democracy was/is that both goals eventually converge.
This is obviously harmful for society but also obviously the best outcome for the platform who wants to sell your attention to advertisers.
Flipping that over: aspire to be correct in your beliefs, not in "being right".
Karl Popper (the man behind the Intolerance of Intolerance "paradox) identified it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
The other kind of beliefs are "Symbolic beliefs." Symbolic beliefs are not held because they are true, or because they are useful on their own. They're held because they signal that you belong to the tribe. They are similar to the "Alief", which is an automatic unequestioned belief. Most Symbolic beliefs are aliefs, but not all.
Since learning about this I've been trying to identify my own aliefs and symbolic beliefs and question them. It turns out I have more than I'd realized. We probably all do.
I think this greatly underestimates the number of completely mundane, innocuous factual beliefs that everyone, or at least everyone who is able to get through their lives without serious mishap for any length of time, has to have. For anyone in that position, most of their beliefs have to be factual beliefs, and have to be true at least to a good enough approximation to allow them to function. We tend to ignore such beliefs in discussions like this, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.
Be careful about what news you consume, even if it appears to agree with you. Check sources. Check facts. Try to work up to your beliefs from direct observation and basic principles whenever possible. Question your beliefs. Maybe they're wrong!
e.g. It's easy to get worked up about Trump. There's an awful lot bad press out there about him. Ask yourself, can a human being really be that vile? Maybe I'm just being misled by the media and partisan politics. Go watch some uncut speeches and press conferences. Pay attention to what the man actually does. Oh, he wants to place tariffs on my country because smoke from forest fires sometimes crosses our shared borders*? He actually said that? Yes. Yes he did. That's directly observable scumbag behaviour. If a romantic interest acted that way I'd break things off immediately. Huge red flag. Maybe the negative opinions about him check out.
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* It crosses both ways, BTW.
The Earth is on the back of a large turtle. Prove me wrong.
Most of the arguments you hear will be deeply flawed.
Therefore we are on the back of a giant turtle.
1. The number of people in the general population who will object to neoliberalism.
2. The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why neoliberalism and the trickle down theory of economics is incorrect, and can speak to your very specific concerns about government bloat and over-regulation in a way that gets across how modern social theorists and economists give a more compelling and ethically coherent account of the way the world works, and do so patiently and thoroughly.
This is great! It works with everything.
If you're going to single out "marxism" as your example of an ideology that is both obviously extreme and obviously wrong, you should make an actual argument against it, and another for why it should be considered extreme, instead of the classic "I've pictured you as the soyjack and me as the chad". That goes against the spirit of the rest of the post.
Actual marxists aren't too attached to the details of the "labor theory of value". They care about classes and their competing interests, and how this conflict shapes the economy and our societies. Something so basic you would have a hard time arguing against, and that is conspicuously absent from "liberal capitalist" theories, that are supposed to be normal, good and the default.
Most workers can intuit that their boss wants them to work more for less, and that it goes against their wishes to be paid more and have more free time.
And that's where TFA's theory falls flat. People turn "ideologically crazy" not from a lack of adequate sparring partners, but because their understanding of their ideology is vague and flexible enough that it can resist any attack, and reinforce itself, even.
People who benefit from a system are unlikely to look for problems with it and unlikely to notice any contradictions. Anything which appears as a contradiction gets shrugged off as "Well, there must be a good reason, I'm not an expert. I will trust the experts." These people corrupt Occam's Razor that the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. "The experts say ..." becomes the ultimate simplest explanation to everything... And the experts that they choose to listen to are those who are aligned with their existing beliefs.
Then you have people who notice the contradictions but they see so many from first-hand experience that they don't trust the experts and they don't have access to enough different information to be able to choose a good one; so they just adopt the least-bad one as their own... The one which best protects their self-image and whose (comparatively) few contradictions can be plausibly explained away by corruption, conspiracy or dishonesty.
But I think the latter group is in fact one step closer to the truth. The truth is there is no conspiracy (at least no grand, all-encompassing one), it's worse than that; systemic incentives create alignment and remove the need for intentional coordination. The coordination, the illusion of conspiracy is just a byproduct of incentives. The second group of people are wrong about the mechanism but their view of reality leads to the same outcome... So with each passing year, their views are being reinforced by more "proof."
The system which manufactures the incentives which create alignment is itself probably not the product of conspiracy; it's just a system which evolved slowly over time to subtly serve its operators and their supporters. They don't want to change it, not out of nefariousness, but out of justified fear of what havoc any change might wreck... Bureaucracy also plays a part.
It's very difficult to co-ordinate a lot of people to agree on anything, let alone act on it. This is one thing that the mainstream anti-conspiracy folks are completely right about.
I'm a global top-50-university-credentialed expert in Information Technology who majored in System Design and has worked for a wide range of companies of different sizes, in multiple industries (education, remote work platforms, social media, banking/finance), in multiple countries including in highly political areas like crypto... So the "trust the experts" folk can trust me when it comes to information flows and system design...
> Consider two categories of people:
> 1. The number of people in the general population who will object to Marxism.
> 2. The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect, and can speak to your very specific concerns about worker power and class conflict in a way that gets across how modern social theorists and economists give a more compelling and ethically coherent account of the way the world works, and do so patiently and thoroughly.
Really this is: let's consider one possibility, that I am right and that you are extreme and wrong. Everything is going well, except for the radical weirdos trying to stop me from doing what I want.
Congratulations on being a vegan. 20% of the population doesn't have health insurance.
I'm no Marxist, but this regurgitation of neolib talking points is not being smart enough to refute a Marxist. The problem with today's "Marxists" is that they don't know enough to defend their own positions, and react with rage when the holes in their absurdly shallow knowledge gleaned from social media posts, Jacobin articles and hipster podcasts are confronted by simple, direct, good faith questions that they don't have answers to. It's not that people aren't well-studied enough to refute their extremism.
These two things are completely unrelated.