The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
blog.andymasley.com63 points by mef 3 hours ago
63 points by mef 3 hours ago
The good part of this: don't fall into the trap of believing the proposition "an idiot disagrees with me, so I must be right". That's solid advice, idiots believe countless true things and geniuses believe innumerable false things. The intelligence of a random interlocutor has nothing to do with the validity of their opinions, really, so it shouldn't serve as evidence one way or another. Generally, I try to pay attention to good arguments against my ideas, not good arguers.
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.
I think knowing about the branches of your government is a prerequisite to having an opinion or good argument about it. It’s not sufficient to just know that but it’s a good filter in the USA where a surprising number of people have “opinions” but lack the most basic knowledge.
It is indeed important to know about ones government - not just its branches, but also its misdeeds and crimes.
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.
It's a prerequisite, but so is breathing. It's necessary but not sufficient.
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.
> and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes
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.
Feels a little disingenuous to quote this line and not the full section where OP was just asking you to know your local representatives.
I've never called anyone about anything political, and I also haven't lived at the same address (or even in the same state) for 20 years but I still know at least who my senators are and some of my representatives. State elections are every two years; you have to almost actively not pay attention to not know anything about yours.
As always everyone is entitled to their opinions, the question is how much should the rest of us care.
Just like how sometimes I consider how little I should care about a social media frequenter’s opinions. I am, for better or for worse, getting near the last willing comment I am going to leave on this, or any, social media site.
That is not due to age or illness, it is due to enshittification. Not by the admin but by the populace.
Very bottom of the page, you can see links to the long and storied history of people saying “HN is bad now,” and why it’s an opinion you don’t really need to share.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I’d throw in for free that when you’re done at a party… say goodbye to your friends and leave. The party in general doesn’t need an announcement of your dissatisfaction and departure. Safe travels.
It’s probably not necessary to know what the administrative structure of your government is in order to hold an opinion on politics. It’s more important to understand things like the different ideas and ideologies, and what concrete evidence actually exists to support whatever legislation you’re interested in. And pretty much nobody has sufficient political knowledge to do this.
If you want to read someone the article author characterizes as #1 (Objects to Marxism) and #2 (Knows enough to carefully and reasonably refute Marxism) I'd recommend James Lindsay's New Discourses podcast and website. He's read all the leftist books and is deeply familiar with all their ideas and terminology, but is about as anti-communist as they come. Interestingly, he has a lot of people on what he calls the "Woke Right" (e.g Tucker Carlson) who also hate him.
Pretty good. I have something to say about this part:
> 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.
I am vegetarian, not vegan. I am so because it is something I can do about the state of animal welfare. I don't engage in discussions about my eating with people outside my immediate family. My immediate family are all omnivores. I sometimes, but rarely, choose to eat meat because it is served to me by someone who doesn't know my preference. Animal welfare remains my top priority and concern.
I agree with a lot of this, and the framing is new to me and I really appreciate it. I especially appreciate the acknowledgement that there isn't necessarily anything wrong with having extreme beliefs; "extreme" is a label most often applied by antagonists of such beliefs. But I definitely feel like there can be a pipeline where one extreme belief may lead to others simply because they are also labelled extreme and not for a more recognizable reason.
> it’s very very easy to be negatively polarized by a ton of bad conversations with normal people about it, until you feel like the whole rest of the world is crazy
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.
Of course the world is crazy. But so are you
Agreed, but also: Just because they're crazy, it doesn't mean they're wrong.
Depends, if we're being pedantic crazy implies you get some stuff wrong, due to not "being" fully there.
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.
I think the advice at the end of this post is essentially sound: you should pre-filter your evaluation of others’ opinions through their understanding of related topics. But that isn’t elitist, and I think we shouldn’t call it that! It’s a form of media and cultural literacy we should be encouraging people to have; there isn’t (and shouldn’t) be anything elite about it.
Great points and nice write-up.
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.
If you're not an extremist at this point relative to everyone else, the vast majority of whom have beliefs that are incompatible with the existence of other life on this planet, then you're probably a moron.
> Don't update positively on your extremist beliefs whenever you hear a bad argument against them
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.)
One big problem is that lately this kind of extremism has become more like a cult: even considering the idea that the “others” might have some truth (while being wrong about the rest) is treated like blasphemy
I think the problem here is that we have a bias for those who agree with us that outweighs our patience in searching for oppositional opinions that are well founded. From a liberal bubble it is quite hard to find conservative viewpoints that aren't based on unobserved apriori belief or strawman arguments. It feels like being a heavyweight surrounded by lightweights and it makes me feel like I need a better sparring partner, I just can't find one...
> I think the problem here is that we have a bias for those who agree with us that outweighs our patience in searching for oppositional opinions that are well founded.
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.
My favorite intellectual conservative sparring partner became a progressive.
Freedom of association is kind of a mistake, as it encourages these bubbles to form.
The key problem is social media feed boosting “engagement”. Balanced, well thought comments don't bring much engagement so they end up being ignored by the algorithm while outrageously stupid takes generate a lot of (negative) engagement, some of which being equally stupid which will bring more engagement than the sensible responses and so on. And at the end if the day, all you see in your social media feed is stupid people sharing at least some of your values arguing with even stupider people (or so you think, at least) who have the opposite views.
This is obviously harmful for society but also obviously the best outcome for the platform who wants to sell your attention to advertisers.
What a breath of fresh air! If only people were in control of their own selves to stick to this kind of balanced and open-minded disposition.
Here's One Weird Trick™ to avoid being an ideologue: be ok with being wrong.
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
I only recently learned that most peoples beliefs are not "factual beliefs". Since most of mine are, I thought that's how other people work. I think Popper may have made the same mistake by assuming "correctness" is always the primary value a belief offers.
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.
Information hygiene is important if you don't want to go "crazy" in this sense.
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.
I like that the author doesn’t clarify what constitutes an extremist idea aside from suggesting that he doesn’t believe in any. “Extremism is when people, who are dumb, don’t know facts unlike me, who is very smart” is a kick ass theme for an essay
"I’m not against extremist ideas on principle. I have my own, the main one being that animal welfare is a much larger urgent catastrophe than most people believe."
This is great. The error it highlights would work for anything.
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.
This is some pseudo-profound Third Way radical centrist horseshit.
> 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.
Rational people will pick the ideology which has the fewest contradictions. Irrational people will choose that which serves them best.
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."
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What in that blog made you write him off? I also clicked through and found very thoughtful writing on the topic, though I still disagree with their position as I understand it.
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He calls his position on animal welfare “extremist”. That’s hardly a smuggling.
And anyways I found his linked blog post pretty thought provoking, even though I hold a different position than the author.
Fine. Not smuggling then “advocating”. It doesn’t actually matter, since it hurts the overall force of his point. Like, if he’s detected this trend why not learn from it himself?
I thought it was kind of convenient and helpful to be able to say "I, too, am a nutjob" while advocating moderation in one's nutjobbery. See the comment by jrflowers for how it would have come off if the author claimed to be perfect.
Because he wants to be clear that you don’t face a choice between turning crazy and believing only things that the people around you consider normal. You can believe strange, extreme things and still be reasonable about them.
Terrible boring normie post. You can get deeper with a 5 min youtube video.