You Don’t Believe In Free Markets And Free Speech If You’re Demanding Criminal Charges Against People For Their Free Market, Free Speech Decisions
The Signal and the Corrective
A technical breakdown of 'narratives' and how they operate: narratives simplify issues by focusing on a main "signal" while ignoring other relevant "noise", and this affects discussions between those with opposing preferred signals. It goes into many examples across basically any kind of ideological or cultural divide.
AI summary:
- The article explores how different people can derive opposing narratives from the same set of facts, with each viewing their interpretation as the "signal" and opposing views as "noise"
- Key concepts:
- Signal: The core belief or narrative someone holds as fundamentally true
- Corrective: The moderating adjustments made to account for exceptions to the core belief
- Figure-ground inversion: How the same reality can be interpreted in opposite ways
- Examples of opposing narratives include:
- Government as public service vs. government as pork distribution
- Medical care as healing vs. medical care as harmful intervention
- Capitalism as wealth creation vs. capitalism as exploitation
- Nature vs. nurture in human behavior
- Science as gradual progress vs. science as paradigm shifts
- Communication dynamics:
- People are more likely to fall back on pure signals (without correctives) when:
- Discussions become abstract
- Communication bandwidth is limited
- Under stress or emotional pressure
- Speaking to unfamiliar audiences
- In hostile environments
- People are more likely to fall back on pure signals (without correctives) when:
- Persuasion insights:
- It's easier to add correctives to someone's existing signal than to completely change their core beliefs
- People must feel their fundamental views are respected before accepting criticism
- Acknowledging partial validity of opposing views is crucial for productive dialogue
- Problems in modern discourse:
- Online debates often lack real-world consequences
- When there's no need for cooperation, people prefer conquest over consensus
- Lack of real relationships reduces incentives for civility and understanding
- The author notes that while most people hold moderate views with both signals and correctives, fundamental differences can be masked when discussing specific policies but become apparent in discussions of general principles
- The piece maintains a thoughtful, analytical tone while acknowledging the complexity and challenges of human communication and belief systems
- The author expresses personal examples and vulnerability in describing how they themselves react differently to criticism based on whether it comes from those who share their fundamental values
narratives contradicting each other means that they simplify and generalize in different ways and assign goodness and badness to things in opposite directions. While that might look like contradiction it isn’t, because generalizations and value judgments aren’t strictly facts about the world. As a consequence, the more abstracted and value-laden narratives get the more they can contradict each other without any of them being “wrong”.
“The free market is extremely powerful and will work best as a rule, but there are a few outliers where it won’t, and some people will be hurt so we should have a social safety net to contain the bad side effects.”
and
“Capitalism is morally corrupt and rewards selfishness and greed. An economy run for the people by the people is a moral imperative, but planned economies don’t seem to work very well in practice so we need the market to fuel prosperity even if it is distasteful.”
. . . have very different fundamental attitudes but may well come down quite close to each other in terms of supported policies. If you model them as having one “main signal” (basic attitude) paired with a corrective to account for how the basic attitude fails to match reality perfectly, then this kind of difference is understated when the conversation is about specific issues (because then signals plus correctives are compared and the correctives bring “opposite” people closer together) but overstated when the conversation is about general principles — because then it’s only about the signal.
I’ve said that when discussions get abstract and general people tend to go back to their main signals and ignore correctives, which makes participants seem further apart than they really are. The same thing happens when the communication bandwidth is low for some reason. When dealing with complex matters human communication tends not to be super efficient in the first place and if something makes subtlety extra hard — like a 140 character limit, only a few minutes to type during a bathroom break at work, little to no context or a noisy discourse environment — you’re going to fall back to simpler, more basic messages.
Internal factors matter too. When you’re stressed, don’t have time to think, don’t know the person you’re talking to and don’t really care about them, when emotions are heated, when you feel attacked, when an audience is watching and you can’t look weak, or when you smell blood in the water, then you’re going to go simple, you’re going to go basic, you’re going to push in a direction rather than trying to hit a target. And whoever you’re talking to is going to do the same. You both fall back in different directions, exactly when you shouldn’t.
It makes sense to think of complex disagreements as not about single facts but about narratives made up of generalizations, abstractions and interpretations of many facts, most of which aren’t currently on the table. And the status of our favorite narratives matters to us, because they say what’s happening, who the heroes are and who the villains are, what’s matters and what doesn’t, who owes and who is owed. Most of us, when not in our very best moods, will make sure our most cherished narratives are safe before we let any others thrive.
Most people will accept that their main signals have correctives, but they will not accept that their main signals have no validity or legitimacy. It’s a lot easier to install a corrective in someone than it is to dislodge their main signal (and that might later lead to a more fundamental change of heart) — but to do that you must refrain from threatening the signal because that makes people defensive. And it’s not so hard. Listen and acknowledge that their view has greater than zero validity.
In an ideal world, any argumentation would start with laying out its own background assumptions, including stating if what it says should be taken as a corrective on top of its opposite or a complete rejection of it.
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Dirt: Coping with things
Coping with things is the prevailing mood in my corner of the universe. As I write this, America has just completed an election in which many people voted primarily for the idea of voting. The prevailing candidate? Less an individual than an avatar of civility and liberalism.
We are a country founded on an idea and not an identity.
Americans have a way of obscuring reality through grand symbolism and none of the accompanying semiotic rigor. As if the facade of democracy can be upheld by not looking too closely at increasingly undemocratic outcomes — our high tolerance for multiculturalism tenuously predicated on everyone struggling equally. The difference between idea and identity is both our saving grace and our downfall. Democracy: watch the gap.
The idea of the American individual, part of the national optimism that fueled the Space Race, is far less prominent than the citizen-consumer. Attaining a degree of celebrity, still a coveted means to financial stability, thrusts one into the category of “celebrity,” where image overtakes personhood.
Lifestyle, like work, is something we can only see in aggregate. Technological gains don’t relieve the pressure for ownership; they merely reinforce it.
Can a universal basic income help address homelessness? | Hacker News Discussion
The number one thing UBI doesn't handle well is rent inflation. You hand out $1000 dollars per person monthly, expect rents to go up by about $1000 monthly as landlords realise there is all this extra disposable income in peoples' hand right now.However, this is just an exaggerated effect of monopolies sucking out all aggregate disposable income out of economy that is already happening. Monopolies by definition don't have price down pressures, so they always price expand to capture anything people might have extra. Since landlording is the biggest aggregate monopoly in the world, landlords capture any disposable workers' income. No matter if they get a raise from their boss, the landlord always takes it away.
One of the biggest strengths of UBI is that it eliminates the beurocracy and waste associated with determining who "deserves" assistance. The dominant model in the US is expecting homeless people with drug problems to solve both their addiction and homelessness at the same time by themselves before they are deemed worthy of being helped, which needless to say is barely assistance at all. Having a gaurenteed income stream would make it easier to gain a foothold.
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