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Comment by rTX5CMRXIfFG | Hacker News Reader

So many people are receiving this article very positively but am I the only one here who’s struggling to understand it? Why do the comments here make it seem as if it is impossible to be right but come off as merely being “self-righteous” because one is being engaged by someone else who is wrong and proud? Where do we draw the definition of when someone is being self-righteous? Is it possible to be self-righteous when you’re actually right or can it only happen when you’re wrong but you insist that you are right?

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People get addicted to controversy and seeing someone else who is "wrong and proud". And when this happens, they start to make up their own controversy and become more radical in order to feed their addiction.

You can believe that you're "good" and define certain things as "bad" without being "self-righteous". Heck, you can pretty much be wrong about what's good and bad and still not be self-righteous.

The problem arises when your opinion becomes rigid and you stop accepting any debate, then when you broaden your opinion so that it becomes more radical, because you want to be "right" and see others be "wrong" so bad. And this can turn even the most reasonable opinion into something extreme, e.g. "black people deserve to live" turning into "white people don't deserve to live [because they endanger black people]"

Humans have a strong bias for doubling down on our current beliefs and rejecting conflicting evidence.

It is crucial that we are just as harsh judging our current beliefs and subjecting them to scrutiny, as we are judging and scrutinizing beliefs with which we disagree.

We can't go far as a specie by denying that objective truth exists, and thus that in an argument there's, more often than not, someone who is less wrong.

We must aim to be collectively less wrong. But that won't happen without rightly self-righteous people fighting the bad ideas. Doesn't mean they have to lack compassion for the mistaken though.

Usually both sides of arguments both have truth to them and the way to objective truth exists via trying to understand why both sides believe what they do.

Athiesm seems like the objective rational truth.

But why do billions of people believe in an invisible man in the sky?

What is the objective truth that we can learn from that?

I think that this is fundamentally untrue. Middle between truth and lie is a lie.

When you are trying to find truth purely by searching middle of what people say, you are enabling bad actors and punishing honest people.

Nobody is talking about the ‘middle’, or even lies.

Most people are at least partly wrong or mistaken about most things, but there are usually some things they are right about.

There is value to be gained in finding out what another person is right about, even if they are wrong overall or you disagree with them.

Yeah it's the "partially" part that's important.

You could be right that:

Blood keeps you alive, working hard is important, community makes you happier overall.

While being wrong that:

If you're sick it's because your blood is poisoned, you should work as hard as possible no matter what, you should always put community first.

This is an imperfect set of examples. A better set would look like a graph of interconnected beliefs that are hard to disentangle, each node being a statement that is true under certain circumstances but not others.

The idea that there is an absolute truth with no shades in between truth and falsity... that:

1) ignores the graph-theoretical nature of truth

2) is a form of psychological "splitting" (which is described in the article)

3) is basically a fundamentalism

When we decide to label someone's statements as wrong and act against them, we ought [;-)] to be aware of this and take ownership of that stance, not attribute our epistemic decision to absolutes.

> Middle between truth and lie is a lie.

It sounds like you're perhaps assuming the "middle" is a point in rational space. But maybe "middle" is best conceived as a point in possibility space -- it's the position over which someone must travel to ever get beside you in the future.

So allowing the middle to exist as valid (even if it isn't "truth") is perhaps important if the goal is for two groups to align more. Denying the middle position as "non-truth" is only helpful if one's goals have less to do with depolarization.

Anyhow, these are just some loosely held ideas. Maybe they're wrong :)

> Usually both sides of arguments both have truth to them and the way to objective truth exists via trying to understand why both sides believe what they do.

This is literally about two people arguing. It is actually very possible that one of them is right and other is wrong. Arguments are not just about abstract things.

> Denying the middle position as "non-truth" is only helpful if one's goals have less to do with depolarization.

Sure. Because "depolarization" while ignoring where it ends can end up in even worst place.

Plus, the "truth is in the middle" thing motivates actors on all sides to make up extreme lies. I don't mean just not caring about facts, but intentionally making them wrong. Because the more extremely I push, the more likely you will end up tilted toward my position.

Thanks for replying :)

> Plus, the "truth is in the middle" thing motivates actors on all sides to make up extreme lies.

No, this is not what the research points to. Rather, having people confidently (and NOT weakly) holding middle positions strengthens groups' abilities to reach consensus. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdfExtended/S0960-9822(...

And yes, I understand that this research is intentionally on topics of ambiguous morality, but that is because that served the protocol design: they didn't want to complicate the protocol with there being a "right" answer someone could look up. And increasingly in our public discourse, factual and moral disagreements are starting to share the same human qualities/challenges anyhow. Conversation about facts are increasingly like conversations about morality, and will be increasingly so as we become more networked.

> Arguments are not just about abstract things.

Believe me, I get that. I'm not overlooking that. But it doesn't matter to the divide that exists, and the steps required to repair it. And for me, the main value in even noticing a difference in perception is to repair it. Noting it for any of reason is just for posterity, and is pretty pointless imho.

Example: Someone you care to engage with believes their experience of the Mandela Effect[1] means they're hopping between dimensions. For the sake of stakes, pretend this is breaking apart this person's marriage. Pretend that giving up on them isn't something you want to do. There is a very clear factual truth here: the Mandela Effect makes no sense as anything more than human forgetfulness. But it's entirely possible that no amount of "bringing the truth" will change their mind, especially when they can easily hop on the internet and be validated by others who (for their own reasons) believe the same thing.

The more likely way to bring them to your reality is to be in closer relationship to their view. To ask questions about it. To make them feel like you're trying to understand and see what they do. Even if you believe 100% that they are wrong, you need to enter a mindset and perspective where they might be right.

That's all I mean. It's basically practicing humility about things you think you already know, because knowing something factual misses the whole process and serves no one. And honestly, my experience of building reflexes for acting this way, is that you actually do learn some things you thought you already knew. Maybe not about hopping dimensions, but about the underlying drives and motivations that animate the curious conclusions at the surface.

[1]: https://www.alternatememories.com/news/tv/mandela-effect-fea...

> maybe "middle" is best conceived as a point in possibility space -- it's the position over which someone must travel to ever get beside you in the future.

Physical motion is continuous, but change of ideas is not physical movement. The ex-Trotskyites that became the original neoconservatives did not move through a continuous path of intermediary ideologies on their left->right journey.

> Denying the middle position as "non-truth" is only helpful if one's goals have less to do with depolarization.

Why would depolarization be a goal independent of the specific consensus position achieved?

It's not wrong to say that athiesm has truth and religion has truth.

Truth (and science) are iterative.

The world is infinitely complex and unless one is omniscient the only thing one can know for certain is that one is less wrong at the moment.

To think one has known an irrefutable truth is fanaticism and righteousness.

Lobotomy's won the Nobel prize when science roundly believed they were beneficial and I'm sure in the moment those experts thought they knew an irrefutable truth.

> Athiesm seems like the objective rational truth.

> But why do billions of people believe in an invisible man in the sky?

There's no equivalency or even logical basis of comparison between these two statements. You could've said, "Oranges exist... But why do we have apples?" or "Some areas of the ocean have boats. But why do other areas not have boats?" and it would make about as much sense.

> What is the objective truth that we can learn from that?

That atheists exist but not everyone is an atheist? What would we by trying to learn from this sort of search for understanding?

"Why both sides believe what they do" is an enormously open-ended, completely ambiguous realm of thought. To drill down the logic behind this sort of question; "because the universe happened."

I'm pretty sure we understand why anti-vax people exist... The roads that lead there aren't that numerous. We also understand why they think we're wrong and they're right and vice versa. There's no "lack of understanding".

The real question is, "how do we break them free from irrational thought?" Is it even possible (en masse) when so many powerful entities depend on these people to stay irrational?

Could the likes of Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax even exist if everyone suddenly switched over to Vulkan-like logical thinking?

> There's no equivalency or even logical basis of comparison between these two statements

They're polar opposites. If one is true the other is false.

However there's truth to both of them.

Actually, no: If the atheists are right then the theists are 100% wrong. There's no middle ground there or "truth to both sides."

If the theists are right... Which theists? Are we talking about polytheists? Single god but multiple instances of it (aka Ahura Mazda in Zoroastrianism)? Monotheism?

If any one of those are right then all the others are wrong. There's not really any ground that exists between these beliefs.

Religion provides community, it provides a spiritual outlet, it provides ritual, it provides comfort in the face of death.

There's many benefits and truths about religion that don't require an invisible man in the sky to exist.

That was acutually my original point.

TRUTH can be found in both atheism and theism.

I think you're confused. The truth you're talking about exists outside of both of those contexts (theism VS atheism).

Religion is just a collection of beliefs that may or may not involve "an invisible man in the sky". Theism VS atheism are mostly orthogonal to the point you're trying to make.

People are driven and indeed may have a need for a sense of a higher power.

Having a shared sense of purpose is very powerful for people.

You don't get that from an atheistic Church which is basically just a club where the only shared purpose is disliking something.

I suspect you’re making more implicit assumptions than you realize.

Also your snarky, facile dismissal of religion makes the idea of constructive engagement with you seem unlikely.

I think you missed the point.

Please tell me where there was snark or dismissal of religion?

Talk about missing the point.

Do you believe “invisible man in the sky” is an accurate representation of of the beliefs of billions of people?

I read that as snarky. Maybe I am too cynical.

At least from my perspective, it's the standard reddit atheist dismissal/thought terminating cliche.

Certainly does correlate with a disdain of religion in my experience.

'invisible man in the sky'

It's useful because it's an abstract term that can apply to the majority of religions.

No need to label God or Allah or Shiva or Jehova or Zeus or whatever.

Saying 'higher power' or 'cosmic force' is not descriptive as there's also include things people don't worship like astronomy.

Almost all monotheistic organized religions have worshipped an invisible man in the sky and most poly theistic as well.

Paul Graham's essay What You Can't Say contains a great piece of advice:

One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of abstraction. If you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to censor. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of labels to prevent discussion.

The downside is sometimes people doesn't understand what you meant.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

> Downside is sometimes people doesn't understand what you meant.

But the explicit purpose is to conceal what you actually mean to avoid criticism. So, you need to be more specific about “people”: one downside is that the intended audience sometimes doesn't understand what you mean (another is that the audience you are trying to bypass sometimes does.)

PG is referring to the long-recognized practice of political dog-whistles here.

At some point a dog whistle is just a whistle though. Every free speech advocate that defends some odious speech is not endorsing that speech.

>> PG is referring to the long-recognized practice of political dog-whistles here.

Serious question: what exactly do you mean by "political dog-whistle"?

No similar term is contained in the Paul Graham piece that was linked and I am genuinely curious what it is you are implying by this.

I have heard this term "political dog-whistle" thrown around over the past few years and for me it has somewhat poor metaphorical quality -- but that's just me.

Can you help me understand this term in the way you seem to understand it?

It is the idea that certain beliefs are outside the Overton Window [1] of acceptable political discourse, but you want to signal your endorsement of that belief to your supporters without saying it outright, to preserve plausible deniability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Only the dog can hear the dog whistle.

The act of using coded words, phrases or even emoji to say specific things to a specific group while seeming innocuous to the general public. It can be used for members of a group to acknowledge who each other are, or to rename issues so that they seem different to the general public, or to bring up events to push an agenda. [0]

[0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dog-whistle

I have a very difficult time finding this to be applicable to the PG piece.

That's one interpretation, but I don't think a particularly charitable one.

My own read on that would be this: the explicit purpose is to discuss something that has emotional/tribal baggage associated with it (which makes it hard for people to think rationally) by distilling out the actual meat of the issue without the baggage.

I think its important to be critical of things, but I see a tendency for people to constantly be looking for the enemy in conversations online. Everyone has their weapons raised. Everything has to be labeled and sorted into it's own little box (the terms "disingenuous" and "bad faith" seem to have exploded in use for example). That's what I see in your reference to dog whistles. Do you think pg is advocating dog whistling?

But the explicit purpose is to conceal what you actually mean to avoid criticism.

Criticism is OK, lynching is not. Attacking the censorship makes obvious that there is a problem with free speech. If you just defend the specific topic, you get sucked into the mess.

Saying that righteousness is an addiction is actually more efficient than attacking one of the addicts' many self-righteous causes. Have you tried to reason with an addict about their use?

Of course we believe we are right otherwise we would believe something that we think is wrong. Self righteous people want you to know that they are right and you are wrong.

But I think what the article is really getting at is that we are putting people into groups of good and bad based on what they think. We have started to dehumanize people who don't agree with us.

Is it OK to punch a Nazi?

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