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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2691 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Why is it that a person can prefer someone who disagrees with them politically on more items than someone who disagrees on fewer items that are a strict subset of the other person's disagreements, so that it cannot be explained by priority of items?

Let me give a toy diagram to clarify. Suppose we have six areas where the people in question can disagree: ABCDEF. Now, if Alice cares mostly about A, I can see her preferring Bob, who agrees with her on A, but disagrees on B-F, over Carol, who agrees on B-F but disagrees on A. But what I'm talking about is when Bob disagrees with Alice on all of A-F, while Carol agrees with Alice on ABC and disagrees on DEF. Carol's disagreements with Alice are a strict subset of Bob's disagreements with Alice, so there's no way of prioritizing items that should make Alice prefer Bob over Carol…

…and yet, I've found people who express exactly this sort of preference. What is this?

Isn’t that the heretic-heathen, traitor-enemy, outgroup-fargroup distinction?

Probably some of it. But when we add in, say, Dave, who is the opposite of Carol, and agrees with Alice on DEF and disagrees with her on ABC, and Alice thinks Dave is indeed preferable to Bob — rather than a heretic/traitor/outgroup — this can't be the whole story.

Let's see if I can make a table for this:

￢ABC ABC
￢DEF Bob Carol
DEF Dave Alice

Where Alice's order of preference for the other parties is Dave > Bob > Carol, rather than something like Dave > Carol > Bob (that makes more sense in terms of preferring agreement), or even Bob > Dave > Carol (that prizes the heathen/enemy/fargroup Bob over the heretics/traitors/outgroups Dave and Carol).

The table is helpful, thank you.

Consider the following case:

  • I weakly believe ABC.
  • I strongly believe ABC implies DEF.
  • I weakly believe ~ABC implies DEF.

Under this example:

  • Overall I believe {ABC, DEF}, so I am Alice.
  • I weakly disbelieve Dave (he disbelieves ABC, but the rest of his logic is sound based on the different premise)
  • I moderately disbelieve Bob (he disbelieves ABC, and also disbelieves that ~ABC implies DEF).
  • I strongly disbelieve Carol (she disbelieves ABC implies DEF!)

This would result in precisely the order of preference you are puzzled by, no?

Alice is worried Carol might be a prion. She needs to be either refolded correctly like Dave or completely denaturalized like Bob.

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