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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2603 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 17, 2023

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.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on Paradise Lost. In my opinion, all epic poetry should be printed as prose. It reads well reformatted. So far it's hard to think of it as a cautionary tale, though this dubious crowd of lost gods do not inspire full confidence.

Who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe.

Paper I'm reading: The follow-up paper from Quandt et al., Dark participation: Conception, reception, and extensions.

From Zvi's Elephant in the Brain Review:

Choosing the best policies is not what most politics is mostly about. Politics is mostly about being in coalitions and showing loyalty to that coalition. In many times and places, members of the political outgroup are not taken kindly to, so one needs to show loyalty to the ingroup and its political viewpoints.

That doesn’t mean politics isn’t ultimately largely about policy. These coalitions involve many actors who do care deeply about certain policies, often out of narrow self-interest but also often as genuine do-rights. The policy wonks and idealists are real, and views on issues often do shift for the right reasons, not only the wrong ones. We all understand that a politics completely about alliances would result in the rapid collapse of the republic, with devastating consequences for almost everyone.

And

You should do the same actions you see, because they have hidden social motives and purposes, and people will punish you for acting differently even if they don’t know why acting differently might be bad here.

This helps explain DiAngelo's observations. Everyone is mostly disincentivized from going on a journey of self-reflection because then they would uncover issues and this would conflict with their goal (which they may not even be consciously aware of) of fitting in with their political ingroup.

I also think what DiAngelo is pointing out can often be generalized as something like:

  • There is certain knowledge that you can't fully understand without having personality experienced it. Like riding a bicycle or living life with a disability.
  • It is often disadvantageous to admit that you aren't fully knowledgeable about a topic.
  • For coalition building it is also often disadvantageous to admit things are nuanced and human nature is messy.
  • In the political coalition the people designing the policy aren't always personally impacted by that specific policy.
  • The policies are designed based on a model built with missing knowledge and assumptions about what those impacted by the policy would want. The mental modeling of the policy is further complicated by the hidden agenda of the policy advocates: looking good in the eyes of the political ingroup.

Ultimately, you then end up with policy and activism that is misaligned with what those impacted by the policy really want.

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