As this
Washington Examiner article notes, it's hard enough to reach a compromise when you have some idea what your opponent wants:
A 2018 study asked 2,100 adults to identify what they believed about a wide range of political issues and then asked them to estimate what people in the other political party believed about those same issues.
The study found that centrists and those not interested in politics did much better at estimating what the other party believed than politically involved partisans. But while a person’s level of education made no difference when Republicans estimated what Democrats believe, the more time Democrats spent in school, the worse they did at identifying what Republicans believed. Democrats with a high school degree did worse than those without. Democrats with a college degree did worse than high school graduates. And Democrats with a graduate degree did worst of all.
It seems that the longer liberals stay walled off in communities dominated by their own kind, which is exactly what higher education has become, the worse they are at understanding and empathizing with those who hold other views.
Censoring all the unclean thoughts comes with a price.
5 comments:
Alan Turing famously proposed a test in which the 'intelligence' of a computer system would be evaluated by its ability to converse with one so convincingly that it would be indistinguishable from the conversation of a real human. He gives a nice illustration of what such a conversation might be like, here:
http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Reference%20Articles/TheTuringTest.html
The term 'Political Turing Test' has been applied to one's ability to emulate a political opponent's argument so convincingly that you can't be distinguished from an actual individual of that political tribe. (People once learned how to do this to some extent via formal debate, in which one had to argue both sides of an issue)
I think the ability to pass the Political Turing test not only for the purpose of developing mutually-agreeable compromises, but also for purposes of political persuasion/marketing. It's hard to sell someone a product if you don't have any understanding of what's important to them in their buying decision-making. Superior ability to pass the PTT *should* be a major advantage of conservative/libertarian/sane people, though it doesn't seem generally to have been exploited very well.
Superior ability to pass the PTT *should* be a major advantage of conservative/libertarian/sane people, though it doesn't seem generally to have been exploited very well.
My guess is the problem is likely that most people consider the position they occupy as 'moderate' so long as they can imagine a more extreme one farther along their side of political spectrum, and see no reason why they need to move the opposite direction. Both sides wind up talking past each other.
I am often amused when I see this dynamic play out in discussions of President Trump and his tweets. One the one hand, Democrats would react vehemently with all kinds of hyperbole - often even more outrageous rhetoric and acting-out. And then the political experts would start weighing in - with evaluations ranging across the scale, depending on political affiliations.
What everybody seemed to understand was that Trump had a special relationship with a large segment of the American population, much of it blue collar, with solid representation from blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities, and a substantial buy-in from white collar segments too.
But what nobody ever seems to put together is the idea that his tweets and his unvarnished commentary are mostly responsible for that appeal. They resonate exactly with that population segment, people who work for a living and take life's struggles seriously, head-on, and without looking somewhere else for excuses or free support. It's amazing how all these analysts are unable to comprehend the effectiveness of that connection without expressing distaste.
David Foster:
It wasn’t intelligence that the Turing test was after. It was a much harder problem: how could we tell if the machine had become sentient? It’s actually not a viable solution, because it turns out to be impossible to know if another being is truly self-aware and experiencing consciousness
Turing did, though, give us a standard for erring on the side of caution. If you treat them as sentient if they pass his test, you won’t enslave a self-aware machine intelligence. That’s good, since slavery is wrong.
I am reminded of some short political discussions with my NYC cousins. Yes, liberal Democrats- whadadya expect from NYC? They bring up politics, but when they find out that I don't have the same liberal Democrat viewpoint that they do, they shut up. All they know about Republicans is that they are ignorant, racist.....whatever.
Not the first time I've gotten that reaction from those in the Northeast.
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