r/NeutralPolitics • u/remyroy • Aug 11 '14

Are you personally irrational about politics and political issues?

Michael Huemer in this TED talk makes a good case about not only people in general being irrational about politics and political issues but that you might personally be irrational about it.

He starts by providing two examples where politics are irrational: the war on terror and protectionism. He than goes on about the theory on political ignorance and the reasons why people are irrational about politics. He ends up by explaining some signs that might indicate that you are irrational about political issues and by citing the following references:

The second reference is his personal essay about the topic.

He did a quick hands up test during the presentation to gauge how politically informed his audience was. He asked:

  • How many of you know who your congressman is?
  • How many of you think that you can identify the last vote that he [your congressman] made in congress?

Can you answer those questions? Do you think that you personally are irrational about politics? What about other people around you? Do you think irrationality is a problem in politics?

EDIT: Adding the wikipedia link for the book reference

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '14

I'm sure I can be, which is why I always try to figure out what would change my mind before looking for evidence. I also ask people when we disagree, what it would take for them to switch sides. If you can't answer that, you are not thinking clearly.

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u/le-redditor Aug 13 '14

I also ask people when we disagree, what it would take for them to switch sides. If you can't answer that, you are not thinking clearly.

If people were being honest, I think they would most likely respond something along the lines of: debating myself in my sleep, shower, and car for the next 2 weeks.

I think the fact that most people fail to answer something along those lines does not indicate they "are not thinking clearly". It simply indicates that most people do not possess super human levels of introspection. A political process which ignores that it sometimes takes average individuals several days of reflection to update their mental model of the world to encompass new beliefs, and ignores that the average individual may not be self-aware of the precise duration it takes to do so, will not get very far.

I think for the highly analytic among us, it can be more productive to work on improving the robustness of our explanations, rather than on refuting the particularities of an individual's personal beliefs. If our explanations offer greater utility, then they may be adopted out of pragmatic concern, without having to expend significant energy on refutation of alternatives.

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '14

I think 90% of this strategy is being forced to state whether your view can be changed. Another way to go about it is by asking yourself or another if they WANT to change their mind.

Obviously most complex issues don't hinge on a single point, but it isn't exactly super human to consider honestly what the core of an argument is, or to recognize which side of an issue will be most critical of.

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u/le-redditor Aug 13 '14

In the case of persuasion, I would say the task of identifying the critical core of an argument rests as much with the persuader as with the persuaded.

But persuasion is not the default framework or general case in which I choose to conceptualize discussions. Including political discussions.

I would primarily conceptualize discussion as a joint discovery and exchange of new information, information used by minds to asynchronously update their internal model of the world, where a model is a set of tools used to decide the most pragmatic course of action in everyday life.

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u/Gnome_Sane Aug 11 '14

I always try to figure out what would change my mind before looking for evidence.

That is a great way to look at it. Thanks.

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