
Political radicals don’t evaluate their own errors–about anything (2018) - Tomte
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/radicals-dont-evaluate-their-mistakes-very-effectively/
======
hugh4life
"Wherever I go, my first object, if I wish to find out the truth, is to get
hold of the Free Press in France as in England, and even in America. But I
know that wherever I get hold of such an organ it will be very strongly
coloured with the opinion, or even fanaticism, of some minority. The Free
Press, as a whole, if you add it all up and cancel out one exaggerated
statement against another, does give you a true view of the state of society
in which you live. The Official Press to-day gives you an absurdly false one
everywhere." Hilaire Belloc - The Free Press (The free press here being the
ideological press)

I remember reading many surveys where centrists end up being less
knowledgeable than those on the extremes of the ideological spectrum. This is
just one I found googling but I know there's more out there.

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/10/political-
mod...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/10/political-moderates-
and-independents-are-not-as-smart-on-average/)

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inflatableDodo
I guess it depends on how you define a political radical, as a radical is one
who stands against the status quo.

Given that current mainstream politics seemingly sees evaluating your own
errors as some kind of a weakness, to openly do so right now would be fairly
radical for a politician.

~~~
colllectorof
_> a radical is one who stands against the status quo._

A radical is someone who is willing to use extreme measures to achieve their
political objectives. Nothing to do with the status quo. Totalitarian regimes,
for example, usually maintain their status quo with radical zeal and measures.

~~~
inflatableDodo
>A radical is someone who is willing to use extreme measures to achieve their
political objectives.

The Quakers are political radicals. They are so extreme they utterly refuse to
kill people, even when ordered.

edit - Given the article about it also on the front page, I thought I'd look
it up in the original Mirriam Webster. The result is kind of interesting;

>2\. (Politics)

>One who advocates radical changes in government or social institutions,
especially such changes as are intended to level class inequalities; --
opposed to conservative. In politics they [the Independents] were, to use
phrase of their own time. "Root-and-Branch men," or, to use the kindred phrase
of our own, Radicals. Macaulay.

[http://lexicon.x10host.com/?w=radical](http://lexicon.x10host.com/?w=radical)

And to contrast with my first port of call, in the Cambridge dictionary you
get a politically neutral definition;

>believing or expressing the belief that there should be great or extreme
social or political change

[https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/radical](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/radical)

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devoply
Western democracies are very good at monitoring and subduing radicals. This is
not something anyone in the Western world worries about. Most radicals are
labelled the lunatic fringe and treated as such. That's all good and well, the
only downside is that liberal democracy is not really all that democratic. But
it is what it is...

Hell they even made a song about it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTFVMMCwsss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTFVMMCwsss)

~~~
0815test
> Western democracies are very good at monitoring and subduing radicals.

In a way, that's true - democracy is based on some degree of reasonably-
widespread consensus, not on what a single power-hungry autocrat might want at
any given moment. That would seem to have an inherently stabilizing and
moderating effect, and the historical record seems to indicate the same. OTOH,
this also implies that deliberative institutions are very important - if a
society becomes fractured and distrustful for whatever reason (one can
summarize this as "social decay", "decadence" or "dissipation of long-term
social capital"), deliberation becomes a lot harder and radicalization has a
chance to prevail once again. The proper answer is not authoritarianism of
course, but a renewed focus on stable, long-term, social-capital-generating
institutions.

------
otalp
\- The Study[1]: 400 people from Amazon's Mechanical Turk were given an online
poll, where they were asked to guess how many dots were in a given picture.
They were then given some information about dot density to see if they changed
their mind. While there was _some_ correlation between radicalism and
dogmatism(more heavily tilted when it comes right-wing radicalism, according
to the study), there were still a significant portion of political radicals
who were just as open minded, or even less dogmatic than moderates, implying
that there could be a subsection of "radicals" who are skewing the whole group
slightly towards more dogmatism.

\- The Headline: "Political radicals don’t evaluate their own errors– _about
anything_ ". "Moderates are _much_ better at figuring out when they're likely
to be mistaken."

I find articles like this a disgrace to both journalism and science, but
unfortunately you need clicks and shares to progress in both.

[1] ([https://www.cell.com/current-
biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)...](https://www.cell.com/current-
biology/fulltext/S0960-9822\(18\)31420-9?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982218314209%3Fshowall%3Dtrue#secsectitle0025))

~~~
claudiawerner
I'm rather confused as to how this fits in with the strong radicalism we see
many academics take - academia is all about (or supposed to be all about)
critical investigation. For instance, Adorno and Horkheimer had very radical
views yet they were more than happy to evaluate their own errors, and
criticise the positions they once held. Marx held radical views but re-
examined them significantly during the course of his life time. Many Marxists
have decided to re-work significant portions of Marx's theory they once held
dear. John Roemer has been very critical of the orthodox Marxism he used to
profess and has been more than happy to admit a limitation people have pointed
out in some of his theories. Radical feminists such as Kate McGowan and Rae
Langton have been happy to admit errors in their previous work on pornography
and speech act theory. Contemporary psychoanalysts have moved beyond Freud's
"experiments".

I'm also skeptical of what the implications for this study are in a broader
sense. Radicals seem to me to be needing to confront a barrage of controversy,
as if the whole world has the deck stacked against them. To maintain a radical
opinion it's usually the case (or we'd like to believe it's the case) that
they have at some point confronted the status quo. I think this is more than
most non-radicals do: non-radicals don't get many chances to experience this
contradiction with the world, nor contradiction within their minds. Is the
result a sign of stubbornness, or ignorance? I can think of some things which
I'd be very glad to be stubborn about defending - in which case at best the
study shows that this stubbornness carries over to places where it is
inappropriate (evaluating the number of dots). As the saying goes, we want to
be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains fall out.

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peisistratos
Today I see the establishment, mainstream media, Republican moderates and
Democratic leadership foaming at the mouth with conspiracies about how Trump
is a Russian spy, and how Russia controls US elections and other wild
conspiracies.

Meanwhile the "radicals" \- Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Glenn Greenwald - as
well as diehard Trump MAGA supporters, think all of these Russisn conspiracies
are overblown, if they have any basis at all.

In science questioning the mainstream, establishment narrative is what leads
to progress. That the establishment stigmatizes those questioning mainstream,
establishment political thinking is not surprising. Of course they would be
found "in error".

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Haga
Political radicals are also at home on both wings at the same time. Radical
right by day, radical left by night.

~~~
rexpop
On its face, your comment is absurd, equating two concepts universally defined
as exclusively complementary.

~~~
Yetanfou
...unless you see the political spectrum as a circle where the opposites meet
at the top. There is a lot to be said for this given the resemblance between
authoritarian-left and authoritarian-right regimes. While they might sound
different on paper and on the barricades they somehow seen to end up with
largely identical - and largely dysfunctional - societies.

~~~
rexpop
Authoritarian regimes will drape themselves in whatever flag serves their
interest, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, there's no
saying it's indistinguishable from its alternatives.

