
The Overton Window and Political Control - nkurz
http://thefutureprimaeval.net/the-overton-bubble/
======
return0
> it has become much easier to build intellectual conversations outside of the
> overton window of the universities.

I don't believe that is true. In fact the problem with the current rhetoric is
that academia, (that is, the part of academia that can publish (thus the part
that passes the review of its peers)) pushed its fringe identity politics
rhetoric to the mainstream media, instead of the actual economic issues that
cause the global Trumpism[1]. It's not a new phenomenon - academia always had
control of the media rhetoric.

On the other side, conspiracies have always existed. From my european
perspective, it actually amazes me how everyone is surprised and looking to
russian conspiracies for explanations, when we have had this propaganda
phenomena for a very long time under the cold war from both sides (and i doubt
they caused a huge swing in democracies). Social media doesn't really make
such a huge difference, because social networks have always existed, just not
online, and just less transparent to everyone. I think Occam's razor would
suggest it's much easier to explain your election results on economic terms
(again, [1]) than doing a witch hunt.

1\.
[http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/11/18/mark_blyth...](http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/11/18/mark_blyth_global_trumpism_and_the_revolt_against_the_creditor_class.html)

~~~
golemotron
Yes, the tension is mainly economic. Without a vision of opportunity everyone
operates from a zero-sum game perspective. Identity politics becomes a way of
marshalling power to fight over fixed resources.

Blyth has the best analysis of the changes the West is undergoing. I recommend
the video you linked to everybody.

~~~
maehwasu
I agree, except that the fixed resource is votes, not economic resources
(which everyone here knows are not fixed in any practical sense).

Democracy is a vote market, and strong identities are the strongest persuasive
tool available for acquiring votes. Strong identities we know of are skin
color, religion, and universalist ideologies (think communism).

Once a particular identity, or combination of compatible identities becomes
large enough to have a chance at becoming a winning coalition, the logic of
the democracy market almost guarantees it will be deployed for that purpose.
Even in the absence of underlying economic factors.

TLDR; democracy has a lot of very scary failure modes, and the US has been
lucky to avoid them because until very recently, there haven't been strong
competing identities, so people have been free to argue over tax rates.

~~~
hga
_I agree, except that the fixed resource is votes, not economic resources
(which everyone here knows are not fixed in any practical sense)._

But doesn't this Presidential election at least suggest that enough people got
unhappy about the _very_ "fixed" (more like steadily declining) economic
"resource" known as the working class job to swing the election to Trump?

All the raw statistics, from labor force participation to suicide rate
changes, suggest your point isn't correct, except in a theoretical sense, or
"any practical sense" except in the very long term.

------
jancsika
Could someone well-versed in "political sociology" provide one or two primary
sources for the concept of "Overton window"? None of the links from its
Wikipedia page end up in anything like a published study.

Just to be clear-- I'm talking about a paper that a) makes a hypothesis about
public policy, b) presents relevant data, and c) makes a conclusion based on
the results of that data.

Edit: removed redundant line

~~~
Kadin
I think you are unlikely to find what you want, because the idea of the
"Overton window" is not especially controversial, in the sense that it's
basically a shorthand for a number of not-especially-new-or-different concepts
that have been around, and are widely understood to exist, for a while. It's
not really a new concept as much as it's just shorthand for "the range of
acceptable opinions that reasonable people can have" on a particular issue. In
fact, you could probably find/change every instance of "Overton window" to
that phrase, and not lose very much, but you'd gain a bunch of extra syllables
in the process. Humans love data compression.

~~~
jancsika
That makes sense for a policy wonk enumerating potential positions and
situating them between two extreme poles to find an efficacious strategy, or
perhaps a group looking to change opinion on a currently fringe idea. I can
imagine that being a clarifying exercise.

But it's sheer confusion to use that same concept as a metric for freedom of
thought. Suppose that respectable opinions on encrypting messaging apps,
treating dimentia, and political correctness all shifted and narrowed in the
last 10 years. So what? You must still look into the details and context of
each shift to have any idea whether or not speech got stifled in the process.
So I don't understand how reference to a narrowing "Overton window" (or
"Overton bubble") has any explanatory power wrt freedom of thought.

------
Tycho
So what is actually outside the Overton window?

My preliminary list would be

\- human neurological uniformity

\- anti-Semitism

\- Islamophobia

\- ethnonationalism

\- conspiracy theories

\- libertarianism and Objectivism

Also there is a kind of inverse-Overton, subjects that can be safely debated
because they are unlikely to lead off the reservation. For instance abortion
and gun control. Everything's already been said.

------
tptacek
Exercise for the reader: analyze how this (purely political, off-topic) post
itself attempts to take control of an "Overton window" to position its
preferred side of the left/right trope.

Here's a hint: liberal academicians and "people using social media to
communicate directly to citizenry" do not, in fact, constitute a dichotomy.

~~~
tnones
Exercise for you: join the actual conversation instead of preaching from above
like a schoolteacher and wielding the red marker that is the flag button when
it doesn't follow your orthodoxy.

It's funny though, because the other day there was a free speech debate at the
University of Toronto where a gender ideologue explicitly denigrated her
opponent's outreach on Youtube as amateurish videos unworthy of consideration.
Despite him being a tenured professor. [1]

Then again, both his opponents also expressed how dismayed they were that this
debate was taking place at all, after they reinterpreted its topic as being
offensive to common decency. They ignored the indecent actions from their camp
that led to it though. It seems liberal academicians do not like debate of any
kind, official or otherwise, they'll just bang on about empathy and care while
denying it to those they disagree with.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDvj6DQd93o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDvj6DQd93o)

~~~
tptacek
Nothing you wrote responds in any way to my comment. The irony is, in response
to an actual criticism of the article† _you_ decided to preach for three
paragraphs without acknowledging any part of that critique.

I'm also not an academician, or part of the academy in any sense (I joined the
workforce at age 18), which makes your specific choice of sermons, well, dumb.

† _which might or might not be valid (I think it is, but then I wrote it)_

------
danharaj
Lots of abstract conceptualization, not a single concrete example or piece of
supporting evidence. Alluring rhetoric, but vacuous.

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
If he mentioned the heresies, this post would not be read by those in the
Overton bubble. An example, in the Overton bubble the cause of all differences
in outcome between people is discrimination or perverse socialization. This
leads to the following reasoning:

Programming is a well paying, desirable job.

White, Asian, Indian, and Jewish males are over-represented in the trade.

All people have identical abilities and preferences on average, therefore the
demographics of a profession should exactly match the census.

We note that this isn't the case, therefore these demographics are the result
of a subconscious and economically counterproductive racist and sexist
conspiracy.

Our reigning ideologies believe in a Lysenkoism of the mind, despite all
psychometric evidence. There really are blogs with better epistemology on this
topic than the top universities in the Overton bubble. Ideological
indoctrination is the practice of instilling in people priors of 0 and 1 on
certain topics, immunizing them against empirical experience. It is the
practice of making geniuses more deluded than fools.

~~~
leot
> All people have identical abilities and preferences on average, therefore
> the demographics of a profession should exactly match the census.

That is rubbish. A straw man. I've spent more than a decade within the so-
called Overton bubble at a university, and this is decidedly not the consensus
as I experienced it.

All biology is known to yield population variation. That is obviously true by
necessity. However, there are both ontogenetic and phylogenetic influences on
outcomes. The progressive/egalitarian view is that the cultural dynamics that
result from small population differences (that are in any case too high
variance to be reliable for making individual discriminations) should not
inhibit phylogeny. Put another way, an individual's self-expression should not
be limited by the fact of their membership in a particular category.

Further, while there may well be, in lab settings, reliable significant
population level differences, these differences at an individual level may
entirely be swamped by cultural influences, rendering them insignificant.

Lastly, the _sources_ of the population differences may, in some instances, be
factors that are entirely culturally malleable. Males as a population may have
a slight predisposition not to understanding mechanisms better, but instead to
finding them interesting, which over the course of development leads to
greater competence. This predisposition may be easily changed at a young age
by an encouraging mentor or compelling Hollywood film. Similarly, someone may
be predisposed to kidney failure not because of bad kidney cells, but because
they don't have as strong a compulsion to drink water (a deficit trivially
remedied).

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
I agree that the best evidence of a person's intelligence and inclinations is
their phenotype, not the average of their racial group or sex. Thus, race and
sex should not be used as a proxy for any characteristic when employing
people. We don't need proxies when we can directly measure - though note, some
forms of measurement (such as culture fair IQ tests) are illegal for anyone
but universities to use in employment, a delightful hypocrisy.

Nonetheless, those parts of academia that define the narrative on these topics
(sociology, history, feminist academia, and political science) do not believe
there is significant non-cultural variation in any economically relevant trait
among the sexes or ethnically distinct populations, and put anyone who openly
states the obvious through a struggle session that usually results in their
firing, as happened with Summers. Though the vast majority of psychologists
admit that IQ is largely genetically heritable, accepting the consensus of the
twin studies, any future inference about what this implies is outside the
Overton bubble.

Just as not knowing disease was caused by small invisible germs made us unable
to treat disease properly, our inability to admit that intelligence and
stupidity are caused by small, invisible alleles has made us unable to treat
social pathologies properly. The distribution of intelligence is grossly
unfair. But we can fix it if we are willing to admit its cause. Let us seize
the high-IQ alleles and distribute them to the proletariat!

I think there is a deep sense in which education as a treatment for stupidity
is like wearing perfume to prevent the plague.

Also, acknowledging these differences prevents racism. Antisemites love
pointing out that jews are overrepresented in many high-status occupations,
postulating crazy conspiracy theories for why this is the case. But once you
acknowledge the IQ gap (Ashkenazi Jews score roughly a standard deviation
above gentiles in most psychometric tests) we have an entirely benign
explanation and it's evident that these conspiracy theories hold no water.

These differences are a perfectly valid subject of inquiry of very little use
to the individual, but becomes necessary to discuss when progressives beg the
question, assuming falsely (just as antisemites do) that underrepresentation
in cognitively demanding endeavours necessarily implies discrimination that
isn't based on ability.

~~~
leot
It is obvious that genetics matter. What isn't obvious is how, or how much.

Ontogeny is context dependent at every scale of analysis. As such it is
sensitive to precise manipulation in myriad ways, the vast majority of which
are likely not yet known. We remain profoundly ignorant of what intelligence
is, let alone what underlies it.

It's likely that large population differences are the result of a synergistic
interaction of genetics and culture, with each depending on the other.
Ashkenazi Jews benefit from one such interaction, but there may well be many
others yet to be discovered.

I disagree that the social theorists as a whole are entirely ignorant of basic
biology. I think they would argue that the cultural forces swamp genetic
signals often enough to be worthy of criticism.

There are no doubt theorists with views that are more extreme, but the
appropriate response isn't to counterweight by going further in the other
direction.

Group membership cannot be destiny. If it is we're not free.

------
ccleve
We have an Overton window here on HN. It's enforced through downvoting. I
would very much like to see downvoting eliminated, or at least modified so
that a small number of upvotes can counteract it.

There are a number of perfectly reasonable comments in this thread that carry
the stain of appearing in light gray.

EDIT: It appears that I've been downvoted, and I don't know why. Anyone care
to explain?

~~~
gunn
Here's my idea to help -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12412788](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12412788)

Rather than each comment having a global score, each user sees comments scored
based on their voting history. This means non-conforming opinions no longer
get buried for everyone.

An upvote should mean "I'd like to see more of this" not "I'd like everyone to
see more of this".

~~~
mjevans
I agree with your use of 'downvoting' to remove content personally but less so
the correlation to 'upvoting'.

Just because there's an up button and a down button close together, and
clearly the intent that they are correlated, doesn't mean that the usage in
practice is the same.

A vote up means that the post is on topic, and relevant of showing to others
preferentially in the eyes of the voter.

A vote down is often used on topics that the voter simply /disagrees/ with,
irrespective of relevance to the topic.

Therefore I would propose that 'mixed votes' indicate a contentious, but
likely on topic, point of discussion for further discourse and refinement.

There should clearly be a threshold (a large number of votes, with a vast
majority of them negative) for indicating actually harmful content.

------
rwmj
TL;DR: The Internet allows people to self-publish ideas, uncontrolled by
universities which [according to the article, really!] were the main
gatekeepers of speech before.

~~~
cronjobber
> universities which [according to the article, really!] were the main
> gatekeepers of speech

This erroneous concept seems to have spread to this writer via Curtis Yarvin
(of Urbit/Strange Loop fame/infamy.)

It seems superficially valid because the media loves to use witnesses of
academic prestige that back its own agenda. However, it should be clear that
the ultimate gatekeeper has always been the media, not any media-selected
credentialed proponents of whatever position the media wants to be seen as the
most prestigious and scientifically valid.

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
I don't know much about Yarvin but I imagine his point is the universities
indoctrinate the teachers and the journalists who in turn indoctrinate the
public.

~~~
badsock
It baffles me that university professors, who are in front of a minority of
the population for typically only 4 years, are viewed as having all this
control, whereas the people who literally own the media, who can arbitrarily
hire and fire any voice they please, are viewed as somehow having less sway
over their own company's output.

~~~
hga
You're ignoring the power they have to shape minds during that 4 year period,
which is particularly powerful for residential students who are out of the
nest for the first time, how they can keep doubleplusungood people out of a
lot of professions by not letting them graduate (it's now getting explicitly
official in some, and personally sobering for me, the moderate conservative-
libertarian I was in 1979? No way today I could become a scientist in the US
today), and apropos of that, _they control who gets to teach K-12 students_ ,
the Overton Window in K-12 curricula (which has had a serious allergy to
effective teaching of reading for close to a century now, and much later
math), etc.

~~~
badsock
I don't disagree, but my point is that it's still less power over media than
those who actually own the media have.

If universities are really brainwashing people, then those who own the media
can just not hire those brainwashed people. Power over hiring is the ultimate
level of control over any organization, media companies included.

You can make the argument that the media needs an audience, and if the masses
are brainwashed then they have to speak in that language. But if you're
talking about non-objective-truths such as values, and those values are so
widespread that media has to cater to them - that's not brainwashing, that's
just popular culture.

