
I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (2014) - tullianus
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
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DougMerritt
Traditional anthropological ingroups and outgroups are defined by "random"
characteristics: ethnicity, language, religion, dress, etc.

Many previous well-known essays and studies have pointed out that the primary
difference between Blue and Red is that they perceive ethics (not just ingroup
traditions/taboos/etc. and folkways) differently.

In the modern day, if not the past, we can tolerate outgroups that have
different taboos (eating shellfish), have different mandatory standards of
politeness (bowing, formal versus informal address to seniors and strangers),
etc.

In the modern day we have narrowed down the set of things where it is
acceptable to take the high moral ground on differences.

It's no longer ok to hate (or even disapprove) on the basis of differences in
ethnicity, language, religion, etc.

But there are still other morals; for most Reds it's acceptable to disapprove
various things that have become unacceptable to disapprove to Blues, and both
parties regard the other side as immoral on those points.

I fault the current article for not taking into account those past essays and
studies.

~~~
convexfunction
Whether or not a thing falls under the domain of "morality" is a function of
many arguments--it depends on the thing itself, as well as who, where, and
when you are.

Do you really think that historically, people who hated their outgroup had the
thought "outgroup is bad _because_ they have slightly different folkways and
speak another language" in their heads? It always gets cast as an issue of
morality. Always. You _identify_ the outgroup by their folkways and language
(we're no different there), but it always get rationalized as some
irreconcilable difference in something that's extremely important
("morality").

~~~
DougMerritt
You are in violent agreement with what I said. I rewrote it several times
before posting to make sure that I didn't fall into that trap.

I basically said that the number of things considered acceptable to be moral
about has decreased, and that the current set is different between Blues and
Reds.

> always gets cast as an issue of morality. Always.

That is a laughable overstatement. There are always some people who are happy
to hate without any rationalization for it.

You're merely talking about the times that people stop and rationalize it.

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Trombone12
That is not how dark matter works at all!! Its sole defining property is that
it is really crappy at interacting with things! Its not going to form planets!
GAH!!! <rant/>

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ggchappell
Fantasic article! Lots of interesting thoughts.

Rather lengthy, though, isn't it? I feel that, lurking somewhere in this
enormous stream-of-consciousness essay, there is a post about 1/2 the length
that could become a truly classic blog post.

~~~
jqm
well, you could do what I did and only read half of it....

~~~
saurik
I enjoyed the first half. Near the end, when he started talking about
LessWrong (he had done it earlier, but I didn't know "LW" was an acronym) it
became clear he was misrepresenting himself as blue and was in fact grey: a
lot of people who are grey assume they are related to red, and so when you go
to find grey you pick apart red, but that viewpoint also shares a lot with
blue, which is why his earlier attempt to fix the political skew in the user
surveys, a strategy that only seemed to try to recount reds, failed to
discover what I would personally assume, which is that the website has very
few actual blues.

He also started railing on specific behaviors in the second half, behaviors he
was doing himself in the article, something he thankfully noticed and
commented on, but then did not defend, other than to use the same excuses he
said were flawed earlier: failing to realize the audience of people who read
this website are also mostly grey; the only people reading his articles who
are blue are people who got linked to the blog for the first time, or (as in
my case), got tricked by a compelling hook. (I read this article due to the
comment here by someone about "that's not how dark matter worked", and then
stayed as I was excited to read an article that sounded sort of grey but was
supposedly written by a blue.)

Maybe humorously, I believe the persistent issues he seems to have with people
"misinterpreting" him are actually coming from this same source: people who
are blue occasionally read his comments for various reasons, realize he's
grey, and then complain about various things he's saying by using words like
"feminist" as short-hand for blue. In practice, all of my friends who are grey
run into the same issues with the things that they say, and honestly it has
been harder and harder for me to keep arguing with them as opposed to just
giving up and reinforcing my bubble (which I really don't want to do: I even
have tried to notice the dumb things I do that turn off reds and have
attempted to fix those).

The only real "point" made in the later part of the article is to try to claim
red and blue are equivalently dumb (a very grey thing to do ;P) by drawing an
analogy from party dynamics to religious persecution. However, despite
claiming earlier that he understood that absolute effect is not a good proxy
for whether something is a problem or not (when he said he understood racism
was worse than partyism), he somehow managed to entirely ignore that he found
in his own terminology an objective moral advantage for blue vs. red: that
blue only hated red, while red (by his own admittance one paragraph earlier)
was causing collateral damage to people who weren't even in the silly color
battle.

So yeah: while I am concerned that this article's terminology actually will
reinforce a core problem rather than helping in any way (I didn't have a good
way to talk about grey before other than "LessWrongers", which I realize is as
useless as calling reds "white men"), I am having some fun using these words,
and am finding it useful to try to divorce my mental categorizations of people
from random incorrect labels, and thereby recommend others read at least the
first half. Whether you read the second half or not is less interesting unless
you need a concrete example of the problem and love the idea of seeing
situations like this "go meta". It is probably the case that jqm's strategy
was actually the correct one here, and I doubt shortening the post (I actually
liked its verbosity) would fix the internal issues.

~~~
frnzkfk
> which is that the website has very few actual blues.

Here's the results from the 2014 survey:

\---

Politics (short)

Communist: 9, 0.6%

Conservative: 67, 4.5%

Liberal: 416, 27.7%

Libertarian: 379, 25.2%

Social Democratic: 585, 38.9%

\---

Politics (longform)

Anarchist: 40, 2.7%

Communist: 9, 0.6%

Conservative: 23, 1.9%

Futarchist: 41, 2.7%

Left-Libertarian: 192, 12.8%

Libertarian: 164, 10.9%

Moderate: 56, 3.7%

Neoreactionary: 29, 1.9%

Social Democrat: 162, 10.8%

Socialist: 89, 5.9%

\---

(From the big groups, we see 66% leftish identification.)

From the detailed groups, 54% of the surveyed ended up in the top longform
groups, ~60% of those seem firmly somewhere on the left.

