Another: two polar opposite political stances can be true at the same time. Immigraton can be and is both good and bad. So are social help programs. Guns. Government intervention. Surveilance. Etc.
Your truth is not the only truth. There are an infinite true perspectives on a issue. Another perspective is not false just because it opposes yours and yours is true.
I agree, but it's important to understand this strictly, and not come to the conclusion that all views are equal and equally true.
To more mathematically minded people I'd explain it like this: two political stances can be correct at the same time, because political stances are projections of high-dimensional conceptual structures to lower-dimensional space. Both a circle and a rectangle are correct 2D projections of a 3D cylinder. But if your 2D projection of a cylinder looks like a hexagon, you're wrong.
>To more mathematically minded people I'd explain it like this: two political stances can be correct at the same time, because political stances are projections of high-dimensional conceptual structures to lower-dimensional space. Both a circle and a rectangle are correct 2D projections of a 3D cylinder. But if your 2D projection of a cylinder looks like a hexagon, you're wrong.
This is brilliant. I tend to fall back on category theory and multivalent logic for the same job.
Thanks and don't worry, it usually takes me a while to even notice when people are picking on me, am notoriously bad at detecting that kind of thing. Obliviousness to social cues does come with some perks.
Out of interest, I'd like it if you could explain why you think it is the most HN comment you've ever read. I have some idea, but am not entirely sure.
> two political stances can be correct at the same time
I think that arguing that a political stance is "correct" or "wrong" isn't the best frame of reasoning here, because it implies that there might be some sort of formal reasoning process you could use to reach a common conclusion. Whereas humans do now work like that and politics does not work like that.
There's no absolute morality, and there's no universal set of moral axioms you can get everyone to agree on. What actually happens is arguing from specific->general in one direction and general->specific in the other, depending how close emotionally people are to the actual situation or how much they're using it to express their identity.
Examples of "specific->general" are any situation where a person gets a law named after them. Examples of "general->specific" is any time people start talking about the constitution.
Each of those is a lossy transformation. Specific->general loses information about the particular situation. General->specific is what we use most of the time - the basis of legal systems - and has the less obvious failure mode that it can produce bad results that have no obvious immediate blame. But neither is more "correct" in a formal sense than the other.
> I think that arguing that a political stance is "correct" or "wrong" isn't the best frame of reasoning here, because it implies that there might be some sort of formal reasoning process you could use to reach a common conclusion. Whereas humans do now work like that and politics does not work like that.
I disagree with that. In so far a political stance refers primarily to objective reality (e.g. "should we introduce a carbon tax, and if yes, in what form?"), you should be able to reach common conclusion in a group of honest people. That people often don't doesn't mean it can't be done - it's a result of political discussions involving plenty of dishonest or disinformed people.
> There's no absolute morality, and there's no universal set of moral axioms you can get everyone to agree on.
Yes and no. There isn't an explicit, absolute morality, but that doesn't mean morality is a free variable. It doesn't exist in a vacuum, in exist in human brains - which are all the same hardware and mostly-same firmware. If you look at all the societies and cultures, there's plenty of values that are essentially universal. That's not an accident.
> arguing from specific->general in one direction and general->specific
I agree that people generally argue like this, and it's a bit orthogonal (if closer to the focus of daily experience) to what I wrote about. But humans are capable of doing these steps multiple times - e.g. simultaneously compare specifics of a situation against a specialization of a generic rule, and generalize the situation to compare against a set of general values. In so far as we're talking about objective reality, correct generalizations and specializations will converge on a self-consistent picture. And whatever subjectivity is caused by a difference in values has its limits - it's not a license to throw reason away and say that the whole space of all possible opinions is equally valid.
> Each of those is a lossy transformation. (...) But neither is more "correct" in a formal sense than the other.
I am arguing that - that two different lossy transformations can be equally "correct". My projection example is a lossy transformation after all. But this doesn't mean any two objects from the codomain of a lossy transformation are equally correct! Just like a hexagon is not a valid projection of a cylinder, or a pony isn't a valid JPEG compression of a human portrait, some generalizations are wrong, and some specializations are wrong.
> (e.g. "should we introduce a carbon tax, and if yes, in what form?"), you should be able to reach common conclusion in a group of honest people.
Really? Even assuming that everyone agrees on the model of policy responses - introducing tax X has result Y - people will still have strong opinions about the distributive effects of those and even the relative importance of the environmental effects. People don't usually come out and say "I'm not willing to spend a dollar to prevent Miami and Bangladesh being submerged", because that sounds bad, but they come very close to it.
> some generalizations are wrong, and some specializations are wrong.
On this we agree - some models are just delusional "motivated reasoning"; Sandy Hook "truthers" etc.
> Even assuming that everyone agrees on the model of policy responses - introducing tax X has result Y
This is a purely objective question, and can be discussed between honest parties until a common conclusion is reached.
> people will still have strong opinions about the distributive effects of those and even the relative importance of the environmental effects.
This is a mix of potentially subjective values and objective statements about how those values are affected by proposed solution; I argue that even if a common conclusion cannot be reached, we can usually come pretty close to it.
> People don't usually come out and say "I'm not willing to spend a dollar to prevent Miami and Bangladesh being submerged", because that sounds bad, but they come very close to it.
People don't usually think in these categories; between lack of information, misinformation, opportunity costs (no one has time to be up to date on everything, or even to think through everything) and psychological discounting ("I worry about securing food for my children tomorrow, not about some uncertain future 50 years from now"), you end up with people who believe in things that are wrong even when taking their own subjective values into account.
I feel the problem we have isn't with subjectiveness - most political issues are objective enough in principle. We have a computational problem - we can't get enough people to think and talk through issues deeply enough. Instead, people fall back to computationally efficient heuristics - ideologies and soundbites. Pattern matching everything into beliefs like "capitalism is bad", or "government regulation is bad" is a faulty generalization, but it saves on thinking.
It may be that at the scale of our current problems, this computational barrier is in practice insurmountable. If so, we're fucked, and I'm not sure what to do. But it's probably why there's so much pushback against democracy from the "intellectual elites" - because they realize that this problem only scales with the number of people you need to involve to make a decision.
(N.b. trust is another computation-saving hack humanity has used since forever, and what enables us to have societies as large as today. The trust that other people don't try to hurt me, that they have my interests in mind. It's damn effective, and that's why I'm particularly hateful towards individual, company and government activities that erode this trust.)
> political stances are projections of high-dimensional conceptual structures to lower-dimensional space
Did you come up with this way of looking at it, or is this from some sort of a dedicated "field of study"? This seems to me an extremely good description of what's going on in society lately, from fake news to disagreement on a wide variety of issues, and perfectly explains why opposing sides both think they are right - because often they are both right, they've just chosen different perspectives (subsets of dimensions) for their lower-dimensional conceptual understanding of the larger high-dimensional problem. Throw in the low precision, low dimension capabilities of language and communication, a lack of intellectual humility, and you've got the perfect recipe for a complete gong show even if everyone is trying to be honest.
I think the field is called "epistemology", but I only know of the name; I didn't study it formally. I came up with this projection example myself, while looking for something more vivid than "focusing on different aspects", and this kind of clicked almost perfectly. In retrospect, it's not really original - I recall seeing suggestions like this in few places, notably the cover of the "Gödel, Escher, Bach", and some random Facebook meme. Also playing with shadows.
(Note, do not confuse this example with the infamous "9 / 6" meme, with two people standing over a number painted on the ground and claiming they're right. One of them is wrong, because there's no information loss giving degrees of freedom here; the digit was drawn with a particular orientation in mind, and one party is ignoring it.)
The intended implication of my example is that if political (or other) opinions are necessarily projections of the full issue, you probably need to hold more than one at the same time. Consider technical drawings, e.g. CAD drawings of parts. In order to completely describe a physical part, you almost always have to have multiple projections on a single picture. I believe the same applies to understanding the real world - which is why I like to listen to "the other side", and generally hate the concept of taking a side.
I have the very same feeling, this concept seems near perfectly correct, which is why I'm trying to find some formal discussion of it, something with more meat on the bone.
I don't think this is a helpful way of saying this. There is, in fact, only one truth in terms of what the facts are. All of us have different models in our head of what the world is like; these models are incomplete and often wrong. But the weakness of our models of the world won't stop reality from coming and biting us when we make bad decisions.
It is true, that sometimes when people disagree on a political idea, that what's happened is that one person believes A (which is true) and hasn't considered B; and another person believes B (which is true) and hasn't considered A. In that case, the best thing is for both people to learn both A and B (see a "perspective [which] is not false just because it opposes yours"), and revise their plan accordingly.
But in the case of polarized opinions, what normally happens is that at least one side believes X, which isn't true, (or is a gross exaggeration). In that case, while it may help to understand where the other person is coming from, it remains the fact that the right thing is for that person to stop believing that X is true.
So take immigration. Some people claim immigrants "take jobs away" from the native population; others claim that they 1) take jobs that the natives don't want, and 2) create as many jobs as they take by being customers as well as workers. All of these individually can be true; but at the end of the day, there will be a "number of jobs" and "number of unemployed" which is a fact, and will or will not be higher. That's the number that actually counts, not these hand-wavy predictions.
I prefer Roisin Murphy's 'You can't hide from the truth, because the truth is all there really is.' What you are describing seems more like relative accuracy of broadly stated opinions.
Of course, and some thing are good for ones (immigration does not hurt middle class but bestowing a cheap labor upon them) and bad for others (immigration is damping the prices of labor of the working class).
But there are some universal falsehoods tho, like when the good intentions are leading to results quite different from the expected.
Your truth is not the only truth. There are an infinite true perspectives on a issue. Another perspective is not false just because it opposes yours and yours is true.