The inability to disagree in a mature way is why we have such a mess of identity politics, name calling and all sorts of division in many counties IMO.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
How many people have you seen converted from dangerous beliefs by isolating them away from dissimilar thinkers?
This strategy single handedly abolished more KKK members than anything else. Contrast to the extremists of today like BLM who are having the opposite effect and pushing more people to racism. We’re going backwards. Then again, it’s not like BLM is actually motivated by their clever branding, so this is unsurprising.
Obviously this is not true.
To correctly say it is untrue, you must show another strategy actually converted at least hundreds of KKK members (perhaps more, as it's possible people beyond just Daryl got results from this strategy).
Are people born racist? Does education an outreach not work? I really don’t see why you’d be so certain.
I have seen no evidence whatsoever that refusing to interact with people deradicalizes them. The filter bubble phenomenon suggests the opposite.
I'll take a strategy that's known to work with unclear scalability over a scalable one with no evidence it works, every time.
Would you mind explaining further?
It seems obvious to me that deplatforming them will further radicalize them. It fits perfectly into their narrative as I understand it.
Engaging them as (deeply flawed, very wrong) humans and having a good-faith debate seems to have worked shockingly well for Daryl. I suspect it could for others, too (though Daryl is obviously a rare breed).
Every vote for that party in our zeitgeist is motivated in no small part by active malignancy. It's the defining characteristic of their leader, unavoidable and undeniable, and as of the convention the party literally has no platform except to serve and support his whims. So there is absolutely a right and a wrong side to things right now.
Friendship is an even stronger signal of tacit endorsement and there are situations, positions where it's inappropriate, even morally unjustifiable, to deploy. Scalia would certainly qualify for me.
If you didn’t know this or chose to ignore it, your model is incomplete and you don’t understand one side.
"It's time to stop arresting these filth only to have them released the next day and start just putting them down"
--seen literally yesterday in a popular politics IRC chatroom, to general agreement. I think many people don't entirely realize how bad it's gotten.
They're also fully in support of the immigration policies that have led to things like the very well-documented child separation.
In what ways are those not denying someone's humanity?
The idea that one ought not fraternize with those who disagree with one’s opinion is unproductive and leads to unnecessary division and ultimately a weaker system. Ultimately it is a brutish and uncivilized idea.
I wish your post wasn’t downvoted. Bad ideas require discussion to be understood. And they can’t be discussed if they are removed from discourse.
If anybody from ycombinator is reading - it seems insane what a post can be down-voted into grey and then the void, whilst it has active commentary beneath it.
"Posts" can have a status applied to them, but the far more important thing is the "thread" where different views collide.
Pulling posts, breaks the thread.
Using me as an anecdotal example, I have acquaintances and a few (loose) friends that are fiscally conservative. I have exactly zero (known) acquaintances or friends that are conservative/regressive with regards to social issues. After all I‘ve seen and experienced in my life I just cannot emphasize with someone that can justify denying women health care or discriminate against race or sexual orientation, for example.
I suppose you could start solving these entrenchments by having millions of desert islands in order to force small groups of people with diametrically opposed viewpoints to endure hardships on them.
On the internet there is no chance. Without seeing the actual person and talking with them for hours it wouldn‘t work. The problem with this method is that it‘s terribly inefficient.
What we need is a sort of enlightened six sense for empathy that makes large groups of people feel the state of mind of other large groups. But barring large scale psychedelic treatments I don‘t see that happening.
I’d like to change your mind one day though. My friendship with Scott was instructive here. He was a former HN mod. I looked to him as a mentor and a friend, though I’m not sure it went both ways. Regardless, we worked together on Lumen for years. When I was banned for a year from HN, he never once allowed our friendship (such as it was) to affect his duty to the site. The decision wasn’t his, and he wasn’t going to pull strings internally just because we occasionally wrote code together.
I get what you’re saying. And I agree that in the long term, it’s extremely important to set up incentive structures in the right way. But friendship — a word quite hard to define, if you think about it — is a part of the human experience.
The point here is that there are people with integrity. They do exist. And they can be friends regardless of other duties — sometimes unpleasant ones.
Now, my little story isn’t quite related. I wasn’t an adversarial peer, which is what you’re talking about. But your reasoning seems to be: if the incentive structure permits friendship, it compromises integrity. It’s a reasonable concern, especially over the course of decades. But the word “professional” reflects the fact that business comes before friendship.
It’s a fundamental truth that people will try to form friendships regardless of their occupation. Rather than change the incentive structure, as you propose, shouldn’t we recognize that truth?
The reason I related to your comment so much is, for a time, I felt exactly the same way: if business was any indication, it was a web of insider deals, “friendships”, and favors behind closed doors. I wanted nothing to do with that world. But two people with integrity can sidestep all of those concerns and simply... be friends. Even in the highest court of the land, which determines our fate.
(As a sidenote, you seem like an interesting person. If you happen to want a friend, or to debate hypothetical political structures, feel free to DM me on Twitter.)
Sure. There are fantastic individuals out there.
The key to fair systems is to structure the system in such a way that does not rely on the recruitment of extraordinary individuals who are filled to the brim with integrity.
The key is to create a system of checks and balances that disallows obvious unfairness by means of liability isolation and personal separation, etc.
I'm glad your friendship with whoever Scott is worked out despite whatever problems on HN, but all the example tells me is that Scott (and to a smaller degree, yourself) have some level of personal integrity; but facts and statistics generally say that systems that can be gamed, will be -- and that's without a motivating factor other than a personal win; include motivation like money and power and the scales tip much more radically against those with integrity.
For every 'Scott' there are 10 folks without any integrity that'd have gladly re-instantiated their friends' accounts that had been banned AS LONG AS it didn't mean hurting their own position.
That's exactly why 'fair' systems are generally built in such an isolated fashion so as to reduce inclusion of bias and personal feelings.
But, after watching Scalia, how can you not like him?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggz_gd--UO0&ab_channel=Ameri...
https://youtu.be/TRS-jdgHok4?t=105
He was witty, charming, and a master orator. So when people hear "can't have a friendship with Scalia, even though you work with him," it's kind of like "can't breathe, even though you're human." It's a logical contradiction. And it's not even a well-defined problem: what is a "friendship," anyway?
I think this is probably true in legislative bodies and in government agencies - for the same reason: both promote deal making because there's something to be gained.
One of the reasons the SC Justices are seated for life is precisely to blunt that effect. They can be friends without needing to make deals because they really don't get anything out of a deal - and one hopes they fully appreciate the gravity of their position.
The Court is a sort of unique entity in that it doesn't need (I don't think) to be confrontational in order to be effective. It is the one place where one would think, true wisdom reigns. And by and large, that is what I see from SCOTUS' decisions.
It's a sign of an intelligent, mature mind to be able to contain contradictory ideas without losing your identity. Being friends with someone on the other side of the political aisle, in a group as small as the supreme court, I would think has the effect of improving the quality of their deliberations and little else.
A competent rhetorician is only "hard to hate" when you don't look at what they do. Keeping one's eye on the ball is not that difficult when you have a set of principles.
If you disagree with that, I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree. It was sort of incredible that Scalia basically straight-up says "You gave me the power to decide whether abortion is permitted nationwide? Really? Who thought this was a good idea?" (Not an actual quote; the talk is quite good.)
Apparently it wasn't always so, and Scalia explains the history too. The concept of the constitution as a "living document" was manufactured, along with the idea that morals mature over time. "Societies only mature, they never rot! /s"
What you're talking about is a matter of business. There are certainly some individuals that it would be quite difficult to be friends with in spite of what they've done. But if Scalia is one of them, well... Everyone has their preferences, I guess.
Antonin Scalia's entire worldview was built because he knew he was a rear-guard for regressive thought and maybe, just maybe, a broken country with an impotent federal government could allow people like him to continue to kick the shit out of the weak a little longer. He was never going to get to punish women with an abortion ban (and today, would never get to fuck over trans people) nationally--so the natural outgrowth of this is to punish women and fuck of trans people where they can. All in the name of "letting people choose", so they can choose to vote on the basic humanity of others.
I reject the idea that one can "be friends" with the people who want to bring the long dark back. They will break civil society on the anvil of a supremacism that exists to benefit me, and I refuse it.
What may seem natural for you isn't for others.
Thus system are designed considering that.
The entire world would be a better place if they do not follow the argument presented here.
The whole thing was clearly created on a principle of opposing friendships between powerful forces.
But that being said, have you seen how many decisions are 5-4? Or 6-3, 7-2? It does not appear that whatever friendship that existed between Scalia and Ginsburg impacted their rulings and dissents on the matters before the Court.
It's completely possible—and I say preferable—to hold starkly contrasting political or legal views, but still like one another. We need more of that. It's how we stay one cohesive nation, instead of warring factions.
36% 9-0
10% 8-1
20% 7-2
11% 6-3
23% 5-4
Most cases tend to be unanimous or nearly so (0-1 dissenters), and only about ⅓ of cases are contentious (5-4/6-3/5-3). This has been decently stable over the past few decades.
I guess my point is that their friendship didn’t seem to have impaired either justice’s ability to do their job with faith to their respective judicial philosophies.
I get confused with all the sailing terms in common vernacular, but generally the sayings go
"I like the cut of your jib"
"That gybes well with me"
Noting that none of them make sense, I think leeway is possibly the worst
I had never seen the "gybes" spelling before. Is it like tire/tyre? Looks Welsh to me!
-Washington Post
SC justices are appointed for life for the very reason to help ensure they are not political but instead apply the standards of legality.
It's not perfect, but it's less politics than when people campaign for constant election/re-election to a position.
Disagree.
The system is confrontational; it's shaped this way so as to reduce the chance of buddy-buddy underdealings and negotiation.
The system is confrontational so as to promote fairness and prevent bias.
Creating yet another environment by which the judges can exert control over the law by winning personal favors among each other must be avoided. That's exactly why things are set up such way within the US government, Supreme Court not-withstanding.
All that said : I have never considered the supreme court to be fair and unbiased. Compromising for the sake of cooperation, sure. Effective, definitely.
> It does not appear that whatever friendship that existed between Scalia and Ginsburg impacted their rulings and dissents on the matters before the Court.
You'd never really know. That's why it should probably be well avoided.
This works as long as both sides are acting in good faith, and everyone involved (i.e. everyone in a society) is on more or less equal footing. If either of those conditions don't exist, fixing them is more important than maintaining the civil discourse. That's true for many reasons, and one important reason is that in those situations, insisting on the equality of reasonable political positions with unreasonable ones is an effective defense of the status quo, which makes the problems harder to fix.
Neither of these conditions exist in the USA right now, for the record.
The Supreme Court isn't a coffee club. The justices being on their toes and constantly being challenged by opposing ideas will lead to better outcomes. Friendship is a process of synchronisation, it sits in opposition to the best outcome for the system.
And yes, I pay a lot of attention to Supreme Court decisions.
If your position is right, doesn't that contradict the continued existence of the United States? What's "United" about the US if it breaks down into a bunch of hostile warring tribes?
That isn't a very fun vision of life on the bench - and any system is imperfect - so I don't really advocate that. But the idea that these people are asserting their preferences over 300 million people and then getting all chummy in their spare time isn't a good thing. It is unavoidable though.