I think identity can have a secondary effect of communicating to others those decisions we've made about what to do.
For example, Someone: What do you do? Me: I give speeches. Someone: So you're a speaker?
It can be a way to bundle a bunch of actions/beliefs/etc into something that is quicker/easier to communicate to others. For example, as a speaker, I may write speeches, deliver speeches, book clients, travel to different companies, and other actions.
The challenges may come in the disagreements we have about which actions belong to which identities. For example, a speaker for some may be someone who speaks at corporations and gets paid for it. For others, it may be someone who gives motivational speeches to schools. For others, it may be someone who speaks on YouTube videos. So for each of those groups, they may hear "speaker" and associate different actions/beliefs/etc. and it can lead to conflict. I know I've seen some of this conflict when I tell someone I have created some Wordpress sites, they can immediately jump into "so you're a coder" and I can quickly think "no no, coders are people who create fullstack stuff, I'm just a tinkerer," etc etc.
This is where the benefits of using tools like E-Prime, a form of English language that avoids usage of the verb "to be" help me. Thinking about things in terms of e-prime allows me to realize that while using labels as a shorthand for more specific information is convenient, I lose specificity and precision, and begin to think in terms of identity when I use labels and think/speak in terms of what things are, rather than think in terms of what people or things actually do.
That describes a dog owner which is a much more concrete category than "dog person". Not every "dog person" actually has a dog. Even if you want a dog, your apartment might not allow dogs, or you might not have time/money to care for a dog while working.
You'd think so, but unfortunately, not all dog owners actually care about their dogs.
For many people, language isn't that much about content, but about signaling affection, social bonds, respect etc. (and of course all the opposites). So "how are you" signals "I care for you", though they don't necessearily want/ are able to work with an honest answer - i.e. the moment of asking is the actual content, and words are just the communication channel.
People who work like this have readily available favorite animals and colors and so on because having these answers is important for maintaining fluent conversation, not necessarily because these things are more important to them. This different usage of language also explains why people often complain about something, but don't want to hear solutions from their communication partner: It's more about bonding by sharing the ups and downs of life, not about searching for a new solution.
And in my experience people working like this sometimes are self-conscious about communication, too, but focussing on the level that's elusive to them: Fearing they are dumb, don't know enough about the topic at hand and so on.
That comes off as combative and doesn't make any sense. There's no connection between getting older and losing the ability to have preferences. I answer hot pink because it's true, and because it surprises people who think they know everything about me based on outward appearance.
Btw, 'hot pink' is the correct answer to the "what's your favorite color" question.
If at all. If you subscribe to thinking in identity-terms for optimization benefits, don’t you get a whole host of other heuristics and shortcuts to ‘conscious thought’?
For one thing, ‘uncertainty’ can be reduced. It’s this or that. And politically, you can turn uncertainty into us/them.
Automatically you get many other rules and reasoning,
If the food you eat doesn’t upset your stomach, don’t change—-what more do you need?
Why change, it’s all going to the same place in the end.
Unmoved and impenetrable to argument these shortcuts come with other formative logics.
Having the broader population decide geopolitical relationships, is like telling your doctor which cancer medication you should take.
If you own a dog, you should take your dog for walks because you care about your dog, not because you're a dog person and that's what dog people do. If you drink tea every morning, that's a habit or routine - possibly a caffeine addiction if skipping it gives you withdrawal symptoms. You don't need to identify as a tea person for that routine to be useful to you.
I think both habits and identities can be harmful in politics, but identities are worse. If someone questions your habits, you might stop to think about them, but most people become defensive when someone questions their identity.
There's a big difference between "this political party supports this legislation" and "this issue-focused group is supporting it".
It's putting blinkers on to pretend that legislation is not frequently titled and described in summary terms, which are quite different to the legal, social or physical specifics of what the individual clauses will do and representative organizations provide a very important function by having the time and people on hand to properly understand issues which affect the groups they represent.
If, for example, gay people would be voting on gig worker law propositions based on LGBTQI support organization recommendations and gun right fans would be voting on housing law propositions based on what the NRA recommends, that (to me) seems like a big problem for democracy, as the issues don't get evaluated on their merits but purely on tribalism.
Gay people don't have to, and often don't, vote based on LGBTQI organization recommendations.
However, if LGBTQI organizations believe that LGBTQI people are more impacted by gig work, shouldn't the orgs be speaking on that?
It seems relevant to me. As long as dismissal for being gay is still possible, workers' rights seem to be very much in scope for these organizations.
[To downvoters: What's the point of having an organization, otherwise?]
1. To silence valid criticism & gag public opinion.
2. To take advantage of a splintered population of
insignificant and disorganized clusters and interest groups
& gain legislative / political power.
3. To steer discussion & policy directives toward
boondoggle initiatives so that there is semblance of
progress but very little to show in the way of actual
positive outcomes - outcomes deemed not core to the said
group's world outlook.
4. To bully lawmakers into shaping public policies in the
hopes of creating a moat so big, that it effectively
shields said organization from any incursion, for decades
to come.
But often an organisation will have multiple goals, some of which you find more important than others; and they'll evolve their stances over time, to stay relevant in a shifting political climate.
So giving your unwavering, uncritical support to a single organisation is only a little less naive than giving the same support to a single political party.
But I’d agree there are probably domains where the interests don’t really intersect.
For example Props 16 in California wanted to amend the state constitution by removing the article that sated that the state doesn't make any difference between different sexes/colors/sexuality.
Depending on how you place yourself regarding recent identity politics movement, you can be LGBTQI and prefer a state that doesn't discriminate because it's progressive or a state that discriminate because it can enact affirmative action.
Let's agree to disagree on this. I think it is a bad assumption to think that activist organizations actually "represent" the larger associated community. It is much more likely they they are advocating for the ideas of the vocal leadership of the organization and not for the membership or the larger associated community.
But if you do care, like it’s a topic that matters to you, or when you do engage in a political debate, it should be your duty as a citizen to have your own point of view and to be ok to change it whenever needed. If you can’t do that, you are not ready for political discussion or debates.
And it’s totally ok to answer « I don’t know / I don’t care about this topic » when invited to give your point. « Why should I care? » is totally ok if you think there is something.
Just staying moderately up to date with the issues is a full time job, which most people cannot afford to perform alongside their running commitments.
Most people just outsource their thinking on most issues to a shaky trust structure based on moral myths, and feel righteous and enlightened about it.
Not sure about the positive case - I guess if EFF supports something, it is more likely it might be good?
I think there is no easy win here. If you even remotely care about an issue, you should do a minimum effort to read about it from multiple sources. e.g. for American politics, I found that the quickest way to gauge where an issue stands is by reading at least CNN and Fox, because they are diametrically opposed, so you can kind of guess where the middle ground is. Reading more neutral and informed pieces could come later on, if I really want to dive in.
This is a powerful concept. When I studied yogic philosophy, the teacher pointed out how our language biases us towards identification.
"I am hungry" in English reads like a statement of identity, whereas "j'ai faim" in French for example means "I HAVE a hunger". The hunger exists but it doesn't define my identity.
This identification is a lie. If you stop drinking coffee and start drinking tea, you are still 100% you, plus you have evolved (whatever information caused you to switch your preference must be new to you)
This gets into self limitation very quickly. "I AM bad at public speaking" means you don't try. "I don't HAVE public speaking skills" leaves room for choice to improve.
There are a few things that are core values to who you really are. Those are important. Your choice of beverage isn't.
>This identification is a lie. If you stop drinking coffee and start drinking tea, you are still 100% you,
Your analysis of "I am hungry" is incorrect. In this case, the "am" is acting as a linking word and not about identity. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copula_(linguistics)
Or put another way, "I am hungry" can be thought of as a shortened version of "I am [currently having feelings of] hunger". If the more verbose sentence is not about identity but sensation, the shortened version is expressing the same idea.
As an aside (not not saying you were doing this btw) whenever there's an analogy, some percentage of people will try to argue the analogy directly rather than try to understand the concept it's attempting to communicate.
"I am sad" absolutely should use a different word than "I am from California," and English gets it wrong by combining the two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_groups_in_th...
You may label yourself as an "intelligent person" or a "hacker". Other people might choose to label themselves as a "dog person". It doesn't matter what the labels are. Everybody has to choose some number of labels and stick to them, at least for a while. The labels are what allow people to accomplish social tasks and form societies built on trust.
Keeping your identity small by using few labels is good advice. But it's important to recognize that the labels are like an oil that keeps the machine of society running
Rather than label one's self (or others) as "intelligent", one can think in terms of they are a person who takes time to be thoughtful/analytical/measured/takes tim to view all sides of a situation.
Rather than think "I am a hacker", one can realize that they mean hacker as a shortcut (label) to mean they engage in DIY projects, or like to ae software, or like to automate things, or like to deconstruct software to find vulnerabilities, or like to deconstruct technology to use it for originally unintended purposes.
Labels are convenient and useful but it is important to realize they are only a shorthand and that they can cause confusion or hurt as much as they help.
This is biologically preconditioned. We have brain wiring for identifying "Us" and "Them".
BigThink put up a compilation video [1] on this topic.
Edit: So it's a cultural rather than biological precondition. ( If a precondition at all. )
For us being able to develop and change Ego and Alter, we need to have the mental capability for doing so. Which we obviously have, physically.
Both Ego and Alter can and do change heavily through life, and thus are strongly affected by culture, socialization etc. They can't change unbridled, though: There are multiple facettes of personality that are pretty stable over time (like in the Big Five model), ignoring traumata etc. And there are limits to our mental capabilities, just like there are for reasoning and other aspects of mind.
So, within the pysical borders our bodies give us, Ego and Alter can develop quite freely, heavily mediated by culture.
This is why I hate "-ism"/"-ists"-labels, because everyone seems to have a different opinion of what particular "-ism" words means. To use an example, Bernie Sanders' "socialism" is about sharing the wealth, meanwhile a lot of his opponents would argue because of the same word, it means he wants to install a Chinese-style dictatorship, or even worse, since it's a word that comes up in "Nazi", this style of fascism is also what Bernie wants.
If someone says they're a Black Live Matters supporter, depending on your leanings you might perceive them as wanting more social justice, or as a sympathizer of gangs that burned local businesses. I suppose, then you can decide whether you trust them or not. The problem is, they're probably not an anarchist that likes burning buildings, but your classification might have put them in that box in your mind, and since you disagree with anarchism (oh, look, another -ism), you conclude dialog with that person is impossible, just because they identified themselves as something...
Sometimes I want this effect so I can help change impressions. Like: furry and nonbinary. The goal then is to help bridge the gap between stereotype and the real human variety contained by those words.
After thousands of years of exactly the reverse, that's rather rich, don't you think?
The vast majority of atheists would be perfectly happy to be left alone to their own devices. But in the United States at least, they are considered second-class citizens.
If someone is so biased that they become angry at the simple mention of a very abstract philosophical stance like atheism, is it really a good idea to placate them by pretending you are something else?
There was no placation. I like effective communication. They accepted me well enough once I chose to really say who I was rather than lean on inaccurate labels.
I'm not sure what you mean by abstract here: does the idea of a very abstract philosophical stance that it has no (or little) effect on other people or the world?
Sheer scale. There’s so many of us, and everyone is mostly replaceable. Not just in the economy, but in everything.
The identity is the one flag in the ground that screams ‘I stand for something’. I’m upset at myself and everyone for bringing back high school into our adult world. The book bags adorned with band stickers, the clothes, the cliques, all making it clear in a superficial way ‘this is who I am’. Like a generation of adult Goth kids - we fucking get it.
It just seems like we have to grow up, over and over.
I think pg actually has another article (can't find it now) where he discusses hacking identity to ingrain positive behaviors. For example making "I'm a 3 workouts/week person" part of your identity. If that's you, skipping a day in the gym is a serious blow to your identity and self-image. It worked for me.
True. But one can become less attached to their identity and learn to be more fluid and less rigid about it. Thinking in terms of what one does, rather than what they are, seems helpful to me.
Identity is even a dominant political trend in itself. "Identity politics".
I agree with the premise of the post. I just cannot see how it can be done. I think it's better to learn to accept differences gracefully rather than minimizing the identity surface. It's also my way to test people and communities. Try to disagree on something they consider basic. They way they'll treat you shows who they really are.
Learning to think and communicate in terms of what people and things do rather than labels, i.e. what they are, has been helpful for me.
“The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”
It is much easier to identity as broadly one wing or the other, so I will tend to vote one way even if some of my party's policies are terrible and some of the oppositions are great.
From a sales perspective it becomes phrasing: “This will cost you $5,000 over the next 3 years if you don’t buy.”
Vs “You will save $5,000...”
People purchase something like 60% more often when using the fear inducing “cost you” phrasing.
From a political standpoint, everything is driven by creating fear of the other party.
Did you know that Republicans are all racist bigots who want you to be poor?
Did you know that Democrats are all lazy, naive communists who want to control everyone’s lives and will bankrupt the entire country while taking away your guns so you can’t protect your family?
Did you know Libertarians are all anarchists who want complete every man for himself chaos with no roads?
It’s always “fear of other” marketing.
IMO, not enough meditation or psychedelic use.
On his podcast sometime this year, Sam Harris said something to the effect of "Why am I so sure that we are capable of moving past these politics of identity? That one does not have to so strongly, or at all, identify with their gender or race or country? Because I know that one does not even have to identify with the face that stares back at them in the mirror."
This is a large part of the benefits of meditation and psychedelic use. The dissolution of the ego, the relinquishment of the seemingly strictly intertwined brain and body, the expansion of the consciousness beyond the self. Whether these experiences are actual reality or simply temporary perceptual illusions is somewhat immaterial to the benefits gained - namely a much more zen and less identity fraught mental modus operandi.
I have a slightly different view of ego though. For me ego is a tool that no doubt had some evolutionary purpose. When my "ego is pumped" I tend to be highly active, motivated, confident and able to solve problems (or hunt for food in evolutionary terms) but once those problems are solved, the ego can be discarded for a time.
From doing stand-up comedy, when you "bomb" (the audience doesn't laugh) it's extremely traumatic for the ego. I look at it now that afterwards I need to "reboot my ego" and in doing so, some ideas or things that I saw as part of my identity get discarded in the process. At this point, having bombed quite a few times, it feels like an accelerated learning process and it becomes less traumatic the less invested I am in my identity.
Meanwhile - connected to the article - what's interesting to me is I think most people have a "tell" (poker term) when they are over-invested in some identity or idea, and that's when they say "I believe X" or "I believe Y". In my experience that's an indicator that they have accepted some conclusion or point of view, without having examined all the evidence that makes the conclusion valid. I think we'd do better with encouraging people to say "I don't know" more often than "I believe" e.g. "What happens after we die?" ... "I don't know" seems better than "I believe we go to Heaven"
"Because I know that one does not even have to identify with the face that stares back at them in the mirror"
But in my experience, this would be the point, where psychonauts start loosing the connection to physical reality.
Because sure, my face is not my identity. But it reflects very strongly my physical identity/reality. So if your mind does not make a connection with the face it sees in the mirror, then I would start to worry, as then your mind and body is already quite seperated.
Writing helps sometimes, specially at late night when you begin to lose taboos and feel more talk-ative.
This is what I perceive our political discourse has been reduced to. Maybe it never has been more than that.
I like the author’s conclusion that to keep an open mind, don’t make stuff your “identity.” Yet the instinct of many is just the opposite, so that not religion and party affiliation but even the most trivial things are stated as identity: “I’m a coffee person, not a tea person.” “I’m a dog person, not a cat person,” and other such bizarreness. Why are people seemingly so drawn to identifying themselves as anything at all?