Scissors Statements for President?

X and Y are cooperating to contain people who object-level care about A and B, and recruit them into the dialectic drama. X is getting A wrong on purpose, and Y is getting B wrong on purpose, as a loyalty test. Trying to join the big visible org doing something about A leads to accepting escalating conditioning to develop the blind spot around B, and vice versa.

X and Y use the conflict as a pretext to expropriate resources from the relatively uncommitted. For instance, one way to interpret political polarization in the US is as a scam for the benefit of people who profit from campaign spending. War can be an excuse to subsidize armies. Etc.

I wrote about this here: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/discursive-warfare-and-faction-formation/

If we can get good enough models of however the scissors-statements actually work, we might be able to help more people be more in touch with the common humanity of both halves of the country, and more able to heal blind spots.

E.g., if the above model is right, maybe we could tell at least some people "try exploring the hypothesis that Y-voters are not so much in favor of Y, as against X -- and that you're right about the problems with Y, but they might be able to see something that you and almost everyone you talk to is systematically blinded to about X."

We can build a useful genre-savviness about common/destructive meme patterns and how to counter them, maybe.  LessWrong is sort of well-positioned to be a leader there: we have analytic strength, and aren't too politically mindkilled.

IDK, but I'll note that IME, calling for empathy for "the other side" (in either direction) is received with incuriosity / indifference at best, often hostility.

One thing that stuck with me is one of those true crime Youtube videos, where at some stage of the interrogation, the investigator stops being nice, and instead will immediately and harshly contradict anything that the suspect Bob is saying to paint a story where he's innocent. The commentator claimed that the reason the investigator does this is to avoid giving Bob confidence: if Bob's statements hung in the air unchallenged, Bob might think he's successfully creating a narrative and getting that narrative bought. Even if the investigator is not in danger of being fooled (e.g. because she already has video evidence contradicting some of Bob's statements), Bob might get more confident and spend more time lying instead of just confessing.

A conjecture is that for Susan, empathizing with Robert seems like giving room for him to gain more political steam; and the deeper the empathy, the more room you're giving Robert.

Minor mod note: I left this post on personal blog, as we generally avoid frontpaging content related to and during the US election for sanity protection [LW · GW]. To be clear, this post is pretty abstracted from any election details, so I'd normally frontpage it, but I'm erring on the side of leaving on personal while the election is so close (literally today).

My belief is that it's primarily the voting system that causes this. (Not the electoral college; rather the whole 'first past the post' style of voting.) We see scissors presidents because that's the winning strategy.

I suspect that other more sophisticated voting systems (even just ranked choice!) would do better. No voting system is perfect, but 'first past the post' is particularly pathological.

This pattern is one I have observed as well, in various disagreements but especially in political ones.  For the past few years I've been working on methods for dissolving these scissors statements.  With some foundational concepts to peel away assumptions and take the conversation down to basics, a person can do it systematically with relative ease.  

Points of disagreement take the form of tradeoffs, which people either accept or reject.  These tradeoffs can be described in terms of costs, risks, habits, and trust.  People accept or reject a tradeoff based on what their experiences tell them about the tradeoff's drawbacks, as well as how well they are positioned to deal with those drawbacks.  

As you pointed out, people often downplay or ignore the drawbacks of their own tradeoff choices, while believing that people who make the opposite choice with different drawbacks are selfish, or even have that choice's drawbacks as a terminal value instead of an unfortunate side-effect.  

For example: 

"My environmental policy won't affect the economy that much.  Our opponents care more about consumerism than about the future of the planet."  

"My economic policy won't affect the environment that much.  Our opponents care more about feeling superior than about the people they'd be putting out of work."  

Listening to and acknowledging the real reasons people accept or reject a tradeoff makes them feel understood and respected, at which point they are more comfortable listening to reasons why other people might disagree.  Understanding the tradeoff concepts makes it much easier to understand and explain the reasoning behind tradeoffs.  

Once we understand the tradeoffs in play and the drawbacks people fear, we can resolve these points of disagreement using constructive principles.  (This part requires zooming out of the narrow focus on the situation and applying problem-solving mindsets.  Most humans get stuck arguing about zero-sum tradeoffs because humans don't yet teach constructive problem-solving as part of a standard educational curriculum.)  

Constructive principles improve the situation over time to put everyone in better positions with more options, lowering the stakes for disagreement about what to do in the short term.  Investment deals with costs.  Preparation deals with risks.  Challenge deals with habits.  Ethics deals with trust.  These principles are how we explore approaches for simultaneously addressing all the drawbacks that all the stakeholders are concerned about.  

How does that sound?  If you'd like to learn more about the process for dissolving scissors statements and reconciling conflict constructively, just let me know.  We can apply it to conflict situations that you want to resolve.  

(Edited for typo.)

While there are legitimate differences that matter quite a bit between the sides, I believe a lot of the reason why candidates are like 'scissors statements' is because the median voter theorem actually kind of works, and the parties see the need to move their candidates pretty far toward the current center, but they also know they will lose the extremists to not voting or voting third party if they don't give them something to focus on, so both sides are literally optimizing for the effect to keep their extremists engaged.

How might someone figure out what their blind spot (A or B) is and overcome it?

Electoral candidates can only be very bad because the country is very big and strong, which can only be the case because there's a lot of people, land, capital and institutions.

Noticing that two candidates for leading these resources are both bad is kind of useless without some other opinion on what form the resources should enter. A simple option would be that the form of the resources should lessen, e.g. that people should work less. The first step to this is to go away from Keynesianism. But if you take that to its logical conclusion, it implies e/acc replacement of humanity, VHEM, mass suicide, or whatever. It's not surprising that this is unpopular.

So that raises the question: What's some direction that the form of societal resources could be shifted towards that would be less confusing than a scissor statement candidate?

Because without an answer to this question, I'm not sure we even need elaborate theories on scissor statements.