Typical Mind and Politics

I'm frequently a victim of "your needs are uncommon, therefore no one else has to accommodate them" type reasoning. A compromise is necessary: I can't demand that the people around me not eat any mint candy (much less that everyone stop using mint toothpaste lest I encounter them an hour later) just because the smell is intolerable to me. Slightly more common needs (that people not invade my personal space) or needs that are supported by societal distaste (that people not smoke cigarettes in my school buildings) get accommodated. In my case, I know these things are at least partly hardwired - oversensitivity to sensory stimuli is par for the course with Asperger's - but I haven't noticed anyone get more sympathetic to this sort of thing when I so inform them unless they've been my friend for a long time (I think non-friends assume I'm making it up to get my way). Even with my friends, I suspect it's because my long-term friends assume anything I don't like must be a consequence of my wiring. I've stopped bothering to explain that my dislike of ginger doesn't mean anything except that I don't like ginger.

There's a danger, in accommodating preferences because they are hardwired, a) that these preferences will seem completely intractable, with nothing on the part of the annoyed to be done and all the accommodation to be done by the annoyer; and/or b) that people resistant to the idea of preferences being hardwired will conclude from the use of this reasoning that if they don't have to believe that preferences are hardwired, then they don't have to take responsibility for accommodating others. The former is dangerous because - in the majority of cases - the annoyed can do something about the annoyance. It's rare that there is a noise next door so loud that earplugs will accomplish nothing, from which follows that to eliminate the annoyance, the noise doesn't necessarily have to be eliminated, just reduced enough that earplugs will do the rest. The second is dangerous because people who won't accommodate anyone else are... well... annoying, and I don't want to live in a society with those people.

If people's political opinions come partly from unchangeable anatomy

It's a big step to go from finding physical correlates of mental phenomena -- especially hypothetical ones -- to ascribing the mental phenomena to "unchangeable anatomy".

I've created Typical mind fallacy article stub on the wiki, linking to the original article and to this one. LessWrong'ers, use it as an excuse to start contributing to the wiki.

"Other than that, it's just a general message of pessimism. If people's political opinions come partly from unchangeable anatomy, it makes the program of overcoming bias in politics a lot harder, and the possibility of coming up with arguments good enough to change someone else's opinion even more remote."

Only if you, like 99.999% of people, are approaching political change in the wrong way. Those few of us who are trying to change politics assuming political views are basically constant, however, have already taken this into account. A major point of seasteading is that it does not require overcoming political bias because it focuses on enabling groups of people to form societies around their uncommon political opinions, not on changing those opinions.

If people's political opinions are fixed and in conflict, then sorting into more politically homogeneous societies is a win.

Also, there are methods for reducing bias in politics which work without changing opinion, like increased competition.

Be warned some large speculation follows

There is a fairly strong liberal/conservative split between urban and rural areas. Now let us say that the human brain is slightly polymorphic and alters its structure dependent upon the population density it finds itself in.

In an urban environment the brain needs to worry somewhat about non-human threats, disease and fire. Raiding from bandits is less of a problem. Some form of taking of money (be it a protection racket or legitimate government) is very likely and in this situation it is unlikely to be able to be resisted successfully.

If a brain finds itself in sparse population, it might be able resist taxes if all its neighbors do and strange human actors such as bandits/raiders are more of threat.

Considering how vast are differences in political views, how tiny are differences in underlying biology, I'm extremely skeptical to any biological explanations.

Political distance between American left 2009 and American right 2009 is far smaller than political distance between average American 2009 and average American 1809, or than political distance between average North Korean 2009 and average Somalian 2009.

If those tiny American differences corresponded to big differences in biology, then people from different countries and times would have to be pretty much a different species. That's obviously not true, so I find such explanations extremely unlikely.

A common reason economists say noise regulation is not needed is that noise doesn't travel very far, most noise sources don't move, and so one can easily find the offending parties. So as long as it is clear who has the relevant property right (to make noise or to stop noise) they can plausibly make a deal to achieve the efficient outcome, at least if the problem is big enough.

So all the important issues like economic freedom and labor policy and maximizing utility and suchwhat get subordinated to whether you're secreting more neurotransmitters in response to money loss or images of sad coal miners.

If people's political opinions come partly from unchangeable anatomy, it makes the program of overcoming bias in politics a lot harder, and the possibility of coming up with arguments good enough to change someone else's opinion even more remote.

But a good first step would be to follow Greene's advice and change our moral language so that people don't think they're in possession of the objective moral truth on the matter, but rather realize that the source of their moral view is a chemistry reaction/crude AI hack that goes on in some squelchy part of their brain. Then they might moderate themselves a little...

I have minimal aversion to monetary loss², but wasting time makes me angry.

2) Actually, it's more complicated than this, because I agonize over spending money when shopping.

Exactly the same happens to me!

Yesterday, I overcame this by deciding which amount of money to spend before entering the store, and once inside I would only be deciding how to spend that amount (as though I had been given a gift card, though this analogy didn't occur to me yesterday).

You do realize that Obama college volunteer plan included a $30/hour refundable tax credit? It was basically paying young people very good tax free salaries to do volunteer work. Keynesian economics at its best!

We could compare how much more sensitive to noise you are than Bill by comparing how you each rate the distraction/impairment from various levels of noise.

I promise there is a decibel level that Bill thinks is damaging, and in need of regulation.

I just assumed everyone knew this

It shouldn't be surprising that psychological differences inform our political intuitions. Hollywood doesn't make people liberal. Artistic / creative people are more likely to be liberal, and they're more likely to move to Hollywood.

We can define a psychological dimension as authoritarian vs non-authoritarian. Non-authoritarian psychology makes people more experimental and creative. They color outside the lines. They are more interested in art, theater, acting or music. They are more likely to experiment with alternative religions and spiritual practices (or no religion at all). They are more likely to be politically liberal. That's probably why religion has the strongest correlation to political views. It's the same underlying psychology.

The alternative is an authoritarian psychology that makes people favor law enforcement, punishment, mainstream religion (especially of a morally authoritarian kind), and more culturally mainstream forms of activity and recreation (less likely to experiment with drugs, for example). It makes people less experimental in their clothing, choice of music, etc. It's more likely to make you a political conservative.

While not all conservatives are authoritarian, 99% of authoritarians are conservative (there was a paper published about that, but I can't find it right now).

I have a strong pain signal from lost money and from lost time. To the extent that I can introspect on the workings of my insula, I think that this is one impulse for me, rather than two as Yvain describes - one for time and one for money.

If I am correct that my brain processes the loss of time using the same moral hardware as the loss of money, what could explain why some people have one impulse covering both cases, while other people have a separate one for each?

The idea that regulation is "for the good" of someone somewhere is a rationalization. It is primarily about power and revenue.

So it seems possible to me that I have an oversensitivity to noise and Bill has an undersensitivity to it.

That seems to imply that the typical case is the "correct" one, and that somehow your (or Bill's) case is invalid because it's non-typical.

If noise means that you can't sleep, study or concentrate, and you can't really help this, then this is a valid factor that should be taken into account.

[edit] though after reading further down i can see that you appreciate that.

Great post!

I like this post, because I really think that you are trying to understand other people instead of merely dismissing them.

What implications does this analysis have for those of us who have changed deeply held political beliefs (more than once)? Is it really a change in brain structure or chemistry? Have I been rewired to get upset about different things than I used to?

If you're going to talk about government regulation please understand that it is the epitome of the is-ought problem and you need a seriously rigorous chain of reasoning before I can take it seriously. I have yet to see a regulatory proposal that provides this.