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How can we break our addiction to contempt?

117 points2 yearsfreakonomics.com
at_a_remove2 years ago

What's the Matter with Kansas? is a lovely example of contempt disguised as gentle inquiry, with a touch of worry over another, and it starts even with the title itself. "Why those poor, naive, uneducated conservatives in the flyover states, they simply do not understand that they are voting against their own interests." It's concern-trolling with a mask of pity.

Once you begin looking for it, you can see it more and more. On a rather left-leaning forum, an article appeared discussing authoritarianism and how pervasive it is in society. One commenter, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, wondered if there were some way to hook into this tendency to get people to get behind gun control or get vaccinated.

I will at least take naked, open contempt over that sort of thing.

BitwiseFool2 years ago

I can't help but think this sense is so prevalent on 'The Left' because they have established an image for themselves that is rational, empathetic, and humanist above all else. They actively frame their positions and actions in terms of "justice" and "fairness". They love to declare that "Reality has a well known liberal bias" and frame people who see the world different as rejecting reality itself. With motivations so unquestionably good, and so unquestionably rational, anyone who is in opposition to their proposals must have something wrong with them, no? How else could someone be opposed to such righteous actions? Well, the answer is that they have been deceived by Fox News, they are ignorant, they are voting against their best interest without realizing it, they are reactionaries, they have no empathy, or they are just plan bad people. Take your pick.

Pxtl2 years ago

That's a wonderful narrative, except that Fox News and other conservative orgs have repeatedly been proven to be really, really deceptive. How many conservative talking heads have had to defend themselves in court that they're not really news, but entertainers playing a silly character for laughs? How many right-wing radio shock jocks have died of COVID because they drank their own kool-aid on the subject of Vaccines?

Polls have shown that Fox News viewers believe more incorrect facts about current events than people who don't follow the news at all.

For example:

http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/

After we spend decades hearing about how Iraq has WMD's and was involved with Al-Qaeda, Obama's secretly a non-American Muslim, Anthropogenic Climate Change is fake, COVID is just a bad cold, vaccines are an evil conspiracy, publicly funded healthcare for Americans will result in "death panels" and so on and so forth... is it not reasonable for American progressives to accept that their political opponents are generally either malevolent or suckers?

At some point it's time to stop assuming good faith.

abbub2 years ago

I mean...it's not 'The Left' that's pushing the 'fake news' and 'alternate facts' agenda when they come up against anything they disagree with...

googlryas2 years ago

Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Rachel Maddow have all used "No one could honestly believe that what we say is really true" as an argument in legal proceedings against them.

+1
TomSwirly2 years ago
BitwiseFool2 years ago

As loathe as people are to hear "both sides", 'The Left' absolutely does this as too. They just use different names and insinuations to communicate the same point, that sources presented by the other side is not to be trusted.

+1
mrtesthah2 years ago
heavyheavy2 years ago

Any examples of this?

JasonCannon2 years ago

Likewise, it isn't the left's fault that conservatives routinely do deny real reporting on real events that actually happened as being reported by a liberal bias.

CoastalCoder2 years ago

I find those two forms of contempt to be equally frustrating, because (AFAICT) they have the same root cause:

Judging an un-nuanced, possibly straw-man version of another's views. Without any effort to check that they truly understand what the other person believes, let alone what reasons that person has for holding those views.

I've seen this from both conservatives and liberals, and especially from those with mass-media audiences.

coffeecat2 years ago

It's impossible for us to understand the beliefs/priorities/values of others from any perspective other than our own. Actually, my conjecture is that the only way to see things from another perspective is to internalize some aspects that perspective.

Let's say Alice holds some internalized ideal of traditional family values, and Bob holds some internalized ideal of tolerance and inclusion of LGBT people. When Alice looks at Bob's views, all she sees is that it's an affront to an ideal that she cares about, and when Bob looks at Alice's views, all he sees is that it's an affront to an ideal that he cares about.

But how can Alice possibly understand Bob's point of view, unless she's able to tentatively drop her concern for traditional family values? I expect that even with effort to understand the other's perspective, unless that other perspective is internalized, Alice's thoughts on Bob's views will be centered around what she cares about: "I guess I understand what motivates Bob to hate family values", "I guess I understand what motivates Alice's bigoted views on LGBT issues", etc.

coffeecat2 years ago

Building on my previous comment, I think it's more useful to say not that we caricaturize opposing viewpoints, but that we compress them using our own internal, lossy compression algorithms. And the original viewpoint is inaccessible to us; we only have access to the compressed representation that our minds generate.

VictorPath2 years ago

> What's the Matter with Kansas? is a lovely example of contempt disguised as gentle inquiry, with a touch of worry over another, and it starts even with the title itself

On the contrary. The title is from the 19th century, from an editorial asking why the populists in Kansas were so left wing, something the book goes into detail about in the second chapter.

h2odragon2 years ago

Such trolling isn't new, its just the causes for which its used change

dang2 years ago

I haven't read that book but I think you may be misassessing Thomas Frank, who of course is from Kansas and whose main interest is rehabilitating progressive populism. Wasn't the title ironic? Having read/heard other things, I assumed he was really trying to explain what was the matter with the people who ask that.

Pxtl2 years ago

It's nice to know the actual factual content of "What's The Matter With Kansas" is completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter who's correct, it matters who hurt their feelings. Which is pretty consistent - conservatives have become utterly disconnected from reality, and their absurd COVID policy has demonstrated what happens when reality doesn't give a crap how you feel.

dang2 years ago

Please don't take HN threads further into political or ideological flamewar. All those flames burn the same, and they're destructive of the place we're trying to have here.

The goal is curious conversation. That means optimizing for interestingness—not for being right, and definitely not for smiting enemies.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've done this repeatedly recently, and we've had to ask you multiple times before. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit more to heart? We'd be grateful.

at_a_remove2 years ago

See, there's that contempt again.

You should know that this is what began to pry me away from being your basic leftist template. I said, "Wow, I better make sure I am not voting against my own interests. Wouldn't I feel like a fool if I supported people who had contempt for me."

After that, I would hear "Ugh, men are awful" in a curious new light. Or someone would say "White people ruin everything" and I would realize, hey, I'm white. This sort of thing began to add up and it became clear that "going left" meant supporting people who had contempt for me, purely on the basis of things like skin color and sex. Wow, I really have been going against my own interests, all this time. I am no better than those "fools" in Kansas.

abbub2 years ago

I guess I just don't care enough about whether or not a person, party, or politician has contempt for me. Whoever has the policy that will be best for the country and the population overall. (With the understanding that my best interests are not always the best interests of the overall country / population...)

Pxtl2 years ago

Again, you're talking about feelings instead of policy. About "contempt" instead of dollars and rights and lives.

I can't help but see this as every bit as ridiculous as the anti-vaxxers who dig their heels in even as the people around them are dying, because they don't want to give in to The Left on vaccines.

at_a_remove2 years ago

Well hell, let's talk about facts!

Do you think the left is particularly supportive of men? ("In fact, more women as a whole now graduate from college than men ... This is a great accomplishment—not just for one sport or one college or even just for women but for America. And this is what Title IX is all about." President Barack Obama.) If they are not, then that is the error of What's the Matter with Kansas?, the error of supporting those who do not have your best interests at heart.

If feelings don't matter to you, then why are you engaging with a discussion about contempt?

SpicyLemonZest2 years ago

I don't think this is a "feelings" thing. Being openly contemptuous of the people I'm trying to help raises legitimate questions about my motivations and honesty. If you see someone go around cracking homophobic jokes all the time, is it worth carefully considering their policy ideas on LGBT issues?

JasonCannon2 years ago

>After that, I would hear "Ugh, men are awful" in a curious new light. Or someone would say "White people ruin everything" and I would realize, hey, I'm white. This sort of thing began to add up and it became clear that "going left" meant supporting people who had contempt for me, purely on the basis of things like skin color and sex.

See, I would stand up for social justice and protecting women and people of color. But women and people of color don't trust white men so instead, I'm going to not stand for these things instead.

Great logic there. I could tell that you used to be a real leftist template.

How about instead, you stand for women and people of color because it's the right thing to do? Regardless of how little they trust white men. Maybe, just maybe, try and understand why they wouldn't trust white men?

+1
at_a_remove2 years ago
+1
the_optimist2 years ago
DFHippie2 years ago

The two sides don't react to contempt symmetrically. The left doesn't care if Trump insults them. It only has any bearing if it leads to policy changes they hate. The right, on the other hand, really, really hates to be made fun of, to the point where they'd rather destroy the country (see the Civil War or the Jan 6 insurrection) than leave an insult unaddressed. The right believes the left is as sensitive as they are to issues of honor, so they spend vast effort trying to own the libs. The left believes compassion, ideals, rational argument, and consideration of material self-interest are what motivate everyone, so they write endless tracts trying to prove their point, appealing to science and founding principles and so forth. The right finds this boring. The clever right find this a useful red cape to distract their enemies with. "Surely we must not nominate Supreme Court judges in an election year! It's a sacred principle! Oops, except let's nominate several now that it's our turn to nominate."

dang2 years ago

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. I realize the topic has a lot of ideological overlap, but that makes it more important to avoid flamewar and stay focused on what's intellectually interesting and curious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

+2
iammisc2 years ago
iammisc2 years ago

> and their absurd COVID policy has demonstrated what happens when reality doesn't give a crap how you feel.

Then why are so many blue staters vacationing in florida and texas right now? Honestly, all my friends from california, many liberals, have all decided to move to Florida and tennessee. I'm so sick of this narrative. The COVID policy in red states has not led to drastically different outcomes, despite all insistence to the contrary

watwut2 years ago

Trigger the libs and snowflakes would be another nice example. And not even trying to hide.

Or like, the notion of real Americams and those who live on cost as not counting as real.

Pearse2 years ago

I found this episode quite cathartic. It's only somewhat related but hidden brain released an episode about passion in politics recently which I also found summed up some core problems with how we are framing discourse. https://pca.st/episode/b2bc078b-f757-41fa-83d8-734cf37589d7

tombert2 years ago

At some level I will be a permanent victim of movies and media, and as such there are absolutely politicians that I hate, but I've been trying to acknowledge to myself that, generally speaking, most of their voters mean well [1], even if they are voting for politicians that I think are disgusting. As such, I've tried to not "hate" them, even if I don't particularly like a good chunk of them either.

[1] Though I have to say that some of the "build the wall" rhetoric around immigrants has made me question this.

bellyfullofbac2 years ago

I'm not so sure about meaning well. If you read https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anythi... , it feels like there's a lot of decisions nowadays that's taken because it will hurt/offend the "other team", with post-facto justification why the decision benefits "me/our side".

It seems like people have been losing their pride in their selves that now they're invested in their "football teqm" winning in the arena of politics.

asdfman1232 years ago

Well, they take the perspective that the "other team" is hurting the country, so hurting them helps the country.

Almost all evil comes from the over-application of morality. "My team is good, and their team is bad, and it is good to hurt bad people."

The problem is that democracy depends on cooperation. If you insist on winning at all costs, the other side adopts your tactics and it becomes a no-holds barred power struggle.

Democracy is in short a system where people can struggle for power without killing or unjustly imprisoning each other.

bellyfullofbac2 years ago

> Well, they take the perspective that the "other team" is hurting the country, so hurting them helps the country.

It seems like the perspective gets taken to - as I write above - justify, after-the-fact, "why I've decided the same way my herd decided". There is a lot of grasping for easy answers ("Yeah, he must be being controlled by China, that's a good enough answer for me!") and cognitive dissonnace when challenged, that usually ends with people being angry so the challenger stops..

asdfman1232 years ago

When you view something as extremely morally important, you're willing to cross a lot of moral boundaries and make a lot of rationalizations.

Full moral consistency is almost impossible: you're always balancing self-interests with other higher ideals, etc., and there's always some dissonance. This is just a more problematic example of people striking that kind of moral balance.

wara23arish2 years ago

On that note, I recently found out about a term “Tittytainement”, coined by Zbigniew Berzinski, a national US security advisor in the 90s.

Message was that due to globalization, a 20/80 split in the job market was inevitable. So there needs to he work done on placating and nursing unrest by distracting people with movies, sports etc..

This was during the 1995 World State Forum. I tried to look up any more material whether that any concrete actions were taken place but couldn’t.

Jtsummers2 years ago

That's a similar premise to the Roman notion of bread and circuses. Given the when for this that you provided, there was apparently a book in 1996 that describes the 20/80 society. The term "tittytainment" was, per wiktionary, coined by Brzezinski, but he was not in any kind of public office in the 1990s, he held the National Security Advisor position in the 70s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Trap

wara23arish2 years ago

Thank you for the correction and the reference.

schoen2 years ago

> Message was that due to globalization, a 20/80 split in the job market was inevitable. So there needs to he work done on placating and nursing unrest by distracting people with movies, sports etc..

This reminds me of the "entertainers" in the Civilization series, where you can convert some workers into professional entertainers who help alleviate discontent that would otherwise throw a city into civil disorder.

bellyfullofbac2 years ago

Seems like Xi Jinping has decided to put a stop to the entertainers in China:

https://scholars-stage.org/xi-jinpings-war-on-spontaneous-or...

Interesting how "the market" has seemingly spontaneously created things like YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagram influencers, etc. Wherever there is money to be made, someone's there. Political news is hot in the attention economy? Macedonians make fake news sites with Google ads: https://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/

golemotron2 years ago

It might help to see it as class based. I know I started to feel better about myself when I realized that, being well educated and in tech, I was part of the upper class in the US and it's not good to look down on those who are not.

TomSwirly2 years ago

> most of their voters mean well

Can you give some sort of reason why you have this impression?

tombert2 years ago

I have conservative members of my family, who I admittedly don’t talk to very often anymore, but when I do I do get a vibe that they believe what they’re saying. They genuinely think that Donald Trump really Made America Great Again, and that Joe Biden exist to destroy America.

I don’t agree with either of those statements, and I think their actions as a result of these beliefs are bad, but I do think they want things to be best for America, though I think they have a different definition of “best”

Obviously this is anecdata, but you asked why I believed this.

bellyfullofbac2 years ago

Making decisions with global, or even national, ramifications is a complex thing, but people seem to take shortcuts when they decide if something is good or bad. In your example, people may think "Trump MAGAed" because "He's fighting China, China's been stealing our jobs, and we liked jobs.", although the way Donald did the tariff wars, it disadvantaged American companies and consumers, making the American economy/jobs situation that little bit worse. (At least Covid happened and it eclipsed the whole problem).

pierrebai2 years ago

I whole-heartedly agree with you. People love to demonize who they disagree with, assuming that disagreement is just a proxy for the fact the others are idiots. In reality, it is merely that they hold different values, their source of true facts they believe in are different and prioritize different things.

coldtea2 years ago

>but I've been trying to acknowledge to myself that, generally speaking, most of their voters mean well [1], even if they are voting for politicians that I think are disgusting.

Some remedies:

(1) Actually talk to those voters and get to know them at a human level, don't just group them as an undefined mass of "people who vote badly".

(2) Try a mental game where you imagine your side has the wrong arguments or is talking from privilege, etc., and study what the other side is saying (even the naive people there, but even more so the smarter and less naive people there), trying to see how they are right. Find arguments why your (current) position is wrong.

(3) Then try for a month, to see all those sides (voters for R or D for example), as an outsider, who doesn't agree with either side. Check what people not belonging to either side have to say - e.g. political outsiders, academics doing a critique of both parties, pundits, commenters, and philosophers from a previous century not giving a damn for today's politics.

(4) Finally, see the ideas of today as from 2121, the same way we see the ideas of 1921 today. Then as from 3021 B.C. Don't assume a monotonic increase in agreement of the future with your current ideas, or the prevalent ideas of today, but that history goes back and forth in ideological fashions (including what's "good").

>[1] Though I have to say that some of the "build the wall" rhetoric around immigrants has made me question this.

Here are some examples of (2) in this case:

(1) Note that the idea of borders and citizenship is already the idea of a wall. And nobody, not even the "good guys" you voted for, ever challenged those.

(2) Note that the wall is defensive (we don't want no any more to come) and not actively harmful, then see how the good guy politicians that are feigning the idea unacceptable and inhuman, often advocate for foreign wars and interventions that actively harm millions.

(3) Note that those in favor of "building the wall" might have issues in their communities or work that e.g. a FAANG engineer might never experience as problems because they have different job prospects. Consider if your private interests were directly harmed by immigration (e.g. you are living in close quarters with poverty striken immigrants, taking to petty crime and so on, or because your low skill job industry prefers immigrants to lower costs and you're either out of a job or have your wages slashed).

And inversely, if you're say a Republican:

(1) Note that your family doesn't have very deep roots here. Just 400-200 years ago they passed some other people's non-wall (and killed a lot of them) to grap the land. If, say, you're a Kowalski or a Smith, you're not fooling anyone that you're the rightful owner of this land. B...tc please, your ancestors didn't come traversing the Bering Strait, you're not Clovis. If you're, like, second generation, your parents were bona-fide wall climbers. Perhaps they did it legaly through Ellis Island for example, but do you think they'd stopped if they were denied there, but had some other way in?

(2) Note that the Wall is established on land (TX, NM, FL, AZ, CA) stolen from the very country its people tries to keep out. It's even in the names of the states, all Spanish. Who are you fooling?

(3) Note that if you're out of a job, it might have more to do with clean shaven, suit wearing anglosaxon bosses preffering cheap immigrant labor, and less about the immigrants themselves. Plus, if those immigrants were legitimised, and given an easy way to citizenship, would they still be a cheaper option to undercut your wage?

tombert2 years ago

I think what you're saying it totally reasonable, I don't think I disagree with any of it, except one small point in your edit about my note.

The thing I was referring to (and this is my bad for not being more clear) in regards to the "build the wall" rhetoric wasn't actually specifically about the wall exactly, but more of the surrounding anti-immigrant sentiment that followed. My wife (a Mexican immigrant) had to deal with an increased level of horrible stuff being said to her after the "build the wall" stuff started, and it did seem to correlate as a dogwhistle. That's why I said it gave me a bit of pause about the intentions of some voters: it really seemed to bring out the worst of people, and it did seem like there were a lot more "worst of people" than I thought. It didn't seem like a lot of them really cared about "a wall", they just didn't like people who didn't look like them.

musicale2 years ago

> (2) Note that the Wall is established on land (TX, NM, FL, AZ, CA) stolen from the very country its people tries to keep out. It's even in the names of the states, all Spanish. Who are you fooling?

Well without the Gadsden purchase, Yuma and Tucson would still be in Mexico.

I appreciate when institutions (such as universities) ceremonially acknowledge the indigenous people whose land they occupy and never intend to return or pay rent on (often while running their own housing and office rental businesses on top of it.)

hinkley2 years ago

In life there are many things we want but don't know we want, or can't admit we want. We seek analogs and those analogs often scratch our itch but might not for other people, leading among other things to arguments about contradictory anecdotes.

We want to avoid people who are bad for us. If you treat them as dangerous, scary, or 'below you' it's fairly emotionally cheap for you to avoid everything about them, not just the badness. But ignoring 'dangerous' problems can just make them more dangerous.

bena2 years ago

The problem with this line of thought is that it always becomes something for "the other" to do.

They need to compromise, they need to calm down, they need to love. And as long as they don't, we don't have to.

Not to mention those that equate compromise, civility, and love with getting their way without any sort of criticism. Then there's the issues where compromise isn't an option. If you want to kill everyone on the planet, and I don't want you to kill anyone. Killing half the planet isn't really a compromise I'm willing to entertain.

So sweet, I'm sure if we all loved each other and treated each other with respect, we'd all ride rainbows and shit ponies or whatever. But when we can't even agree on what love and respect even means, it's just kind of abstract, philosophical masturbation.

lamontcg2 years ago

Maybe people have more and more contempt because its easy to see that government and politics is broken.

adminscoffee2 years ago

by getting rid of the down vote button and putting a down comment button. you can down vote but there must be a reason attached

ootsootsoots2 years ago

How is this in need of philosophical debate at this point?

Change which set of glyphs and discourse matters in politics, or put pressure on the labor market until it bears it no more (the source of contempt).

So much of this can be reasoned around simply as euphemism. Change the story, change the outcome.

GoodJokes2 years ago

by being less contemptible?

alexfromapex2 years ago

"Arthur Brooks is an economist who for 10 years ran the American Enterprise Institute, one of the most influential conservative think tanks in the world. He has come to believe there is only one weapon that can defeat our extreme political polarization: love."

... in other words, we're all doomed.

dang2 years ago

"Don't be snarky."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

motohagiography2 years ago

I get where he's coming from, but love is too freighted to really get traction. If you see love as meaning to be invested in the happiness and actualization of others, it's more practical on a lot of levels.

The contempt issue begins at the roots of identity, I think. When we're adolescents, we're a part of the world or society, but without the responsibility or authority of an adult. This makes us subject to it and a bit helpless (but for the benevolence of adults) until we find a way to become adults ourselves. Until then, we often assert ourselves though revolt and rebellion as victims of the forces we are subject to. Our adolescent mind exists as an island protected by its own defensive resentment and contempt against the forces it is only subject to, until it acquires the responsibility and resultant confidence to act directly on the world. We all emerge from it differently, if at all.

I'm saying the contempt is an adolscent urge that originates from believing we are a subject or victim of our circumstances. There are many situations where you really are a target, but I'd say there is no contempt without identifying first as a victim, and that necessary identity is a remnant of adolescence. The way to mitigate those adolescent remnants is by taking responsibility and ownership of your life, which coincidentally, happens to be a value at the core of conservative ethos Brooks advocates.

Treating people as undeveloped adolescents because they use disgust and contempt as an organizing social signal could seem to merely respond to contempt with sincere, even heartfelt condescention (the most insulting kind), and that would be all the more alienating and enraging, but it's toward discovering what the fundamental divide in the very axioms that inform our values is. When Brooks says we need "love," I think what he means is we need to feel loved, and by this, that there is some force in the world (or universe) that is invested in our growth and happiness, and believing we can both recieve and achieve it.

notquitehuman2 years ago

I hope this is a signal that Brooks has turned to activism and is working to spread the message of love within his party. I eagerly await examples of his success and wish him all the best.

greenail2 years ago

It isn't clear to me what you are saying. Are you saying we are doomed because he's a conservative or because you have no faith we retain the ability love?

rubatuga2 years ago

The ladder.

arthurcolle2 years ago

latter

shoemakersteve2 years ago

We all have to climb the latter of love, one rung at a time.

platz2 years ago

I hate Arthur Brooks

dang2 years ago

OK, but please follow the site guidelines when posting here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Pxtl2 years ago

What's notable is where you can see reality come crashing into people who treat policy like it's a simple team sport.

COVID doesn't care about your feelings, and the very real impact of higher infection rates and lower vaccination coverage is demonstrating who exactly has so dug-in on their position so far that they've become utterly disconnected from reality.

dang2 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28948984 and marked it off topic.

caylus2 years ago

Are you implying that areas of lower vaccination coverage are seeing higher infection rates? That does not seem to be the case under rigorous analysis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/

That's the problem with "reality" - the reality you see is driven by the media that reports the reality to you. Presumably the media you read likes to run stories like "lots of cases in Florida" to score points against the "other team", while ignoring deeper analysis like the paper I linked.

tremon2 years ago

I would expect areas of lower vaccination coverage to show higher hospitalization rates, not necessarily higher infection rates. Got any studies on that statistic perchance?

The infection rate is unreliable because it requires people allowing themselves to be tested when sick, and I would expect people that refuse to be vaccinated also refuse to be tested, on the same grounds.

caylus2 years ago

Sure, it's pretty well established that the vaccines reduce severity of symptoms and risk of death. Just not transmission. It's an important distinction to draw, especially in the context of mandates.

Your suggested confounder is plausible, but I find the possible confounders in the other direction even more plausible:

- Many places have policies like "proof of vaccination /or/ positive test required", which would inflate the number of confirmed cases in less vaccinated areas.

- Someone with reduced symptoms due to vaccination is less likely to notice them and thus decide to get a test, or to have symptoms severe enough to be hospitalized and thus definitely get a test.

And then the really scary one:

- If vaccines hide symptoms but don't significantly reduce transmission, a vaccinated person is less likely to stay at home during an infection, increasing community transmission.

Further evidence for that hypothesis comes from comparisons of viral load in confirmed cases between vaccinated and unvaccinated people, which finds no significant difference: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v...

maxerickson2 years ago

"rigorous analysis"

caylus2 years ago

It seems hard to get much more rigorous than a peer reviewed scientific article in the European Journal of Epidemiology.

maxerickson2 years ago
tombert2 years ago

That doesn't necessarily break with my reasoning, right? They might still actually think that the vaccines are worse than the disease. Obviously they're wrong, and they should get vaccinated, but they might be fundamentally "good" but also misguided people.

I have my own hypothesis about the COVID vaccine denialism in particular, but I am afraid that it might come off as a bit too political for HN and Dang would lock the thread :).

fighterpilot2 years ago

Can you share that hypothesis? You are obviously contributing to this thread in a balanced way and in good faith and I really want to hear it.

I know two anti-vaxxers.

One is not political at all but isn't that smart. Very nice and generous person. Bit prone to conspiracy thinking and bought into fake news on Rumble or something.

The other is very conservative and it's a team/tribe issue with him. He has a strong distrust of institutions that he thinks are run by leftists and would distrust anything they say.

tombert2 years ago

Ok, just to be clear I want to preface this by saying "not all conservatives". I know plenty of conservatives who are lovely and intelligent people.

-------

Basically, I think that rabid anti-vax sentiment is a natural conclusion to roughly ~40 years of near-constant levels of conspiratorial thinking from conservative circles. I think folks like Jerry Fallwell started it, and subsequently Ronald Reagan and most of the conservative politicians after him followed. People like Jerry Fallwell more or less started the "satanic panic", and it started to become somewhat politically acceptable to just say that "the devil" was doing anything that they don't like. This went largely unchallenged in evangelical circles and the evangelicals took a huge turn towards the Republican party.

Fast forward to 2012, and now it's a debate about where Barack Obama was born. A "conspiracy" was just fabricated out of nowhere, and the president is required to show his birth certificate. This was somewhat made fun of, even Bill OReilly disputed it, but it was the first conspiracy that I had heard in my lifetime being taken seriously by at least some politicians.

Fast forward to 2016, and suddenly it seems that idiots like Alex Jones, who had previously been a goofball I would turn on to get a laugh, is being taken seriously by semi-prominent conservatives. PizzaGate was still somewhat of a fringe thing, but it was the first outright debunkable conspiracy that I could think of that people I actually knew who actually believed it.

Fast forward to ~2019, and a sizeable chunk of conservatives (to be clear, NOT a majority) were starting to take the QAnon nonsense seriously, setting the way for 2020, which allowed a basic stream of perpetual lies about COVID to be spread (and accepted) on 8kun. Suddenly, despite overwhelming evidence, we have to have debates on whether we should be taking COVID seriously. Any time Fauchi contradicted Trump, it was because Fauchi was an agent of Satan or something absurd.

I think anti-vaxxing is just the natural progression. There's been an entire generation who has been more-or-less unchallenged in their conspiratorial thinking, and basically anything can be a conspiracy theory. Since they already think that COVID was overblown to make Trump look bad, they subsequently have to think that anything that addresses covid must also be bad.

The left has its share of dumb things that it believes, but it's not nearly at the same level of what is predominant in conservative culture today.

tremon2 years ago

There's another part to this same equation: the "institutions" have very little credibility left. Whether it's about the health risks of tobacco, the environmental risks of fossil fuels, the addiction risks of opiates, the security of mortgage lending, or (recently added) the safety risks of flying, we constantly see the same pattern of officials being undermined by paid-for scientific studies that are aimed at undermining or thwarting policy.

Given that adversarial dynamic between business and policy, I can't bring myself to fault even a single person for refusing the vaccine (I can still fault someone for publicly speaking against vaccinating others on invariably shaky arguments though). There is no public institution that I would trust to act towards any common good, that's how much public trust has been eroded in the name of "good business".

totony2 years ago

I don't think it's quite that. IMO from knowing some anti-vaxx it originates from a rebellion against power more-so than any actual belief in conspiracy. It seems to come from being fed up with being told what to do AND from distrust in authorities (arguably warranted). Conspiracy comes as a post-facto rationalization for some as far as I've seen.

I believe policies like vaccine mandate and the overzealous anti-anti-vax crew are paradoxically aggravating the issue. Making it a partisan issue also seems to force people on the defensive and harden their (potentially unfounded) beliefs, forcing them into the "other camp."

EDIT: My hypothesis on why it comes more from right-wing rather than left-wing people is exactly that right-wing is anti-government power (or more freedom of individuals, usually).

+1
fighterpilot2 years ago
stirfish2 years ago

Honestly I don't trust the vaccine, but I got it anyway because I see the virus as a bigger danger to me

Pxtl2 years ago

The challenge is that historically the political mainstream has been endlessly assuming good faith on obvious bad actors, to the point that Trump's obvious racism was controversial to point out because he didn't literally dress up as a Klansman wielding a noose.

As a reaction to this problem you see the basic approach that the social justice wing has basically declared that intent doesn't matter. No more excuses.

And I'm getting to agree with them. If somebody is doing something destructive and the stakes are high, wasting time being nice about their feelings seems thoroughly counterproductive. COVID has made this problem deafeningly loud - whether the bad actors are crazy or grifters or misguided, polite deference to them on grave matters gets people killed.

tombert2 years ago

Sorry for the second reply, but I wanted to elaborate on what I was saying.

I actually think we might agree on a bit more than you might think. I actually am in that social-justice camp that says "intent mostly doesn't matter". I don't have the ability to read minds yet, so I can't possibly really know anyone's intent, so I have to look at the reasonable consequences of their actions and judge from there.

That said, whether or not people are secretly klansmen or good deep down, they still exist, and they're still humans who deserve to have their voices heard at some level. While I don't think we should automatically assume good faith on every person speaking, I also don't think we should immediately discount it either. A lot of voters are just victims of bad publications, and I don't think any of us are fully immune to that. I'm sure there's a million dumb things that I believe; I try and catch them when I spot them, but I would hope that most people would give me the benefit of the doubt in assuming that my beliefs were honest, if dumb.

edit: Added a "don't" because my point was wrong without it.

TomSwirly2 years ago

> That said, whether or not people are secretly klansmen or good deep down, they still exist, and they're still humans who deserve to have their voices heard at some level.

They don't believe this of us, and this is why they win, and we lose.

msandford2 years ago

> If somebody is doing something destructive and the stakes are high, wasting time being nice about their feelings seems thoroughly counterproductive

Playing devil's advocate here let's imagine that someone from a political party that is probably not yours (just guessing!) might use your same logic and apply it.

Abortions. They're killing people. High stakes? Check.

Abortions. They're killing defenseless humans. Destructive? Check?

You don't have to agree with these definitions for people on the political right to define things this way. And were they to take their definitions and use your logical template and then react in the way you're suggesting might be OK with your definitions, what you're left with is something that looks an awful lot like the Texas abortion ban right now.

The point I'm trying to make isn't that you're wrong and bad and should feel bad. The point I'm trying to make is that a person needs to think very long and very hard about situations in which polite deference isn't warranted.

Because with the team sports politics we've got going on right now it's super easy for one side to look at the template the other side is using and reappropriate it for their pet issues and then things which are "settled" suddenly get very exciting indeed.

tombert2 years ago

I never said that the politicians are acting in good faith. I said that I think a lot of the voters are.

dontbeevil19922 years ago

seems like a good place to put this quote: "Justice is what love looks like in public." If this conservative economist wants to spread love, he can start by supporting economic policies that prevent the 1% from exploiting everyone else

panzagl2 years ago

Right because conservative = bad and deserving of contempt. This is exactly the type of kneejerk reaction that he is talking about. The 1% do just as well when Democrats are in office, but keep on playing the game ruled by tribe and emotion, see where that gets us.

Hokusai2 years ago

Brooks is literally against wealth redistribution. The parent comment is very relevant for this individual.

notenoughbeans2 years ago

Market economies are full of wealth redistribution. Do you mean that Brooks is against government mandated wealth redistribution?

+1
Hokusai2 years ago
watwut2 years ago

I think they talk about Brooks specifically and institute he works for specifically.

He is not just random conservative with unknown politics within spectrum of conservative voices. He is active player in politics and economy.

shaldjfb2 years ago

The Democratic Party is conservative by any popular measure outside of the insular American worldview. In many European countries, the Democratic Party’s politics would be considered far right.

Jensson2 years ago

It is fiscally conservative, Democrats doesn't try to reduce the dominance of the 1%. It is however not socially conservative, they are probably among the most left wing in the world with respect to race if you only count popular parties. And since "far right" today is mostly used to describe racists they wouldn't considered to be "far right".

Instead in Europe the democrats would just be a typical right wing party. Meaning they are pro immigration to stimulate economic growth, pro healthcare for all etc.

shaldjfb2 years ago

The Democratic Party’s “fiscal” policies are a scourge on the very disproportionately impoverished African American population. Any suggestion that the Democratic Party has any sort of commitment to overcoming racial divisions in the US is undermined by that fact.

There is no such thing as a decoupled “fiscal” conservatism. Politics in practice are inseparable from their historical context and Democratic politicians know that. Their virtue appeals in the media are not supported by their politics but rather serve to distract from their politics. Their politics, in fact, are a conservative politics.

dragonwriter2 years ago

> The Democratic Party is conservative by any popular measure outside of the insular American worldview

Its mostly a center-right / center-left coalition with the center-right currently slightly stronger (until very recently much stronger). While it leans right, it isn't coherently conservative, even by international standards.

nec4b2 years ago

Absolutely untrue. The most extreme leftist parities in Europe do not come close the extremism of progressive democrats.

bpodgursky2 years ago

This is a stupid meme which is wildly untrue if you look at actual policies.

+1
panzagl2 years ago
hnuser8472 years ago

The GP's comment about US parties vs European parties is so tired and cliched it belongs on an HN bingo card.

mensetmanusman2 years ago

Some examples please.

trashtester2 years ago

I think virtually every conservative party in Europe supports single-payer healthcare. That's a big one that would put the Democrats to the extreme right in Europe.

Maybe even more importanly, the way Democrat representatives seem to be able to enrich themselves from lobbying money etc, would be totally unacceptable most places in Europe. It would place them more in the class of Plutocrats than conservatives. Democrats tend to have far closer ties to Big Capital than even the most business-friendly conservatives where I live.

It seems to me that their focus on identity politics is a cover for doing very little to actually help the unprivileged, but instead doing the biddings of their donors.

francisofascii2 years ago

One glaring example is climate change issues. For example, the democrats are not pushing to raise the federal gas tax.

jorblumesea2 years ago

So I guess bring up negative facts is now contempt? One party is very much in favor of a more level playing field, for the most part. One party is very much against it.

registeredcorn2 years ago

>One party is very much in favor of a more level playing field, for the most part. One party is very much against it.

I mean, I would hardly argue that the Democrats are "against" a level playing field, but it wouldn't be a stretch to say that they are opposed to such a premise. The fact is though, just because we both strongly dislike progressive ideology does not mean that we need to harp on their shortcomings at every opportunity.

In my mind, it is the constant put downs and negativity that breeds contempt. The thing of itself need not be the act, but merely foster such a stance.

Nasrudith2 years ago

Personally I find another factor of contempt is "failing a reverse Turing Test" where there is such high repetition and little thought that it seems as if they are organic spam bots. The inauthenticity and persistence grating seems to be a common thing given the contempt for Jehovah's witnesses, Hare Krishina's, multilevel marketers and others. Tech support forced into canned scripts are another such example - in computer science terms it seems that the low entropy becomed apparent and raises subconscious red flags.

The infamous "New World Order" conspiracy theorist archetype tends to be negative and full of put downs to their target de jure as the cause of all the world's evils. Even when it is horrifying it draws more of a watching a trainwreck style reaction.

Negativity and putdowns I would classify more as a breeder of disengagement. This is reflected by the impact of negative campaign ads being more reduced total votes than drawing more votes by looking good in comparison.

registeredcorn2 years ago

How can one break an addiction to contempt? The answer is dead simple.

Follow the Prince of Peace.

> Living the New Life

> Therefore, I say this and testify in the Lord: You should no longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their thoughts. They are darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them and because of the hardness of their hearts. They became callous and gave themselves over to promiscuity for the practice of every kind of impurity with a desire for more and more.

> But that is not how you learned about the Messiah, assuming you heard about Him and were taught by Him, because the truth is in Jesus. You took off your former way of life, the old self that is corrupted by deceitful desires; you are being renewed in the spirit of your minds; you put on the new self, the one created according to God’s likeness in righteousness and purity of the truth.

> Since you put away lying, Speak the truth, each one to his neighbor, because we are members of one another. Be angry and do not sin. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger, and don’t give the Devil an opportunity. The thief must no longer steal. Instead, he must do honest work with his own hands, so that he has something to share with anyone in need. No foul language is to come from your mouth, but only what is good for building up someone in need, so that it gives grace to those who hear. And don’t grieve God’s Holy Spirit. You were sealed by Him for the day of redemption. All bitterness, anger and wrath, shouting and slander must be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ.

- Ephesians 4:17-32 (HCSB)

I realize some of the people who might see this have had bad experiences with so-called Christians. I was a staunch Atheist for the vast, VAST majority of my life, specifically because of how some so-called "believers" had treated me when I was very young. I hated Christians so much I scared a preacher half to death, threatened to beat him up, and got him to run away in tears.

My own contempt, my rage, my unbridled hatred for people was off the charts. Anyone who didn't agree with me 100% on everything was an idiot, and I was not afraid to tell them so.

I'm saying all of this to say, if you resent me writing all of this, I get it. I really do. On a fundamental level, I understand that anger. But if you feel like you want to know the only answer to how to turn away from letting those controlling, destructive emotions from ruling your life; this anger that we all seem to be under the thumb of, then there is a very clear, obvious answer: God

Not just mere acknowledgement, or even a reverence for Him, but a stout willingness to obey His commandments and follow His teachings.

There's only one religion that tells you not just that it's wrong to murder, but that to hate someone in your heart is murder, and worthy of the same punishment. There is only one that holds everyone to that level of accountability.

Think it over.

dang2 years ago

Please don't post religious flamebait to HN. We're trying to avoid religious flamewars, which is what this very likely leads to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

registeredcorn2 years ago

What part of what I said was religious flamebait?

dang2 years ago

Blatant proselytizing is guaranteed to trigger your counterparts on the other side of the flamewar. Please don't use HN for that.

h2odragon2 years ago

I'd say something about humility, which can be illustrated from many religious traditions; but i couldn't say it nearly so well.

registeredcorn2 years ago

Very true. I've got my own thoughts about what other religions might say, but I don't want to seem overbearing. Thanks for your kind response! :)

newbie7892 years ago

>…He has come to believe there is only one weapon that can defeat our extreme political polarization: love.

Oh my, what a silly way to pitch a possible reader on your book.

There is a (VERY conservative) town in my state where every single employee of the local department of transportation has quit over the vaccine mandate. Now the former employees and their conservative allies are gleefully posting about how “the libs” won’t be able to use the nearby freeways due to lack of maintenance, and how “the libs” will have trouble driving around town because there will be no snow plow operators come winter.

Here’s the funny part: The conservative:liberal ratio there is about 50:1. This rural town is gleefully destroying its own infrastructure over some perceived culture war, fully knowingly. These people are willing to cripple their ability to leave their houses in order to “own the libs” even if they’re not even existent.

I do not think I could be convinced by some old guy that his newly-invented form of conservative Kumbaya will actually make it possible for these people to go to the pharmacy when it snows, or get fresh food from the grocery store.

notenoughbeans2 years ago

While it might be a silly way to pitch your book, I think your anecdote captures what he is saying pretty well. Rampant contempt is bad for everyone. It doesn't help you or the people for which you hold contempt.

maccolgan2 years ago

If I am to believe that "every single employee of the local department of transportation" are somehow right in a (counterfactual?) different timeline, what are they really supposed to do? Take the vaccine for a greater cause and their worst dreams turn true?

It's not the employees that are destroying the aforementioned rural town, it's the DOT doing blatantly undemocratic things that their employees won't approve.

etherael2 years ago

Isnt this argument predicated on the supposition that the only reason they are opposed to coercive experimental gene therapy is because they want to "own the libs?"

I mean, maybe that's right but it seems unlikely when there are other much more obvious things to explain the reasons for the actions in question. That they then post hoc express schadenfreude for the party who they perceive to be responsible for the situation is evidence of the addiction to contempt the article refers to, sure. But I find it difficult to imagine they wouldn't prefer not to be coerced into experimental gene therapy even if it means they don't get the opportunity to "own the libs" in response.

md8z2 years ago

I'm not sure if you're saying this is your opinion, but just to be clear: Vaccine mandates are not coercive, the vaccine is not experimental, and vaccines in general are not gene therapy.

To elaborate: You can consider work vaccine mandates to be similar to any other job requirement. The COVID vaccines have received a huge amount of studies and trials. And "gene therapy" usually refers to use of things like CRISPR-Cas9 or other methods of delivering DNA into the cell which are able to modify genes. mRNA vaccines do not modify genes. (I'm not a biologist so you should ask one if you want more information on this)

rufus_foreman2 years ago

>> mandates are not coercive

Wait, hold on. That's an actual argument you are making and not satire?

"Mandates are not coercive", that's a thought that actually went through your head and you thought, "Hmm, that sounds like a reasonable argument"?

+1
md8z2 years ago
etherael2 years ago

It's not my opinion, it's a fact that;

Mandates are coercive by definition, that's the entire point of them, putting whatever magical word in front of them you like doesn't change that.

The medication to which the "Vaccine mandates" refer is not the same as traditional inactivated virus vaccines, and before this whole fiasco started, was always referred to as what it actually is which is gene therapy.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4817894/

It doesn't matter how great or how well tested these things are, or how reasonable it is to take them, and that I will acknowledge goes into the realm of opinion and given how polluted that discussion is with political barracking yeah I'm not interested in having it at all, the simple underlying fact that they are actually coercive experimental gene therapy is exactly that, pure fact, not opinion at all.

+2
md8z2 years ago
notenoughbeans2 years ago

What do you mean the vaccine mandates are not coercive? Isn't that the entire selling point of the mandates?

+1
md8z2 years ago
newbie7892 years ago

I didn’t mention anything about gene therapy or whatever other bananas theory that can be inserted into literally any conversation nowadays.

What I did bring up is the fact that people are willing to deny themselves, their families and neighbors the ability to leave their own homes to get food and medicine in order to “own the libs.”

While this sort of Markov-chain sounding word salad about… whatever, must indicate that people are passionate about… whatever, the fact of the matter is that sabotaging your own infrastructure out of ideology sounds kind of suicidal.

I honestly don’t get how I could personally rally behind people that would celebrate my righteous death from being stranded in the snow because I’d died owning the libs because uh… my ideology will have prevented theoretical vaccine deaths in the future? My actual, concrete, current life is literally worth less than… what? Some bogeyman that I read about on Facebook?

If I were genuinely that concerned about all these conspiracies and thought that my thoughtless death would make a difference, I’d self-immolate like the monks during Vietnam. Somehow curiously, these folks rather than doing that are taking the mighty stand of keeping kids from going to school, their neighbors going to work or their doctors, local business owners from opening etc.

Ironically, not plowing the streets creates the exact same (if not considerably worse) lockdown situation that these people have been mad about for 18 months. Ironically, it’s not the reduction of peoples freedoms that matter to these conservatives, it’s who gets to be the ones taking the freedoms away.

People will literally kill themselves and everyone around them in order to feel Right About Stuff.

“Love” isn’t an answer here. It’s a completely meaningless word put in a context to sound nice on a podcast to sell books to people who will never change their minds about any of this.

etherael2 years ago

All you're doing here is re-stating your original argument, seemingly without actually understanding my criticism of it. I'm not sure what you're hoping to accomplish by that, but it strikes me as very strange.

Look, let's say we observe an employee and employer undertaking a discussion that goes something like this.

"Take this medicine"

"No I don't want to"

"Take it or else you're fired"

"I'm not going to take it, fire me if you have to."

"OK, you're fired"

"That's going to turn out poorly for the people who must now suffer the consequences of not having people available to do my job"

I don't understand how you jump to the conclusion that the reason the employee refuses to take the medicine is so they can have that last line of dialogue, rather than that they don't want to take the medicine.

Enlighten me?

+1
newbie7892 years ago
Gunax2 years ago

He's wrong. Contempt will always beat love. Humour will always beat logical soundness. Pithy arguments will always beat correct but intricate arguments.

I dont have any hard proof of course, but this is how it is. No one cares if you're right if the opponent can be witty.

As proof Ill try to leave you with 2 videos, hopefully they are bipartisan enough:

1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=ErZCMcoC8X8 2. https://youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE

MisterBastahrd2 years ago

Arthur Brooks is speaking out now to get ahead of the shitstorm that people like Arthur Brooks created for themselves by being contemptuous of the rank and file American worker for decades. It's all peace and love and respect now that he's made a comfortable life for himself. And in typical AEI fashion, he's got a sense of history that mayflies would find appalling.

Politicians are disagreeing and failing to use nonsensical phrases like "my good friend from <insert location here>?" Anybody want to recite Alexander Hamilton's memoirs of his genial political disputes with Aaron Burr?

rkk32 years ago

> Arthur Brooks is speaking out now to get ahead of the shitstorm that people like Arthur Brooks created for themselves by being contemptuous of the rank and file American worker for decades.

Sweeping generalizations such as "people like him" are bad, seems both contemptuous & a shallow examination.

MisterBastahrd2 years ago

How's being purposefully obtuse working out for you?

dang2 years ago

It's not ok to attack others this way on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. It only makes everything worse, and we've had to ask you this kind of thing more than once before.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.