https://youtu.be/gjufYwIbITw

Haidt also has a book named The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

[0] - Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"

This is a novel, but Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind is fantastic.

It changed the way I think and most of my existing ideas.

I hope people will also put this in the broader context of human psychology.

Check out this book: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.

He mentions that it isn't new, though. I thought it was a neat observation since it was new to me.

Tribe by Sebastian Junger

just put my full lists on medium:

https://medium.com/@dopeshika/2018-in-books-startup-science-...

https://medium.com/@dopeshika/2018-in-books-mind-consciousne...

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

However, I feel like the author sometimes falls into the same biases/flawed thought patterns he spends the book describing. Because of this, I'd rate it as very good instead of great.

Read “the righteous mind” by Jonathan Haidt. Great audiobook too.

Great for grey thinking and better understanding. And I think it's one of those books that if everyone read it, we'd all be better off. Like an antidote or inhibitor to tribalism.

It is an extremely interesting book on moral psychology. (YC 2017 Summer Reading List)

I think Hume beat him to this position by a bit.

It has a lot on how people make ethical arguments in particular which I found quite eye opening (if a bit bleak in terms of its consequences for civic society).

Kindle Version - $11.99

Paperback (Prime) - $9.32

https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...

There's a great book written on this - "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion"

Fantastic walk through his six factor model of human morality. It's as revolutionary to me as learning about the five factor model (& HEXACO) of human personality.

What he's describing is more clearly observed and understood by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind, when Haidt discusses the hive switch.

Also in the vein of 'not quite psychology of religion, but related', The Hero's Journey, by Joseph Campbell.

If you're like me and love debates, this book is awesome. It'll show you how to find common ground and understand implicit values behind arguments.

Link for the lazy (non-affiliate): http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/d...

The Mom Test, how to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you by Rob Fitzpatrick (worst title ever, book is great)

We exist to measure ourselves in an ocean of complexity, with infinite recursion in self-awareness.

This book had a big impact on me; it definitely made me re-evaluate how I was approaching things like politics and religion.

"Emperor of All Maladies" - Siddhartha Mukherjee. An excellently written history of cancer.

"Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage" - Lansing Alfred. A true story of one of the last great explorations man has taken

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind

I cannot recommend this book enough -- I'm halfway through it and it's a very accessible overview of work done in moral development psychology that (for me) shed light on how people come to believe the things they do so strongly. It's increasingly relevant today, and was a bit of an eye-opener for me.

Has anyone else checked it out? Curious to get your thoughts -- I'm not done yet and once I finish, I'm doing to dug through the primary sources he cites.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...

EDIT: Thanks for the list. I think I'm going to check out The Silk Roads - seems like my type of book/topic.

Btw, are you familiar with Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"? Given the topic, I think you might find it interesting.

The Righteous Mind is a good starting place for this topic.

Jordan Peterson talks about the diversity of opinion being important because there is no single or constant fitness function. His lectures on personality get into this a bit. His 12 rules book does not.

I believe he's informed a lot by the work of Jonathan Haidt. His book The Righteous Mind is good.

>...it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

>The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.

https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva...

I get the impression you've decided to take a stance on the book Altruism without reading it. The summary you provide for Rightous mind could work just as well as a summary for Altruism too. At this point, we aren't even disagreeing, we're just citing different sources, and I'm content to just drop it.

https://books.google.com/books?id=1k_2AwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...

That said, Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind does outline a very similar thing. That our 'reasoning' is almost always a post-hoc attempt to explain how we already feel. And Haidt, while claiming neutrality is very definitely on the right end of the spectrum.

* The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt

* 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey

* The Emperor of all Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee

* The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

* Getting Things Done - David Allen

* The Worthing Saga - Orson Scott Card

* The 4-Hour Work Week - Timothy Ferriss

* The 5 Love Languages - Gary Chapman

* The Total Money Makeover - Dave Ramsey

I used to think the same way, but part of the issue is that most people are not abstract or systems thinkers. They don't perceive abstraction or systems the way many HN readers do or would.

In addition, and related, most people have strong tribal identities that overwhelm their limited intellectual capabilities; Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind is very good on this: https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig... and there are others as well.

Climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, and other conspiracy theorists share some key underlying traits.

Most of us, including me, also live in our own bubbles. You're likely in a rationalist and data-driven bubble, so you don't see people to whom you'd have explain an entire rationalist and data-driven worldview.

Nexus (1, 2 and 3) - Ramez Naam - Great scifi exploring human -> cyborg transformations across the world. An OS for the mind had me very excited and scared for the future of computing.

The City & the city - China Miéville - A weird sci fi based that I had no idea what to expect going into it. Enjoyed it, but not as much as some of the others.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good people are Divided by Politics and Religion - Jonathan Haidt - Great read for this current climate. Allowed me to understand those around me better and to improve relations with family members who are far over on the right side of the political spectrum better.

Robert Oppenheimer - Ray Monk - Enjoyed it, but it was quite long. Oppenheimer was an interesting person who didn’t actually make many direct contributions to the world of physics, but was extremely well read and knew everyone in the industry. And you know, lead development of the atomic bomb.

The Phoenix Project - Gene Kim - Great CI/CD book disguised as a novel, inspired me to push heavily for an improved build/release pipeline at work.

Alexander Hamilton - Ron Chernow - Yes, the book the play is based on, but it goes into such great detail of the life of an incredible person. It’s hard to fathom what the United States would become without Hamilton.

It Doesn’t have to be Crazy at work - Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson - Great, short read about why our corporate/entrepreneur culture is just crap. All this hustle, burnout, and destructive ideas are unnecessary and don’t really bring much improvements.

Hitler - Ian Kershaw - Really great biography into the rise and fall of Hitler and the third Reich. It’s horrifying for all the reasons you know, but also with how much is rhyming with the world right now.

Team of Rivals: The political genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin - Great biography into Lincoln and his cabinet. He was truly a unique president who was able to convert people who hated him into his biggest admirers.

Yes, Dawkins is saying that "universal love" does not have an evolutionary component, which seems like a fairly uncontroversial claim.

It seems like your criticism of Dawkins is more a criticism of how other people have misunderstood him, rather than any criticism of the arguments in The Selfish Gene itself?

If you haven't, I highly suggest you read Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". While it's at a popular level, it does a fairly good job at presenting a plausible framework for how moral behavior (like altruism) can emerge from evolutionary principles. [1] Haidt is probably one of the most influential moral psychologists today.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...

After reading The Righteous Mind (best book of the decade, IMO) and generally gaining an appreciation for how blind we are to how good we have it (the aggressively independent types moreso, they are chronically unsatisfied and in a way pessimistic about progress, blind to the incredible luxury we live in now), I find myself really understanding the role and purpose of the conventionistas in society and I’m glad for them! They are the buffer between the woke mobs, they fight to keep the system from moving around too wildly. They are wrong of course (heresy is a good example), but so are the unsatisfied independents as well.

Not that these map perfectly. There are many conservative independents and vice versa, but your main thrust on pg generally:

1. Defining things so they create categories for people, usually framing it for some self-serving purpose

2. Putting himself in the good category and spending very little time thinking over why the “bad” one may not be so bad.

Really hits home.

Side note: I found his last essay on Orthodoxy Privilege to be a real stinker. That he felt the need to write about “privilege” of which he is gluttonous, and use it as a chance to redefine privilege to his ends, was an impressive level of dissonance.

Also, there is a page in there where Haidt hypothesized that the low agreeableness/asperger personality people actually do better in the startup world precisely because they don't fear being ostracized and thus don't engage in the groupthink showcased in the article. Peter Thiel type people. Of course that's hard to really test one way or another, but the narrative fits...

Try teaching non-elite undergrads sometime, and particularly assignments that require some sense of epistemology, and you'll discover that the vast majority of people have pretty poor personal epistemic hygiene—it's not much required in most people, most of the time, in most jobs.

We evolved to form tribes, not to be "right." Jonathan's Haidt's The Righteous Mind deals with this topic well. https://jakeseliger.com/2012/03/25/jonathan-haidts-the-right...

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_...

In The Righteous Mind Haidt actually quotes Hume's "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

Given the above, I'm still happy with Haidt as a reference here, as he references Hume, and also has a decade or two of research to back up his claims.

Yes and no. I suspect those people would have voted for Trump anyway.

I just got done reading The Righteous Mind (https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...). After reading it, my default view on all these things: The final outcome is set in their mind, and they are merely looking for any reason to justify it.

(I mean, sure, things are elastic. His articles do play a role - just not that much).

* Drive, by Daniel Pink

* Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohen

* Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I wrote about some of these ideas here [0]

For a more traditional approach

* High Output Management, by Andy Grove

* The Manager's Path, by Camille Fournier

* The Thing about Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz

Not specifically about management, but in general, if you haven't read Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", you should do that first. This is the book that has changed the way I think and understand people the most, and has indirectly helped me more with management than all of the management focussed books combined.

And I just finished "The Mythical Man Month" which is definitely still a must-read decades after it was first published (get the 20th anniversary edition as it has a nice summary at the end, including where the author thinks he was right and where he admits freely what he got wrong).

[0] https://www.codementor.io/garethdwyer/enter-the-zone-fight-i...

> He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

A few months back I read "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion", by Jonathan Haidt. I'd highly suggest reading it for anyone seeking to improve their understanding of the ideological landscape in modern America. From the publisher's summary: In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding.

The biggest problem I'm seeing with many online communities is the unwillingness to engage with others. There's no discussions, they just tell you that you're wrong and evil, and then they ban or block you. That's no way to change people's mind; it just makes people more likely to dig in their heels. If you want to change people's views you need to engage them calmly and with respect. One of the greatest example of this that I can think of is Daryl Davis, a black man who converted ~200 people from the KKK just by befriending them.

The answer to the second question probably changes a lot, but I think the long term answer is probably:
1) Jonathan Haidt, "The Righteous Mind"
2) Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "Antifragility"
3) Peter Turchin, "Ages of Discord"

  - *The Selfish Gene* by Richard Dawkins

  - *The Righteous Mind* by Jonathan Haidt

  - *Thinking, Fast and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman

  - *The Art of Not Being Governed* by James C. Scott

  - *The Unwinding* by George Packer

  - *People's History of the United States* by Howard Zinn

  - *East of Eden* by John Steinbeck

  - *Sometimes a Great Notion* by Ken Kesey

  - *The Brothers Karamazov* by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This sounds like what I read in "The Righteous Mind" which has stuck with me since then.

First, a little background: You have an emotional response to something first, in the deep parts of your brain, and then you come up with a rational explanation for it from that after the fact. I've run across that concept in multiple books (but I don't have a systematic method of determining which books are true like the author of this blog; it's the first time I've heard of doing that so systematically!).

How that works out in practice: When you are evaluating something you believe to be true, you look for a fact to back you up. That is, "can I believe this is true?" When you are evaluating something you are emotionally against, you think "MUST I believe this is true?" Every fact must dispute what you believed before you change your mind. If there is a shred of doubt, you will stick to the side that is emotionally appealing to you.

Once you're aware of this dynamic, you can see in everywhere (including, disturbingly, yourself). Which I think is what the author is talking about, seeing she is doing that.

As for the latter, I highly recommend reading Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". And keeping in mind that a big part of convincing others is keeping yourself open to having your mind changed.

Going back to the post-fact issue: people are rarely convinced based on evidence or facts alone to change their mind, so in some sense the facts are secondary. That said, finding a common ground of ideas or facts to agree upon is important. Figuring out how to find this common ground is an important skill. This is what I think the crux of "post fact" comes down to. And a lot of this means granting people the benefit of the doubt, engaging in good faith, and refusing to let yourself get dragged into "point-scoring" and other lesser forms of argumentation.

Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman

Coming Into the Country - John McPhee

The Unwinding - George Packer

Anything by James C Scott (Thinking Like a State, The Art of Not Being Governed)

The Righteous Mind - John Haidt

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (Regardless of how you feel about his current public persona, this book published in 1976 is an absolute classic)

  The Righteous Mind
  The Elephant In The Brain
  In Defense of Troublemakers

The worst part is it's excruciatingly difficult and extremely unlikely for you to find your own blind spots. So you need to hash things out with other people. As others mentioned the best thing you can do is hold defeasibility and corrigibility as some of your highest values and do your best to understand all the pitfalls in our thinking.

"... we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a 'typical liberal' would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a 'typical conservative' would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people's expectations about 'typical' partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right. Who was best able to pretend to be the other?"

"The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predications, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as 'very liberal.' The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as 'One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal' or 'Justice is the most important requirement for a society,' liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree."

Link to the study itself: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

If the answer is yes, I can highly recommend the book The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. It didn't really change my opinion on religion but it did give me a different view and perspective into why some others do believe in it.

And 3 books that have most recently made it into my "must-reread" category.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

Antifragile by Nassim Taleb

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The book actually tries to draw more evidence-based claims to explain some of our core political differences as rooted in psychological differences that are rarely salient to us, let alone mutable. It also makes a very compelling case for trying to understand and empathize with core values that people on different sides of the political spectrum fight for, which is especially convincing if we accept that these values are not always the result of a conscious decision. They rarely are the result of something egocentric like selfishness but rather the result of how we prioritize different parts of society, and some balance is probably desirable between opposing views here.

I do agree that, over generations, the correct and truthful views tend to gain the upper-hand. This arises from each generation downloading a new set of facts and learning in school, when they are young and their minds haven't formed their belief system yet. However, if we allowed all children to enter school at their place of worship from 5 to 18, we'd find college students remarkably unwilling to learn many more facts.

So, more broadly, why does it bother you that facts don't change our minds and we're all irrational? We are Homo Sapiens, a mammalian primate who made the jump from the jungle to the Savannah and learned to work together to gather food and hunt game. We haven't left behind our animal software, it is still active in and exploited by our modern society.

I see a fair bit of attempts at understanding. Liberals love to write books like "The Righteous Mind" and "What's The Matter With Kansas?", attempting to understand conservatives from a liberal point of view. I can't think of anything comparable on the right. Progressives seem to me desperate to understand and cater to conservatives, and it feels like the only thing conservatives want is to make my life harder.

It could very well be that I'm just not listening hard enough. That seems to be the response every time liberals lose elections: "understand harder", because the problem is with me. But I'm starting to think that maybe I do understand: they don't want anything from me except someone to be angry at, and whatever despair they're undergoing is more about the deliberate induction of that despair than anything I actually do.

Actually, even moral disgust is positively correlated with right leaning folks. The Righteous Mind (https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...) is a great read that covers the research on the topic.

Conservative ideology: Fairness is about guaranteeing everyone equal rights. If different people have different outcomes, the question is: Did one person have more rights than the other? If so, let's correct for it. If not, it is because the person did not fully utilize his/her resources. However, this step is often omitted and people jump to "Person did not put in effort."

Liberal ideology: Fairness is about guaranteeing equal outcomes. This often (but not always) ends up being a metric regardless of the effort the person put in - so if the outcomes differ, it's a sign of something unfair at play.

There is overlap between the two, and they are not fundamentally at odds with each other. However, as a lot of pop psychology has taught us: People are fundamentally lazy in applying analytical thought, and will look for simple proxies. So instead of thinking through as their ideologies dictate, they will jump to the conclusion.

The article is almost cute. Like, "Did you know people are tribal? And did you ever think that might be a bad thing?" It's not a profound new idea, and it's one that's been better discussed elsewhere, from the SCC posts on the subject (see also the recent one on Albion's Seed[1]) to Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind[2] to Joshua Greene's Moral Tribes[3] to the many, many articles[4][5] that have already been written about partisan polarization in the U.S. (and probably globally, if Europe is any indication).

I mean I'm glad that a random NYT column is provoking further discussion about an important subject, but there's so much more and better stuff that has been said about it than just what this touches on.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-see...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religi...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Tribes-Emotion-Reason-Between/dp...

[4] https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/how-divided-are-...

[5] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/why-are-stat...

I'd also recommend Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind (http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/d...). He makes a lot of interesting points, including that most people come to a conclusion about an issue, then look for reasoning to support it, and that most of us operate on instinct most of the time—logic is a more costly, difficult mode whose use can be cultivated but which is not at all the default.

I'd like to add to your post that anyone looking for interesting writing on this subject should have a look at Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. (Based on the language of you post I think you might have read it?)

When I read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, I don't think I understood how broadly applicable it would be. His follow-up, with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, is also applicable to the censorship movements afoot in many companies (including publishing companies).

Often when we see code, we have a feeling of ‘dirty’ or ‘clean’. An internal reaction that pushes us in some direction. It’s worth questioning why we think that about some things, but I think we eventually develop a sense of what is a good pattern and what isn’t and we actually use the emotional reasoning of our brain to guide us effectively in writing code. Perhaps we wouldn’t even be effective programmers if we had to actually think through full reason each time.

Less applicable when reviewing code, of course.

The same newsletter made me read a book about motivational psychology (The Righteous Mind). A very interesting topic, that I would love to learn more about, if I had more time.

Last year I've (re-)read Category Theory for Programmers. I had tried it once before, but gave up after a third, as the notation didn't make much sense to me anymore. I would like to read it again, creating flash cards for the most important concepts along the way.

Below is a quick dirty quote from Wikipedia.

In chapter 8 of The Righteous Mind, Haidt describes how he began to study political psychology in order to help the Democratic Party win more elections. But in chapter 12 of The Righteous Mind Haidt argues that each of the major political groups – conservatives, progressives, and libertarians—have valuable insights and that truth and good policy emerge from the contest of ideas. Since 2012 Haidt has referred to himself as a political centrist

> Every time liberals lose elections, there is hand-wringing about understanding the other side. But I've never seen the equivalent worry about how conservatives can understand liberals.

One of the big theories in The Righteous Mind can be used to explain this. The Moral Foundations Theory lists 5 drivers of moral judgments, 5 reasons why people may feel things are 'right'. Then it gives data showing that liberals feel 2 of these strongly and 3 weakly, while conservatives feel all 5 about as equally strongly.

By that theory, the reason that conservatives need not work as hard to understand liberals is that they feel all the same moral impulses liberals do, and more, while liberals only feel 2/5ths of the conservatives' impulses.

The same theory suggests that conservative persuasion will be more effective on liberals than liberal persuasion on conservatives. This then leads to election losses, which leads to hand wringing about how liberals don't understand conservatives, so they can't convince them to vote liberal.

Particularly relevant to my own experience was the commentary on how politicians have become less cooperative with their rivals in other parties, and how political views/party associations have become more extreme/less tolerant overall.

Highly recommend.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307455777

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind

Edit: Re-reading this, it's coming off harsher than intended. I likely need to eat something. Apologies.

It's a really lucid and eye opening introduction to moral psychology, and as a left-leaning person politically has made me understand my right-leaning friends more than anything else. Truly enlightening.

For example, when talking about confederate statues coming down, a conservative will respond to arguments around why it's traditional and patriotic to remove those statues (along with why it's fair) whereas a liberal will concentrate only on why it's fair. Make an argument that focuses only on the fairness aspect and the conservative will remain unconvinced and the liberal will think the conservative is a horrible person, because the liberal heavily values fairness.

Liberals are most sensitive to the Care and Fairness moral foundations and conservatives are equally sensitive to all the first five foundations. I think the sixth foundation was added for libertarians.

- Care: cherishing and protecting others; opposite of harm.

- Fairness or proportionality: rendering justice according to shared rules; opposite of cheating.

- Loyalty or ingroup: standing with your group, family, nation; opposite of betrayal.

- Authority or respect: submitting to tradition and legitimate authority; opposite of subversion.

- Sanctity or purity: abhorrence for disgusting things, foods, actions; opposite of degradation.

A sixth foundation, Liberty or oppression, was theorized by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind chapter 8.

Once you understand that the other person is thinking about the problem in a very different way than you, you can stop talking past each other and start getting to a sort of understanding.

Haidt's TED talk is a fun introduction to the subject.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs41JrnGaxc

As a final note, I wonder if conservatives could use their own experiences to develop some much needed empathy for minorities and women in STEM? These groups seem to be at odds right now, but they actually have a lot in common when it comes to feeling like an outsider who will never fully be accepted. Likewise, minorities and women might be missing an opportunity for diversity allies because they are writing off conservatives as being against their cause without ever trying to look for common ground.

You're right, books are a lot of effort. However, they teach something that internet articles & videos don't, and that is delayed gratification.

In the digital age, everything is fighting for your attention and it is getting harder and harder to actually focus on anything. Clickbait titles is perhaps the most obvious manifestation, but you can see it in videos as well - many popular videos are edited in a specific way (no pauses between sentences, cut after cut after cut) that grabs your attention as often as possible.

Books let you practice tuning all that noise out and focusing on a single task for a long time, while still providing entertainment. For a knowledge worker, to be able to focus at this level is a very valuable ability!

Deep Work by Cal Newport is a non-fiction book that goes into more detail about some of these ideas concerning focus in the contemporary era.

Another great non-fiction book that really couldn't be presented in another medium is "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt. The Righteous Mind is not an easy read because the ideas presented are complex and wide-reaching. It takes a lot of time to go through and digest, but it is definitely worth it. The Righteous Mind has had perhaps the most impact upon my understanding of humanity and politics out of anything I've ever read.

If you want to see what it's like to read for fun, check out the Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin - this is probably the best pacing I have ever experienced in a fantasy series.

And if you think science fiction would be more your thing, try to to take a stab at reading Dune by Frank Herbert. This is a sci-fi classic that essentially codified the genre, and some of the ideas in the series are what made Star Wars the phenomenon it is today. I think you can't get better proof that books can stand the test of time than this!

So how is that working out?

Think of all the campaigns that have effected change. How often did shaming work? Sure, you have a few cases like the fight against Apartheid, but in general? Not effective.

Here's the thing. I'm as pro-science as they come. However, I've been blessed to come from communities that fall prey to anti-vaccine and other "nonsense". And one thing I know is that fact based ridicule and moralizing has a low success rate.

As someone who somewhat understands both communities, I am already not on your side. If a pro-vacciner like me is turned off by such rhetoric, imagine it from an anti-vacciner's side.

Think I'm an outlier? I'll hazard a guess that most pro-vacciners are close to someone who is not (family connections, etc).

There is comfort in being "right". But being "right" does not in itself translate to right outcomes.

The Righteous Mind (https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...) is a very worthy read. A few things it points out:

1. On a polarized issue, facts will increase the polarization (and I'm guessing justifying shame with facts will exacerbate the issue)

2. To persuade someone, you will have a lot more success appealing to emotions than to the rational mind. This does not mean playing games where you manipulate people.

The author does a good job at getting the main points through. He ends each chapter with a summary of the discussed points, and at the end of the book he sums em all up again.

Not a book, but I've been consuming many Jordan Peterson videos on YouTube. He has presented me with many new arguments and ideas which I hadn't previously considered.

There are values that just don't scale well without trade offs against things like human dignity (loaded, but important), and applying the sentiments behind equity to vastly heterogeneous global interests is one of them.

While I (and my more reactionary and working class friends) understand that carbon taxes presumably compensate The People for the consequences of what was formerly an environmental externality - the use of climate as just a pretext for redistribution signals what gets perceived as an underlying dishonesty and illegitimate elitism that makes it difficult to legitimize the rationale, or outcomes.

For example, basic income funded by indirect taxation is an interesting solution to a specific set of problems around technology and globalization, but it requires a level of trust that has been damaged by freighting climate with these other agendas. Still doable, but to honestly discuss the options requires frank talk about limits and boundaries to its application.

I've got opinions like anyone and I'm not always entirely above point scoring either, so it's going to take real work for people to do it.

Having read things like Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, and watching Scott Alexander's influence, the question of what the fundamental irreconcilable difference of interest may be is the most pressing question. How do we reconcile interests and coexist with people whose most basic beliefs we experience as alien? Some would just say, "win," even independent of political persuasion, but I'd argue there is immensely valuable work to be done to find ways to do better.

So short version, returning carbon tax money to the general populace means general revenue, for general spending, which is not something conservatives tend to trust.

He is not coming to the conclusion that there is no point. He is suggesting that people need to be aware of their strongly-held preconceived ideas, and work hard to understand the other side's worldview, before being able to make more objective conclusions or have constructive discussions.

It's really about taking time to absorb some of the alternate information streams to understand what a different perspective they are coming from.

The problem is that most information sources are highly polarized at this point.

Republicans tend (this is not universal) to view things through a lense of six things: faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order. Democrats focus on care and fighting oppression. Again, this is a simplification, but the theme is that conservatives have different moral foundations that make it hard for liberals to understand why they make decisions they do. A solid example (I can't remember if this was used in the book, but it helps me) is "why are they voting against their own interests". I hear this in my personal life all the time! I used to say it! Then I realized that voting for someone who is against welfare, when you are low on the socioeconomic spectrum, makes sense if you overweight faith, and believe that abortion is a grave moral sin. What's some poverty now compared to eternal damnation? I don't believe in hell myself, but this insight let me understand that someone who views things different than me isn't dumb, they just have different values that allow them to rationally decide things that my values seem irrational.

The hard part is trying to talk across this gap in moral reasoning, and find the right balance.

- Crocker's Rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881288

- Principle of Charity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12774600

- Rapaport's Rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12774692

I also found Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"[0] really worthwhile. I mean to read it again in the next week or so. What I find particularly impressive with his work is that he found that his research actually changed his own thinking.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt

And you know, re-reading your response "I've never had facts change anyone's mind", I think even if you don't change someone's mind at the time, finding some common ground, something you agree on is a worthwhile accomplishment. Sometimes it seems the gulf between us is so large. Recognizing that it might not be is reassuring.

I hope you find these useful!

Also, do you have a reading recommendation for learning more about that aspect of Martin Luther King Jr. and his compatriots?

That said, it's hard to be informed and not develop some loyalty to any particular politician. In all likelihood, you'll develop an affinity towards whichever politician you find agrees with you the most, and it's hard to say that "In general, I like so and so, but for his opinions on x and y."

Jonathan Haidt has done some fantastic research on the subject, specifically in the area of political psychology, and I would encourage you to read "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion".

In practice though, most people are happy to swallow whatever their party tells them is true, even when it provably isn't.

If you get a chance, take a look at Jonathan Haidt's excellent book The Righteous Mind, which is about, among other things, how people come to believe what they do (I wrote a little about it here: http://jakeseliger.com/2012/03/25/jonathan-haidts-the-righte...).

A better strategy in my experience is go up a meta level to something like, "How do people come to believe what they believe?"

Haidt is a psychologist who studies moral development, and while I don't believe everything he puts forth in the book to be gospel, he makes many good points about how people come to moral conclusions (which may not be logical conclusions, but nonetheless are based on what the person uses their senses to believe is true).

You can hear a summary of Haidt's theory or moral matrices, as well as an example of how the theory has been employed to talk to people across the "political divide": http://media.uoregon.edu/channel/2013/06/04/what-on-earth-is...

If you've progressed to the point where you can dismiss that guy without a thought, given his credentials and accomplishments, I submit to you that alarm bells ought to be going off in your head that you might have epistemologically closed yourself too far.

I'm not saying you're obligated to agree with him. I'm saying if you can't even engage with his arguments, it may be you that has the problem.

I can also recommend:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONUM4akzLGE "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion"

And I would recommend Jonathan Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind"(if I gave offence, I apologize) for how differing political mindsets define fairness - it was quite illuminating to me when I read it.

No, there isn't.

>Give this a read. The science is solid:

https://righteousmind.com/

"The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion?". Hmm...

So, from your comment, I'm guessing that the answer in the book to the question in the subtitle is that there is some baked in "morality" in us, that evolution gave us? If so, that's extremely misguided.

If there was such a thing, it would be at least somewhat similar across all human tribes and cultures. That's not the case at all. It's vastly different throughout history and across cultures because these things have everything to do with power dynamics and resource distribution.

>https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg

And? Monkeys have hierarchies. If they repeated this experiment but swappped the monkeys, it would turn out differently. The experiment is designed and orchestrated to show some sort of "equal pay" nonsense. What is happening is that the monkey on the left is socially higher than the one on the right... and hence it is used to claiming better food for itself first. When it sees the other one gets it, it gets pissed off. When these higher ups get injured, get sick or get old, someone else claims the status. It's all power dynamics and fight over resources. It has nothing to do with "morality".

> What kind of unhinged philosophy are you smoking? Objectivism? Marxism? Freebasing Solipsism?

I don't know what your western intellectuals call it but if I were to translate it to English, it would roughly translate to "reality".

* Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, for explaining so much personally and culturally so concisely.

* Everything on this list: http://jakeseliger.com/2010/03/22/influential-books-on-me-th....

* The Lord of the Rings, for its combination of story, interior drama, and (underrated) political economy.

* Blindsight by Peter Watts.

* Heart of Darkness by Conrad, who seems more prophetic all the time.

Similar examples: incest with 100% guarantee of no conception. Consensual cannibalism (edit for clarity: of someone very well cooked). Eating of a dead dog. Sex with a dead chicken and then its consumption.

We find all of those repugnant, immoral, and will try to come up with victims, even when there are none to be found.

It's a good example of how morality for humans is much more than just about harm. It's about conformity and cohesion with a set of rules that identify a specific tribe, regardless of harm.

http://www.yourmorals.org

From the "About Us" page (http://www.yourmorals.org/aboutus.php):

This website is a collaboration among social psychologists who study morality and politics. Our goal was to create a site that would be useful and interesting to users, particularly ethics classes and seminars, and that would also allow us to test a variety of theories about moral psychology. One of our main goals is to foster understanding across the political spectrum. Almost everyone cares about morality, and we want to understand --and to help others understand -- the many different ways that people care.

You seem to grapple with feeling hypocritical by not having a logical response to something you later find to be wrong, but perhaps your elephant simply wasn't "leaning" in the direction of the wrong-sayer.

I like the idea that the majority of forces acting on a humans actions/behavior are non-verbal; not necessarily big news, but it helps me to justify why I have trouble communicating with friends who are on the bleeding edge of social politics while I spend my weeks writing proprietary code and reading classic fiction novels.

- The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt. Really deepened my understanding of how Western and other cultures think about moral and ethical issues.

- The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan. It's a feminist book that is very non-ideological, and helped me, as someone born in the 80's, appreciate some very real and practical issues that feminism has helped us address.

The balance between logic, emotion and decisiveness is a theme explored in Star Trek S1E16, "The Galileo Seven" [0], [1] Spock taking command and following ^flawlewss logic^ almost gets them marooned and killed. I have a theory smart people who assume a rigid logical mindset make the worst leaders.

Reference

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Galileo_Seven

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708465/

I don't want to run down a rabbit hole of blame here. Rather, I wanted to suggest that it's not just symmetrical, and it's not as simple as "if only we on the left tried harder we could solve the problem unilaterally" -- because I don't think I've ever heard any similar accommodation from the right. I think we've tried that, and need to try something different.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansa...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book)

This quote (by Bertrand Russell) stood out: "Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; and on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of individualism and personal experience that makes cooperation impossible."

http://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religi...

Prior to reading this, my politics aligned very closely with those of Sanders and I thought everybody on the right were selfish, evil, close-minded fools. After reading the book, my politics are still left of center (but definitely right of Sanders), but I think I understand and appreciate the politics of my right leaning family and friends.

Non-fiction: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Of all the books of the last ten years, I can't think of one that more transformed my understanding of (and compassion for) my fellow thinking, feeling, moralizing, tribal primates. https://righteousmind.com/

As for editorial, I find news analysis pieces useful in putting facts in context, especially for topics I'm unfamiliar with, though that can be problematic, too. Similar to confirmation bias, being aware of the different types of bias can help me build the habit of keeping them in mind while I read.

I noticed in another thread that you're familiar with Jonathan Haidt. I hope to re-read "The Righteous Mind" this week. I found it really mind-opening the first time around, and has shaped how I'm now approaching the news in particular and discourse in general.

His abortion example strikes me as particularly off-base. Again, it's not that US liberals don't care about morality. Of course liberals think murder is wrong! They just don't consider a fetus to have the moral standing of a human.

Anyway, some direct links regarding moral foundations theory (though I highly recommend Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind):

https://www.moralfoundations.org/

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

- Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

- Rapoport's Rules: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapo...

- The Principle of Charity: http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html

(Just found the author of the study/studies: Sosis[3]

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...

[2]: A commune being defined as a group of people not sharing kinship deciding to live and work together.

[3]: https://anthropology.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/944/...

Her sharing contributed to my befriending a few people with opposite political views, against this nation's tide of increasing polarization and beating opponents without trying to understand (Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind contributed too). Among the results: less anger, more understanding, more self-awareness, though also more confusion among friends and family to why I would talk to someone who voted that way.

These are some of the books I've given an "A" over the last few years, roughly grouped by genre:

Nonfiction:

- A Short History of Nearly Everything

- Fabric of the Cosmos

- Dataclysm

- The Righteous Mind

- Merchants of Doubt

- Dead Wake

- Man's Search for Meaning

- Evicted

- The New Jim Crow

- Night

Sci-fi:

- We

- The Sirens of Titan

- Hyperion

- Stories of Your Life

- Frankenstein

- The Day of the Triffids

- Childhood's End

Fantasy:

- The Stormlight Archives

- The First Law Trilogy

- The Lord of the Rings

Literature:

- The Stranger

- Dubliners

- Things I've Learned from Dying

- The Things They Carried

- Cloud Atlas

- Stoner

- Pillars of the Earth

Sigh, yeah, I need to watch that. Good of you to let me know.

My take on the not-listening thing -- of course I'm not Aron -- is that if you've heard a faction hector you a lot, and you don't think they're listening to you except maybe to match some of your words into their standard bingo cards, then it's natural to tune someone out the moment they say one of that faction's shibboleths. From this POV, telling the speaker how their rhetoric failed is actually reaching out to them a little. That's not the POV I aspire to: I try to consider more words that piss me off than I really feel like, because I meta-want to be less biased. Sometimes I do, and sometimes they even get through.

Re: social psychology, I'm just starting on Haidt's The Righteous Mind in hopes of learning some basics.

(Since many more people might read this, I guess I want to make it completely clear that I didn't say what brand of words piss me off.)

This reminds me to read a book that talks about this: "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion," by Jonathan Haidt. Maybe someone else has read it and can comment.

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/01/146474609/why-we-fight-the-psy..., http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/d...

Municipalities organized as corporations are not unique to California, but the "inc." at the end of the name doesn't change anything. A government is an organization granted a monopoly (or oligopoly) on the legitimate use of force in a designated geographic area. For a discussion on the philosophical problems with governments as such, I recommend reading "The Problem of Political Authority" by Michael Huemer.

On the facts, Mozilla and I both say I resigned, and Mozilla's board members said at the time that they wanted me to stay.

But in fantasizing that I was fired, gaur's moralistic and judgmental language exhibits the usual signs that Jonathan Haidt has detailed in "The Righteous Mind": a casting out of the other as beyond redemption and justly punished, without the ability to model said other or address their point of view.

(Also without ever adverting to the bad "purging" precedent he's endorsing, which global Trumpism can and will exploit by reversing his right-makes-might-makes-right circular argument. The shoe may soon be on the other foot even here in the USA, at least in large regions; it definitely never left the first foot in places like Saudi Arabia.)

Dishonesty and self-pity are not worth hearing or studying -- we have enough of them already.

Gaur expresses or implies falsehoods about California law, but I've addressed those elsewhere on HN and won't repeat here. Links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12721928

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12721891

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10654732

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9748538

I noticed this too, and for a long time it bothered me. But I recently read Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind, and in it he points out that a lot of people appear to hold believes about a wide array of issues (politics, religion, consumer products, and so forth) that they don't really hold based on logic and evidence, but to signal group identification and affiliation.

In addition, he points out that, on a wide array of issues, people tend to have gut, intuition-based reactions first, then look for evidence to support their intuition, while a lot of us assume or want to assume that it works the other way around.

I probably learned something from The Righteous Mind on every page, and I say this about very few books; I also wrote at more length about it here: http://jseliger.com/2012/03/25/jonathan-haidts-the-righteous... .

(BTW, I agree with your basic point and think it's well put.)

Plus, I like the observation from Maugham's Of Human Bondage: The submission to passion is human bondage, but the exercise of reason is human liberty.

https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...

https://www.amazon.com/Of-Human-Bondage/dp/B004N59WMK/