Political Indifference or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dog and Pony Show

[Riggerjack]

Go to YouTube. Look up Obama's campaign speeches. Compare primary speaches to general election speaches, then compare to the last 8 years.

Or, if you really need to be panicky, just compare to 2009-2011, when his party had Senate, House, and White House. Be fair, compare with Bush 43's first 2 years...

I'm not picking on Obama, he's just the last one, therefore, will have the most footage on YouTube.

Whatever happens in November, there will not be the Trifecta of DOOM, single party control.

[JamesR]

In that regard, I think the Mt Stupid cartoon from SMBC is great because it summarizes practically all the different observations like Dunning-Kruger, Wheaton levels, Dreyfus levels, the four stages of competence, and Cipolla's laws of stupidity.

Almost all [strongly worded] internet debates happen at Dreyfus Level 2 (Advanced Beginner) between people who have acquired almost all "their facts" but haven't yet progressed to an understanding of where "their facts" come from or acknowledged that there may be other facts (level 3) or a way of understanding how these facts can be abstracted (level 4). Consequentially, most debates are of the "I reject your facts and substitute my own"-rinse and repeat variety. This is obviously of little use if you understand both sets of facts and where they're coming from. This is why the willingness to opine dies out with the transition to level 3 and 4.

L2s are easily recognizable because they are greatly confident that they have all the facts.

Going from 1,2 to 3,4 also results in the realization of the existence of Wheaton levels of knowledge.---That "if I just realized that there are things I don't know despite what I used to think, maybe it's better if I shut up until I'm sure that I know everything"; essentially progressing from the first stage of competence. This is why there's a larger peak of experts on the left although I'd say that for many subjects, the expert peak is not high as Mt Stupid itself. At least for the topics above. For more technical areas, it is.

This is a great model for how ridiculous arguments happen. I read this recently and now it's definitely influencing my perception.

There's one site I read for the informative comments, but there's still a lot of noise. Now I notice that the noise is mostly from the L1/L2 comments. Would be interesting to have a way to detect what level the person is talking at for a given subject.

[jacob]

Would be interesting to have a way to detect what level the person is talking at for a given subject.

This would require a method to consistently disentangle Poe's Law from Dunning-Kruger. One somewhat entertaining way is the "DK knock-out" in which you make an argument that's obviously correct to level 1 or 2 but also obviously incorrect to levels 3+. This requires dialling in the irony just right.

[ThisDinosaur]

I feel like I'm in the minority of people who engage in these discussions sincerely hoping someone will convince me with well-reasoned arguments. Obviously I am usually disappointed. Partisanship means that most people identify with the beliefs of their own in-group, as mentioned above. (Why the hell should my confidence in climate science correlate with my opinion on gun control?) People identify as democrat or republican for the same reasons they pick their favorite sports team. If you understand what the Dunning Kruger effect is, you should always consider that you are the ignorant one in the argument. That said, what do you do once you've stated "your facts," they've stated "their facts" and both parties think their own evidence is *clearly* the most compelling? It doesn't seem appropriate just to shrug off this person as hopelessly dense while they do the same to you.

[Dragline]

Look for fallacies in logic. Or maybe just go have a beer.

jacob just duped me into reading a novel (egads, that happened once), where the characters used the word "plane" to mean "used as a verb, utterly to destroy an opponent's [logical] position through the course of a dialog [a one-on-one discussion]."

[jennypenny]

If you understand what the Dunning Kruger effect is, you should always consider that you are the ignorant one in the argument. That said, what do you do once you've stated "your facts," they've stated "their facts" and both parties think their own evidence is *clearly* the most compelling? It doesn't seem appropriate just to shrug off this person as hopelessly dense while they do the same to you.

@ThisDinosaur--Do you mean two people on different sides of an issue or two people on the same side but separated by Wheaton Levels? If it's the first, read Haidt. If it's the second where people in the shallow end of the pool are shouting down the people in the deep end of the pool, take solace in the fact that you no longer swim in the shallows. Live your life in a way that's open and consistent with your views so you might entice others to venture out into deeper water, and encourage them when they do.