Why I don't discuss politics with friends

For all of the author's bloviating and self-congratulating navel gazing, the article manages to largely overlook values, the only mention of them being to dismissively reduce them to irrational tribalism.

In truth, values and ethics are fundamental to effectively discussing politics. After all, all political decisions are ultimately about how we want to shape the world that we as humans live in. There can be no agreement about economic policy without a shared understanding of the ultimate goal of an economy. No agreement about foreign relations without a shared understanding of the role of nations as representatives for groups of humans, and how we believe one group of humans should interact with another group of humans through the lens of nations.

For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent. The policies are different too, but over time we've gone from a world where there were at least some cases where the two parties had different policies for how to reach the same goals, and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.

In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values". If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values.

The crucial question is what is "politics"? Are personalities politics? No. Are parties? No. Are inflammatory issues about race, sex or gender or political correctness or immigration? No!

Here is politics:

Are common American citizens able to afford and obtain reasonable health care?

Are common Americans paid a living wage? Can one person earn enough to have a family?

Do our children have a reasonable opportunity to grow, have a productive life and have a family if they want one?

Is the financial situation getting better for Americans or is the difference between earnings and expenditures growing larger. (Hint do we use code words like 'inflation' instead of calling it like it is).

A functioning democracy requires that the common people are enable to formulate and enact laws that they believe are in their best interests. Do the majority of the laws enacted in all the states meet this requirement?

A functioning democracy requires that the common people are able to use the law and courts to right wrongs. Are the common people able to use/afford access to the courts when wrongs are committed.

Do the common news media act as a forum for the common concerns and issues of the People. (Here's looking at you NYT).

Cuo Bono? If the laws passed are not in the interests of the People, and the courts are not accessible by People, who benefits? If the news media are not a forum for the interests of the People, whose interests do they represent. (Here's looking at you Jeff Bezos).

If advertising funds our primary sources of news, whose interests are represented.

Those are simply things you should discuss with your friends. They are questions not answers. This is not rocket science.

(Article starts off be asserting that they don't talk politics with friends then proceeds to describe how to talk politics with friends?)

Friends are people you should support and build up. You shouldn't try to make them feel bad by winning arguments with them. That said- a healthy society is only possible if individuals can exchange ideas about how to run things and then act collectively (aka "politics"). Sometimes people will have different interests and priorities, that lead to them having different ideas about stuff- most of the time this is totally fine.

This basically comes down to respect and communication skills- but for god's sake people- keep on talking about "politics"!

I'll provide an opposing viewpoint. In the last 10 years, I've lost friendships and family because people in my life have voted for candidates that stripped rights away from women, minorities, etc.

Having a vast difference between opinions is fine, but some of their decisions are fundamentally against my core beliefs and have done literal harm to many people I know.

For that reason, terminating family and friendships has been absolutely worth it for me.

Until we can live in a world where fundamental rights are protected and respected, we have no common ground, and it's pointless to tiptoe around these insanely harmful beliefs while maintaining a facade of friendship.

I guess I just don't see "tribalism". I know it's a popular description though for the divisiveness we find ourselves in politically.

But I consider the things important to me, the beliefs, the issues: and they, all of them, align with a progressive, left-leaning ideology. I'm not just glomming on to everything one "tribe" or another stands for ... one group actually reflects everything I believe. (I think I could split a few hairs here and there, but we're still talking perhaps 95% alignment.)

But I don't think that is too surprising. Others, smarter than me, have gone into great detail about the underpinnings of left-leaning or right-leaning world views in people. Fear of change, empathy ... a number of ideas have been put forth. By this reasoning it naturally follows that those of a certain "personality" will also share common beliefs, ideologies.

The implication instead seems to be that unless you are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum you must be "tribal". That feels dismissive.

> After seven years in San Diego, my wife and I have decided to uproot our family and move to the Bay Area. While there were many factors (a new job opportunity, family), a significant reason was finding a community of truth-seeking people.

Funny. The lack of truth-seeking and truth-telling is one of the chief reasons I moved away from the Bay Area.

I'm 52. For me, there was a time when it was considered impolite to talk about sex, religion and politics. Then it became super fun when done with open/questioning/rational/critical minds, and a lot of progress in my own thinking was achieved from the usually non-threatening but lively debates and fights among friends and family for ideas. Then it shifted in the last ten or fifteen years. When social media started having friends of friends, the tribalism kicked in. It was explained very well in a talk between Maria Ressa and Jon Stewart. She is brilliant, and well worth listening to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsHoX9ZpA_M

I can strongly sympathize. The image with the squares and circles hit home hard, from an early age, it's been pretty lonely. Depending on your environment it can be super hard to find others part of the 1%, so you really need to treasure them when you do find them.

One point of criticism:

The usage of the word "moderate". It seems PG's article is the one to blame here. The word "moderate" when used about politics means something to people in English. And given that meaning, saying that independent thought leads to one being "moderate", is straight up wrong. What the article is really talking about is that independent thought leads to a set of beliefs that is unlikely to be a very good fit for any particular ideology, and therefore, political party. That's true! But that's not "moderate". That's.. diverse, pragmatic, non-ideological. Those words aren't ideal either, but "moderate" is definitely not it.

The 99%/1% is also greatly overstated in a way. Firstly, it's definitely dependent on locale, culture, subculture, environment, as the writer already says themselves. More importantly, if you manage to somehow get people 1:1 in an environment where they feel safe, it turns out that many actually aren't that tribal/ideological after all, and they do actually have beliefs that span different mainstream tribes. But then that conversation finishes, and they go back to being a tribe member.

I'm pretty sure there's plenty of experiments that directly show the above. That when you give people policy choices that are non-obvious (e.g. they've never thought about), and then make them vote on them, they'll often vote against their tribe. But if you'd beforehand tell them which tribe voted which way, they'll always vote with the tribe.

This hits too close to home.

A while back I realized that most news stations have a clear bias and eventually started to dive deeper on stories I was interested in.

I try to look into the source material when possible and found time and time again that the 'news' either left out key details or completely misrepresented the source material.

I never bring up politics, but friends will often repeat news stories and occasionally I'll bring up key facts that weren't reported on.

This has never changed anyone's opinion. Usually all it does is make the other person upset or they bring up another story to reaffirm their currently held belief.

Thankfully my relationships are strong enough that I haven't lost any friends over this, but it's incredibly isolating. Feels like brainwashing on a massive scale.

That's not to say that the news isn't to be trusted at all, some things are as reported. But, often times this isn't the case and it's more important than ever to think critically and not take news stories at face value. The division is mostly manufactured and I believe at our core most of us want the same things.

> By far, relationships determine the happiness of ones life, and relationships are not beholden to truth. In fact, they are very commonly built on the opposite. Whether a boss' reprimands are deserved or not, employees bond over a common enemy. Entire groups form on the basis of beliefs, false or otherwise. We have a word for this: “religion".

> Despite organized religion dropping in attendance, religious patterns of behavior are still everywhere, just adapted to a secular world. Health, exercise, politics, work, self-improvement -- these are all things I've seen friends employ their religious muscle into, across all spectrums and political aisles. And as we get older, I'm seeing more and more of my supposedly-secular friends engage in such behavior.

I have a hypothesis that all humans are compelled to indulge in a certain amount of magical thinking. We seem to be hard-wired to believe there is more underlying metaphysical order and pattern to the universe than there actually is.

I presume this is evolutionarily advantageous because it's better to assume you have more agency and ability to predict than you actually do. Over-assuming leads to occasional disappointment and frustration when things don't work out, but under-assuming leads to having less impact than you actually could have.

If that hypothesis is true, then probably the best thing for society is to provide cultural structures that let us indulge than impulse in non-harmful ways, instead of, say, giving it to religions that also tell us to murder gay people.

Sort of like how sports function as a safe pressure release valve for the compulsion towards competition and violence.

I like it. There's an easier answer to "why don't people move from tribe to view". It's because it's painful to question one's own beliefs, and that's how that change happens. In fact such a move appears masochistic to many, since it almost never pays to undermine loyalty in favor of principle.

I hypothesize that we're seeing the influence of the legal system on the public turbo-charged by Citizens United money. An attorney is paid to be a "zealous advocate" for their client. This means never spending effort on anything that might be against the client's interest. Self-reflection is stochastically against their interest, so why even risk it? Considering alternative views might be against your interest, so why risk it? Therefore, in this new zeitgeist, such behavior is not just perverse and painful, but even unethical and wrong.

The problem, of course, is that for this system of adversarial argument you need an impartial judge. In theory that would be the public, but it turns out flooding people's minds with unethical lawyer screed 24x7 turns more people into lawyers, not judges. "The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it." This could very well refer to the value of dignity, honor, integrity, fairness in debate, respect for one's opponents. These are always under assault, but in the last 10 years they have been decimated to the point people don't remember they ever held sway and young people don't know what politics was like when they did.

I find it easy to discuss politics with friends. The hard part is listening, being open to persuasion yourself. Walzing into a discussion believing the other ones are stupid people with simple arguments rooted in misunderstandings — yeah, that won't fly.

You can smell it in the article. it's right there. The author thinks he's intellectually superior and arrived at his opinion though a pure intellectual pursuit, where the stupid conversation partners can't follow.

I completely understand how you're not having fruitful discussions.

An interesting blog post that would probably do well to look into something like Rob Kegan's theories of adult development [0] and looking up some stats on how many people fit into each category. People actually categorise fairly well into a model where ~66% of the population simply don't understand the concept of independent thought and rely heavily on social signalling to work out what is true.

That model explains an absurd number of social dynamics and a big chunk of politics - which is mostly people with a high level of adult development socially signalling to the masses what they are meant to be doing.

The important observation is that it isn't intellectual honesty that is the problem or truth-seeking the solution. It is actually whether someone is capable of identifying that truth != popular opinion. People who form their opinions by social osmosis can still be intellectually honest if they land in the right sort of community, but they fall apart under social pressure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kegan#The_Evolving_Self

Thoughtful perspective on the social risks of political discussions. However, respectfully engaging with differing viewpoints is valuable for personal and societal growth. Perhaps focusing discussions on understanding each other's underlying values and experiences, rather than specific political positions, could lead to more productive conversations.

I'll just add one thing I learned: what people do is way more important than what they say or what their politics is.

I now find it much more practical to focus on things we can agree on and actually do something about in the real world and try to build from that.

Generic political debates are not very actionable and they are risky for social reasons mentioned in the article, so I think they are largely a waste of time with negative externalities.

I have often observed something about how we build software; I just realized that my observations are of a more fundamental human problem.

First, people are not good at defining problems. They may describe the problem that they want to solve in terms of an outcome, but often times the outcome that they want also includes some aspect that benefits them personally that is separate from the problem that they are describing.

Second, people are not good at separating problem from implementation. in fact, people are horrible at this. I think people have a very difficult time envisioning that the problem and the existing solution implementation (which itself might be making the problem worse) are separate things. so most people rarely consider and often actively oppose, radically different solutions.

In the political sphere, ideology Influences how one frames the problem that one wants to solve, and limits the universe of acceptable solutions. This exemplifies the two points that I raised above.

For example, when talking about healthcare policy, the two main “sides” in the US, both have ideologies that define outcomes in terms of consumer access to medical services, and which constrain allowable implementations to something that resembles insurance, with key differences being about who pays and what is covered and how much coverage one gets.

Just for the purposes of elaborating on my premise, I would point out that not all healthcare delivery systems in the world are designed around the insurance model, And that such a model includes vested interests, regulatory capture, and often incentivizes many participants to optimize in ways that don’t forward the implicit goal of making more people more healthy.

Please don’t reply with your opinions on my imperfect example; I don’t want to have a healthcare policy discussion. I just wanted to provide an example my main points about how humans approach political problem-solving.

Curious how many comments say "it's not about tribalism, it's just the other side is evil". Ctrl+f for this very word on the page yields interesting results.

If you don't talk politics with friends, who are you going to talk to about that?

Probably nobody.

Who will win the elections then? The forces whose supporters do talk politics with friends.

The "What [the political spectrum] Actually Is" graph shows more independent thinkers to be unintentional moderates. The chart is a claim that independence leads to moderation. I deny that. The most independently minded thinkers I know frequently drift off into extremes where most tribes dare not tread. The tribalists are so moderate in comparison that I would turn that christmas tree upside down.

>> be able to understand and empathize with the various (and often opposing) groups involved in a topic

Interestingly, I have seen Elon (DOGE) and others outside of politics (that mega-church leader) telling the public (dare I say, their followers) that one of the main problems with America is empathy, and that we need to _stop_ empathizing with others.

Political discussions for me are like programming. I enjoy them because I like finding bugs in people's logic like I do in programming.

I find a lot of people's political arguments wouldn't compile because of basic logic errors, and I try to point this out. But not many people are interested in this kind of analysis, they instead prefer the tribalist point-scoring like the OP mentions.

I dream of a world where political debates can be syntax-checked. I'm sure you could do it with AI today.

But in the end its all about feelings.

I can't describe how many times I will just go along with someone's passionate ranting on something I disagree with and egg them along because its makes them happy. This is tribalism. I will disagree with the group, and if you saw me you'd think I was the strongest supporter, but I actually vehemently disagree with everything.

There are very few people it's worth having a real discussion with these days.

I don't change my opinion of people for what they think, but it's very rare to find people who reciprocate this.

> when someone asks "who did you vote for"

I find it astonishing that anyone would ask this. The only time I've ever been asked this question has been by pollsters. In my social circle, anyway, the taboo on this question is very strong.

>Most people don't have political views, they have political tribes

Agree with this. Also, I do believe most people are appallingly stupid (I might not not be an exception either), cruel and easy to manipulate, and as a result are incapable of making rational decisions that benefit society as a whole. I try to never ever discuss politics with anyone, it's one of the most damaging and useless activities there is.

Usually, interactions with people on (arguably) political issues just leave me stupefied - no, I don't think people born in certain geographical locations are subhuman because of decisions of their current government; no, I don't hate nor wish death and suffering to anyone; no, I don't think the war is necessary and I don't want anyone to be blown to bits by a drone; no, I don't think artificial lines on a map ("countries") define who is wrong and who is right and worth throwing your only life away for; no, I don't think decisions of the government reflect the opinion of the entire population of that country; yes, I do think people I disagree with are real human beings with capabilities of sense, emotion, and thought just like I am; and the list goes on and on. Anyway, most people have a very different idea on the aforementioned examples. I don't care about the replies, just wanted to offload this filth off my head somewhat.

I hear this soooo often. If you can't talk to friends about your honest opinions without being respectful to one another and also being willing to listen to their reasoning and opinions, what kind of friendship is that?

When did discussing politics with your community become a bad thing? In fact that's the primary place you should talk politics, share new ideas and hone your views. If more people did this they wouldn't be getting radicalized by online bots.

I think one of biggest problems the American voter has is two fold: 1. We have turned politicians into celebrities/heroes. ALL politicians are just like most of us: they are flawed and incomplete individuals who desperately try to hide their flaws. (Under normal circumstances, this isn't so bad. However, to be an elected official with all that power, it's fraud at the very least.

2. Once elected, we refuse to hold the politicians we elected to almost any accountability. (This is very hard to do, no doubt, because of the way the laws have been manipulated to stop this very accountability.)

As for religion in politics: I'm a devoted Christian who is sane enough to know that not everyone will believe the same as I do. I have one vote on election day, to manipulate other people's vote by having my candidate changing laws to thwart the constitution is theft and immoral. (As difficult as it is to say, Christians today should read 2 Peter Ch2, taking it to heart. Stop only glossing over the cheerful faith verses and start reading the one's that call for accountability.)

Ah, another apt time to mention one of my favorite papers, Michael Huemer's In Praise of Passivity. https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm

Basically it argues the most moral thing in a democracy is to do nothing at all. You simply can never make a truly well informed decision over such a complex system, not even with several lifetimes of dedicated work towards it.

Generally speaking I don't take anyone's political opinion seriously unless they have read and have a cogent response to this paper. I'll gladly just let them yap away and think I agree with them, regardless of my actual views. It's sort of like not taking philosophers seriously unless they've considered the question of solipsism first.

> a congregation member asking "you believe in god, right?"

That's a very good analogy.

For some, believing in god or not doesn't matter much and they'll go to church mostly to make friends and be part of a community.

For others, being expected (or not) to believe in God is a no go, and losing friends/family holding these expectations will be a price to pay.

We all have our boundaries, and disagreements on some specific topics will be out of them. Cutting friends/family with incompatible stances is just one instance of that IMHO, be it political, religious or anything else that matters enough.

Something I try to remember when discussing politics or playing Scrabble: "You can be right, or you can have friends"

People do not change opinions because someone told them to. It has to be a result of a narrative with personal experiences. Which is why FAFO is still a big thing.

Hence, any effort trying to convince friends that blue is not green it is not gonna work. Sorry.

On average people are incapable of holding a moral position through to the end.

- Bad parenting is bad, we should have a permit for it --> are you ready to get denied the right to try having kids?

- Thou shalt not kill --> except those really bad people I don't like!

- Stealing is bad --> except when you're "starving"

Our perception of good and evil are multifaceted, with most of it happening in our background cognition.

There is a strange "mirror" stopping people from exchanging once a rift has opened. Someone else posited that it might be a fight or flight reaction.

I posit that our cognition is based on negation, and thus the shape of our tool impact our results.

I believe in the future we will see a much more pronounced split between people who prefer reality to those who prefer un-reality.

Un-reality is the mediated, constructed "reality" that can be conjured up and perpetuated through mediums such as the Internet. It needs constant effort behind it to keep it going because it isn't tethered to actual experience. Un-reality is things like the hyper-partisan views on things that seem like they change on a whim, or extremist views on gender relations. It requires a tribalistic level of affiliation. It is something that has evolved to prize self-perpetuation (e.g. memes) over the views it claims to espouse. (This pattern of growth at all costs also occurs in other contexts, such as business.)

Reality, on the other hand, is the messy, boring, uncontrollable and unmediated thing we experience as humans. It is harder to transmit online because it isn't something that is easily swallowed, but it has a universal appeal to us as we recognize humanity in it. Reality has much bigger downs and ups than un-reality does, that's what makes us want to escape it sometimes. It also has really crappy truths and circumstances in it; there's no respawns or undo.

In some sense, this split already exists: fans of un-reality we often label as too online, implying that they prefer online life to actual life. I believe the biggest difference here lies in the preference for mediated vs unmediated interactions.

This paints a very binary picture. Either you are in or out. Part of this tribe, or this other tribe (ignorantly or not). The article seems to imply that people can't have opinions on political policies unless they are fully informed on not only global affairs but also philosophy and psychology.

I think reality is different - I don't think there are any absolutes that require "knowledge" of e.g. philosophy to get the "right" answer in politics. Instead the right answer (at least in western democracies) is what the people want, even if they are not fully informed.

I view it very much akin to trial by jury - there are highly informed and experienced judges, barristers, solicitors etc but ultimately it is down to the laymen in the jury to make a decision that they see as just. They might reach the "wrong" decision from the perspective of people who are fully informed on the legal processes and the law of the land etc, but that doesn't matter because it is the jury that makes the decision.

So it is for the electorate too.

I have no experience of voting in the US but it appears that a two-party system really stokes the "us Vs them" vibes. The only alternative you have is to totally switch sides. At least in European democracies there is often a plurality of parties to vote for. I've personally moved between the main 3 parties (and there are probably at least another 1 or 2 other minority parties that have different trajectories...) in the UK as my personal situation has changed over the years, and I think that is a very normal thing here.

> And even with all this knowledge, can you empathize with both sides of common issues -- the poor renter vs struggling landlord? The tired worker vs underwater business owner? Rich vs poor, immigrant vs legacy, parent vs child -- the list goes on

To me having just two sides is a uniquely American way of thinking.

Between the renter and landlord there's the homeowner, between the tired worker and business owner there's the public sector/NGO/huge corporation worker/freelancer, rich and poor are relative terms which lie on a scale anyway.

Conflicts that actually have only two parties involved are rare and the very first thing one should do to be able to talk politics, is give up on the notion.

> I think there are two main reasons, the first being the sheer intellectual difficulty of crafting an informed political view leads people to tribalism out of convenience.

What's the difference between tribalism and deferring to experts on complex subjects, e.g. climate change? I have a deep skepticism of people who think they can personally reason through any complex topic from first principles. It shows a lack of humility and self-awareness. Nobody has the time to build that kind of expertise in every domain, and there is wisdom in deferring to the hard won experience of others. But the type to think they can reason through everything seems like the type to call this "tribal politics."

I think there should be a new rule that any time someone writes an article bragging about how he's† a badass independent thinker just like Paul Graham and Eliezer Yudkowsky, he must in the same article identify his major disagreements with Paul Graham and Elizer Yudkowsky. Because to me the authors of these articles seem exactly as tribal as mainstream political and religious groups, they just care about different things. Yeah, I shouldn't be able to guess your views on sex from your views on taxes, but I also shouldn't be able to guess your views on wokeness from your views on AI safety. Yet I can make both predictions with about equal accuracy.

† I have yet to see an article like this written by a woman.

I think it's somewhat funny that two of the images in this blog post, the two signs, and the miner, are commonly used to mock faux intellectualism and a feeling of moral superiority.

I think it's ok to be hypocritical and have friends with different vastly political beliefs, in the end relationships; friendships, lovers, etc are not usually an outcome of rational behavior, so I don't mind having friends who are politically different because it's the unconscious connection that brought us together.

As long as there's respect that's what matters.

Name-calling by commentators dehumanised the debates. I still don't understand why it is considered OK.

"They do it" should not be enough of a reason, but it affects youtube income for individuals, so let the market work, I guess? /sarcasm

In the country where I live, the problem is that it became much of a religious question. People feel like one candidate represents values different than mine, and that by not aligning with them, I'm not an ally. I don't have friends with such different values, but managing family has become a big problem during these times. It's very hard, for example, hearing your mother-in-law defending a change in the constitution that would forbid women to have an abortion, even when raped and at any time of pregnancy, when you have a small daughter. That person is actively trying to make the world a horrible place for my family, according to my values and honestly any sane person.

EDIT: typo.

Further, I mute and unfollow aggressively any family or friends that just constantly post political news/rants etc from Facebook and other social media platforms.

Excellent post.

It wasn’t always like this. I remember when you could be pro-gun and pro-environment—and still have thoughtful, respectful conversations with people who held different beliefs.

Today, if you’re not fully aligned with every talking point of a political party, you’re instantly labeled either a fascist or a communist. And sometimes it borders on absurd: the moment party leadership shifts its stance, the whole tribe flips with it. It wasn’t that long ago that Republicans staunchly opposed tariffs. Now? They’re all in.

My question is: What changed? When did we become so tribal—and why?

A lot of the comments in this thread show how difficult it can be to talk about politics. So many strawmen arguments and ad hominims.

One thing I definitely don't do anymore is discuss politics with any friends or family ONLINE.

It's just not worth it. Publish or tweet something if you have something to say and want to reach a lot of people. Talking to ONE person and risking your relationship has a lousy cost/benefit ratio.

Cut a "rationalist centrist moderate" and a fascist who doesn't want to get cancelled because he still needs VC funding and Linkedin connections bleeds.

US politics has been increasingly polarized into positions congruent with facts and policy and our traditional ideals, and positions associated with a general stance of grievance, with an insistent selfishness, with anti-empathy, anti-intellectualism, with "palingenetic ultranationalism". This has been a test of your ideals, of your humanity. It wasn't very hard.

Yes, there is often a lot of nuanced truth in the middle of any argument. But less now, in politics, than in a long, long time. Only a very particular sort of person walks into a liberated Auschwitz and starts shouting "Both sides are too extreme and I'm better than them!" from the rooftops.

Speaking as somebody who spent a lot of time there: A lot of the tropes in the "rationalist" community are inherently conservative-pointing, and it's a general prerequisite for participating there that you have a coherent base of progressive terminal ideals and an attitude suited towards introspection and iteration of your beliefs. Because otherwise you go from zero to Nietzschean ubermensch to Nazi ubermensch to Musk/Thiel brownshirt in no time, having weaponized everything present there to support your priors and idly expand your confidence.

I enjoy debating politics in the way that others enjoy playing chess or a friendly game of bowling. But when the other party gets wrapped around the axle, I don't debate with them anymore. Unfortunately, most seem to be in the latter camp.

Nice article, the comments in here also reinforced the title.

I can agree with parts of this article, but I believe it's missing a large part of the puzzle.

The author implicitly assumes that the constraints of our society are fixed and that it's therefore possible to determine which political systems are objectively better or worse. We should be doing that research (like astronomers trying to determine how the universe works) instead of religiously supporting ideological positions.

I fundamentally disagree with that assumption. I think we behave the way we do in large part due to the ideological principles we were raised with. This can be confirmed by observing various closed-off societies sometimes operating on principles that seem completely bonkers to most of us.

If you teach people capitalism/socialism, you build a capitalistic/socialistic system. It's impossible to live inside that system and objectively determine whether it's good or bad, let alone better or worse than other systems.

So in that context, I believe following an ideology is _not_ the opposite of thinking for yourself, as the author puts it. It is a conscious decision based on morality. You decide what your values are and you find a political option that aligns with them.

To be clear, that's still a very imperfect decision to make, many things can go wrong from that point on and I believe this is where the author is correct in many ways. We should reason about it constantly to make sure we're actually doing what we want to be doing and not just blindly repeating things.

My personal strategies... 1. I try to be indirect on what I think and just describe why some people think one opinion versus another. So I try not to convince people. 2. I try to stick to "is this going to work?" Style arguments when I do state my opinion. I acknowledge when my preferred party does or says something I disagree with. 3. I avoid getting bogged down with "do you agree with x y z??" Controversies that may be anecdotal and I'm not opinionated or familiar with. So I try not to argue the outage of the day.

This generally keeps me from arguing with relatives and in-laws, and on this site. So usually I can discuss differences without things going crazy.

Wrote this after noticing myself repeating the same conversational pattern over the years w/ friends, across the political spectrum