alt Hacker NewsThe main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
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I think the advice at the end of this post is essentially sound: you should pre-filter your evaluation of others’ opinions through their understanding of related topics. But that isn’t elitist, and I think we shouldn’t call it that! It’s a form of media and cultural literacy we should be encouraging people to have; there isn’t (and shouldn’t) be anything elite about it.
> it’s very very easy to be negatively polarized by a ton of bad conversations with normal people about it, until you feel like the whole rest of the world is crazy
Why wouldn't the world be crazy, though? What reason do we have to assume that the world is not crazy? Most reasons are tautological when you really unpack them.
Pretty good. I have something to say about this part:
> most people are in fact “asleep” about most things most of the time, not super thoughtful in how they develop beliefs
Which is later echoed, but differently, as:
> the average person just doesn’t know much about your hyper specific thing
This is skirting around whether they have a duty to know about your thing. The first phrasing suggests they do, the second suggests not.
Given that your thing is probably stupid and wrong, and life's too short, it seems reasonable to me that most people can't give you good arguments about it unless you invite them to take a pleasant and entertaining walk around your reasoning and maybe sleep on it and come back later. If the subject can't be made pleasant and entertaining, you're probably out of luck. This unfortunately still applies even when your thing is genuinely a great insight.
I agree with a lot of this, and the framing is new to me and I really appreciate it. I especially appreciate the acknowledgement that there isn't necessarily anything wrong with having extreme beliefs; "extreme" is a label most often applied by antagonists of such beliefs. But I definitely feel like there can be a pipeline where one extreme belief may lead to others simply because they are also labelled extreme and not for a more recognizable reason.
One thing that I think would be helpful for anyone is to think about a contentious issue you hold a very strong opinion on. Consider what would make you change your mind on this issue. If there is literally nothing anyone could say to you (no new information, no perspective) that would make you change your mind, maybe you should ask yourself why...
Great points and nice write-up.
At the risk of sounding AI pilled, I find LLM's are fairly good sparring partners if you instruct them well. At least they're more capable of giving you the best arguments against your position than the average bar patron.
Almost all of my non-professional prompts are of that nature.
I am vegetarian, not vegan. I am so because it is something I can do about the state of animal welfare. I don't engage in discussions about my eating with people outside my immediate family. My immediate family are all omnivores. I sometimes, but rarely, choose to eat meat because it is served to me by someone who doesn't know my preference. Animal welfare remains my top priority and concern.
> Don't update positively on your extremist beliefs whenever you hear a bad argument against them
Two problems:
1. There are beliefs people hold approximately as strongly as they hold "the Sun will rise tomorrow", so "updating" is kinda irrelevant.
2. How many people actually think any of their beliefs are "extremist"? And if they don't, they won't consider the warning to apply.
And after digging in further:
3. Many people reasonably believe that their discussion circles already filter out a lot of "average people" and thus expect a higher standard of discourse from their ideological opponents. When that still doesn't happen, it naturally seems like stronger evidence.
4. (Insert generic annoyance at veganism discourse here.)
> The person [is not super fired up and] doesn’t just want to act as a soldier for their team
This pulled me into a tangential thought:
Has anyone else noticed that a lot of people just CAN'T be wrong? They might be contrarian, cynical, narcissists, experts in their field, experiencing PTSD or other emotional disregulation, extremely online, ... Then the team-based things: political entrenchment, [colour]-pilled, conspiracy theorists, religious, Collingwood supporters (kidding) ...
Finding people who are genuinely interested in learning about things that might change their views in substantial ways is very hard. Even when you find people genuinely interested in learning, it's so common to see evidence take a back seat to political or religious views. It makes you feel crazy sometimes.
I think the problem here is that we have a bias for those who agree with us that outweighs our patience in searching for oppositional opinions that are well founded. From a liberal bubble it is quite hard to find conservative viewpoints that aren't based on unobserved apriori belief or strawman arguments. It feels like being a heavyweight surrounded by lightweights and it makes me feel like I need a better sparring partner, I just can't find one...
I'm curious what the author means by: "Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect". First of all isn't that the wrong way around and should be the value theory of labor? But that aside: what is wrong about the concept of surplus value and labour power? (Which I assume would form the core of a marxism and be the value theory of labour; or vice versa) Aren't those generally accepted concepts? The entirety of marxism, especially its teleologial argument/eschatology is a different story, but what social/economic theory falsifies or even contradicts the concept of labour power and surplus value and in what way?
If you're not an extremist at this point relative to everyone else, the vast majority of whom have beliefs that are incompatible with the existence of other life on this planet, then you're probably a moron.
The key problem is social media feed boosting “engagement”. Balanced, well thought comments don't bring much engagement so they end up being ignored by the algorithm while outrageously stupid takes generate a lot of (negative) engagement, some of which being equally stupid which will bring more engagement than the sensible responses and so on. And at the end if the day, all you see in your social media feed is stupid people sharing at least some of your values arguing with even stupider people (or so you think, at least) who have the opposite views.
This is obviously harmful for society but also obviously the best outcome for the platform who wants to sell your attention to advertisers.
I think this is a good observation, but I think the diagnosis is slightly wrong. I don't think the process of becoming dismissive of opinions different to yours is limited to those with "extremist" views.
The people who agree with you are a biased sample of the population. But so are the people who are willing to openly disagree. So we have both a "bubble" and an "anti-bubble". This is especially true for people with unusual views, but it's also true for everyone.
I had a colleague who was part of an idiosyncratic religious denomination, which believes in the literal truth of the Bible etc. He was a nice guy and mostly we avoided talking about this. The one person who raised it in social conversation was the most tactless guy in the office. (To be fair he wasn't that tactless. Someone has to be last). Lots of people online are looking for a verbal fight. The decent people who know you socially or via work, but disagree with you over some political or religious issue, will usually avoid talking about it with you. That applies just as much if you have a mainstream but not universally held belief, as if you have an extreme one.
The problem here is that there's not really any incentive to seriously engage with a person with opposing views, even though our society would be a lot better if people did it. Lots of people seem to think that freedom of speech just means freedom to harangue those you disagree with, and aren't interested in the search for truth.
> Suppose you become politically radicalized and become a Marxist. You get convinced that the labor theory of value is correct.
> The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect,
He's correct most people don't know about labor theory of value. Which is why it's easy for him to categorize those who believe it as "radicalized" and "Marxist" versus the minority of calm, rational, objective people who can discount it.
Marx did follow the labor theory of value - as did virtually every major economist (or as they put it probably better back then, student of political economy) before Marx, who also believed it. Marx credits another revolutionary for discovering the labor theory of value - Benjamin Franklin. There were a few proto-papers on subjective theory of value, but an alternative theory of value did not even really exist before Capital was published.
Labor theory of value was the theory of Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and all the major economists before Marx. And Marx accepted what they accepted.
Alternative theories of value were not really fleshed out until after Marx published Capital.
So consider all of this when he categorizes the idea of the labor theory of value as extremist, radical, Marxist etc.
According to this article, believing that a carpenter banging wood and nails into a table creates value is an extremist belief. Even though pretty much every major economist before Marx believed the same thing.
Ps. This was told to you by myself - from one the 1% of people who know this stuff
Pps. If you didn't read the article, you would not know I am referring to myself as part of an elite 1% of knowledge sarcastically
What a breath of fresh air! If only people were in control of their own selves to stick to this kind of balanced and open-minded disposition.
Freedom of association is kind of a mistake, as it encourages these bubbles to form.
Here's One Weird Trick™ to avoid being an ideologue: be ok with being wrong.
Flipping that over: aspire to be correct in your beliefs, not in "being right".
Karl Popper (the man behind the Intolerance of Intolerance "paradox) identified it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Information hygiene is important if you don't want to go "crazy" in this sense.
Be careful about what news you consume, even if it appears to agree with you. Check sources. Check facts. Try to work up to your beliefs from direct observation and basic principles whenever possible. Question your beliefs. Maybe they're wrong!
e.g. It's easy to get worked up about Trump. There's an awful lot bad press out there about him. Ask yourself, can a human being really be that vile? Maybe I'm just being misled by the media and partisan politics. Go watch some uncut speeches and press conferences. Pay attention to what the man actually does. Oh, he wants to place tariffs on my country because smoke from forest fires sometimes crosses our shared borders*? He actually said that? Yes. Yes he did. That's directly observable scumbag behaviour. If a romantic interest acted that way I'd break things off immediately. Huge red flag. Maybe the negative opinions about him check out.
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* It crosses both ways, BTW.
In the pie chart 100% of people one meets disagree with ”extremist” belief of Matxism. I guess, if you move in very conservative right-wing circles, but I still doubt if this fella understands how pie-charts work.
On the general topic, most people do not have arguments and they do not know how to construct one. They cannot articulate what they believe, since they don’t really know what they believe. Most things people say are just stuff copied from whatever TV-show or meme they saw last. However, if you go around starting discussions on politics with ”what are the three branches of government” most people who actually understand the topic just walk away. I also don’t think ”hey everybody must he stupid except me” explains how people radicalise - or whatever ”idelogically crazy” means. Rather it tells more about the writer and his… problem.
I have another suggestion: just fuckin listen. A truck driver or a cleaning lady might have very original and interesting ideas about the world, if you just shut the fuck up and let them talk. Then there’s about quadrillion firebrands across the internet shouting at a video camera almost none of which are worth your time.
I like that the author doesn’t clarify what constitutes an extremist idea aside from suggesting that he doesn’t believe in any. “Extremism is when people, who are dumb, don’t know facts unlike me, who is very smart” is a kick ass theme for an essay
The author makes some good points, but imho undermines his argument by leading of with concepts like 'you come to believe in an extremist idea'; extremism is a word heavily freighted not only with meanings of intensity, inflexibility, or relative unpopularity but also with the implication of exceptional consequences that follow thereon, like rounding up perceived enemies of the state or overthrowing the social order. It might have been better to start from a perspective of unpopularity or rigid belief in a particular principle, which then hardens into an extremist position following the process of rejection and retrenchment the author describes.
On a side note: Suppose you become politically radicalized and become a Marxist. You get convinced that the labor theory of value is correct.
Marx did not believe in the Labor Theory of Value, although the above is a very common misconception because a lot of self-avowed Marxists do. On the contrary, Marx believed that some things had inherent value, like an oasis in the desert which provides a much-needed resource without any investment of labor. The LTV was adopted as part of the platform at the inaugural conference of the German Social Democratic Party in 1875. At the time, socialism was split between followers of Marx on one side, and followers of socialists like Ferdinand Lasalle on the other. The differences are too complex to delve into here, but you could say that Marxian socialism was more revolutionary and aspired to a general reorganization of society, while Lasallean socialism was more reformist and oriented around securing rights around pay and working conditions via collective bargaining, rather than having a general hostility to the economic order of the time.
Anyway, Marx did not attend this conference but when he was subsequently sent a copy of the program adopted there, he was so annoyed that he wrote a blistering critique, attacking the what he saw as the weak intellectual foundations of the plan and arguing that that they would fundamentally undermine the socialist project. You can read the cirique here, along with a much more comprehensive introduction that provides a lot of additional context: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index...
Marx's writing has a reputation for being turgid and difficult, which I think is somewhat undeserved. But lest people think think I'm just doing the academic or political trick of telling you what I think it means, here's the opening couple of paragraphs, in which Marx gets straight to the point:
First part of the paragraph: "Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture."
Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.
This is great. The error it highlights would work for anything.
The Earth is on the back of a large turtle. Prove me wrong.
Most of the arguments you hear will be deeply flawed.
Therefore we are on the back of a giant turtle.
Consider two categories of people:
1. The number of people in the general population who will object to neoliberalism.
2. The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why neoliberalism and the trickle down theory of economics is incorrect, and can speak to your very specific concerns about government bloat and over-regulation in a way that gets across how modern social theorists and economists give a more compelling and ethically coherent account of the way the world works, and do so patiently and thoroughly.
This is great! It works with everything.
Rational people will pick the ideology which has the fewest contradictions. Irrational people will choose that which serves them best.
People who benefit from a system are unlikely to look for problems with it and unlikely to notice any contradictions. Anything which appears as a contradiction gets shrugged off as "Well, there must be a good reason, I'm not an expert. I will trust the experts." These people corrupt Occam's Razor that the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. "The experts say ..." becomes the ultimate simplest explanation to everything... And the experts that they choose to listen to are those who are aligned with their existing beliefs.
Then you have people who notice the contradictions but they see so many from first-hand experience that they don't trust the experts and they don't have access to enough different information to be able to choose a good one; so they just adopt the least-bad one as their own... The one which best protects their self-image and whose (comparatively) few contradictions can be plausibly explained away by corruption, conspiracy or dishonesty.
But I think the latter group is in fact one step closer to the truth. The truth is there is no conspiracy (at least no grand, all-encompassing one), it's worse than that; systemic incentives create alignment and remove the need for intentional coordination. The coordination, the illusion of conspiracy is just a byproduct of incentives. The second group of people are wrong about the mechanism but their view of reality leads to the same outcome... So with each passing year, their views are being reinforced by more "proof."
The system which manufactures the incentives which create alignment is itself probably not the product of conspiracy; it's just a system which evolved slowly over time to subtly serve its operators and their supporters. They don't want to change it, not out of nefariousness, but out of justified fear of what havoc any change might wreck... Bureaucracy also plays a part.
It's very difficult to co-ordinate a lot of people to agree on anything, let alone act on it. This is one thing that the mainstream anti-conspiracy folks are completely right about.
I'm a global top-50-university-credentialed expert in Information Technology who majored in System Design and has worked for a wide range of companies of different sizes, in multiple industries (education, remote work platforms, social media, banking/finance), in multiple countries including in highly political areas like crypto... So the "trust the experts" folk can trust me when it comes to information flows and system design...
This is some pseudo-profound Third Way radical centrist horseshit.
> Consider two categories of people:
> 1. The number of people in the general population who will object to Marxism.
> 2. The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect, and can speak to your very specific concerns about worker power and class conflict in a way that gets across how modern social theorists and economists give a more compelling and ethically coherent account of the way the world works, and do so patiently and thoroughly.
Really this is: let's consider one possibility, that I am right and that you are extreme and wrong. Everything is going well, except for the radical weirdos trying to stop me from doing what I want.
Congratulations on being a vegan. 20% of the population doesn't have health insurance.
I'm no Marxist, but this regurgitation of neolib talking points is not being smart enough to refute a Marxist. The problem with today's "Marxists" is that they don't know enough to defend their own positions, and react with rage when the holes in their absurdly shallow knowledge gleaned from social media posts, Jacobin articles and hipster podcasts are confronted by simple, direct, good faith questions that they don't have answers to. It's not that people aren't well-studied enough to refute their extremism.
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The good part of this: don't fall into the trap of believing the proposition "an idiot disagrees with me, so I must be right". That's solid advice, idiots believe countless true things and geniuses believe innumerable false things. The intelligence of a random interlocutor has nothing to do with the validity of their opinions, really, so it shouldn't serve as evidence one way or another. Generally, I try to pay attention to good arguments against my ideas, not good arguers.
I think the advice for who to listen to is very bad, though. He calls it being "slightly elitist", but his bar is beneath the ground. The example for discussing politics is knowing what the three branches of government are - I knew that when I was 8 and I don't think I had anything interesting to say about politics back then. I definitely couldn't have given a meaningful critique on the latest policy debate, and neither can anyone possessing merely the most basic knowledge of rudimentary facts on the topic.