• Gsus4
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    Do you consider biases hierarchical or all horizontally equivalent? Because believing in a core of grounding facts and agreeing on basic principles is what allows you to agree, disagree and to communicate. If you go around saying nothing means anything in an equivalent manner, you just explode social cohesion in exchange for very little.

    If you take a hierarchical approach, people can deviate from convention (what has brought us here) as much as they are willing and have the time to read up and explore, but always with a way to pull back into safety at a less abstract layer where more people recognize each other’s positions.

    E.g. you may debate gender definitions if you are settled on the idea of civic rights, human rights. Do you think that makes you a civic rights “conservative”? But civic and human rights rest on an already high abstraction level that depends on people being well-fed, educated, an economic system that works in practice at scale, etc.