The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)

zahlman

> 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.)

stymaar

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.

gibbitz

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...

cgyvbunji

> 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.

miyoji

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.

jrflowers

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

pstuart

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

woodruffw

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.

hingler36

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.

ZoomZoomZoom

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.

beloch

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. --------- * It crosses both ways, BTW.

jongjong

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...

api

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.

NathanielBaking

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.

wisty

Freedom of association is kind of a mistake, as it encourages these bubbles to form.

kylecazar

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.

uiuihu

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.

card_zero

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.

pessimizer

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.

ajb

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.