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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1435 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 2, 2025

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Why is it that a person can prefer someone who disagrees with them politically on more items than someone who disagrees on fewer items that are a strict subset of the other person's disagreements, so that it cannot be explained by priority of items?

Let me give a toy diagram to clarify. Suppose we have six areas where the people in question can disagree: ABCDEF. Now, if Alice cares mostly about A, I can see her preferring Bob, who agrees with her on A, but disagrees on B-F, over Carol, who agrees on B-F but disagrees on A. But what I'm talking about is when Bob disagrees with Alice on all of A-F, while Carol agrees with Alice on ABC and disagrees on DEF. Carol's disagreements with Alice are a strict subset of Bob's disagreements with Alice, so there's no way of prioritizing items that should make Alice prefer Bob over Carol…

…and yet, I've found people who express exactly this sort of preference. What is this?

You're assuming people can only disagree in six areas.

It may well be that the underlying value-set that shows A-C (but not D-F) also expresses !G, whereas the underlying value-set that shows A (but not B-F) also expresses G - and the person in question values G highly.

This goes doubly so when G vs !G is something that is unlikely to be publicly visible for one reason or another.

(This assumes there is only one such value-set. In actuality it's more like "is heavily correlated with".)

There are probably hidden links between the items. Consider "The government shouldn't subsidize college" vs. "The government shouldn't subsidize college for white people" vs. "The government should subsidize college". That's 61% in agreement vs. 0%, right?

Reading downthread, social issues vs. government size don't have as clear of a link as equality under the law, but it's easy enough to come up with a few that wouldn't make it into normal conversation. Maybe: Small conservatism is "don't take people's money", large progressivism is "give people money", large conservatism is "give businesses peoples' money" and small progressivism is "abandon the core functions of government".

Are you thinking of near and far groups?

Because usually they have other things than their opinion in common, for example class, upbringing, faith, worldview, sex, hobbies, interests and so on.

Most intellectual online reactionaries would find discussing politics with a leftist like Sam Kriss or a liberal like Scott Alexander (both of whom are intelligent, very familiar with online political debate, twitter dissident right arguments, are well read etc) more entertaining than discussing it with a random intellectually disappointing groyper who can only reshare the same 10 /pol/ infographics.

Isn’t that the heretic-heathen, traitor-enemy, outgroup-fargroup distinction?

Probably some of it. But when we add in, say, Dave, who is the opposite of Carol, and agrees with Alice on DEF and disagrees with her on ABC, and Alice thinks Dave is indeed preferable to Bob — rather than a heretic/traitor/outgroup — this can't be the whole story.

Let's see if I can make a table for this:

￢ABC ABC
￢DEF Bob Carol
DEF Dave Alice

Where Alice's order of preference for the other parties is Dave > Bob > Carol, rather than something like Dave > Carol > Bob (that makes more sense in terms of preferring agreement), or even Bob > Dave > Carol (that prizes the heathen/enemy/fargroup Bob over the heretics/traitors/outgroups Dave and Carol).

Alice is worried Carol might be a prion. She needs to be either refolded correctly like Dave or completely denaturalized like Bob.

Are A-F correlated in any meaningful way? I prefer the interlocutor that just disagrees with me in a consistent, predictable way to the guy that says, "I like to think through each issue" and winds up with an incoherent dog's breakfast of views.

In the case I'm thinking of, yes. Here, "ABC" stand for social issues, "DEF" for economic/government size issues. Specifically, I'm referring to certain "small government conservatives" who express a preference for "big government social progressives" — whom these same conservatives regularly call "socialists" or even "communists" — over "big government social conservatives."

Sounds like the object-level positions are secondary to some underlying value or ethos that is perceived to be shared with Bob but not Carol. In Walterodim's read, this value would probably be "logical consistency." But it could just as well be a certain type of class consciousness: both anarcho-libertarians and socialists have a kind of working-class, artisanal sensibility that values the individual worker's control over what he creates. Or a perceived character feature: maybe they're small-government conservative because they value tight communities of mutual aid, which socialists could also be perceived as chasing even if they go a bit astray with it.

Because people aren't rational. Carol probably smells better, or Bob looks a little creepy.

"Carol" and "Bob" are meant to be stand-ins for groups more than specific individuals — and you got them reversed — but that does kind of fit what I've observed, in that part of disapproving of "Carol" despite her being less in opposition than "Bob" is that "Carol" has a bad reputation, while "Bob" has a lot of PR on his side (see my reply to Walterodim above).

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