What You Can’t SayMike Rappaport

Extremely interesting article, courtesy of the comments at the eye opening Overcoming Bias Blog, on What You Can’t Say.  Here are a couple of excerpts, but they do don’t do the whole article justice:

[Are our opinions the result of moral fashion?]

Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to expressin front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no,you might want to stop and think about that.  If everythingyou believe is something you’re supposed to believe, couldthat possibly be a coincidence?  Odds are it isn’t.  Odds areyou just think whatever you’re told.

The other alternative would be that you independently consideredevery question and came up with the exact same answers thatare now considered acceptable.  That seems unlikely, becauseyou’d also have to make the same mistakes.  Mapmakersdeliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they cantell when someone copies them.  If another map has the samemistake, that’s very convincing evidence.

Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainlycontains a few mistakes.  And anyone who makes the same mistakesprobably didn’t do it by accident.  It would belike someone claiming they had independently decided in1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.

And this bit:

When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get thewrong answers on tests.  But when people are bad at open-mindednessthey don’t know it.  In fact they tend to think the opposite.Remember, it’s the nature of fashion to be invisible.  It wouldn’twork otherwise. 

These two points remind me of many liberal people I know in New York (and elsewhere): they get their ideas from liberal opinion leaders, and they hardly realize it, and they believe they’re open-minded, even though they won’t brook disagreement with their adopted views.

Of course, it is hard to see our own faults, so who knows what others would say of me.  Of course, sometimes the others don’t agree.  Some people call me a squish — a moderate or compromiser — while others think me an extremist (or put more charitably a strong advocate of certain principles).   I actually think in a way both are true.