Thank you! Super interesting! I also find Jonathan Haidt’s Elephant and Rider model really useful for thinking about this.
In this model, the Elephant is emotional and associative. The Rider is analytical and rationalizes after the fact. People’s judgments are always driven by the Elephant first (see also the book by the Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow")
That’s a good analogy. To take it further, what I’m talking about is 100% pure elephant charging through the bush after knocking off its rider, and joining the herd of other elephants who have found themselves in the same predicament- not one has the self awareness to go back and look for its rider or consider that perhaps there was a symbiotic relationship in their business together.
I largely agree with your distinction between politics as social identity and politics as utility. I especially like the line that “the partisan is speaking the language of aesthetics while the pragmatist is speaking the language of utility.” That’s a useful distinction as a model.
But I wonder whether the essay itself demonstrates some of the category problems it’s describing.
Right from the beginning we get “the hyper-partisan mind,” “the tribal mind,” “the pragmatist,” “centrists,” etc., without much definition of who actually belongs in these categories or where their boundaries are.
The problem isn’t categorization itself. We can’t really think or communicate without categories. The discipline is remembering that the map isn’t the territory.
The Dewey Decimal System can lead you to the book. It can’t read the book for you.
A supermarket needs sections because putting the frozen food in the cereal aisle would be ridiculous. But there’s enormous variation among the things inside each section. Categories help us locate and identify patterns; they become dangerous when the category becomes a complete explanation of the individual thing inside it.
That’s why I wouldn’t turn “the partisan speaks the language of aesthetics while the pragmatist speaks the language of utility” into two different kinds of people. The same person can do both — sometimes in the same conversation.
I’d apply the same standard to objectivity. Objectivity isn’t a personality trait you possess. It’s a discipline you practice. And part of that discipline is recognizing that you’re a subject with incomplete information, experiences, preferences, incentives and biases.
You can’t simply divide the room into “I’m objective; those people are tribal.” The moment you do that, you’ve created another identity category — and potentially insulated yourself from examining your own assumptions.
That’s actually where I’d like to see the idea of “Category Error Projection” pushed further. Turn the lens around. What categories am I creating? Why did I create them? What evidence would cause me to revise them? Where am I projecting? Where am I engaging in aesthetics rather than utility while believing I’m doing the opposite?
Categories should be provisional tools for navigating reality, not substitutes for reality itself.
Otherwise I’m not sure what practical problem the framework solves. If its purpose is to improve civic discourse and practical government, it should help us interrogate our own thinking at least as rigorously as it helps us diagnose everybody else’s.
And maybe we shouldn’t split aesthetics from utility in the first place. Form follows function, but function also shapes form. If we’re trying to engineer better politics or a better social fabric we probably need both. Splitting those atoms apart may be the category error with the most explosive consequences.
Thank you! Super interesting! I also find Jonathan Haidt’s Elephant and Rider model really useful for thinking about this.
In this model, the Elephant is emotional and associative. The Rider is analytical and rationalizes after the fact. People’s judgments are always driven by the Elephant first (see also the book by the Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow")
That’s a good analogy. To take it further, what I’m talking about is 100% pure elephant charging through the bush after knocking off its rider, and joining the herd of other elephants who have found themselves in the same predicament- not one has the self awareness to go back and look for its rider or consider that perhaps there was a symbiotic relationship in their business together.
Very good.
Have restacked several times, with excerpts.
I largely agree with your distinction between politics as social identity and politics as utility. I especially like the line that “the partisan is speaking the language of aesthetics while the pragmatist is speaking the language of utility.” That’s a useful distinction as a model.
But I wonder whether the essay itself demonstrates some of the category problems it’s describing.
Right from the beginning we get “the hyper-partisan mind,” “the tribal mind,” “the pragmatist,” “centrists,” etc., without much definition of who actually belongs in these categories or where their boundaries are.
The problem isn’t categorization itself. We can’t really think or communicate without categories. The discipline is remembering that the map isn’t the territory.
The Dewey Decimal System can lead you to the book. It can’t read the book for you.
A supermarket needs sections because putting the frozen food in the cereal aisle would be ridiculous. But there’s enormous variation among the things inside each section. Categories help us locate and identify patterns; they become dangerous when the category becomes a complete explanation of the individual thing inside it.
That’s why I wouldn’t turn “the partisan speaks the language of aesthetics while the pragmatist speaks the language of utility” into two different kinds of people. The same person can do both — sometimes in the same conversation.
I’d apply the same standard to objectivity. Objectivity isn’t a personality trait you possess. It’s a discipline you practice. And part of that discipline is recognizing that you’re a subject with incomplete information, experiences, preferences, incentives and biases.
You can’t simply divide the room into “I’m objective; those people are tribal.” The moment you do that, you’ve created another identity category — and potentially insulated yourself from examining your own assumptions.
That’s actually where I’d like to see the idea of “Category Error Projection” pushed further. Turn the lens around. What categories am I creating? Why did I create them? What evidence would cause me to revise them? Where am I projecting? Where am I engaging in aesthetics rather than utility while believing I’m doing the opposite?
Categories should be provisional tools for navigating reality, not substitutes for reality itself.
Otherwise I’m not sure what practical problem the framework solves. If its purpose is to improve civic discourse and practical government, it should help us interrogate our own thinking at least as rigorously as it helps us diagnose everybody else’s.
And maybe we shouldn’t split aesthetics from utility in the first place. Form follows function, but function also shapes form. If we’re trying to engineer better politics or a better social fabric we probably need both. Splitting those atoms apart may be the category error with the most explosive consequences.