Politics is interesting from a meta standpoint because if there are millions of people taking a political standpoint different from yours, the odds are quite strong that there are people who are well-informed with good intentions who have thought through their position in-depth and have reached a different conclusion than you have. It's also obviously a place where humans act the most like herd animals. So when you find a really smart person who has a different opinion yet wants to know more, it's an opportunity for both of you to test out your own reasoning skills.
This can be quite fascinating and intellectually humbling. Instead of viewing politics as something for dumb people who want to clan (which it can be for many), you get a personal feel for how much each of us relies on definitions and language that prevents us from doing much introspection. And if it's true in the political arena, it's certainly true in all of the other parts of our lives.
But that's just the first step of the journey. It leads naturally to questions like "How do we 'know' things?" which is a great adventure on its own. Eventually you lead to questions like "How do people of vastly different cultures and background communicate on anything? If I were dropped in the middle of a neanderthal tribe 40k years ago, could each of us learn the other's language and culture? If so, how?"
You end up with a profound sense of ignorance, but that's okay because most stuff works most of the time and we don't have to go around poking at the foundations of knowledge simply to drive to the grocery store. But then you see one of us tech folks make some dramatic and overly-confident statement like "C++ is obviously better than Java" and you think across the panopolpy of human experience you're able to have a good conversation without feeling personally threatened.
Intellectual humility is not only learnable, it's the first step on a grand adventure of realizing where we all fit into the universe.
There was a study sometime ago, about using a PET scan, to gauge responses about various topics, and the majority of the folks used the same part of their brain for both politics and sports teams.
There has been a lot of research that points to the brain acting first, then justifying whatever actions it took.
I believe this to be the natural state of affairs. I think the brain is as maximally lazy as it can be. This translates to clanning with a large-ish group of people, then trusting that group to make a good collective decision. Act immediately on social observation and emotion and then if absolutely necessary come back and revisit the action to figure out "why" you did it.
If this is the way it works, then the default viewpoint regarding anything we do or say should be highly suspicious from a rational standpoint. It also means that we tech folks have spent a lot of time and effort trying to create artificial intelligence that reasons from logic to action, the complete opposite of the way real intelligence works.
This can be quite fascinating and intellectually humbling. Instead of viewing politics as something for dumb people who want to clan (which it can be for many), you get a personal feel for how much each of us relies on definitions and language that prevents us from doing much introspection. And if it's true in the political arena, it's certainly true in all of the other parts of our lives.
But that's just the first step of the journey. It leads naturally to questions like "How do we 'know' things?" which is a great adventure on its own. Eventually you lead to questions like "How do people of vastly different cultures and background communicate on anything? If I were dropped in the middle of a neanderthal tribe 40k years ago, could each of us learn the other's language and culture? If so, how?"
You end up with a profound sense of ignorance, but that's okay because most stuff works most of the time and we don't have to go around poking at the foundations of knowledge simply to drive to the grocery store. But then you see one of us tech folks make some dramatic and overly-confident statement like "C++ is obviously better than Java" and you think across the panopolpy of human experience you're able to have a good conversation without feeling personally threatened.
Intellectual humility is not only learnable, it's the first step on a grand adventure of realizing where we all fit into the universe.