On Civility

User avatar
I Shrugged
Executive Member
Executive Member
Posts: 2062
Joined: Tue Dec 18, 2012 6:35 pm

Re: On Civility

Post by I Shrugged » Wed Aug 03, 2022 4:47 pm

Engineers, doctors, etc have that personality that demands data, citations, proof. Sometimes proof can’t be seen or even found. You have to decide what to do then.

To me, that kind of thinking can be a real limitation. But it works great if you are designing a bridge.

Economics, politics, and the actions and reactions of people to incentives and obstacles are pretty resistant to modeling and proof. If I wanted to design bridges, I’d want a bunch of engineers. If I wanted to understand people, I might listen to some different kinds of thinking. (If an engineer wanted to understand people, they’d probably look for a model or study.)
User avatar
I Shrugged
Executive Member
Executive Member
Posts: 2062
Joined: Tue Dec 18, 2012 6:35 pm

Re: On Civility

Post by I Shrugged » Wed Aug 03, 2022 4:55 pm

Pointedstick wrote:
Sun Jul 31, 2022 8:08 pm
It's easy to play the civility card, and I definitely think that's part of it, but I also see something else as the root cause.

This used to be the Permanent Portfolio forum, back in its early years. We were a bunch of oddballs connected together by our shared interest in this unconventional portfolio, approaching the topic from different perspectives, but bound together by the PP. Together we learned about the PP--how it works and why it works; about MMR and MMT; the relationship between gold and interest rates; safe withdrawal rates plotted against volatility; and about other topics related to financial resilience.

But eventually consensuses arose and those topics got played out. Some people even exited the PP, moving into "PP-like" portfolios, or conventional portfolios with a bit of gold added, or even totally un-PP-like portfolios (I'm in this group)

We'd all developed social relationships and had fun so we stuck around. But we needed new things to discuss--this being a discussion board. So over time we moved more and more more into politics. And there, the relationships we'd built up discussing PP topics became strained.

It's easy to be civil to people in the same tribe, and in the beginning were still "PP tribe," but as politics took over as the dominant topics of conversation, some increasingly identified within this community as "red tribe," "blue tribe," "yellow tribe," and so on. Retaining civility when interacting with people who you don't identify as a member of your tribe is much harder. It's a skill that must be learned and nurtured, not an impulse that comes naturally. Many of us have faltered at times, myself included. But it's important, because civility is the social lubricant that allows people of different mindsets to interact without coming away wanting to kill each other, in the same way that real lubricants keep intermeshing machine parts from grinding each other into metal shavings. It's an integral part of making it work. Try running an internal combustion engine without oil and see how long it works!

I want to hold up Mountaineer as a person who I think gets it right. He and I agree on a lot, but also disagree on a lot, yet we can have interesting discussions that are unlikely to convince the other of anything, and it remains cordial and fun. IMO a huge part of it is because Mountaineer has always been civil, tolerant, and courteous to me, and this encourages me to treat him likewise. If we want to be able to discuss diverse and political topics without our social fabric degrading, we all need to do more of that.

So I think as a community we are faced with two options:

1. Return to being a single-topic community, rallying around the PP with a much smaller relative volume of content in the off-topic section. This way we see each other as tribe-members and civility comes naturally.

2. Acknowledge the need to explicitly work on our civility and tolerance skills, so we can remain a heterogeneous community of oddballs with weird opinions and political positions without coming away hating one another or descending into mockery, disingenuousness, or crabby negativity.

I feel like I understand now why so many single-topic forums explicitly prohibit political discussions. Threading that needle sure is tough. But our core of frequent posters is relatively small, so I think we can actually succeed if enough of those people choose to embrace civility when they discuss politics that they make it into a cultural tenet that's followed by others.

I feel like the irony meter is pegged.
User avatar
Mark Leavy
Executive Member
Executive Member
Posts: 1950
Joined: Thu Mar 01, 2012 10:20 pm
Location: US Citizen, Permanent Traveler

Re: On Civility

Post by Mark Leavy » Wed Aug 03, 2022 10:42 pm

I Shrugged wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 4:55 pm
I feel like the irony meter is pegged.
I think our meters were synchronized. I got a good chuckle also.
And no disrespect to PointedStick. He's a good egg.
Kbg
Executive Member
Executive Member
Posts: 2815
Joined: Fri May 23, 2014 4:18 pm

Re: On Civility

Post by Kbg » Thu Aug 04, 2022 4:14 pm

I don’t really care what goes on in the politics section. That’s what it is for. Political views in the guise of investing approaches doubled down on with no evidence is completely annoying and counter productive to learning or growing wealth.

Gold is a poster child for this here and elsewhere. As an investment asset from a data perspective there’s almost nothing you can conclude about it other than it dances to its own tune and has weak correlation to most everything.
Kbg
Executive Member
Executive Member
Posts: 2815
Joined: Fri May 23, 2014 4:18 pm

Re: On Civility

Post by Kbg » Thu Aug 04, 2022 6:20 pm

Let's call this one...on extremism. (you should be able to access the link at least for a while)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-pr ... _permalink

I'm posting not because of the topic, but for the main point of the article:

"Most important, there is a political tradition in democracy that consists of these words: “That’s asking too much.” Don’t ask people for more than they can give. Don’t go too far, don’t lose by asking for a sweeping decision when people will be willing to go step by step. Ask for as much as they can give, pull them toward your vision, but don’t be afraid of going slow and steady, be afraid of overloading the grid. That’s part of what happened in Kansas: They were asked to take a step they thought extreme, and they don’t like extreme."

And the above is THE difference between a debate, scoring points and actually getting something done that moves the ball in a direction you would like. My personal experience in life is that anyone who is uncompromising has never led anything or anyone and if they have, it didn't last long for them.
Post Reply