Sloth was not the right answer
Love this post about the intersection of politics & culture -> Sloth was not the right answer
One of my strongest beliefs is that way too many people allow politics to play way too large a role in their emotional lives. Of course, elections matter. The world could be better and most potential improvements intersect with politics somehow. But the way we spend our energy on politics is poorly optimized for improving the world and well-optimized for sucking up all our time and making us miserable.
Sometimes I talk to relatives that I haven’t spoken to in months, and within minutes the conversation turns to politics. This never leads to arguments, thanks to my monk-like calm and empathy and impartiality. But no one ever seems to learn anything or shift their views and I feel sad and embarrassed that we aren’t talking about something deeper.
I hate it. In particular I hate how so much information is now slanted to support a particular view because slanted information gets engagement and so now people expect information to be slanted but de-slanting facts is hard so instead people have adopted this horrible strategy of filtering all information by first determining what “side” it comes from then finding lazy justifications or accept or reject it accordingly.
Once an issue has political salience, people seem to lose the ability to think rationally about it. Politics seems to impede the ability of good ideas to spread. This is not a good thing if you think the world needs complicated solutions.
I don’t think It could write it better.
