Rand vs. Evolutionary Psychology - Norms promoting tolerance and honesty

Bryan Caplan at EconLog wrote something worth reading.

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Rand vs. Evolutionary Psychology: Part 2, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty: "If Rand really wanted to build an individualist sub-culture, she would have done so in an evolutionarily informed way. If people naturally care about the opinions of others, jumping on people is a good way to get dishonest conformity, but a bad way to get an honest exchange of ideas. Instead, an individualist sub-culture must be built upon tolerance and honesty. I'd suggest three key norms:

1. Don't think less of people who sincerely disagree.

2. Do think less of people who insincerely agree.

3. Do think less of people who think less of people who sincerely disagree.

I don't claim that these norms are easy. It's tough for humans to follow them perfectly. But they're do-able - and given human nature, they're self-reinforcing. In fact, these guidelines are pillars of the legendary GMU lunch. Our tradition is now in its thirteenth year, and I'm proud to say that unlike the Objectivists, we've never purged a member."

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People moan about overcoming bias - but the unstated is that they bemoan the bias in other people. Disciplines that actually allow one to shed personal bias are very uninteresting to most people. The disciplines that actually allow an individual to shed his own biases are practically the only interesting things in the world.

Liberals Are Useless

Cover of Rules for Radicals

I am not sure what to think about Saul Alinsky. Forgive me for temporarily getting hysterical, I will pick up my argument after this point: our murderers most resemble their murderers, no how different we are from them. OK, tone done the hysteria, pick up the argument - those who would put politics over truth and those who would use propaganda most resemble the dissemblers on the other side.

It is better to be a radical than a liberal, because it is true what Jonathan Schwarz says "Conservatives like people with their hearts, liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts". But being that radical will be a much more quiet and background affair than a straightforward aping of Che Guevara's example (I am using Che Guevara's name just as a placeholder for any infamous radical you could choose. Knock yourself out, and pick your favorite infamous radical.)

Because the internal struggle will be the limiting factor on the care you will provide.

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Conservatives are more likely to use approaches that aid the exceptional individual. Liberals are more likely to use approaches that aid the marginalized group. True care to humans will synthesize both, even thought the two are often quite contradictory. When you need to synthesize the contradictory, you have no short cut, you have to explicitly synthesize the contradictory. Like far from shore, rowing a boat and bailing out a boat at the same time - if you stop either, you are lost - and no efficiency claimed on one of the pair can make up for the absence of the other.

The Eastern Philosophies often explicitly synthesize the contradictory. How mature and wise.

Liberals Are Useless - Tiny Revolution by Jonathan Schwarz: "
Chris Hedges said it, not me:

I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.

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I've thought something along these lines many times myself. In Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky says: 'liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts.' This is an absolutely critical insight about human nature, one which would change the life courses of many young liberals if they heard it. This may explain why it seems to appear almost nowhere online.
The one thing I'd add is that conservatives actually do like people with their hearts. So I think the saying should go: 'Conservatives like people with their hearts, liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts.'
—Jonathan Schwarz
"