America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era

As with distributed systems, coherence is hard and expensive. Being rational about something, as opposed to just rationalizing, is long, slow work. We don't live in an age of patience. But perhaps one will come again, and until then we can at least try to be exceptions.

You have to eat. If a burger is the best choice in front of you, it is reasonable to make that choice. Likewise, if a certain party is the best choice in front of you during an election, it is equally reasonable to choose it. Such decisions always require making tradeoffs.

However, the original comment seems to imply that it is not only a case of voting for a party, but also carrying out activism for that party. This is akin to you eating a burger while protesting with PETA proclaiming the evils of killing cattle. That may be still cognitive dissonance, but to a very different degree.

> In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as a mental phenomenon in which people unknowingly hold fundamentally conflicting cognitions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

It used to mean having behavior that contradicts your stated beliefs.

Now it seems to mean an apparent contradiction between behavior and belief if you ignore real distinctions.

I don't like because it weakens the word and loses an important concept -- we don't have a good way to express real hypocrisy vs. fallaciously construed hypocrisy.

I also said, "I like animals and I eat meat." I thought that was pretty clear, but if you'd like me to beat the point to death, the cognitive dissonance is between my fondness for animals, cows included, who I would never personally hurt and don't want to see killed, and my fondness for a good cheeseburger.

Could I come up with some contrived rationalization which somehow includes both? Sure, I have in the past, and many meat-eaters do. But ultimately I saw through my own bullshit here. Cows aren't essentially different than horses or dogs, but I eat cow while I'd be horrified to eat horse or dog. This doesn't make any logical or moral sense; it's just what I grew up with and am used to. When I think about it, I experience cognitive dissonance. For some that dissonance resolves into becoming vegetarians; for others they just refuse to think about it, or become dickish anti-vegetarians. I'm only different in that I have worked to get more comfortable with that sort of dissonance, as it's important to me to see things as clearly as I can.

I also cannot build trains or houses, but I am an ardent supporter of a rain-proof roof.

Ok. Now try that sentence with "leg of a dog". Does that still feel reasonable? I think the difference isn't that one is more moral, it's that one is more familiar.

I also don't think he was talking about activists. There are plenty of "hardcore MAGA" types who are pretty passive about it. And even there that doesn't necessarily involve cognitive dissonance. I know plenty of people who vote for Democrats that are able to oppose it on certain particulars while still deciding it's the best voting option. But I think MAGA in particular is a cult of personality, which is very hard to justify intellectually.

Yes. If dog legs are readily available in the store then sure.

Most people in developed countries are not in a situation where if they do not eat the food in front of them now, they will starve. Nearly every grocery store should have things like tofu, lentil, beans, etc easily available. It may be most convenient, or most delicious, or something like that but vegetarianism and plant based are both very viable options for most of the developed world at this point.

Voting for a candidate in a 2 party system is not comparable, as there is literally not another viable choice in most cases.

    For how can you compete,
    Being honor bred, with one
    Who were it proved he lies
    Were neither shamed in his own
    Nor in his neighbors' eyes;

    -- W B Yeats, "To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing"

There isn't the option to micromanage gov policies, there are two options taken as package deals - red or blue.

MAGA react to questions like this as Dems react to questions like "what is a woman?".

EDIT: to be clear, they react as if the inconvenient question is in bad faith.

It was kinda too weird to do it at home, but he was really curious.

If you'd like a different example that gets the same feeling, try substituting something else considered treif in your culture, like "roasted eyeballs" or "a human hand". My point being that people who are used to eating some kinds of meat see it as perfectly reasonable, but that has a lot to do with what they've been socialized to. In contrast, raised in vegetarian cultures often find eating any meat equally horrific. Which is the position I find intellectually most rational.

If that's the best choice in front of me, sure. I'm not going to starve to death just because it is dog. Are you?

> I also don't think he was talking about activists.

There was said to be support. That requires activism of some sort. You don't have to gather in the streets in mass promotion, wear certain colored hats, or fly party flags, but there has to be some kind of activity to suggest that the support is there. That isn't someone quietly eating a burger (or dog leg) in the corner.

A person can vote for a party while not agreeing with every one of their platform points. They can also vote for a party and then criticize it later for not following through. As long as they're honest about the divergence and can justify it as an overall better choice, it's not hypocrisy, just being an adult.

The hypocrisy comes in when somebody claims to hold beliefs, votes for a party, and then either ignores a contradiction or spouts the new party line.

There’s nothing wrong with fundamentally valuing life but also consuming it for sustenance. I’m guessing you wouldn’t vote for a law to torture cows while also saying you value a cow’s life.

That is essentially what the outdoorsmen are doing when voting for a politician that’s trying to remove environmental protections.

Horse is good, and while they are noble and majestic, so are cows (which are also cute to boot). I think the same of fish, and while less cuddly, I still feel a tiny bit conflicted about taking one's life just to eat when I do it.

Dogs are family for me. I'd probably be OK with wolf or coyote or similar.

I don't begrudge anyone how they want to align their morals with how and what they eat.

We were talking about making tradeoffs amid the choices available to you, where a burger was supposed, for the sake of discussion, to be the best choice available. I assume you haven't randomly changed the subject.

If you can choose between a hamburger and a dog leg, then, sure, a hamburger, at least to my taste, would be the better choice. I would choose it. But that doesn't mean I would never eat a dog leg. Where the dog leg is the best choice, why wouldn't you eat it?

My goal is to get others to realize that cognitive dissonance is not an us vs them thing. I freely grant that MAGA followers, as part of a cult of personality, are notably worse. But it's a human problem.

Does that clear it up for you?

Likewise, I am pro cleaning shit out of places. I prefer when someone else does it.

My point is that everybody experiences cognitive dissonance. Eating meat is a convenient example, because almost nobody reading this has no other choice, and almost nobody here hates animals (or at least will admit to it).

I'm not interested in pursing weird desert-island hypotheticals where eating a dog is the "best choice". If you are, godspeed, but it's unrelated to the point I was making.

That is what I was talking about. You replied to it. Why would you reply if you had nothing to add to it?

> My point is that everybody experiences cognitive dissonance.

That point was already made earlier in this thread. For what reason does it need to be pointed out again?

> I'm not interested in pursing weird desert-island hypotheticals where eating a dog is the "best choice".

You submitted the idea of the dog leg. Why would you introduce it if you don't want to talk about it?

This has only increased as public discourse is replaced with unyielding rhetoric and asymmetric slogan-flinging.

Or you could look at why you wouldn't kill a cow. For me, I would feel pretty awful about it. I think, for example, about the time I had to take a dog in to be put down. It was necessary, and there was no other choice. But it was fucking awful to take that dog in and have it killed. Cows are lovely animals in person, and I would feel like I was betraying one to kill it.

So for me there would be a lot of cognitive dissonance generated by killing a cow to get food when I have plenty of less murdery ways to get food. I avoid a lot of that dissonance by outsourcing the job, but some of it's still there.

Meaning that after you've weighed all the tradeoffs, you determine one of the available choices is your best option. Making tradeoffs was already spoken to. I don't think that is a foreign concept to the HN crowd, is it? Engineering is all about managing tradeoffs.

> Nearly every grocery store should have things like tofu, lentil, beans, etc easily available.

None of them are perfectly equivalent to the burger, thus tradeoffs have to be made if you choose tofu over a burger. If satiation is your only goal, then it may not matter, but most people don't eat in that kind of vacuum. They will have a long list of properties they want to fulfill with their food, with no food item perfectly satisfying all of them, hence the need to determine what one is willing to give up.

> Voting for a candidate in a 2 party system is not comparable, as there is literally not another viable choice in most cases.

I guess I don't see how your math is mathing. In my world, 2 implies that you have at least two choices (you could argue that not voting, spoiling the ballot, etc. are also choices, but we can ignore them for now). That means one of the choices you can deem as the best choice.

Just running with Americans here, because that's what I'm most familiar with, but Americans are happy to eat burgers and would be horrified to eat dog. They are also happy to eat burgers but would generally be horrified by the killing of the cow. This is not because there's any major difference between cattle and dogs; they're both cute, sociable mammals that raise adorable young. This isn't a rational position, and Americans who think at all about it experience cognitive dissonance.

Because you replied to me in a spirit of contradiction while apparently missing my point. I had some hope of clearing that up, but I see now that was a mistake.

There is a major difference: Dogs have been deemed workers, thus eating them is seen as a threat to one's livelihood. Same reason Americans won't eat horses. You can't plow the fields tomorrow if you eat the horse tonight, so to speak. It has been an imperative that these animals be off limits for consumption. In other parts of the world where the working animals differ, they have no qualms about eating dogs and horses, but may not eat other animals.

Well I recognize the issue and still experience a feeling of dissonance. Indeed, I work to be able to be tolerant of that feeling, because I think it's important in pursuing deeper understanding.

If you have a better term I'm all for it. But I think the "unknowingly" there is meant more as the general case rather than an absolute limit on the term.

Historically, ~100%. I considered caveating that while it is far less true today, the transition is still relatively recent and cultural norms haven't caught up yet, but I assumed you would have the capacity to figure that out on your own. My bad for assuming.

For the sake of my understanding, are you trying to suggest that you didn't make a point by, counterintuitively and contradictorily, telling us that you made a point? Or what is it that you are trying to do here?

I know comparisons are a tempting tool, since they're a very effective way of communicating a lot of information and, more importantly, an impression very economically. But part of what made the holocaust so horrible is that people were being treated like animals. It's like trying to argue that dogs should be kept inside by saying "What if you made your toddler sleep outside in a dog house?", it's a comparison that defeats itself.

If your goal is to feel righteous on the internet and demonstrate your strong love for animals, by all means proceed. If your goal is to change hearts and minds, reconsider your rhetoric; you'll have much more luck if you tune it to people that don't already agree with you,

With context, it’s simply “we should not eat animals we keep as pets”, where “we” needs to be contextualized to the person and culture. I keep dogs as pets, and therefore should not eat them. Other people don’t keep dogs as pets and are free to eat them.

More generally, we shouldn’t kill things we love. Pets are loved, and shouldn’t be killed for food. Farmed animals are a means to an end, not an object of affection.

Other contexts apply too, for the pedantic. Starvation is a context that would make eating pets okay, so on and so forth.

A lot of morality is contextual. If a good friend is going through a break up, I should care and be supportive. If a stranger like Taylor Swift is going through a break up, I have no moral obligation to care or be supportive (though it would be kind to do so anyways). Morality is contextualized by my relationship to that person.

Why? I'm not advocating for killing humans but before the modern era it was common for people to own chicken which the kids would love as pets but you gotta eat, so the beloved chicken would get killed and eaten.

Sounds more like a modern luxury rather than a ground truth.

> part of what made the holocaust so horrible is that people were being treated like animals. It's like trying to argue that dogs should be kept inside by saying "What if you made your toddler sleep outside in a dog house?", it's a comparison that defeats itself.

"In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka"

– Isaac Bashevis Singer

"I believe as long as man tortures and kills animals, he will torture and kill humans as well—and wars will be waged—for killing must be practiced and learned on a small scale".

– Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz

I've read a few accounts of farmers who didn't feel that way and talked about how sad they were sending the animals for slaughter, but they still did it.

There was a TV show ages ago where this guy decided to film one cow for it's life and then cook the meat. They showed the film and then he was just crying and the chef was starting to cook and be sympathetic.

Or something like https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-50986683

I'm not a vegetation but I feel like I am really pushing something out of my mind to eat meat, so it is a cognitive dissonance.

What exactly is meant to be a similar problem here that exists depending on the answer to that question?

I don't know what you are asking here.

"What is a woman?" Should be a fair question if "trans women are women" is taken to be true.

> What exactly is meant to be a similar problem here that exists depending on the answer to that question?

The point is the when the question is asked, it isn't answered, and treated as being asked in bad faith.

The reason is any answer given is likely to be a problem (i.e. offend someone) so it's simply avoided.

It's maybe reasonable to avoid "gotcha" questions, but some questions (i.e. on the basic premise of your position) shouldn't be so.

"I believe we should protect the environment" "But your supported political candidate wants to rollback legislation which would specifically protect the waterways and forests you claim are important from industrial dumping of toxic chemicals" is rather more relevant. Like that's a question which needs an answer, because the positions are mutually contradictory.

What contradictory position is being not answered by "what is a woman?"

"What is a woman?" Should be a fair question if "trans women are women" is taken to be true.

> For example, "we're building a bridge"

This ("What is a woman?") is a famous question, so I thought the context was well known.

Sen. Blackburn asked it of a Supreme Court nominee, and there is a documentary of the same name and topic.

> Like that's a question which needs an answer, because the positions are mutually contradictory.

The positions yes, but to quote myself:

"there are two options taken as package deals - red or blue"

> What contradictory position is being not answered by "what is a woman?"

have you followed the context of why this is brought up?:

> MAGA react to questions like this as Dems react to questions like "what is a woman?".

> EDIT: to be clear, they react as if the inconvenient question is in bad faith.

In other words, they support whatever their candidate does, whether their positions actually agree with it or not.