Jophiel wrote:
It's a great argument that you're talking about concepts of which you have very shallow and selective knowledge because you're basing them off a rather shallow overview from a website and the cherry-picking of some conservative books reviews all delighted that someone said some less than stellar things about liberals.
They are concepts that match with my own observations over the last couple decades Joph. Long before I'd heard of Haidt and his study, heck, long before he did his study, I have been observing the very same thing that he discovered. I've been posting on this forum for probably the last 15+ years about how liberals and conservative are not just flip sides of the same coin, but actually speak a different language and place priorities on different things.
I'm not starting with "some guy on the internet says this so it must be true!". I get that for you, appeal to authority is super important, but for me, it's not. I started with my own observations of this behavior difference between liberals and conservatives, and have commented on it many times. Then, one day, I run across some link or article somewhere discussing the same thing I've noticed (and I'm not along among conservatives for noticing this btw), and it points to this study that Haidt did, where he basically confirmed the very same thing I'd been observing for years.
For me, its not about what Haidt thinks about the data, or his philosophical approach, or whatever. It's that this study confirms what I'd been observing myself. I frankly don't care what he writes about in his book in addition to this. The key point for me is that his study very firmly confirms something I'd already suspected based on my own observations. So yeah, I'm more than comfortable repeating my own observations and opinions, and then pointing at Haidts work as additional support for same.
How many times over how many years have I said that liberals and conservatives speak a different language? How many times have I posted about how I'll make an argument for a position I hold, only to either have the liberal response appear to be a complete lack of understanding of what I'm talking about, or flat out disbelief that my stated argument is *really* why I hold the position I do, followed up with something like "You're just saying that because it sounds better, but you
really believe... <insert strawman argument here>". This has been happening since long before I'd ever heard of Haidt.
This wasn't something I read about and then adopted Joph. I'm not taking Haidt's work and applying it. I'm starting with my own observations and only care about Haidt's work to the point that it provides one more data point in support of those observations. So yeah, reading the book is irrelevant to that.
Typically, you completely failed to understand this though. Which, I suppose, is just another data point in support of the observation. Liberals literally do no understand Conservative thinking. You insist on framing it within your own tightly bounded viewpoint. And when our positions don't match yours, you assume it's because we're "evil", or "stupid", or whatever, and it never occurs to you that we're looking at things in a completely different (and frankly broader) way.