I am once again reminded today at the dissonance between technical thinking about how the world works and tribal reflex thinking. One can make the exact same statement in either technical jargon or political jargon. However, people react completely differently to the two. 1/
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When you make a statement in technical jargon, say in the jargon of economics, you'll get little emotional reaction, and at worst some sort of soft agreement. If you phrase the exact same idea in current political jargon, you get a vehement, polarized response. 2/
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Part of this distinction is probably that far fewer people really understand the technical version. Part of it is also that even those who would understand often won't take the trouble to unpack the consequences of the statement. But I think it may go further than that. 3/
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I have a suspicion (though I have low epistemic confidence in it) that the technical comment engages people's intellects and the "political" phrasing induces a knee-jerk reflex reaction based on what people think other members of their tribe believe. 4/
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Again, this is just a suspicion. And I don't want to give the impression that I suspect there's any conscious intentionality about how such a reaction goes; it's clearly not an intentional reaction. 5/
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But as weak evidence, I note the propensity of people to seek out different political jargon for the same ideas. That may be linked to it. If so, it may be partially an attempt to seek language that does not inspire the same reflex reaction. 6/
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I think that associational thinking and propositional thinking probably are qualitatively different. Associational thinking is "this sounds like that" and works better with more vivid/emotional words. When marketers say "nobody hears the word 'not'" they mean associationally.
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