The Elephant Problem - Blindfolded know-it-alls arguing from their perspective don't see the bigger picture.

[doodoocaca]

Many old parables exist of blind men groping an elephant, each convinced that they truly understood what it was, instead of discussing amongst themselves (and taking different perspectives) to understand they only ever touched a part of it. They also, apparently, wouldn't listen to a sighted person telling them "It's a fucking elephant, dumbass." The point of "if you only see part, you don't understand the whole, especially if you won't listen to people" was well made and lasts through the ages.

This mostly stayed unchanged for a long time, though now the blind idiots argue about how 'valid' they are, and bigoted the other perspectives are, and jostle to see who can get their head the farthest up its ass.

It should be obvious that only letting one idiot-groper dictate how to see the world is going to lead to problems. Even the most well spoken tail-grabber isn't going to give any meaningful insight to someone touching the ear, though maybe the twit with the trunk might agree a little. So, too, does saying only one ideology is correct, and the others are evil, or bad, or whatever the fuck, lead to problems!

First and foremost, the person touching an ear is going to be incredulous that someone touching the tail says it smells like shit. You clearly smell grass and whatever else the elephant eats. To you, the elephant moves sideways, not away from you. So, too, would someone with a different perspective and different life experiences and different values just not 'get' what someone else says. The suggestion that you don't perceive what you perceive is ridiculous, and you'd also get pissed off if you were told you're somehow wrong despite the obviousness presented to you.

There's no literal elephant, but it seems we have two dominant factions making people pretend to see the same thing they do. While it seems some people actually do change values depending on what's dominant where they live, the likes of us do not. I'd also argue that's bad to erase different points of view and value sets in the interest of fitting in and serving some long dead asshole who founded an ideology. The solution is obvious: everyone's right about a part of the problem, but the truth is the entire thing, everyone's points of view in concert.

"But plussy, this isn't an elephant, it's society." OK, fine, let me make an example out of crime:
Libs look at fairness and equity more than anything else. They have externalized loci of control. They will see everything as arising from being in a bad situation, be it poverty or a lack of education, oppression or trauma. The more recent phenomenon of ascribing certain opinions to willful evil bigoted whatever is more of a woke thing, but whatever.
Conservatives also look at personal responsibility, purity, and loyalty. They have internalized loci of control. They see many things as coming out of how good your decisions are.

I'd say that those are different perspectives of the issue, and none are complete, since you can't see all the way around with just one perspective but a synthesis might be: some things are in your control, but others are not; being uneducated means you're less likely to make good decisions, but life experience will make up for it if you have other opportunities to go try. You shouldn't be punished for life for fucking up once, nor allowed to fail due to a lack of support and reduced to just one shot if you're poor. However, if you're dangerous to others, yeah, you should be prevented from hurting people.

This isn't to say some perspectives aren't retarded: "everyone's a victimizer but me, I'm the victim and always right, disagreement with me is willful evil" is the mumbled bullshit from someone with his head up the elephant's ass.

So, how do we shut up those assholes, and get everyone else to take a step back and listen long enough to realize we're all looking at different pieces of the problem, and thus each only have pieces of the solution? How do we build a synthesis of what people have to offer to make a complete solution and have a complete understanding, instead of merely switching between partial understanding and partial solutions endlessly, always chasing our tails when the blind spots of a dominant ideology create predictable problems for the next to fix, only to make its own mistakes and start the shit show again?

 

[PipTheAlchemist]

The problem with elephants is that they're not rhinoceroses

 

[Leftists=Pedophiles]

Don't drag elephants into this, they're cute.

 

[DDR Yoga]

OK then. Tell me one thing each man is correct about.

Hasan Piker
Stefan Molyneux
Tariq Nasheed

 

[gang weeder]

Nice schizo rant.

I'd say that those are different perspectives of the issue, and none are complete, since you can't see all the way around with just one perspective but a synthesis might be: some things are in your control, but others are not; being uneducated means you're less likely to make good decisions, but life experience will make up for it if you have other opportunities to go try. You shouldn't be punished for life for fucking up once, nor allowed to fail due to a lack of support and reduced to just one shot if you're poor. However, if you're dangerous to others, yeah, you should be prevented from hurting people.

I mean sure that is a plausible synthesis. However the actual policy solution to crime does not involve some sort of shitty compromise between two equally valid narratives. When it comes to actual policy the conservative policy works and the liberal one doesn't. If you actually want to lower crime as much as possible you therefore maximize the conservative viewpoint and minimize the liberal, up to and including complete eradication of the liberal viewpoint if possible.

Most of politics is like this. Liberal narratives usually start from a grain of truth, but always wander off into nonsense land fairly quickly from there.

The problem with the elephant analogy is that we actually don't need everyone's personal experiences in order to understand everything. You probably want input from more than one person, because no one is perfect so a single person is bound to be wrong about something, but you certainly want to avoid casting the net too wide as well. So if you wanted to design a bridge you might want a team of engineers rather than trusting only a single engineer. But you wouldn't want like, equal amounts of input from thousands of people the majority of which aren't even engineers. That would be a disaster.

And this is modern mass politics/"democracy." Most people are catastrophically bad at political/moral thinking and have no business even trying their hand at it. This includes all leftists. And then even out of the conservatards, you still probably wanna narrow it down to the cream of the crop.

 

[Ultrapenguin]

But why should the sighted people even bother getting involved? If the blind people and their followers are constantly at each others' throats over the details of some elephant, then they'll never get together to discuss, for example, how garbage the local blind population is treated and how if they organized they could do something about it.

It would be better to encourage infighting, or to go to them and claim "Hey look I'm an authority here, and the guy at the tusks is right. In fact you guys should pay a bunch of money to put up some reinforced fences (it's totally coincidental that the guy who owns the fencing business also happens to be my brother, btw). You can trust me, I have the whole picture, so anyone who disagrees or tries to tell you otherwise is ignorant and/or malicious."

The only reason your scenario could be remedied is because the blind men are capable of direct contact.
What if their information knowledge and messages were impersonally transferred and correlated by the sighted guy/s who have declared themselves the ultimate deciders of truth with views that inherently exist on a level above yours, and/or with self-interest at heart?

In our case the reason people have such virulently conflicting views about the societal elephant isn't because of a natural failure of accordance, it's because there's a lot of social/political/economic vested interest in keeping their arguments going, and arguments have become tied up in blind tribalism and advertisement of identity.

 

[Makhno]

Democracy is fucking stupid. Too many people got the right to vote who can be easily fooled. The issue has nothing to do with differing perspectives but the fact that in our current system misleading people and stoking their egotism is both profitable and an essential step for systematic political power. Many people don't even have agency over their own lives so to allow them to impact the outcome of the lives of others via voting is truly a crime against humanity. This is why our society has become so corrupt and retarded so quickly because most people, especially the stupid and degenerate, are easy to manipulate when you can control their access to content.

 

[Smug]

The point of "if you only see part, you don't understand the whole, especially if you won't listen to people" was well made and lasts through the ages.

The elephant analogy doesn’t exactly encourage listening to everyone else's opinions. When you think about it the blind people's descriptions were only useful insofar as their disagreement with each other suggested at least one of them wasn't right about it, but the sighted person could easily tell you the whole picture, so the blind people's opinions weren't relevant anymore.

It's a pretty elitist analogy now that I think about it. The takeaway I get from it is more like "make sure you see and understand the full picture as best as you can so you don't look like a blind fool when you open your mouth".

 

[draggs]

OP what is this fence sitting faggotry you're trying to peddle

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

Big Elephant has been trying to silence the truth for too long

 

[DDR Yoga]

The elephant analogy doesn’t exactly encourage listening to everyone else's opinions. When you think about it the blind people's descriptions were only useful insofar as their disagreement with each other suggested at least one of them wasn't right about it, but the sighted person could easily tell you the whole picture, so the blind people's opinions weren't relevant anymore.

It's a pretty elitist analogy now that I think about it. The takeaway I get from it is more like "make sure you see and understand the full picture as best as you can so you don't look like a blind fool when you open your mouth".

In other words, you have Destiny licking the elephant's leg, Vaush groping its cock, Hasan fondling it's trunk and Sean fellating one of its tusks.

And then you have Chris Langan standing 20 yards away thinking "This is why I don't get involved."

 

[doodoocaca]

OK then. Tell me one thing each man is correct about.

Hasan Piker
Stefan Molyneux
Tariq Nasheed

Easy.

Hasan probably has repeated at least a few good points Socialists have made, but also cringe and bullshit.
Stefan probably has repeated at least a few good points about what men are facing as society goes full-woke-tard even if it's gauche to suggest they have issues at all, but also actual cringe and bullshit.
Tariq has probably repeated at least a few good points about what black people are facing, but also cringe, bullshit, and his submissive gay fantasies about being BUILT for BWC.

Someone stuck on a leg probably has some insights on that leg you won't have over by the ear.

Quote's broke for you, and only you, and I'm too lazy to copy paste.

My brother in Christ, you're literally groping the leg and ignoring the trunk. However, you're not head-up-ass like a woketard, and I will give credit where due. I never said shitty compromise, nor did I mean that. I mean "do both." I'm not particularly interested in some pareto optimization of them because this is a hypothetical example.

This "one or the other, exclusive-or" mentality you take is unnecessary and likely inefficient. Yes, punish crime, yes, make dangerous people fuck off; why the fuck would you not realize "oh yeah poverty and a shit or no education makes people more likely to need to be punished, let's address that too."

Why not go after things from both ends? Is it some sort of a "myside good, yourside bad" thing? This isn't coke vs pepsi or ford vs chevy, this is "let's have fewer criminals to deal with, but deal with the ones we have to deal with, because shit sucks."

For what it's worth, I'm sliding right more and more, KF accelerated me, then the troonnageddon care of Keff and Liz Fong-Jones the sex pest rapist all but catapulted me further still. While, yes, decisively doing shit like locking up shitheads works, I'm not sold on not using prevention to go with our cure.

And this is modern mass politics/"democracy." Most people are catastrophically bad at political/moral thinking and have no business even trying their hand at it. This includes all leftists. And then even out of the conservatards, you still probably wanna narrow it down to the cream of the crop.

OK fuck it I'll quote this.

I almost entirely agree. I think a minority among the left have something to add, if only because they're not going to have the fixations or blinders someone on the right would. Again, the point is a synthesis, making use of that grain of salt, not "free passes to be a dipshit because of a paper bag test" or "drag queen story time." Fuck, no.

But why should the sighted people even bother getting involved? If the blind people and their followers are constantly at each others' throats over the details of some elephant, then they'll never get together to discuss, for example, how garbage the local blind population is treated and how if they organized they could do something about it.

It would be better to encourage infighting, or to go to them and claim "Hey look I'm an authority here, and the guy at the tusks is right. In fact you guys should pay a bunch of money to put up some reinforced fences (it's totally coincidental that the guy who owns the fencing business also happens to be my brother, btw). You can trust me, I have the whole picture, so anyone who disagrees or tries to tell you otherwise is ignorant and/or malicious."

The only reason your scenario could be remedied is because the blind men are capable of direct contact.
What if their information knowledge and messages were impersonally transferred and correlated by the sighted guy/s who have declared themselves the ultimate deciders of truth with views that inherently exist on a level above yours, and/or with self-interest at heart?

In our case the reason people have such virulently conflicting views about the societal elephant isn't because of a natural failure of accordance, it's because there's a lot of social/political/economic vested interest in keeping their arguments going, and arguments have become tied up in blind tribalism and advertisement of identity.

It's an allegory.

The point is most people tend to see through one lens and can't easily put themselves into another person's shoes or take another 'view' to see the world through. Put another way, most people have only one tint to their lenses at a time, many never changing.

Democracy is fucking stupid. Too many people got the right to vote who can be easily fooled. The issue has nothing to do with differing perspectives but the fact that in our current system misleading people and stoking their egotism is both profitable and an essential step for systematic political power. Many people don't even have agency over their own lives so to allow them to impact the outcome of the lives of others via voting is truly a crime against humanity. This is why our society has become so corrupt and retarded so quickly because most people, especially the stupid and degenerate, are easy to manipulate when you can control their access to content.

I agree. I think this is orthogonal to my point.

To elaborate, I think that most people, period, are not cut out to be meaningfully moral. They don't have any real mental agency; they just think how someone else told them to think, and not critically at all.

Among people who can do that, they should make sure to not have blinders on, and consider other points of view. No, I don't mean they should just not have any fixed positions, I simply mean to see all angles and not just the angles you want to look from.

The elephant analogy doesn’t exactly encourage listening to everyone else's opinions. When you think about it the blind people's descriptions were only useful insofar as their disagreement with each other suggested at least one of them wasn't right about it, but the sighted person could easily tell you the whole picture, so the blind people's opinions weren't relevant anymore.

It's a pretty elitist analogy now that I think about it. The takeaway I get from it is more like "make sure you see and understand the full picture as best as you can so you don't look like a blind fool when you open your mouth".

It's an allegory.

The point is the vast majority of people are proverbially blind and people who can actually see the big picture are able to 'see'. I find it odd that you're leaping to elitism (wtf?) when we're talking about having an understanding of the world that isn't overly tinted by any particular ideology. Why shouldn't you understand the world? Should you be less interested because someone might call you oblivious even if you actually are? WTF.

In other words, you have Destiny licking the elephant's leg, Vaush groping its cock, Hasan fondling it's trunk and Sean fellating one of its tusks.

And then you have Chris Langan standing 20 yards away thinking "This is why I don't get involved."

Most of our leaders are fully up its ass and the coomertroons are licking it's balls, to add to your lovely image.

To be a bit personal, I increasingly want to just go farm goats or whatever. I'm inclined to think Langan has the right idea.

 

[Smug]

It's an allegory.

You're right, my mistake.

The point is the vast majority of people are proverbially blind and people who can actually see the big picture are able to 'see'. I find it odd that you're leaping to elitism (wtf?)

The vast majority of people are proverbially blind and only the select few who can actually see the big picture (the elite, if you will) are able to 'see'. I'm not talking about 'elite' in terms of upper-class or anything, I was just using it in a general sense and making an off-handed comment.

when we're talking about having an understanding of the world that isn't overly tinted by any particular ideology.

I'm of the opinion that any 'understanding of the world (and our place in it)' which is a sufficiently big-picture, low-resolution sense to be thought of as 'seeing' your allegorical elephant, is an ideology itself. The one you're seemingly promoting is in line with an idea that all cultures/ideologies/etc. have some piece of the puzzle to provide, so to speak.
I disagree with that concept: I think some ideologies have nothing useful to bring to the table, or are even outright detrimental.

Why shouldn't you understand the world?

I never implied that you shouldn't.

Should you be less interested because someone might call you oblivious even if you actually are? WTF.

Less interested? No, I'm saying that in this allegory, the most sensible course of action is to open your eyes if you can. If you can't, then the directional hearing your ears provide will be enough to tell you that the different people aren't touching the same object.

There's a difference between asking questions, on the one hand, and blurting out your assumptions as though they're truth, on the other. I was only saying the latter category would look foolish.

 

[William Tyndale]

If you think anyone who is in the mainstream has any good ideas then I immediately disregard your opinion. I hear there is a sportsball tournament this month. You should check it out.

 

[gang weeder]

This "one or the other, exclusive-or" mentality you take is unnecessary and likely inefficient. Yes, punish crime, yes, make dangerous people fuck off; why the fuck would you not realize "oh yeah poverty and a shit or no education makes people more likely to need to be punished, let's address that too."

Okay so first off the left wing narrative that poverty somehow causes crime is retarded and false. What causes crime is being a criminal. The overwhelming majority of violent crime is committed by young men, because that is the population with violent tendencies, full stop. An old granny is not going to do a crime regardless of whether she is rich or poor. If she is really poor guess what, she'll just sit there and be poor. She won't all of a sudden go rob somebody.

The only potential grain of truth is that a rich person is less likely to commit crime because they already have status, access to drugs, or whatever else. And if they act violently they have a lot more to lose compared to some retard with nothing. Of course there is the argument that rich people simply commit other types of crimes, such as embezzlement, but that's a different convo.

So while the leftoid has spotted a correlation he has already failed at causation. Being rich may alleviate crime but being poor is not the root cause. Being poor and being a criminal are highly endogenous in the sense that both also go along with a lot of common shared factors, such as gang culture, no stable family, low IQ, etc. If you really wanted to address crime in an indirect way by making everyone rich, or at least not-poor, you would therefore have to go after those things. But if you even point at those things and admit that they exist lefties lose their minds and call you racist so there goes that idea.

That leaves us with the left wing proposed "solution" of simply handing out gibs, which has a proven track record of abject failure, and in fact traps people in poverty rather than getting rid of it. So again you can see that even if there is a single grain of truth to be found in the left wing viewpoint, overall it's pants-shittingly stupid and giving it the time of day is at best a waste of time or more likely actively counter-productive.

Why not go after things from both ends? Is it some sort of a "myside good, yourside bad" thing? This isn't coke vs pepsi or ford vs chevy, this is "let's have fewer criminals to deal with, but deal with the ones we have to deal with, because shit sucks."

It's a "bad ideas are bad" thing. Leftism is a shitty collection of ideas that is almost universally wrong about everything. It's actually that simple. You're overthinking this. Not every viewpoint is valid just because a bunch of people have bought into it. Some viewpoints are just garbage and should be discarded. Communism was another example and leftism is its retarded cousin.

If you actually wanted to have the tension between two equally valid viewpoints, or at least two viewpoints that both have some validity, I think this more properly exists between "heavy handed" conservatives who want to actively wield power versus libertarians who prefer that people be left alone. There are some actual trade offs to discuss there. But the left side of the aisle deserves only ridicule for the most part.

If we want to use your elephant analogy, libertarians and conservatives are regular people touching the leg or the side or whatever, but lefties are holding the dick and conclude that it must be a nigger because it's such a huge dick. And when the other people tell them it's not a nigger instead of listening they freak out and call them racist.