First of all I think using live political examples like this is not a great idea.
I don’t think that a blanket ban on live political examples is a great norm. There are definite risks from tribalism from doing so, but we also just have a lot more information with which to test our views (compared to, say, how age-weighted voting would have affected the French Revolution). If we’re worried about tribalism, we should just call tribalism out directly, rather than ban certain topics.
In this particular case, I found that thinking about Brexit and the Scottish Independence Referendum helpful to test my starting intuitions. In particular, it somewhat weakened my adherence to my starting assumption of rational self-interest of voters’ political positions—I don’t really see the age-related discrepancies in people’s votes on Brexit and Scottish Independence as being well explained by whether the position involves short-term benefits for long-term harms. (Rather than, say, by how much weight one puts on national sovereignty, which is a political view that might just go in and out of fashion.)
I don’t think that a blanket ban on live political examples is a great norm. There are definite risks from tribalism from doing so, but we also just have a lot more information with which to test our views (compared to, say, how age-weighted voting would have affected the French Revolution). If we’re worried about tribalism, we should just call tribalism out directly, rather than ban certain topics.
In this particular case, I found that thinking about Brexit and the Scottish Independence Referendum helpful to test my starting intuitions. In particular, it somewhat weakened my adherence to my starting assumption of rational self-interest of voters’ political positions—I don’t really see the age-related discrepancies in people’s votes on Brexit and Scottish Independence as being well explained by whether the position involves short-term benefits for long-term harms. (Rather than, say, by how much weight one puts on national sovereignty, which is a political view that might just go in and out of fashion.)