I’ll need to reread Scott’s post to see how reductive it is,[1] but negotiation and motivated cognition here do feel like a slightly lower level of abstraction in the sense that they are composed or different kinds of (and proportions of) conflicts and mistakes. The dynamics you discuss here follow pretty intuitively from the basic conflict/mistake paradigm.
This is still great analysis and a useful addendum to Scott’s post.
actually pretty reductive on a skim, but he does have a savings clause at the end: “But obviously both can be true in parts and reality can be way more complicated than either.”
The dynamics you discuss here follow pretty intuitively from the basic conflict/mistake paradigm.
I think it’s very easy to believe that the natural extension of the conflicts/mistakes paradigm is that policy fights are composed of a linear combination of the two. Schelling’s “rudimentary/obvious” idea, for example, that conflict is and cooperation is often structurally inseparable, is a more subtle and powerful reorientation than it first seems.
But this is a hard point to discuss (because it’s in the structure of an “unknown known”), and I didn’t interview many people before writing my thing.
If you’ve never felt tempted before to see the policy disagreements this way, then I could just be miscalibrated here on the obviousness or lack thereof of these ideas.
I’ll need to reread Scott’s post to see how reductive it is,[1] but negotiation and motivated cognition here do feel like a slightly lower level of abstraction in the sense that they are composed or different kinds of (and proportions of) conflicts and mistakes. The dynamics you discuss here follow pretty intuitively from the basic conflict/mistake paradigm.
This is still great analysis and a useful addendum to Scott’s post.
actually pretty reductive on a skim, but he does have a savings clause at the end: “But obviously both can be true in parts and reality can be way more complicated than either.”
I think it’s very easy to believe that the natural extension of the conflicts/mistakes paradigm is that policy fights are composed of a linear combination of the two. Schelling’s “rudimentary/obvious” idea, for example, that conflict is and cooperation is often structurally inseparable, is a more subtle and powerful reorientation than it first seems.
But this is a hard point to discuss (because it’s in the structure of an “unknown known”), and I didn’t interview many people before writing my thing.
If you’ve never felt tempted before to see the policy disagreements this way, then I could just be miscalibrated here on the obviousness or lack thereof of these ideas.