Questioning our Assumptions

[LA Ute]

This is a long piece but worth the time it takes to read. It made me remember that I need to be careful about my own assumptions.

Were Trump Voters Irrational?

http://quillette.com/2017/09/28/trump-voters-irrational/

[UTEopia]

This is a long piece but worth the time it takes to read. It made me remember that I need to be careful about my own assumptions.

Were Trump Voters Irrational?

http://quillette.com/2017/09/28/trump-voters-irrational/

From his viewpoint and the viewpoint of Trump voters, they were not irrational in voting for Trump, at least no more so than Clinton voters. I'm stunned. What great insight.

[Diehard Ute]

From his viewpoint and the viewpoint of Trump voters, they were not irrational in voting for Trump, at least no more so than Clinton voters. I'm stunned. What great insight.

You actually made it through that insanely wordy thing to figure out what he was saying? I’m impressed!


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[LA Ute]

You actually made it through that insanely wordy thing to figure out what he was saying? I’m impressed!


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Hey, he's an academic....

[LA Ute]

From his viewpoint and the viewpoint of Trump voters, they were not irrational in voting for Trump, at least no more so than Clinton voters. I'm stunned. What great insight.

It looks to me like he was writing to people who do think that people who vote the opposite way are irrational. It reminded me of one of the lessons I most fondly remember from my days at the University of Utah and the Hinckley Institute of politics: people who disagree wwith me or vote a different way than I do are not idiots or bad people. We have seen a lot of that in the current political environment, mostly coming from the left side of the spectrum, but enough of it is on the right to make me unhappy with that faction too. Don’t get me wrong; I am not lecturing anybody here, just remembering something important to my life that I got from going to the U.

[Ma'ake]

I read the whole thing. It's an impressive piece. And quite flawed, by limitations it suggests, vis-à-vis the depth of the subject matter.

In health science, we have axiom to help explain the interaction of genetics with a person's environment: "Genetics loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger".

Rationality is profoundly impacted by circumstance. How many people act rationally when their kids are starving? Neurological research has established lower amounts of bloodflow to the prefrontal cortex of the brain - where our highest acuity thinking occurs - as stress is increased, measured by levels of the stress hormone cortisol, confirmed by fMRI brain scans that show brain activity in different brain regions.

A significant number of Trump voters had previously voted for Obama. Did they become conservative? Or was their "change" impacted by their environment... job loss, effective labeling of Obama as being not being a citizen, being swayed by the vision of Trump as a decisive business leader who could get the country back on track, etc.

The binary Democrat / Republican analysis of rationality is itself very limited.

The author was trying to reveal a common liberal perception of Trump voters as being "irrational" as being erroneous, and in the process revealed how limited his own analysis is, and gives a glimpse of just how complex the landscape of human thought is.