Image via WikipediaRelated source » The Two-Bucket MindScott Adams is very insightful. I recently had a phone conversation with someone I have known a long time. It was a normal conversation (if there is such a thing) until he suddenly veered into the political arena, to wit:
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]
“My hypothesis is that we humans automatically sort topics into two opposing viewpoints, or buckets. In the rare cases when we encounter a third opinion, we can't easily process it because our brains don't have a third bucket. For example, on the topic of using waterboarding to get useful information from terrorists, the two opinion buckets are:
1. Waterboarding works and we should do it.
2. Waterboarding doesn't work and we should not do it.
Dershowitz expressed a third view that I had never heard until last night: Waterboarding works, but we shouldn't do it. […] I came up with the two-bucket hypothesis by observing how some people react to this blog. When I float an idea that doesn't fit into one of the two standard buckets for a given topic, people assume I am an enemy from the other bucket and post comments to that effect. Notice how often the commenters here argue against what I write as if my posts must be supporting one of the two existing buckets. That's the two-bucket phenomenon in action.
I wonder if our brains are natural two-bucket processors or if we have been trained that way by our adversarial political system. In the United States, every issue seems to get sorted into two buckets, with Democrats generally favoring one bucket and Republicans generally favoring the other. I wonder if our political system is making citizens dumber by encouraging us to think that there are only two valid opinions for every topic.”
— Scott Adams, May 4, 2011 (dilbert.com)
That was the end of our conversation.
- He
- So, what do you think of Obama?
- Me
- [surprised pause #1] Not much.
- He
- What!? You support Palin and the tea-baggers?
- Me
- [surprised pause #2] I don't think we have anything further to discuss.
Mind you, he is a very intelligent, highly educated person. But I can not, and will not, tolerate any discussion whose working premise includes such a two-bucket mentality (as described by Scott Adams in the above excerpted article).
As if the only conceivable alternative to worshiping Obama is to be a Palin and/or Tea-Party supporter (with the implication that such an alternative is irrational). Au contraire! Most leftists will accuse you of being a racist if you are not in awe of the Won. But, to be neither an Obamanoid, nor a Palin supporter, and also not a racist ... well, that is just incomprehensible, don't you know?
Whence comes such an arrogant, insulting, and aggressive posture? It's been many millennia since humans had assigned names to numbers beyond "one" and "two". As the old joke has it, when you ask two Jews for an opinion about any issue, you will invariably get at least three opinions!
Post 1,625 One, two, many
There are actually 10 kinds of people: those who know binary arithmetic and those who don't.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, though, it is amazing how reflexive and hard-wired this tendency to a binary sort seems to be. Bin 1 or Bin 2, Friend or Enemy. I am amazed that the human tendency to categorize was even noted in the Book of Genesis, when God's very first task for Adam was to categorize the animals. Regardless of one's view on the theology per se, that was a staggeringly profound insight, given the era when Genesis was written.