Is ‘keeping your identity small’ just strict impartiality?

Paul Graham suggests that we should keep our identity small in order to have better arguments, especially on religion and politics:

More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn’t engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people’s identities.

I totally agree, although I don’t think this perspective is new. I think it used to be called impartiality. This essay reminds me of the Hanson and Cowen paper, ‘Are disagreements honest?’

[via Ben Casnocha]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>