Yesterday I read a post on Instagram that stuck with me for several hours — enough to make me return to it to comment that evening.

It was a very typical post for a leftist/liberal type person. (I won’t cite it verbatim because I’m not trying to blast one side or the other. I don’t care which direction anyone tilts)

She addressed her post on the first slide “To the undecided voter.” Then employed a metaphor of choosing a doctor: Suppose you have two doctors. The first is well qualified, respected by their peers, has a good surgical track record, and no malpractice lawsuits. The other has numerous malpractice lawsuits, no respect from their peers, and no history of practicing medicine.

Which doctor are you choosing??

It was a very thin veil.

And it would absolutely not convince any undecided voters either way, though it did receive a full standing ovation from the comment section — people who already agreed with her. Aka, not-undecided-voters.

It bugged me that her post received such laud, despite the fact that it clearly preached only to the choir of her peers and had no nuance or even a remote understanding of people who see the world differently than her.

It had no understanding of how the fact that Trump is seen as an outsider to politics is actually a positive, because he’s seen as a disrupter of a broken system. He’s not a politician like his ‘peers.’ It made no mention of the lies or shortcomings of the first ‘doctor.’ Etc.

In effect, it treated undecided voters like myself as if we were stupid. Like,

Oh gee, I can’t believe I didn’t look at it like this! Yah, I should vote for the first doctor! She’s perfect and the other one is terrible!

Now, I know it sounds like I’m ripping this poster apart, but Conservatives have their moment in the crosshairs coming, because both sides are equally guilty of seeing opaquely exactly side of every issue. Neither side takes a moment to think that the other side could possibly have a modicum of reason for thinking the way they do.

So one thing I commented is for her to Google ‘ideological Turing test,” an idea I encountered recently. Just as the Turing Test attempts to see whether an AI bot can convince a reader that it’s human, the ideological test does something similar, for humans with differing ideologies. It asks whether a Democrat can convince a reader that they are really a Republican, or vice-versa.

Basically, the test took hundreds of people and they would be divided into four categories:

Republicans defending why they’re Republicans;
Democrats defending why they’re Democrats;
Republicans trying to convince the reader they’re really Democrats defending their views;
Democrats trying to convince the reader they’re really Republicans defending their views.

Make sense?

Then, anyone on the internet can take the test and see if the latter two categories were successful in sounding like their ideological opponents. You just vote on whether you think the paragraph is Real or Fake. Does the author actually believe what they are writing, or are they pretending to be the other side?

If you can convincingly defend the other side, then you probably have a better view of how they see the world and can at least better sympathize with their perspective. The girl who wrote that Instagram post would have miserably failed the ITT, like some of the prompts who had outlandish representation of their opponents. For instance, some Democrats pretending to be Republicans wrote things like, “I love guns and beer and just want my freedom to do whatever I want.” They had a caricature of those who believed differently than them, and it was obvious they had never really had many conversations with their ideological opponents, or listened to diverse news sources.

Again, the same could be said of Conservatives who call others snowflakes or libtards. This gross mischaracterization is a two-way street! And it is not helpful!

I thought the idea of this Ideological Turing Test was brilliant. If someone can’t adequately represent both sides fairly, then they show their hand: that they are victim to an ideology. They only get their news, wisdom, ‘facts,’ and views from one-sided sources. You can tell when someone is neck-deep in Fox News and the Daily Wire, OR MSNBC and CNN.

This is different than the person who reads a lot of diverse sources and thinks through an issue from both sides. Who listens to Ben Shapiro and then Ezra Klein. Who weighs pros and cons of both, does their best to get an accurate take on an event rather than a one-sided, spoon-fed narrative, and then decides to lean toward the Conservative side, or the Liberal side.

This person still ends up in one camp, but it was after taking both sides seriously.

And that’s an art form that needs to be resuscitated in our country. There’s so much shouting with our earplugs in that we don’t even consider that the other side could possibly be reasonable or moral.

That’s what was lacking in that Instagram post, and why it annoyed me so much: She wrote as if the answer was so obvious that anyone who disagreed with her was like someone going to a malpracticing doctor who wanted to kill them. It was evident that she had never taken the other side seriously.

And for the third time: this is just as true of countless Conservatives as well. It’s not a one-sided issue, it’s a human issue.

So ask yourself honestly, could you pass the Ideological Turing Test? Could you convincingly argue for the other side? If not, chances are, you haven’t humanized them enough to see why they may think the way they do. Or maybe you haven’t been exposed to thinkers (not just soundbytes) from their sphere. Maybe you’re just listening to echoes bouncing around your own bubble.

I’m not saying you need to change your mind or vote differently. But I am saying you need to take both sides seriously — there are brilliant people voting both ways. And you need to love your brothers and sisters across the aisle. We are all humans with imperfect knowledge just doing our best.

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Day 97 of 100 Days of Blog

The post Can you think like the other side? appeared first on ethan renoe.