On simple application of the idea put forth in the preceding post is an explanation for the reasons people have such wildly different political beliefs. Consider an island with a bunch of fruit trees. Most of the inhabitants of this island believe that a single tree is possesed by an evil spirit, which tries to lure people into eating the fruit. Once they eat it, they will become bitter and hostile towards everyone on the island. Some guy decides he’s going to try eating it for himself, and when he takes a bite he realizes it’s the best fruit he’s ever eaten. He goes to tell his friends how good the fruit is, and they yell at him for eating the food and trying to tempt them to do the same. He gets irritated by their seeming stupidity and tells them they’re all idiots. The thing is, their model of the tree (i.e. it being possesed by spirits) was able to predict accurately what would happen if someone ate its fruit. The disagreement from the fellow who ate the apple and everyone else stems from the fact that they have two different internal models of how the world around them works.
I’m not trying to take politcal sides (or draw bibilical analogies) – anyone who knows me is probably well aware of my political opinions, and it is not my intention to try to imply that some people have goofy ideas of the world around them. I’ve already stated that any two models capable of predicting world events are intellectually equivalent. I’m just saying that you can explain political differences between most people by examining their mental models of the world; where the models predict different things, you’ll find differing opinions on the nature of the world and therefore what should be done inside it. People whose mental models are diametricaly opposed to each other will find themselves vehemently disagreeing.
This post here is the continuation of my previous post where I talked about video games. I made the statement that if two people could be brought to agree on the rules for a computer simulation of their world, they would agree on most everything in that world. The reason is simple; a computer simulation of the world is just another way of modelling it; if the two people agree on the nature of the computer simulation, then their mental models for the nature of the world are compatible with each other and they most likely agree on most things in the nature of the real world.