Left, Right, and Wrong

Almost 6 years ago Thomas Edsall in his essay "What the Right Gets Right" summarizes good and bad thinking on both sides of the political aisle. Removing party labels, there are strong positives:

• need for fiscal balance and hard work
• importance of individual responsibility
• risk of unresponsive social systems
• centrality of individual liberty
• moral contributions from strong families, communities, and religions

... and likewise big cognitive-fallacy negatives:

• thinking zero-sum on large social scales
• conflating "letting people suffer" and "making people suffer"
• accepting gross unfairness as the overall sum of individually fair transactions
• blaming individuals for the results of social/situational constraints
• over-generalizing from a few instances of bad behavior
• under-appreciating the role of random chance in life outcomes

Can these be further summarized and modeled, understood and balanced? Perhaps it's part of the tug-of-war between justice and mercy, conscientiousness and openness, hard vs soft, yang-yin, judgment-love?

Much to ponder ...

(cf. Fair for All (1999-11-28), Ethical Fitness (2000-12-15), ForGreatJustice (2002-12-01), Big Biases (2014-01-09), Cognitive Distortions (2015-09-28), Mirror Fallacy (2016-03-10), Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet (2016-09-30), ...) - ^z - 2017-12-21