Hmm. Another very interesting article by Scott Alexander. Ironically, I've found myself in both positions, usually whichever is the opposite of whoever I'm arguing with. :P
@Angle I liked that article, though I'm pretty definitely (as is pretty obvious to anyone who knows me) on the disagreement side.
It's very difficult for me to take the 'conflict' side even remotely seriously as a /thing people actually believe/ instead of as…some weird disorder of indigestion that manifests as a form of temporary insanity.
@Azure I think its actually a pretty accurate way to view many things? I mean, politics often does come down to groups with different goals trying to have their way. Sure, you can argue that in the end everyone just wants to be happy and they only disagree on implementation, but when that implementation happens to include things like slavery, conflict theory is generally a bett3r way of viewing things. :/
@Angle @Azure
They are sociological lenses.
I mean this is basically the post-modernist railing against meta-narratives when you boil it down. We're going to try to organize things into these sort of ideologies but in the end we're just looking at text. We need to be aware of our lens and the limits of it because we have no method to see beyond them and engage with the 'objective' truths that underlay the interpretation.
@Irick @Angle SO! We can argue that they're sociological models, but the question still comes down to /which/ model more accurately models objective truth, or at least which makes better predictions about how people behave. (I am a bit of a post-modernism skeptic, at least when it comes to various 'strong' forms, though I wonder how much of that is not being able to see which parts of 'post modernism' have been effectively incorporated into modernism.)