Psychologically, I think Trump had a lot to do with making people think the Mutant Overton approach is a good idea.
Trump is a subtext-free satirical portrait of a reactionary conservative. Because he won a narrow electoral victory, people equated this with success. Trump was not successful. He is a bad advocate for the things he claims to care about. He turned had a large hand in turning some normal conservatives states toward the Democrats. He has even caused a small group of people in his party to do something historically unprecedented to keep him from holding office again (not enough of them, sadly).
Unfortunately, he is so vile and grotesque that people are still shocked by his "winning." When winning for him looks like underperforming generic conservative fundamentals in places long taken for granted (hello Nassau county). He is a good argument for why leaders should try to better utilize information, strategy, basic intuition. He is also a good argument for why attempting to expand the Overton window can hand your opponents easy victories they barely had to work for. He and the Republicans are playing with the house account. They have the electoral map advantage, but I think it's going to look like very poor strategy within the decade.
The other thing that I don't get is that, if you utilize a Mutant Overton Window (MOW) strategy to shift what's "possible"...there is no effective way to unilaterally demobilize the activist advocating for your MOW position in earnest and into accepting the "compromise" position.
Think you always were pretty clear that the goal of M4A was just to get Sanders elected. It was pretty clear folks like AOC and some others got this (in that brief window where it looked like Sanders *might* win....AOC started saying the quiet part out loud and saying that folks would have to "settle" for a public option in the near term)...
But now we see the downfall of that sort of politics in the #ForceTheVote movement stuff Jimmy Dore, Brianna Gray Joy, and Katie Halper are pishing. Where the folks with less power within your ideological movement recast you as a "sell out" for embracing the compromise (or for not "trying" hard enough) and essentially try to leverage iterative purity politics themselves into more power and clout.
I was ready to disagree with this article, but Matty has persuaded me!
I will say, I started listening to the Weeds to understand policy better, and after a few years, I have moved off my deficit hawkery, as well as some other topics. I still think M4A is a terrible idea, and not just for political reasons (having had this disagreement many, many, many times, please forgive me for not responding to people who support it).
Does it matter that the Weeds persuaded me on the benefits of full employment? I’m already a Democrat in a deep blue area in a blue state. But I am a reliable voter. So, maybe?
The overall point about the Overton window is fantastic, but your argument about single payer is built on a completely false assumption.
The difficulty implementing single payer is not “political”. The idea polls significantly better than the ACA, and a lot better than any of the ACA 2.0 reforms that Biden will probably pursue. Even insurance companies are vastly more worried about a public option than they are about M4A.
The real difficulty is that no one has the slightest idea how to actually implement single payer in the US without MASSIVE regressive consequences. The top line polling for single payer is great… but once you start getting into the details of how it could actually happen, then support plummets massively.
The post mentioned that Obama and Pelosi once supported single payer. So did Hillary Clinton (1993), Elizabeth Warren (2019), and the majority of all health care policy wonks at some point. They all tried to work out a plan, realized that the results would be awful, and tried to come up with something that actually works.
Ironically, this actually supports Matthew’s critique of the Mutant Overton Window. From 2010-2016 the ACA barely broke 50% approval. A good chunk of the opposition to the ACA was from people who supported single payer, and felt that the ACA was a corporatist sell out. Even today a good chunk of the democratic party is uninterested in ACA 2.0 because it isn’t as sexy as single payer.
We desperately need to fix the problems with health care, and now is the best chance to make changes that will save lives and make life better for millions of Americans. Building popular support for the changes we need to make is made immeasurably harder if we first have counter a massive sea of pro-single payer rhetoric.
Great article. Another thing to add here is that truly speculative or "pie in the sky" discussion has its place, but it ought to be clearly labeled as such.
Police abolition is a good example. I think it could be a great idea in 200 years! But it's a terrible idea to talk about implementing now. A large living-wage-sized universal basic income is probably the same.
Now is the time to discuss the appeals of these as long-term goals that require lots more incremental changes along the way, and might need to be abandoned if things don't turn out favorably. So let's be clear when we criticize their advocates that these ideas aren't beyond the pale as such. They're just obviously not feasible now, politically or (more importantly) in terms of their likely costs and side effects.
There's no obstacle in principle to UBI, we just don't seem to be wealthy enough to pay for a living-wage UBI yet. Hopefully it'll be possible sooner than 200 years.
It is harder to imagine no police. It would require a big reduction in criminal behavior, which could potentially be brought about by social change, improved psychotherapy, or maybe genetic engineering. If you had a society where criminal behavior was rare in the first place, non-lethal self-defense was cheap and effective, and surveillance technology made it impossible to commit a crime without being identified, I could imagine making things work without police. You'd have to rely on a practice like citizen's arrest for the crimes that did occur.
All well and good until a criminal from the violent past gets unleashed on the peaceful future, and there's only one cop who can stop him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B5v6QZ5R3g
That's honestly much scarier to me than a police force. If police forces have problems arresting people, then I have to imagine untrained police hobbyists making citizen's arrests might have bigger problems. Interesting to think about but just hard for me to personally imagine without getting really, really, sci-fi. A society with a lower crime rate is not hard to imagine though, Japan comes to mind.
Good piece. I would just add two things. First about the incentives for Democrats to embrace this argument. I think the reason for the increase in the use of the "Overton Window" reasoning on the Left is that there has been a rise in the need to defer to underprivileged groups and advocacy groups on major issues. In the primary Biden was very notable in his willingness to go against advocacy groups on major issues like decriminalizing unlawful entry. But other major parts of the party clearly do not feel they have the ability to reign in the parts of the party that are pushing unpopular stances. This is a major contrast from both Clinton and Obama who found it strategically expedient to "punch left" on occasion. The Overton Window justification I think comes from this increasing trend toward establishment figures being unable to publicly disagree with unpopular stances to their left.
As far as why people have talked themselves into it, the Medicare for All issue is super important. Healthcare takes up more space in the Democratic debate than any other issue so there is a tendency to overlearn lessons from healthcare and apply them elsewhere. Many people think that what Bernie is doing on Medicare for All is an overton window move. But I actually think what is going on is it's sort of a trap. Voters trust Democrats much more on healthcare than Republicans. Even if Medicare for All isn't that popular, if it sucks the Republicans in to a healthcare debate that is good for Democrats.
The issue that works the opposite way here is gun control--Republicans are actually more trusted on guns AFAIK, so even very popular proposals from Democrats are not helpful to them. Other issues like immigration and abortion don't have such a clear breakdown on which party is more trusted so it matters a lot whether the parties are associated with popular ideas. But I think Democrats have talked themselves in to the idea that the reason Medicare for All is good is because it's very far to the left and this applies to all issues. Except Medicare for All is actually an exception and it isn't effective because of the Overton Window. It's effective because voters (correctly) perceive Republicans as wanting to take away people's health insurance so pivoting the debate to healthcare is a win for Democrats no matter how you do it.
I have a very specific question that’s directly related to the words of the post but not remotely related to its content: Do you have a consistent reasoning for when you begin a sentence with a coordinating conjunction (usually “But” in this post)?
I recognize in common parlance “but” is used as a transitional contrasting phrase or conversational interjection (see John Oliver’s Supercuts of Larry Kudlow saying “but, but, but but but…”), but in writing I have yet to find an example where it struck me as an obvious usage over several immediately available alternatives.
Every grammar source I’ve consulted—including a linguistics professor last night after I saw the usage in an SAT/ACT Grammar book—insists it’s permissible, but none effectively demonstrate why one would ever choose it beyond a squishy “there are already too many clauses in this sentence” sort of reasoning.
Your writing is typically clarion, so I wonder if you’ve considered the issue.
Less pedantically: great post—particularly the paragraph about the reasoning behind a actions mattering regarding immigration. Didn’t know “People should not make bad arguments in favor of indefensible positions” could be such a refreshing take.
This is a good post!! I read this in part as sorta a long form response to the responses to Matt’s attacks on Sunrise a while back.
At first, I was wondering to what extent this was actually a useful guide. Certainly, it pushes back (rightfully, I think) on the idea that “saying a thing you don’t believe to game the system and get something you do believe” is a sound strategy. But at the same time, I don’t really think many activists are advocating for an idea they think is bad to get a moderate compromise, they’re advocating for it because they think it is a good idea.
So if you told them “hey stop advocating for your idea, which is obviously bad” they would obviously say “no my idea is good and necessary, just not popular yet”— in Matt’s framework, they’d say they’re the ‘Medicare for all’ and not the ‘abolish the police’.
However, this then allows the argument to be positioned back on the merits of their arguments (such as they may be), which is a much more useful place to be than arguments of political strategy. So I think this a useful perspective on things!
“This allows the argument to be positioned back on the merits of their arguments” - very well said! I think that is the core idea that we should all take away from the article, that 1) if you are going to push a non-popular idea, actually do the groundwork of convincing people (Matt’s point is that way too many people will post “Defund the Police” but if you ask them what exactly that looks like they’ll often stumble), and 2) we should be challenging the folks who take non-popular positions to actually defend their position. Ask them genuine questions, raise concerns, instead of just letting them off the hook.
Anchoring and framing works in some fields -- someone mentioned "extreme anchors" as a term of art in marketing. (I believe this, but maybe I'm wrong.)
This isn't a discussion about ideas and rhetoric generally -- it's a more specific discussion about advancing bad policy ideas (disingenuous) with a belief not in the idea but to shift the Overton window. In the two specific political cases mentioned -- Trump's rhetoric about immigration and the Defund The Police movement -- the extreme statements seem to have gotten the opposite of the effect they desired.
N=2, not N=1000. Those are two examples, but are they good examples or bad examples?
One aspect: are they examples of tenable policies in the first place? I think that they're both ideas of Bad Policy Suggestions and are kind of self-undermining, politically and practically. (I'm personally a big fan of 8 can't wait ... but complicated ideas are hard to generate popular support for)
Another aspect: are they representative of this effect in general?
Dope. Notes wafting my oversimplified senses: I think some of this definitely comes from tensions that several populations have advanced that because it’s been felt their identity has been considered outright unreasonable by dominant classes, their advocacy now should not factor consideration of the reasonable or tactical. This is not without significant merit, ruling elites across history have embraced such denigration into policy, however I think it’s a misreading of history to make that rule tacit across even those societies they reference(ie I think it’s a misreading to say white supremacy is always advancing itself, it started a civil war that was arguably its greatest destabilizer, though out of fear of the enduring credence found with various kinds of abolitionist about power). Having those present in discourse (even losing) presents a case that mixes up such readings. Those same discourses enduring into political power complicates the notions further. Engaging these tensions is currently out the door when addressing the seductions of fast power over slower varieties. Out of left field, but I recall Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints) actually making another great argument against this false dichotomy of revolution or reform thinking. Not towards good ideas, but pointing out revolutions are still incrementalist, as one has to do something with the power which can’t lack its own history.
The prevalence of discourses almost historical is not anyone’s. Nell Irving painter hinted as much about Nicole Hannah Jones when reading her work and its controversy. But the drive aligning that historian with a piece that requires side picking rather than enabling fuller understandings of the kind her work actually provides is the ground ceded by cynics acting out. However this tactic is held by the loudest voices in the room at present, much like in the Minneapolis article you reference, imagined homogeneity ends up silencing many of the same identity purported to be speaking out. Suffice to say I feeel that erasure.
Also, you talking about Minneapolis also made me think about how also “defunding” by the amount just about equal to the combined median salaries of how many officers quit was called a progressive win.
So we could distill this to “stretching the Overton window with ‘extreme anchors’ (as they’re called in marketing) only works insofar as those ideas already enjoy widespread consensus and are good ideas”? I think the glitch in the matrix is what happened with wokeness, where you lost the usual “brakes” on the public conversation as people who would push back on other topics feared cancellation, and the fact that it masqueraded wake effectively as something we are all in favor of (the motte and Bailey fallacy) - “who Doesn’t want more equality and justice? Who Doesn’t think black lives matter?”
One wonders if advocates of other policies could take a page from blm, either in good faith or cynically.
I don't think Matt is arguing that you should only advocate for ideas that already have widespread consensus, just for things that you actually believe are good ideas.
And that is people who are broadly "on your side" have reason to believe that your ideas are actually bad, they should call them out.
I'll add, and you should endeavor to be open to being convinced that the idea you thought was good is in fact bad.
Thank you for this piece - I couldn’t agree more. Like Dan said below, this is why I subscribe. I wish I could make every activist I know read this.
This was a fantastic article Matt.
Psychologically, I think Trump had a lot to do with making people think the Mutant Overton approach is a good idea.
Trump is a subtext-free satirical portrait of a reactionary conservative. Because he won a narrow electoral victory, people equated this with success. Trump was not successful. He is a bad advocate for the things he claims to care about. He turned had a large hand in turning some normal conservatives states toward the Democrats. He has even caused a small group of people in his party to do something historically unprecedented to keep him from holding office again (not enough of them, sadly).
Unfortunately, he is so vile and grotesque that people are still shocked by his "winning." When winning for him looks like underperforming generic conservative fundamentals in places long taken for granted (hello Nassau county). He is a good argument for why leaders should try to better utilize information, strategy, basic intuition. He is also a good argument for why attempting to expand the Overton window can hand your opponents easy victories they barely had to work for. He and the Republicans are playing with the house account. They have the electoral map advantage, but I think it's going to look like very poor strategy within the decade.
defund the Sunrise Movement
The other thing that I don't get is that, if you utilize a Mutant Overton Window (MOW) strategy to shift what's "possible"...there is no effective way to unilaterally demobilize the activist advocating for your MOW position in earnest and into accepting the "compromise" position.
Think you always were pretty clear that the goal of M4A was just to get Sanders elected. It was pretty clear folks like AOC and some others got this (in that brief window where it looked like Sanders *might* win....AOC started saying the quiet part out loud and saying that folks would have to "settle" for a public option in the near term)...
But now we see the downfall of that sort of politics in the #ForceTheVote movement stuff Jimmy Dore, Brianna Gray Joy, and Katie Halper are pishing. Where the folks with less power within your ideological movement recast you as a "sell out" for embracing the compromise (or for not "trying" hard enough) and essentially try to leverage iterative purity politics themselves into more power and clout.
I was ready to disagree with this article, but Matty has persuaded me!
I will say, I started listening to the Weeds to understand policy better, and after a few years, I have moved off my deficit hawkery, as well as some other topics. I still think M4A is a terrible idea, and not just for political reasons (having had this disagreement many, many, many times, please forgive me for not responding to people who support it).
Does it matter that the Weeds persuaded me on the benefits of full employment? I’m already a Democrat in a deep blue area in a blue state. But I am a reliable voter. So, maybe?
The overall point about the Overton window is fantastic, but your argument about single payer is built on a completely false assumption.
The difficulty implementing single payer is not “political”. The idea polls significantly better than the ACA, and a lot better than any of the ACA 2.0 reforms that Biden will probably pursue. Even insurance companies are vastly more worried about a public option than they are about M4A.
The real difficulty is that no one has the slightest idea how to actually implement single payer in the US without MASSIVE regressive consequences. The top line polling for single payer is great… but once you start getting into the details of how it could actually happen, then support plummets massively.
The post mentioned that Obama and Pelosi once supported single payer. So did Hillary Clinton (1993), Elizabeth Warren (2019), and the majority of all health care policy wonks at some point. They all tried to work out a plan, realized that the results would be awful, and tried to come up with something that actually works.
Ironically, this actually supports Matthew’s critique of the Mutant Overton Window. From 2010-2016 the ACA barely broke 50% approval. A good chunk of the opposition to the ACA was from people who supported single payer, and felt that the ACA was a corporatist sell out. Even today a good chunk of the democratic party is uninterested in ACA 2.0 because it isn’t as sexy as single payer.
We desperately need to fix the problems with health care, and now is the best chance to make changes that will save lives and make life better for millions of Americans. Building popular support for the changes we need to make is made immeasurably harder if we first have counter a massive sea of pro-single payer rhetoric.
Great article. Another thing to add here is that truly speculative or "pie in the sky" discussion has its place, but it ought to be clearly labeled as such.
Police abolition is a good example. I think it could be a great idea in 200 years! But it's a terrible idea to talk about implementing now. A large living-wage-sized universal basic income is probably the same.
Now is the time to discuss the appeals of these as long-term goals that require lots more incremental changes along the way, and might need to be abandoned if things don't turn out favorably. So let's be clear when we criticize their advocates that these ideas aren't beyond the pale as such. They're just obviously not feasible now, politically or (more importantly) in terms of their likely costs and side effects.
Why is abolishing the police something that would be feasible 200 years from now, while UBI pretty soon isn't?
UBI seems to me pretty much unavoidable in the near future. be cause of globalisation, robots and AI, etc.
I can't even imagine a society that doesn't need a police force.
There's no obstacle in principle to UBI, we just don't seem to be wealthy enough to pay for a living-wage UBI yet. Hopefully it'll be possible sooner than 200 years.
It is harder to imagine no police. It would require a big reduction in criminal behavior, which could potentially be brought about by social change, improved psychotherapy, or maybe genetic engineering. If you had a society where criminal behavior was rare in the first place, non-lethal self-defense was cheap and effective, and surveillance technology made it impossible to commit a crime without being identified, I could imagine making things work without police. You'd have to rely on a practice like citizen's arrest for the crimes that did occur.
All well and good until a criminal from the violent past gets unleashed on the peaceful future, and there's only one cop who can stop him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B5v6QZ5R3g
That's honestly much scarier to me than a police force. If police forces have problems arresting people, then I have to imagine untrained police hobbyists making citizen's arrests might have bigger problems. Interesting to think about but just hard for me to personally imagine without getting really, really, sci-fi. A society with a lower crime rate is not hard to imagine though, Japan comes to mind.
Congratulations on moving the Overton Window on Moving the Overton Window.
Good piece. I would just add two things. First about the incentives for Democrats to embrace this argument. I think the reason for the increase in the use of the "Overton Window" reasoning on the Left is that there has been a rise in the need to defer to underprivileged groups and advocacy groups on major issues. In the primary Biden was very notable in his willingness to go against advocacy groups on major issues like decriminalizing unlawful entry. But other major parts of the party clearly do not feel they have the ability to reign in the parts of the party that are pushing unpopular stances. This is a major contrast from both Clinton and Obama who found it strategically expedient to "punch left" on occasion. The Overton Window justification I think comes from this increasing trend toward establishment figures being unable to publicly disagree with unpopular stances to their left.
As far as why people have talked themselves into it, the Medicare for All issue is super important. Healthcare takes up more space in the Democratic debate than any other issue so there is a tendency to overlearn lessons from healthcare and apply them elsewhere. Many people think that what Bernie is doing on Medicare for All is an overton window move. But I actually think what is going on is it's sort of a trap. Voters trust Democrats much more on healthcare than Republicans. Even if Medicare for All isn't that popular, if it sucks the Republicans in to a healthcare debate that is good for Democrats.
The issue that works the opposite way here is gun control--Republicans are actually more trusted on guns AFAIK, so even very popular proposals from Democrats are not helpful to them. Other issues like immigration and abortion don't have such a clear breakdown on which party is more trusted so it matters a lot whether the parties are associated with popular ideas. But I think Democrats have talked themselves in to the idea that the reason Medicare for All is good is because it's very far to the left and this applies to all issues. Except Medicare for All is actually an exception and it isn't effective because of the Overton Window. It's effective because voters (correctly) perceive Republicans as wanting to take away people's health insurance so pivoting the debate to healthcare is a win for Democrats no matter how you do it.
I have a very specific question that’s directly related to the words of the post but not remotely related to its content: Do you have a consistent reasoning for when you begin a sentence with a coordinating conjunction (usually “But” in this post)?
I recognize in common parlance “but” is used as a transitional contrasting phrase or conversational interjection (see John Oliver’s Supercuts of Larry Kudlow saying “but, but, but but but…”), but in writing I have yet to find an example where it struck me as an obvious usage over several immediately available alternatives.
Every grammar source I’ve consulted—including a linguistics professor last night after I saw the usage in an SAT/ACT Grammar book—insists it’s permissible, but none effectively demonstrate why one would ever choose it beyond a squishy “there are already too many clauses in this sentence” sort of reasoning.
Your writing is typically clarion, so I wonder if you’ve considered the issue.
Less pedantically: great post—particularly the paragraph about the reasoning behind a actions mattering regarding immigration. Didn’t know “People should not make bad arguments in favor of indefensible positions” could be such a refreshing take.
This is a good post!! I read this in part as sorta a long form response to the responses to Matt’s attacks on Sunrise a while back.
At first, I was wondering to what extent this was actually a useful guide. Certainly, it pushes back (rightfully, I think) on the idea that “saying a thing you don’t believe to game the system and get something you do believe” is a sound strategy. But at the same time, I don’t really think many activists are advocating for an idea they think is bad to get a moderate compromise, they’re advocating for it because they think it is a good idea.
So if you told them “hey stop advocating for your idea, which is obviously bad” they would obviously say “no my idea is good and necessary, just not popular yet”— in Matt’s framework, they’d say they’re the ‘Medicare for all’ and not the ‘abolish the police’.
However, this then allows the argument to be positioned back on the merits of their arguments (such as they may be), which is a much more useful place to be than arguments of political strategy. So I think this a useful perspective on things!
“This allows the argument to be positioned back on the merits of their arguments” - very well said! I think that is the core idea that we should all take away from the article, that 1) if you are going to push a non-popular idea, actually do the groundwork of convincing people (Matt’s point is that way too many people will post “Defund the Police” but if you ask them what exactly that looks like they’ll often stumble), and 2) we should be challenging the folks who take non-popular positions to actually defend their position. Ask them genuine questions, raise concerns, instead of just letting them off the hook.
Anchoring and framing works in some fields -- someone mentioned "extreme anchors" as a term of art in marketing. (I believe this, but maybe I'm wrong.)
This isn't a discussion about ideas and rhetoric generally -- it's a more specific discussion about advancing bad policy ideas (disingenuous) with a belief not in the idea but to shift the Overton window. In the two specific political cases mentioned -- Trump's rhetoric about immigration and the Defund The Police movement -- the extreme statements seem to have gotten the opposite of the effect they desired.
N=2, not N=1000. Those are two examples, but are they good examples or bad examples?
One aspect: are they examples of tenable policies in the first place? I think that they're both ideas of Bad Policy Suggestions and are kind of self-undermining, politically and practically. (I'm personally a big fan of 8 can't wait ... but complicated ideas are hard to generate popular support for)
Another aspect: are they representative of this effect in general?
Are there any examples where this worked?
Dope. Notes wafting my oversimplified senses: I think some of this definitely comes from tensions that several populations have advanced that because it’s been felt their identity has been considered outright unreasonable by dominant classes, their advocacy now should not factor consideration of the reasonable or tactical. This is not without significant merit, ruling elites across history have embraced such denigration into policy, however I think it’s a misreading of history to make that rule tacit across even those societies they reference(ie I think it’s a misreading to say white supremacy is always advancing itself, it started a civil war that was arguably its greatest destabilizer, though out of fear of the enduring credence found with various kinds of abolitionist about power). Having those present in discourse (even losing) presents a case that mixes up such readings. Those same discourses enduring into political power complicates the notions further. Engaging these tensions is currently out the door when addressing the seductions of fast power over slower varieties. Out of left field, but I recall Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints) actually making another great argument against this false dichotomy of revolution or reform thinking. Not towards good ideas, but pointing out revolutions are still incrementalist, as one has to do something with the power which can’t lack its own history.
The prevalence of discourses almost historical is not anyone’s. Nell Irving painter hinted as much about Nicole Hannah Jones when reading her work and its controversy. But the drive aligning that historian with a piece that requires side picking rather than enabling fuller understandings of the kind her work actually provides is the ground ceded by cynics acting out. However this tactic is held by the loudest voices in the room at present, much like in the Minneapolis article you reference, imagined homogeneity ends up silencing many of the same identity purported to be speaking out. Suffice to say I feeel that erasure.
Also, you talking about Minneapolis also made me think about how also “defunding” by the amount just about equal to the combined median salaries of how many officers quit was called a progressive win.
So we could distill this to “stretching the Overton window with ‘extreme anchors’ (as they’re called in marketing) only works insofar as those ideas already enjoy widespread consensus and are good ideas”? I think the glitch in the matrix is what happened with wokeness, where you lost the usual “brakes” on the public conversation as people who would push back on other topics feared cancellation, and the fact that it masqueraded wake effectively as something we are all in favor of (the motte and Bailey fallacy) - “who Doesn’t want more equality and justice? Who Doesn’t think black lives matter?”
One wonders if advocates of other policies could take a page from blm, either in good faith or cynically.
I don't think Matt is arguing that you should only advocate for ideas that already have widespread consensus, just for things that you actually believe are good ideas.
And that is people who are broadly "on your side" have reason to believe that your ideas are actually bad, they should call them out.
I'll add, and you should endeavor to be open to being convinced that the idea you thought was good is in fact bad.
> But that’s the slow boring of hard boards, not an arbitrary framing effect.
Hey look it’s the name of the thing!