A Ceasefire to our endless Ideological War
A modest proposal for the merits of "Intellectual Traveling"
The world is not in your books and maps, it’s out there – Gandalf
I have spent a fair amount of time reading and thinking about our human brains' limits in recent years. Almost all cognitive scientists (who study our ability to think) now recognize that not only do our brains often make mistakes, but we make mistakes in predictable ways that are very hard to change, even with training! The world is too complex for us ever to understand it fully.
This insight is why I am so intrigued by the growing movement to train ourselves to recognize our “mental models.” This movement recognizes that one of the ways we simplify the world is by creating imperfect models or maps to represent and simplify the world around us. We take a familiar model and use it to understand a more complex reality around us quickly. As author Shane Parrish says in his book The Great Mental Models:
Largely subconscious, mental models operate below the surface. We’re not generally aware of them and yet they’re the reason when we look at a problem we consider some factors relevant and others irrelevant.
Whether you realize it or not, mental models are probably how you think about almost every novel problem you face day to day. And that is why it is so essential to make sure you use the correct model for the realm that you are considering.
I have become concerned that our society’s primary mental model for intellectual life is increasingly one of battles and wars. Today, much of intellectual life is filtered through a model of right and wrong, good ideas and bad ideas, and the need to defeat those bad ideas. As political philosopher Danielle Allen puts it:
Each side, if it has power, wants to use that power for total victory over the opposition
The problem is that war is not a very good mental model for most things in life. War by its nature is competitive and zero-sum; there are only one winner and one loser. The consequences of losing a war are catastrophic for a people. When war is overlaid as our model for life, it often does a poor job of helping us gain understanding:
In sports, the model of war is very, very common. After all, sports in the late 19th century were explicitly pitched by people like Teddy Roosevelt to serve the function of “military preparedness” during peacetime. It is true that, like war, only one team can win a game, but unlike war, the participants are not undergoing horrors. Instead, they get joy out of merely competing, even if they lose. Winning is not the only thing that matters in sports.
Political elections are zero-sum, and like war, often very nasty. But unlike war, the winner has to govern after an election, which requires some level of conciliation and reconciliation.
In capitalism, business is often compared to war (hence the podcast Business Wars). But unlike war, business is not zero-sum. Often the best way to succeed in business is to be a contrarian: instead of fighting a competitor to death, you try to find uncovered ground, a “blue ocean” of untapped market potential.
It does not take very long to see that “war” is not only an imperfect mental model but actively a counter-productive one.
The Big Man that Never Died
Maybe the best way to illustrate this is by detouring into a relatively uncontroversial subject: sports analysis. The most impactful trend in American sports over the last 20 years has been the rise of data and analytics. Even non-sports fans will be familiar with this through famous works like Moneyball and the rise of explicitly analytics-driven sites like FiveThirtyEight.
In popular understanding, this is often portrayed as a “war” between the “data nerds” and the “old-school” former athletes, who still believe in much of their sports' traditional received wisdom. Of course, this is partly because the extremes on both sides have an entrepreneurial interest in making this into a war: if they can create a narrative that they are 100% right and have “won the war,” their side can get all the “status” benefits of winning: front office jobs, journalism gigs, etc. But this popular comparison to war is and was always wrong.
Rather than a battle, this disagreement is best understood as a kind of intellectual exchange, one that has real consequences for jobs and status but ultimately is “won” by those who fuse both sides' best. I could cite numerous examples of teams and analysts who thrive by doing this, but I think the best illustration is to look at a particular moment in time: the aftermath of the 2015 NBA finals.
The Golden State Warriors won the 2015 finals by doing something no one had ever done before: playing extensively without a center. The following season (2015-16), they proceeded to achieve the best record of any team ever in a regular season. They did this with their best lineup (their “death lineup”) that did not include a center. Many in the “data” side of the “war” saw this as an irreversible trend: the traditional big man was dead. We had seen the future, and it involved the demise of the big man, even if that contradicted all of the received wisdom from basketball history! After all, you could draw a line in basketball history from George Mikan to Bill Russell, to Wilt Chamberlain, to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, to Hakeem Olajuwon to Shaquille O’Neal, and argue that (excepting Michael Jordan) big men have always been the dominant forces in the NBA. But many data people saw the NBA, dominated by Steph Curry and his innovative 3-point shooting, having little room for big men in the future.
Fast Forward to today and that story told by analytics people seems laughable. The best two players in the NBA, according to the analytics, are two centers, Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid:
It turns out the big man was not dead, merely dormant. Being seven feet tall is still essential to be good at basketball! Jokic and Embiid have become dominant forces, not by either 1) doing exactly what old-school centers like Kareem and Russel and Shaq did OR 2) just becoming bigger versions of Steph Curry shooting analytics inspired 3’s. Instead, they each have become beautiful hybrids of the game's past and present in their unique way. Both players use their size to overwhelm smaller players in the post at hyper-efficient numbers while also being threats to shoot on the perimeter. It is not an accident that neither player is American, and they both bring that outsider mentality into the sport. Jokic incorporates a beautiful passing game that comes from his time playing water polo in Serbia. Simultaneously, Embiid’s defensive footwork, learned from his youthful days playing soccer and volleyball in Cameroon, allows him to guard the paint credibly AND the perimeter in a way traditional big men could not. And they are by no means alone in the NBA: last year’s finals featured Anthony Davis Bam Adebayo playing as versatile centers for both the Lakers and the Heat. There is a good chance that the 2021 NBA champion will be a team that includes one of these dominant “new-age” centers.
You may not care for basketball, but I think the principle here is simple: almost always, the winners are not the entrenched, narrow-minded warriors on the extremes of the two sides of a dispute, but the innovative, open-minded outsiders who can take the best from both sides. The essence of critical thinking is to cultivate a curiosity about ideas that are different from your own and choose to learn from them, rather than rejecting them.
Cancel Culture
“Cancel culture” is a term that means very little at this point because it has been used in so many contexts and situations. Often, people focus their ire on the process of cancel culture: debates over free speech and censorship, people getting piled on in social media, or employees fired over tweets. Now, I think these are problems that we as a society need to think through. But I also believe that the debate process is complex and often not productive. After all, societal norms are about balancing different considerations: it is valid for people to speak their mind on the internet, but it is also useful for others to have the chance to respond and disagree, even if that is unpleasant for the original speaker. Employers should not subject their employees to sudden and spurious firings, but we also grant organizations the right to associate with whom they please freely. It would be bad for employers or companies to have to employ people or do business with other organizations if they genuinely see them as “toxic,” even if you grant that the bounds of “toxic” have expanded too far. I do not think these considerations are currently well-balanced, but I want to acknowledge their complexity here.
The bigger problem is the culture that underlies many of these controversies, a culture that first and foremost sees ideas (often implicitly) through the mental model of war. When you dig into many cases of “cancellation,” what you find is the “cancellers” generally believe that what they did was righteous because the ideas held by their opponent were, in fact, dangerous or evil.
Take, for example, a recent example of the saga between the New York Times and a blogger writing under the pseudonym of Scott Alexander. This saga is long and complicated and probably uninteresting to many of you. The gist is that back in 2020, Alexander deleted his blog SlateStarCodex (SSC) because he did not want the Times to use his real name, Scott Siskind, in a story about him. After months of laying low, the New York Times journalist Cade Metz finally published the piece on him and his influence in Silicon Valley. Much of the article was distorted (in my opinion) by the ongoing beef between Big Tech and the New York Times (which is worth exploring in another post). But I want to focus on Metz’s characterization of SSC as a quite reactionary place:
As he explored science, philosophy and A.I., he also argued that the media ignored that men were often harassed by women. He described some feminists as something close to Voldemort, the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books. He said that affirmative action was difficult to distinguish from “discriminating against white men.”
In 2017, Mr. Siskind published an essay titled “Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due to Offensive Attitudes.” The main reason computer scientists, mathematicians and other groups were predominantly male was not that the industries were sexist, he argued, but that women were simply less interested in joining.
After reading the piece on SSC on gender imbalances in tech, the Times piece seems to be an uncharitable reading of an attempt to parse a genuinely complex subject (including choosing never to quote the blog). But rather than debating the merits of a journalist’s interpretation of a blog post, I think what is more crucial is that Metz largely glosses over the fascinating parts of SSC. SSC is primarily interesting for the broader role it plays as “sacred text” amongst an emergent school of thought called “rationalism” that is highly focused on subjects like “effective altruism” and being “less wrong.” As Matt Yglesias pointed out, this is a highly influential stream of thought:
Ross Douthat reads SSC, and so does Ezra Klein.
David Brooks has quoted him in The New York Times.
Tyler Cowen praises SSC and the larger “rationalist community” that it was a flagship publication of, but also critiques them, saying “I would approve of them much more if they called themselves the irrationality community.”
Instead, as Yglesias points out:
Metz does not seem interested in actually exploring rationalist ideas or understanding their content or the scope of their influence. Instead, the article is structured as a kind of syllogism:
Scott Alexander’s blog is popular with some influential Silicon Valley people.
Scott Alexander has done posts that espouse views on race or gender that progressives disapprove of.
Therefore, Silicon Valley is a hotbed of racism and sexism.
Many have pointed out this reasoning about Silicon Valley is not very accurate. But again, the bigger issue here is the mental model of ideas as war: Metz is clearly concerned with the possibility that SSC was spreading sexist and racist ideas and is trying to call that out to try to discredit SSC ideas. But this assumes a zero-sum view of the world: even if your intellectual enemies' ideas are bad, they are probably right about something.
I am not a rationalist: but I have been influenced by rationalism. My post on risk and uncertainty is partially inspired by rationalist concern for existential risks. When I published my California ballot, I included confidence intervals for every vote, an idea that comes out of rationalist thinking (and Scott Alexander actually does this when he publishes his ballot). My writing on experts has been greatly influenced by Phillip Tetlock, who is a hero to rationalists. These incorporations of rationalist thought can co-exist with my disagreement with the rationalists on many other issues!
Before you think that this is merely a phenomenon on the left, it is worth highlighting what happened last summer at the conservative Southern Baptist theological seminaries when several leaders put out a statement on “Critical Race Theory.” Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a formal academic theory, but I think its lay usage has become shorthand in some parts of the Evangelical Right for any talk of “systemic racism.” The last 20 years have seen the leadership of the Southern Baptists grow younger, and many of these younger leaders (like JD Grear and Russell Moore) are eager to try to build trust with the many African American baptist churches that align with the Southern Baptists theologically, but because of the history of race in American, do not alight with the denomination politically or socially. As subjects like race and policing have become more prominent in our politics, many older members of the SBC have been uncomfortable with the increasing talk of “systemic racism.” This discomfort with talking about race can be seen clearly in the seminaries’ statement:
we also declare that affirmation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and any version of Critical Theory is incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message.
Al Mohler went on to say:
We stand together in stating that we believe that advocating Critical Race Theory or Intersectionality is incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message, and that such advocacy has no rightful place within an SBC seminary.
Now, again, I think this goes back to the mental model of war: if you see the world of ideas primarily through the lens of right and wrong, and defeating bad ideas, then it makes sense to be concerned whenever you encounter something you disagree with. Some elements of CRT and intersectionality do indeed diverge from American Evangelicals' traditional core beliefs, which justified many the need to condemn and defeat these ideas. But this is an inferior way to engage the world of ideas! Just because evangelicals may not agree with all elements of a philosophy does not mean they should wholly reject that philosophy. Many African-Americans Christians who talk about “systemic racism” will be quick to point out that there are parallels between CRT and how the Christian scripture talks about justice:
I am also not a critical race theorist, but I have been influenced by it quite a bit. My existing posts on systemic racism have been influenced quite a bit by my learning and thinking about systemic racism, which often comes out of race theory. Critical theory works its way into how I see complex systems like education, criminal justice, and housing. Again, the incorporation of thought that has come out of CRT can co-exist with my disagreements with other parts of the theory!
I have found great utility in incorporating diverse viewpoints, and I think it is a good pathway to gaining wisdom. But there is also sound research showing that organizations of all kinds (political parties, media outlets, companies, nonprofits, churches) perform better when they contain diverse life experiences and viewpoints. As organizational psychologist Adam Grant points out:
But many institutions are currently going in the opposite direction. Many institutions are not placing a high value on being hospitable to, let alone specifically seeking out, people who will offer a contrarian perspective. There's very little space in the current GOP for people who don't like Donald Trump. There's very little space on the left for people who have reservations about contemporary conceptions of social justice. The mental model of war is quite strong!
Now I know many people are probably thinking: your argument falls apart once you consider that ideas have real-world consequences, and some consequences are so dire that we must defeat them so that they cannot harm people.
I do not dispute this. Some ideas are horrible. Nazi Ideology was and is horrible. The Doctrine of Discovery was and is horrible. Eugenics and Social Darwinism were and are horrible. I could go on naming horrible ideas that I personally do not think are worth engaging as viable streams of thought. And I also acknowledge that “learning” from others is more viable in some disciplines, like economic policy debates that rely mainly on incremental tweaks to the existing system. It is harder when you deal with more fundamental issues of human rights.
But a lot of existing debates in American life ARE between people who disagree on fundamental human rights. Abortion is a debate where both sides believe they are fighting for fundamental human rights. This makes it difficult to know where the line is between those who merely have ideas you disagree with and ideas that are truly reprehensible, horrible, very “wicked.” As David French writes:
The reason why cancel culture has alarmed so many Americans is not because, say, Holocaust deniers face public shame or white supremacists can’t find jobs on network television. It’s because even normal political disagreement has generated extreme, punitive backlash. It’s because intolerant partisans try to treat mainstream dissent as the equivalent of Holocaust denial or white supremacy.
It is worth taking a step back and asking: how often in human history has a debate between two fundamental rights been 100% "won" by one side or another? The ideals of self-government embodied by the American revolution may have won, but the constitution ended up being a compromise that incorporated some more monarchical and oligarchic ideas. Intellectual humility should always tug at us to make us skeptical that our pet ideological causes are really going to end up being 100% correct and stand the test of history.
But even if you dispute this reading of history, it is worth asking if fighting oppositional ideas really works. Can we “de-platform” bad ideas out of existence?
I recently started reading Martin Gurri’s book, the Revolt of the Public. It is far too interesting, and I am far too early in the book to try to do it justice, but I think Gurri’s central premise is crucial to understanding our age and this question. Gurri’s thesis is:
1) For most of human history, we have lived in a world where information was scarce. This meant that if you controlled the supply of information as a government or a newspaper, you could expect to be considered authoritative by the public.
2) The internet has created a world of “information abundance.” As Gurri points out: More information was generated in 2001 than in all the previous existence of our species on earth.
3) As the internet and social media have created a world of information abundance, no one source of information can expect to be seen as “authoritative.”
This decline in authority is not a good or bad thing; it is merely a thing that has happened. In many ways, it is similar to philosopher Charles Taylor's positing that living in a secular age does not mean religion's disappearance. Instead, it means that we now live in a world where all who believe have to choose their faith for themselves because there is no longer the default belief in a particular religion. Likewise, Gurri’s thesis is not that authority has gone away entirely, but that now the public can choose for itself what source to trust. If you consider the root of the word “heretic” in Greek, you find it means “a taking or choosing.” Under this definition, when it comes to authority, we are all informational heretics now.
Many governments and journalists do not understand this and thus still try to leverage their authority to coerce “the public” into believing what they think it should. But this almost always ends up merely eroding whatever credibility the institution has left with those who disagree. I would posit that this is exactly what happened when many in the general public came to believe (rightly or wrongly) that the public health community was being deceitful about COVID to manipulate them into taking as cautious an approach as possible. It is also what happens when the New York Times becomes more explicit about progressive advocacy and pushes out bad ideas. Their subscriber base enjoys it, but the general public merely loses trust. Then you see the rise of talking heads like Joe Rogan, whose brand is not caring what elites think of him.
Anecdotally, I am increasingly finding that my friends, especially friends who have prominent positions in elite institutions, express a gap between what they will say in public and private. One of the issues that the New York Times criticized Scott Alexander for was his public skepticism of affirmative action. But that skepticism is not a minority opinion: even in liberal California, proposition 16, which would have allowed affirmative action, failed by 15 points:
Every county outside of LA County and the Bay Area voted against the measure. Imperial County, which is 72% Latino, voted against it by 16 points. I decided to vote “yes,” but I know many progressive friends who quietly voted “no.” It is hard for me to see the outcome changing unless advocates do better at persuading the public rather than advocating for elite media to silence the opposing perspective.
To use another example: research into conspiracy theories shows that trying to “go to war” against these ideas often backfires. That is because the hallmark of conspiracy thinking is not a specific political ideology but rather a low amount of social trust in institutions or “the system.” It shouldn’t be surprising then that when someone with low social trust in a specific system sees a whole range of actors all move against their beliefs, it often works to confirm their belief that those institutions and systems are conspiring against them. Just like with Gamestop, it ultimately rests on a kind of nihilism.
In a matter of months, our current vaccine rollout will reach a point where we no longer are constrained by supply but by demand, as many people feel unsure about the COVID vaccine. This should not be surprising: there are many Americans, both conservative evangelical Christians AND people of color, who have a low level of trust in the medical research community. These low levels of faith are rooted in separate histories, but both groups tend to be vaccine-hesitant. I believe the best response to this is rooted in listening, conversation, and ultimately firm but kind forms of persuasion, rather than “intellectual war.” Suppose there was a concerted effort to “go to war” intellectually against vaccine-skeptics by de-platforming them and not giving them media access. In that case, I believe it is likely to make more people into hardened anti-vaxxers!
You can see this gentle approach in the work of professor Loretta Ross, a Black Feminist who has developed a practice around “calling in” rather than “calling out.”
The antidote to that outrage cycle, Professor Ross believes, is “calling in.” Calling in is like calling out, but done privately and with respect. “It’s a call out done with love,” she said. That may mean simply sending someone a private message, or even ringing them on the telephone (!) to discuss the matter, or simply taking a breath before commenting, screen-shotting or demanding one “do better” without explaining how.
Calling out assumes the worst. Calling in involves conversation, compassion and context. It doesn’t mean a person should ignore harm, slight or damage, but nor should she, he or they exaggerate it. “Every time somebody disagrees with me it’s not ʻverbal violence.’” Professor Ross said. “I’m not getting ʻre-raped.’ Overstatement of harm is not helpful when you’re trying to create a culture of compassion.”
But more famously, you can see it in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.
Christians for centuries have debated how literally to take these words. Does this mean I cannot stand up for my family against imminent threats of harm? But while I think these debates are significant, I have always been attracted to the vision of Christian pacifism that takes Jesus' words at their plain meaning. Christian pacifism at its root foregrounds the consistent and beautiful belief in all people's redeemability, even our opponents. It is an antidote to the contemporary tendency to assume bad faith in our opponents. I do not consider myself a true Christian pacifist (because I do believe there are some threats so grave that there is a need to fight). But I do believe most people, of all faiths and politics, would be better off more seriously considering these words.
Intellectual Travel
To go back to mental models, if war is a flawed model of what intellectual life should look like, what model should we use? Let us see the life of the mind as similar to cross-cultural travel. Unlike tourists, traveling cross-culturally well means being open-minded, enjoying the hospitality of others. Travelers visit a place to sit and learn from those cultures humbly. Likewise, we can cultivate an intellectual pilgrim's habit of mind, who will expect to visit many ideas in our lifetime.
We can and should expect that the vast majority of travels lead to the traveler coming home, to what we previously believed. In rare cases, people will find the intellectual land they visit so compelling that they stay there for much longer than originally intended. There is a telling exchange in the Hobbit between Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins:
Bilbo: You can promise that I’ll come back?
Gandalf: No. And if you do, you will not be the same.
We can expect to learn and grow from our travels and should expect to return home changed. Our intellectual home may, in fact, never feel quite the same.
Of course, intellectual traveling is dangerous. It would be much safer to stay at home! We might meet hostility, which sometimes means we should prepare to travel only with a trusted guide. But there is a greater danger in never traveling, never taking the time to grow and learn, for our insular worldview will not be robust, ready for any experiences of the outside world. Like an immune system never exposed to germs, we will be easily crushed or naively persuaded by different ideas if we are never exposed to them.
Now some will say that just like travel, this kind of life of the mind is not one that all people of all backgrounds can access; it's a kind of privileged way of viewing the world. And on one level, I will not deny that: not everyone may have the time or resources to engage in this kind of intellectual approach to life. But it is also true that everyone can do this, and many already do, even with limited means. My experience has firmly taught me that being an intellectual traveler is not determined by your social class, not determined by your specialized training, not determined by your expertise. It's determined by your humility and curiosity, your training yourself to always respond to new or opposing ideas not combatively but with a desire to learn. I have known many “elites” who are not intellectual travelers and many people who have had any higher education who are intellectual travelers of the first order.
We can and should hope that all people can aspire to this vision. The only question is, will you join in?