argument

People need permission to disagree

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , ,

Jul 21 JDN 2460513

Obviously, most of the blame for the rise of far-right parties in various countries has to go to the right-wing people who either joined up or failed to stop their allies from joining up. I would hope that goes without saying, but it probably doesn’t, so there, I said it; it’s mostly their fault.

But there is still some fault to go around, and I think we on the left need to do some soul-searching about this.

There is a very common mode of argumentation that is popular on the left, which I think is very dangerous:

“What? You don’t already agree with [policy idea]? You bigot!”

Often it’s not quite that blatant, but the implication is still there: If you don’t agree with this policy involving race, you’re a racist. If you don’t agree with this policy involving transgender rights, you’re a transphobe. If you don’t agree with this policy involving women’s rights, you are a sexist. And so on.

I understand why people think this way. But I also think it has pushed some people over to the right who might otherwise have been possible to persuade to our own side.

And here comes the comeback, I know:

“If being mistreated turns you into a Nazi, you were never a good ally to begin with.”

Well, first of all, not everyone who was pushed away from the left became a full-blown Nazi. Some of them just stopped listening to us, and started listening to whatever the right wing was saying instead.

Second, life is more complicated than that. Most people don’t really have well-defined political views, believe it or not. Most people sort of form their political views on the spot based on whoever else is around them and who they hear talking the loudest. Most swing voters are really low-information voters who really don’t follow politics and make up their minds based on frankly stupid reasons.

And with this in mind, the mere fact that we are pushing people away with our rhetoric means that we are shifting what those low-information voters hear—and thereby giving away elections to the right.

When people disagree about moral questions, isn’t someone morally wrong?

Yes, by construction. (At least one must be; possibly everyone is.)

But we don’t always know who is wrong—and generally speaking, everyone goes into a conversation assuming that they themselves are right. But our ultimate goal of moral conversation is to get more people to be right and fewer people to be wrong, yes? If we treat it as morally wrong to disagree in the first place,we are shutting down any hope of reaching that goal.

Not everyone knows everything about everything.

That may seem perfectly obvious to you, but when you leap from “disagree with [policy]” to “bigot”, you are basically assuming the opposite. You are assuming that whoever you are speaking with knows everything you know about all the relevant considerations of politics and social science, and the only possible reason they could come to a different conclusion is that they have a fundamentally different preference, namely, they are a bigot.

Maybe you are indeed such an enlightened individual that you never get any moral questions wrong. (Maybe.) But can you really expect everyone else to be like that? Isn’t it unfair to ask that of absolutely everyone?

This is why:

People need permission to disagree.

In order for people to learn and grow in their understanding, they need permission to not know all the answers right away. In order for people to change their beliefs, they need permission to believe something that might turn out to be wrong later.


This is exactly the permission we are denying when we accuse anyone we disagree with of being a bigot. Instead of continuing the conversation in the hopes of persuading people to our point of view, we are shutting the conversation down with vitriol and name-calling.

Try to consider this from the opposite perspective.

You enter a conversation about an important political or moral issue. You hear their view expressed, and then you express your own. Immediately, they start accusing you of being morally defective, a racist, sexist, homophobic, and/or transphobic bigot. How likely are you to continue that conversation? How likely are you to go on listening to this person? How likely are you to change your mind about the original political issue?

In fact, might you even be less likely to change your mind than you would have been if you’d just heard their view expressed and then ended the conversation? I think so. I think just respectfully expressing an alternative view pushes people a little—not a lot, but a little—in favor of whatever view you have expressed. It tells them that someone else who is reasonable and intelligent believes X, so maybe X isn’t so unreasonable.

Conversely, when someone resorts to name-calling, what does that do to your evaluation of their views? They suddenly seem unreasonable. You begin to doubt everything they’re saying. You may even try to revise your view further away out of spite (though this is clearly not rational—reversed stupidity is not intelligence).

Think about that, before you resort to name-calling your opponents.

But now I know you’re thinking:

“But some people really are bigots!”

Yes, that’s true. And some of them may even be the sort of irredeemable bigot you’re imagining right now, someone for whom no amount of conversation could ever change their mind.

But I don’t think most people are like that. In fact, I don’t think most bigots are like that. I think even most people who hold bigoted views about whatever population could in fact be persuaded out of those views, under the right circumstances. And I think that the right circumstances involves a lot more patient, respectful conversation than it does angry name-calling. For we are all Judy Hopps.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it doesn’t matter how patiently we argue. But it’s still morally better to be respectful and kind, so I’m going to do it.

You have my permission to disagree.

How to make political conversation possible

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 25 JDN 2460121

Every man has the right to an opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.

~Bernard Baruch

We shouldn’t expect political conversation to be easy. Politics inherently involves confllict. There are various competing interests and different ethical views involved in any political decision. Budgets are inherently limited, and spending must be prioritized. Raising taxes supports public goods but hurts taxpayers. A policy that reduces inflation may increase unemployment. A policy that promotes growth may also increase inequality. Freedom must sometimes be weighed against security. Compromises must be made that won’t make everyone happy—often they aren’t anyone’s first choice.

But in order to have useful political conversations, we need to have common ground. It’s one thing to disagree about what should be done—it’s quite another to ‘disagree’ about the basic facts of the world. Reasonable people can disagree about what constitutes the best policy choice. But when you start insisting upon factual claims that are empirically false, you become inherently unreasonable.

What terrifies me about our current state of political discourse is that we do not seem to have this common ground. We can’t even agree about basic facts of the world. Unless we can fix this, political conversation will be impossible.

I am tempted to say “anymore”—it at least feels to me like politics used to be different. But maybe it’s always been this way, and the Internet simply made the unreasonable voices louder. Overall rates of belief in most conspiracy theories haven’t changed substantially over time. Many other times have declared themselves ‘the golden age of conspiracy theory’. Maybe this has always been a problem. Maybe the greatest reason humanity has never been able to achieve peace is that large swaths of humanity can’t even agree on the basic facts.

Donald Trump exemplified this fact-less approach to politics, and QAnon remains a disturbingly significant force in our politics today. It’s impossible to have a sensible conversation with people who are convinced that you’re supporting a secret cabal of Satanic child molesters—and all the more impossible because they were willing to become convinced of that on literally zero evidence. But Trump was not the first conspiracist candidate, and will not be the last.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now seems to be challenging Trump for the title of ‘most unreasonable Presidential candidate’, as he has now advocated for an astonishing variety of bizarre unfounded claims: that vaccines are deadly, that antidepressants are responsible for mass shootings, that COVID was a Chinese bioweapon. He even claims things that can be quickly refuted simply by looking up the figures: He says that Switzerland’s gun ownership rate is comparable to the US, when in fact it’s only about one-fourth as high. No other country even comes close to the extraordinarily high rate of gun ownership in the US; we are the only country in the world with more privately-owned guns than private citizens to own them—more guns than people. (We also have by far the most military weapons as well, but that’s a somewhat different issue.)

What should we be doing about this? I think at this point it’s clear that simply sitting back and hoping it goes away on its own is not working. There is a widespread fear that engaging with bizarre theories simply grants them attention, but I think we have no serious alternative. They aren’t going to disappear if we simply ignore them.

That still leaves the question of how to engage. Simply arguing with their claims directly and presenting mainstream scientific evidence appears to be remarkably ineffective. They will simply dismiss the credibility of the scientific evidence, often by exaggerating genuine flaws in scientific institutions. The journal system is broken? Big Pharma has far too much influence? Established ideas take too long to become unseated? All true. But that doesn’t mean that magic beans cure cancer.

A more effective—not easy, and certainly not infallible, but more effective—strategy seems to be to look deeper into why people say the things they do. I emphasize the word ‘say’ here, because it often seems to be the case that people don’t really believe in conspiracy theories the way they believe in ordinary facts. It’s more the mythology mindset.

Rather than address the claims directly, you need to address the person making the claims. Before getting into any substantive content, you must first build rapport and show empathy—a process some call pre-suasion. Then, rather than seeking out the evidence that support their claims—as there will be virtually none—try to find out what emotional need the conspiracy theory satisfies for them: How does it help them make sense of the terrifying chaos of the world? How does professing belief in something that initially seems absurd and horrific actually make the world seem more orderly and secure in their mind?


For instance, consider the claim that 9/11 was an inside job. At face value, this is horrifying: The US government is so evil it was prepared to launch an attack on our own soil, against our own citizens, in order to justify starting a war in another country? Against such a government, I think violent insurrection is the only viable response. But if you consider it from another perspective, it makes the world less terrifying: At least, there is someone in control. An attack like 9/11 means that the world is governed by chaos: Even we in the seemingly-impregnable fortress of American national security are in fact vulnerable to random attacks by small groups of dedicated fanatics. In the conspiracist vision of the world, the US government becomes a terrible villain; but at least the world is governed by powerful, orderly forces—not random chaos.

Or consider one of the most widespread (and, to be fair, one of the least implausible) conspiracy theories: That JFK was assassinated not by a single fanatic, but by an organized agency—the KGB, or the CIA, or the Vice President. In the real world, the President of the United States—the most powerful man on the entire planet—can occasionally be felled by a single individual who is dedicated enough and lucky enough. In the conspiracist world, such a powerful man can only be killed by someone similarly powerful. The world may be governed by an evil elite—but at least it is governed. The rules may be evil, but at least there are rules.

Understanding this can give you some sympathy for people who profess conspiracies: They are struggling to cope with the pain of living in a chaotic, unpredictable, disorderly world. They cannot deny that terrible events happen, but by attributing them to unseen, organized forces, they can at least believe that those terrible events are part of some kind of orderly plan.


At the same time, you must constantly guard against seeming arrogant or condescending. (This is where I usually fail; it’s so hard for me to take these ideas seriously.) You must present yourself as open-minded and interested in speaking in good faith. If they sense that you aren’t taking them seriously, people will simply shut down and refuse to talk any further.

It’s also important to recognize that most people with bizarre beliefs aren’t simply gullible. It isn’t that they believe whatever anyone tells them. On the contrary, they seem to suffer from misplaced skepticism: They doubt the credible sources and believe the unreliable ones. They are hyper-aware of the genuine problems with mainstream sources, and yet somehow totally oblivious to the far more glaring failures of the sources they themselves trust.

Moreover, you should never expect to change someone’s worldview in a single conversation. That simply isn’t how human beings work. The only times I have ever seen anyone completely change their opinion on something in a single sitting involved mathematical proofs—showing a proper proof really can flip someone’s opinion all by itself. Yet even scientists working in their own fields of expertise generally require multiple sources of evidence, combined over some period of time, before they will truly change their minds.

Your goal, then, should not be to convince someone that their bizarre belief is wrong. Rather, convince them that some of the sources they trust are just as unreliable as the ones they doubt. Or point out some gaps in the story they hadn’t considered. Or offer an alternative account of events that explains the outcome without requiring the existence of a secret evil cabal. Don’t try to tear down the entire wall all at once; chip away at it, one little piece at a time—and one day, it will crumble.

Hopefully if we do this enough, we can make useful political conversation possible.

In defense of civility

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 18 JDN 2459932

Civility is in short supply these days. Perhaps it has always been in short supply; certainly much of the nostalgia for past halcyon days of civility is ill-founded. Wikipedia has an entire article on hundreds of recorded incidents of violence in legislative assemblies, in dozens of countries, dating all the way from to the Roman Senate in 44 BC to Bosnia in 2019. But the Internet seems to bring about its own special kind of incivility, one which exposes nearly everyone to some of the worst vitriol the entire world has to offer. I think it’s worth talking about why this is bad, and perhaps what we might do about it.

For some, the benefits of civility seem so self-evident that they don’t even bear mentioning. For others, the idea of defending civility may come across as tone-deaf or even offensive. I would like to speak to both of those camps today: If you think the benefits of civility are obvious, I assure you, they aren’t to everyone. And if you think that civility is just a tool of the oppressive status quo, I hope I can make you think again.

A lot of the argument against civility seems to be founded in the notion that these issues are important, lives are at stake, and so we shouldn’t waste time and effort being careful how we speak to each other. How dare you concern yourself with the formalities of argumentation when people are dying?

But this is totally wrongheaded. It is precisely because these issues are important that civility is vital. It is precisely because lives are at stake that we must make the right decisions. And shouting and name-calling (let alone actual fistfights or drawn daggers—which have happened!) are not conducive to good decision-making.

If you shout someone down when choosing what restaurant to have dinner at, you have been very rude and people may end up unhappy with their dining experience—but very little of real value has been lost. But if you shout someone down when making national legislation, you may cause the wrong policy to be enacted, and this could lead to the suffering or death of thousands of people.

Think about how court proceedings work. Why are they so rigid and formal, with rules upon rules upon rules? Because the alternative was capricious violence. In the absence of the formal structure of a court system, so-called ‘justice’ was handed out arbitrarily, by whoever was in power, or by mobs of vigilantes. All those seemingly-overcomplicated rules were made in order to resolve various conflicts of interest and hopefully lead toward more fair, consistent results in the justice system. (And don’t get me wrong; they still could stand to be greatly improved!)

Legislatures have complex rules of civility for the same reason: Because the outcome is so important, we need to make sure that the decision process is as reliable as possible. And as flawed as existing legislatures still are, and as silly as it may seem to insist upon addressing ‘the Honorable Representative from the Great State of Vermont’, it’s clearly a better system than simply letting them duke it out with their fists.

A related argument I would like to address is that of ‘tone policing‘. If someone objects, not to the content of what you are saying, but to the tone in which you have delivered it, are they arguing in bad faith?

Well, possibly. Certainly, arguments about tone can be used that way. In particular I remember that this was basically the only coherent objection anyone could come up with against the New Atheism movement: “Well, sure, obviously, God isn’t real and religion is ridiculous; but why do you have to be so mean about it!?”

But it’s also quite possible for tone to be itself a problem. If your tone is overly aggressive and you don’t give people a chance to even seriously consider your ideas before you accuse them of being immoral for not agreeing with you—which happens all the time—then your tone really is the problem.

So, how can we tell which is which? I think a good way to reply to what you think might be bad-faith tone policing is this: “What sort of tone do you think would be better?”

I think there are basically three possible responses:

1. They can’t offer one, because there is actually no tone in which they would accept the substance of your argument. In that case, the tone policing really is in bad faith; they don’t want you to be nicer, they want you to shut up. This was clearly the case for New Atheism: As Daniel Dennett aptly remarked, “There’s simply no polite way to tell someone they have dedicated their lives to an illusion.” But sometimes, such things need to be said all the same.

2. They offer an alternative argument you could make, but it isn’t actually expressing your core message. Either they have misunderstood your core message, or they actually disagree with the substance of your argument and should be addressing it on those terms.

3. They offer an alternative way of expressing your core message in a milder, friendlier tone. This means that they are arguing in good faith and actually trying to help you be more persuasive!

I don’t know how common each of these three possibilities is; it could well be that the first one is the most frequent occurrence. That doesn’t change the fact that I have definitely been at the other end of the third one, where I absolutely agree with your core message and want your activism to succeed, but I can see that you’re acting like a jerk and nobody will want to listen to you.

Here, let me give some examples of the type of argument I’m talking about:

1. “Defund the police”: This slogan polls really badly. Probably because most people have genuine concerns about crime and want the police to protect them. Also, as more and more social services (like for mental health and homelessness) get co-opted into policing, this slogan makes it sound like you’re just going to abandon those people. But do we need serious, radical police reform? Absolutely. So how about “Reform the police”, “Put police money back into the community”, or even “Replace the police”?

2. “All Cops Are Bastards”: Speaking of police reform, did I mention we need it? A lot of it? Okay. Now, let me ask you: All cops? Every single one of them? There is not a single one out of the literally millions of police officers on this planet who is a good person? Not one who is fighting to take down police corruption from within? Not a single individual who is trying to fix the system while preserving public safety? Now, clearly, it’s worth pointing out, some cops are bastards—but hey, that even makes a better acronym: SCAB. In fact, it really is largely a few bad apples—the key point here is that you need to finish the aphorism: “A few bad apples spoil the whole barrel.” The number of police who are brutal and corrupt is relatively small, but as long as the other police continue to protect them, the system will be broken. Either you get those bad apples out pronto, or your whole barrel is bad. But demonizing the very people who are in the best position to implement those reforms—good police officers—is not helping.

3. “Be gay, do crime”: I know it’s tongue-in-cheek and ironic. I get that. It’s still a really dumb message. I am absolutely on board with LGBT rights. Even aside from being queer myself, I probably have more queer and trans friends than straight friends at this point. But why in the world would you want to associate us with petty crime? Why are you lumping us in with people who harm others at best out of desperation and at worst out of sheer greed? Even if you are literally an anarchist—which I absolutely am not—you’re really not selling anarchism well if the vision you present of it is a world of unfettered crime! There are dozens of better pro-LGBT slogans out there; pick one. Frankly even “do gay, be crime” is better, because it’s more clearly ironic. (Also, you can take it to mean something like this: Don’t just be gay, do gay—live your fullest gay life. And if you can be crime, that means that the system is fundamentally unjust: You can be criminalized just for who you are. And this is precisely what life is like for millions of LGBT people on this planet.)

A lot of people seem to think that if you aren’t immediately convinced by the most vitriolic, aggressive form of an argument, then you were never going to be convinced anyway and we should just write you off as a potential ally. This isn’t just obviously false; it’s incredibly dangerous.

The whole point of activism is that not everyone already agrees with you. You are trying to change minds. If it were really true that all reasonable, ethical people already agreed with your view, you wouldn’t need to be an activist. The whole point of making political arguments is that people can be reasonable and ethical and still be mistaken about things, and when we work hard to persuade them, we can eventually win them over. In fact, on some things we’ve actually done spectacularly well.

And what about the people who aren’t reasonable and ethical? They surely exist. But fortunately, they aren’t the majority. They don’t rule the whole world. If they did, we’d basically be screwed: If violence is really the only solution, then it’s basically a coin flip whether things get better or worse over time. But in fact, unreasonable people are outnumbered by reasonable people. Most of the things that are wrong with the world are mistakes, errors that can be fixed—not conflicts between irreconcilable factions. Our goal should be to fix those mistakes wherever we can, and that means being patient, compassionate educators—not angry, argumentative bullies.

Updating your moral software

PNRJ core principles, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 23 JDN 2459876

I’ve noticed an odd tendency among politically active people, particular social media slacktivists (a term I do not use pejoratively: slacktivism is highly cost-effective). They adopt new ideas very rapidly, trying to stay on the cutting edge of moral and political discourse—and then they denigrate and disparage anyone who fails to do the same as an irredeemable monster.

This can take many forms, such as “if you don’t buy into my specific take on Critical Race Theory, you are a racist”, “if you have any uncertainty about the widespread use of puberty blockers you are a transphobic bigot”, “if you give any credence to the medical consensus on risks of obesity you are fatphobic“, “if you think disabilities should be cured you’re an ableist”, and “if you don’t support legalizing abortion in all circumstances you are a misogynist”.

My intention here is not to evaluate any particular moral belief, though I’ll say the following: I am skeptical of Critical Race Theory, especially the 1619 project which seems to be to include substantial distortions of history. I am cautiously supportive of puberty blockers, because the medical data on their risks are ambiguous—while the sociological data on how much happier trans kids are when accepted are totally unambiguous. I am well aware of the medical data saying that the risks of obesity are overblown (but also not negligible, particular for those who are very obese). Speaking as someone with a disability that causes me frequent, agonizing pain, yes, I want disabilities to be cured, thank you very much; accommodations are nice in the meantime, but the best long-term solution is to not need accommodations. (I’ll admit to some grey areas regarding certain neurodivergences such as autism and ADHD, and I would never want to force cures on people who don’t want them; but paralysis, deafness, blindness, diabetes, depression, and migraine are all absolutely worth finding cures for—the QALY at stake here are massive—and it’s silly to say otherwise.) I think abortion should generally be legal and readily available in the first trimester (which is when most abortions happen anyway), but much more strictly regulated thereafter—but denying it to children and rape victims is a human rights violation.

What I really want to talk about today is not the details of the moral belief, but the attitude toward those who don’t share it. There are genuine racists, transphobes, fatphobes, ableists, and misogynists in the world. There are also structural institutions that can lead to discrimination despite most of the people involved having no particular intention to discriminate. It’s worthwhile to talk about these things, and to try to find ways to fix them. But does calling anyone who disagrees with you a monster accomplish that goal?

This seems particularly bad precisely when your own beliefs are so cutting-edge. If you have a really basic, well-established sort of progressive belief like “hiring based on race should be illegal”, “women should be allowed to work outside the home” or “sodomy should be legal”, then people who disagree with you pretty much are bigots. But when you’re talking about new, controversial ideas, there is bound to be some lag; people who adopted the last generation’s—or even the last year’s—progressive beliefs may not yet be ready to accept the new beliefs, and that doesn’t make them bigots.

Consider this: Were you born believing in your current moral and political beliefs?

I contend that you were not. You may have been born intelligent, open-minded, and empathetic. You may have been born into a progressive, politically-savvy family. But the fact remains that any particular belief you hold about race, or gender, or ethics was something you had to learn. And if you learned it, that means that at some point you didn’t already know it. How would you have felt back then, if, instead of calmly explaining it to you, people called you names for not believing in it?

Now, perhaps it is true that as soon as you heard your current ideas, you immediately adopted them. But that may not be the case—it may have taken you some time to learn or change your mind—and even if it was, it’s still not fair to denigrate anyone who takes a bit longer to come around. There are many reasons why someone might not be willing to change their beliefs immediately, and most of them are not indicative of bigotry or deep moral failings.

It may be helpful to think about this in terms of updating your moral software. You were born with a very minimal moral operating system (emotions such as love and guilt, the capacity for empathy), and over time you have gradually installed more and more sophisticated software on top of that OS. If someone literally wasn’t born with the right OS—we call these people psychopaths—then, yes, you have every right to hate, fear, and denigrate them. But most of the people we’re talking about do have that underlying operating system, they just haven’t updated all their software to the same version as yours. It’s both unfair and counterproductive to treat them as irredeemably defective simply because they haven’t updated to the newest version yet. They have the hardware, they have the operating system; maybe their download is just a little slower than yours.

In fact, if you are very fast to adopt new, trendy moral beliefs, you may in fact be adopting them too quickly—they haven’t been properly vetted by human experience just yet. You can think of this as like a beta version: The newest update has some great new features, but it’s also buggy and unstable. It may need to be fixed before it is really ready for widespread release. If that’s the case, then people aren’t even wrong not to adopt them yet! It isn’t necessarily bad that you have adopted the new beliefs; we need beta testers. But you should be aware of your status as a beta tester and be prepared both to revise your own beliefs if needed, and also to cut other people slack if they disagree with you.

I understand that it can be immensely frustrating to be thoroughly convinced that something is true and important and yet see so many people disagreeing with it. (I am an atheist activist after all, so I absolutely know what that feels like.) I understand that it can be immensely painful to watch innocent people suffer because they have to live in a world where other people have harmful beliefs. But you aren’t changing anyone’s mind or saving anyone from harm by calling people names. Patience, tact, and persuasion will win the long game, and the long game is really all we have.

And if it makes you feel any better, the long game may not be as long as it seems. The arc of history may have tighter curvature than we imagine. We certainly managed a complete flip of the First World consensus on gay marriage in just a single generation. We may be able to achieve similarly fast social changes in other areas too. But we haven’t accomplished the progress we have so far by being uncharitable or aggressive toward those who disagree.

I am emphatically not saying you should stop arguing for your beliefs. We need you to argue for your beliefs. We need you to argue forcefully and passionately. But when doing so, try not to attack the people who don’t yet agree with you—for they are precisely the people we need to listen to you.

On the Overton Window

PNRJ core principles, ethics, heuristics and biases, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , ,

Jul 24 JDN 2459786

As you are no doubt aware, a lot of people on the Internet like to loudly proclaim support for really crazy, extreme ideas. Some of these people actually believe in those ideas, and if you challenge them, will do their best to defend them. Those people are wrong at the level of substantive policy, but there’s nothing wrong with their general approach: If you really think that anarchism or communism is a good thing, it only makes sense that you’d try to convince other people. You might have a hard time of it (in part because you are clearly wrong), but it makes sense that you’d try.

But there is another class of people who argue for crazy, extreme ideas. When pressed, they will admit they don’t really believe in abolishing the police or collectivizing all wealth, but they believe in something else that’s sort of vaguely in that direction, and they think that advocating for the extreme idea will make people more likely to accept what they actually want.

They often refer to this as “shifting the Overton Window”. As Matt Yglesias explained quite well a year ago, this is not actually what Overton was talking about.

But, in principle, it could still be a thing that works. There is a cognitive bias known as anchoring which is often used in marketing: If I only offered a $5 bottle of wine and a $20 bottle of wine, you might think the $20 bottle is too expensive. But if I also include a $50 bottle, that makes you adjust your perceptions of what constitutes a “reasonable” price for wine, and may make you more likely to buy the $20 bottle after all.

It could be, therefore, that an extreme policy demand makes people more willing to accept moderate views, as a sort of compromise. Maybe demanding the abolition of police is a way of making other kinds of police reform seem more reasonable. Maybe showing pictures of Marx and chanting “eat the rich” could make people more willing to accept higher capital gains taxes. Maybe declaring that we are on the verge of apocalyptic climate disaster will make people more willing to accept tighter regulations on carbon emissions and subsidies for solar energy.

Then again—does it actually seem to do that? I see very little evidence that it does. All those demands for police abolition haven’t changed the fact that defunding the police is unpopular. Raising taxes on the rich is popular, but it has been for awhile now (and never was with, well, the rich). And decades of constantly shouting about imminent climate catastrophe is really starting to look like crying wolf.

To see why this strategy seems to be failing, I think it’s helpful to consider how it feels from the other side. Take a look at some issues where someone else is trying to get you to accept a particular view, and consider whether someone advocating a more extreme view would make you more likely to compromise.

Your particular opinions may vary, but here are some examples that would apply to me, and, I suspect, many of you.

If someone says they want tighter border security, I’m skeptical—it’s pretty tight already. But in and of itself, this would not be such a crazy idea. Certainly I agree that it is possible to have too little border security, and so maybe that turns out to be the state we’re in.

But then, suppose that same person, or someone closely allied to them, starts demanding the immediate deportation of everyone who was not born in the United States, even those who immigrated legally and are naturalized or here on green cards. This is a crazy, extreme idea that’s further in the same direction, so on this anchoring theory, it should make me more willing to accept the idea of tighter border security. And yet, I can say with some confidence that it has no such effect.

Indeed, if anything I think it would make me less likely to accept tighter border security, in proportion to how closely aligned those two arguments are. If they are coming from the same person, or the same political party, it would cause me to suspect that the crazy, extreme policy is the true objective, and the milder, compromise policy is just a means toward that end. It also suggests certain beliefs and attitudes about immigration in general—xenophobia, racism, ultranationalism—that I oppose even more strongly. If you’re talking about deporting all immigrants, you make me suspect that your reasons for wanting tighter border security are not good ones.

Let’s try another example. Suppose someone wants to cut taxes on upper income brackets. In our current state, I think that would be a bad idea. But there was a time not so long ago when I would have agreed with it: Even I have to admit that a top bracket of 94% (as we had in 1943) sounds a little ridiculous, and is surely on the wrong side of the Laffer curve. So the basic idea of cutting top tax rates is not inherently crazy or ridiculous.

Now, suppose that same idea came from the same person, or the same party, or the same political movement, as one that was arguing for the total abolition of all taxation. This is a crazy, extreme idea; it would amount to either total anarcho-capitalism with no government at all, or some sort of bizarre system where the government is funded entirely through voluntary contributions. I think it’s pretty obvious that such a system would be terrible, if not outright impossible; and anyone whose understanding of political economy is sufficiently poor that they would fail to see this is someone whose overall judgment on questions of policy I must consider dubious. Once again, the presence of the extreme view does nothing to make me want to consider the moderate view, and may even make me less willing to do so.

Perhaps I am an unusually rational person, not so greatly affected by anchoring biases? Perhaps. But whereas I do feel briefly tempted by to buy the $20 wine bottle by the effect of the $50 wine bottle, and must correct myself with knowledge I have about anchoring bias, the presentation of an extreme political view never even makes me feel any temptation to accept some kind of compromise with it. Learning that someone supports something crazy or ridiculous—or is willing to say they do, even if deep down they don’t—makes me automatically lower my assessment of their overall credibility. If anything, I think I am tempted to overreact in that direction, and have to remind myself of the Stopped Clock Principle: reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and someone can have both bad ideas and good ones.

Moreover, the empirical data, while sketchy, doesn’t seem to support this either; where the Overton Window (in the originally intended sense) has shifted, as on LGBT rights, it was because people convincingly argued that the “extreme” position was in fact an entirely reasonable and correct view. There was a time not so long ago that same-sex marriage was deemed unthinkable, and the “moderate” view was merely decriminalizing sodomy; but we demanded, and got, same-sex marriage, not as a strategy to compromise on decriminalizing sodomy, but because we actually wanted same-sex marriage and had good arguments for it. I highly doubt we would have been any more successful if we had demanded something ridiculous and extreme, like banning opposite-sex marriage.

The resulting conclusion seems obvious and banal: Only argue for things you actually believe in.

Yet, somehow, that seems to be a controversial view these days.

How to change minds

PNRJ core principles, ethics, heuristics and biases, politics, science and academia, tribal paradigm , , , , ,

Aug 29 JDN 2459456

Think for a moment about the last time you changed your mind on something important. If you can’t think of any examples, that’s not a good sign. Think harder; look back further. If you still can’t find any examples, you need to take a deep, hard look at yourself and how you are forming your beliefs. The path to wisdom is not found by starting with the right beliefs, but by starting with the wrong ones and recognizing them as wrong. No one was born getting everything right.

If you remember changing your mind about something, but don’t remember exactly when, that’s not a problem. Indeed, this is the typical case, and I’ll get to why in a moment. Try to remember as much as you can about the whole process, however long it took.

If you still can’t specifically remember changing your mind, try to imagine a situation in which you would change your mind—and if you can’t do that, you should be deeply ashamed and I have nothing further to say to you.

Thinking back to that time: Why did you change your mind?

It’s possible that it was something you did entirely on your own, through diligent research of primary sources or even your own mathematical proofs or experimental studies. This is occasionally something that happens; as an active researcher, it has definitely happened to me. But it’s clearly not the typical case of what changes people’s minds, and it’s quite likely that you have never experienced it yourself.

The far more common scenario—even for active researchers—is far more mundane: You changed your mind because someone convinced you. You encountered a persuasive argument, and it changed the way you think about things.

In fact, it probably wasn’t just one persuasive argument; it was probably many arguments, from multiple sources, over some span of time. It could be as little as minutes or hours; it could be as long as years.

Probably the first time someone tried to change your mind on that issue, they failed. The argument may even have degenerated into shouting and name-calling. You both went away thinking that the other side was composed of complete idiots or heartless monsters. And then, a little later, thinking back on the whole thing, you remembered one thing they said that was actually a pretty good point.

This happened again with someone else, and again with yet another person. And each time your mind changed just a little bit—you became less certain of some things, or incorporated some new information you didn’t know before. The towering edifice of your worldview would not be toppled by a single conversation—but a few bricks here and there did get taken out and replaced.

Or perhaps you weren’t even the target of the conversation; you simply overheard it. This seems especially common in the age of social media, where public and private spaces become blurred and two family members arguing about politics can blow up into a viral post that is viewed by millions. Perhaps you changed your mind not because of what was said to you, but because of what two other people said to one another; perhaps the one you thought was on your side just wasn’t making as many good arguments as the one on the other side.

Now, you may be thinking: Yes, people like me change our minds, because we are intelligent and reasonable. But those people, on the other side, aren’t like that. They are stubborn and foolish and dogmatic and stupid.

And you know what? You probably are an especially intelligent and reasonable person. If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance that you are at least above-average in your level of education, rationality, and open-mindedness.

But no matter what beliefs you hold, I guarantee you there is someone out there who shares many of them and is stubborn and foolish and dogmatic and stupid. And furthermore, there is probably someone out there who disagrees with many of your beliefs and is intelligent and open-minded and reasonable.

This is not to say that there’s no correlation between your level of reasonableness and what you actually believe. Obviously some beliefs are more rational than others, and rational people are more likely to hold those beliefs. (If this weren’t the case, we’d be doomed.) Other things equal, an atheist is more reasonable than a member of the Taliban; a social democrat is more reasonable than a neo-Nazi; a feminist is more reasonable than a misogynist; a member of the Human Rights Campaign is more reasonable than a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. But reasonable people can be wrong, and unreasonable people can be right.

You should be trying to seek out the most reasonable people who disagree with you. And you should be trying to present yourself as the most reasonable person who expresses your own beliefs.

This can be difficult—especially that first part, as the world (or at least the world spanned by Facebook and Twitter) seems to be filled with people who are astonishingly dogmatic and unreasonable. Often you won’t be able to find any reasonable disagreement. Often you will find yourself in threads full of rage, hatred and name-calling, and you will come away disheartened, frustrated, or even despairing for humanity. The whole process can feel utterly futile.

And yet, somehow, minds change.

Support for same-sex marriage in the US rose from 27% to 70% just since 1997.

Read that date again: 1997. Less than 25 years ago.

The proportion of new marriages which were interracial has risen from 3% in 1967 to 19% today. Given the racial demographics of the US, this is almost at the level of random assortment.

Ironically I think that the biggest reason people underestimate the effectiveness of rational argument is the availability heuristic: We can’t call to mind any cases where we changed someone’s mind completely. We’ve never observed a pi-radian turnaround in someone’s whole worldview, and thus, we conclude that nobody ever changes their mind about anything important.

But in fact most people change their minds slowly and gradually, and are embarrassed to admit they were wrong in public, so they change their minds in private. (One of the best single changes we could make toward improving human civilization would be to make it socially rewarded to publicly admit you were wrong. Even the scientific community doesn’t do this nearly as well as it should.) Often changing your mind doesn’t even really feel like changing your mind; you just experience a bit more doubt, learn a bit more, and repeat the process over and over again until, years later, you believe something different than you did before. You moved 0.1 or even 0.01 radians at a time, until at last you came all the way around.

It may be in fact that some people’s minds cannot be changed—either on particular issues, or even on any issue at all. But it is so very, very easy to jump to that conclusion after a few bad interactions, that I think we should intentionally overcompensate in the opposite direction: Only give up on someone after you have utterly overwhelming evidence that their mind cannot ever be changed in any way.

I can’t guarantee that this will work. Perhaps too many people are too far gone.

But I also don’t see any alternative. If the truth is to prevail, it will be by rational argument. This is the only method that systematically favors the truth. All other methods give equal or greater power to lies.

Moral disagreement is not bad faith

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 7 JDN 2459008

One of the most dangerous moves to make in an argument is to accuse your opponent of bad faith. It’s a powerful, and therefore tempting, maneuver: If they don’t even really believe what they are saying, then you can safely ignore basically whatever comes out of their mouth. And part of why this is so tempting is that it is in fact occasionally true—people do sometimes misrepresent their true beliefs in various ways for various reasons. On the Internet especially, sometimes people are just trolling.

But unless you have really compelling evidence that someone is arguing in bad faith, you should assume good faith. You should assume that whatever they are asserting is what they actually believe. For if you assume bad faith and are wrong, you have just cut off any hope of civil discourse between the two of you. You have made it utterly impossible for either side to learn anything or change their mind in any way. If you assume good faith and are wrong, you may have been overly charitable; but in the end you are the one that is more likely to persuade any bystanders, not the one who was arguing in bad faith.

Furthermore, it is important to really make an effort to understand your opponent’s position as they understand it before attempting to respond to it. Far too many times, I have seen someone accused of bad faith by an opponent who simply did not understand their worldview—and did not even seem willing to try to understand their worldview.

In this post, I’m going to point out some particularly egregious examples of this phenomenon that I’ve found, all statements made by left-wing people in response to right-wing people. Why am I focusing on these? Well, for one thing, it’s as important to challenge bad arguments on your own side as it is to do so on the other side. I also think I’m more likely to be persuasive to a left-wing audience. I could find right-wing examples easily enough, but I think it would be less useful: It would be too tempting to think that this is something only the other side does.

Example 1: “Republicans Have Stopped Pretending to Care About Life”

The phrase “pro-life” means thinking that abortion is wrong. That’s all it means. It’s jargon at this point. The phrase has taken on this meaning independent of its constituent parts, just as a red herring need not be either red or a fish.

Stop accusing people of not being “truly pro-life” because they don’t adopt some other beliefs that are not related to abortion. Even if those would be advancing life in some sense (most people probably think that most things they think are good advance life in some sense!), they aren’t relevant to the concept of being “pro-life”. Moreover, being “pro-life” in the traditional conservative sense isn’t even about minimizing the harm of abortion or the abortion rate. It’s about emphasizing the moral wrongness of abortion itself, and often even criminalizing it.


I don’t think this is really so hard to understand. If someone truly, genuinely believes that abortion is murdering a child, it’s quite clear why they won’t be convinced by attempts at minimizing harm or trying to reduce the abortion rate via contraception or other social policy. Many policies are aimed at “reducing the demand for abortion”; would you want to “reduce the demand for murder”? No, you’d want murderers to be locked up. You wouldn’t care what their reasons were, and you wouldn’t be interested in using social policies to address those reasons. It’s not even hard to understand why this would be such an important issue to them, overriding almost anything else: If you thought that millions of people were murdering children you would consider that an extremely important issue too.

If you want to convince people to support Roe v. Wade, you’re going to have to change their actual belief that abortion is murder. You may even be able to convince them that they don’t really think abortion is murder—many conservatives support the death penalty for murder, but very few do so for abortion. But they clearly do think that abortion is a grave moral wrong, and you can’t simply end-run around that by calling them hypocrites because they don’t care about whatever other issue you think they should care about.

Example 2: “Stop pretending to care about human life if you support wars in the Middle East”

I had some trouble finding the exact wording of the meme I originally saw with this sentiment, but the gist of it was basically that if you support bombing Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, and/or Syria, you have lost all legitimacy to claiming that you care about human life.

Say what you will about these wars (though to be honest I think what the US has done in Libya and Syria has done more good than harm), but simply supporting a war does not automatically undermine all your moral legitimacy. The kind of radical pacifism that requires us to never kill anyone ever is utterly unrealistic; the question is and has always been “Which people is it okay to kill, when and how and why?” Some wars are justified; we have to accept that.

It would be different if these were wars of genocidal extermination; I can see a case for saying that anyone who supported the Holocaust or the Rwandan Genocide has lost all moral legitimacy. But even then it isn’t really accurate to say that those people don’t care about human life; it’s much more accurate to say that they have assigned the group of people they want to kill to a subhuman status. Maybe you would actually get more traction by saying “They are human beings too!” rather than by accusing people of not believing in the value of human life.

And clearly these are not wars of extermination—if the US military wanted to exterminate an entire nation of people, they could do so much more efficiently than by using targeted airstrikes and conventional warfare. Remember: They have nuclear weapons. Even if you think that they wouldn’t use nukes because of fear of retaliation (Would Russia or China really retaliate using their own nukes if the US nuked Afghanistan or Iran?), it’s clear that they could have done a lot more to kill a lot more innocent people if that were actually their goal. It’s one thing to say they don’t take enough care not to kill innocent civilians—I agree with that. It’s quite another to say that they actively try to kill innocent civilians—that’s clearly not what is happening.

Example 3: “Stop pretending to be Christian if you won’t help the poor.”

This one I find a good deal more tempting: In the Bible, Jesus does spend an awful lot more words on helping the poor than he does on, well, almost anything else; and he doesn’t even once mention abortion or homosexuality. (The rest of the Bible does at least mention homosexuality, but it really doesn’t have any clear mentions of abortion.) So it really is tempting to say that anyone who doesn’t make helping the poor their number one priority can’t really be a Christian.

But the world is more complicated than that. People can truly and deeply believe some aspects of a religion while utterly rejecting others. They can do this more or less arbitrarily, in a way that may not even be logically coherent. They may even honestly believe that every single word of the Bible to be the absolute perfect truth of an absolute perfect God, and yet there are still passages you could point them to that they would have to admit they don’t believe in. (There are literally hundreds of explicit contradictions in the Bible. Many are minor—though still undermine any claim to absolute perfect truth—but some are really quite substantial. Does God forgive and forget, or does he visit revenge upon generations to come? That’s kind of a big deal! And should we be answering fools or not?) In some sense they don’t really believe that every word is true, then; but they do seem to believe in believing it.

Yes, it’s true; people can worship a penniless son of a carpenter who preached peace and charity and at the same time support cutting social welfare programs and bombing the Middle East. Such a worldview may not be entirely self-consistent; it’s certainly not the worldview that Jesus himself espoused. But it nevertheless is quite sincerely believed by many millions of people.

It may still be useful to understand the Bible in order to persuade Christians to help the poor more. There are certainly plenty of passages you can point them to where Jesus talks about how important it is to help the poor. Likewise, Jesus doesn’t seem to much like the rich, so it is fair to ask: How Christian is it for Republicans to keep cutting taxes on the rich? (I literally laughed out loud when I first saw this meme: “Celebrate Holy Week By Flogging a Banker: It’s What Jesus Would Have Done!“) But you should not accuse people of “pretending to be Christian”. They really do strongly identify themselves as Christian, and would sooner give up almost anything else about their identity. If you accuse them of pretending, all that will do is shut down the conversation.

Now, after all that, let me give one last example that doesn’t fit the trend, one example where I really do think the other side is acting in bad faith.


Example 4: “#AllLivesMatter is a lie. You don’t actually think all lives matter.”

I think this one is actually true. If you truly believed that all lives matter, you wouldn’t post the hashtag #AllLivesMatter in response to #BlackLivesMatter protests against police brutality.

First of all, you’d probably be supporting those protests. But even if you didn’t for some reason, that isn’t how you would use the hashtag. As a genuine expression of caring, the hashtag #AllLivesMatter would only really make sense for something like Oxfam or UNICEF: Here are these human lives that are in danger and we haven’t been paying enough attention to them, and here, you can follow my hashtag and give some money to help them because all lives matter. If it were really about all lives mattering, then you’d see the hashtag pop up after a tsunami in Southeast Asia or a famine in central Africa. (For awhile I tried actually using it that way; I quickly found that it was overwhelmed by the bad faith usage and decided to give up.)

No, this hashtag really seems to be trying to use a genuinely reasonable moral norm—all lives matter—as a weapon against a political movement. We don’t see #AllLivesMatter popping up asking people to help save some lives—it’s always as a way of shouting down other people who want to save some lives. It’s a glib response that lets you turn away and ignore their pleas, without ever actually addressing the substance of what they are saying. If you really believed that all lives matter, you would not be so glib; you would want to understand how so many people are suffering and want to do something to help them. Even if you ultimately disagreed with what they were saying, you would respect them enough to listen.

The counterpart #BlueLivesMatter isn’t in bad faith, but it is disturbing in a different way: What are ‘blue lives’? People aren’t born police officers. They volunteer for that job. They can quit if want. No one can quit being Black. Working as a police officer isn’t even especially dangerous! But it’s not a bad faith argument: These people really do believe that the lives of police officers are worth more—apparently much more—than the lives of Black civilians.

I do admit, the phrasing “#BlackLivesMatter” is a bit awkward, and could be read to suggest that other lives don’t matter, but it takes about 2 minutes of talking to someone (or reading a blog by someone) who supports those protests to gather that this is not their actual view. Perhaps they should have used #BlackLivesMatterToo, but when your misconception is that easily rectified the responsibility to avoid it falls on you. (Then again, some people do seem to stoke this misconception: I was quite annoyed when a question was asked at a Democratic debate: “Do Black Lives Matter, or Do All Lives Matter?” The correct answer of course is “All lives matter, which is why I support the Black Lives Matter movement.”)

So, yes, bad faith arguments do exist, and sometimes we need to point them out. But I implore you, consider that a last resort, a nuclear option you’ll only deploy when all other avenues have been exhausted. Once you accuse someone of bad faith, you have shut down the conversation completely—preventing you, them, and anyone else who was listening from having any chance of learning or changing their mind.

Good for the economy isn’t the same as good

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, development economics, macroeconomics , , ,

Dec 8 JDN 2458826

Many of the common critiques of economics are actually somewhat misguided, or at least outdated: While there are still some neoclassical economists who think that markets are perfect and humans are completely rational, most economists these days would admit that there are at least some exceptions to this. But there’s at least one common critique that I think still has a good deal of merit: “Good for the economy” isn’t the same thing as good.

I’ve read literally dozens, if not hundreds, of articles on economics, in both popular press and peer-reviewed journals, that all defend their conclusions in the following way: “Intervention X would statistically be expected to increase GDP/raise total surplus/reduce unemployment. Therefore, policymakers should implement intervention X.” The fact that a policy would be “good for the economy” (in a very narrow sense) is taken as a completely compelling reason that this policy must be overall good.

The clearest examples of this always turn up during a recession, when inevitably people will start saying that cutting unemployment benefits will reduce unemployment. Sometimes it’s just right-wing pundits, but often it’s actually quite serious economists.

The usual left-wing response is to deny the claim, explain all the structural causes of unemployment in a recession and point out that unemployment benefits are not what caused the surge in unemployment. This is true; it is also utterly irrelevant. It can be simultaneously true that the unemployment was caused by bad monetary policy or a financial shock, and also true that cutting unemployment benefits would in fact reduce unemployment.

Indeed, I’m fairly certain that both of those propositions are true, to greater or lesser extent. Most people who are unemployed will remain unemployed regardless of how high or low unemployment benefits are; and likewise most people who are employed will remain so. But at the margin, I’m sure there’s someone who is on the fence about searching for a job, or who is trying to find a job but could try a little harder with some extra pressure, or who has a few lousy job offers they’re not taking because they hope to find a better offer later. That is, I have little doubt that the claim “Cutting unemployment benefits would reduce unemployment” is true.

The problem is that this is in no way a sufficient argument for cutting unemployment benefits. For while it might reduce unemployment per se, more importantly it would actually increase the harm of unemployment. Indeed, those two effects are in direct proportion: Cutting unemployment benefits only reduces unemployment insofar as it makes being unemployed a more painful and miserable experience for the unemployed.

Indeed, the very same (oversimplified) economic models that predict that cutting benefits would reduce unemployment use that precise mechanism, and thereby predict, necessarily, that cutting unemployment benefits will harm those who are unemployed. It has to. In some sense, it’s supposed to; otherwise it wouldn’t have any effect at all.
That is, if your goal is actually to help the people harmed by a recession, cutting unemployment benefits is absolutely not going to accomplish that. But if your goal is actually to reduce unemployment at any cost, I suppose it would in fact do that. (Also highly effective against unemployment: Mass military conscription. If everyone’s drafted, no one is unemployed!)

Similarly, I’ve read more than a few policy briefs written to the governments of poor countries telling them how some radical intervention into their society would (probably) increase their GDP, and then either subtly implying or outright stating that this means they are obliged to enact this intervention immediately.

Don’t get me wrong: Poor countries need to increase their GDP. Indeed, it’s probably the single most important thing they need to do. Providing better security, education, healthcare, and sanitation are all things that will increase GDP—but they’re also things that will be easier if you have more GDP.

(Rich countries, on the other hand? Maybe we don’t actually need to increase GDP. We may actually be better off focusing on things like reducing inequality and improving environmental sustainability, while keeping our level of GDP roughly the same—or maybe even reducing it somewhat. Stay inside the wedge.)

But the mere fact that a policy will increase GDP is not a sufficient reason to implement that policy. You also need to consider all sorts of other effects the policy will have: Poverty, inequality, social unrest, labor standards, pollution, and so on.

To be fair, sometimes these articles only say that the policy will increase GDP, and don’t actually assert that this is a sufficient reason to implement it, theoretically leaving open the possibility that other considerations will be overriding.

But that’s really not all that comforting. If the only thing you say about a policy is a major upside, like it or not, you are implicitly endorsing that policy. Framing is vital. Everything you say could be completely, objectively, factually true; but if you only tell one side of the story, you are presenting a biased view. There’s a reason the oath is “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” A partial view of the facts can be as bad as an outright lie.

Of course, it’s unreasonable to expect you to present every possible consideration that could become relevant. Rather, I expect you to do two things: First, if you include some positive aspects, also include some negative ones, and vice-versa; never let your argument sound completely one-sided. Second, clearly and explicitly acknowledge that there are other considerations you haven’t mentioned.

Moreover, if you are talking about something like increasing GDP or decreasing unemployment—something that has been, many times, by many sources, treated as though it were a completely compelling reason unto itself—you must be especially careful. In such a context, an article that would be otherwise quite balanced can still come off as an unqualified endorsement.

The backfire effect has been greatly exaggerated

PNRJ core principles, heuristics and biases, Uncategorized , , , , , , ,

Sep 8 JDN 2458736

Do a search for “backfire effect” and you’re likely to get a large number of results, many of them from quite credible sources. The Oatmeal did an excellent comic on it. The basic notion is simple: “[…]some individuals when confronted with evidence that conflicts with their beliefs come to hold their original position even more strongly.”

The implications of this effect are terrifying: There’s no point in arguing with anyone about anything controversial, because once someone strongly holds a belief there is nothing you can do to ever change it. Beliefs are fixed and unchanging, stalwart cliffs against the petty tides of evidence and logic.

Fortunately, the backfire effect is not actually real—or if it is, it’s quite rare. Over many years those seemingly-ineffectual tides can erode those cliffs down and turn them into sandy beaches.

The most recent studies with larger samples and better statistical analysis suggest that the typical response to receiving evidence contradicting our beliefs is—lo and behold—to change our beliefs toward that evidence.

To be clear, very few people completely revise their worldview in response to a single argument. Instead, they try to make a few small changes and fit them in as best they can.

But would we really expect otherwise? Worldviews are holistic, interconnected systems. You’ve built up your worldview over many years of education, experience, and acculturation. Even when someone presents you with extremely compelling evidence that your view is wrong, you have to weigh that against everything else you have experienced prior to that point. It’s entirely reasonable—rational, even—for you to try to fit the new evidence in with a minimal overall change to your worldview. If it’s possible to make sense of the available evidence with only a small change in your beliefs, it makes perfect sense for you to do that.

What if your whole worldview is wrong? You might have based your view of the world on a religion that turns out not to be true. You might have been raised into a culture with a fundamentally incorrect concept of morality. What if you really do need a radical revision—what then?

Well, that can happen too. People change religions. They abandon their old cultures and adopt new ones. This is not a frequent occurrence, to be sure—but it does happen. It happens, I would posit, when someone has been bombarded with contrary evidence not once, not a few times, but hundreds or thousands of times, until they can no longer sustain the crumbling fortress of their beliefs against the overwhelming onslaught of argument.

I think the reason that the backfire effect feels true to us is that our life experience is largely that “argument doesn’t work”; we think back to all the times that we have tried to convince to change a belief that was important to them, and we can find so few examples of when it actually worked. But this is setting the bar much too high. You shouldn’t expect to change an entire worldview in a single conversation. Even if your worldview is correct and theirs is not, that one conversation can’t have provided sufficient evidence for them to rationally conclude that. One person could always be mistaken. One piece of evidence could always be misleading. Even a direct experience could be a delusion or a foggy memory.

You shouldn’t be trying to turn a Young-Earth Creationist into an evolutionary biologist, or a climate change denier into a Greenpeace member. You should be trying to make that Creationist question whether the Ussher chronology is really so reliable, or if perhaps the Earth might be a bit older than a 17th century theologian interpreted it to be. You should be getting the climate change denier to question whether scientists really have such a greater vested interest in this than oil company lobbyists. You can’t expect to make them tear down the entire wall—just get them to take out one brick today, and then another brick tomorrow, and perhaps another the day after that.

The proverb is of uncertain provenance, variously attributed, rarely verified, but it is still my favorite: No single raindrop feels responsible for the flood.

Do not seek to be a flood. Seek only to be a raindrop—for if we all do, the flood will happen sure enough. (There’s a version more specific to our times: So maybe we’re snowflakes. I believe there is a word for a lot of snowflakes together: Avalanche.)

And remember this also: When you argue in public (which includes social media), you aren’t just arguing for the person you’re directly engaged with; you are also arguing for everyone who is there to listen. Even if you can’t get the person you’re arguing with to concede even a single point, maybe there is someone else reading your post who now thinks a little differently because of something you said. In fact, maybe there are many people who think a little differently—the marginal impact of slacktivism can actually be staggeringly large if the audience is big enough.

This can be frustrating, thankless work, for few people will ever thank you for changing their mind, and many will condemn you even for trying. Finding out you were wrong about a deeply-held belief can be painful and humiliating, and most people will attribute that pain and humiliation to the person who called them out for being wrong—rather than placing the blame where it belongs, which is on whatever source or method made you wrong in the first place. Being wrong feels just like being right.

But this is important work, among the most important work that anyone can do. Philosophy, mathematics, science, technology—all of these things depend upon it. Changing people’s minds by evidence and rational argument is literally the foundation of civilization itself. Every real, enduring increment of progress humanity has ever made depends upon this basic process. Perhaps occasionally we have gotten lucky and made the right choice for the wrong reasons; but without the guiding light of reason, there is nothing to stop us from switching back and making the wrong choice again soon enough.

So I guess what I’m saying is: Don’t give up. Keep arguing. Keep presenting evidence. Don’t be afraid that your arguments will backfire—because in fact they probably won’t.

The facts will not speak for themselves, so we must speak for them

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, heuristics and biases, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 3, JDN 2457604

I finally began to understand the bizarre and terrifying phenomenon that is the Donald Trump Presidential nomination when I watched this John Oliver episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-l3IV_XN3c

These lines in particular, near the end, finally helped me put it all together:

What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. Because if anything, that was the theme of the Republican Convention this week; it was a four-day exercise in emphasizing feelings over facts.

The facts against Donald Trump are absolutely overwhelming. He is not even a competent business man, just a spectacularly manipulative one—and even then, it’s not clear he made any more money than he would have just keeping his inheritance in a diversified stock portfolio. His casinos were too fraudulent for Atlantic City. His university was fraudulent. He has the worst honesty rating Politifact has ever given a candidate. (Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton are statistically tied for some of the best.)

More importantly, almost every policy he has proposed or even suggested is terrible, and several of them could be truly catastrophic.

Let’s start with economic policy: His trade policy would set back decades of globalization and dramatically increase global poverty, while doing little or nothing to expand employment in the US, especially if it sparks a trade war. His fiscal policy would permanently balloon the deficit by giving one of the largest tax breaks to the rich in history. His infamous wall would probably cost about as much as the federal government currently spends on all basic scientific research combined, and his only proposal for funding it fundamentally misunderstands how remittances and trade deficits work. He doesn’t believe in climate change, and would roll back what little progress we have made at reducing carbon emissions, thereby endangering millions of lives. He could very likely cause a global economic collapse comparable to the Great Depression.

His social policy is equally terrible: He has proposed criminalizing abortion, (in express violation of Roe v. Wade) which even many pro-life people find too extreme. He wants to deport all Muslims and ban Muslims from entering, which not just a direct First Amendment violation but also literally involves jackbooted soldiers breaking into the homes of law-abiding US citizens to kidnap them and take them out of the country. He wants to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, the largest deportation in US history.

Yet it is in foreign policy above all that Trump is truly horrific. He has explicitly endorsed targeting the families of terrorists, which is a war crime (though not as bad as what Ted Cruz wanted to do, which is carpet-bombing cities). Speaking of war crimes, he thinks our torture policy wasn’t severe enough, and doesn’t even care if it is ineffective. He has made the literally mercantilist assertion that the purpose of military alliances is to create trade surpluses, and if European countries will not provide us with trade surpluses (read: tribute), he will no longer commit to defending them, thereby undermining decades of global stability that is founded upon America’s unwavering commitment to defend our allies. And worst of all, he will not rule out the first-strike deployment of nuclear weapons.

I want you to understand that I am not exaggerating when I say that a Donald Trump Presidency carries a nontrivial risk of triggering global nuclear war. Will this probably happen? No. It has a probability of perhaps 1%. But a 1% chance of a billion deaths is not a risk anyone should be prepared to take.

 

All of these facts scream at us that Donald Trump would be a catastrophe for America and the world. Why, then, are so many people voting for him? Why do our best election forecasts give him a good chance of winning the election?

Because facts don’t speak for themselves.

This is how the left, especially the center-left, has dropped the ball in recent decades. We joke that reality has a liberal bias, because so many of the facts are so obviously on our side. But meanwhile the right wing has nodded and laughed, even mockingly called us the “reality-based community”, because they know how to manipulate feelings.

Donald Trump has essentially no other skills—but he has that one, and it is enough. He knows how to fan the flames of anger and hatred and point them at his chosen targets. He knows how to rally people behind meaningless slogans like “Make America Great Again” and convince them that he has their best interests at heart.

Indeed, Trump’s persuasiveness is one of his many parallels with Adolf Hitler; I am not yet prepared to accuse Donald Trump of seeking genocide, yet at the same time I am not yet willing to put it past him. I don’t think it would take much of a spark at this point to trigger a conflagration of hatred that launches a genocide against Muslims in the United States, and I don’t trust Trump not to light such a spark.

Meanwhile, liberal policy wonks are looking on in horror, wondering how anyone could be so stupid as to believe him—and even publicly basically calling people stupid for believing him. Or sometimes we say they’re not stupid, they’re just racist. But people don’t believe Donald Trump because they are stupid; they believe Donald Trump because he is persuasive. He knows the inner recesses of the human mind and can harness our heuristics to his will. Do not mistake your unique position that protects you—some combination of education, intellect, and sheer willpower—for some inherent superiority. You are not better than Trump’s followers; you are more resistant to Trump’s powers of persuasion. Yes, statistically, Trump voters are more likely to be racist; but racism is a deep-seated bias in the human mind that to some extent we all share. Trump simply knows how to harness it.

Our enemies are persuasive—and therefore we must be as well. We can no longer act as though facts will automatically convince everyone by the power of pure reason; we must learn to stir emotions and rally crowds just as they do.

Or rather, not just as they do—not quite. When we see lies being so effective, we may be tempted to lie ourselves. When we see people being manipulated against us, we may be tempted to manipulate them in return. But in the long run, we can’t afford to do that. We do need to use reason, because reason is the only way to ensure that the beliefs we instill are true.

Therefore our task must be to make people see reason. Let me be clear: Not demand they see reason. Not hope they see reason. Not lament that they don’t. This will require active investment on our part. We must actually learn to persuade people in such a manner that their minds become more open to reason. This will mean using tools other than reason, but it will also mean treading a very fine line, using irrationality only when rationality is insufficient.

We will be tempted to take the easier, quicker path to the Dark Side, but we must resist. Our goal must be not to make people do what we want them to—but to do what they would want to if they were fully rational and fully informed. We will need rhetoric; we will need oratory; we may even need some manipulation. But as we fight our enemy, we must be vigilant not to become them.

This means not using bad arguments—strawmen and conmen—but pointing out the flaws in our opponents’ arguments even when they seem obvious to us—bananamen. It means not overstating our case about free trade or using implausible statistical results simply because they support our case.

But it also means not understating our case, not hiding in page 17 of an opaque technical report that if we don’t do something about climate change right now millions of people will die. It means not presenting our ideas as “political opinions” when they are demonstrated, indisputable scientific facts. It means taking the media to task for their false balance that must find a way to criticize a Democrat every time they criticize a Republican: Sure, he is a pathological liar and might trigger global economic collapse or even nuclear war, but she didn’t secure her emails properly. If you objectively assess the facts and find that Republicans lie three times as often as Democrats, maybe that’s something you should be reporting on instead of trying to compensate for by changing your criteria.

Speaking of the media, we should be pressuring them to include a regular—preferably daily, preferably primetime—segment on climate change, because yes, it is that important. How about after the weather report every day, you show a climate scientist explaining why we keep having record-breaking summer heat and more frequent natural disasters? If we suffer a global ecological collapse, this other stuff you’re constantly talking about really isn’t going to matter—that is, if it mattered in the first place. When ISIS kills 200 people in an attack, you don’t just report that a bunch of people died without examining the cause or talking about responses. But when a typhoon triggered by climate change kills 7,000, suddenly it’s just a random event, an “act of God” that nobody could have predicted or prevented. Having an appropriate caution about whether climate change caused any particular disaster should not prevent us from drawing the very real links between more carbon emissions and more natural disasters—and sometimes there’s just no other explanation.

It means demanding fact-checks immediately, not as some kind of extra commentary that happens after the debate, but as something the moderator says right then and there. (You have a staff, right? And they have Google access, right?) When a candidate says something that is blatantly, demonstrably false, they should receive a warning. After three warnings, their mic should be cut for that question. After ten, they should be kicked off the stage for the remainder of the debate. Donald Trump wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. But instead, they not only let him speak, they spent the next week repeating what he said in bold, exciting headlines. At least CNN finally realized that their headlines could actually fact-check Trump’s statements rather than just repeat them.
Above all, we will need to understand why people think the way they do, and learn to speak to them persuasively and truthfully but without elitism or condescension. This is one I know I’m not very good at myself; sometimes I get so frustrated with people who think the Earth is 6,000 years old (over 40% of Americans) or don’t believe in climate change (35% don’t think it is happening at all, another 30% don’t think it’s a big deal) that I come off as personally insulting them—and of course from that point forward they turn off. But irrational beliefs are not proof of defective character, and we must make that clear to ourselves as well as to others. We must not say that people are stupid or bad; but we absolutely must say that they are wrong. We must also remember that despite our best efforts, some amount of reactance will be inevitable; people simply don’t like having their beliefs challenged.

Yet even all this is probably not enough. Many people don’t watch mainstream media, or don’t believe it when they do (not without reason). Many people won’t even engage with friends or family members who challenge their political views, and will defriend or even disown them. We need some means of reaching these people too, and the hardest part may be simply getting them to listen to us in the first place. Perhaps we need more grassroots action—more protest marches, or even activists going door to door like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Perhaps we need to establish new media outlets that will be as widely accessible but held to a higher standard.

But we must find a way–and we have little time to waste.