I think people do not take their opponents arguments seriously enough and it feels so intellectually lazy. I’m not saying you have to be the most attentive listener but you certainly should try to put yourself in their shoes and understand the “why”. It’s insane to me that people will mark off an opinion that’s held by a large group of people without even considering there might be some reasoning to why it’s attracted so many believers…
I agree that this is really important & ~always wish I and people in my circles were better at navigating it.
A post I wrote a while back — "Focusing on bad criticism is dangerous to your epistemics"(https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z9gkxsgMokbQA45ua/focusing-on-bad-criticism-is-dangerous-to-your-epistemics) — touches on some related dynamics. At the time I was paying more attention to mechanisms like criticism-exhaustion, idea inoculation, etc. (especially when engaging with _active_ , low-quality criticism of things one cares about), and largely missing the phenomenon you describe here (in particular the sheer imbalance in numbers, which means that most people's reactions to non-obvious & niche ideas will be shallow and/or confused); I appreciate you articulating that.
There's also some overlap in the practical takeaways in our posts (I think I like the "be slightly elitist" formulation & emphasis on whether the other person knows non-controversial basic facts relevant to the area in question). For reference, my main suggestions were:
1) Avoid casually sharing low-quality criticism, even to dunk on it, express outrage/incredulity, etc. (at least without explaining why it might be relevant or useful)
2) Limit your own engagement with low-quality criticism.
3) Remind yourself and others that it’s ok to not respond to every criticism.
4) Actively seek out, share, and celebrate good criticism.
I also think what you're describing here might help explain why public figures' beliefs so often seem to become ~extremized. (You can go look at the replies to a prominent person's tweets/posts to get a taste for what engaging with the outside world is like from their POV.)
And obviously the flip side to all of this is making sure you're not just ignoring disagreement by labeling it "bad criticism" — honestly I think this is part of why it's such a gift to get good critical engagement and why it's so valuable to make your work more legible in various ways?
I've have some issues with the less wrong community but the starting idea is a good place to not hold on to our beliefs so tightly and figure out how to get closer to the truth.
Public figures rarely have incentives to be nuanced communicators even if they personally have more complex and contingent views which account for ambiguities. It's up to us to evaluate them with either straight or crooked thinking
Most importantly that tying the animal welfare movement so closely to a very specific (and for a lot of people difficult) dietary change has on net been extremely incapacitating for it. It's like if the climate movement demanded that everyone sold their car before saying anything about climate at all.
fwiw I'm troubled by the argument but I'm still vegan. I promote dietary change much less than I used to though compared to other things to do for animals.
That's a valid perspective and one that I'm constantly wrestling with, for sure. That said, it's not really an argument against veganism, but rather an argument against the tactics of the animal rights movement. Maybe I'm ideologically crazy, but I've been listening for a couple of decades now and still haven't heard a valid argument against veganism itself (ethically/ecologically/materially speaking).
- veganism has very little personal impact, it's mostly about inspiring things, in particular 1) the same change in others and 2) thought clarity about animal feelings in oneself.
-> so if part (1) doesn't work, and you can retain part (2), the positive argument for yourself being vegan is much smaller.
- veganism could be unhealthy because you may be missing nutrients that we haven't studied yet. General population studies show that veganism is healthier than eating meat, but that's confounded by filtering by people who have agency and means to control their diet.
- empirically some people just fail to be vegan in a healthy way (they forget to supplement, etc). You are probably doing that to some extent.
- if lack of health prevents you from being agentic and campaigning for animals or earning money to give to people that do so, that's net negative.
I think the most compelling argument against veganism itself (rather than the tactics of the animal rights movement) is that farmed animals would never have existed in the first place if we didn't farm them, so we can't say that they have been made any worse off. Veganism doesn't help any already existing animals, it just stops new ones from even being born in the first place.
Before I went vegan, I used to think that this was a silly argument, because it seemed to me that no one would use it about humans (a hypothetical human organ farm does not suddenly become ok because the humans are bred specifically for that purpose). But now, I've changed my mind. I try to take a consequentialist approach to most questions, and if you want to defend veganism on consequentialist grounds, then I think you do have to believe that most farmed animals lead lives that are 'net negative', meaning they would be better off never having been born (there might be another way where you bring in the environmental argument too and say that we could support more humans if we farmed fewer animals, and this is good because humans have higher quality of life, but if this is the argument for veganism, it feels weaker).
I'm still vegan. I think it's likely that a lot of animals on factory farms do in fact lead lives that are so miserable it would be better if we'd never created them in the first place. And I think having a blanket objection to treating animals as commodities is probably a good thing for promoting their welfare in general (this is also why I'd object to a high-welfare human organ farm). But I recognize now that things are significantly more nuanced than I used to think.
This just gets you animal welfare. My family includes lots of cattle farmers, grazing on open land. The cattle have much better lives than most wild animals, and, at the level of basic needs, better than most humans who have ever lived - food security and no need to work for a living. It's true that, after living much longer than they would in the wild, they take a trip from which they don't come back. But they don't know that, and don't have life projects that are curtailed as a result.
A comprehensive veganism has to be anthropocentric, concerned with the effects of our use of animals for food, not with the interests of the animals.
You could argue that animal murder is fine, but animal torture less so.
There is also the question of wild animals, who eat each other and get eaten. Some vegan EA types want to rejigger the whole planetary ecosystem to eliminate predation, but this strikes me as both impractical and disgusting.
Because predators are beautiful and elegant, and engineering that out of the world is just a celebration of weakness. And turning humans into something like that is like making us into Eloi.
Wouldn't another argument be an extension of Andy's points in https://andymasley.substack.com/p/for-the-climate-little-things-dont - a vegetarian going from vegetarian to vegan is going to be far less impactful than someone eating animal products every day to just one day a week. What matters is not the purity (99% vegan is useless, only 100% vegans have an impact) but the total "impact" on whatever metric you're trying to optimize for (Animal suffering? Climate? I know different people have different reasons for veganism). And for most people, the marginal effort required to remove or reduce a given percentage of their animal product consumption is non-linear: the first bits are easier and going from only a few animal products to none is comparatively much harder. To borrow Andy's analogy above (below? not sure where this will end up) to cars, promoting "never travel in a car ever" as a lifestyle rather than "avoid using cars as much as you can" seems more realistic and impactful.
I have read the arguments against non-veganism. I remain unconvinced by the arguments against non-veganism 😂
@tobycrisford — I see your point, but isn't it clear that most animals on factory farms would be better off having never been born? Beyond the issues around gestation crates for pigs, separation of calves from their mothers, etc., the vast majority of farmed animals are chickens — nearly half of whom are gassed or shredded at birth, while the other half is crammed into ammonia-filled barns or cages by the tens of thousands.
@agaralon — the hypothetical and altogether unsubstantiated idea that vegans are less healthy and therefore less able to advocate for animals because of this seems like a huge stretch to me. Nearly half of (omnivorous) American adults are obese, and consume class 1 carcinogen deli meats and meat grown with antibiotics. Any diet can be unhealthy, and commitment to advocacy imo is much more about an individual's personality/disposition.
@natezsharpe - I agree that the last 1% of veganism is essentially not very important. There were people who went after Jane Goodall for eating the occasional sandwich with dairy cheese or mayo on it because it was all she could find in a random airport after an exhausting day of international travel (on behalf of animals). But that's more of a case to just not be a fundamentalist about it, and doesn't really undermine the core premise of defaulting to not eating animals or the products of their exploitation.
I suspect that one can arrive at an ethical non-veganism within the framework of virtue ethics. The idea would be that an animal can be raised with care and attention and slaughtered and eaten with respect, and hence that doing so isnt necessarily reflective of poor character or vice. (Of course the same argument justifies the killing, and perhaps even the eating, of people in some narrow contexts, but I wager the virtue ethicist would be willing to accept the conclusion).
I've thought for a long time that extreme ideologies are kind of an epistemic immune system. They have set feedback loops to reinforce themselves in the face of contrary evidence.
Funny enough, with a few small changes, this could also describe startup founders: individuals with extreme views that nobody around them seems to understand, who build a group of people with similar crazy belief i.e. a company.
The beauty of San Francisco is it has created a culture of normalizing and integrating weird takes, and then created an incredibly competitive marketplace for finding out who is right or wrong in their extreme views, in a way that happens to also produce billion dollar companies founded on those extreme views.
This is great in general. Except people who aren't in favor of veganism or at minimum ***many*** orders of magnitude of reduction in the amount of animal products we eat are in fact not awake, or morally bankrupt 😁
Small typo close to the end “This ability to separating specific beliefs from…” separating should be separate I think.
This post reminds me a lot of the framework Tim Urban created in “What’s Our Problem”, separating the axes of critical thinking and ideological belief, seen in this graphic: https://share.google/VwP37zI6IioRQBmO1 . When engaging with someone about a topic, it’s much more relevant to assess where they are on the thinking ladder (on the topic in question) than where they are on the ideological spectrum.
I really loved your essay and instantly subscribed. The framing on nuclear weapons is a little low resolution. A better question to ask might be: if a particular country acquired nuclear weapons, where would they rank in relation to existing nuclear-armed powers in terms of willingness to aggressively use nuclear weapons unilaterally?
People miss this distinction in relation to Iran. Iran likely ranks in the top tier below North Korea, but above Pakistan, then Russia. This correctly balances ideological commitment with past pragmatism. However, they score higher on a risk index than this pure metric would suggest, because provocative terrorist action through proxies creates the very real escalation risk that an adversary might be trapped by the threat of further atrocities into utilising conventional means to address an atrocity, only for their response to lead to an escalation spiral.
The real threats of nuclear weapon use occur for less obvious reasons. For example, a Putin assassination scenario raises the risks of Russian nuclear use by an alarming degree.
Again, great essay. I would also add that many beliefs and conspiracy theories are held for purely tribal reasons. This was true of QAnon belief. Actual questioning of QAnon supporters found that belief in specific conspiracies was very low. Far more common was the general belief that Democrat politicians were very bad people. Jonathan Haidt was right to use the analogy of the elephant and the rider.
Great post—it’s something of the complement to some people’s encouragements that we become less opinionated about things we have little or no expertise on. Ie, acknowledge our place in the ocean / isolated island, to use your metaphor, something I wholeheartedly agree with.
Also, by the way, your visual reminds me of this fun—and generally spot-on—comic depicting the fields of modern mathematics as isolated mountain peaks: https://github.com/s-macke/Abstruse-Goose-Archive/blob/master/comics/page-200-250.md#landscape. Not exactly the same idea, though I do wonder if the notion of communication being difficult due to fundamentally different building blocks / bases may carry over here.
As a non sequitur, this is also why AI is likely to help mathematics more generally. It takes special people right now to connect different extant areas of mathematics, the very sort of skill that comes naturally for deep learning AIs. In fact, one of the deeper beauties of mathematics is how apparently disassociated areas are in fact deeply related. Demonstrations of such connections are so rare and difficult that the last widely recognized true generalist, Poincaré, died over a century ago.
I’m less certain about how LLMs will do in creating new mathematical theories & frameworks (as opposed to the current wave of problem-solving using known techniques), but this specific sort of interpolative activity is fairly likely to be dominated by LLMs in the near future IMO, at least for those cases that that rely more on expertise/knowledge than novel insights.
Andy, your "sea of confusion with small islands of sanity" metaphor perfectly illustrates why I believe higher education needs to return to its foundational purpose - teaching students how to think critically. (https://tawnyameans.substack.com/p/the-oldest-educational-idea-is-now)
When you describe how extremists encounter mostly uninformed criticism and conclude their ideas must be correct, you're highlighting exactly the problem I explored in my piece. We've created a world where too few people possess the basic intellectual tools for meaningful dialogue. Your example of dismissing conservatism based on one person's poor argument about nuclear policy is a perfect example of what happens when we lack productive skepticism and cultural interpretation skills.
Your "slightly elitist" filtering criteria - requiring basic factual knowledge and non-tribal engagement - are precisely the meta-competencies I argue colleges should be developing systematically. Instead of producing graduates who become either ideological soldiers or confused bystanders, we could cultivate people capable of the patient, informed dialogue that strengthens democracy and human understanding.
But here's the deeper challenge: as you noted, only 37% of Americans have college degrees. If critical thinking skills are essential for a functioning democracy and meaningful discourse, we can't accept that two-thirds of our population lacks access to these tools. We need to radically expand educational accessibility - whether through reformed higher education, community-based learning programs, or new models that bring critical thinking development directly to people where they are. The "islands of sanity" will remain dangerously small until we open pathways for far more people to develop these essential capabilities.
The tragedy isn't that people hold strong views - it's that our educational system hasn't equipped enough citizens to engage meaningfully with those views, leaving everyone isolated in their respective corners rather than learning from substantive disagreement.
While I’ve never actually gone crazy myself, this is absolutely something I’ve noticed. Back when I was getting into online feminism, I went and read the men’s rights activists. Trying to read the opposing side and all to get a more accurate picture and Google helpfully sent me to A Voice For Men and Returcn Of Kings. Needless to say I concluded, most of the opposition was not intellectually serious and motivated by sexism.
A bit of advice, I would like to add is that when you’re trying to get the view from the opposition, it’s better to read someone whose world view is otherwise pretty similar to you instead of someone with a radically different outlook. For example, when I wanted to give libertarianism a fair hearing, I got hold of Anarchy State And Utopia. I was very impressed by the book and thought you practically smell the authors intellect of the pages, but it didn’t move me an inch. I just found the moral arguments good as arguments, but unconvincing, and when you reject the premise of an argument at the first step, of course, the argument won’t convince you. It was only when I started reading Libertarian inclined bloggers who shared a lot of other opinions with me, like Scott Alexander, and Brian Kaplin that I became more sympathetic to the ideology and moved in the direction, even though I’m still pretty far from the actual position. Also reading people with generally similar outlooks help avoid a failure mode I have noticed. basically, I had tendency to link beliefs that I was less confident in to other beliefs of which I was pretty confident. For example, I would conclude that the reason I was in favour of social democracy and harnessing markets to social objectives through taxes, subsidies, and regulations was because I was a utilitarian while conservatives who were against redistribution and regulation were so because they were deontologists who cared about property rights for their own sake. Lots of other instances of me linking views I was doubtful of two views I was pretty confident in. Even reading relevant experts won’t save you from this. The best solution is just finding somebody who shares the view you’re already confident in or at least gives it great respect while still disagreeing with your less confident conclusion. Yes, I am aware, sometimes your less confident conclusion genuinely follows from your most confident conclusion. However, even then there is likely to be at least one person who has intelligently argued for not linking the two views out there. And even if there isn’t, the exercise is still valuable and learning that there is no such person is itself valuable information that you can’t learn without searching.
I think that this is an important component: from my perspective, my support for human challenge trials and decriminalizing sex work are tightly linked moral convictions (the basic and default right of humans to do as they please with their own bodies, and lack of interest in the moralizing of busybodies). But this is objectively an unusual linkage! Only a tiny fraction of people with strong opinions in favor of the latter will agree with me on the former. Part of the problem is that my particular linking justification is relatively uncommon and most people will come at either issue from a much wider range of perspectives (which are influential if not my overriding concern, etc etc).
I'm more selective about my interlocutors, talking to people whose position is close to, but not identical to my own. That way, the discussion of the topic at hand isn't derailed by innumerable side disputes, which generally decline into (what seems like from my side, and probably the other) silly talking points.
For example, if I were a Marxist believer in the labour theory of value, I'd be talking to left-Keynesians and non-Marxist socialists to see why they didn;t think LTV was either correct or necessary to a left position.
This is on the assumption that I was trying to understand my own position better, rather than trying to convert others. In the latter task, you have to use whatever argument works, as long as it's honest. That may not be the best way to understand the issue at hand, but it might bring the other person close enough to make a proper discussion possible.
The labor theory of value is on the whole probably less important to Marxism then liberals think it is. The heart of the idea is that there's an inherent conflict between the interests of property owners and the interests of wage earners, which in a world of Donald Trumps and Elon Musks is going to seem intuitively true to many people.
I think people do not take their opponents arguments seriously enough and it feels so intellectually lazy. I’m not saying you have to be the most attentive listener but you certainly should try to put yourself in their shoes and understand the “why”. It’s insane to me that people will mark off an opinion that’s held by a large group of people without even considering there might be some reasoning to why it’s attracted so many believers…
I agree that this is really important & ~always wish I and people in my circles were better at navigating it.
A post I wrote a while back — "Focusing on bad criticism is dangerous to your epistemics"(https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z9gkxsgMokbQA45ua/focusing-on-bad-criticism-is-dangerous-to-your-epistemics) — touches on some related dynamics. At the time I was paying more attention to mechanisms like criticism-exhaustion, idea inoculation, etc. (especially when engaging with _active_ , low-quality criticism of things one cares about), and largely missing the phenomenon you describe here (in particular the sheer imbalance in numbers, which means that most people's reactions to non-obvious & niche ideas will be shallow and/or confused); I appreciate you articulating that.
There's also some overlap in the practical takeaways in our posts (I think I like the "be slightly elitist" formulation & emphasis on whether the other person knows non-controversial basic facts relevant to the area in question). For reference, my main suggestions were:
1) Avoid casually sharing low-quality criticism, even to dunk on it, express outrage/incredulity, etc. (at least without explaining why it might be relevant or useful)
2) Limit your own engagement with low-quality criticism.
3) Remind yourself and others that it’s ok to not respond to every criticism.
4) Actively seek out, share, and celebrate good criticism.
I also think what you're describing here might help explain why public figures' beliefs so often seem to become ~extremized. (You can go look at the replies to a prominent person's tweets/posts to get a taste for what engaging with the outside world is like from their POV.)
And obviously the flip side to all of this is making sure you're not just ignoring disagreement by labeling it "bad criticism" — honestly I think this is part of why it's such a gift to get good critical engagement and why it's so valuable to make your work more legible in various ways?
I really liked your essay Liska
I've have some issues with the less wrong community but the starting idea is a good place to not hold on to our beliefs so tightly and figure out how to get closer to the truth.
Public figures rarely have incentives to be nuanced communicators even if they personally have more complex and contingent views which account for ambiguities. It's up to us to evaluate them with either straight or crooked thinking
Serious question: what are the compelling arguments against veganism?
Most importantly that tying the animal welfare movement so closely to a very specific (and for a lot of people difficult) dietary change has on net been extremely incapacitating for it. It's like if the climate movement demanded that everyone sold their car before saying anything about climate at all.
fwiw I'm troubled by the argument but I'm still vegan. I promote dietary change much less than I used to though compared to other things to do for animals.
That's a valid perspective and one that I'm constantly wrestling with, for sure. That said, it's not really an argument against veganism, but rather an argument against the tactics of the animal rights movement. Maybe I'm ideologically crazy, but I've been listening for a couple of decades now and still haven't heard a valid argument against veganism itself (ethically/ecologically/materially speaking).
I'm also vegan and I think this one is valid https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tteRbMo2iZ9rs9fXG/why-you-should-eat-meat-even-if-you-hate-factory-farming (EDIT: it's the same Matt Ball linked below)
- veganism has very little personal impact, it's mostly about inspiring things, in particular 1) the same change in others and 2) thought clarity about animal feelings in oneself.
-> so if part (1) doesn't work, and you can retain part (2), the positive argument for yourself being vegan is much smaller.
- veganism could be unhealthy because you may be missing nutrients that we haven't studied yet. General population studies show that veganism is healthier than eating meat, but that's confounded by filtering by people who have agency and means to control their diet.
- empirically some people just fail to be vegan in a healthy way (they forget to supplement, etc). You are probably doing that to some extent.
- if lack of health prevents you from being agentic and campaigning for animals or earning money to give to people that do so, that's net negative.
Thank you for your comment! Reading the post you link to felt enlightening!
Here's one I just came across today:
https://katwoods.substack.com/p/why-you-should-eat-meat-even-if-you
(The one side of it is in keeping with my "The End of Veganism" https://mattball.substack.com/p/the-end-of-veganism )
No good arguments were found there.
I think the most compelling argument against veganism itself (rather than the tactics of the animal rights movement) is that farmed animals would never have existed in the first place if we didn't farm them, so we can't say that they have been made any worse off. Veganism doesn't help any already existing animals, it just stops new ones from even being born in the first place.
Before I went vegan, I used to think that this was a silly argument, because it seemed to me that no one would use it about humans (a hypothetical human organ farm does not suddenly become ok because the humans are bred specifically for that purpose). But now, I've changed my mind. I try to take a consequentialist approach to most questions, and if you want to defend veganism on consequentialist grounds, then I think you do have to believe that most farmed animals lead lives that are 'net negative', meaning they would be better off never having been born (there might be another way where you bring in the environmental argument too and say that we could support more humans if we farmed fewer animals, and this is good because humans have higher quality of life, but if this is the argument for veganism, it feels weaker).
I'm still vegan. I think it's likely that a lot of animals on factory farms do in fact lead lives that are so miserable it would be better if we'd never created them in the first place. And I think having a blanket objection to treating animals as commodities is probably a good thing for promoting their welfare in general (this is also why I'd object to a high-welfare human organ farm). But I recognize now that things are significantly more nuanced than I used to think.
This just gets you animal welfare. My family includes lots of cattle farmers, grazing on open land. The cattle have much better lives than most wild animals, and, at the level of basic needs, better than most humans who have ever lived - food security and no need to work for a living. It's true that, after living much longer than they would in the wild, they take a trip from which they don't come back. But they don't know that, and don't have life projects that are curtailed as a result.
A comprehensive veganism has to be anthropocentric, concerned with the effects of our use of animals for food, not with the interests of the animals.
You could argue that animal murder is fine, but animal torture less so.
There is also the question of wild animals, who eat each other and get eaten. Some vegan EA types want to rejigger the whole planetary ecosystem to eliminate predation, but this strikes me as both impractical and disgusting.
I agree it's impractical (at least for the foreseeable future and with our current knowledge/abilities), but why on earth would it be disgusting?
Because predators are beautiful and elegant, and engineering that out of the world is just a celebration of weakness. And turning humans into something like that is like making us into Eloi.
Which I find disgusting.
Wouldn't another argument be an extension of Andy's points in https://andymasley.substack.com/p/for-the-climate-little-things-dont - a vegetarian going from vegetarian to vegan is going to be far less impactful than someone eating animal products every day to just one day a week. What matters is not the purity (99% vegan is useless, only 100% vegans have an impact) but the total "impact" on whatever metric you're trying to optimize for (Animal suffering? Climate? I know different people have different reasons for veganism). And for most people, the marginal effort required to remove or reduce a given percentage of their animal product consumption is non-linear: the first bits are easier and going from only a few animal products to none is comparatively much harder. To borrow Andy's analogy above (below? not sure where this will end up) to cars, promoting "never travel in a car ever" as a lifestyle rather than "avoid using cars as much as you can" seems more realistic and impactful.
I think a somewhat compelling (and different) case is the one made here and some other places that non-veganism, on the margin, might reduce wild animal suffering https://reducing-suffering.org/vegetarianism-and-wild-animals/.
Obviously, if you took these beliefs there's a much better coordinated outcome than non-veganism, but that's a separate question.
I have read the arguments against non-veganism. I remain unconvinced by the arguments against non-veganism 😂
@tobycrisford — I see your point, but isn't it clear that most animals on factory farms would be better off having never been born? Beyond the issues around gestation crates for pigs, separation of calves from their mothers, etc., the vast majority of farmed animals are chickens — nearly half of whom are gassed or shredded at birth, while the other half is crammed into ammonia-filled barns or cages by the tens of thousands.
@agaralon — the hypothetical and altogether unsubstantiated idea that vegans are less healthy and therefore less able to advocate for animals because of this seems like a huge stretch to me. Nearly half of (omnivorous) American adults are obese, and consume class 1 carcinogen deli meats and meat grown with antibiotics. Any diet can be unhealthy, and commitment to advocacy imo is much more about an individual's personality/disposition.
@natezsharpe - I agree that the last 1% of veganism is essentially not very important. There were people who went after Jane Goodall for eating the occasional sandwich with dairy cheese or mayo on it because it was all she could find in a random airport after an exhausting day of international travel (on behalf of animals). But that's more of a case to just not be a fundamentalist about it, and doesn't really undermine the core premise of defaulting to not eating animals or the products of their exploitation.
I suspect that one can arrive at an ethical non-veganism within the framework of virtue ethics. The idea would be that an animal can be raised with care and attention and slaughtered and eaten with respect, and hence that doing so isnt necessarily reflective of poor character or vice. (Of course the same argument justifies the killing, and perhaps even the eating, of people in some narrow contexts, but I wager the virtue ethicist would be willing to accept the conclusion).
I've thought for a long time that extreme ideologies are kind of an epistemic immune system. They have set feedback loops to reinforce themselves in the face of contrary evidence.
Funny enough, with a few small changes, this could also describe startup founders: individuals with extreme views that nobody around them seems to understand, who build a group of people with similar crazy belief i.e. a company.
The beauty of San Francisco is it has created a culture of normalizing and integrating weird takes, and then created an incredibly competitive marketplace for finding out who is right or wrong in their extreme views, in a way that happens to also produce billion dollar companies founded on those extreme views.
By God, please tell me all about those strong arguments against veganism already, I finally want to eat a steak again!
This is great in general. Except people who aren't in favor of veganism or at minimum ***many*** orders of magnitude of reduction in the amount of animal products we eat are in fact not awake, or morally bankrupt 😁
Small typo close to the end “This ability to separating specific beliefs from…” separating should be separate I think.
This post reminds me a lot of the framework Tim Urban created in “What’s Our Problem”, separating the axes of critical thinking and ideological belief, seen in this graphic: https://share.google/VwP37zI6IioRQBmO1 . When engaging with someone about a topic, it’s much more relevant to assess where they are on the thinking ladder (on the topic in question) than where they are on the ideological spectrum.
Fixed, thanks so much!
Thanks, Andy. Very thorough and thoughtful. It is my current opinion that the human mind is much more fragile than we think. I could be wrong....
https://www.mattball.org/2021/10/last-mental-health-note-mind-is-fragile.html
https://www.mattball.org/2022/02/the-mind-is-fragile-and-weak.html
I really loved your essay and instantly subscribed. The framing on nuclear weapons is a little low resolution. A better question to ask might be: if a particular country acquired nuclear weapons, where would they rank in relation to existing nuclear-armed powers in terms of willingness to aggressively use nuclear weapons unilaterally?
People miss this distinction in relation to Iran. Iran likely ranks in the top tier below North Korea, but above Pakistan, then Russia. This correctly balances ideological commitment with past pragmatism. However, they score higher on a risk index than this pure metric would suggest, because provocative terrorist action through proxies creates the very real escalation risk that an adversary might be trapped by the threat of further atrocities into utilising conventional means to address an atrocity, only for their response to lead to an escalation spiral.
The real threats of nuclear weapon use occur for less obvious reasons. For example, a Putin assassination scenario raises the risks of Russian nuclear use by an alarming degree.
Again, great essay. I would also add that many beliefs and conspiracy theories are held for purely tribal reasons. This was true of QAnon belief. Actual questioning of QAnon supporters found that belief in specific conspiracies was very low. Far more common was the general belief that Democrat politicians were very bad people. Jonathan Haidt was right to use the analogy of the elephant and the rider.
Great post—it’s something of the complement to some people’s encouragements that we become less opinionated about things we have little or no expertise on. Ie, acknowledge our place in the ocean / isolated island, to use your metaphor, something I wholeheartedly agree with.
Also, by the way, your visual reminds me of this fun—and generally spot-on—comic depicting the fields of modern mathematics as isolated mountain peaks: https://github.com/s-macke/Abstruse-Goose-Archive/blob/master/comics/page-200-250.md#landscape. Not exactly the same idea, though I do wonder if the notion of communication being difficult due to fundamentally different building blocks / bases may carry over here.
As a non sequitur, this is also why AI is likely to help mathematics more generally. It takes special people right now to connect different extant areas of mathematics, the very sort of skill that comes naturally for deep learning AIs. In fact, one of the deeper beauties of mathematics is how apparently disassociated areas are in fact deeply related. Demonstrations of such connections are so rare and difficult that the last widely recognized true generalist, Poincaré, died over a century ago.
I’m less certain about how LLMs will do in creating new mathematical theories & frameworks (as opposed to the current wave of problem-solving using known techniques), but this specific sort of interpolative activity is fairly likely to be dominated by LLMs in the near future IMO, at least for those cases that that rely more on expertise/knowledge than novel insights.
Sort of the actual reality of the Backfire Effect — when it occurs at volume?
Andy, your "sea of confusion with small islands of sanity" metaphor perfectly illustrates why I believe higher education needs to return to its foundational purpose - teaching students how to think critically. (https://tawnyameans.substack.com/p/the-oldest-educational-idea-is-now)
When you describe how extremists encounter mostly uninformed criticism and conclude their ideas must be correct, you're highlighting exactly the problem I explored in my piece. We've created a world where too few people possess the basic intellectual tools for meaningful dialogue. Your example of dismissing conservatism based on one person's poor argument about nuclear policy is a perfect example of what happens when we lack productive skepticism and cultural interpretation skills.
Your "slightly elitist" filtering criteria - requiring basic factual knowledge and non-tribal engagement - are precisely the meta-competencies I argue colleges should be developing systematically. Instead of producing graduates who become either ideological soldiers or confused bystanders, we could cultivate people capable of the patient, informed dialogue that strengthens democracy and human understanding.
But here's the deeper challenge: as you noted, only 37% of Americans have college degrees. If critical thinking skills are essential for a functioning democracy and meaningful discourse, we can't accept that two-thirds of our population lacks access to these tools. We need to radically expand educational accessibility - whether through reformed higher education, community-based learning programs, or new models that bring critical thinking development directly to people where they are. The "islands of sanity" will remain dangerously small until we open pathways for far more people to develop these essential capabilities.
The tragedy isn't that people hold strong views - it's that our educational system hasn't equipped enough citizens to engage meaningfully with those views, leaving everyone isolated in their respective corners rather than learning from substantive disagreement.
While I’ve never actually gone crazy myself, this is absolutely something I’ve noticed. Back when I was getting into online feminism, I went and read the men’s rights activists. Trying to read the opposing side and all to get a more accurate picture and Google helpfully sent me to A Voice For Men and Returcn Of Kings. Needless to say I concluded, most of the opposition was not intellectually serious and motivated by sexism.
A bit of advice, I would like to add is that when you’re trying to get the view from the opposition, it’s better to read someone whose world view is otherwise pretty similar to you instead of someone with a radically different outlook. For example, when I wanted to give libertarianism a fair hearing, I got hold of Anarchy State And Utopia. I was very impressed by the book and thought you practically smell the authors intellect of the pages, but it didn’t move me an inch. I just found the moral arguments good as arguments, but unconvincing, and when you reject the premise of an argument at the first step, of course, the argument won’t convince you. It was only when I started reading Libertarian inclined bloggers who shared a lot of other opinions with me, like Scott Alexander, and Brian Kaplin that I became more sympathetic to the ideology and moved in the direction, even though I’m still pretty far from the actual position. Also reading people with generally similar outlooks help avoid a failure mode I have noticed. basically, I had tendency to link beliefs that I was less confident in to other beliefs of which I was pretty confident. For example, I would conclude that the reason I was in favour of social democracy and harnessing markets to social objectives through taxes, subsidies, and regulations was because I was a utilitarian while conservatives who were against redistribution and regulation were so because they were deontologists who cared about property rights for their own sake. Lots of other instances of me linking views I was doubtful of two views I was pretty confident in. Even reading relevant experts won’t save you from this. The best solution is just finding somebody who shares the view you’re already confident in or at least gives it great respect while still disagreeing with your less confident conclusion. Yes, I am aware, sometimes your less confident conclusion genuinely follows from your most confident conclusion. However, even then there is likely to be at least one person who has intelligently argued for not linking the two views out there. And even if there isn’t, the exercise is still valuable and learning that there is no such person is itself valuable information that you can’t learn without searching.
I think that this is an important component: from my perspective, my support for human challenge trials and decriminalizing sex work are tightly linked moral convictions (the basic and default right of humans to do as they please with their own bodies, and lack of interest in the moralizing of busybodies). But this is objectively an unusual linkage! Only a tiny fraction of people with strong opinions in favor of the latter will agree with me on the former. Part of the problem is that my particular linking justification is relatively uncommon and most people will come at either issue from a much wider range of perspectives (which are influential if not my overriding concern, etc etc).
I'm more selective about my interlocutors, talking to people whose position is close to, but not identical to my own. That way, the discussion of the topic at hand isn't derailed by innumerable side disputes, which generally decline into (what seems like from my side, and probably the other) silly talking points.
For example, if I were a Marxist believer in the labour theory of value, I'd be talking to left-Keynesians and non-Marxist socialists to see why they didn;t think LTV was either correct or necessary to a left position.
This is on the assumption that I was trying to understand my own position better, rather than trying to convert others. In the latter task, you have to use whatever argument works, as long as it's honest. That may not be the best way to understand the issue at hand, but it might bring the other person close enough to make a proper discussion possible.
The labor theory of value is on the whole probably less important to Marxism then liberals think it is. The heart of the idea is that there's an inherent conflict between the interests of property owners and the interests of wage earners, which in a world of Donald Trumps and Elon Musks is going to seem intuitively true to many people.