Connecting Our Ideas to the World Outside Our Heads

Debunking incorrect ideas can help us grow, while refusing to do so can give an advantage to fanatics

"2016-04-07 crackpot" by Robert Couse-Baker is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

An acquaintance of mine combines a job in finance/crypto with a hobby as a conspiracy theorist. He tries to keep both worlds as separate as possible, flying his speculative views under the radar. A few years ago, before I launched this blog, he invited me into a secret Facebook group where he discussed theories about the world with a wide group of people.

The rules were a little strange: Nobody was allowed to discuss psychology in any way, shape or form; and nobody was allowed to post anything that was critical of anyone else’s speculation.

As I’m sure you can imagine, the site was an absolute mess of cranky opinions. I left when members started posted antisemitic conspiracy theories. A friend who stayed despite disagreeing with pretty much every post told me that the group eventually got shut down by Facebook.

Even after leaving, the group’s basic approach niggled at me. Why are all primary opinions fine? But opinions about opinions are illegitimate? And shouldn’t we try and connect our opinions with the world outside our heads?

At the same time, I was doing a lot of reading to prepare the beta version of the Sharpen Your Axe book (the final version is available here). I was struck by a passage in a book by physicist Carlo Rovelli, which I read in 2018. He makes a case that all the achievements of Western philosophy and science stem from a group of thinkers from Miletus, an ancient Greek city in what is now Aydın Province in Turkey.

Around 2,500 years ago, these thinkers began to bravely question traditional teachings. One of them, a historian and geographer called Hecataeus, took a particularly bold move. He went to Cape Tenaro in what is now mainland Greece and investigated legends that Heracles had descended to the underworld there. There was no passage and he debunked the legend. Within a few years, Greek philosophers who came in his wake had discovered that the Earth floats in the sky, as well as developing an early theory of evolution. The lesson should be clear: We need to debunk incorrect beliefs before we can develop better ones.

More recently, I read an interesting history of the long 20th century by J. Bradford De Long. he argues that we need to distinguish between fascism as a movement and fascism as an ideology. “At the core of fascism as a movement was a contempt for limits, especially those imposed by reason-based arguments; a belief that reality could be altered by the will; and an exalatation of the violent assertation of that will as the ultimate argument - indeed, the only kind of argument that mattered.”

So, just as debunking bad arguments can lead to a more reality-based position, refusing to do so can lead to relativism. If we have no methodology distinguishing between different points of view, then the strongest can impose their views on the weakest. This provides an advantage for fascists, who combine an emotionally potent criticism of liberal democracy and capitalism with nationalism, which appeals to people who feel that their lives have no value.

If you accept these points, you can see why Elon Musk’s recent shenanigans on Twitter as so dangerous. Before his over-priced takeover of the social network, journalists had acted as its anchor tenants. Many use the network to develop our work in public. Of course, people with fringe views tend to hate news reporters. As I’ve mentioned before, fact-checking can be a political act when some people doggedly try to prevent their views from coming into contact with cold, hard reality.

Musk’s hostility to journalists has received a lot of attention. What many people have missed is a tweet where he said that people who pay 8 dollars a month will be able to downvote opinions from people who haven’t. Alert readers will probably realize that I think this is a truly terrible idea, even though the billionaire also said that he will develop algorithms that prevent “brigading.”

We have already discussed the theory about why this is a bad idea - opinions shouldn’t act like a popularity contest. Debunking bad but popular ideas can lead to an improved worldview in the future; while focussing on the emotional strength of ideas rather than their connection to reality can pave the way for fascism.

To see how this works in practice, let’s take a very concrete example. Imagine a small, but committed, group of believers in homeopathy, who decide to get organized. They pay subscriptions to Twitter and develop backchannels to coordinate their actions. A scientist posts a tweet saying that water doesn’t have memory. The true believers downvote the tweet. The algorithms will take notice. And yet water has no memory.

We can see something similar with direct democracy. One of the themes developed in this blog over the last couple of years is the idea that liberal democracy is negative - it is meant to keep us safe from the worst leaders. Its killer apps are the peaceful transition of power after elections, a free press and the separation of power.

However, populists and pre-populists often misunderstand the negative side of liberal democracy. They get interested in the positive side, including using elections to find something as nonsensical as “the will of the people.” Populists tend to get very interested in referendums, which allegedly provide a better way of determining “the will of the people” than regular elections.

Sadly, the history of entryism shows the weakness of this view. It is defined by Wikipedia as “a political strategy in which an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, organization in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program.” When I was a teenager in the UK in the 1980s, entryism into the Labour Party by the small Trotskyist group Militant Tendency was a big deal. When I moved to Barcelona in 2005, I gradually became aware of a similar approach by Catalan nationalists, who over several decades tried to turn the region’s institutions into partisan instruments for their old-fashioned ideology.

Entryism works because most non-fanatics have better things to do. Most of us are busy at work. We also have hobbies and side gigs, not to mention family commitments, social lives and fitness regimes. There are books to read and films to watch. Who has time to go to lots of boring meetings? On the other hand, hedgehog-like ideologies that operate out of a position of utter certainty see the boring meetings as necessary battles in the greater war. With a low quorum, well-organized groups can have an outsized influence, even if their numbers are low.

Referendums can, of course, play a role in liberal democracy. Switzerland is a shining example. However, it is worth noting that the Alpine country has other rules to take away the advantage that populists, fanatics and entryists who are indifferent to reality might otherwise enjoy. For example, in 2019, a Swiss court overturned a referendum because voters had been poorly informed beforehand.* If wishful thinking and refusing to consider unintended consequences can backfire, reality-based arguments have a better chance in a competitive scenario.

Funnily enough, Musk is beginning to find out why referendums are unpredictable at best after running a poll of Twitter users to see if he should keep running the platform. He lost, but has yet to resign as CEO.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that everyone has the right to be wrong. However, seekers after truth should follow the advice of a contemporary philosopher called Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. She says that reality is reluctant to reveal itself to sloppy and lazy observers. Instead, we need to develop virtues like integrity, carefulness, humility, flexibility and thoroughness. Wise words!

Since this column contains some passing references to Catalan nationalists, I will turn off the comments for the week. See you next Saturday! And enjoy the rest of the holidays!

Further Reading

Reality Is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli

Slouching Towards Utopia by J. Bradford De Long

Virtues of the Mind by Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

*Catalan nationalists often say that they want Spain to be more like Switzerland. Unfortunately, they have rarely done their homework on what that would actually mean in practice. Article 140 of the constitution of the Swiss Confederation says that any changes to the Federal Constitution require a country-wide vote. Article 1 lists the cantons. So, if any canton wanted to leave the confederation, it would require all Swiss voters to give their opinion. This is remarkably similar to the Spanish Constitution (see Articles 1, 2 and 92). Sorry, nationalists!

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