How to Change Your Mind
There are different ways to install the updates to your worldview; but not all of them will give you good results
"'where have I gone wrong'" by badjonni is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
The three most recent essays on Sharpen Your Axe have taken us in an interesting direction. On 4th January, we discussed why moderates strive to be hard on out own sides and self-critical, while trying to understand our opponents. It set up a contrast between well-educated professionals and “friends, family members and acquaintances who lack degrees but want to do their own research about the world.”
On 11th January, we discussed how this contrast is “only approximately true.” We showed how education can help insulate people against populist narratives some of the time, but we talked about three examples where it has broken down. Well-educated Catalan speakers have been too uncritical of the populist independence movement; credentialed people in Silicon Valley have applied their enthusiasm for disruptive innovation to institutions that should be nurtured instead of smashed; and post-Marxist theorists in the social scientists have forgotten to ground their speculative views in findings from harder sciences.
On 18th January, we went a step further and discussed how human stupidity is inevitable. The best way for us to handle our own stupidity is through scepticism and probabilistic thinking. We should suspend judgement, assume that many of our ideas are wrong much of the time and try to work out which ideas are the most likely.
If you are new to these parts, I recommend reading the three essays before getting stuck into the rest of this week’s missive. You can find links at the bottom. I will wait for you here! If you prefer, though, you can keep reading, of course.
If we take the ideas in these three essays seriously, we can see that all our views should be seen as provisional. How should we change our mind when we see that the evidence goes the other way?
Unfortunately, there is a wrong way of installing the updates, as flagged by George Orwell in the 1940s and discussed in previous essays on Sharpen Your Axe. Orwell noticed that some people, often on the left, rejected the form of nationalism closest to hand. However, they continued to generalise about large group of people, the way that nationalists always do.
As a result, people who believe themselves above nationalism can be susceptible to what Orwell called “transferred nationalism,” which involves adopting a foreign national cause. The person who does this “can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he [or she] believes that he [or she] has emancipated himself [or herself].” He says: “Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one’s conduct.”
Orwell’s observation is tremendously powerful. We have discussed how left-wing Westerners who have adopted Palestinian nationalism have fallen into this trap. I have also spotted something similar in Spain (where I live). I know more than one person who claimed to be a left-wing revolutionary while struggling with unemployment or under-employment during the long recession; only to become a firm member of the hard right almost immediately after getting a good job. These people have swapped one form of radicalism for another, without pausing to wonder whether political radicalism is a good idea or not.
A business professor called Chris Argyris wrote an influential essay in the 1970s that helps explain what is happening here. He noticed that some organisations were bad at reconsidering basic assumptions. Everything is interpreted according to a certain framework, which is never questioned. He called this single-loop learning; and contrasted it with double-loop learning, which involves questioning our most basic assumptions. It can be hard to do, but it always yields interesting results, as we can see at a societal level with Germany and Japan (two of the most interesting countries in the world).
When I look back on the evolution of my own ideas, the clearest example of double-loop learning came when the Berlin Wall fell. I was a philosophy student at the University of Leeds at the time. I had been very interested in Marxism and revolutionary politics. I decided to spend some time examining my assumptions. Karl Popper’s liberal masterpiece, The Open Society and Its Enemies, genuinely put my political thinking on a new course.
I think that if people are interested in changing their minds, it helps to suspend judgement on your conclusions as much as possible. Open source intelligence (OSINT) provides us with an interesting model. We should strive to get as much information as possible and be reluctant to draw conclusions while doing research.
If you are interested in OSINT, you should give primary sources and official sources a much higher weighting than commentary by people with an axe to grind. So, for example, if you are a tech billionaire in the United States (US) and you want to find out about a historical grooming scandal in the United Kingdom (UK), it would be much better to begin your research with the 2022 public enquiry than with a YouTube documentary from someone who has been a member of a neo-fascist party and has been found guilty of violence, fraud and drug dealing.
In many ways, the approach we are developing here should be seen as the opposite of the conspiratorial mindset, which starts with the conclusions. It then works backwards to find supporting evidence, helped by a big dose of intentionality bias. Proponents of conspiracy theories always look for ways to disregard inconvenient evidence - a tendency I have described as being “heads I win, tails you lose,” “feedbackphobia” and conspiracy theories acting as the bodyguards to failing worldviews.
Of course, we are human beings and we do love our narratives and our conclusions. If we are interested in OSINT, how can we add some provisional conclusions back into the mix? My advice is to have a few possible conclusions, like a fox, and give them a percentage score, like a Bayesian. You can move the percentages up and down as the evidence changes and your thinking evolves. If you ever move a percentage over the 50% line, you have just engaged in double-loop learning in a very easy way. Please show gratitude to anyone who provided evidence that helps you reach this point!
There is also another dangerous point. If we take these ideas seriously, we need to be open to the idea that at least some of our ideas are wrong. Which ones are built on sand? Let me conclude this essay with a personal example. The contrast between what I call institutionalism (working within the institutions of liberal democracy that evolved to protect pluralism) and populism (anti-pluralist politics) is a major theme in this blog. What are the limitations of this model?
I think an alternative way of covering the same ground would be to see the battle as one within the elite, with different sides crafting narratives designed to appeal to different segments of the population. We can see this clearest in the Catalan independence movement, which pitted regional politicians in Barcelona against national ones in Madrid. The separatists tended to look for support among native speakers of the Catalan language, who were concerned that their mother tongue had slowly become a minority language in Barcelona and surrounding areas.
Brexit was also a battle within the elite. A UK exit from the European Union (EU) appealed to a coalition of backbench Conservative Members of Parliaments (MPs), hedge fund managers who could make a killing from volatility and executives with locally focused businesses, like pubs, as well as owners of right-wing tabloids. The movement, which positioned itself against “the Establishment,” got an edge when established politicians like Boris Johnson joined in the fun. Its leaders sought allies among people who felt left behind by economic growth, particularly due to a dysfunctional housing market.
In the US, it should be obvious that people like Donald Trump, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are members of the economic elite, no matter how much they position themselves as outsiders. Established politicians like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have joined on the bandwagon, despite any rhetoric about the dangers of career politicians. Like Brexit, the new hard right also seeks support among people who feel left behind, particularly in rural areas.
Let me conclude this essay with one final point. If you assume you might be wrong, it is worth placing bets against yourself. One small example should suffice. If you think that you are unlikely to make it to old age, for whatever reason, you should probably still invest in a pension scheme anyway in case you are wrong. The comments are closed, as usual when we discuss populism. Subscribers who want to continue the conversation can always reply to the email, though. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
On moderates (4th January)
On education (11th January)
On human stupidity and suspending judgement (18th January)
Transferred nationalism (part one, part two and part three)
Conspatorial mindset and intentionality bias
“Heads I win, tails you lose,” feedbackphobia and conspiracy theories as bodyguards
Foxes and Bayesianism
Institutionalism (part one and part two)
Linguistic hysteria in Catalonia
Further Reading
Double Loop Learning in Organizations by Chris Argyris
Notes on Nationalism by George Orwell
The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper
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