Intellectual Integrity

Dominic Cummings vs Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

"European Flag" by rockcohen is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Dominic Cummings - the architect of Brexit - is a smooth talker. As campaign director for Vote Leave, he crafted a successful campaign for the UK to leave the European Union (EU). He then served as chief adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson between July 2019 and November 2020 as the government tried to implement Brexit. He runs an interesting blog, where he talks about many themes that are similar to those we discuss on Sharpen Your Axe. Most notably, he often talks about a Bayesian approach to the world. Here is one example. And yet…

Cummings recently gave a TV interview with the BBC. When he was confronted with Vote Leave’s incorrect claim that Turkey was poised to join the EU and flood the UK with immigrants, he smirked. We have already seen that our first guess about the world is likely to be wrong. We are all experts in self-deception, so any lies we invent will probably protect our first guess. The theory of cognitive dissonance suggests that we aren’t very good at handling contradiction. One implication of this is that if we repeat a lie enough, we will be likely to end up accepting it. Con artists are particularly good at half-believing their own lies.

The implications of the paragraph above should be obvious. If you want to adjust your views like a Bayesian, you have to be honest with others and with yourself. You need to check everything every single time. Failing to do so crashes the system. Bayesian statistics is an approach that is designed to help you transcend a bad starting position. If you try to defend your starting position with lies, exaggerations or half-truths, it simply won’t work. You can’t be a liar and a Bayesian at the same time. Pick one!

In order to see why honesty is so important, it is time to meet a contemporary philosopher called Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. She is the author of an excellent but somewhat dry book called Virtues of the Mind. In it, she suggests that reality is reluctant to reveal itself to sloppy observers. She argues that to see the world as it is we need to develop virtues like intellectual integrity, along with “carefulness, perseverance, humility, vigor, flexibility, courage, and thoroughness, as well as open-mindedness, fair-mindedness, insightfulness, and the virtues opposed to wishful thinking, obtuseness, and conformity” (p155). Cummings’ lies are the opposite of intellectual integrity.

It is interesting that two of the other main architects of Brexit, Johnson and Michael Gove, both have backgrounds as newspaper commentators. I have already suggested that it is best to skip most commentary in the non-financial press. It is largely based on beautifully written hot takes, with no penalties for getting important issues wrong. Johnson is also infamous for having been fired twice for lying. His newspaper career was largely based on telling funny stories about EU regulations, with little to no basis in fact. Sadly, the sloppiness and dishonesty of Cummings, Johnson and Gove have serious implications in the real world, not least for young Brits who want to spend some time in Europe, as I did when I graduated in the middle of a recession; or for UK residents who are facing empty shelves in the supermarkets.

Finally, it is worth spending some time reading one of Cummings’ blog posts on the referendum. In it, he unwittingly provides an argument against Brexit. “I am not aware of a single MP or political journalist who understands the Single Market – its history, its nature, its dynamics, its legal system, the complex interactions between law, economics, business, history and so on… The number of people who do is tiny. In our campaign there were two – Oliver Lewis and Richard Howell – who understood a large fraction of it and the common misconceptions.”

Imagine that you are preparing a car to trek across a desert. A mechanic is looking at the engine. He says: “Nobody knows how this bit works.” And then pulls it out and throws it on the ground. Would you be happy? Probably not! Not breaking things you don’t understand is a pretty good basic principle in politics. As ancient doctors said: “First, do no harm.”

You can find a second argument against Brexit in the same blog post by looking for the word Ireland. It shows up in the comments but not in Cummings’ post. The Good Friday Agreement (GFA), which brought peace to Northern Ireland in the 1990s, only worked because both the UK and Ireland shared their sovereignty as fellow members of the EU. What are the consequences for the GFA if one leaves? Anyone driven by the intellectual virtue of thoroughness would have thought about this issue in great depth before taking a view. If you claim to be a Bayesian, you should adjust your views on the desirability of Brexit down as soon as you realize that the Irish border might have been a issue. Cummings skipped that part.

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the critical-thinking rabbit hole.

[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.