“They will typically say something like, “This isn’t complicated” and I think that is because when one’s ideological beliefs are the basis for what one determines to be true, finding the ‘right’ answer often is not complicated. The reality, however, often is.”
Actually, I agree with the previous sentence (when I say I don't have a respect-worthy opinion on an issue, and people insist that I must have one really, I think they are actually asking “Which side are you on?”) but not with this conclusion.
There are some issues where we are forced to adopt shortcuts and euristics. The situation may be complicated, but there could be no alternative to simplifying it. I also suspect that many if not most important things in life are like that. And it can even work out pretty well. We walk and grab a ball on the fly without resolving equations of motion. We often have to make a decision without fully knowing what its consequences will be (we can't know the future perfectly, after all).
And yes, sometimes we HAVE to choose sides, for example when we vote for an election. We can't have a referendum on every single issue, so we have to delegate. But refusing to vote a party because we don't agree with them on EVERYTHING wouldn't seem less tribal, more pragmatic, nor more moral: it would instead seem as delegating on EVERYTHING (even for things we are more certain of our position). By the way, the attitude of being more confident about the opinions of those who explicitly say "I don't know" is precisely such an euristic, and it could even be considered a new "tribe" (the one of liberals and skeptics with epistemic humility), though of course is well reasoned and I agree with it.
So in the end even if the situation is complicated, we often HAVE to act as if it weren't.
Yes, of course. When voting, we have a responsibility to inform ourselves about the relevant issues to whatever extent we can and then make our best call, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I do not have to have an opinion on international covid responses, the causes of gender dysphoria, the Israel/Hamas war or climate change and declare it on social media unless I choose to take enough of an interest in those topics to look into them in sufficient depth to make it one that is worth reading. We simply DON’T have to an opinion on everything and I won’t be pressured into pretending to have one. I did have to read a lot on whether vaccines cause autism because I had a baby just before that claim was made and I also had to read a lot about the EU because there was a referendum on leaving it or staying in if, but both of those were so unutterably tedious that it was a matter of necessity and not something I intend to do for every topic forever or can do. I actually gave up on understanding the EU, after having read a load of brain-numbing overviews of trade agreements and finally losing the will to live when I got to fishing rights and went with a rough heuristic based on some overviews as you rightly say we often have to do. But I won’t venture there again unless I have to again and I won’t have an opinion on it because I choose not to inform myself on it.
We were implicitly discussing contexts where taking, or expressing, particular conclusions is optional and reaching a proper conclusion is dependent on understanding and knowing relevant details that we do not have direct access to. Your response is changing the context to one where a decision needs to made quickly and as such does not conflict with, or dispute the contents of, the original argument. I think most of us agree that, in that other context where we need to quickly make a decision, we routinely make many such decisions every day without always having a good, or comprehensive, understanding of all the potentially relevant details. And yes, the border line between contexts where we need to quickly make a decision versus where reaching or expressing a conclusion is optional or unnecessary, and even inappropriate given our lack of having needed expertise, can sometimes be fuzzy. I share the perspective expressed by Helen Pluckrose that too many people too often unnecessarily adopt too strong an opinion on such optional to answer questions that they are lacking in the knowledge/understanding/expertise needed to properly anchor and justify. Doing that lacks integrity. There are many potential reasons for this. They may justify doing this based on anti-empiricist claims,or they may have a mistaken understanding of what is required to obtain the expertise, etc.
I love this; gets at why I disliked the "silence is violence" slogan that was popular a few years back. Not having or stating an opinion isn't violence. Also, not stating an opinion in a certain forums doesn't mean you don't have one. People continue existing even when they're not being perceived by the internet panopticon.
>Humans strongly dislike being told what to think and when we are told that we must believe something, we become motivated to try to find reasons not to believe it.
Yes. I sometimes joke I have a degree of oppositional defiant disorder, which manifests internally, but this is probably pretty normal.
Yes! I was reading Simon McCarthy-Jones book on spite recently and he covers this in some depth. Studies reliably find that people told they must believe a certain thing before being shown an example of it find way more problems with it than people invited to consider the thing. Dobbin and Kalev found this with mandatory unconscious bias training too. It made people more resistant to the ideas in it while, if it was voluntary, people could find more merits in some of it. The degree to which we have 'counter-dominant' impulses varies though and I am a particularly disagreeable person who looks out things to disagree with. Not a contrarian. I don't disagree with things for the sake of it, but what I like to do is address things I see as a problem and say why I think they are a problem while other people are more conflict-averse. Perhaps you are more disagreeable than most too!
That makes a lot of sense. I’ll add that book to my reading list.
I often say my two driving forces in life are curiosity and spite. Outwardly I’m pretty conflict avoidant and “go along to get along.” Inwardly though…
I’m a Myers-Briggs dork and recently I saw a meme where someone gave cartoon depictions of their interpretations of the sixteen personality types. My type, INFP, was a woman smiling down at a flower, but there was a faded image of the woman behind that frowning and giving the finger with both hands, representing her inner state. And I was like, oh, that is an accurate depiction of me.
What a beautiful piece. It expresses my thoughts exactly but with far more eloquence than I ever could. Now if only the right people would read it. All the ones who ‘just know’ without having invested the hard work and humility that you do before reaching an opinion.
Agreed, and I would add that it is particularly important to withhold judgement on whatever happens to be the latest “issue of the day” from the news. Typically, those involve limited information with people filling in the gaps with their pre-conceived notions. Once time has passed and more information comes out, they typically look very different.
Nice and well-written essay on the importance of being non-earnest on some issues. I work around other folks' concerns about my opinions or lack of opinions by being 98% full of don't-give-a-fucks.
Helen - I cannot adequately express how much I loved this post! I agree with every word.
And this is why you are so exceptional:
"I am, myself, a particularly single-minded person who likes to research a single topic in depth, learn every single thing I can about it, break it down into its component parts, make models of it and present them to people with ethical arguments for or against them."
If only the rest of the commentariat were as diligent!
I will also do my best to popularize the label "Hedgehog Man." 😂 It is so fitting!
Finally, yes, it is a tough lesson to learn, but "I don't know" is often the best answer.
I think some of us hope that the forces on the left, that took you 15 years to push back against, will themselves have to take 15 years to push back against the right. And we are disappointed at how quickly and effectively the pushback against right wing overreach has been by the same champions that did so much to get us out of the woke mess. I think some of us just have a sense of cynicism about the speed with which the anti-right message is being picked up by people who never used to listen to Helen Pluckrose. I feel the same way about Sam Harris. All the sudden the new message is getting through and some like me are skeptical of lessons learned.
I don't understand? It didn't take me 15 years to push back at the illiberal left. I've been doing it for 15 years. I think I was quick to address the problem on the left and the first few years were spent trying to convince people it was a problem and help me do that. I'm also going to address the rising problem of the illiberal right as soon as it emerges and if we manage to push that back more quickly, that can only be a good thing. It would indicate that lessons have been learnt and that people will see the problem when it is presented to them quicker now. If that happens, it will be ethical conservatives who can take the credit because they are the ones who can effect change.I'm not confident this will happen yet as I'm seeing the same mentality of "There really isn't a problem and 'woke right' is not actually a thing. You just have TDS." However, I also see conservatives objecting to the illiberalism on their own side and if they forge forward with this, they will be able to say they did not stick their heads in the stands and let the issue grow as the left did. I'll help them all I can.
I guess I have a different sense of things. I respect your writing though.
I think the heterodox movement (at least in America) is in flux right now because we’re waiting to see where all the pieces are falling.
The so called “woke right” is being allowed to be brutish because the left was intellectually brutish albeit in a much more insidious subtle way.
I love the frankness of the right. It’s easy to pick up on the flaws. If you are a working person, you only emerge in politics once in a while so you try hard to make your feelings known in a way that will last years, decades.
The left is always heard. It’s heard in universities, in newsrooms, in community organizations. So I’m ok correcting for the brutishness of the right and not being shocked by it. They want to establish some principles of things because afterwards they will get on with their lives for decades to come.
I’m not sure I understand this comment. Do you mean you are disappointed with how quickly people are pushing back on ideas from the illiberal right in general? Or disappointed that some are only finding and supporting people like Helen and Sam because they are opposed to the illiberal right, but are blind to their own illiberal leftism? I’m confused
She says: "I think we could do with a little less certainty and a lot more humility in our public discourse at the moment." humility? Oh, my.
Thanks for another good essay Helen. I think I'll be sharing this one too. One note here though; on many moral issues the 'right or wrong' of the issue may be clear, but one still must know enough about the subject to to explain where the morality involved came from. You don't speak on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but you do have an opinion on the children caught in the conflict, which comes from your beliefs as a humanist.
Absolutely. How many of the people who say "No human is illegal' also hold antisemitic views know that this came from Wiesel's work on how dehumanising language fed into the culture that produced the holocaust. I think there is a difference between neutrality and "I don't know" though. I might well have a strong stance on issues I do not currently engage with if I engaged with them, but unless I do that (which you can't do with everything), it is better for me to simply defend the rights of the people who do to express them. I don't think he'd have suggested we must take a side on every issue from hedgehogs to climate change, though, simply that when there is a rise of some authoritarianism targeting groups that we don't look the other way but object to it.
We won’t be taking you out campaigning for votes then! Not only would you need to debate on political issues from Gaza to steel making, you would need to have a defendable stance on local issues such as preventing fly tipping and parking charges.
That's right, yes. I am not suitable to be a policy campaigning person. I think that takes the kind of brain that likes to have an overview of a broad range of topics. I am of most use specialising in specific topics and then policy-makers can draw on my work and that of others who focus intensively on one particular issue to inform their policies.
“They will typically say something like, “This isn’t complicated” and I think that is because when one’s ideological beliefs are the basis for what one determines to be true, finding the ‘right’ answer often is not complicated. The reality, however, often is.”
Yes, exactly right.
Actually, I agree with the previous sentence (when I say I don't have a respect-worthy opinion on an issue, and people insist that I must have one really, I think they are actually asking “Which side are you on?”) but not with this conclusion.
There are some issues where we are forced to adopt shortcuts and euristics. The situation may be complicated, but there could be no alternative to simplifying it. I also suspect that many if not most important things in life are like that. And it can even work out pretty well. We walk and grab a ball on the fly without resolving equations of motion. We often have to make a decision without fully knowing what its consequences will be (we can't know the future perfectly, after all).
And yes, sometimes we HAVE to choose sides, for example when we vote for an election. We can't have a referendum on every single issue, so we have to delegate. But refusing to vote a party because we don't agree with them on EVERYTHING wouldn't seem less tribal, more pragmatic, nor more moral: it would instead seem as delegating on EVERYTHING (even for things we are more certain of our position). By the way, the attitude of being more confident about the opinions of those who explicitly say "I don't know" is precisely such an euristic, and it could even be considered a new "tribe" (the one of liberals and skeptics with epistemic humility), though of course is well reasoned and I agree with it.
So in the end even if the situation is complicated, we often HAVE to act as if it weren't.
Yes, of course. When voting, we have a responsibility to inform ourselves about the relevant issues to whatever extent we can and then make our best call, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I do not have to have an opinion on international covid responses, the causes of gender dysphoria, the Israel/Hamas war or climate change and declare it on social media unless I choose to take enough of an interest in those topics to look into them in sufficient depth to make it one that is worth reading. We simply DON’T have to an opinion on everything and I won’t be pressured into pretending to have one. I did have to read a lot on whether vaccines cause autism because I had a baby just before that claim was made and I also had to read a lot about the EU because there was a referendum on leaving it or staying in if, but both of those were so unutterably tedious that it was a matter of necessity and not something I intend to do for every topic forever or can do. I actually gave up on understanding the EU, after having read a load of brain-numbing overviews of trade agreements and finally losing the will to live when I got to fishing rights and went with a rough heuristic based on some overviews as you rightly say we often have to do. But I won’t venture there again unless I have to again and I won’t have an opinion on it because I choose not to inform myself on it.
We were implicitly discussing contexts where taking, or expressing, particular conclusions is optional and reaching a proper conclusion is dependent on understanding and knowing relevant details that we do not have direct access to. Your response is changing the context to one where a decision needs to made quickly and as such does not conflict with, or dispute the contents of, the original argument. I think most of us agree that, in that other context where we need to quickly make a decision, we routinely make many such decisions every day without always having a good, or comprehensive, understanding of all the potentially relevant details. And yes, the border line between contexts where we need to quickly make a decision versus where reaching or expressing a conclusion is optional or unnecessary, and even inappropriate given our lack of having needed expertise, can sometimes be fuzzy. I share the perspective expressed by Helen Pluckrose that too many people too often unnecessarily adopt too strong an opinion on such optional to answer questions that they are lacking in the knowledge/understanding/expertise needed to properly anchor and justify. Doing that lacks integrity. There are many potential reasons for this. They may justify doing this based on anti-empiricist claims,or they may have a mistaken understanding of what is required to obtain the expertise, etc.
I love this; gets at why I disliked the "silence is violence" slogan that was popular a few years back. Not having or stating an opinion isn't violence. Also, not stating an opinion in a certain forums doesn't mean you don't have one. People continue existing even when they're not being perceived by the internet panopticon.
>Humans strongly dislike being told what to think and when we are told that we must believe something, we become motivated to try to find reasons not to believe it.
Yes. I sometimes joke I have a degree of oppositional defiant disorder, which manifests internally, but this is probably pretty normal.
Yes! I was reading Simon McCarthy-Jones book on spite recently and he covers this in some depth. Studies reliably find that people told they must believe a certain thing before being shown an example of it find way more problems with it than people invited to consider the thing. Dobbin and Kalev found this with mandatory unconscious bias training too. It made people more resistant to the ideas in it while, if it was voluntary, people could find more merits in some of it. The degree to which we have 'counter-dominant' impulses varies though and I am a particularly disagreeable person who looks out things to disagree with. Not a contrarian. I don't disagree with things for the sake of it, but what I like to do is address things I see as a problem and say why I think they are a problem while other people are more conflict-averse. Perhaps you are more disagreeable than most too!
That makes a lot of sense. I’ll add that book to my reading list.
I often say my two driving forces in life are curiosity and spite. Outwardly I’m pretty conflict avoidant and “go along to get along.” Inwardly though…
I’m a Myers-Briggs dork and recently I saw a meme where someone gave cartoon depictions of their interpretations of the sixteen personality types. My type, INFP, was a woman smiling down at a flower, but there was a faded image of the woman behind that frowning and giving the finger with both hands, representing her inner state. And I was like, oh, that is an accurate depiction of me.
What a beautiful piece. It expresses my thoughts exactly but with far more eloquence than I ever could. Now if only the right people would read it. All the ones who ‘just know’ without having invested the hard work and humility that you do before reaching an opinion.
Well said, Helen.
Humility is among the least rewarded of virtues, though it is one of the most rewarding.
Nevertheless, I don’t know if I agree with you 😊
Agreed, and I would add that it is particularly important to withhold judgement on whatever happens to be the latest “issue of the day” from the news. Typically, those involve limited information with people filling in the gaps with their pre-conceived notions. Once time has passed and more information comes out, they typically look very different.
Absolutely!
@Helen
Nice and well-written essay on the importance of being non-earnest on some issues. I work around other folks' concerns about my opinions or lack of opinions by being 98% full of don't-give-a-fucks.
Thank you for this essay.
Thank you. Very comforting and reassuring post. I’m not sure if that was your intention Helen, but it is certainly how I digested it. 😀
Helen - I cannot adequately express how much I loved this post! I agree with every word.
And this is why you are so exceptional:
"I am, myself, a particularly single-minded person who likes to research a single topic in depth, learn every single thing I can about it, break it down into its component parts, make models of it and present them to people with ethical arguments for or against them."
If only the rest of the commentariat were as diligent!
I will also do my best to popularize the label "Hedgehog Man." 😂 It is so fitting!
Finally, yes, it is a tough lesson to learn, but "I don't know" is often the best answer.
Thanks, Jonathan!
Absolutely excellent
very well says
I think some of us hope that the forces on the left, that took you 15 years to push back against, will themselves have to take 15 years to push back against the right. And we are disappointed at how quickly and effectively the pushback against right wing overreach has been by the same champions that did so much to get us out of the woke mess. I think some of us just have a sense of cynicism about the speed with which the anti-right message is being picked up by people who never used to listen to Helen Pluckrose. I feel the same way about Sam Harris. All the sudden the new message is getting through and some like me are skeptical of lessons learned.
I don't understand? It didn't take me 15 years to push back at the illiberal left. I've been doing it for 15 years. I think I was quick to address the problem on the left and the first few years were spent trying to convince people it was a problem and help me do that. I'm also going to address the rising problem of the illiberal right as soon as it emerges and if we manage to push that back more quickly, that can only be a good thing. It would indicate that lessons have been learnt and that people will see the problem when it is presented to them quicker now. If that happens, it will be ethical conservatives who can take the credit because they are the ones who can effect change.I'm not confident this will happen yet as I'm seeing the same mentality of "There really isn't a problem and 'woke right' is not actually a thing. You just have TDS." However, I also see conservatives objecting to the illiberalism on their own side and if they forge forward with this, they will be able to say they did not stick their heads in the stands and let the issue grow as the left did. I'll help them all I can.
I guess I have a different sense of things. I respect your writing though.
I think the heterodox movement (at least in America) is in flux right now because we’re waiting to see where all the pieces are falling.
The so called “woke right” is being allowed to be brutish because the left was intellectually brutish albeit in a much more insidious subtle way.
I love the frankness of the right. It’s easy to pick up on the flaws. If you are a working person, you only emerge in politics once in a while so you try hard to make your feelings known in a way that will last years, decades.
The left is always heard. It’s heard in universities, in newsrooms, in community organizations. So I’m ok correcting for the brutishness of the right and not being shocked by it. They want to establish some principles of things because afterwards they will get on with their lives for decades to come.
I’m not sure I understand this comment. Do you mean you are disappointed with how quickly people are pushing back on ideas from the illiberal right in general? Or disappointed that some are only finding and supporting people like Helen and Sam because they are opposed to the illiberal right, but are blind to their own illiberal leftism? I’m confused
No Helen, we demand you form an opinion about The Current Thing immediately #AudienceCapture #hottakes
Do you actually have a Hedgehog Man in your town or is this just a creatively parabolic reference to Isaiah Berlin?
We do indeed!
Fabulous. Almost too perfect. Here's hoping your town also has a polymath named Mr/Ms Fox.
She says: "I think we could do with a little less certainty and a lot more humility in our public discourse at the moment." humility? Oh, my.
Thanks for another good essay Helen. I think I'll be sharing this one too. One note here though; on many moral issues the 'right or wrong' of the issue may be clear, but one still must know enough about the subject to to explain where the morality involved came from. You don't speak on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but you do have an opinion on the children caught in the conflict, which comes from your beliefs as a humanist.
The timing of this is weird. Literally hours before I got this email, I was thinking about Ellie Wiesel's quote (that popped up on my feed):
"We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
Imagine taking a side while being ignorant of the problem. Seems like it could cause more problems than it would solve.
Absolutely. How many of the people who say "No human is illegal' also hold antisemitic views know that this came from Wiesel's work on how dehumanising language fed into the culture that produced the holocaust. I think there is a difference between neutrality and "I don't know" though. I might well have a strong stance on issues I do not currently engage with if I engaged with them, but unless I do that (which you can't do with everything), it is better for me to simply defend the rights of the people who do to express them. I don't think he'd have suggested we must take a side on every issue from hedgehogs to climate change, though, simply that when there is a rise of some authoritarianism targeting groups that we don't look the other way but object to it.
We won’t be taking you out campaigning for votes then! Not only would you need to debate on political issues from Gaza to steel making, you would need to have a defendable stance on local issues such as preventing fly tipping and parking charges.
That's right, yes. I am not suitable to be a policy campaigning person. I think that takes the kind of brain that likes to have an overview of a broad range of topics. I am of most use specialising in specific topics and then policy-makers can draw on my work and that of others who focus intensively on one particular issue to inform their policies.
Also, I am still Labour and not SDP.
I feel your pain