A difficult ask

The subtle art of being less stupid

I’m going to ask you to do something that you don’t want to do. I’m going to ask you to admit that you’re wrong.

What went through your mind when you read that? Obviously, you’re wondering what you’d be wrong about. You’re going through the list of things that the typical reader would be wrong about, or maybe think I’m going to come up with some trite generality, or thinking I’m engaging in wordplay.

Somewhere under all of those is the concern that I might actually be able to pull it off, come up with something that you’re wrong about. Maybe even something that didn’t occur to you.

The thing is, this article isn’t about you being wrong. It’s about what our brains do that makes us wrong, and what we can do about it. In the end, though, the trick is to admit that we don’t know.'

Wrong != Incorrect

I need to specify that there’s a significant difference between being wrong and merely being incorrect. Being incorrect is a simple thing, where we didn’t know what we thought we knew. We feel better when we admit we’re incorrect. It’s a good exercise in and of itself, but we’re shooting for something transcendent. You generally can’t be wrong about facts. If you can look it up, then it’s a matter of being incorrect.

In order to actually be wrong, you have to decide that some fuzzy bit of information falls in a specific direction, and then you have to act on it in a way that impacts others. At that point, admitting that you’re wrong is equivalent to admitting that you’ve hurt people.

Nobody wants to admit that. Not even to ourselves. At minimum, it’s a blow to our egos. At it’s worst, you have to admit that you’ve inadvertently gotten a lot of people killed. Nobody wants that.

I didn’t really hurt people

If you’re liberal/progressive, then you’ll appreciate this one. Anybody who has ever insisted that inoculations are a hoax is responsible for roughly .1% of a human death. I could provide citations, but they don’t matter. You can slice and dice the death allocation any way you want, but they’re still responsible for ending some small percentage of a human life.

Now add on deaths due to global warming, abortion bans, the war on drugs, excessive medical costs, and a host of other things, you can see why people might not want to start walking down that road. It’s not like they can credibly claim that there’s no way they could have known.

The kicker is that I doubt I’ve met anyone who doesn’t have something like that in their psychological closets. I’ve spent my life hunting for them in my sub-psyche, and I’m still surprised every time I find one.

Take, for instance, the idea “blind loyalty is a virtue.” This is the lesson that we should have learned from the Crusades, but the majority of us vote based on whoever our friends and relatives vote for. Oh, but YOUR friends and relatives are smart and reliable, right?

Note: If you’ve ever traced a bit of political chicanery back to its source, I’m probably not talking about you.

If that is you, then I apologize because I’m going to have to push the knife in a little deeper. If you’re guilty of blind loyalty, you don’t get to claim that the people you’re blindly loyal to aren’t the bad guys. You don’t know. You opted out of that distinction. You get partial credit for all of the horrible things that it’s caused since you started practicing it.

Harsh, I know, but if you’re trying to figure out how to exempt yourself, then I believe I’ve effectively illustrated how hard we will fight to avoid being wrong.

Epidemiology

Memetically, our resistance to being wrong could be categorized as an autoimmune disorder. we’ve identified some bit of information as harmful to our identity, so we fight against it, not knowing we’re hurting ourselves.

This is more significant that cognitive dissonance. With CD, you’re uncomfortable because what’s inside doesn’t match what’s outside. That’s the case when you are merely incorrect. If you’re actually wrong, then admitting you are wrong comes with a cost.

Remediation

What can we do about it? Having an open mind is necessary but insufficient. It decreases your liability, but leaves your mind full of chunks of misconception.

You could thoroughly research something to find the limits of human knowledge, and I’ve done that with a couple of topics, but it just isn’t practical for most people and most topics. We are finite, and disagreements are infinite.

Fortunately, there’s someone who’s done that research for you. I’m not talking about your pundit of choice or your local authority on why they are wrong. I’m saying you should go to the source, which is an indirect way of saying “just talk to those people, without predetermined enmity.”

I call this Focused Empathy. Yea, I know, Love Conquers All is a sappy plot twist, but hear me out. It is our default state to presume that people believe something you disagree with because they’re idiots, but that’s rarely the case. Everybody who believes something wrong believes it for a reason.

To fix this, you don’t have to find the full scientific background on a topic, you just have to drill down to the kernel of disagreement, the part that is truly opinion-based from which the two perspectives split.

For example…

Deeper dive: abortion

If you drill down on abortion, what you find is that anti-abortion enthusiasts believe that a pregnant woman, especially one who is pregnant because of premarital sex, deserves whatever struggles are coming to them. The arguments focus on whether or not a fetus is equivalent to a baby, but the underlying conundrum is whether women having sex should be punished.

While the pro-abortion side is comparing the welfare of a thriving, young female to the life of a non-sentient multi-celled organism, the anti-abortion side is comparing the welfare of a sinner to the life of the thriving human baby that could one day result from the pregnancy. Behold, the kernel of disagreement.

I find it strange that even anti-abortionists don’t realize this. Much can be said about this mindset, but it’s too well thought-out to call stupid.

Deeper dive: GMOs

In the other direction, lets talk about GMOs. Most liberals will tell you that GMOs aren’t safe, and the public needs to be protected from them. This issue is a bit more complex than abortion, and it actually has numerous kernels.

We can start with over-generalization. GMO tends to be applied to everything from selective breeding to CRISPR editing, and it’s a mistake to bundle them all together. You might be talking about the introduction of Bt toxin into corn while they might be talking about mutation-based random walk.

Even when you limit it down to CRISPR editing, you have to differentiate between changing the coding of muscle formation vs. changing which chemicals are generated during the biological process.

At this point, however, we run into the limitations of how much a person can understand without going for a college degree, so we generalize. This creates a great fear of the unknown, which is why there’s a push for labelling.

At a deeper level, you realize that the root concern isn’t about the plants and animals themselves. Frankencorn will not be stealing your car any time soon. They’re concerned that, if something poisonous is introduced through GMOs, the companies will go to market without any form of testing. Let’s be honest. The level of corruption in the US warrants that concern.

In short, they fear a repeat of the thalidomide incident. We won’t know until thousands of humans have suffered, well, who knows what? It’s a case where the cost/benefit formula results in corporations reaping the benefits while the customers suffer the costs.

The flaw in this thinking is that mutations that are likely to harm us are also likely to kill the host organism, so there’s a control process in there that we don’t have for chemistry. That makes the chemistry-GMO comparison an apples/oranges thing. We have concrete examples with chemicals being sneaky-dangerous, but there is no equivalent to thalidomide with GMOs. Without an example case, it’s fear for the sake of fear, which is irrational.

Obstacles

The most frustrating part of going to the source is that we are conditioned by our political environment to immediately attack the opposition instead of trying to talk to them. Finding someone with opposing views is easy. Trying to have a rational conversation with them is like sticking a fork in a light socket to see if it’s powered. For the examples I’ve provided, I’ve had to get into hundreds of arguments on the internet, with only a few successes in terms of finding the kernel of disagreement. I do wish we had a place to do this.

Conclusion

So, I under-sold this article. I’m not just going to ask you to admit that you are wrong. I’m going to ask you to adopt the process by which you can realize that you’re wrong, to help weed out the ways you misunderstand the world.

This may not allow you to become smarter, but it will certainly help you become less stupid.

Exercise

Since these conversations are hard to find, I suggest you try this. Find yourself an LLM, tell it what your core political leanings are, then ask it to give you examples of issues on which you might, statistically speaking, be misinformed. Ask it questions about it.

Standard disclaimer: LLM’s will help you find that kernel, but you still have to cross-check it against reality.