What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

by Tim Urban

Thinking like a Scientist isn’t about knowing a lot, it’s about being aware of what you do and don’t know—about

Reasoning While Motivated—the thinking equivalent of drunk driving.

People in an Idea Lab don’t usually take arguments personally because Idea Lab culture is built around the core notion that people and ideas are separate things. People are meant to be respected, ideas are meant to be batted around and picked apart.

while Idea Labs are devoted to a kind of thinking, Echo Chambers are devoted to a set of beliefs the culture deems to be sacred.

conviction, used sparingly in an Idea Lab, is social currency in an Echo Chamber. The more conviction you speak with, the more knowledgeable, intelligent, and righteous you seem.

There is a vibrant world of high-rung politics. There’s just an even larger world down below, where politics is less about working together to build a more perfect union and more about the good guys triumphing over the bad guys in a political war.

An Echo Chamber makes its members feel perfectly informed while crippling them as intellectuals. It teaches them that knowledge is easy and gets them hooked on the feeling of knowing the truth about everything without having to work for it.

McGuire found that people’s beliefs worked in a similar way: being repeatedly exposed to weak arguments for a particular position makes people dismissive of all arguments for that position.

Americans seem to be spending a lot more time talking with those who agree with their politics than thoughtfully engaging with those who don’t.

When people are surrounded by ideologically homogeneous groups, their views become more extreme.

cultural sorting yields political sorting as a byproduct, and the resulting homogeneity then makes everyone’s political views more extreme. You end up with increasingly partisan people, holding increasingly negative perceptions of people from the other party, which makes everyone even more determined to surround themselves with people from their own tribe. It’s a classic vicious cycle.

Presenting an inaccurate version of reality breeds misplaced anger and division and hurts our ability to move toward important goals—all in the name of editing the reality show to be more entertaining with crisper, juicier storylines.

I don’t know what truly motivates today’s media. Maybe they make politically motivated propaganda. Maybe they make profit-motivated entertainment, which happens to double as political propaganda. Whatever the motivation, the consequence is the same: enhanced political tribalism.

Social media doesn’t just amplify political junk food, it plays a role in shaping it.

Politicians who act like children are great TV, which incentivizes the media to give them more airtime, which helps those politicians win elections, which encourages more of the same behavior.

On today’s college campuses, the combination of ideological homogeneity and the sacredness of social justice, alongside the backdrop of the country’s hypercharged political tribalism, similarly created an unusual vulnerability to a particular golem: Social Justice Fundamentalism.

The real power of idea supremacy is that you only have to achieve a little of it through punishments and public shamings. In an environment soon infused with fear, self-censorship does most of the heavy lifting.

When papers are instead filtered based on how well their conclusions align with a particular ideology, journals turn from truth-finding organs into political instruments.

Indoctrination is what idea supremacy looks like in a classroom. And it’s an apt description of what happens in many of today’s social justice classes.

Today’s college students are tomorrow’s leaders. Depriving students of a rigorous intellectual boot camp doesn’t hurt only them, it makes tomorrow’s society a less informed, less intelligent place for everyone.

Universities are society’s primary mechanism of knowledge discovery. Academic research is supposed to be the ultimate genie—a marketplace of ideas unlike any other, with rigorous rules and standards, and processes like peer review that institutionalize collaborative thinking to create a hyper-efficient truth-finding machine.

We’ll never hear about the article that sits on the editor’s desk and never gets published, or the movie that never gets bought. The science too risky to research. The book too risky to write. The memo too risky to send. The op-ed too risky to pen. The opinion too risky to voice. George Orwell called this “the sinister fact” about censorship: “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.”

When you leave the “of ___” unspecified, Popper’s Paradox is inevitably twisted by political or religious groups into some version of: In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of [people, ideas, and practices that we don’t like]. By labeling their ideological opponents as “intolerant,” whoever has the most cultural power in any environment can use Popper’s reasoning to justify authoritarianism.

Popper was specifically concerned by those who refuse to engage in rational argument, instead using intimidation to respond to criticism of their ideas. When he talked about intolerance, he was referring to one kind in particular: idea supremacy. Popper believed that liberal societies have to be intolerant when people impede the workings of the marketplace of ideas. Not only is SJF idea supremacy not justified by Popper’s Paradox, it is exactly what Popper was warning about.

Criticism attacks ideas, cancel culture punishes people. Criticism enriches discussion, cancel culture shuts down discussion. Criticism helps lift up the best ideas, cancel culture protects the ideas of the culturally powerful. Criticism is a staple of liberalism, cancel culture is the epitome of illiberalism.

To be a good liberal means to criticize, not cancel. But it also means that you stand up for liberalism—when you see cancel culture happening, you try to stop it. This is what Popper’s Paradox calls for.

The person trying to stop the canceling seems hypocritical.

A healthy marketplace of ideas (or research institution) has two basic rules: 1) all ideas are free to be expressed, and 2) all ideas may be criticized. To make it to the biggest stages, ideas have to be persuasive enough win people over and sound enough to survive a gauntlet of criticism.

Modern diversity trainings are mostly SJF trainings and violate the principle of secularism

The trainings we’ve looked at fall squarely in the inappropriate category, violating the principle of secularism. A company can and should demand that employees are not racist at work. But whether employees reject racism for SJF reasons, for liberal reasons, or for any other reasons is not a company matter.

The problem in all these cases is not the inclusion of SJF ideas in a student’s education—it’s the teaching of those ideas as if they’re Bible verses in a religious school, not to be challenged or questioned.

swapping out teacher training with ideological training is not basic social progress. Infusing schooling for children as young as four with politics, using one and only one political lens, is not basic social progress. Indoctrinating students, instead of teaching them critical thinking skills, is not basic social progress. Imposing severe penalties on teachers, parents, and students who stray from the orthodoxy is not basic social progress.

by 2020, silence on sacred SJF topics was no longer permissible in many arenas. To be considered a non-violent, non-reprehensible person, at least within progressive circles, you had to outwardly preach the SJF gospel.

No neutrality allowed is a trademark of every low-rung movement with way too much power.

When a movement like SJF is allowed to do things the Power Games way, it cripples the society’s ability to make knowledge.

In normal conditions, cheap straw-man tricks like these don’t work. But when the Speech Curve is distorted, we have a hard time getting on the same page about basic notions of what’s true or false or right or wrong.

When the big brain isn’t working correctly, zealotry can look like righteousness. Nuance can look like bigotry. Free speech can look like violence, and violence can look like free speech. Fairness can look like discrimination, and discrimination can look like fairness. Anecdotes look like trends and trends look like anecdotes. Bullying can look like self-defense. And censorship can look like civility.

Paralyzed by the past few years of cultural chaos and confusion, America has allowed a political group to hijack the discussion on so many important issues—to spread falsehoods that foster fear, gloom, hopelessness, and anger, and shut down the nuanced, evidence-based discussions that are so critical to ...

We’re not living in the Jim Crow Era. We don’t have a social credit score or a Department of Antiracism. We’re not in the surveillance state of North Korea or the dystopian world of George Orwell’s 1984. But we’re closer to all these worlds than we should be.

Through a combination of Social-Justice-Horse trickery and mafia-like coercion, the SJF golem has managed to hijack institutions from within and transform them into instruments of SJF activism.

my problem with Social Justice Fundamentalism isn’t the ideology itself. I strongly disagree with most aspects of SJF, but there are hundreds of ideologies floating around today’s world that I don’t like. My problem is with SJF’s tactics—the fact that it’s an expansionist golem that attempts to spread itself not through persuasion but through bullying, smear campaigns, loyalty oaths, guilt by association, and other coercive measures.

This is what we have to remember when we read about some high-profile person getting canceled for defying SJF. No political group in a liberal society should have the power to destroy a person’s livelihood or reputation at will. When a group does have that power, it reveals a big crack in the society’s liberal armor. Once that crack becomes apparent, it will be exploited again and again, to increasing degrees, like a spear pushing deeper and deeper into the society’s vital organs.

Social Justice Fundamentalism evolved for decades within academia to become resistant to the particular immune defenses of the progressive environment. SJF’s use of straw men and smearing and trojan horses was, with time, precisely tailored to exploit progressive vulnerabilities. By the time the movement exploded out of college campuses into the world, SJF had perfected the art of taking over a progressive institution.

When it comes to the state of our politics, negative sentiment like grievance and outrage are shorthand for righteousness in SJF, while positive sentiments like optimism and gratitude are taken as a sign of false consciousness, callous privilege, or both. When positivity is shamed out of the conversation, the air ends up filled with gloom, resentment, and nihilism—not sentiments that energize people to fix problems.

As SJF concept creep has continually expanded the definitions of critically important terms like “racism,” “misogyny,” and “violence,” it has diminished the impact of those words and cheapened their meaning. When a movement continually cries wolf, it weakens our defenses against actual wolves.

Being white is surely a source of privilege in today’s American society but learning about privilege only through the lens of intersectionality leaves would-be progressives with a blind spot toward America’s white working class that, on most other metrics, qualifies as one of the country’s “little guys.”

When “diversity” is only thought about from a one-dimensional perspective, the distinction between the wealthy and poor person of color goes unnoticed.

In any society, it is the little guy who relies most on free speech. But SJF takes the opposite stance, framing free speech as a tool of the powerful and something marginalized groups need protection from.

Elitism is a social club with very specific codes and rules, and SJF sure seems like the current set of code words and code views to signify membership. Which is, of course, the very opposite of what progressivism is supposed to be about.

From every angle, SJF is a complete and utter departure from open-minded progressivism. It is highly authoritarian, laying down rules about how to speak, how to think, how to teach, how to hire. It doles out severe penalties for minor infractions. It’s the opposite of diverse and inclusive, enforcing strict conformity. It’s vindictive and promotes medieval-style public shaming campaigns. It assumes the worst about people’s intentions.