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

by Tim Urban

There are instances when a thinker has the time and the means to collect information and evidence directly—with their own primary observations, or by conducting their own studies. But most of the info we use to inform ourselves is indirect knowledge: knowledge accumulated by others that we import into our minds and adopt as our own.

That’s why perhaps the most important skill of a skilled thinker is knowing when to trust.

Everyone in politics spends time in the middle section of the diagram, where your team’s behavior aligns with your principles—say, defending the free speech of someone you agree with—so you don’t learn anything about someone when they’re here. The litmus test comes when the middle section isn’t an option—when your team and your principles are in conflict.

As for why the Republican decline has been more pronounced, one reason might be that the Republican base is more homogeneous—ethnically, religiously, ideologically.52 To win elections, Democrats have needed to appeal to a more varied demographic, so they couldn’t afford to be as rigidly ideological, preaching a singular story like the Republicans.

Throughout the 2010s, Republicans only needed to win about 45% of total votes for Congress to win the House majority, compared to the Democrats needing to win more than 55% of voters to be the majority party.

SJF’s worldview sees society not as a collection of complex individuals but as a zero-sum struggle of monolithic groups fighting for power. Its core ideas tend to be rigid and unfalsifiable, more dogma than science. Its intellectual immune system enforces conformity and filters for confirmation over truth. It encourages moral hypocrisy and even bigotry in its adherents.

Social justice fundamentalism

A phenomenon that psychologists call “pluralistic ignorance” begins to set in: when no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes.

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.

When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues.

The unproductive discussions always felt the same at the time: I’m trying to reason with someone, but they’re a hopeless low-rung thinker. It’s like arguing with a brick wall. But this is how unproductive discussions always feel. Even when you’re the brick wall.

We all spend time in Unconvinceable Land as Attorneys, sometimes even as Zealots. We all identify a little too much with certain ideas. We’re all unknowingly standing on Child’s Hill with at least a few topics, where our level of conviction far exceeds our level of knowledge. When it comes to the beliefs we hold most sacred, we’re all prone to confirmation bias. In one way or another, we’re all gullible, all in denial, all delusional Disney protagonists. We all have out-groups and we all dehumanize the people in them. We’re all tribal. We’re all hypocrites. We’re all wrong. Because we’re all human.

If you can’t steel man your opponent’s beliefs, you don’t yet know whether you disagree with them or not.