Just Because They’re Annoying Doesn’t Mean They’re Wrong

Woke, Redpilled, Vegan, Rationalist, Socialist, Communist, Reactionary, Neoliberal, Conservative, Progressive, Effective Altruist, Libertarian, Anarchist, Centrist, Stoic, Accelerationist, Nihilist.

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There was a girl in my friend group in college who was very annoying. She didn’t understand social cues, was relatively neurotic, and talked shit to anyone who were even slightly different politically than her, never assuming anything but ill intent. But worst of all, she was vegan — An extremely stereotypically butthurt vegan, like a caricature you’d see on Twitter. She would talk about how I enjoyed murdering babies out of the blue. She commented on a post I made about a Doritos and chicken taco saying I “loved animal rape”.

Well, I’m the type of person who went to church for a year with some of my diehard Christian friends despite being agnostic at the time to try to understand how Christians think. I think the vast majority of people are trying to do good in the world. Given these differences, you can imagine how this vegan girl and I got along. For a long time, she was the only vegan I knew.

…

Only one religion can be correct (or lack thereof). The biggest religion in the world is Christianity, with 29% of the world population. So, at minimum, at least 71% of the entire world is completely wrong about their most fundamental belief. In politics, there are many different factions. Progressives, liberals, conservatives, socialists, communists, alt-right, and more. If these are all competing ideas of government, and one is best, most of these factions are completely wrong. How can it be that so many banners that people rally behind must be incorrect? The answer is that correctness isn’t what’s being optimized for here…

Yesterday I put out a rebuttal to a post titled “Why I’m Not A Rationalist”. In it, I talked about how the post was lacking in something important: arguments. It pointed at a stereotypical rationalist and laughed, and it only made implicit arguments that the things rationalists believe are ridiculous. I now want to zoom out and consider the more general question: what are the implications of a belief becoming a tribe? And I want to also consider how this, indeed, ends up muddying the truth.

Look, humans are tribal creatures. We care about status and being seen as smart, hot, put together, empathetic or whatever else. We sometimes care about this social acceptance over logical consideration of the beliefs we hold. This makes sense! For most of humanity’s existence, we knew a very small number of people, and so whatever beliefs we had were inherited from a small pool. There wasn’t much debate about whether the Sky God or the Star God ruled the heavens; you just accepted whatever you were told, and you certainly didn’t have a reason to disagree and start a big thing of it.

You may assume that the age of the internet may allow us to clear up these tribal misunderstandings, deferring to only the greatest arguments, but it is not so. Nowadays, actually, everyone is pressured to have an opinion on everything. Just because I am not a political scientist does not mean I’m spared from needing to have an opinion on the Middle East in casual conversation. So it’s only natural that we decide to choose the beliefs of people we trust who are smart, compassionate, and good. This isn’t a bad thing! I’d argue that deferring to the beliefs of people we trust on issues we don’t know is great practice! The only issue, of course, is that everybody thinks their group is the smart and correct one, so for any random individual, not looking at the arguments can be fatal. The more people who aren’t experts who influence the discourse, the more the water is muddied.

This isn’t some weak plea for centrism, or always giving both sides a chance. On many issues, one side is correct, and obviously so. But the internet has provided access to everyone in the world’s deepest opinions. And because people need to have opinions on everything from politics to celebrities, and they certainly don’t have time to dive into the arguments, suddenly every single argument turns into “who can portray their enemies as the Soyjak and themselves as the Chad.”

Resist! Don’t let this comic I made make you associate truth seeking with the soyjack! You’re playing directly into the hands of the positioning of your beliefs in a tribal context mattering more than actual arguments! That actually makes you the soyjak, I swear! Quick, view this antidote!

Alright, you’re back. Good to have you.

Anyway, what are we doing here? Progressive politics values siding with those who need the most help in society, so suddenly everything is a race to position yourself as the most oppressed group, to ridiculous extremes. Rationalists value being smart, so indeed, some try to use as big of words as possible to try to seem smarter than the rest. The Republican anti-woke that

Richard Hanania

talks about here supports the policies that are most likely to piss off those they hate, seemingly without regard for how good they are for themselves. Any whining about how they’re making lives worse is met with glee, for that’s the reaction they were gunning for the whole time. Different banners to rally behind, same incentive: status first, arguments later.

Identification with a group becomes a ritual. In an ideal world, you’d identify with “rationalist” or “communist” or “Rick and Morty fan” or “Metalhead” based on how much you agreed with the beliefs of that group. But through this curation of a community, saying you’re a communist represents a lot more than just your beliefs in the optimal form of government, and identifying as a Rick and Morty fan carries a lot more baggage than just liking a random show. Everything you identify as points towards the groups, not the facts. So people say they “watch Rick and Morty, but wouldn’t consider themselves a fan” even if this is a lie.

This doesn’t just ruin groups, it also taints individual points. You can support trans people vehemently and still believe that trans women shouldn’t be in women’s sports. But if the issue then becomes a positioning game where the only people arguing for your point are transphobes, then suddenly you really can’t, because the belief has suddenly become the group. And if the transphobes notice this is their best issue, amplify it to all hell, and use their supposed reasonableness from this point to then take away more rights from trans people, well, then you’re really, really screwed. I could talk about how this leads to echo chambers here, but I think it’s pretty obvious.

There are actually multiple layers to this status game. “Rationalist” is a word that could be used in a sentence to just mean “I use rationality to find my points”. But to identify as a rationalist is to align yourself mostly with utilitarianism, the potential of AI, and good faith arguments. Those are the values I wish defined identifying as a rationalist. Then there’s a third layer: there’s the stereotype of what an average person in the group is like, such as the polyamorous computer nerd. This is the step that I wish we would carve out of our society, where all the bad faith and positioning games on the internet lie. Characteristics of the group, what it means to be a member, eventually swarm and override the beliefs in our social, status-seeking brains.

This carving out, of course, is an impossible ask. And honestly, it’s not a bad thing that similar people end up joining similar groups. The computer nerds deserve to find each other and become friends, just as the patriotic gun lovers deserve to find each other and talk about different kinds of weapons. But if their group identity then rallies behind rationality and conservatism respectively, consider just how divorced this process is from the truth of the banner they rally behind. There’s distance between the substance of what they believe every step of the way.

I have a lot of IRL friends, and the most put together people I know in my whole life, besides myself (I’m not very humble), are in fact the aforementioned diehard Christians! They’re consistently happier, fulfilled, and more agentic than my other friends who are more in line with my politics and beliefs. If I wanted to position myself to my friends as the most put together I could be, then I would identify with Christianity.

But I don’t think Christianity is true! I want to discern the truth for myself as best I can, as untainted as I can be from the ideas of the people who I think are the coolest. I want to learn, and be correct! If you succumb to this status game, applause replaces argument, and sneering replaces scrutiny.

Truth loses.

…

I’ve been trying to become more of a vegan the past couple months, because I’m now convinced by the arguments of why factory farming is really, really bad. I’ve also become an effective altruist. When I told some of my friends this, they said “isn’t that what Sam Bankman-Fried was?” That’s the hat I’ve thrown my lot into, and I’m alright with that, because I believe in the substance of the cause.

As for that vegan friend, I texted her after a few years to tell her I was trying to become vegan by first starting to eat less chicken. Her reply: I suck because I’m starting with chickens over cows, and cows contribute “astronomically” to global warming. Apparently, she’s still annoying. But I’m not embarrassed to share the label. Veganism’s substance is one I believe in, and I’m going to try my best to proudly stand under the banner with the best arguments.

Uh, I know the top said the best way to support me is to like the post, and that’s definitely true, so if you like this post because you enjoyed, I’d really appreciate it. Buut here’s a subscribe button I’m just gonna put here. Just for no reason. Alright, genuinely though, thank you for all the support.