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Keep Your Identity Small
February 2009
I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such
uniquely useless discussions.
As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum
degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this
happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or
other topics people talk about on forums?
What's different about religion is that people don't feel they
need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about
it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can
have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as
one about religion, because people feel they have to be over
some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But
on religion everyone's an expert.
Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too.
Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold
of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong
convictions.
Do religion and politics have something in common that
explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that
they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so
there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one
can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and
sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.
But this isn't true. There are certainly some political
questions that have definite answers, like how much a new
government policy will cost. But the more precise political
questions suffer the same fate as the vaguer ones.
I think what religion and politics have in common is that they
become part of people's identity, and people can never have a
fruitful argument about something that's part of their
identity. By definition they're partisan.
Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people,
not the topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that
included citizens of one or more of the countries involved
would probably degenerate into a political argument. But a
discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze
Age probably wouldn't. No one would know what side to be on.
So it's not politics that's the source of the trouble, but
identity. When people say a discussion has degenerated into a
religious war, what they really mean is that it has started to
be driven mostly by people's identities. [1]
Because the point at which this happens depends on the people
rather than the topic, it's a mistake to conclude that because
a question tends to provoke religious wars, it must have no
answer. For example, the question of the relative merits of
programming languages often degenerates into a religious war,
because so many programmers identify as X programmers or Y
programmers. This sometimes leads people to conclude the
question must be unanswerable--that all languages are equally
good. Obviously that's false: anything else people make can be
well or badly designed; why should this be uniquely impossible
for programming languages? And indeed, you can have a fruitful
discussion about the relative merits of programming languages,
so long as you exclude people who respond from identity.
More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a
topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the
participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields
is that they engage so many people's identities. But you could
in principle have a useful conversation about them with some
people. And there are other topics that might seem harmless,
like the relative merits of Ford and Chevy pickup trucks, that
you couldn't safely talk about with others.
The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is
that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to
avoid, but how to have better ideas. If people can't think
clearly about anything that has become part of their identity,
then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as
few things into your identity as possible. [2]
Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But
there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but
tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more
labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
Notes
[1] When that happens, it tends to happen fast, like a core
going critical. The threshold for participating goes down to
zero, which brings in more people. And they tend to say
incendiary things, which draw more and angrier
counterarguments.
[2] There may be some things it's a net win to include in your
identity. For example, being a scientist. But arguably that is
more of a placeholder than an actual label--like putting NMI on
a form that asks for your middle initial--because it doesn't
commit you to believing anything in particular. A scientist
isn't committed to believing in natural selection in the same
way a biblical literalist is committed to rejecting it. All
he's committed to is following the evidence wherever it leads.
Considering yourself a scientist is equivalent to putting a
sign in a cupboard saying "this cupboard must be kept empty."
Yes, strictly speaking, you're putting something in the
cupboard, but not in the ordinary sense.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, and
Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
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