Your Facts Don’t Make a Difference

A better world comes from understanding, not from being right or silencing others

Repetitive Preface (skip)

Until the day he died, Paul Ehrlich was convinced he was right. Each of his predictions weren’t just wrong, they were 180 degrees wrong. His apocalyptic misanthropic frenzy, loved by the Left and amplified in the “mainstream” media, called for and led to a variety of brutal, barbarous policies, such as tens of millions of forced sterilizations.

Right until the end, the liberal media fawned over Ehrlich. Even after he died, having been the most wrong human in history, many people (including Vox.com) still defended his savage insanity. Hardly anyone but segments of the right dared call him out while he was alive. (Although Hannah Ritchie did in her first book, as did some others.)

All of Ehrlich’s highly-educated fans were – and still are – utterly convinced they had the facts on their side.

Each and every one of us is utterly convinced we have the facts on our side. We are, each and every one of us, rationalizing beasts, not rational animals.

We don’t merely have biases – we’re remarkably good at constructing arguments that make our biases feel like careful reasoning. We each fully and passionately believe we are right.

Current Backstory

A number of things recently brought Ehrlich’s followers to mind (the last being the the point of this post):

1. A vegan contacted me with his new campaign: We all have to go vegan or else we have no future on earth; ecological collapse “is a matter of years, not decades.”
   (Isn’t it convenient that what we want just happens to be what is necessary for the very survival of humanity?)

2. Related to Ehrlich: Ten years ago, a number of vegans made very specific and very, very wrong 10-year predictions regarding plant-based and cultivated meat.(1) Those same people are still revered and promoted and showered with money.
   A huge percentage of vegans would rather be wrong than doubt the story of their “ultimate victory and vindication.”

3. AI is better at persuading people than human experts.
   This is in large part because LLMs take people seriously, rather than condescendingly judge them. Many people would rather be “right” and condescend than understand and persuade.

4. More Good Less Harm (4) noted that consequentialist reasoning is vulnerable to motivated reasoning (an understatement). Unconstrained cost-benefit reasoning can rationalize almost anything when assumptions are chosen favorably.
   Or as Hank Green says here “You can philosophical-thought-experiment yourself into freakin’ anything.”
   Or, as someone else put it, we just pull Bayesian priors out of our asses and then act like we’re being totally rational.

5. Freakonomics did an excellent interview with the president of Vanderbilt, defending the idea of institutional neutrality and free speech.

It is the latter point that I’d like to expand on.

Free Speech and Solutions

I’ve spoken ad nauseum (example) against the rich-white-guy tendency to worship free speech and “conversation” as the greatest good. I don’t believe “conversation” is the greatest good. For example, I would not use my blog to have a conversation with Charles Murray or James Damore or Andrew Tate in the name of “open exchange of ideas.”

On the other hand, I would not say that Charles Murray or James Damore (3) should never be allowed to speak or publish.

I understand the argument that people should not be allowed to say false things. E.g., wanting Holocaust deniers to be de-platformed.

But nearly everyone (2) is absolutely sure that what they believe is factual. The Flat Earthers, the anti-vaxxers, the libertarians, the socialists, the climate fanatics, the only-veganism-will-prevent-the-end-of-Humanity, the anti-Semites, the AI-will-kill-us-all doomers – they are all 100% sure they have the facts. They are highly educated and they have the links and they can show you the Truth.

Pragmatism, Not Ideology

Trying to silence people whose “facts” don’t agree with our own simply doesn’t do any good, at least today. There are platforms for everyone; there is literally no belief weird and crazy enough to be rejected by everyone.

It is better to know what is being said and to offer cogent and constructive counter-arguments. If it is unspeakable to allow others to speak, we are actually admitting that our position is not persuasive.

From a practical perspective: demonizing, dehumanizing, and deplatforming the other side simply doesn’t work. If we endorse the idea of silencing dissent, only allowing thoughts like our own to be expressed, we create a bubble, and the most extreme and militant voices come to dominate. This leads, for example, the Left to become so disconnected from the population as a whole that the median voter will re-elect the worst human being in the country.

As Mark Maron put it, “We annoyed the average American into fascism.”

I actually have sympathy for the average American

For example (and have discussed ad nauseum), I can’t stand the exaggerations, lies, and unbelievable cruelty of the climate fanatics. Their literal “let people broil to death” carbon cult is deplorable, philosophically nihilistic, and political suicide.

That is one example; there are many others.

Another: racial politics in the U.S. has often descended into rage and vilification at the explicit expense of solutions.

More than a few voters flipped from Obama-to-Trump after being told they are inherently and irredeemably racist.

Not here to debate your facts…

I’m sure most climate fanatics believe they have the facts, as do the “all white people are racist” team. I’m not here to debate that.

What am I saying is that our personal facts don’t matter.

Winning elections – not going viral or being loved by our comrades – is the key to actually making things better.

We can’t protect the truly vulnerable if we can’t win elections. And we can’t win elections in a bubble. We can’t win elections by shouting down anyone who doesn’t toe the party line. We can’t win elections if we don’t understand what others are thinking.

Not Hypothetical, Not an Academic Exercise: The most unbelievable story of my lifetime

Please consider the most incredible, unexpected, mind-blowing societal advance of my lifetime.

Understandably, everyone tends to believe that the victimhood of their group is the worst. But I don’t think it is unreasonable to think that, in the U.S., in my lifetime, the worst-off humans were non-heterosexuals.

You might be risking life and limb by coming out. A horrific death from AIDS was widely viewed as righteous “punishment” for being gay. Powerful and influential people said that death and destruction from hurricanes were God’s punishment for “acceptance” of homosexuality. Etc.

In 2004, the (then) Worst President Ever was up for re-election. Nixon was a creep and criminal, but in terms of policies and consequences, no one (then) topped W.

Turd Blossom won re-election for that terrible president by putting anti-gay measures on the ballot in swing states. Our child was more than a decade old when being cruelly anti-gay was the path to political success.

I never, ever thought I’d see equal marriage in my lifetime.

A decade after W started his second term, Obergefell made equal marriage the law of the land.

I honestly don’t think young people today realize what a BFD that was. It was unimaginable basically forever. Truly unbelievable to me, still.

This incredible advance did not happen because anti-equality voices were silenced or shamed. It isn’t because academia proclaimed that only pro-gay voices were allowed. It isn’t because pro-equality people vilified others as “evil” or their words were “violence” or they were promoting “genocide.”

Equal marriage came about because more and more people got to know gay people as people. Gay people stopped being the scary “other.” The TV show Will and Grace did far more to advance equality than any moral or intellectual argument.

Progress came from building understanding; acceptance came from constructive positivity.

Politics is the art of the possible. Better is good.

If – if – we want things to be better, there’s a lot to learn from that.

<fin>

Footnotes

(1) Hopefully it is obvious that I made many, many wrong predictions in the past 40 years. I wrote an entire book about it. I’m in favor of the free exchange of ideas in part because I have been so very wrong in the past.

It seems to me that we can only make real progress when we own up to our mistakes, rather than continue to tell our friends and allies what they want to hear. “We’re winning!” can get likes and donations, but these delusions don’t actually help.

(2) Not everyone believes what they say. Some people just want to get a rise out of the other side. The onus is on us to not rise to the bait and not to give the rabble-rousers attention and exposure. However, very few people seem able to resist rage-bait (either on their own side or the other).

(3) OTOH, it seems to me that if you are a rapist and human trafficker, you should be in jail, not speaking at Yale or on podcasts.

(4) From here:

A major problem is that a cost-benefit analysis is only as good as the assumptions used to anchor it, and the more unconstrained those are, the easier it is to go astray and fall into rationalizing what we already believed for other reasons. Holden Karnofsky has argued that EA’s maximization instinct creates constant temptations to rationalize, and that its track record owes more to the good judgment of the specific people involved than to anything in the framework itself. Vitalik Buterin makes a similar point, that act consequentialism suffers from what he calls “low galaxy brain resistance.” If your reasoning can justify any conclusion by constructing a sufficiently compelling calculation, it can take you to epistemically dangerous ground quite easily. One of Vitalik’s specific examples of a lower-stakes but pervasive failure mode is “bad excuses for banning things for personal aesthetic reasons.”