Ideological moves that should be lower status
Light epistemic bullying
These are things people do with their beliefs about the world, either in their thinking or communication, that are silly, and that we as a culture should socially punish more than we do. These are all ways of behaving like one of a few things are true:
“I am not obligated to behave like an adult, but other people are.”
“There are secret magical reasons why I am better than everyone else.”
“I secretly enjoy having problems and want to push that on other people.”
“I am a coward about my beliefs.”
This isn’t a list of all the ways we think badly, just the ways we think badly that aren’t receiving enough scorn. I’m lightly-to-moderately roasting each.
Getting negatively polarized
It’s become too common to hear people talk with pride about how they got negatively polarized into believing something.
“The left went crazy and drove me to the far right!”
“I used to be a normal liberal but other liberals were so annoying that I’m a communist now!”
This is mental weakness.
It's embarrassing to let people negatively polarize you. You're an adult. Stop it. Negative polarization means your brain got hacked by individual annoying strangers. That’s ridiculous.
When I hear someone say "I once met a very annoying person who believed X and now I hate X as a result" my only thought is that the world has 8 billion individuals in it, each one an infinite story we can just barely begin to understand in our brief time here. This person I’m talking to has let that precious truth slip from their field of vision.
Getting negatively polarized is often a sign that the person enjoys having problems. They like the idea of having someone annoying who they’re responding to directly. It feels like they’re deriving some sublimated joy from the people who annoyed them. The annoying person has given them an exciting narrative where they get to enjoy being the victim. It should be low-status to enjoy having problems like this.
Being part of a preference cascade
A preference cascade is when people who hold an unpopular view realize they’re not the only ones who do, and feel more comfortable expressing their opinions publicly. A lot of people framed Trump’s victory as the cause of some preference cascades, where people got to announce that they had always been secretly more conservative than they let on. “The vibe has shifted” etc.
It should be low-status to pretend to believe things you don’t in the first place.
It’s good to change your mind when new facts arise or you learn more. It’s understandable that in extreme cases you might feel social pressure to not express what you actually believe about something. Outside of those cases, being a part of a preference cascade is somewhat embarrassing. It shows that you were just going along with what was understood as cool without sticking up for unpopular beliefs.
I’ve always been very pro very open immigration. This has recently become an unpopular opinion in America.
For a brief period from 2018-2021 it felt like the open immigration crew was ascendent. That was fun. It was easy to identify with the movement. Now when I mention I support much more open immigration, people who don’t know me well will sometimes react as if I haven’t “Read the room.” Open immigration isn’t a winning idea anymore. I ignore that and power through. I could be a coward and go along with the current vibe and basically lie about what I believe, or I could just say what I actually think. When the next preference cascade comes around on immigration, I won’t be a part of it.
Not deferring to clear visible expert communities
It is hard to describe how sad and skeevy it makes you look to be unwilling to defer to a clear expert consensus. Life is hard. The adult world is hard. One thing that makes it hard is that there are a lot of ways you can feel low-status throughout the day. Deciding to hack your way out of that sense of low-status by pretending to be secretly smarter than all experts who have looked into a topic is a sad desperate lurch for attention and respect. When I hear someone say “I’ve looked into the science and we’re not being told the full story about vaccines” I have the same internal reaction as if someone said “I’ve discovered fairies in my backyard. Now everyone needs to love and respect me.” It’s a very obviously weird assertion of your sense of self-importance via an insane reach. “Look! A clear way I could be important! I’ve discovered a Hidden Secret about the world! Everyone else is mindless and blind. Not like me. I’m special. Notice me.”
An expert is someone who is basically another version of you, except they’ve spent their whole life focused on understanding one specific topic. An expert consensus emerges when thousands of versions of you, who all have reasons to undermine and disagree with each other if they think the others are wrong, have arrived on a solid foundation which they assume they can’t fruitfully question. Unless you have an unbelievably solid reason to go against the consensus of a community of experts on a topic they deeply understand, going against them is basically pretending that if you had much more time (and thousands of clones of yourself) to look into a topic, you would somehow do a worse job of figuring out the truth. Seems fake.
A key part of being an adult is learning to give and receive complex forms of respect, care, and love, even when your life is hard. If someone makes these crazy lurches in a clear bid for status, what it tells me is that they don’t feel ready to be an adult.
Implying that you could detect the deep significance of events, or that there was a way to detect that at all, without explaining the mechanism by which you did that, and implying that you’re just deeply in tune with the universe’s ultimate plan for things
I have a memory of the months after 9/11. When people were talking about it, some would say “I remember years ago going up to the restaurant at the top of the towers, and just feeling at the time like something… something bad would happen… something was off.” Ridiculous.
Once you start to look for it, this happens all the time in otherwise smart circles. It’s just masked in fancier language. “Looking back, you could have drawn a straight line from the invasion of Iraq to the election of Donald Trump” Please explain how. What was the exact chain of causality you detected that was so obvious? How did you change or update your behavior or what you talked about in response? What was obvious that we should have picked up on? Most of the time what people mean by this is “I got bad vibes from something bad. Later… something else bad happened. I want to imply that I could detect the underlying bad vibes governing the world. They’re basically demons we should have been more careful to exorcise.”
There are times when I’ve pressed people on these statements and they’ve given great convincing answers to how and why they knew what they did and how they responded to that knowledge, but if you don’t have that ready to go, maybe don’t imply that you’re in tune with the secret forces governing the world if you can’t even name them.
Implying that the whole world is designed to be a challenge to you specifically
A common symptom of spending too much time online is starting to think that all the complex ways people live and act and think together actually mainly exist to be challenges to you specifically. I sometimes meet people who will find out that I’m a capitalist or vegan or into effective altruism, and instead of talking with me directly about the idea, they’ll talk as if my entire involvement with the idea has been a complex plan to trick them. This happens most often with veganism. If I offhandedly mention I’m vegan, I’ll sometimes get someone who starts talking as if the whole reason I’m vegan is to trick them specifically into going vegan as well. My saying “I’m vegan” sounds identical to them as saying “I’ve been waiting my whole life to trick you specifically into being vegan.” They respond as if my tricks won’t work on them and go into long rants and counter-arguments before I’m able to make it clear that I’m not trying to have a debate. When this happens, it’s hard not to think that they’re just failing to model me and other vegans as full humans living our lives and responding to what we think are realities in the world, who happen to drastically disagree with them. It feels more like they see me as a 2D side character in their own story. It’s often clear when you meet someone who sees everyone who disagrees with them as basically NPCs in a world centered entirely around their own narrative of themselves, who they need to own and destroy rather than engage with as fellow adults with deep value disagreements. This is another way people fail to fully grow up. Understanding that you’re one of many fallible adults in the world and that everyone has a complex inner life takes time and work to fully internalize.
Speaking in slogans
Every ideology has slogans. People like saying them for the sense of belonging. If you’re having a serious conversation, you should clearly signal that you can step out of that mode and only use slogans if you think they’ll communicate a point especially effectively. Sometimes people don’t do this, and when I try to respond to the slogan, they’ll find a way to wrangle a completely unrelated slogan into the conversation. It’s like the conversation is a river they need to cross and each slogan is the next stone they need to jump to. Their actual job is to make sure I hear all the slogans. If I’m not convinced after I hear them all, I’m an enemy or just fundamentally asleep to the world. This makes me want to pause, wave my hand in a friendly welcoming way, and say “Step out of the game. Just be present with me. Let’s just talk. Be not afraid.”
Contra the preference cascade point: I think biting your tongue on particularly spicy issues is both very understandable and often socially savvy (weirdness points and all, being a good hang), and if you stigmatize jumping on the preference cascade bandwagon, you might just lock in the false preference.
A better operationalization IMO would be dropping the stick in favor of carrots when people express presently-unpopular opinions (thoughtfully and in good faith). The proper social policy solution, for this issue at least, is toasting-not-roasting (which is also more pleasant to be a part of!)
It's always nice to a bit of Andy's sharpness and humour in my feed, thank you for writing this <3
The one of these I most encounter in social situations is "Implying that the whole world is designed to be a challenge to you specifically." In the way I see it show up, I attribute it more to insecurity rather than too much time online (not mutually exclusive ofc).
I see this play out in social settings like person A says "I play piano" or "I speak Russian" and person B is overly impressed and goes on to give long explanations about why they never learned a musical instrument or another language and how impressed they are by person A and how obviously inferior they are. Person A looks super uncomfortable and attempts some sort of comforting of person B, and the conversation eventually fizzles out.
My model of what's going on for person B in that situation is that the insecurity they're feeling inside is so strong that it's taking all their bandwidth, forcing an external response. None of their bandwith is available for considering how person A feels or what an interesting question or connective bit of conversation they might offer to the group. Interested if you would read this in the same way? Very possible that I am just projecting based on times I have been Person B in the past.