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