Throughout life, everyone encounters irrationality.
Irrationality bothers me a lot, but I think that I have an unhealthy fixation on it. Other people are able to let it go—and turn to something else—when someone is being irrational, whereas I tend to fixate on it in an unhealthy manner.
When someone is being irrational, the healthy response is to try your best to patiently explain to them why you think that the pillars of evidence and logic on which their arguments rest are not convincing to you. And then the healthy response is to turn to other things when it seems like no progress is foreseeable.
When do you know that it’s time to turn to something else? What if they’re a family member? What if they’re a friend? These are interesting questions.
I’m always uncomfortable turning to something else. I always want engagement to occur. I can’t speak to my own psychology, but maybe it’s just the sense of injustice that I’ve raised what I feel is a strong objection to something—a piece of evidence or a point of logic—and instead of that being engaged with the whole engagement is just abandoned. It’s like a defense lawyer or a prosecutor who prepares their entire case with slides and witnesses and everything, and then the judge says, “Let’s drop it. Let’s forget the whole thing.”
The courtroom analogy is an extreme one, and the fact that I go to that analogy indicates how fixated I get on the issues of justice and proper engagement. As a young child, I got extremely upset when another child stole my toy and got his parents to claim the toy as his—I showed up with a package from my home to prove that the toy was mine, but it was too late because the other kid’s parents had backed him up and the other kid had taken the toy home. I went absolutely ballistic at the outrage of the situation. I’m not sure whether my current attitudes about justice and engagement have anything to do with how ballistic I went as a child regarding the evidence that I had that proved that the toy was mine, but who knows.
Why does irrationality bother people (at least some people, like myself) so much? What evolutionary sense does it makes that people should be so bothered by irrationality when it’s not hurting you? Why has evolution wired us to care about others’ rationality so much? It makes good evolutionary sense that someone would be bothered if someone stole their food or something, but I personally would be more angry if someone said that they didn’t believe in evolution than if they stole some money from me. At least I feel like I get more bothered by irrationality than by things that would seem to make more evolutionary sense to be angry about.
One possible solution to irrationality is to ask the irrational person to go to print with their ideas and arguments. This will expose their views to the “oxygen” of 1000s of people around the world critiquing, challenging, and fact-checking their ideas. This “oxygen” is a beautiful thing because it makes the whole thing no longer personal. Instead of you and me having some heated discussion that gets so emotional—why does it get so personal? isn’t that weird?—you can completely de-personalize the situation by having 1000s of people weighing in from around the world. To take the evolution example, it’s no longer me saying that they’re wrong about evolution—it’s now various evolutionary biologists around the world who they’re having a discussion with and who they’re engaging with and whose evidence/arguments they’re interacting with.
Engagement is the “oxygen” that calms down my emotions about irrationality. Suppose some Christian told me that they don’t believe in evolution. That’s fine. That’s not what bothers me. They can believe whatever they want. But what would make me feel infinitely less bugged by their conclusion is if they could show me that they’ve at least somewhat engaged with the challenges to their views.
I guess that what I want from people is evidence that they have some hypothetical commitment to truth, logic, rationality, and engagement. Regarding engagement, I’d like to see email receipts from an engagement they had with an expert who disagrees with them—and I’d also like to see a hyperlink to where they posted their ideas in a non-friendly online forum and engaged with knowledgeable challengers.
My bar for “engagement” is extremely low—to me, it just means that you moved your eyeballs over some paragraphs that presented challenges to your views. And that you typed up responses (to those paragraphs) that indicate that you read those paragraphs.
I don’t care that much what conclusions people come to. But I want to know that they agree that conclusions should be supported by pillars of evidence and logic, that these pillars are subject to question, and that engagement is a healthy thing.
I recently asked some people I know whether they would commit to picking one of their views and showing me some evidence of engagement (see the bold text above). I’m interested to see if they’ll be interested. I told them that I would do the same with one of my views, so it’s a two-way street. And I told them that we can do this any time over the next year, whenever it’s convenient. I’m excited to see how this experiment turns out.
I’ll finish with this letter that I sent to someone:
Is it crucially important for political exchanges between two people who disagree on something to be thorough/detailed?
Suppose that an exchange is thorough/detailed. In that case, both sides will feel that they’re being heard, that their points are being acknowledged, that nobody is dodging any points, and that everything is being engaged with. You might disagree with what the other person says, sure, but you will have the following feeling X after the exchange: “Wow. They engaged with my points. I’m impressed. They didn’t just stick their fingers in their ears and scream. They took the time to engage. And they didn’t dodge anything or evade anything or skip anything. And even if I didn’t agree with their arguments, I could still see the foundation/premises/logic of what they were arguing. This was a good political exchange, even though we didn’t see eye to eye. I could see where they were coming from, they could see where I was coming from, and nobody’s points were getting ignored/dodged/evaded.”
An exchange that produces X will not generate emotion/hostility/frustration.
The reason why there’s a lot of emotion and hostility and frustration in political exchanges is that X-producing exchanges are not occurring.
Pretty deep, actually, not so quick. Worthwhile.
My immediate reaction is that one of the functions of our brain is to make sense, coherent meaning, out of experience. Over time we build an internal scaffold of ideas and beliefs grounded upon the myriad experiences we've lived. Part of the meaning we crave is an affirmative answer to the question "Is it safe?" Of course it is not safe when the world around us values an immediate emotional bond over truth. So of course, that trivial childhood experience about a toy carries great significance.
I think your proposal is a good one, and hard for me to implement. For example, I intentionally stopped checking in with Fox News about 9 months ago. I have to acknowledge that I get a lot of comfort (ie. security) from the silo I inhabit.