Six Laws of Social Learning
A listicle! Sure to get clicks
We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe.
Dan Williams, channeling Walter Lippmann, writes,
In constructing this inner model throughout our lives, we can never compare it directly against “the facts”. Except for the tiny fraction of the world of which we have first-hand experience, our access to the political universe is entirely mediated by the information we acquire from others—from our cultures, subcultures, and communities, and from the journalists, pundits, politicians, commentators, and so on that share information about that world for us.
…the degree to which our beliefs are not direct reflections of reality but are heavily mediated by vast, complex chains of trust and testimony is highly counter-intuitive. To acknowledge the fragility of that process can easily induce a kind of epistemological vertigo.
My emphasis. We tend to have an asymmetric view: I think for myself. People who disagree with me are dupes of others. But pretty much everyone takes this stance, which means that it can’t be right. The true story is that all of us depend on “complex chains of trust and testimony.”
Who do we tend to trust?
a. People who communicate in a way that we can understand. You cannot learn chemistry from a lecturer speaking in Mandarin, unless you understand that language
b. People with a reputation for knowing what they are talking about.
c. People with whom you feel a bond. You trust someone who appears to care about you. You distrust someone who you believe is willing to mistreat you.
These are not necessarily the people that we should trust. That I discuss in (4)- (6), below.
The motive to seek status competes with the motive to seek truth.
You do not necessarily always seek the truth. Many times, you hold a belief, or at least profess a belief, in order to achieve status.
Consider the classic tale of the emperor with no clothes. The typical citizen praised the emperor’s outfit, because to do otherwise would have lowered the citizen’s status.
Everywhere you look, you can see people doing this. Pundits and aides vouched for President Biden’s cognitive health, until they didn’t. I find it easier to believe that they were motivated by status-seeking than by truth-seeking. Vice-President Vance once condemned Donald Trump. More recently he has heaped praise on him. Again, I find it easier to attribute this to status-seeking than to truth-seeking.
When it is easy to observe status-seeking competing with truth-seeking in other people, then it would be prudent for me to assume that this applies to me, also. I should be aware that I am not strictly a truth-seeker.
Better ideas emerge from a competitive process.
If every single one of us can adopt inferior ideas because of the status-seeking motive, how does society ever learn? The answer is that competition often works.
In a court case, we think that the chance for a fair outcome is better if both sides are able to argue. In politics, we think that it is better for more than one party to have a chance of winning an election. In economics, we think that market competition promotes better business performance and product innovation.
Similarly, when it comes to ideas, our individual weakness can be overcome by a process that allows for competition. That is why free speech is important. It is why intellectual and scientific inquiry should include adversarial argument, not the suppression of dissent in order to enforce consensus.
We should trust people who try to persuade, not to delegitimize.
Persuasion means trying to anticipate the best arguments for a different point of view and to answer them. To be persuasive, you should try to articulate the different point of view in a way that the holder of that view would agree is representative. If you misrepresent the other point of view, that is not persuasive.
There are many tactics to try to delegitimize another point of view. You can attack the person who expresses that point of view. You can caricature the other point of view using a straw man. You can deny the right of someone to express that point of view.
We should trust people who allow for the possibility that they could be wrong.
Often, it is wise to be uncertain. If somebody who states a proposition or prediction and gives a probability that it is correct, that is a sign of wisdom.
Someone should be willing to change their mind, and to give a reason for doing so. “I changed my mind because ___” or “I would change my mind if ____.”
We should trust people who do not dismiss contrary evidence.
If there is an observation that goes against a proposition for which I am arguing, I should be willing to acknowledge that. “Yes, this provides evidence against my view, but I still hold onto my view because ____.”
When someone looks at studies about a topic, they should be as critical of the methods of a study that comes out in their favor as one that comes out against. Instead, people are instinctively inclined to pick apart a contrary study and to accept at face value a favorable study. The best way to use studies is to examine many of them (be especially wary of “this one chart proves ____” as a form of argument). Evaluate the methods and findings of many studies before drawing a conclusion. Often, researching a topic will lead you to find that the studies collectively are inconclusive.
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Re: "We tend to have an asymmetric view: I think for myself. People who disagree with me are dupes of others. But pretty much everyone takes this stance, which means that it can’t be right. The true story is that all of us depend on 'complex chains of trust and testimony.'”
An educated person is more prone than the person in the street to think herself the personification of reason. Precisely because she is more skilled and practiced at argument, she is abler at camouflaging bias or interest or status as truth, even to herself.
And perhaps the person in the street is more likely to be aware that "deciding whom to trust" is a crux of politics.
This is a timely essay for me. I have been bothered a good bit by the formulation of “we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe” but couldn’t put my finger on why till last night. It isn’t the part about the long chains of trust and testimony, but that people don’t really have beliefs over most subjects. That is to say, I don’t think people actually hold beliefs on a variety of subjects the way they hold beliefs about whether their car is still in the driveway or whether it is currently raining; their so called but not real beliefs don’t change their behavior in a way that predicts when their beliefs change.
I think it might be more true to say people believe in particular people and follow what they say to say they believe. An analogy would be that my daughters don’t have a car, but they follow me into the car and thus wind up at the same destination. If I change destinations so do they, often without noticing or caring much, so long as we arrive at the same place.