On intellectual friction and sharing our thoughts in public.
On this site’s About page I wrote a bit about the journey of seeking answers to the core questions: Where are we at? Where should we be going? How do we get there?
This journey is very personal. Reality is complex, and we as individuals cannot hope to experience more than a small fraction of it. Therefore, we have a very limited perspective and should expect to be plainly wrong some of the time, no matter how hard we try to get things right.
Even when we are right, compressing complex thoughts into words is a reductive process, and we rely on the reader’s compatible interpretation for ideas to come across properly. This process is very prone to error.
Even when right and communicating well, we may provoke emotional resistance. We tend to shape our worldview in a way that favors emotional comfort. Some of us seem to be more susceptible to this than others, but we all are to some extent. If you point out a truth that conflicts with a given comfy worldview, this can trigger intense negative emotional responses and lead some people to dismiss dialogue and reason completely. But these painful truths can point to important failures of a given reality model, so confronting them may be vital for that person.
So in summary: we may leave a bad impression because we are wrong, because we communicated poorly, or even because we are right about something that challenges a deeply held worldview. If we are blessed enough to correctly address a collective misunderstanding, we should expect considerable hostility in response.
With this in mind, exposing our journey to random people on the internet may feel unwise. But since you are reading these words, you can guess that I think there are good reasons to share anyway.
Giving back
I owe more to people sharing their thoughts and knowledge on the internet than I can put into words.
Those who were trying to educate others and have discussions in good faith come to mind first. But many times, reading or hearing something makes me realize pretty fast that it is partially or completely wrong, and that realization can be a valuable conclusion in itself.
A way to put this into clearer terms is that I greatly value having access to other people’s knowledge and the friction between their views and my own.
At the same time, I have never shared much publicly about what’s on my mind. I’ve been contributing to free and open-source software (FOSS) for a considerable time, but besides that, my public online interactions have been close to zero.
I don’t consider myself an extrovert, and writing to random people without the constraints of time and space doesn’t come naturally to me. I always rationalized my abstention with arguments such as “I cannot afford the distraction right now”, but over time this imbalance started to disturb me more and more. In short, I believe that if I value tapping into our collective intelligence, I should help sustain it by contributing when I can.
I’m not saying that we should all be joining all discussions and having opinions about everything. We must recognize our ignorance. We should probably just say “I don’t know. I haven’t looked into it” most of the time. But when we are convinced that important evidence or reasoning is missing from public discourse, we can potentially help immensely by pointing out what we are collectively missing.
Raising the stakes
It is easy to be sloppy when I’m writing to myself. I don’t need to pay much attention to the words or to alternative interpretations, since I know what I mean.
When we write to others, especially to people that we don’t know, we need to try to express our point clearly enough for it to make sense to someone that has a model of reality different from ours. And there are potential consequences emerging from the dialogue. The stakes are higher.
So we should be careful to separate opinions and hypotheses from facts. We should make room for nuance, ensure that our degree of confidence in what we’re saying is justified, and use a tone compatible with said confidence. In other words, we need to think harder.
So, when I’m talking to people that I don’t know, I tend to approach the topic with a more careful, empathetic, and humble perspective, and this improves the quality of my thinking.
Getting feedback
I expect to get some things wrong, communicate some things poorly, and get some things right. I can only aim for a net positive and use feedback from others, alongside my own reasoning, to tell these situations apart over time.
It seems obvious enough that how other people react to our ideas can help us refine our own models of reality. Knowing how to handle feedback in general and distinguish signal from noise seems to be the tricky part.
People willing to discuss in good faith can point out gaps in our reasoning or provide additional arguments and facts that strengthen or stress-test it. This is extremely valuable.
Even people reacting emotionally in unreasonable ways or with bad intentions can convey valuable information. Keeping this in mind seems to be a big challenge, though.
Resonating with just some people is a feature, not a bug
When I meet someone in physical space, I normally don’t get the opportunity to go deep into a complex topic that may conflict with that person’s beliefs or my own. When I do get the opportunity, I love it, but conversations at parties and dinners tend to revolve around a topic that everyone in the group feels comfortable talking about, steering clear of the hard questions.
I get to have deep conversations with my wife, other close family members, and a few close friends that I’m very lucky to have. But I feel some reluctance to write to strangers about complicated topics.
This reluctance makes a lot of sense if we think about the social environments in which humans evolved, where social cohesion could be a matter of life and death. So it is not surprising that we have an instinct to be cordial towards others we don’t know well, and this cordiality normally implies avoiding conflicts when possible, which kind of implies avoiding interesting discussions unless all parties seem open to it.
The dynamics of cyberspace changed the social circumstances radically. The challenge is not to “find people” on the web, but to find the right people. People that share some of our values and objectives, or maybe that just value our particular perspective. People that we resonate with to some degree, can exchange value with, and hopefully can grow together with.
I think we find people that are intellectually compatible with us through this process of intellectual friction: exposing our thoughts and ideas, expecting people we resonate with to come closer and others to move away, which is totally fine.
By “come closer”, I don’t mean “become friends”, although that would be a best-case scenario. I mean “keeping that person around” via some communication channel, even if one-sided.
How to share?
I think social media platforms can be great for seeing what’s going on right now and discovering resources and people. Interacting with what others are saying and spreading what we find valuable is important, and I’ll be putting time into that.
But these platforms try to maximize engagement, and we need to keep this in mind. They tend to be distracting and not the ideal settings for getting into the weeds of a complex topic, at least for me.
I believe that the web is supposed to be as open as possible, and that having our little corner in it without relying on managed platforms or opaque algorithms is great. I also really like the simplicity and “personal feel” of RSS feeds, as well as having more control over the content I consume. I think this control is getting more important as the world gets noisier. That’s why I want to use this site as my “base”.
So this is what I’ll be aiming for: interacting more in public online spaces and using this site to dive deeper into some topics.