Heterodox Academy Offers Suggestions on How to Disagree Civilly

Heterodox Academy was founded in 2015 by Jonathan Haidt, Chris Martin, and Nicholas Rosenkranz

in reaction to their observations about the negative impact a lack of ideological diversity has had on the quality of research within their disciplines. What began as a website and a blog in September of 2015 — a venue for social researchers to talk about their work and the challenges facing their disciplines and institutions — soon grew into an international network of peers dedicated to advancing  the values of constructive disagreement and viewpoint diversity as cornerstones of academic and intellectual life.

All members of Heterodox Academy embrace a set of norms and values that they call “The HxA Way.”

“I support open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in research and education.”

HxA offers a tipsheet on how to how to approach moral disagreements in constructive ways. HxA encourages us to "engage in open inquiry and constructive disagreement can use these strategies to build mutual understanding and have better conversations on difficult issues."

I highly recommend visiting this entire article, but in this short article I'm setting out the basic ideas:

  • Lower the perceived state of the disagreement or conflict
  • Don’t sling pejorative labels or assign bad motives
  • Agree upon facts first ("Then talk about what to do about it or how best to address it. Start small and build out.")
  • Lower a disagreement’s visibility ("In public environments, including digital forums, there is much more pressure to conform to one’s group and to virtue signal. It is also far more embarrassing to admit you were wrong to the whole world than to a single person. People are generally much more reasonable in more intimate settings.")
  • Don’t demand too much from the conversation ("In cases of deep disagreement, the initial and primary goal should be simply to clearly understand where the other is coming from and to be well-understood oneself.")
  • Appeal to identity, values, narratives,and frames of reference
  • Speak to people in their own language ("people become much more willing to reconsider or even change their views and to accept controversial facts when presented to them in terms of their own values, commitments, and frames of reference")

The final point of this HxA tip sheet is to "Understand that it’s worth the effort." HxA elaborates:

If you do a deep dive into a radically alternative worldview with an open mind – that mind will be blown. The exploration might, at times, be disorienting, frustrating, or triggering – but you will learn a lot. You might not abandon your own commitments, but you’ll definitely come to see things in a dramatically different way. At the very least, you will discover that your rivals have legitimate reasons for holding the positions they hold on many issues. That in itself – really internalizing that – can be huge.

HxA position is that they prize pluralism and value constructive disagreement. They offer these additional five bullet points for accomplishing these goals:

  • Make your case with evidence.
  • Be intellectually charitable ("However, one should always try to engage with the strongest form of a position one disagrees with (that is, ‘steel-man’ opponents rather than ‘straw-manning’ them). One should be able to describe their interlocutor’s position in a manner they would, themselves, agree with (see: ‘Ideological Turing Test’)")
  • Be intellectually humble ("Take seriously the prospect that you may be wrong")
  • Be constructive.("The objective of most intellectual exchanges should not be to “win,” but rather to have all parties come away from an encounter with a deeper understanding of our social, aesthetic and natural worlds.")
  • Be yourself. This is a critically important point. Standing up to outgroups, in-groups and organizations sometimes takes considerable courage:

At Heterodox Academy, we believe that successfully changing unfortunate dynamics in any complex system or institution will require people to stand up — to leverage, and indeed stake, their social capital on holding the line, pushing back against adverse trends and leading by example. This not only has an immediate and local impact, it also helps spread awareness, provides models for others to follow and creates permission for others to stand up as well. This is why Heterodox Academy does not allow for anonymous membership; membership is a meaningful commitment precisely because it is public.

HxA offers many additional Tools and Resources for engaging in Heterodox Conversations. This is an excellent site to visit to prepare for conversations that might turn contentious.

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A Thanksgiving Message

We are not in "normal" times, but there is so much for many of us to be thankful. If you are looking for these good things, you will find them everywhere. Those who are looking only for problems and imperfections will miss most of the good things. On this Thanksgiving I find myself thinking of those countless people who strive daily to reach out to each other in reassuring and civil ways. Doing this takes many forms, including simply offering friendly greetings and encouragement (at a distance) to oftentimes randomly encountered fellow humans. But it also includes visiting your loved ones who are shut-in, living alone, hanging on, waiting to get to the other side, who suffer from the loud dull pain of social isolation.

I repeatedly think of the millions of people who have worked so hard to developed digital tools that have allowed so many of us to connect to each other. Thanks to incredibly smart people, my elderly mother and sisters have had a weekly Zoom visit each Sunday that has turned out to be a highlight of each week. I also feel deep appreciation for those many thousands of health care workers (including a recent graduate nurse named JuJu Vieth--my daughter) and STEM experts who have worked around the clock to nurture the onslaught of COVID patients and to give all of us extraordinarily sudden hope that a vaccine might be around the corner. We will get through this as a people. That's a given. It's time to raise the bar a bit, though, and aim to get through this in non-divisive ways that make each of us proud to be fellow Americans.

Continue ReadingA Thanksgiving Message

More Criticism of the Political “Left” and “Right” from Eric Weinstein

Eric Weinstein's apt Tweet:

Or, instead of off-script and on-script, should we refer to people as "Thinks for Themselves" and "Doesn't Think for Themselves"? Labels of Left/Right are (often intentionally) deceptive, obscuring massive internal dissent within the "two" tribes for purposes of feigning homogeneity. Tribes use these labels to fluff up their feathers to try to appear coherent, like politically powerful voting blocks.

The labels "Left" and "Right" look precise, but simplistically clean appearance of these labels disguises a lack of precision.  Primarily, these labels refer to heterogenous tribes that try to portray themselves as homogenous.  This is not merely academic. The use of the Left/Right labels (legitimized and amplified by lazy media and social media) is tearing our society apart.

Continue ReadingMore Criticism of the Political “Left” and “Right” from Eric Weinstein

Neil Postman on Orwell vs. Huxley

I had seen this quote before and posted a cartoon on this idea, but tonight I heard Tristan Harris read this passage by Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death) toward the end of his discussion with Joe Rogan. It hits the nail on the head:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism.

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists, who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny, “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.

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Tristan Harris and Joe Rogan Discuss “The Social Dilemma” in Depth

Tristan Harris:

The film, "The Social Dilemma," is really about how it makes the worst of us rise to the top, right, so our hate, our outrage, our polarization, what we disagree about, black and white thinking, more conspiracy-oriented views of the world Qanon, Facebook groups, things like--that and i can we can definitely go into there's a lot of legitimate conspiracy theories i want to make sure I'm not categorically dismissing stuff--the point is that we have landed in a world where the things that we are paying attention to are not necessarily the agenda of topics that we would say in a reflective world is most important.

Joe Rogan:

There's a lot of conversation about free will and about letting people choose whatever they choose, whatever they enjoy viewing and watching and paying attention to, but when you're talking about these incredibly potent algorithms and the incredibly potent addictions that the people develop to these these things . . . and we're pretending that people should have the ability to just ignore it and put it away right and use your willpower.

--

Joe Rogan Look at this [pointing to website news], Apple working on its own search engine as Google ties to be cut soon. I started using DuckDuckGo for that very reason. Just because they don't do anything with [your data]. You know, they give you the information, but they don't they don't take your data and do anything with it.

Tristan Harris Let's say we get all the privacy stuff perfectly, perfectly right, and data protection and data controls and all that stuff. In a system that's still based on attention, in grabbing attention and harvesting and strip mining our brains, you still get maximum polarization, addiction, mental health problems, isolation, teen depression, suicide, polarization, breakdown of truth, right? So we really focus in our work on those topics because that's the direct influence of the business model on warping society.

We need to name this mind-warp when we think of it, like "the climate change of culture. We think these seem like different disconnected topics, much like with climate change. You'd say like, Okay, we've got species loss in the Amazon, we're losing insects, we've got melting glaciers, we've got ocean acidification, we've got the coral reefs dying, these can feel like disconnected things, until you have a unified model of how emissions change all those different phenomena, right? In the social fabric, we have shortening of attention spans, we have more outrage driven news media, we have more polarization, we have more breakdown of truth, we have more conspiracy-minded thinking. These seem like separate events, and separate phenomena, but they're actually all part of this attention extraction paradigm, that the company's growth--as you said--depends on, extracting more of our attention, which means more polarization, more extreme material, more conspiracy thinking and shortening attention spans.

Because we also say if we want to double the size of the attention economy, I want your attention to be split into two separate streams. Like I want you watching the TV, the tablet and the phone at the same time, because now I've tripled the size of the amount of extractable attention that I can get for advertisers, which means that by fracking for attention and splitting you into more junk, so attention that's "thinner." We can sell that as if it's real attention, like the financial crisis, where you're selling thinner and thinner financial assets as if it's real, but it's really just a junk asset.

And that's kind of where we are now, where it's sort of the junk attention economy. Because we were we have shortened attention spans and we're debasing the substrate of that makes up our society because everything in a democracy depends on individual sense-making and meaningful choice, meaningful for you, meaningful independent views. But if that's all basically sold to the highest bidder that debases the soil from which independent views grow, because all of us are jacked into this sort of matrix of social media manipulation, that's ruining integrating our democracy. And that's really, there's many other things that are ruining and hurting our democracy. That's a sort of invisible force, it's upstream, that affects every other thing downstream. Because if we can't agree on what's true, for example, we can't solve any problem.

Joe Rogan Your organization highlights all these issues in an amazing way. And it's very important. But do you have any solutions?

Tristan Harris It's hard, right? So I just want to say that this is as complex a problem as climate change, in the sense that you need to change the business model. I think of it like we're on the fossil fuel economy and we have to switch to something beyond that thing, right? Because so long as the business models of these companies depend on extracting attention, can you expect them to do something different?

Joe Rogan You can't, but how could you? There's so much money involved and now they've accumulated so much wealth that they have an amazing amount of influence.

Tristan Harris And the asymmetric influence, can buy lobbyists, can influence Congress and prevent things from happening. I think we're seeing signs of real change. We had the antitrust case that was just filed against Google. In Congress. We were seeing more hearings . . .

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