Measure Thinkers By Their Best Ideas

Cancel culture has a bias towards the negative

Suppose you wanted to write a hit piece about me arguing that I am some sort of mischievous cretin. I’m not going to tell you exactly what you’d say, for fear that some New York Times journalists are eagerly reading this blog and furiously salivating (if not engaging in other acts that we shall not discuss), but it’s not hard to figure out the sorts of things you’d say. You’d note that I’ve accepted controversial and taboo implications of utilitarianism, that I’ve said that factory farming is orders of magnitude worse than any human injustice (in my defense, that one happens to be obviously true), and that I’ve said controversial things about all sorts of other topics. You’d quickly run through these, attempting to claim that some common sort of villainy—racism, sexism, or some other ism—explains all of these controversial views.

The things you’d attribute to me wouldn’t be wrong but they would be incomplete. Sure, I think some controversial things about, for example, when it’s okay to chop people up and distribute their organs (more often then you’d think) or which sex we’d expect to be more likely to form true beliefs about abortion (not the one you’d expect!), but that’s not most of what I talk about. Most of my articles are not about these things, but instead about more serious and significant topics, like the self-indication assumption.

I think some things that most people regard as outrageous. So does almost every interesting thinker. It’s a sign of being thoughtful that you’re willing to break from the orthodox position, that you think some things that would offend people in your social group. But people aren’t cancelled because a weighted average of their views turns out to reveal that many of them are bad—they’re cancelled because they think or say something particularly offensive and are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Cancel culture only focuses on what’s worst about a person—only focuses on the downsides. It ignores what makes people interesting, maintaining a myopic focus on the views of theirs that sound worse. Those trying to cancel Hanania ignore the interesting things he’s been saying for years, focusing exclusively on some offensive Tweets and old articles that he’s since apologized for. Hanania, as a thinker, is more than his worst Tweets—not a cartoonish supervillain but an interesting guy who says lots of interesting things and lots of offensive things.

This was one of the things that was so outrageous about the New York Times hitpiece on Scott Alexander. Scott is a hilarious, deep, and witty writer, who mostly writes clever, non-partisan analyses of topics and detailed deep-dives on complicated empirical topics. The New York Times thought that a fair summary of him was provided by cherry-picking a few out-of-context quotes that sound bad, which aren’t even objectionable at all in context. It would be a bit like evaluating a several-hundred-page book by having a malicious antagonist find the three sentences that sound the worst out of context.

Speaking of Scott, he has an interesting article from a few years ago titled Rule Thinkers In, Not Out. Suppose you spent a lot of time around Newton—you’d find a lot of material that could be used to dismiss him as a crank. He thought there were secret Bible codes and endorsed alchemy. Newton was, in many ways, a nut-job.

But he was also the most influential mathematician perhaps of all time. Newton was influential not because a weighted average of his ideas rendered them good overall but because he had some ideas that were so good that they changed the world. This is how positive influence works.

If I think about the ideas that influenced me the most—veganism, effective altruism, utilitarianism, the self-indication assumption, various political ideas—it doesn’t much matter what else the people who believe them thought. My ideas come from a patchwork of different thinkers over the years, not a single sage. A thinker with five great ideas and fifty terrible ones is much more valuable than one with fifty-five mediocre ideas. Unless you treat thinkers as gurus, to be deferred to across the board, they should be measured by the quality of their best ideas, not the average quality of their ideas.

Even if Hanania, Scott, and I have various terrible views—which, of course, I doubt—what determines whether we’re interesting thinkers who positively influence the world isn’t the quality of our terrible views but the quality of our best views. Cancel culture, by being solely about the worst-sounding thing a person has ever said, fails to indicate anything significant about the quality of a thinker. If we rule thinkers in—judging them by how many interesting things they say, rather than how few bad things they say—then we’ll be opposed to the censorious impulses that seem all too common among journalists and academics.

Ideas aren’t dangerous viruses that need to be quarantined. Even if a person is deeply evil and thinks horrible things, they still may be quite worth reading. Thinkers should be judged by whether something interesting can be learned from them, not whether they have Bad Karma on account of some out-of-context Tweet they made circa 2013. Because cancel culture focuses only on the bad things people think, getting cancelled correlates inversely with being someone worth being listened to. Interesting people tend to think some cancellable things.

Thinkers should be judged mostly on the best things they think. This makes cancel culture particularly dangerous—by being solely about the worst thing a person thinks, in the eyes of a generally uneducated and highly emotional public, it penalizes something that correlates with being interesting. Not only does it not judge a thinker on their merits, it judges them negatively for something that is positively correlated with merit, namely, attracting controversy.

Cancel culture will inherently target the interesting because they tend to think more cancellable things. This is an inevitable feature of it. However, in its current manifestation—wherein it is solely about ruling out thinkers, and pointing out that a thinker has said lots of other interesting things is no defense—it’s even more efficiently targeted at making our public sphere sterile, uninteresting, and dull.