No Views Have A Monopoly On Smartness

There are smart people on all sides

I’ve elsewhere complained about the infamous midwit meme—which involves (rather conveniently) saying that both really smart and really dumb people have your view, but people in the middle reject it.

The meme is silly for a bunch of reasons but one of the primary ones is: no view is ever like this (this is a rather substantial defect). There are always smart people on both sides of every issue. There’s never a clean divide, where the smart people think X and the dumb people think Y. Instead, usually there are some smart people who think X, some smart people who think Y, and some smart people who think Z.

One of the things I most enjoy about having this blog is that I have lots of extremely smart and thoughtful commenters of all different persuasions.

Daniel Greco—blog here—is pretty reductionist about almost everything. He probably thinks his own mother is just a collection of cells! He’s a non-cognitivist about morality of Blackburn and Gibbardian persuasion and is a physicalist about consciousness. I very strongly reject both of these positions.

But Greco is unbelievably thoughtful; he leaves long, brilliant comments raising objections that I hadn’t considered. Other people sometimes leave long comments that raise objections that I hadn’t considered, but that’s usually because they’re so dumb—Greco is the opposite! There have been times when he’s pwned me and gotten me to change my view. Same thing with frequent commenter Mark, who is one of the few people on Earth I’d be scared to have a head-to-head debate against about anthropics (he’d use unfair debate tactics like bringing up calculus). He and I disagree about most things, but his comments are brilliant. Hearing what smart people on the other side think makes me a better thinker.

On the other end of the spectrum, lots of very thoughtful Christians read this blog. One such person is Aron Wall, author of my favorite blog. Wall is opposite in viewpoint from Greco and Mark—he’s not a reductionist about much and is extremely confident that Jesus rose from the dead.

And there are loads of people in between. There’s Philip, a fairly liberal Christian who knows an insane amount about economics. There’s Scott Alexander, who is pretty reductionist but not so much as Greco (as far as I can tell). He also has a blog, I’m told. Plus there’s Richard Chappell—who is an epiphenomenalist, moral realist, atheist, and property dualist.

Across all sides of the philosophical spectrum, there are smart and thoughtful people who leave comments. (There are also a lot of confused people, but never mind them). And there are many more smart and thoughtful people who don’t leave comments.

What is true of blog commenters is also true in the world. There are Christians who have considered, in detail, all of your objections to Christianity and concluded with high confidence that Jesus rose from the dead. Likewise, there are atheists who have considered all your arguments for Christianity and are supremely confident that there’s no God.

There are people who have studied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades and are convinced Israel is in the right. There are likewise people of equal thoughtfulness who are convinced Israel is presently committing genocide.

On pretty much every side of every issue, there’s someone smarter and more thoughtful than you who holds every position, even after considering all your objections to it.

This should be a cause for deep humility. If there are people smarter than you who disagree with you on some subject, what makes you so confident that you’re right and they’re wrong? While one can still hold views tentatively, this should, at the very least, make them no longer near-certain in the views they hold.

In addition, it should cause us to stop thinking of views as being stupid. There aren’t stupid views, only stupid people who hold views (that one sounded more inspirational in my head). You shouldn’t assume that people who hold a certain view must be confused or naive. They might be far more knowledgeable about the subject than you are.

Above all, you shouldn’t think of learning the truth as a process of easy discovery whereby one quickly figures out the view of informed people, and then spends the rest of their time learning how to defend it. There’s always more to learn, always additional factors that might change your mind if you were better at thinking and knew more. The smartest people I know tend to be the most tentative in holding their views. Mark, one of the most thoughtful commenters on this blog, doesn’t have many strong philosophical views because of peer disagreement and the complexity of philosophy.

Lots of people, for instance, look down on vegans, thinking them a group of sentimental fools who can’t recognize that animals are different from people (What??? They are??? This is news to me???? I thought humans were plants—or perhaps legumes???). Such people rarely look into veganism very carefully. And this is natural if you assume from the outset that the alternative view is ridiculous and there aren’t smart people who adopt it.

But once you realize that there are smart people on both sides of every issue, you should take seriously the claims of vegans. You should listen to them with an open mind, taking seriously the possibility that paying for meat is immoral. When they tell you that you’re routinely doing evil things, you shouldn’t react defensively unless you don’t care about morality at all.

Similarly, you shouldn’t write off pro-lifers as ghouls who want to control women’s bodies. There are pro-lifers who are smarter, kinder, and more morally decent than you are. If you assume from the outset that they’re bad people or stupid, that’s a recipe for dogmatism and extreme error.

In short, you should take ideas very seriously! Don’t just fraternize with your ingroup—seriously consider reasons you might be wrong. Seriously consider opposing arguments, for they may very well be correct (or wait maybe they’re not—huh, I should really seriously consider that). Be especially careful in considering ideas that are very important if true, for otherwise you might be making a huge mistake. If you notice lots of smart people hold a very important view you should genuinely try to approach it with an open mind.

Once you realize that there are brilliant people on every side of every issue, you should stop writing people off based on their views. Humility and open-mindedness are called for. While none of us practice these virtues as much as we should, we can all strive to be a little more charitable and a little less quick to dismiss opposing views. And if you disagree, your view is obviously ridiculous—which I concluded after two seconds of thought—and can be quickly dismissed*.

*This is a joke, obviously.