Thank you so much for writing this! Even as someone who holds fairly conservative views on many issues, I am so freaking fed up with the obnoxious alt-right internet dwellers who refuse to engage with the views of their opponents, and instead just assert the vilest things in the name of being "based", and call anyone who disagrees with them "fake and gay." Really glad to see people calling this out.
It's made me appreciate all the more the work of genuine conservatives like Trent Horn. Even when I disagree with some of his views (which happens fairly rarely) I always get a very strong impression that he's someone who sincerely loves the truth. This video of his covers similar ground to this article. Being based will in fact send you to hell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mutrNUJNhU
And that's what I think we need more of in popular discourse. I'll always prefer a genuine, truth-seeking liberal (like yourself) over an obnoxious right wing Trump-worshipper who will do literally anything stupid or immoral in order to meet the goal of being "based". We need to get back to having real, honest conversations about important issues, instead of just memeing each other into oblivion online.
I love the way you articulated this. Oversimplification through pattern-matching, like whataboutism and ad hominem attacks, is a potent way to shut down discourse and brute-force one’s own viewpoint through. And this is why the stakes of the argument become so important. On the one hand, if there’s real power or money on the line, many people will cheat to win without a second thought. On the other hand, if the argument matters in the first place, using sophistry to push a stupid idea through often leads to real-world consequences that make everything worse. Not that that necessarily stops anybody. But it’s in the realm of the esoteric that the battles get especially vicious, because the practical stakes are often especially low.
This is another example of irony poisoning and ironic detachment. Being aloof makes you unattackable. If I say something dumb, it was a joke; you’re a staid weirdo with no ear for humour. I can’t have you know I feel anything; you might think I’m weak and sensitive. But I’m not. I’m stolid and logical. I don’t care, so I’m above it; it can’t affect me. If you write a screed, I live rent-free in your head; you’re weak and pathetic in your care. If I say something smart, I’ll still take credit for it. Every situation I spin in my favour. Thanks for playing.
The purpose of the midwit bell curve meme isn't that the person on the middle is stupid and wrong (although I am sure it is used this way in practice). It highlights the potential failures of someone in the middle of the bell curve for reasoning.
The person farthest on the left is dumb enough that they primarily rely on intuition rather than research and dedicated reasoning. They come to conclusions that are often good in practice, but are unable to articulate why these solutions make sense. Low class.
The person in the middle is smart enough to be able to research arguments and knowledge, but not smart enough to craft their own arguments from first principles. Their defense of anything will usually boil down to, "So-and-so said this and they are right," rather than "This is right because...". Middle class.
The far right is supposed to be the realm of accomplished philosophers who do the ground breaking research and create new theories, new types of morality. Upper class.
The way the meme is most often used is to highlight how the state organs of propaganda: CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the NYT, "the scientific consensus", often ascribe to policies and beliefs that are harmful and inane in practice. The person on the middle, the middle class person who earnestly devours and repeats state propaganda, will find themselves contorting into knots to defend inane and stupid policies, because they are still relying on trusted sources of authority to determine right and wrong. The criticism here is that the USA has too many middle class people churning to make state propaganda work and life would be better if they would keep their mouths shut.
I don't think I've ever seen the meme used in the way you're describing. It's generally just used for someone to claim their opinion is secretly smart with no reasoning for why this is the case.
Using it to mock an opinion that happens to be espoused by CNN or NPR isn't the same as using it in the way you've described. To do that, the meme would at least have to portray the person in the middle appealing to authority and the person on the right making arguments. But it doesn't - the person on the right never makes an argument for their position, and that seems to be kind of the point of the format.
If it meme format went to the trouble of explaining the implicit reasons why the person in the middle and the person on the right believe what they do, people probably wouldn't find it amusing.
I don't think it would actually be that hard to portray it, but that's not really relevant. The point is, the meme doesn't actually portray it, so it certainly doesn't highlight some failure in reasoning. All the meme says is that the thing stupid people believe is actually also believed by the really smart people, with the implication that the person posting the meme is one of the really smart people who believes it (which is, of course, almost always false in practice).
People become smarter through learning good reasoning skills and by practicing actually engaging with ideas, rather than if they would just keep their mouth shuts. So it is better to encourage everyone to actually engage in ideas than to try and make people believe that they are stupid so they should never try to think, express their opinions or make any decisions.
> The "midwit" meme has been one of the most prominent exploitable images on the internet, which essentially tries to summarize the IQ spectrum from dumbest, average and smartest intelligence, showing that sometimes people engage in overly complex reasoning while individuals at either end of the IQ Bell Curve tend to arrive at similar conclusions, albeit through different rationales.
The middle section isn't merely just "position I disagree with". It's specifically "position I disagree with in an intense amount of detail", usually in the format of a stream-of-consciousness monologue that stems from overthinking and is clearly irrational. It's an important distinction!
I think there are rare cases where it is used well, but unfortunately the vast majority of cases are just people with stupid positions wanting to pretend they're not stupid. Often the middle position isn't some long, convoluted chain of reasoning, but just someone pointing out an obvious reason why the left & right position is wrong.
When mental gymnastics does need to be pointed out, and it's for some reason necessary to do it in meme form, I think the mental gymnastics meme does a much better job at it. Especially since that meme is not an instant conversation-ender.
The problem you describe is related to an ongoing shift in what is intellectually trendy. For the last decade or two we saw a rise in contrarian thinking. Freddy DeBoer addressed this recently in an article on adoption. The "good thing is bad" trend has convinced many that adoption is morally wrong, but Freddy contends that the basic intuition that "it's good for kids to have parents who want them" is correct. "Gender is uncomplicated" is another example where basic intuition has been challenged by more complex reasoning, and we're in a moment of political backlash to that trend.
The truth conveyed by these memes is that complex reasoning is appealing (to some) for it's complexity even when it misses the forest for the trees. There is a feeling that we have demolished Chesterton's fence in too many places. So while your broader point that arguments must be evaluated on their merits is correct, it's worth noticing that e.g. your shrimp welfare take exists in a tradition of anti-intuition thinking and arguments against that tradition itself might be forceful even if they fail to directly address a narrow argument. Most people don't have the time to evaluate all the takes and have to evaluate them in classes.
Religious people used to do this by saying “anything in religion that does not make sense is because we are too limited to possibly understand God’s plan,” or “your reliance on science and rational argument is itself a religion,” or “it is as arrogant to say God doesn’t exist as to say he does.”
I long ago came to the conclusion that people who are not conducting some kind of Socratic dialogue within themselves are not doing any reasoning at all. You should be able to express your opponent’s viewpoint in the most generous way possible. Otherwise, you’re probably not capable of genuinely opposing them.
I’ve always wanted to deploy that in an online argument - “oh, you think you understand my position and still disagree with it? Why don’t you explain it back to me, then make the best argument you can think of for my position before you rebut me?” - but i think i would just get laughed at if i tried. Also, it’s a double edged sword, since you need to be ready for when they ask you do to it back for them.
Only if read uncharitably. If read charitably it’s pointing out the fact that people who don’t get caught up in silly arguments are often more correct than those who do because they don’t doubt things that are obvious
The problem is that everyone is incentivized to believe that their beliefs are obvious and any argument they engage in will be silly and counterproductive. It's very difficult to accurately filter what types of ideas should go unchallenged. So it effectively replaces engaging in argument with status games that dismiss others as ignorant or immoral, relying on appeals to authority rather than engaging with the substance of their ideas.
I'm listening to Alasdair MacIntyre's 'After Virtue' at the moment, and I think it sheds some light on the situation.
Part of the thesis is that, as a culture, we have accepted emotivism — morality is just arbitrary feelings/preferences. We no longer really believe moral disagreements are open to rational resolution. It's just one side asserting their preferences against the other.
In which case, the side that wins really is just the side that is more confident or charismatic in their assertions.
Agreed. What he’s missing about this is that the emotivism of modern analytic moral philosophers is just a shell game and people are right to call it out. It can be argued against if people have the patience and expertise but in reality just opting out because it’s so silly is the rational option
Good post. It's understated how much we've traded persuasion for optics. Rather than getting people to identify with us, we try to identify as "the cool team". (I don't think anyone even enjoys Joe Rogan; it's just a mass delusion that none of his audience is willing to break rank on.)
Bluesky has been an interesting, and unfortunate, case study here. There's not even much in terms of policy differences there, so the dunks are mostly just in-group/out-group. Even if you sort people ideologically, they'll find successively narrower things to dunk over.
This is far from your main point, but (to sound like a very poor AV Club writer commentating on some episode of Black Mirror) I wonder how much the memetification of *social media* via algorithmic distortion itself more or less intrinsically led to this. If (good) argumentation can be largely boiled down to pattern-matching in a *specific instance,* where a positive or negative outcome is not pre-ordained by the inclusion of some subject matter, it runs directly contradictory to memetics, which is founded upon pattern-matching *in the general case.* Memes in turn are incentivized by the attention economy blah blah blah.
While there are certainly better and worse ways of using Standard Social Media, and you kind of need to use it to have any kind of social influence at all, its incentives (obviously) run directly against reasoning well.
It's also that the specific types of platforms we have created are highly optimized for spreading these types of memes and making dunks. I believe that social media doesn't intrinsically have to be this way, we have just explored very few types of platforms due to network effects.
Thank you so much for writing this! Even as someone who holds fairly conservative views on many issues, I am so freaking fed up with the obnoxious alt-right internet dwellers who refuse to engage with the views of their opponents, and instead just assert the vilest things in the name of being "based", and call anyone who disagrees with them "fake and gay." Really glad to see people calling this out.
It's made me appreciate all the more the work of genuine conservatives like Trent Horn. Even when I disagree with some of his views (which happens fairly rarely) I always get a very strong impression that he's someone who sincerely loves the truth. This video of his covers similar ground to this article. Being based will in fact send you to hell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mutrNUJNhU
And that's what I think we need more of in popular discourse. I'll always prefer a genuine, truth-seeking liberal (like yourself) over an obnoxious right wing Trump-worshipper who will do literally anything stupid or immoral in order to meet the goal of being "based". We need to get back to having real, honest conversations about important issues, instead of just memeing each other into oblivion online.
Thanks!
I love the way you articulated this. Oversimplification through pattern-matching, like whataboutism and ad hominem attacks, is a potent way to shut down discourse and brute-force one’s own viewpoint through. And this is why the stakes of the argument become so important. On the one hand, if there’s real power or money on the line, many people will cheat to win without a second thought. On the other hand, if the argument matters in the first place, using sophistry to push a stupid idea through often leads to real-world consequences that make everything worse. Not that that necessarily stops anybody. But it’s in the realm of the esoteric that the battles get especially vicious, because the practical stakes are often especially low.
This is another example of irony poisoning and ironic detachment. Being aloof makes you unattackable. If I say something dumb, it was a joke; you’re a staid weirdo with no ear for humour. I can’t have you know I feel anything; you might think I’m weak and sensitive. But I’m not. I’m stolid and logical. I don’t care, so I’m above it; it can’t affect me. If you write a screed, I live rent-free in your head; you’re weak and pathetic in your care. If I say something smart, I’ll still take credit for it. Every situation I spin in my favour. Thanks for playing.
Memes are the mind-killer
I've noticed that whenever someone disagrees with you it's only because they are too dumb to properly understand your argument, how curious
Can you give me, say, five instances of me saying that?
I do not say this the majority of the time people disagree with me. Such a thing is a very rare occurrence.
The classic Kitten method: make some barbed, false, brazen assertion and then not back it up when pressed. How curious.
Why are you trying to prove his point?
Do you insist on trying to dunk in all of your online interactions? Or are you just trying to take the piss out of Bentham specifically
Reminds me a lot of this Alt-Right Playbook video: https://youtu.be/wmVkJvieaOA?si=3S9jMxhI5Fy38EGb
The purpose of the midwit bell curve meme isn't that the person on the middle is stupid and wrong (although I am sure it is used this way in practice). It highlights the potential failures of someone in the middle of the bell curve for reasoning.
The person farthest on the left is dumb enough that they primarily rely on intuition rather than research and dedicated reasoning. They come to conclusions that are often good in practice, but are unable to articulate why these solutions make sense. Low class.
The person in the middle is smart enough to be able to research arguments and knowledge, but not smart enough to craft their own arguments from first principles. Their defense of anything will usually boil down to, "So-and-so said this and they are right," rather than "This is right because...". Middle class.
The far right is supposed to be the realm of accomplished philosophers who do the ground breaking research and create new theories, new types of morality. Upper class.
The way the meme is most often used is to highlight how the state organs of propaganda: CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the NYT, "the scientific consensus", often ascribe to policies and beliefs that are harmful and inane in practice. The person on the middle, the middle class person who earnestly devours and repeats state propaganda, will find themselves contorting into knots to defend inane and stupid policies, because they are still relying on trusted sources of authority to determine right and wrong. The criticism here is that the USA has too many middle class people churning to make state propaganda work and life would be better if they would keep their mouths shut.
I don't think I've ever seen the meme used in the way you're describing. It's generally just used for someone to claim their opinion is secretly smart with no reasoning for why this is the case.
You've never seen it used to mock an opinion or policy that would happen to be espoused by CNN or NPR?
Using it to mock an opinion that happens to be espoused by CNN or NPR isn't the same as using it in the way you've described. To do that, the meme would at least have to portray the person in the middle appealing to authority and the person on the right making arguments. But it doesn't - the person on the right never makes an argument for their position, and that seems to be kind of the point of the format.
If it meme format went to the trouble of explaining the implicit reasons why the person in the middle and the person on the right believe what they do, people probably wouldn't find it amusing.
I don't think it would actually be that hard to portray it, but that's not really relevant. The point is, the meme doesn't actually portray it, so it certainly doesn't highlight some failure in reasoning. All the meme says is that the thing stupid people believe is actually also believed by the really smart people, with the implication that the person posting the meme is one of the really smart people who believes it (which is, of course, almost always false in practice).
You’re straw man-ing the meme
People become smarter through learning good reasoning skills and by practicing actually engaging with ideas, rather than if they would just keep their mouth shuts. So it is better to encourage everyone to actually engage in ideas than to try and make people believe that they are stupid so they should never try to think, express their opinions or make any decisions.
If you know of a way to force midwits to engage in ideas, I'd love to hear it.
This is a great post that I want to respond to in detail, but for now I just want to make a correction on the midwit meme. According to knowyourmeme (https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-the-midwit-meme-and-what-does-it-mean-the-iq-bell-curve-meme-explained),
> The "midwit" meme has been one of the most prominent exploitable images on the internet, which essentially tries to summarize the IQ spectrum from dumbest, average and smartest intelligence, showing that sometimes people engage in overly complex reasoning while individuals at either end of the IQ Bell Curve tend to arrive at similar conclusions, albeit through different rationales.
The middle section isn't merely just "position I disagree with". It's specifically "position I disagree with in an intense amount of detail", usually in the format of a stream-of-consciousness monologue that stems from overthinking and is clearly irrational. It's an important distinction!
I think there are rare cases where it is used well, but unfortunately the vast majority of cases are just people with stupid positions wanting to pretend they're not stupid. Often the middle position isn't some long, convoluted chain of reasoning, but just someone pointing out an obvious reason why the left & right position is wrong.
When mental gymnastics does need to be pointed out, and it's for some reason necessary to do it in meme form, I think the mental gymnastics meme does a much better job at it. Especially since that meme is not an instant conversation-ender.
I do really like the mental gymnastics meme, although it feels to me like it loses potential for irony from being so straightforward.
The problem you describe is related to an ongoing shift in what is intellectually trendy. For the last decade or two we saw a rise in contrarian thinking. Freddy DeBoer addressed this recently in an article on adoption. The "good thing is bad" trend has convinced many that adoption is morally wrong, but Freddy contends that the basic intuition that "it's good for kids to have parents who want them" is correct. "Gender is uncomplicated" is another example where basic intuition has been challenged by more complex reasoning, and we're in a moment of political backlash to that trend.
The truth conveyed by these memes is that complex reasoning is appealing (to some) for it's complexity even when it misses the forest for the trees. There is a feeling that we have demolished Chesterton's fence in too many places. So while your broader point that arguments must be evaluated on their merits is correct, it's worth noticing that e.g. your shrimp welfare take exists in a tradition of anti-intuition thinking and arguments against that tradition itself might be forceful even if they fail to directly address a narrow argument. Most people don't have the time to evaluate all the takes and have to evaluate them in classes.
Yep, memes are a part of direct democracy, the other part is still up for grabs to build - pol.is with X or Mastodon UI:
It will eat all the polling companies and prediction markets
The next Wikipedia and/or a unicorn startup
Religious people used to do this by saying “anything in religion that does not make sense is because we are too limited to possibly understand God’s plan,” or “your reliance on science and rational argument is itself a religion,” or “it is as arrogant to say God doesn’t exist as to say he does.”
I long ago came to the conclusion that people who are not conducting some kind of Socratic dialogue within themselves are not doing any reasoning at all. You should be able to express your opponent’s viewpoint in the most generous way possible. Otherwise, you’re probably not capable of genuinely opposing them.
I’ve always wanted to deploy that in an online argument - “oh, you think you understand my position and still disagree with it? Why don’t you explain it back to me, then make the best argument you can think of for my position before you rebut me?” - but i think i would just get laughed at if i tried. Also, it’s a double edged sword, since you need to be ready for when they ask you do to it back for them.
Some of your finest work.
What a lot of these memes are doing is cleverly replacing argument with status games.
Only if read uncharitably. If read charitably it’s pointing out the fact that people who don’t get caught up in silly arguments are often more correct than those who do because they don’t doubt things that are obvious
The problem is that everyone is incentivized to believe that their beliefs are obvious and any argument they engage in will be silly and counterproductive. It's very difficult to accurately filter what types of ideas should go unchallenged. So it effectively replaces engaging in argument with status games that dismiss others as ignorant or immoral, relying on appeals to authority rather than engaging with the substance of their ideas.
Sure but are you going to engage with every single belief?
I'm listening to Alasdair MacIntyre's 'After Virtue' at the moment, and I think it sheds some light on the situation.
Part of the thesis is that, as a culture, we have accepted emotivism — morality is just arbitrary feelings/preferences. We no longer really believe moral disagreements are open to rational resolution. It's just one side asserting their preferences against the other.
In which case, the side that wins really is just the side that is more confident or charismatic in their assertions.
Agreed. What he’s missing about this is that the emotivism of modern analytic moral philosophers is just a shell game and people are right to call it out. It can be argued against if people have the patience and expertise but in reality just opting out because it’s so silly is the rational option
Good post. It's understated how much we've traded persuasion for optics. Rather than getting people to identify with us, we try to identify as "the cool team". (I don't think anyone even enjoys Joe Rogan; it's just a mass delusion that none of his audience is willing to break rank on.)
Bluesky has been an interesting, and unfortunate, case study here. There's not even much in terms of policy differences there, so the dunks are mostly just in-group/out-group. Even if you sort people ideologically, they'll find successively narrower things to dunk over.
Enjoyed this a lot.
This is far from your main point, but (to sound like a very poor AV Club writer commentating on some episode of Black Mirror) I wonder how much the memetification of *social media* via algorithmic distortion itself more or less intrinsically led to this. If (good) argumentation can be largely boiled down to pattern-matching in a *specific instance,* where a positive or negative outcome is not pre-ordained by the inclusion of some subject matter, it runs directly contradictory to memetics, which is founded upon pattern-matching *in the general case.* Memes in turn are incentivized by the attention economy blah blah blah.
While there are certainly better and worse ways of using Standard Social Media, and you kind of need to use it to have any kind of social influence at all, its incentives (obviously) run directly against reasoning well.
It's also that the specific types of platforms we have created are highly optimized for spreading these types of memes and making dunks. I believe that social media doesn't intrinsically have to be this way, we have just explored very few types of platforms due to network effects.