Why You Shouldn't Be Very Confident About Politics

This generalizes to lots of domains

Michael Huemer has, I think, a very good article about abortion. It starts with the following.

There is one thing that the extreme pro- and anti-abortion people can agree upon: that the issue is intellectually trivial, the correct answer blindingly obvious. They just disagree about which position is blindingly obvious and which stupidly evil.

I think this claim generalizes. People who are pro minimum wage and people who are anti minimum wage can agree that the minimum wage is either obviously good or obviously bad. The same is true about gun control, people’s political parties, covid policy, and much more.

This is, I think, a huge mistake. In this article, I’ll provide lots of reasons to not be very confident in your political views.

1 Your Political Views Are Not Reliably Formed

People tend to share the political views of those around them. The best explanation of this is that people’s political views are not formed through an objective assessment of the facts, but instead are formed through lots of unreliable emotional influences. If your political views aren’t reliably formed, then you shouldn’t trust them very much.

People also emotionally identify with their political beliefs, such that they don’t give them up when they’re confronted with good reason to give them up. In fact, we know that politics makes people really bad at reasoning. To quote an earlier article

Kahan conducted a study in which people were given math problems. Being better at math made them more likely to get the right answer. At first. Then, Kahan made the math problems politicized, so that getting the right answer meant betraying people’s political instincts. People who were anti gun control were given math problems, for which the correct solution found that gun control reduced crime. People who were pro gun control were given problems for which the correct answer found it increased crime. After this twist was introduced, being better at math made subjects less likely to get the correct answer. That’s… weird.

In fact, people don’t even really know what their opponents believe. Thus, we know political beliefs are formed unreliably, make people irrational, are very emotional, and people have no idea what their opponents believe. This is a recipe for foolishness.

2 Historical Induction

If we look throughout history, lots of people have had very bad political views. Monarchy was mainstream for centuries, despite being a clearly terrible idea. Lots of people throughout history have endorsed slavery, Jim Crow, and have supported the nazis.

And just look at how much political disagreement there is. If some process reliably produces divergent results, it can’t be very reliable — especially when some of those results are pro-slavery and the holocaust.

3 The Other Side Has People Much Smarter Than You

A general plausible principle is that you should generally trust people who are smarter and more knowledgeable about a given domain than you are. If I’m not sure if I got the right answer to a physics question but then Albert Einstein says I did it wrong, I’m probably wrong.

Well, it turns out that there are lots of political Einsteins — people much smarter than you who have studied the issue more — who disagree with you about pretty much every issue. There are republican professors with PhDs who have an IQ of 160 no doubt, and the same is true about democrats.

Thus, you shouldn’t be very confident, any more than you’d be about physics if PhDs in physics disagreed about the answer to some problem.

4 There Are People Like You Who Changed Their Minds

This one is pretty self-explanatory. If you’re a mainstream conservative, there are no doubt some mainstream conservatives who changed their minds and become liberals and vice versa. If there were people who were like you and shared your beliefs for the same reasons before changing their minds, then that would mean there were people who considered all your reasons and then rejected them — no doubt even some smarter than you. If a person knows why I choose answer B for a math problem but they still choose answer A for reasons unknown to me, I should stop being so confident in answer B.

5 Politics Hinges on Lots of Complex Empirical Questions That You Probably Haven’t Investigated

As I point out here, politics involves lots of very difficult political questions. We cannot settle a priori whether the impact of the minimum wage on poverty will be enough to offset its impact on unemployment, whether a particular foreign policy intervention will be successful, or whether tax cuts will increase utility. Thus, these hinge on complex empirical topics — ones that most people have spent no time studying.

Often, there isn’t even any data on them. How could there be data on whether tax cuts increase utility? And the data on nearly all of them is very difficult to parse (check the vast array of studies on the minimum wage if you doubt this).

6 Things Are Super Unpredictable

On top of this, the world is a super unpredictable place. Just consider some unambiguous ethical judgments like that the black plague was bad. Well, it turns out that it’s not so simple. There’s a compelling case to be made that the black plague brought about the decline of feudalism. If this turns out to be correct, then the black plague of unimaginable death and destruction may turn out to have been good.

Or consider covid. Covid changed the identity of near every future person who will ever be born. There’s a non-trivial chance that that saved the world (there’s a similar chance that it caused the world to end by triggering some complex causal change). So we can’t even know that covid or the black plague was bad. And yet we think we can be confident about deeply complex political topics.

Conclusion

Several things are worth noting about this. First, there’s a good chance that we’re wrong. This means we should be more pluralistic and more willing to defer. Second, we shouldn’t demonize those who disagree. We’ve already seen that people don’t really know what their political opponents believe. But on top of that, there’s a good chance that they’re right and you’re wrong. Most political views are within the realm of possibility, so you shouldn’t stop being friends with someone for having them.