I liked to walk home from school. Being Hobart, with its warren of one-way streets and main roads snaking through suburbia, I was almost always enjoying the street to myself. One day, much to my annoyance, a boy with a clean-cut American accent, black blazer and golden badge approached me, brandishing a heavy bible. I enjoyed debating about the existence of God those days. I relished the list of reasons I carried under my coat for why religious superstition was absurd, a logical fallacy for the infirm and uncertain. This guy had the temerity to disturb my quiet, so I opened my mouth.
And got to know the bloke. He was from Arizona. His people were religious. He was excited to be in Tasmania, a place so remote from Phoenix he hadn’t heard of it until his church told him he was going there. His life sounded like one of duty, but a duty he relished on behalf of a family he loved dearly. We stood on the side of the road and talked frankly about the role religion and belief played in each of our lives, until the reason for our differences fell apart like wet newspaper. Our beliefs about the world couldn’t be more contradictory, the perfect paradox to have a combative argument over; but we ended up in each other’s world instead. It was amiable. I almost wanted to take him up on his offer to have a cup of tea. Almost.
Maybe another day it woudn’t have been like that. In fact, we all seem to be marching steadily into separate chambers of reality, in no small part because conversations that can hold a fragile, fluttering paradox are increasingly rare. It turns out that people and algorithms alike vastly prefer strong opinions from charismatic thought leaders. Even if we’re aware of this, we still fall for it from time to time. A charismatic orange guy wooed an entire country into voting for him, before chugging off without accomplishing anything he said he would (now hurtling back like an obnoxious boomerang).
The proliferation of information has made the job of demagogues much easier. Information’s accessibility allows you to come across as well-informed and convincing because you really can become a pseudo-expert quickly. Tim Urban, legendary blogger of Wait But Why fame, said he would devote 2-3 weeks on a topic before blogging about it; just enough time to get dangerous and form an interesting opinion. If you add some bluster (Tim is not blustery), you might have an instant influencer; just dangerous enough to sound knowledgeable, without the awareness of what you don’t know.
Naturally, reality is a bit more complex than a 2-3 week crash course can convey. Actually, much more complex - the average PhD, a project designed to develop narrow expertise, takes 3-4 years. Gladwell famously said that expertise takes 10,000 hours of practice. Maybe the difficulty of becoming an expert is partly why experts are so frequently under fire these days - it’s much easier to hate on experts than face up to the fact we might be missing a trick.
The confidence that comes from being an amateur with a solid background briefing has a name, and you’re familiar with it; the Dunning-Kruger effect. Admire my P aint skills below that illustrates the fates of Dunning-Kruger club members:
This is the actual path of knowledge, a long, torturous, drawn-out process that includes a painful dip. This dip is where we realize how miserably incomplete our worldview is, where peer review wrecks ego, assumptions are revealed, bias disrobed, unoriginality made naked. As any academic will tell you, the dip is necessary and normal.
But it’s also inconvenient for someone peddling a message. If you’re told something disproving your theory of the world, the temptation to brush it aside is enormous; what we think we know is inseperable from our conception of self and identity, a direct threat to our entire being. And because ignorance is so much easier to see in others than ourselves, we can usually summon a reason to ignore inconvenient truths. As Dunning himself said, “the first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club.”
Being smart is no protection from this fallacy either. In turns out brainy types are exceptionally good at finding reasons to support their worldview; in other words, we are all subject to error and falling prey to the Halo Effect. How can we overcome such a blind spot? How can we overcome the temptation to put the world in a neat little box?
The poets have an answer; get comfortable holding two irreconcilable truths at the same time. Not to brag on the poet’s behalf, but exploring contradictions in ourselves is kinda their thing;
The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
- From ‘Song of Myself’ by Walt Whitman
Whitman acknowledges (as we all should) that our desires and behaviors don’t always align with the story we tell ourselves. We’re notoriously unreliable like that. Writing about his deeply held Catholic beliefs, Andrew Sullivan acknowledged his contradictory views on sexual freedom and abortion by concluding
“Yes, this is in part an excruciating contradiction. But living in a liberal democracy requires excruciating contradictions all the time. That’s the core of what toleration in modernity means. It’s never easy. And no one designed it to be.”
It turns out that being able to hold a paradox and not lose our minds is another marker of intelligence. But it’s not just about being intelligent. Being intelligent is pointless if we can’t use it to navigate the world in a more fruitful way. Being able to hold simultaneous paradoxes in opposition reveals the wrinkles of reality as it is, unflinching and weird. The paradox mindset simply means we’re refusing to latch on to a story and be swept away.
My Arizonian interlocutor forced me to keep an inconvenient truth; that God tied his life together in a way I couldn’t imagine, even as non-belief helped tie up my own. I really had been missing something, even while I gathered reasons for his wrongness. Looking back, I’ve never been happier to have been so wrong about someone.
You Should Read This
I linked it in the post, but you really need to read Tim Urban’s piece “The Tail End.” Usually, blogs with stick figures don’t impress me but this is one of the few blogs that landed and really stayed with me for a long time. Changed my life, if you will, and if you read it yours will too. It’s that powerful.
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