Facts Man and the Social Justice Warrior

I.

On Coleman Hughes's podcast, he talks about debunking the "Hands up; don't shoot" myth regarding the Michael Brown shooting. To his credit, he does attempt to understand why people would believe what he calls a "poetic truth", which he contrasts with empirical truth. And while I don't think his steelmanning quite gets it right, the larger issue I have is with the ineffectiveness of this approach to sensitive topics like these. 

In this context, Hughes is acting as what Annie Lowery calls "Facts Man."

"The Facts Man gives it to you straight. With his college degree, with his top-quality résumé, with his insider knowledge, with his background in euclidean something-or-other—sharpened by debating with the smartest people, who never went to school—here is what he has found. These are the data. These are more data. This. Is. It. Here’s the inevitable conclusion. It’s the only conclusion possible!"

 II.

A very progressive woman in my town posted a video on Facebook. She saw a local cop had pulled over a Black driver. She pulled her car to the side of the road and began filming. Despite the fact that nothing happened--nor does anything ever happen in our town, including complaints of police abuse--the comments on her post were filled with praise and instances of the word "brave."

I couldn't help but be reminded of Liz Bruenig's comment about a lack of opportunities for heroism in modern society. It should come as no surprise that this woman's post came just days after Derek Chauvin's conviction. The media made Darnella Frazier a star, the girl who filmed Floyd's murder. I can't help but feel that the woman was motivated by her own desires for heroism.

I felt like commenting with some statistics. Things like the lack of police complaints in our town, or how police abuse happens in violent neighborhoods, not our town. Or how nationally the vast majority of police complaints go to the same small number of cops, so going by base rates this cop is likely to be harmless.

But then I realized how much I would have sounded like Facts Man. Social Justice Warrior can be irrational, but Facts Man can be just as annoying and ineffective, even when he's right. 

There has to be a better way.

III.

John Warner wrote a Twitter thread contrasting Adam Serwer and Conor Friedersdorf's coverage of the Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure denial controversy. Serwer and Friedersdorf aren't exactly Facts Man and the Social Justice Warrior--or if they are, they're the best versions of them--but Warner's analysis points toward something deeper.

Warner dislikes Conor's objective approach. 

But posing as objective (or even neutral) when you are not objective does not enhance anyone's credibility when it's apparent that you are not objective or neutral. This is why even when I agree with Friedersdorf, I roll my eyes because I know I've been subject to a performance.

— John Warner (@biblioracle) May 22, 2021

Here is why Warner likes Serwer's writing better. 

Serwer's description of the precipitating incident is in no way slanted on the facts, but it also isn't an attempt at establishing an "objective" persona. He's telling the reader where he stands so we can evaluate what's to come with that knowledge in hand.

— John Warner (@biblioracle) May 22, 2021

Warner is free to prefer whichever type of writing he likes, but I think he makes two logical errors. The first is to view objectivity/subjectivity as a binary, before rejecting the idea of objectivity at all. 

Scott Siskind explains how rationality is not a binary, but a spectrum, writing:

"You can definitely be bad at rationality, objectivity, and staying unbiased. But if you can be bad, you can also be good. You've admitted there's a spectrum from better to worse, you've admitted that the worse end deserves terms like "irrational" - so shouldn't the natural term for the better end be "rational"?"

In another post, Scott compares rationality to weight training; like objectivity, it's something you get better at the more you train. But because Warner cannot conceive of someone being objective, he becomes immediately suspicious of anyone who appears to approach topics with an objective lens. They must have some evil, hidden agenda, he thinks. 

I see a different distinction between the two writers. Serwer writes beautifully, but what is the point? He is basically reassuring liberals that they are right in believing conservatives are terrible.

Yes, by striving for objectivity, Conor has established credibility for a certain group of readers. But unlike Serwer, Conor's writing does what Amanda Ripley calls Complicating the Narrative. When Warner calls Serwer's writing "illuminating," I call it confirmation bias. Conversely, what Conor does is what I would call persuasion.

The other error Warner makes is to discount the effect of persuasion. Persuasion is so rare now that when people like Warner come across it, they mistake it for something nefarious. They assume people like Conor must have some secret evil motive. But what if Conor's motive is simply to update the priors of readers who are open to having their minds changed? Because I can guarantee you that Serwer isn't changing anyone's mind.

In an interesting column, Tom Chivers wonders "When did we give up on persuasion?" Chivers is curious about people's reaction to Scott Siskind's writing and draws a conclusion.

"When was the last time you read an article, an opinion piece, that you felt was trying to persuade you of something? To argue a position that you don’t hold, and make you believe it?

I suspect such experiences are rare. It is easier to write things for people who already agree with you: to make them cheer or feel clever, or to remind them how dreadful the other lot are. It’s also more fun. 

I’m not talking about reading a column that disagrees with you. I’m sure you read them regularly, or at least the headlines: pieces get hate-shared all the time among people who disagree with them. But they are not written to persuade, and readers are not persuaded. The intention, I think, is to provoke a reaction, to elicit cheers and boos. Not, primarily, to change minds."

IV.

To me, the myth-debunking Facts Man is as pointless as the callout-culture Social Justice Warrior. I think the world would be a better place if both archetypes cared more about the art of persuasion. 

Facts Man doesn't change minds when he debunks. He only angers his interlocutor and riles up his base. In other words, he writes and speaks for those who already agree with him.

Social justice warrior doesn't achieve social justice when he calls out or cancels someone. He just adds to the growing resentment of his outgroup.

The only positive thing both men achieve is higher status within their ingroup. There must be a third way.

I've reimagined what I think Braver Angels should look like. I think it's a mistake to recruit reds and blues as reds and blues. The people they recruit should not have politics as the top layer of their identity. The people they recruit should be Antitribalists. They should recruit Persuasion Man.

Their goal should be to recruit Gladwell's connectors, mavens, and persuaders. People who take debunked myths and present them in a way not intended to make others feel dumb, but to update their priors. People who explain to Facts Man why he should sit this one out and let people be empirically wrong if they're not hurting anyone. People who show Social Justice Warrior how to call in, rather than call out. Or better yet, just ignore people who say mean things. 

The Antitribalists care about truth and justice, but not as much as they fear civil war. The Antitribalists start from a place of empathy. They study, listen to, and learn the language and culture of Facts Man and Social Justice Warrior. They are bayesians, who constantly evaluate and update their beliefs when presented with new information.

They focus on their cognitive biases and work to overcome them and be less wrong. They recognize that persuasion is a two-way street; they cannot expect to change others' minds if they will not change their own.

The Antribalists recognize the irony that a group of people being against tribes is, in fact, a tribe. And they are okay with this because they are bound the similarities of the ingroup rather than hostility toward the outgroup.

Richard Hanania wrote an essay titled "Why is Everything Liberal?" His conclusion is that liberals simply care more. Consider this a post for the Antitribalists out there to care more.

The Slippery Slope to Losing the Culture War

                                    Pixabay — mstlion

I.

I was having a conversation with a conservative friend recently. She was upset that Penn State was changing the class year's names (freshman, sophomore, etc.) to be more inclusive and less hierarchical. Trying to follow the scout mindset, I asked her to continue that line of thinking. Why was this change bad? What did it portend? How does it affect her?

What I came to take away was that the Penn State change really was a low stakes battle. But it was a sign that her tribe was losing the war. It wasn't about the name change as much as it was liberals getting another W.

I've seen people on Twitter lose their minds over a presentation that begins with a land acknowledgment. I've been very critical of the coercive use of Critical Theory-inspired movements.  But a land acknowledgment? Really? Who gives a shit?

But now I understand the resistance. It's a sign that the other tribe has won another battle and it feels like they are losing the culture war.

II.

In my worshiping and compression post, I described how progressives view the "default setting" of humanity:

"For example, I think Ibram Kendi, and the successor ideology at-large, think the default setting of America is racism. In How to be an Antiracist, he describes the birth of the "conjoined twins" (capitalism and racism) in 1450 Portugal, tracing it to the founding of the United States. 

The 1619 Project makes a similar claim, that America was founded on protecting slavery. In this view, the only thing to save us from falling back into slavery, and allowing racism to grow like metastic cancer, is the constant practice of antiracism in the face of the institutions that uphold racism (capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.)."

Looking back, I don't think I did a great job describing that viewpoint. For starters, that description doesn't align with how I described the other groups. I wrote that conservatives fear that losing the culture war means we descend to barbarism. Enlightenment liberals fear that losing the culture war means we descend to civil war. Libertarians fear that losing the culture/policy war means we descend into totalitarianism. (I don't feel confident in my ability to steelman Trumpism, but I would say they fear that losing the culture war means being replaced by socialist-loving immigrants.)

But what about progressives? Why does my description of a default setting and fear of losing sound so clunky?

First, I think a better description would be to say that their belief is that our default setting is for one group to accumulate power (eg White people) and use it to oppress everyone else. They fear losing the culture war means descending into total White Supremacy oppression. 

I like that definition better because it works on both the cultural and policy level. This helps me understand the aggression toward capitalism; they conflate it with White Supremacy. In both instances they see that a bunch of white dudes have accumulated power/capital and are using it to assert their dominance/extract labor from everyone else.

The only thing that makes progressives different from all the other groups is that they don't frame the default settings as a "descent" to their greatest fear (ie White Supremacy). They think they already have lost. White Supremacy has been winning since time immemorial. 

This helps me understand why it's so difficult to talk across ideological lines. Libertarians think the government is already too big. Enlightenment liberals think we are already too polarized. Conservatives think society is already too permissive and chaotic. So collectively, they are understandably confused when progressives lump all these groups together, based on most of them having white skin, and declare that not only are they the bad guys, but they're winning the culture war. 

We're all living different narratives and in each version, someone else is winning.

(As an Enlightenment liberal, I just want to say that I do not think polarization is worse than racism. I just think that we cannot solve racism, or any major problem, until we solve polarization.)

III.

The Georgia voting laws dominated the news cycle for quite some time. Some people argued it was the worst thing ever and others said the hype was overblown. At first, I thought the different reactions was a decouple vs. contextual dichotomy. In other words, how you felt about the laws depended on whether you could decouple them from Georgia's history of racism and voter suppression or whether that context always played a role on how we should interpret them.

For instance, here is a breakdown of how the law is being overblown, with the exception being the part that takes power away from the Secretary of State. That part is actually scary overreach.

But even if a progressive reads the above link and believes every word, they will not be comforted. Because just like my friend hearing about the rather benign Penn State name change, the voter law is a sign that progressives are losing the war. No matter how much you downplay the effects of the law, it will always be interpreted as "My outgroup used their power to put into law something that takes power away from my ingroup." If you're a progressive, this reifies your fear that we are descending into White Supremacy.

IV.

I like the decoupling vs. contextualizing idea. It helped me understand why some people just talk past one another, why we can't even seem to agree on what we're arguing about. Decoupling is considering facts on their merits, irrespective of their context, while contextualizing says that true honesty must acknowledge cultural context.

However, I think the dichotomy is flawed. I don't think the world is made up of people who are decouplers OR contextualizers. I'm not even talking about a spectrum. I think the flaw is that the description is fluid. In some contexts, I'm a decoupler. In others, a contextualizer. The determining factor is how much skin me or my tribe has in the game.

Take the Masterpiece Cakeshop. Should a Christian baker be allowed to refuse a cake for a gay couple? As a straight, non-Christian, I don't have any skin in the game. So whatever my opinion, it is decoupled from the context. 

Now consider the biracial student forced to confess his white dominance in his sociology class. This is the unnecessary race-baiting of Critical Race Theory that increases polarization and puts the culture wars in a pressure cooker. As an Enlightenment liberal who believes our default setting moves us toward civil war, I cannot decouple this scenario from it's context in the polarization culture war. I place it right within the context of the polarization problem. In this case, I am a contextualizer.

So if someone seems to be overreacting to a news story, ask yourself: Is it possible they view the world as a different war than the way I view it? Do they have a different belief about the default setting of humanity?

Is their biggest fear White Supremacy, civil war, barbarism, totalitarianism, or something else different than my biggest fear? If so, are they contextualizing this story as just a battle in a larger war they feel they are losing?

My point is that we all overreact to seemingly mundane news stories and that our reaction has less to do with the context of the story than with the overall feeling that our team is losing. If your response to this point is to justify why your war is more righteous than someone else's war ("Boo Hoo, Christians. You have to call it a Holiday Tree? Guess what? I'm fighting against White Supremacy, which has been oppressing black people for 400 hundred years!") then you're missing the point of living in a multicultural society. We have to make space for everyone, and, yes, that includes the antiracists. 

I think an important step is for members of each tribe to ask themselves: Where do I draw the line? At which point do I concede a battle, knowing that any one group should not have too much power, even if it's my tribe in power?

As an Enlightenment liberal, the American Civil War is a good example. If keeping two factions from tearing one another apart includes allowing a violation of human rights (eg slavery) then I am going to sit this one out or align with whoever is on the side of human rights.