February 2009I finally realized today why politics and religion yield suchuniquely useless discussions.As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degeneratesinto a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religionand not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk abouton forums?What's different about religion is that people don't feel they needto have any particular expertise to have opinions aboutit. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can havethose. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one aboutreligion, because people feel they have to be over some thresholdof expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone'san expert.Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics,like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertisefor expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.Do religion and politics have something in common that explainsthis similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal withquestions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressureon people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, everyopinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly withtheirs.But this isn't true. There are certainly some political questionsthat have definite answers, like how much a new government policywill cost. But the more precise political questions suffer thesame fate as the vaguer ones.I think what religion and politics have in common is that theybecome part of people's identity, and people can never have afruitful argument about something that's part of their identity.By definition they're partisan.Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, notthe topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that includedcitizens of one or more of the countries involved would probablydegenerate into a political argument. But a discussion today abouta battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't. Noone would know what side to be on. So it's not politics that's thesource of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussionhas degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is thatit has started to be driven mostly by people's identities.[1]Because the point at which this happens depends on the people ratherthan the topic, it's a mistake to conclude that because a questiontends to provoke religious wars, it must have no answer. For example,the question of the relative merits of programming languages oftendegenerates into a religious war, because so many programmersidentify as X programmers or Y programmers. This sometimes leadspeople to conclude the question must be unanswerable—that alllanguages are equally good. Obviously that's false: anything elsepeople make can be well or badly designed; why should this beuniquely impossible for programming languages? And indeed, you canhave a fruitful discussion about the relative merits of programminglanguages, so long as you exclude people who respond from identity.More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topiconly if it doesn't engage the identities of any of theparticipants. What makes politics and religion such minefields isthat they engage so many people's identities. But you could inprinciple have a useful conversation about them with some people.And there are other topics that might seem harmless, like therelative merits of Ford and Chevy pickup trucks, that you couldn'tsafely talk about with others.The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is thatit explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but howto have better ideas. If people can't think clearly about anythingthat has become part of their identity, then all other things beingequal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity aspossible. [2]Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But thereis a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: noteven to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have foryourself, the dumber they make you.Notes[1]When that happens, it tends to happen fast, like a core goingcritical. The threshold for participating goes down to zero, whichbrings in more people. And they tend to say incendiary things,which draw more and angrier counterarguments.[2]There may be some things it's a net win to include in youridentity. For example, being a scientist. But arguably that ismore of a placeholder than an actual label—like putting NMI on aform that asks for your middle initial—because it doesn't commityou to believing anything in particular. A scientist isn't committedto believing in natural selection in the same way a biblicalliteralist is committed to rejecting it. All he's committed to isfollowing the evidence wherever it leads.Considering yourself a scientist is equivalent to putting a signin a cupboard saying "this cupboard must be kept empty." Yes,strictly speaking, you're putting something in the cupboard, butnot in the ordinary sense.Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, and RobertMorris for reading drafts of this.
