Episode 52: Is Being Dogmatic Ever a Good Thing?

• Links to this episode: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:08]  Bruce: Welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast. Today, we're going to talk more about dogmatism. In our last episode, we tried to answer the question, was Karl Popper dogmatic? And use that as kind of a jumping off point for a discussion about dogmatism. And that led to a discussion about how hard it is to detect dogmatism. So in today's episode, we're going to talk more about dogmatism. What do we do about it? We talked about last time that maybe it's not entirely bad. Obviously, it can be bad, maybe even quite bad in some cases. So we're going to have an expanded discussion today. How are you doing, guys?

[00:00:44]  Unidentified speaker: Hi, Bruce.

[00:00:44]  Unidentified speaker: Hey, Tracy.

[00:00:45]  Unidentified speaker: Hi, Cameo.

[00:00:46]  Unidentified speaker: Hello.

[00:00:47]  Unidentified speaker: Hi there, Tracy.

[00:00:49]  Cameo: Hi, everybody.

[00:00:49]  Unidentified speaker: Hi.

[00:00:50]  Bruce: So actually, if it's okay, let me actually start with a collection of quotes from Karl Popper. I read a couple of them last time. I'm going to read them again, and then I'm going to do a few more. Just to emphasize that Karl Popper did not see dogmatism as entirely bad. Because we sociologically associate Popper with being an enemy of dogmatism, which is certainly true from a certain point of view. I think we sometimes miss the degree to which he actually did say some positive things about it. So I wanted to emphasize that first to kind of set the stage for the rest of the discussion. So Popper says, it was first in children, later in adults, that I observed the immensely powerful need for regularity. The need which makes them seek for regularities, which makes them sometimes experience regularities, even where there are none, which makes them cling to their expectations dogmatically.

[00:01:41]  Bruce: This is from Objective Knowledge, page 24. Our propensity to look out for regularities and to impose them upon nature leads to the psychological phenomena of dogmatic thinking, or more generally, a dogmatic behavior. This dogmatism is to some extent necessary. Moreover, this dogmatism allows us to approach a good theory in stages by way of approximations. If we accept defeat too easily, we may prevent ourselves from finding that we were even nearly right. This is from Conjecture and Refutation, page 64. He uses the example here of a mental illness and, let's say, a limb that won't move because it's hurt. And he actually says, you may not think of that as an example of dogmatism. This is actually an example of dogmatism. You don't move your arm because it hurts. Dogmatism mentally works the same way. He says, I also later realized the opposite, the value of a dogmatic attitude.

[00:02:33]  Bruce: Somebody had to defend a theory against criticism or it would succumb too easily. Before it had been able to make a contribution to the growth of science, objective knowledge, page 30. The dogmatic attitude of sticking to a theory as long as possible is of considerable significance. Without it, we could never find out what is in the theory. We should give the theory up before we had a real opportunity to finding out its strength. And in consequence, no theory would ever be able to play its role of bringing order into the world, of preparing us for future events, of drawing our attention to events we would otherwise never observe. Conjecture and Refutation, page 420. There is even something like a methodological justification for individual scientists to be dogmatic and biased. Since the method of science is that of critical discussion, it is of great importance that the theories criticized should be tenaciously defended.

[00:03:23]  Bruce: For only in that way can we learn their real power, and only if criticism meets resistance can we learn the full force of a critical argument. Myth of the Framework, page 94. The critical attitude is not so much opposed to the dogmatic attitude as superimposed upon it. Criticism must be directed against the influential beliefs in need of critical revision. In other words, dogmatic beliefs. Conjecture Refutation, page 66. So, I mean, this is actually a fairly powerful set of quotes, especially when I'm taking it completely out of the rest of the context of what Popper is saying. It really does leave you with a more positive view of dogmatism than I think most of us hold. Having said that, let's be honest, dogmatism can be quite bad. Anyone want to disagree with that? No disagreement for me.

[00:04:11]  Unidentified speaker: But I just…

[00:04:13]  Peter: one of the things I just love about Popper is that his stuff just seems to me resonate on so many levels, like on the level of maybe science or more kind of formal discourse, and also just psychologically, I just feel in my own life that that's just how knowledge works. Sometimes you have to kind of dogmatically hold on to a belief a little bit and test it out, and then maybe there's something in the back of your mind thinking that maybe this isn't quite right, maybe someone says something that kind of hits you in a different way, and then that's where you change and move towards truth or however you want to put it. So I just think his comments here just really resonate with me.

[00:05:14]  Bruce: You know, I had a conversation recently with someone, and we were talking about politics, which we've never done an episode on politics. We need to probably do that at some point. I am less concerned with dogmatism within political beliefs than most people are. Although it scares me too. Like, really, there's a lot of things out there that are scary. And let's acknowledge that. But I can see that a lot of the dogmatic attitudes that exist are often pointing towards something approximately that's correct. Not to try to, you know, I could defend anyone, but probably many people listening to the show would have a lot of concerns with wokeism. But even in, wokeism is truly scary. It truly is. I mean, you look at, like, what happened to Bret Weinstein, thank you [unclear]. And it's scary. Or what happened to Nicholas Christakis. And you can see that it, you know, that it is being incredibly dogmatic and it's just scary.

[00:06:11]  Bruce: On the other hand, you can see that it's pointing towards something that is maybe a legitimate problem, even if it's handling it in a very poor way. And there's actual benefit to society from having too much dogmatic of an attitude, as long as there are the necessary filters in place in an open society that allow the true parts to get through while stopping the bad parts. And because of that, I've tended to be a little less worried about dogmatism than I think most people are. I see it more as the long game, whereas it's really scary in the short game and can be really bad. And it's necessary to resist some of these bad ideas, right? If we didn't resist them, then they would end the open society and they would be a problem. But as long as we have that Popperian filter in place, as long as the institutions are staying in place, even these bad ideas have some verisimilitude to them and get through the filter, the good parts get through the filter.

[00:07:09]  Bruce: And that's really where a lot of the progress comes from. I could have said this about anything. I picked wokeism specifically because I know it makes people particularly uncomfortable, particularly in the circles that probably a lot of us run in. But we could say similar things about just about any viewpoint. There are dogmatic attitudes that exist within every single political viewpoint. Some worse than wokeism. I think conservatism right now, I'm a conservative, I feel very close to conservatism. He's got some real dogmatic attitudes that are actually, in my opinion, worse than wokeism right now, that are scary, right? And yet I do…

[00:07:47]  Unidentified speaker: I totally agree.

[00:07:48]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:07:48]  Bruce: Sorry, go ahead, Cameo. Give us your thoughts on that.

[00:07:51]  Cameo: Well, no, they're actually the wokeism and then the place where conservatism are right now, they're the exact same thing. They're almost indiscernible from each other, other than they manifest in different ways. But the things that drive them are the exact same dogmatism.

[00:08:13]  Bruce: Have you guys heard of the horseshoe theory? Are you familiar with that term?

[00:08:17]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, yeah.

[00:08:17]  Bruce: It's the idea that the radical ends of the political spectrum end up meeting each other. They end up closer, almost identical to each other. I think we're seeing a lot of that right now, where you have this radical conservatism and this radical wokeism that are using the same methods, that they act in the same dogmatic ways. They may be reacting to different things, but their tactics are almost identical.

[00:08:48]  Cameo: I was just going to agree. That's exactly what I think we are seeing.

[00:08:51]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:08:51]  Peter: I think I might even go a little bit beyond the horseshoe theory. If you've read Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom, written in 1944, so just right at the tail end of World War II, in his framework, which I think seems spot on to me, he identifies fascism and communism as basically two strains of collectivism, which are opposed to individualism. And once I read that, it just put the whole left-right framework in a really different, just a different dimension. So I might even go beyond horseshoe theory and question the very premise of this left-right thing.

[00:09:46]  Bruce: [Unclear phrase: “I caught me”] to begin with.

[00:09:47]  Peter: Yeah, Jonathan Goldberg's, it's a very unfortunate title, but it's called Liberal Fascism. What he really means is leftist fascism. It's kind of a sensitive, I don't know why he says liberal. I think he thinks of himself as a classical liberal. I don't think people should give up that term. But that's another one that, according to him, this whole associating fascism with the right is based on Stalinist propaganda in the 50s, I think, which influenced a lot of people on the left to try to define fascism as state-sponsored capitalism, which is kind of state-sponsored capitalism?

[00:10:36]  Bruce: What's the difference? It sounds like a different word for the same thing as socialism.

[00:10:41]  Peter: But anyway, I hear what you're saying about horseshoe theory, but I think I might even question the very assumption of the left-right dichotomy.

[00:10:53]  Bruce: There are some forms of dogmatism that scare me more than others. We've had the recent problem with January 6th, where actually dogmatism had led to an attack on the election system. That's a lot more worrisome because you're actually going after one of the institutions that is necessary for an open society to have the ability to question itself. We should be concerned about institutions, but the institutions aren't weak. I mean, the institutions actually do function. I think in a lot of ways, we've seen that, that even with politicians that are actively trying to pull down institutions, it's not something that can just happen overnight, that clearly they've not been able to, in many cases. They've only been able to pull down the weakest of the institutions. That should be somewhat reassuring, the fact that it's optimistic, that we've come up with a system that deals well with dogmatism.

[00:11:50]  Bruce: And in fact, incorporates dogmatism into it. Notice one of those quotes talked about critical rationalism not being the opposite of dogmatism, but superimposed over it. Okay, what he's saying is that it uses dogmatism to some degree to power it, that people get very excited about their political viewpoints and the problems that they see and wanting to solve them. And so they go out and they get politically involved. And that's what actually makes society healthy and work. And yes, sometimes it can veer too far, but it quickly gets slapped down. You know, we really have done a fairly good job of keeping it in check. Even September 6, as bad as it was, it's something very different than what would have happened in a closed society that was dealing with the same sort of dogmatism. In a lot of ways, I see a lot of these things as proof that the open society actually functions exactly the way Popper says it does.

[00:12:48]  Bruce: And it's a very powerful tool that is bigger than us individually in some ways. One thing I kind of left open from the last episode, though, that I think could bother people, and let's maybe talk about this, is I talked about how hard it was to tell if someone was being dogmatic or not. And we gave this example of Popper, where he comes across very dogmatic in this interview, but really, you can't tell. Really, you can't tell. You lack the knowledge to be able to tell. We're determining dogmatism by tells that may or may not actually be tells of dogmatism. It just depends on the circumstance. So this kind of leaves a question, though. Do I believe it's impossible to tell when someone's being dogmatic? No. I actually think that it is possible to tell when someone's being dogmatic. It's just not easy. It's not something you just do. It takes some effort.

[00:13:41]  Bruce: And I definitely have opinions. Like if you were to go out and we were to say, okay, on Twitter, we're talking with all these, you know, twit rats, some of them I consider to be very, very dogmatic. In other words, I don't. And I have opinions. No, my opinions might be wrong. This is one of the things we have to understand. It may be that I'm determining who's dogmatic and who isn't, and I'm doing it by a way that isn't actually accurate. The most obvious being that we tend to determine if someone's dogmatic or not based on whether they agree with us or not, which is clearly not a very viable way to determine dogmatism. And yet I really don't believe that I'm completely up in the night either. I actually do think I can tell that some people are more dogmatic than others.

[00:14:25]  Unidentified speaker: Well, it's like kind of what I was saying last week.

[00:14:28]  Peter: In the most superficial sense, calling someone a dogmatist is kind of just another way of calling someone an asshole, but at a deeper level, it's probably a little harder to judge, is what I hear you saying.

[00:14:43]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:14:44]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:14:44]  Bruce: So the question I wanted to ask, though, to all of you, and I've got some of my own ideas, but none of them are great. I mean, I don't have any definitive ideas here. I got one definitive idea, which I'll share at the end here, but how would you go about properly detecting if someone is being dogmatic or not? Or for that matter, let's turn this around, because it's probably more important to do it the other way. How might you tell if you're being dogmatic?

[00:15:09]  Unidentified speaker: So that you can try it out.

[00:15:09]  Cameo: I think that that's a much better question, because I think it's easier to put that negative implication on somebody else than it is to question whether or not you're being dogmatic yourself.

[00:15:23]  Bruce: They're both hard, aren't they? For the opposite reason, though. I've got a tendency to see someone I'm disagreeing with as being dogmatic, whereas I've got a tendency to not see myself as dogmatic. I suspect I'm not alone in having that problem. What are ways that actually are signs of dogmatism? Or maybe that's even a bad question. Feel free to answer that question or answer this one. What could you do to try to avoid or deal with or mitigate your own dogmatism?

[00:15:57]  Peter: Well, Popper's one of his basic claims is that we should try to be… work towards falsifying our own ideas.

[00:16:06]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:16:06]  Peter: I think that's something that kind of comes into my mind as a useful framework there.

[00:16:14]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:16:15]  Bruce: So let me ask you a question, though. You've talked to a lot of people who would consider themselves to be critical rationalists. You're like the leader of one of the main groups on Facebook.

[00:16:24]  Peter: Well, sort of, yeah.

[00:16:26]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:16:28]  Peter: Please keep in mind, I think I only discovered this stuff about two years ago, so I'm relatively new.

[00:16:34]  Bruce: And you're not on Twitter, I don't think, but I've dealt a lot with them. I call them F-book rats and Twitter rats. What does trying to falsify your own ideas mean? I mean, if I were to take, let's say I'm now thinking of the most dogmatic of the twit rats, do you think he thinks he's not trying to falsify his own ideas?

[00:16:57]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:16:58]  Bruce: He does. He very sincerely believes he's doing his best to falsify his own ideas, even while in the midst of really massively obvious confirmation bias that absolutely everyone around him knows is going on. What does it mean to falsify our ideas? And how do you know if you're trying to falsify your ideas?

[00:17:18]  Peter: Well, I think it's just something you got to ask yourself every single day.

[00:17:21]  Bruce: I don't know. I don't know if there's an easy answer.

[00:17:24]  Peter: I mean, take something like, when I read Sam Harris' book on free will, I said, this is it. This is the final word. Free will is an illusion. I felt like I just saw that so clearly. And well, as time went on, I argued for it. Most of the arguments, I mean, I argued against it, I should say. Most of the arguments I heard in favor of free will just didn't quite go anywhere for me. Well, getting more into the critical rationalist thing, and it was just really just a light bulb going off in my mind on many, many levels. And I just suddenly just became so much more interested in philosophy. I think I've always wanted to be more into philosophy, but I never really read philosophers that went anywhere for me. I mean, maybe there'd be an idea here or there, but anyway, so I just got into this whole thing, and now I consider myself sort of more of an agnostic on free will, and a lot of the compatibilist arguments make sense to me.

[00:18:42]  Peter: A lot of the ideas that maybe free will is sort of a strange concept that can mean different things to different people make a lot of sense to me. Maybe the idea that big things can influence small things just as small things influence big things, sort of an anti-reductionist argument kind of makes sense to me. So, you know, I've got a little bit different direction there, but then I also have to ask myself, well, maybe I'm just dogmatically accepting a new world view, and maybe I should be requesting… [word unclear] I don't know if there's an easy answer there, but, you know, sometimes in life you kind of just have to go towards what makes sense to you, I think, and always ask yourself, am I being a dogmatist? But, you know, there's no easy answer, I guess.

[00:19:30]  Bruce: Cameo and Tracy, do you guys have any ideas on this?

[00:19:32]  Tracy: Well, I don't know. For me, it's a difficult question to answer. I agree with Peter, I don't really think there's a great answer because I feel like I'm trying to do this with myself all the time, but sometimes to the point of maybe almost gaslighting myself.

[00:19:46]  Unidentified speaker: So, it's hard.

[00:19:48]  Tracy: I wish I had a better answer.

[00:19:51]  Cameo: I've been, this is actually something that I wonder a lot, and kind of with varying severity. I've wondered, does everybody who we would consider a troll, do they know that they're a troll? And I think a lot about the meme of if somebody typing ferociously and they're saying, hold on, somebody said something on the internet that's wrong. You know, is it virtuous to see somebody saying something that's wrong and choose to walk on by and not correct them? Do we have an obligation as a human to correct every time that we see something is said wrong? Is there things that are acceptable to be continued to propagate that are lies that aren't maybe [wording unclear] worth our energy to debate? Or that there's benefit of being civil and polite with people versus showing them the error of an assumption or a place that we disagree with them?

[00:21:07]  Bruce: Cameo, answer your own question as best you can.

[00:21:11]  Cameo: Well, and I'm going to kind of say what Tracy said. I will admit that I don't know. I do think that there are differences of opinion, like, is Star Wars better than Star Trek?

[00:21:25]  Bruce: Oh, no, that's not a matter of… Sorry, go on, go on.

[00:21:31]  Unidentified speaker: The funniest thing is I don't even know which direction you're going to vote.

[00:21:34]  Bruce: I don't know either. I just said it to be funny.

[00:21:36]  Cameo: But like those, I think that those are not questions worthy of debate, probably. And civility, I think, demands that we not, that we not overly spend time being dogmatic about that, which is still just comes down to our personal preference.

[00:21:58]  Bruce: Preferences, right.

[00:21:59]  Cameo: I don't think people know when they're being trolls necessarily. And I think it is actually very difficult to understand when you're being dogmatic. Kind of to what Peter said, for a long time, you had like a belief that you were fairly unwielding [word unclear] about. And, you know, anytime you're not willing to like sit down and see a different point of view, you're being dogmatic.

[00:22:25]  Bruce: That was a good statement. You know, there's a famous saying from John Stuart Mill. He says, he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. I actually think, I'll come back to this, but I actually think that gets to probably the best possible answer. To this question. It's hard to answer this question. It definitely is. Cameo, before I move on though, you mentioned something, I saw you recently in real life, and you made a comment that I thought was interesting. How it was something to the effect of that, we tend to see someone who's arguing semantics as being dogmatic, but those two aren't necessarily connected or something to that effect. I may be getting you wrong here.

[00:23:09]  Cameo: No, that was what I said.

[00:23:11]  Bruce: Okay. Tell me what you were thinking there.

[00:23:14]  Cameo: Well, so when we did the episode way back about Shiri's scissors, you know, Shiri's scissors sometimes isn't about the concepts, it's about the words that we use and the way that we use them that kind of obscure the underlying concept because we get fixated on the word. And I think that that's where the semantics come in. There can be words that make it so that we can't think through the rest of the argument. And so then we get fixated on the word. I was having a conversation with one of my employees and one of my peers about some particular processes that we use in our organization, and he was using a word to mean something that to me didn't belong in that concept. And I was like super fixated on it. And if I had chosen to be dogmatic, well, no, if I had chosen to adhere to the semantics, where the word made it so I couldn't ask him and be open and receptive to what, how are you using that word in this situation?

[00:24:32]  Cameo: And then once we talked through what the actual thing was, taking the word out of the, taking the Shiri Scissor concept out of it or the word out of it, then I could view the actual concept and see that there was not actual disagreements. There was just a word that for me meant something that I was so strongly opposed to, I couldn't think past that. So that's where like semantics and dogmatic, I think that's where that overlap is. I think there are a lot of words for people that evoke such a powerful underlying concept that they have to argue the semantics because the word is defining everything within the context of the conversation. Do you know, arguing semantics isn't necessarily the same thing as being dogmatic.

[00:25:24]  Bruce: So I wrote a series of blog posts on this very subject. So I've actually been thinking about that quite a bit because I've noticed that too. One of the more humorous examples of this that I've had is when I hear somebody say, we don't live in a democracy in the United States of America, we live in a republic. And I've had this conversation with numerous people who have said this, and they always take exactly the same stance. I will immediately say, no, that is not correct, because the word democracy is more broad and includes the concept of republic. And they'll say, no, you're wrong. That is not what the word republic means. I'll say, fine, look it up in any dictionary. They immediately go to the dictionary, and it immediately it says a democracy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the first thing they do every single time is they declare the dictionary wrong.

[00:26:18]  Bruce: And I know what's going on in their heads, okay?

[00:26:21]  Unidentified speaker: [Overlapping speech; unclear: “They’re very wrong.”]

[00:26:24]  Bruce: And I swear, I've had this conversation probably a dozen times, and it goes the same way every single time.

[00:26:30]  Unidentified speaker: I don't doubt it.

[00:26:31]  Cameo: I've seen it happen online. The same conversation. I've seen it happen.

[00:26:35]  Bruce: And it's really, it's kind of humorous. What's going on is that they're making a philosophical error. And there's even a term for it. It's called essentialism. Essentialism is a broader philosophical concept. So I call it word essentialism when applied to words. And it's the idea that the original idea of essentialism comes from, like, Plato. So it goes way back. And it's the idea that you gain knowledge by defining things. It's false. It's a false idea. Words don't matter in and of themselves. They do matter politically. I should probably make that distinction. They absolutely matter politically. But in terms of critical rationalism, words are meaningless. Okay, you use them to convey an idea. It's the idea that matters. And there may be multiple words that can convey that idea. There may be no word that can convey that idea, but you've still got to use the closest words you can find until the other person can develop that idea in their head.

[00:27:30]  Bruce: Think back to chat botting versus actually creatively understanding the other person. You have to get them to understand through words. There may be no word in the English language that exactly conveys the idea that you just invented creatively. That's not surprising. And people will get so bent out of shape over words.

[00:27:51]  Peter: Now that I think of it, this concept of critique of essentialism has got to be one of the most powerful ways to see through dogmatism. I mean, I think probably in most cases, when someone is being dogmatic, including ourselves, what it really comes down to is arguing about words. And we should never do that. We should strive to look at meaning behind words. I mean, I think Karl Popper just considered it sort of a banal fact of life that words mean different things to different people.

[00:28:30]  Bruce: In different contexts.

[00:28:32]  Cameo: Well, it might be a banal fact of life, but it's also kind of at the core of our ability to even be able to create knowledge.

[00:28:41]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:28:42]  Unidentified speaker: Fair enough.

[00:28:43]  Cameo: We have no other way to describe concepts that, you know, we can try and mime them. We can make an interpretive dance about... We can make a painting that tries to describe, but, you know, complex ideas have to be... We have to use the... You know, we only... We just have the one little tool, and it's the words that we have.

[00:29:13]  Bruce: So one of the things that... I love the book Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter, for a number of reasons. But one of the things he really points out is that when you go to a dictionary, and it's like, if you look up the word republic in a dictionary, it's going to have multiple definitions. So this is one of the first things I'm trying to convey to the person who makes an honestly dumb statement like we live in a republic instead of a democracy, right? Because I'm trying to get them to understand words don't have single meanings. Okay, the very fact that you can go to a dictionary and it has multiple meanings, that's at least a reminder of that. But Hofstadter points out that words don't have the five meanings that are in the dictionary. They have maybe thousands of meanings.

[00:29:55]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:29:55]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:29:56]  Bruce: And if you don't understand that, some great examples like from Steven Pinker, he gives the example of a bachelor. So bachelor is often used as an example of how essentialism is correct. Like if you're an essentialist, essentialism is not correct. But if you're an essentialist, you'll say, oh, well, a bachelor means an unmarried male. Like that is the essence of that word. It doesn't mean anything else. Well, that just isn't true, Steven Pinker points out. He's a psychologist of language. I can't remember exactly what he is, but he deals a lot with linguistics and things like that. He points out that if your friend came to you and said, hey, invite all your bachelor friends to this party, he then goes through a list of your friends that you need to decide who to invite to the party. And he gives examples of like an old guy who was married, you know, he's in his 90s, but he's no longer married because his wife died.

[00:30:49]  Bruce: And, you know, your gay friend who isn't married but is male, the 13-year-old friend that's male, the 13-year-old friend living with his parents versus the 13-year-old friend that owns his own company. And he really forces you to think about the fact that the word bachelor does not have a meaning. It's got this halo of meanings, and you have to use the context of where it was used to figure out how to apply it to that context. And it's got thousands of possible meanings, just depending on the content. And somehow we very intelligently get down to, okay, I think this is what this person means in this context.

[00:31:31]  Cameo: Well, and a word like bachelor is child's play. Take a word like up, shut up, get up. Like you can play a game of thinking about all the different ways that we use the word up. And only a very small percentage of them have to do with raising something.

[00:31:52]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:31:54]  Cameo: And we use it colloquially.

[00:31:57]  Unidentified speaker: We use it.

[00:31:58]  Cameo: It's just, it's really, really fascinating.

[00:32:00]  Bruce: Yes, it is. Okay. So in this world where words literally have no meaning, okay, we use them as signposts so that they culturally, we know to use certain words in certain contexts to convey certain ideas. And there's enough little different subcultures that not everyone's going to communicate well. And you have to actually stop and do exactly what Cameo… If you're interested in getting at the truth, if you're a critical rationalist, you have to actually stop and you have to do exactly what Cameo did. You have to say, what do you mean by that word? This is where defining words is okay, is when you're getting the other person to define what they meant, so that you can get at the idea they're talking about, rather than the word that they're using. Where it's never okay, and where you are making the essentialist error if you're doing it, is when you insist someone used a word wrong, and that they have to use your definition, because it's the only definition that exists.

[00:33:02]  Bruce: If you ever find yourself doing that, you are in the wrong. If you're doing it the other way, where you're asking the person to explain themselves better, that's okay. That is a benign and good use of definitions. And this is why language at once does matter, as Cameo is saying, and doesn't matter, as Peter is saying, is because it depends on which direction you're talking about. It even makes sense to think very carefully about your own words. One of the things that I struggle with and also can see where they're coming from is the twit rats on Twitter. They have this war of words that's going on, where if you ever use any word that sounds, that use the word justify, or you ever use any word that talks about learning from experience or any phrase, they'll immediately jump down your throat. No, that's impossible. Okay. And that is a mistake that they do that.

[00:33:57]  Bruce: That is wrong. That is essentialism. On the other hand, when you're thinking about how to say it yourself, that makes perfect sense. And it depends on which side you're on, right? Because if I were to say to someone, yeah, well, how do you justify this? I'm not necessarily saying anything wrong. What I have in mind may be just fine, even though I use the word justify, because the word justify has many, many meanings, some of which are completely fine by Popper, right? But the very fact that I use that term may evoke wrong ideas in other people, and it may make more sense for me to be more careful with my terms. So you have to, it's at once important to think about your words, and also completely pointless. It just depends on which side you're on at the moment.

[00:34:43]  Peter: One thing I have tried to do online is sort of, try to avoid things that can be sort of trigger words for people, like, for example, the word virtue signal. Well, to me, it's a tremendous, how I define it in my own mind, it's a tremendously useful concept to describe something that humans of all kinds have a tendency to do. I think it comes from evolutionary psychology originally, or it doesn't matter where it comes from. I just find it to be a useful term. Well, as you can imagine, to a certain person, it's just a dog whistle to the far right, and anyone who says the word virtue signal thinks this and this and this. At some point, you think, well, maybe I should try to find a different word to mean the same thing. Maybe some people have a similar reaction to the word justified, a much smaller subset maybe.

[00:35:48]  Cameo: Well, and when we go back to the comment I made about would you know if you were a troll, I think what defines a troll is choosing always to use the trigger as the entry point to the conversation. And then put the onus on the other person to see past the trigger and choose to say is this what you mean? I think the mark of choosing to not be a troll is how can I disagree with you without using words that I know are purposefully there almost to be weaponized.

[00:36:25]  Bruce: Okay, let me take that as an example for a second. So first of all, let me just point out that words really do matter. So when Popper talks about words don't matter, I take that to mean within the context of a critical rational discussion. It shouldn't matter which words you use. It should be a matter of trying to dig down with each other as to what you meant. However, in a political discussion, that just isn't true. If Popper meant that, maybe Popper meant we shouldn't be like this, but we certainly are. Where we do have to learn to push back on certain terms. I would be willing in a open-minded critical rationalist discussion to change my terms and to say, okay, I'm using this term, you're not liking it, give me a term for this, and I might be willing to switch, right, and progress in the conversation in the other person's terms. I may not be willing to in a political discussion, because there could be some sort of trollish trying to win points just by connotation going on.

[00:37:23]  Bruce: And that may be precisely what I'm resisting, in which case I'm not willing to embrace the other side's use of terms, even if they explain to me what they mean, because I know they're doing it to be a troll.

[00:37:36]  Cameo: You know, this is also why I refuse, as a matter of course, to engage in almost any political conversation. Because I think that this is true for a lot of people, and it's part of how we end up so unbelievably polarized.

[00:37:53]  Bruce: Yeah. So let's talk about techniques to avoid being dogmatic that seem on the surface like they're good ideas. May even be, as a rule of thumb, good ideas, but that I've seen corrupted to the point where they don't work. And I think this is important because a lot of the different tactics that you come up with to avoid dogmatism aren't that hard to corrupt. And this is one of the tough things about trying to get around dogmatism. So one I've heard before is, I will never fail to respond to a criticism. On the surface, and Bart has suggested the idea, never walk away from a conversation. On the surface, these really seem like good ideas. And if I'm talking about Peter, that's always going to be true. I'm never going to walk away from a conversation with Peter, because I know Peter's asking me sincere questions. He's not being a troll. Even if we're disagreeing, I'm going to want to work through that.

[00:38:44]  Bruce: I'm going to want to talk through with the person. But it is not hard to weaponize the idea, I will never walk away from a conversation, or I will never fail to respond to criticism. I've seen two people, I won't mention them by name, who have weaponized this to a fine art. One of them is not malicious, he's just a little self-deluded on this. The other one is literally malicious, to the point where he's just a bad person. Both of them do the same trick though. They've got boundless energy, they will just, if necessary, they'll just keep repeating their same arguments over and over again. They will intentionally say things to get you upset, so that you want to withdraw from the conversation. One of them, the malicious one, will make threats at you to get you to drop out of the conversation so that he can claim you were the one that walked away, not him.

[00:39:33]  Bruce: The other one just wears you down. He will chat bot you, he will not understand what you're saying, and then he will just keep repeating his same arguments that you've already responded to until you leave, and then he tells himself, I didn't walk away from the conversation. It's not even hard, right? It's not even difficult to weaponize this one if you want to, which is why I'm not sure that this rule is actually a true rule. Certainly not as a universal rule, maybe as a rule of thumb.

[00:39:58]  Peter: Yeah, I mean, I like the idea, but my real world experience is more that walking away from a conversation online can just be very valuable for your psychological health, if it's just not going anywhere productive.

[00:40:14]  Bruce: I agree. Another one that I've heard is, I will only withdraw from a conversation when someone gets upset or acts inappropriately. Again, this one sounds so benign, which it almost sounds like what Peter just said, right? But I've seen it weaponized. I can think of somebody on Twitter who uses this technique. Now, basically, think about conversations. Think about any conversation that matters. People are going to get a little heated, and it's impossible to understand what the other person is saying in one try. We talk about chatbotting. The problem with the concept of chatbotting is that a person can legitimately misunderstand you, or they can be just, they're never going to understand you, or they could just be legitimately misunderstanding you, but they'll be willing to come around if you keep working with them. You don't get to tell upfront, which it is.

[00:41:00]  Bruce: If you are judging the person, so the person I've seen use this, weaponize this, they will get upset over grammatical errors and then drop out of the conversation. They will get upset. They'll get upset because you said something slightly offensive or could be read that way or maybe was offensive. It wasn't as bad as things they've said. And then they say, that's it. I'm done. And they withdraw from the conversation. Well, it's not too hard to see that you could very easily practice confirmation bias while following this rule. You could be very seriously practicing a severe form of confirmation bias by following this rule. So this one, as good as it may sound on the surface, again, can only be used as a rule of thumb. It's not a universal rule that you can follow to avoid dogmatism. And then, as I mentioned, the single best tactic that you could possibly use is just to never understand what the other person is saying.

[00:41:55]  Bruce: Anything, any tactic you come up with, if you're chatbotting the person, is going to not be effective. If you're not actually understanding what the other person is saying, you can use any tactic you want to avoid dogmatism, and you're still going to be dogmatic. And it's not that hard to misunderstand, because words don't have meanings. You have to actually actively, creatively engage the person, and you have to put effort into it, and it's not easy to understand them. Or you can go with the simple method and just not understand them. And it's always easy to misunderstand. That is just easier. Because of that, I think that most of the tactics that I've seen just don't work. Okay, because at the end of the day, it really boils down to the John Stuart Mill thing. Do you actually understand the other argument? And that is the ultimate way to avoid dogmatism.

[00:42:51]  Cameo: Well, and I'm going to add a different word in that sentence. Do you want to understand the other argument?

[00:42:58]  Bruce: Do you want to understand? Yes.

[00:43:00]  Cameo: Because my dad used to always say, and my dad's a famous arguer, but he used to always say, you can never bring somebody around to your way of thinking unless they have a desire to be brought around.

[00:43:15]  Bruce: So I have a tactic that I've used that I don't necessarily recommend this tactic. It's kind of an aggressive tactic, and people dislike it. And so because of that, at least at this point in time culturally, it may not be the best tactic. If we were to embrace it as a society, and it was not seen as aggressive anymore, it would be a phenomenally good tactic. And it's this, can you restate the other person's point of view in a way that they can accept it?

[00:43:45]  Peter: That's steel manning, isn't it?

[00:43:47]  Bruce: Well, it would require steel manning to be able to do it. And it is hard. Okay, I have on numerous occasions when I can tell the person is just not understanding what I'm saying and possibly chat botting me, I'll say, would you be willing to do an exchange where I state what you're saying in words that you'll accept, and then you have to do the same thing back for me? I have had one person suggest this to me. I did it. They changed one phrase. Then they accepted my statement. Then they tried to do it for me, couldn't, gave up and moved on and would refuse to give… to do the same thing back for me. I had one person I suggested it to, who accepted it. I restated to him what he was saying. He changed one word, which in my opinion made no difference, but he felt very strongly about that word. He then accepted it. He could not restate what I was saying, and he dropped out of the conversation after that.

[00:44:43]  Bruce: So it's hard, right? I mean, it's doing this tactic is not going to win you friends. I have made this suggestion to numerous other people, and the most common response is the person ignores the request. They simply don't respond to it at all. The other second most common response is that they'll explain why they're not going to. They'll say, you just need to respond to what I'm saying or some variant of that. It is not a well-received tactic. It is perceived as uber aggressive, and it makes you look bad in all honesty. But it's interesting that people don't like it, because I think it does force you. It's literally impossible to do while chatbotting. You cannot do it while chatbotting. You have to actually stop and go back, read what the person was saying, try to understand what their point was. Then you have to figure out how to string that together into a summary.

[00:45:38]  Bruce: And it is incredibly hard. It's emotionally difficult. It's intellectually difficult. But imagine if we all did it. What if we all kind of accepted, hey, when having internet conversations, that's a normal thing to have to do, and it's no longer perceived as aggressive. We would communicate way more. If you do it, by the way, you have to offer to go first. If you're making the other person go first, then obviously it could be easily corrupted into a tactic where you simply do it and then pull out. And then you could slow down every conversation that way. It could very quickly become a weapon of dogmatism. But if you have to go first, then you have to do all the work, and you have to take all the risk up front that the person may pull out when it's their turn. So if you do use this tactic, make sure that you offer to go first. But it is an aggressive tactic, and I have mixed feelings over it because of how poorly received it is.

[00:46:34]  Bruce: So getting back to Peter talking about trying to falsify your own ideas, to Popper, the word falsification means something very specific. It means an observation statement that goes against your theory. It doesn't mean the more twit-rat “I've made some sort of criticism against this theory, and I think it's a good criticism.” And this turns out to actually be super important to the concept of dogmatism and why science works. And a lot of people have missed this. Even a lot of people who are critical rationalists have missed this. Popper's original epistemology applied only to empirical science. And he admitted you could generalize it to other things. And Deutsch really played that up. He said empirical observations aren't the only way to criticize a theory and to refute a theory, since he uses the word refute. Popper only uses the word refute to mean an observation statement.

[00:47:30]  Bruce: Deutsch doesn't. So he says that's the only way to refute a theory. [Scope unclear here.] You can do it by criticism. You can do it by more general criticisms. What Deutsch is saying is true. Okay. But it's missing something important about Popper, which is that Popper had come up with a way to objectively criticize theories. One that you couldn't… never was subjective or a matter of opinion. And it only applies to empirical theories. And that is you have an observation statement that goes against that theory that everyone can intersubjectively reproduce. When you have that, there is clearly a problem that has to be resolved. And it's no longer subjective or a matter of intuition or a matter of, well, I think that was a good criticism. The moment you try to generalize Popper, which is not necessarily a bad thing to do at all. In fact, it's a necessary thing.

[00:48:17]  Bruce: It's a great deal of what I'm trying to do with my work in artificial intelligence, is what's the generalization of Popper. The problem is that the generalization of Popper, saying, well, we can offer any sort of criticism, and we should allow all criticisms to the table, and we should use those to decide which ones to even get to the point where we do empirical tests. All that is true, but it misses the point that there is no known way to tell which criticisms are better and which aren't, and that there's a huge amount of just intuition and subjectiveness that goes into this generalization of Popper. Because of this, Popper was trying to, he's not saying don't do that, but he was trying to say there's something special about empirical theories where we have one of the only known objective ways to be able to say, this theory is actually worse than this one in this objective sort of way.

[00:49:12]  Bruce: And Bruce Caldwell, in his marvelous paper, Clarifying Popper, talks about what he calls, one, falsificationism, the original theory of Popper, and then he calls the more generalized version critical rationalism.

[00:49:27]  Unidentified speaker: That's probably not the way most people use those terms.

[00:49:28]  Bruce: That's how he uses them. And he says, he points out this difference, that falsificationism is more objective and that critical rationalism is true, but it's hard to know what criticisms get to count as better and which criticisms get to count as worse. And then that's something we still need to work out that we don't fully understand. And I think he's right about that. And I think that's also one of the reasons why a lot of the critical rationalists on social media have gone off the rails on a few of their theories, is because they've misunderstood the difference between falsificationism and critical rationalism, as Bruce Caldwell would use those terms. I'm not suggesting that's the only way to use those terms. Obviously, critical rationalism is often used as just a synonym for falsificationism, and that's really common. And this is something that actually, I think, all came out of my conversation with Danny Frederick, where I suddenly realized, oh, there's a distinction here I've missed.

[00:50:24]  Bruce: There's different ways you can use the word refutation. Popper used it specifically as an observation, never used it any other way. And here is, by the way, here is Popper talking about this, which in a fantastic passage where he's trying to explain what the objective criteria for science is. So one of the things that I've often criticized is if you're on Facebook or something like that, you're going to see people post things about the way a scientist thinks compared to a normal person. And they're going to give these kind of inductive type things, or they'll be saying, you know, the scientist is actually, you know, there's someone who's willing to change their mind when new data comes in, or something like that. And I always kind of chuckle a little when I see these, because it misemphasizes what really matters in science. What matters in science is the community, not the individual, not the way the individual thinks.

[00:51:20]  Bruce: The individual scientists may all be dogmatic, could all be dogmatic, and science would still work if it's got the right institutions. And Popper talks about this. He says, objectivity in science is bound, this is from, by the way, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume 2, is closely bound up with the social aspect of the scientific method, with the fact that science and scientific objectivity do not and cannot result from the attempts of an individual scientist to be objective, but from the friendly, hostile cooperation of many scientists. Scientific objectivity can be described as the intersubjectivity of scientific method. But this social aspect of science is almost entirely neglected by those who call themselves sociologists of knowledge. Two aspects of the method of natural sciences are of the importance of this connection [wording unclear].

[00:52:13]  Bruce: Together they constitute, what I may term, the public character of scientific method. First, there is something approaching free criticism. A scientist may offer his theory with full conviction that it is unassailable. But this will not impress his fellow scientists and competitors, rather it challenges them. They know that the scientific attitude means criticizing everything, and they are little deterred even by authorities. Secondly, scientists try to avoid talking at cross purposes. They try very seriously to speak one and the same language, even if they use different mother tongues. In the natural science, this is achieved by recognizing experience as the impartial arbiter of their controversies. When speaking of experience, I have in mind… of a public character [wording unclear] like observations and experiments, as opposed to experience in the sense of more private aesthetic or religious experience.

[00:53:09]  Bruce: And experience is public if everybody who takes the trouble can repeat it. That really kind of wraps up Popper's actual view on the scientific method, which he denies even exists, depending on what you mean by scientific method. But it's really the social aspects of science. It's the fact that not only that you criticize each other, but that there is this super importance laid culturally within the scientific community on observations, and the fact that observations are objective because they're intersubjective, because anyone can go out and repeat them and say, yep, that's a problem, and doesn't have to take anybody else's word for it, doesn't have to rely on somebody else's point of view. That is the nature of science and why science has this objective quality that can keep demonstrating progress. Interestingly, Popper then goes on to give an example, and I always thought this was funny.

[00:54:03]  Bruce: He talks about a scientist who lives on an island by himself, and I always cannot help but think of the professor from Gilligan's Island. So we've got this Robinson Crusoe scientist who tries to do science on his own and comes up with science on his own. Many of us would probably think of that as legitimate science, and in a sense it is, depending on what you mean by science, because again, the word science doesn't have a single meaning. But Popper challenges the idea that this is really the same as what he means by science. In fact, he says that, concerning the scientific papers of this professor, it is only in attempts to explain his work to somebody who has not done it that he could acquire the discipline of clear and reasoned communication, which too is part of the scientific method. He likens this professor doing science on this island by himself as being not that much different than someone who received as a revelation from God a book that explains all these scientific theories.

[00:55:01]  Bruce: And then later, a scientist actually creates the same book. And so this clairvoyant person actually saw the future and saw this book. He actually likens the scientist on the island as being closer to the clairvoyant who receives by revelation the book. I don't even know if I fully agree with that, but I see what he's trying to say when he brings up this example. I think this is one of the more interesting questions, and I wish Popper had spent way more time on this question. Charles Peirce has apparently spent way more time on this question. Jonathan Rauch's book, The Constitution of Knowledge, excellent book, talks about Charles Peirce's theories that science is based on a community rather than an individual. And Popper accepted that. Peirce came before Popper. A lot of Popper’s ideas come from Peirce.

[00:55:50]  Peter: So if the scientist on the island was not a regular scientist, but an AI, would this scientist be capable of creating knowledge and progressing science?

[00:56:06]  Bruce: So here's my belief on this. And I believe this is what Popper is actually saying. Obviously, you can self-criticize. And so you can create knowledge in the sense that you can self-criticize. So you are capable of creating knowledge. But you are ultimately, as a single individual, you are dogmatic. And that's just part of the nature of being who you are.

[00:56:27]  Peter: And an AGI would be just the same, then?

[00:56:30]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:56:33]  Bruce: Because of that, what you have to have to really have the kind of open-ended knowledge creation of science is you have to have a community. Different people with different diverse ideas, dogmatically diverse. The reason why dogmatism isn't a huge problem within the open society is for the exact same reason that dogmatism isn't a huge problem within the scientific community. That there are institutions in place that filter out and force the person to have to be subjected to criticism. This is maybe one of the better techniques when we're talking about trying to deal with your own dogmatism. If you're at least going out there and engaging other people and subjecting your views to criticism, even if you're completely dogmatic about it, you can't help but have some new ideas creep in. So just keep doing it. And to some degree, I think that the answer is, don't worry so much about your dogmatism, because we're all dogmatic, right?

[00:57:36]  Bruce: Embrace your dogmatism to some degree. You've got this idea, Peter, you read Sam Harris' book, and so you're going to go actively argue that free will is an illusion, because you read his book. And thank goodness you're going to do that, because Sam Harris isn't saying nonsense when he says that. There is some sort of truth, verisimilitude in his ideas, and you're helping expose those ideas to criticism by going out and dogmatically arguing with people about it. It almost doesn't matter. Like, if you're worried so much about, oh no, am I being dogmatic? I mean, that's true. Maybe you should worry about that, but maybe you shouldn't. Maybe you just go ahead and have fun, and hey, I read Sam Harris' book, and I think this is the right opinion, and go defend it. And over time, you won't be able to help yourself. It may take a long time, right?

[00:58:28]  Bruce: It might be a lifetime, but you won't be able to help yourself forever. As you go out and you encounter other viewpoints that push back against you, you're going to start picking up on it, which is what happened to you, right?

[00:58:39]  Peter: So let me ask you this, Bruce, big picture. So kind of what I hear you saying and what I hear Popper saying, I guess, is that just this premise that moving towards truth or creating knowledge, it's not easy. If it was easy, I think it would be pretty obvious. It's not a matter of just following rules. Heated conversation might have its place. Polarization might have its place. Civil conversation has its place, of course. And maybe even dogmatism has its place. I guess there's gotta be still some basic principles to cling to. Error correction is something that comes to mind.

[00:59:33]  Bruce: I like what both David Deutsch and Ray Percival have actually said about this. They really emphasize the fact that as human beings, we often talk about how dogmatic human beings are. And I've been talking about this this whole time. Clearly, I agree in a certain sense that human beings are highly dogmatic. We're not highly dogmatic on every subject. We aren't. In fact, on the vast majority of subjects, we're non-dogmatic. If I were to go out and I were to say, you know what, let's have a discussion about why aspirin works, you know, or if aspirin works, we're not going to find a lot of pushback because the vast majority of human beings have systematically addressed that rationally. And we have good reasons to accept that it does work or what the explanations are. By the way, they for a long time didn't know how aspirin worked. Apparently, they have an explanation now.

[01:00:23]  Bruce: We're really just non-dogmatic on the vast majority of issues. And the fact that we are dogmatic on a few issues, if everyone were dogmatic on exactly the same issues, we'd be in trouble. But that just isn't the way it works. Right? I mean, like, not everybody's dogmatic on the same political issues. You may be dogmatic on several political issues, but not everybody in the world is dogmatic on those issues. You may have two groups, and it may get presented in the media as those on the right are dogmatic on this issue this way, and those on the left are dogmatic on this issue this way. And the media reinforces that view. But in real life, what you'll find is that just isn't the way it is. There is a group that's dogmatic, and they're very vocal on both sides. If I could use a straightforward example that's offensive, but I don't intend as long conversation because of that [wording unclear], it's abortion.

[01:01:17]  Bruce: You've got only two points of views have been discussed in the media for forever. And the vast majority of people in the United States hold neither viewpoint and actually hold a much more moderate viewpoint in the middle. And there's tons of studies that have shown this. But it's really the media picks up the vocal people. And so you get the vocal people on one side, it's a baby, and the vocal people on the other side, it's the woman's body. And that's all you get to hear. And vast majority of people disagree with both points of view. And have this carefully nuanced middle view that exists. And that's the actual majority view.

[01:01:56]  Cameo: So for all of this conversation today, I don't, and in spite of the fact that we've talked about this kind of thing before, I don't know if I understand why it is that that happens on something so nuanced that nobody agrees with the viewpoints that are regularly spouted. Like, how does the conversations that are actually matter to people never make it to the forefront?

[01:02:21]  Bruce: That's a really good question, Cameo. And that question deserves its own podcast, honestly. And it's frustrating, isn't it? I mean, like everything in politics is, it is so hard to have a nuanced conversation, political conversation, at least in the media. I think that what you'll find, I mean, like if I were to say, hey, can each of you think of people you've had a nuanced conversation, political conversation with on the following subject? Probably all of us can, because we're having nuanced conversations on political subjects. It's pretty normal. You just can't find it publicly in the media, particularly if you try to talk to politicians who have this strong incentive for various reasons, including how the primary system works, that they need to stick with certain talking points, and they need to stick with certain points of view that their base expects them to say.

[01:03:16]  Bruce: And man, it's frustrating. I remember, I used to be very political when I was younger. Staunch conservative, good conservative, just like you'd expect growing up in a conservative religious family. And I was watching the debate between the first President Bush’s, Dan Quayle, and the other vice president, Bentsen. And there was the whole thing where they kept asking Dan Quayle the question, if the president were to die, what would you do? Which is honestly a stupid question. And Dan Quayle knew it was. So he answered the real question that they were asking, which is, are you competent to handle the presidency? And because he answered not the question that they asked, which was a stupid and unanswerable question, and instead answered the one they actually meant, they kept re-asking him the question. The moderator kept re-asking him the question to make fun of him.

[01:04:07]  Bruce: And Bentsen, and during one of the conversations, Dan Quayle says, I'm not too young to be the president. I'm the same age as Kennedy. And Bentsen jumped on that and said, I've known, you know, Kennedy. You're no Kennedy. And, you know, of course, this is what went all through the media, is he had smacked down Quayle. Quayle was not playing the political game. He was exactly what you should want of a politician. And I was so frustrated that the...

[01:04:33]  Peter: That's really interesting, the context behind that remark.

[01:04:36]  Bruce: Yes.

[01:04:37]  Peter: I did not remember that at all.

[01:04:40]  Bruce: So Quayle was exactly what I wanted in a politician. And to see him just dredge… [word unclear] Quayle has problems. I'm not saying he doesn't. But just in terms of this one particular issue, he had done everything exactly right in terms of open-minded, trying to have a discussion about an actual issue. It was just, he was horrible, and they had to hide him after that. They gave an example of him answering the question later, how he should have. And of course, it was a completely meaningless answer. I would build upon the great presidency of President Bush. Completely meaningless answer was what they were looking for, and that would have allowed him to get past that and seem like he had given a good answer. And I was so frustrated. I was so frustrated that the type of conversation that was critical and mattered and got to the heart of the issue was seen as a bad answer, and the type of answer that was hollow and completely pointless and avoided getting to the issue that the question was really getting at was seen as good.

[01:05:43]  Bruce: The next election, I saw the next vice presidential debate part of it. I had to turn it off because I was so frustrated. Where Dan Quayle was debating the new vice president running mate, which would be, I guess, Gore, if I remember correctly. And everybody said that he did great in that debate. And I was so frustrated because he was no longer the honest politician trying to give a sincere answer. He was now just giving insincere answers. And he was hailed as how great he was in that debate and how wonderful his answers were, and he didn't poke himself in the eye, and all sorts of things were said in the media about him on that. And I could not watch it because I was so frustrated that we had lost someone who cared about the real question and giving a real answer, because he had to, because that was the way he was treated in the media. Now, is this entirely the media's fault?

[01:06:35]  Bruce: No, it's not, and I'm not trying to imply that it is. The media has got such severe problems, and they've only gotten worse over the years. And maybe that's the way it's going to have to be because we're really transitioning away from big media to something else that's going to be better, I think.

[01:06:50]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:06:50]  Bruce: And we're in a painful period where it isn't better yet. But it isn't really entirely the media's fault either. There is a fault of the public that we see humor and rhetorical flourishes as strong, good debating tactics. I don't know why that is. That is our dogmatic side. There is something about the fact that we almost universally really buy into rhetorical flourishes.

[01:07:15]  Peter: Do you think there's some utility to that too? I mean, sometimes a rhetorical flourish can be so effective because it's something that just resonates with people because it's true as well. I mean, I don't know what a conversation would look like with no rhetorical flourishes.

[01:07:37]  Bruce: You know, I think you're right. I think a rhetorical flourish might be, in some cases, if you were to look through the history of science, you would find that rhetorical flourishes plays an important role.

[01:07:48]  Peter: Maybe even in scientific papers, I think you'd probably find.

[01:07:51]  Bruce: Even in scientific papers, absolutely. So I like what you were previously saying, they've got its place. And yet I can't help but feel frustrated that we're so into it that you can tell that it's damaging in some cases, in a lot of cases. And yet somehow we do keep making progress, right? Somehow something good is coming out of it. And I think that is the nature of the institutions themselves, right? When you've got the right institutions, even when every politician is dogmatically sticking to talking points.

[01:08:22]  Peter: And I mean, don't you also think, well, what is the system or what is the institutions? They're fundamentally, they're comprised of human beings. So if you say that the institutions or the system works, at least to the extent that it does, I think kind of what you're saying is that human beings care about truth.

[01:08:45]  Bruce: They do.

[01:08:45]  Peter: Fundamentally, we are truth-seeking creatures. I mean, that's the glass half full view of humans, and it's the one I subscribe to, which is why I'm an optimist, I think.

[01:08:58]  Bruce: So let's define this a little bit better. What do I mean by institutions? Now, I don't even know, because a lot of times we talk about institutions, and we're not even sure what our own institutions are. So we elect judges. We don't allow them to just be replaced. They get long terms or possibly life terms so that they don't have to worry as much about the winds of political rhetoric going around at the moment. They're steeped in traditions that they have to go through to be able to get to be a judge in the first place, the legal system, legal theory, things like that, that they've bought into, or else they aren't able to progress as part of their... if they're just a dogmatic judge that ignores all the rules and ignores everything, they're never going to go anywhere within that system. So judges, even the ones appointed by one of the sides, ultimately did their job, because at the end of the day, they had this really strong understanding.

[01:09:59]  Bruce: So everything surrounding that, the traditions of law, legal theory, moral theories, this is the right thing for me to do, I need to do the right thing. Those all are the institutions that made it impossible for us to become a banana republic when it comes to claims about election fraud, at least right now. I mean, I don't mean to imply it's impossible for us to ever have a problem. Of course, if the institution started to fail, then we would become the same as in a country that doesn't have those institutions, because we wouldn't have many more [wording unclear]. But that's not something that happens quick overnight or just can happen. It would be something that would require a long-term sustained effort to break it down. That's why you can't just go claiming. I mean, you can, you can make the claim, oh, the election was stolen. But the judges just don't care, right?

[01:10:48]  Bruce: They're ultimately going to do their job. You have to actually bring evidence to get them to give a ruling that's going to match what you want. And if you don't have that evidence, then the judge is going to throw it out. And it doesn't matter if it was a Republican-appointed judge or a Democrat-appointed judge. They're going to do their job as a good judge either way. So that would just be one example. There's nothing that actually could have happened that would have resulted in us losing the democracy, at least not this time around. It's not like it's impossible to destroy an open society, and there is a constant need for vigilance. It's exactly like people say. But there's also a constant desire for vigilance. Like the very fact that we want to... Even, again, this is where dogmatism is sometimes in our favor. The fact that we want to police the other side, it means there's always people policing each other.

[01:11:33]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:11:34]  Cameo: Interesting.

[01:11:36]  Bruce: So you would have to have some way of breaking that down as an institution before you could undermine the open society. Open societies aren't invincible. It still matters who you vote for. It still matters, is this someone who's trying to break down institutions that matter or is this someone who doesn't? Is this someone who's trying to undermine free elections or is not trying to undermine free elections? Things like that still matter.

[01:12:01]  Peter: How I often think of it, which is why I don't really call myself a centrist, I guess, but I have some inclination towards that idea is that if conservatives or leftists or libertarians of any group suddenly magically were the supreme rulers of our country or our world, I personally think it would be a disaster.

[01:12:28]  Bruce: It would.

[01:12:28]  Peter: That would be, you know, it's almost like you have to have this conflict, this polarization, however you want to put it, to have a functioning society.

[01:12:42]  Bruce: No, that's a humbling thought, right? Is the fact that no matter what your political viewpoint is, you're actually at some level a utopist.

[01:12:50]  Unidentified speaker: Utopia… [ending unclear]

[01:12:52]  Bruce: If you could wave a magic wand, and conservatism wins, or libertarianism wins, or leftism wins, or whatever, right? You would have a completely dysfunctional society. But every single one of those, and every single person in those, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of them think that isn't the case. If you're a libertarian, you're a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian, you very sincerely think that you know how to organize society in such a way that it would be better. And the real truth is that you're going to make a disaster. We're all a little utopian. And again, maybe that's okay, as long as it's within the open society. The problem with utopians is if they get to rule. Go ahead and be okay with being dogmatic, I guess is where I'm coming from. Pick a side, right? Pick the side that most appeals to you, that you're the most... It's probably a legitimate problem.

[01:13:47]  Bruce: And you're going to actually do some good within the open society, calling out that problem, forcing people to address it, things like that. If you took power, yeah, you'd be horrible because you're dogmatic. But you're not in power, and you're not near the levers of power, and you only get one vote, and you have to actually persuade people. And because you live in the inside of an open society, and maybe you won't make the most persuasive arguments, and then you'll have to tweak your arguments to be more true, to be more persuasive. And because of that, it's kind of just okay. It's okay to be a little dogmatic, and don't get too worried about it. If you really do care about it, then the best advice I can give you is restate people's points of view in a way they can understand. Even that's not a perfect thing. So it's not perfect. It's not like you can necessarily take everything somebody says.

[01:14:42]  Bruce: A person might be talking nonsense, right? And yet this technique is absolutely the most powerful in terms of trying to break yourself out of dogmatic viewpoints. And I think that's hard. I think that makes it so that's why politics is such a difficult subject. And yet somehow we're still making progress. We are actively making it to where our politics has improved over time.

[01:15:03]  Unidentified speaker: I agree.

[01:15:06]  Bruce: We have better views today than back in the 40s or something. I mean, we've actually made progress politically.

[01:15:14]  Peter: People always want to compare everything to their own version of utopia, but that's just not a fair standard of… it’s not touching [word unclear] things. You got to look back a little more, I think.

[01:15:28]  Bruce: There's some value in comparing to a utopia. If by that you mean I'm pointing out real problems that exist. The bad part of comparing to utopia is that the utopia doesn't exist. And so you can imagine a society any way you want, and then say this is wrong with America because we should be like this utopian society instead. And there is some truth to it. There may be like a real problem being presented that needs to be addressed. And that's what we need to get out of that conversation. And yet there's a danger there.

[01:16:03]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:16:03]  Unidentified speaker: The end.

[01:16:05]  Bruce: The end.

[01:16:06]  Peter: No, I thought it was great. I really enjoyed listening to you, Bruce. And yeah, well done.

[01:16:13]  Unidentified speaker: Thanks.

[01:16:13]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:16:16]  Bruce: The Theory of Anything podcast could use your help. We have a small but loyal audience, and we'd like to get the word out about the podcast to others so others can enjoy it as well. To the best of our knowledge, we're the only podcast that covers all four strands of David Deutsch's philosophy as well as other interesting subjects. If you're enjoying this podcast, please give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. This can usually be done right inside your podcast player, or you can Google The Theory of Anything podcast Apple or something like that. Some players have their own rating system, and giving us a five-star rating on any rating system would be helpful. If you enjoy a particular episode, please consider tweeting about us or linking to us on Facebook or other social media to help get the word out. If you are interested in financially supporting the podcast, we have two ways to do that.

[01:17:02]  Bruce: The first is via our podcast host site, Anchor. Just go to anchor.fm slash four dash strands, F-O-U-R dash S-T-R-A-N-D-S. There's a support button available that allows you to do reoccurring donations. If you want to make a one-time donation, go to our blog, which is fourstrands.org. There is a donation button there that uses PayPal. Thank you.