Of mice and frogs

If you haven't yet read Paul Graham's brilliant essay "Keep Your Identity Small," you should do it sometime soon. Here's some excerpts:

As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?

What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert.

(...) this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.

Most people already agree with this and so will probably think it's trivial. Of course, a discussion amongst people with strong convictions and little knowledge will inevitably turn into a yelling match with zero substance. But if we let only the smart and knowledgeable people argue, it won't happen.

Graham's essay explains nicely why this isn't so. Lack of knowledge is only part of the problem; the real problem is people's natural tendency to personalize their opinions about things so that those opinions

(...) become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.

This means that smart people aren't exempt from the tendency of turning their arguments into religious wars because it's not absolute but relative intelligence or knowledge that matters. Sure, someone who's never written a line of Javascript code will not join a thread on Javascript programming in order to express strongly held convictions about it. But among people who have about the same level of expertise in something, holy wars do emerge. Quantitative social science, for example, is a battleground of "frog and mouse" wars between frequentists and Bayesians, classic and behavioral game theorists, or between R and SAS programmers. All this despite the fact that the average IQ of a participant is probably at least in the high 130s, and that some of those warriors use the techniques they identify with to study the epistemic irrationality of identity-based policy disputes. Again in Graham's words:

If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. (...) The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

This is the right solution, but it's also easier said than done. Identities can be based on negations, not just assertions, and the most important reason people construct conscious identities for themselves is that they provide a rationalization for their desire to feel superior to others. In other words, it's easy to fall into a trap of constructing your identity around being someone who realizes labels make people stupid and who therefore takes conscious effort to avoid constructing an identity for herself.