Contra Collisteru: You Get About One Carthage

Collisteru suggests that you should oppose things. I would not say I oppose this. Instead, I would like to gently suggest an alternative strategy. You should oppose about one thing. Everywhere else, talk less, smile more.

I.

I spent the first decade of my career carefully and deliberately habituating to white collar corporate America.

White collar corporate America prizes the ability to work with anyone. Some people find it stifling, but the corporate culture appreciates being willing to put a mask over parts of you that would grate against other people. This is useful, because every piece of interpersonal friction risks jamming up the machine.

Consider your political opinions. Perhaps you’re a staunch Republican. Perhaps you think the Democrats are correct about everything. Or your religious views; do you think God is real and connecting with Him is the most important source of meaning, or do you think churches are worshiping a made up old man in the sky?

Expressing those opinions is discouraged. Why? Imagine a coworker said they were Against Your Team. Do you feel any reluctance to work with them? If you say you’re against Their Team, will they still want to work with you?

This is a case where the Litany of Gendlin is not true. As long as nobody talks about it, nobody has to be mad about it; you can all quietly pretend all the sensible, reasonable people around you don’t hold any views you find abhorrent.

II.

Maybe opposing all you thought was bad would be workable if there was just a single position that people could differ on. There’s enough people on both sides of the atheist and theist divide that maybe you could make a company of all one side. But there is not just one position, there are dozens or hundreds, and Collisteru says:

I think it’s important to publicly reject things. You should be willing to expose a metaphysical point and criticize it. This is an important part of being a writer, and something that I’m a bit too scared of.
...
I want you not to fear controversy. At worst, you’re wrong. No problem: just admit your mistake and change your mind. But even this is a victory: you exercise your mind and purge a wrong belief from your understanding.

Collisteru is incorrect. If you reject the deeply held philosophical core at the heart of your coworker’s life as entirely false, and you make this claim publicly and repeatedly, then the worst case is not that you’re wrong. You can’t just admit your mistake and change your mind, because you can’t assume other people will immediately forgive and forget. The worst case is that in being willing to die on ten different hills you’ve managed to make everybody angry at you.

You have to be able to work with people you disagree with, and part of that is going to involve agreeing to let some irrelevant sleeping dogs lie.

III.

My opposition to opposition doesn’t apply to every situation.

The canonical example is anyone who makes their living from outrage and views. “It’s bad on purpose to make you click” is a real thing. If this describes you, you probably know it already, and know what you’re doing.

There are also safe containers, social spaces where we’ve mutually agreed to have disagreements. Late night after hours perhaps, we loosen the ties and loosen our lips a little. Authentic relating games will set these up for statements which would be rude otherwise. And of course, formal competitive debate, where you’re judged more for how you argue than the position you took.

And when the disagreement is about the work we’re trying to do together, then disagreement becomes useful and worthwhile. If I think your blueprint is shoddy or your delivery schedule is too aggressive, that’s something the corporation can benefit from.

Also, like, most places let you do a lot of separation between your work life and the rest of your life? It’s mostly fine to do whatever you want in your personal life, as long as you come to the office on time.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t delineate in your own mind what you agree or disagree with. I’m saying there is a cost to saying all of those out loud. I’m also not saying you should lie if asked, though I’ll admit I personally will get evasive on a few topics; part of the mutual peace treaty implied by white collar corporate norms is that asking someone else who they voted for or what their religion happens to be is gently dissuaded.

Some people decide to pay those costs and be up front and vocal about all the things they are against. I would like to propose if you think you’ve met one of those people, and you agree with all the things they’re saying, you’re either in a strong filter bubble or they’re misleading you about at least some of their opinions.

IV.

When do you take a stand?

Cato the Elder reportedly ended every speech with “Carthago Delenda Est,” or “Carthage must be destroyed.” The man knew what he wanted to achieve and he kept at it.

I think each of us gets one Carthage. There’s one drum we can beat, a target we can persist in working against. Even then we shouldn’t make our every act about that argument; that would get us labeled as cranks and tuned out. But as long as you do other things too, you can wave your one flag, hold your ground on that one hill.

Collisteru argues:

The world is complicated: its detail is fractal everywhere and the complication never simplifies no matter how far we zoom in. However, I don’t think this means your morality should be complicated. Children have a simple morality, and religion recognizes them as saints.
Humans can’t fit the whole complexity of their physics engine into their mind, and when they try, they invariably fall into skepticism and cynicism. Skepticism is the epistemology of evil; cynicism is the ethics of evil. Believe in things. Be for and against things. You can acknowledge the world’s complexity without using that as an excuse to give up.

I have not researched every part of the the world’s fractal. For each subject as it’s presented to me I start to learn the edges and make inroads into understanding, and keep myself calibrated as to how confused I likely still am. The phrase “strong position lightly held” is a useful key to the rationalist community, itself aspiring to be the kind of space I talk about in part II.

Collisteru appears to me to be making far too strong a claim.

Consider “Skepticism is the epistemology of evil” for a moment. If you consider yourself a skeptic (a title many of you on LessWrong would claim—off the top of my head, Julia Galef of Scout Mindset fame ran the official podcast of the New York Skeptics, called “Rationally Speaking”) Skepticism is the epistemology of a lot of smart, careful people. If you’re reading this on LessWrong, it’s likely your epistemology.

This is actually the central mistake I’m suggesting people avoid. It would not occur to me to write “____ is the ethics of evil” for basically any ____. I’d regard that as an unforced tactical error, and instead I aspire to try things like “I’m curious why people believe ____?” Even when I disagree strongly with people I try to leave them a line of retreat, and it would be too common for that particular construction to leave people thinking I was calling them evil.

I’ve read enough of Collisteru’s writing enough to realize that kind of rhetorical construction is kind of just how they speak, and has less actual force behind it than I thought when first encountering their writing.

I try to take fewer stands, to concentrate my force on a smaller number of subjects. Not only do I expect this means my areas of ire are taken more seriously than Collisteru’s, but it I expect there’s fewer people who I unintentionally pushed away.

Be against about one thing. If you are not driven to have a chosen target, save your opposition until it matters.