Just Enjoy it When Other People Don't Know Things

It's much easier than trying to get them to understand what you do

As I was growing up, it seemed as though other people were genuinely trying their best to confuse and mislead me. Whether it was well-meaning teachers, morally motivated parents, or friendly peers, again and again they would helpfully explain

• Classical music is the best (No, this was the early 90s and Metallica was the best)

• Nuclear power is terrible for the Earth (Our planet is nuclear powered; the reason we have plate tectonics and a magnetic sphere is because our mantle and core are heated by nuclear fission¹)

• Climate change is not real (Except that Greenland’s ice sheets are melting,² and American cities are flooding)

• There are no innate group differences in psychology (Well, sex differences in interests predate the human-chimpanzee divergence³)

• You can’t divide by zero (Yes I can)

• The environment shapes us, so we’re most like ourselves when we are young (No we’re not, heritability rises with age)

• Red, yellow, and blue are primary colors (Sure, if by “red” and “blue” you mean magenta and cyan)

• The Bible is inerrant (even Martin Luther was aware of scriptural errors and contradictions; he didn’t consider them a big deal⁴)

Some of these things I shrugged off, because they were obviously wrong. Others I didn’t have much defense against, and swallowing them actually resulted in years of suffering. This is something I look back on with a deep regret; I think back on the friends I alienated, the years I wasted, the misguided choices I made, and the sheer amount of mental space I devoted to things that didn’t matter, like the numbers in the Enneagram, the Gospel of Q, and the monsters from Fiend Folio.⁵

Partly because adolescence lasts forever, and partly because I’m the kind of person who really values understanding, I still feel an instinctive desire to push back against misinformation and confusion when I encounter it today. I make careful searches of scientific databases. I carry out experiments involving plastic tubs, plastic wrap, and CO2.⁶ I think, “How can I convince the people I know to give up these obvious misconceptions, and understand what’s real?”

But really, truthfully—it’s great to know things that nobody else knows. This is something I remind myself of with some regularity. Yes, mass education has given people a working familiarity with much that is true, or at least useful, but it’s also cluttered their heads with a few things that are neither useful nor true. And it also leaves yawning voids, especially in the soft sciences. Being able to go above the overwhelming majority of people that I encounter on a daily basis gives me an incredible advantage.

Knowledge is a form of Power

People do say “knowledge is power,” but the most obvious interpretation of the saying is wrong. Joe Biden could probably have me assassinated if he wanted to, and if that’s too risky⁷ there’s always detention, interrogation, or just a nice clean cancellation and deplatformation would do the trick. His ability to do this comes from his position, not from the body of his accumulated knowledge. The idea that Biden knows more than I do is, well, pretty funny.

But knowledge is clearly a form of power. Knowledge opens doors, clarifies problems, reveals paths in the dark and winding ways. It can also be sold for money without diminishing the knowledge of them who know, or it can even be shared freely to spread goodwill.

The problem, of course, is that others often refuse to accept what you have to give them. I’m thinking very much of a recent conversation I had with a commentator who posts under the name anzabannanna, who lamented the idealization of science and scientists by the public, writing,

Imagine how worse you would have felt if those things played a *massive* role in causality (war, poverty, hate, etc). And to make it worse: no one else cares, *including people who complain about such things constantly, legitimate smart people, etc*. ....but what if that could be changed? ...PEOPLE CAN IMPROVE!!!

There is a feeling here that is easy to relate to. It can be extremely frustrating to watch the ignorant hurl themselves into barriers or off of cliffs, or wander lost through figural and literal mazes.⁸ Worse, there are times when we are dragged along ourselves by the ignorance of others; when policy is decided by the fads of the day, the tapestries of our lives are woven by altogether arbitrary and foolish whims.

And yet the idea that PEOPLE CAN IMPROVE!!! in this regard is something I see disproven disconfirmed very regularly. I’ve found it extremely difficult to convince other people to accept even the most elementary, grade-school level ideas, completely free of political or religious overtones, like “what are the primary colors?” I haven’t had much time for blogging lately, and as I was still finishing this post, I had an exchange with someone who defended his use of outdated paradigms, very directly, on grounds that he just didn’t care. What are we supposed to say in face of ignorance which is consciously held through sheer unconcern for understanding?

An Aside: The Case for Atheism

Longtime readers may know I’m an agnostic who doesn’t care for skeptical atheism. Yes, I can understand why a person might like to think like a frequentist statistician, default to the null hypothesis, and say “There’s no clear evidence that God exists, therefore I do not believe in God.” But I don’t think it makes sense to default to the null hypothesis to begin with; as I’ve pointed out before, this kind of reasoning creates interesting problems.

And even if we do think like frequentists, there are many reasons to doubt the null hypothesis of a simple, Godless universe. For one thing, we don’t know why the physical constants of our universe are set the way they are, but without what appears to be a fine tuning of these constants, life wouldn’t exist—we’d all be stuck inside black holes, or stuck without any elements heavier than hydrogen. For another thing, we don’t know why things like the placebo effect, or the psi effect, or affective apprehension of future events, have been demonstrated with astronomically low p-values. Is any of this what hard-nosed skeptics would predict?

Atheists are forced into narrow, and often uncomfortable, positions on these issues: Maybe there are an infinite number of (unobservable) parallel universes where the constants are set differently?⁹ As for the placebo effect, OK, it is really strange, but let’s not worry about it. And if parapsychological effects show up in laboratory conditions? Well, all that was probably a fluke (meaning even if we think like frequentists, p < 10^-zillion doesn’t matter when we don’t want it to).

But there’s an even deeper problem here. A problem that relates to intellectual humility, our tendency to make mistakes, and the limits of human knowledge. The question about the nature and number of deities in our world has been a contentious one, something that has perplexed the greatest thinkers that our species has ever been able to produce across the entire length of our recorded history. When people claim to have the answer to a difficult question on which there has never been consensus, doesn’t it make sense to be suspicious?

I can understand a religious person feeling compelled to take a stand on this difficult question. For the most part, they’re not trying to reason objectively. Instead, they’re acting under the idea that their feelings are informative about things that exist at a deeper level of reality. Most critically, religious believers tend to take for granted the idea that faith is a virtue. But what atheist reasons like this? If faith isn’t a virtue, and there’s no benefit to taking a stance on an extremely difficult question that nobody agrees about and that no one has ever been able to clearly resolve, then, does it really make any sense to be an atheist at all?

Using these arguments, I talked to one of my atheist friends in college whom I’ll call Richard. This guy was a mathematics major whose wealthy family had migrated to the southwestern United States from Eastern Europe. Richard loved science, he had a deep respect for figures like Feynman and Sagan, and spoke a lot about cosmology, evolution, and religion. And he was greatly upset by creationists; at one point I mentioned some random creationist argument to him in an email, and he showed up at my doorstep within an hour with a book on geology in his hands and a worried expression on his face.

After a while, I told him look, do we really know? Sure, so the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, and everything else is wrong. But what does that prove? Do we really know what is and isn’t out there? And after going back and forth about this for an hour or so, he said, “OK, you know what, you’re right, we really don’t know if there could be some kind of weird God somewhere.”

But gradually what I noticed was that everything else about the way Richard acted afterwards was exactly the same. He still acted like open questions were settled. He still mocked New Age beliefs and alternative medicine. All in all, he still reasoned like a skeptical atheist, rather than like an open minded agnostic; deep down, he still defaulted to the null hypothesis. And ultimately, our friendship ended because of this.

It happened when one of my relatives was suffering from a rare, incurable disease. Numerous doctors all agreed that the disease would be terminal within half a year, and they also agreed that there was no established treatment capable of providing any hope. So we all discussed this, and shrugging our shoulders, our family agreed, “If there’s no cure, what can it hurt to pursue alternative remedies?” We looked into a number of possible vitamins and herbs, and checked with our doctors to see that there was at least no risk of harm from any of them. Ultimately, none of the remedies we tried worked, and our relative died.

When Richard found out about this, he was extremely disturbed to find that we had been using alternative medicines to treat a serious disease. I suspect Richard believed that we had ignored the advice of the medical establishment, which wasn’t true at all; there were no known treatments, so, rather than giving up entirely, we figured (or at least I figured) that even a placebo was better than nothing. Richard didn’t see it that way. And when he called me up on the phone to make up a story about his sister being in trouble so he had to “move away,”¹⁰ I thought to myself, That’s fine; I don’t need to be friends with this person anymore.

Maybe, when it comes to members of other generations or other countries, atheism may not mean quite the same thing that it does for Americans who are a part of Generation X. But at least for us, atheism was a tell, a sign, a red flag that you might be dealing with someone who was inflexible, dogmatic, not very nuanced about the inherent contradictions of existence, and not very good about remaining humble in the face of uncertainty. (Although I’m not going to name names, I’ve had passing interactions with people on substack who continue to fit this pattern.) So really, what was the point in convincing Richard to be agnostic about God? It just meant getting him to pull down a red flag.

And ultimately, if this is the best I could do with someone I liked and respected, someone who returned that liking and respect, then it begs the question—how much influence do we really have on the way other people around us think?

We have very little influence on the way people around us think

Celebrities, university professors, news anchors, preachers, even elementary school teachers and parents, have some ability to influence people. After all, kids tend to be hungry for information from their elders, and there’s a reason people go out of their way to check the news, or @taylorswift13. And there’s at least an argument to be made that, when authorities across the spectrum all push together in the same direction, dramatic change can occur across an entire society. After all, nobody even realized what was going on with sexuality, race, or transgenderism until the unspoken agreement between Hollywood, the New York Times, and your friendly neighborhood English teachers gave rise to the Woke consensus we all have to deal with today. (On the other hand, the whole thing may just be the result of rising individualism)

But unfortunately, people like us have very little ability to change anyone’s minds. It’s easier when it comes to things that people don’t know anything about; then you have a blank canvas to work with, and if you can be the first person to write something on it, that definitely helps. On the other hand, if the thing you want them to understand has anything to do with values—no matter how tenuous the connection may seem—then if you’re at all interested in what the science says, well, it says you are in for an uphill struggle:

The genetic basis of individual differences in attitudes was examined in a survey of 195 pairs of monozygotic twins and 141 pairs of same-sex dizygotic twins. A principal components analysis of the 30 attitude items in the survey identified 9 attitude factors, of which 6 yielded significant heritability coefficients. Nonshared environmental factors accounted for the most variance in the attitude factors. Possible mediators of attitude heritability were also assessed, including personality traits, physical characteristics, and academic achievement. Analyses showed that several of these possible mediators correlated at a genetic level with the heritable attitude factors, suggesting that the heritability of the mediator variables might account for part of the heritable components of some attitudes. There was also some evidence that highly heritable attitudes were psychologically "stronger" than less heritable attitudes.¹¹

And:

Variation in the extent an attitude is imbued with moral conviction is a strong predictor of a variety of consequential social judgments; however, the extant literature has not explained variation in moral conviction. The authors predict that some attitudes may be experienced as moral because they are heritable, promoting group survival and firmly rooting people in these attitudes. To test this hypothesis, the authors surveyed two community samples and a student sample (total N = 456) regarding the extent participants perceived 20 attitudes as moral attitudes, and compared these ratings to established estimates of attitude heritability. Across all three studies, attitudes with greater previously established heritability estimates were more likely to be experienced as moral, even when controlling for a variety of measures of attitude strength and the extent to which an attitude is associated with one’s religious beliefs.¹²

I complain about the state of philosophy a lot. But philosophers are neither stupid nor ignorant, and they’ve already figured this out:

Ethical and political attitudes are not randomly distributed in a population. Attitudes of family members, for example, tend to be more similar than those of a random sample of the same size. In the fields of social psychology and political science, the historically standard explanation for these attitude distribution patterns was that social and political attitudes are (at least partially) a function of environmental factors like parental socialization and prevailing social norms. This received view is, however, complicated by more recent work in behavioral genetics, which consistently and repeatedly demonstrates that certain ethical and political attitudes dealing with issues like censorship, abortion, capital punishment, and immigration policy have a significant heritability coefficient, to wit, a substantial percentage of attitude variance in a population can be attributed to genetic variance, independent of environmental factors. In this paper, I argue that the genetic influence on our ethical and political attitudes is mediated by what we can agree to be irrelevant and distorting factors that can lead moral reasoning astray. Further, I argue that we should significantly lower our credences in ethical and political attitudes that fall within the domains of belief that involve significant genetic influence.¹³

In other words, humans believe a lot of things because they resonate with our inherited dispositions, not because those things are true. The more one learns from the sciences, the more one comes to face a universe that is utterly indifferent to those values, instincts, and patterns of thought which we carried down from the forests, into the savannah, and across the face of the Earth.

This isn’t something we need to convince others about. This is something we need to realize ourselves.

Obviously, you can tell I do think it would be foolish to completely give up on trying to help other people understand things, particularly where their understanding can impact on our own lives. I wouldn’t be writing this post, otherwise. But the journey of understanding is ultimately one where each person is responsible for their own progress. If they fail to progress, there are many possible explanations, but one explanation is that they simply lack the motivation to accept an understanding that is uncongenial to them.

In other words, if other people don’t care about arriving at the best conclusion that they can, you can’t care for them.

What can you do if you care, but no one else cares?

You may not be able to make people see things they don’t want to. But you can focus on your own thinking, clearing up what errors you can. And with a little perseverance and creativity, you can make use of what you have to benefit yourself and your loved ones.

Take it from me: Let their ignorance be your bliss

Knowing more than other people means you can do things like predict future events with better accuracy than your peers. You can reach solutions to problems faster than others. You can be the only one talking about important subjects.¹⁴ You can find ways to monetize your expertise. And if you start to know so much more than others around you that loneliness gets you down, well, so long as you can find a spouse with a similar psychology to you, your kids will be pretty cool.

1. Gando, A., et al. (2011). "Partial radiogenic heat model for Earth revealed by geoneutrino measurements." Nature geoscience 4, no. 9 (2011): 647-651.

2. Howat, Ian (2007). "Rapidly accelerating glaciers may increase how fast the sea level rises". Currents, UC Santa Cruz, November 14–27, 2005 Vol. 10, No. 14. Available online at https://currents.ucsc.edu/05-06/11-14/glacier.asp

3. Lonsdorf, E. V., Markham, A. C., Heintz, M. R., Anderson, K. E., Ciuk, D. J., Goodall, J., & Murray, C. M. (2014). Sex differences in wild chimpanzee behavior emerge during infancy. PLoS One, 9(6), e99099.

4. Stanton, G. (1995). Gospel Truth? New Light on Jesus and the Gospels. HarperCollins, p. 8.

5. Did you know a flumph is helpless if turned upside down? Do yourself a favor and forget it; not all knowledge is useful

6. Yes I really did this, I tilted the bins up against the south wall of my house to catch the sunlight, yes I still have the photographs, and yes, I found a predictable result: 1 C more warming in the CO2 bin over the control bin.

7. I am writing this in an election year, after all

8. I recently took a long drive through rural New England at night. It really, really helps to have a physical map in the seat beside you, rather than relying on your wife’s cell phone, which might occasionally report that it has no signal, and leave you driving down unmarked roads at 2 in the morning, wondering whether you took a wrong turn an hour ago, or have enough gas to reach the next town.

9. Helbig, P. (2023). Life, the Multiverse, and Fine-Tuning: Fact, Fiction, and Misconceptions. Foundations of Physics, 53(6), 93.

10. He had mentioned to me, years before, that this was his way of removing people from his friendship circle. (Ghosting wasn’t a thing back then.)

11. Olson, J. M., Vernon, P. A., Harris, J. A., & Jang, K. L. (2001). The heritability of attitudes: a study of twins. Journal of personality and social psychology, 80(6), 845.

12. Brandt, M. J., & Wetherell, G. A. (2012). What attitudes are moral attitudes? The case of attitude heritability. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3(2), 172-179.

13. Munroe, W. (2020). The challenge of heritability: genetic determinants of beliefs and their implications. Inquiry, 63(8), 831-874.

14. Most of the content of this blog is an example. I can’t really say much about what everyone else knows, but what other people don’t know gives me innumerable opportunities for writing. For example, I make such a big deal of the HEXACO not because I’m that interested in Honesty, but because its an area where public knowledge hasn’t caught up with scientific findings.