On The Intellectual Identity Forming Loop
The other day, John Collison, the founder of Stripe, had a fascinating tweet:
This is mind boggling. One of today’s most intelligent people acknowledges he can’t change others’ minds with reason. Consider the following from Marc Andreessen (from his wonderful interview with Sriram Krishnan):
Here is another legendary figure admitting he doesn't engage in discourse. And for good measure, here’s Naval Ravikant, called the modern Yoda, weighing in on this:
There was also the infamous Harper’s letter on discourse from a group of renowned intellectuals. Why are great minds giving up on the idea of discourse? Why does it feel like discourse has died? What does this mean for society and how do we course correct?
Think about whether you’ve had the following experience before. You’re sitting at a table, having a discussion when it shifts to a complex issue with unclear answers. One of the people at the table says something inconspicuous. This triggers another of the 4. Bam! The discussion spirals, each of the two commenters raising the ante. Someone at the table gets up and leaves in a tizzy.
In these moments, it’s almost as if we could feel the moment the conversation shifted. As if it was spiraling to an inevitable end. These moments occur while discussing issues at work, eating dinner, and resolving disputes with friends. They've become regular occurrences. What’s going on here?
The Intellectual Identity-Forming Loop
In most situations like this, I’ve noticed that the best idea doesn’t win. The argument isn’t about ideas—it feels personal. This happens because the people at the table conflate their beliefs with their identities. An objection to their ideas becomes an attack on them. The debate gets resolved by who screams loudest. While this phenomenon isn’t new, it’s worsened by the internet and social media in particular.
Identity is the core qualities, beliefs, personality, looks and/or expressions that make a person. Beliefs can be weakly held and easy for us to reconsider or be a part of our identity. So what does it mean to say we stake our identities in arguments? It means that the argument is attacking one of the core things that makes us “us.” New beliefs become a part of our identity through sufficient reinforcement and calcification into our world view. When an idea becomes inseparable from the lens through which we see the world, it becomes a part of our identity. The internet has accelerated the process of ideas becoming a part of our identity. It does so by creating something I call the “intellectual identity-forming loop.” It works like this:
You discover a new idea. You learn about it through the lens through which you see the world. This lens predisposes you to confirmation bias and social validation for this idea.
You find a community supporting the idea. The tribe and their arguments provide emotional reinforcement of the original idea.
Strengthened by the community, their arguments, and your desire for a sense of collective identity, the idea calcifies into your identity. You become a member of the tribe. You adopt other elements of the tribe’s groupthink.
You become a representative for the tribe and its ideas. You strengthen the tribe and magnify the imaginary world associated with it. You hook more wandering strangers into this shared identity.
The terrifying part of this is that it happens absent actual reason, but with the illusion of reason. The internet provides imaginary worlds in which we find a bolstering of our beliefs and a hardening of our identities. These worlds bombard us with emotional reinforcements of our ideas each minute, each hour, and each day. In the context of a larger social group or community, ideas become a part of us. We find strength in numbers. We then go out and become a representative, allowing us to evangelize the ideas to more people. To the extent something challenges our beliefs, it challenges the core of who we are.
The intellectual identity-forming loop drives ideas to become a part of our identities. We stop debating their merit and start debating our merit, since these become one and the same. The internet increases both the rate at which and the number of ideas that become a part of our identity.
Why is this happening?
We want to believe we assess ideas for their merits. But this overlooks a key fact about how the human brain works. The work of individuals like Jonathan Haidt teaches us the basis of human moral judgment is intuitive, not analytical. Haidt’s work on social intuitionism reveals the problem with the myth of rationalism. We don’t reason about ideas and then judge them. We judge ideas and then rationalize them. Discourse is an emotional process, not a rational one. This is related to confirmation bias, but it’s not the same. Confirmation bias tells us that we have a tendency to seek confirming evidence. Social intuitionism teaches us that we have a horse in every race.
Why does this matter in the Internet Age? The internet has exposed an army of people to connect with on the common ground of any idea. Google and Facebook alone create the dangerous combination of a discoverable set of supporting information and a community for every idea. Communities play on our core sense of tribalism and need to have an accepted identity. When the community validates our idea, it emotionally reinforces it. Social intuitionism tells us our immediate reactions to facts either draws us in or pushes us away. Facts strengthen our viewpoints based on our predisposition. We don’t analyze facts; we confirm them with mental gymnastics.
The intellectual identity-forming loop feeds on this process. Any idea can be subjected to the loop because, via the internet, any idea has a discoverable community and set of supporting information. It plays into our nature as intuitive, not analytic thinkers. Instead of analyzing the truth, we find shelter in numbers and in facts we want to believe, allowing the idea to become a part of our intellectual identity. Where we used to have ideologies, we now have “identiologies.”
When ideas become part of our identity, we must justify them or admit our flaws as people. We seek out comforting facts and ideas and avoid discomforting ones. No amount of logic can change our mind. The internet has turned many ideas -- even small issues -- into a matter of intellectual identity.
The Loop in Action
Imagine sitting around one day or browsing Twitter when a thought forms. “Immigration is taking jobs from Americans,” “Jeff Bezos is evil,” or any one of a thousand thoughts. As you look around the internet you find a set of people espousing said view and providing facts to back it up. It could be through a Facebook groups or Twitter threads or forums/communities with specific content. You’re emotionally predisposed to believe your thought was correct. Every time you interact with this idea, you’re in a spiral of confirmation bias. You never stop to realize you’re sledding out of control, building conviction in where you’re going nonetheless.
One day you wake up as an “ist” – a socialist, a nationalist, a capitalist, or any one of the millions of ists you can be. You’re another person on the internet converting others and fighting the holy war. At no point did you stop to examine the beliefs behind your new identity.
To see the danger, consider a friend of mine named Joe and his views on immigration. Joe Googles “immigration taking jobs from americans.” He finds this link. Look at the following passage:
This argument sucks Joe in, playing into the inkling he already has that illegal immigration is bad. Look at the numbers! Look at how many occupations already have US workers, meaning taking jobs in those fields would be taking jobs from Americans! Now I’m on the FAIR website. As Joe navigates, he finds endless resources, links, and a community reinforcing the badness immigration. He’s not alone. He finds more reinforcing facts.
Now Joe believes immigration is horrible. No matter that these facts misrepresent the costs, benefits, and tradeoffs of immigration. Joe got sucked into the cyclone of the loop. Next thing you know he’s yelling at Fareed Zakaria on Twitter. All because his half-baked thought that illegal immigrants might be taking jobs from Americans. Over time, this view calcifies under the weight of continued confirmatory evidence. At some point, no amount of rational information can convince him otherwise. His pre-existing belief has become entrenched into his identity and giving on this would destroy his world view.
Being pro-immigration, I can feel my reactions to these facts. My mind jumps at their cherry-picked nature and how they misrepresent the logic behind the pros and cons of immigration. However, even my brain interprets these facts emotionally. It takes real skill to dig a level deeper and think without having an answer in mind.
The journey of this loop is dangerous, and it is happening to each of us every day. It’s scary, because, again, this happens absent actual reason, but with the illusion of reason. How many viewpoints have you formed in this way? How can you reduce the size of your intellectual identity?
When ideas become a part of your identity, we lose discourse altogether. People don't admit flaws in their identity without a serious level of self reflection. Instead they argue like their life depends on it. It is easier to live in delusion. You can always find solace in the facts and community supporting the belief you have. When we can reinforce any belief, we develop an excess of intellectual identities. This drives a fundamental reframing of discourse.
We see discourse as us-versus-them (opposing groups) rather than opposing ideas. When discourse manifests as us-versus-them, we must be the good people and they must be terrible people. Debates devolve into showing the ridiculousness of the other side. They create strawman arguments and villainize. Note: If you're interested in this idea, you should dig into motive attribution asymmetry. It’s in here where polarization happens. The challenge becomes breaking the loop.
How do we break the loop?
How do we break the loop? Well, it’s tricky, and I won’t claim to have all the answers. Here’s a few suggestions:
Expose yourself, in earnest, to more people from different backgrounds — Exposure to people makes it harder to vilify and forces you to understand. Of course, this must be done in an earnest way. Seek to learn and understand before you seek to evaluate or judge.
Be vigilant against the calcification of ideas into your identity — Prevent yourself from building an intellectual identity outside of truth seeking. Labels lock us into ideologies instead of seeing the world in shades of gray. Don’t be a progressive, a conservative, or a libertarian, be an open minded thinker.
Engage in storytelling — If the way we get caught in the loop is believing narratives, the only thing that can get us out is better narratives. This means finding ways to tell the same story, backed by facts, in a way that can resonate. This means releasing An Inconvenient Truth instead of pointing people towards academic papers. As Yuval Noah Harari tells us in Sapiens, storytelling is fundamental to humans. In the end, if you want to break down people’s identities, you do it by appealing to their emotions, not their reason. Stories captivate and appeal to our emotions. Americans ignored the Black Lives Matters movement for almost a decade until the story behind George Floyd’s death. One black man dying at the hands of the police didn’t change any of the facts behind the situation. It did light a fire.
Learn to meditate – at the risk of sounding trite, meditation supports examination and deconstruction of your identity. There’s nothing more powerful in the journey for truth.
Thanks to Ellen Fishbein, Dalmar Hussein, Adam Cropper, and Daniel Rossett for their feedback on this piece.
