Mercier and Sperber claim reason evolved to win arguments, which also means reason is good at modeling other people's minds, so as to argue against them.
Joe Henrich claims that our minds evolved to copy cultural knowledge which we ourselves do not understand why it works. So we are programed to copy winners, and assume we can't figure out exactly why they are winners.
The combination of these two theories is our brains are tuned to model and be able to predict the actions of other high status people around us. And this means turning them into a sanded off mental model. A persona. The contradictory reality of what an actual person thinks is not what we meme and follow. Partly we meme persona the high status so we can blindly imitate what their persona would do, and partly so we can argue against that persona in status combat.
There is no evolutionary selection to actually understand logical arguments stand alone. It's more of a spandrel.
The test would be for people are good at abstract argument not tied to a persona, do they over history and prehistory tend to have fewer successful offspring or more. I suspect that capability is at best a non factor in reproductive success. And more likely negatively correlated with it.
> When I recently asked scholars who study Adam Smith what was their most controversial issue, they said it is whether Smith was on the left or right politically
Cringe. Partisan politics has broken peoples' brains.
Which is why I think your idea of historians striving for accuracy/consistency/truth is a nice romantic vision, but ultimately naive. Many (most?) historians (e.g. Howard Zinn) strive to further their own agenda and partisan worldview; history is about power, not about truth.
Or maybe I am just jaded and the 1% of partisan historians has soured me on the 99% of honest historians.
In defense of Smithians, I think there are just not many controversial issues. I would struggle to name any other than the whole “trying to shoehorn Smith’s words into supporting leftist policies” as a general category, and even then there are not many who take such attempts seriously. More interesting to most is to what extent Smith is esoteric, but it isn’t really controversial.
It's a fair point for some historians. I think a lot of historians toil honestly away at relatively obscure sub-specialties (I once had a professor who made a modest career from being a world authority on Iranian medicine in the 18th century - it's unlikely he was after power). The only ones we engage with in the media tend to be in the "contact sport" fields of history, such as construction of Russian national identity, history of gender in Europe, most political history from the past 150 years etc. And those historians are as much public intellectuals as they are historians, which often involves being tempted into partisan debates.
This is what we do with political leaders. When we vote for someone, we get a grab bag of policies, some of which we may disagree with, but we hope that the persona we interpret will lead to better results in the future. We might like someone’s policies but distrust their personality, find them somehow weak or untrustworthy. Politicians engage in ad hominem attacks because, in the end, the argument isn’t over the facts, but about who can be trusted.
It seems natural to see versions of the same taking place in intellectual life. When people decide they trust someone, they’re motivated to interpret their views in ways that align with their own, and to create an aligned persona that gives their own views more authority. And that’s also why, when a commonly revered authority held or holds views that some find disagreeable, they seek to undermine trust in the person.
To understand how personas work, I am tempted to start from the assumption that personas are not created by individual people but by groups of people (societies, tribes, subcultures, etc). (Of course, an individual is a group of size one, so individuals are a special case of groups.) If we then find a good example where the same person has different personas in different subcultures, maybe we can use our knowledge of the subcultures to shed light on your question of how personas work. For example, I would expect that personas serve a purpose in the subculture that is quite independent of the actual person. Ideally the example would oppose two personas (of the same person) that are equally powerful but quite far apart from each other.
I'm not sure I can think of any thinker who could really be described as something as complex as a persona. Figures in intellectual history who survive are reduced to characters in a poorly written play - if they're very influential, characters with a few lines, or even characters in a couple of different plays, but ultimately they're just a means of putting across a story.
And their most important attributes aren't necessarily the lines they speak. They're often on stage primarily to give the general narrative a sense of status, of class, by virtue of the things the audience will associate them with. It's no accident that most of the great thinkers are ancient Greeks from around the time of Alexander, Augustinian Romans, or Europeans from periods when their nation was particularly successful.
Attaching oneself to a prestigious historical thinker is certainly most of the motivation. There is also signaling that you are a person of historical education, who understands the ideas of history's greatest thinkers. Anybody who questions you will have to deal with the rhetorical trick of an historical reference that they may not be aware of. People who make historical references are considered to be intelligent. Luckily for them, they are also among the least assailable in their contentions, except by others who've devoted their time to the study of history trivia. That sort of history mining, is generally in the pursuit of confirmation bias. One can find anything one wants to find, in historical anecdote.
Role model imitation is the default way most people learn. It's hard to think logically or think for themselves, and their peers or superiors may not approve of the results anyway. So people evolved to pick a high-status member of their tribe and just try to act like them. This is at the level of an instinct.
That's why many people are so concerned with interpreting what the highest-status intellectuals "would" do. If you like Adam Smith, if you think he's a high-quality high-status thinker, then you want to mimic him and be just like him. In order to do that it is necessary to model what he would do or think in different situations. Then you can just follow the model. The implicit inference is always, "Adam Smith would do or think X about Y, if he were asked to consider Y. Adam Smith is authoritative. Therefore, we should all do or think X about Y, and look down on deviants who don't." It's the same idea as, "What would the founding fathers think?"
Of course, nobody says this reasoning out loud, because when the whole argument is laid out like that, a moment's reflection shows it to be stupid. An argument rests on its own merits; we should be concerned with arguments for what is true, not with what some high-status person said or would say, except insofar as what some high-status person said is useful to determine what is true. High-status people are often wrong, just like the rest of us. But this high-status-mimicking behavior is at the level of an instinct, so logic doesn't matter.
I think this is an important part of the explanation, though as stated I think you've muddled it a bit with the status question.
I'm sure 80% of the examples can be explained with the standard status interpretation of the Hansonian persona (which is how I've interpreted this post ☺), but the Role Model Imitation case is the 20% that's doing 80% of the real work. "What would Jesus do?" "How would Jefferson respond to this law?" "What underlying constant or symmetry would Einstein find in this phenomenon?" People constantly use role models as short cuts/tools in their thought, and if this evolves into a consistent Weltanschauung as described by James Hudson above, that's the system working as designed. Certainly those role models are going to tend towards high status people, but that's also to be expected since those are the salient examples of success, that's not an indication of ulterior motives.
I don't think that behavior is stupid in a world too complicated to reason everything from first principles, and limited intellectual resources. I think it's a reasonable heuristic which is secondarily repurposed towards recruiting the high status to our cause (to the point where that seems the overwhelming usage in broad public discourse).
> I don't think that behavior is stupid in a world too complicated to reason everything from first principles, and limited intellectual resources.
But we're talking about intellectuals performing analysis of Adam Smith (or similar people) as a career. These intellectuals are already experts in their field. They have plenty of intellectual resources in their field, to match the complexity of their specialty. They could easily come up with their own thoughts and arguments. (Doesn't have to be "from first principles," by the way, as long as it is their own thinking.) But these particular intellectuals don't do that because the instinct to ape high-status members of the community is too strong. (And their readers/peers respond positively to it, because they want to ape the high-status members too.)
> Certainly those role models are going to tend towards high status people, but that's also to be expected since those are the salient examples of success, that's not an indication of ulterior motives.
I don't see much difference between being a "salient example of success" and being a "high status person." It's the same instinct at play.
> I think it's a reasonable heuristic
If you don't know anything about a subject, perhaps it can be helpful. If you know a little more about a subject you at least can have an understanding of which groups of experts are more likely to be correct. The more you learn about the subject, the more you are able to distinguish between the credibility of different experts, evaluate the chance that they are wrong (which is often fairly high, because even giants in the field make mistakes and can rely on outdated knowledge), and have thoughts of your own.
Role model imitation is not, fundamentally, a "reasonable" impulse, though sometimes it may result in reasonable ideas by accident. It is an impulse to organize people into conformist groups hostile to outsiders. Another term for it is the "cult of personality." Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Kim Jong-Il, Pol Pot, etc. - every awful dictator loved by his people exploited role model imitation for all it was worth. The instinct to imitate the high-status doesn't necessarily distinguish between expertise and authority. We just evolved to imitate the tribal chief, the guy in charge.
In an ideal world, people would have both the data and the intellectual horsepower to analyze arguments on their merits. But in the real world it's all just heuristics and crude curve fitting in a potentially antagonistic informational environment, even for the "subject matter experts".
Again, I don't disagree that most of the public discourse (i.e. what the "experts" say) is driven by status grubbing. Nor would I deny that it can result in conformism and mutually hostile groups. But I DO actually think it's reasonable from a how-humans-were-built perspective. The fundamental schtick of humans is cultural accumulation, and the way we've evolved to do that is by imitation and distillation (at least according to the just-so evolutionary explanation I'm sketching here). Thus I'm opining that the Role Model Imitation instinct that you pointed out is a simple answer to Robin's question of "why do we value personas more than actual thinkers": "Interpretation" of public intellectuals is the natural consequence of the distillation step and is how we encode out cultural accumulations, so it's natural that we value those personas.
I find your article very interesting. I hope you dont mind if I describe a personal experience that comes to my mind. I first encountered Jordan Peterson in blogs that others wrote about him. A somewhat coherent picture emerged. Using your concepts, I'd say now that this picture had little to do with Peterson the thinker and concerned Peterson the persona (relative to a certain subculture). Only after several friends talked about him was I intrigued enough to listen to Peterson the thinker. A completely different picture emerged. To understand the world we need to create abstractions and shortcuts, so creating personas is probably unavoidable. But can we develop a culture in which these personas are *useful* (as opposed to misleading) abstractions?
Jordan Peterson seems to have a particularly large discrepancy between his persona and his actual ideas.
I think that's because his approach to certain questions doesn't map well onto our familiar left/right debates, but people on both sides want to put him on that spectrum anyway.
Human thinkers are only occasionally the ideal version of themselves
Ayn Rand is famous for lots of thinking, and an awful lot of it was solid -- but she also had LOTS of opinions that were "extraneous" -- and she was bombastic besides.
I find the question of what the ideal Rand thinks about a question more interesting than the question of whether Rand had a specific problem with Mozart.
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If I'm thinking as a Hansonian -- I almost always start from the famous "Hansonian Credo"
So ... my first memories (imperfect) of interacting with you + your ideas were on Larry Sanger's Foundationalist Philosophy group back in the mid-90s. Among other things, someone recommended the novel Earthweb which was a prediction-markets science fiction.
The post is more of an anchor...
As I watch your intellectual progression across the last almost-30 years (parts that I've seen bits and pieces of ), it SEEMS to me that you have changed the question you ask.
Question 1: What's a good/right answer?
Question 2: How do we achieve good/right answers better?
Question 3: Why doesn't anyone care about better answers?
Question 4: ??What are the real concerns in play, rather than the proffered ones?
The number of public thinkers who have even considered #3 out loud is miniscule....
I endeavor now, after ~30 years of watching, to take seriously all of the layers of this question set when approaching problems. As someone who's naturally a rather direct thinker -- academically -- let's engage with the question -- your brand of how you have stepped back from the question is very valuable to me -- it permits me to think.
For instance -- I love Arnold Kling's analysis of the state of healthcare economics in the US and world ... but I now talk about it from your #4 instead. People don't (economically) care about health care outcomes, they care about "showing care" -- ANY discussion of healthcare has to address/balance this fact as primary.
I've spent 25 years in "making software approaches better" ... and it's always worthwhile (as you said before Bladerunner 2) to take seriously that leaders might not want to do software better, they want something else "respect from peers?" and if you deliver better software, it doesn't accomplish maybe their goals.
So, maybe I have a more complex model of Robin in my head than most folks do. Nonetheless -- I'm the only person who I have heard articulate this specific framing of your progression of ideas (1-4).
So...that's me attempting to essentialize "Hansonian" thinking. I've left out most of the nuance and detail, but captured ... a major thrust in how you think.
I have a simplified Robin in my head that whispers "That's only the level 1 question -- what about level 2,3,4"
And I have a simplified Tyler in my head that whispers "That sounds an awful lot like an IQ-Draining Good/Evil story"
And I have a simplified Dawkins/Dennett in my head that says: "How did that thing evolve to what it is now?"
Once upon a time, in the late 80s -- I read something somewhere that said: "I have a council of famous advisors I use, in my head. -- When I come upon an idea, I often imagine Lincoln sitting across from me and we have a conversation -- Here's the idea, and then I imagine what Lincoln might say to that idea"
I don't do that exactly -- my visual /auditory imagination isn't that good -- but in essence, I maintain a few stances towards ideas in my head -- and then I try new ideas against the stances.
I think it's useful -- my little brain can't handle trying to think in Hanson models AND in Cowen approaches at the same time.
This is so removed from reality it is almost laughable if this person was not so dedicated to what seems to amount to a guru. And ifthere is one value Ihave learned in my 78 years on earth ( subtract about five years for all the time I have spent with my head in the clouds, I have learned that gurus are contrary to human efforts,values,and aspirations wort hanything. And when people llike this author and a million asslilnine editorial writers and tv pundits ( and Ive yet to hear any of them make ONE pun!), write something like the sentence above " People dont (economically care about health care outcomes, they care aboutt "showing care" this fflippant and sneeringly denigrating insult to THOUSANDS of people in countries all overthe world marching and planning andfighting for everything from better ERs and ORS, and singlepayerhealt
Economists tend not to listen well to how people talk. Instead they study what people do. When checking how much folks spend on outcomes vs. "showing that they care", it sure seems that the 2nd one gets a lot more $.
I'm happy to listen to people talk, but when you watch which decisions real people make for themselves and their loved ones -- those are a lot different than the nonsense that comes out of their mouths.
I think that's an evidence question -- and it seems pretty clear that the topic has been studied. The question of "what happens if you double health care spending" via single-payer or experiment or gaining insurance? Turns out the actual outcomes don't change -- I'm sure Robin can reference the studies.
So What's going on if doubling health care spending has no measureable impact on health outcomes? That has to be the most interesting question in health, doesn't it?
- Applying models/theories to new situations is difficult, and the heuristic that the best person to do this is the person who developed said model/theory feels right. Imagine that I've read The Republic and I come away very impressed and convinced that Plato basically got it all right. Now I'm asked to weigh in on whether a proposed change in our social structure is good or bad. I look through my notes, but they suddenly seem too abstract to apply to this practical problem. Instead I can ask myself the age old question of 'What Would Plato Do?', of course if anyone is going to apply the ideas correctly it's going to be the person who came up with them in the first place. This works doubly well if I can find some record of Plato facing a similar situation.
- Evaluating models/theories is difficult, the heuristic of dismissing ideas from people who hold other bad/weird ideas feels right. This is one is pretty self-explanatory, and sounds like something to be avoided, but I think it has its uses.
It is essentially never the case that anyone, yourself included, writes out every logically necessary step of an argument they make. Not even math proofs do that consistently. Written arguments in natural language rely on the reader to fill in gaps. How those gaps should get filled in depends in part on the overall mindset of the writer, so readers construct personas in part to help them do that better. These personas also provide a general sense of how reliable, consistent, and coherent a thinker is. They help see when someone has changed their mind on something, which is relevant for knowing whether they still endorse their own past arguments. Since no one has the bandwidth to deeply engage with everyone's arguments on everything, thise knowledge helps us to decide who to bother reading in the first place.
That is what my comment is about: building a mental model of someone that is relatively broad makes it easier, more efficient, and more accurate to evaluate specific arguments at all, gives us more tools for deciding whether to bother analyzing someone's arguments moving forward, and learning how to refine our own thinking in the future,
For one, the persona carries information about how the argument was generated. That can be useful in a way analogous to how knowing if I'm reading a blog post vs a book is useful: the frame/format carries a lot of context that guides the reader in how to best follow and understand the content.
Edit to add: I think you may be asking the word "detailed" to do a lot more work in that sentence than is pretty much ever warranted. There's no such thing as an argument, written in natural language, that is so thorough that it doesn't require the reader and writer to each make assumptions about what the other does or does not already know, and how they're likely to think or not think, and why they're saying and thinking articular things. Sometimes those assumptions are trivial, but they certainly aren't universal.
The persona is often more useful to me than the real thinker. Maybe professionally I’m trying to imagine, what features is company X likely to add to their product. I can think, we’ll if they are a Steve Jobs type thinker, they will do this. If they are an Elon Musk type thinker, they will do that. Etc. The actual opinions of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are not so useful to me because they are not giving their opinion on the question I care about.
A “persona” is a broad, general, even all-encompassing theory. In addressing a limited range of topics, an intellectual may be providing glimpses of an over-arching Weltanschauung that he embodies, perhaps without having articulated it, even for himself. This implicit theory-of-everything, if it exists, would be of interest to his readers; and if it seems defective to them now, they would also be interested in seeing the closest approximation to it that was not obviously invalid--a supposed rectified or “cleaned up” persona.
The charitable assumption is that significant thinkers in their writings have given us fragmentary views of a unified and coherent insight that is their unique contribution. The persona is an attempt to capture this coherent insight and apply it more broadly and consistently than the original thinker had done.
A less charitable take on a similar line would be that no one ever fully assimilates the writings of a thinker, and must at best turn them into an abstraction, one which may extend further than the concrete version, and disagree in various details.
This is further complicated by the fact that it is difficult to produce a body of work that is both coherent/consistent and reflects what the author learned over the course of writing.
And the most cynical take casts all this as warped by an effort to co-opt the respect and authority of the thinker for the interpreter's rhetorical purposes, either in persuading others or deluding/reassuring themselves regarding their opinions.
In Brazil, there is one guy, post-keynesian, that once wrote (it is in a published book's chapter) something like: "When Keynes said X, it was really thinking on Y". It's the most extreme case of interpretation (kind of an exegetics...) I ever seen.
I feel like this will echo what others have already said. People tend to create these personas, or models, as lenses for interpreting the ideas, arguments, and behavior of public and historical figures. Because these figures are seen to have headed or helped to shape social hierarchies, ideas, or the zeitgeist, the persona, or model, or lens, gets created involuntarily, because as we consider these figures' contributions, we need to see how they align or differ with the social groups, role models, or "tribes" with which we ourselves align.
The temptation to subsume the arguments with a persona seems to me to be embodied in the word "role model". We always want to know how ideas new or old can serve as a personified model to follow or reject based on our social position in our own milieus. And therefore we seek to use that model to help solidify or advance said position.
Mercier and Sperber claim reason evolved to win arguments, which also means reason is good at modeling other people's minds, so as to argue against them.
Joe Henrich claims that our minds evolved to copy cultural knowledge which we ourselves do not understand why it works. So we are programed to copy winners, and assume we can't figure out exactly why they are winners.
The combination of these two theories is our brains are tuned to model and be able to predict the actions of other high status people around us. And this means turning them into a sanded off mental model. A persona. The contradictory reality of what an actual person thinks is not what we meme and follow. Partly we meme persona the high status so we can blindly imitate what their persona would do, and partly so we can argue against that persona in status combat.
There is no evolutionary selection to actually understand logical arguments stand alone. It's more of a spandrel.
The test would be for people are good at abstract argument not tied to a persona, do they over history and prehistory tend to have fewer successful offspring or more. I suspect that capability is at best a non factor in reproductive success. And more likely negatively correlated with it.
> When I recently asked scholars who study Adam Smith what was their most controversial issue, they said it is whether Smith was on the left or right politically
Cringe. Partisan politics has broken peoples' brains.
Which is why I think your idea of historians striving for accuracy/consistency/truth is a nice romantic vision, but ultimately naive. Many (most?) historians (e.g. Howard Zinn) strive to further their own agenda and partisan worldview; history is about power, not about truth.
Or maybe I am just jaded and the 1% of partisan historians has soured me on the 99% of honest historians.
In defense of Smithians, I think there are just not many controversial issues. I would struggle to name any other than the whole “trying to shoehorn Smith’s words into supporting leftist policies” as a general category, and even then there are not many who take such attempts seriously. More interesting to most is to what extent Smith is esoteric, but it isn’t really controversial.
It's a fair point for some historians. I think a lot of historians toil honestly away at relatively obscure sub-specialties (I once had a professor who made a modest career from being a world authority on Iranian medicine in the 18th century - it's unlikely he was after power). The only ones we engage with in the media tend to be in the "contact sport" fields of history, such as construction of Russian national identity, history of gender in Europe, most political history from the past 150 years etc. And those historians are as much public intellectuals as they are historians, which often involves being tempted into partisan debates.
This is what we do with political leaders. When we vote for someone, we get a grab bag of policies, some of which we may disagree with, but we hope that the persona we interpret will lead to better results in the future. We might like someone’s policies but distrust their personality, find them somehow weak or untrustworthy. Politicians engage in ad hominem attacks because, in the end, the argument isn’t over the facts, but about who can be trusted.
It seems natural to see versions of the same taking place in intellectual life. When people decide they trust someone, they’re motivated to interpret their views in ways that align with their own, and to create an aligned persona that gives their own views more authority. And that’s also why, when a commonly revered authority held or holds views that some find disagreeable, they seek to undermine trust in the person.
To understand how personas work, I am tempted to start from the assumption that personas are not created by individual people but by groups of people (societies, tribes, subcultures, etc). (Of course, an individual is a group of size one, so individuals are a special case of groups.) If we then find a good example where the same person has different personas in different subcultures, maybe we can use our knowledge of the subcultures to shed light on your question of how personas work. For example, I would expect that personas serve a purpose in the subculture that is quite independent of the actual person. Ideally the example would oppose two personas (of the same person) that are equally powerful but quite far apart from each other.
I'm not sure I can think of any thinker who could really be described as something as complex as a persona. Figures in intellectual history who survive are reduced to characters in a poorly written play - if they're very influential, characters with a few lines, or even characters in a couple of different plays, but ultimately they're just a means of putting across a story.
And their most important attributes aren't necessarily the lines they speak. They're often on stage primarily to give the general narrative a sense of status, of class, by virtue of the things the audience will associate them with. It's no accident that most of the great thinkers are ancient Greeks from around the time of Alexander, Augustinian Romans, or Europeans from periods when their nation was particularly successful.
Attaching oneself to a prestigious historical thinker is certainly most of the motivation. There is also signaling that you are a person of historical education, who understands the ideas of history's greatest thinkers. Anybody who questions you will have to deal with the rhetorical trick of an historical reference that they may not be aware of. People who make historical references are considered to be intelligent. Luckily for them, they are also among the least assailable in their contentions, except by others who've devoted their time to the study of history trivia. That sort of history mining, is generally in the pursuit of confirmation bias. One can find anything one wants to find, in historical anecdote.
Role model imitation is the default way most people learn. It's hard to think logically or think for themselves, and their peers or superiors may not approve of the results anyway. So people evolved to pick a high-status member of their tribe and just try to act like them. This is at the level of an instinct.
That's why many people are so concerned with interpreting what the highest-status intellectuals "would" do. If you like Adam Smith, if you think he's a high-quality high-status thinker, then you want to mimic him and be just like him. In order to do that it is necessary to model what he would do or think in different situations. Then you can just follow the model. The implicit inference is always, "Adam Smith would do or think X about Y, if he were asked to consider Y. Adam Smith is authoritative. Therefore, we should all do or think X about Y, and look down on deviants who don't." It's the same idea as, "What would the founding fathers think?"
Of course, nobody says this reasoning out loud, because when the whole argument is laid out like that, a moment's reflection shows it to be stupid. An argument rests on its own merits; we should be concerned with arguments for what is true, not with what some high-status person said or would say, except insofar as what some high-status person said is useful to determine what is true. High-status people are often wrong, just like the rest of us. But this high-status-mimicking behavior is at the level of an instinct, so logic doesn't matter.
I think this is an important part of the explanation, though as stated I think you've muddled it a bit with the status question.
I'm sure 80% of the examples can be explained with the standard status interpretation of the Hansonian persona (which is how I've interpreted this post ☺), but the Role Model Imitation case is the 20% that's doing 80% of the real work. "What would Jesus do?" "How would Jefferson respond to this law?" "What underlying constant or symmetry would Einstein find in this phenomenon?" People constantly use role models as short cuts/tools in their thought, and if this evolves into a consistent Weltanschauung as described by James Hudson above, that's the system working as designed. Certainly those role models are going to tend towards high status people, but that's also to be expected since those are the salient examples of success, that's not an indication of ulterior motives.
I don't think that behavior is stupid in a world too complicated to reason everything from first principles, and limited intellectual resources. I think it's a reasonable heuristic which is secondarily repurposed towards recruiting the high status to our cause (to the point where that seems the overwhelming usage in broad public discourse).
> I don't think that behavior is stupid in a world too complicated to reason everything from first principles, and limited intellectual resources.
But we're talking about intellectuals performing analysis of Adam Smith (or similar people) as a career. These intellectuals are already experts in their field. They have plenty of intellectual resources in their field, to match the complexity of their specialty. They could easily come up with their own thoughts and arguments. (Doesn't have to be "from first principles," by the way, as long as it is their own thinking.) But these particular intellectuals don't do that because the instinct to ape high-status members of the community is too strong. (And their readers/peers respond positively to it, because they want to ape the high-status members too.)
> Certainly those role models are going to tend towards high status people, but that's also to be expected since those are the salient examples of success, that's not an indication of ulterior motives.
I don't see much difference between being a "salient example of success" and being a "high status person." It's the same instinct at play.
> I think it's a reasonable heuristic
If you don't know anything about a subject, perhaps it can be helpful. If you know a little more about a subject you at least can have an understanding of which groups of experts are more likely to be correct. The more you learn about the subject, the more you are able to distinguish between the credibility of different experts, evaluate the chance that they are wrong (which is often fairly high, because even giants in the field make mistakes and can rely on outdated knowledge), and have thoughts of your own.
Role model imitation is not, fundamentally, a "reasonable" impulse, though sometimes it may result in reasonable ideas by accident. It is an impulse to organize people into conformist groups hostile to outsiders. Another term for it is the "cult of personality." Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Kim Jong-Il, Pol Pot, etc. - every awful dictator loved by his people exploited role model imitation for all it was worth. The instinct to imitate the high-status doesn't necessarily distinguish between expertise and authority. We just evolved to imitate the tribal chief, the guy in charge.
In an ideal world, people would have both the data and the intellectual horsepower to analyze arguments on their merits. But in the real world it's all just heuristics and crude curve fitting in a potentially antagonistic informational environment, even for the "subject matter experts".
Again, I don't disagree that most of the public discourse (i.e. what the "experts" say) is driven by status grubbing. Nor would I deny that it can result in conformism and mutually hostile groups. But I DO actually think it's reasonable from a how-humans-were-built perspective. The fundamental schtick of humans is cultural accumulation, and the way we've evolved to do that is by imitation and distillation (at least according to the just-so evolutionary explanation I'm sketching here). Thus I'm opining that the Role Model Imitation instinct that you pointed out is a simple answer to Robin's question of "why do we value personas more than actual thinkers": "Interpretation" of public intellectuals is the natural consequence of the distillation step and is how we encode out cultural accumulations, so it's natural that we value those personas.
I find your article very interesting. I hope you dont mind if I describe a personal experience that comes to my mind. I first encountered Jordan Peterson in blogs that others wrote about him. A somewhat coherent picture emerged. Using your concepts, I'd say now that this picture had little to do with Peterson the thinker and concerned Peterson the persona (relative to a certain subculture). Only after several friends talked about him was I intrigued enough to listen to Peterson the thinker. A completely different picture emerged. To understand the world we need to create abstractions and shortcuts, so creating personas is probably unavoidable. But can we develop a culture in which these personas are *useful* (as opposed to misleading) abstractions?
Jordan Peterson seems to have a particularly large discrepancy between his persona and his actual ideas.
I think that's because his approach to certain questions doesn't map well onto our familiar left/right debates, but people on both sides want to put him on that spectrum anyway.
Human thinkers are only occasionally the ideal version of themselves
Ayn Rand is famous for lots of thinking, and an awful lot of it was solid -- but she also had LOTS of opinions that were "extraneous" -- and she was bombastic besides.
I find the question of what the ideal Rand thinks about a question more interesting than the question of whether Rand had a specific problem with Mozart.
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If I'm thinking as a Hansonian -- I almost always start from the famous "Hansonian Credo"
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/politics-isnt-ahtml
It's a lens that helps ME think, not a set of positions.
And ... well...that's how I approach all the ideas/positions?
Where does this direction of thinking take me ?
My claims in that post can help you to think but how does a larger persona you might have build around me so help you think?
So ... my first memories (imperfect) of interacting with you + your ideas were on Larry Sanger's Foundationalist Philosophy group back in the mid-90s. Among other things, someone recommended the novel Earthweb which was a prediction-markets science fiction.
The post is more of an anchor...
As I watch your intellectual progression across the last almost-30 years (parts that I've seen bits and pieces of ), it SEEMS to me that you have changed the question you ask.
Question 1: What's a good/right answer?
Question 2: How do we achieve good/right answers better?
Question 3: Why doesn't anyone care about better answers?
Question 4: ??What are the real concerns in play, rather than the proffered ones?
The number of public thinkers who have even considered #3 out loud is miniscule....
I endeavor now, after ~30 years of watching, to take seriously all of the layers of this question set when approaching problems. As someone who's naturally a rather direct thinker -- academically -- let's engage with the question -- your brand of how you have stepped back from the question is very valuable to me -- it permits me to think.
For instance -- I love Arnold Kling's analysis of the state of healthcare economics in the US and world ... but I now talk about it from your #4 instead. People don't (economically) care about health care outcomes, they care about "showing care" -- ANY discussion of healthcare has to address/balance this fact as primary.
I've spent 25 years in "making software approaches better" ... and it's always worthwhile (as you said before Bladerunner 2) to take seriously that leaders might not want to do software better, they want something else "respect from peers?" and if you deliver better software, it doesn't accomplish maybe their goals.
But those sound like my actual ideas, not a simplified persona of them.
So, maybe I have a more complex model of Robin in my head than most folks do. Nonetheless -- I'm the only person who I have heard articulate this specific framing of your progression of ideas (1-4).
So...that's me attempting to essentialize "Hansonian" thinking. I've left out most of the nuance and detail, but captured ... a major thrust in how you think.
I have a simplified Robin in my head that whispers "That's only the level 1 question -- what about level 2,3,4"
And I have a simplified Tyler in my head that whispers "That sounds an awful lot like an IQ-Draining Good/Evil story"
And I have a simplified Dawkins/Dennett in my head that says: "How did that thing evolve to what it is now?"
Once upon a time, in the late 80s -- I read something somewhere that said: "I have a council of famous advisors I use, in my head. -- When I come upon an idea, I often imagine Lincoln sitting across from me and we have a conversation -- Here's the idea, and then I imagine what Lincoln might say to that idea"
I don't do that exactly -- my visual /auditory imagination isn't that good -- but in essence, I maintain a few stances towards ideas in my head -- and then I try new ideas against the stances.
I think it's useful -- my little brain can't handle trying to think in Hanson models AND in Cowen approaches at the same time.
This is so removed from reality it is almost laughable if this person was not so dedicated to what seems to amount to a guru. And ifthere is one value Ihave learned in my 78 years on earth ( subtract about five years for all the time I have spent with my head in the clouds, I have learned that gurus are contrary to human efforts,values,and aspirations wort hanything. And when people llike this author and a million asslilnine editorial writers and tv pundits ( and Ive yet to hear any of them make ONE pun!), write something like the sentence above " People dont (economically care about health care outcomes, they care aboutt "showing care" this fflippant and sneeringly denigrating insult to THOUSANDS of people in countries all overthe world marching and planning andfighting for everything from better ERs and ORS, and singlepayerhealt
h plans beliies the inanity of your remarks. To paraphrase Hamlet, "get thee to healthcare meetling."
Economists tend not to listen well to how people talk. Instead they study what people do. When checking how much folks spend on outcomes vs. "showing that they care", it sure seems that the 2nd one gets a lot more $.
I'm happy to listen to people talk, but when you watch which decisions real people make for themselves and their loved ones -- those are a lot different than the nonsense that comes out of their mouths.
I think that's an evidence question -- and it seems pretty clear that the topic has been studied. The question of "what happens if you double health care spending" via single-payer or experiment or gaining insurance? Turns out the actual outcomes don't change -- I'm sure Robin can reference the studies.
So What's going on if doubling health care spending has no measureable impact on health outcomes? That has to be the most interesting question in health, doesn't it?
Two main reasons come to mind:
- Applying models/theories to new situations is difficult, and the heuristic that the best person to do this is the person who developed said model/theory feels right. Imagine that I've read The Republic and I come away very impressed and convinced that Plato basically got it all right. Now I'm asked to weigh in on whether a proposed change in our social structure is good or bad. I look through my notes, but they suddenly seem too abstract to apply to this practical problem. Instead I can ask myself the age old question of 'What Would Plato Do?', of course if anyone is going to apply the ideas correctly it's going to be the person who came up with them in the first place. This works doubly well if I can find some record of Plato facing a similar situation.
- Evaluating models/theories is difficult, the heuristic of dismissing ideas from people who hold other bad/weird ideas feels right. This is one is pretty self-explanatory, and sounds like something to be avoided, but I think it has its uses.
It is essentially never the case that anyone, yourself included, writes out every logically necessary step of an argument they make. Not even math proofs do that consistently. Written arguments in natural language rely on the reader to fill in gaps. How those gaps should get filled in depends in part on the overall mindset of the writer, so readers construct personas in part to help them do that better. These personas also provide a general sense of how reliable, consistent, and coherent a thinker is. They help see when someone has changed their mind on something, which is relevant for knowing whether they still endorse their own past arguments. Since no one has the bandwidth to deeply engage with everyone's arguments on everything, thise knowledge helps us to decide who to bother reading in the first place.
As I said in the post, I get why we need to interpret details of arguments. My puzzle is about all the other interpretation we do.
That is what my comment is about: building a mental model of someone that is relatively broad makes it easier, more efficient, and more accurate to evaluate specific arguments at all, gives us more tools for deciding whether to bother analyzing someone's arguments moving forward, and learning how to refine our own thinking in the future,
I don't see how creating a personal helps you evaluate that human's detailed arguments.
For one, the persona carries information about how the argument was generated. That can be useful in a way analogous to how knowing if I'm reading a blog post vs a book is useful: the frame/format carries a lot of context that guides the reader in how to best follow and understand the content.
Edit to add: I think you may be asking the word "detailed" to do a lot more work in that sentence than is pretty much ever warranted. There's no such thing as an argument, written in natural language, that is so thorough that it doesn't require the reader and writer to each make assumptions about what the other does or does not already know, and how they're likely to think or not think, and why they're saying and thinking articular things. Sometimes those assumptions are trivial, but they certainly aren't universal.
The persona is often more useful to me than the real thinker. Maybe professionally I’m trying to imagine, what features is company X likely to add to their product. I can think, we’ll if they are a Steve Jobs type thinker, they will do this. If they are an Elon Musk type thinker, they will do that. Etc. The actual opinions of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are not so useful to me because they are not giving their opinion on the question I care about.
A “persona” is a broad, general, even all-encompassing theory. In addressing a limited range of topics, an intellectual may be providing glimpses of an over-arching Weltanschauung that he embodies, perhaps without having articulated it, even for himself. This implicit theory-of-everything, if it exists, would be of interest to his readers; and if it seems defective to them now, they would also be interested in seeing the closest approximation to it that was not obviously invalid--a supposed rectified or “cleaned up” persona.
The charitable assumption is that significant thinkers in their writings have given us fragmentary views of a unified and coherent insight that is their unique contribution. The persona is an attempt to capture this coherent insight and apply it more broadly and consistently than the original thinker had done.
A less charitable take on a similar line would be that no one ever fully assimilates the writings of a thinker, and must at best turn them into an abstraction, one which may extend further than the concrete version, and disagree in various details.
This is further complicated by the fact that it is difficult to produce a body of work that is both coherent/consistent and reflects what the author learned over the course of writing.
And the most cynical take casts all this as warped by an effort to co-opt the respect and authority of the thinker for the interpreter's rhetorical purposes, either in persuading others or deluding/reassuring themselves regarding their opinions.
In Brazil, there is one guy, post-keynesian, that once wrote (it is in a published book's chapter) something like: "When Keynes said X, it was really thinking on Y". It's the most extreme case of interpretation (kind of an exegetics...) I ever seen.
some minor notes, 2023-08-14:
" her or her persona ..."
"to engage most the messy details"
fixed; thanks
I feel like this will echo what others have already said. People tend to create these personas, or models, as lenses for interpreting the ideas, arguments, and behavior of public and historical figures. Because these figures are seen to have headed or helped to shape social hierarchies, ideas, or the zeitgeist, the persona, or model, or lens, gets created involuntarily, because as we consider these figures' contributions, we need to see how they align or differ with the social groups, role models, or "tribes" with which we ourselves align.
The temptation to subsume the arguments with a persona seems to me to be embodied in the word "role model". We always want to know how ideas new or old can serve as a personified model to follow or reject based on our social position in our own milieus. And therefore we seek to use that model to help solidify or advance said position.