I.

Here’s a fun argument you can use to discredit anyone at any time.

Start by calling them an arrogant fanatic with a totalizing ideology, someone who thinks they personally have solved all problems and can’t possibly learn from dissenting viewpoints. If they have friends who agree with them, they’re a cult who collectively work to shelter themselves from any dissenting viewpoint.

Then your victim responds by presenting one hundred notarized affadavits describing times when they have engaged with their critics, spent years studying books by their critics to see what they could learn from them, and even changed their beliefs in response to criticism.

Then you spring the trap: “Ah, but you cherry-picked critics who operate within your worldview, a sort of loyal opposition. You continue to dismiss and exclude genuine critics who challenge your smug assumptions.”

This always works. If your victim protests that they do like and appreciate many critics with worldviews different to theirs, you object that no, those guys are also within the system. You meant a different guy, even further away from their own view. Oh, they read that one too? You meant an even more different guy. Eventually, no matter how cosmopolitan they are, you will reach someone they actually don’t respect - let’s say a Stalinist pedophile who believes the Papacy is a Jewish plot - and then you go ha! I told you that you rejected everyone outside your little bubble!

Everyone has people close to their ideology who they respect, and people far away from it who they don’t respect. Professionally, I work from a tradition of medicalized psychiatry influenced by figures like Kraepelin, Kline, and (sigh) Stahl. When I operate within that tradition - let’s say by prescribing escitalopram to a depressed patient - here are five circles of critics I might consider listening to:

1. The Colleague: “Instead of prescribing escitalopram, you should prescribe bupropion, which studies show is equally efficacious with fewer side effects.”

2. The Biopsychosocialist: “Instead of just using medication, you should treat depression with a balanced regimen of biopsychosocial interventions, including improved diet, better sleep schedule, and helping the patient overcome obstacles in their life.”

3. The Freudian: “Have you even considered that the patient might be repressing his latent desire to kill his father and marry his mother? Maybe you should analyze him weekly for ten years.”

4. The Zealot: “Mental illness is caused by separation from Christ/Mohammed/Buddha/Confucius. Your patient should seek forgiveness and let God/Allah/enlightenment/filial piety into their heart/soul/chakras/family.”

5. The Scientologist: “Psychiatrists are hostile aliens from the planet Farsec. Mental illnesses are caused by body thetans under the influence of the evil overlord Xenu, which can only be removed through dianetics classes, especially the expensive ones.”

In practice, I devote a lot of time and energy to the Colleague and the Biopsychosocialist’s criticisms, a small amount to the Freudian’s, and very little to the Zealot’s and Scientologist’s.

If you portrayed me as a blinkered fanatic who refused to consider other views, I might object by talking about all the time I spent engaging with my colleagues and the biopsychosocialists. Then you could say that those are just loyal opposition within my own modern-20th-century-medicalized-psychiatry paradigm, but, if I’m so broad-minded, why don’t I engage more with Freudians, zealots, and Scientologists? I can only answer that I think those people are wrong. Then you could say “See, , Scott admits that he thinks that his own ideology is the sole source of truth and that outside critics have nothing useful to contribute”.

This is what Eric Raymond calls a Kafkatrap, where any denial is further evidence of guilt. The victim insists “I do so listen to criticism! See, I draw my boundary of who to listen to way out here”, and points to some place very far away from him. The attacker answers “See! Everyone inside that boundary is within your worldview by definition, so you’re admitting that you refuse to listen to criticism from outside your worldview!”

Raymond coined “kafkatrap” during the first round of Social Justice Wars, and this argument figured heavily there. You’re in medicine? You read dozens of books by highly-educated critics of medicine all across the political spectrum? Ah, but have you engaged with this anthroplogist who says medicine is fundamentally racist because surgeons don’t start every operation with a land acknowledgment? Oh, you don’t take her seriously? Seems like you’re one of those insular elitists who think true outsiders, especially black outsiders, have nothing to contribute. If you get my drift, mein Fuhrer.

This is also part of what I was getting at in my plea for effective altruists to stop fawning over their own worst critics. I think rationalists and effective altruists have done a great job engaging with outsiders who have helpful perspectives on things they care about. But the demand - then and now - has always been that we go further. Why aren’t we engaging with the people who think charity is evil? Why aren’t we engaging with the people who think “reason” is a racist scam to claim that white values are objectively correct? Why aren’t we bowing and scraping before the people who spent the past five years saying we were total idiots to worry about AI because it would never be able to count the number of r’s in “strawberry”? Why don’t we worship them as gods? Why don’t we reach out to the people who say we are ugly pervert techbro nerds who should kill themselves, and offer them all-expenses-paid trips to give the keynote speeches at our conferences?

When I try to dialogue with the people who say these things (they’re critics! I have to dialogue with them), I try to ask them what level of “engagement” would make us no longer insular and arrogant and exclusionary - what would allow multiple people in the same social network to share an unpopular belief without getting called “cultish”? I never get a straight answer, and I suspect this is because the real answer would be “You have to abandon all of your unpopular beliefs and switch to believing only popular things instead, and also make me and my friends the high-status leaders of your group”. I decline to do this.

II.

Granting that these people suck, and stepping back from the kafkatrap for a moment, how should we address this epistemic problem? Certainly as a first approximation you shouldn’t spend too much time on people you think are dumb and crazy. But anyone with an opinion sufficiently different from yours probably seems dumb and crazy. If we never listen to anyone whose opinion seems too different from what we currently think is correct, how can we learn?

There’s one very tempting way out: look for “objective evidence” of which critics are worth engaging with. Someone who is very popular and powerful and well-regarded needs to be taken seriously; some marginalized group who can’t get their ideas published in high-impact-factor journals doesn’t. Biopsychosocialists have more social cachet and published journal articles than Scientologists; this accurately predicts that they should be taken more seriously.

But there are two flaws in this plan. First, your perception of “powerful”, “popular”, and “well-regarded” is probably influenced by your current beliefs. I mentioned “high impact-factor journals” above - why do I think those are better “objective” evidence than the number of mentions your ideology gets in Battlefield Earth, one of the best-selling science fiction novels of all time? Probably because I’m a doctor and not a Scientologist.

Second, and more important, it also ensures you always move in a gradient towards Power. Every step you take will be away from your group’s own values, in favor of consensus society. “Abandon everything that makes you unique in favor of being exactly like everyone else” is a Heuristic That Almost Always Works. But it’s also the sort of thing demons whisper to you on desert roads at night. It would be wise to have a plan that tells you something different from the demons.

I rely a little on objective evidence, but I also think it’s healthy to do something like exponential decay: halve the amount of energy you devote to each step away from your current beliefs. If you think medicalized psychiatry is the way to go, you should spend most of your time trying to be the best medicalized psychiatrist you can. Then spend half that amount of time investigating things in the near periphery of medicalized psychiatry, like cognitive therapy and biopsychosocial solutions. Then spend half that amount of time on things in the very far periphery, like Freudianism. Then spend half that amount of time mopping up the things that seem obviously crazy.

“Half” is just an example (I personally do more like a fifth). It doesn’t even have to be the same constant at each step. I think the key idea is that instead of beating yourself up because you don’t read people you hate at exactly the same level as people you respect, you can just read them a little but not too much. This has the advantage of helping you check whether they’re actually as silly as you thought, or whether you were actually missing something important.

(The people trying to kafkatrap you will insist that you didn’t truly understand the few books you read, and that you need to spend years truly soaking yourself in the alternate paradigm before it will can start to seep into someone as beknighted and biased as yourself. This . . . might be true, but there’s no way to spend years investigating every idea, and you shouldn’t award years of your life to whoever can bully you the most, so I still think concentrating on correct-seeming ideas and devoting progressively less energy to progressively more outlandish-seeming ideas - and hoping that this small amount of energy and study will be enough to help you catch the good ones that you should spend more time on - is the way to go.

SSC/ACX book reviews that I consider part of my project of investigating views very different from my own include Just Giving, The Body Keeps The Score, A Future For Socialism, Inventing The Future, Madness And Civilization, Capital In The Twenty-First Century, Seeing Like A State, Unlearn Your Pain, My Brother Ron, Chronicles Of Wasted Time, What’s Wrong With The World, everything I’ve ever written about “neoreaction”, Singer on Marx, San Fransicko, The Others Within Us, I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, America Against America, The Cult Of Smart, Sadly Porn, Mussolini On Fascism, and the Frankfurt School.

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