Keep Your Identity Small
Paul Graham — paulgraham.com, 2009
The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
Why smart people stop thinking clearly when a topic touches their identity. The mechanism is simple: once something becomes a label you wear, you defend it instead of evaluating it. The fix is equally simple, and equally hard.
I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.
As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people care about?
The reason, I think, is that religion isn't a topic but a mode of thought. The religious way of thinking is to think "what does my religion say about this?" and then adjust your actions or beliefs accordingly. This means if you try to have a conversation about religion with someone who thinks this way, you'll discover it's impossible to change their mind. Whatever you say, they'll respond by filtering it through their religious framework.
The same thing happens with politics. Why are political discussions so pointless? It's not merely that they're acrimonious. The problem with politics is that it's a matter of identity, not knowledge. People don't try to figure out what's true; they try to figure out what their side says, and then believe that.
The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
The most dangerous labels are the ones you wear voluntarily: religious, vegetarian, libertarian, feminist, conservative, democrat. When you use a label as part of your identity, it constrains what you can think. If you think of yourself as a feminist, you'll be reluctant to agree with people who seem anti-feminist even when they have good points. If you're a conservative, you'll be reluctant to agree with anything that sounds like it comes from the left, even when it's right.
I have a rule: I don't like to have opinions that I can't change. If I had an opinion about, say, the best approach to concurrency in programming languages, I'd want to be able to change it if I saw compelling new evidence. But if I had an opinion about abortion or whether there's a God, it would be a lot harder to change my mind, because those aren't purely factual questions. They're questions that touch on values, and values are often connected to identity.
The more labels you have for yourself, the more your identity constrains your opinions. The best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
The second biggest mistake, after using labels as identity, is thinking you need to have opinions on everything. Not having an opinion about something that's not your area of expertise is a perfectly acceptable stance. In fact, it's often the optimal one.
When asked about something you don't know enough about, the right answer is usually just to say "I don't know." The reluctance to do this—to admit uncertainty—seems to get worse the older people get. I don't know why. Maybe because they think their age should entitle them to know more than they actually do.
Politics and religion are just the most visible examples of this phenomenon. It happens in subtler ways in other domains. Someone who thinks of themselves as a startup person will resist advice that goes against the startup orthodoxy. Someone who thinks of themselves as an academic will be reluctant to admit that some academic work is a waste of time. Someone who thinks of themselves as a good person will be reluctant to do things that seem mean, even when meanness is what the situation calls for.
The way to deal with this is not to deny that identity exists, but to be thoughtful about what you let into it. Be willing to think about problems freshly rather than through the lens of your identity. Ask yourself: "If I didn't know what I was supposed to think about this, what would I actually think?"
The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.