Early last year, I foresaw the epistemic horrors of the impending 2020 election, so I made this pledge.
I am ceasing intellectual discussions on social media until March 1, 2021. I will continue blogging and promoting my own work, but will not engage until then.
Here's why:https://t.co/bPAdhuxFpg
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) January 24, 2020
Near the end, I asked Jonathan Haidt a question on twitter, and I impulsively responded to his answer. I’d call that a clear violation of my pledge, but to the best of my knowledge, it was the only such violation.
So what did I learn as a result of this self-experiment?
1. Overall, I was glad that I made this pledge. Not only did I avoid arguing about the election on social media. As a free bonus, I also avoided arguing with anyone about COVID on social media. Two exercises in futility averted.
2. As a result of the pledge, I ran many more Twitter polls. Devising good questions felt more constructive, and I definitely learned more about other people’s views than I ever would have learned from arguing with them. A nice illustration of my rule that asking questions is underrated.
3. What did I do with all the time I saved? Honestly, I probably spent most of the savings homeschooling my younger kids, who joined my homeschool back in March. But I also pursued a bunch of new side projects; most notably, my Amore Infernale is now being illustrated.
4. Did I miss arguing on social media? Nope. While free-wheeling exploration of ideas is my life, only a small share of my pre-pledge engagements qualified. And searching for the pearls was an ordeal in itself.
5. During my experiment, I kept reading other people’s arguments on social media. My modal reaction was, “Even now, this person has yet to find wisdom.”
6. The “wisdom” I had in mind was mostly the Epicurean realization that you have to set your expectations for human behavior down to rock bottom to avoid daily disappointment. I never felt angry about the absurd vaccine delays because I expected all this and worse. I never felt angry about the election because I expect every presidential election to be a disgrace. The incidents that outrage almost everyone else are just a rounding error to me.
7. Other than Nazis and Communists, I used to respond to virtually everyone on social media. My new plan is to only engage with people with exemplary manners. Perhaps I’ll lower that high bar for a while when my next book comes out. We’ll see.
8. Many people describe social media as an “addiction.” I never would have so self-described, but outsiders might have called me an “addict” based on my pre-pledge behavior. But at least for me, stopping required only mild concentration at first, then became second nature.
9. If stopping was so easy, why go “cold turkey” as I did? Because the bandwidth gains are non-linear. If I spend an hour a day arguing on social media, I’ll probably spend another hour thinking about the disputes. But if I cut down to to 5 daily minutes of argument, I’d still probably spend at least 50 minutes rehashing everything in my mind.
10. Doesn’t argumentation hone my thinking? If so, doesn’t non-argumentation atrophy my thinking? You, dear readers, are in a better position to judge this than me. Please share in the comments.
READER COMMENTS
Joe Denver
Mar 2 2021 at 10:53am
Yes, I think argument hones ones thinking. I’ve even changed my mind arguing with total bad faith actors. But since I wasn’t arguing in bad faith, even though they were, they brought up good points against my position.
This is perhaps faux pas, but I’ve even gotten value out of arguing with Nazis and Communists. After all, these people are the most likely to bring up a point of view you haven’t considered before. Though actual Communists are quite rare, and Nazis even more so.
All that being said, as Yudkowsky once wrote, “well kept gardens die by pacifism”. There are just a lot of commenters/posters out there that engage in very low quality content. And are more than willing to flood out good quality conversation with their effortless virtue signalling, that you likely won’t get a lot out of by engaging with them.
So yes, while argumentation is good, there is an extent to which you have to weed out low effort participants.
Jose Pablo
Mar 2 2021 at 11:38am
“Argumentation” is useless. Grabbing power is not. Nazis and Communist understand this much better than we do.
I have never seen an analysis along these lines, but I would bet that “bad arguments” (on immigration, taxes, minimum wages, etc…) are more likely to be “influential” (like in “having any effect on our day to day lives”) than “good arguments” are.
And both kind of arguments, in any case, are much less influential than grabbing power and passing legislation, no matter the garbage you plug in the “exposition of motives” part.
Kevin Kelly
Mar 2 2021 at 11:58am
Why arent you continuing with the practice since the benefits are so obvious and overwhelming?
Srdjan Miletic
Mar 2 2021 at 12:02pm
I think the utility of interacting with social media depends heavily on the kind of bubble you build and where in social media you choose interact. For me, I’m very selective of who I friend, one of the main criteria being their epistemic norms. As a consequence I have a bubble where I can trust that commenting on my friends posts or their comments on my posts will be respectful and usually useful. This also applies to arguing in walled gardens. Most of my discussions are in rationalist or EA aligned groups and hence the discussion is usually productive. My attempts to argue with people in mainstream groups when I was younger were less productive.
robc
Mar 2 2021 at 12:28pm
In January of 2008, I did a similar thing on Facebook. I pledged to stop using it until Jan 21, 2009…and I never went back.
Daniel Carroll
Mar 3 2021 at 11:41am
I agree with Srdjan. The benefits/costs of social media depend on the garden you build. I use Facebook to look at pictures of family and friends, and ignore the politics. Since I am not an influencer, I carefully weed out of twitter non-useful tweeters and I only occasionally tweet. Twitter can be very useful, if you follow the right people and don’t get drawn into pointless debates (that’s harder when someone you know and care about says something ridiculous). However, you Bryan are an influencer, which means that you don’t have the same luxuries on Twitter as I. Twitter is megaphone for you, not an earpiece.
LEB
Mar 3 2021 at 4:19pm
Out of curiosity, what was the exchange with Jonathan Haidt. I would like to read it, but can’t find the link.
Roman
Mar 4 2021 at 5:29pm
I strongly recommend Cal Newport’s books “Deep work” and “Digital minimalism”.
Main idea: effective intellectual work requires long chunks of uninterrupted time taking highly focused efforts. Digital distractions totally destroy our ability to concentrate. Social media, being specifically engineered to be addictive, have huge cost vs benefits they bring. If you can’t avoid social media you must schedule in advance their use.
At least, watch his video “Quit social media”.
Comments are closed.