Thread
How should we think about how to use Twitter?
My own thinking has been deeply shaped by @HSJSpeaks’s argument in ‘Why it’s OK to speak your mind.’
His basic claim is that we have an ethical duty to share our arguments, evidence, & views *the more there is social pressure not to.*
My own thinking has been deeply shaped by @HSJSpeaks’s argument in ‘Why it’s OK to speak your mind.’
His basic claim is that we have an ethical duty to share our arguments, evidence, & views *the more there is social pressure not to.*
Our views on reality & what’s true are deeply shaped by the views of those around us. We inevitably rely on others, commonly accessible knowledge, & experts for much of what we take as true. The health of our own views is bound up with the health of others’ & the broader public’s
Think about your watch, dishwasher, car, or computer breaking. Your pet getting sick. Trying to explain how jet engines, steroids, & WiFi work. How to make flour, soap, thread, film, printer ink, a jazz score, or bourbon. We depend daily on the specialized knowledge of others.
A cognitive division of labor makes life possible but given our individual limits we are often in no position to know if something has gone even profoundly wrong in an area where we lack expertise. Our faith, as William James says, is almost always faith in someone else’s faith.
The health of the epistemic commons, our shared repository of knowledge, is vital to everyone. Unhealth & corruption of the epistemic commons happen when there’s a breakdown in some knowledge producing arena. This happens when when non-truth tracking dynamics gain ascendancy.
Ideology & social pressure are leading culprits. Suppose you have some evidence or view that goes against the grain in your field. A healthy field welcomes that as necessary to help us all move toward truth. You express the view & reasoned argument ensues. You grab a beer after.
An unhealthy field responds to unorthodox, controversial, or even offensive views or evidence with social pressure & attack rather than reason, argument, & critique. Those with such views & evidence fear voicing it, even if they’re highly confident & the stakes are very high.
The Chernobyl disaster is an extreme example. The handling of COVID is another. Other cases come to mind. When those with unorthodox views are silenced, there is a false & dangerous illusion of expert consensus & correctness, a poisoning of the commons on which all of us depend.
Your reference network are those whose views on you are consequential. They have power over you. You care what they think. Faculty care what other faculty, activists, & NPR/Bouie/Klein say about them, not Tucker. It’s social pressure from your reference network that matters most!
The more there is social pressure *not* to share some salient evidence, argument, or view within a reference network, the more likely that field is corrupted, unhealthy, & even wrong in relation to that topic. That is very bad for the field & for the entire epistemic commons.
Consider the 1619 project. There has been tremendous social pressure among historians not to be critical of its core claims. Those who’ve done so have not primarily faced scholarly rebuttal but serious social sanction: they are bad people or even racist. This destroys knowledge.
This is why the more social pressure there is not to share evidence or argument, the more there is a duty to do so. For the reference network is corrupted & likely wrong in relation to that topic. This is esp. important for faculty & journalists, whose job is producing knowledge.
This is how I think about twitter. It is why I don’t spend much time condemning Trump, racism, & RW illiberalism, even as I despise them. Most of my reference network offers such critique almost the time. There’s ZERO pressure against condemning Trump, SCOTUS, or the latest -ism.
Not only is there no cost to condemning Trump & boutique -isms in my reference network, doing so benefits almost no one, except the one condemning. Indeed, not condemning these things can be costly! You could be mistaken for a conservative & have your career & reputation suffer.
I have faced social pressure to spend my time here condemning Trump & -isms.
I’ve faced more social pressure *not* to name or critique the DEI excesses & corruption, identiarian neo-racism, pseudo-scholarship, & left anti-intellectualism & authoritarianism I have seen first hand.
I’ve faced more social pressure *not* to name or critique the DEI excesses & corruption, identiarian neo-racism, pseudo-scholarship, & left anti-intellectualism & authoritarianism I have seen first hand.
A scholar attacked me for criticizing race-based admission. They didn’t give counter arguments. I was bad & not supposed to express the view. I was supposed to focus on justice for the marginalized. They applied social pressure, playing the bad cop role for my reference network.
But many in my reference network focus almost exclusively on ‘justice for the marginalized,’ are rewarded for doing so, & demand others do so. In contrast, there’s deep social pressure not to criticize the anti-intellectual ideological illiberalism corrupting some campuses.
This suggests the likelihood of major blind spots within my reference networks around issues of identity, politics, justice, race, harm, trauma, safety, inquiry, diversity, & their intersection, where a narrow set of views, styling themselves progressive, is wrongly assumed true.
Now, if your reference network is a bunch of Trump & Tucker-lovers, your case is almost the opposite of mine. Criticizing attempts to minimize 1/6, romanticize ethno-nationalism, & deny racism is probably important. Your voice carries weight in a way an academic’s may not.
I focus on what I do on here because I think there are major social pressure-caused blind spots in my reference network.
One is a major blind spot about the growing problem of blind spots, itself borne of sometime deliberate ideological bias & uniformity in some scholarly fields.
One is a major blind spot about the growing problem of blind spots, itself borne of sometime deliberate ideological bias & uniformity in some scholarly fields.
