Seeing Past the Picket Line to What's There

There are two kinds of people in this world (among many other lines and subtleties): those who decide whether they are for or against a person (as if the person should go away and die if the answer is "against"), and those who focus on deciding whether specific statements are true and specific actions are constructive. As you can tell from my phrasing, I'm the second kind. We are your buffer against polarization. We keep the rest of the world sane. You're welcome!

I'll tell you what I mean. Jordan Peterson is an intelligent writer, speaker, and debater. Many say his words have turned their lives around. His critical thinking seems sharp next to the average educated person's, which undoubtedly is some of why he's a professor in psychology, a practicing clinical psychologist, and recently (considered) a public intellectual. When I say this, you might think that I agree with his political stance on gender identity. Actually, I do not. Protecting LGBTQ+ people is critical for a fair society, and law changes are necessary. I support the law changes in Canada that upset him. However, some of his points are rational, even excellent. As far as I can see, anyway, he is making a serious effort to be honest and truthful (not the same thing). Is he right? Some of the time he is right, some of the time not. To declare that everything he says is wrong simply because he appears to resent the trans community, feminism, and political correctness at large would be to turn your own opinion into a cartoon. The points he makes are often good points. They add to the debate. You don't have to agree with his stance overall to grant that he makes good points. And that's what almost everyone does: they decide whether they are for or against someone, and then they stop thinking.

As a result, a well-made, apparently impartial documentary about Jordan Peterson is getting picketed and canceled at its first screenings. His political objection is mainly against impingements on free speech, and his most aggressive opponents seem to play right into his hand by trying to ban a documentary about him. They don't seem concerned with what's in the documentary, or they would recognize that it includes people with opinions like their own. They simply want to shut down and shut out Jordan Peterson because they disagree with some small fraction of his thinking about the world, in other words, with a fraction of his thinking that relates to a cause they care about or that affects them directly.

Here's a review of the film. Here's a report on the protest. Here's a statement from the director. Death threats are hate speech, undeniably. Saying that, as a professor, you want to be able to critique issues of gender identity on grounds of truth, and you don't want that to be interpreted and punished as hate speech, is, for the record, not hate speech. Now, he says things that are rather paranoid and are understandably taken as offensive. Whether he is responding to resentment directed at him or is simply prejudiced about gender fluidity, I don't know, but it does make him seem prejudiced. Before writing these words, I have to seriously consider how badly it will reflect on me. And I have to be careful, because I really don't want to add to anyone's oppression. (If that's how this is coming across, please forgive me. That isn't what I want.) Two of my close family members are more paranoid than Peterson is in a big way, and I know people with various prejudices, so I'm used to not hating a person for paranoia or prejudice. Yes, I accept you, whoever you are. You exist and you are important.

The picketing of Jordan Peterson's documentary, and the death threats and excessive polarization reducing complexity to caricatures of people and ultimately voodoo dolls and effigies, all this mirrors the treatment of a documentary made about men's rights activists—by a woman herself critical of that movement. Here's Cassie Jaye's TEDx talk. For investigating a movement she disagreed with, she received death threats. It's amazing how little a person needs to know before they decide they hate someone, a film that person made that they've never seen, the arguments in it that they haven't heard or thought about, etc.

This is exactly what I'm deeply opposed to: yes, also the current presidency (I volunteered for Hillary Clinton and the North Carolina Democrats the month leading up to the election), and much of what Republicanism and conservativism stand for today, but definitely this bad way of thinking (not-thinking, actually) that affects all sides, all academic levels, all social classes, all groups. We believe that all we've got to do is pick a side, pick the good person, pick the bad person, then go to war. And I do not believe that is the best way to make progress at all. At its very most insane, that's a mentality that assassinated Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lennon, and millions of Jews. People think they have to fight for what's right (whatever they believe) by picking the baddies and then attacking the baddies, tragically often on scant evidence (and by that I do not mean to deny women's reports and testimonies in companies and courts, something we need to make a lot more room for and respect better). This polarization on personality and person is juvenile thinking at its most basic (good vs. bad), but it's also how most people think in all walks of life, just not as drastically stupidly as those assassins.

I am against that, and I am for rationality and compassion and progress. I am for you. Thank you for understanding.

I accept you. You exist and you are important. If we disagree, I'm interested most of all in your thought process. Even if we agree, I'm interested most of all in your thought process. And I hope you appreciate that, and I hope you don't mind that I would afford the same consideration to someone else.

st

Broth is usually pronounced incorrectly. It should be pronounced "bruhth."

Also, why are we all so lazy about superscripts? It's bro^th.

The bro^th fresh air was warmer and kinder than the eleven^th fresh air, even better than the fresh^st air.

Out

I've always had a hard time identifying with how easily people get insulted and hold grudges. What good does it do?

If you say something I don't like, I will search it carefully for useful information regardless, and I will never be absolutely totally sure I'm right. There's a little game I play with reality: whimsical uncertainty about absolutely anything. It's usually fun, and it keeps perceptions limber and ready to accommodate facts. I'll imagine you're right, even if you sound insane. You always get a bit of an out there.

Especially if I can construe what you say as a factual statement or an attempt at factuality, I don't see any excuse for holding a grudge.

To me, this is the only sensible way to be. I don't get it.

Actually, I do get it! Life is difficult, and too many people are mean—even decent people. I just disagree, ultimately. My way is better.

Switch

There's something really satisfying about writing code, and it's often around the moments that feel worst. You're staring at some function. The more intensely you work on it, the less you can keep in your mind. Soon, you can't even remember why you started writing the function, let alone what it's doing. You push harder, and it doesn't help. You feel stupid and definitely not cut out for this.

Yet... a little while later, you're surprised and not surprised at once: you've made it clean and organized and crystal clear to yourself. You test it, and it works.

Or you test it, and it doesn't. And maybe you have no idea, maybe you spend an hour trying to untangle why. Maybe you're at this for two or three hours, sometimes more. And again you feel stupid, absolutely not cut out for this. But you do solve the mystery...

by detective work. Over sudden seconds,

the jigsaw pieces fall into shape. And you realize, with a forgotten sense of recognition, that it isn't a surprise: that's what usually happens, after all.

Wars won and lost skirmishes, slowly the upsets reduce. Most wrenches in clockwork are more interesting than discouraging now. You still enjoy the way code feels when it's spiffy and sparkly and firing on self-tuning cylinders. You can almost tell by looking at it that it works. You see it working under the surface of the screen, in some perpendicular time that looks still.

A bit

One of my very favorite quotations is this: "Magna est veritas et praevalet."

Why not love everything about it? First, it's from a now-obscure version of an obscure book of the Bible. It's from Ezra, often attributed "Esdras," as that's the older name. The verse was added by anonymous fingers translating (or copying) the Bible in ancient times, into (or already in) Latin. This probably happened a lot, little changes and additions. The graffiti of generations. It's just... here's one graffito we know about.

And it's really good. But it still needs editing.

It means: "The truth is great and it prevails."

You can see what that is: God is great. God is everywhere. God shows everyone His Way, etc.

But whatever your beliefs, there's something to it. Take God out of it.

It's still... It's still...

true?

So—so—so—let's acknowledge that people everywhere are busy lying, even right now, and many of the lies are busy being believed. And people get things wrong and go to war over nothing, really, and millions die. Humanity could still end in a zombie-skulled scuffle, an unleashing of nuclear war, a biological miasma, or runaway drones, or what have you.

Even though we—in our little sphere—manage to lie and get things wrong so much and so dishearteningly often, the truth, reality, the solid facts: we must admit these do prevail. They create us and destroy us and give us emotions and voice.

Just not always in our minds. Not always in our wills, either. Hell is angelic if human will isn't mostly about subjective desires and preferences, about selfish or groupish goals. Whatever will is, it does seem to exist, so that also is truth. But it seems to depend on something other than facts, even when it's informed.

We've got subjectivity, then. Let's admit that. Undeniably, it's there. And I think most of us rather like subjectivity. We enjoy existing and having this little bubble, this mini-version of the universe, and pushing this way and that.

Because we know that not everything is solved and finished, that the world, at least of humanity, is a work in progress, and we have myths to dispel and truths to uncover, and sometimes a wrong violently oppresses and destroys, and we can help, and so on—seeing all that, later individuals quoting this sentence have added to all the graffiti and written it this way: "Magna est veritas, et praevalebit."

That means: "The truth is great, and it will prevail."

Will prevail, now. There's tons of work to do, some unknown improver realized. Things are changing, discoveries are happening.

Out there are human factors, errors. There they are, but they won't remove truth in the end.

Well, both versions make sense, don't they? At all times, the universe is objective. It's a pile o' facts. It is however it is. The matter is arranged that way. The energy is arranged accordingly, the information accordingly, and all this develops constantly. It's completely objective. It is.

Then we focus on that second telling. It will prevail, won't it? Because we're coming around. We're seeing the light ourselves.

Splitting the difference, others have quoted good old Esdras ("Esdras") this way: "The truth is great and it prevails, or will."

Or. Maybe now, but if not, then one day. Do we see that it is good? The sentence is working on its own self. Folk wisdom has been getting us somewhere, it seems to me. How much of the Bible and other sacred scriptures evolved like this?

In the case of these words Esdras never wrote, the quotation isn't included in most Bibles, because we now know it was added later, and many people who are not "Esdras" are very particular about Bibles, believing in one historical event or line of telling or another.

Nonetheless, stepping back, we see a tiny example of how wisdom can accumulate in great texts, even potentially improving them over time.

There's also the joke version, punning on the Latin tense shift: "The truth is great, and it will prevail a bit."

Praevalebit means "will prevail." Will prevail a bit. Get it?

What this wisdom ultimately says, to me, is something about the character or quality of truth itself. What's true is true because the universe is arranged that way, because mathematics works like that, etc. You see it more by stepping out of the way and observing and testing your beliefs, putting aside some of your desires and preoccupations, than by trying to prove you've already got this detail perfect and therefore you are wonderful and therefore you should have people bringing you grapes on platters and feeding them to you. Getting a detail perfect, the slow etch of observing, insofar as that's possible, is both giving and receiving.

If you understand that one idea, you can help the truth prevail a bit.

Bifurcating stresses

I've always struggled with decisions. I used to think I had bad judgment. Actually, I did have bad judgment, but, by some luck, it was not the worst judgment. I've always tended to think things through, or at least try hard to.

When you are depressed enough, your deciding gets tangled up and impaired. I remember going to a shoe store and my best friend treating me as if I were handicapped with indecision. The atmosphere made me feel as if I needed a decision about footwear made for me. The clerk kept looking at me strangely. That woke me up, a bit.

Much later, another friend told me about a similar conversation with a therapist who'd replied "I love making decisions!" She'd fizzed on passionately about decisions. They make her feel energetic and free, a complete human being. She looks forward to them. This inspired me. If someone I've never met can feel joyous making decisions, well so can I, I imagined. It used to be difficult for her. Now she loves it.

That's sort of how I see it.

Overthinking is a danger, but it's also overrated as a danger and an error. When you think something through obsessively, you get better at thinking about it.

When I was just about my most depressed, I remember I'd get out of class or off of work and I'd have some time to find food. Many times I'd drive around, abrading internally while trying to decide what wouldn't mess up my head. Lots of foods would give me migraines at the time, or at least clutter my thinking somehow. I remember sitting in a parking lot for an hour after more than an hour of driving, convinced I needed to make a decision and get out of the car, but feeling unable to choose, broken. It was a routine experience, but that time was especially bad. I wasn't calm on the inside, either. I was spewing sparks. I was catching fire on oil slicks. I couldn't get myself to do even simple things.

So I used to believe I was irreparably impaired, because I thought so hard about things and couldn't make up my mind, and when I did, it didn't work out well.

What I learned, though, is that this is especially deep practice.

After enough experiences like this, you become wise.

First you start making good decisions. Initially they're just as difficult, but suddenly, on one fine cherry blossom morning, they're not disappointments, and then the process gets easier. Your judgment is no longer bad.

Second, you start making better decisions than other people. Your judgment is somehow unexpectedly good.

Third, you find that you can relay what you've picked up to other people. You can talk about what's complicated and what's simple. You can feel the decision landscape someone's walking on, and they'll appreciate your descriptions of what they haven't said. Your judgment is shared.

Having the guts to admit you don't understand something simple, or to admit that your judgment is poor, allows you to see deeper patterns.

What I've learned, then, is that overthinking is a cost up front that pays off later.

That's what I tell my students, too, if it comes up. Many of them want to dismiss their mistakes as "overthinking." But I understand this better. When you don't know a domain or problem type or situation well, your brain goes into overdrive picking up on what's there, on leads, on angles, on potentials, on regularities and irregularities. After a while, you can navigate all this almost unconsciously, maybe even literally asleep, anyway on autopilot. Autopilot takes much less mental activity because the brain has reorganized itself. But if you try to short-circuit that process, if you say as a beginner "I'm just overthinking it," then I really don't think you're doing yourself a service. Your goal should not be to limit how much time and energy your brain spends reorganizing itself.

For better and worse, I've always wanted to be a game designer. Games are about decisions. There's a kind of poetry in the struggle just deciding. I get to see it all in slow motion. It becomes a talent rather than a defect.

Anyway, that's one way of looking at it.

I've told people I'm almost all about this one idea, about choice. Games are the art made of choice, choice distilled, rather than an art distilled from many choices. That essence mixes with the above and is why I keep saying it. I want to understand what choice is at the deepest possible level, and I want to unfold the best of those growing roots.

A fundamental teaching

There's a fundamental tension in teaching one-on-one that applies whether someone's trying to solve a math problem or write a paper. They will get stuck or be unsure or wrong or ineffective, and they'll need your help. How do you respond? Do you show them how it's done and hope some of the spaghetti sticks, to brandish one extreme of the map, or do you ask them lots of questions and try like Socrates to guide them to an inner wisdom they'd always concealed from themselves?

Given enough time, my preference is the latter. About 2,500 years ago, a few years before Socrates developed his famous method of investigating and teaching, and thousands of miles away, Confucius wrote, "Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three." He also wrote that he would refuse to work with a student who wouldn't work hard to bring in the other corners, which by today's standards is going a bit far.

With math especially, I've noticed that many tutors and teachers lean in the other direction, possibly using the justification that "worked examples" are well known to be very effective, at least for what are called "well-defined problems" like math questions with correct answers. This becomes untrue as you go further into math and the questions get open-ended, but it holds in most math classes.

Most students prefer to have someone just tell them the damn answer.

That's not my style, though. Oh, I'll tell students all kinds of answers. I love to beat their calculators at arithmetic. Sometimes I write out the algebra. Often I give very-mini-lectures. There is no one correct approach to teaching. But I believe in their intelligence, and I push it to grow. Sometimes this frustrates them. Often they think I'm stupid or incompetent. Often they're right about that. But there's a method to my stupidity and incompetence.

If you want to solve a difficult problem, you will need tolerance for the feeling that you're working on a difficult problem and not really prepared to and not really good at this.

That's the number one thing you need, actually.

That's what I try to show students how to handle. Questions come up that I don't know how to answer. Mostly I do know. Experience has taught me. But I resist taking my "authority," such as it is, either from innate intelligence or from having memorized a solution. My "authority" comes from a greater comfort with uncertainty and embarrassment and confusion and inadequacy than my students have. That lets me help them get things right when they need to be right, or original when they need to be original.

Sometimes I won't be able to figure out how to answer something, and I'll tell a student, "Ask your teacher." People respond very differently to this. Many are very accepting and are even encouraged that I'm human. They might give an indication that they feel embarrassed for me (I still do get embarrassed) but let it go. It's often the very smart ones who find this unacceptable. They'll go and complain that I had to look things up. They'll say they feel uneasy and uncertain about everything else when I don't know my stuff. That's understandable. It's a feeling that's familiar to all of us, and part of my job is to avoid that. At the same time, the key insight to learn from Wikipedia's success is not that it's unreliable because everyone can edit it. Instead, we should notice that Wikipedia is shockingly reliable given how it works, and we should take away the idea that every source, including the scientific papers, our textbooks, our professors and parents and friends, experts on television and at conferences and in labs, all of these have a level of unreliability we should not actually ignore. Most students who complain because they want me to know everything work with me again. I don't know everything; I'm not always the best source, but I'm often a good one.

Not just young adults, but many people haven't crossed a certain river yet.

Your intelligence isn't what you know.

The best teachers don't always tell you the answer.

The best teachers may not know the answer.

The most valuable work anywhere is in this tension between questions and answers, between answers and actions, and sometimes most importantly, the tension between uncertainty and the first brave question.

Does that sound a little dry? All the world's wrapped up in it. Give it a spritz and put it in the microwave.