Jonathan Barazzutti

In political and philosophical discussions, it’s very rare for individuals to change their views in any substantial way. People appear to be socialized to actively stick to their opinions even if it means having empirically incorrect views about reality. Many view changing their opinion on something as in and of itself discrediting them in discussions. Beyond the tribal reactions that people have to someone changing their views – negative if it’s away from their views, positive if it’s towards their views – the admission of self-perceived wrongness is often used to imply that the person is worse than others or stupid in some way.

I think it’s the opposite in most cases. Those who change their views on issues and are constantly evolving and improving their understanding of the world are those who are going to adapt when new information inevitably presents itself. I therefore think that to combat existing psychological prejudices we should try to foster a culture that socially incentivizes people to change their viewpoints more regularly than they do.

But it’s important to first understand how people’s beliefs should ideally operate if they are thinking rationally and systematically. One can distinguish two types of claims: descriptive claims and normative claims. Descriptive claims concern what is true, while normative claims concern what ought to be. For example, a descriptive claim might be that increasing Alberta’s minimum wage to $25/hour would reduce poverty. A normative claim might be that we should increase Alberta’s minimum wage to $25/hour. 

People generally have preferences which, depending on what’s true or untrue about reality, may or may not be satisfied by a particular action. For example, suppose I have the sole preference to try and minimize poverty in society (we’ll ignore the question of how I define poverty or if having this as the only goal is reasonable). If increasing the minimum wage to $25/hour would reduce poverty, then increasing the minimum wage to $25/hour would satisfy my preferences. However, if raising the minimum wage to $25/hour would increase poverty, then increasing the minimum wage to $25/hour would not satisfy my preferences.

This example makes it clear that many political arguments are derived from a mix of descriptive and normative claims. Descriptive claims can generally be assessed through empirical examination, although empiricism often needs to be combined with a theoretical framework within which to interpret evidence. Normative claims partly rest on descriptive claims but are also a product of one’s more meta-level preferences. I treat these meta-level preferences as essentially given, and they can create unresolvable disagreements between people even if they have the same descriptive understanding of an issue.

Some debates will rely more on descriptive claims and others will depend more on normative claims. If two people are disagreeing about how high the minimum wage should be, but they both share a preference for reducing poverty, then the debate is going to be purely descriptive and look at what the effects of the minimum wage are. On the other hand, the ethics of abortion is going to be a much more normative debate, even if different sides want to claim that it’s a descriptive debate through word games. I hold that a significant proportion of political disagreements rest primarily or heavily upon differences in people’s descriptive understandings of the world as opposed to their meta-level preferences.

If that is the case, then the question arises as to why people differ in their descriptive understandings of the world, and why this predominantly occurs in the social sciences as opposed to the hard sciences. There are debates and disagreements about facts in the hard sciences. However, while disagreements in the hard sciences tend to be on the edges, disputes in the social sciences are often about the fundamental framework one needs to even begin studying something. This occurs because the social sciences cannot have the same rigor as the hard sciences. While experimentation can easily occur within chemistry, one cannot run experiments on whole societies, meaning that cause-and-effect relationships are significantly more difficult to isolate for. In a discipline like economics for example, researchers can only use observational data, meaning that conditions even approaching quasi-experimental rarely exist.

Nonetheless, descriptive disagreements need to be resolved through some means. Ideally, they would be resolved through ascertaining what is true about the world. However, in the context of social issues where the truth is ambiguous, any descriptive position one takes is likely wrong. Now, it is possible that someone could happen to have correct descriptive views on everything in the social sciences, but that’s probably going to be extremely rare. Furthermore, the correct person probably wouldn’t be able to rationally explain why they are correct, nor could anyone externally confirm that said person is in fact correct with any degree of accuracy.

When the ambiguity of knowledge is recognized, it becomes clear that optimal policy can only be formulated in an evolutionary, progressive process, as opposed to a simple intuitive process where the answers are easily obtainable. Our understanding of the social sciences needs to be conceptualized as constantly being built and torn down by the discovery of new information that shakes our paradigms of the world. 

It is annoying if one wants to have easy answers to hard questions about politics. I know that as I continue to write in this blog, there are things I’ll say that I’ll probably disagree with five or ten years from now. Maybe I’ll realize stuff I’ve already written about was flawed in some way. I try to be as empirically rigorous as I can with this, as I think that empirical methods tend to strip away biases that I may have. Still, I recognize that my methods are not perfect or definitive. The fact that things are ambiguous, as annoying as it can be, is what makes examining the social sciences so much fun. It presents unique puzzles that don’t exist in any other discipline.

This might connect to my hypothesis that a significant portion of differences in political belief come from temperament differences between people. In the social sciences, where information is ambiguous, people are forced to rely on their intuitions to make sense of the world. However, on issues in the hard sciences, there is generally much less debate on the fundamentals (except on rare occasions for issues like evolution). Temperaments don’t really operate in terms of how to interpret and theorize about quantum mechanics because thinking about those issues is alien to social realities that temperaments manifest themselves within.

Once you begin to realize that many political disagreements can be mended by examining the social world scientifically, a lot of disagreements seem somewhat trivial and you’re much less likely to get offended over them. It’s not necessarily that those with a different viewpoint are evil. Rather, they have a fundamentally different understanding of how the world operates that comes from exposure to different information and temperaments they can’t control.

A big theme I want to emphasize in this blog is the importance of tolerance, open-mindedness, and viewpoint diversity. It is in political disagreements that the greatest attention needs to be given to fostering a sense of humility in people. And when people have their own biases and specific knowledge, talking with those of a different viewpoint can help correct your biases and increase your understanding of the world. This humility needs to extend to an acceptance that because of the ambiguity present in the social world, there’s a good chance that you’re wrong about many of the things you believe, as am I. Those who change their viewpoints are oftentimes updating their knowledge sets and improving their arguments. This shouldn’t be viewed negatively, it should be seen as crucial to the advancement of truth.

We often say that teenagers go through phases, and that as we grow older we become entirely different people as a product of the experience and knowledge we gain. We are different people at age 30 than we were at age 20, different at age 40 than age 30, and so on. However, there is no reason why for those interested in politics this shouldn’t apply to their beliefs. We must constantly check for blindspots and humble ourselves to the possibility that we are wrong about what we think we know.