Jordan Peterson and the Art of Strategic Ignorance
Jordan Peterson just made a very public mistake that could have been easily avoided. What’s interesting is that he won’t lose any points with his followers because most won’t know that this mistake ever happened. Today, I don’t just want to focus on this mistake. I want to discuss how this is sort of screwup is common in the gurusphere and what might be happening. I recently came across a name for it that presents a pretty interesting theory, and it’s called “strategic ignorance”.
There are a few questions that are regularly on my mind when I look around at the world of seemingly irrational people. With all of the misinformation and fake experts out there, I think these are questions we should all be asking:
Are people intentionally lying, or do they believe their own BS due to self-deception?
Why don’t people care about the truth?
What can we do to get people to care about the truth?
The truth question is an important one. I’ve been extremely busy lately and haven’t had as much time to write, but I have a short series of pieces outlined to tackle this problem of truth. Here, we’re going to focus more on the lying vs self-deception question.
This is an important one for moral accountability because there’s a major difference between lying and self-deception. For example, if it’s raining outside, and I ask someone, “How is the weather outside today?”, and they tell me it’s sunny, lying vs. self-deception helps me decide if this is a good or bad person.
If they lied to me intentionally, this person is a jerk, and maybe I shouldn’t trust them in the future. But, if for some reason this person lied to themselves, do they get a pass? What if this person just didn’t know if it was raining but gave me an answer rather than saying they weren’t sure? How does that affect moral accountability?
Peterson’s blunder seems to align more with the “just didn’t check” scenario. This is something people like Joe Rogan do regularly, and it may be a strategic move.
The Random Woke Columnist
I’ve been sick for the last few days, but I woke up feeling fantastic. I made some coffee and hopped on my computer for my routine of catching up on the news and see what’s going on in the terrifying world of Twitter. First, I saw this retweet from Matt Browne of the Decoding Gurus podcast:
People misunderstanding science is a topic I’m interested in, so I checked out Liam’s tweet to see what he was sharing, and I saw that it was this tweet from Jordan Peterson.
Jordan Peterson probably thought this was an easy slam dunk. At first glance, even my first thought was, “Oh boy. What’d scientific American do now?” For context, here’s a quick backstory:
Famous evolutionary biologist EO Wilson passed away in December of 2021
The scientific community mourned
Scientific American published The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson two days after his death
The subtitle of this opinion piece was “We must reckon with his and other scientists’ racist ideas if we want an equitable future”
Many in the scientific community came out against this piece, and there were discussions of how “wokeism” is creeping into science
I don’t have time to get into my opinions about the EO Wilson story, but I believe that laid the foundation for Peterson to assume he could easily label this new article as “woke idiocy”. Then, I checked who wrote the piece and knew that Peterson fucked up.
As soon as I saw who wrote it, I immediately got defensive and thought, “Oh hell no!”. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Lisa’s work, you need to go check it out ASAP. Even I’m somewhat of a jackass because I have yet to read her newest book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. But, I did read her previous book, How Emotions Are Made, and it taught me so much, and I reference it regularly.
To give you an idea of who Lisa is, this short tweet sums it up nicely:
Personally, I think the pseudoscience of body-language reading is one of the most dangerous sciences that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. People are literally put in prison for years or life based on this pseudoscience. In Lisa’s book, she does an incredible job explaining why we can’t determine a person’s thoughts or emotions based on facial expressions and body language.
If you don’t have time to read her book, read this piece she wrote for the New York Times titled The Law’s Emotion Problem.
Before fully believing that Peterson is a jackass, I decided to read Lisa’s Scientific American piece in full. There was a chance Lisa went off the rails into full-on woke ideology with no scientific backing in this one, so I had to check.
As you’ll see if you read it here, that’s not the case. Not only is there some great resource cited, I couldn’t find a hint of wokeism in it.
Jack of All Trades and Master of None
This sub-header is probably giving Peterson and other gurus too much credit, but this is a major issue in the gurusphere.
I put a huge emphasis on intellectual humility because it literally saved my life. Tomorrow, I celebrate 10 years sober, and I’m only here to tell you about it because of intellectual humility. I thought I knew everything when I was a drug addict and dying from drugs and alcohol. When I finally became intellectually humble and was willing to listen to others, I was able to stay sober after multiple relapses.
Intellectual humility is one of the primary values I’ve been teaching to my son for years, and I’ll continue to beat it into his head.
Jordan Peterson is a psychologist, and if we’re being charitable, we can maybe toss on the title of philosopher (and that’s a big maybe). To become a psychologist, it takes years of schooling. I know because my mom’s a psychologist, and I’ve worked with many. It takes a ton of time and work to become a psychologist.
With that being said, it blows my mind that these gurus think their hot takes trump people who are experts in their respective fields. They should know better.
Before putting a neuroscientist on blast to your 2.8 million Twitter followers, you’d think he’d pause for a moment and think, “Maybe she knows more than me about this topic.” But nope.
And it’s not just Jordan Peterson. James Lindsay is a mathematician for Christ’s sake, and he has an opinion on everything. Joe Rogan is a comedian and amateur MMA fighter, but I’ll never forget him bragging about his “coodies folder” on his phone that had all the information he needs to debunk the world’s scientists about COVID vaccines. Bret and Heather Weinstein go out of their lane regularly as well.
The list goes on and on and on, but this isn’t even the root of the problem. In Peterson’s case, he didn’t even know Lisa was a neuroscientist and leading expert in her field. A lot of times, these gurus spout out their opinions without knowing information that takes 2 seconds to find. Why is that?
The Beauty of Strategic Ignorance
I recently binged the 2012 book Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind by Robert Kurzban, and it’s one of my new favorites. I wanted to read more about self-deception and cognitive dissonance, and someone reminded me about this book. In it, Kurzban discusses this idea of strategic ignorance quite a bit, and it’s something that I never thought about before.
This concept has been around for ages, but it really clicked for me when Kurzban used it to explain moral accountability and plausible deniability. Here’s a good example from the book:
Consider a person with the following reasonably plausible preferences:*
(1) He wants to have multiple sexual partners; (2) he does not want to be
able to be (correctly) accused of knowingly risking a sexual partner’s life;14
(3) he doesn’t mind being (correctly) accused of not finding out information
that would have led him to conclude that sexual contact would risk his partner’s
health. Such an individual might resist testing, knowing that a positive
test puts him in the position of having to forgo sexual partners to avoid an
accusation of knowingly risking someone else’s health.
Preference (3) might seem odd. Finding out such information is trivial in
terms of time and money compared to the costs of putting someone’s life in
danger.
Much like the “Is it raining?” question from the beginning, this excerpt from the book highlights the massive difference in moral accountability.
Someone recently recommended that I check out the Polite Conversations podcast’s miniseries on Sam Harris. I ended up checking out this episode she did with Chris Kavanaugh from the Decoding Gurus podcast. In it, aside from discussing Harris’ lack of intellectual humility, they spend some time discussing how these gurus always say they “didn’t know” or “couldn’t have foreseen” the terrible actions of someone they closely associate with.
In one example, they tell a story about how Dave Rubin said he didn’t have the “money and resources” to do research as though Google costs money. I legit laughed out loud when I heard that.
But I think strategic ignorance is what’s running rampant in the guru community, and it’s different than self-deception and lying. This is intentionally avoiding information as a way to have plausible deniability.
Strategic Ignorance About Racism
I think the best example is with the racism debate, especially because it’s not a debate. Pick up any anti-woke book ever written, and who are the two people they always reference to prove that racism isn’t such a big deal? Who are the two authors?
Seriously. Take a second and think. Which two people come to mind?
Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.
I just picked a random advanced copy of an anti-woke book I received to see how many times it referenced Kendi, DiAngelo, and antiracist/antiracism. It’s in that book dozens of times. Personally, I bet that’s on the low end of some of these books.
Whenever I read these books, I always ask, “How in the hell do none of these people cite the work of Jennifer Eberhardt?”
For those of you who don’t know who Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt is, she’s a badass. Eberhardt graduated from Harvard University and went on to teach at Yale University. She’s currently a social psychologist at Stanford University and researches racial biases.
Her book Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do highlighting her research findings and the training she does for police departments blew my mind.
It’s easy to attack Kendi and DiAngelo. These two are part of the extreme, and while I agree with some of their ideas, some are too much for me as well. What makes attacking them easy is that these two just present ideas. What’s harder to attack is evidence that’s rooted in solid research, and that’s what Eberhardt presents.
Do these anti-woke people know about Eberhardt? Maybe. But I think strategic ignorance is a pretty realistic explanation as well.
Aside from Kendi and DiAngelo presenting some pretty extreme ideas, they’re both making bank. This makes it easy to say that they’re just doing this for the money. Meanwhile, Eberhardt is fairly unknown in comparison (which blows my mind). Since Dr. Eberhardt doesn’t charge thousands in speaking fees, it’s a bit more challenging to tackle her arguments.
So, it’s a lot easier to avoid doing minimal research to learn about her work. You have the deniability that you didn’t know such in-depth, solid research exists. Now, you can go on saying that the best evidence about widespread racism that we have comes from these fringe people with the loudest voices.
Strategic Ignorance and Moral Accountability
The idea of strategic ignorance is that you’re able to avoid moral accountability. When you don’t know better, how can anyone say that you have nefarious intentions?
So, should we hold these gurus morally accountable for their strategic ignorance?
In my opinion, hell yes.
There’s a reason we have laws for negligence and things like involuntary homicide. Albeit an extreme example, I can’t just feed my kid whatever chemicals are under the kitchen sink and say, “Duhhhhhh, I didn’t know any better because I didn’t do the research.” They’d lock my ass up in a heartbeat.
What blows my mind is that we’ve reached this strange point in our culture where we refuse to acknowledge that different factors change levels of responsibility.
Joe Rogan is the prime example of this. “I’m just a comedian,” is his common go-to when he gets backlash for his misinformation and conspiracy theories. His fanbase also uses this in his defense.
While true, he’s “just a comedian” and podcast host, he’s also the largest podcast in the world.
We acknowledge that when a child reaches certain ages, their personal responsibility changes. Why do you think there are different legal punishments for people under 18 vs people 18 and older? We decided that there’s a certain age where a person should know better and have more responsibility.
But for some unknown reason, we don’t apply that same logic to when someone has millions of podcast listeners or when someone has millions of Twitter followers.
What’s even crazier is that 99.9% of these gurus are the ones who argue for hardcore personal responsibility.
Don’t have a job? Your fault.
Got fired? Your fault.
Don’t have money? Your fault.
Present bad information to millions of people? Well, you’re just a comedian/psychologist/mathmetician/etc and couldn’t be bothered to do the research.
So, What do We Do About it?
My first AA sponsor always told me, “Chris, it’s a lot easier to fix you than it is the rest of the world.” So, I’ll tell you what I do, personally. If you think it sounds good, give it a try.
The best way to explain this is through a conversation I had the other day:
I’ve been pissed that all of the “free speech leftists” only send their criticisms in one direction, and that’s towards the “woke”. LGBTQ issues, racial issues, and other left-leaning issues, they’re extremely vocal about how the woke try to silence people. Meanwhile, the right is removing books, silencing LGTBQ teachers and youth, and worse.
What sparked my anger was this piece from Propublica.com.
The free speech leftist are completely silent on this, and someone brought to my attention that we’re flooded by news and information. It’s possible that they just “don’t know” about these stories.
That’s a great point, but it also helps me vet who I listen to, or more importantly, who I take seriously.
If you don’t know about something like this, one of two things is happening:
A) You’ve immersed yourself so far into a bubble/echo chamber that the algorithms are no longer showing you anything that might give you an alternative view.
B) You’re being strategically ignorant.
While I can’t get people to stop listening to these gurus like Peterson, Rogan, Weinstein, Lindsey and others, I can control what I do. And what I choose to do is not take these people seriously.
Why the hell would I take anyone seriously who can’t be bothered to do minimal research? Why would I follow anyone that never updates their opinions based on new information? Why would I listen to anyone who has 0 intellectual humility and thinks they’re an expert in all things?
The only reason I’d do these things was that I’m addicted to confirmation bias and tribalism. Instead, I value the truth, and I respect people who do the same.
Lastly, not to toot my own horn, but I read a lot of books by people I disagree with. I think the most charitable thing you can do is give a person hours of your time to see if there’s anything you’re missing about their worldview or opinions. A lot of people do this by just spending dozens of hours listening to the Joe Rogan podcast, but I think there’s more we can do.
When you actively seek out information, it’s hard to get accused of being strategically ignorant.
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"Do these anti-woke people know about Eberhardt? Maybe. But I think strategic ignorance is a pretty realistic explanation as well."
Sorry, but I think normal ignorance is probably the culprit. There are far more intellectuals worth reading than there is time to read. Unless a writer is very prominent, the default position should be to assume that they've simply never heard of her.