[content warning: dispassionate discussion of serious topics]
One of the more common uses for social media is reaching a consensus on who is a terrible person. Oftentimes, the way this is done is that Alice quotes Bob as saying something terrible, so that everyone else can notice Bob said something terrible, become outraged, update their opinion of Bob to include “says terrible things, and is therefore a terrible person”, and proceed with the applicable social enforcement. Sometimes this seems appropriate. When I became aware of Heartiste’s opinions about women, I basically agreed with everyone that he has terrible beliefs and encourages terrible behavior on account of those beliefs. But oftentimes my reaction is closer to “Yep, that’s pretty bad, but so what? Everyone believes terrible things”. This happens in person as well. One of my friends told me about a time that his friend or acquaintance was accusing him of acting immorally. I don’t recall the details of the story, but to paraphrase, his reaction was “But you eat meat“.
It seems to me that nearly everyone believes things that are terrible. By this I do not mean merely that “everyone disagrees with me on something important”, nor do I mean that people are inherently bad or anything like that. What I mean is that, insofar as beliefs can be evaluated as good or bad, whether by their implied actions having negative consequences, by their failure to meet some ethical standard, or by incompatibility with our values, I think that most people have at least one truly awful belief. This includes me, for all I know, and it is relatively insensitive to which standards you use to evaluate beliefs.
Take this list of beliefs, each of which I’m somewhat confident is held by at least 1 in 4 Americans, and is considered reprehensible by at least a similarly significant fraction:
- Abortion should be illegal
- Anyone who does not accept some particular set of religious tenants will suffer for eternity, and this is just
- Abortion should be legal
- Transgender folks should be allowed to use restrooms according to their gender identity
- Everyone should be disallowed from using restrooms other than the one corresponding to their sex assigned at birth
- Women and men should not hold the same occupations
- It is desirable to preferentially accept black people to jobs and universities, at the expense of white applicants
- A lack of motivation to work hard is a major factor in why black people can’t get ahead in life
- Almost everyone should be allowed to own a semi-automatic rifle
- The government should prohibit people from engaging in hate speech
- Same-sex marriage should be illegal
- Immigration should be heavily restricted on the basis of religious belief or country of origin
Imagine the person who takes the safest set of stances on these statements, the set of true/false/undecided/maybe/it’s-complicated that, if you described the person’s beliefs to every American, would yield the least strong disagreement. These beliefs are highly correlated, so maybe it would be the person that takes the typical Democrat or Republican stance on each of these. I suspect that no matter what set of stances you take, no more than maybe a quarter of Americans would think none of your beliefs is highly problematic. Even a stance of “Eh, I’m not sure” on all of them would be met with revulsion by many, and I suspect that achieving a not-utterly-repulsed response rate of 20% is optimistic
But it is worse than that. Even within ideological groups, there are commonly-held beliefs for which there is no safe position. Imagine hanging out in a part of Twitter with lots of people who vote Democrat and attempting to opine on the following without getting in trouble:
- Transgender women should be disallowed from competing in women’s sports
- Eating meat is morally wrong
- Police department funding should be dramatically reduced
- It is okay for a professor to hire fewer undergraduate research assistants if they are forced to pay them more
- A school should be forced to change or close if it has highly successful students, but all or nearly all of them are white or Asian
- Homelessness in San Francisco has more to do with regulations restricting supply than it does with a lack of regulations to keep developer and landlord greed in check
- Billionaires should not exist
Analogous to the first list, I think it is very hard to assign yes/no/undecided stances to each of these without most Democrat-voting people thinking at least one of your beliefs is terrible.
On an even more granular level, there is the set of beliefs that each of us personally holds, some of which are very unpopular. For obvious reasons I’m not going to give a complete list of my unpopular beliefs here, but I will offer a few which I hope are less likely to get me in huge trouble. Though I find it somewhat horrifying that most people disagree with me on them, I do not think it is cause for me to view others as monsters.
- Most people’s attitudes toward wild animals and their suffering is utterly horrifying and immoral
- The fact that important life outcomes, like income, being incarcerated, finding a partner, suicide, and life satisfaction are determined so strongly by traits we have only limited control over like conscientiousness, attractiveness, and impulse control is appalling and inexcusable
- It is sad and regrettable anytime someone suffers, no matter who they are or how many bad things they have done
I do not hold these all with high confidence, and my point here is not preach about my fringe beliefs. My point is that, from my perspective, nearly everyone is going through life ignoring huge problems and dismissing anyone who says we should be fixing them. This is part of what makes it seem so misguided when someone tells me I should hate someone for believing that the government should (or should not) impose legal restrictions on hate speech or for expressing the belief that abortion should(or should not) be treated as murder. It is not because I think these are minor problems or because I agree with them. It is because I already live in a world where everyone holds mistaken positions on things that matter, and I do not think it makes sense to hate everyone on those grounds.
There is another reason for expecting the base rate of terrible beliefs to be high. The Overton window changes over time, and our standards for what is an acceptable belief have shifted drastically over the past couple centuries. The practice of slavery used to have similar levels of disagreement to the items on my first list, and is now universally reviled. Gender equality, gay rights, and our attitudes toward atheism have also shown large changes. It seems unlikely that we’ve got everything right this time, and in all likelihood most of us are walking around endorsing things that 100 years from now would result in similar social ostracism that expressing support for slavery would now. Candidates for such beliefs include animal farming, our attitudes toward the elderly and aging, and the indifference toward trait-dependence of life outcomes that I described above.
It seems obvious to me that nobody has good cause for thinking they’ve got it all right, and that they have solved the problem of how to think and behave ethically. Most people throughout most of history have thought this, and it is pretty clear that most of them were wrong. The fact that so many statues of historical figures are being removed on account of those figure’s behavior or beliefs is evidence of this. History gives us reason to be humble and to recognize that we are probably mistaken in our beliefs, and that having such mistaken beliefs is normal.
This brings me to my reasons for using the word mundanity in the title of this post, rather than prevalence or frequency. Given everything we know, we should expect a majority of people to believe terrible things. It is just not that interesting to learn that a particular person holds at least one appalling belief, because this happens all the time in a predictable way for reasons that are at least somewhat easy to discern.
This is not to say that terrible beliefs are without consequence. The level of popular support for abortion access, climate change intervention, and hate speech laws really does matter for how the future plays out. I care as much as I do about attitudes toward wild animals and people with poor impulse control precisely because I think these attitudes are consequential. Presumably this is true for other people as well, though I am aware that some of it is moral grandstanding.
But the prevalence of highly consequential, badly misguided beliefs is normal. A world in which we all agree on everything or only disagree on things that do not matter would be one in which either we have figured out everything that matters or one in which we are unlikely to make progress on figuring things out. We certainly have not solved everything, so we should be thankful that we encounter a diversity of viewpoints, even if it means that terrible viewpoints abound.
Underconfidence 