Hey guys!

There are a few tricks you can do to sharpen up your articulated beliefs, or at the very least to minimize misunderstandings by your audience, and I thought I’d share a few of them here. One of them is to express what you’re not saying, e.g., “I don’t happen to believe that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was something I should have taken. I’m not saying that some people aren’t better off by taking it, nor that it can’t provide protection against the virus, but given my age and general health, I don’t think it’s something that I need.”

This trick is regularly used by Sam Harris (see here, and also here where he uses the trick twice in the span of a few minutes). In fact, the more I listen to Sam Harris, the more I notice that he uses this trick. This trick has also been used by less well-known public thinkers, including Karina Alce, my first podcast guest.

Another trick I like to use is simply pointing out that many things can be true at once. For instance, there have been issues with identity politics on the left for some years now, which people like Jonathan Haidt have been thoughtfully documenting and openly speaking about. There have also been issues with identity politics on the right. Naturally, both instances are undesirable, and somebody calling out one of these is not the same thing as them endorsing the other.

I suppose this trick is best used to prevent any kind of whataboutism. Sam Harris uses it sometimes, see here. Ben Shapiro also used this trick frequently in this episode. Curiously, both examples deal with the January 6^th Capitol attack, directly or indirectly.

Another trick I like to use is to steel-man or articulate any expected counterarguments in real-time. I don’t hear this trick used often by public thinkers, but I still think it can be effective.

For instance, I don’t happen to believe that we can derive values from facts. Someone hearing this might say something along the lines of “there are nothing but facts in the universe, so where else could we hope to get our values from, if not from the facts?” Although this argument may seem like a strong counterargument prima facie, I believe people making this claim make the implicit assumption that the scientific lens (“what is?”) is a sufficiently comprehensive framework through which to view the world. I think there is more to the world than that, like “what should be,” which I don’t believe is encapsulated by science.

I’m not saying science can’t help us live better lives, but the idea that we can have a system of morality that is grounded in science seems impossible. I’m not sure how the state of the universe could ever tell us how the universe should be. This is similar to an argument that Sean Carroll made on this topic when talking to Sam Harris in 2017. In that conversation, I believe Carroll and Harris were speaking slightly past one another, and I suspect it’s because Harris’ definition of science is considerably broader than Carroll’s. Carroll seems to believe that “science” only deals with the physical world as such, whereas we know from this conversation that Harris believes that science and philosophy are manifestations of reason and that the meaningful spectrum that we are operating on (or at least trying to operate on) is between reason and unreason. This definition would explain why he believes that values can be derived from science, given that his argument for moral realism rests on the assumption that we should avoid “the maximum possible suffering for everyone.”

Anyway, if you’re dealing with someone acting in bad faith, they will inevitably and deliberately misunderstand what you’re saying, but if you are dealing with someone that sincerely wants to understand what you’re saying, then these tricks can definitely make a difference.

Until next time!

Jo