On an episode of one of Vox’s podcasts, Ezra Klein said something that I can’t get out of my head, and that bothers me on a deep level. He said that in the present age, with the internet, myriads of think tanks, public intellectuals, universities, and ideological outlets, that any intelligent well-educated person can come up with a strong and hard-to-conclusively-refute argument, with copious citations, expert opinions, interpretation, and analysis, and supportive anecdotes, for almost any position they like in politics.
It really is bothering me because at some level I suspect it is true. I think of how often I see thousands of words used in internet arguments, with copious quotation and citation of experts, for many different sides of an issue, and they all seem pretty convincing if I took them on their face, and it would probably take me dozens of hours of research to be able to engage with them.
You could spend years just reading the output from libertarian intellectuals and outlets and experts, or liberal ones, or socially conservative ones, or anarchist ones, or marxist ones, etc. and still have more to consume without ever challenging your ideological preferences. If you encounter an expert or opinion that is disagreeable to your worldview, you can use Google to pretty quickly find a very articulate and well-cited counterargument to, if not that particular argument, at least that worldview and that position.
You can spend years becoming an expert on a particular issue, and read every expert and source from all sides, and still you’ll probably find people as well-informed as you with the opposite view.
I wouldn’t say this is the fault of, as many people in the rationalist community put it, the mindkilling ability of politics (I think there is truth to that, but I don’t think it’s strong enough to explain this). Rather, I believe it’s because understanding politics involves the intersection of two notoriously difficult areas of study, the social sciences of large groups/societies on the one hand, and ethical and political philosophy on the other. They’re hard because they’re subject matter is so vastly complicated, in a way that is extremely difficult to comprehend and think about.
But, we’re still political animals, and we have to do politics, so we have to keep thinking about this stuff (or, at least, some subset of intelligent people do) to keep society functioning and (hopefully) improving.
This is why “I don’t have an ideology, I’m just following the evidence” is such a dangerous position.
Also why myth-making and dream-weaving are, at least at this point, the most potentially powerful forms of political engagement.
All the arguments, all the evidence…however important they are, and however good they are…end up getting thrown into the giant churning pit that is “everyone throwing arguments and evidence at everyone else.” If you can make people want something that they didn’t want before, if you can change someone’s value function, you might actually stand a chance of making a difference.