Intellectual courage as the scarcest resource

Were we ever brave?

Today

Nate Silver

had a good piece arguing that Democrats have basically shot themselves in the foot by ignoring Biden’s obvious signs of decline. Instead of facing reality, they preferred to lie to themselves that the very legitimate worries about his age were down to “misinformation” spread by nefarious actors. Yet, ultimately, reality caught up with Biden and the Democratic establishment and now the party is pretty much stuck with a candidate that stands a very slim chance of defeating Trump. I’d like to add another point to Nate’s analysis: namely, the role intellectual courage (or lack thereof) had in this. A lot of people, including journalists, public intellectuals, staffers and the list goes on, could see the truth with their own eyes, but refused to openly voice their opinions due to fears “for their career.”

I mention this because, if I had to choose a failure mode of our current intellectual/epistemic environment, it would probably be a lack of intellectual courage. The Biden situation is just one example that happens to have had a very outsized impact, an impact that more and more people are waking up to, so that’s why I chose it as an opener example. But the consequences of intellectual cowardice are often much less obvious. Tiny and scattered all over the place as they are, it’s easy to ignore them. But they do add up to create an intellectual environment that’s bland, stultified and worst of all, incapable of guiding people to the truth. Because the truth emerges via constant argumentation — something that cannot exist if everyone is afraid to say what they think. As a result, I think intellectual cowardice (as well as educational polarization) is at least to some extent to blame for what

Matthew Yglesias

describes as the problem of “elite misinformation.”

Elite misinformation is an underrated problem

As an academic, this whole situation bothers me. I see the role of an intellectual as being about defending the truth — I know, idealistic of me. But what’s the point otherwise?

The extent to which academia suffers from this issue was made clear to me after I started writing on the Internet. I get a lot of DMs from academics, often with much more job security than me, who tell me they agree with this article or the other but that they cannot say it because of x,y,z reason. Now, don’t get me wrong: it’s totally normal to keep your opinions on some topics private. But I am talking about things that are often adjacent to their work and which are not even that controversial. For example, this happened a lot when I wrote about why I think the premise behind misinformation studies is fundamentally flawed. And from academics doing social science related stuff! If people are afraid to voice opinions about this relatively milquetoast topic, it seems to me like we are in a bad place in terms of our ability to openly criticize ideas. And if you do not believe me, then you should check this piece by Matthew Yglesias, where he reports the same thing happening to him.

The two types of courage

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It is popular these days for a certain type of anon account to post memes beginning with the sentence: “Men used to go to war and now [insert lame thing that happens in the modern world].” This kind of meme almost takes it for granted that there was a time when people (or in this case, men specifically) were courageous, a time that has irreversibly passed.

But were we ever brave?

It seems to me that there are two types of courage: high potential upside courage and low potential upside courage. Going to war or taking part in any form of physical confrontation, at least for the nobility, was a high potential upside endeavour: one would be showered in glory if they succeeded. Yes, there was a lot of risk involved, but also, much to gain. And what was to be gained was tangible and widely reinforced by society: status, something we all crave. It was not some subjective thing dependent on deep conviction. I think we still have that type of courage in our society. It’s rare, indeed, but not impossible to find. And while it does not manifest itself in people going to war, it shows up in those who take risks to pursue ideas with low probability of success but huge upside in terms of status. If you follow me, you probably recognize that I am talking about the world of start-up founders. Quitting your cushy job to pursue the life of a founder requires a lot of courage, with a lot of comfort to lose, but also with the promise of very tangible rewards for success. Our start-up founders are the warriors and kings of old.

What we do lack though is courage that has low potential upside: that is, not much to be gained from it. And I am increasingly convinced this type of courage has always been even more rare than the high potential upside type. It requires one to not only have high risk tolerance, but also ignore one’s self-interest — two traits that are already rare to begin with, and even rarer together. It requires one to be a sort of Joan of Arc of intellectual life.

Being intellectually honest about a topic your academic (or journalistic, or any other type of intellectual) colleagues disagree with falls into the low potential upside courage bracket. There is stuff to be lost but relatively little to be gained. What’s worse, you will most likely not even be awarded the dignity of being openly cancelled: most likely, your career will become a bit shittier with each open disagreement you have, a dreary slog you cannot even wear as a badge of honour. You’ll become that which most ambitious people fear the most: a no-name. And you won’t even be able to tell where this comes from, to point to a culprit. If you are even a tiny bit ambitious the calculus is clear: shut up and agree. You need to be a bit mad to do it¹.

This makes me think that if we want more intellectual courage we cannot just assume it will spontaneously emerge from nothing. We need to actively incentivize it and nurture it, to nudge towards it looking more like the “high potential upside” type of courage. The question is: how?

1. This is why very often the people who are intellectual courageous are often also incredibly weird.