There is an idea that has been running through my head for a while: a recent job Scott Sumner helped to shed light on this phenomenon. He argued that there can sometimes be a failure to understand and appreciate how people can think fundamentally differently from you, and how that can lead to political polarization. As he put it:
Those who cannot accept that other people like modern art suffer from a lack of imagination, an inability to understand that other people process visual information differently than they do. People who view voters of the opposing party as evil often fail to understand that not everyone perceives political issues in the same way they do.
It is similar to what Jeffrey Friedman called “ideational heterogeneity” – the idea that different minds process information in different ways. As Friedman described it,
The ideational heterogeneity between my belief network and yours would prevent me from knowing how you will interpret your situation, and hence how you will act in response to it. Even if I know your situation, then – which is itself a difficult question, if you are anonymous to me, as are most agents of the technocrats who attempt to predict their behavior – I cannot know how you will subjectively interpret it, and hence how you will act in response to it, if you and I are ideationally heterogeneous.
While Friedman was talking about differences in how we process information leading to differences in interpretation and action, the more general case I had in mind that was clarified by Scott Sumner’s post is the unknowability of other people’s subjective perceptions. experience, not just their thought processes. If you see modern art and find nothing interesting in the experience, but you ignore the fact that different people have different subjective experiences that are fundamentally inaccessible to you, you might be tempted to think that anyone who claims to enjoy the experience of looking at modern art is just playing a role. Let’s call this phenomenon “experiential heterogeneity”—to paraphrase Friedman’s description, it might be described as follows:
The experiential heterogeneity between my subjective experience and yours would prevent me from knowing how you experience your situation, and hence how you will react to it. Even if I know what your situation is, then – which is itself a difficult question, if you are anonymous to me, as most agents are to the technocrats who try to predict their behavior – I cannot know how you will subjectively experience it, and hence how you will act in response to it, if you and I are experientially heterogeneous.
Besides modern art, here are two other cases where experiential heterogeneity can come into play. The first comes from my own experience, the second comes from someone else.
I was a heavy smoker. Toward the end of my Marine Corps service, I worked at the range, and during my senior year, I was the range safety officer and lead combat marksmanship instructor for annual marksmanship qualification and pre-deployment combat training. It was a job that kept me outside all day, for obvious reasons, which meant I never had to go outside to smoke. I could light up a cigarette at any time—and I was easily smoking three packs a day at that point. I eventually decided to quit—I knew that after I left the Marines and became a college student, my income would drop, so I had to cut back on my expenses. (Plus, there were several other great reasons to quit smoking—you can probably think of a few yourself!) The difficulty of quitting smoking is well-known enough to be a cultural meme, and after being a heavy smoker for so many years, I knew I was in for a difficult transition. Except what I “knew” turned out to be wrong. I didn’t have any real difficulty quitting; in fact, it was pretty easy for me. What do I take from this? Here are two possibilities:
- Quitting smoking is not that hard. All the smokers who complain about how hard it is to quit smoking are just babies.
- Quitting smoking is actually very difficult, but I possess such a herculean level of willpower that I can easily accomplish things that are just too difficult for the plebs.
While both interpretations give me reason to boast about my superiority, I don’t think they’re true. I know people who have struggled mightily to quit smoking and who weren’t just weak-willed babies. I knew too much about the many struggles they had accomplished in their lives to dismiss them as lacking in willpower or discipline. And, to be honest, I can’t claim to have a particularly strong degree of willpower either. There are many things in my life that I’ve found difficult that probably don’t seem difficult to most other people.
So what’s the third option? My subjective experience of quitting smoking has simply been different than most other people’s. So it’s not that I had more willpower than my friends who struggled to quit. More likely, it simply took a lot less willpower than they did. While it may be tempting for me to simply say, “Quitting smoking isn’t that hard—I know that from personal experience! You’re just lazy!” that wouldn’t be fair. The truth is, I have no idea what anyone else’s experience of quitting smoking feels like—and neither do you.
The second case comes from Ben Carpenter, one of the many online fitness personalities on YouTube. If you don’t have an aversion to profanity, I recommend taking a few minutes to watch his videoBut the short version is this. While Ben himself is very thin (being a fitness model and workout coach), his sister has struggled with her weight her entire life. He talks about a time when he was dieting to reduce his body fat percentage absurdly for a photoshoot, and the insane struggle he felt with his hunger while trying to maintain that level of thinness. His sister asked him how he was feeling and he described in detail how extreme his hunger was, how nothing he ate would make it go away, and as soon as he finished eating, all he could think about was when he would eat again. Her response was, “You’ve basically described how I feel every day.” Carpenter describes the realization this brought him:
Dieting to get to that level of leanness is the hardest thing I’ve ever done fitness-wise. If you offered me a hundred thousand dollars to maintain that level for an entire year, I don’t think I could have done it, and I’m not rich. Almost anyone who diets to get to six percent body fat or less without medication will tell you how incredibly insatiable their appetite was. But I only had to fight my appetite signals for a few weeks. She’d been doing it for years…My sister has to put more effort and willpower into fighting her hunger signals her entire life, basically, than I do. Never to have.
Ben Carpenter describes his sister as an “incredibly hardworking” person, so he knows her well enough to know that her struggles with weight control aren’t because she’s a lazy, weak glutton. But if you assume that other people’s subjective experience is the same as yours, you might also assume that people like Emily Carpenter are lazy and weak—despite the incredible work and effort she puts into other aspects of her life. But you don’t know what other people feel when they’re hungry. You can’t know.
So where am I going with all this? Well, I think that in cases like the ones I described above, regarding addiction or weight management, my views on the former and Ben Carpenter’s views on the latter are generally considered more benevolent and compassionate, while the view that everything depends solely on will and voluntary choice is considered harsher. On the other hand, the views of libertarians and classical liberals that leave some issues to be handled “in the marketplace” are often considered the harsher view. To some, this seems callous and uncaring. say “Having a secure job is a good thing, but money is also a good thing. Particularly dangerous jobs—in the contemporary United States, these are mostly fishing, logging, and trucking—pay more than other working-class jobs precisely because people are reluctant to risk death or mutilation on the job. And in a free society, it is good that different people can make different choices on the spectrum of risk and reward.” But I think this approach, far from being callous and indifferent, is actually what shows genuine respect and even compassion for people.
Libertarians and classical liberals are much more likely to accept the idea that “it’s good that different people are able to make different choices on the risk-reward spectrum.” But modern liberals and progressives shy away from it—they view such choices as suspect and feel an imperative need to overturn them through the state. They often express a certain disbelief that anyone could make such a choice—surely no one would. truly People think that higher risk for higher pay is a good trade-off. Such choices must surely be made under duress or perhaps out of ignorance, making their choice susceptible to external veto by third parties.
Scott Sumner concluded his article by saying, “Don’t assume you know what’s going on in other people’s minds. You don’t. Don’t you think your neighbor needs a painkiller? How would you know? We need free markets precisely because we don’t know what other people see, feel, and taste.” I couldn’t agree more. Modern liberals see others making choices that seem wrong or ill-advised and think that shows that those choices are not genuine, or don’t deserve respect, and can therefore be denied. Classical liberals see the same thing and understand that even though these choices may seem strange to us, they are nonetheless worthy of respect and should not be subject to outside interference, because we can’t really know the other person’s subjective thoughts or experiences, and so we can’t really know what value the arrangement offers them. If I see someone making a trade-off between higher risk and higher pay that seems crazy to me, that’s excellent evidence that the trade-off isn’t worth it to me—but precisely no evidence that the trade-off isn’t really worth it to them. As is often the case, Adam Smith said it best:
The statesman who would attempt to direct the people in the manner in which they should employ their capital, would not only burden himself with a most unnecessary attention, but would arrogate to himself an authority which could not be safely confided, not only to any one person, but to any council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to think himself fit to exercise it.
