05. Rethinking Identity

Dated Jan 2, 2022; last modified on Mon, 05 Sep 2022

How Beliefs Become Identities

Didn’t have priors on this. In retrospect, I could have asked: how can I differentiate between a belief and an identity? What are the consequences of a belief becoming an identity?

Feeling under siege from a hostile world may crystallize a belief into an identity, e.g. formula-feeders feeling judged as bad mothers; evangelical christians feeling alienated by legal and cultural changes like legal abortion, gay marriage and sexualized content in the media.

Didn’t know Frequentists and Bayesians were such strong identities. For instance, the site description of Astral Codex Ten | Scott Alexander | Substack is: \(P(A|B) = [P(A) \cdot P(B|A)]/P(B)\), all the rest is commentary.

cites a verse from the Bayesian Songbook , and the book itself is a fun read (though I don’t understand some of the shots being taken). The Bayes-related lyrics are sang on the last night of the biennial international meetings on Bayesian statistics. Titles include: “Bayes! [You’re the One for Me]”, “Frequentists Frenzy”, “[Markov] Chain of Fools”, “Nobody Loves You When You’re a Bayesian”, “A Spouse’s View of Bayes Theorem [My Hubby]”, “There’s no Theorem like Bayes' Theorem”, “The Wild Frequentists”, etc.. Some tunes available at .

Beliefs may become part of your identity when they come to represent some virtue that you take pride in, e.g. breastfeeding as a connection to their baby; believing in crypto as fighting for humanity’s freedom from the tyranny of powerful centralized institutions; pessimism as being savvy and sophisticated; optimism as a sign of virtue for holding positive beliefs.

Signs that a belief might be an identity: using “I believe” (e.g. “People can change” vs. “I believe people can change”), getting annoyed when an ideology is criticized, defiant language (e.g. proud, standing up, unapologetic), righteous tone (e.g. Period., Full Stop., “Talking. Like. This."), gatekeeping, schadenfreude, use of epithets (e.g. social justice warriors, feminazis, neckbeards, snowflakes, Woke Brigade, libtards), having to defend your view especially in public.

When a belief is part of your identity, it becomes harder to change your mind, even when facts change dramatically. For example, evidence that HIV can be transmitted in breast milk began accumulating in the 1980s, but it took until 1998 and the accumulation of a lot more evidence for leading pro-breastfeeding organizations to acknowledge the fact to their members.

Hold Your Identity Lightly

Holding your identity lightly means thinking of it in a matter-of-fact way, rather than a source of pride and meaning in your life, e.g. “feminist” vs. “person who agrees with most ideas that are part of the feminist consensus”. It means maintaining a sense of your own beliefs and values, independent of the tribe’s beliefs and values, and acknowledging the places where those two diverge.

Can you pass an ideological Turing test, where you can explain an ideology convincingly enough that other people can’t tell the difference between you and a genuine believer?

For example, citing the Department of Health and “scientific testing” as proof of the safety of vaccines doesn’t convince a vaccine skeptic because the skeptic already knows that mainstream institutions claim that, and your citing them as authorities shows that you don’t get it. A lightly-held identity allows you to make some concessions, e.g. when the Pandemrix vaccine was found to trigger narcolepsy in children, but the medical community and mainstream media were slow to acknowledge out of fear of giving ammunition to antivaxxers.

Some side effects are rare that testing cannot catch them immediately, e.g. the swine flu shot was administered to 30m in 47 countries, and just more than 1,000 are known to have developed narcolepsy. Better ways of covering uncertainty in vaccine science include: it being okay to be more skeptical of newer vaccines than established ones; accurately reflecting the weight of evidence without giving equal to both sides of an issue that aren’t actually equal; avoiding cheerleading for vaccines that ostracizes legitimate vaccine-skepticism.

Holding your identity lightly is still compatible with activism. Activists tend to face tradeoffs between identity and impact. For example, following the bust of the largely hyped AZT drug, a group of activists in the AIDS crisis went from attention-grabbing protests like chaining themselves to politicians' desks, to working with the bureaucrats and scientists at the National Institute of Health to improve the way drugs were being developed and tested. One of the results of their collaboration was the “large simple trial” that tested a drug’s effectiveness in months instead of years without sacrificing rigor.

A Scout Identity

Dr. Susan Blackmore (parapsychologist turned skeptic) prided herself on being a truth-seeker. Although she believed in the paranormal, she subjected her conclusions to rigorous testing (years of negative research). In the end, she stopped looking for the paranormal.

A scout identity makes it easier to practice hard things, e.g. “I’m not the kind of person who caricatures views that oppose mine.”

Embedding in a scout-like community provides a tailwind for your efforts. For example, an effective altruist disagreeing with the consensus while making a good-faith effort to figure things out doesn’t cost them any social points .

References

  1. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't. Chapter 13: How Beliefs Become Identities. Julia Galef. 2021. ISBN: 9780735217553 .
  2. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't. Chapter 14: Hold Your Identity Lightly. Julia Galef. 2021. ISBN: 9780735217553 .
  3. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't. Chapter 15: A Scout Identity. Julia Galef. 2021. ISBN: 9780735217553 .
  4. Dr. Susan Blackmore. Susan Blackmore. www.susanblackmore.uk . scholar.google.com . Accessed Jan 3, 2022.
  5. The Bayesian Songbook. Bradley P. Carlin. moam.info . www.glicko.net . 2006. Accessed Jan 3, 2022.
  6. Mark Glickman's Music Page. Mark Glickman. www.glicko.net . Accessed Jan 3, 2022.
  7. Lactivism: How feminists and fundamentalists, hippies and yuppies, and physicians and politicians made breastfeeding big business and bad policy. Jung, Courtney. 2015. ISBN: 9780465061655 .
  8. The Ideological Turing Test - Econlib. Bryan Caplan. www.econlib.org . Jun 20, 2011. Accessed Jan 3, 2022.
  9. How anti-vaxxers have scared the media away from covering vaccine side effects - Vox. Julia Belluz. www.vox.com . Jul 27, 2015. Accessed Jan 3, 2022.
  10. How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS. David France. Nov 29, 2016. ISBN: 9780451493309 .
  11. Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. Steven Epstein. Dec 9, 1996. ISBN: 9780520921252 .
  12. A critique of effective altruism - LessWrong. Ben Kuhn. www.lesswrong.com . Dec 3, 2013. Accessed Jan 3, 2022.