Note: The ideas in this essay are almost completely unoriginal. I'm guessing that most of these points have been made thousands of times before. I was inspired to write this anyway because I've personally felt a greater appreciation during the early 2020s of just how deep this epistemic rabbit hole goes.
Contents
Self-righteousness biases
At the start of the 2010 film Easy A, the protagonist tells viewers: "Let me just begin by saying that there are two sides to every story. This is my side, the right one." The joke is funny in part because it's relatable; it's an apt description of how most of us look at the world much of the time. In theory we acknowledge that people have differing perspectives, but internally we feel like we're actually right and others are wrong.
Human brains evolved in part to discover objective truths but also in part to construct self-serving narratives. Our brains were not optimized for impartially assessing complex situations to see the arguments and interests on each side; our brains were instead optimized to push for the supremacy of our interests, as well as those of our kin and other ingroup members. Self-serving behavior is more convincing to others and more motivating to ourselves when we believe ourselves to be objectively correct and fair-minded, so we tend to feel that the side we're on is the side of truth and justice. The other side disagrees with us because they're evil or stupid or both. And because the other side is so wrong, we're justified in fighting them, conquering them, taking their resources for ourselves, and so on.
The previous paragraph is an evolutionary psychological "just-so story", but it makes a lot of sense and matches with the feelings and behaviors we observe in ourselves and others.
In the year 2000, I became interested in progressive politics. I was enthralled by progressive thinkers and found their viewpoints extremely convincing. It seemed like progressives always had a reply to counterarguments, and usually they portrayed their opponents as untrustworthy, so I wasn't tempted to seriously consider opposing viewpoints. I assumed that Republicans held their views due to some combination of vices: ignorance, apathy, hatred, racism, greed, corruption, jingoism, and archaic religious beliefs. I didn't give much weight to the possibility that there might be strong arguments for several Republican policy stances that even I would agree with on further investigation.
Later in the 2000s decade, after I encountered more smart conservative authors and heard more counterarguments to progressive stances, I realized that policy debates were a lot more complicated than they had seemed. As of 2023, my current view is that Republican voters and politicians hold the positions they do in part due to the vices mentioned above and in part for more sincere and legitimate reasons. There is a lot of ignorance on the part of Republican voters. Business interests have outsized sway over Republican politicians. Republicans do usually hold significantly different moral values than I do. However, there are also cases where Republicans are reacting to a real problem and may even see things more clearly than Democrats do. One recent example is Republican willingness to consider the lab-leak theory of SARS‑CoV‑2, which as of 2023 I consider the most likely explanation for the 2020 pandemic. Groupthink on the part of Democrats blinded them from taking the lab-leak theory seriously, due to their instinctive pro-scientist and anti-Trump biases.
Strawmanning
Shulman (2009) offers a fitting description of why I was in an ideological bubble during the first few years of my interest in politics:
a well-written piece that purports to summarize a field can leave you ignorant of your ignorance. If you only read the National Review or The Nation you will pick up a lot of political knowledge, including knowledge about the other party/ideology, at least enough to score well on political science surveys. However, that very knowledge means that missing pieces favoring the other side can be more easily ignored: someone might not believe that the other side is made up of Evil Mutants with no reasons at all, and might be tempted to investigate, but ideological media can provide reasons that are plausible yet not so plausible as to be tempting to their audience. For a truth-seeker, beware of explanations of the speaker's opponents.
Strawmanned explanations of one's opponents are the norm in politics—e.g., the claim that Trump made up the lab-leak "conspiracy theory" because he's racist against China. Sometimes accusations like this are true, or at least have a grain of truth to them. Other times, the accusations are completely false—either deliberate lies or confabulations that the brain invents to explain away behavior by the other side.
I find that pundits often make up explanations of what must be in someone else's head and portray it as fact. For example, various experts argue that Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 because he's revanchist and wants a prominent place in Russian history, because he fears the Westernization and democratization of a fellow East Slavic nation, or because he's irrational and paranoid. All of those might be true to some degree, but how do you as an outsider know which if any of those is the main reason? At the end of the day, only Putin knows what's in his head (and even then, he may be deluding himself to some degree—our motives are never fully transparent even to ourselves).
Of course, we can't trust a person's own descriptions of his/her motives either, because there's strong incentive for him/her to lie or genuinely believe self-favorable motivations. When Putin claims he invaded Ukraine to defend against NATO expansion, we shouldn't take that at face value either. There is strong evidence that voices across the political spectrum in Russia since the end of the Cold War have regarded "Ukrainian entry into NATO" as "the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin)" and "a direct challenge to Russian interests", to quote Biden's CIA Director William J. Burns from 2008 when he was the US ambassador to Moscow (qtd. in Shifrinson and Wertheim 2021). In 2021, Ukraine and NATO were increasing their coordination, and there was growing talk in Washington about whether Ukraine could eventually join NATO in a formal way. However, this is different from strong evidence that moves toward possible NATO expansion were Putin's actual reason for the 2022 invasion. Putin could have been using the widespread opposition within Russia to Ukraine's NATO membership as a pretext when he also had other reasons to want to start the war. It's very hard for non-experts to distinguish between different hypotheses regarding Putin's motivations, especially when Russia has strong incentive to claim that it was being the reasonable party, while the US has equally strong incentive to cast Russia as the sole troublemaker. As Shulman said: "beware of explanations of the speaker's opponents". That means we should be skeptical of the US government's portrayal of rival great powers.
The best evidence for motives usually comes from leaks of information that wasn't intended to be shared, such as private messages or multiple insider accounts of what happened. Even when we have such data, we still need to be cautious about misremembering, misinterpretation, quotes taken out of context, and people with an axe to grind. And even if some people in a movement have unsavory motives, this often doesn't apply to most of the members of that movement.
Noticing hypocrisy
I've found that noticing my hypocrisy can be a helpful way to break out of a self-righteous mindset. For example, I'm often upset when other people do things that harm insects needlessly. I'm angry when people squish bugs in a careless fashion that may not fully crush them, rather than quickly and completely flattening those insects against a piece of paper or putting the insects into a container in the freezer. It pains me when people walk in bug-dense areas outside like grassy fields without caring too much about the bugs who are being maimed by their shoes. I might feel a bit like: "What kind of a monster are you?" However, it helps to remember the countless ways in which I also harm animals for the sake of convenience. For instance, I sometimes use my air conditioner more than I strictly need to, even though over time this extra electricity use will painfully kill a number of tiny fish in power-plant cooling systems.
Hypocrisy is not an excuse for bad behavior; two wrongs don't make a right. It's bad both when other people walk in the grass and when I use more air conditioning than I need. The value of noticing hypocrisy is that it helps us calibrate our reactions. When we see bad behavior in others but not in ourselves, we may think that the other side is uniquely evil. Since evil should be destroyed, we may be tempted to take drastic measures, such as censorship or the use of force, to stamp it out. Of course, the other side reasons the same way, and the result is escalation of hostility. If we instead notice that "We and our allies do some of the same kind of stuff as our enemies do, even if not exactly the same in quantity or quality", then we can have a more measured reaction.
For example, Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine was a barbaric act of aggression. If this was a unique kind of event in a world in which great powers were otherwise well behaved, then we might support drastic measures to make Russia lose the war, no matter the cost. If we're taking a "broken windows" approach to policing, and there's only one broken window so far, then we had better pull out all the stops to bring the window breaker to justice. However, when we consider that the US and its allies also engage in wars of aggression and human-rights atrocities (Marcetic 2023), we can put what seemed like a singular act of evil in context. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq was no more provoked than Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The two victimized countries have similar population sizes. Both invading forces carried out serious war crimes (Pitt 2022). Most of the world opposed both wars. There are various factors that can make one or the other illegal invasion seem worse, but the broader point is that brutal military actions are, unfortunately, the normal behavior of global great powers. There were already numerous shattered windows before Putin's 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine. This doesn't excuse Putin or suggest the US shouldn't support Ukraine in defending itself; however, it does calibrate our sense of how uniquely important the Ukraine war is compared with all the other wars and human-rights atrocities in the world, including some that the US actively supports.
Sometimes, addressing one's own bad behavior is easier than trying to stop bad behavior in others. For example:
- "Although they launched an illegal war of aggression and committed war crimes in Iraq, 20 years later the leaders of the U.S. and the U.K. have never faced criminal accountability. By contrast, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has already charged Russian President Vladimir Putin with war crimes just one year after his unlawful invasion of Ukraine." (Cohn 2023) It would be extremely dangerous for foreign powers to try to actually arrest Putin while he controls the world's largest nuclear arsenal. In contrast, the US government could easily arrest former President George W. Bush without much or any bloodshed, if it wanted to.
- It could potentially be easier for the US to curb Saudi Arabia's war atrocities in Yemen or Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian land than to push Russia fully out of Ukraine, since the latter risks World War III.
Addressing wrongdoing by the US and its allies would not only benefit human rights directly but would also show the world that the US is genuinely concerned with human rights, rather than using the concepts of "human rights" and "international law" as cudgels to selectively target its enemies.
Schwarz and Layne (2023) mention an anecdote about how hard it can be to see one's own hypocrisy:
What, after all, would be America's reaction if Mexico were to invite China to station warships in Acapulco and bombers in Guadalajara? For the past several years a civilian military analyst who has worked on international security issues with the Pentagon has put this question to the rising leaders in the U.S. military and intelligence services to whom he regularly lectures. Their reactions, he told us, range from cutting economic ties and exerting "maximal foreign policy pressure on Mexico to get them to change course" to "we need to start there, and then use military force if necessary," revealing just how reflexively these military and intelligence professionals would defend America's own sphere of influence.
Typifying the egocentrism that governs the U.S. approach to the world in general and relations with Russia in particular, not one of these future military and intelligence leaders has thought to connect, even in this past year, what they believe would be Washington's response to the hypothetical situation in Mexico with Moscow's reaction to NATO's expansion and policy toward Ukraine. When the analyst has drawn those connections, the military and intelligence officers have been taken aback, in many cases admitting, as the analyst reports, " 'Damn, I never thought out what we're doing to Russia in that light.' "
Of course, just as it would be wrong for the US to use force against Mexico for a military partnership with China, it's wrong for Russia to use force against Ukraine for ostensibly a similar reason. It was likewise wrong when the US, in the early 1960s, tried to invade Cuba and carried out terrorism and sabotage against that sovereign state because of its growing ties with a rival superpower.
Noticing my own hypocrisy has improved my interpersonal relationships. It's easy to see flaws in others and be annoyed or upset as a result. This might cause me to lower my opinion of the other person or potentially get into a disagreement with them. When I notice ways in which I have my own failings—sometimes similar to that person's failings and sometimes different but comparable in magnitude—it becomes easier to relax and not be as bothered. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
Of course, some bad actors may use a strategy of pointing out the other person's flaws as a way to falsely equate two wrongs that are very different in scale. Or the bad actor may try to shift blame onto the other person entirely. The buzzword "gaslighting" is commonly cited in contexts like these. While intentional gaslighting does indeed occur, I suspect that in most cases, the disagreement between the two sides of an interpersonal conflict is sincere. The accusation of gaslighting can be a convenient excuse to avoid any attempt at actually understanding the other side's feelings, in a similar way as citing "Russian disinformation" can be a convenient way to shut down any consideration of Russia's side of the Ukraine crisis. Russian disinformation is real and widespread, so it's understandable that people would have knee-jerk impulses to be suspicious. But the result is that most people in the West have a cartoonish picture of Putin's motives.
More on the comparison between Iraq and Ukraine
Some in the West compare Putin with Hitler and cast Russians who support him as like Nazis. There's some merit to this comparison, but I think a more enlightening comparison is between Putin and George W. Bush (or perhaps former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was more astute and conniving than Bush himself). Both Bush's invasion of Iraq and Putin's invasion of Ukraine were cruel foreign-policy blunders sold to gullible domestic audiences under the guises of national security and liberating another country.
There are some differences between the two illegal invasions. For example:
- Iraq became slightly more democratic as a result of the invasion, while occupied parts of Ukraine will presumably become somewhat less democratic if Russia holds on to them. That said, the effort to bring democracy to Iraq largely failed. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index estimated Iraq's level of democracy on a scale from 0 to 10 as 3.13 in 2022, putting it in the "authoritarian" category. Meanwhile, Ukraine's score on the Democracy Index in 2022 was 5.42, making it a "mixed regime". This is in contrast to Russia's score of 2.28.
- Russia annexed parts of Ukraine during its invasion, while the US didn't annex parts of Iraq. That said, the US did profit in other ways from the Iraq invasion, such as by privatizing Iraq's oil industry for the benefit of foreign companies (Juhasz 2013).
- As of July 2023, official figures for civilian deaths in Ukraine were around 9000, though the true number is likely much higher. Also as of 2023, estimated civilian deaths in Iraq directly due to violence were on the order of 300,000, which also is likely to be a significant underestimate.
- Both wars set dangerous precedents for the future. It's plausible that the 2003 Iraq invasion made Putin more willing to invade Ukraine, since if the US could get away with pre-emptive war, maybe Russia could too. Putin's war sets a precedent for nuclear blackmail succeeding to some degree in deterring a full Western response to aggression.
It's easy to see Russia and other rogue actors as alien and barbaric. They speak languages we can't understand, and we may not know many people who live in those countries. We may be tempted to imagine those countries as very different from our own. By recognizing the parallels between Bush/Cheney and Putin, the strange otherness of Russia can give way to a feeling of familiar sameness. There are important differences between the US and its enemies, such as in the level of freedom of expression. But for the most part, people are pretty similar anywhere in the world, and large numbers of citizens can be riled up toward supporting military brutality in the US as well as in authoritarian states.
A Russian who supports the Ukraine invasion in 2022 might seem like just an evil Nazi. But what about Joe the plumber who lives down the street from you and approved of Bush's invasion in 2003? Is he also an evil Nazi? Or was he hoodwinked into supporting the war? Many Russians harbor hostile feelings toward Ukrainians, yes, but many Americans felt strong animus toward Muslims. In 2003, I protested the Iraq war and was very upset with my fellow Americans who cheered it on, but I didn't see them as reprobate Nazis. (And, in all honesty, most ordinary citizens in Nazi Germany were probably also basically decent people in most respects, though it can be controversial to point that out. Alternatively, we could argue that almost everyone is a wretched person. For example, most Westerners pay to enslave and murder tens of highly sentient beings each year via eating meat. Even most vegans kill several mammals per year due to crop farming.)
If we support the assassination of pro-war propagandists on Russian soil in 2022, would we also have welcomed the murder of pro-war Fox News hosts in New York City in 2003? If you say "yes" to both, I have respect for that position, even if I disagree. It seems inconsistent to favor one but not the other, unless I can be convinced that the cases are not fairly analogous.
If we would be happy to see Russia's economy collapse as payback for the Ukraine invasion, would we also have been happy to see the US economy collapse as payback for Iraq and countless other US war crimes? Should we have been gleeful in 2008 when millions of Americans lost their jobs and some were unable to pay for life-saving medical care? If the 2008 recession had been inflicted deliberately on the US by China as an attempt to pressure the US into ending its illegal wars in the Middle East, how would most Americans have felt about that? Many Americans never ask themselves these questions. Humans are often really bad at seeing situations from the outgroup's perspective.
Some argue that ordinary Russians deserve economic hardship and other forms of collective punishment because those citizens aren't protesting against or trying to overthrow their government. But speaking out against the war in Russia could lead to spending years in prison. In the US, the worst outcome of protesting US government atrocities is usually to lose a few friends and be mocked on social media. If ordinary Russians deserve collective punishment for not being willing to risk prison time, then how much more collective punishment must most Americans deserve when their main excuse for not speaking out against their government's wrongdoing is being too busy or too uninterested?
It's plausible to me that severe economic sanctions against Russia are in fact the least bad policy choice. But we have to be consistent. If sanctions against Russia make sense, then probably we should have also supported a hypothetical world coalition threatening the US with extreme sanctions if it dared to invade Iraq in 2003.
One possible viewpoint, which I sympathize with to some degree, is that we want the US to win the global power struggle because it has better values than its competitors do. We might be more willing to give the US a pass on bad behavior because the most important thing is for the US to beat China and Russia in the race to develop advanced artificial intelligence. I see the logic here, but then we shouldn't act surprised or outraged when China and Russia reason exactly the same way—being willing to break the rules if it gives them a leg up. The alternative approach, in which the US would respect international law and stop meddling around the world to gain advantages for itself, would be an interesting experiment to run, though especially since the beginning of the Cold War, that experiment has never really been tried in earnest. Would a more principled US on the international stage win support from around the world for its rectitude and gain soft power that way? Or would other countries take the US's commitment to principle as an opportunity to get away with even more bad behavior, because the US would be more constrained in its ability to police others?
That seems to me to be the key question that divides doves and hawks in general: does a greater commitment to nonviolence foster peace (by being less threatening to others) or foster war (by inviting bad actors to take advantage of pacifism)? Probably the answer is sometimes the former and sometimes the latter. That's also precisely the main question regarding the cause of the 2022 Ukraine invasion: was it the US being too provocative toward Putin by moving ahead on Ukraine's integration with NATO, or was it the result of the West not taking a stronger stand against Putin's earlier aggressions in 2008 against Georgia and in 2014 against Ukraine? The two possible answers to that question imply completely opposite policy prescriptions, and I think nobody really knows which answer is correct.
Collective punishment
As I mentioned above, the view that Americans deserve collective punishment for the atrocities their government committed in the Middle East seems to follow logically from the view I see too often expressed online that ordinary Russians deserve collective punishment for the atrocities of their government in Ukraine. But the view that ordinary Americans deserve punishment for the violence carried out by their government was precisely one of Osama bin Laden's reasons for masterminding the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Fortunately, most in the West who support collective punishment of Russians have in mind economic sanctions, preventing Russians from visiting the West, and other measures that aren't directly violent. However, I have seen in online comments a disturbing number of cheerleaders on behalf of Ukraine-backed damage to civilian houses and injury to civilians within Russia's borders, such as the "widespread residential destruction" carried out during the raids into Belgorod in May-June 2023. These bloodthirsty comments typically say something like the following, though this isn't an exact quote: "Russia has been punching Ukraine in the face 500 times. I'm glad to see Ukraine finally getting a punch back!" bin Laden could have said exactly the same thing about the US. In his 2002 "Letter to America", bin Laden wrote: "It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern. Yet when 3000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet sat down." 1.5 million divided by 3000 is 500. (That said, more recent research on the 1990s sanctions against Iraq suggests that the 1.5 million figure was likely a huge overestimate.) Before Americans spout off vicious comments about how much they enjoy seeing "enemy" civilians attacked, they should consider the mirror image of that statement for themselves.
As I was reading the text of bin Laden's "Letter to America", I discovered that he made the same point I did above about how Americans have more responsibility for the actions of their government than those in non-democracies do:
You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake:
[...] the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.
[...] if we are attacked, then we have the right to attack back. Whoever has destroyed our villages and towns, then we have the right to destroy their villages and towns. Whoever has stolen our wealth, then we have the right to destroy their economy. And whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.
That last paragraph sounds like it could have been taken from the comments I sometimes see expressed in support of violence against the Russian people. Or violence against Muslims during America's wars of revenge for 9/11.
By the way, in case anyone is confused about why I keep focusing on hatred against Russians and Muslims, rather than against Ukrainians and Americans: it's because the mainstream media in the West is already flooded with voices explaining situations from the perspectives of Ukrainians and Americans. Those people are part of the "ingroup" for the Western mainstream press. In the years after 9/11, some Muslims have also become bigger parts of that ingroup, although subsets of Muslims like the Palestinians are still often portrayed unfairly (Albast and Knarr 2022). The point of this piece is about seeing issues from the other side's perspective, which means focusing on those groups that are most strongly reviled in the West.
Propaganda is ubiquitous
Some propaganda takes the form of manufacturing a story or fact out of whole cloth. However, I find that most propaganda has at least a grain of truth, and maybe even half a loaf of truth. Sometimes a quote is taken out of context or an event is badly misportrayed. However, the most common and effective form of propaganda is simply to elide facts and arguments that go against your viewpoint.
Yudkowsky (2007) is titled "Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided", and that's exactly right. For any given policy proposal, there are likely to be numerous good arguments in favor of and against it, even relative to a single person's moral values, because the consequences of any given policy are extremely complex. Suppose we write down 10 facts and arguments that support a policy and 10 that oppose it. The trick of a lot of propaganda is to selectively report the 10 facts and arguments on one side while omitting those on the other side.
Beware when a policy argument sounds too convincing or when the described behavior of a person or country sounds too heinous or irrational. It often (though not always) means that the author has omitted contrary arguments and viewpoints. In a similar way as an animal's traits are due to some mixture of genetic and environmental factors, most acts of evil are due to some mixture of dispositional and situational factors. In many cases we can at least understand why a person might have been driven to feel like he needed to do some bad thing, even while we can still condemn the behavior. The tendency to demonize one's opponents to score political points can lead people to overestimate nefarious motives in others, though sometimes nefarious motives do exist, especially among power-hungry politicians. It would be a mistake to always attribute bad behavior to situational reasons. For example, it looks to me as an amateur outsider like Putin scores higher on Dark Tetrad traits than Gorbachev or Yeltsin did, and plausibly those leaders would not have undertaken a large-scale invasion of Ukraine even in the face of continuing NATO expansion. Of course, the US and its allies also have their fair share of leaders with Dark Tetrad traits.
I once heard someone criticize Noam Chomsky's stances on US foreign policy by alleging that Chomsky only gives you half of the story. That might be true, though the US government and mainstream press also usually only present half of the story. Combining the mainstream presentation of an issue with multiple alternative perspectives like Chomsky's gives a fuller picture.
Most news outlets engage in some degree of biased reporting of facts and arguments. This is due to the ideological biases of the writers and editors, and maybe even more so due to the ideological biases of the viewers and readers that put pressure on the media outlet to adhere to a certain narrative (a phenomenon known as "audience capture"). Advertisers and government officials also exert pressure on media outlets. Readers of liberal or mainstream media may know a radically different set of facts than readers of conservative media. You have to consult multiple media outlets to get a decent picture of a controversy.
Moreover, there's not even in principle such a thing as an unbiased source. Anyone's reporting will be filtered through his or her own interpretation and sense of which facts deserve more emphasis. On episode 1214 of The Joe Rogan Experience, when Rogan was interviewing Lawrence Lessig, Rogan bemoaned the absence of any truly objective media outlet where he could get unbiased news. Lessig replied by saying it's better to consult multiple different sources and try to triangulate the truth, rather than trusting a single source that claims to be "objective". (I can't look up the exact quote because the episode is now only on Spotify, which I don't use. But I found a low-quality transcript of the episode, from which I see that this discussion occurred starting around 1h57m.)
The most important step is realizing that any given source is its own bubble of groupthink. That's even true for rationalists and effective altruists, who try unusually hard to avoid cognitive biases. There's no escaping the fact that any group will converge on certain ideas and shun other ideas. The only solution is to actively explore multiple different ideological bubbles, while recognizing that some are much more credible than others. As the expression says, you should keep an open mind but not so open your brains fall out.
My writings are themselves propaganda to some degree, because I focus on the facts and arguments that I see as more important and persuasive, while I spend less time defending viewpoints I disagree with. If I have limited time and energy, I don't want to go to great lengths to present a compelling case for a view I dislike; I'll leave that to other people who actually support the view. Of course, I do sometimes mention objections to my positions. Regarding questions that are more factual than moral in nature—such as what effects climate change will have on the sizes of various wild-animal populations—I try to lay out information relatively impartially, though I'm probably bad at this sometimes, and different people trying to present facts impartially will still have subtle differences in emphasis and may reach different conclusions.
Inaccuracy abounds
Consulting multiple independent sources can also help one get a sense of how robust the claimed facts are. If different accounts contain different facts, and if neither account seems to be probably a lie, this can rein in one's credulity regarding the accuracy of any given account. (Denials of wrongdoing by governments fall into the category of things that often are lies, especially when the evidence of wrongdoing is strong.)
When you hear only one person's side of a story, it's natural to take it at face value and believe that it's roughly correct. It's easy to forget the amount of noise that may exist between a recounting of events and the actual events. Hearing another person's recollection of the same events is a helpful antidote to that false certainty. I've seen this not just with news but also in my personal life when witnessing disagreements between people I know.
Over the years, I've seen plenty of people online describe my views, motivations, and biography. Some of those comments are pretty accurate, especially if they're made by people who have read my writings extensively. In other cases, the descriptions of me are slightly wrong, uncharitable, or even laughably inaccurate. One person alleged that I must have written my article on the wild-animal-suffering effects of Brazilian beef because I love eating beef so much and want to justify my habit; in fact, I don't eat beef at all (except on rare occasions in the form of leftovers that would otherwise be thrown out). Some people have assumed I must do a lot of drugs because of my "far out" philosophical views; in fact, I've never done any non-medical/non-nutritional drugs (apart from occasional caffeine, accidental alcoholic drinks, etc). I'm sometimes caricatured into a cartoon, one-dimensional version of myself. Sometimes, a game of Chinese whispers results in descriptions of me and my life that are amusingly wrong.
In 2022-2023, effective altruism (EA) gained significant mainstream-media attention, and I read a number of those articles. Some of the articles did a pretty good job of portraying the movement. Some articles gave a distorted picture of EA's priorities and culture but weren't too bad. But several of the articles, even in notable outlets, portrayed EA in an extremely unfair light, giving deference to EA's critics who themselves didn't have a good grasp of EA. One or two pieces quoted EAs out of context in what seemed like a deliberate attempt to paint as bad a picture as possible.
There's no shortcut to knowledge about complex issues. The only way to really know what the EA movement is like is to spend a lot of time in it yourself. For years, the mainstream media and virology community fed us the wrong answer regarding the origins of SARS‑CoV‑2; figuring out that the lab-leak theory is probably correct required a lot of independent research. (Of course, non-mainstream opinions are wrong even more often than mainstream ones, such as idiotic anti-vax conspiracies. Often experts are more correct than your amateur attempts to figure things out for yourself.) Given that we only have time to see a more complete, multi-sided picture about a tiny fraction of topics, the number of issues on which we can have firm opinions will also be very limited.
Arguments against seeing both sides
Since this article is about considering issues from both sides, it's sensible to consider this topic itself from both sides. There are some arguments against trying to see the other side's perspective sometimes.
If people are accustomed to issues seeming one-sided, then hearing arguments for the other side might be demotivating, even if the arguments on each side are not equally strong. The fossil-fuel lobby aimed to sow scientific doubt about whether humans were the main driver of climate change in order to reduce political will to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. Even if some of these scientific arguments had merit, they were much weaker than the arguments showing that humans were causing significant climate change. Similarly, there are a few genuine downsides to vaccines, but they're far outweighed by the benefits, and it would be a mistake to reduce one's motivation to get vaccinated due to those small downside risks.
One solution to this problem is to try to protect people against ever hearing contrary arguments, in order to keep people in a bubble of false certainty that sustains their motivation. I think the better approach is to get people accustomed to the shades of gray that permeate almost any topic, so that a little bit of uncertainty won't scare people away from taking action. On the other hand, maybe this is wishful thinking on my part. Since people have limited time to research most topics, maybe it's better to broadcast simple, unequivocal messages in most cases?
Of course, in instances where the truth really is very hazy, we don't want people to feel false certainty. If the arguments on each side seem roughly equally balanced, it's better to spend resources investigating the question further rather than going full steam ahead in one or the other direction.
A one-sided presentation of a conflict can boost morale during wartime, and higher morale can translate into a higher chance of winning the war. This is why it's understandable (though still execrable in my opinion) when countries censor "unpatriotic" voices during a war. Dehumanizing the "enemy" can make soldiers more willing to shoot at the other side. It's harder to kill someone when you imagine what their own experiences are like and realize that they're another person very similar to yourself. Of course, dehumanization is also a main cause of needless killing, rape, torture, and so on during war. It would be better if both sides could humanize each other; in that case, the war plausibly wouldn't be happening in the first place. But if one side humanizes the other while the other side doesn't, then this can be akin to unilateral disarmament, because dehumanization is a weapon of sorts.
When I have an emotional attachment to one side of an issue, it can be slightly painful to hear arguments against my position. I think this is partly because I want "my side" to be right. And partly it's just because if an issue is more complicated than it seemed, then I need to do more research to figure out what's going on, and that could take a lot of time. It's like if you compile your computer program and see a bunch of compiler errors: it's unpleasant because it means you got a lot of stuff wrong and have to make a lot of changes. Or, if you don't have time to do further research, then you have to live with the uncomfortable uncertainty of not knowing the answer.
One possible strategy for making it more fun to see both sides of a topic is to realize that the information on each side is something that the other side would prefer to keep hidden. It's literally "something they don't want you to know". It can be exciting to escape the "cult" of your own side and see various ways they were hiding information from you. Of course, it's important not to overupdate and join the cult on the other side.