2023 Review: Book

Happy new 2024 everyone 🙂

It feels weird to write a summary of 2023 since my archive contains exactly 0 posts from 2023. It looks like this place is a ghost town by now, never to come alive again. Maybe that’s true, in that I’ll probably move to Substack to keep writing when my book is ready. But for a a ghost town it’s not doing that bad — nothing published at all in 2023 and about 27k visits, a lot less than earlier years but not nothing. I so like that my content has some lasting value.

The reason there have been no new posts is because I’ve priorized my book, not because I’ve stopped writing. A book takes time, even more time than I had hoped, so I’ve had to shift all my focus to that. I started in April last year and I planned for it be ready now, but I’m not there, unfortunately. There’s not that much work left, proportionally, but I also struggle to find the time.

Most of 2022’s writing time — when I was working part time due to a generous grant — went to reading and planning, research, going through my old posts and seeing what could and should be in the book. In that phase it’s easy to feel rich with time so I spent a bit of it writing new posts as well. Not in 2023. As the year started I realized I had only a few months left in my negotiated partial leave ob absence, and the rising costs of everything meant I didn’t have the means to extend it as much as I’d thought before my grant money’d run out.

So spring was a bit of a scramble. Up until then the big challenge had been wrangling all my material, taming it, and turning the ball of interconnected yarn into a coherent, linear narrative. Now it was time to hunker down and write the whole thing. Not just plan and cut and paste. Of course, when you a start to pin down the details you realize that some of the structure does need to change, oh no this part is a mess and ruins the flow, this is too long, and this really need to come after this… and… well you get it.

When the clock ran out I was almost through my first very very rough draft, but it took a long time to get to the end because the decoupling chapter turned into three chapters of mostly new material, which I had planned to be short and 50% copy paste with small changes (goes for all of the book, but especially this). That’s the biggest change compared to my inital outline: I moved it away from the “narratives” part and made it is own section at the end, as a pièce de résistance pulling everything together. This despite my apprehension over what the term has become.

I didn’t go back to full time entirely — although finances did suffer since my wife is and has been for some time now in the process of starting a business and isn’t pulling in signficant money — and could release a day a week most weeks for writing. This meant final chapter done by the end of summer, including some time to go back and clear up some festering messes I had left on my first run through. If this had been a final, “presentable” draft, I’d have been on expected shedule. But it wasn’t. Some chapters were nearly there, but others were still problem children that needed one or two more editing rounds before final polishing were even in the cards.

The rest of the year would have been enough to get the it hadn’t been for two things:

1) having to write a book proposal

2) switching jobs

I had dreaded going back to full time since I was far from fond of my day job. However, the expected “trauma” failed to materialze. I went up only to 80%, with free fridays on the one hand, and on the other I had been, just in time, offered a new job I felt optimistic about. I were to start in august.

New job meant actual full time, which I, due to children and a few hours a week of parental leave, haven’t actually done since before I started blogging.

Of course the stream of words slowed to a trickle, and of course it made things worse that the little time I had, on most weekends thanks to the kindness of my wife, I didn’t work on the actual text. I would have if I’d gone straight for self-publishing, but since an agent has expressed interest, and I felt obligated (since I had received money) to seek the greatest possible impact, I had to at least try to get this thing traditionally published.

That means writing a book proposal, which according to best practices should be about 10k words long and include a section of informed commentary on similar books. That whole thing, plus getting my sample chapter from messy draft status to all-dolled-up-and-ready, took me a big chunk of the autumn season. Whether that will be worthwhile and anyone will be interested I don’t know, no takers so far, which is not entirely surprising for an abstruse, nerdy book.

Adding the first chapter to the proposal meant I had to get it properly formatted and typeset, and honestly that was kind of nice, seeing it looking all real and professional. It gave me a little taste of the final result and it helps me keep going. I want to get it finished, I’m going to get it finished, and I’ll keep working on it, step by step. But it’s with a heavy heart I’m saying that there’s still a fair amount of time to go, with only a day here and there and the odd hour sprinkled in.

I do feel invigorated for more post-book writing. This “boot camp” has made me a better writer, having to make all these fit together like a puzzle has forced me to stretch, and writing small, self-contained pieces in the future will be easier because of this, and because I’ve had my fill of elaborate theorizing. Critically going over my material over and over again has also made me a better self-editor. I’ve become more confident with being brief, and better at zeroing in on the point I want to make. Having the book as a jumping-off point and background reference will also help with future writing.

Please just let me write something short and self-contained again.

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I wrote a chapter overview for my book proposal, and here it is as a preview!

Chapter and section titles are subject to change. The agent I’ve been in contact with has said that my working title “Popular Erisology” is a little intimidating (technical word no one recognizes) and could be changed as well. I don’t know, since its part of the whole concept, but I do see a point to it other than just trying to make it more “selling”. It’s not so much about the word really, not any more. The more I’ve been working with the material the less it’s “various stuff about disagreement” and more one coherent model of how our shared sense of reality is constructed. There could be erisology that took a different view entirely and it’s far less clear that what I’ve written is all that well summarized as being about “the study of disagreement” generally.

I asked on Twitter/X for alternatives, and my favorite of the suggestions I got was “Competitive Worldbuilding” which >I do like a lot and describes the book quite well. Although it’s competitive and collaborative worldbuildning, in a constantly shifting, ambiguous mix. If there’s a neat 2-3 word phrase for that I’m all ears.

Popular Erisology/Competitive Worldbuilding

Prelude: A Tale of Two Realities

Taking my experience as an engineering student being taught a social constructionist approach to science and technology as a jumping-off point, I tell a story about how cultural and intellectual differences between academic disciplines — for example what is meant by “reality” — allow claims and ideas that cross borders to be misinterpreted, playing an important enabling role in conflict. This case study with a light touch of personal story is based on one of my more popular essays, and introduce the major themes that will later be explored in the book.

Part I: Dysfunctional Disagreement

Chapter 1: Popular Erisology

Moving back from the deep end of the pool, this introduction explains the meaning and history of “erisology” as “the study of disagreement” and lists what disciplines its core insights come from. It also explains that the word “popular” refers to how its audience is the educated public, not specialists, and that it contains a framework meant to replace conventional wisdom rather than make novel contributions to specialist bodies of knowledge. Near the end my own educational and professional background and passion for the topic is brought up to explain and justify why it’s me, rather than somebody else, who wrote this book.

Chapter 2: Disagreement Systems

This starts by defining what is meant by disagremeent being “dysfunctional” and defending this judgment from possible criticisms. After that it introduces disagreement systems, arguing that much of public discourse is dysfunctional because people’s belief systems are so different from each other that pinning down what a disagreement is about become more pertinent than determining who is right. This makes ordinary debates look like complex academic controversies like the one described in the prelude, meaning that it must be understood like them. For this to be possible, common sense about how disagreement works needs an upgrade.

Chapter 3: The Postmodern Condition and the Liberal Response

This chapter situates disagreement systems within the postmodern condition, and explains in simple terms what that is. It discusses “the war on Christmas” as an example of controversies around the “loosening” of taken-for-granted cultural assumptions, and ends with supporting a liberal stance towards the resulting pluralism of beliefs and practices where we only require acceptance of a framework of systems and procedures designed for coexistence.

Part II: Language is Not To Be Trusted

Chapter 5: Kuhn Distortions

Going from the grand to the nitty-gritty, the insight that we in the postmodern condition experience the world through indirect representation leads to a discussion of Thomas Kuhn’s idea of incommensurability of paradigms. Terms and claims don’t mean the same things when they are interpreted by different models/theories of the world. Using examples like “free will” and “racism” I show that incommensurability is a commonly a factor in disagreements. Interpreting the claims of others through our own model of reality means we’ll misrepresent them, and build up a distorted image of what they believe.

Chapter 6: Cat Couplings and Types in the Making

Now we zoom in. “Cat couplings” refer to specific piece of micro-rhetoric that you will, once explain, notice every time you come across it. A list of examples establish the concept, before it is recast as more than a detail, but instead an example of how the way we think and communicate (using types) clashes (in fact, is incommensurable, per the last chapter) with how to talk about categories and groups and their properties in scientific, factual terms. This is the first example of how language is not foremost a tool for representing reality accurately.

Chapter 7: Ambiguity Behind Everything

This chapter picks up the mechanism that makes cat couplings from the last chapter work the way they do and broadens it to include motte-and-bailey doctrines, in other word ideas that derive rhetorical force from an ambiguity between a defensible but narrow interpretation and and a far-reaching but indefensible one. I show that this mechanism play a signficant role in real controversies in both straightforward and complex ways, including driving confusion over coordination problems and personal agency.

Chapter 8: You Need to Think About Polysemy All the Time

Here we attack head on the idea that words have stable meanings that refer to a fixed set of “things”. A range of examples show how the inverse, polysemy — which we are perfectly capable of comprehending but equally capable of forgetting at the drop of a hat — play a big role in rhetoric, controversy, and people generally talking past each other. By the end of this chapter and this part, it’s been established that the relationship between words and concepts and the reality they represent is much less direct that we tend to assume, which sets up part 3.

Part III: Bidding for Social Reality

Chapter 9: The Big List of Existing Things

Applying the same approach from the chapter before on what it means for something to “exist” or be “real”, it becomes clear that this seemingly simple word is shorthand for an arbitrarily wide range of claims that are, in physical and logical terms, much more complex than we are able to think about. We should find it confusing, yet we don’t. This goes not just for existence, but any abstraction: we model reality very differently from how it really is. As a consequence, claims about what is true is better understood as claims about which model is better. And voíla — now we have a value judgement on our hands.

Chapter 10: Facts, Slogans, and Everything in Between

The centerpiece of part 3 develops the idea that claims that look factual are partly about values since they imply a certain way of defining and using words. Ambiguity over whether a claim is saying something about reality or telling us how to use a word is used strategically in argument all the time, and getting labels to stick to things is the core activity of political discourse.

Chapter 11: Beliefs Are Endorsements

Picks up the thread that rhetoric if often about establishing the use of specific terminology and argues that many things called “beliefs” are best understood as endorsements of the collective adoption of certain labels and concepts, but phrased as if they were factual. Expressing beliefs means “making bids” for what should be in shared reality, which is important since it forms the basis for coordinated collective action. Because of this importance we strive to establish social dominance for preperred models of the world and reduce dissonance by casting competing ones as illegitimate.

Part IV: Partial Narratives

Chapter 12: Artificial Clarity

Starting with a section on what purpose management consultants’ reports actually fulfills, in this chapter we learn what “narratives” are: accounts of reality that are clearer and more coherent that reality itself, made by putting one aspect front and center and casting it as the essential truth. They work to justify policy and action by implying that imperatives derive from the facts themselves. Because of the choices involved in centering some features and not others, the status of such narratives can animate disagreements even where both parties agree on specific facts — just not what generalities they represent.

Chapter 13: Truth at Different Resolutions

This chapter deals with the tricky question of how “true” narratives and other simplified depictions of reality can be said to be. Using simple examples, it’s shown that the truth of a simplification depends on how specific we expect it to be. Sometimes we have good ways to interpret things at different levels of specitificity, but often we don’t. As a consequence it makes the truth of claims and even the existence of certain things dependent of specificity, with important implications for science as a source of knowledge.

Chapter 14: Mains and Correctives

Here I propose a model of moderate, nuanced views as made up of simple narratives layered on top of each other, with one being the “basically correct intuition” and others correcting for its limitations. This explains a lot of common situtations in disagreement and argumentation, especially when we think of broad public opinion as similarly stacked but disagree on the order, meaning that support for an idea can come across either as supporting the underdog or enforcing an orthodoxy. The second half gives examples of this and shows how complex the switching of order can be depending on social context.

Part V: From the Personal to the Political

Chapter 15: People Are Different

In the last few years, social media has made it easier to shine a light on differences in inner experiences. In 2020 a post about some people having/not having an internal monologue went viral, and before that many were fascinated by “aphantasia” — the inability to picture things in your head. This chapter takes these examples and adds others, going on to argue that such differences are not just funny tidbits without consequence but can have a profound effect on how you experience your life and the world, including judging the behavior of others.

Chapter 16: The Political is Personal

This picks up the thread from chapter 15 and looks at how wants, needs and desires can be experienced from the inside — subtle or clear, malleable or unyielding. Implicitly generalizing the experience of our own personal “human nature” leads us to very different intuitions about how people work, and by extension the workings of society. I tie these different models to the “main and corrective” discussion in chapter 14 as well as whos how they fit with the major political ideologies.

Chapter 17: Inside-Out

Starting from a personal story, we explore further how personality differences affect what we find easy and hard, what we can deal with and what we find intolerable. This leads to an explanation of a major fault line in contemporary politics: whether we’re by default obligated to take on other people’s needs and wants as our own, or whether we must actively consent to have such responsibilities. Such unarticulated frames determine a lot of our responses to specifics and the chapter ends with more examples of such frames.

Part VI: Team Players

Chapter 18: The Enemy Within

It begins with noting that uncharitably misrepresenting others is common and does not make sense either as honest mistakes or full-on intentional lying. Instead it works by subconsciosuly exploiting ambiguity to interpret others in ways most favorable to us, while feeling that we’re just apprehending truth. In support I bring up Robin Hanson’s and Kevin Simler’s argument in The Elephant in the Brain that our minds are teeming with hidden, subconscious motivations of considerable sophistication. It ends with a toy model of the mind as a well-meaning, naive self placing trust a clever but amoral advisor.

Chapter 19: The Two Faces of Reason

This chapter rejects the common idea of human reasoning as rational but prone to failures in the form of cognitive biases. Instead, individual reasoning takes place in a social context, which makes its “flaws” make sense as the ~rational pursuit of different goals. Tying together the unconscious motivation from the chapter before with Jonathan Haidt’s “intuition first” model, Julia Galef’s discussion of motivated reasoning, and Mercier and Sperber’s conception of reason as evolved to function as part of a collective process, it establishes a better understanding of reason than “Mr. Spock but perturbed by pasted-on, ‘irrational’ emotions”.

Part VII: Decoupling

Chapter 20: Decoupling Introduced

Drawing a connection between two ideas from two different academics, this chapter introduces an idea that will come to be relevant to nearly everything in the book. Simplified, it refers to thinking in abstract, formal terms, where ideas are divorced (decoupled) from real world information, associations and significance. Attitudes to this type of thinking underlies many disagreements, much like the personal tendencies described in chapter 17.

Chapter 21: The Silent Agreement

The big, controversial aspect of decoupling concerns its meaning relative to models/narratives combining reference to an objective reality with implications for policy and action. There are cases where evaluating an idea from each direction yield different results, as in things that are true/plausible/possible but improper to bring up or express as such. In the eyes of many there is a silent agreement to avoid these issues altogether, and when one side perceives that the other has overstepped the boundary into the “demilitarized zone”, infected controversy results.

Chapter 22: Family and Empire

This final third expands “decoupling” into a more general account of a family of controversies about whether one thing is legitimately connected to another or not, allowing “goodness” or “badness” to move from one thing to another. This is a — maybe the — core feature of shared social reality that is constantly renegotiated and reegineered: a structure allowing legitmacy and illegitimacy to flow “horizontally” between related things and “vertically” from the specific to the general and back. In the end, this highly abstract concept is allowed to expand and touch upon and absorb nearly everything in the book.

Postlude: The Tower of Recognized Wisdom

This ending ties up a number of threads. It suggests that the postmodern condition applies even to individuals, and that we should behave as if we were visitors to a foreign country when we encounter strangers with different beliefs and experiences. The message of the book as a whole is summarized, there are some clossing comments on decoupling, and a reinterpretation of liberalism as acceptance of contradiction. In the end, this understanding should become part of The Tower of Recognized Wisdom, a set of accumulated knowledge and insight that have allowed us to be astonishingly succesful in our fight against the lower, more destructive parts of our nature — a set of ideas building on each other that enabled democracy, human rights, science and prosperity.

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