Making sense of the (messy) real world

When I was a kid, I was taught to handle conflict. I was told to put myself in the other person's shoes. I was taught to look at both sides of the story. I think most people know this to the point where they are empty platitudes. We know these things, but have we really internalized them? Do we actively practice them in the modern world?

There has been plenty written and spoken about how the world is becoming more divided. Even a pandemic was divided across party lines in the US, where I'm from, and Germany, where I live. There are narratives that mainstream media content seem to follow. All of this is obvious to anyone who hasn't been hiding under a rock the past ten years.

What I notice, when I critically examine my inner-workings, is that although I like to think of myself as rational and neutral, I do tend to gravitate toward particular narratives over others at the gut level. What I don't know is if this is a function of my age, and years and years of checking biased news outlets, or if it's a function of social media algorithms prizing inflammatory content over neutral content. Nonetheless, if I'm not careful I find myself going down rabbit holes of particular narratives that I want to be true without looking into the other side of the story.

In my pursuit of truth, how do I make sense of this increasingly divided and ideological world, there is an incentive toward maximizing things like clicks rather than truth? Here, I'll talk about collecting different and especially opposing perspectives, steelmanning them, and putting them in dialectic. It's not a cure-all, but it sure helps.

I first came across the idea of "steelmanning" from investor Peter Thiel. The idea is the opposite of the straw man. Strawmanning an argument would be to re-phrase it in a way that is easiest as possible to take down. In other words, make the argument sound weak. Steelmanning is to re-phrase an opposing argument as if I myself am defending it. The idea would be that I word the argument in a way that is more compelling than the way the person I'm debating worded it. Want an example? Here (go to 25 minutes in) is philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger steelmanning the pro-wait-till-marriage argument (which he does not necessarily agree with) to a room full of people who outwardly laughed at the end of it, to give you an idea of what their views were.

Steelmanning is something we can all understand. But when it's something I disagree with, it's very difficult to do. I have my views around the controversial topics out there, but what I'm trying to do now is collect the perspectives from the narratives out there, and steelman each one, rather than take a side. Again, this is hard to do. One thing that helps is writing every day. I have my website where you are seeing this article. But I also have thousands of pages of journal entries that go back to 2006. There, I can have a bit more control over the prompting of what I write. I wrote a couple paragraphs on one side of the argument. Now it's time to write a couple paragraphs on the other side.

I'm a scientist by training, so I have to add that in the process of steelmanning each viewpoint out there, I have to always ask: "what else do I need to know in order for this statement to be true?" This might be doing experiments, mining data, reading particular papers or articles, and things of that nature. It's a lot of work.

Once I have these steelmanned perspectives, what do I do with them?

I was talking to my aunt once about big life decisions I had to make at that time. She told me to stop talking, think of the opposing decisions, and "put them into dialogue" for a while. There was something very profound in those words that I'll elaborate on here.

In science class, I learned about the idea that if you hold two opposing thoughts in your head long enough, you approach a higher truth. Like how light is both a particle and a wave. There have been two philosophers I know of that actively practiced this. The first was Plato. In his works, he would simply have characters discuss opposing views. What matters is not the resolution. What matters is the process of putting opposing views in dialogue regardless of outcome. Another term of this "dialogue" of opposing ideas is a dialectic. The second philosopher was 18th-19th century German philosopher Hegel. He built off of Plato's dialectic.

What Hegel did is make the dielectic a bit more pointed. He instructed that truth around a particular topic is found by first producing a thesis. You can think of this as an argument or viewpoint or perspective. Then you produce the opposite of it: an antithesis. Then, from those two you produce the third piece: a synthesis. This is where you produce a higher truth from the relationship between the thesis and the antithesis. This is known today as the Hegelian dialectic.

So then what do you do with your steelmanned arguments? You make your thesis-antithesis-synthesis triads. You produce your Hegelian dialectics. Let's go back to Daniel Schmachtenberger's steelmanning of the pro wait-till-marriage argument. The audience has the opposing view (so it doesn't exactly need to be steelmanned). Here (go to 28:20), he puts the two views together in a deeper synthesis about change versus tradition that you should absolultely look at.

My PhD in Cancer Biology taught me a lot about how to seek truth, particularly around a single dry non-controversial non-politicized topic that a small number of people in the world work on. But it didn't teach me the rest of it. I struggled just as much as everyone else when the pandemic hit, in terms of figuring out what is objectively true. Ironically, I turned to philosophy much more after I received my doctor of philosophy than during the pursuit of it.

Stoic philosopher Epictetus opens his book The Enchiridion by saying that there is only that which you can control and that which you cannot control. I can't control how divided and ideological our society becomes (and how divided my family becomes for that matter) and how hard it is to find truth. But I can control my method in finding truth. Steelmanning multiple viewpoints and putting them in dielectic is something that has at least serving as a light in the darkness right now.

I've referenced philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger a couple of times in this article. I think he has a lot of great things to say on the topic of sensemaking, and his work has had a big influence on the things I've written about in this article. He uses the word "trans-ideological," which encapsulates a lot of what I'm going after. For further reading, look at:

• Higher dimensional thinking
• The war on sensemaking