Defined by What You Hate
Critique-oriented communities and the problem of unwelcome epistemic company
We really enjoy “Decoding the Gurus” — a podcast hosted by a psychologist (Matt Browne) and a cognitive anthropologist (Chris Kavanagh) who do in-depth analyses of “Secular Gurus”.
Whereas prior research on Gurus has mostly focused on religious figures, there has been a rise of somewhat-secular figures who occupy the same psychological niche: providing life advice, having thoughts on many topics, and cultivating strong par asocial relationships with their many disciples. Take Jordan Peterson, for instance:
Peterson has cultivated an audience of loyal fans who admire him for his expertise (perceived or real) on various issues, as well as the life advice, spiritual guidance, and political ideologies he espouses. Many in Peterson’s audience see him as a surrogate father figure and orient their lives around his teachings. This isn’t inherently bad — perhaps his teachings are quite good! — but is very risky.
The Decoding the Gurus (DtG) hosts have therefore created a tool called the “Gurometer” to measure the extent to which public figures meet the archetype of a secular Guru in the Peterson sense (see this talk from Chris Kavanagh explaining the tool in more detail). Figures are rated on a series of dimensions including, but not limited to:
Galaxy Brain-ness: Presenting oneself as having all-encompassing knowledge spanning multiple disciplines, a subsequent willingness to give overconfident hot takes on technical topics, and a dismissal of genuine expertise.
Cultish-ness: Using emotional manipulation and control, establishing binary ingroup/outgroup views of the world, cultivation of parasocial relationships with followers, critics dismissed near-universally as bad-faith and/or unworthy of providing critique.
Anti-establishment: Enduring skepticism of mainstream sources, disparagement of institutional knowledge, emphasis on causing uncertainty or lack of trust in institutions (a void which the Guru can fill)
Grievance Mongering: Reliance on narratives of grievance wherein the Guru’s unique talents have not been recognized by the establishment, typically alongside conspiracy theories as to how malevolent actors may be sabotaging the Guru’s reputation for sinister reasons
Narcissism: Exhibiting a sense of grandiosity, emphasizes the unique perspectives they provide that only their audience could understand, compulsively seeking out attention
This is a non-exhaustive list of Gurometer elements, but is sufficient for our purposes. DtG uses this tool to analyze a wide range of Gurus, from Jordan Peterson to the Weinstein Brothers, to James Lindsay, to Scott Adams. We find DtG’s analyses credible, interesting, and valuable for audiences interested in understanding the phenomenon of secular gurus.
The DtG audience on the other hand…..
Audience Risk
It’s inescapable that many contemporary figures who meet elements of the Gurometer are right-wing. Indeed, one might say that Donald Trump is the ur-Guru — check every element of the Gurometer and he likely scores quite high on each. There’s a clear appetite among many Republicans to seek out anti-establishment figures who can provide counter-narratives to mainstream sources with respect to election denial, vaccine efficacy, and other hot political topics.
As a result, many of the Gurus that DtG covers tend to be right-wing. There are a few exceptions who are either left-wing or neutral — such as Contrapoints, Dan Dennet, or Robert Wright — but the vast majority of Gurus decoded are right-wing. We suspect this isn’t due to bias on the part of the hosts, but simply downstream of the current political landscape where mainstream institutions tend to lean left, so antiestablishment figures with hot takes will naturally end up being more right-wing.
However, this skew in Gurus covered presents a risk. As Scott Alexander put it:
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
The aims of a project, be it a community or podcast, can result in self-selection into the project by people with motives different than those exhibited by the project’s creators.
In the case of DtG, the focus on critiquing right-wing Gurus has resulted in an audience that has self-selected into listening to critiques of right-wing people. This means there’s a lot of people who listen to DtG *because* they critique right-wing people. Of this group, a lot of them will be committed political partisans who probably have little interest in the analysis DtG conducts, and instead are just looking for ammunition against right-wing individuals they dislike for political reasons.
This usually isn’t an issue, save for when DtG criticizes the wrong people. This has happened a couple times recently when the hosts covered Noam Chomsky and Hasan Piker. Chomsky is a renowned linguist who also has many left-wing critiques of the US Government; Piker is a leftist Twitch streamer who extolls the virtues of communism to his audience while also doing more traditional Twitch activities like gaming or IRL streams.
Noam Chomsky
Matt and Chris critically analyzed some content from Noam Chomsky and discussed his habit of justifying non-Western imperialism by pivoting to critiques of Western imperialism (also known as “whataboutism”). In short, when Chomsky discusses something like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he does not condemn the invasion but instead lists all the reasons that America is bad (with a subtle implication, never explicitly stated, that this might make the Russian invasion okay).
The DtG subreddit blew up, with many disappointed in Matt and Chris:
Example 1: This episode is a perfect example of the pointlessness of the show going beyond its core gimmick of doing amusing takedowns of genuine grifters. When the hosts get into academic or political realms that they're not expert in, what you end up with is a few hours of pub-level chat that basically makes porn of 'normie' opinions, as if low competence moderate thought is the only good thing in the world (they're the only ones who aren't ideologically captured, right?).
Example 2: I was looking forward to see some decent critique of Chomsky, but I just found a simplistic analysis and shoddy strawmans.
Example 3: In one breath, you guys criticize Chomsky for not being aware of "how much his ideology impacts his perspective" since apparently he "downplays atrocities" of anti-US regimes... And in the next breath, you get basic facts wrong – and wrong exactly in a way that downplays US atrocities.
I think it should be a little embarrassing to opine so confidently when it seems you have relatively basic facts wrong? I don't know... People make fun of Joe Rogan all the time for making shit up on the fly, but they simultaneously make fun of him for constantly saying "Pull that up Jaime". He does that because he usually wants to get the very basic facts straight and he can be humble enough at times to know when he's out of his depth.
A noticeable theme was a sense of betrayal among commenters — Chris and Matt have been critiquing those bad evil rightwing grifters…. why are they attacking Noam Chomsky? He has good political opinions!
Hasan Piker
Chris and Matt also recently covered Hasan Piker, the leftist Twitch streamer. In particular, they covered an interview Piker had with a self-identified Houthi Pirate, who described his experiences taking hostages on trading ships and has in the past made posts with text like : “Do you threaten us with what we are waiting for, you son of a female Jew?”
This could be an interesting interview, but Hasan Piker was both 1) very sympathetic to the Houthi movement, because of his anti-Israel positions, and 2) not well-prepared to ask interesting questions. Instead, Hasan asked hard-hitting journalistic questions like “do you like One Piece [an anime]?” When the Houthi pirate said yes, Hasan wanted him to know that the Houthis were doing “what Luffy [the protagonist] would do”. We doubt Luffy from One Piece attacked civilian trading vessels while holding flags that say “a curse upon the Jews”, but setting that aside the interview was depressingly insubstantial. Chris and Matt pointed out that the interview only served as soft propaganda for a terrorist group that happened to align with Hasan’s revolutionary leftist politics.
Many fans were disappointed. Some examples:
Example 1: Normally I'm a fan of this podcast, but I feel this was a really poor episode. I like Hasan. I watch him occasionally, so I know enough about him to know that this was at best really uninformed, and at worst in bad faith. I think highly of these two so I'm going to just assume it was uninformed.
First of all, Hasan is a really decent guy. anyone who watches him knows that …Hasan is also intelligent and well informed. If you've ever heard him discuss issues in depth you'd know that. He's just a young guy who likes to have fun and joke around, and doesn't feel like he has anything to prove.
[skipping multiple paragraphs for brevity]
I think this podcast did a great disservice to him and their listeners with this episode. There's a lot of people who's introduction to Hasan is going to be this, and it is so skewed and wrong. Given your steller track record, a lot of people who don't know any better are just going to take your word on this stuff, and honestly, if I didn't know any better, I would to. You can already see this in the majority of comments. Yeah, this was a really poor episode and I'm disappointed in it. I hope you guys do better next time, and I think you will.
Example 2: I think the boys did Hasan dirty here they could have chosen a better interview with someone a bit more reflective of his normal content. I’m a leftie and I acknowledge I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for Hasan, yes he’s a dumbass, often says dumb shit and I have issues with how much of blatant consumerist he is but I think overall he’s promotion of labour rights, healthcare, calling out corporatism and the problems with American imperialism are positive for younger generations who like his style of content. It’s not for everyone but his ethics have been very consistent and he often gets hammered unfairly by Americans especially more the liberal leaning ones who don’t like American supremacy being challenged which you can even see in the people commenting on this post. Just my two cents, long time lurker of the reddit who finally started listening to the pod and loves it, keep up the good work!
Example 3: Love this podcast. Long-time listener. However, their treatment of Hasan was a little unfair. While they claim at the top to know what a streamer is it was kind of obvious that they don't really get the point. The value of Hasan's channel is its unique curation and the content comes from him AND his chat. He sucks at interviews and rarely does them so to spend such a long time analyzing his lack of interviewing chops is a complete waste of time, bordering on disingenuous. And they clipped the absolute worst of his emotional outbursts which i agree are cringe, but it is so far removed from 99% of his content (he streams all day, most days). Personally, I don't find Hasan to be super smart or intellectual on most topics, but his heart is in the right place and he points his audience to some great thinkers and interesting videos. His coverage of the Palestinan genocide alone is evidence of his value to the broader political conversation (even when his takes miss the mark) Again...most of his show is watching clips of other content! His value is in the curation not his own personal ideas. He is so different from most of the people this podcast "decodes" and it was a little awkward that these very intelligent hosts completely missed that basic point.
As with Chomsky, there were a lot of people who felt betrayed by the critique of Hasan, and who often defended his Guru-ish tendencies by gesturing to their agreement with his politics, and coming up with other reasons to dismiss criticism of his substantive content.
Communities of Critique
We talk about DtG a lot in this post, but this dynamic is by no means unique to them. Rather, we think it is generally true that when communities form around critiquing a particular thing, they attract a lot of viewers who are less interested in the substantive critiques and more interested in attacking the thing in question.
For example, we also enjoy the Blocked and Reported podcast with Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog. In particular, we think that Jesse’s reporting on controversies surrounding the evidence base for Youth Gender Medicine are interesting, educational, and highly valuable. And whenever BARPod covers controversies involving this topic, they tend to do so in a pretty measured way that acknowledges complexity, offers specific reasons for disagreement, and takes care to separate evaluations of people from their arguments.
However, we avoid the subreddit like the plague. As responsible as Singal and Herzog may be, their content also attracts a lot of people whose opinions that go far beyond those that Singal and Herzog express in their work. It’s hard to come up with some objective representation of what a subreddit thinks or believes, but here’s an example comment that we feel is pretty representative of many r/BlockedAndReported subreddit participants’ views on gender:
“Gender dysphoria needs to be treated like all the other body dysphorias. It's a mental illness. It needs to be assessed that way, not affirmed as an identity. Treatment shouldn't involve catering to the dysphoria. We don't keep food from a person with anorexia as a form of treatment.”
Contrast this with Singal’s own writing on the subject:
“For gender-dysphoric people, physical transition can be life enhancing, even lifesaving. While representative long-term data on the well-being of trans adults have yet to emerge, the evidence that does exist—as well as the sheer heft of personal accounts from trans people and from the clinicians who help them transition—is overwhelming. For many if not most unwaveringly gender-dysphoric people, hormones work. Surgery works. That’s reflected in studies that consistently show low regret rates for the least-reversible physical procedures to address gender dysphoria.”
We think that a lot of BARPod fans see Singal critique some elements of transgender activism and like them because they’re punching in the right direction. But a cursory examination of Singal’s views suggests that this commenter and Singal actually have pretty strong disagreements about the topic — but they’ve been covered up by mood affiliation. This is why other comments that propose conspiracy theories about the malicious intentions of trans people get decently upvoted:
Perhaps this is us reverting back to a mistake-theory view of the world, but we suspect that many trans activists do genuinely believe what they say, and that they are not simply using concerns over civil rights to enact their dark intentions. They may be incorrect on particular empirical facts, but they aren’t just lying as part of a conspiracy (to what end is also unclear from the comment).
To take another example, the r/Destiny subreddit has also dealt with similar issues from both ends. Destiny, a politics streamer, started his career by arguing against right-wing people and found out that he had ended up attracting a large community of leftists/socialists/communist that caused internal strife in his community. More recently, he has critiqued leftists to such an extent that he has attracted large numbers of conservatives and Trump supporters. In both cases, attacking one side of the political spectrum resulted in members from the opposite end of the political spectrum joining the community without truly understanding the substantive reasons why the other side is being critiqued — they just like that their enemies are being attacked.
Unwelcome Epistemic Company
Why does all of this matter? We think that finding oneself surrounded by people who agree with you, but for the wrong reasons, is epistemically relevant. For this, we draw on an article from Joshua Blanchard on “The Problem of Unwelcome Epistemic Company”, which we believe is highly underrated1. Suppose you are in the following position:
“You haven’t read much on refugee crime rates in the United States, but you pay some attention to the news. Despite being generally in favor of increased acceptance of refugees, you find yourself with the belief that refugees, on average, commit more crimes than citizens. You then encounter a white nationalist who also believes that refugees commit more crimes than citizens.”
Does the fact you agree with a white nationalist means that your beliefs about relative crime rates between refugees and citizens are wrong? Not at all. Instead, the knowledge that a white nationalist agrees with you (on a topic related to their white nationalism) may suggest that you share a similar thought process to them with respect to this issue, and, because white nationalists are wrong about a lot of things, it’s worth investigating whether you have fallen victim to bad reasoning. As Blanchard puts it:
“It may be that white nationalists tend to make inferences about refugees as a class on the basis of sensationalist anecdotes that are prominent in the news. This is not a good form of reasoning, but it may be that you, too – despite your generally favorable attitude toward refugees – are engaging in it. This sort of epistemic similarity is just the kind of problem that unwelcome agreement can help us to discover.”
As in the white nationalist case, if you find yourself (as we have on occasion) enmeshed in a critique-oriented community, you may find yourself surrounded by others who are more motivated by raw partisan animus than by substantive criticisms of particular persons. How should one handle this? Blanchard proposed three options (note that “p” is philosopher-jargon for “proposition”):
Extreme Steadfastness: “In response to unwelcome epistemic company in believing that p, you should maintain your credence that p and resist any introspective moral concern on the basis of the unwelcome agreement.”
Extreme Dissociationism: “In response to unwelcome epistemic company in believing that p, you should always reduce your credence in p by n degree and/or engage in introspective moral concern.”
Moderate Dissociationism: “Unwelcome agreement that p always provides some defeasible reason to doubt, revise, or recheck your belief that p. This reason comes in degrees of strength, depending on the case.”
Blanchard is, of course, somewhat stacking the deck by referring to two of the options as “extreme” and the other as “moderate”, but we tend to agree that “Moderate Dissociationism” is a preferred strategy: in the face of unwelcome company, we should re-check that we truly do believe in a particular proposition and aren’t simply endorsing it for epistemically illegitimate reasons.
We recently experienced this when browsing the Decoding the Gurus subreddit — we noticed that a lot of people were criticizing Lex Fridman and other right-aligned figures on hyper-partisan grounds that were generally congruent with our own political beliefs. We had to take a step back and consider exactly why we disliked Lex Fridman (and others), and ended up revising our opinion about him somewhat. We still dislike him, but some of the reasons we had for disliking him were things that we have no problem with when done by people we like, and were likely an isolated demand for rigour on our part. So we dislike Lex 5% less now, but also feel more certain that the core of our dislike is reasonable.
In closing, we leave you with the following thought:
We promise that Joshua Blanchard had no part in the creation of this Substack post, and likely has no clue this blog exists. If he does: “Hi Josh, big fan of your work!”
Jordan Peterson also used to criticize the right more rather than associate himself with it openly like he does now. But his fanbase rebelled. When he said Brett Kavanaugh should step down, his audience was furious and Peterson backtracked.
His first podcast after his illness also called out that the right was becoming conspiratorial and that Trump almost certainly lost the 2020 election. His fans didn’t like that either and today he’s pretty deep in conspiracy land.
While I agree with everything in this I feel compelled to point out that my personal criticism of lex in the DtG feed was incisive and humid humorous rather than hyperpartisan