Being always in two minds

One thing I did when I was younger was try to imagine different worlds. I think partly it was loneliness but also just a desire. I’d imagine different worlds and peoples. Not just different in superficial ways. But I’d imagine different norms and beliefs and kinds of people. What would a world where crime was 5x higher look like? What about a world where technology became exponentially harder to find and eventually we stagnated? What about a world where tech created an equilibrium such that states and large gatherings of humans could no longer exists. What would the wandering bands and small villages living in the ruins of great cities look like. Would they be able to maintain knowledge? How much? Would they regress to the stone age? Or would they stay at the level of understanding we had in the late renaissance, but always knowing there was so much more that we once knew and they would never be able to find.

I’d imagine myself as different people. An old woman. A young boy. A craftsman. Imagine what their lives felt like from the inside. What they thought and believed.

When I read, whether fiction or non-fiction, I always tried to craft different stories. If I read a story of a hero seeking rightful vengeance against a cruel emperor, I’d lie in bed imagine the opposite. What if the hero was wrong? What if the cruelty of the emperor was only such as was necessary to maintain his rule and peace. I read many stories where the theme was broadly acceptance. That we need to learn to love and live side by side with our enemies. I imagined the reverse. What if the story went differently. What if acceptance and peace just led to the protagonists children filling mass graves. I think all fiction embodies the morals and views of how the world works of it’s authors. It’s easy as a child to let these views seek into you. To let fictional worlds shape your mind and let the writers view of right and wrong, of how society and reality works warp yours. I struggled against this consciously.

I think it’s important to do the same when reading non-fiction. I think a tempting valley of death in rationalism is to stop at the point where you assess arguments for flaws. You read an article, see whether the argument is cogent. At this point you’re already in the top 2% easily. You then examine the evidence the author presents, your priors and update to some extent. I think there are two problems with this approach.

1. Every argument is part of a web of premises, ideas and facts you hold in your mind. Even putting aside filter bubbles, a committed leftist reading a rightist book will almost never update enough and visa-versa. If you encounter singular arguments or facts that go against your existing beliefs, you’ll evaluate it in the context of those beliefs and almost always find it to be highly implausible. Sure an ideal Bayesian agent would not do this but almost all humans will.
2. You’ll never generate your own arguments. Even if you read broadly and go out of your way to challenge yourself and read ideologies different from yours, you’ll be stuck in whatever Paradigms exist in your time in place.

I think a better approach, or at least a way to go a few steps further, is to actively always force yourself to imagine different worlds. Imagine a world where this article is wrong. Imagine several different worlds. Each one with different ground truths or different ideologies being correct. Hold them all in your mind.

When I was a kid the term I coined for this is Two Skies Thinking. You need to hold multiple worlds in your mind. Multiple versions of you, each holding a different world view. When you read or think, you should be able to switch between them.