Recently I was listening to a podcast where two intellectuals were arguing with each other about the finer points of intention and the meaning of what people say.
You can find the podcast here. The podcast was an interview between Sam Harris and Andrew Marantz and began well and good. Marantz is promoting a book in which he documents his experiences while embedded with social media creators and the anti-social people that use those platforms. This post is not about the contents of the book. It is about how two seeming allies can reach a point of contention they probably should not. In the process of their argument you get to see so many examples of why it is so difficult to communicate with people, even when they agree with you.
You can listen to the episode at the bottom of this page. The episode is only 2 hours long, though if you prefer, you can forward to minute 45, where the arguing begins.
The point of contention in their discussion, is that we need to be careful labeling certain emblematic actions, such as dog-whistling. Both agreed there is a spectrum, and as you would expect, their contention emanates from a view of where in the spectrum that label should be planted. Marantz is of the opinion dog-whistling happens sooner in that continuum than Harris believes. Harris believes intention and a high-level of certainty are required before one is bestowed with the label. Both men go back and forth arguing their position, even to the point they both come to an agreement, only to reiterate their claim on the dog-whistling spectrum and disagree again.
How can two seemingly well spoken, well educated men, who agree on the principle, disagree? My dissection is about why I feel they are not communicating properly and the importance of one’s experience. The latter is more important than we care to admit, specially to those of us that work with data and give very little credence to emotions and feelings.
I’m an engineer and my wife is in HR. I have no idea how she manages to talk to so many different people, about so many different topics, without what I consider, proper preparation. She is what some people would judge as a social-butterfly. She is non-white and we have been married for over 25 years. We live in the SF Bay Area and have lived here most of our lives, that is until circa 2010, when we lived in Europe for a few years.
Being male and Caucasian, my wife and I have had that dreaded white-privilege discussion many times. My wife grew up in a rougher part of the Bay Area and shared with me the many unpleasant (to put it mildly) encounters with authority she had, from cops, to security guards, to teachers. My life, on the other hand, was charmed by comparison. And as such, during these conversations I was able to reason my way as to why she had a warped perspective on those experiences. And why, if “she had done this”, or “done that”, or “if she’d listened”, none of it would have happened. Thank God for her being my better half, or we’d still not be together.
Our experiences are powerful. Our rational minds tend to think that “we are above that” and therefore, experiences should have nothing to do with our understanding of the subject. For this reason, we agreed to disagree on the subject of harassment by authority and continued having a diverging view; until Europe.
When we moved to Europe things changed. We lived in Southern Europe, where suddenly I stuck out more than she did. We lived in Europe right after the 2008 economic crisis, a time where most of Europe was suffering, but the South was suffering tremendously. Many people lost their jobs and I think we saw a record high of 50% unemployment amongst young adults (16 to 21 year-olds), it was bad. One of the consequences of this high-level of unemployment was petty theft and shop-lifting. To combat this, companies hired security guards and setup enter-only and exit-only corridors in and out of the stores. The increase in security and my US expectations lead me to my first harassing encounter with authority, something which had never happened to me. For the first time ever, I was being accused of a crime simply for entering a store where my intention was to purchase something, as security guards asked me to inspect my backpack. Other times guards would follow me around. These encounters didn’t happen once or twice, but too many times to count. They became normal and I found myself distrusting the very type of people I had grown believing only dealt with the “bad people“.
My wife and I had discussed this subject for many years in our marriage and I never understood it, until I experienced it myself. In other words, many times, unless one feels it, one cannot see it.
If you listen to the argument between Harris and Marantz, you can see one of the points of contention by Harris is that in the past he’d been incorrectly labeled by the media and thus he’d hate to return the favor and be so careless. Marantz on the other hand, spent a lot of time among the so-called deplorables and his perspective is from someone that has been in the trenches of these guerilla-style trolling. Marantz perspective is that if we don’t do something quickly, it will all be lost. His approach is more aggressive and perhaps more in-line with a small number of casualties are acceptable.
That is the reason they cannot see eye to eye, though they are intelligent and even agree with the general idea, they cannot agree on the implementation because of their own individual experiences. When my wife and I spoke about undo harassment by authorities, my perspective was, said authorities only targeted deserving individuals. Her point of view, however, was less binary and in fact more skewed towards targeting her. From her perspective, undeserving individuals always got targeted and as such, one should be weary of these authority figures.
Even though we like to believe we do not place our biases at the forefront of our discussions, we do so more often than not. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, in general, we are what we’ve experienced. Sure, there are the outliers amongst us, those who use only data even when everything else tells them otherwise. However, they are the outliers, not the general population, and as much as we’d like to think we’re special, there are few Einsteins amongst us and education does not equate to membership into this club. There are many well educated, yet misinformed, people in this world.
So what could have Harris and Marantz done to find common ground? For starters, they would have first have to realized where their points of contention were coming from. Marantz could have done a better job explaining why he felt so strongly that we needed to point out dog-whistling sooner and without as much explicit evidence as Harris required. I believe his experience with the kings and queens of social-media trolling left a strong imprint in him. Harris did a good job explaining his stance on the issue through his narration of his experiences being mislabeled by the media, yet this also became the very reason he could not understand Marantz point of view.
It takes experience or very special people to be able to be more understanding or truly objective to the data being presented. Since the latter won’t happen to most of us, we must put our bets on the former through travel, and by placing ourselves in uncommon situations so that we may hopefully gain experience and a different perspective. Otherwise, if your only tool is a hammer, all of your problems will looks like nails.
