I hope anyone reading this is well aware of the various techniques used by bad faith actors and propagandists—usually on the far right—to spread their evil ideas. I see no reason to discuss those further.

What has bothered me for quite awhile is that in discussions with decent people—most often relating to public policy—we very frequently fall into three related rhetorical traps. These traps hinder the formation of consensus. That in turn causes real harm by preventing, delaying, or watering down concrete actions that will meaningfully improve our society. I believe if we can learn to recognize and avoid these traps, we can more easily agree to enact change even while disagreement remains.

Demand for Completeness

Imagine a friendly discussion on global warming. A person suggests prioritizing renewable energy and disinvesting from fossil fuels. Most everyone agrees with this general principle, but some nerd wants to know the exact proposal down to every last detail.

How many dollars will we invest or divest, and from which specific funds and projects? Where will the money come from? Where, when, and what renewable energy systems will be built with which technologies? What is the timeline? Will there be any externalities, and how will they be mitigated?

If this discussion were taking place in an actual legislative body with real power, then these kinds of questions are both appropriate and necessary. Of course our elected representatives should put forth their best effort to craft a complete and detailed policy.

But this kind of planning is largely a waste of time for people who are just chatting at a cafe or in a comments thread. It is enough for average citizens to agree on the principle. In all likelihood the participants do not even have the qualifications or resources to answer these questions to any satisfactory degree.

Not having all the answers does not preclude someone from having the right idea. Demanding completeness distracts from the formation of consensus. If people simply expressed their approval of the core principles, that generates political juice that can lead to positive outcomes.

Even legislators are only human. They can not think of everything. Laws will always be flawed. That is why we never stop legislating. We must amend, rewrite, revise, and keep moving forward. If we refuse to grant our consent to anything short of an absolutely complete blueprint, no change will ever occur. We can not die on a hill of unfinished plans.

Demand for Perfection

While discussing new ideas, most of us are naturally inclined to dissect those ideas and point out all their downsides. This often leads to the idea being dismissed outright.

The problem is that perfect solutions do not exist. If the standard of approval is perfection, then no change will ever occur. So often we see people on the left, including sitting politicians, oppose measures that will make the world a better place on the grounds that they are imperfect.

Of course I want to tax the rich heavily, but if the option before me is to raise their taxes a little bit, I will still say yes. Of course I want to ban cars, but if the option before me is to make a bike lane on one small street, I’ll take it. Of course solar power isn’t great during nighttime or winter months, but we should still build it anyway. I don’t like incrementalism, and prefer big sweeping changes, but I must take what I can get in the moment.

As long as life goes on, there will be a next time. We get a little bit now, and a little bit more later. Slowly we approach the goal while accepting we can never reach it. If we stubbornly insist on only implementing perfect policies, we will change nothing.

Bias of the Status Quo

Even if we accept an incomplete and imperfect idea, we must always weigh its pros and cons against that of our current policy. When we perform our analyses in a vacuum, the status quo is granted an unfair advantage.

Consider the topic of driverless vehicles. Many opponents point out how unsafe they are, but the question is not “are driverless cars safe?” The correct question is “are driverless cars safer than human drivers?” Even if driverless cars still crash into things and kill people, if they do so less often than human drivers, then they are a positive improvement at least as far as safety goes.

The standard for implementing a change is not whether the change itself is good. The standard is whether it is better than the status quo and better than the other proposals under consideration.

There are some very difficult problems in this world. Quite often the best solutions we can come up with are still heavily flawed. Those flawed ideas are difficult to build support for if we focus on those flaws. Instead, focus on the contrast with the current state of things. In cases where the status quo is terrible, we need to have the will to make the change even when the end result is only a relatively minor improvement. As long as the best available evidence suggests our lives will be measurably better then we should take whatever we can get.

Countermeasures

Thankfully, as long as participants are all well meaning people who come in good faith, these traps are relatively easy to escape. If we keep these fallacies in mind as we debate, we can usually dispel them simply by pointing them out.

Hey, we’re not going to craft a piece of passable legislation in this chat room, are we? I think we can all agree on the fundamental principle and move on, yes?

I know this idea isn’t perfect, nothing is. Can we agree that despite the flaws we would be better off doing this than continuing to suffer with the state of things as they are now?

I wrote this post rather quickly. I know there are probably many problems with it. I would ask the reader to not not-pick a blog post. It’s enough to get the gist and move on with life.