Can we diversify what we are sure we know?
On worldview diversification and the power of humility
This is the first of a series of reflections on of mental models and tools that have been vitally important to me and how I approach life, myself, and other people.
It’s hard to have an open mind. We may say that we do, we may think of ourselves as curious, flexible people, and then our dualistic brains quickly dismiss new information as false and new ideas as wrong as we move through our busy lives. This reality is core to being human, key to our survival. Our brains are difference-making engines, using assumptions and models to rapidly parse tens of thousands of data points every second into relevant or irrelevant, dangerous or safe, good or bad.
They are beautiful engines, keeping us alive and enabling us to solve difficult problems and build great works. They are also prisons, the root of the pervasive biases that, as Daniel Kahneman and others have shown, plague our daily decisions and interactions. And they are the root of arrogance.
As I reflected recently, I consider arrogance to be the enemy of our quest to live a full life and leave the best possible imprint on the world during our brief time here. Too often, we conflate arrogance with confidence. We view the scientist or entrepreneur spouting their vision of the world as manifesting the conviction necessary to create change in the face of skepticism. It is true that we all need confidence to promote and protect ourselves and our ideas, and the harder the challenges we take on the more confidence we need. We also may need to display excessive confidence to play the status games core to our world—to raise money, for example, or to convince people to follow us into the uncharted waters of a new venture. But arrogance is one step further; it doesn’t just hold belief in the potential of our idea, it dismisses the possibility of alternative views and paths.
Arrogance is narrow, juvenile, insecure. Our small, fragile egos worry so much about what will happen to us if we are proven wrong that we armor ourselves in certainty and dismissiveness of other perspectives and possibilities. That armor protects us from pain, but it suffocates our curiosity, our ability to deeply connect with other people, and, ultimately, our ability to explore truths.
I cringe when I think of all the ways I have been spectacularly arrogant throughout my life. I have casually dismissed ideas and people only to later discover they were so much deeper and more beautiful than my closed earlier self could imagine. I wish I could ask for forgiveness from everyone that I have scorned, but I’ve likely forgotten many more incidents than I remember. Instead, I offer forgiveness to myself. As Richard Rohr chronicles, we are meant to seek and hold certainty when we are younger to secure our sense of our place in the world. It is only when we have built that strong foundation, cemented, in part, by our juvenile arrogance, that we can truly engage with the uncertain and paradoxical realities of the world.
So, I forgive my younger selves, and commit to being much better. Escaping the traps of arrogance and engaging everyone and everything I encounter with curiosity and compassion is one of the greatest priorities for the rest of my life. If you read on, I assume you at least partly share that goal.
Humbly Embracing Possibility
Pursuing that goal is so much easier said than done. There are layers upon layers of our arrogance. It is not just when we declare an idea or person we barely understand as wrong or dumb; we are constantly ignoring new data that doesn’t easily fit within our existing worldview. We well-educated, Western types often readily critique people who hold other worldviews as narrow-minded, but then we blindly dismiss anything that doesn’t fit within our own hyper-rationalist framework. History is littered with champions of reason and science who have had spectacularly closed minds (my personal favorite is the German doctor, Max von Pettenkofer, who drank a glass of cholera feces on stage to prove to his colleagues that the germ theory of disease was wrong).
The recent evolution in how elite, rationalist culture views UFOs is a striking example of this dynamic. A few years ago, I and everyone I knew laughed at UFO exploration as crackpot conspiracy theory and/or the delusions of a disturbed and maladjusted fringe. Then news broke that the American military was seriously investigating the phenomena. It released videos showing weird, unexplainable stuff. Congress held hearings. Respectable New York Times journalists wrote stories. And now many elite, science-minded folks are open to possibilities they earlier dismissed. They don’t believe the phenomena are saucers piloted by little gray aliens, but they have moved from a place of certainty that all reports of UFOs are delusional bunk to one of uncertainty and curiosity, to a place of open, if still often skeptical unknowing.
Think about all the other places in our life where we are sure we are right, where we know for certain how the world works and who we are and what is right. How open are we to exploring other possibilities? How curious are we about people who see the world and themselves differently? Will we actively and genuinely explore other perspectives, or will it take a historic data drop from the Pentagon to open us to alternatives?
The best articulation of how to open to possibility, to question our foundational assumption, is worldview diversification. In short, this approach assigns some probability that worldviews other than the one we normally operate within are accurate and informs decisions relevant decisions within our lives accordingly. You might assume this is just the stuff of “woo” pseudoscience and a slippery slope to conspiracy theory. But I first encountered the concept in this interview of one of the pioneers of the hyper-rationalist effective altruist movement, Holden Karnofsky.
Worldview diversification is a powerful and practical antidote to arrogance. Karnofsky describes how he and his team do extensive research and analysis to develop a strong theory for how the philanthropic dollars they manage could have the maximum impact on the world. They allocate a large portion of their resources to that theory, but then they also recognize that their analysis could be fundamentally wrong. They take seriously other perspectives on how to best improve the world and smaller amounts of their money accordingly. It is effectively smart investment guidance (nobody should plow their whole portfolio into a handful of stocks or, god forbid, cryptocurrencies, no matter how strong their conviction) applied to other areas of our lives.
In this way, worldview diversification is the exact opposite of the embrace of conspiracy theories. Radicalization of any kind, including conspiracy theories, is a fearful rejection of uncertainty to make our complex, unsafe world seem feel simpler and more controllable. It is another manifestation of arrogance. Worldview diversification is an exercise in deep humility, a willingness to lean into and hold uncertainty despite the cries of our dualistic minds for certainty. It requires greater courage, resilience, and patience than extremism of any form.
We of course shouldn’t seriously open to every worldview, especially those that are obviously self-serving or deeply disgusting and dangerous (nobody should diversify to the Nazi worldview). Just as financial diversification doesn’t mean we should jump into our former classmate’s ponzi scheme, worldview diversification requires us to skeptically assess the alternative perspectives we explore and may eventually integrate. Consider the UFO analogy again. Opening to the possibility that there may be objects capable of breaking our understanding of the laws of physics does not mean embracing that there are little gray aliens piloting those objects.
Embracing the Uncertainty of Everything
Fully applying worldview diversification to our lives is about far more than where we allocate our money. It calls us to shift how we spend our time, our attention, and, ultimately, our consciousness. With the humility of worldview diversification, we are called to listen more deeply to people we would have otherwise dismissed. We are called to reexamine and wrestle with ethical dilemmas we had taken strong positions on. We are even called to reconsider our foundational ethical frameworks. Karnofsky describes broadening approaches to maximize impact within utilitarianism, but a fuller worldview diversification would also include pursuing outcomes prioritized by other ethical frameworks.
The hardest application of worldview diversification for many rationalists will be the fundamental questions of existence and being human. In these cases, worldview diversification requires stepping beyond reason to other include other ways of experiencing the world and exploring reality. This is hard if you believe reason and logic area paramount, which is its own arrogance. As Christopher Beha writes in his beautiful review of Nobel prize winner Jon Fosse’s work: “I sometimes think that the modern world’s true cultural divide is not between believers and unbelievers but between those who think life is a puzzle that is capable of being solved and those who believe it’s a mystery that ought to be approached by way of silence and humility.”
For those of us who spend most of our lives trying to solve our little worlds, what would true worldview diversification ask of us? It would call us to spend more time in the silent contemplation Beha describes. It would call us to deeply and genuinely engage with people who see the world—and ourselves—as fundamental mystery. And it would call us to seek and surrender to the noetic experiences in which many of those people have felt immersed in that mystery.
Exploring those worldviews doesn’t require that we abandon our existing worldview or way of life. But it will almost certainly humble us and unlock greater compassion and wonder within us as we move through the brief, beautiful, and broken lives we have been gifted. May we all set aside our habits of arrogance and find our way to that place.