Good Critics

Do you have any good critics?

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he knew it was going to be a controversial bombshell. The book made his case for evolution by natural selection, a theory that was not just difficult for people to wrap their minds around, but verging on blasphemous, as it upended the traditional picture of man's God-given dominion over the animal kingdom. Arguing for evolution was "like confessing a murder," he told a fellow scientist.

The book did indeed generate a firestorm of criticism, which Darwin found galling, even though he had known it was coming. His critics straw-manned his arguments, demanded an unrealistically high burden of proof, and raised flimsy objections. Darwin stayed polite in public but vented his frustrations in private letters. "Owen is indeed very spiteful. He misrepresents and alters what I say very unfairly," he fumed about one review.

Of course, it's typical for the maverick with the fringe theory to feel unfairly dismissed by the mainstream. What made Darwin atypical was that he also recognized a handful of good critics in addition to the bad, people who he could tell had taken the trouble to really understand his theory and were raising intelligent objections to it.

One of the good critics was a scientist named François Jules Pictet de la Rive, who published a negative review of On the Origin of Species in a literary magazine called The Athenaeum. Darwin was so impressed with Pictet de la Rive's review that he wrote him a letter thanking him for having summarized the book's argument so accurately, and calling his criticisms perfectly fair. "I literally agree to every word you say," he told Pictet de la Rive. "I most fully admit that I by no means explain away all the vast difficulties. The only difference between us is that I attach much more weight to the explanation of facts, & somewhat less weight to the difficulties than you do."

You can probably think of people who are critical of your deeply held beliefs and life choices. People who hold the opposite view on political issues such as gun control, capital punishment, or abortion. People who disagree with you on scientific questions such as climate change, nutrition, or vaccination. People who condemn the industry you work in, such as tech or the military.

It's tempting to view your critics as mean-spirited, ill-informed, or unreasonable. And it's likely that some of them are. But it's unlikely that all of them are. Can you name people who are critical of your beliefs, profession, or life choices who you consider thoughtful, even if you believe they're wrong? Or can you at least name reasons why someone might disagree with you that you would consider reasonable (even if you don't happen to know of specific people who hold those views)?

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Being able to name reasonable critics, being willing to say "The other side has a point this time," being willing to acknowledge when you were wrong—it's things like these that distinguish people who actually care about truth from people who only think they do.

But the biggest sign of scout mindset may be this: Can you point to occasions in which you were in soldier mindset? If that sounds backward, remember that motivated reasoning is our natural state. It's universal, hardwired into our brains. So if you never notice yourself doing it, what's more likely—that you happen to be wired differently from the rest of humanity or that you're simply not as self-aware as you could be?

Learning to spot your own biases in the moment takes practice. Noticing when you become defensive gives you a chance to reconsider the criticism.