Your Communities Shape Your Identity

YOUR COMMUNITIES SHAPE YOUR IDENTITY

Bethany Brookshire has always cared about getting things right. But over the course of her life, her ability to acknowledge her errors—or even to notice them in the first place—has fluctuated depending on the community she’s been embedded in.

When she was in high school, Brookshire was a member of the drama club, where imperfection was considered a normal, expected part of the learning process. Against that backdrop, she found it relatively easy to notice and talk about flaws in her own performances.

When she started working on her PhD, things changed. In the cutthroat environment of academia, her colleagues would pounce on any admission of error. Brookshire noticed her mind trying to “paper over” things she had gotten wrong, and she had to struggle to overcome the impulse.

When she quit academia ten years later to become a journalist, things changed again. Brookshire’s editor was genuinely appreciative when she would call out her own mistakes, as were the vast majority of her readers online. Noticing errors became easier once more. When she followed up her claim about gender bias in emails with a correction, the reaction she got was laudatory. “Surprising and awesome follow-up,” said one person. “Inspirational.” “We need more of this.”

You can work on your thinking as an individual. Over the medium to long term, you can also change the people you surround yourself with. We humans are social creatures, and our identities are shaped by our social circles, almost without our noticing.

Suppose you told your friends or coworkers that you weren’t sure you agreed 100 percent with some political view they all share. Would you expect them to be curious about your reasoning or to become hostile toward you? Suppose you’re having a disagreement with someone in your social group. Do you feel free to take a moment to consider their point before replying, or do you expect any hesitation on your part to be met with a triumphant smirk from them?

You can make the effort to think honestly no matter what community you’re embedded in. But your friends, coworkers, and audience can either provide a headwind or a tailwind for your efforts.

That tailwind is one of the reasons I joined the effective altruist movement. The core effective altruist organizations maintain public pages titled “Our Mistakes.” Prominent individuals in the movement publish blog posts with titles like “Three Key Issues I’ve Changed My Mind About.”6 Some of the harshest censures I’ve seen from effective altruists have been directed at other people in the movement, for exaggerating or promoting effective altruism to the public in an intellectually dishonest way.

And for the most part, they welcome good criticism. In 2013, a friend of mine named Ben Kuhn published a blog post titled “A Critique of Effective Altruism.”7 It sparked a sprawling discussion in which the most upvoted comments were all from other effective altruists saying some version of the following: “Nice job, but it feels like you went too easy on us. Here are some stronger criticisms I would make . . .”

Earlier that year, Ben had applied for an internship at GiveWell, one of the most prominent effective altruist organizations, but he had been turned down. After reading Ben’s critique, GiveWell got back in touch with him and offered him the position.

Like any community, effective altruism isn’t perfect, and I could add my own critiques to Ben’s. But overall, my experience has been that it makes a sincere effort to reward people for making the community more accurate, not for falling in line or cheering blindly for our “team.” In other social groups I’ve belonged to, there was always an implicit threat in the back of my mind, deflecting my thoughts away from certain conclusions: You can’t believe that or people will hate you. It’s freeing to know that among effective altruists, disagreeing with the consensus won’t cost me any social points, as long as I’m making a good-faith effort to figure things out.