Advocacy

This was originally a series of posts on mastodon in response to the essay “Why I Hate Advocacy”.

I’ve been pretty fixated on this idea of tribalism in ideas and discussions lately. Mostly in a political or sociological context. This article was about programming languages specifically (a tribal war I’ve been participating in for much of my life at this point) but the aspect of human psychology it addresses shows up in many more places than programming paradigms.

I spent a lot of my early education participating in mock trial, debate, and parliamentary procedure oriented political simulations (within various communities). I think there’s an assumption baked into any debate, discussion, or argument that we don’t often address at an epistemic level, which is: you pick a side in an argument, and the side that is true is the one that can muster and verbalize the best arguments. That side wins, and therefore, its thesis is true.

But this isn’t true. When coming from a place of epistemic humility, arriving at truth through a purely Socratic or dialectical sense is a side effect of the process (a deeply valuable one!) but it’s not the game itself.

More often than not I think arguments tend to be a sort of linguistic game of chess, an act of warfare on the part of your group and against another. Whether that tribe is Marx, Perl, Trump, or Java.

And it feels impossible to escape from. I listed 4 things at the end of the last post, and I have an instinctive emotional reaction to each one of them. I don’t even have to think about it.

And therein lies the problem. We’re either inherently wired to pick our side first, and formulate arguments second, OR we’re being conditioned by all of our modern internet discourse to do it. It’s hardly a novel opinion (especially on Mastodon) but I strongly suspect it’s both.

That’s not to say a true dialogue isn’t possible. It’s the ideal. But I worry that on a greater than average basis we’ve completely eliminated our ability to engage in it in the public sphere.

It was interesting to see that exact pattern reflected in a critique of programming language discourse from 25 years ago.

But maybe that’s just the way we’re wired. There are ideas worth fighting for and against. But making every hill you find the one you die on only kills you quicker.

I don’t hate advocacy. But I do hate my own propensity to eat the dialectical junk food that is every hot take or zinger against someone of <external group> I’ll scroll past today on various platforms.