Agnostic Extremism: How Neutral Questions Become Political
Even incontestable facts become controversial in the noise of the crowd
The novelist, comedian, TikTok guy Jason Pargin has a bit that he’s been doing for as long as I can remember. Every couple of years he brings it up again, on TikTok or on Twitter or wherever he wants to stir shit, and I’m pretty sure he does it just to watch the world burn. Here’s how it goes:
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Imagine a 747, the runway is a treadmill moving backward, set to the same speed as the wheels. So the plane can’t actually move relative to the ground. The question is: Will the plane take off?
Now, this question has an answer. I almost don’t want to tell you what it is, because it will make some of you angry. But then, the anger is my point. The fact that there is an answer, and how people react to that, is more important than what the answer is. I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to argue about it in the comments, okay?
Yes, the plane will take off. It takes off because the propulsion comes from its engines, not its wheels. The plane still moves forward on the treadmill because the wheels aren’t even powered. The error is actually in the question: The treadmill can’t be set to match the speed of the wheels because the speed of the wheels is by definition faster than whatever the speed of the treadmill is.
Here's the thing: The larger the group of people in the room with you when you explain this legitimate fact, the more it sounds like an opinion. This is what happens to the comment section every single time Pargin unleashes this infuriating hypothetical to the masses.
“You idiot, of course the plane can’t take off, it’s not moving! You absolute clown! You buffoon!” They’ll start explaining the physics of aeroplane wings and air dynamics. They will start talking to you like you are a child, or you have some developmental disorder. They take pity on you for being unable to parse the simplicity of the scenario for the parasites eating your brain.
What’s important to understand is that although you are right, they are exactly as confident as you are about their own correctness. You can draw diagrams, you can make analogies. You can tell them to picture a normal sized treadmill and imagine pushing a toy car along on it, or a pizza cutter, or a rolling pin. Of course you can still move it. Still it’s futile. A shit ton of people are going to tell you the plane can’t move because it’s on a treadmill. It says it right there in the premise.
Eventually you’re going to reach the infuriating stalemate: Golly gee, it looks like nobody knows what would happen.
Call Zeno of Elea, call the Sophists, call Robert Ripley, we have a legitimate paradox here. This one’s unsolvable, folks. I guess we’ll never know. I guess we’ll have to (shudder) agree to disagree.
The idea that truth—that is, all truth, facts themselves—is essentially subject to a kind of democratic process is endemic to humanity and, I would argue, probably arises from the same desire most humans generally have for some form of liberal democracy as the ideal model of society. We have a natural disdain for authorities being forced onto us against our will and with no say in the matter. And what are facts if not just another kind of authority about the nature of reality?
We want to elect our leaders, the same as we want to elect our facts. And this is how facts become inherently political.
It’s hard to think of an issue like the infernal plane-on-a-treadmill question as being political, but it has many of the features of a political issue. There is a correct answer (the plane takes off), which is rooted in observation, reason, experience, and education such as the knowledge of how planes work (for example, that the wheels don’t provide propulsion), but this answer is also less immediately intuitive, more complex, and more difficult to explain. The other answer is wrong, but equally if not more popular because it sounds right: The plane can’t take off because it's stuck on a treadmill, duh.
What it turns into is people ganging up on the truth. You’ve got one group, who have the knowledge and experience to but maybe more trouble communicating it; You’ve got another group, let’s call them the populists, who have a simpler but more intuitive incorrect answer, and they reinforce and galvanise each other’s beliefs; Then we have a third group, let’s call them the centrists, who see all of this bickering, conclude that nobody knows any better than anybody else on the matter, all anyone has is opinions, and we’ll never know either way.
The centrist’s position only helps the populist.
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In politics as well as in reality, we tend to be disdainful of smart-sounding assholes presuming to tell us what’s true, especially if it goes against what sounds more correct to us, and super especially if it goes against what we’d prefer to be true—against what we would vote for to be true if we were given that chance. We like wishy-washy views of the world that let us cop out of having to commit. We like fallacious but reaffirming intuitive-sounding nonsense like horseshoe theory.
We like clever analogies that portray having any strong position on anything as being the same as having a religion—and that this is wholly irrational.
If any firm position is considered religion then the refusal, or perceived impossibility, of taking a position is a type of agnosticism. I think of it as agnostic extremism—taking an epistemological position, not on the supernatural but on verifiable reality, and declaring it not verifiable, just because there’s too much noise. Too much misinformation from confident ignorance or from deliberate poisoning.
You can get all the engineers you want to explain all day long about how the Twin Towers fell, with diagrams and math, it’s not going to matter in the slightest if they can get a greater number of lay people chanting a simple and catchy phrase like “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.”
Throughout the Covid pandemic, any good faith effort made by people to get genuine advice online was frequently thwarted by legions of people who didn’t understand how medical science works insisting that viruses aren’t real and vaccines, soap, and masks don’t do anything except generate profit for pharma, at best, or harm or kill you, at worst. People who made efforts toward proposing or enacting advice or policy for anything from basic hygiene to public regulation were denounced with the religion slur—"Branch Covidians” was actually pretty clever—and medical professionals were drowned out by loud and influential public figures like RFK Jr and Elon Musk whose medical cynicism was driven by political partisanship and a kind of alt-medical terrain theory.
The former is now running for president to stop the medical companies and the latter bought and obliterated Twitter, in part because he was pissed off about Twitter’s former management taking a position on the validity of Covid. His preference, naturally, is for the platform to be amok with incoherent medical-sounding nonsense, because to an agnostic extremist the made up bullshit is exactly as valid as anything an expert would say.
Musk’s belief that facts about reality are subject to a kind of democratic process shines through in his compromise replacement for platform moderation—the Community Notes feature. This is where any user who successfully applies for the program can “suggest” a correction to any tweet for other users to vote on. And although Musk considers the issue of content moderation fully solved by this feature, the truth is that you will very rarely see a community note on Twitter. Misinformation and disinformation travel and proliferate much faster than the exhaustive days-long process of voting can possibly intercept. The result is that users, sensing its futility, have simply stopped using it.
People, as I’ve said, simply do not like, and will not stand for, smart-sounding assholes telling them what the truth is, no matter what kind of expertise they have on the subject. The phrase “fact-checkers” is spat with the highest disdain possible in the English language. I should know, I used to be one professionally. It’s rewarding when the fact you’re checking is uncontroversial, but those are rarer than you’d think, and as soon as you run into anything controversial you’re deemed not credible. Tainted. Biased. Fact-checkers and experts are unelected authoritarians.
But what people do like, what they love, are smart-sounding assholes reaffirming the rationality of their ignorance and their agnostic extremism. And that is where Jordan Peterson comes in.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out how Jordan Peterson got so popular in the first place, and I got some clues when he recently had an extended debate with a guy named Destiny, who is a pewdiepie (he streams videogames or whatever, I just call all these guys pewdiepies now) who apparently also debates right-wing ideologues from the social democrat angle as a… side-gig? Whatever Destiny has got going on isn’t important to me here, though, it’s the way that Peterson answers questions about a battery of common reactionary and right-wing talking points, settling almost every single time on a firmly and angrily expressed conclusion that we don’t know, and have no way of knowing, anything about anything and therefore, prescriptively, we should never do anything about anything.
Here he is on climate change, which is one of the topics most plagued by this agnostic extremism:
We don’t know anything about the climate! We can’t predict temperatures and weather patterns that far into the future! We can’t predict its economic impact! Shit, we don’t even know where carbon dioxide bloody comes from!
The confidence with which he dismisses the entirety of climate science is based on a dirt poor grasp of the field. And of chemistry, and of verifiable reality (we know the mechanism through which burning fossil fuel turns it into carbon dioxide about as well as we know anything) but he states his incorrect view very confidently, fiercely, and loudly.
Similarly, on Covid:
We have no idea what killed all those people! We never tested the vaccine and we have no idea what it does! We have no idea how vaccines are supposed to work and scientists can’t be trusted when they say that any pharmaceutical does anything at all!
He’s even agnostic about whether Nazism is a right wing or left wing ideology, and he of course leans toward it being left wing due to the inability of right wingers to speak ill of any ideology on their side of the centre line.
We have no idea if Hitler was left wing or right wing because no attempt has ever been made to answer that question!
World War II is, of course, one of if not the most studied event in modern history, so it’s a bit of an oversight that nobody has ever analysed Hitler’s ideology before. That is, unless it’s Peterson who is making an off the wall coo-coo bonkers claim, here.
I’m very lucky that Some More News released a video yesterday that absolutely eviscerates that statement in its first segment so I can just dump that here instead of adding another thousand words to this essay.
The point is, our deference to charismatic ideological “fixers” like Peterson to reassure ourselves that we aren’t actually any less knowledgeable than experts in their fields of expertise is a matter of ego. For one thing, we don’t like feeling stupid, and for another, we don’t like feeling as though we’re not equal participants in the formulation of our own reality. We don’t want to be sheep, and we don’t want to be followers.
There is some virtue in that—skepticism is enormously important. Scientific and political literacy is enormously important. But cynicism in the form of abject agnosticism about the realities of our own world is just stagnation, and it cripples us and freezes us from acting to any extent on very real crises such as climate change or viral pandemics. It gives us permission to cross our arms and do nothing.
After all, there’s nothing we can do about these things, right? The plane can’t take off. It’s stuck on the treadmill.
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You cannot reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
I am afraid to like your post. Aren’t you just saying what I was already thinking, but better than I could, which make me feel smart in the process, and then I can imagine myself using your arguments even though I have not deep knowledge of the question?