Thinking in teams vs values

I mostly focus my writing on education but the attempted assassination of a President is worth spending time thinking about.

One of the reasons I have mostly stopped engaging on social media was the fighting. I love seeing my friends kids. I love hearing good news from people I know and care about. I love maintaining ties with people even if they are loose.

But something happened with social media that hijacked all of our brains; myself included.

I spent way too much time fighting with my friends around 2015-2020 online.

There is something about the confluence of a dopamine hit from the novelty of social media, coupled with an inability to gauge all the nuances of communication that come with talking to people online, that allows us to be callous with our friends and needlessly brutal with people who are strangers.

Disagreements that would be handled with tact and care for the feelings of the person in front of you disappear online and are replaced with the gleeful destruction of wrongthinkers.

Heuristics are kind of like mental shortcuts. When we have insufficient information (which is all the time) we rely on mental shortcuts to help us figure out what is likely the best course of action.

The "team" heuristic is a short cut that encourages us to look at the world through the lens of "us vs them". This is a useful shortcut in our thinking because all we need to do in order to figure out the right course of action is to figure out who represents "us" and who represents "not us" and we have figured out all that we need to know. "my team" is right even if they aren't really right.

This makes sense. We are tribal creatures and maintaining unity within a tribe is more important than being "right" about an issue. We are wired to think about the world in terms of "in group" versus "out group."

It's why Yankees fans hate the Red Sox and vice versa. It's why Michigan hates the entire state of Ohio. If my tribe is going to go sneak around and steal food from the river tribe I am not going to argue with my tribe I am going to go and steal food and enjoy the reward.

Social media reduced all of the intricacies and complexities of our identity and simplified them into the "conservative" tribe versus the "progressive" tribe. I have no interest in arguing with anyone about which tribe is the worse offender since they are both guilty of engaging in this simplistic thinking.

The Values Heuristic

The other shortcut that we tend to use is the "values" heuristic. The values heuristic is useful when we have to make a complex choice between several good options or several bad options. One way to simplify the analysis is to ask yourself "what are my main values" and use that as your guiding light to come to a decision.

So a complicated question like "am I for or against the death penalty" will come down to personal values. If someone holds life as their highest value they will likely oppose the death penalty. Conversely if someone holds "law and order" as their highest value then they may be more likely to support the death penalty.

Pros and cons of each heuristic

The "team" heuristic keeps things simple. I just need to see what my team believes and I fall in line. The bigger the tribe the more wiggle room I have in terms of acceptable deviation from the norms of my tribe but ultimately I don't have to think too much about it and I can go with what my team believes. In other words I don't have to take on a massive cognitive load to figure out the issue I can just agree with my tribe.

The main con to the "team" heuristic is that you will often have to do a lot of mental gymnastics in order to ignore the inevitable inconsistencies of your tribes positions. You will also have to ignore and excuse times where your tribe is behaving badly as all tribes inevitably do.

We saw that this past week with people, mostly on the left, who were upset that Trump was not actually killed in an assassination attempt. Some of these people suggested that Trump staged an assassination attempt in order to win the election. The people expounding this idea don't seem to acknowledge that Trump was polling ahead of Biden after the debate and wouldn't need to risk killing himself in order to win this election. When our brain operates in "team" mode it doesn't think through these kinds of logical inconsistencies.

You can be logically and morally consistent if you let your moral values guide your thinking. There is no need for mental gymnastics to explain why certain things are ok when our guy does it but are unacceptable when the opposing team does it.

It took me awhile to figure out but at this point in my life my highest personal values are life and truth and joy:

• I value life immensely and do not support actions to take life. So I do not support war, murder or assassination of anyone under any circumstances no matter how much I dislike the person. I won't attempt to justify, apologize or excuse those actions even if there are horrific circumstances, like needing to protect someone, under which I could envision myself doing those things.
• I also believe that for most things there is an objective truth. We might not ever find it but we should strive to get as close as we can to figuring out what that truth might be. I disagree with arguments that suggest we should agree "just to get along."
• I want my actions to bring positive feelings to others. I want to bring joy to others. I want to say yes to exciting opportunities and not avoid them out of fear. I don't want to minimize my joy and the joy I can contribute to the world. I try and ask myself "will I enjoy this interaction" before I decide to engage in it. That is why I have almost entirely stopped interacting on social media except to share positive personal and family developments. Social media has mostly reduced our collective sense of joy and I don't want that.

I don't think my moral values are the "best ones". Courage, Faith, Fairness, Justice, Humor, Friendship... there are many admirable virtues. I hope that I have most of these.

Sometimes my values come into conflict. I do not want to have arguments with people as they bring no joy to anyone. But if someone is telling a lie that somehow effects me I have to weigh out whether the diminished joy is worth accepting the falsehood. Not easy to do but I do my best to make a decision in those moments.

Had Trump been assassinated the country would be significantly less stable. I can easily envision riots and even civil war had the assassination actually succeeded. I can imagine wars abroad escalating as leaders attempt to take advantage of us being distracted by our internal crises. People who wished that Trump had died were stuck in their "team" heuristic and were not thinking clearly.

Some people online have expounded the theory that Trump faked the assassination attempt in order to win the election. In order for that to make any kind of sense Trump would have needed to have been losing the election. Given Biden's disastrous debate performance, which prompted him to bow out of running for a second term, it seems very unlikely that Trump or anyone in his camp would be willing to shoot at Trump in order to garner sympathy votes.

It it totally consistent with ones personal values to say "I'm glad Trump isn't dead but I absolutely can't stand the man and hope he doesn't get within 100 miles of the White House." But whenever I hear people wish someone a politician were dead, or compare a politician to a depraved and evil German dictator, I recognize that I am dealing with someone who is thinking that they are the good guys and that everyone else must be the bad guys.

To the extent that anyone can I would recommend you spend time consciously articulating what are your top 2-3 values and just let them guide you whenever you aren't sure what to do. Doing this clarified a tremendous amount of nonsense in my life.

I have developed significantly greater clarity of thought by honing in on my primary values and allowing them to be my guide when I am in murky waters. Clear values at least let you know that you are going in the right direction. Its like the difference between traveling with a compass versus randomly wandering and hoping that you arrive some place nice. When you have that clear most of the nonsense of the world seems to fade away.

And while we are busy focusing on our primary values lets all do our best to avoid arguing on social media. I don't think that there is any place that is better at hiding and obfuscating truth than modern day social media. Minimize our time in that cesspool and just have as many real life engagements as possible. I can't think of any single thing that would improve mental health and happiness than getting rid of social media.

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I'm also really excited to share that I am producing a film this summer! I've hired actors and a film crew and we are shooting it in August! Preparing for this endeavor partly explains why I have not been publishing as consistently as I did before. I am very excited and I can't wait to share details with you! Check out this brief video if you want to learn more!