I think Paul Graham’s essay on identity correctly identified a problem but incorrectly described the mechanism of the problem. The problem is not that people have identities, it’s that they’re subject to them (I wish I had a blog post to link to to explain exactly what I mean by this) in a way that causes lots of actions other people take to be interpreted as threats. You can have an identity without being subject to it, in a way that is difficult for other people to threaten.
For example, for a long time I identified very strongly as a mathematician. A distinguishing feature of most such people is that if you ask them, for example, why kids should learn math in school, they will fairly predictably respond with a spiel about how mathematics is beautiful and everyone should be exposed to its beauty, etc. or else with a spiel about how mathematics is incredibly important for so many other fields and everyone needs to learn some, etc.
What they will almost never say (I am the only person-who-identifies-as-a-mathematician who I have seen say this, publicly or privately) is that kids mostly should not learn math in school. I think they never consider this hypothesis (because after all, they learned math in school and loved it) and that considering it would be threatening to them. But I’m fine with both continuing to identify as a mathematician (although less strongly) and holding this position; it doesn’t feel threatening to my identity to say that learning math is mostly a cruel waste of kids’ time, because that has nothing to do with my relationship to mathematics.
Similarly you could imagine identifying as a Christian in a way that is not threatenable by what a bunch of randos on r/atheism have to say, because that has nothing to do with your relationship to God.
It’s noteworthy that Graham’s examples are about incorporating politics or religion into your identity: these are not just any identities, they are tribal identities. The whole function of tribal beliefs is literally to coordinate side-taking. If you have an identity like “mathematician” or “kind”, then you may still react negatively to threats to that self-image, but those threats are generally of a different nature.
If you have an identity as a kind person, and someone presents you with evidence that you’re not actually very kind, then that threatens a mental construct that had been a source of positive feelings to you; but it’s a conflict that you can resolve, one way or the other, in your own head. Maybe you integrate the evidence to get a more nuanced conception of whether you are kind (“generally yes, except in situation X”), maybe you explain it away as a mistake (“I was trying to be kind but failed because I didn’t do Z, I will do Z in the future”), or maybe you even reject that self-concept entirely.
But a tribal threat is primarily an external one, not an internal one. It’s when you believe or are something, and this makes you an enemy in the eyes of others. If you are Jewish and the Nazis know about that, it doesn’t matter how much you rethink your Jewish identity in your own head: the Nazis will still be out to get you. Or, for a milder example, if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, the people from the other party might still decide to ostracize you and discriminate against you. The extent to which you experience yourself as being threatened by tribal threats, depends on how much you alieve yourself to actually be threatened by the tribe you don’t belong to.
For your math example, depending on the person they might find the “kids mostly shouldn’t learn math” claim threatening in one of several ways. If someone really wanted to be a math teacher, say, then the claim might feel like a tribal threat, in that the claim would threaten the person’s future livelihood if it got widely accepted. On the other hand, if they feel like they are a good person because they are going to teach math to kids and teaching math to kids is good, then that brings us to a third way by which a self-concept might be threatened: if someone argues that its value should be negative rather than positive.
That doesn’t challenge a person’s self-concept as “an aspiring math teacher” in the sense of threatening to prove that they are actually not an aspiring math teacher. Rather it challenges their self-concept that they are an aspiring math teacher and being an aspiring math teacher is good, by implying that it’s a bad thing to be an aspiring math teacher. If they accepted the argument, they might end up believing that they are an aspiring math teacher and that’s bad.
So that gives us three different categories of identity threats, which are worth distinguishing:
A threat to your belief that you are X, and being X is good.
A threat to your belief that you are X, and being X is good.
A tribal threat to your general sense of safety and well-being.
Is there a difference between what you are describing and simply having a more or less nuanced view on the matter? It seems like you’re confirming exactly what Paul Graham describes. You’ve made your identity as a mathematician smaller and are thus no longer threatened by people expressing certain opinions on math. But there are still things that are fundamental to your identity as a mathematician, that need protecting. If someone says “math is useless” does that not evoke a feeling of needing to defend maths?
When Paul Graham says “smaller” he means chucking out labels entirely:
Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
And no, people saying “math is useless” does not evoke any feeling in me of needing to defend math. For many people it’s just true for them and that’s something I can get behind. Most people throughout history did not learn math and were fine, and even most people today need very little math to get by.
It also just wouldn’t actually hurt me personally for this meme to spread; if anything, to the extent that I think math is useful, other people thinking math is useless reduces my competition. They’re just denying themselves an incredibly useful tool.
Ah, you seem to automatically interpret the “math is useless” as meaning “math is useless to me”. But people can also mean − and that’s what I was trying to get at − that “math is of no use for anything, to anyone”. This would be the X being good threatened as Kaj pointed out.
I still don’t find this threatening. It’s clearly false and I’m not worried about more people believing it; furthermore, again, even if they did, it would only hurt them, not me.
There would come a point where, if a large enough amount of people believe it, it would start affecting you. Would make it harder to find jobs, to find other people to discuss ideas with, to convice people of an argument that relies on statistical significance, etc. It would have a huge effect on economical progress if the majority of people started believing that math is of no use to anyone.
I think Paul Graham’s essay on identity correctly identified a problem but incorrectly described the mechanism of the problem. The problem is not that people have identities, it’s that they’re subject to them (I wish I had a blog post to link to to explain exactly what I mean by this) in a way that causes lots of actions other people take to be interpreted as threats. You can have an identity without being subject to it, in a way that is difficult for other people to threaten.
For example, for a long time I identified very strongly as a mathematician. A distinguishing feature of most such people is that if you ask them, for example, why kids should learn math in school, they will fairly predictably respond with a spiel about how mathematics is beautiful and everyone should be exposed to its beauty, etc. or else with a spiel about how mathematics is incredibly important for so many other fields and everyone needs to learn some, etc.
What they will almost never say (I am the only person-who-identifies-as-a-mathematician who I have seen say this, publicly or privately) is that kids mostly should not learn math in school. I think they never consider this hypothesis (because after all, they learned math in school and loved it) and that considering it would be threatening to them. But I’m fine with both continuing to identify as a mathematician (although less strongly) and holding this position; it doesn’t feel threatening to my identity to say that learning math is mostly a cruel waste of kids’ time, because that has nothing to do with my relationship to mathematics.
Similarly you could imagine identifying as a Christian in a way that is not threatenable by what a bunch of randos on r/atheism have to say, because that has nothing to do with your relationship to God.
It’s noteworthy that Graham’s examples are about incorporating politics or religion into your identity: these are not just any identities, they are tribal identities. The whole function of tribal beliefs is literally to coordinate side-taking. If you have an identity like “mathematician” or “kind”, then you may still react negatively to threats to that self-image, but those threats are generally of a different nature.
If you have an identity as a kind person, and someone presents you with evidence that you’re not actually very kind, then that threatens a mental construct that had been a source of positive feelings to you; but it’s a conflict that you can resolve, one way or the other, in your own head. Maybe you integrate the evidence to get a more nuanced conception of whether you are kind (“generally yes, except in situation X”), maybe you explain it away as a mistake (“I was trying to be kind but failed because I didn’t do Z, I will do Z in the future”), or maybe you even reject that self-concept entirely.
But a tribal threat is primarily an external one, not an internal one. It’s when you believe or are something, and this makes you an enemy in the eyes of others. If you are Jewish and the Nazis know about that, it doesn’t matter how much you rethink your Jewish identity in your own head: the Nazis will still be out to get you. Or, for a milder example, if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, the people from the other party might still decide to ostracize you and discriminate against you. The extent to which you experience yourself as being threatened by tribal threats, depends on how much you alieve yourself to actually be threatened by the tribe you don’t belong to.
For your math example, depending on the person they might find the “kids mostly shouldn’t learn math” claim threatening in one of several ways. If someone really wanted to be a math teacher, say, then the claim might feel like a tribal threat, in that the claim would threaten the person’s future livelihood if it got widely accepted. On the other hand, if they feel like they are a good person because they are going to teach math to kids and teaching math to kids is good, then that brings us to a third way by which a self-concept might be threatened: if someone argues that its value should be negative rather than positive.
That doesn’t challenge a person’s self-concept as “an aspiring math teacher” in the sense of threatening to prove that they are actually not an aspiring math teacher. Rather it challenges their self-concept that they are an aspiring math teacher and being an aspiring math teacher is good, by implying that it’s a bad thing to be an aspiring math teacher. If they accepted the argument, they might end up believing that they are an aspiring math teacher and that’s bad.
So that gives us three different categories of identity threats, which are worth distinguishing:
A threat to your belief that you are X, and being X is good.
A threat to your belief that you are X, and being X is good.
A tribal threat to your general sense of safety and well-being.
This sounds right to me.
Is there a difference between what you are describing and simply having a more or less nuanced view on the matter? It seems like you’re confirming exactly what Paul Graham describes. You’ve made your identity as a mathematician smaller and are thus no longer threatened by people expressing certain opinions on math. But there are still things that are fundamental to your identity as a mathematician, that need protecting. If someone says “math is useless” does that not evoke a feeling of needing to defend maths?
When Paul Graham says “smaller” he means chucking out labels entirely:
And no, people saying “math is useless” does not evoke any feeling in me of needing to defend math. For many people it’s just true for them and that’s something I can get behind. Most people throughout history did not learn math and were fine, and even most people today need very little math to get by.
It also just wouldn’t actually hurt me personally for this meme to spread; if anything, to the extent that I think math is useful, other people thinking math is useless reduces my competition. They’re just denying themselves an incredibly useful tool.
Ah, you seem to automatically interpret the “math is useless” as meaning “math is useless to me”. But people can also mean − and that’s what I was trying to get at − that “math is of no use for anything, to anyone”. This would be the X being good threatened as Kaj pointed out.
I still don’t find this threatening. It’s clearly false and I’m not worried about more people believing it; furthermore, again, even if they did, it would only hurt them, not me.
There would come a point where, if a large enough amount of people believe it, it would start affecting you. Would make it harder to find jobs, to find other people to discuss ideas with, to convice people of an argument that relies on statistical significance, etc. It would have a huge effect on economical progress if the majority of people started believing that math is of no use to anyone.