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Based on the challenge not to read books by white men…
Since the election, I’ve noticed a lot of people who are worried about epistemic closure– the tendency of people to be part of a self-reinforcing system of beliefs, an echo chamber in which empirical facts that go against your ideology cannot enter. I share this concern. Unfortunately, the commonly suggested solution to epistemic closure appears to be friending people you disagree with on Facebook, which seems to me to have the failure mode where you’re still getting all your information about the world from Facebook. So I propose a challenge. For three months, only read books by people you disagree with ideologically.
I’m planning on taking the challenge myself, and I’m also throwing this out there to see if anyone else is interested. If people are, I will start biweekly open threads where we talk about what we’re reading.
Here are some Questions I Predict Will Be Frequently Asked. I will update this list as more questions become Frequently Asked:
What positions count as disagreeing?
Fundamentally, “disagreeing” means disagreeing on any fundamental ideological issue. For instance, disagreements on religion count: if you’re an atheist, you might read books by sincerely religious people, while if you’re a Muslim, you might read books by atheists, Christians, pagans, or people who subscribe to a different branch of Islam. Political disagreements also count. I mean more than “votes for Democrats”/”votes for Republicans” here: if you’re a centrist Democrat, reading books by Communists and anarchists would count; if you’re a transfeminist, reading books by trans-exclusive radical feminists would count, even though you’re both feminists.
You might also read authors that disagree with you on other issues that are really important to you. For instance, if you write for Science-Based Medicine, then reading books by homeopaths would count. If you’re paleo, reading books about low-fat diets would count. If you’re very strongly anti-postmodernist, reading Lacan would count. If you practice positive discipline, reading books by pro-spanking authors would count. If you are a regular participant in programming holy wars, reading a book by an advocate of Insert Your Least Favorite Programming Language Here would count.
While it is possible to rationalize your way into “well, this person disagrees with me on whether the word ‘bisexual’ is biphobic!” counting, please note that engaging in Judean People’s Front/People’s Front of Judea nonsense goes against the point of the exercise.
What books count as disagreeing?
There’s a lot of gray areas here. One clearcut rule is that anything where you disagree with the thesis counts: if you’re an atheist, you can definitely read a creationist book or an inspirational romance in which an atheist finds God through the power of love.
On the other hand, books where the disagreement is obviously totally irrelevant to the topic of the book are sort of missing the spirit of the exercise. You can’t read a pro-evolution book or a novel about deconversion by someone who uses Insert Your Least Favorite Programming Language Here and then claim you’re exploring the viewpoints of people who disagree with you.
That said, a lot of books fall into a gray area. How should an atheist taking the challenge treat a pro-evolution book by a theistic evolutionist or a gay inspirational romance in which the hero finds God in an affirming church? I would suggest using your best judgment while reminding yourself that only reading books you agree with is sort of missing the point of the challenge.
In particular, in fiction there’s a lot of gray area, because most books do reflect the worldview of their authors in a more-or-less subtle fashion. Again, it’s hard to put down hard-and-fast rules, but just use your best judgment and remember that the only person you’re cheating is yourself.
A complete exception to the challenge: any books that provide practical knowledge of direct relevance to your job or hobby, or that you have to read for religious/spiritual purposes. If you want to learn how to bake a pie, to speak French, to knit a sock, or to use a new programming language that’s relevant to your job, I’m not going to make you go find a pie-baking book that’s written by a faithful Catholic. And I’m not going to go around telling people to do things that go against their religion, either.
Why are you including fiction?
Fiction often reflects the authors’ beliefs and worldviews. For instance, Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series emphasizes the wonder of science, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld reflects a humanist sensibility, and Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive is deontologist as fuck. Fiction can help you understand not just the facts of an ideology but why it emotionally resonates with people– and maybe you’ll emotionally resonate with it too.
In addition, fiction builds empathy. By putting yourself in the shoes of other people, you can understand what it’s like to be them better. People you disagree with are likely to have a different set of people they understand and empathize with, and thus you will get practice putting yourself into a different set of shoes.
I’m an atheist libertarian and my three favorite authors are Eric Flint, Orson Scott Card, and C S Lewis, are you saying I can take this challenge and just read my favorite authors for three months?
Yep! If you already read a lot of books by people you disagree with, this challenge will be super-easy for you! Good job on avoiding epistemic closure! I still encourage you to branch out from your current favorite authors– diversity in reading is a good thing.
Can I combine this challenge with other challenges?
Be my guest. If you want to spend three months only reading books by creationist women of color, I wish you luck.
What if I just spend the entire time hate-reading authors because they’re stupid?
I encourage you to read books by people you can respect and who can enlighten you about what other people think, but I cannot actually stop you from spending three months reading books by people who enrage you. However, this behavior seems self-punishing.
Thing of Things 
Right before I got to the “I’m an atheist libertarian” paragraph, I was just thinking how I could fulfill the requirement by re-reading Nabokov. He’s my favorite fiction writer, but he was a homophobe, which comes across pretty strongly in Pale Fire.
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The upside of battling my epistemic closure by friending more people on Facebook is that reading Facebook is something I do all the time to procrastinate, whereas reading books is something I can never get myself to do anymore for some reason 😦
I really like this challenge and I hope y’all do talk about your learnings where I can read them, because reading this blog is also something I do all the time to procrastinate 🙂
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But I’m guessing I don’t get any credit for reading John Derbyshire’s two excellent history of mathematics books, which I did this past year.
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NPR just had a short bit on the same thing: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/11/15/epistemic-closure-reading-challenge/
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Ozy writes for NPR?!
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Ahh, this sounds fun! I’ve been meaning to look up and read some non-Christian religious fiction as a way of improving my own writing and understanding of others in general. This challenge seems like a good excuse to finally do that. Are we starting today?
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I’m gonna do this! I don’t read many books, lately, and it’d be nice to kill that and epistemic closure with one stone.
Can anyone recommend anything? I have most of the beliefs you’d expect from a rationality-adjacent liberal millenial.
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There’s Tolkien and Lewis, obviously, if you haven’t read them and want to try out Christian-influenced fiction that isn’t terrible. Narnia is decent; LoTR is better, but also more subtle in its religious influence.
Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is very explicitly Catholic SF. I haven’t actually finished it (my attention span is awful and I keep starting new books), and it is a little slow, but from the first third I can tell you it’s definitely a very unique book, and is very much real SF (as opposed to a sermon with a SF novel papered over it, haha).
Orson Scott Card is Mormon and generally considered socially conservative. It’s more noticeable in some of his work than others, but it does clearly influence his writing. He’s definitely a highly skilled SFF writer.
If you’re not interested in fiction and just want to read intelligent nonfiction that makes a case for Christianity, Lewis’s Mere Christianity is thought-provoking but accessible.
I’m blanking on conservative writers who aren’t religious, sorry! Hopefully at least one of those is of interest, though.
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While I also can’t make any personal non-religious recommendations, there’s an easy source for conservative SF/F fiction: the Sad Puppies nominations slates. My understanding is military science fiction leans strongly conservative but not necessarily religious, and while the Sad Puppies slates aren’t strictly conservative, they’re an easily found list of recent literature considered to be of high quality.
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For lack of an edit button, the last line should finish as “considered to be of high quality by the Sad Puppies.” YMMV, but I do believe that’s somewhat the point of this challenge, no?
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Thomas Sowell is a black American conservative – he might be religious himself but I don’t recall his books as being religious.
Theodore Dalyrmple is another conservative who doesn’t come across as particularly religious.
For blogs, Tim Worstall is a UKIP member and in favour of Brexit. And updates a bunch.
By the way, The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis is very funny.
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For any anti-postmodernists out there, I think there are much better postmodernist than Lacan. I would recommend Foucault (esp. Discipline and Punish). Also Thomas Kuhn.
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Kuhn definitely isn’t postmodern. Latour and Feyerabend are a bit closer to that position, although I wouldn’t say that they quite fit either.
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Kuhn defends positions that can be made to sound postmodernist-friendly, but does so in a thoroughly traditional (rational/modernist) way. For people who find the division of philosophy into analytic and continental traditions useful, postmodernism is part of the continental tradition whereas Kuhn is solidly on the analytic side, even if he’s relatively well-liked by continentalists.
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Fair enough but he’s a good gateway drug. And Latour is definetly postmodern.
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I might be abusing the letter rather than the spirit of the challenge, but if you’re pro-SJ, aren’t you basically guaranteed to disagree with almost anyone who lived prior to like 1950? Like if you pick up any classic novel, it’s basically guaranteed to be sexist, and if deals with any sort of international/interracial issues, it’s probably gonna be racist as well. Even the authors that were progressive at the time were doing this, like idunno, if you look at The City of the Sun by Tommaso Campanella, it describes a communist utopia, which some modern people might find ideologically close, except that women are one of the commodities that real citizens – i.e. men – share. Or Jeremy Bentham, whom we all praised for figuring out that it’s OK to be gay, actually said that it’s OK because gay people are gonna marry people of the opposite sex nonetheless, and he also condemned masturbation (which is about the most unutilitarian position possible). Heck, even if you look at more modern things, Asimov, for example, has a nice short story about how women, unlike men, talk past each other all the time, and men, who normally listen until others stopped talking, and only then respond, found this feminine model of conversations extremely useful for interplanetary communications.
And that stuff is everywhere. Whether you’re reading the classic literary canon, or sci-fi canon, you’re not gonna fall short of prejudice. It in fact seems much harder to find books that don’t exhibit this property.
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Yes, one of the easier ways to find books to read is to read older books. (Although not all older books– Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice don’t contain much that will upset the average liberal.) I don’t have any objections to treating it as a Read Old Books challenge. 🙂
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Jane Eyre puts stock in pseudoscience (phrenology), which was also frequently used to argue for racial differences in character, intelligence, etc.
So you can still read it 🙂
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Phrenology is not a major part of Jane Eyre, nor (AFAIK) was it used in a specifically racist way. I mean, sure, if you want to rules-lawyer, you could probably justify it, but I’m really not sure what’s the point of rules-lawyering a completely voluntary challenge.
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That’s true, although my anti-pseudoscience bias made those bits stand out for me.
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There’s a lovely bit in Pride & Prejudice where Lady Catherine is telling Elizabeth that she can’t marry her nephew Darcy as she’s of a lower class and Elizabeth replies “He is a gentleman and I am a gentleman’s daughter, in that we are equal.” Which is hardly egalitarian.
And it’s pretty clear that Jane Austen is deeply alive to the social slights
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I’m a paleoconservative, and I voted for Trump. Because I am an educated man, I’ve spent my entire life under ideological siege by the advocates of social justice. I think I’ve passed this challenge just by existing lol.
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I applaud your lack of epistemic closure! I hope you participate in the threads: it’ll be interesting to get a different perspective on reading things you disagree with, and maybe you can have some good book recommendations for everyone else.
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One book I would recommend is Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind,” because while he’s center-left politically, he’s charitable to both social justice and conservatism.
Hoppe’s “Democracy-The God that Failed” is another solid book.
I would also recommend Nick Land’s “The Dark Enlightenment,” which is long and abstruse enough to be a book.
For the challenge, I’ll read bell hook’s “Feminism is for Everybody.” I’ve heard this is the modern-day feminist magnum opus, so I think this is the most charitable I can be towards the enemy team.
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If you really want a “WTF, did he really go there” moment, try “Firefly” by Piers Anthony…
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Anyone got some good recommendations of books written by people who use spaces instead of tabs?
(As fun as it sounds, I will not be participating in a debate of above on grounds of not wanting to derail the comments.)
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Is prefers-spaces-instead-of-tabs a large interest group?
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It,s a major religious war in programming. I know people who refuse to review code indented by tabs.
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A mixture of the two is the worst, because what lines up in one editor can (and often will) become a jumble in another.
So if you make me president, I will authorize drone strikes on people that use tabs.
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Y’know, I thought about it, and I will have to give myself one religious exemption–executive dysfunction is way too bad right now to actually read the Bible on a regular basis, but I’m not going to make a rule against reading it if I do feel capable of doing it, especially given my general spiritual state right now. I can cut everything else (non-school or hobby related) that I normally read, though, and I am looking forward to reading lots of things by people who I disagree with. ^_^’
On that note, if I’m a practicing Catholic (trying to be devout and failing miserably, but trying nonetheless), does reading the Sequences meet the spirit of the challenge? I’ve been meaning to do that, but since I haven’t read them yet I’m not actually sure exactly what’s in them. Yudkowsky is an atheist utilitarian, though, yes? So it counts?
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If you’re a practicing Catholic, the Sequences definitely count.
Good point! I’ll add that in as a general exception.
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I already occasionally select books by the criterion “what everyone around me hates most”, and I rarely found those to be a waste of time. Got me to Ayn Rand, but I’d recommend actually reading her only to hardcore masochists. Yes, everything in Atlas Shrugged had to be said – but it does not need over a thousand pages.
Maybe it’s time to dig out Nietzsche again…
(Orson Scott Card and Tolkien seem to be a bit too easy; besides, I’ve already read pretty much everything they wrote).
Strangely, I don’t have much of a problem with ideological disagreements – but I find different ways of thinking hard to digest, especially authors being a huge hedgehog about their one good idea (I’m very much a fox). Even Nassim Taleb, who is more or less a hedgehog about how to best be a fox.
If movies count, I’m going to recommend everything by Adam Curtis. The guy is an oldschool conservative, and I disagree with pretty much every single political point he makes – but he’s incredibly good at asking the right questions and questioning my beliefs about how the world works. I have yet to agree with one of his conclusions, but every single one of his documentary I watched was time well spent.
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That’s an interesting challenge, but I fear it would just make me angry. I already often get angry reading SSC, or non-HPMOR writings of EY. And I agree with Scott Alexander and EY on fundamental principles, even if I strongly disagree on some important issues. So I fear that if I were to try reading Ayn Rand or Scott Card or whoever, it would just be miserable for me.
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No need to do things that make you feel miserable! It’s supposed to be fun. 🙂
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I wrote a bit on how I work to avoid this myself a while back, but I support this as a good idea. I’d specifically advise people to be generous in the specific bits of the challenge; I think there’s more value in reading, e.g., a lot of C.S. Lewis, including the not-religious or less-religious bits, because it makes it harder to go back and dismiss everything he wrote as apologia.
There is much value in recognizing that smart people with good ideas can hold opinions totally contrary to yours, and it’s easiest to see that when you don’t just look for contrarian stuff.
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Card is pretty subtle about inserting his personal opinions, and the world in his stories behaves fairly towards people who disagree with them. If I didn’t know he was a Mormon, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. Ender’s Game and the Shadow Saga focus mainly on the action anyway – it’s only in the later books of the Ender series that he gets philosophical.
Ayn Rand, OTOH, is quite the opposite…
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These days I lean strongly toward moral and aesthetic anti-realism, so virtually everything I read outside of scientific articles disagrees with me on a fundamental level. The idea of the challenge is nonetheless interesting.
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Any recommendations for good writings by nationalists? (Not necessarily Nazis, I’m personally thinking of Winston Peters in NZ political terms.) Or by anarchists who aren’t Ursula Le Guin? Or SF/fantasy in English by Muslims or Buddhists?
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Or, by people who like brutalist architecture?
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I’m not sure if he’s actually an anarchist, but the politics Kim Stanley Robinson puts in his Mars trilogy seems fairly similar to what Le Guin puts in some of her works.
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It’s not a direct answer, but I like Bujold’s five gods series for a nicely done fictional religion. I’ve not tested this, but I think it could be good for opening people up to the general idea of meaningful religion without the baggage of it being a real belief system.
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I’ve read that series and while I love Bujold’s books, it didn’t really give me anything new on religion in general.
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I’m currently about 2/3 through Red Plenty. While I don’t know the ideology of the author, the characters are mostly true Soviet socialists. I find it nearly impossible to turn off my brain’s constant pro-capitalism counter-arguments (which ability was honed during Bernie season). I found a similar and opposite phenomenon while reading Atlas Shrugged. Does anybody have advice for reading people you disagree with without internally critiquing them?
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I think part of the *point* of reading things you disagree with is to internally critique them, as long as you keep your internal critiques fair and admit to yourself when you’re not sure you have a counterargument. In fact this is sort of how I discover when my worldview has gaps.
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I could only read 20 pages of Atlas Shrugged a day, because I knew I’d tear it in half otherwise, and it was borrowed. On reflection, though, it wasn’t the ideas in it so much as the author’s apparent belief that the audience couldn’t grasp them without being beaten over the head with them. The thing could have been 300 pages.
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I find it feels a lot better to read stuff I strongly disagree with when I have a pencil in my hand and write comments in the margin about particularly annoying statements (only do that if you own the book – otherwise, imagine shouting the comments at the author’s face). That way, my brain can let go and direct attention to reading again.
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For lefties interested in reading graphic novels, Chester Brown’s (very libertarian) Louis Riel, about a Canadian historical figure, and Paying For It, an autobiographical comic about hiring prostitutes, are both interesting.
Dave Sim’s (antifeminist) graphic novels are interesting. Although they’re both part of a much, much longer series, I would think that Jaka’s Story, or Guys, or Going Home could all be read on their own, even for readers who don’t know the complete backstory.
For folks who are pro-Israel and wanting to read a good graphic novel that’s critical of Israeli policy, I highly recommend Joe Saccos Footnotes In Gaza.
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Can anyone recommend any “religion is great” stuff that’s not CS Lewis, but is equally well written?
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Eve Tushnet!
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The writeup of her book on amazon sounds bad, but in an attempt to go with the challenge I’ve ordered her book. (although I’m am atheist with strong religious sympathies, so it’s not a strong case, probably the best challenge for me would be “SJW-ism is Right About Everything, by A SJW”)
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Chesterton.
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I like Chesterton, although not as much as Lewis. He has a bad habit of using his writing skills to very cleverly say nothing.
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This is a much more interesting challenge than the one linked to at the top, but at least as long as we’re talking fiction, it runs up against the same problem.
Why/how would I know what the politics of an author is?
When the other one made the rounds of the internets, I had to look up a lot of authors to see what colour/gender they were and I’ve completely forgotten which were which now.
(I think maybe either Delaney or Zelazny might be black but I keep mixing them up anyway, and I think one of them might be dead….)
I would guess politics would be harder to figure out too.
And even if they stated “Liberal” or “Conservative” on the cover, I rarely find people that I consistently disagree with. (someone once told me I was impossible to argue with because “You’re a pro-gun, pro-choice libertarian socialist”)
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Samuel Delaney is African-American, and gay. Roger Zelazny is dead.
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Fossegrimen- just as a counterpoint to indicate that you might be trapped in more epistemic closure than you think- I know a few anti-gun, pro-life mainstream democrats (that is to say, quasi-authoritarian capitalists).
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I often find that knowing the politics of the author adds an interesting spin to the book. (Like, of COURSE Eric Flint is a socialist.)
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“I encourage you to read books by people you can respect and who can enlighten you about what other people think, but I cannot actually stop you from spending three months reading books by people who enrage you. However, this behavior seems self-punishing.”
This seems like it might lead to “atheist reads books by religious person they reckon will be really nice about atheists”-type behaviour, which could ruin the point.
I love the idea of the exercise, but I spent most of the article wondering if I was supposed to pick books I’d see as fairly good or books I’d see as really bad, and I’m not sure this works as a solution, not that I have a solution myself.
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My “fix” for this is to look for books that seem like they’d be bad to me, but are praised as good by people I generally respect.
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Why? You’re more likely to be persuaded by people who are nice to you. Look at commercial advertising, they are generally nice about their intended audience, at the most they imply that the only thing keeping you from perfection is a change of deoderant. (Except British advertisers, because the Brits are weird.)
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I love this challenge. I (perhaps foolishly) decided to jump off into the deep end. I’m about 1/4 of the way through American Sniper.
As I was writing this comment, I realized I had skimmed over your point about reading authors you can respect, and I am so relieved. I’m certainly being enlightened about some things, but I’m finding myself needing to take mental health breaks about 10X more often than I do with other books. The book is popular enough (always on the front page of my library’s online catalog) to the point that I want to see this one through just to better understand it as a national phenomenon, but after this I’m absolutely going to seek out something less upsetting. I’ve been, in my heart of hearts, looking for a reason to read Ender’s Game for a while now. Perfect opportunity!
I’m looking forward to the next three months. I can certainly see this being challenging, but I’m excited for it, and what I might learn along the way. Thank you for a great idea.
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For some reason I can’t reply to Tracy directly, but: Bujold taught me new things about religion, but perhaps you already knew those things!
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