Around 2016, the smartest people I knew started saying increasingly stupid things.
These were people who could parse deep academic documents, who understood logic, who were fully capable of holding two competing ideas in their minds without any interruption.
One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was a consensual fabrication. Others began to regard political dissent as evidence of moral corruption. A third began using the term “liberal” as if it were a personality disorder rather than a loose alliance of sometimes contradictory beliefs.
The common thread: Their extreme situations got them more of what they wanted. The friend who saw conspiracies everywhere gained a following. Then an audience. Then a 7-figure income stream. Anyone who tribalized every issue found a ready community that validated every precedent. etc etc.
The trend of incentives was clear: prudence was costly, and extremism paid off.
We talk a lot about polarization as if it were a disease that has infected society, but we’re missing an important data point: Polarization is a growth hack, and it works.
When you choose a side and commit to it completely and without hesitation, you get things that the liberal position cannot provide. You find certainty in an uncertain world. You will find a community that will protect you. You get a simple heuristic to solve complex issues.
Above all: you get engagement, attention, and influence.
The author who says, “There is nuance to this issue and I can see legitimate concerns on many sides” gets a pat on the head and zero retweets. The influencer who says “anyone who disagrees with me on this is either evil or an idiot” is quote-tweeted into visibility and gains followers who appreciate their presumption of clarity.
The returns to rationality have almost completely collapsed.
The problem is what happens when everyone optimizes for the same short-term wins.
You end up in a world where it’s impossible to change your mind because you’ve built your entire identity around being right. Where accepting uncertainty is social suicide. Where every conversation is a performance for your tribe rather than a genuine exchange of ideas. You lose the ability to solve problems that do not fit neatly into your conceptual framework, which become the most important problems.
Someone who insists solely on ideological purity may start out with some strong ideas. Then those opinions attract the audience. That audience expects continuity. Any deviation is punished. So they doubled. They have to keep moving forward, finding new hypocrisies to condemn, new lines to draw, to maintain their position. They have locked themselves into a rut from which they cannot escape without losing everything.
They are prisoners of their own brand.
Amplify this and you get a society where no one can back down, where every disagreement = survival, where we have lost the ability to compromise // accept complexity.
Incentives push us toward situations that feel good but make us collectively stupid.
And you can’t just accept that your side has lost and walk away.
You too are trapped in this foolish world.
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Start by diversifying your information diet in ways that actively feel uncomfortable. The goal is not to agree with everything you read. You’ll still think most of it is wrong. But exposing yourself to explicit versions of positions you oppose does something valuable: It makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or idiots. It sounds obvious when it’s written out, but your social media feed has spent years training you to believe otherwise.
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Second, practice distinguishing between stakes and truth. Just because an issue matters doesn’t mean every claim about it is true, and just because you’ve chosen a side doesn’t mean you have to defend every argument your side makes. Tribal logic says you have to accept the whole package, but that logic is selling you certainty you haven’t earned.
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Third, find (or at least, discover) communities that reward humility, not tribal loyalty. These are rare, but they do exist. Those are group chats where someone can say “I’ve changed my mind about this” without being treated like a traitor. Those are forums where “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer. These are relationships where you can test ideas without having to perform in front of an audience. You can’t be rational in isolation. You need a small group of people who value truth-seeking more than status games, and you need to intentionally invest in those relationships.
It is a personal choice.
You’ll lose: access, influence, certainty, the comfort of being part of something bigger than yourself.
You’ll gain: the ability to think clearly, the ability to update your beliefs as evidence changes, relationships based on something other than shared enemies, and the possibility of being right in ways that matter.
These trades will not appear to be equivalent. The losses are immediate and serious. The benefits are far-reaching and intangible. When you refuse to join the crowd, you realize it right away. As you maintain your ability to think independently, the benefits come gradually over the years.
The discretionary discount rate is brutal.
But consider the alternative.
The people I knew who went all the way to extremes got what they wanted in the short term. Some built an audience. Some found communities. Some received certainty. Most of them created banks. But they are stuck in their previous position. They can’t update without admitting they were wrong, and admitting they were wrong will cost them their community. They have adapted themselves to a local maximum from which they cannot escape. They won the game based on existing rules and lost something that was difficult to assess.
The world will keep offering you bad trades, rewarding situations, you know it’s too easy to be true. Every day you’ll see people capitalizing on their nuances for impact. Every day you will be tempted to do the same. The only defense is to remember that some things mix differently than others.
Extremism gives you a fast start and a ceiling.
Sanity gives you a slow start and there is no limit to how far you can grow.
Remember: The world only rewards madness because we’re measuring the wrong timeframe.