Diversification of Ideas and Discarded Truths
Independent voices are more incentivized to be right and teach us how to better spot embedded narratives –– Why I've fully decentralized my information intake via ~100 Substacks & ~50 podcasts...
Editor’s Note: Tiger has officially left the podcast and doesn’t intend to do another interview or comment on current affairs. He wrote this piece for internal distribution before his departure, and we’re now sharing it with his followers.
In my three years at Policy Punchline, I’ve rarely publicly expressed any of my own opinions or heuristics, but as my time with the podcast comes to an end, I especially wish to share one principle of mine with you – “idea diversification.”
Diversify information intake like stock holdings
Tony Yoseloff, who manages one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Davidson Kempner, said this about risk management during our interview:
You still need to adhere to basic risk management rules, like the maximum percentage that you want of any one investment in your portfolio, or how much money you are willing to lose in any one place. Weird things can happen outside of investors’ control, and risks can become compounded when leverage is used.
[…] There was an old risk line at Bear Stearns that “no one ever wants to exceed their risk limits for things they don’t like.”
That means if one exceeds their risk limits, by definition they really like it, but that is precisely the moment one has to stay very disciplined to the risk limits because that's when investors can really get into trouble.
I see no difference between the diversification of investments and that of ideas. If you follow some public intellectual’s work religiously, then you probably really like their ideas and tend to believe they’re right unquestioningly, but that could lead to mental biases that cloud our judgement.
Smart people are great at justifying their own changing stances to fit the circumstances, which makes it especially hard to recognize our own biases. Some of the highest IQ people I know are the ones who have terrible viewpoints that they’ve justified in their own mind without recognizing the obvious biases and errors. Who did the Soviet Communists appeal to? Precisely the intellectuals!
And when we’re surrounded by people who agree with us, our biases compound, especially when other factors like social signaling are at play. Just look at how many terrible pseudo-social science ideas come out of Ivy League campuses every year that are completely out of touch with reality!
So just like how we should stay disciplined with risk limits in investing, I think it’s crucial we stay disciplined with our information intake and always ask:
What are the hidden narratives and biases embedded within this public intellectual’s ideas? They may claim to be independent from institutional influences, but that doesn’t mean they’re neutral or “truth-seeking,” or at least they could be inadvertently cherry-picking data in an egregious way.
Do they actually have a great track record, especially judged in terms of hits & misses of predictions, or are they mostly relying on hindsight 20/20?
What are their logical inconsistencies and self-contradictions? It’s fine to update one’s beliefs, but it’s important they should’ve stayed consistent on a fundamental level over the medium term.
I’ve come to realize that most public figures and news sources don’t really pass these tests above. Mainstream media certainly do the worst when examined over a multi-decade horizon, but even independent scholars often suffer from their own biases and inconsistencies.
As a result of American media’s privatization in the 70s and 80s, we don’t get public-interest news anymore. Where would you get news these days? (Not sensationalized news stories, but just plain-old news without any spin.)
CNN? MSNBC? Fox? Certainly no. The cable channels have become advertisement companies, or some would even call propaganda machines.
Subscription-based newspapers like The NYTimes, WSJ, or The Atlantic? They’re more credible and have good reporting, but they’ve all become much more ideologically and narrative driven over the last few years – due to polarization, their ad-based business models, and many other reasons. So it also seems unwise to just read them.
“The Intellectual Dark Web” and their affiliates – Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein, Saagar Enjeti, Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, Lex Fridman, and Tim Dillon? Eh… maybe. On an individual basis they all have some merit, but I don’t think relying on their worldview in totality is a good idea either. Finding holes in the mainstream narrative cannot in and of itself constitute a sufficient alternative for the society. Like populist politicians – the “anti-politician politicians” – the Intellectual Dark Web and all their affiliates are “the anti-mainstream mainstream.”
When someone discontent with mainstream voices first listens to Sam Harris or Russell Brand, it’s very refreshing. You may feel like they’re expressing what you’ve always felt for a long time but couldn’t articulate, but after a while you realize they also have their own set of narratives and fatal blind spots.
The danger is that even the most “independent” public figures would gradually develop a loyal audience, and they could comfortably stay in their own corners and just charge a subscription from them via Patreon, Substack, etc. That’s how the insurgents inevitably get transformed into boring incumbents by their own success.
There are still some good news sources left, mostly subscription-based papers like the Financial Times and Axios that remain relatively neutral. But the overall American media landscape has been torn apart into fragmented tribes. So I see it to be impossible to construct an ideologically comprehensive and domain-diverse knowledge base with just a single-digit number of sources.
Discarded “truths” and scattered insights
During my three years at Policy Punchline, I’ve interviewed around 150 guests. Ideologically, they range from socialist economists like Branko Milanovic (who thinks Elizabeth Warren and Bernie don’t tax enough) to conservative lawyer Robert Barnes (who defended Alex Jones & Kyle Rittenhouse and was invited by Trump to oversee the 2020 presidential elections lawsuit)… Our show is interview-based and I rarely ever express my own opinions, so I’ve always had to embrace the guest’s ideas on a deep level in order to most fully represent their work.
I’ve come to realize: all the people I’ve met make pretty good points – across ideological, political, and academic backgrounds. Their points often get “destroyed” by the media because the media never give them the chance to convey their nuances, but if you listen carefully enough, it becomes impossible to brush away their ideas simply because of someone’s ideological leanings. The interviews with Milanovic and Barnes were two of the most thought-provoking I’ve ever done.
Eric Weinstein made the point that the mainstream machines necessarily cannot hold on to every truth, so new movements are built on discarded truths.
When insights are scattered, it becomes more important to “dig for gold” rather than focusing on getting a deep understanding of the “truths” presented by a few centralized institutions.
I put “” around “truth” in this article because I see it as something we should always strive for but might rarely achieve. It’s hard to say what truth really is in today’s age – it isn’t just mere facts, and there should be a higher-order consequence when used to persuade people. I’m always wary of The NYTimes or Fox News telling people that they alone can tell you the truths and the other side is misinformation.
More importantly, truth doesn’t always have to strictly associate with known facts. The best mental exercise to prove this may be conspiracy theories, which are rarely factual but could still point to some greater truth about certain systems or human nature. You could very rationally examine the arguments made by a conspiracy theorist like Alex Jones and conclude: “I’m very skeptical of the ‘facts’ he’s presenting – they’re often wrong and mischaracterized – but still, I think there’s probably some truth to some of the stuff he’s saying...”
Because the relationship between facts and truths are so complex, it requires more work from an individual to responsibly construct their own worldview.
Over the last two years I’ve “decentralized” my media intake entirely – from reading a few renowned mainstream news sources (like NYT, Bloomberg, FT, WaPo, Vox, and WSJ), to gathering info from ~100 Substack newsletters and ~50 podcasts (a full list can be found here). Nearly all of them are long-form, either deep dive writings or long-form interview podcasts. I don’t read / listen to all of them; I scan through them to get a sense of what’s out there and choose a few to get through every day.
So far I haven’t become an eccentric, fringe conspiracy theorist, and I understand the mainstream narrative just fine. The mainstream narrative can be attained via osmosis – you don’t need to track it religiously. The only reason you would want to do that is for small talk (with a specific target audience in mind, maybe like the neoliberal elites). Unless you’re doing something about whatever issues you hear about, current events are largely mere noise useless for long-term decision making anyways.
A staged deterioration of institutions – independent voices are more incentivized to tell the truth
Over the last few decades, we’ve been witnessing a staged deterioration of institutions. Religion was gone first, followed by orthodox family values. The wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq and Edward Snowden all eroded people’s trust in the military and national security apparatus. The 2008 financial crisis tainted Wall Street and financial institutions. The 2016 election season and the four years of Trump’s presidency destroyed people’s faith in the media. And the Covid crisis delivered a fatal blow to science and scholarly policymaking.
Yes, vaccines are proof that science works, but that’s not what I’m referring to. I’m talking about the political posturing around Covid across the ideological spectrum, the erosion of the public’s faith in the science policymakers given their shoddy track record throughout this pandemic, the politicization of scientific institutions (like when Scientific American endorsed Biden after never having backed a presidential candidate in its 175-year history), and all the other worrisome developments.
During the Covid crisis (especially at the beginning), the mainstream media and political institutions just didn’t have the most accurate or truthful takes on the pandemic. They got some things right, but also knowingly made some fatal errors. For example, the CDC’s initial discouragement for mask-wearing, followed by their justification that it was to prevent a rush on PPE, was a jarring display that institutions often have other motivations and incentives in mind, and hence they wouldn’t tell you in a straightforward way what you should best do for your family or what the “truth” really is.
As institutions fail, independent voices emerge as more reliable sources for facts and truths. The Covid crisis showed us that those who more accurately predicted the pandemic’s outcomes, advocated for forward-thinking policies, and preemptively wrote up in-depth research summaries for public digest were mostly independent voices (Zeynep Tufecki, Alex Tabarrok, Astral Codex Ten, the Less Wrong community, Ben Hunt’s Epsilon Theory, etc.).
It makes perfect sense – independent voices are more incentivized and pressured to deliver better information to the public because they’re judged more directly by their personal track record. The public listen to them not because they work for WSJ or CNN, but because of their own thoughtfulness; there is much less institutional influence propping them up or holding them down.
At the beginning of the Covid outbreak, Alex Tabarrok was invited along with Nobel Laureate Michael Kremer to advise the White House on pandemic policies. Fractional vaccine dosing, mass testing, and faster approval for Covid drugs are just some of Alex’s many ideas that were never officially adopted.
I later asked Alex: “Watching the U.S. government’s inept response to Covid, did you ever regret being an academic and wish that you’re a policymaker yourself so that you can have a bigger impact?”
Alex said: “The politicians often know what’s the right thing to do. They can’t because of political reality. That’s a tough position to be in where your impact is not up to you. I’d rather seek out the truth and have other people acknowledge ‘Alex Tabarrok is right.’”
Robin Hanson, another George Mason University economist famous for his work on prediction markets and signaling, added: “Academics are not motivated by doing the right thing per se; they are motivated by being right at the end of the day.”
I think that interaction is a good summary of why independent voices (when sampled across the spectrum) are often by nature more reliable and accountable than institutional incumbents.
Breadth of information intake results in better ability to spot embedded narratives
I have a lot of smart friends, and I’ve so far observed merely a noisy correlation between the breadth of information intake and the depth of their insights. This makes sense: you could be a great political debater because you read everything from everyone, or you just read everything from 1-2 sources and master their arguments (which is terrible for intellectual stimulation and humility).
In contrast, there is a clear correlation between the breadth of information intake and their ability to recognize someone’s embedded narratives and biases. Because they read so widely, they can immediately spot where others got their ideas. The American media landscape is so fragmented and each tribe usually dishes out their own consistent set of narratives, so you can usually locate whose ideas people are usually regurgitating from: “ok this is the mainstream techno-optimistic way of looking at this issue that’s been circulating in Silicon Valley…” and so on.
I find this ability to spot embedded narratives to be a really valuable skill in life, especially when it can be harnessed to recognize and correct our own biases.
A lot of noise doesn’t sound that bad
By following 150+ thinkers and outlets (and hundreds more on Twitter and in real life), I inevitably increase the noise I’d also intake. But it seems to me that listening to signal mixed with noise from 150+ sources is still better than listening to “pure signal” from 5 sources, especially when such purity doesn’t exist in the first place.
It’s dystopian to live in a world where a few voices can just tell us the “truth” and the “right” way to understand an issue. I don’t believe that such convenience could come without a steep cost to our intellectual freedom.
Soundwaves derived from noise are reasonably random, so they cancel each other out. Even if the noise is not always randomly distributed, there is still a lot to learn from where that noise comes from.
For example, we may observe that there is a strong correlation across the narratives put out by “The Intellectual Dark Web” and the issues they worry about at the moment – vaccine mandate, gender transition at an early age, cancel culture in academia, etc. To me, learning about what the “counter-mainstream mainstream” is focusing their energy on is quite useful in and of itself – I can then judge whether they’re adding diversity of opinions to the greater discourse or wasting energy on low-priority issues; I can contrast their viewpoints with the mainstream narratives and develop a better critique for both sides… There’s so much we can do with a breadth of information (and noise)!
A difficult but rewarding process to undertake
For reasons listed above, I believe diversifying information intake by following a diversity of independent voices is crucial to one’s intellectual sanity and is a far superior way to approach the current socio-political climate than merely following institutional voices.
So far this “decentralized” approach has worked for me because:
I read 30-50 books a year, often not in full but at least enough to get the essense from them, and the more canonical texts provide a nice contrast to and foundation for my daily information intake. For example, Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology and Saez & Zucman’s The Triumph of Injustice give wonderful deep dives & overviews of the Leftist take on inequality and taxation; Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged provide a lens into libertarian thinking that would be helpful when reading Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley startup founders; Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s canonical books and Kay and King’s Radical Uncertainty are amazing “textbooks” on probability and decision theory.
I’m in constant communication with a lot of curious friends who supply me with a stream of ideas, and I catch up with older mentors for their thoughts on the world, so I’m quite in touch with “the real world” as well.
I genuinely enjoy immersing myself in the day-to-day “discourse,” whereas others might not want to be as “plugged-into the discourse” as me.
It’s not an easy process and takes a while to get used to. There will be ups and downs – moments when you become frustrated that the independent voices you adore are suddenly squarely focused on a crusade against those they disagree with, or when the scholars you look up to make fatal errors in their confident statements.
But because I follow such a wide breadth of thinkers, it’s more likely that someone else I follow would provide a much better take on the issue, and reading all such back-and-forth discourse forces me to be a more critical thinker. The more people I read and talk to, the more I can pit their arguments against others’ I’ve learned, and over time I’ve developed a large web of interlocking theses, antitheses, and syntheses in my head. It made me more balanced and nuanced, and more likely to say “yes, but” – “yes inflation is shaping to be more persistent than we thought, but here’s why the Fed may still have been right with their initial policy decisions…”
I spent a month in India on a yoga & meditation trip in the winter of 2019. I forced myself to do a lot of “thinking” alone but soon realized how counter-intuitive that is. Ideas come up naturally during discourse and after a long period of knowledge accumulation. I can’t just sit there and try to come up with epiphanies about life. In order to think clearly, I need to take in a lot and train my brain to process them well. It’s hard work, but learning too little about the world and being too picky with sources I follow is too sub-optimal to settle for.
I still have a long way to go, but the heuristics and principles articulated here have driven me and Policy Punchline for all those years. I hope they can serve as a good benchmark and reminder for what I strive for in life as we continue to explore the truth in this fascinating world.
Special thanks to my friends (who do not wish to be named but want to be identified as “unimaginably intelligent”) for constructive feedback and inspiration.
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Comment from Connor Tabarrok: Good post! It led me to question, how can we as writers and intellectuals be more transparent in the array of sources we integrate into our own perspectives? For instance, is there an easy way to measure how diverse the building blocks of someone's wordview are? Maybe you could measure the degree to which papers cited cite each other, and rate those as either friendly or antagonistic citations, and that would give you a pretty good idea of how one sided or multi-faceted someone's analysis is. Hard to do without a single citation system though. Maybe this presents an opportunity to add value?
Comment from Luke Lea: Hi Tiger, Good to see you diversifying like you describe. I recommend Steve Sailer's blog, which specializes in important political and social issues arising out of often suppressed realities of human biodiversity. His is 20 year old full-time blog financed entirely by voluntary contributions from his many readers. If there is another blogger who makes his living that way I haven't heard about him or her (not counting the new substack phenomenon).