Criticism and The Ascent of Man
Criticism of our current behavior or theories is the only way to improve. Against the 'Do not criticize'-meme and towards a culture of criticism.
Criticism of our current behavior or theories is the only way to improve. It is the most valuable thing you can offer to an idea. Together, conjecture and criticism form the two ingredients of new knowledge and the source of all solutions.
If criticism is prohibited, false theories are not eliminated. This leads to the spreading of false beliefs and theories about the world.
For most of human history, humankind was trapped in a vicious cycle of not having any money for significant expansion. The invention of credit thousands of years ago resulted from criticism of the lack of economic trust in our future. This event, called the credit miracle, created unparalleled wealth and reduction of suffering.
Many of humanity's most important discoveries and inventions were delayed by hundreds of years because the criticism of religious institutions was prohibited and punished. The Italian scientist Giordano Bruno was the first to theorize that the universe is infinite but was burned at the stake by the Catholic Church for his unorthodox ideas.1
Currently, many Germans hold wrong technological theories, such as an incorrect analysis regarding the risks and rewards of nuclear energy2, which leads to trillions of unattained or destroyed value.
Constructive vs. pure
Society has this idea that one should deliver criticism “sandwiched” or “constructive”. But why is that so, and is this useful?
Maybe because we are too attached to our ideas and work that we feel offended if they are criticized. That is wrong.
I argue that criticism should not have to be "constructive". Logically speaking and apart from the colloquial definition, criticism is always evaluative and destructive because it involves finding fault with an existing situation, conduct, or attitude.
What is generally referred to as “destructive criticism” is simple hostility. Saying, "I hate your ideas because I hate you," isn't a criticism; it's just ad hominem.
Ideally, conflicts are solved without hurting each other emotionally, but this shouldn't mean that criticism always has to be sandwiched or needs to be delivered with additional (constructive) advice. Confining oneself only to criticisms with 'constructive' attributes robs humanity of the class of criticisms that lacks this attribute.
Dominance and status
Another threat to criticism is the protection of one's status at all costs.
Kevin Simler in The Economics of Social Status writes:
People often use dominance to reinforce their status in ways that don't advance shared goals. And in addition to being potentially inefficient, dominance also has the effect of silencing criticism. Criticism is always a threat to one's status, but unless your goal is to maintain your own status at all costs, you need criticism to stay on the right track. No one makes perfect decisions at all times, and not everyone promoted into a position of leadership is good for the organization.
However, this is not entirely true. Criticism of an idea can also increase your status. For example, if you come up with a revolutionary product idea, someone criticizes an aspect of it, which leads to a massive improvement and millions more sales of that product. The original idea originator will still reap the status gains of that product.
In any case, we should abolish the cultural behavior of equating criticism of one's ideas with a loss of status.
Decline of criticism
Society is in decline if its use of criticism is.
We shouldn't only be able to criticize each other but also our past selves. If you can't list ways you acted dumb or were less knowledgeable 2–5 years ago, looking back at your past self, you haven't improved your behavior, learned something, or created new knowledge.
Telling ourselves how even our wasted hours and bad decisions have some value is unproductive. Let’s stop saying phrases like “never regret anything - it was a cool experience”. Regret is a valuable emotion that helps us and others learn to not make the regrettable error again. A regret minimization framework can create trillions (1.52 as of Dec 2023) in value:
This value of reflecting on and criticizing our past selves, the past versions of our societies, is why we should allow ourselves to look down upon our predecessors' poor conditions, starving to death, killing each other, and dying in their young years from the slightest infection.
The Ascent of Man (Episode 6) Jacob Bronowski vividly explains the inferiority of the people that placed the famous Moai statues that lived on the Easter Island in eastern Polynesia between the years 1250 and 1500:
The critical question about these statues is, Why were they all made alike? You see them sitting there, like Diogenes in their barrels, looking at the sky with empty eye-sockets, and watching the sun and the stars go overhead without ever trying to understand them. When the Dutch discovered this island on Easter Sunday in 1722, they said that it had the makings of an earthly paradise. But it did not. An earthly paradise is not made by this empty repetition . . . These frozen faces, these frozen frames in a film that is running down, mark a civilization which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge."
Released today, Bronowski's documentary might receive a lot of hate, "for it is de rigueur in our culture to heap praise upon any achievement of a primitive society"3.
Similar holds for the admiration of centuries-old structures such as the pyramids. People often forget that we only see the surviving ones. The Overwhelming majority of structures built in medieval times collapsed long ago, often soon after they were built.
While these early surviving engineering efforts are somewhat impressive considering the limited knowledge these people had, they are still primitive relics of failed societies. What is the basis of the romantic admiration of the ancients and their feudalistic economy that spends a massive amount of money to produce a useless edifice whose only purpose is to glorify some individual who thinks they're a god?
Instead of being in awe of these past efforts, we should celebrate our fellow human contributions to progress, modern structures such as the International Space Station, or the skyscrapers in New York.
"I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?—Ayn Rand
Conformity-seeking and political correctness
Stopping war and achieving equal rights for all races, genders, sexual orientations, and ages is important! Children's rights are especially overlooked, and we should take children seriously.
However, using these to signal a virtue such as inclusiveness or solidarity rather than actually supporting these causes is manipulation. The deeper problem with virtue signaling is that it sets the virtues themselves as immune from criticism. Those who don't profess to be virtuous are considered bigots or their ideas are discounted as coming from bigots. Nothing and nobody should be immune to criticism. Everyone is fallible. This also holds for religions. And there is a clear difference between critiquing someone's religion and being hostile toward its supporters.
"Morally the worst thing of all is to impede the correction of errors."4
Irrational and error-correction-impeding memes spread via virtue signaling, social desirability bias, and conformity seeking.
An everyday outcome of conformity-seeking in the workplace is the suppression of ideas. In his 1948 book, “Your Creative Power”, Alex Osborn, a partner in the advertising agency B.B.D.O. claimed that the most important part of brainstorming is the absence of criticism and negative feedback. A study by Charlan Nemeth, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, in 2003, however, suggests that the ineffectiveness of brainstorming stems from the very thing that Osborn thought was most important. As Nemeth puts it,
"While the instruction 'Do not criticize' is often cited as the important instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition."
Osborn thought that imagination is inhibited by the merest hint of criticism, but Nemeth's work and several other studies have demonstrated that it can thrive on conflict. According to Nemeth, dissent stimulates new ideas because it encourages us to engage more fully with the work of others and to reassess our viewpoints.
"There's this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone's feelings," she says. "Well, that's just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs."
Leaping to a better idea requires dropping the mediocre. If our peers or we hang on to ideas too long, those that get us through the day, we form structures and habits around them and never allow our creativity to jump to other options and eventually better ones. This inertia might be one of the biggest impediments to progress. And as Karl Popper once said5:
“While an uncritical animal may be eliminated altogether with its dogmatically held hypotheses, we may formulate our hypotheses, and criticize them. Let our conjectures, our theories die in our stead!”
The solution: a culture of criticism
The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.”
― Murray N. Rothbard
To build a productive communication culture, company, and society, we should embrace criticism even if it is not "constructive". Nobody should be immune to criticism. We should not shy away from embracing human progress and value our superiority over primitive societies. To achieve this, we need to continue the process of the intellectual Enlightenment and its scientific revolution started. We must abolish all regulations, laws, and taboos preventing new ideas and progress. Or at least abolish the parts of these institutions that prevent progress.
One of the most fundamental moral truths is not to remove the means of error correction and the embrace of criticism.
I wrote about the parasitic meme of religion in Progress via Intellectual Progress. It is interesting to consider that, at the same time, Christianity was a crucial memetic force in driving progress in other areas, such as morality.
read more about the anti-nuclear movement here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germany
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 17. Unsustainable
Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach