🛠️ Clusters and Constellations

Tribal epistemology and the social nature of beliefs

This is the second instalment of The Philosopher’s Toolkit. For an introduction to the series, see here. It was inspired by two things: Deleuze’s definition of philosophy as “forming, inventing and fabricating concepts” and the old saying that “if all you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail”. The aim of the Philosopher’s Toolkit is to give you more tools for interacting with the world.

• Category: Politics, Epistemology

• Thinker of Origin: Nassim Taleb, Destiny

• School of Origin: N/A

• Where it’s popular: Debate Bros, the Terminally Online

• Useful for:

  • Understanding the whack-a-mole nature of modern arguments

    • Why political arguments never seem to get anywhere

    • Conspiracy culture

    • The homogeneity of traditional news media

    • The structure of your own psyche

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I had a Road to Damascus moment this week.

Somewhere in the hundreds of articles I read these past couple of weeks (so much for tuning out and relaxing), one article caused a major pivot in one of my political beliefs.

The content of this belief pivot is less interesting to me than the meta-process of belief change. How do we change our beliefs? How often does it happen? Why does it happen? In an age of culture wars, “meaning crisis” and “echo chambers”, this is far from small fry.

I’ve spent most of this week unpacking the experience, and I’ve identified a few key elements. Today’s philosophical tool is foundational for my theory of belief change. In Black Swan, Nassim Taleb terms this phenomenon “clusters” — the strange proclivity for certain beliefs to cluster together:

“The next time a Martian visits earth, try to explain to him why those who favor allowing the elimination of a fetus in the mother’s womb also oppose capital punishment. Or try to explain to him why those who accept abortion are supposed to be favorable to high taxation but against a strong military. Why do those who prefer sexual freedom need to be against individual economic liberty?”

Our lazy minds are masters of categorising. It’s what allows us to cross the road without resorting to advanced calculus, and it’s also what makes us racist — the mind is great at shortcuts.

A more recent formulation of this idea comes from the streamer Destiny. In his framing, you can predict a whole chunk of a person’s beliefs by knowing just a single one. Beliefs are connected in what he calls “Constellations”. Helpfully, he gives us a case study of this with what he calls the “Anti Establishment Constellation”. Here’s the cluster of beliefs he has identified in this constellation:

Anti-Establishment Constellation:

• You support Donald Trump.

• You think Trump is being unfairly prosecuted.

• You believe there is an elite ruling class.

• You think the 2020 election was stolen.

• You don’t trust mainstream media.

• You don’t trust the vaccine.

• You believe COVID was overblown and that all lockdowns were unnecessary.

• You support Brexit.

• You distrust most U.S. institutions, especially intelligence agencies or anything related to healthcare.

• You think Andrew Tate is being unfairly targeted.

• You oppose most “woke-coded” things — transgenderism, affirmative action, feminism, etc.

Helpful illustration of Destiny’s Constellations by @Ark_Editing (X.com)

If you hold one of these beliefs, then odds are you will hold the rest of them. Like Orion or Taurus, these beliefs are fixed together in the firmament. This, despite these beliefs sometimes contradicting each other or being seemingly unrelated.

On a side note, I am particularly fond of this formulation because of how nicely it dovetails with my framing of the culture wars. When I argue with family or friends over ideological issues, I can’t help but feel that we’re the butt of some cosmic joke — that we’ve mistaken ourselves for soldiers on an archetypal battlefield. Instead of talking with another human who eats, sleeps and laughs at farts, we are suddenly enemies battling on the frontline in the wars of the Gods.

Like mice, with brains toasted by Toxoplasma — fatally attracted to cat urine (and shortly after, death) — we are possessed by Dawkinsian memes. Our brains are toasted, and we forget that we have known this person for decades, and neither of us has any first-hand experience of, or influence over, whatever the hell it is we’re arguing about. But, we got got by the brainrot, and now we are marionettes moved by the mystical astrological forces of Constellations in the archetypal empyrean.

All of which begs the question: why? Why is this the case?

Why is this the case?

As both Taleb and Destiny agree, the reason is quite simple: