🛠️ 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
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.
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:
We are social animals.
Taleb:
“We react to a piece of information not on its logical merit, but on the basis of which framework [read: Cluster/Constellation] surrounds it, and how it registers with our social-emotional system [read: vibes].”
That is to say, our brains are lazy and always looking for shortcuts. Instead of working things through logically, we delegate. We don’t evaluate a belief based on its rationality but based on the Cluster around it and how it hits us in our street smarts. Basically, vibes>facts.
So, for Taleb, we delegate our understanding of this to the tribe. This is a pretty sound policy as far as it goes, but you can see why it’s gotten a bit wonky in the Information Age.
Destiny’s framing is much the same:
“rather than starting from some epistemically humble foundation and individually constructing beliefs, people tend to inherit constellations of beliefs from the social groups they find themselves in”
i.e. we don’t work things out for ourselves like Socrates or Descartes and rigorously build our belief systems from the bottom up. We look around at those we trust, and we glom onto their beliefs.
Where Taleb and Destiny diverge
There’s an interesting divergence in Taleb’s account and Destiny’s account, however. Destiny’s framing is more of a tribal epistemology — we swallow the beliefs of our ingroup unreflectively. Taleb’s framing is slightly different. Published in 2016, Black Swan predates the great Culture Wars of our age. It was a simpler time before a million Cassandras sang the swan song of social media brainrot. His focus is more on journalists than content creators or consumers:
“Contagion was the culprit. If you selected one hundred independent-minded journalists capable of seeing factors in isolation from one another, you would get one hundred different opinions. But the process of having these people report in lockstep caused the dimensionality of the opinion set to shrink considerably—they converged on opinions and used the same items as causes”
So he seems to be attributing the phenomenon of clustering to speed and networking. Remember I said our brains are lazy? Well, the more networked together we are, the easier it is for information/perspectives/beliefs/memes to spread. And the more information we are flooded with, the less time we have to consider the information and the more we have to fall back on these heuristic maps. More and more connection, fewer and fewer maps. Given the laziness of the human brain, the more hyperconnected we are, the fewer perspectives we end up with. Power laws come into play, and just as you end up with a 1% of superrich and powerful folk, you end up with 1% of maps, concepts and ideas — of Clusters and Constellations.
This fear isn’t new. This flattening of the human experience is what Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger bemoaned in modern life with their concepts of The Crowd, The Herd and Das Man.
It’s a slightly different twist on the idea from Destiny, who frames it more in the vein of tribalism than media theory.
Postmodernism all the way down
So, our belief systems then are social — a fact that’s not going to please our “classic liberals” and their doting love of the oft-hypocritical and occasionally mass-murdering Enlightenment1.
The postmodernists, as it turns out, were right when they tried to hammer this idea home again and again. This is Foucault’s power/knowledge (“Discourses don’t just reflect reality; they constitute it”2). This is Kuhn’s conception of scientists working in paradigms (“the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community”). And it’s that other great postmodernist Jordan Peterson’s mythopoetic example from Sumerian mythology in which the heroic embodiment of Order Gilgamesh slays Tiamat — the monstrous embodiment of Chaos — and cuts up her body to form our Ordered world. It’s also the core of the tech right’s darling philosopher René Girard’s theory of mimesis — the idea that desire (and belief) is imitated from our social peers.
If Modernity was drunk on the idea of universal values and truth, Postmodernity is the hangover of post-truth contextualisation of knowledge. Our knowledge is socially constituted. These Constellations/Clusters of beliefs travel together, and their vector is our nature as social beings. There’s a whole lot more that goes into this, such as the importance of language as a medium for travel and the possibility of inoculation against beliefs, which tells us more about what’s going on under the hood. But today we just want to establish this peculiar fact: our beliefs are networked together, and once you know one of my beliefs, you can predict many more.
P.S. I’ve been contemplating the more everyday manifestations of this phenomenon. When your partner reacts to your forgetting to take the bins out as if the sky just fell down, Constellations may be at play. Your forgetting to take the bin out may constellate the rest of a Cluster: maybe you are lazy, maybe their mother was right about you, maybe this relationship has no future because you have no ability to do the most basic task.
If a political argument always takes place against the contextual backdrop of a constellation of beliefs, then why not personal ones?
And when your boss comes down on you like the gust of a thousand winds because of some minor admin mistake, perhaps you’ve noticed that when your colleague makes such a mistake, not a word is said. Constellations may be at work everywhere. The overlap between this concept and subpersonality theory (the idea that we are not one whole personality but made up of a number of discrete personalities) merits further exploration.
Sources
Taleb, N. 2016. Black Swan. New York: Random House.
For Destiny’s account of Constellations, check out this edit on Reddit, this helpfully illustrated version of the same, or his account to Jordan Peterson
Further Reading:
Foucault, M. 1966. The Order of Things. Routledge Classics. London,
Girard R (1987) Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Gurvitch, G. 1966. The Social Framework of Knowledge. New York: Harper Torchbooks. [this is Taleb’s main source for his clusters idea as far as I can tell]
Kuhn, T. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press: Chicago
Peterson, J. 1999. Maps of Meaning: The architecture of belief. Taylor & Frances/Routledge.
Modernity vs. Postmodernity [my piece on the difference between these two ages. Somewhat dated but still a classic]
not that I’m anti-Enlightenment I should clarify. As PF Jung would say, nobody loves Rousseau more than I do; you can Locke me away with Hume and Voltaire any day (so long as we have a garden to tend). I just don’t like pedestals, I always feel like those precious idols are in such precarious well-lit positions.
technically Pseudo-Foucault but as ever the memetic version of Foucault cuts to the point much better than an actual Foucault quote e.g.
Great article. Particularly good insight about how forgetting to do something simple for your partner can elicit a reaction that is part of a constellation of beliefs.