Disciplined iconoclasm

By Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 @ 2025-11-03T22:30 (+25)

“All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.” 

―Nikola Tesla

“They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

―Carl Sagan

There is a modest tension between showing appropriate respect for the expert consensus on a topic (or the mainstream view, or majority opinion, or culturally evolved social norms, or whatever) and wanting to have creative and innovative thoughts about that topic. It's possible to be too deferential to expert consensus (etc.), but it's also possible to be too iconoclastic. Where people in effective altruism err, they tend to err in being too iconoclastic.

The stock market is a good analogy. The market is wrong all the time, in the sense that, for example, companies rocket to large valuations and then come crashing down, not because the fundamentals changed, particularly, but because the market comes to think that the company was a bad bet in the first place. (The work of equity research analysts and investigative reporters with non-consensus/counter-consensus hunches is valuable here.) So, the market is wrong all the time, but beating the market is famously hard. The question is not whether the market often makes mistakes that could be capitalized on (it certainly does), the question is whether you, specifically, can spot the mistakes before the market does, and not make mistakes of your own that outweigh everything else. I think a similar thing is true with ideas in general. 

The consensus view is wrong all the time, society is wrong all the time, about all sorts of things. Like the stock market, expert communities and society at large have ways of integrating criticism and new thinking. There is some sort of error correcting process. The question for anyone pursuing an iconoclastic hunch is not whether society or a particular community of experts has shown it is fallible (it has, of course), the question is whether you can correct an error over and above what the error correcting process is already doing, without introducing even more error yourself. 

The danger doesn't lie simply in having non-consensus/counter-consensus views — everyone should probably have at least a few — the danger is in having too many about too many things, in being far too confident in them, and in rejecting mainstream institutions and error correcting processes. With the stock market, it takes a lot of research to support one non-consensus/counter-consensus bet. At a certain point, if someone tries to take too many bets, they're going to be stretched too thin and will not be able to do adequate research on each one. I think something similar is true with ideas in general. You need to work to engage with the consensus view properly and make a strong criticism of it. People who reject too many consensuses too flippantly are bound to be wrong about a lot. I think maybe people mistake the process of research, which takes time and hard work, which has maybe led them to be right about something that most people disagreed with once or twice, with having some sort of superpower that allows them to see mistakes everywhere without putting in due diligence. 

There's also an important difference between working to improve or contribute to institutions by participating in the error correction processes versus rejecting them and being an outsider or even calling for them to be torn down. I think there's something quietly heroic but typically unglamorous about participating in the error correcting process. The people who have the endurance for it usually seem to be motivated by something deeper than getting to be right or settling scores. It comes from something more selfless and spiritual than that. By contrast, when I see people eagerly take the role of outsider or someone who wants to smash institutions, it often seems like it's based in some kind of fantasy of will to power. 

One potential route for people in effective altruism who want to reform the world's ideas is publishing papers in academic journals and participating in academic conferences. I believe it was in reference to ideas about artificial general intelligence (AGI) and AI safety and alignment that the economist Tyler Cowen once gave the advice, "Publish, publish, publish." The philosopher David Thorstad, who writes the blog Reflective Altruism about effective altruism, has also talked about the merits of academic publishing in terms of applying rigour and scrutiny to ideas, in contrast to overreliance on blogs and forums. I do wish we lived in a world where academia was less expensive and more accessible, but that's a complaint about how widely the academic process can be applied, not about how important it is. 

Anything that can get a person outside the filter bubble/echo chamber/ideological bunker of effective altruism will surely help. Don't forget the basics of good epistemic practice: talking to people who disagree with you, who think differently than you, and putting yourself in an emotional state where you can really consider what they're saying and potentially change your mind. Unfortunately, the Internet has almost no venues for this sort of thing, because the norm is aggressive clashes and brutal humiliation contests. Real life offers much better opportunities, but I'm worried that too much time spent on the Internet (and really Twitter deserves an outsized share of the blame) is making people more dogmatic, combative, and dismissive of others' opinions in real life, too. I don't find this to be an easy problem myself and I don't have clean, simple advice or solutions. (If you do, let me know!)

A related topic is systemic or structural critiques of institutions, including fields in academia. This is not exactly the same idea as everything I've discussed so far, although it is relevant. I think you can make good points about systemic or structural critiques of many institutions, including government (e.g. is it properly representational, do all votes have equal power?), journalism (e.g. does widespread negativity bias have harmful effects such as making people feel more hopeless or more anxious?), and certain academic fields. I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy, so philosophy is the field I'm most familiar with. I think the practice of philosophy could be improved in some ways, such as leaning toward plain English, showing less deference to or reverence for big names in the history of philosophy (such as Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger), and being more mindful of what questions in philosophy are important and why, rather than get drawn into "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"-type debates. 

You can make legitimate critiques of institutions or academic fields, like philosophy, and in some way, the force of those critiques makes those institutions or fields less credible. For example, I take academic philosophy somewhat less seriously than I would if it didn't have the problems I experienced with unclear language, undue deference to or reverence for big names, or distraction by unimportant questions. But if I decide academic philosophy is a temple that needs to be torn down and I try to create my own version of philosophy outside of academia from the ground up, on balance, what I come up with is going to be far worse than the thing I'm trying to replace. Trying to reinvent everything from scratch is a forlorn project. 

So, what applies to ideas also applies to institutions that handle ideas. Systemic or structural reform of institutions is good and probably needed in many cases, but standing outside of institutions and trying to create something better is going to fail 99.9%+ of the time. I detect in effective altruism too much of an impulse too often from too many people to want to reinvent everything from scratch. Why not apply effective altruism's deeply seeing Eye of Sauron to corporations, to governments, to nations, to world history, and, in roughly the words said to me by someone at an effective altruist organization many years ago, solve all the world's problems in priority sequence?^[1] There is a nobility in getting one to three things right that are non-consensus/counter-consensus and giving that contribution to the world. There is also an ignobility in becoming overconfident from a few wins and, rather than being realistic about the limitations of human beings, spreading yourself far too thin and making too many contrarian bets on too many things, and being surely wrong about most of them.

Getting something right, which most people get wrong, that the world needs to know about takes love, care, attention, and hard work. Doing even one thing like that is an achievement and something to be proud of. That's disciplined iconoclasm and it's beautiful. It moves the world forward. The other thing, the undisciplined thing, is in an important sense the opposite of that and its mortal enemy, although the two are easily confused and conflated. The undisciplined thing is to think because you were contrarian and right once or a few times, or just because, for whatever reason, you feel incredibly confident in your opinions, that everyone else must be wrong about everything all the time. That is actually a tragic perspective from which to inhabit life. It is often a refuge of the wounded. It's an impoverished perspective, mean and meagre. 

The heroism of the disciplined iconoclast contrasted with the tragedy of the omni-contrarian evokes for me what the Franciscan mystic Richard Rohr calls the distinction between the soul and the ego, or the true self and the false self. Ironically enough, great deeds are better accomplished by people not concerned with their greatness, and the highest forms of well-being in life, such as love, come from setting aside, at least partially, one's self-interest. Will to power is not the way. The way is love for the thing itself, regardless of external reward or recognition. That kind of selfless love is often unglamorous, sometimes boring, and definitely hard to do, but it's undoubtedly the best thing on Earth.

I think many people like myself once detected something nearly divine in effective altruism's emphasis on sacrificing personal consumption to help the world's poorest people, not for any kind of recognition or external reward, but just to do it. That is an act of basically selfless love. Given that point of comparison, you can understand why many people feel unsatisfied and uneasy with a transition toward discussing what is essentially science fiction at expensive conference venues. Where is the love or the selflessness in that? 

I think excessive contrarianism is best understood as ego or as stemming from an ego problem. It's about not accepting one's fundamental human limitations, which everyone has, and it's about being overly attached to winning, being right, gaining status, gaining recognition, and so on, rather than letting those things go as much as humanly possible in favour of focusing on love for the thing itself. I think this is always a tragic story because people are missing the point of what life is about. It's also a tragic story because every investigation of why someone is unable to let go of ego concerns seems to ultimately trace back to someone, typically a child, who deserved love and didn't get it, and found the best way they could to cope with that unbearable suffering.

When I ask myself why some people seem to need effective altruism to be something more than it could possibly realistically be, or why they seem to want to tear down all human intellectual achievement and rebuild it from scratch, I have to wonder if they would feel the same way if they felt they could be loved exactly as they are. Could it be, at bottom, that it's been about love all along?

1. ^{^}

   In the original version of this post, I said it was an employee of the Centre for Effective Altruism. On reflection, it was more likely an employee or volunteer from the Local Effective Altruism Network or LEAN. 
   
   (I changed this sentence and added this footnote on November 18, 2025 at 3:10 PM Eastern.)