Making Distinctions

Digital Technology Shortens Attentions Spans and Breeds Intellectual Laziness

Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

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One of the most elementary intellectual and moral tasks for the human mind is to make distinctions between two things which have some similarities but which are not the same. The more complex the things, the more difficult this task becomes, and the more mental effort and patience it requires to tease out the differences and similarities. At a certain point, many people give up, and resort to a lazy shorthand they know to be false, “They’re all the same.”

While it’s quite rational to avoid the sunk cost fallacy and quit when the task of making distinctions is a waste of time and effort, unfortunately the internet seems to make many people throw in the towel far too early. Shorter attention spans make this type of higher-level thinking more difficult (because the person with a shorter attention span spends more effort trying to focus than the person with a longer attention span). And digital media (especially the smartphone, social media, and various hyper-brief-style videos and articles) has contributed to shortening average attention spans. I recently heard a young Gen Z journalist say in an interview that (despite her concerns about digital media’s effect on her generation and her desire not to conform to social trends she disliked) she couldn’t sit at her desk quietly “for more than ten minutes” without losing focus.

Individuals who spend too much time online sometimes appear cursed by shiny object syndrome (i.e., they are outraged about the latest thing, which is always different and yet somehow more important than last week’s latest thing or any previous latest thing before that) and a very quick dismissal reflex. This latter manifests in a quick dismissiveness and a willingness to jump to conclusions, but it often involves a failure to make distinctions between two (sometimes entirely different) things.

Almost everyone is prone to some of this. When we are tired or overly busy, we don’t have the energy to engage with certain arguments or information, so we come up with a reason to ignore (“Oh, I know exactly what this is. It’s just like this other thing I know all about. I don’t need to waste my time with this.”). This is forgivable, but it shouldn’t be how we show up all of the time, or even most of the time. And when any of us is having a bad day, we should try to be aware of this tendency in ourselves and actively mitigate it.

Common Examples:

I suspect I am more bothered by elided distinctions than the average person, but one which frustrates me to no end is what I call the “neoliberalism fallacy,” which reduces complex arguments to a simple story which leads from Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek to that devotee of the Chicago School Bill Clinton and then to the presidency of Barack Obama. After all, since both Hayek and Friedman proposed some basic provision for the poor (despite the sympathy both had for eliminating all social welfare),¹ and because Obamacare didn’t literally nationalize the American healthcare system, all of them can be said to support market economies and social welfare in some regard.

Which seems like saying that Charles de Gaulle and Otto von Bismarck were the same because both were from Europe.

A related example: the folks at Reason and Cato sometimes find themselves at pains to explain the difference between libertarianism and anarchism, in part because there is quite a great deal of anarcho-capitalism in the libertarian movement (i.e., Murray Rothbard, the Mises Caucus, etc.). An anarchist is someone who believes that there should be no government. There are many flavors of anarchism, but I find it useful to distinguish between anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-syndicalists (socialists). A libertarian on the other hand, generally believes that there should be a small government with a military, a police force, and courts. Some libertarians believe there should be a little bit more beyond those three things (but some do not).

Another example: late last year, I had someone tell me that there was “no real difference” between America and the Nazis because we took in Oppenheimer after the war (and therefore technically America “harbored Nazis”). When it was instrumental to us to ignore a scientists’ crimes, we let him get off Scot free. This was in the course of telling me that America was no better than Russia (in the context of the Ukrainian invasion) or China (in the context of the Uyghur genocide).

I find this claim lazy to the point of being offensive. It is intellectual and moral cowardice. A small child should be able to see the differences between America and the Nazis. Only an intelligent person could manage to convince himself of the validity of some complicated theory which could provide any reasonable justification for such a belief. It is akin to when “those who lack elementary powers of discretion discern no difference between the Jewish state and a nihilistic death cult that murdered, raped, and burned alive as many Jews as it could.”

Interestingly enough, this refusal to make distinctions between America and the Nazis bespeaks a utopian worldview, which doesn’t require a belief in an actual utopia. Rather than deal in the messy real world, where choices are often between better and worse and every alternative falls far short of perfection, the utopian measures every society against a standard which doesn’t exist and therefore cannot be met. Compared to perfection, all societies might indeed seem equally bad, but compared to each other, they do not.

Another important distinction which is lost on people, but which is very understandable for those unfamiliar with the differences between religious denominations is that between Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians. This distinction mirrors that between the Mormon Fundamentalists and the Church of Latter-day Saints. One of the primary differences is that the Fundamentalists view themselves as the only true believers surrounded by apostasy and heresy (i.e., Catholics, mainline Protestants, Southern Baptists, and the Presbyterian Church of America aren’t “real” Christians). The Mormon Fundamentalists explicitly view LDS leaders as Satan’s henchmen (and the rest of us are even worse in their view).

What is an Evangelical? It used to be that an Evangelical Christian was a Protestant who agreed with these nine points of theology. Sadly, increasingly it signifies political affiliation less than it does religious orthodoxy,² but that is outside the scope of this essay. A Fundamentalist is also a Protestant, but disagrees with Evangelicals (and other Christians) on a few things. A Fundamentalist is more likely to reject sources of knowledge outside of scripture, more likely to see all secular concepts as tainted or unholy, more likely to live in a closed community and view outside culture with hostility, and more likely to believe in imminent apocalypse and to accept the words of current pastors as literal prophecies. There are some theological distinctions as well. The SBC and PCA are Evangelical churches. The Pentecostal Assemblies of God in America is a Fundamentalist church.

Another example: conflating any criticism of science or scientists or particular scientific practices with an antiscientific posture. In other words, mistaking part for the whole. Not every climate scientist who has criticized other prominent climate scientists is a “climate denier.” Not all criticism of the COVID vaccines is vaccine skepticism. The statement, “there is less benefit and more risk (of myocarditis) for a twenty-five-year-old man taking a Pfizer booster than there is for a seventy-five-year-old woman,” does not make someone an antivaxxer. The mean, median, and modal American took the original vaccine and one booster, but no more than one.

Recently, I wrote an article on science and fascism which could be taken by a careless reader to be antiscientific. Actually, part of the point of my article is that a “science” which discards skepticism, free inquiry, the scientific method, the testing of falsifiable hypotheses,³ and the possibility of future evidence overturning the current paradigm is antiscientific. There is a scientific, and an unscientific way to criticize scientists or the work of particular scientists. The former aims at improving human understanding, and the latter at muddying it.

A lighter example: the use of the term “powerlifter” or “bodybuilder” to refer to anyone who lifts weights. Powerlifting and bodybuilding are two different sports. Bodybuilding competitions involve posing on a podium (Arnold Schwarzenegger). Powerlifting means trying to lift the most weight for your weight class in three lifts (squat, bench, deadlift). Bodybuilders are trying to look shredded. Powerlifters can sometimes carry around plenty of bodyfat.

In Conclusion:

I find it highly annoying to converse with people who don’t make distinctions, because either we can’t understand one another or a significant portion of the conversation gets bogged down in defining our terms. Some people elide distinctions in bad faith, but most don’t realize that’s what they are doing (because they haven’t taken the time to learn the difference between similar-but-not-identical things).

As I said, most people don’t have the time to learn all the important details about everything, so it’s natural for us to elide distinctions in some circumstances. Nobody should be skewered for saying of starting pitchers and closers, “Aren’t they both just pitchers?” I can’t tell you what the difference between a running back and a wide receiver is (I would guess that the former runs the ball more frequently and the latter runs down the field in the hope of catching a pass), but (and this point is key) I don’t pretend to know anything about football. Unfortunately, the shallows of digital media has led to an increasing number of people who not only fail to make distinctions, but also insist that they know what they are talking about.

Most people aren’t incapable of making distinctions, but spending too much time online can make it harder to do so. Spending a little more time reading and a little less time surfing the interwebs can go a long way towards correcting this.

1. Friedman’s negative income tax was not the same as the proposed “universal basic income” (UBI) and when speaking exclusively to fellow libertarians, Friedman would admit that the negative income tax was a dirty compromise which had to be made out of political necessity, but which might be a stepping stone on the path to the ultimate goal of zero social welfare.

2. In fact, because the term “evangelical” can now refer to a person who has a certain political affiliation, but who doesn’t attend church and who doesn’t adhere to the nine points of orthodoxy, I try not to use it. I will usually use “traditionalist” instead, a term which includes Catholics as well as Protestants and which connotes orthodoxy rather than political affiliation.

3. Some particle physicists will dispute the need for hypotheses to be falsifiable. There is a legitimate argument to be made that they have a point when it comes to their particular field. However, there is also a legitimate argument to be made that they are wrong. Especially in fields other than particle physics, in which there is usually nothing physically precluding hypotheses from being tested, falsifiability plays a key role in the scientific method.