The problem with earnestness

This is a rant. I’d like to think I don’t rant very often, but this is a blog so I feel entitled to one occasionally.

For some reason, it seems to me that the number of earnest people is rising fast. Perhaps it’s just because I’ve recently been exposed to much more American academic content that previously. Perhaps it is because starting graduate school has put me into closer proximity with the kinds of people who attend Ivy League Schools, who are overwhelmingly earnest. Perhaps it is because the first generation raised in the ‘self-esteem’ regime that now dominates high school environments in the Anglosphere has made it to university. Perhaps it is just an illusion. Regardless of the reason, I want to explain why I think earnestness is dangerous, at least as an attitude to research and public debate. I will only discuss the former here because the latter touches on political correctness and if you want to open that can you better be ready with 5000+ tightly scripted words. This ain’t that; it’s a rant.

What do I mean by earnest?

Compliments of 'Humanitarians of Tinder'

Russ Roberts is a very earnest person. I am going to use him as an example of earnest behaviour. I don’t know whether his earnestness results in the kind of problems I’m about to discuss; I suspect it does, but I’m not going to consider that in detail. Roberts is a Professor at Stanford’s Hoover institute and the host of EconTalk, a great podcast (even if his flagrant Chicago school biases inflame me on a regular basis). On this show Roberts frequently displays earnest behaviour. For example, he interviewed Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion and CEO of a chain of very successful (in terms of test results) charter schools in the USA. I like Doug. I like his book. I like his methods, his philosophy and his schools. But to just about everything Lemov said Roberts replied with something like ‘that’s fabulous’ or ‘that’s wonderful’ or ‘that is so great’. Yeah maybe, but what about asking about some things that maybe aren’t so perfect. Why can’t we get everyone teaching like a champion, for instance?

I’m getting ahead of myself; let’s stick to getting a definition. Take another example: I recently stumbled across this post on my facebook feed: “Tonight I had the honor of meeting one of my greatest inspirations, Dan Pallotta, at the [Ivy league institute] alongside some wonderful [Ivy League] friends. According to Dan, too many nonprofits are rewarded for how little they spend — not for what they get done. In his bold talk, he says: Let's change the way we think about changing the world. "Before 'doing good by doing well' became a thing, if you made money trying to help people you were considered a 'parasite'" ‪#‎inspiration ‪#‎grateful”

In the world of earnest people, everything is #inspirational, #wonderful, #bold, #fabulous, a #hugebreakthrough, #gamechanging etc. They are ceaselessly #grateful (and #checkingtheirprivilege, but let’s leave that for now). Everybody from Harvard, MIT and the rest is always fucking smiling!

How can I be upset with this kind of behaviour? After all, it’s so nice. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone was really positive all the time?

NO. It wouldn’t.

The main problem with earnestness is that it dampens critical reflection. If something is ‘amazing’ you aren’t going to be inclined to say, ‘yeah it’s pretty good but it also has some problems, don’t you think?’

For example, when Duflo, Banerjee and the rest of the J-PAL crew (that’s poverty action lab, at MIT) first started doing randomised controlled trials of development policies the earnest chorus let up one of its biggest ever cheers. Here was hard evidence. This is science! We can now conclusively answer so many big, long-standing questions. OMG, this is so fucking #‘wonderful’, #‘fabulous’,#'game-changing’. Then some of the less earnest people in the discussion, like Dani Rodrik, started coming out of their offices where they had been calmly considering the potential of RCTs for a few months. They said things like: ‘well, there’s very good identification here, but at the expense of breadth, and you can’t answer a huge number of critical questions, like the entirety of macro-economics, and I have serious concerns about the extent to which the information from these studies can be scaled up or moved elsewhere.’ Basically, it turns out that the external validity of RCTs is very limited. Don’t get me wrong, they are still a big step forward in development studies (and economics more generally), indeed, they are ‘game-changing’, but they’re just another step forward in a 500 mile journey. We don’t need to all get together and circle-jerk about them.

I can understand that amidst all the crap that goes on in the world it’s nice to sometimes be #inspired. But we can be inspired without doing spontaneous cartwheels, you know what I mean? I read Nietzsche when I was 19 and the questions he provoked keep me going to this day. But I also recognised, immediately, that Nietzsche has a lot of problems. I’m not so sure the people worshipping Dan Pallotta as a 3rd sector guru behave the same way. Russ Roberts and Pallotta, for example, had a #wonderful, earnest discussion about how government involvement in charitable enterprises reduces incentives for charitable giving at a time when charities need to be able to do more fundraising in order to scale up to deal with (they mentioned) poverty reduction, homelessness, curing cancer, disaster relief and access to community hospitals. They did not consider (perhaps I’m being unfair here) that maybe government is a better vehicle for these things than charities! Government does not have problems of scale. Government does not have problems with fundraising. In countries with large governments you don’t even need community hospitals because health care is socialised! I also wonder whether if charities scaled up to the size of government they wouldn’t run into exactly the same sorts of inefficiency problems as large bureaucracies (empirical evidence suggests they would).

In the facebook post above, there is no indication of any critical reflection about whether this statement is actually true: ‘"Before 'doing good by doing well' became a thing, if you made money trying to help people you were considered a 'parasite'" Ummm, really? The guy that invented the hearing aid made money. Doctors doing cancer research make good money. People working for the REDD+ reforestation initiative of the UN make great bank. Steve Jobs is worshipped even though all he did was make money simply because his inventions happened to help people. Pallotta’s work rests heavily on some of the assumptions imbedded in this quote, in particular that high quality people respond overwhelmingly to financial incentives vs. quality of work incentives (which must sit well with Robert's Chicago school attitudes). I’m straw manning a bit here, but there are very important nuances at play that make turning Pallota's ideas into practical changes is very difficult to get right.  

This brings me to a subsidiary issue: earnestness discourages the application of nuance. So for example, I am in about 50% agreement with Pallotta. He has a lot of good things to say, especially with regards to measuring outcomes and bringing talent into organisation, but in many places I think he’s wrong. I don’t disagree with his central thesis, but I do disagree with a lot of its nuances and applications.  Earnest people are inclined to focus on the central thesis, which is #fabulous, and ignore the details because they make it harder to be #inspired. These details just confirm that the situation is difficult, the problem is wickedly complex and solutions are going to be hard to identify. That’s not #inspiring.

But it is #reality.

I would suggest that rather than being earnest people simply give credit where credit is due. If you come across a paper that you really like from a colleague, you might consider approaching them and saying ‘hey mate, I read your paper on x; it’s really good. I particularly liked your idea about y. That’s seems very important to me. Are you going to continue working on this stuff? I think you should. There seem to be a tonne of un-answered questions, like z, but I really like the approach you’ve got and I think it would provide some new insights into those problems’. People need to be praised for good work—this is what tall poppy syndrome forgets. But they also need to be kept down on earth where the #reality of complexity is front and centre. This is what tall poppy syndrome, or the Australian approach to being high-functioning, gets right. The Americans, those earnest people par-excellence, are a bit too obsessed with celebration. Take it down a notch.

One of the greatest benefits of praising problem solvers rather than #inspiration is that it encourages a slow burn approach to motivation. Inspiration based approaches to motivation tend to fade when confronted by challenges, new problems, setbacks and contrary data. Such things aren’t #inspiring. But if you don’t need inspiration for motivation then you just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Inspiration bounds like a gazelle until it reaches a hill and then says ‘oh, fuck it’. Slow burn motivation just keeps on chugging like the little engine that could right up and over that hill. It makes progress and gets suitably appreciated for that progress, so it continues. It doesn’t get discouraged when the pace drops off. It is interested in a problem not inspired by a solution. If I’m motivational, maybe I get into a room and explain what angles currently exist for tackling a problem and help people to make sense of how they might contribute to solutions. If I’m inspirational, maybe I just drop some confetti bombs into the room and then fuck off. That’s not going to be very helpful en-masse or in the long run.

Mark Fabian is a doctoral candidate in economics at the ANU