A Backbone for the Critical Thinkers

In September I was in Preveza, and I went to see the ruins of Nicopolis, the city Octavian founded to celebrate his win at Actium, a few years before he became Augustus, the first Roman emperor [1]. Walking around it I was thinking about dictators, and I started writing notes on what a good dictator would look like, then on how a society would have to be structured so it didn't need one, and on the morals that would hold it together. It's a list of where I am now and how I choose to live my life. Some of these beliefs are old, some are new and some are still changing, and I'd never written them down before.

I didn't know it would tie up with critical thinking until after I wrote The Age That Needs Critical Thinkers. Reading the notes again, I realised that a good critical thinker without a moral background is just a very good arguer. Asking why five times and spotting the leap in an argument are ways to think, and they don't tell you what's worth arguing for. You need more than critical thinking to build a society I'd want to live in, and the rest of the notes are closer to ethics, or to a way to live in a world where fewer people go to church, be it lack of time or not believing, and where AI sits next to all of us while we think.

> What would a good dictator look like?

On paper it looks like the best system of governance is a benevolent dictatorship, because it allows a quick response to a world that changes fast, but that only works if you assume most people won't think for themselves and will just follow the rules. The good dictator in my notes was kind, had strong moral values, and dealt with the root cause of a problem while a temporary fix held things together.

In real life it breaks when power accumulates, which it always tends to, sometimes within a few years and sometimes over a generation. A dictator ends up building their own dictator brain out of people who only tell them they're right (the AI version of the same loop is in How to Prevent Building Your Own Dictator Brain). Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations, about as much moral background as a ruler has ever had, and he was the fifth of Rome's five good emperors. The four before him had each picked a grown man they thought could do the job and adopted him as their heir, partly because none of them had a surviving son. Marcus had a son, Commodus, and left the empire to him. Cassius Dio, who lived through it, wrote that Commodus "was not naturally wicked", but that his simplicity and cowardice "made him the slave of his companions", and by the end he was fighting as a gladiator. For Dio, that was where his history "now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust" [2]. I think the lesson is that Marcus knew what he was doing and it still failed. The bigger surprise to me is that Rome rolled the dice five times in a row before that and it worked out, and I think that was down to the society around them as much as the emperors themselves. It happens to elected leaders too. David Owen and Jonathan Davidson went through a hundred years of US presidents and UK prime ministers and suggested a name for what they found, hubris syndrome, "a disorder of the possession of power", particularly power "held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader" [3].

So the notes turned into how a society would have to be structured so it didn't need a dictator, good or bad, and most of what I'd wanted from the good one became things I try to do myself. The Federalist No. 51, usually credited to James Madison, put the other half in 1788, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary" [4]. I think we need both, people with a backbone and institutions that don't rely on them having one.

> How I want to treat people

1. A temporary fix with a long-term plan behind it that deals with the root cause. Most problems need something done today, and I think that's fine as long as someone is also working on why it happened. Otherwise we end up fixing the same thing every year.
2. Understanding that we succeed together, and that leaders wouldn't be leaders without everyone else working hard to make their vision real. Nothing I planned at CryptoCompare would have shipped without the team that built it with me. It wouldn't have made money without sales and marketing, and it wouldn't have kept its customers or had a good feedback loop without support and admin. I think a leader who forgets that starts to believe the success is all theirs.
3. Treating other people with respect regardless of who they are, and doing to others as you'd want done to you, without necessarily going to church every week, or ever. The golden rule is in a lot of religions in one form or another, and I don't think you need to believe in any of them to follow it. If enough of us treat people the way we'd want to be treated, I think fewer rules need enforcing from above. Enforcing rules is expensive and it sometimes backfires, so the less often we need to do it, the more weight it carries when a rule does need enforcing.
4. Avoiding, as much as possible, doing things that harm or disrupt other people, while giving them the privacy to do whatever they want in their own lives under the same rule. John Stuart Mill wrote it down in 1859, "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others" [5]. I think the hard part is agreeing on what counts as harm, and most of modern politics is that argument, whether it's about exploitation at work, hate speech or a pandemic. I'm simplifying more than 160 years of political theory into one line here, and I'd rather we keep having that argument in the open than have one person decide it for everyone.
5. Kindness and charity. I think it costs very little. Charity is the same with time or money, for people you'll probably never meet. I hope that if enough of us do both, we need a lot less from whoever is in charge.
6. Listening properly to people who argue for things completely against what you believe, and trusting that a society with a strong critical thinking backbone can choose well. It also means that sometimes they'll win the vote. I know I can live with that, and I know a better case will be made.

> Where I draw the lines

1. Strong moral values, and an open mind that still has lines it won't cross. I think an open mind with no lines can be argued into anything, and that's what a very good arguer does to people. I'd rather decide where my lines are before the argument starts than while someone is pushing me. I think an LLM is the purest version of a very good arguer, because it'll argue either side of most things as well as you ask it to, so the lines have to come from the person using it.
2. Accepting that we need regulation to protect us from predatory practices while we build up our critical thinking. I don't like asking anyone's permission and I build things so other people don't have to. But some companies make their money from people who can't yet tell they're being played, and I think until most of us can, we need rules to protect us.
3. Choosing democracy anyway because, even with low critical thinking, it's still better in the long term. Churchill made the case for it in the House of Commons in 1947, "democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time", and presented it as something that had been said before [6]. It's slow and it gets things wrong, but it lets us remove the people who got it wrong without a war. I don't think a benevolent dictatorship has a way to do that. Karl Popper made this argument in The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945, describing democracy as government "of which we can get rid without bloodshed" [7].
4. Human rights exist because we want them to exist. We believe in them because we choose to, and the choosing is what makes them real. Yuval Noah Harari puts it as "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings" [8]. It also means they only last while enough of us keep choosing them, so I think schools should teach where they came from and why we chose them.

> How I live with it

1. Knowing that the world is broken, that it always has been and that your impact will be small, and still doing something. I think if everyone waited until their part looked big enough, nobody would start.
2. Fighting when you know you're the underdog. I think people with power rarely give it up just because someone asked nicely, so someone has to start pushing before it looks like they could win.
3. Trying, even though "you can be anything you put your mind to" is bullshit. Where you're born, your health and your luck all matter, and I think pretending they don't makes people blame themselves for things they couldn't control. I hope you try anyway, and stay honest with yourself about what was in your hands.
4. Working hard, knowing it's a big part of success but not the only part. I've been lucky and I've worked hard, and I don't know in what percentage each one contributed.
5. Knowing that sometimes your sacrifice is the best way forward, and knowing when to take a step back. I think sometimes giving up something you want is what moves things forward for the people around you. Holding on is what most of us do by default, and hubris syndrome is what happens when nobody steps back.
6. Finding meaning and joy in just existing, journey before destination, as the Knights Radiant swear in Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings [9]. If the meaning only comes at the end, I think most of life is spent waiting for it.

> Asking why five times

Only some of this is critical thinking. I'm putting it together because I think it works better as one thing than as separate pieces, and you can use critical thinking to check each piece. In The Age That Needs Critical Thinkers I said it starts with asking why, five times at least. This is what I got when I tried it on the last item from the first list, listening properly to people who argue for things completely against what you believe.

1. Why listen to them? Because I might be wrong, and they might be the only ones who'd tell me.
2. Why would they be the only ones? Because the people who agree with me have no reason to look for the holes.
3. Why does it matter if nobody looks for the holes? Because I think I'd slowly start to believe I'm right about everything.
4. Why would I start believing that? Because I think that's how the dictator brain gets built, when everyone around you only says yes, in a leader or in anyone with a bit of power.
5. Why does that matter for a society? Because I think if a whole country stops listening to the people it disagrees with, it ends up with the same problem, and we're back to hoping for a good dictator.

After five whys I end up at one of my red lines. The whys give me the practical reasons, and Mill put the rest of it in 1859, "We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still" [5]. The second half of that is the red line.

> REFERENCES

[1] Suetonius, around AD 121, "The Life of Augustus", in "The Lives of the Caesars", translated by J. C. Rolfe for the Loeb Classical Library, 1913. Source for Octavian founding "a city called Nicopolis near Actium" to "extend the fame of his victory at Actium" (chapter 18) and later taking "the surname Augustus" (chapter 7). penelope.uchicago.edu.

[2] Cassius Dio, early 3rd century AD, "Roman History", Books 72 and 73, translated by Earnest Cary for the Loeb Classical Library, 1927. Dio was a senator under Commodus. Source for "our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust, as affairs did for the Romans of that day" (72.36.4). Book 73 in the same edition is the source for Commodus, who "was not naturally wicked" but whose "great simplicity, however, together with his cowardice, made him the slave of his companions" (73.1), and who would "fight as a gladiator" (73.19). Books 68 to 72 cover the emperors from Nerva to Marcus and the adoptions that passed power between them. penelope.uchicago.edu and penelope.uchicago.edu.

[3] David Owen and Jonathan Davidson, 2009, "Hubris syndrome: An acquired personality disorder? A study of US Presidents and UK Prime Ministers over the last 100 years", Brain 132(5), 1396 to 1406. Source for the hundred years of leaders and the definition, "a disorder of the possession of power", particularly power "held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader". doi.org/10.1093/brain/awp008.

[4] The Federalist No. 51, published in the New York Packet on 8 February 1788 and usually credited to James Madison. Source for "If men were angels, no government would be necessary" and "you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself". guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-51-60.

[5] John Stuart Mill, 1859, "On Liberty". Source for the harm principle in chapter I, "Introductory", "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others", and for "We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still" in chapter II, "Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion". gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm.

[6] Hansard, House of Commons debate on the Parliament Bill, 11 November 1947, volume 444, column 207. Source for Churchill's words, "Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time". api.parliament.uk.

[7] Karl Popper, 1945, "The Open Society and Its Enemies", page 118 of the one-volume Princeton University Press edition, 2020. Source for his description of democracy as government "of which we can get rid without bloodshed", for example by way of general elections. press.princeton.edu.

[8] Yuval Noah Harari, 2011 (English edition 2014), "Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind", chapter 2, "The Tree of Knowledge". Source for "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings." ynharari.com/book/sapiens.

[9] Brandon Sanderson, 2010, "The Way of Kings", Tor Books. Source for the First Ideal of the Knights Radiant, "Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination." The Ideals are collected on the Coppermind wiki's "Immortal Words" page. coppermind.net/wiki/Immortal_Words.