Credibility

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

I'm often asked: how can we possibly persuade people Ayn Rand is worth reading when there's so much misinformation out there about her?

My answer is: none of that matters in the face of a recommendation from a trusted source.

The unsung hero of persuasion is credibility. Without credibility, persuasion is nearly impossible. With credibility, you can make a ton of mistakes and still have an impact.

Here's one example of the power of credibility. A lot of Objectivists viewed meditation as mystical nonsense. Then they heard Alex Epstein explain why he meditated and decided to give it a try. And Alex? I'm pretty sure he thought it was mystical nonsense until one of his trusted sources, Jerry Seinfeld, explained that meditation was key to his productivity.

Credibility means that your audience has reason to respect your judgment. Maybe you're a subject matter expert. Or maybe you've achieved something they want to achieve. Or maybe they just know you to be a wonderful person who is worth emulating.

One of the things to think about, particularly if you're trying to build an intellectual career, is how to establish your credibility. And, importantly, you should think about potential credibility killers.

If you're telling people how to make money, but you're broke, that's a credibility killer. If you're telling people how to lose weight, but you're fat, that's a credibility killer. And if you're telling people to follow your philosophy, but you're weird, surly, or living in your parents' basement, that's a credibility killer.

Maybe you're thinking, "Hey, that's not fair: what should matter is my argument." Well, yeah, I do believe that in the end a good argument wins. But once you get beyond a simple syllogism, processing an argument takes time and effort. What credibility does is convince people to put in that effort and not to jump too quickly to the conclusion that a given objection to your view is fatal.

I like to think of persuasion as a bell graph. When people first hear your position, they are looking for a reason to reject it. There are countless ideas out there and no one can spend time fully processing all of them. But as someone becomes more convinced that a position is right, she starts looking for reasons to confirm it.

For example, most  people will dismiss Ayn Rand because they "know" selfishness means taking advantage of other people or because they "know" capitalism hurts the poor.

But if someone doesn't reject Rand on these grounds and learns that actually selfishness means non-sacrifice and capitalism helps everyone flourish, if they start to think that maybe Objectivism is true, what will happen when they hear a new objection--say, that there are studies in psychology that overturn free will? They'll file that, not as a reason to instantly reject Objectivism, but as a question to investigate before adopting the philosophy.

And the last stage is that a person is fully convinced. And here what happens if they encounter an objection is it gets filed as "probably wrong, figure out why if you have the time." (This need not be confirmation bias: it is the proper attitude toward firmly established knowledge. It becomes confirmation bias only when you seek not to genuinely evaluate the objection but to seek out reasons to disconfirm it.)

What you want to do as a persuader is move people along that persuasion bell graph as quickly as possible, from looking for reasons to object to committing to sustained consideration. And often the key differentiator isn't your argument--it's your credibility.

This is why, when I think about Objectivism as a persuasive movement, a lot of what I think about is not how to sharpen our arguments (though I think about that a lot as well), but about how to establish cultural credibility.

Harry Binswanger has said that two Nobel Prize winning scientists crediting Rand's epistemology would be a major win. I agree with that. And more widely I believe that anyone who achieves anything worth achieving is advancing the movement--even if their career is not an intellectual one.

By all means, spend some time on Twitter debating philosophy. But better than that, become a leader in your field and embody the philosophy you preach. And when people ask for the secret to your success, and you tell them, they'll listen.