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2025 Aug 12 See all posts On idea-driven ideas

A long time ago, in the pre-Covid century, I remember the economist Anthony Lee Zhang describing to me his distinction between "idea-driven ideas" and "data-driven ideas". An idea-driven idea is an idea where you start off with some high-level philosophical frame - eg. markets are rational, power concentration is dangerous, time-worn traditions are wise - and deduce a more concrete insight from that frame plus some logical reasoning. A data-driven idea is, in its pure form, an idea that comes out of a process where you start with no preconceptions, do some analysis on data, and endorse whatever conclusion you get. The implication: data-driven ideas are clearly the better type of ideas to have and promote. Last month, Gabriel from Conjecture critiqued my approach to d/acc by arguing that instead of starting from an "ideology" and trying to make it more compatible with other human goals, I should effectively just be a pragmatist, and neutrally seek whatever strategies do the best job of meeting the entire set of human values. These are common sentiments. So what is the proper role of what might alternatively be called ideologies, principles, ideas built on top of ideas, crystallized goals, or consistent guiding thoughts in a person's thinking? And, on the flip side, how do these thinking styles fail? This post will attempt to describe my thoughts on the topic. The argument I will make is as follows:

The world is too complex to "pragmatically reason through" every single decision. To be effective, you need to take, and reuse, intermediate steps. Ideology is not just about personal cognition, it's a social construct. A community needs something to rally around, and if it's not an idea or story then often it instead ends up being a person or small group - which has potentially worse downsides. Another value of encouraging different people to have different narrower goals is enabling and organizing