There Is No Conviction Without Risk

So Silicon Valley should stop trying to foster conviction by lowering risk

I’ve recently found myself in various situations recently that went something like this:

Person I disagree with: presents a factual statement (e.g. a news story or a piece of history) that violates my worldview.

Me in my head: hmmm, that doesn’t sound right, but I know nothing about this fact, so I will stay silent.

Me later after doing some research: oh, that fact was incorrect or missing serious context. I should have challenged that fact.

It’s not hard to imagine something like this in a discussion about politics, but it extends to other aspects of life.

• Someone claims they know someone who got really rich really easily in some domain you know nothing about. This violates your understanding of how wealth accumulation and society works, so you think this story is a lie.

• Someone claims empirical research results that contradict your understanding of science. You assert that that person’s results are fake before even looking at them.

The reason that I always hesitate is because of the asymmetric incentive structure of challenging a claim with no knowledge and only your convictions. There are four possible positions to be in in this situation: the correct claimer, the incorrect claimer, the correct challenger, and the incorrect challenger. In my opinion, here are how society tends to view these positions:

Correct claimer: +1 aura, you made a correct claim that some naive person challenged.

Incorrect claimer: -5 aura, you fell for some misinformation somewhere or were clouded by your biases.

Correct challenger: +2-5 aura, what a beast for calling out BS when you see it. The amount of aura should additionally strongly correlate with how little you know about the original claim, because that means your priors and convictions were very powerful, but unfortunately in my experience that is typically not the case.

While most planets were accidentally empirically discovered, the planet Neptune was famously first mathematically predicted based on irregularities of Uranus’ orbit before it was empirically observed, and the story of Neptune’s discovery is thus retold far more than the discovery of all the other planets. I think the aura gap between the discovery of Neptune and other planets should be similar to the gap between making a claim and successfully challenging that claim based on nothing but your convictions.

Incorrect challenger: -100 aura. What a naive fool whose worldview was so limited he could not believe this fact that was presented to him. A conspiracy theorist might scoff at someone who thinks the US government has an innocent past. An entrepreneur may scoff at a wagie who can’t fathom making money that easily. A practitioner may scoff at a stubborn nerd with an incomplete view of the world.

Indeed, I’ve scoffed at the naive challenger many times in my life, and often rightfully so. Sometimes, days or weeks later I’ll be thinking of what a clown a naive challenger was. That’s why its -100 aura.

Encouraging More Challengers

A successful challenge is the mark of someone with high conviction in an accurate world view. Naturally, if we want to encourage more successful challengers, we may want to encourage more challengers, so in addition to increasing the upside of a successful challenge, we may want to demand that society lowers the downside of being an incorrect challenger. To foster more challenges, should society reward a correct challenge with +100 aura and an incorrect challenge with -1 aura?

People actually already have a method to mitigate the risk of becoming the naive challenger by hedging with irony or detachment. They will say, “hahaha I don’t know if that’s true dude” or “@grok is this true?” However, there’s no reward without risk. When people hedge with irony or detachment, they lower their risk to minimal aura loss, but they cap their upside to minimal aura gain as well. After all, they did not best the claimer in a successful challenge based on their superior convictions; they merely bested the claimer by having greater access to knowledge aided by the internet. It is not a challenge but merely a second claim.

I don’t think lowering the risk of being a naive challenger would actually increase the amount of conviction that goes around; it would only increase the amount of “@grok is this true” NPCs who have outsourced their critical thinking skills to the internet while role-playing as skeptics and original thinkers.

Conviction In Real Life

Let us now move beyond the scope of winning petty arguments. Silicon Valley has correctly noticed that having high-conviction founders is a good thing. The high upside for successful founders has obviously been taken care of via riches.

But parts of Silicon Valley have also made quite an effort to lower the risk of being a high-conviction founder regardless of whether the conviction is correct. The most prominent example of this is probably certain teams and orgs in big tech companies that claim they offer a start-up environment within the security of a big tech company. There is also a strain of VC that claims that no founder is worthy of criticism no matter how silly the idea is.

I think it’s great if everyone has more conviction, but risk is inherently part of conviction. If you try to remove the risk, you don’t get conviction. You instead get more of the equivalent of “@grok is this true” slop in human form.

For example, being a college dropout used to come with high risk and thus was associated with a high-conviction founder, but nowadays with VCs ready to fund and valorize anybody in the arena trying things, a 20-year-old Stanford or Ivy League dropout founder is more likely to just be an annoying person making an AI note-taking app.