Against Prefacing Opinions with Lengthy Reassurances about your Core Values and Credentials

I'm not saying what I'm not saying

Math has a reputation for being epistemically airtight, and for having enforced standards of brevity. If you’re trying to prove something, you just say it bluntly and directly, and avoid inundating the reader with warnings beforehand¹. Outside of math however, when someone holds a defecting opinion, caution and diplomacy (if not silence) get overrated relative to concision and directness.

For an example, there’s this annoying habit among writers of preambulating with lengthy reassurances about their core values and credentials. Suppose you write an article criticizing BLM or whatever. There's an unspoken rule that it has to start like this:

“I once supported BLM. I believe the acronym represents a truthful statement. I have an unblemished record when it comes to racial justice. I have black friends. I listen to rap, and I take extensive notes while doing so. However, what I'm about to say might shock you: I no longer support BLM, for the following reasons...”

This ritual has several spin-offs and subgenres; see also:

• “I've always been a staunch supporter of X, but here's why X has gone too far.”

• “Here are all the reasons Y is evil and bad, but look at me defending Y because I’m so principled.”

• “As a once card-carrying member of my tribe, here’s an opinion that falls anywhere within the range of what you would expect to what you wouldn’t.”

I think of this as the loading screen of opinion articles. If this isn’t coming across, here are six real-life examples: Example #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6

I vow never to do this. It must be tiring.

Why writers do this

I think writers follow this unfortunate template for at least one of the following reasons:

1. They want to establish credibility with their audience.

2. They're afraid of being mischaracterized, especially when defying consensus.

3. They love talking about themselves.

Let's address the merits of each of these.

1. They want to establish credibility with their audience.

This reason is the most sympathetic. It calls to mind a former Westboro Baptist Church spokesperson who was deradicalized, in part, by an unlikely friendship with an Orthodox Jew who she had harassed online:

As the friendship developed, so did their theological discussion. Each challenged the other, the conversation becoming more nuanced as they quoted Biblical sources in a never-ending battle of the wits.

“I had an answer for everything,” Phelps-Roper said. “And if I didn’t, I could just go to a senior member of the church and they would have an answer ready for me.”

And then one day, silence.

...

“David [Abitbol] asked me a question I couldn’t answer,” she said.

It was about supporting the death penalty for homosexuality, and it hit close to home. Phelps-Roper’s older brother was born out of wedlock, and if her mother had been appropriately punished for that sin, she would never have had a chance to repent – and Megan Phelps-Roper might not have been born.

For two years, Phelps-Roper maintained that silence, as she struggled internally with that, and then more questions.

Eventually, she couldn’t deny it any longer, and decided that she had to pack up and leave the church — and effectively, almost her whole family.

There's a subtle, “only Nixon could go to China”-kind of lesson to this story: people are more effectively deradicalized when they share common ground with whoever's trying to deradicalize them. Surely Abitbol – someone observantly and knowledgeably religious – is a more qualified savior for an indoctrinated zealot than, say, a militant atheist-type who could never reach them. If he's pleading with religious extremists, it might make sense to emphasize his religious credentials and status as “one of the gang”.

I consider this an exception; wanting to execute gays is so extreme that only wackos disagree. Opinion pieces aren’t written to try and reach these people, and you need to break emergency glass for them, because it takes such a rare intersection of circumstances to get to that point. The rest of us, when we're on on the wrong side of history, end up there due to circumstances that are quite ordinary (like growing up in a very traditional community, not having the right education, not having free will, stuff like that). Thus, we should be persuadable using reason, without appeals to “cred”.

In some societies, the lunatics run the asylum, and disagreement on political third rails might subject you to unhinged pushback. The US is like this with Social Security, Canada is like this with language politics, Israel is like this with the peace process, the US is like this with Israel, etc. But in each of the above cases, the polity is so unhealthy that no amount of prostrating will let you get away with challenging consensus. If you criticize Israel, for example, it makes no difference whether you put an obligatory foreword affirming that Hamas are evil and that you're not anti-Semitic and that you believe Israel has a right to exist etc etc etc.

2. They're afraid of being mischaracterized, especially when defying consensus.

Reconsider some hypothetical criticism of BLM. Opposition to BLM is coded as right-wing, because of the right's association with tradition, hierarchy, dismissal of identity politics, and sometimes outright white nationalism. If one is criticizing BLM from the left, it might then be clarifying to say “btw, I'm not right-wing”, so that readers don't jump to conclusions. Throw in that they have the right to exist for good measure.

Alternatively, we could not jump to conclusions in the absence of various caveats specifying what the writer isn’t saying and what kind of person they aren't. Opinion pieces aren’t poetry – reading one should be sufficient to explain it without much room for interpretation, and I don’t need to know anything about the life of the author. Obviously the audience shares some blame for being overly imaginative about the values and character of opinionated people – “you think X? Well, that means you must be Y!”² is a boilerplate accusation we’ve all been on the receiving end of. However, we shouldn't elevate this to an expectation by preempting it again and again.

On principle, I object to setting myself apart from “those people”, even if it helps clarify what I’m saying to impatient listeners. This is common of preambles to unconventional opinions, often crossing some dehumanizing lines. I can’t be the only one who’s uncomfortable treating the opposition like the unpopular kid who gets excluded from the treehouse, taking every possible opportunity to remind the world I’m not one of them.

Further, this ritual implies that my opinions need to be validated through a background check, which is just belligerent to the idea of free inquiry. I suppose when you share controversial opinions, you’re ipso facto trying to broaden the range of acceptable views. But how you go about it – being overly tentative, surrendering to the pathologically ungenerous, starting every article with the equivalent of a land acknowledgment about your beliefs – can backfire and actually narrow the range. Imagine defending the Central Park Five on the factual question of their innocence, and opening with “I don’t support attempted murder or rape, but I think they were wrongfully convicted”. The second part is all that matters, and the first is a reminder of how much the class is in thrall to its worst students.

It doesn’t even accomplish anything. Freddie DeBoer, forever cursed to be misunderstood, is on the front lines of this war, patiently explaining his background and beliefs regarding mental health and social justice issues at the start of so many pieces. It still can't prevent people from making wild, unsupported assumptions about him, a frequent theme of his work despite best efforts.

3. They love talking about themselves.

Increasingly, statements of opinions are never just statements of opinions – they also double as autobiographical statements. This is who I am, these are my values, I don't think this, but, nevertheless, here's why I think that, etc. Respectfully, articles shouldn’t read like a writer interviewing himself, and I’m against subjecting readers to a whole psychoideological profile before cutting to the chase.

Let's allow for the fact that, to monetize their opinions, it's useful for writers to also market their personality and life experience. Therefore, they may feel reasonably compelled to talk about themselves alongside their ideas, so this should not, ceteris paribus, invite accusations of self-obsession. That said, it's quite clear that we invest too much in who a writer is, when instead their ideas should have primacy. We see this in selectively-enforced rules about who we're allowed to read, what debates we can weigh in on, and what art we're allowed to make, especially when entangled with resentment politics.

The kinds of people who are drawn to Substack tend to already agree that a writer's background shouldn’t disqualify them from commenting on sensitive issues. I'd go a step further and move to greatly reduce the salience of writers’ identities, since ideas are much more interesting than people. I tend to gravitate towards writers for their skill at writing, and while life experience plays into that, I literally didn’t ask for their whole life story.

When somebody accuses Freddie of having never been institutionalized, sure, it’s an effective rebuttal that he was, in fact, institutionalized. But an alternative one is that it just doesn't matter. The question of whether his lived experience supports his conclusions is distracting, because his arguments are supposed to support his conclusions.

By prefacing their opinions with all of the reasons they have permission think that way, writers redirect the crosshairs to themselves. This allows audiences to revoke that permission, and the writer's background becomes fairer game as a target of attack. While some surely prefer it this way as an opportunity to further talk about themselves, this only helps perpetuate the cycle, feeding into an already narcissistically confessional culture. Readers are less likely to question or weaponize a writer's background in the absence of personal details, so the only sensible course of action is to starve them of that information, taking it off the table altogether.

If you would like to take a stand against excessively autobiographical writing, policing of permissible opinions, and appeasing the unreachable, defer to this simple template from now on:

Title of Opinion Piece

Preamble explaining how you have no relevant credentials, no lived experience, and no permission whatsoever to comment on such a sensitive topic. Further explain how, in the past, you've held totally contradictory views on this topic, or else no views at all.

(A few paragraphs concisely explaining your argument. QED.³)

1. Vaishnav Sunil’s “Just fucking say it!” comes with my wholehearted endorsement.

2. Call these X_2 andY_2, to distinguish them from earlier variables.

3. In math, proofs sometimes conclude with the “tombstone” symbol, which has an unusually descriptive name for something that’s just a black square (∎).