Keep your identity small - Paul Graham

Software guru and venture capitalist Paul Graham's essays are on my must-read list. Here's an excerpt from his latest,  Keep Your Identity Small

I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. [¶¶]

... The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you. ...

Read it all. The comments are interesting too; one commenter insightfully observed:

It's amazing to me how often suffering comes from saying "I am X", therefore "I am negated if X is negated". The converse is also true: it's amazing how much more freely one can live when one doesn't do that.

Graham offers an example of a (theoretical) minimalist professional identity:

A scientist isn't committed to believing in natural selection in the same way a bibilical [sic] literalist is committed to rejecting it. All he's committed to is following the evidence wherever it leads.

Where religion is concerned, we could do worse than to adopt, as our minimalist identity, the Summary of the Law that Jesus stressed. Regular readers know I usually paraphrase the Summary; my latest version is, "face the facts, try to take delight in them, and seek the best for others as you do for yourself."

Comments

[Fraulien]

I think it is a good point that science is supposed to be objective. If you read some of the research on this, you find that is not necessarily true. People who call themselves "scientists" have their own set of underlying presuppositions. Dr. Jonathan Haidt has done some very interesting work at the University of Virginia demonstrating this. The book, The Closing of the American Mind by Bloom also demonstrated that there is a big reinforcement in academic circles for "new and different" when it came to publishing.