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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:

1. The world is too complex to “pragmatically reason through” every single decision. To be effective, you need to take, and reuse, intermediate steps.
2. 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.
3. Another value of encouraging different people to have different narrower goals is enabling and organizing specialization.
4. Ideologies in practice are a complicated mix of means and ends. Our theory needs to account for this.
5. Ideology has downsides, and there’s many ways it interferes with good thinking. This is an actual big problem.
6. Good individual, and social, decision-making requires a balance of “idea-driven” and “pragmatic” modes. I propose a couple of solutions for what this balance concretely looks like.

Good decision-making in complex contexts always has “structure”

Imagine that you are trying to improve how you play chess. In chess, there is a common rule of thumb: a queen is worth nine pawns, rook is worth five pawns, and a bishop or knight are worth three pawns. Thus, a rook plus a pawn for a bishop and a knight is an ok trade to make, but a rook for a knight is not.

This insight has many implications. If you are trying to come up with good tactics in chess, one place to look is to find ways to use your knight to “fork” two of your opponent’s stronger pieces: two rooks, or a rook and a queen, etc. Your opponent is forced to accept your knight eating one of the two strong pieces, in exchange for being able to eat the knight (a weaker piece) right after.

White to move. Knight to f7 is a good move, but you need to know the “knight = 3 pawns, rook = 5 lawns” rule to easily recognize it as such.

Here, “queen = 9 pawns, rook = 5 pawns, knight = bishop = 3 pawns” functions as a generator of further downstream ideas: it’s an insight that you can start with that is much more likely to generate effective tactics than searching completely randomly. We can think of that statement as being an “ideology”. Since pieces on the board in chess are called material, let us overload an already-overloaded term and call this ideology “materialism”.

One could imagine someone who disagrees with materialism, either partially or fully. Often, sacrificing material is okay in service of positional goals, such as exposing the opponent’s king or claiming the center of the board. The value of material can also be context-dependent. In an endgame, I’ve found that single knight is worth more than a single bishop, whereas two bishops are worth more than two knights. If your opponent has one bishop left, pawns might be worth more if they are on squares of the opposite color to that bishop. A person whose approach to chess tactics focuses on exploiting these situations might call themselves a “positionist”.

Positionists and materialists may disagree on practical issues, such as whether or not to trade two pawns for a bishop in a situation like this:

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