Hire The Dissenters

There was a bit of a bombshell this week as uber-bestselling writer, podcaster, and speaker Malcom Gladwell gave a video mea culpa saying that he had, in the last few years, reversed his position on whether or not male-to-female trans athletes should be allowed to compete in the female category.

In this video, Gladwell is referencing his panel at the 2022 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference on transgender athletes. Gladwell says that he is ashamed of his performance on that panel because he allowed himself to be “cowed” and that, furthermore, if the panel were held today it would run entirely in the opposite direction*. What he is trying to say here is that the panel represented not the truth of the matter nor what people really believed about the topic but what they were supposed to believe and were pressured to believe.

Writer Tim Miller was dismissive of Gladwell’s portrayal, claiming that Gladwell (and other powerful and wealthy people) “said the en vogue thing then and they are saying the en vogue thing now.” This interpretation makes sense. Miller is essentially claiming that there is no courage to be found in Gladwell’s reversal, he is merely floating along with the tide. JK Rowling went a bit further, calling Gladwell a “weathervane… a man who’d have named names, but felt a bit uncomfortable about it afterwards.”

Stepping outside the specific critique of Gladwell, Megan McArdle relayed her experience in trying to write about Lia Thomas and how terrified everyone was when talking to her about things as innocuous as swim competition timing rules. She ticks off story after story about people who were terrified to say anything at all because they feared the cancel cops.

“I just said I was going to cover the race. People absolutely unloaded - not conservatives, who just rolled their eyes, but nice liberals who donated to Planned Parenthood and HRC. They would unleash unprompted rants about how unfair it was.

But none of them would ever say that publicly. They figured I was safe, because right-leaning columnist. They didn't want to be quoted, they were hiding it from a lot of their friends, and they were both afraid, and furious that they were afraid to state the *utterly obvious fact* that males have an athletic advantage.”

All in all, this is yet another instructive event that teaches us about how much people self-censor and how many people end up living by lies. And if this story were only about transgender athletes and self-censorship, I wouldn’t be writing about it here. My bigger concern is how this impacts institutional integrity, the wisdom of experts, and how we can build a world in which we can be confident we are able to find the truth.

We Need To Elevate Dissenters

At the tail end of Covid, I wrote a piece for the American Spectator called “Covid Aftermath: Repentance and Reconciliation”. In it, I leaned into a very Christian view of repentance as a model for reforming the relational bonds that had been broken during the pandemic. I think it holds up well.

The most important part of my vision is the “reconciliation” bit at the end in which I make a plea to elevate the dissenters.