No, Really—Why Is This Blog Called “The Elbow”?
A second attempt
It’s now been over a year since I started this Substack (!), and I want to take another stab at explaining its name. This is partly because I’ve uncovered some reasons not tackled in my original treatment of the topic and partly because I’ve acquired a few new readers. Most importantly, I hope to create a shorter, more accessible overview that I can update as the blog continues to evolve.
Reason #1: Peter Elbow
Peter Elbow, PhD, taught English for many years and directed the writing program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He gained recognition for the publication of his first book, Writing Without Teachers, in which he detailed his own struggles putting words on the page and helped popularize freewriting. In an appendix essay in that book (my first and favorite introduction to his work), he also advocates for a practice he calls “The Believing Game.” As Elbow explains it: “[I]nstead of doubting in order to scrutinize fashionable or widely accepted ideas for hidden flaws, we use belief to scrutinize unfashionable or even repellent ideas for hidden virtues.” Put simply, the believing game (or methodological believing) is a much-needed complement to the dominant game in intellectual circles: rational skepticism.
Rational skepticism is great. If you had to choose between kneejerk credulity and kneejerk skepticism, I’d definitely recommend skepticism, lest you hop into the van of every stranger who offers you candy! Thankfully, you’re a grownup, and you don’t have to choose between the two. This is important. While rational skepticism is an essential feature of intelligence and of any functioning democracy, the believing game offers epistemic virtues that can’t be reached through doubt alone. The features below are, I feel, the greatest lessons of the believing game:
The doubting game needs the believing game — Good science starts with interesting hypotheses, and rational skepticism requires a claim to be skeptical of. Relying on observation, immersion, and imagination, the believing game helps us to generate ideas that are worthy of testing.
The believing game is more persuasive than the doubting game — Faced with counterevidence, most people tend to simply double down on their convictions. If we want to change minds, then, we need an alternative to pure reason—per Elbow:
[S]uppose you are…trying to persuade people who disagree with you. You will probably use the doubting game to show flaws in their arguments. Fair enough. But often (surprise!) they don’t change their mind and immediately agree with you. But you haven’t disproved their position, only their supporting arguments. They won’t change their position unless you can get them to see the issue the way you see it. For that, you need the believing game. Of course you can’t make them take the risk of playing the game—of actually trying to believe your position, even hypothetically and temporarily. But the believing game is inherently collaborative. You have no leverage for asking them to try to believe your position unless you start by taking the risk yourself of trying to believe their position. The best way to introduce the believing game is to play it and show that you’ve given a good faith effort to believe what they believe—even asking them to help you.
The believing game helps us make decisions — Just as we cannot easily persuade others by debunking their positions, we cannot easily persuade ourselves by arguing an issue back and forth in our heads. This, Elbow observes, is because “Most ‘real world’ practical problems or disputes are deeply hermeneutic—more like interpreting a text than getting the right answer in geometry. To show that a text truly means X does not displace the claim that it also means something quite contrary to X (even if only partly or in certain senses).” When we face such tradeoffs, when the data are noisy and full of contradictions, the believing game helps bring the right choice into focus. The bottleneck here was never a lack of information; it was a lack of vision.
The believing game is a game — With its low-stakes, even childish framing, the believing game offers permission to engage with alien ideas on our own terms: It’s your choice whether you play it, with whom, and for how long—nor are you in any way bound by the result. (Elbow: “[O]ver the centuries we learned to separate the process of doubting from the decision to reject. But we haven’t learned to separate the process of believing from the decision to accept.”) Have fun out there, kids!
Above all else, the believing game works with our minds rather than against them. This principle is illustrated by an analogy Elbow offers in Writing Without Teachers; here, he asks us to realistically imagine how we might identify a mysterious animal approaching from the distance:
It looks as though it might be a horse or a dog. Perhaps our list of alternatives is longer. But we have no special knowledge to draw on (such as whose field it is) and there is no other object nearby that settles the matter for us. Yet within 30 seconds or so we do know it is a dog and not a horse. What happened? Where did our knowledge come from?
In most cases it did not come from a negative testing such as, for instance, holding up some kind of picture of a horse and finding dissonance or contradiction. This is possible in some cases, of course: check it out for tail-behavior perhaps. But not what we usually do. In most cases it is a matter of trying to “believe”—in this case “see”—both dog and horse and doing better with dog. We don’t disprove horse, we affirm dog. We try to put ourselves into the object as horse and as dog, and we get ourselves further into it as dog. Subjectively, this is the experience of having it appear sharper as dog. When we try to see it as horse, it stays blurrier. I think we could say that we get more visual information when we consider it as dog than when we do as horse. We see more dog than horse. (162)
This is a very believing-game-y case for the believing game: one that persuades not by way of evidence and propositions but by saying, See, isn’t that how our minds work? In doing so, it invites us to introspect about our own cognition, showing us the subjective process of making a decision.
It also highlights, I think, a potential danger of believing: Once we get an idea in our head, we can get stuck on it. If, for example, I miscategorize the approaching animal as a horse from the start, I may start to systematically attend to its equine features and ignore its canine ones; I’ll stop trying to see it as dog. Yet how can we combat this bias toward confirmation, which is so baked into human nature? Again, counterevidence is no help—that’s the whole problem! You can’t just call me a moron and point out how small the oncoming “horse” is; or you can if you want, but realistically I’ll only double down and insist that it’s a mini-horse. A maneless, barking mini-horse, with very paw-like—okay, you know what? Leave me alone, you creep. Who gives a shit.
No, the most powerful tool we have against bad ideas is to replace them with a better, alternative model that reflects the true state of the world. We dispel confirmation bias not by negating the horse but by re-biasing people to confirm the real animal before them. By saying kindly but firmly, to ourselves and to others, Look at this dog:
Reason #2: Nudge Nudge
I’m assuming nudge theory has entered the culture enough that a full explanation of it is not necessary here. Below is the definition offered by its popularizers, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein:
Nudge (n.) — [A]ny aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.
I like the ethos of nudge theory and find it incredibly fruitful as a lens on human behavior; I also think it stacks really nicely on top of the believing game! As a habit of mind, after all, the believing game nudges us toward epistemic humility. As a decision protocol, it moves us out of deliberation and into action. And as a conversational style, it promotes freer speech through a voluntary norm of mutual respect—rather than insistence on the right to offend.
Other Reasons
These are a few other elbow-related associations that have emerged since I began this Substack:
Operations of Creativity — As the elbow guides the hand which throws, draws, or gestures, I'm interested in the mechanics of what happens before the critical act. [6/7/24 edit]
Reflexivity — I’m interested in automatic/habitual responses. [2/6/23 edit]
Elbow Grease — I aim to strike the right balance between pragmatism and optimism.
Elbow as Hinge — I’m interested in turning points/phase transitions. (See “Breaking Up the S-curve.”)
The Funny Bone — Let’s keep things weird, please!