Why Is This Blog Called “The Elbow”?

(Other than elbow.substack.com being ripe for the picking)

For a shorter, updated version of this post, click here.

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At time of writing, there are two primary reasons behind the name of this blog—though I suspect more will emerge in time. The first is Peter Elbow.

I first heard about Dr. Elbow when I was training to become an English teacher. At some point in the course of a required teacher research project (I studied the use of games in the classroom), my program’s English faculty director suggested that I check out an essay titled “The Believing Game,” by Peter Elbow.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this essay has changed my life.

The Believing Game

Full disclosure: I’ve read hardly any of Elbow’s work beyond “The Believing Game”—perhaps too little to justify crowning him my blogfather. (The little I have encountered, I’ve very much enjoyed, and I hope to review one of his books in a future post.)

“The Believing Game,” however, contains multitudes in its thirteen pages. It’s not that Elbow is making a highly provocative claim in the essay (others have used different language for similar concepts). There’s just something about the time and place his ideas found me, and the particular way he expresses them, that has permanently shifted the way I think about thinking. The believing game is an unusually creep-y metaphor: a frame with the capacity to expand into many unexpected corners of our lives.

While I recommend reading the essay in its entirety (link in second paragraph), for now I’ll settle for quoting liberally from it and explaining how I hope the excerpts will guide the ethos of this blog.

The believing game, Elbow writes, can be defined “most easily and clearly by contrasting it with the doubting game” (2). What is the doubting game? As Elbow explains, it’s a little more nuanced than skepticism for its own sake:

The doubting game represents the kind of thinking most widely honored and taught in our culture. It’s sometimes called “critical thinking.” It's the disciplined practice of trying to be as skeptical and analytic as possible with every idea we encounter. By trying hard to doubt ideas, we can discover hidden contradictions, bad reasoning, or other weaknesses in them—especially in the case of ideas that seem true or attractive. We are using doubting as a tool for scrutinizing and testing ideas.

In contrast, the believing game is the disciplined practice of trying to be as welcoming or accepting as possible to every idea we encounter: not just listening to views different from our own and holding back from arguing with them; not just trying to restate them without bias (as Carl Rogers advocated); but actually trying to believe them. We are using believing as a different tool for scrutinizing and testing ideas. But instead 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. Often we cannot see what's good in someone else's idea (or in our own!) till we work at believing it. When an idea goes against current assumptions and beliefs—or if it seems alien, dangerous, or poorly formulated—we often cannot see any merit in it. (2)

Let’s start with (I think) the obvious objection: Isn’t “the believing game” just glorified trolling, or both-sidesism, or the usual crap used to justify perpetuating harmful ideas?

To be fair, the believing game may at first glance appear similar to devil’s advocate. There are, however, a few crucial distinctions between the believing game as I understand it and the normal implications of “devil’s advocate”:

1. First, rather than a kind of reflexive contrarianism, the believing game is a voluntary and selective version of entering into an alien viewpoint. (It is a game after all—one that personally, I prefer not to play with, you know, QAnoners and Nazis…)

2. Second, the believing game is not only about engaging the ideas of one’s intellectual opponents but also about extracting value from those that simply seem kooky, confusing, or half-baked.

3. Third, the believing game emphasizes the perspective of the listener, rather than that of the speaker. (More on the importance of this later.)

The believing game provides a number of benefits that the doubting game cannot (and vice versa), many of which I won’t have time to cover here. At a general level, though, observe that the doubting game offers the promise of reasoning our way to the right answer by process of elimination: We reject inferior solutions until we are left with the one that optimizes for our desired outcome, or at least outperforms the rest. This is a wonderful approach when information about a problem is plentiful, and it lends itself to great clarity and confidence in decision-making

Sadly, most important issues (and a lot of unimportant ones) just aren’t that simple: There are too many variables, too many feedback loops, too many instantaneous and unpredictable interactions, for us to ever tease apart and measure them all. This is where the believing game comes in. As Elbow puts it, “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)” (9). Faced with a thorny policy question, after all, or a crossroads in our own lives, it is hardly acceptable to throw our hands up and object that we don’t have enough data to reach a conclusion.

The believing game offers a radically different method by which to seek truth: not by rigorous separation of the epistemic wheat from the chaff, but by planting the seeds of strange ideas and letting them grow (perhaps trimming them down later with skepticism!). This approach should be familiar to anyone who has marshaled an initial stroke of inspiration, or a messy brainstorm, into a polished final product. It’s certainly an approach I had in mind as I wrote my first post (i.e., letting faith in a squishy, speculative concept guide me to explore disparate examples of metaphors)—and one I hope to employ again in the future.

Psychologically, what I love most about the believing game is that it offers a permission structure not to worry so much about logical consistency. Although the believing game can never completely eliminate the fear of being wrong (or of being a hypocrite, or easily manipulable), it lowers the stakes by saying, “Hey, this is just the game I’m playing right now—it doesn’t mean I’m permanently abandoning my values.” It offers a framework for safe engagement with unusual or antagonistic ideas without saying we have to engage with them, let alone endorse them. As Elbow argues:

We haven’t learned to use belief as a tool—as we use doubt as a tool. That is, over 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. This separation that we made in the case of doubting will feel difficult in the case of believing. For the process of believing has caused enormous problems—and still does—while the process of doubting has born great fruit. Therefore, the process itself of believing feels tainted; our concept of belief tends to connote the decision to accept, that is, commitment. We tend to feel that believing can never be a part of careful thinking. (5)

But believing is a part of careful thinking. You’re allowed to be a real company (hu)man at work—someone sincerely devoted to the success of your organization—then come home at the end of the day and cynically rail against the corporate machine. You’re allowed to genuinely sympathize with a coal miner, or even a big oil executive, for struggling to adapt in a changing world, even as you call for an ever-faster transition to clean energy. In fact, I’d argue that a theory of change that fails to account for the experience of those two (or, in the work example, yourself) is less complete, and ultimately less likely to succeed, than one that does. This isn’t to say that the coal miner and the big oil executive are ultimately correct in their assessment of climate change—just that their subjective experience is valid, and should be factored into our political/economic calculus somehow.

To be clear, I’m not making a case for throwing doubt out the window. Skepticism is an essential part of the scientific method, and of any functioning democracy. Elbow again:

This is no argument against the doubting game in itself, since it obviously develops an indispensable dimension of intelligence or rationality. The only thing I’m arguing against is the monopoly of the doubting game in our culture’s notion of rationality or careful thinking—a monopoly that has led us to neglect a different and equally indispensable kind of careful thinking. (10)

So my hope for this blog is that it will popularize and expand on Dr. Elbow’s antimonopolistic project—not by abdicating all responsibility for critical thinking, but by going down some credulous rabbit holes of my own and encouraging others to do the same.

What I’m advocating for, really, is the smallest pause in the face of new ideas—a moment to observe which game we are playing and whether it is serving us well, before we fall back on habitual responses.

A Nudge Toward Better Discourse

The second reason for the name of this blog is truthfully more of an add-on to the believing game than a wholly separate category (at least in this initial application). Specifically, I’ve settled on “The Elbow” for its suggestion of a nudge.

A nudge, of course, is the pop-psych/econ concept popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which they define as follows:

[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. (6)

I am increasingly convinced that the believing game is something we should be trying to nudge toward as a society—both for the reasons I’ve already outlined, and for some that feel particularly salient to this cultural moment. More importantly, nudge theory offers an explanation as to why and how the believing game could have any large-scale, real-world impacts.

Nudging has been described by its authors as “libertarian paternalism”—by which Thaler and Sunstein mean a system that both respects individual choice and significantly influences behavior. To understand the relevance of this phrase to conversational norms, I’d suggest that you need only recall an example of a truly lively and productive difference of opinions in your own life—a stimulating seminar or workshop, perhaps, or a discussion with a close friend. (This in stark contrast to the average Facebook or Twitter fight, of course.)

My strong suspicion is that this conversation was not preceded by some libertarian appeal for unfiltered opinions; nor, I hope, were there paternalistic sanctions on what could and could not be said. Instead, I expect the experience was a desirable blend of the two: People could speak their minds freely but, because of the context, chose to do so with greater care and curiosity toward others’ perspectives. Something about the social environment encouraged the believing game. The challenge is just getting this to work with more than ten people…

Note, too, that “the believing game” is itself a kind of cognitive nudge—a little elbow at the ribs saying, Hey, what if we thought about disagreement this way instead?

Granted, perhaps it’s more like someone saying “Did you notice they stuck the junk food in a milk crate in the corner?” than it is like putting fruit at eye level. That is, simply by naming an alternative—by making our mental choice architecture more visible—the believing game encourages us to enter a different mode of thought than we would by default, at least some of the time. (For most of us, that “different mode” is the believing game. To be sure, though, there are plenty of credulous people out there—and virtually all of us as children—who need to be taught how to play the doubting game too; the two labels are for their benefit as well.)

I realize I’ve somewhat glossed over what the believing game actually looks and sounds like, so I’m going to take a short—ok, medium—detour here to define it more concretely. (I’ll circle back to nudges more explicitly at the end.)

Without evading this question too much, let’s first just grant that tone matters a lot in defining the two games: A phrase like “What does that mean?” can just as easily be inflected Please, tell me more! as it can What the hell are you talking about?

That said, there are also some general principles that typify the believing game. Elbow describes:

The doubting game is the rhetoric of propositions while the believing game is the rhetoric of experience…The believing game teaches us to try to understand points of view from the inside. Words can help, but the kind of words that most help us experience ideas tend to be imaginative, metaphorical, narrative, personal, and even poetic words.

But not just words. Images and sounds and body movements are particularly helpful for entering into alien ideas. Role playing—and yes, silence. When someone says what seems all wrong, the most productive response is often merely to listen and not reply at all. Teachers can productively insist on short periods of silence after a controversial point has been made. Not all cultures are so wedded to argument with its proliferation of words. In many cultures, silence is felt to correlate with good thinking. (11-12)

Perhaps, then, an imaginative, metaphorical, narrative example is in order to illustrate the believing game in action (again, the tie-in to nudge theory is less overt here, but it’s there if you look for it)…

Let’s say you find yourself on an airplane sitting next to a flat-earther—a fact he reveals to you after takeoff by pressing you on why, if the earth is so spherical, the horizon out the window appears flat.

Under the doubting game, you laugh in his face. You counter that the horizon only appears flat because the plane is not high enough for the earth’s curvature to be visible. You point out the immense preponderance of photographic evidence against his claim. You point out the numerous people who have circumnavigated the globe—as early as the 16th Century. You point out that every other celestial body (even ones we can see with our naked eyes, like the moon) is round. “I said the earth was flat,” the man snaps, cutting you off. “I didn’t say it wasn’t circular. It’s a flat circle, obviously, and the lizard people only want you to think it’s a sphere—they’re the ones who doctored up all those photographs. Think about it: Have you actually been to outer space? Have you yourself circumnavigated the globe? Wait a minute…You’re not a fucking lizard person, are you?”

Maybe you go back and forth like this for a while, but eventually you reach the inevitable conclusion: It’s just not worth it with this guy, a demonstrable nutjob who has clearly watched thousands of hours of YouTube on this topic. You’re certain he’s wrong, of course, but you haven’t done the requisite research to refute all of his ridiculous claims, as you (justifiably) feel this would be a colossal waste of time. Eventually you tell him you’ve had enough, jam on your noise-canceling headphones, and spend the rest of the flight broodily munching the six miniature Cheez-Its that came in your snack pack. (I realize I’m making a lot of assumptions about you here—sorry! If there are any current or former astronauts/circumnavigators in my readership, I would be absolutely thrilled to know about them.)

Now let’s run this scenario again with the believing game. Again, you’re under no obligation to play the believing game (nudges are not mandates!)—and maybe this example is so wildly beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse that you wouldn’t bother. But you’re never going to see this guy again, right? And as far as conspiracy theories go, flat-earthism seems…probably pretty benign? Plus admit it: A part of you is curious—not whether the earth is truly flat—but about the fact that people like this really exist, what kind of crazy mental gymnastics they must have to do to get through the day. So what the hell, why not! I think I’d probably do it, to be honest, if given the opportunity. At the very least, it would make for a much more pleasant and interesting flight than trying to debate a lunatic.

(If you’re not able to go there with flat-earthism, fair enough. Perhaps imagine the two versions with a more banal disagreement—whether it’s morally acceptable for plane passengers to recline their seats, say.)

Back to the believing game. “You're right,” you might concede to the flat-earther. “The horizon does look flat. Why is everyone so convinced it's curved?” Excited, he’ll proceed to tell you his whole grand theory, lizard people and all (it's probably so rare that anyone is actually willing to listen), and maybe, just maybe, since you’ve shown yourself receptive to his ideas, he’ll even open up about some of his uncertainties: the vulnerabilities in his arguments that would likely never have even occurred to you, but to which he is highly attuned because he spends so much time obsessing over this stuff. Or perhaps he'll contradict himself at some point; you’ll ask him to elaborate, of course—but kindly, with genuine curiosity—and that stumper will grow into a seed of doubt in his mind. You’re not going to persuade him then and there (he’s in too deep for that, and you’re just a stranger after all), but you’ve drawn him out the slightest amount, rather than pushing him deeper into his corner. If there are other round-earthers in his life he actually knows and trusts, at least you haven’t diminished the possibility of their reaching him. You may even have marginally improved their chances.

At this point, some readers may be calling bullshit. It’s invalid logic, these skeptics object, to construct a thought experiment, control all the parameters—and then, when the inevitable conclusion supports your position, cite it as evidence. Ok, yes: Under the rules of rationalist debate, I 100% agree. But my main goal in this example isn’t to argue against the doubting game—or, really, even to argue for the believing game. I’m just trying to characterize them in a way that rings true to experience, to help you see and feel the two modes more vividly.

Here’s Elbow on this point, one last time, with my favorite quote of the whole essay:

[S]uppose you are trying to get others to choose among options—that is, 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. (9)

In other words, we should be nudging toward the believing game not simply because it is gentler, or less crazy-making (although it is!)—but because it’s more strategic.

The doubting game, after all, is basically zero-sum: You win it by proving someone wrong, so every point one person scores is a loss for the other. The believing game can plausibly be positive-sum: You win it by forming a more complete mental model of the world, which is an objective both people can achieve simultaneously. Although persuasion is not the primary goal of the believing game, persuasion is often the valuable byproduct of a paradigm that encourages both parties to lower their guards and listen.

Think about it. You can usually tell pretty quickly whether someone is open to persuasion or not. If they are, this is a great time to employ the doubting game! But don’t forget that the believing game is a tool at your disposal, too, if you feel like you keep rehashing the same points, or have completely stopped hearing each other.

If someone is not persuadable, the doubting game will likely only piss both parties off and make them double down on their preconceived views—what’s the point? In contrast, the believing game offers the possibility of extracting some value from a would-be intellectual opponent: You might realize there are a few narrow conditions under which your core beliefs do not hold, for example. Or that there was a key piece of the puzzle you’d been overlooking—one which may not matter to those in your camp, but which matters a lot to the other side. In fact, if your only goal is to gain information, you might even selfishly withhold your own opinions while seeking to draw out as complete a picture of your conversation partner’s as possible. It is of no consequence, in this hypothetical, whether they leave the interaction any wiser than before.

Of course, in the real world, we (rightly) do care about persuading others—and sadly, this means entering into situations where others will make persuasion attempts of their own. It means a freer exchange of ideas. So, yes: I suppose this essay is ultimately an argument for more open debate across, and throughout, the political spectrum. But I’d like to think the believing game flips the usual free speech script (I have the right to say whatever the hell I want) in a way that promotes a legitimately more democratic discourse, rather than more yelling about who’s allowed to say what. The believing game reminds us to notice free speech’s artsier, less obnoxious cousin who was standing next to us the whole time—free listening: the right to choose whether or not I hear you out.

In economic terms, I’d argue that the believing game achieves an oft-cited goal of free speech—a healthier marketplace of ideas, in which the best ones (theoretically) win out—by making a demand-side intervention rather than focusing on supply. It nudges us to want to consume more alien perspectives rather than (de)regulating the perspectives themselves. It subtly rewards curiosity, rather than hot takes.

So how do we do it? How do we get people to play the believing game in greater numbers? What would a large-scale shift in the way we work through important issues look like?

Well, that’s obviously a huge, very relevant question, and the short answer is that I have no clue! (Hence my writing a blog to find out.) Per my main argument here, though, I have a strong hunch that success is likely to stem not from a relentless kumbaya offensive but from socially engineered—i.e., nudged—modes of engagement. Certain mediums (social media, cable news) definitely seem to discourage the believing game, while others (art, podcasts, narrative storytelling/journalism…Substack??) seem more conducive. Certain algorithms and cultural institutions seem better equipped to incentivize it, and certain leaders better at embodying it. If you have other ideas, let me know—I’m on the hunt ;).

Some important caveats before we close: First, it is hardly fair to expect everyone to choose the believing game in equal proportions; by definition, members of historically marginalized groups have already learned to live in a culture whose dominant perspective (white, male, straight) is not their own. Furthermore, some ideas—e.g., women’s suffrage, school segregation—are simply not up for debate, and never should have been in the first place. (I do realize this point may seem to push against my earlier flat-earth example. There, I’ve opted to stick with an extreme, silly scenario in order to dramatize the dynamics of each game, rather than ask the reader to approve my subjective determination of a “debatable” issue.) Finally, the audience for a conversation can, and should, factor into the decision about which game to play: Unlike a television interview, for example, a private, one-on-one believing game affords little risk of being taken out of context, or of being interpreted as a full-throated endorsement of the other person’s point of view. Private reading/consumption presents none of these risks at all.

Lord knows we need better discourse and problem-solving strategies right now. Despite real material progress in a few domains (e.g., child poverty—and vaccine development, of course), it’s hard to look around and not feel like something is very wrong. In addressing such complex issues, we need collective action; yet we find ourselves more polarized than ever. Naturally, this creates agonizing choices about the right course of action—about when to fight for our principles, for example, and when to come to the table and negotiate.

Of course, the believing game doesn’t tell us when to argue and when to listen/compromise. It cannot offer, as we seek to craft coherent policy out of multiple sources of truth, the perfect synthesis of science, economics, and realpolitik. But it provides a simple, useful tool with which to work through the chaos and cognitive dissonance: a nudge toward embracing a decision, and implementing it.

Ultimately, a choice architecture that encourages the believing game has the potential to effect a much-needed virtuous cycle in our politics and our daily lives.

TL;DR

“The Elbow” = 1. Peter Elbow + 2. Nudging.

Maybe this project is hopelessly naive, but I’d like to think the believing game, strategically bolstered by the insights of nudge theory, could help at the margins. It’s certainly helped me.

Thanks to Rachel for edits.

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