Somewhere around 2016, the smartest people I knew started saying increasingly stupid things.
These were folks who could parse dense academic papers, who understood reason, who were entirely capable of holding two competing ideas in their heads without their brains short-circuiting.
But something changed.
One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent. Another started treating political disagreement as evidence of moral corruption. A third began using the word "liberal" as if it was a personality disorder rather than loose coalitions of sometimes contradictory beliefs.
The common thread: their extreme positions got them more of what they wanted. The friend who saw conspiracies everywhere built a following. Then an audience. Then a 7-figure income stream. The one who tribalized every issue found a ready-made community that validated every prior. Etc, etc.
The incentive gradient was clear: sanity was expensive, and extremism paid dividends.
We talk a lot about polarization as if it were a disease that infected society, but we’re missing a key data point: polarization is a growth hack, and it works.
It delivers results.
When you pick a side and commit to it wholly and without reservation, you get things that moderate positions cannot provide. You get certainty in an uncertain world. You get a community that will defend you. You get a simple heuristic for navigating complex issues.
Above all: you get engagement, attention and influence.
The writer who says "this issue has nuance and I can see valid concerns on multiple sides" gets a pat on the head and zero retweets. The influencer who says "everyone who disagrees with me on this is either evil or stupid" gets quote-tweeted into visibility and gains followers who appreciate their approximation of clarity.
The returns on reasonableness have almost entirely collapsed.
Which begs the question: why resist? If extremism delivers what people want, maybe we should just let it run its course and stop clutching our pearls?
The problem is what happens when everyone optimizes for the same short-term wins.
You end up in a world where changing your mind becomes impossible because you've built your entire identity around being right. Where admitting uncertainty is social suicide. Where every conversation is a performance for your tribe rather than an actual exchange of ideas. You lose the ability to solve problems that don't fit neatly into your ideological framework, which turns out to be most important problems.
Someone who goes all-in on ideological purity might start with a few strong opinions. Then those opinions attract an audience. That audience expects consistency. Any deviation gets punished. So they double down. They have to keep escalating to maintain their position, finding new heresies to denounce, new lines to draw. They've locked themselves into a trajectory they can't escape without losing everything they've built.
They're prisoners of their own brand.
Scale this up and you get a society where nobody can back down, where every disagreement = existential, where we've lost the ability to make tradeoffs // acknowledge complexity.
The incentives push us toward positions that feel good but make us collectively stupider.
And you can't opt out by just accepting your side lost.
You're stuck in stupid-world too.
So how do you actually stay sane?
Start by diversifying your information diet in ways that feel actively uncomfortable. The goal isn't to agree with everything you read. You'll still think most of it is wrong. But exposing yourself to articulate versions of positions you oppose does something valuable: it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons. This sounds obvious when written out, but your social media feed has spent years training you to believe otherwise.
Second, practice distinguishing between stakes and truth. Just because an issue matters doesn't mean every claim about it is correct, and just because you've picked a side doesn't mean you have to defend every argument your side makes. The tribal logic says you have to accept the whole package, but that logic is selling you certainty you haven't earned.
Third, find (or at least, look for) communities that reward humility, not tribal loyalty. These are rare, but they exist. They're the group chats where someone can say "I changed my mind about this" without being treated like a traitor. They're the forums where "I don't know" is an acceptable answer. They're the relationships where you can test ideas without performing for an audience. You cannot be reasonable in isolation. You need a small group of people who value truth-seeking over status games, and you need to invest in those relationships deliberately.
That all sounds hard.
Is it worth it?
That’s an individual choice.
You'll lose: reach, influence, certainty, the comfort of being part of something larger than yourself.
You'll gain: the ability to think clearly, the capacity to update your beliefs when evidence changes, relationships based on something other than shared enemies, and the possibility of being right in ways that matter.
These trades won't feel equivalent. The losses are immediate and visceral. The gains are distant and abstract. When you refuse to join the mob, you feel it right away. When you maintain your ability to think independently, the benefits accrue slowly over years.
The discount rate on sanity is brutal.
But consider the alternative.
The people I knew who went all-in on extremism got what they wanted in the short term. Some built audiences. Some found communities. Some gained certainty. Most of ‘em made bank. But they're trapped by their earlier positions. They can't update without admitting they were wrong, and admitting they were wrong would cost them their community. They've optimized themselves into a local maximum they can't escape. They won the game by its current rules and lost something harder to quantify.
The world will keep offering you bad trades, will keep rewarding positions you know are too simple to be true. Every day you'll watch people cash in their nuance for influence. Every day you'll be tempted to do the same. The only defense is to remember that some things compound differently than others.
Extremism gives you a fast start and a ceiling.
Sanity gives you a slow start and no limit to how far you can grow.
Remember: the world only rewards insanity because we're measuring the wrong timeframe.
Check back in ten years.
