About us
This meetup started in 2015 as a group for people in the Philadelphia area who were concerned with the current political turmoil in America, but who also felt that the prevailing liberal-vs-conservative political paradigm is unnecessarily limiting our ability to think rationally about politics & search for policy solutions. Since we shifted to mostly online meetups in 2020, we've opened the group up to people everywhere. If you like to talk politics but you've got some moderate or unconventional views that leave you feeling out of place at most of the activist groups, party meetings & political rallies in your area, this meetup is for you!
However, if your political views put you on the far left or far right of the political spectrum - i.e. you're a Marxist, anarchist, "woke" left-wing identitarian, fascist/ethno-nationalist, Islamist, Black Hebrew Israelite, Christian fundamentalist, etc., or sympathetic to these positions - please go elsewhere. Also, if you consider yourself a moderate Republican or moderate Democrat but your views are just generic talking points you've gleaned from listening to Fox News & Tucker Carlson or MSNBC & The View, this group is not for you. It may seem uncharitable to exclude people, but from past experience our discussions just don't work very well with these folks, since they tend to be close-minded and see all of our problems as the result of only one of our political parties - i.e. they're not even remotely "agnostic".
"Political Agnosticism" is a term I came up with back in 2015 to represent a non-dogmatic approach to politics that acknowledges uncertainty and the validity of multiple perspectives, and looks for practical solutions without worrying about adherence to an overarching political ideology. The purpose of this agnostic, skeptical & free-thinking approach is to avoid treating politics as a "culture war" based on group identities or a clash of "political religions" based more on devotion to a party than knowledge of the issues. Instead, when we cover a political issue, we look at what experts in various disciplines know (and don't know) about it, tease out the ethical implications, note the tradeoffs between different policy approaches, and then look at potential solutions that encompass everything we've learned.
The only political values that are prerequisites for members are a belief in civility & tolerance towards those we disagree with, a belief in traditional civil liberties like the freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of association, and the right to privacy, as well as respect for institutional norms like separation of church & state, academic freedom, press freedom, government transparency, due process, judicial impartiality, and free & fair elections. These principles of an "open society" form the preconditions for the existence of a non-partisan political forum like ours.
Our general approach to politics is based on a concept we've borrowed from another organization, the Circle of Reason, called "pluralistic rationalism" – i.e. a personal commitment to reasoning, regardless of one's worldview. We start by assuming that reasonable people can differ in their cores values, whether it's framed as a preference for freedom vs security, tradition vs progress, individualism vs communitarianism, meritocracy vs egalitarianism, patriotism vs cosmopolitanism, etc. However, this approach is also premised on the belief that we should all commit to following the rules of logic & evidence-based reasoning. "Pluralistic Rationalism" is based on 3 tenets: (1) Factualism (as opposed to Denialism) for sourcing knowledge, (2) Skepticism (as opposed to Dogmatism) for vetting knowledge, and (3) Moderation (as opposed to Emotion) for expressing knowledge. To learn more about "pluralistic rationalism", see the Circle of Reason's website: http://www.circleofreason.org/
We are committed to creating a space for non-partisan political discussion based on intellectual honesty, mutual respect & civility. That means adopting the conversational principles of charity & good faith, avoiding name-calling, and trying to understand the best arguments that can be made for each side.
The goals for this meetup group are as follows:
(1) We try to understand why people - including ourselves - are predisposed by inherent psychological traits, cultural milieu & life experiences to have different moral intuitions & political orientations. We generally use a mix of the Big Five personality traits & Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, as well as Dan Kahan's work on "cultural cognition".
(2) We look at moral philosophy to try to better understand how moral axioms logically connect to one another and form ethical systems like deontological ethics, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and contractarianism. We examine how these ethical systems form the basis for political philosophy, legal philosophy, and normative theories in the social sciences.
(3) We try to increase our level of rationality by learning how to spot logical fallacies, cognitive biases, flawed statistics, and various forms of groupthink. We often look to the bloggers of the "rationalist community" (e.g. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, Julia Galef, Spencer Greenberg, Stefan Schubert, Zvi Moshowitz, Ozy Brennan, Sarah Constantin), the board members of the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), as well as the hosts of the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast (Steven Zuber, Eneasz Brodski, Katrina Stanton, Jace Dickey). We could also include "rationalist-adjacent" bloggers like Tim Urban (Wait But Why), Samuel Hammond (Second Best), Matthew Adelstein (Bentham's Bulldog), Jack Despain Zhou (Tracing Woodgrains), as well as data journalists like Nate Silver & Nate Cohn, tech gurus like Paul Graham & Vitalik Buterin, and scholars like Daniel Kahneman, Philip Tetlock, Keith Stanovich, Scott Aaronson, Nick Bostrum, John Nerst, Sabine Hossenfelder, and Zeynep Tufekci who've promoted a similar style of detached, analytical thinking & strategic forecasting.
(4) We try to educate members on both the fundamentals and the latest research from the social sciences, and we discuss how this relates to current events & trending political topics. Aside from looking at academic research, a lot of our reading material comes from data/explainer journalism sites, econ & policy blogs, as well as the major public intellectuals & pundits from across the political spectrum.
(5) We try to imagine alternative types of political & economic systems that could provide better outcomes for the future based on both theory & empirical data. This often involves looking at various "maps of the policy landscape" like the Cato & Fraser Institutes' Human Freedom Index, SPI's Social Progress Index, the Economist's Democracy Index, the UN World Happiness Report, and others, even as we acknowledge the way their limitations, particularly the way they try to quantify qualitative factors that are often vague or inherently subjective.
(6) As part of our effort to break away from the narrow range of ideas represented by the two major political parties, we often look at constellations of ideas that could be described as syncretic, contrarian or heterodox. This often involves looking to intellectuals who've resisted the major populist & identitarian currents on the left and right, such as the scholars associated with Jonathan Haidt's Heterodox Academy, Peter Singer's Journal of Controversial Ideas, Keith E. Whittington's Academic Freedom Alliance, and Yascha Mounck's Persuasion.
(a) For critical insight on trends within conservatism, we often refer to conservative pundits who've criticized the GOP's ideological capture by Trump, e.g. David French, Sarah Isgur, Jonah Goldberg, Charles Sykes, Kevin Williamson, Anne Applebaum, Bret Stephens, George Will, Mona Charen, and other writers at sites like 'The Dispatch' and 'The Bulwark'. Also of interest are the Obama-era "reformicons" (e.g. David Frum, Yuval Levin, Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, Ramesh & April Ponnuru, David Brooks, James Pethokoukis) who tried to steer the party more towards the interests of the middle & working classes in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, only to end up politically homeless when Trump took over the GOP. (Note: I specifically didn't include some neocons like Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Stephen Hayes, Liz Cheney, etc., since they've never appeared to modify their hawkish foreign policy views in light of the disastrous Iraq War they championed.)
(b) For critical insight on trends within libertarianism, we often refer to "cosmopolitan libertarians" (a.k.a. Beltway libertarians) at the Cato Institute & its "liberaltarian" offshoot the Niskanen Center, the GMU economics department (e.g. Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabbarock, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, Russ Roberts, Walter E. Williams, Arnold Kling), the members of the '200-Proof Liberals' blog - successor to the now-defunct 'Bleeding Heart Libertarians' blog (e.g. Jason Brennan, Chris Freiman, Kevin Vallier, Matt Zwolinski, Jacob Levy, Steve Horwitz, Sarah Skwire), as well as the 'Fifth Column' podcast (Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, Matt Welch) and writers at the magazine 'Reason' (e.g. Nick Gillespie, Robby Soave, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Ilya Somin, Eugene Volokh), and the anti-Trump libertarians at the new Substack 'The UnPopulist' (e.g. Shikha Dalmia, Cathy Young, Trevor Burrus, Aaron Ross Powell, Berny Belvedere, Radley Balko). The debates within Gene Epstein's Soho Forum and the Cato Institute's 'Cato Unbound' blog (although the latter is now defunct) are good venues for seeing the clash of ideas between libertarians & non-libertarians. (Note that I've excluded the paleolibertarians at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the objectivists at the Ayn Rand Institute, and the left-libertarians at the Molinari Institute & C4SS since they seem to be more siloed in their echo chambers - although I'm fairly open to revising this opinion.)
(c) For critical insight on trends within progressivism, we often refer to liberal & centrist journalists who've criticized the biases of legacy-media outlets from within (e.g. Jonathan Chait, Adam Gopnik, George Packer, Graeme Wood, Damon Linker, James Bennet, Caitlin Flanagan, Megan McArdle, Pamela Paul, Josh Barro, Conor Friedersdorf, Jonathan Rauch, Shadi Hamid) and those who've moved to independent platforms like Substack (e.g. Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Emily Yoffe, Freddie deBoer, Matt Taibbi, Jesse Singal, Katie Herzog, Zaid Jilani, Lee Fang). Many of these people signed the open letter against cancel culture in Harper's magazine back in July 2020. Left-leaning scholars who've broken with the progressive orthodoxy on some key issues (e.g. Camille Paglia, Kathleen Stock, Anne Applebaum, Mark Lilla, Scott Galloway, Richard Reeves) also fit into this loose intellectual cluster, as do the advocates of the "Abundance Agenda" (e.g. Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, Steven Teles, Jerusalem Demsas, Marc Dunkelman, Binyamin & Yoni Applebaum, Misha Chellam).
(d) For critiques of trends within both conservatism & progressivism, we often look to the scholars at the Heterodox Academy (e.g. Jonathan Haidt, John Tomasi, Nadine Strossen, Musa al-Gharbi, Lee Jussim, Phil Tetlock, Scott Lilienfeld, Alice Dreger, Allison Stenger, Nicholas Christakis, Eric Smith, Sean Stevens, Yascha Mounck, Eric Kaufmann) and the moderate "enlightened centrist" faction of what used to be called the "Intellectual Dark Web", e.g. Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sarah Haider, Douglas Murray, Claire Lehmann, Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, and the various other writers & editors at media outlets like 'Quillette' and 'Areo Magazine' (although the latter is now defunct). Some other heterodox pundits like Bill Maher, Razib Khan, Richard Hanania, Meghan Daum, Debra Soh, Melissa Chen, Meghan Murphy, Konstantin Kisin, Michael Shellenberger, Freddie Sayers, Winston Marshall, Bari Weiss, Nellie Bowles - as well as other writers at 'Unherd' and 'The Free Press' - could be considered the successors to the IDW. (Note I've excluded some of the former IDW members like Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, Brett & Eric Weinstein, and Maajid Nawaz since they appeared to go off the rails amid the COVID pandemic & 2020 election due to "audience capture" and knee-jerk contrarianism. I've also excluded Joe Rogan due to his interest in pseudoscience & conspiracy theories, and Ben Shapiro is excluded because he seems more like a garden-variety conservative pundit.)
(e) For critical insight on trends within the emerging "bipartisan populist" sphere, we may refer to some members of the new think tank 'American Compass' (e.g. Oren Cass, Chris Griswold, Abigail Ball), writers at Julius Krein's journal 'American Affairs' (e.g. Michael Lind, David P. Goldman, Joel Kotkin), the strange bedfellows at Sohrab Amari's magazine 'Compact' (e.g. Edwin Aponte, Patrick Deneen, Matthew Schmitz, Geoff Shullenberger, Alex Gutentag, Adam Lehrer, Michael Tracey), so-called "reactionary feminists" who criticize both unrestrained capitalism & the sexual revolution (e.g. Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, Nina Power, Helen Andrews, Ashley Frawley), and several "post-left" writers formerly affiliated with the "Dirtbag Left" (e.g. Amber A'Lee Frost, Angela Nagle, Aimee Terese, Oliver Bateman, Malcolm Kyeyune). We could also refer to the 'Breaking Points' online news show headed by Krystal Ball & Saagar Enjeti (with co-hosts Emily Jashinsky & Ryan Grim; and their former 'Rising' co-hosts Kim Iversen & Batya Ungar-Sargon), Glenn Greenwald's post-Intercept output (e.g. the 'System Update' podcast), the writers at 'The Liberal Patriot' blog (Ruy Teixeria, John Halpin, Michael Bahareen), as well as some of the journalists at the socialist magazine 'Jacobin' who are partly sympathetic to populism (e.g. Jennifer Pan, Dustin Guastella, Paul Prescod). This loosely defined intellectual space is still evolving from conversations between anti-woke "class-first socialists" and "post-liberal conservatives" and is less ideologically coherent right now, although it has similarities to earlier Third Way ideologues like producerism and communitarianism. In some cases, figures in this movement have taken positions at odds with the core tenets of classical liberalism, but the left-right dialogue seems to be moderating some of their stances. (The comedians-turned-pundits Jimmy Dore & Russell Brand might fit into this space, as would Tucker Carlson, but I've excluded them as they've all promoted conspiracy theories so - like some of the former IDW members I listed above - they don't help us toward a rational view of politics. There's a similar problem with Anna Khachiyan & Dasha Nekrasova's 'Red Scare' podcast - they're too uninformed on policy & prone to knee-jerk contrarianism for shock value. The "MAGA Communism" guys have a similar problem.)
-- The common feature among all of the new media projects & public intellectuals listed above is that they are openly critical of intellectual blindspots & bad ideas coming from both the left & right, although most of them are not always *equally* aware or critical of problems on both sides of the political spectrum.
(7) In order to do our part combatting political polarization, we borrow ideas from a range of organizations that are currently working on enabling mutual understanding & civil dialogue, such as David Blankenhorn's Braver Angels project, Frank Burton's Circle of Reason, Alexandra Hudson's Civic Renaissance, Liz Joyner's Village Square, Joan Blades' Living Room Conversations, John Gable's AllSides team, David Nevins & Debilyn Molineaux's Bridge Alliance, Lisa Swallow & Kareem Abdelsadek's Crossing Party Lines, Tim Dixon & Gemma Mortensen's More In Common project, David Brooks's Social Fabric Project (a.k.a. Weave), Michael Smerconish's The Mingle Project, Charles Wheelan's Centrist Project (now called "Unite America"), Irshad Manji's Moral Courage Project, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), and others.
Upcoming events
6
HxA Event: "Can We Think Clearly About AI?"
·OnlineOnlineEvent Title:
“Can We Think Clearly About AI?" with Michael InzlichtHow to Watch:
This online event is FREE, but you need to be a member of Heterodox Academy to register to get the Zoom link:
https://heterodoxacademy.org/events/can-we-think-clearly-about-ai/Event Topic:
Join us for Heterodox Academy’s Brown Bag Colloquium Series, a virtual seminar series designed to highlight the scholarship and thought leadership emerging from our community.This colloquium will feature Michael Inzlicht, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, presenting his latest research on the moralization of AI.
Can We Think Clearly About AI?
Artificial intelligence draws an unusual kind of opposition. People resist it even after they are shown it works, and they resist it across wildly different uses, from generating art to giving medical advice. Pragmatic worry cannot explain that pattern. Michael Inzlicht argues that a meaningful slice of AI opposition is moral: a conviction that using AI is wrong, full stop, not merely impractical. In four studies, he and his collaborators found that AI is moralized in news headlines at levels rivaling vaccines and GMOs; that most people who oppose AI say their view would not budge even if the benefits grew and the risks shrank; that this opposition behaves like a single general attitude rather than a set of application-specific judgments; and that earlier moralization predicts refusing a useful AI tool months later, at real personal cost. Moralization makes a person ignore evidence, forgo benefits, and treat an empirical question as a settled verdict. If we want to evaluate AI honestly, we first must notice when we have stopped evaluating it at all.
This colloquium offered exclusively to HxA members on June 30, 2026 at 2:00-3:00 PM EST will include time for audience discussion and Q&A. Register today to join the conversation.
About the Speaker:
* Michael Inzlicht is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment as Professor in the Department of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management. He is also a Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology & Society. He completed his B.Sc. in Anatomical Sciences at McGill University in 1994, his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at Brown University in 2001, and his postdoctoral fellowship in Applied Psychology at New York University in 2004. He has published more than 180 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and edited two books, with his work cited over 34,000 times. His research has been featured in major media outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, NPR, The Washington Post, BBC News, The Globe and Mail, TIME, Forbes, and Science, among many others. His research and teaching have been recognized with the Carol and Ed Diener Mid-Career Award in Social Psychology, the Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize, the ISCON Best Social Cognition Paper Award, and Professor of the Year. He has also been recognized as among the top 1% of most-cited psychologists in the world for four consecutive years (2022-2025). He co-hosts the podcast Two Psychologists Four Beers and writes the Substack newsletter Speak Now Regret Later.About the Event Host:
The Heterodox Academy (HxA) is a nonpartisan collaborative of thousands of professors, administrators, and students committed to enhancing the quality of research and education by promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning. It was founded in 2015 by Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, a Georgetown University law professor, and Chris Martin, an Emory University sociologist.To learn more about their mission, go to https://heterodoxacademy.org/our-mission/
1 attendee
FAIR Event: "Canada's Free Speech Crisis"
·OnlineOnlineThis event is FREE, but you must register at the link below, at which point you'll be given a link to the Zoom event - https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_8Rr-MiHcSGOOXbEaqcIUPA#/registration
NOTE: This webinar will be electronically recorded on video and audio (only panelist faces/voices will be shown and heard, not attendees). By accepting this invitation and attending the webinar, participants consent to the recording and to FAIR's use of the recording in a manner consistent with the law.
The recording will also be available to view immediately after the webinar. Please check our social media platforms to find that. (Within FAIR's YouTube channel, go to the “live” videos section to find their webinars.)
EVENT DESCRIPTION:
Canada shares our values, our language, and our legal traditions — yet free speech there is under pressure in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. FAIR Advisor Lisa Bildy of the Free Speech Union of Canada will walk us through the landscape: who’s being silenced, who’s pushing back, and the cultural pressures that are reshaping expression north of the border. Join us for a candid look at what’s happening in Canada and why it matters for all of us.ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Lisa Bildy graduated from Western Law School in 1993. She practiced as a trial lawyer with a small litigation firm, before taking an unexpected hiatus to raise and homeschool her sons. As she was gearing up to return to full-time practice in 2017, she learned that the Law Society of Ontario was mandating lawyers to sign a Statement of Principles, undertaking to promote Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in all aspects of their lives, as a condition of practicing law. Believing it was not for a regulator to dictate lawyers’ principles or force them to become activists for a particular worldview, Lisa led a successful campaign to elect a slate of 22 lawyers, who were committed to repealing this requirement, to the law society’s governing board. They won with top votes.
Lisa then worked for two years as a staff lawyer with the Calgary-based Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, before resuming her private practice known as Libertas Law, where she focuses on defending civil liberties and individual freedoms. Lisa is also a member of the Board of Advisors of FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, and is an elected bencher (governor) of the Law Society of Ontario.ABOUT THE EVENT HOST:
This is an online event hosted by FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing civil rights and liberties for all Americans, and promoting a common culture based on fairness, understanding and humanity.FAIR was founded in 2020 and boasts an impressive board of advisors that includes psychologists Jonathan Haidt & Frederic Luskin, legal scholars Nadine Strossen & Robert P. George, sociologist Ilana Redstone, political scientist Wilfred Reilly & Shadi Hamid, and journalists Angelo Eduardo, Jonathan Kay, Michael Shellenberger, John Wood Jr., and Andrew Sullivan.
For more info about FAIR, check out their website at https://www.fairforall.org/about/
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