I often type “who” instead of “how.” As I was fixing that typo in a sentence today, I realized that the replacement of who with how is a thread that connects many ideas that resonate with me.
Take Nullius in verba, the Royal Society’s Latin motto translating to “Take nobody’s word for it.” At a time when society was still ordered by rank, a group of elites began to see themselves as “experimental philosophers” and chose a motto stating that, at least when it came to science, how a claim could be demonstrated was more important than who pronounced it.
Later on, Karl Popper made the switch explicit in the field of politics. The question, he argued, is not “Who should rule?” but “How can we develop our political institutions in such a manner that even incompetent and dishonest rulers cannot do too much harm?”1
Naval Ravikant’s observation that truth-seekers take feedback from reality, while consensus-seekers from other people is another instance of the difference between following the who and focusing on the how.
That’s not to say that “who” should always be ignored. When you trust a “who”, you are using them as a proxy for the “how” behind their claim. Even the Royal Society ran on trust between its gentleman members, but that trust wasn’t an innate characteristic. It had to be earned and could be lost; it was based on a track record of detailed experiments, public trials, and witnesses. A “who” goes bad when they are given authority that cannot be revoked: when the “how” behind it becomes immune to criticism.
Progress happens when we move from who to how: from authority to good explanations. But beware. Nothing guarantees the process will continue in one direction only. The ideological capture of editorial boards at various scientific journals and academic institutions is proof of that: a “how” that can no longer be criticized. The replication crisis is the result of a system that over-indexed on the “who” with not enough care for the “how” behind it. Balaji Srinivasan’s exhortation to value independent replication over prestigious citation offers a way out, or, rather, a way back to the original values promoted by the Royal Society.
Adopting a how-over-who attitude offers no certainties; it will only show you where you were wrong, again and again. That’s how we make progress. The work is never over, and it starts every day with revoking the authority of the loudest “who” of all: our ego.
See the What Does the West Believe in? 1958 lecture from the In Search of a Better World collection for the quoted formulation, then Popper’s magnum opus The Open Society and Its Enemies for the detailed argument.