Frame-Appliers vs. Frame-Examiners

Inquisitors and Heretics

There’s a certain type of Substacker and writer who is incredibly productive. They may write two long articles every week. They’re constantly putting out new pieces and yet, when I read their work, very little of it contains genuinely new ideas.

What they’re doing—what they have to do to maintain that kind of output—is adopting a single framework for interpreting the world and then applying that framework to everything they encounter. They have something to say about every news event. They have something to say about what President Trump is doing today, about what “the woke” are doing in the universities, about the conflict in Gaza, and any other hot topic that enters the collective consciousness. Every time a new event occurs they have a take on it because they’ve got a stable interpretive lens they can run it through.

These people are what I’m going to call frame-appliers.

The Frame-Examiner

There’s another type of author who typically doesn’t write as much. They post occasional long-form pieces, maybe with more frequent short comments and audience engagements. These are people who work between frames, who I’d call frame-examiners. I would, for example, put Scott Alexander and Erik Hoel in this camp.

I feel a certain amount of visceral unease toward frame-appliers, and it doesn’t really matter what kind of frame they’ve adopted. I’m just viscerally repelled by them. This includes political pundits like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk, as well as pundits on the left like Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur. Political pundits are always frame-appliers—they adopt a political frame (often accompanied by a religious or metaphysical one) and then apply that frame to every new phenomenon. That’s why they always have something to say about everything.

Why They Bother Me

My unease with these people isn’t about their particular ideology. It’s become clear to me that even when I agree with them about some issue, the manner in which we hold our beliefs is very different. They know they’re right because they have the Truth with a capital T. I am willing to say what I believe not because I know I’m right, but because I think that we should always feel free to adopt provisional frames and advocate for them, even while knowing that they are potentially going to be modified or replaced later on.

I’ve been trying to do some soul-searching about exactly what bothers me with these types of people, and I think it’s this: frame-appliers are an actual, existential threat to people like me. They always have been and they always will be, and it doesn’t really matter what the particular frame they’ve adopted is because any frame that gains enough cultural power to enforce itself will do so. Even the apparently peaceful religious ideologies of Christianity and Buddhism will persecute heretics when they get enough power.

I’ve felt this threat directly, especially in the university setting. I was punished in certain classes for not adopting the prevailing frame. In that context it was always a left-wing frame because that’s the frame universities (and the political activist professors) always endorse and apply. But if it had been a conservative or religious frame, I would have had the same problem. The only essay assignments I ever failed in college were in classes where I disagreed with the frame being enforced—once as an undergraduate and again more recently for a class required to obtain my teaching license.

When frame-appliers become attached to their frame, it stops being provisional. It becomes dogma. And once it’s dogma, they are compelled to enforce it. The frame-appliers always pose an implicit threat toward people who work between frames. Our job is to compare frames, disrupt them, discard them, and build new ones out of the rubble. And in the process, we inevitably violate the dogmas of whatever frames are currently dominant within the culture.

If the people who hold a particular frame have enough cultural power, they will punish you for disrupting it. They always do. Taken to the extreme, frame-examiners are always heretics. Taken to the extreme, frame-appliers are always inquisitors.

Envy

I’ve wondered whether part of my unease is just unconscious envy. I certainly don’t feel envious, but maybe it’s just under the surface of conscious awareness. After all, frame-appliers are often more conventionally successful than frame-examiners. Pundits very often build huge followings, and they seem to do so through rhetoric rather than real intellectual engagement. The reason why can be explained through Dan Williams’ idea of rationalization markets: people will pay you to tell them what they want to hear, to argue for the frame they already hold. They’ll give you money, attention, and status if you do it well.

That’s why pundits—and frame-appliers more broadly—can be extremely successful. They’re selling high-quality rationalizations, and that has much more broad appeal than trying to sell a provisional attempt to frame reality anew.

But I don’t think envy explains my reaction. I don’t want to do what pundits do. I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to—not necessarily from lack of ability, but from a fundamental temperamental difference. Working within a single frame would bore me to death.

No, my visceral unease comes from recognizing the implicit threat that frame-appliers always pose to people like me. The pundit and the inquisitor are really the same type of person. They always hate the heretic, and will punish them if they have enough cultural power to do so.

In our own society, we’re fortunate that the rule of law prevents literal burnings at the stake. But I’ve seen the visceral hatred frame-appliers have for those who challenge them. I saw it in the university setting among left-wing activists. I have never been treated more poorly in my life than I have by fellow students who saw that I did not hold their political and moral framework. Some professors, too, treated me with clear hostility for the same reason. If they could have punished me more severely than they did, they would have. They simply didn’t have the power.

The same is true on the right, although they only gained back some real cultural power pretty recently. I think Donald Trump is a pathological bullshitter and a buffoon, and I’ve seen how Trump supporters respond to that view. They have no hesitation about socially punishing someone who sees their worldview as stupid or pathological. The energy is the same. These are the frame-appliers, and they are always a threat to people like me.

I have never in my life felt compelled to punish someone who simply disagreed with my views about something. I don’t care if they are holocaust deniers, Marxists, race baiters, or whatever. I would certainly promote consequences for harmful actions, but never for beliefs. It’s taken me a lifetime to gain some understanding of the psychology that underlies punishing people for what they believe—it’s just so different from how I feel, and from how I view the world.

Kuhn’s Normal vs. Revolutionary Scientist

We can see this difference in Thomas Kuhn’s famous distinction between normal science and revolutionary science. The normal scientist adopts a paradigm and applies it to new phenomena, working to extend and refine it. Anomalies are either ignored, denied, or absorbed into the existing paradigm with as little disruption as possible.

The revolutionary scientist, on the other hand, works between paradigms, attempting to create new syntheses and frameworks that incorporate anomalies without distorting or denying them. Historically, revolutionary scientists have often been treated with contempt by their “normal” counterparts.

Alfred Wegener, who proposed the theory of continental drift (which became the foundation of modern plate tectonics), was ridiculed for decades before the evidence for seafloor spreading vindicated him. Einstein faced similar resistance: hundreds of scientists publicly signed objections to his theory of relativity. As Einstein dryly noted, “If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”

This same temperamental divide—between the applier and the examiner—shows up everywhere: in science, in politics, in religion. It’s a real, deep-rooted difference in how people relate to ideas.

The Threat Goes Both Ways

The frame-applier poses a threat to the frame-examiner, but the inverse is also true. Frame-examiners are an actual threat to the psychological and social stability of the frame-appliers. We disrupt their sacred beliefs. They identify with those beliefs, and in challenging the beliefs, we are challenging their identity. If the frame we are challenging is the dominant frame within a culture (as Christianity was dominant in Europe for all of the middle ages), then the heretic is also posing a real threat to social stability.

Peterson and Flanders explored this in their 2002 paper on complexity management. The world is far too complex to comprehend in its entirety. We adopt frames to simplify it. Those frames aren’t just mental conveniences; they guide our actions and shape our lives. They provide psychological and behavioral stability. Cultures adopt shared frames to promote cohesion, predictability, and cooperation more generally.

When someone disrupts a frame, they disrupt not only an intellectual structure but an entire way of life. This means that the heretic—the frame-examiner—is a real and actual threat to the frame-applier.

I know which side of that divide I fall on. What about you?

Marguerite Porette was burned alive because she claimed that the soul could attain total union with God, rendering the Church and moral law irrelevant.

Joan of Arc was burned alive because she claimed to hear the voices of saints, experienced trance-like states, and refused to submit to clerical judgment.

Agnes and Huguette, known as the “Waldensian Women”, were burned alive for unauthorized preaching and doctrinal dissent.