10 September 2026

Note

Article 6 — Where Does the Error Go?

How binary debate turns bad decisions into bad peoples

This series began with a simple suspicion: what if the two doors are themselves part of the problem?

In Article 1, I questioned the Oxford architecture: Proposition or Opposition, Yes or No, one door or the other.

In Article 2, I asked what happens when Israel and Palestine themselves are compressed into those two doors—and whether the motion had already smuggled conclusions into the words Israel, never, truly, peace, and Palestine.

In Article 3, the Popperian correction followed: defeating one explanation does not make its designated rival true. Winning the debate is not solving the problem.

In Article 4, I pushed the Backspace Key further: perhaps the most important intellectual achievement is not choosing more intelligently between the available doors, but discovering that another door can be built.

In Article 5, Intelligence Is Not Rationality, the question turned toward the debaters—and toward ourselves. Brilliant people can become exceptionally good at defending conclusions they should abandon. Rationality begins when criticism is allowed to change not merely our arguments, but our position.

Now comes the question that has been waiting underneath all five articles:

When something goes wrong, where does the error go?

A government makes a disastrous decision.

A leader lies.

A military operation fails.

A terrorist organization commits an atrocity.

A political movement protects a destructive doctrine.

An institution becomes corrupt.

Those errors have addresses.

But binary politics has an extraordinary capacity to make the error travel:

Decision → Government → Political movement → Nation → Religion → Civilization → People.

Suddenly Netanyahu becomes Israel.

Hamas becomes Palestine.

A failed Israeli policy becomes evidence about what Israelis are.

A Palestinian atrocity becomes evidence about what Palestinians are.

The decision disappears.

The mechanism disappears.

The responsible actors disappear.

And millions of human beings inherit the error.

This is not better accountability.

It may actually protect the people and institutions that should have been criticized.

Article 6 therefore introduces one of the questions at the heart of The Open Correction Framework:

Where does the error go?

The rule I propose is demanding precisely because it must apply to everyone:

Do not allow an error to travel farther than the evidence permits.

Protect the person.

Criticize the explanation.

Locate the decision.

Test the institution.

Replace the ruler when necessary.

And send the error back to the place where it can actually be corrected.

Because perhaps one of the most dangerous transformations in politics occurs when we stop saying:

Something they did was wrong.

and begin saying:

There is something wrong with them.

Article 6 — Where Does the Error Go?
How binary debate turns bad decisions into bad peoples.

Article 6 Where Does the Error Go?

How binary debate turns bad decisions into bad peoples

A government makes a bad decision.

Where does the error go?

That question sounds almost too simple.

But I have come to think that it is one of the most important questions in politics.

A policy fails.

A leader misjudges.

A military operation produces catastrophe.

A peace proposal is rejected.

A settlement is built.

A terrorist organization attacks civilians.

An institution protects the wrong incentives.

A population elects someone who makes matters worse.

Something has gone wrong.

Now comes the decisive question:

Where does the error go?

Does it travel back into the decision?

Into the assumptions behind it?

Into the explanation that justified it?

Into the institution that produced it?

Into the incentives that protected it?

Into the leader responsible for it?

Or does it travel somewhere else?

Into the party.

Into the nation.

Into the religion.

Into the ethnicity.

Into the civilization.

Into the people.

The Oxford Union debate on the motion “This House Believes Israel Never Truly Wanted Peace with Palestine” provides an unusually vivid laboratory for watching this movement happen.

The debate is ostensibly about peace.

But beneath it lies another question:

What happens to political error after it is discovered?

Too often, the answer is that it moves.

And when error moves to the wrong place, accountability disappears with it.

Start With the Decision

Suppose Benjamin Netanyahu makes a decision that undermines a negotiated settlement.

The first analytical task should be straightforward.

What was the decision?

What problem was it supposed to solve?

What assumptions justified it?

Who supported it?

Which institutions enabled it?

What consequences followed?

Could it have been reversed?

What criticism was available?

Why did that criticism fail?

That is a demanding investigation.

But notice what happens if the analysis instead becomes:

Netanyahu made this decision

→ therefore Israel did this

→ therefore Zionism wants this

→ therefore Israelis want this

→ therefore this reveals what Israel has always wanted.

A difficult explanatory problem has suddenly become very easy.

Too easy.

The particular decision has disappeared inside a collective category.

The same error occurs in the opposite direction.

Suppose Hamas commits an atrocity.

The relevant questions should concern Hamas:

its doctrine;

its leadership;

its strategy;

its organization;

its supporters;

its institutional environment;

its decisions;

the conditions under which its power expands or contracts;

and the mechanisms by which it can be constrained or replaced.

But political argument can move rapidly through another chain:

Hamas

→ Palestinian politics

→ Palestinians

→ Arabs

→ Muslims

→ civilizational essence.

Again, the decision disappears.

The explanation becomes the people.

That is not better accountability.

It is less accountability.

When “Israel” Becomes the Decision-Maker

The Oxford motion itself encourages this slippage.

It asks whether Israel ever truly wanted peace.

But Israel is not a single decision-maker operating continuously across almost eight decades.

Governments changed.

Coalitions changed.

Prime ministers changed.

Public opinion changed.

Wars changed political calculations.

Peace movements rose and declined.

Israeli institutions sometimes constrained governments and sometimes enabled them.

Israeli citizens disagreed profoundly.

One opposition speaker challenged exactly this compression, asking what “Israel” means in such a motion. Another asked who Israel was in the image of Israeli soldiers removing a Jewish settler from Gaza in 2005: the government ordering the withdrawal, the soldiers carrying it out, the citizen resisting it, or the political public that had produced these incompatible positions?

That question should have changed the architecture of the debate.

Instead, the debate continued.

Why?

Because binary argument requires stable collective nouns.

Proposition needs an Israel to accuse.

Opposition needs an Israel to defend.

Once the teams exist, complexity becomes inconvenient.

“The Government Is a Mirror”

The opening speech offered a particularly clear example of how this happens.

Arwa Al-Reyes said that by Israel she meant not only its government but also the political project, institutions, and public attitudes producing governments, adding that a government is not an accident but “a mirror.”

There is something important in this claim.

Governments do not descend from the sky.

They emerge from institutions, elections, political culture, coalitions, interests, historical experiences, and public opinion.

To analyze a government without analyzing the society and institutions that sustain it would be inadequate.

But a mirror is also a dangerous metaphor.

A government is not a perfect reflection of a people.

Electoral systems distort.

Coalitions aggregate.

Institutions constrain.

Voters choose among limited alternatives.

Citizens vote for bundles of policies.

People abstain.

Minorities lose.

Governments act against public opinion.

Public opinion changes.

Political entrepreneurs shape the choices that voters receive.

If government becomes simply “the mirror,” error can move from:

governmental decision

to:

collective character.

That is exactly where analytical discipline must intervene.

Decisions Have Addresses

A decision has an address.

Someone proposed it.

Someone authorized it.

Someone implemented it.

Some institution permitted it.

Some explanation justified it.

Some alternatives were rejected.

Some critics objected.

Some mechanisms made reversal easier or harder.

That is what makes decisions so useful analytically.

They can be criticized.

They can be located.

They can be compared.

They can sometimes be reversed.

They can teach.

Collective essences cannot.

What does one do with the explanation:

Israelis are like this?

Or:

Palestinians are like this?

Or:

Arabs are like this?

Or:

Jews are like this?

Where is the Backspace Key?

What institution should change?

What policy should be repealed?

What doctrine should be criticized?

Which incentive should be redesigned?

No answer follows.

The explanation may generate anger.

It generates very little correction.

The Opposition Does It Too

This problem is not confined to Proposition.

Several opposition arguments moved from particular Palestinian organizations or historical choices toward much broader claims about Palestinian or Arab political rejection.

Einat Wilf framed a sequence of Israeli peace initiatives and Palestinian refusals as evidence of a recurring political choice. Han Mazik developed a much broader account in which pan-Arab nationalism denied the legitimate sovereignty of non-Arab peoples across the region. Emily Schrader similarly emphasized Palestinian and Arab rejection of Jewish sovereignty as a major explanatory continuity.

Each of these claims may contain important historical mechanisms worth examining.

But the same rule must apply.

Which actor?

Which decision?

Which doctrine?

Which institution?

Which year?

Which leadership?

Which constituency?

Which alternative existed?

Which criticism was available?

Without that disaggregation, a sequence of decisions can harden into:

Palestinian rejectionism.

Then into:

Arab rejectionism.

Then perhaps into:

what they are.

That is where explanation becomes protected from history.

Error Becomes Identity

The danger is greatest when a failed decision becomes attached to an identity.

Consider the transformation:

A Palestinian leadership rejects a proposal.

This may be a terrible decision.

Or a defensible one.

Or partly both.

It should be investigated.

But if the conclusion becomes:

Palestinians reject peace,

the error has migrated.

Future Palestinians inherit it.

People who did not participate in the decision inherit it.

Critics of that decision inherit it.

Children inherit it.

Opponents of the leadership inherit it.

The decision becomes identity.

The same happens when an Israeli government’s settlement policy becomes:

Israelis want expansion.

Or when a Zionist thinker writes something a century ago and the statement becomes:

this is what Zionism essentially is.

Once an idea is converted into essence, later criticism has nowhere to go.

History becomes destiny.

That should alarm any Popperian.

Popper’s Better Route

Karl Popper gives us another route.

Human beings are fallible.

Their explanations are fallible.

Their institutions are fallible.

Their decisions are fallible.

The political problem is therefore not how to identify the pure people and defeat the impure people.

The political problem is:

How can bad decisions be discovered and corrected without destroying the people who made them?

That is one of the deepest achievements of the Open Society.

A government fails.

Replace the government.

A law fails.

Repeal the law.

A policy fails.

Change the policy.

An institution protects error.

Reform the institution.

A theory fails.

Abandon the theory.

This architecture performs an extraordinary moral and epistemological separation:

The person does not have to die because the idea was wrong.

And:

The people do not have to lose political standing because the government failed.

Error is routed into correctable objects.

That is civilization.

The Binary Trap Reverses This

Binary political argument often reverses the process.

It begins by constructing sides.

Once the sides exist, every decision acquires team significance.

A criticism of an Israeli decision becomes ammunition for Proposition.

A criticism of a Palestinian decision becomes ammunition for Opposition.

Now the question is no longer:

What was wrong with this decision?

It becomes:

Whose side does this error help?

That is a profound degradation of criticism.

The individual error loses its address.

The side acquires it.

The Wrong Error Route

The bad route looks like this:

Decision

↓

Political side

↓

Collective identity

↓

Historical essence

↓

Moral indictment

Suppose a decision is wrong.

By the end of this route, millions of people can carry its burden.

And something even stranger occurs.

The original decision-maker may escape serious criticism.

Because attention has moved elsewhere.

How Collective Blame Can Protect Leaders

This is one of the most counterintuitive consequences of misplaced criticism.

Suppose someone says:

Israeli policy X is wrong because Israelis are inherently expansionist.

The claim sounds severe.

But analytically it may protect the politicians responsible for policy X.

Why?

Because if the cause is the people, then the leader is merely expressing the people’s essence.

There is little institutional correction to design.

The explanation has moved beyond politics.

The same is true if Hamas violence is explained by saying Palestinians are inherently violent or rejectionist.

Now Hamas becomes almost inevitable.

Its doctrines, funding, leadership, strategic choices, rivals, institutional protections, and failures disappear behind a collective explanation.

Collective condemnation can therefore produce less individual accountability, not more.

This matters.

A good explanation should make correction more precise.

A bad one often spreads guilt until nobody specific can be corrected.

Protect the Person, Criticize the Explanation

The principle I increasingly return to is:

Protect the person. Criticize the explanation.

That does not mean protecting people from responsibility.

A person who commits a crime should be accountable.

A politician who abuses power should be removable.

A commander who violates law should face investigation.

A leader who makes catastrophic decisions should be judged for those decisions.

But criticism should travel toward what can be corrected.

The purpose is not to destroy the carrier of an erroneous idea.

It is to prevent the idea from becoming protected.

That requires separating:

person

from:

conjecture

from:

decision

from:

institution

from:

identity.

Binary debate tends to recombine them.

David Deutsch and Explanatory Reach

David Deutsch adds another important test.

A good explanation should be hard to vary.

“Israelis are expansionist” is easy to vary.

So is “Palestinians reject peace.”

Whenever contradictory evidence appears, the category can be stretched.

Peace movement?

An exception.

Violent faction?

Representative.

Moderate leadership?

Tactical.

Hard-line leadership?

Revealing.

A flexible collective explanation can survive almost anything because the unit of analysis is too large.

A decision-level explanation is more vulnerable.

It must explain:

why this decision;

by these actors;

under these conditions;

with these consequences.

That is harder.

Good.

Explanations should risk being wrong.

The Invisible Reality Behind Decisions

This does not mean stopping at the visible decision.

The decision is the entry point.

Behind it lie invisible explanations.

A leader chooses settlement expansion.

Why?

Security?

Ideology?

Electoral coalition?

Religious claim?

Strategic bargaining?

Institutional inertia?

Economic incentive?

A Palestinian organization chooses violence.

Why?

Doctrine?

Power competition?

Perceived strategic success?

Absence of credible alternatives?

Foreign patronage?

Revenge?

Political legitimacy?

The visible decision is generated by invisible explanations.

That is where criticism must travel next.

But notice the direction:

Decision

→ explanation

not:

Decision

→ people.

This is the difference between analysis and stereotyping.

Brett Hall’s Preservation Principle

Brett Hall’s principle—Do not destroy the means of error correction—gives this issue an institutional dimension.

Some responses to error make future correction harder.

If criticism of Israel becomes indistinguishable from hostility toward Israelis or Jews, critics and defenders can retreat into identity protection.

If criticism of Hamas or Palestinian political decisions becomes indistinguishable from hostility toward Palestinians, the same thing happens.

Now error correction is trapped.

People defend policies because they believe their identity is being attacked.

Opponents attack identity because they believe ordinary policy criticism is insufficient.

The mechanism feeds itself.

That destroys one of the most important means of correction:

the ability to criticize a decision without placing the person’s political or human standing on trial.

The Right to Be Wrong

There is a political principle hidden here.

People must possess the right to make bad political decisions without those errors becoming evidence that the people themselves are illegitimate.

This is a principle I have encountered repeatedly in thinking about Kurdistan.

Bad Kurdish politicians are not an argument against Kurdistan.

They are an argument against bad Kurdish politicians and against institutions that fail to correct them.

The same logical discipline must apply universally.

A bad Israeli government is not by itself an argument against the political standing of Israelis.

A bad Palestinian leadership is not by itself an argument against Palestinian political standing.

Otherwise politics becomes an impossible entrance examination.

Only peoples capable of producing perfect governments would qualify for agency.

No people would pass.

Responsibility Without Collective Innocence

There is an opposite danger here.

One might hear this argument and conclude:

Then nobody is collectively responsible for anything.

That does not follow.

Institutions can produce recurring patterns.

Public attitudes matter.

Political cultures matter.

Electoral majorities matter.

Social movements matter.

Doctrines can become widespread.

Citizens may sustain harmful institutions.

Collective action is real.

But collective explanations should be constructed, not assumed.

They require mechanisms.

How does a belief reproduce?

How does a policy survive elections?

How is dissent punished?

What institutions protect the error?

What incentives reward conformity?

What proportion of the public supports it?

What alternatives exist?

How does that support change over time?

A collective explanation becomes legitimate when it explains how individual and institutional decisions are generated and reproduced.

Not when the collective noun substitutes for the explanation.

From Blame to Architecture

This changes the question we ask after failure.

Instead of:

Who are the bad people?

ask:

What architecture produced the bad decision?

Was criticism possible?

Could dissenters speak?

Could the leader be removed?

Could the policy be reversed?

Were alternatives available?

Did the institution learn from previous failure?

Did identity protect the doctrine?

Did fear make criticism costly?

Did an external enemy strengthen internal hard-liners?

These are questions capable of producing correction.

Moral judgment still matters.

But judgment now has an address.

The Enemy Can Route Your Errors

The Israel-Palestine conflict adds another complication.

One side’s actions can change where error travels inside the other.

A terrorist attack can make criticism of Israeli security policy harder because dissent becomes associated with weakness.

A settlement expansion can make criticism of Palestinian maximalism harder because compromise becomes associated with naivety.

Each side can unintentionally help protect the other’s worst explanations.

The enemy becomes an architect of domestic error-routing.

This is one reason prolonged conflicts become so difficult to correct.

External threat reorganizes internal criticism.

The question:

Is this policy working?

becomes:

Are you with us or against us?

Once that happens, identity begins protecting decisions from criticism.

That Is the Institutional Test

This is why my question is not merely rhetorical.

Where does the error go?

It is an institutional test.

If error can travel upward:

from citizen to official;

from official to policy;

from policy to institution;

from institution to doctrine;

from doctrine to constitutional architecture;

then a society has Backspace.

But if error is always routed downward:

into minorities;

dissidents;

opponents;

foreigners;

ordinary citizens;

entire peoples;

then the system is protecting itself.

The direction of error tells us something about the quality of the political order.

A Better Debate

Imagine redesigning the Oxford discussion around this question.

Instead of dividing speakers into:

Israel never wanted peace

versus:

Israel did want peace,

give them a sequence of concrete decisions.

1947.

Oslo.

Settlement policies.

Camp David.

The Second Intifada.

Gaza withdrawal.

Hamas’s decisions.

Olmert’s proposal.

October 7.

The Gaza war.

For each case ask:

What was the decision?

What alternatives existed?

Which explanation motivated it?

What did critics say?

What happened?

Who learned?

Who did not?

What institutions prevented correction?

What new problem did the decision create?

Now the discussion becomes harder.

And better.

Nobody gets to hide behind:

Israel.

Nobody gets to hide behind:

Palestinians.

The decisions have addresses.

The explanations have authors.

The errors have routes.

The Backspace Rule

The principle I would preserve is therefore simple:

When a political decision fails, do not allow the error to travel farther than the evidence permits.

Begin with the decision.

Then investigate the explanation.

Then the institution.

Then, if warranted, the wider political culture that reproduces it.

Do not leap directly to identity.

And never allow a collective category to become a substitute for a causal mechanism.

This is not merely a requirement of fairness.

It is a requirement of knowledge.

Because the purpose of identifying error is not to find a larger object to blame.

It is to discover what must change.

Where Does the Error Go?

A politician makes a mistake.

Let the error go into the politician’s decision.

A policy fails.

Let it go into the policy.

An institution protects failure.

Let it go into the institution.

A doctrine makes correction impossible.

Let it reach the doctrine.

A constitutional arrangement prevents peaceful replacement.

Let criticism reach the constitution.

But do not let the error escape into millions of people merely because a collective noun makes the argument easier.

People are not explanations.

Identities are not mechanisms.

Nations are not minds.

And history is not destiny.

A civilized political order is not one in which nobody makes mistakes.

That order does not exist.

A civilized political order is one in which the error can find its way back to the decision that produced it—and where the decision can still be corrected.

The most important question after political failure is therefore not only who was wrong.

It is where the error went.