You’re saying things like ‘provocative’ and ‘mindkilling’ and ‘invoking tribal loyalties’, but you’ve not made any arguments relating that to my writing
I should be clear here that I’m talking about a broader phenomenon, not specifically your writing. As I noted above, your post isn’t actually a central example of the phenomenon. The “tribal loyalties” thing was primarily referring to people’s reactions to the SSC/NYT thing. Apologies if it seemed like I was accusing you personally of all of these things. (The bits that were specific to your post were mentions of “evil” and “disgust”.)
Nor am I saying that we should never talk about emotions; I do think that’s important. But we should try to also provide argumentative content which isn’t reliant on the emotional content. If we make strong claims driven by emotions, then we should make sure to also defend them in less emotionally loaded ways, in a way which makes them compelling to someone who doesn’t share these particular emotions. For example, in the quotation you gave, what makes science’s principles “fake” just because they failed in psychology? Is that person applying an isolated demand for rigour because they used to revere science? I can only evaluate this if they defend their claims more extensively elsewhere.
On the specific example of facebook, I disagree that you’re using evil in a central way. I think the central examples of evil are probably mass-murdering dictators. My guess is that opinions would be pretty divided about whether to call drug dealers evil (versus, say, amoral); and the same for soldiers, even when they end up causing a lot of collateral damage.
Your conclusion that facebook is evil seems particularly and unusually strong because your arguments are also applicable to many TV shows, game producers, fast food companies, and so on. Which doesn’t make those arguments wrong, but it means that they need to meet a pretty high bar, since either facebook is significantly more evil than all these other groups, or else we’ll need to expand the scope of words like “evil” until they refer to a significant chunk of society (which would be quite different from how most people use it).
(This is not to over-focus on the specific word “evil”, it’s just the one you happened to use here. I have similar complaints about other people using the word “insane” gratuitously; to people casually comparing current society to Stalinist Russia or the Cultural Revolution; and so on.)
If we make strong claims driven by emotions, then we should make sure to also defend them in less emotionally loaded ways, in a way which makes them compelling to someone who doesn’t share these particular emotions.
Restating this in the first person, this reads to me as ”On the topics where we strongly disagree, you’re not supposed to say how you feel emotionally about the topic if it’s not compelling to me.” This is a bid you get to make and it will be accepted/denied based on the local social contract and social norms, but it’s not a “core skill of rationality”.
You don’t understand what all my words mean. I’m not writing for everyone, so it’s mostly fine from where I’m sitting, and as I said I’m happy to give clarifications to the interested reader. This thread hasn’t been very productive right now though so I’ll drop it. Except I’ll add, which perhaps you’ll appreciate, I did indeed link to an IMO pretty extensive explanation of the reasons behind the ways I think Facebook is evil, and I don’t expect I would have written it that way had I not know there was an extensive explanation written up. The inferential gap would’ve been too big, but I can say it casually because I know that the interested reader can cross the gap using the link.
I should be clear here that I’m talking about a broader phenomenon, not specifically your writing. As I noted above, your post isn’t actually a central example of the phenomenon. The “tribal loyalties” thing was primarily referring to people’s reactions to the SSC/NYT thing. Apologies if it seemed like I was accusing you personally of all of these things. (The bits that were specific to your post were mentions of “evil” and “disgust”.)
Nor am I saying that we should never talk about emotions; I do think that’s important. But we should try to also provide argumentative content which isn’t reliant on the emotional content. If we make strong claims driven by emotions, then we should make sure to also defend them in less emotionally loaded ways, in a way which makes them compelling to someone who doesn’t share these particular emotions. For example, in the quotation you gave, what makes science’s principles “fake” just because they failed in psychology? Is that person applying an isolated demand for rigour because they used to revere science? I can only evaluate this if they defend their claims more extensively elsewhere.
On the specific example of facebook, I disagree that you’re using evil in a central way. I think the central examples of evil are probably mass-murdering dictators. My guess is that opinions would be pretty divided about whether to call drug dealers evil (versus, say, amoral); and the same for soldiers, even when they end up causing a lot of collateral damage.
Your conclusion that facebook is evil seems particularly and unusually strong because your arguments are also applicable to many TV shows, game producers, fast food companies, and so on. Which doesn’t make those arguments wrong, but it means that they need to meet a pretty high bar, since either facebook is significantly more evil than all these other groups, or else we’ll need to expand the scope of words like “evil” until they refer to a significant chunk of society (which would be quite different from how most people use it).
(This is not to over-focus on the specific word “evil”, it’s just the one you happened to use here. I have similar complaints about other people using the word “insane” gratuitously; to people casually comparing current society to Stalinist Russia or the Cultural Revolution; and so on.)
Restating this in the first person, this reads to me as ”On the topics where we strongly disagree, you’re not supposed to say how you feel emotionally about the topic if it’s not compelling to me.” This is a bid you get to make and it will be accepted/denied based on the local social contract and social norms, but it’s not a “core skill of rationality”.
You don’t understand what all my words mean. I’m not writing for everyone, so it’s mostly fine from where I’m sitting, and as I said I’m happy to give clarifications to the interested reader. This thread hasn’t been very productive right now though so I’ll drop it. Except I’ll add, which perhaps you’ll appreciate, I did indeed link to an IMO pretty extensive explanation of the reasons behind the ways I think Facebook is evil, and I don’t expect I would have written it that way had I not know there was an extensive explanation written up. The inferential gap would’ve been too big, but I can say it casually because I know that the interested reader can cross the gap using the link.