I strongly disagree. (This is a special case of my general disagreement with strong forms of Politics-is-the-Mind-Killer-type objections to discussing capital-P Political topics.) I also want to amplify Gram_Stone’s observation that this kind of topic was historically acceptable on LW.
One important difference: The linked article is a description of its author’s experience. This article proposed a general explanation.
When someone provides a personal data point, as long as I don’t suspect that person of lying, I have no reason to disagree. (Unless the person would conclude “everyone else is just like me”, which would be the sin of generalisation from one example.)
Here, Gram_Stone provides one hypothesis, Zack_M_Davis provides another… and there are many people who believe to be experts in the topic and support one or the other… unless of course they merely want to support their tribe. None of these dozens of experts provides a scientific reference for their side; apparently doing so is superfluous because the matter is settled.
Zack_M_Davis provides another… [...] None of these dozens of experts provides a scientific reference for their side
You probably missed it (last paragraph of this comment), but I did in fact reference a blog FAQ and a book (official website, PDF that someone put online, probably in defiance of copyright law). These are both secondary sources, but with plenty of citations back to the original studies in the psychology literature (some of which I’ve read myself; I don’t recall noticing anything being dishonestly cited to claim something that it didn’t say).
I recognize the difference, but I don’t think it’s an important one for the purposes of deciding whether to oppose a type of discussion. (I wouldn’t expect, in general, a person’s honest report of their experience to be much more valuable than someone else’s honest attempt to sketch a general model of some phenomenon.) It’s also a different objection to Dagon’s, which is basically “boo political/social identity, because identity is hard to talk about!”.
Edit to add:
Historically, we also had the downvote button.
Yep, if we still had the downvote button, I probably would’ve just downvoted Dagon’s comment and left it at that.
I strongly disagree. (This is a special case of my general disagreement with strong forms of Politics-is-the-Mind-Killer-type objections to discussing capital-P Political topics.) I also want to amplify Gram_Stone’s observation that this kind of topic was historically acceptable on LW.
One important difference: The linked article is a description of its author’s experience. This article proposed a general explanation.
When someone provides a personal data point, as long as I don’t suspect that person of lying, I have no reason to disagree. (Unless the person would conclude “everyone else is just like me”, which would be the sin of generalisation from one example.)
Here, Gram_Stone provides one hypothesis, Zack_M_Davis provides another… and there are many people who believe to be experts in the topic and support one or the other… unless of course they merely want to support their tribe. None of these dozens of experts provides a scientific reference for their side; apparently doing so is superfluous because the matter is settled.
Historically, we also had the downvote button.
You probably missed it (last paragraph of this comment), but I did in fact reference a blog FAQ and a book (official website, PDF that someone put online, probably in defiance of copyright law). These are both secondary sources, but with plenty of citations back to the original studies in the psychology literature (some of which I’ve read myself; I don’t recall noticing anything being dishonestly cited to claim something that it didn’t say).
I recognize the difference, but I don’t think it’s an important one for the purposes of deciding whether to oppose a type of discussion. (I wouldn’t expect, in general, a person’s honest report of their experience to be much more valuable than someone else’s honest attempt to sketch a general model of some phenomenon.) It’s also a different objection to Dagon’s, which is basically “boo political/social identity, because identity is hard to talk about!”.
Edit to add:
Yep, if we still had the downvote button, I probably would’ve just downvoted Dagon’s comment and left it at that.