Well, just for starters, framing Jihad vs. War on Terror as “toxoplasma” works by choosing a concept handle that evokes a disgust reaction to affect an ethical reframing of the issue.
This part is just objectively wrong. I don’t have a disgust reaction to toxoplasma (possibly because I have no particular visual image associated with it). Do you?
The point is to make an idea and its advocates look silly. The point is to make an idea and its advocates look silly. It’s to manipulate their social status and tickle people’s jimmies until they agree with you. It might not work, but that’s the intent.
This also seems objectively wrong. I mean, I first did this exercise years ago as a way to make my own beliefs more accurate. Manipulating other peoples’ social status presumably wasn’t the intent, because I didn’t share it with anyone for years. I didn’t care about making other people look silly; I generally kept the exercise and its results to myself. I wrote this post figuring that other people would find it helpful; the event which prodded me to write it up now was someone else finding the exercise useful for themselves.
Also, if I were trying to make other peoples’ ideas look silly, tabooing “should” looks like a wildly suboptimal way to do that, since so many people have implicitly-moral-realist worldviews. This is a technique which would only seem sensible in the first place to people with unusually firm philosophical foundations. I expect many such people will want to use the technique themselves, for their own benefit, entirely independent of wanting to make other people look silly.
Like, if Yglesias really was interested in that, then why would he ever, ever pick out such an obviously stupid piece of writing to address in the first place? He has the greatest thinkers and writers available to him to engage with! Why pick out the dumbest thing anybody ever wrote about the PS5?
Because he was specifically trying to talk about problems with modern journalism. The title of the piece was “What’s Wrong With The Media”.
Now, you could certainly interpret that as Yglesias administering a status slap-down to some journalist(s), but if his goal was a status slap-down there are far more effective ways to do that. He could just write an actual hit-piece.
More generally, in all of these examples: you are pointing out that an argument has status/ethics/politics impact, and claiming that the status/ethics/politics impact must therefore have motivated the argument. That’s simply not true. There are non-status/ethics/politics reasons to think about things which have status/ethics/politics implications.
Being skeptical about claims to objectivity is an epistemically-sensible policy. (Matt Yglesias in particular has probably earned an extra helping of such skepticism.) But I think your prior on “argument was chosen for its status/ethics/politics implications” is far too high, and you are making objectively inaccurate predictions as a result (including the first two quotes above).
For the record I do get some disgust reaction out of the toxoplasma thing, think it was at least somewhat intentional (and I think I may also endorse it? With significant caveats)
Regardless of the details of why he picked the piece, it’s pretty clear from a clear-headed reading of the review that Yglesias is attributing to the reviewer a claim they did not make. I think the “PS5 will have outstanding sales” and “there are many people who won’t buy a PS5 due to some impact of the pandemic” can both be true and likely are.
Sorry, I know that this runs the risk of being an exchange of essays, making it hard to respond to each point.
In Toxoplasma of Rage, the part just prior to the reference to the war on terror goes like this:
Toxoplasma is a neat little parasite that is implicated in a couple of human diseases including schizophrenia. Its life cycle goes like this: it starts in a cat. The cat poops it out. The poop and the toxoplasma get in the water supply, where they are consumed by some other animal, often a rat. The toxoplasma morphs into a rat-compatible form and starts reproducing. Once it has strength in numbers, it hijacks the rat’s brain, convincing the rat to hang out conspicuously in areas where cats can eat it. After a cat eats the rat, the toxoplasma morphs back into its cat compatible form and reproduces some more. Finally, it gets pooped back out by the cat, completing the cycle.
[Lion King image] It’s the ciiiiiircle of life!
What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma?
Consider the war on terror.
Now, maybe Scott’s description of Toxoplasma doesn’t evoke the same visceral disgust reaction you might have if you were scooping out the litter box of a cat that you knew was infected with toxoplasma.
But it seems clear that Scott’s conscious intent here was to evoke that feeling. The point is not to use toxoplasma as intellectual scaffolding to explain the cause-and-effect model of violence-begets-violence.
Instead, it was to link the violence-begets-violence model with disgusting imagery. Read that article, and when somebody talks about the War on Terror, if your previous association was with the proud image of soldiers going off to a noble battle with a determined enemy, now it’s with cat shit.
Likewise, read enough “problem with media” articles that selectively reference the silliest media pieces—classic cherry picking on a conceptual level—then slowly but surely, when you think of “media” you think of the worst stuff out there, rather than the average or the best. Is Matt Yglesias looking for the silliest takes that Scott Alexander ever wrote and excoriating them? No, because Scott’s on his team in the blogosphere.
Now, you could certainly interpret that as Yglesias administering a status slap-down to some journalist(s), but if his goal was a status slap-down there are far more effective ways to do that. He could just write an actual hit-piece.
I disagree with this. In fact, his methods are an extremely effective way of administering a status slap-down. If he wrote an actual hit-piece, that’s what his readership would interpret it as: a hit-piece. But when he writes this article, his readership interprets it as a virtuous piece advocating good epistemic standards. It’s a Trojan Horse.
There are non-status/ethics/politics reasons to think about things which have status/ethics/politics implications.
This is true. But what I’m saying is that advocacy of epistemic accuracy as opposed to virtue signaling is in many contexts primarily motivated by status/ethics/politics implications.
And that is fine. There is nothing inherently wrong with an argument about the nature of reality also having status/ethics/politics implications. It’s even fine to pretend, for vague “this makes us think better” reasons, that for the sake of a discussion those status/ethics/politics implications are irrelevant.
But those implications are always present. They’ve just been temporarily pushed to the side for a moment. Often, they come swooping back in, right after the “epistemic discussion” is concluded. That’s the nature of a policy debate.
This part is just objectively wrong. I don’t have a disgust reaction to toxoplasma (possibly because I have no particular visual image associated with it). Do you?
This also seems objectively wrong. I mean, I first did this exercise years ago as a way to make my own beliefs more accurate. Manipulating other peoples’ social status presumably wasn’t the intent, because I didn’t share it with anyone for years. I didn’t care about making other people look silly; I generally kept the exercise and its results to myself. I wrote this post figuring that other people would find it helpful; the event which prodded me to write it up now was someone else finding the exercise useful for themselves.
Also, if I were trying to make other peoples’ ideas look silly, tabooing “should” looks like a wildly suboptimal way to do that, since so many people have implicitly-moral-realist worldviews. This is a technique which would only seem sensible in the first place to people with unusually firm philosophical foundations. I expect many such people will want to use the technique themselves, for their own benefit, entirely independent of wanting to make other people look silly.
Because he was specifically trying to talk about problems with modern journalism. The title of the piece was “What’s Wrong With The Media”.
Now, you could certainly interpret that as Yglesias administering a status slap-down to some journalist(s), but if his goal was a status slap-down there are far more effective ways to do that. He could just write an actual hit-piece.
More generally, in all of these examples: you are pointing out that an argument has status/ethics/politics impact, and claiming that the status/ethics/politics impact must therefore have motivated the argument. That’s simply not true. There are non-status/ethics/politics reasons to think about things which have status/ethics/politics implications.
Being skeptical about claims to objectivity is an epistemically-sensible policy. (Matt Yglesias in particular has probably earned an extra helping of such skepticism.) But I think your prior on “argument was chosen for its status/ethics/politics implications” is far too high, and you are making objectively inaccurate predictions as a result (including the first two quotes above).
For the record I do get some disgust reaction out of the toxoplasma thing, think it was at least somewhat intentional (and I think I may also endorse it? With significant caveats)
Regardless of the details of why he picked the piece, it’s pretty clear from a clear-headed reading of the review that Yglesias is attributing to the reviewer a claim they did not make. I think the “PS5 will have outstanding sales” and “there are many people who won’t buy a PS5 due to some impact of the pandemic” can both be true and likely are.
Sorry, I know that this runs the risk of being an exchange of essays, making it hard to respond to each point.
In Toxoplasma of Rage, the part just prior to the reference to the war on terror goes like this:
Now, maybe Scott’s description of Toxoplasma doesn’t evoke the same visceral disgust reaction you might have if you were scooping out the litter box of a cat that you knew was infected with toxoplasma.
But it seems clear that Scott’s conscious intent here was to evoke that feeling. The point is not to use toxoplasma as intellectual scaffolding to explain the cause-and-effect model of violence-begets-violence.
Instead, it was to link the violence-begets-violence model with disgusting imagery. Read that article, and when somebody talks about the War on Terror, if your previous association was with the proud image of soldiers going off to a noble battle with a determined enemy, now it’s with cat shit.
Likewise, read enough “problem with media” articles that selectively reference the silliest media pieces—classic cherry picking on a conceptual level—then slowly but surely, when you think of “media” you think of the worst stuff out there, rather than the average or the best. Is Matt Yglesias looking for the silliest takes that Scott Alexander ever wrote and excoriating them? No, because Scott’s on his team in the blogosphere.
I disagree with this. In fact, his methods are an extremely effective way of administering a status slap-down. If he wrote an actual hit-piece, that’s what his readership would interpret it as: a hit-piece. But when he writes this article, his readership interprets it as a virtuous piece advocating good epistemic standards. It’s a Trojan Horse.
This is true. But what I’m saying is that advocacy of epistemic accuracy as opposed to virtue signaling is in many contexts primarily motivated by status/ethics/politics implications.
And that is fine. There is nothing inherently wrong with an argument about the nature of reality also having status/ethics/politics implications. It’s even fine to pretend, for vague “this makes us think better” reasons, that for the sake of a discussion those status/ethics/politics implications are irrelevant.
But those implications are always present. They’ve just been temporarily pushed to the side for a moment. Often, they come swooping back in, right after the “epistemic discussion” is concluded. That’s the nature of a policy debate.