Downvoted for the extremely tendentious paraphrase. I’m generally in favor of more discussion of politics on this site, but I think it’s a topic we need to be extra careful about. This is not the way to do it.
I’m extremely interested in this discussion, but I agree—if you’re going to discuss politics, please do so more carefully. A deliberately uncharitable paraphrase is not a good place to start.
“Extremely tendentious” is not what I want. The ideas of 80k make a lot of sense to me and a lot of what Mills was arguing did not, but I tried to paraphrase them as accurately as I could, or leave quotes in when I couldn’t. [1] Which parts do you think badly represent their sources?
[1] For example, “The language of probability will always fail to capture the possibility of system change. What was the expected value of the civil rights movement, or the campaign for universal suffrage, or anticolonial struggles for independence? As we have seen most recently with the Arab Spring, every revolution is impossible, until it is inevitable.” was originally [misunderstands probability] but I tried to be fairer to him and avoid my own biases by using his own words.)
I’m sure your intention was to present an unbiased summary. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do when you strongly identify with one side of a dispute. It also doesn’t help that Mills is not a very clear writer. I’ve noticed that when I read an argument for a conclusion I do not agree with, and the argument doesn’t seem to make much sense, my default is to assume it must be a bad argument, and to attribute the lack of sense to the author’s confusion rather than my own. On the other hand, when the conclusion is one with which I agree, and especially if its a conclusion I think is underappreciated or nonobvious, an unconscious principle of charity comes into play. If I can’t make sense of an argument, I think I must be missing something and try harder to interpret what the author is saying.
This is probably a reasonably effective heuristic in general. There’s only so much time I can spend trying to parse arguments, and in the absence of other information, using the conclusion as a filter to determine how much credibility (and therefore time) I should assign to the source isn’t a terrible strategy. When I’m trying to provide a fair paraphrase of someone’s argument though, the heuristic needs to be actively suppressed. I need to ignore the signals that the person isn’t all that smart or well-informed and engage with the argument under the working assumption that the person is very smart, so that an inability to understand is an indication of a failure on my part. Only if concentrated effort is insufficient to produce an interpretation that I think makes sense do I conclude that the argument is genuinely bad.
If you think a debate is worth reporting on (for purposes other than mockery of one side), then it is worth engaging in this manner. Part of what makes your paraphrase tendentious is that I get the sense you are so convinced that Mills is out of his depth here (which might well be true) that you haven’t tried to read his arguments with care to see if there’s an important point you might be missing. I’ve posted my own attempt at a charitable reading of Mills’ argument elsewhere in the thread, but I think CuSithBell and Khoth have pointed out important lacunae in your presentation. Just including the points they articulate would make Mills come across as much less of an analytic incompetent than he does in your post.
“I refuse to accept replaceability because it conflicts with my politics” is hardly a fair representation of his point, for a start.
I think his point here along the lines of that although if you don’t become a banker someone else will, if you do become a banker, nobody will become a political activist in your place (and for various reasons it’s extremely hard to be both a banker and a socialist activist). And if you’re a successful political activist, you increase the chance that society will be reformed so that there aren’t a load of bankers.
80k makes much of replaceability: “the job will exist whatever you do.” This is stronger than the claim that someone else will become a banker; rather, it states that there will always be bankers, that there will always be exploitation.
Mills doesn’t argue against replaceability, he says that he can’t accept replaceability because it implies there will always be bankers and exploitation.
His actual quote is saying that replaceability goes away if the whole system can be changed. Your original paraphrase makes it sound like he has an ideological precommitment to the idea that if you don’t become a banker, nobody else will.
Regarding your example, I think what Mills is saying is probably a fair point—or rather, it’s probably a gesture towards a fair point, muddied by rhetorical constraints and perhaps misunderstanding of probability. It is very difficult to actually get good numbers to predict things outside of our past experience, and so probability as used by humans to decide policy is likely to have significant biases.
Downvoted for the extremely tendentious paraphrase. I’m generally in favor of more discussion of politics on this site, but I think it’s a topic we need to be extra careful about. This is not the way to do it.
Also, it’s “Engels”, not “Engles”.
I’m extremely interested in this discussion, but I agree—if you’re going to discuss politics, please do so more carefully. A deliberately uncharitable paraphrase is not a good place to start.
“Extremely tendentious” is not what I want. The ideas of 80k make a lot of sense to me and a lot of what Mills was arguing did not, but I tried to paraphrase them as accurately as I could, or leave quotes in when I couldn’t. [1] Which parts do you think badly represent their sources?
[1] For example, “The language of probability will always fail to capture the possibility of system change. What was the expected value of the civil rights movement, or the campaign for universal suffrage, or anticolonial struggles for independence? As we have seen most recently with the Arab Spring, every revolution is impossible, until it is inevitable.” was originally [misunderstands probability] but I tried to be fairer to him and avoid my own biases by using his own words.)
I’m sure your intention was to present an unbiased summary. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do when you strongly identify with one side of a dispute. It also doesn’t help that Mills is not a very clear writer. I’ve noticed that when I read an argument for a conclusion I do not agree with, and the argument doesn’t seem to make much sense, my default is to assume it must be a bad argument, and to attribute the lack of sense to the author’s confusion rather than my own. On the other hand, when the conclusion is one with which I agree, and especially if its a conclusion I think is underappreciated or nonobvious, an unconscious principle of charity comes into play. If I can’t make sense of an argument, I think I must be missing something and try harder to interpret what the author is saying.
This is probably a reasonably effective heuristic in general. There’s only so much time I can spend trying to parse arguments, and in the absence of other information, using the conclusion as a filter to determine how much credibility (and therefore time) I should assign to the source isn’t a terrible strategy. When I’m trying to provide a fair paraphrase of someone’s argument though, the heuristic needs to be actively suppressed. I need to ignore the signals that the person isn’t all that smart or well-informed and engage with the argument under the working assumption that the person is very smart, so that an inability to understand is an indication of a failure on my part. Only if concentrated effort is insufficient to produce an interpretation that I think makes sense do I conclude that the argument is genuinely bad.
If you think a debate is worth reporting on (for purposes other than mockery of one side), then it is worth engaging in this manner. Part of what makes your paraphrase tendentious is that I get the sense you are so convinced that Mills is out of his depth here (which might well be true) that you haven’t tried to read his arguments with care to see if there’s an important point you might be missing. I’ve posted my own attempt at a charitable reading of Mills’ argument elsewhere in the thread, but I think CuSithBell and Khoth have pointed out important lacunae in your presentation. Just including the points they articulate would make Mills come across as much less of an analytic incompetent than he does in your post.
“I refuse to accept replaceability because it conflicts with my politics” is hardly a fair representation of his point, for a start.
I think his point here along the lines of that although if you don’t become a banker someone else will, if you do become a banker, nobody will become a political activist in your place (and for various reasons it’s extremely hard to be both a banker and a socialist activist). And if you’re a successful political activist, you increase the chance that society will be reformed so that there aren’t a load of bankers.
From the source:
Mills doesn’t argue against replaceability, he says that he can’t accept replaceability because it implies there will always be bankers and exploitation.
His actual quote is saying that replaceability goes away if the whole system can be changed. Your original paraphrase makes it sound like he has an ideological precommitment to the idea that if you don’t become a banker, nobody else will.
Ok; I’ll replace the paraphrase with the quote.
Regarding your example, I think what Mills is saying is probably a fair point—or rather, it’s probably a gesture towards a fair point, muddied by rhetorical constraints and perhaps misunderstanding of probability. It is very difficult to actually get good numbers to predict things outside of our past experience, and so probability as used by humans to decide policy is likely to have significant biases.