I don’t have any particular negative reaction to the word ‘ignorant’, AFAICT, so I doubt that was the source of me finding ‘The God Delusion’ a turn-off. (I read it a long time ago, so I’m not sure I can pinpoint exactly why I disliked it, especially since my opinions and attitudes have changed appreciably in the meantime.) It might even not have been vocabulary so much as just the general attitude that came across...basically, that you’d be stupid to believe in God, and furthermore, you’d be stupid to want to believe in God. I don’t know if he used the word ‘stupid’ but that’s what I remember as coming across, and there’s a big difference between calling someone ignorant and implying that they’re stupid.
Have you read any of his atheism books more recently? Is it possible that you disliked them (at least in part) for attacking a group you associated yourself with?
I doubt very much he used the word ‘stupid’ to label religious people. He has said, though; “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is either ignorant, stupid, or insane.”
And of course, people will take from that what they want. “I’m religious, I’m not insane nor am I ignorant, so he must be calling me stupid!”
Another one is his opening to the God Delusion where he lists a long list of characteristics of the christian god. People have of course taken issues with that list, however you can find bible references for every single one of those characteristics, words you’ll even hear in church, so again it’s mostly being taken negatively by people who want it to be negative.
But if you have something concrete, do tell. It’s a puzzle I’ve long wanted to solve.
He has said, though; “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is either ignorant, stupid, or insane.”
I don’t know about safe to say… it is certainly true.
EDIT: This neglects the “Could be a liar” loophole.
Didn’t Eliezer write something about how assuming that your ideological rivals must be defective or aberrant is a bad assumption to make? He phrased it in terms of “evil”, but I think the same principle applies to “stupid/insane”.
As for ignorant, well, isn’t almost tautologically true that we all believe people who hold beliefs that are incompatible with our own to be ignorant or mistaken?
Didn’t Eliezer write something about how assuming that your ideological rivals must be defective or aberrant is a bad assumption to make?
Yes, but sometimes that isn’t an assumption but a conclusion. I can think of a large number of ideological and non-ideological issues where I wouldn’t make that conclusion. Evolution is one where the conclusion seems easier (with the caveat that in the relevant quote “insane” is considered broad enough to mean “highly irrational and subject to cognitive biases in way almost all humans are about at least a few things”).
As for ignorant, well, isn’t almost tautologically true that we all believe people who hold beliefs that are incompatible with our own to be ignorant or mistaken?
There are degrees of how ignorant or mistaken someone can be. For example, Sniffnoy and I are coauthoring a pair of papers on integer complexity. There are certain conjectures we can’t prove that we have different opinions about whether they are true or false. I’m pretty sure that he and I are probably at this point in a set of 5 or 6 people on the planet who understand the relevant problems the most. So our disagreement doesn’t seem to be due to ignorance.
we have different opinions about whether they are true or false.
Probabilistic opinions?
Can you take a set of “unrelated” (the inapplicability of this term to math might make my suggestion worth very little) theorems known to be true or false and give your opinions about the chances they are true?
Also relevant are the costs of type I and type II errors in your paper...and your lives, as these may may have significantly conditioned your reactions to uncertainty.
I don’t know about “certainly.” For example, I consider you none of those things, but I suspect I could induce you to claim not to believe in evolution for a sufficient sum. (This is not an offer.)
“It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is either ignorant, stupid, or insane.”
It’s an interesting characteristic of human language that the word ‘ignorant’, which I find pretty innocuous if used on its own, comes across as a lot harsher when put in the company of ‘stupid’ and ‘insane.’ Some kind of context-building I guess, the brain automatically assuming that the author’s point is simple and uni-faceted.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean that’s the right way to read that sentence, or that it’s constructive to get offended by it. I’m not offended by it now. It’s perfectly possible for one of my friends to be one of those three things and still be a kind, generous, awesome person to hang out with. Maybe I made that distinction less when I was in high school, which is when I read “The God Delusion.”
Come to think of it, I read ‘The God Delusion’ before I’d even heard of Less Wrong, or cognitive biases, or ways in which words could be misinterpreted… I might find it illuminating to read it again.
It’s an interesting characteristic of human language that the word ‘ignorant’, which I find pretty innocuous if used on its own, comes across as a lot harsher when put in the company of ‘stupid’ and ‘insane.’ Some kind of context-building I guess, the brain automatically assuming that the author’s point is simple and uni-faceted.
I think what happens when I read the word in this context is that my brain automatically inserts the word “willfully” before “ignorant.” I mean, it’s trivial to say that, for instance, members of uncontacted tribes are ignorant of evolution, but that’s usually not what people are talking about when they use the word like this.
Yes, interesting point of view. I do remember in my earlier days of reading stuff that at the time was emotional in some way, but now, having re-read it many years later and with (hopefully) more science-based knowledge on-board, seems benign. What was all that fuzz about, really? And really, I think the fuzz was the sound of preconceived and poorly thought-out ideas in my head shredded.
I think the outrage and negativity attached to criticism can be measure in how much you treasure those beliefs. Now that I don’t hold many beliefs at all (I think I can boil them down to some scientific workflow platform), there’s less for me to get upset about. We humans put a strange personal identity on mere ideas, and a critique of ideas are far too often thought of as a critique of the person who holds those beliefs, probably linked to our sense of self.
I think Dawkins and Hitchins (and people like them) have a short way of dealing with stuff that has had a tradition of being dealt with in longer terms. This abrupt and concise way of dealing with issues can have a shocking effect. Sometimes the shock is awakening, other times it can be painful, hurtful and offensive. It comes down to how well we deal with shocks of revelation about our own mind, and many, many people don’t like to face the ugly truth about themselves (which is also why we love herd thinking and the removal of the personal responsibility of our thinking and actions, even when we claim not to do ‘like everybody else.’. Oh yes, you do. :) )
. “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is either ignorant, stupid, or insane.”
Earlier I said Dawkins was a perfect gentleman, but here he proves me wrong. By including ignorant in with stupid and insane, he is making a lack of knowledge equivalent to severe mental defects.
It took mankind thousands of years to come up with evolution (and self organizing systems in general). They were all ignorant, but in a non pejorative sense. Dawkins can get a little snippy when defending his baby.
Earlier I said Dawkins was a perfect gentleman, but here he proves me wrong. By including ignorant in with stupid and insane, he is making a lack of knowledge equivalent to severe mental defects.
You have parsed the meaning incorrectly. Including ‘ignorant’ makes the statement less rude, not more.
Uttering two different words within an ‘either’ class does make those words equivalent it means that ONLY ONE of them need apply. If he left out ignorant then that would be rude indeed. Simply being massively ill informed and provided with insufficient information does not make you stupid, it does make you ignorant.
But he didn’t utter 2 words, he uttered 3, all listed in a way that didn’t distinguish ignorant from stupid and rude. If he intended to distinguish ignorant from from stupid and rude, he could have done so. “They are either ignorant, or stupid or rude.”
Ignorant may or may not be pejorative. If you put it in an otherwise undifferentiated list of multiple other pejorative terms, you should expect the sense taken to be pejorative.
So, I agree with you that if I say “X is either A, B, or C” I am connoting equivalence among A, B, and C, though of course wedrifid is correct that no such equivalence is denoted. (The contrast can be funny. I gather it’s conventional to provide warnings for TV Tropes links.)
But I cannot quite figure out what your objection to Dawkins’ quote actually is, here. As near as I can figure it out, you seem to be saying that by adding “ignorance” to the list he is insulting ignorant people, by implicitly equating them to stupid and insane people, which is rude… whereas if he’d just said “somebody who claims not to believe in evolution is either stupid or insane” he would merely have been equating creationists with stupid and insane people, which is not rude.
No, I’m saying that Dawkin’s list contains no non pejorative options, and hence is an insult. I reject wedfridid’s alternative interpretation of ignorant that would be non pejorative.
So how would you make Dawkins’ statement—which is, and this is the actual point, a statement that is both true[1] and important—in a manner that you would find acceptable?
[1] They could of course be a liar, but you don’t have to work that one into your answer as well. Let’s go with what Dawkins said.
“It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is either ignorant, stupid, or insane.”
First, that the somebody in question is not telling the literal truth is a very likely alternative. Some who claim they don’t believe in evolution may in fact believe in evolution, but don’t want people to know, or want to signal support for those who don’t believe in evolution.
Seems like Dawkins comment wasn’t quite so “absolutely safe” after all. To further criticize Dawkins, this is a case where he is in fact showing unwarranted intellectual arrogance, making an absolute claim of fact, when a tiny bit of reflection on Dennett’s theme of “belief in belief” would have shown him the error of his claim. I have repeatedly found that Dawkins is not at his intellectual or gentlemanly best when the evolution is questioned as a historical fact.
Second, even if you ignore the liar aspect, I don’t think the statement is true unless one plays Clintonian games with language. I could say that everyone is stupid, insane, and ignorant, and it would be true in the context I intend. But in plain, everyday English, his statement was an insult, and it was false.
On your question, I feel that there would be more value in those defending this statement as pejorative free to try to come up with a revised statement that was in fact pejorative free. But I’ll give you one of my own:
“Someone who claims to not believe in evolution is stupid or insane, or is simply ignorant of the theory of evolution and the associated evidence for it.”
Note that this hardly sugar coats the judgment on the person, and many would still find it offensive. But this at least differentiates ignorant from stupid and insane, and more importantly, it delimits the ignorance to an arguably justified scope. If I were at my gentlemanly best, I would leave out the stupid and insane parts entirely, and just say that if you don’t believe in evolution, I think you don’t understand it. Again, many would find that blunt and rude, but I guess that’s as gentlemanly as I get.
It occurs to me that Dawkins could, in a perfect world, have saved us this argument by just using “simple ignorance” instead of unadorned “ignorance”. But then, The God Delusion is annoyingly philosophically unsophisticated. Its main virtue is that it appears to work.
The book pretty much states as its explicit purpose making as many people as possible aware that being religious is a choice and that there can be alternatives. Watertight philosophical rigor would probably harm that goal.
Getting smart people to think that religion deserves seriously thought out counterarguments might just be a way for theists to keep winning anyway.
So it’s ok to call people stupid or insane, but it’s NOT ok to call them ignorant? I’d much rather be ignorant than stupid or insane because ignorance is a condition that can be cured rather than an inherent attribute of an individual.
And in this day of freely available education ignorance is indeed equivalent to a mental defect. At the very least it shows a defect in the natural desire to learn.
Wow. −5. That’s a record for me. And all for a quite reasonable interpretation of his words. No, for the most reasonable interpretation of his words. I’m sticking by it.
I don’t have any particular negative reaction to the word ‘ignorant’, AFAICT, so I doubt that was the source of me finding ‘The God Delusion’ a turn-off. (I read it a long time ago, so I’m not sure I can pinpoint exactly why I disliked it, especially since my opinions and attitudes have changed appreciably in the meantime.) It might even not have been vocabulary so much as just the general attitude that came across...basically, that you’d be stupid to believe in God, and furthermore, you’d be stupid to want to believe in God. I don’t know if he used the word ‘stupid’ but that’s what I remember as coming across, and there’s a big difference between calling someone ignorant and implying that they’re stupid.
Have you read any of his atheism books more recently? Is it possible that you disliked them (at least in part) for attacking a group you associated yourself with?
I doubt very much he used the word ‘stupid’ to label religious people. He has said, though; “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is either ignorant, stupid, or insane.”
And of course, people will take from that what they want. “I’m religious, I’m not insane nor am I ignorant, so he must be calling me stupid!”
Another one is his opening to the God Delusion where he lists a long list of characteristics of the christian god. People have of course taken issues with that list, however you can find bible references for every single one of those characteristics, words you’ll even hear in church, so again it’s mostly being taken negatively by people who want it to be negative.
But if you have something concrete, do tell. It’s a puzzle I’ve long wanted to solve.
I don’t know about safe to say… it is certainly true.
EDIT: This neglects the “Could be a liar” loophole.
It could be a knowledgeable, intelligent and sane liar.
Oh, true. I didn’t even notice the lack of the liar category!
Well, hypothetically, they could just be electable.
Didn’t Eliezer write something about how assuming that your ideological rivals must be defective or aberrant is a bad assumption to make? He phrased it in terms of “evil”, but I think the same principle applies to “stupid/insane”.
As for ignorant, well, isn’t almost tautologically true that we all believe people who hold beliefs that are incompatible with our own to be ignorant or mistaken?
Yes, but sometimes that isn’t an assumption but a conclusion. I can think of a large number of ideological and non-ideological issues where I wouldn’t make that conclusion. Evolution is one where the conclusion seems easier (with the caveat that in the relevant quote “insane” is considered broad enough to mean “highly irrational and subject to cognitive biases in way almost all humans are about at least a few things”).
There are degrees of how ignorant or mistaken someone can be. For example, Sniffnoy and I are coauthoring a pair of papers on integer complexity. There are certain conjectures we can’t prove that we have different opinions about whether they are true or false. I’m pretty sure that he and I are probably at this point in a set of 5 or 6 people on the planet who understand the relevant problems the most. So our disagreement doesn’t seem to be due to ignorance.
Probabilistic opinions?
Can you take a set of “unrelated” (the inapplicability of this term to math might make my suggestion worth very little) theorems known to be true or false and give your opinions about the chances they are true?
Also relevant are the costs of type I and type II errors in your paper...and your lives, as these may may have significantly conditioned your reactions to uncertainty.
I don’t know about “certainly.” For example, I consider you none of those things, but I suspect I could induce you to claim not to believe in evolution for a sufficient sum. (This is not an offer.)
It’s an interesting characteristic of human language that the word ‘ignorant’, which I find pretty innocuous if used on its own, comes across as a lot harsher when put in the company of ‘stupid’ and ‘insane.’ Some kind of context-building I guess, the brain automatically assuming that the author’s point is simple and uni-faceted.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean that’s the right way to read that sentence, or that it’s constructive to get offended by it. I’m not offended by it now. It’s perfectly possible for one of my friends to be one of those three things and still be a kind, generous, awesome person to hang out with. Maybe I made that distinction less when I was in high school, which is when I read “The God Delusion.”
Come to think of it, I read ‘The God Delusion’ before I’d even heard of Less Wrong, or cognitive biases, or ways in which words could be misinterpreted… I might find it illuminating to read it again.
I think what happens when I read the word in this context is that my brain automatically inserts the word “willfully” before “ignorant.” I mean, it’s trivial to say that, for instance, members of uncontacted tribes are ignorant of evolution, but that’s usually not what people are talking about when they use the word like this.
Yes, interesting point of view. I do remember in my earlier days of reading stuff that at the time was emotional in some way, but now, having re-read it many years later and with (hopefully) more science-based knowledge on-board, seems benign. What was all that fuzz about, really? And really, I think the fuzz was the sound of preconceived and poorly thought-out ideas in my head shredded.
I think the outrage and negativity attached to criticism can be measure in how much you treasure those beliefs. Now that I don’t hold many beliefs at all (I think I can boil them down to some scientific workflow platform), there’s less for me to get upset about. We humans put a strange personal identity on mere ideas, and a critique of ideas are far too often thought of as a critique of the person who holds those beliefs, probably linked to our sense of self.
I think Dawkins and Hitchins (and people like them) have a short way of dealing with stuff that has had a tradition of being dealt with in longer terms. This abrupt and concise way of dealing with issues can have a shocking effect. Sometimes the shock is awakening, other times it can be painful, hurtful and offensive. It comes down to how well we deal with shocks of revelation about our own mind, and many, many people don’t like to face the ugly truth about themselves (which is also why we love herd thinking and the removal of the personal responsibility of our thinking and actions, even when we claim not to do ‘like everybody else.’. Oh yes, you do. :) )
I wonder how much scoping the ‘ignorant’ to ‘ignorant of evolution’ would help.
Earlier I said Dawkins was a perfect gentleman, but here he proves me wrong. By including ignorant in with stupid and insane, he is making a lack of knowledge equivalent to severe mental defects.
It took mankind thousands of years to come up with evolution (and self organizing systems in general). They were all ignorant, but in a non pejorative sense. Dawkins can get a little snippy when defending his baby.
You have parsed the meaning incorrectly. Including ‘ignorant’ makes the statement less rude, not more.
Uttering two different words within an ‘either’ class does make those words equivalent it means that ONLY ONE of them need apply. If he left out ignorant then that would be rude indeed. Simply being massively ill informed and provided with insufficient information does not make you stupid, it does make you ignorant.
But he didn’t utter 2 words, he uttered 3, all listed in a way that didn’t distinguish ignorant from stupid and rude. If he intended to distinguish ignorant from from stupid and rude, he could have done so. “They are either ignorant, or stupid or rude.”
Ignorant may or may not be pejorative. If you put it in an otherwise undifferentiated list of multiple other pejorative terms, you should expect the sense taken to be pejorative.
So, I agree with you that if I say “X is either A, B, or C” I am connoting equivalence among A, B, and C, though of course wedrifid is correct that no such equivalence is denoted. (The contrast can be funny. I gather it’s conventional to provide warnings for TV Tropes links.)
But I cannot quite figure out what your objection to Dawkins’ quote actually is, here. As near as I can figure it out, you seem to be saying that by adding “ignorance” to the list he is insulting ignorant people, by implicitly equating them to stupid and insane people, which is rude… whereas if he’d just said “somebody who claims not to believe in evolution is either stupid or insane” he would merely have been equating creationists with stupid and insane people, which is not rude.
Have I understood you?
No, I’m saying that Dawkin’s list contains no non pejorative options, and hence is an insult. I reject wedfridid’s alternative interpretation of ignorant that would be non pejorative.
So how would you make Dawkins’ statement—which is, and this is the actual point, a statement that is both true[1] and important—in a manner that you would find acceptable?
[1] They could of course be a liar, but you don’t have to work that one into your answer as well. Let’s go with what Dawkins said.
Dawkins quote:
First, that the somebody in question is not telling the literal truth is a very likely alternative. Some who claim they don’t believe in evolution may in fact believe in evolution, but don’t want people to know, or want to signal support for those who don’t believe in evolution.
Seems like Dawkins comment wasn’t quite so “absolutely safe” after all. To further criticize Dawkins, this is a case where he is in fact showing unwarranted intellectual arrogance, making an absolute claim of fact, when a tiny bit of reflection on Dennett’s theme of “belief in belief” would have shown him the error of his claim. I have repeatedly found that Dawkins is not at his intellectual or gentlemanly best when the evolution is questioned as a historical fact.
Second, even if you ignore the liar aspect, I don’t think the statement is true unless one plays Clintonian games with language. I could say that everyone is stupid, insane, and ignorant, and it would be true in the context I intend. But in plain, everyday English, his statement was an insult, and it was false.
On your question, I feel that there would be more value in those defending this statement as pejorative free to try to come up with a revised statement that was in fact pejorative free. But I’ll give you one of my own:
“Someone who claims to not believe in evolution is stupid or insane, or is simply ignorant of the theory of evolution and the associated evidence for it.”
Note that this hardly sugar coats the judgment on the person, and many would still find it offensive. But this at least differentiates ignorant from stupid and insane, and more importantly, it delimits the ignorance to an arguably justified scope. If I were at my gentlemanly best, I would leave out the stupid and insane parts entirely, and just say that if you don’t believe in evolution, I think you don’t understand it. Again, many would find that blunt and rude, but I guess that’s as gentlemanly as I get.
It occurs to me that Dawkins could, in a perfect world, have saved us this argument by just using “simple ignorance” instead of unadorned “ignorance”. But then, The God Delusion is annoyingly philosophically unsophisticated. Its main virtue is that it appears to work.
The book pretty much states as its explicit purpose making as many people as possible aware that being religious is a choice and that there can be alternatives. Watertight philosophical rigor would probably harm that goal.
Getting smart people to think that religion deserves seriously thought out counterarguments might just be a way for theists to keep winning anyway.
Fully watertight philosophical rigour is probably optimising the wrong thing, yes. c.f. Mencken on one horse-laugh versus ten thousand syllogisms.
That last is a reasonable try, yes. Thank you.
Ah! OK, I get it now. Yes, agreed.
This is not true. You weren’t saying this. To quote:
So it’s ok to call people stupid or insane, but it’s NOT ok to call them ignorant? I’d much rather be ignorant than stupid or insane because ignorance is a condition that can be cured rather than an inherent attribute of an individual.
And in this day of freely available education ignorance is indeed equivalent to a mental defect. At the very least it shows a defect in the natural desire to learn.
Wow. −5. That’s a record for me. And all for a quite reasonable interpretation of his words. No, for the most reasonable interpretation of his words. I’m sticking by it.