(Tl;dr: it’s both malicious, because it resorts to using essential features of interlocutors against them—ie, quasi-ad hominems—and fallacious, because it fails to explain why the un(der)-privileged can offer arguments that work against their own interests.)
To the extent that privilege claims are about ignorance, I think they’re likely to have a point. To the extent that they’re a claim that some people are guaranteed to be wrong, they’re ad hominem.
One really common case is when person A says something to the effect of, “I don’t see why B people don’t do X instead of complaining about fooism” — but X is an action that is (relatively easily) available to person A, but is systematically unavailable to B people. (And sometimes because of fooism.)
Or, X has been tried repeatedly in the history of B people, and has failed; but A doesn’t know that history.
Or, X is just ridiculously expensive (in money/time/energy) and B people are poor/busy/tired, or otherwise ill-placed to implement it.
Or, X is an attempt to solve the wrong problem, but A doesn’t have the practical experience to distinguish the actual problem from the situation at hand — A may be pattern-matching a situation into the wrong category.
Some of this post could totally be rephrased as being about “non-depressed-person privilege”, but the author doesn’t write like that.
Then the correct response is to point out that X is hard/impractical/ineffective, supporting your point with evidence or plausible arguments.
Asserting to know better because of your incommunicable personal experience, quite possibly affected by confirmation bias and whatnot, is not a way of arguing, it is a way of refusing to engage in intellectual discussion.
I can imagine people frustrated from having to explain the same concept online for the hundredth time; always to someone else; often to people who genuinely don’t know, but sometimes to trolls. That’s the moment where people are likely to point to a FAQ. That’s why we have the Sequences here. Etc.
The problem is that the FAQ (or the Sequences) usually do contain the full explanation, and sometimes even a place where that specific explanation can be debated. But the sentence “check your privilege” does not. It is not replacing hundreds of explanations with one, but hundreds of explanations with zero.
(Sure, I could google what “privilege” means, but then I’d get dozens of explanations, sometimes mutually contradictory. And I don’t know which of the versions the person had in mind. Or it can say that privilege means X or Y or Z, and it may seem to me that neither applies to what I have said, and I don’t know which one of them was supposed to apply to me. -- As a loose analogy, it is better to link people to a specific article in the Sequences, than to Sequences as a whole.)
I guess the solution would be to write a good “Privilege FAQ”. One written by a rational person, which would explain ways how to use it but also how to not use it, encourage people to link to specific subsections of it, and perhaps contain a short commentary to the most frustratingly repeated specific misunderstandings.
(Problem is, creating a good FAQ is hard work, and it may not be the same fun as bullying random people online. -- This applies to internet debates in general, not just specifically about privilege.)
To the extent that privilege claims are about ignorance,
Of course it is quite possible that people from certain backgrounds may tend to be ignorant about certain facts, but then when they say something factually incorrect in a public discussion, the correct answer is to just correct their errors with evidence and plausible arguments. Saying “you are privileged” at best adds no information and sets a hostile tone, at worst, if you can’t support your point with communicable evidence or plausible arguments, is an ad hominem.
As I understand it, a problem the privilege model is designed to address is people who ignorant about important difficulties, and are unwilling to listen. “Privilege” raises the temperature enough to get some people to bend. Of course, psycho-chemistry being what it is, it gets other people to become more rigid, to melt down, or to explode.
There’s the difference between logical fallacy and Bayesian fallacy. Most logical fallacies got evolved into human thinking because they often enough in fact constituted Bayesian evidence. e.g. authorities on a subject often know what the hell they’re talking about.
Sure, many informal fallacies derive from useful heuristics. The problem is occurs when these heuristics are used as hard rules, especially when dismissing criticism.
For instance, the typical ‘privilege’ argument is: “You are white/male/heterosexual/cisgender/educated/upper class/attractive/fit/neurotypical, therefore your arguments about non-white/female/gay/transgender/uneducated/working class/unattractive/fat/neuroatypical people are wrong.” It is reasonable that people with certain life experiences may have difficulties understanding the issues of people with different life experiences, but this doesn’t mean that you need to share life experiences in order to make an informed argument. The “therefore you are wrong” part of the privilege rebuttal is a fallacy.
It is reasonable that people with certain life experiences may have difficulties understanding the issues of people with different life experiences
Notice that this steelmanning of ‘privilege’ is completely symmetrical, i.e., an “unprivileged” person would have the same problems with respect to the “privileged” person as conversely. Given that this “steelman” has no connection to the common use of the word “privilege” the question arises, of why that word is being used at all? The answer, I suspect, is in order to sneak in the connotations from the regular meaning of the word “privilege”.
Do you mean individual or collective power? Individually the average poor citizen may not have much power, but collectively they can do stupid things like voting for the candidate promising to “make the rich pay their ‘fair share’ ”.
I think the privilege model is neither completely true nor completely false, and one of the ways it falls down is that it’s framed as absolute about members of groups (and according to a static list) rather than being about a statistical tilt.
The argument against symmetry is that the privileged perspective is massively over-represented in prominent cultural productions (movies, books, op-eds, etc.), so underprivileged people have many more resources available that allow them some access to the experiences of the privileged. See this, for instance.
privileged perspective is massively over-represented in prominent cultural productions (movies, books, op-eds, etc.)
Really? What definition of “privilege” are you using here? I agree that certain perspectives are over-represented in cultural products, but those are not the same ones that the SJ-types call “privileged”.
If the argument is about how the world of people (as distinct from scientific conclusions) works, then life experiences are important information. What sort of argument about the world (say, an argument about why people are poor) should ignore life experience? Admittedly, the experiences of two people aren’t enough, but at least that’s a start. It’s also worth checking on whether one of the people is arguing from no experience.
I don’t think “malicious” quite does the delicacy of that sort of very abstract Marxist argument justice, though I’m not sure what word would be better.
“Unfair” doesn’t quite do the job, either, though the author does point out that a privilege framework means that the same argument will be approved or ignored depending on who makes it.
“Consciousness itself is complicit.” is kind of cool. It could almost be something from LW (or at least Peter Watts), but the author probably means something else by consciousness.
I agree, though to be fair the author himself seems to use malicious and fallacious to describe a privilege framework.
First, I am arguing that no one’s participation in public discourse should be denigrated by appeal to essential features of their identity. If we, as leftists, want to be unashamedly critical of discourse—as we should be—we should do so with reference to structures of power, such as heterosexual hegemony, rather than with reference to essential identities, such as the ‘straightness’ of particular individuals.
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Second, I am arguing that to situate ideology in identity can not only be malicious, but also fallacious. If a self-identified queer person were to have written “How Gay Pride Backfires”, the privilege framework would collapse as an explanans, as it would no longer be able to appeal to the heterosexual privilege of the author to explain the danger of the argument. Importantly, however, in this alternative scenario, the queerness of the author would not render the article any less ideological and detrimental to the interests of sexual minorities.
This is a really great take on why use of privilege-based critique in (often leftist) public discourse is flawed:
http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/privilege-leftist-critique-left/?fb_action_ids=10152177872632732&fb_action_types=og.likes
(Tl;dr: it’s both malicious, because it resorts to using essential features of interlocutors against them—ie, quasi-ad hominems—and fallacious, because it fails to explain why the un(der)-privileged can offer arguments that work against their own interests.)
I’d always thought that using ‘privilege’ arguments was the plain and simple ad hominem fallacy.
To the extent that privilege claims are about ignorance, I think they’re likely to have a point. To the extent that they’re a claim that some people are guaranteed to be wrong, they’re ad hominem.
One really common case is when person A says something to the effect of, “I don’t see why B people don’t do X instead of complaining about fooism” — but X is an action that is (relatively easily) available to person A, but is systematically unavailable to B people. (And sometimes because of fooism.)
Or, X has been tried repeatedly in the history of B people, and has failed; but A doesn’t know that history.
Or, X is just ridiculously expensive (in money/time/energy) and B people are poor/busy/tired, or otherwise ill-placed to implement it.
Or, X is an attempt to solve the wrong problem, but A doesn’t have the practical experience to distinguish the actual problem from the situation at hand — A may be pattern-matching a situation into the wrong category.
Some of this post could totally be rephrased as being about “non-depressed-person privilege”, but the author doesn’t write like that.
Then the correct response is to point out that X is hard/impractical/ineffective, supporting your point with evidence or plausible arguments.
Asserting to know better because of your incommunicable personal experience, quite possibly affected by confirmation bias and whatnot, is not a way of arguing, it is a way of refusing to engage in intellectual discussion.
I can imagine people frustrated from having to explain the same concept online for the hundredth time; always to someone else; often to people who genuinely don’t know, but sometimes to trolls. That’s the moment where people are likely to point to a FAQ. That’s why we have the Sequences here. Etc.
The problem is that the FAQ (or the Sequences) usually do contain the full explanation, and sometimes even a place where that specific explanation can be debated. But the sentence “check your privilege” does not. It is not replacing hundreds of explanations with one, but hundreds of explanations with zero.
(Sure, I could google what “privilege” means, but then I’d get dozens of explanations, sometimes mutually contradictory. And I don’t know which of the versions the person had in mind. Or it can say that privilege means X or Y or Z, and it may seem to me that neither applies to what I have said, and I don’t know which one of them was supposed to apply to me. -- As a loose analogy, it is better to link people to a specific article in the Sequences, than to Sequences as a whole.)
I guess the solution would be to write a good “Privilege FAQ”. One written by a rational person, which would explain ways how to use it but also how to not use it, encourage people to link to specific subsections of it, and perhaps contain a short commentary to the most frustratingly repeated specific misunderstandings.
(Problem is, creating a good FAQ is hard work, and it may not be the same fun as bullying random people online. -- This applies to internet debates in general, not just specifically about privilege.)
Of course it is quite possible that people from certain backgrounds may tend to be ignorant about certain facts, but then when they say something factually incorrect in a public discussion, the correct answer is to just correct their errors with evidence and plausible arguments.
Saying “you are privileged” at best adds no information and sets a hostile tone, at worst, if you can’t support your point with communicable evidence or plausible arguments, is an ad hominem.
As I understand it, a problem the privilege model is designed to address is people who ignorant about important difficulties, and are unwilling to listen. “Privilege” raises the temperature enough to get some people to bend. Of course, psycho-chemistry being what it is, it gets other people to become more rigid, to melt down, or to explode.
In a way that has no reason to correlate with the truth of the issue under discussion.
None of the typical reactions to “privilege” are reliably related to the truth of the matter.
That’s another problem with overuse of the “priviledge” concept: the more people throw it around, the less punch it packs.
Agreed, that’s a great way of putting it.
There’s the difference between logical fallacy and Bayesian fallacy. Most logical fallacies got evolved into human thinking because they often enough in fact constituted Bayesian evidence. e.g. authorities on a subject often know what the hell they’re talking about.
Sure, many informal fallacies derive from useful heuristics. The problem is occurs when these heuristics are used as hard rules, especially when dismissing criticism.
For instance, the typical ‘privilege’ argument is: “You are white/male/heterosexual/cisgender/educated/upper class/attractive/fit/neurotypical, therefore your arguments about non-white/female/gay/transgender/uneducated/working class/unattractive/fat/neuroatypical people are wrong.”
It is reasonable that people with certain life experiences may have difficulties understanding the issues of people with different life experiences, but this doesn’t mean that you need to share life experiences in order to make an informed argument. The “therefore you are wrong” part of the privilege rebuttal is a fallacy.
Notice that this steelmanning of ‘privilege’ is completely symmetrical, i.e., an “unprivileged” person would have the same problems with respect to the “privileged” person as conversely. Given that this “steelman” has no connection to the common use of the word “privilege” the question arises, of why that word is being used at all? The answer, I suspect, is in order to sneak in the connotations from the regular meaning of the word “privilege”.
The more power you have, the more damage you can do through ignorance.
Do you mean individual or collective power? Individually the average poor citizen may not have much power, but collectively they can do stupid things like voting for the candidate promising to “make the rich pay their ‘fair share’ ”.
I think the privilege model is neither completely true nor completely false, and one of the ways it falls down is that it’s framed as absolute about members of groups (and according to a static list) rather than being about a statistical tilt.
The problem is as I mentioned, to the extend it is true, it doesn’t correspond to the connotations of the word “privilege”.
The argument against symmetry is that the privileged perspective is massively over-represented in prominent cultural productions (movies, books, op-eds, etc.), so underprivileged people have many more resources available that allow them some access to the experiences of the privileged. See this, for instance.
Really? What definition of “privilege” are you using here? I agree that certain perspectives are over-represented in cultural products, but those are not the same ones that the SJ-types call “privileged”.
If the argument is about how the world of people (as distinct from scientific conclusions) works, then life experiences are important information. What sort of argument about the world (say, an argument about why people are poor) should ignore life experience? Admittedly, the experiences of two people aren’t enough, but at least that’s a start. It’s also worth checking on whether one of the people is arguing from no experience.
Indeed, “therefore you are wrong” does not follow logically. The usage I more often see is “please, you’re being a dick, stop it.”
Which is even worse because it accuses the other party of bad faith. Clearly, that’s a conversation stopper.
Does the article say anything that shouldn’t already be obvious to the average LW reader and is therefore worth reading?
It says: “don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
I’m not sure what the average LW reader knows.
I consider it likely that there are LW readers (both left and right) who don’t know there’s opposition to the privilege model from the left.
I think the idea that shooting people down based on perceived privilege is an ad hominem is fairly straightforward and obvious.
Well, it’s still encouraging to get a feedback that the public sanity waterline is higher than absolute zero.
Nothing is “straightforward and obvious” for everyone. Especially when it’s somehow related to politics.
I don’t think “malicious” quite does the delicacy of that sort of very abstract Marxist argument justice, though I’m not sure what word would be better.
“Unfair” doesn’t quite do the job, either, though the author does point out that a privilege framework means that the same argument will be approved or ignored depending on who makes it.
“Consciousness itself is complicit.” is kind of cool. It could almost be something from LW (or at least Peter Watts), but the author probably means something else by consciousness.
I agree, though to be fair the author himself seems to use malicious and fallacious to describe a privilege framework.
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