Yvain, here is a challenge. Many of your examples are weak versions of strong right-wing arguments that you do not accept. (by your remark about Schelling fences, it seems you’re aware of this). I challenge you to replace each of these examples with a weak version of a strong left-wing argument that you do accept. Since policy debates should not appear one-sided, there should be no shortage of weak arguments “on your side.” And it would be an interesting kind of ideological Turing test.
Perhaps I’m wrong about “what side you’re on” and you already accept the strong right-wing arguments. In which case you got me, well done!
“X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features, even though it doesn’t.”
This is the original definition given for TWAITW. Note that the examples Yvain gave all had the form of: “X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain negative features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features.” However, working with the explicit definition outlined by Yvain, as opposed to the implicit definition used by Yvain, we can easily conjure liberal examples:
Abortion is a medical procedure.
Pornography is art.
Welfare is charity.
Other liberal examples, using Yvain’s implicit definition:
Homophobia is hatred.
The War on Drugs is Prohibition.
Pornography is sexist.
However, I am not entirely sure if our capacity to conjure examples matters.
I very much like “Abortion is a medical procedure”. It’s actually a believable WAitW to make, and has the admirable feature that it completely ignores every aspect of abortion relevant to the debate.
I think the “free speech” examples don’t quite have the right form: the central question probably is whether or not pornography or flag burning is free speech, and the conclusion “Flag burning is free speech, therefore it should be legal” is valid if you accept the premise.
Indeed. Many evolutionary biologists are highly dismissive of evopsych. In evolutionary biology you have to start with a variation in a trait, in an environment where—overall, over all interactions—one side of the variation gets a strong enough advantage… then there’s genetic studies, and so on. One has to deal with the bother of doing a whole lot of actual science.
If you look at evolutionary psychology—Tooby and Cosmides, or Pinker, that’s folks literally making up caveman stories with no well defined physical traits and mechanisms to start with, no demonstration that a trait is a net benefit, no genetics… and, usually, not even any evolution, in the sense that there’s no identification of the original proto-trait and it’s gradual path of evolution.
You misunderstand me. Dspeyer used it above as an example of a non-central fallacy, implying that Ev Psych is not very much like what science is. I meant to disagree. To the extent of my awareness, Ev Psych makes predictions and tests them, and goes on to build up theories, making it a typical example of a science.
I’m not so sure when you say it doesn’t specifically use evolutionary theory in the same way Biologists normally do, and thus it’s not a science. Even if that were true, that’s like saying Meteorology isn’t a science because they don’t always use meteors in their work. I think that if you want to say something isn’t a science, you need to show that it doesn’t make falsifiable predictions, doesn’t describe the world, and hasn’t made any advances in our knowledge. Furthermore, you should really have a good explanation as to why Ev Psych people get scientific funding and have papers published in specific Ev Psych journals. And finally, if you’re going to dismiss a field, you should be very knowledgeable about said field (or have other very strong evidence, like the studies showing Psychoanalysis is useless). You can’t really make that decision that a field is bad, without that sort of evidence, even if it just seems that way to you.
I don’t see where in your link EvPsy first makes a falsifiable prediction and then tests it. The experiment described looks like data mining for correlations to me. The expression “was almost exactly what a Darwinian would predict” is yet another post-factum story.
Well perhaps it’s not a good example, although that this single example doesn’t work doesn’t remove the burden of evidence required to dismiss a field.
And then again, maybe it is a good example.
You wouldn’t even think of this as an experiment to be performed if not for evolutionary psychology.
You seem to have some strong privileging of a hypothesis going on here.
What prior would you assign to the scientific competence of a field purporting to be a science, that has journals and textbooks and experts, that’s based on an extension of good theory (evolution)? I’m aware that you have more evidence than this, from (I imagine) online discussions and you’ve read some of the experts, but I’ve not had this experience, and I think that I am more likely to misunderstand an area of science than to have understood it better than its proponents.
Whether something is a science is not decided by how many sciency-looking accoutrements and trappings it has.
Well, certainly not, but having sciency-looking accoutrements and trappings is nevertheless bayesian evidence that something is a science. The question is just how good that evidence is. You’re saying, I take it, that your prior probability that a given set of claims will come along with trappings equivalent to evo psych (or whatever) is substantially higher than your prior probability that evo psych is a science. But in any case, the trappings should probably produce a skyward update (even if it’s small).
having sciency-looking accoutrements and trappings is nevertheless bayesian evidence that something is a science. The question is just how good that evidence is.
No, not at all. The question isn’t how good that evidence is, the question is what other evidence is there. And in this particular case we have, for example, the lack of theories which can be falsified.
I would have no problems with calling evopsy, say, a field of study. But saying it’s a science implies rigor and tests against reality which are, um, absent.
The cute answer is actually more revealing than you think and might help resolve this conversation.
Astronomy lets you predict the way celestial objects move in the sky. You can trivially extend this to weak!Astrology, which just asserts that the movement of the celestial bodies has some kind of systematic causal impact on the way humans behave. However, you would quite reasonably take issue with strong!Astrology, which makes specific, detailed, wrong claims about the nature and extent of these interactions, as well as the general sloppy standards of the field of strong!Astrology.
Evolution lets you predict the way natural selection affects a population over time. You can trivially extend this to weak!Evpsych, which just asserts that evolution will have some impact in shaping the mental faculties of the population. But you can still disagree with some specific claims of evolutionary psychology, as well as the methodologies used to generate them, and the practices of the field as a whole.
I think that Benito thinks you’re saying weak!Evpsych is wrong (that evolution didn’t shape our minds at all), when you’re actually just critiquing aspects of strong!Evpsych—e.g. that evolutionary psychologists are too quick to generalize from WEIRD college students into the rest of humanity, and so on. At least, my usual kneejerk response to critics of evpsych is “what, you think evolution stops above the neck?”
It doesn’t even construct plausible stories about evolution. In the time in which rather simple morphological changes to the bone shapes make some very minor progress, we supposedly evolve whole new instincts, whose morphological complexity (in terms of wiring adjustments in the brain), if innate, would be comparable to entire new organs, if not higher.
Where evolutionary biology predicts that X won’t evolve (and thus doesn’t exist as an innate quality), evolutionary psychology claims X evolved from scratch and exists.
we supposedly evolve whole new instincts, whose morphological complexity (in terms of wiring adjustments in the brain), if innate, would be comparable to entire new organs, if not higher.
I meant can you site a specific example of an evolutionary psychologist proposing an evolved instinct “whose morphological complexity (in terms of wiring adjustments in the brain), if innate, would be comparable to entire new organs, if not higher”. The wikipedia article doesn’t seem to include any.
Looking at the criticism at best some are valid criticisms of a few stupid evolutionary explanations that some people cite, e.g., the claim that homosexuality is adaptive. Most are, however, either simply incoherent like the “Disjunction and grain problems” section, based on false premises like the “ethnocentrism” section, or straw men like the section on “rape”.
The synaptic structure even of parts of your brain is vastly more complex than the organisational structure of any other organ. You can draw diagrams of about how various hepatic cells go together, and that’s all there is to it (caveats apply, though the rules are kind of simple). A diagram which tells you where the synapses go, so that you’d get e.g. a fight-or-flight response? Vastly more complex.
Now consider the evopsych innate module explanation for improved performance on Wason selection task when it’s specified verbally in terms of social rules, just to pick a specific and common example. (How the hell would such a module even interface to a bunch of learned language circuitry? That’s a question which would have to be answered first).
There’s a good overview of the clashes between evopsych modules and neuroscience:
Note, by the way, that evopsych proposes a very specific explanation—modules performing very specific tasks—not something like e.g. higher general arousal improving general cognitive performance depending on the context, improved clarity, greater involvement of mental visualization, or the like. edit: that’s is, without trying to explain it in terms of use or evolution of existing traits (specialized mental visualization) they skip to postulating a new module.
(How the hell would such a module even interface to a bunch of learned language circuitry?).
This rhetorical question suggests confusion. “How?” Don’t much care, it probably involves synapses. This is nothing remotely like the intended conclusion of “it is implausible that”.
Humans ‘learn’ how to walk. We consistently ‘learn’ how to speak and hear language, except when that is not viable in which case, unless the disability is extreme, we ‘learn’ other ways to communicate. We learn all sorts of emotional skills and habits, we learn how to model 3d physics with gravity. We learn which signals to send to our muscles to produce which results. These all have various degrees of learning and predisposition and each of those modules interface with the other ‘learned’ circuitry without difficulty. Or, rather, with difficulty that was ironed out over a couple of billion years.
Well, scientists care about that sort of things, pseudoscientists don’t. The issue is that the learned circuitry is fairly different across individuals, and there is no known or plausible mechanism by which a mutation could make such highly specific modifications to the learned circuitry (as required for evopsych explanation of improved performance at Wason selection task concerning people, to give a specific example).
There’s simply no known way how a gene would connect learned concepts in a very specific way as to give rise to improved performance on Wason selection task when it is discussing social interactions, but not otherwise.
I’m not so much disagreeing as giving a different perspective. Even in utero, most organs already fulfill their intended function. It takes little time for kidneys to produce urine, or for a proto-heart to beat. There are exceptions, such as certain liver functions not being available until late into the pregnancy or post natal. The point is that it doesn’t take all that much information to describe which layer of cells goes where. It’s an astounding process, cells inducing other cells to specialize in certain ways, and gradually creating 3D structures by doing so.
However, contrast that to how much longer it takes for a brain to learn simple functions. The exact 3D structure of the brain cannot be stored in DNA in the same way that the structure of a glomerulus is stored. Only a framework is provided. The actual connectome is only created in response to information from the environment, external data stores becoming necessary because the DNA carrier cannot handle that much information. Of course, there are upsides, namely that by reacting to outside information, the resulting structure is better adapted to its specific environment than if it relied only on DNA information (which is much less flexible).
Human babies in their first months of live can be considered to be in a final, external stage of pregnancy. The cost of birthing and providing for a baby which is astoundingly helpless (“altricial”) compared to other mammals at that stage of life is enourmous. Of course, the ultimate cognitive power of their brains outweighs the investment, but I wouldn’t exactly call a years-long process which awkwardly circumvents various obstacles (e.g. a bigger and better brain wouldn’t fit through the female pelvis and would exceed the mother’s nutritional capacity) to be without difficulty. But I get your meaning.
Indeed. Thing is, we actually know a lot about how it is built. We see genetically predetermined specialization—hippocampus is very structurally distinct from the neocortex, for example.
We also see learned specialization: initially morphologically homologous areas that acquire increased specialization through synaptic pruning, which is known to be driven by the specific electrical signalling within the brain rather than specific genetic instructions targeting those synapses. We see universality (within those brain regions), in the sense that if one brain region is missing from an early enough time, other brain regions will learn to perform same function (thus proving, at least, that learning can account for said functionality).
What we don’t see is innate specialization in those regions, as proposed by Tooby/Cosmides/Pinker (‘hundreds or thousands distinct mental organs’). They’re somehow below any detection, and work absolutely identical to what learning works like.
They’re somehow below any detection, and work absolutely identical to what learning works like.
And what do you think learning looks like? You seem to be envisioning some kind of blank slate priorless learning. The problem is that learning without priors is logically incoherent. Now that we’ve established that our brains have built in priors, why is it implausible that it said priors were the results of evolution? In fact, it would be implausible for them not to be.
A piece of neocortex consisting of approximate repeats of same structure (made from same genetic code) is not prior-less.
Now that we’ve established that our brains have built in priors, why is it implausible that it said priors were the results of evolution? In fact, it would be implausible for them not to be.
It’s not C. Elegans. It is individual-specific which neuron groups end up learning a concept. And genome is not a blueprint, there’s no short way to create a gene that would target a specific region even on the location basis. In humans there’s no gene controlling specifically the strength of a specific synapse any place in neocortex, and if you wanted to genetically engineer an alteration to a specific synapse of your choice you would have to set up an incredibly complex framework for expressing that gene in just that specific neuron and affecting that specific synapse.
And if we are to compare humans to animals, there’s also a far larger brain that does far more distinct things, without a massive increase in the number of genes.
There’s the root of the problem, really: environment drives evolution of genes, genes interact with neurobiology, neurobiology gives rise to psychology. And “evolutionary psychologists”, of the Tooby/Cosmides/Pinker kind, skip the middle links in the chain (where a lot of high quality but complicated science is done).
Now that we’ve established that our brains have built in priors, why is it implausible that it said priors were the results of evolution? In fact, it would be implausible for them not to be.
It’s not C. Elegans. It is individual-specific which neuron groups end up learning a concept. And genome is not a blueprint, there’s no short way to create a gene that would target a specific region even on the location basis.
So your claim is that each human’s priors are assigned not by genetics, but randomly? (according to some distribution?). I don’t even see how to phrase your position coherently.
In humans there’s no gene controlling specifically the strength of a specific synapse any place in neocortex,
But there are genes that control how strong synapses are under what conditions, and there are genes that control the conditions in different parts of the neocotrex.
and if you wanted to genetically engineer an alteration to a specific synapse of your choice you would have to set up an incredibly complex framework for expressing that gene in just that specific neuron and affecting that specific synapse.
Or he could, you know, try tweaking a bunch of genes and see which ones produced effects close to the effect he wanted. Then try more similar tweaks to those and see which get him closer.
There’s the root of the problem, really: environment drives evolution of genes, genes interact with neurobiology, neurobiology gives rise to psychology.
Just because there are many intermediate steps in the causal diagram from genes to psychology doesn’t mean that much of psychology isn’t based on genes.
To use an analogy to a computer, I would argue that studying the properties of neurons will get you about as far in understanding psychology as studying the properties of circuits will get you in understanding software.
I don’t even see how to phrase your position coherently.
There’s far more hypotheses which a human updates on when learning in the early life than there are genes, so there’s simply not enough genes to address priors to hypotheses individually. A lot in the human body (minor blood vessels, details in the fingerprint patterns, etc) is not set by genes—most of the fine detail isn’t individually controlled by genes.
But there are genes that control how strong synapses are under what conditions, and there are genes that control the conditions in different parts of the neocotrex.
The fidelity is very low—it’s not a blueprint. The thing is, you can’t make predictions about what would evolve from just what’s beneficial. It’d be beneficial for many mammals to have extra eyes in the back, but not a single mammal has those, because the developmental process doesn’t provide for a simple mutation that yields such eyes.
To use an analogy to a computer, I would argue that studying the properties of neurons will get you about as far in understanding psychology as studying the properties of circuits will get you in understanding software.
Not when the guys who speculate about the software keep insisting that microsoft windows is added into the computers at the semiconductor chip factory… that’s probably the best analogy. Hardware is what determines how and where the software can be loaded from. For example from the hardware considerations we can see that RAM comes in blank, and hard drive comes in with head positioning tracks and some firmware but not the OS.
There’s far more hypotheses which a human updates on when learning in the early life than there are genes, so there’s simply not enough genes to address priors to hypotheses individually.
Was anyone claiming they do?
The fidelity is very low—it’s not a blueprint. The thing is, you can’t make predictions about what would evolve from just what’s beneficial. It’d be beneficial for many mammals to have extra eyes in the back, but not a single mammal has those, because the developmental process doesn’t provide for a simple mutation that yields such eyes.
Yes, and it would also be beneficial to correctly apply the Wason selection principle to all problems not just ethical ones, but because the relevant circuitry is in the ethics module, our brains only apply it to ethics.
Yes, and it would also be beneficial to correctly apply the Wason selection principle to all problems not just ethical ones, but because the relevant circuitry is in the ethics module, our brains only apply it to ethics.
Or do they really?
A large fraction of people get the problem right even in it’s more abstruse form, where it is harder to leverage the experience to correctly understand the problem statement.
Evopsych you describe is actually a very fringe interpretation of how we get improved performance on Wason selection task. Source . There just isn’t a reason to believe that improved performance has anything to do with ethics, rather than, for example, general improvement in understanding when describing problems that make more sense. Something as simple as replacing ‘married’ with something patently irrelevant such as hair colour, throws people off. A proposed explanation had been that most people just flip cards that seem relevant to them, and that’s it, they aren’t actually solving a logical problem.
A large fraction of people get the problem right even in it’s more abstruse form, where it is harder to leverage the experience to correctly understand the problem statement.
Yes, our brain also has the a general purpose module, but it’s not as effective as the special purpose ones on the problems they are designed for.
There just isn’t a reason to believe that improved performance has anything to do with ethics, rather than, for example, general improvement in understanding when describing problems that make more sense.
Do you have an example of an experiment that distinguishes this from the ethics hypothesis?
Something as simple as replacing ‘married’ with something patently irrelevant such as hair colour, throws people off.
That is also what the ethics theory would predict.
A proposed explanation had been that most people just flip cards that seem relevant to them, and that’s it, they aren’t actually solving a logical problem.
That’s a non-explanation. It doesn’t explain why some cards and not others seem relevant. That just relates a black box in the subjects’ brains with the corresponding black box in the explainer’s brain without saying anything about how either of them work.
Yes, our brain also has the a general purpose module, but it’s not as effective as the special purpose ones on the problems they are designed for.
They aren’t designed, they’re shaped by evolution, and evolution is driven by differential reproduction, which is larger for more widely applicable improvements.
That is also what the ethics theory would predict.
How so? Did you read my link? Two people are making a bet on a trait. If results gone other way, would ethics theory predict that too?
It doesn’t explain why some cards and not others seem relevant.
The relevance is complicated and highly dependent on context and prior experience of the subject.
Yes, our brain also has the a general purpose module, but it’s not as effective as the special purpose ones on the problems they are designed for.
They aren’t designed, they’re shaped by evolution, and evolution is driven by differential reproduction, which is larger for more widely applicable improvements.
It’s also larger for improvements that do really well in situations that commonly come up.
How so? Did you read my link? Two people are making a bet on a trait. If results gone other way, would ethics theory predict that too?
Sorry, I didn’t. Now taking a look at it, that is indeed not directly moral. Although I suspect it might be implicitly moral since there is a presumption in our culture that unmarried men are not to be trusted with children.
The relevance is complicated and highly dependent on context and prior experience of the subject.
Now consider the evopsych innate module explanation for improved performance on Wason selection task when it’s specified verbally in terms of social rules, just to pick a specific and common example. (How the hell would such a module even interface to a bunch of learned language circuitry? That’s a question which would have to be answered first).
The same way the hunger module interfaces with the learned language circuitry when someone tells you there is cake in the fridge.
Also the “Wason module” if you want to call it that is a submodule of the ethics/social rules module, which is why it only gets involved on social rules type problems. Are you trying to argue that it’s implausible that the social rules module interfaces with learned language circuitry?
A diagram which tells you where the synapses go, so that you’d get e.g. a fight-or-flight response? Vastly more complex.
Type error. The complexity of the details of a specific phenotype are not the same as the complexity of the adaptation. This is especially the case when considering the organ that is explicitly design to adapt to complexity via bulk application of an adaptive neural algorithm. The diagram of synapses involved in a given process will be completely different between genetically identically individuals.
Analogy: I don’t know whether there is more complexity in apples or watermelons. I do know that a lot more can be said about an individual watermelon than about an individual apple, if I represent enough detail.
A diagram which tells you where the synapses go, so that you’d get e.g. a fight-or-flight response? Vastly more complex.
I don’t think it weakens your point (given charitable reading) but using ‘fight-or-flight response’ as the illustration of how the brain is most complex than other organs has difficulties given just how many of those other organs are involved in the response. Especially when a diagram “so that you’d get e.g. a fight-or-flight response” could plausibly be an electric wire stabbed into either the pituitary or adrenal glands.
Someone uttering this may claim that they are not using the worst argument in the world as defined:
If he can unilaterally declare a Worst Argument, then so can I. I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: “X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features, even though it doesn’t.”
They claim that it does have the critical features in question. Even the person they are arguing against may agree that it is equivalent to shouting out loud “My country is a @#$% disgrace! Screw my country!”. The disagreement seems to be whether one should be permitted to do that kind of thing.
I do not possess any particularly strong intuitions regarding freedom of speech, for better or for worse. For this hypothetical arguer, could you outline what they think are the critical features?
I do not possess any particularly strong intuitions regarding freedom of speech, for better or for worse. For this hypothetical arguer, could you outline what they think are the critical features?
Something along the lines of being able to say (or otherwise express) whatever you wish without fear of punishment.
I wouldn’t say that. However, I also wouldn’t say that the War on Drugs is the same as Prohibition. I do not have any opinions on these matters that I view as worth stating at this time.
I would say that the War on Some Drugs is sufficiently like Prohibition to make this not an instance of the WAitW. It’s still a fairly weak argument, since it’s lacking in details, but I don’t think it’s trying to sneak in any connotations, and I think basically all of the problems with Prohibition are also problems with the War on Some Drugs.
Prohibition was unpopular with a large portion of the population. It caused a lowered respect for the law in general, because so many people casually broke the law in response. It funded organized violent crime. It invaded personal liberty in order to prevent something that only caused harm as a contributing element, not direct harm. It didn’t work.
Prohibition was a war on a different subset of drugs. It had a constitutional amendment that made it unquestionably legal for the federal government to be doing. It had few medical implications. There was not an obvious historical argument that it would fail catastrophically when it was implemented.
In other words, I think one could reasonably come to different conclusions on the two cases based on cost/benefit analyses, but I think it’s reasonable to call them two instances of the same thing. I also think it’s reasonable to say that most of the reasons Prohibition was bad also apply to the War on Some Drugs.
As an example of the fallacy, I think it’s less than ideal.
There seems to be a significant difference between “prohibition” and “war on drugs” to me, that may justify it being WAitW : prohibition is attacking a behavior that most people actually do. Nearly everyone drinks alcohol, at least on special occasions. While drugs (even the “softer” of the prohibited one, cannabis) are only used by a small fraction (in the USA, where it’s pretty high, according to Wikipedia, it’s 13% who used cannabis at least once in 2009). I’m not in favor of “war on drugs” (in my opinion, it has a lot of negative consequences and doesn’t work well at all at reducing drug usage), but there is a significant difference between forbidding something “everyone” does and something 10% of the population does, and “prohibition” does bring in the “forbidding something everyone does” connotation.
I would find it more accurate to call the ban on filesharing “prohibition” than to call war on drugs “prohibition” (but both are a form of WAitW).
Tried, I would say it depends of the age group. But “tried once in your life” is not the most important for prohibition issues, it’s people using it regularly the real issue.
So, do it regularly (at least once a year) ? It’s hard to find stats on filesharing usage, but the data I remember is about 1⁄3 of people with internet access using p2p, which is about 2⁄3 of the population, so 2⁄9 = 22%, nearly twice the 13% who used cannabis “once per year”. Cannabis is not the only durg, but p2p isn’t the only form of filesharing, so it more or less compensates.
Is that your real question? It feels like you’re objecting to something else or asking an entirely different question, like, say, “Does filesharing really deserve the ‘prohibition’ connotations more than drugs?”.
Prohibition was unpopular with a large portion of the population. It caused a lowered respect for the law in general, because so many people casually broke the law in response. It funded organized violent crime. It invaded personal liberty in order to prevent something that only caused harm as a contributing element, not direct harm. It didn’t work.
Also applies to the present-day prohibition of marijuana (provided you’re more liberal with the usage of the words large and many). And what do you mean by “direct harm”? Pretty sure that, from a physiological point of view alone, alcohol is more harmful than marijuana (at least in large doses).
Unlike the other examples, this one doesn’t really fit the pattern: it’s “X is like Y” and not “X belongs to category Y”. The difference is that “X is like Y” does not sneak in any connotations; it’s well understood that “The War on Drugs is Prohibition” is a rhetorical way of saying “The War on Drugs is very similar to the Prohibition of the 1930s”.
“Affirmative action is like hanging people just because they’re black!” doesn’t carry the same sneaky rhetoric as “Affirmative action is racist!”
Slightly controversial left wing example: “trans women are women”.
(Which is used to argue that they should be treated as women in all instances regardless of the reason that women might traditionally be treated differently to men in that particular situation—eg. competitive sports.)
The challenge is an interesting exercise, and I will try to think up some examples, but your comment also contains an implied accusation which I’d like to respond to first.
By my count, this post includes critiques of four weak right-wing arguments (abortion, euthanasia, taxation, affirmative action) and three weak left-wing arguments (eugenics, sexism, capital punishment). As far as I know, neither side thinks MLK was a criminal. That means I’m 4-3, ie as balanced as it’s mathematically possible to get while seven remains an odd number.
And I think the responses I see below justify my choice of examples. Shminux says the pro-choice converse of “abortion is murder” would be “forced pregnancy is slavery”; TGM suggests below it “denying euthanasia is torture”. These would be excellent examples of TWAITW if anyone ever asserted them which as far as I know no one ever has. Meanwhile, I continue to walk past signs saying “Abortion Is Murder!” on my way to work every day. I don’t know who exactly it would be helping to give “Forced Pregnancy Is Slavery” equal billing with “Abortion Is Murder” here and let my readers conclude that I’m arguing against some fringe position irrelevant to the real world.
If you can think of left-wing WAITWs that are as well-known and catchy as “abortion is murder!”, I will happily edit the post to include them (well, to include one of them; otherwise it’ll be 5-4 and the leftists will start complaining). The best I can do at the moment is anti-war arguments that seem to equate for example humanitarian intervention in Rwanda with invading your next-door neighbor to steal their land because they’re both “war”, but that one doesn’t come in convenient slogan form as far as I know.
Arguments that your stereotypical leftist and stereotypical rightist will both see as bad are the sort of thing that would, ideally, dominate the article.
Why? Isn’t that just Pretending To Be Wise by flattering the prejudices of the two major sides? Ideally, the article should discomfort everyone who has made weak arguments, whether Blue, Green, or Libertarian.
Ideally, the article should discomfort everyone who has made weak arguments, whether Blue, Green, or Libertarian.
The article’s purpose should be education. By beginning with arguments that most agree are bad, and then progressing to arguments that they may recognize as close to their own, the article will convince most readers that this is a valid fallacy to watch out for, and then show them some arguments close to theirs that fit the pattern.
Using this, I’d argue that “Corporations are not people” is somewhat valid as an example of the WAitW, since the idea is to put the emphasis on people, and everything else is just property, things. It puts Corporations in some abstract, undefined category of not-people things that, when phrased appropriately, can carry a strong connotation.
I fail to see the connotation in the “not-speech” for the third example though, and I don’t quite see how one would use that example to argue against or for money—the label / categorization doesn’t seem like it would sway anyone either way.
The money is not speech argument is used (just like the corporations are not people argument) to protest against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. The claim is that although speech is constitutionally protected, this does not mean that wealthy individuals have the right to spend large amounts of money to get their poltiical views heard (by, say, contributing to SuperPACs). The idea is: although it’s true that the government should not be allowed to prevent people from expressing their opinions, the government should be allowed prevent people from spending money to buy ads expressing their opinion because in that case the regulation is on the person’s expenditure of money, and money is not speech (or, if you prefer, money is not-speech).
I think this is an example of the WAitW. The first amendment gives Americans the right to free speech. Wealthy people claim that this means they can spend their considerable wealth in order to broadcast their opinions. After all, if the government can’t restrict my speech, surely that means the government can’t prevent me from utilizing my own resources as a medium for that speech. But, the leftist responds, the government can totally prevent wealthy people from doing this, because the wealthy people are spending money in order to get their opinions broadcast, and hey, money is not-speech, so like many other examples of not-speech, restricting its use is not a violation of the Bill of Rights.
the government should be allowed prevent people from spending money to buy ads expressing their opinion because in that case the regulation is on the person’s expenditure of money, and money is not speech (or, if you prefer, money is not-speech).
The first amendment gives Americans the right to free speech.
More conveniently, it prohibits Congress from regulating the freedom of the press, i.e. the printing press, i.e. the technological means of reproducing ideas so that others may consume them, as in television ads.
Which is why I found the Citizens United decision so baffling- the reasoning they used to reach their conclusion was not at all the reasoning I would have used. (But, then again, I would rule the vast majority of laws Congress outputs unconstitutional, which is one of the many reasons I have not been nominated to the Supreme Court.)
Now that sounds like “Money is speech” which is also a fit to WAiTW.
This highlights an ambiguity in what we mean by “Money is not speech”. It could mean “Money is a subset of (non-speech)” which is false since Money does talk in some cases.
Or it could mean “It is not the case that money is a subset of speech” which is more debatable, and definitely not WAItW. Expressed as a Venn diagram, Money and Speech may be overlapping circles with neither strictly contained in the other.
Not to get into the details, but there is at least a plausibility argument that “speech should be free only when it is free”. If you have to pay someone (or lots of someones) to speak on your behalf, why should your use of them as a mouthpiece be protected? If the people doing the actual speaking (or broadcasting) genuinely agreed with you, and thought it was worth saying, you wouldn’t have to pay them to say it...
Another, amusing, point is that the whole mechanism of broadcast licensing is a massive restriction of freedom of speech. True freedom to speak via broadcast would allow everyone to flood the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously, drowning each other out in interference. That would destroy a public good of course, but once you admit that it is OK to restrict free speech to preserve a public good, you lose the whole “free speech is absolute, and must be protected” argument.
Sure. Heck, once I admit that it’s OK to prevent me from committing mass murder to assemble my manifesto out of rotting bodies, I have admitted that it’s OK to regulate the forms of speech.
Where I end up after that depends rather a lot on what I cared about in the first place.
For example, if what I care about is avoiding the differential suppression of ideas, I might end up with something like “the legality of expressing an idea I through medium M shall not depend on I.” Which allows for broadcast licensing and laws against expressive homicide… though it still doesn’t allow for obscenity or pornography or sedition laws. (Well, not laws against them, anyway.)
Quite true: If I genuinely care about the “differential suppression of ideas” then I will want to avoid suppression of the ideas of the poor by crowding them out of public discourse e.g. by flooding the airwaves with the ideas of the rich. There are more types of suppression to worry about than legal suppression.
However, this is now getting overly political, and off-topic...
That would probably fall under time or manner restrictions. Most free speech absolutists mean that speech should be free in a way that is independent of content. Time or manner restrictions are generally seen as ok by even most self-identified free speech advocates. The danger and ideological objection is to content based restrictions.
Banning defamation (knowingly making false statements to maliciously cause harm) is a content restriction which is pretty well supported even by serious free-speech folks — at least when the target is a private individual. Defamation of famous people, politicians, corporations, products, etc. is a somewhat less well supported idea.
Not to get into the details, but there is at least a plausibility argument that “speech should be free only when it is free”.
Well since even printing presses aren’t free, that would destroy freedom of the press even in its original meaning.
Another, amusing, point is that the whole mechanism of broadcast licensing is a massive restriction of freedom of speech. True freedom to speak via broadcast would allow everyone to flood the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously, drowning each other out in interference.
There are other ways to solve this problem, e.g., treat spectrum as a property right and interference as trespass. In fact the (US) courts were moving in that direction before the 1934 federal power grad.
On printing presses not being “free” either (because you have to buy them) well this is getting into the details. However, it may help to distinguish the funding model. Consider two extreme models:
1) Funding comes from a grant or trust, and is used to buy the press, paper, salaries for journalists, press-operators etc. The funder has no say on what content gets printed (it is up to journalists’/editors’ discretion). Any proceeds from paper sales get paid back into the trust.
This seems like a case of truly free speech (in both senses of free) because no-one is paid to say anything in particular. So the journalists say what they agree with and think is worth saying. It pattern matches to an instance of free speech that we think is worth protecting.
2) Funding comes from a tyrant who owns the whole business, and uses it as a propaganda rag. He orders the journalists to print what he tells them, whether or not they agree with it, whether or not they believe it. If they don’t, they get fired. If they tell anyone what happened, they are sued under non-disclosure agreements.
This doesn’t seem like free speech in either sense (the speakers are being coerced), and doesn’t pattern-match to anything obviously worth protecting.
Cases where the funding comes from advertising look a bit more interesting. An initial pattern-match is that the ads themselves aren’t free speech that we particularly want to protect (outright lies about Snakeoil or distortions about competitor products can be restricted by an advertising standards body). Whereas any news or editorial comment is protected free speech, provided it is cleanly separated from the advertising, and the advertiser doesn’t have any control of its content. If a particular story was run because the advertiser demanded it, that isn’t protected. And so on.
On your other remark about spectrum being a property right: possible, but notice that it is still a massive restriction on free speech (by rights of property now, rather than by legislative censorship). And it shows up some of the problems with broad property rights; seems too similar to making air a property right, with trespass for anyone who breathes it without the owner’s permission.
Please note that “the advertiser doesn’t have any control of its content” doesn’t always hold: advertisers have the power to blackmail editors/newspapers with “if you publish that paper that attacks us, we won’t put advertising in your columns anymore”. They can exert a form of censorship, and induce self-censorship reactions “no, we won’t publish that article about the working conditions in company X, because company X is paying us a lot in advertising and we don’t want to upset them” even without company X having to do any explicit blackmail. This is not an easy problem to solve.
Yes, this is why advertising funding is an “interesting” case and falls between the extremes. One solution is “firewalls” between the department selling advertising space and the editorial team, so that explicit threats of blackmail can’t get through. The paper might need to show evidence of such firewalls to claim protection for pieces which are labelled as comment but look suspiciously-like paid-for advertising.
What is most difficult here is “self-censorship” whereby the editor knows that if he runs a particular story, then the advertising will dry up, and the paper risks going out of business. But this is not in principle different from dilemmas on readership such as “If I run this shocking story about what our troops are up to abroad, then I’ll sound unpatriotic, lose readers, and go out of business”.
There is self-censorship in almost all speech contexts (“If I say that, my friends will think I’m an idiot”, “If I post that, it will get down voted”). But the important point is that what emerges through the self-censorship filter is protected. The intuition here is that we don’t want to impose even more filters.
I agree with all three examples as WAITW even if the last two are negative. It’s also very rare that you can settle policy questions through the negation of a categorization. Corporations aren’t typical people and money isn’t typical speech, but neither of those observations settle the policy question or even debate it—these are just slogans.
The negative examples are different because they don’t suggest an argument, only a counterargument. If X is an apple then various conclusions (typically/intuitively) follow, for instance, that X is edible. But if X is a non-apple then nothing much follows from that; it only serves to block the apple-->edible argument (and suggest that X is not necessarily edible).
“Money is speech” implies that all of the protections that get applied to speech should be applied to spending. If money is not speech, then who knows? Nothing much follows directly from that (it’s not as if there’s some general principle that things which are non-speech should be banned); it just suggests that we don’t necessarily have to apply the speech protections to spending. It’s more similar to the “MLK was not a criminal” counterargument than to the “MLK was a criminal” argument (note that being a non-criminal doesn’t make someone especially admirable), but it doesn’t fall into the trap of being obviously false.
While I can see this argument apply as a sort of justifiable use when humans are doing such profiling, though even in that case I think it should be used sometimes, I find it a bit absurd when applied to say data mining systems. Are we to apply Bayesian reasoning to everything except predictors tied to certain sacralized human traits like gender, dress, class, race, religion and origin? Why don’t we feel averse applying it to say age?
“Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
To avoid nitpicking that cancer cells have no ideology, I will point out that if they did, they would share the ideology with all life forms on the planet.
“Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of life!”
I think the difference is that the right wing examples are examples of core beliefs that many stereotypical conservatives believe. Thus leftists feel like they are scoring points when they read it. The left examples, however, aren’t really core beliefs of the Democratic party. Democrats may lean against capital punishment, but no presidential candidate in my memory has made that a core tenant of eir campaign.
I also think it’s wildly generous to suggest eugenics as a leftist issue. I can’t remember ever hearing someone seriously suggest that genetic engineering is eugenics. And typically, it’s conservatives who are opposed to genetic engineering, generally on the grounds of playing God.
And when I was reading it, MLK got lumped in with conservatives for a number of reasons. First, the strong conservative examples primed me to put it there. Second, the civil rights act was largely pushed for by a Democratic legislature and president. Lastly, African Americans tend to line up with democrats in modern demographics.
The best leftist example I could come up with is “Meat is murder”. I think that merits including. Or mixing in with the abortion one.
By my count, this post includes critiques of four weak right-wing arguments (abortion, euthanasia, taxation, affirmative action) and three weak left-wing arguments (eugenics, sexism, capital punishment)
I was surprised people didn’t notice that both the sexism and eugenics arguments where somewhat “right wing”. I think a key thing might be that perception of “right” and “left” are tied to the current American political landscape. The important role of religion in it means that conservative politicians don’t often make arguments for their policies based on evolutionary psychology or the high heritability of IQ or conscientiousness. The America right seems almost as invested in blank slate notions as the left.
“Arguing against homosexuality is hate speech!”. Many anti-queer statements are hate speech, e.g. promotion of murder, but others are along the lines of “People shouldn’t act on same-sex attraction because...”. Quite a few conservatives complain that the latter form of argument is dismissed as “hate speech”, even though “People shouldn’t drive SUVs because...” is never taken to mean you hate SUV drivers.
That’s not the worst argument in the world. “People shouldn’t act on same-sex attraction because...” is closer to the central archetype of hate speech than “People shouldn’t drive SUVs because...” is. And the full argument is probably something like “Arguing against homosexuality is hate speech, and therefore harms homosexuals.” — which is a sloppy argument, but a cleaned-up version would be “Arguing against homosexuality encourages people (through the magic of virtue ethics) to view homosexuals as vicious. And it legitimizes (through the affect heuristic) the established pattern of homophobia. Therefore, you should not argue against homosexuality. By the way, hate speech shares these features.”
So this may be more complicated than I thought, in that all of the examples below seem really bad to me, but that might just be an example of my personal bias. I think if any of them get, let’s say, more than ten upvotes I’ll assume they’re generally agreed to be a good argument and I’ll put them in—does that sound like a reasonable bar? That means upvote them if you think they’re worthy of inclusion.
I was trying to think of further liberal examples, and I think some references to “human rights” might qualify—for example, “health care is a human right”. The meaning of “human right” that allows us to assert this seems very poorly defined, whereas the meaning of “human right” that allows us to say that negative rights like free speech are human rights seems well-defined, even though I don’t agree with it. So calling health care (or housing, or something) a “human right” might be a way of trying to claim that we should view health care as exactly like free speech, free religion, etc, even though it is quite different in that it requires positive action by other people.
I’m not quite willing to include that one just because the total ambiguity in the definition of “human right” makes it pretty hard to pin down exactly how the argument is being made.
EDIT: Just saw “Property is theft” has 15 upvotes. Do people think this one should be added?
“Human rights” are poorly defined, but I guess the closer we have to a formal definition of them is Universal Declaration of Human Rights which does include health care and right to education at the same level than free speech or fair trial.
But I agree it’s a very poor defense of universal healthcare, the UDHR is a political document that can carry weight of authority, but it doesn’t make something ethical or unethical by itself. The only way I use the UDHR in a political discussion is with a reasoning like « UDHR includes right to healthcare, and UDHR was accepted by most countries of the planet, so it’s not a completely lunatic position. Now, please stop your authority arguments like “the only natural rights are freedom and ownership” and listen to my actual arguments for universal healthcare, and I’ll listen to your real ones against it », which doesn’t in itself justify healthcare, but can help giving me at least a chance to expose my arguments.
It might be easier to come up with examples if you go back to your original definition and note that it allows for categories with positive qualities lending their positive qualities to category members who lack those physical qualities. (Leftist arguments as a rhetorical class are usually phrased in terms of including things in positive categories, whereas rightist arguments are more well-known for including things in negative categories.)
An official of the Russian Orthodox Church on Thursday said supporters of the band bear a moral responsibility for the gruesome killings in the city of Kazan.
There are similar Western examples with Wikileaks/Anonymous.
As for the euthanasia-is-torture one, I heard that a lot on the media at the time of Terri Schiavo and similar cases. (Maybe none used the word torture but still.)
I lost a lot of faith in contemporary philosophy when I heard “A Defense of Abortion” was “the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy”.
Interesting example. I’m trying to figure out how it fulfills the second criteria for the WAITW namely “as though it also had those features even though it doesn’t”
The archetypical example of a struggle for equal rights has been identical political enfranchisement (e.g. the suffragette movement) or identical legal equality (equal right to property, etc) on an individual level.
Things like gay marriage or adoption rights don’t fit those archetypical examples—hence the rather silly counter-argument by its opponents that “gays are already allowed to marry—they’re allowed to marry people of the opposite gender.”
I’m saying all this as a huge supporter of gay rights, btw.
Ah I see now, thanks. I don’t its nearly as common as “abortion is murder” though. Actually I’m quite embarrassed that I can’t think of any liberal examples of the worst argument in the world with regard to social issues that people actually use regularly. I don’t like any that I’ve seen so far.
The archetypical example of a struggle for equal rights has been identical political enfranchisement (e.g. the suffragette movement) or identical legal equality (equal right to property, etc) on an individual level.
It’s not as different as it might seem. Initially, only property owners could vote, and so only letting men vote was effectively “one vote per household”. With the “sensible” assumption that everyone is married and truthful with their spouses, giving votes to both spouses means either one candidate gets two votes, or they vote for different people and thus might as well have stayed home. Since the only difference there is that the folks counting the votes would have to do twice as much work (since spouses usually agree about everything), it would not be helpful to give every household 2 votes instead. People could have argued at the time (I’m not sure whether they actually did) that women do have the right to vote—the husband is voting for both of them (this is of course complicated by the fact that women could not own property).
Equal right to property works similarly—unmarried women could own property, but married women could not.
Willie Nelson: How much oil is a human life worth?
Economist: Well, in the United States workers value their lives at about $7 million. With current crude oil prices at around $100 a barrel, a human life is worth about 70,000 barrels of oil.
If only 100 barrels of oil ends up being worth a human life, clearly we ought to invade Iran. Or Equatorial Guinea if we can only scrape up a couple of million dollars for the coup.
I’d quibble about “clearly,” even in context. Wars are just too damn random.
Nothing against cost-benefit analysis in the abstract, but, in practice, invading a country seems like one of those very complicated choices that may inherently risk some major, major unintended consequences. I’m mostly thinking negative, but I suppose this would go both ways—unexpected ultimate positive consequences might be possible as well, but still hard to calculate at all.
I am not entirely convinced that a foreign-backed violent coup, even against a truly heinous dictator, is necessarily a good idea. This seems like one of those cases for ethical injunctions, because the visible upside is so clear (the dictator is gone), but the downside is more complicated: violent coups, for whatever reason, very rarely end up producing good governments.
The premise was that human life is ethically cheap, and the conclusion wasn’t that backing a coup was a good idea, but that outright invasion would be.
Personally, I don’t think that the cash value of the oil (discounted as normal) is greater than the cash cost of the war plus the reconstruction needed to get the oil. I could be wrong on my estimates, because I don’t think the relative monetary cost is a significant factor in the moral calculus, so I didn’t spend much time or effort estimating the values.
I looked at it considering that the coup attempt never started, and figured that he was claiming that someone dropped a tip and stopped it.
I don’t know if ~80 people could complete a coup; it would seem that if the military is loyal to the existing regime, it would fail, and if the military was disloyal no mercenaries are needed.
Nope, wasn’t accusing you of anything. I was just amused by the point that anyone who wants to save as many lives as possible, but has only a finite amount of oil, must be able to state some consistent value of human life in terms of barrels of oil, since otherwise you could rearrange the oil to save more lives.
So, are the downvotes because these are, or because they are not, exactly what was asked for? And is −3 too much of a hair trigger for the karma fine for replying, or about right?
I didn’t downvote, but on your 3 examples, only the first one qualifies for me, which can justify downvotes (I didn’t because the first one qualifies, making it enough to not be worth a downvote).
“Rethuglican” is not an argument, just a typical pun on words against the ones you don’t like, but it doesn’t pretend to be a reason to not like republicans, just something democrats say between themselves. It’s an happy death spiral, but not a WAitW.
“We are the 99%” doesn’t share much of the WAitW features. It doesn’t try to sneak in connotations, it doesn’t attack an typical example of a cluster by assimilating it with the archetype of the cluster.
I have the impression that (1) when people post things in LW that are politically leftish, it’s quite common for them to get a response along these lines—complaining about leftward bias and suggesting that it should be addressed by a deliberate injection of rightward bias to compensate—whereas (2) when people post things in LW that are politically rightish, they basically never receive such responses.
I have no statistics or anything to back this up, and it’s not clear that there’s any feasible way to get (or informatively fail to get) them, so I’d be interested in other opinions about whether this asymmetry is real.
If it is real, it seems to me quite interesting.
(One possible explanation, if it’s real, would be that leftish views are much more common here than rightish ones, so that people with rightish views feel ill-treated and want the balance redressed. Except that I think I see distinctly more rightish than leftish political commentary here, and the rightish stuff more often gets large numbers of upvotes. I suppose it’s possible that what we have here is a lot of slightly leftish people and a smaller number of rightish ones who feel more strongly. Again, this is probably hard to get a good handle on and I’d be interested in others’ impressions.)
Well right wing people are almost certainly a minority here, but don’t forget that makes such positions convenient for hipster fun. Some LWers who argue for right wing positions have stated that they feel more and more unwelcome in the past few months. Not only that I think they make a good case for pro left bias being very prevasive on LessWrong. I think what you are seeing is some users trying to correct for it.
I dislike the fact that we’re talking about the bias rather than the arguments. Here, more so than any other place I know of, we should be dissecting arguments and talking about the truths of the issues, rather than saying that a statement is incorrect because of its side on the political spectrum.
This site is about refining the art of human rationality, while we certainly do try to get a good map of the world we spend most of our time thinking about thinking. The fundamental realization at the heart of our community, that to a certain extent distinguishes it from traditional rationality, is that humans are biased and broken thinkers who can’t rely on their naive reasoning too much. You can think as long and as calmly as you like but if you base your thinking on broken axioms or bad epistemology you won’t get much closer to truth.
I did not say or even wish to imply a set of arguments was wrong because of political affiliation, neither where the users I linked to. What I was implying quite strongly is that we are unlikely to hear the best arguments or to update appropriately to those that are politically inconvenient. Not even because of a desire to engage in propaganda for ones cause, but because the world simply looks a certain way to them! There are many correct arguments one can make for incorrect positions, by selectively only hearing correct arguments one does not by default hear the counter-arguments or correct arguments for other positions and perhaps doesn’t’ even realize they may exist. These are not a controversial observations at all.
Following this reasoning and promoted by complaints and observations observations of my own I stated my argument by pointing out the dominant political affiliation and ideological assumptions on the site and how this harms the rationality of the community on certain subjects.
The most popular political view, at least according to the much-maligned categories on the survey, was liberalism, with 376 adherents and 34.5% of the vote. Libertarianism followed at 352 (32.3%), then socialism at 290 (26.6%), conservativism at 30 (2.8%) and communism at 5 (.5%).
I have the impression that (1) when people post things in LW that are politically leftish, it’s quite common for them to get a response along these lines—complaining about leftward bias and suggesting that it should be addressed by a deliberate injection of rightward bias to compensate—whereas (2) when people post things in LW that are politically rightish, they basically never receive such responses.
My explanation of this perception is that posters, in general, know better than to post rightish things at LW unless they are correct. Every now and then you get a new Objectivist who gets downvoted because they aren’t discussing things at a high enough level.
Lots of beliefs that are common on LW are uncomfortable for the stereotypical leftist- like human biodiversity in general. To see someone brazenly state that, yes, there is a difference in measured IQ between the races and that reflects reality rather than our inability to design tests properly, or that men and women are actually neurologically distinct, will seem like a “not my tribe” signal to the stereotypical leftist- but people here don’t hold that opinion (as far as I can tell) because of racial or sexual enmity, but because they put evidence above wishful thinking and correct beliefs above politeness.
But now imagine that for the stereotypical rightist. How big of a “not my tribe” signal is atheist materialism and evolution?
I am thinking that one possible asymetry between “the left” and “the right” is that the former is a rather homogenous group, while the latter is heterogenous. The left generally means socialist(-ish), and the right generally means non-socialist. The left is a fuzzy blob in the concept-space, the right seems like a label for points outside of this blob.
As an example, both Ayn Rand and Chesterton would be examples of “the right”. What exactly do they have in common? (Religion: the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever? Individual or community? Mystery or reason? The great future or the great past? Selfishness or selflessness? Should women be allowed as leaders? Etc.) The common trait that classifies them both as “the right” is the fact that neither of them is a socialist.
Well, I could also says that neither of them “considers hinduism the best thing ever”… but why should that information be used to classify them? Well, for a hinduist that would be an important information. Then it follows that classifying many diverse views under one label of “the right” makes sense to you mostly if you are a socialist. (Or if being versus not-being a socialist is the dominant question in your political paradigm.) An “Ayn-Rand-type” non-socialist and a “Chesterton-type” non-socialist would otherwise feel uncomfortable under the common umbrella.
I am not saying there are no differences among “the left”, but to me they seem more like a matter of degree. This observation may be culture-dependent. I am from eastern Europe, where “the left” basically either wants “what communists did” or “something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence”. -- I suppose in USA the diversity of “the left” is greater, because there is no such attractor. Actually, the Republican party may serve as a similar (though weaker) attractor for “the right”.
OK, what I tried to say was this: suppose that the leftist opinions are pretty similar, and the rightist opinions are very diverse. Assuming that both sides are about equally mindkilled (believe in about the same proportion of true statements, and the same proportion of false statements), for most statements the left will probably have either true believes or false beliefs as a whole, while the right will internally disagree—therefore even if each specific right political group has the same chance to have true beliefs, there is a very high chance that at least one of the right political groups will have a true belief.
For clarity, here is a model: There are true beliefs A, B, C, D; and every political group is correct only about one of them, and incorrect about three of them. There are three left groups, but all of them believe in A. There are three right groups, first of them believes in B, second in C, third in D. -- Now if we make a per-group statistics, we find that each party is 25% correct and 75% incorrect. However, if we make a per-true-belief statistics, we find that 25% of true beliefs are associated with the left (A), and 75% of true beliefs are associated with the right (B, C, D). -- In this model, if a group of people could succeed to hold all true beliefs (A, B, C, D), an external observer would judge they are mostly right (despite they happen to disagree with every individual right group in majority of beliefs).
Back to the beginning—we disagree with Ayn Rand about simplicity of values, or about importance of community; we also disagree with Chesterton about religion. That alone does not give us a political label. On the other hand, disagreeing with a socialist political idea is sufficient to get the label of political right, because any point outside of the socialist concept-space is called “the right”.
I am thinking that one possible asymetry between “the left” and “the right” is that the former is a rather homogenous group, while the latter is heterogenous. [...] The left is a fuzzy blob in the concept-space, the right seems like a label for points outside of this blob.
Beware the out-group homogeneity effect. People tend to see their own group as more heterogeneous than other groups, as differences that look small from far away look bigger up close.
With left and right, I have also heard the exact opposite claim: that the “right” represents a narrower, more coherent group. In the US, the “right” is based in the dominant, mainstream social group (sometimes called “real America”), drawing disproportionately from people who are white, male, Christian, relatively well-off, straight, etc., while the “left” is a coalition of the various groups that are left out of “real America” for one reason or another. Alternatively, conservatives are the people who support the existing social order and want to keep things roughly how they are; liberals are the ones who want change—and there are more degrees of freedom in changing things than in keeping things the same.
If a political group X, identified as A in {”left”, “right”}, becomes very powerful in some era, the following things happen:
people see X as a prototype of A;
other A groups are seen like less successful variations of X; if that is impossible, the cognitive dissonance will be solved by reclassifying the incompatible group as non-A;
after a while X (and therefore A) becomes the default position for people who don’t think too much about politics.
Later, when the political group X loses some power:
simple people still identify as X (A), which is reinforced by seeing the past with rose-colored glasses;
new opinions are automatically classified as non-A, because they don’t pattern-match X;
therefore smart people begin to identify as non-A, to signal intellectual superiority and independent thinking.
In USA, X = Republican / religious right, and A = “right”. In Eastern Europe, X = Communist, and A = “left”.
This is very simplified, but it explains why sometimes the same person could self-identify as “left wing” in USA (to express their incompatibility with the religious right), and as “right wing” in Eastern Europe (to express their incompatibility with the communists). On the other hand, people mostly compatible with the religious right or with the communists can self-identify the same in both places.
In Eastern Europe the distinction between “support the traditional model” and “support change” is rather confused, because it is not clear whether the traditional refers to the era before the fall of communism, or to era even before the communists. In some sense, both religious right and communists are literally the conservative parties here.
This is an interesting point, that one about the left being more homogeneous than the right. I am not sure whether to believe it, so let me present some objections that I can think of, without evaluating their merit.
A) Assuming the left is indeed more homogeneous, isn’t it true just because of greater variability of right between different countries, with a typical single country’s right being as homogeneous as the same country’s left? (The objection hasn’t a particularly strong bearing on the perceived LW left/right imbalance, but may be relevant to the more general question of how the categories of left and right are defined.)
The left generally means socialist(-ish), and the right generally means non-socialist.
B) This may not be accurate; beware availability heuristics.
Environmentalists aren’t necessarily socialists as their opinions about the optimal economic order aren’t the defining part of their ideology and may differ. Yet the environmentalists are usually classified on the left. Anarchists aren’t necessarily socialists; many of them oppose any form of organised society, while archetypal socialism is a very organised society, from many points of view more than market capitalism. Feminists rarely dream about socialist utopias as they have a different fish to fry. Yet both feminists and anarchists are usually considered standing on the left. In fact I could use the examples of these groups to make a mirror argument of yours, namely, that the right is capitalist(-ish) while the left is everything opposed to capitalism. I don’t think this is a good definition since there are counter-examples to it too (e.g. the nazis who are against capitalism but still “right-wing”) but at least I don’t immediately see this description being less reasonable than yours.
Of course this all hinges on the definitions of socialism or capitalism, discussions about which might better be avoided for their pointlessness. It is not clear whether there is a sensible definition of left and right other than “arbitrary convention set up by historical accident”, but if there is, I suppose it would go along the lines of social status: the right are those who side with the elites and wish the present distribution of power preserved, the left are those who side with the underclasses and therefore wish to shift the balance towards more egalitarianism, from which would the lower status people profit (in terms of relative status increase, not necessarily materially). This definition has several advantages: for one thing, it has no problems with the fact that in the late 18th century the market liberals were considered left.
As an example, both Ayn Rand and Chesterton would be examples of “the right”. What exactly do they have in common?
C) Both Jacques Derrida and Lenin would be examples of “the left”. What do they have in common? Or Pol Pot and Bertrand Russell? Neither of them was a big fan of free markets (or hinduism, for that matter), but that doesn’t guarantee much ideological homogeneity.
I am from eastern Europe, where “the left” basically either wants “what communists did” or “something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence”.
D) When I still thought that “left” and “right” were more than two rather arbitrary labels, I considered myself a leftist and “something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence” wasn’t the way I would summarise my political preferences. Of course, there is a sense in which any government intervention into the markets is “what communists did, just less”, but it is a sense on such a level of vagueness and generality that it lacks significant information value. In any case, for ideologically oriented both social democrats and greens communism is primarily a negative example rather than an attractor. (I don’t claim deep knowledge of the contemporary left in Slovakia, but feel quite certain to object to your statement being formulated as valid for the whole Eastern Europe).
It is not clear whether there is a sensible definition of left and right other than “arbitrary convention set up by historical accident”, but if there is, I suppose it would go along the lines of social status: the right are those who side with the elites and wish the present distribution of power preserved, the left are those who side with the underclasses and therefore wish to shift the balance towards more egalitarianism, from which would the lower status people profit (in terms of relative status increase, not necessarily materially).
I don’t think that quite described the US, or Western Europe—the stereotypical redneck is low-status but on the right (same for ploucs here in France), and buying organic food seems to be more common with the rich, but is associated to the left.
A better description of the left/right gap may be that each represents a status ladder, and that people support the status ladder on which they have the best relative position. The details of what counts tend to vary with time and place, but on the left you tend to get status for being educated, open-minded, environmentally aware, original, etc., and on the right you tend to get status for being rich, responsible, having a family, being loyal to your country, etc.
At least, that angle of approach seems better than looking at policies; if you compare the policies of the French left and the American left, the policies might seem so different that they don’t deserve the same label; but if you compare the kind of people who support either parties, the similarities are much more apparent.
I have a notion that in the US, left-wingers tend to focus on defection by high-status people and right-wingers tend to focus on defection by low-status people.
It is not clear whether there is a sensible definition of left and right other than “arbitrary convention set up by historical accident”, but if there is, I suppose it would go along the lines of social status: the right are those who side with the elites and wish the present distribution of power preserved, the left are those who side with the underclasses and therefore wish to shift the balance towards more egalitarianism, from which would the lower status people profit (in terms of relative status increase, not necessarily materially).
Except where “the left” has become the elites, there the dynamic is reversed.
The key question is not whether leftist politicians have become elites (they do regularly) but whether their agenda supports elites and whether they get support from the elites, which happens very rarely. There is a lot of self-serving political decisions made by both left and right politicians from which politicians benefit, but the left politicians are nevertheless still more connected with lower classes than the right politicians.
Somewhat special example were/are communist countries where the non-political aspects of social status are reduced and the groups of communists and elites have large overlap. These countries, when compared internationally, are “left”, but in the internal politics there is usually little place for using “left” and “right” as the left and right are relative characteristics which are useless when there is only one political party.
The key question is not whether leftist politicians have become elites (they do regularly) but whether their agenda supports elites and whether they get support from the elites, which happens very rarely.
I wasn’t just referring to politicians, but to the liberal intelligentsia.
but the left politicians are nevertheless still more connected with lower classes than the right politicians.
I don’t know what the situation is in the Czech Republic, but in the US while this was probably somewhat true a generation ago, it’s highly dubious today. (Although of course liberals like to think it’s still true.)
I don’t know what the situation is in the Czech Republic, but in the US while this was probably somewhat true a generation ago, it’s highly dubious today.
I’m reminded of a quote from a hippy band during the Vietnam War. Paraphrased:
We thought we were representing the working class. Then we realized the working class were the ones beating us with nightsticks.
I don’t know what the situation is in the Czech Republic, but in the US while this was probably somewhat true a generation ago, it’s highly dubious today. (Although of course liberals like to think it’s still true.)
Especially when you consider things like gay marriage or free immigration, causes universally approved of (in public, at least) by the liberal intelligentsia, but very unpopular among several core Democratic groups.
But there are any number of sub-varieties of socialism, so it is itself a fuzzy blob. Moreover, the non-right in many
countries, particularly the US, barely has a whiff of classical socialism, Who is advocating a centrally planned economy
or worker control of production in the US? It’s a standing joke in Europe that the US has two parties of the right. That’s “perception” of course. It’s also a US perception that public healthcare “is” socialism—the idea is seen as mainstream
and cross-party elsewhere. What is going on is that the right have this convenient label “socialist” to lambast
the non-right with, and the non-right don’t have a corresponding term to hit back with. That doesnt mean anything about ideaspace.
Which question? Wanting some but not all things under state/provision control is not socialsim by any strict definition. More like moderate or centrel-left or social democracy or something. But “social democrat!” doens’t have the right insulting ring.
About as big as “human biodiversity” is for a leftist. I think you are severely underestimating the strength of conviction among people whose beliefs disagree with your own, or the extent to which these are moral disagreements, rather than exclusively factual.
I think you are severely underestimating the strength of conviction among people whose beliefs disagree with your own,
Very possibly. The Christian who gets infected by LW might be terrified of telling their family, friends, and church group that they’re now an atheist; similarly, the anti-racist who gets infected by LW might be terrified of telling their family and friends that they’re now a race realist.
similarly, the anti-racist who gets infected by LW might be terrified of telling their family and friends that they’re now a race realist.
I recognize that if evidence shows differences in (for example) intelligence between races, then, yeah, I’ve got to change my belief and except that people of X race are smarter than those from Y. I don’t know that this would change my behaviour towards people of either race, or that I think any state policy should change. Perhaps my “racism bad” reflex is stronger than I’m consciously accounting for, but I don’t see any useful way to act on this data. Similarly, I don’t think my behaviour would change much if there was hard data about intelligence difference between the genders.
I choose intelligence because it’s a controversial, and common, topic. I can maybe see the value in applying this data to predisposition to violence, or things like calculating insurance premiums.
There’s a lot of ways to act on data about group differences in intelligence.
For example, if it turns out that group A has a higher average IQ than group B, and that A and B can be distinguished reliably by genetic testing (including but not limited to visual inspection for associated phenotypes), I might decide to devote more effort to educating group B than group A, to make up for the difference. Or I might decide to devote more effort to educating group A than group B, to get the best bang for my education buck. Or I might decide to research the differences, to learn more about the physiological mechanisms of intelligence. Or I might change my ways of evaluating claims so that I give more weight to group A’s ideas relative to group B’s than I used to (assuming I used to believe they were equally intelligent). Or I might decide to structure my society in such a way that group A has access to certain privileges that group B is denied, on the grounds of their superiority, or such that B gets privileges A is denied, on the grounds of their greater need. Etc.
Which of those I do, if any, depends a lot on what I think follows from greater potential intelligence within a group. People disagree about this. People often change their minds about this depending on whether they consider themselves in group A or B.
Incidentally, just for the record: I find it pretty likely that there do exist such group differences, though I expect that the portion of variation in real-world expressed intelligence accounted for by group differences in innate intelligence is <10%. I find it fairly unlikely that “race” is the best detectable correlate of membership in such groups available to us, though it might be more reliable than, say, the shape of an individual’s head (also a popular theory once). I expect its popularity in that role is more of a reflection of historical social relations than a conclusion drawn from current data.
For example, if it turns out that group A has a higher average IQ than group B, and that A and B can be distinguished reliably by genetic testing (including but not limited to visual inspection for associated phenotypes), I might decide to devote more effort to educating group B than group A, to make up for the difference. Or I might decide to devote more effort to educating group A than group B, to get the best bang for my education buck.
Fair enough, that’s an example of policy, based on this data.
Or I might decide to research the differences, to learn more about the physiological mechanisms of intelligence.
Also cool, seems obvious in hindsight!
Or I might change my ways of evaluating claims so that I give more weight to group A’s ideas relative to group B’s than I used to (assuming I used to believe they were equally intelligent).
I’d imagine a group’s ideas are more to do with non-genetic factors than genetic intelligence.
Or I might decide to structure my society in such a way that group A has access to certain privileges that group B is denied, on the grounds of their superiority, or such that B gets privileges A is denied, on the grounds of their greater need. Etc.
For me some of these would be contingent on the additional discovery that the group’s intelligence is a result of its genetic difference; group B could be generally poorer, or less well-nourished, or some other factor leading to lower intelligence, in addition to being genetically distinguishable. This is also making the assumption that IQ tests are culturally fair and the like—though I’m happy to use the term as a placeholder for ‘idealized intelligence test’.
I’d imagine a group’s ideas are more to do with non-genetic factors than genetic intelligence.
As would I. But the claimant’s intelligence (whether genetic or otherwise) is nevertheless a factor I take into account when deciding how much weight to give a claim.
And, yes, all of this is contingent on the idea that IQ correlates well with intelligence.
And, yes, if it turns out that the physiological mechanisms whereby group A develops greater intelligence than group B are heavily environmentally mediated (e.g., due to differential poverty, nourishment, or other factors) I might well decide to alter the environment to increase intelligence in group B as well.
I’ve posted such complaints about left wing bias, so I’ll elaborate on my impressions.
I perceive the left wing comments come with much more of an implicit assumption by the poster, and the respondents to it, of the moral superiority of left wing positions, and that all attending will see it the same way.
Most of the non left wing views don’t seem to me to come with that presumption on the part of the speaker that everyone here shares their moral evaluation. If anything, the tone is of someone who expects to be taken as a crank.
The liberals are more generally accustomed to being in an ideologically homogeneous environment while the libertarians are accustomed to being in the minority, and both speak with a tone appropriate to the general environment, and not to the particular environment here, where liberals and libertarians are equally represented.
For my part, I also find instances where the absent conservatives are caricatured and snickered at, again with the presumption that all right thinking folk agree, and the bile rises in the gorge, and I feel the need to respond.
I perceive the left wing comments come with much more of an implicit assumption by the poster, and the respondents to it, of the moral superiority of left wing positions, and that all attending will see it the same way.
Isn’t that reasonable though? If you’re a X-winger, isn’t the whole point that X-wing positions are in fact morally superior?
Isn’t that reasonable though? If you’re a X-winger, isn’t the whole point that X-wing positions are in fact morally superior?
Morally superior perhaps, but they lack the hull plating and durability to survive ongoing combat and the offensive payload pales in comparison to what the Y-wing can deliver.
The Y-wing was an outdated piece of junk even by the Battle of Yvain; that’s why the Rebels had it at all. The X-wing’s proton torpedoes deliver the hurt when necessary (just ask Tarkin or Ysanne Isard), and if you want more than that, well, that’s what the B-wings are for… Between them and the A-wing, there is simply no role for Y-wings at any point—except cannon bait!
Interesting; thanks. For what it’s worth, I don’t have at all the same perception that leftish comments come with an implicit assumption of the moral superiority of left-wing positions. But I happen to lean distinctly left myself, especially by US standards, and if you don’t then it’s hardly surprising that our perceptions would have such a difference.
What is the strong version of “taxation is theft”, for example? I can recall arguments against taxation stronger than this, of course, but none of them I would consider a version of the “taxation is theft” argument.
As for the arguments mentioned in the OP, “taxation is theft”, “abortion is murder” and “euthanasia is murder” are typically right-wing, “affirmative action is racist” is also probably right-wing (although general accusations of racism fit better into the left wing arsenal) while “capital punishment is murder”, “ev-psych is sexist” and “genetic engineering is eugenics” sound quite leftist to me. Not sure about “M.L.King was a criminal”, but the examples seem balanced with respect to the stereotypical left/right division. With respect to Yvain’s opinions the choice might be less balanced, of course.
What is the strong version of “taxation is theft”, for example?
Simple: “taxation is theft and is also just as wrong as mugging because 1) the supposed benefits of government programs aren’t really there and 2) majority voting doesn’t make mugging any better than theft by a gang of robbers is better than theft by a single robber.” All of these arguments can be made stronger by specifying the reasons you should ignore the major differences between the moral issue in question and the archetypal example’s.
(1) and (2) are two distinct arguments. (1) is stronger than, but not related to the original argument by categorisation. (2) is itself a conjunction of (i) “taxation is theft” hidden as a tacit assumption and (ii) a counter-argument to the unsaid “but this instance of theft is legitimated by majority voting”. I don’t find it useful to call X and Y and Z a strong version of X when the only thing Y and Z have in common with X is their being used to support the same conclusion.
Edit: (1) is in fact also a counter-argument to the (yet) unsaid “this theft is legitimised by its positive benefits” and doesn’t address the question of why taxation is bad in the first place, besides categorising it as theft.
What is the strong version of “taxation is theft”, for example? I can recall arguments against taxation stronger than this, of course, but none of them I would consider a version of the “taxation is theft” argument.
Well I can give you one example. Neoclassical economics makes a pretense of being neutral about how resources are distributed. The focus is instead on the absolute amount of resources. As I think Steven Landsburg puts it, taxes are no fun to pay, but they are fun to collect. The problem is that taxes can be avoided, and that resources put into avoiding taxes (and collecting them) are wasted. There is an identical economic argument against theft: the issue isn’t that the thief deserves to have the painting less than the museum, it’s that resources the museum puts into defending the painting (and that the thief puts into procuring it) are wasted.
Naturally that is a criticizable line of reasoning, but it gave me a lot to think about the first time I heard it.
But private property also requires resources to defend it (which are wasted like the ones to collect taxes), so in fact, neoclassical economics agree with Proudhon that “property is theft” ? :)
I think the standard rejoinder is that private property incurs greater benefits than the general cost of securing it, owing to true “tragedy of the commons” type situations it attempts to avoid.
Agreed that the anti-capital-punishment stance exemplified by “capital punishment is murder” is more attached to the American left than the American right, as are accusations of sexism in general (including but not limited to those applied to evo-psych).
“Genetic engineering is eugenics” seems trickier to me.
In the U.S. at the moment, I’d say Republican voters are more likely to endorse a “science can’t be trusted” argument than Democratic ones, and Democratic voters are more likely to endorse a “corporations can’t be trusted” argument than Republican ones. “Genetic engineering is eugenics” can be spun both ways, I think.
That is, if I wanted to convince a randomly selected Democratic voter to vote against genetic engineering, I could use rhetoric along the lines of “evil corporations want to use genetic engineering techniques to breed a so-called superior race of food crops, which will eradicate the food crops ordinary consumers know and trust and leave us at their mercy. Don’t let them get away with it!” pretty effectively. (Though less effectively than they could have 30 years ago.)
If I wanted to convince a randomly selected Republican voter, I could use similar rhetoric with “corporations” replaced by “scientists” and “consumers” replaced by “ordinary people”.
Both of those, I think, would be invoking the spectre of eugenics, the only change would be how the eugenicists are characterized… that is, are they elite academic eugenicists, or greedy corporate eugenicists?
All of that said, I endorse eugenics, so I’m probably not a reliable source of information about the rhetorical charge of these words for the mainstream.
Different perspectives, probably. In most European countries, I dare to say, everything associated with genetics is suspect to the left and the left also more often sides with the anti-science rhetoric in general. This is partly because the European right-wingers are less religious than in the U.S. (although I have heard creationism had become political issue in Serbia few years ago) and perhaps somehow related to the differences between Continental and analytic philosophy, if such intellectual affairs have real influence over practical politics.
Yeah, that’s been a significant shift over the last few decades in the U.S. There’s still a significant anti-scientific religious faction within the American left (New Agers and such) but they’ve been increasingly joined by factions that thirty/forty years ago would have been considered right, making the coalition as a whole a lot more secular than it was. Meanwhile the right’s power base has increasingly moved towards more rural states, and the . anti-scientific religious faction within the American right (evangelical Christians and such) have gained more relative power within it.
Three or four decades ago I think were were more aligned with the European model.
I have no idea whether the distinctions between continental and analytic philosophy have anything to do with it, and am inclined to doubt that the philosophical schism is causal if so, but I’d love to hear arguments supporting the idea.
It gets more complex once you include other groups, too — such as libertarians. In the ’60s and ’70s, the libertarian movement was closer to the New Left than to the Right, for instance.
I would tend to put “Genetic engineering is eugenics” in as a left-wing argument, because the left seems more likely to compare the right to Nazis, call them racist, etc. (with the right, of course, comparing the left to Stalin).
But on the other hand the American Right seems to have been up in arms about “Death Panels” or something, so I gotta admit I’m uncertain; I don’t follow the minutiae of politics on your side of the Atlantic.
Yeah, I think in a global context I would agree with you. The U.S. Left and Right are at this point their own beasts.
Also, at this point in the U.S., pretty much everyone compares everyone else to Hitler, and pretty much nobody remembers exactly who Stalin was. Actually, I suspect that >60% of the population, if asked whether the Soviet Union was allied with the U.S. or with Nazi Germany during WWII, would state confidently that it was allied with Nazi Germany.
I would say that “USSR was an ally of Nazi Germany for a time” is an example of WAitW. They had a non-aggression pact for a while, but both side knew it was just a matter of time before they will fight each other, and they didn’t do anything to actually help the other—USSR mostly used all the bought time to prepare itself for war against Nazi Germany. For borderline values of “ally” you can call them allies, but that’s sneaking in the usual connotation of being allies (actively helping each others) which was just not present.
This is far off-topic, but Stalin certainly expected the non-aggression pact to last. The whole tone of the Soviet press at the time changed to avoid criticizing fascism much, and there were trade ties and even (gasp!) cultural exchanges. There were no indications that the Soviet regime had any inclination of starting a war with Germany, though ti would probably not have joined the Axis either. Well, maybe, if Hitler changed the rhetoric enough to exclude the Russians from the Untermensch classification and found his Lebensraum elsewhere, though this is a pure counterfactual speculation.
There were no indications that the Soviet regime had any inclination of starting a war with Germany, though ti would probably not have joined the Axis either.
The Soviets actually tried to join the Axis in October-November 1940. The sticking point was that the Germans wanted the Soviets to agree to a split in spheres of influence along the Dardanelles and Bosporus, while the Soviets wanted a share of the Balkans.
Throw in things like Basis Nord, the massive amount of war-critical natural resources the Soviets shipped the Nazis 1939-1941, the German shipments of weapon systems (cruisers, aircraft, naval guns) and technical drawings to the Soviets, German diplomatic support for the invasion of Finland . . . well. The Soviets and Germans were awfully cooperative until Barbarossa, even if one stops short of saying they were allied.
Feel free to substitute “fought a shared enemy with” for “was allied with” if you think that improves the question. I trust you understood my point, though.
I thought the standard left-wing argument against genetic engineering was that only the rich will be able to afford it, with an implication that the rich will be able to unfairly stabilize their advantages.
I don’t understand how you get from “policy debates should not appear one-sided” to “there should be no shortage of weak arguments ‘on your side’”. Especially if you replace the latter with “there should be no shortage of weak arguments of this sort on your side”—which is necessary for the challenge to be appropriate—since there could be correlations between a person’s political position and which sorts of fallacies are most likely to infect their thinking.
In particular, I predict WAITW use to be correlated with explicit endorsement of sanctity-based rather than harm-based moral values, and we’ve recently been talking about how that might differ between political groups.
I think this is because of the way you’re deconstructing the arguments. In each case, the features you identify which supposedly make us dislike the arcetypal cases are harm-based features. Someone who believed in sanctity instead might identify the category as a value in itself. Attempts to ascribe utilitarian-style values to them, which they supposedly miss the local inapplicability of, risks ignoring what they actually value.
If people genuinely do think murder is wrong simply because it is murder, rather than because it causes harm, then this is not a bad argument.
Absent any reason to do so, disliking all murders simply because they are murders makes no more sense than disliking all elephants simply because they are elephants. You can choose to do so without being logically inconsistent, but it seems like a weird choice to make for no reason. Did you just arbitrarily choose “murder” as a category worthy of dislike, whether or not it causes harm?
At the risk of committing the genetic fallacy, I would be very surprised if their choice of murder as a thing they dislike for its own sake (rather than, say, elephants) had nothing to do with murder being harmful. And although right now I am simply asserting this rather than arguing it, I think it’s likely that even if they think they have a deductive proof for why murder is wrong regardless of harm, they started by unconsciously making the WAITW and then rationalizing it.
But I agree that if they do think they have this deductive proof, screaming “Worst argument in the world!” at them is useless and counterproductive; at that point you address the proof.
Absent any reason to do so, disliking instances of harm simply because they are instances of harm makes no more sense than disliking all elephants simply because they are elephants.
I don’t want to assume any metaethical baggage here, but I’m not sure why “because it is an instance of harm” is an acceptable answer but “because it is an instance of theft” is not.
Keeping your principle of ignoring meta-ethical baggage, dis-valuing harm only requires one first principle, whereas dis-valuing murder, theft, elephants, etc require an independent (and apparently arbitrary) decision at each concept. Further, it’s very suspicious that this supposedly arbitrary decision almost always picks out actions that are often harmful when there are so very many things one could arbitrarily decide to dislike.
This sounds like the debate about ethical pluralism—maybe values are sufficiently complex that any one principle can’t capture them. If ethical pluralism is wrong, then they can’t make use of this argument. But then they have a very major problem with their metaethics, independant of the WAitW. And what is more, once they solve the problem—getting a single basis for their ethics—they can avoid your accusation, by saying that actually avoiding theft is the sole criteria, and they’re not trying to sneak in irrelivant conotations. After all, if theft was all that mattered, why would you try to sneak in connotations about harm?
Also, I think you’re sneaking in conotations when you use “arbitrary”. Yes, such a person would argue that our aversion to theft isn’t based on any of our other values; but your utilitarian would probably claim the same about their aversion to harm. This doesn’t seem a harmful (pun not intended) case of arbitrariness.
Contrariwise, they might find it very suspicious that your supposedly arbitrary decision as to what is harmful so often picks out actions that constitute theft to a libertarian (e.g. murder, slavery, breach of contract, pollution, trespass, wrongful dismissal...) when there are so very many things one could arbitrarily decide to dislike.
This line of argument seems to err away from the principle that you can’t unwind yourself into an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness. You’re running on hardware that is physically, through very real principles that apply to everything in the universe, going to react in a certain averse manner to certain stimuli to which we could assign the category label “harm”. This is commonly divided into “pain”, “boredom”, etc.
It is much more unlikely (and much more difficult to truly explain) that a person would, based on such hardware, somehow end up with the terminal value that some abstract, extremely solomonoff-complex interpretation of conjointed mental and physical behaviors is bad—in contrast with reflective negative valuation of harm-potentials both in self and in others (the “in others” being reflected as “harm to self when harm to other members of the tribe”).
Then again, I feel like I’m diving in too deep here. My instinct is to profess and worship my ignorance of this topic.
A particular preference that does not make sense at all is empirically unlikely to exist due to the natural selection process. We should thus, if for whatever reason we prefer correspondence between map and territory, assign reasonable probability that most preferences will “make sense”.
As for why it should, well… I’m not able to conceive of an acceptable answer to that without first tabooing “should” and applying generous amounts of reductionism, recursively within sub-meanings and subspaces within semanticspace.
“Burning fossil fuels is environmentally irresponsible!”
EDIT: Are these not Worst Arguments in the World? I have heard arguments for gun control that don’t specify why being in the class “weapons” makes guns subject to additional restrictions. I have also seen the environment or nature treated as a sanctified moral value.
An important part of WAitW is that it uses an atypical member of a category to attach to it the rejection of a typical member of the category. Both abortion and death penalty are atypical members of the “murder” category (if they are), and associating them with “murder” is trying to associate them with the connotation of the “typical” murder.
Guns are quite the typical weapon. They are not border-line weapons like a kitchen knife or a hammer, they are not military grade weapons. Saying “guns are weapons!” doesn’t try to associate guns with something different, it doesn’t add much to the debate, but it doesn’t carry the same attempt to sneak in connotations as “abortion is murder!” is.
For “Burning fossil fuels is environmentally irresponsible!” it’s also quite different. “Environmentally irresponsible” is more a description, a feature that “burning fossil fuels” has (or doesn’t have, but that’s another issue), than a broad category in which we are trying to tie “burning fossil fuels”.
Not every “A is B” satisfies the definition of “the worst argument in the world” (truly a horrible name for a fallacy which should be replaced by something shorter, more descriptive and less exaggerating). “A is B, therefore A is C” qualifies as the discussed fallacy if
A belongs to the category B as far as technical/denotational meaning of B is considered,
using the technical meaning, not all B are C,
most (or most typical / available) members of B are C and therefore B has C in connotations, and
all C-relevant information about A is known, screening off potential C-relevant information about A coming from its membership in B.
In “burning fossil fuels (A) is environmentally irresponsible (B) [and therefore is bad] (C)”
holds
is subjective but for many audiences fails (i.e. “irresponsible” means “likely to cause bad outcomes”, which makes the whole category tautologically bad)
is problematic, since the denotational and connotational meaning of B aren’t different (badness-wise)
fails, since presumably the listener doesn’t know about A’s environmental irresponsibility
The argument may be fallacious if the listener doesn’t care about the environment but is tricked into accepting the badness of A based on connotations of “irresponsible”, but that isn’t exactly the fallacy described in the OP.
In “guns (A) are weapons (B) [and therefore should be banned] (C)”
holds
holds if the listener agrees that all weapons should be banned, else fails
depends on the listener’s idea of a typical weapon, if it is a hydrogen bomb, then (3) holds, if it is a knife, (3) fails, if it is a gun, we are building a circular argument
probably holds
So this argument may qualify, but it is so obviously tautological that I have problems imagining someone actually using it.
“firearms with magazines that hold more than 10 rounds are assault weapons (and therefore should be banned)” seems to be more along the lines of arguments I’ve actually seen. I probably oversimplified in my head when I wrote the first post. Of course, having a Federal statute that happened to define firearms in that way might have directly led to such arguments after the ban expired, but it’s probably appropriate to label some laws as having “The Worst Legal Categorization in the World” as well. What if banning firearms with magazines holding more than 9 rounds would have saved even one extra life?
Obviously one can find any number of weak arguments for anything, but surely the point here was to find weak arguments that have a particular sort of problem but are otherwise at least reasonably credible-sounding.
/
I’m having trouble understanding what part of what I wrote looked like “there’s no chance of finding a suitable argument, so it’s not worth trying”. For the avoidance of doubt, that wasn’t at all what I meant.
Would any of the (at least four) people who have upvoted Eliezer’s comment but not my response—or Eliezer, if he happens still to be reading—like to explain to me in what way Eliezer is right and I’m wrong here? Thanks!
Would any of the (at least four) people who have upvoted Eliezer’s comment but not my response
There’s not necessarily even one of those, let alone four. Four people could have upvoted both of you and then four other people could have downvoted just you.
Generally speaking, there are fewer upvotes later in a thread, since fewer people read that far. If the children to your comment have more karma then your comment, it’s reasonable to assume that people saw both comments and chose to up vote theirs, but if a parent to your comment has more karma, you can’t really draw any inference from that at all.
I have tried constructing a pro-choice example similar to “Abortion is murder!” (“Forced pregnancy is slavery!”???), but it ended up pretty unconvincing. Hopefully someone can do better:
Leaving rape cases aside, the archetypal example is an unwanted teenage pregnancy due to defective or improperly used birth control or simply an accident. Forcing her into letting the embryo develop into a fetus and eventually into a human baby would likely make the woman significantly worse off in the long run, financially, physically and/or emotionally, so she should have an option of terminating the pregnancy.
An example a pro-life person thinks of: aborting a healthy fetus, possibly in the second trimester, as a habitual birth control method.
I find “Forced parenthood is slavery!” to be pretty convincing, actually. Though I may be prejudiced by having grown up around a Libertarian father (now, alas, more Republican(!??)) who went about proclaiming that jury duty was slavery.
It seems to me that the left-wing slogan “My body, my choice!” and its variations are a version of the WAitW. Although the slogan itself doesn’t follow the “X is a Y” format, its underlying argument does: it asserts something like, “This fetus is a part of my body; I am entitled to do whatever I choose with any part of my body; therefore, I am entitled to do whatever I choose with this fetus.”
This version of the WAitW emphasizes the similarity between a fetus and other parts of a woman’s body (the part in question is inside her; the part in question is made up of her cells; etc.) while ignoring the relevant differences (most of her body parts, if left to their own devices, will not go on to have their own life outside her body, while the fetus will; most of her body parts have no potential for sentience or moral agency, while the fetus does; etc.) By equating the fetus with her body parts, the argument implies that the fetus is MERELY a part of a woman’s body. While most people will agree that a fetus is technically part of its mother’s body, I think most people will also agree that a fetus is not morally equivalent to a woman’s liver, kidneys, or small intestine. “My body, my choice!” conceals this inequivalence.
Excellent idea. It would be beneficial to how the community deals with politics, something that I’ve been very concerned about recently, to see this written out.
Some tentative to sanitize political debates needs more data. In this post, one common strategy is criticized, I suposse are others, but doubt someone will write a sequence about it.
Economic inequality is an unequal distribution of resources. The most salient example of this is an unequal distribution of resources that all have equal claim to, like a pie a parent bakes for their children. But [various convincing arguments in favor of at least some economic inequality.]
War is killing, which is bad because murder is bad. (Or eating meat, or capital punishment.)
Gay marriage is good because it’s a right, and the most salient rights are good.
Welfare is good because it’s a form of helping people, and helping people in ways that don’t produce bad incentive effects and without taking from anyone else is good.
Processed food is bad because putting the most salient synthetic chemicals in food would be a really bad idea.
Note that “genetic engineering to cure diseases is eugenics” and “evolutionary psychology is sexist” are probably left-wing viewpoints, though not ones Yvain agrees with.
ISTM that categorizing many of those as “Left-wing viewpoints” or “Right-wing viewpoints” is a strong category error, one that we should attempt to reduce rather than redraw or blue boundaries. “Evolutionary psychology is sexist” is, afaict, a word error. It is not a position, but an implicit claim: “Because evolutionary psychology is sexist, it is bad, and thus evolutionary psychology is wrong!”—this is usually combined (in my experience) with an argument that the world is inherently good and that all humans are inherently equal and so on, which means that theories that posit “unfair” or “bad” circumstances are wrong; the world must be “good” and “fair”. Stereotypicalism would call for a reference to religion here.
It may be a word error—I don’t think it is, “Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists and rationalized by the scientists even though the claims are not at all well-supported compared to nonsexist alternatives” is a coherent and meaningful description of a way the universe could be but isn’t, and is therefore false, not a word error—but if so, it’s a word-error made by stereotypically left-wing people like Lewontin and Gould who were explicitly political in their criticism, not a word-error made by any right-wing scientists I can think of offhand.
In general, we should be careful about dismissing claims as meaningless or incoherent, when often only a very reasonable and realistic amount of charity is required to reinterpret the claim as meaningful and false—most people are trying to be meaningful most of the time, even when they’re rationalizing a wrong position. Only people who’ve gotten in a lot more trouble than that are actively trying to avoid letting their arguments be meaningful. And meaningless claims can be dismissed immediately, without bringing forth evidence or counterobservations; meaningful false claims require more demonstration to show they’re false. So when somebody brings a false claim, and you dismiss it as meaningless, you’re actually being significantly logically rude to them—putting in less effort than they’re investing—it takes more effort to bring forth a meaningful false claim than to call something ‘meaningless’.
I dislike accusations of sexism as much as the next guy, but in the last year or two I have started to think that ev-psych is way overconfident. The coarse grained explanation is that ev-psych seems to be “softer” than regular psychology, which itself is “softer” than medicine, and we all know what percentage of medical findings are wrong. I’d be curious to learn what other LWers think about this, especially you, because your writings got me interested in ev-psych in the first place.
Summary: Checking Google Books shows lots of references to pink for girls/blue for boys, and no references to the opposite, going back to the 19th century.
Note: Wikipedia links to this article, but summarizes it in a way which makes it sound much weaker than it really is.
This seems like a qualitative argument, when a quantitative argument would be more interesting. Who is the John Ioannidis of evolutionary psychology? Or, what research has been published that has later turned out to be false?
(Also, why do you dislike accusations of sexism? Shouldn’t you only dislike false accusations of sexism?)
I dislike accusations of sexism for the same reason I dislike accusations of any other negative behavior. Those accusations signal either sexism or false accusations of sexism, both of which are net negatives to me.
Because you and I no doubt hang out in completely different circles, my view of the prototypical case of sexism is probably different from yours. Also, I consider most non-prototypical cases of sexism to be wrong, so there aren’t really any connotations being smuggled in.
Not if (a) you’re in a situation where everyone already agrees on that
And assuming you also don’t want to even consider the possibility that you might be wrong. In any case, as you > may have noticed, that’s not true here.
Having common language and beliefs does not preclude questioning those beliefs.
(b) you consider fairness to be an important value.
More like you consider a particular interpretation of fairness to be such an important value that it trumps all others.
Sexism can mean a whole bunch of different things. It’s not a simple binary predicate: this is sexist, that isn’t. In general, I mean a cluster of attitudes and actions that harm people based on their sex. Usually, its women being harmed, but definitely not always.
Affirmative action is, of course, an interesting case. On its face, it involves advantaging one group, which naturally comes at the expense of all other groups. So, of course it’s sexism in one sense of the word. So why does anyone think it’s fair? Because there are believed to be cognitive biases in play that prevent people from (for instance) selecting an equally qualified woman for a job (one day, I would like to write up a post on the evidence for this). The theory is that an explicit adjustment for these biases will result in treatment more like what there would have been if employers were unbiased. If this theory is correct, then in cases where we believe that there is such discrimination, maintaining the status quo would be sexism. Naturally, not all cases of affirmative action qualify for this.
As the discussion on The Bedrock Of Fairness shows, fairness can have many meanings. They frequently correspond almost exactly to meta-ethical stances (consequentialist, deontological, virtue ethics). I’m a consequentialist with regards to fairness (since I view it as merely a part of the whole system of ethics). And affirmative action is only justifiable under a consequentialist (or perhaps virtue ethics) framework of fairness—and then only sometimes. I guess that is, as you say, one particular interpretation of fairness, but it’s one that I would imagine is relatively common here, since consequentialist ethics are relatively popular on Less Wrong.
The theory is that an explicit adjustment for these biases will result in treatment more like what there would have been if employers were unbiased.
This is a deontological stance, namely immoral act X was performed so we must bring the world as close as possible to the state it would have been in had X not happened.
I’m a consequentialist with regards to fairness
I have no idea what this means. That is, I have no idea how to incorporate ‘fairness’ into a utility function that won’t produce absurd things (like saying life extension research is immoral because it’s not fair to those who will die before it gets implemented).
The theory is that an explicit adjustment for these biases will result in treatment more like what there would have been if employers were unbiased.
This is a deontological stance, namely immoral act X was performed so we must bring the world as close as possible to the state it would have been in had X not happened.
I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that an immoral act was performed in these cases; often people just make mistakes. And trying to stop an ongoing harm is entirely compatible with consequentialism.
I’m a consequentialist with regards to fairness
I have no idea what this means. That is, I have no idea how to incorporate ‘fairness’ into a utility function that won’t produce absurd things (like saying life extension research is immoral because it’s not fair to those who will dies before it gets implemented).
First, unfair situations make people unhappy in and of themselves. That is, in some sense, absolutely absurd, but no more so than boredom is absurd. Nonetheless, it is the way humans seem to be (research on apes also shows this effect as well). Gwern’s post on the psychology of power discusses some of the less obvious effects of this on e.g. cortisol.
Second, when talking about money, utilities are non-linear in dollars. If A has $1 million, and B has $100, and utility is the square root of money, then, ceteris parabus, redistributing money from A to B would be the utilitarian thing to do. Of course, this ignores the incentive and precedent effects of this (why should B bother to work if they can just get A’s money?), as well as A’s unhappiness at losing the money, so of course in the real world the computation is considerably more complex.
Third, if everyone benefits from having the better person doing any given job, then correcting for biases that prevent this will make society better off.
[Edit] Fourth, when a group of people is treated as abnormal or subordinate, their desires are not given full weight (and thus, they are less likely to be happy). An example of this in the US is that only one non-Christian group has ever won a Free Exercise Clause case.
This is a worthy steel-manning when trying to reach an accurate conclusion about ev-psych, but I think you give the typical person who claims “ev-psych is sexist” too much credit here.
Natasha Walter makes the argument that Eliezer refers to in Living Dolls (not really about ev-psych, but about the idea of innate differences between genders in abilities), and I’m sure there are other examples (I haven’t actually read all that much feminist writing). However, I have also encountered people who won’t even discuss the issue with anyone who is pro-ev psych because they think that they’re so morally appalling. Not sure how typical the people I’m encountered are though—I suspect they may be more extreme than most, and the most extreme people are the loudest.
There’s definitely a temptation to identify a belief we agree with with its best advocates, and a belief we disagree with with its typical advocates. I definitely see this when people talk about how stupid eg “the left/right” is. I may be encouraging that error...
The sexism associated with evolutionary biology is typically the result of the perceived (or actual) claim that because sexual differentiation has a historical and evolutionary basis, it is morally correct to reinforce those differences today.
You can point out that that type of claim is not commonly made my evolutionary psychologists, but when lay people perceive that that claim is true and use it to justify sexist actions that they would not have taken in the absence of their perception of such a claim, then it is the case that evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex.
One of the key points is that “Evolutionary psychology is sexist” and “evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex” are very nearly the same statement, while “Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists” is a radically different statement.
when lay people perceive that that claim is true and use it to justify sexist actions that they would not have taken in the absence of their perception of such a claim, then it is the case that evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex.
Well, sure. But so do a million other things. After all, it would be much harder to discriminate unfairly on the basis of sex if we didn’t have sensory organs capable of distinguishing an individual’s sex, so the existence of such organs contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex. Unarguable.
Also uninteresting.
Surely a more important question is whether the study of evolutionary psychology differentially contributes to such discrimination? Which perhaps it does, but this takes more effort to demonstrate than simply pointing out that there exist lay people who use it to justify sexist actions.
Okay- I assert that there are almost zero people who seriously assert that ‘Having sensory organs which can distinguish sex’ justifies sexist actions, and that there are more than one hundred thousand Americans who demonstrably either claim, or allow the claim to stand, that EP justifies sexist actions that they themselves take.
I’m prepared to defend the second assertion if needed, which is why I choose a conservative number. The first assertion is trivial to falsify if you can find a significant number of people who believe that.
To be more logically complete, my unstated assumption: Lay people typically don’t take actions which they believe to be unjustified.
and that there are more than one hundred thousand Americans who demonstrably either claim, or allow the claim to stand, that EP justifies sexist actions that they themselves take.
I’m prepared to defend the second assertion if needed, which is why I choose a conservative number.
I’d be interested in seeing this. Largely because I’m curious to see specific examples of what you consider unjustified sexism.
The most godawful example I’ve seen of EP being used as a cover for blatant sexism and misogyny is this NRO article, which basically says that as a rich boss with many male sons, Mitt Romney exudes alpha male power, and all women should fall in trance and vote for him.
In particular, I have just now realized that whereas I encountered evolutionary psychology in the context of my quest to unravel the mysteries of human cognition and so I read a bunch of science books and papers on it, many other people may be encountering evolutionary psychology primarily in the context of Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, attempted invocations of ev-psych which are so terrible as to be propagated through the blogosphere as horrors for everyone to marvel at.
This explains a lot about the oddly bad opinion that so many online-folk seem to have about evolutionary psychology. This has had me making puzzled expressions for years, not sure what was going on. But you would probably get a pretty different first-impression (and first impressions are very controlling) if your first exposure was reading that NRO article instead of “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”. Even if somebody tried to expose you to the real science afterward, you’d probably go in with some degree of motivated skepticism.
Having thus generalized the problem—is this likely to be happening to me somewhere, or you? Besides ev-psych and economics, which other sciences will Reddit expose to you primarily in the form of exhibiting Someone Is Wrong On The Internet misuses?
That’s surely playing a role, but another thing is that gender dynamics is often a mind-killer, in pretty much all contexts it shows up in. I don’t have a full explanation for that, but I think that has to do with the sexual frustration of unattractive¹ people being repeatedly turned down by attractive people and the resentment of attractive people being repeatedly harassed by unattractive people. I tend to be overly cautious about this and hence to avoid mentioning gender even when it’s relevant (e.g., if in the previous sentence “unattractive people” was replaced with “lots of men” and “attractive people” with “lots of women”, it would be just as accurate and perhaps even more precise).
When I use attractive as a one-place word, I mean ‘attractive to most members of the same species of their preferred sex’.
In my experience, when people invoke evolutionary psychology, they tend to neglect the mechanisms by which genes could have the postulated effect. Often, absurdly specific evolved traits are claimed that can also be understood as simple reinforcement or the like. Or they claim something so information-laden that it defies belief that it could be encoded in an evolved mechanism except through general learning.
For example, there’s a culture in which people don’t experience the Müller-Lyer illusion—which has even been observed in people who have been blind from birth.
The anthropologist Colin Turnbull described what happened in the former Congo in the 1950s when a BaMbuti pygmy, used in living in the dense Ituri forest (which had only small clearings), went with him to the plains:
And then he saw the buffalo, still grazing lazily several miles away, far down below. He turned to me and said, ‘What insects are those?’
At first I hardly understood, then I realized that in the forest vision is so limited that there is no great need to make an automatic allowance for distance when judging size. Out here in the plains, Kenge was looking for the first time over apparently unending miles of unfamiliar grasslands, with not a tree worth the name to give him any basis for comparison...
When I told Kenge that the insects were buffalo, he roared with laughter and told me not to tell such stupid lies. (Turnbull 1963, 217)
Because Kenge had no experience of seeing distant objects he saw them simply as small.
This isn’t a science, and perhaps not even terribly important, but I think Aristotle is subject to this effect. Almost every Aristotelian I’ve encountered on the internet is a Thomist, leading to the impression (in my estimation) that Aristotle is some kind of a proto-apologist. And of course, there’s a list of Aristotle-fails, like the women’s-teeth thing or the thing about air rushing in behind a thrown ball to maintain its motion that are either false or misleading.
On the other hand, there aren’t good reasons for most people to study actual Aristotle. Nevertheless he does show up as a foil in odd places.
Besides ev-psych and economics, which other sciences will Reddit expose to you primarily in the form of exhibiting Someone Is Wrong On The Internet misuses?
It is not as if we have no half-baked evopsych theorizing here; and there’s Hanson, who is particularly guilty. Who can read some of his wilder posts and not regard it was a wee bit discrediting of evopsych?
it also pattern-matches very strongly to the “scientific racism” of the 19th and early 20th century.
Part of the issue is that as far as I know said “scientific racism” was never scientifically discredited (the underlying facts may even be true). It was simply socially discredited in a “this leads to genocide and other horrible things” kind of way and a memetic immune system was set up to fight these memes. However, as mentioned in the linked article said immune system is no match for rational thought.
When it appears that an intellectual edifice has been constructed to portray as necessary a particular status-quo — in the case of scientific racism, that of slavery and subjugation by race — we may reasonably suspect that the overturning of those social conditions is all the disproof that is needed to overthrow the entire edifice of rationalization, too.
Imagine that there exists a complicated, deeply explained theory to explain why no green-eyed, black-haired person has ever been, or ever will be, elected president. And then one is. The theory is not merely socially discredited; it is empirically disproven.
Scientific racism was concocted to explain curious observations such as that black people liked to run away from slavery and sometimes did not work as hard as they could for a slave-master.
I feel I should point out that these two examples are pretty lame examples: they were proposed by the same guy, before Francis Galton (generally considered the father or grandfather of any genuinely scientific racism), have never been used by any except anti-racists, and indeed, were widely mocked at the time.
To claim that they are an example of a motivating problem in scientific racism is roughly like someone in 2170 saying TimeCube was a motivating problem in the development of a since-discredited stringy theory.
I think the Time Cube example is almost certainly an exaggeration, although I admit you probably know more on the subject than me. Do you have a more … typical … example?
Speaking from my 2170th perspective, I must point out that Time Cube was perfectly standard 20th century physics: it was distributed on their premier form of scholarly communication the Internet, was carefully documented in the very first versions of Wikipedia (indicating the regard it was held in by contemporaries), it dealt with standard topics of 20th century American discourse, conspiracy theories (which thankfully we have moved beyond), it was widely cited and discussed as recent citation analyses have proven, and finally, the author lectured and taught at the only surviving center of American learning, MIT.
The historical case is simply open and shut! This isn’t a random layman myth like Nixon mentoring Obama and running dirty tricks in his first election (as every informed historian knows, Nixon was of the Greens while Obama bin Laden, of course, was a Blue).
Except Time Cube is incomprehensible gibberish, not just wrong. But I’m not saying that it was actually mainstream, you understand.
Also, that’s a really good “2170th perspective”. I can’t argue with that. Unless, of course, you’re saying our understanding of recent history is quite as bad as the closing paragraph there.
Except Time Cube is incomprehensible gibberish, not just wrong. But I’m not saying that it was actually mainstream, you understand.
I’m not sure we could say anything better of Isaac Newton’s alchemy.
Unless, of course, you’re saying our understanding of recent history is quite as bad as the closing paragraph there.
Popular understanding can be pretty bad. The more I read in history, the more I realized I didn’t understand the past anywhere near as well as I thought I did; revelations ranging from spherical earths to gay presidents to the Founding Fathers being conspiracy theorists etc. I don’t put much stock on understanding well the context of the racist who was originally being discussed, although enough information survives that I can point out discrediting parts.
I’m not sure we could say anything better of Isaac Newton’s alchemy.
Which, while of some minor historical significance, is not considered mainstream science AFAIK.
Popular understanding can be pretty bad. The more I read in history, the more I realized I didn’t understand the past anywhere near as well as I thought I did; revelations ranging from spherical earths to gay presidents to the Founding Fathers being conspiracy theorists etc. I don’t put much stock on understanding well the context of the racist who was originally being discussed, although enough information survives that I can point out discrediting parts.
Fair enough.
Wait, spherical earths I assume refers to the notion that Columbus was a visionary who somehow deduced the Earth was round before even sailors did, and while I couldn’t name names statistically a few presidents must have been in the closet at least. But I have to admit I’m not sure what you mean by “the Founding Fathers being conspiracy theorists”.
Actually the spherical earth was described by the 2nd century (AD or CE) Greek, Ptolemy (who unfortunately is best remembered for describing the phenomena of the sky in terms of concentric spheres around the earth, which led to planetary orbits having the infamous epicycles). Ptolemy not only stated but fairly well demonstrated the earth’s circularity and gave a reasonable (for the time) estimate of its size. The educated classes in Columbus’ time hence from my readings, were well aware that the earth was sperical.
What Columbus did, was to read Marco Polo, and from Polo’s estimates of the various legs of his journey, and whatever else he had to go on, miscalculated that Japan was around 3000 miles west of Europe, and so, proposed the daring idea of sailing farther than one could hope to return from (if it turned out you were still in the middle of the ocean) because he believed he’d reach Japan and and be able to repair the ships and take on new food, water, and supplies, for the return journey. I guess he hoped for a reasonably friendly reception.
While Japan wasn’t about 3000 miles west of Europe, lucky for Columbus, something was there—of the 2 oceans one would have to cross to reach Japan (plus one continent), he only had to cross the more narrow one, and such human society as he found were not a threat to a well armed group of 15c Europeans (to say the least).
Most obviously, ascribing it to Ptolemy seems like a pretty serious error given Eratosthenes’s famed and remarkably accurate calculation of the diameter of the earth centuries before.
Right, but deism then had roughly the same social / religious status as modern atheism does. He was certainly attacked as an infidel during the elections, and as the story goes, the pious buried their Bibles at news of his election, for fear that the new administration would take them away.
Given how many Founding Father types were deists, I suspect that they didn’t have ‘roughly’ the same status. Were there contemporary presidents saying of deists that “I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be” (to quote Bush)?
I think that the number and public perception of atheists have both significantly improved since the H.W. Bush years.
I think someone running for president today who listed their religious affiliation as “deist” or said things like “I think Jesus’s morality is a good one, but he wasn’t divine and miracles don’t happen” would be considered basically an atheist by the people who would react negatively because of that.
I think the modern analogues of the Founding Fathers as a group are not presidents but public intellectuals, and atheists are very overrepresented among public intellectuals (perhaps even the majority). That public intellectuals then were mostly areligious shouldn’t be that odd when comparing with now.
I think that the number and public perception of atheists have both significantly improved since the H.W. Bush years.
I wasn’t really around for Bush, but I haven’t noticed any improvement. What makes you think that?
would be considered basically an atheist by the people who would react negatively because of that.
Romney did fine, despite believe pretty darn weird things by Christian standards.
I think the modern analogues of the Founding Fathers as a group are not presidents but public intellectuals, and atheists are very overrepresented among public intellectuals (perhaps even the majority).
I’ll believe that as soon as the next 4 presidents or so are public intellectuals, and a bunch of public intellectuals draft a new Constitution and get the states to approve it etc.
Stuff like this, though I’m having trouble getting access to the historical poll data.
I’ll believe that as soon as the next 4 presidents or so are public intellectuals, and a bunch of public intellectuals draft a new Constitution and get the states to approve it etc.
My model was that the sort of person who would become a memorable Founding Father in the 1700s is the sort of person who would become a public intellectual in the 2000s, and that atheism is more strongly linked by personal temperament than public position. I think the early American presidents were very different from the ones we have now, and so it’s not clear which comparisons carve reality at the joints.
(It’s not clear to me what point you would concede if an atheist president was identified.)
Alchemy in general, yes. But Newton was less than generous with his science at the best of times; with the already secretive alchemy, he wasn’t exactly publishing peer-reviewed articles.
Note that, on gender issues at least, it also pattern-matches very strongly to the “scientific racism” of the 19th and early 20th century.
No it bloody doesn’t except on the Internet. Read “The Psychological Foundations of Culture” and quote me a paragraph that pattern-matches anything like that. And then perhaps you’ll give me back your respect point, because in a flash of enlightenment you’ll suddenly understand why I was puzzled by people having issues with EP.
“The Psychological Foundations of Culture” does not discuss gender issues in detail.
More specifically: Sexual Strategies Theory tends to agree with modern cultural stereotypes of men and women, much as “scientific racism” tended to confirm cultural stereotypes of people of different races.
(I do acknowledge that “Sexual Strategies Theory” is far from settled science and has been heavily criticized—but it’s a large part of what comes to mind when people think of ev-psych.)
Perhaps it is merely that reputable evolutionary psychology is not about gender issues, while disreputable evo-psych is almost entirely focused on them.
I’ve had the luck of understanding both why people were puzzled and why they were wrong to be puzzled, since I only really learned any real ev-psych after I came to LessWrong.
What Crono says is pattern-matching is, well, yes mostly on the internet. However, it’s also somewhat present out there, but it’s not the Ev-Psych itself that pattern-matches—it’s the behaviors and arguments of idiots who use Ev-Psych as ammunition.
What I’ve seen personally is mostly cases where “Evolutionary Psychology” could be substituted for “Magical Scientific Explanation” and no meaning would be lost, or cases where you could reasonably assert that a magical giant goat head yelling “facts” at people could have been the arguer’s only source of information—i.e. the “fact” they pulled from ev-psych was technically true in the exact sense that “light is waves” is true, but they had no understanding of it whatsoever and their derivations from that were completely alien to the science.
is this likely to be happening to me somewhere, or you? Besides ev-psych and economics, which other sciences will Reddit expose to you primarily in the form of exhibiting Someone Is Wrong On The Internet misuses?
Note that, on gender issues at least, it also pattern-matches very strongly to the “scientific racism” of the 19th and early 20th century.
Indeed. Do you take 21st century scientific racism seriously? Or do you dismiss it because it pattern matches to what some idiots have said?
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, despite our natural pattern-matching inclinations to treat it as such.
After reading that article, I seriously can’t tell whether he means should epistemically (‘women are likely to vote for him’), ethically (‘women had better vote for him’), or he’s (deliberately or accidentally) equivocating the two. His arguments only makes sense if he means it epistemically, but his tone only makes sense if he means it ethically.
My guess is that the article is a propaganda piece, designed above all things to elevate Romney’s status and make him look better. I don’t think the author, if pressed on the point, would either commit to a prediction that Romney will receive an overwhelming amount of the female vote, nor to a normative claim that women, ethically, should vote for him(1). In other words, I guess he was just bullshiting. But bullshit can still be sexist.
(1) He probably does think that women (and men) ought ethically to vote for Romney, but on grounds unrelated to the topic of the article.
I suspect that it was intended to be ironic on some level. Whether it’s the irony of those crazy liberal’s theory “proving” they should vote conservative, the irony that conservatives, who are often attacked as anti-womans-rights, should “logically” be getting the votes of women, or something else, I couldn’t tell you. It could even be an attempt to show women information that “should” persuade them to vote for his preferred candidate, but somehow I doubt it. The tone just seems too jokey. Regardless, of course, it’s definitely offensive, so it was a stupid thing to write; I may be overestimating the author.
which basically says that as a rich boss with many male sons, Mitt Romney exudes alpha male power, and all women [will] fall in trance and vote for him.
Is your objection that the descriptive statement is false, or than it’s sexist to say it even if its true?
Yes, how one’s candidate appeals to voters’ biases is not exactly something to brag about, but it’s unfortunately a common occurrence in our political process.
First, it is false. Polls put Obama over Romney among female voters by 8, 10, or 16 points, according to the first three results I found in Google News. Moreover, in 2008 Obama won the female and tied the male vote, while now he seems to be winning the female vote by a somewhat smaller amount, but losing substantially the male vote. So looking at the female/male ratio (to control for the state of the economy and other general features) it looks as of now that Romney does worse with women than McCain did.
Of course, not every false statement about women is sexist. But I would say that an analysis attributing (in a false and unsubstantiated way) women’s voting choices to irrational, subconscious factors as opposed to conscious ideological preference or self-interest, while not making a similar analysis for men’s voting choices, is sexist.
Also, in my opinion it edges into outright misogyny because the paragraph
Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.
is not merely an objective analysis that in the author’s opinion women will see Obama as weak/emasculated//whatever for having daughters instead of sons: it actively mocks Obama and expresses contempt for him on that basis, thus reinforcing the idea that women are less valuable than men.
It’s not clear to me that it’s supposed to be a descriptive statement. Downvoted for misquotation (even if explicitly shown by square brackets) hiding that.
Wait, are you asserting that sexism is ever justified? If so, we have a definition mismatch.
For a start, we have Forbes Magazine drawing a link from EP to why most women will never be CEOs (Never mind that most people will never be CEOs). I haven’t yet demonstrated how many readers of Forbes allowed the claim that EP justifies the sexist treatment of executives, and also take sexist actions regarding executives; will you accept that 5% of board members of publicly traded companies make sexist decisions about executives, and that 80% of those people read Forbes and didn’t object to that (4% of board members overall)? (again, I’m using numbers that I think are conservative, because direct measurements are hard.)
Sexist actions, by definition, has no valid justification. If there was a valid justification, they would be rational actions.
Going from “Females, in general, make poor executives” (even if this were to be true) to “A particular female will make a poor executive” Isn’t a valid justification. I’m going to make the dangerous claim that the proof is obvious and trivial.
What about going from “members of subcategory X of category Y are more likely to possess characteristic C” to “In the absence of further information, a particular member of subcategory X is more likely to possess characteristic C than a non-X member of category Y”.
You are saying you can’t go from probabilistic information to certainty. This is a strawman.
That only applies if there is an absence of further information. Do you make judgments about what the weather is right now by looking only at historical information, or do you look out the window?
Also, if you’re going to get into category theory:
members of subcategory X of category Y are more likely to possess characteristic C
Category A is a subset of category X
Category B is mutually exclusive with category X, but a subset of Y
Category B is smaller than category A
Given only “members of subcategory X of category Y are more likely to possess characteristic C”, can you draw a conclusion about whether a random member of category A or category B is more likely to possess characteristic C?
Let characteristic C be “will perform above the 75th percentile of CEOs”, category X be ‘males’, category A be ‘males who being seriously considered for a CEO position’, and category B be ‘females and intersex people being considered for a CEO position’.
It’s only a strawman if it isn’t the exact argument being used in the boardroom.
I agree that many Americans assert that EP justifies sexist actions.
I agree that effectively nobody asserts that having sensory organs which can distinguish sex justify sexist actions. Nor did I claim anyone did.
My assertion was, and is, that the presence of those organs, much like the presence of those justifications, contributes to sexist actions that would not occur in their absence.
I assumed your objection was to the sexist actions, and the justifications were objectionable merely because they enabled those actions. In which case it seems that anything else that equally enabled those actions would be equally objectionable.
But, sure, if you’re concerned specifically with asserted justifications rather than with the actions themselves, then I’m entirely beside your point.
Unrelatedly: lacking a justification for X != believing X to be unjustified.
The ability to notice a difference irrelevant to a decision is not in the same category as the belief that a difference which is irrelevant to a decision is, in fact, relevant.
“This field of study encourages sexist actions” and “This field of study is sexist” are equivalent statements, so far as ‘sexist’ can apply to something which does not make decisions.
Previously you defined sexism as something which must be inherently unjustified, or else it doesn’t fit your defintion.
Now you’re effectively said that if “This field of study encourages unjustified actions” is equivalent to “This field of study is unjustified”. (in regards to gender matters, i guess).
Since EVERY field of study will effectively directly or indirectly encourage some unjustified actions for some people, you’ve effectively declared every field of study unjustified.
I suggest you try and do some serious work towards trying to unconfuse in your mind your labels of various social phenomena and your moral judgments—and also your ideas about what is with your ideas about what should be.
Can you provide an example of something that you, or a significant number of people, would call sexist that you think is inherently justified?
Now you’re effectively said that if “This field of study encourages unjustified actions” is equivalent to “This field of study is unjustified”
More accurately “This field of study encourages wrongful thinking.” and “This field of study has a negative aspect.” More semantically pure “This field of study is sexist” is equivalent to “This field of study is used to create invalid justifications”, because a field of study cannot take actions like encouraging behavior; nor can an object be justified or unjustified; only agents can take actions, and only decisions can be justified or unjustified.
If every field of study is used to create invalid justifications, then every field of study has at least one negative aspect.
What caused you to think I was speaking in moral terms, rather than descriptive terms?
What caused you to think I was speaking in moral terms, rather than descriptive terms?
When someone’s talking about justified actions, I expect they mean morally justified. If they’re talking about justified beliefs, I expect they mean epistemically justified.
You spoke about decisions, so I assumed you meant moral justification of actions.
Can you provide an example of something that you, or a significant number of people, would call sexist that you think is inherently justified?
For a consequentialist like myself actions are morally justified by their consequences, not “inherently”.
But here, I’ll provide one of each—action and belief which may not be inherently justified but they’re also not inherently unjustified.
I think that most people (including me) would concede the sexism of pornography, i.e. the objectification of women, but I’m far from certain that pornography is morally wrong as a whole, even when sexist.
Discussing even theoretically whether male brain structure might allow greater proficiency on average with e.g. mathematics or science would be treated as sexism by most people. But there’s no inherent reason to know for certain that there do not exist such differences between average male and average female brains.
I’ll grant that the objectification of people is wrong from a consequentialist perspective, barring any redeeming factors. I’ll also point out that any action (like supporting a given field of study) that has negative consequences which exceed the positive consequences is immoral from a consequentialist perspective. I’ll refrain from making any claims about whether supporting any specific field is a net negative.
No, I think that actions are ‘justified’ when the expected consequences are in accordance with the values of the actor. Actions are only ‘moral’ in my view when they are made with the mutual consent of all participating actors. A decision such as destroying one’s own private property and making oneself sad as a result are moral but unjustified in my view; from a consequentialist view, that would be immoral.
Unjustified actions are not always immoral, but do indicate suboptimal decision making and poor mental hygiene. Being able to recognize those decisions in oneself and others is important.
I rage against the sexism that results when the possible fact “There is a difference between male and female brain chemistry with this result” becomes “This is proof that one sex is [universally|locally] inferior”. Not because I have a moral obligation to prevent as much harm or create as much good as possible, but because I have a philosophical need for people, who are metaphysically equal, to be treated as metaphysically equal.
Actions are only ‘moral’ in my view when they are made with the mutual consent of all participating actors.
Is that a mere simplification of your deontology? Because if it’s the totality thereof, I find it very easy to construct counterexamples where it’d be really eccentric to proclaim them immoral… e.g. you see a two-year old child lean dangerously over an open window and you pull him back, lest it falls—even though it doesn’t consent and might even cry in protest.
Or you are a doctor and perform an operation to save the life of an unconscious patient that was in a car accident. You don’t have their consent because they’re unconscious and can’t provide it—does it mean the action of saving their life isn’t moral?
In the first counter-examples you make the assumption that people who are young are persons, in the sense that they are worth moral consideration. Some would maintain that children are not people, and thus any action regarding them cannot be considered moral/immoral. In other words, their consent does not matter as they are not ‘actors’. In that way Decius’ claim that all actors must consent would still be true, as you are the only actor in that scenario. I’d be curious to read about any justification you would cite for the treatment of children as moral actors.
However, that said, I find your second example to be more convincing, but I’d be interested to know how the nature of the unconsciousness might affect your view. Would someone in a vegetative state also be considered as a moral actor in your view (and thus should be saved)?
I think IAWYC, but I’d steel-man Decius and assume that young children unconscious people, etc. wouldn’t count as “actors” and thus such actions wouldn’t be more immoral than, say, replace a broken string in a guitar without its consensus.
Well, if that was the position, then it wouldn’t be any more immoral not to help an unconscious person than to not help a broken swing. That seems fairly problematic, so I doubt that’s a successful solution.
Why is it problematic to say that the existence of unconscious people does not obligate me to provide medical care any more than the existence of a broken string obligates me to provide repair services?
A doctor (profession) is under contract to be available and to provide emergency medical services; failing to perform that (social) contract without the consent of the other parties (all of society, in some cases), is impermissible. A doctor who has agreed to provide care in a given situation is obligated to, just as a repairman who has agreed to perform repairs in a given situation is obligated to do so.
Most people feel no obligation to help someone who is in need of help. For example, there is a shortage of living kidney donors everywhere.
The only thing that creates an obligation in me is my decision to accept an obligation; the only way I can obligate others is for them to accept the obligation.
It’s not the totality thereof- contract theory is also included with the concept “It is possible to consent to actions in the future in a manner which may not be unilaterally revoked.”
I can’t explain why the social contract or geographical government has jurisdiction over a new actor who does not choose to accept it.
Not because I have a moral obligation to prevent as much harm or create as much good as possible, but because I have a philosophical need for people, who are metaphysically equal, to be treated as metaphysically equal.
What kinds of experiences would you expect in a world where (some?) people are metaphysically equal that you wouldn’t expect in a world where people are not metaphysically equal?
If my premise that people are metaphysically equal is wrong, then something which is not part of this universe has privileged access over something else which is not part of this universe.
I would, for example, expect the same entity to make decisions for two physical bodies, or for psychic phenomena to exist and not have a physical basis, or for consciousness to persist after death differentially depending on the conscious entity; in general, things would have to be able happen without a physical basis and differentially based on the metaphysical person.
Since I posit that the metaphysical person exists only as a moral abstraction (and can thus be defined to be equal), such evidence that ‘personhood’ is an actual concrete thing, and that some ‘personhoods’ were inherently superior in an objectively measurable way would falsify my moral beliefs. I also suspect that it would be problematic for all moral systems.
Are you saying people are metaphysically equal by definition? If not, I’m not sure what you mean, since I find your comment somewhat difficult to follow.
A decision such as destroying one’s own private property and making oneself sad as a result are moral but unjustified in my view; from a consequentialist view, that would be immoral.
This confuses me: I self-identify as a consequentialist myself, but I wouldn’t call an action which harms you but no-one else “immoral” (but I’d call it stupid).
I’m not at all sure what it means for an act to be immoral, under a consequentialist moral frame, if not that it leads to the loss of value. Can you expand on this?
But deliberately harming oneself does lead to a loss of value (at least as much as if you did that). So, why do I think that harming you is not-evil if you do it yourself but not if I do it? I’m confused...
You said that if I perform an action that harms me, that’s not immoral. We agree that if I perform an action that harms me, that leads to a loss of value. So it follows that whatever it means for an act to be immoral, by your reasoning, it is not simply that it leads to a loss of value. Also, you’ve identified your moral reasoning as consequentialist.
So I’m asking: under your consequentialist moral frame, what does it mean for an act to be immoral, since you don’t think it’s that it leads to a loss of value?
It’s been suggested elsewhere that the key here is foreknowledge… that an immoral act is one that has negative expected value for the actor. I would agree that this is consistent with a (rule-)consequentialist moral frame, and that you might mean “I wouldn’t call an action which harms you but no-one else ‘immoral’ (assuming you don’t expect it to cause harm).” I would agree with that statement (though I would find it odd) but I doubt that’s actually what you meant.
Many consequentialist systems consider the morality or immorality of an action to be a function of the consequences expected by the agent at the time when it makes the decision. For any act, there is a possible universe where that act results in harmful consequences relative to the alternatives. What matters is how harmful it typically is, when executed by an agent in the same epistemic state.
I would guess that among humans we consider self-harming behaviour a sign of mental incompetence, since people don’t usually desire their own suffering. Hence someone who takes “stupid” actions is probably believing that the actions lead to excellent consequences, in which case you can prevent such behaviour through psychological treatment rather than punishment.
Well, OK, but if “better addressed through psychological treatment than punishment” is equivalent to “not immoral”, then it seems that by that reasoning my harming others isn’t immoral either, as long as I’m incompetent enough to expect an increase in value from my actions.
I guess so. But harming anyone at all can still be considered bad. “Immoral” simply has a connotation (or maybe even an additional denotation?) of “blameful” that means it can basically only be applied to competent agents.
I’ll grant that the objectification of people is wrong from a consequentialist perspective, barring any redeeming factors.
Isn’t consequentialism intrinsically objectifying? It doesn’t treat people as right holders but as means to the end of achieving desirable world states.
It can also treat people as the ends, instead of the means, of desirable world states.
I intuit that there is also something along the lines of ‘equal objectification’; if everyone, including oneself, is objectified equally, is that really objectification? I don’t know and must consider that.
It can also treat people as the ends, instead of the means, of desirable world states.
In practice at best it treats people as some combination of tools and victory points.
I intuit that there is also something along the lines of ‘equal objectification’; if everyone, including oneself, is objectified equally, is that really objectification? I don’t know and must consider that.
but because I have a philosophical need for people, who are metaphysically equal, to be treated as metaphysically equal.
I invite you to consider the possibility that what people are, and how people should be treated as, may possibly be two different things. If they’re not “metaphysically equal”, perhaps it’s still best that they be treated as such.
If things are different in a significant way, it is appropriate that they are treated as different.
It is a premise of mine that people are metaphysically equal; to delve further into that we need to discuss what ‘people’ means. I doubt that you will find such a discussion rewarding.
Equal, in every sense that cannot be falsified by the observation of privilege or inequality which exists only in the embodied world.
Basically, it’s a way of creating a metaphysical entity “person”, which is defined to be that which exercises control over the physical embodiment of that person. By making the moral agent an abstract rather than a concrete, the inequalities which exist in the concrete world do not falsify the claim to general equality.
For example, people do not lose or gain rights as their fortunes change.
What is the metaphysical entity “rock”, and how do the actions of physical geology reflect them? When a person consents to a transaction in the world, their body is what makes the decision and indicates to other people’s bodies that consent is present.
If a rock consents to an action which involves a geologic object, how would it indicate that to other physical objects?
think that most people (including me) would concede the sexism of pornography, i.e. the objectification of women, but I’m far from certain that pornography is morally wrong as a whole, even when sexist.
Why do you think that pornography is sexist? There are male porn stars too.
The sexism associated with evolutionary biology is typically the result of the perceived (or actual) claim that because sexual differentiation has a historical and evolutionary basis, it is morally correct to reinforce those differences today.
I’m not sure what you mean by “reinforce”, but it seems reasonable to take these differences into account when making decisions.
For example, suppose that evolutionary science has determined that is was pro-survival in the past for females to refrain from occupations which had high fatality rates.
Reinforcing that would be claiming that females should refrain from or be prohibited/discouraged from those occupations in the present and near future.
Also sexist is the line of thought “Females are statistically more/less likely to be X, therefore I require that it be a male/female who performs task Y.”, when variation within each sex is great enough that there are a very large number of one sex who outperform a typical member of the other; a specific example would be “Females are less likely than males to complete a degree in mathematics; therefore it makes sense to award this scholarship to the equally qualified male instead of the female”.
when variation within each sex is great enough that there are a very large number of one sex who outperform a typical member of the other
That’s not the relevant comparison. In practice the comparison is between an above average members of each sex.
a specific example would be “Females are less likely than males to complete a degree in mathematics; therefore it makes sense to award this scholarship to the equally qualified male instead of the female”.
In your example, than depends on whether the first clause is still true after controlling for whatever qualifications are used in the second.
You don’t always have the luxury of choosing from among a sample that includes above-median performers.
The second case is a textbook example of sexist thought; I thought it was clear that the first clause was not controlling for anything, while the second was making a specific measurement of expected performance.
You don’t always have the luxury of choosing from among a sample that includes above-median performers.
In that case comparing average members of one sex with the above average members of the other is still not the right comparison to make.
I thought it was clear that the first clause was not controlling for anything, while the second was making a specific measurement of expected performance.
Even this statement is ambiguous. Does the specific measure of expected performance actually screen of gender?
Support/opposition to nuclear technology seems pretty orthogonal with left/right to me. The anti-nuclear left tend to be more pro-solar/wind/hydro instead, while the anti-nuclear right more pro-oil/coal/gas instead, but there are pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear is both “sides”. Even in a country like France where we have like a dozen of significant political parties, all the parties but one (the greens) have internal disagreement about nuclear energy in general.
That said, yes, “thorium is nuclear” is a good example of TWAITW.
It feels to me that until recently the pro-nuclear left was a very small faction, but growing with the likes of George Monbiot passionately switching over.
Depends where, here in France, of the 4 left-wing parties (PS, PCF, Les Verts and PG) two (PS and PCF) are mostly in favor of nuclear energy, the two others (Les Verts and PG) mostly against it, while all but Les Verts are internally split.
But that may also be because France has a strong nuclear industry, and the left-wing parties tend to be friendly with the unions, and the unions defend nuclear energy because it creates jobs (both for our own energy and because we export nuclear technology).
Thanks for the link to Caplan’s post, it’s a very nice thought experiment. How about a thread where right-wing folks can give their strongest versions of left-wing arguments and vice versa, all the while quietly laughing about each other’s misconceptions but not stepping in to correct? I could give it a try, as a right-winger imitating a left-winger, but I’d probably just embarrass myself.
Sounds lame; better to find a way where we can learn from our misconceptions. At the very least, people should be hinted towards the fact that they’re exhibiting misconceptions.
I’d rather see people that are expert in their position give the highest level version of their argument (just ignore inferential difference ffs; smart people can bridge the distance themselves if you use google-able jargon and make references explicit, and maybe throw in a book recommendation or two for further reading).
Example comment:
Conservative position re abortion (note to reader: generate your strongest conservative argument for abortion and compare before removing the rot13)
Zl avccyrf ner yvxr fnaqcncre.
And no arguing in the comments, it’s enough to be more informed of another position’s strongest arguments.
An exchange could be “Whether porn movies should be legal, left-wing viewpoint” “I, right-wing person, believe a left-wing person would support this because it causes no obvious harm.” “I, real-life left-wing feminist, oppose this because porn is objectification.”
Well, everyone agrees that actors in most porn movies are just here to turn on the viewer, and could be replaced by CGI with equivalent effect. “Objectification” just means that. The useful work in the argument is done by the theory about why objectification is a bad thing.
Well, everyone agrees that actors in most porn movies are just here to turn on the viewer, and could be replaced by CGI with equivalent effect. “Objectification” just means that.
Sorry, don’t want to turn this into a full-fledged political argument, but your definition seems to be missing some important part. Any movie can be replaced by sufficiently realistic CGI, but left-wing folks don’t seem to be against movies in general...
My imaginary feminist here claims that people should care about what shooting the movie meant for the actor. For example, some people admire Harrison Ford’s ad-libbed “I love you. “I know.”, or have strong feelings about an actor’s interpretation of a role that differs from the original script. This exists in porn too; I’ve heard Bettie Page praised for making sex look joyful and shameless. But in mainstream porn movies actors rarely have any room to show their feelings about the role.
Edit: This has sparked a full-on political subthread. I am sorry, retract this comment, and will be more careful in the future.
My imaginary anti-porn feminist (while not ignoring working conditions for porn actors (and possibly having some concern about whether “actors” reliably includes women)) is much more concerned about the effect on male viewers—that they will be strengthening a habit of only seeing women as potential porn-like entities. If the anti-porn feminist spoke LW, they’d phrase it as availability bias.
Thanks, your explanation makes more sense. The evidence for it seems inconclusive, so I won’t switch to being anti-porn, but at least it’s an understandable human reaction.
EDIT: oh shit, oh shit, I just unintentionally made a WAITW by extending the stupidity and callousness of the above comment to right-libertarianism in general. Damnit!
They weren’t sold into slavery. If you don’t like a job, hold out for something you like more. If there’s no such job, and you don’t step out of the labor market, you don’t not like the job enough to complain: it really is an improvement on your life. Or, demand more money to make up for the amount you dislike your job. This seems to be what happened in porn.
There are so many worse problems in porn as a job than the fact that people might not feel artistically fulfilled in their job. Porn can be a really unpleasant job for women, especially if you are working on several jobs a day, as many actresses do, but they don’t have to do that to survive, as it can pay from hundreds to thousands of dollars. They do that because it pays shit loads of money, and because they know that it’s not a job they want to work into old age.
Are we talking about a separate world here, where the only form of employment is porn? If it was that unpleasant with lousy pay the job wouldn’t be that competitive: they’d be doing something else.
My objection is more generic than that: I’m not making an argument about porn-actors’ career choices one way or another, as I hardly have the required knowledge to do so.
I’m just finding your own arguments which seems to say that every career choice is a good career choice and that therefore people shouldn’t complain rather unconvincing.
I’m not sure if I’d go all the way to good. Only an improvement over nothing, given that you stay in the job. If you dislike the job enough to either not take it or quit, then it wasn’t.
If there are a lot of people competing for a job, assuming they actually want the job and aren’t tricked by magic fairies, they must at least believe the job is going to be and improvement over their current employment.
I’m not sure if I’d go all the way to good. Only an improvement over nothing
Why is “nothing” the alternative to compare a given job to?
When people complain about a job, they generally don’t say “I wish I was unemployed”, they say things like “I wish I was paid more” or “I wish I wasn’t forced to work as many hours for fear of losing my job” or “I wish I had better working conditions”.
To compare any job to unemployment seems to be missing the point of such complaints. It’s not that the people would prefer unemployment. They’d prefer a better job.
I’m comparing the job to the job not existing. Not to no job at all for an individual. We’d all prefer a better job for ourselves, and if we aren’t jerks, we’d prefer better jobs for others too. Until the robots replace all the shitty jobs and all forms of scarcity vanish I don’t see the point.
There are so many jobs on the labor market. If you have a job, then you must at least think it is better than the alternatives. How is this controversial?
At this point, you’re comparing two different versions of society, a society (A) where the job exists and a society (B) where the job doesn’t exist.
If you have a job, then you must at least think it is better than the alternatives.
But at this point, you’re comparing two different choices for an individual within the same society (A), choosing to have the particular job (choice A1) or quitting (choice A2).
Those are two different questions. E.g. imagine that the porn industry didn’t exist at all, for some magic reason. Wouldn’t the customer money financing it go to some other form of entertainment or product? What makes you think that the additional jobs that industry would create wouldn’t have less shitty working conditions than the porn industry?
The question of whether the existence of porn industry is positive or negative as a whole, therefore isn’t the same to whether any given individual in it should quit or not. The choices person has in timeline B aren’t necessarily the same they have in timeline A2.
At this point, you’re comparing two different versions of society, a society (A) where the job exists and a society (B) where the job doesn’t exist.
Yes.
But at this point, you’re comparing two different choices for an individual within the same society (A), choosing to have the particular job (choice A1) or quitting (choice A2).
Yes.
Those are two different questions. E.g. imagine that the porn industry didn’t exist at all, for some magic reason. Wouldn’t the customer money financing it go to some other form of entertainment or product? What makes you think that the additional jobs that industry would create wouldn’t have less shitty working conditions than the porn industry?
Because there is only so much demand for goods, and only so much investment. The how any why of porn suggests that the mainstream entertainment industry probably isn’t where that money would go e.g. probably towards prostitution which is even less humane. And doesn’t pay as well.
More importantly, the reason people invest in porn is because they think that would be the best return on their dollar. The drive on investment is of course demand, utility represented by dollars in the economy. A redirection of that would have to be to the perceived second and third best percieved investment. If you think people who invest in porn are dumb and the percieved second best investmentwould generate better returns, then OK. But I tend to assume every one is an (imperfect) rational actor, who’s trying to generate the best return on investment, so changing that would be a bad Thing (TM).
If you don’t know why good returns on investment are good, realize that if I want to send all my money to AMF, I need to get it from somewhere. If you want a job from me, I need to get the money from somewhere.
The choices wouldn’t be the same, but they’d be worse, CP, because people were generating less return on investment, because one of their options was removed.
This is especially bad if you’re primarily concerned about employment in a first world nation, say America, (I’d talk about Greece, but I just have no idea.) where porn is actually one of the home grown industries, and that money would end up going to China or India as a likely second best investment. Which would normally be cool; the Chinese have to eat too. But you’re also supporting a government that keeps the wages down and standards cheap through methods you might not be entirely kosher with.
This doesn’t have that much to do with porn per se, only to point out that you aren’t necessarily supporting a less cruel industry, by removing a single industry that you find “objectifying”.
I still say if you find your job objectifying, quit or demand more money for the inconvenience. If you can’t do either, then the job is improving your life, or you are a slave. No one seems to attack the main point; they just don’t like hearing it.
The how any why of porn suggests that the mainstream entertainment industry probably isn’t where that money would go e.g. probably towards prostitution which is even less humane. And doesn’t pay as well.
Well, the people who want to magically stop porn also tend to want to magically stop prostitution.
I, personally, would be in favor of the existence of both, but I’d also wish much higher working conditions for both—a wish which your command to “Deal!” in regards to their low working conditions, because they’re supposedly better than the “alternative” of their non-existence doesn’t quite adequately represent.
If you think people who invest in porn are dumb and the second best return on investment would generate better returns, then OK. But I tend to assume every one is an (imperfect) rational actor
And hence all the people buying lottery tickets? All the alcoholics buying booze? All the drug-addicts doing drugs? All the people going to church?
What’s the actual difference between “dumb” and “imperfect” besides the former being a ruder word than the latter?
The choices wouldn’t be the same, but they’d be worse, CP, because people were generating less return on investment, because one of their options was removed.
That again may sound reasonable, but it isn’t a logical necessity. It isn’t a logical necessity that having more options causes greater profit, unless people are indeed perfect rational agents, with perfect knowledge of the consequences of each choice, including psychological/social/etc.
I respect libertarianism because I do mistrust the government to make these choices for us—but that doesn’t mean by far that its application necessitates greater utility for all in every single scenario.
I, personally, would be in favor of the existence of both, but I’d also wish much higher working conditions for both—a wish which your command to “Deal!” in regards to their low working conditions, because they’re supposedly better than the “alternative” of their non-existence doesn’t quite adequately represent.
I personally would like better working conditions for everyone. I live in the real world. They chose the work. Given real world economic realities, I’m not sure I see the problem. An actress can work less, choose different films, pick another career. These all come at cost, because that’s the real world. Every actor who isn’t a slave made their decision. Who am I to question it?
What’s the actual difference between “dumb” and “imperfect” besides the former being a ruder word than the latter?
I tend to think people generate utility from all those things and don’t really see the problem. I’m an athiest, but know both Christians and, I hesitate to say Athiest, but people who don’t really believe in a personal god as such, who go to church like functions for the utility they recieve from them. Same goes for lottery tickets, booze, and drugs.
I tend to think in terms of imperfect = less than perfect mathematically described agent, dumb = less than me, at least in this particular domain. That last one is probably not great. I apologize for any confusion.
That again may sound reasonable, but it isn’t a logical necessity. It isn’t a logical necessity that having more options causes greater profit, unless people are indeed perfect rational agents, with perfect knowledge of the consequences of each choice, including psychological/social/etc.
I’m not sure I said that, though I do think there enough smart people gaming the system where that works out, albeit with a certain amount of inefficiency. How much inefficiency? No idea. The common libertarian arguement is usually not that libertarianism is perfect. But it’s better than the alternatives as they currently exist.
I personally would like better working conditions for everyone. I live in the real world.
But you would also like everyone to not complain about the working conditions they currently have? Ending people’s complaints requires an even more magical solution than ending porn or prostitution.
Why don’t you say to yourself “People complain. Deal.”
They chose the work. Given real world economic realities, I’m not sure I see the problem.
Reality includes the fact that people are free to argue about whether reality sucks and how to improve it. So what’s your problem? Why are you so okay with every “real” aspect of the labour market, except the fact that in the real world people can also complain about the labour market?
The whole subthread started with you saying “Deal.” While others still discussed the “is” of the matter, you leaped to an unsupported “ought”. Whether from a consequentialist or a deontologist perspective, you demanded a particular course of action which you don’t remotely prove by saying “this is the labour market” nor even by “they chose it”—both “is” statements which can’t by themselves build an “ought”.
I didn’t mean literally don’t complain ever, that’s silly and I never said that. There is a certain extent to which I think that if you have immediate control over something you should just shut up and do, but that wasn’t what I meant either.
All employment is comodification of human time, and therefore objectification of human beings. Part of living in the real world is making peace with that. The fact that people want to single out porn is silliness. That’s what I meant. Is this really what this whole conversation has been about?
All employment is comodification of human time, and therefore objectification of human beings. Part of living in the real world is making peace with that. The fact that people want to single out porn is silliness. That’s what I meant. Is this really what this whole conversation has been about?
Yes. If you had said “All employment is comodification of human time, and therefore objectification of human beings. Part of living in the real world is making peace with that. The fact that people want to single out porn is silliness.” this would allow people to respond e.g. why they might consider porn a worse form of objectification, or e.g. agree with you and nonetheless continue discussing what a society might do with alleviating the problems of objectification in employment in general.
Saying on the other hand “It’s the labour market. Deal.” is nothing but a rude conversation-stopper, which attempts to stifle discussion without actually making any coherent argument one could respond to. It fell so much beneath the standards of a LessWrong discussion that it wasn’t even funny.
It fell so much beneath the standards of a LessWrong discussion that it wasn’t even funny.
I totally agree with your stated point, and you made the point well. But the function of the quoted sentence is winning a status contest, not advancing your argument. The post would be vastly stronger without it.
If it was that unpleasant with lousy pay the job wouldn’t be that competitive: they’d be doing something else.
That argument is only valid during times of full employment, of which this isn’t one. There are people for whom the alternative to an unpleasant job with lousy pay would be having no way to earn a living at all. (Just making a general point; I’m not claiming this is likely to be the case for a male porn actor in particular.)
Really? Cause it seems like it’d be more valid to me. You could take a part time or second full time job, take a hobby that produces goods (gardening, carpentry, etc.), and if you have full employment this implies you do not need secondary non full employment to survive.
EDIT: Oh, I’ve been there. I would have wished I could get a job in porn too. Or at McDonalds. Or anywhere. Again, if you take the job, you at least perceive it is an improvement over not taking the job. Right? Or am I crazy?
By “full employment” I mean ‘negligible unemployment rate’ (on a society level), not ‘working as many hours as you possibly could’ (on an individual level).
I don’t get it either. Seems to happen every time politics is brought up. My own posts in this thread have gone up and down several times. Reflexive down voting over politics I can understand, even if I think it’s silly.
The up votes are actually harder to explain. It’s possible I could have educated some one, but given the people who post here, that seems doubtful.
Ah. I thought you were implying something more like “40ish hours a week” of work.
I don’t know how that changes my point. You like the job enough to keep working, therefore it is an improvement of your life. Conceivably, a solution could be better social welfare or better regulation of the industry, but if the job didn’t exist, (as I assume would be the ideal state for an anti porn feminist) that takes away something that was improving their life.
I happen to live somewhere where wages are terrible, there isn’t much of a safety net outside your own family. Some jobs, like TA, really pay poorly enough where it might be a good idea to go try and farm in your own backyard. Should the minimum wage be raised? Maybe. But for those working the job, it’s enough to improve their lives, so taking away the job would be a Bad Thing(TM).
You could always head out into the woods and farm. Or beg. Or steal. Or kill yourself. I didn’t say you liked the job. I said you like the job enough. If the job didn’t exist, you’d be worse off.
Everyone agrees on that fact. But the relevant question, when I’m deciding whether it would be good on net to regulate an industry, is whether the jobs in a state of economic nature (bargained down in terms of wages and working conditions to just better than the marginal employee’s best alternative) are worse for the general welfare than the regulated jobs (and the associated economic tradeoffs) would be.
Sometimes regulation is clearly a win for society (like the workplace safety regulations in the US following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and other disasters), sometimes it’s clearly a net loss (the Greek pension system is one of the things bankrupting the country), and sometimes it’s hard to tell. But there’s an actual tradeoff in consequences, and the optimal amount of regulation is not zero in all cases.
I didn’t argue that the amount of regulation was zero in all cases. I don’t think may people really believe that, and the argument amounts to a straw man. Only that if a job market didn’t exist, the people working in that job market would be worse off.
Ah, thanks. Now I see what you misunderstood. The point of making the argument high level is because then you’re able to 1) see the depths of your ignorance and 2) see where you need to move to remove that ignorance. Moreover, the best arguments are going to be written out more completely somewhere else anyway (probably books).
For example, if you’re arguing at a high level that porn should be illegal, you could import the work of other people to support you of which the details have been argued—and this makes sense if your argument is representational of the highest level of thought within that area.
This. The lack of examples from the left makes me uncomfortable sharing this article with people that will likely see it as an attack on their ideology. If they have some things to cheer for too, they are far more likely to accept it as a good post.
Yvain, here is a challenge. Many of your examples are weak versions of strong right-wing arguments that you do not accept. (by your remark about Schelling fences, it seems you’re aware of this). I challenge you to replace each of these examples with a weak version of a strong left-wing argument that you do accept. Since policy debates should not appear one-sided, there should be no shortage of weak arguments “on your side.” And it would be an interesting kind of ideological Turing test.
Perhaps I’m wrong about “what side you’re on” and you already accept the strong right-wing arguments. In which case you got me, well done!
This is the original definition given for TWAITW. Note that the examples Yvain gave all had the form of: “X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain negative features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features.” However, working with the explicit definition outlined by Yvain, as opposed to the implicit definition used by Yvain, we can easily conjure liberal examples:
Abortion is a medical procedure.
Pornography is art.
Welfare is charity.
Other liberal examples, using Yvain’s implicit definition:
Homophobia is hatred.
The War on Drugs is Prohibition.
Pornography is sexist.
However, I am not entirely sure if our capacity to conjure examples matters.
Edit: Changed the free speech examples.
I very much like “Abortion is a medical procedure”. It’s actually a believable WAitW to make, and has the admirable feature that it completely ignores every aspect of abortion relevant to the debate.
I think the “free speech” examples don’t quite have the right form: the central question probably is whether or not pornography or flag burning is free speech, and the conclusion “Flag burning is free speech, therefore it should be legal” is valid if you accept the premise.
It seems rather probable that the free speech examples were problematic. As such, the post has been edited.
I really like “Abortion is a medical procedure”. I suspect that we could remove some of the mind-killing by presenting the examples in pairs:
Abortion is murder
Abortion is a medical procedure
Evopsych is sexist
Evopsych is science
Hmm, creating these pairs is harder than I thought.
No problem here. Not even non-central.
Indeed. Many evolutionary biologists are highly dismissive of evopsych. In evolutionary biology you have to start with a variation in a trait, in an environment where—overall, over all interactions—one side of the variation gets a strong enough advantage… then there’s genetic studies, and so on. One has to deal with the bother of doing a whole lot of actual science.
If you look at evolutionary psychology—Tooby and Cosmides, or Pinker, that’s folks literally making up caveman stories with no well defined physical traits and mechanisms to start with, no demonstration that a trait is a net benefit, no genetics… and, usually, not even any evolution, in the sense that there’s no identification of the original proto-trait and it’s gradual path of evolution.
You misunderstand me. Dspeyer used it above as an example of a non-central fallacy, implying that Ev Psych is not very much like what science is. I meant to disagree. To the extent of my awareness, Ev Psych makes predictions and tests them, and goes on to build up theories, making it a typical example of a science.
I’m not so sure when you say it doesn’t specifically use evolutionary theory in the same way Biologists normally do, and thus it’s not a science. Even if that were true, that’s like saying Meteorology isn’t a science because they don’t always use meteors in their work. I think that if you want to say something isn’t a science, you need to show that it doesn’t make falsifiable predictions, doesn’t describe the world, and hasn’t made any advances in our knowledge. Furthermore, you should really have a good explanation as to why Ev Psych people get scientific funding and have papers published in specific Ev Psych journals. And finally, if you’re going to dismiss a field, you should be very knowledgeable about said field (or have other very strong evidence, like the studies showing Psychoanalysis is useless). You can’t really make that decision that a field is bad, without that sort of evidence, even if it just seems that way to you.
I don’t see where in your link EvPsy first makes a falsifiable prediction and then tests it. The experiment described looks like data mining for correlations to me. The expression “was almost exactly what a Darwinian would predict” is yet another post-factum story.
Well perhaps it’s not a good example, although that this single example doesn’t work doesn’t remove the burden of evidence required to dismiss a field.
And then again, maybe it is a good example.
Are there any good examples?
You seem to have some strong privileging of a hypothesis going on here.
What prior would you assign to the scientific competence of a field purporting to be a science, that has journals and textbooks and experts, that’s based on an extension of good theory (evolution)? I’m aware that you have more evidence than this, from (I imagine) online discussions and you’ve read some of the experts, but I’ve not had this experience, and I think that I am more likely to misunderstand an area of science than to have understood it better than its proponents.
Just like astrology, then? :-) It’s based on “an extension of good theory”, too...
Whether something is a science is not decided by how many sciency-looking accoutrements and trappings it has.
Well, certainly not, but having sciency-looking accoutrements and trappings is nevertheless bayesian evidence that something is a science. The question is just how good that evidence is. You’re saying, I take it, that your prior probability that a given set of claims will come along with trappings equivalent to evo psych (or whatever) is substantially higher than your prior probability that evo psych is a science. But in any case, the trappings should probably produce a skyward update (even if it’s small).
No, not at all. The question isn’t how good that evidence is, the question is what other evidence is there. And in this particular case we have, for example, the lack of theories which can be falsified.
I would have no problems with calling evopsy, say, a field of study. But saying it’s a science implies rigor and tests against reality which are, um, absent.
How, precisely, is astrology an “extension of a good theory”?
There is a cute answer—that movements of celestial bodies (e.g. the Sun and the Moon) certainly affect people’s lives and fates.
And there is a historical answer—that for centuries astronomy and astrology were, basically, inseparable.
The cute answer is actually more revealing than you think and might help resolve this conversation.
Astronomy lets you predict the way celestial objects move in the sky. You can trivially extend this to weak!Astrology, which just asserts that the movement of the celestial bodies has some kind of systematic causal impact on the way humans behave. However, you would quite reasonably take issue with strong!Astrology, which makes specific, detailed, wrong claims about the nature and extent of these interactions, as well as the general sloppy standards of the field of strong!Astrology.
Evolution lets you predict the way natural selection affects a population over time. You can trivially extend this to weak!Evpsych, which just asserts that evolution will have some impact in shaping the mental faculties of the population. But you can still disagree with some specific claims of evolutionary psychology, as well as the methodologies used to generate them, and the practices of the field as a whole.
I think that Benito thinks you’re saying weak!Evpsych is wrong (that evolution didn’t shape our minds at all), when you’re actually just critiquing aspects of strong!Evpsych—e.g. that evolutionary psychologists are too quick to generalize from WEIRD college students into the rest of humanity, and so on. At least, my usual kneejerk response to critics of evpsych is “what, you think evolution stops above the neck?”
Does it? I don’t think evopsy predicts anything, I think it only constructs plausible stories after the fact.
No, I’m not saying that, it would be pretty silly.
No, and not only that as well. I am not critiquing certain aspects, I’m critiquing the whole field for failing the usual criteria of a science.
It doesn’t even construct plausible stories about evolution. In the time in which rather simple morphological changes to the bone shapes make some very minor progress, we supposedly evolve whole new instincts, whose morphological complexity (in terms of wiring adjustments in the brain), if innate, would be comparable to entire new organs, if not higher.
Where evolutionary biology predicts that X won’t evolve (and thus doesn’t exist as an innate quality), evolutionary psychology claims X evolved from scratch and exists.
[citation please]
Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_psychology , or go explain massive modularity to almost any neurobiologist and see what they say about it.
I meant can you site a specific example of an evolutionary psychologist proposing an evolved instinct “whose morphological complexity (in terms of wiring adjustments in the brain), if innate, would be comparable to entire new organs, if not higher”. The wikipedia article doesn’t seem to include any.
Looking at the criticism at best some are valid criticisms of a few stupid evolutionary explanations that some people cite, e.g., the claim that homosexuality is adaptive. Most are, however, either simply incoherent like the “Disjunction and grain problems” section, based on false premises like the “ethnocentrism” section, or straw men like the section on “rape”.
The synaptic structure even of parts of your brain is vastly more complex than the organisational structure of any other organ. You can draw diagrams of about how various hepatic cells go together, and that’s all there is to it (caveats apply, though the rules are kind of simple). A diagram which tells you where the synapses go, so that you’d get e.g. a fight-or-flight response? Vastly more complex.
Now consider the evopsych innate module explanation for improved performance on Wason selection task when it’s specified verbally in terms of social rules, just to pick a specific and common example. (How the hell would such a module even interface to a bunch of learned language circuitry? That’s a question which would have to be answered first).
There’s a good overview of the clashes between evopsych modules and neuroscience:
http://www.niu.edu/phil/~buller/publications/_pdf/epmdn.pdf
Note, by the way, that evopsych proposes a very specific explanation—modules performing very specific tasks—not something like e.g. higher general arousal improving general cognitive performance depending on the context, improved clarity, greater involvement of mental visualization, or the like. edit: that’s is, without trying to explain it in terms of use or evolution of existing traits (specialized mental visualization) they skip to postulating a new module.
This rhetorical question suggests confusion. “How?” Don’t much care, it probably involves synapses. This is nothing remotely like the intended conclusion of “it is implausible that”.
Humans ‘learn’ how to walk. We consistently ‘learn’ how to speak and hear language, except when that is not viable in which case, unless the disability is extreme, we ‘learn’ other ways to communicate. We learn all sorts of emotional skills and habits, we learn how to model 3d physics with gravity. We learn which signals to send to our muscles to produce which results. These all have various degrees of learning and predisposition and each of those modules interface with the other ‘learned’ circuitry without difficulty. Or, rather, with difficulty that was ironed out over a couple of billion years.
Well, scientists care about that sort of things, pseudoscientists don’t. The issue is that the learned circuitry is fairly different across individuals, and there is no known or plausible mechanism by which a mutation could make such highly specific modifications to the learned circuitry (as required for evopsych explanation of improved performance at Wason selection task concerning people, to give a specific example).
There’s simply no known way how a gene would connect learned concepts in a very specific way as to give rise to improved performance on Wason selection task when it is discussing social interactions, but not otherwise.
I’m not so much disagreeing as giving a different perspective. Even in utero, most organs already fulfill their intended function. It takes little time for kidneys to produce urine, or for a proto-heart to beat. There are exceptions, such as certain liver functions not being available until late into the pregnancy or post natal. The point is that it doesn’t take all that much information to describe which layer of cells goes where. It’s an astounding process, cells inducing other cells to specialize in certain ways, and gradually creating 3D structures by doing so.
However, contrast that to how much longer it takes for a brain to learn simple functions. The exact 3D structure of the brain cannot be stored in DNA in the same way that the structure of a glomerulus is stored. Only a framework is provided. The actual connectome is only created in response to information from the environment, external data stores becoming necessary because the DNA carrier cannot handle that much information. Of course, there are upsides, namely that by reacting to outside information, the resulting structure is better adapted to its specific environment than if it relied only on DNA information (which is much less flexible).
Human babies in their first months of live can be considered to be in a final, external stage of pregnancy. The cost of birthing and providing for a baby which is astoundingly helpless (“altricial”) compared to other mammals at that stage of life is enourmous. Of course, the ultimate cognitive power of their brains outweighs the investment, but I wouldn’t exactly call a years-long process which awkwardly circumvents various obstacles (e.g. a bigger and better brain wouldn’t fit through the female pelvis and would exceed the mother’s nutritional capacity) to be without difficulty. But I get your meaning.
Indeed. Thing is, we actually know a lot about how it is built. We see genetically predetermined specialization—hippocampus is very structurally distinct from the neocortex, for example.
We also see learned specialization: initially morphologically homologous areas that acquire increased specialization through synaptic pruning, which is known to be driven by the specific electrical signalling within the brain rather than specific genetic instructions targeting those synapses. We see universality (within those brain regions), in the sense that if one brain region is missing from an early enough time, other brain regions will learn to perform same function (thus proving, at least, that learning can account for said functionality).
What we don’t see is innate specialization in those regions, as proposed by Tooby/Cosmides/Pinker (‘hundreds or thousands distinct mental organs’). They’re somehow below any detection, and work absolutely identical to what learning works like.
And what do you think learning looks like? You seem to be envisioning some kind of blank slate priorless learning. The problem is that learning without priors is logically incoherent. Now that we’ve established that our brains have built in priors, why is it implausible that it said priors were the results of evolution? In fact, it would be implausible for them not to be.
A piece of neocortex consisting of approximate repeats of same structure (made from same genetic code) is not prior-less.
It’s not C. Elegans. It is individual-specific which neuron groups end up learning a concept. And genome is not a blueprint, there’s no short way to create a gene that would target a specific region even on the location basis. In humans there’s no gene controlling specifically the strength of a specific synapse any place in neocortex, and if you wanted to genetically engineer an alteration to a specific synapse of your choice you would have to set up an incredibly complex framework for expressing that gene in just that specific neuron and affecting that specific synapse.
And if we are to compare humans to animals, there’s also a far larger brain that does far more distinct things, without a massive increase in the number of genes.
There’s the root of the problem, really: environment drives evolution of genes, genes interact with neurobiology, neurobiology gives rise to psychology. And “evolutionary psychologists”, of the Tooby/Cosmides/Pinker kind, skip the middle links in the chain (where a lot of high quality but complicated science is done).
So your claim is that each human’s priors are assigned not by genetics, but randomly? (according to some distribution?). I don’t even see how to phrase your position coherently.
But there are genes that control how strong synapses are under what conditions, and there are genes that control the conditions in different parts of the neocotrex.
Or he could, you know, try tweaking a bunch of genes and see which ones produced effects close to the effect he wanted. Then try more similar tweaks to those and see which get him closer.
Just because there are many intermediate steps in the causal diagram from genes to psychology doesn’t mean that much of psychology isn’t based on genes.
To use an analogy to a computer, I would argue that studying the properties of neurons will get you about as far in understanding psychology as studying the properties of circuits will get you in understanding software.
There’s far more hypotheses which a human updates on when learning in the early life than there are genes, so there’s simply not enough genes to address priors to hypotheses individually. A lot in the human body (minor blood vessels, details in the fingerprint patterns, etc) is not set by genes—most of the fine detail isn’t individually controlled by genes.
The fidelity is very low—it’s not a blueprint. The thing is, you can’t make predictions about what would evolve from just what’s beneficial. It’d be beneficial for many mammals to have extra eyes in the back, but not a single mammal has those, because the developmental process doesn’t provide for a simple mutation that yields such eyes.
Not when the guys who speculate about the software keep insisting that microsoft windows is added into the computers at the semiconductor chip factory… that’s probably the best analogy. Hardware is what determines how and where the software can be loaded from. For example from the hardware considerations we can see that RAM comes in blank, and hard drive comes in with head positioning tracks and some firmware but not the OS.
Was anyone claiming they do?
Yes, and it would also be beneficial to correctly apply the Wason selection principle to all problems not just ethical ones, but because the relevant circuitry is in the ethics module, our brains only apply it to ethics.
Or do they really?
A large fraction of people get the problem right even in it’s more abstruse form, where it is harder to leverage the experience to correctly understand the problem statement.
Evopsych you describe is actually a very fringe interpretation of how we get improved performance on Wason selection task. Source . There just isn’t a reason to believe that improved performance has anything to do with ethics, rather than, for example, general improvement in understanding when describing problems that make more sense. Something as simple as replacing ‘married’ with something patently irrelevant such as hair colour, throws people off. A proposed explanation had been that most people just flip cards that seem relevant to them, and that’s it, they aren’t actually solving a logical problem.
Yes, our brain also has the a general purpose module, but it’s not as effective as the special purpose ones on the problems they are designed for.
Do you have an example of an experiment that distinguishes this from the ethics hypothesis?
That is also what the ethics theory would predict.
That’s a non-explanation. It doesn’t explain why some cards and not others seem relevant. That just relates a black box in the subjects’ brains with the corresponding black box in the explainer’s brain without saying anything about how either of them work.
They aren’t designed, they’re shaped by evolution, and evolution is driven by differential reproduction, which is larger for more widely applicable improvements.
How so? Did you read my link? Two people are making a bet on a trait. If results gone other way, would ethics theory predict that too?
The relevance is complicated and highly dependent on context and prior experience of the subject.
It’s also larger for improvements that do really well in situations that commonly come up.
Sorry, I didn’t. Now taking a look at it, that is indeed not directly moral. Although I suspect it might be implicitly moral since there is a presumption in our culture that unmarried men are not to be trusted with children.
Ok, so your theory is even less falsifiable.
The same way the hunger module interfaces with the learned language circuitry when someone tells you there is cake in the fridge.
Also the “Wason module” if you want to call it that is a submodule of the ethics/social rules module, which is why it only gets involved on social rules type problems. Are you trying to argue that it’s implausible that the social rules module interfaces with learned language circuitry?
There’s no specific “eat cake” module there, it’s learned that cake reduces hunger, that’s the whole point.
These are two quite distinct claims. Only one of them is insane.
No, he is arguing that the concept of very specific modules/massive modularity is implausible.
Type error. The complexity of the details of a specific phenotype are not the same as the complexity of the adaptation. This is especially the case when considering the organ that is explicitly design to adapt to complexity via bulk application of an adaptive neural algorithm. The diagram of synapses involved in a given process will be completely different between genetically identically individuals.
Analogy: I don’t know whether there is more complexity in apples or watermelons. I do know that a lot more can be said about an individual watermelon than about an individual apple, if I represent enough detail.
I don’t think it weakens your point (given charitable reading) but using ‘fight-or-flight response’ as the illustration of how the brain is most complex than other organs has difficulties given just how many of those other organs are involved in the response. Especially when a diagram “so that you’d get e.g. a fight-or-flight response” could plausibly be an electric wire stabbed into either the pituitary or adrenal glands.
Someone uttering this may claim that they are not using the worst argument in the world as defined:
They claim that it does have the critical features in question. Even the person they are arguing against may agree that it is equivalent to shouting out loud “My country is a @#$% disgrace! Screw my country!”. The disagreement seems to be whether one should be permitted to do that kind of thing.
“Flag burning is freedom” should be a legitimate example along the same lines.
I do not possess any particularly strong intuitions regarding freedom of speech, for better or for worse. For this hypothetical arguer, could you outline what they think are the critical features?
Something along the lines of being able to say (or otherwise express) whatever you wish without fear of punishment.
How would you say the War on Some Drugs is different than Prohibition?
I wouldn’t say that. However, I also wouldn’t say that the War on Drugs is the same as Prohibition. I do not have any opinions on these matters that I view as worth stating at this time.
I would say that the War on Some Drugs is sufficiently like Prohibition to make this not an instance of the WAitW. It’s still a fairly weak argument, since it’s lacking in details, but I don’t think it’s trying to sneak in any connotations, and I think basically all of the problems with Prohibition are also problems with the War on Some Drugs.
Prohibition was unpopular with a large portion of the population. It caused a lowered respect for the law in general, because so many people casually broke the law in response. It funded organized violent crime. It invaded personal liberty in order to prevent something that only caused harm as a contributing element, not direct harm. It didn’t work.
Prohibition was a war on a different subset of drugs. It had a constitutional amendment that made it unquestionably legal for the federal government to be doing. It had few medical implications. There was not an obvious historical argument that it would fail catastrophically when it was implemented.
In other words, I think one could reasonably come to different conclusions on the two cases based on cost/benefit analyses, but I think it’s reasonable to call them two instances of the same thing. I also think it’s reasonable to say that most of the reasons Prohibition was bad also apply to the War on Some Drugs.
As an example of the fallacy, I think it’s less than ideal.
There seems to be a significant difference between “prohibition” and “war on drugs” to me, that may justify it being WAitW : prohibition is attacking a behavior that most people actually do. Nearly everyone drinks alcohol, at least on special occasions. While drugs (even the “softer” of the prohibited one, cannabis) are only used by a small fraction (in the USA, where it’s pretty high, according to Wikipedia, it’s 13% who used cannabis at least once in 2009). I’m not in favor of “war on drugs” (in my opinion, it has a lot of negative consequences and doesn’t work well at all at reducing drug usage), but there is a significant difference between forbidding something “everyone” does and something 10% of the population does, and “prohibition” does bring in the “forbidding something everyone does” connotation.
I would find it more accurate to call the ban on filesharing “prohibition” than to call war on drugs “prohibition” (but both are a form of WAitW).
You think that more people have tried filesharing than drugs?
Tried, I would say it depends of the age group. But “tried once in your life” is not the most important for prohibition issues, it’s people using it regularly the real issue.
So, do it regularly (at least once a year) ? It’s hard to find stats on filesharing usage, but the data I remember is about 1⁄3 of people with internet access using p2p, which is about 2⁄3 of the population, so 2⁄9 = 22%, nearly twice the 13% who used cannabis “once per year”. Cannabis is not the only durg, but p2p isn’t the only form of filesharing, so it more or less compensates.
Is that your real question? It feels like you’re objecting to something else or asking an entirely different question, like, say, “Does filesharing really deserve the ‘prohibition’ connotations more than drugs?”.
That’s my real question. I’m not really objecting to anything, I just found the implied estimate surprising.
Thanks for clarifying.
Also applies to the present-day prohibition of marijuana (provided you’re more liberal with the usage of the words large and many). And what do you mean by “direct harm”? Pretty sure that, from a physiological point of view alone, alcohol is more harmful than marijuana (at least in large doses).
Unlike the other examples, this one doesn’t really fit the pattern: it’s “X is like Y” and not “X belongs to category Y”. The difference is that “X is like Y” does not sneak in any connotations; it’s well understood that “The War on Drugs is Prohibition” is a rhetorical way of saying “The War on Drugs is very similar to the Prohibition of the 1930s”.
“Affirmative action is like hanging people just because they’re black!” doesn’t carry the same sneaky rhetoric as “Affirmative action is racist!”
Diversity is strength.
Slightly controversial left wing example: “trans women are women”.
(Which is used to argue that they should be treated as women in all instances regardless of the reason that women might traditionally be treated differently to men in that particular situation—eg. competitive sports.)
The challenge is an interesting exercise, and I will try to think up some examples, but your comment also contains an implied accusation which I’d like to respond to first.
By my count, this post includes critiques of four weak right-wing arguments (abortion, euthanasia, taxation, affirmative action) and three weak left-wing arguments (eugenics, sexism, capital punishment). As far as I know, neither side thinks MLK was a criminal. That means I’m 4-3, ie as balanced as it’s mathematically possible to get while seven remains an odd number.
And I think the responses I see below justify my choice of examples. Shminux says the pro-choice converse of “abortion is murder” would be “forced pregnancy is slavery”; TGM suggests below it “denying euthanasia is torture”. These would be excellent examples of TWAITW if anyone ever asserted them which as far as I know no one ever has. Meanwhile, I continue to walk past signs saying “Abortion Is Murder!” on my way to work every day. I don’t know who exactly it would be helping to give “Forced Pregnancy Is Slavery” equal billing with “Abortion Is Murder” here and let my readers conclude that I’m arguing against some fringe position irrelevant to the real world.
If you can think of left-wing WAITWs that are as well-known and catchy as “abortion is murder!”, I will happily edit the post to include them (well, to include one of them; otherwise it’ll be 5-4 and the leftists will start complaining). The best I can do at the moment is anti-war arguments that seem to equate for example humanitarian intervention in Rwanda with invading your next-door neighbor to steal their land because they’re both “war”, but that one doesn’t come in convenient slogan form as far as I know.
“Property is theft”
Is an example of the left using the WAITW.
American liberals aren’t that kind of left. And Proudhon did mean “property is wrong for the same class of reasons theft is”.
Arguments that your stereotypical leftist and stereotypical rightist will both see as bad are the sort of thing that would, ideally, dominate the article.
Why? Isn’t that just Pretending To Be Wise by flattering the prejudices of the two major sides? Ideally, the article should discomfort everyone who has made weak arguments, whether Blue, Green, or Libertarian.
The article’s purpose should be education. By beginning with arguments that most agree are bad, and then progressing to arguments that they may recognize as close to their own, the article will convince most readers that this is a valid fallacy to watch out for, and then show them some arguments close to theirs that fit the pattern.
As a leftist, this seems like a useful exercise. Here are a few claims I’ve heard more than once from fellow leftists that might qualify.
A fetus is a clump of cells.
Corporations are not people.
Money is not speech.
The first one is a good leftist example of the WAitW… and with a bit of shame I’ve to admit I used it in the past.
I wouldn’t say the other two qualify because they are negatives. “X is not Y” is quite different from a rethorical perspective than “X is Y”.
Let Y = (Not Z)
X is Y.
Using this, I’d argue that “Corporations are not people” is somewhat valid as an example of the WAitW, since the idea is to put the emphasis on people, and everything else is just property, things. It puts Corporations in some abstract, undefined category of not-people things that, when phrased appropriately, can carry a strong connotation.
I fail to see the connotation in the “not-speech” for the third example though, and I don’t quite see how one would use that example to argue against or for money—the label / categorization doesn’t seem like it would sway anyone either way.
The money is not speech argument is used (just like the corporations are not people argument) to protest against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. The claim is that although speech is constitutionally protected, this does not mean that wealthy individuals have the right to spend large amounts of money to get their poltiical views heard (by, say, contributing to SuperPACs). The idea is: although it’s true that the government should not be allowed to prevent people from expressing their opinions, the government should be allowed prevent people from spending money to buy ads expressing their opinion because in that case the regulation is on the person’s expenditure of money, and money is not speech (or, if you prefer, money is not-speech).
I think this is an example of the WAitW. The first amendment gives Americans the right to free speech. Wealthy people claim that this means they can spend their considerable wealth in order to broadcast their opinions. After all, if the government can’t restrict my speech, surely that means the government can’t prevent me from utilizing my own resources as a medium for that speech. But, the leftist responds, the government can totally prevent wealthy people from doing this, because the wealthy people are spending money in order to get their opinions broadcast, and hey, money is not-speech, so like many other examples of not-speech, restricting its use is not a violation of the Bill of Rights.
Buckley v. Valeo disagrees.
More conveniently, it prohibits Congress from regulating the freedom of the press, i.e. the printing press, i.e. the technological means of reproducing ideas so that others may consume them, as in television ads.
Which is why I found the Citizens United decision so baffling- the reasoning they used to reach their conclusion was not at all the reasoning I would have used. (But, then again, I would rule the vast majority of laws Congress outputs unconstitutional, which is one of the many reasons I have not been nominated to the Supreme Court.)
I thought the more common claim is that spending money just is self-expression, and therefore protected.
Now that sounds like “Money is speech” which is also a fit to WAiTW.
This highlights an ambiguity in what we mean by “Money is not speech”. It could mean “Money is a subset of (non-speech)” which is false since Money does talk in some cases.
Or it could mean “It is not the case that money is a subset of speech” which is more debatable, and definitely not WAItW. Expressed as a Venn diagram, Money and Speech may be overlapping circles with neither strictly contained in the other.
The choice of what to spend on, not the act of spending.
Not to get into the details, but there is at least a plausibility argument that “speech should be free only when it is free”. If you have to pay someone (or lots of someones) to speak on your behalf, why should your use of them as a mouthpiece be protected? If the people doing the actual speaking (or broadcasting) genuinely agreed with you, and thought it was worth saying, you wouldn’t have to pay them to say it...
Another, amusing, point is that the whole mechanism of broadcast licensing is a massive restriction of freedom of speech. True freedom to speak via broadcast would allow everyone to flood the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously, drowning each other out in interference. That would destroy a public good of course, but once you admit that it is OK to restrict free speech to preserve a public good, you lose the whole “free speech is absolute, and must be protected” argument.
Sure. Heck, once I admit that it’s OK to prevent me from committing mass murder to assemble my manifesto out of rotting bodies, I have admitted that it’s OK to regulate the forms of speech.
Where I end up after that depends rather a lot on what I cared about in the first place.
For example, if what I care about is avoiding the differential suppression of ideas, I might end up with something like “the legality of expressing an idea I through medium M shall not depend on I.” Which allows for broadcast licensing and laws against expressive homicide… though it still doesn’t allow for obscenity or pornography or sedition laws. (Well, not laws against them, anyway.)
Quite true: If I genuinely care about the “differential suppression of ideas” then I will want to avoid suppression of the ideas of the poor by crowding them out of public discourse e.g. by flooding the airwaves with the ideas of the rich. There are more types of suppression to worry about than legal suppression.
However, this is now getting overly political, and off-topic...
That would probably fall under time or manner restrictions. Most free speech absolutists mean that speech should be free in a way that is independent of content. Time or manner restrictions are generally seen as ok by even most self-identified free speech advocates. The danger and ideological objection is to content based restrictions.
Banning defamation (knowingly making false statements to maliciously cause harm) is a content restriction which is pretty well supported even by serious free-speech folks — at least when the target is a private individual. Defamation of famous people, politicians, corporations, products, etc. is a somewhat less well supported idea.
Well since even printing presses aren’t free, that would destroy freedom of the press even in its original meaning.
There are other ways to solve this problem, e.g., treat spectrum as a property right and interference as trespass. In fact the (US) courts were moving in that direction before the 1934 federal power grad.
On printing presses not being “free” either (because you have to buy them) well this is getting into the details. However, it may help to distinguish the funding model. Consider two extreme models:
1) Funding comes from a grant or trust, and is used to buy the press, paper, salaries for journalists, press-operators etc. The funder has no say on what content gets printed (it is up to journalists’/editors’ discretion). Any proceeds from paper sales get paid back into the trust.
This seems like a case of truly free speech (in both senses of free) because no-one is paid to say anything in particular. So the journalists say what they agree with and think is worth saying. It pattern matches to an instance of free speech that we think is worth protecting.
2) Funding comes from a tyrant who owns the whole business, and uses it as a propaganda rag. He orders the journalists to print what he tells them, whether or not they agree with it, whether or not they believe it. If they don’t, they get fired. If they tell anyone what happened, they are sued under non-disclosure agreements.
This doesn’t seem like free speech in either sense (the speakers are being coerced), and doesn’t pattern-match to anything obviously worth protecting.
Cases where the funding comes from advertising look a bit more interesting. An initial pattern-match is that the ads themselves aren’t free speech that we particularly want to protect (outright lies about Snakeoil or distortions about competitor products can be restricted by an advertising standards body). Whereas any news or editorial comment is protected free speech, provided it is cleanly separated from the advertising, and the advertiser doesn’t have any control of its content. If a particular story was run because the advertiser demanded it, that isn’t protected. And so on.
On your other remark about spectrum being a property right: possible, but notice that it is still a massive restriction on free speech (by rights of property now, rather than by legislative censorship). And it shows up some of the problems with broad property rights; seems too similar to making air a property right, with trespass for anyone who breathes it without the owner’s permission.
Please note that “the advertiser doesn’t have any control of its content” doesn’t always hold: advertisers have the power to blackmail editors/newspapers with “if you publish that paper that attacks us, we won’t put advertising in your columns anymore”. They can exert a form of censorship, and induce self-censorship reactions “no, we won’t publish that article about the working conditions in company X, because company X is paying us a lot in advertising and we don’t want to upset them” even without company X having to do any explicit blackmail. This is not an easy problem to solve.
Yes, this is why advertising funding is an “interesting” case and falls between the extremes. One solution is “firewalls” between the department selling advertising space and the editorial team, so that explicit threats of blackmail can’t get through. The paper might need to show evidence of such firewalls to claim protection for pieces which are labelled as comment but look suspiciously-like paid-for advertising.
What is most difficult here is “self-censorship” whereby the editor knows that if he runs a particular story, then the advertising will dry up, and the paper risks going out of business. But this is not in principle different from dilemmas on readership such as “If I run this shocking story about what our troops are up to abroad, then I’ll sound unpatriotic, lose readers, and go out of business”.
There is self-censorship in almost all speech contexts (“If I say that, my friends will think I’m an idiot”, “If I post that, it will get down voted”). But the important point is that what emerges through the self-censorship filter is protected. The intuition here is that we don’t want to impose even more filters.
Or even go one step further: a group of people threaten to boycott companies that advertise on shows saying politically incorrect things.
I agree with all three examples as WAITW even if the last two are negative. It’s also very rare that you can settle policy questions through the negation of a categorization. Corporations aren’t typical people and money isn’t typical speech, but neither of those observations settle the policy question or even debate it—these are just slogans.
The negative examples are different because they don’t suggest an argument, only a counterargument. If X is an apple then various conclusions (typically/intuitively) follow, for instance, that X is edible. But if X is a non-apple then nothing much follows from that; it only serves to block the apple-->edible argument (and suggest that X is not necessarily edible).
“Money is speech” implies that all of the protections that get applied to speech should be applied to spending. If money is not speech, then who knows? Nothing much follows directly from that (it’s not as if there’s some general principle that things which are non-speech should be banned); it just suggests that we don’t necessarily have to apply the speech protections to spending. It’s more similar to the “MLK was not a criminal” counterargument than to the “MLK was a criminal” argument (note that being a non-criminal doesn’t make someone especially admirable), but it doesn’t fall into the trap of being obviously false.
While I can see this argument apply as a sort of justifiable use when humans are doing such profiling, though even in that case I think it should be used sometimes, I find it a bit absurd when applied to say data mining systems. Are we to apply Bayesian reasoning to everything except predictors tied to certain sacralized human traits like gender, dress, class, race, religion and origin? Why don’t we feel averse applying it to say age?
To avoid nitpicking that cancer cells have no ideology, I will point out that if they did, they would share the ideology with all life forms on the planet.
Doesn’t sound as evil no?
Either this is a joke or you mean “odd”.
You saw nothing!
I think the difference is that the right wing examples are examples of core beliefs that many stereotypical conservatives believe. Thus leftists feel like they are scoring points when they read it. The left examples, however, aren’t really core beliefs of the Democratic party. Democrats may lean against capital punishment, but no presidential candidate in my memory has made that a core tenant of eir campaign.
I also think it’s wildly generous to suggest eugenics as a leftist issue. I can’t remember ever hearing someone seriously suggest that genetic engineering is eugenics. And typically, it’s conservatives who are opposed to genetic engineering, generally on the grounds of playing God.
And when I was reading it, MLK got lumped in with conservatives for a number of reasons. First, the strong conservative examples primed me to put it there. Second, the civil rights act was largely pushed for by a Democratic legislature and president. Lastly, African Americans tend to line up with democrats in modern demographics.
The best leftist example I could come up with is “Meat is murder”. I think that merits including. Or mixing in with the abortion one.
I was surprised people didn’t notice that both the sexism and eugenics arguments where somewhat “right wing”. I think a key thing might be that perception of “right” and “left” are tied to the current American political landscape. The important role of religion in it means that conservative politicians don’t often make arguments for their policies based on evolutionary psychology or the high heritability of IQ or conscientiousness. The America right seems almost as invested in blank slate notions as the left.
Of course not!
MLK was a Communist philanderer. That’s worse. ;)
“Arguing against homosexuality is hate speech!”. Many anti-queer statements are hate speech, e.g. promotion of murder, but others are along the lines of “People shouldn’t act on same-sex attraction because...”. Quite a few conservatives complain that the latter form of argument is dismissed as “hate speech”, even though “People shouldn’t drive SUVs because...” is never taken to mean you hate SUV drivers.
That’s not the worst argument in the world. “People shouldn’t act on same-sex attraction because...” is closer to the central archetype of hate speech than “People shouldn’t drive SUVs because...” is. And the full argument is probably something like “Arguing against homosexuality is hate speech, and therefore harms homosexuals.” — which is a sloppy argument, but a cleaned-up version would be “Arguing against homosexuality encourages people (through the magic of virtue ethics) to view homosexuals as vicious. And it legitimizes (through the affect heuristic) the established pattern of homophobia. Therefore, you should not argue against homosexuality. By the way, hate speech shares these features.”
So this may be more complicated than I thought, in that all of the examples below seem really bad to me, but that might just be an example of my personal bias. I think if any of them get, let’s say, more than ten upvotes I’ll assume they’re generally agreed to be a good argument and I’ll put them in—does that sound like a reasonable bar? That means upvote them if you think they’re worthy of inclusion.
I was trying to think of further liberal examples, and I think some references to “human rights” might qualify—for example, “health care is a human right”. The meaning of “human right” that allows us to assert this seems very poorly defined, whereas the meaning of “human right” that allows us to say that negative rights like free speech are human rights seems well-defined, even though I don’t agree with it. So calling health care (or housing, or something) a “human right” might be a way of trying to claim that we should view health care as exactly like free speech, free religion, etc, even though it is quite different in that it requires positive action by other people.
I’m not quite willing to include that one just because the total ambiguity in the definition of “human right” makes it pretty hard to pin down exactly how the argument is being made.
EDIT: Just saw “Property is theft” has 15 upvotes. Do people think this one should be added?
I’m not fond of any, either. See if you can find something you like here.
“Human rights” are poorly defined, but I guess the closer we have to a formal definition of them is Universal Declaration of Human Rights which does include health care and right to education at the same level than free speech or fair trial.
But I agree it’s a very poor defense of universal healthcare, the UDHR is a political document that can carry weight of authority, but it doesn’t make something ethical or unethical by itself. The only way I use the UDHR in a political discussion is with a reasoning like « UDHR includes right to healthcare, and UDHR was accepted by most countries of the planet, so it’s not a completely lunatic position. Now, please stop your authority arguments like “the only natural rights are freedom and ownership” and listen to my actual arguments for universal healthcare, and I’ll listen to your real ones against it », which doesn’t in itself justify healthcare, but can help giving me at least a chance to expose my arguments.
It might be easier to come up with examples if you go back to your original definition and note that it allows for categories with positive qualities lending their positive qualities to category members who lack those physical qualities. (Leftist arguments as a rhetorical class are usually phrased in terms of including things in positive categories, whereas rightist arguments are more well-known for including things in negative categories.)
For example, something like “we should support racial diversity because of the benefits of ideological diversity”?
Not quite any wing: the jailed Pussy Riot members should stay behind bars because a killer requested their release.
There are similar Western examples with Wikileaks/Anonymous.
Judith Jarvis Thomson? (Well, she didn’t use the word slavery but still.)
As for the euthanasia-is-torture one, I heard that a lot on the media at the time of Terri Schiavo and similar cases. (Maybe none used the word torture but still.)
I lost a lot of faith in contemporary philosophy when I heard “A Defense of Abortion” was “the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy”.
How about “Gay rights are equal rights”?
Interesting example. I’m trying to figure out how it fulfills the second criteria for the WAITW namely “as though it also had those features even though it doesn’t”
The archetypical example of a struggle for equal rights has been identical political enfranchisement (e.g. the suffragette movement) or identical legal equality (equal right to property, etc) on an individual level.
Things like gay marriage or adoption rights don’t fit those archetypical examples—hence the rather silly counter-argument by its opponents that “gays are already allowed to marry—they’re allowed to marry people of the opposite gender.”
I’m saying all this as a huge supporter of gay rights, btw.
Ah I see now, thanks. I don’t its nearly as common as “abortion is murder” though. Actually I’m quite embarrassed that I can’t think of any liberal examples of the worst argument in the world with regard to social issues that people actually use regularly. I don’t like any that I’ve seen so far.
It’s not as different as it might seem. Initially, only property owners could vote, and so only letting men vote was effectively “one vote per household”. With the “sensible” assumption that everyone is married and truthful with their spouses, giving votes to both spouses means either one candidate gets two votes, or they vote for different people and thus might as well have stayed home. Since the only difference there is that the folks counting the votes would have to do twice as much work (since spouses usually agree about everything), it would not be helpful to give every household 2 votes instead. People could have argued at the time (I’m not sure whether they actually did) that women do have the right to vote—the husband is voting for both of them (this is of course complicated by the fact that women could not own property).
Equal right to property works similarly—unmarried women could own property, but married women could not.
No blood for oil!
Willie Nelson: How much oil is a human life worth?
Economist: Well, in the United States workers value their lives at about $7 million. With current crude oil prices at around $100 a barrel, a human life is worth about 70,000 barrels of oil.
This is the subjective value of one’s own life. The market value of human life, i.e. the price for which one life can be saved, should be much lower.
If only 100 barrels of oil ends up being worth a human life, clearly we ought to invade Iran. Or Equatorial Guinea if we can only scrape up a couple of million dollars for the coup.
Incidentally, there appears to be an important list of unsung humanitarian heroes here.
I’d quibble about “clearly,” even in context. Wars are just too damn random.
Nothing against cost-benefit analysis in the abstract, but, in practice, invading a country seems like one of those very complicated choices that may inherently risk some major, major unintended consequences. I’m mostly thinking negative, but I suppose this would go both ways—unexpected ultimate positive consequences might be possible as well, but still hard to calculate at all.
I am not entirely convinced that a foreign-backed violent coup, even against a truly heinous dictator, is necessarily a good idea. This seems like one of those cases for ethical injunctions, because the visible upside is so clear (the dictator is gone), but the downside is more complicated: violent coups, for whatever reason, very rarely end up producing good governments.
The premise was that human life is ethically cheap, and the conclusion wasn’t that backing a coup was a good idea, but that outright invasion would be.
Personally, I don’t think that the cash value of the oil (discounted as normal) is greater than the cash cost of the war plus the reconstruction needed to get the oil. I could be wrong on my estimates, because I don’t think the relative monetary cost is a significant factor in the moral calculus, so I didn’t spend much time or effort estimating the values.
I’m not sure how to interpret Eliezer’s “unsung humanitarian heroes” comment other than as an endorsement of the coup attempt.
Or maybe I’m just missing some sarcasm.
I’ll take option B, in the form of reductio ad absurdum, on the claim that a human life is worth 100 barrels of oil.
I was baffled by that too. They attempted to overthrow a nasty dictator . . . but they did it for the oil money they’d get from the new government.
I believe your sarcasm detector may be improperly calibrated.
I believe Eliezer is more concerned with whether the coup would have led to an increase in utility than the motives of the plotters.
I looked at it considering that the coup attempt never started, and figured that he was claiming that someone dropped a tip and stopped it.
I don’t know if ~80 people could complete a coup; it would seem that if the military is loyal to the existing regime, it would fail, and if the military was disloyal no mercenaries are needed.
By the same logic, doesn’t everyone who steals X money, where X happens to be higher than the value of life, become a humanitarian hero?
By which I mean that I don’t understand your point. You seem to indirectly accuse me of commiting a fallacy, yet I don’t know which one.
Nope, wasn’t accusing you of anything. I was just amused by the point that anyone who wants to save as many lives as possible, but has only a finite amount of oil, must be able to state some consistent value of human life in terms of barrels of oil, since otherwise you could rearrange the oil to save more lives.
I am probably becoming a bit paranoid lately.
“Bankers are parasites.”
“We are the 99%.”
“Rethuglican.” (You’ll see the “is” if you unpack the word.)
So, are the downvotes because these are, or because they are not, exactly what was asked for? And is −3 too much of a hair trigger for the karma fine for replying, or about right?
I didn’t downvote, but on your 3 examples, only the first one qualifies for me, which can justify downvotes (I didn’t because the first one qualifies, making it enough to not be worth a downvote).
“Rethuglican” is not an argument, just a typical pun on words against the ones you don’t like, but it doesn’t pretend to be a reason to not like republicans, just something democrats say between themselves. It’s an happy death spiral, but not a WAitW.
“We are the 99%” doesn’t share much of the WAitW features. It doesn’t try to sneak in connotations, it doesn’t attack an typical example of a cluster by assimilating it with the archetype of the cluster.
I have the impression that (1) when people post things in LW that are politically leftish, it’s quite common for them to get a response along these lines—complaining about leftward bias and suggesting that it should be addressed by a deliberate injection of rightward bias to compensate—whereas (2) when people post things in LW that are politically rightish, they basically never receive such responses.
I have no statistics or anything to back this up, and it’s not clear that there’s any feasible way to get (or informatively fail to get) them, so I’d be interested in other opinions about whether this asymmetry is real.
If it is real, it seems to me quite interesting.
(One possible explanation, if it’s real, would be that leftish views are much more common here than rightish ones, so that people with rightish views feel ill-treated and want the balance redressed. Except that I think I see distinctly more rightish than leftish political commentary here, and the rightish stuff more often gets large numbers of upvotes. I suppose it’s possible that what we have here is a lot of slightly leftish people and a smaller number of rightish ones who feel more strongly. Again, this is probably hard to get a good handle on and I’d be interested in others’ impressions.)
Well right wing people are almost certainly a minority here, but don’t forget that makes such positions convenient for hipster fun. Some LWers who argue for right wing positions have stated that they feel more and more unwelcome in the past few months. Not only that I think they make a good case for pro left bias being very prevasive on LessWrong. I think what you are seeing is some users trying to correct for it.
I find the fact that both people who see themselves as left leaning and those who see themselves as right leaning suddenly feel there is favouritism for those who disagree with them is a much more worrying sign. I think this is what being on one side of a tribal conflict looks like from the inside.
I dislike the fact that we’re talking about the bias rather than the arguments. Here, more so than any other place I know of, we should be dissecting arguments and talking about the truths of the issues, rather than saying that a statement is incorrect because of its side on the political spectrum.
I can’t be the only person thinking this, right?
This site is about refining the art of human rationality, while we certainly do try to get a good map of the world we spend most of our time thinking about thinking. The fundamental realization at the heart of our community, that to a certain extent distinguishes it from traditional rationality, is that humans are biased and broken thinkers who can’t rely on their naive reasoning too much. You can think as long and as calmly as you like but if you base your thinking on broken axioms or bad epistemology you won’t get much closer to truth.
I did not say or even wish to imply a set of arguments was wrong because of political affiliation, neither where the users I linked to. What I was implying quite strongly is that we are unlikely to hear the best arguments or to update appropriately to those that are politically inconvenient. Not even because of a desire to engage in propaganda for ones cause, but because the world simply looks a certain way to them! There are many correct arguments one can make for incorrect positions, by selectively only hearing correct arguments one does not by default hear the counter-arguments or correct arguments for other positions and perhaps doesn’t’ even realize they may exist. These are not a controversial observations at all.
Following this reasoning and promoted by complaints and observations observations of my own I stated my argument by pointing out the dominant political affiliation and ideological assumptions on the site and how this harms the rationality of the community on certain subjects.
This rationality quote by Jonathan Haidt may explain this better than I have. Also here is me making an argument explicitly along those lines.
-- Yvain’s 2011 survey
Aha, thanks.
My explanation of this perception is that posters, in general, know better than to post rightish things at LW unless they are correct. Every now and then you get a new Objectivist who gets downvoted because they aren’t discussing things at a high enough level.
Lots of beliefs that are common on LW are uncomfortable for the stereotypical leftist- like human biodiversity in general. To see someone brazenly state that, yes, there is a difference in measured IQ between the races and that reflects reality rather than our inability to design tests properly, or that men and women are actually neurologically distinct, will seem like a “not my tribe” signal to the stereotypical leftist- but people here don’t hold that opinion (as far as I can tell) because of racial or sexual enmity, but because they put evidence above wishful thinking and correct beliefs above politeness.
But now imagine that for the stereotypical rightist. How big of a “not my tribe” signal is atheist materialism and evolution?
I am thinking that one possible asymetry between “the left” and “the right” is that the former is a rather homogenous group, while the latter is heterogenous. The left generally means socialist(-ish), and the right generally means non-socialist. The left is a fuzzy blob in the concept-space, the right seems like a label for points outside of this blob.
As an example, both Ayn Rand and Chesterton would be examples of “the right”. What exactly do they have in common? (Religion: the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever? Individual or community? Mystery or reason? The great future or the great past? Selfishness or selflessness? Should women be allowed as leaders? Etc.) The common trait that classifies them both as “the right” is the fact that neither of them is a socialist.
Well, I could also says that neither of them “considers hinduism the best thing ever”… but why should that information be used to classify them? Well, for a hinduist that would be an important information. Then it follows that classifying many diverse views under one label of “the right” makes sense to you mostly if you are a socialist. (Or if being versus not-being a socialist is the dominant question in your political paradigm.) An “Ayn-Rand-type” non-socialist and a “Chesterton-type” non-socialist would otherwise feel uncomfortable under the common umbrella.
I am not saying there are no differences among “the left”, but to me they seem more like a matter of degree. This observation may be culture-dependent. I am from eastern Europe, where “the left” basically either wants “what communists did” or “something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence”. -- I suppose in USA the diversity of “the left” is greater, because there is no such attractor. Actually, the Republican party may serve as a similar (though weaker) attractor for “the right”.
OK, what I tried to say was this: suppose that the leftist opinions are pretty similar, and the rightist opinions are very diverse. Assuming that both sides are about equally mindkilled (believe in about the same proportion of true statements, and the same proportion of false statements), for most statements the left will probably have either true believes or false beliefs as a whole, while the right will internally disagree—therefore even if each specific right political group has the same chance to have true beliefs, there is a very high chance that at least one of the right political groups will have a true belief.
For clarity, here is a model: There are true beliefs A, B, C, D; and every political group is correct only about one of them, and incorrect about three of them. There are three left groups, but all of them believe in A. There are three right groups, first of them believes in B, second in C, third in D. -- Now if we make a per-group statistics, we find that each party is 25% correct and 75% incorrect. However, if we make a per-true-belief statistics, we find that 25% of true beliefs are associated with the left (A), and 75% of true beliefs are associated with the right (B, C, D). -- In this model, if a group of people could succeed to hold all true beliefs (A, B, C, D), an external observer would judge they are mostly right (despite they happen to disagree with every individual right group in majority of beliefs).
Back to the beginning—we disagree with Ayn Rand about simplicity of values, or about importance of community; we also disagree with Chesterton about religion. That alone does not give us a political label. On the other hand, disagreeing with a socialist political idea is sufficient to get the label of political right, because any point outside of the socialist concept-space is called “the right”.
Beware the out-group homogeneity effect. People tend to see their own group as more heterogeneous than other groups, as differences that look small from far away look bigger up close.
With left and right, I have also heard the exact opposite claim: that the “right” represents a narrower, more coherent group. In the US, the “right” is based in the dominant, mainstream social group (sometimes called “real America”), drawing disproportionately from people who are white, male, Christian, relatively well-off, straight, etc., while the “left” is a coalition of the various groups that are left out of “real America” for one reason or another. Alternatively, conservatives are the people who support the existing social order and want to keep things roughly how they are; liberals are the ones who want change—and there are more degrees of freedom in changing things than in keeping things the same.
Seems to me there could be a common pattern:
If a political group X, identified as A in {”left”, “right”}, becomes very powerful in some era, the following things happen:
people see X as a prototype of A;
other A groups are seen like less successful variations of X; if that is impossible, the cognitive dissonance will be solved by reclassifying the incompatible group as non-A;
after a while X (and therefore A) becomes the default position for people who don’t think too much about politics.
Later, when the political group X loses some power:
simple people still identify as X (A), which is reinforced by seeing the past with rose-colored glasses;
new opinions are automatically classified as non-A, because they don’t pattern-match X;
therefore smart people begin to identify as non-A, to signal intellectual superiority and independent thinking.
In USA, X = Republican / religious right, and A = “right”. In Eastern Europe, X = Communist, and A = “left”.
This is very simplified, but it explains why sometimes the same person could self-identify as “left wing” in USA (to express their incompatibility with the religious right), and as “right wing” in Eastern Europe (to express their incompatibility with the communists). On the other hand, people mostly compatible with the religious right or with the communists can self-identify the same in both places.
In Eastern Europe the distinction between “support the traditional model” and “support change” is rather confused, because it is not clear whether the traditional refers to the era before the fall of communism, or to era even before the communists. In some sense, both religious right and communists are literally the conservative parties here.
This is an interesting point, that one about the left being more homogeneous than the right. I am not sure whether to believe it, so let me present some objections that I can think of, without evaluating their merit.
A) Assuming the left is indeed more homogeneous, isn’t it true just because of greater variability of right between different countries, with a typical single country’s right being as homogeneous as the same country’s left? (The objection hasn’t a particularly strong bearing on the perceived LW left/right imbalance, but may be relevant to the more general question of how the categories of left and right are defined.)
B) This may not be accurate; beware availability heuristics.
Environmentalists aren’t necessarily socialists as their opinions about the optimal economic order aren’t the defining part of their ideology and may differ. Yet the environmentalists are usually classified on the left. Anarchists aren’t necessarily socialists; many of them oppose any form of organised society, while archetypal socialism is a very organised society, from many points of view more than market capitalism. Feminists rarely dream about socialist utopias as they have a different fish to fry. Yet both feminists and anarchists are usually considered standing on the left. In fact I could use the examples of these groups to make a mirror argument of yours, namely, that the right is capitalist(-ish) while the left is everything opposed to capitalism. I don’t think this is a good definition since there are counter-examples to it too (e.g. the nazis who are against capitalism but still “right-wing”) but at least I don’t immediately see this description being less reasonable than yours.
Of course this all hinges on the definitions of socialism or capitalism, discussions about which might better be avoided for their pointlessness. It is not clear whether there is a sensible definition of left and right other than “arbitrary convention set up by historical accident”, but if there is, I suppose it would go along the lines of social status: the right are those who side with the elites and wish the present distribution of power preserved, the left are those who side with the underclasses and therefore wish to shift the balance towards more egalitarianism, from which would the lower status people profit (in terms of relative status increase, not necessarily materially). This definition has several advantages: for one thing, it has no problems with the fact that in the late 18th century the market liberals were considered left.
C) Both Jacques Derrida and Lenin would be examples of “the left”. What do they have in common? Or Pol Pot and Bertrand Russell? Neither of them was a big fan of free markets (or hinduism, for that matter), but that doesn’t guarantee much ideological homogeneity.
D) When I still thought that “left” and “right” were more than two rather arbitrary labels, I considered myself a leftist and “something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence” wasn’t the way I would summarise my political preferences. Of course, there is a sense in which any government intervention into the markets is “what communists did, just less”, but it is a sense on such a level of vagueness and generality that it lacks significant information value. In any case, for ideologically oriented both social democrats and greens communism is primarily a negative example rather than an attractor. (I don’t claim deep knowledge of the contemporary left in Slovakia, but feel quite certain to object to your statement being formulated as valid for the whole Eastern Europe).
I don’t think that quite described the US, or Western Europe—the stereotypical redneck is low-status but on the right (same for ploucs here in France), and buying organic food seems to be more common with the rich, but is associated to the left.
A better description of the left/right gap may be that each represents a status ladder, and that people support the status ladder on which they have the best relative position. The details of what counts tend to vary with time and place, but on the left you tend to get status for being educated, open-minded, environmentally aware, original, etc., and on the right you tend to get status for being rich, responsible, having a family, being loyal to your country, etc.
At least, that angle of approach seems better than looking at policies; if you compare the policies of the French left and the American left, the policies might seem so different that they don’t deserve the same label; but if you compare the kind of people who support either parties, the similarities are much more apparent.
I have a notion that in the US, left-wingers tend to focus on defection by high-status people and right-wingers tend to focus on defection by low-status people.
Except where “the left” has become the elites, there the dynamic is reversed.
The key question is not whether leftist politicians have become elites (they do regularly) but whether their agenda supports elites and whether they get support from the elites, which happens very rarely. There is a lot of self-serving political decisions made by both left and right politicians from which politicians benefit, but the left politicians are nevertheless still more connected with lower classes than the right politicians.
Somewhat special example were/are communist countries where the non-political aspects of social status are reduced and the groups of communists and elites have large overlap. These countries, when compared internationally, are “left”, but in the internal politics there is usually little place for using “left” and “right” as the left and right are relative characteristics which are useless when there is only one political party.
I wasn’t just referring to politicians, but to the liberal intelligentsia.
I don’t know what the situation is in the Czech Republic, but in the US while this was probably somewhat true a generation ago, it’s highly dubious today. (Although of course liberals like to think it’s still true.)
I’m reminded of a quote from a hippy band during the Vietnam War. Paraphrased:
Especially when you consider things like gay marriage or free immigration, causes universally approved of (in public, at least) by the liberal intelligentsia, but very unpopular among several core Democratic groups.
But there are any number of sub-varieties of socialism, so it is itself a fuzzy blob. Moreover, the non-right in many countries, particularly the US, barely has a whiff of classical socialism, Who is advocating a centrally planned economy or worker control of production in the US? It’s a standing joke in Europe that the US has two parties of the right. That’s “perception” of course. It’s also a US perception that public healthcare “is” socialism—the idea is seen as mainstream and cross-party elsewhere. What is going on is that the right have this convenient label “socialist” to lambast the non-right with, and the non-right don’t have a corresponding term to hit back with. That doesnt mean anything about ideaspace.
Well, that depends on the industry. For example, as you mentioned below, the left here is advocating central planning in the medical industry.
Of course I meant central planning of (pretty much) everything. Every polity has some central planning of some things.
The question is how much of the economy is under central planning and which factions are trying to increase or decrease it.
Which question? Wanting some but not all things under state/provision control is not socialsim by any strict definition. More like moderate or centrel-left or social democracy or something. But “social democrat!” doens’t have the right insulting ring.
About as big as “human biodiversity” is for a leftist. I think you are severely underestimating the strength of conviction among people whose beliefs disagree with your own, or the extent to which these are moral disagreements, rather than exclusively factual.
Very possibly. The Christian who gets infected by LW might be terrified of telling their family, friends, and church group that they’re now an atheist; similarly, the anti-racist who gets infected by LW might be terrified of telling their family and friends that they’re now a race realist.
I recognize that if evidence shows differences in (for example) intelligence between races, then, yeah, I’ve got to change my belief and except that people of X race are smarter than those from Y. I don’t know that this would change my behaviour towards people of either race, or that I think any state policy should change. Perhaps my “racism bad” reflex is stronger than I’m consciously accounting for, but I don’t see any useful way to act on this data. Similarly, I don’t think my behaviour would change much if there was hard data about intelligence difference between the genders.
I choose intelligence because it’s a controversial, and common, topic. I can maybe see the value in applying this data to predisposition to violence, or things like calculating insurance premiums.
There’s a lot of ways to act on data about group differences in intelligence.
For example, if it turns out that group A has a higher average IQ than group B, and that A and B can be distinguished reliably by genetic testing (including but not limited to visual inspection for associated phenotypes), I might decide to devote more effort to educating group B than group A, to make up for the difference. Or I might decide to devote more effort to educating group A than group B, to get the best bang for my education buck. Or I might decide to research the differences, to learn more about the physiological mechanisms of intelligence. Or I might change my ways of evaluating claims so that I give more weight to group A’s ideas relative to group B’s than I used to (assuming I used to believe they were equally intelligent). Or I might decide to structure my society in such a way that group A has access to certain privileges that group B is denied, on the grounds of their superiority, or such that B gets privileges A is denied, on the grounds of their greater need. Etc.
Which of those I do, if any, depends a lot on what I think follows from greater potential intelligence within a group. People disagree about this. People often change their minds about this depending on whether they consider themselves in group A or B.
Incidentally, just for the record: I find it pretty likely that there do exist such group differences, though I expect that the portion of variation in real-world expressed intelligence accounted for by group differences in innate intelligence is <10%. I find it fairly unlikely that “race” is the best detectable correlate of membership in such groups available to us, though it might be more reliable than, say, the shape of an individual’s head (also a popular theory once). I expect its popularity in that role is more of a reflection of historical social relations than a conclusion drawn from current data.
Thanks for the reply!
Fair enough, that’s an example of policy, based on this data.
Also cool, seems obvious in hindsight!
I’d imagine a group’s ideas are more to do with non-genetic factors than genetic intelligence.
For me some of these would be contingent on the additional discovery that the group’s intelligence is a result of its genetic difference; group B could be generally poorer, or less well-nourished, or some other factor leading to lower intelligence, in addition to being genetically distinguishable. This is also making the assumption that IQ tests are culturally fair and the like—though I’m happy to use the term as a placeholder for ‘idealized intelligence test’.
As would I. But the claimant’s intelligence (whether genetic or otherwise) is nevertheless a factor I take into account when deciding how much weight to give a claim.
And, yes, all of this is contingent on the idea that IQ correlates well with intelligence.
And, yes, if it turns out that the physiological mechanisms whereby group A develops greater intelligence than group B are heavily environmentally mediated (e.g., due to differential poverty, nourishment, or other factors) I might well decide to alter the environment to increase intelligence in group B as well.
I’ve posted such complaints about left wing bias, so I’ll elaborate on my impressions.
I perceive the left wing comments come with much more of an implicit assumption by the poster, and the respondents to it, of the moral superiority of left wing positions, and that all attending will see it the same way.
Most of the non left wing views don’t seem to me to come with that presumption on the part of the speaker that everyone here shares their moral evaluation. If anything, the tone is of someone who expects to be taken as a crank.
The liberals are more generally accustomed to being in an ideologically homogeneous environment while the libertarians are accustomed to being in the minority, and both speak with a tone appropriate to the general environment, and not to the particular environment here, where liberals and libertarians are equally represented.
For my part, I also find instances where the absent conservatives are caricatured and snickered at, again with the presumption that all right thinking folk agree, and the bile rises in the gorge, and I feel the need to respond.
Isn’t that reasonable though? If you’re a X-winger, isn’t the whole point that X-wing positions are in fact morally superior?
Morally superior perhaps, but they lack the hull plating and durability to survive ongoing combat and the offensive payload pales in comparison to what the Y-wing can deliver.
The Y-wing was an outdated piece of junk even by the Battle of Yvain; that’s why the Rebels had it at all. The X-wing’s proton torpedoes deliver the hurt when necessary (just ask Tarkin or Ysanne Isard), and if you want more than that, well, that’s what the B-wings are for… Between them and the A-wing, there is simply no role for Y-wings at any point—except cannon bait!
Shouldn’t that be spelled “canon bait”? Heh.
Well, by bringing in Isard, I make it both.
Ha!
Assuming that everyone would see it the same way when manifestly they do not is just an empirical mistake.
Yes, everyone think’s their position is right, but not everyone speaks to audiences who disagree with them expecting them all to agree.
Interesting; thanks. For what it’s worth, I don’t have at all the same perception that leftish comments come with an implicit assumption of the moral superiority of left-wing positions. But I happen to lean distinctly left myself, especially by US standards, and if you don’t then it’s hardly surprising that our perceptions would have such a difference.
How about the other side of that—my characterization of the tone of non left wing views?
Not far off, I think.
What is the strong version of “taxation is theft”, for example? I can recall arguments against taxation stronger than this, of course, but none of them I would consider a version of the “taxation is theft” argument.
As for the arguments mentioned in the OP, “taxation is theft”, “abortion is murder” and “euthanasia is murder” are typically right-wing, “affirmative action is racist” is also probably right-wing (although general accusations of racism fit better into the left wing arsenal) while “capital punishment is murder”, “ev-psych is sexist” and “genetic engineering is eugenics” sound quite leftist to me. Not sure about “M.L.King was a criminal”, but the examples seem balanced with respect to the stereotypical left/right division. With respect to Yvain’s opinions the choice might be less balanced, of course.
Simple: “taxation is theft and is also just as wrong as mugging because 1) the supposed benefits of government programs aren’t really there and 2) majority voting doesn’t make mugging any better than theft by a gang of robbers is better than theft by a single robber.” All of these arguments can be made stronger by specifying the reasons you should ignore the major differences between the moral issue in question and the archetypal example’s.
(1) and (2) are two distinct arguments. (1) is stronger than, but not related to the original argument by categorisation. (2) is itself a conjunction of (i) “taxation is theft” hidden as a tacit assumption and (ii) a counter-argument to the unsaid “but this instance of theft is legitimated by majority voting”. I don’t find it useful to call X and Y and Z a strong version of X when the only thing Y and Z have in common with X is their being used to support the same conclusion.
Edit: (1) is in fact also a counter-argument to the (yet) unsaid “this theft is legitimised by its positive benefits” and doesn’t address the question of why taxation is bad in the first place, besides categorising it as theft.
Well I can give you one example. Neoclassical economics makes a pretense of being neutral about how resources are distributed. The focus is instead on the absolute amount of resources. As I think Steven Landsburg puts it, taxes are no fun to pay, but they are fun to collect. The problem is that taxes can be avoided, and that resources put into avoiding taxes (and collecting them) are wasted. There is an identical economic argument against theft: the issue isn’t that the thief deserves to have the painting less than the museum, it’s that resources the museum puts into defending the painting (and that the thief puts into procuring it) are wasted.
Naturally that is a criticizable line of reasoning, but it gave me a lot to think about the first time I heard it.
But private property also requires resources to defend it (which are wasted like the ones to collect taxes), so in fact, neoclassical economics agree with Proudhon that “property is theft” ? :)
I think the standard rejoinder is that private property incurs greater benefits than the general cost of securing it, owing to true “tragedy of the commons” type situations it attempts to avoid.
Agreed that the anti-capital-punishment stance exemplified by “capital punishment is murder” is more attached to the American left than the American right, as are accusations of sexism in general (including but not limited to those applied to evo-psych).
“Genetic engineering is eugenics” seems trickier to me.
In the U.S. at the moment, I’d say Republican voters are more likely to endorse a “science can’t be trusted” argument than Democratic ones, and Democratic voters are more likely to endorse a “corporations can’t be trusted” argument than Republican ones. “Genetic engineering is eugenics” can be spun both ways, I think.
That is, if I wanted to convince a randomly selected Democratic voter to vote against genetic engineering, I could use rhetoric along the lines of “evil corporations want to use genetic engineering techniques to breed a so-called superior race of food crops, which will eradicate the food crops ordinary consumers know and trust and leave us at their mercy. Don’t let them get away with it!” pretty effectively. (Though less effectively than they could have 30 years ago.)
If I wanted to convince a randomly selected Republican voter, I could use similar rhetoric with “corporations” replaced by “scientists” and “consumers” replaced by “ordinary people”.
Both of those, I think, would be invoking the spectre of eugenics, the only change would be how the eugenicists are characterized… that is, are they elite academic eugenicists, or greedy corporate eugenicists?
All of that said, I endorse eugenics, so I’m probably not a reliable source of information about the rhetorical charge of these words for the mainstream.
Different perspectives, probably. In most European countries, I dare to say, everything associated with genetics is suspect to the left and the left also more often sides with the anti-science rhetoric in general. This is partly because the European right-wingers are less religious than in the U.S. (although I have heard creationism had become political issue in Serbia few years ago) and perhaps somehow related to the differences between Continental and analytic philosophy, if such intellectual affairs have real influence over practical politics.
Yeah, that’s been a significant shift over the last few decades in the U.S. There’s still a significant anti-scientific religious faction within the American left (New Agers and such) but they’ve been increasingly joined by factions that thirty/forty years ago would have been considered right, making the coalition as a whole a lot more secular than it was. Meanwhile the right’s power base has increasingly moved towards more rural states, and the . anti-scientific religious faction within the American right (evangelical Christians and such) have gained more relative power within it.
Three or four decades ago I think were were more aligned with the European model.
I have no idea whether the distinctions between continental and analytic philosophy have anything to do with it, and am inclined to doubt that the philosophical schism is causal if so, but I’d love to hear arguments supporting the idea.
It gets more complex once you include other groups, too — such as libertarians. In the ’60s and ’70s, the libertarian movement was closer to the New Left than to the Right, for instance.
I would tend to put “Genetic engineering is eugenics” in as a left-wing argument, because the left seems more likely to compare the right to Nazis, call them racist, etc. (with the right, of course, comparing the left to Stalin).
But on the other hand the American Right seems to have been up in arms about “Death Panels” or something, so I gotta admit I’m uncertain; I don’t follow the minutiae of politics on your side of the Atlantic.
Yeah, I think in a global context I would agree with you.
The U.S. Left and Right are at this point their own beasts.
Also, at this point in the U.S., pretty much everyone compares everyone else to Hitler, and pretty much nobody remembers exactly who Stalin was. Actually, I suspect that >60% of the population, if asked whether the Soviet Union was allied with the U.S. or with Nazi Germany during WWII, would state confidently that it was allied with Nazi Germany.
But it was, for a time at least!
I would say that “USSR was an ally of Nazi Germany for a time” is an example of WAitW. They had a non-aggression pact for a while, but both side knew it was just a matter of time before they will fight each other, and they didn’t do anything to actually help the other—USSR mostly used all the bought time to prepare itself for war against Nazi Germany. For borderline values of “ally” you can call them allies, but that’s sneaking in the usual connotation of being allies (actively helping each others) which was just not present.
This is far off-topic, but Stalin certainly expected the non-aggression pact to last. The whole tone of the Soviet press at the time changed to avoid criticizing fascism much, and there were trade ties and even (gasp!) cultural exchanges. There were no indications that the Soviet regime had any inclination of starting a war with Germany, though ti would probably not have joined the Axis either. Well, maybe, if Hitler changed the rhetoric enough to exclude the Russians from the Untermensch classification and found his Lebensraum elsewhere, though this is a pure counterfactual speculation.
The Soviets actually tried to join the Axis in October-November 1940. The sticking point was that the Germans wanted the Soviets to agree to a split in spheres of influence along the Dardanelles and Bosporus, while the Soviets wanted a share of the Balkans.
Throw in things like Basis Nord, the massive amount of war-critical natural resources the Soviets shipped the Nazis 1939-1941, the German shipments of weapon systems (cruisers, aircraft, naval guns) and technical drawings to the Soviets, German diplomatic support for the invasion of Finland . . . well. The Soviets and Germans were awfully cooperative until Barbarossa, even if one stops short of saying they were allied.
Feel free to substitute “fought a shared enemy with” for “was allied with” if you think that improves the question. I trust you understood my point, though.
I thought the standard left-wing argument against genetic engineering was that only the rich will be able to afford it, with an implication that the rich will be able to unfairly stabilize their advantages.
I don’t understand how you get from “policy debates should not appear one-sided” to “there should be no shortage of weak arguments ‘on your side’”. Especially if you replace the latter with “there should be no shortage of weak arguments of this sort on your side”—which is necessary for the challenge to be appropriate—since there could be correlations between a person’s political position and which sorts of fallacies are most likely to infect their thinking.
In particular, I predict WAITW use to be correlated with explicit endorsement of sanctity-based rather than harm-based moral values, and we’ve recently been talking about how that might differ between political groups.
I think this is because of the way you’re deconstructing the arguments. In each case, the features you identify which supposedly make us dislike the arcetypal cases are harm-based features. Someone who believed in sanctity instead might identify the category as a value in itself. Attempts to ascribe utilitarian-style values to them, which they supposedly miss the local inapplicability of, risks ignoring what they actually value.
If people genuinely do think murder is wrong simply because it is murder, rather than because it causes harm, then this is not a bad argument.
Absent any reason to do so, disliking all murders simply because they are murders makes no more sense than disliking all elephants simply because they are elephants. You can choose to do so without being logically inconsistent, but it seems like a weird choice to make for no reason. Did you just arbitrarily choose “murder” as a category worthy of dislike, whether or not it causes harm?
At the risk of committing the genetic fallacy, I would be very surprised if their choice of murder as a thing they dislike for its own sake (rather than, say, elephants) had nothing to do with murder being harmful. And although right now I am simply asserting this rather than arguing it, I think it’s likely that even if they think they have a deductive proof for why murder is wrong regardless of harm, they started by unconsciously making the WAITW and then rationalizing it.
But I agree that if they do think they have this deductive proof, screaming “Worst argument in the world!” at them is useless and counterproductive; at that point you address the proof.
Absent any reason to do so, disliking instances of harm simply because they are instances of harm makes no more sense than disliking all elephants simply because they are elephants.
I don’t want to assume any metaethical baggage here, but I’m not sure why “because it is an instance of harm” is an acceptable answer but “because it is an instance of theft” is not.
Keeping your principle of ignoring meta-ethical baggage, dis-valuing harm only requires one first principle, whereas dis-valuing murder, theft, elephants, etc require an independent (and apparently arbitrary) decision at each concept. Further, it’s very suspicious that this supposedly arbitrary decision almost always picks out actions that are often harmful when there are so very many things one could arbitrarily decide to dislike.
This sounds like the debate about ethical pluralism—maybe values are sufficiently complex that any one principle can’t capture them. If ethical pluralism is wrong, then they can’t make use of this argument. But then they have a very major problem with their metaethics, independant of the WAitW. And what is more, once they solve the problem—getting a single basis for their ethics—they can avoid your accusation, by saying that actually avoiding theft is the sole criteria, and they’re not trying to sneak in irrelivant conotations. After all, if theft was all that mattered, why would you try to sneak in connotations about harm?
Also, I think you’re sneaking in conotations when you use “arbitrary”. Yes, such a person would argue that our aversion to theft isn’t based on any of our other values; but your utilitarian would probably claim the same about their aversion to harm. This doesn’t seem a harmful (pun not intended) case of arbitrariness.
Contrariwise, they might find it very suspicious that your supposedly arbitrary decision as to what is harmful so often picks out actions that constitute theft to a libertarian (e.g. murder, slavery, breach of contract, pollution, trespass, wrongful dismissal...) when there are so very many things one could arbitrarily decide to dislike.
This line of argument seems to err away from the principle that you can’t unwind yourself into an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness. You’re running on hardware that is physically, through very real principles that apply to everything in the universe, going to react in a certain averse manner to certain stimuli to which we could assign the category label “harm”. This is commonly divided into “pain”, “boredom”, etc.
It is much more unlikely (and much more difficult to truly explain) that a person would, based on such hardware, somehow end up with the terminal value that some abstract, extremely solomonoff-complex interpretation of conjointed mental and physical behaviors is bad—in contrast with reflective negative valuation of harm-potentials both in self and in others (the “in others” being reflected as “harm to self when harm to other members of the tribe”).
Then again, I feel like I’m diving in too deep here. My instinct is to profess and worship my ignorance of this topic.
Why should a preference have to “make sense”?
A particular preference that does not make sense at all is empirically unlikely to exist due to the natural selection process. We should thus, if for whatever reason we prefer correspondence between map and territory, assign reasonable probability that most preferences will “make sense”.
As for why it should, well… I’m not able to conceive of an acceptable answer to that without first tabooing “should” and applying generous amounts of reductionism, recursively within sub-meanings and subspaces within semanticspace.
Ok, so replace “abortion is murder” with “abortion harms the fetus”.
“Guns are weapons!”
“Burning fossil fuels is environmentally irresponsible!”
EDIT: Are these not Worst Arguments in the World? I have heard arguments for gun control that don’t specify why being in the class “weapons” makes guns subject to additional restrictions. I have also seen the environment or nature treated as a sanctified moral value.
An important part of WAitW is that it uses an atypical member of a category to attach to it the rejection of a typical member of the category. Both abortion and death penalty are atypical members of the “murder” category (if they are), and associating them with “murder” is trying to associate them with the connotation of the “typical” murder.
Guns are quite the typical weapon. They are not border-line weapons like a kitchen knife or a hammer, they are not military grade weapons. Saying “guns are weapons!” doesn’t try to associate guns with something different, it doesn’t add much to the debate, but it doesn’t carry the same attempt to sneak in connotations as “abortion is murder!” is.
For “Burning fossil fuels is environmentally irresponsible!” it’s also quite different. “Environmentally irresponsible” is more a description, a feature that “burning fossil fuels” has (or doesn’t have, but that’s another issue), than a broad category in which we are trying to tie “burning fossil fuels”.
Not every “A is B” satisfies the definition of “the worst argument in the world” (truly a horrible name for a fallacy which should be replaced by something shorter, more descriptive and less exaggerating). “A is B, therefore A is C” qualifies as the discussed fallacy if
A belongs to the category B as far as technical/denotational meaning of B is considered,
using the technical meaning, not all B are C,
most (or most typical / available) members of B are C and therefore B has C in connotations, and
all C-relevant information about A is known, screening off potential C-relevant information about A coming from its membership in B.
In “burning fossil fuels (A) is environmentally irresponsible (B) [and therefore is bad] (C)”
holds
is subjective but for many audiences fails (i.e. “irresponsible” means “likely to cause bad outcomes”, which makes the whole category tautologically bad)
is problematic, since the denotational and connotational meaning of B aren’t different (badness-wise)
fails, since presumably the listener doesn’t know about A’s environmental irresponsibility
The argument may be fallacious if the listener doesn’t care about the environment but is tricked into accepting the badness of A based on connotations of “irresponsible”, but that isn’t exactly the fallacy described in the OP.
In “guns (A) are weapons (B) [and therefore should be banned] (C)”
holds
holds if the listener agrees that all weapons should be banned, else fails
depends on the listener’s idea of a typical weapon, if it is a hydrogen bomb, then (3) holds, if it is a knife, (3) fails, if it is a gun, we are building a circular argument
probably holds
So this argument may qualify, but it is so obviously tautological that I have problems imagining someone actually using it.
“firearms with magazines that hold more than 10 rounds are assault weapons (and therefore should be banned)” seems to be more along the lines of arguments I’ve actually seen. I probably oversimplified in my head when I wrote the first post. Of course, having a Federal statute that happened to define firearms in that way might have directly led to such arguments after the ban expired, but it’s probably appropriate to label some laws as having “The Worst Legal Categorization in the World” as well. What if banning firearms with magazines holding more than 9 rounds would have saved even one extra life?
Shouldn’t there never be a shortage of weak arguments for anything? Strong arguments can always be weakened.
/
Isn’t there enough chance of finding a weak argument to at least make it worth trying? You never know, you might find a weak argument somewhere.
Obviously one can find any number of weak arguments for anything, but surely the point here was to find weak arguments that have a particular sort of problem but are otherwise at least reasonably credible-sounding.
/
I’m having trouble understanding what part of what I wrote looked like “there’s no chance of finding a suitable argument, so it’s not worth trying”. For the avoidance of doubt, that wasn’t at all what I meant.
Would any of the (at least four) people who have upvoted Eliezer’s comment but not my response—or Eliezer, if he happens still to be reading—like to explain to me in what way Eliezer is right and I’m wrong here? Thanks!
There’s not necessarily even one of those, let alone four. Four people could have upvoted both of you and then four other people could have downvoted just you.
D’oh! Of course you’re right. I should have said: either upvoted Eliezer’s comment but not mine, or downvoted mine but not Eliezer’s.
Generally speaking, there are fewer upvotes later in a thread, since fewer people read that far. If the children to your comment have more karma then your comment, it’s reasonable to assume that people saw both comments and chose to up vote theirs, but if a parent to your comment has more karma, you can’t really draw any inference from that at all.
Except that when I made my comment, Eliezer’s was at zero. Er, it might have been +1, but it certainly wasn’t +4.
I have tried constructing a pro-choice example similar to “Abortion is murder!” (“Forced pregnancy is slavery!”???), but it ended up pretty unconvincing. Hopefully someone can do better:
Leaving rape cases aside, the archetypal example is an unwanted teenage pregnancy due to defective or improperly used birth control or simply an accident. Forcing her into letting the embryo develop into a fetus and eventually into a human baby would likely make the woman significantly worse off in the long run, financially, physically and/or emotionally, so she should have an option of terminating the pregnancy.
An example a pro-life person thinks of: aborting a healthy fetus, possibly in the second trimester, as a habitual birth control method.
I find “Forced parenthood is slavery!” to be pretty convincing, actually. Though I may be prejudiced by having grown up around a Libertarian father (now, alas, more Republican(!??)) who went about proclaiming that jury duty was slavery.
Does this qualify as “a weak version of a strong left-wing argument that you do accept”?
Mm… sure. “X is Y!” is generally pretty weak, and I’m pro-choice, so, sure.
Are laws (in the U.S.) against driving on the left side of the road slavery?
“Denying euthanasia is Torture!”
Given the majority of legislators are male, for abortion: “Forced pregnancy is mysogyny!” though that may be too tenuous.
It seems to me that the left-wing slogan “My body, my choice!” and its variations are a version of the WAitW. Although the slogan itself doesn’t follow the “X is a Y” format, its underlying argument does: it asserts something like, “This fetus is a part of my body; I am entitled to do whatever I choose with any part of my body; therefore, I am entitled to do whatever I choose with this fetus.”
This version of the WAitW emphasizes the similarity between a fetus and other parts of a woman’s body (the part in question is inside her; the part in question is made up of her cells; etc.) while ignoring the relevant differences (most of her body parts, if left to their own devices, will not go on to have their own life outside her body, while the fetus will; most of her body parts have no potential for sentience or moral agency, while the fetus does; etc.) By equating the fetus with her body parts, the argument implies that the fetus is MERELY a part of a woman’s body. While most people will agree that a fetus is technically part of its mother’s body, I think most people will also agree that a fetus is not morally equivalent to a woman’s liver, kidneys, or small intestine. “My body, my choice!” conceals this inequivalence.
The boundaries are inherently fuzzy and ill-defined, but I count 5 right wing arguments and 3 left wing arguments. Doesn’t seem too unbalanced.
Excellent idea. It would be beneficial to how the community deals with politics, something that I’ve been very concerned about recently, to see this written out.
Some tentative to sanitize political debates needs more data. In this post, one common strategy is criticized, I suposse are others, but doubt someone will write a sequence about it.
Off the top of my head:
Economic inequality is an unequal distribution of resources. The most salient example of this is an unequal distribution of resources that all have equal claim to, like a pie a parent bakes for their children. But [various convincing arguments in favor of at least some economic inequality.]
War is killing, which is bad because murder is bad. (Or eating meat, or capital punishment.)
Gay marriage is good because it’s a right, and the most salient rights are good.
Welfare is good because it’s a form of helping people, and helping people in ways that don’t produce bad incentive effects and without taking from anyone else is good.
Processed food is bad because putting the most salient synthetic chemicals in food would be a really bad idea.
Note that “genetic engineering to cure diseases is eugenics” and “evolutionary psychology is sexist” are probably left-wing viewpoints, though not ones Yvain agrees with.
ISTM that categorizing many of those as “Left-wing viewpoints” or “Right-wing viewpoints” is a strong category error, one that we should attempt to reduce rather than redraw or blue boundaries. “Evolutionary psychology is sexist” is, afaict, a word error. It is not a position, but an implicit claim: “Because evolutionary psychology is sexist, it is bad, and thus evolutionary psychology is wrong!”—this is usually combined (in my experience) with an argument that the world is inherently good and that all humans are inherently equal and so on, which means that theories that posit “unfair” or “bad” circumstances are wrong; the world must be “good” and “fair”. Stereotypicalism would call for a reference to religion here.
It may be a word error—I don’t think it is, “Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists and rationalized by the scientists even though the claims are not at all well-supported compared to nonsexist alternatives” is a coherent and meaningful description of a way the universe could be but isn’t, and is therefore false, not a word error—but if so, it’s a word-error made by stereotypically left-wing people like Lewontin and Gould who were explicitly political in their criticism, not a word-error made by any right-wing scientists I can think of offhand.
In general, we should be careful about dismissing claims as meaningless or incoherent, when often only a very reasonable and realistic amount of charity is required to reinterpret the claim as meaningful and false—most people are trying to be meaningful most of the time, even when they’re rationalizing a wrong position. Only people who’ve gotten in a lot more trouble than that are actively trying to avoid letting their arguments be meaningful. And meaningless claims can be dismissed immediately, without bringing forth evidence or counterobservations; meaningful false claims require more demonstration to show they’re false. So when somebody brings a false claim, and you dismiss it as meaningless, you’re actually being significantly logically rude to them—putting in less effort than they’re investing—it takes more effort to bring forth a meaningful false claim than to call something ‘meaningless’.
I dislike accusations of sexism as much as the next guy, but in the last year or two I have started to think that ev-psych is way overconfident. The coarse grained explanation is that ev-psych seems to be “softer” than regular psychology, which itself is “softer” than medicine, and we all know what percentage of medical findings are wrong. I’d be curious to learn what other LWers think about this, especially you, because your writings got me interested in ev-psych in the first place.
As in about the likelihood of certain kinds of explanations?
Can’t think anything without a concrete example.
I am going to rehearse saying this in a robotic voice, while spinning round and round flailing my arms in a mechanical fashion.
Can you put it up on Youtube when you’re done?
Off the top of my head:
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S096098220701559X
So far as I know, the association of pink with girls and blue with boys is a western custom which only goes back a century or so.
Response to old post:
Appears to be an urban legend.
Summary: Checking Google Books shows lots of references to pink for girls/blue for boys, and no references to the opposite, going back to the 19th century.
Note: Wikipedia links to this article, but summarizes it in a way which makes it sound much weaker than it really is.
Thanks. I hope that someone gets around to actually looking at the clothes and/or paintings.
Precisely.
This seems like a qualitative argument, when a quantitative argument would be more interesting. Who is the John Ioannidis of evolutionary psychology? Or, what research has been published that has later turned out to be false?
(Also, why do you dislike accusations of sexism? Shouldn’t you only dislike false accusations of sexism?)
I dislike accusations of sexism for the same reason I dislike accusations of any other negative behavior. Those accusations signal either sexism or false accusations of sexism, both of which are net negatives to me.
See the OP.
Because you and I no doubt hang out in completely different circles, my view of the prototypical case of sexism is probably different from yours. Also, I consider most non-prototypical cases of sexism to be wrong, so there aren’t really any connotations being smuggled in.
I may or may not agree depending on which definition of “sexism” you are using.
Well, in any debate you’d still have to explain why that particular example of sexism is wrong.
Not if (a) you’re in a situation where everyone already agrees on that or (b) you consider fairness to be an important value.
And assuming you also don’t want to even consider the possibility that you might be wrong. In any case, as you may have noticed, that’s not true here.
More like you consider a particular interpretation of fairness to be such an important value that it trumps all others.
Having common language and beliefs does not preclude questioning those beliefs.
Can you unpack that?
Ok, I suppose I should ask you what your definition of sexism is.
Also, is e.g., affirmative action sexist, how about not using affirmative action? Same question about desperate impact?
Sexism can mean a whole bunch of different things. It’s not a simple binary predicate: this is sexist, that isn’t. In general, I mean a cluster of attitudes and actions that harm people based on their sex. Usually, its women being harmed, but definitely not always.
Affirmative action is, of course, an interesting case. On its face, it involves advantaging one group, which naturally comes at the expense of all other groups. So, of course it’s sexism in one sense of the word. So why does anyone think it’s fair? Because there are believed to be cognitive biases in play that prevent people from (for instance) selecting an equally qualified woman for a job (one day, I would like to write up a post on the evidence for this). The theory is that an explicit adjustment for these biases will result in treatment more like what there would have been if employers were unbiased. If this theory is correct, then in cases where we believe that there is such discrimination, maintaining the status quo would be sexism. Naturally, not all cases of affirmative action qualify for this.
As the discussion on The Bedrock Of Fairness shows, fairness can have many meanings. They frequently correspond almost exactly to meta-ethical stances (consequentialist, deontological, virtue ethics). I’m a consequentialist with regards to fairness (since I view it as merely a part of the whole system of ethics). And affirmative action is only justifiable under a consequentialist (or perhaps virtue ethics) framework of fairness—and then only sometimes. I guess that is, as you say, one particular interpretation of fairness, but it’s one that I would imagine is relatively common here, since consequentialist ethics are relatively popular on Less Wrong.
This is a deontological stance, namely immoral act X was performed so we must bring the world as close as possible to the state it would have been in had X not happened.
I have no idea what this means. That is, I have no idea how to incorporate ‘fairness’ into a utility function that won’t produce absurd things (like saying life extension research is immoral because it’s not fair to those who will die before it gets implemented).
I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that an immoral act was performed in these cases; often people just make mistakes. And trying to stop an ongoing harm is entirely compatible with consequentialism.
First, unfair situations make people unhappy in and of themselves. That is, in some sense, absolutely absurd, but no more so than boredom is absurd. Nonetheless, it is the way humans seem to be (research on apes also shows this effect as well). Gwern’s post on the psychology of power discusses some of the less obvious effects of this on e.g. cortisol.
Second, when talking about money, utilities are non-linear in dollars. If A has $1 million, and B has $100, and utility is the square root of money, then, ceteris parabus, redistributing money from A to B would be the utilitarian thing to do. Of course, this ignores the incentive and precedent effects of this (why should B bother to work if they can just get A’s money?), as well as A’s unhappiness at losing the money, so of course in the real world the computation is considerably more complex.
Third, if everyone benefits from having the better person doing any given job, then correcting for biases that prevent this will make society better off.
[Edit] Fourth, when a group of people is treated as abnormal or subordinate, their desires are not given full weight (and thus, they are less likely to be happy). An example of this in the US is that only one non-Christian group has ever won a Free Exercise Clause case.
This is a worthy steel-manning when trying to reach an accurate conclusion about ev-psych, but I think you give the typical person who claims “ev-psych is sexist” too much credit here.
Natasha Walter makes the argument that Eliezer refers to in Living Dolls (not really about ev-psych, but about the idea of innate differences between genders in abilities), and I’m sure there are other examples (I haven’t actually read all that much feminist writing). However, I have also encountered people who won’t even discuss the issue with anyone who is pro-ev psych because they think that they’re so morally appalling. Not sure how typical the people I’m encountered are though—I suspect they may be more extreme than most, and the most extreme people are the loudest.
There’s definitely a temptation to identify a belief we agree with with its best advocates, and a belief we disagree with with its typical advocates. I definitely see this when people talk about how stupid eg “the left/right” is. I may be encouraging that error...
The sexism associated with evolutionary biology is typically the result of the perceived (or actual) claim that because sexual differentiation has a historical and evolutionary basis, it is morally correct to reinforce those differences today.
You can point out that that type of claim is not commonly made my evolutionary psychologists, but when lay people perceive that that claim is true and use it to justify sexist actions that they would not have taken in the absence of their perception of such a claim, then it is the case that evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex.
One of the key points is that “Evolutionary psychology is sexist” and “evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex” are very nearly the same statement, while “Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists” is a radically different statement.
Well, sure. But so do a million other things. After all, it would be much harder to discriminate unfairly on the basis of sex if we didn’t have sensory organs capable of distinguishing an individual’s sex, so the existence of such organs contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex. Unarguable.
Also uninteresting.
Surely a more important question is whether the study of evolutionary psychology differentially contributes to such discrimination? Which perhaps it does, but this takes more effort to demonstrate than simply pointing out that there exist lay people who use it to justify sexist actions.
Okay- I assert that there are almost zero people who seriously assert that ‘Having sensory organs which can distinguish sex’ justifies sexist actions, and that there are more than one hundred thousand Americans who demonstrably either claim, or allow the claim to stand, that EP justifies sexist actions that they themselves take.
I’m prepared to defend the second assertion if needed, which is why I choose a conservative number. The first assertion is trivial to falsify if you can find a significant number of people who believe that.
To be more logically complete, my unstated assumption: Lay people typically don’t take actions which they believe to be unjustified.
I’d be interested in seeing this. Largely because I’m curious to see specific examples of what you consider unjustified sexism.
The most godawful example I’ve seen of EP being used as a cover for blatant sexism and misogyny is this NRO article, which basically says that as a rich boss with many male sons, Mitt Romney exudes alpha male power, and all women should fall in trance and vote for him.
Suddenly I am enlightened!
In particular, I have just now realized that whereas I encountered evolutionary psychology in the context of my quest to unravel the mysteries of human cognition and so I read a bunch of science books and papers on it, many other people may be encountering evolutionary psychology primarily in the context of Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, attempted invocations of ev-psych which are so terrible as to be propagated through the blogosphere as horrors for everyone to marvel at.
This explains a lot about the oddly bad opinion that so many online-folk seem to have about evolutionary psychology. This has had me making puzzled expressions for years, not sure what was going on. But you would probably get a pretty different first-impression (and first impressions are very controlling) if your first exposure was reading that NRO article instead of “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”. Even if somebody tried to expose you to the real science afterward, you’d probably go in with some degree of motivated skepticism.
Having thus generalized the problem—is this likely to be happening to me somewhere, or you? Besides ev-psych and economics, which other sciences will Reddit expose to you primarily in the form of exhibiting Someone Is Wrong On The Internet misuses?
That’s surely playing a role, but another thing is that gender dynamics is often a mind-killer, in pretty much all contexts it shows up in. I don’t have a full explanation for that, but I think that has to do with the sexual frustration of unattractive¹ people being repeatedly turned down by attractive people and the resentment of attractive people being repeatedly harassed by unattractive people. I tend to be overly cautious about this and hence to avoid mentioning gender even when it’s relevant (e.g., if in the previous sentence “unattractive people” was replaced with “lots of men” and “attractive people” with “lots of women”, it would be just as accurate and perhaps even more precise).
When I use attractive as a one-place word, I mean ‘attractive to most members of the same species of their preferred sex’.
In my experience, when people invoke evolutionary psychology, they tend to neglect the mechanisms by which genes could have the postulated effect. Often, absurdly specific evolved traits are claimed that can also be understood as simple reinforcement or the like. Or they claim something so information-laden that it defies belief that it could be encoded in an evolved mechanism except through general learning.
They also fail to check on whether a behavior is as universal as they think it is.
Male and female are not important explanatory categories
Yeah, you definitely have to beware of WEIRD psychological samples, too.
For example, there’s a culture in which people don’t experience the Müller-Lyer illusion—which has even been observed in people who have been blind from birth.
Which culture?
According to the PDF about the WEIRD psychological samples, the San foragers of the Kalahari desert.
Another “interesting” bit of trivia: the ability to look at something very far away and understand that it only looks small is a learned skill, not an innate one.
Original source
Taboo “learned/innate skill”. Is everything except what feral children do a learned skill? If not what do you mean?
Here is one possibility:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/656735
This isn’t a science, and perhaps not even terribly important, but I think Aristotle is subject to this effect. Almost every Aristotelian I’ve encountered on the internet is a Thomist, leading to the impression (in my estimation) that Aristotle is some kind of a proto-apologist. And of course, there’s a list of Aristotle-fails, like the women’s-teeth thing or the thing about air rushing in behind a thrown ball to maintain its motion that are either false or misleading.
On the other hand, there aren’t good reasons for most people to study actual Aristotle. Nevertheless he does show up as a foil in odd places.
Evolutionary biology in general.
Well, Will Newsome would say theology.
While you mention it, do you know of something like “The Psychological Foundations of Culture” but for macroeconomics instead?
This is an economics textbook I liked:
http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-N-Gregory-Mankiw/dp/0030259517
It took you this long to understand why people have issues with evolutionary psychology? −1 respect points, Eliezer.
Note that, on gender issues at least, it also pattern-matches very strongly to the “scientific racism” of the 19th and early 20th century.
I strongly recommend not punishing people for saying that it’s taken them time to learn something.
That’s… probably a good idea.
xkcd
It is not as if we have no half-baked evopsych theorizing here; and there’s Hanson, who is particularly guilty. Who can read some of his wilder posts and not regard it was a wee bit discrediting of evopsych?
Part of the issue is that as far as I know said “scientific racism” was never scientifically discredited (the underlying facts may even be true). It was simply socially discredited in a “this leads to genocide and other horrible things” kind of way and a memetic immune system was set up to fight these memes. However, as mentioned in the linked article said immune system is no match for rational thought.
When it appears that an intellectual edifice has been constructed to portray as necessary a particular status-quo — in the case of scientific racism, that of slavery and subjugation by race — we may reasonably suspect that the overturning of those social conditions is all the disproof that is needed to overthrow the entire edifice of rationalization, too.
Imagine that there exists a complicated, deeply explained theory to explain why no green-eyed, black-haired person has ever been, or ever will be, elected president. And then one is. The theory is not merely socially discredited; it is empirically disproven.
Scientific racism was concocted to explain curious observations such as that black people liked to run away from slavery and sometimes did not work as hard as they could for a slave-master. These curiosities are better explained by modern evolutionary psychology, with its notion of the psychological unity of mankind, than by the convoluted rationalizations created to justify past systems of social relations.
I feel I should point out that these two examples are pretty lame examples: they were proposed by the same guy, before Francis Galton (generally considered the father or grandfather of any genuinely scientific racism), have never been used by any except anti-racists, and indeed, were widely mocked at the time.
To claim that they are an example of a motivating problem in scientific racism is roughly like someone in 2170 saying TimeCube was a motivating problem in the development of a since-discredited stringy theory.
I think the Time Cube example is almost certainly an exaggeration, although I admit you probably know more on the subject than me. Do you have a more … typical … example?
I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration.
Speaking from my 2170th perspective, I must point out that Time Cube was perfectly standard 20th century physics: it was distributed on their premier form of scholarly communication the Internet, was carefully documented in the very first versions of Wikipedia (indicating the regard it was held in by contemporaries), it dealt with standard topics of 20th century American discourse, conspiracy theories (which thankfully we have moved beyond), it was widely cited and discussed as recent citation analyses have proven, and finally, the author lectured and taught at the only surviving center of American learning, MIT.
The historical case is simply open and shut! This isn’t a random layman myth like Nixon mentoring Obama and running dirty tricks in his first election (as every informed historian knows, Nixon was of the Greens while Obama bin Laden, of course, was a Blue).
Except Time Cube is incomprehensible gibberish, not just wrong. But I’m not saying that it was actually mainstream, you understand.
Also, that’s a really good “2170th perspective”. I can’t argue with that. Unless, of course, you’re saying our understanding of recent history is quite as bad as the closing paragraph there.
I’m not sure we could say anything better of Isaac Newton’s alchemy.
Popular understanding can be pretty bad. The more I read in history, the more I realized I didn’t understand the past anywhere near as well as I thought I did; revelations ranging from spherical earths to gay presidents to the Founding Fathers being conspiracy theorists etc. I don’t put much stock on understanding well the context of the racist who was originally being discussed, although enough information survives that I can point out discrediting parts.
Which, while of some minor historical significance, is not considered mainstream science AFAIK.
Fair enough.
Wait, spherical earths I assume refers to the notion that Columbus was a visionary who somehow deduced the Earth was round before even sailors did, and while I couldn’t name names statistically a few presidents must have been in the closet at least. But I have to admit I’m not sure what you mean by “the Founding Fathers being conspiracy theorists”.
Actually the spherical earth was described by the 2nd century (AD or CE) Greek, Ptolemy (who unfortunately is best remembered for describing the phenomena of the sky in terms of concentric spheres around the earth, which led to planetary orbits having the infamous epicycles). Ptolemy not only stated but fairly well demonstrated the earth’s circularity and gave a reasonable (for the time) estimate of its size. The educated classes in Columbus’ time hence from my readings, were well aware that the earth was sperical.
What Columbus did, was to read Marco Polo, and from Polo’s estimates of the various legs of his journey, and whatever else he had to go on, miscalculated that Japan was around 3000 miles west of Europe, and so, proposed the daring idea of sailing farther than one could hope to return from (if it turned out you were still in the middle of the ocean) because he believed he’d reach Japan and and be able to repair the ships and take on new food, water, and supplies, for the return journey. I guess he hoped for a reasonably friendly reception.
While Japan wasn’t about 3000 miles west of Europe, lucky for Columbus, something was there—of the 2 oceans one would have to cross to reach Japan (plus one continent), he only had to cross the more narrow one, and such human society as he found were not a threat to a well armed group of 15c Europeans (to say the least).
Why is this down voted? I don’t see any obvious inaccuracy. It elaborates nicely on Mugasofer’s point.
Edit: and now it isn’t down voted. I’m still confused why it ever was.
Most obviously, ascribing it to Ptolemy seems like a pretty serious error given Eratosthenes’s famed and remarkably accurate calculation of the diameter of the earth centuries before.
Fair enough. But that’s the type of thing a solitary silent down vote will essentially never communicate.
Indeed. The remark about Ptolemy is even accurate, as far as it goes.
Alchemy was far more mainstream than, say, ‘chemistry’.
The gay president would be Buchanan, and as for conspiracy theorists, well, that’s the shortest summary. See http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#the-american-revolution
Buchanan won a three-way election as a compromise candidate, so don’t draw any sweeping conclusions from his single term!
Name an atheist president who won any election at all, and I’ll concede the point.
Jefferson, kind of?
Pfft. He’d be the first to say he was a deist.
Right, but deism then had roughly the same social / religious status as modern atheism does. He was certainly attacked as an infidel during the elections, and as the story goes, the pious buried their Bibles at news of his election, for fear that the new administration would take them away.
Given how many Founding Father types were deists, I suspect that they didn’t have ‘roughly’ the same status. Were there contemporary presidents saying of deists that “I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be” (to quote Bush)?
Three points:
I think that the number and public perception of atheists have both significantly improved since the H.W. Bush years.
I think someone running for president today who listed their religious affiliation as “deist” or said things like “I think Jesus’s morality is a good one, but he wasn’t divine and miracles don’t happen” would be considered basically an atheist by the people who would react negatively because of that.
I think the modern analogues of the Founding Fathers as a group are not presidents but public intellectuals, and atheists are very overrepresented among public intellectuals (perhaps even the majority). That public intellectuals then were mostly areligious shouldn’t be that odd when comparing with now.
I wasn’t really around for Bush, but I haven’t noticed any improvement. What makes you think that?
Romney did fine, despite believe pretty darn weird things by Christian standards.
I’ll believe that as soon as the next 4 presidents or so are public intellectuals, and a bunch of public intellectuals draft a new Constitution and get the states to approve it etc.
Stuff like this, though I’m having trouble getting access to the historical poll data.
My model was that the sort of person who would become a memorable Founding Father in the 1700s is the sort of person who would become a public intellectual in the 2000s, and that atheism is more strongly linked by personal temperament than public position. I think the early American presidents were very different from the ones we have now, and so it’s not clear which comparisons carve reality at the joints.
(It’s not clear to me what point you would concede if an atheist president was identified.)
Alchemy in general, yes. But Newton was less than generous with his science at the best of times; with the already secretive alchemy, he wasn’t exactly publishing peer-reviewed articles.
Thanks for the history trivia :)
Well come on, it’s not like Newton’s alchemy was noticeably more nonsensical than regular alchemy!
No it bloody doesn’t except on the Internet. Read “The Psychological Foundations of Culture” and quote me a paragraph that pattern-matches anything like that. And then perhaps you’ll give me back your respect point, because in a flash of enlightenment you’ll suddenly understand why I was puzzled by people having issues with EP.
“The Psychological Foundations of Culture” does not discuss gender issues in detail.
More specifically: Sexual Strategies Theory tends to agree with modern cultural stereotypes of men and women, much as “scientific racism” tended to confirm cultural stereotypes of people of different races.
(I do acknowledge that “Sexual Strategies Theory” is far from settled science and has been heavily criticized—but it’s a large part of what comes to mind when people think of ev-psych.)
Evolutionary psychology is not primarily about gender issues. This may be much of why so many folks have such a problem with it ….
Perhaps it is merely that reputable evolutionary psychology is not about gender issues, while disreputable evo-psych is almost entirely focused on them.
Oh boy, this is going to be one of those “reference class tennis” arguments, isn’t it?
I’ve had the luck of understanding both why people were puzzled and why they were wrong to be puzzled, since I only really learned any real ev-psych after I came to LessWrong.
What Crono says is pattern-matching is, well, yes mostly on the internet. However, it’s also somewhat present out there, but it’s not the Ev-Psych itself that pattern-matches—it’s the behaviors and arguments of idiots who use Ev-Psych as ammunition.
What I’ve seen personally is mostly cases where “Evolutionary Psychology” could be substituted for “Magical Scientific Explanation” and no meaning would be lost, or cases where you could reasonably assert that a magical giant goat head yelling “facts” at people could have been the arguer’s only source of information—i.e. the “fact” they pulled from ev-psych was technically true in the exact sense that “light is waves” is true, but they had no understanding of it whatsoever and their derivations from that were completely alien to the science.
In fairness, that’s about culture. Not gender.
The paper could’ve been called “The Biological Foundations of Culture” and it would’ve been more accurate. Read it before saying that.
I’ve been rumbled :(
We’re talking about this, right? If I really have misunderstood it, I guess this is a good time to get around to reading it.
Nope. You’re looking for the paper by Tooby and Cosmides.
Indeed. Do you take 21st century scientific racism seriously? Or do you dismiss it because it pattern matches to what some idiots have said?
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, despite our natural pattern-matching inclinations to treat it as such.
The technical term is “karma”. But I must admit, I am surprised he didn’t already know.
After reading that article, I seriously can’t tell whether he means should epistemically (‘women are likely to vote for him’), ethically (‘women had better vote for him’), or he’s (deliberately or accidentally) equivocating the two. His arguments only makes sense if he means it epistemically, but his tone only makes sense if he means it ethically.
My guess is that the article is a propaganda piece, designed above all things to elevate Romney’s status and make him look better. I don’t think the author, if pressed on the point, would either commit to a prediction that Romney will receive an overwhelming amount of the female vote, nor to a normative claim that women, ethically, should vote for him(1). In other words, I guess he was just bullshiting. But bullshit can still be sexist.
(1) He probably does think that women (and men) ought ethically to vote for Romney, but on grounds unrelated to the topic of the article.
This article isn’t a joke?
That is an excellent question.
It could almost pass as an article on the Onion.
I suspect that it was intended to be ironic on some level. Whether it’s the irony of those crazy liberal’s theory “proving” they should vote conservative, the irony that conservatives, who are often attacked as anti-womans-rights, should “logically” be getting the votes of women, or something else, I couldn’t tell you. It could even be an attempt to show women information that “should” persuade them to vote for his preferred candidate, but somehow I doubt it. The tone just seems too jokey. Regardless, of course, it’s definitely offensive, so it was a stupid thing to write; I may be overestimating the author.
They must have been terribly disappointed that his alpha pheromones only worked on married women.
Is your objection that the descriptive statement is false, or than it’s sexist to say it even if its true?
Yes, how one’s candidate appeals to voters’ biases is not exactly something to brag about, but it’s unfortunately a common occurrence in our political process.
First, it is false. Polls put Obama over Romney among female voters by 8, 10, or 16 points, according to the first three results I found in Google News. Moreover, in 2008 Obama won the female and tied the male vote, while now he seems to be winning the female vote by a somewhat smaller amount, but losing substantially the male vote. So looking at the female/male ratio (to control for the state of the economy and other general features) it looks as of now that Romney does worse with women than McCain did.
Of course, not every false statement about women is sexist. But I would say that an analysis attributing (in a false and unsubstantiated way) women’s voting choices to irrational, subconscious factors as opposed to conscious ideological preference or self-interest, while not making a similar analysis for men’s voting choices, is sexist.
Also, in my opinion it edges into outright misogyny because the paragraph
is not merely an objective analysis that in the author’s opinion women will see Obama as weak/emasculated//whatever for having daughters instead of sons: it actively mocks Obama and expresses contempt for him on that basis, thus reinforcing the idea that women are less valuable than men.
It’s not clear to me that it’s supposed to be a descriptive statement. Downvoted for misquotation (even if explicitly shown by square brackets) hiding that.
Wait, are you asserting that sexism is ever justified? If so, we have a definition mismatch.
For a start, we have Forbes Magazine drawing a link from EP to why most women will never be CEOs (Never mind that most people will never be CEOs). I haven’t yet demonstrated how many readers of Forbes allowed the claim that EP justifies the sexist treatment of executives, and also take sexist actions regarding executives; will you accept that 5% of board members of publicly traded companies make sexist decisions about executives, and that 80% of those people read Forbes and didn’t object to that (4% of board members overall)? (again, I’m using numbers that I think are conservative, because direct measurements are hard.)
Since I specified unjustified sexism, you’ll have to provide an argument for why said justification is incorrect.
Sexist actions, by definition, has no valid justification. If there was a valid justification, they would be rational actions.
Going from “Females, in general, make poor executives” (even if this were to be true) to “A particular female will make a poor executive” Isn’t a valid justification. I’m going to make the dangerous claim that the proof is obvious and trivial.
What about going from “members of subcategory X of category Y are more likely to possess characteristic C” to “In the absence of further information, a particular member of subcategory X is more likely to possess characteristic C than a non-X member of category Y”.
You are saying you can’t go from probabilistic information to certainty. This is a strawman.
That only applies if there is an absence of further information. Do you make judgments about what the weather is right now by looking only at historical information, or do you look out the window?
Also, if you’re going to get into category theory:
members of subcategory X of category Y are more likely to possess characteristic C
Category A is a subset of category X Category B is mutually exclusive with category X, but a subset of Y Category B is smaller than category A Given only “members of subcategory X of category Y are more likely to possess characteristic C”, can you draw a conclusion about whether a random member of category A or category B is more likely to possess characteristic C?
Let characteristic C be “will perform above the 75th percentile of CEOs”, category X be ‘males’, category A be ‘males who being seriously considered for a CEO position’, and category B be ‘females and intersex people being considered for a CEO position’.
It’s only a strawman if it isn’t the exact argument being used in the boardroom.
Sounds good to me if you’re going to get all connotative about it.
Was that sour grapes with an ad-hom, genuine agreement with a condition, sarcasm, or something else? I honestly can’t tell.
Genuine agreement with whimsical annoyance about having to consider actual situations and connotations.
Thank you for the clarification.
I agree that many Americans assert that EP justifies sexist actions.
I agree that effectively nobody asserts that having sensory organs which can distinguish sex justify sexist actions. Nor did I claim anyone did.
My assertion was, and is, that the presence of those organs, much like the presence of those justifications, contributes to sexist actions that would not occur in their absence.
I assumed your objection was to the sexist actions, and the justifications were objectionable merely because they enabled those actions. In which case it seems that anything else that equally enabled those actions would be equally objectionable.
But, sure, if you’re concerned specifically with asserted justifications rather than with the actions themselves, then I’m entirely beside your point.
Unrelatedly: lacking a justification for X != believing X to be unjustified.
The ability to notice a difference irrelevant to a decision is not in the same category as the belief that a difference which is irrelevant to a decision is, in fact, relevant.
True.
And the existence of a field of study that can be used to justify such a belief is in yet a third category.
“This field of study encourages sexist actions” and “This field of study is sexist” are equivalent statements, so far as ‘sexist’ can apply to something which does not make decisions.
Previously you defined sexism as something which must be inherently unjustified, or else it doesn’t fit your defintion.
Now you’re effectively said that if “This field of study encourages unjustified actions” is equivalent to “This field of study is unjustified”. (in regards to gender matters, i guess).
Since EVERY field of study will effectively directly or indirectly encourage some unjustified actions for some people, you’ve effectively declared every field of study unjustified.
I suggest you try and do some serious work towards trying to unconfuse in your mind your labels of various social phenomena and your moral judgments—and also your ideas about what is with your ideas about what should be.
Can you provide an example of something that you, or a significant number of people, would call sexist that you think is inherently justified?
More accurately “This field of study encourages wrongful thinking.” and “This field of study has a negative aspect.” More semantically pure “This field of study is sexist” is equivalent to “This field of study is used to create invalid justifications”, because a field of study cannot take actions like encouraging behavior; nor can an object be justified or unjustified; only agents can take actions, and only decisions can be justified or unjustified.
If every field of study is used to create invalid justifications, then every field of study has at least one negative aspect.
What caused you to think I was speaking in moral terms, rather than descriptive terms?
When someone’s talking about justified actions, I expect they mean morally justified. If they’re talking about justified beliefs, I expect they mean epistemically justified.
You spoke about decisions, so I assumed you meant moral justification of actions.
For a consequentialist like myself actions are morally justified by their consequences, not “inherently”.
But here, I’ll provide one of each—action and belief which may not be inherently justified but they’re also not inherently unjustified.
I think that most people (including me) would concede the sexism of pornography, i.e. the objectification of women, but I’m far from certain that pornography is morally wrong as a whole, even when sexist.
Discussing even theoretically whether male brain structure might allow greater proficiency on average with e.g. mathematics or science would be treated as sexism by most people. But there’s no inherent reason to know for certain that there do not exist such differences between average male and average female brains.
I’ll grant that the objectification of people is wrong from a consequentialist perspective, barring any redeeming factors. I’ll also point out that any action (like supporting a given field of study) that has negative consequences which exceed the positive consequences is immoral from a consequentialist perspective. I’ll refrain from making any claims about whether supporting any specific field is a net negative.
No, I think that actions are ‘justified’ when the expected consequences are in accordance with the values of the actor. Actions are only ‘moral’ in my view when they are made with the mutual consent of all participating actors. A decision such as destroying one’s own private property and making oneself sad as a result are moral but unjustified in my view; from a consequentialist view, that would be immoral.
Unjustified actions are not always immoral, but do indicate suboptimal decision making and poor mental hygiene. Being able to recognize those decisions in oneself and others is important.
I rage against the sexism that results when the possible fact “There is a difference between male and female brain chemistry with this result” becomes “This is proof that one sex is [universally|locally] inferior”. Not because I have a moral obligation to prevent as much harm or create as much good as possible, but because I have a philosophical need for people, who are metaphysically equal, to be treated as metaphysically equal.
Is that a mere simplification of your deontology? Because if it’s the totality thereof, I find it very easy to construct counterexamples where it’d be really eccentric to proclaim them immoral… e.g. you see a two-year old child lean dangerously over an open window and you pull him back, lest it falls—even though it doesn’t consent and might even cry in protest.
Or you are a doctor and perform an operation to save the life of an unconscious patient that was in a car accident. You don’t have their consent because they’re unconscious and can’t provide it—does it mean the action of saving their life isn’t moral?
In the first counter-examples you make the assumption that people who are young are persons, in the sense that they are worth moral consideration. Some would maintain that children are not people, and thus any action regarding them cannot be considered moral/immoral. In other words, their consent does not matter as they are not ‘actors’. In that way Decius’ claim that all actors must consent would still be true, as you are the only actor in that scenario. I’d be curious to read about any justification you would cite for the treatment of children as moral actors.
However, that said, I find your second example to be more convincing, but I’d be interested to know how the nature of the unconsciousness might affect your view. Would someone in a vegetative state also be considered as a moral actor in your view (and thus should be saved)?
I think IAWYC, but I’d steel-man Decius and assume that young children unconscious people, etc. wouldn’t count as “actors” and thus such actions wouldn’t be more immoral than, say, replace a broken string in a guitar without its consensus.
Well, if that was the position, then it wouldn’t be any more immoral not to help an unconscious person than to not help a broken swing. That seems fairly problematic, so I doubt that’s a successful solution.
Why is it problematic to say that the existence of unconscious people does not obligate me to provide medical care any more than the existence of a broken string obligates me to provide repair services?
A doctor (profession) is under contract to be available and to provide emergency medical services; failing to perform that (social) contract without the consent of the other parties (all of society, in some cases), is impermissible. A doctor who has agreed to provide care in a given situation is obligated to, just as a repairman who has agreed to perform repairs in a given situation is obligated to do so.
It is not logically problematic, but it I still something with which (I think) most people would (say they) disagree.
Most people feel no obligation to help someone who is in need of help. For example, there is a shortage of living kidney donors everywhere.
The only thing that creates an obligation in me is my decision to accept an obligation; the only way I can obligate others is for them to accept the obligation.
It’s not the totality thereof- contract theory is also included with the concept “It is possible to consent to actions in the future in a manner which may not be unilaterally revoked.”
I can’t explain why the social contract or geographical government has jurisdiction over a new actor who does not choose to accept it.
What kinds of experiences would you expect in a world where (some?) people are metaphysically equal that you wouldn’t expect in a world where people are not metaphysically equal?
If my premise that people are metaphysically equal is wrong, then something which is not part of this universe has privileged access over something else which is not part of this universe.
I would, for example, expect the same entity to make decisions for two physical bodies, or for psychic phenomena to exist and not have a physical basis, or for consciousness to persist after death differentially depending on the conscious entity; in general, things would have to be able happen without a physical basis and differentially based on the metaphysical person.
Since I posit that the metaphysical person exists only as a moral abstraction (and can thus be defined to be equal), such evidence that ‘personhood’ is an actual concrete thing, and that some ‘personhoods’ were inherently superior in an objectively measurable way would falsify my moral beliefs. I also suspect that it would be problematic for all moral systems.
Are you saying people are metaphysically equal by definition? If not, I’m not sure what you mean, since I find your comment somewhat difficult to follow.
This confuses me: I self-identify as a consequentialist myself, but I wouldn’t call an action which harms you but no-one else “immoral” (but I’d call it stupid).
I’m not at all sure what it means for an act to be immoral, under a consequentialist moral frame, if not that it leads to the loss of value. Can you expand on this?
But deliberately harming oneself does lead to a loss of value (at least as much as if you did that). So, why do I think that harming you is not-evil if you do it yourself but not if I do it? I’m confused...
I’m not sure what’s confusing.
You said that if I perform an action that harms me, that’s not immoral.
We agree that if I perform an action that harms me, that leads to a loss of value.
So it follows that whatever it means for an act to be immoral, by your reasoning, it is not simply that it leads to a loss of value.
Also, you’ve identified your moral reasoning as consequentialist.
So I’m asking: under your consequentialist moral frame, what does it mean for an act to be immoral, since you don’t think it’s that it leads to a loss of value?
It’s been suggested elsewhere that the key here is foreknowledge… that an immoral act is one that has negative expected value for the actor. I would agree that this is consistent with a (rule-)consequentialist moral frame, and that you might mean “I wouldn’t call an action which harms you but no-one else ‘immoral’ (assuming you don’t expect it to cause harm).” I would agree with that statement (though I would find it odd) but I doubt that’s actually what you meant.
Many consequentialist systems consider the morality or immorality of an action to be a function of the consequences expected by the agent at the time when it makes the decision. For any act, there is a possible universe where that act results in harmful consequences relative to the alternatives. What matters is how harmful it typically is, when executed by an agent in the same epistemic state.
I would guess that among humans we consider self-harming behaviour a sign of mental incompetence, since people don’t usually desire their own suffering. Hence someone who takes “stupid” actions is probably believing that the actions lead to excellent consequences, in which case you can prevent such behaviour through psychological treatment rather than punishment.
Or something like that.
Well, OK, but if “better addressed through psychological treatment than punishment” is equivalent to “not immoral”, then it seems that by that reasoning my harming others isn’t immoral either, as long as I’m incompetent enough to expect an increase in value from my actions.
I guess so. But harming anyone at all can still be considered bad. “Immoral” simply has a connotation (or maybe even an additional denotation?) of “blameful” that means it can basically only be applied to competent agents.
Isn’t consequentialism intrinsically objectifying? It doesn’t treat people as right holders but as means to the end of achieving desirable world states.
It can also treat people as the ends, instead of the means, of desirable world states.
I intuit that there is also something along the lines of ‘equal objectification’; if everyone, including oneself, is objectified equally, is that really objectification? I don’t know and must consider that.
In practice at best it treats people as some combination of tools and victory points.
Taboo ‘objectification’.
I invite you to consider the possibility that what people are, and how people should be treated as, may possibly be two different things. If they’re not “metaphysically equal”, perhaps it’s still best that they be treated as such.
If things are different in a significant way, it is appropriate that they are treated as different.
It is a premise of mine that people are metaphysically equal; to delve further into that we need to discuss what ‘people’ means. I doubt that you will find such a discussion rewarding.
I’d like to know what you mean by ‘metaphysically equal’?
Equal, in every sense that cannot be falsified by the observation of privilege or inequality which exists only in the embodied world.
Basically, it’s a way of creating a metaphysical entity “person”, which is defined to be that which exercises control over the physical embodiment of that person. By making the moral agent an abstract rather than a concrete, the inequalities which exist in the concrete world do not falsify the claim to general equality.
For example, people do not lose or gain rights as their fortunes change.
By that definition aren’t people ‘metaphysically equal’ to rocks?
What is the metaphysical entity “rock”, and how do the actions of physical geology reflect them? When a person consents to a transaction in the world, their body is what makes the decision and indicates to other people’s bodies that consent is present.
If a rock consents to an action which involves a geologic object, how would it indicate that to other physical objects?
Why do you think that pornography is sexist? There are male porn stars too.
Um… OK. I’m tapping out here.
I’m not sure what you mean by “reinforce”, but it seems reasonable to take these differences into account when making decisions.
For example, suppose that evolutionary science has determined that is was pro-survival in the past for females to refrain from occupations which had high fatality rates.
Reinforcing that would be claiming that females should refrain from or be prohibited/discouraged from those occupations in the present and near future.
Also sexist is the line of thought “Females are statistically more/less likely to be X, therefore I require that it be a male/female who performs task Y.”, when variation within each sex is great enough that there are a very large number of one sex who outperform a typical member of the other; a specific example would be “Females are less likely than males to complete a degree in mathematics; therefore it makes sense to award this scholarship to the equally qualified male instead of the female”.
That’s not the relevant comparison. In practice the comparison is between an above average members of each sex.
In your example, than depends on whether the first clause is still true after controlling for whatever qualifications are used in the second.
You don’t always have the luxury of choosing from among a sample that includes above-median performers.
The second case is a textbook example of sexist thought; I thought it was clear that the first clause was not controlling for anything, while the second was making a specific measurement of expected performance.
In that case comparing average members of one sex with the above average members of the other is still not the right comparison to make.
Even this statement is ambiguous. Does the specific measure of expected performance actually screen of gender?
You never need to compare the average, because you only ever need to compare a small number of individuals.
Performance in the production environment correlates with the measured expectation equally well for males and females.
Thorium reactors are a nuclear technology.
OK, I don’t accept that one, but it’s left wing.
Support/opposition to nuclear technology seems pretty orthogonal with left/right to me. The anti-nuclear left tend to be more pro-solar/wind/hydro instead, while the anti-nuclear right more pro-oil/coal/gas instead, but there are pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear is both “sides”. Even in a country like France where we have like a dozen of significant political parties, all the parties but one (the greens) have internal disagreement about nuclear energy in general.
That said, yes, “thorium is nuclear” is a good example of TWAITW.
It feels to me that until recently the pro-nuclear left was a very small faction, but growing with the likes of George Monbiot passionately switching over.
Depends where, here in France, of the 4 left-wing parties (PS, PCF, Les Verts and PG) two (PS and PCF) are mostly in favor of nuclear energy, the two others (Les Verts and PG) mostly against it, while all but Les Verts are internally split.
But that may also be because France has a strong nuclear industry, and the left-wing parties tend to be friendly with the unions, and the unions defend nuclear energy because it creates jobs (both for our own energy and because we export nuclear technology).
Thanks for the link to Caplan’s post, it’s a very nice thought experiment. How about a thread where right-wing folks can give their strongest versions of left-wing arguments and vice versa, all the while quietly laughing about each other’s misconceptions but not stepping in to correct? I could give it a try, as a right-winger imitating a left-winger, but I’d probably just embarrass myself.
Sounds lame; better to find a way where we can learn from our misconceptions. At the very least, people should be hinted towards the fact that they’re exhibiting misconceptions.
I’d rather see people that are expert in their position give the highest level version of their argument (just ignore inferential difference ffs; smart people can bridge the distance themselves if you use google-able jargon and make references explicit, and maybe throw in a book recommendation or two for further reading).
Example comment:
And no arguing in the comments, it’s enough to be more informed of another position’s strongest arguments.
Won’t work. Why the jargon is relevant is the main problem. Just saying “That’s not what we think” should be enough and cause less mess.
It won’t work because jargon is relevant? What?
An exchange could be “Whether porn movies should be legal, left-wing viewpoint” “I, right-wing person, believe a left-wing person would support this because it causes no obvious harm.” “I, real-life left-wing feminist, oppose this because porn is objectification.”
Well, everyone agrees that actors in most porn movies are just here to turn on the viewer, and could be replaced by CGI with equivalent effect. “Objectification” just means that. The useful work in the argument is done by the theory about why objectification is a bad thing.
Sorry, don’t want to turn this into a full-fledged political argument, but your definition seems to be missing some important part. Any movie can be replaced by sufficiently realistic CGI, but left-wing folks don’t seem to be against movies in general...
My imaginary feminist here claims that people should care about what shooting the movie meant for the actor. For example, some people admire Harrison Ford’s ad-libbed “I love you. “I know.”, or have strong feelings about an actor’s interpretation of a role that differs from the original script. This exists in porn too; I’ve heard Bettie Page praised for making sex look joyful and shameless. But in mainstream porn movies actors rarely have any room to show their feelings about the role.
Edit: This has sparked a full-on political subthread. I am sorry, retract this comment, and will be more careful in the future.
My imaginary anti-porn feminist (while not ignoring working conditions for porn actors (and possibly having some concern about whether “actors” reliably includes women)) is much more concerned about the effect on male viewers—that they will be strengthening a habit of only seeing women as potential porn-like entities. If the anti-porn feminist spoke LW, they’d phrase it as availability bias.
A pro-porn feminist discusses some problems caused by porn.
Thanks, your explanation makes more sense. The evidence for it seems inconclusive, so I won’t switch to being anti-porn, but at least it’s an understandable human reaction.
People tend to be overconfident about their model of the world when they’re angry.
Yes, you’re right of course. Sorry for editing my comment.
They’re working a job. They’re getting paid. There’s a case to be made that that is objectification. That’s the labor market. Deal.
EDIT: oh shit, oh shit, I just unintentionally made a WAITW by extending the stupidity and callousness of the above comment to right-libertarianism in general. Damnit!
That sort of argument seems not to leave any room to object to anything, ever.
They weren’t sold into slavery. If you don’t like a job, hold out for something you like more. If there’s no such job, and you don’t step out of the labor market, you don’t not like the job enough to complain: it really is an improvement on your life. Or, demand more money to make up for the amount you dislike your job. This seems to be what happened in porn.
There are so many worse problems in porn as a job than the fact that people might not feel artistically fulfilled in their job. Porn can be a really unpleasant job for women, especially if you are working on several jobs a day, as many actresses do, but they don’t have to do that to survive, as it can pay from hundreds to thousands of dollars. They do that because it pays shit loads of money, and because they know that it’s not a job they want to work into old age.
And even more so for men: lousy pay, boner drug injections, stiff (sorry) competition.
Are we talking about a separate world here, where the only form of employment is porn? If it was that unpleasant with lousy pay the job wouldn’t be that competitive: they’d be doing something else.
Are you assuming perfect rationality on the part of the actors?
No, just imperfectly rational ones. Are you suggesting they were tricked into the job somehow?
My objection is more generic than that: I’m not making an argument about porn-actors’ career choices one way or another, as I hardly have the required knowledge to do so.
I’m just finding your own arguments which seems to say that every career choice is a good career choice and that therefore people shouldn’t complain rather unconvincing.
I’m not sure if I’d go all the way to good. Only an improvement over nothing, given that you stay in the job. If you dislike the job enough to either not take it or quit, then it wasn’t.
If there are a lot of people competing for a job, assuming they actually want the job and aren’t tricked by magic fairies, they must at least believe the job is going to be and improvement over their current employment.
Why is “nothing” the alternative to compare a given job to?
When people complain about a job, they generally don’t say “I wish I was unemployed”, they say things like “I wish I was paid more” or “I wish I wasn’t forced to work as many hours for fear of losing my job” or “I wish I had better working conditions”.
To compare any job to unemployment seems to be missing the point of such complaints. It’s not that the people would prefer unemployment. They’d prefer a better job.
I’m comparing the job to the job not existing. Not to no job at all for an individual. We’d all prefer a better job for ourselves, and if we aren’t jerks, we’d prefer better jobs for others too. Until the robots replace all the shitty jobs and all forms of scarcity vanish I don’t see the point.
There are so many jobs on the labor market. If you have a job, then you must at least think it is better than the alternatives. How is this controversial?
Here’s the discrepancy:
At this point, you’re comparing two different versions of society, a society (A) where the job exists and a society (B) where the job doesn’t exist.
But at this point, you’re comparing two different choices for an individual within the same society (A), choosing to have the particular job (choice A1) or quitting (choice A2).
Those are two different questions. E.g. imagine that the porn industry didn’t exist at all, for some magic reason. Wouldn’t the customer money financing it go to some other form of entertainment or product? What makes you think that the additional jobs that industry would create wouldn’t have less shitty working conditions than the porn industry?
The question of whether the existence of porn industry is positive or negative as a whole, therefore isn’t the same to whether any given individual in it should quit or not. The choices person has in timeline B aren’t necessarily the same they have in timeline A2.
Yes.
Yes.
Because there is only so much demand for goods, and only so much investment. The how any why of porn suggests that the mainstream entertainment industry probably isn’t where that money would go e.g. probably towards prostitution which is even less humane. And doesn’t pay as well.
More importantly, the reason people invest in porn is because they think that would be the best return on their dollar. The drive on investment is of course demand, utility represented by dollars in the economy. A redirection of that would have to be to the perceived second and third best percieved investment. If you think people who invest in porn are dumb and the percieved second best investmentwould generate better returns, then OK. But I tend to assume every one is an (imperfect) rational actor, who’s trying to generate the best return on investment, so changing that would be a bad Thing (TM).
If you don’t know why good returns on investment are good, realize that if I want to send all my money to AMF, I need to get it from somewhere. If you want a job from me, I need to get the money from somewhere.
The choices wouldn’t be the same, but they’d be worse, CP, because people were generating less return on investment, because one of their options was removed.
This is especially bad if you’re primarily concerned about employment in a first world nation, say America, (I’d talk about Greece, but I just have no idea.) where porn is actually one of the home grown industries, and that money would end up going to China or India as a likely second best investment. Which would normally be cool; the Chinese have to eat too. But you’re also supporting a government that keeps the wages down and standards cheap through methods you might not be entirely kosher with.
This doesn’t have that much to do with porn per se, only to point out that you aren’t necessarily supporting a less cruel industry, by removing a single industry that you find “objectifying”.
I still say if you find your job objectifying, quit or demand more money for the inconvenience. If you can’t do either, then the job is improving your life, or you are a slave. No one seems to attack the main point; they just don’t like hearing it.
Well, the people who want to magically stop porn also tend to want to magically stop prostitution.
I, personally, would be in favor of the existence of both, but I’d also wish much higher working conditions for both—a wish which your command to “Deal!” in regards to their low working conditions, because they’re supposedly better than the “alternative” of their non-existence doesn’t quite adequately represent.
And hence all the people buying lottery tickets? All the alcoholics buying booze? All the drug-addicts doing drugs? All the people going to church?
What’s the actual difference between “dumb” and “imperfect” besides the former being a ruder word than the latter?
That again may sound reasonable, but it isn’t a logical necessity. It isn’t a logical necessity that having more options causes greater profit, unless people are indeed perfect rational agents, with perfect knowledge of the consequences of each choice, including psychological/social/etc.
I respect libertarianism because I do mistrust the government to make these choices for us—but that doesn’t mean by far that its application necessitates greater utility for all in every single scenario.
I personally would like better working conditions for everyone. I live in the real world. They chose the work. Given real world economic realities, I’m not sure I see the problem. An actress can work less, choose different films, pick another career. These all come at cost, because that’s the real world. Every actor who isn’t a slave made their decision. Who am I to question it?
I tend to think people generate utility from all those things and don’t really see the problem. I’m an athiest, but know both Christians and, I hesitate to say Athiest, but people who don’t really believe in a personal god as such, who go to church like functions for the utility they recieve from them. Same goes for lottery tickets, booze, and drugs.
I tend to think in terms of imperfect = less than perfect mathematically described agent, dumb = less than me, at least in this particular domain. That last one is probably not great. I apologize for any confusion.
I’m not sure I said that, though I do think there enough smart people gaming the system where that works out, albeit with a certain amount of inefficiency. How much inefficiency? No idea. The common libertarian arguement is usually not that libertarianism is perfect. But it’s better than the alternatives as they currently exist.
But you would also like everyone to not complain about the working conditions they currently have? Ending people’s complaints requires an even more magical solution than ending porn or prostitution.
Why don’t you say to yourself “People complain. Deal.”
Reality includes the fact that people are free to argue about whether reality sucks and how to improve it. So what’s your problem? Why are you so okay with every “real” aspect of the labour market, except the fact that in the real world people can also complain about the labour market?
The whole subthread started with you saying “Deal.” While others still discussed the “is” of the matter, you leaped to an unsupported “ought”. Whether from a consequentialist or a deontologist perspective, you demanded a particular course of action which you don’t remotely prove by saying “this is the labour market” nor even by “they chose it”—both “is” statements which can’t by themselves build an “ought”.
I didn’t mean literally don’t complain ever, that’s silly and I never said that. There is a certain extent to which I think that if you have immediate control over something you should just shut up and do, but that wasn’t what I meant either.
All employment is comodification of human time, and therefore objectification of human beings. Part of living in the real world is making peace with that. The fact that people want to single out porn is silliness. That’s what I meant. Is this really what this whole conversation has been about?
Yes. If you had said “All employment is comodification of human time, and therefore objectification of human beings. Part of living in the real world is making peace with that. The fact that people want to single out porn is silliness.” this would allow people to respond e.g. why they might consider porn a worse form of objectification, or e.g. agree with you and nonetheless continue discussing what a society might do with alleviating the problems of objectification in employment in general.
Saying on the other hand “It’s the labour market. Deal.” is nothing but a rude conversation-stopper, which attempts to stifle discussion without actually making any coherent argument one could respond to. It fell so much beneath the standards of a LessWrong discussion that it wasn’t even funny.
In the spirit of constructive criticism:
I totally agree with your stated point, and you made the point well. But the function of the quoted sentence is winning a status contest, not advancing your argument. The post would be vastly stronger without it.
I thought the point was clear. Apparently, I was wrong.
If you found it was rude, it’s because I found the point silly, obvious, and really not worth the time. And here I find shortcuts make long delays.
Porn workers are objectified in a way library workers aren’t.
That argument is only valid during times of full employment, of which this isn’t one. There are people for whom the alternative to an unpleasant job with lousy pay would be having no way to earn a living at all. (Just making a general point; I’m not claiming this is likely to be the case for a male porn actor in particular.)
Really? Cause it seems like it’d be more valid to me. You could take a part time or second full time job, take a hobby that produces goods (gardening, carpentry, etc.), and if you have full employment this implies you do not need secondary non full employment to survive.
EDIT: Oh, I’ve been there. I would have wished I could get a job in porn too. Or at McDonalds. Or anywhere. Again, if you take the job, you at least perceive it is an improvement over not taking the job. Right? Or am I crazy?
By “full employment” I mean ‘negligible unemployment rate’ (on a society level), not ‘working as many hours as you possibly could’ (on an individual level).
Why was this downvoted? AFAIK this usage is more-or-less standard.
I don’t get it either. Seems to happen every time politics is brought up. My own posts in this thread have gone up and down several times. Reflexive down voting over politics I can understand, even if I think it’s silly.
The up votes are actually harder to explain. It’s possible I could have educated some one, but given the people who post here, that seems doubtful.
Ah. I thought you were implying something more like “40ish hours a week” of work.
I don’t know how that changes my point. You like the job enough to keep working, therefore it is an improvement of your life. Conceivably, a solution could be better social welfare or better regulation of the industry, but if the job didn’t exist, (as I assume would be the ideal state for an anti porn feminist) that takes away something that was improving their life.
I happen to live somewhere where wages are terrible, there isn’t much of a safety net outside your own family. Some jobs, like TA, really pay poorly enough where it might be a good idea to go try and farm in your own backyard. Should the minimum wage be raised? Maybe. But for those working the job, it’s enough to improve their lives, so taking away the job would be a Bad Thing(TM).
Or, you keep working because it’s the only way to survive you’ve found, even if you hate it. Not everyone has a wealthy family or something.
You could always head out into the woods and farm. Or beg. Or steal. Or kill yourself. I didn’t say you liked the job. I said you like the job enough. If the job didn’t exist, you’d be worse off.
Everyone agrees on that fact. But the relevant question, when I’m deciding whether it would be good on net to regulate an industry, is whether the jobs in a state of economic nature (bargained down in terms of wages and working conditions to just better than the marginal employee’s best alternative) are worse for the general welfare than the regulated jobs (and the associated economic tradeoffs) would be.
Sometimes regulation is clearly a win for society (like the workplace safety regulations in the US following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and other disasters), sometimes it’s clearly a net loss (the Greek pension system is one of the things bankrupting the country), and sometimes it’s hard to tell. But there’s an actual tradeoff in consequences, and the optimal amount of regulation is not zero in all cases.
Related: The Non-Libertarian FAQ, or Why I Hate Your Freedom
I didn’t argue that the amount of regulation was zero in all cases. I don’t think may people really believe that, and the argument amounts to a straw man. Only that if a job market didn’t exist, the people working in that job market would be worse off.
Ah, thanks. Now I see what you misunderstood. The point of making the argument high level is because then you’re able to 1) see the depths of your ignorance and 2) see where you need to move to remove that ignorance. Moreover, the best arguments are going to be written out more completely somewhere else anyway (probably books).
For example, if you’re arguing at a high level that porn should be illegal, you could import the work of other people to support you of which the details have been argued—and this makes sense if your argument is representational of the highest level of thought within that area.
This. The lack of examples from the left makes me uncomfortable sharing this article with people that will likely see it as an attack on their ideology. If they have some things to cheer for too, they are far more likely to accept it as a good post.
See above. Come up with a good leftist example beyond the three already there and I’ll add it.
Which is unfortunate since this seems to be one of the few recent articles with relatively short inferential distances.