Maximum_Publius
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User ID: 780
Well in my ideal world you'd be able to sort by top - quality and top - agreement, but if they wanted to keep it simple they could just use the quality metric. I think that's what LessWrong does.
Completely agree about the complexity angle.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
I agree that this doesn't solve the problem of people voting "politically," as it were, but I think it might mitigate it slightly.
As to your other point , I strongly disagree. Rationality can only work once certain premises have been accepted. There is no rational way to choose what premises you start an argument with. In the abortion context, for example, if someone starts from the premise that it is always wrong to take an innocent human life, no matter how much suffering it might experience or cause, they'll reach a certain set of conclusions, and if someone starts from a utilitarian set of premises, they'll reach another. Yes, you can argue about the rational basis for premises to some extent, but at a certain point you just hit intuition. Thus, two equally rational people could reach wildly different conclusions simply because they have different intuitions about the premises of the argument.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Why do you say it hasn't worked for LessWrong?
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Your claim was that you "find it hard to imagine that to anyone who arrives at their positions by rational thinking . . . could really find an opposing argument well done."
All I'm saying is that a rational person could easily find an opposing argument "well done" if their only problem with the argument was that it began from premises derived from intuitions they don't share.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
This seems right on one dimension. I agree that it does feel like older-style forums, without voting, seemed to have better discussions. But when I read sites like SSC that purposely hide comment scores, I find it annoying not to be able to sort by "best" and find myself missing upvotes, without really feeling the conversation is all that better without them. Maybe this is just a function of the internet getting worse in general...
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Look at the case of Paul Clement (widely considered the greatest Supreme Court advocate of our generation), who left his firm after it decided to stop taking 2nd Amendment cases after he won the Bruen case. The top firms definitely make political choices about who to represent.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Contrapoints released her newest video yesterday. As someone who has found a number of her past videos to be well done and interesting (they're generally better the further back you go), this one was disappointing. Some random thoughts:
Contrapoints made a name for herself through actually engaging with the "alt-right" and by being willing to make real arguments in response to conservatives; now it seems like she's totally bought into some of the worst argumentation styles of the woke left. Most annoying to me is the frequency with which Natalie begs the question by referring to "trans rights" as if they're some unobjectionable, neutral thing that only "bigots" could oppose. Interestingly, the only time she actually concretely discusses a supposed "trans right" (males competing in women's sports), she agrees that there is a debate to be had here. Of course, no mention of kids transitioning, males in women's prisons, etc. Just "trans rights" in the abstract. The one thing Contrapoints is clear about is that not acknowledging that "trans women are women" is at the least "transphobic" (if not a violation of "trans rights" in some hard to define way), which is interesting. What does it mean to be "transphobic"? Could one not be "transphobic" and still refuse to acknowledge that "trans women are women"? Because I would like to say that I'm not "transphobic" on the basis that I don't think trans people should be denied rights that we accord to others, or that they should be forcibly prevented from dressing like women, or even (if over 18) allowed to surgically alter themselves to match their desired gender identity (perhaps with some reasonable safeguards).
I think she makes some good arguments about the fact that there are always limits to debate. She talks about how LGBTQ activists essentially "cancelled" an old anti-gay activist Anita Bryant, with the implication that most people nowadays would agree with that cancellation. Of course, I would simply say that there are meaningful differences between gay activism and trans activism (e.g., gay people were fighting against laws that criminalized consensual behavior between adults; trans people often are fighting to allow children to mutilate themselves). Nonetheless, I do take her point: Arguing against "cancellation" or "illiberal" tactics in the abstract is kind of pointless, because almost no one is a true free speech absolutist here. If, say, someone was going around and gathering a following by literally advocating for the murder of Jews, I think a lot of us would agree that public shaming (at the least) would be appropriate. That means that one must always have some object-level discussion about what people are being cancelled for before one can reasonably argue that any given cancellation is unacceptable. It's hardly a groundbreaking observation, but it's true nonetheless that there must be a line somewhere that would make "cancel culture" type tactics acceptable; we're all just debating where that line is.
Finally, I was surprised to see how much more aggressive Rowling has gotten in her anti-trans rhetoric. Not that I necessarily disagree with her, but it looks like I can no longer say that she's being unfairly smeared as an enemy of the trans movement.
Anyways, I would be curious on others thoughts here (assuming anyone is willing to watch a nearly two hour video by someone most would consider an ideological opponent.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
I think it's also because she unwittingly participated in the Witch Trials of J.K Rowling podcast and now feels like she must make amends.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Yes, this seems like a useful distinction. Also highlights how unspecific terms like "homophobia" and "transphobia" are. People tend to use them to cover both social and metaphysical phobias, which confuses these issues. I guess most activists would argue, 1., most people who hold "metaphysical" transphobia tend to have "socally" transphobic ideas as well (probably true), and then also, 2., even if someone only holds metaphysically transphobic ideas, the expression of those ideas will lead to more hate crimes and more "social" transphobia.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
So, you think if you were in Weimar Germany around 1930, it wouldn't have been acceptable to "cancel" Hitler (lol) if you thought that was a tactic likely to prevent his coming to power? To me there is no question it would be legitimate to disrupt Nazi rallies, throw pies in Hitler's face (a tactic Contrapoints discusses LGBTQ activists using against anti-gay activists), etc., if you legitimately thought it would prevent Nazism and the Holocaust. The problem for me with current activists is simply that they've set the bar for using these tactics way too low.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
The problem is that things that seem morally obvious now weren't always so. In the antebellum United States, there were millions of people who thought slavery was totally acceptable, and many others who thought it was in fact a positive good. I think we'd all agree that someone advocating for a return to chattel slavery (at least assuming they had a real chance of success) would justify the use of "cancel culture" tactics today (if anything could), but this simply wasn't a morally obvious truth in the 1850s. You could make a similar argument about Jim Crow, which wasn't all that long ago. Activists would simply argue that their cause is today's slavery/Jim Crow/Holocaust/etc., and I think to justify why their use of "cancel culture" tactics is wrong you have to engage in the merits of their arguments to some degree
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
I'd agree with this as a heuristic for where it is absolutely OK to cancel someone. But certainly there's a middle ground? It can't only be either "I can only use reasoned debate to stop this person" or "I can shoot or cancel someone". Surely there's a place at which it would be acceptable to cancel but not murder someone?
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
I agree "mutilation" is a little tendentious, but only a little. You are removing healthy body parts, which in almost all other circumstances is mutilation. I also note that you do admit that minors are getting top surgery, so I wouldn't say hormones are the only focus for minors. Not to mention that hormone replacement can leave minors sterilized and sometimes unable to orgasm for the rest of their lives, or cause osteoporosis-type symptoms, so I wouldn't exactly consider it a minor intervention even if no surgeries were being done.
A lot of our disagreements probably come down to empirical questions. How many kids would simply get over their transgender phase and never experience the "hell" of being in a body they hate if they weren't "affirmed"? For how many people does gender transition actually lead to long term mental health gains? How many people will regret being put on hormones or going through surgery as minors? How many people would go through the "hell" of being stuck in the "wrong body" in the absence of trans activists constantly telling them about transgenderism? These seem like very relevant questions to how we should approach this issue.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
You're obviously right of course. (I've never heard of "A meaningful 'yes' requires the possibility of 'no'". Thanks, that's good.) But I guess psychological arguments aren't something I have much interest in, and indeed they're one of my pet peeves from the Left. In my experience, woke people LOVE to psychologize the "real" reasons their opponents are claiming XYZ, and then using that (hypothesized) "real" motivation as a reason to dismiss their opponents' substantive arguments. I also don't see why someone couldn't have both a very strong psychological reason to believe something and provide good arguments for believing in it, so I'd rather just evaluate someone's arguments on the merits than speculate as to their motivations.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
People aren't just arguing about it in the abstract. Contrapoints is enforcing that abstract thinking on the discussion by insisting on begging the question on whether trans activism is in some ways distinct from other forms of activism (which would mean the cancellations could be more unjust than past ones).
I think this is exactly right, thanks for articulating it. As someone who is relatively sympathetic to the original gay rights movement, the whole time she was talking about Anita Bryant I was thinking, "Okay, sure, it was unjust for gay people to be thrown in jail for sodomy, and so maybe some form of "cancellation" was justified here, but that's way different than the kind of changes that trans activists are demanding!"
You see this kind of rhetorical move used a lot by the woke--drawing on the essentially universal consensus that the civil rights movement was a good thing, and then trying to make parallels between the activism of that era and the activism of our own, and implying that the moral questions are just as easy to answer now as they were back then. I see a similar move being made by "abolitionists" who clearly chose the term to evoke slavery abolitionists, even though abolishing slavery and abolishing the police are radically different types of policies and have almost nothing to do with each other.
As to Rowling: I guess by "enemy of the trans movement" I was more trying to get at the fact that she is now someone who says things that your average progressive wouldn't agree with, even in private (whereas saying there should be reasonable restrictions on sports, minors transitioning, etc., can get agreement in private even from a lot of liberals). I used to use Rowling as a good example of unreasonable cancellation because she wasn't even saying things that were outside the realm of normal progressive discourse, but now that she's passed that boundary she no longer can serve as an easy example of leftist overreach (although I still think she has been unreasonably cancelled and I largely agree with her).
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
If you're saying that disruptions of Nazi rallies led to the creation of the Sturmabteilung and thus indirectly led to the rise of Hitler, okay. It doesn't really affect my point, because I specifically qualified the use of "cancellation" on the legitimate belief that it would prevent his rise. If you think that cancellation is counterproductive (I largely tend to agree), that's a tactical disagreement, not a moral one.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Yeah, I think, especially with the rise of what I think are more transitioners due to cultural contagion, that the 2-5% detransition number is quite likely a severe undercount (and as far as I know, some of the low detransition numbers were collected from studies that had serious flaws).
The empirical landscape here is really complicated, both because it's a relatively new phenomenon and because the political stakes are so high for any given study that it can be hard to trust the results/interpretation from either side. So I don't think either of us will be able to convince the other by throwing studies/etc. at each other. I will mention that some European countries are pulling back from the affirming care model as more evidence comes out that the mental health gains claimed for transitioning are less certain than was claimed. See, e.g., here.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
I largely agree that cancellation is tactically counterproductive. But one could also say that the Woke left uses cancellation all the time and seems to have amassed a large amount of cultural power, which might indicate that in certain circumstances it is effective.
But even if I thought it would work, I'm against censorship on principle.
So would you be opposed to "cancelling" Hitler if it was guaranteed to prevent his rise to power? Or what if it provided a 50% chance of preventing his rise?
Maximum_Publius
11mo ago
I think your approach is clearly the right one when engaged in a particular debate with a particular person, and OP says as much. But I think ymeskhout’s post is directed more to the scenario where someone is writing about a movement or argument in general instead of engaging with a particular person. In such cases the weakmanning concern is more real.
Maximum_Publius
11mo ago
While agreeing with ymeskhout’s response, I also think part of the issue here is that there’s a whole set of truth statements which depend for their accuracy on the beliefs of a given group. “Defund the Police is a harmful movement because they want to totally remove police officers” is either true or false (assuming a given set of morals), and that in turn depends on what the DTP movement actually believes.
Maximum_Publius
11mo ago
How Peaceful Sweden Became Europe’s Gun-Murder Capital
This link is probably paywalled for most, so some of the salient points:
"Turf wars for control of the drug trade, driven by an influx of guns, personal vendettas and a pool of available youths, many from marginalized migrant communities, have resulted in a gun-homicide rate approximately 2½ times the European average, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.
With 62 people shot dead last year, up from 45 in 2021, Sweden’s overall homicide rate is about one-sixth of the U.S.’s. But in a European context, it is extraordinary. Stockholm’s gun-murder rate was roughly 30 times higher per capita than London’s.
Perpetrators are becoming younger, and are also resorting to increasingly violent tactics such as throwing hand grenades and placing bombs, injuring a growing number of bystanders, including children.
Because most shootings in Sweden take place among individuals from migrant backgrounds, they have fueled a surge of right-wing populism. In the 2022 election, the Sweden Democrats, a party that has roots in Nazism and blames Sweden’s liberal migration policies for the violence, gained more than 20% of the votes to become the country’s second-largest. Today it rejects Nazism and white nationalism on its platform.
The new center-right government has promised to tighten migration policies, double sentences for offenses committed in “gang environments,” widen the use of electronic surveillance and expel more criminals who aren’t Swedish citizens.
“Compared internationally, we have had a much laxer criminal law. And we have now lost control over the situation,” said Daniel Bergström, an adviser to the Swedish minister of justice.
Experts, however, say there is no simple explanation for the violence.
Nikoi Djane, a former gang member turned criminologist, said authorities had failed to help refugees integrate into society, instead segregating them from society in housing estates with few job opportunities or treatment for conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder.
“The perpetrators have a responsibility, but they are also victims of their circumstances,” Djane said.
Manne Gerell, an associate professor at Malmö University with expertise in organized crime, said the problem was caused by poor integration and exacerbated by years of insufficient response from authorities, police and politicians.
Today, an estimated 75% to 80% of deadly shootings remain unsolved, and the low risk of getting caught has prompted a growing number of youths to kill for bounties issued by gang leaders, said Salihu, the crime expert.
It might also be helpful to look at this article in conjunction with this Free Press article on violence in Sweden: Two Bombings in One Night? That’s Normal Now in Sweden.
At least on its face, this situation has a clear cause (migration from non-Western countries) and a simple solution (stop accepting migrants and remove many of the migrants that are already in Sweden), but to even state these facts gets you labeled a "right-wing populist" (nice of WSJ to omit the customary "far right populist").
I do see where the Left is coming from here. Most migrants aren't committing violence, and it does seem cruel to kick out people who have been living somewhere for years or even decades. But I also think a given community has the right to maintain the integrity of its society and culture. That's also why I'm more okay with something closer to open borders in the USA: Our culture is already so hollowed out that migrants moving here are probably adding, not subtracting, from whatever "culture" there is in the US.
Maximum_Publius
11mo ago
By non-Western I mean to indicate that I don't think Sweden would be having these problems if all of these immigrants were, say, (non-immigrant) Germans or French. Admittedly, they probably wouldn't have them if the immigrants were Asian either.
Maximum_Publius
11mo ago
I don't think crime rate is separate from questions of "culture." I'd argue that in fact the crime rate is a reflection of culture. How often a given group of people commit crimes is a behavioral fact about that group of people just as much as any other behavioral fact that we consider "cultural" (like a tendency to listen to certain types of music, adhere to certain religions, etc.). To the extent that some group enters a society and increases that society's crime rate, I'd argue they are changing that society's culture.
As to the statistics you cite, it does seem as though I may be indulging in a bit of hysteria here, so thanks for the context.
Why wouldn't it work as well here? People would downvote political enemies to suppress their ideas?
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