guesswho
3yr ago
I'm not sure why it's important to discredit a witness in the public eye, instead of at trial where you're allowed to say all those things directly to the judge and jury.
Especially in light of the negative externalities to the system itself, ie if we allow defendants to make witnesses and judges and prosecutors and jurors lives a living nightmare right up until the line of 'definitely undeniably direct tampering', then that sets a precedent where no sane person wants to fill any of those roles, and the process of justice is impeded.
Also, I agree that a fairly narrow range of things that someone might say about their trial should qualify as tampering/intimidation. However, defendants have a strong motive to preferentially say those things, and therefore we should a priori expect a lot of the things they would say to fall into that category, and therefore expect proper gag orders to cover a lot of their actual intended speech.
guesswho
3yr ago
but that doesn't make it a good idea to wear a flashy diamond Rolex in a bad neighborhood.
In a vacuum, sure. The entire discussion is about what type of society we're trying to create, an what things it makes safe or unsafe.
For example: in a vacuum, it seems dangerous to live in a giant opulent mansion while there are droves of homeless people living in camps less than a mile away. They massively outnumber you and are living desperate existences, surely they will just come overpower you and take your stuff to survive. They probably want your mansion and the food and goods inside more than almost any rapist wants to rape someone in skimpy clothes.
But we've set up a society where actually that is an extremely safe thing for a rich person to do, they do it all the time, and the idea that poor people would rise up and occupy their mansion and steal their stuff is something close to laughable. That's because we've built a social order in which there a lots of safeguards against that ever happening, both physical and ideological, and we promise overwhelming consequences against any group that would try it.
The ask here is that we take the same types of steps in order to make a society where women are as safe against rapists at a party with them as billionaires are against the homeless encampments a few blocks away from their mansion.
Of course, the crux of that argument is whether we are trying hard enough to create that type of society vs how possible that even is to accomplish (or how much we'd have to give up).
One side thinks that we don't have a society that ensures the safety of women as well as it ensures the safety of billionaires because we care about the finances of billionaires far more than we care about the sexual safety of women, and we could extend that protection if we wanted to take systemic steps to do so.
The other thinks that this is a genuinely harder problem because it happens behind closed doors and leaves little evidence afterwards, and also trying harder to solve it would involve tradeoffs in freedoms and due process and etc that would not be worthwhile, so effectively we're already pretty close to the optimal boundary and it's just unfortunate this is a hard problem.
(as per usual, my opinion is that the truth is somewhere in the middle, I do think there's room for some improvements - especially ideological ones - but it's definitely a harder problem and there isn't a ton of low-hanging fruit that's easy to grab her e in terms of improvements)
guesswho
3yr ago
Also: if your dad tells you to be careful about what you wear to a party, that's pretty much his job being done correctly.
If the chief of police tells women in general to be careful what they wear to parties, then arguably that's maybe some small fraction of his job in terms of public awareness campaigns, but really his job is supposed to be catching and prosecuting rapists, and ideally doing public awareness/outreach programs that make life harder on criminals rather than on victims.
I feel a lot more confident calling victim blaming on people who are supposed to be fighting the criminals and are instead chiding the victims. This is often an individual vs systemic distinction (eg, giving advice to a specific person you know vs trying to decrease sexual assault rates across the entire city).
guesswho
3yr ago
... because the people who would do that do not have the perspective that these men are non-predatory, and therefore don't consider them victims, same as her.
I would expect that lots of people like the people talking about it in this thread are complaining in the same way that 'cancellations' normally happen, there just aren't enough of them, or not enough in influential enough positions, to actually have much impact.
guesswho
3yr ago
I think there's a distinction here between 'advice reasonable people would give to women as a preventative measure' and 'details unreasonable people pick out to blame a woman after the fact.'
Unfortunately you can find examples of really heinous after-the-fact victim blaming, especially when the alleged perp is someone people like, like a celebrity.
The heinous examples stick in people's minds when they condemn victim blaming, and the reasonable examples come to mind when someone defends giving advice, and the sides often talk past each other.
guesswho
3yr ago
Interesting. As you say, there's certainly not that many philosophy books a year that get teh type of attention Byrne seems to be going for; I was under the impression that physical publishing is doing really poorly as an industry right now, and expected that nothing would get published if it didn't have wide appeal. I guess there are other publishing channels for small academic stuff that's never intended to break big, which makes sense, I just wasn't thinking about it.
Thanks for the info!
guesswho
3yr ago
Ok, I do still think there is value in that type of pointed comment, but I am getting the message about how it will be interpreted when it is too much of an inferential gap away from a reader's expectations. Which makes sense.
I'll try to remember that and use the other style.
It's marginal because she's trying to walk a tightrope of depicting this behavior of picking up needy unstable women for sex and then dumping them and maybe spreading rumors about it as not-quite-assault-but-definitely-predatory-and-damaging-to-them.
So she's depicting the men who end up in this situation as, not quite criminals, but some type of perpetrator who is getting retribution for misdeeds.
Of course, if you're the type of person who believes that men in those situations have done nothing morally wrong, then from that perspective this would be straight-up victim blaming.
And similarly, if you believe that women who dress skimpy or flirt or drink too much are doing something morally wrong, then you could apply the logic she's talking about here to say a lot of statements are not victim blaming, which she would think are.
This is definitely a case where she's proposing a standard for what type of condemnations of people who had something bad happen to them are or are not ok, which would lead different people with different perspectives on the situation to disagree about what is or isn't justified to say after the fact.
That is definitely shaky ground for feminism, since it creates more grey area to justify statements they would consider victim blaming.
She is trying to use this to claw back moral ground for her side by implying 'false accusations are ussually made against bad actors anyway, so they're not as bad as the other side says'.
But I think this ploy is pretty bad and almost certainly loses more ground than it gains, both by leaving the door open to justify victim blaming against women and by proposing what will look like a blatant double standard to anyone who disagrees with their perspective.
Hopefully this meme will not catch on with other feminists, we'll have to see.
Note, if anyone cares about my own position: I generally feel that blame is non-transferable, one person getting more blame in a situation doesn't mean the other gets less, teh two calculations are entirely independent from each other.
guesswho
3yr ago
Ok, lets circle back to our original comments then.
You talk about my failure to 'engage with' Byrne, but I think we need to specify between two different types of engagement here.
There's 1. Engaging with Byrne's arguments about trans people and gender ideology, and 2. Engaging with Byrne's assertions about how academics are cowardly and won't engage with anything that could get them in trouble.
Your original post was entirely about 2, and never delved into 1.
My response was also entirely about 2, and not meant to say anything about 1.
You're correct that, if I had been trying to disprove Byrne's claims about trans issues by saying that people consider him to be a laughably wrong asshole, then this would just be sneering at the opposition to dismiss them without engaging their ideas. I agree that would be bad, and also stupid.
But my post was providing an alternate explanation for Byrne's observations about academics not engaging with him. It was solely about 2, and I believe I engaged with 2 directly and reasonably. The theory I propose is actually sufficient to explain his empirical observations, it's a viable alternative hypothesis that deserves to be a part of this conversation, and it's what I actually believe to be the most likely cause.
So, again: it was not sneering at Byrne to dismiss 1, it was engaging with 2 by suggesting that it is explained by people sneering at 1.
Now, aside from the content, there's the question of tone. Certainly I used strong language, and I could have written something more oblique and indirect, like:
"Although I can appreciate why it would feel to someone in Byrne's position that the lack of public engagement to his ideas must be some sort of conspiracy or enemy action, I don't think this is actually the only or most parsimonious explanation. Consider the fact that many of the ideas he advances in the article you linked have been around in the popular media discussion of this topic for years now, and in academic discussion of these topics for much longer. Consider also that, as you yourself say, Byrne is only a recent entrant to this topic of study, and seems to be entering it with teh intent to reach a mass popular audience quickly, rather than slowly building his credentials through academic publishing and conferences. It seems quite plausible to me that academics who are more versed in this subject matter simply don't find his ideas novel enough or persuasive enough to merit that type of public engagement, and that they are weary of engaging someone who may pattern-match (perhaps through coincidence and no fault of his own!) to the type of person who is jumping on a popular trend in hopes of garnishing fame and fortune. I also note that this pattern by which someone notices that their ideas are not being engaged with, and suggests as a natural explanation that people must despise or fear their ideas or be motivated by some political commitments, is to my mind a common and potentially dangerous form of bias. While such events certainly do occur, I think they are rarer than people imagine, and less likely than they feel to the person living inside such a situation; a more common explanation is simply that most people never merit that type of attention and engagement for their ideas in the first place, and most ideas are not persuasive or interesting enough to inspire such a response regardless of their social context.'
Would that have been a better comment?
My feeling is that, while it's certainly more politely-phrased, it would be a significantly worse comment.
It lacks the visceral emotional impact that captures attention. More importantly, it lacks the visceral emotional narrative which I think accurately captures the real psychological and social dynamics at play here. In the name of tone and politeness, it obfuscates to the point of misleading; the laughing in derision at something you've seen pop up and be (to your mind) debunked a hundred times is a very real thing, the avoiding and hedging out of people you think are opportunistic assholes is a very real thing, and I think the understanding of those emotions are important to the argument.
I think it's good to use blunt language, when that most accurately conveys the point being made. I think it's good that you called the people who disagree with you on gender issues 'a cult', and say that they seem to only believe what CNN tells them to believe. I think it's good that LS says his political opposition 'like getting politically pegged'. I think it's good that Armin says the Left is full of apologists for jew-slaughter and WC responds by talking about their naked insanity.
These comments do not use maximally polite language, but they do clearly express a position in a way that is succinct, intuitive, easy to understand, and easy to engage with. I think they often do a lot more to advance the discussion and communicate ideas effectively than a wall of oblique caveated mush ever could. I think the push away from that type of blunt language often ends up with misunderstandings and lack of communication, because people have trouble maintaining focus over and fully responding to large walls of oblique text, when they even bother to read them thoroughly in the first place. And because they lead to responses fracturing into sub-responses to sub-sections or only responding to one paragraph out of eight or etc.
All of which boils down to a stylistic preference which, again, I'm happy to discuss. Or, if you want to edge more into your moderator hat and just declare that it's not acceptable, I'll just have to accept that and try to remember.
guesswho
3yr ago
After a quick google, it looks like my intuitions about the number of philosophy professors there are were massively off, and I made a mistake adding so many significant digits. I should have just stuck with your 99%, as that was sufficient to make my point anyway.
That point being, almost everyone in the world, even most philosophy professors, never get a published book or a large public platform or widespread media attention with which to discuss and spread their ideas. Someone not getting that type of platform, even if they wish they had it and believe they deserve it, is absolutely the norm, the standard case, the null hypothesis. It takes a lot of something to overcome that barrier - merit, charisma, connections, etc. - and I don't see any of that from Byrne, such that we must imagine some conspiracy of silence and fear in order to explain why he's not more famous.
I don't think they'd substantially engage with a counterfactual philosopher who makes good or provocative arguments.
I think they would, although probably more in academic articles than in the public-facing media channels Byrne seems to want.
Again, regarding your point about the possibility that we're missing something important: I agree that this could happen, and it's important to have channels open to spot things like that.
I just maintain that Byrne is not putting forward anything, and does not really have the background or expertise, that could make him the one that would notice something like that. Nor is he pursuing it through the types of channels which someone with a genuinely new and important discovery would use, or where it would be possibly to explore such a finding with the necessary depth and scrutiny.
I do expect that the channels we'd need to discover something like that exist, and would be used if there were sufficiently strong evidence of something sufficiently important. I'm not saying there would be no pushback or inertia at all, unfortunately it's true that the political incentives around this issue make people skeptical of new findings that push one side's narratives, in the same way that people are skeptical of studies funded by corporations with a monetary interest in the result. But I do think if there were sufficient evidence, it would be picked up eventually.
guesswho
3yr ago
-I take your point about the worse outcomes of embracing negative utilitarianism. My point was that utility calculations are how bad a consequence would be times how likely it is to happen. The odds that we elect a negative utilitarian and applaud as he launches the nukes are very close to the zero; the odds of politicians using rhetoric adjacent to Byrne's to justify bills that restrict the rights of trans people is 'its already happening.'
-I agree that surprising Byrne's book wouldn't help, but I don't even get the impression that's happening, just his publisher getting cold feet. I was focusing on his claim that academics refuse to take him seriously and engage with him in the public square; I do think that declining to publicly engage with people who want a platform for their ideas is meaningfully different from suppression, and can be one part of a balanced strategic response that is positive EV.
-Obviously the ideas do need to be discussed to see if we're missing anything important, and that does happen. That's different from public platforms for reheated memes. If any of the really important possibilities you raise were true, Byrne would not be the one to discover or discuss them, that's not his expertise or approach.
-99.999% of philosophy professors don't have a book or a wide public platform, and I don't think they're automatically obliged to one any more than Byrne is. My point remains that it's reasonable for people to platform and respond to you in proportion to how important and useful your arguments are, and Byrne joins millions of others in not reaching the very high bar needed to justify the type of attention and cooperation he is claiming to deserve.
guesswho
3yr ago
There is no substance to saying that Byrne's arguments are transphobic, there is only hollow condemnation of an outgroup.
When you have to cut off a sentence in the middle to make your point, it's a good indicator that you might be continuing to do the thing I said you were doing, trying to assign someone beliefs they don't actually have and actions they aren't actually taking.
I never called Byrne transphobic, nor anyone else. I've used that word exactly once in this conversation, in a hypothetical example to agree with you that professors would get in trouble for saying transphobic things, and where I also explicitly called out the distinction between that and the milder, non-transphobic arguments on that side of the debate (eg Byrne and you and etc.)
When I literally explicitly say that I am not calling Byrne transphobic, in the latter half of a sentence you quoted the first half of and therefore presumably read, and your response is that I need to stop calling Byrne transphobic, I literally don't know what I'm supposed to say to you. When I twice give substantive criticism of specific arguments and each time you ignore that and say I refuse to engage with teh substance of the arguments, it feels like you don't intend to hear any arguments against your position. It feels like communication is impossible because you're dead set on arguing with a different person who is saying different things.
Is your point just that no argument could ever be transphobic, that the word 'transphobic' is itself meaningless and only used as a rhetorical slur and should never be used in polite conversation? Given how fixated you are on that word appearing one time in a hypothetical and in a way that was specifically not directed at anyone or anything in this conversation, it seems like maybe that's your point. If that's your position it's a pretty bold and broad claim, and you'll need to make it explicit before I respond.
Beyond that, the rest of your post seems to be saying, again, that yes there's a perfectly innocent and cogent way of reading what I wrote, yes it's exactly what I have said I was saying since then, no you don't believe that's what I was saying because you'd rather me be just sneering and insulting people because that's already your impression of everyone who disagrees with you on this topic and fits your narrative and makes you the hero of this exchange.
While your central point seems to be the assertion that I'm 'merely sneering Byrne' to dismiss him, you're happy to completely dismiss everyone I cite as 'culture warriors to the bone' without engaging with any of their arguments, sneer the entire class of people who disagree with you as 'a cult', and sneer me personally in a myriad of ways.
At this juncture, I've made my points, explained what they are several times, defended them with supporting arguments and evidence, offered to discuss other related topics in other ways if that's what would make you happy, and just been repeatedly rebuffed, insulted, and misconstrued.
For a second time, if your objection is that you wish this conversation had been a discussion of the merits of Byrne's arguments (even though that has nothing to do with your original post, which was 'just sneering at' university profs for not engaging in the debate, not about the merits of the arguments themselves), then I'll have that discussion. Go ahead and present the argument from Byrne which you think is worthy of debate, and I'll answer. I'm happy to do the thing you claim no one who disagrees with you will ever do.
If you don't want to do that, it doesn't seem like we have anything else to discuss here.
guesswho
3yr ago
Regarding semantics, I don't know what to tell you, this is a standard academic example for 'the contradictions of capitalism.' Maybe whoever translated Marx originally should have used a different word, I don't know, I don't think that's very important.
But importantly, I do think 'self-correcting mechanism' is way too charitable, and has connotations that miss the point here.
In the case where marginally lower employment leads to marginally lower resource prices leads to marginally higher investment in manufacturing leads back to marginally higher employment again, that's a self-correcting mechanism.
In the case where marginally lower employment leads to disinvestment in manufacturing and investment in financialization and speculation instead, and this process creates a feedback loop that drives more and more of the economy into those sectors until the bubble bursts and there's a large-scale recession, that's not really describing minor course corrections anymore. It's describing a cyclical failure where capitalism cannot function under it's own success, which I think is reasonably described as a contradiction.
When all factors of production, and therefore all consumer goods are no longer scarce, capitalism stops making sense. That's not a contradiction, that's the system's explicitly acknowledged limit.
It feels like we agree on the mechanisms here, and disagree about what to call them or how society reacts to them, or something?
Like, yeah, Marx acknowledged that capitalism inherently produces conditions under which it can no longer function successfully, and needs to be replaced with new systems which can successfully manage the abundance it produced. That's the cliff notes version of one section of his historical materialism.
Capitalists don't explicitly acknowledge that! Standard capitalist rhetoric is, as far as I can tell, that capitalism is just permanently and forever the best way to run an economy, under any circumstances, and any attempts to interfere with or subvert or replace it will only cause suffering and dysfunction.
It's not the case that capitalists are keeping a list of sectors of teh economy where capitalism has succeeded in creating post-scarcity and is no longer needed in that sector and that sector can be handed off to central planning or w/e because capitalism can't handle it anymore. They think capitalism can and should handle everything, and the cases where they insist on that even though they're wrong create the contradiction.
If that happens, but there are other scarce good, the capitalist system directs investment into those goods instead, stopping short of pushing a particular good to post scarcity before it makes sense. Goods going to waste was more often a feature of centrally planned systems, rather than capitalism.
Sadly, no, goods do go to waste or cease being produced under unregulated capitalism; that's one of the reasons we have so many regulations today, which avoid the worst of these tragedies while also capping the amount of benefit capitalism can accrue to society.
Again, this is a contradiction: capitalism is so good at making goods cheap that we need laws to make them more expensive, or else capitalism can't properly distribute them anymore and no one can get enough of them.
guesswho
3yr ago
It feels like you're really dedicated to assigning me a position and actions that I don't hold and am not taking. This assumption about me feels weaved throughout all your comments in a way that makes it hard to respond to the other parts, because engaging with any of it feels like granting your premise about my position.
I never called Byrne transphobic, nor anyone else. I've used that word exactly once in this conversation, in a hypothetical example to agree with you that professors would get in trouble for saying transphobic things, and where I also explicitly called out the distinction between that and the milder, non-transphobic arguments on that side of the debate (eg Byrne and you and etc.)
The fact that professors would get in trouble for actively promoting transphobic ideas to a wide audience, is not evidence that those ideas (or more mild ones on that side of the argument) are correct.
Nor have I failed to engage with Byrne's ideas, in the comment you are currently responding to I called out two big philosophical failings in the first three paragraphs. If you are going to insist, I could go through the whole article you linked, doing a section-by-section analysis and re-explaining the same arguments against each point that everyone here has presumably been familiar with for a decade or so, but that's not related to the point I was originally making and not something I'm super interested in doing.
Because, as I have been trying to communicate, I'm not really making a point about the object-level question about gender philosophy. I'm making a point about the arguments and politics and rhetoric around those issues and how society discusses them, a point which you seem to at least partially agree with while also dismissing as obvious and irrelevant.
If you agree with my point but think it's not relevant to the situation, and would rather discuss all these other points, just say that! What I don't appreciate is assigning me a different point, then challenging me to defend it with citations.
To be clear: my point was that people finding that your ideas don't have enough merit to be worth engaging with, and have been answered so many times already that they don't need to be answered yet again, are sufficient to explain the observations which Byrne instead attributes to fear and weak stomachs. This meta-point about explaining observations in the situation would be equally relevant and valid if it were in some subject I know nothing about, like the historical study of 12th century architecture; my personal ability to refute the claims and cite sources is not relevant to the meta point that this is a sufficient alternate example.
And I think this all leads into another point that's related to my original point and becoming obviously relevant to the way the conversation is going now, which is the idea of the distributed Gish Gallop. The pattern where, thanks to the way modern media and the internet and politics work, the same questions and arguments can be asked and advanced a million times by a million different people, with a much smaller group of people 'responsible' for giving the same answers to each of the million instances, followed by swift declarations of victory and bad faith if they ever get tired or frustrated or bored and fail to answer a single instance, or ever make a single mistake in any of the million responses.
This pattern doesn't require that any one of the people bringing up the same points is being dishonest or hostile, it's at its most effective when a situations can occur when every one of them is more-or-less sincere and trying to engage honestly, because then they can be sincerely and honestly offended when engagement from the other side fails.
To them it looks like they raised these perfectly reasonable questions, one time, and no one wanted to talk to the. They're not considering the other side, where a thousand people wanted to ask you the same question, and you only responded to 500 of them.
Again, if no one had ever responded to ideas like Byrne's, then I'd agree with you that they are failing in their duties.
But my point is that Byrne is not making any new points (in the article you linked), he's making the same standard points and moves that Contrapoints was making videos against half a decade ago, he's using the same hacky attack helicopter logic that was a copypasta meme a full decade ago, he's equivocating between gender and sex without acknowledging the distinction in ways that haven't help academic rigor since de Beauvoir.
I agree that students should see those arguments refuted in the classroom (even if they're already seen them refuted a hundred times on social media and podcasts already), and I'd be surprised and upset if there was a class that was supposed to cover those topics and didn't consider them.
That's not what Byrne is talking about, though, he wants to be a public intellectual with a successful book deal, and to obligate everyone to argue with him in public in order to build his brand and name recognition. That's not actually a duty that accrues to other academics and intellectuals, they do get to choose who they engage with in the public sphere and why. And the nature of the distributed gish gallop on this issue is that many of them are both weary and wary of engaging with the next talking head down the pike repeating these same lines that they've been answering for a decade or more.
It's not actually a duty that accrues to me either, but you seem pretty fixated on it, so I'm willing to move to that topic if you want to go through it. To answer you specific question: people like Lévi-Strauss and Beauvoir and Friedan built the distinction between gender/social roles and physical sexual characteristics which obviates Byrne's 'look in a mirror' argument and makes clear the problem with his equivocation between sex and gender. His confusion about 'core gender identity' could be answered by meditating on Foucault's discussion of how Power creates Subjects. Etc.
Anyway, I'm not especially dedicated to the '60s and 70s' line, I think it's largely correct but I'm not enough of an expert on the history o philosophy to defend it in depth off the top of my head, and don't care enough to be the one responsible for doing all the research in this discussion. If you want me to shift my position to 'that was hyperbolic and wrong, I should have said 80s and 90s instead' then sure, fine, that doesn't really change my point at all.
My point is that in contemporary times, Byrne is not bringing up things that are novel enough that everyone should be expected to excitedly engage with them in the public square today, and I can demonstrate that by linking old Contrapoints videos.
Isn't the cyclical crisis the part that clears out finacialization and speculation?
That's what I would call the collapse, with the crisis being the part where capitalists realize they can't make enough money trying to sell real things to actual people and have to dump everything into financialization instead.
Yes, the collapse is what then clears all that out, restarting the cycle.
We could argue about what to call each part of the cycle, but that's just semantics. My point is that the cycle itself is a contradiction of capitalism, where having it succeed in its natural processes leaves it unable to function properly, until it goes nuts for awhile and suffers a collapse and loses much of those gains.
A non-contradictory process would be one that doesn't suffer from its own success in this way, and has a virtuous cycle that simply turns success into more success instead.
Yes, capitalism will help me figure out whether the vest way to produce more grain under current conditions is with a horse plow or a tractor, and thus make grain less scarce. Yes, it will stop being useful once we reach post-scarcity of factors of production. That is not a contradiction in any way.
What you are missing is the part where grain becomes so plentiful that its price at market drops below the cost to bring it to market, farmers are forced to leave it rotting in fields, and everyone starves. Again, that's why it's a contradiction, the success of the system leaves the world in a new state which the system was not built for and can't accommodate, and the whole thing collapses briefly until the problems it was good at solving exists again.
And that's what happens if you 'don't fix what's not broken': when an excess of abundance drives the price of something too low, no one is incentivized to produce or sell it anymore, and it paradoxically becomes more difficult to find.
That's why we use things like IP laws and price fixing and paying farmers to not grow crops and etc. etc. etc., to prevent that type of collapse and dysfunction when capitalism succeeds in creating a situation it cannot itself function in.
But that type of artificial scarcity and restrictive regulation is, again, it's own type of contradiction: the success of capitalism necessitates and inevitably produces imposed limiters that evaporate much of the potential gain from capitalist innovations.
Re: Byrne... in the third paragraph of the article you link, he pulls the standard trick of switching from using the word 'gender' to the word 'sex' without notice or justification, as if the proposed difference in the meaning of those two terms weren't the entire crux of the question at issue here. In the second paragraph, he plays the standard 'identify as an attack helicopter' card (in this case, a princess) as if this were actually a meaningful comparison.
Yes, it's true that writers back then were not writing things specifically responding to Byrne's specific rhetoric, because that specific rhetoric hadn't been compiled back then.
Better to say that writers back then were already writing things that obviated his arguments. That were sufficiently careful about semantics that they make these types of games obvious and hollow, that explored the different types of social roles and their relation to physical processes, that talked about the battle between society and the individual to define identity and social function, in ways that make his rhetoric look sophomoric.
Much of this doesn't even need to come from writing on gender, the rhetorical tricks being used are broader than that, and flimsy enough to be shown up by more general philosophy.
Re: arguing about which one of us should be treated as the authority on this topic... No, I'm not an academic philosopher working on topics of gender, as I'm pretty sure you aren't either (would have been weird not to mention given the rest of your comment). Yes, I have worked in academia and on faculty in the social sciences, and currently have a wife and several other family and friends working as active professors in various social and hard sciences, and am pretty abreast of all of the issues you mention.
And yes, I'm aware of a lot of professors feeling the type of tension you're talking about, and I'm not denying it exists.
What I am saying, to be as clear as possible, is this:
The fact that professors would get in trouble for actively promoting transphobic ideas to a wide audience, is not evidence that those ideas (or more mild ones on that side of the argument) are correct.
The fact that professors might face social policing for publicly agreeing with or praising Byrne, is not evidence that actually they secretly admire and agree with him but are too chicken to admit it.
This is what I was trying to get at in my first comment and in the first part of my previous comment, and I kind of wish it were where this conversation was focused since it was my original point.
This is not to say that it can never be the case that true, good ideas become unpopular and censured, and that this can lead to them not receiving the attention and respect they should have. This absolutely does happen, and indeed we should be ever vigilant for cases of it.
But it is, in fact, possible for bad and wrong ideas to become unpopular and censured, too.
In fact, we should a priori expect that the happen much more often than the reverse, and my experience of the world leaves me with the belief that this is how it more often goes.
At the very least, an idea being unpopular and censured should not be treated as evidence in favor of it being correct (or important or useful or etc), which I fear is very much the implication I get from articles like Byrne's and threads like this one.
If you will permit me to use the ad absurdum case for clarity, rather than as any kind of insinuation: just because Hitler's ideas are very unpopular and any professor would get censured or fired for publicly endorsing them, is not evidence that actually they are correct or important and need to be discussed more widely and taken more seriously. To the extent there is any causal relationship between those two factors at all, it is probably a negative correlation rather than a positive one.
That's most of what I'm really reacting against, here: my impression that people are using emotional affect against censors and cancel mobs to improperly imply Bayesian evidence in favor of their victims being correct, in ways that drive people towards incorrect conclusions and worse arguments.
I care a little bit about the lives and rights and happiness and etc. of trans people. But I care a lot more about bad argumentation and improper Bayesian reasoning. That's what is driving me nuts, here, and what I find I am ussually agitated by when I read arguments on this topic.
Like, is it really worse than being a negative utilitarian or eliminative materialist?
Well, I suppose it depends on whether you're talking virtue ethics/deontology or consequentialism.
Because yeah, a lot of things that are 'the same' under virtue ethics or deontology, are extremely different under consequentialism.
Once speakers at national conventions are talking about 'eliminating' groups of people to wide applause, it does raise the stakes on discussing the ideas their rhetoric is drawing from.
Definitely that's not really fair to the people who care about those ideas as ideas rather than policy goals, and who don't support the policies or more extreme rhetoric of those speakers. As someone who is interested in some leftist ideas, trust me, that's a hurt I'm intimately familiar with.
If Byrne had said 'when push comes to shove, philosophy professors are largely utilitarians who are reluctant to promote ideas that they think will lead to real people being actively harmed', I'd have a lot more sympathy for his point and find it a lot more interesting to discuss. He didn't say that though, he said they were cowards who were afraid of being ostracized.
Do you think it's possible to make the gender-critical/anti-trans philosophical arguments without being annoying and mean / having your book banned?
When you ask blanket questions like this, the only correct answer is 'of course it's possible, anything is possible.'
Is it likely?... well, let me say that I think there's quite a lot of adverse selection at play in the current political environment, with regards to what type of gender-critical writing aimed at mass popular audiences is likely to get picked up by publishers and catch enough attention for people to hear about it.
Basically, this topic has been mind-killed in the popular imagination by dint of becoming a political football, and it's no easier to have a civil and well-measured discussion about it in popular media outlets than it is to have one about gun control or Trump or critical race theory or etc. One side is not interested in reading anything that's at all critical of modern gender movements, the other side is not interested in hearing any criticism of them which is polite or well-intentioned.
We're talking about a popular media book for general audiences that a publisher picked up and got somewhat wide attention. No, I think it's very very unlikely that any piece of gender-critical writing could reach that position in the current political climate without being annoying and mean.
Byrne's book, as far as I can tell, was quite reasonable, kind, and philosophical.
I have admittedly not read any excerpts from the book itself, but the linked article from Byrne should presumably be representative, and is quite feeble IMO. Starting with the standard 'The dictionary defines gender as' spiel and the long-since hacky 'identifying as an attack helicopter' bit (in this case a princess), going straight into equivocating between the words gender and sex with no acknowledgement as if the proposed difference between those two terms weren't the entire crux of the article, slipping in standard right-wing blood libel rhetoric about desistance and mutilating infants through the back door of 'not infrequently (estimates vary)' and 'let us imagine', etc.
It is certainly true that Byrne takes on the affect of a polite, kind, and reasonable philosopher who is 'just asking questions'. In the same way that Ben Shapiro takes on the affect of being a smart, rational, fact-driven intellectual, despite actually being a kind of dumb affect-driven political hack. What Byrne is actually talking about (at least in the linked article) is mostly the same semantic games and innuendo that other conservative talking heads have been pedaling for a decade at this point, said with a lot more words and the aesthetic layout of a logical proof, but not that much more substance. And as his actions have shown, he's more than happy to jump on the conservative 'I've-been-cancelled the-left-is-intolerant' fame-and-fortune tour that is a clear and persistent political cudgel of the right.
So, yeah. If you're used to reading anti-trans stuff from politically-motivated right-wing talking heads, Byrne is certainly one of the most polite and thoughtful and restrained of those available.
Is he an important and meaningful philosopher with anything academically rigorous or interesting to say? Do his ideas demand serious response on their own merits, outside of their political import? I certainly haven't seen anything yet that would indicate as much.
guesswho
3yr ago
I have no idea what is better now than when I was younger, any more than my parents knew about or understood the cool stuff I was paying attention to when I was a teen.
So many times I've been blindsided by some cool new thing I'd never heard of, only to find that it has five hundred million rabid fans already.
I have a fair amount of faith that lots of things are better, even if I don't know what they are.
guesswho
3yr ago
True enough, something significant has to happen before any of these solutions will be allowed to be implemented.
guesswho
3yr ago
Sure!
A classic contradiction is that strong bargaining power by the capitalist class over the working class tends to lead to increased production and corporate profits at the same time it leads to decreased wages for consumers and a drop in demand for goods and services, creating a cyclical crisis that tends to drives productive capability away from consumer goods and services and into things like financialization and speculation, which leads to bubble bursts and depressions.
One of the contradictions I was trying to point out here is that capitalism is great at increasing productivity so that valuable goods and services become less scarce, but also relies on scarcity to set prices and cannot natively incentivize the production and distribution of post-need goods. This contradiction becomes more and more relevant to our everyday lives as capitaisms's successes drive more and more things into the post-scarcity category, with effects such as a marginal additional pill that costs 3 cents to make costing hundreds of dollars to buy, or governments being pressured into making and rabidly enforcing IP laws.
guesswho
3yr ago
You're certainly right, I was just narrowly addressing the question by examining the US/Israel analogy it used. It definitely takes two to tango in situations like this, and either side probably could be in a better place today by being more civil in the past.
I do personally have an ethos that says the burden of being civilized and absorbing affronts while continuing to reach for peace should always be on the stronger and more comfortable party in any conflict, partially because they can afford it, partially because that burden is the only way to end up at anything like an equitable resolution to a conflict between a stronger and weaker party.
But I acknowledge that there's something there in the intuition of 'the stronger party should overwhelm the weaker party brutally and efficiently so that the bad equilibrium ends quickly and hopefully the new equilibrium is better for everyone'.
I think that approach is too vulnerable to abuse and exploitation and works worse overall, but maybe this is one of those cases where different contexts call for different solutions and I am overgeneralizing my heuristics to a situation where they don't work.
/shrug, glad it's not my call.
guesswho
3yr ago
laughter is irrelevant to whether the target is actually right or wrong
It's strong Bayesian evidence.
The balance of evidence is often wrong, that's why we need to keep studying.
But having the balance of evidence against you is neither irrelevant to the question of whether you're right, nor is it a badge of honor that should be lionized with rhetoric like the 'first they laugh at you' line.
It was directed at the person whose quote I was responding to, which is Byrne. I thought that was unambiguous as it was a direct reply to a direct quote, sorry if it was not.
That's not an "or." They obviously think that. It's the fact that they only seem to think that when CNN tells them to that is, at best, awfully suspicious.
I think that 'they are scared of being ostracized if they agree with me' and 'they actually disagree with me' are mutually exclusive reasons for why someone would say they disagree with you.
(or at least redundant in a way that makes them rhetorically exclusive)
Of course it is possible for both to be true, but genuinely disagreeing with you is sufficient reason for them to say they disagree with you. If they actually disagree with you, you don't need to go further to search for sinister or cowardly motives for why they are claiming to disagree with you, and doing so becomes uncharitable.
Why they are aligned with what CNN would want them to say is a meaningful question, but it's a different question from this. Again, if they believed Byrne was right, or at least interesting and useful, then CNN would be a good explanation for why they act like he's not... but if they genuinely have no use for him anyway, then bringing CNN into it is needlessly multiplying entities.
There's also a certain thread of history that goes "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Yes, that sounds like a pretty good description of the trans rights movement.
It's not like there some ancient historical tradition of trans rights, and it's only now that brave new voices are stepping forth to propose that sex and gender are teh same thing actually. The people you're describing here are the people representing the status quo in intellectual development and common sense for the past thousands of years. They are the people laughing at Socrates.
They have not spent thousands of pages explaining why Byrne is wrong
They have, they just did it in like the 60s and 70s, when academic philosophy was first exploring these issues in a systematic way.
People like Byrne are not a new emerging philosophical ideas, they're just a political backlash to a long-established school of philosophical study emerging into mainstream acceptance and actually affecting our daily lives.
The reason it's not worth serious people's time to engage with the likes of Byrne and Tuvel is that they're not saying anything genuinely new that hasn't been written about and argued about a thousands times decade ago. They're just aiming it at a new audience of political laymen who aren't familiar with the literature and think it's all brilliant new ideas.
That's interesting to know, and I believe it for the average person who gets a public defender, which is enough of the cases in existence that it's very relevant to the overall question.
In the specific examples here, though, do you really think that's what it will be like for Trump? Or would be like for the hypothetical rich newspaper owner?
I have the intuition that, if you're paying for your own team of 5 or 20 lawyers, you get a lot more time to talk and a lot more discretion over what you say.
But I have never actually watched any court proceedings in detail, so I could still be wrong.
More options
Context Copy link