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Notes -
What are the limits of the weak man?
Note: Although this post cites specific real-life examples, the intent of the discussion is intended to be entirely at the meta level.
Scott Alexander's definition is apt to cite:
Also instructive is Bryan Caplan's gradation:
What Caplan is describing as "collective straw manning" seems to be a good scale for weakmanning's range. And lastly, consider also Julian Sanchez's disclaimer:
At least in theory, I think weakmanning should be avoided, but I struggle with how to draw the line exactly. If your goal is to avoid weakmanning, there's at least two axes that you must consider:
All the possible arguments for position X, ranked on a spectrum from least to most defensible.
All the possible arguments for position X, ranked on a spectrum from least to most *representative *of believers in X.
Weakmanning is not much of an issue if you're arguing against a single individual, because they either endorse the particular arguments or not. You can't showcase the error of one's ways by refuting arguments they never held.
But generally we tend to argue over positions endorsed by many different people, where each person may differ with regard to which argument they either advance or prioritize, so what should count as "representative"?
For example, many people believe in the theory of evolution, but some believers do so under the erroneous belief that evolutionary change occurs within an individual organism's lifespan. [I know some smartass in the comments will pipe up about some endangered tropical beetle or whatever does demonstrate "change-within-lifespan" evolutionary changes. Just remember that this is not an object-level discussion.] If you use a crude heuristic and only poll relevant experts (e.g. biology professors) you're not likely to encounter many adherents of the "change-within-lifespan" argument, so this could be a decent filter to narrow your focus on what should count as "representative" for a given position. This is generally an effective tactic, since it helps you avoid prematurely declaring victory at Wrestlemania just because you trounced some toddlers at the playground.
But sometimes you get a crazy position believed by crazy people based on crazy arguments, with a relatively tiny minority within/adjacent to the community of believers aware of the problems and doing the Lord's work coming up with better arguments. InverseFlorida coined the term "sanewashing" to describe how the meaning of "defund the police" (DTP) shifted [TracingWoodgrains described the same dynamic with the gentrification of /r/antiwork. Credit also to him for most of the arborist-themed metaphor in this post.] to something much more neutered and, correspondingly, much more defensible:
Keep in mind that this is not an object-level discussion on the merits of DTP. Assume arguendo that the "sanewashed" arguments are much more defensible than the "crazy" ones they replaced. If someone were to take a position against DTP by arguing against the now obsolete arguments, one of the sanewashers would be technically correct accusing you of weakmanning for daring to bring up that old story again. This fits the literal definition of weakmanning after all.
As Sanchez noted above, for most people for most positions, intuition predates rationality. They stumble around in the dark looking for any sort of foothold, then work backwards to fill in any necessary arguments. Both the sanewashers and the crazies are reliant on the other. Without the sanitization from the hygiene-minded sanewashers, the position would lack the fortification required to avoid erosion; and without the crazy masses delivering the bodies and zeal, the position would fade into irrelevance. The specific ratio may vary, but this dynamic is present in some amount on any given position. You very likely have already experienced the embarrassment that comes from a compatriot, purportedly on your side, making an ass of both of youse with their nonsensical arguments.
If your ultimate goal is truth-seeking, weakmanning will distract you into hacking away at worthless twigs rather than striking at the core. But sometimes the goal isn't seeking truth on the specific position (either because it's irrelevant or otherwise already beyond reasonable dispute) and instead the relevant topic is the collective epistemological dynamics [I dare you to use this phrase at a dinner party without getting kicked out.]. InverseFlorida's insightful analysis would not have been possible without shining a spotlight on the putative crazies — the very definition of weakmanning in other words.
Here's the point, at last. Normally someone holding a belief for the wrong reasons is not enough to negate that belief. But wherever a sanewasher faction appears to be spending considerable efforts cleaning up the mess their crazy neighbors keep leaving behind, it should instigate some suspicion about the belief, at least as a heuristic. Any honest and rational believer needs to grapple for an explanation for how the crazies managed to all be accidentally right despite outfitted — by definition — with erroneous arguments. Such a scenario is so implausible that it commands a curious inquiry about its origin.
It's possible that this inquiry unearths just another fun episode in the collective epistemological dynamics saga; it's also possible the probe ends up exposing a structural flaw with the belief itself. In either circumstances, a weakmanning objection is made in bad faith and intended to obfuscate. Its only purpose is to get you to ignore the inconvenient, the annoying. You should pay no heed to this protest and continue deploying the magnifying glass; don't be afraid to focus the sun's infernal rays into a burning pyre of illumination. Can you think of any reasons not to?
A sleep-deprived rant that may be missing your argument:
I agree with this meta-post. But, in fairness, I suspect that the biggest intellectual deficit of the rationalsit culture is precisely this preoccupation with the meta. Half a high school debate club, half a nerd cult of reason, with very little exposure to empirical matters and gratitious amounts of speculative fiction plus a sprinkling of Talmudic education – this is our foundation. This hothouse allowed nuanced, hypothetical concepts to thrive, concepts which would not have lasted a day in a challenging object-level environment; indeed, some even become apex predators, like «infohazard». Or steelmanning. More terms and tools aren't always good; they can get reified and multiply confusion.
I don't think that arguments which get called out as «weakmanning» typically address a weak point, or a nonrepresentative point, per se. They address, and attack, that which their speaker think the other party actually believes, on basis of reasoning about their broader philosophy; specific illustrations are only for convenience. If it doesn't, at the moment, match the other party's consensus (however we establish it), that is immaterial. We can protest brining subpar evidence for an assertion about such essential belief, but it's important to know whether the assertion is meant to depend on the evidence presented.
How is «weakman» different from «the bailey»? «Steelman» from «sanewashing» or «the motte»? Those are all loaded terms (sanewashing implies the insanity of the main body of belief) and some comments offer a sensible perspective, eg @DuplexFields here. But in real scenarios each politically significant group has a wide gamut of opinions (as in, comprehensive interpretation of what the group «is about»), from the most idiotically extremist and unsubstantiated to fruitlessly anodyne to plain dumb (with tiny pockets of well-reasoned extremists); it's an exercise in futility to classify whether a particular take X' falls within the normal range for X-affiliated distribution of takes, or somewhat on its fringes (weakman) or just at the very edge of self-parody and not recognized as a legitimate variant by the consensus (strawman). (Language allows endless compositionality, so even a crazy rant can be construed as an inapt appeal to common sense.)
The futility goes deeper. Yes, there are ways for bizarre outliers to come to be which are basically unrelated to the position's essence, so strawmen do not tell us much about the big tent or merits of its ideology, and in this vein it could seem meaningful to identify them. But I'd argue it doesn't even matter if no such caricatures have proven existence. So long as the position is well-documented enough, it is appropriate to discuss its implications even if no proponent (again, recognized as such by the group's consensus) is currently willing to bite the bullet. And in fact this method is constantly applied to non-mainstream views.
The obvious example: consider the beeline from HBD to eugenics to racism and fascism; this is not so much a matter of historical association as it's recognition that these object-level views can be used to support illiberal policies; they don't have to, but it can work.
Consider, also, that merely a few months ago, back in the gentle age where plans like «inflating regulatory burden to obstruct AI research» were considered beyond the pale, Yudkowsky disavowed all violence in pursuit of AI risk reduction, and cranks like me were saying that utilitarianism + AI Doom doctrine imlies impossibility to trust such disawovals, that in the end AI Doomers will be willing to embrace totalitarianism. Lo and behold, now he advocates for airstrikes and worse. It wasn't the threat model that changed, it wasn't his philosophy; what changed was the Overton window, and the logic of his doctrine realigned his expressed views accordingly. Could this have been predicted by Yudkowsky?
I don't know. I don't even know if I could predict my own reaction to the invasion of Ukraine on February 23rd, 2022. But I was saying then that it probably won't happen, because it's so absurd, and I mocked Western intelligence that played up all the saber-rattling on the border; and many people who seemed to be on the same page as me then proceeded to enthusiastically support the Z operation, to the point of cheering for unhinged barbarism. It turned out that I was the fringe, not them; that the logic of our stated ideology, in a timeline like this, flows like that – just as predicted by our oh-so-despicable opponents. They were correct to interpret the outspoken outliers as signs of things to come; they were correct to dismiss me when I was saying that those strawmen or weakmen are not representative of the whole. I can steelman Russian Nationalism. I cannot redeem it.
I don't think people who can operate at many layers of abstraction are fools (and people who can't, generally can't benefit from appeals to these epistemological categories). They can understand positions fine, and they can see the distribution of voices as well as anyone, pointing out to them that this specific voice is X deviations from the median on the axis of quality or popularity is not a very good use of time. The disagreement is mainly about how a given position, adopted by a given group, works out in reality; what it collapses into.
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I think this is the core of the argument. Arguments are soldiers and all that, breach the argumentative frontline at its weakest point and deliver debilitating strikes to the opponent's rear. Why would you do that if your goal is truth-seeking? The only justifiable argumentation I can think of is: the motte of some idea X is fine, but the bailey its proponents are trying to occupy has dangerous consequences. I can't destroy the motte, but it's strictly good to attack that idea's bailey in the most efficient way until they stop sallying from the motte.
It depends on your ultimate goal and level of opposition. If you actually believe in the motte, you think it is a true position that you yourself share or at least don't object to, but believe is being exploited to defend a harmful bailey, then this is entirely appropriate. If you destroy the bailey and everyone stays in the motte then you are content.
If, however, you fundamentally disagree with the entire position, are attempting to tear down both the motte and bailey, and simply focus on the bailey more often because it's easier, then there's a sort of dishonesty here. The weakman fallacy is when you point out flaws in the bailey and then use those to try to tear down the motte. In this scenario, even in the event that you push people out of the bailey you then switch tactics to fighting the motte afterwards using the victories over the bailey as momentum. In some sense, this is a fulfillment of the slippery slope: as soon as you accomplish X you then keep pushing towards Y. Which is fine if you are honest about it from the beginning, admitting that you disagree with both and are prioritizing the bailey first because it's easier. But is a problem if you pretend that they Bailey is the only problem up until you win that battle and then immediately launch a surprise attack on the motte (and/or attack people who are already motte-only people using bailey arguments).
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I used to get criticized and attacked all the time by people, who claimed I was always trying to 'win' some argument in the conversation being had. And I usually was only met with that reply, for attempting to keep things on course and refusing to let the topic just irrationally jump from one unrelated point to another. I was never as concerned with 'truth-seeking' so much as I was determined to establish 'some' kind conclusion within the topic being had. Conversations that are had recreationally with no ended aim in mind, annoy the hell out of me in the vast majority of cases. But I think people are getting 'far' too much mileage out of terms like 'strawmanning' or 'steelmanning' or 'weakmanning'.
I think there are few basic distinctions that on some level, are common to all terms used to capture this concept. Most people aren't very adept at 'precisely' articulating their arguments. People epistemologically always know 'more' than they're capable of expressing through language. For most of them, they can only approximate, at 'best' what it is they're 'trying' to say. And that's where all the haggling over the various -manning, takes place; IMO. There's what people are 'trying' to say, and then there's what they're 'actually' saying. I don't think any of those terms apply entirely, across the board as a general rule. You have to ask yourself what the purpose of your argument is.
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I feel about this post the way I feel about articles that say wine or chocolate in moderation has mild health benefits. Maybe there are some people who would benefit from adding a small amount of dark chocolate to their diet and this is valuable information to them, but most people are going to use that information to justify excessive consumption. Maybe there are some people who are so devoted to steel manning that they're missing out on important insights because they accept too many bad-faith weakman objections, but most people need to be pushed to focus on their opponent's best arguments. There are many, many sites on the internet that can be described as a magnifying glass focused on the outgroup's crazies, and most of them produce circle-jerks and dunk contests rather than a burning pyre of illumination. There's no alpha left in trying to detect structural flaws in your opponent's position based on their dumbest arguments.
There might be a tiny tiny bit of alpha in trying to explain the outgroup's collective epistemological dynamics, but "my opponents say they believe this because of x, but they really are motivated by y" is not exactly an untapped field of inquiry online either.
I don't think this is as unlikely as you say. Many political issues are directional in the near term (e.g. should taxes/welfare/prison sentence length go slightly up or down relative to status quo). Many crazies who you disagree with about the optimal tax level are going to end up on your side of the "should taxes go up or down' debate. Your opponents and engagement-driven social media have strong incentives to emphasize the crazies on your side, and you have a strong incentive to downplay their extremity by sane-washing them.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/
Qua Scott, there are many pathologically selfish and selfless people in the world. Selfish people need to hear the message that other people's preferences matter and you can't always put yourself first. Selfless people need to hear the message that it is sometimes okay to put yourself first. But group A might hear the message/content intended for group B and use it to justify their destructive behaviour, and vice versa.
I feel this way about a lot of modern "self-care" content, which seems like it was (at least initially) intended to give some measure of succour to genuine victims of child abuse, bullying or similar, but was quickly co-opted by selfish narcissists (invariably claiming to suffer from some nebulously defined "trauma") to rationalize their self-absorption and inconsiderate behaviour. Or indeed a lot of journalistic content about the dangers of excessive exercise, which may be useful advice to the handful of legitimate fitness freaks out there, but likely ends up being consumed by the obese and sedentary as a reason not to go for a walk.
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Are you sanewashing weakmanning?
There is an obvious incentive to “continue deploying the magnifying glass” whether your source is the sun or, uh, a flashlight.* Scott says it right in the title—Weak Men are Superweapons. It sure is convenient when one’s enemies are as vicious as they are stupid. Any honest and rational believer should be very suspicious indeed.
Not that it’s wrong to hammer on a specific factual claim! But you’re risking getting dragged into a definitional dispute. Surely no true Scotsman would believe X, or Y, or Z. It’s defining by exclusion.
Fortunately, the truth does actually exist. An accusation of weakmanning probably looks like “but most people don’t believe that!” I think it’s better to respond with “okay, what do they (or you) believe?” Not only is this more charitable, but it gets people to anchor on actual predictions. By all means, shoot holes in their arguments, not the ones they aren’t even making. If they try to sanewash, ask whether that motte supports other parts of the bailey. The more time they spend carefully thinking, the better.
Say you have a hypothetical segregationist with the sincere belief that black people deserve fewer rights than everyone else. When you ask him about this, he denies any ill will towards black people, and accuses you of weakmanning him as one of those extremists. I don’t think it’s very practical to go after policies one by one and explain how they fit your suspicion. Instead, you should let him attempt to set up his sanewashed stance, then take it apart. “You claim to only want more control over who gets your tax dollars. Explain how this justifies anti-miscegenation laws?” Either you get him to disavow the more extreme, less consistent positions, or you generate a lot of cognitive dissonance. Give him the rope to hang himself.
* As much as I like the term “sanewashing,” given your choice of analogies, you really should have gone with something like “Bleached Ideas.” Kind of has a LessWrong sound to it, no?
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.
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You make some good points. The question of how I may effectively debate a suspected sanewasher is distinct from whether the prevalence of sanewashers means I should disbelieve something.
The most relevant Scottposts are in the Conflict vs. Mistake series, but I don’t know that he argued we actually have similar goals. (That does sound like a LessWrong position…) Scott seemed to recognize that the conflict-mode was way more realistic for things which could be considered “values differences.”
I framed it as individual conversations in part because of ymeskhout’s last paragraph, which I assumed meant debate. It does make more sense if he’s talking about blogposts or other one-sided constructions. Even so, it strikes me as rather…conflict-theorist. Is there really no legitimate reason why an opponent would accuse you of weakmanning? If I really am tilting at windmills, then I’ve done something wrong.
As for bleaching…fair enough. I was thinking of Tvtropes’s Bleached Underpants, referring to a very particular sort of censorship. Though I will say the negative connotation of bleaching is still appropriate for sanewashing. I think sanewashing is more an accusation than a self-description. In that context, it makes sense that the (deceptive) sane version gets the negative connotation, even if the insane versatile is also despised.
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Failure to recognize that some of your enemies are evil is why rationalism is so full of quokkas.
And like drinking wine in moderation, or selfishness/selflessness, or all the other ideas to which this applies, some people need to see fewer of their enemies as evil, and some people need to see more of their enemies as evil.
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This is valid, but then you have to make sure this is actually what's happening. It seems like it might be easy to assume that this is happening, without looking closely at the history of the ideas. Or you might even have different groups coming to a vaguely similar conclusion, but independently--neither is trying to "fix" the other.
My main confusion with this post, though, is seeming to conflate positions with arguments. The DTP example seems like it refers to different sets of claims of what to do rather than reasons why we should it. The moderate liberals aren't coming in and cleaning up after the radicals made a mess, tidying up the support columns after they accidentally built a beautiful cathedral. They're both reacting to perceived injustice, but one is going further in the other direction than the other. Sometimes the arguments they use ("racism is bad") will overlap, sometimes they won't ("we can entirely replace police with X"/"no we can't").
Scott's post seems to blur this distinction as well. It's a combination of "social dynamics that cause strange groupings of people" and "what is actually correct?" If all you, personally, care about, is whether God exists, then you should only care about the strongest arguments from the most reasonable proponents. If you, personally, are just trying to decide on what public policy to support, then it shouldn't really matter what the relationship is between moderate reform liberals and radical DTP leftists. But it does matter politically, for the reasons Scott describes.
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.
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For the DTP example, the issue exists with both positions and arguments. There's the "should we defund the police?" position question, which definitely gets muddled with whether it means "slashing budgets to 0" or just "changing definition of 'police' to no longer include 911 dispatchers". But even if you pick one DTP position and hold it static, there's still going to be sanity variance within the respective arguments, such as "crime will disappear once we get rid of capitalism" versus "there may be downsides but we'd be better off on net without police given that they steal more than robbers do".
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I brought that point up in my response to the original post.
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I sort of lean towards weak-manning not being a thing, and any view that anyone holds is fair game. But treating every member of a group as if they have to defend every weak position of their side is a form of waging the culture war. It commonly happens in the real world, but I'd hope to avoid it here.
One specific reason why I find weak-manning ok, is that the arguments themselves don't play fair, and so I'm not gonna play fair in trying to tear them down.
Consider something like humor and comedy. A funny thing does not have to be true. So false and true ideas can both be supported by comedy. Humor can work as a an argument for something because people like laughing, they might be laughing at a viewpoint, or laughing with the presenter. But ultimately its just an association of a happy emotion with a certain political viewpoint. It is one of the purest examples of "arguments as soldiers".
Arguments that might be "weak" around here, because they are objectively foolish or devoid of logic/evidence, could actually be some of the strongest arguments out in 'the wild'. Religion is a good example to bring up. One of the reasons I've seen people start to believe in the Christian faith is because they are fundamentally broken people, and being convinced that someone loves and cares about them is a salve to their wounded minds. That there is no evidence the sky-god exists and actually loves them is not something that they appreciate people pointing out. They aren't seeking truth. They are seeking medicine. And you are ruining their placebo. However, when they try to shove the religion down my throat the kid-gloves that I'd normally use come off.
Similar things with politics. Some of the people I know that support one of the major parties seem to do it out of the same tribal part of their brain that supports sports teams. Evidence and reason don't actually matter very much to them. I don't go to sports games and point out that many of the athletes are probably using steroids. Because sports games don't come after me or my bank account. Politicians do come after me. So again, the kid gloves are off. All the stupid arguments are getting called out. What I once did, and no longer bother to ever do, is to seek out the strongest arguments for a position and try to knock those down.
There are a complex set of economic arguments for why minimum wage might be good. It has to do with elasticities of prices, monopsony, and some complex models. But luckily ~100% of people arguing for minimum wage don't know any of those arguments. If you brought out those arguments to try and knock them down they'd just get annoyed and angry at you. "No, I support a higher minimum wage because people should be paid enough to survive!"
I'd like everyone here to consider that what they think are "weak-man" arguments might actually be the strong arguments for a thing. We are coincidentally in a place where logic and evidence have some advantages as argumentative techniques. But that is by design, and something that has to be enforced.
I think they are more thinking along the lines of why is it that some of the other employees of the firm they work for earn manyfold as much as they do and that they are thinking about minimum wage increases for them being funded by decreases in the wages of the higher earners, but in reality that scenario requires the government to regulate all wages not just the minimum.
Basic math should be used to address those concerns. A million dollar salary can only be split twenty times to pay 50k salaries
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I think weak man is sort of a strange way to put it. I would give as a principle that a good representation of the position of your opponent is one that a reasonably studied adherent would argue for himself.
It would be disingenuous to argue that Christianity is true because Constantine saw a vision of a cross. No one who’s studied the issues would hold that position. As such refuting Christianity on the basis of debunking the conversion of Constantine isn’t a good faith argument. It’s irrelevant to the issues at hand. Better would be arguing from history or Jewish scriptures or something along those lines. The argument being that the scripture doesn’t actually say what you think it says, or that history doesn’t record what you think it records.
Well sure. Because he saw a chi-ro. =P
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This is a repost from https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/58cZF7ZnJyxbArGYP/what-are-the-limits-of-the-weak-man
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There is also the dynamic of movements that are composed of many contradictory cores, maintained by sanewashers who's arguments contradict each other, pointed in the same direction that all have their own sets of features. Feature sets that can't possibly be sane washed all at once but are all vaguely in the same direction and are all held simultaneously by some weak men. I think the trans movement has a lot of these and it makes it very difficult to argue against either as a whole or in detail. You have people who believe in sexual dysphoria to argue with whenever you go after whether transgenderism is even a meaningful concept but when you go after whether you should be able to gatekeep certain institutions you are met with claims that gender is a social construct that we can define any way we want. You may even get meta sane washing that can cover both of these two features at the expense of some other feature but the glue that holds it all together are the weak men that really don't put any effort into reconciling their beliefs into a coherent whole. This all leads to arguing against any movement like this feeling like moving through mud where you spend most of the time just hashing out the particular axioms the interlocutor is even operating on today which just so happen to be perfectly tuned for this one subject and totally incapable of defending a different topic.
This is precisely what inspired this post. I had a post sitting in my drafts for months, largely because of an ever-present concern that I was weakmanning or otherwise nutpicking the crazies. I tried to map out the movement and figure out who should be representative, but then even purported authority figures say absolutely insane shit (e.g. the head psychologist of a major hospital's gender clinic talks about babies giving "gendered signals" because they took off a barrette or some shit).
I have no idea who I'm supposed to turn to, so I wrote this instead.
Good Lord. Some loo-lah asks about "how can you tell in pre-verbal children if they're trans" (so, kids too young to have mastered simple speech yet) and Doctor Psychologist Lady gives the example of a toddler tearing out barrettes and sobbing.
That doesn't mean they're trans, it means they don't like the feeling of clips in their hair! They could be autistic! They could have sensory issues! They could just not like how the clips are too tight!
I know this was held in San Francisco, but is there not one sane person in the entire city?
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I guess I’m one of those people that sanewashes the transgender movement - I don’t agree with 100% or maybe even 50% of the movement, but I do feel compelled to defend it to some degree because at least it defends my right to be accepted in society and have access to healthcare I need, unlike the current anti-trans conservatives in the US. That’s one of the downsides of the culture, you’re thinking about picking a fight with an ideological monolith and losing all the nuances from discussing individual philosophical differences.
However I feel obligated to point out that you picked a wrong example from the transgender movement; how is sexual dysphoria contradictory with gender being a social construct? You can argue that they’re unrelated, you could feel dysphoric about having the physical characteristics of your biological sex, and you could have gender dysphoria about being treated as a man or a woman in society; the latter would go away in a theoretical society where men and women were treated 100% the same, whereas the former would be present even on a desert island.
If you wanted weak men of the transgender movement, pick the tucutes who believe gender dysphoria isn’t necessary to be trans, that gender presentation isn’t related to gender identity, and that it’s transphobic to be a gay man and not want to pleasure a trans man’s vagina. Those are actual beliefs held by some people in the community and much more contradictory in that they devalue the very concept of gender identity.
The problem is we don't hear from the ordinary trans people who just want to live their lives and will not have a meltdown every five minutes about trans genocide if somebody doesn't use the exact correct right pronouns.
We hear from the extremists and the crazies, and those are the ones who then set the public image for ordinary people of what transgender is all about. And instead of being willing to compromise and agree that yeah, this particular view is extreme and not representative, the allies and supporters and organisations and activists all rush out to say that if you don't accept 110% what Extreme View says, you are literally murdering trans people in an intentional genocide.
First, sex and gender were two separate things and nobody was denying biology, you bigot. That soon swerved into sex and gender are the same thing, and when I say gender I mean my sex, and biology not real, bigot. Then if you're not up to date on the latest terminology and get confused because "hey, I thought gender and sex were different?", you're a transphobe monster.
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I'll split this into two parts and you can respond to both, either or neither as you please.
If you're making a coherent argument or at least making a good faith attempt at a coherent argument I do think I owe you actual arguments in return and the follow section will contain those. That said it actually does matter that your faction has decisively lost the mainstream and that the people driving the movement call you 'scum' precisely because of some of the axioms your arguments rest on in order to remain coherent.
To reverse the tables at least on myself. I believe in the importance of gun rights because they are a ward against tyranny. I don't particularly find self defense reasoning all that compelling. If it turned out that my pro-gun position was an extreme minority that would not get its way if not for the self defense position, and the self defense position ends up being bogus then I think that should matter politically. The people making the wrong argument about self defense should rightfully be convinced against their position(again assuming it's wrong) and I should actually have to convince those people of my position as well. If I fail then I fail and the power wielded in my interest by my larger faction was never mine to wield at all. Now it might be the case that these other people, even if convinced against the self defense portions of gun control might fall back to my ward against the tyranny of the state position but if they frequently called people who believe my argument 'wardscum', because I wasn't in favor of policies that might aid in self defense but not have any impact as a ward against tyranny like more guns in schools, well that's evidence against the possibility.
Again, you may philosophically owe me an actual argument against my position but if, given everyone heard all the arguments, you have the votes and I don't then you win. If I only have the votes for reasons totally unrelated and unsupportable by my position then I've only gotten lucky and this should concern me because, if for no other reason, my luck could change.
The problem with this being a 'weak man' is that it's the majority opinion espoused both by practically every expert and every activist. While I may owe you an argument we both know the arguments that would defeat the majority of the movement and we both know that they're resistance to the arguments has nothing at all to do with them having a coherent and workable worldview. And while from your perspective the world where they rule, warts and all, is worth it for your own reasons from my perspective there are a lot of kids who will be mutilated by these people on this pyre. Just like many kids will die in school shootings for lack of gun control I have a hard bullet biting answer for it being worth it but I recognize I'm biting quite a bullet here.
Let me see if I can pass the ideological turing test on your position and let me know where I fail:
You believe, bolstered especially by your personal experience, that there is a condition similar to body integrity disorder centered on primary and secondary sex characteristics. You call this 'sexual dysphoria' and believe the best treatment is hormones and possibly surgery as analogous to a BID patient getting an offending arm amputated. It's a rare and unfortunate condition that we wish we could solve without these drastic actions but this is unfortunately the best we can do. We should all do our best to accommodate people, like yourself.
Further for historically contingent reasons there are many behaviors and practices that society "genders" with two categories which have traditionally people have been assigned to at birth by their sex. These behaviors are largely arbitrary, in the past boys were associated with pink and now girls are. These barriers are silly and limiting. Society would be better to rid itself of them and treat everyone as they want to be treated.
I have problems with this position but I'd like you to correct/bolster it where wrong before I got off arguing against something you don't believe.
Bit of a late reply but unfortunately I lost my previous attempt, so here goes:
I do think there’s a very good point you’re making about the risks of allying with people who are ostensibly after the same end goals but for completely different reasons; but I think the differences between say, your position on firearms and one motivated by self-defence are smaller than between you and someone pro gun control. Ideological purity is a fractal and I don’t think it’s possible to agree 100% with any individual on policy or societal goals, but that doesn’t mean there’s not individuals with whom you agree more than others.
I’m not American so the concept of the 2nd amendment or frequent school shootings is very foreign to me, but I admire the fact that you don’t brush them aside. I do understand the concerns with surgeries on minors, but the number is very low (56 genital surgeries between 2019-2021, 776 top surgeries) and my experience is that there is a significant amount of gatekeeping - I’m not sure about the US but in my country you need a gender identity disorder diagnosis + referral letters from two psychiatrists and that’s as an adult. Calling it “mutilation” is emotionally charged language that brings to mind violent traumatic maiming, when the end goal is a surgery that improves the patient’s life.
Your attempt at the Turing test is mostly correct except for the comparison to a BID patient getting an arm amputated; no pro-trans rights person would make that point.
Firstly, the end goal of becoming an amputee vs becoming the opposite sex is very different; if done perfectly, the former will impair your daily functioning and makes you unable to do things the average healthy person can, while a perfect sex change wouldn’t - unless you want to argue that 50% of the population is somehow impaired compared to the other.
Current technology doesn’t give you a perfect sex change, but I don’t see how any of the modern treatments give you any impairments to your daily life, let alone any that are comparable to amputation. Fertility is the main thing that is impacted; but you can plan around it by freezing sperm or eggs beforehand (or by halting HRT - at least for MtFs, it’s possible to have normal sperm counts once T levels are back to normal). Fertility is also not relevant to your daily life in the same way having limbs is, and I personally wanted a vasectomy anyway which is something that’s available to cis men.
Let’s go step by step for each modern treatment;
You can go on HRT and have the hormone levels of the opposite sex, giving you some of their sexual secondary characteristics. The main thing you risk is loss of fertility, but it’s generally reversible at that stage. Otherwise, there are no changes that make your daily life worse than either the average man or woman.
If FtM, you can get top surgery. This is a cosmetic procedure but you will be unable to lactate after; this is desirable for many, as men don’t lactate. Larger breasts will have visible scars but this is a purely cosmetic feature once they’re healed.
Bottom surgery is more complex; the loss of fertility is permanent at that stage, and you have to remain on hormones for the rest of your life. But, if it goes well, you can have a healthy, fulfilling sexual life with genitals that you actually like, instead of ones that you can’t stand.
Also as a side note, did you know that there was a study in the mid-20th century on institutionalised patients that showed that castrated males lived on average up to 12 more years than intact males (depending on age of castration)? See also medieval eunuchs who had a considerably longer lifespan than their aristocratic peers. So a transfem patient could very well have a longer healthier life by going through the so-called “mutilation”. Personally if any procedure could give me an extra decade of life, I would heavily consider it.
I think you've missed the point that I was emphasizing from @ymeskhout's OP. It's not just about whether it's tactically sound or not, it's a question of what people in our position are supposed to do when there is a significant difference between the popular variant of a movement and the many competing variants that are actually reasoned. Especially when the popular one in its confused way prescribes things then more reasoned variant wouldn't. We might believe that the popular variant is harmful itself and it's worth addressing it and trying to oppose it and engaging with these other variants is not necessary for that. But at the same time these variants are often brought up as defenses of the whole, deployed at their strongest points, even though they can't all fit together cohesively in a way that justifies the greater movement. If as you've said gender and sex incongruencies are entirely separate issues, one is physical and one is something that might not exist on a deserted island then we can't use the sexual dysphoria as an argument for gender affirming care and yet this move is constantly made, and when it's made the movement is disagreeing with you because you are not useful to it at the moment.
This all has the effect of every trans discussion being several long posts drilling down on what a particular interlocutor actually believes and at some point the thread dies when it becomes necessary for the TRA poster to actually start throwing some of the popular trans movement under the bus for ideological consistency. It's a tactic that produces a movement that can argue for or against anything whenever it is convenient.
I do not trust the gatekeepers, I have seen their "yeet the teet" advertising, I am unimpressed.
In the cases where it was not necessary, which are the cases analogous to school shootings, it is a violent and traumatic maiming. There isn't a way to sugar coat unnecesarilly flaying a healthy person's penis that would not have ever desired the procedure if not exposed to this idea. The question of what percentage of patients this describes is of course up for debate but the horror it should invoke can't and shouldn't be sugar coated. I understand why you flinch away, I have the same reaction to pictures of dead kids being used to argue against my position, but the instinct is a weakness.
I was mainly comparing them on the mechanism for an unexplainable physical "wrongness" of the body, I wasn't actually trying to compare the outcome itself. That said I honestly would take losing a limb over being reduced to the trans version of my sex, in my case an FTM. I would rather not have a leg than be FTM. I do not think this is an unusual position.
But going on the rest of the statement of belief, how do you bridge or do you not bridge support for trans women in women's sports?
Do you mean that you shouldn’t give gender affirming care (i.e. medical treatments) if someone has only social dysphoria and no physical dysphoria? I agree with that and from what I can see that’s the general position many trans people have. The most frequent manifestation is trans people with no bottom dysphoria not getting bottom surgery, which is where the whole “women can have penises” angle comes from. Some trans people won’t take HRT (often they will just identify as non-binary tho), however many that have mostly social dysphoria will still go on HRT in order to pass.
I think from the start I have tried to be clear that I don’t agree 100% with all of the modern day trans rights beliefs? Going back to the very interesting point you made about defending a position from whichever mutually exclusive variant is most convenient, I would be interested in seeing whether or where I did that - I am trying to be as ideologically consistent as possible, if only for my one sake, although it is possible I am adjusting my position as new arguments are made.
The difference is that a kid being shot is always a horrifying thing, while gender affirming surgery can sometimes be horrifying, and sometimes the best thing to happen to someone.
That is honestly extremely difficult for me to comprehend. You use your legs every day, having a prosthetic leg would be a severe inconvenience in your daily life to say the least, preventing you from doing many activities you take for granted. Meanwhile the FtM version of you would probably still pass as a male socially. I could perhaps understand preferring to lose a leg than your genitals if your genitals are your only source of sexual pleasure, but the FtM version of you would still be able to enjoy sex, if in a different way.
Hm… although perhaps that can be a good analogy for you to understand gender dysphoria? What you feeling about becoming an FtM version of yourself is how I feel about being a biological male. To me what’s horrifying is not “flaying my penis” but having a penis at all, and I am filled with utter disgust every time I have to look at it. As I said in a previous comment, I wanted it removed as a child who had 0 awareness of the existence of trans people - there was a point where I honestly thought of taking a kitchen knife and faking a bloody accident.
I can’t see how someone would undergo bottom surgery without having similar feelings, and I certainly can’t see how they would go through it if they valued it as much as you seemed to value yours, just by being exposed to the idea. There’s certainly plenty of trans women who value theirs and keep it, and I don’t see the number of minors getting SRS as anything concerning at the minute.
If It's not offensive to you, and let me know if it is and I'll switch to something else, I'm going to call the physical dysphoria variant transsexual and the social variant as transgender because this comment was difficult to make readable without two terms.
No I mean something different. Because both the transsexual people and the transgendered people are under the same umbrella term of "trans" every discussion on the topic has the group under discussion shift as is convenient to the argument. And it's not clear the mainstream trans position actually ever bothers to differentiate between these groups. Puberty blockers are frequently pushed as something all kids who identify as trans should get, with trans being inclusive of transgender kids. But this is an insane thing to suggest for a social phenomenon, even if it might make sense if we had some reliable way to detect transsexuality(which I do not believe we do). If I oppose blockers, which I do for a number of reasons, it may as well be as if the transgender segment doesn't even exist. And as I said above, I do not trust the gatekeepers on this, they do not seem to share your belief that there are different segments here.
I'd like to just comment on how confusing this must be to kids going through the normal discomfort of their bodies changing during puberty. Combined with normal teenage insecurity and identity formation and you have a perfect storm for false positives that will stick. I am incredibly unimpressed with how unserious the movement takes this massive potential hazard.
Yes and I believe you. It's not that you agree 100% with them, it's that we don't have a choice between what you believe and what we(We being broadly the trans skeptical side) believe. The choice is between what the mainstream trans side proposes and what the mainstream trans skeptical side proposes - and I also don't 100% agree with the main stream trans skeptical side.
So we can go back and forth given this bifurcation of trans and maybe reach a raesoned compromise but what is that worth if you're not at all representative of the movement? At the end of the day we're either confiscating guns or not and it has nothing to do with either of our positions. So when arguing against things like puberty blockers, it might be worth it just for the exercise and curiosity to find how your unique position feels on the topic but if the mainstream position is going to be to add them to the k-12 water fountains(hyperbole) then your more sane position isn't really useful.
The life saving gender affirming care in this metaphor is akin to a good shoot that saved lives.
It's not just the sex life it's being thrown entirely off of the normal life path. I can have my own children, have normal parameters in all other areas of my life without a leg. It's difficult to fully explain all the differences it would make. What would you give up to have been born a woman?
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Too real. I've had countless conversations with trans people where some variant of "oh haha yeah those people are crazy and don't represent my views at all" comes up. Ok fine but why are those people so prominent? This cannot be explained as just a right-wing ratfucking conspiracy to discredit the movement by signal-boosting the crazies. Because the way these episodes typically play out is that virtually no one from the trans side is willing to scold the crazies publicly and (most pertinently) it's not like there's a coherent explanation or framework for basic questions over what transgender identity even means that everyone can conveniently point to. Even if you take only what the relatively sane authority figures on the trans side say, you still end up with an incoherent and contradictory soup that is impossible to reconcile.
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As far as I can tell this is a myth. The Wikipedia article is better than last time I checked, actually pointing out that it's a myth.
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I think a fundamental question that needs to be addressed is what exactly distinguishes a weakman from the enemy bailey - and, I guess, whether it is good (for the discourse) in principle to contest the enemy bailey at all, or if gentlemen should always go straight for the motte (as the choice of our forum's name may seem to suggest).
The strawman is the besiegers saying, “Look, my enemy has no motte, just this ludicrous and/or evil argument which I have helpfully provided here.” It isn’t actually an argument the besieged use.
The weakman is the besiegers’ uncharitable understanding/characterization of the besieged’s arguments, strong or weak. You can have a weakman of a motte.
The bailey is the weaker (less evidenced) arguments the besieged actually believe. When pressed for evidence, they fall back to the motte and say the bailey is still implied, just not defendable.
As I remember it, the SSC definition of the weakman entails that at least some in the besieged category do actually believe it; otherwise it is just a strawman.
As I see it, the only thing that possibly distinguishes it from the bailey is that the inhabitants of the motte definitely intend to exploit the bailey the moment the siege is over, whereas a weakman may or may not get their share of the spoils should their coalition win. More often than not, it seems to me, disowning your weakmen is not the default, and the assumption is that the coalition should reward all those who showed up to see through its victory. The left-wing version of this has been glossed with something like "no enemies to the left", but I don't think it's confined to the left wing.
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The idea of "steelmanning" was originally about making the best argument you could for the opposing position. This quickly morphed into redefining the opposing position to be easier to defend, and then having defended this easier position, assuming those arguments applied to the actual position -- which amounts to handing your opponents a motte.
The idea of "strawmanning" is making arguments against a position your opponents don't believe. Then "weakmanning" is making arguments against a version of the position only a few extreme and marginalized opponents believe. This quickly morphed into "making arguments against a version of the position held by your opponent's spokespeople and leaders, but which could be 'steelmanned' (sense 2) into something more palatable."
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I think by the time you have an “enemy” then you are past the point where the steelman and weakman are of any real value to you. They seem most useful as tools for picking which side of the fight you should be on.
I interpreted "enemy" to be another word for "opposite interlocutor", doesn't have to be antagonistic
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To harbour no enmity towards any political position that one discusses seems like a bar so noble that approximately nobody on this forum would meet it. If you think that picking the strongest arguments from the other side is of no value for the epistemics of those of us who fail it, do you think there is anything that can improve them (short of, I don't know, meditating until we have attained indifference), or are we just irredeemable?
(To be clear, I wasn't thinking anything particularly deep when choosing that term. It just naturally fit the motte-bailey metaphor, which after all is about medieval warfare.)
What I am saying is that if you are a local lord and one of your advisors say that you should back the Lancastrian claim since Henry VI is the rightful king and your other advisor says you should back the Yorkist claim because white roses are prettier, you don’t just say that the argument in favor of Lancaster are stronger. Instead, you say that this Yorkist claim is a weakman and I need to figure out the strongest possible Yorkist argument to see if they are actually correct before I make a decision. Once you are flying the Lancastrian banner and have a Yorkist castle under siege you don’t need to invent Yorkist arguments, since there will be plenty of them flying at you.
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I think that in conjunction with the weakman and steelman, there needs to be a "realman" -- arguing against the steelman position is just as pointless if it's only held by a tiny minority as arguing against the weakman in the same position would be. The realman should consider what the most common defences in a particular debate are, not merely just the best.
And even then, I only really countenance steelmanning in ossified forums like this one, and never in real life; because at that point you're just handing your enemies better arguments.
How is this forum "ossified," as you've put it here? Sorry I am not positive I get your meaning or why, if I do get it, you believe this ossification is so self-evident?
Basically what @Pongalh said. Rationalist talk a big game about "rising above" and "avoiding sloppy thinking" right up to the moment doing so runs up against the interests or biases of progressive costal urbanites at which point all bets are off.
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Post-liberalism has accepted as good everything ugly about politics the rationalists wanted us to get past. Clickbait is good. Sensationalism is good. Treating arguments as soldiers is good. Thinking ideologically is good. Just picking a damn side already is good. Thinking of people as ultimately political and not having some valuable quality that is outside of politics is good.
And so on.
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Discussion like this is very much a relic of the older internet, even if it does insist on using the reddit interface instead of the more traditional forums setup. The whole place is shielded in time and away from relevance.
Relevance to whom? You seem to be suggesting that the setup and dynamic (as opposed to the content) of the forum is the problem.
Relevance to the wider world. There is no influence here, nobody with power knows this place exists.
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Why would that matter?
Let's say you give them a convincing argument for X and they use it. If it's so good that people are convinced, then doesn't that imply it was actually valid?
Because then I am helping my enemy and working against my own preferred outcomes? What about this is difficult to understand?
Let's put it this way. I have come to believe, after my deliberations, position X. My opponents believe position Y. I, obviously, have considered position Y and rejected it. The argument they have for position Y, argument Y1, is a weak argument. If I argue my reasoning X1 against it, they might concede. If instead I hand them stronger argument Y2, and then argue X1 against it, they might not concede.
Considering that I still believe position X is more correct that position Y, by handing argument Y2 over and preventing them from switching sides to position X, or at the very least abandoning position Y, I am preventing an increase in people holding the position I believe to be most correct. Surely, then, if I truly believe position X is the greater good, I should not do this?
This kind of assumes that the only thing that matters is convincing people to switch sides in the short term. This may be valid for elections and highly charged issues but the idea behind steelmanning is that you don't just change a mind, you foster genuine understanding of the nuance of an issue which will help people form more robust opinions and ideas on new issues.
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Why wouldn't you argue X2 against Y2?
Why would you argue y2 when you could be constructing x3?
Well, we don't have argument Y3 yet, so...
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Because I should always be leading with my strongest arguments?
No, not my point.
Suppose you refute Y1, then steelman and give them Y2. What stops you from also mentioning "Oh, by the way, Y2 is also false for the following reasons"?
Because people are emotional and will cling to their prior conclusions if at all possible.
If you can destroy, utterly humiliate, their Y1 argument which is why they hold Y belief in the first place, but have a much harder time arguing against Y2, you will be much easier to dismiss in the latter case. And they'll want to dismiss you, because everyone wants to have always been right all along.
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Is this a serious question? Have you ever met an actual human being? Even the smart ones can be misled by compelling but ultimately flawed arguments and the bottom 95% are absolutely hopeless
I am assuming that argument A2 is better in all regards than A1. So for people to believe A2 is still to believe a more valid argument. But I agree that both can ultimately be wrong.
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