This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
POSIWID, deepities and scissor statements
A response to Scott Alexander, with whom I largely agree
Last week, Scott Alexander published an article called “Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does” followed by “Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID” today. I recommend reading both first, but if you’d rather not I will attempt to summarise Scott’s thesis under the “POSIWID” section.
If you know what POSIWID, deepities and scissor statements mean, feel free to skip down to “POSIWID is a deepity” (spoiler alert for the meat of my argument), in which I offer my own analysis of the phrase.
POSIWID
POSIWID is an acronym standing for “The purpose of a system is what it does”, coined by the management consultant Stafford Beer. As near as I understand it, Beer was hired by companies to audit their existing business processes and suggest improvements. When he pointed out that a given business process or system was producing undesirable results, the C-suite executives would sometimes defend the process by pointing to the desirable purpose the system was intended to accomplish. Beer would retort “the purpose of a system is what it does”: in other words, regardless of what purpose the system was intended to accomplish, the executives must take ownership of what the system is actually doing and what results it is actually producing.
Scott’s recent posts concerned his disagreement with how the phrase is often used in political discussions, such as by progressives who assert that the real purpose of police services is to oppress, imprison and murder black people (and stopping crime is just an incidental positive externality); or conversely, by conservatives who assert that the real purpose of non-profits designed to combat homelessness is actually to exacerbate homelessness: if homelessness were to end, they’d be out of a job! Scott argues that this framing is needlessly hostile, cynical and paranoid; instead, it is more productive to model organisations as having goals that they are trying to accomplish in earnest, but pursuing these goals sometimes incurs undesirable but unavoidable side effects (e.g. carbon emissions, medical mistakes); or the organisation is prevented from accomplishing their goals to their full extent due to factors outside of their control (e.g. budgetary limitations, competing organisations).
Deepities
“Deepity” is a term coined by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, referring to phrases which have the unique property wherein they convey two meanings at once: one meaning is true, but trivial, while the other meaning is false, but would be profound if it was true. The dual meaning allows the deficiencies in one to be shored up by the strengths of the other (and vice versa) which makes them invaluable as rhetorical devices: when the listener notices that the former meaning is trivial, they are reassured by the fact that the latter meaning is profound, and when one notices that the latter meaning is false, one is reassured by the fact that the former meaning is true. The concept is best illustrated by examples, all of which are taken from Coleman Hughes’s excellent article on the concept:
Scissor statements
Scott Alexander wrote a wonderful short story called “Sort by Controversial”, which concerns a tech startup whose employees inadvertently develop a piece of software that generates what the team calls “scissor statements”: statements (and later, events) which are maximally controversial, in the sense that one half of a particular community would enthusiastically endorse them and the other half would vociferously deny them. “Scissor statements”, it is explained, can tear communities apart merely in the fact of being spoken or having taken place: to one half of a community they seem so obviously true/good as to be hardly even worth stating, to the other half so obviously false/wrong as to be hardly even worth rebutting.
Examples from the original story:
To the canonical examples from the short story, I might add “A black gay actor is the victim of a racist, homophobic hate crime perpetrated by two Donald Trump supporters, and is later accused of having staged the attack to further his career”.
“POSIWID” is a deepity
“The purpose of a system is what it does” seems very reminiscent of my first example of a deepity, “everything happens for a reason”. Much as every event obviously has an immediate proximate cause, it is obviously true that a system should only be meaningfully assessed on the basis of its actual outputs. If a particular business process is meant to boost profits by 10%, but consistently fails to achieve that goal, the process must be assessed first and foremost on the basis of the latter fact, not the former. All of this is straightforward and uncontroversial: indeed, true but trivial.1
But the secondary meaning imparted by the phrase implies something far more profound and controversial: that the designers of a given system are fully cognizant of all of its outputs (positive and negative); that all of said outputs were fully intended and desired by the designers; that if the designers are made aware of a negative output thereof and refuse to immediately change it, the only reasonable interpretation is that this negative output is affirmatively sought by the deisgners; and that this is equally true regardless of to what resolution the phrase is applied (whether looking at an individual business process within a company, the company itself, an entire industry, an entire country, or a multi-national economic structure). This interpretation seems to me just as obviously wrong as the secondary meaning of “everything happens for a reason”, in which there is an underlying cosmic purpose to every event, no matter how small or terrible.
Per his second article, Scott seems to recognise this:
Certain people in the comments of Scott’s first article argued that the phrase was meaningful in its original context as used by Stafford Beer, but has been misused by political commentators who misunderstood it as implying its second meaning, to which Scott had a witty rejoinder:
“POSIWID” is a scissor statement
Scott seems to have been legitimately taken aback by what a fervent response his first article inspired, with a lot of commenters enthusiastically agreeing with it and many others insisting that he’d missed the point entirely. He admits to being confused by the latter group:
In a forum in which I saw Scott’s article being discussed2, the same pattern was visible: a significant number of people enthusiastically agreeing with him, and a second group accusing him of engaging in an elaborate trolling effort, or wasting time on a pedantic argument about semantics instead of acknowledging the penetrating insight the phrase contains. This suggests to me that “the purpose of a system is what it does” is a scissor statement: a maximally-controversial phrase which one half of a community finds so obviously true as to be hardly worth mentioning, while the other half dismisses it out of hand, and finds it baffling as to how anyone could think it was true for even a moment.
Perhaps many deepities are also scissor statements?
Deepities, as discussed above, have two meanings: one which is true but trivial, the other which is false, but which would be profound if it was true. Scissor statements, meanwhile, are maximally-controversial statements which tear communities apart because half of the community finds them so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, while the other half dismisses them as obviously false.
Thus in both cases we see a bifurcation in how a statement is interpreted. Perhaps this is not a coincidence?3
For some number of people looking at a Necker cube (the first figure in the illustration below), they will initially interpret the ambiguous shape according to the second figure; for others, the third figure (both of which are equally valid interpretations of the shape). With some effort, we can force ourselves to see the alternative interpretation, but whichever one first jumps out at us feels like the “correct” one. I don’t have any studies backing this up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that the split of these two groups is roughly fifty-fifty: in other words, if the configuration of cubes was something we cared about, Necker cubes would make for a perfect scissor statement.
Illustrations in original post
Perhaps deepities work in the same way? Maybe if you looked at a group of people encountering the phrase “everything happens for a reason” for the first time, for roughly half of them, the true-but-trivial meaning would jump out at them instantly, and they would completely overlook the false-but-profound meaning; whereas for the other half, they’d immediately notice the false-but-profound meaning and overlook the true-but-trivial meaning. (Or perhaps the first group would only notice the true-but-trivial meaning, while the second group would notice the false-but-profound meaning in addition to the true-but-trivial one.)
Before long, the two groups are talking past each other: the first group cannot understand why the second group is getting so worked up about an observation which, while true, strikes them as trite and unremarkable; and the second group cannot understand why the first group is ignoring the (allegedly) penetrating insight and instead making glib dismissals like “if I get struck by a car, the underlying cause is that I failed to look both ways before crossing the street”. The first group thinks the second group are intellectual lightweights for getting so bent out of shape about such a trite observation; the second group feels condescended to by the first, and thinks the first group are overly literal-minded pedants who are missing the wood for the trees. Hence, a classic scissor statement: merely in the act of being spoken, it generates outrage and tears communities asunder.
__
1 Admittedly, we might perhaps benefit from reading the phrase backwards: perhaps at the time of its coining, the idea that a business process should be judged primarily (or solely) on the basis of its actual outputs (as opposed to its creator’s intentions for it) was a legitimately novel insight, and only seems trite and obvious to us now because we’ve fully internalised it. Hard to say.
2 I'm sure you know the forum I mean.
3 Because nothing is ever a coincidence.
This is... a very bad example to choose here. One man's "obvious nonsense" is another man's treasure. I do, in fact, believe that everything happens for a reason.
What reason can you divine for the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami? If God does indeed work in mysterious ways, this one has to be the most mysterious of them all. Unlike many calamities which can be said to have a proximate cause rooted in human activity, this one was pure Nature’s Wrath. The only part any person played in it was having had the misfortune to live in, or even to have visited, the vicinity. Nearly 230,000 people dead in the course of a single day. Many of them Christians, no doubt, whose prayers appear not to have availed them.
These are all basically the problem of theodicy written over and over. Nature's Wrath has a long history in Jewish lore of being God's wrath. God created nature, remember.
As to the reason - I don't know! Nobody truly knows the answer to theodicy. Some say it's because the devil is still at work in the world with his demons, implying God isn't fully omnipotent as we might understand it. Others say evil exists to help teach us to become good. Still others say that we couldn't have free will without evil existing in the world.
There are many answers. All I know is that I believe that God allows evil in the world for a reason.
Yes, I know what theodicy is. I’ve thought a lot about it too, and I’ve looked into many of the various answers which sincere Christians have offered as solutions. Maybe, though, the fact that over the course of 2,000+ years of Christianity (and, of course, centuries of Judaism before that) so many people have had to come up with so many different answers points to something: None of their answers have been very good! None of them have made much sense, or satisfactorily answered the problem at hand without highlighting important contradictions within the logic of the faith.
The core dilemma here is that Christianity is very explicitly dedicated to, among others, two key claims about God: 1. He is benevolent, loving, and invested not only in the future of humanity as a whole, but in the well-being and spiritual life of each individual living human. 2. He intervenes, at least subtly, in the lives of individuals, to effectuate positive life outcomes for them.Those two claims are what make theodicy so incredibly difficult for Christianity specifically to deal with.
Paganism has no problem explaining why something like a natural disaster happens. The various gods and supernatural entities are capricious, they’re in competition with each other, they frequently act wrathful or even tyrannical, and humans’ primary relationship with them is transactional. We propitiate the gods by offering them praise and things of value, so that we can remain in their favor and persuade them to intervene helpfully on our behalf, and to not curse us or slaughter us. This view of the order of the world leaves much to be desired emotionally; it offers little in the way of a message of hope, love, inspiration, and salvation. But if nothing else, it makes it very easy to explain the wanton suffering which so many humans experience — and not always at the hands of each other — without producing any cracks at the heart of the religion.
Judaism, too, famously has a certain fatalism and moral ambivalence about God. The Old Testament, as you note, features many episodes in which God acts wrathfully and in a way which, if a human ruler acted the same way, we would recognize as tyrannical or even monstrous. (Of course, Judaism also offers an explanation: We deserved it then, and we’ll probably deserve it again in the future. God doesn’t especially love the Jews, even if they are his chosen people, and he’ll gladly throw any individual Jews into a shredder if they disappoint him — and that’s to say nothing of what he will do, or instruct the Jews to do on his behalf, to the gentiles!)
In contrast, I think Christianity is really at a loss when dealing with natural disasters of this nature, though. Theodicy is uniquely corrosive to the doctrines of Christianity, which is why so many of its theologians have obsessed about it, and why they’ve reached for such contradictory answers. Of the three explanations you put forward, at least two of them are wildly insufficient to deal with a problem of the magnitude of the example I offered. In fact, one of them —
— doesn’t address natural disasters at all! Sure, I can totally understand and appreciate the idea that a world in which humans have free will is necessarily a world in which humans have the power to murder each other, to make war on each other, to firebomb each other’s cities, etc. That has nothing to do with a natural disaster, though. Whether or not humans have free will would have made no difference in the outcome of an earthquake or tsunami; again, the only “free will” any human exercised was the “choice” to happen to be in its path. (Not a choice at all, of course, since nobody could have predicted it nor seen it coming.) It isn’t even a “problem of evil”, since “evil” implies intention, and a tsunami has none. Any supernatural entity which did intentionally send that tsunami toward blameless human habitation would indeed be evil, and any supposedly benevolent supernatural entity which could have prevented it but chose otherwise is, at best, ineffectual.
As for one of your other proposed explanations —
— you must recognize why non-Christians find this answer so exasperating. Suppose I’m a child, and I break some sort of rule. To punish me and to teach me a lesson, my father strangles one of my siblings to death in front of me. Obviously if a human father did this, we would universally recognize it as psychopathic. No benevolent person acting out of love would do so. So, if the Christian God did indeed intentionally make the tsunami happen, in order to teach people a lesson, what does it actually mean to say that this same God “loves us”?
That leaves your third explanation — the one you put first, which may be seen as implying you lean toward it:
I mean, isn’t this getting pretty dangerously close to paganism, or at best Henotheism? There are many powerful supernatural entities at work in the world, and God is, at best, only arguably the strongest? He can intervene in people’s lives sometimes, to help with relatively quotidian issues — you can pray to him before an important job interview, and maybe he’ll subtly help that interview go well for you — but he can’t reliably do anything about the really big stuff if there’s some other entity, like Satan, who’s directly working against him. This is, again, satisfactory to me as a plausible explanation for how the world actually works, but it seems to be in contradiction with some of Christianity’s stronger claims about God’s omnipotence.
I want to be clear that I’m not saying any of this because I hate Christianity. I’m not some fire-breathing atheist like I was when I was younger. I would like very much if Christianity were true, and if someone could provide to me an answer to these questions which I could psychologically wrap my head around. I’ve prayed to God myself, and even explicitly to Jesus Christ. I’ve no idea if any of these prayers produced a tangible effect on the world, although I do know that they produced some level of internal comfort within me.
Still, though, the 2004 tsunami, and then Hurricane Katrina the very next year, made a very profound effect on me. Seeing that level of wanton suffering (some of the footage of people being swallowed by the floods is still seared into my brain) delivered to people who had done nothing particularly wrong, while so many individuals who were so much more blameworthy continued to prosper unharmed, put theodicy at the very front of my mind at the very point in my life in which I was first starting to ponder these religious questions. Christians seem two-faced about the issue. When confronted directly about it they’ll claim that God isn’t as omnipotent as we think, and therefore he simply can’t be expected to step in and save people from things like this; in their own lives, though, they routinely pray for God to intervene on their behalf in issues which have, comparatively, so much less importance.
@FCfromSSC claimed below that Christians do not expect God to make any changes to anyone’s appointed hour of death, but this is directly belied by Christians’ actions. God can help you get a raise at work, but he can’t help you not get hit by a car? Christians pray for each others’ safety and health all the time. They pray before surgeries, before flights, before risky endeavors, etc. If they don’t expect these prayers to do anything, then is God no more than a therapist? Just there to be a sounding board for whatever’s making us anxious, to help us order our internal lives and soothe ourselves? This seems highly unsatisfactory compared to the loftier claims which the Bible seems, to me, to make about God’s capabilities.
What do you make of Scott's answer in God's Answer To Job, out of curiosity? It's the only one that's ever really convinced me, though it hasn't made me a believer.
More options
Context Copy link
@FCfromSSC claimed below that Christians do not expect God to make any changes to anyone’s appointed hour of death...
I claimed that prayer doesn't make one's hour of death predictable, and I think the difference between the two formulations is substantive.
More options
Context Copy link
First off, I’m not worried about getting “dangerously close” to Henotheism or other issues. I’m Orthodox, we have a pretty relaxed view about the omnipotence of God compared to Catholics, or really the ability for us to know much about God beyond what Christ directly told us at all.
In regards to a God of love allowing evil - yes! That’s the fundamental paradox of the world! The thing is, this idea that God is love comes from direct mystical experience, and of course the revelation of Christ & the apostles.
It’s not even limited to Christianity. Many sects of Buddhism also posit a sort of “loving kindness” quality inherent to the Tao, or the Ground of Being. Yes it’s confusing as to why a God of Love would allow evil.
My personal answer is something like - suffering is inherently voluntary, whether we understand that or not. With the right mindset or view, this world would be Paradise, despite all the limitations. You see this in the great mystics and Saints who take the worst outcomes like torture, martyrdom, etc with a smile on their faces.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link