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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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I'll happily concur with the basic premise; it's all too easy for me to look at the whiplash people have done and are doing on, well, a whole lot of topics, but most present and obvious would probably be the complete 180 that took place between the George Floyd race riots and 1/6.

Even at the time, you had people copy-and-pasting people's cheering on of one while shrieking in pretend-fear of the other, and it was painfully obvious that there were no actual principles about when, what, and how protest should be done involved, in either case. It should not be at all hard to show that the words of most of Amercia's current set of taste-makers have less reasoning behind them then the latest from ChatGPT, just by looking for simple, recent contradictions.

I am a little curious about your S-disposition term of art. Like, if I want to fuck a vegan, so I spend a period of however long it takes of putting up a convincing front of sympathy-towards-veganism statements and minor displays of activism, but internally my mental state doesn't change, and I cheerfully drop the front once I've gotten what I wanted from her, do we need a word other than 'lie' for what I was doing?

I will say that I've personally reached a point of deep cynicism, and feel that the vast majority of people I encounter are at best moral children who have never considered the multiple and obvious contradictions in the beliefs they espouse (and have also been trained to carefully avoid any factual information or ideas that would lead to those contradictions being too widely exposed), that the expected case is that most people are moral cowards and also wildly disinterested in morality, and thus espouse whatever a surface-view of the world shows them will avoid punishment and make up reasons why those beliefs are good after the fact, and in my more grim moments, I take people at their contradictory word and feel that very many people literally are GPT3-ing their way through their interactions with their fellow humans.

Is this just a here-and-now study? I feel like you could get some really interesting data looking at communist or other totalitarian areas, and seeing what people said in public, what they did in private, and what they said about what they both said and did after the totalitarianism fell.

I'd say that people being inconsistent on whether protests are allowed don't believe their professed reasons for when it's okay to protest--not even when applied to themselves. They're just liars.

I think your analysis has too much mistake theory and not enough conflict theory.

I'll happily concur with the basic premise; it's all too easy for me to look at the whiplash people have done and are doing on, well, a whole lot of topics, but most present and obvious would probably be the complete 180 that took place between the George Floyd race riots and 1/6.

See also: The dysfunctional cheering on of the George Floyd race rioters as "peaceful protest" vs. the sheer outrage and vitriol towards the Canadian truckers (despite the peacefulness of the latter compared to the former). Many people who supported the former suddenly started denouncing the latter, and the inconsistencies in their moral evaluations are so readily apparent to me that I'm honestly unsure how it is possible for them to live with the cognitive dissonance.

The only real principle in operation here just seems to be this utterly tribal "Leftist protest is good regardless of how violent things become, right-wing protest is bad under any circumstances".

do we need a word other than 'lie' for what I was doing?

I'd distinguish pretty strongly between S-dispositions and lying insofar as the latter is (to at least some degree) an intentional act. We can talk about grey areas here, and lying is a surprisingly complicated state, but in general I think it's part of our concepts of lying and deceit that they require some extra cognitive work and self-awareness compared to telling the truth - e.g. you know that not-P, but you decide to assert that P for some duplicitous motive.

By contrast, S-dispositions as I'm understanding them require less work than regular strict beliefs - you espouse P without ever having seriously subjected P to reflection or scrutiny, but also without any real awareness of doing something epistemically irresponsible.

The vegan case I gave and which you reference might have been misleading in this regard, insofar as it's easy to imagine someone being genuinely deceptive in professing to be a vegan in order to get laid. That's not what I had in mind, though; I was thinking about a slightly naive person who finds themselves swept along with a certain kind of political stance due to interpersonal incentives, and even thinks they believe it at first, but has never actually put in the epistemic leg-work to integrate it with their world-view or figure out if they actually, deep-down endorse it.

I think it's part of our concepts of lying and deceit that they require some extra cognitive work and self-awareness compared to telling the truth

Not that much though. it's, in a sense, 'lying' when someone tells a white lie - plenty of "oh honey you look great tonight"s are plain lies (as opposed to more subtle distinctions), but that doesn't take much effort.

I don't think the separation here of 's-dispositions' as a label that applies to distinct beliefs is useful, even though thinking about how supposed 'beliefs' don't really act like honestly held beliefs in a variety of social situations is useful, because of how fluidly said pseudobeliefs will be part of / relate to other beliefs / purposes / social contexts, and because many very different reasons to "pseudobelieve" will be united under teh same concept. That's more of a general gripe with philosophy/logic as applied to 'thinking' though