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Is revenge a good reason to do things you find immoral? I think a lot of us more principled folk would disagree.
If I am attacked, it is good to use force against my attacker to both defend myself but also to establish future deterrence. If I am cheated, it is good to sue not just for the value of what was denied me but also for punitive damages - to take the cheater's money. If I am stolen from, it is good not just to retrieve what was stolen, but also to incapacitate the thief to prevent their ability to do these things again.
How certain are you that you're actually being attacked and it's not underdog bias?
I know and see plenty of leftists online who say similar things in the way you're saying now. That the powerful conservatives are attacking everyone and that their left wing censorious behavior is justified in defense. They're just as convinced as themselves as you are.
Knowing that people delude themselves into the very same style of bias perceptions you currently hold, knowing that there are studies and evidence suggesting that this happens on both sides of pretty much every topic, how certain are you that you're not just experiencing an underdog bias and failing to see the ways your own side might hold institutional powers unfairly? And how does any answer you give look differently than what a leftist under the bias would give?
If I started beating my wife to the point that she snaps and starts physically assaulting me while holding a gun, am I able to then accuse her of "underdog bias" and talk about how I'm actually the one being attacked when she strikes back? Are you sure she's not just failing to see the ways her own side holds institutional powers/firearms unfairly?
Ok, now imagine a leftist just said the exact same thing to me (or how about instead of me, it's an alien arbitrator, a completely neutral third party so you don't even have to imagine you're dealing with someone possibly biased.) about the right. That obviously reality is the right struck first and how absurd it is I suggest they could possibly exhibit an underdog bias.
Certainly you can see in this scenario how to the alien arbitrator, you might not look any different than the leftists claiming the same thing. Maybe they go and look at the world and say "Ok, right wing you were correct and the left started everything". But maybe they look and say the right started it all and the leftist is correct.
With your knowledge as a rational actor aware that this bias is both extremely common to the point of being basically universal and it's hard to see one's own bias, what would you place the odds of the alien choosing your side being?
Ok, how about if we replaced "left and right" with say a flame war between PlayStation and Xbox gamers or a flame war between Twilight fans. What is the odds the alien will say the Edward stans have the underdog bias vs the Jacob stans having the underdog bias?
Good news, the answer doesn't even matter anyway if you choose the option to have principles! If you stick up for freedom no matter when and who, the alien won't rule against you no matter what. You can't be the one who started the shitslinging if you aren't slinging shit. Join the side of keeping your principles and you'll always be a winner.
Why imagine? I am a leftist and just said that to you. I'm opposed to the social justice movement because I think it is both bad, ineffective politics and morally wrong (poor white kids should not pay the price for the crimes of robber barons in years past), but I am still a left-winger. To make my perspective clear, I believe that the optimal move would have been for the left to not actually go on the long march through the institutions precisely because of the incredibly predictable blowback that is currently taking place.
I have seen it happen in my life time. There's no absurd conspiratorial thinking here - this was done in the open and people loudly spoke about it. The Long March Through the Institutions took place and we have the statistical evidence with regards to discrimination against conservatives. The discrimination wasn't just pervasive, it was openly celebrated - there's no point denying it now. You're going to need much more rigorous evidence if you want to make the case that the right wing has been in control of academia for the past 40 years.
Ok, my principles are that if you try to politicise academia in order to purloin the social credibility it has for partisan aims you deserve to be punished badly and cast out into the wilderness for the real harm you're doing to legitimately important societal mechanisms. So I actually do get to support the current punishment - though admittedly I do have to switch back when the conservatives start deporting people or getting them fired for voicing mild criticisms of the ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
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Ok, I'm imagining it. It looks no different than the husband in his scenario striking first.
Tell you what why don't you show us how we should wrestle with our biases, by leading by example. How do you that everything you're saying isn't the result of bias? What steps have you taken to counteract it?
Why do you keep saying some principle was broken, and then ignoring any response indicating that this did nit take place, or questioning you about it?
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What are the consequences for a NYT or New Yorker journalist, or Yale speaker, or children's book author, that refers to white people as a cancer, as goblins, as a deal with the devil?
What are the consequences for a 14 year old that sang along to the wrong rap song in a Snapchat video and is trying to get accepted to college 4 years later? I assume he got in somewhere, eventually. But not his top choices.
What are the consequences for corporate HR departments putting out there "don't hire white people"?
I hear that kind of thing, but up until Trump's re-election they didn't bother providing any evidence. After, they just point at Trump, which I don't find convincing but it's better than a huffed "obviously!"
At best, one might get complaints of disparate impact, but that's a lot weaker IMO than plain-letter discrimination. Alas, they have different moral foundations than I do, and at this point the conversation hits a dead end.
It depends!
One thing that most first amendment scholars and libertarians will agree on is that private action and government action are different things. While we should still embrace freedom of speech in private proceedings, there's a difference between say, your boss firing you for your speech criticizing they had an affair and a city council gaveling you down for alleging one of them had an affair.
For a private organization like NYT or New Yorker, the consequences for such speech is on the owners of the private organization. Do they want to fire the employee? They can if they want. Do readers want to boycott over the employee? Also fine.
I would expect the same if someone said blacks were animals or Jews were parasites or anything else. The owner of a private company has editorial control over their company.
For a public university? There should be none. For private universities it's a more difficult question. https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/private-universities
I would hope they hold themselves to the standards of free speech as they often claim they do, and they should be bound to any promises they make regarding such freedoms but ultimately as FIRE puts it
And if you think about it, groups like private Christian/Jewish/Muslim religious universities wouldn't be able to exist if they were legally bound to the same standards as public ones since they would not be able to select off religion as they do.
Again I would hope that private institutions embrace free speech and free expression on their own accord, but they have every right not to.
I can name two pretty big examples of the top of my head, the targeting of evolution and the targeting of climate science.
Well yes, say anything within 10 degrees of the first and you'll be jettisoned immediately and the company will put everyone left behind through
endless punishmentsensitivity training. Reaction to the second depends if it was before or after 10/7.This attitude is what turned so many Mottezans away from being principled on this topic, noticing the massive gap between what people say they will do and how they behave in practice. Turns out very few people are really bothered by racism or sexism or discrimination in general, there's several populations that are totally fair targets. Alas, "your rules applied fairly" is not a stable point and assumes people are honest about what their rules are supposed to be.
The Harvard kid was more famous but it happened at NC State too. No consequences for the university afaict, and I haven't turned up the kids' names to see if they went elsewhere.
Are they allowed to select by religion? Hmm... looking at FIRE's page I may have been remembering that CLS v Martinez case, that student groups at public universities can't. Vaguely recall some other exception but maybe not.
I'd consider the the evolution complaint petty in comparison, but fair enough.
See the issue otherwise is that editorial control is removed for business owners. Take that LGBT cake incident a while back. If business owners do not have editorial control under the first amendment, then the bakery would likely not have had legal protection over what speech they can and not produce for a client.
Edit: Or even worse, imagine you have an employee go on TV and start insulting your customers. Your customers stop buying from you, but you can't fire the employee. You are compelled to give him a job no matter how much he sabotages your company because to do so otherwise would be violating his free speech, despite the fact that it's your private company!
Yes, student groups at public universities are not the same as a private religious university.
I think the difference boils down to few people really thinking it is appropriate to treat universities, even private ones, like private companies. Considering how a university generally winds up hosting a large part of its students' entire lives, they are really more akin to landlords, power companies or ISPs, whose "editorial rights" to choose and un-choose their customers are greatly circumscribed.
(Before you call gotcha there, yes, I think it should be possible to force Christian, Jewish or Islamic universities to admit gay students. I think this should be especially possible if such universities become in any way dominant; I'm not so bothered by a single low-tier small Islamic school practicing full Sharia law, and wouldn't be bothered if there were a handful of designated low-prestige SJW schools that require any white students who join to undergo a humiliation ritual either, in the spirit of conservationism)
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Falling back to "How can you really know you know anything, maaan??" is not particularly convincing. Many of the people you have been arguing with have been observing or participating in (voluntarily or otherwise) the culture war for over a decade. And most of the evidence is there, and a good bit of it has been posted.
One example:
The University of California system, in particular, was up until March of this year requiring "diversity statements" for prospective faculty, which were statements demonstrating the applicant's dedication to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. These statements were in many cases not merely one factor among many, but used as an initial screen to exclude non-politically-aligned candidates.
When we examine the world and we see a common self-perception bias about one's self and their own groups, one that all those other groups are blind to for themselves it stands to reason we might also have that same bias even if we don't see it.
Because of course we wouldn't, all those other groups are blind to their bias and there doesn't seem to be any other exceptions. Why would we be so special?
That doesn't mean we aren't and can't be an exception, but "I don't see it" is a weak response. Of course not, none of the other groups see theirs.
This is just a fancier way of saying "How can you really know you know anything, maaan??" And if you believe in perceptual bias that severe, you might as well give up on science anyway because you cannot trust any of the observations.
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This is true. Is not the proper response to look at the evidence available and draw one's own conclusions?
I would hope others in a rationalist community are aware of how our own biases can impact our perception. Maybe you haven't read things like the lens that sees it's flaws and other parts of the sequences before, I recommend it
When we examine the world and we see a common self-perception bias about one's self and their own groups, one that all those other groups are blind to for themselves it stands to reason we might also have that same bias even if we don't see it. How sure are you that you're uniquely immune?
I would hope that others in a rationalist community would, having examined their own biases and framed their efforts in a prudent level of epistemic humility, then proceed on to engage with what evidence is available to them.
I do not claim to be uniquely immune. I know that I have been wrong in the past, and that biases have played a part in my previous errors. I aim to be less wrong in the future, and I make considerable efforts to minimize my own bias as much as I can.
On the other hand, one way to assess one's understanding of reality is to make predictions about what one thinks is likely to happen next. I think I've done tolerably well at that, and so my confidence in my model has increased over the years. On this topic in particular, I think I have a great deal of reasonably solid evidence at hand to support the conclusions I'm drawing. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm entirely deluded. But I've made a considerable effort over a considerable period of time to get as good a picture as possible, and I don't think either is the case.
I've considered the possibilities you've raised, and discarded them as incompatible with my understanding of the best evidence available. I'm open to substantive arguments that I've discarded them prematurely, but that would require something with a bit more to it than you're offering so far. If you would like to see that evidence, by all means let's examine it. But if you're wedded to meta-epistemic doubt for its own sake, after more than a decade of fairly intensive conversation on this subject with a variety of opposites, that doesn't seem like a very fruitful avenue to me. I'm much more interested in trying to get the best picture possible of what happens next.
That's a great way to go about it, but it still has an issue. I'll call it the "9/11 truther effect" because I see it in conspiracy theories a lot. People will have some sort of low evidence idea in their head that is disagreed with because of a personal bias or issue of theirs, and then update later with the claim of "Ahah, I was right all along. This proves 9/11 was manufactured!" because of course, the standards and biased thinking that led them to believing 9/11 was fake to begin with also lead them to judge they are proven correct later.
I'll give you the same thought experiment I came up for with someone else.
With your knowledge as a rational actor aware that this self perception bias is both extremely common to the point of being basically universal and it's hard to see one's own bias, what would you place the odds of the neutral alien reality knowing arbiter choosing your side being correct when they check reality?
Ok, how about if we replaced you and your side with a third party discussion, with say a flame war between PlayStation and Xbox gamers or a flame war between Twilight fans. What is the odds the alien will say the Edward stans have the underdog bias vs the Jacob stans having the underdog bias?
I'd say equal, even if I'm one of the participants. Maybe my side started the shitslinging all along and I didn't know.
But good news, the answer doesn't even matter anyway if you choose the option to have principles! If you stick up for freedom no matter when and who, the alien won't rule against you no matter what. You can't be the one who started the shitslinging if you aren't slinging shit. Join the side of keeping your principles and you'll always be a winner in this alien court.
All epistemic methods I'm aware of have issues. I'm not aware of one with fewer issues than weighing evidence, making predictions, and tracking results. Certainly you have not presented an alternative, nor explained why that alternative is better.
You are pointing out that peoples' assessment of evidence can be flawed, and their assessment of outcomes can also be flawed, and that correlation between these flaws can compromise their assessments. This is true. Unfortunately, there is no general solution to the epistemic problem, and all the evidence I've seen indicates that this is as good as it gets.
When I was much younger, I was a deep-blue progressive atheist deeply embedded in the Blue Tribe narrative machine. I believed that Bush did 9/11, that he was a fascist, and that he intended to overthrow American democracy, probably by conducting another false-flag terror attack and then using it as a pretext to suspend elections. This was a quite popular belief among Blues back then, and I bought it all hook, line and sinker. I believed it so firmly that I moved to Canada and seriously considered renouncing my American citizenship. Only, none of the things I believed would happen, the things the people I was listening to predicted would happen, actually happened. There never was another major terror attack anywhere close to the scale of 9/11, false-flag or otherwise. Bush was re-elected in an election I and most of my social circle was certain was rigged, but then four years later Obama trounced Romney, and power transferred as normal.
I had invested heavily in predictions that were decisively falsified. Much that I had theorized, much that I had assumed was true, came apart. I took a hard look at much of the information economy I'd been patronizing, and downgraded the voices who had clearly fed me bad data and bad predictions. I updated my model of how the world worked. Nor was there much room for ambiguity in these predictions.
In 2016, immediately following the election of Donald Trump, I had a considerable amount of savings, and wanted to invest it. I'd been reluctant to do so for years, due to distrust in the economy after living through both the dotcom crash and the housing crisis. Still, it seemed to me that my fear of economic conditions was increasingly irrational, and I thought I should probably bite the bullet and put my money to work. While researching the question online, I found Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman's post-election predictions that Trump was absolutely going to trash the market and destroy the American economy. I looked around and found plenty of other economic authorities offering the same line. Having spent well over a decade immersed in Blue Tribe culture, and having spent considerable time reading and discussing Rationalist literature, I had great respect for Credentialed Experts. I sat on my money, and missed out on one of the best stock market runs of my adult life.
Again, I had invested (or not invested, as it were) heavily in the predictions of a particular data stream. That data-stream's predictions were falsified very thoroughly. I noted this, and updated accordingly: I no longer listen to Paul Krugman, nor to people who employ or cite Paul Krugman, and I place significantly less weight on the opinions of economists generally. This has stood me in good stead ever since, from holding crypto to noting the presence of inflation that was officially denied, to refusal to accept the economic case against Trump in the 2024 election.
What predictions have you invested in? Where have you been wrong? What have you learned?
I would place the odds of the reality-knowing alien agreeing with me fairly high. You are correct that all humans are biased, and that it is hard to see one's own bias. That does not mean it is impossible, and I have spent a long time testing my understanding in a fairly rigorous and notably adversarial environment, while going a fair distance out of my way to encounter and engage with contrary opinions and perspectives. I do my best to maintain epistemic humility, and to consider that I might be wrong, but at this point I do not think it is unreasonable to expect something more concrete than a looping claim of "maybe you're wrong even if you can't see how or why and no evidence has been presented". Yes, maybe I am wrong. Maybe all the evidence I've accumulated and all the predictions I've tracked and all the outcomes I've updated off were flawed in some subtle way. And if so, then the best way to know it is to see outcomes that falsify my expectations or evidence that contradicts my understanding, not to reject assessment and action due to endless, self-referential doubt.
What is the alien in this model? You are familiar with the is/ought problem, yes? It seems that your scenario only makes sense if the alien is "ought", if the alien represents moral correctness, and you are asking "are you confident in your moral judgements". As it happens, I am reasonably confident in my moral judgements and, from the way you write, somewhat skeptical of yours, but I do agree that the best way to ensure one maintains the moral high ground is to stick to one's principles. Unfortunately, I have also learned that actual principles are exceedingly costly, and I find that I cannot afford to maintain very many of them. It has proved crucial to choose which to keep and which to discard, and while you have not even begun to adequately define this "freedom" you speak of, I am pretty sure that's not one of the ones I'm holding on to. "Freedom", as popularly understood and as taught to me in my youth, is a spook, a non-entity, a linguistic confusion. It seems to me there are some specific freedoms worth paying dearly for, but the model you appear to be appealing to here and certainly have appealed to elsewhere in the thread is, in my assessment, worthless, pointless and hopeless.
Krugman literally days after was like yeah ok that's too alarmist, protectionism and short term thinking on the climate are going to be economic issues in the long run but it's not like they explode everything right away https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/opinion/trump-slump-coming.html
Which yeah, protectionism is pretty terrible in the long run. We had a whole bout about it in the 1700s with free traders like Adam Smith and Hume tearing into the idea of mercantilist style trade theory. Capitalism exists with the concept that markets and trade are good.
People being hyperbolic doesn't mean real issues don't exist, it just means people are hyperbolic. I've heard plenty of hyperbolic conservatives talk about how Covid vaccines was going to be used to insert nanochips into people, heck I overheard a neighbor once say that everyone who was vaccinated will die within a year. That didn't happen.
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"Look, Charles, I know you look at those organisms there and note their similarities and differences and think this is good evidence that they arose via natural selection of variations among the offspring of some parent organism. But Archbishop Wilberforce, he's looked at the same 2500 organisms and he sees in them the hand of God. How are you so sure he's the biased one and not you?"
Interesting example given that conservatism is generally the one associated with denying evolution. And hey wait then, did you just show there was something about your own group you were accidently blind to?
"My own group"? LOL. When this all started I was an atheist libertarian. I'm still a atheist, and in some ways a libertarian -- but I demand my libertarianism pays off in liberty for me and mine, rather than simply being beliefs which require that I let others harm me. Heck, if you think Trump himself is a religious conservative you're way off base. This motley alliance of people who are seeing Trump beat on the institutions and being OK with it was put together, not by the religious right nor by Trump nor even by J.D. Vance. It was put together by the left itself, who has been throwing everyone who disagrees with them into a political pit with various derogatory labels for well over a decade now.
You've been carefully ignoring all the examples of this that have been presented, instead demanding we ignore all that and continue to give them the maximum benefit of the principles they do not hold and did not grant to us. And when that seemed a little much you retreated to the position of invincible ignorance, that we cannot know that we are right and they are wrong, so we shouldn't treat them as if they are wrong. But ignoring those things doesn't make them go away, and a universal argument against knowledge is just sophistry.
You don't think there's religious people who don't believe in evolution that are on your side of the left-wing/right-wing divide?
I agree with your general proposition that political alliances can not be split so easily to begin with and to blame you for the beliefs and actions of the religious evolution denier would be silly, but I also believe that of the many groups and factions that compose "the left".
Likewise I have been presented with tons of examples from leftists about conservative institutions and powerful elites censoring and oppressing people. Heck some examples are ironic, like a school that tried to ban Harry Potter due to depictions of witchcraft back in the 90s. That's of course a funny example, but there's plenty that aren't so funny.
The FCC's rules against "indecency" prohibiting even swearing. The radio stations that banned the Dixie chicks for opposing the Iraq war. Even now the director of the United States Office of Management and Budget has expressly said he wants to ban pornography through back door methods.
So I have evidence from both sides, strong evidence of both sides. Both of them yelling "we didn't start the fire" as they both throw Molotovs.
Good news, you can know you didn't start the fire if you don't throw molotovs and side with principled free speech organizations like FIRE.
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