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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32799 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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You are being excessively literal in a way which is the scourge of rationalists.

"Why should anyone care" means "why should people other than the ones central to the situation care", not literally "why should any human being care".

You are being excessively literal in a way which is the scourge of rationalists.

I'm never going to apologize for seeking clarity. Or maybe put a little differently: if I'm an autist at heart, then telling me I'm being too autistic is like telling a bird it is being too feathery. Like, look around you. If you have a problem with rationalists, you've come to a funny part of town...

"Why should anyone care" means "why should people other than the ones central to the situation care", not literally "why should any human being care".

Looks like a motte-and-bailey to me. "What? No! I just meant me, personally--I don't mean literally no one should care about the outgroup I'm railing against and weak-manning right here in the thread. What kind of monster do you take me for?" Uh huh. Try pulling the other one.

The post contained:

Some dude in a dress follows your daughter into the locker room, well, you have great reason to care about your daughter's comfort, and no reason at all to make that a lower priority than his comfort.

That post claims that "nobody should care" is wrong because the person at the center of it cares about what happens to him personally. That's not "as long as it's the outgroup", unless his outgroup is one person, that's blatantly misreading it.

Furthermore, there's no motte and bailey around because most normal people are capable of understanding that phrase. This is on the order of going to a party and being told "Have as much cake as you want" and then claiming it's a motte-and-bailey when you loaded all five cakes from the party into your truck and drove home with them, and your host got mad.

I disagree that this is a bad thing. Precision of language is a laudable goal to strive for, even if nobody ever quite attains the goal in practice.

You’re not wrong, but neither is it wrong to answer the question literally. Where it goes wrong, in my eyes, is when it turns into pedantry, dismissal, or antagonism.

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