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Looks like Dilbert is being pulled from newspapers following controversial remarks by its creator, Scott Adams https://www.foxnews.com/us/laid-off-newspapers-drop-office-cartoon-dilbert-over-creators-racial-remarks
I don't think this is quite that big of deal personally. He has FU money and his brand/career at punditry keeps growing. I think his bigger risk would is being de-platformed from Youtube/Twitter. He don't need Dilbert anymore but he does need his Youtube and Twitter accounts.
I'm curious about this. To what extent are his views actually his choice? The concept of anyone's views being anyone's actual choice is kind of silly to me. Your views are the result of all of your life experiences, are they not? Maybe this is crossing into free will territory. I never sit down and think, "What am I going to choose to believe today?"... I just believe things. If data comes about that demonstrates I'm wrong, then that's a learning experience, not a choice to change my view.
Alternatively,
They're respecting his "choice" about as much as the British respected the Indian "choice" to immolate widows.
At least nobody was murdered, or threatened to be murdered. We live in the gentlest of times!
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I think it makes sense to read this as a statement about the locus of control, here. That is, Adams' views are to be determined by Adams himself. His opinions are not controlled by the newspaper, nor does the newspaper consider itself responsible for controlling them. It's actually quite an important principle, in its own way.
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No one at any level of this controversy, except possibly Adams himself, actually cares whether his views are his choice. The newspaper wants to avoid a reader boycott that they don't know won't happen and so are terrified of being seen as "supporting racists" or whatever. That statement is just a soundbite.
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"His views are his choice, our choice is to not associate with him" is a lie from both directions.
If newspapers really, really cared what their cartoonists think, they'd have their on-staff investigative reporters do PI work on 'em. They don't, because what they actually care about from revealed preferences is their cartoonist's public-facing, loudly broadcasted views. If it's not gonna cause them PR problems, they don't care, and if it's not a broadcasted view, it's not gonna cause them PR problems. No-one cares if you don't really think General Secretary Andropov is a good leader, so long as you keep your opinions to your fucking self, comrade.
The other direction in which this is a lie is that it's not the newspaper's choice either. They're being coerced, extorted, by (their expectations of) their own readership. That's what a "PR problem" is - a problem that wouldn't matter unless the public's reaction mattered. If it were 1950 and Dilbert was being published mostly in the South, Adams' comments wouldn't be a PR problem, they'd be a PR boon, and no-one would get cancelled; which serves to prove that the newspaper is similarly constrained by the political milieu in which it operates.
Admittedly, this sort of analysis is mildly comolicated by the recent dynamic of entryism into newspapers by actual ideological zealots who would like to use investigative reporters as Stasi thoughtpolice on their own colleagues and don't care if the newspaper goes bankrupt so long as Brown Scare enemies get cancelled, but I don't think those people are making the command decisions. Yet.
Well, yes, that was the case before the epoch of wokeness and every company having VP DIE. Now, the whole thing is short-circuited and the twitter doesn't even crow three times before the wrongthinker is already cancelled by the in-house DIE team.
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You are overly philosophizing a one-line throwaway rationalization but;
I do wonder if one could make a convincing woke case that beliefs are actually not one's own choice just like their race, gender, and sexual orientation; how much would that short circuit the wokes hostility towards nonbelievers? Something along the lines of..
" Muslims and most Black people despite being minorities don't hold welcoming views towards LGBTQ people. This is not a good thing because in our fight against the patriarchal white supremacy we all live in all minorites need to combine their strengths to stand even a fighting chance. Nonetheless, we don't consider it a moral failure on the part of Black people or Muslims because we all know that
black people can do no wrong evereven minority cultures historically have not been safe from the influence of pervasive systems of bigotry. Often, all the disenfranchised have are their culture. Therefore we shouldtolerate bigotry from black peopleconsider cultural beliefs and traditions to be a protected form of expression."It wouldn't at all. The nonbelievers are already evil in their minds; if you managed to sincerely convince them that there was nothing they could do to change this through activism, education, and other outlets, I would be willing to bet that a non-trivial number would adopt eliminationist rhetoric, and a non-zero number of them would act on it.
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Saying "black people can be racist" already short circuits them. Look at the thread on the old place's news board and see them flip out at people questioning the narrative.
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To all practical extents, for this and most questions of value and abstract assessment. We choose which arguments to accept, which to interrogate, which to reject, and for each issue the chain of argument extends infinitely for any question of significant complexity. We follow that chain as far as we wish, and where we stop on one chain versus another is always a choice.
It's true, perhaps, to a limited extent, that one cannot arbitrarily change basic, heavily reinforced beliefs about simple, obvious things. Even with these, though, one can choose to actively undermine those reinforcements, until the belief itself becomes unsupported enough to be a mere opinion.
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You can also ignore the data and remain committed to your view despite the evidence. I'm not sure if that's a 'choice' in some philosophical sense but there is more than one way this can go.
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You are defending the actions taken, the question was about the reasoning. Choosing to not court controversy is very different to choosing what to believe. No matter how his beliefs were discovered they would have ellicited the same reaction. But he didn't choose them.
Beliefs are supported by the assessment of evidence. Assessment is judgement. Judgement is choice.
Evidence is acquired by searching for it. Searching or not is a choice.
You and others in this thread are looking at heavily supported, highly-reinforced beliefs, and noting that they are not easily changed on a whim. In the same way, addictions, phobias, and other heavily-supported or highly reinforced mental constructs are also difficult to change on a whim. The fact that you can choose to make some choices much easier or harder to make than they might otherwise be may obfuscate the choices being made, but does not obviate them.
Free will is an illusion*. A judgement is a choice in the sense that it is the selection of one option out of many, it is not necessarily a conscious decision. If you dislike a burger because of its taste you have judged it, but you didn't have a choice between "mmm I just can't get enough of this disgusting burger" and "snakes alive what did I just put in my mouth?"
Which is beside the point that Adams choosing to not court controversy is very different to choosing what he believes.
*But you should behave as if it's real regardless.
That is certainly a belief one can choose to hold, but the entire context of this discussion is over whether the paper should choose to treat Adams other than how they have. To the exact extent that Adams' actions are not chosen, neither are those of the people punishing him, or those of us arguing about the situation. It's not that this line of thinking can't have an internally consistent logic, it's just completely pointless to the exact extent it's not selectively applied.
Not necessarily, no. Biases and priors weigh heavily on most judgements. But the biases and priors are themselves formed largely by previous choices, some large, some very small and almost imperceptible. The chains of causality are tightly knotted, but our consciousness and the will that directs it are, I think, dispositive in the final analysis.
If you have disliked a burger because of its taste, you have reacted to it. Instinctive reactions can, with effort, be overridden. Tastes can be acquired, associations changed, biases shaped and altered. All these are completely normal things that people do every day, as part of teaching, social interaction, and personal growth.
I have spoken only about Adams' beliefs, but should go a step further: Adams is not a good-faith communicator. He is not, strictly speaking, honest, either about his beliefs or his intentions. His normal modus operandi is to say things not because they are true, but to elicit desired reactions from his audience and from the public at large. I am normally quite leery of the "they're just saying it for attention, they're a grifter" argument applied to people who speak out against woke orthodoxy, but it seems to me that "grifter" is a reasonably accurate description of Adams, and I am pretty sure he is, in fact, doing it for the attention. My guess is that he's done the math, newspapers are dying, and so he's getting himself "cancelled" out of a market that does him limited good, in exchange for public attention that will boost his various entertainment properties.
It seems like we are talking past each other. My whole argument is about not necessarily conscious decisions. You ceded the argument to me when you said:
And elsewhere when you said
Like your ability to determine facts from evidence. If you learn a bunch of inconvenient facts, you can't just choose to ignore them and believe the opposite. You can lie to yourself and others about it, but if you believe something is a fact, saying it isn't true doesn't change your belief. The belief can change over time, I never said beliefs can't change, but you merely chose to lie about it - it is not until you are no longer lying about it that it becomes a different belief. And you won't stop lying about it until you lose faith in the facts you originally believed.
That's the difference between a belief and a reason - faith. But reason isn't an alternative to faith, you need to have faith in reasoning to utilise it - you can't start reasoning until you have faith in reasoning as a tool to ascertain the truth. And once you trust in your own ability to use logic and deduction and inference, it is almost impossible to stop believing in it, no matter how much you wish you could, as anyone who has found evidence the love of their life is cheating on them knows. So if you start going down the racial crime statistics rabbit hole, for which the rebuttal is "how dare you look at that!", you are going to arrive at conclusions you probably shouldn't put in your podcast (note I am not claiming the newspaper did wrong by him, I don't think they had a choice either, as I have already said it is the reasoning not the actions I take issue with).
But being silent about them doesn't change your beliefs. The only thing that would change your beliefs is alternative evidence, which doesn't exist, or if you abandoned logic and reasoning. Perhaps you can do that. I don't think it's outrageous to think Adams can't, because I know a lot of other people who are in that position. People who didn't want to be "racist", people who desperately sought out rebuttals and alternative evidence because they were told repeatedly throughout their lives and believed that black crime is a racist myth. But they didn't find rebuttals and alternative evidence, because the alternative is "Wait these stats agree with racists? Stop recording them then!"
Which is why I agree that Adams is not a good faith communicator and also don't care. He's as good faith as any other media pundit. He's saying something other people, people without his reach, have been saying. That is when a pundit is closest to truth, and when people say they don't think he can choose that belief they are often people who came to a similar unavoidable conclusion.
You mean you shouldn't do that; the unwashed masses do so most of the time. Meanwhile, sophisticated, urbane individuals such as yourself or I simply weigh the inconvenient facts against a set of more convinient ones, with our values/worldview/will casting the deciding vote. Intelligent people learn that any question worth discussing is highly complex, hence comes with a fair amount of ambiguity, and that ambiguity is more than sufficient for opposite conclusions to be drawn from the same set of evidence, merely through weighting, emphasis, and similar selection effects. You can conclude, if you are young and have not yet learned that you are capable of error, that anyone who disagrees with your assessment of evidence is simply lying to themselves. But From many, many years of arguing with people, I have concluded that, no, they really do see things differently.
You don't have to stop believing in it for Reason to not operate deterministically. Human reason simply is not good enough, precise and reliable enough, and the knowledge it's based on comprehensive enough, to operate deterministically beyond even slight abstractions. It's good enough to read a map or split an atom. It's good enough for you to be convinced your wife is cheating on you, if you catch her in flagrante. It's not good enough to tell you why she's cheating on you, or how you should feel about it, or what to do about it. And this is for extremely simple questions, with low-single-digit numbers of first-order variables!
...This does not seem accurate to me.
You and Adams are pointing to the obvious, overwhelming evidence of Black crime rates. The people on the other side are not shrieking "how dare you look at that", they are pointing to the obvious, overwhelming evidence of multiple centuries of brutal chattel slavery, followed by another century of strictly-enforced racial oppression, followed by a few decades of quite severe racial animosity that slowly declined over time. That is a lot of evidence that you neglected to mention in your summary!
You weigh these two sets of evidence, and many others besides, and in doing so you use your own values, perspective, and axioms to render judgement. It is my contention that your values and axioms are themselves chosen by you, that they tend to be dispositive unless the evidence is absolutely overwhelming on an issue, and that the evidence is never, ever overwhelming on any issue of real significance. You choose your values, incrementally over time, and in turn your values lead you to choose what evidence to collect, and how to assess it.
Conclusions are, to a first approximation, never unavoidable on any question of substance. If they were, it would not be a question of substance any longer, because evidence would deterministically conform peoples' beliefs to the truth. This observably does not happen with questions pertaining to human nature, behavior, or history, to philosophy, theology, or ideology, questions of value and questions of worldview. People differ not because they fail to use their reason properly, but because human reason itself is insufficient to the task.
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This is not true. The objecvtion to Adams having "chosen" isn't a general one about all sorts of choices, it's about his beliefs. Beliefs are not-chosen in a stronger sense than actions are.
Belief is always an action.
Some actions are trivial, and some are not. Closing my laptop is an action. Becoming a billionaire is also an action. Closing my laptop and becoming a billionaire can be thought of as a single process, or a whole series of complex sub- and sub-sub and sub-sub-sub processes, but either way, they are both accomplished by will put into practice. The difference is that closing my laptop is a trivial action for me, while becoming a billionaire is not, because the necessary actions involve much greater effort and will. On the other hand, the last step in the billionaire process, signing the contract that will secure one's fortune, for example, can easily become trivial once all the rest of the work has already been done.
In the same way, some beliefs are trivial, and some are not. I could ask you which of three random pieces of art you preferred, and to give your reasons as to why it was the best. Selecting a piece could be done on instinct, but interrogating the instinct, making it a real choice, is going to result in making decisions, active effort, action. You would in fact be choosing a belief, and it is in fact easy to do for such trivial questions, because the choice being made is isolated.
Other beliefs are non-trivial to change, not because the questions are somehow fundamentally different, but because some of their answers can put one in tension with large constellations of previously-chosen beliefs. Usually such tension is most easily resolved by simply rejecting the answers that cause them, but this, again, is still a choice. One could instead accept the tension, and begin re-evaluating those previous choices, and the choices supporting them, and so on as far back as necessary until the tension is resolved. For many questions, this would be very hard to do, but the choice being hard does not preclude it from being a choice.
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From the perspective of a certain liberal dream, people should be free to air their views without facing such consequences. Requiring a narrow band of ideological adherence in one’s extended personal and professional circle leading to people hiding their true beliefs is not healthy. Individual responsibility cuts the other way: in the interest of a free open society, he has a duty not to lie. I would question whether newspaper consumers in general really want him fired (as opposed to a few activists), but if they do, they are wrong.
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This is something that gets me as well. I wager if you asked the person from MLive Media who wrote that statement to choose to become a Nazi right now, in the sense that he truly, in his heart of hearts, believed that Jews were sub-humans who ought to be exterminated, he couldn't do it, even under threat of death or torture. The best he could do is to play-act the role. I don't see why this would be any different for Scott Adams's views about black people or anyone's views about anything.
This does cross into free will territory and applies more broadly to any sort of behavior. A bank robber didn't have the choice to have a brain that tells him that grabbing a gun and threatening tellers was a good way to make money, no more than Charles Whitman had a choice to have a tumor in his brain affecting his amygdala before he went on a killing spree in UT Austin.
Yet our society does treat these behaviors as being "choices" and hold the people carrying these out as agents responsible for the consequences of these "choices." And to a large extent, our society depends on this in order to function. People noticed that holding people accountable for their "choices" is helpful for making a more comfortable society to live in, likely through incentivizing - perhaps "manipulating" is just as good a term - people to behave in certain ways. The way I see it, the idea that these types of things are choices is a sort of legal fiction that society holds up as a means to make it function at all. And basically no one who created the fiction realized it was fiction, and same goes for people who follow the fiction.
And so we get to cases like here, where someone like Scott Adams is excoriated for daring to "choose" his views. The person is just acting out the fictional thing that our society agreed on to treat as fact; he doesn't like Scott Adams's behavior and wants less of it, so he incentivizes less of it in society by punishing Scott Adams for doing that behavior, while invoking that fiction as the justification.
Actually, I've recently noticed that whenever a mass shooting occurs, very little time is spent blaming the shooter, and much more ink and airtime is spent on blaming guns, gun stores, gun manufacturers, toxic masculinity, racism, sexism, inadequate mental health care, inadequate school security, cowardly cops that refuse to attempt to intervene, etc., etc., etc.
I suppose that, in many cases, the default assumption is that mass shooters are psychopathic, and thus, anyone who assumes that doesn't need to spend time considering mass shooters as agents with choices.
There's other factors to this: the strategy of preventing mass shootings by not publicizing the event also means not publicizing the perpetrator, which obviously eliminates the possibility of exploring the person in question as a person and not just some unforeseen force of destruction, and, of course, there's also what you imply in your post; that mass shootings are instead used as evidence to argue for some social change.
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i think this is because there is little need to blame the shooter. it's kinda the default to be appalled by such a thing (for very good reason i might add) and only a fringe few are willing to take the position of defending a mass shooter.
if this was a extremely rare event i'd be inclined to agree but such events are more common than "extremely rare" (it's still pretty rare comparatively). this + the shocking and violent nature of what mass shootings are... well they're bound to cause people to look for solutions.
it's well established that people are at least in part a product of their environment. and since we don't have control over innate characteristics of humans (there's no "is gonna be a mass shooter" gene), the best people tend to go for I think to have some sense of control is the environment.
an aside: and it is fair also i think to recognize and criticize authority responses to such events, but that's a different comment.
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I've never been convinced by this line of reasoning. Like, the conclusion is supposed to be, "...and, therefore, one's beliefs aren't a choice," but I just don't see how that follows. Instead, the only conclusion I see is, "Some beliefs are held strongly enough that asking for them to change (perhaps even under threat of death or torture) will not result in said change." It doesn't seem to imply anything about whether the strong belief is chosen or not.
I suppose, can you give me an example of a thing that a person can choose? I think, at bottom, the above argument is a facile face on what is really just hard determinism at its core (from people who can't bear to "choose" to live with the consequences of real hard determinism).
I can't give an example, and that's the entire point; there is no such example, by my lights. And I don't see how determinism enters into it. Whether the universe is deterministic or there's some sort of cosmic dice that get rolled for physical interactions that make future states impossible to reliably predict based on the current state, one still doesn't have choice on the states of one's brain, which are the direct antecedents of one's apparent "choices." I didn't choose to have a brain that tells my finger muscles to type out this paragraph, for instance, and that's the case even if the atoms in my brain aren't following some sort of deterministic set of physical rules but rather being affected by some sort of truly random process.
It's more a question of dualism than determinism, which are related concepts but not identical. Dualism makes room for a soul to manipulate our neurons, allowing us to make true choices, but also requires a belief in the supernatural. Without it, we have to accept that whatever experience of "choosing" one has in their consciousness is a consequence of the behavior of the atoms in one's brain, which may be deterministic or not, but either way aren't controlled by oneself. One could argue that one's current brain state is "controlled" by past choices made by one's conscious mind, but that just moves the whole thing back a step, which can continue all the way back to the point where one became conscious for the first time as a baby.
Schrödinger equation's equation is deterministic, but the output concerning physical observables includes randomness. So, your distinction concerning randomness isn't really relevant. Nor is dualism the only mechanism by which the ability to choose could be said to exist. Typically, 'determinism' is short-hand for the opposite position of 'free will'.
But yeah, as I suspected, you pretty much commit yourself to hard determinism... at least until this discussion is finished.
Nothing personnel eh?
How about you just explain what you mean? Because currently your posts look like shorelines with at least three feet of vertical elevation above the high tide line.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
You speak very condescendingly about hard determinism, but never actually explain what you mean by that term. Even after 07mk said he doesn't see determinism entering the equation, you still just sneer at the concept like everyone should know exactly what you mean. In the past when I have seen people do this, it is as a bluff. Either a sort of shit test to see if their partner knows as much as them, or in the hopes their confidence and condescension will convince others to assume they know what they are talking about and drop it. But that goes against the spirit of this place, and the speak plainly rule.
I don't want to report you though, because I might be wrong or you might have done it by accident or a thousand other possibilities, so I'd rather just talk it out. I do think you know what you are talking about, but I would also like to know what you are talking about.
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