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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.
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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