This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I find this an odd argument, particularly if you care about truth or morality?
Suppose we have two groups of people, A and B. Group A generally finds right answers, but for wrong reasons. Group B generally finds wrong answers, but for right reasons. Which group would you rather be in?
I feel like there's a reasonable case that Group A is preferable. The right answers are, well, the whole point. I would rather be in the group that's not eating sharks or getting cyanide poisoning. Even then, I think the Secret of Our Success model is a bit too patronising - the shark and manioc examples are cute but sound too much like "they did something sensible but for bad reasons, whereas we know the good reasons now".
But what makes a reason 'right' or 'wrong'? If a certain type of reasoning generally leads you to right or good answers, doesn't that in itself make that type of reasoning right? The slogan used to be that rationality is winning. The process that gets you to the right answers is the right process, surely?
I do think that good reasoning and bad reasoning exist. A guess that randomly lands on the right answer is not epistemically virtuous; likewise a reasonable hypothesis that nonetheless turns out to be false is not un-virtuous. High school science teaches that Democritus came up with atomic theory, but firstly he didn't really, and secondly Democritus' atoms aren't really any more sensible or reasonable a guess than Thales' water-based theory. Good reasoning ought to reliably, in a manner better than random chance, lead to good results. Likewise we might think that good reasoning ought to, in some way, logically relate premises to conclusions, though even that might just be a result of the observation that logic positively correlates with reasons that lead to good conclusions.
However, in a case like this, if Group A are using some sort of black-box reasoning that regularly leads to good conclusions, and Group B are using a different black-box that regularly leads to bad or wrong conclusions, I would suggest that maybe we should look in Group A's black box. Maybe there's something inside it that works. Good reasoning is reasoning that regularly produces good conclusions.
I think you are overdosing on philosophy. If group A generally finds the right answers it has a generally correct model of the world. They could be wrong in the sense that newtonian physics is wrong but a better way to think about it is that it is approximately correct under certain circumstances. Your hypothetical presupposes a definition of correctness that's beyond just making correct predictions.
To the general point you were addressing, you shouldn't adopt a model of the world that correctly predicts one thing if it happens to do it for the wrong reasons, because it will be generally wrong.
More options
Context Copy link
In the hypothetical A obviously. But reality isn't that hypothetical and in the real world better reasoning skills will tend to result in more accurate answers. This is the literal point of reasoning after all. Smarter people will tend to be more right than dumber people are.
Modern western society is generally more intelligent and richer (one of the more objective ways to judge this because wealth is a universal goal and being better at getting money typically means you have higher skill somewhere) than both other modern societies and past societies western or not. The decisions of modern western society can be expected to generally be smarter and better than those alternatives then. Thus most likely "we don't really care about the gays" is a better choice than "behead the gays".
It's not perfect (there's probably hundreds of thousands/millions of different factors in a society after all), but it is a general trend that classically liberal democratic freedom embracing western society has more factors correct than illiberal oppressive freedom hating ones.
In that case, then what is the point of considering the hypothetical of "right for the wrong reasons" versus "wrong for the right reasons"? The former can only be right by accident, and the latter can only be wrong by some sort of mistake. Wrong reasons will inevitably conduce to wrong answers, and right reasons likewise to right answers.
Don't you just, at this point, reduce to "good and smart things are good and smart"? Well, sure, but that's not much of an insight.
In the post I was responding to, you suggested:
Okay, so, let's rephrase the hypothetical a bit.
Group A, which is small, holds position X for well-thought-out reasons.
Group B, which is also small, though larger than Group A, holds position anti-X for well-thought-out reasons.
Group C, which is very large, holds position X for poorly-thought-out reasons.
Should Group A therefore recant position X, and switch to anti-X? Why?
From the position of Group A, maybe Group C have accidentally or arbitrarily landed on a correct position. Is that a reason to turn down Group C's support? I can't see any inconsistency in Group A allying with Group C, and perhaps also aiming to better-educate Group C.
Alternatively, Group A might theorise that there's some deeper, hard-to-express wisdom that is being expressed by Group C, even if Group C are incapable of rationalising it or expressing it. This is the argument you get in The Secret of Our Success, or what concepts like the wisdom of repugnance are getting at. In Catholic theology, this is also called the sensus fidei - the people as a whole may not be able to competently express a doctrine, but they have an 'instinct' for its truth. (A famous example of this is that most lay Catholics cannot define the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, but they have an instinctive, inchoate sense that Mary is special, or in some way set apart by God for a holy task.)
Maybe you buy the idea of some sort of pre-rational folk wisdom, like SooS or the sensus fidei, but even if you don't, I do not see how the existence of Group C constitutes a reason for Group A to reconsider their views. Even if Group C picked a position completely at random, from Group A's perspective, they got lucky and picked the right position. It's certainly not evidence that position X is wrong.
You used the example of social conservatism, but I don't think you have to read this in a partisan way like that. Your post, following Hanania, seems to be written assuming that the intelligent elite will always trend liberal (for some unspecified definition of 'liberal') whereas the masses will be conservative, but that doesn't seem to empirically always be the case. Even on the example he used, sexuality, the masses have switched sides and now the opposite seems to be true - in the West nowadays, position X is pro-LGBT, and it's Group B who are anti-gay. (The intellectual gap is visible as well! Group A, the intellectual pro-LGBT camp, are now the ones who've dived into queer theory and trans liberation and family abolition. Group C, the masses, are the ones who say 'sure, let them marry, don't care one way or the other'.)
But generally and more broadly, it is true that there are sometimes liberal or progressive positions embraced by the masses, while smaller intellectual groups are against them. I don't think you can universally generalise. The masses adopt all sorts of positions - maybe sometimes arbitrarily, sometimes through being honestly persuaded, maybe sometimes due to messy, organic cultural revolution - and I do not consider the fact that the masses hold a particular position to be an argument against that position.
On the individual level, of course you should always try to hold your positions for the right reasons. That goes for everyone. But the existence of large numbers of people who hold the same position for the wrong reasons should not invalidate your reasons, nor cause you any kind of intellectual crisis.
You're right, the hypothetical doesn't really work to begin with. Good reasoning and intelligence are specifically measures meant to reflect the ability to get the correct answers.
Groups with bad reasoning and right answers are broken clocks, they were just lucky. Groups with good reasoning and bad answers are not fools, they are just unlucky.
For instance imagine someone trying to calculate how far a bullet will go, and an idiot says "one inch" randomly cause he doesn't understand gunpowder and thinks the bullet will slide out of the chamber. The genius does a bunch of math, but is blind and doesn't know there's a wall right in front of the gun stopping the bullet.
The idiot is correct from luck, the genius is incorrect from luck. We should not want to be the idiot, because the idiot will be wrong in every other bullet calculation.
That's true to some degree, but a lot of populist beliefs held by the masses are not even particularly left or right leaning to begin with among the general population! Like price controls sound as though they should be left leaning, but look at the major conservative states and they have it too..
A divide among intellectual elites does not necessarily reflect a divide among the general populace.
If smart people trend towards X and dumb people trend towards Y, and everything else you know about it is equal you should go with X. Yes smart people can sometimes be wrong too, but if intelligence doesn't reflect a general ability to get things more correct more often, then we have a bad measurement of intelligence. It shouldn't overwrite all sense and reason you have obviously (especially since often the correct answer is nuanced and can differ based off the situation like how in a video game a top tier character might be top tier because of high execution that a lower rank player can't do, and therefore the character is actually weak in low ranks), but you really should trend towards what smart people do and say.
This reasoning leads to the conclusion that a bunch of people you probably don't enjoy calling high intelligence are high intelligence. (Donald Trump seems to have gotten ahead in life far more than the average Mottizen has.) Or else it leads you to say "actually, looking at results isn't enough because they could still get lucky" in which case you just contradicted your own thesis, and also need a measure of intelligence that is not about getting results. (IQ tests?)
Wouldn't your standards require that you conclude black people are low in intelligence?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How fast can you fail, are we talking locally wrong or globally wrong, and to what extent are As constrained? Though again, this is progressivism/traditionalism/conservatism/whatever Six Foundation thinking is calling itself these days [as A] vs. and classical liberalism [as B].
Which is why most people are, at the intersection of all identities, generally in Group A (as well as the fact that 'right answers for right reasons' are inevitably incorporated by A when discovered by B). You'd have to be some sort of principled libertarian to be in B, which is why B tends to have a lot to do with those who find wrong answers for wrong reasons.
Yet the fact remains that A is completely unsustainable without B- you claim that A "finds" right answers, but generally speaking, they do no such thing. The reverse is not as true, which creates a lot of existential angst for A (and most A memes are designed to shut down and delay realizing that cognitive dissonance, ideally past one human lifetime).
Well, yeah- when A was racist, racism yielded a global maximum of results (or perhaps the predictive power of racism yielding excellent local results lead to the As at the time incorporating it). A rapidly discovered and incorporated the epistemic virtue of racism.
But that's too reductive- it's more accurate to say that racism was a local maximum (which is why As were racist) in a particular time and place. However, once racism stopped being that local maximum, the A at that time was completely destroyed, and a new group A' took over from A.
Naturally, A' claimed they discovered the virtue of not being racist both to siphon power from A, and disavow that the existence of A' owed its existence to grabbing whatever B had for anti-racism and erecting an entire moral edifice around it (as those who choose A have as much a psychological dependence on that morality as those who choose B depend on the idea that the process of correct morality yields positive results). But they're both still A, and once the takeover has concluded, A has 'always been at war with Eastasia', so to speak.
From B's viewpoint, yes- they might be locally (or even globally) correct but they're also horrible people who should never get anywhere near real power, the Puritans being a classic example (note also that "puritanical" is a B meme).
From A's viewpoint, there's no dissonance here, because they don't perceive it to be random- they are good people and deserve good things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link