site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34382 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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.

15
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Recently I watched a debate between friend-of-the-motte Aella and infamous Canadian radical feminist Meghan Murphy on the subject of the ethics of the sex industry. I found the debate infuriating to listen to, so I wrote way too many words breaking down my issues with it, namely outlining Meghan's extremely dodgy arguments. Much of the ideas contained herein would be well-worn to most of y'all but enjoy either way. Excerpted to avoid character limit (Zorba please save us!!):

I can't help feeling a tinge of awkward self-consciousness whenever I describe myself as part of the modern-day "Rationality" movement. As I've said before, it's perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of a group with such a self-serving and masturbatory name, because isn't everyone in favor of rational thinking? The core lessons of rationality are --- or at least should be --- dreadfully pedestrian: you should test your theories with evidence, you shouldn't believe things that aren't true, you should make logically coherent arguments, threatening to kill someone is not a valid rebuttal to their arguments, et cetera forever.

Like I said, boring stuff that you would expect from any public intellectual or anyone with even a passing familiarity with logic and critical thinking. It's at least one reason why I didn't really understand or appreciate why Eliezer Yudkowsky spent so much time writing The Sequences, a long series of blog posts that aims to break down rationality into delicious bite-sized chunks. But I live in a bubble full of rat nerds, and sometimes I get shocked awake with some cold water thrown at me. In this post, I want to highlight one recent episode that particularly stood out to me as emblematic of the evergreen utility of rationalist concepts, and it's the debate between Aella and Meghan Murphy on the ethics of the sex industry (prostitution and pornography) on the Calmversations podcast hosted by Benjamin A. Boyce.

To set things up, Meghan Murphy is a feminist thinker who has written extensively about the harms prostitution and pornography have imposed (primarily) on women, including arguing in favor of a total ban on pornography. Aella has worked as a prostitute and produced porn, and her positions on the sex industry are significantly more positive. I should say that I'm friends with Aella, but that hasn't stopped me from pointedly criticizing her ideas before. I reached out to Meghan Murphy by email, and although this post will be rather critical of her reasoning, she should absolutely be commended for responding to my questions despite the severe snark I previously tweeted her way.

I should also make it clear that any criticism should be construed narrowly, and is not meant as a broad denunciation of either Meghan's work in general nor --- crucially! --- her specific criticisms about the sex industry. I want to make sure this point is heavily emphasized, as one of the most useful (and, unfortunately, least adopted) tools in rationality is the ability to cut discussions into discrete pizza slices, such as abstracting from the object level to the meta level, or decoupling distinct ideas from each other. This is an invaluable practice in any discourse because humans are prone to irrational distractions, and very often we get reflexively defensive and assume that an attack on an argument or premise is an attack on a conclusion. To use the parlance, someone could be "accidentally right" and reach a true conclusion despite using faulty logic. So just because I criticize someone's argument does not mean that their conclusion is false.

Make Your Belief Falsifiable (i.e., Make That Motherfucker Burnable)

If I had a rationality genie grant me one wish, it would be to force everyone to make their theories falsifiable. Put simply, all it means is that if you present a theory, you should be able to articulate at least the theoretical circumstances by which your theory would be "falsified" --- proven wrong. Carl Sagan elucidated an excellent illustration of falsifiability when he described the dragon in his garage.

Consider if we were in the same house and I claimed the roof was on fire. Given what you know about the potential risks of fire, you may then want to evacuate the house, or (if you're feeling frisky) perhaps decline any water and just let the motherfucker burn. But if you look around you and point out that you don't see any flames, don't smell any smoke, nor do you hear any fire alarms, you've reasonably falsified my claim. If my response is to claim the fire I'm talking about is invisible, doesn't produce any smoke, and doesn't trigger any fire alarms, you'd be right to dismiss what I'm saying as complete fucking nonsense because I'm not conveying any useful information to you. A theory that is unfalsifiable is like a compass that always points north no matter what direction it's facing; it's useless precisely because it's "true" no matter what.

One of the very first topics Aella and Meghan broached in their debate was on the subject of the effects of pornography on its users. Meghan's argument is fairly straightforward (2:23): she believes that a consistent exposure by men to violent and/or extreme pornography (and reinforced by orgasmic dopamine feedback loop) would encourage men to replicate the acts depicted on screen in real life. Meghan repeats a version of this argument several times, and ties it explicitly to child abuse (11:51):

I think that the theory of men seeking out barely legal porn and the amount of men who look for child porn, even online, proves that there's a lot of men who are seeking out girls and underage women online to jack off to. And I think that we know that molestation and child abuse and sexual abuse and men predating on young girls, or like young women, to young women is a pretty big problem in our society. So I think that adding porn to that mix is for sure not helping and probably making it worse.

This is a logically sound and straightforward argument and, most importantly, testable and falsifiable. If Meghan argues one reason that porn is bad is because it causes bad things, then a falsification would be the absence of said bad things. But when Aella asks Meghan "What kind of data would make you update your mind?" Meghan responds "No data" and blithely asserts "I think it's bad for men to jack to barely legal porn."

The same happened when I reached out by email and asked about her position vis-à-vis the harm on women within the industry. Meghan has demonstrably changed her mind on several issues over time, so I cannot accuse her of being completely immune to new evidence or arguments. Her initial approach to porn involved "feminist porn" projects in school and reading articles by "empowered" sex workers and academics about female agency and how we need to flip the script on the "victim" narrative. But over time, she couldn't shake off the persistent and gnawing discomfort she had with pornography and eventually connected with and interviewed women who spent many years in the sex industry, who did frontline work, and academics who extensively studied the sex trade (along with reading a lot more second-wave analysis of the topic). In other words, Meghan discovered new evidence and arguments that made her change her mind.

I asked Meghan to explain the apparent contradiction between claiming that no data would change her mind, while simultaneously lucidly explaining how data did indeed change her mind. Meghan's answer was not responsive to the issue; she reiterated that no data would change her mind because her position is based on ethics.

As shown in numerous instances throughout the debate, Meghan readily provides evidence and support to explain why she is against the sex industry (31:23):

I mean, I talked to lots and lots of women in prostitution. Women who've worked as high-end escorts, women who've worked in the street, women who worked in the Downtown Eastside, women who worked in brothels. And they all said they didn't want to be there. They all have suffered immense physical and emotional trauma. Most of them came from physical and emotional trauma. Most of them came from homes where there was sexual abuse. And it was really a scary, horrific experience for them that is very difficult to get out of. So I think most of the women who are in prostitution and pornography don't actually want to be there.

But does this mean you can Believe All Women™ regarding what they say about the conditions of the sex industry? Of course not, because Meghan preemptively applies a strict credibility filter, her version of "No True Prostitute" (37:35):

[continued in full post]

I think that we know that [bad thing] is a pretty big problem in our society.

Asserting her obvious correctness on a subject. Her controversial opinion is just obviously known to be right.

Once you learn to recognize this dirty trick you see quite a bit. She doesn't argue that she is correct. She merely asserts that we all already know she's right.

Yes, this is a very normal thing to say if it's not your argument, but rather one of your premises.

The problem is that "prostitution" is as worthless of a word as "homeless" because they can be used to describe a vast spectrum of behaviors and situations. A single mom who gets fired in an economic downturn and thus can't pay rent and is evicted is not the same as a 25 year old man with a fent habit who lives in a tent for easy access to his dealer and things to boost to pay for his habit - and yet both would be "homeless"

Similarly, the vast majority of women who sell sex in the US are not like Aella they are like the street walkers you'll find in the shitty parts of any city. These women tend to be addicts, tend to have a fraught relationship with "consent" (is it really consent if their pimps beat them for not making enough money?) and live sad lives of poverty. One could argue that full legalization would solve this issue and balance the scales more towards Aella-types...but many studies have shown legalization increases human trafficking (a supply and demand problem that will exist forever - very few women wish to be prostitutes compared to the number of men who wish to use prostitute's services).

So, even basic questions of policy in this debate are difficult and highly depend on what one values more in society. Prostitution and porn are "questions" that cannot be answered with data because data cannot tell us what we ought to value more than something else. That's going to depend on the individual's moral palette. Let's assume that the data show that violent porn does not lead to violent tendencies in men who view it regularly - that wouldn't convince someone who believes violent depictions of women are inherently wrong. If it was shown that watching child pornography does not lead to pedophilic abuse in men who view it regularly many people would still feel that child pornography was wrong - even if it was drawn/rendered and not real. Even if it was shown that viewing realistic rendered child porn decreased pedophile offending rates (this is unlikely, some studies show that consumption of this kind of pornography makes offending more likely - but we just don't know), many people would still consider the production of such images wrong, perhaps even criminal.

Similarly, the vast majority of women who sell sex in the US are not like Aella they are like the street walkers you'll find in the shitty parts of any city. These women tend to be addicts, tend to have a fraught relationship with "consent" (is it really consent if their pimps beat them for not making enough money?)

Is this based on any data? I've heard claims of diametrically opposing nature (from "nobody is ever forced to do sex work nowadays, it's completely voluntary because it's the easiest job ever, you're literally born with everything you need for it" to "vast majority of sex workers are forced into it and trafficked and nobody talks about it") but I have no way to verify it. I've read self-reports from several Aella-type sex workers but I imagine I wouldn't have access to the opposite stories as opposite cases probably won't be very active on the internet, and I have no independent means to research this. So how would one know if it's true or not?

but many studies have shown legalization increases human trafficking

Prostitution is legal in Nevada, though with limitations. How much did that increase the human trafficking in Nevada compared to, say, Oregon and California? I read Las Vegas does have issues with underage prostitution, but ironically prostitution is not legal in Las Vegas at all.

So how would one know if it's true or not?

Normally I'd recommend triangulation, but the spread between what each side claims is so wild it's probably not going to yield anything accurate.

Let's assume that the data show that violent porn does not lead to violent tendencies in men who view it regularly - that wouldn't convince someone who believes violent depictions of women are inherently wrong. If it was shown that watching child pornography does not lead to pedophilic abuse in men who view it regularly many people would still feel that child pornography was wrong - even if it was drawn/rendered and not real. Even if it was shown that viewing realistic rendered child porn decreased pedophile offending rates (this is unlikely, some studies show that consumption of this kind of pornography makes offending more likely - but we just don't know), many people would still consider the production of such images wrong, perhaps even criminal.

This is where we defer to the Constitution and more broadly the justice system in a liberal democratic republic like the USA, isn't it? Certainly anyone is free to find anything immoral for any reason, but for criminalizing images, in the USA, there would have to be more justification than just finding them immoral. IANAL and I don't know about the specific legal reasoning behind criminalizing some types of porn, but given the strong free speech protections due to the 1st amendment, I imagine carving out exceptions to free speech in order to criminalize them must involve at least some consideration of the empirical reality surrounding them, such as how fair use for using copyrighted material partly hinges on if it competes directly with the original copyrighted work.

Of course, the moral judgments of society also affect the Constitution and the law, but the system is designed to make such effects go through multiple layers before taking effect. And in the case of criminalizing something purely on grounds of finding it immoral and nothing else, at least in the US, that tends to be a lot of layers. One can circumvent that by stepping up another meta level and replacing the Constitution wholesale in one shot, but that also tends to be difficult mainly for physical reasons.

"Carving out exceptions" isn't exactly what's going on, though the difference may seem pedantic outside philosophy-of-law discussions. The idea is that the original philosophical concept of free speech at the time it was instantiated into the First Amendment wasn't a complete blanket protection of all communication, from which exceptions were carved for practical reasons--it was that several types of communication did not fall under free speech at all, and never did. So categories like slander, perjury, or obscenity occupy their own metaphorical territory beyond the borders of free speech.

You still have the same debate as to where the correct line is between protected speech, and say, slander, though the philosophical grounding may affect aspects of the debate like burdens of proof and so forth. Copyright is an interesting example, because there's a longstanding debate over whether "intellectual property" is a philosophically-grounded right prior to its legal protection--that is, is IP created by or recognized by the laws protecting it. (The various items in the Bill of Rights fall into the "recognized by" category, incidentally.)

As I've said before, it's perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of a group with such a self-serving and masturbatory name, because isn't everyone in favor of rational thinking?

This gets brought up more often than it should. The name was never about rationalists being more rational. From the very beginning the idea was that we're all far less rational than we probably think and that we should aspire to rationality using intentional practices. The confusion is rather like thinking Christians all go around thinking they are Christ like instead of aspiring to be more Christ like and making efforts to that effect.

Also, to be honest, I find a lot of people aren't actually necessarily strictly "in favor of rational thinking". I know lots of people I've spoken to who scoff at rationalists because they don't believe that you can rationally quantify and know everything. To be fair, rationalists don't believe you can either, but these other people scoff at the attempt to even try it. And there are other people I've spoken to who highly value irrationality in the form of emotional reactions, and believe that emotions should be considered as strongly as rational thought. So overall, I'd say, I don't think that the name is self-serving.

I'll second this. I noticed around 10 years ago within much of my online social circles that "rational" and "logical" were being used as insults. And not in the sense of "that person is so full of himself for thinking that he's more rational than others," but rather in the sense of "rational thinking is just another way of analyzing the world and the only reason people value it highly is due to historical accident, which we must combat." From my perception, this view has largely gotten more popular and more influential in wider society since that time.

Seems reasonable to dismiss Aella’s experience as an outlier and criticize her surveys as less than rigorous (As an aside, if they are in fact rigorous I’d love to see some sort of review, I’ve been wondering about this).

Meghan loses a few points for refusing to answer the “what would change your mind” tactic, but I think if it was a boxing match she would have scored more points. It felt a little bit like a boxing match.

About the best defense you can get for Aella's surveys is that their problems -- terribly limited and self-selected sample, minimal randomization, anchoring, etc -- are also endemic in mainstream social science and no small amount of 'harder' sciences, and at least she's not promoting the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Which is true, and also damning with faint praise.

((That said, the implied 'people only care because vagina' seems a little in tension with the people in this very thread (including anti-porn people) linking to multi-hour videos by rando doctors or 'doctors'. The ratsphere is nothing if not masturbatory in the less literal sense, after all.))

criticize her surveys as less than rigorous

They’re comically unrigorous. Barely internally valid and definitely not externally valid. We learn less than nothing about the world from them. I have no idea why people pay so much attention to her (just kidding, I do). The whole community’s obsession with her is really embarassing tbh.

This critique is vague on the details. What about her surveys exactly are so bad that we learn less than nothing?

Not the person you replied to, but I am concerned that Aella doesn't care much about representativeness of the sample, instead prefering to boast about how many people filled in the survey (over 500,000 now!)

Aella claims that large sample sizes are helpful to extract statistically significant data on rare subgroups, but the Lizardman Constant shows that's not true. For example, if only 1 in 1000 people are Freemasons, you can't collect good data on Freemasons by sampling even 1,000,000 people, because according to the Lizardman Constant of 4%, you would get 40,000 responses from people falsely claiming to be Freemasons drowning out the results from the 1,000 real ones. Aella seems oblivious to this.

There are other obvious reasons why the results to Aella's kink survey would be biased, e.g.:

  1. People who aren't kinky are going to be less inclined to take a survey on kink, and it's not obvious how to control for that.

  2. Normal people with a fulltime job and a family and/or a social life don't spend a lot of time filling out surveys on TikTok. So the results are likely going to be biased towards terminally online weirdos, and it's not obvious how to control for that.

This isn't just conjecture; it's obvious in the results she's reported so far are not representative at all. For example, in The mental illness gap between cis and not-cis females she reports that trans-identified females are almost 5 times more likely to suffer from autism than normal females. Seemed interesting, and definitely plausible. But then I noticed that about 50% of all female respondents claimed to suffer from clinical depression, while more than 20% identified as transgender. Both of these figures are waaaay above the base rates in the overall population, even in the US, even if you account for the fact that females and young people are more likely to id as trans.

So either the sample is extremely biased, or people are lying about a lot of stuff, or both: either way, this doesn't bode well for the validity of other results.

My concern is not so much this bias itself. Lots of academic research is biased, as Aella pointed out on the stream (also known as the WEIRD bias). My concern is that Aella is not really willing or able to acknowledge the limitations of her own research. For example, on the stream she claimed that 93% of women consumed erotica. Only when Murphy challenged her did she admit this was 93% of respondents: but as I pointed out these are going to be biased towards more kinky people.

You learn about how the people who follow her on Twitter answer the questions she posts on Twitter. To try to generalize that into something broader is the problem.

It's a glib snipe at Aella being female, I assume.

Oooh, nice-- are there some examples of badness that stand out to you? Or do you have a link to a critique? I would not be surprised if there are some critiques out there, but I'm also wary of the elitist "she's not an academic so she can't do anything of value." On the other hand it seems like the number of responses she gets are sometimes huge, so presumably there are some tricks you can do with a big dataset?

To be fair, she has a unique perspective and is really weird. That on its own is enough to be interesting, but she's also (arguably) hot and talks about sex things, which I imagine is what you're referring to.

If my response is to claim the fire I'm talking about is invisible, doesn't produce any smoke, and doesn't trigger any fire alarms, you'd be right to dismiss what I'm saying as complete fucking nonsense because I'm not conveying any useful information to you.

I understand the example was made to illustrate a point, so it's unfortunate that invisible, smokeless fires do exist.

E.g. Methanol is used as a fuel for racing cars, and burns without being visible or producing smoke.

My thoughts exactly. Invisible smokeless fires are all too real. Metaphors and djinn break down in (the ironic) light of the material reality of blazing hot invisible smokeless flames.

Well goddamn, fascinating that it's mandated in racing because it doesn't block visibility.

I think it also says there that it's actually harder to set on fire than gasoline. Ethanol is also really popular as racing fuel, I think.

Jesus, that's scary to think about.

Eh... whatever it burns will start burning in a visible way, so not as scary unless you were planning on jumping into a methanol-filled swimming pool, or something.

I was referring to things like "the race marshal can't see exactly where the crewman is being burned."

I asked Meghan to explain the apparent contradiction between claiming that no data would change her mind, while simultaneously lucidly explaining how data did indeed change her mind.

You're really this confused by the possibility that some opinions can be changed by data, and others are a question of prinicples?

As shown in numerous instances throughout the debate, Meghan readily provides evidence and support to explain why she is against the sex industry (31:23):

Huh? That's not even an example of data changing her mind.

The logic is:

Some stances are based on data, some on principles. Meghan does change her mind based on data (your first quote). Is the question of pornography/sex work one of data or principles? Meghan argues for her side using data (your second quote), so clearly she thinks it's one based on data (bailey) but when the data is challenged she says it's a matter of principles (motte). As Yassine says in the full piece:

There’s nothing wrong with either approach done separately, but Meghan appears to want to have it both ways to maintain an acrobatic ability to backflip away from ever having to defend her positions.

That data exists which support my argument is not evidence that I chose my argument because I was convinced by that data.

"I listened to group A and found their testimony more compelling than the testimony of group B, for reasons X, Y, and Z", is not data based reasoning. This supposed contradiction seems to be entirely his invention.

We might be quibbling over definitions here but I'm using 'data' rather broadly. In your example, how would you evaluate someone's testimony without some sort of empirical data or observation about their testimony or demeanor?

If I remember right, in this case she was evaluating it based on incentives.

I can't help feeling a tinge of awkward self-consciousness whenever I describe myself as part of the modern-day "Rationality" movement. As I've said before, it's perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of a group with such a self-serving and masturbatory name, because isn't everyone in favor of rational thinking? The core lessons of rationality are --- or at least should be --- dreadfully pedestrian: you should test your theories with evidence, you shouldn't believe things that aren't true, you should make logically coherent arguments, threatening to kill someone is not a valid rebuttal to their arguments, et cetera forever.

This is why being self-deprecating is so effective in terms of likability or even persuasion. Same for 'effective altruism'. But lesswrong is not that pretentious and mostly harmless. Even Yudd himself can do a good job approximating a normal human being at times. Aella is just weird even by rationality standards.

I think part of the reason (which you seem to understand) that people immediately resort to extremely sketchy thinking in culture war debates is that often the debate is really more about inherently unfalsifiable, aesthetic, ethical or metaphysical claims that aren’t arrived at through logic or reason. But trying to argue my personal aesthetic or ethical preferences are the best is very unconvincing to anyone, so these debates turn into the battle of who has more studies they can toss out there to prove their preferences are objectively better for everyone.

Often this turns out to a tennis match of who’s studies are more methodologically flawed or faked or whatever. But I think another part of the problem with Data and Studies is that most people have certain opinions where they think they know what’s good for other people, better than those other people know for themselves. And I think in those cases, how can you possibly use data to change someone’s mind?

You could come up with the most methodologically sound study in the world which proves that everyone is happier when they do XYZ. But if my belief is that, sure, I think those people think they are happier when they do XYZ, but it actually makes everything worse in some difficult to quantify way, then there’s basically no amount of data showing that people are subjectively better off doing XYZ that can convince you otherwise. And I don’t think that’s an irrational position to hold, or the same thing as assuming the conclusion and arguing backwards from there. I think most people feel something close to this about drugs or junk food. But it’s very difficult to argue this convincingly to anyone who doesn’t already agree in some sense, especially in a short debate format and on a topic where it’s near impossible to quantitatively prove the causality for XYZ being a net harm.

A theory that is unfalsifiable is like a compass that always points north no matter what direction it’s facing; it’s useless precisely because it’s “true” no matter what.

That's what a compass is supposed to do.

Argh, I didn't phrase this right. What I meant is referring to a compass with a stuck needle, where you use it to claim that every direction it points to is north.

Well yeah. But such a compass is still not trustworthy, which is the point @ymeskhout was making.

I guess you could interpret it as a compass whose definition of "north" is where the needle points, which is always in the same direction relative to its body. The mechanism adds no value, so "aligned with compass north" is equivalent to saying "pointed in a(ny) direction."

A better framework would be a compass that always points forward on its own heading axis: it's (tautologically) correct, but neither meaningfully falsifiable, nor very useful for any other purpose.

I am going to wade back into the motte for a sec and respond to part of this. Bear with me, as my tie in will take a few detours. TLDR, I grow weary of the cult of “data-driven decision making”

There’s a difference between non-falsifiable theories , an non-demonstrable theories (unlikely the right term, I’m sure some rat has a real term for this).

The Sagan’s dragon is non-falsifiable, but the Russell’s teapot, even though it’s considered exemplar of unfalsifiable, is only non-demonstrable. It could be falsified, but we don’t have the tools to do it. People play these two interchangeably (often they can be), but too much and it causes a lot of soldier arguments. I think most of Caplan, who is correct a lot about education, a lot of his arguments play on a motte-and-bailey between these two.

Suppose Jon argued hard that learning Shakespear in middle-school paid off in various interpersonal interactions later in life. That is certainly not non-falsifiable, but it is almost a teapot's difficulty to measure empirically. Any study bound by real world constraints that attempted it would be insufficient.

So you say, it’s non-falsifiable, and Jon says No, I don’t think so. Jon goes out and interview a lot of people and puts together a nice phenomenology or narrative or whatever, and finds lots of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence of a phenomenon that appears again and again that many people seem to be able to draw a connection between their Shakespear and communication benefits. Suppose it is gold-standard qualitative research. Now I still think that it’s perfectly valid for you to stop here and argue, it’s not compelling enough to convince you.

But say you respond by pointing to several studies that went looking for these benefits but weren’t able to reject the null hypothesis of no connection. The first looked at learning Shakespeare and life outcomes with no relationship. Jon responds that of course the effect of a single course in shakespeare on life outcomes is going to be tiny, all other influences considered, that no study would be powered enough to find that signal. You find another study that looks at learning shakespeare and recall of his plays in college students, and finds very small retention. Jon again disagrees that it’s looking at the same thing. And so on.

You accuse Jon of refusing to update on data, and of holding a non-falsifiable belief. Here Jon admits that the whole logic model and all the influencing factors are somewhat unknown, but that there is connection as seen in his field research. Jon argues back at you that studies that don’t show any connection may be evidence that they aren’t designed properly since the phenomenon does exist and seems to in a nontrivial amount. He argues that if your data is correctly measuring the construct, it would predict that he wouldn’t have found the qualitative results he has.

He concludes that even with the unknowns, the benefit-cost is worth including it in the curriculum.

I’m not suggesting that Jon’s logic is air-tight, but I think it does show cracks in worshiping empirical ‘data’ in complex, longitudinal experimental problems, and the weakness of dismissing theories about difficult problems as unfalsifiable.

I think when someone like Megan says they won’t update on data, they’re essentially saying this. She has observed an actual and significant (not statistically) phenomenon that influences her epistemic and ethical view of the situation, enough so that when data that fails to capture it, her priors don’t rule out under-powered or poorly operationalized designs that aren’t measuring the right thing.

Another example. You ask me what data would change my mind that there are thousands or more faithful Catholics in the world, I would say none. Because I know several dozen myself. The alternatives that I live in a completely anomalous space and happen to know a large percentage of all faithful catholics, or that I am so bad at modeling others, the people I think are faithful aren’t, are both so ridiculously improba

You are attempting to give what is effectively jon’s intimate conviction an aura of legitimacy – he conducts a study of sorts, but consisting entirely of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence (?). The point of both analogies however, is that he loses on studies.

I’m not a fan of the distinction. If your belief is Russell’s teapot, you’ve already lost. “At least it’s not Sagan’s dragon”. How would we know, with current tech they look exactly the same. You are multiplying entities beyond necessity.

Not to mention that in this case, due to her moral convictions, her teapot is a dragon .

I think you are slanting /u/iprayiam3's point pretty hard here.

The point of both analogies however, is that he loses on studies.

Sure, current, widely-accepted studies. As you said, he has also done a study of sorts, so clearly he doesn't lose all studies, and there's no guarantee he will continue to lose them as studies grow more powerful.

If your belief is Russell’s teapot, you’ve already lost.

If your belief is [Russell's teapot but with some evidence] then you haven't lost, which was iprayiam3's whole point. If you and plenty of others you've talked to have seen that teapot, but studies say the teapot is not statistically significant, then that doesn't mean you just lose by default.

“At least it’s not Sagan’s dragon”. How would we know, with current tech they look exactly the same.

The difference is that believers in the teapot will not continue to make excuses forever, whereas believers in the dragon will. So it's pretty easy to tell the difference between them, and one clearly is a much more defensible belief.

Not to mention that in this case, due to her moral convictions, her teapot is a dragon.

Beliefs always look like dragons until they don't. I believe in gravity. If I see someone float up into the air, I'm likely to make excuses--maybe they're tricking me or I'm hallucinating. Even if I see a million people start floating around, I will probably decide that someone built an anti-gravity machine, rather than that gravity itself turns off. This looks like a dragon but really it's just normal, correct human reasoning to continue with the most likely hypothesis until another explanation becomes more likely. Moral convictions are even more this way, since they are generally not deliberately-acquired beliefs. People don't know why they believe whether something is moral or not--they generally just believe it until a certain amount of evidence sways them the other way.

Since she has changed her beliefs over time, I think that's pretty strong evidence that her beliefs can indeed still be changed over time based on the evidence she sees in her life, so her convictions are not a dragon.

Since she has changed her beliefs over time, I think that's pretty strong evidence that her beliefs can indeed still be changed over time based on the evidence she sees in her life, so her convictions are not a dragon

Thi proves too much. Likely, literally everyone has changed their beliefs over time - I'm skeptical that there's anyone who never had a fantastical belief as a child and purely reasoned things rationally and correctly in a way that didn't mislead them from the moment they had a conscious thought, which they never outgrew due to serving them poorly. By this standard, no one could ever be said to have a "dragon" conviction. For the concept of a "dragon" conviction to be meaningful, a premise has to be that some beliefs are amenable to change through data and some beliefs might not be in a given individual.

To be honest I think very few people, if any, can truly be said to have "dragon" convictions. Many people may have a weaker version of the dragon going on, where their beliefs seem unreasonably stubborn, but I don't think the concept of "does not ever change mind, despite evidence" is even a possible state of the human mind. At best you can say people are too mentally ill to truly understand the issue, or stubborn enough to not be convinced by any reasonable amount of evidence.

That's a perfectly cromulent view, but then the argument about Murphy's view becomes very different. Notably,

Since she has changed her beliefs over time, I think that's pretty strong evidence that her beliefs can indeed still be changed over time based on the evidence she sees in her life, so her convictions are not a dragon

is misleading; the reasoning that "since she has changed beliefs over time" is misleadingly over-specific, and rather the reasoning would be "since it is impossible for anyone to have dragon beliefs, her convictions are not a dragon." It's a categorical denial based on the human condition rather than a denial based on Murphy's specific circumstances.

Furthermore, even under this framework, we could just re-label a "dragon" belief as "a teapot belief that reaches a certain level of threshold of being close a true dragon belief," and the arguments would remain the same. Perhaps Murphy's belief isn't a "dragon" but rather a "teapot," and there could theoretically be some evidence that changes her mind, but she has openly stated that she doesn't believe that to be the case, and she behaves in a way consistent with that belief. As a result, for all intents and purposes, her "teapot" belief is sufficiently close to a "dragon" belief to treat it as the latter.

I think my example was too detailed, and the analogy gets lost. The TLDR is that Russell's teapot and Sagan's dragon are ontologically different concepts. And you can have anecdotal data of the former which can be used to diagnose lack of formal observation, but you cannot have it in the latter.

I am not trying to equivocate qualitative and quantitative research. But qualitative research can observe phenomena that that existing quantitative research may be unable to effectively construct, generalize, or have enough power to measure.

Your default to no, he loses, circumvents my entire point.

If your belief is Russell’s teapot, you’ve already lost. “At least it’s not Sagan’s dragon”. How would we know, with current tech they look exactly the same. You are multiplying entities beyond necessity.

You're missing my distinction. The classic form of Russell's teapot is that it is completely unobserved, but not materially unobservable, while Sagan's dragon is both. They only both look the same when they are both speculative. Russel's teapot can be qualitatively or anecdotally observed while Sagan's dragon cannot. If Megan's argument is that she's never actually seen the damage of prostitution, but is convicted it exists based on her ethical assumptions, then yes, it matters not whether it's a teapot or a dragon.

But if her conviction is based on cases, then it's more like, yes I have seen dishware in outer space, even can't give you the coordinates, so I'm not going to take your inability to find it with current satellite tech as proof it isn't there. except the analogy fully breaks down here so this last paragraph is more confusing than enlightening, so why am I even still typing, I'm not even using periods anymore, just commas,

Russell’s teapot, even though it’s considered exemplar of unfalsifiable, is only non-demonstrable. It could be falsified, but we don’t have the tools to do it.

This is how I understood Russell's teapot. Wikipedia describes the example as claiming "to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others."

I think it's important to distinguish between what's theoretically unfalsifiable and what is practically unfalsifiable, as they address different concerns. Your Shakespeare example is in the latter category, and there would be no basis for me to dismiss it because it's (theoretically) non-falsifiable, and I would actually find Jon's arguments compelling. Despite my stated adherence to (theoretically) falsifiability, I don't see the contradiction here. I can acknowledge that some theories are very difficult to prove one way or another because of practical difficulties in gathering empirical data, but that's not an outright bar against believing anything (with proper qualifiers of course). Even if we lack tight data, we can fill in the gaps with other tools like logic and intuition.

The distinction between Jon and Meghan is that Jon acknowledges the practical difficulties yet nevertheless is still willing to brainstorm ways to gather data.

I think when someone like Megan says they won’t update on data, they’re essentially saying this.

That's the charitable version (that she believes that porn is in fact empirically a bad thing, but she doesn't have enough data to prove it). The somewhat less charitable version is that basically she does not like porn and she feels like it's bad, but even if you could show her data proving that porn has no statistical impact, it wouldn't change her mind. It would be like trying to prove to a Catholic with data that prayer is useless.

The somewhat less charitable version is that basically she does not like porn and she feels like it's bad, but even if you could show her data proving that porn has no statistical impact, it wouldn't change her mind. It would be like trying to prove to a Catholic with data that prayer is useless.

That's not uncharitable, that's how the overwhelming majority of people operate, including - and perhaps especially - those who claim to be updating on data. Non-HBDers don't suddenly become HBDers when you show them a bunch of twin studies, BLMers don't switch the target of their ire from cops to criminals when you show them the crime victimization rates, and for that matter atheists don't become Catholic when you show them the data that prayer and church attendance does have a positive impact on your psychological health, and that's exactly how it should be!

By saying "no data will change my mind" Meghan Murphy is being honest about this being a values disagreement, and saving you time that you'd waste on digging out studies, which won't have an impact on the discussion. More people should follow her example, to be honest.

By saying "no data will change my mind" Meghan Murphy is being honest about this being a values disagreement, and saving you time that you'd waste on digging out studies, which won't have an impact on the discussion. More people should follow her example, to be honest.

There's nothing wrong with having a values disagreement but Meghan is not being honest about her stance here. If she was then she wouldn't be citing studies and evidence to argue her point, only to retreat back into the values cave when pressed.

"Retreat" implies she staked her position on data being on her side, and I don't see where she did that.

Yes she did, many times! Anytime she cites the experience of women she talked to about the industry, that's data. I even asked her and quoted her explanation for how she arrived at her position to begin with.

Using data as a supporting argument is not the same thing as staking your position on it. The latter is a lot closer to Aellas approach than Murphy's.

I even asked her and quoted her explanation for how she arrived at her position to begin with.

That was the "I talked to some women who left sexwork" bit, right? Again, that's not staking your position on data.

I agree with that, to a point. But if someone tells you that no evidence would convince them they're wrong, there is no point in having an evidence-based discussion with them.

I don't think this is entirely true, I agree that for most people (even here) that most of the data driven arguments they claim are the reason for their beliefs are actually post-hoc rationalizations. We feel first and rationalize second. It isn't deliberate, our conscious mind supports what our unconscious has already decided.

Having said that, because of that people don't actually know which arguments might change their beliefs once they internalize them. They might claim nothing will change their mind, but because changing your mind is the unconscious process they do not actually know when an argument will make them change until after it happens.

Someone can truly believe that no amount of evidence will convince them of X and be wrong because the act of being convinced is for some 99.5% of people (in my estimation) an entirely unconscious act. So whether you can change someone's mind may well be entirely orthogonal to whether they believe their mind can be changed. It's not easy or common to change a mind, but I am not convinced the individual themselves can give you much information about what arguments would persuade them.

But she never came into it saying it's an evidence based conversation.

When you lead with "but studies show..." type arguments, it's at least implied. Later flipping to "but it's an ethical question, it's not about data" as soon as her empirical case starts to look dodgy does feel like a dishonest bait-and-switch, even if that's her real position and thus, from a narrow point of view, more honest.

When you lead with "but studies show..." type arguments

I don't think she did that though.

for that matter atheists don't become Catholic when you show them the data that prayer and church attendance does have a positive impact on your psychological health

One of these things is not like the others: atheists don't necessarily disagree with the data. If you show a non-HBDer twin studies, presumably they'll try to disagree with them because they agree that to believe in the worldview modelled by the studies would "compel" them to become a HBDer, which they don't want for social censure. Ie. there are preferences attached to their beliefs. But if an atheist believes that Christians are more mentally healthy, this does not compel him to believe in God. Why would it? I mean, it's absolutely a value difference, but it's a value difference that isn't hooked to that part of the world model.

Fine, atheists don't start going to church and start praying after seeing the data.

I mean yeah? I'm pretty happy with my mental health, I don't see an urgent need to improve it. If my mental health was in the shitter, I'd keep church in the back of my mind.

(That's assuming it is causal, which I think would be hard to demonstrate.)

Well, there's another difference. I might believe that praying and going to church is good for the mental health of people who believe in God. That doesn't mean it would do me any good if I don't believe in God.

(This is pretty close to my actual position. I think the positive power of a community and a sincere belief that there's an omnipotent being who loves you personally probably is good for someone's mental health. That doesn't convince me that the omnipotent being exists, or that pretending to believe in him would make me feel better.)

Right, so that would be a situation where both sides can reconcile data with their beliefs, no matter what the data says.... which is exactly like the debate on porn.

You may be right in this case, and there are certainly plenty of cases where people work backwards from aesthetic or moral preferences and even the god of True Data presenting them with absolute proof that their opinion is wrong wouldn’t change their minds. But in real life culture war flashpoints where it’s extremely difficult to determine what’s Empirically Good, how do you tell the difference between this type of pure motivated reasoning, and a more considered opinion that due to Molochian forces (competition, coordination problems, preference cascades, defect-defect equilibria, negative feedback loops etc.) we are stuck in a local minima, where the data may show that X thing is better than not-X in our current circumstances, when if we changed other circumstances we’d see that not-X is actually much better. So in this sense I have a lot of opinions that I believe are empirically true even if they lack data or the data contradicts this belief, because I think we would need to run civilization-level RCTs to “empirically” prove them. I’m unsure how to tell even within myself whether this is just an elaborate cope I tell myself so that I can never be proven wrong “real communism hasn’t been tried!”, or if it is actually a principled and well reasoned belief.

I don’t want to argue the object level but just to give an example of the type of reasoning I’m referring to: I believe for many of the fuzzier mental illnesses that the data will show subjective improvement in response to therapy/drugs, but that completely banning psychiatric treatment for anything but schizophrenia, and a culture of mocking, shaming and overall not taking fuzzy mental illnesses seriously would result in much better outcomes as a whole. There’s not really any data showing that bullying increases depression or that destigmatizing mental illness decreases anxiety or whatever that could move me off of this position, because the idea of taking these conditions seriously at all is what I see as the primary cause of their existence. And unless we could coordinate all of society to not reward claims of mental illness with sympathy, each individual is better off “going to therapy” and punishing those who mock them.

Is this just regular motivated reasoning with extra steps?

Is this just regular motivated reasoning with extra steps?

I think so, yes. Which doesn't mean your conclusion is wrong. It just means it's not actually supported by evidence, and there's no point in trying to persuade you for or against with evidence.

The somewhat less charitable version is that basically she does not like porn and she feels like it's bad, but even if you could show her data proving that porn has no statistical impact, it wouldn't change her mind.

This is also a pretty defensible position. If you've talked with people in person, you shouldn't change your mind solely based on studies that contradict those people's first-hand accounts.

Sure, but Megan Murphy is drawing broader conclusions from first-hand accounts. I absolutely believe that individual women have been harmed by porn. She may even be right that porn is bad for women in general! (I am less cynical and skeptical about this than @ymeskhout is.) But as compelling as first-hand accounts may be (and as understandable as it is that you might be powerfully swayed by them), they are not evidence of something applying in a universal fashion. @ymeskhout's example is that Megan Murphy says she flatly does not believe that any woman has a positive experience as a sex worker. Any woman who says she does (such as Aella) is lying or in denial. Maybe she's right! But it doesn't sound like she is persuadable by anything that contradicts her personal convictions.

Let's say you believe prayer is effective. You have seen the effects of prayer in your personal life. Obviously, a double-blind study of people praying for sick patients or whatever and seeing no results is not going to persuade you you're wrong. OTOH, if I see all those double-blind studies showing prayer is not effective, and you insist you have personally experienced miracles as a result of prayer, should I believe you?

Positions arrived at as a result of personal values are not really amenable to being changed by evidence. This doesn't mean they're wrong, but it doesn't mean they're right either. It does mean that basically only very powerful rhetoric (independent of truthfulness) or personal experience will change their mind.

Meghan had a lot of gall claiming that Aella was lying about her own experiences with prostitution. She said she was invested in giving it the most positive gloss she could because that's how she makes a living.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

It is fair to accuse someone of motivated reasoning when they are not financially independent. Coldhearted, maybe, but definitely fair.

It is fair, but the skepticism should be narrowly deployed to only apply when the person is citing their personal experience or asking you to trust their reporting without showing their work.

Also notice how Murphy shifted the goal posts.

That's the charitable version (that she believes that porn is in fact empirically a bad thing, but she doesn't have enough data to prove it).

Maybe I'm confused, because i thought that's what OP was saying she was saying explicitly.

On a tangent, were I to sit down with someone like Aella and try to discuss whether porn was empirically bad, we'd never even get to the empirical part because we'd have such different worldviews that we wouldn't be able to operationalized 'bad'. I'm all for finding common ground, but most of the ground to cover on porn is too tied to conflicting foundational moral visions, that it's...well... about as effective as masturbating.

I meant the charitable version is that she thinks it's empirically true that porn is bad, but she can't prove it. The uncharitable version is that she doesn't actually care whether porn is "bad" in the sense of being a net negative in any measurable way, she just doesn't like it, and would still oppose it even if theoretically we "proved" the opposite.

It's rather like the distinction you are making between Sagan's dragon and Russel's teapot. One is literally an unfalsifiable belief that is constructed to be unfalsifiable; the other is a belief that is currently unfalsifiable, but given much greater capacity to collect evidence, it could be falsified. If you believe in Russel's teapot, then you could be convinced you were wrong if we became able to find literally any object in the solar system. If you believe in Sagan's dragon, nothing will ever convince you, and nothing ever could convince you, that it doesn't exist.

edit

Huberman consistently promotes bad science, and makes terrible inferences and overbroad claims atop them, on his show. example from twitter

As an aside, I appreciate the link. I've been listening to Huberman a bit lately because I'm starved for good advice about how to deal with an alcoholic family member, and it's been very hard to come by a trustworthy assessment of his podcasts (like Ritchie).

, there seems to be good data that shows that porn trains the brain to be a cuck (more here).

Is there any evidence of this that doesn't come in the form of a 2.5 hour video? Life is too short.

there seems to be good data that shows that porn trains the brain to be a cuck (more here). It would not be too much of a leap to then go : "violent porn trains the brain for violent sex".

If it's true that porn trains you to be a cuck, then wouldn't it follow that violent porn trains you to be a voyeur of violence rather than a participant?

edit

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats