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 -
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):
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):
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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,
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link