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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]
You're really this confused by the possibility that some opinions can be changed by data, and others are a question of prinicples?
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:
That data exists which support my argument is not evidence that I chose my argument because I was convinced by that data.
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"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.
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