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From Quillette, an MIT professor describes the outraged reaction from fellow philosophers when he argued that a woman is an adult human female.
Back in 2019 Alex Byrne wrote one of my favorite essays on the incoherence of gender identity and as far as I can tell no one has managed to offer a solid refutation. Byrne follows up by discussing the difficulties he's had in getting a chapter and a book published on the topic, and his travails are equal parts infuriating and hilarious. For example, consider how a fellow colleague was treated once the crowd got wind that her book might be a bit too critical:
This trend of protesting a book before anyone even reads it will never stop being funny to me. Byrne expected his book to go through several revisions and by his account he was happy to accomodate feedback. His reviewers, though, were not:
"What is wrong with my argument?"
"Everything."
"Can you be more specific?"
"Just all of it, it's just bad."
This is the kind of sophistry one would expect from random online arguments, and I'm sure you can identity similar instances even in this very forum. The take-away I'm generally left with is that Byrne's interlocutors are an amalgamation of intellectually fragile individuals. Conclusory statements rather than specifics are a transparent indication that you are aware your arguments will crumble when exposed to a light breeze. Protesting rather than arguing are a transparent indication that you are unable to defend your ideas on their own merits.
All this seems painfully obvious to me as an outsider, and I'm baffled why anyone engages in this ablution pantomime. Who could it possibly convince?
Freddie DeBoer recently put out a banger of a post called "A Conversation About Crime" about the absolute intellectual void behind the "defund the police" movement. The whole thing is worth reading in full, but I'll include the parting shot here:
Are there really that many people who hold progressive/woke opinions out of fear? I feel that most of the progressives/wokes and the liberals whom I have interacted with held their opinions because they genuinely believed that those opinions were superior to other opinions, in the sense of being better for the world and so on. And to the extent that their opinions were inconsistent with each other and reality, it was because they were either not smart enough to understand those things or they simply did not care enough to devote sufficient effort to looking into the contradictions. But I cannot think of any time that I detected fear as the primary motivation. I guess maybe the closest I have seen to fear being the motivation has been in the rationalist sphere with Scott Alexander and the like. But not among more typical progressives and liberals. In my experience the typical woke, progressive, or liberal has an attitude of "my opinions are so obviously at least directionally good for humanity, and my political opponents are so obviously vile reactionaries whose opinions are beneath contempt, that it would be silly for me to even engage with those people... the only important dialogue to be had is among us good people, and the only significant topic of conversation when we discuss politics among ourselves is just 1) how exactly should we implement our obviously directionally good ideas when it comes to the fine details?, and 2) how do we defeat the bad people?".
It doesn't have to be fear necessarily, all it requires is a modicum of incentive. About 4 years ago I applied to work at this advocacy nonprofit and literally the first question they asked me at the interview was "what is the definition of equity?" Once we got into more substantive questions the interview went great but man that first question really threw me for a loop and caught me off-guard. My confusion was likely visible because my initial instinct was to wonder why they were asking me about a financial term. I eventually mumbled an answer about how equity was "equal opportunity" which (LOL) was not the right answer and I could tell I disappointed some people. I never used "equity" in my daily life and I had to look up the issue later to figure out that the question was used as a cultural shibboleth: if you give the right answer, you signal the right tribal affiliation.
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It depends. A lot of people do hold politically correct opinions out of fear. And for me, the tell is exactly what was in the blog post — the opinions are incoherent, contradictory, and don’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Saying “I’m obviously right and you’re a [sneer term] for disagreeing,” isn’t the position a person who had a coherent theory about the world or their politics. And from my observation this tends to crop up in higher levels of society. If you’re a parole and paid hourly, nobody gives a fuck. But once you start getting into the higher levels of business and politics, it becomes necessary to hold the right opinions. It even, at high enough levels, becomes necessary to protest or donate to the right causes. Failing to do so can limit your career, cost you friends, even family.
It was really obvious to me when Trump came about. I didn’t vote for him, and I think he’s an ass, but really, as far a things he did, he was either a 1990s era democrat (keep in mind that democrats had at that time favored a border wall, and championed “don’t ask, don’t tell”) or perhaps poor judgement. But people seemed to lose their minds, not only at him personally, but at people who might have some modicum of support for him or anyone not personally opposed to him. In 2016, people bragged about walking out of thanksgiving dinner because someone at the table was pro-Trump. But, these same people were conservatives before, and you did eat with them. In the same time period, people were harassing diners they knew were republicans out of restaurants, shaming people for wearing red hats, etc. it was extremely performative, very loud and very public. Even today, people feel the need to blow the “I’m not a filthy heretic” trumpet in any news discussion or political discussion.
And what’s changed is our panopticon. In 1996, you could plausibly keep your opinions to yourself. In the age of social media, it’s almost impossible for you to do so without taking extra steps. And I think people are afraid of their social credit going down if they’re discovered to have crimethink on their social media or know people who do. And I think everyone knows it at this point, we have an informal but effective social credit system enforced by HR departments terrified of discrimination lawsuits, and workers who know this have to be liberal enough to not trip the “thought crime” alert. So they organize protests, they bitch about “evil republicans” online, and purge their friends list of any filthy conservatives.
It's always amusing to me when people say, "why does the Left freak out over Trump? He's just a 90's Democrat."
First of all, that's not really true, but we'd probably disagree on that, but also, that doesn't matter.
A 1965 Democrat who ran the median 1965 Democratic planks on social issues would've likely been more comfortable in the GOP as well - as we saw happening in the South during this time. Social change happens, and people uncomfortable with that social change align with the political movement that'll stop that change.
Well, the freak outs included warnings against literal Nazism. If the 90's democrats too were literal Nazis, I think we're overdue for some Nuremberg trials. It might also mean that maybe Nazism isn't all that bad. Take your pick.
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Yes, it is. That theory is "I belong to a group with actual power and you don't".
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"Fear" is a strong word. There are absolutely people who disagree with the progressive/woke
consensusorthodoxy, but hold their tongues out of genuine fear of personal or professional repercussions. I think in most cases it's not so much fear as garden-variety conformity: wanting to fit in, not to be seen as weird. Most people aren't thinking "I'd better mouth the words 'defund the police', because if I don't, I'll lose my job": they're thinking "all my friends are saying 'defund the police', so I'll say it too, to fit in".Remember the Bataclan shooting, when people overlaid the French flag on top of their profile pictures on Facebook? I'm quite confident that a significant minority (if not an actual majority) of people doing so have no idea what it was intended to symbolise, and if I asked them "that shooting in the Bataclan was so horrific, wasn't it?" they wouldn't have a clue what I was talking about. It's not that these people think the shooting in the Bataclan was good, but pretended to think it was bad for fear of personal or professional repercussions - this isn't a Havel's greengrocer situation. It's that these people saw other people in their social circle overlaying the French flag on their profile pictures, and did likewise to fit in, at no point stopping to consider why their friends were overlaying the French flag on their profile pictures. Conformity for conformity's sake.
"So you're saying that most people calling for the police to be defunded or abolished are only doing so because they saw their friends doing so, no different from adopting a trendy hairstyle, and have put essentially zero thought into the practical implications of such a policy?" yeschad.jpg
But keep in mind. Being a nonconformist on the wrong things, even if they aren’t obvious can be harmful for your lifestyle. You might think that letting parents have a say in the types of books in the elementary school library is no big deal. But it later becomes a culture war thing and now that opinion is problematic. So there’s a pressure to conform beyond what would exist on most other issues (for example ask about what should be taught in a math class and whether parents should get a say, or whether violent books can be kept out of elementary schools) simply because it’s hard to know if some issue will become a shibboleth. That coupled with the permanent record created by social media makes “going along with the herd” a solid defense strategy. That’s a bit different from hairstyles which you can easily discard and nobody will care.
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This is my experience of the most vocal woke/progressive/liberal people. My experience of the typical person who puts their pronouns on their slack profile without protest when HR asks, votes for whoever has a (D) next to their name if they bother to vote, and has a vaguely positive affect towards the idea of minorities is that they want to be on the "right side of history" but they don't want to have to think about it or make any decisions.
Which, IMO, is super valid. Getting into twitter flamewars about politics is bad for the world and bad for your mental health, so people who make the decision that instead of doing that they just want to grill are making a good choice.
It's a good choice for themselves, but has bad externalities.
In terms of twitter itself, I think engaging with bad leftist arguments is actively harmful, even if you are obviously correct to anyone who reads your rebuttal. The reason I think it's harmful is that the reach of a tweet is related to how strongly people engage with it, where "reply" is a particularly strong form of engagement. Thus, by refuting a tweet, you are also boosting it.
If lots of people refute batshit insane takes and ignore or merely like sane takes, the result of that is that the typical Twitter feed will be full of batshit insane takes, and people will make the observation "the current societal consensus seems batshit insane to me, but it seems like everyone agrees with it. Maybe I'm the one who's wrong". Mostly they will not read the comments rebutting the batshit insane take (yes, I am aware that the concept of being "ratio'd" exists, but I don't think the majority of Twitter users take that strongly into account).
This is a good point if you're specifically talking about Twitter, but it doesn't generalize well. If every ordinary person kept their head down away from bad politics, politics would be dominated by the most fanatical and unreasonable people who made it the most unpleasant to debate them. (To make a Douglas Adams reference, there is a theory that this has already happened.)
I agree that this is Twitter-specific, but also I think Twitter specifically is probably responsible for somewhere around half of the instances of "someone sees a terrible take". Consider how many news articles seem to be a couple paragraphs of commentary around a screenshot of someone's batshit takes on Twitter.
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It's valid in one sense I agree, but we're entering an era where it's increasingly misguided to try to 'sit this one out'. While it was fine to ignore discussions on the right tax rate or whether public transport should be subsidised, this issue is different. We are all adversely affected by the unhinged turn towards non-reality. In my view, the potential for corruption at not addressing this could take us all into the abyss. We need a shared reality for social cohesion - if we cavalierly dismiss it we are inviting all kinds of demons (admittedly a bit melodramatic but I think a sketch of this kind of argument can be plausibly made).
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I'm more surprised that other people don't seem notice it more. Quite often I'll come across people accidentally revealing their power level, and when that's the case I think there's at least some sort of pragmatic decision to go with the flow rather than a real conviction in woke stuff.
I mean, these are people who will repeat all the shibboleths, but they're not people who go full tattoos + weird neon coloured haircut + nose rings + etc., but if you just clerked them on what they said their opinions are, they'd be very progressive...except I have good reason to think they're not really genuine about it. Unless you mean the people who really go hard on the acting obnoxiously queer part?
It's not that unique of a phenomena though. I think Caplan referred to this idea as "low-cost beliefs" and an example is believing in either the theory of evolution or intelligent design. Unless you're working as a biologist, what you believe will likely have zero impact on your day-to-day life but will allow you to signal affiliation with friends. It's a small price to pay. Contrast that with a high-cost belief, like gravity, which would get you killed if you choose to ignore it.
Or belief in climate change/belief there is no climate change, or grandstanding about Ukraine/Russia, …
I agree with you. I’m just surprised people don’t notice it in other people as much, and I think this has more in common with Havel’s greengrocer than people care to admit.
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