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Notes -
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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