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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?".
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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