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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   31571 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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Here's the point, at last. Normally someone holding a belief for the wrong reasons is not enough to negate that belief. But wherever a sanewasher faction appears to be spending considerable efforts cleaning up the mess their crazy neighbors keep leaving behind, it should instigate some suspicion about the belief, at least as a heuristic. Any honest and rational believer needs to grapple for an explanation for how the crazies managed to all be accidentally right despite outfitted — by definition — with erroneous arguments. Such a scenario is so implausible that it commands a curious inquiry about its origin.

This is valid, but then you have to make sure this is actually what's happening. It seems like it might be easy to assume that this is happening, without looking closely at the history of the ideas. Or you might even have different groups coming to a vaguely similar conclusion, but independently--neither is trying to "fix" the other.

My main confusion with this post, though, is seeming to conflate positions with arguments. The DTP example seems like it refers to different sets of claims of what to do rather than reasons why we should it. The moderate liberals aren't coming in and cleaning up after the radicals made a mess, tidying up the support columns after they accidentally built a beautiful cathedral. They're both reacting to perceived injustice, but one is going further in the other direction than the other. Sometimes the arguments they use ("racism is bad") will overlap, sometimes they won't ("we can entirely replace police with X"/"no we can't").

Scott's post seems to blur this distinction as well. It's a combination of "social dynamics that cause strange groupings of people" and "what is actually correct?" If all you, personally, care about, is whether God exists, then you should only care about the strongest arguments from the most reasonable proponents. If you, personally, are just trying to decide on what public policy to support, then it shouldn't really matter what the relationship is between moderate reform liberals and radical DTP leftists. But it does matter politically, for the reasons Scott describes.

While agreeing with ymeskhout’s response, I also think part of the issue here is that there’s a whole set of truth statements which depend for their accuracy on the beliefs of a given group. “Defund the Police is a harmful movement because they want to totally remove police officers” is either true or false (assuming a given set of morals), and that in turn depends on what the DTP movement actually believes.

My main confusion with this post, though, is seeming to conflate positions with arguments. The DTP example seems like it refers to different sets of claims of what to do rather than reasons why we should it.

For the DTP example, the issue exists with both positions and arguments. There's the "should we defund the police?" position question, which definitely gets muddled with whether it means "slashing budgets to 0" or just "changing definition of 'police' to no longer include 911 dispatchers". But even if you pick one DTP position and hold it static, there's still going to be sanity variance within the respective arguments, such as "crime will disappear once we get rid of capitalism" versus "there may be downsides but we'd be better off on net without police given that they steal more than robbers do".

My main confusion with this post, though, is seeming to conflate positions with arguments.

I brought that point up in my response to the original post.

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