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Notes -
When Someone Tells You They're Lying, Believe Them
Some people refuse to admit they're wrong, but there's other clues
Paul Ehrlich became well-known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, where he made many confidently-stated but spectacularly-wrong predictions about imminent overpopulation causing apocalyptical resource scarcity. As illustration for how far off the mark Ehrlich was, he predicted widespread famines in India at a time when its population was around 500 million people, and he wrote "I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." He happened to have made this claim right before India's Green Revolution in agriculture. Not only is India able to feed a population that tripled to 1.4 billion people, it has long been one of the world's largest agricultural exporter.
Ehrlich is also known for notoriously losing a bet in 1990 to one of my favorite humans ever, the perennial optimist (and business professor) Julian Simon. Bryan Caplan brings up some details to the follow-up that never was:
The first bet was fairly straight-forward: Ehrlich picked 5 commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, & tungsten) and predicted that their price would be higher in 1990 compared to 1980 as the materials become scarcer. Instead of rising, the combined price went down. Ehrlich's decade-spanning obstinance and unparalleled ability to step on rakes make him an irresistible punching bag but despite his perennial wrongness, his responses have ranged from evasion to outright denials:
Some humans possess the unfortunate egotistical and dishonorable habit of refusing to admit error. It's a reflex I personally find utterly baffling, because nothing engenders someone's credibility to me more than their ability to admit error. So if we can't always rely on people to admit a mistake, what else do we have?
What I find so interesting about the second bet in 1995 is how peculiar the proposed conditions were [image link]:
I kept thinking "...so?" as I read these. Why would someone care about the availability of firewood versus the heating and cooking costs in general? Why would someone care about per capita cropland statistics versus the availability of food in general? Many of these are also blatant statistical fuckery, such as monitoring increases in absolute worldwide AIDS deaths during a period of persistent population growth.
Ehrlich is playing a seemingly uncomfortable game of Twister here, but his behavior makes perfect sense if you read intelligence and agency behind his decisions. The only explanation for the indirect, tangential, and collateral measurements is that Ehrlich knows that a direct measurement will not be favorable to his pet theory. He does not believe in truth, but rather believes in belief as the kids say, and he's not willing to jeopardize it.
The acrobatics are the tell here. When Meghan Murphy debates the sex industry, she has to keep the wheels on her goalposts perpetually greased up. Meghan wants to say that everyone who works in the industry has a negative view of it, but the preemptive goalpost shifting she employs is proof she knows that's a lie. The guy claiming there's a dragon in his garage can only preemptively dismiss [thermal imaging/flour/whatever] as a legitimate investigatory tool only because he knows there is no dragon.
It's not perfect but it's often the best we have. Ideally we get people who act honorably and admit mistakes and are willing to falsify their own theories but barring that, just look for the acrobatics. They're the product of intelligent design, not random chance.
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I'm not sure if this is the most helpful framing for understanding Murphy's internal psychology and the position she holds.
When she says for example:
Instead of assuming that this makes her a dishonest liar, you could instead look for an interpretation or implicit assumptions that make her position more reasonable. Such as:
1.) It's a common refrain in radfem circles that patriarchy conditions women into enjoying their own subjugation. I imagine that Meghan believes this, and that she further believes that it invalidates any "data" that you could collect on this issue. Women have been systematically deceived about their own preferences and desires, so self-reports about their experiences in the sex industry, particularly positive reports, are inherently suspect.
2.) She's quite clear that her opposition to "barely legal porn" is a bedrock moral principle for her, and isn't subject to falsification. I imagine this principle could break down a little further into something like - it's a violation of a woman's dignity for her to act in barely legal porn, and a man shows a willingness to violate women's dignity when he watches it. As far as moral principles go, these don't seem that crazy to me (even though I disagree with them). Ethics always has to hit bedrock somewhere. I assume that you believe inflicting extreme pain on someone for no reason is wrong, and it's hard to see how this belief could be falsifiable. There's no further empirical data that could be relevant; it just is what it is. And that's how she sees barely legal porn.
And of course this is all in addition to the standard examination you have to do of any "data" related to a highly contentious issue, questioning the collection methodology and the interpretation and etc.
That's all fine as far as it goes, but it isn't apt to be very persuasive to someone that disagrees, right? I don't know how I'd reply to such a position with much other than, "well, that's like, your opinion, man". I agree that there are positions that aren't amenable to data or argument and I can easily think of some that I hold; for example, I think it's morally obvious and incontrovertable that someone like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should have been swiftly executed following his bombing of the Boston Marathon. No amount of argument on whether the death penalty "works" will change my mind, I just think that motherfucker deserves to die and think people that don't feel the same have something wrong with their moral intuition. Fine, it is what it is, but I don't expect to change anyone's mind by saying, "it's just obvious and not debatable".
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