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Why Cross-Examination Is So Damn Great
There's an obvious solace within the written medium. You get to carve out a space safe from constraints and take as much as you need to fully express yourself. Words are neat! I mean, just look at the torrential avalanche I regularly shit out just on my own.
But still, I don't want people to forget about the benefits to real-time adversarial conversations, benefits which cannot be as easily replicated with writing. I recently wrote (ahem) about how humans have this nasty aversion to admitting error. You'll rarely ever get someone willing to outright say "I am a liar" and the roomy comfort that we all love so much about text also provides bad faith actors the ability to build up elaborate defensive ramparts in peace. Nevertheless, even in instances where a smoking gun confession is missing, I cite to a few examples to outline how you can still construct a damning indictment using only a few minor inference hops:
Of course, this gets way easier to accomplish in a real-time confrontation. Chalk it up to the stereotype but yes, I fucking love cross-examination and I want to explain why. Lessons From The Screenplay had a fantastic video analyzing the climactic cross-examination from the movie A Few Good Men while using the vocabulary normally reserved to discuss physical duels. The story's hook is watching the military lawyer protagonist (Kaffee) figure out how he can elicit an outright confession from a notoriously disciplined and experienced commander (Jessep) using only the 'weapons' found within a courtroom. The primary elegance of cross-examination as a weapon stems from the fact that, when done successfully, you can fabricate a solid cage for your opponents using only their own words as ingredients. Kaffee does exactly this by asking questions that appear superficially innocent but, when joined together, weld into a formidable trap Jessep is unable to escape.
I want to highlight a few other recent examples, running the gamut across the political spectrum. My aim here is not to ignite a debate about the specific issue that happens to be discussed (though a toe dip is inevitable) but rather to comment on the rhetorical maneuvers at play and see what lessons we can impart. And a strong word of caution is warranted here: It's true that some this veers dangerously close to mind-reading, which is obviously prone to confirmation bias and erroneous conclusions. With that in mind my goal is to ensure that any conclusion I reach is both solidly grounded within the available evidence and appropriately qualified (with any alternative explanations highlighted). I think the utility is worth the risk of error, and the harm can be mitigated by a commitment to acknowledging one's own mistakes.
First up is Nathan Robinson interviewing Christopher Rufo, specifically the part where they discuss whether the Founding Fathers were racist hypocrites — extolling the virtues of liberty while also owning slaves:
So Rufo finds himself in a bit of a pickle. He's fully aware that he can't say "Thomas Jefferson, the man who believed blacks were inferior and held 130 of them in bondage, was not a racist" with a straight face. But simultaneously he also expends a lot of acrobatic energy trying to dodge answering a straightforward question. The italicized portion of his statement above explains why. Although Rufo has made his career as a stalwart opponent of Critical Race Theory (however you define it) he reveals that he might accept one of its core tropes — that the United States is indelibly and irredeemably tainted by its original sin of racism. Notice that Robinson did not ask "Should we discredit Jefferson's work in advancing equality?" he simply asked if Jefferson was racist. But Rufo looks past Robinson's question and sees the warning beacons coming up on the horizon, and so he charges forward in an effort to preemptively maintain a defensive line on ideas he suspects would next be attacked.
According to his own words, Rufo divulges that he thinks racism is potentially grounds to have your accomplishments discredited. If you accept that framework then it makes sense why he would expend so much energy avoiding admitting that Jefferson was racist; the fear is that this concession would cause the rest of his favored structure to crumble. It's not likely we would've gotten this admission in writing; he had to be cornered by his own statements in real-time for this to slip.
I am going to now praise Tim Pool of all people. A few months ago he invited Lance/TheSerfsTV to his livestream to be grilled on a range of topics. On the abortion question, some of the more enthusiastic pro-choice activists have staked their position on legalizing elective abortion not just at the "viability" line (~22 weeks) but up until the millisecond the fetus exists the birth canal. Lance affirms this is his position, claiming that the mother should always maintain full and absolute autonomy over what happens with the pregnancy. But as the real-time discussion evinced, it's not clear if he actually believes this:
Such a spectacular reveal would not have made it through the cognitive filters had it not taken place in real time. If someone's position is that a pregnant woman can do whatever she wants with her body, up to and including terminating the life of the fetus, it logically follows that such an expansive authority would also include less fatal harms. But as Lance discloses in the moment, he doesn't believe that a pregnant woman has the right to take meth and so he offers a justification that is on its own eminently reasonable, but only after it's too late does he realize the self-inflicted rhetorical leg sweep he tripped into.
The rest of the conversation gets bogged down on the legality of certain drugs but to Lance's credit, he does eventually bite the bullet and concede that although he may not agree with the decision he still believes a pregnant woman has the right to take heroin. The eventual consistency is commendable, but the fact that he so reflexively resorted to the commanding ethos of "do not intentionally kill a child" should call into question how much he really believes in the "absolute dominion of the mother" position he insisted upon.
Lastly is our old friend Meghan Murphy again. I already wrote extensively about the numerous logical fallacies deployed in her conversation with Aella on the ethics of the sex industry. Murphy also discussed the same topic with professional debate bro Destiny and he describes the fundamental issue after she had walked out in frustration:
That's a fair question! If someone says they don't like X because of reasons A/B/C, and you get rid of A/B/C but they still don't like X, then it inevitably follows they have other reasons for disliking X they're not divulging. What Destiny has outlined here is an effective method to uncovering pretextual justifications — the false reasons someone provides as a bid to keep the true reasons hidden (likely because they're too unpalatable or unpersuasive to say out loud).
Destiny spends an agonizing amount of time trying to get Murphy to explain what her precise objections to the sex industry are and gets nowhere, and their final exchange illustrates why. They're discussing one of Murphy's argument that the sex trade is unethical because of women's particular vulnerability during penetrative sex:
Take note of the italicized responses; that kind of evasion is not a generally pervasive reaction for Murphy. She speaks for a living and within other moments in this debate and elsewhere, Murphy has demonstrated a clear ability to confidently answers questions with immediacy and relevancy. It can't be just a coincidence when acrobatics are prompted only by these vexing questions.
Murphy's responses make a lot more sense if you assume that her true objections to the sex industry are really borne out of an aesthetic or disgust aversion, and specifically only when men are the patrons. Murphy is evidently aware that this argument can't be spoken out loud because it's likely too vacant to be generally persuasive, so she instead cycles through a rolodex of pretextual (read: fake) arguments that she's willing to unhesitantly discard whenever they risk becoming a liability to her core thesis. That's why she dodges the male prostitute hypothetical to instead reiterate her dislike of men paying women for sex. That's why she laughs off the female client hypothetical as implausible instead of grappling with its implications.
I'm comfortable accusing Murphy of dishonesty here because her acrobatic evasions are selectively deployed in response to concrete threats to her position, rather than the result of random chance.
It's unfortunate that human beings sometimes lie, and it's too bad that they also refuse to admit mistakes. Such is life. Given the examples I outlined above, some generalizable heuristics is to be suspicious of anyone who refuses to answer straightforward questions (in writing or otherwise), or who refuses to engage in anything but the most sympathetic of conversations. A lot of our contentious interactions have and continue to migrate over towards asynchronous text exchanges, but hopefully I've made a case for why talking is still cool. Also I host The Bailey podcast and I'm always delighted to talk to people I vehemently disagree with, so reach out if you want to butt heads!
As a parting bonus, here's the journalist Beth Rigby interviewing Iain Anderson, chair of the LGBT organization Stonewall. It's quite the bloodbath.
Destiny's line of argument here sounds quite a lot to me like confusing the map for the territory. Murphy probably has 1000 reasons that sex work is bad, all of which add up to a belief that sex work in general is bad. Go after any one reason and prove that it doesn't apply to everyone, and that doesn't invalidate the other 999.
There's very rarely actually a principled reason why a word is always morally wrong in 100% of cases. You could do the same thing with things seen as straightforwardly bad, like rape. "The problem is lack of consent? So what if one person withdraws consent but the other has no way of knowing, is that wrong? So your problem isn't REALLY lack of consent then, is it?" The endless search for noncentral but epistemically pure hypotheticals detracts from the overall process of truth-finding. It's a rhetorical tool, nothing more.
In an ideal world people would admit this ("okay there are situations where sex work/racism/rape/abortion is moral") but then they lose ground. There is no incentive to do so, especially in the face of uncharitable questioning by a hostile interlocutor.
Can you name a single view, or thing, that has a thousand clearly distinguishable 'reasons', of approximately equal importance, that aren't (when considered properly) part of a broader and more relevant reason? I can't.
Why is welfare good? Because people can buy food, get electricity, not get sick, buy cars that help them get their own jobs, ... you could list a thousand things like this, but they all have something in common! A reason of "use money to improve peoples' material conditions, which is an end in itself" neatly sums it up.
Why do we have lines on freeways? There are a few reasons, but not 999. Why do humans have blood vessels? Well over thousand different things are transported, sure, but ... 'transporting stuff' sure does sum all of them up, and you'd say that in an argument, not listing every nutrient and waste product. Why do animals want to have sex with other animals? You could list every neuron, or every potential ancestor who didn't reproduce due to non-horniness, but ...
The things we do and use are mostly purposeful, encapsulation and patterns makes them easier to understand and use, whether you're a human or the blind idiot god of evolution, and as a result the ways they interact or go wrong are usually relatively simple to describe, at a high level. At the very least things have a clear hierarchy to them. Why does too-high temperature damage humans, or why does water damage a phone? There are a thousand low-level reasons ... but the high level reason of 'changing temperature changes a lot of chemistry, and humans depend on a lot of chemistry, and natural selection operated in a certain temperature range' works quite well.
The closest example of something that has 'many equal importance causes' are the output bits of a hash algorithm - which exists precisely because it's impossible to understand what parts of the input cause any particular bit to be set!
Also, in practice OP just makes excuses for a gish gallop. How can we ever come to any conclusions if you can have 999 good reasons for something? At a minute each, thats' 16 hours...
Any argument about welfare that's more sophisticated than "buys food, food good" is going to apply differently to the items in that list; they're going to have different tradeoffs and incentives, to the point where no nontrivial argument can be made for them as a group. Yes, you can sum up the group and rephrase it as one item, but pretty much no legitimate argument applies to that one item. (But sophistry often does apply to that one item, as in the Jefferson racist example.)
I do think 'it is a fundamental good to help people', and decreasing marginal utility of money, applies to the entire group and is a legitimate argument often made for social support / wealth redistribution?
Even beyond that, there are a lot of specific nontrivial arguments that apply to the entire group. Eg "welfare disincentivizes work" is fairly uniform across what the welfare is for because money is fungible.
And the ways the subtopics differ are hierarchically grouped - we can differentiate essential needs like food/medicine and discretionary wants, and say we want the former but not the latter. That's still two reasons, not a thousand. There's structure that makes OP's '999 reasons, knocking out one doesn't matter' not work.
(note that every object-level argument I'm writing here is mention, not use)
That fails to be more sophisticated than "food good", except it's "help good" instead. Not just because it contains few words, but because it implicitly assumes that there's no need to balance the benefit from the help against anything else.
er, that's what 'decreasing marginal utility of money' is about. we're evenly weighting personal well-being or happiness or w/e, and the balance is that taking money away from high-earners lowers their utility less than it increases the utility of low earners. In non-robot terms, that means "joe affording an android phone is worth denying Sarah her 20th dress of the month", or even "bill affording two nights at a a cheap bar is worth jeff not having one night at an expensive bar".
And I think that this, while obviously complicated, like everything, is a "single, coherent reason" in a way that avoids the 999 reasons thing
(if this isn't a specific nit and it relates to a larger-scale point about my original post, it's going over my head)
There are other things to balance against than the benefit to high earners. "What bad incentives does it create", for instance. And if you're going to argue for welfare in such general terms that you're making one argument for the entire category, you haven't actually restricted it to situations where the money is taken from high earners in the first place.
The larger point is that "my side of the argument" is different from "the argument". If you don't need to defend your argument, it's easy to state it in very broad terms that apply to a very broad category. If you do have to defend it, this is no longer so.
I agree. But if we engaged in a debate about 'is welfare good', we could nail down the primary benefit (marginal utility, increasing total welfare), and then move onto potential countervailing issues - you'd probably agree that there are that and 0-5 other general things that make welfare potentially bad, and then we could go into detail on those.
Sure, but the broad statements help scope the more detailed defense. You may have hundreds of distinct points to oppose welfare, but they can all be grouped into broad categories - which you'd name when Destiny asked you 'what are your reasons for opposing it', and if he said 'would you be fine with welfare without those' you'd say 'yes' or 'yes, but that's an impossible hypothetical' (which is what i'd say in that circumstance), and then the discussion would narrow into one of your points.
With Megan, he can't do that - he can either engage with her on 'it's about women' or 'it's about penetration', and then if he wins that argument megan will just say 'yeah but its still bad without those' an hour later, and then both parties will run out of time, unsatisfied.
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