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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28961 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Given that obesity is sorta culture war related and in the news a lot, I figured this story would be relevant: Weight-Loss Stocks Soar After Obesity-Drug Study Spurs Investor Frenzy

Weight-loss tied stocks jumped following the update with rival Eli Lilly & Co. surging 15% to a record high. A positive outlook in Lilly’s earnings report also helped fuel the climb. Viking Therapeutics Inc., a drug developer working on a treatment similar to Novo’s Wegovy, jumped 12%. And WW International Inc. — better known as Weight Watchers — which bought a telemedicine firm that prescribes obesity medications earlier this year, soared 13%.

Novo’s Wegovy showed a 20% reduction in heart issues compared to those getting a placebo in a closely watched study. The results cheered Wall Street bulls who called it a best-case scenario. Analysts saw the benefit extending the market for Wegovy as well as Lilly’s Mounjaro and possibly removing an obstacle in insurance reimbursement.

I am more convinced than ever that these drugs are not only the future of wright loss, but similar to Paxil, is also going to a part of culture too and another tool or crutch to mitigate the downsides of modernity, except instead of social anxiety , it's too much food. We're sorta collectively inflicted this on ourselves, as victims of our own success. The pendulum if progress has swung so far towards abundance that we need modern technology just to try to undo it.

crutch to mitigate the downsides of modernity, except instead of social anxiety

Of course, the drugs seem to work like shit compared to be an authentically mentally healthy human being. I expect that Wegovy and similar drugs will wind up similar on a number of dimensions. I genuinely cannot imagine preferring a lifetime of pill popping to just riding a bike.

I genuinely cannot imagine preferring a lifetime of pill popping to just riding a bike.

More time to do actually enjoyable things instead of faffing around on a child's toy?

Why get some exercise and fresh air when I could be whacking it instead?

Or working on something meaningful, spending more time with partners and children, or any number of things.

Reclaiming unenjoyable exercise time would increase productivity and enjoyment of life.

Exercise with your partner and children.

I can't abide repetitive tasks no matter the company.

You won't be experiencing company of any kind for too long if you avoid exercise and fresh air.

Why are gymlets so vicious when people don't share their boring obsessions?

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I rode a bike last weekend with my wife and child. We rode with another family and their kids. Of course all those things go together.

Just doesn't seem as fun as laser tag.

To a childless young adults, very well might not.

Yep, can't imagine it. Riding a bike is enjoyable. I cannot relate to wanting to just pop pills and get back to [enjoyable things], particularly when [enjoyable things] for most people looks a lot like staring at a screen.

You can phrase everything like this. Oh, can't imagine people spending hours at a time contracting their muscles presumably for fun, instead of enjoying gathering new knowledge or engaging in the debates with educated people from around the world. But I can imagine, it's quite easy to understand that people have different preferences.

The number of obese people doing that is what? 7?

Reading something on the Internet is quite popular activity indeed. As is reading books that is also today involves "staring at a screen".

Reading books is very possible to do while exercising, so...

???? Give me this secret!!!

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Obese people aren't obese because they're minmaxing their knowledge.

There are people who will say the same about all of your proclivities. "I cannot relate to people who don't want to play football every weekend" and so on.

OK. I don't know what your point is. I can look down on the pillpoppers and they can look down on my faffing, we'll be on the same page. I can certainly relate to plenty of preferences that aren't my own (Crossfit isn't appealing to me, but that's fine, people like it), but I'm not going to pretend that I think all preferences are equally virtuous. The preference to have subsidized drugs rather than pick a sport and eat reasonably is loathsome to me.

The point is that fully generalisable sentiments that are really just subjective priorities and values differences underneath it all are not a meaningful topic of conversation. "I like thing" "Well I don't like thing" Ok great, we've achieved absolutely nothing here.

instead of faffing around on a child's toy?

Is this a jab at the Europeans who cycle to work?

What do Europeans have to do with the discussion? Are you under impression that Europeans ride bicycles a lot, including to work? They don’t, except of couple of places, which is no different than in US.

They ride/walk to work far more than people in USA.

Not really, though I understand how one might get this impression if one is very online and frequents places like Reddit or HN. Most of Europe is unlike Amsterdam, and even in Netherlands, last I checked, majority of commuters drive.

Note that I wrote "far more than people in USA" not "more often than commuting by a car".

That was intentional.

I am pretty sure that in nearly all or all European countries people commute via walking/cycling at noticeably higher rate than in USA.

What do Europeans have to do with the discussion?

I just found it to be a funny unintentional marker of the same cultural gap between Americans and Europeans that starts lots of arguments here.

They don’t, except of couple of places, which is no different than in US.

The full bike sheds at my old 6:30am-start factory workplace would seem to indicate otherwise but of course that's anecdotal. Ipsos tells me that 5% of Americans cycle to work, which is on par with Britain, but half or less than half of the number who do in Spain, Italy, Norway or Belgium, a third or less of Germany, Hungary and Poland, a quarter of Sweden and one sixth the number in the Netherlands.

Yes, you are confirming what I said: Europeans don’t cycle to work a lot. Overall, maybe something like 10% does. Large majority of them drives. Sure, the split between driving and cycling is only slightly less lopsided towards driving, but whether 5% cycles or 10% is not substantial difference.

Then we're just debating the meaning of 'a lot'. A substantial minority to me still seems like a lot, a doubling or tripling compared to America seems like 'a lot more'.

No, if I wanted to do that I would have talked about how ungainly it is to arrive at your destination sweaty and/or soaked from the elements.

I just don't consider bikes to be a serious transport option in general.

how ungainly it is to arrive at your destination sweaty

Ever heard of a shower? Most offices have them. Get up, put on your exercise gear, put your office clothes in your backpack, cycle into work, take a shower and put on your work clothes. You'll likely have cut a huge amount of time out of your commute, and the morning cycle is far more invigorating and refreshing than spending 30-60 minutes in a car or on public transport (and if you live in a warm climate, being stuck in a cramped bus or train during the morning rush hour will probably result in you getting hot and sweaty anyway).

Bikes are the perfect vehicle. A decent bike costs a few hundred bucks, max, and will last you for years. If cycling in a city, traffic won't impede your progress the way it would in a car or bus (or even a motorbike). Even an only moderately fit person can cover immense distances without exhausting themselves (I'm by no means an avid distance cyclist, but am confident I could cycle 100km tomorrow without any training and without exerting myself to any great degree). Calories are your fuel, so you aren't dependent on petrol/gas infrastructure. If so inclined, you can attach panniers or a trailer to your bike to allow you to bring possessions with you that are too big for a backpack. Certain kinds of bike can ride on effectively any terrain, so you aren't dependent on roads. Virtually all repairs and maintenance can be done by anyone after one day's training, unlike modern cars which are so complex that only specialists can repair them (at great expense to the owner). There's no additional cost in GHG emissions. Bicycles take up far less space than motor vehicles: there are bicycle parking centres in Amsterdam which can comfortably fit thousands of bicycles into a space which would accommodate a few hundred cars at most. They're vastly cheaper than cars (in addition to the smaller initial outlay noted above: almost all of the maintenance and upkeep can be done yourself with only one or two specialised tools, you don't need to buy petrol/gas, you don't need insurance). And best of all, the mere act of using one improves the health of the user along multiple metrics (heart rate, blood pressure, muscle mass, life expectancy etc.).

Your comment has inspired more contempt in me than any I've read on this site in months.

Ever heard of a shower? Most offices have them.

So now not only am I leaving even earlier to compensate for my MUCH slower method of transportation, I'm having to leave even earlier again so that I can... shower at work?! I'm really struggling to see what I'm gaining here!

Bikes are the perfect vehicle.

The hardest of disagrees. They're toys for children, and not suitable for serious adults. I like being able to do a full week's shop in one day. I like being able to just nip to IKEA and come back with a new standing mirror, or cabinet, or end table or whatever else without paying their extortionate delivery costs. I like air conditioning. I like playing music and jamming along to it with my partner. I like being able to make phone calls if I need to. Most importantly, I like not looking like an absolute fool. Wearing ugly lycra, or flattening my hair into a helmet, and ugh, sweating -- these things are not for me. To say nothing of how woefully bottom heavy and thunder thighed habitual cyclists become! And even though as you note, attaching a trailer to a bike is an option, the problem is it looks absolutely ridiculous! Like something out of the olden days! The image hit from being a cyclist would be totally insurmountable to me.

Trying to get bikes considered as a serious form of transport gives off the same vibes to me as trying to get hentai to be considered a serious art form. It's fine that you like that stuff, but stop trying to normalise it.

So now not only am I leaving even earlier to compensate for my MUCH slower method of transportation

Assuming you live in an urban centre, when factoring in traffic, cycling will often end up being faster than driving or taking public transport. It takes me an hour to get to my office via public transport, but only half an hour on a bike, and that's maintaining a gentle 12 km/h (not even fast enough to break a sweat, obviating the need for a shower).

I like being able to do a full week's shop in one day.

As I said, you can do this if you attach a trailer to your bike.

I like being able to just nip to IKEA and come back

Obviously there are circumstances in which cars are preferable to bikes, but seriously - how often do you go to IKEA? I can't imagine it's more than once a month.

I like being able to make phone calls if I need to.

It isn't remotely difficult to cycle a bike with one hand and operate your phone with the other. I do it all the time.

Most importantly, I like not looking like an absolute fool. Wearing ugly lycra, or flattening my hair into a helmet, and ugh, sweating -- these things are not for me. To say nothing of how woefully bottom heavy and thunder thighed habitual cyclists become! And even though as you note, attaching a trailer to a bike is an option, the problem is it looks absolutely ridiculous!

I must say, it seems very strange for a person so aggressively averse to apparently all forms of physical exercise to be so hyper image-conscious. Sure, a slim, fit dude in fluorescent Lycra looks a little silly compared to a slim, fit dude not wearing Lycra, but neither of them looks nearly as ridiculous as an obese man huffing and puffing after walking a hundred feet. And I don't own any Lycra clothing at all.

This is a roundabout way of saying: if you get as little exercise as it sounds, you probably look like an absolute fool already, even if you're in denial about it.

stop trying to normalise it

I'm not trying to normalise it. It IS normal where I live, as in most Western nations. Only in America, seemingly, is cycling seen as this weird thing that only losers do.

Assuming you live in an urban centre, when factoring in traffic, cycling will often end up being faster than driving or taking public transport.

Big assumption. My commute is from an outlying town to a city center, a journey that takes 30 minutes by car, along mainly 60mph speed limit roads. I travel along maybe one mile of roads slower than that the entire way there, since the city's main A-road cuts directly through the center.

As I said, you can do this if you attach a trailer to your bike.

At the expense of looking like an utter tool, or a child towing their mobile lemonade stand to the next location. And having to worry about cornering too sharply and tipping the whole thing over.

Obviously there are circumstances in which cars are preferable to bikes, but seriously - how often do you go to IKEA? I can't imagine it's more than once a month.

Whenever I need something, and it's not the only store out there I'd need it for. Carrying a framed painting from an art store back on a bike would be an exercise in frustration and anxiety. Trying to carry a very heavy ornate mirror or light shade from an antiques store would be worse.

It isn't remotely difficult to cycle a bike with one hand and operate your phone with the other. I do it all the time.

And have to shout over the rushing air? It's bad enough when walking near a busy road let alone being in the middle of one.

I must say, it seems very strange for a person so aggressively averse to apparently all forms of physical exercise to be so hyper image-conscious.

Is it so completely out of the realm of possibility that a person can be slim and attractive without boring themselves half to death by doing braindead and repetitive busywork tasks constantly? My experience in the school system left me with less than zero patience for such things.

I'm not trying to normalise it. It IS normal where I live, as in most Western nations. Only in America, seemingly, is cycling seen as this weird thing that only losers do.

I'm in the UK, and among my peers it's considered a niche thing that is mainly the domain of children, eco loons or retirees. Everyone else on the road despises cyclists because they're super slow and utterly entitled.

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So you're an obese person? I'll make sure to disregard everything you post from now on.

  • -20

Fairly sure that's a false dichotomy there.

It's been a while since your last warning, but given that this low effort snarl is even more antagonistic than the last one, I'm kicking you into the corner for a few days. Three day ban.

Bikes rock. I'm back into bike riding now that my kid has the strength for hills and longer rides.

I'm ride or die for biking.

Exercise doesn't seem to reduce weight by much, though of course it will make you healthier overall.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/upshot/to-lose-weight-eating-less-is-far-more-important-than-exercising-more.html

I don't doubt the science on how many calories cardio burns directly, but there must be something more to it. Why do people who do a lot of exercise just never seem to be obese? Where are all the avid gym goers with double chins? Does exercise also help regulate appetite or something?

The exceptions I can think of are ones where piling on muscle is worth it even if it comes with a lot of fat.

It might work the opposite direction- exercise is horrifically uncomfortable for fat people, so they don’t do it.

Right, maybe that discomfort is also the feedback by which people are motivated to stay in shape. If I go for a cycle and feel terrible, the cycling itself won't have done much for me but it will be a wake up call for me to cut down on smoking/drinking/gaining weight (or if I'm feeling lazy, a wake up call to quite cycling).

The feedback cycle is not fitting in my damn pants. I don’t need to waste half an hour on the treadmill to tell me that. I spend that time because I want to be healthier.

by which people are motivated to stay in shape

The people who feel that way are not the target demographic. You're not the target demographic.

They're already not in shape. They don't have something they fear to lose, that's the point. Because of rising childhood obesity they may never have been in shape enough to distinguish between 'normal' and 'wakeup call'

Honestly, given that - adults who never even developed basic coping mechanisms - I'd pump this shit into the water supply if it was safe.

I can attest from personal experience that when i take a couple weeks off from the gym junk food is more appealing and when I'm really pushing myself vegetables and lean protein are delicious

Yeah, I actually lost most of my weight from diet but it feels like my regimen was most consistent and sustainable when I was also exercising. Part of it was that early on it seemed to help me fast but I've adapted past that now.

But still, if I fall off the wagon on exercise I seem to fall off with other stuff like diet. Not sure if it's the direct or only cause (there's some interaction with sleep quality but that's a cycle) but still.

It's easier to do it all sometimes.

You haven’t met my dad. Obese, pre-diabetic, dad-gut, exercises at the YMCA daily, eats 3 meals a day.

Meanwhile, I don’t exercise and I’m his mirror image.

Yeah, a lot of older guys at the gym lift, run, swim, are ostensibly doing a lot of exercise but are also very fat.

I don't doubt the science on how many calories cardio burns directly, but there must be something more to it. Why do people who do a lot of exercise just never seem to be obese? Where are all the avid gym goers with double chins?

Most likely the causation arrow goes the other way. Obese people don't exercise because it's difficult for them to do so.

Does exercise also help regulate appetite or something?

It does absolutely. It upregulates it. Meaning that those who exercise experience more hunger. If you burn 500 calories on your exercise bike, and respond to your body's natural hunger cues, you'll tend to eat 500 more calories of food. And if you lift weights, you'll tend to increase in weight.

Every bodybuilder will tell you that fitness is made in the gym but physiques are made in the kitchen. It's very difficult to exercise yourself lean, except for at the extremes.

Exercise has many benefits, but for diet matters more than exercise for maintaining a good physique.

Why do people who do a lot of exercise just never seem to be obese

Not necessarily the only explanation but - The kind of person who is willing to do something somewhat uncomfortable for health benefits is the kind of person who will both exercise and intentionally eat less.

Where are all the avid gym goers with double chins?

Have you never been to Planet Fitness? /s

But seriously, I agree with the explanations by @curious_straight_ca and @hydroacetylene: people that are fat usually don't enjoy exercise.

Why do people who do a lot of exercise just never seem to be obese?

Plenty are!

Several years ago I lost quite a bit of weight by tracking my calories. I made no changes to my exercise routine which had been stable for the previous six months or so and just made sure to keep average consumed calories around 2200 kcal (maintenance level for a person my age and height). I ended up having an average 1000 kcal daily deficit for months while losing around 25 kg overall, meaning I'd been exercising ~1000 kcal worth daily for many months prior to that while having obese BMI and without any weight loss.

Exercise alone really doesn't work for weight loss for most people because they just end up increasing the number of calories eaten without even realising it.

"Which is more important in an internal combustion engine? Oxygen or the flammable substance?"

It's diet and exercise. You have to have both. Together.

These pills won't make people healthier. They will make people feel better about themselves. They aren't weight loss drugs, they're NextGen antidepressants. Metabolic syndrome often does not present as visible obesity. Major stomach and liver issues can go undetected for years. People will start taking these drugs and remain at a lower body weight. Then, one day, they die suddenly and any autopsy performed with reveal superfluous amounts of visceral fat, a leaking stomach, and a liver close to non-function.

Physical fitness is, among many other things, an information feedback loop. If you are in bad shape, you have been making poor health decisions. Sometimes, this can be unavoidable (late nights during crunch time at work or school, what have you). But, mostly, it's a clear indication that you're making poor, poor choices. Using something that covers up the effects of these choices does nothing to alter that decision process. I'd wager that habitual users of Wegovy etc. probably will also habitually (ab)use other substances - alcohol, narcotics, sugar, social media. This is not a road to health.

It's diet and exercise. You have to have both. Together.

You really don't, at least for weight loss. You can lose weight from diet alone by simply eating X fewer calories. You can't really lose weight from exercise alone unless you're exercising at pro athlete/olympian levels, exercise just doesn't really burn all that many calories.

Exercise presumably helps make diets sustainable. If you want to cut a deficit of say 500 calories per day then cutting out a snack and exercise is one way to tackle it.

I know people constantly insist on this, but running 50 miles per week is actually a lot of calories and isn't even half of what pros are doing. When I ramp up from my typical 40 mile/week schedule to 70+ miles per week during marathon training cycles, I will either lose weight or make a deliberate choice to eat more simple carbs and keep weight. This is even easier in cycling, where long rides are easier to pull off consistently than long runs. Unsurprisingly, the extra ~600-1000 calories per day from exercise makes it much easier to maintain homeostatic calorie intake than what sedentary people would eat; I know this because maintaining my weight required much more conscious choices before I picked up endurance sports.

exercise just doesn't really burn all that many calories.

It does burn calories, sometimes lots of calories. The problem is that your hunger levels increase to compensate for the calories you burn.

Then, one day, they die suddenly and any autopsy performed with reveal superfluous amounts of visceral fat, a leaking stomach, and a liver close to non-function.

On what you base this prediction?

Not OP, but I won't be surprised if these new weight loss drugs are trumpeted for a couple of years, then we find complications of some sort with them (skinny-but-unhealthy sounds plausible) and have to memory hole them like the last half dozen wonder solutions we've been sold: Fen-phen and Ephedra both seemed promising in their times but had high incidences of adverse effects showing up later.

I'd wager that habitual users of Wegovy etc. probably will also habitually (ab)use other substances - alcohol, narcotics, sugar, social media. This is not a road to health.

Ozempic reduces alcohol cravings as well, so at least that will also be less of an issue:

https://neurosciencenews.com/ozempic-alcohol-addiction-23422/

Don't take any of those class of drugs. They really fuck with your head.

Nobody is claiming that the pills make people healthier directly.

If you are in bad shape, you have been making poor health decisions.

You are of course, correct. That's the genius of semaglutide - it's a pill that doesn't improve your health, it's a pill that improves your decisions, that leads to measurable changes in behavior that lead in turn to better health.

Really? You can’t imagine why someone might prefer not to spend time on a bike?

Cardio is boring. I’m saying this as someone who grudgingly runs 3x a week anyway, because it is valuable. Much as I choose to drive instead of carrying my groceries, I’m not opposed to a technological solution.

Yes, really, I genuinely can't imagine preferring a sedentary life to a life with some chosen sport. I chose biking because I like biking, but it sure doesn't have to be biking - go swimming, do a hard trail hike, roll on a ju-jitsu mat, do Crossfit, play soccer, just pick something and do it. I cannot imagine someone experiencing the joy of fitness and mastery in a sport and saying, "no, I am too busy getting knowledge". The extent of how weird I find it is that I basically just don't believe people and think it's excuse-making for sloth.

I cannot imagine someone experiencing the joy of fitness and mastery in a sport and saying, "no, I am too busy getting knowledge".

Finally lifting to a point where I can empathise with this and the issue is that the reward is the wrong way round. Assuming someone who is unfit and bad at sports, your main experience of exercise is as a mist of childhood pain and humiliation.

You have to go through that, spending quite a lot of time and money doing something boring and painful before you start getting a reward. And if you don’t have people to help correct your form and technique you might not even get a reward at all. So it’s very easy for people either to conclude it’s not worth it right from the start; or do it for a couple weeks, conclude it’s horrible and doesn’t work, then quit, telling all their friends not to bother.

Personally I blame it on PE. If we taught it like we taught other subjects, paying even the slightest attention to children’s abilities and actually trying to improve them over time, a lot more people would be a lot more active.

Personally I blame it on PE. If we taught it like we taught other subjects, paying even the slightest attention to children’s abilities and actually trying to improve them over time, a lot more people would be a lot more active.

For all that Mottizens complain about American public schooling, I'm surprised that American PE isn't criticized more. I won't say my experience was particularly bad, but I feel like gym class is quite possibly one of the biggest pain points in American childhood.

Not just American public schools. I went to a good school in the UK and the contrast between the high quality of the lessons and the low quality of the PE was pretty stark IMO. The PE wasn't shoddy, they spent lots of money on good facilities. But we used to call it Games rather than PE and I think that highlights the disconnect for me. It was intended to let the sporty children do well at sports and win prizes for the school. There was no real interest in improving children who were in the bottom half, or in physical health as such, and the exercise was very standardised. As a below-par child you learned very quickly how to fake being able to do 20 press-ups and stay on the parts of the team that didn't require lots of running around. If they had sat down with us and explained how you get stronger / fitter, and made any attempt to do progressive training, I think a lot of people could have had big improvements.

I try to go to the gym to run every other day (or every third day), and try to mix in some HIIT here and there as well.

I hate it so much even when it’s less than 10% of my waking hours. If I could be perfectly fit without exercise, sign me the fuck up.

I’m the same way. I’ve exercised now for a while, 3x a week, lift, reformer pilates, run, and I hate all of it. I have never enjoyed exercise, I have never enjoyed the gym, the most I can say is that I feel mildly satisfied after I’m done, the same way I do if I order a salad instead of a cheeseburger and fries, maybe.

Just curious. Why run 3x a week instead of lifting if you hate running? Many would argue that lifting has better health benefits, and is especially better for male aesthetics.

Many would argue that lifting has better health benefits

Citation? Maybe I'm lifting wrong (too few reps with too much weight?) but I never get my heart rate up for long while doing it. IIRC exercise-elevated heart rate and breathing are what most directly translate to better cardiopulmonary health and stamina, which is what has the strongest effect on healthspan and lifespan.

There are many studies which conclude that strength, as measured by grip strength, is highly correlated with life span, even for individuals under age 60.

Here's a review: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20829298/

What's your HR when doing squats? I usually got to 80%+ of my max HR when doing 5 reps at my working weight. Now, I do lighter weights and still experience elevated HR, but not to the same level.

My general understanding is that resistance work alone is enough to get someone to a decent level of cardiovascular health. Is there a lifespan benefit to being 95th percentile in resting HR or VO-2 max as opposed to 80th percentile?

I have an elevated heart rate and don’t want to rely on beta blockers forever.

Also, my apartment complex has treadmills and free weights, but no squat rack. I miss that in particular.

If you have any recommendations for a free-weight program, I’m all ears.

Dr Mike had some DB exercises for the lower body in one of his latest videos.

I'm not @netstack, but cardiovascular and resistance training are both necessary for ideal health and performance. Even someone that's beautifully sculpted will be fitter and healthier if they mix in some running, biking, or swimming. It only takes a couple hours per week to provide a large boost.

I don’t really understand the judgmental tone. Few on this forum would have a problem with using adderall to enhance performance or Lipitor to reduce blood pressure. How is this different?

I don't respect Adderall use either. That's the point, I think people would be better off fixing what's wrong with them than patching over it with drugs.

This assumes that the model of drug assistance is min(peak natural ability, current ability + drugs assistance). The actual model is max(peak natural ability, current ability + drugs assistance) Both args to the function have domain 0-infinity.

The effects are additive.

Let's say you do focussed work 9 hours a day. Respectable by all means, more than most people, nothing to patch up. But if you really want whatsoever that focus is achieving, why not take Adderall and work 12?

If you are below baseline it's a patch, if you are above, it's a boost.

Walter, I think, is drawing the comparison precisely because he doesn't think they are different.

Everyone I know who took adderall for performance enhancement is insanely burned out mentally and is downright awful physically by their late 30s, just fyi. YMMV but look out.

I do have problems with those things and think fat shaming is the solution to the obesity crisis, not yet more drugs.

I genuinely cannot imagine preferring a lifetime of pill popping to just riding a bike.

As someone currently using semaglutide, and having lost 40 lbs with it after around 10 years of trying to lose the weight, you are severely underestimating the variance in the willpower required for people to lose weight. Of-fucking-course the healthiest choice is to never have been fat in the first place, just like it's better to never start smoking cigarettes, but once you're addicted and fat, it makes no sense at all to insist on trying (and failing) to do it without help. Semaglutide helps you make better choices and dig yourself out of the hole, sure, it might not be healthy by itself (just like nicotine patches), but it sure as shit is healthier than having a 45lb plate strapped to your back all the time.

and dig yourself out of the hole

Are you out of the hole, though? I'd happily pay for 6 months of semaglutide to lose 20 pounds, if I expected the 20 pounds to stay off, but from what I've read it sounds like you basically have to continue taking semaglutide forever if you don't want your appetite and then your equilibrium weight to shoot right back up to its pre-intervention point.

It may be that "continue taking semaglutide forever" is still healthier than "stay 40 pounds overweight forever", though, I admit.

My strategy is a month of semaglutide on, followed by three or so months off, repeat. The cycles let me keep a six pack most of the year and at times of my choosing without having to deal with the psychological effects of a deep cut. The appetite suppression lasts maybe a month after cessation for me.

Of course, this is entirely vanity oriented, and I wouldn't claim it's at all healthy compared to the alternative. Though certainly better than the last weight loss drug I was on...

I am "out of the hole" in the sense that once you've lost all the weight, you can start eating at maintenance again, which is much easier than eating at a deep deficit. So pre-semaglutide my daily maintenance calories might have been like 3500, and I was eating at like 3600, very slowly gaining weight. During semaglutide I'm eating 2300, which is a very deep deficit, made much easier due to the appetite reduction. After semaglutide, my reduced body weight will push my maintenance calories at around 3000, which will be much easier to maintain, either with discipline or with low-dose semaglutide. I think that the state of being obese does some kind of permanent damage to appetite regulation, so that anyone who has ever been significantly overweight will basically need to be on some sort of permanent diet for the rest of their lives, and there's no scenario in which they eat "naturally" and don't gain all the weight back.

I think ultimately, even with the drugs, there’s just no getting around the need for better choices.

In part, I think this is an aesthetic horror for me. We aren’t becoming more emotionally resilient by deadening our emotions, nor are we going to solve our food issues by artificially turning down our hunger thermostat.

Actually, technologies allowed us making many terrible choices that in the past would have surely killed us. I'm certain that people became more care-free outside and at various worksites after consequences of unlucky cut changed from likely gangrene or tetanus to basically nothing.

Conservatives of course are for all technological wonders apart from the modern ones. Virtuous(ones who got lucky at genetics roulette) people will lose their status gained from being able to remain fit in the modern food environment and these disgusting(visually ergo personally) fatsos will get help to adapt their brains evolved for completely different circumstances to the food abundance of current time. Horrible! I will tell you more, when new drugs appear that will directly boost your metabolism rates and not making you want to eat less, people, regardless of their virtue, will become more hedonistic, healthier and happier, as they already did many times before.

and these disgusting(visually ergo personally) fatsos will get help to adapt their brains evolved for completely different circumstances to the food abundance of current time.

I actually wonder how it'll go. Just like plastic surgery can't really make you younger but instead gives you a distinct post-op look, and Adderall doesn't just restore executive function to baseline, chemically fit people may become a very intriguing new phenotype. Are fat people today unjustly maligned for their looks? Or do they really have systematically different characters which will largely remain even without all the extra adipose tissue? We shall see.

There's the entire "Ozempic Face" thing, but that seems to be less a result of the drug itself and more of a result of rapid weight loss.

Character wise, it's fair to say most fat people have bad posture and less attention to hygiene and style, though you can imagine causality working either way.

Character wise, it's fair to say most fat people have bad posture and less attention to hygiene and style, though you can imagine causality working either way.

Honestly having lost about 20 KG from 130~ KG to 110KG at 6'3 and going from 'I need to actively hunt for clothing in my size that isn't a tent' to actually being able to walk into a reasonable department store and buy clothing off the rack that is semi-fashionable, suddenly style became a lot easy to participate in.

Also Big Man's Stores rarely do discounts on their upsized nice clothing, whilst getting to the point of buying from a standard department store means I've suddenly got an ability to participate in deals, clearances and the like. Buying 'nice jeans' would previously have cost about $150 AUD per pair, now it's closer to $50 if I'm at all patient.

Adderall doesn’t just restore executive function to baseline

What exactly do you mean by this? That Adderall can boost executive function to superhuman (or super-non-enhanced-human) levels?

@2rafa had a decent writeup on this but, as it happened, deleted. In short: no, it's not like having enhanced executive function, it's like being obsessive. I've written a bunch on this too.

chemically fit people may become a very intriguing new phenotype.

Keep in mind that they won't be chemically fit, they'll just be chemically less fat. Ozempic face is already a thing:

But some have also pointed to an unanticipated side effect: “Ozempic face.”

The buzzy term, coined by a New York dermatologist, describes the gaunt or hollow look of sagging facial skin that can appear when people lose excess fat in their cheeks or neck.

Weight loss always has some unappealing visual side effects, but I would expect weight loss with no improvement in actual underlying fitness to have a particularly unappealing aesthetic. Naturally, there are already plastic surgeons capitalizing on it!

I'm certain that people became more care-free outside and at various worksites after consequences of unlucky cut changed from likely gangrene or tetanus to basically nothing.

The opposite - life was just cheaper back then, and people tolerated workplace death rates that we wouldn't. The CDC reports a 90% decline in workplace death rates between 1933 and 1997 (and a bigger drop for specific dangerous industries like coal mining). The trend in the UK is even more stark, but I can't find data before the 1980's online. In the current year, workplace deaths in the US are mostly on-the-clock shootings and car crashes - i.e. not deaths amenable to improvements in traditional health-and-safety.

I don’t think hedonism makes people long term happier. If it did, our kids would be happier than we are because they have more cool stuff. Except that we’ve never had so much loneliness or depression and anxiety. Something like 25% of the US population is on a drug for emotional regulation despite our abundant wealth and our higher levels of education.

nor are we going to solve our food issues by artificially turning down our hunger thermostat.

Why not?

If there was a drug that made people want to eat less, with little side effects; Wouldn't that help? Wouldn't that be part of having better choices?

What does better choices mean, in this context? Is it giving people more choices in their food consumption? Or is it giving them choices you deem as better/removing choices you deem as bad?

What does better choices mean, in this context?

It refers to people exercising intentionality to consume the foods that align with their physical goals. If that's losing weight, it means a caloric deficit. If that's endurance sports, it means eating a bunch of boring sugars and simple carbs out of your back pocket while you're on the bike because it'll go poorly later if you don't. If it's normal homeostasis, it means matching your appetite to your activity. If it's bodybuilding, it means protein shakes, egg slonking, and chicken breast when you don't want anymore because it's necessary to add muscle.

Basically, it means making an actual choice, electing to eat the things that make sense rather than defaulting to absent-minded gluttony.

If it's normal homeostasis, it means matching your appetite to your activity.

I can understand controlling what you eat, but how does one control appetite? It seems that taking medications like this is a real way to match appetite to activity, so I'm not sure what the objection is.

When you eat nutritious foods for a long time, your body starts to crave nutritious foods. Your appetite changes. If you go on a low carb high protein/fat diet for long enough, cake starts to taste disgustingly sweet. Most people dont commit to it long enough to notice this. Or they are following bad diet advice (e.g. egg whites, skim milk, etc)

how does one control appetite

Low glycemic index food. No breakfast. No snacking after dinner.

Your desire to eat decreases the less your blood sugar spikes and crashes. Also you can train yourself to not eat in the morning or after dinner.

Excessive self-harmful hunger isn't something foisted onto us. You choose to cultivate it or not.

"Controlling your appetite" seems harder than "controlling what you eats" in the same way that "controlling what you are afraid of" seems harder than "controlling whether you into the fear", but fears are "controllable" too. Pairing a shock with a stimulus is a good way to condition a fear of said stimulus, and exposing yourself to the stimulus while paying attention to the lack of any bad consequences is the way that therapy can reduce fear.

The same thing works for appetite. Pay attention to what you're eating, how your body feels in response, and what the outcomes are. People are often very mindless about this, craving foods which make them feel bad and lead to undesirable outcomes while flinching away from making the connections. Make the connections, and all of a sudden those foods/quantities of foods no longer seem so appealing -- in the same way that a restaurant no longer seems so appealing after you get food poisoning there, only more subtle because the effects are not so immediate and dramatic. When someone says something horribly fat shaming like "You eat too much", for example, instead of pushing it away with "I know I know don't rub it in I can't help it!", sit with it. Face it. "I do eat too much. I am fat, and look disgusting. My stomach feels disgustingly over full, once I pay attention to it". How hungry are you after sitting through that? How compelling is that same hunger?

Perhaps the easiest way to get a gut level feel for how much your relationship to food can change is to just not eat for a few days. Eventually you get over the neediness and experience the desire for food completely differently, in a way that leaves a lot more perceived freedom to do what you want to do.

how does one control appetite?

By learning how to be hungry.

In my eyes the risk is making the general population take the drug with carrot and stick incentives (health insurance?) in a bid to reduce “climate change” and increase “food security equity”. This tool exists now, it’s only left up to policy makers to misuse it.

There's also the part where the government and insurance providers are now on the hook for $20K per year for a drug that accomplishes the same thing as people not being sedentary and lacking impulse control. If people want to pay it out of their own pocket, more power to them, but subsidizing this is galling.

nor are we going to solve our food issues by artificially turning down our hunger thermostat.

Is the hunger thermostat of the average American in 2023 really the natural order of things? The obesity epidemic only began in the 1970s and has been increasing in prevalence and severity. Not just in the States, either, but around the world. I don't know why it is, but I haven't read any compelling arguments that it's really due to a massive global loss of character since a century ago.

Suppose it's one of the "contaminants in the environment" theories (all of concrete ones having serious flaws, I know). If so, our hunger thermostat is artificially turned up; although it's less than ideal to counteract it by introducing drugs to artificially turn it down, it's still far better to have that than to be fat. It means more attractive, healthier people who weigh down the medical system less.

I don't think there's a single secret chemical that is making people fat. I think it's the result of many decades of work of food scientists and the growing popularity of eating out.

Take Oreos. A single Oreo cookie is 46 calories here in Russia (53 in the US). The serving size is three cookies, or 150 calories. That's a perfectly reasonable amount, except no one eats three cookies. I am probably limited more by the amount of milk I can drink.

In 1922, Oreos sold for 32 cents per pound. That's 5.83 dollars in 1923 money. Target says I can buy 18.12oz for 4.69, or 4.14 per pound. That's 30% cheaper. Even if nothing has changed in their recipe since 1912, grocery stores in 2023 are stuffed with dozens, hundreds of new brands of cheap hyperpalatable food.

Eating out is no longer a luxury and delivery is much more common. You can't really control your portion sizes when you don't cook for yourself and you aren't limited by the number of dishes you can cook simultaneously, so it's easy to overeat. Restaurants have to compete for customers, so they come up with the tastiest recipes full of sugar, salt and fat that stimulate your appetite.

food is too calorie dense, even healthy food. a few slices of whole wheat bread is 140 calories. i can easily eat a lot of it given it's just mostly air.

Non-starchy vegetables are surprisingly calorie-sparse. If reducing calories is your goal, replacing most starch-based sides with legumes and cruciferous vegetables (and carrots) is a great move.

I’ll agree that food companies making hyper pallet able foods is a major part of it, but I also think we’ve created a kind of “snacking culture” that really didn’t exist prior to the 1970s. People are almost constantly bombarded with opportunities to eat, with snack foods literally everywhere you go in public, including gyms. And eating between meals is, at least around me, fairly normalized, and you’ll see people in the office or in the break room eating and drinking and stashing snacks in their desks. Food portion sizes have also grown tremendously since then (this started with restaurants but it’s entered the home as well [https://www.yourweightmatters.org/portion-sizes-changed-time/]) to the point that our calorie intake is nearly 125% of what was typical in 1970. Add up nearly constant snacking that’s been more or less normalized, a sedentary lifestyle (most people work desk jobs, rather than more active factory, retail, or skilled labor jobs) and fewer sports leagues for kids and adults who aren’t good enough to play select teams. Surprise, eating 25% more while moving less causes obesity.

Other than the hyper-palatable foods and portion sizes, I don’t think our food has changed as much as people are saying. We’ve had Oreos within $0.50 of their current price for decades, and their recipe hasn’t changed much. What’s changed most of all, at least from what I can see is the normalization of snacking all the time, the normalization of eating an amount of food that would have embarrassed your grandfather, and the loss of social physical activities as a way to meet friends. It’s culture, a culture obviously shaped by marketing, but culture.

I mean it would be even better for people to use water filters or whatever it takes to minimize exposure to said environmental contaminants, because said contaminants almost certainly have other effects.

The obesity epidemic only began in the 1970s and has been increasing in prevalence and severity. Not just in the States, either, but around the world. I don't know why it is, but I haven't read any compelling arguments that it's really due to a massive global loss of character since a century ago.

This is a wonderful straw man. No one argues that it's a massive global loss of character. Instead, people argue that there are factors like how calories have become insanely more abundant to billions of people, how they now have vastly more wealth to enable them to casually consume those calories without concern, how they've been packaged in superstimulating, high-calorie, low-satiety form, and how we've started constantly lying to people about how this all works. It shouldn't be surprising that people start believing the lies when we tell them over and over again, and it shouldn't be surprising when their behavior shifts in accordance with those beliefs.

You say we need better choices, but turn your nose up at a pill that causes people to make better choices?

I'm posting my reply here at the top level original post, but it is really a reply, or series of replies, to comments further down.

I used to be obese, I've used semeglutide, and I no longer am. There's more too it than that though.

I didn't grow up fat. I've always been a bit on the big side though. When I was 22 I was 6'3" and about 255lbs. I was very active, had a black belt in Judo, competed regularly and had excellent cardio. I was, probably genetically, just big. I was also jacked from 2-4 days a week hitting the weights. My favorite cardio has always been swimming.

About 8 years ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I don't want to get into the finer details but it was rough. After many surgeries I've been cancer free for about 4 years now. There were bad complications from a surgery and I was bed ridden on and off for almost a year with a wheelchair after for a while. During these years my dietary and activity habits of a lifetime vanished. This post is really about habits.

After beating the cancer, regaining my mobility, and returning to the world my appetite came roaring back one day. My ability to be physically active lagged behind. Additionally I became severely depressed. My career trajectory was irrevocably trashed by the cancer. I wasn't "tough" any more, lost my black belt (you have to actually maintain activity in Judo where the belts are competition classes that reflect ability, no ability=no belt). My finances were ok despite being out of work so I consoled myself with snacks. Lots of snacks. You don't really think about your dietary habits, built unconsciously over a lifetime, until they are gone. I was overeating all the time and was constantly starving. I could eat so much that it was physically difficult to stand up and walk around, and I was still starving. All the time.

Obesity is a physical symptom of mental unwellness, and its like quicksand. Or maybe its like any other addiction. Imagine being a heavy smoker, deciding you need to quit, but you still have to smoke 2-3 cigarettes a day for the rest of your life, or you would die. Food addiction can't be "quit" in the classic sense like drugs or alcohol. You can live without those. There also aren't trillions of dollars in advertising to sell you heroin everywhere, nor huge R&D departments to develop super-tobacco. Food has all of these things.

I couldn't be active, I was in constant pain (And still am), got more depressed about it, and ate more. Rinse and repeat until I was about 100lbs overweight. It was impossible to reign in with just "willpower", if such a thing even exists. After returning to my meditative practice I was determined to make a change so I spoke with a doctor who suggested the semeglutide.

It took about 5 weeks for the berserk, constant hunger to switch off. The other primary effect is I felt full faster. Through some mechanism this drug speeds up the internal sensation that says "you're full now". This was enough to reforge my relationship with food. No calorie counting, no "willpower", no tricks.

Being heavy itself is self-reinforcing. Being fat makes you want to eat more. This drug short-circuits this feedback loop and provided the slack in my bad habits I needed to readjust. The body gets used to a certain amount of caloric intake and screams at you if it doesn't get it under normal circumstances, but the body can be "trained" though reduced intake to expect fewer calories. The drug suppresses that "screaming" for more food, the constant hunger that is only reinforced by eating, not sated.

After about 15 months it was largely complete, by body now expects 1500-2000 calories per day. The doctor was pretty alarmed at how little I was eating for someone who is 6'3'', suggesting 2500-2800. I don't know what happened to my metabolism but at 2500 calories a day I immediately began gaining weight again, fast, so I'm back to about 1700 or so daily. I'm not hungry like I was after the cancer anymore, I've been off the drug for about 6 months now and haven't put any of it back, no longer experience constant hunger, and am swimming again for the first time in 8 years.

I could not have done any of this without semeglutide. Obesity is a tailspin of depression and increased hunger that most people cannot pull out of. People who are very self satisfied in their own weight and judgemental of the obese have no understanding of any of these issues. Their bodies are trained to expect a certain amount of calories and activity and are largely on autopilot. They put almost zero effort into their own weight control, congratulate themselves on their moral superiority for being thin, and wallow in their hatred of others.

This last point often gets overlooked in out culture. Many people absolutely hate fat people. They despise them with a vitriol usually reserved for heretics or murderers. They keep it under wraps as its not socially acceptable to express these opinions in our present culture safely, but will pounce on any opportunity to lash out at the hated other, who they are superior too. Maybe there is some evolutionary advantage to this.

I used to be one of these people. I lived in the gym and the dojo. I reveled in defeating my opponents in competition. I had a lifetime of good diet and exercise habits, until I didn't. This is the opportunity these drugs offer, a break in the dysfunctional cycle of poor diet to give the body time to be re-trained. Even this is too much for some people though. Fat people, being morally inferior, deserve nothing but suffering forever until they die in misery apparently.

Congrats on beating cancer (I have a close family member going through that right now), and I'm quite enthused that you broke the cycle and have found your way back toward good habits!

But I have to ask, who are you talking to in this thread? There's like the one guy with one line who was immediately banned, but where is there anyone with anything even approximating vitriol usually reserved for heretics or murderers? Where is there anyone who is saying that fat people are morally inferior or that they deserve nothing but suffering forever until they die in misery? I see literally no one saying anything remotely like this... but I see multiple people claiming that other people think stuff like this. Like, nobody thinks this.

To the crowd, what is the phenomenon that is causing a variety of folks to conjure up cartoonish fat haters?

It kind of feels like the undercurrent to everything @Walterodim has said in this thread.

I cannot imagine someone experiencing the joy of fitness and mastery in a sport and saying, "no, I am too busy getting knowledge". The extent of how weird I find it is that I basically just don't believe people and think it's excuse-making for sloth.

The preference to have subsidized drugs rather than pick a sport and eat reasonably is loathsome to me.

There are other examples but I hate this thread so I don't want to find them. I say I sense that undercurrent in those comments because they are the kinds of things I would say back when I was Flex Mentallo, so I might be typical minding, but I don't think I am. He refuses to try to understand alternative perspectives and simply decides they are lying about their values. That is the behaviour of people who believe themselves morally superior.

The first comment is in response to someone that literally said they "can't imagine people spending hours at a time contracting their muscles presumably for fun, instead of enjoying gathering new knowledge or engaging in the debates with educated people from around the world", as though that's actually a set of interests that compete with cycling. The second is a comment that I stand by. I do think maintaining fitness is superior to neglecting physicality, so no objection there.

That said, the idea that I "despise them with a vitriol usually reserved for heretics or murderers" is absurd and completely unsupported. Yeah, I think obesity is usually a product of gluttony and sloth, but no, I don't hate people for having normal human failings. I do hate that we have a massively subsidized medical system that profits immensely from medicalization of everything from obesity to sadness and dispenses hundreds of billions in drugs per year. I'm sure that there are people, such as the topline commenter in this sub thread, that really do benefit from that, but I'm appalled by pharmaceutical solutions to character issues as a normal matter of course.

You say it's a character issue, but it's difficult for me to credit the modern phenomenon of mass obesity to sudden onset degeneracy rather than the mass availability of Oreo biscuits. Maybe we were always gluttons in search of a buffet big enough to kill us.

You say it's a character issue, but it's difficult for me to credit the modern phenomenon of mass obesity to sudden onset degeneracy rather than the mass availability of Oreo biscuits.

The Oreo dates back to 1912; it was a slightly sweeter of the 1908 Hydrox. The obesity epidemic is not that old.

In 1912 Joe Average couldn't afford to buy a shit ton of Oreos and also did a lot more physical activity.

I assumed 'vitriol reserved for heretics and murderers' was the kind of hyperbole often used by people who feel unjustly despised, because never mind the motte, there are so few people anywhere in Western society who vocally hate fat people on the same level as murderers. It was considered impolite to be visibly disgusted by fat people even before the body positivity movement was created.

Anyway hate is the kind of word everyone rates differently, would I be wrong to assume you consider fat people broken? Or that you think obesity is repugnant? If charles hadn't explained his situation and had just said "I used to be obese, I've used semeglutide, and I no longer am", would you not have assumed he was just taking a lazy shortcut?

Anyway hate is the kind of word everyone rates differently, would I be wrong to assume you consider fat people broken?

I would consider them "broken" in the same way that anyone that has a reparable defect is.

Or that you think obesity is repugnant?

Yes, of course it is.

If charles hadn't explained his situation and had just said "I used to be obese, I've used semeglutide, and I no longer am", would you not have assumed he was just taking a lazy shortcut?

Yes, because the vast majority of obese people are obese for straightforward reasons that don't have much to do randomly distributed crises. The correct prior remains that it's not that complicated of a story - modern food is too delicious, too plentiful, too subsidized, too cheap, and many people just eat too much of it. I still think drug treatments are a shortcut that I'm unconvinced of the long-run efficacy of. If it works and gets people back on track, that's great. I don't think the cornucopia of pharmaceuticals approach to health is actually working out very well and I'm not excited about subsidizing it. I do wish individuals well though.

I empathize a lot with this comment. I did not go through a drastic life change like you did. I was just always a skinny guy whatever I ate ... until I turned about 22.

I started gaining weight slowly. An additional 10 to 15 pounds a year, but I went from skinny to pushing the obese BMI weight category in 5 years. And then suddenly I started losing a bunch of weight. I thought it was great until I visited a doctor ... my liver was getting destroyed by sugar. I had type II diabetes and I wasn't even 30.

Its been a few years. I've managed to get my blood sugar levels in line. I completely quit sugar, started intermittent fasting, and I'm on metformin which gives me explosive diarrhea anytime I fail myself and eat too much sugar (and no, the punishment of explosive diarrhea was not enough to really stop me from eating sugar).

I think quitting sugar has easily been the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life. Not that I've racked up a whole bunch of difficult life experiences. But quitting sugar is always gonna be on that list of metrics.

I had a lifetime of good diet and exercise habits, until I didn't.

I had a lifetime of bad diet and mediocre exercise habits. And it took 25 years before I paid the price. In an alternate world where obesity related problems aren't treated as a medical issue, I'd be fucked. The battery of blood tests that diagnosed the diabetes and liver problems wouldn't have existed in that alternate world. I would have just blissfully kept eating sugar for a few more years before organ failure and possibly death.

I'm glad you seem to be doing better. I'm glad there is another tool in toolbox for dealing with obesity.

Holy balls. You might want to talk to your doctor about MODY - maturity-onset diabetes of the young. Is there a strong family history of diabetes? 28 is very young to wind up with diabetes, poor dietary habits or no. I've seen it, at 25...but that person had a BMI of 70.

My dad has diabetes, but he was diagnosed with it in his old age, after me actually.

My A1C is under control these days. But yes it is strange how early it happened, the doctor was very confused.

Amazing post, thanks for sharing your experience.

This last point often gets overlooked in out culture. Many people absolutely hate fat people. They despise them with a vitriol usually reserved for heretics or murderers. They keep it under wraps as its not socially acceptable to express these opinions in our present culture safely, but will pounce on any opportunity to lash out at the hated other, who they are superior too. Maybe there is some evolutionary advantage to this.

I used to be one of these people. I lived in the gym and the dojo. I reveled in defeating my opponents in competition. I had a lifetime of good diet and exercise habits, until I didn't. This is the opportunity these drugs offer, a break in the dysfunctional cycle of poor diet to give the body time to be re-trained. Even this is too much for some people though. Fat people, being morally inferior, deserve nothing but suffering forever until they die in misery apparently.

I share the perspective you describe. I know I have an absolutely ravenous appetite but at 6'2" 220lbs with half-assed diet scrutiny but lots of weightlifting and HIIT cardio I'm pretty happy with how I look and what I'm physically capable of at my age. But I also know (and often forget) how easy it is to fall off the wagon. I dislocated a kneecap while giving someone a lapdance (I wish I could say it was worth it but no it fucking wasn't) but it took several months of ineffective physical therapy to find out that I had a complete ACL tear.

Just finding out the news led me to completely give up on all my habits because given how long ACL surgery recovery takes, why bother? My weight ballooned by 15lbs just in the month leading up to the surgery. After the surgery I was stuck on crutches for several weeks and because I was also unemployed at the time, I also had absolutely nothing to do except eat a lot, so I gained another 15lbs on top of that. My surgery recovery took far longer than it needed to, because I'd constantly oscillate between "oh fuck me I don't fit in my clothes anymore, I gotta start cutting NOW" and "oh fuck me I am too fucking exhausted from cutting calories to do any of my physical rehab, and still too debilitated to have the option to go HAM at the gym like I used to. That tension was agonizing to deal with in the moment and eventually resolved with time, but I forget how lucky I am that I have the health and enough positive life circumstances that allow me to turn things around if I need to.

This reminds me of an experience I had. I was on a cycling trip. We were riding all day, every day. I was eating approximately all of the calories, and I saw that it was good. Then one day, I banged up my knee enough that I was going to have to stop riding, potentially for the remainder of the trip. I realized quickly, "Uhhh, damn, my appetite is still yuge, but I just ain't burning that much anymore." Thankfully, I had a pretty deep experience with counting my calories in the past, so I just forced myself to cut back, basically immediately, all the way to where I would have been without all the activity. Also thankfully, I was still spending all my time with a really positive group that I really liked, so my mood was still good, and I was able to just make the switch without too much agony. I'm exceedingly grateful that I wasn't stuck at home by myself or something, because I can imagine the psychological effects wouldn't have been nearly as pleasant.

I think this is perhaps one of the biggest divides between the people who say, "We're not morally judging; we're just saying that this is reality and that you have to find ways to make plans, enforce those plans, and have a proper support system to succeed," and those who think that the first category is simply morally condemning them. Like, no, I feel like most of us genuinely understand that there are strong psychological factors at play. There are strong psychological factors at play when people like, become alcoholics, too. Lots of people can tell stories of how this or that setback led them to the bottle spiral. I get that. But that it doesn't mean there isn't a path out. It doesn't mean that you have zero agency or ability to climb out of the spiral. Nor does it deny the real physiological damage of alcoholism/obesity or the physical effects that can contribute to the spiral. We just want people to succeed. We want them to win. We want them to learn and to overcome. We don't want them to believe the lie that they are totally and completely helpless in the face of some magical force that like, causes some bodies to consume 500cal/day, feel the physical/psychological effects of being in a deep cut, and yet still somehow gain weight. The more that people tell that lie, the more hopeless they will feel, and the worse the psychological spiral will be.

Thanks for sharing your experiences, I can relate to a lot of it. Speaking as an overweight but formerly obese person, I don't think that people in general really hate fat people that much. They hate the idea of themselves being fat, and may resent fat people for getting away with being fat when they wouldn't be able to live with themselves for being fat, but I think that generally people are as accepting of fat people as they are of dwarves or the mentally challenged or some exotic ethnic minority or whatever. Fat people probably hate ourselves more than the average person hates us.

I'll give the pushback while mostly agreeing. There are two sides to the fat people hate.

Yes, there is some latent contempt for fat people. But it didn't come from nowhere, and is not frequently directed at people who just happen to be fat. Nearly every conversation I've seen or heard of people trashing fat people has been in the context of delusional fat people making outlandish claims about how it's impossible to be healthy and the people trashing them nearly universally praise fat people who are recovering by working out and fixing their diet. And this makes sense because the loudest contingent of people who hate on fat people are former fat people where the pushback is against ideas that they see as having hurt them. They see the shame they are heaping on fat people as trying to instill in them the same mentality that got them out of the hole. And in a world without semiglutide, a world we've all had to live in for the majority of our lives, the experience of having your coping about how you're "big boned" or have a "slow metabolism" is bullshit and that there exists a clear, if difficult way out. And once you've found your way out and seen what that mentality was doing to you it can be infuriating to see other people transmit those memes.

Am I saying there is no limit to how much cruelty fat people should endure? Am I saying that it isn't harder for some people than others? No and no. But overcoming them was worth so much more than I can really express. It is simply true that it is much much worse to be fat.

You also had fucking cancer and still struggle with chronic pain; your fatness had rather more to do with bad luck than the median fat person's. Still: I appreciate your story. Respect.

The drug suppresses that "screaming" for more food, the constant hunger that is only reinforced by eating, not sated.

It's incredible how similar this sounds to my adhd meds, which also happen to be common eating disorder meds.

'The ability to quiet my screaming mind' is exactly how I would describe them. In my case, it is the constant urge to click on whichever interesting thing enters my peripheral vision or peripheral mind-space. I have also noticed something similar. Even when I am off my Adhd meds, I can now quiet my mind a little better than before.

I think if these work it will have a huge cultural impact, particularly in places in the Midwest or South where almost everyone is fat. Fat people don’t particularly like looking at or being with other fat people either. There are probably 50 million or more beautiful faces waiting to be liberated from their fatness. This could be one of the single biggest aesthetic improvements in modern history.

This could be one of the single biggest aesthetic improvements in modern history.

To each their own! We all have our preferences.

One of the best outcomes of feminism for me personally has been all the fat women in advertising and movies.

One of the benefits of Reddit was that I could tag people via RES. Facts like these make me want this feature here, right now.

I had to concatenate multiple tags into acronyms. You could use CCC for primaprimaprima - Confirmed chubby chaser

I had "average BBW enjoyer" in mind, but yours works too.

Fat? Or Thicc?

I mean it varies I guess. But in some instances, yes, fat.

Personal preferences aside, most men are going to prefer looking at women whose fertility potential is highest. Obese women are less fertile.

And my guess is that you are excluding women who carry weight in their abdomen from your preferences.

Similar to how many women say they like guys with a "dad bod" but are definitely not including guys with big man boobs, or a soft round butt, in their calculations.

And my guess is that you are excluding women who carry weight in their abdomen from your preferences.

I can most certainly assure you that I am not!

I'd be rather suspicious of possible side effects.

For this reason, my personal plan is to wait 5 years and then do a cost-benefit analysis.

My BMI is around 26 so I can afford to wait. And yeah, I could get down to 22 or whatever, but then I'd be hungry all the time.

My read of the literature is that a BMI around 26 does not add any meaningful risk and may well be protective in many cases. If you're active, I doubt you have anything to worry about at that weight. Decreasing your weight would be either a vanity or performance project, not a strictly health-based one.

Possibly. I think I remember hearing about a paper that said a BMI of 27 is ideal for lifespan. There were criticisms about confounders. Specifically, a sick person with cancer, or a heroin user or whatever is going to have a low BMI. I'd have to do more research. But when "surprising" scientific data with many confounders goes against common sense, it is nearly always common sense that wins out in the long run.

Mice certainly seem to live longer by eating fewer calories.

There would have to be some truly terrible side effects to be worse than the normal effects of obesity.

Fat people don’t particularly like looking at or being with other fat people either.

Surely you've heard of gay bears? We love each other. Yes we'd probably all rather be 250 pounds of muscle than fat but we'd still rather be 250 pounds of fat than 90 pounds of twink...

I wonder what Big Food is going to do. They've spent decades perfecting hyperpalatable foods you can binge on, and now Big Pharma is cutting them off by directly suppressing people's hunger. They are now in direct competition.

There are surprising synergies (I promise the word works in this context) in scenarios like these. You have to start with understanding what metric the consumer optimizes when there are no limitations.

Health and Palatability have always been counter to one another. When given a choice, people have chosen Palatability. So the consumer maximizes palatability until they reach a point where their health falls off a cliff (and sometimes they keep going even after that).

So far, the food industry has worked with this limitation. Create the most delicious food, but stay under a certain calorie limit. If you think that 2000 calorie Cheese-cake-factory pasta was the limit.....hoo boy are you in for a ride. If the new drugs allow us to move the needle on the point where health falls off the cliff, then we are not going to necessarily see healthier people. We might just see unhealthier (and even more palatable) foods while people more or less stay in the same weight bracket. Portion sizes might go down, but calorie counts might stay the same. People might start having Bubble tea / liquid calories with every meal.

When fundamental limitations of industries go away, we often see the culture change dramatically. Once that happens, older intuitions on what industries worked well together and which were in conflict do not work anymore.

What I AM worried about, is drug dependence. If your eating habits only work in a world where you regularly consume these drugs, then you'll never be able to cope without them. Even worse, if the world is built with the assumption that everyone consumes them, then it will be especially hard for a drug-avoider to sustain themselves in that culture.

You make the assumption that palatibility is infinite with more sweetness and more calories and sugars.

This is a ridiculous claim that needs accompanying sources.

The future of an America that requires weekly injections in order to stay healthy is basically "what's the cost to live an extra ten years?" Well, that cost is looking to be approximately 400$/month.

In my experience cooking (which is decent, but not noteworthily vast), adding extra salt, sugar, and fat is basically a cheat code for making tastier food. Not all tasty food is inherently unhealthy, but when you're eating at a restaurant and not watching them cook (and sometimes when you are, like on cooking shows), marginal extra butter probably improves critics' reviews.

There's a Laffer curve to it though. I love my salt, sugar, and fat, but you can only have so much of those things before it makes the food gross.

I would argue they are not making this claim at all. The world of food is vast, and the arms race of palatability has been applied unevenly.

If a 10oz lasagna previously eschewed butter soaked breadcrumbs for toppings and went light on the mozz, but should now be 6oz with all that added in, then the nutrient density of the food overall has dropped.

That being said, you raise a good point - I'm already disgusted by some of the more exotic foods out there that are terrible for you. There is an upper limit to what empty food people will eat, probably represented by a deep-fried stick of butter. There's a distinct correlation between calories and feeling full, so even if weight loss drugs are only acting on the latter, they'll still reduce how much trash people are eating.

If you assume that our sugar addiction is a palatibility problem and not a physical one, certainly.

With the onset and effectiveness of semaglutide, it's becoming clear that it is a physical problem.

If the new drugs allow us to move the needle on the point where health falls off the cliff, then we are not going to necessarily see healthier people. We might just see unhealthier (and even more palatable) foods while people more or less stay in the same weight bracket. Portion sizes might go down, but calorie counts might stay the same. People might start having Bubble tea / liquid calories with every meal.

Isn't the whole point of Ozempic and friends that it's not a magic calorie burner, but an appetite suppressant? The market for food will simply shrink.

  • snack manufacturers can start to directly compete with the new drugs by designing the most addictive snacks ever. Like, something so salty and sweet and fatty and umami that you just have to eat it even if you're going to skip lunch and dinner
  • or they can come up with new stuff that's doesn't really trigger satiation because it has no calories. Don't feel like drinking soda? Try some La Croix. The smell of bread no longer makes you hungrier? Have some dietary fiber puffs

Yeah this does seem like the inevitable future.

Honestly it was always felt absolutely absurd to me that people blamed individuals completely for their overweight status. Like yes, a portion of this is always going to come down to personal responsibility, but when the overweight proportion of America and the world so high, maybe there's something more going on.

There have always been poor people, there have always been low class people, there have always been those without personal responsibility and those who have terrible impulse control. But it's only in the recent decades that we've seen such a massive rise of country and international obesity levels. Is there somehow something so unique with modern Americans and modern humanity that we lack that simple impulse control as our ancestors did for millennia?

Maybe to some extent, but to this scale? Probably not.

I think it was always obvious the problem was that we are animals. Animals with genetics and a brain that was meant for a much different environment and world. Modern civilization is an artificial construct we've engaged for a blip in the time scale of our species. The problem was obviously the extremely easily available high calorie, extremely unnutritiousness foods found literally at every corner.

Do we blame the gambling addict completely if we transport them to Las Vegas and tell them to be smart? If they end up gambling, yes it's on them, but it's also partly on us for taking them to Las Vegas in the first place.

I feel like this reality was obvious to us at least by the mid 2000's. If you are a person who believes in sin taxes then we should have supported and pushed for the significant taxing of these foods and used that money to directly subsidize healthier food. If not for the betterment of the individuals in society, than for the fact that society has to face the huge costs of generations of obesity in things like ballooning healthcare costs, part of the contribution to the proliferation of incels, increased insurance liabilities, ect.

But since we successfully convinced everyone that fatness was a unique individual moral failing, jack in the box stays open and everyone and everything pays the huge negative externalities. On top of that we get another point of contention and divide between people in this country where everyone argues with each other and blames each other while those that profit off of this just walk around with the fortunes in their pockets.

Thankfully since that is politically untenable for multiple reasons, the pharma companies have come to the rescue and soon enough massive obesity will be a thing of the past.

I genuinely believe that obesity and the modern health crisis resulting from that have had a hand in a number of the biggest modern societal problems and I think on a much, much, much, much smaller scale we might notice in a decade or two where certain societal problems will have decreased and we might statistically be able to tie it to people no longer being as massively obese in the same way we tie lead in the paint with so many problems. Again, on a hugely smaller scale of course. Just trying to make the point that this is an issue that has an impact on a number of different issues and without it, a lot of affected things will change for the better.

I wonder why you and others seemingly have trust in a wonder drug, or a wonder cure. Don't we have ample evidence to the contrary? Morphine, heroin, methamphetamine, Prozac, Zoloft, OxyContin etc. - all of those have catastrophic effects on society. Any social ill that has come into full effect after decades, and is not caused by any drug, surely cannot be solved with another drug in short order.

What "catastrophic effects" have Prozac and Zoloft had on society?

The normalization of prescription drug use/overuse/abuse, and widespread addiction to anti-depressants.

I have no trust in a wonder drug. I simply have trust that this drug with all of its known and potential side affects will still be better than severe obesity is for most humans in this situation. I don't doubt there will be some more widely taught dangerous outcomes, especially if people end up using this long term even after they lose weight as a method to, "keep off" the weight, but again, if you've seen just how terrible obesity is for individuals and society as a whole, it might still end up being worth it.

And again, I still think if we sin taxed the extremely high calorie, nutritiously trash, banned advertising for fast food, ect and made them pay for the negative externalities of their businesses and subsidized healthy foods for humans, that would be a much better outcome. I just have little hope in that happening, so I expect this or future iterations of this drug to be the best we can hope for in the modern world.

I think really, we did have fat shaming in the past, at least among intimates. There was a culture of “not eating like a pig” of not getting seconds let alone thirds of your meal, and of not snacking all the time (or at least choosing better snacks). People in 1960 would definitely say something negative about you eating a quarter of a 16 inch pizza by yourself. They’d notice the kid dragging a 2L soda to class.

Some people have a problem, sure, I’ll agree. I’ll also agree that our food environment is more super stimulating than any other environment in the past. I don’t however think that humans are incapable of choice. In fact, I think the 21st century is one of abdication of responsibility for the choices made. We don’t push kids to study hard, or to achieve things. We don’t push people to be more resilient to stress. We don’t say or do anything about people falling into bad choices and in some cases addiction. I think we can improve the environment, and we should. I just don’t think that it’s only down to “environment” as humans have choices and make them all the time.

Well sure, but did I excuse personal responsibility completely?

I think it is understandable that when addicts for anything from alcohol, drugs, gambling, ect relapse, some of that is hugely on them for not being able to handle temptation and keep better self control. But I think we can all understand how it's much different for a person who's living in Las Vegas to fall back into gambling or someone living in LA to be more easily tempted with drugs than if that same person living in 1970's Salt Lake City.

In my experience a lot of handling self control and responsibility is understanding the importance of building the right environment around you.

In college I found out that I have a temptation to stress eat and when I gained 20 pounds over the course of a semester, I realized that having my kitchen stocked with easy to get snacks and food didn't help. I no longer bought snacks and so made it so that if I wanted to eat anything I would have to make a meal or at the least get up and walk to a store and buy something. I made it a chore and more of an inconvenience to eat food. That simple change made it so that I was back to my healthy skinny weight by the end of the following semester+summer. It worked because food was no longer a momentary snap decision made when I was studying and stressed. It had to be a deliberate action and decision which meant a number of times when I wanted to grasp for the comfort of food I couldn't.

Same thing happened when in the past few years I found myself so easily grabbing my phone anytime things were slow to read some random post, article or book on it. Most of it was meaningless drivel that just helped me pass the time, but wasn't adding to my life and was distracting me more than I liked. When I finally got around to addressing this so that when I wanted to work without distractions and the temptation for a short break I put my phone and it's charger on the other side of the apartment. That way it would require me to get up and walk over to check it. It would have to be a deliberate action which did a lot to cut down on my phone use. Though the biggest help was switching to an iphone se with it's tiny screen which made it a chore to use outside of actual necessity. I would have switched to a dumb phone, but just out of social and work obligation I needed a smartphone and the tiny screen has really helped in cutting down on idle phone use because it's so suboptimal.

Now you could say that yes anyone can do these types of things, but I want to emphasize that I think myself of fairly conscientious and put together and I found it quite hard. It wasn't impossible, but it wasn't easy and I'm not saying that I have the greatest cravings for food as well. I think it's completely understandable in a modern society where people are bombarded and stimulated with food ads everywhere, the cheapness of all of this food, the slight extra difficulty that healthy food has versus fast food, it is more than understandable why many cannot handle the difficulty of managing these things on top of the rigors of life. Especially for those living in higher stress lower income environments where they're worried about their next paycheck, having enough to pay for rent, utilities, and food in general. For those people, having the luxury to add on a new thing to stress and watch about might be much more difficult than my incident in college.

I also think you need to factor in support systems into this. When I was trying to lose the weight in the summer back at home, I mentioned to my mom that I wanted to eat healthier and she was more than happy to help me. Replacing less healthy meals with more chicken dinners and such and we cut out having high calorie processed food snacks in the house. My sister grumbled, but she was understanding.

If you have a supportive family structure, something that generally overlaps more with middle and higher classes, the importance of healthy living and being in shape is taken much more seriously. Requests like mine are things that are understood and taken more seriously. Overweight people are generally lower class and often their families are also overweight. If say one of them decides that they want to be healthier, that plan is severely hampered and made more difficult if the people around them who also are probably overweight are unwilling to also join them. It's not impossible, but you can understand that if their families are not on board, chances are that unhealthy high calorie snacks and foods will still dominate their kitchen making it that much more difficult for the person trying to lose weight. It's easier to stick to a diet if you aren't staring the face of bags of potato chips everytime you get up to get water.

One pound of fat is about 3500 calories. 3500 extra calories is pretty easy to gain over the course of few days for most. I'd argue most won't even notice it significantly if they ingest 800 extra calories a day a for week. That's literally two poptarts a day. Weight loss is a slow gradual process that can be achingly slow. Gaining 3500 calories can happen without notice, but losing 3500 calories? Being on constant calorie deficit can be extremely frustrating. The person must deny themselves the food needed to sate their hunger and force their body to burn that fat inside. You can do everything right for a week and be on pace to lose a pound then on Sunday you go out with friends to watch the game at a bar and a few beers and a couple slices of pizza could mean that you've just ingested 2000 calories and much of the progress you made over that entire week is gone.

I say all of that to simply say that yes, it's doable. Millions of people workout and diet to lose weight and it works. It's a struggle, but it works both historically and the modern day. I did it, you might have at some point, many do it after the holiday season every year and it works out decently well for them.

My point is that I think the idea that the modern day is filled with people who are uniquely bad with self control and temptation out of a individual failing is a lie. Maybe we're worse than people were 80 years ago, but I think you take many of those people from 80 years ago and make them grow up in the modern day, most would struggle similarly. In the past extreme weight gain and obesity was probably more of a personal failing because of yes the environment that might shame them around them, but also just what they could eat to get fat. Advertising and yes human behavior has normalized the huge portions that would be unthinkable previously. The food itself has changed, oatmeal isn't terribly appetizing but honey nut cheerios is.

When the scale is as big as it is in the modern day I'm much more likely to see this as a industrial scaled problem where more of the blame should be on society than individuals. Some of these are people who might have fallen into this behavior, but most are probably people in previous eras would have had an extra piece of pie but would at worse just have slightly chubbier cheeks. I put the blame more on society for fostering a terrible environment where those on the edge to be led astray.

In my opinion obesity is a bigger health crisis than smoking ever was and we should implement the same kind of sin taxes on corporations that push these things. Society pays for obesity through healthcare, mental problems, lower productivity, less polite world, exacerbating class divides, insurance expenses, and a whole lot more. There are so many negative externalities and we should at the least ban advertising for fast food and unhealthy foods like poptarts, ect the same way we banned advertisements for smoking. If people want it then they can get it, but there is great benefit from keeping their messaging from barraging a population that does not need that temptation in front of them constantly. Society would be better for it.

Purchasing power parity is the measurement commonly used in order to compare how much a certain amount of money can buy in a country. I believe there needs to be an additional factor, the technological cost compenesation. For example Americans spend far more money on health care than Turks yet live roughly as long. This is only in part because health care is more expensive. An equally important factor is that it requires a lot more effort to keep an obese person who drives everywhere alive.

Commuting is a similar cost. Urban sprawl is expensive and vast quantaties of money are spent moving people between beds and desks. Having worked with people from the developing world I am fascinated at their relatively affluent life styles despite low salaries and the fact that prices aren't that much lower. They just don't spend tonnes of money on gym cards, commuting, diabetes meds, child care and other expenses that most of humanity never new they needed.

The most extreme examples proposed would be carbon capture from the atmosphere. Partitioning the air to get more than a kg of CO2 out of the atmosphere for each liter of gas burned would cost a fortune. The effort to burn the fossil fuels would be lesser than the effort to reverse the process.

GDP per capita should be measured at (purchasing power parity) * (percentage of money spent not combating progress induced costs)

I’m pretty sure that most people in say, Mexico or China prefer to use cars over walking when they can. It’s just that many can’t afford to.

I mean you can create a metric of ‘is it possible to be poor in this country’, but realistically Mexicans and Chinamen who can afford cars strongly prefer them. It’s not as if there are large numbers of people in these countries who live otherwise affluent lifestyles except for not having cars or whatever; it’s the poor that don’t have cars there.

I mean you can create a metric of ‘is it possible to be poor in this country’, but realistically Mexicans and Chinamen who can afford cars strongly prefer them. It’s not as if there are large numbers of people in these countries who live otherwise affluent lifestyles except for not having cars or whatever; it’s the poor that don’t have cars there.

True of Mexico and China specifically, but not of actually-first-world Asia (mostly Japan, South Korea, Taiwan), where middle class people living in cities without a car (or more commonly with one car shared between multiple employed adults such that most trips are not by private car) is even more normal than it is in Europe.

I mean he did specify the developing world, and that’s why I picked two random large middle income countries. Obviously Taiwanese and Dutch people drive less because they choose to, but his comment seemed much more geared to China and Latin America.

This is an interesting point, although I haven't seen too many people abroad living like kings on low salaries.

Another giant cost that you don't mention is cars and housing. Owning a vehicle is usually the second most expensive thing for a household in the U.S., after housing. Housing in the U.S. is artificially driven up in cost by all sorts of things.

Plus, people are just far less willing to live with roomates/family in the Western world if they have the means. I haven't seen stats but I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of folks in the developing world live with at least two other people.

The other options were unpopular, to say the least, so it was certainly inevitable we would end up in this position.

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:

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.

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:

Robinson: You don't believe that Thomas Jefferson was a racist?

Rufo: It's not true. It's such a lazy reduction.

Robinson: Do you want me to quote him? [...]

Rufo: So I think to go back and say, "Oh, they're all racist." It's just so lazy.

Robinson: But it's true. It's not lazy, it's just a fact. [...] Again, it seems a way to not acknowledge that the country was founded by people who held Black people in chains and thought they were inferior.

Rufo: I acknowledge that. That's a fact. That's a historical fact. I don't see how anyone would deny that. [...] But to say that they are racist is a different claim because you're taking an ideological term and then back imposing it on them to discredit their work advancing equality. And so I think that I reject it in a linguistic frame, while acknowledging the factual basis that there was slavery.

Robinson: "The blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind." That's Jefferson. Is that not racist?

Rufo: I disagree with that statement. I don't know what you want me to say.

Robinson: I want you to say it's racist.

Rufo: Saying "oh, we're going to cherry pick one sentence."

Robinson: I want you to tell the truth. I want you to tell the truth about this man.

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:

Seamus: You believe that the moment the child is outside of the birth canal, that they are now endowed with human rights.

Lance: Yes.

Seamus: However, when they are inside of the mother, literally anything you do to them is acceptable because they're inside of the mother.

Lance: Oh no, I don't think anything's acceptable, but I think the mother should still have the choice — ultimate authority over what happens to her body. [crosstalk]

Tim: Wait wait wait hold on hold on. What about meth?

Lance: Like she should be allowed to do meth? I think if someone is doing meth while they're pregnant, that it is completely acceptable for [child protective services to get involved].

Tim: Woah but that's her body though.

Lance: Yeah it's her body.

Tim: She wants to do meth, what's the big deal?

Lance: The big deal is that she's intentionally trying to kill a child. [flashes of cosmic realization]

Tim: Hold on there a minute.

Lance: Yeah. And I see where we're going.

Tim: I don't- I don't understand what you're saying. It's her body. If she wants to do meth, what's the problem?

Lance: [pregnant pause] Well first off doing meth is illegal period. Doesn't matter if you're doing it with a child or without a child.

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:

This is what somebody will do, they'll say "I don't like cheeseburgers, because they have meat, the buns look orange, and because they go in my mouth." Then I'll say what if the bun was blue? And they'll go like "I still wouldn't like it." Ok what if the bun was blue and you ate them with your hands? "I still wouldn't like that." Ok what if the bun was blue, you ate them with your hands, and it didn't have meat or whatever? and "I still wouldn't like that." Ok then why the fuck would you tell me all these reasons why you don't like it when none of them are actually important to why you don't like it?

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:

Destiny: I understand that women are particularly vulnerable during sex, that's probably true. How do you feel about male prostitutes then? Do you think that it would be ethical for men to do sex work?

Murphy: Um, what I don't think is ethical is again for a man to pay a woman or a man for sex.

[crosstalk & sidetracking]

Destiny: So I'm going to ask again: is it unethical to pay men for sex? If a male wants to do pornography or if a male wants to sell his body for sex? Is that unethical?

Murphy: Yeah, I think it's unethical to pay anyone for sex.

Destiny: Okay. Then the vulnerability and the penetration part don't matter then. I don't know why you bring that up if a guy can't even sell his body for sex then—

Murphy: Well he's being penetrated also, no?

Destiny: But what if it's a male prostitute that has women but not with a strap-on?

Murphy: Oh I mean that's a real common thing eh? How many women do know who have ever paid for sex with a male prostitute? I mean, I think that's unethical too.

Destiny: Ok! That's what I'm getting at! I'm just trying to figure out why you think it's unethical!

[more crosstalk & yelling]

Murphy: Every time I start explaining my arguments you interrupt me and act completely exasperated because I'm not saying what you want me to say. You want to frame the conversation in a way that I am not interested in framing the conversation. Like the way that I want to talk about this is not how you want to talk about it and you can't accept that. The way I'm looking at this is not the way that you're looking at it but you don't really want to hear how I'm looking at it. You want to have the conversation you want to have so there's not really any point to this. You don't want to learn anything you don't want to hear, so you are just annoyed that I'm saying something you don't want me to say.

[more crosstalk & yelling]

Destiny: I'm not showing off to anybody! I'm just trying to have a conversation, I don't even know why you're against sex work! That's what I'm trying to figure out right now.

Murphy: I appreciate the big show that you're having but I don't want to continue this if you're going to keep interrupting me.

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.

Robinson: You don't believe that Thomas Jefferson was a racist?

Rufo: It's not true. It's such a lazy reduction.

Robinson: Do you want me to quote him? [...]

Rufo: So I think to go back and say, "Oh, they're all racist." It's just so lazy.

Robinson: But it's true. It's not lazy, it's just a fact. [...] Again, it seems a way to not acknowledge that the country was founded by people who held Black people in chains and thought they were inferior.

Rufo: I acknowledge that. That's a fact. That's a historical fact. I don't see how anyone would deny that. [...] But to say that they are racist is a different claim because you're taking an ideological term and then back imposing it on them to discredit their work advancing equality. And so I think that I reject it in a linguistic frame, while acknowledging the factual basis that there was slavery.

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.

I agree this makes it obvious that Rufo is refusing to abandon something indefensible because retreating is how battles are lost. I agree it's good to point this out when it happens. At the same Rufo is being quite honest that their actual disagreement is whether Thomas Jefferson should be viewed as a shitty person, so this really doesn't seem like a case of "thinking on your feet exposes the problem with your beliefs/honesty/etc." -- Rufo seems more than willing to be honest.

Robinson's insistence on only having that argument after establishing linguistically favorable footing makes Robinson seem unreasonable here. What's wrong with arguing whether a man who owned slaves and helped found America was a good person without having to use one of the most mind-killing words in all of discourse?

Might as well go around insisting that Republicans admit Hitler was "right leaning" before beginning any debate. "It's just a fact" right?

What's wrong with arguing whether a man who owned slaves and helped found America was a good person without having to use one of the most mind-killing words in all of discourse?

"What's wrong" is that it would be very difficult and awkward in an interview to describe Jefferson in a way that didn't just make people reading go "oh, you're trying to say he's a racist." By any reasonable definition we have, we could consign Jefferson to the category. But Robinson may just genuinely not get that Rufo would never admit it because "Rufo admits CRT was right" is the kind of headline people would unironically parrot forever when discussing him.

Why Robinson decided to interview Rufo is beyond me, it should have been obvious that as "new" as the arguments might be, the incentives for a persona are entirely different from that of a person.

Rufo literally admitted to the fact. He's just not willing to capitulate on the word, for the exact same reason Democrats don't want to call the estate tax the "death tax" despite it being factually triggered by a death -- because everyone agrees on what the estate tax is and calling it a different name changes nothing about the actual substance of the disagreement. Refusing to use your opponent's loaded terminology has nothing to do with being dishonest.

The problem is that even in an entirely good-faith argument, I don't know how you could come away thinking Jefferson isn't a racist by our standards. Such an argument might also give consider what describes a person when one thinks of them generally - should you think Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father or Thomas Jefferson, racist Founding Father? Or if we have to acknowledge this bigotry in every instance.

This is why I was saying the personas mattered. Rufo's status hinges on him rejecting the philosophy of the social progressives and other radical leftists he identifies, he has every incentive to not give them an optics win. Approach Rufo in a bar with no other people and make the same argument, he'd be far more amenable to it, I suspect.

The proper conclusion is "Jefferson was a racist, but not all racism is as bad as you think it is". But "racism isn't as bad as you think it is" is a taboo position, regardless of its truth. Robinson knows this, which is why he built the questioning around racism in the first place, and which makes it fundamentally dishonest.

Rufo himself declared CRT to be wrong on everything. Robinson was challenging him precisely on the question of what they had gotten wrong when they described the Founding Fathers as racist. How is Robinson supposed to engage with Rufo on the validity of his claims about CRT if not by challenging something as basic as this?

Only a certain kind of literalist on the Internet thinks being wrong "about everything" means literally every single thing, rather than being wrong about major implications in typical cases.

"They are literally right that Jefferson is racist, but they are wrong in what this implies about how we should treat Jefferson" is, by normie standards, being wrong about Jefferson.

"The Founding Fathers were racist" is not a trivial statement in this case. It is very much an important idea that both sides grapple with in their critiques and rebuttals of said critiques. I don't know how you can say that this is a case of "Internet literalism" when it's a crucial point in the CRT edifice. Hell, this is literally one of the basis facts of the 1619 project. Rufo would 100% deliberately trash this because it constitutes a major attack on his stance.

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Yes.

The proper lesson to learn is not to share a society with people who play these sorts of games. Conversations that start with the other side possessing absolute control over the terms aren't worth having, and Blues have demonstrated an abundant variety of methods for how to terminate conversations one considers unproductive.

Why Robinson decided to interview Rufo is beyond me

Cause if you don't Rufo will go around insisting that the Left isn't willing to have a discussion.

I don't see anything in the Current Affairs article saying that Rufo approached Robinson.

That's usually not how it works: I doubt most people are salivating to debate Nathan Robinson in particular. But they will attack the Left, claiming it doesn't discuss things anymore and where have the good liberal leftists gone and so on. This is an old game played by right-wingers and is especially good after some form of college illiberalism is thrown their way (e.g. Shapiro, Milo).

I just heard him on Hanania and he basically said as much: the Left doesn't really do debate anymore so the goal is to make it so uncomfortable that they have to.

Rufo was an impossible position. He was being asked to defend "a racist can still be a good person", which is true but against the current religion.

It's like 500 years ago, when church people were debating what to do about the ancient Greeks and Romans. The ancients were clearly atheist or pagan. Obviously this meant their works were evil and must be banned. Therefore, much like Rufo, people employed mental gymnastics to give the ancients a pass based on "different standards of the time". Dante placed them in the first circle of hell (the least bad one) along with unbaptised babies.

Rufo is smart enough not to say the blasphemous words. Better inconsistent than deplorable.

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I'm trying to see where we disagree here. Perhaps I phrased it poorly. Yes, Christians and Rufo are the on the same side here. In both cases, they are deflecting.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the position of the Christians was that Aristotle was a virtuous person, therefore had he been exposed to Jesus's teachings, he would have been a Christian. It's not his fault he was born too early. "See he's not really an atheist, he's a Christian just waiting to get out". But no, Aristotle was not a proto-Christian.

Likewise, Rufo is trying for the line of "Jefferson's wasn't really a racist". But no, he really was a racist, and that doesn't make him evil.

Robinson's insistence on only having that argument after establishing linguistically favorable footing makes Robinson seem unreasonable here. What's wrong with arguing whether a man who owned slaves and helped found America was a good person without having to use one of the most mind-killing words in all of discourse?

The reason they even got into this argument in the first place was prompted by this question from Robinson:

One of the things that struck me about your book is that you spent a lot of time talking about these radical theorists: here's who they are, here is the influence they've had. And then you say we need a counter-revolution. But I would have liked to see more evidence that they were wrong. Because a lot of the times when you cite something that you say is some crazy critical race theory thing, I find my reaction to be "Well, sounds like they kind of have a point." For example, you say the National Credit Union Administration told the employees America was "founded on white supremacy"; "Critical race theorists argue that America was founded on racism, slavery, white supremacy"; or Derrick Bell "attacked Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as racist hypocrites." But they were. It was founded on racism. They were racist hypocrites.

I didn't point this out but it adds another explanation for why Rufo is so motivated to avoid conceding the "Jefferson was a racist" position, because then it would necessarily follow that "maybe some CRT advocates might have a point". Now, normally this shouldn't be such a cataclysmic event but it is for Rufo because he's an activist who has seen a significant rise in his national profile precisely from speaking in absolutes like this. He can't deploy nuance and so it has to be all-out total war and CRT advocates are not just wrong, but wrong about everything.

Perception is everything in the year of 2023, Rufo conceding is the point.

I agree on your main point but I don’t agree with your characterization of Rufo’s argument. Rufo is trying to elevate the conversation to a deeper level of substance, and Robinson refuses to break from the realm of connotation. Being a racist is bad because being a racist is immoral, and Rufo is disputing the immorality of the founding fathers by reminding Robinson that the consensus at the time of Jefferson was that Blacks were inferior. We judge people morally based on whether they did morally better than expected in their conditions or milieu. We shouldn’t, for instance, declare MLK Jr evil on the whole just because he was a supporter of conversion therapy. If we held to a milieu-controlled standard we would have to declare that there is no moral man left, because we all fall short of perfection. How bad is it that we buy vanity products from companies that abuse workers? Or that we pollute the earth? Why would future generations find this forgivable, rather than the purchasing of already-enslaved people from an undeveloped part of the world during a time period where slavery was normalized and historically ubiquitous?

So I don’t think Rufo let anything slip. He explained his position not badly for the time allotted. Robinson is using lawyerly tricks to make Rufo look suspect to the ears of an untrained audience by refusing to charitably entertain Rufo’s nuance. And also, Rufo doesn’t believe that immorality (true racism) should never be cancellable. Rufo believes that the standard of cancellation is too low. It’s not as if Rufo is trying to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler or Mosley or someone who was genuinely more racist than their time period without ever having produced some balancing commensurate good to society. Good examples of what I mean by the latter are John Lennon (wife beater), Wagner, and Kanye West. We don’t cancel them because their good on the whole far outweighs their bad on the whole. I think this is genuinely how people see moral judgment in practice, rather than a less nuanced rules-based morality.

Re: prostitution, perhaps a general rule is that it’s much more difficult to argue against someone who has committed themselves to a general rule. Destiny can say “women should do what they want with their bodies if not harming others”, and then the opponent has to scour through psychological sciences and moral philosophy and the anecdota of history to adequately present the view that prostitution is bad for the sum good of society. Consider how much harder it is to argue against gambling than for it. To argue against gambling you have to have an understanding of addiction, genetic proclivities to addiction, the data on who gambles, and the adaptability of human happiness. To argue for gambling you just say “people should be allowed to do what they want unless harming someone”.

Being a racist is bad because being a racist is immoral, and Rufo is disputing the immorality of the founding fathers by reminding Robinson that the consensus at the time of Jefferson was that Blacks were inferior.

Whether that was the point that Robinson was intending to make eventually, I don't know. But the premise for why they got into this topic was fairly limited based on Robinson's first question:

One of the things that struck me about your book is that you spent a lot of time talking about these radical theorists: here's who they are, here is the influence they've had. And then you say we need a counter-revolution. But I would have liked to see more evidence that they were wrong. Because a lot of the times when you cite something that you say is some crazy critical race theory thing, I find my reaction to be "Well, sounds like they kind of have a point." For example, you say the National Credit Union Administration told the employees America was "founded on white supremacy"; "Critical race theorists argue that America was founded on racism, slavery, white supremacy"; or Derrick Bell "attacked Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as racist hypocrites." But they were. It was founded on racism. They were racist hypocrites.

To repeat another comment I just made: I didn't point this out but it adds another explanation for why Rufo is so motivated to avoid conceding the "Jefferson was a racist" position, because then it would necessarily follow that "maybe some CRT advocates might have a point". Now, normally this shouldn't be such a cataclysmic event but it is for Rufo because he's an activist who has seen a significant rise in his national profile precisely from speaking in absolutes like this. He can't deploy nuance and so it has to be all-out total war and CRT advocates are not just wrong, but wrong about everything.

To repeat another comment I just made: I didn't point this out but it adds another explanation for why Rufo is so motivated to avoid conceding the "Jefferson was a racist" position, because then it would necessarily follow that "maybe some CRT advocates might have a point". Now, normally this shouldn't be such a cataclysmic event but it is for Rufo because he's an activist who has seen a significant rise in his national profile precisely from speaking in absolutes like this. He can't deploy nuance and so it has to be all-out total war and CRT advocates are not just wrong, but wrong about everything.

I mean, it seems obvious to me that you are simply correct here. The founding fathers were by and large racists. America was in fact founded on something reasonably described as white supremacy. The CRT people, speaking strictly about those historical facts, have a point. Rufo won't admit that fact because it badly undermines his position.

What, in your view, is Rufo's position, strictly speaking?

I note that a lot of people here seem very reluctant to draw the above conclusions. Why do you suppose that is?

America was in fact founded on something reasonably described as white supremacy.

That's the error. Even if the founding fathers were white supremacists, they were much more other things, and those other things were what the country was founded on. To say "America was founded on white supremacy" is to imply that its foundation is composed mostly of white supremacist ideals.

Even if the founding fathers were white supremacists, they were much more other things, and those other things were what the country was founded on.

This must be that nuance @ymeskhout was talking about. You try and sell that line to the public, tell me how it goes.

That's the error.

I disagree.

There's a socio-political token "racism", and there's a socio-political token "Thomas Jefferson", and the idea the Blues are positing is that there's better common ground available burning the "Thomas Jefferson" token and coordinating our cooperation around the "racism" token. The idea you're positing is that you can keep them from burning the "Thomas Jefferson" token by pointing out what an absolutely terrible idea it is. But the Scorpion's response is going to be "lol, LMAO", and at this point you really should know that and have planned accordingly.

The error is acting as though there's a conversation worth having with Blues about "racism" at all, that this is some sort of misunderstanding and a little more nuance (man, I love this word!) will sort it out. Thomas Jefferson was a racist and a slaveowner; why deny it? Because you value the Constitution? Because you think there's a nation here with a rich history that might be a little tarnished, but it's still worth saving? Sure. Sure! If you still believe that, you go give it your very best try. Rufo is, certainly, which is why he's embarrassing himself on camera, trying to deny obvious historical truths in a vain attempt to defend the foundations of liberal ideology, because he knows the nuance you're pitching, no matter how truthful, is as good as slitting his own throat. His answer looks kinda not-great to people who watch the video and can follow the arguments, which is essentially no one. Your way, that clip would be the most famous thing he ever said, permanently.

From a strategic perspective, sure, but as far as the actual truth goes, America wasn't founded on white supremacy any more than it was founded on bloodletting. From a strategic perspective, in a debate you just go for the most slimy manipulative deceitful things you can say that will get your opponent into an inconvenient bind. I responded to your object level statement:

The CRT people, speaking strictly about those historical facts, have a point. Rufo won't admit that fact because it badly undermines his position.

with my own object-level statement, which is that they actually don't have a point.

but as far as the actual truth goes, America wasn't founded on white supremacy any more than it was founded on bloodletting.

At the founding, America's legal, social and political systems allowed black people to be owned as property, and the first immigration act specifically discriminated in favor of white people. Several of the founding fathers owned slaves; most of them appeared to hold views on race that would certainly mark them as central examples of white supremacists in our own time.

How is a group of white supremacists intentionally building a new legal system that enshrines white supremacy into law not "founded on white supremacy"?

You can say they were "much more other things". Much more how? It seems to me that this is a statement of subjective value, and there is no obvious reason to expect others to share it. A murderer likely spends a very small percentage of his time killing people, and yet we find that small percentage of killing the most salient aspect of his character. It does not seem obviously unreasonable to take the same approach with slavers.

To say accurately what the US was founded on, we should look at what the system was like before independence was declared and why they declared independence and fought a war against the most powerful army of the time for it.

The founders wrote the Declaration of Independence to proclaim their reasons for claiming it. It's published, you can go read it here. You'll see that it says nothing at all about slavery or race - it's all about civil rights, taxes, and various details about how the government works. Those were their beefs with the British system, not anything about slavery or race.

Indeed, it would be pretty weird for anything like that to be in there, considering that slavery and racism were near-universally approved of in those days. The British certainly had no problem with it at the time, and neither did any of the other colonizing powers. A claim that America was "founded on white supremacy" would only be accurate if the primary reason for declaring independence was that the British demanded that they tolerate colored people and they were sufficiently opposed to that to make war based upon it.

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Absent further information my best guess is that it's the defensive version of Arguments As Soldiers. The concern is that a concession on any ground, no matter how trivial, will threaten to collapse the entire front. Assuming I'm describing the dynamics here accurately, I find the fear very puzzling because it's so easily remedied by just a tiny bit of nuance. I also have to admit I start suspecting insecurity at play here regarding how strong one's convictions are, with the coping mechanism being latching onto as many arguments as possible (no matter how bad some might be).

Absent further information my best guess is that it's the defensive version of Arguments As Soldiers. The concern is that a concession on any ground, no matter how trivial, will threaten to collapse the entire front.

So what would a more nuanced reply look like? More importantly from a socio-political perspective, what would you expect the response from Robinson and the Blue public at large to such a nuanced reply to be?

I mean, the assumption you're working from here seems to be that Ruso is a radical who's painted himself into a corner by refusing to concede any ground, no matter how small. It seems obvious to me that you're correct about him painting himself into a corner, but the part I think you miss is that he's not a radical, and in fact he is doing his very best to keep the peace, including by standing up for obvious lies.

There's a socio-political token "racism", and there's a socio-political token "Thomas Jefferson", and it seems to me that the idea the 1619 people are offering, and Robinson is endorsing, is that we'll reach common ground and a path forward by burning the "Thomas Jefferson" token and coordinating around the "racism" token, which they coincidentally maintain absolute, unquestionable control over and have abused daily for longer than any of us have been alive. You seem to be positing that we don't have to burn it, maybe just singe it a bit, and to your credit there's a lot of people in this thread laying out "nuanced" takes. One notes that they're offering them here, in a pseudonymous backwater of the internet that's been successively purged from like five other places by the very forces their nuance presumes won't object to claims that maybe White Supremacy isn't actually the worst thing ever.

The thing I don't think you appreciate is that Ruso is a moderate. What he's lying for is conciliation and peace. When the "Thomas Jefferson" token burns, which it absolutely will sooner or later, cooperation isn't going to reorganize around the "racism" token. Cooperation isn't going to happen at all. There is no future where we finally beat Racism and the scores come up and the crime rates normalize, not under anything remotely resembling current conditions and assumptions, and I think if you are honest with yourself, you probably know that. You should know that those unpleasant realities are not the fault of people like me, and that people like me are done being used as a scapegoat for them. Consequently, the racial animosities Robinson and the 1619 people are stirring up are here to stay for at least another generation, and the plan with the highest likelihood of dealing productively with that fact is probably Ruso's. The alternatives all appear to be various routes to, in the parlance of the community, coordinated meanness. Or at least it seems so to me. Maybe your view is different.

I'm comfortable conceding that Jefferson was a racist white supremacist straight-up because I don't give a shit about Jefferson. I don't value him or the Constitution he wrote or the nation he founded, the corpse of which I'm unhappily stuck in. I'm happy to embrace honesty and watch the counterfeit common-ground burn, because nothing I value is founded on it. I'm not counting on Ruso's plan to win, because I already assume that the moderate solutions are dead-ends. But you give the impression that you believe that the common ground is going to keep being there in the future, and I find that odd.

More importantly from a socio-political perspective, what would you expect the response from Robinson and the Blue public at large to such a nuanced reply to be?

No doubt very similar to the fanfare and adoration the 1619 project received when it ran with a similar premise. There won't be a shortage of dramatic headlines from bad faith actors crowing over how Rufo Admits CRT is RIGHT! I don't deny that.

In the rest of your post, you're making what is essentially a game theory argument for why the defect strategy is justified both morally and strategically. I concede your explanation for why Rufo is lying to be valid and an important point to keep in mind, and it would be inappropriate for me to respond to that with a deontological appeal to honesty. Instead, though I'm not sure what goal Rufo is really pursuing but in the process I assume he's alienating plenty of fence-sitters with this obstinate strategy of refusing to concede banal truths.

The closest parallel I can think of is probably the trans discourse which seems to me to have gone through an obvious vibe shift this year where criticism from non-conservative voices has gotten much less hesitant. I gather at least some of it was probably the result of people tired of having been lied to about obvious topics for so long.

[btw I'm not sure what you mean about Rufo being a radical vs moderate, those terms don't really mean anything to me.]

No doubt very similar to the fanfare and adoration the 1619 project received when it ran with a similar premise. There won't be a shortage of dramatic headlines from bad faith actors crowing over how Rufo Admits CRT is RIGHT! I don't deny that.

Well, that doesn't sound so bad. Who cares about headlines? If that's what's at stake, why do people care so much?

...To speak more plainly, yes, that does seem like the likely immediate outcome. The long-term outcome that seems more relevant is that the CRT wins this argument, and we move significantly further from the happy futures.

In the rest of your post, you're making what is essentially a game theory argument for why the defect strategy is justified both morally and strategically.

Say rather I'm pointing out the incentives that currently exist. Specifically, I'm pointing out that moderate positions don't appear to be able to survive in the wild without deception, both of oneself and of others, while honesty leads to the embrace of extremism. I'm not endorsing lying, and in fact I argue that honesty is likely better for everyone involved. I do think it helps to understand why they think the lies are necessary, though.

There was a really good article I read here once talking about what amounted to a truce on race in the 90s-2000s, where white people tacitly agreed that racism was Very Bad, and black people tacitly agreed to stop constantly making accusations of racism, and the idea was that we'd try to fix the problems rather than arguing over who's fault they were. Only, it didn't actually work, because the problems didn't get fixed. Policy Starvation kicked in, and here we are.

btw I'm not sure what you mean about Rufo being a radical vs moderate, those terms don't really mean anything to me.

Imagine the throttle lever of some vast steam-powered ship, a three-foot steel bar mounted to the floor. Push it forward, the ship speeds up, pull it back, the ship stops. Moderates are the people arguing over whether the best results will be secured by pushing the lever forward or back, or by how much. Extremists are the people who think the best results will come from ripping the lever off its mounting and wielding it as a club. System as a tool for mutual benefit, versus system as a weapon for mutual combat, no?

Rufo and Robinson are both moderates; they are trying to use the rules-as-written to secure what they consider to be positive, stable outcomes for everyone. They're trying to maintain something that at least roughly resembles what's commonly understood to be the status quo. The reason that last sentence is stacked with so many qualifiers, of course, is because that our common understanding of the status quo is mostly built on lies exactly like the ones you're chiding in your original post. The system (both the academic/educational system they're fighting over here, and our society more generally) runs on selective falsehood. Operating within its constraints consists of selecting which lies one will call out and which one will ignore, and especially on not breaching the very important lies all the serious, responsible people have collectively agreed to never, ever talk about.

Being moderates, both of them are liars: Rufo is lying about the past, claiming that Jefferson wasn't a white supremacist, and Robinson is lying about the present, claiming that Jefferson's white supremacy is at all relevant to the current situation. I'd argue that the significant difference is that Rufo's lie, if carried off, moves us away from serious conflict, while Robinson's lie moves us toward it, but I don't expect that argument to be persuasive to anyone on the other side; of course I'm going to argue that the lie that puts the burden on the other side is "better", while they're going to argue that the lie that puts the burden on my side is better; that's how people are. Of course I think I'm right and they're wrong; doesn't everyone? Charity doesn't solve the problem; it reveals the fact that there is no solution, at least in the general case. Hence blossoming extremism of various flavors, as we realize that compromise is not essential or often even possible, and so become more accepting of its absence. Or alternatively, as we grow disillusioned with the known lies of moderation, and turn to the untested claims of extremists.

I concede your explanation for why Rufo is lying to be valid and an important point to keep in mind, and it would be inappropriate for me to respond to that with a deontological appeal to honesty.

Not so! Just insist that Robinson be honest as well, and recognize that selective honesty is not honesty. Or do you think that it is acceptably honest to start the conversation at "Was Jefferson a White Supremacist?", as though this were an isolated trivia question?

Instead, though I'm not sure what goal Rufo is really pursuing but in the process I assume he's alienating plenty of fence-sitters with this obstinate strategy of refusing to concede banal truths.

Well, take a look at the responses here; the moderate voices are the ones defending Ruso's equivocation, aren't they? "The Truth, at any cost" is not a moderate, fence-sitter ideal; they don't want large-scale upheaval, and most of them would like to bypass the whole question. It seems to me that Ruso's approach is more likely to get them there, were it to work. They could go back to talking about how Racism Is Very Wrong And We Must Fight Against It, and also about how Jefferson was a Great Man Who Founded Our Nation. What could be more moderate and fence-sitting than that?

In any case, how do you differentiate between Ruso losing the uncommitted by being a jerk, versus losing them because he's simply been shouted down? The argument you're making seems to be that nuance would have improved Ruso's actual position, helped him achieve his goals more easily. The space Ruso is operating in is quite large, and there's a lot of people in it. Can you point to some doing a better job that Ruso at what appear to be Ruso's goals? If Ruso is Trump, all sound and fury even at the compromise of the core mission, who's De Santis?

Say rather I'm pointing out the incentives that currently exist. Specifically, I'm pointing out that moderate positions don't appear to be able to survive in the wild without deception, both of oneself and of others, while honesty leads to the embrace of extremism. I'm not endorsing lying, and in fact I argue that honesty is likely better for everyone involved. I do think it helps to understand why they think the lies are necessary, though.

This post explains, with impeccable clarity, a dynamic that is prevalent but elusive to describe. I guess you could group it under the penumbra of kayfabe. I admit that it's a bit naive and colloquially autistic for me to plow through with a whole "akshually, logic" analysis without better acknowledging how much the treaty theatrics are pulling some of the incentives levers out of frame.

Not so! Just insist that Robinson be honest as well, and recognize that selective honesty is not honesty. Or do you think that it is acceptably honest to start the conversation at "Was Jefferson a White Supremacist?", as though this were an isolated trivia question?

What did I say that would make you think I would be in favor of selective honesty? Of course I want him to be honest too. That said, I don't think you're characterizing this exchange fairly. First, that's not how Robinson started the exchange as I already pointed out, it started when Robinson explicitly asked about Rufo's CRT criticism. But assuming Robinson did indeed start the conversation with "Was Jefferson a White Supremacist?" whether or not it would be considered honest would depend on some context. If it was a panel discussion on "The Legacy of the Founding Fathers" then I think it's perfectly fair, if it was in the context of "Is The United States a Force For Good" then I would find it extremely slimy.

In any case, how do you differentiate between Ruso losing the uncommitted by being a jerk, versus losing them because he's simply been shouted down? The argument you're making seems to be that nuance would have improved Ruso's actual position, helped him achieve his goals more easily. The space Ruso is operating in is quite large, and there's a lot of people in it. Can you point to some doing a better job that Ruso at what appear to be Ruso's goals? If Ruso is Trump, all sound and fury even at the compromise of the core mission, who's De Santis?

This is mostly an empirical question, and I admit I don't have enough evidence to adjudicate. The other high-profile individual operating within the vague "wokeness has gone too far" that could be a contrast is probably Jonathan Haidt, but that answer probably just shows how ignorant I am about this question. A lot of my response would be necessarily leaning upon (potentially delusional) optimism of wanting the 'good guys' to win (read: the honest ones, regardless of partisanship). Rufo is slightly more famous than I am, and fame is a necessary condition for any activist hoping to leave an impact so he's already way ahead and much better positioned to evaluate his decisions. There could be something similar to how the candidates that can win the general are the least likely to win the primary, but that's going to boil down to an empirical question I'm not equipped to handle.

We judge people morally based on whether they did morally better than expected in their conditions or milieu.

Can you clarify what you mean by "conditions"? Are we going down the route of "morality is just what you can afford"?

To a degree, yeah — wealth makes moral choices easier by reducing stressors and increasing time for contemplation. The way I see it, we we can only improve our moral behavior b by some x percent over some period of time y. The conditions are the base number that we start at, according to things like education, parents, genetics, and random experience. Someone who has a genetic propensity for alcoholism, as an example, should be held to a lower standard re: falling into addiction compared to someone whose genes make them sick from drinking. You don’t have to phrase it as “morals you can afford”. It’s a psychological fact that our willpower and growth are limited given a certain period of time. As in, you can’t master calculus in a week — the learning must take place over time.

I just added the word conditions to make a more general point. I think that’s essentially how people judge the morality of those around them in their own lives.

Someone who has a genetic propensity for alcoholism, as an example, should be held to a lower standard re: falling into addiction compared to someone whose genes make them sick from drinking.

Just out of curiosity, lower standards typically come with lower respect for autonomy. I don't mean this in an insulting way, but in the way we treat children. I don't really complain if a toddler pulls and breaks something, but likewise, I do not afford that toddler the right to make decisions for itself. Do you think someone with that kind of propensity should be socially given less leeway to make their own decisions when it comes to that vice?

The way I see it, we we can only improve our moral behavior b by some x percent over some period of time y.

Sure. Let's suppose that we're talking about a decade. How much should we expect a person's morality to be "improved" in that time period, assuming the arguments are made in the first year?

The autonomy I personally believe in, and which is probably unpopular, is an autonomy that is the result of efficient morality. A person who is free from addictions, vices, consumerism, and general poor habits has a substantive autonomy that allows him to pursue whatever great heights of life he wills to pursue. To get there, we should eliminate the evils of human life that take advantage of primitive animal instinct. (As such, gambling should be banned.) Now to answer your question specifically, yes in theory. We should reduce the autonomy of unwise and immoral people for their own good. The question of whether you can practically do this without risks is a separate question. I would point out that in the formative years of teens we eradicate autonomy, forcing them into a very specific weekday routine with courses they usually can’t pick. Then if they go to college they also lack autonomy. Then if they go to work, they lack autonomy. Civilized life is about lacking autonomy, or, another way of putting it, externalizing cognitive labor.

Let's suppose that we're talking about a decade. How much should we expect a person's morality to be "improved" in that time period

I don’t know if it’s a matter of expecting. If you know someone with anger issues who is actually consuming information and practicing whatever helps his issues, intuitively we know to give this person praise and not blame. If you take another person and they are laughing off the suggestion of helping their anger issues because they say it doesn’t matter, intuitively we know that this person deserves blame. Now applying this to historical figures, did the founding fathers laugh off the idea of black people being equal in the face of insurmountable evidence? Well, no. Such evidence wasn’t widespread or unanimous. But obviously in 1970, the evidence would be, and so blame is due. [ignore HBD for the sake of my example]

Now applying this to historical figures, did the founding fathers laugh off the idea of black people being equal in the face of insurmountable evidence? Well, no. Such evidence wasn’t widespread or unanimous.

Is there any analogy, in your view, between moral ideas and scientific ones? Let's suppose a new paradigm, a better one, is created to address gravity or some other scientific topic. Are scientists obligated to pursue its truth value even if they might be early adopters?

If yes, then I would ask you whether people have a similar obligation to morality. Especially, say, those who have the time or means to pursue a moral question to a rigorous end.

To a degree the paradigms are similar, sure. Did you have an example in mind? If we’re talking about the morality of slavery, that’s kind of what happened — moral development determined it was immoral. But if we’re talking about, let’s say, the bombing of Hiroshima, the moral paradigm is informed by “what would the Japanese do to us?” and “what are the costs of invasion”. Then, if we’re talking about individual morality in everyday life, norms have to be considered because moral actions are usually costly… I would allege that at a certain threshold of students cheating in a university course (51%?), it becomes morally permissible to cheat because that has become a new norm.

But if we’re talking about, let’s say, the bombing of Hiroshima, the moral paradigm is informed by “what would the Japanese do to us?” and “what are the costs of invasion”.

I'm not entirely certain that it does. Why would Japanese barbarity change pre-war moral paradigms about how to treat noncombatants and captured/surrendered soldiers? I have no desire to go to an eye-for-an-eye morality. I would not want the Japanese subjected to the atom bomb simply because they killed many more in their occupied territories.

But I'm not interested in moral questions of the past as I am the present. The clear example is LGBT rights in the last decade or two, which is a sign of moral progress (for the most part) in my eyes. Now, there are widespread and very clear arguments in favor of the variety of LGBT rights (marriage, the right to physically transition, etc.). However, there are also places where one would known of these ideas, but never encounter the arguments sans someone's anti-LGBT rhetoric or commentary over them.

Let us suppose there exists a person in a community which is largely anti-LGBT. This person is reasonably well-off, but would still stand to lose some social status if they disagreed with the majority. They know of the issue, but have not previously pursued the moral questions with any rigor. Let us also suppose that this person would, if they heard them, be convinced by pro-LGBT arguments.

Does this person have a moral obligation to dive into the question and change their stance by being an early adopter?

More comments

Yep.

Rufo acquitted himself admirably because he saw an unfair framing for what it was, refused to give the soundbite that he would have then had to spend huge amounts of time explaining, and of course made the point that they were still far ahead of the moral standards of the time.

The only thing that I would have done differently is said "I can say it is racist if you, first, say that racism is not a mortal sin nor does it invalidate a persons' other ideas."

Because you can disarm their attempt to reduce things to a blanket condemnation simply by requiring they admit to the nuance. If they can't, then don't give them what they want.

The only thing that I would have done differently is said "I can say it is racist if you, first, say that racism is not a mortal sin nor does it invalidate a persons' other ideas."

Coming from the interviewer that's useless. Even if he sticks to that (which he likely won't), his audience won't.

The most common way for a debate to go nowhere is for both participants to just throw ideas at each other - "you republicans are so racist. oh yeah? demonrats support affirmative action, which is real racism! affirmative action is necesary to correct systemic disparities. SYSTEMIC? that's more CRT marxism ...", wandering over a massive battlefield without trying to defend any territory. It's the default state of political discussion. One way to avoid this is to pin your enemy down on specific points, and call them out when they leap away to the next motte - try to get them to agree to your premises, and from there make an argument for your conclusion. That's what this felt like to Nathan - he cares about 'was Jefferson racist', both personally and as a component of his argument, and Rufo was just dodging it with sophistry (again, from nathan's perspective, I don't agree with him on the facts).

Consider how much harder it is to argue against gambling than for it. To argue against gambling you have to have an understanding of addiction, genetic proclivities to addiction, the data on who gambles, and the adaptability of human happiness. To argue for gambling you just say “people should be allowed to do what they want unless harming someone”.

Yes this is closely related to my point below about the effects of the paradigm on the conversation, and it's a counterpoint to @ymeskhout 's point about the value of the cross-examination. When the framesetter is also the interrogator, (99% of the time), their interrogated starts out in an epistemology gravity well.

using your gambling example, as you suggest, starting with the pro-gambling argument is easier (within a particular meta-frame of Western liberal modernity. If your starting meta-paradigm is a traditionaly Christian society, I think it's reversed. There's a trite anti-gambling starting point: "Gambling is immoral and degenerate", and an argument for liberalism is the more complex one).

But even in today's world, starting with either argument makes arguing the other one against it harder.

Suppose I begin an interview with a pro-gambler, even in a modern western liberal context, by saying, "Gambling causes a lot of harm and addiction, and society has a responsibility against throwing its most vulnerable to the wolfs". I've put you several steps away from being able to argue simply "people should be allowed to do what they want unless harming someone” because I didn't allow you to begin with a proposal for liberal law making. You are forced to first debate whether or not my conjecture is true or blast into a non-sequitor to get to your position of libertarian license.

For a fair examination, the interviewer should begin with the examined frame of reference and work out from there.

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:

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.

Go after any one reason and prove that it doesn't apply to everyone, and that doesn't invalidate the other 999.

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...

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 broader and more relevant reason in this case is just "sex work harms those who engage in it." I never claimed that all 1000 reasons are of equal importance or cannot be summed up, but that finding an example where 1 reason does not apply does not invalidate the other 999.

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...

Your hypothetical begs the question. In a debate there's no way someone waits for you to rattle off all 999 reasons. They will engage with the first few, then come up with a few more general counterarguments of their own. If your first few claims are easily defeated, then it stands to reason the other few hundred are of similar or inferior quality. Finding exceptions to any one claim though doesn't actually defeat that claim.

"Use money to improve people's material conditions, which is an end in itself" is not actually the part of welfare that people disagree with. Same with lines on freeways, blood vessels, etc. All of those examples are very unlike the debate being had here, because people generally agree with your phrasings of them. A better example would be something like "is drinking alcohol unethical." It makes people more abusive, it makes them waste money, it causes drunk driving, etc. but are any of those an actual principle making alcohol immoral? There are certainly exceptions to all of them. In reality, most people's genuinely held ethical positions are simply agglomerations of more fundamental principles. If something is bad enough often enough then it's simply unethical.

I expect this is Murphy's actual position. Sex work can be OK, but only under circumstances rare enough that it's much easier and better to ban it altogether than to give the bad actors a pretext for their less virtuous actions. I don't think Murphy is as intelligent as people on here seem to think (especially @ymeskhout, who's referenced her like 10 times) and I doubt she (or her interlocutors, to be fair) are capable of actually recognizing this. So how would you suggest they go about conducting this debate, if not by directly engaging with (rather than finding rare and unrepresentative exceptions to) a few of her claims about the supposed harm sex work causes to sex workers?

The broader and more relevant reason in this case is just "sex work harms those who engage in it." I never claimed that all 1000 reasons are of equal importance or cannot be summed up, but that finding an example where 1 reason does not apply does not invalidate the other 999.

The idea is that - if you're making an argument, the onus is on you to present the broadest and most convincing reasons up front. If the first reason you present is one of the smaller reasons, only responsible for .5% of your belief - why even mention it? Mention one of the big 'classes of reasons' (which is itself a "reason").

A better example would be something like "is drinking alcohol unethical." It makes people more abusive, it makes them waste money, it causes drunk driving, etc. but are any of those an actual principle making alcohol immoral?

I mean, that's three things, and they're all broadly within "alcohol makes people behave badly". There's another important factor, which is "alcohol is physically unhealthy". So that's two large-scale reasons, each of which have three to six big more specific reasons within them. That's reasonable. It works with my above comment, and isn't a gish gallop.

A debate with that would go like: Maybe Megan first mentions abuse, destiny says "okay what if it didn't cause abuse", megan mentions wasting money and drunk driving. Destiny now notices the grouping, and says "okay, it looks like you think alcohol clouds peoples' judgement and lets out their worst instincts. What if it didn't do that, would you still oppose it". Megan now says yes, and says "because it makes you fat and harms your liver". Destiny now asks "okay, what if it didn't cloud your judgement and didn't have health effects, would you oppose it"? Now Megan says "I guess not." Now Destiny understands megan's position better, and we can figure out if each component is true or not!

All of those examples are very unlike the debate being had here, because people generally agree with your phrasings of them

Tbh I spent most of the comment trying to come up with a reason I believed for "why don't some things have 1000 different reasons", because it seemed true but I wasn't sure why, as opposed to thinking about arguments.

"Use money to improve people's material conditions, which is an end in itself" is not actually the part of welfare that people disagree with.

That's only true now because people broadly agree with welfare, it's popular, and widely implemented. Some (including me, to an extent) do disagree with that.

In reality, most people's genuinely held ethical positions are simply agglomerations of more fundamental principles. If something is bad enough often enough then it's simply unethical

Sure, but on any specific topic those principles are, at a high level, relatively simple, there aren't a few thousand of them. I think this is true about sex work, too! For some people the 'one reason' is that God or Traditional Values said NO. For others the reason is sex is for reproduction and porn isn't reproduction. For others (feminists) it's bad because it exploits women and propagates social values that exploit women, or something. For even more all three of these, and one or two more, mix together.

I basically agree with Destiny and ymes that megan's both a bad debater and doesn't have a coherent source for her points of view.

So how would you suggest they go about conducting this debate, if not by directly engaging with (rather than finding rare and unrepresentative exceptions to) a few of her claims about the supposed harm sex work causes to sex workers?

Part of why Megan responded poorly to destiny's approach is she's not a systematic thinker and is a normal person who doesn't like having her ideas 'attacked'.

I think the right move if you're trying to convince her is to try to meet megan where she's at right now, and try to come up with a narrative for her points of view that she'll agree with but is fairly concrete, and even show sympathy for and agree with parts of it - and hopefully she'll feel positive about you at that point - and then try to show its inadequacies by exploring some of the consequences for it, trying to connect it to other beliefs she has or experiences she's had.

Even if you don't want to do that, and more want to own her for an audience, I think destiny's approach isn't ideal, it seems a bit autistic, and Destiny and most people here probably know the good anti-porn arguments better than Megan does so making her awkwardly spell them out in response to hypotheticals isn't really necessary other than to own her.

The idea is that - if you're making an argument, the onus is on you to present the broadest and most convincing reasons up front. If the first reason you present is one of the smaller reasons, only responsible for .5% of your belief - why even mention it? Mention one of the big 'classes of reasons' (which is itself a "reason")

I don't get why we're still talking about this. I agree with you here. Meghan also did this and then was later asked to clarify her position, which was when she got into the specifics. It was there that Destiny looked for exceptions rather than engaging with the examples provided.

A debate with that would go like: Maybe Megan first mentions abuse, destiny says "okay what if it didn't cause abuse", megan mentions wasting money and drunk driving. Destiny now notices the grouping, and says "okay, it looks like you think alcohol clouds peoples' judgement and lets out their worst instincts. What if it didn't do that, would you still oppose it". Megan now says yes, and says "because it makes you fat and harms your liver". Destiny now asks "okay, what if it didn't cloud your judgement and didn't have health effects, would you oppose it"? Now Megan says "I guess not." Now Destiny understands megan's position better, and we can figure out if each component is true or not!

I don't think the whole "penetrative sex" excerpt is representative of the whole debate, but even in reference to just that section, this comparison still isn't very accurate. A better comparison would be something like:

Meghan: "I dislike alcohol due to its negative effects on people."

Destiny: "Like what?"

Meghan: "Like abuse."

Destiny: "What about women drinking alcohol? They can't abuse men."

Meghan: "Yes they can, especially on alcohol."

Destiny: "What about female children?"

Meghan: "How many alcoholic little girls have you heard of? Besides, I think it's bad for them to be alcoholics too."

Destiny: "So there we go, abuse has nothing to do with why you actually think alcohol is bad. I still have no idea why you think it's unethical."

You can see why this whole tactic is disingenuous, right? Meghan's a bad debater, yeah, but Destiny is outright dishonest.

At this point she could have brought up a separate reason why it's bad for little girls to be alcoholics, but then she'd cede the ground about how abusive alcoholics aren't a big issue. She could have talked about the noncentral fallacy, but I doubt she's even heard of that, and she'd already tried to do so a few times with her references to talking about a "fantasy world" vs reality. So instead she quit.

Sure, but on any specific topic those principles are, at a high level, relatively simple, there aren't a few thousand of them.

Yes, and at a high level, Meghan articulated her main belief, which was that the porn/prostitution industries enable quite a lot of exploitation. Destiny dug into that and started getting into hyperspecifics, so it's unfair to blame Meghan for coming up with answers to his questions about those specifics. It's totally fair to have a thousand reasons for why porn causes harm, and for the very first reason cited to not cover literally 100% of possible cases.

Part of why Megan responded poorly to destiny's approach is she's not a systematic thinker and is a normal person who doesn't like having her ideas 'attacked'.

Agreed, but I think a bigger part is that he was just being disingenuous. He kept coming up with extreme exceptions ("you don't think a girl selling foot pics is the same as a 9-year old getting gangraped, do you?") and then getting upset when she objected to his characterization of her point, because if she refuses to engage with his noncentral examples then her central examples must be dodging the question. He really wanted to equate the overall porn industry with the most milquetoast parts of it, and any attempts by her to steer the conversation towards central examples such as pornhub were met by derision and accusations of bad faith.

If I were trying to change her mind, I'd have attacked the Nordic model she favors. The thing about her position is that it is in essence a criticism of the status quo. You can't really debate that without defending the status quo, which really does have many issues. So the thing to focus on would be "how would you fix things" and then discuss the weaknesses with that. This is more rhetorically powerful, more direct, more likely to actually change her mind, and much more productive.

He kept coming up with extreme exceptions ("you don't think a girl selling foot pics is the same as a 9-year old getting gangraped, do you?") and then getting upset when she objected to his characterization of her point

Rewatched this part of the debate - this was directly in response to (compressed)

Destiny: Are we discussing porn or prostitution? These are very different, risk of trafficking/abuse is very different.

Murphy: I don't consider them that different. Selling sex is prostitution, even if online

Destiny: You're saying posting pictures of feet on twitter is the same as a 9 year old being trafficked in Uganda to a brothel in Germany?

Destiny's using a lot of hyperbole, but it's not really dishonest, as it's in response to Megan unreasonably conflating porn and prostitution while arguing they're bad due to risk of exploitation. It'd be more dishonest if it was unprompted, because he'd be implying megan was conflating them - but she kinda was!

==

His first hypothetical is a direct question of: "if there was a company with no exploitation, would you be fine with i?t", in response to her bringing up exploitation in the past. She waffles on this question. He then explains he's asking because he's heard her claim she wants almost all pornography outlawed - and he believes quite a bit (i'd guess >25-50% from his statements) of existing online sexual content weighted by revenue is currently not exploitative, so her arguments don't justify the claims she's made elsewhere.

Then

Megan: Sex is something where women are particularly vulnerable and could face lifelong trauma. This is why rape bad.

Destiny: How do you feel about male prostitutes then? Do you think it'd be ethical for men to do sex work?

I think this is also reasonable from Destiny. He's trying to figure out what the shape of her view is - how much does the 'woman' part really contribute? It's not implied that 'if she thinks prostitution/porn is bad, she must think it's bad for men', as it kinda is in your hypothetical - she's free to take either direction in the fork.

Megan: I think it's unethical for a man to pay a man for sex.

Destiny: Then the female vulnerability part doesn't matter.

You could argue this is somewhat dishonest - maybe she thinks female matters a bit but there are other factors too - even so, it's a more reasonable claim than every inference Megan has made in the past five minutes of the debate. But it's not dishonest in the context of a broader claim that he's making, and has explicitly said - even if he wins on every factual argument Megan makes, she'll keep jumping from argument to argument (as she has) because she isn't in this due to arguments.

The massive difference between Destiny's argument and your example is - his hypotheticals are in direct response to claims Megan has made. In your dialogue, Destiny brings in the 'female' and 'children' distinctions - in the above dialogue, Megan introduces the 'vulnerable' and 'female' distinctions.

About then she ragequits.

I mean, you're not entirely wrong. Destiny's approach here isn't actually going to tease out why Megan dislikes porn, it's just going to make her look stupid. It's probably better to assume she means 'female vulnerability makes a bad situation worse', even if that is a steelman, and debate that instead (while still mentioning that you're doing that). I think you can do that while still making her look stupid, although idk if my video would blow up like his did!

If I were trying to change her mind, I'd have attacked the Nordic model she favors

I think I would have, instead of going all logic-bro, told detail-rich stories about the kind of solo-content only onlyfans model destiny mentions, or boyfriend and girlfriend who make content with themselves and threesomes, and then gotten her to directly denounce those, and then explored the tension between her claims of exploitation and the stories.

==

Aside from that last sentence, this is a funny discussion because neither of us care about the object-level issue of 'was destiny slightly dishonest in the debate', unlike CW questions, it's just exploring a very mild disagreement out of technical interest in the disagreement.

Yeah I think we're on the same page, or close enough anyways. Still, I do have a few quibbles.

Destiny's using a lot of hyperbole, but it's not really dishonest, as it's in response to Megan unreasonably conflating porn and prostitution while arguing they're bad due to risk of exploitation

Well what she says is that selling sex is selling sex. His immediate response is to bring up porn which isn't selling sex. You could look at this as an attempt to pinpoint her position, but to me it seems more like a disingenuous argumentative tactic. At this point in the discussion he knows what her central point is, and is choosing to call her out on these little details rather than engaging with it at all.

You could argue this is somewhat dishonest - maybe she thinks female matters a bit but there are other factors too - even so, it's a more reasonable claim than every inference Megan has made in the past five minutes of the debate. But it's not dishonest in the context of a broader claim that he's making, and has explicitly said - even if he wins on every factual argument Megan makes, she'll keep jumping from argument to argument (as she has) because she isn't in this due to arguments.

I think her claims make a lot more sense in the context of her original claim, which was that the porn industry has a lot of exploitation. That is the most important reason porn is unethical, as she has stated, and he goes looking for another one as if she hasn't provided one already.

She comes up with reasons porn is bad, he finds exceptions, rinse and repeat. I'd have more charity towards him if he engaged with any of her points rather than finding exceptions to all of them. Of course, she can defend herself (well, she can't, but it's her job to) and if she were competent she could have called him out on that better.

In the end this terrible muddled mess is kind of what they both asked for though. They both make money stirring up controversy, not discovering truth, and in that they're both experts regardless of their skill at debate.

Yeah, close enough.

I actually don't think exploitation is the main reason porn is unethical - it's that it subverts the productive instinct towards reproduction in favor of something meaningless. But I don't think the puritan moral rage you generally see from reactionaries at this is a well-calibrated way to fight it.

They both make money stirring up controversy, not discovering truth, and in that they're both experts regardless of their skill at debate

Destiny's been a lot better in the past few years at attempting to discover truth instead of stirring up controversy, and most of his conversations aren't heated or adversarial like this one was (whereas in the past he was a lot more debate bro-ish). Imo ideally, heat/conflict and accuracy don't have to be incompatible, but a lot of social incentives make them so in practice.

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I'm fascinated at how much you and @curious_straight_ca dissected this exchange. I'll repost a relevant comment I made elsewhere that also includes how I would construct an "honest" version of Murphy's objections:

The lead up to this particular exchange is relevant because Murphy was first arguing that sex work is bad because it's coercive, and it's by definition coercive because it involves someone having sex they wouldn't otherwise have were it not for the money offered. Destiny offers the obvious rejoinder that if you accept that premise, then ALL jobs are also "by definition coercive" as well. There's some anti-capitalists that actually agree with this premise but Murphy doesn't and so she finds herself having to add yet another qualifier to her argument, this time about how women are much more vulnerable during sex. Similarly, there are radical feminists that actually believe that ALL heterosexual sex is "by definition coercive" because it's penetrative and occurs within a patriarchal system where consent is impossible. Murphy has to be aware of these arguments, but as an unapologetic heterosexual woman, she doesn't want to concede that. At this point my impression is she quit because she ran out of pivots.

There's a pattern here. She just moves on to another, then another, then another etc. all without any acknowledgement. It's hard to tell what she actually believes in because she just keeps mechanistically cycling through her repertoire! The "coercive because money" argument got immediately thrown out without any acknowledgement and never made a re-appearance, and that's because Murphy knew she'd have to admit that all jobs are coercive. We didn't get much of an epilogue for the "coercive because sex" argument, but I'm guessing she realized she'd have to admit that hetero sex is at least somewhat rapey. I also gather that after already confirming she believes males engaging in sex work is also unethical, she realized she wouldn't be able to offer a reason for that position (I can't think of one based on what she said, but maybe you can?).

If I had to construct an honest form of the basic tenets of her argument, it might be something like this:

"Wage work has an element of coercion, because you're doing work you would otherwise refuse to do freely. Sex also has an element of violence and coercion for women in particular, given how much more vulnerable they are. Taken individually, neither is necessarily a problem because of [reasons]. But there's a symbiotic magnification of the harms that occurs when these two aspects are combined together into what we know as the sex trade. This crosses a line over what we should deem as ethical and acceptable behavior."

I may not agree with the conclusion but I think the argument is perfectly reasonable! If I had to guess, the reason Murphy doesn't adopt this framework is because it would necessarily require her to curtail some of her overall position. For example it would require her to concede at least some scenarios where the sex trade is not unethical (e.g. male prostitutes, OF model playing with toys, etc.).

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.

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.)

the point where no nontrivial argument can be made for them as a group

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)

I do think 'it is a fundamental good to help people', and decreasing marginal utility of money, applies to the entire group

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.

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)

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

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.

(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)

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.

There are other things to balance against than the benefit to high earners

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.

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.

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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It's why I'm glad people like Robin Hanson exist, or else we wouldn't have oeuvres like Gentle Silent Rape

Hanson is either trolling or socially clueless. "Gentle silent rape" implies that central examples of rape are gentle and silent.

How does it do that? Hanson quite explicitly narrowed his questions about rape in general to "gentle silent rape":

I presented evidence that most men would rather be raped than cuckolded...[referencing a prior post which is linked] It occurred to me recently that we can more clearly compare cuckoldry to gentle silent rape. Imagine a woman was drugged into unconsciousness and then gently raped, so that she suffered no noticeable physical harm nor any memory of the event, and the rapist tried to keep the event secret. Now drugging someone against their will is a crime, but the added rape would add greatly to the crime in the eyes of today’s law, and the added punishment for this addition would be far more than for cuckoldry.

A few hours later he called out again that gentle silent rape differs quite a lot from standard rape:

Added 11p 1Dec: 95 comments so far, almost all of which ignore my “gentle silent” modifier, and just argue about standard rape.

So no, Hanson is not implying anything of the sort.

How does it do that? Hanson quite explicitly narrowed his questions about rape in general to "gentle silent rape":

The title doesn't contain any disclaimers and it's far more prominent than the place in the article where he does have the disclaimer, simply because titles work that way. He's doing it that way because he knows very well that people will read the title as being offensive, and he's trolling people by tricking them into making reasonable in context interpretations and then saying "see, that's not what it literally says, if you read the fine print, so you're literally wrong".

There's a reason why we have the concept of clickbait titles.

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?"

This is precisely why people actually go to great efforts to understand and explain what is going on in cases like this. See, for example, the major works of Wertheimer/Westen on consent to sexual relations. I have zero doubt that if you tried this gotcha on them, they would have an immediate thirty second response. I happen to disagree with some of their positions, generally, as I don't believe in a consent-only sexual ethic, but I have no doubt that they have thought about the issue in significant enough detail to be able to easily reply. I think it, frankly, is an indication that a person hasn't sufficiently thought through an issue if they get caught out this easily on it.

Of course, that shouldn't be surprising when it comes to political talking heads. The sheer range of issues they are setting themselves out to address means that they're almost certainly to get caught out sometimes. Think of this general discourse as watching top-tier chess tournaments. The participants may actually have thought about it far more than lay folks, but the game is so incredibly broad, you still regularly see folks just get totally caught out by some opening prep idea. Of course, when that happens and they get embarrassed publicly, they immediately go home and study it to make sure it doesn't happen again. Compare to academic types, who are more like what chess players could get away with in the pre-computer-prep era - the guy who played the same opening every time and just knew it better than you.

I think the lesson we should take often depends on which type of person it is, which type of game they're prepping for, and what the result looks like. Thinking of chess again, in the computer era, even a specialist in an opening can get absolutely wrecked if they get stung with dynamite novel computer prep. But we're not going to see them just get absolutely bamboozled by just some basic shit in an opening that we know they have to have realized was likely.

Rufo is 'prepped' for talking about Marcuse, modern discrimination law, etc. Jefferson is a not-insignificant sideline, but it's definitely a sideline. Iain Anderson? Dude got blown off the board by a beginner who learned like the most common first six moves of the Sicilian.

It's being used as a rhetorical attack to discredit Jefferson and Poison the Well. "Jefferson was racist, ergo a bad person and all of his works are now discredited." It's not a truth finding expedition being made in good faith, but rhetorical culture war.

"Why won't my opponent concede when he knows I'm using rhetoric?" isn't really a fair question.

"Jefferson was racist, ergo a bad person and all of his works are now discredited."

Maybe this is how things work in the culture war but I don't think the latter has to follow when you admit the former. I've seen plenty of wholehearted defenders of a philosophy say something to the effect of "X (founder of their favourite ideology) was a terrible person, now let's discuss what is still worthwhile about their ideas".

the purpose is to attack the myth; all of "his works" are part of the myth

attacking and destroying the hero is the point of this sort of rhetorical attack and admission

so, you either get the person to help you in destroying their myth/hero or you force them into a position where they defend something which is heretical which could destroy their life

this isn't genuine discussion or dialogue, it's rhetoric and argument and should treated as such

I don't think the latter has

Okay, so it's theoretically possible for this to not poison the well or destroy the myth/hero which forms part of the identity the person you're talking to, now what?

if the point was to discuss their "still" worthwhile ideas, why didn't the discussion start there? because the destruction and poisoning the well is the point of this sort of comment

Okay, so it's theoretically possible for this to not poison the well or destroy the myth/hero which forms part of the identity the person you're talking to, now what?

I don't need to argue that it's theoretically possible to avoid destroying the myth, just that destroying the myth behind a person doesn't discredit whatever lessons you might draw from their writings or actions.

if the point was to discuss their "still" worthwhile ideas, why didn't the discussion start there? because the destruction and poisoning the well is the point of this sort of comment

The mythology itself can be an obstacle to discussing someone's ideas. "I'm a follower of Jefferson because he was a great man" is no foundation, "I believe in the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence" is more substantial even if you admit the moral failings of the author.

It does which is why they're doing it. Theoretically, perhaps it's true that attacking the man behind the ideas doesn't necessarily affect those ideas, but it does to the vast majority of people and it's the case in the linked example. The purpose of getting someone to admit their hero/myth is flawed is because you're trying to signal to others WARNING: HERETIC and poison the well. If it didn't affect the idea, a person wouldn't lead off a discussion with "this guy is a racist, though, right?"

Because the point is to destroy the myth and taint its parts. It's to signal negative vibes to the normies that this guy should be approached with caution, if at all.

A man being a great man is the best foundation to follow him or be a follower. I sincerely do not understand what would be a better reason. Without men, ideas are irrelevant.

The purpose of getting someone to admit their hero/myth is flawed is because you're trying to signal to others WARNING: HERETIC and poison the well. If it didn't affect the idea, a person wouldn't lead off a discussion with "this guy is a racist, though, right?"

I'll grant that this is often a reason. I do think we have other genuine reasons of it not being an attempt to poison the well, I've brought it up before but philosophy professors will often start their attempt to impress the value of a thinker upon their students by admitting all the terrible and crazy things about them history has revealed.

When it comes to an adversarial discussion, you might be poisoning the well by referring to a thinker's past crimes, you might also just be seeing if your interlocutor holds any insane beliefs resulting from hero worship or ideological blindness. Ideally they come out of it having established their credibility as someone who will admit fault when he sees it but still give praise when he thinks it's due.

Depending where the debate is on the scale of rap battle to Oxford debate you might be able to trust the audience to make distinctions here.

A man being a great man is the best foundation to follow him or be a follower. I sincerely do not understand what would be a better reason. Without men, ideas are irrelevant.

A better reason would be that you follow his ideas because they work no? There are lots of great men of history that would be hard to follow in any political sense because their ideas are either inapplicable in the modern day or obviously terrible. Jefferson is remembered because the constitution he helped design worked well enough that we still consider his political thoughts relevant (in more than a purely historical sense).

the purpose is to attack the myth; all of "his works" are part of the myth

attacking and destroying the hero is the point of this sort of rhetorical attack and admission

I concede you have a point. I can respond just as @Tollund_Man4 did that "destroying the myth behind a person doesn't discredit whatever lessons you might draw from their writings or actions" but I also recognize that people often adopt positions in a reflexive manner based on just vibes (I'm potentially vulnerable to doing this myself). If you accept that concern as real and wish to defend against it, you have to remain active at the meta-level where you're defending the mythology rather than defending the substantive arguments. And implicit at this level is that you can't break character and be transparent about what you're doing, because "I am defending Jefferson's legacy in order to shore up the vibes supporters he has" shatters the kayfabe. Defending the mythology also can be in tension with defending the substance.

We're all affected by vibes and the reason this attack is done at all is to communicate negative vibes and steer anyone not completely able to separate myth from underlying idea (i.e., everyone) will be affected by it. I do not remember the person who I first read a similar comment to yours, but he described normal people as not thinkers but "vibers," and I think that's a pretty good description and these tactics simply work. Arguing this is theoretically possible, especially in the above example, is such an unsatisfying reply because of this and gives cover to people who do it to destroy the founding myth and founding heroes. Is it theoretically possible? Perhaps, but not really in the real world which is why it's done and it's being done in the exact example being discussed.

If attacks on person didn't work, it wouldn't be the number 1 tactic everyone does to attack ideas even in communities like this where people still regularly do stuff like "Person X, known pedophile/racist/antisemite, _________."

It is also judging someone based on today’s morality. Was Jefferson blameless in his generation? No. Was he bad in his generation? No. Jefferson was clearly bothered by the concept of slavery and even took some efforts to try to limit and eventually end the practice. He is very different compared to certain people like John Calhoun.

Moreover, Jefferson crafted one of the most important documents in human history and gave birth to some of the most important words uttered in human history (generally when people say things like that it is an exaggeration but in this case the Declaration of Independence is probably the most important document in the last 1,000 years).

That is, Jefferson was a great man. A flawed man. He was human; not a saint. But he was still great and trying to use modern sentiments to besmirch that greatness is unjust.

Funny enough, most people who complain about Jefferson only do so because of the profound words Jefferson wrote. MLK Jr would not have had half the success he had but for Americans treating the declaration of independence as sacred. Yet these half wits and talentless dweebs like Robinson feel they can be the moral superior to the greatness of Jefferson?

"Jefferson was racist, ergo a bad person and all of his works are now discredited."

Except that Robinson's leftist wagon fort never applies the same standard to Marx, or Engels, or Che Guevara, or any other leftist revolutionary who ever expressed racist views. I find it regrettable that Rufo seemingly never made that point.

Rufo knows that's a trap because, if pressed, Robinson would obviously disavow Marx's racism but merely say he "had some interesting ideas about labor relations" or something. Rufo, on the other hand, wants to defend some kind of constitutional originalism where the founding fathers were uniquely capable sages whose instructions must still be followed today.

merely say he "had some interesting ideas about labor relations" or something

I argue it'd be relatively easy to press him on this. Surely his ideological investment in Marxism goes further than that.

the founding fathers were uniquely capable sages

Does Rufo actually go that far? I'm not familiar with his work so I don't know.

Robinson has said plenty of negative things about Marx and his ideas, which upset the folks at Jacobin. I didn't read his book so I don't know how much of his argument relies on "bad person ergo" but figured this trivia was worth pointing out

From the review, Robinson appears to have tarred Marx as an authoritarian (a position which Jacobin might not champion, but is willing to tolerate if it leads to a better world state), not as a supporter of racism, bigotry or anti-semitism (ideologies which Jacobin wouldn't support, even if they would bring socialism closer). Would have interesting to see him confront anti-Slavic and anti-Jewish sentiment pervading the writings of early socialists.

Googling I discovered that Robinson argues against Marx being an anti-semite, confirming that he only scours the history for prejudice, if it advances his ideology. If facts would bury his intellectual forefathers, they instead are buried.

It's not a truth finding expedition being made in good faith, but rhetorical culture war.

I'm sorry, but Rufo of all people doesn't get to complain about this. He is engaged in an explicit political project, to win the culture war. In fact, despite all the seething, that's what's attractive about him: he knows this. No way he walks into a debate with Robinson and doesn't get the game.

If his counter was inadequate that's on him.

That's a fair point. If he is going into a rhetorical knife fight, his failings are on him. No quarter asked or given, but my main point was about his 'ducking and weaving' when the argument isn't dialectical using logos.

The mistake all these people made was in being forced to defend their positions.

The Socratic method, employed adversarially, makes fools of us all. Instead of accepting the frame of their interlocutor, they should have flipped the script.

"So you think that up until the baby enters the birth canal, the mother is free to kill it?"

Instead of answering directly say: "And you think that the second a sperm fertilizes an egg, it's a human? What kind of position is that?"

"Answer my question".

"You answer mine first and then I'll go".

The Socratic method, employed adversarially, makes fools of us all. Instead of accepting the frame of their interlocutor, they should have flipped the script.

Or maybe some people make fools of themselves?

Tim Pool hardly pulled off some brilliant or devious maneuver here. Nothing here would be out of place in an early philosophy seminar.

He simply asked Lance a couple of questions to tease out his position, and Lance admirably admitted something a lot on his side probably believe: "bodily autonomy" is the strongest legal argument for abortion but the point of abortion is to avoid this issue. If tomorrow a 5 week-old baby was viable that basic, pressing issue of work that helps the pro-choice movement would remain.

Of course, in politics people stay on message and avoid traps like this (god bless audience-captured Youtubers). But that doesn't mean it's not actually a legitimate tension to try to bring to light and that its not a good thing for people to know

"You answer mine first and then I'll go".

Not playing because you don't think you can answer in a way favorable to your cause is actual bad faith, as opposed to asking questions to tease out an opponents position and discovering he simply holds incoherent combinations or even answering and then launching your own questions.

Not playing because you don't think you can answer in a way favorable to your cause is actual bad faith

Honestly, I kind of think it’s the opposite. Trying to trap your opponent between heresy and concession is a dick move in my opinion. If the position were genuinely hugely unpopular that might be a bit different. But in this case the debater is resorting to vox stasi rather than vox populi.

Personally I don’t think you can have a truly fair debate in any position where there’s an audience. Two people, in a pub, with a beer. Anything else is grandstanding and manipulation.

Trying to trap your opponent between heresy and concession is a dick move in my opinion.

Another way to frame it is "trying to find out your opponent's basic beliefs and how they interact . Which is essential to debate. Not even for "gotchas"; you have to know why Lance is pro-choice and why to even have a productive discussion.

It's Lance's fault he's so bad at organizing his beliefs that he trips when he has to consider them holistically.

As for whether it's "heresy": I mean, whose fault is it if your side considers it so? Not Tim's issue.

Personally I don’t think you can have a truly fair debate in any position where there’s an audience.

Maybe not. But we'll have to make do.

I was thinking of Rufo. His opponent is not conducting a good-faith investigation of his beliefs in preparation for constructive discussion, he’s forcing him to admit to having taboo opinions in an environment where that will destroy him. Of course, I can’t know this with certainty but I feel pretty sure.

By contrast, with the abortion case, admitting that you think there are times it’s okay to force a woman to do something for the sake of her unborn child is pretty bad for the guy’s specific argument but it’s not going to get you unpersoned or debanked.

he’s forcing him to admit to having taboo opinions in an environment where that will destroy him

If you're referring to "Jefferson was a racist" why is that taboo and how would admitting to it destroy Rufo?

Not Tim's issue.

Ad hominem attacks don't become not dick moves, just because they are based upon characteristics of its victims and not aggressors. That it isn't Tim creating the enviroment which considers valid arguments immoral, but merely exploiting it, doesn't make him in the right.

It's not an ad hominem. It's simply things inconvenient to admit in the target's milieu.

If that counts as a dick move in debate then the entire concept is a dick move. It's an absurd standard.

No religious debate could ever happen if one party couldn't poke the other's beliefs because they might have to choose between sticking with incoherency and saying something that's unpopular.

I think there’s a problem when those beliefs are widely considered heresy. Then you have the problem of having been asked to publicly commit to positions that poisoned the well. Asking if the founders are racist is asking a person to pre-commit to the idea that they were (and are thusly tainted) or deny it (and thus discredit yourself). In the case of the abortion debate, it’s about committing to frames (a woman’s choices are her alone to make, even while pregnant, or that the woman should have no choices while pregnant that might endanger the fetus).

Not playing because you don't think you can answer in a way favorable to your cause is actual bad faith, as opposed to asking questions to tease out an opponents position

Yes, I agree. But I think the bad faith is deserved. These weren't adversarial collaborations, they were just adversarial. If my goal is to make you look bad, you are under no obligation to play along. These interviews were never truth-seeking endeavors.

I don't agree. I can use MMA as an example: you don't have to fight your opponent's game (in fact, you're given an incentive to exploit the holes in their game), but some amount of actual fighting is not just expected, it's required under the rules (timidity is a sanctionable offense).

Something not being a collaboration doesn't mean that there aren't rules or standards of behavior meant to extract the goods from that endeavor. It was fair to ask Rufo/whoever that question, it's fair for Rufo/whoever to answer and then pull their own uncomfortable question. "Not until you go" is closer to timidity imo.

Otherwise why bother? Just don't deal with Robinson or the concept of debate at all. According to Rufo this has worked very well for the radical leftists he loathes, but isn't that part of why he loathes them?

He simply asked Lance a couple of questions to tease out his position, and Lance admirably admitted something a lot on his side probably believe: "bodily autonomy" is the strongest legal argument for abortion but the point of abortion is to avoid this issue. If tomorrow a 5 week-old baby was viable that basic, pressing issue of work that helps the pro-choice movement would remain.

I mean it is the most clearly announced motte & bailey argument I've seen, and it frustrates me to no end when people refuse to admit it. The main organisation championing it in the US, Planned Parenthood, is named after the bailey. But if you come with arguments that if women are given the choice of parenthood men should be given a choice too (to legally and financially renounce fatherhood) then woah bro! We're just talking about a medical procedure and bodily autonomy!

"And you think that the second a sperm fertilizes an egg, it's a human? What kind of position is that?"

"The correct one. Unless you have some reliable evidence to demonstrate when the fetus is otherwise endowed with 'humanity.'"

I love biting bullets.

If only because it then forces THEM to wade into the mire of uncertainty which they have even less of a map of than I do.

Of course they can just shut down the conversation there and say "you're an insane ideologue/religious extremist and I won't argue with such absurd beliefs" but then they betray they weren't acting in good faith to begin with, just looking for the first chance to ad hominem me.

The Socratic method, employed adversarially, makes fools of us all. Instead of accepting the frame of their interlocutor, they should have flipped the script.

The infamous Channel 4 interview of Jordan Peterson shows how the Socratic method can backfire on someone who doesn't know what the fuck they're doing. Cathy Newman has yet to live that down, people still talk about it 5 years on.

I think one major problem with this style of argumentation is that while it is very good at exposing contradictions and flaws in a specific person's understanding of an issue that does not always translate into exposing contradictions or flaws in the philosophical or political positions themselves. It's perfectly possible to give a false proof of a true statement and when your debate partner rips apart that proof it might make the audience think that this means your conclusion was false, but it doesn't actually imply this. I sometimes watch debate videos and I often find myself frustrated that the person who I agree with is giving such bad arguments, I want to yell at them through the screen.

I think this is why I prefer to read cross-examinations of text against text. A huge advantage for live cross examination is that it’s easier to game. I can’t go look for better evidence. I am forced into publicly speaking, where my appearance, demeanor, and off the cuff word choices are the meat of the discussion. These things are not necessarily germane to the topic at hand. No truth can be derived from how I look or sound on camera, my poor off the cuff word choices, or my delivery. The audience will absolutely judge people on these things, which is why those who wish to persuade in the public arena tend to look the part.

This is something that hurts a lot of good ideas, even true ones. I think, while I disagree on his conclusions, Curtis Yarvin actually has a pretty good understanding of how power and incentives work in our society. The problem is that his rambling style, his deadpan demeanor, and his appearance absolutely poisons the well on his ideas — even before you pit him against anyone else. Put him up against a practiced public speaker, put him against Obama for example, and there’s no way anyone would ever listen. They’d look at Obama in a suit and tie, listen to his delivery style, and he’s carrying the day, not necessarily because he’s correct, but because of things that are irrelevant to the truth of the issue.

This is actually a problem in trials. If you know how to make your opponent sound like an ass or your client sound sweet and innocent, you can move closer to victory. This is something touched on in “A Few Good Men” much earlier. The attorneys are preparing their clients to take the stand, and one thing the tell them point blank is to not call Santiago Willy. The reason is that such a choice of words “Willy” instead of “Santiago” subtly reminds the jury that Willy Santiago is a formerly living human being, dead at the hands of the accused. Even if they’re not supposed to think that way, human psychology works that way. And thus bringing in an audience brings in the very human biases of those humans.

Writing removes the human from the equation, leaving only the argument. It doesn’t handicap the author to only the information crammed into his brain before the debate. It doesn’t allow extraneous information about the speaker themselves to change the public’s perception of the content apart from the quality of the actual argument. Writing also has the advantage of allowing citations that the reader can cross check. I can come at you with citations, references to ideas, mathematical equations, or other logical theories, link to them, and let the audience see and understand where I’m going. Writing, because you can edit, also allows these arguments to be presented as well as the writer is capable of. They have full control of the wording, and have plenty of time to polish their writing style and present their ideas in their best light.

Having two people argue in writing tends to keep the debate honest and about the ideas rather than about stylistic choices. I love reading the rat-sphere debates for just that reason. I read one side of the debate, look into the sources, and then look into the other side, then the original rebuttal of the contra, back and forth as they argue about a topic. They have to have the logic and the facts because they can’t sway the audience with anything else. They can’t put the other guy on the back foot by bringing up a new angle, the opponent has time to research it and find a rebuttal. He can’t simply be better dressed — there’s nothing there but the words themselves. The victor is determined by his argument, whether it’s true or not.

There's not much I disagree with you here. My point was not to sing the praises of "live debate" uber alles but to point out specific aspects that remain useful and difficult to replicate in the written form. Namely the ability to tease out someone's position with higher precision, and a better opportunity to root out dishonesty. There's obviously quite a lot of aspects of live debates that are easy to game or just distractions.

I don’t see why you can’t tease out specific aspects of an argument. The argument is laid out before you, and if something is poorly defined, or inconsistent, or a logical leap is made, you can point to that explicitly and point out the mistake. If in paragraph 3 you’re arguing that freedom means “freedom from external control,” than in paragraph 5 argue that people in America are less free because they are not provided free healthcare and education, there’s at least a potential inconsistency, and it’s easy enough to notice and point out. In fact, especially in papers where citations are used, it’s relatively easy to point out if a source used doesn’t say what the person using it in an argument says it does.

The thing I like about written arguments is that they don’t give you ways to hide. If you make a mistake it’s there on paper or on the website, and anyone wanting to question your ideas can do so at his leisure. He doesn’t have to catch you saying it at the time, he can read it, reread it, check your sources, work through the logic, and find it.

I don’t see why you can’t tease out specific aspects of an argument.

I'm not saying you can't! It's just harder to do with asynchronous written exchange. If you tried to transpose any of the verbal exchanges I highlighted into a discussion on the motte, they'll quickly become impossible to follow threads that are several comments too deep and that take several days to play out. I think people realize how annoying it is to be repeatedly pestered by small questions over time, so the reaction with written debates generally tends to be to package clarifying questions with multiple arguments that anticipate potential responses (e.g. "Can you explain what you mean by X? Because if Y then [words words words] but if Z then [words words words]"). Even if both people are acting honestly, this is a lot of work and can get quite tiresome because you're wasting a lot of time on arguments that were never going to come up in the first place. It's even worse in the case where someone is acting dishonestly, because the medium makes it much easier to just ignore vexing questions, or one of the preemptive arguments gives away the blueprint for how to continue acting dishonestly and evading detection.

I suppose i can see it in online fora, though, I don’t really find it too hard personally, as I said since everything is public and easily read through from beginning to end. I find following things like YouTube videos much more difficult simply because it’s almost impossible to go line by line without missing something. This is one reason I tend to be more suspicious of people who cite YouTube videos or podcasts as evidence. It’s a bit more difficult to really dig in (at least for me) because I’m constantly needing to pause and back up and see if the person really said what I think he said.

What I’m mostly thinking of is blog posts that directly oppose other blogposts. Scott Alexander does these on occasion and other bloggers do as well. So in that case, you’re reading the entire argument in one go as a multiple paragraph article about something, then someone else writes a contra-[blogger_name] on [topic] and they go back and forth until they are satisfied with the outcome.

My concern is chiefly that video and theatrical debates tend to allow magic tricks and chicanery that a text simply doesn’t allow. A person giving a speech can easily elide parts of his argument he thinks (or knows) are false by stating the forcefully or pounding the table. If I’m doing a video, I can select images of my opponents that make them look stupid, evil, or weird (this is often hilarious during American political campaigns when they tend to show a photograph of their opponent mid snarl, or take speeches completely out of context highlighting the one line in a ten minute speech that sounds bad). If I’m selling a dubious idea on video I can use computer graphics to make it seem like it will work, and carefully avoid mentioning the physics and mathematics that show it doesn’t.

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I think if you have two subject-matter experts, with ample time to research and prepare, AND are allowed to bring their sources into the real-time debate, AND they take the time to define the terms they'll be using throughout, and they are very clear about the scope of the question they're trying to get to the truth of, then its a pretty good way to either get at the truth or at least have the audience come away far more educated as to the state of the situation than before.

But the vast majority of such real-time debates ain't that.

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Yes, although you don't need charity if there are some rules of decorum and perhaps a moderator to prevent things devolving too much.

I kinda want both sides to be going for the throat, but things have to be temperate enough to allow arguments to be heard and understood, not two people shouting past each other.

Murphy's position seems quite clear -- selling sex for money is in her opinion inherently unethical due to the nature of sex -- she advances a few analogies like how rape is treated as more legally serious than non-sexual assault or theft. Destiny doesn't really give her an opportunity to do more than sketch this position, because he keeps derailing by asking stuff like "well what's so different about selling sex than making cheeseburgers"? Clearly she thinks that having sex is categorically different from those things -- this does not seem like an untenable position?!

I often like Destiny's debates, but he does this faux exasperation thing that is quite tiresome (and very bad cross-examination technique I should think)-- particularly this time it is very rich for him to accuse Murphy of too many tangents; his position on this one seems to be all tangents all the time.

I note that he never answers her question as to whether he thinks it would be ethical for him to pay someone who doesn't want to have sex with him enough to change their mind -- it's a pretty incisive question; he has lots of money, he could do this and maybe does. But he feels uncomfortable just saying "yeah that would be fine" -- which is in itself evidence for Murphy's assertion that something is different about buying sex from buying cheeseburgers; also that Destiny agrees with the assertion on some level but would rather play word-games to make it seem small.

He's very far from truth-seeking on this one unfortunately.

Murphy's position seems quite clear -- selling sex for money is in her opinion inherently unethical due to the nature of sex -- she advances a few analogies like how rape is treated as more legally serious than non-sexual assault or theft.

She also said she's against all prostitution regardless of the sex of the parties involved, which would presumably include a woman buying non-penetrative services from a male prostitute. But I can't figure out exactly why except maybe some guesses along the lines of "sex is sacred", buuut Murphy has no problem with casual sex. That doesn't have to be an inconsistent position ("ok to give but not sell" is the position a lot of people for organ transplants) but we're still operating in the dark and it's such an easy position for Murphy to clear up.

If I had to construct an honest form of the basic tenets of Murphy's argument, it might be something like this:

"Wage work has an element of coercion, because you're doing work you would otherwise refuse to do freely. Sex also has an element of violence and coercion for women in particular, given how much more vulnerable they are. Taken individually, neither is necessarily a problem because of [reasons]. But there's a symbiotic magnification of the harms that occurs when these two aspects are combined together into what we know as the sex trade. This crosses a line over what we should deem as ethical and acceptable behavior."

I may not agree with the conclusion but I think the argument is perfectly reasonable! If I had to guess, the reason Murphy doesn't adopt this framework is because it would necessarily require her to curtail some of her overall "all sex work is always bad" position. For example it would require her to concede at least some scenarios where the sex trade is not unethical (e.g. male prostitutes, OF model playing with toys, etc.).

but we're still operating in the dark and it's such an easy position for Murphy to clear up.

This seems like a big counter-example to your post's thesis - it's a big disadvantage of cross-examination. Yeah, it would be easy for her to clear it up, as long as she was talking to someone just trying to understand her. She can hardly be blamed for not clearing it up during a conversation with someone insisting she explain the difference between selling hamburgers and selling sex.

I may not agree with the conclusion but I think the argument is perfectly reasonable! If I had to guess, the reason Murphy doesn't adopt this framework is because it would necessarily require her to curtail some of her overall "all sex work is always bad" position.

...or you just got the basic tenets of her argument wrong, and there are perfectly reasonable (and perfectly reasonable to disagree with at the same time) arguments for all sex work being always bad.

The problem I often have with your top level posts, is that it's very hard to tell what you're trying to get at. Do you actually want to talk about how awesome cross-examination is? Do you want to talk about the ethics of prostitution and abortion, or the racism of the founding fathers? Do you want to figure out the best arguments for each of these issues? Do you want to psychoanalyze and dunk on the people you're using as examples? I suppose it could be possible to do all of the above, but I think it's pretty hard in general, and in the case of your posts these are clearly getting in the way of each other. I could give an example for a coherent "all sex work is bad" position, but given how your post is structured it would likely be met with a "that's not what she said, and it would be so easy for her to clear it up" response. On the other hand, you're using her performance in the debate to imply her position is unterneble, and that she should modify it, at least somewhat, and this does not follow at all. This is why I think that if you want to go for a multi-threaded approach, you should keep them separated, instead of trying to juggle them at the same time.

I agree there is a risk of getting issues muddled, and in this exchange I'm not trying to take a position on the sex work issue itself. I explained why I think Murphy is being evasive with her answers (she's acutely aware of the vulnerabilities in her positions) and cited to the particular pattern in her evasiveness as evidence for that thesis. I've dissected her interviews and even emailed her for clarification and that's what I have to work with. Even with that incomplete record, I also tried to construct what I think is an "honest" approach to what she seems to be getting at. If you think I might have gotten the basic tenets of her argument wrong, can you be specific about what my error is?

I agree there is a risk of getting issues muddled

If I was analyzing your behavior the same way you're analyzing Murphy's, I'd likely come to the conclusion that this was deliberate.

I explained why I think Murphy is being evasive with her answers (she's acutely aware of the vulnerabilities in her positions) and cited to the particular pattern in her evasiveness as evidence for that thesis. I've dissected her interviews and even emailed her for clarification and that's what I have to work with.

I don't think you demonstrated her avoidance so much as you invented it. Your email exchange is a good example. If memory serves, you asked her how she ended up coming to her beliefs about prostitution, and, like a normal person, she recalled the events that made an impression on her - conversations she had with proustites. You then framed it as her admitting to following a data-driven approach, in supposed contradiction to her earlier statement that no data could change her mind, even though there is no contradiction between these statements.

This is another point against cross-examination being awesome: even when someone is being clear about what they believe, you can ask unrelated question, and frame the answer to imply they believe something they don't.

If you think I might have gotten the basic tenets of her argument wrong, can you be specific about what my error is?

Sure:

  • The first error was implying that the "sex is sacred" view somehow contradicts her views on casual sex.

  • The second error was to use the first one to paint your version of the "basic tenets" as a more reasonable argument.

  • The third error was ascribe the supposedly more reasonable views to her, despite no evidence that she holds them.

  • The fourth error was declaring that the likely reason she did not express the views, which there is no evidence she even holds, was that expressing them would force her to adjust her position.

If I was analyzing your behavior the same way you're analyzing Murphy's, I'd likely come to the conclusion that this was deliberate.

You are welcome to do so and I would be eager to hear your evidence. I would be curious to know how you'd address one of the first hurdles, namely that I do agree with Murphy that selling sex is qualitatively different than virtually every other job. If I'm discussing cross-examination deliberately as just a pretext, why would I be doing so to undermine my own position?

I don't think you demonstrated her avoidance so much as you invented it.

I don't know what else to say here, she literally refused to answer Destiny's question and walked off, and she ignored multiple questions I asked her (e.g. most prominent one was how she ascertains the quality of a study, to her credit though she answered most of them). That's my definition of "avoidance", I'm not sure if you have a different one.

The first error was implying that the "sex is sacred" view somehow contradicts her views on casual sex.

'Sacred' and 'casual' are not direct antonyms, but it seems fair to say that they point to completely different directions. I readily admit that I don't know if this necessarily is a contradiction for Murphy, because I don't know how she'd reconcile the positions.

The second error was to use the first one to paint your version of the "basic tenets" as a more reasonable argument.

I don't follow. Is the problem that I used what you think is an erroneous premise, or that I declared my alternative argument to be more reasonable? If the former, my alternative argument doesn't rely on the "sex is sacred" premise so you can just take it out. If the latter, it would be helpful to explain why it's not reasonable rather than just assert it so.

The third error was ascribe the supposedly more reasonable views to her, despite no evidence that she holds them.

This is very confusing. There's overwhelming evidence that she holds the premises that selling sex is coercive because money is involved, and that sex makes women vulnerable, she said exactly so in the video we're discussing. I have no idea how you would overlook that. If what you meant to say is that she doesn't hold the exact argument I just made, well yes, that's why I said it was my own reformulation attempt instead of attributing it to her. Please let me know if I should've have been even more specific.

The fourth error was declaring that the likely reason she did not express the views, which there is no evidence she even holds, was that expressing them would force her to adjust her position.

Again, if you think something is an error, it helps to address the specific arguments I made for why I reached that conclusion rather than just assert it's wrong. "Is too" "Is not" is not a productive exchange.

You are welcome to do so and I would be eager to hear your evidence.

I'd have to go through your posts, but I feel like establishing a pattern where you mix a bunch of topics during the course of an argument would be easy enough. The challenge would be to get evidence that you do it on purpose, in order to muddle the issues. Thankfully your approach does not require much in terms of evidence, all I'd have to do is write a plausible story, where your actions are interpreted in an uncharitable light.

I would be curious to know how you'd address one of the first hurdles, namely that I do agree with Murphy that selling sex is qualitatively different than virtually every other job. If I'm discussing cross-examination deliberately as just a pretext, why would I be doing so to undermine my own position?

Because you wouldn't be undermining your own position. It's pretty clear that the reason you disagree with Murphy is that she thinks all pornography and all prostitution is bad, and you think it can be bad, but in some cases can be ok.

I don't know what else to say here, she literally refused to answer Destiny's question and walked off, and she ignored multiple questions I asked her (e.g. most prominent one was how she ascertains the quality of a study, to her credit though she answered most of them). That's my definition of "avoidance", I'm not sure if you have a different one.

Usually when you accuse someone of being evasive or avoidant, it means they are deliberately trying to not answer a specific question. Her hanging up on Destiny is not evidence of her avoiding a question. There are many other reasons that could explain her refusing to continue the conversation, including the ones she directly stated prior to leaving the stream, or Destiny's conduct during the debate outlined by jkf.

'Sacred' and 'casual' are not direct antonyms, but it seems fair to say that they point to completely different directions. I readily admit that I don't know if this necessarily is a contradiction for Murphy, because I don't know how she'd reconcile the positions.

"Sacred" in this context just means "regarding it higher than other day-to-day activities", it can mean anything from "only between married couples" to "only if you feel an emotional connection to the person" (or what the kids these days call "demisexual"). "Casual sex" usually means "outside of a romantic relationship, and with no expectation of it leading to one" it too can mean anything from "sucking off random dudes in bathroom stalls" to "I met someone at a conference, they're from the other side of the world, so there was no chance of it going anywhere, but we were vibing so great together that I spent the night with them anyway". Between the corners of these extremes there's plenty of space for someone being ok with casual sex, but believing it's sacred enough to not be for sale.

I don't follow. Is the problem that I used what you think is an erroneous premise, or that I declared my alternative argument to be more reasonable? If the former, my alternative argument doesn't rely on the "sex is sacred" premise so you can just take it out. If the latter, it would be helpful to explain why it's not reasonable rather than just assert it so.

It does rely on it. If the "sex is sacred" argument is kept on the table, you can't go on to declare that the likely reason she did not express the argument you outlined, is because it would force her to modify her position. There's still the possibility that that she's just going with the "sex is sacred" approach instead.

This is very confusing. There's overwhelming evidence that she holds the premises that selling sex is coercive because money is involved, and that sex makes women vulnerable, she said exactly so in the video we're discussing. I have no idea how you would overlook that.

And these are all very different from what you wrote in your outline, so I'm not overlooking them, you're moving the goalposts.

"Women are vulnerable (during sex)" does not mean there's an element of violence and coercion in sex. "Selling sex is coercive, because there's money involved" does not imply the same logic holds for wage work.

that's why I said it was my own reformulation attempt instead of attributing it to her. Please let me know if I should've have been even more specific.

If you didn't attribute it to her, it makes even less sense to claim that she didn't express these views, because it would force her to modify her position.

Again, if you think something is an error, it helps to address the specific arguments I made for why I reached that conclusion rather than just assert it's wrong. "Is too" "Is not" is not a productive exchange.

Yeah, but that's the problem with making claims with no evidence - it makes "is not" a perfectly valid response that needs to be addressed.

I understand that you're not convinced by my argument that there's enough evidence that Murphy is acting dishonestly, though keep in mind that I didn't claim my argument was conclusive or irrefutable. That's why I included an epistemological warning up top.

Her hanging up on Destiny is not evidence of her avoiding a question. There are many other reasons that could explain her refusing to continue the conversation, including the ones she directly stated prior to leaving the stream, or Destiny's conduct during the debate outlined by jkf.

What you're doing here (noting how this specific behavior of hers can have an innocent explanation) is great pushback! I offer one explanation and you offer another, but unless you develop why your explanation is more likely, we're kind of left in the agnostic "who can know?" position. If that's your position then cool.

But what if these moments of revelation aren’t real? As you say, you’re mind reading. What I dislike about verbal confrontation is that it’s easy for the whole thing to go off the rails, not because you’re wrong, but because you didn’t think quickly enough in response to being attacked from an unexpected direction, or you failed to notice a sly trap being inserted into the conversation three responses ago. It’s why Schopenhauer argued for never admitting defeat in an argument - just because you don’t have a response this second doesn’t mean you’re wrong, you might think of a counter argument in another couple of seconds.

Personally, I think there are benefits to verbal interchange - it’s much easier to pick up on confusions and misunderstandings - but if you’re going to use it for serious enquiry then it has to be relaxed, slow and capable of taking a break at any time. In the majority of cases I would rather have duelling essays.

Agreed. This is the basis for Nominal Group Technique in which decisions are made by people writing down their ideas and then having them read anonymously.

A person who is charismastic, quick-witted, or intimidating can win a debate even if their ideas are poor. Winning debates in real life is mostly just about busting the frame anyway. That's why political candidates never actual answer the questions given to them, but just grandstand. And it's why they go over their time to deprive their opponents the chance to grandstand.

Imagine Ben Shapiro vs. Scott Alexander. Ben would destroy Scott in a debate, but Scott is the far better thinker. Heck, even Donald Trump could probably "beat" Scott in a debate.

Imagine Ben Shapiro vs. Scott Alexander. Ben would destroy Scott in a debate, but Scott is the far better thinker. Heck, even Donald Trump could probably "beat" Scott in a debate.

This would really depend on the moderation style. It's like with interviewing, there are interviewers whose style is to keep the guest talking, so they lob softball questions when the guest starts to run dry. There are interviewers whose style is about putting the guest on the spot, so they keep cycling back to the same question if the guest is evasive.

If the debate was led by a hardball moderator, busting the frame would no longer be a winning tactic.

Donald Trump would steamroll Ben Shapiro in a debate with no contest. Charisma and presence matter a lot more when it comes to debates than written essays, (I'd honestly rather read an essay by Trump than Shapiro to be honest), and Trump is far better at that than Ben Shapiro could ever be.

Imagine Ben Shapiro vs. Scott Alexander. Ben would destroy Scott in a debate, but Scott is the far better thinker. Heck, even Donald Trump could probably "beat" Scott in a debate.

Yes, but why have them debate when you saw how good Scott's questions for the 2016 candidates were? I want to hear Bush address whether Barbara Bush was a genius or if there were many better candidates than him.

Imagine Ben Shapiro vs. Scott Alexander. Ben would destroy Scott in a debate, but Scott is the far better thinker. Heck, even Donald Trump could probably "beat" Scott in a debate.

I dont get people's obsession with Ben Shapiro. He's a savage culture warrior for sure, but claiming he's dumb is just kinda outright insane. He's clearly brilliant in his own sort of way. And I think his performance in a debate with Scott, setting aside his machine gun style, would highly depend on the topic. Some of Scott's positions are more well reasoned than others. Some of Ben's are more or less.

What I dislike about verbal confrontation is that it’s easy for the whole thing to go off the rails, not because you’re wrong, but because you didn’t think quickly enough in response to being attacked from an unexpected direction, or you failed to notice a sly trap being inserted into the conversation three responses ago.

Yes, of course this is a risk, and in picking out my examples I tried to avoid instances that could plausibly be interpreted as what you describe. I never claimed that verbal confrontation is better than everything! My praise was fairly limited to just a few aspects.

as Lance discloses in the moment, he doesn't believe that a pregnant woman has the right to take meth

He believes in killing fetuses/kids, but not if the would-be mother enjoys the process.

Really, that's the difference. One is an expensive and unpleasant medical procedure with lots of forms to be signed and cold metal tables. The other is a party.

Yes. Do you believe it makes no sense?

"You can receive X benefit but only after an unpleasant process, which itself serves partly as deterrent to prevent frivolous abuse" is not without precedent.

Nobody has designed abortion to be unpleasant. On the contrary, it's constantly evolving and improving to be less so. The financial and social consequences of choosing abortion are being persistently chipped away.

One is an expensive and unpleasant medical procedure with lots of forms to be signed and cold metal tables.

Not all abortions are dilatation & curettage. Pretty sure more than half of abortions are medical.

Not the late term ones

not if the would-be mother enjoys the process.

This isn't really a gotcha. Many people (most people, I'd argue) believe this to be true about many animals, for example. The guy who kills a cute fluffy cow because he's a farmer is OK with almost anyone who isn't a vegan. The guy who kills a cute fluffy cow out of bloodthirst and because he enjoys murdering living creatures to hear them squeal (and who thinks this is amusing) is not OK with almost anyone. Accidentally stepping on a bug is normal, pulling the wings off ladybugs you encounter for your amusement is not.

It is logically consistent to oppose people doing something for casual amusement but tolerate it for some other, (perceived as) more 'genuine' purpose. Of course, a genuine purpose is entirely subjective, but so are many things.

Overall, this is a great post, and I think you have a good point. However, I beleive you overargue it a bit, and even the insinuation that these examples might involve lying or dishonesty, is under-evidenced here(thought not necessarily untrue, just over interpreted given you're examples).

There's a very real difference in cross-examining on material facts of a situation from epistemic positions, and I think you're extending the implications of contradictions in the former too much into the latter. If I ask you 'where were you?, when?, what did you do?, with who?, and so on, and you provide me answers that self-contradict or are contradicted with other evidence, then I can fairly accuse you of being dishonest or mistaken.

Partly, this is because we're working on a very clear frame of ontology and epistemology that nobody is pushing back against. We're working within a materialist, physical reality that is universal and constant, and so forth. Contradictions that cannot exist in that shared framework must be reconciled, they are not usually allowed as evidence against the framework.

Imagine to the contrary, someone, when faced with a contradicting timeline, tried to argue that this is because of an update to the simulation or because of Christmas magic. You could dismiss as lying or crazy, but assume you didn't. To engage them, and get back to your orignal accusation of impossible contradiction between Event A and B, you must first travel down one level and redefend the consistent materialist frame. If your witness's entire argument rests on the existence of Christmas magic, and you refuse their allowance of arguing or even answering within a framework where that might exist, then you will walk away with the appearance of simple inconsistency, and interpretations of dishonesty, insanity, or stupidity.

So that's a somewhat silly scenario, because we all know that Christmas magic can't change the rules of physics and that we don't live in a simulation (right? don't we know that?).But the crux in epistemic, ideological, and political debates, is that the "we all know" is far less founded than in empirical examinations. When the examiner sets the frame, he controls the debate.

Chris Ruffo's example gets at this swimmingly, and he even tries to get to this meta-argument and it isn't accepted by the presenter (at least in your exerpt).

In his book, The Allure of Order about how educational debates are framed, Jal Mehta lays out three ways in which a particular paradigm in a debate shapes it. The main point is that having first mover advantage on setting the paradigm is powerful because replacing a paradigm is much more difficult, and the existing paradigm has tremendous authority over the conversation.

1. Consitutive (interpretations) effects. The paradigm sets the way an issue is conceived and discussed. 2. Strategic (incentives) actions. The paradigm creates opportunities for those who's views are consistent with it. 3. Regulative (intersubjective) function. It constrains the positions those who oppose the paradigm can take.

You can see all three of these on display quite clearly in the Ruffo example. And if you simply accept the paradigm, it might look like Rufo's in an epistemic jam. But if you reversed the cross examination, you would have seen an equal and opposite jam. These say nothing about who's epistemic position is inconsistent, because it only says that the conclusions of the one actor is inconsistent with the frame of the others... Which is not as interesting or 'gotcha' as it seems.

We see this also in your interpretation of the Murphey example, where you force a reframe of what's more likely a deontological view as an aesthetic one:

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.

This seems inaccurate, and you use that to ground your entire critique.Without the full clip, what I see Murphy doing here is having a deontological opinion, but defending it inside a paradigm about effects and outcomes. No fault to Destiny here. In fact, effects and outcomes, is kind of the default way to discuss morality across unsettled moral frameworks. But this has a constitutive effect, initially setting the converstaion into a causal discussion. There's nothign dishonest about taking this up, especially because the conversational cost to resetting the paradigm is great and rarely effective. (See Rufo's attempt).

Because we're talking effects and outcomes, Murphey takes the strategic position of showing the bad outcomes. But when it comes to exceptional examples, the regulative function of the paradigm set contrains her from being able extend the worldview. What we see here is an existing paradigm chase someone who's framework doesn't actually fit into a corner, not necessarily a breakdown of her actual position.

Now I think you get at this with your interpretation, but I think you mis-characterize it as her dishonestly hiding her real objection, when I think it's really getting chased down from trying to play along with a different framework's boundaries in realtime.

Sure, Murphey could have threaded this needle better by saying something like, "Male prostitutes for women are tremendously rare. Nominally allowing them, creates a standard of inequality for imperceptible benefit. Whether or not I find it wrong objectively is beside my point about the real-world affect of female prostitution on women."

But the fact that she didn't isn't really a point against here. When you drop someone else in your own maze, it's a hollow gloat that they get lost. What is interesting is whether they get lost in mazes they got to choose.

With that, we get to Tim Pool's example which is different, and notably happens because Tim interjects, he's not the cross-examiner.

Remember before I said:

These say nothing about who's epistemic position is inconsistent, because it only says that the conclusions of the one actor is inconsistent with the frame of the others... Which is not as interesting or 'gotcha' as it seems.

Here, Pool allows Lance to draw out his own framework. The "mother's body, mother's choice" has no starting point in the pro-lifer's frame. And Lance walks into an open contradiction within his own set of justification. It's somewhat similar to Murphey, but you already admitted that Murphey here probably isn't arguing her actual epistemic foundation around prostitution. There's no appearnce that Lance isn't. Lance is just proving that his heuristic is undercooked. It's nothing like the Rufo situation, which is just open paradigm warfare.

Eh, a deontological view of morality is, to caricature, 'sex is bad because it's on the list of Bad Things that my society told me I just know, ya know'. There's not really much defending to be done, within that framework, it's just on the moral-duty-list or it isn't. And I think that corresponds to a real flaw in Murphy's position that no framing fixes.

Destiny wasn't losing that debate no matter how things were 'framed', because Murphy's just not a capable thinker or debater. Obviously, there are plenty of strong and coherent cases against pornography.

To be quite fair, I dony know who either of these people are or the debate beyond what @ymeskhout quoted. My point was mostly about the power of the frame and the difficulty epistemic differences bring to claiming contradictions in a value based discussion as compared to a fact based one

I really appreciate how thorough and thoughtful this response is. I should have perhaps made it clearer that live debate has plenty of failure mode, particularly with how a conversation gets framed.

But if you reversed the cross examination, you would have seen an equal and opposite jam. These say nothing about who's epistemic position is inconsistent, because it only says that the conclusions of the one actor is inconsistent with the frame of the others... Which is not as interesting or 'gotcha' as it seems.

I don't think I understand this, what do you mean by "reverse" the cross-examination? I'm guessing you might mean an alternative scenario where Rufo asks Robinson about Jefferson's legacy but Robinson refuses to say anything positive about it? If that's how the discussion shakes out then yes I agree that would establish Robinson's position as inconsistent. It's perfectly possible for both of them to each hold inconsistent positions, showcasing that one person is using dodgy reasoning does not imply the other participant is innocent. [It's not relevant to your hypothetical, but in the interview Rufo does reverse the roles and asks multiple questions which to his credit Robinson readily answers.]

Re: Murphy

This seems inaccurate, and you use that to ground your entire critique.Without the full clip, what I see Murphy doing here is having a deontological opinion, but defending it inside a paradigm about effects and outcomes.

I agree with your analysis here based on the excerpt I picked out. I omitted a significant amount of prior discussion just because I wanted to be mindful of space, but I should have been more explicit. A commentator elsewhere made a similar point so I'll just repost part of my response:

The lead up to this particular exchange is relevant because Murphy was first arguing that sex work is bad because it's coercive, and it's by definition coercive because it involves someone having sex they wouldn't otherwise have were it not for the money offered. Destiny offers the obvious rejoinder that if you accept that premise, then ALL jobs are also "by definition coercive" as well. There's some anti-capitalists that actually agree with this premise but Murphy doesn't and so she finds herself having to add yet another qualifier to her argument, this time about how women are much more vulnerable during sex. Similarly, there are radical feminists that actually believe that ALL heterosexual sex is "by definition coercive" because it's penetrative and occurs within a patriarchal system where consent is impossible. Murphy has to be aware of these arguments, but as an unapologetic heterosexual woman, she doesn't want to concede that. At this point my impression is she quit because she ran out of pivots.

Re: Lance

Here, Pool allows Lance to draw out his own framework. The "mother's body, mother's choice" has no starting point in the pro-lifer's frame. And Lance walks into an open contradiction within his own set of justification. It's somewhat similar to Murphey, but you already admitted that Murphey here probably isn't arguing her actual epistemic foundation around prostitution. There's no appearnce that Lance isn't. Lance is just proving that his heuristic is undercooked.

I concede that "undercooked heuristic" is a possible explanation for what transpired but I'm not convinced because of how Lance's pivots were deployed. Reflexively his first objection was based on a straight forward "thou shall not intentionally kill a child" ethos, which I believe is revealing because it sheds some light on what Lance believes 'kill' and 'child' to mean. When he realizes how much he stumbled, he doesn't acknowledge that, he just pivots to another reason ("meth is illegal") that seems even more undercooked. Granted, the lack of an acknowledgement is not dispositive given the real-time nature of the discussion and how many people were ganging up on, but my impression of the exchange still falls along the lines of "oh damn, I admitted something I wasn't supposed to, now I have to think of another reason." My interpretation can indeed be characterized as a stretch, but it's also not set in stone and I would be interested to hear an alternative explanation from the man himself.

One of the worst things about having a very unpopular worldview that I have to hide from nearly everybody I know is that these days I have basically no opportunities for serious face-to-face synchronous argument/conversation about controversial issues. I used to be very good at debate-style argumentation, but I definitely feel like that skill has atrophied from disuse. Even the people with whom I do discuss serious issues are the ones who are largely in agreement with me about the big picture - at least, in enough agreement that I can reliably trust them not to want to harm me because of my views - so it’s not useful for practicing the art of arguing well.

I do agree with some commentators who have pushed back against your thesis; debate-style argument genuinely is more susceptible to emotional manipulation, the leveraging of charisma, and various cynical derailing tactics. Especially when an audience is involved, the incentive toward demagoguery and cheap tactics can be profound, and that’s to say nothing of the opportunity it presents for the mining of unflattering soundbites that can be decontextualized and then weaponized. It’s an artform that rewards glibness.

Still, I think you’re dead-on about the ways in which, when done correctly, it can allow interlocutors to really strike at the heart of disagreements, without all of the careful rhetorical defenses that the written form allows one to cultivate. It’s also just fun and invigorating, and is a great opportunity to hone one’s thinking and exercise one’s brain.

I’ve considered reaching out to you about appearing on The Bailey, but I would probably want to discuss something slightly less inflammatory than the topic(s) I’m most closely associated with - not only because you’ve already had a (frankly, pretty poor quality, I’m sorry to say) episode about race/identity, but also because I’m still so freaked-out about op-sec - and I’ve struggled to think of another topic where I feel like I could really be a more valuable and interesting contributor than someone else you could talk to instead. I’ll mull it over some more!

AI has vastly expanded the tricks we could use to maintain your anonymity. We can make you sound like Drake if you really wanted to!

Imagine the risk to poor Champagne Papi’s career if someone were to listen to the episode and think it’s really him expressing such views! I couldn’t bear to get a fellow former theatre kid cancelled like that.

I used to be very good at debate-style argumentation, but I definitely feel like that skill has atrophied from disuse.

This is exactly my feeling as well. I know for a fact that I used to be extremely persuasive, and for better or for worse had a reputation for "standing on a soapbox". Late night conversations in high school and college were full of real discussion where people walked away either convinced or more educated, not pissed off beyond repair.

Now the absolute best-case scenario is I find myself in a 6-on-1 debate after I've already had 3 whiskeys and am compelled to respond to some hot-take that's too stupid to let slide.

Judging just by the quotes I don't find the Destiny/Murphy example convincing. In particular it's not clear who's employing pretextual arguments (both?).

Murphy gives an example of an (alleged) harm that she claims accompanies the sex industry. Destiny responds by proposing a situation where the harm does not occur. But that does not address the argument against prostitution as a whole -- if the industry is necessarily accompanied by harm, you can be against it as a whole, and if you're against it as a whole then it's common to be against it in every case, if only because blanket rules are less corruptible than arbitrarily large decision trees. After all, almost every "unethical" behavior has some corner case where it's actually a good choice, does that invalidate the concept? Destiny's argument reminds me of politicians who talk endlessly about the advantages of clean coal, only to build more of the dirty kind.

You're by no means the first to find that particular example lacking, and it's my fault that I didn't include at least a summary of the discussion that preceded it. See here for that.

The goal of the questions Destiny was employing was explained well by @curious_straight_ca in considering a parallel on alcohol:

A debate with that would go like: Maybe Megan first mentions abuse, destiny says "okay what if it didn't cause abuse", megan mentions wasting money and drunk driving. Destiny now notices the grouping, and says "okay, it looks like you think alcohol clouds peoples' judgement and lets out their worst instincts. What if it didn't do that, would you still oppose it". Megan now says yes, and says "because it makes you fat and harms your liver". Destiny now asks "okay, what if it didn't cloud your judgement and didn't have health effects, would you oppose it"? Now Megan says "I guess not." Now Destiny understands megan's position better, and we can figure out if each component is true or not!

If you don't know exactly why someone supports/opposes a thing, then it's pretty damn hard to discuss the thing.

The alcohol example may be illuminating: note that the counterfactuals have different forms. In the alcohol case, the hypotheses apply to alcohol as a whole, whereas in the prostitution one they only apply to a specific worker. If I told you (a teetotaler) that my mate Paul drinks a fifth every day, has the liver of a man half his age, and actually drives better drunk, would that change your mind on the merits of drink? Now, I may well be imputing an argument that Murphy would not support and did not speak to. One can charitably assume that both speakers abbreviate the rigor of their arguments, and attempt to beat steelmen out of the plowshares (?) they provide.

I'm not understanding why the distinction between whole and individual matters in this context. If you told me (as a teetotaler) about Paul my response would probably be something along the lines that an individual's remarkable account is weak counter-evidence. If you told me about a class of people like Paul, a possible response would probably cite a utilitarian calculus.

The alcohol and prostitution examples are not meant to map onto each other perfectly. It was meant to describe what the purpose of questions are, to figure out and draw the boundaries for why people hold positions.

This is a minor point but isn't the more obvious argument against pregnant mothers doing meth (from the perspective of an advocate for late-term abortion) is that there is a chance the baby will be born with severe disabilities and have a lot of trouble throughout their life because of that? It seems logically consistent to believe both that killing fetuses is basically fine and that doing things that will result in children who experience needless suffering is not fine. I realize Lance didn't reach for that justification and that perhaps reveals something about his moral intuitions, but the "what about meth" argument doesn't actually seem like much of a gotcha to me.

the "what about meth" argument doesn't actually seem like much of a gotcha to me.

I didn't intend to present that question as generalizable gotcha, rather my focus was on how Lance responded to it. I'm sure there's plenty of principled responses you could make to the question but Lance instead reflexively resorted to "you shouldn't kill a child" which I thought was quite revealing about what he really believes.

Yeah, I wasn't trying to disagree with you. I agree it may be revealing about what Lance himself believes (perhaps I didn't indicate that clearly enough). I just wanted to comment that there are pretty good responses to this question, even for the most die-hard of abortion advocates.

I think the better question for pro choice people is “Did you support my body my choice really covid vax?”.

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.

The right move is to turn this around. YOU, Robinson, are doing something so totally heinous today that in 200 years all people will condemn you as a terrible bigot. But you can't even see what it is with your own eyes. Is the future right to condemn you?

But you can’t even see what it is with your own eyes.

The tricky part here is that the Founding Fathers, including Jefferson, did consciously acknowledge that slavery was a real moral wrong. Not only is it not the case that the Founding Fathers couldn’t see what they were doing wrong in owning slaves, but they actively stated that slavery ought to end. Here’s Jefferson’s take:

A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once concieved and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. […] The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be.

This isn’t even on the same level as, say, veganism, to which analogies are often made. Sure, maybe our descendants living centuries from now would condemn us for our meat-eating, but despite the existence of present-day vegans, it cannot be stated that there is a deep moral divide at the center of America (or any other country to my knowledge) between vegans and carnivores in the same way that there was in early America between slavery-enjoyers and abolitionists.

So it would be inaccurate, in this case, to say that Jefferson couldn’t even see what he was doing wrong by owning slaves.

There's an inkling of a good argument here. But it's not the kind of argument that'd work in Rufo's position, or more generally in a public debate without a lot of context. It feels like "okay, maybe I stole from the store, but aren't we all sinners in God's eyes?".

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.

Okay, not the most substantive point but this error, which seemed to be pretty rare at one time, is everywhere lately and it drives me nuts. "Borne" is not a fancy alternate spelling of "born", as many people seem to have suddenly concluded. It's a different word with a different meaning ("carried", more or less). You could say, for example, that Murphy's responses are "borne up by a mighty wind of righteous indignation", or something like that, though that does seem a bit purple for either Yassine or myself now that I read back over it. But in this case the word you want is just "born".

I appreciate you pointing this out! I admit I never really paid attention to the word before. It seems that "borne out" carries (heh) a slightly different meaning and seems to be used as a synonym for "confirmed" or "proven" as in "the evidence bears out the allegations"

I think it kind of works; one could be said to 'carry' an objection. I understand your irritation, though.

Re Rufo I think he is just making the point that “Noah was a righteous man of his time.” That is, Jefferson should be judged in the context of his society. In that context, he was probably in the center on this issue. But what Robinson is trying to do is use modern views to go back in time to discredit what Jefferson did (which was quite valuable).

That might be what Rufo was trying to do, but it's not that hard to just say something like: "Sure he was racist but if you somehow believe this should diminish the lasting impact his efforts have had in securing a beacon of liberty the world continue to be envious of, I would vehemently disagree with that."

Entrenching himself on the "was he racist?" line just accepts Robinson's potential framing.

I think Rufo is saying “he wasn’t Racist judged by his contemporaries and his ideas that he actually is famous for are not non fact racist and continue to have vitality today.”

Agreed Rufo could do a better job

I think the best way to describe this in military terms would that it's baiting the enemy army to fight you in the bailey.

Perfect! I like this a lot

The greatest minds of all generations are considered as such due to years if not decades of deep thought, not because of the off the cuff ripostes. Newton's magnum opus was the result him being so consumed by his work, he forgot to even consume food. He was also painfully shy and if he would forced to defend his hypotheses against a hostile interluctor, more interested in defeding Aristotelism than the truth, fan of the Greek guy would appear victorious.

Luckily, he lived in a time in which the written word was common place and the printing press which speedup the process of dissemation of ideas even further. When objections arose he was able to consider and respond to them asynchronously.

Or the Fermat-Pascal correspondance. Two pioneers in probability poking holes in the others formula for the expected value of a interrupted best-out-N game. Had they forgone letters and were instead each given five minutes and five minutes to respond, the problem would have been solved by someone else.

When it comes to my academic work, I have absolutely already thought about every detail far more intensively than anyone who questions me about it, and I have to regularly go in front of highly-educated people who are not shy in the least about trying to question every aspect that they can think of. I've seen some folks get absolutely blindsided by questions in the past, but those folks are usually either new to a field or just have sub-par work generally. (Academic work, like everything, follows Sturgeon's Law; there are a lot of sub-par academics.)

Worst case, you're dealing with someone whose brain is just completely stuck in a different way of thinking, which can easily happen if you're doing something genuinely novel, especially if the old methods have been established for decades, such that folks have essentially 'grown up' just doing the method, not thinking about it, figuring that all the thinking about it was done decades ago. But if you know this, as Newton would have surely known about his predecessors in detail, it's not too difficult to come up with concrete examples which definitively show that the old methods cannot be blindly applied. This is absolutely a top priority for my own work, refining these examples to their barest, with maximum force against the old way of thinking. It surely was for Newton and others. Many of the major defining moments in science/mathematics are not actually the new method, but the bold, undeniable counterexample demonstrating that the old method is broken. Then follows the new approach.

I have zero doubt that Newton would succeed in this challenge, but that is in part due to what is ultimately the narrowness of academic inquiry.

I have no idea what racists means. You need more specific. Do I believe on average blacks are better athletes and whites are smarter. Yes. Was my last love and almost married black like Jefferson. Yes.

Is racism believing in not believing in genetics and everyone has the same endowments? Or does it mean you judge people on their own abilities?

This is a funny thing he said.
The blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind."

I guarantee nobody whose well a KKK member believes that. Or a HBD person.

I have no idea what racists means. You need more specific.

I agree! That would've been a great clarifying question for Rufo to ask.

up until the millisecond the fetus exists the birth canal

Presume this should be "exits".

It's pretty funny how badly Meghan Murphy got stuck in your had. That debate was months ago, time to move on man.

What's the point of this comment other than a low-effort jab? You have a lot of bad comments like this, though you seem to spread them out over a period of months. But next time is probably going to get you a ban.

Is there any proof that Jefferson's personal views on blacks ever motivated any of his decisions as a politician and public servant? And if yes, did those decisions have a lasting effect on the political fabric of the nation? That seems to be an important question to me.

Murphy is evidently aware that this argument can't be spoken out loud because it's likely too vacant to be generally persuasive

From a rationalist point of view, this can be one of the bad things about the whole process. It's easy for some position to not "be generally persuasive" in the sense of "quoting it on CNN or sending it to your employer gets you in trouble", yet actually be fairly reasonable. I'm sure you can think of a number of examples (perhaps some low controversy examples would be "yes, I should run over a fat man with a trolley" or "yes, there is some acceptable non-zero level of violent crime", but many examples are very political).

There's also the problem of absolute statements made about noncentral examples. You can't say "Thomas Jefferson is a noncentral example of a racist" on the Internet. (Not that most of the audience knows what a noncentral example is anyway.)

And finally there's epistemic learned helplessness. The proper reaction to someone "disproving your position" is to politely ignore them. If you've checked around for a while, and haven't found any good counter-counterarguments even when you aren't being put on the spot and have some time and access to research, then maybe you can start changing your position.


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