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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   30252 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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This gets at something of a personal peeve of mine in discussions (especially culture war or political discussion more generally) where generalizations over groups come with a lack of quantifier for the group being generalized over. This might seem pedantic but I think it's important because quantifiers can cause a generalization ("Street sweepers are bad") to range from the trivial ("There exists at least one bad street sweeper") to the absurd ("Every street sweeper is bad"). I think a lot of motte and bailey arguments boil down to two people interpreting the same statement with radically different quantifiers. This is especially the case when there is a lack of charity on either side. It is very easy to read statements by your political opponents in the most absurd way and unclear communication enables such misunderstandings.

I think one problem with this analysis (that is illustrated by the factory worker example) is an unstated assumption that an individuals marginal value or net contribution is some property of the individual that is somehow fixed over time. All humans start out as net drains on society (in the form of infants) and develop our abilities in various ways to be more or less productive. How productive a member of society we end up being is not just down to our personal characteristics but also other social and economic facts of the society we exist in. As in the factory worker example the marginal value of the 5th worker (whoever they are) is very high but the marginal value of the sixth worker (and more) is very low. Our contribution to society is not purely some individual thing, but also a function of the decisions and positions of other people in society.

You might enjoy this John Nerst post on Interpretation Matrices, if you haven't already seen it. Some simple statements are imprecise on multiple dimensions, even.

A very good post, thank you for sharing it. One of those eye-openers that I'm sure I'll see everywhere now.

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