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I kind of frowned at your comment above, which is plausibly innocent in spite of the fact that it reads like thinly-veiled, low-effort bait. But leading your further response with a backhanded "hmm I wonder" seems like confirmation that your initial question was insincere, and you were just probing for an angle to sneer at. This is unnecessarily antagonistic (and arguably Bulverism, too). Engage honestly, or not at all, please. (In particular, speculating on the motives of your interlocutor is something that must be handled with effort and charity, and is often better never raised at all. And yes--I understand that is what I am doing here, but it is something moderation sometimes requires.)
This specific interaction with you seems to happen every time I comment about trans stuff. I'm not sure what to do about it as I was trying to be more cautious this time.
The first comment was sincere confusion. The second comment was genuinely trying to point out an alternative explanation for their observations (the two situations look very similar to the receiver) and see if they wanted to reflect and talk about the topic more (apparently not).
Blanket statements are almost always wrong, and assigning a blanket statement to your opponent's belief-state is especially fraught. That's what OP is doing by saying 'many of my opponents believe that the difference is 100% nothing other than patriarchy brainwashing,' a type of extreme and simplistic sentiment that very few people actually believe and that it's dangerous to casually assign to them.
I don't know if I just have to accept their premise because they're making a claim about their lived experience, that seems bad for debate. Or if I'm again just being asked to use more words to rule out specific types of hostile intent, which I was trying to do more of in my comments on this particular thread but failed to apply to this individual sentence. I can try to leave zero sentences under-caveated, it's just very tiring.
Interesting. I did not originally see that this was a thread about gender revisionism, however--only when I went back to check the context of the conversation.
Well, like I said, that doesn't strike me as totally implausible. But "I'm gonna ask a question that is non-specific, without even making any clearly charitable attempt at interpreting your position as written or expressing my own views in vulnerable detail" is often used as bait, by positioning one commenter as "just asking questions," placing the entire burden of carrying the discussion on the other as they explain their own position while getting increasingly frustrated with the refusal of the other party to engage. Of course--sometimes we are completely ignorant and the best we can manage is a "huh, say more please?" But often such noncommittal engagement is just insincere.
Part of charitable engagement is accepting evidence presented in the best possible light. Sometimes the evidence is sufficiently unlikely that a different approach is warranted, but when you re-describe someone's experiences you're engaged in a sort of mind-reading argument, rather than meeting them on their own terms. This is encapsulated in part in this rule:
Like, in our non-mod-hat interaction here, imagine if instead of just pointing out to you something you didn't know, I had responded
This is a strictly inferior response to the one I wrote. Instead of giving you (I assume) new information directly correcting your false belief (as my actual response did), this response assumes you are in fact wrong about your own experiences and skips straight to describing why you are wrong by insinuating, and not even very subtly, that you are just using arguments as soldiers, rather than possessing any real understanding of the world. Slapping an "I wonder" at the front to make it speculative rather than declarative softens it some, but comes across as passive-aggressive instead, on account of the Bulverism that follows.
Well, perhaps predictably, I actually like that comment a lot (although obviously your actual use of an example was very good too).
I feel like I would have taken this as a fair challenge to reflect on how I've interpreted things I've read in the past and wrack my memory more carefully. It might have been enlightening for me (it is somewhat as I'm thinking about it now). It actually is possible that I flag too many things as the result of hostile filter bubbles or toxoplasma or etc and apply 'no true scotsman' to them too regularly. That's a good possibility to point out and ask for reflection on.
Of course, the response might be 'Everyone should always be doing that type of self-reflection all the time before posting anything, so there shouldn't be anything to gain from challenging them like this', but I think that's not a realistic standard to expect from people in general. These wouldn't be cognitive biases if they didn't get regularly overlooked by the people making them. And if we were all in perfect self-reflective equilibrium on all our beliefs all teh time and all our disagreements were only due to different utility functions or disagreements about matters of fact, there would be no mutual benefit to talking about things here instead of just reading Wikipedia.
I guess part of it is just that I really like the Socratic Method, and underestimate how much of a high-trust game that is and how hostile initiating it can look if that trust doesn't exist. I like the conversational style of a long series of short interactive back-and-forth questions and challenges a lot more than two people chucking a couple of walls of text at each other, I think it has a lot more chance of two people actually coming to know and understand each other rather than just representing themselves.
But, again, fair enough, I'll try to watch my affinity for this type of interaction and make sure I'm making myself clear and being respectful.
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