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Recently, I've been subjected to several posts on Twitter about Peter Singer. Singer posits a compelling argument: Society accepts a certain concept, A, yet its variant A', which along many relevant dimensions is similar to A but should be less objectionable, is met with taboo. Here is Singer's post, although I don't want to get into the the details because I'm thinking not about the argument itself but the prevalent reaction to it. The most common response to Singer's points is not an intellectual rebuttal but rather an expression of shock and outrage. The taboo around A' is like an emotional firewall, preventing any rational discourse.
This pattern of reaction is disconcerting. We live in a world of complex issues that demand thoughtful consideration, yet it appears that a significant portion of discourse is reduced to emotional outbursts. It's really hard for me not to feel disheartened or even adopt a misanthropic view when I see things like this.
So, is this emotional explosiveness truly representative of the general populace, or is it just that on Twitter, the most extreme views gain the most traction? Moreover, how can we, as individuals seeking constructive dialogue, navigate this landscape without succumbing to frustration or misanthropy?
I'm genuinely interested in understanding whether these reactions are as pervasive as they seem and what strategies we might employ to foster more meaningful, thought-provoking conversations, especially in a world dominated by emotional responses.
Besides being obvious sneerclub bait, this post is kind of ridiculous because you can sum it up as "Why does the Motte exist?", but I just want to know if there is any way to bring more people into the Motte's style of discourse or how serious a problem it is that some people are seemingly unpersuadable.
I don't really think you can take the particular A and A' of Singer's comment and generalize them to all such forms of the argument. For example, something like this argument was (is) very common in the push for legal marijuana. That society already accepts and encourages use of much more dangerous drugs (in the form of alcohol and tobacco) so it doesn't make any sense to ban marijuana on the basis of its supposed danger.
"Should be less objectionable" according to who? It seems like the argument assumes a degree of inter-subjective agreement about the relative ranking of A and A' that is not, empirically, true.
Statements like this are why discussing this without the context of the actual A and A' are impossible. This may be true for the particular A' in Singer's post but I do not think it is true in general.
Exactly! And I guess your point is that the push for legal marijuana is slowly winning, but my counter-point is that legal marijuana is winning much more slowly than it ought to be, given that there is such a strong argument in its favor. Indeed, these are the kinds of important questions of public policy that I am worried about and that inspired this post, Singer's A' being illegal is nowhere near the top 10 on my list of biggest injustices. But we have lots of things that would make a lot of people better off but are illegal because they sound bad, which, as Bryan Caplan puts it, "The way I like to think about it is that markets are great at doing good things that sound bad, and governments are great at doing bad things, that sound good."
I agree with you that Singer's A' is not strictly comparable to A such that we can say supporting A but not A' is irrational, but my point is that the responses I have seen do not even get there, they stop at "A'? Ew, yuck"
I think this misunderstands my point. My point is rather, there are some arguments of the A/A' form that do not descend into "Ew, yuck" or similar, but also that what makes an argument convincing is not universal, it can be relative. It's relative to what ethical premises you accept. It's relative to facts you know about the world. Changes in policy get even more complicated, being related to facts about how governments are structured and a million other factors. There are many explanations for why the given A/A' argument is not considered strong by a lot of people, ranging from differences of premises to different knowledge of facts. It is not correct to extrapolate the state of the world by assuming most people share your moral opinions and state of knowledge.
Frankly, I think this is a terrible theory of mind. People generally have motivations and reasons for believing the things they do beyond "it sounds bad." Maybe you think their reasons round off to that because they are not utilitarians or consequentialists but I think it is much better to understand people's beliefs and motivations on their own terms.
Do you often see discussions of issues on Twitter that go the way you wish this discussion had gone?
Well... I disagree that it is a terrible theory of mind. In line with the main theme of this discussion, people just don't tend to think very deeply about most issues. And I don't believe that the average person who supports, say, rent control laws, understands the economic argument against them but still supports them because they have a different moral philosophy from economists, even though I agree that in theory there could be such a person with such a philosophy. I just think most voters go by "gut instinct", so if something sounds bad, they want a law against it, and if it sounds good, they want a law promoting it.
I think the issue is most people in favor of rent control policies don't understand the economic arguments against them. They have mistaken factual beliefs. They correctly perceive the first order effects of reducing rent for people covered by such policies and think it is desirable. I think it takes a pretty specific kind of economics education to see the prices as outputs of a system, rather than inputs, and reason from the implications of that.
I think there is a confusion in this discussion between people being irrational and people lacking specific technical knowledge or perspective.It's like the xkcd Average Familiarity comic but for moral philosophy or economics.
The issue here, to me, is that then the obvious follow-up question is, Why do they have mistaken factual beliefs? Surely some of them are just stupid and others are just in situations of forced ignorance, but I doubt that that covers more than a tiny fraction of them. So that would leave most people who are choosing to remain ignorant of the truth, which leads them to false conclusions; but why would they do that? My pet theory isn't "gut instinct" about what sounds good or what sounds bad to oneself, but rather another sort of "gut instinct" about what belief makes one more praised and less punished in one's social world. And thus people figure out what to remain ignorant of, so as to control one's own beliefs in a way that is beneficial to their social well-being (this may look like Bulverism, but in this case, the fact that these people in this hypothetical are mistaken, i.e. wrong, was taken as the baseline, so talking about how and why they landed on this wrongness rather than whether they're wrong seems appropriate).
That said, my pet theory might just be equivalent to the original assertion about what "sounds good," since one of the most common ways that I can tell of someone learning how to control one's own beliefs in such a way as to increase praise and reduce punishment socially is to modulate what "sounds good" (in an intuitive, ethical sense) to oneself.
I think you overestimate how much people are motivated to seek out the truth about something that's not interesting or important to them, especially if it means getting in long online debates and understanding technical arguments and possibly reading academic papers. It's not that people are aware of their ignorance and consciously choosing to be ignorant, it's that they were told incorrect things by some source they trust and have rarely been presented with counter evidence or reasoning. Or worse, have ended up in some epistemic closure that prevents them from considering alternative reasons and evidence. They are ignorant of their ignorance! I think certain kinds of arguments having certain social status attached might make sense as a cause for why people come to form particular beliefs but I think it is rarely a reason, in the sense of something subjectively experienced.
I'd agree with this, but, again, I think just moves things a step back - why are they ignorant of their own ignorance? Most of it is, I think, that it's really hard to pay attention to your own ignorance; given that it's so hard, it's natural that they would make that choice not to do it and just remain ignorant of it. The cost-benefit calculation, compared to the far less costly and usually more beneficial strategy of just following the "does it give me social praise/punishment" measurement just doesn't work out. So they choose - a good choice in most cases, almost certainly - not to put in the hard work necessary to confront their own ignorance, and so they remain ignorant of their own ignorance, causing them to land at wrong conclusions. But they do land at conclusions somehow - it might be a bit too pithy to call it "gut instinct" or "what feels good," but if it is, I don't think it is by much.
I haven't thought of this sort of distinction between "cause" versus "reason," but if you break it up that way, I think what you wrote here makes sense. It's just, I think the "reason" in the sense of something subjectively experienced is one of the least interesting and least impactful factors when it comes to exploring the way people think about things, because the flexibility that people have for using anything they want as a reason to support anything they want is effectively infinite.
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