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Just because they're annoying doesn't mean they're wrong - a meta-discussion
A few months ago a wild vegan appeared. He was almost self-parodically stereotypical: short, mid thirties, college-educated, and into endurance sports. He posted a reasonably well-argued case that veganism was not harmful to sporting performance, with the usual smug boasting of his numbers in endurance sports. At the end of his post, he finished with "what's your excuse?"
The entirety of his well-reasoned post was ignored, and he was dogpiled for that one final sentence.
Mottizens could immediately detect what was going on - he actually found the killing and eating of animals to be immoral, but didn't think that would be a convincing argument, so he tried to achieve his goal with another argument.
Both positions are actually worth considering. I'm open to the possibility that killing animals for food is wrong, and I'm open to the possibility that a vegan diet is not harmful to athletic performance. Hiding behind one to advance another, however, is deceitful.
I've actually tried to engage seriously with these ideas, and in my desire to see their own steelmen, I have tried to read some vegan sites. Usually I give up quickly, as they are full of the above argumentation - shifting goalposts, emotional appeals, hiding behind one argument to advance another, etc.
I wish I could say I have rejected vegetarianism because I engaged with their best arguments and found them wanting. Instead, I found their argumentation so annoying I ceased to engage with them.
I've had similar experiences with people who hate cars. Like anyone else who can do math, I have often found it absurd to use two tons of car and two liters of fuel to get two bags of groceries. I've also tried to mitigate some of these by moving to a New Urbanist development (with an unpleasant HOA, sadly), and I've got an electric car and solar panels on my roof. Sadly, this doesn't lead to any productive discussion, as I've discussed before.
Years ago, I remember a similar circular argumentative style among supporters of the ACA. They would say that people are afraid to start companies because they won't have health care, to which I'd reply "sure, how about two years of subsidized COBRA?". Then they'd point to catastrophic expenses, to which I'd say "sure, how about a subsidized backstop for all 1MM+ expenses for anyone who has a 1MM plan?", to which they'd change the argument again.
Of course, there's a pattern here. From what I can tell, many vegetarians have an (understandable) response to the raising, killing, and eating of animals. Some people seem to be terrified of owning and operating large machines, and they find private cars and single family housing to be socially alienating. Some people are emotionally disturbed by other people suffering from the health consequences of a lifetime of bad choices.
What these groups all have in common is a strong ability to signal these things emotionally to people similar to them and form a consensus, but also a generally terrible ability to discuss these things reasonably.
We don't have many vegans, anti-car people, or socialists here at The Motte - but that's not because their arguments are invalid, it's because the people attracted to those ideologies don't fit well with our particular discursive style. On the flip side, we have plenty of white nationalists, who seem to be able to adapt.
I'm confident that white nationalists are wrong. I have engaged with their best arguments, and found them wanting.
I'm only confident that vegans are annoying, because they are so annoying that I find it hard to engage with their arguments.
I think that's a blind spot for The Motte.
So the Motte struggles to productively engage with ideas that are usually held and advocated by the types of people who are a poor fit for the culture here, is that right? Sure, I can believe that.
In general, the Motte is a very male social group that is structured around creating conditions for a masculine "fair fight". The rules are all about structuring an environment where people openly challenge each other, state their position and opposition plainly, and have a battle of wits, skill, and knowledge. The roles of popularity, status, and broader coalitional politics of the people involved are supposed to be temporarily suspended. Some kind of analogous form of this kind of competition occurs throughout the animal kingdom, but almost entirely between competing males, and it's more common as intra-group competition. The outgroup may be regarded more like dangerous animals that need to be eliminated by any means necessary.
Feminized social spaces don't tend to have much time even for the concept of a "fair fight". In fact, for women (or feminine males), the very notion of a fair fight is foolishness. Female social competition is much more about misdirection, subtefuge, and ambush. You should never challenge an enemy openly and square off against them; there should be no declaring a time and place or choosing your weapons. The goal is to wait until your opponents' back is turned and strike, or even better get someone else to strike for you. The roles of popularity, status, and coalitional politics are front and center, and even the very means by which the battle is waged.
This is essentially why too many women in academia is ruining science and related fields. Once there are enough relatively ordinary women, they shift the culture away from the "fair fight" model of science, and so science is now more about popularity, status, and coalitional politics and the battle of ideas is engaged by way of back channels. I recall recently listening to an interview with a philosopher lamenting the terrible influence that critical theory has had on the philosophy profession, and how it has all but taken over without seeming to have won any arguments. Infamously, such people do not engage in debates, i.e. "fair fights", but rather they use indirect, institutional, and social power to defeat their enemies often without even giving them a chance to defend themselves.
In my experience, advocates of veganism (as opposed to all vegans) tend to disproportionately belong to the latter group, and so they aren't going to feel comfortable and competent at interacting with the Motte. Sometimes people like these will actually stumble upon good ideas, and those ideas will perhaps not get a fair hearing on a forum like The Motte because their advocates usually don't fight fair. This could undoubtedly cause a blind spot. There is no solution. White nationalist types tend to be rather masculine in their disposition, and so they usually intuitively and more comfortably engage with the fair-fight culture.
I don't think this is true as stated. It's more of a place where we can discuss ideas and share perspectives. People do stake out opposing positions, but don't really battle as much as they do elaborate and try to convince. I understand why this feels right, the analogy fits. But this place is, if anything, one of the least "battle"-based "political debate" spaces on the internet. Does anyone, for instance, mentally keep track of who's winning the most arguments? I certainly don't - I do have a sense of who's writing well or poorly, but that's almost never based in winning, it's just based on how informative or enjoyable I find reading individual posts. George_E_Hale would be up there if I had to make a status ranked list, even though he just posts little life stories totally unconnected to anything else. Whereas, in say, a community for a small online game, there's a strong competitive spirit and desire to win, people carefully watch who's beating who and try to copy their skills, and form teams based on winrates and stats. Or even in other political debate spaces, there are formalized 'debates' and people discuss after the fact who won the 'debates', who had better arguments, etc. In both of these, while it's not normative, people regularly get very mad when they lose repeatedly, which I don't really see here. So IMO themotte is significantly more feminine in the respect you describe than the kind of 'fair fights' you see in sports - and that's a good thing.
And, indeed, themotte has significantly more women than most other high-intelligence online spaces I participate in, and women are if anything overrepresented among posters I enjoy reading the most versus average posters. (although it's still obviously very male skewed)
Also, iirc most of the major innovators in critical theory, postmodern philosophy, and other in-large-part-BS academic fields (I think there are some good parts in critical theory and postmodernism, but it's undeniable something went wrong) were male. I don't think women have much to do with why Derrida, Freire, or Lacan are like that.
Eh. There are a ton of extremely 'masculine' (in terms of discourse style) vegan advocates, even though you're right that vegan activists are disproportionately female (iirc), so I don't think this is actually an issue at all. Random examples - avi bitterman, vegan gains (both of whom are also very "masculine" in the physical sense), also Effective Altruists (less so in the physical sense)! One of the much more aggressive and combat-oriented debate communities I was referencing above is significantly composed of vegans.
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Do you still have links to the interview?
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Reference here for all the people who got really mad at me for characterizing anti-woke sentiments as believing women are not as competent in high-status professions.
Also:
Pretty sure it always was, and only doesn't look that way to us because victors write the history books and because there wasn't social media to record and promote all of it to a wide audience.
Always was, but less so. It's all on the margin, as the economists say. It's not like men were always honorable, but they could at least sometimes be held to that code of honor. It sometimes worked, and that was usually enough. Now it's mostly gone.
The competency of men vs. women is a complicated issue; female social norms don't scale as well but work better in some contexts than others. Science loses much when the "fair fight" model is rejected in order to be more "welcoming" to people who shouldn't be there. Women also tend to bring down the status of professions, because a large part of what makes a profession high status is that it makes men desirable to women, but the reverse is rarely true. It's one of the reasons why high status seems so frustratingly elusive for many women; they do the same things as the men but don't enjoy the same results.
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It's worth noting that "fair fight" spaces have their own failure modes, notably that people interpret their opponents uncharitably and take opportunistic potshots. One of my favorite things about quokka spaces is that they avoid those failure modes.
Also "status" is absolutely a thing in masculine spaces, which is one reason why "I'm sorry, I was wrong" is never seen here.
"Never" certainly isn't true. Example 1 and 2 from me.
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How many examples do I need to find before I hear this from you? I want a number. I recall seeing this dozens of times in my time here. Status is a thing everywhere, and in healthy cultures apologizing can earn you status.
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I did get something quite close! It does happen!
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Status is a thing, but once a challenge has been accepted the rules are fair. You're equals at least temporarily. The idea is to suppress the role of status in the conflict.
The rules are 'fair' in the sense of 'it is illegal for rich men and the homeless alike to sleep under an overpass.'
Sure, it's not fair in the cosmic sense of all that might have been but for the random vicissitudes of life. A "fair fight" does not need to satisfy that standard to achieve its intended purpose.
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I'm not saying the rules aren't fair. I'm saying the failure modes of the "fair fight" philosophy also hinder productive discussion.
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