Make an ass out of you and everyone

Pop quiz

Imagine that I give you a quiz where you're supposed to determine whether a bunch of statements are true or false.  Upon reading the statements, you find that they are too obscure, and you have no idea what to make of any of them.  However, I give you the hint that 80% of the statements are true, and the other 20% are false.  How should you proceed?

If you say that 80% of the statements are true and the other 20% are false, then your expected score will only be 68%.  Clearly, you should guess that every single statement is true.  You will only get an 80% on the quiz, but that's the best you can do.

Now imagine instead that we're talking about people.  You're at a high school reunion, and to be honest you haven't interacted with a single person here since graduation.  You know that around 5% of your former classmates are queer, but you don't know which ones.  How would you make your guesses?

This is a loaded question of course.  Why would you ever need to guess?  Why not just assume nothing of anyone?

The irony is that while queer people (or anyone who invisibly deviates from the norm) are the biggest losers in the assumption game, they are also in a unique position to recognize the value of the same assumptions.

Assumption spaces

There's a reason why queer safe spaces are needed.  They are spaces where you can assume that everyone else is queer, or at least very sympathetic.  When an intruder comes into a safe space and attacks people, it's considered worse than the same attack outside the safe space, because it's also an attack on our ability to make assumptions.

Queer dating, clubbing, and hookups are even more in need of assumptions.  Among my queer male friends, it's a perpetual problem to be meeting men in straight spaces (such as the gym), and to have to guess, based on subtle cues, whether they're straight or not.  In an ideal world, you could just ask, but in the real world, this is potentially dangerous, as a lot of straight guys don't take kindly to the mere thought that they could be like us.  Even when not dangerous, it can be uncomfortable, and just plain disheartening to know you'll be automatically rejected 95% of the time.  A lot of queer guys simply aren't up to the risks, and prefer to meet people through designated queer spaces.

[cn: sexual assault] Spaces with special assumptions can have problems.  For example, one of the things I complain about is the ubiquity of sexual assault in gay night clubs.  The problem is there are multiple ideas about what kinds of assumptions are acceptable.  Some think it's okay to grope people non-consensually because they think it's the social assumption in those spaces.  Other people in the same spaces think that's not an acceptable assumption anywhere and you should get consent first (nonverbal consent due to loud music).  The common response is that it's the victim's fault for not understanding the assumptions.  No, I understand the assumptions, I just reject them, and reject the supposition that everyone in the space has ever shared those assumptions.

Signals vs stereotypes

Moving beyond queer spaces, many queer people are still sick of the assumptions placed upon them on a daily basis.  So often they'll adopt signals to make their queerness more visible.  Often the most effective signals you can adopt closely resemble stereotypes.  With gay men in my area, there are a number of fashion markers and mannerisms that allow a gaydar to work.  People aren't necessarily signalling intentionally, but many gay men happen to like these markers, and aren't especially bothered by appearing gay, since they are gay, after all.

This is understandably uncomfortable, because aren't we basically contributing to the stereotypes?  And by merely reading those signals, aren't I imposing those stereotypes on possibly unwilling people?  Rather than combatting assumptions, we're trying to take advantage of them and guide them in the right direction.

And what about people who can't access those stereotypes?  Black queer people can't make themselves white, but unfortunately in our culture that's basically what they'd have to do to send a clear signal.  "I hate signals so much!" "I wish I could signal too!"

Guessing is a battleground

Many people have talked about a distinction between "ask" culture and "guess" culture.  In ask culture, if you want something then you ask for it, even knowing that you may not get it.  In guess culture, it's only polite to ask for things that you're reasonably sure you'll receive.

Ask and guess culture also apply to gender.  In many queer spaces, it's common to ask people for pronouns, because in general you can't tell what gender a person is by seeing how they look.  This is especially important for inexperienced people (unfortunately the same group of people who tend not to understand why it's important), since they may otherwise base guesses on harmful stereotypes.

But trans people, understandably, don't want to spend their entire lives confined to queer spaces, and they have to deal with these guesses and assumptions everywhere.  I've heard many queer people express a desire that we should ask people for pronouns everywhere, not just in queer spaces.  Unfortunately, this strikes most people as extreme.  Society at large clearly has a guess culture with respect to gender; many people would find it insulting if you asked their pronouns when they think they're being perfectly clear.

It's a common saying that "When you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME".  But people clearly like assumptions and derive some value from them.  Assumptions in the public realm are defended fiercely.  Queer people also derive value from assumptions and create spaces and signalling structures around them.

It's about time that we recognize assumptions on their own terms, containing both good and bad.

Between rationality and politics

Last year, there was an incident where Arthur Chu criticized LessWrong/Rationalists for abandoning political effectiveness in favor of being "rational".  This has been on my mind increasingly, partly because Arthur Chu went on to become a popular columnist whom I like, and I went on to learn more and more about how pathological the Rationalist community really is.

This has some personal significance, and is somewhat disillusioning.  A decade ago, I became interested in skepticism primarily because I liked thinking about how we think, and how to improve upon the process of thinking on a meta level.  I was also on board with the political project of skepticism (fighting bad beliefs), but became less interested in it over time, which left just the critical thinking component of skepticism.

But if I just have the critical thinking, these are basically the same values held by the Rationalist community.  In fact, some of the things I like to write about, the Rationalist community addresses better than I do.  And then, to discover how the Rationalist community behaves...

But let's go back to the issue of rationality vs politics.

Lies and Shunning

At first, it sounded like "politics" meant lying for a cause.  Part of the original context related to false or misleading statistics.  That seems difficult to justify.  I am in favor of, say, infographics which popularize information while eliding truth just a little.  Certainly there are problems with clickbait pop science, and with partisan "research", but we also can't spend forever getting exactly every fact right, sacrificing all accessibility to get every detail.  So I see both sides and, okay, it's really hard to justify misleading statistics.

But I think I see now that it's not really about lying or eliding truth.  It's about other rational values, such as...

• Always hear out an argument and consider it in its strongest form before calmly coming to a conclusion.
• Never shun people no matter how bad they may be.

The idea of not shunning people seems fairly innocuous, or even positive, until you see it taken to its extreme.  Take for instance, the Neoreactionaries (NRx).  They're a small and inconsequential group who believe that we should get rid of democracy and return to the days of white supremacy (no, seriously).  For some reason, many NRx are welcomed in LessWrong, to the point that LessWrong enjoys a space in this map of neoreactionaries.

Scott Alexander, the second most popular LessWrong writer, has talked about how NRx have inspired his writing, even though he thinks they're wrong.  He contrasts them with feminists, who he says has correct "object-level" beliefs but bad meta-beliefs.  On its face, he's basically saying he likes neoreactionaries because they talk the Rationalist talk.  This is funny because there's a Rationalist saying, "rationality is about winning", which means that rationality isn't about how you sound, it's about the ultimate consequences.  Valuing people who talk the talk is basically a bias towards the in-group.  And what an in-group they've chosen!

It's hard to tell exactly what effect it's had for the community to have extended exposure to NRx ideas.  In my limited experience, my impression is Rationalists are perfectly willing to argue for racist things, more than the general public.  I think NRx may have moved the whole Overton window of the community, and maybe Rationalists just think they're immune.  To them, the only valid way to reject NRx ideas is by considering them at great length, and if you absorb some of their ideas in that time, hey, maybe they were good ideas worth adopting, because Rationalists couldn't possibly come to a wrong conclusion on an issue they've thought about.

EA and AI

I should mention that there appears to have been some sort of Rationalist diaspora.  From what I've heard, the community used to be more centralized on the LessWrong website, but has now spread out to new websites and to new ideas.  It is near certainty that what I criticize does not necessarily apply to the entire diaspora.

Probably one of the best things to come out of Rationalism is the Effective Altruism movement (EA).  They believe in figuring out which charities do the most good for your dollar and then donating lots of money to them.  They're associated with organizations like GiveWell and Giving What We Can.

They're pretty hard to fault.  I mean, we can criticize the details, such as the particular things that they prioritize in their calculations.  I'm also really iffy on the idea of "earning to give".  But one of the problems with EA is that telling people that their donations are ineffective sometimes just discourages them from donating at all.  Likewise, if I criticize EA, I think that might just discourage people from donating at all.

More recently, EA came under fire because their EA Global conference prominently featured AI risk as one of their causes.  That means people were talking about donating to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) to do artificial intelligence research in order to prevent extinction by a malevolent AI.  Said research involves trying to build a benevolent AI.  In response to criticism, Jeff Kaufman, who is known for advocating against AI research within EA, called for pluralism.  (Scott Alexander, for his part, argued that AI risk was at least somewhat reasonable and anyway less than a third of his donations go to MIRI.  How inspiring.)

So this is another case of not shunning people, but instead welcoming them.  And as a consequence, some people in the community begin to regard it as correct, and most regard it as somewhat reasonable.  But really, what place does AI risk have in an evidence-based charity group?  It seems to be based more on philosophy--a very idiosyncratic take on utilitarianism, and a bunch of highly questionable probability estimates.

Incidentally, that particular kind of utilitarianism is the kind advocated by LessWrong, and more specifically, its founder Eliezer Yudkowsky.  Eliezer Yudkowsky has long argued for the importance of AI risk, and is the founder of MIRI.  In some ways, convincing people to donate to MIRI was underlying motivation for teaching people his ideas about rationality.  He wanted to show people that his own cause was right, despite being contrarian.  And it worked!  Not only do a lot of Rationalists accept the value of MIRI, there's also a preponderance of other strange beliefs held by Eliezer, including his favorable views towards cryonics and paleo diets.

So basically, the EA movement is weighed down by the history of the Rationalist community and its particular in-group biases.

Political rationality?

Given the way the Rationalist community has turned out, I'm glad I never got involved, despite my intellectual values clearly leaning in that direction.  One question is whether I can synthesize anything better.

I wish I could, but I don't think I can.  I feel conflicted about the whole thing.

On the one hand, I have these rational values.  Arguments should be treated based purely on content.  It's easy to be blanket-skeptical about things which are actually reasonable.  Ideas that sound too crazy to entertain can be right.  Even if something is too crazy, rebutting it point by point can be helpful to other people who find it somewhat reasonable.

On the other hand, I also believe arguments are about power.  If you stick to purely rational arguments, you'll lose your audience and miss the point.  And rational arguments aren't even very effective to help yourself come to the correct conclusions.  I believe in the Overton window, and I believe it's something we need to fight over--actually fight, not just debate.  I believe anger is so useful that I'll fake it if necessary.  Finally, I believe in the goodness of shunning people, and shutting down arguments.

I don't think I am always consistent about which tack I take.  And I don't think I have the ability, or commitment, to map out consistent rules for it.  Better to take it on a case-by-case basis and spend that time on other things.

This all makes me glad that I'm changing my blog title in a month.

"Committed"

I was reading some feminist writing which spoke of being "committed" to feminism.  It said that if you are committed to feminism, then you will believe and behave in a certain way.  And if you don't believe and behave in a certain way, then you aren't committed.  (And that would be bad.)

I may speak sometimes of being "committed" to feminism or atheism, but that is merely a description of how strong my opinions are.  I do not believe in literally committing to a worldview.

Framing commitment as a good thing is much like framing doubt as a bad thing.  It's an obvious overgeneralization.  How can it be good to be committed to X, regardless of what X is?  How can it be bad to doubt Y, regardless of what Y is?  Presumably if you doubt something, you think that thing is wrong and therefore it is good to doubt it.  Presumably if you are not committed to something, you think that thing is wrong and therefore it is bad be committed to it.  Doubt and commitment are both neutral.

I have a lot of very feminist views, but I do not think they are correct because they are feminist.  When we examine an issue, yes, all relevant feminist insights should be brought to bear, but I do not ask myself, "What Would a Feminist Do?"  If my view on a subject disagrees with feminist "tenets", then so much the worse for those tenets.  I would say the same about all my beliefs, no matter how strongly they are held.

In which I am mean to trolls

Recently, I got one of my first trolls since the comments RSS feed went down.  It was rather amusing.

They were saying, asexuality is bullshit.  So I responded in a particularly mean way: I asked them to explain their opinions, and then justify them with reasoned arguments.  It's funny because your average troll doesn't know how to offer reasoned arguments for shit.  This particular troll didn't even seem to understand why it was necessary.

A little background.  Given that my blog is not that widely read, and does not have particularly active comment sections, I generally don't attract trolls.   The trolls that I do attract, are typically wayward googlers (as I tend to think of them) who found some old page in my archives on the second page of some search term I don't care about.  Usually they're just incensed by the topic and don't respond in any way to what I wrote.

Before, other people could theoretically see the trolls' comments via the "recent comments" on the sidebar or following the comments RSS feed.  There weren't many readers tracking comments in the first place, but now that these features are broken, the only person who can possibly see the trolls' comments is me, because I alone have access to the moderation queue.  If the trolls are trying to get attention, they are doing it in about the least effective way possible.

In short, the only trolls I get are the ones who are thoroughly incompetent.

There are basically four reasons why I might care about a person's opinion:

1. The person has power.
2. I care about the person.
3. The opinion is backed up by arguments.
4. The opinion is succinct, eloquent, novel, or otherwise intrinsically interesting.

In the case of incompetent rando trolls, they don't have power, I don't care about them, they are too incompetent to argue, and too tedious to be interesting.  I like to poke at them until they either make coherent arguments or realize they've been wasting their time all along.

Of course, I'm much nicer to commenters who don't appear to be trolling.  Even when commenters don't offer supporting arguments for points of disagreement, I at least tend to care about their opinions by #2.

Abusing skeptical tropes: case in point

The other day, I wrote something about the word "groupthink" and how it's often used in a rather meaningless way.  I didn't have any examples in mind, but what do you know, Ron Lindsay (head of the Center for Inquiry) provided an example just yesterday:

Unfortunately, at least in my experience, some humanists do treat certain views and principles as “sacred.” These principles appear to be adopted more out of reflex, emotion, or groupthink than evidence-based reasoning.

This also runs into what I said a couple months ago about how "sacred" is abused.  Over half of the essay appears to be abusing this sort of rhetoric, claiming his opponents are failing to question everything, blindly accepting ideological principles, using empty rhetoric etc. etc.  I could probably write a series about these sorts of tropes, but I would begin to repeat myself very quickly.

The worst part is that most of these are recognizably skeptical/atheist tools.  Part of skepticism 101 is learning about lots of logical fallacies.  Part of atheism 101 is questioning everything and rejecting faith and dogma.  The tools are meant to be applied across the board in hopes that we can better reach the correct conclusion of any argument.  But do they really work?  Or do they just lead to extraneous bloviation?

This, here, is why I all but stopped naming fallacies.  I use them to aid my thinking, but I try not to use them explicitly as argumentative shortcuts.  I am unconvinced that these skeptical tropes help me to avoid being wrong, and unconvinced that it's effective at persuading others.

It's not that fallacies and cognitive biases aren't good to know about.  They just really need some quality standards.  The practices of naming fallacies or accusing opponents of bias is not really conducive to maintaining standards. Anyway, those are my current thoughts, though I realize I'm just asserting an opinion at this time.


(Via Pharyngula.  In case you're wondering, I oppose the death penalty, but I mostly don't care because it affects a very small number of people relative to other problems with California's prison system.)

"Groupthink"

One word I never use against opponents is "groupthink", fundamentally because I do not know what that means.  What does groupthink look like from the outside?  What does it look like from the inside?  What are its operating principles?


Alas, these are questions without answers, because groupthink is not a thing, it does not have an essence, it does not have a definition with necessary and sufficient conditions.  It is just a word, and a rather typical one: you see the word used in a few situations, then you form a mental model of when it's most appropriate, and later you use the word yourself.

My mental model of "groupthink" is "generic insult used against large groups that uniformly disagree with me."  And as a generic insult it's fine, but it seems void of any real explanatory power.

Given its common use as an insult, we know what groupthink looks like from the outside.  However, if we wanted to actually "solve" the problem of groupthink, we'd try to appeal to the people with the most power to change it, i.e. the insiders.  So we need a model of what groupthink looks like from the inside.  If there is no way to identify it from the inside, then it hardly seems like we can hold people morally responsible for what they cannot identify.

To the extent that groupthink is a thing (which it isn't), we can offer various theories about why it is a thing:

• People who are part of a group mostly associate with each other.  There's a cognitive bias to agree with views that we perceive as common.
• We get exposed to our group's ideas more often and with more favorable framing.
• We like the people in our group, and we're more inclined to agree with people we like.
• People who disagree with the group on a particular issue are less likely to voice their opinion.
• People who disagree with the group leave the group or aren't part of it in the first place.

Each theory offers a possible way to identify groupthink as an insider.  Do I ever associate with outsiders, or read about the issues as framed by them?  For those issues on which I disagree with the group, how do I treat those opinions within the group?

On the other hand, these theories do not offer very compelling solutions.  Just because I have some biases does not mean I'm wrong about any particular issue.  There isn't necessarily anything wrong with a group selecting for particular beliefs.  And though we can partially reduce biases by transforming the way we socialize, it's not clear that this is a good tradeoff.

I offer a concrete and feasible solution.  If you're part of a movement, a community, or some other kind of group, obviously that's something that you like.  So join a second one.  Take careful note of the different norms and worldviews in the groups, and acknowledge the dissonances.

The moral horror that is ourselves

Consider the following propositions about our society:

• We totally approve of causing pointless pain to certain individuals, even though torture is known to be ineffective.
• Everyone is either a rapist, or implicitly supports rape and sexual assault.
• We enslave and murder because we like the way meat tastes.
• We enslave people, and we think it's okay because they get paid enough to feed themselves.
• In the future, everyone will look back at this era and see something horrible about us, and they will be right.

I am not arguing for the truth of any of these statements, but trying to identify a particular trait they have in common.  Each proposition, if true, is horrifying, because it means you and everyone around you is evil.  And that makes us recoil.

The elder god represents ourselves. (source)

And yet, we might still wish to argue for some of these propositions.  For example, it is entirely true that torture is pointless, and yet supported by most Americans.  And I would say that sexual assault is so widespread that it is frequently accepted as normal.  And even if you do not agree with these statements, you might have your own sharp critiques about society.

One of the strongest cognitive biases is the belief that I am a good person.  This bias extends to society at large.  If society is so evil, and I am a part of society, then I am evil.  I am not evil, therefore...

In my post giving general advice on how to argue, I said that the belief in one's own goodness is such a strong cognitive bias, that it's better to work around it than to directly counter it.  Here we have the same dilemma.  If I wish to argue, for instance, that capitalism is slavery, should I skirt around the moral horror, and reassure people that I am not condemning them as the ultimate evil?  Or should I play up the horror, saying, "that's why it's so important to address this issue"?

And what should we tell ourselves?  Are we complicit in the moral horror that is modern society?  Or are we on a righteous crusade to defeat evil?  Or should we assure ourselves that society's not totally evil, and that it's just this ordinary problem that we're trying to solve?

The weeds represent enslavement, torture, and rape.  Image source unknown.

Our approach to moral horror can be informed by our ethical system. Here, I will discuss utilitarianism, which judges actions based on how well the consequences align with our preferences, and deontology, which judges actions based on the quality of the actions themselves.  It's common for people to use utilitarianism in some situations (eg cost-benefit analyses) and deontology in other situations (eg any talk about "rights").*

*Note I am not saying that this is logically inconsistent.  Many utilitarians believe that things like rights can be justified on utilitarian grounds.  I am merely observing the fact that, on the surface level, some ethical arguments look utilitarian, and some look deontological.  I'm suggesting that it is the surface level which is relevant here, rather than the underlying ethical justification.

Consider the cause of animal rights.* Despite "rights" being in the name, a lot of animal rights philosophy is explicitly utilitarian.  It is not based on an animal analogue to human rights so much as it is based on animal suffering.  Though one of the philosophical critiques of utilitarianism is that implies that all moral actions are obligatory, in practice it makes moral actions less black and white.  There's a sliding scale--if you simply reduce the amount of meat you consume, that reduces harm.  This allows us to focus on small steps to improve the world, rather than focusing so much on how everyone who isn't vegan is evil, and even vegans are complicit.

*Disclosure: I am not a vegetarian.

The situation is different when we talk about rape and sexual assault.  The fundamental problem with rape is that it is a violation of consent.  This is, on the surface, a deontological argument.  It is based on the intrinsic quality of rape as an action, rather than on the consequences.

The fact that we think of it this way allows us to draw some hard lines about what's right and wrong.  But it also plays up the moral horror whenever we talk about rape culture.  It's hard for me to talk about how common sexual assault is in nightclubs, because that is horrifying.  It's hard to talk about the many ways that partners and society can soft-pressure people into having sex that they don't really want, because that is like saying many of your friends are practically rapists.

On the other hand, there are benefits to taking a more black and white view, in a world where people constantly exploit gray areas to justify assault and blame victims.  Or consider a world not too long ago where US had legalized slavery.  If people at the time had been horrified by the society they lived in, they would have been right.

So here's my question: If it would give our poor psyches a break, should we consciously adopt more utilitarian approaches to the big issues afflicting society?

What is an apology?

There are countless cases in the news where a public figure does something wrong, and we all collectively ask, "Why don't they just apologize?" or "Why don't they apologize the right way?"  In the mean time I've often thought, "Why does anyone apologize ever?  What is an apology aside from a collection of emotions with no rational analogue?"

An apology is a sort of script.  Alice wrongs Bob.  Bob demands an apology from Alice.  Alice apologizes.  Bob forgives Alice.

OR

Alice refuses to apologize.  Bob is angered and seeks other means to punish Alice.  He could deny her trust, deny her social status, or even punish through legal means.

But what's in it for Alice?  What's in it for Bob?  As far as Alice is concerned, the outcome of apologizing is clearly better than that of refusing to apologize.  As far as Bob is concerned, punishment may provide either a psychological or game-theoretic value--why should any of that change just because Alice arranges some words in a particular way?

We've all been in Alice's place at one time or another, so we intuitively know the answer.  Apologizing is humbling, and feels bad.  Refusing to apologize feels empowering.  This is backed up by psychological research (and reading the intro to that paper helped frame some of the thoughts in this post).  Thus, Alice is weighing the psychological benefit of refusing to apologize against the potential for reconciliation upon apologizing.  And if Alice feels bad about apologizing, this serves some of Bob's psychological and game-theoretic needs, in place of punishment.

It's crucial to the script that Alice can actually prove that she feels bad when she apologizes.  Anyone can just say that they feel bad.  And yet, we have the phenomenon of the "non-pology".  A non-pology is when someone tries to apologize, but since they don't actually feel bad about their wrong-doing, it comes across as insincere.  It seems that people are not very good at mimicking sincerity when it comes to apologies.  Thus when people sound sincere, this often suffices as proof.

Apologies start to make more rational sense now.  However, they only make rational sense because we're living in an irrational psychological landscape.  In particular, we need that:

1. Apologizing feels bad.  Refusing to apologize feels good.

2. People are bad at mimicking sincere apologies.

3. People are good at detecting insincere apologies.

This psychological landscape needs an evolutionary explanation--although not necessarily an adaptive explanation.  I will not offer any specific hypothesis, although I will compare it to the phenomenon of the Duchenne smile.  People have two kinds of smiles, the kind they make spontaneously, and the kind they make voluntarily.  We are able to spot the spontaneous smile, called the Duchenne smile, and it appears to us as the "truer" smile.  And yet, despite the advantages a Duchenne smile, most people are unable to make one at will, unable to mimic sincerity.  Why did this evolve?

In any case, thinking this through has given me a better understanding of why people apologize, and why they don't apologize.  An apology is a way of communicating psychic pain, one that we are naturally bad at faking.

Why I find LessWrong fascinating

As it says in the title of the blog, I'm a skeptic.  That is to say, my attitudes and modes of thinking have roots in the modern skeptical movement and community.  The skeptical community is interested in a cluster of ideas, which I roughly illustrate below:

[Image: Skepticism is surrounded by the words Critical Thinking, Science, Anti-Pseudoscience, and Religious Skepticism]

For a variety of reasons, I've moved away from skepticism, more out of disinterest than disagreement.  But I'm still very fond of the value of critical thinking.  I like learning about cognitive biases and fallacies.  I like the idea of judging an argument based on its form rather than on one's prejudices about the particular topic.

In fact, I wouldn't mind if critical thinking were treated with a little more rigor.  The skeptical approach is constrained because it's mostly geared towards countering strange and harmful beliefs of other people.  If there were a little more focus placed on the sloppy thinking within ourselves, we might be able to move beyond mere fallacy-spotting, and hammer down some of the subtler details of rational thought.

The LessWrong community looks like that critical thinking utopia.  LessWrong is the name of a website founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2009, although it more broadly refers to the community that grew around that website.  Yudkowsky had previously gained popularity by writing his "Sequences" on the blog Overcoming Bias, which mostly covered topics in critical thinking.  As the name implies, the Sequences built on each other progressively, enabling them to reach dizzying heights.  So here we have a community based on using critical thinking more rigorously, as a tool for progressive self-improvement.

So I have a bit of an affinity for the LessWrong community.  And in fact, I've read a lot of LessWrong material, including a lot of stuff about decision theory, nearly all of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, plus a scattering of blog posts whenever I get linked.  I'm familiar with a decent amount of LessWrong lingo.

But I don't read LessWrong on any consistent basis, basically because of the major TL;DR factor.  It's all fine and good when I want to read one particular major article that I've been linked, but in general the website is unreadable.  They've embraced the progressive structure of ideas, and so everything is thickly woven with required premises and lingo.  I especially dislike the lingo.  I hate that they either don't know how or don't know when to speak in plain language.  I hate that nearly every neologism is secretly a sci-fi reference.

It's also clear that LessWrong is not just a generic community focused on critical thinking.  Just as skepticism has other components in addition to critical thinking, so does LessWrong:

[Image: LessWrong is surrounded by the words Transhumanism, Critical Thinking, Effective Altruism, and Utilitarianism.  Keeping in mind that I'm not part of this community and may not correctly identify what they consider most important.]

The part that should raise the most eyebrows is transhumanism.  I'm going to get some of these details wrong, but they believe that we will develop artificial intelligence which will be powerful enough to take over the world.  They hope to ensure that the AI will be friendly to humans, rather than antagonistic.  People are encouraged to donate to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute which was founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky and is affiliated with LessWrong.

I would not be able to refute any of these claims, and can only express general uncertainty about any specific claims about the future (AI in the future, sure, but beyond that??).  Mostly, I just don't care about transhumanism because I'm too pessimistic about our power to predict anything useful.

And then there are other weird things about LessWrong.  Like the obvious preoccupation with specific intellectual heroes, particularly Eliezer Yudkowsky.  Or the common acceptance of fringe science, like cryonics and cold fusion.  Then there's Roko's Basilisk, although personally I find that more amusing than damning.  I'm more bothered by the neo-reactionaries, a spinoff group from LessWrong.  Neo-reactionaries... advocate for monarchy?  Explicitly believe in discrimination by race?  Due to LessWrong's value system, they're obliged to take it seriously.

I like the idea of LessWrong.  But closer examination just makes me appreciate the more populist aspects of the skeptical movement.  The accessibility of skepticism may have made it a more chaotic crowd, but chaos may be preferable to insularity.

The tone argument, in retrospect

In an earlier post, I talked about the "tone argument" in the atheist blogosphere, and how that argument basically disappeared in 2011.  The tone argument accused atheists of being too angry, too mocking, or otherwise uncooperative.  Of course, mockery and anger are two very different things, but all these differences tended to get glossed over, and I'll gloss over them here as well.

Because I saw so much about the tone argument, and because it so suddenly disappeared in 2011, whenever I see anything resembling the tone argument, I think to myself, "Ugh, we already resolved this argument years ago!"

However, this is excessively dismissive of me, and basically amounts to relying on popular opinion.  What if the popular opinion is wrong?  What if it's only popular among the people who remained in the atheist communities?  Furthermore, even if popular opinion is correct, we need to examine the extent to which it is correct.  I have never believed, for instance, that anger is completely correct in all situations at all times.

So here I present a serious treatment of the tone argument, with the benefit of hindsight over years of atheist blogging.

Angry atheism is a stereotype

The key to understanding the tone argument in an atheist context is understanding that the angry atheist is a stereotype.  The stereotypical atheist is rude, strident, loud, smug, and a general asshole.  I can't tell you how many stories I've heard of people who knew an atheist in high school who argued vehemently with anyone who would listen.  I do not doubt these people existed, but it's odd how angry high school atheists become the prototypical atheist, and whenever atheists are nice, it's such a reversal of expectations.

It's easy to see the cultural underpinnings of the stereotype (in the US), even without being a great student of culture. Religion is considered to be a bit of a taboo topic, even more than politics.  It's not something you're supposed to bring up at dinner.  And if you identify as an atheist, you are explicitly saying that you disbelieve all the major religions in the US.  Your very existence is far too impolite, far too loud, far too angry.

The consequences of this stereotype--like the consequences of any stereotype--are far-reaching and complex.  On the one hand, you have people who simply say that the stereotype is wrong.  "I'm not angry!" they say, or alternatively, "Personally, I'm angry, but lots of atheists I know aren't!"

On the other hand, you have people who reject the implicit norm behind the stereotype.  "What's wrong with being angry?" is the question.  And so these people talk up the value of being angry, and in the process become angrier than they would be otherwise.  Additionally, they will be more likely to frame things in terms of anger, even if the same emotions wouldn't be framed as anger in other contexts.  I don't think atheists are any more vocal than US liberals, for instance, but liberals are far less likely to think of themselves as "angry" or "strident" about their views.

So you basically have two groups pulling in opposite directions.  There are atheists who play down the stereotype, because the stereotype is wrong.  And there are atheists who play up the stereotype, because they argue that there's nothing wrong with fitting the stereotype.  The "tone wars" of atheism started out by outsiders applying the angry atheist stereotype to atheists.  And then the conflict burned on because of conflicting ways for atheists to deal with the stereotype.

So whenever you think of atheists as angry, the two questions you have to answer are, "Are you sure that they're as angry as you perceive?" and "What's wrong with being angry?"

Is anger useful?

Besides being an issue of stereotypes, anger (or lack thereof) is also a big part of how a social movement operates.  If you're a rationalist-idealist, you might believe that you can persuade everyone by arguing calmly and rationally, but "rationalist-idealist" is practically a contradiction in terms.  Truly calm and rational arguments would mostly succeed in getting everyone to tune out.  For instance, it takes a very special kind of person who is willing to read loooong blog posts, and blogs already aren't exactly models of rigor.  Anger and mockery are important and necessary tools to get people to pay attention.

And yes, it is true that arguing angrily can turn people off.  I'm sure you can even find some SCIENCE which says as much.  But I am extremely skeptical of the SCIENCE, because it ultimately presents a very limited part of the wide range of settings of a social movement.

Try to imagine the most stereotypical setting where atheists argue against religion.  For me, I imagine an everyman atheist and an everyman Christian arguing over a game of chess.  Or maybe there's an atheist with his Christian family at Thanksgiving, and there's some conflict over the practice of saying grace.  Maybe the scientific studies apply to those sorts of "normal" situations.

But you know, neither of those "normal" situations has ever happened to me.  Arguing with people one-on-one just isn't a thing that happens on any regular basis.  The truly normal setting for me is I blog, and some people freely choose to read it.  Most of the readers are already atheists.

What about other settings for arguments?  Say that you're not talking with religious people at all, but talking with other atheists and trying to build a community.  Say you're not an everyman, but a trans woman, and you're dealing with religious people who insist you're really a man.  Say you're an activist, and you're trying to convince politicos that you're a force to be reckoned with.  Say you aren't using anger as a tactic, you're just genuinely angry, and the ability to express that anger is your main motivation for getting into activism in the first place.

Scientific studies might provide some useful insights about the way people think.  It's good to know a bit about the backfire effect.  It's good to know that expressing anger tends to make you angrier, rather than "venting" it.  But I deny that this means that a social movement should not use anger or mockery in general.

Is anger honest?

Aside from whether anger is effective as a strategy, there's also the question about whether anger is an honest strategy.  We're frequently stuck in this situation where it doesn't matter who is right about the argument, it matters who wins.  But in the atheist movement and rationalist community more generally, we tend to value honesty, and we generally want to win arguments if and only if we happen to be on the right side of the argument.

There certainly appear to be some cases where anger is unfair, or encourages confirmation bias.  For example, anger pushes some people out of the conversation.  And it often appears that angry people are more likely to "dig in" to their mistakes.

But perhaps not everything is as it seems.  While some people would feel pushed out by an angry argument, other people would feel pushed out of a conversation where "calmness" is enforced, especially in the presence of a stereotype which makes them appear angrier than they really are.  Furthermore, when I looked up anger and confirmation bias, it appears that anger tends to decrease confirmation bias.

I am less sure about mockery than about anger.  I have seen many instances of atheists mocking religions where I thought the underlying criticism was incorrect or unfair.  But I could be wrong about that too.  Maybe my perception is distorted, and I simply attribute these things to mockery when they're unrelated.

We can also ask the same questions about whether "friendly" tactics are honest.  One of the most effective ways to convince people of something is to make personal connections and socially surround them with opposing views.  We're used to seeing this tactic used by religious groups.  It's difficult to tell people, stop being so friendly, but it sure feels dishonest in some way that's hard to place.

Summary

The tone argument is wrong because it's based on a stereotype of angry atheists.  Not only do people perceive atheists as angrier than they really are, they underestimate the value of anger in a social movement.  Lastly, while anger sometimes appears to be associated with cognitive biases, it's far from clear that it is any worse in this regard than being friendly.

In my opinion, the ultimate reason the tone argument fails is because it overreaches, trying to make a universal statement about the value of anger.  But in a social movement there are so many vastly different contexts that it is difficult to make any universal statement.  If at some point, the "angry" atheists were to argue that everyone should be angry all the time, then this argument would similarly fail.

Sexist jokes and Bill Maher

I'm a member of the atheist student group at UC Berkeley, known as BASS, and apparently they recently launched a blog.  The first post is about Bill Maher, who was invited as a commencement speaker.  Some students, especially the Muslim student group, did not like that Bill Maher was invited, and they started a petition to stop him.

I basically don't care about Maher speaking at commencement, because I already hate commencement.  It's a long boring ritual that we're strongly pressured to participate in whether or not we personally derive anything from it.  Anyway, I'm not an undergraduate, and it's for the undergraduates to work out.

What I find shameful is the defense of Bill Maher in general, and the defense of "sexist" jokes (in scare quotes because my opponents are contesting that they are sexist):

...let’s take as an example a Tweet that Bill Maher made recently, saying “Dealing w/ Hamas is like dealing w/ a crazy woman who’s trying to kill u – u can only hold her wrists for so long before you have to slap her”.

Now, I agreed with him that the Tweet was objectionable, but I also saw that the moment he started arguing over whether the term “sexist” applied to it, he gave the conversation away to the forces of nonsense.

Calling something sexist just means that it's objectionable, particularly with respect to the gender axis.  If he agrees that it's objectionable, then it hardly seems necessary to argue a point we already agree with.  He appears to be operating under the view that "sexist" is to be reserved for things that are LITERALLY HITLER, whereas my definition of "sexist" is apparently too loose?  It seems clear to me that a looser definition of "sexist" is simply a superior one, because then maybe I can actually use it every so often on things that exist in the real world.

The author then goes on to talk about the real world harm of the tweet:

“It perpetuates the stereotype of women as irrational and insane.”  In whose mind?  Yours?  Maybe if you’re an idiot.

Wow, what a great example of people believing that if they're smart enough, they can overcome cognitive biases.  Only an idiot would ever be taken in by stereotypes.

You don't need to look very far to find lots of research on sexist jokes, and how they affect attitudes towards women.  Here are a few examples from one study:

How many men does it take to change a lightbulb? None let her do the dishes in the dark.

Why do women have small feet? So they can get closer to the sink!

These jokes are, of course, "ironic", because no one actually believes that women have small feet so they can do housework.  The lightbulb joke only mentions a specific woman, and not women in general.  In fact, that one's really making fun of lazy men, not women.  Only an idiot would be affected by these jokes.

Look, we can argue back and forth whether Bill Maher's humor is qualitatively different.  But we don't know if it's sufficiently different, because I didn't see any studies that looked at the finer gradations of sexist humor.  I don't think the problems with Maher's humor can be dismissed out of hand as something that only affects idiots (and certainly not ourselves!).

Oh, and take a look at this concern trolling:

If Feminists attack people who make disagreeable remarks on social media, then – in the public perception, at least – Feminism comes to entail attacking people who make disagreeable remarks on social media, and that’s all anyone needs to know to safely dismiss the brand altogether (e.g. "Feminists?  You mean those people who say you can never call a woman crazy, even if she's trying to kill u?").  If you want to brand yourself as the kind of person who throws a fit whenever a public figure says something unflattering, don’t be surprised when people stop listening to you, even about real issues.

People focus on quotes because it's actually a lot more effective than saying "Bill Maher is islamophobic" or "We have a problem with islamophobia."  "Oh?  Can you give an example?"  Yes, here are some quotes.  No wait, Alex Freeman advised me not focus on quotes, and surely he knows best.

Alex Freeman proposes that instead we focus on actions.  For instance, Bill Maher is my goddamn enemy because he is anti-vaccination, and I got into skepticism precisely to oppose that sort of nonsense.  But let's not focus on anything Maher said about vaccines or Louis Pasteur recanting germ theory on his deathbed.  Let's focus on his actions, and any actions he directly inspired.  I don't know of any such action, so I guess Maher's off the hook!

In the face of public criticism

You may not have seen it, but in the last month I was the target of more public criticism than I have ever been previously.  The story is that I'm on the committee which worked on this survey of asexual communities (no longer collecting data, preliminary findings now posted).  I would say the survey is not particularly professional, but neither is there anything horribly wrong about it.  Accordingly, the negative feedback we get is fairly mild.  But we do get some criticism, simply because we're a big target.  We have over 10,000 participants, mostly from Tumblr--and you know, bloggers, they're complainers.

But I'm not going to talk about the specific critiques.  I just want to talk about the experience of getting public criticism.  Public criticism is interesting, because we all engage in it, but few people ever experience much of the other side.  Despite this, we all build mental models of how the targets of criticism react, and how they should react.

The committee, as I said, is not particularly professional, we're just a bunch of disorganized volunteers.  So we didn't bother to come up with an official response to feedback.  We all respond as individuals.  There was one person who thought nearly all the critiques were correct, and felt really bad about themselves.  Another person thought nearly all the critiques were wrong and ignorant--but didn't say anything publicly.  As for me, I use my skeptical values to inform my response.  But I'm well aware that skeptical values are just high-minded ideas, and not practical tips for this specific situation.

Public criticism makes you experience a lot of irrationality.  My closest point of comparison is when I was in a dysfunctional relationship.  In the relationship, I went back and forth, day to day, between thinking the relationship was great, and thinking it was terrible.  In response to public criticism, I went back and forth, day to day, between thinking it would be good to respond to something, and thinking that it would be a bad idea to respond.  Either I'm being irrational on one day, or irrational the day after, although I don't know which it is.  When experiencing these kinds of emotions, I found it was always good to wait a day to see if they were at least time-consistent.

The reason for these conflicting emotions is that there are many conflicting values and priorities.  I want to be able to admit errors and avoid being defensive.  But I also want to be honest about the things I think are not errors.  I want to explain to people why we did what we did.  But I also want to be practical and act in the survey's best interest.

Yes, a big part of it is that explaining the whole truth is not really in the survey's best interest.  If I say too much, I can bias survey results in multiple ways.  And then, it's like I'm using the truth to create lies.  Honesty conflicts with itself!  Another problem, if I slammed a critic for saying something wrong, that would discourage other people from giving feedback, even if those people have good feedback to give.  That feedback is needed to improve future surveys.

To make peace with the fact that some people will just never know why they're right or wrong about the survey, I find it useful to think about the power dynamics here.  The survey team is like the brain, and the complainers are like the feet.  The brain has nearly complete power over the feet.  The feet can only complain.  Sometimes we should not act on the complaints, because we need to walk this hike and there's no way to do it without making the feet at least a little uncomfortable.  Sometimes we should act on the complaints, like if we accidentally walked over some broken glass.  In both cases, the complaints of the feet should be acknowledged and validated.

Arguments are about power

I can think of a few arguments that aren't about power.  For instance, when I was on the internet in high school, the things I argued about were whether 2.9999... = 3, and what happens when you put an infinite number of marbles in an urn.  I feel confident in saying that those arguments had nothing to do with power.  (Although, it should be noted that I eventually earned a modder position on that website, and helped control content.)

But a lot of arguments are really about power, especially the loudest and most volatile arguments.  That's often why they're so loud and volatile.  And when I say that the argument is really about power, that doesn't merely mean arguing about who has power, or who deserves power.  The argument itself is part of the power struggle.  Winning the argument materially gives you more power, independent of whether you won by being on the right side.

I admit this is a very cynical view.  Nobody on either side of an argument wants to say that it's really about something so crass and selfish as power.  Better to pretend that the argument is about what's true and righteous.  But if you actually care about what's true, it's clear that arguments are often not about what's true.  And we need to realize that power struggles are not necessarily bad, and that we're participating in power struggles all the time.  It is not wrong to want power, or to want someone else not to have power.  Although it can be wrong, depending on how you get what you want.

Some of the clearest examples are arguments over video games.  Many recent high-profile incidents  show how nasty video game culture can be, but that much has long been obvious to anyone who paid attention to gaming communities.  This is easily explained by an underlying power struggle.  As I said last year, there is a limited space for games in the market, because they're so expensive to develop and advertise.  In particular, this is true of so-called AAA games, which are the big-budget games we usually think of as being "hard-core".  Everyone needs to choose from the same small set of games, so the power struggle is over what games get made, what games get the money.

There's an image that shows up repeatedly in these arguments, the white male gamer who is afraid of other people stealing his hobby.  For example:

It’s hard for them to hear they don’t own anything, anymore, that they aren’t the world’s most special-est consumer demographic, that they have to share.

This is treated as a caricature, something pathetic and laughable.  But I think it's also true, gamers really are afraid of sharing space.  And furthermore, they are right to be afraid, because sharing may in fact result in diminished space for themselves.  If more AAA gamers are convinced that games need to represent women better, then everyone will be forced to play AAA games with better female representation, if they play AAA games at all. Those poor sexist gamers.  In losing the argument, they really are losing power.  Although maybe not as much power as they think.  I'm sure they will continue to be able to find some games that appeal to them.  And perhaps having more women will just mean that more games will be made.

The power struggle among gamers comes from control over the public good of video games.  Another public good I often concern myself with are identity labels.  Arguments over labels are also frequently arguments about power.  Who gets to control what a label means?  Who controls the public image?  Who controls the actions of any organizations arising from the label?

All the big wars over feminism in the atheist movement?  Those are clearly about power.  Power over who speaks, power over who makes up the movement, and power over what the movement focuses on.

When people harass Jen McCreight or Rebecca Watson to get them to shut up, that's about power.  When Jen McCreight invented Atheism+, that was creating a space where social justice is legitimate atheist cause, and that was about power.  When people mock FTB as "FTBullies", they're discouraging people from looking at FTB, and that's about power.  When people on FTB mock "brave heroes" and "freeze peach", or talk about how Skeptic Ink was founded on hating FTB, that's about power.  When Dawkins refers to PZ Myers as writing clickbait, and using it as an excuse to not link to PZ, that's about power.  And when you say that you're above all that nasty stuff, well, that's about power too.  Everything is about power, get used to it.

That's not to say that there aren't also arguments about truth in there.  Some groups don't use their power as well as other groups, and that's a truth we can argue over.  Anti-harassment policies at conferences seem like an obvious good to me, and the people who would use their power to remove them are basically incompetent leaders.  And by winning this argument, we take their power away.

But we can also take their power away by name-calling.  That's the truth.  And while I'm hardly a name-caller myself, it seems like you have to accept the tactic, lest you just forfeit the struggle.  But how is name-calling different from harassment campaigns, which we also know go both ways?  Do we have to accept harassment campaigns too?  I don't.

It's a rationalist fantasy that if we just all argue rationally and carefully work out the details, we'll agree on the conclusion and rid ourselves of conflict.  A good rationalist recognizes how small a role rationality really plays in the biggest arguments.

The dangers of meta

In the context of a discussion, going meta means to talk about how we're doing the discussion.  For example, in skeptical discourse, a common way of going meta is to talk about fallacies, and styles of argumentation.  In social justice discourse, a common way of going meta is to talk about the words we use in discussion, and whether these words are problematic.  Or we talk about "derailing", which is the way that people shut down discussions about social justice.

This post, of course, is going meta one level deeper.  I'm not talking about how we talk about things.  I'm talking about how we talk about how we talk about things.

For someone like me, there's a strong draw towards meta conversations.  And that's not a bad thing.  Meta-discussions are often what separate the advanced discussion and the basic discussion.  Meta-discussions inject a sense of self-awareness into our normal discussions.

Unfortunately, advanced discussion is not for everyone, and there's a reason the basic discussion is needed.  I know, for instance, that this blog will never have popular appeal.  And this doesn't just have to do with me.  Anything that involves reading thousands of words on such narrow topics will never have popular appeal.

And yet--I'm speaking for myself here--meta-discussions have a strong hold on me.  I can't let go of my self-awareness.  And self-awareness is just one step away from self-consciousness.  I am self-conscious about using arguments that I know are bullshit or political expedients (which is nearly everything).  As I've mentioned before, I am self-aware about concern trolling.  The self-awareness doesn't always stop me from doing it, but changes how I do it (and possibly not for the better).

Another problem with meta-discussions is that it feels like meta is the answer to everything, and that everything needs meta, but this is not true.  Meta-discussion is a general discussion.  Most problems require case-by-case judgments, and knowledge of specific details.  For instance, many skeptical topics, even the small and pointless ones like bigfoot, require specific knowledge to effectively address.  They require research.  Pointing out logical fallacies will only get you so far.

Meta is not the answer to everything, nor does everything need meta.  In many of my discussions on the internet, I have strong opinions on the meta aspects.  Like, say I'm talking with someone, and they declare that bringing up a particular topic is "derailing".  I have strong opinions on whether certain things count as derailing or not.  But even if I disagree with someone, bringing up a whole meta-discussion about derailing is itself honest to goodness actual derailing.  It's distracting from the main point, and frankly condescending.

I see this happen with other skeptics.  I see people bring up logical fallacies when it's inappropriate.  Whether or not I agree with the point on fallacies, it comes off as condescending, and a distraction from the point.  Like Process Man we're in danger of putting the arcane details of the process above the results.

Nonetheless, I would say that on some level meta-discussion really is indispensable.  The default, for many people is to fall along partisan lines.  Not necessarily partisan political lines (as in left or right), but things like the partisan skeptical line, the partisan atheist line, or the partisan social justice line.  One of the best ways to break out of these partisan lines is to have strong opinions about what sort of arguments are valid or invalid, regardless of who makes the argument.

Judgment, anger, and me

I am a very judgmental person.  I'd have to be, to maintain an blog about my opinions for so long.

This remains true even as I've become influenced by queer ideas of non-judgmentalism with regard to people's orientation, behavior, and identity.  Now I just have really strong opinions (judgments!) about when judgmentalism is appropriate and when it is not.  When it is not appropriate, I refrain from expressing any judgment, even if I do not refrain from thinking it.

But perhaps there need to be multiple axes of judgmentalism, because there is another sense in which I'm not very judgmental at all.  I have a large quantity of judgments, but they're mostly small judgments.  I don't think you're a terrible person for having done something wrong.  You're just a normal person because in my view, everyone is doing things wrong, and I also have thoughts about what in particular they're doing wrong.

For example, I don't think very highly of the trolls I occasionally get in my comments, but I also think they're probably not so bad elsewhere or offline.  They are terrible at arguing, and often have terrible opinions, but that's pretty much all I know about them.  Perhaps if we interacted in a different context they'd be more sensible and competent, who knows?

This is also applicable to public intellectuals.  For instance, for years now, some people have been pretty upset with Richard Dawkins, going so far as to say they will no longer buy books from him or otherwise consume his work.  Now, I think Dawkins' infamous "Dear Muslima" comment* was really stupid, blindingly stupid.  Even Sam Harris's stupidity is given a run for its money.  On the other hand, do people not remember Dawkins' other stupid comments?  Like how "Neville Chamberlain atheists" is a backhanded comparison of religion to Nazism?  Or how the comparison of religion to child abuse created years of unproductive arguments?  Or the stupid stuff he said about fantasy fiction?  And what about memes?  And brights?  Dawkins has been perpetually been putting his foot in mouth for years.

*Apparently he recently apologized for this.

Maybe "Dear Muslima" was worse than all that, either for being especially stupid, especially harmful, or especially emblematic.  But I just can't maintain my anger about it, never could.  I'm just not emotionally disposed to do that.

But also, I can't be angry at people who went so far as to shun Richard Dawkins.  Seems to me that that's their own prerogative.

I'm not saying that my way is the right way.  On the contrary, I am saying that this is one of my biases.  I don't get very angry at people, regardless of whether I should.  I don't hold grudges against people, regardless of whether I should.  It's common for people to say "criticize the opinion, not the person", and that's what I do, not because it is the right thing to do, but quite simply because it is my emotional default.

This bias has led to real life problems in my leadership experience.  I get along with people who don't get along with each other.  As a result, I've promoted officers who were problematic, and have been poorly prepared for the consequences.  Because I just don't get it.  What is this emotional response that other people are feeling but I'm not?

Since this is a recognized personal bias, I take steps to compensate for it.  I don't try to fake emotions, because my emotional response is real and just as valid as anyone else's.  But I make a point to remember that a person's past actions are predictive of their future actions, and I guard myself against unwarranted optimism.  And I remember that most other people do have a stronger anger response, that not everyone is exactly like me.  Lastly, I realize that calmness is valued in our culture, but I question that value, because calmness does not make me a superior person.

Richard Dawkins is a Vulcan

Richard Dawkins posted a series of tweets that set off a firestorm.

X is bad. Y is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of X, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned how to think logically.

Mild pedophilia is bad. Violent pedophilia is worse. If you think that's an endorsement of mild pedophilia, go away and learn how to think.

Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think anybody who said that would thereby be endorsing date rape, go away and learn how to think.

Twitter is such a terrible format, I'd rather not even engage with it.  Instead, I will respond to Richard Dawkins' longer post on the subject, "Are there emotional no-go areas where logic dare not show its face?"  In effect, I am being charitable to Dawkins by considering his fuller justification, regardless of whether he actually deserves such charity.

Some people angrily failed to understand that it was a point of logic using a hypothetical quotation about rape. They thought it was an active judgment about which kind of rape was worse than which. Other people got the point of logic but attacked me, equally furiously, for choosing the emotionally loaded example of rape to illustrate it.  To quote one blogger, prominent in the atheist movement, ‘What would have been wrong with, “Slapping someone’s face is bad, breaking their nose is worse”? Why need to use rape?’
...
I hope I have said enough above to justify my belief that rationalists like us should be free to follow moral philosophic questions without emotion swooping in to cut off all discussion, however hypothetical. I’ve listed cannibalism, trapped miners, transplant donors, aborted poets, circumcision, Israel and Palestine, all examples of no-go zones, taboo areas where reason may fear to tread because emotion is king. Broken noses are not in that taboo zone. Rape is. So is pedophilia. They should not be, in my opinion. Nor should anything else.

In short, Dawkins was trying to make a point about logic.  But he wasn't really trying to make a point about logic, he was trying to make a point about how certain subjects are so taboo that we fail to apply logic.  According to Dawkins, people angrily failed to understand that he was just trying to make a point about logic.  How can they disagree with logic?  Except, apparently he wasn't just making a point just about logic.

I appreciate that there are taboos that block rational discussion of important topics.  Perhaps the one most important to Dawkins is the taboo against criticizing religious beliefs.

On the other hand, Dawkins is being that guy.  The guy who dumbly pretends that they only understand literal meanings, and who act shocked when people interpret their statements in any sense other than the literal one.  I'm not sure what the cool kids call it these days, but when I was a kid, we called this being a "smart alec".  Smart alecs were assholes.  Even smart alecs themselves knew they were being assholes.

I know Richard Dawkins has a science popularizer background, and not a Skeptical background (and I mean capital S Skepticism, as in the community of people actively interested in the subject).  And in some ways, capital S Skepticism is dying, or it is to me, because of dissatisfaction with the community.  But there was at least one advantage to the community, which was that it made us think about our collective image as skeptics.  We knew that we were perceived of as smart alecs, as Vulcans, as people who only cared about logic.  We knew the stereotype that skeptics don't care about feelings, neither our own nor other people's.  We made sure to counter this stereotype whenever possible.

But Dawkins.  Dawkins is trying to be that guy.  He's trying to be the Vulcan.

Sorry, but being a Vulcan is neither endearing, nor is it the correct approach to critical thinking.

As for the fallacy that Dawkins mentioned, is it ironic that the politically-correct witch-hunting feminazis actually discuss this particular fallacy in greater depth than Dawkins ever could?  This fallacy is commonly discussed under the heading of "oppression olympics".

"Oppression olympics" is when people disingenuously compare how bad X and Y are, in order to just shut people up about X.  For instance, if people are talking about sexism in the UK, someone might dismiss the whole discussion by referring to sexism in the Middle East.*  But that's stupid.  Just because Y is worse than X doesn't mean we should ignore X.  X may still be pretty bad.

*I use this particular example because it's something Dawkins himself has infamously done.

At this point, the person who invoked the comparison gets defensive.  "I wasn't trying to say that X isn't bad.  I wasn't endorsing X."  But if what they said has no implications on X, why did they bring it up in a conversation about X?  Probably they subconsciously believe it has implications on X, even though they won't admit it.  In other words, people can still believe in the fallacy even when they say they don't.

Case in point, Dawkins says he doesn't believe in the fallacy, but people still remember his comments from last year when he said he "can’t find it in [him] to condemn" the "mild pedophilia" he experienced in his youth.  Just because it was "milder" than other people's experiences doesn't mean it wasn't bad, and doesn't mean we can't condemn it.  Does Dawkins himself understand the lesson of his own tweet?

Again, I appreciate the value of breaking taboos.  It's actually a pet peeve of mine when, because of taboos, people don't understand that different cases of sexual assault or rape may result in different degrees of trauma. But it's not so simple as dividing rape and assault into different "kinds", it's not so deterministic.  There are a lot more factors involved than just whether it was "date rape" or "violent rape".  The important message here is that people can react in different ways, and their feelings are valid.  And I will say that regardless of how taboo it is.

Beliefs are moral

A few weeks ago, in my post on The Asexual Agenda talking about atheism, I said the following:

But the way we talk about intersectionality doesn’t quite work for atheists.  Just by saying I’m an atheist, I’m telling you that I think your theistic beliefs are wrong.  By telling you I’m a “new” atheist, I’m telling you that I think you’re wrong and you should stop being wrong.  To speak of intersectionality is to look for allies.  But we are not allies, we are opposed. [emphasis added]

At least a few people found it shocking: I ended up arguing with one commenter, and my coblogger disagreed with it on her personal blog.  I had intended to shock, but it was still surprising to see people being shocked by something that to me is so basic.

It is possible to believe in something, and not really believe in it--brains are physical objects and we don't have complete control in them.  But I really do believe that there is no supernatural, and that supernaturalists are factually wrong.  Thus I am an atheist.  It is possible to be an atheist and not believe that others should believe in atheism--and "should" is just equivalent to saying that it's morally/ethically correct.  But I really do believe that supernaturalists should stop believing in the supernatural.  Thus I am a new atheist.

You might not be an atheist, or you might not be a new atheist.*  If so, you are wrong, and should stop being wrong.  If you are a new atheist, you are still wrong (about something else) and should stop being wrong.

*I am simplifying because being a "new atheist" also requires living in the 21st century, having some contact with atheist communities, and liking the label enough to adopt it.  But here I am using "new atheist" in the reductive sense of an atheist who believes that others should be atheists.

You believe that I am wrong about some things too, and I believe that you should believe that I should stop being wrong.

In short, I believe that beliefs are subject to morality.  People "should" believe what is factually correct.  I don't think it's an absolute principle, but I would say that this is generally true at least.  When I argue on the internet I don't know what your particular circumstances are, but on average I would say that my readers are better off with correct beliefs.

Correct beliefs lead to better decisions.  Even if incorrect beliefs incidentally lead to good decisions, "incidentally" implies that they are unreliable about it.  Christians who believe that gay sex is okay because of their particular Biblical interpretation are incidentally correct.*  That's not good enough, because now I can't rely on them to be ace-friendly, for instance.

*I think these people usually aren't using the Bible as a moral basis, but rather their moral intuitions informed by cultural norms.  But this is also only incidentally correct.  The same moral basis applied fifty years ago would not have been gay-friendly, and in fact was not.

This is true of belief-forming mechanisms as well.  A better belief-forming mechanism leads to better beliefs, leads to better decisions.  Even if a belief-forming mechanism incidentally leads to a correct belief, "incidentally" implies that it is unreliable.  Skeptics who exclusively use mockery to attack Creationists are incidentally correct.  That's not good enough, because now I can't rely on them to, you know, have any correct beliefs outside of skepticism.

Believing in god is a belief, but perhaps more importantly, a belief-forming mechanism.  The god-belief itself may not do a whole lot, but it may cause you to have more respect for religious authorities, cause you to believe in prayer, altmed, moral theology, or even just the naturalistic fallacy.  If you don't believe in those things, you are incidentally correct.  Good for you, but not good enough.

Above all else, I want to be correct.  Wanting you to be correct is just an application of the golden rule.  And most of all, I want you to want me to be correct.  I don't want you to be an asshole about it, and I want you to do your due diligence if you're going to persuade me of something.  But it's important to me, because you may be in a better position to persuade me than I am.

(There will be a part 2 to this post.)

Confusing causality and moral responsibility

In the days following the shooting at UC Santa Barbara, many of my friends are arguing about the meaning of the attack.  Is this reflective of a larger culture of misogynistic violence?  Should violent crimes be used to launch political points, or is this unfair?

In these arguments, I'd like to point out a distinction that many people often overlook.  Determining the cause of an event is not the same as determining who or what deserves blame.  (No, this isn't the first time I've discussed this topic.)

Let's talk about another problem, the more general problem of violence against women.  Many people react to this problem by advising women on how to be more safe.  Don't wear revealing clothing.  Don't walk alone in the streets at night.  Don't hang out at bars or clubs.  Don't drink too much without some friends to keep you safe.  Don't lead men on.  Carry pepper spray, learn some self-defense.  As a counterreaction, feminists argue that violence and sexual assault are not caused by women's failure to take safety precautions, but are instead caused by people who commit violence against women.

A friend of mine once said feminists seemed to be denying that women played any causal role whatsoever.

I don't think this is true, though, since I've never seen feminists say women should never take any safety precautions.  Rather, there seems to be some conflation between causality and responsibility.  In a sense, women have no moral responsibility to take safety precautions, because the truly moral thing would be to end rape culture.  And since moral responsibility is conflated with causality, feminists sometimes speak as if women's behavior plays no causal role whatsoever.

And this is understandable, because people on the other side conflate causality and responsibility too.  If someone says, "But surely women who hang out at bars are at higher risk of violence!" then literally speaking they are making a claim about causality.  But one strongly suspects that they are trying to make a claim about moral responsibility, trying to say that women should change how they socialize in order to reduce risk of violence.

In general, every event is caused by many many things.  The shooting at UCSB was caused in part by the flapping of wings of a particular butterfly in 1984.  What's more, in general it doesn't make sense to ask which causes played a greater role than other causes.  If this butterfly didn't flap its wings, that would have prevented 100% of the shooting, so the butterfly is 100% of the cause, but that just doesn't make sense, now, does it?

Usually, we're only interested in causes that have a much clearer connection to their consequences.  We simply can't control all the butterflies, or predict what effects they will have.  So the butterflies are best treated as random background.

But even when we confine ourselves to causes that clearly connect to their result, this is insufficient to assign moral responsibility to the cause.  Moral responsibility is basically a tool we use to get more desirable results in society.  We hold people morally responsible when we think that this could influence behavior in similar situations, and that this will result in better outcomes in the future.  In order to hold a behavior morally responsible for some outcome, it must have a causal relation to the outcome.  But the fact that a behavior causes an outcome does not necessarily mean it should be held morally responsible.

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Let's consider a few points of view on the UCSB shooting.

Some people resist assigning any moral responsibility to killing sprees.  There are simply too few of them, and it seems like no matter how we reconfigure society and its moral values, we may never be rid of them.  Holding people morally responsible will be futile, and change nothing.  It's not that shootings don't have causes, it's that we can't influence those causes with moral language.

Some people have held the MRA, PUA, and incel communities responsible.  The general idea here is that while we may not be able to eliminate shooting sprees, we may be able to mitigate the more general problem of violence against women by countering misogyny among men.  Basically, countering misogyny is something we should be doing anyway, but here we have a prominent example of violence explicitly motivated by misogyny, so let's make hay out of it.

Some people argue that it's caused by mental illness, or by the shooter being "crazy".  However, it is not clear that people suffering from mental illness are any more likely than people who don't to commit violent crimes.  Upon a brief search, I could not find any meta-analysis backing up such a claim (even in the case of schizophrenia, the link is questionable).  So this fails as a causal claim.

But it fails even more as a moral claim.  I don't think people intend to hold mentally ill responsible, but perhaps they intend to hold poor mental health care responsible.  But this assignment of responsibility does not lead to a better outcomes.  It has the unintended effect of stigmatizing mental illness, which discourages people with mental illness from seeking help.  Further, it could worsen the problem of violence against people with mental illness, which meta-analyses show is a real problem.

How to argue

If there's one thing I learned about blogging, it's how to keep the scope of each post narrow. The question "How to argue?" defies this rule.  Nonetheless, I will hammer out some thoughts which I hope are useful (even though they are not supported with arguments), and which could be expanded in separate posts.  Please raise your hand if you're interested in me expanding any particular thought.

A bit about my perspective.  I am very non-confrontational.  I hardly ever argue offline, and not so much online either.  Although I have a lot of persuasive writing, so that's something.  Also note that I've fully swallowed a particular piece of skeptical ideology: I believe in only developing argumentative skills that are more effective when deployed by the correct side than when deployed by the incorrect side.

90% of arguments are crap.

Sturgeon's law says 90% of everything is crap, and that applies to arguments as well.  It follows that you are justified in being selective about which arguments to participate in.

It's worth pointing out that the most common failure mode is when arguments are not arguments at all.  Sometimes it's a different kind of conflict entirely.  Sometimes, people just explain their own opinion, and fail to offer any arguments for it. I wish people wouldn't try to pass off assertions as arguments, but on the other hand it seems like people don't spend enough time on assertions.  I regularly get commenters who are unable to explain their opinion, and unable to understand mine.  Obviously that stuff needs to be worked out before any productive argument occurs.

Argue from shared beliefs.

It's an Objectivist fantasy that arguments are built upwards from fundamental assumptions about reality.  Human knowledge is more like a web of interconnected facts and opinions.  You should think about who your audience is (whether it's the person you're arguing with, or bystanders), and either find out or guess what your shared beliefs are.  Travel along the web from these shared beliefs towards the main subject of your argument.  If that's too far to travel, argue about something else.

 

Be tactical, but honest.

Tactical arguments are not synonymous with dishonesty.  For example, if your opponent believes A, and you disagree with A, you can still use arguments like, "If A, then B.  So you should agree with me on B, if not A."  For instance, sometimes I concern troll people (ie give advice to people I disagree with), and this is basically an attempt to argue based on the opponent's assumptions rather than my own.  Whenever I do this, I am open about my role as concern troll.

Don't tell your opponents what they believe.

If you happen to be wrong, that's the quickest route to loserville.  If you're right, your opponent may decide that they don't believe it after all, and whoops you're in loserville again.  We do need to make guesses about our opponents (especially if they're no good at explaining themselves), but try not to be too brazen about it.  If necessary, clarify that you are guessing their opinion, and ask if your guess is correct.

Treat scientific evidence as a trump card.

If the opponent presents a study, and you don't have the time or desire to check it, consider folding.  If you do have the time and desire, check a) whether the study really says and implies what is claimed, b) whether the paper has questionable philosophical assumptions or methodological issues, c) whether the paper is authoritative, and d) whether there are superior studies out there.

People see themselves as essentially good.

This is such a strong cognitive bias, that it's better to work around it than to counter it, at least within any given argument.  What people most need to hear is that they would not be bad people if they decided to change their minds.  And this is often true; people make mistakes, and do bad things without being bad people.

People won't change their minds in front of you.

This is another strong cognitive bias that is better to work around.  What people most need to hear is that if they change their mind about one particular argument for their beliefs, that doesn't mean they need to change their mind about the entire belief.  This allows people to change their minds without changing their minds.

Tell your opponent something they didn't know.

One acceptable moment for people to change their minds is when they receive new information.  It's a plausible excuse for why they were previously wrong--they were simply unaware of a relevant fact.

Don't gloat when people change their mind.

Another thing is that people will sometimes change their mind when they think you're not looking.  For instance, "shifting the goalpost", when it's not employed disingenuously, is just that.  I do not recommend discouraging shifting the goalpost unless you think your opponent is being disingenuous.

Consider losing the argument.

Even if you don't really think you lost.  There is some underrated power in being the loser: the loser chooses when to leave.  You can get out of an argument that is either not fun or not productive.

 

And of course sometimes you really will be wrong.  In those cases, you are probably affected by the bias where you don't want to change your mind in front of people.  Losing even when you don't think you lost is a good way to give yourself the opportunity to change your mind--or not.