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anonym comments on Why I'm Staying On Bloggingheads.tv - Less Wrong
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It sounds like those are reasons to avoid engaging Creationists, not BhTV in general. If this is going to expand into a point about lowering BhTV's intellectual standards like you mentioned above... then I find it odd to argue that one podcast could have such a powerful marginal effect on the enjoyment one derives from the site, unless you're using some weird criteria where your overall evaluation of BhTV is based on the least intellectual podcast it hosts at any given time.
And I would be surprised if the worst podcast on BhTV by the criteria you described were Behe's - rom a lot of comments on Sean and Carl's posts, plenty of people would love to see Megan McArdle boycotted as well. I'd imagine that most people's list of "least rational" targets to successively knock off would end up looking awfully partisan (get Megan, and then Jonah Goldburg, and then that annoying Will Wilkinson!), which fuels my skepticism here. I'd submit that if a diavlog with a "ghost hunter" was uploaded, people would find it annoying but the reaction would be otherwise subdued.
You asked for non-arbitrary standards for believing creationism to be the most boycott-worthy of the views represented on BhTV. I gave you a plausible answer. I don't know enough about all the BhTV participants to argue that it is actually the case, but you seemed to have difficulty in even coming up with any such potential explanation, which is why I made the suggestion. You were implying that believing creationism is the most boycott-worthy was prima facie an arbitrary, totally subjective choice.
And for the record, I think Eliezer made the right decision based on what is known so far. I think that BhTV does deserve a second chance. At the same time, I am very disappointed in the intentional vagueness of the editorial policy that was posted, for the reasons I've talked about above.
People find creationism more disturbing than ghost hunters because (among other reasons) creationism is making inroads in the educational system in USA, which could have very serious effects. I'm not sure why I even have to mention this. Do you really not see that creationism is different than ghost hunters in some pretty fundamental ways and that the repercussions of each being taken seriously and widely debated are very different?
I'm quite sure that there are political participants who would fare worse than Behe on any of the dimensions you'd offer. I guess one could lack the expertise to evaluate more than a subset of participants, however, in which case one could apply the principle consistently..
You have to mention this precisely because it's disingenuous to hide behind the purely non-political justifications of the boycott - you end up trying to draw up a non-political dividing line which just so happens to exclude the viewpoints you have political objections to. This is precisely why I expressed skepticism that there's a non-arbitrary principle for the unique objection to Behe, because if the political considerations are a necessary factor in the boycott, there isn't one, unless one wants to get into a broader defense of one's particular political sympathies... which most people will avoid because they realize that "people who I dislike sufficiently shouldn't be given platforms to speak on" is a principle that isn't going to sway one's opponents.
And the young-earth creationist? Since you are quite sure about it, which people hold which specific political beliefs that are as utterly refuted by the scientific evidence as the idea that Genesis is pretty much right and that the Earth is on the order of thousands or tens of thousands of years old?
No one ACTUALLY cares that the young-earth creationist was on. They only care about Behe. Note that Eliezer didn't mention the first interview.
(edit for clarity)
Wrong.
Sean Carroll:
Why would emails be flying back and forth if he didn't care about the creationist?
Carl Zimmer:
Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer leaving BhTV is what kicked the whole thing off, in case you haven't followed the affair at all, and they both explicitly stated in the articles quoted above that they were cared very much that the creationist was on but that they were willing to accept it was a one-time mistake that wouldn't happen again. How do you interpret that as "not caring"?
Some conspiracy theory! Epistemic hygiene, please.
I don't think a conspiracy is a reasonable reading of my words. I certainly deny a conspiracy.
This is an interesting challenge and I'm wondering if anyone has a good candidate for it.
Except that it doesn't exclude viewpoints I have political objections to. It excludes people who are willfully ignorant and who refuse to engage with arguments and follow standard rules of intellectual discourse, regardless of what they happen to believe. It applies to atheists just as impartially to creationists, if they happen to engage in the same kinds of intellectual sleaziness. I never suggested that it would only damn creationists, just that it would be especially damning to creationists. And for what it's worth, I've had this personal test for distinguishing between people worthy of debate/discussion and people who are a waste of my time for much, much longer than I've had a distaste for creationism.