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lessdazed comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong
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So you prefer the situation in which a dubious mainstream view remains entirely unchallenged to a situation where a doubter, instead of remaining silent, states that it is likely wrong but that spelling out an explicit argument why it is so would violate social norms? As far as I see, the information made available in the second case is a proper superset of the information available in the former. So how can this constitute "obscurantism" in any reasonable sense of the term?
I'd prefer social norms be violated. Asserting that a proposition is wrong without explaining why one has reached that conclusion or presenting an alternative is not a behavior that is generally viewed as beneficial in any other context on Lesswrong.
ETA: I also see the widespread use on Lesswrong of "politically correct" as an attribution that prima facie proves something is wrong to be problematic. Society functions on polite fictions, but that does not mean that everything that is polite is inherently false.
I do not. If things are thought false, its critics say so. Otherwise, its critics suppress it socially. If some idea is socially suppressed, I infer its critics fear it is true. There is a famous essay on this I couldn't find, but here is a discussion on it.
What I think we’re in danger of forgetting is that, anywhere but Less Wrong, “That’s offensive!” is actually a really persuasive argument. People who blithely ignore even the strongest of evidence will often shut up and look stupid if you successfully play the offense card. PC arguments may be so commonly heard, not because they are the “best” (most valid) arguments that could be made in support of a given assertion, but because they totally work.
If someone says, with no factual basis at all, that members of Group X murder children, piles and piles of evidence may not be enough to make the claim go away, but if you can convince people that to say so is offensive and Anti-X, you're home free. So why bother presenting the evidence?
"You're wrong" implies "you're a liar," or a more direct response could be "that's a lie." If the goal is to make someone look stupid, this can work better. Admittedly that's not always a major goal, cases won't overlap, etc.
But I think we do see people make fact-citing arguments that are delivered in the tone of "that's offensive", so the methods aren't mutually exclusive. For example, any argument beginning "There is no scientific evidence that..." in an appropriately shrill tone sends the message that offense is taken and sidesteps the logical evidence to highlight the strongest available evidence, the absence of scientific evidence.
Even if the offense argument is explicit, factual arguments could at least be added to it.
Do you mean Paul Graham's What you can't say?
Yes. To gwern (verb) it, to reconstruct it from quotes according to the Pareto principle:
Add "politically correct" to the set of possible x and y and we are in agreement. This was the point of my original comment on the matter.
Saying things violate Paul Grahm's principle isn't used here to dismiss ideas, only to, as you said, put the burden of proof on them as being prima facie false. I don't think that "heretical" was quite the same way, nor are "racist" and "fascist", etc.
I would never say "prima facie proves" so maybe we are using some words to express very different concepts.
This may be evidence that the critics fear that, but it isn't always the case. Sometimes they just think that there can be damage if people are mislead by the falsehoods for example.
Sure, it's not always the case. But if I just think that there can be damage if people are misled by a falsehood, I will probably claim it's false, and argue for that point.
This isn't really true. To give the most prominent example, Holocaust denial is heavily suppressed in Western societies, in many even with criminal penalties, although its falsity is not in any doubt whatsoever outside of the small fringe scene of people who espouse it. (And indeed, it really doesn't stand up even to the most basic scrutiny.) For most beliefs that the respectable opinion regards as deserving of suppression, respectable people are similarly convinced in their falsity with equal confidence, regardless of how much truth there might actually be in them.
Now, sometimes it does happen that certain claims are clearly true but at the same time so inflammatory and ideologically unacceptable that respectable people simply cannot bring themselves to admit it, even when the alternative requires a staggering level of doublethink and rationalization. In these situations, contrarians who provoke them by waving the obvious and incontrovertible evidence in front of their eyes will induce a special kind of rage. But these are fairly exceptional situations.
How do people respond to the claims? I acknowledge that any response other than just "that's false" de-emphasizes the falsity of it, but if the response is "That's a lie and illegal," that's a different sort of thing to say than "That's classist," or the like for other claims. If people respond with "The powerful Jews will lock you up for saying such a thing, by the way I think it's 15% likely true," then that's an interesting case too, one that isn't a counterexample.
In one sense legal coercion is at the far end of a single scale from mild disapproval to ostracization to illegalization,but in another sense it is qualitatively different. A country within which saying something is illegal might have most endorse the illegal idea, or most oppose it by simply calling it "false", or most oppose it by emphasizing its illegality and somewhat mentioning its illegality, etc., or no majority of any type. What's important here is the social climate around the statements, for which the laws on the books are important evidence but alone don't make an example or counterexample of a country.
Yes, this is the precise complaint! To frame an argument as politically incorrect is to imply that all arguments against it are based on squeamishness. It's a transparent attempt to exploit the mechanism you describe, one so beloved of tabloid hacks that practically any right of centre* talking point can be described as politically incorrect ("you can't say [thing I'm saying right now on prime-time television] any more" and so on).
Why declarations of politically incorrectness are taken any more seriously than claims to be totally mad/random or the life of the party I shall never know.
*am I being, ah what's the equivalent here - unserious perhaps? populist? - if I suggest that this trick is mostly limited to the right? That political correctness just means any non-socialist leftwing opinion, with the added implication that the opinion is both hegemonic and baseless. When left wing commentators trip over themselves to avoid criticising america or soldiers, or rush to condemn protests at the first sign of a black mask, nobody talks about political correctness. Despite all the talk about how OWS has made it acceptable to moral issues in ways that were previously beyond the pale, nobody calls it an anti-PC movement.
Perhaps we should have a separate term to describe this phenomenon, if we are going to keep going on about political correctness, and pretending we aren't talking about politics? Since otherwise we reach a point where commentators are unable to call people fascists, for being so PC is decidedly politically incorrect.
First, politically correct arguments are obviously a subset of arguments for conclusions that are the same as those reached by politically correct arguments.
Second, that conflates levels.
People don't randomly decide which arguments to give justifying their statements and actions, they tend to give the strongest ones they have available. Arguments that are politically correct are non-truth-citing arguments. The argument that an argument is politically correct is a non-truth-citing argument. Non-truth-citing arguments are generally weaker than truth-citing arguments.
See here. If someone presents a NTC argument, I infer they don't have a TCA unless there are extenuating circumstances such that I think that they would have presented a NTCA even when they had a TCA.
Likewise when someone's presents a TCA, one can infer, all else being equal, that they don't have a much more compelling one available. Even weak TCAs ought to lower one's degree of belief something is true when they are presented by someone who probably would have used a better argument had it been available, even though the argument is a valid and novel one, and one had expected the arguments for the position to be better.
Imagine you are watching two people. The first makes a claim about a subject with which you aren't familiar. At that point, you assign it a certain credibility. The second objects with a NTCA. At that point, you should think the claim more likely than before because the best objection the second person could make was weak and your original estimate had expected them to do better. If the first person objects to the objection with a NTCA, then you should think the claim less likely than at the second point, because the best counterobjection the first person could make was weak and your estimate at the second point in time had expected them to do better.
That "To frame an argument as politically incorrect" is an argument roughly as bad as a politically correct argument does not salvage politically correct arguments.
So, I think I have a reasonable sense of what people mean when they say an argument, or an assertion, is politlcally incorrect. Reading this, though, I begin to suspect that I have no idea what you mean when you say an argument is politically correct.
Ordinarily, I don't hear that term used to describe arguments at all, I hear it used to describe people who object to politically incorrect arguments... or who object to arguments on the grounds that they are politically incorrect.
Among other things, I can't tell if you intend for "politically correct" and "politically incorrect" to be jointly exhaustive terms, or whether there's a middle ground between them. If the latter, I think I agree with most of what you say here, though I'm not sure how many real-world arguments it applies to.
I mean an argument with a few characteristics:
For example, they don't take the form "It's not true that all violent rapes in the city were perpetrated by immigrants." They take the form "It's insensitive to say that all violent rapes in the city were perpetrated by immigrants."
For example, "We've done experiments, and the results suggest no difference in intelligence between Koreans and Chinese, controlling for other factors, there are probably no measurable differences between the groups" is not a PC argument, because it appeals to truth. "The assumption that Koreans are smarter than Chinese is racist, if you properly controlled for environmental differences, there would be no measured difference between the groups," has a very similar conclusion, and is a PC argument. It's not the argument's conclusion that makes it PC or not.
For example, arguing that something is wrong because "A Muslim said it" is obviously neither truth citing nor PC. PC arguments are those that are rationalizations for a particular set of conclusions.
Truth-citing and non-truth-citing are just poles of a range. Arguments such as evolutionary debunking arguments attempt to show a loose relationship between a proposition and the truth - loose, neither tight nor non-existent.
Unlike PC arguments, PI arguments are just those with conclusions or implicit assumptions targeted by PC arguments. Mercy said "To frame an argument as politically incorrect is to imply that all arguments against it are based on squeamishness. It's a transparent attempt to exploit the mechanism you describe..." this is largely true. The framing corresponds to a certain degree with reality in each case.
Positions for which the best argument is "My opponent's arguments is PC," are weak. This weakness is because the accusation that the argument is a rationalization for a predetermined conclusion, i.e. that it is a PC argument, does not attack the conclusion directly. The accusation is a form of evolutionary debunking argument, and weakens the evidence brought for the conclusion without destroying the evdence and without attacking the conclusion. The accusation is weak in a way similar to all PC arguments.
Mercy went wrong in thinking that because calling out arguments as being PC and thus not tightly bound to truth of their conclusions does not address the conclusions either, arguments' actual status as PC arguments is unimportant.
The reason to especially doubt arguments usually supported by the argument "This argument is rejected because it is a politically incorrect argument," is that valid arguments with true premises and conclusions can usually do better. There is an excuse to say "This argument is rejected because it is a politically incorrect argument," so long as one has prioritized better arguments, or if it is to explain rather than argue for something, e.g. to explain why someone was fired but not why the statement that person was fired for is true.
(nods) OK, I see what you're getting at, at least generally. Thanks for the clarification.
One thing...
This would make significantly more sense to me if it said "incorrect." Was that a typo, or am I confused?
What does this mean?
I believe a "discuss" (or synonym thereof) was omitted between "a" and "moral."