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Will_Sawin comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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Yvain, here is a challenge. Many of your examples are weak versions of strong right-wing arguments that you do not accept. (by your remark about Schelling fences, it seems you're aware of this). I challenge you to replace each of these examples with a weak version of a strong left-wing argument that you do accept. Since policy debates should not appear one-sided, there should be no shortage of weak arguments "on your side." And it would be an interesting kind of ideological Turing test.
Perhaps I'm wrong about "what side you're on" and you already accept the strong right-wing arguments. In which case you got me, well done!
Off the top of my head:
Economic inequality is an unequal distribution of resources. The most salient example of this is an unequal distribution of resources that all have equal claim to, like a pie a parent bakes for their children. But [various convincing arguments in favor of at least some economic inequality.]
War is killing, which is bad because murder is bad. (Or eating meat, or capital punishment.)
Gay marriage is good because it's a right, and the most salient rights are good.
Welfare is good because it's a form of helping people, and helping people in ways that don't produce bad incentive effects and without taking from anyone else is good.
Processed food is bad because putting the most salient synthetic chemicals in food would be a really bad idea.
Note that "genetic engineering to cure diseases is eugenics" and "evolutionary psychology is sexist" are probably left-wing viewpoints, though not ones Yvain agrees with.
ISTM that categorizing many of those as "Left-wing viewpoints" or "Right-wing viewpoints" is a strong category error, one that we should attempt to reduce rather than redraw or blue boundaries. "Evolutionary psychology is sexist" is, afaict, a word error. It is not a position, but an implicit claim: "Because evolutionary psychology is sexist, it is bad, and thus evolutionary psychology is wrong!" - this is usually combined (in my experience) with an argument that the world is inherently good and that all humans are inherently equal and so on, which means that theories that posit "unfair" or "bad" circumstances are wrong; the world must be "good" and "fair". Stereotypicalism would call for a reference to religion here.
It may be a word error - I don't think it is, "Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists and rationalized by the scientists even though the claims are not at all well-supported compared to nonsexist alternatives" is a coherent and meaningful description of a way the universe could be but isn't, and is therefore false, not a word error - but if so, it's a word-error made by stereotypically left-wing people like Lewontin and Gould who were explicitly political in their criticism, not a word-error made by any right-wing scientists I can think of offhand.
In general, we should be careful about dismissing claims as meaningless or incoherent, when often only a very reasonable and realistic amount of charity is required to reinterpret the claim as meaningful and false - most people are trying to be meaningful most of the time, even when they're rationalizing a wrong position. Only people who've gotten in a lot more trouble than that are actively trying to avoid letting their arguments be meaningful. And meaningless claims can be dismissed immediately, without bringing forth evidence or counterobservations; meaningful false claims require more demonstration to show they're false. So when somebody brings a false claim, and you dismiss it as meaningless, you're actually being significantly logically rude to them - putting in less effort than they're investing - it takes more effort to bring forth a meaningful false claim than to call something 'meaningless'.
I dislike accusations of sexism as much as the next guy, but in the last year or two I have started to think that ev-psych is way overconfident. The coarse grained explanation is that ev-psych seems to be "softer" than regular psychology, which itself is "softer" than medicine, and we all know what percentage of medical findings are wrong. I'd be curious to learn what other LWers think about this, especially you, because your writings got me interested in ev-psych in the first place.
As in about the likelihood of certain kinds of explanations?
Can't think anything without a concrete example.
I am going to rehearse saying this in a robotic voice, while spinning round and round flailing my arms in a mechanical fashion.
Can you put it up on Youtube when you're done?
Off the top of my head:
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S096098220701559X
So far as I know, the association of pink with girls and blue with boys is a western custom which only goes back a century or so.
Precisely.
This seems like a qualitative argument, when a quantitative argument would be more interesting. Who is the John Ioannidis of evolutionary psychology? Or, what research has been published that has later turned out to be false?
(Also, why do you dislike accusations of sexism? Shouldn't you only dislike false accusations of sexism?)
I dislike accusations of sexism for the same reason I dislike accusations of any other negative behavior. Those accusations signal either sexism or false accusations of sexism, both of which are net negatives to me.
See the OP.
Because you and I no doubt hang out in completely different circles, my view of the prototypical case of sexism is probably different from yours. Also, I consider most non-prototypical cases of sexism to be wrong, so there aren't really any connotations being smuggled in.
I may or may not agree depending on which definition of "sexism" you are using.
Well, in any debate you'd still have to explain why that particular example of sexism is wrong.
Not if (a) you're in a situation where everyone already agrees on that or (b) you consider fairness to be an important value.
This is a worthy steel-manning when trying to reach an accurate conclusion about ev-psych, but I think you give the typical person who claims "ev-psych is sexist" too much credit here.
Natasha Walter makes the argument that Eliezer refers to in Living Dolls (not really about ev-psych, but about the idea of innate differences between genders in abilities), and I'm sure there are other examples (I haven't actually read all that much feminist writing). However, I have also encountered people who won't even discuss the issue with anyone who is pro-ev psych because they think that they're so morally appalling. Not sure how typical the people I'm encountered are though - I suspect they may be more extreme than most, and the most extreme people are the loudest.
There's definitely a temptation to identify a belief we agree with with its best advocates, and a belief we disagree with with its typical advocates. I definitely see this when people talk about how stupid eg "the left/right" is. I may be encouraging that error...
The sexism associated with evolutionary biology is typically the result of the perceived (or actual) claim that because sexual differentiation has a historical and evolutionary basis, it is morally correct to reinforce those differences today.
You can point out that that type of claim is not commonly made my evolutionary psychologists, but when lay people perceive that that claim is true and use it to justify sexist actions that they would not have taken in the absence of their perception of such a claim, then it is the case that evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex.
One of the key points is that "Evolutionary psychology is sexist" and "evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex" are very nearly the same statement, while "Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists" is a radically different statement.
Well, sure. But so do a million other things. After all, it would be much harder to discriminate unfairly on the basis of sex if we didn't have sensory organs capable of distinguishing an individual's sex, so the existence of such organs contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex. Unarguable.
Also uninteresting.
Surely a more important question is whether the study of evolutionary psychology differentially contributes to such discrimination? Which perhaps it does, but this takes more effort to demonstrate than simply pointing out that there exist lay people who use it to justify sexist actions.
Okay- I assert that there are almost zero people who seriously assert that 'Having sensory organs which can distinguish sex' justifies sexist actions, and that there are more than one hundred thousand Americans who demonstrably either claim, or allow the claim to stand, that EP justifies sexist actions that they themselves take.
I'm prepared to defend the second assertion if needed, which is why I choose a conservative number. The first assertion is trivial to falsify if you can find a significant number of people who believe that.
To be more logically complete, my unstated assumption: Lay people typically don't take actions which they believe to be unjustified.
I'd be interested in seeing this. Largely because I'm curious to see specific examples of what you consider unjustified sexism.
The most godawful example I've seen of EP being used as a cover for blatant sexism and misogyny is this NRO article, which basically says that as a rich boss with many male sons, Mitt Romney exudes alpha male power, and all women should fall in trance and vote for him.
Suddenly I am enlightened!
In particular, I have just now realized that whereas I encountered evolutionary psychology in the context of my quest to unravel the mysteries of human cognition and so I read a bunch of science books and papers on it, many other people may be encountering evolutionary psychology primarily in the context of Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, attempted invocations of ev-psych which are so terrible as to be propagated through the blogosphere as horrors for everyone to marvel at.
This explains a lot about the oddly bad opinion that so many online-folk seem to have about evolutionary psychology. This has had me making puzzled expressions for years, not sure what was going on. But you would probably get a pretty different first-impression (and first impressions are very controlling) if your first exposure was reading that NRO article instead of "The Psychological Foundations of Culture". Even if somebody tried to expose you to the real science afterward, you'd probably go in with some degree of motivated skepticism.
Having thus generalized the problem - is this likely to be happening to me somewhere, or you? Besides ev-psych and economics, which other sciences will Reddit expose to you primarily in the form of exhibiting Someone Is Wrong On The Internet misuses?
After reading that article, I seriously can't tell whether he means should epistemically (‘women are likely to vote for him’), ethically (‘women had better vote for him’), or he's (deliberately or accidentally) equivocating the two. His arguments only makes sense if he means it epistemically, but his tone only makes sense if he means it ethically.
This article isn't a joke?
Is your objection that the descriptive statement is false, or than it's sexist to say it even if its true?
Yes, how one's candidate appeals to voters' biases is not exactly something to brag about, but it's unfortunately a common occurrence in our political process.
They must have been terribly disappointed that his alpha pheromones only worked on married women.
Wait, are you asserting that sexism is ever justified? If so, we have a definition mismatch.
For a start, we have Forbes Magazine drawing a link from EP to why most women will never be CEOs (Never mind that most people will never be CEOs). I haven't yet demonstrated how many readers of Forbes allowed the claim that EP justifies the sexist treatment of executives, and also take sexist actions regarding executives; will you accept that 5% of board members of publicly traded companies make sexist decisions about executives, and that 80% of those people read Forbes and didn't object to that (4% of board members overall)? (again, I'm using numbers that I think are conservative, because direct measurements are hard.)
Since I specified unjustified sexism, you'll have to provide an argument for why said justification is incorrect.
I agree that many Americans assert that EP justifies sexist actions.
I agree that effectively nobody asserts that having sensory organs which can distinguish sex justify sexist actions. Nor did I claim anyone did.
My assertion was, and is, that the presence of those organs, much like the presence of those justifications, contributes to sexist actions that would not occur in their absence.
I assumed your objection was to the sexist actions, and the justifications were objectionable merely because they enabled those actions. In which case it seems that anything else that equally enabled those actions would be equally objectionable.
But, sure, if you're concerned specifically with asserted justifications rather than with the actions themselves, then I'm entirely beside your point.
Unrelatedly: lacking a justification for X != believing X to be unjustified.
The ability to notice a difference irrelevant to a decision is not in the same category as the belief that a difference which is irrelevant to a decision is, in fact, relevant.
True.
And the existence of a field of study that can be used to justify such a belief is in yet a third category.
I'm not sure what you mean by "reinforce", but it seems reasonable to take these differences into account when making decisions.
For example, suppose that evolutionary science has determined that is was pro-survival in the past for females to refrain from occupations which had high fatality rates.
Reinforcing that would be claiming that females should refrain from or be prohibited/discouraged from those occupations in the present and near future.
Also sexist is the line of thought "Females are statistically more/less likely to be X, therefore I require that it be a male/female who performs task Y.", when variation within each sex is great enough that there are a very large number of one sex who outperform a typical member of the other; a specific example would be "Females are less likely than males to complete a degree in mathematics; therefore it makes sense to award this scholarship to the equally qualified male instead of the female".
That's not the relevant comparison. In practice the comparison is between an above average members of each sex.
In your example, than depends on whether the first clause is still true after controlling for whatever qualifications are used in the second.
You don't always have the luxury of choosing from among a sample that includes above-median performers.
The second case is a textbook example of sexist thought; I thought it was clear that the first clause was not controlling for anything, while the second was making a specific measurement of expected performance.
In that case comparing average members of one sex with the above average members of the other is still not the right comparison to make.
Even this statement is ambiguous. Does the specific measure of expected performance actually screen of gender?