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Alejandro1 comments on Rationality Quotes March 2013 - Less Wrong
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--Rod Dreher
(Post slightly edited in response to comments below)
This sort of argument was surprisingly common in the 18th and 19th century compared to today. The Federalist Papers, for example, lay out the problem as a set of premises leading inexorably to a conclusion. I find it hard to imagine a politician successfully using such a form of argument today.
At least that's my impression; perhaps appeals to authority and emotion were just as common in the past as today but selection effects prevent me from seeing them.
Also, in the past the people you were trying to convince were likely to be better educated.
Today's politicians don't use writing as their primary means of convincing other people. Airplane travel is cheap. It doesn't cost much to get a bunch of people into a room behind closed doors and talk through an issue.
This is not a good way to argue about anything except mathematics. It takes the wrong attitude towards how words work and in practice doesn't even make arguments easier to debug because there are usually implicit premises that are not easy to tease out.
For example, suppose I say "A (a thing that affects X) hasn't changed. B (a thing that affects X) hasn't changed. C (a thing that affects X) hasn't changed. Therefore, X hasn't changed." There's an implicit premise here, namely "A, B, C are the only things that affect X," which is almost certainly false. It is annoyingly easy not to explicitly write down such implicit premises, and trying to argue in this pseudo-logical style encourages that mistake among others.
(In general, I think people who have not studied mathematical logic should stop using the word "logic" entirely, but I suppose that's a pipe dream.)
I agree that the formal "premiss + premiss + premiss = conclusion" style of arguing is not good outside formal contexts. But still, the appropriate response would be "Your argument is wrong because it doesn't take into account D", not "that's your opinion and I have mine".
Well, that depends on what the premises and conclusion were. "That's your opinion" can be used as a deflecting move if someone doesn't want to have a particular debate at that particular moment (e.g. if the premises and conclusions were about something highly charged and the woman was not interested in having a highly charged debate). Ignoring a deflecting move could be considered a social blunder, and maybe that's what the woman was responding to. There are a lot of ways to read this situation, and many of them are not "haha, look at how irrational this woman was."
Unfortunately, a lot of people have taken to using these kinds of deflective moves to protect their irrational beliefs.
To avoid this, try the more honest "You're dead wrong, possibly literally, but not important enough to be worth the time it'd take to save from your own stupidity by explaining why."?
People who have not studied mathematical logic reserved the word well before those who have studied mathematical logic. If a field wants to make a word that means something different to what it used to mean or is exclusive to those in the field then it should make up a new word.
I should clarify. I'm not exactly worried that people will mix up the colloquial meaning of logic with the mathematical meaning of mathematical logic. I just want people to taboo "logic" because I think it is frequently used to label a particular style of bad argument in order to mask certain kinds of weaknesses that such arguments have. Studying mathematical logic is one way to recognize that there's something off about how people colloquially use the word "logic," but I suppose it's not the only way.
Would the quote sound as bad to you if “logic” was replaced with “reasoning”?
As per Postel's law, if a word has both a colloquial meaning and a technical meaning, the latter is not what I want, and there's a decent synonym for the former, I personally use the synonym instead (e.g. “usefulness” instead of “utility”, “substantial” or “sizeable” instead of “significant”, etc.), but as per Postel's law I don't demand that other people do the same, especially if the colloquial meaning is way more widespread overall.
The word logic is much older than proper mathematical logic. There no real reason to assume that people mean mathematical logic when they say the term.
Did you read my clarifying comment here?
The below discussion is why "person" is such a useful feminist word.
The quote sounds stereotyping/sexist, though the article it's quoted from isn't.
I honestly don't think so, because I don't see any implication or subtext in the quote that the attitude that this particular woman took is representative of all/most women, or more prevalent in women than in men. It is just as easy to imagine a man taking this attitude, it just happened to be a woman in this particular conversation.
I saw exactly that subtext.
The quote opens "I once had a civil argument with a woman". The author spends one noun to describe this person, and spends it on gender. It could have been "with a friend" or "with a politician" or even just "I once had a civil argument" (that the author had it with somebody is implied in the nature of argument). The antiepistimologist has exactly one characteristic: gender, and that characteristic is called out as important.
It gets worse because being bad at logic is an existing negative stereotype of women.
The subtext is definitely there on some level for the reasons you mention, but probably it wasn't a conscious, deliberate choice by the speaker, and I don't think it's all that useful to hold probably subconscious attitudes against people. (I don't know whether I had noticed the subtext if I hadn't read shminux's comment before seeing the quote itself.)
To change subconscious attitudes it helps to make them salient and make people consciously aware of them.
In principle, I agree, but: 1) attempts to do that can backfire if done the wrong way, and 2) Ron Dreher is most likely not reading this thread anyway.
I basically agree with 1 and 2. That said, although Ron Dreher is not going to read this, odds are good that the number of people on this thread that would benefit from a more conscious less automatic process for choosing words with regards to making / not making gener salient is greater than 0.
Greater than zero is a weak claim, but I do think this kind of criticism adds value.
Single data point: when I read "I once had a a civil argument with a woman", it immediately felt sexist to me. I think I half-expected something about "how men think versus how women think". The whole thing doesn't feel sexist to me, just that opening.
(I do not necessarily endorse that feeling.)
Yep. It's a matter of what features are salient to mention.
If someone said "I once had a civil argument with a German" it would sound like they were saying that it was unusual or notable for an argument with a German to be civil; or possibly that the person's Germanness was somehow relevant to the civility of the argument — maybe they cited Goethe or something?
(On the other hand, it might be that they were trying to imply that they were well-traveled or cosmopolitan; that they've talked to people of a lot of nationalities.)
If the identity mentioned is a stereotyped group, a lot of people would tend to mentally activate the stereotype.
I did not see a sexist subtext, where I think I would have seen a discriminatory subtext if he had used "I once had a civil argument with a German," because "woman" in this case explains his later pronoun use. If the person had been a man, I would have expected him to say "man", rather than "person", to better clarify his later use of "he."
In retrospect though, I can see why other people would interpret it as having a sexist subtext.
I think this thread is also experiencing this effect.
Quick! Where did your brain put emphasis first?! Maybe we need a poll to see if the distribution is roughly uniform. (Or maybe it's not uniform as shown by existing research I don't know about.)
Also, I really like the German example.
I once had a civil argument with a German. Germans' arguments are usually uncivil, but this one time ....
I once had a civil argument with a German. Most of my arguments with Germans are flamewars and cussin'.
I once had a civil argument with a German. Germans are so civil, even their arguments are civil!
I once had a civil argument with a German. I'm so good at civil arguments (or so well-traveled) I've even had one with a German!
I once had a civil argument with a German. I have such interesting and unusual experiences.
I once had a civil argument with a German. The rest of you have merely heard about civil arguments with Germans.
I once had a civil argument with a German. As opposed to a civil argument about a German.
I once had a civil argument with a German. I'm not trying to generalize the pattern to all Germans.
Trouble is, the default stress pattern is identical to the last. And you don't usually interpret the first sentence of a text with a non-default stress pattern when the following text doesn't force you.
I was primed by reading shminux's comment before seeing the quote itself, so I'll exclude myself from the sample.
Another data point: I had the very same experience (including not endorsing the feeling - I actually was a bit embarrassed).
In response to three data points, I update in the direction of the quote: a) pattern-matching to typical sexist beliefs, and b) possibly causing a reinforcement of sexist biases in some readers. I still don't think the quote was sexist in intent, just meaning to illustrate a relativist Zeitgeist with a personal anecdote that happened to feature a woman, but I recognize that its actual effect can be divorced from its intent.
What should I do? Edit it to include some sort of disclaimer?
The next few sentences, ending with "I think that’s how most of us roll these days. It’s laziness, mostly. I’m guilty of it too" show that this was, in fact, not a case of stereotyping.
I think you could change "a woman" to "[someone]" using those editorial bracket things and the pronouns won't be weird. Just draw attention away from the word and make the quote closer to what you wanted it to say? It makes perfect sense to me that something yanked out of its context would acquire weird connotations that you didn't intend and didn't notice because you read it in context.
(I also feel like you get a similar effect if you change "woman" to "lady" and I have no idea why.)
That's probably what I've done, too.
(I'm not a native speaker, so don't trust me about this.) Using “woman” suggests that the only salient feature about that person was her gender, which is indeed kind-of weird IMO; OTOH, using “lady” (or “girl”) would suggest that her adult (or young) age was also salient, and that would lower my estimate for how strongly the out-group homogeneity effect affects Rod Dreher when he thinks about women. (Also, I'm under the impression that many of the stereotypes about women are closer to the truth in the case of younger women than in the case of older ones (as an ageing effect, not a cohort effect), though this might be due to selection effects in the groups of people I interact with.)
Good idea, I did that. Thanks for the suggestion!