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gjm comments on There is no such thing as strength: a parody - Less Wrong Discussion
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I was not trying to suggest that intelligence and strength are as alike as race and strength. Rather, I was motivated by the observation that there are a number of arguments floating around to the effect that,
A. Race doesn't exist
B. Intelligence doesn't exist.
and, actually, to a lesser extent,
C. Rationality doesn't exist (as a coherent notion).
The arguments for A,B,C are often dubious and tend to overlap heavily; I wanted to write something which would show how flawed those arguments are through a reductio ad absurdum.
To put it another way, even if strength (or intelligence or race) really was an incoherent notion, none of the arguments 1-7 in my post establish that it is so. It isn't that that these arguments are wholly wrong -- in fact, there is a measure of truth to each of them -- but that they don't suffice to establish the conclusion.
(Separate comment because I'm making an entirely separate point.)
I wonder whether any nontrivial proposition, however well supported, could survive the treatment you are meting out here. The procedure seems to be: (1) find a number of brief and sketchy attacks on something, (2) do a search-and-replace to turn them into attacks on something else, (3) quote maybe a sentence or two from each, and (4) protest that none of these one-or-two-sentence attacks suffices to establish that the thing they're attacking is bad or unreal.
I'm not sure how supportable the claims "race doesn't exist" and "intelligence doesn't exist" are (though clearly the answer will depend a lot on exactly how those claims are interpreted) but I'm quite certain that if either of them is true then a decent argument for it will take (let's say) at least a page or two. If someone says "race doesn't exist" or "intelligence doesn't exist" followed by a one-sentence soundbite, they probably aren't trying to "establish the conclusion" so much as gesturing towards how an argument for the conclusion might go. (Or maybe they really think their soundbite is enough, but in that case what we should conclude is that the person in question isn't thinking very clearly and that if we really want to evaluate their claims we need to find a better statement of them.)
First, only some of the attacks I cited were brief and sketchy; others were lengthier. Second, I have cited a few such attacks due to time and space constraints, but in fact they exist in great profusion. My personal impression is that the popular discourse on intelligence and race is drowning in confused rhetoric along the lines of what I parodied.
Finally, I think the last possibility you cite is on point -- there are many, many people who are not thinking very clearly here. As I said, I think these people also have come to dominate the debate on this subject (at least in terms of what one is likely to read about in the newspaper rather than a scientific venue). Instead of ignoring them and focusing on people who make more thoughtful and defensible variations of these points, I think some kind of attempt at refutation is called for.
Generally, for any "football" topic that gets kicked back and forth, there
A) is a way of defining it so that it is almost trivially existent
B) a way of defining it so that it is almost trivially nonexistent
C) a failure if debate participants to realise that they are actually talking past each other.
If one scratches the situation a little bit one tends to find that one side frequently tries to equivocate between the two definitions so as to claim that definition (B) is non-existent.
True. If you are saying that C is happening here, perhaps you could be more specific about what terms you think Zoltan and I are understanding differently without recognizing the fact?
I don't see much point in commenting on the parody, but this characterises arguments about the I word and the R word.