= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Sewing-Machine comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - LessWrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1742)
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!
This is the original definition given for TWAITW. Note that the examples Yvain gave all had the form of: "X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain negative features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features." However, working with the explicit definition outlined by Yvain, as opposed to the implicit definition used by Yvain, we can easily conjure liberal examples:
Other liberal examples, using Yvain's implicit definition:
However, I am not entirely sure if our capacity to conjure examples matters.
Edit: Changed the free speech examples.
I very much like "Abortion is a medical procedure". It's actually a believable WAitW to make, and has the admirable feature that it completely ignores every aspect of abortion relevant to the debate.
I think the "free speech" examples don't quite have the right form: the central question probably is whether or not pornography or flag burning is free speech, and the conclusion "Flag burning is free speech, therefore it should be legal" is valid if you accept the premise.
It seems rather probable that the free speech examples were problematic. As such, the post has been edited.
I really like "Abortion is a medical procedure". I suspect that we could remove some of the mind-killing by presenting the examples in pairs:
Hmm, creating these pairs is harder than I thought.
No problem here. Not even non-central.
Indeed. Many evolutionary biologists are highly dismissive of evopsych. In evolutionary biology you have to start with a variation in a trait, in an environment where - overall, over all interactions - one side of the variation gets a strong enough advantage... then there's genetic studies, and so on. One has to deal with the bother of doing a whole lot of actual science.
If you look at evolutionary psychology - Tooby and Cosmides, or Pinker, that's folks literally making up caveman stories with no well defined physical traits and mechanisms to start with, no demonstration that a trait is a net benefit, no genetics... and, usually, not even any evolution, in the sense that there's no identification of the original proto-trait and it's gradual path of evolution.
You misunderstand me. Dspeyer used it above as an example of a non-central fallacy, implying that Ev Psych is not very much like what science is. I meant to disagree. To the extent of my awareness, Ev Psych makes predictions and tests them, and goes on to build up theories, making it a typical example of a science.
I'm not so sure when you say it doesn't specifically use evolutionary theory in the same way Biologists normally do, and thus it's not a science. Even if that were true, that's like saying Meteorology isn't a science because they don't always use meteors in their work. I think that if you want to say something isn't a science, you need to show that it doesn't make falsifiable predictions, doesn't describe the world, and hasn't made any advances in our knowledge. Furthermore, you should really have a good explanation as to why Ev Psych people get scientific funding and have papers published in specific Ev Psych journals. And finally, if you're going to dismiss a field, you should be very knowledgeable about said field (or have other very strong evidence, like the studies showing Psychoanalysis is useless). You can't really make that decision that a field is bad, without that sort of evidence, even if it just seems that way to you.
I don't see where in your link EvPsy first makes a falsifiable prediction and then tests it. The experiment described looks like data mining for correlations to me. The expression "was almost exactly what a Darwinian would predict" is yet another post-factum story.
Well perhaps it's not a good example, although that this single example doesn't work doesn't remove the burden of evidence required to dismiss a field.
And then again, maybe it is a good example.
Are there any good examples?
You seem to have some strong privileging of a hypothesis going on here.
What prior would you assign to the scientific competence of a field purporting to be a science, that has journals and textbooks and experts, that's based on an extension of good theory (evolution)? I'm aware that you have more evidence than this, from (I imagine) online discussions and you've read some of the experts, but I've not had this experience, and I think that I am more likely to misunderstand an area of science than to have understood it better than its proponents.
Someone uttering this may claim that they are not using the worst argument in the world as defined:
They claim that it does have the critical features in question. Even the person they are arguing against may agree that it is equivalent to shouting out loud "My country is a @#$% disgrace! Screw my country!". The disagreement seems to be whether one should be permitted to do that kind of thing.
"Flag burning is freedom" should be a legitimate example along the same lines.
I do not possess any particularly strong intuitions regarding freedom of speech, for better or for worse. For this hypothetical arguer, could you outline what they think are the critical features?
Something along the lines of being able to say (or otherwise express) whatever you wish without fear of punishment.
How would you say the War on Some Drugs is different than Prohibition?
I wouldn't say that. However, I also wouldn't say that the War on Drugs is the same as Prohibition. I do not have any opinions on these matters that I view as worth stating at this time.
I would say that the War on Some Drugs is sufficiently like Prohibition to make this not an instance of the WAitW. It's still a fairly weak argument, since it's lacking in details, but I don't think it's trying to sneak in any connotations, and I think basically all of the problems with Prohibition are also problems with the War on Some Drugs.
Prohibition was unpopular with a large portion of the population. It caused a lowered respect for the law in general, because so many people casually broke the law in response. It funded organized violent crime. It invaded personal liberty in order to prevent something that only caused harm as a contributing element, not direct harm. It didn't work.
Prohibition was a war on a different subset of drugs. It had a constitutional amendment that made it unquestionably legal for the federal government to be doing. It had few medical implications. There was not an obvious historical argument that it would fail catastrophically when it was implemented.
In other words, I think one could reasonably come to different conclusions on the two cases based on cost/benefit analyses, but I think it's reasonable to call them two instances of the same thing. I also think it's reasonable to say that most of the reasons Prohibition was bad also apply to the War on Some Drugs.
As an example of the fallacy, I think it's less than ideal.
There seems to be a significant difference between "prohibition" and "war on drugs" to me, that may justify it being WAitW : prohibition is attacking a behavior that most people actually do. Nearly everyone drinks alcohol, at least on special occasions. While drugs (even the "softer" of the prohibited one, cannabis) are only used by a small fraction (in the USA, where it's pretty high, according to Wikipedia, it's 13% who used cannabis at least once in 2009). I'm not in favor of "war on drugs" (in my opinion, it has a lot of negative consequences and doesn't work well at all at reducing drug usage), but there is a significant difference between forbidding something "everyone" does and something 10% of the population does, and "prohibition" does bring in the "forbidding something everyone does" connotation.
I would find it more accurate to call the ban on filesharing "prohibition" than to call war on drugs "prohibition" (but both are a form of WAitW).
You think that more people have tried filesharing than drugs?
Tried, I would say it depends of the age group. But "tried once in your life" is not the most important for prohibition issues, it's people using it regularly the real issue.
So, do it regularly (at least once a year) ? It's hard to find stats on filesharing usage, but the data I remember is about 1/3 of people with internet access using p2p, which is about 2/3 of the population, so 2/9 = 22%, nearly twice the 13% who used cannabis "once per year". Cannabis is not the only durg, but p2p isn't the only form of filesharing, so it more or less compensates.
Is that your real question? It feels like you're objecting to something else or asking an entirely different question, like, say, "Does filesharing really deserve the 'prohibition' connotations more than drugs?".
That's my real question. I'm not really objecting to anything, I just found the implied estimate surprising.
Thanks for clarifying.
Unlike the other examples, this one doesn't really fit the pattern: it's "X is like Y" and not "X belongs to category Y". The difference is that "X is like Y" does not sneak in any connotations; it's well understood that "The War on Drugs is Prohibition" is a rhetorical way of saying "The War on Drugs is very similar to the Prohibition of the 1930s".
"Affirmative action is like hanging people just because they're black!" doesn't carry the same sneaky rhetoric as "Affirmative action is racist!"
What is the strong version of "taxation is theft", for example? I can recall arguments against taxation stronger than this, of course, but none of them I would consider a version of the "taxation is theft" argument.
As for the arguments mentioned in the OP, "taxation is theft", "abortion is murder" and "euthanasia is murder" are typically right-wing, "affirmative action is racist" is also probably right-wing (although general accusations of racism fit better into the left wing arsenal) while "capital punishment is murder", "ev-psych is sexist" and "genetic engineering is eugenics" sound quite leftist to me. Not sure about "M.L.King was a criminal", but the examples seem balanced with respect to the stereotypical left/right division. With respect to Yvain's opinions the choice might be less balanced, of course.
Simple: "taxation is theft and is also just as wrong as mugging because 1) the supposed benefits of government programs aren't really there and 2) majority voting doesn't make mugging any better than theft by a gang of robbers is better than theft by a single robber." All of these arguments can be made stronger by specifying the reasons you should ignore the major differences between the moral issue in question and the archetypal example's.
Agreed that the anti-capital-punishment stance exemplified by "capital punishment is murder" is more attached to the American left than the American right, as are accusations of sexism in general (including but not limited to those applied to evo-psych).
"Genetic engineering is eugenics" seems trickier to me.
In the U.S. at the moment, I'd say Republican voters are more likely to endorse a "science can't be trusted" argument than Democratic ones, and Democratic voters are more likely to endorse a "corporations can't be trusted" argument than Republican ones. "Genetic engineering is eugenics" can be spun both ways, I think.
That is, if I wanted to convince a randomly selected Democratic voter to vote against genetic engineering, I could use rhetoric along the lines of "evil corporations want to use genetic engineering techniques to breed a so-called superior race of food crops, which will eradicate the food crops ordinary consumers know and trust and leave us at their mercy. Don't let them get away with it!" pretty effectively. (Though less effectively than they could have 30 years ago.)
If I wanted to convince a randomly selected Republican voter, I could use similar rhetoric with "corporations" replaced by "scientists" and "consumers" replaced by "ordinary people".
Both of those, I think, would be invoking the spectre of eugenics, the only change would be how the eugenicists are characterized... that is, are they elite academic eugenicists, or greedy corporate eugenicists?
All of that said, I endorse eugenics, so I'm probably not a reliable source of information about the rhetorical charge of these words for the mainstream.
Different perspectives, probably. In most European countries, I dare to say, everything associated with genetics is suspect to the left and the left also more often sides with the anti-science rhetoric in general. This is partly because the European right-wingers are less religious than in the U.S. (although I have heard creationism had become political issue in Serbia few years ago) and perhaps somehow related to the differences between Continental and analytic philosophy, if such intellectual affairs have real influence over practical politics.
Yeah, that's been a significant shift over the last few decades in the U.S. There's still a significant anti-scientific religious faction within the American left (New Agers and such) but they've been increasingly joined by factions that thirty/forty years ago would have been considered right, making the coalition as a whole a lot more secular than it was. Meanwhile the right's power base has increasingly moved towards more rural states, and the . anti-scientific religious faction within the American right (evangelical Christians and such) have gained more relative power within it.
Three or four decades ago I think were were more aligned with the European model.
I have no idea whether the distinctions between continental and analytic philosophy have anything to do with it, and am inclined to doubt that the philosophical schism is causal if so, but I'd love to hear arguments supporting the idea.
I would tend to put "Genetic engineering is eugenics" in as a left-wing argument, because the left seems more likely to compare the right to Nazis, call them racist, etc. (with the right, of course, comparing the left to Stalin).
But on the other hand the American Right seems to have been up in arms about "Death Panels" or something, so I gotta admit I'm uncertain; I don't follow the minutiae of politics on your side of the Atlantic.
Yeah, I think in a global context I would agree with you.
The U.S. Left and Right are at this point their own beasts.
Also, at this point in the U.S., pretty much everyone compares everyone else to Hitler, and pretty much nobody remembers exactly who Stalin was. Actually, I suspect that >60% of the population, if asked whether the Soviet Union was allied with the U.S. or with Nazi Germany during WWII, would state confidently that it was allied with Nazi Germany.
But it was, for a time at least!
I would say that "USSR was an ally of Nazi Germany for a time" is an example of WAitW. They had a non-aggression pact for a while, but both side knew it was just a matter of time before they will fight each other, and they didn't do anything to actually help the other - USSR mostly used all the bought time to prepare itself for war against Nazi Germany. For borderline values of "ally" you can call them allies, but that's sneaking in the usual connotation of being allies (actively helping each others) which was just not present.
This is far off-topic, but Stalin certainly expected the non-aggression pact to last. The whole tone of the Soviet press at the time changed to avoid criticizing fascism much, and there were trade ties and even (gasp!) cultural exchanges. There were no indications that the Soviet regime had any inclination of starting a war with Germany, though ti would probably not have joined the Axis either. Well, maybe, if Hitler changed the rhetoric enough to exclude the Russians from the Untermensch classification and found his Lebensraum elsewhere, though this is a pure counterfactual speculation.
The Soviets actually tried to join the Axis in October-November 1940. The sticking point was that the Germans wanted the Soviets to agree to a split in spheres of influence along the Dardanelles and Bosporus, while the Soviets wanted a share of the Balkans.
Throw in things like Basis Nord, the massive amount of war-critical natural resources the Soviets shipped the Nazis 1939-1941, the German shipments of weapon systems (cruisers, aircraft, naval guns) and technical drawings to the Soviets, German diplomatic support for the invasion of Finland . . . well. The Soviets and Germans were awfully cooperative until Barbarossa, even if one stops short of saying they were allied.
Feel free to substitute "fought a shared enemy with" for "was allied with" if you think that improves the question. I trust you understood my point, though.
I thought the standard left-wing argument against genetic engineering was that only the rich will be able to afford it, with an implication that the rich will be able to unfairly stabilize their advantages.
Well I can give you one example. Neoclassical economics makes a pretense of being neutral about how resources are distributed. The focus is instead on the absolute amount of resources. As I think Steven Landsburg puts it, taxes are no fun to pay, but they are fun to collect. The problem is that taxes can be avoided, and that resources put into avoiding taxes (and collecting them) are wasted. There is an identical economic argument against theft: the issue isn't that the thief deserves to have the painting less than the museum, it's that resources the museum puts into defending the painting (and that the thief puts into procuring it) are wasted.
Naturally that is a criticizable line of reasoning, but it gave me a lot to think about the first time I heard it.
But private property also requires resources to defend it (which are wasted like the ones to collect taxes), so in fact, neoclassical economics agree with Proudhon that "property is theft" ? :)
I think the standard rejoinder is that private property incurs greater benefits than the general cost of securing it, owing to true "tragedy of the commons" type situations it attempts to avoid.
The challenge is an interesting exercise, and I will try to think up some examples, but your comment also contains an implied accusation which I'd like to respond to first.
By my count, this post includes critiques of four weak right-wing arguments (abortion, euthanasia, taxation, affirmative action) and three weak left-wing arguments (eugenics, sexism, capital punishment). As far as I know, neither side thinks MLK was a criminal. That means I'm 4-3, ie as balanced as it's mathematically possible to get while seven remains an odd number.
And I think the responses I see below justify my choice of examples. Shminux says the pro-choice converse of "abortion is murder" would be "forced pregnancy is slavery"; TGM suggests below it "denying euthanasia is torture". These would be excellent examples of TWAITW if anyone ever asserted them which as far as I know no one ever has. Meanwhile, I continue to walk past signs saying "Abortion Is Murder!" on my way to work every day. I don't know who exactly it would be helping to give "Forced Pregnancy Is Slavery" equal billing with "Abortion Is Murder" here and let my readers conclude that I'm arguing against some fringe position irrelevant to the real world.
If you can think of left-wing WAITWs that are as well-known and catchy as "abortion is murder!", I will happily edit the post to include them (well, to include one of them; otherwise it'll be 5-4 and the leftists will start complaining). The best I can do at the moment is anti-war arguments that seem to equate for example humanitarian intervention in Rwanda with invading your next-door neighbor to steal their land because they're both "war", but that one doesn't come in convenient slogan form as far as I know.
As a leftist, this seems like a useful exercise. Here are a few claims I've heard more than once from fellow leftists that might qualify.
A fetus is a clump of cells.
Corporations are not people.
Money is not speech.
I agree with all three examples as WAITW even if the last two are negative. It's also very rare that you can settle policy questions through the negation of a categorization. Corporations aren't typical people and money isn't typical speech, but neither of those observations settle the policy question or even debate it - these are just slogans.
The first one is a good leftist example of the WAitW... and with a bit of shame I've to admit I used it in the past.
I wouldn't say the other two qualify because they are negatives. "X is not Y" is quite different from a rethorical perspective than "X is Y".
Let Y = (Not Z)
X is Y.
Using this, I'd argue that "Corporations are not people" is somewhat valid as an example of the WAitW, since the idea is to put the emphasis on people, and everything else is just property, things. It puts Corporations in some abstract, undefined category of not-people things that, when phrased appropriately, can carry a strong connotation.
I fail to see the connotation in the "not-speech" for the third example though, and I don't quite see how one would use that example to argue against or for money - the label / categorization doesn't seem like it would sway anyone either way.
The money is not speech argument is used (just like the corporations are not people argument) to protest against the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling. The claim is that although speech is constitutionally protected, this does not mean that wealthy individuals have the right to spend large amounts of money to get their poltiical views heard (by, say, contributing to SuperPACs). The idea is: although it's true that the government should not be allowed to prevent people from expressing their opinions, the government should be allowed prevent people from spending money to buy ads expressing their opinion because in that case the regulation is on the person's expenditure of money, and money is not speech (or, if you prefer, money is not-speech).
I think this is an example of the WAitW. The first amendment gives Americans the right to free speech. Wealthy people claim that this means they can spend their considerable wealth in order to broadcast their opinions. After all, if the government can't restrict my speech, surely that means the government can't prevent me from utilizing my own resources as a medium for that speech. But, the leftist responds, the government can totally prevent wealthy people from doing this, because the wealthy people are spending money in order to get their opinions broadcast, and hey, money is not-speech, so like many other examples of not-speech, restricting its use is not a violation of the Bill of Rights.
Buckley v. Valeo disagrees.
More conveniently, it prohibits Congress from regulating the freedom of the press, i.e. the printing press, i.e. the technological means of reproducing ideas so that others may consume them, as in television ads.
Which is why I found the Citizens United decision so baffling- the reasoning they used to reach their conclusion was not at all the reasoning I would have used. (But, then again, I would rule the vast majority of laws Congress outputs unconstitutional, which is one of the many reasons I have not been nominated to the Supreme Court.)
I thought the more common claim is that spending money just is self-expression, and therefore protected.
Now that sounds like "Money is speech" which is also a fit to WAiTW.
This highlights an ambiguity in what we mean by "Money is not speech". It could mean "Money is a subset of (non-speech)" which is false since Money does talk in some cases.
Or it could mean "It is not the case that money is a subset of speech" which is more debatable, and definitely not WAItW. Expressed as a Venn diagram, Money and Speech may be overlapping circles with neither strictly contained in the other.
The choice of what to spend on, not the act of spending.
Not to get into the details, but there is at least a plausibility argument that "speech should be free only when it is free". If you have to pay someone (or lots of someones) to speak on your behalf, why should your use of them as a mouthpiece be protected? If the people doing the actual speaking (or broadcasting) genuinely agreed with you, and thought it was worth saying, you wouldn't have to pay them to say it...
Another, amusing, point is that the whole mechanism of broadcast licensing is a massive restriction of freedom of speech. True freedom to speak via broadcast would allow everyone to flood the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously, drowning each other out in interference. That would destroy a public good of course, but once you admit that it is OK to restrict free speech to preserve a public good, you lose the whole "free speech is absolute, and must be protected" argument.
Sure. Heck, once I admit that it's OK to prevent me from committing mass murder to assemble my manifesto out of rotting bodies, I have admitted that it's OK to regulate the forms of speech.
Where I end up after that depends rather a lot on what I cared about in the first place.
For example, if what I care about is avoiding the differential suppression of ideas, I might end up with something like "the legality of expressing an idea I through medium M shall not depend on I." Which allows for broadcast licensing and laws against expressive homicide... though it still doesn't allow for obscenity or pornography or sedition laws. (Well, not laws against them, anyway.)
Well since even printing presses aren't free, that would destroy freedom of the press even in its original meaning.
There are other ways to solve this problem, e.g., treat spectrum as a property right and interference as trespass. In fact the (US) courts were moving in that direction before the 1934 federal power grad.
On printing presses not being "free" either (because you have to buy them) well this is getting into the details. However, it may help to distinguish the funding model. Consider two extreme models:
1) Funding comes from a grant or trust, and is used to buy the press, paper, salaries for journalists, press-operators etc. The funder has no say on what content gets printed (it is up to journalists'/editors' discretion). Any proceeds from paper sales get paid back into the trust.
This seems like a case of truly free speech (in both senses of free) because no-one is paid to say anything in particular. So the journalists say what they agree with and think is worth saying. It pattern matches to an instance of free speech that we think is worth protecting.
2) Funding comes from a tyrant who owns the whole business, and uses it as a propaganda rag. He orders the journalists to print what he tells them, whether or not they agree with it, whether or not they believe it. If they don't, they get fired. If they tell anyone what happened, they are sued under non-disclosure agreements.
This doesn't seem like free speech in either sense (the speakers are being coerced), and doesn't pattern-match to anything obviously worth protecting.
Cases where the funding comes from advertising look a bit more interesting. An initial pattern-match is that the ads themselves aren't free speech that we particularly want to protect (outright lies about Snakeoil or distortions about competitor products can be restricted by an advertising standards body). Whereas any news or editorial comment is protected free speech, provided it is cleanly separated from the advertising, and the advertiser doesn't have any control of its content. If a particular story was run because the advertiser demanded it, that isn't protected. And so on.
On your other remark about spectrum being a property right: possible, but notice that it is still a massive restriction on free speech (by rights of property now, rather than by legislative censorship). And it shows up some of the problems with broad property rights; seems too similar to making air a property right, with trespass for anyone who breathes it without the owner's permission.
Please note that "the advertiser doesn't have any control of its content" doesn't always hold: advertisers have the power to blackmail editors/newspapers with "if you publish that paper that attacks us, we won't put advertising in your columns anymore". They can exert a form of censorship, and induce self-censorship reactions "no, we won't publish that article about the working conditions in company X, because company X is paying us a lot in advertising and we don't want to upset them" even without company X having to do any explicit blackmail. This is not an easy problem to solve.
That would probably fall under time or manner restrictions. Most free speech absolutists mean that speech should be free in a way that is independent of content. Time or manner restrictions are generally seen as ok by even most self-identified free speech advocates. The danger and ideological objection is to content based restrictions.
Banning defamation (knowingly making false statements to maliciously cause harm) is a content restriction which is pretty well supported even by serious free-speech folks — at least when the target is a private individual. Defamation of famous people, politicians, corporations, products, etc. is a somewhat less well supported idea.
The negative examples are different because they don't suggest an argument, only a counterargument. If X is an apple then various conclusions (typically/intuitively) follow, for instance, that X is edible. But if X is a non-apple then nothing much follows from that; it only serves to block the apple-->edible argument (and suggest that X is not necessarily edible).
"Money is speech" implies that all of the protections that get applied to speech should be applied to spending. If money is not speech, then who knows? Nothing much follows directly from that (it's not as if there's some general principle that things which are non-speech should be banned); it just suggests that we don't necessarily have to apply the speech protections to spending. It's more similar to the "MLK was not a criminal" counterargument than to the "MLK was a criminal" argument (note that being a non-criminal doesn't make someone especially admirable), but it doesn't fall into the trap of being obviously false.
While I can see this argument apply as a sort of justifiable use when humans are doing such profiling, though even in that case I think it should be used sometimes, I find it a bit absurd when applied to say data mining systems. Are we to apply Bayesian reasoning to everything except predictors tied to certain sacralized human traits like gender, dress, class, race, religion and origin? Why don't we feel averse applying it to say age?
To avoid nitpicking that cancer cells have no ideology, I will point out that if they did, they would share the ideology with all life forms on the planet.
Doesn't sound as evil no?
I think the difference is that the right wing examples are examples of core beliefs that many stereotypical conservatives believe. Thus leftists feel like they are scoring points when they read it. The left examples, however, aren't really core beliefs of the Democratic party. Democrats may lean against capital punishment, but no presidential candidate in my memory has made that a core tenant of eir campaign.
I also think it's wildly generous to suggest eugenics as a leftist issue. I can't remember ever hearing someone seriously suggest that genetic engineering is eugenics. And typically, it's conservatives who are opposed to genetic engineering, generally on the grounds of playing God.
And when I was reading it, MLK got lumped in with conservatives for a number of reasons. First, the strong conservative examples primed me to put it there. Second, the civil rights act was largely pushed for by a Democratic legislature and president. Lastly, African Americans tend to line up with democrats in modern demographics.
The best leftist example I could come up with is "Meat is murder". I think that merits including. Or mixing in with the abortion one.
Of course not!
MLK was a Communist philanderer. That's worse. ;)
Buying a laptop is murder.
ETA: For those who may not know, the article I linked is by Yvain himself; that's his blog.
Excellent example. This kind of equivocation on 'murder' is used---and even accepted---on lesswrong with distressing frequency.
Oooooh. Thanks! <runs off to make a currency conversion spreadsheet>
I'm surely going to find a use for this.
I was surprised people didn't notice that both the sexism and eugenics arguments where somewhat "right wing". I think a key thing might be that perception of "right" and "left" are tied to the current American political landscape. The important role of religion in it means that conservative politicians don't often make arguments for their policies based on evolutionary psychology or the high heritability of IQ or conscientiousness. The America right seems almost as invested in blank slate notions as the left.
"Property is theft"
Is an example of the left using the WAITW.
American liberals aren't that kind of left. And Proudhon did mean "property is wrong for the same class of reasons theft is".
Arguments that your stereotypical leftist and stereotypical rightist will both see as bad are the sort of thing that would, ideally, dominate the article.
Why? Isn't that just Pretending To Be Wise by flattering the prejudices of the two major sides? Ideally, the article should discomfort everyone who has made weak arguments, whether Blue, Green, or Libertarian.
The article's purpose should be education. By beginning with arguments that most agree are bad, and then progressing to arguments that they may recognize as close to their own, the article will convince most readers that this is a valid fallacy to watch out for, and then show them some arguments close to theirs that fit the pattern.
"Arguing against homosexuality is hate speech!". Many anti-queer statements are hate speech, e.g. promotion of murder, but others are along the lines of "People shouldn't act on same-sex attraction because...". Quite a few conservatives complain that the latter form of argument is dismissed as "hate speech", even though "People shouldn't drive SUVs because..." is never taken to mean you hate SUV drivers.
That's not the worst argument in the world. "People shouldn't act on same-sex attraction because..." is closer to the central archetype of hate speech than "People shouldn't drive SUVs because..." is. And the full argument is probably something like "Arguing against homosexuality is hate speech, and therefore harms homosexuals." — which is a sloppy argument, but a cleaned-up version would be "Arguing against homosexuality encourages people (through the magic of virtue ethics) to view homosexuals as vicious. And it legitimizes (through the affect heuristic) the established pattern of homophobia. Therefore, you should not argue against homosexuality. By the way, hate speech shares these features."
Either this is a joke or you mean "odd".
You saw nothing!
So this may be more complicated than I thought, in that all of the examples below seem really bad to me, but that might just be an example of my personal bias. I think if any of them get, let's say, more than ten upvotes I'll assume they're generally agreed to be a good argument and I'll put them in - does that sound like a reasonable bar? That means upvote them if you think they're worthy of inclusion.
I was trying to think of further liberal examples, and I think some references to "human rights" might qualify - for example, "health care is a human right". The meaning of "human right" that allows us to assert this seems very poorly defined, whereas the meaning of "human right" that allows us to say that negative rights like free speech are human rights seems well-defined, even though I don't agree with it. So calling health care (or housing, or something) a "human right" might be a way of trying to claim that we should view health care as exactly like free speech, free religion, etc, even though it is quite different in that it requires positive action by other people.
I'm not quite willing to include that one just because the total ambiguity in the definition of "human right" makes it pretty hard to pin down exactly how the argument is being made.
EDIT: Just saw "Property is theft" has 15 upvotes. Do people think this one should be added?
I'm not fond of any, either. See if you can find something you like here.
It might be easier to come up with examples if you go back to your original definition and note that it allows for categories with positive qualities lending their positive qualities to category members who lack those physical qualities. (Leftist arguments as a rhetorical class are usually phrased in terms of including things in positive categories, whereas rightist arguments are more well-known for including things in negative categories.)
For example, something like "we should support racial diversity because of the benefits of ideological diversity"?
No blood for oil!
Willie Nelson: How much oil is a human life worth?
Economist: Well, in the United States workers value their lives at about $7 million. With current crude oil prices at around $100 a barrel, a human life is worth about 70,000 barrels of oil.
This is the subjective value of one's own life. The market value of human life, i.e. the price for which one life can be saved, should be much lower.
If only 100 barrels of oil ends up being worth a human life, clearly we ought to invade Iran. Or Equatorial Guinea if we can only scrape up a couple of million dollars for the coup.
Incidentally, there appears to be an important list of unsung humanitarian heroes here.
I'd quibble about "clearly," even in context. Wars are just too damn random.
Nothing against cost-benefit analysis in the abstract, but, in practice, invading a country seems like one of those very complicated choices that may inherently risk some major, major unintended consequences. I'm mostly thinking negative, but I suppose this would go both ways -- unexpected ultimate positive consequences might be possible as well, but still hard to calculate at all.
I am not entirely convinced that a foreign-backed violent coup, even against a truly heinous dictator, is necessarily a good idea. This seems like one of those cases for ethical injunctions, because the visible upside is so clear (the dictator is gone), but the downside is more complicated: violent coups, for whatever reason, very rarely end up producing good governments.
The premise was that human life is ethically cheap, and the conclusion wasn't that backing a coup was a good idea, but that outright invasion would be.
Personally, I don't think that the cash value of the oil (discounted as normal) is greater than the cash cost of the war plus the reconstruction needed to get the oil. I could be wrong on my estimates, because I don't think the relative monetary cost is a significant factor in the moral calculus, so I didn't spend much time or effort estimating the values.
I'm not sure how to interpret Eliezer's "unsung humanitarian heroes" comment other than as an endorsement of the coup attempt.
Or maybe I'm just missing some sarcasm.
I was baffled by that too. They attempted to overthrow a nasty dictator . . . but they did it for the oil money they'd get from the new government.
I looked at it considering that the coup attempt never started, and figured that he was claiming that someone dropped a tip and stopped it.
I don't know if ~80 people could complete a coup; it would seem that if the military is loyal to the existing regime, it would fail, and if the military was disloyal no mercenaries are needed.
By the same logic, doesn't everyone who steals X money, where X happens to be higher than the value of life, become a humanitarian hero?
By which I mean that I don't understand your point. You seem to indirectly accuse me of commiting a fallacy, yet I don't know which one.
Nope, wasn't accusing you of anything. I was just amused by the point that anyone who wants to save as many lives as possible, but has only a finite amount of oil, must be able to state some consistent value of human life in terms of barrels of oil, since otherwise you could rearrange the oil to save more lives.
I am probably becoming a bit paranoid lately.
"Bankers are parasites."
"We are the 99%."
"Rethuglican." (You'll see the "is" if you unpack the word.)
So, are the downvotes because these are, or because they are not, exactly what was asked for? And is -3 too much of a hair trigger for the karma fine for replying, or about right?
I didn't downvote, but on your 3 examples, only the first one qualifies for me, which can justify downvotes (I didn't because the first one qualifies, making it enough to not be worth a downvote).
"Rethuglican" is not an argument, just a typical pun on words against the ones you don't like, but it doesn't pretend to be a reason to not like republicans, just something democrats say between themselves. It's an happy death spiral, but not a WAitW.
"We are the 99%" doesn't share much of the WAitW features. It doesn't try to sneak in connotations, it doesn't attack an typical example of a cluster by assimilating it with the archetype of the cluster.
Not quite any wing: the jailed Pussy Riot members should stay behind bars because a killer requested their release.
There are similar Western examples with Wikileaks/Anonymous.
How about "Gay rights are equal rights"?
Judith Jarvis Thomson? (Well, she didn't use the word slavery but still.)
As for the euthanasia-is-torture one, I heard that a lot on the media at the time of Terri Schiavo and similar cases. (Maybe none used the word torture but still.)
The boundaries are inherently fuzzy and ill-defined, but I count 5 right wing arguments and 3 left wing arguments. Doesn't seem too unbalanced.
I have tried constructing a pro-choice example similar to "Abortion is murder!" ("Forced pregnancy is slavery!"???), but it ended up pretty unconvincing. Hopefully someone can do better:
Leaving rape cases aside, the archetypal example is an unwanted teenage pregnancy due to defective or improperly used birth control or simply an accident. Forcing her into letting the embryo develop into a fetus and eventually into a human baby would likely make the woman significantly worse off in the long run, financially, physically and/or emotionally, so she should have an option of terminating the pregnancy.
An example a pro-life person thinks of: aborting a healthy fetus, possibly in the second trimester, as a habitual birth control method.
It seems to me that the left-wing slogan "My body, my choice!" and its variations are a version of the WAitW. Although the slogan itself doesn't follow the "X is a Y" format, its underlying argument does: it asserts something like, "This fetus is a part of my body; I am entitled to do whatever I choose with any part of my body; therefore, I am entitled to do whatever I choose with this fetus."
This version of the WAitW emphasizes the similarity between a fetus and other parts of a woman's body (the part in question is inside her; the part in question is made up of her cells; etc.) while ignoring the relevant differences (most of her body parts, if left to their own devices, will not go on to have their own life outside her body, while the fetus will; most of her body parts have no potential for sentience or moral agency, while the fetus does; etc.) By equating the fetus with her body parts, the argument implies that the fetus is MERELY a part of a woman's body. While most people will agree that a fetus is technically part of its mother's body, I think most people will also agree that a fetus is not morally equivalent to a woman's liver, kidneys, or small intestine. "My body, my choice!" conceals this inequivalence.
"Denying euthanasia is Torture!"
Given the majority of legislators are male, for abortion: "Forced pregnancy is mysogyny!" though that may be too tenuous.
I find "Forced parenthood is slavery!" to be pretty convincing, actually. Though I may be prejudiced by having grown up around a Libertarian father (now, alas, more Republican(!??)) who went about proclaiming that jury duty was slavery.
Does this qualify as "a weak version of a strong left-wing argument that you do accept"?
Mm... sure. "X is Y!" is generally pretty weak, and I'm pro-choice, so, sure.
Are laws (in the U.S.) against driving on the left side of the road slavery?
Excellent idea. It would be beneficial to how the community deals with politics, something that I've been very concerned about recently, to see this written out.
Some tentative to sanitize political debates needs more data. In this post, one common strategy is criticized, I suposse are others, but doubt someone will write a sequence about it.
I don't understand how you get from "policy debates should not appear one-sided" to "there should be no shortage of weak arguments 'on your side'". Especially if you replace the latter with "there should be no shortage of weak arguments of this sort on your side" -- which is necessary for the challenge to be appropriate -- since there could be correlations between a person's political position and which sorts of fallacies are most likely to infect their thinking.
Shouldn't there never be a shortage of weak arguments for anything? Strong arguments can always be weakened.
/
Isn't there enough chance of finding a weak argument to at least make it worth trying? You never know, you might find a weak argument somewhere.
Obviously one can find any number of weak arguments for anything, but surely the point here was to find weak arguments that have a particular sort of problem but are otherwise at least reasonably credible-sounding.
/
I'm having trouble understanding what part of what I wrote looked like "there's no chance of finding a suitable argument, so it's not worth trying". For the avoidance of doubt, that wasn't at all what I meant.
Would any of the (at least four) people who have upvoted Eliezer's comment but not my response -- or Eliezer, if he happens still to be reading -- like to explain to me in what way Eliezer is right and I'm wrong here? Thanks!
Generally speaking, there are fewer upvotes later in a thread, since fewer people read that far. If the children to your comment have more karma then your comment, it's reasonable to assume that people saw both comments and chose to up vote theirs, but if a parent to your comment has more karma, you can't really draw any inference from that at all.
Except that when I made my comment, Eliezer's was at zero. Er, it might have been +1, but it certainly wasn't +4.
There's not necessarily even one of those, let alone four. Four people could have upvoted both of you and then four other people could have downvoted just you.
D'oh! Of course you're right. I should have said: either upvoted Eliezer's comment but not mine, or downvoted mine but not Eliezer's.
In particular, I predict WAITW use to be correlated with explicit endorsement of sanctity-based rather than harm-based moral values, and we've recently been talking about how that might differ between political groups.
I think this is because of the way you're deconstructing the arguments. In each case, the features you identify which supposedly make us dislike the arcetypal cases are harm-based features. Someone who believed in sanctity instead might identify the category as a value in itself. Attempts to ascribe utilitarian-style values to them, which they supposedly miss the local inapplicability of, risks ignoring what they actually value.
If people genuinely do think murder is wrong simply because it is murder, rather than because it causes harm, then this is not a bad argument.
Absent any reason to do so, disliking all murders simply because they are murders makes no more sense than disliking all elephants simply because they are elephants. You can choose to do so without being logically inconsistent, but it seems like a weird choice to make for no reason. Did you just arbitrarily choose "murder" as a category worthy of dislike, whether or not it causes harm?
At the risk of committing the genetic fallacy, I would be very surprised if their choice of murder as a thing they dislike for its own sake (rather than, say, elephants) had nothing to do with murder being harmful. And although right now I am simply asserting this rather than arguing it, I think it's likely that even if they think they have a deductive proof for why murder is wrong regardless of harm, they started by unconsciously making the WAITW and then rationalizing it.
But I agree that if they do think they have this deductive proof, screaming "Worst argument in the world!" at them is useless and counterproductive; at that point you address the proof.
Why should a preference have to "make sense"?
A particular preference that does not make sense at all is empirically unlikely to exist due to the natural selection process. We should thus, if for whatever reason we prefer correspondence between map and territory, assign reasonable probability that most preferences will "make sense".
As for why it should, well... I'm not able to conceive of an acceptable answer to that without first tabooing "should" and applying generous amounts of reductionism, recursively within sub-meanings and subspaces within semanticspace.
Absent any reason to do so, disliking instances of harm simply because they are instances of harm makes no more sense than disliking all elephants simply because they are elephants.
I don't want to assume any metaethical baggage here, but I'm not sure why "because it is an instance of harm" is an acceptable answer but "because it is an instance of theft" is not.
Keeping your principle of ignoring meta-ethical baggage, dis-valuing harm only requires one first principle, whereas dis-valuing murder, theft, elephants, etc require an independent (and apparently arbitrary) decision at each concept. Further, it's very suspicious that this supposedly arbitrary decision almost always picks out actions that are often harmful when there are so very many things one could arbitrarily decide to dislike.
This sounds like the debate about ethical pluralism - maybe values are sufficiently complex that any one principle can't capture them. If ethical pluralism is wrong, then they can't make use of this argument. But then they have a very major problem with their metaethics, independant of the WAitW. And what is more, once they solve the problem - getting a single basis for their ethics - they can avoid your accusation, by saying that actually avoiding theft is the sole criteria, and they're not trying to sneak in irrelivant conotations. After all, if theft was all that mattered, why would you try to sneak in connotations about harm?
Also, I think you're sneaking in conotations when you use "arbitrary". Yes, such a person would argue that our aversion to theft isn't based on any of our other values; but your utilitarian would probably claim the same about their aversion to harm. This doesn't seem a harmful (pun not intended) case of arbitrariness.
Contrariwise, they might find it very suspicious that your supposedly arbitrary decision as to what is harmful so often picks out actions that constitute theft to a libertarian (e.g. murder, slavery, breach of contract, pollution, trespass, wrongful dismissal...) when there are so very many things one could arbitrarily decide to dislike.
This line of argument seems to err away from the principle that you can't unwind yourself into an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness. You're running on hardware that is physically, through very real principles that apply to everything in the universe, going to react in a certain averse manner to certain stimuli to which we could assign the category label "harm". This is commonly divided into "pain", "boredom", etc.
It is much more unlikely (and much more difficult to truly explain) that a person would, based on such hardware, somehow end up with the terminal value that some abstract, extremely solomonoff-complex interpretation of conjointed mental and physical behaviors is bad - in contrast with reflective negative valuation of harm-potentials both in self and in others (the "in others" being reflected as "harm to self when harm to other members of the tribe").
Then again, I feel like I'm diving in too deep here. My instinct is to profess and worship my ignorance of this topic.
Thorium reactors are a nuclear technology.
OK, I don't accept that one, but it's left wing.
Support/opposition to nuclear technology seems pretty orthogonal with left/right to me. The anti-nuclear left tend to be more pro-solar/wind/hydro instead, while the anti-nuclear right more pro-oil/coal/gas instead, but there are pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear is both "sides". Even in a country like France where we have like a dozen of significant political parties, all the parties but one (the greens) have internal disagreement about nuclear energy in general.
That said, yes, "thorium is nuclear" is a good example of TWAITW.
It feels to me that until recently the pro-nuclear left was a very small faction, but growing with the likes of George Monbiot passionately switching over.
Depends where, here in France, of the 4 left-wing parties (PS, PCF, Les Verts and PG) two (PS and PCF) are mostly in favor of nuclear energy, the two others (Les Verts and PG) mostly against it, while all but Les Verts are internally split.
But that may also be because France has a strong nuclear industry, and the left-wing parties tend to be friendly with the unions, and the unions defend nuclear energy because it creates jobs (both for our own energy and because we export nuclear technology).
I have the impression that (1) when people post things in LW that are politically leftish, it's quite common for them to get a response along these lines -- complaining about leftward bias and suggesting that it should be addressed by a deliberate injection of rightward bias to compensate -- whereas (2) when people post things in LW that are politically rightish, they basically never receive such responses.
I have no statistics or anything to back this up, and it's not clear that there's any feasible way to get (or informatively fail to get) them, so I'd be interested in other opinions about whether this asymmetry is real.
If it is real, it seems to me quite interesting.
(One possible explanation, if it's real, would be that leftish views are much more common here than rightish ones, so that people with rightish views feel ill-treated and want the balance redressed. Except that I think I see distinctly more rightish than leftish political commentary here, and the rightish stuff more often gets large numbers of upvotes. I suppose it's possible that what we have here is a lot of slightly leftish people and a smaller number of rightish ones who feel more strongly. Again, this is probably hard to get a good handle on and I'd be interested in others' impressions.)
Well right wing people are almost certainly a minority here, but don't forget that makes such positions convenient for hipster fun. Some LWers who argue for right wing positions have stated that they feel more and more unwelcome in the past few months. Not only that I think they make a good case for pro left bias being very prevasive on LessWrong. I think what you are seeing is some users trying to correct for it.
I find the fact that both people who see themselves as left leaning and those who see themselves as right leaning suddenly feel there is favouritism for those who disagree with them is a much more worrying sign. I think this is what being on one side of a tribal conflict looks like from the inside.
I dislike the fact that we're talking about the bias rather than the arguments. Here, more so than any other place I know of, we should be dissecting arguments and talking about the truths of the issues, rather than saying that a statement is incorrect because of its side on the political spectrum.
I can't be the only person thinking this, right?
This site is about refining the art of human rationality, while we certainly do try to get a good map of the world we spend most of our time thinking about thinking. The fundamental realization at the heart of our community, that to a certain extent distinguishes it from traditional rationality, is that humans are biased and broken thinkers who can't rely on their naive reasoning too much. You can think as long and as calmly as you like but if you base your thinking on broken axioms or bad epistemology you won't get much closer to truth.
I did not say or even wish to imply a set of arguments was wrong because of political affiliation, neither where the users I linked to. What I was implying quite strongly is that we are unlikely to hear the best arguments or to update appropriately to those that are politically inconvenient. Not even because of a desire to engage in propaganda for ones cause, but because the world simply looks a certain way to them! There are many correct arguments one can make for incorrect positions, by selectively only hearing correct arguments one does not by default hear the counter-arguments or correct arguments for other positions and perhaps doesn't' even realize they may exist. These are not a controversial observations at all.
Following this reasoning and promoted by complaints and observations observations of my own I stated my argument by pointing out the dominant political affiliation and ideological assumptions on the site and how this harms the rationality of the community on certain subjects.
This rationality quote by Jonathan Haidt may explain this better than I have. Also here is me making an argument explicitly along those lines.
-- Yvain's 2011 survey
Aha, thanks.
I've posted such complaints about left wing bias, so I'll elaborate on my impressions.
I perceive the left wing comments come with much more of an implicit assumption by the poster, and the respondents to it, of the moral superiority of left wing positions, and that all attending will see it the same way.
Most of the non left wing views don't seem to me to come with that presumption on the part of the speaker that everyone here shares their moral evaluation. If anything, the tone is of someone who expects to be taken as a crank.
The liberals are more generally accustomed to being in an ideologically homogeneous environment while the libertarians are accustomed to being in the minority, and both speak with a tone appropriate to the general environment, and not to the particular environment here, where liberals and libertarians are equally represented.
For my part, I also find instances where the absent conservatives are caricatured and snickered at, again with the presumption that all right thinking folk agree, and the bile rises in the gorge, and I feel the need to respond.
Interesting; thanks. For what it's worth, I don't have at all the same perception that leftish comments come with an implicit assumption of the moral superiority of left-wing positions. But I happen to lean distinctly left myself, especially by US standards, and if you don't then it's hardly surprising that our perceptions would have such a difference.
How about the other side of that - my characterization of the tone of non left wing views?
Not far off, I think.
My explanation of this perception is that posters, in general, know better than to post rightish things at LW unless they are correct. Every now and then you get a new Objectivist who gets downvoted because they aren't discussing things at a high enough level.
Lots of beliefs that are common on LW are uncomfortable for the stereotypical leftist- like human biodiversity in general. To see someone brazenly state that, yes, there is a difference in measured IQ between the races and that reflects reality rather than our inability to design tests properly, or that men and women are actually neurologically distinct, will seem like a "not my tribe" signal to the stereotypical leftist- but people here don't hold that opinion (as far as I can tell) because of racial or sexual enmity, but because they put evidence above wishful thinking and correct beliefs above politeness.
But now imagine that for the stereotypical rightist. How big of a "not my tribe" signal is atheist materialism and evolution?
I am thinking that one possible asymetry between "the left" and "the right" is that the former is a rather homogenous group, while the latter is heterogenous. The left generally means socialist(-ish), and the right generally means non-socialist. The left is a fuzzy blob in the concept-space, the right seems like a label for points outside of this blob.
As an example, both Ayn Rand and Chesterton would be examples of "the right". What exactly do they have in common? (Religion: the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever? Individual or community? Mystery or reason? The great future or the great past? Selfishness or selflessness? Should women be allowed as leaders? Etc.) The common trait that classifies them both as "the right" is the fact that neither of them is a socialist.
Well, I could also says that neither of them "considers hinduism the best thing ever"... but why should that information be used to classify them? Well, for a hinduist that would be an important information. Then it follows that classifying many diverse views under one label of "the right" makes sense to you mostly if you are a socialist. (Or if being versus not-being a socialist is the dominant question in your political paradigm.) An "Ayn-Rand-type" non-socialist and a "Chesterton-type" non-socialist would otherwise feel uncomfortable under the common umbrella.
I am not saying there are no differences among "the left", but to me they seem more like a matter of degree. This observation may be culture-dependent. I am from eastern Europe, where "the left" basically either wants "what communists did" or "something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence". -- I suppose in USA the diversity of "the left" is greater, because there is no such attractor. Actually, the Republican party may serve as a similar (though weaker) attractor for "the right".
OK, what I tried to say was this: suppose that the leftist opinions are pretty similar, and the rightist opinions are very diverse. Assuming that both sides are about equally mindkilled (believe in about the same proportion of true statements, and the same proportion of false statements), for most statements the left will probably have either true believes or false beliefs as a whole, while the right will internally disagree -- therefore even if each specific right political group has the same chance to have true beliefs, there is a very high chance that at least one of the right political groups will have a true belief.
For clarity, here is a model: There are true beliefs A, B, C, D; and every political group is correct only about one of them, and incorrect about three of them. There are three left groups, but all of them believe in A. There are three right groups, first of them believes in B, second in C, third in D. -- Now if we make a per-group statistics, we find that each party is 25% correct and 75% incorrect. However, if we make a per-true-belief statistics, we find that 25% of true beliefs are associated with the left (A), and 75% of true beliefs are associated with the right (B, C, D). -- In this model, if a group of people could succeed to hold all true beliefs (A, B, C, D), an external observer would judge they are mostly right (despite they happen to disagree with every individual right group in majority of beliefs).
Back to the beginning -- we disagree with Ayn Rand about simplicity of values, or about importance of community; we also disagree with Chesterton about religion. That alone does not give us a political label. On the other hand, disagreeing with a socialist political idea is sufficient to get the label of political right, because any point outside of the socialist concept-space is called "the right".
Beware the out-group homogeneity effect. People tend to see their own group as more heterogeneous than other groups, as differences that look small from far away look bigger up close.
With left and right, I have also heard the exact opposite claim: that the "right" represents a narrower, more coherent group. In the US, the "right" is based in the dominant, mainstream social group (sometimes called "real America"), drawing disproportionately from people who are white, male, Christian, relatively well-off, straight, etc., while the "left" is a coalition of the various groups that are left out of "real America" for one reason or another. Alternatively, conservatives are the people who support the existing social order and want to keep things roughly how they are; liberals are the ones who want change - and there are more degrees of freedom in changing things than in keeping things the same.
Seems to me there could be a common pattern:
If a political group X, identified as A in {"left", "right"}, becomes very powerful in some era, the following things happen:
Later, when the political group X loses some power:
In USA, X = Republican / religious right, and A = "right". In Eastern Europe, X = Communist, and A = "left".
This is very simplified, but it explains why sometimes the same person could self-identify as "left wing" in USA (to express their incompatibility with the religious right), and as "right wing" in Eastern Europe (to express their incompatibility with the communists). On the other hand, people mostly compatible with the religious right or with the communists can self-identify the same in both places.
In Eastern Europe the distinction between "support the traditional model" and "support change" is rather confused, because it is not clear whether the traditional refers to the era before the fall of communism, or to era even before the communists. In some sense, both religious right and communists are literally the conservative parties here.
This is an interesting point, that one about the left being more homogeneous than the right. I am not sure whether to believe it, so let me present some objections that I can think of, without evaluating their merit.
A) Assuming the left is indeed more homogeneous, isn't it true just because of greater variability of right between different countries, with a typical single country's right being as homogeneous as the same country's left? (The objection hasn't a particularly strong bearing on the perceived LW left/right imbalance, but may be relevant to the more general question of how the categories of left and right are defined.)
B) This may not be accurate; beware availability heuristics.
Environmentalists aren't necessarily socialists as their opinions about the optimal economic order aren't the defining part of their ideology and may differ. Yet the environmentalists are usually classified on the left. Anarchists aren't necessarily socialists; many of them oppose any form of organised society, while archetypal socialism is a very organised society, from many points of view more than market capitalism. Feminists rarely dream about socialist utopias as they have a different fish to fry. Yet both feminists and anarchists are usually considered standing on the left. In fact I could use the examples of these groups to make a mirror argument of yours, namely, that the right is capitalist(-ish) while the left is everything opposed to capitalism. I don't think this is a good definition since there are counter-examples to it too (e.g. the nazis who are against capitalism but still "right-wing") but at least I don't immediately see this description being less reasonable than yours.
Of course this all hinges on the definitions of socialism or capitalism, discussions about which might better be avoided for their pointlessness. It is not clear whether there is a sensible definition of left and right other than "arbitrary convention set up by historical accident", but if there is, I suppose it would go along the lines of social status: the right are those who side with the elites and wish the present distribution of power preserved, the left are those who side with the underclasses and therefore wish to shift the balance towards more egalitarianism, from which would the lower status people profit (in terms of relative status increase, not necessarily materially). This definition has several advantages: for one thing, it has no problems with the fact that in the late 18th century the market liberals were considered left.
C) Both Jacques Derrida and Lenin would be examples of "the left". What do they have in common? Or Pol Pot and Bertrand Russell? Neither of them was a big fan of free markets (or hinduism, for that matter), but that doesn't guarantee much ideological homogeneity.
D) When I still thought that "left" and "right" were more than two rather arbitrary labels, I considered myself a leftist and "something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence" wasn't the way I would summarise my political preferences. Of course, there is a sense in which any government intervention into the markets is "what communists did, just less", but it is a sense on such a level of vagueness and generality that it lacks significant information value. In any case, for ideologically oriented both social democrats and greens communism is primarily a negative example rather than an attractor. (I don't claim deep knowledge of the contemporary left in Slovakia, but feel quite certain to object to your statement being formulated as valid for the whole Eastern Europe).
I don't think that quite described the US, or Western Europe - the stereotypical redneck is low-status but on the right (same for ploucs here in France), and buying organic food seems to be more common with the rich, but is associated to the left.
A better description of the left/right gap may be that each represents a status ladder, and that people support the status ladder on which they have the best relative position. The details of what counts tend to vary with time and place, but on the left you tend to get status for being educated, open-minded, environmentally aware, original, etc., and on the right you tend to get status for being rich, responsible, having a family, being loyal to your country, etc.
At least, that angle of approach seems better than looking at policies; if you compare the policies of the French left and the American left, the policies might seem so different that they don't deserve the same label; but if you compare the kind of people who support either parties, the similarities are much more apparent.
I have a notion that in the US, left-wingers tend to focus on defection by high-status people and right-wingers tend to focus on defection by low-status people.
Except where "the left" has become the elites, there the dynamic is reversed.
The key question is not whether leftist politicians have become elites (they do regularly) but whether their agenda supports elites and whether they get support from the elites, which happens very rarely. There is a lot of self-serving political decisions made by both left and right politicians from which politicians benefit, but the left politicians are nevertheless still more connected with lower classes than the right politicians.
Somewhat special example were/are communist countries where the non-political aspects of social status are reduced and the groups of communists and elites have large overlap. These countries, when compared internationally, are "left", but in the internal politics there is usually little place for using "left" and "right" as the left and right are relative characteristics which are useless when there is only one political party.
But there are any number of sub-varieties of socialism, so it is itself a fuzzy blob. Moreover, the non-right in many countries, particularly the US, barely has a whiff of classical socialism, Who is advocating a centrally planned economy or worker control of production in the US? It's a standing joke in Europe that the US has two parties of the right. That's "perception" of course. It's also a US perception that public healthcare "is" socialism -- the idea is seen as mainstream and cross-party elsewhere. What is going on is that the right have this convenient label "socialist" to lambast the non-right with, and the non-right don't have a corresponding term to hit back with. That doesnt mean anything about ideaspace.
Well, that depends on the industry. For example, as you mentioned below, the left here is advocating central planning in the medical industry.
Of course I meant central planning of (pretty much) everything. Every polity has some central planning of some things.
The question is how much of the economy is under central planning and which factions are trying to increase or decrease it.
Which question? Wanting some but not all things under state/provision control is not socialsim by any strict definition. More like moderate or centrel-left or social democracy or something. But "social democrat!" doens't have the right insulting ring.
About as big as "human biodiversity" is for a leftist. I think you are severely underestimating the strength of conviction among people whose beliefs disagree with your own, or the extent to which these are moral disagreements, rather than exclusively factual.
Very possibly. The Christian who gets infected by LW might be terrified of telling their family, friends, and church group that they're now an atheist; similarly, the anti-racist who gets infected by LW might be terrified of telling their family and friends that they're now a race realist.
I recognize that if evidence shows differences in (for example) intelligence between races, then, yeah, I've got to change my belief and except that people of X race are smarter than those from Y. I don't know that this would change my behaviour towards people of either race, or that I think any state policy should change. Perhaps my "racism bad" reflex is stronger than I'm consciously accounting for, but I don't see any useful way to act on this data. Similarly, I don't think my behaviour would change much if there was hard data about intelligence difference between the genders.
I choose intelligence because it's a controversial, and common, topic. I can maybe see the value in applying this data to predisposition to violence, or things like calculating insurance premiums.
There's a lot of ways to act on data about group differences in intelligence.
For example, if it turns out that group A has a higher average IQ than group B, and that A and B can be distinguished reliably by genetic testing (including but not limited to visual inspection for associated phenotypes), I might decide to devote more effort to educating group B than group A, to make up for the difference. Or I might decide to devote more effort to educating group A than group B, to get the best bang for my education buck. Or I might decide to research the differences, to learn more about the physiological mechanisms of intelligence. Or I might change my ways of evaluating claims so that I give more weight to group A's ideas relative to group B's than I used to (assuming I used to believe they were equally intelligent). Or I might decide to structure my society in such a way that group A has access to certain privileges that group B is denied, on the grounds of their superiority, or such that B gets privileges A is denied, on the grounds of their greater need. Etc.
Which of those I do, if any, depends a lot on what I think follows from greater potential intelligence within a group. People disagree about this. People often change their minds about this depending on whether they consider themselves in group A or B.
Incidentally, just for the record: I find it pretty likely that there do exist such group differences, though I expect that the portion of variation in real-world expressed intelligence accounted for by group differences in innate intelligence is <10%. I find it fairly unlikely that "race" is the best detectable correlate of membership in such groups available to us, though it might be more reliable than, say, the shape of an individual's head (also a popular theory once). I expect its popularity in that role is more of a reflection of historical social relations than a conclusion drawn from current data.
Thanks for the reply!
Fair enough, that's an example of policy, based on this data.
Also cool, seems obvious in hindsight!
I'd imagine a group's ideas are more to do with non-genetic factors than genetic intelligence.
For me some of these would be contingent on the additional discovery that the group's intelligence is a result of its genetic difference; group B could be generally poorer, or less well-nourished, or some other factor leading to lower intelligence, in addition to being genetically distinguishable. This is also making the assumption that IQ tests are culturally fair and the like - though I'm happy to use the term as a placeholder for 'idealized intelligence test'.
As would I. But the claimant's intelligence (whether genetic or otherwise) is nevertheless a factor I take into account when deciding how much weight to give a claim.
And, yes, all of this is contingent on the idea that IQ correlates well with intelligence.
And, yes, if it turns out that the physiological mechanisms whereby group A develops greater intelligence than group B are heavily environmentally mediated (e.g., due to differential poverty, nourishment, or other factors) I might well decide to alter the environment to increase intelligence in group B as well.
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.
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.
Thanks for the link to Caplan's post, it's a very nice thought experiment. How about a thread where right-wing folks can give their strongest versions of left-wing arguments and vice versa, all the while quietly laughing about each other's misconceptions but not stepping in to correct? I could give it a try, as a right-winger imitating a left-winger, but I'd probably just embarrass myself.
This. The lack of examples from the left makes me uncomfortable sharing this article with people that will likely see it as an attack on their ideology. If they have some things to cheer for too, they are far more likely to accept it as a good post.
See above. Come up with a good leftist example beyond the three already there and I'll add it.
Which is unfortunate since this seems to be one of the few recent articles with relatively short inferential distances.