Now, it is said we all here pride ourselves on our intelligence, rationality, and moral sense. It is also said, however, that we are a fiercely independent bunch, and that we can let this pride of ours get the better of us. There have also been comments that the live communities that appear at meetups provide much more positive interactions than what goes on on this site's discussions; this might merit further investigation.
My point is; we've done a lot of research on how to do proper ethical and metaethical calculations, and on how to achieve self-empowerment and deal with our own akrasia, which is awesome. We've also done some work on matters of gender equality, which is very positive as well. But I haven't seen us do anything about the basic details of human interaction, what one would call "politeness" and "basic human decency". And I think it might be useful if we started tackling these, for our own sakes, that of those who surround us, and that of easing our mission along, which is, as I understand it so far, to save the world (from existential risk (at the hands of (unfriendly and self-modifying) artificial intelligence))).
What inspired me to propose this post was a video I just saw from Hank Green of the famed and fabled vlogbrothers. I hold these two individuals in very high esteem, and I would expect many here to share my feelings about them, on account of their values and sensibilities largely overlapping with ours; namely the sense that intelligence, knowledge and curiosity are awesome, and that intellectuals ought to use their power to help improve themselves and the world around them.
Here it is; I hope you enjoy it
My first reaction to this video is that it's pretty crappy. Its main message is to insist on the following sequence as everyone's moral responsibility: once you say something that someone perceives as hurtful, you're morally obliged not to "question their feelings", but to perceive that you screwed up, to feel bad, to apologize, and change your behavior so this doesn't happen again. The video repeatedly insists that your own thoughts about whether what you've done was improper are irrelevant.
Now, it should be completely obvious that this sequence is not going to be used as prescribed by anyone including the author of the video. If you were to approach him and say, "In your video, you identified my position as that of a fartbag, repeatedly, and that was very hurtful to me", he's not going to say, "Oh, thanks for telling me that, I'm sorry I screwed up, I feel really bad and will never do this again". He is, in fact, going to use his own judgement about the appropriateness of his behavior to decide whether or not he should apologize.
Why, then, is there no mention of your own moral judgement in the video, and instead, you're repeatedly encouraged not to question someone's hurt feelings, but to accept them as a proof you did something hurtful, and must feel bad and apologize?
My guess is that this is a shortcut towards setting up a double standard. Once you've gotten people to accept this sequence as their moral responsibility, some varieties of hurt feelings are going to be treated as obviously triggering the sequence, while others will just be ignored. This isn't conscious lying - the author of the video is sincere. He's going to have a blinkered view of what it means to hurt someone's feelings, and he wants you to have that same view, too. If you approach him with a hypothetical scenario in which what he's said or done was true, virtuous, and hurt the feelings of some bad person, he's not going to be able to see a problem with that, and will accuse you of sophistry.
Double standards are incredibly powerful because they allow you to be hypocritical without consciously being aware of the fact. They've replaced direct and conscious lies as the preferred method of being untruthful in arguments.
The video that is recommended at the end as the inspiration for this one provides much of the missing context; it's all about how to correctly apologize after being "called out, which in the context of this video is when you say or do something that upholds the oppression of the marginalized groups of people"; the video teaches you how to apologize and become a proper "ally", etc. So we're fully into the social-justice-warriors terminology here, which is or course very much misaligned with rationality, and the double standard described above is being built primarily with that purpose.
There are some good things about this video. It is true that many people feel that apologizing is a sign of weakness. It is also true that there should be more direct apologies and fewer non-apology "I'm sorry you feel that way" apologies. These good aspects of the video are drowned by the dogmatic, irrational claims of alleged moral responsibility to which most of the video is devoted.
Watching the video was a decent exercise in detecting some typical patterns of bad thinking.
I didn't get this impression; that is, the impression I got from the video wasn't "you should accept your interlocutor's perspective as the Only True Perspective" but "don't give Weasel Apologies."
Someti... (read more)