I'm not sure I can phrase this in a sufficiently nuanced manner, but .. how much of this nuance is achieved by having discussions about issues which have real life-or-death impacts on people but without having any of those people inconveniently present? You can have a discussion about racism among white people, a discussion about trans people with no trans people present, a discussion about accessibility with no disabled people involved; and so on. It sounds nuanced but only because it's an academic exercise to those involved, not something with real impact on their lives.
Anyone can assess evidence. Opinions formed after a best-as-you-can assessment of the evidence are better than the alternatives. A group of black people are perfectly capable of empathising with, understanding and having a nuanced opinion of the concerns of disabled people. Swap adjectives around as you like. This is because everybody has the ability to weigh evidence. Opinions formed on things that aren't evidence based are exceptionally bad ideas, so I'm more than happy for them to fall by the wayside.
I'm not talking peer reviewed evidence, but the ordinary stuff where there is reason to believe something is true and it has to passes all or at least most tests of authenticity that are thrown at it.
To have a nuanced discussion of politics, pushing partisans out of the room or at least quietening them down is the first step. "An X needs to be in the room to discuss topics related to X" is fair and necessary for decision making but not at all required for nuanced discussion.
Opinions formed after a best-as-you-can assessment of the evidence
are better than the alternatives.
Sure, agreed.
A group of black people are perfectly capable of empathising
with, understanding and having a nuanced opinion of the
concerns of disabled people. Swap adjectives around as you like
Absolutely not. Nobody will have as much evidence on the experiences of a group as those within the group.
Have you ever worked closely with disabled folks? Been one? Had them in your home? As somebody with minor disabilities myself, it is absolutely humbling when my friend with different disabilities visits, because various things in my home and the surrounding environs affect her in ways that I could not imagine without her help.
Am I discussing anecdota, rather than hard evidence? Certainly, but most of the truly hard decisions in the world are not the sort that lend themselves to purely evidence-based approaches.
There is no conclusive study or collection of studies that can, for example, tell us how to resolve the Israel/Palestine matter, whether allowing women to abort their pregnancies is a good idea, etc. We can not establish proper control groups, etc, to study these issues. Much purported "evidence" is biased. We need to lean on the evidence as much as possible, but there is also no substitute for the voices belonging to those being discussed.
There is a post on SSC about Isolated Demand for Rigor which, well, I can't link you to because it's down. But I think it is relevant to many points made in this conversation. Is it better to have representation when making policy decisions? Pretty much everybody is saying yes. And somehow, this "yes" gets interpreted as "can't have an opinion on any topic as long as I'm not part of a certain group". That's identity politics taken to the extreme.
I'm going to put common sense on the table and say that yes, I can have opinions on various topics. Including, among many others, disabled people.
Are my opinions equally valid, given that I'm not part of that group? And here we start to see how things get confused - because absolutely nobody deigns to give a definition of "valid". Are my opinions correct? good? useful? - that's damn easy to judge, comparatively. But "valid"? Hell, I could have the best damn idea in the whole wide world, and it still wouldn't make it "valid" - in the climate we're moving towards.
Are opinions of people not of that group, on average, equally good as those in the group? That's a completely different question, and now the isolated demand for rigor becomes clear: we move from a statistical bias to being allowed to do something. Being less likely to be right is not a criteria for being allowed in the public discourse. Nor should it be.
To add, personal experience can be useful, but is not the end-all in decision making. It's useful in the ways anecdotes are useful, that is to say, good as an illustrative example but may not be statistically representative.
In general, you do not need to have personally experienced X to have a useful or "valid" opinion on X. As a reductio ad absurdum, nobody would be allowed to have an valid opinion on murder.
> how much of this nuance is achieved by having discussions about issues which have real life-or-death impacts on people but without having any of those people inconveniently present?
Followed by an assertion that
> A group of X people is [not] capable of of empathising with, understanding and having a nuanced opinion of the concerns of !X people
So I think there are people advocating that you should be speaking only if you lived it.
Of course, anecdotes and personal experiences are valuable and including people with personal experience is helpful, but the central claim here is that you can have productive discussions about X without anyone with personal experience with X.
You can have a discussion about X, as long as you recognize that the discussion is going to be flawed without anybody from X there.
Sometimes this is a necessity. In history class we learn about ancient Sumerians without inviting them to the discussion, because they have all been dead for a long time. So we make do.
Certainly, if we had the chance, we'd love to have them there.
(A useful thought experiment: what if a bunch of ancient Sumerians fell out of a time machine and were available for discussion? Would we not think poorly of people who wanted to discuss ancient Sumerians did so without the Sumerians, who were standing like... right outside the room?)
Can a bunch of e.g. men sit around and have a meaningful discussion about women? It... really depends. Certainly a group of male gynecologists could usefully discuss some procedure, although the history of gynecology also certainly suggests that for many years the profession surely suffered from a lack of female perspective. Men can usefully discuss gender relations, because they are a part of the group that experiences gender relations, although again this discussion will be a lot weaker if it involves exclusively male perspectives. A room full of men can probably not very usefully discuss issues highly specific to women, unless they were indirectly drawing upon female experiences (e.g., two men could certainly learn from a discussion about an article written by a female author about childbirth or male-on-female sexual assault, etc)
I reject that discussion will be inherently flawed without representation. I further submit that representation can cause flaws in discussion.
To use your thought experiment as an example, say if we are critically examining Sumerian religion and their creation myths, we may not want the Sumerians in the room even if they were readily available, since they may well take offense at us disrespecting and dissecting their beliefs. If we are discussing Sumerian religion with Sumerians and we don't want to cause them offense, we would have to tiptoe around the fact their gods well, aren't real, and subjects like "what might have inspired the Sumerians to ascribe this trait to that god" can't be discussed at all.
And to use a example more grounded in reality, a group of men can't have properly conduct a discussion on how to attract women with women in the discussion. I am well aware that this sort of discussion has pejorative connotations with how infamous the PUA community has become, but the fact is that young men do need to social spaces and groups where they can learn this, since it is skill that needs to be learned and practiced.
Or to use an even more absurd example, a group of rape victims can't have a discussion with a rapist, even though the rapist would be able to add their side of the story to the discussion.
if we are critically examining Sumerian religion
and their creation myths, we may not want the Sumerians
in the room even if they were readily available, since
they may well take offense at us disrespecting and
dissecting their beliefs.
I would agree with this specific example.
Religion is a special case when it comes to rational discussion. It is explicitly a belief in the irrational, and is not compatible with rational thought.
When the "out group" decides to exclude the "in group" from a discussion, we should be very very sure that there's some highly specific reason why the "in group" is simply incapable of rational discussion.
For example, we exclude my car from discussions about his medical care because he is a cat and he can't speak or understand medicine. If we do that with people, we need to be very careful.
And to use a example more grounded in reality,
a group of men can't have properly conduct a
discussion on how to attract women with women
in the discussion.
This is completely opposite to my experiences.
I certainly think it's healthy and good for men to discuss sex, attraction, etc, without women as well. Heterosexual men are a part of the group that experiences dating and sex with women. (I wonder how many hours of my life I've spent on this? Thousands? Tens of thousands?)
This is markedly different than, say, a panel of men discussing/deciding things for women, i.e. a panel full of men deciding what women can and cannot do with their bodies.
a group of rape victims can't have a discussion
with a rapist, even though the rapist would be
able to add their side of the story to the discussion.
I agree with caveats. (Some victims find power and closure by confronting their rapists, etc.)
To generalize this specific example into something broadly applicable, the reason why this example works is because in this case the rapist has done something highly transgressive - essentially, they have broken anything that might reasonably be considered a social contract - and it would certainly be reasonable for a rape victim to find it highly upsetting to see their rapist, much less listen to them.
So again, I would say the validity of excluding a person from a discussion relevant to them would highly depend upon some explicit evidence or reasoning that productive discussion simply cannot occur if they are a part of it.
This would not apply to, say, a room full of white people deciding things about the Black experience.
I think given the context of this thread, it’s fair to mention that there are plenty on the internet who use that kind of rhetoric to invalidate any out-group opinions they don’t like. Not everyone of course, but it happens. These are some of the conversations that are lacking nuance. Sometimes the out-group has something to offer. Sometimes you just need to make them feel heard before you explain to them what they’re not getting. It’s about having the conversation. Why should anyone listen to someone if they don’t get the same respect back?
Sometimes you just need to make [the out group] feel
heard before you explain to them what they’re not getting.
When you listen to groups of affected issues, what you often hear is that they have been explaining forever, it hasn't worked, and frankly they're exhausted.
Often, the folks who ask them for "explanations" are doing so in bad faith. Perhaps you're doing so in good faith, but they have a right to be wary and/or weary.
Understand that a group being oppressed or affected by some injustice is already bearing an undue burden.
Why should anyone listen to someone if they don’t get the
same respect back?
In some cases, you may be the one being incredibly disrespectful by expecting some sort of explanation, because tons of explaining has already been done.
To name one example, there is an incredibly rich history of African-American writing, art, and other forms of expression regarding the African-American experience. To use the mildest possible word I can bring myself to type, it would be rude to expect any individual to owe me some sort of explanation. Why should they do the work of explaining (yet again, most likely) when I haven't?
Look, I get where you're coming from, but this post was specifically about places to find nuanced discussion on the internet, and in the context of that, responding to
> No one advocates that you should only speak if you lived it, we say that those who lived it must have a say if that is in any way possible.
I stand by what I said. If you're coming to the table for nuanced discussion, I don't think it makes much sense to shout down your opponent with ad hominems simply because others have argued against you in bad faith before. If you're weary of explaining something, I get that, but I don't think coming to a place full of people looking for a nuanced discussion and calling them names when they may basically be on your side already does your cause any good. I understand it, and it's a completely human reaction, but it's alienating.
Oh, "they" don't advocate. "They" are very careful not to advocate. But ask questions? Suggest? Leave historical links to wikipedia? God, I'm starting to hate this whole thing with a burning passion.
Not the poster, mind you - clicked through its history and he's a decent fellow. Or fellowette. Rather like him, actually.
But the whole memeplex that seems to grow and grow to the point it actually has rules on how to breach topics on public forums... that I do begin to really hate.
I can have opinions on various topics. Including,
among many others, disabled people.
Are my opinions equally valid, given that I'm not
part of that group?
There's a distinction here that I'm struggling to put into words.
As largely non-disabled people, there is a lot we can and should be doing.
If you have an idea for a better sort of wheelchair or walking aid, is that something you should pursue? Yeah! It's not that you should shut up and stay far, far, away from disabled people who are doing disabled things. But, each step of the way, we've got an obligation to make sure we're not overruling them. Pragmatically, this makes sense as well - we're unlikely to design some kind of gamechanging next-gen wheelchair without some serious collaboration from folks who are actually confined to wheelchairs.
There are parallels when it comes to race relations. As a white man in America, should I largely (or entirely) shut up when it comes to the Black experience in America? Yes. I am not going to understand that experience by any means other than some voracious listening. But there is plenty of work to be done from the white side of things as well. My thoughts and actions are needed there. In fact, considering we have the majority of economic and political power in this country, most of the work needs to be done by us if the situation is to be improved.
Is it better to have representation when making policy
decisions? Pretty much everybody is saying yes. And
somehow, this "yes" gets interpreted as "can't have
an opinion on any topic as long as I'm not part of a
certain group". That's identity politics taken to the extreme.
I would encourage you to think holistically.
Here's (part of) my thought process. I don't know your demographics so I'll share mine. As a white man living in America...
1. Will I still have plenty of power and agency in my life, if I have the humility to refrain from forming opinions and/or exercising authority over matters in which I have no personal experience?
2. From a purely selfish perspective, won't I learn more and therefore become a better person if I do much more listening than talking when it comes to matters that affect groups I'm not a part of?
3. What are my odds of having better ideas on a given topic than the subject matter experts themselves? As a Ruby programmer, I basically don't have opinions at all on Python or how the Python community should run things. Why wouldn't I extend the same courtesy to women, or people of color?
4. Are there already a lot of areas in my life where I practice this kind of humility? When I step onto a plane, do I assume my opinions about flying the plane are on par with those of the pilots?
That's fair, though also note that in a discussion whether Alice or Bob should get $100, Alice and Bob will be the most biased voices, not the least. So by all means, listen to the testimony of interested parties, but treat it with as much skepticism as other evidence.
This obviously works well when it comes to Alice and Bob's little dispute, assuming we don't have a personal connection to either.
This approach doesn't scale up to meet most of the world's difficult and interesting questions and problems. Issues of society, race, gender, economy, and so forth affect all of us.
How can there ever be a disinterested party when it comes to matters of national or societal importance?
> How can there ever be a disinterested party when it comes to matters of national or societal importance?
The scientific method doesn't require that I be a disinterested party, but it does require that I evaluate evidence, to the best of my ability, in a disinterested manner.[2]
E.g. I might believe women are discriminated against in academia and locked out of opportunity; my heart might beat out of my chest because of all the horror stories my friends tell me. However, the data seems to indicate that 57%[0] of university degrees in the U.S. are awarded to women, and that this proportion is increasing. I am emotionally invested in my belief in the former injustice, but I have to evaluate the data as though I weren't and update my beliefs accordingly.[1]
> This approach doesn't scale up to meet most of the world's difficult and interesting questions and problems. Issues of society, race, gender, economy, and so forth affect all of us.
Anecdotally, I've heard many social justice advocates recently assert that dispassionate analysis of evidence and data can't lead to solutions for social problems. "Other ways of knowing" or different "epistemological frames" such as "lived experience" are emphasised. I find this misguided: Indeed mathematics and the scientific method are _the only_ tools that can help us find the truth about social problems. Why would the intellectual tools that build homes, bridges, hydroelectric dams, energy grids, the internet; that find surgical methods, discover medicines, design microchips, and so on, be somehow less effective than lived experience in the social realm? No, these are humanity's most powerful tools. We must not abandon them.
> my heart might beat out of my chest because of all the horror stories my friends tell me. However, the data seems to indicate that 57%[0] of university degrees in the U.S. are awarded to women, and that this proportion is increasing
Both of these are true; women face substantial gendered barriers in academia, and numerically women are doing well. You can't say "you weren't sexually assaulted because some other women got degrees".
It is also fair to ask "are men facing structural barriers in access to university?" Or are they choosing not to, or experiencing barriers further down the pipeline, and so on.
The problem with using aggregate statistics on humans is that they tell you nothing about whether a particular case was dealt with justly or unjustly. (In fairness, there's also a problem going the other way, of over-extrapolating from a single example).
> Why would the intellectual tools that build homes, bridges, hydroelectric dams, energy grids, the internet; that find surgical methods, discover medicines, design microchips, and so on, be somehow less effective than lived experience in the social realm?
This is Le Corbusier style high modernism, the idea that living should be mechanised and human life subjected to statistical process control.
> Then you encounter the problem that there are no average humans
[sigh] In statistical modelling at the population level, we don't make conclusions about "average humans". We derive conclusions based on distributions. And the average is rarely indicative; the median is often more useful. Simple conclusions can be derived through power laws e.g. the divergence in income of the median male since 1970 relative to GDP growth.
> This is Le Corbusier style high modernism, the idea that living should be mechanised and human life subjected to statistical process control
Is this an argument of some kind? I'm sorry but I can't parse what point you're trying to make or the relevance of the statement in determining the correctness of concepts and policies that affect a society.
I find this misguided: Indeed mathematics and the scientific
method are _the only_ tools that can help us find the truth
about social problems.
I love "analysis of evidence and data" as much as the next guy, and quite possibly more.
That's why I am extremely wary of lending too much credence to data when it comes to something as messy as a society of human beings.
What's one of the very first things we learn when we learn about "the scientific method" as schoolkids? For an experiment to be valid, we need control samples. This can rarely, if ever, be practically or ethically achieved with human beings. There are, to put it mildly, an overwhelming number of confounding variables at play in any statistical study of human beings.
That doesn't mean data is useless when it comes to social sciences, but it is rarely if ever sufficient. (This is also resoundingly true for "lived experience", of course)
> To have a nuanced discussion of politics, pushing partisans out of the room or at least quietening them down is the first step.
There's the fallacy though. How do you tell the difference between "pushing partisans out the room" and "pushing one side out of the room"? They have the same effect. A 100% "partisan" discussion looks calm and "nuanced" if no one is there to disagree.
You say you want a nuanced discussion, but how do you know you're not just sitting in an echo chamber?
If you're in a room with partisans from opposite sides, more often than not they'll be shouting over each other and not really having a discussion.
If you're in an echo chamber, you'll find that generally everyone is agreeing with you.
If you're in a room without partisans and you're not in an echo chamber, you can have a discussion, some people will disagree with you on pretty major issues, and you may even change your mind, at least to some degree. These are wonderful spaces to be in.
And again, I think you're just fooling yourself. The people you label as "partisans" are not a representative sample. What you're really doing, whether you realize it or not, is pushing out, not the people who "disagree most strongly", but the people who "disagree most strongly with you".
Those people in the wonderful spaces who disagree with you on pretty major issues and cause you to change your mind to some degree?
Those are just the people you're willing to listen to.
I don't think I agree. I'm perfectly willing to have conversations with people who disagree strongly with me, if they're actually willing to have a conversation. The people I'm labeling as "partisans" are those who bash others with opposing views (or even views that are similar but not identical to their own) rather than having a conversation. Debate the idea, not the person; be charitable in your interpretation; etc.
Which is not to say that every space needs to be like this; disagreements are exhausting after all. But I think there need to be spaces where this kind of reasoned discussion is the norm if we're ever going to escape the tribalism in our society.
You're right in one sense: the people who disagree with me that communication and building bridges with people you disagree with is something to be valued... those people I'm pushing out, yes.
And again, because I don't think you're getting the point, I argue you're assessment of "communication and building bridges" and and "bashing rather than having a conversation" are fundamentally subjective. You routinely forgive passionate and edgy behavior by people who agree with you, where you view the same kind of debate from your enemies as "partisan". I don't need to find examples, I know this is true for you because it's true for everyone.
And that adds up. So, fine, you sincerely want a forum for dispassionate debate. But it doesn't work. You end up driving away the actually diverse viewpoints and your forum ends up an echo chamber. And it's worse than that: it's an echo chamber you think is telling you how the world works.
So you get forums like the letters.wiki site being discussed elsewhere, which is filled with sincere and high-minded discussion from minds drawn from (heh) across the spectrum from "center-left technocrat" to "right-leaning libertarian".
>You routinely forgive passionate and edgy behavior by people who agree with you
Yes, I am guilty of this at times. I would hope and expect to be called out for it in such spaces.
>I argue you're assessment of "communication and building bridges" and and "bashing rather than having a conversation" are fundamentally subjective
No, I disagree. If someone comes into a discussion space and dismisses someone else's points by simply calling them a (libtard|fascist|fraud), that's just a textbook ad hominem attack. This is objectively decidable - the person is not engaging with the contents of the other person's view, but is rather attacking the speaker themselves.
This is one example, but there are others: threats and other forms of verbal abuse, for example. They're pretty evident to anyone who's not emotionally involved in the conversation. I would like to keep all of this behavior out of such spaces, and I think it's possible to build a culture that discourages it.
I would ask you this: what's the alternative? Simply accept the vitriol between opposing sides of our political arguments and give up on any hope of connecting with people with significantly differing views? (In the US) we have a two-party political system, should we just accept the endless back-and-forth power struggle between the two sides? We all have a vote, and if we can't reach across the aisle to those we disagree with, how can we ever hope to make progress?
> how much of this nuance is achieved by having discussions about issues which have real life-or-death impacts on people but without having any of those people inconveniently present
I find this comment difficult to understand. On an uncharitable reading, you would seem to be implying that non-white people are incapable of nuanced discussion about race, which I'm sure isn't what you meant. Or are you saying that what we take to be nuanced discussions about race are only considered nuanced because there are no non-white people? Or that it is impossible for white people to have a nuanced discussion about race unless there are black people present?
While not impossible, discussion on problems as they play out in practice rather than in theory (in theory we don't have racism after all), we tend to not have statistics or not the right statistics (we're not measuring the things that would show the issue). Then, the best way to be informed is first hand accounts, which white people naturally wont have. First hand accounts serve as a ground truth when statistics are insufficient, and as such, I don't see how you can have a very informed exchange without them. Now you may read up on those account, but far more often than not, I see white people point to the absence of racism in a statistic and take it as proof it does not exist, or is so uncommon it doesn't show up. That is the problem that is avoided when including (people who telling their) first hand accounts.
> I see white people point to the absence of racism in a statistic and take it as proof it does not exist
I agree, and often I see it the other way around, with statistics used as the basis to build a racist discourse. The classic example is prison population statistics, and the even more classic one is Lombroso.
Plus, it's not like white people don't rely on personal experience and prejudices. There are psychological mechanisms to isolate "otherness" out of people you witness as "bad", you will just use the easiest one to pinpoint. So if you witness a bad guy who is white but from another town, you'll form a prejudice against people from the other town; if the guy is black, the prejudice will "scale up" to skin tone. The only way to offset that problem is to ensure everyone in the room comes from significantly different experiences and can somehow balance them out.
In the legal sense I meant (it is not allowed). And very few people are intentionally of consciously discriminating. I wanted to contrast that to practice: human features that gatekeep people of color and so on. Hope its clear now.
Today's twitter row is the "cancellation" of a history broadcaster for using the phrase "so many damn blacks" in a video, which is probably not a criminal offence Mark Meechan notwithstanding, but is definitely unambiguously racism.
Employment discrimination and the set of things covered by equalities law is the _beginning_ of tackling racism, not the end.
I am pretty sure that the last of your interpretations is closest to the truth, and it is really clear exactly what the parent is saying: people who are directly affected by or involved in the issue under discussion should be involved in the discussion of the issue.
A room full of rich white people discussing problems affecting poor people of colour is doomed to fail to capture the nuance of the situation. Not because white people are inherently too stupid to understand things, but because nobody can completely understand and articulate someone else's lived experience. It's not like this is a new or mind-blowing idea - representation is a key tenet of democracy, and should cover all the ways of segmenting society that are clearly differentiating.
Uh. Excuse me. <foreigner raises hand>. How is 95% of the globe population supposed to discuss black people in America? Are we just simply not allowed to?
And to take the reductio ad absurdum even further - do we move towards a society where you need a token black person to be able to discuss certain subjects? Because, statistically, there's going to be quite a lot of rooms without one.
Like I said in another comment, this is a hell of an Isolated Demand for Rigor. We don't use this kind of strict standard for absolutely anything else. People cook without being chefs, raise children without diplomas in parenting, and make travel plans without a travel rep by their shoulder. But apparently certain subjects can't even be discussed without a representative?
> It's not like this is a new or mind-blowing idea - representation is a key tenet of democracy, and should cover all the ways of segmenting society that are clearly differentiating.
Actually, this is a very new and mind blowing idea. In two ways. First, "all the ways of segmenting a society" part is new, and I can't help but notice that the people doing the gerrymandering... sorry, I meant deciding which segments are clearly differentiating are having a hell of an advantage. Speaking of, I'm going to say that being an introvert is a pretty big thing, and I really don't feel my needs are properly represented in politics. And second, the idea that we need to take the kind of rules made for governing and apply them to citizen's everyday life. This is not a normal extension - it's a reversal. Rules made for governing have the very important purpose of curtailing the power of those in power, so that we, the citizens, have more freedom.
I'm also a foreigner to the USA. Not sure why that us being used as the reference point but OK.
It's really not hard - you actively seek out written or shared experiences, opinions and perspectives of the relevant people.
By all means people are welcome to have uninformed discussions that are doomed to trap them in an echo chamber. But if you want to have a well informed discussion and truly understand an issue then you'll try to diversify the participation and the evidence base.
That is why we have discussions and a good chunk of why we as humanity have so much literature outside of technical and entertainment reasons. Putting down your "lived experience" and conveying it so that others can understand it is very important and should be happening everywhere. There is nothing magical about "lived experience" if you articulate its effects clearly and others can understand it. People can, of course, choose to dismiss them but that is their own failing.
Personally, I think the "lived experience" argument is currently being used more as a way of discounting/dismissing opinions just by virtue of who is saying them rather than the content and value that said experiences convey/express. It's equally dismissing of the "lived experience" of the other group as well because they bring a unique perspective as an outsider if the issue pertains to just one group.
Right now, the "lived experience" of white-people (and some other groups) is being dismissed and ignored. There is currently racial discrimination against white people, double-standards against pro-white opinions, all-round blaming of white people for grand historic things that they are not the sole perpetrators of, downright hatred against them that is ignored and celebrated, demonization of them expressing pride in their identity, historic slavery and oppression of white people is swept under the rug, human-rights abuses against white minority groups around the world are ignored, predominantly white nations are being demonized for racism for wanting national sovereignty, etc. These are all "lived experiences" currently affecting the white population group. So if we want to bring emotion to the discussion, then I'm all for having the "lived experience" discussion with any group, so long as all groups' experiences matter.
Side note: Another "lived-experience" affecting white people: Having to tip-toe and be afraid of voicing our opinion on racial topics such as this one.
There are obviously situations where one might have a discussion without the person being discussed being present. The point is that if the discussion might affect those people, they should be represented. That could be by the people having the discussion actively seeking out resources to genuinely learn the perspective of the people in question, but where at all possible it should involve them.
> Having to tip-toe and be afraid of voicing our opinion on racial topics such as this one.
I'm a white person and am not at all afraid of voicing my opinion on racial topics, but that's often not important to do. Far more important is to listen or actively seek out and learn from other (affected) people's perspectives. If you're afraid of voicing your opinion it's because you haven't made a good faith attempt to learn about the subject, and have formed an uninformed opinion. Learn and then think and then maybe speak. Everyone doesn't have to have their stupid opinions respected.
"Nuanced" is a description of tone; it says nothing about how well informed the participants are. Someone who comes in saying "I am part of this group, and you're completely misrepresenting me" is not nuanced.
Perhaps our misunderstanding is just one of definition then. I understood nuance to mean something like this from Merriam-Webster: "sensibility to, awareness of, or ability to express delicate shadings (as of meaning, feeling, or value)". A nuanced discussion according to that definition would be one that takes into account the various complexities and positions involved in a topic, rather than papering over them with political rhetoric, partiality, or fallacious reasoning.
For example, I can have a nuanced understanding of how fire works, the fire code in my area, and so on. But I'm not going to be very "nuanced" when I'm trapped in a burning building and screaming for help because I'm about to burn to death.
Both meanings are relevant here.
To the parent poster's point...
Certainly, nuanced discussion is in general a good thing. We want that understanding, that openness to new ideas, the understanding of others' perspectives, the acknowledgement of complexity, the reliance upon facts and not rhetoric or emotion.
However, an insistence on nuanced discussion necessarily excludes folks who do not have the luxury of nuance. If I am trapped in a burning building, I would not have the luxury of nuance. Folks being rounded up for transport to concentration camps do not have the luxury of nuance. A person being stalked by a jealous ex-lover with a history of violence does not have the luxury of nuance.
So if we exclude those whose tone lacks nuance, we also tend to exclude those with a truly nuanced understanding of the issue at hand.
I wouldn't advocate holding any sort of discussion in a burning building or when exigent circumstances demand urgent action. Pausing for a chat while people are, at that moment and in that place, being "rounded up for transport to concentration camps" seems irresponsible. If someone interrupted a conversation to tell me they were having a heart attack, I wouldn't tell them off for lacking nuance.
But conversations don't take place in those circumstances. Those circumstances stop conversations, which can only take place when people have the space to talk or write, making and critiquing arguments, and so on.
To return to my original point: there seems to be an underlying worry that the people we should be listening to about race, who should be part of those conversations, are incapable of nuanced conversation, either nuance of tone or nuance of content, which strikes me as deeply patronizing and nakedly racist.
Either that or it's an attempt to shut down conversation in case the "nuance" tends to show one party's arguments to be false.
To return to my original point: there seems to be
an underlying worry that the people we should be
listening to about race are incapable of nuanced
conversation, either nuance of tone or nuance of
content, which strikes me as nakedly racist.
Nobody is suggesting that any group of people is intrinsically incapable of nuanced conversation. If they did, they would be profoundly (factually and morally) wrong.
What is being suggested that, yes, some individuals and groups are experiencing circumstances that -- while not as exigent as being trapped in a burning building -- are something like that.
Certainly, if I or my loved ones personally experienced police brutality, or if it was a common enough experience for people in my area who looked like me, and it was a real possibility that I faced every day... it would of course be challenging for me to discuss it in a nuanced way. I do not feel this would represent some sort of weakness intrinsic to my race.
See, that's exactly the kind of questions you could ask there. And it wouldn't take long before somebody would point out that forum discussions don't have real life-or-death impacts on people, and while policy without representation is a pretty good idea, applying it to non-policy discussion is just having a chilling effect on conversations. Plus a bunch of comments about the idea of policy and representation itself, positive and negative, which would likely be above my head.
But yeah, we don't have that anymore.
So post-ssc-takedown, I'm going to be human, emotional and biased and going to say that I'm personally opposed to any ideology that suggest we should discuss less.
And my current position is to be completely opposed to cancel culture. I'm considering it the contemporary ideological enemy. Just making my biases known :)
Ontopic, I just can't imagine any good place this can take a society. If you accept that some topics can be (politely) discussed and some can't, this is equivalent to accepting that people in power decide which topics can be discussed. Because, well... how else are you going to decide except by discussing them? And no, I see no trace of people being able to separate conversation from meta-conversation, as long as it involves the same topic.
Not to mention that it goes again an intellectual and political tradition going back to the Enlightenment. Every time we diverged from open agora, we went to very dark places. That's one hell of a Chesterton's fence. I want a big, big argument pro cancel culture before I can consider it.
That's very much the point. But it's also a distraction, because the Englightenment idea that politics somehow operates on the basis of disinterested rational persuasion and public debate is clearly nonsense.
Politics operates on the basis of applied force and leverage between competing interests. The terrible thing about cancel culture is that it makes this explicit. Groups who are not usually allowed political leverage suddenly act as if they're no longer willing to stay in their usual place of political impotence.
This isn't entirely a good thing, for various reasons, most of which will be familiar. It also isn't an entirely bad one.
But it is unarguably a reminder of how power dynamics really work in this culture, as opposed to the rather self-congratulatory narrative of how we're supposed to believe power dynamics work.
It's also a reminder of what happens when political and business leaders ignore the rule of law and basic standards of representational social justice. Cancel culture and wokeness wouldn't be necessary - and wouldn't even be happening - if there was a general sense that the culture was fundamentally ethical.
Of course it isn't. Given that, there's no need to feel surprised that pushback is happening.
This is an excellent comment from somebody who understands Hobbes :)
> It's also a reminder of what happens when political and business leaders ignore the rule of law and basic standards of representational social justice. Cancel culture and wokeness wouldn't be necessary - and wouldn't even be happening - if there was a general sense that the culture was fundamentally ethical.
Exactly. #metoo exists because reporting sexual assault to employers or the police is often ineffective, so the only resort is the court of public opinion. "Black lives matter" exists because of a number of incidents where a black life was lost and no consequences attached to those responsible nor was any attempt made to prevent it happening again.
> Englightenment idea that politics somehow operates on the basis of disinterested rational persuasion and public debate is clearly nonsense.
This is the ideal to work toward than a law. The enlightenment has helped us progress toward this so politics isnt just a wrestling match with divine rule forever after.
I would like you to define what you're against in more detail here.
There are also things much worse than mere "cancellation" going on; murder and deportation, for example. We don't normally have to say we're against "murder culture", but somehow there are hugely controversial street protests against it.
> I would like you to define what you're against in more detail here.
Among other things, I'm really irritated by the pattern of forcing the conversation partner to properly define his position (likely to be able to poke holes in it) while your original position is floating on air and walking on clouds. You original comment says absolutely nothing, to the point there's a long thread in the subsequent conversation on what you're actually advocating. This happens often enough to be a pattern, and one I keep associating with things I don't like.
(well, you asked).
For the record, I did take a quick peel in your comment history and I definitely, emphatically, don't dislike you as a person. Which I guess makes it easier to take swings at this ideology.
And to be a bit more ontopic, I'm against cancel culture, aka the idea that one of the first tools in our toolset to reach for is some form of silencing people (forcefully, by shaming, by deplatforming and so on). It can be a tool in the toolset and as it happens there was a use-case I agreed with this very winter - my local government closed down a few denialist websites early in the pandemic. But that's pretty much the level I see necessary to get as far as silencing or punishing speech - spreading wrong information in a national emergency situation, or falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.
Anything less should be solved with other tools, even if it's much more difficult. To me, seeing cancel culture used to solve day to day problems shocks me just as much as seeing somebody use an angle grinder in the kitchen. They can keep telling me all day how much faster it is at cutting, it's still an idiotic idea, to the point I actually have to think for a minute before saying why. Except for the obvious "you're definitely going to cut something you don't want, sooner or later". Which applies to our conversation as well.
The point of the post you were responding to was not to discuss the details of this particular claim, it was to show that one of the best ways we can learn about perspectives beyond our own and discover the faults in our logic is through discussion.
It would seem you consider discussion a tool so dangerous (in that it can have real effects) that we should not have them unless we have a perfectly representative group of people taking part in that discussion. But that seems... extreme (e.g. it means that two people can't have a discussion, since two people will never approximately represent all of the groups making up our society). Perhaps you could clarify your claim?
I certainly don’t want to have a pool of representative nazis to make sure we can have discussions about nazis.
I think this is a illogical result of combining the “CNN Crossfire” style of politics with the good idea that more diverse experiences improves the conversation.
1. People ask HN where they can find a replacement for their objectively great rationality discussion club in which they can discuss solutions to the issues of the day.
2. HN commenters point out that the objectively great rationality discussion club wasn't that great, or all that rational.
3. People say "so what, what's the harm in having a crappy social discussion club, it's not like we're killing anyone."
> how much of this nuance is achieved by having discussions about issues which have real life-or-death impacts on people but without having any of those people inconveniently present?
Uh, not much? This comment seems to be assuming some weird things about what the blog typically focuses on. Actually, he writes about trans issues a bit, got some flack for defending Blanchard, and a large fraction of the readership is trans.
I can see what he's getting at, at least if he's focusing on the SSC subreddits and comments. It's easier to be a brave truth-teller when it's not your ox being gored, and I think the demographics of the SSC commentariat explain its openness to e.g. discussing HBD and critiquing feminism, but rather prickly responses to more ingroup-focused critique. The whole 'grey tribe' distinction was often used in a more defensive/obscurantist and less productive/illuminating way than in Scott's original formulation. I think the community is still far more open than average, but this is certainly influenced by the interaction between demographics (which Scott regularly surveys) and blog topics.
I don't think this is unique to SSC, by the way. I think it's why exclusive groups often eventually emerge from inclusive groups, and why apps like Clubhouse are attractive.
Well, there is a reason that victims of a crime aren't the ones who prosecute or judge the accused. If your goal is to seek understanding, you generally don't want the most emotionally involved person being the one controlling the discussion.
There's a place to hear the testimony of people who personally live a topic, and it's fundamentally important, but to claim they need to be present to discuss whatever topic they relate to seems counterproductive.
If a bunch of people are applying a really crummy approach to setting policy, that's bad for policy. If a bunch of people are applying a really crummy approach to having a discussion about policy, then that's a low-quality discussion.
Whatever goal you set for yourself, you end up with something that is deeply sub-optimal at achieving that goal. Why not pay attention to the critique and build something that achieves its goals well?
Nuance is desirable. Anything complicated worth discussing is going to require a lot of nuanced understanding. It should certainly always be one of our ideals.
The challenge is: nuance is a luxury.
The people actually being affected by a crisis are often precisely those people who don't have the luxury of nuance.
So, while we should always strive for nuance, we also need to balance it with other ideals e.g. empathy.
> without having any of those people inconveniently present?
Actually, the very presence of the people involved can actually be counterproductive because of personal emotional investment, so it depends on circumstances.
> it's an academic exercise to those involved, not something with real impact on their lives.
A benefit of academia, even if it often fails to keep to this standard, is that it provides a setting for dispassionate discourse. And you can be sure that it has affects. If you want to see what society will look like in 20 years, look no further to what students are being taught at universities today.
--
It is my general observation that what some people call "dialogue" actually amounts to surreptitious coercion. You mention having a trans person present at the table. However, if you're a psychologist and you're characterizing mental disorders like gender dysphoria, you don't invite a trans person to the table as an equal with whom you're going to come to some compromise pleasing to both (in practice, pleasing to the trans person). This is not political negotiation, it's an attempt at knowing the truth. Sadly, we've made truth a kind of "what's the narrative we can all agree on" (in practice, "that the loudest bully is willing to accept"[0]). Conversation is ultimately about trying to get to the truth. By bringing the trans person to the table as an equal and not as a patient presumes the legitimacy of trans beliefs which are precisely that which is at issue. If someone, trans or not, wishes to make arguments in favor of their position, by all means, but one's, shall we say, identity does not take the place of reasoned argument.
[0] This is what happened with the DSM and same-sex attraction. There was no reasoned debate, only political coercion and acquiescence.
The problem is that you assume there is such thing as an objective truth that can be "reached" or "discovered". That is definitely not the case for social sciences like psychology.
Using standard truth-seeking tools is in fact bad and harmful when it comes to people's identities. The ultimate goal of society should not be to seek out objective truth! It should be to minimize harm to human beings. Seeking truth is merely a means to that goal, and is powerful when it works. But it often doesn't!
> The ultimate goal of society should not be to seek out objective truth! It should be to minimize harm to human beings.
I disagree with this statement as I think objective truth is much more useful and important than minimizing harm.
I don’t think humans should be sacrificed, but I think in 1000 years objective truth in science, math, art will be more important than whether my air conditioning was always pleasantly at 74.
> You mention having a trans person present at the table. However, if you're a psychologist and you're characterizing mental disorders like gender dysphoria, you don't invite a trans person to the table as an equal with whom you're going to come to some compromise pleasing to both (in practice, pleasing to the trans person)
So you presume they're an unequal? This is exactly the problem.
> By bringing the trans person to the table as an equal and not as a patient
Your medical ethics license has been revoked for treating patients as subhumans. People were executed for that at Nuremberg.
> This is what happened with the DSM and same-sex attraction. There was no reasoned debate, only political coercion and acquiescence.
Are you arguing that the DSM ending characterising homosexuality as a mental disorder was wrong? Is this based on anything other than raw homophobia?
The slogan "nothing about us without us" has been used a lot for this recently, but it has a much older history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_About_Us_Without_Us