I've certainly noticed a devolution into overly-simplified caricatures of common arguments in modern discourse. However, some blame for this rests on those who use simplified arguments, not just the respondent. But also much of this simplification happens when debates, blog wars, or just general cultural divisions are summarized.
When people communicate with others who hold very similar worldviews, there's a lot of mutual tacit knowledge that needn't be explicitly referenced because it can be easily and reliably inferred. But so often when we discuss or debate something with someone or an audience which we know holds views radically opposing our own, we don't realize that it's the tacit knowledge or perspective which is likely more important than the summarization of the common or official arguments & tenets.
I like to think of this tacit or 'unseen' rationalization structure as the matrix of graphite that supports the fine point at the end of a pencil.
I couldn't agree more. There's nothing more painful than watching Dawkins vs <some random theologian> and thinking the whole time that they are both talking completely past each other. I don't remember which debate it was, but Dawkins at some point went(and this is from memory but I think accurate) "I could believe in God if you'd told me he was evolved from something else, I just can't believe in complexity that arises without evolution". I stopped watching at that point because it was clear that they weren't even talking about the same thing when they said "God" and neither of them seemed to notice that!
At least on matters of (a)theism, by far the only (famous) atheist I've seen who actually knows how debate without using tacit knowledge and can actually understand the opponents views and debate them on that level was Christopher Hitchens.
Also about Dawkins, while I agree with all that he says, I don´t think he is behaving in a scientific way with religious people.
I mean that if he wants to make people see how the scientific method is vastly superior to religion, I don´t see that pushing them and calling them "dumb" (not literally, but you can feel that´s what he is thinking) is not having just the opposite result, and is making creationists more active in their positions.
While you write that you want to avoid alienation, your language is inflammatory.
Beyond that, the scientific method is not vastly superior (morally?) to religion. The one is a system for examining that which is discoverable while the other attempts to relate to that which is not. In other words, they are orthogonal.
The problem with political debates is people just repeat things they've heard from authority figures and don't do original research to inform themselves because that takes time and effort. Even if you do the research and come up with a brilliant argument it's only going to work on people who can be convinced by arguments and then just one at a time if in person.
I think your point that everything is oversimplified because of summaries could in part be mitigated by having high schoolers take one philosophy course. I took a couple in college, and I quickly learned there's a reason that simply stated argument have enormous treatises written on them to avoid ambiguity through simplification.
So people fall for this stuff people they haven't learned about Plato's law of forms, that contradictions suck, and that words can have multiple meanings.
The premise of the article is that you should be able to have a dialogue with anyone. But this isn't the case; some people want a way to shut you out - not because they hate you, but because they're tired of seeing the same discussion over and over.
w/r to today's feminism and sj, it's the norm to get called out provided you are active for long enough. This is not entirely bad, but it does reflect the ease with which post-structural theory can be weaponized.
All language can be weaponized, indeed. However, Postmodernism did add an effective tool to the arsenal, which is to insist that you get to redefine the terms your opponent is using to suit your whims, and (watch the "and" here, it's important) it smeared a patina of academic correctness over that process. (Yes, it has happened since time immemorial, I'm sure, but the intellectual traditions of the past several centuries would at least have rejected it.) Intellectuals now considered this not only legitimate, but a desirable method of argument. They put fancy terms around this process like "deconstruction", but "redefinition" is really at the core. And some really sophisticated "redefinition" it is, to, as befits "intellectuals", that includes the ability not only to redefine the things your opponent said, but also to redefine the things they didn't say.
Nobody's argument can survive a "deconstruction". I don't just mean, nobody can convince anyone in the presence of deconstruction, I mean, the argument itself can not survive.
True. But chipsy has a point too, because "post-structural theory"/feminism/"social justice" seems to go verbally nuclear more readily than other movements do.
I think it comes from post-structuralism. Words lose their meaning in post-structuralism. All discourse is about power, not truth, because truth is not possible to determine, even in principle. So these people are not interested in having a reasonable conversation. They don't think it's even possible to have one. They're interested in winning the battle of words, and only that, because they think that that's what all conversation is.
It's interesting how the article makes a great effort explaining why and how stereotypical "bingo" strawman pattern matching is counterproductive, and then goes on to categorize feminism as a "conceptual superweapon" using a bunch of shallow strawmen itself.
I was thinking the same thing. I wish the author didn't single out any group for using this tactic because up until that point, it was a legitimate critique. After that, it felt a little like he was attacking a straw man himself.
I think the author is going too far in his last part and most of the people who describe themselves as feminist who I've met aren't anything like the stereotype he gives. But it's also true that I have met people who call themselves feminists who do behave in the way he describes. So it might be stereotyping, but it's not a straw man.
I guess that calling it a strawman is kind of a stretch to begin with. My point is that his reasoning somewhat embodies the same phenomenon that he is criticizing.
I won't say that it can or can't be, but I think that the author of the article makes his stance on it pretty clear up until the point where his own arguments start fulfilling the definition.
Maybe you could also contribute to the discussion by explaining what is so hilarious about my comment. I'm sure you have a reasonable and relevant argument to make.
Consider the possibility that he wasn't using shallow strawmen, and also consider that your comment might be an example of exactly what he's complaining about! (You don't actually have to agree, but you wouldn't have written your GP comment that way if you had really thought about it.)
> Consider the possibility that he wasn't using shallow strawmen
Let's have a look at the article again, then:
If you are like everyone else on the Internet, your immediate response is "Whoever is saying that is obviously a racisty racist who loves racism! I can't believe he literally used the 'I'm not racist, but...' line in those exact words! The old INRB! I've got to get home as fast as I can to write about this on my blog and tell everyone I really met one of those people!"
If a man thinks parts of the reason why some men are jerks toward women is because women actually are more likely to date jerks than people who are respectful, she can gleefully declare "You're a Nice Guy (TM) and therefore Worse Than Hitler (TM)!" and point and laugh.
If those are indeed both truly representative and real anecdotes, feel free to correct me, but otherwise I don't see how they are more than just shallow strawmen.
> also consider that your comment might be an example of exactly what he's complaining about!
I did consider that, but I personally think that that it isn't, so maybe you could give me a hint as to how my comment embodies any of the tendencies described in the article.
Consider that asking me to consider these things could be a way for you to suggest that they are true without having to resort to actual reasoning.
(I'll happily agree that very many things said after "INR,B" ARE racist, but it also seems obvious to me that if you have an actual non-racist point to make, lots of people are going to dismiss it if you start with "INR,B".)
At the risk of self-identifying as a coward, I never touch anything to do with sexism, feminism or "women in tech" in any kind of conversation except with my closest friends. I wasn't always like this, I used to be quite outspoken, but I got myself into trouble a couple of times (almost into really big trouble once at a conference, I mean career-ending trouble) and well, never again.
Sexism/women in tech is basically the Afghanistan of topics. No-one has ever prevailed and you won't either. The only way to win is not to play. I wish it wasn't like that, but it is.
I think "the Afghanistan of topics" is a great metaphor, but no reason to avoid the subject.
Here I'm talking not to you specifically, but the generic vocal male "you":
If you have a strong urge to share your opinion, consider where that impulse is coming from. Pause and absorb what's actually being said. Mull it over. It might sting a little bit, but you might also gain a new perspective.
If you're male and privileged, it's hard to think about what it's really like to be not male or not privileged. You can try, but you can't know.
If you've ever observed the dynamic of conversation, it can be uncomfortable to see how men and women are (typically) socialized to interact together.
I have rarely seen women talk over men in the same way as the reverse.
[And yes, I realize that I am not taking my own advice here]
Well, this is more the problem I have with these arguments than the superweapon bingo thing in the OP. In the kind of feminist/SJ arguments that are gaining currency in the tech world, what's put at the forefront is people's feelings.
People are not robots; their feelings matter. But they're the worst possible route to the truth, and thus to effective action to redress injustices. A nice illustration is provided, in fact, by this little exchange - so the GP feels scared to get involved with debates on the women's question. It's perfectly legitimate to argue that men have more power and are socialised in certain ways, etc; but this man's (if it is a man) emotional response will not take that into account. People are as emotionally traumatised by bad break-ups as they are by amputations. The human emotional response has no sense of perspective, and never will. When we discuss matters such as sexism, we are necessarily discussing the greater public good - which has to be indifferent to such things. (For example, we do not allow the relatives of murder victims to determine the sentence of the perpetrators - for good reason.)
So arguments get personalised - eg, "Julie Ann Horvath is lying" vs "Julie Ann Horvath would not lie about this" - and thus depoliticised.
All this "you can't know what it's like" stuff, if it were followed absolutely, simply makes reasoned argument impossible. Indeed, I can't know what it's like. But if everything is reduced to 'what it's like', then my only possible response is to shut up - or to browbeat an interlocutor into doing so. I cannot convince anyone to have different feelings. I can convince people that their arguments, on the basis of logical consistency or empirical evidence, are erroneous - but only if we can collectively agree to forget about everyone's feelings.
And so you end up in topsy turvy world. A classic example:
> If you have a strong urge to share your opinion, consider where that impulse is coming from.
So now the opinionated are supposed to feel guilty about it! It's utterly bizarre. More people should share their opinions (including racists, sexists and suchlike); they should not shut up on the off-chance it might make people feel better about themselves. Otherwise those opinions will go unchallenged, and fester in the dark.
I'm very curious how many people are avoiding commenting simply because they're terrified of being dragged into an internet pissing match.
I'd be one. I typically only engage a popular repetitive internet arguments when I can make a solid point at the fringe and then back way. Even if I agree with someone's conclusion but want to point out that a piece of their argument doesn't carry water, it can turn into a disaster. The issue are just too hotbutton to bother.
I really enjoyed reading this article. I will however point out one of the difficulties that arises when you try to implement this 'threshold'. For one thing, the scale that you measure over is often not as constrained and clear as in the cancer case (for example). What is considered 0 and 100 by some body of people could very easily be just 25 to 75 on another scale, or absolutely beyond the pale of another group's scale of thinking. And it's not always easy to spot when things like this happen. Often the issue is that when you have different groups with different conceptions of what this scale entails, that is when you have hilariously "bad" interactions, and can result in ridiculous drives to the extremes of the "platonic" scale.
Another common pitfall (I think anyways) is that some of these drives to extremes are driven at least partly out of a sense of the current 'threshold' being placed far too far away from where they 'should' be. Large disparities create large pressures. Coupled with wanting to see things change soon (obviously), and that people have an intuitive motion that if you try to push against something to reach X, you'll probably end up with X-1 or something, you can at least kind of understand some of the drive to extremes.
Wouldn't it be even better if there was no need for feminism? And isn't it sad that some feminists devolve to hate all men? Turning a cause that has merit (but hopefully not forever) into hatred is self-harming. But railing against those causes doesn't help either.
When people communicate with others who hold very similar worldviews, there's a lot of mutual tacit knowledge that needn't be explicitly referenced because it can be easily and reliably inferred. But so often when we discuss or debate something with someone or an audience which we know holds views radically opposing our own, we don't realize that it's the tacit knowledge or perspective which is likely more important than the summarization of the common or official arguments & tenets.
I like to think of this tacit or 'unseen' rationalization structure as the matrix of graphite that supports the fine point at the end of a pencil.