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Notes -
Why Cross-Examination Is So Damn Great
There's an obvious solace within the written medium. You get to carve out a space safe from constraints and take as much as you need to fully express yourself. Words are neat! I mean, just look at the torrential avalanche I regularly shit out just on my own.
But still, I don't want people to forget about the benefits to real-time adversarial conversations, benefits which cannot be as easily replicated with writing. I recently wrote (ahem) about how humans have this nasty aversion to admitting error. You'll rarely ever get someone willing to outright say "I am a liar" and the roomy comfort that we all love so much about text also provides bad faith actors the ability to build up elaborate defensive ramparts in peace. Nevertheless, even in instances where a smoking gun confession is missing, I cite to a few examples to outline how you can still construct a damning indictment using only a few minor inference hops:
Of course, this gets way easier to accomplish in a real-time confrontation. Chalk it up to the stereotype but yes, I fucking love cross-examination and I want to explain why. Lessons From The Screenplay had a fantastic video analyzing the climactic cross-examination from the movie A Few Good Men while using the vocabulary normally reserved to discuss physical duels. The story's hook is watching the military lawyer protagonist (Kaffee) figure out how he can elicit an outright confession from a notoriously disciplined and experienced commander (Jessep) using only the 'weapons' found within a courtroom. The primary elegance of cross-examination as a weapon stems from the fact that, when done successfully, you can fabricate a solid cage for your opponents using only their own words as ingredients. Kaffee does exactly this by asking questions that appear superficially innocent but, when joined together, weld into a formidable trap Jessep is unable to escape.
I want to highlight a few other recent examples, running the gamut across the political spectrum. My aim here is not to ignite a debate about the specific issue that happens to be discussed (though a toe dip is inevitable) but rather to comment on the rhetorical maneuvers at play and see what lessons we can impart. And a strong word of caution is warranted here: It's true that some this veers dangerously close to mind-reading, which is obviously prone to confirmation bias and erroneous conclusions. With that in mind my goal is to ensure that any conclusion I reach is both solidly grounded within the available evidence and appropriately qualified (with any alternative explanations highlighted). I think the utility is worth the risk of error, and the harm can be mitigated by a commitment to acknowledging one's own mistakes.
First up is Nathan Robinson interviewing Christopher Rufo, specifically the part where they discuss whether the Founding Fathers were racist hypocrites — extolling the virtues of liberty while also owning slaves:
So Rufo finds himself in a bit of a pickle. He's fully aware that he can't say "Thomas Jefferson, the man who believed blacks were inferior and held 130 of them in bondage, was not a racist" with a straight face. But simultaneously he also expends a lot of acrobatic energy trying to dodge answering a straightforward question. The italicized portion of his statement above explains why. Although Rufo has made his career as a stalwart opponent of Critical Race Theory (however you define it) he reveals that he might accept one of its core tropes — that the United States is indelibly and irredeemably tainted by its original sin of racism. Notice that Robinson did not ask "Should we discredit Jefferson's work in advancing equality?" he simply asked if Jefferson was racist. But Rufo looks past Robinson's question and sees the warning beacons coming up on the horizon, and so he charges forward in an effort to preemptively maintain a defensive line on ideas he suspects would next be attacked.
According to his own words, Rufo divulges that he thinks racism is potentially grounds to have your accomplishments discredited. If you accept that framework then it makes sense why he would expend so much energy avoiding admitting that Jefferson was racist; the fear is that this concession would cause the rest of his favored structure to crumble. It's not likely we would've gotten this admission in writing; he had to be cornered by his own statements in real-time for this to slip.
I am going to now praise Tim Pool of all people. A few months ago he invited Lance/TheSerfsTV to his livestream to be grilled on a range of topics. On the abortion question, some of the more enthusiastic pro-choice activists have staked their position on legalizing elective abortion not just at the "viability" line (~22 weeks) but up until the millisecond the fetus exists the birth canal. Lance affirms this is his position, claiming that the mother should always maintain full and absolute autonomy over what happens with the pregnancy. But as the real-time discussion evinced, it's not clear if he actually believes this:
Such a spectacular reveal would not have made it through the cognitive filters had it not taken place in real time. If someone's position is that a pregnant woman can do whatever she wants with her body, up to and including terminating the life of the fetus, it logically follows that such an expansive authority would also include less fatal harms. But as Lance discloses in the moment, he doesn't believe that a pregnant woman has the right to take meth and so he offers a justification that is on its own eminently reasonable, but only after it's too late does he realize the self-inflicted rhetorical leg sweep he tripped into.
The rest of the conversation gets bogged down on the legality of certain drugs but to Lance's credit, he does eventually bite the bullet and concede that although he may not agree with the decision he still believes a pregnant woman has the right to take heroin. The eventual consistency is commendable, but the fact that he so reflexively resorted to the commanding ethos of "do not intentionally kill a child" should call into question how much he really believes in the "absolute dominion of the mother" position he insisted upon.
Lastly is our old friend Meghan Murphy again. I already wrote extensively about the numerous logical fallacies deployed in her conversation with Aella on the ethics of the sex industry. Murphy also discussed the same topic with professional debate bro Destiny and he describes the fundamental issue after she had walked out in frustration:
That's a fair question! If someone says they don't like X because of reasons A/B/C, and you get rid of A/B/C but they still don't like X, then it inevitably follows they have other reasons for disliking X they're not divulging. What Destiny has outlined here is an effective method to uncovering pretextual justifications — the false reasons someone provides as a bid to keep the true reasons hidden (likely because they're too unpalatable or unpersuasive to say out loud).
Destiny spends an agonizing amount of time trying to get Murphy to explain what her precise objections to the sex industry are and gets nowhere, and their final exchange illustrates why. They're discussing one of Murphy's argument that the sex trade is unethical because of women's particular vulnerability during penetrative sex:
Take note of the italicized responses; that kind of evasion is not a generally pervasive reaction for Murphy. She speaks for a living and within other moments in this debate and elsewhere, Murphy has demonstrated a clear ability to confidently answers questions with immediacy and relevancy. It can't be just a coincidence when acrobatics are prompted only by these vexing questions.
Murphy's responses make a lot more sense if you assume that her true objections to the sex industry are really borne out of an aesthetic or disgust aversion, and specifically only when men are the patrons. Murphy is evidently aware that this argument can't be spoken out loud because it's likely too vacant to be generally persuasive, so she instead cycles through a rolodex of pretextual (read: fake) arguments that she's willing to unhesitantly discard whenever they risk becoming a liability to her core thesis. That's why she dodges the male prostitute hypothetical to instead reiterate her dislike of men paying women for sex. That's why she laughs off the female client hypothetical as implausible instead of grappling with its implications.
I'm comfortable accusing Murphy of dishonesty here because her acrobatic evasions are selectively deployed in response to concrete threats to her position, rather than the result of random chance.
It's unfortunate that human beings sometimes lie, and it's too bad that they also refuse to admit mistakes. Such is life. Given the examples I outlined above, some generalizable heuristics is to be suspicious of anyone who refuses to answer straightforward questions (in writing or otherwise), or who refuses to engage in anything but the most sympathetic of conversations. A lot of our contentious interactions have and continue to migrate over towards asynchronous text exchanges, but hopefully I've made a case for why talking is still cool. Also I host The Bailey podcast and I'm always delighted to talk to people I vehemently disagree with, so reach out if you want to butt heads!
As a parting bonus, here's the journalist Beth Rigby interviewing Iain Anderson, chair of the LGBT organization Stonewall. It's quite the bloodbath.
Murphy's position seems quite clear -- selling sex for money is in her opinion inherently unethical due to the nature of sex -- she advances a few analogies like how rape is treated as more legally serious than non-sexual assault or theft. Destiny doesn't really give her an opportunity to do more than sketch this position, because he keeps derailing by asking stuff like "well what's so different about selling sex than making cheeseburgers"? Clearly she thinks that having sex is categorically different from those things -- this does not seem like an untenable position?!
I often like Destiny's debates, but he does this faux exasperation thing that is quite tiresome (and very bad cross-examination technique I should think)-- particularly this time it is very rich for him to accuse Murphy of too many tangents; his position on this one seems to be all tangents all the time.
I note that he never answers her question as to whether he thinks it would be ethical for him to pay someone who doesn't want to have sex with him enough to change their mind -- it's a pretty incisive question; he has lots of money, he could do this and maybe does. But he feels uncomfortable just saying "yeah that would be fine" -- which is in itself evidence for Murphy's assertion that something is different about buying sex from buying cheeseburgers; also that Destiny agrees with the assertion on some level but would rather play word-games to make it seem small.
He's very far from truth-seeking on this one unfortunately.
She also said she's against all prostitution regardless of the sex of the parties involved, which would presumably include a woman buying non-penetrative services from a male prostitute. But I can't figure out exactly why except maybe some guesses along the lines of "sex is sacred", buuut Murphy has no problem with casual sex. That doesn't have to be an inconsistent position ("ok to give but not sell" is the position a lot of people for organ transplants) but we're still operating in the dark and it's such an easy position for Murphy to clear up.
If I had to construct an honest form of the basic tenets of Murphy's argument, it might be something like this:
"Wage work has an element of coercion, because you're doing work you would otherwise refuse to do freely. Sex also has an element of violence and coercion for women in particular, given how much more vulnerable they are. Taken individually, neither is necessarily a problem because of [reasons]. But there's a symbiotic magnification of the harms that occurs when these two aspects are combined together into what we know as the sex trade. This crosses a line over what we should deem as ethical and acceptable behavior."
I may not agree with the conclusion but I think the argument is perfectly reasonable! If I had to guess, the reason Murphy doesn't adopt this framework is because it would necessarily require her to curtail some of her overall "all sex work is always bad" position. For example it would require her to concede at least some scenarios where the sex trade is not unethical (e.g. male prostitutes, OF model playing with toys, etc.).
This seems like a big counter-example to your post's thesis - it's a big disadvantage of cross-examination. Yeah, it would be easy for her to clear it up, as long as she was talking to someone just trying to understand her. She can hardly be blamed for not clearing it up during a conversation with someone insisting she explain the difference between selling hamburgers and selling sex.
...or you just got the basic tenets of her argument wrong, and there are perfectly reasonable (and perfectly reasonable to disagree with at the same time) arguments for all sex work being always bad.
The problem I often have with your top level posts, is that it's very hard to tell what you're trying to get at. Do you actually want to talk about how awesome cross-examination is? Do you want to talk about the ethics of prostitution and abortion, or the racism of the founding fathers? Do you want to figure out the best arguments for each of these issues? Do you want to psychoanalyze and dunk on the people you're using as examples? I suppose it could be possible to do all of the above, but I think it's pretty hard in general, and in the case of your posts these are clearly getting in the way of each other. I could give an example for a coherent "all sex work is bad" position, but given how your post is structured it would likely be met with a "that's not what she said, and it would be so easy for her to clear it up" response. On the other hand, you're using her performance in the debate to imply her position is unterneble, and that she should modify it, at least somewhat, and this does not follow at all. This is why I think that if you want to go for a multi-threaded approach, you should keep them separated, instead of trying to juggle them at the same time.
I agree there is a risk of getting issues muddled, and in this exchange I'm not trying to take a position on the sex work issue itself. I explained why I think Murphy is being evasive with her answers (she's acutely aware of the vulnerabilities in her positions) and cited to the particular pattern in her evasiveness as evidence for that thesis. I've dissected her interviews and even emailed her for clarification and that's what I have to work with. Even with that incomplete record, I also tried to construct what I think is an "honest" approach to what she seems to be getting at. If you think I might have gotten the basic tenets of her argument wrong, can you be specific about what my error is?
If I was analyzing your behavior the same way you're analyzing Murphy's, I'd likely come to the conclusion that this was deliberate.
I don't think you demonstrated her avoidance so much as you invented it. Your email exchange is a good example. If memory serves, you asked her how she ended up coming to her beliefs about prostitution, and, like a normal person, she recalled the events that made an impression on her - conversations she had with proustites. You then framed it as her admitting to following a data-driven approach, in supposed contradiction to her earlier statement that no data could change her mind, even though there is no contradiction between these statements.
This is another point against cross-examination being awesome: even when someone is being clear about what they believe, you can ask unrelated question, and frame the answer to imply they believe something they don't.
Sure:
The first error was implying that the "sex is sacred" view somehow contradicts her views on casual sex.
The second error was to use the first one to paint your version of the "basic tenets" as a more reasonable argument.
The third error was ascribe the supposedly more reasonable views to her, despite no evidence that she holds them.
The fourth error was declaring that the likely reason she did not express the views, which there is no evidence she even holds, was that expressing them would force her to adjust her position.
You are welcome to do so and I would be eager to hear your evidence. I would be curious to know how you'd address one of the first hurdles, namely that I do agree with Murphy that selling sex is qualitatively different than virtually every other job. If I'm discussing cross-examination deliberately as just a pretext, why would I be doing so to undermine my own position?
I don't know what else to say here, she literally refused to answer Destiny's question and walked off, and she ignored multiple questions I asked her (e.g. most prominent one was how she ascertains the quality of a study, to her credit though she answered most of them). That's my definition of "avoidance", I'm not sure if you have a different one.
'Sacred' and 'casual' are not direct antonyms, but it seems fair to say that they point to completely different directions. I readily admit that I don't know if this necessarily is a contradiction for Murphy, because I don't know how she'd reconcile the positions.
I don't follow. Is the problem that I used what you think is an erroneous premise, or that I declared my alternative argument to be more reasonable? If the former, my alternative argument doesn't rely on the "sex is sacred" premise so you can just take it out. If the latter, it would be helpful to explain why it's not reasonable rather than just assert it so.
This is very confusing. There's overwhelming evidence that she holds the premises that selling sex is coercive because money is involved, and that sex makes women vulnerable, she said exactly so in the video we're discussing. I have no idea how you would overlook that. If what you meant to say is that she doesn't hold the exact argument I just made, well yes, that's why I said it was my own reformulation attempt instead of attributing it to her. Please let me know if I should've have been even more specific.
Again, if you think something is an error, it helps to address the specific arguments I made for why I reached that conclusion rather than just assert it's wrong. "Is too" "Is not" is not a productive exchange.
I'd have to go through your posts, but I feel like establishing a pattern where you mix a bunch of topics during the course of an argument would be easy enough. The challenge would be to get evidence that you do it on purpose, in order to muddle the issues. Thankfully your approach does not require much in terms of evidence, all I'd have to do is write a plausible story, where your actions are interpreted in an uncharitable light.
Because you wouldn't be undermining your own position. It's pretty clear that the reason you disagree with Murphy is that she thinks all pornography and all prostitution is bad, and you think it can be bad, but in some cases can be ok.
Usually when you accuse someone of being evasive or avoidant, it means they are deliberately trying to not answer a specific question. Her hanging up on Destiny is not evidence of her avoiding a question. There are many other reasons that could explain her refusing to continue the conversation, including the ones she directly stated prior to leaving the stream, or Destiny's conduct during the debate outlined by jkf.
"Sacred" in this context just means "regarding it higher than other day-to-day activities", it can mean anything from "only between married couples" to "only if you feel an emotional connection to the person" (or what the kids these days call "demisexual"). "Casual sex" usually means "outside of a romantic relationship, and with no expectation of it leading to one" it too can mean anything from "sucking off random dudes in bathroom stalls" to "I met someone at a conference, they're from the other side of the world, so there was no chance of it going anywhere, but we were vibing so great together that I spent the night with them anyway". Between the corners of these extremes there's plenty of space for someone being ok with casual sex, but believing it's sacred enough to not be for sale.
It does rely on it. If the "sex is sacred" argument is kept on the table, you can't go on to declare that the likely reason she did not express the argument you outlined, is because it would force her to modify her position. There's still the possibility that that she's just going with the "sex is sacred" approach instead.
And these are all very different from what you wrote in your outline, so I'm not overlooking them, you're moving the goalposts.
"Women are vulnerable (during sex)" does not mean there's an element of violence and coercion in sex. "Selling sex is coercive, because there's money involved" does not imply the same logic holds for wage work.
If you didn't attribute it to her, it makes even less sense to claim that she didn't express these views, because it would force her to modify her position.
Yeah, but that's the problem with making claims with no evidence - it makes "is not" a perfectly valid response that needs to be addressed.
I understand that you're not convinced by my argument that there's enough evidence that Murphy is acting dishonestly, though keep in mind that I didn't claim my argument was conclusive or irrefutable. That's why I included an epistemological warning up top.
What you're doing here (noting how this specific behavior of hers can have an innocent explanation) is great pushback! I offer one explanation and you offer another, but unless you develop why your explanation is more likely, we're kind of left in the agnostic "who can know?" position. If that's your position then cool.
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I think the best way to describe this in military terms would that it's baiting the enemy army to fight you in the bailey.
Perfect! I like this a lot
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Judging just by the quotes I don't find the Destiny/Murphy example convincing. In particular it's not clear who's employing pretextual arguments (both?).
Murphy gives an example of an (alleged) harm that she claims accompanies the sex industry. Destiny responds by proposing a situation where the harm does not occur. But that does not address the argument against prostitution as a whole -- if the industry is necessarily accompanied by harm, you can be against it as a whole, and if you're against it as a whole then it's common to be against it in every case, if only because blanket rules are less corruptible than arbitrarily large decision trees. After all, almost every "unethical" behavior has some corner case where it's actually a good choice, does that invalidate the concept? Destiny's argument reminds me of politicians who talk endlessly about the advantages of clean coal, only to build more of the dirty kind.
You're by no means the first to find that particular example lacking, and it's my fault that I didn't include at least a summary of the discussion that preceded it. See here for that.
The goal of the questions Destiny was employing was explained well by @curious_straight_ca in considering a parallel on alcohol:
If you don't know exactly why someone supports/opposes a thing, then it's pretty damn hard to discuss the thing.
The alcohol example may be illuminating: note that the counterfactuals have different forms. In the alcohol case, the hypotheses apply to alcohol as a whole, whereas in the prostitution one they only apply to a specific worker. If I told you (a teetotaler) that my mate Paul drinks a fifth every day, has the liver of a man half his age, and actually drives better drunk, would that change your mind on the merits of drink? Now, I may well be imputing an argument that Murphy would not support and did not speak to. One can charitably assume that both speakers abbreviate the rigor of their arguments, and attempt to beat steelmen out of the plowshares (?) they provide.
I'm not understanding why the distinction between whole and individual matters in this context. If you told me (as a teetotaler) about Paul my response would probably be something along the lines that an individual's remarkable account is weak counter-evidence. If you told me about a class of people like Paul, a possible response would probably cite a utilitarian calculus.
The alcohol and prostitution examples are not meant to map onto each other perfectly. It was meant to describe what the purpose of questions are, to figure out and draw the boundaries for why people hold positions.
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It's pretty funny how badly Meghan Murphy got stuck in your had. That debate was months ago, time to move on man.
What's the point of this comment other than a low-effort jab? You have a lot of bad comments like this, though you seem to spread them out over a period of months. But next time is probably going to get you a ban.
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This is a minor point but isn't the more obvious argument against pregnant mothers doing meth (from the perspective of an advocate for late-term abortion) is that there is a chance the baby will be born with severe disabilities and have a lot of trouble throughout their life because of that? It seems logically consistent to believe both that killing fetuses is basically fine and that doing things that will result in children who experience needless suffering is not fine. I realize Lance didn't reach for that justification and that perhaps reveals something about his moral intuitions, but the "what about meth" argument doesn't actually seem like much of a gotcha to me.
I think the better question for pro choice people is “Did you support my body my choice really covid vax?”.
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I didn't intend to present that question as generalizable gotcha, rather my focus was on how Lance responded to it. I'm sure there's plenty of principled responses you could make to the question but Lance instead reflexively resorted to "you shouldn't kill a child" which I thought was quite revealing about what he really believes.
Yeah, I wasn't trying to disagree with you. I agree it may be revealing about what Lance himself believes (perhaps I didn't indicate that clearly enough). I just wanted to comment that there are pretty good responses to this question, even for the most die-hard of abortion advocates.
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The greatest minds of all generations are considered as such due to years if not decades of deep thought, not because of the off the cuff ripostes. Newton's magnum opus was the result him being so consumed by his work, he forgot to even consume food. He was also painfully shy and if he would forced to defend his hypotheses against a hostile interluctor, more interested in defeding Aristotelism than the truth, fan of the Greek guy would appear victorious.
Luckily, he lived in a time in which the written word was common place and the printing press which speedup the process of dissemation of ideas even further. When objections arose he was able to consider and respond to them asynchronously.
Or the Fermat-Pascal correspondance. Two pioneers in probability poking holes in the others formula for the expected value of a interrupted best-out-N game. Had they forgone letters and were instead each given five minutes and five minutes to respond, the problem would have been solved by someone else.
When it comes to my academic work, I have absolutely already thought about every detail far more intensively than anyone who questions me about it, and I have to regularly go in front of highly-educated people who are not shy in the least about trying to question every aspect that they can think of. I've seen some folks get absolutely blindsided by questions in the past, but those folks are usually either new to a field or just have sub-par work generally. (Academic work, like everything, follows Sturgeon's Law; there are a lot of sub-par academics.)
Worst case, you're dealing with someone whose brain is just completely stuck in a different way of thinking, which can easily happen if you're doing something genuinely novel, especially if the old methods have been established for decades, such that folks have essentially 'grown up' just doing the method, not thinking about it, figuring that all the thinking about it was done decades ago. But if you know this, as Newton would have surely known about his predecessors in detail, it's not too difficult to come up with concrete examples which definitively show that the old methods cannot be blindly applied. This is absolutely a top priority for my own work, refining these examples to their barest, with maximum force against the old way of thinking. It surely was for Newton and others. Many of the major defining moments in science/mathematics are not actually the new method, but the bold, undeniable counterexample demonstrating that the old method is broken. Then follows the new approach.
I have zero doubt that Newton would succeed in this challenge, but that is in part due to what is ultimately the narrowness of academic inquiry.
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I agree on your main point but I don’t agree with your characterization of Rufo’s argument. Rufo is trying to elevate the conversation to a deeper level of substance, and Robinson refuses to break from the realm of connotation. Being a racist is bad because being a racist is immoral, and Rufo is disputing the immorality of the founding fathers by reminding Robinson that the consensus at the time of Jefferson was that Blacks were inferior. We judge people morally based on whether they did morally better than expected in their conditions or milieu. We shouldn’t, for instance, declare MLK Jr evil on the whole just because he was a supporter of conversion therapy. If we held to a milieu-controlled standard we would have to declare that there is no moral man left, because we all fall short of perfection. How bad is it that we buy vanity products from companies that abuse workers? Or that we pollute the earth? Why would future generations find this forgivable, rather than the purchasing of already-enslaved people from an undeveloped part of the world during a time period where slavery was normalized and historically ubiquitous?
So I don’t think Rufo let anything slip. He explained his position not badly for the time allotted. Robinson is using lawyerly tricks to make Rufo look suspect to the ears of an untrained audience by refusing to charitably entertain Rufo’s nuance. And also, Rufo doesn’t believe that immorality (true racism) should never be cancellable. Rufo believes that the standard of cancellation is too low. It’s not as if Rufo is trying to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler or Mosley or someone who was genuinely more racist than their time period without ever having produced some balancing commensurate good to society. Good examples of what I mean by the latter are John Lennon (wife beater), Wagner, and Kanye West. We don’t cancel them because their good on the whole far outweighs their bad on the whole. I think this is genuinely how people see moral judgment in practice, rather than a less nuanced rules-based morality.
Re: prostitution, perhaps a general rule is that it’s much more difficult to argue against someone who has committed themselves to a general rule. Destiny can say “women should do what they want with their bodies if not harming others”, and then the opponent has to scour through psychological sciences and moral philosophy and the anecdota of history to adequately present the view that prostitution is bad for the sum good of society. Consider how much harder it is to argue against gambling than for it. To argue against gambling you have to have an understanding of addiction, genetic proclivities to addiction, the data on who gambles, and the adaptability of human happiness. To argue for gambling you just say “people should be allowed to do what they want unless harming someone”.
The most common way for a debate to go nowhere is for both participants to just throw ideas at each other - "you republicans are so racist. oh yeah? demonrats support affirmative action, which is real racism! affirmative action is necesary to correct systemic disparities. SYSTEMIC? that's more CRT marxism ...", wandering over a massive battlefield without trying to defend any territory. It's the default state of political discussion. One way to avoid this is to pin your enemy down on specific points, and call them out when they leap away to the next motte - try to get them to agree to your premises, and from there make an argument for your conclusion. That's what this felt like to Nathan - he cares about 'was Jefferson racist', both personally and as a component of his argument, and Rufo was just dodging it with sophistry (again, from nathan's perspective, I don't agree with him on the facts).
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Can you clarify what you mean by "conditions"? Are we going down the route of "morality is just what you can afford"?
To a degree, yeah — wealth makes moral choices easier by reducing stressors and increasing time for contemplation. The way I see it, we we can only improve our moral behavior b by some x percent over some period of time y. The conditions are the base number that we start at, according to things like education, parents, genetics, and random experience. Someone who has a genetic propensity for alcoholism, as an example, should be held to a lower standard re: falling into addiction compared to someone whose genes make them sick from drinking. You don’t have to phrase it as “morals you can afford”. It’s a psychological fact that our willpower and growth are limited given a certain period of time. As in, you can’t master calculus in a week — the learning must take place over time.
I just added the word conditions to make a more general point. I think that’s essentially how people judge the morality of those around them in their own lives.
Just out of curiosity, lower standards typically come with lower respect for autonomy. I don't mean this in an insulting way, but in the way we treat children. I don't really complain if a toddler pulls and breaks something, but likewise, I do not afford that toddler the right to make decisions for itself. Do you think someone with that kind of propensity should be socially given less leeway to make their own decisions when it comes to that vice?
Sure. Let's suppose that we're talking about a decade. How much should we expect a person's morality to be "improved" in that time period, assuming the arguments are made in the first year?
The autonomy I personally believe in, and which is probably unpopular, is an autonomy that is the result of efficient morality. A person who is free from addictions, vices, consumerism, and general poor habits has a substantive autonomy that allows him to pursue whatever great heights of life he wills to pursue. To get there, we should eliminate the evils of human life that take advantage of primitive animal instinct. (As such, gambling should be banned.) Now to answer your question specifically, yes in theory. We should reduce the autonomy of unwise and immoral people for their own good. The question of whether you can practically do this without risks is a separate question. I would point out that in the formative years of teens we eradicate autonomy, forcing them into a very specific weekday routine with courses they usually can’t pick. Then if they go to college they also lack autonomy. Then if they go to work, they lack autonomy. Civilized life is about lacking autonomy, or, another way of putting it, externalizing cognitive labor.
I don’t know if it’s a matter of expecting. If you know someone with anger issues who is actually consuming information and practicing whatever helps his issues, intuitively we know to give this person praise and not blame. If you take another person and they are laughing off the suggestion of helping their anger issues because they say it doesn’t matter, intuitively we know that this person deserves blame. Now applying this to historical figures, did the founding fathers laugh off the idea of black people being equal in the face of insurmountable evidence? Well, no. Such evidence wasn’t widespread or unanimous. But obviously in 1970, the evidence would be, and so blame is due. [ignore HBD for the sake of my example]
Is there any analogy, in your view, between moral ideas and scientific ones? Let's suppose a new paradigm, a better one, is created to address gravity or some other scientific topic. Are scientists obligated to pursue its truth value even if they might be early adopters?
If yes, then I would ask you whether people have a similar obligation to morality. Especially, say, those who have the time or means to pursue a moral question to a rigorous end.
To a degree the paradigms are similar, sure. Did you have an example in mind? If we’re talking about the morality of slavery, that’s kind of what happened — moral development determined it was immoral. But if we’re talking about, let’s say, the bombing of Hiroshima, the moral paradigm is informed by “what would the Japanese do to us?” and “what are the costs of invasion”. Then, if we’re talking about individual morality in everyday life, norms have to be considered because moral actions are usually costly… I would allege that at a certain threshold of students cheating in a university course (51%?), it becomes morally permissible to cheat because that has become a new norm.
I'm not entirely certain that it does. Why would Japanese barbarity change pre-war moral paradigms about how to treat noncombatants and captured/surrendered soldiers? I have no desire to go to an eye-for-an-eye morality. I would not want the Japanese subjected to the atom bomb simply because they killed many more in their occupied territories.
But I'm not interested in moral questions of the past as I am the present. The clear example is LGBT rights in the last decade or two, which is a sign of moral progress (for the most part) in my eyes. Now, there are widespread and very clear arguments in favor of the variety of LGBT rights (marriage, the right to physically transition, etc.). However, there are also places where one would known of these ideas, but never encounter the arguments sans someone's anti-LGBT rhetoric or commentary over them.
Let us suppose there exists a person in a community which is largely anti-LGBT. This person is reasonably well-off, but would still stand to lose some social status if they disagreed with the majority. They know of the issue, but have not previously pursued the moral questions with any rigor. Let us also suppose that this person would, if they heard them, be convinced by pro-LGBT arguments.
Does this person have a moral obligation to dive into the question and change their stance by being an early adopter?
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Whether that was the point that Robinson was intending to make eventually, I don't know. But the premise for why they got into this topic was fairly limited based on Robinson's first question:
To repeat another comment I just made: I didn't point this out but it adds another explanation for why Rufo is so motivated to avoid conceding the "Jefferson was a racist" position, because then it would necessarily follow that "maybe some CRT advocates might have a point". Now, normally this shouldn't be such a cataclysmic event but it is for Rufo because he's an activist who has seen a significant rise in his national profile precisely from speaking in absolutes like this. He can't deploy nuance and so it has to be all-out total war and CRT advocates are not just wrong, but wrong about everything.
I mean, it seems obvious to me that you are simply correct here. The founding fathers were by and large racists. America was in fact founded on something reasonably described as white supremacy. The CRT people, speaking strictly about those historical facts, have a point. Rufo won't admit that fact because it badly undermines his position.
What, in your view, is Rufo's position, strictly speaking?
I note that a lot of people here seem very reluctant to draw the above conclusions. Why do you suppose that is?
That's the error. Even if the founding fathers were white supremacists, they were much more other things, and those other things were what the country was founded on. To say "America was founded on white supremacy" is to imply that its foundation is composed mostly of white supremacist ideals.
This must be that nuance @ymeskhout was talking about. You try and sell that line to the public, tell me how it goes.
I disagree.
There's a socio-political token "racism", and there's a socio-political token "Thomas Jefferson", and the idea the Blues are positing is that there's better common ground available burning the "Thomas Jefferson" token and coordinating our cooperation around the "racism" token. The idea you're positing is that you can keep them from burning the "Thomas Jefferson" token by pointing out what an absolutely terrible idea it is. But the Scorpion's response is going to be "lol, LMAO", and at this point you really should know that and have planned accordingly.
The error is acting as though there's a conversation worth having with Blues about "racism" at all, that this is some sort of misunderstanding and a little more nuance (man, I love this word!) will sort it out. Thomas Jefferson was a racist and a slaveowner; why deny it? Because you value the Constitution? Because you think there's a nation here with a rich history that might be a little tarnished, but it's still worth saving? Sure. Sure! If you still believe that, you go give it your very best try. Rufo is, certainly, which is why he's embarrassing himself on camera, trying to deny obvious historical truths in a vain attempt to defend the foundations of liberal ideology, because he knows the nuance you're pitching, no matter how truthful, is as good as slitting his own throat. His answer looks kinda not-great to people who watch the video and can follow the arguments, which is essentially no one. Your way, that clip would be the most famous thing he ever said, permanently.
From a strategic perspective, sure, but as far as the actual truth goes, America wasn't founded on white supremacy any more than it was founded on bloodletting. From a strategic perspective, in a debate you just go for the most slimy manipulative deceitful things you can say that will get your opponent into an inconvenient bind. I responded to your object level statement:
with my own object-level statement, which is that they actually don't have a point.
At the founding, America's legal, social and political systems allowed black people to be owned as property, and the first immigration act specifically discriminated in favor of white people. Several of the founding fathers owned slaves; most of them appeared to hold views on race that would certainly mark them as central examples of white supremacists in our own time.
How is a group of white supremacists intentionally building a new legal system that enshrines white supremacy into law not "founded on white supremacy"?
You can say they were "much more other things". Much more how? It seems to me that this is a statement of subjective value, and there is no obvious reason to expect others to share it. A murderer likely spends a very small percentage of his time killing people, and yet we find that small percentage of killing the most salient aspect of his character. It does not seem obviously unreasonable to take the same approach with slavers.
To say accurately what the US was founded on, we should look at what the system was like before independence was declared and why they declared independence and fought a war against the most powerful army of the time for it.
The founders wrote the Declaration of Independence to proclaim their reasons for claiming it. It's published, you can go read it here. You'll see that it says nothing at all about slavery or race - it's all about civil rights, taxes, and various details about how the government works. Those were their beefs with the British system, not anything about slavery or race.
Indeed, it would be pretty weird for anything like that to be in there, considering that slavery and racism were near-universally approved of in those days. The British certainly had no problem with it at the time, and neither did any of the other colonizing powers. A claim that America was "founded on white supremacy" would only be accurate if the primary reason for declaring independence was that the British demanded that they tolerate colored people and they were sufficiently opposed to that to make war based upon it.
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Absent further information my best guess is that it's the defensive version of Arguments As Soldiers. The concern is that a concession on any ground, no matter how trivial, will threaten to collapse the entire front. Assuming I'm describing the dynamics here accurately, I find the fear very puzzling because it's so easily remedied by just a tiny bit of nuance. I also have to admit I start suspecting insecurity at play here regarding how strong one's convictions are, with the coping mechanism being latching onto as many arguments as possible (no matter how bad some might be).
So what would a more nuanced reply look like? More importantly from a socio-political perspective, what would you expect the response from Robinson and the Blue public at large to such a nuanced reply to be?
I mean, the assumption you're working from here seems to be that Ruso is a radical who's painted himself into a corner by refusing to concede any ground, no matter how small. It seems obvious to me that you're correct about him painting himself into a corner, but the part I think you miss is that he's not a radical, and in fact he is doing his very best to keep the peace, including by standing up for obvious lies.
There's a socio-political token "racism", and there's a socio-political token "Thomas Jefferson", and it seems to me that the idea the 1619 people are offering, and Robinson is endorsing, is that we'll reach common ground and a path forward by burning the "Thomas Jefferson" token and coordinating around the "racism" token, which they coincidentally maintain absolute, unquestionable control over and have abused daily for longer than any of us have been alive. You seem to be positing that we don't have to burn it, maybe just singe it a bit, and to your credit there's a lot of people in this thread laying out "nuanced" takes. One notes that they're offering them here, in a pseudonymous backwater of the internet that's been successively purged from like five other places by the very forces their nuance presumes won't object to claims that maybe White Supremacy isn't actually the worst thing ever.
The thing I don't think you appreciate is that Ruso is a moderate. What he's lying for is conciliation and peace. When the "Thomas Jefferson" token burns, which it absolutely will sooner or later, cooperation isn't going to reorganize around the "racism" token. Cooperation isn't going to happen at all. There is no future where we finally beat Racism and the scores come up and the crime rates normalize, not under anything remotely resembling current conditions and assumptions, and I think if you are honest with yourself, you probably know that. You should know that those unpleasant realities are not the fault of people like me, and that people like me are done being used as a scapegoat for them. Consequently, the racial animosities Robinson and the 1619 people are stirring up are here to stay for at least another generation, and the plan with the highest likelihood of dealing productively with that fact is probably Ruso's. The alternatives all appear to be various routes to, in the parlance of the community, coordinated meanness. Or at least it seems so to me. Maybe your view is different.
I'm comfortable conceding that Jefferson was a racist white supremacist straight-up because I don't give a shit about Jefferson. I don't value him or the Constitution he wrote or the nation he founded, the corpse of which I'm unhappily stuck in. I'm happy to embrace honesty and watch the counterfeit common-ground burn, because nothing I value is founded on it. I'm not counting on Ruso's plan to win, because I already assume that the moderate solutions are dead-ends. But you give the impression that you believe that the common ground is going to keep being there in the future, and I find that odd.
No doubt very similar to the fanfare and adoration the 1619 project received when it ran with a similar premise. There won't be a shortage of dramatic headlines from bad faith actors crowing over how Rufo Admits CRT is RIGHT! I don't deny that.
In the rest of your post, you're making what is essentially a game theory argument for why the defect strategy is justified both morally and strategically. I concede your explanation for why Rufo is lying to be valid and an important point to keep in mind, and it would be inappropriate for me to respond to that with a deontological appeal to honesty. Instead, though I'm not sure what goal Rufo is really pursuing but in the process I assume he's alienating plenty of fence-sitters with this obstinate strategy of refusing to concede banal truths.
The closest parallel I can think of is probably the trans discourse which seems to me to have gone through an obvious vibe shift this year where criticism from non-conservative voices has gotten much less hesitant. I gather at least some of it was probably the result of people tired of having been lied to about obvious topics for so long.
[btw I'm not sure what you mean about Rufo being a radical vs moderate, those terms don't really mean anything to me.]
Well, that doesn't sound so bad. Who cares about headlines? If that's what's at stake, why do people care so much?
...To speak more plainly, yes, that does seem like the likely immediate outcome. The long-term outcome that seems more relevant is that the CRT wins this argument, and we move significantly further from the happy futures.
Say rather I'm pointing out the incentives that currently exist. Specifically, I'm pointing out that moderate positions don't appear to be able to survive in the wild without deception, both of oneself and of others, while honesty leads to the embrace of extremism. I'm not endorsing lying, and in fact I argue that honesty is likely better for everyone involved. I do think it helps to understand why they think the lies are necessary, though.
There was a really good article I read here once talking about what amounted to a truce on race in the 90s-2000s, where white people tacitly agreed that racism was Very Bad, and black people tacitly agreed to stop constantly making accusations of racism, and the idea was that we'd try to fix the problems rather than arguing over who's fault they were. Only, it didn't actually work, because the problems didn't get fixed. Policy Starvation kicked in, and here we are.
Imagine the throttle lever of some vast steam-powered ship, a three-foot steel bar mounted to the floor. Push it forward, the ship speeds up, pull it back, the ship stops. Moderates are the people arguing over whether the best results will be secured by pushing the lever forward or back, or by how much. Extremists are the people who think the best results will come from ripping the lever off its mounting and wielding it as a club. System as a tool for mutual benefit, versus system as a weapon for mutual combat, no?
Rufo and Robinson are both moderates; they are trying to use the rules-as-written to secure what they consider to be positive, stable outcomes for everyone. They're trying to maintain something that at least roughly resembles what's commonly understood to be the status quo. The reason that last sentence is stacked with so many qualifiers, of course, is because that our common understanding of the status quo is mostly built on lies exactly like the ones you're chiding in your original post. The system (both the academic/educational system they're fighting over here, and our society more generally) runs on selective falsehood. Operating within its constraints consists of selecting which lies one will call out and which one will ignore, and especially on not breaching the very important lies all the serious, responsible people have collectively agreed to never, ever talk about.
Being moderates, both of them are liars: Rufo is lying about the past, claiming that Jefferson wasn't a white supremacist, and Robinson is lying about the present, claiming that Jefferson's white supremacy is at all relevant to the current situation. I'd argue that the significant difference is that Rufo's lie, if carried off, moves us away from serious conflict, while Robinson's lie moves us toward it, but I don't expect that argument to be persuasive to anyone on the other side; of course I'm going to argue that the lie that puts the burden on the other side is "better", while they're going to argue that the lie that puts the burden on my side is better; that's how people are. Of course I think I'm right and they're wrong; doesn't everyone? Charity doesn't solve the problem; it reveals the fact that there is no solution, at least in the general case. Hence blossoming extremism of various flavors, as we realize that compromise is not essential or often even possible, and so become more accepting of its absence. Or alternatively, as we grow disillusioned with the known lies of moderation, and turn to the untested claims of extremists.
Not so! Just insist that Robinson be honest as well, and recognize that selective honesty is not honesty. Or do you think that it is acceptably honest to start the conversation at "Was Jefferson a White Supremacist?", as though this were an isolated trivia question?
Well, take a look at the responses here; the moderate voices are the ones defending Ruso's equivocation, aren't they? "The Truth, at any cost" is not a moderate, fence-sitter ideal; they don't want large-scale upheaval, and most of them would like to bypass the whole question. It seems to me that Ruso's approach is more likely to get them there, were it to work. They could go back to talking about how Racism Is Very Wrong And We Must Fight Against It, and also about how Jefferson was a Great Man Who Founded Our Nation. What could be more moderate and fence-sitting than that?
In any case, how do you differentiate between Ruso losing the uncommitted by being a jerk, versus losing them because he's simply been shouted down? The argument you're making seems to be that nuance would have improved Ruso's actual position, helped him achieve his goals more easily. The space Ruso is operating in is quite large, and there's a lot of people in it. Can you point to some doing a better job that Ruso at what appear to be Ruso's goals? If Ruso is Trump, all sound and fury even at the compromise of the core mission, who's De Santis?
This post explains, with impeccable clarity, a dynamic that is prevalent but elusive to describe. I guess you could group it under the penumbra of kayfabe. I admit that it's a bit naive and colloquially autistic for me to plow through with a whole "akshually, logic" analysis without better acknowledging how much the treaty theatrics are pulling some of the incentives levers out of frame.
What did I say that would make you think I would be in favor of selective honesty? Of course I want him to be honest too. That said, I don't think you're characterizing this exchange fairly. First, that's not how Robinson started the exchange as I already pointed out, it started when Robinson explicitly asked about Rufo's CRT criticism. But assuming Robinson did indeed start the conversation with "Was Jefferson a White Supremacist?" whether or not it would be considered honest would depend on some context. If it was a panel discussion on "The Legacy of the Founding Fathers" then I think it's perfectly fair, if it was in the context of "Is The United States a Force For Good" then I would find it extremely slimy.
This is mostly an empirical question, and I admit I don't have enough evidence to adjudicate. The other high-profile individual operating within the vague "wokeness has gone too far" that could be a contrast is probably Jonathan Haidt, but that answer probably just shows how ignorant I am about this question. A lot of my response would be necessarily leaning upon (potentially delusional) optimism of wanting the 'good guys' to win (read: the honest ones, regardless of partisanship). Rufo is slightly more famous than I am, and fame is a necessary condition for any activist hoping to leave an impact so he's already way ahead and much better positioned to evaluate his decisions. There could be something similar to how the candidates that can win the general are the least likely to win the primary, but that's going to boil down to an empirical question I'm not equipped to handle.
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Yes this is closely related to my point below about the effects of the paradigm on the conversation, and it's a counterpoint to @ymeskhout 's point about the value of the cross-examination. When the framesetter is also the interrogator, (99% of the time), their interrogated starts out in an epistemology gravity well.
using your gambling example, as you suggest, starting with the pro-gambling argument is easier (within a particular meta-frame of Western liberal modernity. If your starting meta-paradigm is a traditionaly Christian society, I think it's reversed. There's a trite anti-gambling starting point: "Gambling is immoral and degenerate", and an argument for liberalism is the more complex one).
But even in today's world, starting with either argument makes arguing the other one against it harder.
Suppose I begin an interview with a pro-gambler, even in a modern western liberal context, by saying, "Gambling causes a lot of harm and addiction, and society has a responsibility against throwing its most vulnerable to the wolfs". I've put you several steps away from being able to argue simply "people should be allowed to do what they want unless harming someone” because I didn't allow you to begin with a proposal for liberal law making. You are forced to first debate whether or not my conjecture is true or blast into a non-sequitor to get to your position of libertarian license.
For a fair examination, the interviewer should begin with the examined frame of reference and work out from there.
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Yep.
Rufo acquitted himself admirably because he saw an unfair framing for what it was, refused to give the soundbite that he would have then had to spend huge amounts of time explaining, and of course made the point that they were still far ahead of the moral standards of the time.
The only thing that I would have done differently is said "I can say it is racist if you, first, say that racism is not a mortal sin nor does it invalidate a persons' other ideas."
Because you can disarm their attempt to reduce things to a blanket condemnation simply by requiring they admit to the nuance. If they can't, then don't give them what they want.
Coming from the interviewer that's useless. Even if he sticks to that (which he likely won't), his audience won't.
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Overall, this is a great post, and I think you have a good point. However, I beleive you overargue it a bit, and even the insinuation that these examples might involve lying or dishonesty, is under-evidenced here(thought not necessarily untrue, just over interpreted given you're examples).
There's a very real difference in cross-examining on material facts of a situation from epistemic positions, and I think you're extending the implications of contradictions in the former too much into the latter. If I ask you 'where were you?, when?, what did you do?, with who?, and so on, and you provide me answers that self-contradict or are contradicted with other evidence, then I can fairly accuse you of being dishonest or mistaken.
Partly, this is because we're working on a very clear frame of ontology and epistemology that nobody is pushing back against. We're working within a materialist, physical reality that is universal and constant, and so forth. Contradictions that cannot exist in that shared framework must be reconciled, they are not usually allowed as evidence against the framework.
Imagine to the contrary, someone, when faced with a contradicting timeline, tried to argue that this is because of an update to the simulation or because of Christmas magic. You could dismiss as lying or crazy, but assume you didn't. To engage them, and get back to your orignal accusation of impossible contradiction between Event A and B, you must first travel down one level and redefend the consistent materialist frame. If your witness's entire argument rests on the existence of Christmas magic, and you refuse their allowance of arguing or even answering within a framework where that might exist, then you will walk away with the appearance of simple inconsistency, and interpretations of dishonesty, insanity, or stupidity.
So that's a somewhat silly scenario, because we all know that Christmas magic can't change the rules of physics and that we don't live in a simulation (right? don't we know that?).But the crux in epistemic, ideological, and political debates, is that the "we all know" is far less founded than in empirical examinations. When the examiner sets the frame, he controls the debate.
Chris Ruffo's example gets at this swimmingly, and he even tries to get to this meta-argument and it isn't accepted by the presenter (at least in your exerpt).
In his book, The Allure of Order about how educational debates are framed, Jal Mehta lays out three ways in which a particular paradigm in a debate shapes it. The main point is that having first mover advantage on setting the paradigm is powerful because replacing a paradigm is much more difficult, and the existing paradigm has tremendous authority over the conversation.
1. Consitutive (interpretations) effects. The paradigm sets the way an issue is conceived and discussed. 2. Strategic (incentives) actions. The paradigm creates opportunities for those who's views are consistent with it. 3. Regulative (intersubjective) function. It constrains the positions those who oppose the paradigm can take.
You can see all three of these on display quite clearly in the Ruffo example. And if you simply accept the paradigm, it might look like Rufo's in an epistemic jam. But if you reversed the cross examination, you would have seen an equal and opposite jam. These say nothing about who's epistemic position is inconsistent, because it only says that the conclusions of the one actor is inconsistent with the frame of the others... Which is not as interesting or 'gotcha' as it seems.
We see this also in your interpretation of the Murphey example, where you force a reframe of what's more likely a deontological view as an aesthetic one:
This seems inaccurate, and you use that to ground your entire critique.Without the full clip, what I see Murphy doing here is having a deontological opinion, but defending it inside a paradigm about effects and outcomes. No fault to Destiny here. In fact, effects and outcomes, is kind of the default way to discuss morality across unsettled moral frameworks. But this has a constitutive effect, initially setting the converstaion into a causal discussion. There's nothign dishonest about taking this up, especially because the conversational cost to resetting the paradigm is great and rarely effective. (See Rufo's attempt).
Because we're talking effects and outcomes, Murphey takes the strategic position of showing the bad outcomes. But when it comes to exceptional examples, the regulative function of the paradigm set contrains her from being able extend the worldview. What we see here is an existing paradigm chase someone who's framework doesn't actually fit into a corner, not necessarily a breakdown of her actual position.
Now I think you get at this with your interpretation, but I think you mis-characterize it as her dishonestly hiding her real objection, when I think it's really getting chased down from trying to play along with a different framework's boundaries in realtime.
Sure, Murphey could have threaded this needle better by saying something like, "Male prostitutes for women are tremendously rare. Nominally allowing them, creates a standard of inequality for imperceptible benefit. Whether or not I find it wrong objectively is beside my point about the real-world affect of female prostitution on women."
But the fact that she didn't isn't really a point against here. When you drop someone else in your own maze, it's a hollow gloat that they get lost. What is interesting is whether they get lost in mazes they got to choose.
With that, we get to Tim Pool's example which is different, and notably happens because Tim interjects, he's not the cross-examiner.
Remember before I said:
Here, Pool allows Lance to draw out his own framework. The "mother's body, mother's choice" has no starting point in the pro-lifer's frame. And Lance walks into an open contradiction within his own set of justification. It's somewhat similar to Murphey, but you already admitted that Murphey here probably isn't arguing her actual epistemic foundation around prostitution. There's no appearnce that Lance isn't. Lance is just proving that his heuristic is undercooked. It's nothing like the Rufo situation, which is just open paradigm warfare.
I really appreciate how thorough and thoughtful this response is. I should have perhaps made it clearer that live debate has plenty of failure mode, particularly with how a conversation gets framed.
I don't think I understand this, what do you mean by "reverse" the cross-examination? I'm guessing you might mean an alternative scenario where Rufo asks Robinson about Jefferson's legacy but Robinson refuses to say anything positive about it? If that's how the discussion shakes out then yes I agree that would establish Robinson's position as inconsistent. It's perfectly possible for both of them to each hold inconsistent positions, showcasing that one person is using dodgy reasoning does not imply the other participant is innocent. [It's not relevant to your hypothetical, but in the interview Rufo does reverse the roles and asks multiple questions which to his credit Robinson readily answers.]
Re: Murphy
I agree with your analysis here based on the excerpt I picked out. I omitted a significant amount of prior discussion just because I wanted to be mindful of space, but I should have been more explicit. A commentator elsewhere made a similar point so I'll just repost part of my response:
Re: Lance
I concede that "undercooked heuristic" is a possible explanation for what transpired but I'm not convinced because of how Lance's pivots were deployed. Reflexively his first objection was based on a straight forward "thou shall not intentionally kill a child" ethos, which I believe is revealing because it sheds some light on what Lance believes 'kill' and 'child' to mean. When he realizes how much he stumbled, he doesn't acknowledge that, he just pivots to another reason ("meth is illegal") that seems even more undercooked. Granted, the lack of an acknowledgement is not dispositive given the real-time nature of the discussion and how many people were ganging up on, but my impression of the exchange still falls along the lines of "oh damn, I admitted something I wasn't supposed to, now I have to think of another reason." My interpretation can indeed be characterized as a stretch, but it's also not set in stone and I would be interested to hear an alternative explanation from the man himself.
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Eh, a deontological view of morality is, to caricature, 'sex is bad because it's on the list of Bad Things that
my society told meI just know, ya know'. There's not really much defending to be done, within that framework, it's just on the moral-duty-list or it isn't. And I think that corresponds to a real flaw in Murphy's position that no framing fixes.Destiny wasn't losing that debate no matter how things were 'framed', because Murphy's just not a capable thinker or debater. Obviously, there are plenty of strong and coherent cases against pornography.
To be quite fair, I dony know who either of these people are or the debate beyond what @ymeskhout quoted. My point was mostly about the power of the frame and the difficulty epistemic differences bring to claiming contradictions in a value based discussion as compared to a fact based one
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Destiny's line of argument here sounds quite a lot to me like confusing the map for the territory. Murphy probably has 1000 reasons that sex work is bad, all of which add up to a belief that sex work in general is bad. Go after any one reason and prove that it doesn't apply to everyone, and that doesn't invalidate the other 999.
There's very rarely actually a principled reason why a word is always morally wrong in 100% of cases. You could do the same thing with things seen as straightforwardly bad, like rape. "The problem is lack of consent? So what if one person withdraws consent but the other has no way of knowing, is that wrong? So your problem isn't REALLY lack of consent then, is it?" The endless search for noncentral but epistemically pure hypotheticals detracts from the overall process of truth-finding. It's a rhetorical tool, nothing more.
In an ideal world people would admit this ("okay there are situations where sex work/racism/rape/abortion is moral") but then they lose ground. There is no incentive to do so, especially in the face of uncharitable questioning by a hostile interlocutor.
This is precisely why people actually go to great efforts to understand and explain what is going on in cases like this. See, for example, the major works of Wertheimer/Westen on consent to sexual relations. I have zero doubt that if you tried this gotcha on them, they would have an immediate thirty second response. I happen to disagree with some of their positions, generally, as I don't believe in a consent-only sexual ethic, but I have no doubt that they have thought about the issue in significant enough detail to be able to easily reply. I think it, frankly, is an indication that a person hasn't sufficiently thought through an issue if they get caught out this easily on it.
Of course, that shouldn't be surprising when it comes to political talking heads. The sheer range of issues they are setting themselves out to address means that they're almost certainly to get caught out sometimes. Think of this general discourse as watching top-tier chess tournaments. The participants may actually have thought about it far more than lay folks, but the game is so incredibly broad, you still regularly see folks just get totally caught out by some opening prep idea. Of course, when that happens and they get embarrassed publicly, they immediately go home and study it to make sure it doesn't happen again. Compare to academic types, who are more like what chess players could get away with in the pre-computer-prep era - the guy who played the same opening every time and just knew it better than you.
I think the lesson we should take often depends on which type of person it is, which type of game they're prepping for, and what the result looks like. Thinking of chess again, in the computer era, even a specialist in an opening can get absolutely wrecked if they get stung with dynamite novel computer prep. But we're not going to see them just get absolutely bamboozled by just some basic shit in an opening that we know they have to have realized was likely.
Rufo is 'prepped' for talking about Marcuse, modern discrimination law, etc. Jefferson is a not-insignificant sideline, but it's definitely a sideline. Iain Anderson? Dude got blown off the board by a beginner who learned like the most common first six moves of the Sicilian.
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Can you name a single view, or thing, that has a thousand clearly distinguishable 'reasons', of approximately equal importance, that aren't (when considered properly) part of a broader and more relevant reason? I can't.
Why is welfare good? Because people can buy food, get electricity, not get sick, buy cars that help them get their own jobs, ... you could list a thousand things like this, but they all have something in common! A reason of "use money to improve peoples' material conditions, which is an end in itself" neatly sums it up.
Why do we have lines on freeways? There are a few reasons, but not 999. Why do humans have blood vessels? Well over thousand different things are transported, sure, but ... 'transporting stuff' sure does sum all of them up, and you'd say that in an argument, not listing every nutrient and waste product. Why do animals want to have sex with other animals? You could list every neuron, or every potential ancestor who didn't reproduce due to non-horniness, but ...
The things we do and use are mostly purposeful, encapsulation and patterns makes them easier to understand and use, whether you're a human or the blind idiot god of evolution, and as a result the ways they interact or go wrong are usually relatively simple to describe, at a high level. At the very least things have a clear hierarchy to them. Why does too-high temperature damage humans, or why does water damage a phone? There are a thousand low-level reasons ... but the high level reason of 'changing temperature changes a lot of chemistry, and humans depend on a lot of chemistry, and natural selection operated in a certain temperature range' works quite well.
The closest example of something that has 'many equal importance causes' are the output bits of a hash algorithm - which exists precisely because it's impossible to understand what parts of the input cause any particular bit to be set!
Also, in practice OP just makes excuses for a gish gallop. How can we ever come to any conclusions if you can have 999 good reasons for something? At a minute each, thats' 16 hours...
Any argument about welfare that's more sophisticated than "buys food, food good" is going to apply differently to the items in that list; they're going to have different tradeoffs and incentives, to the point where no nontrivial argument can be made for them as a group. Yes, you can sum up the group and rephrase it as one item, but pretty much no legitimate argument applies to that one item. (But sophistry often does apply to that one item, as in the Jefferson racist example.)
I do think 'it is a fundamental good to help people', and decreasing marginal utility of money, applies to the entire group and is a legitimate argument often made for social support / wealth redistribution?
Even beyond that, there are a lot of specific nontrivial arguments that apply to the entire group. Eg "welfare disincentivizes work" is fairly uniform across what the welfare is for because money is fungible.
And the ways the subtopics differ are hierarchically grouped - we can differentiate essential needs like food/medicine and discretionary wants, and say we want the former but not the latter. That's still two reasons, not a thousand. There's structure that makes OP's '999 reasons, knocking out one doesn't matter' not work.
(note that every object-level argument I'm writing here is mention, not use)
That fails to be more sophisticated than "food good", except it's "help good" instead. Not just because it contains few words, but because it implicitly assumes that there's no need to balance the benefit from the help against anything else.
er, that's what 'decreasing marginal utility of money' is about. we're evenly weighting personal well-being or happiness or w/e, and the balance is that taking money away from high-earners lowers their utility less than it increases the utility of low earners. In non-robot terms, that means "joe affording an android phone is worth denying Sarah her 20th dress of the month", or even "bill affording two nights at a a cheap bar is worth jeff not having one night at an expensive bar".
And I think that this, while obviously complicated, like everything, is a "single, coherent reason" in a way that avoids the 999 reasons thing
(if this isn't a specific nit and it relates to a larger-scale point about my original post, it's going over my head)
There are other things to balance against than the benefit to high earners. "What bad incentives does it create", for instance. And if you're going to argue for welfare in such general terms that you're making one argument for the entire category, you haven't actually restricted it to situations where the money is taken from high earners in the first place.
The larger point is that "my side of the argument" is different from "the argument". If you don't need to defend your argument, it's easy to state it in very broad terms that apply to a very broad category. If you do have to defend it, this is no longer so.
I agree. But if we engaged in a debate about 'is welfare good', we could nail down the primary benefit (marginal utility, increasing total welfare), and then move onto potential countervailing issues - you'd probably agree that there are that and 0-5 other general things that make welfare potentially bad, and then we could go into detail on those.
Sure, but the broad statements help scope the more detailed defense. You may have hundreds of distinct points to oppose welfare, but they can all be grouped into broad categories - which you'd name when Destiny asked you 'what are your reasons for opposing it', and if he said 'would you be fine with welfare without those' you'd say 'yes' or 'yes, but that's an impossible hypothetical' (which is what i'd say in that circumstance), and then the discussion would narrow into one of your points.
With Megan, he can't do that - he can either engage with her on 'it's about women' or 'it's about penetration', and then if he wins that argument megan will just say 'yeah but its still bad without those' an hour later, and then both parties will run out of time, unsatisfied.
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The broader and more relevant reason in this case is just "sex work harms those who engage in it." I never claimed that all 1000 reasons are of equal importance or cannot be summed up, but that finding an example where 1 reason does not apply does not invalidate the other 999.
Your hypothetical begs the question. In a debate there's no way someone waits for you to rattle off all 999 reasons. They will engage with the first few, then come up with a few more general counterarguments of their own. If your first few claims are easily defeated, then it stands to reason the other few hundred are of similar or inferior quality. Finding exceptions to any one claim though doesn't actually defeat that claim.
"Use money to improve people's material conditions, which is an end in itself" is not actually the part of welfare that people disagree with. Same with lines on freeways, blood vessels, etc. All of those examples are very unlike the debate being had here, because people generally agree with your phrasings of them. A better example would be something like "is drinking alcohol unethical." It makes people more abusive, it makes them waste money, it causes drunk driving, etc. but are any of those an actual principle making alcohol immoral? There are certainly exceptions to all of them. In reality, most people's genuinely held ethical positions are simply agglomerations of more fundamental principles. If something is bad enough often enough then it's simply unethical.
I expect this is Murphy's actual position. Sex work can be OK, but only under circumstances rare enough that it's much easier and better to ban it altogether than to give the bad actors a pretext for their less virtuous actions. I don't think Murphy is as intelligent as people on here seem to think (especially @ymeskhout, who's referenced her like 10 times) and I doubt she (or her interlocutors, to be fair) are capable of actually recognizing this. So how would you suggest they go about conducting this debate, if not by directly engaging with (rather than finding rare and unrepresentative exceptions to) a few of her claims about the supposed harm sex work causes to sex workers?
The idea is that - if you're making an argument, the onus is on you to present the broadest and most convincing reasons up front. If the first reason you present is one of the smaller reasons, only responsible for .5% of your belief - why even mention it? Mention one of the big 'classes of reasons' (which is itself a "reason").
I mean, that's three things, and they're all broadly within "alcohol makes people behave badly". There's another important factor, which is "alcohol is physically unhealthy". So that's two large-scale reasons, each of which have three to six big more specific reasons within them. That's reasonable. It works with my above comment, and isn't a gish gallop.
A debate with that would go like: Maybe Megan first mentions abuse, destiny says "okay what if it didn't cause abuse", megan mentions wasting money and drunk driving. Destiny now notices the grouping, and says "okay, it looks like you think alcohol clouds peoples' judgement and lets out their worst instincts. What if it didn't do that, would you still oppose it". Megan now says yes, and says "because it makes you fat and harms your liver". Destiny now asks "okay, what if it didn't cloud your judgement and didn't have health effects, would you oppose it"? Now Megan says "I guess not." Now Destiny understands megan's position better, and we can figure out if each component is true or not!
Tbh I spent most of the comment trying to come up with a reason I believed for "why don't some things have 1000 different reasons", because it seemed true but I wasn't sure why, as opposed to thinking about arguments.
That's only true now because people broadly agree with welfare, it's popular, and widely implemented. Some (including me, to an extent) do disagree with that.
Sure, but on any specific topic those principles are, at a high level, relatively simple, there aren't a few thousand of them. I think this is true about sex work, too! For some people the 'one reason' is that God or Traditional Values said NO. For others the reason is sex is for reproduction and porn isn't reproduction. For others (feminists) it's bad because it exploits women and propagates social values that exploit women, or something. For even more all three of these, and one or two more, mix together.
I basically agree with Destiny and ymes that megan's both a bad debater and doesn't have a coherent source for her points of view.
Part of why Megan responded poorly to destiny's approach is she's not a systematic thinker and is a normal person who doesn't like having her ideas 'attacked'.
I think the right move if you're trying to convince her is to try to meet megan where she's at right now, and try to come up with a narrative for her points of view that she'll agree with but is fairly concrete, and even show sympathy for and agree with parts of it - and hopefully she'll feel positive about you at that point - and then try to show its inadequacies by exploring some of the consequences for it, trying to connect it to other beliefs she has or experiences she's had.
Even if you don't want to do that, and more want to own her for an audience, I think destiny's approach isn't ideal, it seems a bit autistic, and Destiny and most people here probably know the good anti-porn arguments better than Megan does so making her awkwardly spell them out in response to hypotheticals isn't really necessary other than to own her.
I don't get why we're still talking about this. I agree with you here. Meghan also did this and then was later asked to clarify her position, which was when she got into the specifics. It was there that Destiny looked for exceptions rather than engaging with the examples provided.
I don't think the whole "penetrative sex" excerpt is representative of the whole debate, but even in reference to just that section, this comparison still isn't very accurate. A better comparison would be something like:
Meghan: "I dislike alcohol due to its negative effects on people."
Destiny: "Like what?"
Meghan: "Like abuse."
Destiny: "What about women drinking alcohol? They can't abuse men."
Meghan: "Yes they can, especially on alcohol."
Destiny: "What about female children?"
Meghan: "How many alcoholic little girls have you heard of? Besides, I think it's bad for them to be alcoholics too."
Destiny: "So there we go, abuse has nothing to do with why you actually think alcohol is bad. I still have no idea why you think it's unethical."
You can see why this whole tactic is disingenuous, right? Meghan's a bad debater, yeah, but Destiny is outright dishonest.
At this point she could have brought up a separate reason why it's bad for little girls to be alcoholics, but then she'd cede the ground about how abusive alcoholics aren't a big issue. She could have talked about the noncentral fallacy, but I doubt she's even heard of that, and she'd already tried to do so a few times with her references to talking about a "fantasy world" vs reality. So instead she quit.
Yes, and at a high level, Meghan articulated her main belief, which was that the porn/prostitution industries enable quite a lot of exploitation. Destiny dug into that and started getting into hyperspecifics, so it's unfair to blame Meghan for coming up with answers to his questions about those specifics. It's totally fair to have a thousand reasons for why porn causes harm, and for the very first reason cited to not cover literally 100% of possible cases.
Agreed, but I think a bigger part is that he was just being disingenuous. He kept coming up with extreme exceptions ("you don't think a girl selling foot pics is the same as a 9-year old getting gangraped, do you?") and then getting upset when she objected to his characterization of her point, because if she refuses to engage with his noncentral examples then her central examples must be dodging the question. He really wanted to equate the overall porn industry with the most milquetoast parts of it, and any attempts by her to steer the conversation towards central examples such as pornhub were met by derision and accusations of bad faith.
If I were trying to change her mind, I'd have attacked the Nordic model she favors. The thing about her position is that it is in essence a criticism of the status quo. You can't really debate that without defending the status quo, which really does have many issues. So the thing to focus on would be "how would you fix things" and then discuss the weaknesses with that. This is more rhetorically powerful, more direct, more likely to actually change her mind, and much more productive.
Rewatched this part of the debate - this was directly in response to (compressed)
Destiny's using a lot of hyperbole, but it's not really dishonest, as it's in response to Megan unreasonably conflating porn and prostitution while arguing they're bad due to risk of exploitation. It'd be more dishonest if it was unprompted, because he'd be implying megan was conflating them - but she kinda was!
==
His first hypothetical is a direct question of: "if there was a company with no exploitation, would you be fine with i?t", in response to her bringing up exploitation in the past. She waffles on this question. He then explains he's asking because he's heard her claim she wants almost all pornography outlawed - and he believes quite a bit (i'd guess >25-50% from his statements) of existing online sexual content weighted by revenue is currently not exploitative, so her arguments don't justify the claims she's made elsewhere.
Then
I think this is also reasonable from Destiny. He's trying to figure out what the shape of her view is - how much does the 'woman' part really contribute? It's not implied that 'if she thinks prostitution/porn is bad, she must think it's bad for men', as it kinda is in your hypothetical - she's free to take either direction in the fork.
You could argue this is somewhat dishonest - maybe she thinks female matters a bit but there are other factors too - even so, it's a more reasonable claim than every inference Megan has made in the past five minutes of the debate. But it's not dishonest in the context of a broader claim that he's making, and has explicitly said - even if he wins on every factual argument Megan makes, she'll keep jumping from argument to argument (as she has) because she isn't in this due to arguments.
The massive difference between Destiny's argument and your example is - his hypotheticals are in direct response to claims Megan has made. In your dialogue, Destiny brings in the 'female' and 'children' distinctions - in the above dialogue, Megan introduces the 'vulnerable' and 'female' distinctions.
About then she ragequits.
I mean, you're not entirely wrong. Destiny's approach here isn't actually going to tease out why Megan dislikes porn, it's just going to make her look stupid. It's probably better to assume she means 'female vulnerability makes a bad situation worse', even if that is a steelman, and debate that instead (while still mentioning that you're doing that). I think you can do that while still making her look stupid, although idk if my video would blow up like his did!
I think I would have, instead of going all logic-bro, told detail-rich stories about the kind of solo-content only onlyfans model destiny mentions, or boyfriend and girlfriend who make content with themselves and threesomes, and then gotten her to directly denounce those, and then explored the tension between her claims of exploitation and the stories.
==
Aside from that last sentence, this is a funny discussion because neither of us care about the object-level issue of 'was destiny slightly dishonest in the debate', unlike CW questions, it's just exploring a very mild disagreement out of technical interest in the disagreement.
Yeah I think we're on the same page, or close enough anyways. Still, I do have a few quibbles.
Well what she says is that selling sex is selling sex. His immediate response is to bring up porn which isn't selling sex. You could look at this as an attempt to pinpoint her position, but to me it seems more like a disingenuous argumentative tactic. At this point in the discussion he knows what her central point is, and is choosing to call her out on these little details rather than engaging with it at all.
I think her claims make a lot more sense in the context of her original claim, which was that the porn industry has a lot of exploitation. That is the most important reason porn is unethical, as she has stated, and he goes looking for another one as if she hasn't provided one already.
She comes up with reasons porn is bad, he finds exceptions, rinse and repeat. I'd have more charity towards him if he engaged with any of her points rather than finding exceptions to all of them. Of course, she can defend herself (well, she can't, but it's her job to) and if she were competent she could have called him out on that better.
In the end this terrible muddled mess is kind of what they both asked for though. They both make money stirring up controversy, not discovering truth, and in that they're both experts regardless of their skill at debate.
I'm fascinated at how much you and @curious_straight_ca dissected this exchange. I'll repost a relevant comment I made elsewhere that also includes how I would construct an "honest" version of Murphy's objections:
The lead up to this particular exchange is relevant because Murphy was first arguing that sex work is bad because it's coercive, and it's by definition coercive because it involves someone having sex they wouldn't otherwise have were it not for the money offered. Destiny offers the obvious rejoinder that if you accept that premise, then ALL jobs are also "by definition coercive" as well. There's some anti-capitalists that actually agree with this premise but Murphy doesn't and so she finds herself having to add yet another qualifier to her argument, this time about how women are much more vulnerable during sex. Similarly, there are radical feminists that actually believe that ALL heterosexual sex is "by definition coercive" because it's penetrative and occurs within a patriarchal system where consent is impossible. Murphy has to be aware of these arguments, but as an unapologetic heterosexual woman, she doesn't want to concede that. At this point my impression is she quit because she ran out of pivots.
There's a pattern here. She just moves on to another, then another, then another etc. all without any acknowledgement. It's hard to tell what she actually believes in because she just keeps mechanistically cycling through her repertoire! The "coercive because money" argument got immediately thrown out without any acknowledgement and never made a re-appearance, and that's because Murphy knew she'd have to admit that all jobs are coercive. We didn't get much of an epilogue for the "coercive because sex" argument, but I'm guessing she realized she'd have to admit that hetero sex is at least somewhat rapey. I also gather that after already confirming she believes males engaging in sex work is also unethical, she realized she wouldn't be able to offer a reason for that position (I can't think of one based on what she said, but maybe you can?).
If I had to construct an honest form of the basic tenets of her argument, it might be something like this:
"Wage work has an element of coercion, because you're doing work you would otherwise refuse to do freely. Sex also has an element of violence and coercion for women in particular, given how much more vulnerable they are. Taken individually, neither is necessarily a problem because of [reasons]. But there's a symbiotic magnification of the harms that occurs when these two aspects are combined together into what we know as the sex trade. This crosses a line over what we should deem as ethical and acceptable behavior."
I may not agree with the conclusion but I think the argument is perfectly reasonable! If I had to guess, the reason Murphy doesn't adopt this framework is because it would necessarily require her to curtail some of her overall position. For example it would require her to concede at least some scenarios where the sex trade is not unethical (e.g. male prostitutes, OF model playing with toys, etc.).
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Yeah, close enough.
I actually don't think exploitation is the main reason porn is unethical - it's that it subverts the productive instinct towards reproduction in favor of something meaningless. But I don't think the puritan moral rage you generally see from reactionaries at this is a well-calibrated way to fight it.
Destiny's been a lot better in the past few years at attempting to discover truth instead of stirring up controversy, and most of his conversations aren't heated or adversarial like this one was (whereas in the past he was a lot more debate bro-ish). Imo ideally, heat/conflict and accuracy don't have to be incompatible, but a lot of social incentives make them so in practice.
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It's why I'm glad people like Robin Hanson exist, or else we wouldn't have oeuvres like Gentle Silent Rape
Hanson is either trolling or socially clueless. "Gentle silent rape" implies that central examples of rape are gentle and silent.
How does it do that? Hanson quite explicitly narrowed his questions about rape in general to "gentle silent rape":
A few hours later he called out again that gentle silent rape differs quite a lot from standard rape:
So no, Hanson is not implying anything of the sort.
The title doesn't contain any disclaimers and it's far more prominent than the place in the article where he does have the disclaimer, simply because titles work that way. He's doing it that way because he knows very well that people will read the title as being offensive, and he's trolling people by tricking them into making reasonable in context interpretations and then saying "see, that's not what it literally says, if you read the fine print, so you're literally wrong".
There's a reason why we have the concept of clickbait titles.
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Is there any proof that Jefferson's personal views on blacks ever motivated any of his decisions as a politician and public servant? And if yes, did those decisions have a lasting effect on the political fabric of the nation? That seems to be an important question to me.
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The right move is to turn this around. YOU, Robinson, are doing something so totally heinous today that in 200 years all people will condemn you as a terrible bigot. But you can't even see what it is with your own eyes. Is the future right to condemn you?
There's an inkling of a good argument here. But it's not the kind of argument that'd work in Rufo's position, or more generally in a public debate without a lot of context. It feels like "okay, maybe I stole from the store, but aren't we all sinners in God's eyes?".
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The tricky part here is that the Founding Fathers, including Jefferson, did consciously acknowledge that slavery was a real moral wrong. Not only is it not the case that the Founding Fathers couldn’t see what they were doing wrong in owning slaves, but they actively stated that slavery ought to end. Here’s Jefferson’s take:
This isn’t even on the same level as, say, veganism, to which analogies are often made. Sure, maybe our descendants living centuries from now would condemn us for our meat-eating, but despite the existence of present-day vegans, it cannot be stated that there is a deep moral divide at the center of America (or any other country to my knowledge) between vegans and carnivores in the same way that there was in early America between slavery-enjoyers and abolitionists.
So it would be inaccurate, in this case, to say that Jefferson couldn’t even see what he was doing wrong by owning slaves.
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Re Rufo I think he is just making the point that “Noah was a righteous man of his time.” That is, Jefferson should be judged in the context of his society. In that context, he was probably in the center on this issue. But what Robinson is trying to do is use modern views to go back in time to discredit what Jefferson did (which was quite valuable).
That might be what Rufo was trying to do, but it's not that hard to just say something like: "Sure he was racist but if you somehow believe this should diminish the lasting impact his efforts have had in securing a beacon of liberty the world continue to be envious of, I would vehemently disagree with that."
Entrenching himself on the "was he racist?" line just accepts Robinson's potential framing.
I think Rufo is saying “he wasn’t Racist judged by his contemporaries and his ideas that he actually is famous for are not non fact racist and continue to have vitality today.”
Agreed Rufo could do a better job
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He believes in killing fetuses/kids, but not if the would-be mother enjoys the process.
Really, that's the difference. One is an expensive and unpleasant medical procedure with lots of forms to be signed and cold metal tables. The other is a party.
This isn't really a gotcha. Many people (most people, I'd argue) believe this to be true about many animals, for example. The guy who kills a cute fluffy cow because he's a farmer is OK with almost anyone who isn't a vegan. The guy who kills a cute fluffy cow out of bloodthirst and because he enjoys murdering living creatures to hear them squeal (and who thinks this is amusing) is not OK with almost anyone. Accidentally stepping on a bug is normal, pulling the wings off ladybugs you encounter for your amusement is not.
It is logically consistent to oppose people doing something for casual amusement but tolerate it for some other, (perceived as) more 'genuine' purpose. Of course, a genuine purpose is entirely subjective, but so are many things.
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Not all abortions are dilatation & curettage. Pretty sure more than half of abortions are medical.
Not the late term ones
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Yes. Do you believe it makes no sense?
"You can receive X benefit but only after an unpleasant process, which itself serves partly as deterrent to prevent frivolous abuse" is not without precedent.
Nobody has designed abortion to be unpleasant. On the contrary, it's constantly evolving and improving to be less so. The financial and social consequences of choosing abortion are being persistently chipped away.
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Presume this should be "exits".
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Okay, not the most substantive point but this error, which seemed to be pretty rare at one time, is everywhere lately and it drives me nuts. "Borne" is not a fancy alternate spelling of "born", as many people seem to have suddenly concluded. It's a different word with a different meaning ("carried", more or less). You could say, for example, that Murphy's responses are "borne up by a mighty wind of righteous indignation", or something like that, though that does seem a bit purple for either Yassine or myself now that I read back over it. But in this case the word you want is just "born".
I appreciate you pointing this out! I admit I never really paid attention to the word before. It seems that "borne out" carries (heh) a slightly different meaning and seems to be used as a synonym for "confirmed" or "proven" as in "the evidence bears out the allegations"
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I think it kind of works; one could be said to 'carry' an objection. I understand your irritation, though.
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It's being used as a rhetorical attack to discredit Jefferson and Poison the Well. "Jefferson was racist, ergo a bad person and all of his works are now discredited." It's not a truth finding expedition being made in good faith, but rhetorical culture war.
"Why won't my opponent concede when he knows I'm using rhetoric?" isn't really a fair question.
Except that Robinson's leftist wagon fort never applies the same standard to Marx, or Engels, or Che Guevara, or any other leftist revolutionary who ever expressed racist views. I find it regrettable that Rufo seemingly never made that point.
Robinson has said plenty of negative things about Marx and his ideas, which upset the folks at Jacobin. I didn't read his book so I don't know how much of his argument relies on "bad person ergo" but figured this trivia was worth pointing out
From the review, Robinson appears to have tarred Marx as an authoritarian (a position which Jacobin might not champion, but is willing to tolerate if it leads to a better world state), not as a supporter of racism, bigotry or anti-semitism (ideologies which Jacobin wouldn't support, even if they would bring socialism closer). Would have interesting to see him confront anti-Slavic and anti-Jewish sentiment pervading the writings of early socialists.
Googling I discovered that Robinson argues against Marx being an anti-semite, confirming that he only scours the history for prejudice, if it advances his ideology. If facts would bury his intellectual forefathers, they instead are buried.
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Rufo knows that's a trap because, if pressed, Robinson would obviously disavow Marx's racism but merely say he "had some interesting ideas about labor relations" or something. Rufo, on the other hand, wants to defend some kind of constitutional originalism where the founding fathers were uniquely capable sages whose instructions must still be followed today.
I argue it'd be relatively easy to press him on this. Surely his ideological investment in Marxism goes further than that.
Does Rufo actually go that far? I'm not familiar with his work so I don't know.
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Maybe this is how things work in the culture war but I don't think the latter has to follow when you admit the former. I've seen plenty of wholehearted defenders of a philosophy say something to the effect of "X (founder of their favourite ideology) was a terrible person, now let's discuss what is still worthwhile about their ideas".
the purpose is to attack the myth; all of "his works" are part of the myth
attacking and destroying the hero is the point of this sort of rhetorical attack and admission
so, you either get the person to help you in destroying their myth/hero or you force them into a position where they defend something which is heretical which could destroy their life
this isn't genuine discussion or dialogue, it's rhetoric and argument and should treated as such
Okay, so it's theoretically possible for this to not poison the well or destroy the myth/hero which forms part of the identity the person you're talking to, now what?
if the point was to discuss their "still" worthwhile ideas, why didn't the discussion start there? because the destruction and poisoning the well is the point of this sort of comment
I concede you have a point. I can respond just as @Tollund_Man4 did that "destroying the myth behind a person doesn't discredit whatever lessons you might draw from their writings or actions" but I also recognize that people often adopt positions in a reflexive manner based on just vibes (I'm potentially vulnerable to doing this myself). If you accept that concern as real and wish to defend against it, you have to remain active at the meta-level where you're defending the mythology rather than defending the substantive arguments. And implicit at this level is that you can't break character and be transparent about what you're doing, because "I am defending Jefferson's legacy in order to shore up the vibes supporters he has" shatters the kayfabe. Defending the mythology also can be in tension with defending the substance.
We're all affected by vibes and the reason this attack is done at all is to communicate negative vibes and steer anyone not completely able to separate myth from underlying idea (i.e., everyone) will be affected by it. I do not remember the person who I first read a similar comment to yours, but he described normal people as not thinkers but "vibers," and I think that's a pretty good description and these tactics simply work. Arguing this is theoretically possible, especially in the above example, is such an unsatisfying reply because of this and gives cover to people who do it to destroy the founding myth and founding heroes. Is it theoretically possible? Perhaps, but not really in the real world which is why it's done and it's being done in the exact example being discussed.
If attacks on person didn't work, it wouldn't be the number 1 tactic everyone does to attack ideas even in communities like this where people still regularly do stuff like "Person X, known pedophile/racist/antisemite, _________."
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I don't need to argue that it's theoretically possible to avoid destroying the myth, just that destroying the myth behind a person doesn't discredit whatever lessons you might draw from their writings or actions.
The mythology itself can be an obstacle to discussing someone's ideas. "I'm a follower of Jefferson because he was a great man" is no foundation, "I believe in the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence" is more substantial even if you admit the moral failings of the author.
It does which is why they're doing it. Theoretically, perhaps it's true that attacking the man behind the ideas doesn't necessarily affect those ideas, but it does to the vast majority of people and it's the case in the linked example. The purpose of getting someone to admit their hero/myth is flawed is because you're trying to signal to others WARNING: HERETIC and poison the well. If it didn't affect the idea, a person wouldn't lead off a discussion with "this guy is a racist, though, right?"
Because the point is to destroy the myth and taint its parts. It's to signal negative vibes to the normies that this guy should be approached with caution, if at all.
A man being a great man is the best foundation to follow him or be a follower. I sincerely do not understand what would be a better reason. Without men, ideas are irrelevant.
I'll grant that this is often a reason. I do think we have other genuine reasons of it not being an attempt to poison the well, I've brought it up before but philosophy professors will often start their attempt to impress the value of a thinker upon their students by admitting all the terrible and crazy things about them history has revealed.
When it comes to an adversarial discussion, you might be poisoning the well by referring to a thinker's past crimes, you might also just be seeing if your interlocutor holds any insane beliefs resulting from hero worship or ideological blindness. Ideally they come out of it having established their credibility as someone who will admit fault when he sees it but still give praise when he thinks it's due.
Depending where the debate is on the scale of rap battle to Oxford debate you might be able to trust the audience to make distinctions here.
A better reason would be that you follow his ideas because they work no? There are lots of great men of history that would be hard to follow in any political sense because their ideas are either inapplicable in the modern day or obviously terrible. Jefferson is remembered because the constitution he helped design worked well enough that we still consider his political thoughts relevant (in more than a purely historical sense).
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It is also judging someone based on today’s morality. Was Jefferson blameless in his generation? No. Was he bad in his generation? No. Jefferson was clearly bothered by the concept of slavery and even took some efforts to try to limit and eventually end the practice. He is very different compared to certain people like John Calhoun.
Moreover, Jefferson crafted one of the most important documents in human history and gave birth to some of the most important words uttered in human history (generally when people say things like that it is an exaggeration but in this case the Declaration of Independence is probably the most important document in the last 1,000 years).
That is, Jefferson was a great man. A flawed man. He was human; not a saint. But he was still great and trying to use modern sentiments to besmirch that greatness is unjust.
Funny enough, most people who complain about Jefferson only do so because of the profound words Jefferson wrote. MLK Jr would not have had half the success he had but for Americans treating the declaration of independence as sacred. Yet these half wits and talentless dweebs like Robinson feel they can be the moral superior to the greatness of Jefferson?
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I'm sorry, but Rufo of all people doesn't get to complain about this. He is engaged in an explicit political project, to win the culture war. In fact, despite all the seething, that's what's attractive about him: he knows this. No way he walks into a debate with Robinson and doesn't get the game.
If his counter was inadequate that's on him.
That's a fair point. If he is going into a rhetorical knife fight, his failings are on him. No quarter asked or given, but my main point was about his 'ducking and weaving' when the argument isn't dialectical using logos.
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The mistake all these people made was in being forced to defend their positions.
The Socratic method, employed adversarially, makes fools of us all. Instead of accepting the frame of their interlocutor, they should have flipped the script.
"So you think that up until the baby enters the birth canal, the mother is free to kill it?"
Instead of answering directly say: "And you think that the second a sperm fertilizes an egg, it's a human? What kind of position is that?"
"Answer my question".
"You answer mine first and then I'll go".
The infamous Channel 4 interview of Jordan Peterson shows how the Socratic method can backfire on someone who doesn't know what the fuck they're doing. Cathy Newman has yet to live that down, people still talk about it 5 years on.
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"The correct one. Unless you have some reliable evidence to demonstrate when the fetus is otherwise endowed with 'humanity.'"
I love biting bullets.
If only because it then forces THEM to wade into the mire of uncertainty which they have even less of a map of than I do.
Of course they can just shut down the conversation there and say "you're an insane ideologue/religious extremist and I won't argue with such absurd beliefs" but then they betray they weren't acting in good faith to begin with, just looking for the first chance to ad hominem me.
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Or maybe some people make fools of themselves?
Tim Pool hardly pulled off some brilliant or devious maneuver here. Nothing here would be out of place in an early philosophy seminar.
He simply asked Lance a couple of questions to tease out his position, and Lance admirably admitted something a lot on his side probably believe: "bodily autonomy" is the strongest legal argument for abortion but the point of abortion is to avoid this issue. If tomorrow a 5 week-old baby was viable that basic, pressing issue of work that helps the pro-choice movement would remain.
Of course, in politics people stay on message and avoid traps like this (god bless audience-captured Youtubers). But that doesn't mean it's not actually a legitimate tension to try to bring to light and that its not a good thing for people to know
Not playing because you don't think you can answer in a way favorable to your cause is actual bad faith, as opposed to asking questions to tease out an opponents position and discovering he simply holds incoherent combinations or even answering and then launching your own questions.
Yes, I agree. But I think the bad faith is deserved. These weren't adversarial collaborations, they were just adversarial. If my goal is to make you look bad, you are under no obligation to play along. These interviews were never truth-seeking endeavors.
I don't agree. I can use MMA as an example: you don't have to fight your opponent's game (in fact, you're given an incentive to exploit the holes in their game), but some amount of actual fighting is not just expected, it's required under the rules (timidity is a sanctionable offense).
Something not being a collaboration doesn't mean that there aren't rules or standards of behavior meant to extract the goods from that endeavor. It was fair to ask Rufo/whoever that question, it's fair for Rufo/whoever to answer and then pull their own uncomfortable question. "Not until you go" is closer to timidity imo.
Otherwise why bother? Just don't deal with Robinson or the concept of debate at all. According to Rufo this has worked very well for the radical leftists he loathes, but isn't that part of why he loathes them?
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I mean it is the most clearly announced motte & bailey argument I've seen, and it frustrates me to no end when people refuse to admit it. The main organisation championing it in the US, Planned Parenthood, is named after the bailey. But if you come with arguments that if women are given the choice of parenthood men should be given a choice too (to legally and financially renounce fatherhood) then woah bro! We're just talking about a medical procedure and bodily autonomy!
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Honestly, I kind of think it’s the opposite. Trying to trap your opponent between heresy and concession is a dick move in my opinion. If the position were genuinely hugely unpopular that might be a bit different. But in this case the debater is resorting to vox stasi rather than vox populi.
Personally I don’t think you can have a truly fair debate in any position where there’s an audience. Two people, in a pub, with a beer. Anything else is grandstanding and manipulation.
Another way to frame it is "trying to find out your opponent's basic beliefs and how they interact . Which is essential to debate. Not even for "gotchas"; you have to know why Lance is pro-choice and why to even have a productive discussion.
It's Lance's fault he's so bad at organizing his beliefs that he trips when he has to consider them holistically.
As for whether it's "heresy": I mean, whose fault is it if your side considers it so? Not Tim's issue.
Maybe not. But we'll have to make do.
I think there’s a problem when those beliefs are widely considered heresy. Then you have the problem of having been asked to publicly commit to positions that poisoned the well. Asking if the founders are racist is asking a person to pre-commit to the idea that they were (and are thusly tainted) or deny it (and thus discredit yourself). In the case of the abortion debate, it’s about committing to frames (a woman’s choices are her alone to make, even while pregnant, or that the woman should have no choices while pregnant that might endanger the fetus).
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I was thinking of Rufo. His opponent is not conducting a good-faith investigation of his beliefs in preparation for constructive discussion, he’s forcing him to admit to having taboo opinions in an environment where that will destroy him. Of course, I can’t know this with certainty but I feel pretty sure.
By contrast, with the abortion case, admitting that you think there are times it’s okay to force a woman to do something for the sake of her unborn child is pretty bad for the guy’s specific argument but it’s not going to get you unpersoned or debanked.
If you're referring to "Jefferson was a racist" why is that taboo and how would admitting to it destroy Rufo?
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Ad hominem attacks don't become not dick moves, just because they are based upon characteristics of its victims and not aggressors. That it isn't Tim creating the enviroment which considers valid arguments immoral, but merely exploiting it, doesn't make him in the right.
It's not an ad hominem. It's simply things inconvenient to admit in the target's milieu.
If that counts as a dick move in debate then the entire concept is a dick move. It's an absurd standard.
No religious debate could ever happen if one party couldn't poke the other's beliefs because they might have to choose between sticking with incoherency and saying something that's unpopular.
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From a rationalist point of view, this can be one of the bad things about the whole process. It's easy for some position to not "be generally persuasive" in the sense of "quoting it on CNN or sending it to your employer gets you in trouble", yet actually be fairly reasonable. I'm sure you can think of a number of examples (perhaps some low controversy examples would be "yes, I should run over a fat man with a trolley" or "yes, there is some acceptable non-zero level of violent crime", but many examples are very political).
There's also the problem of absolute statements made about noncentral examples. You can't say "Thomas Jefferson is a noncentral example of a racist" on the Internet. (Not that most of the audience knows what a noncentral example is anyway.)
And finally there's epistemic learned helplessness. The proper reaction to someone "disproving your position" is to politely ignore them. If you've checked around for a while, and haven't found any good counter-counterarguments even when you aren't being put on the spot and have some time and access to research, then maybe you can start changing your position.
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I think one major problem with this style of argumentation is that while it is very good at exposing contradictions and flaws in a specific person's understanding of an issue that does not always translate into exposing contradictions or flaws in the philosophical or political positions themselves. It's perfectly possible to give a false proof of a true statement and when your debate partner rips apart that proof it might make the audience think that this means your conclusion was false, but it doesn't actually imply this. I sometimes watch debate videos and I often find myself frustrated that the person who I agree with is giving such bad arguments, I want to yell at them through the screen.
I think this is why I prefer to read cross-examinations of text against text. A huge advantage for live cross examination is that it’s easier to game. I can’t go look for better evidence. I am forced into publicly speaking, where my appearance, demeanor, and off the cuff word choices are the meat of the discussion. These things are not necessarily germane to the topic at hand. No truth can be derived from how I look or sound on camera, my poor off the cuff word choices, or my delivery. The audience will absolutely judge people on these things, which is why those who wish to persuade in the public arena tend to look the part.
This is something that hurts a lot of good ideas, even true ones. I think, while I disagree on his conclusions, Curtis Yarvin actually has a pretty good understanding of how power and incentives work in our society. The problem is that his rambling style, his deadpan demeanor, and his appearance absolutely poisons the well on his ideas — even before you pit him against anyone else. Put him up against a practiced public speaker, put him against Obama for example, and there’s no way anyone would ever listen. They’d look at Obama in a suit and tie, listen to his delivery style, and he’s carrying the day, not necessarily because he’s correct, but because of things that are irrelevant to the truth of the issue.
This is actually a problem in trials. If you know how to make your opponent sound like an ass or your client sound sweet and innocent, you can move closer to victory. This is something touched on in “A Few Good Men” much earlier. The attorneys are preparing their clients to take the stand, and one thing the tell them point blank is to not call Santiago Willy. The reason is that such a choice of words “Willy” instead of “Santiago” subtly reminds the jury that Willy Santiago is a formerly living human being, dead at the hands of the accused. Even if they’re not supposed to think that way, human psychology works that way. And thus bringing in an audience brings in the very human biases of those humans.
Writing removes the human from the equation, leaving only the argument. It doesn’t handicap the author to only the information crammed into his brain before the debate. It doesn’t allow extraneous information about the speaker themselves to change the public’s perception of the content apart from the quality of the actual argument. Writing also has the advantage of allowing citations that the reader can cross check. I can come at you with citations, references to ideas, mathematical equations, or other logical theories, link to them, and let the audience see and understand where I’m going. Writing, because you can edit, also allows these arguments to be presented as well as the writer is capable of. They have full control of the wording, and have plenty of time to polish their writing style and present their ideas in their best light.
Having two people argue in writing tends to keep the debate honest and about the ideas rather than about stylistic choices. I love reading the rat-sphere debates for just that reason. I read one side of the debate, look into the sources, and then look into the other side, then the original rebuttal of the contra, back and forth as they argue about a topic. They have to have the logic and the facts because they can’t sway the audience with anything else. They can’t put the other guy on the back foot by bringing up a new angle, the opponent has time to research it and find a rebuttal. He can’t simply be better dressed — there’s nothing there but the words themselves. The victor is determined by his argument, whether it’s true or not.
There's not much I disagree with you here. My point was not to sing the praises of "live debate" uber alles but to point out specific aspects that remain useful and difficult to replicate in the written form. Namely the ability to tease out someone's position with higher precision, and a better opportunity to root out dishonesty. There's obviously quite a lot of aspects of live debates that are easy to game or just distractions.
I don’t see why you can’t tease out specific aspects of an argument. The argument is laid out before you, and if something is poorly defined, or inconsistent, or a logical leap is made, you can point to that explicitly and point out the mistake. If in paragraph 3 you’re arguing that freedom means “freedom from external control,” than in paragraph 5 argue that people in America are less free because they are not provided free healthcare and education, there’s at least a potential inconsistency, and it’s easy enough to notice and point out. In fact, especially in papers where citations are used, it’s relatively easy to point out if a source used doesn’t say what the person using it in an argument says it does.
The thing I like about written arguments is that they don’t give you ways to hide. If you make a mistake it’s there on paper or on the website, and anyone wanting to question your ideas can do so at his leisure. He doesn’t have to catch you saying it at the time, he can read it, reread it, check your sources, work through the logic, and find it.
I'm not saying you can't! It's just harder to do with asynchronous written exchange. If you tried to transpose any of the verbal exchanges I highlighted into a discussion on the motte, they'll quickly become impossible to follow threads that are several comments too deep and that take several days to play out. I think people realize how annoying it is to be repeatedly pestered by small questions over time, so the reaction with written debates generally tends to be to package clarifying questions with multiple arguments that anticipate potential responses (e.g. "Can you explain what you mean by X? Because if Y then [words words words] but if Z then [words words words]"). Even if both people are acting honestly, this is a lot of work and can get quite tiresome because you're wasting a lot of time on arguments that were never going to come up in the first place. It's even worse in the case where someone is acting dishonestly, because the medium makes it much easier to just ignore vexing questions, or one of the preemptive arguments gives away the blueprint for how to continue acting dishonestly and evading detection.
I suppose i can see it in online fora, though, I don’t really find it too hard personally, as I said since everything is public and easily read through from beginning to end. I find following things like YouTube videos much more difficult simply because it’s almost impossible to go line by line without missing something. This is one reason I tend to be more suspicious of people who cite YouTube videos or podcasts as evidence. It’s a bit more difficult to really dig in (at least for me) because I’m constantly needing to pause and back up and see if the person really said what I think he said.
What I’m mostly thinking of is blog posts that directly oppose other blogposts. Scott Alexander does these on occasion and other bloggers do as well. So in that case, you’re reading the entire argument in one go as a multiple paragraph article about something, then someone else writes a contra-[blogger_name] on [topic] and they go back and forth until they are satisfied with the outcome.
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My concern is chiefly that video and theatrical debates tend to allow magic tricks and chicanery that a text simply doesn’t allow. A person giving a speech can easily elide parts of his argument he thinks (or knows) are false by stating the forcefully or pounding the table. If I’m doing a video, I can select images of my opponents that make them look stupid, evil, or weird (this is often hilarious during American political campaigns when they tend to show a photograph of their opponent mid snarl, or take speeches completely out of context highlighting the one line in a ten minute speech that sounds bad). If I’m selling a dubious idea on video I can use computer graphics to make it seem like it will work, and carefully avoid mentioning the physics and mathematics that show it doesn’t.
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I think if you have two subject-matter experts, with ample time to research and prepare, AND are allowed to bring their sources into the real-time debate, AND they take the time to define the terms they'll be using throughout, and they are very clear about the scope of the question they're trying to get to the truth of, then its a pretty good way to either get at the truth or at least have the audience come away far more educated as to the state of the situation than before.
But the vast majority of such real-time debates ain't that.
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Yes, although you don't need charity if there are some rules of decorum and perhaps a moderator to prevent things devolving too much.
I kinda want both sides to be going for the throat, but things have to be temperate enough to allow arguments to be heard and understood, not two people shouting past each other.
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One of the worst things about having a very unpopular worldview that I have to hide from nearly everybody I know is that these days I have basically no opportunities for serious face-to-face synchronous argument/conversation about controversial issues. I used to be very good at debate-style argumentation, but I definitely feel like that skill has atrophied from disuse. Even the people with whom I do discuss serious issues are the ones who are largely in agreement with me about the big picture - at least, in enough agreement that I can reliably trust them not to want to harm me because of my views - so it’s not useful for practicing the art of arguing well.
I do agree with some commentators who have pushed back against your thesis; debate-style argument genuinely is more susceptible to emotional manipulation, the leveraging of charisma, and various cynical derailing tactics. Especially when an audience is involved, the incentive toward demagoguery and cheap tactics can be profound, and that’s to say nothing of the opportunity it presents for the mining of unflattering soundbites that can be decontextualized and then weaponized. It’s an artform that rewards glibness.
Still, I think you’re dead-on about the ways in which, when done correctly, it can allow interlocutors to really strike at the heart of disagreements, without all of the careful rhetorical defenses that the written form allows one to cultivate. It’s also just fun and invigorating, and is a great opportunity to hone one’s thinking and exercise one’s brain.
I’ve considered reaching out to you about appearing on The Bailey, but I would probably want to discuss something slightly less inflammatory than the topic(s) I’m most closely associated with - not only because you’ve already had a (frankly, pretty poor quality, I’m sorry to say) episode about race/identity, but also because I’m still so freaked-out about op-sec - and I’ve struggled to think of another topic where I feel like I could really be a more valuable and interesting contributor than someone else you could talk to instead. I’ll mull it over some more!
AI has vastly expanded the tricks we could use to maintain your anonymity. We can make you sound like Drake if you really wanted to!
Imagine the risk to poor Champagne Papi’s career if someone were to listen to the episode and think it’s really him expressing such views! I couldn’t bear to get a fellow former theatre kid cancelled like that.
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This is exactly my feeling as well. I know for a fact that I used to be extremely persuasive, and for better or for worse had a reputation for "standing on a soapbox". Late night conversations in high school and college were full of real discussion where people walked away either convinced or more educated, not pissed off beyond repair.
Now the absolute best-case scenario is I find myself in a 6-on-1 debate after I've already had 3 whiskeys and am compelled to respond to some hot-take that's too stupid to let slide.
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I agree this makes it obvious that Rufo is refusing to abandon something indefensible because retreating is how battles are lost. I agree it's good to point this out when it happens. At the same Rufo is being quite honest that their actual disagreement is whether Thomas Jefferson should be viewed as a shitty person, so this really doesn't seem like a case of "thinking on your feet exposes the problem with your beliefs/honesty/etc." -- Rufo seems more than willing to be honest.
Robinson's insistence on only having that argument after establishing linguistically favorable footing makes Robinson seem unreasonable here. What's wrong with arguing whether a man who owned slaves and helped found America was a good person without having to use one of the most mind-killing words in all of discourse?
Might as well go around insisting that Republicans admit Hitler was "right leaning" before beginning any debate. "It's just a fact" right?
The reason they even got into this argument in the first place was prompted by this question from Robinson:
I didn't point this out but it adds another explanation for why Rufo is so motivated to avoid conceding the "Jefferson was a racist" position, because then it would necessarily follow that "maybe some CRT advocates might have a point". Now, normally this shouldn't be such a cataclysmic event but it is for Rufo because he's an activist who has seen a significant rise in his national profile precisely from speaking in absolutes like this. He can't deploy nuance and so it has to be all-out total war and CRT advocates are not just wrong, but wrong about everything.
Perception is everything in the year of 2023, Rufo conceding is the point.
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"What's wrong" is that it would be very difficult and awkward in an interview to describe Jefferson in a way that didn't just make people reading go "oh, you're trying to say he's a racist." By any reasonable definition we have, we could consign Jefferson to the category. But Robinson may just genuinely not get that Rufo would never admit it because "Rufo admits CRT was right" is the kind of headline people would unironically parrot forever when discussing him.
Why Robinson decided to interview Rufo is beyond me, it should have been obvious that as "new" as the arguments might be, the incentives for a persona are entirely different from that of a person.
Cause if you don't Rufo will go around insisting that the Left isn't willing to have a discussion.
I don't see anything in the Current Affairs article saying that Rufo approached Robinson.
That's usually not how it works: I doubt most people are salivating to debate Nathan Robinson in particular. But they will attack the Left, claiming it doesn't discuss things anymore and where have the good liberal leftists gone and so on. This is an old game played by right-wingers and is especially good after some form of college illiberalism is thrown their way (e.g. Shapiro, Milo).
I just heard him on Hanania and he basically said as much: the Left doesn't really do debate anymore so the goal is to make it so uncomfortable that they have to.
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Rufo literally admitted to the fact. He's just not willing to capitulate on the word, for the exact same reason Democrats don't want to call the estate tax the "death tax" despite it being factually triggered by a death -- because everyone agrees on what the estate tax is and calling it a different name changes nothing about the actual substance of the disagreement. Refusing to use your opponent's loaded terminology has nothing to do with being dishonest.
The problem is that even in an entirely good-faith argument, I don't know how you could come away thinking Jefferson isn't a racist by our standards. Such an argument might also give consider what describes a person when one thinks of them generally - should you think Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father or Thomas Jefferson, racist Founding Father? Or if we have to acknowledge this bigotry in every instance.
This is why I was saying the personas mattered. Rufo's status hinges on him rejecting the philosophy of the social progressives and other radical leftists he identifies, he has every incentive to not give them an optics win. Approach Rufo in a bar with no other people and make the same argument, he'd be far more amenable to it, I suspect.
The proper conclusion is "Jefferson was a racist, but not all racism is as bad as you think it is". But "racism isn't as bad as you think it is" is a taboo position, regardless of its truth. Robinson knows this, which is why he built the questioning around racism in the first place, and which makes it fundamentally dishonest.
Rufo himself declared CRT to be wrong on everything. Robinson was challenging him precisely on the question of what they had gotten wrong when they described the Founding Fathers as racist. How is Robinson supposed to engage with Rufo on the validity of his claims about CRT if not by challenging something as basic as this?
Only a certain kind of literalist on the Internet thinks being wrong "about everything" means literally every single thing, rather than being wrong about major implications in typical cases.
"They are literally right that Jefferson is racist, but they are wrong in what this implies about how we should treat Jefferson" is, by normie standards, being wrong about Jefferson.
"The Founding Fathers were racist" is not a trivial statement in this case. It is very much an important idea that both sides grapple with in their critiques and rebuttals of said critiques. I don't know how you can say that this is a case of "Internet literalism" when it's a crucial point in the CRT edifice. Hell, this is literally one of the basis facts of the 1619 project. Rufo would 100% deliberately trash this because it constitutes a major attack on his stance.
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Yes.
The proper lesson to learn is not to share a society with people who play these sorts of games. Conversations that start with the other side possessing absolute control over the terms aren't worth having, and Blues have demonstrated an abundant variety of methods for how to terminate conversations one considers unproductive.
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Rufo was an impossible position. He was being asked to defend "a racist can still be a good person", which is true but against the current religion.
It's like 500 years ago, when church people were debating what to do about the ancient Greeks and Romans. The ancients were clearly atheist or pagan. Obviously this meant their works were evil and must be banned. Therefore, much like Rufo, people employed mental gymnastics to give the ancients a pass based on "different standards of the time". Dante placed them in the first circle of hell (the least bad one) along with unbaptised babies.
Rufo is smart enough not to say the blasphemous words. Better inconsistent than deplorable.
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I'm trying to see where we disagree here. Perhaps I phrased it poorly. Yes, Christians and Rufo are the on the same side here. In both cases, they are deflecting.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the position of the Christians was that Aristotle was a virtuous person, therefore had he been exposed to Jesus's teachings, he would have been a Christian. It's not his fault he was born too early. "See he's not really an atheist, he's a Christian just waiting to get out". But no, Aristotle was not a proto-Christian.
Likewise, Rufo is trying for the line of "Jefferson's wasn't really a racist". But no, he really was a racist, and that doesn't make him evil.
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But what if these moments of revelation aren’t real? As you say, you’re mind reading. What I dislike about verbal confrontation is that it’s easy for the whole thing to go off the rails, not because you’re wrong, but because you didn’t think quickly enough in response to being attacked from an unexpected direction, or you failed to notice a sly trap being inserted into the conversation three responses ago. It’s why Schopenhauer argued for never admitting defeat in an argument - just because you don’t have a response this second doesn’t mean you’re wrong, you might think of a counter argument in another couple of seconds.
Personally, I think there are benefits to verbal interchange - it’s much easier to pick up on confusions and misunderstandings - but if you’re going to use it for serious enquiry then it has to be relaxed, slow and capable of taking a break at any time. In the majority of cases I would rather have duelling essays.
Yes, of course this is a risk, and in picking out my examples I tried to avoid instances that could plausibly be interpreted as what you describe. I never claimed that verbal confrontation is better than everything! My praise was fairly limited to just a few aspects.
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Agreed. This is the basis for Nominal Group Technique in which decisions are made by people writing down their ideas and then having them read anonymously.
A person who is charismastic, quick-witted, or intimidating can win a debate even if their ideas are poor. Winning debates in real life is mostly just about busting the frame anyway. That's why political candidates never actual answer the questions given to them, but just grandstand. And it's why they go over their time to deprive their opponents the chance to grandstand.
Imagine Ben Shapiro vs. Scott Alexander. Ben would destroy Scott in a debate, but Scott is the far better thinker. Heck, even Donald Trump could probably "beat" Scott in a debate.
I dont get people's obsession with Ben Shapiro. He's a savage culture warrior for sure, but claiming he's dumb is just kinda outright insane. He's clearly brilliant in his own sort of way. And I think his performance in a debate with Scott, setting aside his machine gun style, would highly depend on the topic. Some of Scott's positions are more well reasoned than others. Some of Ben's are more or less.
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Yes, but why have them debate when you saw how good Scott's questions for the 2016 candidates were? I want to hear Bush address whether Barbara Bush was a genius or if there were many better candidates than him.
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Donald Trump would steamroll Ben Shapiro in a debate with no contest. Charisma and presence matter a lot more when it comes to debates than written essays, (I'd honestly rather read an essay by Trump than Shapiro to be honest), and Trump is far better at that than Ben Shapiro could ever be.
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This would really depend on the moderation style. It's like with interviewing, there are interviewers whose style is to keep the guest talking, so they lob softball questions when the guest starts to run dry. There are interviewers whose style is about putting the guest on the spot, so they keep cycling back to the same question if the guest is evasive.
If the debate was led by a hardball moderator, busting the frame would no longer be a winning tactic.
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I have no idea what racists means. You need more specific. Do I believe on average blacks are better athletes and whites are smarter. Yes. Was my last love and almost married black like Jefferson. Yes.
Is racism believing in not believing in genetics and everyone has the same endowments? Or does it mean you judge people on their own abilities?
This is a funny thing he said.
The blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind."
I guarantee nobody whose well a KKK member believes that. Or a HBD person.
I agree! That would've been a great clarifying question for Rufo to ask.
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