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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Yes, I think you're generally correct to flag me here as 'just being honest' isn't a great excuse for being so transgressive, though most of the rest of what you wrote doesn't apply in this case I think. This isn't an instance of me wanting to say mean things about a group.

Nor is my issue with 'black people' so much as... look, I'm having sincere trouble finding terminology that gets the idea across without being legitimately interpreted as 'antagonistic'. There's a continuum problem. "Human" is a fuzzy category and largely in the eye of the beholder. Is a gorilla which speaks sign language human? What about Lucy (A. afarensis)? Primitive Tanzanians who discovered fire, then lost the secret and apparently reverted to the lifestyle of other hominids generally not recognized as human?

Skin color is not especially interesting to me. But I agree that the language about human/non-human is inflammatory and doesn't really get the point across, so I'll try to refrain from it in the future. My sincere apologies.

There is a quality which is something along the lines of 'capacity for moral responsibility' that generally (but not perfectly) correlates with IQ and which I think is localized entirely within select groups of ancestries and almost entirely men. These embody and sustain priceless phenomena ranging from how they experience and perceive the world to cultural inheritances. This heritage is inestimably valuable, fragile, and, increasingly, endangered.

My take on 'humans' outside of those groups is that they're something more like children than like non-humans. The trouble, of course, is that they generally don't have the capacity to grow into members of those groups. So they're something else, a third category between children and animals. Something more like permanently disabled children which are helpful dependents at best and, if they get strong and numerous enough, serious existential threats to the system and individuals within it. Their existences are often improved by domestication (honest question: is that word okay? I feel like it's exactly the one I want, no shade) and in the process they can participate in the grand project and enjoy in many of its fruits.

Meanwhile, inability to see this picture clearly or even discuss it intelligibly is one of the greatest threats to the Good and I'm at great pains to figure out how to articulate it.

So that's the perspective, more or less.

I am not sure how to give you guidelines for how you can argue that blacks and women are incapable of functioning as fully sentient adults with agency, which seems to be what you're asking for. I mean, your post above would not, IMO, break any rules, much as I disagree with it. But I would suggest that if you want to argue that black people cannot and should not be free citizens and need to be "domesticated" to keep them in line, or that women should be property (not sure if that is your position, but it has been the position of some other posters), well, we've allowed those arguments, but it matters a lot how you say it.

"I don't think women are actually fully capable of expressing agency the same way men are" - probably okay. "Women don't have agency" - not okay.

"I question whether blacks are capable of building a fully functional civilization on their own" - probably okay. "Blacks are animals" - not okay.

Now, some of our critics will be quick to say "Aha! It really is just about using MOAR WORDS!" But it isn't. It's about expressing some epistemic humility, or put another way, allowing for the possibility that you might be wrong. And at least pretending that you believe those people are people who have a right to disagree with you.

If you said the first thing - "I question whether blacks are capable of building a fully functional civilization on their own" - a black poster here, assuming they were willing to engage, has something to engage with. They can disagree with your premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask you why you think that.... But what is a black person supposed to say to "You're an animal"?

So look my response here (the one I'm writing at the moment) is not intended as a petulant argument, but I feel a bit frustrated and I'm trusting you to interpret it in the spirit in which I mean it, and thanks in advance for taking the time.

First things first, I appreciate the ethos you're laying out here. As I understand it, this space functions based upon an axiom that anyone should be able to participate in good faith without having to suffer what amount to unnecessary indications of being unwelcome. If someone is of the opinion that entire classes of people are fundamentally incapable of participating in valid ways, that's a problem, because The Motte takes as axiomatic that people of all classes should be welcome to participate as they're able and those who disagree damage the capacity of the site to fulfill that function.

I think this is basically good and right. Not for reasons of niceness, but for reasons of epistemic humility, as you say. It's all too easy for any of us to be flatly wrong about something if for no other reason than because we've simply never encountered someone who could have corrected us if we'd bothered to discuss the matter with them. And, particularly when it comes to evaluating such matters as the one under discussion at the moment (to what degree long-divergent ancestral groups should be considered as belonging in the same class), it's intuitively very important that those of the ancestral groups in question have as much of a chance at participation as possible in order to maximize the chances of this happening.

So far, so good.

"Blacks are animals" - not okay.

Arguendo that was my position (it wasn't; see below), how about "I think blacks are animals"? It's a useful test case because we get to the heart of whether the issue is with the opinion or the phrasing. Though FWIW, again, I think the term 'animals' here was a poor choice which generates vastly more heat than light, at least without defining it in detail and in ways that would probably trigger a lot of disagreement per se.

It's about... at least pretending that you believe those people are people who have a right to disagree with you.

I just don't think I ran afoul of this, is the thing. If I say that I don't think eight year olds (and those who are mentally at that level regardless of their adult bodies) generally don't have the capacity to function as responsible adults, I doubt anyone would react with horror and disgust, and I also think the difference is entirely political. Similar opinions about women and, er, genetically-less-mentally-developed ancestral groups were nothing if not mainstream and considered prima facie obvious not too long ago and for most of human history.

Yeah, saying that is gonna upset some eight year olds, who are a lot less likely to participate precisely because they are juvenile and react accordingly. And I'll even allow that somewhere out there are a few who would make better citizens than many existing citizens. But it would be crazy to object to the observation on those grounds. And the "I think" in the claim is qualifier enough, in my opinion, or in the case of my OP, "I call it". Hedging my statements like that is a practice I picked up here, actually, for exactly the reason that signaling epistemic humility by doing so is useful for the tone of the space and even as a little reminder to myself. I've gotten lazy about it, so again, I concede that you had grounds for correcting me.

If you said the first thing - "I question whether blacks are capable of building a fully functional civilization on their own" - a black poster here, assuming they were willing to engage, has something to engage with. They can disagree with your premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask you why you think that...

All good and well.

But what is a black person supposed to say to "You're an animal"?

They can disagree with my premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask me why I think that...

In short, they can behave exactly as I'd expect myself to behave. Or, if they can't, well?

Finally, and I realize this is likely to come off as splitting hairs but I wasn't talking about 'black people', and frankly I sincerely doubt that any of the people I was talking about would ever show up here in the first place for the same reason that eight year olds don't. (Perfectly-lovely and intelligent black people do show up here from time to time and I consider a couple of them friends and hang out in other spaces and even occasionally go to one for advice on medical issues.) I'm talking about comparatively-genetically-mentally-incapable people. In this particular case, heavy overlap with black, yes. But slavery is not a uniquely black issue and neither is being what amounts to a feral savage who will behave as such regardless of attempts at forcible civilization. In any event there's enough admixture at this point that blanket statements about SSH-descended inhabitants of the US are a lot less appropriate than they were two hundred years ago.

So -- I guess I just want to get the above off my chest. This isn't really an objection to anything you said in particular, I again acknowledge your correction, and (hopefully obviously) I don't intend any kind of gotcha argument. It's just a difficult situation. I'm glad to be in a place where we're at least trying to navigate such a thicket together in good faith.

Without trying to get bogged down in debating the specific claims you are (or aren't) making, I think the basic problem here is the way you expressed yourself, because yes, often it is about the wording. Because this place is explicitly tone policed and not content policed, tone is important. Consider the difference between "You're fat" and "I'm concerned about your health." Arguably they are communicating the same message, but one is being insulting without regard for how it's received, and the other is at least pretending to be offered with good intentions.

So with regards to saying "You're an animal," okay, I suppose a black person could, as you say, politely debate the proposition that they are an animal and not a human being, but I don't think anyone would deny that calling someone an animal is straightforwardly an insult. People here are expected to engage politely even with opinions they strongly disagree with and find offensive, but they are not expected to accept being told they're subhuman.

Granting that that wasn't exactly what you meant, if you want to discuss specific subsets of the population which happen to be majority black and argue that they are, essentially, subhuman, you can do that if you take the trouble to qualify your statement with behaviors you believe justify such a categorization, but you cannot just make a broad generalization about "blacks." Given that two mods read your original post as saying "Blacks are animals," it's fine if you want to walk that back a little, but hopefully you see why it matters what words you use.

Given that two mods read your original post as saying "Blacks are animals," it's fine if you want to walk that back a little

FWIW I do -- I still call it husbandry, and mainly used the term 'animal husbandry' because people have no idea what the hell I mean by the former without gesturing at the latter. It's the same kind of husbandry men have for women, children, and domestic animals. My error was in recklessly implying that less-human hominids fit squarely into that last category when, as I say, I think they're somewhere in-between.

Obviously that is going to come off as insulting, though I think it's grounds for a really good conversation at some point if I can figure out how to present it appropriately.

There's a continuum problem. "Human" is a fuzzy category and largely in the eye of the beholder.

There is not a continuum problem, and "human" is not a fuzzy category largely in the eyes of the beholder. Awareness, sense-of-self, language, volition and Will are obvious and inescapably significant, despite more than a century of extremely popular lies to the contrary. The evidence you are gesturing at simply does not exist, and claims to the contrary have long been established as lies that no one bothers to maintain or defend any more.

Is a gorilla which speaks sign language human?

There are not, nor have there been, any gorillas that can speak sign language. Claims to the contrary appear to be a more elaborate form of Clever Hans, and more generally yet another example of how Psychology and Sociology are grifts that have polluted our society for more than a century.

What about Lucy (A. afarensis)?

We have no observations of Lucy's behavior or capabilities one way or the other. What we can observe is current humans, and the observation shows that while their capabilities may differ, the cluster is still significant and very, very well-separated from all other animals.

There is a quality which is something along the lines of 'capacity for moral responsibility' that I think is generally localized entirely within select groups of ancestries and almost entirely men.

I observe capacity for moral responsibility in my wife, and in the females of my family generally. They make choices and live with the results. That does not mean there is a difference in how they think versus how I and the males in my family think, but the difference is not a matter of "greater" and "lesser" in the way you seem to be claiming.

If domestication is a thing, it is a thing that all humans require. I can identify ways in which I myself have been "domesticated", how my instincts and desires have been shaped away from raw selfishness and self-gratification toward responsibility and care for others. in this sense, I see no way to argue that domestication is something white men do to white women in particular and blacks generally. In other senses, I cannot see support for an argument that "domestication" exists at all.

Well, firstly, thanks, because now I feel like we're having a good, interesting, and productive conversation.

What do you think about Alex the parrot, who (allegedly, and feel free to object) combined words to make neologisms?

And what's your take on humans with nasty FOXP2 mutations such that, uh, let me grab a quote,

FOXP2 came to light through the discovery by Jane Flurst, an English geneticist, of an unusual London family whose existence she reported in 1990. The family consists of three generations. Of the 37 members old enough to be tested, 15 have a severe language deficit. Their speech is hard to understand, and they themselves have difficulty comprehending the speech of others. If asked to repeat a phrase like "pattaca pattaca pattaca," they will stumble over each word as if it were entirely new. They have difficulty with a standard test of the ability to form past tenses of verbs ("Every day I wash my clothes, yesterday I ___ my clothes"; four-year-olds will say "washed" as soon as they get the idea). They have problems in writing as well as speaking. The affected members of the family have been given intensive speech training but mostly hold jobs where not much talking is required. "Their speech is difficult to understand, particularly over the telephone, or if the context is not known. In a group of family members it is hard for you to pick up the pieces of the conversation, which is difficult to follow because many of the words are not correctly pronounced," says Faraneh Vargha-Khadem of the Institute of Child Health in London.55

Some of the first linguists to study the affected family members believed [Page 48] their problem was specific to grammar but Vargha-Khadem has shown that it is considerably wider. Affected members have trouble in articulation, and the muscles of their lower face, particularly the upper lip, are relatively immobile.

It could be argued that their defect stemmed from some general malfunction in the brain, which was not specific to language. But the IQ scores of the affected members, though low, fell in a range (59 to 91) that overlapped with that of the unaffected members (84 to 119).56 The core deficit, Vargha-Khadem concluded, is "one that affects the rapid and precise coordination of orofacial [mouth and face] movements, including those required for the sequential articulation of speech sounds."57

The affected members of the KE family, as it is known, have each inherited a single defective gene from their grandmother. They provide the results of an experiment that no one would even contemplate doing in humans, but which nature has performed nonetheless — what happens if you disable a critical speech gene? And the one disabled in the KE family seems to operate at such a sophisticated level that it looks as if it were one of the last genes to be put in place as the faculty of language was perfected.

In 1998 a team of geneticists at Oxford University in England set out to identify the defective gene by analyzing the genome of KE family members. Their method was to look for segments of DNA that the affected members shared and the unaffected lacked. The Oxford team soon narrowed the cause of the problem to a region on chromosome 7, the seventh of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in which the human genome is packaged. Within this region lay more than 70 genes, and it seemed that it would take several years to study each gene and see which one was responsible. But Hurst then turned up a new patient with the same rare set of symptoms. The patient, a boy, had a break in his chromosome 7 that disrupted one of the genes in the section the Oxford team was studying. It was an easy task to identify which of the new patient's genes had been broken. It was a gene known as forkhead box P2, or FOXP2 for short.58

The Oxford geneticists, Cecilia Lai, Simon Fisher and Anthony Monaco, then analyzed all 267,000 DNA units in the FOXP2 genes of the KE family members. In all the affected members, and in none of the normal members, just one of these letters was changed from a G to an A (the four different kinds of chemical units in DNA are known for short as A, T, G and C). The [Page 49] switch to an A at this site in the gene meant that in the protein molecule specified by the gene, a unit that should have been an arginine was changed to a histidine (proteins are made up of 20 different kinds of units, known as amino acids, of which arginine, and histidine are two).59

How could a single mutation in a gene cause such a wide range of effects? The FOX family of genes makes agents known as transcription factors, which operate at a high level of the cell's control system. The agents bind to DNA and in doing so control the activity, or transcription, of many other genes. FOXP2 is active during fetal development in specific parts of the brain, and the protein transcription factor it makes probably helps wire up these brain regions correctly for language. Brain scans of affected KE family members seemed normal at first glance but a more sophisticated type of scan has shown they have considerably fewer neurons than usual in Broca's area, one of the two brain regions known to be involved in language, and more neurons than usual in the other region, known as Wernicke's area.60

I don't think capacity for language is magic and I don't think it's a good yardstick for humanity. And I don't think awareness, sense-of-self, or volition are uniquely human either. As it happens I work with animals and have a lot of time to consider this. Their internal experiences are indeed very different from ours, but not, I think, in the ways you're proposing.

What do you think about Alex the parrot, who (allegedly, and feel free to object) combined words to make neologisms?

I don't think about Alex the parrot at all. To my knowledge, no parrot has ever used their language to organize a rebellion against their human owners, something human slaves have done repeatedly. By language, I am not referring to words, but rather to the ability of humans to communicate their internal state to others, to build communicable models of the world that coordinate large-scale cooperative action. Neither parrots nor other animals do that.

I'm not sure what your excerpt about genetic defects is supposed to communicate.

I don't think capacity for language is magic and I don't think it's a good yardstick for humanity.

Whether it is "magic" is an interesting question. I'll agree that it alone is not a good yardstick for humanity; large language models are not human and I don't care much about them. I care about language because it interpenetrates and mutually amplifies the rest of the items on that list. Language, in the sense I am using it, is one of the reasons tyranny is not sustainable: people can formulate moral arguments, and those moral arguments retain weight. They can make blood-guilt immortal beyond the imagining of any individual human, and are part of why justice is, in every practical sense, inescapable.

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