This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

Shaming.
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
Recruiting for a cause.
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad 5d ago · Edited 5d ago

That is a particular goal you're putting your definitions in service of. If defining something changes how you sense the world around you

You keep criticizing me for how I argue with progressives without understanding where they're coming from, but you're not really practicing what you preach. Instead of listening to how I see and use definitions, it sounds like you're a lot more interested in telling me how I should see and use them.

I'm trying to tell you - it doesn't change how I sense the world around me. I can substitute my definitions for yours, or anyone else's, and the way I see the world will stay the same. It's useful to have symbols in order to reason about reality, but what what symbols are assigned for what is not a big deal, I can do substitutions in my head with little effort.

Either that statement uses my definition of "man" and "woman," in which case it's false, or it's using your own, in which case it completely fails to communicate any information.

Ok, maybe I misunderstood something you said, let's go over this again:

It doesn't matter whether we live under TradCath divinely ordained gender-complementarity, uno-reverso Amazonian matriarchy, or full-blown egalitarianism, my definition of "man" and "woman" stays exactly the same. My views on what their rights and duties are may vary, but a man is a man under TradCathism, matriarchy, or egalitarianism, and a woman is a woman under all 3 as well.

Then you have confused the map for the territory. There's no point litigating what a "man" and a "woman" is just to change an entry in a dictionary. A definition is a tool, constructed to serve some particular personal or social end. If your definitions do not change when your goals and understanding of the world do, they are useless. If your definitions do not influence how you think and act, they are useless. Definitions do not exist in an abstract void-- they are the cognitive tools with which we understand and classify the world, so we can come to particular decisions and conclusions.

I said my definition of "man"/"woman" is independent of the social order I, or the person in question, is living under. Your response seems to be arguing that this makes my entire approach to definitions wrong, because if what I don't change what I consider to be a "man" or "woman" depending on the social order I'm under, that makes those definitions useless. I don't know what other conclusion to draw from that, other than that a useful approach to definition necessitates that the same person can be a man in one social order and a woman in another. If you didn't mean to say that, than I honestly don't know what your response has to do with what I said.

What?

Let's say you tell me "I'm for equality between the sexes", and because I'm cynical by nature, I don't believe you and suspect that this is something you want only for your own benefit. But then I see you advocating for something that would put you at a disadvantage, and benefit the opposite sex. That's an indication that I haven't met you where you are, and I should adjust my perception of you.

Policies are a means to an end, not an end in and of themselves. Obviously once you decide on an end, then it makes sense to talk about policies, but until then it's pointless.

Your argument went:

In order to talk about policies, I need to first talk about what I mean by "man" and "woman".
But before talking about that we need to talk about what goals we're trying to achieve by creating those definitions.

If policies are a means to an end, and definitions are explicitly created is services of particular ends (see also: "A definition is a tool, constructed to serve some particular personal or social end.") then decoupling definitions from policies is a largely fruitless task. The only people who can have a productive conversation this way, are people who already signed on for the same end goals (except they won't even kno.

and the glib little propaganda piece you linked falls into the exact same failure state.

I don't see how. People should be able to answer a simple question like regardless of their preferred policies, or the end goals they're trying to reach. My views on this issue are more or less opposite to yours, we have to start with the definitions, in order to make sure we're even talking about the same thing. From there we can try to find out if we agree or disagree on questions of end goals or the means to achieve them.

Okay, let's do that.

On the issue of sports, my position is that the differences in reproductive biology correlate with a whole swath of physical capabilities, such that putting the group with one set of reproductive characteristics against another, will put one of them at a massive disadvantage, and physical danger.

On the issue of prison much the same arguments apply, except on top of them there's the risk of not only physically maligning prisoners of a group with certain reproductive characteristics, but subjecting them to the risk of sexual assault.

On the topic of medical interventions, I believe they need to be stopped because they don't meet basic medical ethics standards. People are being encouraged to participate in what is effectively a medical experiment, without being informed that this is what they're signing up for. This is particularly egregious when it comes to children, but even cases of adults aren't ethically in the clear.

The transgender debate touches on many other issues like education or parental custody, but this should be enough to demonstrate that what you said about definitions is wrong. I argue for my views even with the words tabooed, and it makes no difference to me what definitions we use.

And I don't think a non-catholic government has the correct moral authority to legislate what sports teams do to make money or who's allowed in which bathrooms based off a non-catholic, non-consensus over gender and what the purpose of defining it is.

Governments have been legislating on what people are allowed to do to make money, and how, since we had governments. Unless you're a hardcore libertarian or an ancap, I will need some more meat on the argument for why this is where we must draw the line on government intervention.

m not sure, because doing that requires us to exchange actual information first. I think we're arguing on completely different levels because we can't agree on terminology.

I don't think we've been arguing over the meaning of any particular word.

Context

GaBeRockKing ArjinFerman 3d ago · Edited 1d ago

I’ve decided to stop spaghetti posting because it’s making it miserable to respond in a coherent fashion. If in the process I fail to address what you consider a major point, please bring it back up again.

Part 1 - definitions, perceptions

You accuse me, first, of hypocrisy-- of not understanding how you create definitions, even as I accuse you of not understanding the gender-ideologist’s position. I would instead characterize that as disagreement. I think either we are using the same word (‘definition’) to point at two separate topics, or your definition of ‘definition’ rests on an incoherent theory of mind and therefore incomplete self-understanding.

Let me try to describe your position as best as possible:

The words we use to describe concepts are arbitrary, but concepts themselves have a fixed, platonic nature-- at least, on a personal level. There is an objective standard for ‘car’, ‘blue’, and ‘man’, regardless of what words you use to describe them. Even if you were magically transported into a society where there was no distinction between road and sidewalk, and therefore no need to designate “bike lanes” and “car lanes”, you would still perceive the existence of ‘cars’ and ‘pedestrians’-- you would still classify the respective groups accordingly-- and you would still want to use the terms ‘car’ and ‘bike’ or some sort of uniquely-identifying equivalent, even if you were speaking in another language. Therefore, the definition of ‘car’ is whatever you perceive to be a ‘car’, and it makes absolutely no sense to talk about changing definitions.

Now, let me describe mine;

The human brain is a supervised classifier at the level of neurotransmitter feedback that ties together sense-impressions into useful behaviors. Seeing the letters C-A-R, hearing the sound /kɑɹ/, passing your hand over smooth metal, observing a precise number of wheels, hearing the rumble of an engine-- all of those things exist on an independent and more fundamental level than the concept we call ‘car’. But through repetition, our minds group those things together, such that when the network for “four wheels” fires, the networks for “engine rumble” and “C-A-R” also fire. And in particular, we discover that the same process happens to the people we talk to-- if we say “car” they’re also likely to bring up wheels and engines and metal because they’ve also pattern-matched to the same stimuli.

Except for some reason, people keep riding their bicycles on the highway and claiming they’re riding their cars. You try to explain to them the importance of the four wheels, and the metal, and the engine. They rebut with nonsense about training wheels, and bamboo and the flintstones. You challenge them to coherently define “car” and they mumble something about how any vehicle can be a car if they want it to be-- and for that matter, a car can be any other type of vehicle, too. They call you a reactionary for wanting to keep cars off of sidewalks, and in turn you come away from the experience thinking these people are indoctrinated idiots spewing the propaganda of their shadowy windmill-loving political elite.

In the end, nothing serves to change your grouping of related concepts-- your ‘definition.’ in its most fundamental sense. You come away from the experience thinking your definition is immutable.

Except it’s not! The brain is a flexible thing. If you committed to using the word ‘car’ to apply to every vehicle on the highway, and ‘bike’ to apply to every vehicle on the sidewalk, you could easily shuffle your groupings around. You’d still want to refer to your original concepts occasionally… for example, if you’re talking to a mechanic, you need to specify whether you’re having problems with your two-wheeled-pedal-vehicle or your four-wheeled-engine-vehicle. But it would be entirely doable to change your definitions.

Except… why would you want to?

Even if you concede that cars can drive on sidewalks and bikes on the highway, why would you want them to trigger the same networks in your brain? Wouldn’t you prefer to keep them separate, so that when the “car” network triggers the “danger” network is appropriately stimulated, rather than being offset by association with less-dangerous vehicles?

You can concede that your definition is not necessarily immutable, but at the very least it must be immutable to be functional. And additionally, you can only explain these people with apparently non-functional definitions by pointing to either malice or stupidity. And for that, you support your position by pointing to their insane policy prescriptions-- requiring a driver’s license to ride a bike??? Ridiculous! So definitions (whether a bike is a car), policy (whether a car can drive on the sidewalk), and goals (being stupid/evil) become inextricable.

But the reason I’m so insistent about separating definition-policy-goals is because the conclusion you’re drawing rests on unfounded assumptions about their goals. You’re assessing bad-definition bad-policy by comparing them to your goals.

Imagine if you wanted a society with wider sidewalks, narrower roads, and harsh speed limits on both. In such a society, there might still be different prescriptions of how the people in each environment might drive. For example, road-bound vehicles might be expected to always go in a predictable direction and speed, while sidewalk-bound vehicles are afforded the right to start and stop at leisure. But it becomes wholly conceivable for a vehicle to move on and off the sidewalk at its owner’s leisure, so long as it follows the applicable laws and customs in both locations.

Or alternatively, imagine wishing for a society with a wide gradation between roads and sidewalks, each with their own idiosyncratic rules, such that any individual vehicle-user has a variety of choices for how they want to drive at any given point.

Either of those goals might lead you to adopt definitions of ‘bikes’ and ‘cars’ that allow bikes to be cars, and vica-versa, because it’s more useful for you think in terms of, “is this vehicle following highway or sidewalk customs?” than in terms of “does this vehicle have four wheels and a motor?” Either of those goals could lead you to controversial policy prescriptions about where cars and bikes are allowed to go. But they’re still very different goals-- and in any case, trying to talk to someone that has those goals about how “obviously things would be safer for bikes if cars weren’t allowed on sidewalks” is just going to be mutually frustrating. They’ll say something to the effect of, “of course it’s dangerous to have a self-identified car on the sidewalk… but I don’t see why self-identified bikes are obviously perfectly welcome.” You call them an idiot, they call you a bigot, everyone walks away mad. I smugly nod, having correctly assessed your mutual incomprehensibility.

Except… maybe they really are stupid and/or evil. Maybe you really were addressing their actual goals. I admit that the end result would still look the same-- mutual disgust, and an end to discussion. So I can’t claim, prima facie, that your inability to productively talk to cyclists-- I mean, gender-ideologists, is evidence of your beliefs about them being wrong. If we were having the same discussion about, say, flat-earthers, I’d accept that the other group really is too dumb to talk too. Why disagree here?

Well, the short answer is… personal experience. The gender-ideologists I’ve talked to just aren’t like that. Speaking just of the people I’ve met in person-- the trans people I meet tend to be troubled, but decent people. The progressives get a little hysterical sometimes, but otherwise they’re pretty OK. I admit that I don’t really expect too much from them anyways because they’re atheists/heretics anyways, but in terms of personal virtual they’re really not very far from the catholics I know. And speaking of the people I’ve met online-- and here I’m referring mostly to /r/slatestarcodex and some very interesting discussions I had on my alt-account at PurplePillDebate--the egalitarian-feminists I talked to argued from coherent principles and goals that I could tell incidentally lead to their view of gender ideology. (We weren’t actually talking about transgenderism, by-the-by, which was what made the discussion particularly interesting as a look into the substrate on which transgenderism could be reasonable derived from. I think the substrate was wrong of course, but that’s because I believe in God.)

There’s no doubt in my mind that plenty of gender-ideologists are stupid and malicious. The same is true of people who support traditional gender roles! I might share my definition of “man and women” with viking-obsessed neo-pagan neo-nazi, and even agree on a number of policy prescriptions, but our goals are very much distinct.

So seeing reasonable people in the gender-ideologist camp and unreasonable people in the traditionalist camp… I’m just inclined to believe in my null hypothesis. That being: that they’re just people like everyone else. That their intelligence/morality bell curves largely reflect the bell curves of the general population. That their goals, while alien to mine, are not some evil monolith designed to squash me flat.

So with reference to your original question-- “What would the world have to look like for you to change your mind” I suppose statistical evidence of lower intelligence + higher criminality correlating to increased support for gender-ideologists views would cause me to update my views.

Part 2 - Government Intervention

I’ll start by characterizing myself as a neoliberal, rather than a libertarian. It’s true that I don’t take a full, “no steppy snake” position… I’m pro-having-a-government even though I accept that governments are basically just machines that turn the violation of natural rights into security. People have a right to bear arms, but I still want to make any weapon small enough to concealed-carry too ludicrously expensive for the average person to own. (People should be able to own missiles, not pistols. An AR-15 is enough to defend your home, and a tank is enough to overthrow your government.) People have a right to property, and taxation is theft, but I’m still pro-theft when that money is spent on maintaining my roads.

But in general, I still believe in the aphorism that a person’s right to swing their fist ends where another person’s nose begins-- and I believe the justified role of the government is to prevent nose-hitting, not fist-swinging. It’s often impossible to do one without the other, but I just don’t see how that applies to transgender procedures and medicines? If you choose to hurt yourself… okay? It’s not like taking drugs, where by hurting yourself, you become more likely to hurt other people too. Well, I guess taking testosterone specifically is a little like that, but also we just allow men to walk around with high test levels anyways so it doesn’t seem like an issue. Regarding sports-- you implicitly agree to a level of danger by participating in a sporting event, mediated by the rules. Whether female athletes want to agree to the dangers of male involvement is up to them. Whether sporting organizations want to set the danger level at a particular point is up to market incentives. Either way, there’s no place for the government to intervene… unless it’s funding the sport for some reason, which it shouldn’t be doing anyways. (I voted against a recent stadium tax in my municipal elections.)

It’s reasonable for the government to set up guardrails when it comes to medicine. And verifying that patients (and if applicable, the parents) are giving informed consent and that the drug or procedure given will be successful at giving it to them is extremely non-trivial. I suspect a “perfect” implementation of the system would result in a lot fewer minors ultimately getting medically transitioned. But I don’t think the government should prevent people from inflicting what I would consider to be harm on themselves. People should have a right to cut off their limbs if they can prove they really, truly want to. (They shouldn’t have a right to accept disability payments after but that’s a separate discussion.)

And yes, it’s true that you and I were able to discuss this issue without reference to the definitions of “man” and “woman”, but that’s because we more-or-less agree on those definitions in the first place, and additionally agree that it would be personally immoral to crossdress and go into women’s bathrooms. Therefore our disagreement probably hinges on the definition of “government” and “intervention” and “right” instead, and we will almost certainly go around in circles if we aren’t careful about making sure we’re talking about the same things.

ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad GaBeRockKing 1d ago · Edited 1d ago

Don't get me wrong, a disagreement between us most likely exists as well, but if you understood my position you'd be able to describe it in terms I would recognize as accurate, and you haven't really done that yet. This is much broader than the disagreement over my approach to definitions, so far, whenever a second person pronoun was followed by a description of an idea or behavior it has failed to match thoughts I have or approaches I take, which is why I believe you don't understand where I'm coming from. You've been informed of that repeatedly, and instead of trying to correct any misunderstanding between us, you're confidently claiming I lack self-understanding. It's quite clear you're not living up to your own standard here.

Funnily enough the position you describe as yours is much closer to mine than the one you describe as mine. I don't believe there's anything fixed, or platonic about concepts, and if I depend on "objectivity" of any kind it's only to the extent I believe there's a physical reality external to us, which doesn't much care what we think of it. You're right that the lack of various lanes and sidewalks would not affect how I see vehicles and pedestrians, but I hold that you're wrong it makes no sense to talk about changing definitions. Definitions are necessary to express ideas, and if you're using the word "car" in some other way than I am, it's pointless to fight over who has the "correct" definition (and I'm pretty sure you were making that point yourself), and much easier to just switch over to yours, express my ideas with your concepts, and make-do with pointing fingers at objects when all else fails.

I like the idea of the brain as a supervised classifier, nothing you said about the mutability of definitions goes much against anything I believe, and I don't think there's any one true way to classify things, but where it falls flat for me is the insistence that definitions are derived from goals. I believe that not only is it possible to have the same goal while having different definitions, or different goals while having the same definitions, I believe it's not even possible to talk about goals, unless you have a set of coherent definitions to begin with.

You call them an idiot, they call you a bigot,

maybe they really are stupid and/or evil.

There’s no doubt in my mind that plenty of gender-ideologists are stupid and malicious.

That's great, but the words "stupid", "evil" and "malicious" never left my virtual mouth, so you've been essentially talking to yourself throughout the train of thought. This was a particularly egregious example of not meeting me where I am.

If you choose to hurt yourself… okay? It’s not like taking drugs, where by hurting yourself, you become more likely to hurt other people too.

So to take another example, if a patient goes to a doctor and asks for an opioid prescription, not because he's sick, not because's he's in any sort of unbearable pain, but because it will make him feel good, and the doctor runs his clinic by the motto "the customer is always right", ~~you'd see absolutely nothing wrong with that~~ edit: you would not see that as a valid case for government intervention?

It’s reasonable for the government to set up guardrails when it comes to medicine. And verifying that patients (and if applicable, the parents) are giving informed consent and that the drug or procedure given will be successful at giving it to them is extremely non-trivial. I suspect a “perfect” implementation of the system would result in a lot fewer minors ultimately getting medically transitioned.

I don't think you have to go as far as "perfect". A very basic implementation of the system would result it that, and it would likely limit many adult transitions as well.

And yes, it’s true that you and I were able to discuss this issue without reference to the definitions of “man” and “woman”, but that’s because we more-or-less agree on those definitions in the first place

If you believe that having a discussion this way requires to have the same definitions in the first place, why did you say this:

If you taboo'd the words 'man,' 'woman,' 'male,' and 'female,' you could actually have a productive discussion with leftists about whether people should be empowerd to advertise their sexual preferences via their mode of dress...

Therefore our disagreement probably hinges on the definition of “government” and “intervention” and “right” instead, and we will almost certainly go around in circles if we aren’t careful about making sure we’re talking about the same things.

I'm pretty sure I share the definitions for all of those 3 words with you and I simply disagree on whether government intervention is actually wrong in this instance, or whether people have a particular right. This is a good example of why it's backwards to claim that you need to have a goal in mind when creating a definition.

What is this place?

Why are you called The Motte?

New post guidelines

Rules

Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024