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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33302 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Looks like Dilbert is being pulled from newspapers following controversial remarks by its creator, Scott Adams https://www.foxnews.com/us/laid-off-newspapers-drop-office-cartoon-dilbert-over-creators-racial-remarks

Multiple newspapers have pulled the popular office comedy comic strip "Dilbert" after its creator Scott Adams made racist comments in his podcast, and then doubled down on them.

"If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with White people – according to this poll, not to me – that’s a hate group," Adams said during his "Coffee with Scott Adams" vlog, referring to a Rasmussen poll published this week. "That’s a hate group, and I don’t want anything to do with them."

"And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I can give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people," he continued, adding, "There is no fixing this … you just have to escape," which he said was why he moved to his current neighborhood that has "a very low Black population."

I don't think this is quite that big of deal personally. He has FU money and his brand/career at punditry keeps growing. I think his bigger risk would is being de-platformed from Youtube/Twitter. He don't need Dilbert anymore but he does need his Youtube and Twitter accounts.

I had no idea he was even making the Dilbert comics anymore. If pressed I'd have guessed he stopped some time in the early 2010s. I've read his blog on and off since the 2016 election and he almost never discussed Dilbert and when he did it had a decidedly in-the-past tense to the whole discussion.

I think his point was that if the races were reversed, no one would care.

It's not exactly a fresh point to make for anybody who was awake for the last 20 years or so. Everybody knows about this asymmetry and everybody has made up their minds about it. If you talk about memetic power, "It's OK to be white" is still unbeatable. He is not adding much to it, just riding the coattails. I don't know if he can do better, but if he can, he should.

stale, yes, but it got a lot of people talking about it, lots of twitter engagement, so probably a success nonetheless.

As a troll, yes, he is still a hugely successful one. I think he loves it, and why won't he?

Scott Adams seems to have updated quite strongly on a 1000 person poll, which included black people, over the nuance of who agreed with an apparent well known(?) racist dog whistle.

He decides from here that black people hate white people and that white people must get away from them. Then he hurls some fairly ready to go insults about black people in general that I guess he was just saving for this?

He seems as... crazed ... as usual here, but I do agree he's being taken out of context. He obviously feels betrayed because he thought of himself as a fierce advocate for black people (??) but learning that all black people might still have problems with all white people completely flipped him.

I'm trying to think of a more fair headline. Maybe: Dilbert creator decides black people are hate group after reading one small poll about a racist dog whistle, cautions white people to "get the fuck away" from black people.

He seems as... crazed ... as usual here, but I do agree he's being taken out of context.

Is he crazed? I think he might be a bit set off because he is upset about learning about the huge black bigotry problem that the less...influential set of online intellectuals have known about for decades. He also seems to just be vocalizing what people do anyways: move away from black people because they are violent and will make your life suck. From a post I read elsewhere, apparently he is taking a victory lap on that latter point now. His new claim is people are pretending to be angry because they agree with him. I personally have no insight into the inner workings of a white progressive that seeks out "good schools" for his/her children, but he is either correct, or simply underestimating the level of doublethink most people can hold.

huge black bigotry problem

This poll does not demonstrate that at all, because the slogan in question has become so loaded among people aware of the controversy.

I mean, you might say that, but its a pre-existing known issue. If this is the tripwire that opened his eyes, it is that.

The people looking for good schools are, I am fairly sure, actually looking for good schools. At least "good schools" as defined by helicopter parents and Tiger Moms. (Though as another poster on another forum pointed out, there are some who avoid districts with too many Asians because they don't think the resulting high-pressure high-homework environment is good; this is probably as racist as they get). That this strongly anti-correlates with black and Hispanic population is probably something they avoid thinking about.

The ones who are looking for "safety" are likely more of a mixed bag. I suspect it runs the gamut from those who simply assume black-and-Hispanic means dangerous to those who are aware of it and mildly embarrassed to those who are full crimestop and don't think about it.

Half of black Americans declined to say it was okay to be white. Yes, it was just one poll. But isn't that the only part of this story that can reasonably be labeled 'crazy'?

I've listened to him for a while off and on, IMO this is his usual schtick, to find a news item of interest and discuss it from a perspective of taking it maximally seriously. This leads to him frequently seeming to take contradictory positions. He's previously said things like, if Confederate statues make black people uncomfortable than we should indeed take them down, and take words they find offensive, i.e. the N word, out of our vocabulary, etc. I've never seen him approach things from a perspective of, my true worldview overall is X, is event Y a good enough reason to update it?

The weird part IMO is he must have known something like this would happen if he applied his usual MO to this story in this way. I wonder why he chose to do it now. Maybe he just doesn't care much?

I'd also say, if you don't already know that a very substantial number of black people (not all, but definitely more than a few percent) really truly do hate white people, where've you been, and have you ever really talked to black people?

I mean, I don't necessarily feel sympathy for him since he says lots of inflammatory stuff and has what looks like deranged thinking processes. But I do think if he goes down it should be over things he actually said.

I'd also say, if you don't already know that a very substantial number of black people (not all, but definitely more than a few percent) really truly do hate white people, where've you been, and have you ever really talked to black people?

The black people I consider friends don't say how much they hate white people. Biased sample perhaps!

That said, it's plausible that half of black people think it's bad to be white just not sure this survey is the one to go to production on, given the small sample and the general confusion around using a dog whistle to measure sentiment.

The black people I consider friends don't say how much they hate white people. Biased sample perhaps!

IME, the majority of upper-middle class American white people have a big blind spot about this due to only interacting with black people in contexts they find familiar. Where do most people meet their friends? School, work, hobbies, sports, music, etc. If you do mostly typical white people things for those, the only black people you will meet and have the opportunity to talk in depth with and befriend are the one who have already chosen to step away from primarily black activities and participate in mostly white activities for an extended amount of time.

Unless you go out of your way to do something unusual for your race and class, like get deeply enthusiastic about rap music or playing pickup basketball, and stay with it despite being one of only a handful of white people (how do you think those black guys who choose to do white stuff feel?), you will never meet the black people who mostly want to stay around their own and do their own things and never hear the kinds of things they say to each other.

It's a hard thing to study or do research on, and there's not much media out there that covers it. I have no idea how to get hard numbers on it. It's definitely out there though. The Boondocks TV series has some good examples. If you've read Freakonomics, there's a passage in the story about a university researcher embedding with an urban Chicago crack gang, whose leader happens to be a black college graduate with a business degree who tried working in a normal legitimate business but felt too out of place there. Consider the deeper meaning - everyone around him must have understood what he was talking about and why he chose to leave a white-collar job to lead a crack-dealing gang.

I'd honestly assumed Scott Adams would have been cancelled already by now. What took this so long?

The audience for newspaper comics is old. Unlike tech where good programmers and creatives have lots of sway writers for regional newspapers are constantly being laid off so audience demands are important than staff demands. Therefore Adams has to do something management anticipates will be objectionable to it's boomer audience rather than to a staff of college educated millennials before cancelling him.

That would make sense--Dilbert had already been pulled from one corporation's newspapers like last year, I think, and possibly over something else, but Adams has never said or done anything in his post-2015 phase that would rile up the boomers. But then, why this now?

(But then again, is it really "boomers," or is it actually Gen X? I feel like Gen X were the kinds of people who actually read Dilbert in its original heyday.)

(But then again, is it really "boomers," or is it actually Gen X? I feel like Gen X were the kinds of people who actually read Dilbert in its original heyday.)

To the people who complain about boomers, there are only boomers, millennials, and whatever Z is being called today. Gen-X does not exist. Please do not remind them otherwise.

I think it's an interesting step though. Regardless of what the headlines say, Adams was doing 'racism' from a rather 'queer' angle. Whilst people can shout about racism from the sidelines I don't think there are any salient right of center arguments against the position Adams put himself in.

As a white person, is your safety and wellbeing secondary to your obligation to help black people that hate you?

In addition to what @Glassnoser said...

Your safety and well-being has always been secondary, it's one of the West's founding Tenets. Christ goes to the cross willingly

This could reasonably be considered by some as cloying virtue signaling

Christ was so nervous beforehand that he sweat blood and he cried out 'father why have you forsaken me' on the cross. You don't have to smile and wave as you're crucified, not even Christ did that.

I would like to be able to say that such arguments are only salient for the likes of David French. But I honestly think you're right on the money.

Regardless of anything else I think there is an element to wit prioritizing "safety and wellbeing" leads one to lose out on the means to attain it. A man commits himself to eliminating all risks and then wonders where the rewards went.

The relationship between whites and blacks in the US would be the absolute worst example to make that argument though.

Why does some black people hating white people and being dangerous mean that one should avoid all black people? Many black people are obviously not like that.

99%+ of AR-15 owners don't commit mass shootings; it doesn't stop the half of the country that doesn't understand gun culture from finding all AR-15 owners at best suspicious and at worst actively threatening.

To be honest, I don't find an argument "some idiots do idiotic thing X, therefore you should do similar thing Y" particularly compelling.

What's your point?

Attempting to point out the hypocrisy of a social justice movement that simultaneously argues that a) it's horribly racist for white people to be frightened by black people on account of the actions of a very small subset of black people and b) it makes perfect sense for people to be frightened by guns on account of the actions of a very small subset of gun owners.

But I am not part of that social justice movement and did not say those things. So why are you responding to my comment with that?

Area A has higher risk than area B. Which one would you like your family to live in?

Now help me understand why the fact that 'many black people are not violent and hateful' should influence your decision. Do the same for the school you will send your kid to.

I would certainly live in a richer, safer area. But I would not have a preference between safer area with a lot of black families and equally safe and attractive area with no black families. As an anecdata, I had a black family live almost next door to me (second door actually) and the only non-positive thing I can remember about them is that they put up "Black lives matter" placard on their window for a while. I certainly wouldn't have an objection to living close to a similar family (even with the placard, I had much much worse neighbors than that - who were lily white btw, which is easily explained of course by the fact that the majority of my neighbors were white. Interestingly enough they replaced another black family who moved out - and who were very good neighbors). Why would I Goodhart myself in such important matters? If I want to live in a safe neighborhood, I'd just look into its safety directly, not into an imperfect proxy like the race of its inhabitants. Once I know the direct data, the race part would not even be necessary. I mean, certainly, there would be a correlation, likely, but I don't need the correlation if I can have the necessary data directly!

If your preference for safety leads you to implicitly avoid living with black people, then this is fine.

If your preference for safety leads you to explicitly avoid living with black people, then this is... fine? Or no?

On top of all of that, race as a proxy functions on a much broader level than just crime. Which is why I mentioned schooling. When you have picked a safe area with a 'good' school you won't be living near black people. Those are just two things that you can virtually guarantee via the race proxy. It might not be as precise as looking directly at the safety of the area and the 'goodness' of the school, but there is undeniably a lot of information there. Not just information about the immediate circumstance, but also as a predictor. Is the area and school close to blacks? Are there signs of these areas getting 'darker' or 'lighter'? I'm not saying this information is 'better'. I'm simply recognizing that it is undeniably information relevant to the things cared about. Not to mention race based ingroup bias where many blacks otherize whites.

I guess I am not understanding where the need to even express this distinction comes from. People use and live by countless imperfect proxies their whole lives. In ways that directly and indirectly impact people close by them or far away from them. No one cares. But for some reason we won't allow ourselves to use this very obvious and highly informative proxy because, what? We can imagine a hypothetical situation that negates it? Or because we can recognize that information about groups doesn't reflect on all individuals of that group?

I could understand a person who ingroups blacks being mad at someone who is outgrouping blacks. But your post strikes me as being written by someone who is doing neither. Not a racist, not an anti-racist. 'People are just people and when they do good its good and when they do bad its bad.' Maybe I'm wrong on that impression, but regardless, I don't see why such a person would hold any reservations about taking away information from race as a proxy. It's just people. Some of them are a different color and commit a lot more crime. What's the big deal?

If your preference for safety leads you to implicitly avoid living with black people, then this is fine.

But it doesn't. It makes me avoid living in poor neighborhoods with bad policing and so on. Yes, many of such neighborhoods have a lot of black people, many of other such neighborhoods don't have any black people. I don't care. I won't live in either.

When you have picked a safe area with a 'good' school you won't be living near black people.

Again, if I look for good schools, I'd just look for good schools. Why would I again need a proxy if I can just find out which school is good?

I'm simply recognizing that it is undeniably information relevant to the things cared about.

That's the point - it is not. It's like you wanted to fly to Canada, and instead of going to the travel site and looking up flights to Canada and buying a ticket, you started tracking people who look Canadian to you, in case they'd want to go home and you then could follow them and figure out how to get to Canada. Sure, if you're lucky you could get to Canada this way too, but it's not the way any sane person would approach it!

But it doesn't. It makes me avoid living in poor neighborhoods with bad policing and so on.

You imply that it does. Race is a stronger predictor of crime than poverty in the majority of the literature that looks at this. By the standard you allow yourself to say you are avoiding living in poor neighborhoods you are by definition avoiding living in black neighborhoods. I would even hazard a guess that, proportionally, a poor neighborhood would be more likely to be safe and have a good school than a black one in the vast majority of cases.

I don't care.

I never said you did. The point of the 'implicit' example was precisely to say that it's not about it being a stated preference.

Again, if I look for good schools, I'd just look for good schools. Why would I again need a proxy if I can just find out which school is good?

I didn't say you needed it. I said that it was valid. I said it wasn't necessarily as precise as directly looking at the metric as measured, but that there was undeniably information there. Considering that no metric, not matter how direct, is a crystal ball I don't see why a person who professes to no care about race would ignore it if it had valid and relevant information. You are making inferences about reality based on metrics and proxies.

That's the point - it is not.

The correlations between black and every single relevant metric are higher than practically anything else. To couch it as luck or insanity to deduce something from race as a proxy goes far beyond any realm of rationality. On top of that, I'm not proposing an either or. I find your analogy completely inapplicable to what I've been saying.

Race is a stronger predictor of crime than poverty in the majority of the literature that looks at this.

That very well may be - but I don't need a predictor if I can get the actual thing measured!

I didn't say you needed it. I said that it was valid.

Possible, but why invent such proxy if there's no need in it?

You are making inferences about reality based on metrics and proxies.

Well, yes, but there are more direct metrics for the quality of schools, why anybody would be interested in metrics that are secondary or tertiary?

The correlations between black and every single relevant metric are higher than practically anything else.

Ok, there's a correlation. But so what? There are a lot of correlations: https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations Given that I have access to direct metrics, how this correlation is more useful to me than correlation between butter production in Bangladesh and marriage rate in Kentucky?

More comments

Saying one should avoid black people is a much stronger statement than saying one should not live in neighbourhoods with a lot of black people.

Adams was giving a practical advice to white people: 'get the hell away from black people'.

I don't see the angle you are gunning for here. Unless you are arguing against racism in thought but not practice.

Adam’s said you need to escape black people which is why Adam’s moved to a place with very few black people. One could read that as “don’t live in neighborhoods with a lot of black people”

Alternatively,

“Be it so. This statement of opinion is your choice; prepare the presses. But my company has also a choice. When you make statements like that we cancel our contracts and denigrate you. My lawyers shall therefore prepare the paperwork for when your statement is released. Let us all act according to our free choice."

They're respecting his "choice" about as much as the British respected the Indian "choice" to immolate widows.

At least nobody was murdered, or threatened to be murdered. We live in the gentlest of times!

I think it makes sense to read this as a statement about the locus of control, here. That is, Adams' views are to be determined by Adams himself. His opinions are not controlled by the newspaper, nor does the newspaper consider itself responsible for controlling them. It's actually quite an important principle, in its own way.

No one at any level of this controversy, except possibly Adams himself, actually cares whether his views are his choice. The newspaper wants to avoid a reader boycott that they don't know won't happen and so are terrified of being seen as "supporting racists" or whatever. That statement is just a soundbite.

I'm curious about this. To what extent are his views actually his choice?

"His views are his choice, our choice is to not associate with him" is a lie from both directions.

If newspapers really, really cared what their cartoonists think, they'd have their on-staff investigative reporters do PI work on 'em. They don't, because what they actually care about from revealed preferences is their cartoonist's public-facing, loudly broadcasted views. If it's not gonna cause them PR problems, they don't care, and if it's not a broadcasted view, it's not gonna cause them PR problems. No-one cares if you don't really think General Secretary Andropov is a good leader, so long as you keep your opinions to your fucking self, comrade.

The other direction in which this is a lie is that it's not the newspaper's choice either. They're being coerced, extorted, by (their expectations of) their own readership. That's what a "PR problem" is - a problem that wouldn't matter unless the public's reaction mattered. If it were 1950 and Dilbert was being published mostly in the South, Adams' comments wouldn't be a PR problem, they'd be a PR boon, and no-one would get cancelled; which serves to prove that the newspaper is similarly constrained by the political milieu in which it operates.

Admittedly, this sort of analysis is mildly comolicated by the recent dynamic of entryism into newspapers by actual ideological zealots who would like to use investigative reporters as Stasi thoughtpolice on their own colleagues and don't care if the newspaper goes bankrupt so long as Brown Scare enemies get cancelled, but I don't think those people are making the command decisions. Yet.

Well, yes, that was the case before the epoch of wokeness and every company having VP DIE. Now, the whole thing is short-circuited and the twitter doesn't even crow three times before the wrongthinker is already cancelled by the in-house DIE team.

You are overly philosophizing a one-line throwaway rationalization but;

I do wonder if one could make a convincing woke case that beliefs are actually not one's own choice just like their race, gender, and sexual orientation; how much would that short circuit the wokes hostility towards nonbelievers? Something along the lines of..

" Muslims and most Black people despite being minorities don't hold welcoming views towards LGBTQ people. This is not a good thing because in our fight against the patriarchal white supremacy we all live in all minorites need to combine their strengths to stand even a fighting chance. Nonetheless, we don't consider it a moral failure on the part of Black people or Muslims because we all know that black people can do no wrong ever even minority cultures historically have not been safe from the influence of pervasive systems of bigotry. Often, all the disenfranchised have are their culture. Therefore we should tolerate bigotry from black people consider cultural beliefs and traditions to be a protected form of expression."

I do wonder if one could make a convincing woke case that beliefs are actually not one's own choice just like their race, gender, and sexual orientation; how much would that short circuit the wokes hostility towards nonbelievers?

It wouldn't at all. The nonbelievers are already evil in their minds; if you managed to sincerely convince them that there was nothing they could do to change this through activism, education, and other outlets, I would be willing to bet that a non-trivial number would adopt eliminationist rhetoric, and a non-zero number of them would act on it.

To what extent are his views actually his choice?

To all practical extents, for this and most questions of value and abstract assessment. We choose which arguments to accept, which to interrogate, which to reject, and for each issue the chain of argument extends infinitely for any question of significant complexity. We follow that chain as far as we wish, and where we stop on one chain versus another is always a choice.

It's true, perhaps, to a limited extent, that one cannot arbitrarily change basic, heavily reinforced beliefs about simple, obvious things. Even with these, though, one can choose to actively undermine those reinforcements, until the belief itself becomes unsupported enough to be a mere opinion.

If data comes about that demonstrates I'm wrong, then that's a learning experience, not a choice to change my view.

You can also ignore the data and remain committed to your view despite the evidence. I'm not sure if that's a 'choice' in some philosophical sense but there is more than one way this can go.

You are defending the actions taken, the question was about the reasoning. Choosing to not court controversy is very different to choosing what to believe. No matter how his beliefs were discovered they would have ellicited the same reaction. But he didn't choose them.

Beliefs are supported by the assessment of evidence. Assessment is judgement. Judgement is choice.

Evidence is acquired by searching for it. Searching or not is a choice.

You and others in this thread are looking at heavily supported, highly-reinforced beliefs, and noting that they are not easily changed on a whim. In the same way, addictions, phobias, and other heavily-supported or highly reinforced mental constructs are also difficult to change on a whim. The fact that you can choose to make some choices much easier or harder to make than they might otherwise be may obfuscate the choices being made, but does not obviate them.

Free will is an illusion*. A judgement is a choice in the sense that it is the selection of one option out of many, it is not necessarily a conscious decision. If you dislike a burger because of its taste you have judged it, but you didn't have a choice between "mmm I just can't get enough of this disgusting burger" and "snakes alive what did I just put in my mouth?"

Which is beside the point that Adams choosing to not court controversy is very different to choosing what he believes.

*But you should behave as if it's real regardless.

Free will is an illusion[.]

That is certainly a belief one can choose to hold, but the entire context of this discussion is over whether the paper should choose to treat Adams other than how they have. To the exact extent that Adams' actions are not chosen, neither are those of the people punishing him, or those of us arguing about the situation. It's not that this line of thinking can't have an internally consistent logic, it's just completely pointless to the exact extent it's not selectively applied.

A judgement is a choice in the sense that it is the selection of one option out of many, it is not necessarily a conscious decision.

Not necessarily, no. Biases and priors weigh heavily on most judgements. But the biases and priors are themselves formed largely by previous choices, some large, some very small and almost imperceptible. The chains of causality are tightly knotted, but our consciousness and the will that directs it are, I think, dispositive in the final analysis.

If you dislike a burger because of its taste you have judged it, but you didn't have a choice between "mmm I just can't get enough of this disgusting burger" and "snakes alive what did I just put in my mouth?"

If you have disliked a burger because of its taste, you have reacted to it. Instinctive reactions can, with effort, be overridden. Tastes can be acquired, associations changed, biases shaped and altered. All these are completely normal things that people do every day, as part of teaching, social interaction, and personal growth.

Which is beside the point that Adams choosing to not court controversy is very different to choosing what he believes.

I have spoken only about Adams' beliefs, but should go a step further: Adams is not a good-faith communicator. He is not, strictly speaking, honest, either about his beliefs or his intentions. His normal modus operandi is to say things not because they are true, but to elicit desired reactions from his audience and from the public at large. I am normally quite leery of the "they're just saying it for attention, they're a grifter" argument applied to people who speak out against woke orthodoxy, but it seems to me that "grifter" is a reasonably accurate description of Adams, and I am pretty sure he is, in fact, doing it for the attention. My guess is that he's done the math, newspapers are dying, and so he's getting himself "cancelled" out of a market that does him limited good, in exchange for public attention that will boost his various entertainment properties.

It seems like we are talking past each other. My whole argument is about not necessarily conscious decisions. You ceded the argument to me when you said:

Not necessarily, no.

And elsewhere when you said

It's true, perhaps, to a limited extent, that one cannot arbitrarily change basic, heavily reinforced beliefs about simple, obvious things.

Like your ability to determine facts from evidence. If you learn a bunch of inconvenient facts, you can't just choose to ignore them and believe the opposite. You can lie to yourself and others about it, but if you believe something is a fact, saying it isn't true doesn't change your belief. The belief can change over time, I never said beliefs can't change, but you merely chose to lie about it - it is not until you are no longer lying about it that it becomes a different belief. And you won't stop lying about it until you lose faith in the facts you originally believed.

That's the difference between a belief and a reason - faith. But reason isn't an alternative to faith, you need to have faith in reasoning to utilise it - you can't start reasoning until you have faith in reasoning as a tool to ascertain the truth. And once you trust in your own ability to use logic and deduction and inference, it is almost impossible to stop believing in it, no matter how much you wish you could, as anyone who has found evidence the love of their life is cheating on them knows. So if you start going down the racial crime statistics rabbit hole, for which the rebuttal is "how dare you look at that!", you are going to arrive at conclusions you probably shouldn't put in your podcast (note I am not claiming the newspaper did wrong by him, I don't think they had a choice either, as I have already said it is the reasoning not the actions I take issue with).

But being silent about them doesn't change your beliefs. The only thing that would change your beliefs is alternative evidence, which doesn't exist, or if you abandoned logic and reasoning. Perhaps you can do that. I don't think it's outrageous to think Adams can't, because I know a lot of other people who are in that position. People who didn't want to be "racist", people who desperately sought out rebuttals and alternative evidence because they were told repeatedly throughout their lives and believed that black crime is a racist myth. But they didn't find rebuttals and alternative evidence, because the alternative is "Wait these stats agree with racists? Stop recording them then!"

Which is why I agree that Adams is not a good faith communicator and also don't care. He's as good faith as any other media pundit. He's saying something other people, people without his reach, have been saying. That is when a pundit is closest to truth, and when people say they don't think he can choose that belief they are often people who came to a similar unavoidable conclusion.

If you learn a bunch of inconvenient facts, you can't just choose to ignore them and believe the opposite.

You mean you shouldn't do that; the unwashed masses do so most of the time. Meanwhile, sophisticated, urbane individuals such as yourself or I simply weigh the inconvenient facts against a set of more convinient ones, with our values/worldview/will casting the deciding vote. Intelligent people learn that any question worth discussing is highly complex, hence comes with a fair amount of ambiguity, and that ambiguity is more than sufficient for opposite conclusions to be drawn from the same set of evidence, merely through weighting, emphasis, and similar selection effects. You can conclude, if you are young and have not yet learned that you are capable of error, that anyone who disagrees with your assessment of evidence is simply lying to themselves. But From many, many years of arguing with people, I have concluded that, no, they really do see things differently.

But reason isn't an alternative to faith, you need to have faith in reasoning to utilize it - you can't start reasoning until you have faith in reasoning as a tool to ascertain the truth. And once you trust in your own ability to use logic and deduction and inference, it is almost impossible to stop believing in it, no matter how much you wish you could, as anyone who has found evidence the love of their life is cheating on them knows.

You don't have to stop believing in it for Reason to not operate deterministically. Human reason simply is not good enough, precise and reliable enough, and the knowledge it's based on comprehensive enough, to operate deterministically beyond even slight abstractions. It's good enough to read a map or split an atom. It's good enough for you to be convinced your wife is cheating on you, if you catch her in flagrante. It's not good enough to tell you why she's cheating on you, or how you should feel about it, or what to do about it. And this is for extremely simple questions, with low-single-digit numbers of first-order variables!

And once you trust in your own ability to use logic and deduction and inference, it is almost impossible to stop believing in it, no matter how much you wish you could, as anyone who has found evidence the love of their life is cheating on them knows. So if you start going down the racial crime statistics rabbit hole, for which the rebuttal is "how dare you look at that!"

...This does not seem accurate to me.

You and Adams are pointing to the obvious, overwhelming evidence of Black crime rates. The people on the other side are not shrieking "how dare you look at that", they are pointing to the obvious, overwhelming evidence of multiple centuries of brutal chattel slavery, followed by another century of strictly-enforced racial oppression, followed by a few decades of quite severe racial animosity that slowly declined over time. That is a lot of evidence that you neglected to mention in your summary!

You weigh these two sets of evidence, and many others besides, and in doing so you use your own values, perspective, and axioms to render judgement. It is my contention that your values and axioms are themselves chosen by you, that they tend to be dispositive unless the evidence is absolutely overwhelming on an issue, and that the evidence is never, ever overwhelming on any issue of real significance. You choose your values, incrementally over time, and in turn your values lead you to choose what evidence to collect, and how to assess it.

Conclusions are, to a first approximation, never unavoidable on any question of substance. If they were, it would not be a question of substance any longer, because evidence would deterministically conform peoples' beliefs to the truth. This observably does not happen with questions pertaining to human nature, behavior, or history, to philosophy, theology, or ideology, questions of value and questions of worldview. People differ not because they fail to use their reason properly, but because human reason itself is insufficient to the task.

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To the exact extent that Adams' actions are not chosen, neither are those of the people punishing him, or those of us arguing about the situation.

This is not true. The objecvtion to Adams having "chosen" isn't a general one about all sorts of choices, it's about his beliefs. Beliefs are not-chosen in a stronger sense than actions are.

Beliefs are not-chosen in a stronger sense than actions are.

Belief is always an action.

Some actions are trivial, and some are not. Closing my laptop is an action. Becoming a billionaire is also an action. Closing my laptop and becoming a billionaire can be thought of as a single process, or a whole series of complex sub- and sub-sub and sub-sub-sub processes, but either way, they are both accomplished by will put into practice. The difference is that closing my laptop is a trivial action for me, while becoming a billionaire is not, because the necessary actions involve much greater effort and will. On the other hand, the last step in the billionaire process, signing the contract that will secure one's fortune, for example, can easily become trivial once all the rest of the work has already been done.

In the same way, some beliefs are trivial, and some are not. I could ask you which of three random pieces of art you preferred, and to give your reasons as to why it was the best. Selecting a piece could be done on instinct, but interrogating the instinct, making it a real choice, is going to result in making decisions, active effort, action. You would in fact be choosing a belief, and it is in fact easy to do for such trivial questions, because the choice being made is isolated.

Other beliefs are non-trivial to change, not because the questions are somehow fundamentally different, but because some of their answers can put one in tension with large constellations of previously-chosen beliefs. Usually such tension is most easily resolved by simply rejecting the answers that cause them, but this, again, is still a choice. One could instead accept the tension, and begin re-evaluating those previous choices, and the choices supporting them, and so on as far back as necessary until the tension is resolved. For many questions, this would be very hard to do, but the choice being hard does not preclude it from being a choice.

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From the perspective of a certain liberal dream, people should be free to air their views without facing such consequences. Requiring a narrow band of ideological adherence in one’s extended personal and professional circle leading to people hiding their true beliefs is not healthy. Individual responsibility cuts the other way: in the interest of a free open society, he has a duty not to lie. I would question whether newspaper consumers in general really want him fired (as opposed to a few activists), but if they do, they are wrong.

This is something that gets me as well. I wager if you asked the person from MLive Media who wrote that statement to choose to become a Nazi right now, in the sense that he truly, in his heart of hearts, believed that Jews were sub-humans who ought to be exterminated, he couldn't do it, even under threat of death or torture. The best he could do is to play-act the role. I don't see why this would be any different for Scott Adams's views about black people or anyone's views about anything.

This does cross into free will territory and applies more broadly to any sort of behavior. A bank robber didn't have the choice to have a brain that tells him that grabbing a gun and threatening tellers was a good way to make money, no more than Charles Whitman had a choice to have a tumor in his brain affecting his amygdala before he went on a killing spree in UT Austin.

Yet our society does treat these behaviors as being "choices" and hold the people carrying these out as agents responsible for the consequences of these "choices." And to a large extent, our society depends on this in order to function. People noticed that holding people accountable for their "choices" is helpful for making a more comfortable society to live in, likely through incentivizing - perhaps "manipulating" is just as good a term - people to behave in certain ways. The way I see it, the idea that these types of things are choices is a sort of legal fiction that society holds up as a means to make it function at all. And basically no one who created the fiction realized it was fiction, and same goes for people who follow the fiction.

And so we get to cases like here, where someone like Scott Adams is excoriated for daring to "choose" his views. The person is just acting out the fictional thing that our society agreed on to treat as fact; he doesn't like Scott Adams's behavior and wants less of it, so he incentivizes less of it in society by punishing Scott Adams for doing that behavior, while invoking that fiction as the justification.

Yet our society does treat these behaviors as being "choices" and hold the people carrying these out as agents responsible for the consequences of these "choices."

Actually, I've recently noticed that whenever a mass shooting occurs, very little time is spent blaming the shooter, and much more ink and airtime is spent on blaming guns, gun stores, gun manufacturers, toxic masculinity, racism, sexism, inadequate mental health care, inadequate school security, cowardly cops that refuse to attempt to intervene, etc., etc., etc.

I suppose that, in many cases, the default assumption is that mass shooters are psychopathic, and thus, anyone who assumes that doesn't need to spend time considering mass shooters as agents with choices.

There's other factors to this: the strategy of preventing mass shootings by not publicizing the event also means not publicizing the perpetrator, which obviously eliminates the possibility of exploring the person in question as a person and not just some unforeseen force of destruction, and, of course, there's also what you imply in your post; that mass shootings are instead used as evidence to argue for some social change.

i think this is because there is little need to blame the shooter. it's kinda the default to be appalled by such a thing (for very good reason i might add) and only a fringe few are willing to take the position of defending a mass shooter.

if this was a extremely rare event i'd be inclined to agree but such events are more common than "extremely rare" (it's still pretty rare comparatively). this + the shocking and violent nature of what mass shootings are... well they're bound to cause people to look for solutions.

it's well established that people are at least in part a product of their environment. and since we don't have control over innate characteristics of humans (there's no "is gonna be a mass shooter" gene), the best people tend to go for I think to have some sense of control is the environment.

an aside: and it is fair also i think to recognize and criticize authority responses to such events, but that's a different comment.

I wager if you asked the person from MLive Media who wrote that statement to choose to become a Nazi right now, in the sense that he truly, in his heart of hearts, believed that Jews were sub-humans who ought to be exterminated, he couldn't do it, even under threat of death or torture. The best he could do is to play-act the role.

I've never been convinced by this line of reasoning. Like, the conclusion is supposed to be, "...and, therefore, one's beliefs aren't a choice," but I just don't see how that follows. Instead, the only conclusion I see is, "Some beliefs are held strongly enough that asking for them to change (perhaps even under threat of death or torture) will not result in said change." It doesn't seem to imply anything about whether the strong belief is chosen or not.

I suppose, can you give me an example of a thing that a person can choose? I think, at bottom, the above argument is a facile face on what is really just hard determinism at its core (from people who can't bear to "choose" to live with the consequences of real hard determinism).

I suppose, can you give me an example of a thing that a person can choose? I think, at bottom, the above argument is a facile face on what is really just hard determinism at its core (from people who can't bear to "choose" to live with the consequences of real hard determinism).

I can't give an example, and that's the entire point; there is no such example, by my lights. And I don't see how determinism enters into it. Whether the universe is deterministic or there's some sort of cosmic dice that get rolled for physical interactions that make future states impossible to reliably predict based on the current state, one still doesn't have choice on the states of one's brain, which are the direct antecedents of one's apparent "choices." I didn't choose to have a brain that tells my finger muscles to type out this paragraph, for instance, and that's the case even if the atoms in my brain aren't following some sort of deterministic set of physical rules but rather being affected by some sort of truly random process.

It's more a question of dualism than determinism, which are related concepts but not identical. Dualism makes room for a soul to manipulate our neurons, allowing us to make true choices, but also requires a belief in the supernatural. Without it, we have to accept that whatever experience of "choosing" one has in their consciousness is a consequence of the behavior of the atoms in one's brain, which may be deterministic or not, but either way aren't controlled by oneself. One could argue that one's current brain state is "controlled" by past choices made by one's conscious mind, but that just moves the whole thing back a step, which can continue all the way back to the point where one became conscious for the first time as a baby.

Schrödinger equation's equation is deterministic, but the output concerning physical observables includes randomness. So, your distinction concerning randomness isn't really relevant. Nor is dualism the only mechanism by which the ability to choose could be said to exist. Typically, 'determinism' is short-hand for the opposite position of 'free will'.

But yeah, as I suspected, you pretty much commit yourself to hard determinism... at least until this discussion is finished.

Nothing personnel eh?

How about you just explain what you mean? Because currently your posts look like shorelines with at least three feet of vertical elevation above the high tide line.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

You speak very condescendingly about hard determinism, but never actually explain what you mean by that term. Even after 07mk said he doesn't see determinism entering the equation, you still just sneer at the concept like everyone should know exactly what you mean. In the past when I have seen people do this, it is as a bluff. Either a sort of shit test to see if their partner knows as much as them, or in the hopes their confidence and condescension will convince others to assume they know what they are talking about and drop it. But that goes against the spirit of this place, and the speak plainly rule.

I don't want to report you though, because I might be wrong or you might have done it by accident or a thousand other possibilities, so I'd rather just talk it out. I do think you know what you are talking about, but I would also like to know what you are talking about.

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I wonder how many decades one would have to go back without comments like Adams' (if getting wide publicity) not leading to strip getting dropped by multiple papers.

Tom Buchanan was written as gauche and pigheaded for vaguely and verbally opposing whatever term you'd like to apply to this broad phenomena (maybe black empowerment?) in the last 20's - so there's that

His attitude towards polling should be reason for his cancellation. I think that pre Trump the comment themselves would have been not a big deal.

No, they would have been a big deal. Plenty of people pre-Trump were fired for a lot less.

It woudl have been a big deal

It may have been even worse because he cannot pivot off the cancel culture angle. It's like people were fired, and that was it. There was no way to try to claim censorship.

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