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That's the charitable version (that she believes that porn is in fact empirically a bad thing, but she doesn't have enough data to prove it). The somewhat less charitable version is that basically she does not like porn and she feels like it's bad, but even if you could show her data proving that porn has no statistical impact, it wouldn't change her mind. It would be like trying to prove to a Catholic with data that prayer is useless.
That's not uncharitable, that's how the overwhelming majority of people operate, including - and perhaps especially - those who claim to be updating on data. Non-HBDers don't suddenly become HBDers when you show them a bunch of twin studies, BLMers don't switch the target of their ire from cops to criminals when you show them the crime victimization rates, and for that matter atheists don't become Catholic when you show them the data that prayer and church attendance does have a positive impact on your psychological health, and that's exactly how it should be!
By saying "no data will change my mind" Meghan Murphy is being honest about this being a values disagreement, and saving you time that you'd waste on digging out studies, which won't have an impact on the discussion. More people should follow her example, to be honest.
There's nothing wrong with having a values disagreement but Meghan is not being honest about her stance here. If she was then she wouldn't be citing studies and evidence to argue her point, only to retreat back into the values cave when pressed.
"Retreat" implies she staked her position on data being on her side, and I don't see where she did that.
Yes she did, many times! Anytime she cites the experience of women she talked to about the industry, that's data. I even asked her and quoted her explanation for how she arrived at her position to begin with.
Using data as a supporting argument is not the same thing as staking your position on it. The latter is a lot closer to Aellas approach than Murphy's.
That was the "I talked to some women who left sexwork" bit, right? Again, that's not staking your position on data.
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I agree with that, to a point. But if someone tells you that no evidence would convince them they're wrong, there is no point in having an evidence-based discussion with them.
I don't think this is entirely true, I agree that for most people (even here) that most of the data driven arguments they claim are the reason for their beliefs are actually post-hoc rationalizations. We feel first and rationalize second. It isn't deliberate, our conscious mind supports what our unconscious has already decided.
Having said that, because of that people don't actually know which arguments might change their beliefs once they internalize them. They might claim nothing will change their mind, but because changing your mind is the unconscious process they do not actually know when an argument will make them change until after it happens.
Someone can truly believe that no amount of evidence will convince them of X and be wrong because the act of being convinced is for some 99.5% of people (in my estimation) an entirely unconscious act. So whether you can change someone's mind may well be entirely orthogonal to whether they believe their mind can be changed. It's not easy or common to change a mind, but I am not convinced the individual themselves can give you much information about what arguments would persuade them.
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But she never came into it saying it's an evidence based conversation.
When you lead with "but studies show..." type arguments, it's at least implied. Later flipping to "but it's an ethical question, it's not about data" as soon as her empirical case starts to look dodgy does feel like a dishonest bait-and-switch, even if that's her real position and thus, from a narrow point of view, more honest.
I don't think she did that though.
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One of these things is not like the others: atheists don't necessarily disagree with the data. If you show a non-HBDer twin studies, presumably they'll try to disagree with them because they agree that to believe in the worldview modelled by the studies would "compel" them to become a HBDer, which they don't want for social censure. Ie. there are preferences attached to their beliefs. But if an atheist believes that Christians are more mentally healthy, this does not compel him to believe in God. Why would it? I mean, it's absolutely a value difference, but it's a value difference that isn't hooked to that part of the world model.
Fine, atheists don't start going to church and start praying after seeing the data.
I mean yeah? I'm pretty happy with my mental health, I don't see an urgent need to improve it. If my mental health was in the shitter, I'd keep church in the back of my mind.
(That's assuming it is causal, which I think would be hard to demonstrate.)
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Well, there's another difference. I might believe that praying and going to church is good for the mental health of people who believe in God. That doesn't mean it would do me any good if I don't believe in God.
(This is pretty close to my actual position. I think the positive power of a community and a sincere belief that there's an omnipotent being who loves you personally probably is good for someone's mental health. That doesn't convince me that the omnipotent being exists, or that pretending to believe in him would make me feel better.)
Right, so that would be a situation where both sides can reconcile data with their beliefs, no matter what the data says.... which is exactly like the debate on porn.
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You may be right in this case, and there are certainly plenty of cases where people work backwards from aesthetic or moral preferences and even the god of True Data presenting them with absolute proof that their opinion is wrong wouldn’t change their minds. But in real life culture war flashpoints where it’s extremely difficult to determine what’s Empirically Good, how do you tell the difference between this type of pure motivated reasoning, and a more considered opinion that due to Molochian forces (competition, coordination problems, preference cascades, defect-defect equilibria, negative feedback loops etc.) we are stuck in a local minima, where the data may show that X thing is better than not-X in our current circumstances, when if we changed other circumstances we’d see that not-X is actually much better. So in this sense I have a lot of opinions that I believe are empirically true even if they lack data or the data contradicts this belief, because I think we would need to run civilization-level RCTs to “empirically” prove them. I’m unsure how to tell even within myself whether this is just an elaborate cope I tell myself so that I can never be proven wrong “real communism hasn’t been tried!”, or if it is actually a principled and well reasoned belief.
I don’t want to argue the object level but just to give an example of the type of reasoning I’m referring to: I believe for many of the fuzzier mental illnesses that the data will show subjective improvement in response to therapy/drugs, but that completely banning psychiatric treatment for anything but schizophrenia, and a culture of mocking, shaming and overall not taking fuzzy mental illnesses seriously would result in much better outcomes as a whole. There’s not really any data showing that bullying increases depression or that destigmatizing mental illness decreases anxiety or whatever that could move me off of this position, because the idea of taking these conditions seriously at all is what I see as the primary cause of their existence. And unless we could coordinate all of society to not reward claims of mental illness with sympathy, each individual is better off “going to therapy” and punishing those who mock them.
Is this just regular motivated reasoning with extra steps?
I think so, yes. Which doesn't mean your conclusion is wrong. It just means it's not actually supported by evidence, and there's no point in trying to persuade you for or against with evidence.
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This is also a pretty defensible position. If you've talked with people in person, you shouldn't change your mind solely based on studies that contradict those people's first-hand accounts.
Sure, but Megan Murphy is drawing broader conclusions from first-hand accounts. I absolutely believe that individual women have been harmed by porn. She may even be right that porn is bad for women in general! (I am less cynical and skeptical about this than @ymeskhout is.) But as compelling as first-hand accounts may be (and as understandable as it is that you might be powerfully swayed by them), they are not evidence of something applying in a universal fashion. @ymeskhout's example is that Megan Murphy says she flatly does not believe that any woman has a positive experience as a sex worker. Any woman who says she does (such as Aella) is lying or in denial. Maybe she's right! But it doesn't sound like she is persuadable by anything that contradicts her personal convictions.
Let's say you believe prayer is effective. You have seen the effects of prayer in your personal life. Obviously, a double-blind study of people praying for sick patients or whatever and seeing no results is not going to persuade you you're wrong. OTOH, if I see all those double-blind studies showing prayer is not effective, and you insist you have personally experienced miracles as a result of prayer, should I believe you?
Positions arrived at as a result of personal values are not really amenable to being changed by evidence. This doesn't mean they're wrong, but it doesn't mean they're right either. It does mean that basically only very powerful rhetoric (independent of truthfulness) or personal experience will change their mind.
Meghan had a lot of gall claiming that Aella was lying about her own experiences with prostitution. She said she was invested in giving it the most positive gloss she could because that's how she makes a living.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
It is fair to accuse someone of motivated reasoning when they are not financially independent. Coldhearted, maybe, but definitely fair.
It is fair, but the skepticism should be narrowly deployed to only apply when the person is citing their personal experience or asking you to trust their reporting without showing their work.
Also notice how Murphy shifted the goal posts.
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Maybe I'm confused, because i thought that's what OP was saying she was saying explicitly.
On a tangent, were I to sit down with someone like Aella and try to discuss whether porn was empirically bad, we'd never even get to the empirical part because we'd have such different worldviews that we wouldn't be able to operationalized 'bad'. I'm all for finding common ground, but most of the ground to cover on porn is too tied to conflicting foundational moral visions, that it's...well... about as effective as masturbating.
I meant the charitable version is that she thinks it's empirically true that porn is bad, but she can't prove it. The uncharitable version is that she doesn't actually care whether porn is "bad" in the sense of being a net negative in any measurable way, she just doesn't like it, and would still oppose it even if theoretically we "proved" the opposite.
It's rather like the distinction you are making between Sagan's dragon and Russel's teapot. One is literally an unfalsifiable belief that is constructed to be unfalsifiable; the other is a belief that is currently unfalsifiable, but given much greater capacity to collect evidence, it could be falsified. If you believe in Russel's teapot, then you could be convinced you were wrong if we became able to find literally any object in the solar system. If you believe in Sagan's dragon, nothing will ever convince you, and nothing ever could convince you, that it doesn't exist.
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