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toadworrier  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   1808 thread views

Mary's Motte and the case against progress

I have a subsblog. And my [first post][mm] is against those who say there's "no such thing as progress"

https://www.amphobian.info/p/marys-motte-and-the-case-against.

I'm basing this off Mary Harrington's recent podcast with Bret Weinstein. But more likely I'm picking a fight with some y'all here, so I hope you enjoy it.

It is one thing when someone is merely wrong. But when someone denies what is starkly before everyone's eyes, then bullshit is in the air. And that is what I smell whenever I hear the dogma that "there is no such thing as progress".

I these dogmatists of of a motte-and-bailey trick

... progress-skeptics retreat back to the safety of Mary's Motte and acknowledge the growth of knowledge, productivity social complexity and human health but deny that this is called progress.

Their motte is a Reasonable But Wrong claim that these sorts of growth aren't morally valuable. Their bailey extends to denying history and also accusing optimists of teleological magical thinking. But really progress has a simple cause: useful knowledge increases.

Civilised humans took millennia to discover writing, bronze and electricity. But we have not since undiscovered them. Useful knowledge is easier to retain than win and easier to win than destroy. On the scale of history, it is quickly disseminated, replicated and used. It gets encoded redundantly in books, technologies, social practices and the genes of domesticated species. Every generation inherits a vast and waxing store of ancestral knowledge both explicit and tacit.

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Put scare quotes around "respectable" next time. And yeah, poverty only even correlates with a fraction of the problem.

I'm giving you a downvote because that's really what people at Harvard profess to believe and what polite society seems to believe and pretending it's not so is rather odd.

And you say "since 1930s"? No. The 2020 jump leaves us worse than 1937-1939, but it's still below the start of the 30s and nearly 20% below the peak. The first big jump in homicide was over the 1900s through 1920s (following a long secular decline), and then the mid 30s through mid 50s was a decline again.

We've gone over this. Homicide isn't nearly as lethal now as then. Thus having the same rate now implies perhaps 50-100% higher rate of violence, or more.

Ceteris paribus, far fewer people admitting to having been victimized is evidence of fewer victims!

Has the survey wording stayed the same ? Then yes. But we all know how is it with politicised measures.

Scare quotes are for things which are believed to be true but which are not true.

It was bad enough when I was getting downvotes for disagreeing with you; if you're now also downvoting me for paragraphs where I agree with you then I think I'm out of options for replies you'll be able to appreciate.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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