site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31884 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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.

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

When Someone Tells You They're Lying, Believe Them

Some people refuse to admit they're wrong, but there's other clues

Paul Ehrlich became well-known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, where he made many confidently-stated but spectacularly-wrong predictions about imminent overpopulation causing apocalyptical resource scarcity. As illustration for how far off the mark Ehrlich was, he predicted widespread famines in India at a time when its population was around 500 million people, and he wrote "I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." He happened to have made this claim right before India's Green Revolution in agriculture. Not only is India able to feed a population that tripled to 1.4 billion people, it has long been one of the world's largest agricultural exporter.

Ehrlich is also known for notoriously losing a bet in 1990 to one of my favorite humans ever, the perennial optimist (and business professor) Julian Simon. Bryan Caplan brings up some details to the follow-up that never was:

We've all heard about the Ehrlich-Simon bet. Simon the cornucopian bet that resources would get cheaper, Ehrlich the doomsayer bet that they would get pricier, and Simon crushed him. There's a whole book on it. What you probably don't know, however, is that in 1995, Paul Ehrlich and Steve Schneider proposed a long list of new bets for Simon - and that Simon refused them all.

The first bet was fairly straight-forward: Ehrlich picked 5 commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, & tungsten) and predicted that their price would be higher in 1990 compared to 1980 as the materials become scarcer. Instead of rising, the combined price went down. Ehrlich's decade-spanning obstinance and unparalleled ability to step on rakes make him an irresistible punching bag but despite his perennial wrongness, his responses have ranged from evasion to outright denials:

Anne and I have always followed U.N. population projections as modified by the Population Reference Bureau --- so we never made "predictions," even though idiots think we have. When I wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, there were 3.5 billion people. Since then we've added another 2.8 billion --- many more than the total population (2 billion) when I was born in 1932. If that's not a population explosion, what is? My basic claims (and those of the many scientific colleagues who reviewed my work) were that population growth was a major problem. Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists' warning to humanity in the same year. My view has become depressingly mainline!

Some humans possess the unfortunate egotistical and dishonorable habit of refusing to admit error. It's a reflex I personally find utterly baffling, because nothing engenders someone's credibility to me more than their ability to admit error. So if we can't always rely on people to admit a mistake, what else do we have?

What I find so interesting about the second bet in 1995 is how peculiar the proposed conditions were [image link]:

I kept thinking "...so?" as I read these. Why would someone care about the availability of firewood versus the heating and cooking costs in general? Why would someone care about per capita cropland statistics versus the availability of food in general? Many of these are also blatant statistical fuckery, such as monitoring increases in absolute worldwide AIDS deaths during a period of persistent population growth.

Ehrlich is playing a seemingly uncomfortable game of Twister here, but his behavior makes perfect sense if you read intelligence and agency behind his decisions. The only explanation for the indirect, tangential, and collateral measurements is that Ehrlich knows that a direct measurement will not be favorable to his pet theory. He does not believe in truth, but rather believes in belief as the kids say, and he's not willing to jeopardize it.

The acrobatics are the tell here. When Meghan Murphy debates the sex industry, she has to keep the wheels on her goalposts perpetually greased up. Meghan wants to say that everyone who works in the industry has a negative view of it, but the preemptive goalpost shifting she employs is proof she knows that's a lie. The guy claiming there's a dragon in his garage can only preemptively dismiss [thermal imaging/flour/whatever] as a legitimate investigatory tool only because he knows there is no dragon.

It's not perfect but it's often the best we have. Ideally we get people who act honorably and admit mistakes and are willing to falsify their own theories but barring that, just look for the acrobatics. They're the product of intelligent design, not random chance.

/images/1689295105365971.webp

This is a repost from your blog, but you didn't label it as such.

I tend to post most of what I write simultaneously on multiple places. I generally avoid linking to my Substack here, to avoid the appearance that I'm trying to push traffic to it.

What a weird list if it were an honest attempt to get at whether humans are behaving and growing unsustainably. Take [11] as a great example:

The oceanic fisheries harvest per person will continue its downward trend and thus in 2004 will be smaller than 1994

Note that it doesn't reference whether oceanic populations will be larger, but whether the harvest per person will be smaller. Isn't that the outcome that someone encouraging sustainability should want? To move from overharvesting oceanic fisheries to sources that are more sustainable, like switching to aquaculture production? Here's what's happened in absolute terms. This seems great! Humans are getting more fish than ever while slowing down the overfishing of our natural resources.

In fact, the situation above seems like it should be a credit to people like Ehrlich. I would think he'd be going around speaking excitedly about the measures that have been and are being taken to make the planet sustainable for 8 billion or 10 billion people. Sure, he took a big L on specific predictions about short-run disaster and continues to do so, but he could spin it as a big dub in that the reason there wasn't a disaster is that he persuaded people!

That this never seems to happen makes me suspicious that Ted K was correct about this much.

but his behavior makes perfect sense if you read intelligence and agency behind his decisions.

Or an intelligence agency......

The acrobatics are the tell here. When Meghan Murphy debates the sex industry, she has to keep the wheels on her goalposts perpetually greased up. Meghan wants to say that everyone who works in the industry has a negative view of it, but the preemptive goalpost shifting she employs is proof she knows that's a lie.

I'm not sure if this is the most helpful framing for understanding Murphy's internal psychology and the position she holds.

When she says for example:

But when Aella asks Meghan “What kind of data would make you update your mind?” Meghan responds “No data”

Instead of assuming that this makes her a dishonest liar, you could instead look for an interpretation or implicit assumptions that make her position more reasonable. Such as:

1.) It's a common refrain in radfem circles that patriarchy conditions women into enjoying their own subjugation. I imagine that Meghan believes this, and that she further believes that it invalidates any "data" that you could collect on this issue. Women have been systematically deceived about their own preferences and desires, so self-reports about their experiences in the sex industry, particularly positive reports, are inherently suspect.

2.) She's quite clear that her opposition to "barely legal porn" is a bedrock moral principle for her, and isn't subject to falsification. I imagine this principle could break down a little further into something like - it's a violation of a woman's dignity for her to act in barely legal porn, and a man shows a willingness to violate women's dignity when he watches it. As far as moral principles go, these don't seem that crazy to me (even though I disagree with them). Ethics always has to hit bedrock somewhere. I assume that you believe inflicting extreme pain on someone for no reason is wrong, and it's hard to see how this belief could be falsifiable. There's no further empirical data that could be relevant; it just is what it is. And that's how she sees barely legal porn.

And of course this is all in addition to the standard examination you have to do of any "data" related to a highly contentious issue, questioning the collection methodology and the interpretation and etc.

1.) It's a common refrain in radfem circles that patriarchy conditions women into enjoying their own subjugation. I imagine that Meghan believes this, and that she further believes that it invalidates any "data" that you could collect on this issue. Women have been systematically deceived about their own preferences and desires, so self-reports about their experiences in the sex industry, particularly positive reports, are inherently suspect.

That's an example of why these sorts of beliefs are unfalsifiable; God of the (Wage)Gaps, True Marxism has never been tried, ect. How does she know that the patriarchy hasn't conditioned her to enjoy her own subjugation? She wouldn't know if she was subjugated or not, because of her conditioning. It could be infinite recurring patriarchal Matrixes.

"Barely legal" is a category I find distasteful. It's "if I were just a bit less of a coward, I'd fuck underage girls" consumers, and it's not much help that 'well the women are much older than they're pretending to be'. A guy who likes to fantasise about 16 year olds* probably also likes to fantasise about 14 and 15 year olds, and how low do we go before we're hitting actual paedophilia?

*Age of consent being a tricky one; 'barely legal' may mean 'pretending I just turned 16 yesterday' in one country and 'just turned 18' in another.

But hey, it's legal (as much as any porn is); porn is highly reliant on taboo and 'forbidden fruit' for its appeal, because why would you bother with vanilla stuff, hence the fantasy of barely legal; men are hardwired to like the same age range of women despite getting older themselves, so whether a man is 18 or 60 he's still going to like 18 year olds, and at least it's not kids.

Yet.

"Barely legal" is a category I find distasteful.

Considering that it's usually 25yos in pigtails and knee socks, I wouldn't get too het up about it.

Pretty much all datasets on the matter I've seen show a strong preference in most men for women as young as they can get, being bounded by a minimum age of 18, only because that's the lowest the chart shows.

https://medium.com/@okcupid/the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8cabacdf5

I suspect that if the researchers uncapped it and offered images of even younger women, the modal preference would be around the age of 16. Leaving aside issues of cowardice, it's illegal in many jurisdictions to fuck someone that age if you're not covered by Romeo and Juliet clauses, and often filming porn of them is illegal even if that's not.

So if you disapprove of this, you are necessarily disapproving the preferences of almost all men, which is to catch them as young as they feasibly can. Not me, I like older women myself, to a degree, but even just looking at the most popular OnlyFans creators or their Tiktok equivalents reveals how insanely in demand outright neoteny in. Shame biology as it stands isn't so obliging.

/images/1689354118344763.webp

That's all fine as far as it goes, but it isn't apt to be very persuasive to someone that disagrees, right? I don't know how I'd reply to such a position with much other than, "well, that's like, your opinion, man". I agree that there are positions that aren't amenable to data or argument and I can easily think of some that I hold; for example, I think it's morally obvious and incontrovertable that someone like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should have been swiftly executed following his bombing of the Boston Marathon. No amount of argument on whether the death penalty "works" will change my mind, I just think that motherfucker deserves to die and think people that don't feel the same have something wrong with their moral intuition. Fine, it is what it is, but I don't expect to change anyone's mind by saying, "it's just obvious and not debatable".

It's a common refrain in radfem circles that patriarchy conditions women into enjoying their own subjugation. I imagine that Meghan believes this

She doesn't. She dropped the feminist label, and doesn't believe the concept of "patriarchy" is useful.

Women have been systematically deceived about their own preferences and desires, so self-reports about their experiences in the sex industry, particularly positive reports, are inherently suspect.

The argument I heard from her is much more simple - while you're in the industry, you have an incentive to pretend everything is great. I think she even said something to the effect of "I'll hear them out when they leave porn/prostitution".

You respect people more for admitting mistakes. Others decide people who make mistakes are unreliable and respect people who don't appear to make mistakes.

Or people who publicly flipflop on serious ideological issues seem more like psychotics than they do like fair minded thinkers. It often strikes me as arrogance rather than humility.

Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs just seem to have something off in their brains to me.

And I'm old enough to have friends who were complete shitbirds when we were 19 and who found Jesus at 30 and now won't shut up about it. And while I respect them for their change, I kind of reject their lectures. I stayed at a 5 (semi open relationship with the same girl) all along, you were at a 0 (lie to girls about your career and family to try to trick them into sex) and now you're at a 10 (premarital sex will lead to hell). Maybe take a chill pill, a touch of humility, if you were wrong then you might be wrong now.

Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs just seem to have something off in their brains to me.

It's super consistent behavior, though; they like attention and they found a larger audience, or they tend to follow the crowd and the crowd changed directions, or, less charitably but perhaps more accurately, they like to bully others and they found a less costly way to be horrible.

I grew up in a religious community. I was always unorthodox, and was treated poorly by a lot of people who were regarded as "upstanding" for their piety. I expressed doubts about God as a kid, so no one is surprised to hear me say such things as an adult. But the same individual people who were most likely to mete out social punishment for my little heresies are still the people most likely to mete out social punishment for my heresies, only now they're various shades of woke and my heresies are political instead of theological.

Whether they've stayed in the faith or separated from it, basically all of them are ultra-orthodox woke advocates now (mostly for LGBT issues, but depending on their circumstances also for a rainbow of disabilities, with autism--or "autism"--and obesity being common pet projects in addition to the usual vapid strains of so-called anti-racism). The ones who haven't blocked me on their social media feeds are still the same bullies they've always been (I assume the same is true for the ones who took the step of blocking me, but I can't guarantee it). No amount of hair dye or piercings can hide the fact that they are still doing everything they can to punish independent thought or questioning of the party line. That it's a different party line is irrelevant except, perhaps, as a "born again" bona fide. As the Wizard sings--"the most celebrated are the rehabilitated..."

Freddie deBoer's "Planet of Cops" tells the story well, though I don't think he ever quite twigs to the shared identity of the conservative cops he complains about, and the woke cops he sees as imitating them. When he criticizes religious conservatives as natural cops, he memorably cites William Burroughs:

William Burroughs summarized the whole social conservative movement perfectly as “decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.”

And my response is: it's still the "decent church-going women" (and, often, men), they still wear mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces. Often, literally the same actual people. They just left their old church and joined your new, political not-a-church.

Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs are some of the most internally consistent people in the world. If feeling morally superior to others and reveling in hating and even seeking the extermination of the right people is something you enjoy, the difference between Nazis and Twitter SJWs is little more than a palette swap.

My view on that is that it's easier to claim the "decent church-going folks" are the natural pinch-faces, because that lets you ignore the pinch-faces on your side. 'We're not religious! We're not conservative! So we can never ever be like that!'

Oh yes indeed you can be, and often are.

It's super consistent behavior, though; they like attention and they found a larger audience

Absolutely how it works on Twitter. While neither a Nazi nor an SJW (hopefully), at some point I went from having followers like Nick Land and BAP to getting a whole clique of rabidly Communist transgender Jews. Twitter is dominated by leftists, and they supply cheap attention. If I cared more about such schlock I'd have probably tailored my messaging further; and were I worse at isolating processes (or just younger), I could have had this environmental change propagate back into my own value system.

Many people are not particularly good at that.

You know what, this makes me grateful that my outspoken atheism as early as the age of 5 never really hurt me in any way. Religion never took in me in the first place, and despite occasional efforts by my parents when I was younger to drag me to the odd temple or festival, they never really made a fuss about what I believed. Nor did anyone else I've interacted with in person.

I'd chalk it to Hinduism being unusually non-evangelist or proselytizing, including continued historical acceptance of sects that were atheist (in the sense they denied the existence of any gods, while often holding vague spiritual views). "Nastik", the Hindi/Bengali term for atheist, specifically refers to them. I'm sure that if I had relapsed from Islam, the consequences would have been much more severe, but both Hindus and Muslims just seem grateful that I don't side with either and are content to let me be.

the difference between Nazis and Twitter SJWs is little more than a palette swap

Please don’t summon him…

I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to, though it sounds like maybe asking you to explain would potentially violate your concern.

@HlynkaCG, I believe you have been summoned.

Ah. If that's what we're talking about, I will cheerfully insist that I've been saying "the only difference between the alt-right and the far-left is the approved targets of their identitarianism" for at least as long as Hlynka has been on that train.

But then how do you explain:

  • Opposition to medical transition in general, and especially hormone therapy for children, is an alt right position, while supporting them is a leftist position.

  • The alt right thinks women should be encouraged (through both informal cultural means and formal policy) to be housewives, while the left thinks that women should be encouraged to build independent careers.

  • Opposition to mandatory Covid vaccination is right-coded, support for mandatory Covid vaccination is left-coded.

Are these not legitimate differences? Differences that aren't reducible to the target of their identitarianism?

More comments

Yeah, /r/StormfrontorSJW is almost 10 years old now.

I’ve always found the Peterson “ideological possession” idea useful as an explanation. Some people need a political and social framework outside of themselves to function and thus run from ideology to ideology in hopes that simply believing the ideology and living by it will provide structure they personally need to function. Other people don’t need as much structure in their lives so they tend not to follow or build one.

There’s a qualitative difference to me between someone who goes from one ideology— hook, line, and sinker— to another with no gaps in between, especially if they’re extremely different, and someone whose thinking evolved over time and can admit to nuances in their positions both before and after. If I go from fundamentalist Christian to hard core atheist SJW with pink hair and a nose ring, you’d be right to be at least suspicious of my reasoning— and at least from my observation of them, there wasn’t any hard dispassionate reasoning in between. People who reason themselves into a position are much less likely to make that position into a large portion of their personality.

When Someone Tells You They're Lying, Believe Them

Whenever you criticize something adjacent to my beliefs I'm always bothered, but since we're all biased, I have to be honest and admit that I might only be bothered by the disagreement/criticism itself, rather than the quality of you arguments or the background low-key antagonism towards your targets. This post was very helpful in clearing up the question of what's bothering me. If you managed to make me feel defensive towards Paul Ehrlich of all people, then I think we've found the problem, and it is you.

If you say things like "when someone tells you they're lying", I will be expecting some admission of deception, not run of the mill rationalization of the "even when I'm wrong, I'm right" variety.

He happened to have made this claim right before India's Green Revolution in agriculture

Which is probably why he's seems reluctant to concede his broader argument about us eventually running into limits of what our planet can sustain. For people like him the Green Revolution is a bailout, not a permanent solution, or a change of trajectory towards a more sustainable path. Focusing on a specific prediction would be missing the forest for the trees, unless you want to claim that there will always be a new Green Revolution coming to bail us out when we need it.

Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists' warning to humanity in the same year. My view has become depressingly mainline!

This part in particular rings true. If he was so wrong, why is every single influential organization, governmental or otherwise, constantly blasting us with propaganda about "sustainability"?

What I find so interesting about the second bet in 1995 is how peculiar the proposed conditions were [image link]

Huh... they were already talking about declining sperm counts in 1995? I'll be...

Which is probably why he's seems reluctant to concede his broader argument about us eventually running into limits of what our planet can sustain. For people like him the Green Revolution is a bailout, not a permanent solution, or a change of trajectory towards a more sustainable path. Focusing on a specific prediction would be missing the forest for the trees, unless you want to claim that there will always be a new Green Revolution coming to bail us out when we need it.

This would've been a fair defense of Ehrlich's predictions. Even the first bet could have resulted in Julian Simon losing had they used another time period. The problem is that Ehrlich never backs down. He could have said "My prediction about India was wrong, as I never would have expected such an unprecedented boost in agricultural productivity to happen. Nevertheless, my concerns remain ripe for the following reasons..." but he didn't. Instead of acknowledging he was wrong, he comes up with creatively-shaped second predictions to avoid the vise.

Given that global population growth is slowing and the global population is likely to peak this century, the ‘green revolution’ is indeed sufficient to feed the projected maximum human population of the earth. So calling it a ‘temporary bailout’ is wrong.

This assumes the slowing of population growth is organic, rather than the product of decades of social engineering by people like Ehrlich.

I see no reason for that assumption, birth rates are dropping even in countries that have never tried outright population control measures, and in turn they do not respond to attempts to increase fertility.

This is still transitory, since it increases selection pressures on the remaining fertile till we reach new resource constraints. Even then, only the ignorant would think that we'd be anywhere close to reaching that limit in this century, or the next, unless we absolutely change or exceed the limits of our biology (which might happen).

When you say "never tried population control" do you mean things like the one child policy, and mandatory sterilization, or propaganda about sex being primarily for pleasure, contraceptives, abortion, "women's empowerment", deconstruction of the family, and deconstruction of various identities?

The former.

I dispute the latter matters all that much because "propaganda" in the other direction has been useless, leaving aside more concrete incentives.

No, propaganda in the other direction has not been useless- red tribe propaganda about how awesome having kids is is probably the main reason for their oddly high fertility rates, and non-haredi Jews in Israel are to my understanding under a very similar propaganda-fertility boost, albeit more about the duty of having children than the joys. Now if that propaganda is obvious lies, or drowned out by anti-natal propaganda, it’s useless. The key is to make good propaganda.

Fair point, but I would like to point out that as propaganda goes, the latter doesn't really scale.

More comments

Well, it's something reasonable people can disagree on.

For my part I believe propaganda in the other direction has been essentially non-existent, and if you look at the sub-groups that do reproduce you'll find that they hold strong beliefs about all the issues I mentioned above, which go in the direction opposite to that promoted by the regime.

Sure, I can agree to disagree. I see it as being moot for most relevant time scales, be it because we're not going to expand beyond 11 billion in a "business as usual" world (itself extremely unlikely), or because of clear technological pathways that also raise the carrying capacity by OOMs.

But I will say that the evidence that strong pro-natal propaganda doesn't work is also evidence that anti-natal propaganda doesn't work, it seems that the a decreased urge to have or raise children is a consequence of modernity as a whole, not concerted action by any particular interest group, barring a weird definition of interest group that would include like 5-6 billion people.

This isn't a "if she floats she's a witch, and if she sinks she's a witch" deal either, because I am transferring the probability mass to a third outcome, that having 1.8 kids is what most people raised in modern culture want to do, at least from revealed preferences. I don't think that something as broad as widely-conserved aspects of global culture ought to be described as propaganda, not merely things like condom distribution or sex ed classes. The latter is not outright anti-natalist, it only seeks to shift the window of fertility to a more stable part of a woman's life, even if in terms of outcomes it does likely suppress total birth rates. The teachers conducting them or the bureaucrats endorsing them don't care if their kids go on to have 3 or 4 kids, as long as they don't do it while in school.

Aella-simping blogspam aside,

But when Aella asks Meghan “What kind of data would make you update your mind?” Meghan responds “No data”

While I’m sure this makes Aella Twitter poll takers gasp, it’s important to understand there’s a difference between something being falsifiable and something being testable with the data we have at our disposal. There’s a test you could theoretically run to tell whether porn is bad: a society-wide RCT where people are randomly assigned from birth into the porn society or into the no porn society and then we measure outcomes years later. In contrast there’s probably no observational data at present that would be very useful in answering the question well. (Silly Aella surveys are unhelpful and probably worse than nothing.) That doesn’t mean that Murphy’s belief is any more unfalsifiable than the particle physicist who needs a bigger particle accelerator’s theory is.

That whole exchange just tells me that Murphy has much better intuition than Aella for why causal inference with observational social science data is hard, even if she doesn’t have the language to exactly explain why.

In contrast there’s probably no observational data at present that would be very useful in answering the question well. (Silly Aella surveys are unhelpful and probably worse than nothing.) That doesn’t mean that Murphy’s belief is any more unfalsifiable than the particle physicist who needs a bigger particle accelerator’s theory is.

That whole exchange just tells me that Murphy has much better intuition than Aella for why causal inference with observational social science data is hard, even if she doesn’t have the language to exactly explain why.

I'm not following here. I agree that an RCT would be better than a survey, but that doesn't mean the latter is useless. People didn't find out that smoking caused cancer because of some RCTs; all they needed were serious discrepancies in observational data (a survey, in other words). Because we lack RCTs on the subject, I suspect (but don't know for sure) that porn is probably bad for the consumer. However, if there was a survey that found serious discrepancies between the porn consumer and the porn non-consumer, I would certainly keep in mind selection bias etc, but I also would take the findings seriously. It's not conclusive, but that's not the same thing as having zero evidentiary value.

I don't understand what you mean when you say Murphy has a better intuition about causal inference? She's not presenting as an agnostic on this issue here.

I don't think Murphy has 'better intuition on causal inference', she's just sticking to her position without any particular justification, given her debate performance. Even if Aella's substantially wrong.

No, she's just not a data-driven utilitarian, and she said as much.

Agreed. I'm always skeptical of people, like Aella, who focus endlessly on what the data is and trying to interpret grand conclusions from statistics, bigger conclusions than one should. There's a reason "lies, damned lies, and statistics" is a saying.

For example, police statistically pull over and ticket more black people. Does this mean that police are racist? No, it just means that black people commit more traffic offenses. Indeed, black people statistically commit more crime in general. (Noticing this is only racist if you come up with racist explanations for this. There's perfectly innocuous explanations you could argue like black people being historically disadvantaged, being in poverty, etc.) People will argue that speed cameras are better because they can't be biased, and then once speed cameras are implemented, will allege that cameras are racist somehow just because they, statistically, ticket more black people.

Most people don't think in terms of data and statistics, and quite frankly, it's not really the best policy to implement something from "well this number is lower" or "this line is going up and to the right". So what if Meghan Murphy is wrong, and, for the sake of argument, a lot of people in the sex industry have a positive view of it (as proven by statistics)? It does not necessarily follow that the sex industry is ethical or positive for society as a whole.

(Silly Aella surveys are unhelpful and probably worse than nothing.)

Just so we're on the same page, there's already articles defending Aella's surveys as things you can draw big conclusions from, rather than things that only apply to Aella's audience.

"Selection bias doesn't make Aella's surveys worse than average" should not mean Aella's surveys are useful; it should mean on average surveys are about as useful as astrology.

Definitely. Scott's article is arguing against some hypothetical person that disbelieves Aella's surveys but for some reason believes the average sociological survey, when as far as I'm aware, people who criticize Aella don't also believe in the average survey.

The whole point of that article, that selection bias is bad, correctly points out that it gives you a conditional expectation when you often want an unconditional one. But then in the very next sentence it says nbd because you often care about correlations, not expectations. Sure, you often care about unconditional correlations, not conditional ones, which is what selection bias gives you.

Of the two, I’d much rather follow someone who is looking for data, simply because it’s easy to tap dance away from being wrong if you can simply find reasons to not trust the data. It’s perfectly reasonable to propose an alternative theory, or point out an obvious flaw in the data we have. On the other hand, if you’re completely dismissive of the data in hand, you’ve completely lost the ability to think rationally about the issue because you’ve moved from asking whether something is true based on facts to a piori claims that “of course my claim is right, the data you have is flawed, and if we had (what I get to define as) the real data, it would agree with me.”

Online polls of self-selected people have flaws, obviously. But they are at least an attempt at gathering real facts, and they actually do tend to falsify the claim that “women in the sex industry don’t like it” as it shows women in the sex industries liking their job. To simply dismiss that datapoint completely undermines your credibility because it means that your position is not based in fact, but in conjecture. And if you’re basing your opinion on conjecture devoid of facts, it should be dismissed out of hand.

This is my big thing with alien enthusiasts. They are not interested in facts. You point out that we haven’t found any megastructures, they counter with cloaking devices. You tell them that a lot of the the supposed faster than light devices violate known physics or require exotic matter and energy that we can’t find anywhere in the universe, and they point out that the aliens are millions of years ahead of us. And on it goes, dismissing facts at hand as flawed or explaining them away such that the position isn’t based in fact, and it turns out that we have no data at all or the data we have is flawed in such a way that the evidence pointed away from their desired outcome isn’t a problem. It’s dishonest, and I find it much harder to take a position like that seriously if you’re ignoring facts.

It’s perfectly reasonable to propose an alternative theory, or point out an obvious flaw in the data we have. On the other hand, if you’re completely dismissive of the data in hand, you’ve completely lost the ability to think rationally about the issue because you’ve moved from asking whether something is true based on facts to a piori claims that “of course my claim is right, the data you have is flawed, and if we had (what I get to define as) the real data, it would agree with me.”

What do we do if all the data we have access to really is horribly flawed?

Agnosticism is always an option

In this case, you point to the flaws in the study and if better are available, cite those. If there’s nothing better, then provisionally accept what we actually have, and go from there. What you don’t get to do is simply say “study bad, therefore it’s all dismissed.” I’m still right because I’m rejecting the data I don’t like, and I reserve the right to reject any data I don’t like on the basis of whether or not I like the studies in question. It’s dishonest in a debate to give yourself the power to simply dismiss evidence without having some data of your own refuting it, Twitter surveys suck as evidence, but absent other evidence from better sources, you can’t simply say “bad methods, so it doesn’t count.” It refuted the point in question, that At least some women enjoy sex work. You can point out that you took a survey of people who follow a prostitute and therefore it’s biased, you can point to a lack of controls to prevent multiple accounts by the same person voting. It’s flawed, but it’s at least some evidence.

If there’s nothing better, then provisionally accept what we actually have, and go from there.

But why should I do this if, as posited, I have good reason to think that the data sucks?

Let me give a sort-of example from my own area of expertise. It's not actually a data-driven field; it's very deterministic mathematical theory. For decades now, people have been solving certain problems one way, using one method. The method has significant flaws. Some of the flaws are well-known; others, more damning ones in my mind, are just being revealed now. (I hate to say it, but it truly is, "Being revealed by a series of papers in which I'm a coauthor." I can lessen the arrogant-sounding sting a little bit by wholeheartedly acknowledging that it was a collaborator, not me, who came up with the initial counter-example that kicked off the whole shebang.)

We've been able to fix the problem, using a completely different method (established in a different context)... but so far, only for one specific version. There are numerous other variants of the problem. The thing is, for several of these variants that we've looked at, I can demonstrate that the (very bad) problem exists! I can show actual examples demonstrating why and how the prior methods fail to do what we had previously expected them to do. But we haven't yet 'fixed the glitch' for all these other variants (working on it!).

In sum, I know the bounds of what the prior method actually accomplishes, but I also now know what it doesn't accomplish. This has been hard for some people I've talked to in the field to grok, because they're so steeped in the old method. (I've had this conversation quite a few times, and it really breaks their brains at first, but if I get them to really focus on a particular example and I get them to really consider what would happen with the counterexample, I have a 100% rate of convincing them so far (profs in the field).) If someone were to say something like, "Yeah, ok, well, we know the prior method isn't perfect, but there's nothing better yet for this particular version of the problem, so let's provisionally accept it and go from there," I'm going to say, "HELLS NO!" Instead, I'm likely going to go find a particular counterexample for this variant, show exactly how the existing method is broken for this variant, and simply say, "We can't actually proceed further until we fix this."

I know this is shrouded in a small amount of mystery, but it's related, because we want to say, "Method/data says X." We think that, "Method/data says X." But it turns out that the method/data actually only says Y... which turns out to be very far from actually saying X. I'm not going to provisionally hold X when it pretty clearly says only Y and we don't actually have proper evidence for X.

Quite right, firewood per capita is not a useful measurement of anything. 10th century Europe had lots of firewood per capita, 20th century Europe had less but was far stronger and richer. I'm willing to bet that the most powerful civilization in the universe has a negligible firewood per capita ratio.

Better to ask broader questions than narrower questions. The modern day US doesn't have many horsemen and few, ill-fortified castles. Yet it doesn't follow that it's a weak nation, easy for conquistadors to thrash like the Aztec Empire. Total energy production, manufacturing throughput by weight... these would show why modern civilizations are more powerful than ancient ones, they'd show Ehrlich to be wrong.

Intellectual dishonesty exemplified in a 15 point list.

I lol'd especially hard at #12: "There will be fewer plant and animal species still extant in 2004 than in 1994". Way to take a bold stance there, bud.

It's tempting to look at someone like Paul Ehrlich and say "he was wrong, but his reasoning was right". As you point out, this isn't true. He was wrong, and he continued to be wrong in the face of overwhelming evidence. He was a charlatan all along.

I can understand being cautious and careful about metrics given the world we live in. If I was expecting extreme poverty in the near future and made a bet with someone that people would have less money in the next 10 years and we then went through a period of hyperinflation, I would have been ultimately correct but technically wrong (hey these accounts have a higher number of dollars in them!). And on the flipside of that, if you have a sudden pandemic that wipes out 80% of the population then I would say that the people living in the broken shell of an economy that resulted would ultimately be poorer, even though they have a higher number on their bank account and can lay claim to a greater share of society's wealth. Being careful about what it is you're actually measuring isn't necessarily a sign of dishonesty... but while I am raising this objection here I absolutely agree with the broader thrust of your post.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

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."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats