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Notes -
-I take your point about the worse outcomes of embracing negative utilitarianism. My point was that utility calculations are how bad a consequence would be times how likely it is to happen. The odds that we elect a negative utilitarian and applaud as he launches the nukes are very close to the zero; the odds of politicians using rhetoric adjacent to Byrne's to justify bills that restrict the rights of trans people is 'its already happening.'
-I agree that surprising Byrne's book wouldn't help, but I don't even get the impression that's happening, just his publisher getting cold feet. I was focusing on his claim that academics refuse to take him seriously and engage with him in the public square; I do think that declining to publicly engage with people who want a platform for their ideas is meaningfully different from suppression, and can be one part of a balanced strategic response that is positive EV.
-Obviously the ideas do need to be discussed to see if we're missing anything important, and that does happen. That's different from public platforms for reheated memes. If any of the really important possibilities you raise were true, Byrne would not be the one to discover or discuss them, that's not his expertise or approach.
-99.999% of philosophy professors don't have a book or a wide public platform, and I don't think they're automatically obliged to one any more than Byrne is. My point remains that it's reasonable for people to platform and respond to you in proportion to how important and useful your arguments are, and Byrne joins millions of others in not reaching the very high bar needed to justify the type of attention and cooperation he is claiming to deserve.
Sure. It's still bad. I don't think they'd substantially engage with a counterfactual philosopher who makes good or provocative arguments. Which is the issue.
And a broader problem here is we're trying to keep potentially anti-trans philosophical ideas from spreading on the grounds that people will act in negative ways based on them. But, what if the current philosophical or scientific grounding for beliefs related to trans issues is somewhat incorrect? Then we're potentially both acting in harmful ways due to said misunderstandings, and preventing potential corrections to said misundrstandings from surfacing. Which is an issue.
Er, 'publishing a book' is an incredibly common thing for a philosophy professor to do. There are a ton of books, and academics don't have much else to do beyond write. Whether anyone other than you and your dozen friends who have their own books actually read it is a separate question.
After a quick google, it looks like my intuitions about the number of philosophy professors there are were massively off, and I made a mistake adding so many significant digits. I should have just stuck with your 99%, as that was sufficient to make my point anyway.
That point being, almost everyone in the world, even most philosophy professors, never get a published book or a large public platform or widespread media attention with which to discuss and spread their ideas. Someone not getting that type of platform, even if they wish they had it and believe they deserve it, is absolutely the norm, the standard case, the null hypothesis. It takes a lot of something to overcome that barrier - merit, charisma, connections, etc. - and I don't see any of that from Byrne, such that we must imagine some conspiracy of silence and fear in order to explain why he's not more famous.
I think they would, although probably more in academic articles than in the public-facing media channels Byrne seems to want.
Again, regarding your point about the possibility that we're missing something important: I agree that this could happen, and it's important to have channels open to spot things like that.
I just maintain that Byrne is not putting forward anything, and does not really have the background or expertise, that could make him the one that would notice something like that. Nor is he pursuing it through the types of channels which someone with a genuinely new and important discovery would use, or where it would be possibly to explore such a finding with the necessary depth and scrutiny.
I do expect that the channels we'd need to discover something like that exist, and would be used if there were sufficiently strong evidence of something sufficiently important. I'm not saying there would be no pushback or inertia at all, unfortunately it's true that the political incentives around this issue make people skeptical of new findings that push one side's narratives, in the same way that people are skeptical of studies funded by corporations with a monetary interest in the result. But I do think if there were sufficient evidence, it would be picked up eventually.
I think it's way below 99%, too. As an exercise, I picked a random semi wellknown uni, picked a random phil professor off their list of professors (an asst. professor), and checked if they'd written a book - they had (The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality - Paperback).
I then picked a smaller local university, and checked a few of their professors. They, too, had each written a book.
Writing a book is, for a phil or humanities professor, a very common activity. Not a rarity at all.
Writing a book that gets a lot of attention, yes, that's a rarity.
Interesting. As you say, there's certainly not that many philosophy books a year that get teh type of attention Byrne seems to be going for; I was under the impression that physical publishing is doing really poorly as an industry right now, and expected that nothing would get published if it didn't have wide appeal. I guess there are other publishing channels for small academic stuff that's never intended to break big, which makes sense, I just wasn't thinking about it.
Thanks for the info!
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