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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25317 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Despite my own inclination to completely accept gay people qua gay people, I find nothing objectionable about Johnson's statements and see them as a much more accurate model of reality than what the CNN crew is expressing. I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition. I'm agnostic on whether this could allow someone who has a natural inclination towards homosexuality (or heterosexuality) to groom attraction for the sex that they didn't initially prefer, but it's not obvious to me, and I don't think there's good reason to say that it's deboonked as though this is just a common stylized fact.

I'm 99% certain that, in writing this paragraph, you thought about this issue at least one order of magnitude more than anyone you saw on CNN has in all their lives put together. For at least the past 2 decades, the dogmatic consensus has been that someone's sexuality is a part of their inner essence, that someone doesn't become gay or straight, they merely discover it. If you think about it empirically, it becomes immediately clear that we simply lack the mountains of scientific research in order to conclude this, much less have any confid in the conclusion, but why think about it empirically when thinking about it empirically can get you accused of homophobia?

More generally, there's a tendency of people to reject the effectiveness of what they consider morally abhorrent. You see this with other CW topics like death penalty (obviously it's barbaric AND it doesn't deter crime any better than the alternative) or torture (obviously it's excessively cruel AND it doesn't give us good info). The mirror image is the case too, such as affirmative action (obviously it's morally correct to give individuals belonging to oppressed categories extra opportunities, AND this will enable schools/companies to be better/smarter/richer by being able to make use of previously overlooked individuals from those categories).

I don't know if there's some psych term for this, but it's just incredibly common in all realms of politics, I think. Very often, they're even true. But also very often, people just jump to unwarranted conclusions by falling prey to this pattern.

i thought this was referred to as 'mood affiliation' in some circles but i'm not sure if that's the right term. maybe it's just confirmation bias. see: https://www.econlib.org/mood-affiliation-or-confirming-evidence/

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