That's interesting, have you written up a guide or essay on that process? That might be really valuable for a variety of reasons.
One of the interesting thing about Parrhesia's observation to me is that the woke might not be doing it on purpose, but rather it is a genuine gap in their ability to think. Maybe it is a crutch they unconsciously use to win arguments, or a mental flaw inherent in certain brain structures, or just a bad way of thinking rewarded by our educational/indoctrination system; I don't know. It strikes me though that figuring that out might be a crucial aspect to solving the apparent psychosis of the modern age, particularly if we are teaching people to think like that (intentionally or not).
I agree, Haidt's moral foundations theory is really useful for understanding the leftist mindset in many ways, although I find it more useful for the more moderate leftists and less for the progressive/woke crowds. The latter seem to put more emphasis on loyalty as well, although that might be less personality trait around right/wrong and more about group movement adherence.
Similarly useful is Arnold Kling's "Three Languages of Politics" book, specifically how the American left frames everything in an "Oppressor - Oppressed" narrative; identify which actor is which and you know who is supposed to be bad and opposed and who isn't, and that's the only relevant dimension.
The trouble I find is getting people to change their minds based on those aspects. Like when LGBTQ+++++ advocates also favor burning down Israel and handing it to the Palestinians. Pointing out that that Palestinian government oppresses the hell out of gay people, who then flee to Israel for protection, doesn't seem to do much. Likewise with the general wokes and fairness... their definition of fairness is really out there, such that they redefine fair to be "whatever I wanted before we started talking".
Admittedly, this might also be a function of most people just not having serious principles they care about but just wanting to be part of a group, and being part of their group they want to argue and defend their group's beliefs. There are definitely some decent people who can be argued with productively where understanding where they are coming from via moral foundations or language of politics angles really helps find common ground.
I would probably start with a diagnosis of the problem, a description of the general strategy, then how to reframe "normal" thought to meet the woke where they are and define the terms up front. Then a handful of examples.
I feel like there are a lot of steps I would see and probably say "Huh, it never would have occurred to me I needed to do that!" It feels like I would need to have a huge copy pasta file of definitions of terms or something to be sure... a short cut would be good, or maybe I am just thinking about it the wrong way.
I find I have a hard time arguing in ways that I don't want to be argued with, if that makes sense. For example, I hate being "sold" things, and can't really sell people stuff either. I am really good at helping people figure out what they want to solve a problem, and to the extent I can be sold things it has to be in that format.
I wish I had your ability, because I haven't formulated a strategy for refuting that sort of thing (e.g., "parental leave is infrastructure").
Edit: my issue is, how do you argue against the general subverting of all categories, if most of our categories are indeed imprecise and determined by habit/precedent, rather than objective rules and principle? And why do I care so much - am I against parental leave? In the "infrastructure" example above, leaves and benefits aren't physical lasting things and as such not "infrastructure" in the way we commonly understand it. But why not? They're important to society's functioning! Etc.
See, that's when I start responding "What?! NO! Words mean things!" :) Usually as my temples start throbbing. Even reading that I can feel my brain start to press against the inside of my skull as it tries to make "parental leave is infrastructure" make any kind of sense.
In a way what makes it more frustrating is that they can say shit like that and the other 99% of people don't scream "You are speaking moronic gibberish, or lying! Are you stupid or dishonest, or both?" then promptly throw them out of office and in front of a train.
I mean, you can argue for more parental leave without just talking like a crazy person who pics words at random. If I were to argue for more parental leave and someone made the claim that parental leave was infrastructure I would ask them to leave my political party.
Yea, I recall people making those sorts of claims in the infrastructure bill last year. It is like they define "infrastructure" only as "things we think are good and want". Maybe they are banking on other people not having a more accurate definition than that.
I will keep an eye out! The obvious "Silence/Speech is violence!" pops to mind, but then that is sort of super low hanging fruit. Plus it rhymes in the silence formulation, so that's like +5 power points right there.
Another maybe too easy one is the "X-phobia" applied to everyone who disagrees or doesn't like X. It seems that it started as being literally about being scared of e.g. homosexuals or Islam, but then spread to be not fear (because that would put it in the realm of things that need safe spaces perhaps?) but hatred and some sort of -ism.
Examples: the concept of "erasing" someone. Why shouldn't we start using words like "birthing people" or "people with uteruses", or "people experiencing homelessness". Any argument where you complain, say, of something that you believe exists - higher crime in certain neighborhoods, the danger of mentally unstable homeless people, "how do you know they're actually high crime and it's perpetuated by people of that group"; "well, actually schizophrenia, when properly controlled, is not a threat", and "actually, this protest only happened within two blocks of Portland and not the whole city"; minimizations and deflections of what seem like obvious statements? For these last ones I need to get you more context..... but that's the sort of discussions I get into people with.
Aye, I wonder if this is a matter of bad pedagogy teaching people to think like this (intentionally or not) or a psychological flaw that tended to get selected against more harshly in the old days but has found the modern era more forgiving. Or maybe the whole dialectic philosophy business subtly pushes this sort of thinking? I don't know, but it feels like it might be worth finding out if we want to improve things.
A more religious person than I might argue that the lack of any purpose or objective morality is a sure path toward moral relativism and nihilism, which is why people only start caring about words and not about truth and what IS.
I think one of the biggest mistakes systemising, high IQ people tend to make is to characterise this type of phenomenon as a "psychological flaw" or "bias" or suchlike. The underlying assumption in that view has to be something like our brains (and minds) evolved to be truth-seeking devices and that our speech therefore under normal functioning should reflect this. It can be very hard to get our heads around the (likely) fact that humans evolved their substantial intellectual prowess mostly to navigate social games where status rules the roost and the ultimate goal is to come out on top in competition with our fellow tribes members, mostly by coalition building which to a large degree depends on powers of persuasion since that probably leads to more stable social arrangements in the long-term than brute force and violence.
That is to say, most people are mostly sophists most of the time and that is the default mode of thinking and interacting with others. That is no flaw and it is us, the fairly large but still vastly outnumbered minority who care about abstraction, meaning, correspondence with physical reality and logical cohesion, who are the odd ones out. Since this group of people are also the only ones who have an interest in systematically understanding things, qua understanding them, their models of ordinary humans, their motives and their behaviour suffers from the fact that the only other people who like to discuss these things are drawn from that very same pool of more or less obligate systemisers, leading to a form of constantly validated collective typical-mind-fallacy that only gets worse the deeper they penetrate into these issues.
If you're familiar with Sperber & Mercier's paper "Why do Humans Reason?" (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1698090) it might be edifying to google for reviews or commentary about it to see how many really bright and deeply knowledgable people (like Jonathan Haidt, for example) were curiously surprised and impressed with their claims when the paper came out. That is, to my mind, to some degree an indictment of the whole project of understanding human behaviour that such a straight-forward model that, by all reason, should follow pretty directly from Darwin coupled with a pinch of casual observation of ordinary people.
(I hope the tone of this comment doesn't come off as overly dismissive or patronising – my bewilderment comes from my on experience of going through most of my life utterly failing to draw the right, and in hindsight obvious, conclusions from what I had already known for a long time, even though I'd spent in inordinate amount of time thinking about things like these, for as long as I can remember.)
Thanks for linking that article! I quite agree with your take that much of our reasoning is about arguing and status. I am reminded of a favorite line from an old blog "Atomic Nerds", how human language was developed for hurling insults at the tribe in the next tree over, not explaining quantum physics.
I think, however, it is a mistake to underestimate the functional aspect of reasoning, that is to say "I have this problem with physical things X and Y, and need them to Z." Goal driven reasoning in the sense that we have a goal and we need to try and figure out how to get there. Primarily this involves the manipulation of physical reality, but it can also involve complex political situations. (or even just an intentional approach to persuading someone)
My guess is that the two systems operate somewhat in parallel, with the social persuasion system only overlapping with the physical reasoning occasionally in certain realms. I will give the paper a closer read again, thanks!
To me, it seems like Parrhesia is giving too much credit to the people who coin these slogans, as though there were good faith behind it. It's not just sloppy thinking, or "thinking with words", it's gotchas and sophistry. There's no sincere belief, and when you have these discussions (if anyone is willing to have the discussion at all) is not engaging in sincere debates.
But not everyone who then believes and says them is cynical, which makes it harder to be hard-line or dismissive.
You are probably correct. I recall a few weeks ago someone... here or over at ACX... maybe John C? (Hey, it's bad memory Christmas this morning!) pointing out that while the masses of the movement were pretty driven by the usual emergent evolution of "what wins me arguments" sophistry, there was a hard core of the movement consciously selecting catch phrases, talking points etc. to be maximally effective at breaking through people's sensibilities. Increased gain of function for memes, as it were.
I think you are right that much of that is at play here, but as you say it can be hard to tell who knows better and is being cynical and who actually does think like that (for whatever reason). There are definitely the politicians, thought leaders, whatever we call them, poking around and just saying whatever will get them votes, attention or power. The fascinating part for me is how so many people are willing to go along with it, and I really feel like that needs some examination. My thought is that the crazy, evil and power hungry will always be around to try and get people to go along with crazy evil things, but people seem especially easily deluded now, and it honestly scares me a little that we don't know why or how to deal with the problem. I am not even sure we have a good enough sense of what went wrong to operationalize some sort of corrective measure, beyond "Have a giant bloody civil war until everyone wants to stay the hell out of politics for fear of another." I would really, really like to avoid that.
That's interesting, have you written up a guide or essay on that process? That might be really valuable for a variety of reasons.
One of the interesting thing about Parrhesia's observation to me is that the woke might not be doing it on purpose, but rather it is a genuine gap in their ability to think. Maybe it is a crutch they unconsciously use to win arguments, or a mental flaw inherent in certain brain structures, or just a bad way of thinking rewarded by our educational/indoctrination system; I don't know. It strikes me though that figuring that out might be a crucial aspect to solving the apparent psychosis of the modern age, particularly if we are teaching people to think like that (intentionally or not).
I agree, Haidt's moral foundations theory is really useful for understanding the leftist mindset in many ways, although I find it more useful for the more moderate leftists and less for the progressive/woke crowds. The latter seem to put more emphasis on loyalty as well, although that might be less personality trait around right/wrong and more about group movement adherence.
Similarly useful is Arnold Kling's "Three Languages of Politics" book, specifically how the American left frames everything in an "Oppressor - Oppressed" narrative; identify which actor is which and you know who is supposed to be bad and opposed and who isn't, and that's the only relevant dimension.
The trouble I find is getting people to change their minds based on those aspects. Like when LGBTQ+++++ advocates also favor burning down Israel and handing it to the Palestinians. Pointing out that that Palestinian government oppresses the hell out of gay people, who then flee to Israel for protection, doesn't seem to do much. Likewise with the general wokes and fairness... their definition of fairness is really out there, such that they redefine fair to be "whatever I wanted before we started talking".
Admittedly, this might also be a function of most people just not having serious principles they care about but just wanting to be part of a group, and being part of their group they want to argue and defend their group's beliefs. There are definitely some decent people who can be argued with productively where understanding where they are coming from via moral foundations or language of politics angles really helps find common ground.
I would probably start with a diagnosis of the problem, a description of the general strategy, then how to reframe "normal" thought to meet the woke where they are and define the terms up front. Then a handful of examples.
I feel like there are a lot of steps I would see and probably say "Huh, it never would have occurred to me I needed to do that!" It feels like I would need to have a huge copy pasta file of definitions of terms or something to be sure... a short cut would be good, or maybe I am just thinking about it the wrong way.
I find I have a hard time arguing in ways that I don't want to be argued with, if that makes sense. For example, I hate being "sold" things, and can't really sell people stuff either. I am really good at helping people figure out what they want to solve a problem, and to the extent I can be sold things it has to be in that format.
YOU HAVE 5 DAYS!
I wish I had your ability, because I haven't formulated a strategy for refuting that sort of thing (e.g., "parental leave is infrastructure").
Edit: my issue is, how do you argue against the general subverting of all categories, if most of our categories are indeed imprecise and determined by habit/precedent, rather than objective rules and principle? And why do I care so much - am I against parental leave? In the "infrastructure" example above, leaves and benefits aren't physical lasting things and as such not "infrastructure" in the way we commonly understand it. But why not? They're important to society's functioning! Etc.
See, that's when I start responding "What?! NO! Words mean things!" :) Usually as my temples start throbbing. Even reading that I can feel my brain start to press against the inside of my skull as it tries to make "parental leave is infrastructure" make any kind of sense.
In a way what makes it more frustrating is that they can say shit like that and the other 99% of people don't scream "You are speaking moronic gibberish, or lying! Are you stupid or dishonest, or both?" then promptly throw them out of office and in front of a train.
I mean, you can argue for more parental leave without just talking like a crazy person who pics words at random. If I were to argue for more parental leave and someone made the claim that parental leave was infrastructure I would ask them to leave my political party.
That particular one was in context of an infrastructure bill being debated in Congress. Here's an example of more: https://twitter.com/sengillibrand/status/1379773312482607106?lang=en
Yea, I recall people making those sorts of claims in the infrastructure bill last year. It is like they define "infrastructure" only as "things we think are good and want". Maybe they are banking on other people not having a more accurate definition than that.
The above is one. I will try to think of some - it's hard to come up with them when you try. (IS IT ALL IN OUR HEADS?!)
I will keep an eye out! The obvious "Silence/Speech is violence!" pops to mind, but then that is sort of super low hanging fruit. Plus it rhymes in the silence formulation, so that's like +5 power points right there.
Another maybe too easy one is the "X-phobia" applied to everyone who disagrees or doesn't like X. It seems that it started as being literally about being scared of e.g. homosexuals or Islam, but then spread to be not fear (because that would put it in the realm of things that need safe spaces perhaps?) but hatred and some sort of -ism.
Examples: the concept of "erasing" someone. Why shouldn't we start using words like "birthing people" or "people with uteruses", or "people experiencing homelessness". Any argument where you complain, say, of something that you believe exists - higher crime in certain neighborhoods, the danger of mentally unstable homeless people, "how do you know they're actually high crime and it's perpetuated by people of that group"; "well, actually schizophrenia, when properly controlled, is not a threat", and "actually, this protest only happened within two blocks of Portland and not the whole city"; minimizations and deflections of what seem like obvious statements? For these last ones I need to get you more context..... but that's the sort of discussions I get into people with.
Aye, I wonder if this is a matter of bad pedagogy teaching people to think like this (intentionally or not) or a psychological flaw that tended to get selected against more harshly in the old days but has found the modern era more forgiving. Or maybe the whole dialectic philosophy business subtly pushes this sort of thinking? I don't know, but it feels like it might be worth finding out if we want to improve things.
A more religious person than I might argue that the lack of any purpose or objective morality is a sure path toward moral relativism and nihilism, which is why people only start caring about words and not about truth and what IS.
That there is much bad pedagogy is also true.
I think one of the biggest mistakes systemising, high IQ people tend to make is to characterise this type of phenomenon as a "psychological flaw" or "bias" or suchlike. The underlying assumption in that view has to be something like our brains (and minds) evolved to be truth-seeking devices and that our speech therefore under normal functioning should reflect this. It can be very hard to get our heads around the (likely) fact that humans evolved their substantial intellectual prowess mostly to navigate social games where status rules the roost and the ultimate goal is to come out on top in competition with our fellow tribes members, mostly by coalition building which to a large degree depends on powers of persuasion since that probably leads to more stable social arrangements in the long-term than brute force and violence.
That is to say, most people are mostly sophists most of the time and that is the default mode of thinking and interacting with others. That is no flaw and it is us, the fairly large but still vastly outnumbered minority who care about abstraction, meaning, correspondence with physical reality and logical cohesion, who are the odd ones out. Since this group of people are also the only ones who have an interest in systematically understanding things, qua understanding them, their models of ordinary humans, their motives and their behaviour suffers from the fact that the only other people who like to discuss these things are drawn from that very same pool of more or less obligate systemisers, leading to a form of constantly validated collective typical-mind-fallacy that only gets worse the deeper they penetrate into these issues.
If you're familiar with Sperber & Mercier's paper "Why do Humans Reason?" (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1698090) it might be edifying to google for reviews or commentary about it to see how many really bright and deeply knowledgable people (like Jonathan Haidt, for example) were curiously surprised and impressed with their claims when the paper came out. That is, to my mind, to some degree an indictment of the whole project of understanding human behaviour that such a straight-forward model that, by all reason, should follow pretty directly from Darwin coupled with a pinch of casual observation of ordinary people.
(I hope the tone of this comment doesn't come off as overly dismissive or patronising – my bewilderment comes from my on experience of going through most of my life utterly failing to draw the right, and in hindsight obvious, conclusions from what I had already known for a long time, even though I'd spent in inordinate amount of time thinking about things like these, for as long as I can remember.)
Thanks for linking that article! I quite agree with your take that much of our reasoning is about arguing and status. I am reminded of a favorite line from an old blog "Atomic Nerds", how human language was developed for hurling insults at the tribe in the next tree over, not explaining quantum physics.
I think, however, it is a mistake to underestimate the functional aspect of reasoning, that is to say "I have this problem with physical things X and Y, and need them to Z." Goal driven reasoning in the sense that we have a goal and we need to try and figure out how to get there. Primarily this involves the manipulation of physical reality, but it can also involve complex political situations. (or even just an intentional approach to persuading someone)
My guess is that the two systems operate somewhat in parallel, with the social persuasion system only overlapping with the physical reasoning occasionally in certain realms. I will give the paper a closer read again, thanks!
To me, it seems like Parrhesia is giving too much credit to the people who coin these slogans, as though there were good faith behind it. It's not just sloppy thinking, or "thinking with words", it's gotchas and sophistry. There's no sincere belief, and when you have these discussions (if anyone is willing to have the discussion at all) is not engaging in sincere debates.
But not everyone who then believes and says them is cynical, which makes it harder to be hard-line or dismissive.
You are probably correct. I recall a few weeks ago someone... here or over at ACX... maybe John C? (Hey, it's bad memory Christmas this morning!) pointing out that while the masses of the movement were pretty driven by the usual emergent evolution of "what wins me arguments" sophistry, there was a hard core of the movement consciously selecting catch phrases, talking points etc. to be maximally effective at breaking through people's sensibilities. Increased gain of function for memes, as it were.
I think you are right that much of that is at play here, but as you say it can be hard to tell who knows better and is being cynical and who actually does think like that (for whatever reason). There are definitely the politicians, thought leaders, whatever we call them, poking around and just saying whatever will get them votes, attention or power. The fascinating part for me is how so many people are willing to go along with it, and I really feel like that needs some examination. My thought is that the crazy, evil and power hungry will always be around to try and get people to go along with crazy evil things, but people seem especially easily deluded now, and it honestly scares me a little that we don't know why or how to deal with the problem. I am not even sure we have a good enough sense of what went wrong to operationalize some sort of corrective measure, beyond "Have a giant bloody civil war until everyone wants to stay the hell out of politics for fear of another." I would really, really like to avoid that.