http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/0
I.
I love Scott's writings, and his existence makes me happy, but it's frustrating and obnoxious and a little creepy (in a similar-feeling way to that described in Against Devil's Advocacy) how he can come across like anyone who doesn't share his particular meta methods for analysing such situations is ethically inferior and The Reason We Can't Have Nice Things, when his actual arguments on such matters seem way too incomplete and shaky to justify such arrogance.
Any position on this subject which does not acknowledge that this is—in principle, at least—an empirical matter, is suspect. It is an empirical question whether defecting from the particular norm of 'don't fire people for their political statements/actions outside work' is going to bite defectors in the ass, and whether that bite will outweigh the immediate gain. Similarly if we broaden the reference class of controversial situations or go up meta-levels of fairness/cooperation norms. On the dialectic scale between 'Destroy ideological opponents by any means necessary' and 'Be charitable to and try to view opponents favourably', some have over-updated and are unrealistically favourable.
For example, in A Comment I Posted On “What Would JT Do?”, Scott says:
"But people also have to understand that the correct response to “idea I disagree with” is “counterargument”, not “find some way to punish or financially ruin the person who expresses it.” If you respond with counterargument, then there’s a debate and eventually the people with better ideas win (as is very clearly happening right now with gay marriage)."
I assume this is a causal statement, i.e. that debate causes better ideas to win, and moreover that this causes them to win faster than other means, and this is an empirical question whose answer is not obvious. And the fact that Scott doesn't, to any significant extent (as I recall, though I may have forgotten, which would be pretty embarrassing, but hey), acknowledge this—nor many of those who Share/Like/etc. his posts—is a massive red flag for blinkered/Just World/naïve thinking. (A weak theory, but one worth mentioning, is the possibility that people like Scott Typical Mind on abstract fairness and sanity and overestimate how effective being correct/right is in pursuing social justice.)
This is a point in various contexts (feminism, secularism, bigotry, etc.) which has been relevant to other things Scott has written: Is it more effective to be strident and defect, or to cooperate? This might be empirically tractable: Do defecting pushes (e.g. throwing oneself under the King's/monarch's horse) tend to be more effective? Often a movement will have relatively defecting and relatively less defecting branches, but by looking at particular pushes and timelines, this confounder seems possibly surmountable.
This seems like a resistant point to almost everybody I've ever seen touch on it or get close to it. The cooperation/defection points differ, but all of them seem to be areas where people will not independently realise that these matters are empirical and consequentialist, or even when it is pointed out, it will seem to pass in one ear and out the other.
A: We shouldn't congratulate men for not doing X; not doing X is basic decency; it's to be expected.
B: True; it would be nice if people were decent not due to rewards but by being able to change their behaviour when it's pointed out to be bad. But in practice, humans learn through reinforcement. So it might be more effective to reward them through congratulation, even if it does leave a sick feeling at seeming to compromise; in many contexts such compromise is lauded as Wise.
A: But it's not my responsibility to congratulate people for doing the right thing; they should do it anyway.'
(Deontological thinking, Just World, possible rôle-type thinking, abdication of (heroic) responsibility, stopsign, mind killed.)
There are saner possible continuations of that dialogue (e.g. 'If we train people to only improve when they are rewarded, then they might be less likely to do so in contexts where they are not rewarded than if we didn't train them onto rewards'). But it generally feels like the underlying feeling or thought process is immovably deontological.
I lean somewhat towards the position that social justice is won fastest when (possibly in addition to cooperative approaches), minorities make things difficult enough for the majority that the majority's utility is maximised by giving up on oppressing the minority. There was a time when I used to be closer to Scott in thinking cooperating was the way to go, but then I realised that I was probably Just Worlding a bit and noticed that this left me confused as to what incentive the majority would have to change, given that people generally don't value consistency/truth-seeking/whatever magic ingredients allegedly preclude oppressing minorities. (Corresponding theory to the aforementioned one: I am Typical Minding on Just Worlding, and am overconfident that Scott is doing so, because I did so.)
In the same paragraph of the same post I quoted above, Scott says, "If there’s a norm of trying to punish the people with opposing views, then it doesn’t really matter whether you’re doing it with threats of political oppression, of financial ruin, or of social ostracism, the end result is the same – the group with the most money and popularity wins, any disagreeing ideas never get expressed."
To state this so confidently without backing it up, when there seem to be obvious potential counterexamples, is again a red flag. When feminisms begin, do they tend to have popular opinion and greater capital on their side? Campaigns for minority ethnic groups? My prior is slanted significantly towards no, they often don't (never do?). Scott has presumably realised this at some point, but this doesn't seem to have propagated to his position that I just quoted. If the minority puts a higher value on not being oppressed than the majority benefits by oppressing them, then, given coordination, the minority should be able to win by punishing the majority until the majority realises it's too much of a hassle to continue oppressing the minority, and gives them what they want. This is corroborated by guerrilla warfare and terrorism.
Of course, this can fail if you're up against an enemy who will exterminate you. But often opponents will value not being the type of person who exterminates you, or at least not appearing so to others, etc. And of course, both cooperative and defecting approaches can have this weakness.
And I remember that this did not feel like a gradual shift of position in me, but rather a sudden realisation that I was confused and that I had become complacent. If I had to speculate as to why it took me so long to realise this (i.e. to shift more towards social justice being won by being a nuisance), I would say that a lot of the strident discourse (of which I had read quite a lot, and at an even earlier time possibly endorsed) never left me with the impression that they had really, seriously tried cooperating and found it less effective. Rather, a lot of the strident stuff comes across in the aforementioned deontological fashion, like the strident narrative was bought into without actual comparison of results. So even though I was aware of the strident position, maybe (this is speculation) I did not feel moved by it because (subconsciously?) I could screen off the disagreement between myself and the strident folk as 'these people have bought into a dogma and not tested my position thoroughly, hence our disagreement'. So it was only after a worryingly long time that I independently realised that there was more to the strident position than I realised; their discourse did not come across as sane enough to help me much getting there.
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/malcolm.m
More generally, but less confidently than that specific point, it really does seem to me that the Republican Party (nowadays; some claim it 'used to be' better at some unspecified point, though I retain the possibility this is again a Wise and Charitable play or something, depending on the period we're talking about) and its politicians (not necessarily its supporters/voters) are more unscrupulous, nastier, and defect more than, say, Democrats. Both parties have politicians that do good things, give to charity, etc., and do some bad things. But on those things I have not detected a difference, whereas it does seem to me that the (vast) majority of corruption scandals, misdemeanours, sexual harassment/assault cases, gerrymandering, attempts to prevent voters of the other Party voting come from the Republican Party and its politicians.
Similarly, I know of no liberal/pro-gay analogue of the Westboro Baptist Church. (Maybe there have been some individual incidents, but not sustained campaigns like theirs.)
And it seems like a common criticism of the current Democratic Party is that they are too 'weak-willed'—that they aren't politically vicious enough to match the Republican's partisan antics, and as a result end up losing where they could have won.
However much the left might defect, it seems that fundies/the Republican Party/pro-lifers do more. And the latter don't stop defecting so much when the left cooperates more. And when, even when one tries to say, 'Okay, I'm going to cooperate (a bit more) now; let's both cooperate, okay?' and then cooperates and is defected against, then cooperates again because maybe the other didn't believe one would actually cooperate, and this iterates several (dozen, hundred, thousand, million, billion) times, then—barring evidence of a big change—I think it's better to defect in kind, since the whole point of cooperating is to try to get a cooperate-cooperate situation going.
So a statement like, "Honestly, there's going to be a big giant fireback due to this, and liberals are going to regret for the trigger being pulled," as someone commented, seems potentially unverifiable; if the other side is already defecting, then the marginal contribution of this incident is immeasurable. But it does seem to me that many on the other side already have such a low opinion of the left that they are already defecting on all cylinders, and (to make my own potentially immeasurable claim) this incident will therefore have a negligible impact. And I worry that the people saying 'liberals are going to regret this' will mistake the base level of the other side defecting for proof of their Wise prophecy—that this incident caused it, rather than that level of defection always being there and them being too Charitable to notice it. Also, again potential for Typical Mind when people who are in the top (0.)1% in ability to identify the situation as defection in an ethical-political Prisoner's Dilemma claim that since this is defection, it will cause a backlash.
But it's a lot easier and fun for many of us (including Scott) to write abstract, meta, clever (Clever?) posts, rather than trying to figure things out empirically, because that would involve the less exciting and more difficult work of reading up on history, reading accounts from or interviewing activists, doing case studies on particular minority movements, etc. And one does get the feeling that even a very honest, very thorough such study would basically be ignored by most people, and they would continue arguing from deontology or Just World thought processes.
Remember:
"Another example would be the principal who, faced with two children who were caught fighting on the playground, sternly says: "It doesn't matter who started the fight, it only matters who ends it." Of course it matters who started the fight. The principal may not have access to good information about this critical fact, but if so, he should say so, not dismiss the importance of who threw the first punch. Let a parent try punching the principal, and we'll see how far "It doesn't matter who started it" gets in front of a judge. But to adults it is just inconvenient that children fight, and it matters not at all to their convenience which child started it, it is only convenient that the fight end as rapidly as possible."
It's very tempting to look down upon humanity with disgust, and wonder why they can't just cooperate and let justice take its course. And often that's a fair enough perspective, and I am suspicious of those who don't feel like that in at least some measure. But in this situation, that's taking too high a ground to catch the details.
II.
'Rights' and 'freedom of X', while potentially having a sound basis in convergent points of cooperation ('Let's agree to not kill each other over disagreements; we'll have an ethical injunction against that, even if it seems like a good idea at the time—right to life/freedom of expression'), are concepts that all-too-often encourage deontological, mindkilled thinking, and serve as stopsigns. Rights can be a sham in more than one way. And even when such terms are not explicitly used (Scott doesn't mention 'rights' in his current OkC profile, and the only freedom of X/free X that comes up is him quoting Andrew Sullivan), similar thinking can still be taking place.
A major problem with rights-type thinking is that they encourage circular ethical reasoning; we define a right to encapsulate things we want (with the same name being given by different people to different things), then assert that those things are good, because they are rights.
And even when we avoid using those particular words, similar problems can creep in. If we define defection at only a single point, and choose that point to be 'causing someone's employment status to be affected by factors other than direct, technical, object-level competence,' and treat cooperation as a sacred virtue, then people who defect can seem like ignorant people who should be shamed, the same way that people who don't unhesitatingly agree with one's pet rights can be called a monster and shamed. And also like rights arguments, cooperation arguments can devolve into 'my Line of Salient Defection is right and yours is wrong' arguments.
I am generally confused about the various levels and intersections of argumentative cooperation and defection, and how to weigh them into my actions, and indeed whether I should do so to any significant extent at all. (The theoretical calculation would be done without mention of cooperation and defection, in the same way that criminal justice would theoretically be done without ever using the word 'rehabilitation', but it's a useful/necessary approximation.) Scott is implying that there is a single relevant defection point, namely the point of boycott of Mozilla or something.
People wanting to marry people of the same legal sex might feel that the salient defection point was Eich opposing their 'right to marriage' by funding a campaign against that. Others might look towards defections in epistemic processes causing opposition to same-sex marriage in the first place; ignoring evidence, using a disgust heuristic, siding with political expedience, etc. 'No significant number of people could be both reasonable and oppose same-sex marriage. So at some point people must be unreasonable (defecting epistemically) to get to that position.' You can't just paint the Line of Salient Defection wherever you want, then point and laugh at anyone who crosses your line; that is in itself a form of defection. Not in all cases, at least. (It might be okay in cases where somebody is literally unable to understand in terms of intelligence or because they would defect on enough meta-levels that they could not be reasoned into your object-level position on the correct LSD with any reasonable amount of effort.)
It's not entirely clear which LSD, of the many possible ones, Scott is using. Some would make his profile hypocritical, others wouldn't. Without clarifying, not only do we have the dimension of argumentative ridiculousness from it being a 'my LSD is better than yours' argument, but another dimension from most of those who do not actively disagree with Scott assuming they know what his LSD even is and beating a hayperson. ('Hay' rather than 'straw' because the needle is in the haystack, even if it's not obvious where. 'Person' because ew 'man'.)
(I acknowledge that in the post I quoted from and the OkC profile, Scott might not have been trying to argue (x-)rationally but rather optimise for other things.)