Don't Believe Everything You Think

This academic paper tries to pathologize healthy self-doubt and, in particular, the role anticipation of and respect for others' skepticism helps us activate it in ourselves. But only if you're female.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/713146

The argument ultimately rests on the claim that society is biased against believing women. But this is factually incorrect, particularly with regard to claims of abuse. There's abundant evidence that women are more, not less, likely than men who make such claims.

Thanks to Robin Hanson for bringing this absurdity to my attention.

Karl vs. Bret

Marxism is a subject which a great many people think they understand far better than they actually do. This is largely because opponents have psychological blocks to understanding it and are motivated to misinterpret it.

Watching evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein's new interview with Jordan Peterson the other day -- and particularly the part in which they purport to be discussing Marxism -- gave me occasion to bring together a number of points which I've made in comments under other videos. 

 

Weinstein refers to "attempts to create a Marxist Utopia," and this only demonstrates that he hasn't actually acquainted himself with basic Marxist texts. If he had, he'd know that Marxism rejects the idea of using the State to try and instantiate a Utopia, holding instead that that endpoint will come about only at the same stage of history when the State no longer exists -- an entire historical period after the overthrow of capitalism by a proletarian revolution. And "equality of outcome," another phrase he uses in this context, isn't even an objective of Marxism. The same text that places Utopia at the end, not the beginning of a post-revolutionary period -- Critique of the Gotha Programme -- describes that Utopia as having "inscribed on its banner the watchword: 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!'" Since, as this statement implicitly recognizes, people don't have equal abilities or needs, this clearly does not mean equal outcomes.

He says we want a system in which people are "economically rewarded for doing a good thing" -- that is, performing socially useful labor. But this is exactly how Marx defines "bourgeois right" as it would operate in the first stage of socialist society, with people being compensated according to their labor (with the obvious exceptions that we see even in civilized capitalist countries, i.e., children, the elderly, and invalids).

The kernel of truth in what he's saying about unequal outcomes is that we want people to be motivated to be more rather than less productive, which is absolutely true. Where he errs is in assuming that this has to take the form of differences in economic wealth or even in income, and it's rather ironic that he makes this error, given his academic background. As a Darwinian, he ought to understand that what matters ultimately is only the higher status that results in more and better reproductive opportunities. Society can be arranged so that this status is independent of economic wealth. In particular, common ownership of productive wealth would greatly facilitate the transparency that would allow people to see directly how big a contribution someone has made, instead of having to infer it from conspicuous consumption which, aside from its purported motivational function, represents by definition a non-optimal allocation of resources as it means to some extent the prioritizing of (relative) luxuries over necessities.

And when Peterson talks about "forcing equality," he sounds as if he's describing the dystopia in Ayn Rand's Anthem. As the editor who rejected her manuscript observed, "The author does not understand socialism."

Protest Creatively, for Safety's Sake

Are outdoor in-person protests safe? There's been a lot of back and forth about this.

I went to a couple last summer, based on the organizers' call for participants to wear masks and practice physical distancing. Both times, most did wear masks, but when the rally transitioned to a march down a street, people were squeezed too closely together, willy-nilly. The problem was not apparently that they didn't understand the importance of distancing; they just had no way of spontaneously coordinating to accomplish this.

As a result, I stopped taking part in such in-person events, but I took every opportunity to point out that an alternative is possible. That alternative is for people to actually plan ahead of time exactly how they will stay far enough apart. I have seen stories about events where this was done successfully.

One way of doing so is to use a service like signup.com, which is how Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania ensures that enough, but only enough, people volunteer to be patient escorts and escort coordinators. Volunteers go to the website, sign in, and are presented with a specified number of slots for each day, hour, and location. Once the full complement is filled for a given time and place, no more people can sign up for it. This ensures that patients aren't intimidated or inconvenienced by an excessive number of volunteers as they go into the clinic. The same technology could be used to arrange for, say, three and no more than three people to stand and hold up signs at each corner of each intersection along a major thoroughfare, ensuring that lots of motorists will get the message -- and not merely for a moment, but over an extended interval of time -- while demonstrators stay a safe distance apart.

Some may point to the fact that no significant spikes in COVID-19 cases followed last summer's protests. This is true, and it reflects that fact that this pathogen spreads more easily in enclosed spaces. Unfortunately, there are now new, more contagious strains, and even if these aren't easily transmitted within outdoor crowds, such events still create conditions that could hasten the evolution of new strains that would be. We can't afford to risk that.

Against Moral Totalism

Keywords: spanking, spankers, bias, prejudice, stereotypes

I watched this video by Jillian Keenan the other day. In case you might misunderstand the title, it's not about safe technique but, rather, keeping oneself safe from bad actors in the spanking fetish community:

Spanko Safety -- YouTube

For the most part it's a great video, but I have to disagree on one point, where she calls it a "red flag" if someone defends the spanking of children. She doesn't elaborate on why, but I would presume it's because they "don't believe in consent."

This is an example of a kind of totalistic thinking: either you have my morality, or you have no morality, because no other kind is possible. Or, to put it another way, it reflects an inability to comprehend that different people organize their moral thought in accordance with different categories.

For instance, someone who calls herself pro-life may think her position is adequately explained by the statement, "Killing is wrong," and therefore assume that anyone calling himself pro-choice must think that killing isn't wrong. She might consequently conclude that she can't trust him to babysit her children, because he "doesn't care" if they're killed.

Her error would be that she's failing to comprehend that the pro-choicer puts born children and unborn fetuses in separate moral categories -- in fact, his position is explicitly based on this distinction -- and so he most certainly isn't going to defend killing born children, since that would be at odds with the ideological basis of his pro-choice position.

In like manner, when Keenan views people who defend the spanking of children as untrustworthy play partners, she's failing to recognize that for them, an essential ideological premise is that children and adults are morally distinct categories, with different rights and responsibilities. The very distinction on which their position rests, therefore, militates strongly against their disregarding consent when it comes to adult play partners, since to do so would mean negating the ideological premise on which their position rests.