Not a dry eye in the house
Catching up. Jerry has some thoughts on Phil Plait’s famous best-selling Booker Prize-winning Library of Congress-approved “don’t be a dick” speech. One thought is that it sounded a good deal too much like “Tom Johnson” and his Amazing Experiences With the Out-of-control Atheist Fiends. Another thought is that Plait didn’t offer a shred of evidence for all his claims of pervasive atheist baddery. Those two thoughts are not unrelated to each other. “Tom Johnson” didn’t offer a shred of evidence for his exciting tale of persecution and spitting, either, and oh hey gee what do you know, it turned out that that was because it never happened and Tom Johnson was just throwing mud at people he doesn’t like. So why should anyone think Phil Plait is doing anything different?
Well one reason is that Plait is a different guy, and has a lot more to recommend him than “Tom Johnson” did. And another reason is…no actually that first reason is the only one I can think of. The fact that he didn’t and wouldn’t and won’t give any examples means that we don’t even know what he means, which makes it possible for people who hate gnu atheists to think he means pretty much everything short of plain secrecy and silence, and also makes it possible for gnu atheists to feel universally if vaguely guilty or implicated. That’s the case even though what Plait actually does spell out doesn’t make me (for one) go “Oh right, I do that all the time! Must do better.”
Insulting them, yelling at them, calling them brain damaged or morons or baby rapers, may make you feel good. . . but is your goal to score a cheap point, or is your goal to win the damn game?
Yeah no, see, I don’t do any of that. I don’t see a lot of other people doing that, either. A few blog comments, but that’s about it, and that can’t be what Plait was making such heavy weather about. Can it?
Richard Dawkins (Mr Ground Zero of putative dickish gnu atheism himself) made a very helpful point.
Plait naively presumed, throughout his lecture, that the person we are ridiculing is the one we are trying to convert. Speaking for myself, it is often a third party (or a large number of third parties) who are listening in, or reading along.
When Peter Medawar destroyed Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, in the most devastatingly barbed book review I have ever read, he wasn’t trying to convert Teilhard. Teilhard was already dead in any case. Medawar was trying (and succeeding, in spades)to convert the large number of gullible fools who had been taken in by Teilhard.Similarly, when I employ ridicule against the arguments of a young earth creationist, I am almost never trying to convert the YEC himself. That is probably a waste of time. I am trying to influence all the third parties listening in, or reading my books. I am amazed at Plait’s naivety in overlooking that and treating it as obvious that our goal is to convert the target of our ridicule. Ridicule may indeed annoy the target and cause him to dig his toes in. But our goal might very well be (in my case usually is) to influence third parties, sitting on the fence, or just not very well-informed about the issues. And to achieve that goal, ridicule can be very effective indeed.
Why have I never thought to say that? Because I’m not clever enough, presumably. It’s dead right, and it gets at one of the things that I hate about the whole framey discourse, which is that it’s always personalized in this stupid way, as if every book or article or review were aimed right at sobbing Suzy R Innocent of Fluffy Falls, South Dakota. It’s not. Books and articles and reviews are written for a broad or narrow public, but a public, not a single person in the hopes of making her cry. People who write, write for the larger world, not for the nice church-going people down the street. We get to do that! We get to write for everyone, and for no one in particular. That means we get to write stuff without worrying too much about whether what we write will hurt the feelings of some fragile Christian who feels lonely and sad because the skeptics won’t eat lunch with her. It means we get to treat Plait’s maudlin invocation of crying believers thanking him for his speech with contempt. That’s good, because contempt is what it deserves.
Another young woman, one I had never met before, similarly approached me and told me much the same story. She was crying as well. Eventually I heard from others who told me there were several people in the audience who were crying because they had felt so alone. Many were feeling so isolated from the skeptical community — and had experienced so many encounters with other skeptics who were rude, boorish, insulting, and dismissive — that they were seriously considering leaving the movement altogether.
I want to know where they keep their stuffed animals, so that I can steal them.
I’m glad it’s not just me. :)
One of the most frequent disagreements between my wife and I is this “religion gets to be treated differently” issue. I have little sympathy for people that walk into a skeptic’s conference and expect to have their Christian beliefs walled off from criticism – we wouldn’t extend the same courtesy to bigfoot enthusiasts. Phil doesn’t extend that courtesy to Moon Landing Deniers. They should be aware of the territory. If they are reasonably thick skinned, then they’re welcome – but if not, then it’s not like they weren’t warned.
No sacred cows.
I think no gnu atheist can be a Dick, unless his first name is Richard.
(Cymbal crash). I’ll be here all week, try the buffet.
So some people weren’t going to be skeptics anymore because of the mean ol’ atheists? How does that work? “They said they don’t believe in god, so now I’m going to believe in everything!”
That description of the people crying was just creepy. It sounds more like something you’d see at a megachurch than a skeptics’ convention.
“Phil doesn’t extend that courtesy to Moon Landing Deniers.”
Someone who’s more mean-spirited than I am and has more free time should go through Phil’s archives, where they would find numerous examples of a skeptic and his blog commenters behaving dickishly toward believers. But I guess those wouldn’t count, since they wouldn’t be targeted at religious believers.
I honestly think Phil (and a lot of other people) are also probably wrong about even the effect on the immediate target of the ridicule.
It’s one of these things everyone thinks they know, and which, frankly, I think no one really does. It’s taken as received wisdom that making someone feel like a fool will never (or at least rarely) persuade them. Especially in the area of religious beliefs, which are often so deeply reinforced by a larger community, and such a point of pride…
But the evidence for either contention–that it’s likely or not likely to persuade–so far as I know, is hardly airtight. And thus I continue to suspect that the truth of the matter, here, is: those arguing against ridicule aren’t really doing it out of an empirical case at all, nor even more generally out of (to borrow Phil’s word) a conviction that this is or is not how you ‘win’…
Said it before, will say it again: I think it’s more about they’re looking for excuses to do what’s easier. There’s a plausible case–or one that appeals to this notion we know this thing we probably don’t–that somehow being ‘polite’ will win the day… And it’s easier. Less risky, less scary–a lot of people don’t like to tell people they like too directly that they’re even wrong about much of anything, if they can avoid it… Put those two things together, it’s a temptingly easy tack to take. So they take it.
In opposition to this: my experience is scattered, anecdotal, imprecise. And somewhat contradictory on this point. But I will say: I have been impressed by other people who were actually pretty directly rude with me when they thought I was wrong. It struck me as actually ultimately more respectful, and I found I in turn had to respect their courage in saying what they had. Said right, it’s like saying to someone: look, I think you’re grown up enough, big enough to hear this. So: you’re wrong.
(See also: give it to me straight, doc. I can take it.)
More precisely: the accommodationists of the world paint, from what I see, with far too broad a brush. You can’t just say ‘don’t be rude’, because what actually works is a far wider spectrum than any of them can even imagine, and varies widely person to person, situation to situation. And lots of what works in a given situation may be well over the ‘rude’ line, almost regardless of where you draw it.
Hmm, I didn’t think of how his vagueness plays into the hands of the anti-gnus till you pointed it out. Since simply saying “you’re wrong” in the nicest tone possible is offensive to a great many people, it’s no help at all when the accomoframers won’t get specific (using real life examples) about where and when the Line o’ Civility is to be drawn.
Not that I’m about to take their advice on reigning in the ridicule since, short of getting everybody to think critically, I believe it’s important to maintain or create a deterrent atmosphere of idiocy-by-association around things deserving of ridicule. If I’m wrong, I can be persuaded otherwise, but speculation and anecdote won’t cut it.
I remember making Richard’s point to TB back on Intersection a year ago. This was before TB’s mind closed shut completely like the vault doors in “Get Smart”.
Anyway. I don’t know why people are replying to Plait by saying stuff like “it’s hard to find examples” when everyone explicitly agrees that the comments section of Pharyngula is full of hobgoblins. Granted, we’re all kind of unsure why it is that we should care when anonymous blowhards say mean things over the internet. (One reason: those of us who have made the unwise decision to use our real names on internet forums have put our heads on the real world chopping block. I’ve already been approached once by someone who reads these forums, for instance, though luckily it was nice.) But still — the examples are right there, case closed.
I think it’s interesting that Plait explicitly disavows attributing dickishness to Myers. I think it’s fairly weird that Plait didn’t do this. After all, Myers is a dick — purposefully. He explicitly says that that’s what he wants to be, and what he wants other people to be. (He thinks organizing atheists should be “herding lions” not “herding cats”, etc.)
But Plait can’t make the “dickishness -> cheap points” argument off the cuff. After all, Myers is also funny, with an eye for argument and rhetoric, and usually has informed opinions on the subjects he talks about. He makes the dickishness worthwhile and effective — probably somewhere in between “scoring points” and “winning the game”. (Hell, even Chris Mooney agrees that Myers is effective when it comes to his large audience, which is probably why Plait doesn’t make reference to Myers.)
Maybe what Plait means is something like, “If you’re not a funny informed expert with adequate reading comprehension skills, try not to be a gratuitous asshole”. I’ll buy that for a dollar.
I would have thought ridicule/satire/sarcasm are actually well known tools that can convince and have convinced people. I would have thought that Mr Plait was referring to insults/profanities ? (Yes I know a lot of people have already said we actually dont know because he actually didnt say).
Hold on a minutes! What’s the problem with Teilhard de Chatdin?
If young take out “Christogeneisis” (which is obviously contrived, as I read him), de Chardon has very much to offer. He was one of the first global thinkers and if you consider the noosphere somewhat metaphorically (which I think he did) it’s what is actually happening.
Anyway I will go find Medawar’s book review if I can find it.
I think Phil should make a video for us:
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/4e76d2c36c/dissing-your-dog-from-nino?rel=player
I wish he’d name names and give examples … but he’s hit on a good formula, “Don’t be a Dick” … how simple, all better, confusion lifted, Southern Baptist formal statement on incompatibility of science and faith lifted … right?
I first came over to B&W because they made fun of postmodernism and religion, two things I already knew were stupid. But then they opened my eyes regarding feng shui, homeopathy, and acupuncture, among other things – I’ve had no idea these things were so widely discredited until I read Ophelia’s dickish comments about them. Thanks, OB!
Phil likes to be liked. I’m just saying.
The lack of specific examples annoying. Not just for the sake of actually stating a case but from the fact (as pointed out) people have assumed he’s talking about the likes of PZ etc. They will go on assuming such until Phil gives the examples that are trivially easy to find.
The real issue here is that some hypersensitive moderates get upset by the odd comment on the odd website. And the whole community of people on those websites including the authors get tarred with the DBAD brush. Look at most of those defending Phil in the comments section, they’re largely moderates/agnostics/deists etc First, I never knew there were so many of them, but second, they’re still the minority on those sites.
It seems the problem extends from these people being unable to adjust to having views and beliefs challenged…well good luck in life because it’s going to happen for the rest of it for everything you believe in, not just a god. The biggest point though is that people really do seem to take comments sections on blogs, newspapers, even goddamned youtube to heart. Rather than saying to those people they may need an Etcha-Sketch shake-up reality check, everyone is targeted.
The other issue I really take offence at is the “some of my best friends are moderates and I’m nice, why can’t you be?” Well we are because we’re normal well-adjusted people; we can cope and operate in the world away from the screen. Giving it socks to some nob spewing bile on a comments section doesn’t mean I get on the phone and call my mum a retard because she went to mass. It doesn’t mean I’ve isolated myself from every one I know with a belief that doesn’t fit with my view on the world. Guess what? I know how to do the whole being a human thing, I have friends, I have relatives, we disagree on stuff and sometimes (after a few jars) it sometimes gets a bit heated in the discussion, but no one takes it to heart.
We should be asking the moderates just why they find any challenge so offensive and just why they take one random nob on a comments section quite so personally.
Actually, there’s an iTunes podcast (Meet the Author…not sure if it’s only a UK/Ireland thing) with Stephen Fry, it’s worth listening to for some context to this. The main speech is an ode to Apple, but in the questions and answers Stephen has some interesting things to say about what people should expect when they access the internet and also (from a separate question) how theists have reacted to his atheism. I guess that’s the context Phil never gave for Dawkins, Hitchens, Meyers, Coyne and Ophelia, the volume of hate mail received daily, the life long career seeing people attack them, call them liars and progress to political policy before they first put pen to paper.
Anyway, his initial proposition is mixed up, let alone invalid. He talks about a degradation of civility on the internet and then asks how many people were converted by people “getting your face” “pointing fingers in your face”, umm…yeah, aggressive emoticons.
But I’d also add more to Dr Dawkins adjusted question. I’d be asking how many were “converted” in a sudden epiphany anyway or for how many did the sites first serve to plant seeds? How many gave up on the whole education system on the basis of a tosser on a comments section? How many only used the internet for their education and enlightenment?
A not unrelated snippet – all the newspaper reviews of Richard Dawkins’ latest TV programme that I have seen described him as being “uncharacteristically” calm, decent, and just plain nice. In other words the image in front of them didn’t match the image in their heads and therefore something had changed. It couldn’t be that their mental image was wrong – oh no.
In case you collect these things, another lecture over at 3QD.
Personal and vitriolic attacks on religious individuals are also inconsistent with religious freedom.
And citing Phil as an authority on these things, natch.
Well not always. Some threads have a lot of that kind of thing but others are extended intelligent discussions among very knowledgeable people.
Anyway, I didn’t mean to say stuff like “it’s hard to find examples” but rather that the examples it’s easy to find surely can’t be what Plait is talking about, because what would be the point of devoting an extended talk to the sometimes dickishness of comments at Pharyngula? If that is all he meant, he should have said so. If it’s not, he should have said so. Either way, he should have said exactly what he meant. The sneery (dickish) refusal to say gets up my nose big time, because it’s like saying “you’re all horrible” without actually saying it and paying the price.
Perhaps I’m straying too far from the context of Plait’s speech (I haven’t read it, only comments on it here and at Coyne’s site), but is it a “game” we’re trying to “win” when people’s ignorance (the kind Plait says we shouldn’t mock too overtly or loudly) leads to say, stoning? If a game or a competition is all that’s at stake, I suppose one ought to be less ill-humored, less hysterical about wrong-headed beliefs. Not!
Plait took the shotgun approach to his speech, which makes it hard to figure out how to take him. Prof. Dawkins — and, for all we know, AJ Milne above — are right in their critiques.
But Plait does emphasize at the start that his concern is venom instead of reason. His problem, if he were to articulate it more carefully, is that he doesn’t want a culture of unreasonable assholes. He doesn’t have a problem with confrontation itself. As he puts it in the blog post itself, “I was very clear that anger has its place, that we need to be firm, and that we need to continue the fight.”
“he doesn’t want a culture of unreasonable assholes”
Who does? Even the most shrill, strident, and militant among atheists hardly want that. So, Benjamin, if you’re right that that’s all he was trying to say, then who was Plait talking about, and why is his talk relevant? He could have just as well wasted his entire speech on how we don’t want atheists bombing innocent civilians with the aim of eradicating religion.
Ben, but that doesn’t help. If you make a big point of saying “Don’t be a dick” that implies that some people are being dicks. If you imply that and refuse to say which people are being dicks – you’re doing a bad thing. Not for the first time, I don’t really see the point of defending a subjunctive version of what he said.
Hahaha – yes, that last sentence of Tea’s is what I meant.
Phil even undermines his own case when he says in his talk that people can’t be reasoned out of that which they didn’t reason in in the first place. Well sure, but if that’s true then what is the purpose of being reasonable? You can’t reason the person out of their belief, so the main purpose must be to persuade others who are listening and are on the fence.
I brought this same issue up early on in Phil’s first “Don’t be a dick” thread since he had replied to a couple comments already. He’s ignoring the issue. Seriously, his question about “have you ever been convinced by someone being a dick” (paraphrasing) ignores the main reason skeptics (including his hallowed Sagan and Randi) are dicks — to show how misguided or dishonest one person is, to convince third parties. It’s thoroughly dishonest to discuss skeptic dickishness without acknowledging how the tactic is actually used.
Tea/Oph, “don’t be an unreasonable asshole” doesn’t appear to be all that he was saying. That’s why I conceded: “Plait took the shotgun approach to his speech, which makes it hard to figure out how to take him. Prof. Dawkins — and, for all we know, AJ Milne above — are right in their critiques.” There’s no question that Plait would have been more effective if he had called people out.
Still, “don’t be an unreasonable asshole” appears to be one of his conclusions, and since he mentioned it right at the start, it seems like his central motivation. Since it is something he’s been explicit about, there’s nothing subjunctive about it. I didn’t need to race across Rome with a Rosetta Stone in one arm and the DaVinci Code in the other in order to come up with the reading.
What’s the point of saying it when everyone agrees? Because lots of people say they agree, and then go on being unreasonable assholes.
Benjamin S Nelson (#24)
Who decides what’s an “unreasonable” level of assholishness, though? If I say I agree we shouldn’t be unreasonable assholes and go on to be an asshole to someone in a way that makes you uncomfortable, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m being unreasonable. Perhaps my level of assholishness is justified by the situation.
The hard-sell works towards the third party. That’s the long and the short of it. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. And that’s not in terms of a/theism, it’s also the same in politics, movies, music whatever. Especially politics.
Does anybody have any doubt that the Republican hard-sell is a billion times more effective than the Democratic soft sell?
Atheism actually has had a ton of success in terms of image and visibility over the last few years. Things are getting better because of the “gnu atheists”. That might be just a coincidence, but I doubt it.
Quite. We (“we” meaning everyone) just don’t agree about what unreasonable assholeishness is. I agree that I shouldn’t be an unreasonable asshole, but then I go on being what I take to be well short of that. Clearly, opinions differ wildly on the subject, in general and in particular. Someone I used to collaborate with surprised me profoundly by suddenly explaining just exactly what an unreasonable asshole he thinks I am (in internet discussions like this one). I puzzled, and wondered, and scratched my head, and concluded that of the two of us, I was not the unreasonable asshole.
And because Plait is doing the whole secretive, no examples thing, I just don’t know what his criteria for unreasonable asshole are. And I think it’s unfair and, indeed, unreasonable of him to play the game that way.
From now on whenever Chris Mooney flaps his mouth talking about the gnu atheists, why should we bother adressing any thing he says, when we can just reply.
“Don’t be a dick” (Plait, 2010)
I think it’s worth pointing out that many religious believers will take offense at the words “I don’t believe in God” and everything that follows after. Religion is primarily supported by various types of ad populum fallacies: tradition, peer group and family support, authority, etc. A dissenting voice tends to burst the bubble, which is why they consider death bed conversions so important. And if you refuse to convert, there is always the fallacy of poisoning the well; you don’t count, you’re bad, shrill, ignorant, intolerant, etc (even if you’re not). I am always astounded to see two Richard Dawkins in the world, one a biology professor from Oxford, the other a man made entirely out of straw and animated only by the imaginations of the first Richard Dawkins’ opponents.
A man made entirely out of straw and screaming like a banshee.
A.Noyd/Oph, I agree with you both. “Unreasonable asshole” is a term of art that is almost always up for negotiation.
But there are some rough-and-ready indicators of what’s cooperative and what isn’t. We expect people to be sincere, economical, level-headed, and focused. Lying & bullshitting, interpreting people in the worst possible light, fisking & bombast, making oracular pronouncements (or “deepities”), gratuitous insults & threats, commands and advice from false authority, dogmatic aloofness, free association, and shifting goalposts are all indicators of speech that is not in good faith.
Of course that’s all inscrutable. If I decide that some conversation isn’t in good faith, it might just be that I’m not reading in good faith — maybe I’m not feeling on my game that day, that I haven’t got the mental energy to participate, or that I can’t control my disdain enough to give the person a fair reading. But when we see somebody doing most of the above things without hesitating about it, and even having a jolly good time at it, we don’t hesitate to come to the conclusion that they’re unreasonable assholes.
Ophelia wrote
“Why have I never thought to say that? Because I’m not clever enough, presumably. It’s dead right, and it gets at one of the things that I hate about the whole framey discourse, which is that it’s always personalized in this stupid way, as if every book or article or review were aimed right at sobbing Suzy R Innocent of Fluffy Falls, South Dakota. It’s not.”
Back when I was an administrator of (the late lamented) Internet Infidels Discussion Board, that point boiled down to “It’s for the lurkers.” There was almost no chance of convincing the YEC loons we used as punching bags, but we did so in order to demonstrate to the lurkers, the fence-sitters who were reading without participating, just how loony the YECs’ beliefs are.
Oops. “did so” above means “continued to respond to the YECs with derision and facts”
Benjamin S Nelson (#31)
Oh, really now. I’ll give you “sincere” on the one side, and “lying,” “interpreting people in the worst possible light,” and “shifting the goalposts” on the other, but I either disagree with the importance of or can’t make out what you mean by the rest.
I don’t know what is it to be “economical” in a blog conversation, nor do I see the point in always remaining level-headed. As for fisking (assuming you mean point-by-point rebuttal), what’s wrong with it? What makes an insult “gratuitous,” and what do you mean by “free association” or “dogmatic aloofness”? Furthermore, you described the comments section of Pharyngula as “full of hobgoblins,” but your list of bad faith argumentation tricks far more often applies to the believers who show up there to defend their beliefs. Are you talking about believers or are you talking about gnu atheists?
Even if you and I could agree on a list what attributes make someone an asshole, what does that do for the believers who will have different standards and who will still be offended? Is the goal to comfort them, or is it to make one another feel we’re being fair to them despite their own feelings about it?
Women come up to PZ Myers after his speeches, too . . .
(SRSLY. His vicinity at the TAM 6 opening-night party was like those Intel commercials where people orgasm as the inventor of USB walks by.)
I think the criticism that mocking people doesn’t win them over is vulnerable. There are simply too many cases of people who felt that yes, they were being mocked for their foolish unexamined beliefs and who responded by examining them. You do win over people that way. And excessive caution, treating people as though they were fragile, is open to misinterpretation. It may appear that you are endorsing the idea that challenging beliefs is bad, and that religions have a right to be protected from ridicule, a point that they are constantly trying to make. I don’t think it’s a good idea to help them do that.
I’ve been trying to wade through this discussion, and I’m beginning to wonder what the point of it all is. Phil Plait’s original ‘address’ is weak at the knees, maudlin and contemptible. He gives no examples. He provides no evidence for his claims, and then we are told that the crying of supposedly marginalised Christians shows how right he is. He speaks of behaviour which, if practiced by a few marginal figures in the atheist community, is certainly reflected by a few marginal figures in the believing community, and, by the way, by some well-known, central figures of the believing community. Usually, in the latter case, it takes the form of the false accusation that atheists are boorish and bullying, that they shout, or, even worse, yell, and that they insult their opponents, and betray a very feeble grasp of the hardy sinews of English polemic. Words like ‘strident’ and ‘sthrill’ seem to predominate in these accusations, and while there are occasionally very strongly worded atheist denunciations of the misdoings of theists and believers in other madnesses and inanities, some that may even, on the rare occasion, rise to stridency and shrillness, these will usually be seen, if they are placed in context, to adopt both a tone and a language that is justified by the occasion. What people like Phil Plait must do is to show that it is never justified, and yet it is surely ridiculous to suggest that one must never speak one’s mind plainly and forcefully, even with the occasional note of ridicule and contempt. Even hurtful, yet deserved contempt, as Dawkins points out, can be used to help people see things in perspective. Coddling idiots suggests that idiocy should be coddled, and no one thinks that, though we may differ as to the idiocies that may afflict us. Why is it that suddenly it is thought appropriate to banish polemic? Do we really want to have our differences pass through a blander? (The noun ‘blander’ is my own coinage. I think it may have a use.)
Phil Plait has taken this whole disagreement over tone and framing to a new low, and for that he deserves our contempt. He should not be coddled. Nor should we search for nuances that are not there. Questions about the individuating conditions of ‘assholish’ or ‘dickish’ behaviour or language really shows that this is not a discussion about real things at all. This can no longer be taken seriously. Phil Plait has taken the whole discussion out of the realm of reality into the realm of fantasy, and it would be better, I think, to leave fantasists to fantasize on their own. They are, when you consider it, much more like the religious, than they are like reasonable people. No wonder the religious were showing signs of religious joy — often evidenced by tears — in Phil’s presence. The correct response to people like Phil Plait is a bit of well-placed stridency and contempt.
In his writings Dick Feynman was never a dick (except perhaps in the eyes of those responsible for security during the Manhattan Project), and Dick Dawkins is not usually a dick but sometimes he comes close. I suspect that I am often a dick myself and I enjoy it too much to give it up completely, but I also suspect that it is not productive.
[…] negative respondents to Phil Plait’s “Don’t be a Dick” speech mostly miss the point because […]
This would be the Feynman who embarrassed NASA and Morton Thiokol on TV during public hearings by putting a space shuttle O-ring in a glass of ice water and showing it lost pliability? I’m sure that many folks involved with the space program would have initially thought that was a grandstanding dick move.
A Noyd, maybe not the best word for what I mean. A point by point rebuttal is fine, but fisking in the negative sense that I meant it involves nitpicking something sentence by sentence without really taking the time to consider whether or not you’re wasting everyone’s time. It makes the critic look as though they can’t grasp actual points for what they are, and it makes it look as if the target were being put on trial via Twitter.
I used to take up this Usenet style of argument when I was a sophomore, which is perhaps why I come down hard on it.
But it also has a superficial allure to it. So, for example, here’s a (tongue-in-cheek) response to the rest of your post, in the style I find obnoxious.
It seems that some cock-sure dicks, armed with wads of pin pricks, have made some of our sceptic girls cry. But Phil has a spiel that will let us all heal–keep the dick in our pants, and out of our rants–and keep all our eyelashes dry.
With the mighty cod piece of framing, and the condom of not name-naming, and the shrinkage of subjects to which we can ask ‘why.’
That right here? That’s Shakespeare.
By refusing to define his argument or provide any examples I think Plait is playing a similar game to the Three God Monte gambit, where his opponents can’t disprove his argument because he never actually made one in the first place and he is free to claim that, of course, he doesn’t mean important people like Dawkins or PZ, who he doesn’t want to piss off, but he does mean some people.
I don’t feel obligated to try to nail Jello to a wall. Until Plait actually deigns to define his terms, make an actual argument and provide evidence for it there is nothing to disprove. Plait’s “argument” follows the exact same traditions cranks use, the kind of arguments he would formerly have eviscerated but is, instead, now using himself. As Eric MacDonald argues, such tactics deserve our contempt.
Benjamin S Nelson (#41)
Well, I appreciate that you can give an example of fisking in the negative sense, but at the same time, you’re just saying you think doing it (and a rather lot of other, highly subjective things) makes someone look like an asshole. Nor do you add much clarity to other elements of your list below. The “substantive purpose” of an insult is in the eye of the beholder, as is, to a large extent, signal versus noise. Unless you were joking, what is there to agree on?
Moreover, as much as Plait’s admonition failed because of a lack of specific examples, your indicators are undermined by your attempt to apply them to anyone and everyone. At least Plait had someone in mind to appease. If you’re only trying to make clear what you find dickish, that’s fine, but I don’t get the sense that you are.
So what you’re getting at is you don’t like how gnu atheists behaving in ways you disapprove of makes you look bad by association.
Thanks Ophelia for bringing up the whole crying/huggy thing. For me, that little drama reeks too much of the anointed knight battling the big dick of a dragon over the poor helpless damsel. I find it hard to believe that the skeptics who are religious are too scared to speak up for themselves. A case in point is the fellow who was moderating Phil’s talk (more like egging him on really) who said that he just couldn’t bring up his religion to his fellow skeptics anymore. This doesn’t make much sense to me because in the next breath he said that he made a ran for Congress a while back. Is he saying that even after having the experience of being a politician, he’s so scared of the skeptic community that he can’t hold his own in a spirited debate or communicate his views in a compelling talk of his own? Enter stage right, nice Dr. Phil on big white horse to the rescue.
Instead of cuing the violins for these people, maybe they should heed Dr. Phil’s own advice that communication is the only way to uh, communicate with everybody. Heck, these people don’t even have to be nice while communicating. Demeanor only counts if you are an outnumbered, outcast atheist skeptic, then you have to be nice.
I’m not sure what in Phil’s talk would let loose anybody’s waterworks. Listening to the talk, I got from it: skepticism is just way too hard & unnatural (only having faith is natural,) be nice, debunking doesn’t work, be nice, we’re evil outcasts, we’re greatly outnumbered so don’t be a dick, you can be passionate, but don’t ever fight for ideas (because, only fighters fight & we’re too outnumbered to be in a fight,) communication is good, be nice & by all means let everybody in the tent because we’re outnumbered & need everybody to be in our tent.
Phil’s talk doesn’t leave me crying, but it does give me a headache.
A Noyd, if you think fisking is more effective and efficient, then — why? How? Take my above example. Notice how many of the fisks could just be eliminated because they’re pure snark (1,13) or redundant (2,3,9,12) — only (4-8,10-11) answer your direct questions or points. But by the technique of fisking, I get to stretch out the comment to emphasize the obvious elements of disagreement, and make it seem as though I’m being thorough when really I’m just being trite. And to any third parties observing who happen to be nimrods, I might even seem like a particularly clever person, even though the fact of the matter is that I haven’t put even the slightest effort into the conversation. If I kept doing things this way, you would very quickly lose the forest for the trees, and ultimately make the possibility of mutual understanding impossible.
Here is evidence for the ineffectiveness of fisking: my rhetoric has caused you to develop the mistaken impression that we disagree more than we do. As I said from the start, while there are some useful principles we can appeal to, in the end it will be open to interpretation, something that can only be negotiated. The criteria are ultimately subjective, or (as I put it above) “rough-and-ready” and “inscrutable” — but they’re also ubiquitous, and non-arbitrary.
And yes, I’m definitely trying to lay out principles that apply generally to all conversations. But I only did so when prompted by questions and comments.
So, in the big picture, it doesn’t matter. Maybe Plait would accept these criteria, maybe not. The only real takehome message here is that Plait wants to warn people off of being uncritical dicks.
On an ethical level, I don’t generally approve of people being unreasonable dicks, no. But my id might say different if I let him out of his cage.
My first and foremost reaction to the people who get so tearful about feeling ostracized and othered at skeptic/atheist meetings is not very kind, but it is my response. To put it succinctly:
Congratulations. Now you know how a hundred thousand atheists feel every day of their lives.
I’m lucky; I work in science, my social circles consist of college-educated folks, and my immediate family is cheerfully godless. Among the people who have the most occasion to judge me, dogmatic belief is thin on the ground. I don’t have to worry about being “out”. But what about, say, the preachers and pastors who have lost their faith and have no way to confess to their communities? What about the children who cannot have an honest conversation about religion with their parents, or the wives who have inwardly lost the faith that their husbands still keep? Their lot in life is, I dare say, significantly worse than that of a deist at TAM.
So, how about you leverage those tears of yours into a little empathy for your fellow human beings? If you make a slight effort to look a little beyond yourself, you might even find a bit of kinship with other people who have felt they don’t fit in at JREF meetings, for various reasons. Plenty of skeptic folks have said in my hearing that they’re not fond of the libertarian bias of many TAM attendees (and of some notable presenters), or that they think TAM excludes people with children, or that they’re pissed off the speakers’ roster is full of the same Balding White Dudes every year. Are any or all of these grievances justifiable? Well, that’s not for me to say, at least not right now, but surely those who feel marginalized can seek out a common cause.
Like I said, it probably ain’t the most civil position. My politeness meter was calibrated on Bill Hicks, Mary Prankster and Warren Ellis, and I’d bet it shows.
The suffering caused by the uncritical acceptance of bunk outweighs our desire to live a life free of irritating questions.
Benjamin S Nelson (#47)
When did “effective and efficient” come into this? I never made an argument towards that end; last I looked, we were discussing the assholishness of fisking. (What was that about shifting goalposts?)
I had no problem pulling what meaning there was out of your example and tying it back into the overall theme of the problem with subjective measures. You’re the one wandering off into the woods.
How very presumptuous. The only thing you’ve clarified is that fisking can be carried out in a way that impedes conversation. But since not all fisking obscures more than it illuminates, you haven’t made the point for the style as a whole. What I do and don’t agree with hasn’t changed since #34.
I’m having a bit of trouble envisioning the following:
Inscrutable principles that are useful.
Something that is both subjective and non-arbitrary
A ubiquitous criterion.
If I’m mistaken and these aren’t utterly nonsensical concepts, please do try to explain.
How does your list work to demarcate instances of assholishness in conversations that don’t include you? Who becomes the arbiter of gratuitousness or level-headedness in your absence? If your list is meant to inform people what you consider to be assholish behavior, then it’s fine. Even if people decline to respect it, you would at least be communicating something. However, contrary to what you said in #31, I do not usually conclude people doing the things you listed (to the extent that I can make sense of your meaning) are unreasonable assholes.
So are you agreeing that you’re concerned about others making you look bad or not?
[Note that the last three sections above are the only ones inviting a reply. The first three are simply dismissals of the quoted material.]
If you want an example of “dickish” atheists, how about this post by Mark Chu-Carroll:
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2010/08/17/preachy-twits-please-go-away/
Mark is more than capable of speaking for himself, and I don’t know if he wants to get involved in this discussion (I suspect not), but to paraphrase, he says that merely mentioning that he is a religious Jew attracts a swarm of annoying and persistent atheist comments/mail. Mark is a skeptical blogger, he is not trying to force his religion on anyone or even discuss it in detail, and clearly will not be deconverted by yet another recitation of Atheism for Dummies, so the preaching he describes is (a) dickish and (b) pointless.
Of course the people pestering Mark are not Big Famous Atheists like Dawkins or Myers. The BFAs have better manners, and more productive things to do with their time. But I’d say the behaviour Mark describes is a problem, and the BFAs (and Medium-Sized Less-Famous Atheists) should perhaps do more to discourage it.
Dawkins reaction was exactly my first reaction to Plait’s controversial opening line. In fact, I know a friend who was finally jostled into letting go of the nominal label of “Catholic” after watching Religulous — which is basically 90 minutes of Bill Maher going around doing exactly what Plait described.
That said, I think I am maybe beginning to see that Plait might have a point — but his lack of specificity makes it frustratingly difficult to say whether I agree with him, or if I just happen to agree with what I thought he might have been saying.
Talisker raises a good example of a case where a bunch of atheists were most definitely being dicks, and not in a good way. Recently as well, I have been flabbergasted by how many within the atheist/skeptical community are being bamboozled by Christianist theocrats over the not-at-Ground Zero not-a-mosque. In the latter case, it feels like some are just being like, “Yeah, religion bad!” without thinking about the implications of what they are saying and doing.
Talisker (man, now I want some scotch) mentions as well a point that cannot be made forcefully enough: If there is a problem here — and I am beginning to believe there is — it is not the usual subjects of criticism which are the problem!
Just curious: when Plait talked about dicks, did he mention Biggus Dickus?
’cause that guy’s the worst.
Talisker – right, that sounds absurd and intrusive. But I don’t see what I or other gnu atheists have to do with it or are supposed to do about it. I mean…if someone identifies as a fan of Ayn Rand on a blog and then gets a swarm of annoying and persistent liberal comments/mail…am I as a liberal somehow responsible for that, and obliged to do something about it? Is something like that a reason to give a speech telling liberals not to be dicks?
I don’t see it.
A Noyd. No, we’re talking about unreasonable assholishness. From the start. Hence, efficiency and effectiveness matters. The question is, how can you miss this? We were just talking about it. That’s an excellent example of what I mean by forest for the trees. You’ve stopped drawing from the whole conversation.
The principles of informal logic — the informal fallacies — are examples of principles that are useful, but whose application can be rationally contested. That’s what I mean by inscrutable. So if somebody is not following a chain of reasoning, they might mistake a premise for a non-sequitur. If somebody calls X ignorant, it might be seen as an ad hominem, but actually it’s meant to be delivered for the purpose of diagnosing an argument. If somebody tells Richard Dawkins that he has no authority in matters of faith, we might say that there is no such thing as an authority in that domain. Etc. Notice, they are rational, but their application is subjective.
The “ubiquitous criteria” I had in mind were the first four: sincerity, economy, level-headedness, and focus. They’re the skills that I thought underlie HP Grice’s maxims for cooperative conversation: “Quality, quantity, manner, and relevance”. (Short version is at http://www.criticism.com/da/grice-maxims.php, but I recommend reading Grice’s “Logic and Conversation”, which is pretty readable and gives clear examples.)
You may be right, in that I may have to rethink “level-headedness”. But the success that Grice has had in philosophy of language, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, is what makes me confident enough to think they apply generally.
About the origins of my dislike of unreasonable assholes. Well, maybe some of it has to do with concern about how I’d appear; that’s always an element at some level. But that’s not really at the front of my mind. If people are fair-minded, they won’t lump me in with a group, they’ll ask me what I think and I’ll tell them. In fact, I don’t even think of myself as an atheist, but if people from the other side of the river call me that, then I don’t mind.
No, I’m more worried about whether or not people are themselves acting like the kinds of people I’m ashamed of on a visceral level. I can explain where that recoil comes from in terms of personal experience, if you like, since you’re asking personal questions already. But the long and the short of it is that when people decide that they can’t come to some consensus about what makes for good and bad, unreasonable and reasonable, then it leads to the trivialization of debate, and then to pointless narcissistic internecine squabbles.
James’s post referred to above on atheists/liberals and Park51. It deserves to be blogwhored.
I’ll also point out that MarkCC’s post was well after Phil’s speech, so it’s hardly an event he could have in mind when he gave his “dick” speech. I have been following Good Math, Bad Math for a long time though, and he does get similar mail sprees every time he mentions he’s a religious Jew (although this is the first time I recall him calling out atheists on it). It goes without saying that the behavior directed towards Mark is inexcusable.
Benjamin S Nelson (#54)
Then it’s your job to first make the case for the link between unreasonable assholishness and efficiency and effectiveness rather than simply assuming that they are connected. (Then you can go on to show, for example, how inefficiency and ineffectiveness are integral parts of fisking.) Since I don’t share the assumption you’re making, you appear to be talking about two separate issues: effective communication and (unreasonable) assholishness.
I guess you’re using some unusual definition of “inscrutable.” Informal fallacies aren’t all that difficult to comprehend except that common misuse of terms like “ad hominem” muddies the understanding for people who haven’t come in contact with the actual definitions of these things. If that makes informal fallacies inscrutable, then subjects like evolution are likewise inscrutable because of the pervasiveness of popular misunderstandings.
In most cases, the ignorance of how fallacies work or how evolution works is not deliberate, thus I would not mark someone as an asshole, much less an unreasonable one, merely for exercising their ignorance. If there’s reason to think someone is intentionally misrepresenting a topic (like Ray Comfort when he’s talking about what atheists believe), then the label might apply.
Perhaps “ubiquitous” is yet another word you have a special definition of. “Ubiquitous criteria” reads to me as a category error since criteria are, by definition, subjective. Inappropriate adjectives aside, it’s fine to present criteria for smooth and effective communication; that would be something worth debating and sharing. But you stray away from saying something of value when you try to tie it into assholishness.
Given that how you measure shameful behavior might bear no similarity to how other people experience it, what is the point of worrying? Your concern is self-centered rather than empathetic. If you’re not involved in a conversation or argument, who is supposed to give a shit how you would judge the behavior of people involved? What do they get out of easing your worry? I consider it unreasonably assholish to try to “fix” what others are doing based on how uncomfortable it makes you feel rather than how it affects them.
A Noyd, good. But the leap isn’t hard to make. The practice of being reasonable involves fair communication (hence efficiency and effectiveness) — they’re deeply intertwined. When X complains that someone else Y is being unreasonable, it’s because X is claiming that there is some defect in Y ability to consider reasons effectively.
Would you agree that violation of the informal fallacies is unreasonable? If not, then we’re at an impasse. But if so, ask: what leads X to say that Y is committing a fallacy?
I suggest that it’s because X perceives that Y is stepping all over the Gricean maxims. Example: the fallacy of ambiguity is a failure to follow the maxim of Quantity (which, as I put it, involves a feeling for economy). Similarly, I would say that almost all of the informal fallacies are linked with failures in Grice, at least when a speaker in good faith puts a bit of thought into the accusations they’re making. That’s how it’s ubiquitous.
Each use of an informal fallacy involves a judgment call. Informal fallacies are just constructs. They are stable conventions that are judged by whether or not they are useful at increasing the possibility of reasoned cooperation. On the other hand, evolution is not just a construct, it’s a true theory about facts in the world. That’s how the informal fallacies are subjective or rough-and-ready, while evolution is not.
So that’s the unreasonable part.
But sure, the asshole part requires a different analysis. If I were to offer some tentative suggestions, I think being an asshole involves both a) awareness of the suffering of others without effective sympathy for it, b) responding to a mistake with disproportionate levels of active resentment. Both are subjective, because whether or not something is “proportionate” or “effective” depends on your prior moral standards. But they’re useful criteria for distinguishing an asshole from a spirited crank.
The two are only related to the degree that Plait is concerned about the two of them together. I think he is, because that’s what he explicitly said. For the rest of the speech, he mostly complained about the asshole part, sure, but that’s a failure of execution, not of the idea.
The last bit, including lines like “Your concern is self-centered rather than empathetic”, only addresses a single sentence. Accurately, I think; if I think you’re a disgraceful loon, I’m not thinking about your emotional health and well-being, I’m looking for the exit. So if that were all I said, then I suppose you’d be right. But you aren’t, because you ignored what I said in the next two sentences. Specifically: “the long and the short of it is that when people decide that they can’t come to some consensus about what makes for good and bad, unreasonable and reasonable, then it leads to the trivialization of debate, and then to pointless narcissistic internecine squabbles.”
So, wait. Some members of the skeptical community were upset because other members of the skeptical community were skeptical of some of their beliefs? That’s like being upset that a gay rights group advocates for lesbians as well as gay men! Or that it accepts straights. Or supports transgendered rights.
I could go on.
I know I’m a little late to the party, but let me try and turn this on its head. The reason people are worried about this supposed “dick-ish” behavior is because it will alienate theists, right? Well, what about alienating people *already in the movement*?
Allow me to explain. I heard about this as TAM was going on, and decided to reserve judgment until video or audio of Phil’s actual talk showed up somewhere. It did, causing a blog explosion, and I thought about watching it. I then realized: “Wait, I really don’t care.” I’m just tired of the atheism-based infighting within/among our little group/s. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly have my opinions about this and about other recent in-house controversies, but I’m freaking tired of it.
I’m a skeptic first, and an atheist a distant-but-important-and-more-importantly-related second. If folks like Phil (and others (cough-Mooney-cough)) are going to tell me that my atheism is wrong for no good reason, what do they expect me to do? I expect some answers and explanations, and I expect them to practice what they preach (skepticism, science, etc) and provide them. Failing that, I’m ultimately going to stop paying attention to them and supporting their efforts.
Everyone says that organizing people like us is like “herding cats,” and then they chuckle. Perhaps the problem isn’t with the herd, but rather the herders.
@James: Thanks. :-) Phil was being annoyingly non-specific, but I think at its core his talk had a valid point.
@Paul: Yes, but MarkCC’s post is merely a convenient example. I think it’s fair to assume theists had been getting similar reactions long before Phil’s speech.
@Ophelia: There will always be “dicks” adhering to any ideology. There will always be people with too much time on their hands who want to declaim the Truth (atheistic, political, environmental, whatever) at any available opportunity, regardless of whether it is useful to do so. That much is inevitable, but the more serious and responsible leaders of a movement can decide how they react to it.
If someone like Richard Dawkins responds to Phil’s concerns with a polite and erudite version of, “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” then it only encourages the dicks to go on harrassing the likes of MarkCC. OTOH, Dawkins could say something like, “Some people get carried away in trying to promote atheism, they become rude and aggressive in a completely unproductive fashion, and I don’t approve of that.” Some of the dicks will continue being dicks, but others might at least stop and think.
As an analogy: Any political party will have a lunatic fringe, the sort of people who rant about how the socialist/capitalist conspiracy will eat your babies and must be fought at all costs and by any possible means. As a more mainstream member of the same group, these people may be nominally on your side, but it may nonetheless be wise to distance yourself from them.
Sorry, Talisker, I don’t buy it. I don’t know about these people, so how can I distance myself from them, and why should I? I know about them now in the sense that you have mentioned them, but that’s not really knowledge. I don’t know who Mark CC is – I don’t know anything about any of this. Given that, I really don’t see why I should care, much less make it my responsibility, or agree that it’s Dawkins’s responsibility. Bat-loony people in the Tea Party are conspicuous, some random people saying things to some random person are not.
Sorry, but I think this is just more of the same old crap – there are some Bad Atheists somewhere and therefore New Atheism is bad ow ow ow ow look out. I do not buy it.
In a sense Dawkins already has said what you suggest he should say. That’s why RDF got re-organized. But should he do a Phil Plait and just make yet more vague generalizations about what “some atheists” do and then tut tut about them? Well has Phil Plait’s advice to nobody-knows-whom worked well? I don’t think so, because nobody knows how to apply it. Thus I’m really not persuaded that Dawkins should do the same thing.
@Ophelia: As I say, MarkCC is just a convenient example. I don’t read his email either and I don’t know exactly what volume of harassment he receives. But just suppose for a moment that you are a theist who is otherwise skeptical, secular, and generally on the side of the atheists. It will be highly annoying if, whenever you mention your theism, a large number of atheists insist that you are a contemptible fool. It might put you off trying to work with atheists in general, even where you share common ground.
How often does that happen? I don’t know. In the absence of a rigorous study of atheist behaviour (which would be difficult to say the least), I’m not sure anyone knows. But anecdotes suggest that it may be a problem. All I’m saying is that it deserves to be taken seriously, not just dismissed out of hand.
I’ll say again that any ideology attracts some rude and annoying twerps, and no one expects you, Dawkins, or anyone else to get rid of all of them. But any normal, mainstream movement (political party, environmental campaign, etc.) has some element of zealous, rude, even “dickish” adherents who regard any compromise as a sellout. If the more pragmatic elements of the group want to get things done, then sometimes they have to make clear that the “dicks” are not running the show.
Talisker – Well for one thing I don’t think “a theist who is otherwise skeptical, secular, and generally on the side of the atheists” is a very meaningful concept. If I imagine myself that way I have to imagine myself as fundamentally confused – so then the thought “why am I trying to have it both ways?” is part of the imagination. In other words I think you’re trying to suggest that I should agree that a theist who is otherwise skeptical, secular, and generally on the side of the atheists is someone I should respect, and I don’t – not as such, not because of the qualities stipulated. I might have all sorts of other reasons to respect such a person, but I feel no duty to express deference for that “otherwise” stuff. Being a theist is not a small or incidental thing, so claiming to be otherwise skeptical is just rather silly.
For another thing, you’re saying this in a context in which atheists get verbally beaten up for alleged savagery all the time – so saying that “anecdotes suggest that it may be a problem” is frankly kind of clueless. That’s like saying anecdotes suggest feminism is about ugly women burning their bras and hating men. The putative problem has been and is being constructed, relentlessly, in order to other and marginalize and delegitimize atheists. Saying it deserves to be taken seriously is not quite the trivial matter that you suggest.
Given that, it really isn’t the job of explicit atheists to take time out now and then to announce that dicks aren’t running the show, unless there really is some genuine and bad display of dickishness to deal with. A report of something that happens to someone somewhere doesn’t quite fit the bill.
Benjamin S Nelson (#57)
That’s supposing that X means “immune to reason” rather than, say, “excessive.” It’s clear now that you mean only the former. I was confused because I don’t see the connection between assholishness and being unreasonable. Since you say below, “the asshole part requires a different analysis,” it doesn’t seem like you do, yourself. Either explicitly separate the two or have another go at explaining the connection. I certainly don’t agree that being unreasonable makes someone an asshole, even if they’re unhesitating and having a good time at it.
I would say that when someone uses informal fallacies, they are being unreasonable in the sense of failing to make valid arguments. I’m not sure that’s what you were asking.
If X doesn’t just spot the fallacy directly, X might notice something Y said isn’t adding up and, being familiar with the definitions of the informal fallacies, give what Y said a few more readings in order to determine which fallacy (if any) is to blame.
Ambiguity falls under the maxim of Manner in the list you linked to.
First, your argument here appears circular. Maybe it’s not, but you need to convince me that “good faith” isn’t decided by whether the speaker agrees that informal fallacies are linked with the maxims. Second, your error above bodes ill for the existence of these links. But even if almost all informal fallacies can be categorized somehow under the maxims, it doesn’t follow the maxims are “ubiquitous” (by which I’m assuming you mean “universally applicable”). They do different things. Fallacies tell us when an argument is invalid and the maxims are descriptive conventions of effective conversation. Ambiguity as a fallacy (amphiboly, equivocation, etc.) destroys an argument, but ambiguity is not confined to arguments, and how detrimental it is outside of them relies far more on subjective measures.
So while you could make a case for fallacies being universally applicable, you still won’t have demonstrated the universality of the maxims. I don’t see that you can, either, given that other cultures have different conventions. Employing brevity in Japanese is a good way to piss off the person you’re talking to and shut down conversation. There are even differences between blog “cultures.” Over at the Intersocktion, all the maxims are routinely sacrificed with the goal of promoting communication. However absurd and contrary we might find that, our attempts at communication there will be impaired by not following the local conventions.
You’ve missed my point. It doesn’t matter if informal fallacies are subjective and evolution is a fact. I was saying that if the difficulty in understanding or applying fallacies arising from popular misunderstanding is what makes fallacies “inscrutable,” then the same thing would also make evolution “inscrutable.”
Furthermore, as should have been clear from my premise (“Informal fallacies aren’t all that difficult to comprehend…”), I disagree with your characterization of informal fallacies. They are indicators of an unsound argument. The judgment required to use them is in interpreting what your opponent meant. If that’s done correctly, figuring out which fallacy was used isn’t terribly difficult or subject to interpretation.
Not only are the qualities of “proportionate” and “effective” subjective, your examples assume you know the mind of the person you’re judging. How do you measure someone else’s sympathy or resentment? There’s nothing useful at all in criteria that require you to guess at other people’s intentions.
Just because I didn’t quote the entire passage doesn’t mean I ignored the other sentences. Are you trying to say that you’re not self-centered because you’re looking out for the integrity of argumentation for the sake of, well, some people you haven’t mentioned (but not the people who are “trivializing debate”)?
@Ophelia:
Not so. Rationality is not a binary on/off state, it’s a continuous spectrum. No one is totally rational, and many skeptics have some deeply-held irrational beliefs.
For example, it’s basically irrational to feel loyalty to a nation, as opposed to your local community or the human race as a whole. And supporting a sports team is totally irrational; fans contribute time and money, and get upset if they lose or someone insults the team, in return for nothing more than a feeling of pride and belonging.
Does this mean patriots and sports fans can’t be Real Skeptics (TM)? Maybe, but if you exclude them you’re alienating a lot of potential allies and generally decent people.
Yes, this is more or less what I’m suggesting, and I disagree with your conclusion. Standing up for secularism and rational thinking is inherently worthy of respect. In modern society, it’s badly needed, and often thankless. It does not automatically become less worthy if contributed by someone with a strong, unreasoning devotion to Quakerism, or the Portuguese nation, or the Green Bay Packers.
Of course you have to look at each individual’s actions, and decide if their irrational, harmful behaviour outweighs that which is good and justified. But are you really saying that supporting secularism and skeptical thinking does not count as a positive attribute?
I agree it’s not trivial, but in a way this is exactly my point.
Bullying of the “out group” by the “in group” happens all the time, and atheists can be perpetrators as well as victims. I’m afraid much of what you’re saying sounds like the typical excuses to ignore bullying: “It’s not happening, at least not much, and no one important is doing it, and it doesn’t seem to happen in public, and the victims should just ignore it or go somewhere else, and they brought it on themselves, and anyway it’s nothing to do with me.” You can believe any or all of these things, and you may even be right, but stop and consider the possibility that you’re not.
Ophelia is telling the straight-up, unvarnished truth and you’re talking about alliances and decency. Ugh. That
s some confused reasoning.
Have the courtesy to deal with the original point. You could admit that theists and these other people were not behaving sceptically in these areas and I’m sure everyone else would then tell you they would happily work with non-sceptics to advance various other issues. We aren’t a political advocacy group remember, we were talking about scepticsm so maybe deal with the points before drifting.
Atheists face genuine persecution in some places including loss of work, physical beatings, threats, and property damage. More than one person who spoke up against religious indoctrination in schools has had their house firebombed (and yes, this has happened to Christians who don’t share the right views). This isn’t something that happened in the dark ages or during the 1920s but is happening today.
And in response you equate this with, what, Internet trolling, insults on message boards and bloggers saying that their beliefs are factually incorrect?
Talisker…yes I know all that about rationality, but it’s tangential to what I said. I think you’re playing games now.
No I’m not saying that supporting secularism and skeptical thinking does not count as a positive attribute, but that again is not what you said in the first place and not what I replied to. Please don’t play games.
And please don’t tell me to stop and consider the possibility as if you know that I haven’t. I consider it all the time, but I’m not required to think that your claim is worth hours of consideration. It’s an anecdote about someone I’ve never heard of who gets atheist comments when he mentions being a theist. No, I don’t think that’s good evidence that Atheists Are Bullies.
And to be perfectly frank, if we’re playing Argumentum ad MarkCC’s inbox, I’m willing to bet atheists come off as much better than the religious. How telling that the only people regularly being framed as bullies are the disenfranchised minority, eh? I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
To be explicit, I am not criticizing MarkCC here. He wasn’t framing atheists as dicks, although he did make a point to point out that some of them were alongside the religious people trying to “convert” him to their various ways of thinking. He generally doesn’t have any part in this framing business, although I believe he’s friendly with some of those who are. But the vast majority of emails he mentions in his posts are from religious nutters being unreasonable, and he’s not the type to hold back if he was getting the same from atheists (as evidenced by the recent blog post).
@Ophelia: I honestly am not trying to play games. It was not my intention to misinterpret what you are saying. I’ll back up and try again if you don’t mind:
Is it your opinion that it is “silly” for a theist to claim to be a skeptic? If not, could you please explain what you did mean by this?
Suppose that our hypothetical theist is not trying to convert anyone, doesn’t confront anyone with his or her religious beliefs, doesn’t even discuss his or her religious beliefs in detail, but does support secularism, science, and rational thinking. (I thought all that was clear from what I said before, but perhaps not.) Is such a person, hypothetically speaking, worthy of respect and courtesy? And if not, why not?
What exactly would you consider to be good evidence? I really would like to know.
@Paul: Read MarkCC’s post, he makes clear that he is equally annoyed by the atheists and Christians.
Talisker – if someone is a theist then that does diminish my intellectual respect, other things being equal. I did say I might have other reasons to respect such a person, but I don’t have intellectual respect for theism.
But then…you couple it with courtesy, so perhaps you’re using “respect” to mean just “not being rude to” – but that’s not really what respect means.
What I would consider good evidence would be, at a minimum, primary material, not commentary on primary material.
Re:
‘Atheists face genuine persecution in some places including loss of work, physical beatings, threats, and property damage. More than one person who spoke up against religious indoctrination in schools has had their house firebombed (and yes, this has happened to Christians who don’t share the right views). This isn’t something that happened in the dark ages or during the 1920s but is happening today…’
I’d add also that, even well under that level of ugly (or perhaps in combination with it–I don’t know), there seem to be a fair number of people who post into venues like Pharyngula’s comments threads who describe themselves as being effectively ‘in the closet’ in their real lives. They describe biting their tongues, feeling compelled to make themselves effectively invisible, having to endure any amount of stupid in meatspace sans comment…
Under their ‘nym, in the comments threads, therefore, I imagine, they must find an almost dizzying freedom to call the incredibly silly incredibly silly. So I tend to figure they really should have at least a little space to say how they really feel about this BS online. If they think someone’s being incredibly stupid, I think it’s well within their rights to say so as directly as they see fit. If their real world is such that this is potentially so very costly. As I could well believe it is.
And hell, more practically: I strongly doubt it would matter one tiny bit if I felt otherwise. ‘Cos I expect that, especially given that context, they would anyway. And beyond that, given that background, I find myself just as often marveling at the relative restraint people show–especially in the face of stubbornly repeated stupid.
And speaking of repeated stupid, yes, it’s true: on occasion, you do encounter folk who don’t say much in response to the latest bit of flim flam beyond ‘oh, shut it’. But frankly, in fact, I can’t even come down especially hard on that either…
Insofar as religion online (and in real life besides, come to think of it) is so very repetitive, and thus as much like spam as anything else: omnipresent, endlessly repeated, seeking to convince not with originality so much as sheer volume of material flung. It’s a shotgun strategy: keep throwing the same stale crap, hope someone present is perhaps inexperienced enough not to have heard one in particular before, perhaps gullible enough also not to look at it too closely…
In that context, it seems to me saying merely ‘shut it, we’ve heard it’ is perfectly justified. Hell, I’d even suggest: it puts the tone right where it belongs, which is pretty much also to say: ‘Look, you’re just insulting our intelligence and wasting our time with this warmed-over swill; thus we’re not impressed enough even to bother with you at any length. So thanks all the same, and mebbe come back after you’ve developed some of your own material.’
Exhibits the first and second: keep in mind there are numbnuts still pulling out Anselm and Pascal in this day and age, for crying out loud, and I only wish I were kidding. Returning every repeated sally in a world like that with a lengthy reasoned rejoinder would be lovely, ‘n all, but it often strikes me this is a bit like writing email to every wank spamming your mailbox with come-ons for dodgy pharmaceuticals–responding to them with lengthy, footnoted essays beginning: ‘Sir, I have reason to suspect your promotional literature may be somewhat in error, as my recent search of PubMed seems to suggest that ‘herbal v***** does not, in fact, exist…’
(Oh, and lest anyone clumsily or malevolently start trying to mischaracterize from my description here that the whole of that forum’s content is merely ‘shut it, we’ve heard it’, note that a surprising number of people do seem to make some effort to do exactly that lengthy reasoned rejoinder thing all the same, writing at incredible length and complexity on a regular basis, their very stamina a thing to behold. I merely say: I can’t so much blame those who don’t, or don’t exclusively.)
Adding, following from that, seriously, there’s this meme I see taking off here: that oh, the Pharyngula comment threads are now the worst of the worst–let’s compare our oh so moderate and reasonable selves favourably to the rabid beasts that lurk therein, slavering for meat…
To which I can only say: if that’s true–if that’s as bad as it gets–as far as I’m concerned, contemporary atheism has absolutely nothing to apologize for. I mean heavens to Betsy, what, so people on a website are bluntly calling rank stupidity belched noisily out of the credulous netherworld of the net what it actually is?
Oh merciful heavens, how shocking, and oh, my poor virgin ears. And what have we wrought, setting such monstrosities as these loose, and however will we repair the infrastructure afterward.
Seriously, get some perspective, and look, by the way (as no one taking this tack ever seems to do) honestly at the vapidity of what those rejoinders are actually answering…
For having done that myself, I still comfortably maintain: if those comments threads are the benchmark for ‘shrill’, I find myself staggeringly underwhelmed as to the effort it takes to earn that honour.
Brilliant, Andrew. (Are you AJ?)
That “spam…we’ve heard it” thing is why the Australian stick-cartoon rules for the debate item is so funny.
Quite right about comments at Pharyngula. I don’t mean to help the meme that “oooh they’re so terrible.” It’s more that there is sometimes an echo effect, which is just an artefact of the size of the place. It’s not a symptom of Atheist Evil, it’s just a result of a very large number of readers and thus a proportionately large number of commenters. Once you make allowance for that…there’s nothing particularly noteworthy, much less Evil.
Thanks Ophelia. And yeah, I’m AJ. Plethora of sign-on-services ‘n associated cookies lurking in various browsers… what can ya do.
A Noyd, ah, I think i see where the conversation went off track now. When you said “Who decides what’s an “unreasonable” level of assholishness, though?”, I should have noticed how you were reading the phrase. Sorry. I didn’t mean “an unreasonable level of assholery”, I meant “unreasonable and an asshole”. To be clear, you can be an unreasonable person without being an asshole — say, when you’re joking around. Or you can be an asshole while being reasonable — Prof. Myers, for example. (Or all of us, on occasion).
You’re right about ambiguity and Manner. My mistake. Still, you can see that my point applies in the case of ambiguity. I can go through others if you like. (I think I wrote an undergraduate paper on this, but it’s been a few years since then.)
I think the argument I presented is only circular if you believe that Grice’s cooperative principle trivially implies the four maxims. His cooperative principle is: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.” Conceivably, you might accept this principle as a working model of what makes for “good faith”, but not accept his four maxims.
Although much of this is up for discussion, I would argue that the informal fallacies are concerned with both soundness and cogency. And they’re certainly not concerned with formal validity (if that’s what you meant by “validity”). And they’re not just a matter of soundness, because they involve the intentions and purposes of the conversation as much as the facts of the matter.
Assuming I’m right about the fallacies more-or-less mapping onto the principles. The relativity of cultures (say, with the case of Japanese culture) is consistent with my point about the subjectivity of the application of the maxims. We have different ideas about what is required. But when we go about the business of doing what’s required, we make use of the maxims as a means to that end.
I should add that none of this explains Moonenbaum’s behavior. But that gives us good reason to say that they’re not acting in good faith, and not trying to.
Sure there is. We all make judgments based on an analysis of the content of speech and asking the appropriate questions. There may not be any necessary and sufficient conditions for successful communication, but we do have some insight into what works. i.e., the more common knowledge that you and your interlocutor share concerning the facts, the easier it is to figure out their purposes.
Yep. Especially because I know what the consequences look like.
The thing about Pharyngula is that it seems to act more like a place to vent among like-minded individuals (which is what AJ and Ophelia were saying just above). For me, it made me a lot more confident in my atheism and skepticism in general, to know that I wasn’t alone, and there were good reasons for not-believing in these things, and I didn’t need to be ashamed of it. If Pharyngula scares off a couple of religious people while instilling that confidence in 100 non-religious, who can then go out into the rest of the world and be ‘out’ about it, and show people that atheists aren’t monsters, but friends and neighbors, isn’t that a worthwhile trade?
Not that I have any idea what the numbers actually are, but it seems unlikely that a great number of religious people are reading Pharyngula regularly. Outside of our little corner of the interwebs, a phrase like ‘PZ posted on Pharyngula’ is going to be met by confusion.
I posted a few times on Phil’s threads asking questions about what exactly he meant by ‘being a dick’. Since he specifically excluded PZ, I really have no idea what he could be talking about. I think his unwillingness to give examples is because his examples would be nobodies from various comment threads rather than anyone prominent, which would immediately raise the question of why does he even care what random nobodies are saying.
One small amendment – commenters aren’t necessarily nobodies – and nobody is really a nobody anyway. :- )
But the point is, if your examples of Evilness all come from comments, then you obviously don’t have much of a case, because why don’t any of them come from actual posts? If comments are all you can offer, then you’re reaching, and if you’re reaching…well then fuck off.
I agree Ophelia, I probably should have worded that differently. But you know what I mean.
@Ophelia #72:
I linked to the “primary material”, a first-hand account. I never claimed it proved anything about the extent of the problem, just that it was a useful example. If you must dismiss any and all anecdotes, then you’ll just have to wait for the peer-reviewed anthropological study, but it may be a long time in coming.
@Andrew Milne, #73:
How is this relevant, exactly? I wasn’t talking about god-botherers who visit the comment threads at Pharyngula and try to convert the heathen. (So far as I can tell, neither was Phil.) They deserve all the derision they get.
What about a forum to promote science, secularism, and critical thinking, but not atheism as such? If theists are secular, pro-science, and not trying to convert anyone, should they be made welcome there? Or is it acceptable for them to be subjected to harassment and insults, just for the bare fact of being theists?
@Ophelia #78
Since that “fuck off” seems to be partially directed at me, I will now do so.
Talisker:
If ‘made welcome’ is some code word for ‘not criticize them the same way we would criticize every other magical belief’, then the answer is no.
Let me make a small, one word change in what you just said:
What do you think?
No, Talisker, the “fuck off” was not (even partially) directed at you.
I didn’t say anything about proving: I didn’t say I “must” dismiss all anecdotes; I didn’t say any of what you seem to think I said. But you seem to expect one anecdote to elicit cries of shame and guilt from people who don’t know the people involved and had nothing whatever to do with the anecdote. I just don’t see what your point is. A guy gets email and comments from atheists. Oh. Wow. [shrug]
Also, as I mentioned, you’re ignoring the context of all this. You’re ignoring the fashion for calling atheists evil screaming witch-hunters baying for blood and eating theist children without even stunning them first. I just can’t get worked up about this fella who gets comments. Is he worked up about the crap that gets thrown at me?
Benjamin S Nelson (#76)
All right, so we’re clear were talking about two principles for conducting conversations:
1) Don’t be unreasonable.
2) Don’t be an asshole.
The first is a good principle for argumentation and, so long as we’re using “unreasonable” in the sense of “making invalid arguments” or “failing to see the validity of someone else’s argument,” is easy enough to define. For conversation in general, though, things get a little murky and culturally derived expectations take on a bigger role. I think we can agree both that there are rules for constructing valid arguments and that conversation is facilitated by everyone involved agreeing on a set of standards for conversing. Where we disagree is whether there is a universal set of standards.
The second is also a good principle, but is next to impossible to put into action given the highly subjective nature of assholishness. It can even conflict with the first principle when arguing with people who find it unbearably assholish to be held to standards of proper argumentation.
What does that have to do with whether “almost all of the informal fallacies are linked with failures in Grice”? I was asking if there is a “good faith” way to disagree.
Of course I didn’t mean formal validity, but it seems like you consider informal logic to work by significantly different rules than formal logic. I really don’t know what you mean by “soundness” or “cogency” here. “Soundness” should be reserved for arguments with both true premises and valid reasoning. Is that also your understanding? If you mean “cogency” as a synonym for “validity,” then I would say that informal fallacies are only concerned with both soundness and cogency to the extent that a sound argument requires cogency. If you mean “cogency” as a synonym for “compelling” regardless of validity, then I would disagree.
Perhaps I would have been more clear had I said informal fallacies “are indicators of an unsound argument along with false premises.” They are a matter of an argument’s validity (and by extension soundness) because they involve identifying what elements of an argument render the speaker’s conclusions invalid (and by extension make her argument unsound). But they aren’t anything more. Intentions and purposes come into it because determining which fallacy applies first requires correctly understanding what an opponent means to say.
The first is not a safe assumption, especially given your idiosyncratic take on informal fallacies. As for the rest, from what I can find, it’s not explicit whether violations of the maxims in cultures with a different set of norms aren’t actual violations. It seems to me that, if we allow this, then the maxims become generalized to the point of working like a sort of linguistic astrology; rather than explaining anything, they’re just categories you cram elements of conversation into. You might find that useful, but I don’t, either from a linguistic standpoint or in the interest of keeping argumentation effective.
Let me rephrase my objection: Criteria such as you gave that require you to guess at other people’s state of mind (how sympathetic or resentful they feel) do not work “for distinguishing an asshole from a spirited crank.”
You’re off on some tangent about successful communication (and if it’s not a tangent, then you’ve assumed some connection between assholishness and successful communication).
This might work if you’re only talking about reason. But it seems you were saying that your concern for assholishness has something to do with the integrity of argumentation. Yet you haven’t made any such case. You haven’t even established who would benefit from de-assholifying argumentation except to dismiss the concerns of religious believers.
Talisker (#80)
Primary material would be the emails themselves. The account is worth less (not worthless) because we don’t know if the people sending the mails are being fairly represented by Mark.
But are they being subjected to harassment and insults? This seems to be unreasonably difficult for accomodationists to demonstrate when it should be trivial if there’s an actual problem.
@A.Noyd: OK, but it still sounds like you (and Ophelia) are looking for excuses to ignore it. Just suppose, for the sake of argument, that MarkCC is being fair and his complaints represent a somewhat widespread phenomenon. What then?
@Ophelia: OK, my mistake re. “fuck off.”
Where, exactly, have I asked for “cries of shame and guilt”? I’ve put forward the suggestion that unwarranted hostility by atheists towards theists may sometimes be a problem. There’s no need to exaggerate.
I’m aware that atheists face all sorts of bigotry in the wider world. But it works both ways; in China, theists are persecuted by an atheistic government. None of this has anything to do with the specific case of interacting with individual, secular theists. (Of course it’s understandable if atheists are feeling frustrated and want to rant at any religious target that presents itself, but that doesn’t make it desirable.)
You seem to be saying that, by definition, verbal harassment is not a problem worth taking seriously. Is this really true?
@JasonA #81:
Well, that’s the point. Is it always a good idea to insult, ridicule, and try to deconvert religious people, regardless of context? Suppose that, one day, you are introduced to a friend’s grandmother who casually mentions that she goes to church. Based on that, is it really a good idea to harangue her about her delusional belief system? Or, hypothetically, would it just be rude and pointless?
If not, then as I said, imagine a forum about science or secularism, where atheism is tangential to the matter at hand. Is it possible that similar considerations would apply?
Regarding homeopaths: Actually, yes. A parallel situation would be someone discussing, say, how to keep religious influence out of schools, who has in one way or another revealed that he/she has used homeopathic “remedies.” Ranting about homeopathy is not relevant, particularly if the user makes clear that he/she is not interested in discussing it. This person may be just as committed as anyone else to the separation of church and state, but understandably become annoyed and reluctant to participate if he/she is continually being insulted about homeopathy. Also, there are homeopaths and homeopaths; there’s a big difference between the casual, “it seems like it might be worth a try” user and someone who fully buys into all the homeopathic woo, tries to discourage use of scientific medicine, etc.
Similarly, there is a wide spectrum of religious belief. Many believers admit they cannot objectively prove God exists, do not claim their faith provides any special knowledge or authority, and are not trying to convert anyone. But they do find an irrational comfort and enjoyment in it. In practical terms, this may be no worse than feeling irrational joy at watching the Green Bay Packers score a touchdown.
Why is it that the former seems to attract the slings and arrows of outraged atheists, regardless of context, while the latter gets pretty much a free pass? Is it just that seeing all religious people, all the time, as The Enemy has become a reflex?
(I know a standard answer would be that moderate religious belief always enables and encourages the worst kinds, but I don’t really buy this. The connection between a Quaker meeting in Australia and a stoning in Iran is very, very tenuous indeed. It’s rather like saying all patriotism is on a slippery slope to massacres and prison camps.)
Re:
‘How is this relevant, exactly? I wasn’t talking about god-botherers who visit the comment threads at Pharyngula and try to convert the heathen. (So far as I can tell, neither was Phil.) They deserve all the derision they get.’
While I’m delighted that we agree on this, and no doubt those who answer such stupidity will be equally delighted with your kind endorsement, and I’ll be every so sure to pass it on, the real problem, Talisker, is I don’t think either you or Phil has the faintest clue exactly what you are talking about.
No, really, you don’t. The tell for me is your odd question to Ophelia upthread. Asked to clarify exactly what’s bothering you, you ask her, no, please, you tell me what would bother you. I don’t seem to know right now what behaviour I’m on about, exactly, so please help me out here. What am I talking about, exactly?
And that’s exactly because you don’t even know what’s really going on. Nor does Phil.
So let me help you out. Allow me to tell you exactly why Phil made all the muddy noise he did:
Phil caught the words going ’round that them thar atheists are getting uppity, goin’ on and making fun of theists. Answering them, golly gee, in public. Calling even moderate, nice, kind, charitable, non-evangelical mainstream believers’ cherished truths delusions. The very noive.
‘Course, he probably didn’t hear it that way exactly. All he caught was: geez, these people are being mouthy. Extreme, probably, even. Shrill, I shouldn’t wonder.
And he doesn’t want to be associated with that. So he makes some noise, sez, hey, just so everyone knows, I’m not a dick. There’s some other guys in the room I won’t deign to mention who are, but that’s not me. Allow me, therefore, to distance myself from them with this vague noise. I’m nice. Really.
‘Course, the end result of that is it winds up being nothing more than a smear. No one knows exactly what he’s saying. There’s no line anywhere he gives between what is and isn’t dickish.
Which, actually, is terribly useful to those who’d really rather atheists didn’t say anything whatsoever. Without the line drawn, all it really says is: look, shut up. Word on the street is: atheists are mouthy. Don’t be one of those guys. Second guess yourself every time you open your mouth, make sure you don’t get identified as one of those guys. They’re bad, they are.
And look where we get from that: we get a nice, repeated meme that there’s atheists out there that are dicks. Atheist/dick… watch for that combination. You don’t have to name names, oh no… You don’t have to give evidence, nor specifics, oh no. But you can make the discussion about atheism a discussion about dicks anytime you like. Oh, you think religion is a delusion? Yer not one of those dicks, are ya? Better shut up. Just in case.
And the great thing about this for those who want atheists just to shut up about religion entirely is: Phil and you both are thereby made useful idiots–to borrow a particularly apt phrase–in the spreading of that meme. You want to be vaguely nice, you want to appear vaguely reasonable, but all you’re really doing, unless you can really lay down the line about what’s over it, is spreading that meme. And saying, effectively, to everyone who might discuss religion too forthrightly: hush. Not allowed.
You want to avoid that, you give those specifics. You point out what you don’t like, where it happened, try to set your protocol. You don’t come whining to Ophelia saying: please do my homework for me. You say: ‘this happened, here, and I think it’s inappropriate, and here’s why’.
Oh, and speaking of, re:
‘What about a forum to promote science, secularism, and critical thinking, but not atheism as such? If theists are secular, pro-science, and not trying to convert anyone, should they be made welcome there? Or is it acceptable for them to be subjected to harassment and insults, just for the bare fact of being theists?’
Yes.
As in: yes, it’s acceptable. More saliently: it’s unavoidable, purely from the question you just asked. Give up your demand that this be ruled out of bounds. You will not get it. It is, in fact, a logical contradiction, purely from that part of your question that went and included ‘critical thinking’.
Because here’s the reality: to some of the religious, any challenge to their belief will be taken as ‘harassment’, and any challenge will be taken as an ‘insult’.
You doubt this? Look at Zwartz and Helprin. To them, saying merely ‘It’s okay not to believe in a god’ was ‘ugly’.
Right. Saying it’s ‘okay’ to believe as we do. How very shrill. How very out of bounds.
Given that, what isn’t?
The problem is: your ‘forum to promote science, secularism, and critical thinking’ cannot be expected just to shelter entirely one silly belief because it so happens those who hold it are ‘nice’, not to mention numerically dominant in a particular context. The artificiality of it will be merely laughable hypocrisy, to anyone who thinks about it even halfway rigourously. And wasn’t this, after all, a forum to promote ‘critical thinking’?
Now I could try to join the nice brigade as much as I’d ever desire to do by qualifying this to say: I do think when people point out any religion, mainstream or no, is as much nonsense as, say, Scientology, Mormonism, tea-leaf reading or astronomy, that it would be nice if they tried to set the tone according to what they got from the person identifying themselves as a member of the same…
But I have to emphasize: even if I got my wish, it wouldn’t matter to this discussion in the long run. Religion believes it has privilege–certain religions especially–and will take offense however kindly you point out their unreason, merely for having the temerity to suggest their cherished, privileged faith is, in fact, a superstition. So your demand that persons not be subjected to ‘harassment and insults’ will become, effectively, a demand discussion of certain unreasons simply be ruled out entirely. And you and Phil will still be hearing: fuck, but those atheists are dicks. And trying to distance yourselves, insisting, oh no no no, we’re the nice ones.
And then we’ll be right back here, telling you: Talisker, give it up. You cannot protect religion to its satisfaction unless you rule out frank discussion of religion entirely. And this, I should hope, you wouldn’t be such a fool even to wish.
Hee hee… in case anyone’s wondering:
Above, please substitute ‘astrology’ for ‘astronomy’.
(/Call it latent annoyance with Phil’s recent silliness. All them astronomers, we hates them, precious.)
Talisker (#85)
Supposing there’s evidence for atheists being assholes to the religious doesn’t tell us a damn thing about whether there is a problem with atheists being assholes to the religious. Why don’t I suppose unicorns exist while I’m at it?
Which you can’t back up with any evidence better than someone’s descriptions of the emails he gets. Conclusive evidence shouldn’t be hard to find if there’s a “widespread phenomenon.” Given that no one can seem to put forward the evidence, it’s a reasonable assumption that there isn’t an actual problem.
You seem to be incapable of grasping simple concepts. Verbal harassment is not a problem worth taking as seriously as things like physical violence.
Jason A. didn’t say anything about insulting, ridiculing and deconverting, only criticizing. Not the same thing.
Is the problem in this hypothetical situation the supposed ranting or that homeopathy isn’t relevant to religion in schools? That is, are you arguing that the “widespread phenomenon” this is parallel to is atheists bringing up theism when it’s not relevant or atheists being hostile towards theists? Specify, and then come up with a more appropriate “parallel” situation. And, either way, cough up some evidence for the problem or shut the fuck up already.
Again, you’re assuming that atheists are insulting believers.
Unsurprisingly, you also haven’t comprehended any of the arguments for how moderate religion facilitates extremism.
@A.Noyd #88: Unlike the unicorn, MarkCC’s blog post definitely exists. I am asking what if, hypothetically, the situation described in that blog post is a fair example of a wider phenomenon.
Of course verbal abuse is less serious than physical violence. Only a complete idiot would believe otherwise. Physical violence based on belief or lack thereof is not relevant to the discussion at hand. Perhaps you are the one with difficulty grasping simple concepts.
@Andrew Milne #86:
I am not insisting that *all* religious people, of whatever stripe, be made to feel comfortable. It would be ridiculous to suggest that. As you say at great (and frankly tedious) length, it would be impossible to achieve and undesirable to try.
I’ve tried to make clear that I am talking about theists who are not claiming any special authority from their faith, trying to convert anyone, or even interested in discussing their faith in detail.
My question is the reverse: Will *anyone* who self-identifies as a theist feel comfortable in a skeptical forum, without attracting an excessive level of insults and deconversion attempts? (Even a rational argument in polite language could become insulting if it is repeated persistently, it is not relevant, and the target makes clear that it is unwelcome.)
Based on this discussion, it would seem the answer is “no.”
I leave you with a couple of lines from “The Big Lebowski”:
WALTER: Am I wrong, Dude? Am I wrong?
THE DUDE: No, Walter, you’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole!
Walter is hilarious on film but his real-life imitators are a lot less amusing.
These theists you’re talking about, Talisker – if they don’t do any of these things that you say they don’t do, how does anyone even know they’re theists? Why would they draw any disagreement? It sounds as if they wouldn’t even mention their theism.
I wonder if you have theism confused with deism. A deist could “feel comfortable” in a skeptical forum; think Martin Gardner for example. But a theist has to believe a lot more peculiar and inconsistent things than a deist does, and that’s why atheists aren’t necessarily willing to agree to what you’re demanding we agree to, which is careful refusal ever to point out a place where skepticism collides with theistic beliefs.
Hmph. For the record: I’ve finally read the Mark CC post that Talisker has been making such a point of – and that Talisker, laughably, called “primary.” Tell that to a judge! It could hardly be less primary. It’s entirely Mark CC saying what is in some emails he gets. That is not evidence of anything! It is the essence of hearsay. It’s not just that readers have to take Mark CC’s word for it, they also have to trust Mark CC’s description, which is entirely general and summary. There are no specifics whatsoever, let alone any quotes. (This is not a complaint directed at Mark CC – presumably people who send him such emails will read the post, so the summary is good enough for the purpose. He wasn’t testifying in court. The point is that his post is useless for the purpose Talisker wanted to use it for.)
So, no. That post tells me nothing. Mark CC doesn’t even say how many emails he’s talking about. In any case emails from readers of blogs don’t tell us anything except the obvious – there are some atheists who are (possibly) obnoxious. No kidding! There are some [insert personal noun here]s of any kind who are obnoxious! But you can’t get from “an unknown number of gnu atheists are obnoxious” to “gnu atheism is obnoxious.” You need more than that.
Talisker (#89)
The emails probably exist too, but the question is, do they contain what Mark says they contain? Are they evidence of atheists being assholes? If your argument rests on everyone agreeing to imagine his post is such evidence (and that it represents a wider phenomenon), then the problem you’re talking about (whatever it is) is likewise imaginary. Hence the unicorn comment. We can imagine unicorns exist, but doing so doesn’t tell us a damn thing about reality, and any conversation we might have on the topic will be a waste of time.
If the situation in the post is an example of a wider phenomenon, then there should be no shortage of other examples. Maybe even ones that aren’t hearsay. How many times do accomodationists have to fail to come up with this evidence before we can safely conclude there is no problem?
All right, my bad. I thought Ophelia was the one who brought up physical violence, but that was Tyro up in #67. But you’re still misrepresenting what Ophelia did say, which is about double standards. Why are atheists responsible for the misbehavior of other atheists if theists aren’t responsible for the misbehavior of other theists? Why should atheists have to scold atheistic assholes if theists aren’t expected to scold theistic assholes? The seriousness of the “problem” of verbal abuse seems to be rather one-sided.
Your first task is to show that this problem isn’t entirely hypothetical. Till you can do that, I suggest we switch to talking about unicorn husbandry because, as far as imaginary things go, unicorns kick way more ass.
A Noyd, yes, those two principles are the shape of my claim. But what I’ve been suggesting is that Plait was sparked off by seeing the combination of the two, and that he explicitly condemned these two together. But then most of his speech was about the asshole part. He probably neglected the unreasonable part because an audience of critical thinkers doesn’t need yet another lecture on critical thinking, but there you go.
To be clear, I think you can be a reasonable asshole, and you can be an unreasonable gentleman. Being an unreasonable asshole is the real problem. So sometimes people who whine about being held up to standards may need to be driven into reason through the spirited prodding of an asshole.
The fact that I’ve been looking at both of these criteria separately for the sake of completeness should make it clear to you that talk about successful communication is NOT a “tangent”, because it isn’t related to assholery. It is related to reasonableness.
I’m still stuck on what you mean by “validity” if you don’t mean “formal validity”. This is going to be a roadblock if we don’t clear this up from the start. You need to define “validity”. As I’ve been trained, validity in argumentation involves determining whether a conclusion follows by force of necessity from the truth of the premises. Soundness is validity plus premises that actually are true. Cogency means “convincing”, although I have in mind something like “rationally convincing”. There are other senses of validity out there, but I don’t know what sense you’re using it, such that it applies to all the informal fallacies.
I used to have something like the view you endorse, and I even argued for it on these forums. I don’t anymore, because I have started to take Habermas seriously. I think you’re stressing cultural relativity to the point where you’re missing out on the normative power of reason. Also, I think (and mentioned above) that there are rough-and-ready principles on not being an asshole that are just as widely applicable as the rough-and-ready principles of being reasonable; if you disagree, then you need to disagree on the particulars of what I have argued. No hand waving!
If this helps, think of it as a matter of “principles and parameters”. The principles are universally applicable features that separate good faith discourse from discourse that’s not in good faith. These principles are pragmatic, and they emerge from widely shared experience with dialogue (that’s their ubiquity); but they’re also normative, which is how they’re universal. Cultural expectations determine the parameters of application, but any person or culture that asks us to outright abandon these principles is systematically distorted, or not in good faith. The prediction is that if everybody in a given speech-situation were to have equal (or near-equal) power, these are the principles they would come to.
My take on the informal fallacies is hardly idiosyncratic. Contentious, maybe — it depends on how I were to cash out the details — but not idiosyncratic. The pragma-dialectic approach to argumentation explicitly owes a debt to Grice, for example. I may not be “safe”, but I’m not alone either.
I might complain about your comparison of Grice to astrology by trying to disavow it, but I’d rather not, since it’s a nice enough expression of my point about the criteria being “subjective but useful”.
Instead, I’ll ask you to look into the best case for the usefulness of astrology to see how powerful your intuitions are about the analogy. To quote a passage from Douglas Adams’s “Mostly Harmless”:
Is that roughly how you imagine Grice’s cooperative maxims? I don’t, but maybe you do.
You said:
I argued that to have a good faith disagreement is to obey the cooperative principle that I quoted, and yet still to disagree. Good faith is not defined by the four maxims, though, since it’s logically possible (though entirely unmotivated) for you to be in good faith in the above sense while failing to abide by the four maxims.
No. The two are only linked insofar as they are connected with their ability to produce good results for the social organization. This is all I have ever suggested.
Both being an asshole and being unreasonable, together, ends up trivializing debate and destroying the possibility of successful organization. In my view, and in Plait’s. In other words, if you think you need to be an unreasonable asshole, and you genuinely do care about the kinds of things that Plait and the skeptics are talking about, then the burden is on you to say when and why you think unreasonable assholery works, and how it helps in terms of organizing the movement. If you don’t think this, then we don’t disagree.
Re:
‘Based on this discussion, it would seem the answer is “no.”’
Based on experience, actually, the answer to that specific question is almost certainly yes. But your assumption of the reverse here is intriguing. To put it gently.
As the question you’re now asking: ‘Will anyone who self-identifies as a theist feel comfortable in a skeptical forum, without attracting an excessive level of insults and deconversion attempts?’ is now exceptionally broad. And a rather different one from the one you asked last, about whether it’s ‘acceptable’ believers be insulted, I might add.
More importantly: of course what you’re now asking could happen, and does. It depends a great deal on what they themselves consider an insult, I’d expect, and how they conduct themselves in the first place. As Ophelia points out, if they don’t even mention what they believe on this question, it would be hard to imagine why anyone would discuss them, personally. Beyond this, I can also tell you: if they mention it and don’t make a huge issue of it beyond being merely open about it, and generally participate in discussion they don’t see as particularly significant to it, the same is also very likely. And speaking of, even going back to Pharyngula, which is something of a free-fire zone for people to talk about these things, there are certainly Christians and believers of other stripes who are open enough about that and who do hang around. And even there, people certainly don’t steadily hector them, personally, to dump that particular stupid. Yes, they do talk openly about how silly they regard religious delusions, and yes, they can be reasonably confident the believer is likely to read that thread. But again, as I hope we agree, that’s pretty much only fair. That’s what the place is there for.
But that is not what you asked previously. And my answer, whether you like it or not, remains germane to that former question. And it remains the same: yes, it is acceptable that believers be insulted–even ‘nice’ ones. Yes, in my experience, it is unavoidable, if we are to have a frank discussion of any kind.
And, perhaps more clearly: I strongly suspect that’s the only reason we’re even hearing about it, and the real reason you’re here discussing it in the first place. The believers aren’t being hectored endlessly, and in some terrible, paralyzing bind that they dare not go near any ‘skeptical’ discussion for fear of this exhausting ‘harassment’…
Rather, some of them take offense that their religion is being discussed openly at all, anywhere halfway public, sans the respectful veneer they demand. That’s all that’s getting back to you.
Benjamin S Nelson (#93)
Can you find anything that would support the notion that Plait is unconcerned with reasonable assholes? Or that he even thinks they exist. I don’t see it. He says being a dick (asshole) is “when the person belittles their opponent, uses obviously inflammatory language, or overly aggressively gets in their face.” Seems to me from his speech that he’s making an assumption that when people do the above, they also stop arguing rationally.
You replied to my criticism (2nd to last section of #65) of your criteria “for distinguishing an asshole from a spirited crank” by bringing up successful communication.
Perhaps I’m confused on whether you mean them to be criteria we apply to ourselves or criteria to apply to other people. The last sentence of the paragraph you mentioned the principles (quoted in part above) seems to imply the latter. If it’s the latter, my criticism in #65 applies. If it’s the former, we go back to the question subjectivity and whose standards of assholishness we ought to use.
Being unreasonable alone does this, so what about being an asshole changes anything? Rather than shifting the burden of proof onto me, this claim about the damage done by being an asshole is what you (or Plait or anyone making it) need to specify and support. As for my goals, see #6.
Are you trying to say that this definition of “validity” is the same as “formal validity,” thus informal logic has to use some other definition? Because this definition works for both types. Formal validity would just be when an argument is valid or invalid for a reason pertaining to formal logic.
How is that different that “valid”? An examples of something that’s cogent in this sense but not valid would help.
I think you don’t know what my view is if you think so. There aren’t alternative ways to reason, but not all communication is argument. Refer back to the first section of #83. I only brought up cultural relativity as a criticism against the supposed universality of Grice, which I’ll revisit below.
It seems to me that you’re basing the universality of these principles on your own experience, whereas, in my experience, they’re not a reliable guide to good faith discourse in Japanese (and probably a great many other languages). (Also, I really would appreciate if you’d refrain from using “ubiquitous” when you really mean “widespread.”)
Then your principles are not paraphrases of the maxims? Because, otherwise, this statement seems to contradict the first sentence in the quote directly above.
Care to get specific about the “parameters of application”?
And yet they’re supposed to be relevant to real-world communication, most of which takes place outside this ideal?
My comparison to astrology was only relevant if you want to say that violations of Grice’s maxims aren’t really violations. The point I was making was that people in other cultures can violate the maxims while still communicating in good faith because they are used to a different set of conventions.
Astrology is pointless because a person’s birth sign doesn’t predict anything specific about that person. But the predictions can be made so vague that people will find ways to fit themselves into those categories after the fact. It is my observation that the maxims become similarly vague if you try to fit in the style of “good faith” communication of other cultures that would otherwise entail violations.
I have absolutely no flippin’ clue what you mean by “almost all of the informal fallacies are linked with failures in Grice, at least when a speaker in good faith puts a bit of thought into the accusations they’re making,” then.
@Ophelia:
MarkCC for one. (Fine, you won’t accept even the hypothetical possibility that he is being fair and accurate about his email inbox, but can you at least accept that he is describing his own religious beliefs accurately?) And plenty of other theists of my acquaintance. It is quite common for a person to identify with a specific religious tradition, and therefore be a Jew, Christian, Hindu, whatever and not a deist, yet have all of the other characteristics I described.
In all honesty, it does seem like you’re waiting for the peer-reviewed, statistically-validated, anthropological study before you entertain the possiblity that atheists, as a group, might be going too far in hostility to theists. That’s your prerogative, but in the case of bullying of an “out-group” by an “in-group,” these things are extremely difficult to validate.
It’s generally accepted that straights can be hostile and bullying towards gays, men towards women (particularly in a male-dominated field such as science), native-born towards immigrants, Christians towards atheists, and so on and so forth. This may well occur in private or semi-private communications, which are not amenable to easy validation. Even if leaders (and other members) of the majority group are not actively participating in abuse (verbal or otherwise), they may have a responsibility to make clear that it is not acceptable.
Does this not apply to atheists, in situations where they are a majority? Are atheists basically good and noble, so any problems are the isolated actions of a few bad apples that the wider group doesn’t need to worry about? I think I’ve heard that sort of excuse before.
(Just to be clear: Yes, I also think that religious leaders have a responsibility to speak out against religious bigotry. Obviously, many of them fail in this respect.)
Anyway, this is getting boring. Just for daring to defend theists, I’m being accused of all kinds of idiotic things which I have not said and do not believe, had my intelligence questioned, and been told to “shut the fuck up.” I’d like to think you are self-aware enough to realise this is making my point for me, but that is probably too much to expect. Have fun together, I’m going to go watch The Big Lebowski again.
Talisker – in the bit you quote, I said “how do you know?” – and you reply “MarkCC for one.” Eh? That’s not an answer to “how do you know?” I didn’t ask “who is” or “who, in your view, is” – I asked how you know people are theists if they are as apparently secretive as the theists you describe.
You lost your own thread in the first paragraph of your lengthy reply – so a little less of the lecturing manner from you would not come amiss.
That’s a rude and stupid thing to say, and it’s wrong. It’s especially rude and stupid when I took the trouble to say his post was fine for his purpose. My point was and is that it’s absurd for you to use it as evidence that atheists are meanies; it’s especially absurd for you to call it “primary.” Of course I will accept the possibility that he is being fair and accurate about his email inbox, but I won’t accept your claims based on what he says about his email inbox. Do you not get the difference? Saying “that is hearsay” is not the same thing as saying “that is a lie” or “that cannot be true.” It’s not about him; it’s about you. You need better evidence. What you say X said Y said is not it.
“In all honesty” nothing – in all irritation is more like it. You seem to be completely clueless about what kind of evidence counts as evidence and why; it is not the case that the only alternative to your “X said Y said” is “the peer-reviewed, statistically-validated, anthropological study.” There is plenty of ground between the two, so don’t give me that “in all honesty” crap.
No of course I’m not saying that atheists are abnormally immune to bullying tendencies. So give us a real example – one that matters, not just a random comment or three on Pharyngula. Don’t just say atheists are like other people so there must be lots of bullies so you have to speak out against them. K? Give us something. Or don’t. But don’t refuse to give us something and still persist in the passive-aggressive complaining.
Talisker (#96)
In the same breath as you wrongly accuse us (no one is attacking you just for defending theists), you claim we’ve accused you of saying things you haven’t said. And then you go on to talk about our self-awareness? Hilarious.
Really, you’ve been shown way more patience than you deserve. I told you to shut the fuck up unless you could cough up some evidence that the problem is a real one. Because otherwise you’re being a disingenuous asshole, wasting our time trying to get us to morally condemn what might be an imaginary problem. Why should we cater to someone jerking us around?
Congratulations on being one more piece of evidence for why “don’t be a dick” becomes a one-sided, vacuous admonition in practice.
A Noyd, that’s a misunderstand of what I’ve attributed to Plait. He starts out a) talking about unreasonable assholes, then b) moves on to talk about assholes period. He’s wrong to do that second stuff, (b). I thought we were clear on that from the start. But I’ve been arguing that you don’t get to ignore (a), and I’ve been pointing out that Plait was explicitly motivated by (a), too.
I’m concerned with the fisking, again, though for new reasons. I desperately want to move on to defend my argument about assholes and unreasonableness, because I find it all terribly interesting. But I am not sure that my overall point has been made clearly enough. Given the tedious length of my previous reply, in this reply I will purposefully refrain from making any new arguments until I’ve made myself clear about the points I’ve already made.
I should have said “unreasonable asshole” instead of just “asshole”.
These criteria for assholishness should apply to both ourselves and to others, which is why it has broader application. And your #65 criticism has no sting, because it treats the activity of interpreting the minds and sympathies of others as more exotic than it is.
I don’t agree that being unreasonable alone trivializes debate. My grandmother is a nice old lady, but she’s completely unreasonable in her beliefs. She doesn’t trivialize debate, she’s frightened by it. PZ Myers, Monty Python, and various satirists are reasonable assholes. It’s not until you cross the line into Crossfire or Ann Coulter territory that you turn the culture into goo.
Again, I seriously need for you to define what you mean by validity. I can’t answer those questions until you do. We don’t have the same definition and have probably been educated using different textbooks. I can’t compare the concepts I’m working with to yours if I don’t understand what the concept you’re working with looks like.
I’m basing it on its success in the field of pragmatics. Admittedly, though, my claims could be debunked if enough of the details of a complete account turned out wrong, in something like the way you describe. But empirical disconfirmation would have to refute the principles-and-parameters reading that I suggested, and in power-neutral environments. This is not a trivial task!
You’re obviously right that not all communication is argumentative. But let’s deal with one thing at a time. Argumentation is going to be central to what Plait has in mind, I think. Or what he ought to have in mind, at any rate.
The principles are the maxims. The statement you refer to (“The principles are universally applicable features that separate good faith discourse from discourse that’s not in good faith…”) is consistent with what I’ve said, because universality is not the same as necessity. Suppose I stipulate: to be in good faith is necessarily to act in accordance with the cooperative principle. Suppose I then go out into the world and observe that all acts of good faith, so described, are also in accord with the four maxims: Quantity, Quality, Manner, Relation. This is not circular, because I have not defined good faith in terms of the four maxims. Nevertheless, those four maxims may apply across all acts of good faith.
Sure. I’ll take that Japanese scenario as an example. Suppose Amyarta is in a conversation with George. They have relatively equal social power. They also have shared cultural expectations about what is required of a good faith conversation in terms of Quantity: it is simply required for the purposes of all conversations that you not be frugal with the details. From the get-go, as part of the background to the dialogue, those mutual expectations are understood to be part of what is required in order to speak in good faith. They’re the local parameters of application for both the cooperative principle (which, recall, asks us to do what is required, when it is required, etc.) and the maxim of Quantity.
Wikipedia has an interesting bit on what some people would consider flouting. “Keenan claims that the Malagasy, for example, follow a completely opposite Cooperative Principle in order to achieve conversational cooperation. In their culture, speakers are reluctant to share information and flout the Maxim of Quantity by evading direct questions and replying on incomplete answers because of the risk of losing face by committing oneself to the truth of the information, as well as the fact that having information is a form of prestige.” My answer to this example is similar to the one above. Background cultural expectations are parameters of “what is required”.
You probably want to know how this is falsifiable science, then. Can any maxim ever be flouted? Sure — all you have to do is find circumstances where you think people are speaking in good faith, but do the opposite of what is required, and especially the opposite of what is required while also flouting the maxims. Good comedy might be an example of this. (Not incidentally, a lot of humor can be characterized as flouting of the Gricean maxims. Damn, I *know* I wrote a paper on this somewhere.)
Yes. It’s a model.
Well, hopefully what I mean by “principles and parameters” will clear some of this up.
I don’t understand what you think is inconsistent between the two statements. Possibly the bit after the comma was misleading (starting with “at least when a speaker…”). It’s expendable, so I’ll rephrase the two sentences in such a way that I omit the post-comma part:
A good faith disagreement is a disagreement where both parties have aimed to say what is required, when it’s required, etc. Almost all of the informal fallacies owe to a failure to abide by the Gricean maxims.
@Ophelia #97: Mark is an example of a theist who meets the criteria I describe. I thought that was comprehensible.
Let’s suppose, for a moment, that you had access to MarkCC’s inbox. Strictly speaking, this doesn’t get us far in establishing there is a problem. At most, it just proves that one guy got some offensive emails.
If there is a problem, it consists of a huge number of communications (emails, blog comments, verbal remarks) directed at a large number of people (the “hundreds” of correspondents Phil describes, and presumably others who didn’t write in). In order to gather an objective body of evidence, you would have to take a survey, and gather supporting transcripts or witness statements where possible. Preferably, you’d also ask how many polite and constructive interactions they had with atheists, so as to provide a baseline.
It would be great if Phil had done this, and certainly would have made his talk more powerful. But it would be a lot of work, of a kind that really could be written up and submitted to the journals.
We’re not trying to convict someone in a court of law here. Can hearsay evidence (particularly from large numbers of people) be enough to make it more plausible that there is a problem?
Hey, if you wanted more evidence, you could have just asked for it. You could have put up a blog post saying, “OK, there may be a problem here, but I’m not convinced it’s that serious, so could anyone who’s undergone this kind of abuse reply in the comments with some specific examples?”
Instead you decided to go for some cheap derision, characterise the alleged victims as “some fragile Christian who feels lonely and sad because the skeptics won’t eat lunch with her,” and announce that you want to steal their stuffed animals. Fair enough, it’s your blog, but I think you were being too quick to dismiss the possibility of a problem.
I admit that I am still clarifying my own ideas on the topic. To that extent this discussion has been helpful, but it’s also been tedious and frustrating to wade through a lot of verbiage (from other commenters, not yourself), attributing some utterly ridiculous ideas to me, in the hope that they might be making a valid point somewhere.
Anyway, I’d just like to mention that although I disagree with you on this point, I read your blog regularly and in general I like and agree with your writing.
Talisker – but it’s not just that Phil didn’t do a survey – he didn’t do anything. He just asserted, and left it at that. He asked a leading question, and left it at that. You, by way of (according to you) doing better, offered a general claim by someone else. Surely you can imagine better examples and evidence that are still short of a full-blown survey.
Yes, of course I could have done what you suggest, but the post was about more than wanting more evidence, so that’s why I didn’t do it that way. I went for some “cheap” derision because I thought there were elements of Plait’s account that were well worth derision, expensive or not, especially the maudlin bullshit about people crying. I think the combination of no evidence or examples and emotional bullying is both disgusting and absurd, so I derided it.
And, again, as I have said several times and as you have consistently ignored, even if there is a problem, there is also a problem in the other direction, which is this enormous repetitive bullying backlash. Plait’s speech is part of the backlash, whether he intended it to be or not. You’re not even dismissing that, you’re just ignoring it. I’m one of the objects of it, so I couldn’t ignore it if I wanted to.
Benjamin S Nelson (#99)
I really don’t get who he’s talking about. At the start, he mentions skeptics who use assholish behavior in the place of reason, or who “believe in” skepticism/science/reason/whatever without actually putting the principles of those things into use. At the same time he assumes throughout that the goal of any given skeptic is changing the minds of the people involved in the argument, which a lot of people don’t agree with. Given that, and given how he doesn’t give any examples of the people he’s scolding, I can’t tell he’s talking about anything other than a straw man. All of the people I know who live up to his definition of an asshole are either reasonable or they’re pretty clear they’re not out to deconvert the subject of their assholishness. The way I see it, he didn’t neglect the unreasonable part because his audience was smart enough to get it, but because his portrayal of an unreasonable asshole is a straw man.
My point, which I should have explicitly stated, was that I don’t see Plait even making an effort to separate out “reasonable assholes” from “unreasonable assholes,” or even acknowledging the first exists. You do, and I have some respect for that, but I don’t see this as a point of similarity between you and Plait. (This is meant as a compliment towards you.)
This is why I find fisking useful. Not to impede conversation or make mockery of anyone, but to make clear what all the points of contention are. If someone honestly declines to discuss any particular point, rather than evading it while making the same damn arguments and assertions (see Talisker in this thread), I don’t get offended, but if what they’d prefer to discuss is contingent on some point that was never settled, it’s likely to come up again.
That said, I’m going to be short on time over the next few days, so it suits me to drop the stuff about Grice. You did clarify a lot and I think I see better what you’re trying to say, though I happen to find what I do agree with far more trivial than it appears you do. Anyway, it should help minimize confusion on any related points.
I thought you were separating the two. You did say, “But sure, the asshole part requires a different analysis,” and “I’ve been looking at both of these criteria separately for the sake of completeness.” So is the assholishness of an unreasonable asshole different than the assholishness of a reasonable one? Are the principles (“don’t be unreasonable” and “don’t be an asshole”) separate or not?
So what problem is applying those criteria to ourselves supposed to resolve if our opponents have vastly different ways of judging assholishness? It seems yours is only a recipe for reassuring yourself or like-minded folk that you’re not being what you would consider an asshole. But if assholishness is a problem (for communication or protecting debate), then your opponent’s perceptions matter more than your beliefs about your assholishness. Both the lack of and the expectation of agreement on what makes one an asshole between opponents demonstrates the non-existence of universal standards. Opponents might need to agree on standards, but they can agree on any set they please. This is what I see in many of the arguments between regulars at Pharyngula; there’s a much higher tolerance of exactly the sort of thing that elicits accusations of assholishness from believers.
No it doesn’t. Humans are notoriously terrible at doing that, especially if they’re already upset or expect to be upset by something the person they’re analyzing says or does. Not only do people I argue with mistake my state of mind all the time, I see way too many skeptics fall for what I consider to be obvious satire. (These are probably related; I have all the social sensitivity of a cinder block, so I tend not to base my analyses of sincerity on the emotional content of a post. When I err, I usually mistake a genuine loon for satire.) It takes a lot of work to overcome the biases that prime us to be uncharitably suspicious of the motivations of those we disagree with and more so if we consider them to be transgressing some moral boundary. We also tend to suck at judging whether we’re good at judging others.
One thing that might be interesting to explore is how much (perception of) assholishness can be avoided by making an effort not to assume the intentions of an opponent.
Are we talking about the “culture” of debate or of debate itself? I think we agree that intentionally and flagrantly avoiding reason in favor of lies is worse for culture in that it encourages people to avoid reason and critical thinking. Transmission and reinforcement of uncritical thinking is a serious problem. But to say that unreasonable assholes are the only ones goo-ifying the culture supposes that unreasonable non-assholes do not significantly contribute to the problem, which is not a safe assumption. Indeed, there’s plenty of talk about whether the selective critical thinking of moderate believers insulates culture against honest debate.
As for debate itself, any persistent failure, even accidental, to apply reason to argumentation is enough to trivialize debate. Refusal to confront arguments counts as well. When it comes to alternative medicine, my mother is like your grandmother. I fail to see how her avoidance of rational discussion on the matter is not destructive.
I said the definition you’ve been trained to use works for both types: “validity in argumentation involves determining whether a conclusion follows by force of necessity from the truth of the premises.” Hence my questions.
Talisker (#100)
You could provide a representative sample of the huge number of blog comments. Again, this shouldn’t be hard if the problem is widespread. Instead, you’re choosing evade responsibility by pretending there’s no middle ground between one insufficient example and a huge scientific study even after being told that was wrong.
A Noyd,
I think people like Plait had a certain blog culture in mind, as opposed to particular persons. The Pharyngulan horde, for example — Plait might think that Myers is cool, while still thinking Myers’s “Herding Lions” vision is undesirable. Dawkins himself recently changed his blog so that it fostered a more relevant, less dickish culture, and he and his webmaster were blasted by nitwits for it. These are things that we can criticize, they’re not strawmen, because they have more to do with social norms than particular individuals. Maybe that means these are grievances that are harder to redress (scapegoating is always easier), but they’re still legit as far as it goes.
On the other hand, Plait’s vision of “diplomats not soldiers” strikes me as being completely off-base. Like most of the non-accommodationists, I think both “soldiers” and “diplomats” are needed for purposes of organization. (Though I am irritated by the analogy to war.)
I do enjoy the philosophy of language stuff, concerning discourse. It’s terrifically interesting on its own. But also if we’re in the mood to envision what a “good culture” looks like, it’ll be tremendously important to think about these matters.
I do mean for “asshole” to be separate from “unreasonable”. For the purposes of the correction you mention above, I was clarifying that my statement should have read “…distinguishing an unreasonable asshole from a spirited crank”. In that case, it’s a conjunction of unreasonable and asshole.
I don’t think “asshole” has necessary and sufficient conditions that everyone’s going to agree with all the time. In the case of “asshole”, I’m trying to say, here are some typical conditions. We should treat these typical conditions as if they were necessary ones, as a provisional starting point, so that if people want to dissent, they know that the burden is on them to develop a clear alternative idea of what kind of behavior they’re criticizing.
It’s true that ‘mind-reading’ is hard, but it’s possible when you have enough prior common ground. The stuff you describe would have to be part of our error theory — mind-reading requires a kind of intense open dialogue that can be uncomfortable.
You’re probably correct that it is not just unreasonable assholes that trivialize debate (in the culture). I concede the point. But then again, in certain formal contexts, the reasonable asshole trivializes debate, too. We need some venues where people drop all pretence of playfulness so that we can get as fine-grained an analysis as possible. Show up at one of these venues in a WWE uniform and prelude all your lucid erudite questions with a symphony of armpit farts and you aren’t fostering a culture of debate. (Of course, though, this is a fact that is irrelevant to the present conversation, since it certainly doesn’t apply to blogs, which ought to be at least a bit playful.)
You missed my point. MarkCC complains about what he gets in the mail periodically — I was pointing out that this was the first time I could recall him calling atheists out. Odd that there’s no railing against dickish religious practicioners amongst those in the middle.
Actually, his webmaster was blasted for flat out lying to their many volunteers, deleting member accounts and thousands of posts of history for people saying anything less than flattering, and then deleting logs to leave no evidence of what he’d done. Not for fostering a “more relevant, less dickish culture”*. Anyone familiar with the forum knew Dawkins was hands-off about it and there was no real point in blasting him about it.
Nice framing, bro.
*Not that I’m a fan — I’d seen more dickishness there than on Pharyngula. Just sayin’.
Benjamn S Nelson (#104)
Not unless it can be shown that Pharyngula’s comment threads really do house the sort of behavior Plait referred to–using personal attacks in the place of reasoned arguments. I don’t see it. I mean, people do get verbally mauled on a regular basis, but it’s in addition to being given reasoned arguments. Nor do insults get flung without some level of provocation. I’ve seen honestly curious believers treated well, even thanked for being willing to consider they’re wrong, in the same comment thread as other believers are geting a verbal thrashing for being disingenuous, JAQing off, and ignoring any substantial answers that were given them.
If Plait isn’t arguing a strawman, then he needs to point out examples of this supposed reason-free sort of assholishness already.
You’re over-formalizing things, but I mostly agree in principle. Rather than saying they’re already available, we might establish a set of criteria that are general-purpose, that are offered for anyone to adopt if they don’t want to go to the trouble of developing their own, and that can be a starting point for cross-cultural communication. But most of the time norms aren’t developed deliberately. Blogs and forums are a bit unique in that the owners can set out and enforce behavioral guidelines. They can tell visitors what sort of treatment they should and shouldn’t object to. Even still, there’s a lot of norms that just arise naturally out of the culture that develops. And that can shape people’s expectations without them noticing.
Outside the internet, norms are even more “wild.” They’re either applied unconsciously or it’s taken for granted they’re beneficial and conformity is demanded of others. Thus, to maintain a certain set of criteria would, in part, require some regular effort at directing people’s attention to them. If some folks need them pointed out to temper their being unreasonable assholes, then others need to see them to understand their feelings of offense at simply having their beliefs challenged aren’t genuine grounds for complaint.
Anyway, while I don’t dislike the idea in theory, I have a hard time seeing how it would work in reality. You have to, at least in some small way, be able to reason with people before you can expect them to agree the burden of developing an alternative is on them. In America right now, it seems that would be like pushing against a tidal wave with your bare hands. I don’t know what the solution is, but for your idea of venues of hardcore debate to be more than some geeks stuffed away in a closet, something needs to change. Facts and reason have to become cool.
I think we’re mostly winding down at the point. I’ll agree that the burden is on Plait to point to cultural examples, but I am fairly optimistic that he can find them. For myself, I would choose the “Andrew Rosenberg” incident, where some Pharyngulans found a young and mildly pretentious creationist’s personal information and spread it publicly. It’s pretty shocking.
I think the formalizing is necessary, because the stuff I said there applies only to the “asshole” criterion, and not the “unreasonable” criterion. On the one hand, I think the case for being “unreasonable” involves more than just “treating typical conditions as necessary ones”. These conditions really do seem like they’re necessary for reasoning, in the sense that once the appropriate conditions are met by good faith actors, they’re going to show up. Although I agree that they’re applied subjectively, I don’t think that your worries about cultural relativism will hold up. And of course more needs to be shown to develop the sketch into a fuller explanation, but I hope to have given at least enough to take it seriously. On the other hand, I don’t have similar hopes for my formulation of “assholishness”, though I do think I’ve given some conditions that are (at worst) merely typical and (at best) typical conditions that we should pretend are necessary. I haven’t defended either of these claims at all, so you don’t have to take my word for it, but for now I’ll stress it as a possibility worth investigating.
As for that last bit — I don’t think that the Hardcore Debate Team vision is one that I’d apply to any circumstances except very special ones. I just brought it up in order to illustrate a case where the reasonable asshole has gone off the rails.
Benjamin S Nelson (#107)
By “some Pharyngulans” do you mean PZ Myers? Rosenberg’s full name, age and city were in the email that PZ published.
My take is that something as relativistic and instinctual as giving or taking offense doesn’t lend itself to formalization. It can be done, but it’s a constant effort to get others to play along. (I suspect that religion arose, in part, out of this difficulty.)
I’m not sure what you mean by the first sentence. Also, do you understand I’m saying reason is not something relative to culture? Arguments either work or they don’t. Nor am I a relativist in the postmodern sense. All I’ve said of relativism is descriptive and pertains to assholishness and conversation beyond argumentation.
I wasn’t impressed by Prof. Myers’s lack of discretion, no. But I was even less impressed by the people who purported to track him down by the use of that information.
I agree that the assholishness criteria are relative, though widespread. I haven’t got a good enough argument there.
If we disagree, it’s with respect to the reason criteria. Things might turn out to be culturally relative to a degree, but the relativist will still need to meet the conditions I’ve put forward as conducive to good faith exchanges. If the good faith criteria are difficult to achieve in practice, then we can expect that what people consider “reason” will be heterogeneous and relative. But that makes no difference to what good faith reasoning actually looks like.
In the first sentence, I meant that good faith dialogue (in the sense of the cooperative principle) will inevitably be consistent with the four maxims. People will adopt those maxims of their own volition, compelled by the knowledge of whatever works best. We should be relatively confident that this will happen.
And yes, I’m talking about cultural relativism in the empirical sense here. If I’m right, then I should be vindicated by sociolinguistics. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. But the studies have to be restricted to conditions where speakers are engaged in good faith dialogue.
Benjamin S Nelson (#109)
Unless you’re a relativist when it comes to reason, I don’t see why you’re bringing this up when I’ve said more than once that I don’t think relativism applies to reason.
My confusion stems from your habit of using ill-defined pronouns and switching between talking about assholishness and unreasonableness without making it clear which you mean. If this clears up the first half of the second paragraph in #107, it only leaves me more puzzled about the second half.
At any rate, we should probably leave things here since I don’t have the time to really concentrate on the argument just now. Such are the perils of volunteering oneself for things one really hasn’t the time for.
Sounds good. Take care.
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I am so stealing that line… :)
@Ophelia, #74:
This is something I’ve been thinking about: Shouldn’t we want blog owners to set a good example and remind commenters now and then of how to be a good {skeptic | rationalist | debater}? I suppose it might benefit everybody if occasionally a commenter got called out for gratuitous rudeness, using bad arguments, or otherwise grossly unexemplary behavour—especially if that commenter agreed with the blog host.
I know, this is very Christian and all (;>), but shouldn’t we preferentially try to educate those on, for lack of a better word, ‘our side’? If there’s anything in (or at least related to) Phil’s rather weak proposal, maybe this is something we can all get behind.
Yes, other things being equal. On the other hand some people really prefer to have a light hand on the monitoring, on principle as well as for practical reasons. So I waffle.