Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Explain belief.

The late Ray Hyman, a leading expert on cold reading and arch-nemesis of parapsychologists, was once asked if he thought alleged psychic Rosemary Altea was a fraud. Hyman’s answer (from memory) went something like:

I don’t know if she’s a fraud, but if I were a fraud I would do exactly what she does.

Many of the things that seem crazy to us begin to make sense (in a ”reverse engineering” sort of way) once we ask ourselves:

If I were determined to defend the indefensible, what would I do?

To me the main virtue of Simon Edge’s The End of the World Is Flat is not that it’s a particularly close analogy to gender ideology*, but the way it deals with precisely this question.

As the word ”indefensible” implies, persuasion by evidence and argument is obviously not the way to go in this case. Instead you need to work on people’s motivations. Some useful ”carrots” include being ”kind” (according to self), being on the ”right side of history”, getting to take your righteous indignation out on others and feel good about it etc. The ”sticks” include the fear of causing offense, of making yourself unpopular, of social isolation, of losing your job, of having your name pulled through the dirt all over the internet etc.

Ideally you want to avoid addressing the actual substance of your opponent’s arguments for as long as possible. Instead make it about your opponent as a person. The ”Perfect Rhetorical Fortress” of the woke Left and the ”Efficient Rhetorical Fortress” of the Trumpist Right (cf. Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott) offer endless excuses for never getting to the issue. Postmodernism (or, if you’re on the Right, Trumpist post-truth politics) is your friend: If any appeal to ”evidence” and ”logic” is just a naked exercise of power in a zero-sum conflict between oppressors and oppressed, why waste your time with such such things?

If you have to talk about research, avoid specifics at all costs. All people have to know is that there is generic ”research” that proves you right, and that your opponents are too ignorant and uneducated to know about. No need to cite any sources. Instead place all the burden of proof squarely on your opponents. Woke standpoint epistemology comes to the rescue: It’s not the job of marginalized people to educate you, remember! If you can’t claim an officially approved ”marginalized” identity for yourself, you can always claim to simply be ”passing on” what the truly marginalized told you, as a good ”ally”. If you are on the far Right, don’t worry. Religious apologists can show you how it’s done:

There are irrefutable arguments in favor of my position that are out there on the internet (or in the theological literature) somewhere. I’m not saying what they are, but I’m still going to attack you for not dealing with them. If you had made a serious effort to educate yourself, you would know why I’m right, so the fact that you still don’t agree with me proves you haven’t made the effort. Now go out there and study forever or until you agree with me.

Unless your opponents are able to meet any arbitrary standard you impose on them, you get to claim victory by default, without having to meet any standards at all. Once again it’s more or less analogous to saying that ”I get to claim for free what you have to pay for”.

Daniel Dennett once made a useful distinction between two very different kinds of ”belief”: You can believe in the actual propositional content of a statement (e.g. I believe that the sun will rise in the East, as seen from my frame of reference, tomorrow morning), or you can believe in ”whatever statement x happens to mean” (e.g. I believe, on the authority of physicists, that E = mc².). The former kind requires you to actually understand the statement in question (you can’t believe in the content without knowing what the content is) while the latter does not. The relevance to our purpose should be obvious: You want to encourage the latter kind of belief! Indeed the less people understand what they are required to believe the better. Once again, all we need to know is that there’s sound ”research” (or ”scholarship”) supporting all this stuff, and if it all sounds like gibberish to us, it’s because the ideas are too intellectually sophisticated and profound for our primitive brains to fathom.

Ophelia once wrote an insightful blog post (I believe it was called ”#peopleagainstbadthings”) about people who claimed to be against misogyny (more or less by definition ”bad things”) while (from memory) ”defining misogyny so narrowly that it’s defined out of existence”. There is also a danger of defining things too broadly. Of course everyone thinks they’re against ”bad things”, whether it’s ”misogyny”, ”phobias”, ”injustice”, ”bigotry”, ”Fascism”, ”hate” etc. And everyone is in favor of ”good things” (e.g. ”social justice”, minority ”rights”, ”diversity”, ”equity”, ”inclusion” etc.). On the other hand most people most of the time don’t necessarily have a well thought out idea of what all this entails in practice. This can be used to manipulate us by first getting us to declare ourselves ”against [bad thing]” or ”pro [good thing]” and then using that as a Trojan horse for smuggling in tons of other crap that’s supposedly implied for reasons best left unspecified. Soviet-style Communism is an obvious example. Your ”good thing” (i.e. the Trojan horse) may be ”justice for the working class” etc., and what it is taken to imply is unconditional endorsement of tyranny, the one party state, leader worship, forced orthodoxy and intellectual conformity, censorship, thought police, the surveillance state, endless purges and show trials, political arrests, torture, executions, labor camps, forced collectivisation, mass-starvation, genocide etc. etc. In the end even questioning the inalienable right of the leader to live like an emperor while the workers are starving is reframed as denying ”justice for the working class”.

* Too conspiracist, too traceable back to a single source, too easily defeated in the end etc.