Just going with what a lot of other people have said
I’m just catching up on the news about a teacher who was abruptly fired, apparently for teaching critical thinking. It seems the school also seized his personal laptop and is keeping it, which…how is that legal? It’s either that or he was writing a book on a school computer and not backing it up on a computer of his own, which…why tf would he do that?
I’m only halfway through because I stopped to look for background information so that I could make sense of what he says. So. That quest led to this video and, starting at 1:25, the core of this whole shitshow – not the one around this teacher but the one around the ideology. You know the one.
Student to Smith: It was deemed transphobic – ok – like, I myself –
Smith to student: Do you find that transphobic yourself?
Student: Uhhhhh – I don’t really have an opinion on it, but, I’m just going with what a lot of other people have said
BAM!
Slam down on that stop button, suspend all search for background on this story, in order to shout as loudly as possible YES, EXACTLY, YOU AND EVERYONE ELSE, AND THAT IS HOW WE GOT HERE.
Imagine everyone’s surprise when all the questions are asked and it finally becomes too obvious to deny that that’s what EVERYONE is doing AND THAT’S WHY THIS IS SUCH A GARBAGE FIRE of a movement and an ideology and an attempt at “liberation” or “inclusion” or “equity” or whateverthefuck these robotic goons think they’re doing.
“I’m just going with what a lot of other people have said” – yes and guess what, sonny, so are they. It turns out that’s all ANYONE is doing. You all think someone somewhere must have gotten hold of the right end of the stick somehow, so there’s no need to think further. Well you are WRONG about that. No one did. There is no right end of this stick. It’s a crock of shit from top to bottom.
Now back to learning more about Warren Smith…now that the outlines are pathetically clear.
There’s another video where the person he’s talking to basically refuses to engage with the thought experiment, which is something I encountered often as a philosophy undergrad. Present people with a Trolley Problem, for instance, and watch them squirm trying to find ways to escape the limitations of the scenario. There’s a part of me that suspects this phenomenon is linked to the “I’m just going along with what other people say” phenomenon and related resistance to engaging with potentially contravening evidence or arguments.
I suppose we all do it, in a sense, because we can’t understand everything. I notice myself doing it a lot with scientific and tech stuff that I just don’t know enough to “agree” or “disagree” with – that I just have to take on faith. Know what I mean? I can feel my brain cringing and shrinking and trying to hide, because it knows it will never really understand.
Is this the “this video” you meant? https://youtu.be/zIPPpsJY39c?si=rXtO5eh0yTxq_xrJ
Yes; when it’s not thought-terminating mantras, it’s the assumption that someone. somewhere got this right, and has passed it along in good faith. No further investigation or justification is needed, ever again; just shut up and submit. this goes for opponents as well as “allies”, except that allies have the added duty to get others to shut up and submit. It’s a religion, protection racket, and pyramid scheme rolled into one. It seals itself off from scrutiny and accountability by declaring any doubt, question, or critique as hateful, “transphobic” bigotry.
Not just the tenets of the ideology itself, but all of the judgements passed in its name are unquestionable. To doubt that Rowling is a hateful bigot, or to ask for proof of her “transphobia” is bigoted, because her evil is now a part of the narrative, another lie that must be defended along with all of the others. The degree to which she is viewed as radioactive by the media, wherein the “fact” that she is “controversial”, or a toxic transphobe is taken for granted and is presented as background information for any story about her, is some indication of the how successful this smear campaign against her has been.
In the past, this teacher’s union might have been expected to come to his defence, but in this era of institutional capture he’ll be lucky if it doesn’t offer testimony against him and pass a motion applauding his termination.
@OB #2
That is trust, not faith.
I was wondering how long this was going to take.
We all do it, and we all have to do it, because there’s too much information out there. I’ve been thinking about exactly this over the past few days. It gets to my problem with the so-called “heterodox” movement, or the “Intellectual Dark Web” or whatever it’s called these days. I like to think of it as the Joe-Rogan-osphere.
Sorry, this is a super-long rant I’m about to lay on you. Because this issue is a bit of an obsession for me lately.
Society is a web of information, and it’s a web of trust. We build consensus around ideas and values, and we have unspoken hierarchies that we rely on to stay informed about the consensus view on things. That’s why we give certain newspapers the label “paper of record” — that it’s their job to fact-check and adjudicate the reasoned consensus about the facts of the world.
That in and of itself isn’t actually a bad thing, and it’s not something that we can get rid of. The problem is that our trust networks are not functioning properly anymore. In the Internet age, people have discovered that they can hack into the trust system and inject their own bogus ideas into it — ideas like transgender ideology, which should not have passed editorial muster.
The problem with the “heterodox” worldview is that it seems to reject the idea of information-reputational gatekeeping at all — that any and all ideas are equal, and can remain on the table forever. (The heterodix-ists don’t actually hold that view — they’re not as averse to judging and gatekeeping views as they claim to be, but I’ll get to that in a moment.)
The problem with that kind of free-speech absolutism, which rejects the notion that there’s a kind of ad-hoc hierarchy to the information network that we all have to work together to maintain, that some ideas have rightly earned a low reputation and therefore deserve commensurately low-status platforming, is that humans are not perfect machines that can evaluate ideas on their own merit correctly all the time. People have irrational tendencies, including the tendency to cling to ideas or beliefs long after they’ve been shown to be false or harmful. Many people will simply believe what they see is the most popular view on any issue. Which means that some people will obsessively try to make their irrational views the dominant ones by any means necessary. The idea of tossing the information-reputational hierarchy out the window will only empower the bad actors.
To put it bluntly, the problem is quacks and bigots.
Quacks and bigots exist. Quacks and bigots are immune to reasonable argument. An entirely libertarian laissez-faire “free marketplace of ideas” is like an entirely libertarian laissez-faire economic market: it’s a fictional idea that would never work in the real world. The best ideas don’t always come out on top, because people can game the system. The marketplace of ideas needs rules and regulations just like financial marketplace does, or the quacks and bigots will exploit and ultimately break the system. The marketplace of ideas should be as free as possible within an established reputational system in order to safeguard against the quacks and the bigots.
This is the problem with Joe Rogan, and it’s the reason he irks the establishment media. He has a massive platform and he gives it to absolutely anyone with any crazy idea, on the grounds that every single listener will act like a perfect vessel to determine the validity of every possible platformed idea. And what you end up with is zombie, debunked, or bigoted views that simply won’t go away. Fake news. Ivermectin. Et cetera.
I don’t think any ideas or views should be vanquished from existence, but I do think the reputational context in which they’re presented is absolutely important to understand, and the heterodoxists’ pretence that this factor is unimportant are being naive, and if anything, they’re only ruining their reputations and casting themselves out of the whole reptuational system.
For all Rogan’s massive platform reach, all he’s really doing is building a kind of Wild West alternative information-reputational world, and there’s frankly a lot of dysfunction within it.
Sure, Rogan platforms many gender-critical people and that’s great and important, but his viewership, large though it is, consists almost entirely of people who have turned against the very idea of depending on a hierarchy of trust to keep their worldview in good working order and to keep themselves out of trouble.
The problem really wasn’t that we should do away with our fact-checkers and arbiters of consensus like the New York Times, the BBC, or the CBC, it’s that we need to repair or replace them and reinforce them against informational hacking. In the internet age, we actually need more information-reputational gatekeeping, not less.
This gets to the issue of platforming. People who build up large platforms have a responsibility to maintain their reputations in proportion. This came up in a thread here at B&W a few years ago. The topic was whether a medical conference should host an AIDS denialist. Someone thought himself oh-so-morally-superior to the Libs with his stance that of course an AIDS denialist should have a welcome platform at a medical conference, because informational gatekeeping is for the dumb libtard sheeple. (I’m paraphrasing a wee bit.) I pointed out to him that an AIDS denialist (someone with the view that the disease called AIDS is not caused by the virus called HIV) is an inappropriate speaker any medical or scientific conference, not because we’re dumb sheeple who can’t handle people with heterodox ideas, but because the theory was already resoundingly debunked. It’s a dead, zombie conspiracy theory that rightly earned a failing grade in the marketplace of ideas, and the people who cling onto it are acting irrationally and need the “market regulations” of the informational marketplace to intervene and deny that view a legitimate platform anymore.
Or take the lie that cigarettes don’t cause cancer: there had to be a forceful intervention to stop the tobacco companies feeding the lie into the “free market” of ideas, because hundreds of thousands of people were dying horrible deaths from cancer because of it.
Holocaust denialism is another one. It’s a dead idea. It should rightfully be marked as taboo and barred from any kind of platform that has any kind of reputation of respectability attached to it, because there’s no longer anything but harm to come out of continuing that conversation, not because people are too stupid to be exposed to it. The arguments are there for people to look up. They’re not censored from the internet. They’re relegated to the history books, not the memory hole.
This kind information gatekeeping is both to protect a platform’s legitimacy — a “paper of record” would lose the trust it has built up if it didn’t sufficiently uphold high standards for its platformed editorialists — and to guard against bad ideas running roughshod over everyone. Which is exactly what’s happening right now because of “wokeness” and gender lunacy.
How big a reputational quarantine to put around bad ideas is an open question. People shouldn’t be denied platforms for unrelated things, sure. I might argue that a speaker’s advocacy about the cause of AIDS wouldn’t be relevant enough to deplatform him from a Star Wars fan convention. But a medical conference would quickly find itself with no one on its side except the quacks and the bigots if it didn’t work hard to keep the quacks and the bigots at bay.
I’ve seen this happen over and over again within the “gender-critical” movement. There was a big nationwide march against gender ideology across Canada last summer. The organizers took the stance that anyone who opposed gender ideology should get involved. Well, the vast majority of people who oppose gender ideology in Canada are religious conservatives who also hold explicitly bigoted views about gay people’s civil rights. The commmittee organizing the event was quickly overrun with anti-gay religious zealots, who actively expelled gays from it, there was a mess of infighting, and the marches themselves had amplified stages which included horrific rants that gay people were all psychopaths. The only people who saw the marches as a win in the war against gender identity ideology were the kinds of people who had already abandoned the informational-reputational hierarchy. Among the rest of us, many, many people actually moved further away from the gender critical position upon seeing that the people who hold it were not sufficiently maintaining their reputations, happily mingling with all that anti-gay hate, and were therefore untrustworthy themselves.
Pedophilia advocacy is a zombie idea that we rightly don’t platform anymore. Even Joe Rogan and the heterodix-ists know that promoting sex with children has failed the reputational test and no longer merits his platform. In other words, everyone has a line they won’t cross, even if they say they don’t. It’s just that many people who’ve been burned by the failure of the current media establishment’s reputational system have decided to build an alternative one which has such a low bar for informational gatekeeping it’s inherently unstable and endlessly miring itself in fighting and chaos, and it hasn’t done a very good job not being relegated to the corner with the fringe bigots and quacks.
Racism is good example of information gatekeeping done right. There are strong taboos around even saying the n-word in most contexts (Quentin Tarantino films being a notable exception) for example because we know that in an entirely laissez-faire marketplace of ideas, the irrational humans who inhabit it have a tendency to glom onto racism if we don’t work collectively to keep it down.
One time I was having lunch with some coworkers, and we were griping about some manager or other, and I went to respond to someone’s gripe with a commiserative “Jeez!” or “Phew!” but my brain couldn’t decide which word to use, and my mouth ended up uttering something like, “PhJew!”
Another colleague must have thought I had said “That Jew!” and, discovering that we were a “safely” heterodox bunch, she let out an ugly remark against Jews. In the moment of awkward silence that followed, I looked closely around at everyone: I wondered if I hadn’t accidentally just created a space for open antisemitism, and that it might actually invite others to dabble in it. Thankfully someone changed the subject and we all moved on.
This is why we don’t have any tolerance for even “mild” racist remarks in a workplace: they can turn into wildfires very quickly. And within the gender-critical movement, every time someone dips a toe with a “mild” anti-gay remark, a few people rush in to vent their hidden hate for gays, and this seems to invite more people to dabble in these views that, in a functional information dissemination system, should have been relegated to history. When we lift the taboo, the issue ends up stuck in litigation forever, and progress becomes impossible.
In the internet age, the way information gets disseminated is a hot, crazy mess, and it’s ripe for exploitation by all kinds of nefarious people. I, as a gay person, am extremely wary of my rights becoming rolled back, but I don’t think the answer is in a libertarian wild west, it’s in a rebuilt, and reinforced hierarchy because I can see quite clearly that people are sometimes like sheep, and they need stronger safety rails, not weaker ones. If anything, the gender mess only shows us how badly the wild west of information fucked up when we took the guardrails down.
The information age needs more, better editors and curators, not fewer and worse ones.
Artymorty,
Very well said.
As to the story in the OP, I’ll wait for updates. I’m inherently suspicious of people proclaiming their own free speech martydrom/cancellation.
Arty: I agree with your first half and disagree with your second half.
I think the problem with much of the corporate world is not that there isn’t a strong taboo against bigoted speech, but instead that there issuch a strong taboo that there’s no mechanism of resisting the dominant view of what constitutes racism, or sexism, or homophobia, or whatever form of prejudice you want. The taboo is so strong that there’s no protection against DARVO. When the actual offender turns the tables, most people crumble under the taboo’s pressure and capitulate, admitting that they were in the wrong all along.
What we need is to adopt norms and systems that aren’t immediately susceptible to being hacked by bad actors. Of course, that’s an impossibly tall order, given how hard it is to write simple code that’s free of bugs and unintended consequences.
Artymorty: Your story about the gender-crit tour in Canada reminded me of my own abandoned cause. I used to make fairly regular and strong arguments against male infant circumcision. It’s a stupid and pointless procedure, and arguably cruel in the moment (though not so much long-term, since the kid forgets about it quickly enough).
But I found out after awhile that even talking about circumcision in a negative way immediately caused you to find yourself with conspiracy-theorist anti-Semites (who insist that the whole practice is an attempt to make Christian babies ‘Jewish’) on one side, and MRAs (who try to conflate it with female circumcision, which… no. Just no.) on the other. And so I dropped out of those discussions, because in the end, the harm done by the practice, while not zero, is probably less than giving either of those groups any facsimile of support or legitimacy.
NiV@1,
Oh god, you’re gonna make me do my Trolley Problem Rant, aren’t you? (I can’t help myself)
Ok, so I’m not going to say that trolley problems aren’t useful. I suspect they’re a useful spur to discussion about ethical systems, and I’m certainly not going to tell professional philosophers their business.
But there is a very good reason why people often want to “fight the hypothetical.” First of all, questioning hypothetical scenarios is good, especially when one of the choices being presented is “sacrifice some other person for the greater good.” In real life, we should be rightly suspicious of people who insist that sacrificing some other person’s life is the right thing to do because there were supposedly no other good options. In reality, there usually are other options, but some people are just really really quick to ignore them once they’ve found a “solution” that only requires other people to suffer.
Second, I find that many versions of trolley problems are so laughably absurd and contrived that they come across as an attempt to “stack the deck” and make one choice seem absurd, when it’s the hypothetical that is absurd. For example, saying “yes, I would push a fat man onto the tracks to save the lives of six other people” is I think supposed to sound ridiculous and cold, because what kind of person just goes around shoving innocent people onto trolley tracks? What a crazy solution to a serious problem! But someone posing the “push the fat guy onto the trolley tracks?” question usually handwaves away all other options. Yes, you know for a perfect certainty that six people will die if you don’t act, and you know for a perfect certainty that pushing the fat man onto the tracks will save them. No, the trolley won’t stop in time on its own, you can’t just try to get the driver’s attention, or leap on board and pull the brakes yourself. No, you can’t throw yourself on the tracks, you’re not fat enough to stop it, only a fat man will do. No, there’s no other object you can use. No, there’s no way to get the six people out of the trolley’s path Etc. The hypothetical has become so contrived that I find it hard to believe it’s in any way useful for generating insights.
Freemage,
Yeah, I’ve always thought that anti-circumcision folks were correct on the merits, but the people who cared about the issue enough to become activists (or, as some of them insist on being called, “intactivists”), were really troubling people who just make everyone want to back away slowly.
@Nullius #9
That sounds agreeable. Maybe we don’t actually disagree and I just didn’t quite have my ideas worked out yet.
I sense there’s definitely a major problem with our “information-reputational” system: we have primate brains but we live in a high-information world and we need a large proxy system to manage most of the work of processing all that information. And our tribal primate brains’ instinctual reputation sensing mechanism, if put to the task correctly, does an adequate job sorting information according to the trustworthiness of its sources. So far, you and I seem to be on the same page.
But I also sense that our primate brains’ taboo-aversion mechanism is also critically important when it comes to some kinds of conceptual ideas that are maybe too difficult for individuals to process via common sense. There are some social problems that invite illusorily simple but incorrect solutions, which in reality require more than mere common sense to solve. These complex social problems require cooperation to solve, and for those solutions to be implemented, it requires some kind of discipline/enforcement mechanism to prevent the cooperation/cohesion falling apart. The human instincts towards racism or sexism or anti-gay bias are examples where we understand that face-value, knee-jerk ideas taken in isolation lead to false conclusions — harmful ideas like “women are just less equal than men” etc. — and we have to rely on something to keep the tribe in line because they require collective effort.
If that makes any sense? So I agree that we need some kind of mechanism to police/punish/reinforce the more complex components of the social contract, but whatever our current system is, it’s clearly not working well, and arguably actually backfiring.
Nullius @ 3, no, the video I meant is the one directly under the sentence in which I mention it. I think that’s a pretty normal convention isn’t it, to say this and then share the “this”?
Ophelia: The video wasn’t showing when I posted the link.
Oh, sorry! It was when I posted it, and then I was off doing other things. Sorry for snotty reply.
No biggie!
Screechy, #11:
There is one objection to that scenario that cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand. A locomotive weighs tens of tons; if it’s pulling carriages or hoppers then it’s hundreds of tons. In motion, that mass is increased in relation to its speed. If the fat man is heavy enough to stop that mass in its tracks then he is certainly too heavy for me to push around.
Additionally, I have usually seen the scenario phrased that the fat man is sat on the wall of a bridge with his legs hanging above the tracks. For a hypothetical to be valid it must have a basis in reality (otherwise, one can just give an answer that is equally as impossible as the question), and the reality of physics is that a man large enough to stop a train by lying in front of it is far too large to lift his own bulk onto a wall and swing his legs over to dangle them over the side while remaining too heavy for me to have any chance of shifting his bulk and pushing him off.
Well if the “fat man” is an abusive, lying idiot with an orange combover, then I suppose (physics and ethics aside) that I would be able to decide a course of action without much thought at all (hypothetically speaking of course).
I doubt that that particular fat man has the required mass to stop the trolley, but as the saying goes, you’ll never know if you don’t try.
That particular fat man is already a train wreck.
But so few of the solutions to the trolley problem have the potential to make the world a better place!
Real life trolley problems are more statistical.
Eg: In car crashes there will be oddball cases where someone is thrown to safety if he is not wearing a seatbelt, but in the vast majority of cases wearing the seatbelt makes injury or death less likely. Having everyone wear seatbelts puts a few people on one trolley track & the vast majority on another track, but we don’t know in advance who will be on which track.
The fat man is moral agent. There is therefore a lie implicit in that version of the trolley scenario; namely that it is your decision to make.
There’s an episode of the TV series, The Good Place, that does a fantastic job of highlighting (in hilarious fashion) that one of the key issues with the Trolley Problem is that the scenario describes a split-second decision (in fact, it has to, to eliminate all those objections people have discussed). But in a situation like that, you’re not making much of a conscious, deliberate decision at all. Instead, you’re reacting on some gut instinct, then spending the next week justifying why you chose the way you did.
So much missing the point here, I can’t help but sigh. The purpose of the thought experiment, indeed any thought experiment, is to force you to confront the intersection of your intuition and your reason. It is not, as Screechy put it, to stack the deck and make one choice seem absurd. I feel weird even explaining this to intelligent, erudite people, because it’s so bleeding obvious.
It is exactly the thing that we do when we work in idealized frictionless environments of perfect elasticity. If you, as a physics student, refuse to answer the exam question because the real world is messy and not frictionless, you’re missing the point. We idealize the situation in full knowledge that it’s unrealistic. Why? Because it allows us to focus on the interactions and consequences of specific theoretical frameworks. Extracting value from the idealization requires playing along with it.
We construct idealized philosophical thought experiments the same way, in full knowledge that they’re unrealistic and that there are many interesting, relevant things left not captured. The question posed by the Trolley Problem is not, “What ought you do when there’s a trolley hurtling toward civilians?” If that’s how you approach it, you’re doing it wrong. Rather, the experiment asks, “Consequentialist, how far does your imperative to maximize aggregate good go? Are numbers really sufficient to decide? Deontologist, how far does your injunction against treating people as ends go? Can you really never take numbers into account? Virtuist, what happens when there’s no Aristotelian mean? Is one extreme preferable to another? All of you, how does this square with your intuition? If it doesn’t, how so, and what would need to change to make it jibe?” Refusal to engage with the problem is a refusal to engage with these questions. If you, as an ethics student, instead object that the fat man is too massive for you to move, you’re missing the point. Extracting value from the idealization requires paying along with it.
We use imaginative thought experiments rather than just asking the questions directly (even though we often do that, too) because imagination elicits more of our intuition. Things we’re fine with saying in the abstract (e.g., never ever lie!) suddenly collide with sentiments we might not have expected (e.g., a Nazi knocks on your door asking about Jews, and you have a Jewish family hiding in your attic.) This confrontation between conviction and intuition, between conviction and conviction, or between intuition and intuition forces us to see their limits.
[…] a comment by Nullius in Verba on Just going with what a lot of other people have […]
Nullius, if it was that bleeding obvious we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Obvious to you does not mean obvious to all.
Different things are obvious to different people. OBviously. Boom-tish.