I changed my mind in a Cairo cafe, talking to a young Muslim woman. I let it slip during the conversation that I was an atheist, and she seemed genuinely curious why. You’ve all probably been in such a situation, and you probably know how hard it is to choose just one reason, but I’d been reading about Biblical contradictions at the time and I mentioned the myriad errors and atrocities and contradictions in all the Holy Books.
Her response? “Oh, thank goodness it’s that. I was afraid you were one of those crazies who believed that monkeys transformed into humans.”
I admitted that um, well, maybe I sorta kinda might in fact believe that.
It is hard for me to describe exactly the look of shock on her face, but I have no doubt that her horror was genuine. I may have been the first flesh-and-blood evolutionist she ever met. “But...” she looked at me as if I was an idiot. “Monkeys don’t change into humans. What on Earth makes you think monkeys can change into humans?”
On r/atheism, a Christian-turned-atheist once described an “apologetics” group at his old church. The pastor would bring in a simplified straw-man version of a common atheist argument, they’d take turns mocking it (“Oh my god, he said that monkeys can give birth to humans! That’s hilarious!”) and then they’d all have a good laugh together. Later, when they met an actual atheist who was trying to explain evolution to them, they wouldn’t sit and evaluate it dispassionately. They’d pattern-match back to the ridiculous argument they heard at church, and instead of listening they’d be thinking “Hahaha, atheists really are that hilariously stupid!”
[...]
There are lots of good arguments against libertarianism. I have collected some of them into a very long document which remains the most popular thing I’ve ever written. But when I hear liberals discuss libertarianism, they very often head in the same direction. They make a silly face and say “Durned guv’mint needs to stay off my land!” And then all the other liberals who are with them laugh uproariously. And then when a real libertarian shows up and makes a real libertarian argument, a liberal will adopt his posture, try to mimic his tone of voice, and say “Durned guv’ment needs to stay off my land! Hahaha!” And all the other liberals will think “Hahaha, libertarians really are that stupid!”
Many of you will recognize this as much like the Myers Shuffle. As long as a bunch of atheists get together and laugh at religious people who ask them to read theology before criticizing it, and as long as they have an easily recognizable name for the object of their hilarity like “Courtier’s Reply”, then whenever a religious person asks them to familiarize themselves with theology the atheist can just say “Courtier’s Reply!” and all the other atheists will crack up and think “Hahaha, religious people really are that stupid!” and they gain status and the theist loses status and at no point do they have to even consider responding to the theist’s objection.
This tendency reaches its most florid manifestation in the “ideological bingo games”. See for example “Skeptical Sexist Bingo”, feminist bingo, libertarian troll bingo, anti-Zionist bingo, pro-Zionist bingo, and so on. If you Google for these you can find thousands, which is too bad because every single person who makes one of these is going to Hell.
Let’s look at the fourth one, “Anti-Zionist Bingo.” Say that you mention something bad Israel is doing, someone else accuses you of being anti-Semitic, and you correct them that no, not all criticism of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic and you’re worried about the increasing tendency to spin it that way.
And they say “Hahahahahhaa he totally did it, he used the ‘all criticism of Israel gets labeled anti-Semitic’ argument, people totally use that as a real argument hahahaha they really are that stupid, I get ‘B1’ on my stupid stereotypical critics of Israel bingo!”
The other day, I asked a close friend of mine who’s active in feminist organizations to read Yvain’s post on bingo cards so we could discuss it. Some things that came out of that discussion:
It’s actually useful to recognize repeated themes in opposing arguments. We have to pattern-match in order to understand things. (See this comment for a similar point — “[P]eople need heuristics that allow them to terminate cognition, because cognition is a limited resource”) Even if mocking or dismissing opposing arguments is bad, we shouldn’t throw out categorization as a tool.
One reason feminists make bingo cards is to say to other feminists, “You’re not alone in your frustration at hearing these arguments all the time.” Bingo cards function as an expression of support for others in the movement. This seems to me to be a big part of what feminists get out of feminism: “No, you’re not alone in feeling crappy about gender relations. So do I, and so do all these other people, too. So let’s work on it together.” For that matter, a lot of what secularists get out of the secularist movement seems to be “No, you’re not alone in thinking this god stuff is bogus. Let’s make our society safer and friendlier for people like us.”
If you’re actually trying to have a discussion with someone who makes an argument that sounds like a bingo square, instead of stopping and responding only to the bingo-square match, you can ask for a delta between the bingo square and the argument they’re making. “Huh, it sounds like you’re saying my argument is invalid because I’m a woman, and you believe women are less rational than men. Is that really what you’re saying?”
On the other hand, there exist some arguments that are only made by people who are ignorant of a field. For instance, even if sophisticated theologians might not make the “birds don’t hatch from reptile eggs” argument, many creationists do make it. It is exhausting to have to constantly struggle to bring ignorant people up to the level where they can make sophisticated arguments — especially if they are both ignorant and hostile. Without some mechanism to recognize and exclude ignorant people, it’s impractical to have a higher-level discussion.
Related: One problem that seems to be more common in feminism discussions online than in other topics, is that there are a heck of a lot of people who enter feminist forums and demand answers to their challenges … when they have not done the background reading to understand the discussion that is taking place. So one possible reason feminists make more bingo cards than Zionists, anti-Zionists, libertarians, anarchists, etc. may simply be that they are the target of more “bingo-card-worthy” challenges from hostile ignorant people coming into their blogs, forums, casual conversations, etc.
(On that last point, I tried to imagine what Less Wrong would feel like if we had the same level of outright hostile outsider behavior that outspoken feminists regularly receive. “You dorks think belief has something to do with math? What you need is a real Christian to beat you senseless and drag you to church. Then you’d find out what belief is really about!”)
Afterward, I realized that I have on hand a book that could be described as a very advanced bingo card: Mark Isaak’s Counter-Creationism Handbook, which grew out of an FAQ for the Usenet newsgroup talk.origins. The entire book is a catalog of creationist arguments, classified by topic (e.g. “Biology”, “Geology”, “Biblical Creationism”), going so far as to give the arguments numeric catalog codes, e.g. “CB805: Evolution predicts a continuum of organisms, not discrete kinds.” However, unlike the usual bingo-card format, Isaak gives for each argument a citation of one or more creationist writers actually using it, and a cited scientific rebuttal.
You’ve made a lot of really good points about how these kinds of copy-paste responses can help identify trolls and build community solidarity, many of which hadn’t really occurred to me. I hope you’ll forgive me for not spending more space laying out where we agree; I don’t like posts which could be summed up entirely with an upvote.
I do have to quibble with one point though;
(On that last point, I tried to imagine what Less Wrong would feel like if we had the same level of outright hostile outsider behavior that outspoken feminists regularly receive. “You dorks think belief has something to do with math? What you need is a real Christian to beat you senseless and drag you to church. Then you’d find out what belief is really about!”)
The issue here isn’t whether feminists (or anyone else for that matter) are morally/emotionally justified in using these sorts of thought-terminating cliches, but whether these types of cliches lower the quality of discourse and make their users more resistant to genuine counter-argument/counter-evidence.
In that vein, I’d have to say that thick skin is not always an asset; you can “win” arguments by endurance, but you’ll never find truth or allies that way. Most of the discussions I’ve had with feminists online could be mapped 1:1 to arguments I’ve had with fundamentalist Christians IRL, where you realize halfway through that you’re speaking to someone who is scanning everything you say for keywords without ever actually thinking about it. It’s exhausting and in the end both people are angrier without having achieved anything.
I realize it’s much easier to say “be rational” than to do it when your back is up, and I certainly don’t want to dismiss anyone’s emotional pain, but ultimately giving in to the urge to irrationality is not something to be celebrated. Not everyone is a Sage with pure Apatheia, able to resist any temptation through will alone, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to be reasonably objective. Objectivity is a dirty word in some circles, but if we don’t at least try to overcome our biases we are ruled by them.
(Thanks for acknowledging the common ground; this response likewise deals only with the small area of disagreement.)
The issue here isn’t whether feminists (or anyone else for that matter) are morally/emotionally justified in using these sorts of thought-terminating cliches,
Oh, I agree. My point in concocting the imaginary scenario of an embattled Less Wrong was to provide an alternative to the notion that feminism is fundamentally disposed to semantic stopsigns; namely that feminists find themselves in a situation) where semantic stopsigns are unusually cognitively necessary (as opposed to morally or emotionally).
That is, it’s not possible to usefully understand the cognitive situation of public feminism without thinking about the death threats, the rape threats, the “you just need a good fucking” responses, the “feminists are just ugly women” responses, and so on. It’s not that these morally justify the dismissive attitude represented by bingo cards, nor that they emotionally explain (i.e. psychoanalyze) it; but that they make it cognitively and dialectically a necessary tool.
but whether these types of cliches lower the quality of discourse and make their users more resistant to genuine counter-argument/counter-evidence.
If the situational interpretation applies, then reducing the use of semantic stopsigns would mean less available cognitive power to respond to meaningful counter-evidence, not more.
If the situational interpretation applies, then reducing the use of semantic stopsigns would mean less available cognitive power to respond to meaningful counter-evidence, not more.
I think situation plays a role here as well though.
If I’m reading the comments section on Shakesville and see some rando come in with a basic question and get hit with the “I’m not your sherpa” card and a link to 101 materials, that’s fine. You can’t drop everything to debate every random dude who expresses a disagreement; I certainly don’t appreciate it when people wander into the bio department and start up debates about irreducible complexity (yup, true story).
On the other hand, if I’m on GiantITP having a fun conversation about the best way to generate ability scores in Dungeons and Dragons (3d6 down the line, BTW) and someone goes full RadFem and derails the thread into talking about “biotruth” and privilege until it has to be locked, my jimmies get considerably rustled. Especially when I recognize a lot of the same rhetorical techniques I saw up in the first example.
That’s the general point I was making; these tools are useful for defense, but unfortunately just as useful for offense.
Afterward, I realized that I have on hand a book that could be described as a very advanced bingo card: Mark Isaak’s Counter-Creationism Handbook, which grew out of an FAQ for the Usenet newsgroup talk.origins.
The problem with the Bingo boards is that they’re not even a list of “answers to straw arguments” since they’re missing the answers. Specifically, feminists treat placing an argument (or even a statement) they don’t like on a bingo card as an alternative to answering (or disproving) it. This is similar to the obnoxious debating technique of saying “I don’t want to here objection X” without bothering to actually address objection X.
One reason feminists make bingo cards is to say to other feminists, “You’re not alone in your frustration at hearing these arguments all the time.” Bingo cards function as an expression of support for others in the movement. This seems to me to be a big part of what feminists get out of feminism:
This nicely illustrates the source of the problem: What kind of arguments are the most frustrating? The kind where you don’t have a good counterargument (possibly because the argument is in fact valid).
Sure, many people use “I don’t want to hear X” or “pfft, X is a well-known fallacy” or “you really should read author X on this subject and come back when you’ve educated yourself” or many variations on that theme to dismiss arguments they don’t actually have counterarguments for. Agreed.
This ought not be surprising… any strategy that knowledgeable people use to conserve effort can also be adopted as a cheap signal by the ignorant. And since ignorant people are in general more common than knowledgeable people, that also means I can dismiss all the people who use that cheap strategy as ignorant, including the knowledgeable ones, if I don’t mind paying the opportunity costs of doing that. (Which in turn allows for cheap countersignaling by ignorant contrarians, and around and around we go.)
None of that is to say that all the people using this strategy are ignorant, or that there’s no value in learning to tell the difference..
Many knowledgeable people find frustrating being asked to address the same basic argument over and over. A common response to this is to write up the counterargument once and respond to such requests with pointers to that writeup. In larger contexts this turns into a body of FAQs, background essays and concepts, etc. which participants in the conversation are expected to have read and understood, and are assumed to agree with unless they explicitly note otherwise.
LW does this with a number of positions… starting a conversation about ethics here and then turning out halfway through to not accept consequentialism, for example, will tend to elicit frustration. Non-consequentialists are not per se unwelcome, but failing to acknowledge that the community norm exists is seen as a defection, and people who do that will frequently be dismissed at that point as not worth the effort. Similar things are true of atheism, of the computational model of consciousness, and a few other things.
My point is that there is a difference between an important FAQ and a bingo card.
Also, even with an FAQ one needs to be willing to engage in further discussion when people point out problems with the answers there, e.g., I don’t entirely accept consequentialism (or many of the standard premises here for that measure) and have generally been able to have civilized discussions on the topics in question.
one needs to be willing to engage in further discussion when people point out problems with the answers there
I don’t really agree. Up to a point, yes, but one reaches that point quickly.
For example, we get theists every once in a while insisting that we engage in further discussion when they point out problems with our reasons for atheism. I often engage them in further discussion, as do others, although I wouldn’t say we need to… it’s not like theism is some kind of obscure philosophy that we’re simply not acquainted with the compelling arguments for.
If we instead got one every few days, I would not engage them, and I would also recommend that others not do so; at that point silent downvotes would be a superior response.
Reasonable people can disagree about where exactly the threshold between those points is best drawn, but I think it’s clear that it needs to be drawn somewhere.
There are lots of good arguments against libertarianism. I have collected some of them into a very long document which remains the most popular thing I’ve ever written. But when I hear liberals discuss libertarianism, they very often head in the same direction. They make a silly face and say “Durned guv’mint needs to stay off my land!” And then all the other liberals who are with them laugh uproariously. And then when a real libertarian shows up and makes a real libertarian argument, a liberal will adopt his posture, try to mimic his tone of voice, and say “Durned guv’ment needs to stay off my land! Hahaha!” And all the other liberals will think “Hahaha, libertarians really are that stupid!”
This is an interesting example, because there is an entire subreddit of libertarians doing the exact same thing, making fun of strawman versions of anti-libertarian arguments just to train themselves to not listen to the actual arguments.
Related on LW: Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale.
Also, on Yvain’s old blog:
The other day, I asked a close friend of mine who’s active in feminist organizations to read Yvain’s post on bingo cards so we could discuss it. Some things that came out of that discussion:
It’s actually useful to recognize repeated themes in opposing arguments. We have to pattern-match in order to understand things. (See this comment for a similar point — “[P]eople need heuristics that allow them to terminate cognition, because cognition is a limited resource”) Even if mocking or dismissing opposing arguments is bad, we shouldn’t throw out categorization as a tool.
One reason feminists make bingo cards is to say to other feminists, “You’re not alone in your frustration at hearing these arguments all the time.” Bingo cards function as an expression of support for others in the movement. This seems to me to be a big part of what feminists get out of feminism: “No, you’re not alone in feeling crappy about gender relations. So do I, and so do all these other people, too. So let’s work on it together.” For that matter, a lot of what secularists get out of the secularist movement seems to be “No, you’re not alone in thinking this god stuff is bogus. Let’s make our society safer and friendlier for people like us.”
If you’re actually trying to have a discussion with someone who makes an argument that sounds like a bingo square, instead of stopping and responding only to the bingo-square match, you can ask for a delta between the bingo square and the argument they’re making. “Huh, it sounds like you’re saying my argument is invalid because I’m a woman, and you believe women are less rational than men. Is that really what you’re saying?”
On the other hand, there exist some arguments that are only made by people who are ignorant of a field. For instance, even if sophisticated theologians might not make the “birds don’t hatch from reptile eggs” argument, many creationists do make it. It is exhausting to have to constantly struggle to bring ignorant people up to the level where they can make sophisticated arguments — especially if they are both ignorant and hostile. Without some mechanism to recognize and exclude ignorant people, it’s impractical to have a higher-level discussion.
Related: One problem that seems to be more common in feminism discussions online than in other topics, is that there are a heck of a lot of people who enter feminist forums and demand answers to their challenges … when they have not done the background reading to understand the discussion that is taking place. So one possible reason feminists make more bingo cards than Zionists, anti-Zionists, libertarians, anarchists, etc. may simply be that they are the target of more “bingo-card-worthy” challenges from hostile ignorant people coming into their blogs, forums, casual conversations, etc.
(On that last point, I tried to imagine what Less Wrong would feel like if we had the same level of outright hostile outsider behavior that outspoken feminists regularly receive. “You dorks think belief has something to do with math? What you need is a real Christian to beat you senseless and drag you to church. Then you’d find out what belief is really about!”)
Afterward, I realized that I have on hand a book that could be described as a very advanced bingo card: Mark Isaak’s Counter-Creationism Handbook, which grew out of an FAQ for the Usenet newsgroup talk.origins. The entire book is a catalog of creationist arguments, classified by topic (e.g. “Biology”, “Geology”, “Biblical Creationism”), going so far as to give the arguments numeric catalog codes, e.g. “CB805: Evolution predicts a continuum of organisms, not discrete kinds.” However, unlike the usual bingo-card format, Isaak gives for each argument a citation of one or more creationist writers actually using it, and a cited scientific rebuttal.
You’ve made a lot of really good points about how these kinds of copy-paste responses can help identify trolls and build community solidarity, many of which hadn’t really occurred to me. I hope you’ll forgive me for not spending more space laying out where we agree; I don’t like posts which could be summed up entirely with an upvote.
I do have to quibble with one point though;
The issue here isn’t whether feminists (or anyone else for that matter) are morally/emotionally justified in using these sorts of thought-terminating cliches, but whether these types of cliches lower the quality of discourse and make their users more resistant to genuine counter-argument/counter-evidence.
In that vein, I’d have to say that thick skin is not always an asset; you can “win” arguments by endurance, but you’ll never find truth or allies that way. Most of the discussions I’ve had with feminists online could be mapped 1:1 to arguments I’ve had with fundamentalist Christians IRL, where you realize halfway through that you’re speaking to someone who is scanning everything you say for keywords without ever actually thinking about it. It’s exhausting and in the end both people are angrier without having achieved anything.
I realize it’s much easier to say “be rational” than to do it when your back is up, and I certainly don’t want to dismiss anyone’s emotional pain, but ultimately giving in to the urge to irrationality is not something to be celebrated. Not everyone is a Sage with pure Apatheia, able to resist any temptation through will alone, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to be reasonably objective. Objectivity is a dirty word in some circles, but if we don’t at least try to overcome our biases we are ruled by them.
(Thanks for acknowledging the common ground; this response likewise deals only with the small area of disagreement.)
Oh, I agree. My point in concocting the imaginary scenario of an embattled Less Wrong was to provide an alternative to the notion that feminism is fundamentally disposed to semantic stopsigns; namely that feminists find themselves in a situation) where semantic stopsigns are unusually cognitively necessary (as opposed to morally or emotionally).
That is, it’s not possible to usefully understand the cognitive situation of public feminism without thinking about the death threats, the rape threats, the “you just need a good fucking” responses, the “feminists are just ugly women” responses, and so on. It’s not that these morally justify the dismissive attitude represented by bingo cards, nor that they emotionally explain (i.e. psychoanalyze) it; but that they make it cognitively and dialectically a necessary tool.
If the situational interpretation applies, then reducing the use of semantic stopsigns would mean less available cognitive power to respond to meaningful counter-evidence, not more.
I think situation plays a role here as well though.
If I’m reading the comments section on Shakesville and see some rando come in with a basic question and get hit with the “I’m not your sherpa” card and a link to 101 materials, that’s fine. You can’t drop everything to debate every random dude who expresses a disagreement; I certainly don’t appreciate it when people wander into the bio department and start up debates about irreducible complexity (yup, true story).
On the other hand, if I’m on GiantITP having a fun conversation about the best way to generate ability scores in Dungeons and Dragons (3d6 down the line, BTW) and someone goes full RadFem and derails the thread into talking about “biotruth” and privilege until it has to be locked, my jimmies get considerably rustled. Especially when I recognize a lot of the same rhetorical techniques I saw up in the first example.
That’s the general point I was making; these tools are useful for defense, but unfortunately just as useful for offense.
In fact I suspect much of the feminists’ need for defense comes from the highly aggressive ways they tend to go on offense.
I guessed the “fundamentally” link would be to this.
The problem with the Bingo boards is that they’re not even a list of “answers to straw arguments” since they’re missing the answers. Specifically, feminists treat placing an argument (or even a statement) they don’t like on a bingo card as an alternative to answering (or disproving) it. This is similar to the obnoxious debating technique of saying “I don’t want to here objection X” without bothering to actually address objection X.
This nicely illustrates the source of the problem: What kind of arguments are the most frustrating? The kind where you don’t have a good counterargument (possibly because the argument is in fact valid).
Sure, many people use “I don’t want to hear X” or “pfft, X is a well-known fallacy” or “you really should read author X on this subject and come back when you’ve educated yourself” or many variations on that theme to dismiss arguments they don’t actually have counterarguments for. Agreed.
This ought not be surprising… any strategy that knowledgeable people use to conserve effort can also be adopted as a cheap signal by the ignorant. And since ignorant people are in general more common than knowledgeable people, that also means I can dismiss all the people who use that cheap strategy as ignorant, including the knowledgeable ones, if I don’t mind paying the opportunity costs of doing that. (Which in turn allows for cheap countersignaling by ignorant contrarians, and around and around we go.)
None of that is to say that all the people using this strategy are ignorant, or that there’s no value in learning to tell the difference..
Many knowledgeable people find frustrating being asked to address the same basic argument over and over. A common response to this is to write up the counterargument once and respond to such requests with pointers to that writeup. In larger contexts this turns into a body of FAQs, background essays and concepts, etc. which participants in the conversation are expected to have read and understood, and are assumed to agree with unless they explicitly note otherwise.
LW does this with a number of positions… starting a conversation about ethics here and then turning out halfway through to not accept consequentialism, for example, will tend to elicit frustration. Non-consequentialists are not per se unwelcome, but failing to acknowledge that the community norm exists is seen as a defection, and people who do that will frequently be dismissed at that point as not worth the effort. Similar things are true of atheism, of the computational model of consciousness, and a few other things.
It’s not an unreasonable way to go.
My point is that there is a difference between an important FAQ and a bingo card.
Also, even with an FAQ one needs to be willing to engage in further discussion when people point out problems with the answers there, e.g., I don’t entirely accept consequentialism (or many of the standard premises here for that measure) and have generally been able to have civilized discussions on the topics in question.
I don’t really agree. Up to a point, yes, but one reaches that point quickly.
For example, we get theists every once in a while insisting that we engage in further discussion when they point out problems with our reasons for atheism. I often engage them in further discussion, as do others, although I wouldn’t say we need to… it’s not like theism is some kind of obscure philosophy that we’re simply not acquainted with the compelling arguments for.
If we instead got one every few days, I would not engage them, and I would also recommend that others not do so; at that point silent downvotes would be a superior response.
Reasonable people can disagree about where exactly the threshold between those points is best drawn, but I think it’s clear that it needs to be drawn somewhere.
This is an interesting example, because there is an entire subreddit of libertarians doing the exact same thing, making fun of strawman versions of anti-libertarian arguments just to train themselves to not listen to the actual arguments.
http://www.reddit.com/r/whowillbuildtheroads/
It’s interesting to see the exact same technique being used as a thought-killing device by people on both sides.