And okay, a tiny fraction of the time people are just trying to use words as a Schelling fence.
I’m not sure it’s that tiny, especially once you’re using the “steel man” version of the arguments; i.e. things like “Schelling fences” do not often appear in the reasons given for the disagreement, but that can still be what it boils down to.
People who object to abortion may be objecting to a weakening of the social stigma against the murder of innocents—that social stigma performs a useful function in society, so allowing anything that could be described as “murder of innocents” is perceived as bad, regardless of whether that thing is in itself bad.
In other words, even if words are hidden inferences with leaky generalizations etc. - social norms are still defined in terms of words, and so “pointless” debates over definitions still have their place in discussions of morality. Questions that shouldn’t be morally relevant (“is abortion murder?”) become so because of the instrumental value of social norms.
So yes, sometimes pulling out a dictionary in the middle of a moral argument may be justified. The discussion can then turn to something more useful, like “is it worse if the norm against murder is slightly weakened, or if women have to keep children they don’t want?”.
Even if that is true (and I stick to my guess that it’s only a tiny fraction of the time) I still think deconstructing the argument is valuable. If people’s true rejection of abortion is Schelling fences, then let’s talk Schelling fences! I would ask why birth doesn’t also work as a Schelling fence, and I would get to hear their response, and maybe one of us would change our mind.
But if their true rejection is based on Schelling fences, and instead they’re just saying that abortion is murder, there’s not much we can do except play Dueling Dictionaries. And the reason that has no chance of working (“Really? Merriam-Webster defines murder as killing a human after birth? Guess I’ll go NARAL!”) is directly related to it not being their real issue.
there’s not much we can do except play Dueling Dictionaries.
There are real-world examples that could be described as getting the “dictionary” changed — for instance, the successful campaign to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association’s “dictionary” (as it were) of mental illnesses.
I agree that talking Schelling fences is usually more productive, and that it’s probably not people’s true rejection on abortion (norms around sexuality and fertility probably play a bigger role). Note also that unlike you, I never saw an “abortion is murder” sign in real life, and don’t remember the topic ever coming up in real life.
Schelling fences probably play a bigger role for “justifiable killing” (like self-defense, the death penalty, euthanasia), where having a strong norm against killing in general discourages revenge killings (anti-abortion seem to be trying to hijack that norm to cover a case that doesn’t fall under “killing” nearly as naturally). “Racism is bad” is another case where the norm is pretty valuable and useful in itself, and acknowledging that “non-bad cases of racism are not bad” would weaken it.
I stick to my guess that it’s only a tiny fraction of the time
Eh, it probably depends of the reference class you’re picking, and how charitable you’re willing to be in interpreting people’s reasons. when deconstructing a WAitW, it may be worth directing the discussion to one on Schelling Fences / norms etc., both as a way of raising the quality of the discussion, and of leaving a line of retreat.
I just thought of another good illustration: “Marijuana is a drug!”
This fits perfectly under Yvain’s description (it associates Marijuana with the worse kinds of hard drugs that turn you into a skinny toothless zombie willing to sell his grandmother for his next fix), and a concern of some opponents to legalization is that making one form of recreational drug will lower the taboo on drugs as a whole. And that is a legitimate concern, considering the damage hard drugs can cause! (though of course it’s to weigh against the damage caused by marijuana trafficking, which would be significantly reduced if it was legal—and if it was legal it would cluster less naturally with the hard drugs).
I like this version; it also applies to modafinil (“modafinil is a drug!”) and you can swap out ‘drug’ for more convincing versions (since ‘drug’ seems to me to be losing its negative connotations), like “nicotine is a toxin!”
The “a fetus is a person” attempt to frame the abortion debate actually seems like it would weaken the norm against killing innocents. Most people agree with the rule that it’s generally wrong to kill an innocent person, which is a relatively clear bright-line rule. If pro-abortion people can just say “well, a human fetus doesn’t count as a person so the rule doesn’t apply there” then the rule against killing a person remains relatively clear and simple for them. But if they have to count a human fetus as a “person” then the rule against killing a person becomes messy and complicated for them—they have to say “well, it’s often wrong to kill a person, but there are various exceptions and factors to weigh.”
Anti-abortion people might like having the abortion debate take place on those grounds, with a human fetus counting as a “person” by definition, because of the rhetorical advantage it gives them within that particular debate. But for the broader goal of establishing shared support for the “sanctity of life” it is counterproductive to cast the abortion debate in those terms. If you use a dictionary to remove the flexibility/disagreement in defining the domain where the rule applies, then that flexibility/disagreement gets shifted into the content of the rule.
It might be worth noting that abortion proponents cluster with death penalty supporters, gun ownership advocates, and generally have a poor record on human rights for e.g. GLBT people. I’m not convinced that they hold the sanctity of life to be equally important for all people generally.
One person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens.
I think it’s pretty obvious that evand mean “abortion opponents,” not “abortion proponents.” Make that correction and the rest of the comment is accurate.
Abortion was probably not the best example, “racism is wrong” is a clearer norm that depends on words. I agree with you, as I said later on:
Schelling fences probably play a bigger role for “justifiable killing” (like self-defense, the death penalty, euthanasia), where having a strong norm against killing in general discourages revenge killings (anti-abortion seem to be trying to hijack that norm to cover a case that doesn’t fall under “killing” nearly as naturally).
For racism, you get the same problem you mention, with people trying to add more things under the “racist” umbrella (such as affirmative action, or opposition to affirmative action), at the risk of weakening the norm.
I want a Generalized Emergency Taboo button for just such cases; press the button and everyone is banned from using the word “murder” when talking about “abortion”.
That way, in the future, we could talk about abortion using “abortion”, and murder in general using “murder”, whether abortion is murder or not, without weakening social norms in the process.
Or maybe Beisutsukai already have such a button? Perhaps they need a high enough level to unlock the skill? I had an idea of some third option we could use here to counter the social norm issue when I first read this, but got distracted and forgot it before I could follow up. Anyone else got any such ideas?
I want a Generalized Emergency Taboo button for just such cases; press the button and everyone is banned from using the word “murder” when talking about “abortion”.
That’s not really generalized, since it’s specific to abortion and murder. A generalized emergency taboo button would be a custom where it’s considered polite to ask people to taboo a word (if you think this might help the discussion), and impolite to ignore this request.
I think Less Wrong is pretty decent about this, at least compared to the rest of the world. It’s the only place where I’ve ever seen such a request succeed. For most people it’s far from onvious what the point of tabooing a word would be, and it’s hard to give a compelling justification for it in a quick sound-bite that you can drop into an in-person discussion.
In the rest of the world, when I find it necessary to invoke the concept, I generally ask people to clarify what they mean by a word and then echo back the phrase they used the word in, substituting their explanation.
Generally speaking, people respond to this as though I’d played some dirty rhetorical trick on them and deny ever having said any such thing, at which point I apologize and ask them again to clarify what they mean by the word.
Among conversations that continue past this point, it works pretty well. (They are the minority.)
Yeah, that works pretty well for me too. Unfortunately, the side effects—extremely powerful dork and/or argument-winning sophist signalling, misinterpretation as a status move, etc. - often far outweigh the benefits I would get from this tactic.
If people decide to trust me enough to actually engage honestly with the question, I try to be careful about engaging honestly with their answer, and often that can lead to some exceptionally interesting conversations. I’ve made some excellent friends this way, as well as a few educational opponents.
Most people don’t trust me that much, of course. But I’m at a stage in my life where efficiently working my way through lots of people in order to find one or two worth exploring as excellent friends, even if it means unnecessarily alienating dozens of people who would have made perfectly adequate friends, feels like a pretty good tradeoff. I already have more perfectly adequate friends than I’m capable of fully engaging with.
The major benefit I see is that in discussions where this ends the conversation, the conversation would have had very little value if it had continued.
That’s not really generalized, since it’s specific to abortion and murder. A generalized emergency taboo button would be a custom where it’s considered polite to ask people to taboo a word (if you think this might help the discussion), and impolite to ignore this request.
My intent wasn’t to contextualize, thanks for making it more explicit.
(...) and it’s hard to give a compelling justification for it in a quick sound-bite that you can drop into an in-person discussion.
Don’t Try This At Home Capsule: Some dark arts work really well. I’ve found that out firsthand, both accidentally/involuntarily and in a tiny-sample controlled test (not scientifically relevant, but anecdotally sufficient for me to have good intuitive confidence thanks for confirmation bias vs VoI and different in expected utility). This was before I learned of confirmation bias and the risks of Dark Arts, though.
I don’t think an analysis of either the rhetoric of abortion opponents or their stances on issues where one can make a similar Schelling fence argument supports that many people believe this Schelling fence argument.
On abortion probably not—there are also big “those women are getting what they deserve” and “having children is good, not having children is selfish” components coming into play and probably play a bigger role than “murder is wrong”.
Euthanasia, however, is probably mostly about Schelling fences.
For most people, beliefs are not supported by arguments at all. If we restrict our analysis to the tiny fraction of abortion opponents whose beliefs are supported by arguments, then I suspect they mostly do believe the Schelling fence argument. All but a tiny minority of that tiny minority believe specious arguments against abortion as well—so what?
Then I think you agree with the statement of Yvain that Emile quoted and objected to. Indeed you use almost the same language.
I was trying to access, among those who have an argument, some notion of the primary argument: the one they find most convincing or most central to their beliefs. I think the Schelling point argument is the primary argument for only a tiny fraction of those who have an argument.
I’m not sure it’s that tiny, especially once you’re using the “steel man” version of the arguments; i.e. things like “Schelling fences” do not often appear in the reasons given for the disagreement, but that can still be what it boils down to.
People who object to abortion may be objecting to a weakening of the social stigma against the murder of innocents—that social stigma performs a useful function in society, so allowing anything that could be described as “murder of innocents” is perceived as bad, regardless of whether that thing is in itself bad.
In other words, even if words are hidden inferences with leaky generalizations etc. - social norms are still defined in terms of words, and so “pointless” debates over definitions still have their place in discussions of morality. Questions that shouldn’t be morally relevant (“is abortion murder?”) become so because of the instrumental value of social norms.
So yes, sometimes pulling out a dictionary in the middle of a moral argument may be justified. The discussion can then turn to something more useful, like “is it worse if the norm against murder is slightly weakened, or if women have to keep children they don’t want?”.
Even if that is true (and I stick to my guess that it’s only a tiny fraction of the time) I still think deconstructing the argument is valuable. If people’s true rejection of abortion is Schelling fences, then let’s talk Schelling fences! I would ask why birth doesn’t also work as a Schelling fence, and I would get to hear their response, and maybe one of us would change our mind.
But if their true rejection is based on Schelling fences, and instead they’re just saying that abortion is murder, there’s not much we can do except play Dueling Dictionaries. And the reason that has no chance of working (“Really? Merriam-Webster defines murder as killing a human after birth? Guess I’ll go NARAL!”) is directly related to it not being their real issue.
There are real-world examples that could be described as getting the “dictionary” changed — for instance, the successful campaign to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association’s “dictionary” (as it were) of mental illnesses.
I agree that talking Schelling fences is usually more productive, and that it’s probably not people’s true rejection on abortion (norms around sexuality and fertility probably play a bigger role). Note also that unlike you, I never saw an “abortion is murder” sign in real life, and don’t remember the topic ever coming up in real life.
Schelling fences probably play a bigger role for “justifiable killing” (like self-defense, the death penalty, euthanasia), where having a strong norm against killing in general discourages revenge killings (anti-abortion seem to be trying to hijack that norm to cover a case that doesn’t fall under “killing” nearly as naturally). “Racism is bad” is another case where the norm is pretty valuable and useful in itself, and acknowledging that “non-bad cases of racism are not bad” would weaken it.
Eh, it probably depends of the reference class you’re picking, and how charitable you’re willing to be in interpreting people’s reasons. when deconstructing a WAitW, it may be worth directing the discussion to one on Schelling Fences / norms etc., both as a way of raising the quality of the discussion, and of leaving a line of retreat.
I just thought of another good illustration: “Marijuana is a drug!”
This fits perfectly under Yvain’s description (it associates Marijuana with the worse kinds of hard drugs that turn you into a skinny toothless zombie willing to sell his grandmother for his next fix), and a concern of some opponents to legalization is that making one form of recreational drug will lower the taboo on drugs as a whole. And that is a legitimate concern, considering the damage hard drugs can cause! (though of course it’s to weigh against the damage caused by marijuana trafficking, which would be significantly reduced if it was legal—and if it was legal it would cluster less naturally with the hard drugs).
I like this version; it also applies to modafinil (“modafinil is a drug!”) and you can swap out ‘drug’ for more convincing versions (since ‘drug’ seems to me to be losing its negative connotations), like “nicotine is a toxin!”
“Alcohol and tobacco are drugs!”
The ‘drug’ aspect isn’t an argument, it’s a distraction from the real reasons.
The “a fetus is a person” attempt to frame the abortion debate actually seems like it would weaken the norm against killing innocents. Most people agree with the rule that it’s generally wrong to kill an innocent person, which is a relatively clear bright-line rule. If pro-abortion people can just say “well, a human fetus doesn’t count as a person so the rule doesn’t apply there” then the rule against killing a person remains relatively clear and simple for them. But if they have to count a human fetus as a “person” then the rule against killing a person becomes messy and complicated for them—they have to say “well, it’s often wrong to kill a person, but there are various exceptions and factors to weigh.”
Anti-abortion people might like having the abortion debate take place on those grounds, with a human fetus counting as a “person” by definition, because of the rhetorical advantage it gives them within that particular debate. But for the broader goal of establishing shared support for the “sanctity of life” it is counterproductive to cast the abortion debate in those terms. If you use a dictionary to remove the flexibility/disagreement in defining the domain where the rule applies, then that flexibility/disagreement gets shifted into the content of the rule.
It might be worth noting that abortion proponents cluster with death penalty supporters, gun ownership advocates, and generally have a poor record on human rights for e.g. GLBT people. I’m not convinced that they hold the sanctity of life to be equally important for all people generally.
One person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens.
It would be if it were true.
Those three groups do not tend to cluster, nor do they have the record on human rights that you ascribe to them.
I think it’s pretty obvious that evand mean “abortion opponents,” not “abortion proponents.” Make that correction and the rest of the comment is accurate.
Abortion was probably not the best example, “racism is wrong” is a clearer norm that depends on words. I agree with you, as I said later on:
For racism, you get the same problem you mention, with people trying to add more things under the “racist” umbrella (such as affirmative action, or opposition to affirmative action), at the risk of weakening the norm.
I want a Generalized Emergency Taboo button for just such cases; press the button and everyone is banned from using the word “murder” when talking about “abortion”.
That way, in the future, we could talk about abortion using “abortion”, and murder in general using “murder”, whether abortion is murder or not, without weakening social norms in the process.
Or maybe Beisutsukai already have such a button? Perhaps they need a high enough level to unlock the skill? I had an idea of some third option we could use here to counter the social norm issue when I first read this, but got distracted and forgot it before I could follow up. Anyone else got any such ideas?
That’s not really generalized, since it’s specific to abortion and murder. A generalized emergency taboo button would be a custom where it’s considered polite to ask people to taboo a word (if you think this might help the discussion), and impolite to ignore this request.
I think Less Wrong is pretty decent about this, at least compared to the rest of the world. It’s the only place where I’ve ever seen such a request succeed. For most people it’s far from onvious what the point of tabooing a word would be, and it’s hard to give a compelling justification for it in a quick sound-bite that you can drop into an in-person discussion.
In the rest of the world, when I find it necessary to invoke the concept, I generally ask people to clarify what they mean by a word and then echo back the phrase they used the word in, substituting their explanation.
Generally speaking, people respond to this as though I’d played some dirty rhetorical trick on them and deny ever having said any such thing, at which point I apologize and ask them again to clarify what they mean by the word.
Among conversations that continue past this point, it works pretty well. (They are the minority.)
Yeah, that works pretty well for me too. Unfortunately, the side effects—extremely powerful dork and/or argument-winning sophist signalling, misinterpretation as a status move, etc. - often far outweigh the benefits I would get from this tactic.
Yeah, there’s that.
For me it becomes a matter of tradeoffs.
If people decide to trust me enough to actually engage honestly with the question, I try to be careful about engaging honestly with their answer, and often that can lead to some exceptionally interesting conversations. I’ve made some excellent friends this way, as well as a few educational opponents.
Most people don’t trust me that much, of course. But I’m at a stage in my life where efficiently working my way through lots of people in order to find one or two worth exploring as excellent friends, even if it means unnecessarily alienating dozens of people who would have made perfectly adequate friends, feels like a pretty good tradeoff. I already have more perfectly adequate friends than I’m capable of fully engaging with.
The major benefit I see is that in discussions where this ends the conversation, the conversation would have had very little value if it had continued.
My intent wasn’t to contextualize, thanks for making it more explicit.
Don’t Try This At Home Capsule: Some dark arts work really well. I’ve found that out firsthand, both accidentally/involuntarily and in a tiny-sample controlled test (not scientifically relevant, but anecdotally sufficient for me to have good intuitive confidence thanks for confirmation bias vs VoI and different in expected utility). This was before I learned of confirmation bias and the risks of Dark Arts, though.
I don’t think an analysis of either the rhetoric of abortion opponents or their stances on issues where one can make a similar Schelling fence argument supports that many people believe this Schelling fence argument.
On abortion probably not—there are also big “those women are getting what they deserve” and “having children is good, not having children is selfish” components coming into play and probably play a bigger role than “murder is wrong”.
Euthanasia, however, is probably mostly about Schelling fences.
I do not have sufficient data to have an opinion on that.
For most people, beliefs are not supported by arguments at all. If we restrict our analysis to the tiny fraction of abortion opponents whose beliefs are supported by arguments, then I suspect they mostly do believe the Schelling fence argument. All but a tiny minority of that tiny minority believe specious arguments against abortion as well—so what?
Then I think you agree with the statement of Yvain that Emile quoted and objected to. Indeed you use almost the same language.
I was trying to access, among those who have an argument, some notion of the primary argument: the one they find most convincing or most central to their beliefs. I think the Schelling point argument is the primary argument for only a tiny fraction of those who have an argument.