If you haven’t read a lot of biblical literature and gone through a long process of unlearning your Fallen and sinful nature, and accepting Jesus as your Lord and savior, I think I can provide evidence of your behaving in a way that perpetuates sin in this world. To do this I’d have to watch you in person for a while, but if you want to answer this question without that happening, you can just read lots of the Bible (even modern translations of the Bible will work for this, I suggest starting with the Gospel of John and building up to some Letters from Paul) and reflect on your past behavior.
And yes, if you perpetuate sinfulness, you should feel guilty. I might get to explain why later, but I’m getting downvoted so often that I can only respond once every few minutes, so you’ll have to bear with me. If I do, it’ll be higher in this thread.
I mean, I don’t have a horse in this race, but this can just as easily be “If you haven’t read a lot of cognitive science and statistics and gone through a long process of unlearning your irrational and corrupted-hardware nature, and identifying the importance of rationality, I think I can provide evidence of your behaving in a way that perpetuates irrationality in this world. To do this I’d have to watch you in person for a while, but if you want to answer this question without that happening, you can just read lots of the literature on heuristics and biases (even frequentism will work for this....”
This sort of superficial pattern-matching proves nothing. It really is true that most people who don’t put effort into improving beyond the cultural baseline are most likely perpetuating the irrational biases of their culture, even if they think they’re thinking perfectly clearly; the fact that it pattern-matches your bit about the Bible doesn’t change that.
No, the bit that pattern-matches is that “patriarchy”, “oppression”, “privilege” and the like have no consistent definition, just like “sinfulness”. Also, rationalists don’t try to guilt-trip you into overcoming your biases and becoming more rational (unless you count some of the efficient-charity advocacy as akin to guilt-tripping). It really is a pseudo-religious argument.
(nods) If your comment had been clearer about your objection being to the ill-defined nature of key terms and to the use of guilt as a means of manipulating behavior, I would not have reacted as I did. But that was far from clear.
Mmm. I sympathize, but I don’t think this is likely to be very helpful; as this blog post by Yvain mentions, the Courtier’s Reply is a lot less obviously fallacious than it might naively seem. That is, it’s generally unlikely to convince anyone that’s not unusually vulnerable to an argument from authority, but there are situations where it’s appropriate too.
I’m not sure what Yvain’s proposed solution might indicate in this context, though. It seems likely to me that estimations of who’s being “smart and rational” here are so closely bound to political tribalism that reading works on gender by people you already admire would tend to reinforce existing beliefs more than it’d lead them to converge; there aren’t many well-respected writers on gender, on any side of the issue, who’re greatly accomplished in other fields. With the possible exception of evolutionary psychology, and as others have mentioned there are good reasons to doubt its prescriptions here.
If you haven’t read a lot of biblical literature and gone through a long process of unlearning your Fallen and sinful nature, and accepting Jesus as your Lord and savior, I think I can provide evidence of your behaving in a way that perpetuates sin in this world. To do this I’d have to watch you in person for a while, but if you want to answer this question without that happening, you can just read lots of the Bible (even modern translations of the Bible will work for this, I suggest starting with the Gospel of John and building up to some Letters from Paul) and reflect on your past behavior.
And yes, if you perpetuate sinfulness, you should feel guilty. I might get to explain why later, but I’m getting downvoted so often that I can only respond once every few minutes, so you’ll have to bear with me. If I do, it’ll be higher in this thread.
Oh, come on.
I mean, I don’t have a horse in this race, but this can just as easily be “If you haven’t read a lot of cognitive science and statistics and gone through a long process of unlearning your irrational and corrupted-hardware nature, and identifying the importance of rationality, I think I can provide evidence of your behaving in a way that perpetuates irrationality in this world. To do this I’d have to watch you in person for a while, but if you want to answer this question without that happening, you can just read lots of the literature on heuristics and biases (even frequentism will work for this....”
This sort of superficial pattern-matching proves nothing. It really is true that most people who don’t put effort into improving beyond the cultural baseline are most likely perpetuating the irrational biases of their culture, even if they think they’re thinking perfectly clearly; the fact that it pattern-matches your bit about the Bible doesn’t change that.
No, the bit that pattern-matches is that “patriarchy”, “oppression”, “privilege” and the like have no consistent definition, just like “sinfulness”. Also, rationalists don’t try to guilt-trip you into overcoming your biases and becoming more rational (unless you count some of the efficient-charity advocacy as akin to guilt-tripping). It really is a pseudo-religious argument.
(nods) If your comment had been clearer about your objection being to the ill-defined nature of key terms and to the use of guilt as a means of manipulating behavior, I would not have reacted as I did. But that was far from clear.
Many of my friends and family remain Christians. On their behalf I claim offense.
Mmm. I sympathize, but I don’t think this is likely to be very helpful; as this blog post by Yvain mentions, the Courtier’s Reply is a lot less obviously fallacious than it might naively seem. That is, it’s generally unlikely to convince anyone that’s not unusually vulnerable to an argument from authority, but there are situations where it’s appropriate too.
I’m not sure what Yvain’s proposed solution might indicate in this context, though. It seems likely to me that estimations of who’s being “smart and rational” here are so closely bound to political tribalism that reading works on gender by people you already admire would tend to reinforce existing beliefs more than it’d lead them to converge; there aren’t many well-respected writers on gender, on any side of the issue, who’re greatly accomplished in other fields. With the possible exception of evolutionary psychology, and as others have mentioned there are good reasons to doubt its prescriptions here.