The description of agency here feels very “Lesswrongy”, i don’t think that’s how most people would describe agency. I think what happened is that people got used to “robust agency” and it also changed their concept of “agency”.
When people usually talk about agency i don’t think they mean that in some game theoretic / decision theory sense. It’s about taking initiative, acting with intention, etc.
I’m not so sure whether we should keep this tag, but if we do i suggest “Acceptance”. (A stoicism tag might also be nice, but it should be it’s own tag)
If you’re willing to write a data extraction script, and John Hopkins continues updating from a new source (that doesn’t otherwise publish raw data), you can find the numbers on the embedded sub-pages:
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/embed/testing/state-data/testing_per_state_New_York.html
lim(EV(fn)) != EV(lim(fn))
Oooooh. Neat. Thank you. I guess… how do we know EV(lim(fn))=0? I don’t know enough analysis anymore to remember how to prove this. [reads internet] Well, Wikipedia tells me two functions with the same values everywhere but measure 0 even if those values are +inf have the same integral, so looks good. :D
I would like to modify my original statement: The consumption of animal products is not necessary in order to be healthy. Therefore, they are unnecessary for human health. This makes their consumption optional, a choice. If you can choose non-violence over violence, I think that is a moral imperative (to which I was referring in my title).
This depends, of course, on what you define to be “violence”. If “violence” includes the killing of animals (not the usual usage, but also not unheard of)—then I disagree with the claim that choosing “non-violence” is a moral imperative.
I do not know if this holds up against your argumentation, but I would like to try anyways: I define unnecessary suffering in this case as suffering that is not essential to our lives. If the only reason we consume animal products is pleasure, the question is the following: Can we justify the suffering of others only because it gives us pleasure? As I see it not avoiding the pain and suffering of millions of animals just because we like their taste is immoral.
There are several things that might be said in response to this.
First: pleasure is essential to our lives. If you propose that we resign ourselves to living lives devoid of pleasure, then I cannot but condemn that proposal in the strongest terms. Any ideology that deems pleasure and enjoyment to be “inessential” or “unnecessary” is anti-human and, frankly, evil.
Of course, not everything can be justified by the pursuit of pleasure or enjoyment! But the question of what we may rightly sacrifice, in the service of what gains, is not a trivial one. Simply to declare that enjoyment and pleasure are “inessential” is to avoid the question, not to answer it.
Second: the question of animal “suffering”. I address this below.
Third: you say “others” (i.e., “the suffering of others”), as if it were a monolithic set, as if it made sense, morally speaking, to aggregate not only all humans, but all animals as well, or all living things, etc. But it does not—or, at least, it does not obviously make sense. Agent-neutral morality is not universally held, for one thing, and indeed some people do not include animals in their circle of moral concern at all.
Non-human animals are capable of suffering and their suffering is morally relevant. If we cannot agree on this point, I see no point in discussing the other matters further.
Ah, well. Here we come to the crux of the matter, yes? I certainly do not agree on this point!
That they are capable of suffering is not only obvious to anyone who ever witnessed some non-human animal suffer, but also scientifically proven.
Citation needed. (But before you begin collecting references, you may consider reading this recent forum thread on Data Secrets Lox, where just this topic was discussed at length.)
Not considering their suffering morally relevant is, analogous to sexism or racism, speciesism.
Labels are no substitute for arguments.
Please google the term yourself if my explanation was not sufficient.
Surely you’re not suggesting that googling the term ‘speciesism’ is going to convince anyone of anything? Do you assume that anyone who disagrees with you must simply not be aware of the term? With respect, this is not at all a reasonable assumption on Less Wrong, of all places!
(Disclaimer: I mention TUSD and TrueFi below; my brother is the CEO of the company behind those so you can guess my biases. None of this is financial advice)
have a giant pile of US dollars somewhere under someone’s control, and have that person act as a counterparty for anyone who wants to buy or sell 1 US dollar for 1 token. This is what Tether and USDC do.
Not quite—Tether hasn’t been properly backed by dollars since 2019 (see discussion over at https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6656/tether-in-2021/). A better example of a second fully-backed stablecoin would be TrueUSD (and its sister coins for other currencies, like TrueHKD).
Because it’s supposed to be trustless and decentralized, all loans are necessarily at least fully collateralized
TrueFi (https://truefi.io/) is offering uncollateralized loans. It’s not nearly as trustless and decentralized as something like Uniswap, but it is moving in that direction—loans are voted on by holders of the governance token TRU, and the project roadmap says that soon they’ll be doing more of this algorithmically based on info such as your on-chain credit history.
(also TrueFi is offering some pretty sweet yield farming rates right now :) )
See proving too much. In the thought experiment where you consider sapient wolves who hold violent consumption of sentient creatures as an important value, the policy of veganism is at least highly questionable. An argument for such a policy needs to distinguish humans from sapient wolves, so as to avoid arguing for veganism for sapient wolves with the same conviction as it does for humans.
Your argument mentions relevant features (taste, tradition) at the end and dismisses them as “lazy excuses”. Yet their weakness in the case of humans is necessary for the argument’s validity. Taste and tradition point to an ethical argument against veganism, that doesn’t not exist as you claim at the start of the article. Instead the argument exists and might be weak.
Re: the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics:
You quoted their Wikipedia page and that they profit from funding. However, according to that same Wikipedia article, they are still the largest organization of food and nutritional professionals. Every large institution needs money. They do science. Your own opinion in not trusting their science does not make their science any less credible IMO.
That they are “the largest organization of food and nutritional professionals” is irrelevant. Mere numbers of members aren’t any kind of evidence.
As for “they profit from funding”—perhaps you have missed the point, which is not that they are funded, but by whom they are funded. Do you think this does not matter? The point, to be maximally clear, is that they take money from corporations which have interests that very strongly conflict with the public interest (of getting reliable, unbiased information) and with their own stated purpose! Once again: this so-called “Academy” has severe conflicts of interest, severe enough to fatally compromise them as a source of scientific information on nutrition and diet.
Shall I quote some more from that same Wikipedia page? Let’s see:
Watchdogs note that the Academy rarely criticizes food companies, believing it to be out of fear of “biting the hand that feeds them.”[67][68] Nutrition expert Marion Nestle opined that she believed that as long as the AND partners with the makers of food and beverage products, “its opinions about diet and health will never be believed [to be] independent.”[63] Public health lawyer Michele Simon, who researches and writes about the food industry and food politics, has voiced similar concerns stating, “AND [is] deeply embedded with the food industry, and often communicate[s] messaging that is industry friendly.”[69]
You would trust this organization, when these experts do not? What do you know that they don’t?
A 2011 survey, found that 80% of Academy members are critical of the Academy’s position. They believe that the Academy is endorsing corporate sponsors and their products when it allows their sponsorship.[70]
You would trust this organization, when four out of five of their own members do not?
The organization also publishes nutrition facts sheets for the general public, which food companies pay $20,000 to take part in writing the documents.[73] A list of these publications for the general public include: […] This industry funding also gives food companies the ability to offer official educational seminars to teach dietitians how to advise their clients in a way that advances the interests of the food company. For instance, in a Coca-Cola sponsored seminar for dietitians, the speaker promoted free sugars consumption for children as a healthy choice.[79]
To be frank, the idea that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is a reliable and unbiased source of nutrition-related information is ludicrous. To claim otherwise undermines the credibility of every other claim you make.
However, here is a further source that links to several other organizations that have affirmed that vegan diets are healthy:
https://www.veganism.com/is-vegan-diet-healthy/
I hope that addresses argument (1) sufficiently.
By no means does this address the argument at all.
You have linked to an advocacy website. Not to a meta-analysis or review, not to a paper published in a respected journal, not even to a popular science article in a reputable publication, or a blog post by a scientist working in the field—but to an advocacy website. I’m sorry to be blunt about this, but—do you not see how worthless this is, as evidence? (And lest you consider replying that they link to other, more reputable sources, recall that a biased advocate for a position can cherry-pick sources to support almost any possible point—see “What Evidence Filtered Evidence?” and “The Bottom Line” for further commentary.) Linking to a page on a vegan advocacy site and declaring the matter settled is simply not anything even resembling a serious approach to this topic.
Suppose I were interested in investigating this topic for myself. Setting aside the deep skepticism which it is only rational to cultivate about any nutrition-related topic, and the awareness that advocacy of all sorts, and profound systemic and instutional flaws, compromise the reliability of even credentialed sources, I might do the maximally naive thing and simply do a web search for “vegan diet health”. On the very first page of search results, I would see sites and documents which say things like:
One common concern is whether a vegan diet provides enough vitamin B12. B12 helps prevent nerve damage, and is found in meat, fish, eggs and dairy, but not in fruit or vegetables. It’s recommended that adults consume 1.5 micrograms of the vitamin per day.
“A B12 deficiency can lead to neurological symptoms such as numbness, and it’s irreversible if the deficiency is present for too long,” says Janet Cade, of the Nutritional Epidemiology Group, School of Food Science and Nutrition.
A recent study involving 48,000 people over 18 years compared the health of meat-eaters, pescatarians – who eat fish and dairy but not meat – and vegetarians, including some vegans. They found that people who eat vegan and vegetarian diets have a lower risk of heart disease, but a higher risk of stroke, possibly partly due to a lack of B12.
Researchers are concerned that a lot of research comparing the vegan diet and health outcomes (also known as observational research) is unreliable, since vegans tend to be healthier.
“Typically, vegans smoke less, drink less alcohol and exercise more,” says Faidon Magkos, associate professor at the University of Copenhagen’s department of nutrition, exercise and sports, who last year published a review into research examining the health effects of the vegan diet.
These lifestyle factors, which can also contribute to a lower risk of heart disease and mortality, can suggest that the vegan diet alone is healthier than it may actually be.
While the evidence isn’t very strong for the vegan diet specifically, Cade says, the vegan diet seems to be linked to better general health, apart from bone density and fractures, which may be more common due to possible lower calcium intake, and the likelihood of B12 deficiency.
“If you compare a plant-based diet with an unhealthy diet that includes meat, the plant-based diet is certainly better,” Faidon says.
“But if you follow a relatively prudent omnivorous diet, such as the Mediterranean diet, which is high in fruit, vegetables, legumes and low in meat, there’s evidence to suggest this type of omnivorous diet is at least as healthy as a vegan diet,” he says.
(From https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200122-are-there-health-benefits-to-going-vegan)
(See also https://empoweredsustenance.com/is-vegan-healthy/ for a laundry list of other concerns.)
At the very least, this would convince me that the case is far from closed, and that much more investigation is needed.
EDIT:
I think you should not underestimate nutritional science and do your research first if you make such a claim. The scientific findings are sufficient to claim that vegan diets are healthy. Therefore, humans do not need animal products to be healthy.
Citation needed. Since you suggest that I do my research, no doubt you’ve done yours—yes? The “scientific findings” you refer to ought to be cited explicitly.
There are some interesting and tangentially related comments in the discussion of this post
Hi Ruben, it’s true that omega-3s seem to be important, but the research on omega-3 supplementation consistently seems to find almost no effect or tiny effects, or sometimes even small harmful effects (examine.com’s pages are a good starting off point for this).
Again, while it’s true that seafood may have yucky contaminants in it, eating small fish close to the bottom of the food chain here seems like a situation where moral and nutrition concerns align—briesling sprats and pilchard sardines have very very tiny wee little brains, and it seem less likely to me that they suffer much. They’re also wild caught, so have at least had free lives.
The supplement industry, OTOH, also has documented problems with contamination, and many supplements are poorly absorbed—consuming an isolated compound generally doesn’t seem to be fungible with eating a whole food.
Chalmers’ paper just seems to be an implicit defense of weaponizing language. He even uses the term “conceptual activism” and bemoans the difficulty in making others adopt his new definitions for existing words. He recognizes that “words have power” and argues that words should be redefined to use that power to “make for a more just world,” like pushing through things like gay marriage, without having to change the law. He argues that “If everyone (including judges) uses ‘marriage’ as if it applies to same-sex marriage, then even if historical external links say that ‘marriage’ still refers only to unions between men and women, this will matter very little for practical purposes.”
Of course, this sentence hides a clear contradiction within itself. If everyone would truly agree, then why would the judge need to rule on it?
The completely unrealistic notion that one can get everyone to agree on that new definition just serves to shield these words from criticism that this method is undemocratic and a violation of the trias politica. In practice, we see that people weaponize the claim of consensus by excluding large groups from consideration. It’s often a mere tautology: everyone who matters agrees with me and disagreeing with me shows that you don’t matter, because then you are unscientific, homophobic, etc.
The paper ignores Foucault’s objection that language is used for social control by the powerful. Of course Chalmers may believe that those who have the most power to shape language or will have that power with the bottled persuasiveness that he dreams of, are the ones who desires deserve precedence over others and/or the majority. Yet many disagree (although ironically, neoreactionaries probably would agree).
There will be plenty of functions that have fewer bits in their encoding than the real function used by the demonstrator.
I don’t think this is a problem. There will be plenty of them, but when they’re wrong they’ll get removed from the posterior.
Thank you for your extensive reply. I will make sure to address all of your points.
(1) Humans do not need animal products to be healthy.
Citation needed. When providing citations, please note that (a) much of nutrition science is very shoddy (in all the usual ways—methodology, replicability, file-drawer effects, etc.), and (b) there is considerable variation, between people and between groups of people, in optimal diet, physiological responses to dietary changes, etc. Almost any universal statement about human nutrition is likely to be wrong. So a claim like this requires considerable support to be raised even to the “plausible” level, much less to “certain enough to base moral claims on”. (Indeed, it is possible that nutrition science, in its current state, is simply not capable of providing us with the degree of certainty which we would need in order to use a claim like this in a moral argument.)
Citation for the claim:
The source is from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. In regard to the institution you stated the following:
Under no circumstances would I believe a word these people say about nutrition.
You quoted their Wikipedia page and that they profit from funding. However, according to that same Wikipedia article, they are still the largest organization of food and nutritional professionals. Every large institution needs money. They do science. Your own opinion in not trusting their science does not make their science any less credible IMO. However, here is a further source that links to several other organizations that have affirmed that vegan diets are healthy:
https://www.veganism.com/is-vegan-diet-healthy/
I hope that addresses argument (1) sufficiently.
Indeed, it is possible that nutrition science, in its current state, is simply not capable of providing us with the degree of certainty which we would need in order to use a claim like this in a moral argument
I think you should not underestimate nutritional science and do your research first if you make such a claim. The scientific findings are sufficient to claim that vegan diets are healthy. Therefore, humans do not need animal products to be healthy.
(2) Therefore, the consumption of animal products is unnecessary.
Granting claim (1), this one does not follow. You seem to imply that something is only “necessary” if, without it, we would die (or suffer serious harms to health). I reject this view.
I would like to modify my original statement: The consumption of animal products is not necessary in order to be healthy. Therefore, they are unnecessary for human health. This makes their consumption optional, a choice. If you can choose non-violence over violence, I think that is a moral imperative (to which I was referring in my title).
(3) This makes the killing of non-human animals for animal products unnecessary.
Note that if your argument depends on establishing the immorality of killing animals, that gets you to vegetarianism only, not to veganism. Eggs, dairy, etc. do not require killing animals, so a non-vegan vegetarian might well ask—how does this argument apply to me?
Again, a slight modification to clarify: The killing of non-human animals for their products is not necessary for human health. Concerning your points about eggs and dairy: Yes, they very much require killing.
(a) The egg industry kills male chicks on the first day of their life, usually by throwing them in a big blender. On another note, chickens that produce eggs suffer from horrible conditions in the majority of cases, which again is suffering not necessary for human health.
(b) The dairy industry does not need the male calves, which are being killed either after a few days or after a few weeks (for veal). Most dairy cows also get slaughtered after 4 to 5 years because their production of milk decreases. Again, there is also a lot of suffering in the industry besides the premature killing of sentient beings, which can be avoided by being vegan.
(Kindly note that the arguments used in (a) and (b) are derived from the book Why we love dogs, eat pigs, and wear cows by Dr. Melanie Joy.)
(4) Not avoiding unnecessary suffering is immoral.
The word “unnecessary” seems to be doing most of the work in this claim, but it’s difficult to see how to operationalize it. Interestingly, utilitarianism (which is usually a background assumption in arguments like this, and likely here as well, though you never name it explicitly) doesn’t much help; there isn’t really any way, for a utilitarian, to designate some suffering to be “necessary” or “not necessary”—it simply gets entered as input into the utility calculation, along with all other relevant facts about the world. On the other hand, most non-utilitarian views don’t offer any clear way to make sense of this claim either.
I do not know if this holds up against your argumentation, but I would like to try anyways: I define unnecessary suffering in this case as suffering that is not essential to our lives. If the only reason we consume animal products is pleasure, the question is the following: Can we justify the suffering of others only because it gives us pleasure? As I see it not avoiding the pain and suffering of millions of animals just because we like their taste is immoral.
(5) Therefore, contributing to unnecessary animal suffering makes you an animal abuser.
This presupposes several other claims, which are missing from your argument, and must be made explicit. These include “non-human animals are capable of suffering” (and/or “the suffering of non-human animals is morally relevant”).
As a side note, the term “abuser” is tendentious; clearly, you are trying to bring in the connotations of the term we use to describe people who beat their pet dogs, into the argument about whether it’s acceptable to kill cows for their meat. If you have a point, make it without recourse to underhanded emotional tactics.
Non-human animals are capable of suffering and their suffering is morally relevant. If we cannot agree on this point, I see no point in discussing the other matters further. That they are capable of suffering is not only obvious to anyone who ever witnessed some non-human animal suffer, but also scientifically proven. They have brains, feel physical and emotional pain. Not considering their suffering morally relevant is, analogous to sexism or racism, speciesism. Only because they are not part of our human “in-group” does not make them irrelevant. Please google the term yourself if my explanation was not sufficient.
Concerning the term animal abuser: There are no underhanded emotional tactics. I made the point so people make the uncomfortable connection in their heads for themselves. If you pay for animal products, you pay the industry that causes them suffering and pain. Therefore, you are causing suffering and pain to animals. That is the definition of an animal abuser in my book.
(Please also see my response to your other comment.)
A policy outputs a distribution over , and equations 3 and 4 define what this distribution is for the imitator. If it outputs (0, a), that means and and and if it outputs (1, a), that means and . When I say
The 0 on the l.h.s. means the imitator is picking the action itself instead of deferring to the demonstrator,
that’s just describing the difference between equations 3 and 4. Look at equation 4 to see that when , the distribution over the action is equal to that of the demonstrator. So we describe the behavior that follows as “deferring to the demonstrator”. If we look at the distribution over the action when , it’s something else, so we say the imitator is “picking its own action”.
The 0 on the l.h.s. means the imitator is picking the action itself instead of deferring to the demonstrator or picking one of the other actions???
The 0 means the imitator is picking the action, and the means it’s not picking another action that’s not .
I’ve worked out our earlier discussion of the order of limits into a response to this here.
We’ve done some amount of this, as you reference. I would strongly enjoy having more children around, and I think my kids would like that a lot. On the other hand, there are drawbacks:
Parenting styles very enormously. It’s very hard to watch someone else’s kid if you disagree about how to do it. I think this is much less of an issue in extended families, and especially historically, because there’s better agreement on how to do it, but I know a lot of people in houses with multiple adults who have a lot of conflict over this. How closely do you supervise the kids? If one of them is hitting the other do you do something about it or let them sort it out themselves? Can they eat whenever they want? Can they have candy whenever they want? How messy an activity are they allowed to do on their own? If they do something wrong what sort of discipline do you use?
Kids are very good at understanding that different adults have different rules, and if sometimes kids are being watched by a parent and other times a nanny this isn’t a problem. On the other hand, when multiple adults are present at once it’s not clear which rules to apply, so you need more communication among the adults to have a consistent system. Otherwise the kids are going to spend all their time jurisdiction shopping and poking at edge cases.
Kids are messy and noisy, and different adults handle this differently. I’m also not very confident in adults ability to predict how their preferences will change after having kids. Perhaps your cleanest roommate will turn out to be exhausted and overwhelmed by child care and decide that keeping things tidy is just not a priority. This combines with the previous point: some parents are going to be okay just letting the kids yell, while others aren’t.
I’m pretty pessimistic about strategies that involve building a new intentional community in a rural area, because you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. In Boston I have many communities, and while I’m close to my housemates they’re not that my whole world. If something happened where we stopped getting along, we all have other options that don’t totally disrupt our lives. The rural approach is definitely cheaper, and going into it with several other families does cover some of the normal downsides of isolation, but I’d expect this to be much higher variance than I personally would be comfortable with.
They pick a $200,000 medical school rather than a $250,000 school, and use the savings to fund the first 5 years of raising their child.
The economics of this are substantially worse. Someone in medical school has very little free time, and so needs more than the standard amount of childcare. Even standard child care, however, is going to cost more than $10k/y, more like $20k.
Hey Crotchety_Crank,
Your name does suit you. Believe it or not, I have read (good translations of) Plato and the Sophists! Very little Aristotle, and you’re correct I fell asleep once or twice during a year-long ancient phil course. Not, however, during the Plato lectures, and my prof—one of the hottest young philosophers in the country, recently tenured at NYU—presented a picture of Platonic forms that agrees with the account in my original post. I’m being glib; I don’t at all mean to imply that view is not the only correct interpretation, but it is a common and perhaps dominant one. A few notes in response:
It may well be true that Socrates did not believe in sufficient and necessary conditions—he is part fictional creation, so we cannot know for sure, but he does make statements that can be charitably interpreted as challenging a view of the Good or Justice as having a clear definition. However, this is a very different question from what Plato believed, as you must well know.
Depending on how one interprets Plato’s language, specifically his description of the realm that forms exist in, and what it means for a form to exist, one can, perhaps, charitably understand Plato as not implying some “essence” of things. (OTOH, it also doesn’t seem an accurate reading to say Plato saw these concepts as existing in the mind—so it’s not clear where the hell he thinks they dwell. This question takes up hundreds if not thousands of pages of anguished scholarly writing.) But, important to note—as soon as one believes in an essence, “sufficient and necessary conditions” follows naturally as its prerequisite.
It doesn’t actually matter so much what Plato intended; what counts, pragmatically speaking, is how he was interpreted, and Neoplatonism + Christian metaphysics clearly believe in essences; their philosophical doctrines ruled the West for over a millennium.
It is clearly false to say that “sufficient and necessary” is a strawman that no one ever believed. Logical positivism, conceptual analysis, and the history of analytic all explicitly contradict this claim.
Whether or not individuals explicitly pay lip service to “sufficient and necessary,” or a concept of essences, is also besides the point; as I have argued, the mode of analysis which has dominated analytic philosophy the past century rests implicitly on this belief.
I see you’re brand new here, so a head’s up: discursive norms here veer constructive. If you believe I’m wrong, please make an argument for your alternate interpretation instead of casting ad hominems. Your last line is a sick diss—no hate! much respect!—but sick disses don’t hold much water. Other than a quotation by Aristotle, who is not mentioned in this post anywhere, there is no textual support in your comment for your interpretations of Plato, Socrates (though I agree), or any of the other listed philosophers.
Here is the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Wittgenstein’s life:
Family resemblance also serves to exhibit the lack of boundaries and the distance from exactness that characterize different uses of the same concept. Such boundaries and exactness are the definitive traits of form—be it Platonic form, Aristotelian form, or the general form of a proposition adumbrated in the Tractatus. It is from such forms that applications of concepts can be deduced, but this is precisely what Wittgenstein now eschews in favor of appeal to similarity of a kind with family resemblance.
Note that Wittgenstein was an avid reader of Plato; he cited the philosopher more than any other, but viewed his own approach as a radical break. (He did not read Aristotle! Interesting!) It seems possible to me that Wittgenstein himself, the authors of the SEP article, and the editors who peer-reviewed it, have fundamentally misunderstood not just Platonic forms but Aristotelian forms, and therefore, the entire legacy of Wittgenstein’s work. But that is a serious case to build, and it’s unclear why I should take your word for it over theirs without any presentation of evidence.
Your claims here go against major philosophical reference sources, many dominant interpretations of Platonic forms, and the interpretations of many well-informed, well-read philosophers of language past. They contradict various histories of the discipline and various historical dilemmas—e.g. Bertrand Russell, famous for writing one of the most definitive histories of philosophy, is sometimes seen as “solving” the Sorites paradox (an ancient Greek philosophical problem) by arguing that natural language is vague. If this solution was as obvious and widely known as you claim, it’s unclear to me why the Sorites paradox would have staying power, or why Russell’s solution would be taken seriously as innovative.
I’m sincerely willing and interested in engaging—I do think the story is more complicated than this piece lays out. But arguments must take a side, and summaries must exclude nuance. If you’re interested in a good-faith discourse I’m game.
Fair point, I apologize for this.
But that’s the nature of identity: a claim that’s part of identity won’t suffer insinuations that it needs any arguments behind it, let alone the existence of arguments against. Within one’s identity, labels are absolutely superior to arguments. So the disagreement is more about epistemic role of identity, not about object level claims or arguments.