You neglected to include a good argument in favor of slavery.
Some people aren’t intelligent enough/don’t have high enough time preferences to function in modern society. Thus you either need to have them under the control of a master, or you wind up having to put them on the public dole and institutionalize the many of them anyway.
True, however, the civil rights movement did.
For instance, suppose my cause is to prevent the growth of a hole in the ozone layer. I tell people they must stop using CFCs.
Well, that raises issues about just how serious a threat was the “hole in the ozone layer”, and how much if anything it had to do with CFCs.
Stop hyper-focusing on individual words to try to score debating points when the intent behind their use is clear from the context, everybody on LessWrong.
There were good arguments for all of those things when they were still in use. There are no good Arguments today for favoring Aristotelian physics over Newtonian physics, Ptolemaic over Copernican, or the phlogiston theory over the oxygen theory, where an Argument means a complete consideration of the evidence and the individual arguments.
I’m not trying to score debating points. I have a serious point, namely that chances are you don’t actually know most of the arguments involved, either here or in the political debate. Instead you rely on appeals to authority. This raises the question of how reliable are the authorities. Probably reasonable reliable in the case of physics, rather less so in the case of political issues.
Slavery, suffrage, Christianity or Prohibition aren’t right or wrong in some objective non-moral sense. Arguments for or against such things are inevitably about convincing people, not about some objective truth.
Well three of those four things are essentially government/societal policies, and one can argue about what the consequnces of adopting or not adopting those policies are.
Let’s test your idea that “There are no good arguments for X” is simply how having a successful social taboo against X feels from inside:
“There are no good arguments for the phlogiston theory of chemistry” is simply how having a successful social taboo against the phlogiston theory of chemistry feels from inside.
“There are no good arguments for Ptolemaic astronomy” is simply how having a successful social taboo against Ptolemaic astronomy feels from inside.
“There are no good arguments for Aristotelian physics” is simply how having a successful social taboo against Aristotelian physics feels from inside.
There are in fact good arguments for all three of those theories, and better arguments against. I’m guessing you don’t know either arguments, and base your belief in all three based on argument from authority.
Edit: Also the situation isn’t exactly analogous due to the difference between debates about physical facts, and debates about policy.
Ideally, I would estimate the negative effects: how many people would later learn I lied and abandon my cause, and how enemies of the cause might use the fact I lied against it, and the reputational harm to my other causes and to my allies.
Not to mention the damage the people who believe your lies might do by acting on them.
Those movements didn’t require wholesale lying and sleight-of-hand, because they could make valid and true one-sided arguments.
Yes they did, in particular the false claim that there are no significant diffrences between blacks and whites.
It’s hard to come up with a good counter-argument to “slavery is bad”.
Well, “slavery is bad” isn’t even an argument it’s either an asertion or at best a value judgement. The fact that this wasn’t obvious to you is a sign you haven’t thought much about the topic.
Even women’s suffrage and Prohibition didn’t require lying.
Well, consider how the latter turned out. Prohibition involved making false statements (they might not technichally have been lies only because some of the people making them believe them) about how much of the contry’s crime was caused by alcohol. Some counties even sold off their jails after prohibition passed, figuring that without alcohol there’d be no crime so there would be no need for it.
What might be the cause of the perceived difference between the atheists/nontheists in Europe and in the USA?
Where in Europe? Richard Dawkins is from England and organized things like the infamous atheist bus campaign.
Also numerous European countries used to have atheist militants, of the priest-killing or at least send-priests-to-labor-camps variety.
Both Western governments and countries like Sierra Leone and Saudi Arabia. If he’s simply talking bullshit why do government seek him out as a highly-payed advisor?
Because the official who made the proposal gets to look good for consulting with someone high status. There’s a reason consultants have the reputation they do in the business world and governments have even worse internal incentive problems.
Anything about adding symptoms to currently harmless bacteria?
The argument isn’t that logic is inherently sexist and racist and therefore bad but that it’s frequently used in places where there are other viable alternatives.
Such as?
There are no pure-blooded aryans here. There are no pure-bloods at all.
There’s also no such thing as 100% pure water, that doesn’t mean “water” or even “fresh water” is a meaningless or “socially constructed” concept, and it definitely doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to drink a glass of sea water.
I’d argue, as our culture defines race, you really encounter a large number of different and distinct ways of classifying groups of people, of which skin color is just one which gets disproportionate attention owing to historic cultural reasons combined with extreme visual salience (black skin is much easier to notice than eye color).
So how do you account for the fact that race as measured by what you consider the “flawed cultural way” correlates as strongly as it does with things like intelligence and criminality?
In other periods of time, other ways of grouping people by race got more attention.
And quite possibly they were dealing with different populations and the groupings they used did in fact correlate with important things.
There’s far more difference between a black-skinned person whose ancestors have lived in America for five generations and a black-skinned person whose ancestry remains rooted in Africa, than there is between the black-skinned American and a white-skinned American
Genetics science says otherwise. Or do you believe that genes have no impact on who someone is?
Am I from a small tribe in Polynesia because I have an unusual crown formation? Maybe I’m American Indian because of the way my roots wrap around my jawbone?
I don’t know, are you? You can trace your ancestry or get genetic tested if your curious.
There’s a stronger statement about this I feel like I could make, but I can’t translate the strong version of this into words
Have you considered taking this as a hint that your beliefs about the subject are incoherent.
The identification of individuals as their race, rather than themselves.
Well, steelmanning your Chomsky sentence, I assume you mean treating someone’s race as the only meaningful information about them. In that case you might want to actually read what I wrote.
It is an assertion that the way you treat others should reflect the way you wish to be treated.
In that case it is completely irrelevant to the discussion. For your convenience here is a summary of the debate up to this point:
Me: We should admit that some people are smarter/less prone to criminality/better than others and that these differences correlation with things like race, etc.
You: there’s still somebody smarter than you. While you consider what to do to -your- lessers, consider whether you want your betters to follow your example.
Me (slightly confused by your irrelevant assertion but willing to steelman it by using the conversational convention of relevance): That looks like a fully general counter argument against admitting that differences in intelligence exist.
You: That’s not what I meant.
In that case what did you mean and how was it relevant to my point?
I do not regard people’s religions relating to race as being truths.
Do you agree that there is a fact of the matter on the questions relating to race?
The only person who might be considered as pointing this out here is you, I will observe.
There’s a world outside LW, you realize that right?
The difference between my intelligence and the intelligence of the average person who makes this argument
Someone has a massive overestimation of his own intelliegence. I’ve only seen this particular argument made a couple times and the people making it were probably somewhat smarter than the average LWer. Also, judging by this comment of yours alone and the fact that it has almost no connection to what I wrote, you appear to be below average for LW.
If you want to argue that racism is acceptable
I have no idea what you mean by the word “racism”. In fact it doesn’t appear to have a single meaning, but rather at least two meanings that you switch between as needed in classic motte-and-bailey style.
But even if you leave me out of it, and there’s still somebody smarter than you. While you consider what to do to -your- lessers, consider whether you want your betters to follow your example.
That looks like a fully general counter argument against admitting that differences in intelligence exist.
I have little patience for affirmative action and other “social justice” forms of collectivism
Except when a proponent of affirmative action argues that affirmative action is necessary because the process is still racist and the process is clearly racist because fewer blacks are getting admitted, you have no counterargument because you refuse to look at the evidence that would prduce one. This is not hypothetical, this is the standard argument AA proponents actually use.
To put it another way: It’s nice that you oppose a bad policy; however, you shouldn’t be surprised that if you (collective) endorse intentional ignorance about a topic, the result is bad policy in matters related to that topic.
But what’s going on here is just our old familiar dilemma of justice vs. truth. It SHOULDN’T be profitable to use someone’s skin color as a quick proxy for what’s inside their heads. That would be monstrously unfair. People can’t help their skin color.
People largely can’t help what’s inside their head either.
Well, in case you haven’t noticed aren’t in small forager tribes right now.
You’re right, I left out a few alternatives. We could also deport them to a haunter-gatherer society, let them go around engaging in tribal-style raids (although that tends to interfere with the functioning of modern society for those who can function in it), or let them starve to death.