I just found out that the Generals won a few games against the Globetrotters. As many as 6! So assuming 6 is correct, their win/loss record is something like 6-16,000.
It's in a bunch of medical school curricula and a lot of disability rights groups use it. If you do any work with medicine or disability you've probably heard it taught as "the right way to think about things".
And to be clear, I think the social model is clearly out of balance. I just wonder how much effect it's actually having on how businesses and organizations behave.
Technicallyyyyyyy there were those people on Twitter getting mad about Mr Beast giving lots of people eye surgeries. But that's actually more of an example of people complaining about capitalism/inequality, not necessarily the Social Model. I'd bet a lot of money that some of those people were using the Social Model, though.
I went through a phase of being really interested in sign languages, I can totally understand why deaf parents might be worried about their children not being part of their community, and a shared language is a big part of that.
That said, I'm sure a child of deaf parents would end up fluent in Sign Language regardless, and so this does feel like a decision to deprive their child of something that could be really beneficial to them, without really gaining anything by it.
From what I understand (a couple of decades old) cochlear implants are not an adequate replacement for normal hearing, and have some unpleasant side effects. (The only one I remember, though, is excessive sensitivity at certain frequencies.)
Perhaps they've been improved a lot since I noticed articles about them, otherwise I wouldn't be too sure that it's not in the child's benefit to wait. (And I'm sure glad I never had to make that kind of judgement call.)
I have definitely heard it used to argue against giving children cochlear implants, deafness is probably the area where it's most contentious.
That said, most times I see the social model mentioned it's usually about how a combination of medical devices (like wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs) and social accomodations (like ramps and not being weird when people have a missing leg) provide the most benefit to people with disabilities.
The most extreme example I can think of is a social worker I know vociferously arguing that someone's tendency towards physical aggression towards roommates was just a "different way of being" that we needed to find better ways to accommodate rather than seek to modify. Given that offering plans for behavior modification was my role on the support team, this put us at opposed positions, and it became necessary for me to find professional and sophisticated ways of saying, "What the hell?" in emails.
I personally don't think this is an issue of importance and doesn't really have any major impact on quality of medical care. DOs undergo many hours of training in Osteopathic manipulation despite the fact that there is limited evidence for its benefit, yet I think the quality of care between the MDs and DOs is quite similar. I think physicians are smart enough to know when something works and when something doesn't.
How did no-one in the 200 comments I've skimmed mention a famous real world example in which youtuber Mr Beast paid for something like 1'000 blind people to get operations to cure their blindness in exchange only for being filmed for 15 seconds with a beaming My Beast....
<i>and got promptly attacked by thousands of shrieking harridans of the social model for debasing the poor victims' noble blindness</i>!!!
Scott covered this on a linx-post. Video+outrage+how can there be outrage?! - Not much into Mr Beast, would have missed out on that vid without Scott - and it turns me into a cry-baby from second 17 to end. Each f...ing time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ2ifmkGGus
It feels really weird to think that this is an important point to argue about. I have a REALLY hard time thinking that anyone would take that "Social Model" seriously as a general argument. I have heard people argue in favor of it in specific cases, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone argue in favor of it, e.g., cases of muscular dystrophy.
OTOH, I have heard of folks from societies of deaf people argue against taking their children and teaching them to speak. (I've never heard that most people in those societies feel that way, but it's conceivable.)
I never would have believed people would literally defund the police, then they did because a world model said police are an institution of the majority and are therefore inherently harmful to minorities
You can carry on not believing it, because people didn't literally defund the police. People literally attempted to pressure their local governments to cut police budgets, with results ranging from total lack of success to very modest success. And they did so not because a world model said police are an institution of the majority and are therefore inherently harmful to minorities, but for a variety of reasons clustering around "a world model said police are an institution of the powerful and are therefore inherently harmful to the less powerful" and "a world model said (or frankly, simple observation reveals) that many police departments are outfitted with extremely dangerous and expensive military-like toys but often lack the training, ethics, or emotional maturity to wield them without killing people unnecessarily."
"Literally lessfund the police" didn't have the same ring to it
Part of the lack of success has been the dramatic increase in non-police shootings. 1000 men, women and children a year. I think that put the brakes on it
I hear deaths of unarmed black men during arrests has tripled to 30 per year. My theory is that quality cops abandoned high risk areas while a major drop in active policing means there are now more violent encounters where incidental or negligent deaths in custody can occur. I am very unhappy with these tragedies and don't feel any short to medium term hope for it to return to as it was
The theory that an institute of the powerful would be inherently injurious to the less powerful makes me the most unhappy in that reducing the influence of that institution was therefore the solution preferred instead of research and training into non-lethal weapons and first responders which seems like the likely choice otherwise
It is a convenient way to talk about things. The Medical model puts too much onus on the Doctor. Self-help groups and peer-support may be effective and perhaps cheaper in some contexts. Equally important is that the Social Model strengthens the political constituency for higher spending on Health. Sadly, because of Baumol Cost Disease (which can only be defeated by exporting a lot of health services) there is a crowding out effect whereby the 'second order' public good (which consists of demanding more provision of the first order good) consumes more and more resources while the 'first order good' (e.g. medical interventions) get rationed or simply disappear.
Probably the clearest example of the Social Model being taken literally and taken to extremes are the self-professed "deaf community" members who actively oppose cochlear implants, sometimes even denying them to their deaf children, on the grounds that fixing their disability is "an attack on their identity as deaf people." (If that sounds like an over-the-top parody of someone's idea of what a crazy activist would say... that's Poe's Law for you. As horrifying as what I just described is, it's quite real.)
Cochlear implants do not by any means “fix” deafness. They are incredibly expensive, remove any residual hearing (not all deaf people have 0% hearing) risky (as all surgeries in the head are) and the sound quality is such that some who get them simply choose never to wear the external device. There are also scenarios where wearing the device is impossible, like swimming.
Your description matches perfectly the plot of Sound of Metal (a recent Oscar-winning film). Based on a google search for "Sound of Metal cochlear implant accurate" I'm left with the impression that your claims are highly controversial, in the sense that some people really do agree with that description, but also some with cochlear implants consider it nonsense fearmongering.
I'd be interested in a survey of cochlear-implant satisfaction, not sure how else we can resolve this as it seems at least somewhat subjective.
I tried to google for some surveys and came away unsatisfied. The rest of this comment is a description of what I found, since I think it's good epistemic practice, but I am unqualified for this analysis so feel free to stop reading:
Best I could find (links below) is a study of older patients (paywalled) which found 68% of respondents were satisfied with their implant, and 25% somewhat satisfied, zero of 60 respondents expressed regret. Then another study doing a review of studies on quality-of-life which is far too long and complicated for me to read, but the conclusion says QoL seems to improve after a CI when using surveys designed for deafness specifically (hence subject to more straightforward bias, like maybe they ask if you can hear more things), whereas if you just ask "how is your life now" there's insufficient evidence that CI improves QoL.
It seems very clear that CI improves the ability to hear, in the sense that you're on average more likely to understand what people are saying and notice quiet noises. That stuff is straightforward to measure and an obvious inventive for the medical establishment
The main argument against CI has got to be about the desirability of the type of hearing it affords you. Ideally we should poll a bunch of people who could hear, went deaf, then got an implant and ask how the three compare, but if anyone has conducted a survey like that I couldn't find it (we know for a fact that we'd get a range of responses, so only percentages matter). Satisfaction/regret after implantation would be a really useful metric, because it directly addresses "should we encourage deaf people to get CI" and it indirectly addresses "does CI give a subjectively desirable hearing experience," but those surveys also elude me. Just asking "how's life?" and checking for correlation pre/post CI is a proxy for satisfaction/regret, which as mentioned is a proxy for "do you like receiving sound input this way"
Cochlear implants, while imperfect, are getting better. My legally deaf and blind friend can now hear better than at any time in her life.
The more fraught issue is that American Sign Language could be driven into extinction over the next century or so by improvements in technology:
"ASL-only speakers can be highly protective of their culture, and some fear its eradication by cochlear implants, somewhat as many lesbians fear that the current popularization of sex change therapies among butch girls threatens the long-term existence of their sexual orientation."
Found it via the Wikipedia page very easily, my usual go-to for this sort of thing. The sampel sizes even in the meta reviews seem to be small though, I think it's generally just assumed that people want to be able to hear if possible.
It would be my guess that it depends on the surgeon and the device. Certainly that matches the description of using a cochlear implant that I heard a decade or so ago, but one would hope that they have been improved in the intervening period.
OTOH, that's a pretty small market, so perhaps they haven't been. Or perhaps only some of them have been.
Someone with an artificial limb (or even someone who needs glasses) has similar issues, but I think they'd generally still consider the prosthetic to be a useful improvement - this seems to be the consensus on cochlear implants as well. Sure, maybe it doesn't "fix" disability, but I'm not sure why you'd make that your goal when you could instead aim to improve quality of life by giving people access to experiences and independance that they'd otherwise be denied.
The two people I know who are missing hands don't wear their prosthetics. People always want to make analogies to glasses, but many (possibly most?) interventions for pretty profound disabilities like missing limbs are more give and take. It really depends on the disability and the person. In the case of limb prosthetics, some are actually quite useful (foot prosthetic s) and some are really more cosmetic (full double leg replacements).
Probably the hardest part of talking about something like "disability" is we inevitably end up overgeneralising - I suppose I was thinking of lower leg prosthetics, I am aware that there isn't much that can be done if the knee is missing. I don't know anyone with a prosthetic hand, I assumed they were more useful than they apparently are but I can imagine any function being too clumsy to be worth it.
My point was that it's not a dichotomy between curing and accommodating, there are useful things that medicine can do but also profound limits.
Logan wrote a much more rationalist response than I will, but I can at least attest that quantitatively the surgeries are not particularly risky. And as described to me by surgeons, the results depicted in 'Sound of Metal' are only accurate in that they show the initial effects immediately post surgery. Neuroplasticity is everything. In children the results can be amazing. In adults who are dedicated to their neuro rehab, the results are great. In adults who expect an immediate miracle, they will be frustrated and disappointed.
Although their attitudes may correspond to the Social Model, I think they actually predate it. Deaf people have their own language, and their own distinct communities where they congregate. They can't easily assimilate, because few people who aren't deaf or related to deaf people learn sign language, and they have shared experiences unique to people without hearing, so they've developed what they consider to be a distinct culture which they're quite protective of. They may have contributed to the development of the Social Model, but I don't think it represented a change in their social attitudes (although the reduction of Deaf communities due to the invention of the cochlear implant definitely did.)
The rise in the well-being of the deaf from the old "deaf and dumb" days due to the standardization and spread of sign languages and the development of boarding schools for the deaf where, after a long struggle, sign language use was encouraged is an example that sometimes the Social Model can do a lot of good.
Similarly, the decline in persecution of lefthanded children for using the sinister hand has made life better for a significant number.
It's also worth considering how unique this is to Deaf people, there isn't a Blind commununty in the same way, because blind people can share a language with the sighted. There is braille, but that's mostly just an alternative writing system. I think some of the difficulties in the discussion come from trying to generalise a lot of different things that we all call "disability".
Sign languages are really interesting (notably there's a lot of them, it's not like all Deaf people can understand each other), but while they're great within a community they reveal the obvious limits of the social model since most people can't understand the language and probably aren't going to learn unless they know a Deaf person.
And of course sign languages also pose different problems for amputees who can speak voices languages just fine. There is no possible universal accommodation in language.
Well, ... "no possible" is a bit strong, though we certainly couldn't build one now. And it would need to include "locked-in" folks. This clearly implies that it would need to be a mechanical mind-reader. Likely it would need to train on each person individually, and do a transform into a more universal symbology.
Now if you'd said "no universal accommodation" I'd probably agree, as I can't think of one this side of Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands". But when you restrict it to language I suspect that we could build one in the next decade or two. (I'm NOT sure it would be a good idea.)
I can't help but think this is going to really backfire on those parents is a really tragic way, as opposed to going ahead with the implant but also making sure their child also learns sign language (probably inevitable if your parents are deaf) and can become a bilingual member of the deaf community.
I have glasses, and I really would be blind without them! (e.g. if I take them off to go swimming I can easily get lost because anything more than a few metres away is a blur). If I found out that my parents had decided to not give me them as a child because they wanted me to have a "visually impaired" identity, I think I'd be rather angry with them when I later realised what was possible.
No, because it's not opposed to medical interventions.
What Scott describes here as the social model is what the literal words describing the social model say. But what he describes as the interaction model is what most people actually come to understand the social model to be.
The ADA implements either the social model or the interaction model, because the difference between the two is in medical interventions in disabled people, which is a thing that the ADA doesn't address.
It's used extensively in disability rights. This is an area I have a lot of experience with, and in that (admittedly anecdotal) experience, I'd say most people don't *really* believe it, but find it useful as a way to get people to think more intelligently about the interaction between accommodation and people's innate conditions when we describe someone's disabilities. That said, there is a more radical core group who absolutely believe the claims in the strongest sense and they tend to be those most apt to throw out charges of bigotry, so it becomes necessary to dance around the subject.
The Social Model is very popular among disability activists, and as a result tends to be influential in the thinking of people with disabilities who have any contact with that sphere. That ideology seems a priori likely to have a really toxic effect on people, and my experience (admittedly limited to just a couple of people) seems to bear that out. Having a significant disability that can't be cured is awful; having one which isn't well accommodated by society is even worse. But the Social Model tells people with disabilities to blame *all* of the bad experiences they have as a result of their disability on society's evil oppression of themselves. This can make the people in question unpleasant to be around, obviously, but I'm sure it's also just psychologically unhealthy in itself. It can feel appealing at some level to have someone to blame all your suffering or deprivation on, but living in a constant state of resentment is just about as miserable a psychological state as I can imagine.
I mean you will hear that exact line of argument trotted out if you are disabled (I am disabled in a very minor way and absolutely got speeches about the social model from medical providers when it happened in the mid 90s at age 14) or when discussing accommodations. I am not sure many people other than activists really believe it, but they certainly use it as a cudgel to get their way a lot and get some truly insane/inefficient accommodations approved.
I can think of more than a few rec areas in my state where trails/facilities have been abandoned because there wasn't a way to make them "accessible".
In my current neighborhood we had an amazing volunteer fundraised and built playground 3x better than any other playground at a grade school, but well before it was at the end of its life they tore it up and replaced it (despite the school district being super broke) so that now a C+ playground was 40% useable by disabled kids instead of a A+ playground being 20% useable by disabled kids.
A similar thing happened back in my home town too with two different newish giant playgrounds ripped up to make them more accessible (and in the process made much more samey, boring and smaller).
First, I used to work at a large corporate job (as in, the job was at a large corporation, not a large job) which involved a lot of contact with people with various disabilities, especially hearing disabilities. Late last year, as part of our training (about a half-day out of a 10 day program, so ~5% of the time) was spent uncritically going through this model, presenting it as the only correct/compassionate model. Most of my other trainees there were not especially well educated, so for them this was the only education they've received on the topic. Anecdotally, most seemed to swallow it uncritically. (The culture at that workplace was such that pushing back even a little bit would have gotten me fired, or at minimum in deep trouble.)
Second, a few days ago I was at a methodology workshop at a university (back to my studies), and the first speaker ostensibly talked about different ways to engage with participants/gather data that don't involve traditional language-dependent measures, like interviews or surveys. This speaker took up the morning slot, so ~2 hours of an 8-hour day of a three-day workshop (although I skipped the next two), so ~10% of the total time. They uncritically repeated this model, which based on comments and discussion was treated as not only valid, but again, obviously true and the only way of looking at things. These people were either PhD students or working academics in a range of fields from psychology to design to law to business.
That isn't direct, concrete consequences, but if both average people are being taught this stuff, and academics are actively swallowing/repeating it, that seems plausible to lead to said consequences?
The biopsychosocial model has a bad reputation in disability activism circles because it is regularly used to tell disabled people that their problems are all their own fault and should be fixed with the power of positive thinking rather than, say, painkillers, or that all disabled people could work if they tried hard and believed in themselves. Especially in the UK where the phrase has been used extensively by the DWP to deny a lot of people disability benefits on the grounds that their impairments are theoretically within their gift to overcome.
The social model as actually practiced by the disability rights movement sees availability of medical interventions as an important variety of social accommodation for impairments - but the emphasis is on the person with the impairment wanting the intervention, rather than society wanting the intervention to make the person more convenient. (A standard example of treatment to make someone more convenient rather than actually being what the person wants to happen is ABA for autism, but there are equivalents for physical impairments like the historical 'pillow angel' horror.)
The typical example is pain treatment switching to 'cost-effective' psychological treatment rather than painkillers. (This is especially bad for the people who already know the first line psych treatment of worksheet based CBT doesn't work for them / makes them actively worse, which is fairly common in autistic women, who are also especially prone to chronic pain conditions)
"the prioritisation of return to work, increased activity and cost savings are all signs of this problem."
I can't speak to cost savings, but this statement implies getting back to a normal or fulfilling life (which for most people includes returning to work and increasing activity) is bad? Is that what you mean? I am not sure that view is held by most people with chronic pain.
Are you in the UK? Given the difference in the UK health care regime and that of the US, you may have a very different view of how the biopsychosocial model is used in practice. Because the US doesn't have a monolithic health service, decision are made in a much more piecemeal way. The application of models isn't done consistently. And given the profit driven approach in the US, "cost savings" aren't at the top of the list for doctors or health providers (or even patients if the have insurance). I can assure you that in the US we have much more of a problem of using TOO MANY painkillers, not taking them away from people who need them (though some government policies are resulting in this and its shameful, but its not due to the biopsychosocial model).
> fairly common in autistic women, who are also especially prone to chronic pain conditions
Autism is a very complex condition with physical, social, and psychological factors. Given the correlation of autism and chronic pain, its not a jump to say that the chronic pain experienced by people with autism also has physical, social, and psychological factors.
What data or guideline should make anyone consider psychotherapy more cost-effective than analgetic drugs for chronic pain conditions? For what timespans and outcomes? State of the art would be a combination of both with other interventions, IIRC, still with often dissatifiying results.
Really, what part of the biopsychosocial model sounds like "own fault"?
I kind of disagree with the way the disability rights movement uses the term "more convenient" as a way of saying "bad and ill-intentioned". If for example someone is constantly screaming really loudly, then trying to prevent that is "making them more convenient", but I am sometimes in favor of doing this (especially on a crowded ward full of lots of other people). Obviously it's better to solve the underlying problem somehow or give them some private ward where nobody else has to hear them; equally obviously this isn't always an option.
EDIT: Oh wait, it's the "psych" part, isn't it? I guess I always thought of that as something you add in to make people happy so they don't accuse you of medicalizing things too much, but I can see how that could go wrong if you take therapy too seriously. I'd be happy to move to "biosocial" but the therapists would never go for it.
The place this is mostly evidently a problem is chronic pain treatment, especially in light of the opioid crisis - a lot of people have had their painkillers taken away and replaced with platitudes and cognitive behaviour therapy, and the biopsychosocial model is regularly cited in defence of this.
The biopsychosocial model regularly gets sold as a cost-effective way of treating pain, and people in constant pain generally hate to be told they're getting a treatment they consider less effective because it's cost-effective, regardless of whether it's actually a good treatment or not...
I agree this model seems like a very bad fit for chronic pain treatment.
Do chronic pain patients like the Social Model? I think of the Social Model as saying that people should medicalize things less, whereas in chronic pain usually the problem is we're not medicalizing them enough.
Depends on whose framing of the social model we're talking about. I generally see two in the wild:
Mostly neurodiversity advocates goimg full social model and demanding that nobody attempts to treat their condition as an impairment at all; this is generally not welcomed by people with intrinsically pain-causing impairments. (The Deaf community has also been going in for this for much longer than we had the present vocabulary for it.)
Mostly 'classically' physically disabled people like wheelchair users attempting to get people to distinguish impairment and disability, but acknowledging that both exist and it's good to treat a impairment if possible, but generally considering currently society is if anything too pushy on that (eg pushing surgeries with high chances of failure / unacceptable side effects and then considering the impairment the person's own fault for declining them) and needs more of a push towards accommodating impairments and not turning them into disabilities. Chronic pain patients are generally quite on board with this because fatigue accommodation is often quite similar to other physical impairment accommodation and is vitally important to them (and often this is a fight they have over which painkillers to use, as most people find fatigue more aversive than pain but have trouble explaining this to healthcare providers).
If I believe that disability is an interaction between both biological and social factors, that the strongest version of the Social Model is false, and that people with chronic pain should get good access to pain killers, is there any existing group/term here that I can identify with or support?
That is what most people in disability activism call the social model, but I appreciate that's imprecise because others also use that for the pure social model; I don't think there's a precise term, I think biosocial model could actually catch on and at least won't set off a knee jerk reaction, and I think the most important signalling mechanism in the direction of the moderate version of the social model is using the words impairment and disability separately rather than referring to a condition as a disability.
The use of opioids to treat chronic pain is incredibly more complex than “good access to pain killers.” In fact, it’s good example of the biopsychosocial dimensions of the suffering from chronic pain. The topic is way beyond the scope of this comment, so I’ll just offer one anecdote:
I have a patient who has right lower extremity complex regional pain syndrome, so severe that her leg has atrophied and she has to use a knee walker. She has tried all interventions and still lives with 9/10 daily pain. One day she came to a followup visit and told me she had stopped her (substantial but not excessive) opioid regimen altogether. Shocked, I asked her why on earth? She said, “I got tired of being the person in the corner at the family gatherings who is treated kindly but also ignored because I’m a little bit numbed out by the pain medicine. I’m going to live with the pain and be the real me.”
I thought that part of the problem was that there AREN'T any good long term pain killers. E.g., that opioids have habituation problems such that after awhile they're no better than aspirin.
As someone who has been treating chronic pain for years, I aver that the biopsychosocial model is exactly the most sound way to approach the problem. The suffering from chronic pain has biological, psychological, and social dimensions and there are often ways to help people along each of those dimensions, depending on the problem. There is no chronic pain management clinician who uses the framing biopsychosocial “to tell disabled people that their problems are all their own fault.”
In the US the specialty of chronic pain management came out of anesthesia and has been historically overly focused on the biological cure--- “when my pain goes away, I’ll be OK.” Chronic pain is pain that is chronic in spite of physical treatments. You have to help people learn “I can be OK living with pain.”
Im not a doctor, but have done a lot of (amateur) research on biopsychosocial model when it comes to pain and I have never heard it used in the way the original poster describes. It's always much more what you describe. To me the biopsychosocial model is a way to introduce nuance to treatment and introduce a model which takes into account all factors influencing a condition.
Right. The biopsychosocial paradigm applies to many complex human conditions. For another example, I think it would add some nuance to the current volatile discussions around the idea that gender is purely a social construct.
Cases like this have been motivating opposition to the social model for some time - see e.g. the work of Susan Wendell (1997, 2001), who taps into a broader trend of saying that the social model has historically neglected the perspective of some disabled people, especially women, whose impairments are harmful and not only because of social stuff. Tom Shakespeare is another very influential critic of the social model on related issues.
Though, as others in the thread have said, part of the issue is that the social model was always something of a broad tent, and so the line between posing a problem for it, and precisifying it in a preferred direction, is very blurry. Perhaps some of what I wrote in section 6 here is vaguely helpful: https://jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/572.
A lot of abuse of people with disabilities, particularly mental illness, and even more particularly intellectual disabilities, results from the fact that people are trying to make their interactions more convenient for them. They want to do something easier, quicker, or cheaper to help someone, and it results in a lower quality of life for that person, where "lower quality of life" might mean "horrific abuse." Institutions, as you know, are infamous for this exact problem. Coming to understand this is a keystone to promoting more humane treatment of the disabled. But because of that, every single person with any kind of interaction with disability rights likely has heard the concept, and not everyone is the best at picking up on ideas and using them with appropriate nuance. So you see this idea get used in sloppy and promiscuous ways where not extending infinite resources towards a person is treated as an act of malice. That was never the intent when you're trying to teach people patience or advocate for resources above the level of persistent neglect, but it is how the concept sometimes get invokes in the real world.
"the fact that people are trying to make their interactions more convenient for them. They want to do something easier, quicker, or cheaper to help someone, and it results in a lower quality of life for that person...not everyone is the best at picking up on ideas and using them with appropriate nuance."
A general truism that scales and transfers to most every other human activity over time. 'Character is destiny,' evergreen.
Your edit here is a fascinating point that could be an entire post. Even without therapists being involved. After all, choosing to literally have completely different mental processes instead of going to therapy implies that if someone else doesn't choose this, he's at fault.
Millions of people objected to the COVID vaccines, and not solely on the ground that they questioned the safety/efficacy (though of course there was that, too). Many objected solely to the government requiring them to make a certain medical decision. Then when they were told they weren't allowed to go to work or interact with society in meaningful ways, they balked that they would be required to make a medical decision the way the government wanted them to, or sacrifice freedoms they'd previously enjoyed without doing that thing.
This could be similar to one reason deaf people might be so virulently opposed to cochlear implants. "Look, you can hear now. Good for you! Just make sure you go get the surgery."
Say you're doing mostly fine, but then some people come along and tell you to go make a medical modification to your body in a way that will amplify its capabilities in line with social expectations. In a way, society is asking you to make a medical decision in the way they approve. "I'm good, no thanks." Except it's not really a choice if society effectively shuns you for deciding in an unapproved way.
This doesn't have to be the same as the mandates for vaccines, to have the same effects on keeping your job, etc. Maybe you reject the modification, but many other people choose to get the implant and in so doing reduce the number of people who need the kind of deaf accommodations you need. At the limit, if everyone went to get the implant, you'd be the last person to provide accommodations for, so few if any people would provide them. You'd essentially be forced, by social convention, to make a medical choice you objected to.
Your optimal play in this situation is to attempt to stigmatize when other people choose to get the implant, advertise the implant, or inform people about the availability of the implant. The fewer people who feel comfortable getting the procedure, the more easily you'll be able to go through life without having to get it yourself. Thus, ironically, the only way to preserve your own freedom to make this medical choice the way you want is by pressuring others to make the choice in the same way.
Caveats: I have low confidence in this analysis, and would be interested to hear from anyone who has direct experience in the community. I'm not making any specific claim about deaf people in general, just reasoning out the incentives that I would naturally expect from this kind of situation.
Social model as a pure philosophy tends to be the domain of eg neurodiversity advocates (and, interestingly, the Deaf community who've been doing it a lot longer than current vocabulary).
Social model as a way of distinguishing impairment (the actual condition) and disability (how the person is actually harmed, usually via social factors), and suggesting that society goes too hard on trying to fix the impairment and not hard enough on trying to fix the disability, is much more widespread - so people should have painkillers (of the kind they want which balance pain and fatigue to their choice) and also fatigue accommodation and adequate rest.
Depending on the severity of the disability caused by the impairment, that seems clearly not actually the case? People with different impairments can compensate for each other even in a state of nature; some things which disable people in modern life are not even noticed at other developmental stages?
Most historical people had some kind of impairment by modern standards, generally caused by inadequate nutrition, but they still built a society capable of improving to our current state.
And I hope that as technological advancement continues, future people will consider most of us to be impaired in comparison to themselves...
Why should anyone help anyone? Either altruism or enlightened self interest (impairment isn't a binary state, eg lots of people who do useful jobs have impaired vision but nowadays we correct it with glasses and everyone is better off for this).
If you pick a specific impairment and posit everyone has that one, sure, you can pick one that makes people die out in the ancestral environment. Most modern humans would also die in the ancestral environment. This says nothing about their ability to contribute today, if that's how you judge the worth of a person (which seems overly harsh to me given we have surplus around to support quite a lot of people who don't 'pull their weight').
I dunno that's true in the general case, e.g. it's not obvious to me that a society with no hearing people at all would be impossible (though it'd be pretty different from ours).
It is certainly possible at a low-tech level. (Well, almost certainly.) I've read about communities of the deaf in Egypt in (very late) Roman Republic times. From the reports (which may be biased) it wasn't that different from other remote villages. To me this implies that they paid taxes rather than depended on largess.
"society’s failure to provide adequate bus routes is better considered a failure to resolve the disability, not the cause of it."
overall point taken, but i do think the more salient/useful feature of the social model is that its theory of social causation intuitively produces a sense of social responsibility. does it matter necessarily if society "caused" the disability if the larger motivation is to promote social action? whether the approach is infrastructural or medical in nature, either way the responsibility to accommodate falls on society's shoulders at large. i think the social model's recognition of this necessity still advantages it over the biopsychosocial model
Can you rephrase this? It sounds like you're saying this is an unnatural framing that's being used because it has the right political implications, which is exactly my complaint.
essentially i'm pointing to a functional disconnect between the two models. if the question is "what causes disability?" then i would agree that turning to the biopsychosocial model makes sense there. but if the question is "what should we do about it?" then i think the social model proves the more useful there. this is assuming we agree generally that social action of some sort is what's called for in order to solve the problem of, say, providing blind people with options for transportation
I guess I'm asking if you're just saying (sorry for hostile reframing) "anything is justified if it makes good propaganda".
For example (sorry for offensive example), suppose incels were to say "it's society that's making us single", and when you asked what they meant, they meant that, although it was their own characteristics that made nobody want to date them, society refused to give them free state sponsored gfs. And instead of framing this as "society has not solved our undateability", they were reframing this as "society causes our undateability".
Is your position that the incels' argument is no better or worse than the Social Model's, but that you politically support the Social Model but politically oppose incels for other reasons, so you would let the Social Model have convincing-sounding-propaganda-strongly-worded-framings but deny the incels' right to use the same? Or do you think there's some fundamental difference?
i'm more making a "pay mind to the baby in the bathwater" kind of argument. the social model orients towards the insight that disability is, pragmatically, a social problem — not in the sense that it caused it (this is the bathwater), but in the sense that it takes organization on a societal level — whether that means universal health care or expanded public transit — to alleviate it.
with the incel analogy, i think we'd have to accept the incel premise that undateability is a disability for which they're owed accommodation, a fundamental right they've been unjustly denied access to. i think, firstly, that the social model makes its argument in the context of the question of disability, and so naturally we run into errors of translation when applying it to a situation outside of that environment.
doing this translation and applying it anyway though, i think the essence of the social model recognizes that incels are a phenomenon of social concern in the first, and thus call for a social approach in order to solve it. (of course this would mean something like a materialist study of incel echochambers rather than state sponsored gfs, because again involuntary celibacy isn't a disability)
This example demonstrates nicely that the "social model of disability" is actually a two-step process for seizing power: First, advocates of the model push to define "disability" (absurdly) as a failure of society to accommodate an impairment, thus establishing themselves as absolute authorities with the prerogative to define terms arbitrarily in the area of disability. Second, those advocates leverage their established authority to define "disability" to include groups they wish society to accommodate, and to exclude those they don't wish society to accommodate. As a result, they accrue arbitrary power to redirect society's resources towards those they deem "disabled" (or whose "disability" they wish to highlight at the moment for political purposes), and away from those whose claims of "disability" they choose to dismiss (again, presumably for political purposes).
Now, I don't personally believe "incels" should be defined as disabled--but then, I don't believe anybody else should be, either, if we accept the social model definition, which attributes all disability solely to social failures of accommodation. When "disability" is redefined as an unlimited claim on societal resources for accommodation, the power to define/emphasize--or downplay/refuse to define--a condition as a disability becomes far greater than anyone should rightly possess in a democracy.
More like, the less nuanced propaganda, the more effective it is. You understandably are disgusted by this, because it's basically the definition of a symmetric weapon, but they do often happen to beat asymmetric ones in the short term. Still, kudos for fighting the good fight anyway.
This is where I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone. Isn't it really, really obvious that the point of the Social Model is its propaganda value? Isn't that essentially what its proponents say about it themselves? None of the scientific, governmental or advocacy organizations you quoted did an empirical study that found concrete evidence that fit the Social Model but not the Medical Model. How could they? It's not that kind of model. It can't be true in the way the theory of gravity is true, only in the way "thou shalt not kill" is true. It's an assertion of a terminological paradigm, not of a fact. Calling it "propaganda" is like calling a fish wet, as though that was an insult.
Its creators and proponents are not asking themselves "which model fits reality best?" -- they're asking, "which model advances societal progress the most?" Anybody who cares primarily about whether a model fits reality would be embarrassed of the Social Model.
It seems to me that the point of models of this kind is to dress up policy priorities as scientific facts. So trying to find a more accurate model is futile. It's like trying to pick out the saltiest equilateral triangle. The more fruitful path is to ask what role these models play in society. How does an empathetic, benevolent person who is also committed to honesty and clear thinking interact with a model of this kind in an ethical way?
“ It seems to me that the point of models of this kind is to dress up policy priorities as scientific facts.”
The disconnect here is that the usual meaning of “model” is usually “a thing that accurately represents another thing” or more precisely in this domain, “a tool we can use to make accurate predictions about reality”.
So if you call it “the Social Model”, and phrase all your training as if it is, in fact, a model (an accurate representation of reality), but it’s really just the “Social Rhetorical Strategy”, that is going to bother Scott.
A better term for what it is might be 'analytical lens' or 'framework', with the idea that you should look at a situation from several 'analytical lenses' in order to figure out possible solutions.
So you can look at disabled people under the 'medical lens' and propose solutions from that for how medical interventions may address their problems. And then you can also look at it under the 'social lens' and propose solutions for how social accommodations or restructuring society may address their problems.
And there may be a somewhat outdated assumption that everyone uses the medical lens by default, so you have to be really pushy about getting people to use the social lens at all.
They admit that they are advocating for society accommodating disabled people, but I don't think they admit in all contexts that that's why they choose the Social Model in the first place.
Once someone admits that he chooses his arguments based on their propaganda value, not truth, he basically gives up on convincing you if you aren't already convinced, because there is no reason for you to trust him.
Perhaps they admit in some discussions that they choose the framing for its propaganda value, but for it to have propaganda value, they rely on it not being publicized everywhere the framing is pushed.
So if you care about the truth, and about society making good decisions based preferably on asymmetric weapons, it's a good thing to publicize the fact that the framing has been chosen for propaganda value, not truth. Except perhaps if you fully agree with the goals of the propaganda; but even then you should reevaluate whether you might have been convinced by bullshit arguments.
Maybe I misinterpreted the Contra Caplan, but it seemed like that one said that mental disorder is currently political, but there's no other way. Whereas this one is saying that physical disability is currently political, but it should be redefined in a way that doesn't blame society as much?
But the social model does not allow for there to be any limits on degree of accommodation. If someone's disability is entirely the result of society's treatment, then it is reasonable to demand that society stop wrecking "disabled" people's lives. Wrecking lives is a crime. There should be no limits at all on how much we expect society to limit the wrecking of lives. But if the limitations that disabled people experience are the manifestations of illness or injury, it does make sense for society to put some limits on accommodations: Most of the money and efforts should go into setting up accommodations that give the most bang for the buck -- that help many disabled people in ways that make a real difference. But heroic, very expensive accommodations that would benefit only a tiny minority of the disabled -- such as building a handicap ramp up Everest -- can legitimately be skipped.
> There should be no limits at all on how much we expect society to limit the wrecking of lives
Most of the inhabitants of modern society appear to be entirely on board with wrecking some lives in the process of attempting to improve others. ( See, for instance, the subject of Aaronson's famous "Comment 171". Can easily find via Google; I suspect that Scott would prefer not to have it linked here. )
this is a good point, i can see the disadvantage there. i suppose i'm made a little uncomfortable here, because as with all lines in the sand i don't think there's a fair way to differentiate between what ratio of bio:psycho:social reasonably constitutes what degree of response — i.e what exactly counts as "most bang for the buck"? who'd make that call in the first place?
Many things, maybe everything, in the regulating of society involves that kind of judgment call. Any rule about who can do what is going to benefit some greatly, benefit some a moderate amount, and harmsome. We have to look for ways to set things up so there's the most total benefit, while minimizing the number of people who are greatly harmed. Speed limits: If everyone drove 5 mph on the turnpike there would be no fatal accidents, but many people would be harmed in various ways by the obligation to drive so slowly. The higher you make the speed limit the more fatal accidents there are, but of course there is a lot of benefit to being able to travel quickly. I don' t know whether we are setting speed limits at the optimal point, but it makes sense of think of cost-benefit while setting the point.
"We have to look for ways to set things up so there's the most total benefit, while minimizing the number of people who are greatly harmed." Interesting take. I personally would like to set things up to spread out pain equitably, first and foremost, and leave "total benefit" as a tertiary, even quaternary.
"Any rule about who can do what is going to benefit some greatly, benefit some a moderate amount, and harm some. We have to look for ways to set things up so there's the most total benefit, while minimizing the number of people who are greatly harmed."
Very much agreed! ( Albeit there are also second order effects: If a regulation sets a precedent for a future regulation which e.g. might make some effort they are considering making irrational (e.g. some types of "windfall" taxes), then they may decide making the effort is a bad choice. )
The social model might inspire some useful conclusions ("we should be more accommodating of disability when designing society"), but the biopsychosocial/interactionist model does the exact same thing! And the latter is much less likely to lead to less useful, and potentially harmful, conclusions ("we should invest fewer resources into finding medical cures for disability," "it is society's responsibility to accommodate all possible disabilities even at enormous cost").
While I'm all in favor of better bus systems, I don't think this is properly framed as ac accommodation to blindness. The accommodation would be allowing seeing-eye dogs on the bus. Or letting the blind person and their companion ride for one fare. And I'm also in favor of that. For that matter, I'd even be in favor of letting them ride for free, whereas I think most people should by a token amount.
HOWEVER, society is not obliged to provide accommodations. It chooses to do so, as a means of strengthening social cohesion. This is true of all accommodations, including those for having a low income. I often think that society should provide more accommodations, but this is because they strengthen social cohesion. If too many people feel that they are being treated unfairly, society tends to fall apart. (This is one of the problems with much of social media. They foster feeling of outrage.)
Note that society is not a person. I can care about other people (well, some other people), but society does not have that capability, except in an extremely extended metaphorical sense.
Even if you think being truthful can come second to rhetoric, I think you do still have to show that this kind of framing is more effective overall. To me, this sort of thinking really just seems to be leading to more polarization.
see my response to OP. obviously it does no one good to privilege politics over truthfulness, but i do think the two models perform two different functions
I don't think there's any question of truth here; no one using the social model would make a different empirical predictions of what they would physically observe in a given situation, compared to someone using the medical or interactionist model.
Rather, this is just a question of framing the same empirical truths in a different ethos, in a way that suggests different actions for clinicians and therapists, city planners and architects, relatives and friends, etc.
Given that there's no empirical disagreement, truth isn't at issue, all that's at issue is which framing creates the best outcomes.
In teh SF definition especially, I see a useful reframing towards utilitarianism in the social model: focus on whichever combination of treatments and accommodations actually make people's lives better, rather than looking for 'cures'.
This matches Scott's 'just take the hair dryer in the car with you' story in terms of consequentialist treatments, for me.
>social causation intuitively produces a sense of social responsibility
No, it doesn't. It merely asserts that a population of people are entitled to a certain standard of living and that other populations must foot the bill.
>does it matter necessarily if society "caused" the disability if the larger motivation is to promote social action?
Okay, so you're literally admitting that this has nothing to do with truth and therefore the 'social model' is a form of political propaganda that is useful to your desired ends?
>whether the approach is infrastructural or medical in nature,
The social model proper REJECTS the medical options here as stigmatizing and dehumanising, because it implies there's something wrong with these people that needs to be fixed.
>It merely asserts that a population of people are entitled to a certain standard of living and that other populations must foot the bill
i do generally agree with this. you clearly fundamentally disagree with me, which is fine, but i would like to point out that the nice thing about this is that you too get kickbacks from large scale structural accommodations for the disabled. it sure would be nice to have expanded public transit, no?
>Okay, so you're literally admitting that this has nothing to do with truth and therefore the 'social model' is a form of political propaganda that is useful to your desired ends?
no. i am making the case that the social model's usefulness is not in its capacity as an epistemic device to determine the "truth", it's better as a lens for thinking about possible solutions. there are a considerable number of people who are blind who want to participate meaningfully in society. whether they are blind because they were born that way, or drank rubbing alcohol, or suffered from a pre-existing condition that went untreated is, on the level of policy, not especially relevant — we will still need to implement blind-friendly crosswalks anyway.
>The social model proper REJECTS the medical options here as stigmatizing and dehumanising
sure, and i'm okay with letting that aspect of it go as i think it's at best tertiary for the relevance of the social model. (although i do say this as somebody who is fully able-bodied, so i have never experienced stigmatization nor dehumanization due to medical intervention and thus don't have much of a stake in that. i suspect a disabled person might disagree)
"i am making the case that the social model's usefulness is not in its capacity as an epistemic device to determine the "truth", it's better as a lens for thinking about possible solutions."
And it's a terrible lens for thinking about possible solutions, because it antagonizes the people (or "society", which is made up of people) who would have to fund and implement those solutions. My reaction to the social model is not "wow, I didn't know until now that it was possible to make disabled people's lives easier! It sure took political propagandists spewing obvious falsehoods to make me realize that wheelchair ramps are a thing!" It's more along the lines of "fuck you, I'm not giving you a single extra cent, you son of a bitch ingrate blaming me because you can't see!"
> whether they are blind because they were born that way, or drank rubbing alcohol, or suffered from a pre-existing condition that went untreated is, on the level of policy, not especially relevant — we will still need to implement blind-friendly crosswalks anyway.
I disagree, as it's highly relevant to what policies we should set to prevent more people from going blind.
I think it does matter how someone got disabled, and it becomes everyone's business when society is expected to pay for accommodations (and treatment, hopefully). If 10,000 people did some kind of stupid tiktok challenge and became disabled, I think that's pretty relevant information on whether society "must" or "should" accommodate them. It's a much better argument that society should help out when someone was harmed beyond their control.
I think society can and should set standards that say something like "if you harm yourself in a very predictable way through negligence and expect us to pay to restore your place in society, we reserve the right to socially shame you and withhold those payments at our discretion."
Why? Because we really really want to discourage people from doing bad things that have real costs on society. That's why we make criminals pay fines or go to jail. That's why taxes on cigarettes are so high. Accommodations are often expensive and disruptive. People creating the need for an accommodation based on poor decisions or knowingly harmful activities are asking or demanding that society incur costs that would otherwise not be needed. That's not okay.
We might decide to help people anyway, but it makes a difference how they became disabled.
I think the social model of disability is bad, but I'm amused by the way this community views propaganda in a wholly negative light. Propaganda is a crucial tool for any political movement. Politics is a dirty business and if you aren't getting dirty you don't care about winning. And if you don't care about winning, you're a sitting duck, a victim in waiting. (Quietism is respectable, I have no problem with staying quiet and keeping your head down. But if you enter the political arena and you aren't willing to play hard, that's SUICIDAL.)
To forward their political agenda. "Medical organizations shouldn't have a political agenda!" Too. bad, they do. That's the real world. If it's any consolation, American non-profit medical groups may have a liberal agenda, but they are also institutionally low-key hostile towards socialist goals like universal public health care. They want more tax dollars to fund their little fiefdoms, but they DON'T want to be cut out as unnecessary middlemen. This explains the surprisingly vicious fight between Bernie supporters and Liz Warren supporters in the 2020 Democratic primary. Rank-and-file nurses were more open to Bernie, while LPNs, doctors and admin sided with Warren.
"The social model proper REJECTS the medical options here as stigmatizing and dehumanising, because it implies there's something wrong with these people that needs to be fixed."
There isn't even a sharp boundary between medical options and infrastructure. Eyeglasses can be looked at as a medical option, as a prosthetic, or as (admittedly rather local and personal) infrastructure.
yup. there’s a lot to unpack here, but a case this everyday and this difficult suggests maybe we should just throw out the whole suitcase (category structure) and start over. easier said than done, of course.
One strange illustration of how Americans think about things is that the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act a third of a century ago turned out to be a boon to undisabled mothers pushing baby carriages because of all the ramps that were constructed for the smaller number of people in wheelchairs.
That got me thinking: Why didn't we build ramps for mothers pushing baby carriages before? Why did they benefit only as an accidental byproduct of society's concern for The Disabled? To my mind, mothers pushing baby carriages should rank up near the top of society's priorities, but instead they don't seem to come up much. Mothers pushing baby carriages simply aren't seen in modern America as one of the recognized groups whose rights must be protected from discrimination, so nobody much noticed that they'd benefit from ramps to get around staircases.
Also just in general, there's a nice property where anyone with any mobility can go up a ramp, but only able-bodied people without wheeled cargo can go up stairs.
And a similar thing applies to many accomodations - they make things easier for everyone, not just the people with the relevant disability.
If that was the case, the market would have already made those improvements. Your fantasy world where tradeoffs don't exist and every policy you support is universally good in every way does not exist. Everything has tradeoffs.
The tradeoff with ramps is that they take up more space than stairs and more time to create than a simple drop curb, I agree that without people arguing for more accomadations these would not have been implemented, it's just interesting how often the benefits can be widely distributed.
A large amount of urban planners, like enterprise software product managers, are known for not caring much about users but more about satisfying some set of architectural vision and pseudo-engineering requirements at a minimum cost.
I guess one of the reasons I feel the Social Model isn't literally true (but is still useful) is that the "State of Nature" is not particularly accomodating to any of us, regardless of our level of physical ability, and civilisation is an ongoing process to make it more convenient. E.g. paved roads are a relatively new innovation, before they existed a wheelchair would not have been a very useful way of getting around, but as the lack of ramps shows we didn't create them with people with disabilities in mind. I think that it's a sign of progress that drop curbs are now assumed as part of urban design rather than something people in wheelchairs have to specifically advocate for.
That said, I don't think there's any way to structure society such that being in a wheelchair never poses a barrier to accessibility, because uneven surfaces are the default in the natural world. That's not to say we shouldn't keep trying, but it does illustrate the limits of the social model, as opposed to the Medical Solution of giving everyone cyborg legs (sadly still a WIP).
There's also the possibility of accomodations making things worse for those who do not need them. For example, a bathroom that is not wheelchair accessible might allow for more stalls than one that is wheelchair accessible .
There may also be an interaction with the size of baby carriages - once there were ramps, carriages started increasing in size. Now some of them are almost the weight of a wheelchair.
Baby strollers for some are conspicuous consumption, for others a disability accommodation. The less industrialized world is still full of mothers physically fit enough to wear a toddler while also carrying goods to market. The poor in the first world don't need strollers because they don't stroll.
It's similar to a motte and bailey - a crazy idea is introduced and the originators and many others absolutely believe in the crazy version. For whatever reason it catches on politically and so it goes through a period of 'sane washing' where it's explained they didn't REALLY mean the crazy stuff, just this more reasonable version. 'Abolish the Police' went through this. The original version was absolutely about literally abolishing the police, and then it eventually was sanewashed by Vox and others to be about changing police budgets or something.
Not quite my recollection. As I recall the term "defund the police" was invented specifically as a strategic compromise between people who wanted to reduce police budgets and people who wanted to reduce police budgets to zero. It was deliberately ambiguous, but could be used in an honest statement of both positions- allowing people to do their own thing, under a broad banner of agreement that police budgets were too high. In that regard, it's not too dissimilar to "end cruelty to animals in food production" which some people will interpret as seeking the abolition of most or all uses of animals in farming, and others will see as about cage hens etc.
Do you have any sources for this to point to? I've never seen anything to indicate that it was a deliberate compromise, but I've long seen it as an accidental one. I've participated in a number of discussions where large numbers of participants supported "defunding the police," and thought they were all backing the same position, until I asked them specifically what they meant, and discovered in the process that they mostly supported completely different things and believed each other's actual positions were ridiculous mischaracterizations meant to discredit the movement.
This seems correct to me as well. I think there was probably one group of people who sincerely wanted to reduce but not eliminate police budgets, another group of people who really were using it as a smokescreen for eliminating the police and assumed everyone else was as well, and a whole bunch of other groups of people who were doing their own weird things with it.
The same thing is probably going on with the Social Model of Disability. One group of people is using it as a rhetorical technique, another group of people believes it literally and totally and means exactly what they say, both groups of people believe they're on the same page. It's all a pretty substantial blackpill on the organised left's capacity to do anything.
There was also "abolish the police" at the very start of the summer 2020 uproar, but outside of Minneapolis (where it took about a year to die down), it died down relatively quickly. You did have people trying to sanewash "abolish the police" into all sorts of totally unrelated things.
"What’s remarkable about this image is that it lays out the whole plan. They intend to start with “reasonable reform” like consent decrees and changes in use-of-force policies, move on to defunding police, and finally abolish police altogether. This didn’t happen because defunding the police is still massively unpopular, and so this graphic and message have been memory-holed and you won’t find them on the 8 Can’t Wait website today. But now we know what they’d like to do if they could."
That's exactly what you'd expect if "defund the police" was meant to be a multiply interpretable demand which some people interpreted in terms of a final goal of abolition, and others didn't. Some people who supported it wanted to use it to escalate to abolition via a sequence of steps.
No one's claiming "defund" wasn't supported by a bunch of abolitionists, the point is that it was supported by both abolitionists and non-abolitionists, for different purposes, in a sort of hedge-the-differences grand bargain. As far as I can remember, that's why it took off, much more so than previous demands to abolish the police which lacked the relevant ambiguity.
Nope, it was absolutely started by police abolitionists, and its framing as an extremely moderate view on policing created ONLY after 'defund the police' proved to be electorally toxic and that less policing was clearly leading to more crime.
Which part of that overlong post supports your position. I skimmed it and don’t see the support. It reads like a lot of “this person said this and that person said that@.
The supporters of "defund the police" on my social media timeline insist, strenuously and explicitly, that they mean the complete abolition of the police. They deny any ambiguity or willingness to compromise.
I don't know, if something was first said by a crazy person but 99.9% of people who say it now mean a different sane thing, and any support for the people saying it will end with the sane version being implemented, it seems pretty fair to just say the sane version is the 'real' meaning of the phrase?
Like, we do this with words constantly, their meaning changes to however people actually use them rather than what they originally meant.
I feel like we've all more or less agreed that the descriptivists are right and the prescriptivists are wrong when it comes language. This seems like trying to be a prescriptivist for entire phrases and ideas, which feels doubly perverse to me.
I think there is a lot of empirical disagreement over the "and any support for the people saying it will end with the sane version being implemented" part of your argument.
A crazy politician will start the "Tigers Eating Peoples Faces" party, people will vote for them because "Tigers are photogenic and endangered and worth supporting, and there's no way he's being literal", and then be shocked and outraged when their faces get eaten by tigers as a result.
N.B. I deliberately avoided real examples because I can only think of current culture war ones, I would appreciate a historical one that wouldn't trigger people's arguments as soldiers instincts.
Literal Hitler clearly said that European Jews will be annihilated if they cause a new World War and everybody ignored that part, including Jewish publications.
> At the time of the speech, Jews and non-Jews inside and outside Germany were paying close attention to Hitler's statements because of Kristallnacht and the possibility of war.[30] In the following days, the speech attracted significant commentary in Germany.[34] The German-Jewish diarists Luise Solmitz and Victor Klemperer mentioned the speech in their diaries but paid little attention to Hitler's threat.[44] Outside Germany, coverage of the speech focused on the geopolitical implications of Hitler's discussion of foreign policy,[45][46] while the threat to Jews went unremarked.[45] The New York Yiddish newspaper Forverts printed a headline referencing Hitler's threat against the Jews, but the article below it only discussed the threat of war and Hitler's alliances with Italy and Japan. The Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt discussed the speech in several issues beginning on 31 January, but did not emphasize the prophecy. On 31 January, it printed the main points of the speech without mentioning the prophecy; in an analysis of the speech published the next day, columnist Moshe Yustman discussed appeasement and other foreign policy issues.[47]
Seems to me that a significant issue here is a lack of clarity that is used to make motte-bailey type arguments.
First, we have to understand what exactly is it that is claimed to be caused by society. Is it:
1) The actual state of the person's body/mind. Is it society that causes a paraplegic to be unable to move their legs via nueral messages? (only ppl w/ crazy views about social construction of reality believe this).
2) Is it the fact that the person's condition creates a limitation for them that is caused by society? That it creates a significant limitation?
3) Is it the fact that limitation is regarded as a disability that is caused by society?
Of course, in some sense 3 is trivially true in that society in some sense is responsible for all the concepts we deploy and their boundaries but the problem is that people tend to use the theory with meaning 2 in mind but then defend it via meaning 3.
And more broadly we have to ask what one means by being caused by society or only via society. The natural understanding of what 2 means is that it would somehow not be a serious limitation in a state of nature without society. However, if you interpret cause to mean just that: if society was different than this fact wouldn't constitute a significant limitation than of course it's true because you could imagine a society where anyone who was caught walking or using their legs is immediately shot.
A very central example is a congenitally wheelchair-bound person's ability to traverse a building.
Society doesn't cause the person to be unable to use their legs, but it does build buildings with stairs instead of ramps/ elevators/chairlifts, and with hallways too narrow for a wheelchair.
And notably, ramps, elevators, and wider hallways are usable by the able-bodied as well, and also useful to people pushing strollers or transporting large or heavy objects.
That's certainly true, but that would be accurately described by saying: the choices people make -- and especially the standards we adopt -- make a huge difference in the ability of the disabled to function in society. And the fact that this much clearer statement is both the simpler and more obvious one calls into question the motive for advancing this more complicated theory.
I get that this is advanced by well-intentioned people who are upset we don't do more to accommodate the disabled but that's not a good reason to launder the fact that societal choices can make a big difference into something more -- a near absolute which obscures the fact that there are real tradeoffs here. That while sometimes affordable changes can enable someone with a disability essentially the same ability to navigate the world as someone without the disability at other times either accomodations can't bridge the difference or aren't practical.
At my work place, there were steps (it's a government building, so it does have the fascist large offset architecture). They needed to put in a ramp after it was built, so they did.
No one, but no one, uses the ramp - because it's a switchback. A straight ramp would put the bottom end in traffic. "Accommodating" in a way that people not in wheelchairs would use would mean tearing down the existing building and constructing a new smaller one so the ramp could be fit on the existing lot.
Oh and there's an elevator, which is accessible without using the stairs (there's parking under the building and the first level is exposed on the sides and accessible) - but they >also< had to put in the ramp.
I think the example of the spaceship is actually helpful. It’s very natural for nasa to build a spaceship that needs sight to be usable. But if they also build it so that only people between 5’10” and 6’0” can use it, and only people with normal smell faculties (because, say, some sensors report with smells that would be unnoticeable to some people or problematic ally overpowering to others) then we can see some of the possible variance in 2.
Interestingly that's exactly what NASA does. There are minimum and maximum height requirements to be an astronaut because it's very expensive to make multiple models of spacesuits and or to test and launch more complex adjustable mechanisms to make the various treadmills, seats etc adjustable.
I think that points to exactly why the way the theory is stated is very misleading. Yes, it's true that choices in how we design our environment can make a big difference for how people with different physical attributes/abilities are able to manage. But these aren't free choices, they are trade offs imposed by reality with costs and benefits we have to balance.
Yes, in most cases it makes sense to require new buisnesses to have a wheelchair ramp but not to require nasa to accommodate even relatively common variation in height. And there are going to be all sorts of cases in between from historical or artistic concerns to thr fact that in rural northern Canada lever doors give bears access (ok I included that bc it's a neat fact).
I'd add that this kind of theory is why I have my anti-charity attitude (to theories not people). Sure, if one pushes and pulls at all the definitions you can give it a meaning that's at least plausibly true.
However, what you can't do is render it an efficient means to communicate an understanding of how disability and society relate. The theory only complicates and obscures the truths that the examples people use to explain the theory convey.
Those examples illustrate important points but moving beyond them to this theory seems to only make mistakes and confusion more likely.
I consider the ADA a disaster myself but the reference to Everest (which I'm sure has been conquered by people with various limitations) recalled to me that in the early 70s, I think it was, 3 young disabled men climbed the highest peak in Texas, Guadalupe Peak. Sure, it's not the Rockies - but it's still an amazing feat. There's a trail but it's plenty rocky in places. I have forgotten the nature of their disabilities. But suffice to say they were wheenchair users, and on the parts of the trail where wheelchairs were of no avail, they essentially pulled them and clambered on somehow.
Very probably someday soon, activists will find fault with the marker that tells of this trek but for now you can read about it at the national park.
Sorry, I'm not sure where I erred in a partially ban worthy way. Obviously your serious reply shows you disagree that the social model of disability is so unserious as to be undeserving of a serious reply, but surely disagreement isn't grounds for banning.
Maybe I can try to make my point in a different way. Is there any comperably prominent expert view or theory that is so unserious that you think mockery or another non serious response is most appropriate? I'm not interested in the specific view or theory, just whether or not such a case exists. By appropriate I mean meriting and/or effective in exposing as unserious.
I think that if a viewpoint is sufficiently entrenched that it's systematically argued for by experts, then mockery probably won't help change that, even if it's arguably deserved. It might be cathartic, but anyone sympathetic to open mockery probably wouldn't have taken the experts arguing the position seriously in the first place.
Even if it's _not_ sufficiently entrenched, mockery is still not appropriate. If it's _actually_ fringe, then straight up ignoring it is perhaps appropriate (No one has time to seriously and deeply address every weird thing that 3 people online believe). If it's gotten enough traction that ignoring it isn't an option, then it also has enough traction that mockery won't be effective.
>Is there any comperably prominent expert view or theory that is so unserious that you think mockery or another non serious response is most appropriate?<
If no one attempts to seriously discredit it, you don't actually know how dumb it is. Maybe there are counters to your counters, which you won't find out about unless someone gives a serious argument that provides the opportunity to present them.
"Why" something is dumb is always valuable to explain. We don't need to do it ourselves on every topic, but we certainly don't need to discourage other people's attempts.
This felt less earnest than most of Scott’s post, and the examples given seem more mocking & uncharitable than they should be & the literal interpretation seems less literal & support by quotes than it claims it
I don’t have a staked position on the topic, as I don’t know anyone disabled and my politics doesn’t take a side on the topic
However, while Scott’s rhetoric often convinces me, this has done the opposite for once
Maybe this is stupid, but do birds think of us as disabled because we cannot fly? (Like, insofar as they think.)
Or to put it another way, I can't exactly climb Mount Everest either. Does that make me disabled?
It seems to me that we all have a scope of things we can not do, and those are very much on a spectrum. What's the point at which it becomes a disability? When we can't provide for ourselves at all? Or when we can't do the things that society demands of us?
These all seem like naive questions that people have good answers for--I'm just trying to think it through. But it kinda-sorta-seems like you could steelman something useful out of the Social Model? Even if it's mostly pretty stupid.
I like the answer that a disability is a limitation that is unnatural. Not artificial - a birth defect is still unnatural even though it was not caused by any accident or injury. Natural in this context meaning essentially "functioning normally". A functioning eye can see, so blindness is a disability. A functioning arm cannot fly, so flightlessness is not a disability.
I have some gripes with the social model, but it does have some very valid points about accommodations.
Needing glasses or contact lenses is an example of a disability that is accommodated in most places. More specifically, the technology that "makes" these people not disabled is accommodated.
Most places do not make you remove your glasses before you enter, even if it may be potentially an issue (for example you can wear glasses to saunas even if it makes your glasses fog up). If it is a serious issue, it gets accommodated (fit over safety glasses that go over most glasses).
Mobility devices and/or service animals don't always get these accommodations. Especially service animals - a real service animal is NOT an issue, even in a food service venue, because the animal is trained to make it not an issue (emotional support animals are a different story and I don't like those people misusing accommodations for service animals).
It's not saying that lasik is bad or shouldn't be available. It's acknowledging that lasik is super expensive and sometimes inherently not an option and sometimes limited accessibility and people are getting on fine with glasses. If they're fine with glasses, you shouldn't force them to get an expensive, invasive procedure just so it makes your life easier (e.g by not providing fit over safety glasses).
This is exactly where the social model derived language around impairment and disability is really useful.
Short sightedness is an impairment, but you have a good solution available which is socially accepted and generally accommodated (glasses) so you are not disabled by the impairment.
Acceptance of glasses and accommodation for them in eg safety equipment has considerably improved within my lifetime (eg when I was a kid I was embarrassed to wear my glasses as 'speccy' and 'four-eyes' were common insults).
It’s useful as an example of where an impairment is socially accommodated (via acceptance, medical interventions and glasses-friendly product design) to such an extent that short-sighted people are not considered disabled at all. Best of all, no handouts involved.
People who promote the social model would point to this as a 100% success case when discussing more “severe” disabilities.
- At any instant, there is a considerable range in functioning even in just the bulk of the population.
- Over a lifetime, there is a considerable range in functioning for each of us.
- Over historical periods, changes in technology can both widen and narrow the range of "functioning normally", both compensating for some natural limits (e.g. due to artificial lighting) and exacerbating other natural limits (e.g. making distractions more pervasive)
I agree that disability carries the implication of "disabled relative to the average person" and only makes sense as long as there's some large population of people with basically the same health level who form a natural comparison group. I think this is mostly still true, but could become less true if we get transhumanism, or if there are situations like obesity where lots of people in a society start having the same problem simultaneously.
But it's the lives of 'the average pesron' are those which disabled people are comparing their own to when demanding "accomodations", so it makes no sense for disability advocates to criticize this definition
>What's the point at which it becomes a disability? When we can't provide for ourselves at all? Or when we can't do the things that society demands of us?
The disabled, here, are the ones making the demands. They aren't saying 'we're fine living how we are, thank you very much', they're demanding to have full access to the things that abled society does.
Unaided flight isn't a normal part of modern human life, so it isn't a disability. Being able to drive is, so physical disabilities like blindness are a disability. There's no flying people we can point to and accuse of perpetrating an injustice by not finding a way to allow us to fly too. But this is what happens for everything disabled people want.
OK, thinking this through. Parts of society are designed with a reference class of humans in mind. There is nothing normative about this reference class; nothing natural. Parts of it exclude children; at times, women have been excluded.
So you could jury-rig an argument that says, “ There is no state of nature--everything we do happens in a society. Naturally, of course we have a variety of abilities. But a disability is when someone has trouble because due to some deviation from a physical norm they are excluded from the reference class for society. But this is a problem with the reference class, not themselves. “
The fact that you can create a society within a state of nature does not mean there is no state of nature. I agree that our wealth and technology will constantly open up different choices and opportunities, but avoiding the acknowledgement of a state of nature allows the magic realism that always seems to creep into these Marxist plans to remake society.
Disability is always relative to the typical expectations, which is where the Social Model seems most true - a bird that cannot fly is disabled (if you use that term for animals), and humans would struggle in a society built by flying creatures, but fortunately we don't so our lack of flight poses few barriers in everyday life.
I would say the real reason the Biosocial model is more useful than the Social Model is that it's often easier to provide a prosthetic than to restructure all of society to make it more accomodating. It's much easier for me to wear eyeglasses than for everyone else to use really large print on signs! Social accomodation like changes in the built environment are useful, but so are artificial limbs that enable people to walk again - and a combination of both achieves a lot more than either in isolation.
I'm no utilitarian, but that's where it comes in really handy, doesn't it? A disability is where the net harm to society to try to accommodate your needs outweighs the burden to you in having to navigate one's own accommodations.
Because of the bell-shaped curve where "average people" are not that dissimilar, this model reduces to the Biosocial model since the optimal value for design is going to be well within that bell curve.
My partner has a very strong sense of smell, and there are certain circumstances where the social model helps me understand his condition as a disability. Some cities (New York) have a system for dealing with garbage that sometimes leaves him unable to walk down certain streets, and some people wear levels of perfume in offices that make him unable to go there. (When I say “unable” I mean this in the same sense that someone with a limp is “unable” to climb stairs - it’s possible but really unpleasant.)
What should be a superability has instead been turned into a disability.
My wife also has an extremely strong sense of smell, but for her it really is more of a superability. That is, she is not impaired or disabled by unpleasant odors (our Rottweiler’s flatulence being a possible exception). So I wonder if your partner’s disability isn’t just being a supersmeller, but one who is additionally uncommonly sensitive to bad odors.
I think you're getting at teh same thing I liked about the SF definition of the social model at the top, where it says clinicians should focus on improving function in society.
It feels like this model is inherently utilitarian, focusing only on how to give people the best lives possible through whatever means. Rather than having an essentialist view of what is 'correct' for either a body or a society, and trying to force people into that standard through cures or training.
I think the closest thing to an example of the social model being right is probably high-functioning autism. Throw an aspie on a deserted island and throw a normie on a deserted island and there's *not* clearly a difference there; the issue is mostly (not quite entirely; there are a couple of other effects, but they're minor) that normies detect us as Other.
Probably sort of. Attentional focus seems to exist on a spectrum, and people may struggle to control their focus well enough to handle office jobs, but thrive in other environments (which might be closer to our ancestral ones.) But at the extremes, lack of attentional control could be a serious impediment even to ability to exist in a tribal environment or a desert island.
I think this is an interesting example that goes along with Scott’s point. I see a lot of ADHD peeps say that they’re only disabled in the context of modern society (work/school/necessity of operating vehicles for transportation/constant availability of junk food). Yet, ADHD is most often so much more than not performing as well as a neurotypical person ... there’s often mood disturbances and difficulties with social norms that even in Paleolithic times, it would be a hinderance to thriving. Imagine the caveman who accidentally insults someone because they can’t keep their mouth shut, or who gets irrationally frustrated and angry when they can’t get the fire started rubbing their sticks, who impulsively climbs a rock formation for fun but falls and injures themself. And that’s not even getting into incredibly common comorbidities like sleep apnea, migraines, etc etc. All of those things shorten lifespan and quality of life regardless if one is alone on an island versus working in a Manhattan office.
ADHD has always been an odd one for me in terms of why people ask for accommodations. A job may require that people devote lots of attention to a specific task for long periods of time. Why should a company have to change a job to accommodate someone who cannot do those things?
Nobody wants an accountant that constantly gets distracted and can't finish calculations. I'm frankly baffled that some people seem to think that employers should find a way to make that work instead of just hiring someone who does the job better.
Note, the ADA doesn't require that an employer accommodate here, but there are definitely people pushing that it should. The standard is that someone with a disability that could complete the essential functions of the job with a reasonable accommodation be given that reasonable accommodation. If concentration is an essential function of the job, the ADA doesn't negate that. Medication that permits someone with ADHD to concentrate enough to do the job can meet the essential functions - the medication is the accommodation because after using it, the employee can do what the job requires. The employer doesn't have to change the job to match the applicant, only permit an otherwise qualified applicant to do the job if they can.
In my line of work, the type of accommodations being asked for are things like dedicated quiet blocks and more flexible work hours. An ADHD accountant might turn out completely capable of doing the job, provided they are not expected to sit still for 8 hours with constant interruptions from email and chat apps. Those things are part of the social environment after all, not anything intrinsic to accounting.
If one job applicant would require a separate office and flexible hours (which could mean less certainty on when tasks get done and if someone is available for, among other things, meetings) and another can just do the job, I think it's quite reasonable for a company to hire the person who can just do the job.
So that goes back to the curb-cut effect mentioned upthread (which is its actual name in the urban planning literature). Only ADHD workers actually need flexibility and guaranteed no-meetings time to do their jobs. But once a company makes it available, it benefits everyone. I can tell you that all the software developers I work with became more productive once they could properly defend their deep focus time against those quick meeting and chat requests that became so common during lockdown. Same for flexibility - this is now a cherished perk that people would not give up without higher compensation. I believe most of these widely beneficial accommodations _do_ make financial sense overall, it’s a 20-bill on the sidewalk. But you won’t see them if you apply the false dichotomy of can do the job/cannot do the job that you posed in your comment.
As for private offices… I agree that would not fall under most companies’ reasonable accommodation policy. I don’t think that sinks my whole argument though - noise-cancelling headphones, cubicles with doors and remote work all exist. I don’t need to defend the most expensive possible solution, only the financially viable ones.
Aspies clearly have worst social skills than non-aspies, and these social skills are a crucial part of society. It's unlikely we could have the kind of society we have if the majority of people had the social skills of aspies. Throw a thousand aspies on an island and it likely won't do as well as 1000 non-aspies. The 'throw a [single] blind person on an island' example is simply pointing to the fact that blindless fails even at the individual level and fail much harder than sighted aspies.
And this is why the social model is dumb - the society that is supposed to "accomodate" all these completely non-flawed disabled people is only capable of existing thanks to 'abled' people in the first place!
If these 'opressive' abled people didn't exist, the disabled wouldn't simply be 'non-opressed' - they would die out!
Your opening statement here is probably incorrect - as long as those 1000 are all 'aspies' they will likely be fine. Social skill defecit in 'high functioning' autism is primarily a problem of translation between neurotypical and autistic modes, rather than something that persists even when everyone is in the same mode.
This is definitely not true - there's no possible mechanism that could explain a bunch of people who are definitionally worse at a wide range of communication skills suddenly becoming better when put with other people who also lack communication skills. You can imagine gathering up a bunch of people with social anxiety and trying to get them to interact - none of them would want to, because they all have social anxiety. The fact that everyone else also has social anxiety doesn't suddenly make it easier to interact, it just means it's bad for everyone. For this to be a "translation" issue, you'd need evidence that there's some specific, 'different' way of interacting that autistics have that isn't just "worse", which there is no evidence of.
Ooooh, *Scientific* evidence? With a capital S and everything?
If you actually read the paper, it both fails to provide what you claim (some particular mode of interaction that is unique to autistics - what precisely does this supposed mode consist of?) and even directly contradicts you - "rapport ratings revealed significantly lower scores for mixed chains" and "Information transfer selectively degrades more quickly in mixed pairs, in parallel with a reduction in rapport." - meaning the effect was entirely explained by a lack of rapport between the groups, not some special method of information transfer.
You can also see by the IQ values that the "autistic" group is a highly biased sample (115 mean IQ vs significantly sub 100 mean IQ for autistic people as a whole)
I think this is getting a little heated, so I'll stick to specific factual points - the initial assertion was about high functioning autism, not the variety that comes with sub 100 IQs, and my position is the perception of poor social skills in such individuals is caused by the lack of rapport rather than being actual deficiencies when not in a majority neurotypical context.
Since we're clearly dispensing with charity here, I'll just say that the particular mode of interaction that is unique to aspies and high-functioning autistics is speaking English (or other appropriate language) while saying only what you mean and meaning only what you say. And it's a really good tool for communication.
Just, don't depend on it for communicating with normies.
You seem to have missed the point - if autistics talk fine to autistics and neurotypicals talk fine to neurotypicals, but mixed groups have miscommunications, that's exactly what would be predicted by 'translation issues'
For your point to be true you'd expect to see *worse* performance in all-autistic groups than mixed groups.
"imagine gathering up a bunch of people with social anxiety and trying to get them to interact - none of them would want to"
If socializing, that is, working together equated to eating I bet they'd figure it out. Given enough time "social anxiety" would drop from their vocabulary.
> This is definitely not true - there's no possible mechanism that could explain a bunch of people who are definitionally worse at a wide range of communication skills suddenly becoming better when put with other people who also lack communication skills.
Even assuming this were true, which is not a given, it's irrelevant. The point is that there's an implicit assumption that the social skills that "aspie's" lack make positive contributions to the society's fitness on this island, and that's why a society of aspie's would fair worse than a society of normies. That's not at all obvious.
>It's unlikely we could have the kind of society we have if the majority of people had the social skills of aspies. Throw a thousand aspies on an island and it likely won't do as well as 1000 non-aspies.
This is not actually particularly obvious. Aspies suck at lying and spotting lies - but that's no issue without liars around. Aspies suck at avoiding triggering normies' Evil Radar - but without normies around that's again no issue.
This understanding is one of several reasons that labels like "high-functioning" are dispreferred among many people in the autistic community—"high-functioning" leads people to underestimate the level of disability.
People hear 'high-functioning autism' and their mental model is closer to 'high-functioning for a neurotypical person' (i.e. not disabled) than it is 'high-functioning for an autistic person' (i.e. disabled but not accompanied by additional disabilities such as intellectual disability in particular).
For me, the hardest part of being autistic is that I am so full of social anxiety I have to ask people "You believe me, right?" And that makes me sound like I might be lying, when I'm absolutely telling the truth. I am a very tall, big guy and I've been told I have an intimidating look... And when strangers look at me nervously, especially women, I am so socially anxious I sometimes blurt out something conciliatory. And it almost always makes things worse. No matter what I say, it makes things worse. No matter how hard I try, I can never fit in... Not even around other autistics. They just stare at me with this glazed over look in their eyes and when they talk to me, I can tell they just are going through the motions. I try to be grateful that I can function in society well enough that I can stay out of jail and stay out of the homeless shelter. But it is still so hard... I just have to hold out until age 65 so I can retire and smoke weed all day every day. Just 26 years left... If I can hold out I can finally get some relief. I hope.
This is reminiscent to me of the famous Ronald Coase paper, The Problem of Social Cost.
Coase was writing in an economic context and talking about the problem of pollution and other externalised costs. But he had the same key insight - identifying who is causing the problem and making them responsible for fixing it is not always the best way to address the problem.
The Social Model of Disability is akin to the Polluter Pays Principle - it frames the cost of certain issues as a matter of justice and fairness, and insists that the costs must be borne in a way that alleviates this perceived unfairness. But in doing so it neglects to recognise the stark reality that not all problems can be reasonably resolved in this manner. Both of these ideas are more interested in theoretical conceptions of justice rather than in dealing with the messy reality where their prescriptions sometimes become unworkable.
Right. Good insight. There are a lot of American policies, such as dealing with mentally disabled students in public schools, where a disinterested public-spirited magistrate would arrive at a different arrangement as being in the best interest of society, including the other students in the class. But here in modern America everything becomes a struggle over who is the more oppressed victim, so we do a lot of things that are cost-ineffective and kind of dumb as a matter of principle.
Functionally speaking I think these aren't models (of reality) but disguised moral claims about when it is normatively appropriate to accommodate a disability.
I've long wondered if it wouldn't make more sense to simply offer some disabled individuals large sums of cash rather than ask people constructing buildings etc to accommodate them. Obviously wouldn't make sense for the common easy to accommodate cases and it would have to be enough to account for the harms resulting from potential lack of community/etc but at the very least it seems to me that we should ask the disabled if they'd prefer yearly/lump sum cash payments whose NPV is less than the NPV cost of accomodations.
Unfortunately, the really weird fact that we somehow don't understand laws that demand buisnesses lay out money as a tax means it's not a real option. Still, I think considering this in extreme hypothetical scenarios demonstrates the claim that it should always be society who offers an direct accomodation can't possibly be correct.
> we should ask the disabled if they'd prefer yearly/lump sum cash payments whose NPV is less than the NPV cost of accomodations
This introduces a problem discussed in the old UBI threads: many (most?) people who suddenly wind up with a "life-altering" pile of cash (even with timed installments) have a tendency to spend, give away (to a parade of friends/relatives with "urgent need") or, worse, use it to get into massive debt. (See, for instance, this 2008 piece re: lottery winners: https://archive.is/wip/AMNIq )
That's a fair concern and should be something that should be raised and pointed out to disabled individuals in the particular category. I still tend to think, however, that it's probably a good idea to let them make the call.
Also, I think the result might be different if their friends and family and the individual themselves gets the message the money is supposed to allow them to overcome barriers to access etc... It's one thing to get a gift from a lotto winner another to take the money your disabled relative could otherwise use to hire an assistant.
The same reason we build interstates rather than just cutting everyone a check for “transportation costs”. It’s a solution to a coordination problem (not a perfect one, but probably a more successful and actually easier one).
The other thing you’re not taking into account is that accommodations allow the disabled person to be productive, while cutting them a check does not. So you get back some or all of the cost of accommodations (or may even be net positive - it’s easy to imagine even a single good employee more than offsetting the cost of a concrete ramp).
A tangent about libertarian polemics.The libertarians are right that the state is an instrument of violent force. Taxation is inherently violent and the interstate was created through indirect, obfuscated threats of violence. The libertarians CONVINCED me of that, their arguments seem rock-solid. But since we obviously need interstates, I can only conclude that violent coercion of the citizenry is necessary to maintain crucial civic institutions. Mission accomplished, libertarians? Was this what you intended? Maybe refine your message?
Cash support can go far (ie there are specialized vehicles for people who do not have legs to be able to drive themselves, and those are expensive because they are custom due to lack of demand)
However, unless that person is exempt from having to go to the DMV to register the vehicle, the DMV building will need to be accessible. So maybe one may argue, ok, government and publicly owned buildings need to be accessible, but what about private business? A person without legs still may want to travel for leisure, and how many private hotels would build wheelchair accessible bathrooms and showers if they were not legally required to? There’s no feasible way that someone who received money for their disability could ensure that enough hotels have the accessibility they need, unless you’re talking about sums of money great enough that wheelchair users could own most private properties. In that case, I’d argue it’s less expensive and more simple to mandate that all buildings have accessibility built in.
Regarding private buisnesses, well it's a sum of money that's equal to their share of the cost of making these places wheelchair accessible. If that's not that so expensive per wheelchair user then presumably a lot of buisnesses will do it anyway to attract more customers. Indeed, I think it might be more desierable to have a few buisnesses that are a tad bit more expensive (but less so than the extra cash I have) than it is to have every buisness minimally accessible. If it's quite expensive per wheelchair user than it's a fuckton of money they all recieve.
And the DMV doesn't literally need to be accessible. They could have curbside service or even send someone out to your house for anyone in a wheelchair. Depending on details it could be better or awful and humiliating -- but that still doesn't make it obvious the payment isn't the better deal.
What specific examples of building accommodations are you talking about? Genuinely asking.
Otherwise, I suppose this relates to several recent Supreme Court cases and discrimination. Is it fair to force someone to accommodate someone else, so that all best attempts are made to ensure equal access to all business for everyone? SCOTUS has been ruling in ways that I disagree with, but it’s been 6-3 many times,
To put it another way, let’s say there’s a restaurant owner who does not want to serve people of a certain race. A common libertarian argument is that that is fine, let members of that race just dine somewhere else? But what if you live in an area where discrimination against that race is so common that there are no restaurants to serve them? Should they be content to go their life without dining out in their hometown? Would monetary compensation make up for that? I’d argue no but I can see how some would disagree. So should people be allowed to discriminate against disabled people as long as we throw money at them? I’d say no, most of society had decided that’s not right.
Re: your wheelchair last paragraph: is it not more simple to have a ramp n every building than to dedicate staff to going to people’s houses? I mean I think both would be the loveliest and kindest option, but I error toward allowing everyone to be able to have the same miserable DMV experience as someone non-disabled if that’s what allows them to feel they’re living an equal life. And I think that’s mostly what you also mean, too, but I just generally think that requiring wheelchair accessibility for buildings is such a no brainer kindness that we can’t allow private business to not to do it. Because in my experience (not physically disabled but mentally so) is that most businesses these days WILL be willing to lose disabled customers if it means an immediate, however short term and short sighted, quarterly earning profit boosts their stock options.
You conflate "refuse to serve someone (because of racial animus)" with "refuse to invest in accessibility improvements that may not ever be used." They seem very different to me. In any case, a large payment to a disabled person can cover, for example, relocation to an area with sufficient density of similarly disabled people that widespread accommodation becomes profitable.
That's a non-answer, as the entire point of the question was to determine the priority between the two, given that in the real world there are *always* tradeoffs (in this case, massive tradeoffs).
"businesses these days WILL be willing to lose disabled customers if it means an immediate, however short term and short sighted, quarterly earning profit"
Where did this myth come from, and why is it still around in 2023? Are we really still pretending companies are chasing after quarterly profit boosts when we have Uber losing billions of dollars for 14 years in the hopes of becoming profitable in another decade or two, Netflix voluntarily not turning a profit for 15 years due to constant reinvestment in the business, Tesla losing money for 10+ years but making massive profit now due to this long-term vision - I could go on. It's patently false that companies just chase after short-term profit - even humorously false if you're aware of recent trends in the venture capital world.
But mostly I was suggesting this for the more unusual disabilities that are both relatively rare and relatively expensive to accommodate (making the cost per individual very high). Wheelchairs are pretty common.
It is also worth remembering that there are disabilities that _cannot_ be accommodated because we lack the technology. Consider anosmia. If someone cannot smell spoiled food, there isn't an equivalent of adding ramps for wheelchair access to accommodate them.
If there was sufficient demand from moneyed wheelchair users for hotels rooms in a particular place to bid the price of an accessible room to, say 3x price of an unaccessible room, I am pretty sure that many hotels would convert some of their rooms to become wheelchair accessible. For that to work you do not need "wheelchair users to own most private properties" or anything like that.
San Francisco's amazingly ornate city hall, with its magnificent marble staircases, was reconstructed at huge monetary and aesthetic expense in the late 20th Century to accommodate wheel chair ramps. Here's the PR release from the city government:
"Until not long ago, there was a sign on the corner of Polk and Grove that pointed to the side entrance to the basement and said, "DELIVERIES AND HANDICAPPEDS." That was the state of accessibility. That was our version of Jim Crow. Even when a ramp was installed in 1985, it went to the back door on Van Ness.
"A person in a wheelchair has never been able to enter City Hall by the front door... until today, Tuesday, January 5th 1999 at noon!"
What strikes me is that the added ramps didn't benefit just the disabled, but also mothers pushing baby carriages, workmen delivering heavy objects, travelers with wheeled luggage (one answer to the common question of why it took so long to put wheels on suitcases is because before the Americans with Disabilities Act mandated wheelchair ramps, you still had to lug your suitcase up staircase, so why bother?), and a host of other users of City Hall. But all these other constituencies who benefited from the changes were ignored in this announcement because they aren't an officially recognized oppressed victim group the way The Disabled are.
It would seem to me that if official oppressed victim groups really are oppressed victim groups, they would be emphasizing how they share interests with unoppressed nonvictim groups such as mothers pushing baby carriages, water bottle delivery men, and frequent fliers. But instead they tend to treat their officially disprivileged victimhood as privileging them to not bother recruiting official nonvictims to join their coalition.
I responded more favorably to a previous comment of yours, but now I do bristle much more at this comment where you essentially are telling disabled people how to properly disable, and in that you’re being unkind. I do think that society accommodating the disabled can help everyone, which is great, but it would be the correct thing to do EVEN if it did not benefit all. Fighting for individual rights is not automatic victimhood and does not inherently REQUIRE that it benefits all.
I think you’re really over exaggerating the situation to the point of it being off topic to the greater nuance of Scott’s post. You’re straw manning that disabled people are alienating others and that they don’t have many, many non-disabled people who agree they should have accommodations. They do.
It may be the correct thing to do on an individual moral level, but that has no bearing on whether or not there's a moral justification for using the violent coercion of the state to force "society", at gunpoint, to provide these accommodations.
When an individual is born into this world they do not start off with any obligations to anyone else. Not once do they sign any imagined "social contract" or agree to be mutually enslaved by their neighbors just because they live in proximity. There is no fundamental moral justification for one person having authority over another (and therefore being able to forcibly enslave them to provide 'accommodations' for others).
That question is incoherent. If someone enslaved someone else using violent coercion, they would be a government by definition. There's also no reason a group of people whose goal it is to "prevent people from enslaving each other" themselves have to enslave everyone else to achieve that goal. Put simply, you can have a bunch of people with guns and a goal to prevent slavery without them having to steal 50% of people's income at gunpoint to achieve that.
Eh ... We use the violent coercive powers of the state all the time.
To my mind, the more people who benefit from using the violent coercive powers of the state the better. But that kind of greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number thinking is now treated as inherently dubious. Today, the fewer the beneficiaries, the more absolute their claim upon the violent coercive powers of the the state.
I think that the value in Steve's point is that sometimes accommodating disabled people can destroy something in the process (in this case the aesthetics of the capital building), and so it would be nice if they would take a utilitarian approach of pointing out all of the other benefits generated, rather than a rights based approach claiming that it is their societal due.
Let me give you a personal example, in which I am expressing my personal opinion, and not trying to speak for disabled people as a whole.
I've been struggling with UC for a while which, to briefly summarize the condition, sometimes requires prompt access to a bathroom. I also enjoy hiking in the wilderness where there are not many signs of human development.
To perfectly accommodate me when my UC was at it's worst, I might've needed a bathroom to be build every 100 feet. That would've destroyed the ambiance of the hike. And the vast majority of the population wouldn't have needed that many bathrooms, so it would've been (imo) overly destructive.
Now that my UC is less bad, I might onl need a bathroom located at the parking lot. I would probably have more luck getting this, and be better liked, if I explained my disability AND pointed out that even healthy people need bathrooms, so it would be nice for everyone.
I don't know if this was exactly what he was trying to say, but this is my interpretation of the point, and to me it seems reasonable.
My default perspective for evaluating policies is 19th Century leftist Benthamite greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number utilitarianism. Thus, in the example of the San Francisco City Hall, spending a fortune to mar the looks of perhaps the most splendid municipal building in America by putting in ramps sounds more justifiable to me the _more_ people there are who will benefit from the ramps. And when you stop and think about it, there actually are lots of people who aren't officially members of The Disabled protected class who benefit from ramps: besides wheelchair-users, there are also mothers pushing babycarriages, workmen delivering heavy objects, and frequent fliers with wheeled luggage. And in the future, robots will do better with ramps as alternatives to stairs. So ramps are, by my count, win-win-win-win-win.
But that Benthamite way of thinking is badly out of fashion these days in which greatest-good-for-the-smallest-number anti-utilitarian minoritarianism is seen as self-evidently morally superior.
For example, to, say, the Biden Administration, making a farce out of NCAA women's swimming to accommodate Lia Thomas is justified precisely because there are so few individuals like Lia Thomas. Just as damaging men's college sports (e.g., ending many men's wrestling programs to pay for women's sports) to benefit the fewer number of women who want to play college sports was a good idea because fewer women are fanatical athletes, damaging women's college sports to benefit Lia Thomas and a tiny number of other individuals in Thomas's Protected Class is self-evidently a good cause.
Hence, making common cause with the non-Disabled to push policies such as ramps that would benefit both this Protected Class and large numbers of the non-Protected Classes was already seen in the 20th Century as inherently morally suspicious.
Disability activists invented the term "curb-cut effect" to describe exactly this phenomenon where accessibility features benefit lots of people who aren't disabled. I certainly see it referenced a lot when disability activists are campaigning for accessibility features.
You seem to be angry that people aren't doing something they are doing, while pointing at something that was produced by the City of San Francisco 24 years ago, rather than anything more recent, or anything produced by actual disability activists.
... a propaganda term which is widely discredited in reality. The vast majority of forced "accessibility features" have large tradeoffs that either invoke large monetary costs on the populace or harm accessibility for everyone else - this logically must be the case, as otherwise all of these changes being pushed by activists would have already been implemented!
The term lets them spread the false mind-virus meme that nothing ever has tradeoffs and that 'helping oppressed minorities' also helps everyone else, when this is approximately the most false possible thing.
Mostly it's the monetary costs. There aren't many of these that do restrict access for non-disabled people if implemented competently - a ramp alongside stairs doesn't restrict access. Are there some idiots implementing the rules rather than applying their brains? Sure. But that's true in any walk of life and shouldn't be regarded as a problem with the rules, but with the implementer.
One of the big differences between left and right (and, perhaps, the sense in which I am most centrist) is that the left regards resources as effectively infinite, so doesn't take "it will cost money" as a serious issue and the right regards spending resources either directly as a result of a governmental mandate, or indirectly through taxation as something to be avoided at all possible costs. My view is that resource constraints are real, that waste is bad, but also that we do live in rich enough societies that we can afford a bit of slack for that sort of thing. Of course there are trade-offs, but that doesn't mean that nothing is worth doing.
"this logically must be the case, as otherwise all of these changes being pushed by activists would have already been implemented!" This isn't true; lots of these changes are relatively cheap if they are designed-in, but very expensive to retrofit. Because they aren't widespread (because they are expensive to retrofit), people don't think of them when designing new buildings. Adding them to the building code (for new buildings) forces architects and structural engineers to put in access features. Or look at level boarding for trains. If you're building a new platform, you can build it any height you like for approximately the same cost (the cost of a concrete pour depends far more on labour than on exactly how much concrete you use). But once you have a platform, changing the height is expensive. Yet there are brand-new stations with brand-new platforms being built in Massachusetts that are not level with the door height of MBTA trains, because they are being built to the standard height of all other stations for exactly no good reason other than that it is a standard (and no, they can't buy new trains that have doors at that height; if you did that, the doors would be below the axles). There are lots of examples of things that could be built new in ways that are much more accessible without much cost but which can't be cheaply retrofitted; getting regulations changed so the new-build incorporates accessibility from the start is one of the big things activists push for.
For example, the cost of putting in braille next to elevator buttons for the benefit of the blind is likely extremely minimal for new elevators. There were probably a few old elevators where retrofitting turned out to be absurdly expensive, but were likely past that stage now.
"What strikes me is that the added ramps didn't benefit just the disabled, but also mothers pushing baby carriages, workmen delivering heavy objects, travelers with wheeled luggage..."
Setting aside the politics, I suspect that the absence of ramps in building designs simply counts as a mistake most of the time. ( Yes, there are exceptions, where the cost is exorbitant, or the building is historic and altering its appearance detracts from it. And some architects are infamous for ignoring their building's users. )
I have to admit that as much as I'm trying to be charitable and open minded, the idea of the "Social Model" just seems incredibly alien to me. It feels like its advocates' model of the world is that humans are ethereal social spirits flying around and supporting or oppressing each other. Whereas my worldview is very much formed around the belief that the world is by default unforgiving, full of pain and suffering and death, and humans have to work to improve it. People can and should talk about social issues - who eats cake and who eats bread - but this should be grounded in the understanding that we need tractors, irrigation, fertilizers, logistics and plain physical labor to have bread in the first place. And clearly, all of these are harder to do for people with disabilities. And of course, this doesn't mean disabled people are to blame in any way! But surely it must be possible to disentangle blame and objective physical limitations.
I wonder if this can also be phrased in the "thrive vs survive" framework.
I think Scott's first link best explains how someone could possibly believe this sort of strong model:
"But changing how we talk about disability can also change how we think about it. The social model of disability makes an important distinction between “impairments” and “disabilities.” Impairments can be thought of as the functional limitations an individual might face (i.e., not being able to walk). Disabilities, on the other hand, are the disadvantages imposed on individuals by a society that views and treats impairments as abnormal, hence worthy of exclusion. "
It's annoying to change the definition of a word from the commonly accepted definition, but you can see why you'd want to have separate terms for the situations you're talking about and the more society-conditional/avoidable situations.
>It's annoying to change the definition of a word from the commonly accepted definition, but you can see why you'd want to have separate terms for the situations you're talking about and the more society-conditional/avoidable situations.
But the 'definition' they're using is complete question begging. Whether or not these things are the fault of society is the very thing that's being debated here.
It's a more feminine way of thinking about the world as mostly consisting of people saying either nice things or nasty things about you, so you want to make the world a better place by forcing them to say only nice things about you.
It tends to be alien to the way masculine engineers think about the world as being more than subjective.
Both points of view have their merits and uses. The masculine engineering perspective dominated both the left (especially in the Soviet Union) and the right during the Industrial Revolution, but has come to seem retrograde as women have become more powerful while men have retreated into the black hole of video games.
Like a lot of my woke beliefs that irritate rationalists (standpoint epistemology, systemic explanations for racial disparities, etc), I think an important and easily-missed feature of this discourse is that whether we admit it or not, most adherents of the social model treat it "seriously but not literally"—specifically, as a moderately strong prior rather than a brittle, irrational foregone conclusion.
I'm a biomedical researcher, obviously I'm aware that (some) diseases and disabilities are objectively worth trying to cure. But I also try to stay on guard for the possibility that "disabled people are, sadly, less able to do things than abled people" is a thought-terminating cliché. Most people are abled along any given dimension, and even without raising the cynical possibility that abled people don't like being inconvenienced for the sake of including a minority, it's clear that it's easy for abled people to forget about or fail to imagine the experience of disabled people (top-of-mind example, saw a semi-viral tweet the other day about whether it was weird to see a couple sitting on the same side of a booth in a restaurant, and hundreds of people were discussing without anyone mentioning the possibility that one of the people could only hear out of one ear and not very well).
So any time I (a mostly abled person) think about or am told by another abled person about an accessibility issue framed as an objective biological fact, like "you don't see wet lab workers in wheelchairs because they wouldn't be able to reach the benchtops," I always try to check myself and see if I can think of a reasonably cost-effective social solution to this obstacle. Obviously it will sometimes be the case that there is no such solution, but I believe that in expectation, making the mental effort to think about it for a moment is both epistemically worthwhile and increases the likelihood that my thought will lead to some positive-EV practical conclusion.
Perfectly fair! Personally, while I'm not a full-on continental philosophy fan I do think there's a time and place for saying things that are obviously not literally true on reflection, as provocative correctives to a complacent status quo. That said, I often value your contributions specifically because you disagree and insist on trying to say things that are literally true, as provocative correctives to a complacently hyperbolic discourse!
"Personally, while I'm not a full-on continental philosophy fan I do think there's a time and place for saying things that are obviously not literally true on reflection, as provocative correctives to a complacent status quo. "
Is that what Continental philosophers and their followers think of themselves as doing? I hadn't realized it was that self-aware.
Continental philosophers and critical theorists are among the most agonizingly self-aware people I've ever encountered—it's part of their métis, they're always accusing each other of slipping up and "making the author transparent". I've learned that when someone like Gayatri Spivak says something that I think sounds obviously false, it's not because I'm smart and she's stupid but because she's making some big-brained gambit that I haven't grasped yet.
I myself would never claim that my use of the social model is on this level. On the contrary, I recognize that a biopsychosocial analysis is often more suited for an exhaustive analysis. But if I don't have time to write a monograph yet want to have some chance of thinking of something useful, the starting hypothesis "disabilities are caused by society not being creatively accommodating enough (except when they're not)" is much more promising than the frame "disabilities are caused by a complex interaction of phenomena, most of which I probably can't understand or do anything about without technical knowledge I don't have."
Yes. Dialectic theories of history, which we may associate with Hegel and Marx and their successors (Continental philosophers), and which have Eastern analogs (eg the I Ching), posit that change happens akin to the way that sailboats move: tacking and jibing and adapting to the ever-changing wind, current, and weather (environmental) conditions, with navigation constrained by the difficulty of assessing one’s current position by means of observing the stars, not in a linear path towards Objective Truth.
In another thread, you expressed ignorance of the brutal application of the Medical Model by eugenicists; the thesis to which the Social Model serves as antithesis. Arguably, the flaws of the Medical Model and the Social Model do encourage a more rational synthesis of the them both.
Even if one grants the efficacy of dialectical thinking as a means of social progress, the objection you raise, that Propaganda Is Bad, may be taken as its antithesis. I feel comfortable acknowledging that point, and synthesizing into the view that because we live in a world awash in propaganda (and ads, PR, engagement-optimized clickbait, ideologically-driven social science, etc), we ought to strive to hew to the observable facts while also tailoring our messaging to our audience’s existing mental models, biases, group dynamics, and incentive structures that constrain the possibilities for enacting change.
I actually consider that the prioritization of Objective Truth over all other considerations a contrarian view. Although held by most scientists and buyers of analytic philosophy, outside of these epistemically communities, most people don’t really believe that words have literal meanings. Most people mostly speak in metaphors, and choose their words and beliefs by the value they derive from the actions they inspire, not their correspondence with Objective Reality.
For instance, traders have a saying: “Do you want to be right, or do you want make money?”
To be provocative, I would add that hyper literal thinking styles — which correspond with an inability to handle ambiguous and/or misleading but socially effective communications — reflects an impairment in one’s social skills.
While moderate degrees of this impairment — “autism” — aid in scientific research and technological development, it does come at the cost of increased difficulty in modeling the minds of “normies”.
The problem I see with this approach of basically creating untrue exaggerations to offset untruths in the opposite direction, is that they only make sense in the context of the other untruth being the dominant narrative that everyone is familiar with. Your model is not internally complete! It’s an appendix to some other model.
In a world dominated by the unmoderated Medical Model, sure, there is value in creating, as a thought experiment, the Social Model to serve as a counterweight and catch all the things the Medical Model misses.
But the problem is that the Social Model is now being taught and promulgated as a “first principle”, a complete pedagogy. Now that the Medical Model is more or less totally abandoned (at least in its strong form), the context of the Social Model is lost.
Now, we’ve got a bunch of people running around who of only been formally taught the Social Model, and they are no less wrong than the strong Medical Modelers of old, because they lack familiarity with the thing the Social Model was meant to critique.
> In a world dominated by the unmoderated Medical Model, sure, there is value in creating, as a thought experiment, the Social Model to serve as a counterweight and catch all the things the Medical Model misses.
>But the problem is that the Social Model is now being taught and promulgated as a “first principle”, a complete pedagogy. Now that the Medical Model is more or less totally abandoned (at least in its strong form), the context of the Social Model is lost.
>Now, we’ve got a bunch of people running around who of only been formally taught the Social Model, and they are no less wrong than the strong Medical Modelers of old, because they lack familiarity with the thing the Social Model was meant to critique.
Holy crap, you may have just explained social justice, critical race theory, and all such animals (to include their analogues on the Right and in other fields entirely).
Practitioners of these ideologies see their exaggerations/distortions of the truth/outright falsehoods as necessary correctives to endemic problems, which are so dominant and insidiously everpresent that a straightforward, rational, fact-based approach is simply far too tepid to have any meaningful effect (and they may be right!). When a problem is so everpresent that it's like the water you breathe—no one even notices it's there—simply stating that it's wrong in a calm, measured tone will do very little. Not many will pay attention at all. You've got to yell shrill, overstated accusations to get listened to, and now people will rally around, you can enforce compliance with your oppositional ideology, and demonize the other side, all of which are more likely to be effective—if the core of your argument can be seen to be valid—than being reasonable, rational, or truthful.
Of course, more-rational people can see the flaws in this approach—it may provide a needed remedy to injustice, but there's no limit to it. Since it only exists in opposition to a prevailing ideology, when *it* becomes the prevailing ideology, its lies become, not needed counterbalance to a prevailing narrative, but the prevailing narrative itself. And now you have just the same sort of situation as you started with—a one-sided system that takes itself to be gospel, brooks no questioning of its obvious falsehoods, and oppresses a different segment of society than before. But now it's locked in—there's no possibility of a self-correction mechanism, because True Belief—or, at least, the appearance of true belief—is required to ensure the system continues to exist. Any questioning of the orthodoxy risks going back to the bad old days, and relinquishing power to the movement's enemies, bringing back old injustices. I mean, this sounds a *lot* like religion, right? To the point where I'm now wondering whether existing religions came into existence through just some such process.
Moreover, this strongly hints at the possibility that SJW/Woke/CRT folks (what *are* we supposed to call them, anyway?) are much more well-meaning, and less cynically power-seeking, than I had suspected. Everybody thinks they're the good guys of course, but by this narrative, it really is the case that these folks continually believe that they represent a beleaguered minority view about to be overwhelmed by the forces of darkness, that the US really has made no meaningful progress in race relations or black equality since slavery (yes, they genuinely [say they] believe this), instead of their view being hugely culturally dominant, represented in every university, every media outlet, and most schools and government institutions in the country. They don't see—they *can't* see—that they're winning, which means that they can't ameliorate their message to accommodate that reality. The forces of Satan are always banging at the door, the enemies are always at the gates, and it's always necessary to engage even more in censorship, repression, and social control, because if you let up one iota, the forces of evil will burst forth and destroy all the progress you've made. Of course it is just exactly all these oppressive behaviors which will lead opponents to arise, and since you've based your entire ideology on falsehoods, their arguments against you will sound pretty good to many people. And so the pendulum swings back again. I wonder how many times this sort of thing has happened throughout history?
"Although held by most scientists and buyers of analytic philosophy, outside of these epistemically communities, most people don’t really believe that words have literal meanings. Most people mostly speak in metaphors, and choose their words and beliefs by the value they derive from the actions they inspire, not their correspondence with Objective Reality."
I was about to object that I don't think that's true, and then realized that I would be trying to determine whether what you said corresponded with Objective Reality when really you don't care and were just making a point.
No, you misunderstood me. I admire the nerdy pursuit of truth. I just accept it to be true that most people don’t care much about truth.
I mean, do you read the newspaper or watch TV? Do you think that most tweets aim at the truth? Do you acknowledge that most people care more about sports and movies than science? That even science has become hyperpoliticized?
Humans, as a social species, care far more about their social status than truth.
Wait, so if not really being able to understand this sort of communication is an *impairment*, then, on the social model of disability, it’s a disability because society isn’t accommodating for it.
So . . . Shouldn’t, by their own lights, social model of disability theorists have translations of everything they write for ‘hyper literal thinking styles’?
This may sound like a ‘Gotcha!’ point, but I’m actually excited about the possibility of it as a way to bridge the gap between ‘hyper-literal’ people like I am and these Continental-types.
I really don’t like the label ‘hyper-literal’; the identification of it with autism is super provocative: Ever notice how the ‘logo-centric’ modernity that post-modernists/Continental philosophers love to hate is basically just . . . autism? Binaries, logic, consistency, hypersensitivity to incongruities . . .
As an analytic philosopher, I'm willing to say that I think this is basically what *science* (as well as philosophy) is doing. Not usually quite "obviously not literally true", but the point is that you are intending to stick your neck out there and say something radical and extreme in order to see how far it can really be pushed. Did Galileo and Newton really believe that objects in motion continue in motion literally forever as long as they fail to receive outside forces? Did Einstein really believe that there is literally no way to objectively characterize some reference frame as that of the laws? Did behaviorist psychologists really believe that it was possible to completely characterize behavior as a function from inputs to outputs with no interesting reference to internal mental states? Some of these bold proposals held up really well for a really long time, and even the ones that didn't ended up making major methodological contributions to research, and are still valuable heuristics in many contexts.
"Did Galileo and Newton really believe that objects in motion continue in motion literally forever as long as they fail to receive outside forces?"
Huh? Why is this "obviously not literally true upon reflection"? Like, maybe it's false because of the expansion of the universe or whatever, but why do you imply that Newton and Galileo didn't believe it was literally true?
"Did Einstein really believe that there is literally no way to objectively characterize some reference frame as that of the laws?"
If I understand what you're asking — I assume so, yes. Why wouldn't he?
I'm late, but I'll add some context, as a signpost to future readers who may be interested.
In a recent ACX book review contest entry comment thread, somebody mentioned that the Efficient Market Hypothesis becomes truer as people discover new ways that it's false. (Trading strategies exploit inefficiencies, which creates efficiency.) So is the Efficient Market Hypothesis true, or is it false? Sadly, it just doesn't fit into the true / false binary; so the old medieval Scholastic logic is simply unable to discuss it. In our lives we have to deal with situations like this all the time, and the Socratic syllogistic binary logic handed down by the ancients just can't cope.
Analytic philosophy turns to math and tries to come up with an equation that encompasses the binary-resistant complexity, and then argues over whether to assign True or False to that equation. Rationalists have Bayes to build a system around to deal with the problem, and talk about bets and priors. Continental philosophy takes a different strategy (starting with Hegel) and tries to build a logic that doesn't use True and False, and disregards the Principle of Non-Contradiction entirely. Instead, you have principles like the positive and the negative, or form and background, or difference. Thinkers like Sartre or Deleuze discard all binaries, not just True and False. But especially True and False.
(Replacing a value-laden binary like Disabled / Healthy with "difference" is very Continental. Might as well call it "differance". That's a Derrida joke.)
What people generally remember of Hegel is his Thesis / Antithesis / Synthesis formula; but what's even more important is that Thesis / Antithesis / Synthesis replaces True / False. (Or, it's part of a system that does.) Instead of trying to pin down all the different ideas with labels like True and False, you watch them interact with each other down through history.
Anyway, this is something that's very important to remember when reading certain kinds of academic literature that pull from the Continental tradition. Arguing about whether an idea is true or false is considered kind of sadly naive, and taken as an indication that you weren't paying attention in class, or you haven't read much Theory.
I took a couple of continental philosophy classes, and I was under the impression I was paying attention well, but I wasn't even aware of this. I feel like it explains a ton of what I was failing to understand.
Was I supposed to figure this out from the subtext of what the professors were saying? Or did they just not explain it in a way that I understood? Or did I miss some introductory material? Are there any books or sources that explain the continental elimination of the True/False binary in clear terms like you have? Of course I was aware of the idea that continental philosophers aren't huge fans of binaries, but I didn't realize it extended so far as to them usually not literally meaning what they're saying. Would love to read more on the subject.
I think that asking such questions indicates that you're not the sort of person who's going to be able to "understand" Continental philosophy, as it's not designed to be understood in an analytical sense. "If I have to explain, you wouldn't understand."
It sounds like you might have missed out on the Kant --> Hegel --> Existentialists development. By the time you get to Sartre, he's explicitly denying the existence of any binaries.
Maybe my summary is idiosyncratic, but in my view all of the Continental philosophers depend on the radical break with scholastic syllogistic reasoning that Hegel made. They're either assuming from the beginning that you're onboard with Hegel's dialectic (which is the name for the post-true-false mode of reason) or they're doing a similar radical break as he did, in another direction.
You might also read the introduction to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, it's a more contemporary statement of the general Continental attitude toward epistemology. Deleuze basically thinks you're an idiot if you think a book can be attributed to an author, or have a subject, or reflect the reality of the world. "At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world."
Saying the efficient market hypothesis does not fall into the true/false binary is a weird and overcomplicated way of putting it. If we take the unreasonably strong form, "There's no strategy which can beat the market.", I'm pretty sure that's just straightforwardly false (and I say "pretty sure" because of my uncertainty about how exactly to formulate the statement and the actual economics stuff, not the philosophy involved). It may be the case it's impossible to know and use/publicly exhibit such a strategy without the market adjusting so that it's no longer a counterexample, but that's very different from such strategies not existing in the first place. Of course, the efficient market hypothesis as a whole is somewhere between true and false because it's not a single clear statement, but this is just the usual vagueness of incompletely specified statements, not anything to do with whether counterexamples are knowable.
A clearer example, perhaps, would be "There is a true fact that nobody knows.". It has the same odd property as the EMH that we can't know of any examples, but I still know that it's true.
"Weird and overcomplicated" is a very normal reaction to the Continental philosophical approach! Which makes me feel like I'm doing a good job describing it.
It's famously hard to establish universal epistemic obligations of any kind, including for beliefs like "an external world exists". The social model of disability is a useful tool to guide your thinking if you're interested in thinking about accessibility in a way likely to yield low-hanging fruit in the form of improvements to disabled people's lives.
In America, some groups are legally and culturally defined as Protected Groups and others aren't. The Disabled were more or less socially constructed in the 1970s-1980s out of a lot of disparate groups until a critical mass of political power was assembled.
The defining characteristic in current American thinking about who deserves to be a Protected Group appears to be victimhood. For example, building wheelchair ramps to get around staircases turned out to be good for mothers pushing baby carriages as well. But nobody had much thought about the needs of mothers pushing baby carriages because they aren't considered victims so they aren't a protected group, even though protecting new mothers is a high priority of most sane societies.
There may well be numerous opportunities for coalitions to form to get various other mutually beneficial accommodations: e.g., closed captions benefit not just the deaf but people who want to watch TV without waking the baby or want to learn a new language or whatever. But our current system is driven by the legal and cultural power of victim status so there isn't much incentive to build coalitions with nonvictims.
It's considered in poor taste to say, "Well, there aren't enough official victims with Disability X to justify expensive Accommodation Y, but if we add in all these nonvictims who'd benefit from Y as well, we see that mandating Y would be good for society as a whole."
Maybe that's how they do things in France where 145 IQ civil servants are supposed to decide what's in the cost effective best interest of the Republic as a whole.
But in America we don't like reaching intelligent compromises, we like having rights, the more absolute the better. If I'm officially a Victim, no matter how few we are or how expensive our accommodation per victim, then I should have the right to whatever accommodation I have the right to, such as bringing my 125 pound Canary Island Fighting Dog emotional support animal on the airliner, or whatever.
If you don't like it, me and my lawyer (and my Presa Canario) will see you in court.
I disagree generally about your victimhood take, however you do raise very interesting points about how accommodating the least fortunate in society can raise all boats and benefits all. I suspect, generally, we’d all be better off investing, monetarily or otherwise, into ways of making everyone’s life easier. America in particular with its bootstraps ideology, and individualistic culture, probably would be happier overall if we did try to provide aid and ease of life to even non-disabled people. And then maybe accommodating disabled people wouldn’t seem like such a massive burden.
For example, I went to MBA school in 1981 with a JD-MBA student who was the single most arrogant and impolite individual in my B-School. But he had good reason for being arrogant: he was the closest thing to the hero of a Robert Heinlein sci-fi novel I've ever met.
I didn't believe him when he told me was going to get rich off of outer space, but decades later I'd send him $25 per month for his outer space-based service. And then one of the several children he'd fathered came down with a debilitating disease, so he studied medical textbooks for the first time in his life and invented the now-standard treatment, off which he made his second fortune.
I never much liked the guy, but I am in awe of him.
In 2013, the Washington Post declared him "America's highest-paid female CEO," he having declared himself a woman. By the rules of modern America, by announcing that he was trans, he was an official Victim.
I can see now that you’ve rather randomly veered into anti-trans terrorize that we will not have a productive discussion. Everything you’ve described about this person means they are not a victim and have succeeded in life, and none of the trans people I personally know have considered themselves disabled, though someone else is free to let me know if they’ve heard or feel differently.
If certain accommodations benefit everyone, and are actually worth their cost, they will be provided even without any legal mandate or much activism. The problem is that many accommodations may not benefit people, in total, enough to be worth the cost. In particular, it may be wasteful to make costly accommodations in *every* building (or perhaps even every new building) if they are only needed by a small minority, and they only benefit a (larger) minority.
"In particular, it may be wasteful to make costly accommodations in *every* building" Agreed
"If certain accommodations benefit everyone, and are actually worth their cost, they will be provided even without any legal mandate or much activism." I am less confident in the efficiency of the market. People make mistakes. Sometimes even groups of people make systematic mistakes. And some architects are infamous for ignoring the users of their buildings.
Or you can have the European attitude to rights - that they aren't thought-terminating cliches, that you have to balance rights against each other and that doing that balancing is one of the roles of government.
Take a look at the European Convention of Human Rights and look at all the qualifications and the extent of the government's rights to qualify those laws.
Indeed, do: the margins at which there is a difference in freedom of speech are far smaller than American absolutists think they are. The First Amendment is spread across three entire articles of the ECHR (Article Nine on religion and belief, Article Ten on freedom of expression, Article Eleven on freedom of association).
There is no right to bear arms in Europe not because of a different legal approach to the protection of rights, but because the drafters of the ECHR did not recognise it as a fundamental right, unlike the drafters of the US Bill of Rights.
Meanwhile look at the state of privacy in the US (Article Eight ECHR) - the Fourth Amendment is far weaker. Or look at the absence of a right to life in the US (Protocol Six and Protocol Thirteen),
No, I definitely prefer our conception of rights as inalienable and sacrosanct. I merely object to the multiplication of rights. I'd actually like to see a retvrn to talking about "rights and privileges." We DO talk about driving privileges... I would like to see more discussion of our privileges. Like a right but tertiary and conditional. (Not to be confused with the sinister "white male privilege" of radlib discourse.)
Fair enough. I just find that the US ends up with the courts setting the limits of a right on a "know it when we see it" basis. Like: why doesn't freedom of speech include the right to lie about other people (ie defamation)? Why doesn't freedom of speech include fraud, or espionage, or trade secrets?
The answer is "because that would be fucking stupid". The Supreme Court, because it's politer than I am, calls this the "suicide pact" rule, not the "fucking stupid" rule.
But SCOTUS' perception of what is fucking stupid changes over time - look at Second Amendment jurisprudence, where you get US v Miller in 1938, ruling that a short-barreled shotgun can be prohibited because it is "not a militia weapon" (this is transparently not because that's actually true - one of the justices had actually used a short-barreled shotgun in the trenches in WWI - but because they felt that it was fucking stupid to let private citizens own them) and then DC v Heller in 2008 ruling that "The Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia"
I prefer having express exceptions and requiring the legislature to resolve conflicts of rights to the US system of writing sweeping rights and then inventing exceptions out of thin air (perhaps the clearest example being the "actual malice" standard of US v Sullivan on libel) and never being wholly certain when a court is going to create a new exception or abolish an old one.
The accusation of engaging in "victimhood politics"—reflexively leveled at any movement that follows the commonsense EA strategy of prioritizing the interests of individuals whose interests are least well-served by the status quo—is hilariously inapt in the case of the disability rights movement, which is uniquely focused on restoring autonomy and agency.
A better example of "victim politics" would be, say, spending an entire career complaining about the myriad injustices suffered by white Americans despite our disproportionately dominant representation in the Electoral College and Senate, the holders of national wealth, the halls of academia, and the offices of political and corporate power.
If that is true and it is indeed relatively easy and cost-effective to make these accommodations, they can just pay for the accommodations themselves, right? Where does the justification for finding a random, blameless person completely unrelated to the person with the disability, enslaving them, and forcing them to provide these accommodations at gunpoint come from?
I spent some time with Scientologists and they do not believe that. They are generically against psychiatry, although the individuals I spoke to said modern psychology and psychiatry was better than the stuff in the 70s. But more importantly their whole practice is set up as a kind of therapy.
There is a lot of Stanislovsky Method-esque training as well as sessions designed to "clear" people of "engrams", which are described as basically maladaptive thought processes they picked up during times of trauma. You don't create your own parallel therapy system if you don't think people have the equivalent of psychological problems.
Szasz and the Scientologists did co-found one of the leading anti-psychiatry groups (https://www.cchr.org/), and their currently Scientologist-run website continues to endorse Szasz and quote him a bunch of times, so even though there is some difference between their position I think it's fair to think of them as carrying on his legacy.
Paul Thomas Anderson's movie "The Master" is a sympathetic fictionalization of the early days of Scientology when it was marketed as non-religious Dianetics, a cheaper DIY alternative to the Freudian talking cure that drew heavily from actor's exercises (with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix acting up a storm) and from science fiction hubris.
As an aside this kind of thing is why I think it's often really important to be a bit of an ass about definitions. The reason a bunch of bad stuff gets through is that people feel bad about pushing hard on what exactly is meant and feel they have to respond to the gist.
If, when someone starts explaining the social model, you interupt them and ask them to spell out exactly what is it they mean is caused (is it the condition, fact it's a big deal, etc) and what they mean by caused by society (does that just mean we could imagine some society where it wasn't true?) then it's hard to believe anyone would find this model ever attractive.
"Two Arms and a Head", the painfully frank memoir/suicide note of the paraplegic philosophy student Clayton Schwartz, opens by deriding a quote from Stephen Hawking. I'll just post his first paragraph:
>“I try to lead as normal a life as possible, and not think about my condition, or regret the things it prevents me from doing, which are not that many."
>Is anything in man so deep-rooted and prevalent as the drive to see things as they are not? What Professor Hawking says here is reasonable, up until the last five words. That’s where the sky cracks and falls. Relativity and quantum mechanics may both be mind-bending and baffle the understanding, but no less than when a world-famous mathematical and scientific genius who can do little more than twitch his cheek and move his eyes; who cannot feed, dress, wash, or care for himself in the most rudimentary way; who would, if abandoned next to a stockpile of food and water, starve and eventually die of dehydration where he was left, positioned as he was left, tells us that there are “not that many” things he cannot do.
Wow, that was certainly unusually frank and - while he would perhaps not be pleased to hear it- makes one all the more impressed with the people who go on. Tragic. And: motorcycles are the worst.
It's the antithesis of this Texas Monthly story about John McClamrock:
Skimming this and then remembering the perennial talk of jhanas on here makes me wonder if this guy wouldn't have killed himself if he had access to a free, nearly magical pleasure-generating process that you can just do inside your head. If jhanas are really as good as their "maximalists" claim, wouldn't it be a moral imperative to teach them to the paraplegic, quadriplegic, and locked-in so that they can have an immediate, non-addictive source of pleasure that their disability genuinely doesn't bar them from? I'm honestly surprised teaching Buddhism to the severely disabled isn't more of a thing, not just in regards to jhanas but in general, the theme of internal liberation from suffering seems especially relevant to those without external agency.
The only way we don't consider it fully socially acceptable for this guy to kill himself is because it makes able-bodied people uncomfortable to think about themselves in the same situation. I'm not saying we should encourage him to kill himself - it's entirely up to him - nor am I saying that we should be more accepting of suicide in general. However, in the specific case of people with total and catastrophic disabilities that massively and permanently reduce their quality of life, we should be able to overcome our squeamishness about death and accept that suicide is a pretty reasonable response to the situation. It seems far crueller to me that everyone just avoids the issue.
Given that I'm reading and responding to this on a computer screen taht I've been staring at for the past 4 hours and will probably be staring at for the next 4 hours, I feel like it's useful to distinguish between things you 'could' do and things you 'would' do.
Given the average screentime of most Americans, Hawking may not be missing out on too many things that other people *actually* do, even if he's missing out on many things they *could* do.
IMO the most insidious problem with the Social Model was only very lightly touched on in this article: the way it interferes with Step 1, as in "the first step to solving a problem is admitting that it exists."
When people deny that a disability is a real, objective problem, and especially when they start bringing political pressure to bear on those who prefer not to deny it, they perpetuate the problem by making it more difficult to perform any sort of research that might end up leading to a cure. Yes, it's definitely nice when society is able to accommodate people with disabilities, but how much nicer would it be to never have to in the first place because we can fix the disabilities?
People pushing the Social Model push to make that bright future impossible.
This is the paradox of RFK Jr. On the one hand he's in cloud cuckoo land with his vaccine/autism belief; but on the other, he's probably the only person left in America who's willing to say out loud that autism is *a problem*. And however shaky his standard of proof for all his other notions (with which I'm not really familiar), it's refreshing to have someone in the public arena who is concerned about chemicals' effect on human development.
Oh wow. I remember a while back, in another online community, one person absolutely blowing up and going on a massive tantrum rant when another member said something positive about a group called "Autism Speaks." He accused them of being a "hate group" dedicated to "genocide" because they want to find a cure to autism, and therefore because he's autistic they're a bunch of Nazis who want to throw him in a gas chamber, and therefore the person who mentioned this ought to be banned from the community forever and also get doxxed and lose his job and also be prosecuted and thrown in jail, etc, etc... you know the type.
The thing he showed zero interest in even considering is that the spectrum *is* a spectrum, and his ability to communicate these ideas intelligibly in the first place demonstrates how incredibly close he is on the "near" end of the spectrum. He doesn't know, nor would he apparently care to learn, about my autistic brother in law, who's still living with his parents despite being a full-grown adult well into his 30s because he's not fully able to care for himself, and he's still officially relatively "near" on the spectrum. He doesn't know, or care, about people further still on the spectrum who are nonverbal prisoners trapped within their own minds. I'd tell him to ask them whether they think it's a real problem that needs a real cure, but he can't, *because they're nonverbal prisoners trapped within their own minds!*
Frankly, I consider the refusal to acknowledge the possibility that something could possibly be a problem, simply because it's not a problem for you personally, a form of abuse towards those for whom it very obviously is a problem.
100% to all of this. Because disabilities are disabling, the loudest disabled voices in the public discourse will tend to be the most mildly disabled (either that or the ones who have achieved some sort of extreme atypical success despite their disability). The most seriously disabled lack the access and sometimes literally lack a voice to participate, making it easy to center the discourse in the wrong place.
It’s easy to say “I’m just neurodivergent, stop trying to “cure” me!” when you’re basically a fully average, functional adult that just happens to miss some social cues and has weird hang ups about clothing tags, but pretty cruel to apply that standard to someone who literally spends their days bashing their head against a wall because they are nonverbal and that’s how their “stimming” manifests.
The typical argument is that autism is frequently comorbid with intellectual disability but this is due to both correlating with mutational load rather than a causative mechanism. I'm not 100% sure of the truth of this proposition.
These people are saying, in general, that they are fine with a low-IQ cure but don't want an *autism* cure/prevention to exist, out of concern that this would result in no more aspies. This isn't an assured result, but it's hardly implausible either - most normie parents don't want even an aspie child, and aspie parents deliberately counter-selecting for aspie children could plausibly get labelled child abuse and banned, never mind the obvious results if the cure/prevention becomes the Officially Approved Thing the way that e.g. transition therapy is for GID.
Part of this, of course, is generative instinct. I don't want a future where no-one who thinks like I do exists ever again, which is essentially what's on the table here.
This attitude is by no means limited to disability activists. Many opponents of eugenics fear that its widespread adoption would make the existence of people like themselves impossible, and oppose it on these grounds. Not merely worried about being out-competed, they are in effect solipsistic enough to suggest that any world that precludes their existence must be a worse one. (The parents of many Jews would have never met without the Holocaust, so ...)
If this is going to be a primary topic du jour on this blog, I will become the Commenter who Harps On My Belief that it’s really hard for any kind of discourse to proceed in this area until we all Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Teleology.
(Also, somewhat à propos: I wonder if Scott would still pretty much agree with his previous negative review of After Virtue?)
I think it's very easy to do this with teleology. I don't think people who disagree with me will necessarily listen to my teleology-less-version, but they wouldn't listen to your teleological version either, so we're even.
Perhaps not, but it does have a sort of parsimony which might make it better to win over the normies, if their views (and hence sway on policy) are what are actually being contested between the intractable disability activists and their opponents. Which isn't to say you should advocate something less correct because it makes better propaganda, but if there are multiple correct-but-from-a-different-angle models, it seems wise to at least consider which have the best marketing if it's an issue where what the majority believes has significant impact.
Even aside from the propaganda angle I want to push back on this - teleology has been constantly losing ground over the past 500 years. Why would you think it's good marketing / "the winning team"?
Maybe as an overall worldview it's been losing ground among serious philosophers, but I still think on a "localized" level it can apply, and I say this as a pretty strict utilitarian. I think someone somewhere else in the comments gave the example of how in the human body, the arm "exists towards" arm-like functions, and the eye "towards" eye-like functions, so when the arm or eye is not able to perform as usual, it makes sense to frame the disability in a teleological sense, in that there is some part of the body not performing the function it was "designed for" and it would be a good thing if that could be rectified. All the stuff in quotes are sort of cute metaphors, but they still reflect how much of the public looks at things (or even how things are modeled in an easy to digest way for systems like evolution that optimize towards certain attractor states without intent), and it seems like appealing to those popular intuitions would be more direct and effective than wading into a debate about utilitarianism, which much of the public (unfortunately) has a weird knee-jerk reaction against. Basically in this case, applying this narrow form of teleology in public messaging might be the most utilitarian thing to do.
(Edited "with or without intent" to "without intent" to not mistakenly have it look like I consider intelligent design to be a serious prospect. The point is that even in systems like evolution where the experts will stress that it's not *actually* teleological, a teleological framework can still be useful to build intuition)
FWIW, it would be more accurate to say that, within a certain timeframe, it has been GAINING ground. Virtue ethics (as well as teleology, and indeed, hylomorphism) was DEAD dead leading up to the mid-20th century. But it has enjoyed such a revival that 1. People know what it is! And 2. It seems like a live option.
Which is not something small! Obviously it’s still a minority position…
Thanks. That's fairly intuitive to me. I was wondering what a post on this topic that was coming from the perspective of loving teleology would look like. Mostly this is because I'm not very familiar with Teleology and I was hoping the commentor who has such strong views on it would educate me
Something I notice about woke people is that they are not comfortable admitting to having any sort of negative reaction to any group, except I suppose they'd make exceptions for Nazi's and serial killers (and of course for members of their own cohort who are insufficiently woke about some issue). But denial of negative judgments seems like a really core thing. So it seems to me that that denial lies at the root of a bunch of woke nonsense like the Social Model of Disability.
When I see someone who is disabled or deformed I invariably have a craving to stare at them. I feel intensely curious about what the problem is and exactly what it looks like. Of course I do not stare, unless I can figure out a way to do it without the person being aware of what I'm doing, because I don't want to make them uncomfortable. Also, I generally have a negative, "that's ugly" feeling about their disability. I am pretty sure my inner reactions are not at all unusual, and I don't really feel guilty about them. Once I get to know someone who has a disability all that stuff fades away pretty fast and they just look like themselves to me.
But it seems to me that there are a whole bunch of people walking around these days who have somehow ended up believing that even their private thoughts and feelings must be pure as the driven snow. Where the hell did that idea s come from? Is it because the country is becoming less religious, and people have a need for rules about what you are supposed to think and feel? I live in Boston, and used to see in psychotherapy people of Irish descent who grew up with old-style Catholicism -- the kind that tells young males that they will go to hell for masturbating, and that thinking of a sin is equivalent to doing the deed. The people I saw from that cohort had been left with terrible anxiety disorders. This woke religion seems about as harsh as old-school Catholicism, though about different issues.
Anyhow, my theory of the Social Model is that it's an attempt by people who hate themselves for their spontaneous negative reactions to disability, and invented the Model as a way of atoning for their sin.
But mightn't they have sensed that society was in a novel place where it was vulnerable to that argument? It's not has though people have been making the case for that argument all along -- or, if they were back in 1910, people would have just thought they were nuts and so their diatribes, if they happened at all, disappeared without a trace.
Negative reactions to characteristics you have yourself are pretty common - internalised ablism is probably just as prevalent as internalised misogyny etc.
Well, yeah, but I think we all have at least some of that going on -- sexism, racism, ableism, etc. How could we not? It seems to me that what works best is to try to be fully aware of every bit of that, and try hard not to let it influence your thinking and behavior about whatever the relevant group is. Hating yourself for having some ableism or whatnot floating around inside doesn't accomplish anything, and hating others who you suspect of having some is unfair, and trying to compensate for it by demanding that society give limitless love and help to the relevant groups is madness.
Similar to mental health - there's absolutely nothing wrong with being mentally ill, but society's failure to cure this non-problem is the height of injustice.
I can't recall ever having a negative, "that's ugly" response to disability. Just not something I recall ever doing. But I'm not grandstanding on moral goodness here, since I'll readily admit I do have a "that's ugly" reaction to people who seem, well, quite ugly to me.
Maybe you just haven't seen a spectacular enough deformity 🤷♂️ I have a hard time not looking at the absence of a limb, and then always feel awkward and sort of awful when the person can tell I was just doing the mental process of "ok there's his arm, and then nothing - ah ok he's missing a hand, aah stop looking where the hand should be."
We're maybe just talking past each other. I do feel an intense curiosity and a bit of shock in some cases, and an awkwardness deriving from my fear of being perceived as a rude gawker. If that's what you meant by a "that's ugly" feeling, then we're on the same page. But I don't consciously think of dismemberment or deformity as (necessarily) ugly.
PS. Maybe the most efficient explanation for why I don't think the same way you do is because we have different brains? Porn is the low-hanging example I can use to demonstrate how differently people react to other people. A scene that might seem incredibly visually appealing to Bob may be absolutely disgusting to Fred. Another example of this is how people treat the severely mentally ill. I'd say your average person responds to an obviously mentally ill person with fear, if not revulsion. They get super uncomfortable and try to get away. My impulse is to engage with the ill person and have a conversation. They are used to being ostracized, and you'll find they are often so grateful to be treated kindly! That said, I'm not claiming some unique empathy. I was simply socialized this way. My mom was a mental health professional and my Dad was open about his psychiatric diagnoses. I've seen the statistics and I know the severely mentally ill are not especially dangerous. But if most of what I knew about mental illness came from media depictions, I'd be afraid, too.
I think what I mean by "that's ugly" isn't the same feeling one has been seeing a a normal person who just happens to be very homely. It's closer to what you call shock -- the injury or deformity looks disturbing, wrong, grotesque.
In order to officially be able to dislike someone, it is necessary for the woke person to call that person a Nazi (fascist/reactionary/etc.). This is, bluntly, unpersoning (also called "taking away the face"). At that point it's then safe to do anything, anything at all against that person.
So if a disabled person washes up all by themselves on a desert Island... are they the victim of the society, the society that makes them a victim, or both?
This case would probably be framed by the "social model" people as "society has failed at the job of preventing the disabled from ending up on desert islands".
No, you see, the only reason they're on the island in the first place is because they live in a society that can build boats. We must ban boats at once to prevent this sort of thing.
I think the answer is just that in that case they have a large number of impairments that will make their life very difficult, but no disabilities.
Which feels awkward if you are used to using the word 'disability' to mean both things, but someone trying to change the definition of a word within their technical model isn't the same as being wrong.
Is your statement that your grandma "Didn’t want some kind of social revolution. She just wished she could see again" drawn from conversation with her, or is it just a conclusion you've drawn on your own? It seems to pit against each other two things that really aren't mutually exclusive.
The Medical Model exactly as stated (with the "you must stigmatize people with disabilities" part included) was hugely historically popular, and calling it a straw man is only true insofar as the real people who believed it have (mostly) died off. Although it wasn't called the "medical model" at the time, that set of beliefs was the grounding for the eugenics movement and played a huge role in historical abuses of disabled people. I think Deafness is a really good example of this. The oral education of Deaf people imposed on them by hearing doctors didn't work, because there WAS no medical remedy for deafness at the time. The Cochlear implant is relatively recent, and it's not a flawless solution. In the place of the actual practice of medicine was inhumane education, which determined the worth of a Deaf person by how well they could learn how to speak, as opposed to recognizing sign language as an actual valid language with a grammar and so on. This is the ideal example of the social model versus the medical model - Deaf people were never "incapable" of speech, rather, hearing educators at the time, influenced by Alexander Graham Bell's theories of eugenics, were incapable of recognizing that the Deaf were perfectly proficient in sign language. A medical inadequacy, solved by a social solution.
I agree with you that 1) this dichotomy is outdated and doesn't correspond to modern beliefs very well and 2) that we could stand to be less skeptical of medical interventions that do work, especially with regards to mental health. Nevertheless, I think there are circumstances where the parable of the social model versus the medical model is incredibly valuable. Specifically, the circumstance when someone suggests the most humane medical intervention for a disability is to sterilize the affected population to prevent them from perpetuating their inadequacy.
Otherwise, you make a good point. I think it's worth it to change how we teach the history of this particular paradigm shift in accessibility care, and to consider the negative implications of how the social model interacts with modern psychiatry and medically treatable disabilities.
Can you explain more about the history? Were there times when Sign Language had already been invented, but people refused to teach it to the deaf? What was their thought process? Did they think if they didn't teach sign language, this would have some good result (eg the deaf would learn to hear)? How does any of this relate to eugenics (I would have expected eugenicists to want to prevent deaf people from reproducing, but I wouldn't have thought they would have strong opinions about how to treat existing ones)
Oralism is a philosophy of deaf education that has seen as much as 80% adoption in schools for the deaf over nearly 100 years https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oralism
Sign language was banned in the classroom on the theory it would force kids to learn lip reading and other techniques for communication, and interact “normally” with their hearing peers. Of course outside the classroom, these deaf students signed with their peers, a much more effective method of communication than lip reading.
American Sign Language emerged in the early 19th century at the American School for the Deaf in Connecticut, combining elements of French Sign Language, Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (which is now extinct but emerged organically on that island due to a high rate of congenital deafness), and home signs of deaf people in the local area (home signs are rudimentary communication systems that deaf children spontaneously invent with their families in absence of exposure to an existing signed language). For most of the 19th century, deaf education in the US and elsewhere was split between oralism and manualism; i.e. those that preferred to teach spoken language only vs those who used sign language. In 1880, an international meeting comprised mostly of oralists (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_International_Congress_on_Education_of_the_Deaf) passed several resolutions declaring that oral education was superior to manual education, and the result was that many schools of the deaf stopped using signed languages as a medium of instruction, with some even banning students from signing outright. The justification they used was basically that signed languages were not “real” languages, and that teaching them would interfere with deaf students’ learning to speak. We now know that precisely the opposite is true - deaf children exposed to sign language early on actually learn spoken language more easily than those that are deprived of linguistic inputs that they can perceive. I’m not familiar with the Alexander Graham Bell’s theories of eugenics, so I won’t comment on that.
I think the deaf community offers a really interesting example to think about with respect to the social model of disability - many deaf people adopt this framework wholeheartedly, even asserting that their condition is not a disability but simply a difference of perception. I don’t go that far, but I think there is something to this. In places where there is an unusually high rate of congenital deafness (such as Martha’s Vineyard in the 18th to 19th century), hearing and deaf people alike naturally acquire the local signed language and deaf people are fully integrated into the local society. Deafness doesn’t prevent people from doing most of the necessary activities they partake in during their life, it just hinders communication with hearing people who do not know sign. I think using a biopsychosocial model of disability, deafness definitely leans more towards more towards psychosocial than biological, but I agree with you that characterizing it as 100% due to society is incorrect.
I wrote about the 33 year old struggle over cochlear implants for deaf children between hearing parents and deaf culture activists who fear the Medical Model (cochlear implants) as eradicating the need for their Social Model (American Sign Language, a separate language that's more closely related to French Sign Language than to British Sign Language):
This controversy can shine some perspective to understanding identity politics issues. On the other hand, the emotional temperature of this dispute appears to have diminished somewhat in this century even as other identity politics issues have heightened.
Even if what you're saying is true, the 'medical model' is NOT the alternative to the social model, and it's absolutely dishonest to frame things in those terms. The left used to believe in lysokenist genetics, does that mean I get to contrast by my beliefs about behavioral heritability with lysenkoism to show how right I am and how wrong my opponents are?
My husband had a deaf co-worker at his job in the 90s who simply didn't have the language skills - so it seemed - to do the work as others did. This was just shrugged off as a charity case - it was a government agency, and for example the person in the lunchroom who took your money was blind - but I think the deaf person's employment required a certain pretense. I wonder if this situation had something to do with the education he'd received.
The social model is one of those concepts where I struggle to understand how anyone sincerely believes it, and yet I know some people do. Like, your example of a blind person on a desert island -- of *course* it is inherently better for a person to be able to see, regardless of the society they live in.
I am mostly aware of this attitude as it regards the deaf community - both from friends with deaf relatives, and from media. Reading this, I was reminded of the movie Sound of Metal, about a drummer who loses his hearing and integrates into a deaf community. Its main thesis, which is spelled out didactically by the deaf community's leader, is that deafness is not a disability, and that deaf people should never be made to feel any "lesser" for their lack of hearing or to seek a cure. Basically following the mantra of the social model of disability. (now I will spoil the ending)...
The protagonist learns about the existence of cochlear implants, which he is told have the power to restore his hearing. Eventually he saves up his money and gets the operation, after which two things happen:
a) the leader of the deaf community tells him he is no longer welcome there, since he sought to "cure" his deafness, and that would send the wrong message to the other deaf people.
b) although he can technically hear, it's not what he expected; everything is distorted and staticky. People sound like robots, there is constant feedback. If the point of curing his deafness was, in part, to be able to enjoy music again, then it is a failure. (In the final shot of the film, the protagonist turns off the implants, since the silence is preferable to the constant feedback)
We, the audience, are meant to accept the leader's message here (the social model of disability), but to me, it rang hollow. If cochlear implants actually worked as the main character had hoped, and fully restored his hearing as it was originally, then of course it would be the right choice, and every deaf person would get them, because being able to hear is simply preferable than the alternative. The movie just reinforced to me that the whole social model attitude of "disabilities aren't real, society is the problem" is a coping mechanism for when an adequate physical cure does not exist yet.
Deaf Culture is a separate language community. Its signers are worried about their language community dying out, much like Yiddish speakers regret the diminishment of the number of Yiddish speakers, and Yiddish-only speakers who are too old to learn a more popular language have practical as well as cultural reasons for regretting the decline in the number of young people who speak Yiddish. Same for those who do all their thinking in American Sign Language (picturing signs in their mind's eye as they carry on their internal monologue) and are too old to learn to understand English even if cochlear implants are perfected.
I also do think your examples in "Why I Disagree With The Social Model" are pretty questionable. I mean, confronting the spaceflight one--it's not like you steer a rocket by looking out the windshield. I'm neither blind nor a rocket scientist, but rockets are small enclosed spaces where everything has a designated spot and looking out the window adds nothing at all. Of course NASA could make a spaceship that a blind person could operate. Unlike a ramp to Everest, the cost and effort would be trivial compared to the total cost of the endeavor. It doesn't mean NASA's evil for not having done so, but it's still a choice and I don't think that's an inherently sighted activity. I don't think pointing out the failings of the literal version of the social model has to mean limiting our creative thinking about what is "inherent" in the way that some of these examples do.
I'm not thinking entirely of looking out the windshield (although I think I remember this being important during the moon landing), but rather as something like - there are 200 gauges and 100 levers in front of you, and you need to be paying attention to all of them. I would expect it to be hard to have this kind of massively-parallel information delivery system.
Thinking about it harder, I can imagine each gauge having a button you could press that would say verbally what the gauge is reporting, and then the blind person memorizes the position of each gauge and lever (I don't know if the sound effects would be practical in 1969, but they would be today). I don't know if this kind of massive spatial memorization effort would work in real life.
It's actually the case that NASA is experimenting with making space more 'accessible'. I have a blind friend who has taken part in experiments sponsored by NASA in which she did several trips on the 'Vomit Comet' a few months ago, along with deaf folks and those who use wheelchairs (not during the experiment, of course). They worked on things like 'where should braille notices be placed when you are weightless?'
Checkout some videos of blind people using screen readers to navigate computers/Internet. They are astounding. Many experienced screen reader users have the speed cranked so far up it just sounds like noise to you or me, but they can discern wants on the screen and easily navigate around (providing the website/program is properly set up). The new Space X space ships use big touch screens for almost everything instead of individual gauges - could easily put a screen reader on these.
(But in general, i agree with your example and this article).
Of course, let's breeze past the part where things like space flight (or modern civilization per se) can only ever be developed by sighted people in the first place.
I'm not saying that being blind doesn't matter or that blind people can do literally every activity that a sighted person can, I am saying that making a rocket operable by a blind person is trivial compared to building a rocket in the first place and it's not a very robust example of an inherently sighted activity.
NASA could certainly build a spaceship that a blind man could operate, because NASA prefers to build spaceships a potato could operate. And then lets the astronauts have a few controls to use because otherwise they'll quit and NASA needs them for PR.
But blind people having anything particularly useful to do in space, is going to be a tall order. Aside from the information-bandwidth problem that Scott notes, simply orienting one's self in microgravity is much more dependent on visual cues - sleeping areas invariably have "night lights", because if an astronaut woke up in actual darkness they'd never find the light switch. Or the Braille I/O terminal or whatever.
Blind person here. As a member of the disability community myself, I basically agree with this post. I've been concerned about the social model for a while, but Scott has an uncanny ability to put my thoughts into words much better than I ever could.
One thing I will add, it is often much easier and cheaper to "solve" disability by changing society than by curing it in the first place, and therefore advocacy for that course of action is certainly not unwarranted.
Some people even argue that curing or preventing disabilities often slows down progress on the social front, as fewer disabled people means less pressure on society to make the necessary accommodations. According to this argument, this effect causes progress on the medical front to have less of an effect than we would assume, as it negatively affects the disabled people that cannot be cured. I'm personally pretty unconvinced, but I will admit that this effects works in the opposite direction; countries which had a sudden influx of the disabled, usually war veterans, often made a lot of progress on the social front. None of this detracts from the main point, and in my opinion these effects are small enough that they shouldn't be of much concern.
As an anecdote, I have seen a person in the blind Twitter community (which, for obvious reasons, recently became the blind Mastodon community and basically became Tumblr reborn) unironically argue that, with the advent of mobile apps which let trained helpers assist people over video calls, there's nothing stopping a blind person from becoming a surgeon or a pilot, and it's all just stupid, discriminatory laws that need to be changed. Granted, this was a singular, radical opinion, but it's indicative of a more general sentiment. You don't have to look hard if you want to find a blind person who would require all software developers to make all software, external or internal, perfectly accessible from day one.
PS. A bit unrelated, but It would be great if we could finally get proper alt descriptions on this blog; we usually get something along the lines of "07857d17-f333-45e4-9a54-deaac6969d28", which might be helpful to a computer, but definitely not to us.
I remember a CBC radio story/documentary once about a lady who had started reading books for the blind - which involved a lot of reading stuff. Then one day she starts reading coding books, meaning you have to listen back to the person ahead of you and see if they missed a damn backslash, because someone was learning to code. And this was like twenty years ago - I shudder to think how many person-hours were burned on that exercise, and hope-but-doubt that the person made it worthwhile.
I mean, really, my view on "is disability real" is that it can be trivially answered by "are there people who cannot use the bathroom unassisted?" The answer is yes, and so after that it's just a question of where the lines are drawn. They absolutely exist.
Do you find getting alt-text descriptions of images useful? I sometimes consider them, but I'm not sure how much the images already make sense based on context, or how much a text description helps with this.
This depends on the image, if the image is purely decorative, it should be marked as such. HTML has facilities for this, not sure about whatever UI Substack uses for writing.
The standard advice is "imagine you're reading the post over the phone, how do you describe the image?" My take on it is "export to txt and/or just use text-to-speech, try reading it that way, what are you missing?" Ask yourself why the image is there in the first place, what information would a reader lose if they saw the article but not the image, and what information from the image do they care about in this context.
An image of a tennis player might be purely decorative if used as a stock illustration in a news article, described as "a woman playing tennis" in an exercise in a language textbook, and described in great detail if the article is about the woman's innovative playing style. Same image, three articles, three different descriptions. It all depends on context.
If you can replace or augment an image with something else (text/table), you should. Images / screenshots with text are an obvious culprit, they should be avoided if at all possible, the contents should be included as alt text otherwise. Charts should at least have enough description to make the surrounding context understandable, if the post mentions some interesting changes from 2017 onwards but doesn't describe them, the alt description should say what the pattern was before 2017 and how it changed. THe mantic Monday posts fail really hard at this, and so do a lot of other posts which cite scientific research. The same goes for things like covid/political maps, AI art (if the post is about how much better a new model is) etc. There's no need to say that a chart uses blue bars on a green background, that's irrelevant, there's usually no need to even list all the datapoints, though a table would certainly be appreciated, but "graph of covid cases in the US per month" is too little and doesn't tell us anything that we don't already know from context.
Thanks; I'll try to do this - please remind me if I forget.
I've wanted Substack to enable tables for a while and I have it on my list of things to bother them about. But how do text-to-speech devices handle text-based tables? Are they comprehensible if it just says something like "Row 1, Column 1 - five. Row 1 Column 2 - seven" - or is there some more clever solution?
The way blind people handle computers is a bit different, we navigate and interact with our devices a lot more, having commands to move by line, paragraph, heading, link etc. With tables, there are usually commands to move up/down in a column and left/right in a row. whether coordinates and row/column headers are announced before the actual cell contents is usually configurable. For tables with numerical data, a "say all" mode, reading top-to-bottom, makes no sense, although it does exist and can be used.
This assumes that the table is an actual table in the HTML sense of the word, not just a bunch of elements visually laid out in a way that sighted people would perceive as a table. Those are annoying with a screen reader. There are tricks to make them accessible if you know what you're doing, but goodness knows if those would work in an email.
If there's no alt text, someone using computer disability aids even know what they're missing. A minimal 5-word description removes the feeling of "I don't know what I'm missing".
But they're not the same thing. Wheelchair ramps and lifts are not the same thing as being able to walk. Curing paralysis is much more expensive, but it's also much, much better. And if there's less disabled people resulting in less 'pressure' to solve their problems....this is more than offset by less people having the problems in the first place!
I guess the counterpoint is that it's sometimes a lot easier and cheaper to solve disability with a medical device than with changes to society - for example, eyeglasses are such an effective prosthetic lens that people with them are not considered disabled!
Another complication would be that it's not like it's all or nothing, technologies like prosthetic limbs and hearing aids seem to go part of the way, improving quality of life but not curing the disability. I beleive there are technologies being developed for blind people that can work in a similar way, although bionic eyes are a long way off. I'm curious if that's ever discussed!
I wouldn't generalise too much from the influx of disabled veterans, war veterans are inherantly sympathetic and can be used to increase support for anything...
I suppose it seems to me that so long as the idea of "impairments" being bad on their own is taken seriously, and "disability" just refers to the social aspects, this is a "merely" verbal debate. It's just defining "disability" as the social bit but allowing that biological "impairments" exist separately and are bad. Emphasizing that distinction seems to be how the social model theorist will push back, and it looks like once they do that, it's going to collapse into a verbal debate, where everyone agrees there are biological problems and social problems alike, but one side wants to say the biological problems, while bad, aren't in the category "disability". Maybe this is an important "merely" verbal debate, but it does seem like a verbal debate.
A couple formatting/wording suggestions and a more substantive critique.
First, there are two places my clinician friends will get hung up in the intro. One is on the reference to the Washington Generals. People with ADHD (who might be very interested in reading this post) struggle with even conventional metaphores, and an unconventional, undefined metaphore like this may be a barrier. I would suggest briefly defining it.
The other is the reference to bravery debates. You define it in the middle of the linked post ("arguments where people boast about how brave they are to take an unorthodox and persecuted position, and their opponents counter that they’re not persecuted heretics, they’re a vast leviathan persecuting everyone else"), and I think it would help your readers to include that definition in the post body. It would particularly help if you found a way to define them in such a way that, as you argue they are, the idea of a bravery debate sounded like a normal thing people experience in actual debates. For example, you might say "Maybe this is a bravery debate - pushing a one-sided idea that's incomplete, but that society needs to think about more."
A more substantive critique is that you haven't explicitly dealt with the possibility that Social Model advocates have redefined disabilities, handicaps, and barriers - not as an intrinsic physically-rooted functional barrier to participating in meaningful occupations, but as the set of impositions by society's in response to an impairment. "Impediment" would refer those activities that an impairment physically prevents you from doing (i.e. how blindness prevents you from driving safely or surviving on a deserted island). But the "disability," "handicap," or "barrier" would be defined as just those things society prevents you from doing due to your impairment (i.e. how society prohibits blind people from obtaining a driver's license, or perhaps from going on a rafting trip).
Is this a sneaky rhetorical Motte-and-Bailey strategy, or an appropriate recategorization that increases the flexibility and conceptual coverage of the English language? Why not both? Let's say that the Social Model project as I've hypothesized it is desirable. Then there are perhaps three ways to implement it. One is to make an argument that we ought to redefine terms like "disability" to refer to artificial barriers against people with impairments and try to achieve broad social consensus. Good luck with that. Another is to construct new terms and endow them with the meaning we want, as you did when you coined "bravery debate." But that requires you to teach and normalize new language, and it undercuts the the ability to enforce your new ideas on the wider population.
The most impactful approach, and the one progressives have won with time and again, is to just assert that these terms have a new meaning, start using them that way, and to police the language of people who use the old meaning. The success of the Social Model is another piece of evidence that this strategy works pretty well.
Under the hypothesis I'm laying out here to explain the Social Model, it's not a bravery debate - not a neglected half-truth that needs more consideration by society. It's a redefinition of terms that makes its claims, properly understood, consistent with common sense, yet more strident in their call to action because it casts society's failures to maximally reduce the very real disabilities it imposes on people with impairments as an injustice that is in urgent need of correction.
And the right thing to do in the face of that call to action is to think about and focus on the common-sense, most impactful steps society could take to oppress the disabled less - not to focus on corner cases like the wheelchairs-in-submarines example that only seem to apply if you've misunderstood what Social Model activities (I am guessing) mean when they refer to "disability." I believe they are hoping you will adopt their language and way of thinking, then apply your common sense to figuring out impactful anti-oppressive steps society should take, then advocate for them in the language of the Social Model. Instead, what you are doing is giving a regressive old-school definition of terms like "disability," eliding the useful distinctions Social Model activists are trying to draw, and then arguing weird edge cases and operating under the assumption that Social Model activists are probably just misleading people, rather than assuming they're trying to spread valuable new categories and definitions. That's not a bravery debate either - it's just kind of annoying.
This little essay is not meant to be interpreted as a straightforward endorsement of the Social Model, because I do think that there are plenty of people who'll get confused by the redefinition and be mislead. If there isn't plenty of space being made for "onboarding" and an active effort to preserve plenty of space for conversation about the ways that medicine can help people overcome impediments, the limitations on society's ability to help minimize those impediments, and good reasons for society to disable some people through the imposition of artificial barriers to participate in certain meaningful occupations, then I think that Social Model activism would be replacing one misleading way of thinking (what they call the "Medical Model") with another (the one-sided interpretation of the Social Model you outline here).
But I do think that if we had one set of terms to refer to impairments and impediments (physically rooted) and another to refer to diagnoses disabilities (socially rooted and oppressive), that would be a clearly useful and common-sense set of conceptual distinctions to have. I would personally advocate for conversations that seek to reinforce these linguistic distinctions, having the nerdy in-depth conversation about definitions and concepts that doesn't make for very powerful activism but does, I think, lead to long-term consensus on the truth.
People with ADHD struggle with metaphor? I've never heard this, I couldn't find any papers backing it up, and it doesn't comport with my own experience and observation. Do you have a source for this claim? Perhaps you were thinking of autism, a conditon which can canonically involve literal-mindedness?
An example is “ Semantic conflicts are resolved differently by adults with and without ADHD.”
A personal example is that my partner, who has an ADHD diagnosis, reports that metaphors cause her to involuntarily picture an unhelpfully literal mash-up image of the thing being analogized. It makes the metaphor confusing and requires either plenty of time in conversation for her to block the mash-up image, think about the comparison being made, and then reinterpret the original statement; or else it requires a follow up literal explanation of the comparison being drawn. For example, if I say “lawyers are sharks” (a conventional metaphor and therefore easier to understand), she involuntarily pictures a shark in a suit.
The thing to google scholar search is “ADHD figurative meaning,” since the term “metaphor” largely turns up unrelated literature.
Hi there, I'm someone with ADHD. I definitely resonate with your above description and assumed that was how everyone processed metaphors. Would you mind describing how neurotypicals process metaphors if not in that way?
I can’t guarantee I’m neurotypical, but I don’t have a diagnosis of anything mental health related.
When I hear a metaphor, any of three things may happen depending on how easy it is to understand. For easy or conventional metaphors, my mind immediately returns an abstract sense of what the metaphor means, without any imagery. For harder metaphors, I have to consciously force my mind to generate an image, letting me then intuit very quickly which aspect of the image is relevant - the difference being that I have to will this to happen, and can shut it off or manipulate the experience with some control. For hard metaphors, like the Washington Generals metaphor, processing it involves no imagery, just a verbally based analysis (“oh, they deliberately lose against the Globetrotters while pretending to play a good game - so the term means a ‘stooge’”).
Based on what my girlfriend tells me, the key difference is that I have more control over whether, when and how the imagery appears in my mind, and this allows me to more easily ignore distracting aspects and focus on the connection that matters.
The problem is that “disability” already has a perfectly cromulent definition that is entrenched in most English speakers’ minds.
To use another rationalist bit of jargon, this is a “taboo your words” situation. Work out what concepts you want covered without using words that already have loaded meanings in the discussion. Then, if you find you’ve resolved upon a useful distinction that lacks a linguistically unique reference, create one. But don’t redefine an existing already useful term, and certainly don’t attack people for using the term as it is commonly defined.
I don’t think this “redefine and police” approach is value neutral - it’s a rhetorical dark art that shores up Motte-and-Bailey doctrines and lets you confuse and obfuscate people JJ not up to speed in your jargon ingroup, or worse to cast them as bad people for using “problematic and oppressive language”.
Oh I’m not saying it’s value neutral. You clearly don’t like it. But if we put it to a vote, I would vote for us to redefine “impairment” and “disability” in the way I’ve proposed here. I don’t think having those terms be vague synonyms helps us articulate ourselves more effectively, and having them defined with crisp and unambiguous different definitions does. It may be annoying but it is useful, and I don’t see how it’s particularly different from exposure to the evolution of slang, pressures to learn new languages or jargon terms, the existential state of being born into a complex unfamiliar set of interlocking cultures that you have to figure out as you grow up, or the experience of trying to form consensus from a confused debate.
I guess I'm saying theres a missing mood here. Like, of COURSE it's useful to redefine vague synonyms to cover new concepts while still leaving a term that has the old meaning, and isn't it too bad that sometimes that helpful process is frustrating? And instead of that constructive mood, I am seeing a mood that feels some combination of paranoid, overly negative, and not actually that thoughtful about the pragmatics of the strategy of redefining existing words or how exactly that's being done in this case.
My “mood” is probably best described by Scott’s “Social Justice and Words, Words, Words” - I don’t want to badly regurgitate that whole argument so if you’re not familiar with it I can certainly recommend it.
Now, I don’t think this redefinition of “disability” by the Social Model is quite as egregious as the way “privilege” has been mangled, but it’s also got a very similar flavor. So that’s where the suspicion comes from.
I mean not to be a jerk about it, but your whole line of argument here kinda looks like a retreat to the motte - you’re making much more reasonable points (e.g. “we still believe in what you call disability, we just call it impairment so we have more precise terms”) but that distinction, those reasonable arguments, do not appear in the more common presentations of the model that Scott quoted.
“This is not meant to be literally 100% true, it’s just a paradigm to help illuminate social solutions, and we still believe in and have a word for medical/biological issues that reduce a person’s abilities regardless of social situation”. That’s a remarkably easy caveat to add, so how come no one does until the model is criticized for being, in its usually stated form, kinda nuts?
I have actually started to take issue more and more with the motte-and-bailey accusation in general.
One reason is that such accusations often fail to track who is making what argument. I, MeadowFreckle, am making the argument you describe as a “retreat to the motte,” yet have never made an argument that would be “retaking the bailey” and wouldn’t agree with those arguments.
And there is a substantive difference amongs those “taking the bailey” between people who are confused and making bad arguments by accident and then realizing they were wrong, people who are engaging in a bravery debate and making bad arguments to counteract a popular worse one acknowledging that this is what they’re doing when called on it, and people who are making bad arguments with sneaky rhetorical strategies on purpose to win an argument who use the retreat to the motte as a tactic.
I don’t think that lumping it all together as a “motte and bailey” helps us understand what a specific individual or group is doing and why, and for that reason, I think it too often stands in the way of analysis and becomes just another thought-stopping rhetorical shot.
Particularly among folks in this scene, I’d prefer to see a combo of trying to steelman arguments and see if there’s sense in them, and trying to understand the motivations of specific groups when they’re making bad arguments. I think Scott did a good job of the latter but failed at the former here, and I think a lot of commenters here are not really succeeding at even the first when they say that the Social Model “seems nuts” or that they “just can’t understand it” or that it’s an “alien way of thinking.”
Nicholas Shackel, original author / coiner of “Motte and Bailey” actually discusses your objection. The “motte and bailey fallacy” is in some sense a corruption (or maybe oversimplification) of what he originally wrote about, which was the idea of “motte and bailey DOCTRINES”. A doctrine is of course, not a single argument by a single person, but a whole series of arguments, beliefs, and proponents, mutually supporting but not necessarily homogenous. A “school of thought”.
He writes: “ I think it is clearly worth distinguishing the Motte and Bailey Doctrine from a particular fallacious exploitation of it. For example, in some discussions using this concept for analysis a defence has been offered that since different people advance the Motte and the Bailey it is unfair to accuse them of a Motte and Bailey fallacy, or of Motte and Baileying. That would be true if the concept was a concept of a fallacy, because a single argument needs to be before us for such a criticism to be made. Different things said by different people are not fairly described as constituting a fallacy. However, when we get clear that we are speaking of a doctrine, different people who declare their adherence to that doctrine can be criticised in this way. Hence we need to distinguish the doctrine from fallacies exploiting it to expose the strategy of true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who defend the Motte.”
The Social Model is a doctrine. It consists of both a bailey - extremely provocative but hard to defend statements such as those Scott quotes, and more defensible but less radical statements such as yours. That different people are proponents of different parts of the doctrine doesn’t really matter - you both consider yourselves adherents to (or at least defenders of) the Social Model Doctrine.
The “all disability is socially constructed” crowd needs you to provide a defensible fallback. But you also depend on them to make the “social model” even a distinct thing worth talking about. Otherwise the whole flavor of our discussion would be different - you and I would not be arguing different models, but just quibbling over some minor distinctions within the Interactionist Model that we both fundamentally agree with (basically, exactly how much emphasis we should put on social accommodation, and whether we ought to use different terms for challenges that are primarily medical vs primarily socially induced).
ETA - I have a bit of an objection to “steelmanning” myself. While it is occasionally a useful way to contemplate an issue, it suffers the same fundamental flaw of a straw man, which is that nobody actually sincerely holds that position.
It seems like, under the definition Shackel proposes, any set of arguments that is made by any number of people that includes a combination of both indefensible/radical and defensible/less-radical statements is classified as a Motte and Bailey, even if the proponents of the defensible arguments disagree with the proponents of indefensible arguments.
That seems like a pretty expansive definition, and it seems like the vast majority of schools of thought would be Motte and Bailey doctrines. Given widespread misunderstandings about the concept of the Motte and Bailey you point out, perhaps even the concept of Motte and Bailey doctrines itself could be classified as a Motte and Bailey doctrine.
We could make it mean more if we added a component in which many people, or a particularly influential few, were misunderstanding it in especially problematic ways. But then, I'm not sure the term itself is particularly apt, since it heavily implies that the existence of the defensible argument is merely an instrumental, coordinated, engineered effort to defend the Bailey, rather than that the Bailey is an accidental and undesirable outgrowth or divergence from the Motte.
I do think the term is useful to explain why certain ideas, in the language and style in which we typically find them clothed, tend to be self-perpetuating. "There is an intellectual Motte here, and also a rhetorical Bailey" is a thing you could say about a collection of documents (such as a ACX comment thread, where my comments are the intellectual Motte and Scott's post quotes the rhetorical Bailey). I think that can be useful, but I do think this clearly applies to the Motte and Bailey concept itself, and I think Shackel therefore has to be either wrong or self-defeating when he says "Diagnosis of a philosophical doctrine as being a Motte and Bailey Doctrine is invariably fatal."
I also think that there’s an incompatibility between the idea of a doctrine of Motte and Bailey and the objection you make to steelmanning. The former accepts the idea of a problematic discourse irrespective of who holds what views. The latter idea insists on engaging with an idea that a person actually has.
I think the best move is to engage with the strongest version of an idea, on the grounds that even if nobody holds it when you start, that if you find yourself convinced, you’ll be the first adopter of it. If you reject it, then you can also in theory reject the more foolish actually held views - if even the strongest version is unconvincing, that’s a powerful result.
I guess? I think I come across as many metaphors as the average person, but I don't recall having any trouble interpreting them. I'd say I'm about average at it.
Good to know! I guess I should moderate my statement and say “the ADHD population has higher rates of difficulty with figurative language” or something.
In particular, the Washington Generals metaphor should be explained because a) non-USAns are more likely not to know what it's about, b) the Harlem Globetrotters aren't as famous as they used to be, and c) bringing up the Generals without mentioning the Globetrotters seems like an extra degree of difficulty. (Having said all that, I, a US person, got it right off.)
I like semi-obscure metaphors. If you get them, they hit extra hard. If you don’t get them, you get a fun little Wikipedia rabbit hole to go down.
FWIW I liked this one a lot - it’s perfect for the situation - and got it immediately. But then, I’ve witnessed the Globetrotters beat the Generals live.
This is perfectly timed. There are so many zoomers who are used to leveraging the social theory of disability to their universities (title 9 says I need nap time or you sleep with the fishes), and that's because at university they are a paying customer. They are used to this obsequious notion of customer service.
In the working world, you are an employee. You no longer dictate the terms. Either you become your own boss as a freelance duct cleaner or you get an alarm clock, you dig?
And as an appeal to experience, I say this as someone whose disability cost myself a hard won career. I acknowledge that I cannot ideology my way into working a job my body won't allow me to work. So I'm trying to learn enough to start in another field where having tons of physical limitations is not so fatal.
> "This is perfectly timed. There are so many zoomers who are used to leveraging the social theory of disability to their universities (title 9 says I need nap time or you sleep with the fishes), and that's because at university they are a paying customer. They are used to this obsequious notion of customer service. "
I don't think this is necessarily a social-theory-of-disability problem. I think any theory of disability (including my preferred biopsychosocial one) would allow that some people have disabilities that might require extra sleep (eg narcolepsy). If you think this is a bad idea, it requires arguing values (for example, your "you are an employee" claim) rather than models of disability.
> some people have disabilities that might require extra sleep (eg narcolepsy)
Does scheduled extra sleep actually mitigate narcolepsy? (My naive layman's idea of this disease is that the sufferer is liable to fall asleep at literally any moment.)
Incidentally AFAIK narcoleptics (and even diagnosed ADHD sufferers) are prohibited from being issued a pilot's license in the US. I wonder what the "social model" adherents think of this? (Unjust? and if so, are they ready to fly on a liner flown by a narcoleptic?)
Narcolepsy is pretty complicated and sometimes extra sleep can help, but I agree if we're talking about scheduled sleep maybe some other fatigue condition would be a better example.
School is a service that students (or their parents) are paying for, and it's totally appropriate to expect good customer service. The reason you don't dictate terms as an employee is because you're receiving payment in exchange for your compliance.
I get that schools are expected to prepare young people for the working world, but is being compliant really the main thing we want them to prepare them for? I think we want them to be excellent learning and humanizing environments. And the incentives for them to be that are so whack that students need to be assertive about getting their needs met.
The complication is that schools grant you a credential upon successful completion that is supposed to mean you have been met some measurable and accredited standard of performance in your learning, which other people then use to determine that you are qualified to do stuff.
If the accommodation required for you to successfully meet this standard is unreasonable outside the university environment, that puts a big old asterisk on the credential (which reduces the value of the credential for everyone who has it or uses it).
I agree that’s a complication, and I would have more sympathy for the objection if I thought the challenges schools pose bore more of a relationship to real-world work challenges. I’m with Brian Caplan on schools as a wasteful form of covert signaling, and in their current broken state, I’m for anything that makes them less dehumanizing for the students being marched through them. Maybe that will make some room for actual learning, or at least make things less miserable.
There’s a big old “it depends” on that unfortunately. In practice most of the accommodations I see are basically just “do the same thing, but make it easier (eg more time or resources for a test), or just remove certain requirements entirely. That is, you aren’t “humanizing” or generating more learning, you’re just giving the equivalent of an extension in the assignment because grandma died.
The most creative accommodation I saw was a subsidized smart pen and niotebook system for someone with short term memory problems. That’s cool I guess, but I still don’t think it meets your standard of really altering the school process in a meaningful way.
It doesn’t hurt though, it does help at least some people, and it creates policy mechanisms and discourse that allow us to continue moving in a more humanizing direction. Being able to take more time on a test because grandma died is exactly my idea of humanization.
I’ll partially defend the social model of disability.
However, I do want to say that the version of the model I am defending comes from Elizabeth Barnes’ book, “The Minority Body.” I think her book, which is fairly short and good, does a better job of exploring the nuance of the social model of disability, and presents a more difficult model to rebut than the definitions you have used. She posits, for example, that disability (at least physical disability, she suggests that mental disabilities are the same, but declares them beyond the scope of her book) are “mere difference.”
I tend to agree, physical disabilities are “mere difference.” There is nothing inherently better about being sighted versus being blind. There is nothing inherently better about walking versus using a wheelchair. It is only once we impose certain values that these differences become salient.
One could imagine, for example, a world where deaf people are the norm. 99% of people are deaf, whereas 1% of people are sighted. The world is designed for deaf people, who speak exclusively using sign language, and little thought has been put into how loud or high-pitched noises may affect hearing individuals. Now it is those who can hear, not those who are deaf, who are disabled. Consider the same sort of world-changing thought experiment but for blind people.
It is slightly tendentious, but I would argue that every physical disability can be defended as “mere difference” in this manner. A world designed for people with wheelchairs is not ideal for those who walk. A world designed for those with gigantism or dwarfism would be poorly designed for those of more normal height. Even a world designed for people experiencing some sort of very common pain-disorder (please do better than to note that I called this a “dis”-order, it’s hard enough talking about this subject in an analytic way without people breaking words into their component parts and forcing you to pick new and confusing ones just to avoid literal implications) would have those without the disorder disabled insofar as their unusual medical priorities are delegitimized in importance.
This is still, technically, the social model of disability. However, what annoys me about the definitions you used is that they suggest, incorrectly when compared to philosophers of disability, that accomodations are easy to provide or that society is malicious is not providing accomodations.
Where I differ with Barnes is that I do not particularly care that society has values which occasionally require it to discriminate against certain members, so long as that discrimination is the logical result of society pursuing a legitimately agreed-upon social good, and not the result of cruelty or some other bigotry.
It is fine that we prioritize efficiency in fulfilling social goods. It would be a terrible, Harrison Bergeron-esque world if we attempted to ensure that no social good could be pursued until everybody was equally happy with their individual treatments and help. I actually like Barnes’ book because she spends much of her time arguing that disabled people are not unhappy. They are in fact, generally quite OK (Barnes herself has some sort of painful disorder which I cannot recall from memory), and tend to take much of their identity from their disability. They are, in other words, not miserable wretches whom society must drop everything in order to help, but merely one of many interests groups in a democratic, pluralistic society--albeit one with a more salient cause than many others.
I’d like to end with an example of left-handed people.
Left-handed people were long stigmatized, in part due to ancient beliefs that the left-hand side was associated with demons (see the kabbalistic text “Emanations of the Left-Hand Side” by Rabbi Isaac Ha-Kohen for a medieval Jewish example). This stigma persisted well into the early 20th century, and left-handed schoolchildren were bullied terribly by teachers and students alike.
Then, people realized that this treatment of left-handed people was superstitious, cruel, and stupid. For the most part, they stopped doing it. A disability was “cured” not by making left-handed people right-handed, but by societal accomodations.
So far this seems like a pure victory for the social model, but not so fast.
The British Military uses the SA80 rifle for infantryman. The SA80 is a purely right-handed weapon. It ejects the spent cartridge out of the left side, and so cannot be safely used in a left-handed manner. Left-handed soldiers must use the SA80 in a right-handed manner. This is still an interaction with society, because it is society, and specifically the military, the military-industrial complex, and British Parliament, which has decided to build exclusively right-handed SA80 rifles.
However, the reasons for doing so are not cruelty to left-handed people. It is a matter of cost and consistency between soldiers. These are equally legitimate values to pursue in addition to equality. No person, involved in the decisionmaking process here needed to have a hatred of left-handed people. They simply decided that it was more important to accomodate the right-handed majority than the left-handed minority. If left-handed people were the majority and right-handed people the minority, it stands to reason that the opposite decision would have been made.
Left-handed people, in other words, are discriminated against merely because they have “minority bodies.” Unlike Barnes (who does not use this precise example), I think this is often acceptable, but this is still the social model of disability.
Re: differences between disability and ability being matters of value.
First, one counterargument you could make is that things disabled people can do is usually a subset of things abled people can do. For example, even in a world designed around wheelchairs, a person able to walk could just use a wheelchair. Even in a world designed around deaf people, hearing people can learn sign language just as easily. I agree that your "hearing person in a world where there are annoying sounds all the time" gets around this - I could potentially plead that earplugs would help, but then you could just call these accommodations.
A second counterargument is that being abled is useful in many more situations than being disabled, separate from any social choices - for example, the desert island.
A third counterargument is that yes, "X ability is better than Y disability" is a necessarily a value judgment (since it uses the word "better"), but this doesn't necessarily make it subjective in a meaningful way (there's a sense in which "being alive is better than being dead" is subjective, because of the is-ought distinction - a moral non-realist can't prove this - but it's easy to conclude from values nearly every human shares). In the same way, I think "being sighted is better than being blind" is derivable from values almost everyone shares - this is why for example people try to avoid getting rubella when pregnant, instead of trying really hard to get rubella when pregnant.
I'm kind of drawing of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism here, where Eliezer argues that weird transhumanist beliefs most people don't hold (for example, we should try to cure death) are natural extensions of normal beliefs that most people do hold (for example, we should try to cure cancer), which require nothing more than being consistent. I think in the same way, trying to be very consistent about our normal values is enough to prefer being abled to being disabled.
(except in some cases where people really are just projecting their own prejudices and social values; someone upthread gave high-functioning autism as an example and I agree with that)
I'm interested in the history of anti-left-hand-ism. I genuinely don't know whether those people were thinking:
1. That it's impossible to accommodate left-handers so we shouldn't try
2. That it's very expensive to create left-handed versions of everything and easier to force lefties to accommodate to right-handed versions
3. That left-handedness was fake and lefties were just malingering in some sense
4. That left-handedness was evil, and even if was impractical and made people's life worse for no reason, they should be forced to become right-handed.
Starting from left-handedness and working backwards:
2 and 4 seem to me to be the primary reasons for discriminating against left-handed people, and as history has progressed, we have on balance moved away from 4 and towards 2, and in total away from both and towards accomodation. Accomodation of left-handed people is not particularly expensive or difficult in most settings. Creation of left-handed scissors does require slightly more resources than creating merely right-handed scissors and forcing left-handed people to cope, but that is a minor cost to modern industrial societies that create gizmos far less useful than scissors desired by much less than 10% of the population.
But a quick Google Search for “discrimination against left-handed people” brings up continued results of discrimination, and well as much of the past discrimination.
Regarding your three counterarguments, I have some rebuttals.
I think the idea that non-disabled people can do everything that disabled people can, but more, is problematic for essentially the reasons you outlined. More “ability” is not something which literally exists outside of the social and material context in which ability is measured. The “ability” to hear is easily turned into a disability under the right context, much as we now diagnose people with certain “hyper-sensitivity” disorders, despite the fact that hyper-sensitivity literally implies that a person is hyper-capable.
This also problematizes your second rebuttals because the context you provided is cherry-picked. It is true that most disabilities would be worse for people who want to survive on a desert island, but so would many things we don’t consider a disability in ordinary society, such as white skin, which is more susceptible to sunburn, or a slightly less efficient means of disposing of waste urea (thus leading to increased water loss), which is something that I doubt anybody even knows about themself.
Now, there may be legitimate reasons society cares about desert-island survival. Perhaps your society is that of the pre-contact Polynesians, and island survival is basically your default. In those contexts, desert island survival is really important! But notice how we can only decide which biological facts about a person count as disabilities after we have determined the social and material context which we are discussing.
Regarding your third point, specifically, “being sighted is better than being blind is derivable from values almost everyone shares.”
I think this is true, but tautologically. In a different social and material context, where vision meant the perception of painfully bright and confusing images, we could rightfully call vision itself a disability. The reason why we consider sightedness a moral good is because we have built a society where being sighted is much better than being blind.
I think that is fine. Most people are sighted, it makes sense to build a society which is good for most people, and then to figure out how to accomodate those whose position is not helped, or indeed made worse, by society.
My objection to the social model of disability radicals is not their model is entirely wrong, but that their idea of solutions tend to be incredibly stupid and dystopic. It is right for society to make decisions about how to structure itself in a manner that benefits most people, and wrong to argue that many should suffer for the marginal benefit of a few.
Left-handedness was much discriminated against in the past. For example, Ronald Reagan was a natural lefty who was brought up to write righthanded. But then discrimination against left-handers greatly declined in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if the immense popularity of lefthanded baseball heroes like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth changed American attitudes. For example, in the 1992 Presidential debate, all three candidates (Clinton, Bush, and Perot) took notes lefthanded.
Interestingly, the media has virtually no interest in rehashing this history of intolerance followed by lefthander liberation compared to, say, Asian-American Pacific Islander History Month.
And current examples of disparate impact discrimination against lefthanders elicit almost zero interest. For example, while in general baseball has been very very good to lefthanders, there hasn't been a left-handed catcher in the big leagues since 1989. Nobody seems able to agree on why not, other than that there must be some excellent reason and it can't just be prejudice and discrimination. There's no Ibram X. Kendi for left-handed catchers stating to media acclaim that if leftys are less than 12% of MLB catchers, then the only possible reason must be bigotry and oppression.
Lefthanders are not a legally protected class, so there's no money in suing over discrimination against them.
There are many theories, but one that holds at least a little bit of water is that really strong young lefties are often recruited to become pitchers, leaving fewer candidates to play behind the plate.
Left-handed pitchers have a modest advantage. It used to be believed that their pitches broke more on average than right-handed pitchers, but now that every pitch is tracked precisely with scanners, it's been discovered that's not true. Apparently, the left-handed advantage at pitching is hitters' lack of familiarity with left-handers as they come up through the ranks.
But a lot of successful right-handed big league catchers are too short to be successful big-league pitchers. The average MLB pitcher is 6'3" while the average MLB catcher is 6'0."
For example, Will Smith of the Los Angeles Dodgers is an All-Star catcher, but he's only 5'10". If he were left-handed, he'd probably be a relief-pitcher stuck in the mid-minors rather than catching and batting third for the Dodgers. (By the way, I see that All-Star pitcher Marcus Stroman is only 5'7". Good for him!. But it's a lot easier to make it to the big leagues as a 6'7" pitcher than as a 5'7" pitcher.)
But baseball hitters also have an advantage, which is why the top 4 hitters ever -- Ruth, Bonds, Williams, and Gehrig -- are all lefthanders.
Lefthanders have defensive advantages at first base, but lots of righthanders have played first. I would imagine that without discrimination, the great majority of catchers would be right-handed, but maybe 2 per season would be left-handed. Instead, the last was a 3rd stringer in 1989. (His view was he could throw fine to the bases, unlike what people assumed, but that he had a harder time on tag plays at home than right-handed catchers.)
My guess is that baseball is missing out on a few fine lefthanded catchers due to unfamiliarity and prejudice. Lefthanders are not a Protected Class so there are no lawyers putting together arguments against the bias against left-handed catchers and feeding it to the media.
By the way, I'm not left-handed, nor are any close relatives. It just strikes me as informative that in the single most handedness-aware field in American culture -- baseball -- nobody can come up with a consensus rationalization for why there are no left-handed catchers. And, yet, nobody much cares.
I played around with fencing in university. My coach's contention was that something like thirty or forty percent of fencers fought at least sometimes left-handed.
I did find when fencing against someone who was unfamiliar with lefties it was quite easy to make cheap shots - their guard would have been very good against a right-handed opponent, but they left holes that were easily exploitable for me.
I never fought anyone who was particularly experience though. I imagine that being able to adjust would be a factor in continuing.
An example of anti-ambisinisterism you probably aren't familiar with. The NYT had another one of their fancy interactive experiments the other day on the topic of manga localization: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/14/books/manga-comic-books.html The early practices were to Americanize manga translations as much as possible, including the obvious issue of reading direction; so they would mirror the images before translating. Reasonable, but angered the artists. I never quite understood how it 'ruined the layout' or 'damaged the art' or why they would be willing to redraw/relayout the manga at considerable expense, aside from minor issues like people driving on the wrong side of the road or occasional issues with someone talking about directions, but the NYT helpfully explains one major issue they were perhaps not too keen to be explicit about: flipping manga *makes all the characters left-handed*.
> Japan has a longstanding bias against lefties, and many left-handed children were trained to use their right hand. So manga artists and their fans weren’t crazy about seeing left-handed warriors in the U.S. versions. Another way publishers have addressed this issue over the years was to move the panels. This allowed the books to be read from left to right without making everyone left-handed. Aesthetic concerns aside, all that flipping was costly and labor intensive. In 2002, Tokyopop, a Los Angeles-based company, started telling their readers that manga should be read the Japanese way: back to front and right to left.
That is, it turns them all into minorities. And while you may not know that lefties are looked down on that much in Japan even into the 2000s, you do know how minorities of any type tend to be treated...
This is the first time I've heard about any of this, and given that the 4chan culture I've spent much time in almost took it as a challenge to shit on Japan as much as possible, I'm assuming it'd surface this too, if it was even minimally plausible.
Meanwhile, US cultural imperialism (or at least, as in this case, cultural monopoly over its own population) is spun as "other cultures are bigoted" so often and reliably, it could propel a helicopter.
A vastly more plausible explanation, here and in all other such cases, is that US companies' practices are just overall crappy, and even if any of them individually seemed defensible, everyone kept reflexively insisting they just interfere as little as possible until it more or less worked.
A friend of mine's father tied his left hand behind his back until he favored using his right hand more. His father owned a saw mill, in the Alps, in the '60s. It was just too dangerous to be a lefty in that workplace.
"In a different social and material context, where vision meant the perception of painfully bright and confusing images, we could rightfully call vision itself a disability."
Why would an organism evolve vision under contexts where vision brought no net benefits, but only delivered "bright and confusing images"? Why would a sentient species arrange its environment in a way that a tremendously useful sensory input that >99% of its members possess is rendered useless and confusing? You are arguing from very far-fetched hypothetical edge cases, whereas we all live in a world where being able to see normally beats being blind (ceteris paribus) every day, all day (especially since people with normal vision still have the option of putting on an eye mask).
Well said. I think if someone has to imagine a scenario where the world is fundamentally different to make their argument, then it's an irrelevant argument.
If I said, "breathing carbon monoxide is bad", and the best response was "but what about a world where people breath carbon monoxide and oxygen is poison?", I wouldn't call that a productive discussion
The same reason that an organism would evolve blindness in contexts where vision brings net benefits. You have to imagine the person with the unusual (dis)abilities as a *minority*. Hence the title of the book "The Minority Body".
Give me an example of an organism that lost the ability to see in an evolutionary environment where light is available, then maybe I can follow your point. Besides, being a "minority" is not bad in itself. I can think of a couple of fields where a few people have extraordinary sensory or physical abilities (rather than dis-abilities). These people often end up as highly paid specialists, not as a disadvantaged group clamoring for accomodations.
My point is that sighted people in an environment where blindness is the advantage would likely be a minority facing some of the same problems that blind people in an environment where sight is the advantage do. I'm not imagining humans on earth - I'm imagining an alien species in an alien environment.
Being a minority is not inherently bad - but it does often mean that social designs are created in a way that benefit most people but accidentally harm you.
While "ability” is dependant on the social and material context, generally we look up to people who have capabilities the rest of us lack, if it remains useful in that context. Sure, if nobody else could walk then it wouldn't make sense to consider that a disability, but walking still wouldn't be an impairment.
I am pretty sure that in a world of deaf people, a hearing person would find a way to leverage their superhuman senses- it would be very useful (if lonely) to have the "Fifth Sense", and be able to hear other people approaching without looking at them, even if you do have to tolerate a lack of soundproofing in built environments. This is the basic premise for superhero stories, based on much older fantasies of superhuman abilities - "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" comes to mind!
Unless I'm missing something about the overall argument, I think the "material context" part of your contention is specious. Now, if it's socislly-constructed material context, that's not true—if, for instance, "deaf-world" had loud screeching noises everywhere because nobody bothered to make sure their machines were quiet, that would be analogous to, say, deaf people getting run over because cars are fitted with horns instead of bright lights. In both cases, the "disabilities" are socially created.
But if that's *not* the case, and by and large it isn't, "material context" is not a good element of this argument. Literally every single thing about humans, or any living thing—besides the fact of reproduction—could be a benefit or a detriment depending on material context. Sure, if gravity were different, very many things about human bodies could be called disabilities relative to a being which evolved in such gravity, but I don't see how that's relevant to the present discussion. If our atmosphere were transparent to a different range of electromagnetic frequencies, most existing Earthly beings would be mostly blind compared to hypothetical beings with different eye design.
Because given our actual material context, someone sighted actually does have an inherent advantage over a blind person in most situations; similarly, someone hearing over someone deaf, and someone able vs. someone crippled. And that is true irrespective of our socially constructed environment, because we *don't* have things like bright confusing lights everywhere.
So I think the social model falls down based on these facts, and your modification does not wholly rescue it.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and perspectives on this! I resonate with your balance of contextualism (wrt defining what is a "disability") and pragamitism (wrt how society configures itself), and the importance of looking at intention when balancing the two. I think you provided great examples and were right to call out Scott for cherry picking examples to continue down a thread pragmatism when the jist of your points feels to be emphasizing the importance of contextualism for honing the way we relate to these differences in our bodies and minds.
Do you have any further reading or listening you'd recommend?
On a personal note, I'm someone who would say they are "hyper-sensitive" from birth trauma. I have been reclaiming my body and my sense for about 3 years now, and I certainly feel more hyper-capable than hyper-sensitive these days. Thank you for sharing that reframe that embraces both sides of the coin. Sometimes noise is terribly dysregulating and I don't even notice it, and other times I can hear everything going on around me and sing in harmony. It has been the most challenging and rewarding work in my life so far :)
I think in some cultures (Arab?) you do clean things with your right hand, like eating and preparing food and shaking hands, and you do unclean things with your left hand like wiping your behind after going to the bathroom. I guess I'd put that under 2. if I had to assign it one of your categories?
> There is nothing inherently better about being sighted versus being blind. There is nothing inherently better about walking versus using a wheelchair.
This is the kind of statement that IMHO makes it very difficult to swallow the notion that anyone genuinely subscribes to (as opposed to merely signals) the "social model". Where are the people pushing for allowing e.g. the blind to perform surgery -- or even to drive cabs? (Or would a philosophically-consistent believer in the cited statement hold that a world with surgeons or cabbies is "not inherently better" than one without?)
I think that the answer would be that a world full of blind people would have very different methods for performing surgery and driving cabs than ours does.
We can care about the outcomes (health and transportation) in a vacuum, and even recognize that alternatives to sight to accomplish these goals might be difficult, but all the social model wants to say is that
1) These alternatives exist
2) Given that these alternatives exist, “disability” is dependent on the structure of society itself
I think this is a very difficult-to-rebut point, because nearly everything humans can accomplish is dependent on living in a society.
In fact, cab-drivers themselves could not do their job without the invention of cars, or at least the domestication of horses and the invention of the wheel. Similarly, an 8th millenium BC surgeon is going to have a difficult time doing their job prior to the invention of refined metal instruments, not to mention means of sanitation.
I think it is right to say that transportation and health are reasonably universal human goods, but wrong to connect lack of sight specifically to those goods. There are worlds other than ours (either a future or an imagined alternate reality) where neither surgery nor transportation require vision.
>2) Given that these alternatives exist, “disability” is dependent on the structure of society itself
These alternatives cannot exist with sighted people. A society capable of providing these alternatives cannot exist in the first place without sighted people. This is an inherenty weakness of being blind. You take away the people causing this 'opressive' structure of society and you aren't left with libertation, you've left with extinction.
This assumes that “society” is structured basically arbitrarily, rather than having evolved to support the needs of the human animal living on earth.
Sure, some “social” things are arbitrary, but others (like designing the society for sighted people) are the obvious and necessary result of millions of years of biological evolution.
Sight evolved (as a survival mechanism) long before anything you could reasonably call “society”. Society developed in response to sighted creatures, not the other way around. At no point did society make any sort of choice between “alternatives” of favoring sight or favoring blindness.
So it’s silly to say essentially “if I can imagine a completely different course of human evolution, it’s fair to label the fact that we don’t design everything to be equally easy for blind people as merely a ‘consequence of how society is structured’”. The cause and effect is completely backwards: society is structured as it is because of the senses humans evolved to use, not the other way around.
>I tend to agree, physical disabilities are “mere difference.” There is nothing inherently better about being sighted versus being blind.
Only if your definition of "better" is such that there's nothing 'inherently better' about industrialisation, medical advances, agricultural surpluses, longer life expectancies or anything that results from modern civilization. Sure, it's literally true that the value we place in things like literally BEING ALIVE is not 'inherent'. But if that's the type of meaning you're going for, then your statement is trivially true and therefore useless.
Modern (or even primitive) society cannot exist without sighted people. It could never have come into existence without sighted people. If some weird virus emerged that killed all the sighted people and left the blind unharmed, the blind people die out. They die out today, and they definitely would have died out at any time in humanity's remote past. Blind people are INHERENTLY dependant on sighted people for their literal survival.
A society remotely capable of 'accomodating' blind people literally cannot ever have come into existence in the first place (or even be maintained after coming into existence) without sighted people. Without sighted people, blind people don't become 'non-oppressed' - they become non-existent.
So yes, for any practically meaningful conception of 'inherently better' (i.e. one which treats having the option of staying alive as 'inherently better') - sightedness is absolutely better than blindness, and blindness is only meaningfully survivable in the presence of a sufficient number of sighted people.
I’m not sure if you’re being intentionally obtuse, but I already addressed this point, but in the original comment and in my reply to asciilifeform.
The simple but important rebuttal is that it is possible to imagine a society where these things are not dependent on sightedness.
This society could exist in the future or some alternate reality, but so long as it is true that such a society could exist, the social model is technically correct.
The point that there are other competing social goods that come in conflict with absolute equality or a world in which people are differently abled is one that I already made throughout my original comment, which you apparently did not read particularly carefully.
Whether or not such a society could even exist is VERY much up for debate.
Whether or not such a society could arise without sighted people existing in the first place is not up for debate - it objectively cannot happen.
If such a society is possible, it is made possible exlcusively by the abilities of sighted people. If sight is required to build an 'equal' society, or literally one in which blind people can survive at all, then by your own standards, sightedness is better than
blindness!
>This society could exist in the future or some alternate reality, but so long as it is true that such a society could exist, the social model is technically correct.
If it requires an alternative reality to be true, its truth is worthless. If an unchanging, primitive hunter gatherer society could not possibly 'accomodate' a blind or paralysed person, does this disprove the social model? What use is the social model if it says nothing about what a GIVEN society can do to accomodate the disabled? If nothing can be done, then on what planet does it make sense to talk about sightedness and blindness being equally preferrable to each other?
>The point that there are other competing social goods that come in conflict with absolute equality or a world in which people are differently abled is one that I already made throughout my original comment, which you apparently did not read particularly carefully.
Ironic, since this has nothing to do with what I wrote.
I said nothing about the cost - my comment was entirely concerned with the idea of sightedness being inherently better than blindness, which is only false if you think there's nothing 'inherently better' about living a normal live over dying in a gutter somewhere. The fact that every society that has ever existed since the dawn of humanity has naturally been suited for sighted people and not blind people should also highlight that sightedness naturally satisfies most people's definition of inherent betterness.
But again, if 'absolute equal' is desirable, then this points to the superiority of sightedness, because only sightedness can allow such a society to possibly come into existence, not to mention allow the literal survival of blind people until such time.
I don't think your point about physical disabilities being "mere difference" is very valuable. Yes, if I am imaginative enough, I can conceive of a possible world in which sight is more of a hindrance than an ability. But in such a world, it would presumably be the overall environment, not just society, that favored sightlessness over sight, and humans would have evolved to fit that environment.
So sure, "disability" is relative, given the environment. But that doesn't seem like a relevant point that's worth making. Given an environment in which people have evolved, there will be a set of optimal features and abilities for humans to have. And lacking those features will be "disabilities". In our world, based on the environment of Earth and the history of human evolution, blindness *is* a disability. I don't think this is genuinely debatable, and I don't think we need to qualify it by adding "relative to the physical reality we live in, of course" every time it comes up.
I think this gets to a problem I've had with a number of the comments on here. Vision provides spatial perception; vision is the only human sense that provides spatial perception. You can come up with scenarios where other senses providing spatial perception are more advantageous than having vision (bats and echolocation, for a real-world example), but having spatial perception is an absolute advantage over not having spatial perception.
2D navigation without spatial perception is possible, if you're willing to do it roomba-style by colliding with obstacles to learn their positions at a point in time. But a robot that navigates roomba style having an advantage over a robot that navigates via spatial perception that's had its spatial perception removed doesn't negate the absolute utility of spatial perception.
"There is nothing inherently better about having spatial perception versus not having spatial perception" is right up there with "there is nothing inherently better about being able to communicate versus not being able to communicate" as far as statements that seem inherently irrational. It's why blindness is such an important edge case for these sorts of debates: spatial perception is a vital part of a number of processes, and pretending that you can ignore this requirement is detached from reality.
So, recall that part of the purpose of coming up with a “theory of disability” is creating the most parsimonious and universally true definition we can come up with.
The point of these sorts of questions is not to come up with useful shorthand methods for identifying disability, which is an entirely different matter.
I think this is why you find the mere difference argument to not be particularly valuable, but that has little relevance to whether or not it is true.
In relevance to this point:
>But in such a world, it would presumably be the overall environment, not just society, that favored sightlessness over sight
Why?
We don’t have to imagine an alternate reality where evolution took a different path, just an alternate reality where humans, perhaps with different levels of technology than our, created a world hostile to sighted people.
The point is that one can imagine such a world, and that it should be obvious that in such a world people who have sight are disabled.
If that is true, however, then any universally true definition of disability must include that social and material context. To preempt your point, it is clearly the case that disability is in fact relative to the physical reality we live in, and a definition lacking that clause is always deficient.
>I don't think we need to qualify it by adding "relative to the physical reality we live in, of course" every time it comes up.
I don’t see why not.
Disability is, in point of fact, relative to the physical reality we live in, which is significantly determined by the social structure of society (cities don’t build themselves).
If you are interested in actually engaging with the debate being had here about accurate definitions, then you can’t simply decide to leave an essential part of the definition out because you dislike it.
A society that for some bizarre reason made itself hostile to sighted people would be conquered by a society that did not (if it didn't just die out before then), and would have its bizarre social structure replaced.
I fail to see why that matters when discussing what disability means.
Furthermore, you cannot be certain that this is true for all cases, across all time periods. Perhaps there is some advantage in blindness when interfacing with certain technologies.
Then again, perhaps not, but why arbitrarily limit your definition to make it less universal?
Because it's silly to talk about it at all when eyesight was obviously selected for because it's highly advantageous, and blindness in humans results from things like pathogens or accidents rather than being any kind of morph following a different strategy.
The whole point of the thought experiment is to point out that it is trivially easy to imagine a scenario where blindness is not an advantage.
The fact that it is in advantage in some other, more common scenarios is irrelevant.
Most of the time, it is advantageous to have high amounts of melanin in your skin. Black skin protects from harmful UV rays to a greater extent than white skin, which is advantageous only in areas with limited sunlight (e.g. Norway) to prevent Rickett’s, and in societies which discriminate against dark skin.
Would you insist that it was advantageous to have dark skin in 1850s America merely because it is, in general, advantageous to have dark skin in nature?
This is clearly an instance of the naturalistic fallacy.
Disability: A disadvantage or deficiency, especially a physical or mental impairment that interferes with or prevents normal achievement in a particular area.
There are some disabilities that we recognize because normal human achievement is measured against society. However, there are some disabilities that are so obviously disadvantageous that the relation to society makes no difference; often, it is only the presence of society that keeps the disabled individual alive.
A hawk that could not see, a bat that could not hear, or a wolf that could not smell would not be merely different than its fellow animals. It would be at a significant disadvantage. If the animal mind were capable of conceptualizing, it would understand this as a disability. Society is tied to the concept of disability since humans are linked both to concepts and society, not because there's any inherent link between disability and society.
It's not that I dislike the definition, it's that for any practical use of the word "disability", it isn't relevant to the conversation, and is merely pedantic. Sure, there are other possible worlds or dimensions in which different traits are the norm, and not having those traits constitute disabilities. In ours, the abilities to see, hear, and walk are some of those.
The "relativity" part of your definition is only useful with regards to philosophical speculation of alternate fantasy worlds. But when we're speaking generally, it's about *this* world, at which point it's no longer debatable that certain things *are* disabilities. If I'm talking to a friend and I mention my other "disabled" friend with cerebral palsy, it would be completely weird and unnecessary to add, "but when I say 'disabled', that's based on how we've evolved physically and as a society. We could just as easily live in a world where having cerebral palsy is the norm, and we're the disabled ones!" Sure, it might be technically true, but it would also be pedantic and off-putting, and if I were the type of person to say that, I probably would not have many friends, disabled or otherwise.
"There is nothing inherently better about being sighted versus being blind." ...if that is true, would you care to explain why eyesight evolved independently more than 40 times, in all kinds of creatures? That strongly suggests that being blind is fundamentally at odds with a "value" that is hard to argue with, namely survival.
Sorry, but arguments that go off the rails in the first paragraph need some rethinking.
Firstly, your facts are incomplete. The vast majority of the world's living things are non-sighted. There are also examples of evolutionary lineages losing their capacity for sight. By your theory, this would imply that it's better to be sightless!
But those facts don't imply that, because of a much more important fact: Evolution is not teleological. You can't assume that "X evolved from Y" means "X is better than Y."
"The vast majority of the world's living things are non-sighted." Yeah, if you count living things that don't profit from being able to see (because they couldn't react to what they see, because they can't MOVE). On the other hand, if you focus on animals that move around where there's light (such as humans), just about every one of them has eyes.
"There are also examples of evolutionary lineages losing their capacity for sight. By your theory, this would imply that it's better to be sightless!"
Yeah. Cave-dwellers, and... anyone else? If there's no light whatsoever, it is slightly less expensive to not have eyes. I don't see how that applies to humans, though.
" Evolution is not teleological. You can't assume that "X evolved from Y" means "X is better than Y.""
Yes, evolution is not teleological, but it does provide a mechanism for gradual improvement as measured by "descendants that survive to maturity under the circumstances where the evolution takes place". So in that sense, especially if something evolves multiple times, that means that it IS better for survival.
I was going to make some similar points, but I won't repeat what you've said here. Your exchange with Scott pretty much covers what I would have expected to be said.
I will just add this, though:
"One could imagine, for example, a world where deaf people are the norm." - Of course, that's the world we live in! Just as there are disabilities, there are also lots of superabilities. Extreme colour vision, perfect pitch, extreme tallness (if you want to count that as an ability), extreme memory, etc., etc. For people with perfect pitch, for example, it could be easy and helpful to have a lot more sonic alerts in the world, distinguished by pitch. For the rest of us, those alerts would be hard to distinguish and annoying, so the pitchies don't get them.
One of the things Scott does well, but in this case I think could do even better, is to always remember the huge diversity of people (and viewpoints) out there.
“always remember the huge diversity of people (and viewpoints) out there.”
But likewise, you must always remember that the huge diversity is not distributed at all uniformly, and it’s often very hard to design the environment to accommodate every possible person on the long tails of the distribution.
Yeah... I mean, that's true, but my feeling is that we could probably do a lot more accommodating. Just within my lifetime (40 years), there have been a lot of changes made in the direction of accommodating women(! hardly a disabled group, and yet that had to be forced through), gay people, wheelchair users, trans people, and neurodiverse people. There was resistance to all of these accommodations, but it turns out all of them were possible. I feel like the difficulty of accommodations gets overplayed *a lot*.
There’s a huge difference in difficulty between, say, “stop firing people for being gay” and “replace every unit of housing with a wheelchair accessible one”. Accommodations also span a huge range!
Like, I know what you mean, but I literally disagree with your example.
Limiting homophobia has proved to be one of the hardest political slogs of modern times, involving a huge number of intersecting disciplines and institutions.
Wheelchair access requires a ramp. It would take a little bit of money, I agree, but not very much (and, I suggest, possibly less money than was wasted on all the legal tussles over discrimination). Retrofitting would be expensive, but if we said, starting now, all new buildings will have ramps and slightly wider doors to make them wheelchair accessible, that small change to building regs would gradually establish a new norm of accessibility. And I think, in reality, that's pretty much what happened about 30 years ago, isn't it?
Like I say, it always seems to me like the difficulty of accommodations gets exaggerated. Ramps are not high tech or expensive.
My point is the “accommodations” for gay people are categorically different from “constructing new infrastructure”. They were mostly “negative” rights (e.g. don’t discriminate against gay people) rather than stuff that forces “society” to give them something unique to make up for an impairment.
On the flip side, “be nice to people in wheelchairs” is great and all, but even if the stigma was zero, it doesn’t make it any easier to climb a flight of stairs with no legs.
And ramps are easy, which is why we’ve all already agreed to build them in a lot of places even though the “social” definition of disability would likely poll very badly.
It seems hard to reconcile that "mere difference" rather than "better" or "worse" idea with natural selection causing abilities to reach fixation in the first place.
I think this is a misunderstanding of what natural selection does. It hasn't selected any of our abilities to be the "best". Nor have they "reached fixation". They're just a contingent bunch of cabilities that happen to be what we have at this evolutionary moment. In total, this selection of capabilities is *good enough* to enable our species to survive, but that doesn't imply for a moment that any one of our capabilities is at any kind of optimal level.
Eyesight really has reached fixation in our species (and a giant swathe of related species). It's not like bloodgroups, or height, or coloration. I didn't claim our eyesight is optimal, there are other species with better eyesight. The issue is instead sightedness vs blindness.
I don't really know what you're trying to say, but I know it's not science. There is no concept of fixation in natural selection. If you want to make a claim that there is some kind of "normal" or "fixated" eyesight, I guess you can do that. What you can't do is suggest that this has any basis in the scientific theory of evolution.
Did you read the page? Like... I don't know if you think you just scored a clever point. Or, what...
Just firing off a link as if it's a clever point isn't really what I come here for (I do it in other places! But this is a place for slightly deeper discussion.)
I agree that that word is indeed, "fixation," and that it is part of genetics. That's not the same as the concept that you were talking about earlier.
Because this is Astral Codex, I'll take the time to actually explain. But I do so with trepidation, because I feel like you're arguing at a 4chan level at the moment.
Here's the definition: "fixation is the change in a gene pool from a situation where there exists at least two variants of a particular gene (allele) in a given population to a situation where only one of the alleles remains."
First, fixation is a genome-level event, not a phenome-level event. Conflating the two shouldn't be done casually. Second, fixation completely eliminates a certain allele. If eyesight were really a gene that had been "fixated" in the human population, there wouldn't be any people with congenital blindness. But there are.
I'm no biologist, but these points are clear to anyone who reads the page.
In a world where everyone is blind, someone who can see basically has super powers. He can do anything anyone can do, and more. Can you imagine the amazement people would feel, hen he could understand a complex mechanism, that people have to thoroughly touch to get, at a distance? How he can easily navigate new places without a map or aide?
You say is just as good to walk as to use a wheelchair, and it could be true. But people who can walk can use wheelchairs with no problem. It's better to have the option to walk than to not have it.
I once had a pretty bad case of peripheral neuropathy that made me numb and weak specially at the hands and feet. I was very well accommodated, and am thankful for it. But it simply not true that not being able to consistently grasp or type is just as good as being able to grasp or type. It is not true that not being able to walk is just as good as being able to walk. There's no amount of accommodation that changes it.
If i had the choice I'd take not having peripheral neuropathy in a society where everyone has it every time. In a world where everyone has peripheral neuropathy, a guy without it has literal superstrenght!
I don't think this is right, because it's a situation that really exists. For example, there are people with perfect pitch. That's a pretty extraordinary perceptory capability. I guess a lot of them become musicians, but a lot don't. And we don't seem to regard them as superheroes.
There are a small number of people with super colour vision. They can see colours we can't even imagine, and easily spot colour differences we can't see. They seem to enjoy no significant advantage in life.
There are people of extreme height. Some of them make a lot of money playing basketball, but most just find it hard to buy a comfortable bed.
Etc., etc.
It doesn't seem clear to me that giving someone an ability over and above the general population always confers a massive advantage. And when it does, it's because there's a very specific social institution (like the NBA) set up to support them.
Don't think height is a good example. in general both extreme high height and extreme low height are considered bad. This is very different from vision, where everyone thinks the better you see the better, or hearing where everyone thinks the better you hear the better.
There are people with perfect pitch, and there are people with super colour vision, and they are not seem as superheroes. But the difference between hearing and not hearing is much bigger than the difference between having and not having perfect pitch, and the difference between seeing and not seeing is much bigger than the difference between having super colour vision and normal colour vision. As an example daltonism is pretty common and most of them have very little problem with it. If everyone was daltonic and you could see more colour I don't expect anyone to be particularly impressed, it would be good, but not life changing. We don't consider super colour vision a superpower for the exact same reason we don't consider daltonism a meaningful disability. The same thing aplies for hearing, there's lots of variation in range of frequencies people are capable of detecting, and no one thinks people who lost highs need some more support from society.
But vision itself would come up all the time, having a new way to probe the world at a distance is immensely useful. You can know what people are doing in an instant, like you enter a party you immediately know who everyone is talking to, how close they seem to be, you can see their body language, how much they are touching, etc, you know where things are in new places instantly, they are much easier to navigate, etc. even the simplest things, like finding a dropped object are easier.
If everyone is wheelchair bound due to some neurological issue and you are not, you are quite literally super strong. This is also extremely useful. In a wheelchair jam at the end of shift you can just get up, lift your chair and squeeze through everyone to the front. You can lift and carry stuff no one else can, you get less tired doing anything at all, there's nothing that is more generally helpful than that.
Of course having the whole society behind you helps, the guy with one eye in the land of the blind can't take advantage of our lots of visual interfaces, signs, he doesn't have visual art, everything is much more drab due to no one caring about how things look, etc. But that does not mean he gets no mileage from his vision, it's still quite a boon.
In general being able to do something is good, and not being able to do something is bad, quite independently from society.
(The hearing case is a little bit different, althou i think it is still better to hear than not, even in the deaf society. As you can't turn off hearing, by getting to hear you generally give up the ability not to hear. This could cause problems in being constantly bothered by sounds, althou I don't think this would be a big problem in practice, machines would probably be generally more noisy, but people would be less. Anyway i don't think it is very important to the general point)
"99% of people are deaf, whereas 1% of people are sighted" So, 0.1% can hear and see and 98.9% are blind and deaf? Guess "sighted" should have been "hearing".
> The British Military uses the SA80 rifle for infantryman. The SA80 is a purely right-handed weapon. It ejects the spent cartridge out of the left side, and so cannot be safely used in a left-handed manner. Left-handed soldiers must use the SA80 in a right-handed manner. This is still an interaction with society, because it is society, and specifically the military, the military-industrial complex, and British Parliament, which has decided to build exclusively right-handed SA80 rifles.
I’m coming here from the followup post to address this point in particular.
The SA80 is a notoriously and exceptionally bad rifle, and this is just one of the many reasons for that. Notably, elite British units like the SAS and Royal Marine Commandos don’t use the SA80, instead preferring variants of the AR-15 platform similar to the American M4 and M16.
I won’t go into every problem with the SA80, but I think you might have cherry picked the single service rifle in any major military that can’t be fired left-handed. The SA80 is a “bullpup” design that places the action (and, importantly, the ejection port) behind of the trigger rather than in front of it. Conventional designs such as the AR and AK eject in front of the trigger and can thus be used left-handed. But even other bullpups, such as the Steyr AUG, the FAMAS, and Israel’s Tavor family, can be adjusted to eject from the left hand side for left handed use.
Furthermore, which hand one uses to fire a rifle is not entirely determined by which hand is dominant in the first place. Many shooters have a dominant right hand but a dominant left eye and find that being able to aim through the sights with their dominant eye is more valuable than using their dominant hand to pull the trigger. Larry Vickers is a famous example of this. Also, especially in urban warfare, even a soldier who typically shoots right handed will sometimes shoot left handed based on available cover—for instance, if you are taking cover behind an armored vehicle and shooting around the left hand side (from the shooter’s perspective), doing so left-handed allows you to keep more of your body in cover.
Correct. That's a misstatement on the part of the original comment--the SA80 does eject on the right hand side.
A conventional rifle such as an AR-15 can still eject cartridges towards the shooter, but with a bullpup it's a much larger problem because the ejection port is in the rear part of the stock, exactly where you would rest your cheek to aim. Since hot gas (from burned gunpowder) also tends to come out the ejection port, you could probably burn yourself pretty badly that way.
I think this is very different and speaks to a deep distrust (affected or otherwise) of medication generally and that they're used by prescribers for nefarious social ends. Not that being physically or mentally ill is just fine and we should accept these people for who they are.
I wonder if this is related to the "black box" warnings that antidepressants have to have in the US (claiming that they can increase the risk of suicide among children and adolescents) because a politician's daughter was on antidepressants when she committed suicide? I remember my psychiatrist going on a big spiel about how this was pure political distortion and scaremongering and didn't reflect any sort of scientific reality. Of course, given that he was a dispenser of antidepressants he had something of a horse in the race himself.
There are a lot of studies that do show antidepressants can increase suicide risk over the short term, especially in young people. One of the standard explanations is that it gives people more energy/motivation before it makes them happier, and sometimes it makes them motivated to go ahead and commit suicide like they'd been dreaming of for a while. But I also think sometimes they can have paradoxical effects / side effects that make things worse. I still think over the long term and across all ages they're probably good, including for suicide. But it's pretty commonly accepted that they do have the occasional suicide-promoting effect.
Thank you for the response, while obviously it would be better if antidepressants really didn't increase the chance of suicide in certain cases, on the other hand it's at least encouraging to know that the system isn't as corrupt/silly as my psychiatrist was implying.
This type of post is useful to see just how many commenters read the posts carefully and how many skim and comment based on the topic (and some sort of mood affiliation). I'm curious whether you think the median individual hold's view closer to the Medical Model or the Social Model? Reading through your links, and some of the comments, there's this suggestion that people seem to have pretty bad/outdated views of impaired/disabled people. I'm sure I'm guilty of some of the things they mention, but I typically think most people just don't know how to interact with impaired people because they meet very few of them. Maybe this would be an interesting set of questions for the next ACT survey?
But isn't the point that the obviously correct answer is both? I am pretty sure most people would pick that option if it was explained to them.
I probably lean more towards the medical approach (medicines, surguries, prosthetics and assistive devices) as being more life changing than an equivalent investment in social change, but these treatments are constrained by the technology of the time and require the appropriate social accomodation to be fully realised (e.g. ramps for wheelchairs). Both medical treatments and social changes come with tradeoffs (e.g. cochlear implant vs learning sign language), why would you limit yourself to only one approach when you can utilise a combination of both?
I think almost everyone here (including myself) would agree with you that the obviously correct answer is both. What I'd be more interested in is measuring people's perceptions of whether societal factors/features or biological impairments are more to blame for the limitations impaired people face in their every day life. I think my prior is that most people know very few impaired people, and so can miss the ways relatively small things can really limit the opportunities of someone with an impairment. This is true even if they understand and believe in the standard/interactionist/biopsychosocial model
I suspect that most able bodied people think more in terms of the physical differences, leaning us more towards the medical model. However, I can imagine the small accomodations or lack thereof being much more obvious to people with disabilities, leaning them more towards the social model - i does depend on how you personally define "cause" and "blame" though.
I remember that when I was pushing my granddad's wheelchair, aspects of the built environment like uneven pavements became much more obvious to me, but I'm unsure how he would have thought about it - I don't think society resurfacing pavements more often was that high on his list of priorities. People like me probably should think more about the social causes of disability, since that is something we can try to help with, but can't really think of a social change that would have adressed my grandad's inability to wash and dress himself. Even under the best of circumstances, having to have somebody else do that for you is inherantly more constraining than doing it yourself.
It would be interesting to investigate perceptions on this in a survey, but it would be hard to get a big enough sample size of disabled people, especially since you should probably seperate out different types of disability, that may well affect this.
I have OCD, so the "social model" has struck me as utter nonsense. No amount of societal accommodation would eliminate the suffering that occurs when I stop taking my meds and my brain decides to light itself on fire and torture me endlessly with "what if"s about made-up nonsense where if I don't do everything perfectly me and my family die.
Although just to play devil's advocate, I had an OCD patient who would ask lots of questions at work (probably out of an obsessive need to be sure they were understanding a task right). Their first boss answered the questions and everything was fine. Later they got another boss who found this annoying and started a process to fire them. Later still that boss was replaced and they got another boss who answered the questions and everything was fine.
I know I come out kind of anti-Social-Model here, but I really do think a whole lot of things are interactions between conditions and society and that even pretty unpleasant conditions like OCD can have social aspects that are worth considering.
I’m curious if the social model makes more sense for physical disabilities rather than some mental disabilities like personality disorders and some neurodevelopmental disorders. For instance, one could make the case we should teach every child in school sign language and deaf people would all have a much easier life. We could arguably build infrastructure and build a world where hearing is not necessary, however expensive. However, for something like ADHD, OCD, schizophrenia, etc, they are disorders so much more internalized that our brains don’t allow us to function that well in all aspects of life even if we have all kinds of societal accommodations. Sometimes, ADHD makes me act like an asshole to others, which I then regret and I completely understand if others think that it’s not healthy for their own psyche/mental health to have to interact with me/my brain. Medication helps me a lot, of course, but I don’t feel entitled that anyone should be subjected to my mood swings because those can be objectively hurtful to others. Meanwhile, there’s nothing about someone, say, being paralyzed and needing to use a wheelchair that can be mentally damaging to others in the same way that a personality disorder can be. And I believe there’s accordingly nothing wrong with being entitled to proper building access and transport everywhere and anywhere, because that doesn’t harm anyone else’s health at all to do.
(I’m completely open to the possibility that I’m downplaying potential complexities of physical disabilities however, as I have little direct experience with them.)
I think there are conditions (both physical and mental) which are better treated through accomodation and there those which are better treated through medication. Or even maybe this distinction makes more sense when speaking about specific symptoms of a condition.
I wouldn't like to take a pill that would "cure" my autism. But I may want to soften or even get rid of some specific symptoms without rewiring my brain alltogether.
"we should teach every child in school sign language"
You would then have the average child able to say "Where is the bathroom" and "A beer please" in ASL, based on the success rate of teaching children French, Spanish, etc. in public school (including mandated classes, such as we have in English-speaking Canada).
Unless there's someone to practice with and reason to do so.
Oh, I bet kids could really easily imagine reasons to be able to communicate without sharing it with adults around them. Sure, you wouldn't be invisible, and in this hypo a lot more adults would know sign language, but...
There's a whole fad of teaching babies sign language, on the theory that their language-brains develop faster than their vocal abilities. There hasn't been a surge of signing, hearing toddlers AFAIK.
An interesting and well-written essay, somewhat undercut by my utter inability to imagine anyone taking the other side of these arguments. You say they exist and I believe you, but I'm in bizarre dark matter world on this one.
I think a version of the orthodox Social Model can be charitably rescued if you replace Society with the Environment in general. For example, a blind person marooned on an island has to deal with an overly adverse environment (a modern society, as a part of the "environment" would make it less adverse).
The degree of "ability" is a reasonably smooth function of both arguments. Sometimes it is a total disability, sometimes it is a minor inconvenience, and sometimes it's a huge bonus, even for the same value of the "impairment".
That doesn't rescue it - it renders it useless. Living in a certain type of environment (e.g. planet earth) is part of human life, so blaming your death on 'the environment' makes the model meaningless.
If you cannot survive in the environment that humans evolved to live in, broadly speaking, then the problem is with you, not the environment. The whole point of the 'social model' is that we can change the aspects of human society to accomodate the disabled. The 'environment model' has no practical difference to the medical model.
Well, we can also change the broader environment. Or find the environment where a disability becomes an ability. It does not have to be the society that has to change. Planet earth is not a single environment, and it is not immutable.
Having just spent a semester in a bioethics course where the Social Model was very much the local consensus, this was a satisfying read. Your points about the distinction between society causing vs. failing to resolve a disability and the biopsychosocial model being a sane way to acknowledge social conditions' influence without throwing out biology altogether were well-put. Not sure whether this was a genuinely great piece or it just happened to be ribbing my recently acquired outgroup, probably about 70% the latter if I'm honest with myself, but a pleasure either way.
You're mixing politics and models together and then arguing against a weird mix of both, instead of any individual concrete point.
The social model just means that a disability is defined by what society thinks a person should be able to do, not some objective list of "things humans should be able to do". A blind person can't drive a car, true. They also can't fly around like an eagle, but are not considered disabled for lacking this capacity. The inability to appreciate a sunset or an opera is a tragedy, as is not being immortal, but only some of those are disabilities. If possible, it'd be better to have sight restored than to be granted blindness accommodations, and it'd be super cool to be granted the ability of flight, understanding the distinction between the two is the point of the social model. This should be seen free from political activism, value neutrally. It's not wrong of society to have some abilities assumed and others not, that's just how society is going to function.
The biopsychosocial model is good for developing treatments for disabled people, do what you can to give capacity medically and work out accommodations for what you can't, but there is still a need for an understanding of what disability is, which is what the social model does. You haven't replaced that, or even attempted to, because you mixed up political action and model of understanding to argue against. The biopsychosocial completely fails as an explanation of what disability is.
You may want to call this a "motte", but the social model is still correct then, it's just a bunch of political activism that's been tacked on you disagree with. Which is fine, but still means you're wrong on the majority of this article.
>The social model just means that a disability is defined by what society thinks a person should be able to do, not some objective list of "things humans should be able to do". A blind person can't drive a car, true.They also can't fly around like an eagle, but are not considered disabled for lacking this capacity.
This makes no sense. You can't say it's society imposing this standard on people when it's the disabled who are demanding accomodations to make these things accessible to them.
Nobody is pointing to eagles and claiming to be oppressed because society doesn't put things in place to make them fly. Disability advocates point to abled society and claim it an injustice that they can't do all the things that abled people do.
>It's not wrong of society to have some abilities assumed and others not, that's just how society is going to function.
But these accomodations being demanded cannot exist without abled people in the first place!
If nobody could see, humans would have already died out (or evolved into something categorically different to humans).
Blind people would die out if all sighted people died - this is not society imposing value judgements on things and abilities. This is the cold hard reality of humanity. The blind depend on the sighted for their existence, and short of making them not-blind, this is always going to be the case (even if robots take care of every human need in the future, these robots will almost certainly possess visual perception abilities).
>Nobody is pointing to eagles and claiming to be oppressed because society doesn't put things in place to make them fly. Disability advocates point to abled society and claim it an injustice that they can't do all the things that abled people do.
... Yes, that is the point. There is an abled society, and failing to meet the demands of that abled society makes you disabled. If nobody could see, nobody would consider being blind a disability, but most people can so it is assumed you should be able to.
>Blind people would die out if all sighted people died - this is not society imposing value judgements on things and abilities. This is the cold hard reality of humanity.
I tried my utmost to be clear that I was describing a model for the purposes of understanding, and not trying to suggest political action or moral judgement based on that model. Lacking abilities like sight or being able to walk suck. The question is, how have we determined that this is a disability? The temptation and obvious answer is that there is something wrong with the person. Which is sometimes useful, treating disability is often a good thing. But contrast to something like running a marathon. People can do that, but some can't, and we don't consider those who can't disabled. Why? Trying to understand that arrives at the social model, that we live in a society that is designed around certain assumptions about what a person can do. What we should do from there is something I'm not talking about, I'm distancing myself from political activism to try and talk about the model neutrally.
An alternative way to think of disability is not what "society thinks a person should be able to do" but lacking an ability that is ordinary or commonplace. My failure to be able to fly by thinking about it isn't a disability, but if 80% of the public could do that, then it plausibly would be. It isn't social judgment that makes this so, but rather the range of abilities as they exist. Some disabilities are significant impediments to a person based on the environment while others aren't, of course, and part of what the environment looks like is socially constructed in ways that could be changed to make it less challenging.
The "social model" (taken literally) is so obviously nonsense that it's surprising anyone would even pretend to commit to it.
Thought experiment for its proponents: image you live in a utopia that has implemented all conceivable accomodations and is perfectly welcoming to everyone. Would you be willing to have your hands surgically removed? Your feet? Your eyes? Your ears? If not, why not - shouldn't make a difference, right?
As for placing the responsibility for fixing their issues on the disabled, rather than on society: this is obviously an issue where a reasonable compromise has to be struck, but there is at least some responsibility that lies with the disabled person. Example (inspired by Scott's doctor with glasses): if I wear my glasses, I can do my job perfectly fine. If I don't, I pretty much can't. Do I have an obligation to society to wear my damn glasses, do my job and pay my taxes, rather than refuse, and apply for disability benefits instead? Damn straight I do. And if I lived in a world where there are no glasses, but the alternative would be an affordable and fairly safe surgery such as lasik, I would have an obligation to do that as well.
In a utopian society you'd still want all the capacity you can get. Just like you'd want 120 IQ instead of 110 IQ, or indeed as much IQ as you could manage. Having 110 IQ doesn't make you disabled, however, and it would be possible to design a society that treats losing your feet, eyes, or ears as if you lost a lot of IQ instead of a disability. Which is to say, still very bad.
Okay, it took me a few minutes and a cold shower to put the "social model" into context - namely, that it's just the "disabilty" version of Cultural Marxism, where nothing bad can possibly be caused by things that happen in the real world due to actual mechanisms and circumstances, but must be the fault of one group oppressing another. Like, being obese is not bad because it almost inevitably causes issues with the heart, the joints and the metabolism, but because thin people fail to celebrate and acknowledge fat people yada yada.
Also, my wife works as a special education teacher here in Germany, and when I just mentioned the social model, she rolled her eyes. Apparently, it's considered an obviously bad, obsolete idea and has no practical importance in her line of work. I guess seeing people struggle with actual physical handicaps every day dispells the notion that it's all just society.
I mean, I might be wrong about my understanding of how activists these days are using the Social Model, but here's how I understand it:
Social model is not anti-cure, it's that you should NOT be forced to get a cure in order to do regular day to day things.
I like short-sightedness as an example. Myopia is managed by either visual aids (glasses) or it can be treated with lasik. Socially, glasses are commonly accepted. They're also generally acknowledged as Really Important To People - so you don't just grab someone's glasses or move them if it inconveniences you. You make sure the owner of the glasses is always in control of them, and if you have to remove them for whatever reason (usually dentist or swimming), they need to take good care of them and watch over them carefully. Insurance covers glasses. You can drive with glasses.
You can get LASIK if you like, but you don't need to. If you're managing your condition with glasses, you could consider LASIK if it makes your life easier, but you aren't forced to if it's not an issue - people understand LASIK is really expensive, takes a number of consults, and quite invasive.
Wheelchair users are saying that really, once you get used to it, being wheelchair bound is fine as long as the footpaths are traversable, there are elevators, and people treat the wheelchair with the same care and respect that they do glasses when they need to part with it. You should not force them to do many invasive surgeries to walk again, if they're finding the wheelchair ok.
1. Wheelchair accomodations are a much more active cost than that imposed by glasses wearing. It doesn't make it an unreasonable cost, but it's not very analogous. Few people's lives are different due to others wearing glasses. We have norms against touching or otherwise messing with people's clothing and belongings anyway - it's not something we need a model of disability for. We sure as hell didn't need the social model for 'don't fuck with people's glasses' to become a norm - this has been the case since long before the social model existed.
2. The cost, risk or other inconveniences of LASIK are I think obscuring the more fundamental truth of the matter. You seem to think the 'forcing' part is what is bad about the alleged alternatives to the social model, but then you bring up the cost, financial or otherwise, or LASIK.
What if one day, curing vision impairment was free and involved only swallowing a pill (that had no more side effects than other over the counter medications). Would it then be okay for 'society' to say that we're not making any accomodations for the vision impaired people? Is this still "forcing" them to get cured? And even if it is, is it actually wrong?
Yes. It's not anyone's business to force other people to meet any random standard. It might become an economic decision (if glasses get too expensive), but it needs to be a decision in a meaningful way.
I do actually have the resources to throw at LASIK, if I wanted to. I could probably wait a few years and they'd improve it to be even less invasive, cheaper, with less side effects. I still don't want it - I like to have blurrymode available, and don't want to go through life with full HD all the time. I'm not alone - many who are d/Deaf and HoH also enjoy having real silence if they switch off their assistive devices.
On the flipside, we also have to focus on here and now - and the reality is if we hold out for miracle cures for all disabilities, what does everyone who's currently disabled do now? That is the main concern of most activists - it's not a good solution to demand that everyone should just wait to be cured.
I mean there is the “soft” version of the social model where it’s just largely uncontroversial stuff like “we should build wheelchair ramps and elevators into most public buildings”.
But there’s a “harder” version that’s more like “no, paraplegic is just as valid a way of being as any other, therefore anything that is harder for a paraplegic person is because of oppression”.
To me, glasses ARE the medical model, it’s literally a medical professional prescribing (gate keeping!) you a prosthetic and saying “ok now go out into the same world perfect vision people live in and deal with it”.
The “hard” social model solution for myopia would be more like “there is nothing inherently worse about 20/200 vision, society is just wrong and oppressive for designing the world for 20/20 seers”. And the solution would be designing all signage so that it could be read with I corrected 20/200 vision.
As someone with not one but two disabilities (Narcolepsy and Tourette's syndrome, the latter with "all the fixins"), I fully endorse this message. Another major problem with the general approach of "society has all the responsibility to accommodate disability" is when the person's disability symptoms come into conflict with *other* people's natural rights, and Tourette's syndrome is a pretty good example of this, especially if you have some of the more extreme symptoms (as I do, on occasion).
Like, there is literally no way for society to accommodate absolutely everything. It is good for society to try to accommodate me a reasonable amount, and I'm very, very, grateful that I'm privileged enough to say that for most of my life, it by and large has. But there are things society can't and even *shouldn't* try to accommodate too, and this is very important.
I did a long interview about this once if you're curious about all the bizarre details I'm alluding to:
'This couldn’t because their disability prevented successful naval service, or Nelson’s victories would have been impossible. It must have been because of state discrimination.'
Agree - essentially the social model of disability discounts the fact that human beings are inherently physical creatures with physical constraints. And a disabled person may have MORE physical constraints laid on top of this.
A non-physical, social-only model of disability discounts this.
I mean, if you were teleported to a world where almost everybody is able to see infrared light and people rely on each other being able to see infrared light, you'd be disabled even if nothing intrinsic to you changed...
If your model doesn't presuppose being human (as humans currently exists), then it's a stupid model.
But even THEN, I would likely be able to survive in infrared world without accomodations, and me and a group of non-IR-seers could survive on if all the IR-seers died. If sighted beings all died, the blind would be abjectly helpless, in this and almost any conceivable world.
The current state of affairs looks very much as if people originally followed the Medical model which led to lots of terrible things, so the Social model was developped as a challanger and then they synthesized into the Interactionist model which people actually follow now.
Social model is just as wrong as Medical one, yet as it came after it and thus led to correction the prevously flawed practises we celebrate the Social model and shame the Medical one. In the world where the Social model came first and we had bad history with people refusing to treat cataract due to it, it would've been the opposite.
Also, I have to notice that "society makes people disabled" is the matter of category border, not a fact. We can define our terms so that "impairment" is the medical condition while "disability" is societal one. It makes sense to have different words for it and be able to talk about them separately. We just shouldn't forget the difference between "being able to talk about them separately" and "assuming they are always separate and there is no relation between them whatsoever".
I do appreciate that you take people seriously at what they *say* they mean.
But this is the first I have heard about it as a regularish person. So I'm curious if this is a pre-emptive post by you to head off a crazy idea, or is it in response to a bunch of people trying to implement hair-brained schemes with the social model in place.
Even if it is just pre-emptive I don't think its a bad idea to make the post. The last decade has shown me that there should have been more pre-emptive challenges to crazy ideas. I just don't feel like there were many concrete examples of what these people were doing, rather than what they were saying.
I think the social model works especially bad for autistic people. I have an autistic kid and he's very sensitive to noise and can't stand other children making noise - and autistic kids are also, in general, far noisier than neurotypical kids (stimming, talking during inappropriate times, and of course meltdowns.) And in fact, both of these traits often exist in the same autistic person - my kid included.
Basically, these are "competing access needs" which can occur across disabilities, except in this case the needs are competing even *within* the same disability.
Obviously many ways of "fixing" this is problematic. Accommodating autistic people should never involve removing autistic people from a space. It's a really difficult situation.
Curious, I'd think that social-ish model approach are especially *good* for autistic people as one of the main problems is society traumatizing autistic people into appearing to behave neurotypically instead of accomodating the actual needs.
> Basically, these are "competing access needs" which can occur across disabilities, except in this case the needs are competing even *within* the same disability.
What about sound dampening headphones? Wouldn't they accomodate both the need to make loud noises and the need not to hear loud noises?
Loud sounds don't bother my kid, it's actually that ambient speech makes it difficult to pick out the speaker- for instance, at an animal handling event- and he already struggles with understanding speech. Crosstalk can be really difficult for autistic people. So they actually make things even worse for him by making it harder to hear in general. They're also uncomfortable (sensory issues).
In general it bothers me that earphones are our solution to autism in classrooms. These are kids that struggle with social interaction and understanding speech and we further isolate them by removing (temporarily) one of their senses. It's cheaper to put a kid in headphones than in a smaller class though.
Sorry, I misinterpreted you. If there is no constant problem with loud sounds then there is no need for permanent headphones. There are options to use them only when the kid is overstimulated or close to it, but of course they have to be confortable and not provoking sensory issues themselves.
> Crosstalk can be really difficult for autistic people
Yeah, crosstalk sucks. My girlfriend has a huge problem with it. I'm less so, most of my sensory issues are visual. I'm both having not a very good eyesight and overtimulated by light so I'm constantly using dark glasses with diopters. I'm not sure by maybe there is a similar solution for auditory stuff? Something to filtering the ambient noises but not strong enough to remove the hearing alltogether and even help to concentrate on the speech?
I had thought with your grandparent post that you were referring to active noise-cancelling headphones, which do exactly this.
(Audio-Technica ATH-ANC23 are wired earbuds which run off a AAA battery, one of the cheapest ways to experiment with noise-cancellation. They work without an audio source; I use them on airplanes.)
Part of what is going on is that we are in a post-truth world where activists say what they think will have the best effect, or just say what they want to be true, without worrying about what is true. It make sense for them to do this because a lot of people will say they believe the thing that sounds most inclusive or whatever and aren’t concerned with what is true.
I wonder if proponents of the purest Social Model would ascribe to some model of passive causation. It may slide between concepts of causation and responsibility, but take the classic trolly problem for example: if you refuse to pull the lever, your failure to act when you plausibly could have is part of the chain of events leading to the people on the tracks dying. It’s not one billiard ball colliding into another type “causation” but I see how it can make sense to say a failure of action can have causal power in some situations. To analogize the splitting of the terms “impairment” and “disability” you might say the runaway trolly is the physical impairment which is of initial causal power, but society’s failure to “flip the switch” of accommodations is what “causes” the disability according to how I would understand the Social Model. I’m not sure what I think about that framework, and honestly fits your “standard model” too in some ways, but it sets the focus is on society acting or not acting (with impact on disability) contrasted with what are assumed to be a pre-given set of facts about impairment.
I think you are slightly misunderstanding the LITERAL interpretation of social model.
It says not to treat disabilities medically, but it also separates disability and impairment, and doesn’t say anything against impairment being medically treat, just disabilities.
So wanting to cure the impairment of blindness is more like wanting surgery to implant magnets in your hands so you have a sense of electromagnetic fields around (which I’m definitely in favour of, the more senses the better)
But curing the disability of blindness should be done socially, like designing cars & their infrastructure so that they can be safely driven by the blind
You say NASA building spaceships for the sighted only didn’t deprive the blind, but I disagree, if most everyone in society was blind, we’d still want to go to space and spaceships would’ve been built with the blind in mind, and the blind were deprived of the opportunity of living in a more blind compatible society
Also you bring up the example of a blind person being disadvantaged on a desert island, but it’s not like there aren’t natural environments where blindness is advantaged, hence why blindness has evolved more times than sightedness has (though blindness is easier to evolve than sightedness)
Yeah, it seems to me that what they're doing is simply redefining the existing word "disability" to mean something different from the normal meaning of the word, which naturally leads to confusion. I don't know if the model has any actual content beyond that.
When looked at it this way, the whole thing screams "motte and bailey". With the motte being "we're just separating the part that can be remedied by society from the medical part", and the bailey "restructure all of society to accomodate us, dammit!"
Yeah, the originators of the social model don’t seem to have rigorously grounded the model like I’m suggesting it(as far as Scott quotes suggest), but I do feel like Scott should be arguing against a rigorous strongmanned version of the social model rather than the weaker version he is objecting to, ESPECIALLY when the strongman version is still compatible with the literalist interpretation of the social model
Because building spaceships depends on a massive stack of prerequisite skills, and a lot of those skills require spatial perception. You can probably start with just knowing that what we call space exists requires some spatial perception of electromagnetic radiation. A species operating off of spatial perception via sound waves (echolocation) isn't going to be able to know space exists.
You can probably build a spaceship without hearing, taste, or smell. Tactile sense (touch) is a bit trickier; at high technology levels tools can compensate, but I don't know how you would get basic tools at all without touch, since everything starts with hands (or similar manipulators).
A different and I think better argument for space travel for the blind is that most space projects are fundamentally for symbolic purposes. Sure, we do science on them and yes, maybe we’ll mine asteroids or colonize Mars someday, but the immediate and often explicit motivation is symbolism. Putting an impaired astronaut in space would be a compelling symbol of inclusion, way more interesting than just launching yet another highly competent able bodied person onto the ISS to do scientific experiments the public will never know nor care about.
Are you saying that deaf people are less than human? Are you saying that people with Downs Syndrome are less than human? Why are you excluding them?
I was deliberately argumentative to make a point; once you start down this path, there's no logical end to it. Yes, we've stupidly sent one-off space tourists up at public cost; this was stupid at the time. But once you start the 'symbolic' route, you're mired in a maze of which impairments are worth being symbols and which aren't. A private ride to the ISS via SpaceX costs $55 million for an able-bodied tourist. That's the average tax payment of 3,000 US taxpayers, each, for empty symbolism.
This is also a long way from 'a society of the blind could build a spaceship'. Knowing space exists is just part of the problem. Without vision (or some sort of electromagnetic spatial perception), how would you know the Earth was round? You can't see the masts of ships over the horizon before the hulls, you can't measure the shadows of buildings, you can't track the motions of the stars or see the shadow of the Earth on the moon (and you don't know that the moon or stars even exist). How far would metallurgy (and thus chemistry) have progressed without the ability to distinguish which rock was which? (I suspect that if humanity as a species was even color-blind, we'd be a lot further behind in chemistry, just because of how many chemical discoveries seem to come down to 'that rock / crystal / flame is a funny color; why is that?')
“Once you start the 'symbolic' route, you're mired in a maze of which impairments are worth being symbols and which aren't.”
Sorry, that’s just false. I think you are the one of us two who is mired in a maze about symbolism. For me, it’s very simple and clear - if you can get enough public support for sending a paraplegic person into space, then you can do that for symbolic reasons and cheer the outcome. I expect you’ll hate that, but I think that if you do hate it, it’s because you hate costly symbolic acts generally, not because you think this particular proposal is a mediocre form of symbolism. I bet that a proposal to send up an entire team of variously disabled astronauts would get a huge amount of positive press coverage and be a potent pro-inclusivity symbol.
Baloney. This is like saying that sighted people could never discover radio, because they can't perceive it with their senses.
Sure, a world of blind people would probably take longer to discover that space exists, but remember that they could still feel the heat of the sun, and *certainly* observe its effects, as well as the effects of the moon (i.e. tides). They'd figure out the existence of heavenly bodies eventually. Heck, they'd probably do quite well; as soon as they invent an instrument that converts electromagnetic waves to sound, the whole universe opens up to them.
Walk me through this: how do you notice the patterns of the tide going in and out without spatial perception, unless you just stand on the beach for a month? (Hint: even I can navigate through my house in pitch darkness; drop me in the wilderness and ask me to forage for food and it's hard to know where I am relative to where I was an hour ago even with spatial perception).
For that matter, what does a painting sound like when converted to sound? More importantly, what does a blueprint sound like? What does the difference between copper and iron sound like?
It's fine to imagine some advanced technology that can provide an entity that doesn't have spatial perception the ability to manipulate the world around it as if it had spatial perception. The problem is that you need to start from the basics and go every step of the way, and those basics require spatial perception. Picturing some magic device that represents the 3D world in 1.5D sound is great, until you realize you need to interact with the 3D world to build it in the first place.
Unless you're going to invent something entirely outside of human understanding (which you may as well call magic and treat the same way), the necessary technological path has some basic first steps. You need to make tools. You need to manipulate fire. You need to find and smelt metal. You could uplift an animal species to human-level intelligence and they would struggle with those unless you also gave them something close to human form. Octopi are probably smart enough as it is to use tools, but making them from scratch is going to be almost impossible, and fire and metal are beyond that. This is not fair, but the universe isn't fair.
>Walk me through this: how do you notice the patterns of the tide going in and out without spatial perception, unless you just stand on the beach for a month?
Sound! Certainly it is the case that tides make different sounds going in and out. If you’re close enough to *see* the tides, you’re certainly close enough to *hear* them, at least in many places.
Or, if you are gathering food at the beach/in the shallows on a daily basis, you’re going to *feel* the tides go in and out. It may take several generations for people to figure out just what is going on (and of course many more to figure out *why*), but they’ll *notice* it almost immediately.
>(Hint: even I can navigate through my house in pitch darkness; drop me in the wilderness and ask me to forage for food and it's hard to know where I am relative to where I was an hour ago even with spatial perception).
And someone who lives in the wilderness can navigate it (literally) with their eyes closed, just as you can your house.
>For that matter, what does a painting sound like when converted to sound?
Paintings aren’t converted to sound. There would never be paintings to begin with. Paintings aren’t a feature of the natural world; they’re human created. They’d have music, just like we do, and maybe tactile “art,” and who knows what else. Humans are inventive!
>More importantly, what does a blueprint sound like?
>What does the difference between copper and iron sound like?
I don’t know! What *does* it sound like? I know that such things do often make different sounds when struck (people used to be able to tell good gold coins from counterfeit from hearing them ring on a metal surface, so I’ve heard).
What does the difference between zinc and nickel look like?
>It's fine to imagine some advanced technology that can provide an entity that doesn't have spatial perception the ability to manipulate the world around it as if it had spatial perception. The problem is that you need to start from the basics and go every step of the way, and those basics require spatial perception.
>Picturing some magic device that represents the 3D world in 1.5D sound is great, until you realize you need to interact with the 3D world to build it in the first place.
Are you thinking that hearing would be their *only* sense? That would be a challenge indeed! I believe the conditions were “evolved without sight,” not “evolved with only hearing and no other senses.”
I think blind people interact with the 3D world all the time.
>Unless you're going to invent something entirely outside of human understanding (which you may as well call magic and treat the same way), the necessary technological path has some basic first steps. You need to make tools. You need to manipulate fire. You need to find and smelt metal. You could uplift an animal species to human-level intelligence and they would struggle with those unless you also gave them something close to human form. Octopi are probably smart enough as it is to use tools, but making them from scratch is going to be almost impossible, and fire and metal are beyond that. This is not fair, but the universe isn't fair.
The majority of human societies that have ever existed would not be capable of building a spaceship (even the Chinese didn't realize the Earth was round until Jesuits told them). Spaceships aren't something independently arrived at by lots of different societies through convergent cultural evolution, it's something that only happened as a result of a narrow filter.
Monkeys by default do have eyesight, take away that and you've got a species less capable than monkeys. Chimps don't deliberately teach each other, but they are capable of learning things like tool-use by observing each other. Remove their eyesight and you take away some of their limited learning ability.
1. The point about spaceships and cars is weird and feels exactly like the point the social model is trying to make. Spaceships and cars require sight because they were designed that way, by sighted people. If all humans were blind, they would've designed them differently.
2. Mt. Everest is a bit of a strawman, but it's certainly true that the natural world is not always very accommodating to disabilities.
Pray tell, how would a society of blind people design a car that can be operated by blind people? Now, after more than 100 years of technological progress, it is still not possible to rely on computer vision to safely operate cars - and that progress was made mostly by people who could see, and needed that ability to do the work.
* People used to believe (mostly) medical model of disability
* People made a big argument that we should have less than 100% medical model of disability and more than 0% social model of disability (or more than we usually had at the time)
* As with every new idea in the history of all fields, some people wanted "More of this than we have now" and some people wanted "All this, all the time, for everything. And any exceptions are trivial edge cases we can ignore". And lots of people didn't worry about which of those we'd aim for until we'd started moving at all.
* Social model of disability caught on. Some people are still fighting to have it applied to them. Some people are dutifully passing down the arguments of the original fight. Some people are preaching straw men for various honest or disingenuous reasons. While some people are fighting not to recognise that there are many cases where it doesn't apply and we shouldn't have 100% social model of disability.
I think "social model of disability doesn't apply 100% of the time" is true (with caveats depending on who I'm talking to).
But if some people use "social model of disability" to mean "applies 100% of the time" and other people use it to mean "applies more than 0% of the time", then regardless of whether they have reasonable reasons for interpreting that way, and regardless of any official definition, a claim "against the social model" will sometimes be true and sometimes be false depending on the definition which is used by the person reading it
It's funny you use blind astronauts as an example, as Radiolab podcast did an episode last year on disabled people in space and how they are being overlooked: https://radiolab.org/podcast/right-stuff
A specific example I remember is that blind astronauts would be extremely effective during an emergency involving the station filling with smoke, as they would know their way around in ways a sighted person wouldn't.
Definitely worth a listen/read (there's a transcript).
A sighted astronaut could train with their eyes closed for such a scenario and then be fine, but a blind astronaut is not going to be able to do everything that the sighted astronaut can do.
I'd encourage you to listen to the episode/read the transcript as it goes into more detail than just the one example I gave.
But I also think it's disingenous to say that a person who trains for even an hour a day to navigate a dynamic space with their eyes closed will be better at navigating a familiar place in the dark than someone who can't see.
Even better example might be something like a colostomy bag. Takes a lot of training and special equipment for the default-model butthole to poop safely in microgravity. Surgical implant which some medical condition already made necessary could reduce that arduous task to something barely more difficult than recharging a phone at a wall outlet.
A spaceship is, ultimately, an assistive device enabling humans to travel and survive in hostile environments - surely those who use other sorts of assistive devices, wrangling hostile environments on a daily basis, have skills and insights to contribute.
You switch between the interactionist model, the standard model, and the biopsychosocial model. It is a bit confusing, also since you give no references to others using these concepts (except with regard to the good old biopsychosocial model).
In the context of disability, you can replace the two first with a concept that is dominant up here in Scandinavia: The Gap model, also referred to in the literature as the relational model. The model refers to the gap between a person's capabilities and the demands of his/her environment.
The policy implication is that the gap should be made as narrow as possible (ideally closed), by interventions aimed at both sides: both to empower the individual, and to reduce barriers in his/her physical and social environment. The Gap-model is well-established; it is used both in research reports and in government papers.
I must add that the quotes you provide from US University websites sound as if the webpages have been written by naive, well-meaning people, not by people who have tried to seriously confront the policy dilemmas in this field. The quotes you provide are also not aligned with how disability is defined in the UN convention on the rights of people with disabilities, Article 1. Quote:
"Persons with disabilities include those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others."
...the important point to notice in this definition is "in interaction with". Which leads directly to the Gap-model (what you call the interactionist model/standard model).
...plus, the critique you refer as to the medical model, seems unaware of how the medical model is formulated by influential spokespersons for this model. For example, here is Saad S. Nagi's (1991) medical definition of disability: An "expression of a physical or mental limitation in a social context, a gap between the individual's capabilities and the demands created by the physical and the social environment." (See "Disability concepts revisited" in Pope, A & Tarlov, A (eds.): Disability in America. Institute of Medicine, Committee on a National Agenda for the Prevention of Disabilities).
...Nagi's definition illustrates that the assumed reductionist-individualistic bias of the medical approach is less pronounced than argued by the critics. As illustrated in the above quote, Nagis' upgraded medical model brings the social context of the individual into the definition of disability, including both the physical and social environment.
You further refer the critique by some militant "social model of disability" activists against what may be labelled compensatory policy measures, including cash transfers and services targeted on people with disabilities. This criticism holds that by singling out people with disabilities for special treatment their "difference" is emphasised, potentially resulting in stigmatisation and social marginalisation. What these activists often fail to see, however, is that singling out people with disability for special treatment is also necessary if you use regulation policies (anti-discrimination legislation and the like, which is extremely popular in the US) to improve their conditions.
Let me give an example: Arie Rimmerman (in his 2013 book "Social inclusion of people with disabilities. National and international perspectives"), shows that such potentially stigmatizing singling-out takes place with regard to anti-discrimination legislation. I recommend the book for his discussion of cases brought to court based on the US anti-discrimination act (p. 110-11) and the UK and Israeli equivalents (pp. 117 and 123). His examples illustrate that in order to apply anti-discrimination legislation, judges must decide if the offended person is really "disabled". And to have one's disabilities scrutinised by judges or a jury, is obviously at least as potentially stigmatizing than having to demonstrate "disability" in order to be awarded a cash benefit or subsidised service.
For example, Rimmerman quotes a US case where the court found that the Anti-Discrimination Act did not apply since the plaintiff "despite her undisputed impairment [carpal tunnel syndrome] and the demonstrable limitation that it created, ... failed to qualify as disabled because 'she could still brush her teeth, wash her face, bathe, tend her flower garden, fix breakfast, do laundry, and pick up around the house'" (p. 111).
The example is instructive of how human rights-based legislation (here: anti-discrimination) creates exactly the same targeting problems as traditional compensatory measures (disability pensions and disability services, such as being granted the right to have a paid personal assistant helping with activities of daily living). To simply shift from compensatory policy measures (benefits and services) to legal policy measures (human rights legislation) as some activists advocate, does not avoid the necessity to investigate whether people are disabled or not disabled, i.e. it is still necessary to target ("brand") the benefactors as disabled.
A brief aside to the theories of science: The social model of disability exists in a strong and weak version, roughly corresponding to the difference between strong and weak social constructivism. Strong social constructivists argue against anything that contains a trace of essentialism: There are no objective facts, only interest-driven "constructions". If one accepts this view, that all disability is WHOLLY socially constructed, it makes theoretical sense to abolish all policies that one way or another target people with disabilities. Since targeting, however well-intended, serves to maintain a social construct that can (in theory) disappear if we stop interpreting it as real. This strong social model of disability can be associated with some militants within the disability movement who portray any policy except mainstreaming (i.e. only very general stuff, such as making buildings wheelchair-accessible) as oppressive.
In contrast, weak social constructivists (e.g. the sociologist Peter Berger, co-author of the enormously influential Berger/Luckmann book The Social Construction of Reality) maintain that all reality is subjected to socially derived interpretations, but does not therefore infer that all interpretations are equally valid - that none corresponds better to an outside "reality" than others. (For an elaboration of this view, see Peter Berger's later book "In Praise of Doubt" , co-authored with Anton Zijderveld.)
Applied to disability, the weak version of the social model confers that disabilities are (also) connected to biological phenomena that exist independently of how we talk about the world. Here, disabilities are regarded as a complex interface between the individual and his/her surroundings. In practice, the weak version is very close to the updated medical model, as interpreted by Nagi (see above). Policy implications are also similar: Disability policies should be geared toward making the surroundings more accommodating to people with disabilities, but as a supplement - not as a replacement - to cash benefits, subsidised services, and legal protection targeted particularly at this group.
(Short version: radical social constructivists believe that there is no reality outside language. Weak social constructivists believe that the body is older than language.)
Ending this long comment with a personal opinion:
I find the policy implications of a pure social model-approach to disability politically dangerous. This is so, since it is utopian to believe that mainstreaming alone will remove the need for targeted efforts directed at this group. A pure social model - approach can even serve as an ideological veil under which benefits can be scaled down and services dismantled. (Some people within Departments of Finance and Treasuries might like the social model for this reason.)
Activists hell-bent on the strong version of the social model of disability are in some sense modern-day equivalents to Lenin's useful idiots, in that their academic chatter can be used to put a progressive gloss on the scaling-down of medical and social welfare benefits and services targeted at this group.
Here is the basic question: Are people with disabilities to receive rather more benefits, services and/or legal protection than an "ordinary" citizen facing the many tribulations in life? If so, there must be some way to identify who has disabilities and who has not. We simply cannot avoid this.
I feel that the problem underlying all of this is that the term "cause" is getting philosophically misused throughout the article. I could equally say, "I am personally the cause of all disability in the world because I have not invented a solution to heal it", or "God is the the cause of all disability, for He allows it to exist, or at least does not provide help to deal with impairments". I think we should take a step back and become very clear on what do we mean by the word "cause". I am afraid that in the social model, for example, it is used to hide the implication of responsibility and blame.
I am not sure what the rational definition of "cause" is, but my first attempt to fix it would be to say "inaction can not be a cause of action. Action can either be caused by some other action, or be spontaneous and self-generating". Otherwise we can use loads of insane counterfactuals to explain causation (the cause of the murder was that the aliens did NOT abduct the murderer).
We could say that the idea which causes the problem here is "counterfactual model of causation": if assuming that A had happened implies that B would not have happened, then not A causes B. So maybe we should be careful to not sneak counterfactuals into our explanations of cause and effect. So "a hammer hit the ball, so the ball flew" is a good cause-and-effect chain, while "if a hammer had not hit the ball, the ball would not have flown" is a bad cause-and-effect chain.
"inaction can not be a cause of action. Action can either be caused by some other action, or be spontaneous and self-generating".
What about if you have an obligation to act, and do not? For example, I’m supposed to pick up a friend from the airport, but instead do not do this. Have I “caused” my friend to be late/annoyed/etc?
I think that what this example demonstrated relates to expectations, not to obligations. Consider two more examples:
Suppose I promise my friend to cure ageing by tomorrow, and (obviously) fail to do so. Does it mean that I am now the cause of death of every old person from now on?
Suppose you wanted to arrive somewhere by sailboat, knowing that the wind blows there constantly. However, on the day of your travel the wind dies due to anomalous weather conditions, so you are late and annoyed. Does it mean the absence of wind is what caused you to be late?
I feel like the answer to the first example is no, and the answer to the second example is yes. But the second example is about expectation rather than obligation (the wind is not obliged to blow every day, it just usually does so), and the first example is about obligation rather than expectation (no one realistically expects you to cure ageing in one day, even if you solemnly promise to do so).
So maybe my idea can be modified by saying that we distinguish action action from inaction not be comparing the outcome to perfect stillness, but to our expected outcome. But such an approach implies that causation is subjective, and depends on what you know and expect. Consider another example: your friend A is arriving by plane and has promised to meet with your another friend, B, by 5pm. In secret from A, you promise B to meet A at the airport (as a surprise for A). Then you fail to do so, friend A goes to friend B by bus, but still gets late because she accidentally boards the wrong bus. What is the cause of her being late? From the point of view of A, it is A choosing the wrong bus. From the point of B, it is you failing to pick A up.
Can we salvage this subjectivity by considering a hypothetical observer, which always expects perfect stillness? I am not sure. Maybe the best thing we can do is to explicitly describe our knowledge and expectations before discussing any causation.
But the one thing we should definitely avoid doing is speaking about causation with respect to our desired outcomes, as opposed to the expected outcomes. And this is what I believe happens in the social theory of disability. A person wishes society fully accommodates every person with every impairment, and so says that the lack of such accommodation is the actual cause of people being perceived as disabled.
This feels incomplete to the point of being borderline straw-man-ish. Yes, it's a good takedown of the Social Model. Then what? (Sorry Scott, we're used to more :D)
The really fascinating topic hinted here is not how the Social Model came to be - this is very well covered as being the natural reaction of some people at a certain point in history. The fascinating topic is why modern institutions in the west have such a strong tendency to take these kind of positions as official. Because it happens too often and in too similar ways not to be a standard failure mode. If by any chance that's the next article in the series, yey.
It wouldn't. With 10s of km, it's rather small scale. Almost every highway or train line is longer. So are lots of subways, tunnels, etc.
Perhaps you compare it with vertical structures? Yes, we don't build 10km high buildings. But it seems to me that "structures lying more or less on the ground" is the better reference category.
I was imagining a giant ramp built up the side of Everest which would have to be massive, but if you spiraled and zig-zagged it, it would basically just be a road. Unsure on the cost and practicality of it, but the elevation alone would make it a very ambitious engineering project.
Ah, I understand. Yes, a ramp would have gigantic costs. And a meandering road would still be really ambitious, but not cost a trillion.
The Karakorum highway of 800km goes up to 4.7km and costs 10 billions. Let's say the Mount Everest Wheelchair Lane needs to cover 4km altitude at a 1:12 ratio, that's roughly 50km, so a factor of 20 shorter. The altitude will make construction a lot more ambitious, but the MEWL can be much smaller than a highway, which cancels some of the difficulty. My very wild guess would be that it ends up at most twice as expensive per km, which brings us to 1 billion in total. Perhaps even less.
Not so expensive after all. Though the cost for snow clearance will be a nightmare. Much easier and cheaper to build a tunnel+elevator.
Your transportation costs will be much much higher, as there are few improved roads that even get close to your starting point. There is no open ground to base your road on, you have to defrost the whole thing as you go, I guess, and keep it open while you build. As you remove the snow and ice, the soil will rebound and need to be constantly stabilized. You have a very small time window every year to work in, so you need to start and stop building over a period of years, with repairs to your existing structure and whatever routes your are using to transport all your materials. BTW, these routes will mostly be built brand new for this project because they don't exist now, and they will need to be of a large size to bear the weight of all your equipment. You will need to house all your workers, providing every need since Everest is so far from any city capable of providing these needs. You need to buy the land from Nepal, or the official landowners. Since Everest is something of a natural attraction, and you are forever despoiling it, I imagine that will be costly. The final tens of kilometers will be at extremely high altitude, you will need special engines for all your construction equipment, which will probably have to be specially designed and built, making them probably an order of magnitude more expensive.
This is just of the top of my head. 1 Trillion sounds about right.
> Before people invented spaceships, blind people couldn't be astronauts, because nobody could be astronauts; going to space was just fundamentally difficult. Then people invented spaceships that could be piloted by sighted astronauts, but couldn't be piloted by blind people.
As a matter of history this is wrong. The first spaceships didn't need any piloting; they could be (and were) flown equally well by a monkey as a human. Presumably the same would be true of a blind person.
One surprising thing I learned from reading "The Right Stuff" is that in the early days the space program was somewhat stigmatized among test pilots as being "not real flying".
You wrote: "To support his point, he gave various examples. Lord Nelson, who was blind in one eye, was a great Admiral. But in his own day, disabled people were banned from the Navy. This couldn’t because their disability made successful naval service impossible, or Nelson’s victories would have been impossible. It must have been because of state discrimination."
In my hobby exploring the British navy in the age of Nelson, I have come across many amputees and other types of disabled people serving on ships. Many of them were injured early in their careers and nevertheless rose in the ranks.
Here is a quote from a discussion of "Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals: Amputee Officers in Nelson's Navy," by Teresa Michals:
"Michals identified more than 40 amputees who attained the rank of commander or above. All but four of those officers held subordinate positions when they received their injury. One of them, Sir Watkin Owen Pell, lost his left leg as a rank-and-file seaman during an 1800 battle with a French warship. He was 12 years old at the time. After becoming an amputee, Pell spent another 60 years on active duty, the last 20 or so as an admiral. He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1837."
Any day that involves Scott Alexander dunking on Bryan Caplan is a good one.
And speaking of disabilities, I think Caplan has a uniquely strong one when it comes to seeing contradictory evidence. Oh, I know, bubbles, internet, "have-you-been-on-twitter?". But this is different. People on twitter who ignore evidence counter to their views still see it - they will dismiss it as "fake news", or as "biased" or start speculating about your sexual attraction to barnyard animals, or whatever. But there is still some sort of reaction.
Caplan isn't like this. It's like his whole visual and pre-frontal cortex edits out contradictory evidence. I swear, you could have all the world's experts screaming at him all the reasons why he's wrong, and all he would see would be an endless, empty plain, with the wind blowing mournfully and the tumbleweeds drifting....
Despite the bogeyman comment and all the scare quotes, the "Medical Model" is what the man in the street believes to be the best explanation of disability. If I have only one leg, it is the loss of the leg that causes disability. Medical professionals and society at large can ameliorate that difference between me and my bipedal friends, but they cannot remove it entirely, or magic it away. That is why the Social Model is pie in the sky. The Medical Model does not imply stigmatization, nor that we should not accommodate, and certainly does not remove the human rights we choose to accord each other. That's all piffle.
Just to " to come at the bravery debate from the other side" that gets a lot of sidekicks in this post: Please note: Thomas S. Szasz was no "anti-psychiatrist." We both believe in psychiatry between consenting adults. We are opposed to institutional psychiatry and coercion. We are not opposed to contractual or consensual psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, or counseling, what have you, as long as the designated client is able to fire his or her therapist at any time. ... If people want to take drugs to control the way they think, feel, behave and perceive, by all means they should be free to do so. See Szasz's work: "Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared", published by Syracuse University Press, 2009. See the review by Dr. Ron Roberts 2010: https://fee.org/articles/antipsychiatry-quackery-squared
"You and your comrades had just won a great victory in getting the medical establishment to de-list homosexuality as a mental disorder, and - sure enough - the problem had been society’s persecution of gays, not the “disorder” itself. "
From a utilitarian perspective, what consequences of decriminalising and destigmatising homosexuality would you consider compelling evidence that actually the problem is homosexuality and not society's persecution? Because what we actually got was AIDS. Clearly, you think the actual number of gays who died in incredibly horrible ways is not compelling evidence that homosexuality itself is the problem, but what number would you consider compelling?
Was that caused by decriminalization, or a critical mass of gays gathering in one place after medicines were introduced to treat the syphilis that would have killed them prior to AIDS?
It's hard to believe that the big change in incentives had no influence on the propensity of homosexuals to engage in intercourse with each other. Perhaps you can say that legalisation and stigmatisation might have been less disastrous had we not cured syphilis, but what's the take home message here "don't cure syphilis so that we can legalise homosexuality without it getting too out of hand?'.
The point here is that Left-Rationalists hold up the legalisation of homosexuality as the textbook example of the paradox of success. 'Legalising homosexuality was so successful people took it too far and started cutting teenager's breasts off', 'Legalising homosexuality was so successful that people took it too far and decided that there as no such thing as mental illness.' But, actually, legalising homosexuality was a policy catastrophe akin to the Vietnam war that turned out far worse than even its most fierce opponents predicted. The real message is that, no matter how disastrous your policies are, if you hold cultural power, you can still leverage them to do even more disastrous things.
Who are the "Left-Rationalists" making such claims?
Lawrence v. Texas was handed down in 2003, well after AIDS had peaked. Sodomy laws were upheld in Bowers v. Hardwick, during its height. If you reply that the relevant decisions were made at the state rather than national level, it should be noted that Illinois was the first state to decriminalize in 1962, but AIDS' epicenters instead were in NYC (where it first started spreading from Haiti in 1971, decriminalization not occurring there until 1980) and San Francisco (where it spread from NYC in 1976).
One of the Left-Rationalists I was thinking about was the author of this article *in this article* where he writes:
"The Social Model Of Disability came out of the same 60s/70s cultural current that gave us Thomas Szasz’s claim that mental disorders are fake. Szasz was thinking of examples like the stigmatization of homosexuality; he (understandably) preferred to think of homosexuality being a perfectly fine alternate-way-of-being that society just had to learn to accommodate. But he took it too far"
"But put yourself in the shoes of a 1970s radical. Your stereotype of psychiatric treatment, which wasn’t entirely false, would have been cops taking gays / LSD users / eccentrics, locking then up in horrible state-run hospitals for months, and treating them with strong drugs or electroshock therapy or lobotomies. You’d never met a schizophrenic, but you believed Gregory Bateson and Thomas Szasz’s report that they were just cool eccentric people who didn’t abide by society’s artificial rules. You and your comrades had just won a great victory in getting the medical establishment to de-list homosexuality as a mental disorder, and - sure enough - the problem had been society’s persecution of gays, not the “disorder” itself. Drunk with victory, you might see the arc of history pointing to the complete liberation of all categories of supposedly “mentally ill”."
Maybe you should take up your novel thesis about when gay liberation happened with him.
My point is that nothing Scasz advocated had anything like as disastrous effects that gay liberation had, unless you think 100,000s of people gruesomely dying isn't bad or something.
I don't see how Uganda cracking down on homosexuality in the 2020s is pertinent to whether Gay Lib resulted in the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. and western countries.
However, since you brought it up, Africa is the one continent where straight people who aren't smackheads get AIDS at high rates. There are various reasons for this, but one of the reasons *might* be that straight Africans are just less strictly straight. It will be interesting to see if Uganda's crackdown on homosexuality has an unexpected influence on AIDS transmission.
I don't think AIDS was a result of gay liberation anywhere. I was born in the US in '89 and I remember homosexuality still being pretty taboo in the 90s. The liberation project didn't really gain traction until the '00s in my experience.
Very anti-homosexuality nations still having AIDS problems bolsters the idea that gay liberation doesn't cause AIDS epidemics.
This is just very strange. The article you are commenting on refers to the progress made in gaining toleration for gays in the 1960s and 70s, taking it as a given fact that it happened. And yet, when faced with the also obvious fact that this caused AIDS, suddenly gay lib never happened until the 00s.
In 1960, if you opened you opened up a gay bar anywhere in the U.S. cops showed up and shut it down. By 1970, there were 100s of them. And then AIDS happened. AIDS in western countries has always been and still is a disease of homosexuals and intravenous drug users. The only other significant group of people in western countries who ever caught AIDS were people receiving blood transfusions, but this was solved by stopping homosexuals from giving blood. (Despite an ongoing campaign by homosexuals for their human right to give haemophiliacs AIDS, this ban is still in force in most western countries, so I guess you can say in that sense gay lib still hasn't happened and some future commenter will claim it didn't *really* get started until the 2030s.)
It is not in dispute that AIDS in the US began among homosexuals and that an absolute majority of people with AIDS have always and continue to be homosexuals. It is also not in dispute that this happened straight after it became much easier for homosexuals to have sex with each other. So the better way to phrase your question is "why in western countries is AIDS a gay disease, but in Africa lots of straight people have it too?". The three non-controversial explanations are as follows:
1) One reason gays have more AIDS in western countries is that gays have an order of magnitude more sexual partners, on average, than straights, but in Africa straights have a lot more sexual partners than in the west.
2) One reasons gays have more AIDS in western countries is that anal sex is 2 [!} orders of magnitude more likely to give you AIDS than normal sex, but in Africa there is a preference for 'dry sex ' (google it, if you must) which causes tears and bleeding in a similar manner to anal sex.
3) In the west, most straight people who get AIDS are intravenous drug users, and in Africa more people use intravenous drugs, and the standards of hygiene are much lower.
However, I don't think that quite explains the discrepancy, so I will dip my toe into some more controversial waters. AIDS is caused by HIV, but it's actually quite hard to get HIV if certain risk factors are not present. Specifically, the average gay man in the US (a) has upwards of a dozen parasite and bacterial infections over the course of his life as a result of exposure to fecal matter and (b) takes a lot of drugs, especially poppers, at least in his 20s. However, in Africa, simply drinking water exposes you to a lot of infections, and there is a lot of really dangerous drug use, including sniffing glue and, rather shockingly, catalytic converters. So, in short, being an African is, from the perspective of bodily insults, kind of like being an American homosexual.
On a general note, it seems to me that some people (particularly those who lean a bit social-ist), often see “social” as damning criticism and a mic drop. As if something is necessarily suspect if it can be shown to be “just” a social thing. It looks a lot like the mirror image of the naturalistic fallacy (that “natural” = “good”).
While I think it can be really helpful to understand something like disability (or mental illness or the economy or race or gender or...) as a social phenomenon, that should not be the end of the reasoning: “X is just a social construct, therefore it’s okay to simply reject it and condemn society for it.”
In a larger context, I don’t think anyone would disagree that “social” is mostly a good thing. It implies sharing, collaboration, agreement, negotiation and compromises, getting along, civility, tolerance, and certain concessions to practical realities. In short: give and take. Usually in tension with others and the environment.
So, I would like to reframe how some of these things are often presented:
If X is socially constructed, then flat-out rejection of X is anti-social behavior.
There may be a time for some (disciplined) anti-social behavior, but most of the time, it’s as unwelcome and unhelpful as it sounds. The socially acceptable way to run with the “it’s social” argument is to use it to start, not end, the conversation: “X is in part a social construct, therefore it can be changed and improved upon. How can we do that together, and how can we do it faster?”
It’s great if anyone wants to change the culture and society for the ever more perfect – even when it pushes people out of their comfort zone. But unlike what some seem to think, the changes can’t be dictated by anyone, even when those who want to dictate are experts, or particularly deserving individuals, or powerful special-interest groups, or armies of white knights and Don Quixotes.
Instead, I think the loudest and most adamant voices demonizing the rest of us for social oppression and exclusion would do good to remember that social phenomena aren’t just unavoidable, but usually good, and that the best way to change the culture and society is to be more social (as opposed to anti-social): Listening as well as speaking, making suggestions not demands, giving examples not orders, negotiating and navigating societal realities, giving and taking, and so helping new and more helpful social constructs evolve.
Navy soldier here. I’d like to elaborate on the “person who uses a wheelchair aboard submarine” thing.
First, I served on an auxiliary, on which lack of space is less of a problem than on e.g. frigates or submarines. We had wide corridors and elevators. It still wouldn’t work. For a million reasons: the elevators aren’t always in use (e.g. during heavy seas, or in the event of a fire), the ship’s compartments are separated by hatches where a wheelchair couldn’t get through, etc etc. How would they even get up the gangway? (Granted, I can come up with technological solutions to that last one – but would they work ship-to-ship? Not every harbour is big enough for every ship to be moored directly on the quay. Also, would the wheelchair-accessible gangway take longer to set up than the standard one? If yes, then when the ship is returning home after several months at sea and the families are waiting on the pier, everyone else will hate you.)
Second, every person aboard a warship has additional jobs in addition to their main role. For the troops, that’s mostly stuff like cleaning and, in pandemic times, disinfecting, but more importantly, your role in the event of fire/water breach/NBC alarm/general alarm (crew to action stations). I cannot come up with roles that most people with disabilities could sensibly fill in one of these events. Which is the reason there are physical requirements, more so than any inconvenience caused by accommodations that could be made to make everyday life aboard warships more accessible. “Can get from port A to port B” isn’t the standard warships have to reach, even though it’s what most warships do, most of the time. It has to be useful in wartime.
I agree with Scott’s point and I get what it’s like to really want to do something like serve in the Navy. For transparency’s sake, I also had to jump through various hoops and provide additional doctor’s assessments for nine months before the German Navy accepted me (though in my case it was the psych eval they were worried about). I wouldn’t have wanted to be there unless I had the confidence that I could pull my weight. That’s not just due to a sense of honour, or maybe fairness. Life aboard warships is already hard enough; you don’t want to be that person who’s not pulling their weight.
Somewhat tangential, in the US military only members of the Army refer to themselves as soldiers; the Navy has sailors/seamen.
You clarified later that you were in the German Navy, so terminology (especially considering translation) would plausibly differ, but there's enough stolen valor in the US that many veterans wouldn't have made it past the third word of your post before accusing you of the same. I'd suggest maybe leading with more specificity (e.g., "German Navy soldier") to avoid having to deal with that.
In Germany, all people in the military are called soldiers, though there's the more specific term 'Marinesoldat', (literally 'Navy soldier') so I always used that to self describe without knowing what you said. Come to think of it, the US naval bases I've been to always have some kind of poster like "Welcome Sailors" but I never questioned it. Also, I kind of thought that 'seaman' was specifically a low ranking Navy soldier, as in 'Able Seaman'. Thanks for saving me from putting my foot in my mouth!
Regarding stolen valor- I could kind of guess from context what that meant, but I googled it to be sure. It's not a thing in Germany. As in, I've literally never heard of it. (I would make a joke about losing two world wars here, but I can't think of a good one.)
Having been in the service just isn't seen as positively here, so it makes no sense for someone to lie about it. Though the reverse does happen - soldiers in uniform get free train travel here (partly as an effort to increase visibility and improve public perception), but I have plenty of comrades who prefer to pay for the regular ticket rather than having to deal with passing e.g. Berlin central station in uniform.
If you don't mind my asking, I'm moving to the UK soon, so would "I used to be a German Navy soldier " be correct or would another term be better? Seaman/sailor sounds like it might be US specific.
Not "soldier". I think sailor or seaman would be better, or just "I used to be in the German Navy". Your question made me realise I don't actually know myself! (UK-based, but not any form of military).
I was in the US Air Force, so my understanding of the distinction between "sailor" & "seaman" is tenuous at best.
"Navy soldier" would probably be fine in person if you don't sound like a native English speaker (most would correctly chalk it up to language differences); in accentless writing (as here), the specification of German could serve the same purpose.
ETA: upon further reflection - especially since it's coming from German - "Navy soldier" may be misinterpreted as a literal translation of a compound word equivalent to "Marine". Not the same kind of issue as disbelieving you in the first place, but still a plausible issue that could be avoided by more idiomatic than literal translation.
I have an audible accent and don't really look like someone who served in what in German would be called the Navy Infantry. Thanks for pointing out the issue though.
"The model says that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their impairment or difference."
Is this the reification of a teen's response to a sarcastic dad who said "oh, yes, it's the world that's the problem, not your behavior"? I appreciate looking at the world through different lenses but this one is bonkers.
I didn’t ever understand this until I became disabled myself. I had to leave my clinical NHS job because I was unable to work a conventional job - 9-5, office-based, with a commute. This was pre-pandemic and there were few alternative options. My employer (understandably) told me they could not accommodate my level of disability that meant I would need shorter days and time spent lying down. Nobody could. I was facing a lifelong dependency on disability benefits.
Instead I launched my own business and within a year had a wildly successful, multi-six figure enterprise. From my bed. With exactly the same level of disability as before. In a world where we’re used to measuring worth and value via financial contributions, it was wild to go from “you can no longer contribute to society” to “you’re now a top 1% earner and the BBC keep phoning you up”.
But my body was never the issue; the conventions and infrastructure were.
If every human was born with the same level of physical ability that I now live with, everything would be shaped differently and it wouldn’t be a handicap. As a statistical outlier, I of course accept that the world isn’t built like that. But suddenly you start to realise that it’s not really the abilities and limitations of anyone’s specific body that define what they can do in the world. It’s the level of accessibility and our adherence to conventions and ‘one size fits all’ structures that define who does and does not get to participate.
I absolutely agree with all that - in my own much smaller example, I am pretty tall and very broad shouldered (and varying levels of broad-waisted), and there are lots of things that just aren't made for someone like me - restaurant chairs, cars, airplane seats, auditorium seating (my nemesis), etc. But the Social Model says that I should feel empowered to demand others change their lives and bear the costs of things to make me more comfortable. If all the chairs were built for me they would be way too big for most people 🤷♂️
Taken as an internal motivation (I need to do whatever I can with the abilities I have in the environment I'm in) this is healthy and good. But when it's morphed into an external expectation, it becomes a weird political project that makes demands of others that I'm uncomfortable with.
Yeah, there’s nuance, of course. But I do believe on a fundamental level that a fair society should strive to allow all humans to enjoy the same level of accessibility to essential services and practices. If we have the technology and resources, it feels unethical to not.
If you pay the same for a plane ticket, as a customer, should you not be able to demand the same level of accommodation and comfort that less tall passengers enjoy? I think you should. The law talks a lot about “reasonable accommodations” where disability is concerned, and while imperfect, it seems this often works out. IMO it would be entirely reasonable for you to demand the airplane appropriately seats you with extended leg room, or stops selling seats to people they cannot properly accommodate. If everyone affected did so, perhaps they’d stop squeezing people in like sardines in a can.
While I take your point about the political impossibilities, the only alternative is to say that disabled people should change their lives and bear the cost for the comfort of the able-bodied, which seems to be prioritising the more privileged. Disabled people already face increased costs of living, poor access to health, work and social activities, etc. Where is the line between ‘just catering to the most common denominator’ and discrimination? It’s a messy one to parse.
"If you pay the same for a plane ticket, as a customer, should you not be able to demand the same level of accommodation and comfort that less tall passengers enjoy?"
Seems like a strange example and something that isn't obviously true. What would such an accommodation be like? And why should such a tall person be entitled to it just because they paid a standard ticket price?
Let’s say you were so tall you literally couldn’t fit into one economy seat. Let’s say you are also too poor to afford business class where you could fit, but you can afford the economy seat. And you in the business class seat gives you the same legroom as an economy class ticket, ie you would have an equal experience to an average-height person in economy. You get no other special advantages, just now all passengers now fit equally. Wouldn’t you want to not have to pay extra simply because of your genetics? Wouldn’t it be a big kindness if we could help people like this? Wouldn’t we all be happier if we lived in a world where we did it have to worry about that?
the devil is in the details, ceteris is never paribus, etc., etc.
Two quick points: I see no reason that would be the duty of the airline to accommodate rather than via some other mechanism (perhaps the government pays for a better ticket). I also don't see "equal experience" as an obviously laudable (not to mention feasible) goal; down that road lies the Mankiw height tax.
As to weight issues, we already live in the world you imagined. Everone can take the same luggage mass and pays the same for excess luggage no matter what their body weighs. Except for small private planes, I think.
Well, because you pay for safe and comfortable travel to your destination. That’s what is sold to you. There’s nothing in the t&cs that says “btw, if you’re over 6 foot you’re going to have to fold like a pretzel, so forget those first two lol”.
If you or I, as (presumably) non-tall people got to our seat and found this was required, and that there was ludicrously insufficient leg room for our standard anatomy, we’d be rightfully irate. So why shouldn’t a tall person be?
Why shouldn’t a disabled person be, in an equivalent circumstance?
That doesn't seem correct. You pay for a specified seat on a plane. I don't think "comfortable" is guaranteed (surely we've all been on enough flights to know that isn't the case). If I bought a ticket and they told me I had to stand in the bathroom instead, I think I'd have reason to be angry, but if I bought a ticket and the seat was like every other seat on the plane and like every other seat I'd bought a ticket for previously, I don't think I'd have any reason to complain regardless of my height; I knew what I was buying, and I got it. The airline is selling a product, and I don't see how that's the airline's fault if I can't consume that product comfortably.
I think that this is a nice idea in some ways. The reason that I hate it is because of the inevitable result that short people would get less legroom than they do now.
Which seems silly until you look at the US school system.
Perhaps this was not a universal experience, but at my school there was at times a clear expectation that the highest performing students would put in additional work to help the lower performing students. I am normally happy to do this, but when it becomes a tool to take away advanced courses, it becomes a problem. This overall philosophy that everyone should get the same level of education in school can result in the active deprevation of resources from students. Now, thankfully my school was willing to listen to reason when all the parents yelled at them, which made it merely bad for me instead of the hellscape that other commenters sometimes describe. But it does suck, and result in a shitty time sometimes. Idk that there's a good result, but certainly at times I can feel the appeal of "give people cash and let them prioritize spending it as they want."
I've been on both sides of this. I suffered from some pretty severe spinal degeneration in my 30s, and though it proved to eventually be treatable, the treatment was multiple lumbar interbody fusions that have left me with a permanently reduced range of motion, persistent stiffness, fatigue if I ever have to sit or stand for any extended period of time. I couldn't drive for a long time. It made it hard to work any kind of regular office job, but luckily when I still did, my employer and line of work was pretty accommodating, allowing me all the breaks I needed to go lay down and decompress, but I still couldn't work while doing that. Work from home has been a godsend in that regard and I can't imagine ever going back at this point. It has enabled to me to remain a productive high-income earner, but relies upon telecommunications infrastructure existing and a culture that allows people to work in a distributed manner.
On the other hand, before all the treatment, when I was just living with vertebrae grinding against each other because the discs had permanently lost all fluid volume, that was not the same nature of disability. That was incredibly debilitating, brain-frying, nonstop chronic pain. It was innately bad. No conceivable accommodation could do anything to improve quality of life in that state. Only the hope of eventually getting better even made it worth continuing to live at all. Since I couldn't do much of anything back then, I did find myself gravitating at times to disability support and advocacy communities on the Internet and strong believers in this social model definitely existed and made me feel pretty alienated. The idea that anyone could ever possibly want to live in the state I was living in, regardless of how human societies structured themselves, was insulting. I wanted to yell at some of these people to stab themselves in a nerve center and twist the blade, all day every day for the next year, and tell me that experience is only bad because society is making it bad.
I’ve always considered the social model as applying strictly to physical disability, but this is an important point.
Pain and brain fog are disabling in a way that cannot be captured by the social model. Learning disabilities too, and perhaps some mental illnesses. And many - perhaps even the majority - of disabled people are living with one or more of these factors alongside their PD.
Maybe the ability to cope with bad stuff should be considered like intelligence: unevenly distributed, not easily modified and quite predictive for life outcomes.
Are you planning to flesh out the Interactionist model more? I think that’s where I align although I also think of ability/disability as relative scales and contextual in an ultimate sense. I would be less abled than a person who could see Dark Matter in general, but more abled in a scenario where their ability to see Dark Matter would distract them from a task where only seeing regular matter was the most important.
Also just to be that guy, The Social Model is a justification for every progressive fever dream piece of legislation mandating more and more expensive demands on property owners to satisfy some abstract vision of an imaginary just society. Using the Social Model I can explain why we NEED the Green New Deal and to retrofit homes not only for clean energy but accessibility. It turns out the real pandemic was lack of accessibility, et cetera, ad nauseam
I don't think Caplan regards it as "fine" to use drugs and that society should stop stigmatizing it. Rather, he thinks that addiction is an excuse used by people who want to use drugs (or drink) and society shouldn't take such excuses seriously.
Moderate users are less extreme, while it is the addicts who cause most of the problems (Mark Kleiman would agree on that, but then he also regarded the alcohol industry as a bad outcome to be avoided with other drugs in the process of decriminalization). Alcohol is more acceptable and considered less deviant, and we can look at what he says about that. He does not drink, as he's not persuaded that even moderate drinkers have better outcomes than non-drinkers:
He says "alcohol has obvious negative side effects", not qualified by it being only for cases of abuse, but that "Depriving drinkers of alcohol tends to make them belligerent, making it a high-cost punishment to impose":
People are fundamentally the same but specifically different. We are practically defined by our social and therefore our moral nature.
Modern society has excelled at creating divisions by providing overwhelming incentives to view each other as economic units in return for social order, miraculous scientific advancement and unprecedented wealth at all levels of society. This, but at the cost of much of our humanity.
What I've described has happened, in general, in every civilization as a cycle documented since the 14th century(1) and this due to evolved human nature taking 10s of thousands of years to change however technology, that is, our control over our environment and each other(Abolition of Man, CSL) advances far more quickly.
To mitigate the harm "society" does to individuals and vice-versa we must individually choose to gradually include others in our definition and sense of 'self'. If we can agree on this can we also agree the first step is the encouragement chiseled over the entryway to the Oracle of Delphi?
Made me think of how dominant a discourse can be that means well, but treats a situation we’re you’re not tall enough, or short enough, to reach the fruit while you’re stranded as mystically socially caused. The scurvy you’d get is because some blameable people, not the shipwreck. I thought similar things when I read an anthropologist try to make the case natural disasters were socially constructed because society doesn’t respond well enough. Not because we have yet to master tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanoes.
I get the case made as an appeal against context, but the unflinching prescriptive adherence of supposed adherents is irksome and the pretension this belief is inherently productive is distracting. Mind the contextual loam of your theories people. Once again, American shit cannot walk and chew gum at the same time, there’s a denied gum chewing gym taken from someone. America SUCKS at wisdom. (America is my stand in for who’s/whats /wheres cultures this kinda hierarchical theory/praxis fetish bc I sure as shit see it here).
The social model of disability seems like an example of a general phenomenon where professionals feel the need to push incredibly hard on a counterintuitive (wrong) position because the general public's common sense is wrong in the opposite way. No one with any expertise admits to supporting the medical model, but that's everyone's default assumption before they acquire expertise. So the training ends up trying as hard as possible to beat that assumption out of people to the extent that if you took it literally you'd make the opposite mistake.
Literally no-one has 'the default assumption' of the medical model as described in this article. When have you ever heard someone say there should be no wheelchair ramps anywhere in the country?
I was taught the social model in a disabilities studies class that I took last fall semester in college. I'm not sure how it is taught in other courses/activist groups but I remember that it was largely used to critique capitalism and the emphasis on productivity and labor. The idea was that if it wasn't for society's unhealthy emphasis for production and labor, there would be no such thing as disability, as disabled only meant so in the context of being less productive. I think the social model serves as one of the intuitive and easy ways to support current negative attitudes on capitalism in college campuses.
Why is it that whenever you find something that when taken at it's word would be both completely asinine and very destructive in "unexpected" and "unintended" ways it turns out a Marxist from the 70s came up with it?
I think we should abolish the ADA and let the free market decide what types and degrees of accommodations are worth building and what sorts of disabled people are worthwhile to hire for which sorts of jobs.
Please tell me this is a joke. We know exactly what degree of accomodations existed prior to the ADA thanks to the free market. All we have to do is look at what accomodations existed in 1989.
Do you have any quantitative data on pre-1989 accommodations? Also as the country gets richer, and disabled people earn more through increasingly-common remote work so that they have more money to spend in various establishments, the equilibrium amount of free-market accommodation will rise
The best I have offhand is my experience as a landscape architect who has worked, in the last few years, on dozens of retrofits on sites built before 1990 that require additional access ramps, wider walkways, and railings to bring them up to modern accessibility requirements. This is qualitative evidence, not quantitative, but physical accomodations for access buildings is literally part of my job. Most of the developers I work with want to do the absolute bare minimum legally required for accessibility and disabled people's money doesn't cross their minds, even though many people with limited mobility are part of the workforce. Even companies building affordable housing (market price dwelling units, MPDUs in the parliance of my region) want to build as few ADA accessible units as legally required, even though they are building the exact sort of units that low income disabled people are much more likely to rent.
I don't have numbers to convince you, so writing this might be a pointless exercise. But I still want to explain in broad strokes where I'm coming from.
How much does accessibility do for the resale price of the housing unit and how much does it cost to make the housing unit accessible? Maybe paying the disabled people directly might be a more efficient way to accomplish things than imposing unfunded mandates on every goods-producer to inflate the supply of goods that disabled people consume.
The Social Model is so wrong that if you didn't quote a bunch of proponents at the beginning of this article, I would have assumed it was an invented strawman. I'm hard of hearing and wear hearing aids. With my aids, I can hear most things fairly well. If people take the time and effort to look at me and speak clearly, I can understand almost everything. But I will never, no matter what technology I use or what accomodations people make, be able to hear as well as someone with perfect hearing. And the reason is 100% physical, not social - I have a physical disability that prevents me from hearing as well as the typical person.
> we wouldn’t typically say “the police caused the assault”. We would say “I caused the assault, and the police failed to prevent it.”
The problem is that many people's idea of moral causality actually is this messed up (or at least, it is when it comes to certain topics). You don't have to look hard to find people blaming politicians for making a bad but vague tweet and then one of their ten thousand followers committing violence because of it. Or calling them mass murderers for saying that COVID wasn't that big of a deal, or saying the NRA has blood on its hands because something something guns. I think for the most part, this is just people using the facade of moral reasoning to support their pre-existing policy preferences. It contributes to the modes of thinking (common among extremists) of black and white/us vs them, while also allowing them to shift blame to those who can implement those policy preferences. Kind of like suing a company or government rather than an individual person, because the former has more money, not because they're actually culpable (in fact I assume this often uses the same justification--they didn't do enough to stop it, or perhaps very slightly encouraged it).
As an academic in medical sciences this touches a few nerves. I will never forget an argument at a seminar made by a Deaf studies researcher suggesting that funding research exploring prenatal genetic intervention for congenital hearing loss was tantamount to funding the genocide of the Deaf community. Following this stuff to its logical conclusion lands you in weird places.
"It requires that we refuse to treat blind people whose sight could be restored with simple ten-minute cataract surgery" Thank you! As I was reading the quotes describing the Social Model, cataracts were the counterexample I had in mind. Thank you for covering it!
I think actually some form of the medical model is pretty much universally held in cases where we can actually solve the problem. As someone else pointed out in this thread, glasses are pure medicalism, they're literally a prescription. The correction of deformed teeth using braces, the surgical correction of cleft palates, the use of prosthetic replacement limbs, physical therapy, ear tubes, orthotic shoes. We do things to medically correct/prevent disabilities all the time, and most of them are completely uncontroversial.
I was about to write a comment that said something like, "If you have to argue this hard in favor of basic common sense, then it probably means that the people you're arguing against are so thoroughly inoculated against it that you're wasting your time".
But then I realized that this comment was bad, and I should feel bad.
Because deep down I can see that the Social Model of Disability isn't really relevant to the world of natural human relationships, where common sense applies. Rather, it's the sort of thing that results from the world of modern bureaucracy, where individuals are subject to the agents of vast interconnected institutions, whose actions are the result of policies set by obscure processes involving negotiations between countless levels and arms of authority, and in which any individual actor is incentivized more than anything to cover their own ass.
Someone once said that bureaucracy is basically unaligned AI; well, things like the the Social Model of Disability are basically prompt hacking.
Last summer I had a serious back problem. Fortunately, the problem could be treated effectively by a combination of drugs and physical therapy. I got the treatment, AND, while I was recovering, I got people to help me, and otherwise arranged things in my life, so I could avoid lifting heavy objects. I and everyone around me could see that the medical treatment and the accommodations were both patently good ideas; nobody had to appeal to any Models or Theories to justify either. But also, in my case, the treatment and the accommodations were both relatively minor and easy to obtain. My life, my livelyhood, and my basic rights were never under threat, and I never had to fight to bend the will of any institutions to get what I needed.
So again, I don't think things like the Social Model of Disability are really for human beings discussing or figuring out their lives. They're for nudging the system in a different direction. And in certain situations, for certain individuals, nudging the system is way more important.
I think this post is well argued but treats the theory within the rather narrow scope of an academic theory taught to clinicians or informing policies, when the way I've come to view the Social Model of Disability is as embodied by a broader, more roughly-defined mindset whose effects are largely, well, social. It goes hand-in-hand with the youth social movement towards SJ/"woke" ideology although isn't directly implied by the form of that ideology that blossomed ten years ago: it adds a particular bent to it where the point is people are disadvantaged by oppression and lack of privilege *only ever* in the narrow sense of privilege-as-conferred-by-society rather than as some inherent advantage. It's predicated on the assumption that no condition/trait can ever be viewed innately in a negative light (in fact, on Tumblr I've run across the mentality that a belief that Trait X is both genetic and innately bad is essentially eugenicist!). It's spread far beyond the traits that are widely classified as "disabilities", to neurotypes, mental illnesses, obesity, and other things (although there seem to still be some mental illnesses, such as depression, that are okay to consider "bad"). There is practically no such thing as an Unfortunate Condition; there is only Societal Oppression which is to blame for the hardships people suffer from certain conditions.
As others have pointed out, this mindset was around in a big way within certain particular communities (the deaf community) decades ago, but it's caught hold in a hundred more places since then and seeped into our youth culture. I first came to understand this when Stephen Hawking died and a bunch of my (very academic) friends were posting articles about how it's disgustingly ableist to portray his ALS condition and associated symptoms as bad things he would have liked to overcome, as though it's perfectly *lovely* to not be able to move like all but three of your muscles, using such arguments as "being paralyzed eventually inspired him to come up with his scientific ideas in a more geometric way, which was enriching to his research" and "when Hawking was offered a more human-sounding artificial voice, he refused, therefore not having a human-sounding voice is fine if not better than the alternative". I don't have time to try to hunt down those articles from 2018, but I hope I'm not uncharitably relating my memory of their arguments here.
I've come to see this creeping through the way younger generations view the way social interactions and society should work now more pervasively even than the original now-much-attacked oppression-olympics ideology that has come to be called "woke", and with much less explicit recognition and pushback from outsiders to the ideology. This post is a start for attacking it from the academic end, but I'd like the broader social implications of this to become part of the cultural discussion a bit more. Maybe over the next few years it will be.
As Freddie deBoer said in a very emotional video about this ideology where applied to mental illness (https://youtu.be/yKB6F_VYuZY?t=586), "What I just, I hate, I hate, I hate about modern liberal culture is, everything is not good. Some things in life are just bad. Some things are just, like, just bad, and they're not chosen, and you can't change them, and they suck, so we deal with them, but they're just bad, and they don't need to be fucking bright-sided all the time."
Scott, I'm glad that you too recognize the importance of democratizing access to mountains. We should aim to pave routes to the summits of all peaks to enable the hitherto-gatekept vistas to be enjoyed by all. "This dream is one of unity, one where any individual can reach into the heavens, even if just for an ephemeral day trip from Denver in a rental 4Runner. One where you can purchase a hot dog and browse the wares of a souvenir shop in sparse alpine air. One where the literal heights of our society are not confined only to those with the means to reach them on their own."
I think this article articulates some valid criticisms of the social model. However, I disagree with the contention that the social model is meant as literal truth, and that the people who articulated the social model in the '70s and '80s (a more accurate time frame) didn't see it as primarily a political tool. I wrote up a response here going into some of the history and looking at some early papers from back then. It's a first post, so would appreciate thoughts.
Show us in the quoted literature Scott has here where it explains that “this model is not meant to be taken literally”. These are training materials etc. that present it as fact, not as an interesting framing to consider for policy purposes.
The Social Model explains why you reject it. The fact is Society has actively abused and traumatized you to such an extent that you can' no longer understand that you DESERVE hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from the State because CAPITALIST Society has wilfully maimed your capability (vide Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, Patti Obaweyo-Golem et al) to endorse the Social Model.
By contrast, any Structural Causal Model of disability which improves organic capabilities and functionings irrespective of which Society its interventions are implemented in, can't account for why different people choose different Grievances, or allegations of fanaticism and stupidtiy, to brandish at each other. This is perfectly understandable. Politics may be supervenient on biology but is not reducible to it.
In the old days, of course, we had a Causal Model which featured God, rather than Society, because God had a lot of power whereas Society spent a lot of time starving in between getting ravaged by invaders or viruses or whatever.
Disabled people were obviously greatly loved by God because their patient suffering on Earth bought them an eternal reward. Sadly, some lepers etc. cursed God instead of praising Her Holy name and thus ended up in Hell. You too, are dearly beloved of Society which is why it has spent so much time maiming and crippling and scotomizing your understanding. That is why you won't get hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from the Government whereas I, who share your disability, will definitely be getting a check for loads of dosh any day now.
> There’s no such thing as drug addiction; people just voluntarily choose to use drugs. Society stigmatizes that choice by casting it as a disease where the person can’t control their drug use.
This is the opposite of the way modern efforts at stigmatization and destigmatization are usually phrased. The choice is more blameworthy than the nonchoice. Is Szasz working in a different paradigm where voluntarily choosing to use drugs is admirable and involuntarily doing the same thing is culpable?
I'd guess that "medical model" is what people call it when they want to disagree with it, but normally it's just not named. Like if you search for "cataracts" you don't get anybody saying "the medical model says that cataracts cause blindness" or anything else about the medical model. You just get stuff that IS the medical model: about cataract surgery rather than audiobooks and braille.
“Drunk with victory, you might see the arc of history pointing to the complete liberation of all categories of supposedly “mentally ill”. So why not the supposedly “physically ill” too? Why not liberate everybody?“
A lot of this stuff originates with overreaction to overreach and/or arrogance of authorities. I think that “drunk with victory” sentence might apply just as aptly to someone like Ron desantis, reacting to some antiscientific Covid stuff, then overplaying his hand.
So, I agree with you for the most part, but I think you missed a crucial part of the history of the Social Model that really should be mentioned (to cover off, I prefer pluralist/intersectional models mysel and would prefer that be the default hands down).
So to cover my biases. I have Autistic Catatonia and spontaneously lose cognitive and motor functions in response to stress. I also cannot feel stress. These things combined means that there is very little society can do to accomodate my disability when I am disabled. When I am not disabled, I am fully functional, have 4 degrees, and occasionally engage in game design and disability advocacy. About the only thing I can do to accomodate for my disability is not travel alone so that someone is always around to deal with things if I am crossing the road and lose the ability to walk or identify what a car is. If that can't be managed, basically I am not allowed to leave my house ever.
According to the Social Model of disability, I am not disabled. Also, blaming society achieves absolutely nothing for me.
BUT, I want to draw focus on that. Blaming society. That fundamentally is what the Social Model is all about and I feel it's important to stress that this is the entire point of the Social Model. It's a no-compromise political standpoint intended to force people to change or rethink policies. The social model plays the blame game because that's one of the most effective political strategies known to mankind. At most fundamental levels the social model is about changing how we look at disability, and it almost doesn't matter if it's right, what matters is if it forces us to address the point. Furthermore large parts of the pluralist and interactional and bio/eco/social/medical movements have evolved OUT of the Social Model, and many of your own criticisms of the Social model came out of people who were trying to improve the model.
It's worth noting that the medical model isn't a total fiction either. Aside from the fact that the medical model is more about mentality and approach to disability rather than anything else, fundamentally the medical model is an extreme that tends to be based on the way surgeons are taught - focus on the body/operation/disorder and leave the rest to the nurses, GPs and psychs. The medical model and the social model are both extremes like being political left or politically right. No one really 100% meets the definition of "left" or "right", but people do tend to look for dichotomies and lean more in one direction than the other (even if reality is infinitely more complex). Now again, I think the intersectional model is better, and the mediating tools model, and the pluralist model, and a bunch of others, but not only are these models often seen as more complex, they're often politically weak standpoints because they don't create a strong us vs them mentality, they don't cast blame, they don't provide a banner to unite around, etc., etc., but these things are kinda the entire point of a no-compromise position. By not compromising you (theoretically) force the other party to change, readjust, come up with a new position and eventually you get somewhere agreeable - or at least you create an opening for a third party to step in and take over. That is what the Social Model is about. It's not (read as shouldn't) be the dominant standpoint, but it should be about forcing people to bring these questions to the table by starting from and maintaining a position of strength. Now that doesn't mean there aren't people who don't blindly follow the Social Model to the point of stupidity, but I've met people who adhere to the medical model as a standpoint too.
Also you seem to have totally missed the charity model of disability which the Social Model is generally intended to confront also. Although I do say generally because usually it's listed as medical model first, charity model second, and frankly I'd be dead if it wasn't for the charity model even if the way it's carried out is very insulting a lot of the time (add onto this the conditional charity model and... there's a lot of depth to these arguments).
Anyway. This is something I've studied a decent amount because of the impact the Social Model, Charity Model and Medical Model has had on the Australian model, and in particular studying the history of the IDF (the former ICIDH), and a few other things. But I'm not an expert. And I'm also speaking from the perspective of a disabled Australian and not Ireland (our history with the social model mostly goes back to the late 80s at best).
To recap, the point of the Social Model is to be a political advocacy stance first and foremost. Do I agree with it? No. But it has had positive effects that may not have been achieved otherwise including the invention of pluralist/interactionist models? Yes. It has also had many negative effects, including the fact that you can't base an economic system around the social model but some people think you can for some reason (holy crap, that's a rant). But I think it's worth addressing that the point of the social model is to be a no-compromise political stance first, and like all no-compromise political stances it has flaws. But those flaws are generally considered less important by the people who are advocating it for whatever reason, if only because it invites people to fix those flaws.
Otherwise I largely agree with you, I just really feel you missed the point about the Social Model's political history and how important it has been to creating and generally improving the models we have now.
If there was no Society and individual homo sapiens would have to survive on their own, those with disabilities would be at a disadvantage and would prefer to not have their disability.
I feel like including this definition sort of gives the game away:
> Disabilities are restrictions imposed by society. Impairments are the effects of any given condition. The solution, according to this model, lies not in fixing the person, but in changing our society.
> Medical care, for example, should not focus on cures or treatments in order to rid our bodies of functional impairments. Instead, this care should focus on enhancing our daily function in society.
This definition already feels like a utilitarian reframing of the interactionist model.
Society and medical conditions both cause problems, we just use the words 'disability' and 'impairment' to differentiate them for clarity.
Medical care is a central part of the process, but it should have a utilitarian goal of improving function and quality of life, rather than an essentialist goal of 'fixing' 'defects'.
This puts me in your mind of 'just take the hair dryer in the car with you' story in terms of improving quality of life over solely looking for 'cures'.
If you say most people teaching the social model don't teach it in this reasonable way, I believe you.
But you frame your argument as demonstrating that the *definitions* given for the social model are bad and insane, and that the proponents do actually follow those insane definitions instead of some more moderate sensible thing people might reinterpret them as.
This definition seems sensible and good, given a charitable reading, so it undermines that framing of the argument.
"Medical care is a central part of the process, but it should have a utilitarian goal of improving function and quality of life, rather than an essentialist goal of 'fixing' 'defects'." Right, that's why there is preventive, curative and rehabilitative fields in medicine and good physicians should know where to work on to alleviate a certain problem. Ignaz Semmelweis was right to prioritise preventive measures over curative ones to save the lives of young mothers, for example. The borders are fuzzy. Many medical interventions can't resurrect healthy functionality but reduce disability, including the disability of reduced life expectancy, so their impact is really more rehabilitative than curative.
>I would respond in two ways: first, even granting this, the blind person’s inability to drive remains due to their blindness, not society. The Social Model explicitly says that all impairments only become disabilities in response to society’s choices. I only need to find one counterexample to prove its universal statement wrong.
Isn't the response just, their inability to drive is an impairment, their inability to get to the store is a disability?
The line between a "cure" and an external social support is very blurry, with glasses, prosthetics, implants etc.
Suppose you give blind people a handheld clicker, and a drug that boosts their hearing, and you train them to navigate by sonar. That's part drug, part training and part external device, working together to do something with both upsides and downsides compared to sight.
In the article linked below, student activists explain how they learned to use the “social model” to force university administrators to give in to their demands on campus. When asking nicely didn’t work, accusing the administrators of prejudice akin to racial prejudice helped them force administrators to give in. The students also call it the “minority model” in which they “reframe…disabled people as an oppressed minority.” https://library.osu.edu/ojs/index.php/dsq/article/view/4253/3593
If taking LSD and being gay and being depressed in bed all day are entirely valid life choices under the hippie social model, why isn't taking antidepressants or getting cataract surgery.
The movement seems so keen to label everything as a "valid lifestyle choice", except choosing to get medical treatment.
Dear people of earth, I would like to ask for your help in optimizing the insight of ACX. Let me explain how you can help.
It is fine to have weird beliefs (which generally make for great ACX articles), just please coordinate to avoid situations where the majority believes (or teaches) what would sound like a bad straw-person. Otherwise, Scott will feel obliged refuting these in articles with titles like "Contra the flat earth cosmological model" or "Contra the miasma model of COVID epidemiology", where the likely reader response is "Duh, that 'theory' is obviously wrong", which is my reaction to this article.
As a side effect, it will also stop me from updating towards "the universe I inhabit is a bad straw-person argument".
I can sort of get where the social model is coming from, people see society fail to accommodate people with disabilities and thus aggravate their hardship. So they decide to over-adjust into the plain silly belief that actually disabilities would be fine if not for society.
This is general bad.
If you want to raise the minimum wage, don't say a just minimum wage would be 1000$/h.
If you want to fight sexism, don't claim that the median woman would be physically stronger than the median man in a gender-equal society.
If you want to emphasize the importance of the kindergarden, don't claim that kids who don't go there will all grow up to be sociopaths or werewolves.
Contrary to common belief, each of these statements is not just a cheer for your pet cause, but has hidden within it an actionable claim about the world. If the only problem with disabilities were that society was not accommodating enough, forcibly blinding, deafening and crippling a large percentage of the population would solve the issue. If everyone is disabled, society will certainly be maximally accommodating, so the formerly able-bodied 'victims' would not be off any worse. In actual reality, disabilities suck even in societies which place a high value on being accessible, so such a policy would be utterly monstrous (just like the equivalent policy of dissuading patients with disabilities from getting medical or technological help to overcome them to whatever degree is feasible, (e.g. using wheelchairs, glasses, eye surgery, hearing aids etc)).
To avoid such unfortunate implications, try to keep your cheers general. Let us say your pet cause is dental hygiene. You could say:
a.) "Brushing your teeth three times a day is the most important thing in the world" -> Bad. This is immediately actionable and suggests prioritizing toothpaste over nutrition for malnourished people in developing countries.
b.) "Most health issues are ultimately caused by bad dental hygiene" -> Bad. It would prescribe better dental hygiene as a way to avoid most illnesses, (which to my knowledge would not actually work).
c.) "Brushing your teeth is important" -> Good. There are almost no factual claims in that statement alone which could be considered false. Lots of things can be important, so even the people who believe that daily nail trimming is more important than brushing ones teeth would have no reason to object.
The problem is that the last one is not a good signal of group membership, as it is cost-less to send. If there is a radical group of fans of dental hygiene, they probably signal membership by claiming that brushing and flossing is important than climate change, systemic racism and prevention of nuclear war. "Look, I am so invested in The Cause that I will propagate even the most laughable claims which support it."
I think the Biopsychosocial Model might be missing the factor of ... minority-ness.
Imagine a world where approximately everyone is deaf. There's no point in spending considerable expense and effort engineering machines to be quiet, no point in adding things like mufflers on cars; they can't be annoyed, hurt, or distracted by noise. (The din is probably somewhat bad for the local wildlife, but no more so than other stuff we inflict on wildlife.)
Now, imagine being a hearing person born in this world. If you go out into the countryside, or construct a special sound-proof room, you have a mild advantage - you can sometimes sense things happening behind you. Speaking, non-sign-based language doesn't exist. But being around appliances, industrial machinery, and vehicles is somewhere between annoyingly distracting and intensely painful for you, often leaving you with debilitating headaches; it's somewhat comparable to an allergy or an autistic sensory disorder.
Prosthetic ear-plugs or ear-muffs can help somewhat, simple surgery can resolve the condition entirely, and it tends to fade somewhat with time.
Is this society's "fault"? Society didn't make you unable to bear loud noises. Society could have put in the effort to soundproof or redesign every single machine, but understandably that would cost billions or trillions. This isn't like the persecution of gay people, it's not a result of stigma.
And yet... there is obviously a sense in which hearing is only "a disability" in this hypothetical as a result of "the way society is", of being a minority.
(Some disabilities would outright make a society where they're possessed by the supermajority impossible - quadropalegia, extreme schizophrenia, perhaps. Others might not offer much disadvantage to those without them if they were the minority, e.g. I think people who can walk would do fine in a society of wheelchair users, and "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" is probably correct.)
Consider a society where most people have poor vision (not crippling, just bad). Everything would probably be really ugly and we might not have invented non-Braille writing, but overall the fully sighted would still have a massive advantage.
The social model of disability really wants to pretend that having 20/20 vision isn't just obviously better.
The radical version of the Social Model of Disability comes from the radical left ideology: equality of outcomes. Just like the radical version of the infamous growth mindset.
It is pointless to discuss the object level with the proponents if the meta level is so different.
I don't think people literally believe the social model of disability. At least, not any more than believe in the Caplan model. Rather, people think society has approximately the intellect of a toddler (I'm not sure they're wrong) such that the only messages about disabled people it can comprehend are "more accommodation" and "less accommodation". The social model of disability is what happens when you try to talk a toddler into supporting more accommodation. The literal meaning of the words is completely retarded, but that's because they imagine themselves to be talking to retards, proponents will say it's directionally correct.
I completely agree - I'm also very critical of the social model because it's a very poor fit for my own condition, where the one thing I wish society would do most is come up with a good medical solution!
That said, let me for the sake of argument defend the pure social model. As you said long ago in a post on why PETA pulls such extreme stunts, it's because there's already an organisation in the niche of like-PETA-but-without-the-dumb-bits, and very few have heard of it. I imagine that before the social model theorists entered the debate, there were already a lot of "hey maybe we chould build a ramp to the local library" petitions and people went that's a great idea, maybe we should discuss it in a few years' time or so. Then the social-model Marxists appear and demand RAMPS EVERYWHERE! NOW! and ... by some process of Hegelian dialectic, we end up with a synthesis of a society with some kerb cuts, ramps, wheelchair lifts, the ADA, legal protections for taking service dogs everywhere unless there's a very very good reason not to, subtitles and occasionally sign language interpreters on TV, etc. etc.
What was the social model useful for? For dragging the world kicking and screaming into a state where a wheelchair user can (sometimes) shop in their local store, vote, and take the bus into town. That doesn't make the model right, but it sure made the world a better place. Personally I think that ditching the social model in favour of the interactionist one is not only true, but more useful to continue improving accomodations for disabled people nowadays (including ones who want a medical solution). I also think that the social model privileges 'nice' disabilities over 'horrible' ones, and physical over mental ones. You can require a wheelchair but still, in an accomodating society, have a good quality of life. But with afflictions like - I don't know, complex PTSD? Psychosis? Severe Anxiety? - you by definition dot no have a good quality of life, and society can do only so much about it, but medicine sometimes works really well. I pretty much endorse everything Freddie deBoer has said about his own condition and why the social model is a bad fit for that. But I'll still give the social modellers credit for putting the idea of "maybe society should sometimes build ramps rather than separate-but-"equal" off the disabled people" in the spotlight in the first place; maybe such an extreme version of the model was necessary to achieve this in the first place.
As someone with severe disabilities, I wholeheartedly agree. The Interactionist Model is obviously correct, and what most people seem to believe. I am sick and tired of activists endorsing the Social Model, effectively declaring that my painful, debilitating condition shouldn't be medically treated.
I found it disappointing that you switched mid-paragraph from explaining how Szasz took his views too far, to explaining instead Caplan's caricature of said views (especially after the recent post where you claimed not having an ongoing debate with Caplan, which post convinced me that his views on this issue are noise as opposed to signal). If Szasz is the stronger anti-psychiatry thinker, I'd be more interested in a fair critique of that. (Do you have any long-form writings on Szasz already, by any chance?)
Edit: never mind! I parsed the subclause incorrectly.
After an admittedly brief internet skim of the topic, a somewhat notable absence from this post may be Mike Oliver, who seems to have to coined the term 'social model' and whose work, Wikipedia tells me at least, so make of this what you will, was 'widely cited as a major moment in the adoption of this model', and a 1990 paper of his on the topic paints a fairly different picture to the one you offer us from Mr Finkelstein (he does credit UPIAS's ideas for forming the basis of the model, but seems to have engaged in a bit of sanewashing).
He certainly doesn't reject treating 'the person' as a crucial element of alleviating disability, but he conceives of the role of doctors as primarily being to tackle illness, which will in turn resolve the 'disabling effects' brought on by that illness. Moreover, he does seem to basically subscribe to the 'all models are wrong...' dictum;
'The only escape for all concerned is to jointly work on the problems of disability within the parameters of the social model which while it does not guarantee a cure, nevertheless offers the possibility of developing a more fruitful relationship between doctors and disabled people'
While he does clearly view the social model as superior to (at the time) existing models, it also seems that he doesn't view it as containing some undeniable truth about society and disability, but rather a way of thinking about disability that would facilitate a better response from doctors, policymakers et al.
This is why I don't think the desert island analogy really contributes anything; the social model, at least to Oliver, seems to be a tool for describing disability as it exists now in society and for making resultant policy decisions - hence why his earliest (I think?) work to reference the model, 'Social Work With Disabled People' (1983), was orientated towards welfare/social work policymaking and social work practice. From the book;
'Disability is neither an individual misfortune nor a social problem... [it] is thus a relationship between individual impairment and social restrictions imposed by social organisation'.
This definition of disability, and his social model that accompanies it, thus simply seeks to distinguish between the fact of the 'impairment' and how that impairment manifests itself under our current system of social organisation. Either way, given Oliver's apparent influence, he seems an important counter-example to;
'The Social Model goes on to say that it’s only okay to treat disability with accommodation, not with medical cures (if you’re going to object that it doesn’t say this, please read the quoted statements from proponents above).'
Insofar as he agrees with this characterisation of his social model, it's only because he conceives of medical treatment as working through the intervening stage of treating 'impairment', which in turn can alleviate disability.
Separately, some of your quotes from proponents of the social model seem a bit weak? Especially from the first of the second set of quotes, from 'The Social Model Explained';
'But for many, the main disadvantage of living with a disability is less about their own body and more about society’s response to them'
'Many'? 'Less' and 'more'? Seems much less than an absolute declaration that all disability is societal in origin, no?
As a person with a disability (vision, coincidentally), I've been saying "it's both" to people for years when they either won't make simple accommodations or insist on removing legitimate expectations because I can't possibly be expected to do anything to help (the poor widdle dear, I can almost hear people saying). I would be furious if I learned that my doctor could improve my vision but wouldn't because society should accommodate me, just as I am furious when simple accommodations like larger print (or zoomable digital) documents aren't available "because that's your problem not our problem". Disability is more complicated than that, and different disabilities and different instances of the same disability will fall at different points in the space outlined by the biological, psychological, and societal vertices.
Some limitations are inherently medical, not societal. Your astronaut example resonated for me because as a child of the space-race era that's exactly what I wanted to grow up to be -- until I learned that the path to "astronaut" passed through "pilot" and "pilot" requires 20/20 vision which I would never ever have. But it made sense and I moved on to other things.
Society sometimes tries to overcompensate in ways that are patronizing, making the people they claim to want to help feel even worse. As an example, when I was preparing to sit for the SATs (this was in the days of paper exams and #2 pencils), having seen a practice test, I asked for a larger-print copy when taking the real one. They gave me a large-print test, a private seating, and unlimited time. I asked why the unlimited time and they said because of my vision. I said it's my eyes that don't work right, not my brain, and that's why I was getting the large-print copy. The proctor couldn't understand why I wouldn't want to take every advantage they were offering me or why I felt I didn't need it. I kept time myself since the proctor wouldn't; anything else felt unfair. I have no regrets.
At the time I'd never heard of the social model of disability, and now I wonder if I was on the receiving end of it: *I* couldn't possibly have a problem, so society must do everything possible to mitigate, even when that didn't make sense. It left me feeling demeaned, not uplifted like the creators of that policy probably intended. Fortunately, school administrators never tried to interfere with the medical treatment for my vision problems.
I feel like the social model is a useful extreme to check your thinking against at times. I find it helpful to consider abilities that every person lacks but that aren't outside of the realm of possibility in nature. Like, people can't see UV light even though some animals/ insects can. This makes the fair skinned among us liable to get sunburns and eventually skin cancer, so we invented the UV index and I check that before going outside with my shirt off or whatever. We don't understand the UV index as an accommodation, though. I imagine the point of the social model is, at least partially, to make the point that we are all constantly accommodating and being accommodated in these kinds of ways, and the point of that is to diffuse the arguments of some who want to refuse to accommodate disabled people for one reason or another. Obviously there are times when it makes sense to not build accommodations, like the ramp up Everest. Then again, there are times when accommodations are essentially costless but people still don't like them. I've heard of many professors refusing to let students record their lectures, for example, even if they have something like an auditory processing disability and it would be helpful for the student to play the lecture back at .75x speed.
“I feel like the social model is a useful extreme to check your thinking against at times.”
Essentially all the defenders of the model here are saying this. But none of the people/organizations quoted by Scott are saying “oh by the way we don’t REALLY mean this literally, this is a thought experiment to refine your thinking”. They just state it bluntly as fact and mayyybe retreat to “useful extreme” if pressed (or let you do that for them).
This is fundamentally dishonest. If what you mean is “we often too quickly leap to medicalizing all disabilities when sometimes they might be created or exacerbated by social conventions instead - try approaching things from the assumption that they are usually social, and see what you find out”, don’t say “Individual limitations are not the cause of disability. Rather, it is society’s failure to provide appropriate services and adequately ensure that the needs of disabled people are taken into account in societal organization.”
Yeah to be clear I wouldn't put myself alongside any organization explicitly endorsing this as a matter of policy. I think it's an interesting *idea* to think about and gin up hypotheticals around to test ones own assumptions and ideas, but a bad basis for, like, doctors to operate from.
Not to be devil's advocate, but it would seem to me that there are a few conditions for which the social model of disability makes sense. I'm thinking mainly of short stature (as in, being between 135cm and 155cm, say) - and would say the same of being very tall, only one doesn't need to say anything about it, as somehow it is not *seen* as a problem (although it involves much of the same lifelong inconveniences as being of short stature: things not being designed for you, stares, etc.).
Of course, again, any sort of dogmatism doesn't help. Robert Reich makes sense (to me) when he says:
"From time to time, worried parents of abnormally short children phone or email me, seeking reassurance. I tell them what I’ve told you, just now.
I also tell them that if they or their children are desperate, they can resort to limb-lengthening surgeries, growth hormone treatments with unknown and potentially dangerous side effects, humatrope, and a wide variety of homeopathic or crank remedies.
But I gently urge them not to do any of these things. I tell them to love their short kids. Inundate them with affection, and they’ll be okay."
- but Messi's parents obviously did the right move when putting Messi on growth hormones! I'd also imagine that the right dosage of growth hormones is better known by now; they've been used for more than a generation.
(There are very real health problems - other than short height - that come with Reich's condition, and it would be wonderful to prevent those. There are also inevitable health problems that essentially *have* to come with being extremely short or extremely tall - that's basically engineering. In principle, though, you can be of Reich's height and completely healthy, as plenty of pygmies will tell you.)
A bit off topic, but someone out there might find this interesting...
My dad worked in brain injury rehabilitation. One of the main thrusts of his career was moving the field away from a "medical" model, where patients were given mental exercises to get their neural systems back in shape. (Roughly analogous to physical therapy, where patients are often prescribed stretches, lifts, etc.)
What he advocated for was a kind of social approach, but very different from what Scott describes here. Rather than saying society at large is obligated to accommodate a patient's impairment, he worked with patients and the people around them (family, therapists, etc) to find strategies to help the patient lead as normal of a life as possible in their particular case.
If this has anything to do with Scott's post, maybe it's highlighting one of the tricky dimensions at play. That is, some impairments are quite common (blindness, loss of limbs). Some are either less common, or express themselves in more idiosyncratic ways. The more common an impairment is, the more reasonable the social model (the weaker/common sense version) is.
Her take on her own disability, a congenital neuromuscular disorder that left her unable to walk, bathe, or dress without assistance, was that she could not say it had made her life "worse", given that she had never lived without it. Her condition didn't distress her; it was just the way life was.
It would be absurd to claim that disabilities don't inherently limit capacities; what Social Model advocates claim is that it is a consequence of social context which limitations are generally considered *problems*. Humans can't fly (without machines), but we don't consider our flightlessness a *problem*, just a fact of life.
If all humans were deaf, we would likely consider the inability to hear a simple "part of the human condition", not a problem. (Maybe we'd invent artificial ears; maybe some transhumanists would dream of a future where we would be genetically enhanced to have sound-perceiving senses; but society probably wouldn't prioritize this very urgently.) Some all-deaf communities are already living in this context, where people can go through life without encountering situations where the fact that they can't hear presents itself as particularly frustrating or unfortunate.
Your example of a blind person on a desert island seems to misunderstand the social model. The blind person is just as blind on the island as she would be in society; but she might not *mind* that she's blind. Yes, counterfactually, if she could see, she could do more things; but if she has never heard that humans are "supposed" to have sight (or has been alone so long that she no longer compares herself to other humans), she might consider it a silly counterfactual, no more worth thinking about than the counterfactual world where she could fly like a bird.
An impairment is only *distressing* in itself if it violates expectations -- if a person wanted to be able to do something, but cannot -- or, perhaps, if it is itself a disorder of the distress machinery, as with depression or chronic pain.
An impairment is also only a cause of *socially recognized* dysfunction if society considers it sub-normal. If all people used wheelchairs, there would be no valued professions (like admirals) from which wheelchair users were excluded. We'd either have wheelchair-using admirals or no admirals, tautologically.
Insightful post! Thanks for sharing. I'm going to nitpick on this specific line you made:
"but if she has never heard that humans are "supposed" to have sight (or has been alone so long that she no longer compares herself to other humans), she might consider it a silly counterfactual, no more worth thinking about than the counterfactual world where she could fly like a bird."
Would I be wrong in assuming that humans are "supposed" to have sight given that almost every human (including people who are blind) is born with dozens of brain structures and organs very clearly designed for sight? If a person takes damage to some visual pathway, they become blind but still have a biological body with many other faculties evolved for vision. Why am I wrong to believe that they were "supposed" to see?
I feel like this is the motte version of the Social Model. I can find nothing to disagree with in this, and yet I don't feel that it captures the "all so-called disabilities are society's fault and society is bad for not fixing these problems before they arose" aspect, as described here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-the-social-model-of-disability/comment/20828354
I, like a lot of disabled people, agree with Scott’s arguments and conclusions here. But Scott’s characterization of the Social Model’s supposed omnipresence within contemporary discourse jibes with my own experiences.
From my own observations of the subject in academia, I believe the Social Model is currently something of a bête noire among disability researchers, and has been for quite some time. I have not seen a recent disability studies paper for cite it without immediately disclaiming, qualifying, or justifying it. Entire branches of contemporary Disability Studies, like Critical Disability Theory or Disability Justice, define themselves in opposition to it. Its chapter in the introductory text The Disability Studies Reader (Ed. Davis) is mostly a long criticism of it, ending on this damning claim that “the Social Model has now become a barrier to further progress.” These are not signs of a popular, dominant paradigm, to say the least.
The problematic separation between “impairments” and “disabilities” have been roundly criticized in disabled circles since the early ‘90s, as a more diverse cohort of activists (the members of the UPIAS were mostly mobility/physically disabled) pointed out that some impairments, like chronic illness, are going to inhibit full participation from society even without any externally imposed barriers. Even the strongest recent argument I’ve seen for a full-fledged Social Model (Mike Oliver’s “The Social Model in Action: if I had a hammer,” available online here https://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/library/author/oliver.mike/) has to concede that the Social Model isn’t a model, isn’t even a coherent theory of disability, but a useful “practical tool” for eliciting political concessions (as another example of his pragmatistic view of the model, Oliver notes that medical and rehabilitative interventions in the lives of disabled people are still useful).
Scott is right, however, to point out that popular discussion of disability has really stuck on to the Social Model past its shelf life; the American Psychological Association and UCSF badly need to update those pages. While medical organizations should not uncritically cite the social model without emendation, the activist orgs Scott cites I assume are drawing from Oliver’s perspective, and foregrounding the Social Model as a beginner-friendly training wheel into larger debates about Disability. Such a method isn’t without precedence, one can think of how LGBTQ groups still talk about how “sex/gender is to nature/culture” eons after feminist academics have jettisoned that maxim. I think any arguments against this practice among activist groups needs to take place on rhetorical grounds rather than rational ones.
"Caplan says that we shouldn’t medicalize certain conditions, because it's possible in theory for individuals to overcome them, so they must just be choosing not to so, so it's all their fault."
"not to so, so" seems like a typo. I assume you intended "not to do so, so" or "not to, so"
Tip of the hat for the Washington Generals call back
I didn't get this part, what are Washington Generals in this context?
> a sort of Washington Generals of disability models which nobody will admit to believing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Generals
Thanks but this doesn't explain why Scott has mentioned them in this quote. Are they a baseball team nobody admits to supporting or something?
They only exist to lose against the Harlem Globetrotters. It makes no sense to support them.
Ah OK thanks
I just found out that the Generals won a few games against the Globetrotters. As many as 6! So assuming 6 is correct, their win/loss record is something like 6-16,000.
Numbers achieved by having two or more sets of Trotters/Wizards on the road simultaneously.
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S06E15/856071
The team that traveled with the Harlem Globetrotters for the purpose of losing to them.
"Some conditions are 99.9% biological and only 1% psychosocial". Is this deliberate to emphasize the overlap?
No, I'm just terrible. Fixed, thank you.
Happens to the best of us! And to me, too.
Where is the Social Model having an effect in the real world? The essay seems pretty scant on examples.
It's in a bunch of medical school curricula and a lot of disability rights groups use it. If you do any work with medicine or disability you've probably heard it taught as "the right way to think about things".
I understand that it's taught-that was clear from the article. Are there any examples of actual implementations outside of education?
Just asking for examples of group z applying this to group y
And to be clear, I think the social model is clearly out of balance. I just wonder how much effect it's actually having on how businesses and organizations behave.
What does it mean to implement a model?
Implement things based on a model. Like actually refusing to give people cataract surgeries because it's society's fault for not accommodating them.
I don't think anyone goes that far, no.
Ok, what’s the furthest you’ve seeen anyone go and how frequent is it?
Technicallyyyyyyy there were those people on Twitter getting mad about Mr Beast giving lots of people eye surgeries. But that's actually more of an example of people complaining about capitalism/inequality, not necessarily the Social Model. I'd bet a lot of money that some of those people were using the Social Model, though.
There are deaf people with deaf children who refuse to let their children get cochlear implants. Personally I think this is a form of child abuse
I t be to agree. But that’s not what the article is about.
I went through a phase of being really interested in sign languages, I can totally understand why deaf parents might be worried about their children not being part of their community, and a shared language is a big part of that.
That said, I'm sure a child of deaf parents would end up fluent in Sign Language regardless, and so this does feel like a decision to deprive their child of something that could be really beneficial to them, without really gaining anything by it.
From what I understand (a couple of decades old) cochlear implants are not an adequate replacement for normal hearing, and have some unpleasant side effects. (The only one I remember, though, is excessive sensitivity at certain frequencies.)
Perhaps they've been improved a lot since I noticed articles about them, otherwise I wouldn't be too sure that it's not in the child's benefit to wait. (And I'm sure glad I never had to make that kind of judgement call.)
I have definitely heard it used to argue against giving children cochlear implants, deafness is probably the area where it's most contentious.
That said, most times I see the social model mentioned it's usually about how a combination of medical devices (like wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs) and social accomodations (like ramps and not being weird when people have a missing leg) provide the most benefit to people with disabilities.
The most extreme example I can think of is a social worker I know vociferously arguing that someone's tendency towards physical aggression towards roommates was just a "different way of being" that we needed to find better ways to accommodate rather than seek to modify. Given that offering plans for behavior modification was my role on the support team, this put us at opposed positions, and it became necessary for me to find professional and sophisticated ways of saying, "What the hell?" in emails.
I personally don't think this is an issue of importance and doesn't really have any major impact on quality of medical care. DOs undergo many hours of training in Osteopathic manipulation despite the fact that there is limited evidence for its benefit, yet I think the quality of care between the MDs and DOs is quite similar. I think physicians are smart enough to know when something works and when something doesn't.
Mr Beast!!
Mr Beast!!
How did no-one in the 200 comments I've skimmed mention a famous real world example in which youtuber Mr Beast paid for something like 1'000 blind people to get operations to cure their blindness in exchange only for being filmed for 15 seconds with a beaming My Beast....
<i>and got promptly attacked by thousands of shrieking harridans of the social model for debasing the poor victims' noble blindness</i>!!!
Amazingly not even the only such example:
https://www.deseret.com/2023/4/14/23682606/mrbeast-most-influential-people-time-magazine-criticism#:~:text=Some%20critics%20called%20MrBeast%20%E2%80%9Cdemonic,shoes%20to%20children%20in%20Africa.
Scott covered this on a linx-post. Video+outrage+how can there be outrage?! - Not much into Mr Beast, would have missed out on that vid without Scott - and it turns me into a cry-baby from second 17 to end. Each f...ing time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ2ifmkGGus
Maybe he was subblogging that with this article?
It feels really weird to think that this is an important point to argue about. I have a REALLY hard time thinking that anyone would take that "Social Model" seriously as a general argument. I have heard people argue in favor of it in specific cases, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone argue in favor of it, e.g., cases of muscular dystrophy.
OTOH, I have heard of folks from societies of deaf people argue against taking their children and teaching them to speak. (I've never heard that most people in those societies feel that way, but it's conceivable.)
I never would have believed people would literally defund the police, then they did because a world model said police are an institution of the majority and are therefore inherently harmful to minorities
You can carry on not believing it, because people didn't literally defund the police. People literally attempted to pressure their local governments to cut police budgets, with results ranging from total lack of success to very modest success. And they did so not because a world model said police are an institution of the majority and are therefore inherently harmful to minorities, but for a variety of reasons clustering around "a world model said police are an institution of the powerful and are therefore inherently harmful to the less powerful" and "a world model said (or frankly, simple observation reveals) that many police departments are outfitted with extremely dangerous and expensive military-like toys but often lack the training, ethics, or emotional maturity to wield them without killing people unnecessarily."
"Literally lessfund the police" didn't have the same ring to it
Part of the lack of success has been the dramatic increase in non-police shootings. 1000 men, women and children a year. I think that put the brakes on it
I hear deaths of unarmed black men during arrests has tripled to 30 per year. My theory is that quality cops abandoned high risk areas while a major drop in active policing means there are now more violent encounters where incidental or negligent deaths in custody can occur. I am very unhappy with these tragedies and don't feel any short to medium term hope for it to return to as it was
The theory that an institute of the powerful would be inherently injurious to the less powerful makes me the most unhappy in that reducing the influence of that institution was therefore the solution preferred instead of research and training into non-lethal weapons and first responders which seems like the likely choice otherwise
>"Literally lessfund the police" didn't have the same ring to it
Perhaps not, but it's less blatantly wrong, and therefore looks a bit less silly with the word "literally" included.
It is a convenient way to talk about things. The Medical model puts too much onus on the Doctor. Self-help groups and peer-support may be effective and perhaps cheaper in some contexts. Equally important is that the Social Model strengthens the political constituency for higher spending on Health. Sadly, because of Baumol Cost Disease (which can only be defeated by exporting a lot of health services) there is a crowding out effect whereby the 'second order' public good (which consists of demanding more provision of the first order good) consumes more and more resources while the 'first order good' (e.g. medical interventions) get rationed or simply disappear.
Probably the clearest example of the Social Model being taken literally and taken to extremes are the self-professed "deaf community" members who actively oppose cochlear implants, sometimes even denying them to their deaf children, on the grounds that fixing their disability is "an attack on their identity as deaf people." (If that sounds like an over-the-top parody of someone's idea of what a crazy activist would say... that's Poe's Law for you. As horrifying as what I just described is, it's quite real.)
I remember reading a story about a deaf same-sex couple who wanted to have IVF baby and purposely tried to select for deafness.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/08/davidteather
Cochlear implants do not by any means “fix” deafness. They are incredibly expensive, remove any residual hearing (not all deaf people have 0% hearing) risky (as all surgeries in the head are) and the sound quality is such that some who get them simply choose never to wear the external device. There are also scenarios where wearing the device is impossible, like swimming.
Source?
Your description matches perfectly the plot of Sound of Metal (a recent Oscar-winning film). Based on a google search for "Sound of Metal cochlear implant accurate" I'm left with the impression that your claims are highly controversial, in the sense that some people really do agree with that description, but also some with cochlear implants consider it nonsense fearmongering.
I'd be interested in a survey of cochlear-implant satisfaction, not sure how else we can resolve this as it seems at least somewhat subjective.
I tried to google for some surveys and came away unsatisfied. The rest of this comment is a description of what I found, since I think it's good epistemic practice, but I am unqualified for this analysis so feel free to stop reading:
Best I could find (links below) is a study of older patients (paywalled) which found 68% of respondents were satisfied with their implant, and 25% somewhat satisfied, zero of 60 respondents expressed regret. Then another study doing a review of studies on quality-of-life which is far too long and complicated for me to read, but the conclusion says QoL seems to improve after a CI when using surveys designed for deafness specifically (hence subject to more straightforward bias, like maybe they ask if you can hear more things), whereas if you just ask "how is your life now" there's insufficient evidence that CI improves QoL.
https://www-clinicalkey-com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/#!/content/playContent/1-s2.0-S0385814620301140?returnurl=null&referrer=null
https://karger.com/aud/article/26/2/61/44273/Systematic-Review-of-Quality-of-Life-Assessments
Claiming “on average CI improves QoL” is a far cry from “CI fixes deafness”
It seems very clear that CI improves the ability to hear, in the sense that you're on average more likely to understand what people are saying and notice quiet noises. That stuff is straightforward to measure and an obvious inventive for the medical establishment
The main argument against CI has got to be about the desirability of the type of hearing it affords you. Ideally we should poll a bunch of people who could hear, went deaf, then got an implant and ask how the three compare, but if anyone has conducted a survey like that I couldn't find it (we know for a fact that we'd get a range of responses, so only percentages matter). Satisfaction/regret after implantation would be a really useful metric, because it directly addresses "should we encourage deaf people to get CI" and it indirectly addresses "does CI give a subjectively desirable hearing experience," but those surveys also elude me. Just asking "how's life?" and checking for correlation pre/post CI is a proxy for satisfaction/regret, which as mentioned is a proxy for "do you like receiving sound input this way"
Cochlear implants, while imperfect, are getting better. My legally deaf and blind friend can now hear better than at any time in her life.
The more fraught issue is that American Sign Language could be driven into extinction over the next century or so by improvements in technology:
"ASL-only speakers can be highly protective of their culture, and some fear its eradication by cochlear implants, somewhat as many lesbians fear that the current popularization of sex change therapies among butch girls threatens the long-term existence of their sexual orientation."
Found it via the Wikipedia page very easily, my usual go-to for this sort of thing. The sampel sizes even in the meta reviews seem to be small though, I think it's generally just assumed that people want to be able to hear if possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant#Outcomes
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5776066/
Sample size 1, but my wife's father absolutely loves his.
Glasses do not give me 20/20 vision, but they do mean I can drive - with them.
It would be my guess that it depends on the surgeon and the device. Certainly that matches the description of using a cochlear implant that I heard a decade or so ago, but one would hope that they have been improved in the intervening period.
OTOH, that's a pretty small market, so perhaps they haven't been. Or perhaps only some of them have been.
Someone with an artificial limb (or even someone who needs glasses) has similar issues, but I think they'd generally still consider the prosthetic to be a useful improvement - this seems to be the consensus on cochlear implants as well. Sure, maybe it doesn't "fix" disability, but I'm not sure why you'd make that your goal when you could instead aim to improve quality of life by giving people access to experiences and independance that they'd otherwise be denied.
The two people I know who are missing hands don't wear their prosthetics. People always want to make analogies to glasses, but many (possibly most?) interventions for pretty profound disabilities like missing limbs are more give and take. It really depends on the disability and the person. In the case of limb prosthetics, some are actually quite useful (foot prosthetic s) and some are really more cosmetic (full double leg replacements).
Probably the hardest part of talking about something like "disability" is we inevitably end up overgeneralising - I suppose I was thinking of lower leg prosthetics, I am aware that there isn't much that can be done if the knee is missing. I don't know anyone with a prosthetic hand, I assumed they were more useful than they apparently are but I can imagine any function being too clumsy to be worth it.
My point was that it's not a dichotomy between curing and accommodating, there are useful things that medicine can do but also profound limits.
Logan wrote a much more rationalist response than I will, but I can at least attest that quantitatively the surgeries are not particularly risky. And as described to me by surgeons, the results depicted in 'Sound of Metal' are only accurate in that they show the initial effects immediately post surgery. Neuroplasticity is everything. In children the results can be amazing. In adults who are dedicated to their neuro rehab, the results are great. In adults who expect an immediate miracle, they will be frustrated and disappointed.
Although their attitudes may correspond to the Social Model, I think they actually predate it. Deaf people have their own language, and their own distinct communities where they congregate. They can't easily assimilate, because few people who aren't deaf or related to deaf people learn sign language, and they have shared experiences unique to people without hearing, so they've developed what they consider to be a distinct culture which they're quite protective of. They may have contributed to the development of the Social Model, but I don't think it represented a change in their social attitudes (although the reduction of Deaf communities due to the invention of the cochlear implant definitely did.)
The rise in the well-being of the deaf from the old "deaf and dumb" days due to the standardization and spread of sign languages and the development of boarding schools for the deaf where, after a long struggle, sign language use was encouraged is an example that sometimes the Social Model can do a lot of good.
Similarly, the decline in persecution of lefthanded children for using the sinister hand has made life better for a significant number.
It's also worth considering how unique this is to Deaf people, there isn't a Blind commununty in the same way, because blind people can share a language with the sighted. There is braille, but that's mostly just an alternative writing system. I think some of the difficulties in the discussion come from trying to generalise a lot of different things that we all call "disability".
Sign languages are really interesting (notably there's a lot of them, it's not like all Deaf people can understand each other), but while they're great within a community they reveal the obvious limits of the social model since most people can't understand the language and probably aren't going to learn unless they know a Deaf person.
And of course sign languages also pose different problems for amputees who can speak voices languages just fine. There is no possible universal accommodation in language.
Well, ... "no possible" is a bit strong, though we certainly couldn't build one now. And it would need to include "locked-in" folks. This clearly implies that it would need to be a mechanical mind-reader. Likely it would need to train on each person individually, and do a transform into a more universal symbology.
Now if you'd said "no universal accommodation" I'd probably agree, as I can't think of one this side of Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands". But when you restrict it to language I suspect that we could build one in the next decade or two. (I'm NOT sure it would be a good idea.)
I can't help but think this is going to really backfire on those parents is a really tragic way, as opposed to going ahead with the implant but also making sure their child also learns sign language (probably inevitable if your parents are deaf) and can become a bilingual member of the deaf community.
I have glasses, and I really would be blind without them! (e.g. if I take them off to go swimming I can easily get lost because anything more than a few metres away is a blur). If I found out that my parents had decided to not give me them as a child because they wanted me to have a "visually impaired" identity, I think I'd be rather angry with them when I later realised what was possible.
Yup, the deaf communities are the new Amish. They're insular and live within society, but apart from it.
Isn’t the American disability act an example of implementing the social model?
No, because it's not opposed to medical interventions.
What Scott describes here as the social model is what the literal words describing the social model say. But what he describes as the interaction model is what most people actually come to understand the social model to be.
The ADA implements either the social model or the interaction model, because the difference between the two is in medical interventions in disabled people, which is a thing that the ADA doesn't address.
It's used extensively in disability rights. This is an area I have a lot of experience with, and in that (admittedly anecdotal) experience, I'd say most people don't *really* believe it, but find it useful as a way to get people to think more intelligently about the interaction between accommodation and people's innate conditions when we describe someone's disabilities. That said, there is a more radical core group who absolutely believe the claims in the strongest sense and they tend to be those most apt to throw out charges of bigotry, so it becomes necessary to dance around the subject.
The Social Model is very popular among disability activists, and as a result tends to be influential in the thinking of people with disabilities who have any contact with that sphere. That ideology seems a priori likely to have a really toxic effect on people, and my experience (admittedly limited to just a couple of people) seems to bear that out. Having a significant disability that can't be cured is awful; having one which isn't well accommodated by society is even worse. But the Social Model tells people with disabilities to blame *all* of the bad experiences they have as a result of their disability on society's evil oppression of themselves. This can make the people in question unpleasant to be around, obviously, but I'm sure it's also just psychologically unhealthy in itself. It can feel appealing at some level to have someone to blame all your suffering or deprivation on, but living in a constant state of resentment is just about as miserable a psychological state as I can imagine.
That all makes sense to me.
I mean you will hear that exact line of argument trotted out if you are disabled (I am disabled in a very minor way and absolutely got speeches about the social model from medical providers when it happened in the mid 90s at age 14) or when discussing accommodations. I am not sure many people other than activists really believe it, but they certainly use it as a cudgel to get their way a lot and get some truly insane/inefficient accommodations approved.
I can think of more than a few rec areas in my state where trails/facilities have been abandoned because there wasn't a way to make them "accessible".
In my current neighborhood we had an amazing volunteer fundraised and built playground 3x better than any other playground at a grade school, but well before it was at the end of its life they tore it up and replaced it (despite the school district being super broke) so that now a C+ playground was 40% useable by disabled kids instead of a A+ playground being 20% useable by disabled kids.
A similar thing happened back in my home town too with two different newish giant playgrounds ripped up to make them more accessible (and in the process made much more samey, boring and smaller).
Without going into details, I have two examples.
First, I used to work at a large corporate job (as in, the job was at a large corporation, not a large job) which involved a lot of contact with people with various disabilities, especially hearing disabilities. Late last year, as part of our training (about a half-day out of a 10 day program, so ~5% of the time) was spent uncritically going through this model, presenting it as the only correct/compassionate model. Most of my other trainees there were not especially well educated, so for them this was the only education they've received on the topic. Anecdotally, most seemed to swallow it uncritically. (The culture at that workplace was such that pushing back even a little bit would have gotten me fired, or at minimum in deep trouble.)
Second, a few days ago I was at a methodology workshop at a university (back to my studies), and the first speaker ostensibly talked about different ways to engage with participants/gather data that don't involve traditional language-dependent measures, like interviews or surveys. This speaker took up the morning slot, so ~2 hours of an 8-hour day of a three-day workshop (although I skipped the next two), so ~10% of the total time. They uncritically repeated this model, which based on comments and discussion was treated as not only valid, but again, obviously true and the only way of looking at things. These people were either PhD students or working academics in a range of fields from psychology to design to law to business.
That isn't direct, concrete consequences, but if both average people are being taught this stuff, and academics are actively swallowing/repeating it, that seems plausible to lead to said consequences?
The biopsychosocial model has a bad reputation in disability activism circles because it is regularly used to tell disabled people that their problems are all their own fault and should be fixed with the power of positive thinking rather than, say, painkillers, or that all disabled people could work if they tried hard and believed in themselves. Especially in the UK where the phrase has been used extensively by the DWP to deny a lot of people disability benefits on the grounds that their impairments are theoretically within their gift to overcome.
The social model as actually practiced by the disability rights movement sees availability of medical interventions as an important variety of social accommodation for impairments - but the emphasis is on the person with the impairment wanting the intervention, rather than society wanting the intervention to make the person more convenient. (A standard example of treatment to make someone more convenient rather than actually being what the person wants to happen is ABA for autism, but there are equivalents for physical impairments like the historical 'pillow angel' horror.)
The typical example is pain treatment switching to 'cost-effective' psychological treatment rather than painkillers. (This is especially bad for the people who already know the first line psych treatment of worksheet based CBT doesn't work for them / makes them actively worse, which is fairly common in autistic women, who are also especially prone to chronic pain conditions)
Citation: https://www.healthcentral.com/pain-management/chronic-pain-biopsychosocial-model - this article which I just found by searching 'biopsychosocial model' on the surface looks fine, but the prioritisation of return to work, increased activity and cost savings are all signs of this problem.
https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/biopsychosocial-basis-for-benefit-cuts-is-cavalier-unevidenced-and-misleading/ is an example of a common kind of article about how the model is misused in the UK.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6255230/#b5 is a more scientific review with citations.
"the prioritisation of return to work, increased activity and cost savings are all signs of this problem."
I can't speak to cost savings, but this statement implies getting back to a normal or fulfilling life (which for most people includes returning to work and increasing activity) is bad? Is that what you mean? I am not sure that view is held by most people with chronic pain.
Are you in the UK? Given the difference in the UK health care regime and that of the US, you may have a very different view of how the biopsychosocial model is used in practice. Because the US doesn't have a monolithic health service, decision are made in a much more piecemeal way. The application of models isn't done consistently. And given the profit driven approach in the US, "cost savings" aren't at the top of the list for doctors or health providers (or even patients if the have insurance). I can assure you that in the US we have much more of a problem of using TOO MANY painkillers, not taking them away from people who need them (though some government policies are resulting in this and its shameful, but its not due to the biopsychosocial model).
> fairly common in autistic women, who are also especially prone to chronic pain conditions
Autism is a very complex condition with physical, social, and psychological factors. Given the correlation of autism and chronic pain, its not a jump to say that the chronic pain experienced by people with autism also has physical, social, and psychological factors.
Yes, I am in the UK - so my posts here are very much based on the UK situation, not the US one, which I know less about.
What data or guideline should make anyone consider psychotherapy more cost-effective than analgetic drugs for chronic pain conditions? For what timespans and outcomes? State of the art would be a combination of both with other interventions, IIRC, still with often dissatifiying results.
Really, what part of the biopsychosocial model sounds like "own fault"?
I kind of disagree with the way the disability rights movement uses the term "more convenient" as a way of saying "bad and ill-intentioned". If for example someone is constantly screaming really loudly, then trying to prevent that is "making them more convenient", but I am sometimes in favor of doing this (especially on a crowded ward full of lots of other people). Obviously it's better to solve the underlying problem somehow or give them some private ward where nobody else has to hear them; equally obviously this isn't always an option.
EDIT: Oh wait, it's the "psych" part, isn't it? I guess I always thought of that as something you add in to make people happy so they don't accuse you of medicalizing things too much, but I can see how that could go wrong if you take therapy too seriously. I'd be happy to move to "biosocial" but the therapists would never go for it.
The place this is mostly evidently a problem is chronic pain treatment, especially in light of the opioid crisis - a lot of people have had their painkillers taken away and replaced with platitudes and cognitive behaviour therapy, and the biopsychosocial model is regularly cited in defence of this.
The biopsychosocial model regularly gets sold as a cost-effective way of treating pain, and people in constant pain generally hate to be told they're getting a treatment they consider less effective because it's cost-effective, regardless of whether it's actually a good treatment or not...
I agree this model seems like a very bad fit for chronic pain treatment.
Do chronic pain patients like the Social Model? I think of the Social Model as saying that people should medicalize things less, whereas in chronic pain usually the problem is we're not medicalizing them enough.
Depends on whose framing of the social model we're talking about. I generally see two in the wild:
Mostly neurodiversity advocates goimg full social model and demanding that nobody attempts to treat their condition as an impairment at all; this is generally not welcomed by people with intrinsically pain-causing impairments. (The Deaf community has also been going in for this for much longer than we had the present vocabulary for it.)
Mostly 'classically' physically disabled people like wheelchair users attempting to get people to distinguish impairment and disability, but acknowledging that both exist and it's good to treat a impairment if possible, but generally considering currently society is if anything too pushy on that (eg pushing surgeries with high chances of failure / unacceptable side effects and then considering the impairment the person's own fault for declining them) and needs more of a push towards accommodating impairments and not turning them into disabilities. Chronic pain patients are generally quite on board with this because fatigue accommodation is often quite similar to other physical impairment accommodation and is vitally important to them (and often this is a fight they have over which painkillers to use, as most people find fatigue more aversive than pain but have trouble explaining this to healthcare providers).
Thanks!
If I believe that disability is an interaction between both biological and social factors, that the strongest version of the Social Model is false, and that people with chronic pain should get good access to pain killers, is there any existing group/term here that I can identify with or support?
That is what most people in disability activism call the social model, but I appreciate that's imprecise because others also use that for the pure social model; I don't think there's a precise term, I think biosocial model could actually catch on and at least won't set off a knee jerk reaction, and I think the most important signalling mechanism in the direction of the moderate version of the social model is using the words impairment and disability separately rather than referring to a condition as a disability.
The use of opioids to treat chronic pain is incredibly more complex than “good access to pain killers.” In fact, it’s good example of the biopsychosocial dimensions of the suffering from chronic pain. The topic is way beyond the scope of this comment, so I’ll just offer one anecdote:
I have a patient who has right lower extremity complex regional pain syndrome, so severe that her leg has atrophied and she has to use a knee walker. She has tried all interventions and still lives with 9/10 daily pain. One day she came to a followup visit and told me she had stopped her (substantial but not excessive) opioid regimen altogether. Shocked, I asked her why on earth? She said, “I got tired of being the person in the corner at the family gatherings who is treated kindly but also ignored because I’m a little bit numbed out by the pain medicine. I’m going to live with the pain and be the real me.”
I thought that part of the problem was that there AREN'T any good long term pain killers. E.g., that opioids have habituation problems such that after awhile they're no better than aspirin.
As someone who has been treating chronic pain for years, I aver that the biopsychosocial model is exactly the most sound way to approach the problem. The suffering from chronic pain has biological, psychological, and social dimensions and there are often ways to help people along each of those dimensions, depending on the problem. There is no chronic pain management clinician who uses the framing biopsychosocial “to tell disabled people that their problems are all their own fault.”
In the US the specialty of chronic pain management came out of anesthesia and has been historically overly focused on the biological cure--- “when my pain goes away, I’ll be OK.” Chronic pain is pain that is chronic in spite of physical treatments. You have to help people learn “I can be OK living with pain.”
Im not a doctor, but have done a lot of (amateur) research on biopsychosocial model when it comes to pain and I have never heard it used in the way the original poster describes. It's always much more what you describe. To me the biopsychosocial model is a way to introduce nuance to treatment and introduce a model which takes into account all factors influencing a condition.
Right. The biopsychosocial paradigm applies to many complex human conditions. For another example, I think it would add some nuance to the current volatile discussions around the idea that gender is purely a social construct.
Cases like this have been motivating opposition to the social model for some time - see e.g. the work of Susan Wendell (1997, 2001), who taps into a broader trend of saying that the social model has historically neglected the perspective of some disabled people, especially women, whose impairments are harmful and not only because of social stuff. Tom Shakespeare is another very influential critic of the social model on related issues.
Though, as others in the thread have said, part of the issue is that the social model was always something of a broad tent, and so the line between posing a problem for it, and precisifying it in a preferred direction, is very blurry. Perhaps some of what I wrote in section 6 here is vaguely helpful: https://jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/572.
A lot of abuse of people with disabilities, particularly mental illness, and even more particularly intellectual disabilities, results from the fact that people are trying to make their interactions more convenient for them. They want to do something easier, quicker, or cheaper to help someone, and it results in a lower quality of life for that person, where "lower quality of life" might mean "horrific abuse." Institutions, as you know, are infamous for this exact problem. Coming to understand this is a keystone to promoting more humane treatment of the disabled. But because of that, every single person with any kind of interaction with disability rights likely has heard the concept, and not everyone is the best at picking up on ideas and using them with appropriate nuance. So you see this idea get used in sloppy and promiscuous ways where not extending infinite resources towards a person is treated as an act of malice. That was never the intent when you're trying to teach people patience or advocate for resources above the level of persistent neglect, but it is how the concept sometimes get invokes in the real world.
"the fact that people are trying to make their interactions more convenient for them. They want to do something easier, quicker, or cheaper to help someone, and it results in a lower quality of life for that person...not everyone is the best at picking up on ideas and using them with appropriate nuance."
A general truism that scales and transfers to most every other human activity over time. 'Character is destiny,' evergreen.
Your edit here is a fascinating point that could be an entire post. Even without therapists being involved. After all, choosing to literally have completely different mental processes instead of going to therapy implies that if someone else doesn't choose this, he's at fault.
Millions of people objected to the COVID vaccines, and not solely on the ground that they questioned the safety/efficacy (though of course there was that, too). Many objected solely to the government requiring them to make a certain medical decision. Then when they were told they weren't allowed to go to work or interact with society in meaningful ways, they balked that they would be required to make a medical decision the way the government wanted them to, or sacrifice freedoms they'd previously enjoyed without doing that thing.
This could be similar to one reason deaf people might be so virulently opposed to cochlear implants. "Look, you can hear now. Good for you! Just make sure you go get the surgery."
Say you're doing mostly fine, but then some people come along and tell you to go make a medical modification to your body in a way that will amplify its capabilities in line with social expectations. In a way, society is asking you to make a medical decision in the way they approve. "I'm good, no thanks." Except it's not really a choice if society effectively shuns you for deciding in an unapproved way.
This doesn't have to be the same as the mandates for vaccines, to have the same effects on keeping your job, etc. Maybe you reject the modification, but many other people choose to get the implant and in so doing reduce the number of people who need the kind of deaf accommodations you need. At the limit, if everyone went to get the implant, you'd be the last person to provide accommodations for, so few if any people would provide them. You'd essentially be forced, by social convention, to make a medical choice you objected to.
Your optimal play in this situation is to attempt to stigmatize when other people choose to get the implant, advertise the implant, or inform people about the availability of the implant. The fewer people who feel comfortable getting the procedure, the more easily you'll be able to go through life without having to get it yourself. Thus, ironically, the only way to preserve your own freedom to make this medical choice the way you want is by pressuring others to make the choice in the same way.
Caveats: I have low confidence in this analysis, and would be interested to hear from anyone who has direct experience in the community. I'm not making any specific claim about deaf people in general, just reasoning out the incentives that I would naturally expect from this kind of situation.
>power of positive thinking rather than, say, painkillers
???
Painkillers imply something is bad about pain, and we even named the 'treatment' as something literally 'killing' the pain.
Social model as a pure philosophy tends to be the domain of eg neurodiversity advocates (and, interestingly, the Deaf community who've been doing it a lot longer than current vocabulary).
Social model as a way of distinguishing impairment (the actual condition) and disability (how the person is actually harmed, usually via social factors), and suggesting that society goes too hard on trying to fix the impairment and not hard enough on trying to fix the disability, is much more widespread - so people should have painkillers (of the kind they want which balance pain and fatigue to their choice) and also fatigue accommodation and adequate rest.
Except a society capable of making these 'accomodations' cannot exist without people who are "non-impaired".
Depending on the severity of the disability caused by the impairment, that seems clearly not actually the case? People with different impairments can compensate for each other even in a state of nature; some things which disable people in modern life are not even noticed at other developmental stages?
Most historical people had some kind of impairment by modern standards, generally caused by inadequate nutrition, but they still built a society capable of improving to our current state.
And I hope that as technological advancement continues, future people will consider most of us to be impaired in comparison to themselves...
Blindness being a pretty obvious example of this clearly being the case.
And if what you're saying is true, why is up to the abled to help these people? Why not just help each other?
Why should anyone help anyone? Either altruism or enlightened self interest (impairment isn't a binary state, eg lots of people who do useful jobs have impaired vision but nowadays we correct it with glasses and everyone is better off for this).
If you pick a specific impairment and posit everyone has that one, sure, you can pick one that makes people die out in the ancestral environment. Most modern humans would also die in the ancestral environment. This says nothing about their ability to contribute today, if that's how you judge the worth of a person (which seems overly harsh to me given we have surplus around to support quite a lot of people who don't 'pull their weight').
I dunno that's true in the general case, e.g. it's not obvious to me that a society with no hearing people at all would be impossible (though it'd be pretty different from ours).
It is certainly possible at a low-tech level. (Well, almost certainly.) I've read about communities of the deaf in Egypt in (very late) Roman Republic times. From the reports (which may be biased) it wasn't that different from other remote villages. To me this implies that they paid taxes rather than depended on largess.
"society’s failure to provide adequate bus routes is better considered a failure to resolve the disability, not the cause of it."
overall point taken, but i do think the more salient/useful feature of the social model is that its theory of social causation intuitively produces a sense of social responsibility. does it matter necessarily if society "caused" the disability if the larger motivation is to promote social action? whether the approach is infrastructural or medical in nature, either way the responsibility to accommodate falls on society's shoulders at large. i think the social model's recognition of this necessity still advantages it over the biopsychosocial model
Can you rephrase this? It sounds like you're saying this is an unnatural framing that's being used because it has the right political implications, which is exactly my complaint.
essentially i'm pointing to a functional disconnect between the two models. if the question is "what causes disability?" then i would agree that turning to the biopsychosocial model makes sense there. but if the question is "what should we do about it?" then i think the social model proves the more useful there. this is assuming we agree generally that social action of some sort is what's called for in order to solve the problem of, say, providing blind people with options for transportation
I guess I'm asking if you're just saying (sorry for hostile reframing) "anything is justified if it makes good propaganda".
For example (sorry for offensive example), suppose incels were to say "it's society that's making us single", and when you asked what they meant, they meant that, although it was their own characteristics that made nobody want to date them, society refused to give them free state sponsored gfs. And instead of framing this as "society has not solved our undateability", they were reframing this as "society causes our undateability".
Is your position that the incels' argument is no better or worse than the Social Model's, but that you politically support the Social Model but politically oppose incels for other reasons, so you would let the Social Model have convincing-sounding-propaganda-strongly-worded-framings but deny the incels' right to use the same? Or do you think there's some fundamental difference?
i'm more making a "pay mind to the baby in the bathwater" kind of argument. the social model orients towards the insight that disability is, pragmatically, a social problem — not in the sense that it caused it (this is the bathwater), but in the sense that it takes organization on a societal level — whether that means universal health care or expanded public transit — to alleviate it.
with the incel analogy, i think we'd have to accept the incel premise that undateability is a disability for which they're owed accommodation, a fundamental right they've been unjustly denied access to. i think, firstly, that the social model makes its argument in the context of the question of disability, and so naturally we run into errors of translation when applying it to a situation outside of that environment.
doing this translation and applying it anyway though, i think the essence of the social model recognizes that incels are a phenomenon of social concern in the first, and thus call for a social approach in order to solve it. (of course this would mean something like a materialist study of incel echochambers rather than state sponsored gfs, because again involuntary celibacy isn't a disability)
This example demonstrates nicely that the "social model of disability" is actually a two-step process for seizing power: First, advocates of the model push to define "disability" (absurdly) as a failure of society to accommodate an impairment, thus establishing themselves as absolute authorities with the prerogative to define terms arbitrarily in the area of disability. Second, those advocates leverage their established authority to define "disability" to include groups they wish society to accommodate, and to exclude those they don't wish society to accommodate. As a result, they accrue arbitrary power to redirect society's resources towards those they deem "disabled" (or whose "disability" they wish to highlight at the moment for political purposes), and away from those whose claims of "disability" they choose to dismiss (again, presumably for political purposes).
Now, I don't personally believe "incels" should be defined as disabled--but then, I don't believe anybody else should be, either, if we accept the social model definition, which attributes all disability solely to social failures of accommodation. When "disability" is redefined as an unlimited claim on societal resources for accommodation, the power to define/emphasize--or downplay/refuse to define--a condition as a disability becomes far greater than anyone should rightly possess in a democracy.
On this model, most philosophical views are processes for seizing power.
More like, the less nuanced propaganda, the more effective it is. You understandably are disgusted by this, because it's basically the definition of a symmetric weapon, but they do often happen to beat asymmetric ones in the short term. Still, kudos for fighting the good fight anyway.
> the less nuanced propaganda, the more effective it is
You reminded me of something Dan Luu wrote (he was generalizing from his experience at early Microsoft to make a point about how hard it is for orgs to communicate nuanced priorities): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JrLExmCZWTxkvK8ih/dan-luu-on-you-can-only-communicate-one-top-priority
This is where I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone. Isn't it really, really obvious that the point of the Social Model is its propaganda value? Isn't that essentially what its proponents say about it themselves? None of the scientific, governmental or advocacy organizations you quoted did an empirical study that found concrete evidence that fit the Social Model but not the Medical Model. How could they? It's not that kind of model. It can't be true in the way the theory of gravity is true, only in the way "thou shalt not kill" is true. It's an assertion of a terminological paradigm, not of a fact. Calling it "propaganda" is like calling a fish wet, as though that was an insult.
Its creators and proponents are not asking themselves "which model fits reality best?" -- they're asking, "which model advances societal progress the most?" Anybody who cares primarily about whether a model fits reality would be embarrassed of the Social Model.
It seems to me that the point of models of this kind is to dress up policy priorities as scientific facts. So trying to find a more accurate model is futile. It's like trying to pick out the saltiest equilateral triangle. The more fruitful path is to ask what role these models play in society. How does an empathetic, benevolent person who is also committed to honesty and clear thinking interact with a model of this kind in an ethical way?
“ It seems to me that the point of models of this kind is to dress up policy priorities as scientific facts.”
The disconnect here is that the usual meaning of “model” is usually “a thing that accurately represents another thing” or more precisely in this domain, “a tool we can use to make accurate predictions about reality”.
So if you call it “the Social Model”, and phrase all your training as if it is, in fact, a model (an accurate representation of reality), but it’s really just the “Social Rhetorical Strategy”, that is going to bother Scott.
A better term for what it is might be 'analytical lens' or 'framework', with the idea that you should look at a situation from several 'analytical lenses' in order to figure out possible solutions.
So you can look at disabled people under the 'medical lens' and propose solutions from that for how medical interventions may address their problems. And then you can also look at it under the 'social lens' and propose solutions for how social accommodations or restructuring society may address their problems.
And there may be a somewhat outdated assumption that everyone uses the medical lens by default, so you have to be really pushy about getting people to use the social lens at all.
They admit that they are advocating for society accommodating disabled people, but I don't think they admit in all contexts that that's why they choose the Social Model in the first place.
Once someone admits that he chooses his arguments based on their propaganda value, not truth, he basically gives up on convincing you if you aren't already convinced, because there is no reason for you to trust him.
Perhaps they admit in some discussions that they choose the framing for its propaganda value, but for it to have propaganda value, they rely on it not being publicized everywhere the framing is pushed.
So if you care about the truth, and about society making good decisions based preferably on asymmetric weapons, it's a good thing to publicize the fact that the framing has been chosen for propaganda value, not truth. Except perhaps if you fully agree with the goals of the propaganda; but even then you should reevaluate whether you might have been convinced by bullshit arguments.
Maybe I misinterpreted the Contra Caplan, but it seemed like that one said that mental disorder is currently political, but there's no other way. Whereas this one is saying that physical disability is currently political, but it should be redefined in a way that doesn't blame society as much?
But the social model does not allow for there to be any limits on degree of accommodation. If someone's disability is entirely the result of society's treatment, then it is reasonable to demand that society stop wrecking "disabled" people's lives. Wrecking lives is a crime. There should be no limits at all on how much we expect society to limit the wrecking of lives. But if the limitations that disabled people experience are the manifestations of illness or injury, it does make sense for society to put some limits on accommodations: Most of the money and efforts should go into setting up accommodations that give the most bang for the buck -- that help many disabled people in ways that make a real difference. But heroic, very expensive accommodations that would benefit only a tiny minority of the disabled -- such as building a handicap ramp up Everest -- can legitimately be skipped.
> There should be no limits at all on how much we expect society to limit the wrecking of lives
Most of the inhabitants of modern society appear to be entirely on board with wrecking some lives in the process of attempting to improve others. ( See, for instance, the subject of Aaronson's famous "Comment 171". Can easily find via Google; I suspect that Scott would prefer not to have it linked here. )
this is a good point, i can see the disadvantage there. i suppose i'm made a little uncomfortable here, because as with all lines in the sand i don't think there's a fair way to differentiate between what ratio of bio:psycho:social reasonably constitutes what degree of response — i.e what exactly counts as "most bang for the buck"? who'd make that call in the first place?
Many things, maybe everything, in the regulating of society involves that kind of judgment call. Any rule about who can do what is going to benefit some greatly, benefit some a moderate amount, and harmsome. We have to look for ways to set things up so there's the most total benefit, while minimizing the number of people who are greatly harmed. Speed limits: If everyone drove 5 mph on the turnpike there would be no fatal accidents, but many people would be harmed in various ways by the obligation to drive so slowly. The higher you make the speed limit the more fatal accidents there are, but of course there is a lot of benefit to being able to travel quickly. I don' t know whether we are setting speed limits at the optimal point, but it makes sense of think of cost-benefit while setting the point.
"We have to look for ways to set things up so there's the most total benefit, while minimizing the number of people who are greatly harmed." Interesting take. I personally would like to set things up to spread out pain equitably, first and foremost, and leave "total benefit" as a tertiary, even quaternary.
"Any rule about who can do what is going to benefit some greatly, benefit some a moderate amount, and harm some. We have to look for ways to set things up so there's the most total benefit, while minimizing the number of people who are greatly harmed."
Very much agreed! ( Albeit there are also second order effects: If a regulation sets a precedent for a future regulation which e.g. might make some effort they are considering making irrational (e.g. some types of "windfall" taxes), then they may decide making the effort is a bad choice. )
The social model might inspire some useful conclusions ("we should be more accommodating of disability when designing society"), but the biopsychosocial/interactionist model does the exact same thing! And the latter is much less likely to lead to less useful, and potentially harmful, conclusions ("we should invest fewer resources into finding medical cures for disability," "it is society's responsibility to accommodate all possible disabilities even at enormous cost").
While I'm all in favor of better bus systems, I don't think this is properly framed as ac accommodation to blindness. The accommodation would be allowing seeing-eye dogs on the bus. Or letting the blind person and their companion ride for one fare. And I'm also in favor of that. For that matter, I'd even be in favor of letting them ride for free, whereas I think most people should by a token amount.
HOWEVER, society is not obliged to provide accommodations. It chooses to do so, as a means of strengthening social cohesion. This is true of all accommodations, including those for having a low income. I often think that society should provide more accommodations, but this is because they strengthen social cohesion. If too many people feel that they are being treated unfairly, society tends to fall apart. (This is one of the problems with much of social media. They foster feeling of outrage.)
Note that society is not a person. I can care about other people (well, some other people), but society does not have that capability, except in an extremely extended metaphorical sense.
Fwiw this is known in the field as the Charity Model, if I understand things correctly
Even if you think being truthful can come second to rhetoric, I think you do still have to show that this kind of framing is more effective overall. To me, this sort of thinking really just seems to be leading to more polarization.
see my response to OP. obviously it does no one good to privilege politics over truthfulness, but i do think the two models perform two different functions
I don't think there's any question of truth here; no one using the social model would make a different empirical predictions of what they would physically observe in a given situation, compared to someone using the medical or interactionist model.
Rather, this is just a question of framing the same empirical truths in a different ethos, in a way that suggests different actions for clinicians and therapists, city planners and architects, relatives and friends, etc.
Given that there's no empirical disagreement, truth isn't at issue, all that's at issue is which framing creates the best outcomes.
In teh SF definition especially, I see a useful reframing towards utilitarianism in the social model: focus on whichever combination of treatments and accommodations actually make people's lives better, rather than looking for 'cures'.
This matches Scott's 'just take the hair dryer in the car with you' story in terms of consequentialist treatments, for me.
>social causation intuitively produces a sense of social responsibility
No, it doesn't. It merely asserts that a population of people are entitled to a certain standard of living and that other populations must foot the bill.
>does it matter necessarily if society "caused" the disability if the larger motivation is to promote social action?
Okay, so you're literally admitting that this has nothing to do with truth and therefore the 'social model' is a form of political propaganda that is useful to your desired ends?
>whether the approach is infrastructural or medical in nature,
The social model proper REJECTS the medical options here as stigmatizing and dehumanising, because it implies there's something wrong with these people that needs to be fixed.
>It merely asserts that a population of people are entitled to a certain standard of living and that other populations must foot the bill
i do generally agree with this. you clearly fundamentally disagree with me, which is fine, but i would like to point out that the nice thing about this is that you too get kickbacks from large scale structural accommodations for the disabled. it sure would be nice to have expanded public transit, no?
>Okay, so you're literally admitting that this has nothing to do with truth and therefore the 'social model' is a form of political propaganda that is useful to your desired ends?
no. i am making the case that the social model's usefulness is not in its capacity as an epistemic device to determine the "truth", it's better as a lens for thinking about possible solutions. there are a considerable number of people who are blind who want to participate meaningfully in society. whether they are blind because they were born that way, or drank rubbing alcohol, or suffered from a pre-existing condition that went untreated is, on the level of policy, not especially relevant — we will still need to implement blind-friendly crosswalks anyway.
>The social model proper REJECTS the medical options here as stigmatizing and dehumanising
sure, and i'm okay with letting that aspect of it go as i think it's at best tertiary for the relevance of the social model. (although i do say this as somebody who is fully able-bodied, so i have never experienced stigmatization nor dehumanization due to medical intervention and thus don't have much of a stake in that. i suspect a disabled person might disagree)
"i am making the case that the social model's usefulness is not in its capacity as an epistemic device to determine the "truth", it's better as a lens for thinking about possible solutions."
And it's a terrible lens for thinking about possible solutions, because it antagonizes the people (or "society", which is made up of people) who would have to fund and implement those solutions. My reaction to the social model is not "wow, I didn't know until now that it was possible to make disabled people's lives easier! It sure took political propagandists spewing obvious falsehoods to make me realize that wheelchair ramps are a thing!" It's more along the lines of "fuck you, I'm not giving you a single extra cent, you son of a bitch ingrate blaming me because you can't see!"
> whether they are blind because they were born that way, or drank rubbing alcohol, or suffered from a pre-existing condition that went untreated is, on the level of policy, not especially relevant — we will still need to implement blind-friendly crosswalks anyway.
I disagree, as it's highly relevant to what policies we should set to prevent more people from going blind.
I think it does matter how someone got disabled, and it becomes everyone's business when society is expected to pay for accommodations (and treatment, hopefully). If 10,000 people did some kind of stupid tiktok challenge and became disabled, I think that's pretty relevant information on whether society "must" or "should" accommodate them. It's a much better argument that society should help out when someone was harmed beyond their control.
I think society can and should set standards that say something like "if you harm yourself in a very predictable way through negligence and expect us to pay to restore your place in society, we reserve the right to socially shame you and withhold those payments at our discretion."
Why? Because we really really want to discourage people from doing bad things that have real costs on society. That's why we make criminals pay fines or go to jail. That's why taxes on cigarettes are so high. Accommodations are often expensive and disruptive. People creating the need for an accommodation based on poor decisions or knowingly harmful activities are asking or demanding that society incur costs that would otherwise not be needed. That's not okay.
We might decide to help people anyway, but it makes a difference how they became disabled.
I think the social model of disability is bad, but I'm amused by the way this community views propaganda in a wholly negative light. Propaganda is a crucial tool for any political movement. Politics is a dirty business and if you aren't getting dirty you don't care about winning. And if you don't care about winning, you're a sitting duck, a victim in waiting. (Quietism is respectable, I have no problem with staying quiet and keeping your head down. But if you enter the political arena and you aren't willing to play hard, that's SUICIDAL.)
Why are medical organizations promulgating "dirty" political propaganda?
To forward their political agenda. "Medical organizations shouldn't have a political agenda!" Too. bad, they do. That's the real world. If it's any consolation, American non-profit medical groups may have a liberal agenda, but they are also institutionally low-key hostile towards socialist goals like universal public health care. They want more tax dollars to fund their little fiefdoms, but they DON'T want to be cut out as unnecessary middlemen. This explains the surprisingly vicious fight between Bernie supporters and Liz Warren supporters in the 2020 Democratic primary. Rank-and-file nurses were more open to Bernie, while LPNs, doctors and admin sided with Warren.
"The social model proper REJECTS the medical options here as stigmatizing and dehumanising, because it implies there's something wrong with these people that needs to be fixed."
There isn't even a sharp boundary between medical options and infrastructure. Eyeglasses can be looked at as a medical option, as a prosthetic, or as (admittedly rather local and personal) infrastructure.
yup. there’s a lot to unpack here, but a case this everyday and this difficult suggests maybe we should just throw out the whole suitcase (category structure) and start over. easier said than done, of course.
Many Thanks!
One strange illustration of how Americans think about things is that the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act a third of a century ago turned out to be a boon to undisabled mothers pushing baby carriages because of all the ramps that were constructed for the smaller number of people in wheelchairs.
That got me thinking: Why didn't we build ramps for mothers pushing baby carriages before? Why did they benefit only as an accidental byproduct of society's concern for The Disabled? To my mind, mothers pushing baby carriages should rank up near the top of society's priorities, but instead they don't seem to come up much. Mothers pushing baby carriages simply aren't seen in modern America as one of the recognized groups whose rights must be protected from discrimination, so nobody much noticed that they'd benefit from ramps to get around staircases.
Also just in general, there's a nice property where anyone with any mobility can go up a ramp, but only able-bodied people without wheeled cargo can go up stairs.
And a similar thing applies to many accomodations - they make things easier for everyone, not just the people with the relevant disability.
If that was the case, the market would have already made those improvements. Your fantasy world where tradeoffs don't exist and every policy you support is universally good in every way does not exist. Everything has tradeoffs.
The tradeoff with ramps is that they take up more space than stairs and more time to create than a simple drop curb, I agree that without people arguing for more accomadations these would not have been implemented, it's just interesting how often the benefits can be widely distributed.
The spread of wheelchair ramps may have contributed to the growth in wheeled suitcases.
A large amount of urban planners, like enterprise software product managers, are known for not caring much about users but more about satisfying some set of architectural vision and pseudo-engineering requirements at a minimum cost.
I guess one of the reasons I feel the Social Model isn't literally true (but is still useful) is that the "State of Nature" is not particularly accomodating to any of us, regardless of our level of physical ability, and civilisation is an ongoing process to make it more convenient. E.g. paved roads are a relatively new innovation, before they existed a wheelchair would not have been a very useful way of getting around, but as the lack of ramps shows we didn't create them with people with disabilities in mind. I think that it's a sign of progress that drop curbs are now assumed as part of urban design rather than something people in wheelchairs have to specifically advocate for.
That said, I don't think there's any way to structure society such that being in a wheelchair never poses a barrier to accessibility, because uneven surfaces are the default in the natural world. That's not to say we shouldn't keep trying, but it does illustrate the limits of the social model, as opposed to the Medical Solution of giving everyone cyborg legs (sadly still a WIP).
There's also the possibility of accomodations making things worse for those who do not need them. For example, a bathroom that is not wheelchair accessible might allow for more stalls than one that is wheelchair accessible .
There may also be an interaction with the size of baby carriages - once there were ramps, carriages started increasing in size. Now some of them are almost the weight of a wheelchair.
Baby strollers for some are conspicuous consumption, for others a disability accommodation. The less industrialized world is still full of mothers physically fit enough to wear a toddler while also carrying goods to market. The poor in the first world don't need strollers because they don't stroll.
>Why didn't we build ramps for mothers pushing baby carriages before?<
We didn't want to encourage them to leave the kitchen.
Kitchen doors used to be three feet thick and lock from the other side.
You are echoing the idea of "sane-washing" here, first elaborated on by the twitter account @ne0liberal:
https://twitter.com/ne0liberal/status/1334218313472356353
It's similar to a motte and bailey - a crazy idea is introduced and the originators and many others absolutely believe in the crazy version. For whatever reason it catches on politically and so it goes through a period of 'sane washing' where it's explained they didn't REALLY mean the crazy stuff, just this more reasonable version. 'Abolish the Police' went through this. The original version was absolutely about literally abolishing the police, and then it eventually was sanewashed by Vox and others to be about changing police budgets or something.
Good point, although I think it would be almost maximally offensive to use that term in the current article!
Not quite my recollection. As I recall the term "defund the police" was invented specifically as a strategic compromise between people who wanted to reduce police budgets and people who wanted to reduce police budgets to zero. It was deliberately ambiguous, but could be used in an honest statement of both positions- allowing people to do their own thing, under a broad banner of agreement that police budgets were too high. In that regard, it's not too dissimilar to "end cruelty to animals in food production" which some people will interpret as seeking the abolition of most or all uses of animals in farming, and others will see as about cage hens etc.
Do you have any sources for this to point to? I've never seen anything to indicate that it was a deliberate compromise, but I've long seen it as an accidental one. I've participated in a number of discussions where large numbers of participants supported "defunding the police," and thought they were all backing the same position, until I asked them specifically what they meant, and discovered in the process that they mostly supported completely different things and believed each other's actual positions were ridiculous mischaracterizations meant to discredit the movement.
I do not have any sources, this is just my vague impression, apologies if my memory of this is wrong.
This seems correct to me as well. I think there was probably one group of people who sincerely wanted to reduce but not eliminate police budgets, another group of people who really were using it as a smokescreen for eliminating the police and assumed everyone else was as well, and a whole bunch of other groups of people who were doing their own weird things with it.
The same thing is probably going on with the Social Model of Disability. One group of people is using it as a rhetorical technique, another group of people believes it literally and totally and means exactly what they say, both groups of people believe they're on the same page. It's all a pretty substantial blackpill on the organised left's capacity to do anything.
There was also "abolish the police" at the very start of the summer 2020 uproar, but outside of Minneapolis (where it took about a year to die down), it died down relatively quickly. You did have people trying to sanewash "abolish the police" into all sorts of totally unrelated things.
Thanks, I don't think I realized this.
It's not right. 'Defund the police' has its origins in police abolitonism.
https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/its-not-about-police-reform
Your link, if anything supports my claim:
"What’s remarkable about this image is that it lays out the whole plan. They intend to start with “reasonable reform” like consent decrees and changes in use-of-force policies, move on to defunding police, and finally abolish police altogether. This didn’t happen because defunding the police is still massively unpopular, and so this graphic and message have been memory-holed and you won’t find them on the 8 Can’t Wait website today. But now we know what they’d like to do if they could."
That's exactly what you'd expect if "defund the police" was meant to be a multiply interpretable demand which some people interpreted in terms of a final goal of abolition, and others didn't. Some people who supported it wanted to use it to escalate to abolition via a sequence of steps.
No one's claiming "defund" wasn't supported by a bunch of abolitionists, the point is that it was supported by both abolitionists and non-abolitionists, for different purposes, in a sort of hedge-the-differences grand bargain. As far as I can remember, that's why it took off, much more so than previous demands to abolish the police which lacked the relevant ambiguity.
Nope, it was absolutely started by police abolitionists, and its framing as an extremely moderate view on policing created ONLY after 'defund the police' proved to be electorally toxic and that less policing was clearly leading to more crime.
https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/its-not-about-police-reform
Which part of that overlong post supports your position. I skimmed it and don’t see the support. It reads like a lot of “this person said this and that person said that@.
The supporters of "defund the police" on my social media timeline insist, strenuously and explicitly, that they mean the complete abolition of the police. They deny any ambiguity or willingness to compromise.
I don't know, if something was first said by a crazy person but 99.9% of people who say it now mean a different sane thing, and any support for the people saying it will end with the sane version being implemented, it seems pretty fair to just say the sane version is the 'real' meaning of the phrase?
Like, we do this with words constantly, their meaning changes to however people actually use them rather than what they originally meant.
I feel like we've all more or less agreed that the descriptivists are right and the prescriptivists are wrong when it comes language. This seems like trying to be a prescriptivist for entire phrases and ideas, which feels doubly perverse to me.
I think there is a lot of empirical disagreement over the "and any support for the people saying it will end with the sane version being implemented" part of your argument.
A crazy politician will start the "Tigers Eating Peoples Faces" party, people will vote for them because "Tigers are photogenic and endangered and worth supporting, and there's no way he's being literal", and then be shocked and outraged when their faces get eaten by tigers as a result.
N.B. I deliberately avoided real examples because I can only think of current culture war ones, I would appreciate a historical one that wouldn't trigger people's arguments as soldiers instincts.
Literal Hitler clearly said that European Jews will be annihilated if they cause a new World War and everybody ignored that part, including Jewish publications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_prophecy
> At the time of the speech, Jews and non-Jews inside and outside Germany were paying close attention to Hitler's statements because of Kristallnacht and the possibility of war.[30] In the following days, the speech attracted significant commentary in Germany.[34] The German-Jewish diarists Luise Solmitz and Victor Klemperer mentioned the speech in their diaries but paid little attention to Hitler's threat.[44] Outside Germany, coverage of the speech focused on the geopolitical implications of Hitler's discussion of foreign policy,[45][46] while the threat to Jews went unremarked.[45] The New York Yiddish newspaper Forverts printed a headline referencing Hitler's threat against the Jews, but the article below it only discussed the threat of war and Hitler's alliances with Italy and Japan. The Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt discussed the speech in several issues beginning on 31 January, but did not emphasize the prophecy. On 31 January, it printed the main points of the speech without mentioning the prophecy; in an analysis of the speech published the next day, columnist Moshe Yustman discussed appeasement and other foreign policy issues.[47]
Seems to me that a significant issue here is a lack of clarity that is used to make motte-bailey type arguments.
First, we have to understand what exactly is it that is claimed to be caused by society. Is it:
1) The actual state of the person's body/mind. Is it society that causes a paraplegic to be unable to move their legs via nueral messages? (only ppl w/ crazy views about social construction of reality believe this).
2) Is it the fact that the person's condition creates a limitation for them that is caused by society? That it creates a significant limitation?
3) Is it the fact that limitation is regarded as a disability that is caused by society?
Of course, in some sense 3 is trivially true in that society in some sense is responsible for all the concepts we deploy and their boundaries but the problem is that people tend to use the theory with meaning 2 in mind but then defend it via meaning 3.
And more broadly we have to ask what one means by being caused by society or only via society. The natural understanding of what 2 means is that it would somehow not be a serious limitation in a state of nature without society. However, if you interpret cause to mean just that: if society was different than this fact wouldn't constitute a significant limitation than of course it's true because you could imagine a society where anyone who was caught walking or using their legs is immediately shot.
A very central example is a congenitally wheelchair-bound person's ability to traverse a building.
Society doesn't cause the person to be unable to use their legs, but it does build buildings with stairs instead of ramps/ elevators/chairlifts, and with hallways too narrow for a wheelchair.
And notably, ramps, elevators, and wider hallways are usable by the able-bodied as well, and also useful to people pushing strollers or transporting large or heavy objects.
That's certainly true, but that would be accurately described by saying: the choices people make -- and especially the standards we adopt -- make a huge difference in the ability of the disabled to function in society. And the fact that this much clearer statement is both the simpler and more obvious one calls into question the motive for advancing this more complicated theory.
I get that this is advanced by well-intentioned people who are upset we don't do more to accommodate the disabled but that's not a good reason to launder the fact that societal choices can make a big difference into something more -- a near absolute which obscures the fact that there are real tradeoffs here. That while sometimes affordable changes can enable someone with a disability essentially the same ability to navigate the world as someone without the disability at other times either accomodations can't bridge the difference or aren't practical.
The disabled aren't entitled to anything. Absolutely no one is entitled to anything at all from anyone else. It's because of your personality anyway.
At my work place, there were steps (it's a government building, so it does have the fascist large offset architecture). They needed to put in a ramp after it was built, so they did.
No one, but no one, uses the ramp - because it's a switchback. A straight ramp would put the bottom end in traffic. "Accommodating" in a way that people not in wheelchairs would use would mean tearing down the existing building and constructing a new smaller one so the ramp could be fit on the existing lot.
Oh and there's an elevator, which is accessible without using the stairs (there's parking under the building and the first level is exposed on the sides and accessible) - but they >also< had to put in the ramp.
I think the example of the spaceship is actually helpful. It’s very natural for nasa to build a spaceship that needs sight to be usable. But if they also build it so that only people between 5’10” and 6’0” can use it, and only people with normal smell faculties (because, say, some sensors report with smells that would be unnoticeable to some people or problematic ally overpowering to others) then we can see some of the possible variance in 2.
Interestingly that's exactly what NASA does. There are minimum and maximum height requirements to be an astronaut because it's very expensive to make multiple models of spacesuits and or to test and launch more complex adjustable mechanisms to make the various treadmills, seats etc adjustable.
I think that points to exactly why the way the theory is stated is very misleading. Yes, it's true that choices in how we design our environment can make a big difference for how people with different physical attributes/abilities are able to manage. But these aren't free choices, they are trade offs imposed by reality with costs and benefits we have to balance.
Yes, in most cases it makes sense to require new buisnesses to have a wheelchair ramp but not to require nasa to accommodate even relatively common variation in height. And there are going to be all sorts of cases in between from historical or artistic concerns to thr fact that in rural northern Canada lever doors give bears access (ok I included that bc it's a neat fact).
I'd add that this kind of theory is why I have my anti-charity attitude (to theories not people). Sure, if one pushes and pulls at all the definitions you can give it a meaning that's at least plausibly true.
However, what you can't do is render it an efficient means to communicate an understanding of how disability and society relate. The theory only complicates and obscures the truths that the examples people use to explain the theory convey.
Those examples illustrate important points but moving beyond them to this theory seems to only make mistakes and confusion more likely.
I consider the ADA a disaster myself but the reference to Everest (which I'm sure has been conquered by people with various limitations) recalled to me that in the early 70s, I think it was, 3 young disabled men climbed the highest peak in Texas, Guadalupe Peak. Sure, it's not the Rockies - but it's still an amazing feat. There's a trail but it's plenty rocky in places. I have forgotten the nature of their disabilities. But suffice to say they were wheenchair users, and on the parts of the trail where wheelchairs were of no avail, they essentially pulled them and clambered on somehow.
Very probably someday soon, activists will find fault with the marker that tells of this trek but for now you can read about it at the national park.
Both blind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Weihenmayer) and double-amputee (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/21/ex-gurkha-soldier-with-no-legs-reaches-summit-of-mount-everest) climbers have summited Everest, for what it's worth!
This model is so dumb that mockery rather than a thousand earnest words is the most appropriate response.
Moderate warning, 50% of a ban. Fewer comments like this, please.
Sorry, I'm not sure where I erred in a partially ban worthy way. Obviously your serious reply shows you disagree that the social model of disability is so unserious as to be undeserving of a serious reply, but surely disagreement isn't grounds for banning.
Maybe I can try to make my point in a different way. Is there any comperably prominent expert view or theory that is so unserious that you think mockery or another non serious response is most appropriate? I'm not interested in the specific view or theory, just whether or not such a case exists. By appropriate I mean meriting and/or effective in exposing as unserious.
I think that if a viewpoint is sufficiently entrenched that it's systematically argued for by experts, then mockery probably won't help change that, even if it's arguably deserved. It might be cathartic, but anyone sympathetic to open mockery probably wouldn't have taken the experts arguing the position seriously in the first place.
Even if it's _not_ sufficiently entrenched, mockery is still not appropriate. If it's _actually_ fringe, then straight up ignoring it is perhaps appropriate (No one has time to seriously and deeply address every weird thing that 3 people online believe). If it's gotten enough traction that ignoring it isn't an option, then it also has enough traction that mockery won't be effective.
>Is there any comperably prominent expert view or theory that is so unserious that you think mockery or another non serious response is most appropriate?<
If no one attempts to seriously discredit it, you don't actually know how dumb it is. Maybe there are counters to your counters, which you won't find out about unless someone gives a serious argument that provides the opportunity to present them.
"Why" something is dumb is always valuable to explain. We don't need to do it ourselves on every topic, but we certainly don't need to discourage other people's attempts.
This felt less earnest than most of Scott’s post, and the examples given seem more mocking & uncharitable than they should be & the literal interpretation seems less literal & support by quotes than it claims it
I don’t have a staked position on the topic, as I don’t know anyone disabled and my politics doesn’t take a side on the topic
However, while Scott’s rhetoric often convinces me, this has done the opposite for once
Interpreting a model's description literally is not being uncharitable. If the model permits absurd conclusions, then that's a problem with the model.
I’m saying it was insufficiently literal
I assume by "it", you mean Scott's examples. What's an example that you think is not literal enough?
He’s not taking the distinction between disabilities & impairments literally, and lumping them together
And I disagree, so maybe you could point to what you think is the worst offender.
They're the same position descriptively, the difference lay in the normative stance
Maybe this is stupid, but do birds think of us as disabled because we cannot fly? (Like, insofar as they think.)
Or to put it another way, I can't exactly climb Mount Everest either. Does that make me disabled?
It seems to me that we all have a scope of things we can not do, and those are very much on a spectrum. What's the point at which it becomes a disability? When we can't provide for ourselves at all? Or when we can't do the things that society demands of us?
These all seem like naive questions that people have good answers for--I'm just trying to think it through. But it kinda-sorta-seems like you could steelman something useful out of the Social Model? Even if it's mostly pretty stupid.
I like the answer that a disability is a limitation that is unnatural. Not artificial - a birth defect is still unnatural even though it was not caused by any accident or injury. Natural in this context meaning essentially "functioning normally". A functioning eye can see, so blindness is a disability. A functioning arm cannot fly, so flightlessness is not a disability.
Am I disabled for being short-sighted, then?
I have some gripes with the social model, but it does have some very valid points about accommodations.
Needing glasses or contact lenses is an example of a disability that is accommodated in most places. More specifically, the technology that "makes" these people not disabled is accommodated.
Most places do not make you remove your glasses before you enter, even if it may be potentially an issue (for example you can wear glasses to saunas even if it makes your glasses fog up). If it is a serious issue, it gets accommodated (fit over safety glasses that go over most glasses).
Mobility devices and/or service animals don't always get these accommodations. Especially service animals - a real service animal is NOT an issue, even in a food service venue, because the animal is trained to make it not an issue (emotional support animals are a different story and I don't like those people misusing accommodations for service animals).
It's not saying that lasik is bad or shouldn't be available. It's acknowledging that lasik is super expensive and sometimes inherently not an option and sometimes limited accessibility and people are getting on fine with glasses. If they're fine with glasses, you shouldn't force them to get an expensive, invasive procedure just so it makes your life easier (e.g by not providing fit over safety glasses).
Yes, I would say that short-sightedness is a disability.
This is exactly where the social model derived language around impairment and disability is really useful.
Short sightedness is an impairment, but you have a good solution available which is socially accepted and generally accommodated (glasses) so you are not disabled by the impairment.
Acceptance of glasses and accommodation for them in eg safety equipment has considerably improved within my lifetime (eg when I was a kid I was embarrassed to wear my glasses as 'speccy' and 'four-eyes' were common insults).
>This is exactly where the social model derived language around impairment and disability is really useful.
How? Glasses and other similar accomodations precede the social model in the first place!
It’s useful as an example of where an impairment is socially accommodated (via acceptance, medical interventions and glasses-friendly product design) to such an extent that short-sighted people are not considered disabled at all. Best of all, no handouts involved.
People who promote the social model would point to this as a 100% success case when discussing more “severe” disabilities.
Mostly agreed, but with a few caveats:
- At any instant, there is a considerable range in functioning even in just the bulk of the population.
- Over a lifetime, there is a considerable range in functioning for each of us.
- Over historical periods, changes in technology can both widen and narrow the range of "functioning normally", both compensating for some natural limits (e.g. due to artificial lighting) and exacerbating other natural limits (e.g. making distractions more pervasive)
I agree that disability carries the implication of "disabled relative to the average person" and only makes sense as long as there's some large population of people with basically the same health level who form a natural comparison group. I think this is mostly still true, but could become less true if we get transhumanism, or if there are situations like obesity where lots of people in a society start having the same problem simultaneously.
But it's the lives of 'the average pesron' are those which disabled people are comparing their own to when demanding "accomodations", so it makes no sense for disability advocates to criticize this definition
The average person IS nearsighted in some countries though, but it’s still considered a disability in those countries right?
Technically, nearsightedness isn't considered a disability in the US, according to the ADA. It's specifically exempted.
>What's the point at which it becomes a disability? When we can't provide for ourselves at all? Or when we can't do the things that society demands of us?
The disabled, here, are the ones making the demands. They aren't saying 'we're fine living how we are, thank you very much', they're demanding to have full access to the things that abled society does.
Unaided flight isn't a normal part of modern human life, so it isn't a disability. Being able to drive is, so physical disabilities like blindness are a disability. There's no flying people we can point to and accuse of perpetrating an injustice by not finding a way to allow us to fly too. But this is what happens for everything disabled people want.
OK, thinking this through. Parts of society are designed with a reference class of humans in mind. There is nothing normative about this reference class; nothing natural. Parts of it exclude children; at times, women have been excluded.
So you could jury-rig an argument that says, “ There is no state of nature--everything we do happens in a society. Naturally, of course we have a variety of abilities. But a disability is when someone has trouble because due to some deviation from a physical norm they are excluded from the reference class for society. But this is a problem with the reference class, not themselves. “
The fact that you can create a society within a state of nature does not mean there is no state of nature. I agree that our wealth and technology will constantly open up different choices and opportunities, but avoiding the acknowledgement of a state of nature allows the magic realism that always seems to creep into these Marxist plans to remake society.
Disability is always relative to the typical expectations, which is where the Social Model seems most true - a bird that cannot fly is disabled (if you use that term for animals), and humans would struggle in a society built by flying creatures, but fortunately we don't so our lack of flight poses few barriers in everyday life.
I would say the real reason the Biosocial model is more useful than the Social Model is that it's often easier to provide a prosthetic than to restructure all of society to make it more accomodating. It's much easier for me to wear eyeglasses than for everyone else to use really large print on signs! Social accomodation like changes in the built environment are useful, but so are artificial limbs that enable people to walk again - and a combination of both achieves a lot more than either in isolation.
I'm no utilitarian, but that's where it comes in really handy, doesn't it? A disability is where the net harm to society to try to accommodate your needs outweighs the burden to you in having to navigate one's own accommodations.
Because of the bell-shaped curve where "average people" are not that dissimilar, this model reduces to the Biosocial model since the optimal value for design is going to be well within that bell curve.
My partner has a very strong sense of smell, and there are certain circumstances where the social model helps me understand his condition as a disability. Some cities (New York) have a system for dealing with garbage that sometimes leaves him unable to walk down certain streets, and some people wear levels of perfume in offices that make him unable to go there. (When I say “unable” I mean this in the same sense that someone with a limp is “unable” to climb stairs - it’s possible but really unpleasant.)
What should be a superability has instead been turned into a disability.
My wife also has an extremely strong sense of smell, but for her it really is more of a superability. That is, she is not impaired or disabled by unpleasant odors (our Rottweiler’s flatulence being a possible exception). So I wonder if your partner’s disability isn’t just being a supersmeller, but one who is additionally uncommonly sensitive to bad odors.
I think about 80-90% of the time it is positive, but 10-20% of the time is a lot too.
This: "Disability is always relative to the typical expectations,"
plus: "a combination of both achieves a lot more than either in isolation"
is the solution but requires constant rebalancing by people who are the right mix of self-interested and empathic, including some societal leaders.
I think you're getting at teh same thing I liked about the SF definition of the social model at the top, where it says clinicians should focus on improving function in society.
It feels like this model is inherently utilitarian, focusing only on how to give people the best lives possible through whatever means. Rather than having an essentialist view of what is 'correct' for either a body or a society, and trying to force people into that standard through cures or training.
"Together, We Can Reach Entirely New Levels Of Disagreeing With Bryan Caplan About Mental Illness" — Love it.
All Scott Alexander Articles Will Now Feature This Paragraph.
I think the closest thing to an example of the social model being right is probably high-functioning autism. Throw an aspie on a deserted island and throw a normie on a deserted island and there's *not* clearly a difference there; the issue is mostly (not quite entirely; there are a couple of other effects, but they're minor) that normies detect us as Other.
Only, surely, because you told us to?
In the immortal words of Pauline Hanson, "Please explain?"
Isn't ADHD supposed to be in the same category?
Probably sort of. Attentional focus seems to exist on a spectrum, and people may struggle to control their focus well enough to handle office jobs, but thrive in other environments (which might be closer to our ancestral ones.) But at the extremes, lack of attentional control could be a serious impediment even to ability to exist in a tribal environment or a desert island.
I think this is an interesting example that goes along with Scott’s point. I see a lot of ADHD peeps say that they’re only disabled in the context of modern society (work/school/necessity of operating vehicles for transportation/constant availability of junk food). Yet, ADHD is most often so much more than not performing as well as a neurotypical person ... there’s often mood disturbances and difficulties with social norms that even in Paleolithic times, it would be a hinderance to thriving. Imagine the caveman who accidentally insults someone because they can’t keep their mouth shut, or who gets irrationally frustrated and angry when they can’t get the fire started rubbing their sticks, who impulsively climbs a rock formation for fun but falls and injures themself. And that’s not even getting into incredibly common comorbidities like sleep apnea, migraines, etc etc. All of those things shorten lifespan and quality of life regardless if one is alone on an island versus working in a Manhattan office.
ADHD has always been an odd one for me in terms of why people ask for accommodations. A job may require that people devote lots of attention to a specific task for long periods of time. Why should a company have to change a job to accommodate someone who cannot do those things?
Nobody wants an accountant that constantly gets distracted and can't finish calculations. I'm frankly baffled that some people seem to think that employers should find a way to make that work instead of just hiring someone who does the job better.
Note, the ADA doesn't require that an employer accommodate here, but there are definitely people pushing that it should. The standard is that someone with a disability that could complete the essential functions of the job with a reasonable accommodation be given that reasonable accommodation. If concentration is an essential function of the job, the ADA doesn't negate that. Medication that permits someone with ADHD to concentrate enough to do the job can meet the essential functions - the medication is the accommodation because after using it, the employee can do what the job requires. The employer doesn't have to change the job to match the applicant, only permit an otherwise qualified applicant to do the job if they can.
In my line of work, the type of accommodations being asked for are things like dedicated quiet blocks and more flexible work hours. An ADHD accountant might turn out completely capable of doing the job, provided they are not expected to sit still for 8 hours with constant interruptions from email and chat apps. Those things are part of the social environment after all, not anything intrinsic to accounting.
If one job applicant would require a separate office and flexible hours (which could mean less certainty on when tasks get done and if someone is available for, among other things, meetings) and another can just do the job, I think it's quite reasonable for a company to hire the person who can just do the job.
So that goes back to the curb-cut effect mentioned upthread (which is its actual name in the urban planning literature). Only ADHD workers actually need flexibility and guaranteed no-meetings time to do their jobs. But once a company makes it available, it benefits everyone. I can tell you that all the software developers I work with became more productive once they could properly defend their deep focus time against those quick meeting and chat requests that became so common during lockdown. Same for flexibility - this is now a cherished perk that people would not give up without higher compensation. I believe most of these widely beneficial accommodations _do_ make financial sense overall, it’s a 20-bill on the sidewalk. But you won’t see them if you apply the false dichotomy of can do the job/cannot do the job that you posed in your comment.
As for private offices… I agree that would not fall under most companies’ reasonable accommodation policy. I don’t think that sinks my whole argument though - noise-cancelling headphones, cubicles with doors and remote work all exist. I don’t need to defend the most expensive possible solution, only the financially viable ones.
Aspies clearly have worst social skills than non-aspies, and these social skills are a crucial part of society. It's unlikely we could have the kind of society we have if the majority of people had the social skills of aspies. Throw a thousand aspies on an island and it likely won't do as well as 1000 non-aspies. The 'throw a [single] blind person on an island' example is simply pointing to the fact that blindless fails even at the individual level and fail much harder than sighted aspies.
And this is why the social model is dumb - the society that is supposed to "accomodate" all these completely non-flawed disabled people is only capable of existing thanks to 'abled' people in the first place!
If these 'opressive' abled people didn't exist, the disabled wouldn't simply be 'non-opressed' - they would die out!
Your opening statement here is probably incorrect - as long as those 1000 are all 'aspies' they will likely be fine. Social skill defecit in 'high functioning' autism is primarily a problem of translation between neurotypical and autistic modes, rather than something that persists even when everyone is in the same mode.
This is definitely not true - there's no possible mechanism that could explain a bunch of people who are definitionally worse at a wide range of communication skills suddenly becoming better when put with other people who also lack communication skills. You can imagine gathering up a bunch of people with social anxiety and trying to get them to interact - none of them would want to, because they all have social anxiety. The fact that everyone else also has social anxiety doesn't suddenly make it easier to interact, it just means it's bad for everyone. For this to be a "translation" issue, you'd need evidence that there's some specific, 'different' way of interacting that autistics have that isn't just "worse", which there is no evidence of.
Scientific evidence of exactly that: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362361320919286
Ooooh, *Scientific* evidence? With a capital S and everything?
If you actually read the paper, it both fails to provide what you claim (some particular mode of interaction that is unique to autistics - what precisely does this supposed mode consist of?) and even directly contradicts you - "rapport ratings revealed significantly lower scores for mixed chains" and "Information transfer selectively degrades more quickly in mixed pairs, in parallel with a reduction in rapport." - meaning the effect was entirely explained by a lack of rapport between the groups, not some special method of information transfer.
You can also see by the IQ values that the "autistic" group is a highly biased sample (115 mean IQ vs significantly sub 100 mean IQ for autistic people as a whole)
I think this is getting a little heated, so I'll stick to specific factual points - the initial assertion was about high functioning autism, not the variety that comes with sub 100 IQs, and my position is the perception of poor social skills in such individuals is caused by the lack of rapport rather than being actual deficiencies when not in a majority neurotypical context.
Since we're clearly dispensing with charity here, I'll just say that the particular mode of interaction that is unique to aspies and high-functioning autistics is speaking English (or other appropriate language) while saying only what you mean and meaning only what you say. And it's a really good tool for communication.
Just, don't depend on it for communicating with normies.
You seem to have missed the point - if autistics talk fine to autistics and neurotypicals talk fine to neurotypicals, but mixed groups have miscommunications, that's exactly what would be predicted by 'translation issues'
For your point to be true you'd expect to see *worse* performance in all-autistic groups than mixed groups.
"imagine gathering up a bunch of people with social anxiety and trying to get them to interact - none of them would want to"
If socializing, that is, working together equated to eating I bet they'd figure it out. Given enough time "social anxiety" would drop from their vocabulary.
> This is definitely not true - there's no possible mechanism that could explain a bunch of people who are definitionally worse at a wide range of communication skills suddenly becoming better when put with other people who also lack communication skills.
Even assuming this were true, which is not a given, it's irrelevant. The point is that there's an implicit assumption that the social skills that "aspie's" lack make positive contributions to the society's fitness on this island, and that's why a society of aspie's would fair worse than a society of normies. That's not at all obvious.
>It's unlikely we could have the kind of society we have if the majority of people had the social skills of aspies. Throw a thousand aspies on an island and it likely won't do as well as 1000 non-aspies.
This is not actually particularly obvious. Aspies suck at lying and spotting lies - but that's no issue without liars around. Aspies suck at avoiding triggering normies' Evil Radar - but without normies around that's again no issue.
Who calls high-functioning autism a "disability?" I've never heard that in my life. If it was disabling, how could it be called "high-functioning?"
This understanding is one of several reasons that labels like "high-functioning" are dispreferred among many people in the autistic community—"high-functioning" leads people to underestimate the level of disability.
People hear 'high-functioning autism' and their mental model is closer to 'high-functioning for a neurotypical person' (i.e. not disabled) than it is 'high-functioning for an autistic person' (i.e. disabled but not accompanied by additional disabilities such as intellectual disability in particular).
The stats regarding our prospects in life are still pretty horrifying.
For me, the hardest part of being autistic is that I am so full of social anxiety I have to ask people "You believe me, right?" And that makes me sound like I might be lying, when I'm absolutely telling the truth. I am a very tall, big guy and I've been told I have an intimidating look... And when strangers look at me nervously, especially women, I am so socially anxious I sometimes blurt out something conciliatory. And it almost always makes things worse. No matter what I say, it makes things worse. No matter how hard I try, I can never fit in... Not even around other autistics. They just stare at me with this glazed over look in their eyes and when they talk to me, I can tell they just are going through the motions. I try to be grateful that I can function in society well enough that I can stay out of jail and stay out of the homeless shelter. But it is still so hard... I just have to hold out until age 65 so I can retire and smoke weed all day every day. Just 26 years left... If I can hold out I can finally get some relief. I hope.
This is reminiscent to me of the famous Ronald Coase paper, The Problem of Social Cost.
Coase was writing in an economic context and talking about the problem of pollution and other externalised costs. But he had the same key insight - identifying who is causing the problem and making them responsible for fixing it is not always the best way to address the problem.
The Social Model of Disability is akin to the Polluter Pays Principle - it frames the cost of certain issues as a matter of justice and fairness, and insists that the costs must be borne in a way that alleviates this perceived unfairness. But in doing so it neglects to recognise the stark reality that not all problems can be reasonably resolved in this manner. Both of these ideas are more interested in theoretical conceptions of justice rather than in dealing with the messy reality where their prescriptions sometimes become unworkable.
Right. Good insight. There are a lot of American policies, such as dealing with mentally disabled students in public schools, where a disinterested public-spirited magistrate would arrive at a different arrangement as being in the best interest of society, including the other students in the class. But here in modern America everything becomes a struggle over who is the more oppressed victim, so we do a lot of things that are cost-ineffective and kind of dumb as a matter of principle.
Functionally speaking I think these aren't models (of reality) but disguised moral claims about when it is normatively appropriate to accommodate a disability.
I've long wondered if it wouldn't make more sense to simply offer some disabled individuals large sums of cash rather than ask people constructing buildings etc to accommodate them. Obviously wouldn't make sense for the common easy to accommodate cases and it would have to be enough to account for the harms resulting from potential lack of community/etc but at the very least it seems to me that we should ask the disabled if they'd prefer yearly/lump sum cash payments whose NPV is less than the NPV cost of accomodations.
Unfortunately, the really weird fact that we somehow don't understand laws that demand buisnesses lay out money as a tax means it's not a real option. Still, I think considering this in extreme hypothetical scenarios demonstrates the claim that it should always be society who offers an direct accomodation can't possibly be correct.
> we should ask the disabled if they'd prefer yearly/lump sum cash payments whose NPV is less than the NPV cost of accomodations
This introduces a problem discussed in the old UBI threads: many (most?) people who suddenly wind up with a "life-altering" pile of cash (even with timed installments) have a tendency to spend, give away (to a parade of friends/relatives with "urgent need") or, worse, use it to get into massive debt. (See, for instance, this 2008 piece re: lottery winners: https://archive.is/wip/AMNIq )
That's a fair concern and should be something that should be raised and pointed out to disabled individuals in the particular category. I still tend to think, however, that it's probably a good idea to let them make the call.
Also, I think the result might be different if their friends and family and the individual themselves gets the message the money is supposed to allow them to overcome barriers to access etc... It's one thing to get a gift from a lotto winner another to take the money your disabled relative could otherwise use to hire an assistant.
Okay then we can simply change it to an income stream from a trust instead of a lump sum.
I think we'll just continue doing what we're doing, thanks.
But why?
The same reason we build interstates rather than just cutting everyone a check for “transportation costs”. It’s a solution to a coordination problem (not a perfect one, but probably a more successful and actually easier one).
The other thing you’re not taking into account is that accommodations allow the disabled person to be productive, while cutting them a check does not. So you get back some or all of the cost of accommodations (or may even be net positive - it’s easy to imagine even a single good employee more than offsetting the cost of a concrete ramp).
A tangent about libertarian polemics.The libertarians are right that the state is an instrument of violent force. Taxation is inherently violent and the interstate was created through indirect, obfuscated threats of violence. The libertarians CONVINCED me of that, their arguments seem rock-solid. But since we obviously need interstates, I can only conclude that violent coercion of the citizenry is necessary to maintain crucial civic institutions. Mission accomplished, libertarians? Was this what you intended? Maybe refine your message?
Cash support can go far (ie there are specialized vehicles for people who do not have legs to be able to drive themselves, and those are expensive because they are custom due to lack of demand)
However, unless that person is exempt from having to go to the DMV to register the vehicle, the DMV building will need to be accessible. So maybe one may argue, ok, government and publicly owned buildings need to be accessible, but what about private business? A person without legs still may want to travel for leisure, and how many private hotels would build wheelchair accessible bathrooms and showers if they were not legally required to? There’s no feasible way that someone who received money for their disability could ensure that enough hotels have the accessibility they need, unless you’re talking about sums of money great enough that wheelchair users could own most private properties. In that case, I’d argue it’s less expensive and more simple to mandate that all buildings have accessibility built in.
Regarding private buisnesses, well it's a sum of money that's equal to their share of the cost of making these places wheelchair accessible. If that's not that so expensive per wheelchair user then presumably a lot of buisnesses will do it anyway to attract more customers. Indeed, I think it might be more desierable to have a few buisnesses that are a tad bit more expensive (but less so than the extra cash I have) than it is to have every buisness minimally accessible. If it's quite expensive per wheelchair user than it's a fuckton of money they all recieve.
And the DMV doesn't literally need to be accessible. They could have curbside service or even send someone out to your house for anyone in a wheelchair. Depending on details it could be better or awful and humiliating -- but that still doesn't make it obvious the payment isn't the better deal.
What specific examples of building accommodations are you talking about? Genuinely asking.
Otherwise, I suppose this relates to several recent Supreme Court cases and discrimination. Is it fair to force someone to accommodate someone else, so that all best attempts are made to ensure equal access to all business for everyone? SCOTUS has been ruling in ways that I disagree with, but it’s been 6-3 many times,
To put it another way, let’s say there’s a restaurant owner who does not want to serve people of a certain race. A common libertarian argument is that that is fine, let members of that race just dine somewhere else? But what if you live in an area where discrimination against that race is so common that there are no restaurants to serve them? Should they be content to go their life without dining out in their hometown? Would monetary compensation make up for that? I’d argue no but I can see how some would disagree. So should people be allowed to discriminate against disabled people as long as we throw money at them? I’d say no, most of society had decided that’s not right.
Re: your wheelchair last paragraph: is it not more simple to have a ramp n every building than to dedicate staff to going to people’s houses? I mean I think both would be the loveliest and kindest option, but I error toward allowing everyone to be able to have the same miserable DMV experience as someone non-disabled if that’s what allows them to feel they’re living an equal life. And I think that’s mostly what you also mean, too, but I just generally think that requiring wheelchair accessibility for buildings is such a no brainer kindness that we can’t allow private business to not to do it. Because in my experience (not physically disabled but mentally so) is that most businesses these days WILL be willing to lose disabled customers if it means an immediate, however short term and short sighted, quarterly earning profit boosts their stock options.
You conflate "refuse to serve someone (because of racial animus)" with "refuse to invest in accessibility improvements that may not ever be used." They seem very different to me. In any case, a large payment to a disabled person can cover, for example, relocation to an area with sufficient density of similarly disabled people that widespread accommodation becomes profitable.
"both would be the loveliest and kindest option"
That's a non-answer, as the entire point of the question was to determine the priority between the two, given that in the real world there are *always* tradeoffs (in this case, massive tradeoffs).
"businesses these days WILL be willing to lose disabled customers if it means an immediate, however short term and short sighted, quarterly earning profit"
Where did this myth come from, and why is it still around in 2023? Are we really still pretending companies are chasing after quarterly profit boosts when we have Uber losing billions of dollars for 14 years in the hopes of becoming profitable in another decade or two, Netflix voluntarily not turning a profit for 15 years due to constant reinvestment in the business, Tesla losing money for 10+ years but making massive profit now due to this long-term vision - I could go on. It's patently false that companies just chase after short-term profit - even humorously false if you're aware of recent trends in the venture capital world.
But mostly I was suggesting this for the more unusual disabilities that are both relatively rare and relatively expensive to accommodate (making the cost per individual very high). Wheelchairs are pretty common.
Re relatively rare disabilities:
It is also worth remembering that there are disabilities that _cannot_ be accommodated because we lack the technology. Consider anosmia. If someone cannot smell spoiled food, there isn't an equivalent of adding ramps for wheelchair access to accommodate them.
If there was sufficient demand from moneyed wheelchair users for hotels rooms in a particular place to bid the price of an accessible room to, say 3x price of an unaccessible room, I am pretty sure that many hotels would convert some of their rooms to become wheelchair accessible. For that to work you do not need "wheelchair users to own most private properties" or anything like that.
San Francisco's amazingly ornate city hall, with its magnificent marble staircases, was reconstructed at huge monetary and aesthetic expense in the late 20th Century to accommodate wheel chair ramps. Here's the PR release from the city government:
"Until not long ago, there was a sign on the corner of Polk and Grove that pointed to the side entrance to the basement and said, "DELIVERIES AND HANDICAPPEDS." That was the state of accessibility. That was our version of Jim Crow. Even when a ramp was installed in 1985, it went to the back door on Van Ness.
"A person in a wheelchair has never been able to enter City Hall by the front door... until today, Tuesday, January 5th 1999 at noon!"
https://sfgov.org/cityhall/accessibility-fact-sheet
What strikes me is that the added ramps didn't benefit just the disabled, but also mothers pushing baby carriages, workmen delivering heavy objects, travelers with wheeled luggage (one answer to the common question of why it took so long to put wheels on suitcases is because before the Americans with Disabilities Act mandated wheelchair ramps, you still had to lug your suitcase up staircase, so why bother?), and a host of other users of City Hall. But all these other constituencies who benefited from the changes were ignored in this announcement because they aren't an officially recognized oppressed victim group the way The Disabled are.
It would seem to me that if official oppressed victim groups really are oppressed victim groups, they would be emphasizing how they share interests with unoppressed nonvictim groups such as mothers pushing baby carriages, water bottle delivery men, and frequent fliers. But instead they tend to treat their officially disprivileged victimhood as privileging them to not bother recruiting official nonvictims to join their coalition.
I responded more favorably to a previous comment of yours, but now I do bristle much more at this comment where you essentially are telling disabled people how to properly disable, and in that you’re being unkind. I do think that society accommodating the disabled can help everyone, which is great, but it would be the correct thing to do EVEN if it did not benefit all. Fighting for individual rights is not automatic victimhood and does not inherently REQUIRE that it benefits all.
I think you’re really over exaggerating the situation to the point of it being off topic to the greater nuance of Scott’s post. You’re straw manning that disabled people are alienating others and that they don’t have many, many non-disabled people who agree they should have accommodations. They do.
It may be the correct thing to do on an individual moral level, but that has no bearing on whether or not there's a moral justification for using the violent coercion of the state to force "society", at gunpoint, to provide these accommodations.
When an individual is born into this world they do not start off with any obligations to anyone else. Not once do they sign any imagined "social contract" or agree to be mutually enslaved by their neighbors just because they live in proximity. There is no fundamental moral justification for one person having authority over another (and therefore being able to forcibly enslave them to provide 'accommodations' for others).
What's stopping people from enslaving each other in a world with no government to stop us?
That question is incoherent. If someone enslaved someone else using violent coercion, they would be a government by definition. There's also no reason a group of people whose goal it is to "prevent people from enslaving each other" themselves have to enslave everyone else to achieve that goal. Put simply, you can have a bunch of people with guns and a goal to prevent slavery without them having to steal 50% of people's income at gunpoint to achieve that.
Eh ... We use the violent coercive powers of the state all the time.
To my mind, the more people who benefit from using the violent coercive powers of the state the better. But that kind of greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number thinking is now treated as inherently dubious. Today, the fewer the beneficiaries, the more absolute their claim upon the violent coercive powers of the the state.
I think that the value in Steve's point is that sometimes accommodating disabled people can destroy something in the process (in this case the aesthetics of the capital building), and so it would be nice if they would take a utilitarian approach of pointing out all of the other benefits generated, rather than a rights based approach claiming that it is their societal due.
Let me give you a personal example, in which I am expressing my personal opinion, and not trying to speak for disabled people as a whole.
I've been struggling with UC for a while which, to briefly summarize the condition, sometimes requires prompt access to a bathroom. I also enjoy hiking in the wilderness where there are not many signs of human development.
To perfectly accommodate me when my UC was at it's worst, I might've needed a bathroom to be build every 100 feet. That would've destroyed the ambiance of the hike. And the vast majority of the population wouldn't have needed that many bathrooms, so it would've been (imo) overly destructive.
Now that my UC is less bad, I might onl need a bathroom located at the parking lot. I would probably have more luck getting this, and be better liked, if I explained my disability AND pointed out that even healthy people need bathrooms, so it would be nice for everyone.
I don't know if this was exactly what he was trying to say, but this is my interpretation of the point, and to me it seems reasonable.
My default perspective for evaluating policies is 19th Century leftist Benthamite greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number utilitarianism. Thus, in the example of the San Francisco City Hall, spending a fortune to mar the looks of perhaps the most splendid municipal building in America by putting in ramps sounds more justifiable to me the _more_ people there are who will benefit from the ramps. And when you stop and think about it, there actually are lots of people who aren't officially members of The Disabled protected class who benefit from ramps: besides wheelchair-users, there are also mothers pushing babycarriages, workmen delivering heavy objects, and frequent fliers with wheeled luggage. And in the future, robots will do better with ramps as alternatives to stairs. So ramps are, by my count, win-win-win-win-win.
But that Benthamite way of thinking is badly out of fashion these days in which greatest-good-for-the-smallest-number anti-utilitarian minoritarianism is seen as self-evidently morally superior.
For example, to, say, the Biden Administration, making a farce out of NCAA women's swimming to accommodate Lia Thomas is justified precisely because there are so few individuals like Lia Thomas. Just as damaging men's college sports (e.g., ending many men's wrestling programs to pay for women's sports) to benefit the fewer number of women who want to play college sports was a good idea because fewer women are fanatical athletes, damaging women's college sports to benefit Lia Thomas and a tiny number of other individuals in Thomas's Protected Class is self-evidently a good cause.
Hence, making common cause with the non-Disabled to push policies such as ramps that would benefit both this Protected Class and large numbers of the non-Protected Classes was already seen in the 20th Century as inherently morally suspicious.
Disability activists invented the term "curb-cut effect" to describe exactly this phenomenon where accessibility features benefit lots of people who aren't disabled. I certainly see it referenced a lot when disability activists are campaigning for accessibility features.
You seem to be angry that people aren't doing something they are doing, while pointing at something that was produced by the City of San Francisco 24 years ago, rather than anything more recent, or anything produced by actual disability activists.
... a propaganda term which is widely discredited in reality. The vast majority of forced "accessibility features" have large tradeoffs that either invoke large monetary costs on the populace or harm accessibility for everyone else - this logically must be the case, as otherwise all of these changes being pushed by activists would have already been implemented!
The term lets them spread the false mind-virus meme that nothing ever has tradeoffs and that 'helping oppressed minorities' also helps everyone else, when this is approximately the most false possible thing.
Mostly it's the monetary costs. There aren't many of these that do restrict access for non-disabled people if implemented competently - a ramp alongside stairs doesn't restrict access. Are there some idiots implementing the rules rather than applying their brains? Sure. But that's true in any walk of life and shouldn't be regarded as a problem with the rules, but with the implementer.
One of the big differences between left and right (and, perhaps, the sense in which I am most centrist) is that the left regards resources as effectively infinite, so doesn't take "it will cost money" as a serious issue and the right regards spending resources either directly as a result of a governmental mandate, or indirectly through taxation as something to be avoided at all possible costs. My view is that resource constraints are real, that waste is bad, but also that we do live in rich enough societies that we can afford a bit of slack for that sort of thing. Of course there are trade-offs, but that doesn't mean that nothing is worth doing.
"this logically must be the case, as otherwise all of these changes being pushed by activists would have already been implemented!" This isn't true; lots of these changes are relatively cheap if they are designed-in, but very expensive to retrofit. Because they aren't widespread (because they are expensive to retrofit), people don't think of them when designing new buildings. Adding them to the building code (for new buildings) forces architects and structural engineers to put in access features. Or look at level boarding for trains. If you're building a new platform, you can build it any height you like for approximately the same cost (the cost of a concrete pour depends far more on labour than on exactly how much concrete you use). But once you have a platform, changing the height is expensive. Yet there are brand-new stations with brand-new platforms being built in Massachusetts that are not level with the door height of MBTA trains, because they are being built to the standard height of all other stations for exactly no good reason other than that it is a standard (and no, they can't buy new trains that have doors at that height; if you did that, the doors would be below the axles). There are lots of examples of things that could be built new in ways that are much more accessible without much cost but which can't be cheaply retrofitted; getting regulations changed so the new-build incorporates accessibility from the start is one of the big things activists push for.
For example, the cost of putting in braille next to elevator buttons for the benefit of the blind is likely extremely minimal for new elevators. There were probably a few old elevators where retrofitting turned out to be absurdly expensive, but were likely past that stage now.
"What strikes me is that the added ramps didn't benefit just the disabled, but also mothers pushing baby carriages, workmen delivering heavy objects, travelers with wheeled luggage..."
Setting aside the politics, I suspect that the absence of ramps in building designs simply counts as a mistake most of the time. ( Yes, there are exceptions, where the cost is exorbitant, or the building is historic and altering its appearance detracts from it. And some architects are infamous for ignoring their building's users. )
I have to admit that as much as I'm trying to be charitable and open minded, the idea of the "Social Model" just seems incredibly alien to me. It feels like its advocates' model of the world is that humans are ethereal social spirits flying around and supporting or oppressing each other. Whereas my worldview is very much formed around the belief that the world is by default unforgiving, full of pain and suffering and death, and humans have to work to improve it. People can and should talk about social issues - who eats cake and who eats bread - but this should be grounded in the understanding that we need tractors, irrigation, fertilizers, logistics and plain physical labor to have bread in the first place. And clearly, all of these are harder to do for people with disabilities. And of course, this doesn't mean disabled people are to blame in any way! But surely it must be possible to disentangle blame and objective physical limitations.
I wonder if this can also be phrased in the "thrive vs survive" framework.
I think Scott's first link best explains how someone could possibly believe this sort of strong model:
"But changing how we talk about disability can also change how we think about it. The social model of disability makes an important distinction between “impairments” and “disabilities.” Impairments can be thought of as the functional limitations an individual might face (i.e., not being able to walk). Disabilities, on the other hand, are the disadvantages imposed on individuals by a society that views and treats impairments as abnormal, hence worthy of exclusion. "
It's annoying to change the definition of a word from the commonly accepted definition, but you can see why you'd want to have separate terms for the situations you're talking about and the more society-conditional/avoidable situations.
Hmm, thanks, after rereading some of the links I now feel like I don't understand what "model" means in this context.
>It's annoying to change the definition of a word from the commonly accepted definition, but you can see why you'd want to have separate terms for the situations you're talking about and the more society-conditional/avoidable situations.
But the 'definition' they're using is complete question begging. Whether or not these things are the fault of society is the very thing that's being debated here.
This feels like a Sapir-Worf cost of paint on the euphemism treadmill.
*coat not cost
It's a more feminine way of thinking about the world as mostly consisting of people saying either nice things or nasty things about you, so you want to make the world a better place by forcing them to say only nice things about you.
It tends to be alien to the way masculine engineers think about the world as being more than subjective.
Both points of view have their merits and uses. The masculine engineering perspective dominated both the left (especially in the Soviet Union) and the right during the Industrial Revolution, but has come to seem retrograde as women have become more powerful while men have retreated into the black hole of video games.
Are you a Nietzsche fan? This very much jives with this thoughts on resentment or "Slave vs Master Morality".
Like a lot of my woke beliefs that irritate rationalists (standpoint epistemology, systemic explanations for racial disparities, etc), I think an important and easily-missed feature of this discourse is that whether we admit it or not, most adherents of the social model treat it "seriously but not literally"—specifically, as a moderately strong prior rather than a brittle, irrational foregone conclusion.
I'm a biomedical researcher, obviously I'm aware that (some) diseases and disabilities are objectively worth trying to cure. But I also try to stay on guard for the possibility that "disabled people are, sadly, less able to do things than abled people" is a thought-terminating cliché. Most people are abled along any given dimension, and even without raising the cynical possibility that abled people don't like being inconvenienced for the sake of including a minority, it's clear that it's easy for abled people to forget about or fail to imagine the experience of disabled people (top-of-mind example, saw a semi-viral tweet the other day about whether it was weird to see a couple sitting on the same side of a booth in a restaurant, and hundreds of people were discussing without anyone mentioning the possibility that one of the people could only hear out of one ear and not very well).
So any time I (a mostly abled person) think about or am told by another abled person about an accessibility issue framed as an objective biological fact, like "you don't see wet lab workers in wheelchairs because they wouldn't be able to reach the benchtops," I always try to check myself and see if I can think of a reasonably cost-effective social solution to this obstacle. Obviously it will sometimes be the case that there is no such solution, but I believe that in expectation, making the mental effort to think about it for a moment is both epistemically worthwhile and increases the likelihood that my thought will lead to some positive-EV practical conclusion.
Yeah, I agree with all of this, I just disagreeing with hanging all of this on a thing which isn't literally true.
Perfectly fair! Personally, while I'm not a full-on continental philosophy fan I do think there's a time and place for saying things that are obviously not literally true on reflection, as provocative correctives to a complacent status quo. That said, I often value your contributions specifically because you disagree and insist on trying to say things that are literally true, as provocative correctives to a complacently hyperbolic discourse!
"Personally, while I'm not a full-on continental philosophy fan I do think there's a time and place for saying things that are obviously not literally true on reflection, as provocative correctives to a complacent status quo. "
Is that what Continental philosophers and their followers think of themselves as doing? I hadn't realized it was that self-aware.
Continental philosophers and critical theorists are among the most agonizingly self-aware people I've ever encountered—it's part of their métis, they're always accusing each other of slipping up and "making the author transparent". I've learned that when someone like Gayatri Spivak says something that I think sounds obviously false, it's not because I'm smart and she's stupid but because she's making some big-brained gambit that I haven't grasped yet.
I myself would never claim that my use of the social model is on this level. On the contrary, I recognize that a biopsychosocial analysis is often more suited for an exhaustive analysis. But if I don't have time to write a monograph yet want to have some chance of thinking of something useful, the starting hypothesis "disabilities are caused by society not being creatively accommodating enough (except when they're not)" is much more promising than the frame "disabilities are caused by a complex interaction of phenomena, most of which I probably can't understand or do anything about without technical knowledge I don't have."
Yes. Dialectic theories of history, which we may associate with Hegel and Marx and their successors (Continental philosophers), and which have Eastern analogs (eg the I Ching), posit that change happens akin to the way that sailboats move: tacking and jibing and adapting to the ever-changing wind, current, and weather (environmental) conditions, with navigation constrained by the difficulty of assessing one’s current position by means of observing the stars, not in a linear path towards Objective Truth.
In another thread, you expressed ignorance of the brutal application of the Medical Model by eugenicists; the thesis to which the Social Model serves as antithesis. Arguably, the flaws of the Medical Model and the Social Model do encourage a more rational synthesis of the them both.
Even if one grants the efficacy of dialectical thinking as a means of social progress, the objection you raise, that Propaganda Is Bad, may be taken as its antithesis. I feel comfortable acknowledging that point, and synthesizing into the view that because we live in a world awash in propaganda (and ads, PR, engagement-optimized clickbait, ideologically-driven social science, etc), we ought to strive to hew to the observable facts while also tailoring our messaging to our audience’s existing mental models, biases, group dynamics, and incentive structures that constrain the possibilities for enacting change.
I actually consider that the prioritization of Objective Truth over all other considerations a contrarian view. Although held by most scientists and buyers of analytic philosophy, outside of these epistemically communities, most people don’t really believe that words have literal meanings. Most people mostly speak in metaphors, and choose their words and beliefs by the value they derive from the actions they inspire, not their correspondence with Objective Reality.
For instance, traders have a saying: “Do you want to be right, or do you want make money?”
To be provocative, I would add that hyper literal thinking styles — which correspond with an inability to handle ambiguous and/or misleading but socially effective communications — reflects an impairment in one’s social skills.
While moderate degrees of this impairment — “autism” — aid in scientific research and technological development, it does come at the cost of increased difficulty in modeling the minds of “normies”.
The problem I see with this approach of basically creating untrue exaggerations to offset untruths in the opposite direction, is that they only make sense in the context of the other untruth being the dominant narrative that everyone is familiar with. Your model is not internally complete! It’s an appendix to some other model.
In a world dominated by the unmoderated Medical Model, sure, there is value in creating, as a thought experiment, the Social Model to serve as a counterweight and catch all the things the Medical Model misses.
But the problem is that the Social Model is now being taught and promulgated as a “first principle”, a complete pedagogy. Now that the Medical Model is more or less totally abandoned (at least in its strong form), the context of the Social Model is lost.
Now, we’ve got a bunch of people running around who of only been formally taught the Social Model, and they are no less wrong than the strong Medical Modelers of old, because they lack familiarity with the thing the Social Model was meant to critique.
> In a world dominated by the unmoderated Medical Model, sure, there is value in creating, as a thought experiment, the Social Model to serve as a counterweight and catch all the things the Medical Model misses.
>But the problem is that the Social Model is now being taught and promulgated as a “first principle”, a complete pedagogy. Now that the Medical Model is more or less totally abandoned (at least in its strong form), the context of the Social Model is lost.
>Now, we’ve got a bunch of people running around who of only been formally taught the Social Model, and they are no less wrong than the strong Medical Modelers of old, because they lack familiarity with the thing the Social Model was meant to critique.
Holy crap, you may have just explained social justice, critical race theory, and all such animals (to include their analogues on the Right and in other fields entirely).
Practitioners of these ideologies see their exaggerations/distortions of the truth/outright falsehoods as necessary correctives to endemic problems, which are so dominant and insidiously everpresent that a straightforward, rational, fact-based approach is simply far too tepid to have any meaningful effect (and they may be right!). When a problem is so everpresent that it's like the water you breathe—no one even notices it's there—simply stating that it's wrong in a calm, measured tone will do very little. Not many will pay attention at all. You've got to yell shrill, overstated accusations to get listened to, and now people will rally around, you can enforce compliance with your oppositional ideology, and demonize the other side, all of which are more likely to be effective—if the core of your argument can be seen to be valid—than being reasonable, rational, or truthful.
Of course, more-rational people can see the flaws in this approach—it may provide a needed remedy to injustice, but there's no limit to it. Since it only exists in opposition to a prevailing ideology, when *it* becomes the prevailing ideology, its lies become, not needed counterbalance to a prevailing narrative, but the prevailing narrative itself. And now you have just the same sort of situation as you started with—a one-sided system that takes itself to be gospel, brooks no questioning of its obvious falsehoods, and oppresses a different segment of society than before. But now it's locked in—there's no possibility of a self-correction mechanism, because True Belief—or, at least, the appearance of true belief—is required to ensure the system continues to exist. Any questioning of the orthodoxy risks going back to the bad old days, and relinquishing power to the movement's enemies, bringing back old injustices. I mean, this sounds a *lot* like religion, right? To the point where I'm now wondering whether existing religions came into existence through just some such process.
Moreover, this strongly hints at the possibility that SJW/Woke/CRT folks (what *are* we supposed to call them, anyway?) are much more well-meaning, and less cynically power-seeking, than I had suspected. Everybody thinks they're the good guys of course, but by this narrative, it really is the case that these folks continually believe that they represent a beleaguered minority view about to be overwhelmed by the forces of darkness, that the US really has made no meaningful progress in race relations or black equality since slavery (yes, they genuinely [say they] believe this), instead of their view being hugely culturally dominant, represented in every university, every media outlet, and most schools and government institutions in the country. They don't see—they *can't* see—that they're winning, which means that they can't ameliorate their message to accommodate that reality. The forces of Satan are always banging at the door, the enemies are always at the gates, and it's always necessary to engage even more in censorship, repression, and social control, because if you let up one iota, the forces of evil will burst forth and destroy all the progress you've made. Of course it is just exactly all these oppressive behaviors which will lead opponents to arise, and since you've based your entire ideology on falsehoods, their arguments against you will sound pretty good to many people. And so the pendulum swings back again. I wonder how many times this sort of thing has happened throughout history?
"Although held by most scientists and buyers of analytic philosophy, outside of these epistemically communities, most people don’t really believe that words have literal meanings. Most people mostly speak in metaphors, and choose their words and beliefs by the value they derive from the actions they inspire, not their correspondence with Objective Reality."
I was about to object that I don't think that's true, and then realized that I would be trying to determine whether what you said corresponded with Objective Reality when really you don't care and were just making a point.
No, you misunderstood me. I admire the nerdy pursuit of truth. I just accept it to be true that most people don’t care much about truth.
I mean, do you read the newspaper or watch TV? Do you think that most tweets aim at the truth? Do you acknowledge that most people care more about sports and movies than science? That even science has become hyperpoliticized?
Humans, as a social species, care far more about their social status than truth.
Wait, so if not really being able to understand this sort of communication is an *impairment*, then, on the social model of disability, it’s a disability because society isn’t accommodating for it.
So . . . Shouldn’t, by their own lights, social model of disability theorists have translations of everything they write for ‘hyper literal thinking styles’?
This may sound like a ‘Gotcha!’ point, but I’m actually excited about the possibility of it as a way to bridge the gap between ‘hyper-literal’ people like I am and these Continental-types.
I really don’t like the label ‘hyper-literal’; the identification of it with autism is super provocative: Ever notice how the ‘logo-centric’ modernity that post-modernists/Continental philosophers love to hate is basically just . . . autism? Binaries, logic, consistency, hypersensitivity to incongruities . . .
As an analytic philosopher, I'm willing to say that I think this is basically what *science* (as well as philosophy) is doing. Not usually quite "obviously not literally true", but the point is that you are intending to stick your neck out there and say something radical and extreme in order to see how far it can really be pushed. Did Galileo and Newton really believe that objects in motion continue in motion literally forever as long as they fail to receive outside forces? Did Einstein really believe that there is literally no way to objectively characterize some reference frame as that of the laws? Did behaviorist psychologists really believe that it was possible to completely characterize behavior as a function from inputs to outputs with no interesting reference to internal mental states? Some of these bold proposals held up really well for a really long time, and even the ones that didn't ended up making major methodological contributions to research, and are still valuable heuristics in many contexts.
"Did Galileo and Newton really believe that objects in motion continue in motion literally forever as long as they fail to receive outside forces?"
Huh? Why is this "obviously not literally true upon reflection"? Like, maybe it's false because of the expansion of the universe or whatever, but why do you imply that Newton and Galileo didn't believe it was literally true?
"Did Einstein really believe that there is literally no way to objectively characterize some reference frame as that of the laws?"
If I understand what you're asking — I assume so, yes. Why wouldn't he?
I'm late, but I'll add some context, as a signpost to future readers who may be interested.
In a recent ACX book review contest entry comment thread, somebody mentioned that the Efficient Market Hypothesis becomes truer as people discover new ways that it's false. (Trading strategies exploit inefficiencies, which creates efficiency.) So is the Efficient Market Hypothesis true, or is it false? Sadly, it just doesn't fit into the true / false binary; so the old medieval Scholastic logic is simply unable to discuss it. In our lives we have to deal with situations like this all the time, and the Socratic syllogistic binary logic handed down by the ancients just can't cope.
Analytic philosophy turns to math and tries to come up with an equation that encompasses the binary-resistant complexity, and then argues over whether to assign True or False to that equation. Rationalists have Bayes to build a system around to deal with the problem, and talk about bets and priors. Continental philosophy takes a different strategy (starting with Hegel) and tries to build a logic that doesn't use True and False, and disregards the Principle of Non-Contradiction entirely. Instead, you have principles like the positive and the negative, or form and background, or difference. Thinkers like Sartre or Deleuze discard all binaries, not just True and False. But especially True and False.
(Replacing a value-laden binary like Disabled / Healthy with "difference" is very Continental. Might as well call it "differance". That's a Derrida joke.)
What people generally remember of Hegel is his Thesis / Antithesis / Synthesis formula; but what's even more important is that Thesis / Antithesis / Synthesis replaces True / False. (Or, it's part of a system that does.) Instead of trying to pin down all the different ideas with labels like True and False, you watch them interact with each other down through history.
Anyway, this is something that's very important to remember when reading certain kinds of academic literature that pull from the Continental tradition. Arguing about whether an idea is true or false is considered kind of sadly naive, and taken as an indication that you weren't paying attention in class, or you haven't read much Theory.
I took a couple of continental philosophy classes, and I was under the impression I was paying attention well, but I wasn't even aware of this. I feel like it explains a ton of what I was failing to understand.
Was I supposed to figure this out from the subtext of what the professors were saying? Or did they just not explain it in a way that I understood? Or did I miss some introductory material? Are there any books or sources that explain the continental elimination of the True/False binary in clear terms like you have? Of course I was aware of the idea that continental philosophers aren't huge fans of binaries, but I didn't realize it extended so far as to them usually not literally meaning what they're saying. Would love to read more on the subject.
I think that asking such questions indicates that you're not the sort of person who's going to be able to "understand" Continental philosophy, as it's not designed to be understood in an analytical sense. "If I have to explain, you wouldn't understand."
It sounds like you might have missed out on the Kant --> Hegel --> Existentialists development. By the time you get to Sartre, he's explicitly denying the existence of any binaries.
Maybe my summary is idiosyncratic, but in my view all of the Continental philosophers depend on the radical break with scholastic syllogistic reasoning that Hegel made. They're either assuming from the beginning that you're onboard with Hegel's dialectic (which is the name for the post-true-false mode of reason) or they're doing a similar radical break as he did, in another direction.
I like this professor's videos on the subject, she really knows what she's talking about, and this video is a nice summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GrX_fK6XeQ
You might also read the introduction to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, it's a more contemporary statement of the general Continental attitude toward epistemology. Deleuze basically thinks you're an idiot if you think a book can be attributed to an author, or have a subject, or reflect the reality of the world. "At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world."
Saying the efficient market hypothesis does not fall into the true/false binary is a weird and overcomplicated way of putting it. If we take the unreasonably strong form, "There's no strategy which can beat the market.", I'm pretty sure that's just straightforwardly false (and I say "pretty sure" because of my uncertainty about how exactly to formulate the statement and the actual economics stuff, not the philosophy involved). It may be the case it's impossible to know and use/publicly exhibit such a strategy without the market adjusting so that it's no longer a counterexample, but that's very different from such strategies not existing in the first place. Of course, the efficient market hypothesis as a whole is somewhere between true and false because it's not a single clear statement, but this is just the usual vagueness of incompletely specified statements, not anything to do with whether counterexamples are knowable.
A clearer example, perhaps, would be "There is a true fact that nobody knows.". It has the same odd property as the EMH that we can't know of any examples, but I still know that it's true.
"Weird and overcomplicated" is a very normal reaction to the Continental philosophical approach! Which makes me feel like I'm doing a good job describing it.
i.e. the social model of disability is a convenient, false piece of political propaganda we have no epistemic obligation to regard as true.
It's famously hard to establish universal epistemic obligations of any kind, including for beliefs like "an external world exists". The social model of disability is a useful tool to guide your thinking if you're interested in thinking about accessibility in a way likely to yield low-hanging fruit in the form of improvements to disabled people's lives.
“ a useful tool to guide your thinking if you're interested in thinking about accessibility”
But it’s not being presented that way! It’s being taught to people as a definitive truth about the way the world works.
In America, some groups are legally and culturally defined as Protected Groups and others aren't. The Disabled were more or less socially constructed in the 1970s-1980s out of a lot of disparate groups until a critical mass of political power was assembled.
The defining characteristic in current American thinking about who deserves to be a Protected Group appears to be victimhood. For example, building wheelchair ramps to get around staircases turned out to be good for mothers pushing baby carriages as well. But nobody had much thought about the needs of mothers pushing baby carriages because they aren't considered victims so they aren't a protected group, even though protecting new mothers is a high priority of most sane societies.
There may well be numerous opportunities for coalitions to form to get various other mutually beneficial accommodations: e.g., closed captions benefit not just the deaf but people who want to watch TV without waking the baby or want to learn a new language or whatever. But our current system is driven by the legal and cultural power of victim status so there isn't much incentive to build coalitions with nonvictims.
It's considered in poor taste to say, "Well, there aren't enough official victims with Disability X to justify expensive Accommodation Y, but if we add in all these nonvictims who'd benefit from Y as well, we see that mandating Y would be good for society as a whole."
Maybe that's how they do things in France where 145 IQ civil servants are supposed to decide what's in the cost effective best interest of the Republic as a whole.
But in America we don't like reaching intelligent compromises, we like having rights, the more absolute the better. If I'm officially a Victim, no matter how few we are or how expensive our accommodation per victim, then I should have the right to whatever accommodation I have the right to, such as bringing my 125 pound Canary Island Fighting Dog emotional support animal on the airliner, or whatever.
If you don't like it, me and my lawyer (and my Presa Canario) will see you in court.
I disagree generally about your victimhood take, however you do raise very interesting points about how accommodating the least fortunate in society can raise all boats and benefits all. I suspect, generally, we’d all be better off investing, monetarily or otherwise, into ways of making everyone’s life easier. America in particular with its bootstraps ideology, and individualistic culture, probably would be happier overall if we did try to provide aid and ease of life to even non-disabled people. And then maybe accommodating disabled people wouldn’t seem like such a massive burden.
For example, I went to MBA school in 1981 with a JD-MBA student who was the single most arrogant and impolite individual in my B-School. But he had good reason for being arrogant: he was the closest thing to the hero of a Robert Heinlein sci-fi novel I've ever met.
I didn't believe him when he told me was going to get rich off of outer space, but decades later I'd send him $25 per month for his outer space-based service. And then one of the several children he'd fathered came down with a debilitating disease, so he studied medical textbooks for the first time in his life and invented the now-standard treatment, off which he made his second fortune.
I never much liked the guy, but I am in awe of him.
In 2013, the Washington Post declared him "America's highest-paid female CEO," he having declared himself a woman. By the rules of modern America, by announcing that he was trans, he was an official Victim.
I can see now that you’ve rather randomly veered into anti-trans terrorize that we will not have a productive discussion. Everything you’ve described about this person means they are not a victim and have succeeded in life, and none of the trans people I personally know have considered themselves disabled, though someone else is free to let me know if they’ve heard or feel differently.
Have you see the transhumanism-themed movie they produced, 2B?
http://www.2bmovie.com/
Highly relevant today
If certain accommodations benefit everyone, and are actually worth their cost, they will be provided even without any legal mandate or much activism. The problem is that many accommodations may not benefit people, in total, enough to be worth the cost. In particular, it may be wasteful to make costly accommodations in *every* building (or perhaps even every new building) if they are only needed by a small minority, and they only benefit a (larger) minority.
"In particular, it may be wasteful to make costly accommodations in *every* building" Agreed
"If certain accommodations benefit everyone, and are actually worth their cost, they will be provided even without any legal mandate or much activism." I am less confident in the efficiency of the market. People make mistakes. Sometimes even groups of people make systematic mistakes. And some architects are infamous for ignoring the users of their buildings.
I'm pretty blase about compromises but I HATE how Americans frame everything as a right. Awful.
Or you can have the European attitude to rights - that they aren't thought-terminating cliches, that you have to balance rights against each other and that doing that balancing is one of the roles of government.
Take a look at the European Convention of Human Rights and look at all the qualifications and the extent of the government's rights to qualify those laws.
Then look at the text of the US Bill of Rights.
Then look at the state of freedom of speech and the right to bear arms in Europe.
Indeed, do: the margins at which there is a difference in freedom of speech are far smaller than American absolutists think they are. The First Amendment is spread across three entire articles of the ECHR (Article Nine on religion and belief, Article Ten on freedom of expression, Article Eleven on freedom of association).
There is no right to bear arms in Europe not because of a different legal approach to the protection of rights, but because the drafters of the ECHR did not recognise it as a fundamental right, unlike the drafters of the US Bill of Rights.
Meanwhile look at the state of privacy in the US (Article Eight ECHR) - the Fourth Amendment is far weaker. Or look at the absence of a right to life in the US (Protocol Six and Protocol Thirteen),
You can literally go to jail for bad tweets in the UK
No, I definitely prefer our conception of rights as inalienable and sacrosanct. I merely object to the multiplication of rights. I'd actually like to see a retvrn to talking about "rights and privileges." We DO talk about driving privileges... I would like to see more discussion of our privileges. Like a right but tertiary and conditional. (Not to be confused with the sinister "white male privilege" of radlib discourse.)
Fair enough. I just find that the US ends up with the courts setting the limits of a right on a "know it when we see it" basis. Like: why doesn't freedom of speech include the right to lie about other people (ie defamation)? Why doesn't freedom of speech include fraud, or espionage, or trade secrets?
The answer is "because that would be fucking stupid". The Supreme Court, because it's politer than I am, calls this the "suicide pact" rule, not the "fucking stupid" rule.
But SCOTUS' perception of what is fucking stupid changes over time - look at Second Amendment jurisprudence, where you get US v Miller in 1938, ruling that a short-barreled shotgun can be prohibited because it is "not a militia weapon" (this is transparently not because that's actually true - one of the justices had actually used a short-barreled shotgun in the trenches in WWI - but because they felt that it was fucking stupid to let private citizens own them) and then DC v Heller in 2008 ruling that "The Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia"
I prefer having express exceptions and requiring the legislature to resolve conflicts of rights to the US system of writing sweeping rights and then inventing exceptions out of thin air (perhaps the clearest example being the "actual malice" standard of US v Sullivan on libel) and never being wholly certain when a court is going to create a new exception or abolish an old one.
The accusation of engaging in "victimhood politics"—reflexively leveled at any movement that follows the commonsense EA strategy of prioritizing the interests of individuals whose interests are least well-served by the status quo—is hilariously inapt in the case of the disability rights movement, which is uniquely focused on restoring autonomy and agency.
A better example of "victim politics" would be, say, spending an entire career complaining about the myriad injustices suffered by white Americans despite our disproportionately dominant representation in the Electoral College and Senate, the holders of national wealth, the halls of academia, and the offices of political and corporate power.
If that is true and it is indeed relatively easy and cost-effective to make these accommodations, they can just pay for the accommodations themselves, right? Where does the justification for finding a random, blameless person completely unrelated to the person with the disability, enslaving them, and forcing them to provide these accommodations at gunpoint come from?
I spent some time with Scientologists and they do not believe that. They are generically against psychiatry, although the individuals I spoke to said modern psychology and psychiatry was better than the stuff in the 70s. But more importantly their whole practice is set up as a kind of therapy.
There is a lot of Stanislovsky Method-esque training as well as sessions designed to "clear" people of "engrams", which are described as basically maladaptive thought processes they picked up during times of trauma. You don't create your own parallel therapy system if you don't think people have the equivalent of psychological problems.
Szasz and the Scientologists did co-found one of the leading anti-psychiatry groups (https://www.cchr.org/), and their currently Scientologist-run website continues to endorse Szasz and quote him a bunch of times, so even though there is some difference between their position I think it's fair to think of them as carrying on his legacy.
Paul Thomas Anderson's movie "The Master" is a sympathetic fictionalization of the early days of Scientology when it was marketed as non-religious Dianetics, a cheaper DIY alternative to the Freudian talking cure that drew heavily from actor's exercises (with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix acting up a storm) and from science fiction hubris.
As an aside this kind of thing is why I think it's often really important to be a bit of an ass about definitions. The reason a bunch of bad stuff gets through is that people feel bad about pushing hard on what exactly is meant and feel they have to respond to the gist.
If, when someone starts explaining the social model, you interupt them and ask them to spell out exactly what is it they mean is caused (is it the condition, fact it's a big deal, etc) and what they mean by caused by society (does that just mean we could imagine some society where it wasn't true?) then it's hard to believe anyone would find this model ever attractive.
"Two Arms and a Head", the painfully frank memoir/suicide note of the paraplegic philosophy student Clayton Schwartz, opens by deriding a quote from Stephen Hawking. I'll just post his first paragraph:
>“I try to lead as normal a life as possible, and not think about my condition, or regret the things it prevents me from doing, which are not that many."
>Is anything in man so deep-rooted and prevalent as the drive to see things as they are not? What Professor Hawking says here is reasonable, up until the last five words. That’s where the sky cracks and falls. Relativity and quantum mechanics may both be mind-bending and baffle the understanding, but no less than when a world-famous mathematical and scientific genius who can do little more than twitch his cheek and move his eyes; who cannot feed, dress, wash, or care for himself in the most rudimentary way; who would, if abandoned next to a stockpile of food and water, starve and eventually die of dehydration where he was left, positioned as he was left, tells us that there are “not that many” things he cannot do.
http://www.2arms1head.com/
Wow, that was certainly unusually frank and - while he would perhaps not be pleased to hear it- makes one all the more impressed with the people who go on. Tragic. And: motorcycles are the worst.
It's the antithesis of this Texas Monthly story about John McClamrock:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/still-life/
Skimming this and then remembering the perennial talk of jhanas on here makes me wonder if this guy wouldn't have killed himself if he had access to a free, nearly magical pleasure-generating process that you can just do inside your head. If jhanas are really as good as their "maximalists" claim, wouldn't it be a moral imperative to teach them to the paraplegic, quadriplegic, and locked-in so that they can have an immediate, non-addictive source of pleasure that their disability genuinely doesn't bar them from? I'm honestly surprised teaching Buddhism to the severely disabled isn't more of a thing, not just in regards to jhanas but in general, the theme of internal liberation from suffering seems especially relevant to those without external agency.
The only way we don't consider it fully socially acceptable for this guy to kill himself is because it makes able-bodied people uncomfortable to think about themselves in the same situation. I'm not saying we should encourage him to kill himself - it's entirely up to him - nor am I saying that we should be more accepting of suicide in general. However, in the specific case of people with total and catastrophic disabilities that massively and permanently reduce their quality of life, we should be able to overcome our squeamishness about death and accept that suicide is a pretty reasonable response to the situation. It seems far crueller to me that everyone just avoids the issue.
Thanks for posting that link. Truly compelling and powerful.
Given that I'm reading and responding to this on a computer screen taht I've been staring at for the past 4 hours and will probably be staring at for the next 4 hours, I feel like it's useful to distinguish between things you 'could' do and things you 'would' do.
Given the average screentime of most Americans, Hawking may not be missing out on too many things that other people *actually* do, even if he's missing out on many things they *could* do.
IMO the most insidious problem with the Social Model was only very lightly touched on in this article: the way it interferes with Step 1, as in "the first step to solving a problem is admitting that it exists."
When people deny that a disability is a real, objective problem, and especially when they start bringing political pressure to bear on those who prefer not to deny it, they perpetuate the problem by making it more difficult to perform any sort of research that might end up leading to a cure. Yes, it's definitely nice when society is able to accommodate people with disabilities, but how much nicer would it be to never have to in the first place because we can fix the disabilities?
People pushing the Social Model push to make that bright future impossible.
This is the paradox of RFK Jr. On the one hand he's in cloud cuckoo land with his vaccine/autism belief; but on the other, he's probably the only person left in America who's willing to say out loud that autism is *a problem*. And however shaky his standard of proof for all his other notions (with which I'm not really familiar), it's refreshing to have someone in the public arena who is concerned about chemicals' effect on human development.
Re autism: that’s too binary a distinction, given that autism is on a spectrum
Oh wow. I remember a while back, in another online community, one person absolutely blowing up and going on a massive tantrum rant when another member said something positive about a group called "Autism Speaks." He accused them of being a "hate group" dedicated to "genocide" because they want to find a cure to autism, and therefore because he's autistic they're a bunch of Nazis who want to throw him in a gas chamber, and therefore the person who mentioned this ought to be banned from the community forever and also get doxxed and lose his job and also be prosecuted and thrown in jail, etc, etc... you know the type.
The thing he showed zero interest in even considering is that the spectrum *is* a spectrum, and his ability to communicate these ideas intelligibly in the first place demonstrates how incredibly close he is on the "near" end of the spectrum. He doesn't know, nor would he apparently care to learn, about my autistic brother in law, who's still living with his parents despite being a full-grown adult well into his 30s because he's not fully able to care for himself, and he's still officially relatively "near" on the spectrum. He doesn't know, or care, about people further still on the spectrum who are nonverbal prisoners trapped within their own minds. I'd tell him to ask them whether they think it's a real problem that needs a real cure, but he can't, *because they're nonverbal prisoners trapped within their own minds!*
Frankly, I consider the refusal to acknowledge the possibility that something could possibly be a problem, simply because it's not a problem for you personally, a form of abuse towards those for whom it very obviously is a problem.
100% to all of this. Because disabilities are disabling, the loudest disabled voices in the public discourse will tend to be the most mildly disabled (either that or the ones who have achieved some sort of extreme atypical success despite their disability). The most seriously disabled lack the access and sometimes literally lack a voice to participate, making it easy to center the discourse in the wrong place.
It’s easy to say “I’m just neurodivergent, stop trying to “cure” me!” when you’re basically a fully average, functional adult that just happens to miss some social cues and has weird hang ups about clothing tags, but pretty cruel to apply that standard to someone who literally spends their days bashing their head against a wall because they are nonverbal and that’s how their “stimming” manifests.
The typical argument is that autism is frequently comorbid with intellectual disability but this is due to both correlating with mutational load rather than a causative mechanism. I'm not 100% sure of the truth of this proposition.
These people are saying, in general, that they are fine with a low-IQ cure but don't want an *autism* cure/prevention to exist, out of concern that this would result in no more aspies. This isn't an assured result, but it's hardly implausible either - most normie parents don't want even an aspie child, and aspie parents deliberately counter-selecting for aspie children could plausibly get labelled child abuse and banned, never mind the obvious results if the cure/prevention becomes the Officially Approved Thing the way that e.g. transition therapy is for GID.
Part of this, of course, is generative instinct. I don't want a future where no-one who thinks like I do exists ever again, which is essentially what's on the table here.
This attitude is by no means limited to disability activists. Many opponents of eugenics fear that its widespread adoption would make the existence of people like themselves impossible, and oppose it on these grounds. Not merely worried about being out-competed, they are in effect solipsistic enough to suggest that any world that precludes their existence must be a worse one. (The parents of many Jews would have never met without the Holocaust, so ...)
Fixing society is hard. Fix biology. One of the top SSC posts.
If this is going to be a primary topic du jour on this blog, I will become the Commenter who Harps On My Belief that it’s really hard for any kind of discourse to proceed in this area until we all Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Teleology.
(Also, somewhat à propos: I wonder if Scott would still pretty much agree with his previous negative review of After Virtue?)
I think it's very easy to do this with teleology. I don't think people who disagree with me will necessarily listen to my teleology-less-version, but they wouldn't listen to your teleological version either, so we're even.
Perhaps not, but it does have a sort of parsimony which might make it better to win over the normies, if their views (and hence sway on policy) are what are actually being contested between the intractable disability activists and their opponents. Which isn't to say you should advocate something less correct because it makes better propaganda, but if there are multiple correct-but-from-a-different-angle models, it seems wise to at least consider which have the best marketing if it's an issue where what the majority believes has significant impact.
Even aside from the propaganda angle I want to push back on this - teleology has been constantly losing ground over the past 500 years. Why would you think it's good marketing / "the winning team"?
Maybe as an overall worldview it's been losing ground among serious philosophers, but I still think on a "localized" level it can apply, and I say this as a pretty strict utilitarian. I think someone somewhere else in the comments gave the example of how in the human body, the arm "exists towards" arm-like functions, and the eye "towards" eye-like functions, so when the arm or eye is not able to perform as usual, it makes sense to frame the disability in a teleological sense, in that there is some part of the body not performing the function it was "designed for" and it would be a good thing if that could be rectified. All the stuff in quotes are sort of cute metaphors, but they still reflect how much of the public looks at things (or even how things are modeled in an easy to digest way for systems like evolution that optimize towards certain attractor states without intent), and it seems like appealing to those popular intuitions would be more direct and effective than wading into a debate about utilitarianism, which much of the public (unfortunately) has a weird knee-jerk reaction against. Basically in this case, applying this narrow form of teleology in public messaging might be the most utilitarian thing to do.
(Edited "with or without intent" to "without intent" to not mistakenly have it look like I consider intelligent design to be a serious prospect. The point is that even in systems like evolution where the experts will stress that it's not *actually* teleological, a teleological framework can still be useful to build intuition)
FWIW, it would be more accurate to say that, within a certain timeframe, it has been GAINING ground. Virtue ethics (as well as teleology, and indeed, hylomorphism) was DEAD dead leading up to the mid-20th century. But it has enjoyed such a revival that 1. People know what it is! And 2. It seems like a live option.
Which is not something small! Obviously it’s still a minority position…
What would a version from that perspective look like?
I think this post is coming from a utilitarian framework. Being blind is less good than being sighted because it produces some combination of:
1. You can't do as much, which makes you unhappy/less able to satisfy your preferences
2. Society has to accommodate you, which costs resources it could use making other people happy/satisfying their preferences
Thanks. That's fairly intuitive to me. I was wondering what a post on this topic that was coming from the perspective of loving teleology would look like. Mostly this is because I'm not very familiar with Teleology and I was hoping the commentor who has such strong views on it would educate me
Something I notice about woke people is that they are not comfortable admitting to having any sort of negative reaction to any group, except I suppose they'd make exceptions for Nazi's and serial killers (and of course for members of their own cohort who are insufficiently woke about some issue). But denial of negative judgments seems like a really core thing. So it seems to me that that denial lies at the root of a bunch of woke nonsense like the Social Model of Disability.
When I see someone who is disabled or deformed I invariably have a craving to stare at them. I feel intensely curious about what the problem is and exactly what it looks like. Of course I do not stare, unless I can figure out a way to do it without the person being aware of what I'm doing, because I don't want to make them uncomfortable. Also, I generally have a negative, "that's ugly" feeling about their disability. I am pretty sure my inner reactions are not at all unusual, and I don't really feel guilty about them. Once I get to know someone who has a disability all that stuff fades away pretty fast and they just look like themselves to me.
But it seems to me that there are a whole bunch of people walking around these days who have somehow ended up believing that even their private thoughts and feelings must be pure as the driven snow. Where the hell did that idea s come from? Is it because the country is becoming less religious, and people have a need for rules about what you are supposed to think and feel? I live in Boston, and used to see in psychotherapy people of Irish descent who grew up with old-style Catholicism -- the kind that tells young males that they will go to hell for masturbating, and that thinking of a sin is equivalent to doing the deed. The people I saw from that cohort had been left with terrible anxiety disorders. This woke religion seems about as harsh as old-school Catholicism, though about different issues.
Anyhow, my theory of the Social Model is that it's an attempt by people who hate themselves for their spontaneous negative reactions to disability, and invented the Model as a way of atoning for their sin.
I don't think this last one was true because it was invented by very committed disability activists who were disabled themselves.
But mightn't they have sensed that society was in a novel place where it was vulnerable to that argument? It's not has though people have been making the case for that argument all along -- or, if they were back in 1910, people would have just thought they were nuts and so their diatribes, if they happened at all, disappeared without a trace.
Negative reactions to characteristics you have yourself are pretty common - internalised ablism is probably just as prevalent as internalised misogyny etc.
Well, yeah, but I think we all have at least some of that going on -- sexism, racism, ableism, etc. How could we not? It seems to me that what works best is to try to be fully aware of every bit of that, and try hard not to let it influence your thinking and behavior about whatever the relevant group is. Hating yourself for having some ableism or whatnot floating around inside doesn't accomplish anything, and hating others who you suspect of having some is unfair, and trying to compensate for it by demanding that society give limitless love and help to the relevant groups is madness.
Similar to mental health - there's absolutely nothing wrong with being mentally ill, but society's failure to cure this non-problem is the height of injustice.
I can't recall ever having a negative, "that's ugly" response to disability. Just not something I recall ever doing. But I'm not grandstanding on moral goodness here, since I'll readily admit I do have a "that's ugly" reaction to people who seem, well, quite ugly to me.
Maybe you just haven't seen a spectacular enough deformity 🤷♂️ I have a hard time not looking at the absence of a limb, and then always feel awkward and sort of awful when the person can tell I was just doing the mental process of "ok there's his arm, and then nothing - ah ok he's missing a hand, aah stop looking where the hand should be."
We're maybe just talking past each other. I do feel an intense curiosity and a bit of shock in some cases, and an awkwardness deriving from my fear of being perceived as a rude gawker. If that's what you meant by a "that's ugly" feeling, then we're on the same page. But I don't consciously think of dismemberment or deformity as (necessarily) ugly.
PS. Maybe the most efficient explanation for why I don't think the same way you do is because we have different brains? Porn is the low-hanging example I can use to demonstrate how differently people react to other people. A scene that might seem incredibly visually appealing to Bob may be absolutely disgusting to Fred. Another example of this is how people treat the severely mentally ill. I'd say your average person responds to an obviously mentally ill person with fear, if not revulsion. They get super uncomfortable and try to get away. My impulse is to engage with the ill person and have a conversation. They are used to being ostracized, and you'll find they are often so grateful to be treated kindly! That said, I'm not claiming some unique empathy. I was simply socialized this way. My mom was a mental health professional and my Dad was open about his psychiatric diagnoses. I've seen the statistics and I know the severely mentally ill are not especially dangerous. But if most of what I knew about mental illness came from media depictions, I'd be afraid, too.
About that stuff I'm like you. I'm a psychologist and have seen lots of psychotic people. I'm not alarmed or disgusted by them either.
I think what I mean by "that's ugly" isn't the same feeling one has been seeing a a normal person who just happens to be very homely. It's closer to what you call shock -- the injury or deformity looks disturbing, wrong, grotesque.
The attitude is worse than that.
In order to officially be able to dislike someone, it is necessary for the woke person to call that person a Nazi (fascist/reactionary/etc.). This is, bluntly, unpersoning (also called "taking away the face"). At that point it's then safe to do anything, anything at all against that person.
Some woke people spend their lives doing this.
So if a disabled person washes up all by themselves on a desert Island... are they the victim of the society, the society that makes them a victim, or both?
This case would probably be framed by the "social model" people as "society has failed at the job of preventing the disabled from ending up on desert islands".
No, you see, the only reason they're on the island in the first place is because they live in a society that can build boats. We must ban boats at once to prevent this sort of thing.
I think the answer is just that in that case they have a large number of impairments that will make their life very difficult, but no disabilities.
Which feels awkward if you are used to using the word 'disability' to mean both things, but someone trying to change the definition of a word within their technical model isn't the same as being wrong.
Is your statement that your grandma "Didn’t want some kind of social revolution. She just wished she could see again" drawn from conversation with her, or is it just a conclusion you've drawn on your own? It seems to pit against each other two things that really aren't mutually exclusive.
The Medical Model exactly as stated (with the "you must stigmatize people with disabilities" part included) was hugely historically popular, and calling it a straw man is only true insofar as the real people who believed it have (mostly) died off. Although it wasn't called the "medical model" at the time, that set of beliefs was the grounding for the eugenics movement and played a huge role in historical abuses of disabled people. I think Deafness is a really good example of this. The oral education of Deaf people imposed on them by hearing doctors didn't work, because there WAS no medical remedy for deafness at the time. The Cochlear implant is relatively recent, and it's not a flawless solution. In the place of the actual practice of medicine was inhumane education, which determined the worth of a Deaf person by how well they could learn how to speak, as opposed to recognizing sign language as an actual valid language with a grammar and so on. This is the ideal example of the social model versus the medical model - Deaf people were never "incapable" of speech, rather, hearing educators at the time, influenced by Alexander Graham Bell's theories of eugenics, were incapable of recognizing that the Deaf were perfectly proficient in sign language. A medical inadequacy, solved by a social solution.
I agree with you that 1) this dichotomy is outdated and doesn't correspond to modern beliefs very well and 2) that we could stand to be less skeptical of medical interventions that do work, especially with regards to mental health. Nevertheless, I think there are circumstances where the parable of the social model versus the medical model is incredibly valuable. Specifically, the circumstance when someone suggests the most humane medical intervention for a disability is to sterilize the affected population to prevent them from perpetuating their inadequacy.
Otherwise, you make a good point. I think it's worth it to change how we teach the history of this particular paradigm shift in accessibility care, and to consider the negative implications of how the social model interacts with modern psychiatry and medically treatable disabilities.
Can you explain more about the history? Were there times when Sign Language had already been invented, but people refused to teach it to the deaf? What was their thought process? Did they think if they didn't teach sign language, this would have some good result (eg the deaf would learn to hear)? How does any of this relate to eugenics (I would have expected eugenicists to want to prevent deaf people from reproducing, but I wouldn't have thought they would have strong opinions about how to treat existing ones)
Oralism is a philosophy of deaf education that has seen as much as 80% adoption in schools for the deaf over nearly 100 years https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oralism
Sign language was banned in the classroom on the theory it would force kids to learn lip reading and other techniques for communication, and interact “normally” with their hearing peers. Of course outside the classroom, these deaf students signed with their peers, a much more effective method of communication than lip reading.
This sounds a lot like the phonics vs. whole word controversy, and probably comes from the same...people.
American Sign Language emerged in the early 19th century at the American School for the Deaf in Connecticut, combining elements of French Sign Language, Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (which is now extinct but emerged organically on that island due to a high rate of congenital deafness), and home signs of deaf people in the local area (home signs are rudimentary communication systems that deaf children spontaneously invent with their families in absence of exposure to an existing signed language). For most of the 19th century, deaf education in the US and elsewhere was split between oralism and manualism; i.e. those that preferred to teach spoken language only vs those who used sign language. In 1880, an international meeting comprised mostly of oralists (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_International_Congress_on_Education_of_the_Deaf) passed several resolutions declaring that oral education was superior to manual education, and the result was that many schools of the deaf stopped using signed languages as a medium of instruction, with some even banning students from signing outright. The justification they used was basically that signed languages were not “real” languages, and that teaching them would interfere with deaf students’ learning to speak. We now know that precisely the opposite is true - deaf children exposed to sign language early on actually learn spoken language more easily than those that are deprived of linguistic inputs that they can perceive. I’m not familiar with the Alexander Graham Bell’s theories of eugenics, so I won’t comment on that.
I think the deaf community offers a really interesting example to think about with respect to the social model of disability - many deaf people adopt this framework wholeheartedly, even asserting that their condition is not a disability but simply a difference of perception. I don’t go that far, but I think there is something to this. In places where there is an unusually high rate of congenital deafness (such as Martha’s Vineyard in the 18th to 19th century), hearing and deaf people alike naturally acquire the local signed language and deaf people are fully integrated into the local society. Deafness doesn’t prevent people from doing most of the necessary activities they partake in during their life, it just hinders communication with hearing people who do not know sign. I think using a biopsychosocial model of disability, deafness definitely leans more towards more towards psychosocial than biological, but I agree with you that characterizing it as 100% due to society is incorrect.
I wrote about the 33 year old struggle over cochlear implants for deaf children between hearing parents and deaf culture activists who fear the Medical Model (cochlear implants) as eradicating the need for their Social Model (American Sign Language, a separate language that's more closely related to French Sign Language than to British Sign Language):
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-grateful-deaf/
This controversy can shine some perspective to understanding identity politics issues. On the other hand, the emotional temperature of this dispute appears to have diminished somewhat in this century even as other identity politics issues have heightened.
Sign languages have existed in the Americas since before the Europeans arrived see Plains Indian Sign Language for example
Even if what you're saying is true, the 'medical model' is NOT the alternative to the social model, and it's absolutely dishonest to frame things in those terms. The left used to believe in lysokenist genetics, does that mean I get to contrast by my beliefs about behavioral heritability with lysenkoism to show how right I am and how wrong my opponents are?
My husband had a deaf co-worker at his job in the 90s who simply didn't have the language skills - so it seemed - to do the work as others did. This was just shrugged off as a charity case - it was a government agency, and for example the person in the lunchroom who took your money was blind - but I think the deaf person's employment required a certain pretense. I wonder if this situation had something to do with the education he'd received.
The social model is one of those concepts where I struggle to understand how anyone sincerely believes it, and yet I know some people do. Like, your example of a blind person on a desert island -- of *course* it is inherently better for a person to be able to see, regardless of the society they live in.
I am mostly aware of this attitude as it regards the deaf community - both from friends with deaf relatives, and from media. Reading this, I was reminded of the movie Sound of Metal, about a drummer who loses his hearing and integrates into a deaf community. Its main thesis, which is spelled out didactically by the deaf community's leader, is that deafness is not a disability, and that deaf people should never be made to feel any "lesser" for their lack of hearing or to seek a cure. Basically following the mantra of the social model of disability. (now I will spoil the ending)...
The protagonist learns about the existence of cochlear implants, which he is told have the power to restore his hearing. Eventually he saves up his money and gets the operation, after which two things happen:
a) the leader of the deaf community tells him he is no longer welcome there, since he sought to "cure" his deafness, and that would send the wrong message to the other deaf people.
b) although he can technically hear, it's not what he expected; everything is distorted and staticky. People sound like robots, there is constant feedback. If the point of curing his deafness was, in part, to be able to enjoy music again, then it is a failure. (In the final shot of the film, the protagonist turns off the implants, since the silence is preferable to the constant feedback)
We, the audience, are meant to accept the leader's message here (the social model of disability), but to me, it rang hollow. If cochlear implants actually worked as the main character had hoped, and fully restored his hearing as it was originally, then of course it would be the right choice, and every deaf person would get them, because being able to hear is simply preferable than the alternative. The movie just reinforced to me that the whole social model attitude of "disabilities aren't real, society is the problem" is a coping mechanism for when an adequate physical cure does not exist yet.
Deaf Culture is a separate language community. Its signers are worried about their language community dying out, much like Yiddish speakers regret the diminishment of the number of Yiddish speakers, and Yiddish-only speakers who are too old to learn a more popular language have practical as well as cultural reasons for regretting the decline in the number of young people who speak Yiddish. Same for those who do all their thinking in American Sign Language (picturing signs in their mind's eye as they carry on their internal monologue) and are too old to learn to understand English even if cochlear implants are perfected.
I also do think your examples in "Why I Disagree With The Social Model" are pretty questionable. I mean, confronting the spaceflight one--it's not like you steer a rocket by looking out the windshield. I'm neither blind nor a rocket scientist, but rockets are small enclosed spaces where everything has a designated spot and looking out the window adds nothing at all. Of course NASA could make a spaceship that a blind person could operate. Unlike a ramp to Everest, the cost and effort would be trivial compared to the total cost of the endeavor. It doesn't mean NASA's evil for not having done so, but it's still a choice and I don't think that's an inherently sighted activity. I don't think pointing out the failings of the literal version of the social model has to mean limiting our creative thinking about what is "inherent" in the way that some of these examples do.
I'm not thinking entirely of looking out the windshield (although I think I remember this being important during the moon landing), but rather as something like - there are 200 gauges and 100 levers in front of you, and you need to be paying attention to all of them. I would expect it to be hard to have this kind of massively-parallel information delivery system.
Thinking about it harder, I can imagine each gauge having a button you could press that would say verbally what the gauge is reporting, and then the blind person memorizes the position of each gauge and lever (I don't know if the sound effects would be practical in 1969, but they would be today). I don't know if this kind of massive spatial memorization effort would work in real life.
It's actually the case that NASA is experimenting with making space more 'accessible'. I have a blind friend who has taken part in experiments sponsored by NASA in which she did several trips on the 'Vomit Comet' a few months ago, along with deaf folks and those who use wheelchairs (not during the experiment, of course). They worked on things like 'where should braille notices be placed when you are weightless?'
Checkout some videos of blind people using screen readers to navigate computers/Internet. They are astounding. Many experienced screen reader users have the speed cranked so far up it just sounds like noise to you or me, but they can discern wants on the screen and easily navigate around (providing the website/program is properly set up). The new Space X space ships use big touch screens for almost everything instead of individual gauges - could easily put a screen reader on these.
(But in general, i agree with your example and this article).
Of course, let's breeze past the part where things like space flight (or modern civilization per se) can only ever be developed by sighted people in the first place.
Why? Humans have developed technology around all sorts of things we can’t naturally sense
I'm not saying that being blind doesn't matter or that blind people can do literally every activity that a sighted person can, I am saying that making a rocket operable by a blind person is trivial compared to building a rocket in the first place and it's not a very robust example of an inherently sighted activity.
NASA could certainly build a spaceship that a blind man could operate, because NASA prefers to build spaceships a potato could operate. And then lets the astronauts have a few controls to use because otherwise they'll quit and NASA needs them for PR.
But blind people having anything particularly useful to do in space, is going to be a tall order. Aside from the information-bandwidth problem that Scott notes, simply orienting one's self in microgravity is much more dependent on visual cues - sleeping areas invariably have "night lights", because if an astronaut woke up in actual darkness they'd never find the light switch. Or the Braille I/O terminal or whatever.
Blind person here. As a member of the disability community myself, I basically agree with this post. I've been concerned about the social model for a while, but Scott has an uncanny ability to put my thoughts into words much better than I ever could.
One thing I will add, it is often much easier and cheaper to "solve" disability by changing society than by curing it in the first place, and therefore advocacy for that course of action is certainly not unwarranted.
Some people even argue that curing or preventing disabilities often slows down progress on the social front, as fewer disabled people means less pressure on society to make the necessary accommodations. According to this argument, this effect causes progress on the medical front to have less of an effect than we would assume, as it negatively affects the disabled people that cannot be cured. I'm personally pretty unconvinced, but I will admit that this effects works in the opposite direction; countries which had a sudden influx of the disabled, usually war veterans, often made a lot of progress on the social front. None of this detracts from the main point, and in my opinion these effects are small enough that they shouldn't be of much concern.
As an anecdote, I have seen a person in the blind Twitter community (which, for obvious reasons, recently became the blind Mastodon community and basically became Tumblr reborn) unironically argue that, with the advent of mobile apps which let trained helpers assist people over video calls, there's nothing stopping a blind person from becoming a surgeon or a pilot, and it's all just stupid, discriminatory laws that need to be changed. Granted, this was a singular, radical opinion, but it's indicative of a more general sentiment. You don't have to look hard if you want to find a blind person who would require all software developers to make all software, external or internal, perfectly accessible from day one.
PS. A bit unrelated, but It would be great if we could finally get proper alt descriptions on this blog; we usually get something along the lines of "07857d17-f333-45e4-9a54-deaac6969d28", which might be helpful to a computer, but definitely not to us.
I remember a CBC radio story/documentary once about a lady who had started reading books for the blind - which involved a lot of reading stuff. Then one day she starts reading coding books, meaning you have to listen back to the person ahead of you and see if they missed a damn backslash, because someone was learning to code. And this was like twenty years ago - I shudder to think how many person-hours were burned on that exercise, and hope-but-doubt that the person made it worthwhile.
I mean, really, my view on "is disability real" is that it can be trivially answered by "are there people who cannot use the bathroom unassisted?" The answer is yes, and so after that it's just a question of where the lines are drawn. They absolutely exist.
Do you find getting alt-text descriptions of images useful? I sometimes consider them, but I'm not sure how much the images already make sense based on context, or how much a text description helps with this.
This depends on the image, if the image is purely decorative, it should be marked as such. HTML has facilities for this, not sure about whatever UI Substack uses for writing.
The standard advice is "imagine you're reading the post over the phone, how do you describe the image?" My take on it is "export to txt and/or just use text-to-speech, try reading it that way, what are you missing?" Ask yourself why the image is there in the first place, what information would a reader lose if they saw the article but not the image, and what information from the image do they care about in this context.
An image of a tennis player might be purely decorative if used as a stock illustration in a news article, described as "a woman playing tennis" in an exercise in a language textbook, and described in great detail if the article is about the woman's innovative playing style. Same image, three articles, three different descriptions. It all depends on context.
If you can replace or augment an image with something else (text/table), you should. Images / screenshots with text are an obvious culprit, they should be avoided if at all possible, the contents should be included as alt text otherwise. Charts should at least have enough description to make the surrounding context understandable, if the post mentions some interesting changes from 2017 onwards but doesn't describe them, the alt description should say what the pattern was before 2017 and how it changed. THe mantic Monday posts fail really hard at this, and so do a lot of other posts which cite scientific research. The same goes for things like covid/political maps, AI art (if the post is about how much better a new model is) etc. There's no need to say that a chart uses blue bars on a green background, that's irrelevant, there's usually no need to even list all the datapoints, though a table would certainly be appreciated, but "graph of covid cases in the US per month" is too little and doesn't tell us anything that we don't already know from context.
In the end, it all comes down to a judgment call.
Thanks; I'll try to do this - please remind me if I forget.
I've wanted Substack to enable tables for a while and I have it on my list of things to bother them about. But how do text-to-speech devices handle text-based tables? Are they comprehensible if it just says something like "Row 1, Column 1 - five. Row 1 Column 2 - seven" - or is there some more clever solution?
The way blind people handle computers is a bit different, we navigate and interact with our devices a lot more, having commands to move by line, paragraph, heading, link etc. With tables, there are usually commands to move up/down in a column and left/right in a row. whether coordinates and row/column headers are announced before the actual cell contents is usually configurable. For tables with numerical data, a "say all" mode, reading top-to-bottom, makes no sense, although it does exist and can be used.
This assumes that the table is an actual table in the HTML sense of the word, not just a bunch of elements visually laid out in a way that sighted people would perceive as a table. Those are annoying with a screen reader. There are tricks to make them accessible if you know what you're doing, but goodness knows if those would work in an email.
Do the tables on https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/26/cortical-neuron-number-matches-intuitive-perceptions-of-moral-value-across-animals/ work okay?
Yes, the column headers don't seem to be properly announced as headers, but I've seen far worse.
If there's no alt text, someone using computer disability aids even know what they're missing. A minimal 5-word description removes the feeling of "I don't know what I'm missing".
But they're not the same thing. Wheelchair ramps and lifts are not the same thing as being able to walk. Curing paralysis is much more expensive, but it's also much, much better. And if there's less disabled people resulting in less 'pressure' to solve their problems....this is more than offset by less people having the problems in the first place!
I guess the counterpoint is that it's sometimes a lot easier and cheaper to solve disability with a medical device than with changes to society - for example, eyeglasses are such an effective prosthetic lens that people with them are not considered disabled!
Another complication would be that it's not like it's all or nothing, technologies like prosthetic limbs and hearing aids seem to go part of the way, improving quality of life but not curing the disability. I beleive there are technologies being developed for blind people that can work in a similar way, although bionic eyes are a long way off. I'm curious if that's ever discussed!
I wouldn't generalise too much from the influx of disabled veterans, war veterans are inherantly sympathetic and can be used to increase support for anything...
I suppose it seems to me that so long as the idea of "impairments" being bad on their own is taken seriously, and "disability" just refers to the social aspects, this is a "merely" verbal debate. It's just defining "disability" as the social bit but allowing that biological "impairments" exist separately and are bad. Emphasizing that distinction seems to be how the social model theorist will push back, and it looks like once they do that, it's going to collapse into a verbal debate, where everyone agrees there are biological problems and social problems alike, but one side wants to say the biological problems, while bad, aren't in the category "disability". Maybe this is an important "merely" verbal debate, but it does seem like a verbal debate.
A couple formatting/wording suggestions and a more substantive critique.
First, there are two places my clinician friends will get hung up in the intro. One is on the reference to the Washington Generals. People with ADHD (who might be very interested in reading this post) struggle with even conventional metaphores, and an unconventional, undefined metaphore like this may be a barrier. I would suggest briefly defining it.
The other is the reference to bravery debates. You define it in the middle of the linked post ("arguments where people boast about how brave they are to take an unorthodox and persecuted position, and their opponents counter that they’re not persecuted heretics, they’re a vast leviathan persecuting everyone else"), and I think it would help your readers to include that definition in the post body. It would particularly help if you found a way to define them in such a way that, as you argue they are, the idea of a bravery debate sounded like a normal thing people experience in actual debates. For example, you might say "Maybe this is a bravery debate - pushing a one-sided idea that's incomplete, but that society needs to think about more."
A more substantive critique is that you haven't explicitly dealt with the possibility that Social Model advocates have redefined disabilities, handicaps, and barriers - not as an intrinsic physically-rooted functional barrier to participating in meaningful occupations, but as the set of impositions by society's in response to an impairment. "Impediment" would refer those activities that an impairment physically prevents you from doing (i.e. how blindness prevents you from driving safely or surviving on a deserted island). But the "disability," "handicap," or "barrier" would be defined as just those things society prevents you from doing due to your impairment (i.e. how society prohibits blind people from obtaining a driver's license, or perhaps from going on a rafting trip).
Is this a sneaky rhetorical Motte-and-Bailey strategy, or an appropriate recategorization that increases the flexibility and conceptual coverage of the English language? Why not both? Let's say that the Social Model project as I've hypothesized it is desirable. Then there are perhaps three ways to implement it. One is to make an argument that we ought to redefine terms like "disability" to refer to artificial barriers against people with impairments and try to achieve broad social consensus. Good luck with that. Another is to construct new terms and endow them with the meaning we want, as you did when you coined "bravery debate." But that requires you to teach and normalize new language, and it undercuts the the ability to enforce your new ideas on the wider population.
The most impactful approach, and the one progressives have won with time and again, is to just assert that these terms have a new meaning, start using them that way, and to police the language of people who use the old meaning. The success of the Social Model is another piece of evidence that this strategy works pretty well.
Under the hypothesis I'm laying out here to explain the Social Model, it's not a bravery debate - not a neglected half-truth that needs more consideration by society. It's a redefinition of terms that makes its claims, properly understood, consistent with common sense, yet more strident in their call to action because it casts society's failures to maximally reduce the very real disabilities it imposes on people with impairments as an injustice that is in urgent need of correction.
And the right thing to do in the face of that call to action is to think about and focus on the common-sense, most impactful steps society could take to oppress the disabled less - not to focus on corner cases like the wheelchairs-in-submarines example that only seem to apply if you've misunderstood what Social Model activities (I am guessing) mean when they refer to "disability." I believe they are hoping you will adopt their language and way of thinking, then apply your common sense to figuring out impactful anti-oppressive steps society should take, then advocate for them in the language of the Social Model. Instead, what you are doing is giving a regressive old-school definition of terms like "disability," eliding the useful distinctions Social Model activists are trying to draw, and then arguing weird edge cases and operating under the assumption that Social Model activists are probably just misleading people, rather than assuming they're trying to spread valuable new categories and definitions. That's not a bravery debate either - it's just kind of annoying.
This little essay is not meant to be interpreted as a straightforward endorsement of the Social Model, because I do think that there are plenty of people who'll get confused by the redefinition and be mislead. If there isn't plenty of space being made for "onboarding" and an active effort to preserve plenty of space for conversation about the ways that medicine can help people overcome impediments, the limitations on society's ability to help minimize those impediments, and good reasons for society to disable some people through the imposition of artificial barriers to participate in certain meaningful occupations, then I think that Social Model activism would be replacing one misleading way of thinking (what they call the "Medical Model") with another (the one-sided interpretation of the Social Model you outline here).
But I do think that if we had one set of terms to refer to impairments and impediments (physically rooted) and another to refer to diagnoses disabilities (socially rooted and oppressive), that would be a clearly useful and common-sense set of conceptual distinctions to have. I would personally advocate for conversations that seek to reinforce these linguistic distinctions, having the nerdy in-depth conversation about definitions and concepts that doesn't make for very powerful activism but does, I think, lead to long-term consensus on the truth.
People with ADHD struggle with metaphor? I've never heard this, I couldn't find any papers backing it up, and it doesn't comport with my own experience and observation. Do you have a source for this claim? Perhaps you were thinking of autism, a conditon which can canonically involve literal-mindedness?
An example is “ Semantic conflicts are resolved differently by adults with and without ADHD.”
A personal example is that my partner, who has an ADHD diagnosis, reports that metaphors cause her to involuntarily picture an unhelpfully literal mash-up image of the thing being analogized. It makes the metaphor confusing and requires either plenty of time in conversation for her to block the mash-up image, think about the comparison being made, and then reinterpret the original statement; or else it requires a follow up literal explanation of the comparison being drawn. For example, if I say “lawyers are sharks” (a conventional metaphor and therefore easier to understand), she involuntarily pictures a shark in a suit.
The thing to google scholar search is “ADHD figurative meaning,” since the term “metaphor” largely turns up unrelated literature.
Hi there, I'm someone with ADHD. I definitely resonate with your above description and assumed that was how everyone processed metaphors. Would you mind describing how neurotypicals process metaphors if not in that way?
I can’t guarantee I’m neurotypical, but I don’t have a diagnosis of anything mental health related.
When I hear a metaphor, any of three things may happen depending on how easy it is to understand. For easy or conventional metaphors, my mind immediately returns an abstract sense of what the metaphor means, without any imagery. For harder metaphors, I have to consciously force my mind to generate an image, letting me then intuit very quickly which aspect of the image is relevant - the difference being that I have to will this to happen, and can shut it off or manipulate the experience with some control. For hard metaphors, like the Washington Generals metaphor, processing it involves no imagery, just a verbally based analysis (“oh, they deliberately lose against the Globetrotters while pretending to play a good game - so the term means a ‘stooge’”).
Based on what my girlfriend tells me, the key difference is that I have more control over whether, when and how the imagery appears in my mind, and this allows me to more easily ignore distracting aspects and focus on the connection that matters.
Got it, thank you for the explanation!
The problem is that “disability” already has a perfectly cromulent definition that is entrenched in most English speakers’ minds.
To use another rationalist bit of jargon, this is a “taboo your words” situation. Work out what concepts you want covered without using words that already have loaded meanings in the discussion. Then, if you find you’ve resolved upon a useful distinction that lacks a linguistically unique reference, create one. But don’t redefine an existing already useful term, and certainly don’t attack people for using the term as it is commonly defined.
I don’t think this “redefine and police” approach is value neutral - it’s a rhetorical dark art that shores up Motte-and-Bailey doctrines and lets you confuse and obfuscate people JJ not up to speed in your jargon ingroup, or worse to cast them as bad people for using “problematic and oppressive language”.
Oh I’m not saying it’s value neutral. You clearly don’t like it. But if we put it to a vote, I would vote for us to redefine “impairment” and “disability” in the way I’ve proposed here. I don’t think having those terms be vague synonyms helps us articulate ourselves more effectively, and having them defined with crisp and unambiguous different definitions does. It may be annoying but it is useful, and I don’t see how it’s particularly different from exposure to the evolution of slang, pressures to learn new languages or jargon terms, the existential state of being born into a complex unfamiliar set of interlocking cultures that you have to figure out as you grow up, or the experience of trying to form consensus from a confused debate.
I guess I'm saying theres a missing mood here. Like, of COURSE it's useful to redefine vague synonyms to cover new concepts while still leaving a term that has the old meaning, and isn't it too bad that sometimes that helpful process is frustrating? And instead of that constructive mood, I am seeing a mood that feels some combination of paranoid, overly negative, and not actually that thoughtful about the pragmatics of the strategy of redefining existing words or how exactly that's being done in this case.
My “mood” is probably best described by Scott’s “Social Justice and Words, Words, Words” - I don’t want to badly regurgitate that whole argument so if you’re not familiar with it I can certainly recommend it.
Now, I don’t think this redefinition of “disability” by the Social Model is quite as egregious as the way “privilege” has been mangled, but it’s also got a very similar flavor. So that’s where the suspicion comes from.
I mean not to be a jerk about it, but your whole line of argument here kinda looks like a retreat to the motte - you’re making much more reasonable points (e.g. “we still believe in what you call disability, we just call it impairment so we have more precise terms”) but that distinction, those reasonable arguments, do not appear in the more common presentations of the model that Scott quoted.
“This is not meant to be literally 100% true, it’s just a paradigm to help illuminate social solutions, and we still believe in and have a word for medical/biological issues that reduce a person’s abilities regardless of social situation”. That’s a remarkably easy caveat to add, so how come no one does until the model is criticized for being, in its usually stated form, kinda nuts?
I have actually started to take issue more and more with the motte-and-bailey accusation in general.
One reason is that such accusations often fail to track who is making what argument. I, MeadowFreckle, am making the argument you describe as a “retreat to the motte,” yet have never made an argument that would be “retaking the bailey” and wouldn’t agree with those arguments.
And there is a substantive difference amongs those “taking the bailey” between people who are confused and making bad arguments by accident and then realizing they were wrong, people who are engaging in a bravery debate and making bad arguments to counteract a popular worse one acknowledging that this is what they’re doing when called on it, and people who are making bad arguments with sneaky rhetorical strategies on purpose to win an argument who use the retreat to the motte as a tactic.
I don’t think that lumping it all together as a “motte and bailey” helps us understand what a specific individual or group is doing and why, and for that reason, I think it too often stands in the way of analysis and becomes just another thought-stopping rhetorical shot.
Particularly among folks in this scene, I’d prefer to see a combo of trying to steelman arguments and see if there’s sense in them, and trying to understand the motivations of specific groups when they’re making bad arguments. I think Scott did a good job of the latter but failed at the former here, and I think a lot of commenters here are not really succeeding at even the first when they say that the Social Model “seems nuts” or that they “just can’t understand it” or that it’s an “alien way of thinking.”
Nicholas Shackel, original author / coiner of “Motte and Bailey” actually discusses your objection. The “motte and bailey fallacy” is in some sense a corruption (or maybe oversimplification) of what he originally wrote about, which was the idea of “motte and bailey DOCTRINES”. A doctrine is of course, not a single argument by a single person, but a whole series of arguments, beliefs, and proponents, mutually supporting but not necessarily homogenous. A “school of thought”.
He writes: “ I think it is clearly worth distinguishing the Motte and Bailey Doctrine from a particular fallacious exploitation of it. For example, in some discussions using this concept for analysis a defence has been offered that since different people advance the Motte and the Bailey it is unfair to accuse them of a Motte and Bailey fallacy, or of Motte and Baileying. That would be true if the concept was a concept of a fallacy, because a single argument needs to be before us for such a criticism to be made. Different things said by different people are not fairly described as constituting a fallacy. However, when we get clear that we are speaking of a doctrine, different people who declare their adherence to that doctrine can be criticised in this way. Hence we need to distinguish the doctrine from fallacies exploiting it to expose the strategy of true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who defend the Motte.”
The Social Model is a doctrine. It consists of both a bailey - extremely provocative but hard to defend statements such as those Scott quotes, and more defensible but less radical statements such as yours. That different people are proponents of different parts of the doctrine doesn’t really matter - you both consider yourselves adherents to (or at least defenders of) the Social Model Doctrine.
The “all disability is socially constructed” crowd needs you to provide a defensible fallback. But you also depend on them to make the “social model” even a distinct thing worth talking about. Otherwise the whole flavor of our discussion would be different - you and I would not be arguing different models, but just quibbling over some minor distinctions within the Interactionist Model that we both fundamentally agree with (basically, exactly how much emphasis we should put on social accommodation, and whether we ought to use different terms for challenges that are primarily medical vs primarily socially induced).
Link to Shackel: http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and-bailey-doctrines/
ETA - I have a bit of an objection to “steelmanning” myself. While it is occasionally a useful way to contemplate an issue, it suffers the same fundamental flaw of a straw man, which is that nobody actually sincerely holds that position.
Thanks for the information!
It seems like, under the definition Shackel proposes, any set of arguments that is made by any number of people that includes a combination of both indefensible/radical and defensible/less-radical statements is classified as a Motte and Bailey, even if the proponents of the defensible arguments disagree with the proponents of indefensible arguments.
That seems like a pretty expansive definition, and it seems like the vast majority of schools of thought would be Motte and Bailey doctrines. Given widespread misunderstandings about the concept of the Motte and Bailey you point out, perhaps even the concept of Motte and Bailey doctrines itself could be classified as a Motte and Bailey doctrine.
We could make it mean more if we added a component in which many people, or a particularly influential few, were misunderstanding it in especially problematic ways. But then, I'm not sure the term itself is particularly apt, since it heavily implies that the existence of the defensible argument is merely an instrumental, coordinated, engineered effort to defend the Bailey, rather than that the Bailey is an accidental and undesirable outgrowth or divergence from the Motte.
I do think the term is useful to explain why certain ideas, in the language and style in which we typically find them clothed, tend to be self-perpetuating. "There is an intellectual Motte here, and also a rhetorical Bailey" is a thing you could say about a collection of documents (such as a ACX comment thread, where my comments are the intellectual Motte and Scott's post quotes the rhetorical Bailey). I think that can be useful, but I do think this clearly applies to the Motte and Bailey concept itself, and I think Shackel therefore has to be either wrong or self-defeating when he says "Diagnosis of a philosophical doctrine as being a Motte and Bailey Doctrine is invariably fatal."
I also think that there’s an incompatibility between the idea of a doctrine of Motte and Bailey and the objection you make to steelmanning. The former accepts the idea of a problematic discourse irrespective of who holds what views. The latter idea insists on engaging with an idea that a person actually has.
I think the best move is to engage with the strongest version of an idea, on the grounds that even if nobody holds it when you start, that if you find yourself convinced, you’ll be the first adopter of it. If you reject it, then you can also in theory reject the more foolish actually held views - if even the strongest version is unconvincing, that’s a powerful result.
ADHDer here, making new metaphors is one of my strengths. YMMV.
Just curious, do you also feel strong at accurately and quickly interpreting novel metaphors that other people present to you?
I guess? I think I come across as many metaphors as the average person, but I don't recall having any trouble interpreting them. I'd say I'm about average at it.
Good to know! I guess I should moderate my statement and say “the ADHD population has higher rates of difficulty with figurative language” or something.
In particular, the Washington Generals metaphor should be explained because a) non-USAns are more likely not to know what it's about, b) the Harlem Globetrotters aren't as famous as they used to be, and c) bringing up the Generals without mentioning the Globetrotters seems like an extra degree of difficulty. (Having said all that, I, a US person, got it right off.)
I like semi-obscure metaphors. If you get them, they hit extra hard. If you don’t get them, you get a fun little Wikipedia rabbit hole to go down.
FWIW I liked this one a lot - it’s perfect for the situation - and got it immediately. But then, I’ve witnessed the Globetrotters beat the Generals live.
This is perfectly timed. There are so many zoomers who are used to leveraging the social theory of disability to their universities (title 9 says I need nap time or you sleep with the fishes), and that's because at university they are a paying customer. They are used to this obsequious notion of customer service.
In the working world, you are an employee. You no longer dictate the terms. Either you become your own boss as a freelance duct cleaner or you get an alarm clock, you dig?
And as an appeal to experience, I say this as someone whose disability cost myself a hard won career. I acknowledge that I cannot ideology my way into working a job my body won't allow me to work. So I'm trying to learn enough to start in another field where having tons of physical limitations is not so fatal.
> "This is perfectly timed. There are so many zoomers who are used to leveraging the social theory of disability to their universities (title 9 says I need nap time or you sleep with the fishes), and that's because at university they are a paying customer. They are used to this obsequious notion of customer service. "
I don't think this is necessarily a social-theory-of-disability problem. I think any theory of disability (including my preferred biopsychosocial one) would allow that some people have disabilities that might require extra sleep (eg narcolepsy). If you think this is a bad idea, it requires arguing values (for example, your "you are an employee" claim) rather than models of disability.
> some people have disabilities that might require extra sleep (eg narcolepsy)
Does scheduled extra sleep actually mitigate narcolepsy? (My naive layman's idea of this disease is that the sufferer is liable to fall asleep at literally any moment.)
Incidentally AFAIK narcoleptics (and even diagnosed ADHD sufferers) are prohibited from being issued a pilot's license in the US. I wonder what the "social model" adherents think of this? (Unjust? and if so, are they ready to fly on a liner flown by a narcoleptic?)
Narcolepsy is pretty complicated and sometimes extra sleep can help, but I agree if we're talking about scheduled sleep maybe some other fatigue condition would be a better example.
Ah I knew someone would get me for my overly simple example. Keep up the good work Scott
School is a service that students (or their parents) are paying for, and it's totally appropriate to expect good customer service. The reason you don't dictate terms as an employee is because you're receiving payment in exchange for your compliance.
I get that schools are expected to prepare young people for the working world, but is being compliant really the main thing we want them to prepare them for? I think we want them to be excellent learning and humanizing environments. And the incentives for them to be that are so whack that students need to be assertive about getting their needs met.
The complication is that schools grant you a credential upon successful completion that is supposed to mean you have been met some measurable and accredited standard of performance in your learning, which other people then use to determine that you are qualified to do stuff.
If the accommodation required for you to successfully meet this standard is unreasonable outside the university environment, that puts a big old asterisk on the credential (which reduces the value of the credential for everyone who has it or uses it).
I agree that’s a complication, and I would have more sympathy for the objection if I thought the challenges schools pose bore more of a relationship to real-world work challenges. I’m with Brian Caplan on schools as a wasteful form of covert signaling, and in their current broken state, I’m for anything that makes them less dehumanizing for the students being marched through them. Maybe that will make some room for actual learning, or at least make things less miserable.
There’s a big old “it depends” on that unfortunately. In practice most of the accommodations I see are basically just “do the same thing, but make it easier (eg more time or resources for a test), or just remove certain requirements entirely. That is, you aren’t “humanizing” or generating more learning, you’re just giving the equivalent of an extension in the assignment because grandma died.
The most creative accommodation I saw was a subsidized smart pen and niotebook system for someone with short term memory problems. That’s cool I guess, but I still don’t think it meets your standard of really altering the school process in a meaningful way.
It doesn’t hurt though, it does help at least some people, and it creates policy mechanisms and discourse that allow us to continue moving in a more humanizing direction. Being able to take more time on a test because grandma died is exactly my idea of humanization.
I’ll partially defend the social model of disability.
However, I do want to say that the version of the model I am defending comes from Elizabeth Barnes’ book, “The Minority Body.” I think her book, which is fairly short and good, does a better job of exploring the nuance of the social model of disability, and presents a more difficult model to rebut than the definitions you have used. She posits, for example, that disability (at least physical disability, she suggests that mental disabilities are the same, but declares them beyond the scope of her book) are “mere difference.”
I tend to agree, physical disabilities are “mere difference.” There is nothing inherently better about being sighted versus being blind. There is nothing inherently better about walking versus using a wheelchair. It is only once we impose certain values that these differences become salient.
One could imagine, for example, a world where deaf people are the norm. 99% of people are deaf, whereas 1% of people are sighted. The world is designed for deaf people, who speak exclusively using sign language, and little thought has been put into how loud or high-pitched noises may affect hearing individuals. Now it is those who can hear, not those who are deaf, who are disabled. Consider the same sort of world-changing thought experiment but for blind people.
It is slightly tendentious, but I would argue that every physical disability can be defended as “mere difference” in this manner. A world designed for people with wheelchairs is not ideal for those who walk. A world designed for those with gigantism or dwarfism would be poorly designed for those of more normal height. Even a world designed for people experiencing some sort of very common pain-disorder (please do better than to note that I called this a “dis”-order, it’s hard enough talking about this subject in an analytic way without people breaking words into their component parts and forcing you to pick new and confusing ones just to avoid literal implications) would have those without the disorder disabled insofar as their unusual medical priorities are delegitimized in importance.
This is still, technically, the social model of disability. However, what annoys me about the definitions you used is that they suggest, incorrectly when compared to philosophers of disability, that accomodations are easy to provide or that society is malicious is not providing accomodations.
Where I differ with Barnes is that I do not particularly care that society has values which occasionally require it to discriminate against certain members, so long as that discrimination is the logical result of society pursuing a legitimately agreed-upon social good, and not the result of cruelty or some other bigotry.
It is fine that we prioritize efficiency in fulfilling social goods. It would be a terrible, Harrison Bergeron-esque world if we attempted to ensure that no social good could be pursued until everybody was equally happy with their individual treatments and help. I actually like Barnes’ book because she spends much of her time arguing that disabled people are not unhappy. They are in fact, generally quite OK (Barnes herself has some sort of painful disorder which I cannot recall from memory), and tend to take much of their identity from their disability. They are, in other words, not miserable wretches whom society must drop everything in order to help, but merely one of many interests groups in a democratic, pluralistic society--albeit one with a more salient cause than many others.
I’d like to end with an example of left-handed people.
Left-handed people were long stigmatized, in part due to ancient beliefs that the left-hand side was associated with demons (see the kabbalistic text “Emanations of the Left-Hand Side” by Rabbi Isaac Ha-Kohen for a medieval Jewish example). This stigma persisted well into the early 20th century, and left-handed schoolchildren were bullied terribly by teachers and students alike.
Then, people realized that this treatment of left-handed people was superstitious, cruel, and stupid. For the most part, they stopped doing it. A disability was “cured” not by making left-handed people right-handed, but by societal accomodations.
So far this seems like a pure victory for the social model, but not so fast.
The British Military uses the SA80 rifle for infantryman. The SA80 is a purely right-handed weapon. It ejects the spent cartridge out of the left side, and so cannot be safely used in a left-handed manner. Left-handed soldiers must use the SA80 in a right-handed manner. This is still an interaction with society, because it is society, and specifically the military, the military-industrial complex, and British Parliament, which has decided to build exclusively right-handed SA80 rifles.
However, the reasons for doing so are not cruelty to left-handed people. It is a matter of cost and consistency between soldiers. These are equally legitimate values to pursue in addition to equality. No person, involved in the decisionmaking process here needed to have a hatred of left-handed people. They simply decided that it was more important to accomodate the right-handed majority than the left-handed minority. If left-handed people were the majority and right-handed people the minority, it stands to reason that the opposite decision would have been made.
Left-handed people, in other words, are discriminated against merely because they have “minority bodies.” Unlike Barnes (who does not use this precise example), I think this is often acceptable, but this is still the social model of disability.
Re: differences between disability and ability being matters of value.
First, one counterargument you could make is that things disabled people can do is usually a subset of things abled people can do. For example, even in a world designed around wheelchairs, a person able to walk could just use a wheelchair. Even in a world designed around deaf people, hearing people can learn sign language just as easily. I agree that your "hearing person in a world where there are annoying sounds all the time" gets around this - I could potentially plead that earplugs would help, but then you could just call these accommodations.
A second counterargument is that being abled is useful in many more situations than being disabled, separate from any social choices - for example, the desert island.
A third counterargument is that yes, "X ability is better than Y disability" is a necessarily a value judgment (since it uses the word "better"), but this doesn't necessarily make it subjective in a meaningful way (there's a sense in which "being alive is better than being dead" is subjective, because of the is-ought distinction - a moral non-realist can't prove this - but it's easy to conclude from values nearly every human shares). In the same way, I think "being sighted is better than being blind" is derivable from values almost everyone shares - this is why for example people try to avoid getting rubella when pregnant, instead of trying really hard to get rubella when pregnant.
I'm kind of drawing of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism here, where Eliezer argues that weird transhumanist beliefs most people don't hold (for example, we should try to cure death) are natural extensions of normal beliefs that most people do hold (for example, we should try to cure cancer), which require nothing more than being consistent. I think in the same way, trying to be very consistent about our normal values is enough to prefer being abled to being disabled.
(except in some cases where people really are just projecting their own prejudices and social values; someone upthread gave high-functioning autism as an example and I agree with that)
I'm interested in the history of anti-left-hand-ism. I genuinely don't know whether those people were thinking:
1. That it's impossible to accommodate left-handers so we shouldn't try
2. That it's very expensive to create left-handed versions of everything and easier to force lefties to accommodate to right-handed versions
3. That left-handedness was fake and lefties were just malingering in some sense
4. That left-handedness was evil, and even if was impractical and made people's life worse for no reason, they should be forced to become right-handed.
Starting from left-handedness and working backwards:
2 and 4 seem to me to be the primary reasons for discriminating against left-handed people, and as history has progressed, we have on balance moved away from 4 and towards 2, and in total away from both and towards accomodation. Accomodation of left-handed people is not particularly expensive or difficult in most settings. Creation of left-handed scissors does require slightly more resources than creating merely right-handed scissors and forcing left-handed people to cope, but that is a minor cost to modern industrial societies that create gizmos far less useful than scissors desired by much less than 10% of the population.
But a quick Google Search for “discrimination against left-handed people” brings up continued results of discrimination, and well as much of the past discrimination.
Regarding your three counterarguments, I have some rebuttals.
I think the idea that non-disabled people can do everything that disabled people can, but more, is problematic for essentially the reasons you outlined. More “ability” is not something which literally exists outside of the social and material context in which ability is measured. The “ability” to hear is easily turned into a disability under the right context, much as we now diagnose people with certain “hyper-sensitivity” disorders, despite the fact that hyper-sensitivity literally implies that a person is hyper-capable.
This also problematizes your second rebuttals because the context you provided is cherry-picked. It is true that most disabilities would be worse for people who want to survive on a desert island, but so would many things we don’t consider a disability in ordinary society, such as white skin, which is more susceptible to sunburn, or a slightly less efficient means of disposing of waste urea (thus leading to increased water loss), which is something that I doubt anybody even knows about themself.
Now, there may be legitimate reasons society cares about desert-island survival. Perhaps your society is that of the pre-contact Polynesians, and island survival is basically your default. In those contexts, desert island survival is really important! But notice how we can only decide which biological facts about a person count as disabilities after we have determined the social and material context which we are discussing.
Regarding your third point, specifically, “being sighted is better than being blind is derivable from values almost everyone shares.”
I think this is true, but tautologically. In a different social and material context, where vision meant the perception of painfully bright and confusing images, we could rightfully call vision itself a disability. The reason why we consider sightedness a moral good is because we have built a society where being sighted is much better than being blind.
I think that is fine. Most people are sighted, it makes sense to build a society which is good for most people, and then to figure out how to accomodate those whose position is not helped, or indeed made worse, by society.
My objection to the social model of disability radicals is not their model is entirely wrong, but that their idea of solutions tend to be incredibly stupid and dystopic. It is right for society to make decisions about how to structure itself in a manner that benefits most people, and wrong to argue that many should suffer for the marginal benefit of a few.
Thanks!
Left-handedness was much discriminated against in the past. For example, Ronald Reagan was a natural lefty who was brought up to write righthanded. But then discrimination against left-handers greatly declined in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if the immense popularity of lefthanded baseball heroes like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth changed American attitudes. For example, in the 1992 Presidential debate, all three candidates (Clinton, Bush, and Perot) took notes lefthanded.
Interestingly, the media has virtually no interest in rehashing this history of intolerance followed by lefthander liberation compared to, say, Asian-American Pacific Islander History Month.
And current examples of disparate impact discrimination against lefthanders elicit almost zero interest. For example, while in general baseball has been very very good to lefthanders, there hasn't been a left-handed catcher in the big leagues since 1989. Nobody seems able to agree on why not, other than that there must be some excellent reason and it can't just be prejudice and discrimination. There's no Ibram X. Kendi for left-handed catchers stating to media acclaim that if leftys are less than 12% of MLB catchers, then the only possible reason must be bigotry and oppression.
Lefthanders are not a legally protected class, so there's no money in suing over discrimination against them.
There are many theories, but one that holds at least a little bit of water is that really strong young lefties are often recruited to become pitchers, leaving fewer candidates to play behind the plate.
That's Bill James' theory.
Left-handed pitchers have a modest advantage. It used to be believed that their pitches broke more on average than right-handed pitchers, but now that every pitch is tracked precisely with scanners, it's been discovered that's not true. Apparently, the left-handed advantage at pitching is hitters' lack of familiarity with left-handers as they come up through the ranks.
But a lot of successful right-handed big league catchers are too short to be successful big-league pitchers. The average MLB pitcher is 6'3" while the average MLB catcher is 6'0."
For example, Will Smith of the Los Angeles Dodgers is an All-Star catcher, but he's only 5'10". If he were left-handed, he'd probably be a relief-pitcher stuck in the mid-minors rather than catching and batting third for the Dodgers. (By the way, I see that All-Star pitcher Marcus Stroman is only 5'7". Good for him!. But it's a lot easier to make it to the big leagues as a 6'7" pitcher than as a 5'7" pitcher.)
But baseball hitters also have an advantage, which is why the top 4 hitters ever -- Ruth, Bonds, Williams, and Gehrig -- are all lefthanders.
Lefthanders have defensive advantages at first base, but lots of righthanders have played first. I would imagine that without discrimination, the great majority of catchers would be right-handed, but maybe 2 per season would be left-handed. Instead, the last was a 3rd stringer in 1989. (His view was he could throw fine to the bases, unlike what people assumed, but that he had a harder time on tag plays at home than right-handed catchers.)
My guess is that baseball is missing out on a few fine lefthanded catchers due to unfamiliarity and prejudice. Lefthanders are not a Protected Class so there are no lawyers putting together arguments against the bias against left-handed catchers and feeding it to the media.
By the way, I'm not left-handed, nor are any close relatives. It just strikes me as informative that in the single most handedness-aware field in American culture -- baseball -- nobody can come up with a consensus rationalization for why there are no left-handed catchers. And, yet, nobody much cares.
Unfamiliarity can make a large difference.
I played around with fencing in university. My coach's contention was that something like thirty or forty percent of fencers fought at least sometimes left-handed.
I did find when fencing against someone who was unfamiliar with lefties it was quite easy to make cheap shots - their guard would have been very good against a right-handed opponent, but they left holes that were easily exploitable for me.
I never fought anyone who was particularly experience though. I imagine that being able to adjust would be a factor in continuing.
An example of anti-ambisinisterism you probably aren't familiar with. The NYT had another one of their fancy interactive experiments the other day on the topic of manga localization: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/14/books/manga-comic-books.html The early practices were to Americanize manga translations as much as possible, including the obvious issue of reading direction; so they would mirror the images before translating. Reasonable, but angered the artists. I never quite understood how it 'ruined the layout' or 'damaged the art' or why they would be willing to redraw/relayout the manga at considerable expense, aside from minor issues like people driving on the wrong side of the road or occasional issues with someone talking about directions, but the NYT helpfully explains one major issue they were perhaps not too keen to be explicit about: flipping manga *makes all the characters left-handed*.
> Japan has a longstanding bias against lefties, and many left-handed children were trained to use their right hand. So manga artists and their fans weren’t crazy about seeing left-handed warriors in the U.S. versions. Another way publishers have addressed this issue over the years was to move the panels. This allowed the books to be read from left to right without making everyone left-handed. Aesthetic concerns aside, all that flipping was costly and labor intensive. In 2002, Tokyopop, a Los Angeles-based company, started telling their readers that manga should be read the Japanese way: back to front and right to left.
That is, it turns them all into minorities. And while you may not know that lefties are looked down on that much in Japan even into the 2000s, you do know how minorities of any type tend to be treated...
This is the first time I've heard about any of this, and given that the 4chan culture I've spent much time in almost took it as a challenge to shit on Japan as much as possible, I'm assuming it'd surface this too, if it was even minimally plausible.
Meanwhile, US cultural imperialism (or at least, as in this case, cultural monopoly over its own population) is spun as "other cultures are bigoted" so often and reliably, it could propel a helicopter.
A vastly more plausible explanation, here and in all other such cases, is that US companies' practices are just overall crappy, and even if any of them individually seemed defensible, everyone kept reflexively insisting they just interfere as little as possible until it more or less worked.
>the 4chan culture I've spent much time in almost took it as a challenge to shit on Japan as much as possible
That doesn't seem right. Aren't they all weebs?
Also, (these days at least) many of them are bigots, so they shouldn't have a problem with Japan being bigoted against the left-handed.
A friend of mine's father tied his left hand behind his back until he favored using his right hand more. His father owned a saw mill, in the Alps, in the '60s. It was just too dangerous to be a lefty in that workplace.
"In a different social and material context, where vision meant the perception of painfully bright and confusing images, we could rightfully call vision itself a disability."
Why would an organism evolve vision under contexts where vision brought no net benefits, but only delivered "bright and confusing images"? Why would a sentient species arrange its environment in a way that a tremendously useful sensory input that >99% of its members possess is rendered useless and confusing? You are arguing from very far-fetched hypothetical edge cases, whereas we all live in a world where being able to see normally beats being blind (ceteris paribus) every day, all day (especially since people with normal vision still have the option of putting on an eye mask).
Well said. I think if someone has to imagine a scenario where the world is fundamentally different to make their argument, then it's an irrelevant argument.
If I said, "breathing carbon monoxide is bad", and the best response was "but what about a world where people breath carbon monoxide and oxygen is poison?", I wouldn't call that a productive discussion
The same reason that an organism would evolve blindness in contexts where vision brings net benefits. You have to imagine the person with the unusual (dis)abilities as a *minority*. Hence the title of the book "The Minority Body".
Give me an example of an organism that lost the ability to see in an evolutionary environment where light is available, then maybe I can follow your point. Besides, being a "minority" is not bad in itself. I can think of a couple of fields where a few people have extraordinary sensory or physical abilities (rather than dis-abilities). These people often end up as highly paid specialists, not as a disadvantaged group clamoring for accomodations.
My point is that sighted people in an environment where blindness is the advantage would likely be a minority facing some of the same problems that blind people in an environment where sight is the advantage do. I'm not imagining humans on earth - I'm imagining an alien species in an alien environment.
Being a minority is not inherently bad - but it does often mean that social designs are created in a way that benefit most people but accidentally harm you.
While "ability” is dependant on the social and material context, generally we look up to people who have capabilities the rest of us lack, if it remains useful in that context. Sure, if nobody else could walk then it wouldn't make sense to consider that a disability, but walking still wouldn't be an impairment.
I am pretty sure that in a world of deaf people, a hearing person would find a way to leverage their superhuman senses- it would be very useful (if lonely) to have the "Fifth Sense", and be able to hear other people approaching without looking at them, even if you do have to tolerate a lack of soundproofing in built environments. This is the basic premise for superhero stories, based on much older fantasies of superhuman abilities - "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" comes to mind!
It's a recurrent Superman trope that, when his powers were first manifesting, he had to learn how to not be overwhelmed by the constant din.
Unless I'm missing something about the overall argument, I think the "material context" part of your contention is specious. Now, if it's socislly-constructed material context, that's not true—if, for instance, "deaf-world" had loud screeching noises everywhere because nobody bothered to make sure their machines were quiet, that would be analogous to, say, deaf people getting run over because cars are fitted with horns instead of bright lights. In both cases, the "disabilities" are socially created.
But if that's *not* the case, and by and large it isn't, "material context" is not a good element of this argument. Literally every single thing about humans, or any living thing—besides the fact of reproduction—could be a benefit or a detriment depending on material context. Sure, if gravity were different, very many things about human bodies could be called disabilities relative to a being which evolved in such gravity, but I don't see how that's relevant to the present discussion. If our atmosphere were transparent to a different range of electromagnetic frequencies, most existing Earthly beings would be mostly blind compared to hypothetical beings with different eye design.
Because given our actual material context, someone sighted actually does have an inherent advantage over a blind person in most situations; similarly, someone hearing over someone deaf, and someone able vs. someone crippled. And that is true irrespective of our socially constructed environment, because we *don't* have things like bright confusing lights everywhere.
So I think the social model falls down based on these facts, and your modification does not wholly rescue it.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and perspectives on this! I resonate with your balance of contextualism (wrt defining what is a "disability") and pragamitism (wrt how society configures itself), and the importance of looking at intention when balancing the two. I think you provided great examples and were right to call out Scott for cherry picking examples to continue down a thread pragmatism when the jist of your points feels to be emphasizing the importance of contextualism for honing the way we relate to these differences in our bodies and minds.
Do you have any further reading or listening you'd recommend?
On a personal note, I'm someone who would say they are "hyper-sensitive" from birth trauma. I have been reclaiming my body and my sense for about 3 years now, and I certainly feel more hyper-capable than hyper-sensitive these days. Thank you for sharing that reframe that embraces both sides of the coin. Sometimes noise is terribly dysregulating and I don't even notice it, and other times I can hear everything going on around me and sing in harmony. It has been the most challenging and rewarding work in my life so far :)
I think in some cultures (Arab?) you do clean things with your right hand, like eating and preparing food and shaking hands, and you do unclean things with your left hand like wiping your behind after going to the bathroom. I guess I'd put that under 2. if I had to assign it one of your categories?
> There is nothing inherently better about being sighted versus being blind. There is nothing inherently better about walking versus using a wheelchair.
This is the kind of statement that IMHO makes it very difficult to swallow the notion that anyone genuinely subscribes to (as opposed to merely signals) the "social model". Where are the people pushing for allowing e.g. the blind to perform surgery -- or even to drive cabs? (Or would a philosophically-consistent believer in the cited statement hold that a world with surgeons or cabbies is "not inherently better" than one without?)
I think that the answer would be that a world full of blind people would have very different methods for performing surgery and driving cabs than ours does.
We can care about the outcomes (health and transportation) in a vacuum, and even recognize that alternatives to sight to accomplish these goals might be difficult, but all the social model wants to say is that
1) These alternatives exist
2) Given that these alternatives exist, “disability” is dependent on the structure of society itself
I think this is a very difficult-to-rebut point, because nearly everything humans can accomplish is dependent on living in a society.
In fact, cab-drivers themselves could not do their job without the invention of cars, or at least the domestication of horses and the invention of the wheel. Similarly, an 8th millenium BC surgeon is going to have a difficult time doing their job prior to the invention of refined metal instruments, not to mention means of sanitation.
I think it is right to say that transportation and health are reasonably universal human goods, but wrong to connect lack of sight specifically to those goods. There are worlds other than ours (either a future or an imagined alternate reality) where neither surgery nor transportation require vision.
>2) Given that these alternatives exist, “disability” is dependent on the structure of society itself
These alternatives cannot exist with sighted people. A society capable of providing these alternatives cannot exist in the first place without sighted people. This is an inherenty weakness of being blind. You take away the people causing this 'opressive' structure of society and you aren't left with libertation, you've left with extinction.
This assumes that “society” is structured basically arbitrarily, rather than having evolved to support the needs of the human animal living on earth.
Sure, some “social” things are arbitrary, but others (like designing the society for sighted people) are the obvious and necessary result of millions of years of biological evolution.
>This assumes that “society” is structured basically arbitrarily
Not at all. It assumes that our definitions should apply to difficult and niche cases, including unlikely hypotheticals.
Sight evolved (as a survival mechanism) long before anything you could reasonably call “society”. Society developed in response to sighted creatures, not the other way around. At no point did society make any sort of choice between “alternatives” of favoring sight or favoring blindness.
So it’s silly to say essentially “if I can imagine a completely different course of human evolution, it’s fair to label the fact that we don’t design everything to be equally easy for blind people as merely a ‘consequence of how society is structured’”. The cause and effect is completely backwards: society is structured as it is because of the senses humans evolved to use, not the other way around.
>I tend to agree, physical disabilities are “mere difference.” There is nothing inherently better about being sighted versus being blind.
Only if your definition of "better" is such that there's nothing 'inherently better' about industrialisation, medical advances, agricultural surpluses, longer life expectancies or anything that results from modern civilization. Sure, it's literally true that the value we place in things like literally BEING ALIVE is not 'inherent'. But if that's the type of meaning you're going for, then your statement is trivially true and therefore useless.
Modern (or even primitive) society cannot exist without sighted people. It could never have come into existence without sighted people. If some weird virus emerged that killed all the sighted people and left the blind unharmed, the blind people die out. They die out today, and they definitely would have died out at any time in humanity's remote past. Blind people are INHERENTLY dependant on sighted people for their literal survival.
A society remotely capable of 'accomodating' blind people literally cannot ever have come into existence in the first place (or even be maintained after coming into existence) without sighted people. Without sighted people, blind people don't become 'non-oppressed' - they become non-existent.
So yes, for any practically meaningful conception of 'inherently better' (i.e. one which treats having the option of staying alive as 'inherently better') - sightedness is absolutely better than blindness, and blindness is only meaningfully survivable in the presence of a sufficient number of sighted people.
I’m not sure if you’re being intentionally obtuse, but I already addressed this point, but in the original comment and in my reply to asciilifeform.
The simple but important rebuttal is that it is possible to imagine a society where these things are not dependent on sightedness.
This society could exist in the future or some alternate reality, but so long as it is true that such a society could exist, the social model is technically correct.
The point that there are other competing social goods that come in conflict with absolute equality or a world in which people are differently abled is one that I already made throughout my original comment, which you apparently did not read particularly carefully.
Whether or not such a society could even exist is VERY much up for debate.
Whether or not such a society could arise without sighted people existing in the first place is not up for debate - it objectively cannot happen.
If such a society is possible, it is made possible exlcusively by the abilities of sighted people. If sight is required to build an 'equal' society, or literally one in which blind people can survive at all, then by your own standards, sightedness is better than
blindness!
>This society could exist in the future or some alternate reality, but so long as it is true that such a society could exist, the social model is technically correct.
If it requires an alternative reality to be true, its truth is worthless. If an unchanging, primitive hunter gatherer society could not possibly 'accomodate' a blind or paralysed person, does this disprove the social model? What use is the social model if it says nothing about what a GIVEN society can do to accomodate the disabled? If nothing can be done, then on what planet does it make sense to talk about sightedness and blindness being equally preferrable to each other?
>The point that there are other competing social goods that come in conflict with absolute equality or a world in which people are differently abled is one that I already made throughout my original comment, which you apparently did not read particularly carefully.
Ironic, since this has nothing to do with what I wrote.
I said nothing about the cost - my comment was entirely concerned with the idea of sightedness being inherently better than blindness, which is only false if you think there's nothing 'inherently better' about living a normal live over dying in a gutter somewhere. The fact that every society that has ever existed since the dawn of humanity has naturally been suited for sighted people and not blind people should also highlight that sightedness naturally satisfies most people's definition of inherent betterness.
But again, if 'absolute equal' is desirable, then this points to the superiority of sightedness, because only sightedness can allow such a society to possibly come into existence, not to mention allow the literal survival of blind people until such time.
I don't think your point about physical disabilities being "mere difference" is very valuable. Yes, if I am imaginative enough, I can conceive of a possible world in which sight is more of a hindrance than an ability. But in such a world, it would presumably be the overall environment, not just society, that favored sightlessness over sight, and humans would have evolved to fit that environment.
So sure, "disability" is relative, given the environment. But that doesn't seem like a relevant point that's worth making. Given an environment in which people have evolved, there will be a set of optimal features and abilities for humans to have. And lacking those features will be "disabilities". In our world, based on the environment of Earth and the history of human evolution, blindness *is* a disability. I don't think this is genuinely debatable, and I don't think we need to qualify it by adding "relative to the physical reality we live in, of course" every time it comes up.
I think this gets to a problem I've had with a number of the comments on here. Vision provides spatial perception; vision is the only human sense that provides spatial perception. You can come up with scenarios where other senses providing spatial perception are more advantageous than having vision (bats and echolocation, for a real-world example), but having spatial perception is an absolute advantage over not having spatial perception.
2D navigation without spatial perception is possible, if you're willing to do it roomba-style by colliding with obstacles to learn their positions at a point in time. But a robot that navigates roomba style having an advantage over a robot that navigates via spatial perception that's had its spatial perception removed doesn't negate the absolute utility of spatial perception.
"There is nothing inherently better about having spatial perception versus not having spatial perception" is right up there with "there is nothing inherently better about being able to communicate versus not being able to communicate" as far as statements that seem inherently irrational. It's why blindness is such an important edge case for these sorts of debates: spatial perception is a vital part of a number of processes, and pretending that you can ignore this requirement is detached from reality.
>vision is the only human sense that provides spatial perception
It’s actually fairly common for blind people to develop moderate abilities in echolocation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation
So, recall that part of the purpose of coming up with a “theory of disability” is creating the most parsimonious and universally true definition we can come up with.
The point of these sorts of questions is not to come up with useful shorthand methods for identifying disability, which is an entirely different matter.
I think this is why you find the mere difference argument to not be particularly valuable, but that has little relevance to whether or not it is true.
In relevance to this point:
>But in such a world, it would presumably be the overall environment, not just society, that favored sightlessness over sight
Why?
We don’t have to imagine an alternate reality where evolution took a different path, just an alternate reality where humans, perhaps with different levels of technology than our, created a world hostile to sighted people.
The point is that one can imagine such a world, and that it should be obvious that in such a world people who have sight are disabled.
If that is true, however, then any universally true definition of disability must include that social and material context. To preempt your point, it is clearly the case that disability is in fact relative to the physical reality we live in, and a definition lacking that clause is always deficient.
>I don't think we need to qualify it by adding "relative to the physical reality we live in, of course" every time it comes up.
I don’t see why not.
Disability is, in point of fact, relative to the physical reality we live in, which is significantly determined by the social structure of society (cities don’t build themselves).
If you are interested in actually engaging with the debate being had here about accurate definitions, then you can’t simply decide to leave an essential part of the definition out because you dislike it.
A society that for some bizarre reason made itself hostile to sighted people would be conquered by a society that did not (if it didn't just die out before then), and would have its bizarre social structure replaced.
I fail to see why that matters when discussing what disability means.
Furthermore, you cannot be certain that this is true for all cases, across all time periods. Perhaps there is some advantage in blindness when interfacing with certain technologies.
Then again, perhaps not, but why arbitrarily limit your definition to make it less universal?
Because it's silly to talk about it at all when eyesight was obviously selected for because it's highly advantageous, and blindness in humans results from things like pathogens or accidents rather than being any kind of morph following a different strategy.
The whole point of the thought experiment is to point out that it is trivially easy to imagine a scenario where blindness is not an advantage.
The fact that it is in advantage in some other, more common scenarios is irrelevant.
Most of the time, it is advantageous to have high amounts of melanin in your skin. Black skin protects from harmful UV rays to a greater extent than white skin, which is advantageous only in areas with limited sunlight (e.g. Norway) to prevent Rickett’s, and in societies which discriminate against dark skin.
Would you insist that it was advantageous to have dark skin in 1850s America merely because it is, in general, advantageous to have dark skin in nature?
This is clearly an instance of the naturalistic fallacy.
Disability: A disadvantage or deficiency, especially a physical or mental impairment that interferes with or prevents normal achievement in a particular area.
There are some disabilities that we recognize because normal human achievement is measured against society. However, there are some disabilities that are so obviously disadvantageous that the relation to society makes no difference; often, it is only the presence of society that keeps the disabled individual alive.
A hawk that could not see, a bat that could not hear, or a wolf that could not smell would not be merely different than its fellow animals. It would be at a significant disadvantage. If the animal mind were capable of conceptualizing, it would understand this as a disability. Society is tied to the concept of disability since humans are linked both to concepts and society, not because there's any inherent link between disability and society.
It's not that I dislike the definition, it's that for any practical use of the word "disability", it isn't relevant to the conversation, and is merely pedantic. Sure, there are other possible worlds or dimensions in which different traits are the norm, and not having those traits constitute disabilities. In ours, the abilities to see, hear, and walk are some of those.
The "relativity" part of your definition is only useful with regards to philosophical speculation of alternate fantasy worlds. But when we're speaking generally, it's about *this* world, at which point it's no longer debatable that certain things *are* disabilities. If I'm talking to a friend and I mention my other "disabled" friend with cerebral palsy, it would be completely weird and unnecessary to add, "but when I say 'disabled', that's based on how we've evolved physically and as a society. We could just as easily live in a world where having cerebral palsy is the norm, and we're the disabled ones!" Sure, it might be technically true, but it would also be pedantic and off-putting, and if I were the type of person to say that, I probably would not have many friends, disabled or otherwise.
>Sure, it might be technically true, but it would also be pedantic and off-putting
This is AstralCodexTen, beacon of the rationalist movement.
Pedantic and off-putting might as well be the motto.
"There is nothing inherently better about being sighted versus being blind." ...if that is true, would you care to explain why eyesight evolved independently more than 40 times, in all kinds of creatures? That strongly suggests that being blind is fundamentally at odds with a "value" that is hard to argue with, namely survival.
Sorry, but arguments that go off the rails in the first paragraph need some rethinking.
"eyesight evolved independently more than 40 times" Many Thanks! I was going to make the same point.
Er... this doesn't make any sense.
Firstly, your facts are incomplete. The vast majority of the world's living things are non-sighted. There are also examples of evolutionary lineages losing their capacity for sight. By your theory, this would imply that it's better to be sightless!
But those facts don't imply that, because of a much more important fact: Evolution is not teleological. You can't assume that "X evolved from Y" means "X is better than Y."
"The vast majority of the world's living things are non-sighted." Yeah, if you count living things that don't profit from being able to see (because they couldn't react to what they see, because they can't MOVE). On the other hand, if you focus on animals that move around where there's light (such as humans), just about every one of them has eyes.
"There are also examples of evolutionary lineages losing their capacity for sight. By your theory, this would imply that it's better to be sightless!"
Yeah. Cave-dwellers, and... anyone else? If there's no light whatsoever, it is slightly less expensive to not have eyes. I don't see how that applies to humans, though.
" Evolution is not teleological. You can't assume that "X evolved from Y" means "X is better than Y.""
Yes, evolution is not teleological, but it does provide a mechanism for gradual improvement as measured by "descendants that survive to maturity under the circumstances where the evolution takes place". So in that sense, especially if something evolves multiple times, that means that it IS better for survival.
I was going to make some similar points, but I won't repeat what you've said here. Your exchange with Scott pretty much covers what I would have expected to be said.
I will just add this, though:
"One could imagine, for example, a world where deaf people are the norm." - Of course, that's the world we live in! Just as there are disabilities, there are also lots of superabilities. Extreme colour vision, perfect pitch, extreme tallness (if you want to count that as an ability), extreme memory, etc., etc. For people with perfect pitch, for example, it could be easy and helpful to have a lot more sonic alerts in the world, distinguished by pitch. For the rest of us, those alerts would be hard to distinguish and annoying, so the pitchies don't get them.
One of the things Scott does well, but in this case I think could do even better, is to always remember the huge diversity of people (and viewpoints) out there.
“always remember the huge diversity of people (and viewpoints) out there.”
But likewise, you must always remember that the huge diversity is not distributed at all uniformly, and it’s often very hard to design the environment to accommodate every possible person on the long tails of the distribution.
Yeah... I mean, that's true, but my feeling is that we could probably do a lot more accommodating. Just within my lifetime (40 years), there have been a lot of changes made in the direction of accommodating women(! hardly a disabled group, and yet that had to be forced through), gay people, wheelchair users, trans people, and neurodiverse people. There was resistance to all of these accommodations, but it turns out all of them were possible. I feel like the difficulty of accommodations gets overplayed *a lot*.
There’s a huge difference in difficulty between, say, “stop firing people for being gay” and “replace every unit of housing with a wheelchair accessible one”. Accommodations also span a huge range!
Like, I know what you mean, but I literally disagree with your example.
Limiting homophobia has proved to be one of the hardest political slogs of modern times, involving a huge number of intersecting disciplines and institutions.
Wheelchair access requires a ramp. It would take a little bit of money, I agree, but not very much (and, I suggest, possibly less money than was wasted on all the legal tussles over discrimination). Retrofitting would be expensive, but if we said, starting now, all new buildings will have ramps and slightly wider doors to make them wheelchair accessible, that small change to building regs would gradually establish a new norm of accessibility. And I think, in reality, that's pretty much what happened about 30 years ago, isn't it?
Like I say, it always seems to me like the difficulty of accommodations gets exaggerated. Ramps are not high tech or expensive.
My point is the “accommodations” for gay people are categorically different from “constructing new infrastructure”. They were mostly “negative” rights (e.g. don’t discriminate against gay people) rather than stuff that forces “society” to give them something unique to make up for an impairment.
On the flip side, “be nice to people in wheelchairs” is great and all, but even if the stigma was zero, it doesn’t make it any easier to climb a flight of stairs with no legs.
And ramps are easy, which is why we’ve all already agreed to build them in a lot of places even though the “social” definition of disability would likely poll very badly.
It seems hard to reconcile that "mere difference" rather than "better" or "worse" idea with natural selection causing abilities to reach fixation in the first place.
I think this is a misunderstanding of what natural selection does. It hasn't selected any of our abilities to be the "best". Nor have they "reached fixation". They're just a contingent bunch of cabilities that happen to be what we have at this evolutionary moment. In total, this selection of capabilities is *good enough* to enable our species to survive, but that doesn't imply for a moment that any one of our capabilities is at any kind of optimal level.
Natural selection is not teleological!
Eyesight really has reached fixation in our species (and a giant swathe of related species). It's not like bloodgroups, or height, or coloration. I didn't claim our eyesight is optimal, there are other species with better eyesight. The issue is instead sightedness vs blindness.
I don't really know what you're trying to say, but I know it's not science. There is no concept of fixation in natural selection. If you want to make a claim that there is some kind of "normal" or "fixated" eyesight, I guess you can do that. What you can't do is suggest that this has any basis in the scientific theory of evolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_(population_genetics)
Did you read the page? Like... I don't know if you think you just scored a clever point. Or, what...
Just firing off a link as if it's a clever point isn't really what I come here for (I do it in other places! But this is a place for slightly deeper discussion.)
I agree that that word is indeed, "fixation," and that it is part of genetics. That's not the same as the concept that you were talking about earlier.
Because this is Astral Codex, I'll take the time to actually explain. But I do so with trepidation, because I feel like you're arguing at a 4chan level at the moment.
Here's the definition: "fixation is the change in a gene pool from a situation where there exists at least two variants of a particular gene (allele) in a given population to a situation where only one of the alleles remains."
First, fixation is a genome-level event, not a phenome-level event. Conflating the two shouldn't be done casually. Second, fixation completely eliminates a certain allele. If eyesight were really a gene that had been "fixated" in the human population, there wouldn't be any people with congenital blindness. But there are.
I'm no biologist, but these points are clear to anyone who reads the page.
This seems simply wrong to me.
In a world where everyone is blind, someone who can see basically has super powers. He can do anything anyone can do, and more. Can you imagine the amazement people would feel, hen he could understand a complex mechanism, that people have to thoroughly touch to get, at a distance? How he can easily navigate new places without a map or aide?
You say is just as good to walk as to use a wheelchair, and it could be true. But people who can walk can use wheelchairs with no problem. It's better to have the option to walk than to not have it.
I once had a pretty bad case of peripheral neuropathy that made me numb and weak specially at the hands and feet. I was very well accommodated, and am thankful for it. But it simply not true that not being able to consistently grasp or type is just as good as being able to grasp or type. It is not true that not being able to walk is just as good as being able to walk. There's no amount of accommodation that changes it.
If i had the choice I'd take not having peripheral neuropathy in a society where everyone has it every time. In a world where everyone has peripheral neuropathy, a guy without it has literal superstrenght!
I don't think this is right, because it's a situation that really exists. For example, there are people with perfect pitch. That's a pretty extraordinary perceptory capability. I guess a lot of them become musicians, but a lot don't. And we don't seem to regard them as superheroes.
There are a small number of people with super colour vision. They can see colours we can't even imagine, and easily spot colour differences we can't see. They seem to enjoy no significant advantage in life.
There are people of extreme height. Some of them make a lot of money playing basketball, but most just find it hard to buy a comfortable bed.
Etc., etc.
It doesn't seem clear to me that giving someone an ability over and above the general population always confers a massive advantage. And when it does, it's because there's a very specific social institution (like the NBA) set up to support them.
Don't think height is a good example. in general both extreme high height and extreme low height are considered bad. This is very different from vision, where everyone thinks the better you see the better, or hearing where everyone thinks the better you hear the better.
There are people with perfect pitch, and there are people with super colour vision, and they are not seem as superheroes. But the difference between hearing and not hearing is much bigger than the difference between having and not having perfect pitch, and the difference between seeing and not seeing is much bigger than the difference between having super colour vision and normal colour vision. As an example daltonism is pretty common and most of them have very little problem with it. If everyone was daltonic and you could see more colour I don't expect anyone to be particularly impressed, it would be good, but not life changing. We don't consider super colour vision a superpower for the exact same reason we don't consider daltonism a meaningful disability. The same thing aplies for hearing, there's lots of variation in range of frequencies people are capable of detecting, and no one thinks people who lost highs need some more support from society.
But vision itself would come up all the time, having a new way to probe the world at a distance is immensely useful. You can know what people are doing in an instant, like you enter a party you immediately know who everyone is talking to, how close they seem to be, you can see their body language, how much they are touching, etc, you know where things are in new places instantly, they are much easier to navigate, etc. even the simplest things, like finding a dropped object are easier.
If everyone is wheelchair bound due to some neurological issue and you are not, you are quite literally super strong. This is also extremely useful. In a wheelchair jam at the end of shift you can just get up, lift your chair and squeeze through everyone to the front. You can lift and carry stuff no one else can, you get less tired doing anything at all, there's nothing that is more generally helpful than that.
Of course having the whole society behind you helps, the guy with one eye in the land of the blind can't take advantage of our lots of visual interfaces, signs, he doesn't have visual art, everything is much more drab due to no one caring about how things look, etc. But that does not mean he gets no mileage from his vision, it's still quite a boon.
In general being able to do something is good, and not being able to do something is bad, quite independently from society.
(The hearing case is a little bit different, althou i think it is still better to hear than not, even in the deaf society. As you can't turn off hearing, by getting to hear you generally give up the ability not to hear. This could cause problems in being constantly bothered by sounds, althou I don't think this would be a big problem in practice, machines would probably be generally more noisy, but people would be less. Anyway i don't think it is very important to the general point)
"99% of people are deaf, whereas 1% of people are sighted" So, 0.1% can hear and see and 98.9% are blind and deaf? Guess "sighted" should have been "hearing".
> The British Military uses the SA80 rifle for infantryman. The SA80 is a purely right-handed weapon. It ejects the spent cartridge out of the left side, and so cannot be safely used in a left-handed manner. Left-handed soldiers must use the SA80 in a right-handed manner. This is still an interaction with society, because it is society, and specifically the military, the military-industrial complex, and British Parliament, which has decided to build exclusively right-handed SA80 rifles.
I’m coming here from the followup post to address this point in particular.
The SA80 is a notoriously and exceptionally bad rifle, and this is just one of the many reasons for that. Notably, elite British units like the SAS and Royal Marine Commandos don’t use the SA80, instead preferring variants of the AR-15 platform similar to the American M4 and M16.
I won’t go into every problem with the SA80, but I think you might have cherry picked the single service rifle in any major military that can’t be fired left-handed. The SA80 is a “bullpup” design that places the action (and, importantly, the ejection port) behind of the trigger rather than in front of it. Conventional designs such as the AR and AK eject in front of the trigger and can thus be used left-handed. But even other bullpups, such as the Steyr AUG, the FAMAS, and Israel’s Tavor family, can be adjusted to eject from the left hand side for left handed use.
Furthermore, which hand one uses to fire a rifle is not entirely determined by which hand is dominant in the first place. Many shooters have a dominant right hand but a dominant left eye and find that being able to aim through the sights with their dominant eye is more valuable than using their dominant hand to pull the trigger. Larry Vickers is a famous example of this. Also, especially in urban warfare, even a soldier who typically shoots right handed will sometimes shoot left handed based on available cover—for instance, if you are taking cover behind an armored vehicle and shooting around the left hand side (from the shooter’s perspective), doing so left-handed allows you to keep more of your body in cover.
Also, wouldn't ejecting the cartridge from the left side go directly into the face of a right-handed shooter?
Correct. That's a misstatement on the part of the original comment--the SA80 does eject on the right hand side.
A conventional rifle such as an AR-15 can still eject cartridges towards the shooter, but with a bullpup it's a much larger problem because the ejection port is in the rear part of the stock, exactly where you would rest your cheek to aim. Since hot gas (from burned gunpowder) also tends to come out the ejection port, you could probably burn yourself pretty badly that way.
¨Nowadays this perspective has been abandoned by everyone except a few holdouts, Bryan Caplan, and the Scientologists¨ Don´t forget Alex Jones!!!
I actually don't know about this - what's his position?
He called antidepressants ¨suicide pills¨ in an interview with Piers Morgan some years ago.
I think this is very different and speaks to a deep distrust (affected or otherwise) of medication generally and that they're used by prescribers for nefarious social ends. Not that being physically or mentally ill is just fine and we should accept these people for who they are.
I wonder if this is related to the "black box" warnings that antidepressants have to have in the US (claiming that they can increase the risk of suicide among children and adolescents) because a politician's daughter was on antidepressants when she committed suicide? I remember my psychiatrist going on a big spiel about how this was pure political distortion and scaremongering and didn't reflect any sort of scientific reality. Of course, given that he was a dispenser of antidepressants he had something of a horse in the race himself.
There are a lot of studies that do show antidepressants can increase suicide risk over the short term, especially in young people. One of the standard explanations is that it gives people more energy/motivation before it makes them happier, and sometimes it makes them motivated to go ahead and commit suicide like they'd been dreaming of for a while. But I also think sometimes they can have paradoxical effects / side effects that make things worse. I still think over the long term and across all ages they're probably good, including for suicide. But it's pretty commonly accepted that they do have the occasional suicide-promoting effect.
Thank you for the response, while obviously it would be better if antidepressants really didn't increase the chance of suicide in certain cases, on the other hand it's at least encouraging to know that the system isn't as corrupt/silly as my psychiatrist was implying.
I don't know. I think it's more like the people who think that playing basketball makes you taller, that antidepressants make you suicidal.
You seem to go back and forth between the terms "standard model" and "interactionist model" (without ever explicitly saying that they're the same).
Thanks, you're right, fixed.
This type of post is useful to see just how many commenters read the posts carefully and how many skim and comment based on the topic (and some sort of mood affiliation). I'm curious whether you think the median individual hold's view closer to the Medical Model or the Social Model? Reading through your links, and some of the comments, there's this suggestion that people seem to have pretty bad/outdated views of impaired/disabled people. I'm sure I'm guilty of some of the things they mention, but I typically think most people just don't know how to interact with impaired people because they meet very few of them. Maybe this would be an interesting set of questions for the next ACT survey?
But isn't the point that the obviously correct answer is both? I am pretty sure most people would pick that option if it was explained to them.
I probably lean more towards the medical approach (medicines, surguries, prosthetics and assistive devices) as being more life changing than an equivalent investment in social change, but these treatments are constrained by the technology of the time and require the appropriate social accomodation to be fully realised (e.g. ramps for wheelchairs). Both medical treatments and social changes come with tradeoffs (e.g. cochlear implant vs learning sign language), why would you limit yourself to only one approach when you can utilise a combination of both?
I think almost everyone here (including myself) would agree with you that the obviously correct answer is both. What I'd be more interested in is measuring people's perceptions of whether societal factors/features or biological impairments are more to blame for the limitations impaired people face in their every day life. I think my prior is that most people know very few impaired people, and so can miss the ways relatively small things can really limit the opportunities of someone with an impairment. This is true even if they understand and believe in the standard/interactionist/biopsychosocial model
I suspect that most able bodied people think more in terms of the physical differences, leaning us more towards the medical model. However, I can imagine the small accomodations or lack thereof being much more obvious to people with disabilities, leaning them more towards the social model - i does depend on how you personally define "cause" and "blame" though.
I remember that when I was pushing my granddad's wheelchair, aspects of the built environment like uneven pavements became much more obvious to me, but I'm unsure how he would have thought about it - I don't think society resurfacing pavements more often was that high on his list of priorities. People like me probably should think more about the social causes of disability, since that is something we can try to help with, but can't really think of a social change that would have adressed my grandad's inability to wash and dress himself. Even under the best of circumstances, having to have somebody else do that for you is inherantly more constraining than doing it yourself.
It would be interesting to investigate perceptions on this in a survey, but it would be hard to get a big enough sample size of disabled people, especially since you should probably seperate out different types of disability, that may well affect this.
I have OCD, so the "social model" has struck me as utter nonsense. No amount of societal accommodation would eliminate the suffering that occurs when I stop taking my meds and my brain decides to light itself on fire and torture me endlessly with "what if"s about made-up nonsense where if I don't do everything perfectly me and my family die.
Yeah, I'm pretty unhappy about having OCD too.
Although just to play devil's advocate, I had an OCD patient who would ask lots of questions at work (probably out of an obsessive need to be sure they were understanding a task right). Their first boss answered the questions and everything was fine. Later they got another boss who found this annoying and started a process to fire them. Later still that boss was replaced and they got another boss who answered the questions and everything was fine.
I know I come out kind of anti-Social-Model here, but I really do think a whole lot of things are interactions between conditions and society and that even pretty unpleasant conditions like OCD can have social aspects that are worth considering.
I’m curious if the social model makes more sense for physical disabilities rather than some mental disabilities like personality disorders and some neurodevelopmental disorders. For instance, one could make the case we should teach every child in school sign language and deaf people would all have a much easier life. We could arguably build infrastructure and build a world where hearing is not necessary, however expensive. However, for something like ADHD, OCD, schizophrenia, etc, they are disorders so much more internalized that our brains don’t allow us to function that well in all aspects of life even if we have all kinds of societal accommodations. Sometimes, ADHD makes me act like an asshole to others, which I then regret and I completely understand if others think that it’s not healthy for their own psyche/mental health to have to interact with me/my brain. Medication helps me a lot, of course, but I don’t feel entitled that anyone should be subjected to my mood swings because those can be objectively hurtful to others. Meanwhile, there’s nothing about someone, say, being paralyzed and needing to use a wheelchair that can be mentally damaging to others in the same way that a personality disorder can be. And I believe there’s accordingly nothing wrong with being entitled to proper building access and transport everywhere and anywhere, because that doesn’t harm anyone else’s health at all to do.
(I’m completely open to the possibility that I’m downplaying potential complexities of physical disabilities however, as I have little direct experience with them.)
I think there are conditions (both physical and mental) which are better treated through accomodation and there those which are better treated through medication. Or even maybe this distinction makes more sense when speaking about specific symptoms of a condition.
I wouldn't like to take a pill that would "cure" my autism. But I may want to soften or even get rid of some specific symptoms without rewiring my brain alltogether.
"we should teach every child in school sign language"
You would then have the average child able to say "Where is the bathroom" and "A beer please" in ASL, based on the success rate of teaching children French, Spanish, etc. in public school (including mandated classes, such as we have in English-speaking Canada).
Unless there's someone to practice with and reason to do so.
Oh, I bet kids could really easily imagine reasons to be able to communicate without sharing it with adults around them. Sure, you wouldn't be invisible, and in this hypo a lot more adults would know sign language, but...
There's a whole fad of teaching babies sign language, on the theory that their language-brains develop faster than their vocal abilities. There hasn't been a surge of signing, hearing toddlers AFAIK.
An interesting and well-written essay, somewhat undercut by my utter inability to imagine anyone taking the other side of these arguments. You say they exist and I believe you, but I'm in bizarre dark matter world on this one.
He literally linked to multiple instances of major organizations spouting this view?
I think a version of the orthodox Social Model can be charitably rescued if you replace Society with the Environment in general. For example, a blind person marooned on an island has to deal with an overly adverse environment (a modern society, as a part of the "environment" would make it less adverse).
The point is that disability, unlike an impairment, is relative (in Eliezer's terms, a two-place function https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eDpPnT7wdBwWPGvo5/2-place-and-1-place-words). Society is a part of that second place:
ability = f(impairment, environment).
The degree of "ability" is a reasonably smooth function of both arguments. Sometimes it is a total disability, sometimes it is a minor inconvenience, and sometimes it's a huge bonus, even for the same value of the "impairment".
That doesn't rescue it - it renders it useless. Living in a certain type of environment (e.g. planet earth) is part of human life, so blaming your death on 'the environment' makes the model meaningless.
If you cannot survive in the environment that humans evolved to live in, broadly speaking, then the problem is with you, not the environment. The whole point of the 'social model' is that we can change the aspects of human society to accomodate the disabled. The 'environment model' has no practical difference to the medical model.
Well, we can also change the broader environment. Or find the environment where a disability becomes an ability. It does not have to be the society that has to change. Planet earth is not a single environment, and it is not immutable.
Having just spent a semester in a bioethics course where the Social Model was very much the local consensus, this was a satisfying read. Your points about the distinction between society causing vs. failing to resolve a disability and the biopsychosocial model being a sane way to acknowledge social conditions' influence without throwing out biology altogether were well-put. Not sure whether this was a genuinely great piece or it just happened to be ribbing my recently acquired outgroup, probably about 70% the latter if I'm honest with myself, but a pleasure either way.
You're mixing politics and models together and then arguing against a weird mix of both, instead of any individual concrete point.
The social model just means that a disability is defined by what society thinks a person should be able to do, not some objective list of "things humans should be able to do". A blind person can't drive a car, true. They also can't fly around like an eagle, but are not considered disabled for lacking this capacity. The inability to appreciate a sunset or an opera is a tragedy, as is not being immortal, but only some of those are disabilities. If possible, it'd be better to have sight restored than to be granted blindness accommodations, and it'd be super cool to be granted the ability of flight, understanding the distinction between the two is the point of the social model. This should be seen free from political activism, value neutrally. It's not wrong of society to have some abilities assumed and others not, that's just how society is going to function.
The biopsychosocial model is good for developing treatments for disabled people, do what you can to give capacity medically and work out accommodations for what you can't, but there is still a need for an understanding of what disability is, which is what the social model does. You haven't replaced that, or even attempted to, because you mixed up political action and model of understanding to argue against. The biopsychosocial completely fails as an explanation of what disability is.
You may want to call this a "motte", but the social model is still correct then, it's just a bunch of political activism that's been tacked on you disagree with. Which is fine, but still means you're wrong on the majority of this article.
>The social model just means that a disability is defined by what society thinks a person should be able to do, not some objective list of "things humans should be able to do". A blind person can't drive a car, true.They also can't fly around like an eagle, but are not considered disabled for lacking this capacity.
This makes no sense. You can't say it's society imposing this standard on people when it's the disabled who are demanding accomodations to make these things accessible to them.
Nobody is pointing to eagles and claiming to be oppressed because society doesn't put things in place to make them fly. Disability advocates point to abled society and claim it an injustice that they can't do all the things that abled people do.
>It's not wrong of society to have some abilities assumed and others not, that's just how society is going to function.
But these accomodations being demanded cannot exist without abled people in the first place!
If nobody could see, humans would have already died out (or evolved into something categorically different to humans).
Blind people would die out if all sighted people died - this is not society imposing value judgements on things and abilities. This is the cold hard reality of humanity. The blind depend on the sighted for their existence, and short of making them not-blind, this is always going to be the case (even if robots take care of every human need in the future, these robots will almost certainly possess visual perception abilities).
>Nobody is pointing to eagles and claiming to be oppressed because society doesn't put things in place to make them fly. Disability advocates point to abled society and claim it an injustice that they can't do all the things that abled people do.
... Yes, that is the point. There is an abled society, and failing to meet the demands of that abled society makes you disabled. If nobody could see, nobody would consider being blind a disability, but most people can so it is assumed you should be able to.
>Blind people would die out if all sighted people died - this is not society imposing value judgements on things and abilities. This is the cold hard reality of humanity.
I tried my utmost to be clear that I was describing a model for the purposes of understanding, and not trying to suggest political action or moral judgement based on that model. Lacking abilities like sight or being able to walk suck. The question is, how have we determined that this is a disability? The temptation and obvious answer is that there is something wrong with the person. Which is sometimes useful, treating disability is often a good thing. But contrast to something like running a marathon. People can do that, but some can't, and we don't consider those who can't disabled. Why? Trying to understand that arrives at the social model, that we live in a society that is designed around certain assumptions about what a person can do. What we should do from there is something I'm not talking about, I'm distancing myself from political activism to try and talk about the model neutrally.
An alternative way to think of disability is not what "society thinks a person should be able to do" but lacking an ability that is ordinary or commonplace. My failure to be able to fly by thinking about it isn't a disability, but if 80% of the public could do that, then it plausibly would be. It isn't social judgment that makes this so, but rather the range of abilities as they exist. Some disabilities are significant impediments to a person based on the environment while others aren't, of course, and part of what the environment looks like is socially constructed in ways that could be changed to make it less challenging.
The "social model" (taken literally) is so obviously nonsense that it's surprising anyone would even pretend to commit to it.
Thought experiment for its proponents: image you live in a utopia that has implemented all conceivable accomodations and is perfectly welcoming to everyone. Would you be willing to have your hands surgically removed? Your feet? Your eyes? Your ears? If not, why not - shouldn't make a difference, right?
As for placing the responsibility for fixing their issues on the disabled, rather than on society: this is obviously an issue where a reasonable compromise has to be struck, but there is at least some responsibility that lies with the disabled person. Example (inspired by Scott's doctor with glasses): if I wear my glasses, I can do my job perfectly fine. If I don't, I pretty much can't. Do I have an obligation to society to wear my damn glasses, do my job and pay my taxes, rather than refuse, and apply for disability benefits instead? Damn straight I do. And if I lived in a world where there are no glasses, but the alternative would be an affordable and fairly safe surgery such as lasik, I would have an obligation to do that as well.
In a utopian society you'd still want all the capacity you can get. Just like you'd want 120 IQ instead of 110 IQ, or indeed as much IQ as you could manage. Having 110 IQ doesn't make you disabled, however, and it would be possible to design a society that treats losing your feet, eyes, or ears as if you lost a lot of IQ instead of a disability. Which is to say, still very bad.
Okay, it took me a few minutes and a cold shower to put the "social model" into context - namely, that it's just the "disabilty" version of Cultural Marxism, where nothing bad can possibly be caused by things that happen in the real world due to actual mechanisms and circumstances, but must be the fault of one group oppressing another. Like, being obese is not bad because it almost inevitably causes issues with the heart, the joints and the metabolism, but because thin people fail to celebrate and acknowledge fat people yada yada.
Also, my wife works as a special education teacher here in Germany, and when I just mentioned the social model, she rolled her eyes. Apparently, it's considered an obviously bad, obsolete idea and has no practical importance in her line of work. I guess seeing people struggle with actual physical handicaps every day dispells the notion that it's all just society.
I mean, I might be wrong about my understanding of how activists these days are using the Social Model, but here's how I understand it:
Social model is not anti-cure, it's that you should NOT be forced to get a cure in order to do regular day to day things.
I like short-sightedness as an example. Myopia is managed by either visual aids (glasses) or it can be treated with lasik. Socially, glasses are commonly accepted. They're also generally acknowledged as Really Important To People - so you don't just grab someone's glasses or move them if it inconveniences you. You make sure the owner of the glasses is always in control of them, and if you have to remove them for whatever reason (usually dentist or swimming), they need to take good care of them and watch over them carefully. Insurance covers glasses. You can drive with glasses.
You can get LASIK if you like, but you don't need to. If you're managing your condition with glasses, you could consider LASIK if it makes your life easier, but you aren't forced to if it's not an issue - people understand LASIK is really expensive, takes a number of consults, and quite invasive.
Wheelchair users are saying that really, once you get used to it, being wheelchair bound is fine as long as the footpaths are traversable, there are elevators, and people treat the wheelchair with the same care and respect that they do glasses when they need to part with it. You should not force them to do many invasive surgeries to walk again, if they're finding the wheelchair ok.
1. Wheelchair accomodations are a much more active cost than that imposed by glasses wearing. It doesn't make it an unreasonable cost, but it's not very analogous. Few people's lives are different due to others wearing glasses. We have norms against touching or otherwise messing with people's clothing and belongings anyway - it's not something we need a model of disability for. We sure as hell didn't need the social model for 'don't fuck with people's glasses' to become a norm - this has been the case since long before the social model existed.
2. The cost, risk or other inconveniences of LASIK are I think obscuring the more fundamental truth of the matter. You seem to think the 'forcing' part is what is bad about the alleged alternatives to the social model, but then you bring up the cost, financial or otherwise, or LASIK.
What if one day, curing vision impairment was free and involved only swallowing a pill (that had no more side effects than other over the counter medications). Would it then be okay for 'society' to say that we're not making any accomodations for the vision impaired people? Is this still "forcing" them to get cured? And even if it is, is it actually wrong?
At that point, I think wearing glasses would be like we would view a young man using a cane today - an affectation at best.
Yes. It's not anyone's business to force other people to meet any random standard. It might become an economic decision (if glasses get too expensive), but it needs to be a decision in a meaningful way.
I do actually have the resources to throw at LASIK, if I wanted to. I could probably wait a few years and they'd improve it to be even less invasive, cheaper, with less side effects. I still don't want it - I like to have blurrymode available, and don't want to go through life with full HD all the time. I'm not alone - many who are d/Deaf and HoH also enjoy having real silence if they switch off their assistive devices.
On the flipside, we also have to focus on here and now - and the reality is if we hold out for miracle cures for all disabilities, what does everyone who's currently disabled do now? That is the main concern of most activists - it's not a good solution to demand that everyone should just wait to be cured.
I mean there is the “soft” version of the social model where it’s just largely uncontroversial stuff like “we should build wheelchair ramps and elevators into most public buildings”.
But there’s a “harder” version that’s more like “no, paraplegic is just as valid a way of being as any other, therefore anything that is harder for a paraplegic person is because of oppression”.
To me, glasses ARE the medical model, it’s literally a medical professional prescribing (gate keeping!) you a prosthetic and saying “ok now go out into the same world perfect vision people live in and deal with it”.
The “hard” social model solution for myopia would be more like “there is nothing inherently worse about 20/200 vision, society is just wrong and oppressive for designing the world for 20/20 seers”. And the solution would be designing all signage so that it could be read with I corrected 20/200 vision.
As someone with not one but two disabilities (Narcolepsy and Tourette's syndrome, the latter with "all the fixins"), I fully endorse this message. Another major problem with the general approach of "society has all the responsibility to accommodate disability" is when the person's disability symptoms come into conflict with *other* people's natural rights, and Tourette's syndrome is a pretty good example of this, especially if you have some of the more extreme symptoms (as I do, on occasion).
Like, there is literally no way for society to accommodate absolutely everything. It is good for society to try to accommodate me a reasonable amount, and I'm very, very, grateful that I'm privileged enough to say that for most of my life, it by and large has. But there are things society can't and even *shouldn't* try to accommodate too, and this is very important.
I did a long interview about this once if you're curious about all the bizarre details I'm alluding to:
https://thebrowser.com/notes/lars-doucet/
'This couldn’t because their disability prevented successful naval service, or Nelson’s victories would have been impossible. It must have been because of state discrimination.'
Missing a 'be' before 'because'.
Agree - essentially the social model of disability discounts the fact that human beings are inherently physical creatures with physical constraints. And a disabled person may have MORE physical constraints laid on top of this.
A non-physical, social-only model of disability discounts this.
I mean, if you were teleported to a world where almost everybody is able to see infrared light and people rely on each other being able to see infrared light, you'd be disabled even if nothing intrinsic to you changed...
If your model doesn't presuppose being human (as humans currently exists), then it's a stupid model.
But even THEN, I would likely be able to survive in infrared world without accomodations, and me and a group of non-IR-seers could survive on if all the IR-seers died. If sighted beings all died, the blind would be abjectly helpless, in this and almost any conceivable world.
And vice versa, if a deaf person was teleported in a world where nobody ever had any hearing, etc.
The current state of affairs looks very much as if people originally followed the Medical model which led to lots of terrible things, so the Social model was developped as a challanger and then they synthesized into the Interactionist model which people actually follow now.
Social model is just as wrong as Medical one, yet as it came after it and thus led to correction the prevously flawed practises we celebrate the Social model and shame the Medical one. In the world where the Social model came first and we had bad history with people refusing to treat cataract due to it, it would've been the opposite.
Also, I have to notice that "society makes people disabled" is the matter of category border, not a fact. We can define our terms so that "impairment" is the medical condition while "disability" is societal one. It makes sense to have different words for it and be able to talk about them separately. We just shouldn't forget the difference between "being able to talk about them separately" and "assuming they are always separate and there is no relation between them whatsoever".
I do appreciate that you take people seriously at what they *say* they mean.
But this is the first I have heard about it as a regularish person. So I'm curious if this is a pre-emptive post by you to head off a crazy idea, or is it in response to a bunch of people trying to implement hair-brained schemes with the social model in place.
Even if it is just pre-emptive I don't think its a bad idea to make the post. The last decade has shown me that there should have been more pre-emptive challenges to crazy ideas. I just don't feel like there were many concrete examples of what these people were doing, rather than what they were saying.
I think the social model works especially bad for autistic people. I have an autistic kid and he's very sensitive to noise and can't stand other children making noise - and autistic kids are also, in general, far noisier than neurotypical kids (stimming, talking during inappropriate times, and of course meltdowns.) And in fact, both of these traits often exist in the same autistic person - my kid included.
Basically, these are "competing access needs" which can occur across disabilities, except in this case the needs are competing even *within* the same disability.
Obviously many ways of "fixing" this is problematic. Accommodating autistic people should never involve removing autistic people from a space. It's a really difficult situation.
Curious, I'd think that social-ish model approach are especially *good* for autistic people as one of the main problems is society traumatizing autistic people into appearing to behave neurotypically instead of accomodating the actual needs.
> Basically, these are "competing access needs" which can occur across disabilities, except in this case the needs are competing even *within* the same disability.
What about sound dampening headphones? Wouldn't they accomodate both the need to make loud noises and the need not to hear loud noises?
Loud sounds don't bother my kid, it's actually that ambient speech makes it difficult to pick out the speaker- for instance, at an animal handling event- and he already struggles with understanding speech. Crosstalk can be really difficult for autistic people. So they actually make things even worse for him by making it harder to hear in general. They're also uncomfortable (sensory issues).
In general it bothers me that earphones are our solution to autism in classrooms. These are kids that struggle with social interaction and understanding speech and we further isolate them by removing (temporarily) one of their senses. It's cheaper to put a kid in headphones than in a smaller class though.
>Loud sounds don't bother my kid
Sorry, I misinterpreted you. If there is no constant problem with loud sounds then there is no need for permanent headphones. There are options to use them only when the kid is overstimulated or close to it, but of course they have to be confortable and not provoking sensory issues themselves.
> Crosstalk can be really difficult for autistic people
Yeah, crosstalk sucks. My girlfriend has a huge problem with it. I'm less so, most of my sensory issues are visual. I'm both having not a very good eyesight and overtimulated by light so I'm constantly using dark glasses with diopters. I'm not sure by maybe there is a similar solution for auditory stuff? Something to filtering the ambient noises but not strong enough to remove the hearing alltogether and even help to concentrate on the speech?
I had thought with your grandparent post that you were referring to active noise-cancelling headphones, which do exactly this.
(Audio-Technica ATH-ANC23 are wired earbuds which run off a AAA battery, one of the cheapest ways to experiment with noise-cancellation. They work without an audio source; I use them on airplanes.)
Yeah, the ones they generally give autistic people are called "ear defenders" and they're passive.
Part of what is going on is that we are in a post-truth world where activists say what they think will have the best effect, or just say what they want to be true, without worrying about what is true. It make sense for them to do this because a lot of people will say they believe the thing that sounds most inclusive or whatever and aren’t concerned with what is true.
I wonder if proponents of the purest Social Model would ascribe to some model of passive causation. It may slide between concepts of causation and responsibility, but take the classic trolly problem for example: if you refuse to pull the lever, your failure to act when you plausibly could have is part of the chain of events leading to the people on the tracks dying. It’s not one billiard ball colliding into another type “causation” but I see how it can make sense to say a failure of action can have causal power in some situations. To analogize the splitting of the terms “impairment” and “disability” you might say the runaway trolly is the physical impairment which is of initial causal power, but society’s failure to “flip the switch” of accommodations is what “causes” the disability according to how I would understand the Social Model. I’m not sure what I think about that framework, and honestly fits your “standard model” too in some ways, but it sets the focus is on society acting or not acting (with impact on disability) contrasted with what are assumed to be a pre-given set of facts about impairment.
I think you are slightly misunderstanding the LITERAL interpretation of social model.
It says not to treat disabilities medically, but it also separates disability and impairment, and doesn’t say anything against impairment being medically treat, just disabilities.
So wanting to cure the impairment of blindness is more like wanting surgery to implant magnets in your hands so you have a sense of electromagnetic fields around (which I’m definitely in favour of, the more senses the better)
But curing the disability of blindness should be done socially, like designing cars & their infrastructure so that they can be safely driven by the blind
You say NASA building spaceships for the sighted only didn’t deprive the blind, but I disagree, if most everyone in society was blind, we’d still want to go to space and spaceships would’ve been built with the blind in mind, and the blind were deprived of the opportunity of living in a more blind compatible society
Also you bring up the example of a blind person being disadvantaged on a desert island, but it’s not like there aren’t natural environments where blindness is advantaged, hence why blindness has evolved more times than sightedness has (though blindness is easier to evolve than sightedness)
Yeah, it seems to me that what they're doing is simply redefining the existing word "disability" to mean something different from the normal meaning of the word, which naturally leads to confusion. I don't know if the model has any actual content beyond that.
When looked at it this way, the whole thing screams "motte and bailey". With the motte being "we're just separating the part that can be remedied by society from the medical part", and the bailey "restructure all of society to accomodate us, dammit!"
Just this. (Why isn't there a Like button here?)
Yeah, the originators of the social model don’t seem to have rigorously grounded the model like I’m suggesting it(as far as Scott quotes suggest), but I do feel like Scott should be arguing against a rigorous strongmanned version of the social model rather than the weaker version he is objecting to, ESPECIALLY when the strongman version is still compatible with the literalist interpretation of the social model
> if most everyone in society was blind, we’d still want to go to space and spaceships would’ve been built with the blind in mind
Spaceships wouldn't be built at all.
Why? We're monkeys! In what world do you look at a clever monkey & decide it's ability to build spaceships depends on how good its eyes are?
Because building spaceships depends on a massive stack of prerequisite skills, and a lot of those skills require spatial perception. You can probably start with just knowing that what we call space exists requires some spatial perception of electromagnetic radiation. A species operating off of spatial perception via sound waves (echolocation) isn't going to be able to know space exists.
You can probably build a spaceship without hearing, taste, or smell. Tactile sense (touch) is a bit trickier; at high technology levels tools can compensate, but I don't know how you would get basic tools at all without touch, since everything starts with hands (or similar manipulators).
A different and I think better argument for space travel for the blind is that most space projects are fundamentally for symbolic purposes. Sure, we do science on them and yes, maybe we’ll mine asteroids or colonize Mars someday, but the immediate and often explicit motivation is symbolism. Putting an impaired astronaut in space would be a compelling symbol of inclusion, way more interesting than just launching yet another highly competent able bodied person onto the ISS to do scientific experiments the public will never know nor care about.
Are you saying that deaf people are less than human? Are you saying that people with Downs Syndrome are less than human? Why are you excluding them?
I was deliberately argumentative to make a point; once you start down this path, there's no logical end to it. Yes, we've stupidly sent one-off space tourists up at public cost; this was stupid at the time. But once you start the 'symbolic' route, you're mired in a maze of which impairments are worth being symbols and which aren't. A private ride to the ISS via SpaceX costs $55 million for an able-bodied tourist. That's the average tax payment of 3,000 US taxpayers, each, for empty symbolism.
This is also a long way from 'a society of the blind could build a spaceship'. Knowing space exists is just part of the problem. Without vision (or some sort of electromagnetic spatial perception), how would you know the Earth was round? You can't see the masts of ships over the horizon before the hulls, you can't measure the shadows of buildings, you can't track the motions of the stars or see the shadow of the Earth on the moon (and you don't know that the moon or stars even exist). How far would metallurgy (and thus chemistry) have progressed without the ability to distinguish which rock was which? (I suspect that if humanity as a species was even color-blind, we'd be a lot further behind in chemistry, just because of how many chemical discoveries seem to come down to 'that rock / crystal / flame is a funny color; why is that?')
“Once you start the 'symbolic' route, you're mired in a maze of which impairments are worth being symbols and which aren't.”
Sorry, that’s just false. I think you are the one of us two who is mired in a maze about symbolism. For me, it’s very simple and clear - if you can get enough public support for sending a paraplegic person into space, then you can do that for symbolic reasons and cheer the outcome. I expect you’ll hate that, but I think that if you do hate it, it’s because you hate costly symbolic acts generally, not because you think this particular proposal is a mediocre form of symbolism. I bet that a proposal to send up an entire team of variously disabled astronauts would get a huge amount of positive press coverage and be a potent pro-inclusivity symbol.
Baloney. This is like saying that sighted people could never discover radio, because they can't perceive it with their senses.
Sure, a world of blind people would probably take longer to discover that space exists, but remember that they could still feel the heat of the sun, and *certainly* observe its effects, as well as the effects of the moon (i.e. tides). They'd figure out the existence of heavenly bodies eventually. Heck, they'd probably do quite well; as soon as they invent an instrument that converts electromagnetic waves to sound, the whole universe opens up to them.
Walk me through this: how do you notice the patterns of the tide going in and out without spatial perception, unless you just stand on the beach for a month? (Hint: even I can navigate through my house in pitch darkness; drop me in the wilderness and ask me to forage for food and it's hard to know where I am relative to where I was an hour ago even with spatial perception).
For that matter, what does a painting sound like when converted to sound? More importantly, what does a blueprint sound like? What does the difference between copper and iron sound like?
It's fine to imagine some advanced technology that can provide an entity that doesn't have spatial perception the ability to manipulate the world around it as if it had spatial perception. The problem is that you need to start from the basics and go every step of the way, and those basics require spatial perception. Picturing some magic device that represents the 3D world in 1.5D sound is great, until you realize you need to interact with the 3D world to build it in the first place.
Unless you're going to invent something entirely outside of human understanding (which you may as well call magic and treat the same way), the necessary technological path has some basic first steps. You need to make tools. You need to manipulate fire. You need to find and smelt metal. You could uplift an animal species to human-level intelligence and they would struggle with those unless you also gave them something close to human form. Octopi are probably smart enough as it is to use tools, but making them from scratch is going to be almost impossible, and fire and metal are beyond that. This is not fair, but the universe isn't fair.
>Walk me through this: how do you notice the patterns of the tide going in and out without spatial perception, unless you just stand on the beach for a month?
Sound! Certainly it is the case that tides make different sounds going in and out. If you’re close enough to *see* the tides, you’re certainly close enough to *hear* them, at least in many places.
Or, if you are gathering food at the beach/in the shallows on a daily basis, you’re going to *feel* the tides go in and out. It may take several generations for people to figure out just what is going on (and of course many more to figure out *why*), but they’ll *notice* it almost immediately.
>(Hint: even I can navigate through my house in pitch darkness; drop me in the wilderness and ask me to forage for food and it's hard to know where I am relative to where I was an hour ago even with spatial perception).
And someone who lives in the wilderness can navigate it (literally) with their eyes closed, just as you can your house.
>For that matter, what does a painting sound like when converted to sound?
Paintings aren’t converted to sound. There would never be paintings to begin with. Paintings aren’t a feature of the natural world; they’re human created. They’d have music, just like we do, and maybe tactile “art,” and who knows what else. Humans are inventive!
>More importantly, what does a blueprint sound like?
Whatever you want it to! Though I assume that sound would not be the sense that blueprints would be mediated through; likely touch. Which makes sense, right? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blind-architect-drafts-different-blueprint-for-success/
>What does the difference between copper and iron sound like?
I don’t know! What *does* it sound like? I know that such things do often make different sounds when struck (people used to be able to tell good gold coins from counterfeit from hearing them ring on a metal surface, so I’ve heard).
What does the difference between zinc and nickel look like?
>It's fine to imagine some advanced technology that can provide an entity that doesn't have spatial perception the ability to manipulate the world around it as if it had spatial perception. The problem is that you need to start from the basics and go every step of the way, and those basics require spatial perception.
And blind people have no spatial perception? At minimum they can use dead reckoning, and more plausibly their inner ear. Also…https://www.science.org/content/article/how-blind-people-use-batlike-sonar
>Picturing some magic device that represents the 3D world in 1.5D sound is great, until you realize you need to interact with the 3D world to build it in the first place.
Are you thinking that hearing would be their *only* sense? That would be a challenge indeed! I believe the conditions were “evolved without sight,” not “evolved with only hearing and no other senses.”
I think blind people interact with the 3D world all the time.
>Unless you're going to invent something entirely outside of human understanding (which you may as well call magic and treat the same way), the necessary technological path has some basic first steps. You need to make tools. You need to manipulate fire. You need to find and smelt metal. You could uplift an animal species to human-level intelligence and they would struggle with those unless you also gave them something close to human form. Octopi are probably smart enough as it is to use tools, but making them from scratch is going to be almost impossible, and fire and metal are beyond that. This is not fair, but the universe isn't fair.
I think I fail to see your point here. I will say, though, that much more is possible by proceeding stepwise over many generations than you might imagine: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/
The majority of human societies that have ever existed would not be capable of building a spaceship (even the Chinese didn't realize the Earth was round until Jesuits told them). Spaceships aren't something independently arrived at by lots of different societies through convergent cultural evolution, it's something that only happened as a result of a narrow filter.
Monkeys by default do have eyesight, take away that and you've got a species less capable than monkeys. Chimps don't deliberately teach each other, but they are capable of learning things like tool-use by observing each other. Remove their eyesight and you take away some of their limited learning ability.
Mostly agree, but:
1. The point about spaceships and cars is weird and feels exactly like the point the social model is trying to make. Spaceships and cars require sight because they were designed that way, by sighted people. If all humans were blind, they would've designed them differently.
2. Mt. Everest is a bit of a strawman, but it's certainly true that the natural world is not always very accommodating to disabilities.
Pray tell, how would a society of blind people design a car that can be operated by blind people? Now, after more than 100 years of technological progress, it is still not possible to rely on computer vision to safely operate cars - and that progress was made mostly by people who could see, and needed that ability to do the work.
> If all humans were blind, they would've designed them differently.
No, they wouldn't have designed them at all.
I summarise this as:
* People used to believe (mostly) medical model of disability
* People made a big argument that we should have less than 100% medical model of disability and more than 0% social model of disability (or more than we usually had at the time)
* As with every new idea in the history of all fields, some people wanted "More of this than we have now" and some people wanted "All this, all the time, for everything. And any exceptions are trivial edge cases we can ignore". And lots of people didn't worry about which of those we'd aim for until we'd started moving at all.
* Social model of disability caught on. Some people are still fighting to have it applied to them. Some people are dutifully passing down the arguments of the original fight. Some people are preaching straw men for various honest or disingenuous reasons. While some people are fighting not to recognise that there are many cases where it doesn't apply and we shouldn't have 100% social model of disability.
I think "social model of disability doesn't apply 100% of the time" is true (with caveats depending on who I'm talking to).
But if some people use "social model of disability" to mean "applies 100% of the time" and other people use it to mean "applies more than 0% of the time", then regardless of whether they have reasonable reasons for interpreting that way, and regardless of any official definition, a claim "against the social model" will sometimes be true and sometimes be false depending on the definition which is used by the person reading it
It's funny you use blind astronauts as an example, as Radiolab podcast did an episode last year on disabled people in space and how they are being overlooked: https://radiolab.org/podcast/right-stuff
A specific example I remember is that blind astronauts would be extremely effective during an emergency involving the station filling with smoke, as they would know their way around in ways a sighted person wouldn't.
Definitely worth a listen/read (there's a transcript).
A sighted astronaut could train with their eyes closed for such a scenario and then be fine, but a blind astronaut is not going to be able to do everything that the sighted astronaut can do.
I'd encourage you to listen to the episode/read the transcript as it goes into more detail than just the one example I gave.
But I also think it's disingenous to say that a person who trains for even an hour a day to navigate a dynamic space with their eyes closed will be better at navigating a familiar place in the dark than someone who can't see.
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/crew.php#notdisable
Even better example might be something like a colostomy bag. Takes a lot of training and special equipment for the default-model butthole to poop safely in microgravity. Surgical implant which some medical condition already made necessary could reduce that arduous task to something barely more difficult than recharging a phone at a wall outlet.
A spaceship is, ultimately, an assistive device enabling humans to travel and survive in hostile environments - surely those who use other sorts of assistive devices, wrangling hostile environments on a daily basis, have skills and insights to contribute.
You switch between the interactionist model, the standard model, and the biopsychosocial model. It is a bit confusing, also since you give no references to others using these concepts (except with regard to the good old biopsychosocial model).
In the context of disability, you can replace the two first with a concept that is dominant up here in Scandinavia: The Gap model, also referred to in the literature as the relational model. The model refers to the gap between a person's capabilities and the demands of his/her environment.
The policy implication is that the gap should be made as narrow as possible (ideally closed), by interventions aimed at both sides: both to empower the individual, and to reduce barriers in his/her physical and social environment. The Gap-model is well-established; it is used both in research reports and in government papers.
I must add that the quotes you provide from US University websites sound as if the webpages have been written by naive, well-meaning people, not by people who have tried to seriously confront the policy dilemmas in this field. The quotes you provide are also not aligned with how disability is defined in the UN convention on the rights of people with disabilities, Article 1. Quote:
"Persons with disabilities include those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others."
...the important point to notice in this definition is "in interaction with". Which leads directly to the Gap-model (what you call the interactionist model/standard model).
...plus, the critique you refer as to the medical model, seems unaware of how the medical model is formulated by influential spokespersons for this model. For example, here is Saad S. Nagi's (1991) medical definition of disability: An "expression of a physical or mental limitation in a social context, a gap between the individual's capabilities and the demands created by the physical and the social environment." (See "Disability concepts revisited" in Pope, A & Tarlov, A (eds.): Disability in America. Institute of Medicine, Committee on a National Agenda for the Prevention of Disabilities).
...Nagi's definition illustrates that the assumed reductionist-individualistic bias of the medical approach is less pronounced than argued by the critics. As illustrated in the above quote, Nagis' upgraded medical model brings the social context of the individual into the definition of disability, including both the physical and social environment.
You further refer the critique by some militant "social model of disability" activists against what may be labelled compensatory policy measures, including cash transfers and services targeted on people with disabilities. This criticism holds that by singling out people with disabilities for special treatment their "difference" is emphasised, potentially resulting in stigmatisation and social marginalisation. What these activists often fail to see, however, is that singling out people with disability for special treatment is also necessary if you use regulation policies (anti-discrimination legislation and the like, which is extremely popular in the US) to improve their conditions.
Let me give an example: Arie Rimmerman (in his 2013 book "Social inclusion of people with disabilities. National and international perspectives"), shows that such potentially stigmatizing singling-out takes place with regard to anti-discrimination legislation. I recommend the book for his discussion of cases brought to court based on the US anti-discrimination act (p. 110-11) and the UK and Israeli equivalents (pp. 117 and 123). His examples illustrate that in order to apply anti-discrimination legislation, judges must decide if the offended person is really "disabled". And to have one's disabilities scrutinised by judges or a jury, is obviously at least as potentially stigmatizing than having to demonstrate "disability" in order to be awarded a cash benefit or subsidised service.
For example, Rimmerman quotes a US case where the court found that the Anti-Discrimination Act did not apply since the plaintiff "despite her undisputed impairment [carpal tunnel syndrome] and the demonstrable limitation that it created, ... failed to qualify as disabled because 'she could still brush her teeth, wash her face, bathe, tend her flower garden, fix breakfast, do laundry, and pick up around the house'" (p. 111).
The example is instructive of how human rights-based legislation (here: anti-discrimination) creates exactly the same targeting problems as traditional compensatory measures (disability pensions and disability services, such as being granted the right to have a paid personal assistant helping with activities of daily living). To simply shift from compensatory policy measures (benefits and services) to legal policy measures (human rights legislation) as some activists advocate, does not avoid the necessity to investigate whether people are disabled or not disabled, i.e. it is still necessary to target ("brand") the benefactors as disabled.
A brief aside to the theories of science: The social model of disability exists in a strong and weak version, roughly corresponding to the difference between strong and weak social constructivism. Strong social constructivists argue against anything that contains a trace of essentialism: There are no objective facts, only interest-driven "constructions". If one accepts this view, that all disability is WHOLLY socially constructed, it makes theoretical sense to abolish all policies that one way or another target people with disabilities. Since targeting, however well-intended, serves to maintain a social construct that can (in theory) disappear if we stop interpreting it as real. This strong social model of disability can be associated with some militants within the disability movement who portray any policy except mainstreaming (i.e. only very general stuff, such as making buildings wheelchair-accessible) as oppressive.
In contrast, weak social constructivists (e.g. the sociologist Peter Berger, co-author of the enormously influential Berger/Luckmann book The Social Construction of Reality) maintain that all reality is subjected to socially derived interpretations, but does not therefore infer that all interpretations are equally valid - that none corresponds better to an outside "reality" than others. (For an elaboration of this view, see Peter Berger's later book "In Praise of Doubt" , co-authored with Anton Zijderveld.)
Applied to disability, the weak version of the social model confers that disabilities are (also) connected to biological phenomena that exist independently of how we talk about the world. Here, disabilities are regarded as a complex interface between the individual and his/her surroundings. In practice, the weak version is very close to the updated medical model, as interpreted by Nagi (see above). Policy implications are also similar: Disability policies should be geared toward making the surroundings more accommodating to people with disabilities, but as a supplement - not as a replacement - to cash benefits, subsidised services, and legal protection targeted particularly at this group.
(Short version: radical social constructivists believe that there is no reality outside language. Weak social constructivists believe that the body is older than language.)
Ending this long comment with a personal opinion:
I find the policy implications of a pure social model-approach to disability politically dangerous. This is so, since it is utopian to believe that mainstreaming alone will remove the need for targeted efforts directed at this group. A pure social model - approach can even serve as an ideological veil under which benefits can be scaled down and services dismantled. (Some people within Departments of Finance and Treasuries might like the social model for this reason.)
Activists hell-bent on the strong version of the social model of disability are in some sense modern-day equivalents to Lenin's useful idiots, in that their academic chatter can be used to put a progressive gloss on the scaling-down of medical and social welfare benefits and services targeted at this group.
Here is the basic question: Are people with disabilities to receive rather more benefits, services and/or legal protection than an "ordinary" citizen facing the many tribulations in life? If so, there must be some way to identify who has disabilities and who has not. We simply cannot avoid this.
I feel that the problem underlying all of this is that the term "cause" is getting philosophically misused throughout the article. I could equally say, "I am personally the cause of all disability in the world because I have not invented a solution to heal it", or "God is the the cause of all disability, for He allows it to exist, or at least does not provide help to deal with impairments". I think we should take a step back and become very clear on what do we mean by the word "cause". I am afraid that in the social model, for example, it is used to hide the implication of responsibility and blame.
I am not sure what the rational definition of "cause" is, but my first attempt to fix it would be to say "inaction can not be a cause of action. Action can either be caused by some other action, or be spontaneous and self-generating". Otherwise we can use loads of insane counterfactuals to explain causation (the cause of the murder was that the aliens did NOT abduct the murderer).
We could say that the idea which causes the problem here is "counterfactual model of causation": if assuming that A had happened implies that B would not have happened, then not A causes B. So maybe we should be careful to not sneak counterfactuals into our explanations of cause and effect. So "a hammer hit the ball, so the ball flew" is a good cause-and-effect chain, while "if a hammer had not hit the ball, the ball would not have flown" is a bad cause-and-effect chain.
"inaction can not be a cause of action. Action can either be caused by some other action, or be spontaneous and self-generating".
What about if you have an obligation to act, and do not? For example, I’m supposed to pick up a friend from the airport, but instead do not do this. Have I “caused” my friend to be late/annoyed/etc?
I think that what this example demonstrated relates to expectations, not to obligations. Consider two more examples:
Suppose I promise my friend to cure ageing by tomorrow, and (obviously) fail to do so. Does it mean that I am now the cause of death of every old person from now on?
Suppose you wanted to arrive somewhere by sailboat, knowing that the wind blows there constantly. However, on the day of your travel the wind dies due to anomalous weather conditions, so you are late and annoyed. Does it mean the absence of wind is what caused you to be late?
I feel like the answer to the first example is no, and the answer to the second example is yes. But the second example is about expectation rather than obligation (the wind is not obliged to blow every day, it just usually does so), and the first example is about obligation rather than expectation (no one realistically expects you to cure ageing in one day, even if you solemnly promise to do so).
So maybe my idea can be modified by saying that we distinguish action action from inaction not be comparing the outcome to perfect stillness, but to our expected outcome. But such an approach implies that causation is subjective, and depends on what you know and expect. Consider another example: your friend A is arriving by plane and has promised to meet with your another friend, B, by 5pm. In secret from A, you promise B to meet A at the airport (as a surprise for A). Then you fail to do so, friend A goes to friend B by bus, but still gets late because she accidentally boards the wrong bus. What is the cause of her being late? From the point of view of A, it is A choosing the wrong bus. From the point of B, it is you failing to pick A up.
Can we salvage this subjectivity by considering a hypothetical observer, which always expects perfect stillness? I am not sure. Maybe the best thing we can do is to explicitly describe our knowledge and expectations before discussing any causation.
But the one thing we should definitely avoid doing is speaking about causation with respect to our desired outcomes, as opposed to the expected outcomes. And this is what I believe happens in the social theory of disability. A person wishes society fully accommodates every person with every impairment, and so says that the lack of such accommodation is the actual cause of people being perceived as disabled.
This feels incomplete to the point of being borderline straw-man-ish. Yes, it's a good takedown of the Social Model. Then what? (Sorry Scott, we're used to more :D)
The really fascinating topic hinted here is not how the Social Model came to be - this is very well covered as being the natural reaction of some people at a certain point in history. The fascinating topic is why modern institutions in the west have such a strong tendency to take these kind of positions as official. Because it happens too often and in too similar ways not to be a standard failure mode. If by any chance that's the next article in the series, yey.
Now I am wondering how much a wheelchair ramp for Mount Everest would actually cost. 1 trillion $ sounds way too much.
But great article!
Actually sounds like way too little, given that it would have to be one of the largest structures ever constructed.
It wouldn't. With 10s of km, it's rather small scale. Almost every highway or train line is longer. So are lots of subways, tunnels, etc.
Perhaps you compare it with vertical structures? Yes, we don't build 10km high buildings. But it seems to me that "structures lying more or less on the ground" is the better reference category.
I was imagining a giant ramp built up the side of Everest which would have to be massive, but if you spiraled and zig-zagged it, it would basically just be a road. Unsure on the cost and practicality of it, but the elevation alone would make it a very ambitious engineering project.
Ah, I understand. Yes, a ramp would have gigantic costs. And a meandering road would still be really ambitious, but not cost a trillion.
The Karakorum highway of 800km goes up to 4.7km and costs 10 billions. Let's say the Mount Everest Wheelchair Lane needs to cover 4km altitude at a 1:12 ratio, that's roughly 50km, so a factor of 20 shorter. The altitude will make construction a lot more ambitious, but the MEWL can be much smaller than a highway, which cancels some of the difficulty. My very wild guess would be that it ends up at most twice as expensive per km, which brings us to 1 billion in total. Perhaps even less.
Not so expensive after all. Though the cost for snow clearance will be a nightmare. Much easier and cheaper to build a tunnel+elevator.
Your transportation costs will be much much higher, as there are few improved roads that even get close to your starting point. There is no open ground to base your road on, you have to defrost the whole thing as you go, I guess, and keep it open while you build. As you remove the snow and ice, the soil will rebound and need to be constantly stabilized. You have a very small time window every year to work in, so you need to start and stop building over a period of years, with repairs to your existing structure and whatever routes your are using to transport all your materials. BTW, these routes will mostly be built brand new for this project because they don't exist now, and they will need to be of a large size to bear the weight of all your equipment. You will need to house all your workers, providing every need since Everest is so far from any city capable of providing these needs. You need to buy the land from Nepal, or the official landowners. Since Everest is something of a natural attraction, and you are forever despoiling it, I imagine that will be costly. The final tens of kilometers will be at extremely high altitude, you will need special engines for all your construction equipment, which will probably have to be specially designed and built, making them probably an order of magnitude more expensive.
This is just of the top of my head. 1 Trillion sounds about right.
> Before people invented spaceships, blind people couldn't be astronauts, because nobody could be astronauts; going to space was just fundamentally difficult. Then people invented spaceships that could be piloted by sighted astronauts, but couldn't be piloted by blind people.
As a matter of history this is wrong. The first spaceships didn't need any piloting; they could be (and were) flown equally well by a monkey as a human. Presumably the same would be true of a blind person.
My understanding is that the earliest animals sent to space did not survive to return home.
If only they'd been able to read the button saying "LAND SAFELY".
One surprising thing I learned from reading "The Right Stuff" is that in the early days the space program was somewhat stigmatized among test pilots as being "not real flying".
You wrote: "To support his point, he gave various examples. Lord Nelson, who was blind in one eye, was a great Admiral. But in his own day, disabled people were banned from the Navy. This couldn’t because their disability made successful naval service impossible, or Nelson’s victories would have been impossible. It must have been because of state discrimination."
In my hobby exploring the British navy in the age of Nelson, I have come across many amputees and other types of disabled people serving on ships. Many of them were injured early in their careers and nevertheless rose in the ranks.
Here is a quote from a discussion of "Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals: Amputee Officers in Nelson's Navy," by Teresa Michals:
https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5410/
"Michals identified more than 40 amputees who attained the rank of commander or above. All but four of those officers held subordinate positions when they received their injury. One of them, Sir Watkin Owen Pell, lost his left leg as a rank-and-file seaman during an 1800 battle with a French warship. He was 12 years old at the time. After becoming an amputee, Pell spent another 60 years on active duty, the last 20 or so as an admiral. He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1837."
Any day that involves Scott Alexander dunking on Bryan Caplan is a good one.
And speaking of disabilities, I think Caplan has a uniquely strong one when it comes to seeing contradictory evidence. Oh, I know, bubbles, internet, "have-you-been-on-twitter?". But this is different. People on twitter who ignore evidence counter to their views still see it - they will dismiss it as "fake news", or as "biased" or start speculating about your sexual attraction to barnyard animals, or whatever. But there is still some sort of reaction.
Caplan isn't like this. It's like his whole visual and pre-frontal cortex edits out contradictory evidence. I swear, you could have all the world's experts screaming at him all the reasons why he's wrong, and all he would see would be an endless, empty plain, with the wind blowing mournfully and the tumbleweeds drifting....
No, Caplan keeps responding (even with some delays) because he does see what others write.
No. He doesn't. This is just factually wrong.
How is he able to quote from Scott's responses if he doesn't "see" it?
https://betonit.substack.com/p/caplan-critical-links
And if you look back to his most recent actual reply (rather than mere acknowledgement), you can see he repeatedly quotes Scott:
https://betonit.substack.com/p/the-szaszian-fork-another-reply-to
It is YOU who is "just factually wrong".
Despite the bogeyman comment and all the scare quotes, the "Medical Model" is what the man in the street believes to be the best explanation of disability. If I have only one leg, it is the loss of the leg that causes disability. Medical professionals and society at large can ameliorate that difference between me and my bipedal friends, but they cannot remove it entirely, or magic it away. That is why the Social Model is pie in the sky. The Medical Model does not imply stigmatization, nor that we should not accommodate, and certainly does not remove the human rights we choose to accord each other. That's all piffle.
Just to " to come at the bravery debate from the other side" that gets a lot of sidekicks in this post: Please note: Thomas S. Szasz was no "anti-psychiatrist." We both believe in psychiatry between consenting adults. We are opposed to institutional psychiatry and coercion. We are not opposed to contractual or consensual psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, or counseling, what have you, as long as the designated client is able to fire his or her therapist at any time. ... If people want to take drugs to control the way they think, feel, behave and perceive, by all means they should be free to do so. See Szasz's work: "Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared", published by Syracuse University Press, 2009. See the review by Dr. Ron Roberts 2010: https://fee.org/articles/antipsychiatry-quackery-squared
"You and your comrades had just won a great victory in getting the medical establishment to de-list homosexuality as a mental disorder, and - sure enough - the problem had been society’s persecution of gays, not the “disorder” itself. "
From a utilitarian perspective, what consequences of decriminalising and destigmatising homosexuality would you consider compelling evidence that actually the problem is homosexuality and not society's persecution? Because what we actually got was AIDS. Clearly, you think the actual number of gays who died in incredibly horrible ways is not compelling evidence that homosexuality itself is the problem, but what number would you consider compelling?
Was that caused by decriminalization, or a critical mass of gays gathering in one place after medicines were introduced to treat the syphilis that would have killed them prior to AIDS?
It's hard to believe that the big change in incentives had no influence on the propensity of homosexuals to engage in intercourse with each other. Perhaps you can say that legalisation and stigmatisation might have been less disastrous had we not cured syphilis, but what's the take home message here "don't cure syphilis so that we can legalise homosexuality without it getting too out of hand?'.
The point here is that Left-Rationalists hold up the legalisation of homosexuality as the textbook example of the paradox of success. 'Legalising homosexuality was so successful people took it too far and started cutting teenager's breasts off', 'Legalising homosexuality was so successful that people took it too far and decided that there as no such thing as mental illness.' But, actually, legalising homosexuality was a policy catastrophe akin to the Vietnam war that turned out far worse than even its most fierce opponents predicted. The real message is that, no matter how disastrous your policies are, if you hold cultural power, you can still leverage them to do even more disastrous things.
Who are the "Left-Rationalists" making such claims?
Lawrence v. Texas was handed down in 2003, well after AIDS had peaked. Sodomy laws were upheld in Bowers v. Hardwick, during its height. If you reply that the relevant decisions were made at the state rather than national level, it should be noted that Illinois was the first state to decriminalize in 1962, but AIDS' epicenters instead were in NYC (where it first started spreading from Haiti in 1971, decriminalization not occurring there until 1980) and San Francisco (where it spread from NYC in 1976).
One of the Left-Rationalists I was thinking about was the author of this article *in this article* where he writes:
"The Social Model Of Disability came out of the same 60s/70s cultural current that gave us Thomas Szasz’s claim that mental disorders are fake. Szasz was thinking of examples like the stigmatization of homosexuality; he (understandably) preferred to think of homosexuality being a perfectly fine alternate-way-of-being that society just had to learn to accommodate. But he took it too far"
"But put yourself in the shoes of a 1970s radical. Your stereotype of psychiatric treatment, which wasn’t entirely false, would have been cops taking gays / LSD users / eccentrics, locking then up in horrible state-run hospitals for months, and treating them with strong drugs or electroshock therapy or lobotomies. You’d never met a schizophrenic, but you believed Gregory Bateson and Thomas Szasz’s report that they were just cool eccentric people who didn’t abide by society’s artificial rules. You and your comrades had just won a great victory in getting the medical establishment to de-list homosexuality as a mental disorder, and - sure enough - the problem had been society’s persecution of gays, not the “disorder” itself. Drunk with victory, you might see the arc of history pointing to the complete liberation of all categories of supposedly “mentally ill”."
Maybe you should take up your novel thesis about when gay liberation happened with him.
My point is that nothing Scasz advocated had anything like as disastrous effects that gay liberation had, unless you think 100,000s of people gruesomely dying isn't bad or something.
Wait, doesn't Uganda have the death penalty for homosexuality and a huge problem with AIDS nonetheless?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6307011/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/ugandas-new-anti-gay-legislation-includes-death-sentence-for-in-some-cases
I don't see how Uganda cracking down on homosexuality in the 2020s is pertinent to whether Gay Lib resulted in the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. and western countries.
However, since you brought it up, Africa is the one continent where straight people who aren't smackheads get AIDS at high rates. There are various reasons for this, but one of the reasons *might* be that straight Africans are just less strictly straight. It will be interesting to see if Uganda's crackdown on homosexuality has an unexpected influence on AIDS transmission.
I don't think AIDS was a result of gay liberation anywhere. I was born in the US in '89 and I remember homosexuality still being pretty taboo in the 90s. The liberation project didn't really gain traction until the '00s in my experience.
Very anti-homosexuality nations still having AIDS problems bolsters the idea that gay liberation doesn't cause AIDS epidemics.
This is just very strange. The article you are commenting on refers to the progress made in gaining toleration for gays in the 1960s and 70s, taking it as a given fact that it happened. And yet, when faced with the also obvious fact that this caused AIDS, suddenly gay lib never happened until the 00s.
In 1960, if you opened you opened up a gay bar anywhere in the U.S. cops showed up and shut it down. By 1970, there were 100s of them. And then AIDS happened. AIDS in western countries has always been and still is a disease of homosexuals and intravenous drug users. The only other significant group of people in western countries who ever caught AIDS were people receiving blood transfusions, but this was solved by stopping homosexuals from giving blood. (Despite an ongoing campaign by homosexuals for their human right to give haemophiliacs AIDS, this ban is still in force in most western countries, so I guess you can say in that sense gay lib still hasn't happened and some future commenter will claim it didn't *really* get started until the 2030s.)
If gay lib caused AIDS in the US, what caused AIDS in Africa?
It is not in dispute that AIDS in the US began among homosexuals and that an absolute majority of people with AIDS have always and continue to be homosexuals. It is also not in dispute that this happened straight after it became much easier for homosexuals to have sex with each other. So the better way to phrase your question is "why in western countries is AIDS a gay disease, but in Africa lots of straight people have it too?". The three non-controversial explanations are as follows:
1) One reason gays have more AIDS in western countries is that gays have an order of magnitude more sexual partners, on average, than straights, but in Africa straights have a lot more sexual partners than in the west.
2) One reasons gays have more AIDS in western countries is that anal sex is 2 [!} orders of magnitude more likely to give you AIDS than normal sex, but in Africa there is a preference for 'dry sex ' (google it, if you must) which causes tears and bleeding in a similar manner to anal sex.
3) In the west, most straight people who get AIDS are intravenous drug users, and in Africa more people use intravenous drugs, and the standards of hygiene are much lower.
However, I don't think that quite explains the discrepancy, so I will dip my toe into some more controversial waters. AIDS is caused by HIV, but it's actually quite hard to get HIV if certain risk factors are not present. Specifically, the average gay man in the US (a) has upwards of a dozen parasite and bacterial infections over the course of his life as a result of exposure to fecal matter and (b) takes a lot of drugs, especially poppers, at least in his 20s. However, in Africa, simply drinking water exposes you to a lot of infections, and there is a lot of really dangerous drug use, including sniffing glue and, rather shockingly, catalytic converters. So, in short, being an African is, from the perspective of bodily insults, kind of like being an American homosexual.
Lots of good, common sense, here (as usual).
On a general note, it seems to me that some people (particularly those who lean a bit social-ist), often see “social” as damning criticism and a mic drop. As if something is necessarily suspect if it can be shown to be “just” a social thing. It looks a lot like the mirror image of the naturalistic fallacy (that “natural” = “good”).
While I think it can be really helpful to understand something like disability (or mental illness or the economy or race or gender or...) as a social phenomenon, that should not be the end of the reasoning: “X is just a social construct, therefore it’s okay to simply reject it and condemn society for it.”
In a larger context, I don’t think anyone would disagree that “social” is mostly a good thing. It implies sharing, collaboration, agreement, negotiation and compromises, getting along, civility, tolerance, and certain concessions to practical realities. In short: give and take. Usually in tension with others and the environment.
So, I would like to reframe how some of these things are often presented:
If X is socially constructed, then flat-out rejection of X is anti-social behavior.
There may be a time for some (disciplined) anti-social behavior, but most of the time, it’s as unwelcome and unhelpful as it sounds. The socially acceptable way to run with the “it’s social” argument is to use it to start, not end, the conversation: “X is in part a social construct, therefore it can be changed and improved upon. How can we do that together, and how can we do it faster?”
It’s great if anyone wants to change the culture and society for the ever more perfect – even when it pushes people out of their comfort zone. But unlike what some seem to think, the changes can’t be dictated by anyone, even when those who want to dictate are experts, or particularly deserving individuals, or powerful special-interest groups, or armies of white knights and Don Quixotes.
Instead, I think the loudest and most adamant voices demonizing the rest of us for social oppression and exclusion would do good to remember that social phenomena aren’t just unavoidable, but usually good, and that the best way to change the culture and society is to be more social (as opposed to anti-social): Listening as well as speaking, making suggestions not demands, giving examples not orders, negotiating and navigating societal realities, giving and taking, and so helping new and more helpful social constructs evolve.
Navy soldier here. I’d like to elaborate on the “person who uses a wheelchair aboard submarine” thing.
First, I served on an auxiliary, on which lack of space is less of a problem than on e.g. frigates or submarines. We had wide corridors and elevators. It still wouldn’t work. For a million reasons: the elevators aren’t always in use (e.g. during heavy seas, or in the event of a fire), the ship’s compartments are separated by hatches where a wheelchair couldn’t get through, etc etc. How would they even get up the gangway? (Granted, I can come up with technological solutions to that last one – but would they work ship-to-ship? Not every harbour is big enough for every ship to be moored directly on the quay. Also, would the wheelchair-accessible gangway take longer to set up than the standard one? If yes, then when the ship is returning home after several months at sea and the families are waiting on the pier, everyone else will hate you.)
Second, every person aboard a warship has additional jobs in addition to their main role. For the troops, that’s mostly stuff like cleaning and, in pandemic times, disinfecting, but more importantly, your role in the event of fire/water breach/NBC alarm/general alarm (crew to action stations). I cannot come up with roles that most people with disabilities could sensibly fill in one of these events. Which is the reason there are physical requirements, more so than any inconvenience caused by accommodations that could be made to make everyday life aboard warships more accessible. “Can get from port A to port B” isn’t the standard warships have to reach, even though it’s what most warships do, most of the time. It has to be useful in wartime.
I agree with Scott’s point and I get what it’s like to really want to do something like serve in the Navy. For transparency’s sake, I also had to jump through various hoops and provide additional doctor’s assessments for nine months before the German Navy accepted me (though in my case it was the psych eval they were worried about). I wouldn’t have wanted to be there unless I had the confidence that I could pull my weight. That’s not just due to a sense of honour, or maybe fairness. Life aboard warships is already hard enough; you don’t want to be that person who’s not pulling their weight.
An interesting text to read alongside this one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/
Too bad it opens with a mistaken take on Robin Williams.
Somewhat tangential, in the US military only members of the Army refer to themselves as soldiers; the Navy has sailors/seamen.
You clarified later that you were in the German Navy, so terminology (especially considering translation) would plausibly differ, but there's enough stolen valor in the US that many veterans wouldn't have made it past the third word of your post before accusing you of the same. I'd suggest maybe leading with more specificity (e.g., "German Navy soldier") to avoid having to deal with that.
Wow, I didn't know that, thanks!
In Germany, all people in the military are called soldiers, though there's the more specific term 'Marinesoldat', (literally 'Navy soldier') so I always used that to self describe without knowing what you said. Come to think of it, the US naval bases I've been to always have some kind of poster like "Welcome Sailors" but I never questioned it. Also, I kind of thought that 'seaman' was specifically a low ranking Navy soldier, as in 'Able Seaman'. Thanks for saving me from putting my foot in my mouth!
Regarding stolen valor- I could kind of guess from context what that meant, but I googled it to be sure. It's not a thing in Germany. As in, I've literally never heard of it. (I would make a joke about losing two world wars here, but I can't think of a good one.)
Having been in the service just isn't seen as positively here, so it makes no sense for someone to lie about it. Though the reverse does happen - soldiers in uniform get free train travel here (partly as an effort to increase visibility and improve public perception), but I have plenty of comrades who prefer to pay for the regular ticket rather than having to deal with passing e.g. Berlin central station in uniform.
If you don't mind my asking, I'm moving to the UK soon, so would "I used to be a German Navy soldier " be correct or would another term be better? Seaman/sailor sounds like it might be US specific.
Again, thank you!
Not "soldier". I think sailor or seaman would be better, or just "I used to be in the German Navy". Your question made me realise I don't actually know myself! (UK-based, but not any form of military).
Thank you!
I was in the US Air Force, so my understanding of the distinction between "sailor" & "seaman" is tenuous at best.
"Navy soldier" would probably be fine in person if you don't sound like a native English speaker (most would correctly chalk it up to language differences); in accentless writing (as here), the specification of German could serve the same purpose.
ETA: upon further reflection - especially since it's coming from German - "Navy soldier" may be misinterpreted as a literal translation of a compound word equivalent to "Marine". Not the same kind of issue as disbelieving you in the first place, but still a plausible issue that could be avoided by more idiomatic than literal translation.
Thank you!
I have an audible accent and don't really look like someone who served in what in German would be called the Navy Infantry. Thanks for pointing out the issue though.
ETA: it seems like I can no longer edit the original comment. I'll pay attention to this in the future.
Scott I don’t think debating with retards like these is the best use of your considerable talents.
The “social model” is fake and not worthy of this level of engagement
"The model says that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their impairment or difference."
Is this the reification of a teen's response to a sarcastic dad who said "oh, yes, it's the world that's the problem, not your behavior"? I appreciate looking at the world through different lenses but this one is bonkers.
I didn’t ever understand this until I became disabled myself. I had to leave my clinical NHS job because I was unable to work a conventional job - 9-5, office-based, with a commute. This was pre-pandemic and there were few alternative options. My employer (understandably) told me they could not accommodate my level of disability that meant I would need shorter days and time spent lying down. Nobody could. I was facing a lifelong dependency on disability benefits.
Instead I launched my own business and within a year had a wildly successful, multi-six figure enterprise. From my bed. With exactly the same level of disability as before. In a world where we’re used to measuring worth and value via financial contributions, it was wild to go from “you can no longer contribute to society” to “you’re now a top 1% earner and the BBC keep phoning you up”.
But my body was never the issue; the conventions and infrastructure were.
If every human was born with the same level of physical ability that I now live with, everything would be shaped differently and it wouldn’t be a handicap. As a statistical outlier, I of course accept that the world isn’t built like that. But suddenly you start to realise that it’s not really the abilities and limitations of anyone’s specific body that define what they can do in the world. It’s the level of accessibility and our adherence to conventions and ‘one size fits all’ structures that define who does and does not get to participate.
I absolutely agree with all that - in my own much smaller example, I am pretty tall and very broad shouldered (and varying levels of broad-waisted), and there are lots of things that just aren't made for someone like me - restaurant chairs, cars, airplane seats, auditorium seating (my nemesis), etc. But the Social Model says that I should feel empowered to demand others change their lives and bear the costs of things to make me more comfortable. If all the chairs were built for me they would be way too big for most people 🤷♂️
Taken as an internal motivation (I need to do whatever I can with the abilities I have in the environment I'm in) this is healthy and good. But when it's morphed into an external expectation, it becomes a weird political project that makes demands of others that I'm uncomfortable with.
Yeah, there’s nuance, of course. But I do believe on a fundamental level that a fair society should strive to allow all humans to enjoy the same level of accessibility to essential services and practices. If we have the technology and resources, it feels unethical to not.
If you pay the same for a plane ticket, as a customer, should you not be able to demand the same level of accommodation and comfort that less tall passengers enjoy? I think you should. The law talks a lot about “reasonable accommodations” where disability is concerned, and while imperfect, it seems this often works out. IMO it would be entirely reasonable for you to demand the airplane appropriately seats you with extended leg room, or stops selling seats to people they cannot properly accommodate. If everyone affected did so, perhaps they’d stop squeezing people in like sardines in a can.
While I take your point about the political impossibilities, the only alternative is to say that disabled people should change their lives and bear the cost for the comfort of the able-bodied, which seems to be prioritising the more privileged. Disabled people already face increased costs of living, poor access to health, work and social activities, etc. Where is the line between ‘just catering to the most common denominator’ and discrimination? It’s a messy one to parse.
"If you pay the same for a plane ticket, as a customer, should you not be able to demand the same level of accommodation and comfort that less tall passengers enjoy?"
Seems like a strange example and something that isn't obviously true. What would such an accommodation be like? And why should such a tall person be entitled to it just because they paid a standard ticket price?
Let’s say you were so tall you literally couldn’t fit into one economy seat. Let’s say you are also too poor to afford business class where you could fit, but you can afford the economy seat. And you in the business class seat gives you the same legroom as an economy class ticket, ie you would have an equal experience to an average-height person in economy. You get no other special advantages, just now all passengers now fit equally. Wouldn’t you want to not have to pay extra simply because of your genetics? Wouldn’t it be a big kindness if we could help people like this? Wouldn’t we all be happier if we lived in a world where we did it have to worry about that?
the devil is in the details, ceteris is never paribus, etc., etc.
Two quick points: I see no reason that would be the duty of the airline to accommodate rather than via some other mechanism (perhaps the government pays for a better ticket). I also don't see "equal experience" as an obviously laudable (not to mention feasible) goal; down that road lies the Mankiw height tax.
As to weight issues, we already live in the world you imagined. Everone can take the same luggage mass and pays the same for excess luggage no matter what their body weighs. Except for small private planes, I think.
Well, because you pay for safe and comfortable travel to your destination. That’s what is sold to you. There’s nothing in the t&cs that says “btw, if you’re over 6 foot you’re going to have to fold like a pretzel, so forget those first two lol”.
If you or I, as (presumably) non-tall people got to our seat and found this was required, and that there was ludicrously insufficient leg room for our standard anatomy, we’d be rightfully irate. So why shouldn’t a tall person be?
Why shouldn’t a disabled person be, in an equivalent circumstance?
That doesn't seem correct. You pay for a specified seat on a plane. I don't think "comfortable" is guaranteed (surely we've all been on enough flights to know that isn't the case). If I bought a ticket and they told me I had to stand in the bathroom instead, I think I'd have reason to be angry, but if I bought a ticket and the seat was like every other seat on the plane and like every other seat I'd bought a ticket for previously, I don't think I'd have any reason to complain regardless of my height; I knew what I was buying, and I got it. The airline is selling a product, and I don't see how that's the airline's fault if I can't consume that product comfortably.
I think that this is a nice idea in some ways. The reason that I hate it is because of the inevitable result that short people would get less legroom than they do now.
Which seems silly until you look at the US school system.
Perhaps this was not a universal experience, but at my school there was at times a clear expectation that the highest performing students would put in additional work to help the lower performing students. I am normally happy to do this, but when it becomes a tool to take away advanced courses, it becomes a problem. This overall philosophy that everyone should get the same level of education in school can result in the active deprevation of resources from students. Now, thankfully my school was willing to listen to reason when all the parents yelled at them, which made it merely bad for me instead of the hellscape that other commenters sometimes describe. But it does suck, and result in a shitty time sometimes. Idk that there's a good result, but certainly at times I can feel the appeal of "give people cash and let them prioritize spending it as they want."
I've been on both sides of this. I suffered from some pretty severe spinal degeneration in my 30s, and though it proved to eventually be treatable, the treatment was multiple lumbar interbody fusions that have left me with a permanently reduced range of motion, persistent stiffness, fatigue if I ever have to sit or stand for any extended period of time. I couldn't drive for a long time. It made it hard to work any kind of regular office job, but luckily when I still did, my employer and line of work was pretty accommodating, allowing me all the breaks I needed to go lay down and decompress, but I still couldn't work while doing that. Work from home has been a godsend in that regard and I can't imagine ever going back at this point. It has enabled to me to remain a productive high-income earner, but relies upon telecommunications infrastructure existing and a culture that allows people to work in a distributed manner.
On the other hand, before all the treatment, when I was just living with vertebrae grinding against each other because the discs had permanently lost all fluid volume, that was not the same nature of disability. That was incredibly debilitating, brain-frying, nonstop chronic pain. It was innately bad. No conceivable accommodation could do anything to improve quality of life in that state. Only the hope of eventually getting better even made it worth continuing to live at all. Since I couldn't do much of anything back then, I did find myself gravitating at times to disability support and advocacy communities on the Internet and strong believers in this social model definitely existed and made me feel pretty alienated. The idea that anyone could ever possibly want to live in the state I was living in, regardless of how human societies structured themselves, was insulting. I wanted to yell at some of these people to stab themselves in a nerve center and twist the blade, all day every day for the next year, and tell me that experience is only bad because society is making it bad.
I’ve always considered the social model as applying strictly to physical disability, but this is an important point.
Pain and brain fog are disabling in a way that cannot be captured by the social model. Learning disabilities too, and perhaps some mental illnesses. And many - perhaps even the majority - of disabled people are living with one or more of these factors alongside their PD.
Maybe the ability to cope with bad stuff should be considered like intelligence: unevenly distributed, not easily modified and quite predictive for life outcomes.
Are you planning to flesh out the Interactionist model more? I think that’s where I align although I also think of ability/disability as relative scales and contextual in an ultimate sense. I would be less abled than a person who could see Dark Matter in general, but more abled in a scenario where their ability to see Dark Matter would distract them from a task where only seeing regular matter was the most important.
Also just to be that guy, The Social Model is a justification for every progressive fever dream piece of legislation mandating more and more expensive demands on property owners to satisfy some abstract vision of an imaginary just society. Using the Social Model I can explain why we NEED the Green New Deal and to retrofit homes not only for clean energy but accessibility. It turns out the real pandemic was lack of accessibility, et cetera, ad nauseam
I don't think Caplan regards it as "fine" to use drugs and that society should stop stigmatizing it. Rather, he thinks that addiction is an excuse used by people who want to use drugs (or drink) and society shouldn't take such excuses seriously.
He's a libertarian, I'm pretty sure that means he's in favor of drugs...
He opposes laws prohibiting drugs, that doesn't mean he favors the actual taking of them.
Ah, the boring kind of libertarian. Noted.
He is ok with normal drug use:
https://betonit.substack.com/p/abusers-give-vice-a-bad-name
Most of that post is about how society is too soft on addicts.
Yes, and how casual drug users are unfairly stigmatized for the drug problem.
It seems like he is ok with moderate drug use and would like to stigmatize only abuses
Moderate users are less extreme, while it is the addicts who cause most of the problems (Mark Kleiman would agree on that, but then he also regarded the alcohol industry as a bad outcome to be avoided with other drugs in the process of decriminalization). Alcohol is more acceptable and considered less deviant, and we can look at what he says about that. He does not drink, as he's not persuaded that even moderate drinkers have better outcomes than non-drinkers:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/04/should_i_take_t_1.html
He says "alcohol has obvious negative side effects", not qualified by it being only for cases of abuse, but that "Depriving drinkers of alcohol tends to make them belligerent, making it a high-cost punishment to impose":
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2010/11/television_defe.html
The number of people who apparently quite sincerely want to live in Harrison Bergeron world continues to appall me.
People are fundamentally the same but specifically different. We are practically defined by our social and therefore our moral nature.
Modern society has excelled at creating divisions by providing overwhelming incentives to view each other as economic units in return for social order, miraculous scientific advancement and unprecedented wealth at all levels of society. This, but at the cost of much of our humanity.
What I've described has happened, in general, in every civilization as a cycle documented since the 14th century(1) and this due to evolved human nature taking 10s of thousands of years to change however technology, that is, our control over our environment and each other(Abolition of Man, CSL) advances far more quickly.
To mitigate the harm "society" does to individuals and vice-versa we must individually choose to gradually include others in our definition and sense of 'self'. If we can agree on this can we also agree the first step is the encouragement chiseled over the entryway to the Oracle of Delphi?
Good luck to Us.
(1) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1btPKl8ynTBr32c17VfKt2mcgD_I97nUg/view
Made me think of how dominant a discourse can be that means well, but treats a situation we’re you’re not tall enough, or short enough, to reach the fruit while you’re stranded as mystically socially caused. The scurvy you’d get is because some blameable people, not the shipwreck. I thought similar things when I read an anthropologist try to make the case natural disasters were socially constructed because society doesn’t respond well enough. Not because we have yet to master tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanoes.
I get the case made as an appeal against context, but the unflinching prescriptive adherence of supposed adherents is irksome and the pretension this belief is inherently productive is distracting. Mind the contextual loam of your theories people. Once again, American shit cannot walk and chew gum at the same time, there’s a denied gum chewing gym taken from someone. America SUCKS at wisdom. (America is my stand in for who’s/whats /wheres cultures this kinda hierarchical theory/praxis fetish bc I sure as shit see it here).
I wish for decent folk....
The social model of disability seems like an example of a general phenomenon where professionals feel the need to push incredibly hard on a counterintuitive (wrong) position because the general public's common sense is wrong in the opposite way. No one with any expertise admits to supporting the medical model, but that's everyone's default assumption before they acquire expertise. So the training ends up trying as hard as possible to beat that assumption out of people to the extent that if you took it literally you'd make the opposite mistake.
Literally no-one has 'the default assumption' of the medical model as described in this article. When have you ever heard someone say there should be no wheelchair ramps anywhere in the country?
I was taught the social model in a disabilities studies class that I took last fall semester in college. I'm not sure how it is taught in other courses/activist groups but I remember that it was largely used to critique capitalism and the emphasis on productivity and labor. The idea was that if it wasn't for society's unhealthy emphasis for production and labor, there would be no such thing as disability, as disabled only meant so in the context of being less productive. I think the social model serves as one of the intuitive and easy ways to support current negative attitudes on capitalism in college campuses.
Why is it that whenever you find something that when taken at it's word would be both completely asinine and very destructive in "unexpected" and "unintended" ways it turns out a Marxist from the 70s came up with it?
It’s all in the tradition of Marx himself wanting to abolish families, lol.
I think we should abolish the ADA and let the free market decide what types and degrees of accommodations are worth building and what sorts of disabled people are worthwhile to hire for which sorts of jobs.
Please tell me this is a joke. We know exactly what degree of accomodations existed prior to the ADA thanks to the free market. All we have to do is look at what accomodations existed in 1989.
Do you have any quantitative data on pre-1989 accommodations? Also as the country gets richer, and disabled people earn more through increasingly-common remote work so that they have more money to spend in various establishments, the equilibrium amount of free-market accommodation will rise
The best I have offhand is my experience as a landscape architect who has worked, in the last few years, on dozens of retrofits on sites built before 1990 that require additional access ramps, wider walkways, and railings to bring them up to modern accessibility requirements. This is qualitative evidence, not quantitative, but physical accomodations for access buildings is literally part of my job. Most of the developers I work with want to do the absolute bare minimum legally required for accessibility and disabled people's money doesn't cross their minds, even though many people with limited mobility are part of the workforce. Even companies building affordable housing (market price dwelling units, MPDUs in the parliance of my region) want to build as few ADA accessible units as legally required, even though they are building the exact sort of units that low income disabled people are much more likely to rent.
I don't have numbers to convince you, so writing this might be a pointless exercise. But I still want to explain in broad strokes where I'm coming from.
How much does accessibility do for the resale price of the housing unit and how much does it cost to make the housing unit accessible? Maybe paying the disabled people directly might be a more efficient way to accomplish things than imposing unfunded mandates on every goods-producer to inflate the supply of goods that disabled people consume.
The Social Model is so wrong that if you didn't quote a bunch of proponents at the beginning of this article, I would have assumed it was an invented strawman. I'm hard of hearing and wear hearing aids. With my aids, I can hear most things fairly well. If people take the time and effort to look at me and speak clearly, I can understand almost everything. But I will never, no matter what technology I use or what accomodations people make, be able to hear as well as someone with perfect hearing. And the reason is 100% physical, not social - I have a physical disability that prevents me from hearing as well as the typical person.
> we wouldn’t typically say “the police caused the assault”. We would say “I caused the assault, and the police failed to prevent it.”
The problem is that many people's idea of moral causality actually is this messed up (or at least, it is when it comes to certain topics). You don't have to look hard to find people blaming politicians for making a bad but vague tweet and then one of their ten thousand followers committing violence because of it. Or calling them mass murderers for saying that COVID wasn't that big of a deal, or saying the NRA has blood on its hands because something something guns. I think for the most part, this is just people using the facade of moral reasoning to support their pre-existing policy preferences. It contributes to the modes of thinking (common among extremists) of black and white/us vs them, while also allowing them to shift blame to those who can implement those policy preferences. Kind of like suing a company or government rather than an individual person, because the former has more money, not because they're actually culpable (in fact I assume this often uses the same justification--they didn't do enough to stop it, or perhaps very slightly encouraged it).
As an academic in medical sciences this touches a few nerves. I will never forget an argument at a seminar made by a Deaf studies researcher suggesting that funding research exploring prenatal genetic intervention for congenital hearing loss was tantamount to funding the genocide of the Deaf community. Following this stuff to its logical conclusion lands you in weird places.
"It requires that we refuse to treat blind people whose sight could be restored with simple ten-minute cataract surgery" Thank you! As I was reading the quotes describing the Social Model, cataracts were the counterexample I had in mind. Thank you for covering it!
I think actually some form of the medical model is pretty much universally held in cases where we can actually solve the problem. As someone else pointed out in this thread, glasses are pure medicalism, they're literally a prescription. The correction of deformed teeth using braces, the surgical correction of cleft palates, the use of prosthetic replacement limbs, physical therapy, ear tubes, orthotic shoes. We do things to medically correct/prevent disabilities all the time, and most of them are completely uncontroversial.
I was about to write a comment that said something like, "If you have to argue this hard in favor of basic common sense, then it probably means that the people you're arguing against are so thoroughly inoculated against it that you're wasting your time".
But then I realized that this comment was bad, and I should feel bad.
Because deep down I can see that the Social Model of Disability isn't really relevant to the world of natural human relationships, where common sense applies. Rather, it's the sort of thing that results from the world of modern bureaucracy, where individuals are subject to the agents of vast interconnected institutions, whose actions are the result of policies set by obscure processes involving negotiations between countless levels and arms of authority, and in which any individual actor is incentivized more than anything to cover their own ass.
Someone once said that bureaucracy is basically unaligned AI; well, things like the the Social Model of Disability are basically prompt hacking.
Last summer I had a serious back problem. Fortunately, the problem could be treated effectively by a combination of drugs and physical therapy. I got the treatment, AND, while I was recovering, I got people to help me, and otherwise arranged things in my life, so I could avoid lifting heavy objects. I and everyone around me could see that the medical treatment and the accommodations were both patently good ideas; nobody had to appeal to any Models or Theories to justify either. But also, in my case, the treatment and the accommodations were both relatively minor and easy to obtain. My life, my livelyhood, and my basic rights were never under threat, and I never had to fight to bend the will of any institutions to get what I needed.
So again, I don't think things like the Social Model of Disability are really for human beings discussing or figuring out their lives. They're for nudging the system in a different direction. And in certain situations, for certain individuals, nudging the system is way more important.
Not the exactly the same topic, but highly relevant: https://www.thedriftmag.com/the-bad-patient/
I think this post is well argued but treats the theory within the rather narrow scope of an academic theory taught to clinicians or informing policies, when the way I've come to view the Social Model of Disability is as embodied by a broader, more roughly-defined mindset whose effects are largely, well, social. It goes hand-in-hand with the youth social movement towards SJ/"woke" ideology although isn't directly implied by the form of that ideology that blossomed ten years ago: it adds a particular bent to it where the point is people are disadvantaged by oppression and lack of privilege *only ever* in the narrow sense of privilege-as-conferred-by-society rather than as some inherent advantage. It's predicated on the assumption that no condition/trait can ever be viewed innately in a negative light (in fact, on Tumblr I've run across the mentality that a belief that Trait X is both genetic and innately bad is essentially eugenicist!). It's spread far beyond the traits that are widely classified as "disabilities", to neurotypes, mental illnesses, obesity, and other things (although there seem to still be some mental illnesses, such as depression, that are okay to consider "bad"). There is practically no such thing as an Unfortunate Condition; there is only Societal Oppression which is to blame for the hardships people suffer from certain conditions.
As others have pointed out, this mindset was around in a big way within certain particular communities (the deaf community) decades ago, but it's caught hold in a hundred more places since then and seeped into our youth culture. I first came to understand this when Stephen Hawking died and a bunch of my (very academic) friends were posting articles about how it's disgustingly ableist to portray his ALS condition and associated symptoms as bad things he would have liked to overcome, as though it's perfectly *lovely* to not be able to move like all but three of your muscles, using such arguments as "being paralyzed eventually inspired him to come up with his scientific ideas in a more geometric way, which was enriching to his research" and "when Hawking was offered a more human-sounding artificial voice, he refused, therefore not having a human-sounding voice is fine if not better than the alternative". I don't have time to try to hunt down those articles from 2018, but I hope I'm not uncharitably relating my memory of their arguments here.
I've come to see this creeping through the way younger generations view the way social interactions and society should work now more pervasively even than the original now-much-attacked oppression-olympics ideology that has come to be called "woke", and with much less explicit recognition and pushback from outsiders to the ideology. This post is a start for attacking it from the academic end, but I'd like the broader social implications of this to become part of the cultural discussion a bit more. Maybe over the next few years it will be.
As Freddie deBoer said in a very emotional video about this ideology where applied to mental illness (https://youtu.be/yKB6F_VYuZY?t=586), "What I just, I hate, I hate, I hate about modern liberal culture is, everything is not good. Some things in life are just bad. Some things are just, like, just bad, and they're not chosen, and you can't change them, and they suck, so we deal with them, but they're just bad, and they don't need to be fucking bright-sided all the time."
Aha, I found one of the articles from after Stephen Hawking's death which I was referring to above: https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-stephen-hawking-disability-rights-20180316-story.html. While some valid points can be extracted from it, I still think it's riddled with convoluted distortions of reasoning, just as I thought at the time.
Scott, I'm glad that you too recognize the importance of democratizing access to mountains. We should aim to pave routes to the summits of all peaks to enable the hitherto-gatekept vistas to be enjoyed by all. "This dream is one of unity, one where any individual can reach into the heavens, even if just for an ephemeral day trip from Denver in a rental 4Runner. One where you can purchase a hot dog and browse the wares of a souvenir shop in sparse alpine air. One where the literal heights of our society are not confined only to those with the means to reach them on their own."
https://passingtime.substack.com/p/pave-the-14ers
I think this article articulates some valid criticisms of the social model. However, I disagree with the contention that the social model is meant as literal truth, and that the people who articulated the social model in the '70s and '80s (a more accurate time frame) didn't see it as primarily a political tool. I wrote up a response here going into some of the history and looking at some early papers from back then. It's a first post, so would appreciate thoughts.
https://demogorgon.substack.com/p/contra-contra-scott-alexander-on?sd=pf
Show us in the quoted literature Scott has here where it explains that “this model is not meant to be taken literally”. These are training materials etc. that present it as fact, not as an interesting framing to consider for policy purposes.
The Social Model explains why you reject it. The fact is Society has actively abused and traumatized you to such an extent that you can' no longer understand that you DESERVE hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from the State because CAPITALIST Society has wilfully maimed your capability (vide Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, Patti Obaweyo-Golem et al) to endorse the Social Model.
By contrast, any Structural Causal Model of disability which improves organic capabilities and functionings irrespective of which Society its interventions are implemented in, can't account for why different people choose different Grievances, or allegations of fanaticism and stupidtiy, to brandish at each other. This is perfectly understandable. Politics may be supervenient on biology but is not reducible to it.
In the old days, of course, we had a Causal Model which featured God, rather than Society, because God had a lot of power whereas Society spent a lot of time starving in between getting ravaged by invaders or viruses or whatever.
Disabled people were obviously greatly loved by God because their patient suffering on Earth bought them an eternal reward. Sadly, some lepers etc. cursed God instead of praising Her Holy name and thus ended up in Hell. You too, are dearly beloved of Society which is why it has spent so much time maiming and crippling and scotomizing your understanding. That is why you won't get hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from the Government whereas I, who share your disability, will definitely be getting a check for loads of dosh any day now.
> There’s no such thing as drug addiction; people just voluntarily choose to use drugs. Society stigmatizes that choice by casting it as a disease where the person can’t control their drug use.
This is the opposite of the way modern efforts at stigmatization and destigmatization are usually phrased. The choice is more blameworthy than the nonchoice. Is Szasz working in a different paradigm where voluntarily choosing to use drugs is admirable and involuntarily doing the same thing is culpable?
I'd guess that "medical model" is what people call it when they want to disagree with it, but normally it's just not named. Like if you search for "cataracts" you don't get anybody saying "the medical model says that cataracts cause blindness" or anything else about the medical model. You just get stuff that IS the medical model: about cataract surgery rather than audiobooks and braille.
“Drunk with victory, you might see the arc of history pointing to the complete liberation of all categories of supposedly “mentally ill”. So why not the supposedly “physically ill” too? Why not liberate everybody?“
A lot of this stuff originates with overreaction to overreach and/or arrogance of authorities. I think that “drunk with victory” sentence might apply just as aptly to someone like Ron desantis, reacting to some antiscientific Covid stuff, then overplaying his hand.
So, I agree with you for the most part, but I think you missed a crucial part of the history of the Social Model that really should be mentioned (to cover off, I prefer pluralist/intersectional models mysel and would prefer that be the default hands down).
So to cover my biases. I have Autistic Catatonia and spontaneously lose cognitive and motor functions in response to stress. I also cannot feel stress. These things combined means that there is very little society can do to accomodate my disability when I am disabled. When I am not disabled, I am fully functional, have 4 degrees, and occasionally engage in game design and disability advocacy. About the only thing I can do to accomodate for my disability is not travel alone so that someone is always around to deal with things if I am crossing the road and lose the ability to walk or identify what a car is. If that can't be managed, basically I am not allowed to leave my house ever.
According to the Social Model of disability, I am not disabled. Also, blaming society achieves absolutely nothing for me.
BUT, I want to draw focus on that. Blaming society. That fundamentally is what the Social Model is all about and I feel it's important to stress that this is the entire point of the Social Model. It's a no-compromise political standpoint intended to force people to change or rethink policies. The social model plays the blame game because that's one of the most effective political strategies known to mankind. At most fundamental levels the social model is about changing how we look at disability, and it almost doesn't matter if it's right, what matters is if it forces us to address the point. Furthermore large parts of the pluralist and interactional and bio/eco/social/medical movements have evolved OUT of the Social Model, and many of your own criticisms of the Social model came out of people who were trying to improve the model.
It's worth noting that the medical model isn't a total fiction either. Aside from the fact that the medical model is more about mentality and approach to disability rather than anything else, fundamentally the medical model is an extreme that tends to be based on the way surgeons are taught - focus on the body/operation/disorder and leave the rest to the nurses, GPs and psychs. The medical model and the social model are both extremes like being political left or politically right. No one really 100% meets the definition of "left" or "right", but people do tend to look for dichotomies and lean more in one direction than the other (even if reality is infinitely more complex). Now again, I think the intersectional model is better, and the mediating tools model, and the pluralist model, and a bunch of others, but not only are these models often seen as more complex, they're often politically weak standpoints because they don't create a strong us vs them mentality, they don't cast blame, they don't provide a banner to unite around, etc., etc., but these things are kinda the entire point of a no-compromise position. By not compromising you (theoretically) force the other party to change, readjust, come up with a new position and eventually you get somewhere agreeable - or at least you create an opening for a third party to step in and take over. That is what the Social Model is about. It's not (read as shouldn't) be the dominant standpoint, but it should be about forcing people to bring these questions to the table by starting from and maintaining a position of strength. Now that doesn't mean there aren't people who don't blindly follow the Social Model to the point of stupidity, but I've met people who adhere to the medical model as a standpoint too.
Also you seem to have totally missed the charity model of disability which the Social Model is generally intended to confront also. Although I do say generally because usually it's listed as medical model first, charity model second, and frankly I'd be dead if it wasn't for the charity model even if the way it's carried out is very insulting a lot of the time (add onto this the conditional charity model and... there's a lot of depth to these arguments).
Anyway. This is something I've studied a decent amount because of the impact the Social Model, Charity Model and Medical Model has had on the Australian model, and in particular studying the history of the IDF (the former ICIDH), and a few other things. But I'm not an expert. And I'm also speaking from the perspective of a disabled Australian and not Ireland (our history with the social model mostly goes back to the late 80s at best).
To recap, the point of the Social Model is to be a political advocacy stance first and foremost. Do I agree with it? No. But it has had positive effects that may not have been achieved otherwise including the invention of pluralist/interactionist models? Yes. It has also had many negative effects, including the fact that you can't base an economic system around the social model but some people think you can for some reason (holy crap, that's a rant). But I think it's worth addressing that the point of the social model is to be a no-compromise political stance first, and like all no-compromise political stances it has flaws. But those flaws are generally considered less important by the people who are advocating it for whatever reason, if only because it invites people to fix those flaws.
Otherwise I largely agree with you, I just really feel you missed the point about the Social Model's political history and how important it has been to creating and generally improving the models we have now.
Typo? ICIDH became ICF (International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health), not IDF (Israeli Defence Forces), AFAIK.
...Look, I want to admit it was a typo, but now I just want to say I totally studied disability in the Israeli Defence Forces. :p
If there was no Society and individual homo sapiens would have to survive on their own, those with disabilities would be at a disadvantage and would prefer to not have their disability.
I feel like including this definition sort of gives the game away:
> Disabilities are restrictions imposed by society. Impairments are the effects of any given condition. The solution, according to this model, lies not in fixing the person, but in changing our society.
> Medical care, for example, should not focus on cures or treatments in order to rid our bodies of functional impairments. Instead, this care should focus on enhancing our daily function in society.
This definition already feels like a utilitarian reframing of the interactionist model.
Society and medical conditions both cause problems, we just use the words 'disability' and 'impairment' to differentiate them for clarity.
Medical care is a central part of the process, but it should have a utilitarian goal of improving function and quality of life, rather than an essentialist goal of 'fixing' 'defects'.
This puts me in your mind of 'just take the hair dryer in the car with you' story in terms of improving quality of life over solely looking for 'cures'.
If you say most people teaching the social model don't teach it in this reasonable way, I believe you.
But you frame your argument as demonstrating that the *definitions* given for the social model are bad and insane, and that the proponents do actually follow those insane definitions instead of some more moderate sensible thing people might reinterpret them as.
This definition seems sensible and good, given a charitable reading, so it undermines that framing of the argument.
"Medical care is a central part of the process, but it should have a utilitarian goal of improving function and quality of life, rather than an essentialist goal of 'fixing' 'defects'." Right, that's why there is preventive, curative and rehabilitative fields in medicine and good physicians should know where to work on to alleviate a certain problem. Ignaz Semmelweis was right to prioritise preventive measures over curative ones to save the lives of young mothers, for example. The borders are fuzzy. Many medical interventions can't resurrect healthy functionality but reduce disability, including the disability of reduced life expectancy, so their impact is really more rehabilitative than curative.
>I would respond in two ways: first, even granting this, the blind person’s inability to drive remains due to their blindness, not society. The Social Model explicitly says that all impairments only become disabilities in response to society’s choices. I only need to find one counterexample to prove its universal statement wrong.
Isn't the response just, their inability to drive is an impairment, their inability to get to the store is a disability?
The line between a "cure" and an external social support is very blurry, with glasses, prosthetics, implants etc.
Suppose you give blind people a handheld clicker, and a drug that boosts their hearing, and you train them to navigate by sonar. That's part drug, part training and part external device, working together to do something with both upsides and downsides compared to sight.
In the article linked below, student activists explain how they learned to use the “social model” to force university administrators to give in to their demands on campus. When asking nicely didn’t work, accusing the administrators of prejudice akin to racial prejudice helped them force administrators to give in. The students also call it the “minority model” in which they “reframe…disabled people as an oppressed minority.” https://library.osu.edu/ojs/index.php/dsq/article/view/4253/3593
If taking LSD and being gay and being depressed in bed all day are entirely valid life choices under the hippie social model, why isn't taking antidepressants or getting cataract surgery.
The movement seems so keen to label everything as a "valid lifestyle choice", except choosing to get medical treatment.
Dear people of earth, I would like to ask for your help in optimizing the insight of ACX. Let me explain how you can help.
It is fine to have weird beliefs (which generally make for great ACX articles), just please coordinate to avoid situations where the majority believes (or teaches) what would sound like a bad straw-person. Otherwise, Scott will feel obliged refuting these in articles with titles like "Contra the flat earth cosmological model" or "Contra the miasma model of COVID epidemiology", where the likely reader response is "Duh, that 'theory' is obviously wrong", which is my reaction to this article.
As a side effect, it will also stop me from updating towards "the universe I inhabit is a bad straw-person argument".
I can sort of get where the social model is coming from, people see society fail to accommodate people with disabilities and thus aggravate their hardship. So they decide to over-adjust into the plain silly belief that actually disabilities would be fine if not for society.
This is general bad.
If you want to raise the minimum wage, don't say a just minimum wage would be 1000$/h.
If you want to fight sexism, don't claim that the median woman would be physically stronger than the median man in a gender-equal society.
If you want to emphasize the importance of the kindergarden, don't claim that kids who don't go there will all grow up to be sociopaths or werewolves.
Contrary to common belief, each of these statements is not just a cheer for your pet cause, but has hidden within it an actionable claim about the world. If the only problem with disabilities were that society was not accommodating enough, forcibly blinding, deafening and crippling a large percentage of the population would solve the issue. If everyone is disabled, society will certainly be maximally accommodating, so the formerly able-bodied 'victims' would not be off any worse. In actual reality, disabilities suck even in societies which place a high value on being accessible, so such a policy would be utterly monstrous (just like the equivalent policy of dissuading patients with disabilities from getting medical or technological help to overcome them to whatever degree is feasible, (e.g. using wheelchairs, glasses, eye surgery, hearing aids etc)).
To avoid such unfortunate implications, try to keep your cheers general. Let us say your pet cause is dental hygiene. You could say:
a.) "Brushing your teeth three times a day is the most important thing in the world" -> Bad. This is immediately actionable and suggests prioritizing toothpaste over nutrition for malnourished people in developing countries.
b.) "Most health issues are ultimately caused by bad dental hygiene" -> Bad. It would prescribe better dental hygiene as a way to avoid most illnesses, (which to my knowledge would not actually work).
c.) "Brushing your teeth is important" -> Good. There are almost no factual claims in that statement alone which could be considered false. Lots of things can be important, so even the people who believe that daily nail trimming is more important than brushing ones teeth would have no reason to object.
The problem is that the last one is not a good signal of group membership, as it is cost-less to send. If there is a radical group of fans of dental hygiene, they probably signal membership by claiming that brushing and flossing is important than climate change, systemic racism and prevention of nuclear war. "Look, I am so invested in The Cause that I will propagate even the most laughable claims which support it."
I think the Biopsychosocial Model might be missing the factor of ... minority-ness.
Imagine a world where approximately everyone is deaf. There's no point in spending considerable expense and effort engineering machines to be quiet, no point in adding things like mufflers on cars; they can't be annoyed, hurt, or distracted by noise. (The din is probably somewhat bad for the local wildlife, but no more so than other stuff we inflict on wildlife.)
Now, imagine being a hearing person born in this world. If you go out into the countryside, or construct a special sound-proof room, you have a mild advantage - you can sometimes sense things happening behind you. Speaking, non-sign-based language doesn't exist. But being around appliances, industrial machinery, and vehicles is somewhere between annoyingly distracting and intensely painful for you, often leaving you with debilitating headaches; it's somewhat comparable to an allergy or an autistic sensory disorder.
Prosthetic ear-plugs or ear-muffs can help somewhat, simple surgery can resolve the condition entirely, and it tends to fade somewhat with time.
Is this society's "fault"? Society didn't make you unable to bear loud noises. Society could have put in the effort to soundproof or redesign every single machine, but understandably that would cost billions or trillions. This isn't like the persecution of gay people, it's not a result of stigma.
And yet... there is obviously a sense in which hearing is only "a disability" in this hypothetical as a result of "the way society is", of being a minority.
(Some disabilities would outright make a society where they're possessed by the supermajority impossible - quadropalegia, extreme schizophrenia, perhaps. Others might not offer much disadvantage to those without them if they were the minority, e.g. I think people who can walk would do fine in a society of wheelchair users, and "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" is probably correct.)
Oh, I'm indebted to Ozy Brennan for the basic idea of this hypothetical - https://wp.me/p5hiRi-ZA
Consider a society where most people have poor vision (not crippling, just bad). Everything would probably be really ugly and we might not have invented non-Braille writing, but overall the fully sighted would still have a massive advantage.
The social model of disability really wants to pretend that having 20/20 vision isn't just obviously better.
The radical version of the Social Model of Disability comes from the radical left ideology: equality of outcomes. Just like the radical version of the infamous growth mindset.
It is pointless to discuss the object level with the proponents if the meta level is so different.
I don't think people literally believe the social model of disability. At least, not any more than believe in the Caplan model. Rather, people think society has approximately the intellect of a toddler (I'm not sure they're wrong) such that the only messages about disabled people it can comprehend are "more accommodation" and "less accommodation". The social model of disability is what happens when you try to talk a toddler into supporting more accommodation. The literal meaning of the words is completely retarded, but that's because they imagine themselves to be talking to retards, proponents will say it's directionally correct.
But the social model doesn’t propose “more” accommodation, it proposes ONLY accommodation.
The most accommodation possible!
I completely agree - I'm also very critical of the social model because it's a very poor fit for my own condition, where the one thing I wish society would do most is come up with a good medical solution!
That said, let me for the sake of argument defend the pure social model. As you said long ago in a post on why PETA pulls such extreme stunts, it's because there's already an organisation in the niche of like-PETA-but-without-the-dumb-bits, and very few have heard of it. I imagine that before the social model theorists entered the debate, there were already a lot of "hey maybe we chould build a ramp to the local library" petitions and people went that's a great idea, maybe we should discuss it in a few years' time or so. Then the social-model Marxists appear and demand RAMPS EVERYWHERE! NOW! and ... by some process of Hegelian dialectic, we end up with a synthesis of a society with some kerb cuts, ramps, wheelchair lifts, the ADA, legal protections for taking service dogs everywhere unless there's a very very good reason not to, subtitles and occasionally sign language interpreters on TV, etc. etc.
What was the social model useful for? For dragging the world kicking and screaming into a state where a wheelchair user can (sometimes) shop in their local store, vote, and take the bus into town. That doesn't make the model right, but it sure made the world a better place. Personally I think that ditching the social model in favour of the interactionist one is not only true, but more useful to continue improving accomodations for disabled people nowadays (including ones who want a medical solution). I also think that the social model privileges 'nice' disabilities over 'horrible' ones, and physical over mental ones. You can require a wheelchair but still, in an accomodating society, have a good quality of life. But with afflictions like - I don't know, complex PTSD? Psychosis? Severe Anxiety? - you by definition dot no have a good quality of life, and society can do only so much about it, but medicine sometimes works really well. I pretty much endorse everything Freddie deBoer has said about his own condition and why the social model is a bad fit for that. But I'll still give the social modellers credit for putting the idea of "maybe society should sometimes build ramps rather than separate-but-"equal" off the disabled people" in the spotlight in the first place; maybe such an extreme version of the model was necessary to achieve this in the first place.
What counts as a controversy these days : D
As someone with severe disabilities, I wholeheartedly agree. The Interactionist Model is obviously correct, and what most people seem to believe. I am sick and tired of activists endorsing the Social Model, effectively declaring that my painful, debilitating condition shouldn't be medically treated.
I found it disappointing that you switched mid-paragraph from explaining how Szasz took his views too far, to explaining instead Caplan's caricature of said views (especially after the recent post where you claimed not having an ongoing debate with Caplan, which post convinced me that his views on this issue are noise as opposed to signal). If Szasz is the stronger anti-psychiatry thinker, I'd be more interested in a fair critique of that. (Do you have any long-form writings on Szasz already, by any chance?)
Edit: never mind! I parsed the subclause incorrectly.
After an admittedly brief internet skim of the topic, a somewhat notable absence from this post may be Mike Oliver, who seems to have to coined the term 'social model' and whose work, Wikipedia tells me at least, so make of this what you will, was 'widely cited as a major moment in the adoption of this model', and a 1990 paper of his on the topic paints a fairly different picture to the one you offer us from Mr Finkelstein (he does credit UPIAS's ideas for forming the basis of the model, but seems to have engaged in a bit of sanewashing).
He certainly doesn't reject treating 'the person' as a crucial element of alleviating disability, but he conceives of the role of doctors as primarily being to tackle illness, which will in turn resolve the 'disabling effects' brought on by that illness. Moreover, he does seem to basically subscribe to the 'all models are wrong...' dictum;
'The only escape for all concerned is to jointly work on the problems of disability within the parameters of the social model which while it does not guarantee a cure, nevertheless offers the possibility of developing a more fruitful relationship between doctors and disabled people'
While he does clearly view the social model as superior to (at the time) existing models, it also seems that he doesn't view it as containing some undeniable truth about society and disability, but rather a way of thinking about disability that would facilitate a better response from doctors, policymakers et al.
This is why I don't think the desert island analogy really contributes anything; the social model, at least to Oliver, seems to be a tool for describing disability as it exists now in society and for making resultant policy decisions - hence why his earliest (I think?) work to reference the model, 'Social Work With Disabled People' (1983), was orientated towards welfare/social work policymaking and social work practice. From the book;
'Disability is neither an individual misfortune nor a social problem... [it] is thus a relationship between individual impairment and social restrictions imposed by social organisation'.
This definition of disability, and his social model that accompanies it, thus simply seeks to distinguish between the fact of the 'impairment' and how that impairment manifests itself under our current system of social organisation. Either way, given Oliver's apparent influence, he seems an important counter-example to;
'The Social Model goes on to say that it’s only okay to treat disability with accommodation, not with medical cures (if you’re going to object that it doesn’t say this, please read the quoted statements from proponents above).'
Insofar as he agrees with this characterisation of his social model, it's only because he conceives of medical treatment as working through the intervening stage of treating 'impairment', which in turn can alleviate disability.
Separately, some of your quotes from proponents of the social model seem a bit weak? Especially from the first of the second set of quotes, from 'The Social Model Explained';
'But for many, the main disadvantage of living with a disability is less about their own body and more about society’s response to them'
'Many'? 'Less' and 'more'? Seems much less than an absolute declaration that all disability is societal in origin, no?
As a person with a disability (vision, coincidentally), I've been saying "it's both" to people for years when they either won't make simple accommodations or insist on removing legitimate expectations because I can't possibly be expected to do anything to help (the poor widdle dear, I can almost hear people saying). I would be furious if I learned that my doctor could improve my vision but wouldn't because society should accommodate me, just as I am furious when simple accommodations like larger print (or zoomable digital) documents aren't available "because that's your problem not our problem". Disability is more complicated than that, and different disabilities and different instances of the same disability will fall at different points in the space outlined by the biological, psychological, and societal vertices.
Some limitations are inherently medical, not societal. Your astronaut example resonated for me because as a child of the space-race era that's exactly what I wanted to grow up to be -- until I learned that the path to "astronaut" passed through "pilot" and "pilot" requires 20/20 vision which I would never ever have. But it made sense and I moved on to other things.
Society sometimes tries to overcompensate in ways that are patronizing, making the people they claim to want to help feel even worse. As an example, when I was preparing to sit for the SATs (this was in the days of paper exams and #2 pencils), having seen a practice test, I asked for a larger-print copy when taking the real one. They gave me a large-print test, a private seating, and unlimited time. I asked why the unlimited time and they said because of my vision. I said it's my eyes that don't work right, not my brain, and that's why I was getting the large-print copy. The proctor couldn't understand why I wouldn't want to take every advantage they were offering me or why I felt I didn't need it. I kept time myself since the proctor wouldn't; anything else felt unfair. I have no regrets.
At the time I'd never heard of the social model of disability, and now I wonder if I was on the receiving end of it: *I* couldn't possibly have a problem, so society must do everything possible to mitigate, even when that didn't make sense. It left me feeling demeaned, not uplifted like the creators of that policy probably intended. Fortunately, school administrators never tried to interfere with the medical treatment for my vision problems.
I feel like the social model is a useful extreme to check your thinking against at times. I find it helpful to consider abilities that every person lacks but that aren't outside of the realm of possibility in nature. Like, people can't see UV light even though some animals/ insects can. This makes the fair skinned among us liable to get sunburns and eventually skin cancer, so we invented the UV index and I check that before going outside with my shirt off or whatever. We don't understand the UV index as an accommodation, though. I imagine the point of the social model is, at least partially, to make the point that we are all constantly accommodating and being accommodated in these kinds of ways, and the point of that is to diffuse the arguments of some who want to refuse to accommodate disabled people for one reason or another. Obviously there are times when it makes sense to not build accommodations, like the ramp up Everest. Then again, there are times when accommodations are essentially costless but people still don't like them. I've heard of many professors refusing to let students record their lectures, for example, even if they have something like an auditory processing disability and it would be helpful for the student to play the lecture back at .75x speed.
“I feel like the social model is a useful extreme to check your thinking against at times.”
Essentially all the defenders of the model here are saying this. But none of the people/organizations quoted by Scott are saying “oh by the way we don’t REALLY mean this literally, this is a thought experiment to refine your thinking”. They just state it bluntly as fact and mayyybe retreat to “useful extreme” if pressed (or let you do that for them).
This is fundamentally dishonest. If what you mean is “we often too quickly leap to medicalizing all disabilities when sometimes they might be created or exacerbated by social conventions instead - try approaching things from the assumption that they are usually social, and see what you find out”, don’t say “Individual limitations are not the cause of disability. Rather, it is society’s failure to provide appropriate services and adequately ensure that the needs of disabled people are taken into account in societal organization.”
Yeah to be clear I wouldn't put myself alongside any organization explicitly endorsing this as a matter of policy. I think it's an interesting *idea* to think about and gin up hypotheticals around to test ones own assumptions and ideas, but a bad basis for, like, doctors to operate from.
Maybe. Sounds like psychological speculation. 7
Not to be devil's advocate, but it would seem to me that there are a few conditions for which the social model of disability makes sense. I'm thinking mainly of short stature (as in, being between 135cm and 155cm, say) - and would say the same of being very tall, only one doesn't need to say anything about it, as somehow it is not *seen* as a problem (although it involves much of the same lifelong inconveniences as being of short stature: things not being designed for you, stares, etc.).
Of course, again, any sort of dogmatism doesn't help. Robert Reich makes sense (to me) when he says:
"From time to time, worried parents of abnormally short children phone or email me, seeking reassurance. I tell them what I’ve told you, just now.
I also tell them that if they or their children are desperate, they can resort to limb-lengthening surgeries, growth hormone treatments with unknown and potentially dangerous side effects, humatrope, and a wide variety of homeopathic or crank remedies.
But I gently urge them not to do any of these things. I tell them to love their short kids. Inundate them with affection, and they’ll be okay."
- but Messi's parents obviously did the right move when putting Messi on growth hormones! I'd also imagine that the right dosage of growth hormones is better known by now; they've been used for more than a generation.
(There are very real health problems - other than short height - that come with Reich's condition, and it would be wonderful to prevent those. There are also inevitable health problems that essentially *have* to come with being extremely short or extremely tall - that's basically engineering. In principle, though, you can be of Reich's height and completely healthy, as plenty of pygmies will tell you.)
A bit off topic, but someone out there might find this interesting...
My dad worked in brain injury rehabilitation. One of the main thrusts of his career was moving the field away from a "medical" model, where patients were given mental exercises to get their neural systems back in shape. (Roughly analogous to physical therapy, where patients are often prescribed stretches, lifts, etc.)
What he advocated for was a kind of social approach, but very different from what Scott describes here. Rather than saying society at large is obligated to accommodate a patient's impairment, he worked with patients and the people around them (family, therapists, etc) to find strategies to help the patient lead as normal of a life as possible in their particular case.
If this has anything to do with Scott's post, maybe it's highlighting one of the tricky dimensions at play. That is, some impairments are quite common (blindness, loss of limbs). Some are either less common, or express themselves in more idiosyncratic ways. The more common an impairment is, the more reasonable the social model (the weaker/common sense version) is.
This is another post à clef about transsexuals, isn't it.
I found Unspeakable Conversations, by Harriet McBryde Johnson, useful for getting insight on the Social Model from the perspective of one of its advocates. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/unspeakable-conversations.html
Her take on her own disability, a congenital neuromuscular disorder that left her unable to walk, bathe, or dress without assistance, was that she could not say it had made her life "worse", given that she had never lived without it. Her condition didn't distress her; it was just the way life was.
It would be absurd to claim that disabilities don't inherently limit capacities; what Social Model advocates claim is that it is a consequence of social context which limitations are generally considered *problems*. Humans can't fly (without machines), but we don't consider our flightlessness a *problem*, just a fact of life.
If all humans were deaf, we would likely consider the inability to hear a simple "part of the human condition", not a problem. (Maybe we'd invent artificial ears; maybe some transhumanists would dream of a future where we would be genetically enhanced to have sound-perceiving senses; but society probably wouldn't prioritize this very urgently.) Some all-deaf communities are already living in this context, where people can go through life without encountering situations where the fact that they can't hear presents itself as particularly frustrating or unfortunate.
Your example of a blind person on a desert island seems to misunderstand the social model. The blind person is just as blind on the island as she would be in society; but she might not *mind* that she's blind. Yes, counterfactually, if she could see, she could do more things; but if she has never heard that humans are "supposed" to have sight (or has been alone so long that she no longer compares herself to other humans), she might consider it a silly counterfactual, no more worth thinking about than the counterfactual world where she could fly like a bird.
An impairment is only *distressing* in itself if it violates expectations -- if a person wanted to be able to do something, but cannot -- or, perhaps, if it is itself a disorder of the distress machinery, as with depression or chronic pain.
An impairment is also only a cause of *socially recognized* dysfunction if society considers it sub-normal. If all people used wheelchairs, there would be no valued professions (like admirals) from which wheelchair users were excluded. We'd either have wheelchair-using admirals or no admirals, tautologically.
Insightful post! Thanks for sharing. I'm going to nitpick on this specific line you made:
"but if she has never heard that humans are "supposed" to have sight (or has been alone so long that she no longer compares herself to other humans), she might consider it a silly counterfactual, no more worth thinking about than the counterfactual world where she could fly like a bird."
Would I be wrong in assuming that humans are "supposed" to have sight given that almost every human (including people who are blind) is born with dozens of brain structures and organs very clearly designed for sight? If a person takes damage to some visual pathway, they become blind but still have a biological body with many other faculties evolved for vision. Why am I wrong to believe that they were "supposed" to see?
I feel like this is the motte version of the Social Model. I can find nothing to disagree with in this, and yet I don't feel that it captures the "all so-called disabilities are society's fault and society is bad for not fixing these problems before they arose" aspect, as described here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-the-social-model-of-disability/comment/20828354
I, like a lot of disabled people, agree with Scott’s arguments and conclusions here. But Scott’s characterization of the Social Model’s supposed omnipresence within contemporary discourse jibes with my own experiences.
From my own observations of the subject in academia, I believe the Social Model is currently something of a bête noire among disability researchers, and has been for quite some time. I have not seen a recent disability studies paper for cite it without immediately disclaiming, qualifying, or justifying it. Entire branches of contemporary Disability Studies, like Critical Disability Theory or Disability Justice, define themselves in opposition to it. Its chapter in the introductory text The Disability Studies Reader (Ed. Davis) is mostly a long criticism of it, ending on this damning claim that “the Social Model has now become a barrier to further progress.” These are not signs of a popular, dominant paradigm, to say the least.
The problematic separation between “impairments” and “disabilities” have been roundly criticized in disabled circles since the early ‘90s, as a more diverse cohort of activists (the members of the UPIAS were mostly mobility/physically disabled) pointed out that some impairments, like chronic illness, are going to inhibit full participation from society even without any externally imposed barriers. Even the strongest recent argument I’ve seen for a full-fledged Social Model (Mike Oliver’s “The Social Model in Action: if I had a hammer,” available online here https://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/library/author/oliver.mike/) has to concede that the Social Model isn’t a model, isn’t even a coherent theory of disability, but a useful “practical tool” for eliciting political concessions (as another example of his pragmatistic view of the model, Oliver notes that medical and rehabilitative interventions in the lives of disabled people are still useful).
Scott is right, however, to point out that popular discussion of disability has really stuck on to the Social Model past its shelf life; the American Psychological Association and UCSF badly need to update those pages. While medical organizations should not uncritically cite the social model without emendation, the activist orgs Scott cites I assume are drawing from Oliver’s perspective, and foregrounding the Social Model as a beginner-friendly training wheel into larger debates about Disability. Such a method isn’t without precedence, one can think of how LGBTQ groups still talk about how “sex/gender is to nature/culture” eons after feminist academics have jettisoned that maxim. I think any arguments against this practice among activist groups needs to take place on rhetorical grounds rather than rational ones.
https://peterplantinga.substack.com/p/contra-scott-alexander-in-contra
"Caplan says that we shouldn’t medicalize certain conditions, because it's possible in theory for individuals to overcome them, so they must just be choosing not to so, so it's all their fault."
"not to so, so" seems like a typo. I assume you intended "not to do so, so" or "not to, so"
What about cochlear implants on perfectly normal deaf babies? Society makes us disabled because they value auditory communication.