So the medical model (thesis) that Mrs Grundy believes in is at the bottom of the barberpole, the social model (antithesis) is in the middle and the interactionist model (synthesis) is right at the top being discussed by academics.
Sounds like pretty normal trendyness-dialectics to me.
> I tend to agree, physical disabilities are “mere difference.” There is nothing inherently better about being sighted versus being blind.
I have a blind friend who would be the first to tell you otherwise. The thought experiment about "civilization designed for" blind people can jump right out the window, because before you can even begin to design a civilization you have to get past a bunch of earlier steps. And out in the uncivilized natural world of prerequisites, a sighted person has any number of advantages.
Just for starters, let's take one of the most fundamental attributes of animal life, locomotion. I can walk much more quickly than my blind friend. Not because I'm particularly stronger or more physically fit than her, but simply because *I can see where I'm going,* whereas she has to take special care to not run into things or trip over them. By any measure, that's an inherent, objective advantage.
I, for one, am willing to go directly to "capability is always inherently and objectively better than incapability" and die on that hill¹.
People tell me that this isn't even the Medical Model of Disability, it's the Cavil Model of Transhumanism, to which I find invariably myself replying "So? It seems trivially obvious to me that it would be a better world in which everyone could perceive the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and smell dark matter too, while we're at it. Engineers, go to."
1. Albeit with a small side valley labeled "Except for people who conflate capability and moral worth, who should please not talk to me kthx."
Oh, definitely. One person being physically superior to someone else is a simple, objective matter; being morally superior is an entirely unrelated value judgment.
Thank you Bob Frank. Advanced societies based on humans with mostly no vision, hearing, legs, or capability to stay conscious? It's an interesting thought experiment if it could get past evolution, nature, and reality. It doesn't. After 150+ years of tripping over Marxist inspired thought it's time to be more deeply suspicious of the magic realism that it so often appeals to.
It's a fair point, and one I should probably have thought of myself. (As mentioned back in my own post, I suspect my light-sensitivity, although of different origin, qualifies as a varietal.)
On the other hand, I think there is some valid logic-chopping one might do on the extent to which a capability which causes you harm, or pain, or which you simply can't process the data from/to qualifies as a capability at all. I mean, I would *love* to be able to get that much information about the texture of fabric, or gather aromas as well as my dog, or hear pins drop a street away, *if* I could actually understand it and filter it without it breaking my brain.
So maybe the correct perspective here is that it's not the enhanced senses (per se) that are the disability, but the sensory processing deficiency that flips them from useful to stressful/painful?
I think there's a meaningful distinction between having a sense and having hypersensitivity, this specific arguement feels like responding to someone with an insensitivity to pain by pointing out how bad chronic pain is - both are bad actually, I prefer to have normal human pain sensitivity, even though this is the sense that people most strongly wish they didn't have! (Being immune to pain does sound like a superpower, until you realise it's why the limbs of people with leprosy get infected and need amputating)
As I recall, the life expectancy of people who have CIPA, essentially complete pain-immunity, is estimated at somewhere around 25 even if they're extremely careful about trying to fill the gap with other senses.
But I think the point is that what counts as "hypersensitivity" rather than "normal" rather than "deficiency" is going to be determined in large part by the environment you live in. There is no objectively correct level of sensitivity to have to various stimuli, independent of environment.
Wait, hang on. Hypersensitivity, as a disability, is essentially defined as "that level of sensitivity which causes people having it to suffer stress and pain".
The objectively correct answer here would seem to me be "all of the sensitivity you can have that doesn't do that".
(The objectively correct meta-answer is "basically, we should fix things such that even always-on perfect omniscience doesn't do that, because being able to effectively handle arbitrarily large quantities of arbitrarily complex input is a really awesome superpower everyone should have".)
Which we fix by defining "sensory hypersensitivity" as a disability that, ideally, can be engineered/medicalized out of existence (either by better senses or by a better brain).
Do those with hypersensitivity perform better on quantifiable metrics than neurotypical people? If not why categorize it as a capability when it isn't?
I took CleverBeast to be saying that it’s hard to define “capability” outside of a specific environmental context. Maybe a counterexample to the desert island thought experiment would be the subterranean world of the Morlocks or drow or whatever. Like blind cave fish, maintaining the ancestral trait in the new environment would be expensive in evolutionary terms, perhaps to the detriment of developing compensatory adaptations like lateral lines, echolocation, or other novel senses.
I think my response there would be that evolution is, by definition, a blind idiot designer that will cling to whatever local maxima it stumbles into.
Situationally, sure, if you're living in Morlock country *and* you have a limited budget of whatever to work with, then you may be better off throwing vision away if you develop some superior local adaptation.
But in the non-local big picture, where the environment is the Universe (one cannot stay in Morlockville forever!), it's optimal to have vision and echolocation and electroception and whatever else your cunning little brain can gin up, 'cause that way you can hang with the Morlocks and the Eloi and whoever we haven't met yet.
(Maybe this is the Veruca Salt Model of Capability.)
All/most of your statements in this thread seem to imply that trade offs don't exist, while it's quite obvious and well documented that they do, in fact, exist because while we don't exactly have stat points to be distributed, there's a cost to everything.
Do you really not consider trade offs in your thinking, or is this a thought experiment of some sort where you're not considering the idea that optimisation is typically happening under constraints?
Trade-offs determine what's possible (an is); they don't determine what's desirable (an ought).
Deciding what concessions have to be made to the annoying coquetries of [local, circumstantial] physical reality is something both secondary and posterior to deciding what is actually desirable in the first place.
If you start writing off things that you might not be able to have before you even know what you want, you will be led into error, because you will never even consider whether or not you could have had that impractical-seeming thing after all.
That's a good example. Visual processing requires oxygen and calories. We tend to assume that those things are abundant. But in some environments they absolutely are not.
This is true in the literal sense, but I still give it a lot of pushback because as an argument, I think it's both:
a) so trivially true as to be functionally meaningless. Just because there is a theoretically conceivable world in which it would be "better" to be blind than to see does not change the fact that in *this* world, that is decidedly not the case. It's like arguing about what we mean by the color orange, since on a different planet in a different atmosphere, the wavelengths of light we interpret as being orange might appear differently. So what? If we go to that planet, we can have that conversation. Until then, everybody knows what "orange" means.
b) The motte in the motte/bailey used by proponents of the social model when discussing "disabilities". If your response to "being blind is a disability" was to suggest that, well, it wouldn't be a disability if humanity had evolved to live in caves, then I would think you were borderline trolling. When discussing these things, we are generally talking about reality as it actually exists, and we should not have to qualify every statement we make by clarifying that beforehand.
Even having a debilitating, painful chronic illness may be an advantage in a world where a superintelligence tortures everyone who doesn’t have a debilitating, painful chronic illness.
If someone brought this up in the context of an online discussion of whether it is “objectively” better to not have a debilitating, painful chronic illness, I’d call it pedantry. In the context of whether or not we should try to develop cures for the illness, I’d call it trolling. In the context of whether parents should be able to deliberately cause their child to have said illness, sociopathy.
> I took CleverBeast to be saying that it’s hard to define “capability” outside of a specific environmental context.
So you define it as a ratio across all possible environmental contexts. Clearly someone sighted is more capable across a much broader range of environments than a blind person, so the capable:disabled ratio is much higher for sight than blindness. In fact, there are arguably very, very few environments where that may not the case.
I think to conclude that capability is always better than incapability, you have to be prepared to attach some significant qualifiers. There are abilities which one might have where ability to cope with them can't be taken for granted.
For instance, if you have the ability to hear people's thoughts, which you can't turn off any more than your regular hearing, and you find this stressful and disorienting, and it makes people not want to associate with you, you're probably much worse off than if you didn't have the ability to hear people's thoughts.
Even if you set aside the idea of abilities we might not be equipped to deal with, in some cases, having extra capabilities can leave you worse off from a game theoretic standpoint. If you have the power to rain down mass destruction on the scale of a nuclear arsenal, and this makes you a target for preemptive destruction because your abilities don't come with second-strike capability and your mere existence makes everyone fear for their safety, you'd probably wish you didn't have that ability.
On the former, as with the case of sensory hypersensitivity upthread, or that of the "constant awareness of stimuli" downthread, I would model those as two distinct things: the capability to hear thoughts, and the incapability of controlling/filtering it. And as in those cases, my preferred outcome of any solution to the problem is to have the former preserved and the latter removed.
If that's not possible, then we have to move to the ugly world of trade-offs, but ceteris paribus, still...
On the latter, in view of limited time this morning and an objectivity problem from recent events in my life, I'll merely reflect that in this case, as in that of Guy's similar comment in this thread, where I am living in a world where people are inclined to murder you for what you _might_ do on the grounds of ability alone, I'm gonna cling extremely tightly to my first-strike capability. Maybe even get some preemption up in that.
"Always" is problematic once you introduce other people. In Game Theory, there are plenty of examples where having a move available to you can result in a worse payoff. A sighted may be a threat to others in a way that a blind person isn't, and end up being killed, whereas the blind person is spared. In such an environment, it is objectively better to be blind.
Yes. The fact that there are multiple people quoted who apparently think that hearing has no value outside of language is bizarre. Perhaps these people are the ones I see driving or biking with headphones on. Just so we’re all clear: trying to navigate a dangerous environment at high speeds is MUCH more dangerous if you can’t hear than if you can. This has nothing to do with society, and everything to do with literally just being able to hear someone in your blind spot before you collide with them.
Is it possible that there’s an entire generation of people who have never interacted with the world outside of their electronic devices? Reading this stuff makes me think there might be.
Exactly! And even in the realm of languages, if I can see and sign, I can talk with someone in front of me. If I can hear and speak, I can talk with anyone around, even if they're behind me and have their back to me so neither of us can see the other.
The fact that animals have hearing without having language should be enough to indicate that hearing does actually have value outside of speaking to each other.
I’ve encountered this mindset multiple times in different contexts. There seems to be a cohort who don’t think that the natural world is… real, I guess? It’s not just the “social model of disability” people, I’ve also seen someone (in some sort of political anarchist context) argue that “the word ‘power’ always means power over people”. I pointed out that the use of “power” to refer to social power was in fact figurative, and that the word originally referred to physical power, ie power to affect the physical environment. This person refused to acknowledge that as the primary, or even a legitimate, use of the word “power”. He accused me of playing word games.
I often think society would be better if we made people spend a few years performing some kind of unpleasant, physically demanding task (like national service, but not -- necessarily -- in the military), just to hammer home the message that yes, physical constraints are real and meaningful, and no, abundance and comfort is not the default state of humanity.
You're missing the point, though. The contention isn't "hearing is useful." Obviously, in this society, hearing is useful. It's that, in a world set up differently, hearing would be less useful, or even not useful or somewhat harmful.
Yes, hearing is useful when you're driving. But in a society where everyone is deaf, driving isn't going to look the same as in our society.
If we all had electroception, society would be built differently. Maybe we would not touch when we shake hands, because we'd have evolved using electrical signals to determine if another person is healthy or a good mate or whatever. Maybe we'd have settled on carved potatoes for reading or something equally strange. If you were stuck in such a society, you'd be disabled.
I'm mostly blind, and had to spend a bunch of time sitting around redisigning tools so I could do my job. The issue wasn't that I couldn't do specific things because I'm blind, but that I have to interface with all this stuff created by quite different people. My way of doing things is pretty solid and for some workflows better, but I had to develop a lot of it myself, or learn how to use other people's tools that aren't always well supported. So yeah, it's a disability, but from where I'm sitting, I could pretty easily imagine doing things like construction in a less ad hoc way that would work fine for blind people. A lot of piloting and technical work is already about sensory replacement (radar/sonar/oscilloscopes), you'd mostly be using different input modalities. There's actually something weirdly ad hoc and arbitrary about a lot of sighted construction, blind people tend to go about things in a more logical way by necessity and value things that are good for other uses, like APIs and structured markup.
I know a lot of this just sounds like woo, and it's obvious that being blind is bad. I would choose to be sighted, seeing things is pretty great. But if everyone were blind there would be nothing to miss, the stuff I can't really do that I want to (mostly just playing video games) would be built in a different way, and I'd have AAA audiogames. And maybe I'd be navigating my city by pulling myself around on ropes with braille on them or whatever, and cars wouldn't be driving all over trying to run me over, it would all be trains, etc. etc.
> The contention isn't "hearing is useful." Obviously, in this society, hearing is useful. It's that, in a world set up differently, hearing would be less useful, or even not useful or somewhat harmful.
The problem is that that contention is obviously false.
> If we all had electroception, society would be built differently. Maybe we would not touch when we shake hands, because we'd have evolved using electrical signals to determine if another person is healthy or a good mate or whatever. Maybe we'd have settled on carved potatoes for reading or something equally strange. If you were stuck in such a society, you'd be disabled.
And you're illustrating a problem that was probably shared by the shockingly many commenters willing to claim that hearing would be a disability if most people couldn't do it. That example doesn't support your contention! You're saying that someone without electroception would suffer relative to someone with it in a society that assumed electroception. Everyone agrees on that.
But you've failed to make the argument that would support your actual claim, which is that someone with electroception would suffer in the world we've got, where nobody else has electroception. The obvious reason not to make that argument is that it's false. But it takes your "contention" down with it.
I think the stock response here would be to say that you could get around even faster if you could fly, but despite occasional daydreams we don't spend much time thinking about that.
I feel like deconstructing the word disability itself is handy here - it's the lack of an ability. But we lack many abilities that we don't consider disabilities. So pretty obviously, a disability isn't just the lack of an ability - it's the lack of an *expected* ability. There's some set of abilities that we consider "normal" and disability is what happens when someone is missing one of those "normal" abilities.
Where I think the social model fails is that the set of abilities we consider "normal" is not an arbitrary social construct. There is a pretty clear telos to how the human body is constructed and organized. We have legs so we can walk around, we have arms and hands to grab things, we have eyes so we can see where we're going, etc. These are all "expensive" parts and evolution would not have furnished us with them if they didn't do anything useful. In a sense the design of the human body is value-laden.
We can if we want reject those values, but I don't think most people want to. We're humans first and foremost and we value doing human things like walking around and talking to each other and picking things up. It sucks when someone isn't able to do that stuff.
I've flown plenty of times, and it most definitely is faster. Expensive and tedious, but generally worth it. I'm just glad that we've had people in our past who *did* spend much time thinking about it!
"despite occasional daydreams we don't spend much time thinking about that." - In fact people have spent considerable amounts of time designing planes, helicopters, hang-gliders, parachutes (and I still hear people yearning after flying cars).
In a way, much of humanity's history revolves around going beyond our natural abilities.
This is refreshing and well stated! Sometimes, I think the question we should ask, say, Deaf people, is not ‘Do you want to be able to hear?’ But rather ‘How would you feel if you were blind?’
This is interesting because I actually think deaf people have a fairly unique situation.
A pretty natural and normal human thing is to form communities around a shared language. To a very large extent, language = culture and culture = language.
Deaf people are unique in disability groups in having a unique language of their own, and therefore a genuinely separate and distinct culture. And I think it is super normal and natural for cultural groups to seek their own preservation across time and generations.
So I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to deaf worries about cochlear implants. Maybe not enough to actually ban them. That would amount to telling parents their children can be randomly kidnapped to fill the ranks of some totally different cultural group. But I feel like I get the visceral fear of seeing your entire culture wiped out.
I very much agree with you! I shouldn’t have made Deaf people seem like any random example when I mentioned them for exactly this reason. Many Deaf people do not consider themselves disabled at all because of the rich language, community and history they have built.
However, I would guess that your average Deaf person would see being blind, losing a limb, or having a chronic condition as being ‘disabled’
Similarly, I don’t think anyone who doesn’t have all limbs (whether born that way or otherwise) would be thrilled to also be Deaf or Blind.
Maybe this does speak to the power of ‘community’ after all? And the Deaf community can provide some guidance?
Community is obviously important. I really do think the deaf situation is qualitatively different from any other disability though, specifically because they have their own bespoke language(s) all their own. But that said, I am sympathetic to anyone who grieves for the loss of their community.
What your friend is noticing is that there's a *wide range of environments* in which having sight is much more beneficial than being blind. But one could come up with some environments though (ones that we, living in our environment, would consider "extreme" and "unusual") in which it would be a disability. It's much easier to do for senses of sound and smell, but possible for sight as well.
It's not an inherent, objective advantage, unless you assume an environment with similar amounts of light to the ones we are used to, and a good number of objects that interact in relatively simple ways with light.
<i>It's not an inherent, objective advantage, unless you assume an environment with similar amounts of light to the ones we are used to, and a good number of objects that interact in relatively simple ways with light.</i>
Given that we do in fact live in such an environment, it would seem that sight is indeed an "inherent, objective advantage".
I think you must be using "inherent, objective" in a different way from how I am. I would call this an "extrinsic, relational" advantage, because it depends on the environment, not an "inherent, objective" advantage.
Given that the places being sighted is not an advantage are purely hypothetical, I think inherent and objective advantage is quite correct. We live in this world, with these laws of physics, and this natural environment. Within every human context we have experienced and seem likely to experience, being sighted is simply better.
But even more than that, there is no environment (e.g. one where it is too bright to see and it causes discomfort) where you cannot get the full "benefit" of being blind by temporarily blinding yourself (e.g. with a blindfold), whereas there are reams of environments where being blind is a huge impediment with no workaround.
Being sighted is a _superset_ of being blind. A sighted person can become blind and become sighted more or less at will. A blind person is only blind. That is an inherent, objective advantage in every environment, even your hypothetical ones.
I think that you're assuming perfect reaction speeds. A very bright light can be stunning and painful, enough so that flashbangs are used in warfare. I'm fairly light sensitive, so when I step outside on a particularly bright day, I sometimes recoil in pain, and then navigate to wherever I'm going with my eyes pretty much closed. A blind person would navigate to wherever they are going without sight as well, but without the initial delay and pain.
I'm not claiming that I don't think that on average being sighted is better than being blind. But since bright, blinding lights donexist in the world, there are some small, clear scenarios in which a sighted person would fare worse than a blind person if they failed to predict the light.
You can't get the full advantage of being blind just by temporarily blinding yourself as sustained lack of vision causes changes in a person that take time to develop. But the range of environments were having a persistent lack of sight is an advantage are just much more narrow than the reverse. The fact that we can construct a thought experiment version of an oppressive society where sight is a disadvantage doesn't mean that disability exists only relative to social construction. Indeed, a sighted society will be at an advantage over our hypothetical blind one.
Perception is inherently relational. It's an interpretation of environmental stimuli, after all. But we can assume that the sorts of environments where visual perception are advantageous are fixed enough that we can shorten up the claim to saying vision is advantageous to have.
I wouldn't call a lack of vision a disability in a world where few if any people had it. But when most people have the power of sight, then I think it is fair to call the lack of it a form of disability. How challenging that disability happens to be is going to depend on how society is structured and what accommodations exist, but that's a softer claim than saying the disability exists entirely within social relations.
If you have to imagine up a counterfactual that doesn't match the reality we live in in order to disprove the idea that it's an objective advantage, I have to agree with Mr. X that that doesn't do much to disprove the idea. Objectivity is about reality, not wild imaginations.
> It's much easier to do for senses of sound and smell, but possible for sight as well.
Sound, maybe. Smell, not so much, because noxious smells correlate pretty well with legitimate chemical/biological hazards. Someone who can't smell nasty things and avoid them is much more likely to end up sickened or poisoned without realizing it.
Coming up with a counterfactual that doesn't match reality is precisely what it takes to prove that something is only a relative advantage, in our actual environment, rather than an intrinsic, objective advantage, that would apply in any environment.
Smell is the one where I think this is clearest - some workplaces actually do have overwhelming perfumes, or sewage scent, that makes them really hard to work in for people with unusually strong senses of smell. There are very few ways in which a strong sense of smell socially benefits people, and many ways in which it socially harms people, in our actually existing society, so that extra-strong smell actually functions in many ways as at least as much of a disability as lack of smell.
The context that initially came to my mind here is mining, with reference to assorted noxious gases and suchlike found underground, but it also probably applies to sewer work, because a lot of those become dangerous a lot more quickly than they become obvious to the stock human sense of smell.
On the one hand, sure, it makes life very unpleasant for Nick the Nose to have an unusually strong sense of smell under those circumstances.
On the other hand, when the Nose picks up those tell-tale traces of stinkdamp before they cause anosmia, poison everyone, and explode, it's going to save his life, and possibly a whole bunch of others.
Not sure I'd be willing to call that a disability.
(Also, on a brief personal-experience digression: my retinae lack normal pigmentation, which makes me unusually sensitive to light. Regular natural light, as found outdoors more or less anywhere, hurts. Sunward glances, bright reflections, and glare hurt a *lot*.
I wear dark photochromic glasses basically all the time because of this; at least I get good night vision out of the deal when there isn't a lot of glare around.
Empirically, I'm still not even slightly inclined to trade in my eyeballs for a pain-free existence.)
Yeah, in the case of Nick the Nose, I think you're imagining a social context that makes this feature have a positive function. That's precisely the point. If you imagine a society where all of the anosmia/poison/etc things were already taken care of mechanically, but cities just do garbage pickup like New York and everyone wears extra strong perfume, I think it becomes more of a disability.
And of course, disability activists will be the first to say that something functioning as a disability in a particular society doesn't mean that people would be inclined to trade it in - and not being inclined to trade it in doesn't mean that society isn't set up in a way that constitutes it as a disability!
I'm not sure I would consider it a matter of social context, myself.
After all, even in the hypothetical society in which all these things are taken care of mechanically, Nick the Nose *still* has the superpower of not getting dead when the automatic poison snoopers break down. It's a rarer positive function (which lowers its relative value), but it's still a positive function (in absolute terms).
And, honestly, having been to New York, I would find it a real stretch to consider it an advantage to *not* be aware of the godawful stench of filth all around you, because much like pain as discussed elsethread, that stench is an important signal to get the hell out of New York that you really shouldn't miss.
(Seriously. That's the smell of hanging-by-a-thread infrastructure.)
On second consideration, I suspect a major sticking factor here is that this depends in general on environmental ignorance being a positive, and I'm very strongly predisposed against finding ignorance in any context a positive.
If you were floating in a void empty of anything to sense or interact with, no hypothetical configuration of your body would be "better" than any other. In order to make any kind of statement about the quality of different bodies you have to make *some* assumptions about the environment the bodies exist in. It is reasonable (to the point of being taken for granted by about 70% of commenters) that you would assume the environment to be something like Earth pre-civilization.
Personally, I'm red-green color-blind, which means that my eyes are just like anyone else's except that they give me less information about the environment. The only scenario I can come up with where being color-blind gives me an advantage is one where I am saved from witnessing unpleasant messages written as Ishihara tests for some reason.
Yes, if we lived our eyes in total darkness or blinding light eyesight would be pointless, as many eyeless cave-dwellers are happy to demonstrate.
That said, I don't find this retort particularly convincing, the fact that all adjectives are relative to something doesn't mean they can't refer to meaningful realities in the physical world. If we could all fly I bet that someone with the inability to fly would struggle to navigate the built environment, but I still don't think I'd consider that as "society has disabled them". I'd attribute it more to a defective wing muscle, and we could still discuss ways to improve accessibility by adding stairs to public buildings, but it's never going to be able to fully make up for the capacity that person lacks.
Yeah like, actually completely one-sided strictly better differences are rare, but in most case one side is better in the vast majority of plausible situations. For example I observe that:
-In the example of a society designed by and for deaf people to be optimized for convenience for the deaf majority, I expect I would still prefer to be able to hear unless they *intentionally* went out of their way to make it hostile to hearing people.
-In the example of a society designed by and for blind people to be optimized for convenience for the blind majority, I expect that *even if* they intentionally went out of their way to make it hostile to sighted people, there's *still* a good chance they'd fail to make it hostile enough that I'd rather be blind.
-And I notice that CleverBeast didn't even *try* to convince us that being able to walk could ever be a disadvantage compared to being wheelchair-bound.
Did you know that deaf people enjoy music? The way they experience it is typically to crank the volume up extremely high and place the speaker on a surface that transmits tactile vibrations. Combine that mental image with the fact that the music itself wouldn't be composed with hearing ears in mind.
You would also probably be surprised at how much louder and more unpleasant the machinery of modern life would sound if there weren't any resources directed toward engineering everything for acoustic characteristics. There's some efficiency benefit in reducing noise, but diminishing returns kick in pretty quickly, and there's no benefit outside of human comfort from engineering for pleasant frequency profiles.
You also wouldn't automatically have the benefit of research and development motivated by the needs of hearing people. There'd be no good earplugs or earmuffs or noise-cancelling headphones; no guidelines on safe noise exposure; no recognition of tinnitus as a disorder.
I think a hearing person in a deaf society would find themselves in something almost analogous to the position of many autistic people with sensory sensitivity in our current society. You wouldn't necessarily want to trade your way of being for the dominant one, but you'd be acutely aware that your unusual sensitivities limited your options for housing, work, and recreation and caused you to behave strangely.
Yeah, maybe. There would still be substantial advantages as well though. At minimum I think being hearing in a deaf-oriented society would still be less of a disadvantage than being deaf in a hearing-oriented society.
"You would also probably be surprised at how much louder and more unpleasant the machinery of modern life would sound if there weren't any resources directed toward engineering everything for acoustic characteristics. "
How many people (especially people who post here!) interact with industrial machinery? And the problem of the hearing person in the loud land of the deaf is self-correcting.
Do you have a car? Live near a road? Have an HVAC system in your home? An elevator in your office building? Do you ever fly? Everyone in the developed world interacts with machinery, and the closer it is to the average person's life, the more its acoustic characteristics were taken into account in the design process.
Industrial machinery is actually a good mental model here: the engineers who design it don't worry much about acoustics because they can just make everyone who interacts with it wear ear protection. If everyone were deaf, consumer equipment would sound a lot more like industrial equipment, so in this hypothetical world the answer to your question would be "everyone."
The "self-correcting" idea is...sorry, I don't even know how to address this charitably...it's just wrong. Noise pollution causes psychological stress long before it causes physical damage; the physical damage takes years or even decades to produce total deafness; and the resulting deafness isn't the same subjectively-neutral absence of sound perception as congenital deafness.
A hearing child born into a deaf world would spend her critical early-childhood years under a barrage of sensory overstimulation, which would probably be treated as a psychological disorder. It might be lumped under autism if people thought the child was just hypersensitive to tactile vibrations, but if he were too insistent on it being a separate sense localized to his ears, he might get tagged as delusional. In any case, this child would definitely be treated as disabled from toddlerhood when it became clear that he was distressed by normal stimuli, and the parents would be able to recall signs of the disability dating back to early infancy: poor sleep, inconsolable crying, distractibility.
As he grew up, he'd develop coping strategies, but these would have social consequences. His insistence on sleeping in a "low-vibration" room would mark him as strange and possibly crazy. Some people might compare his foam earmuffs to a tinfoil hat. He'd feel pressure to leave them off for important events and gatherings, and over time he'd probably accumulate hearing damage.
But damage isn't silence. The auditory cortex of a hearing person relies on auditory input to calibrate itself. When it stops detecting input in a given frequency range, it essentially "turns up the gain," resulting in tinnitus. Hearing damage is loud. (This is well-established; we understand it well enough to temporarily suppress tinnitus with magnetic stimulation of the auditory cortex https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17691335/ ).
Hearing damage also doesn't affect all frequencies equally. The 3000-6000hz frequency range is affected first, regardless of the frequency that caused the damage.
So in an environment with a lot of low-frequency unpleasant noise, the early stages of hearing damage are marked by tinnitus, a loss of sensitivity to potentially-useful or pleasant sounds (birdsong, rustling leaves, etc.), and no increase in tolerance for the unwanted noise. (In fact, this stage of hearing loss is sometimes characterized by hyperacusis.)
Our hypothetical hearing person will be middle-aged or older before he can match deaf people's tolerance for sound. Reaching that point won't undo all of his prior experiences (especially not early childhood development). And the faster he gets there, the more disabling and traumatizing the process will have been.
I've built midget racers. I spent a couple of decades sitting in front of the trombones in an orchestra. I am deaf in my left ear from that. So I know very well that the level at which hearing loss occurs is far below that level which causes pain. I also know that this idea that there is a correlation between noise sensitivity and auditory acuity is bogus.
But of course this entire argument is a silly exercise akin to children playing each declaring they are using superweapons and new kinds of force fields in order to win the game. A race of deaf people would hardly develop the structures that we call "hearing" as opposed to some other variation of touch or pressure sensitivity.
> One could imagine, for example, a world where deaf people are the norm. 99% of people are deaf, whereas 1% of people are sighted.
Contra-Contra, Contra; Contra, Contra=Contra the social theory of disability.
What if some things are entirely social like left handed or entirely real like a society of deaf people with a minority sighted who will basically have super powers and rob all them blind. What is a deaf bank guard going to when the person with hearing and sight walks around them will unbelievable skill, and knows when to start and stop lock picking.
I really dont get this argument, how can society oppress a sighted person so hard they cant just run circles around everyone else.
You just have flashing lights in lots of places, sometimes next to low light places, and with lots of mirrors and lenses and gels and other things that make the light confusing and unuseful.
I agree that it seems unlikely that a blind society would have bright flashing lights in enough places to make much of a difference, and that, in the worst case, it's possible to completely block out light. But neither of those things is true about sound so the deaf/hearing example is more obviously true. It seems quite obvious to me that a almost entirely deaf society would have loud, obnoxious noises almost _everywhere_, given how much effort our current society puts into noise dampening and mitigation. It would certainly be the case that in _many_ places, having hearing would give almost no advantage and often be a detriment in a society which did not care about the soundscape. Hell, in our own society, where we very much do care about noise, we have tons research in how noise can negatively affects performance in both schools and workplaces. And that's in a situation where we all _know and care_ about sounds!
And yes, ear plugs can _to a degree_ help. But I have never heard of or found _fully_ noise canceling/filtering ear protection and I'm quite certain that, without mitigation, there would be lots of places that, regardless of ear plugs, would be unpleasant and distracting for a hearing person to be around (again, I've been in such places in our own world), so it's not as simple as "well they just will be reduced down to the same capability". No, they will be worse off because the fully deaf people won't have the distractions.
Re the flashing lights: we've done a great job of splattering data-laden garp all over the rest of the EM spectrum, and visible light is certainly eligible:
The reason it hurts your ears/eyes to see bright lights or hear loud noises is because if you aren't careful about those intense stimuli they will affect your ability to see/hear. Thus, in a society that doesn't care about a hearing/sighted person's sensitivities everyone will eventually be deaf/blind anyway and the 'disability' goes away. That's not the case if the situation is reversed.
I can imagine it being worse for sound than hearing since loud noise is hard to ever truly block out, but I actually have this amazing ability to block out light any time I want, so I'm still up for being the One-Eyed King of the Land of the Blind (at least during the day). I promise to use my power benevolently.
"Loud noise is particularly harmful to the inner ear (cochlea). A one-time exposure to extreme loud sound or listening to loud sounds for a long time can cause hearing loss. Loud noise can damage cells and membranes in the cochlea. Listening to loud noise for a long time can overwork hair cells in the ear, which can cause these cells to die."
This is why I think that explanation fails. It really doesn't work to reverse roles. Indeed, if the only thing society can do to a hearing person, with their collective malicious apathy aimed at them, is restore equality then that seems like further proof that the social model fails.
I wrote my own somewhat-inspired-by-the-original post (which is over here at https://noiseinmysignal.substack.com/p/the-antisocial-model-of-disability , although I disclaim that it is less a reasoned argument and more a rant inspired by a lingering urge to punch one of its more persistent advocates elsenet), but one thing I talk about there that seems worth mentioning over here is a certain fundamental problem with building wheelchair ramps up Everest.
Specifically, my lingering childhood ambition to climb Fuji, as wise men should once.
Which is, very specifically a desire to *climb* Fuji, which my spine won't let me do.
A wheelchair ramp up to the summit, or to pick the example that I seem to recall might actually be available, a helicopter ride up to the summit, can't give that to me, because what I want is *to climb* the mountain, the experience and the achievement, not *to sit at the top of the mountain*, the state.
The very large number of scenarios isomorphic to this one, while they obviously don't render accommodations valueless, do put a very distinct cap on exactly what they can do for anyone.
Regarding wheelchair ramps and the like being sneaky charity, to the degree they are, aren't there also lots of other things that should be considered charity then? Roads, sidewalks, streetlamps are built in just the same way and accommodate most people, but no one considers them charity. Building out similar things that accommodate others, even if they're a minority, doesn't seem like it should be called charity then. Or to put it another way, yes it's something that society owes wheelchair users, to the same degree that society owes everyone.
There may be a discussion of how much it makes sense to spend for how many people, but at that point it's a different argument. (Yes I know those things are often tax funded, but everyone pays taxes.)
>Roads, sidewalks, streetlamps are built in just the same way and accommodate most people, but no one considers them charity.
Because they're paid for and used by everyone. But no disabled minority = no wheelchair ramps.
>Or to put it another way, yes it's something that society owes wheelchair users, to the same degree that society owes everyone.
The other stuff if being paid for by people who use it. If wheelchair people could fund everything themselves, we wouldn't be having as much of this conversation (you would still need to convince/force people to accept the wheelchair ramp even if you're paying for it yourself).
Sidewalks aren't used by everyone, but they still have to pay for them. Same with bike lanes, water fountains, public parks, crosswalks, beach showers, bike pumps along trails, public trash cans (though you can argue this one is just a positive externality), dog parks, and landscaped median strips. Are those all considered charity too? After all, if bikers/walkers/swimmers/dog owners could fund everything themselves we wouldn't need to have this conversation.
I note that my local council specifically taxes dog ownership; I don't know whether that tax is actually equal in magnitude to the cost of making the local park a dog park, but it seems quite plausible that it is - choosing to use a dog-safe fertiliser on the oval and having water bowls for dogs are not huge costs.
Most of the rest are used by the vast majority of the relevant taxpayers, especially considering they're often paid for by local councils rather than being state level infrastructure.
This applies to so many things society builds and shares that you either go full libertarian or it seems unjustified to draw the line at wheelchair ramps. No one ever sued me nor did I ever sue anyone. Yet courts exists and I am indirectly paying for them (assuming simplistically that the salaries of judges come from my taxes). So is the existence of courts forced charity?
I think the difference is whether some significant percentage (almost always a majority, sometimes a supermajority) of people would choose to implement something for their own needs. Even people who don't go anywhere benefit from roads, boats, and planes. They bring stuff to them that they need. Wheelchair ramps, on the other hand, are a benefit to a minority, required by a smaller minority, and are not needed by the majority. I think it's safe to say that most people would not independently build them (which is why before the ADA was passed, there were very few wheelchair ramps).
If we build it anyway, it's charity, at least by this definition.
I think this isn't quite right. The fact that many buildings have a single step at the entryway indicates that people often don't implement level entries entirely for their own needs. But just putting the building at ground level so that you can eliminate this step is a really easy accommodation, that results in a benefit in many ways for most people, even if it has some slight costs, and so it doesn't seem like charity, even though by your definition it is.
From a Chesterton's Fence perspective, the fact that so many buildings have slightly raised entrances suggests some sort of benefit (less likely to have water seep through in heavy rain?), which I'd want to find out before doing away with the practice.
Floor height has to be above the prevailing ground height for a damp-proof course to work to prevent rising damp.
Well, or you have to dig a trench around the building, and put in a sealant up to the prevailing ground height before filling the trench in, which is expensive and so is worthwhile for public buildings with lots of pedestrian circulation but not for private houses.
My understanding is that the main reason why building floors are usually at a slightly higher level than the roadway is to do with water. If the roadway and the building floor level are the same then a heavy rainfall would have water trying to flow into the building. So you want the floor level inside the building to be somewhat higher than the floor level outside. In regions where rising damp is a problem, you can put in a damp proof course or damp proof membrane below the floor level of the building and above the road level and so block the capillary action that causes rising damp.
Not having a step at the entrance is common with buildings that get a lot of foot traffic like shops. With pedestrianised streets, there are approaches to building that solve this, but they're more expensive than a step into the building (you reverse the camber on the street, so the centre is the lowest part and put a drain there; water then runs away from the building instead of building up under the entrance step: the solution to the damp-proof course is that you have a narrow gap between the building and the street (a few mm) that is stuffed with a waterproof sealant (rubber or something) that extends down into the gap to connect to the damp-proof course.
Steps slow people down (even going down), which can create crowding if there is heavy footfall into and out of a building, so you want level entry if the building is busy enough - regardless of disability (also there are lots of people not in wheelchairs who have problems with steps, e.g. parents with children in buggies).
Good question. I think that depends on whether the minority has the power/money/political clout to get something implemented on their own, instead of asking a majority. Within that, there's also a question of cost verses benefit. The larger the minority and the cheaper the accommodation or convenience, the more likely they can get their way.
I did include in my previous post that it's usually a majority, but minorities often get their way, especially when the rest of the population is ambivalent or don't have to care. Wheelchair ramps existed before the ADA, and I wouldn't consider them charity in those cases. They just weren't enforced on a wide range of buildings whether they were needed/wanted or not.
Wheelchair ramps are attempted charity. Putting destinations at ground level and having level entry is universal design. The kinds of accommodations that we build for the majority tend to be much more like the latter, and it's what we should at least *aim* for in general disability accommodations.
Practically speaking, they're about 50% paid for via gas taxes which is a roundabout use fee. In a different time, such taxes were much easier to collect.
1. Automated toll collection is faster and less expensive, now. Today, someone just drives slowly through a toll booth and is automatically charged thanks to a device in their car. If they cheat the system a photo of their license is mailed to them with a request to pay. (Yes, large toll roads do still have one or two human operated booths for those who need them.) Coin operated toll booths with automated arms also existed in the past. But then you run into the peril of someone not having change for the booth. Failures to register payment might have been more common. Enforcement was less effective. I suspect that there were more jams that needed to be repaired when one is dealing with actual coins. Etc.
2. In the past you didn't have the potential for electric vehicles or hybrids. So fuel usage was a more reliable proxy for road usage. It seems reasonable that cars which are at least partly powered by electricity will become more common as time goes on, meaning that fuel usage will become an increasingly unreliable proxy for road usage.
Note also that fuel usage correlates with the weight of the vehicle, and thus with the wear and tear it inflicts on the road - motor vehicles are very much not equal in this regards, and a fair user-pays scheme should see goods trucks pay far far more per unit distance than commuter cars
Right. It’s essentially “make our built environment in such a way to maximize the functionality of the maximum number of people”. Which is not really charity.
If you hand a disabled person a stack of cash, they might be able to use it to have a comfortable life. But they probably won’t be a “productive member of society” in the sense that they will be precluded from most forms of productive labor (much less true today with digital technology and remote jobs - one wonders, if the ADA happened today, would we get ramps and elevators in office buildings, or just more work-from-home?).
So mandated ramps etc. aren’t “charity” so much as they are solving a coordination problem that individual disabled people could not solve.
Roads make moving trade goods easier. Sidewalks keep pedestrians off the road, which makes moving trade goods easier. Streetlamps let people drive at night more safely, making it possible to move trade goods longer. They're not considered charity because they directly increase monetary value.
None of that applies to residential roads though, unless you're counting things like groceries as trade goods? And it also doesn't apply to a host of other things, like art exhibits, hiking trails, or play structures.
I am absolutely counting groceries as trade goods, as well as anything else that's brought in to be sold for money. Groceries are the most important good of all; you're not doing anything if you can't get food.
I would say hiking trails* and play structures serve the sidewalk purpose of funneling people away from places you don't want them; without hiking trails you get people wandering across the whole of the woods, without play structures you get children climbing window ledges. Art exhibits aren't really charity, they're a statement by the maker; once they put it up, everyone has to look at it, whether they like the art or not. You'd prefer having a Lord Liberty over Lady Liberty? Tough shit.
*(The hiking trail I know the story of was privately constructed, and was indeed charity.)
That logic seems somewhat contorted? There are well known ways to keep people out of places you don't want them, and a fence or keep out sign is cheaper than maintaining something. And public art usually isn't funded by the maker, it's the opposite and they get paid to do it. The fact that not everyone likes art is the whole reason I'm drawing the comparison here.
But sure, then I submit that ramps facilitate the passage of trade goods by allowing easy access for wheeled devices, including wheelchairs and carts, for various activities involving transporting groceries and, like, going to your job (is labor a trade good?). Not to mention they keep wheeled devices users users from attempting the stairs where they're more likely to hinder foot traffic and cause a scene.
>Humans can't fly (without machines), but we don't consider our flightlessness a problem, just a fact of life.
I think problems vs facts of life is a false dichotomy. Yes, flightlessness is a fact of life, but we spend a lot of money on planes and drones to get around this fact of life because it is a problem that we are mostly land bound, and we are able to complete novel tasks or current tasks much more easily by taking advantage of flight. In the other examples with blindness or wheelchair using admirals, likewise technology that expanded the capabilities of the user would change the facts of life such that not being able to use those abilities would become a problem
I feel like I've seen the pattern a few times now where the absolute dumbest stuff happens in spaces one or two levels removed from academia. Actual academics are generally quite smart and extremely invested in their field. But then weird things happen when academic ideas escape containment and lose all their qualifiers and nuance and baggage. Or like, one academic with an axe to grind will make the rounds but leave out the gigantic pile of controversy that surrounds their particular position.
It sort of turns into an accidental motte and bailey, with a bunch of consultants and hangers-on occupying the bailey and academics vigorously working to fortify the motte.
Re: the first comment, it seems to me that the thought experiment only works if you assume a post-industrial first-world country where functionally no-one has to do dangerous or strenuous manual labour. If you're living in a society of hunter-gatherers -- the form of organisation that prevailed for the majority of human history -- being deaf or blind or wheelchair-bound presents obvious problems. You can't hunt prey very well if you can't see, hear, or chase it, after all. Similarly, if you're a farmer in a peasant village -- the second-longest form of organisation -- you're going to find it much easier to sow, weed, and harvest crops if you can walk around and see what you're doing. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, if you're a factory worker operating heavy machinery, or a craftsman trying to produce something by hand.
I don't think, therefore, that the sort of society CleverBeast imagines could actually come about, because its members wouldn't be able to pass through the previous stages of social/economic/technological development necessary to reach it. Even if it did somehow happen, it would suffer greater constrains than ours does -- farming, manufacturing, and operating machinery are still vital to modern society, after all, even if we sometimes forget this because most of the work gets outsources to poorer countries.
I was confused about that as well, as though postindustrial society came into being fully formed or something.
Maybe it's possible for a being that never developed sight to do as well as humans and eventually develop a technologically sophisticated civilization. But those beings would most likely be very different from humans. Hearing less so -- maybe we would have an even closer connection with dogs or something in that case. I could imagine a world where nothing ever developed hearing or sight (I remember something like that in A Wrinkle in Time), but that seems more the realm of science fiction than a realistic question of how humans should or can live.
This was my exact thought. You can go back further than the hunter-gatherer stage; Any evolutionary branch of large land animals unable to see would have gone extinct tens of millions of years ago. I think the fact that, with a tiny handful of exceptions, every single surface dwelling land animal has developed at least rudimentary sight is a pretty strong indicator of what an advantage it is. Sure, I guess if I want to go truly imaginative I could imagine a world where advanced life evolved in giant underground caves or whatever, but that world is so different from ours that there's no real comparison.
>I became more aware of the fact that it’s hard to define “disabled” in a sense where things we consider abled (eg hearing) wouldn’t be disabilities in some other society.
Most of the 'accomodations' demanded of social model advocates are literally impossible to provide without the ability of people considered non-disabled today. Blind people literally could not survive without sighted people, and any hypothetical society that somehow allowed the blind to live without the sighted could only be built...by the sighted. If all the sighted people were killed by a virus that spared blind people, 'society' would still be 'oppressing' blind people, but now 'society' is....just blind people!
If you cannot provide for yourselves in the absence of a certain category of abled people, then yes, you are inherently disabled. It is INHERENTLY better to be sighted because sighted people are capable of independent survival (i.e. as a group they can survive in the absence of any other group), blind people are not. If this does not count as 'inherently better', then 'inherently better' is a meaningless, useless term being used by someone trying to be 'technically right' in a way divorced from anything that actually matters. If the model doesn't account for reality as it is, as SOCIETY actually is, then it's not saying anything meaningful. If a hunter gatherer tribe literally cannot provide 'accommodations' to a disabled person, how is it possibly meaningful to blame 'society' for 'making' disabled people disabled? The social model purports to describe disability in the context of human society, but then appeals to an entirely abstract notion of 'society' divorced from the majority of societies that ever existed (and in some cases, may never exist).
Do you believe it would be impossible for an intelligent society to evolve anywhere in the universe, from any creatures that didn't have biological sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation in the 380 to 700 nanometer range?
Switching to my SF-writer hat for a moment (and thus needing to spend a bunch of time thinking about the diversity of sophonts in the 'verse), my conclusion was that while it's certainly possible, it's probably mostly limited to extremophiles living in environments where 380-750 nm EM is absent, on the grounds that it's such an absurdly useful part of the EM spectrum and relatively easy for evolution to stumble onto.
(i.e.; it's short enough to produce detailed representation of the environment around you in a way that the modalities of most senses are poorly equipped to, while courteously refraining from mucking up most of your molecules.)
Being creative for a moment: It might be impossible for a civilization to evolve with creatures that cannot perceive, with a high level of accuracy, objects that are not in current contact with the body but are of interest. How would a species work with metal, fire, chemicals, or electricity, if you could not know with precision how to touch them safely? When you think about it, a great deal of civilization is precise knowledge of how to work with dangerous but useful tools and products.
Perhaps there is another sense that could sense those things with precision at a distance. But then the society would be reliant on that sense, and any creature that had a deficit in that sense would be disabled. Does it have to be sight? I don't know, but it probably has to be something.
How is that relevant? We're talking about human society - that's what 'social' means. Intelligent beings inherently capable of existing without sight would not be recognisably human.
If sighted people were wiped out, blind people would die out before there was any chance of evolution.
This is what I think OP is talking about being 'technically right' - you're appealing to something that may hypothetically be true, and then bizarrely using that as a justification for political policies in the here and now, but there's no real link between them.
It cannot be the case that blind people are being 'opppressed' by sighted people if sighted people ceasing to exist would make things catastrophically worse for the blind. There's exceptions to this line of reasoning, obviously, if you imagine for example somebody prevented from learning to walk. They may be unable to fend for themselves if mobile people disappeared. But this isn't analogous to blindness, because blindness is an inherent weakness, people by and large are not blind because somebody imposed this on them. The only way blind people can survive is through sighted people using their sight.
I'm not going to use the word "oppressed" here, and I don't believe I did in any of my comments. I also didn't advocate specific political policies.
My claim was just that there is no "inherent, objective" way in which these things are disabilities - they are always disabilities *relative to an environment*.
I'm not going to claim "the environment should always be changed to make things not be disabilities" - I suspect that this would even be impossible, for precisely some reasons that are central to the social model of disability (since different people with different embodiments are going to need different environments in order to not be disabled, so we can't make things work for everyone).
Impossible, anywhere in the universe? Certainly not. But it would require an environment so different from ours that I'm not sure the point of the comparison. I've mentioned this elsewhere but it's no coincidence that (with a tiny number of exceptions) every surface dwelling land animal has at least rudimentary vision.
"Anywhere in the universe" is all well and good, but on the planet I live on vision happens to be a pretty profound evolutionary advantage (precise wavelength range arbitrary to a point).
Anywhere else in the universe seems not relevant. Anywhere, anytime ever is so far removed from our earthly primate-base experience that too many other factors would likely be different for our comparison to be meaningful. (Like talking about "individual rights" and "gender roles" in a civilization that functioned like a bee hive.)
Here on Earth, it is perhaps conceivable to have intelligent beings that get around the physical world and search for food via, say, echolocation, vision in another part of the spectrum like infrared, touch, smell, etc. But their adaptations would have to be very different - say, much better hearing and smell than humans have now - to be able to survive in the world as we know it, and eat the food that these methods make accessible.
Just taking humans as they are now or were thousands of years ago but without sight, at current normal levels of function of the other senses, would be a difficult hurdle to survival.
"If you cannot provide for yourselves in the absence of a certain category of abled people, then yes, you are inherently disabled. "
I think that is a little too simple. Suppose there is some talent that is essential for the survival of a society but survival only requires one percent of the population to have it. Someone who doesn't have it lacks an ability just as someone who can't swim the English channel lacks the ability to swim the channel, but I wouldn't describe either as disabled.
I think implicit in the concept of "disability" is something that significantly reduces what you can do unless other people bear costs to help you do things.
>Humans can't fly (without machines), but we don't consider our flightlessness a problem, just a fact of life.
Humans can survive without flight. Blind humans cannot survive without sighted humans. Quadraplegic humans cannot exist without mobile humans. THAT is the difference. This isn't anything 'social', it's the raw reality of human life. Unless you're saying 'preferring life to death is just a value judgement', then something like blindness is necessarily an inherent disability.
Categorically false - individual sighted humans are capable of survivng by themselves - not always, but it's possible. And sighted individuals have a better chance of survival than large groups of blind people do (in the absence of sighted people).
But in any case, all this shows is that sight is necessary but insufficient for survival. Blindness procludes survival independent of the sighted. And we'retalking about GROUPS of people. Blind people AS A GROUP cannot exist without sighted people. Blind people need not only other humans, but humans of different fundamental abilities. That's obviously what we're talkin about here. A million people with my exact intelligence, skills, knowledge etc. would very likely be able to survive. It probably wouldn't be much of a society compared to the current e.g. US, but most of us would survive (beyond some certain time horizon). This is not analogous to blind people being inherently depndent on the sighted.
Humans can survive by foraging and fishing for multiple decades at a time. That still happens today. Other humans are not a requirement.
It's necessary to receive the training that enables you to do this, so you have to have had parents at some point. But you'll be fine without them, once you're trained.
Although I am still not a fan of the social model, I do appreciate the input of those in favor of its use. I honestly feel like I learned some things about potential disability accommodations that somewhat changed my view on them.
Ultimately I agree with the commenters who say that some accommodations would be incredibly inefficient in a society where very few people would need or use those accommodations.
I do also feel as though at least some proponents of the social model treat a certain standard of living as obviously possible no matter how we order society, when I don't think that's true. If we became inefficient enough, everyone would have a lower standard of living - including those that are asking for accommodations - such that even with an accommodation they are worse off than in a more efficient society that is more thoughtful about which things to accommodate and how.
“[Consider] any poorly understood or hard-to-diagnose illness that causes malaise and pain (e.g fibromyalgia, Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, post-Lyme disease syndrome, endometriosis, celiac disease, and many more). Healthcare providers, often oblivious to the great diversity of ‘bio’ possibilities, shift the diagnostic burden onto the easier scapegoat of the ‘psychosocial,’ and pat themselves on the back for doing it. Worse, they often do this in an insidiously gaslighting way, e.g. ‘You’ve stressed yourself into chronic illness, it’s self-inflicted burnout, you poor self-sabotaging thing!’
“The pseudo-diagnosis of burnout just puts a coat of BPS paint on incompetence, but it’s so common that it’s the only influence of BPS that many patients have ever seen.“
I’ve even seen something as commonplace and “bio” as asthma “psychosocialed” as, “Maybe the asthma symptoms you describe as interfering with your sleep lately aren’t asthma but never-before-diagnosed anxiety pretending to be asthma.” (Spoiler: they weren’t.)
Ingraham concludes, “Rocket science is hard, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with rocket science, and I don’t think there's anything wrong with BPS itself. It’s a vision of really great healthcare; it would be weird if it was gracefully, consistently implemented across the land. It’s aspirational.”
Unrelated but I think it would be preferable to avoid links to twitter-, I mean, X until they allow unregistered people to view stuff. Just in case people with accounts forgot this was still a thing.
Although I guess in this case (the dog in fire meme) there was no other option if you were linking directly to the creator and not just where you found it.
Interesting, I hadn't realised this had happened. The last change I observed had been that Twitter had gotten _less_ obnoxious about it after the acquisition (the undismissable nag screen that would appear if you scrolled down far enough had been removed). Shame that it's now actually gotten worse than it was and is completely unusable without an account.
I wonder if they also still auto-ban accounts that sign up just to read? (Source: I did this once for work to stop being annoyed by the nag screens; after two days or so the account got disabled because of "suspicious tweeting activity" (i.e. they decided no tweeting was suspicious). Had to go through Twitter support to get the account re-enabled. Unsurprisingly, I found it deeply hypocritical at the time.)
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I guess I would have noticed at some point, but it's nice to be emotionally prepared. :)
Thanks for the thought. I cannot embed X links directly in Substack because Elon is still angry about Notes and has banned automatic interaction between the two sites, so I don't have a great way to give credit without a link.
"Yes, this is false, but you don’t seem to understand that we’re using this false thing as propaganda"
The version of this that makes some sort of sense to me is something like:
The truth is a complex compromise between multiple models of disability (so the Social Model, the Medical Model, the Biophysical Model, the Charity Model, etc). Each of the models is individually pretty simple to explain and understand, so the best way to aid people's understanding is to emphasize the model(s) that that are non-dominant in order that the model in people's heads becomes a more accurate compromise.
I think that the dialectical argumentation style - reach for an opposite of something you don't like, then use it as a challenge, rather than trying to actually be right - tends to result in people getting locked in to the challenging (but inaccurate) idea and not accepting the synthesis when it emerges. Hegel did the best-known expression of the dialectic, and you can see how badly it worked because his most famous pupil, Marx, set up communism as an antithesis (opposing idea) to capitalism and then got locked in to the antithesis and never got to the synthesis that is the mixed economy or social democracy or whatever you want to call capitalism with a welfare state and some regulations of large corporations, and his successors started calling people who did support that "social fascists".
I think the dialectical argumentation style can work with individuals or small groups, but on a society-wide scale it tends to, as you say, lock people into the antithesis rather than get to the true synthesis. Introducing the social model of disability might be a good idea in a tutorial or research seminar, but it probably won't work for wider society.
I kinda like the idea of models as 'lenses', to use another academic term. The point of them is to generate novel hypotheses.
You ask "if we treat disabilities as medical illnesses to be cured or treated, what solutions does that suggest?" And then you ask "if we treat disabilities as a form of oppression and assume all possible accomodations are owed by society, what does that suggest", and then we take those hypotheses and evaluate them for what good we can do with them.
I also read "Unspeakable Conversations" between the last post and this one and one thing I think that essay revealed is that behind the question of what's a disability is really a question as to the validity and nature of preference itself.
Specifically, Peter Singer and I share a lot of the same attitudes around what makes a person a person, and as a consequence of that is that infants don't really have more rights than fetuses, only their parents have rights. What I hadn't realized is that Peter Singer then goes on to make the perfectly logically consistent argument that there's really no ethical problem with killing disabled infants, provided the parents can demonstrate a legitimate preference for a non-disabled child.
In this specific case, I think disability advocates are upset by this argument as much because it seems a slippery slope to euthanizing all disabled people as to their vested interest in more disabled people being born, but if you take out the infantacide part and only frame it as the slightly less morally itchy question of "should an adult couple be able to abort a fetus just because of a disability and for no other reason" I can't see how you can get around this without a robust social model of disability.
Because essentially, the argument has to be that the preference for a non-disabled child is sort of nonsensical in a world where we agree all disabilities are social constructs created by various cultural and economic forces. There's no such "thing" as disability to create a valid preference, it would be like aborting a child because you wanted one to have blue eyes instead of brown.
Of course, perhaps one day the technology will exist to easily tell what eye color your baby will have and some small percentage of people will want to have abortions based slowly on such considerations, and then, as I said at the top, advocates and opponents of such things will be applying all of the same arguments to the very nature of preference itself. How much of wanting a tall child is because tallness conforms to real medical benchmarks of what healthy looks like, and how much of it is structured by arbitrary economic and cultural forces that make it easier to navigate the world in a tall body?
I can't stress how deep a rabbit hole this sent me down. I've always known that I would be uncomfortable (although not necessarily unable) to provide parental care for a disabled child, and I've also always been comfortable with people having abortions for basically any reason. I hadn't thought about the intersection of these two ideas, nor about how if you abort a potential life solely on the basis of them being disabled, at least part of what you are acknowledging is that the world is not shaped as well for disabled people. Which might not be unjust in itself, but it is certainly an acknowledgement that the world could be built better than it is. When we imagine a utopian future, what's the difference between imagining one where everyone is tall and symmetrical and contain no genetic disorders that impact their ability to navigate, vs one where basically everyone, regardless of the circumstances of their biology, has the kind of miraculous personal accommodations that allow them to live a full and happy life? Because the first one seems more enactable to me, but the second one seems in a weird way, more beautiful. But that itself is a preference and I don't know where it comes from.
"In this specific case, I think disability advocates are upset by this argument as much because it seems a slippery slope to euthanizing all disabled people as to their vested interest in more disabled people being born, but if you take out the infantacide part and only frame it as the slightly less morally itchy question of "should an adult couple be able to abort a fetus just because of a disability and for no other reason" I can't see how you can get around this without a robust social model of disability. "
I think you can get around it easily.
Aborting a fetus is some specific level of bad. If you're very pro-life, it's exactly as bad as killing an adult human; if you're very pro-choice, it might be zero bad. I am pretty close to zero bad - I think it's inherently as bad as killing any other creature with that amount of consciousness/intelligence/selfhood, which is low - I don't think it has as much C/I/S as a cow, and although I'm semi-mostly-vegetarian I'm not going out of my way to prevent cows from dying if it's important for something.
If you think killing a fetus doesn't matter much, you should be willing to tolerate it for small reasons, whether that's "the parents don't feel ready to be parents right now" or "it would be disabled and they want to try again for a non-disabled one", or "the parents want an athletic kid, but the genetic tests say the current kid will be slow and clumsy". I'm not sure I'm entirely ready to accept this last one, but I think I'm being inconsistent in not doing so and would have to plead not wanting to set a bad precedent for more important cases.
On the other hand, not killing an adult matters a lot, so our threshold for killing one should be extremely high and maybe unreachable.
"nor about how if you abort a potential life solely on the basis of them being disabled, at least part of what you are acknowledging is that the world is not shaped as well for disabled people"
This also doesn't seem true. If you abort a kid because they have Tay-Sachs (condition where you can't do basic metabolism things and die painfully before age 1) that just seems like a reasonable choice that doesn't imply anything about the world except that it's cosmically unjust, which you already knew.
Yeah, I think you misunderstood (or I didn't write my point very well). The specific critique of disabled people advocating against aborting disabled infants comes mostly from fear of genocide. If you don't think that's a rational fear, then you can construct (as you did) a perfectly valid model of abortion where its okay to *at least* abort most disabled fetuses, and probably fetuses that don't meet many more arbitrary criteria.
Which is just to say, I didn't expect you (Scott) to have much of a problem with it. My real point was that the preference for a non-disabled child over a disabled child has to come from somewhere, and whether its a preference for a happier child, or a less burdensome life raising a child, it is probably a preference predicated on an assumption that life is harder for disabled people and the families who give support to disabled people. Which is an assumption disability advocates dispute as being made too casually in many cases, but is hardly indefensible. But if you were certain that whatever disability your child faced could be completely ameliorated or essentially neutralized by society than that decision does look harder to justify.
Imagine aborting a fetus you would otherwise want because it won't have full use of its legs in a world where motorized wheelchairs are free and ramps are Ubiquitous and people in wheelchaors generally report happiness consistent with their unparalyzed peers. You are probably still allowed to make that decision, but wouldn't it feel more arbitrary?" I will grant you that as a doctor, you can probably come up with many conditions that are fundamentally not like this. Some conditions can't be ameliorated, they either will kill you or render you perpetually unhappy. But I think disability advocates mainly argue that we lump too many conditions in the "fundamentally unhappy" category instead of the "needs accommodation from technology and society to be happy" camp. Which is something I think I was guilty of. Apparently Peter Singer is also guilty of this. He really did seem in conversations with the person he was talking to to take it for granted that a paralyzed person in a motorized chair must have obviously suffered internally from tbe difference between themselves and nondisabled people.
Ask a bunch of paralysed people with fancy wheelchairs how much they'd give to be able to walk. I bet it's a lot.
I think I do get your underlying point, in that some 'disabilities' like myopia are sufficiently easily mitigated by current technology that we don't much care about them; I'd still prefer to have better eyesight, mind you, and a lot of people opt for corrective surgery now that that's a thing that's available.
I would say that all these things are qualitatively bad, but some are much worse than others due to the availability and cost of mitigation. I feel that abortion is a certain level of bad and while most things society regards as 'disabilities' are worse there are things like myopia that are "too small" to justify an abortion. (Infanticide is obviously worse than abortion, in the same way that 3rd trimester abortions are obviously worse than 1st trimester abortions, fwiw). I would still choose to embryo select or gene edit away even minor impairments, ceteris paribus.
What if they were flying wheelchairs? Obviously you could want both, but then what you want is as much choice as possible in your mobility, not some obvious preference for the default baseline human experience.
" (Infanticide is obviously worse than abortion, in the same way that 3rd trimester abortions are obviously worse than 1st trimester abortions, fwiw)."
I don't take this as obvious, and I don't think all bioethicists do either. The point at which a human life obtains some ethical/moral dimension of personhood is probably around the time it starts having an awareness of itself as a being in time, I can't poinpoint the moment that process begins, and I'm willing to grant plenty of slack, but based on newborns I'm seen, they aren't there yet. I agree most people have some sentiment that makes them act as if newborns are categorically distinct from fetuses, but I think this is mostly an aesthetic thing, biologically hardwired thing, as opposed to something logically consistent.
> Obviously you could want both, but then what you want is as much choice as possible in your mobility, not some obvious preference for the default baseline human experience.
One wants more *abilities*, ceteris paribus, yes. If I could fly I would like it, and being able to fly would not make me ambivalent about losing the ability to walk, especially if it's the sort of flight that cares about the laws of physics and isn't pure magic.
I possibly shouldn't have used the word "obviously" there. To me, personhood is not a binary, and while babies lack full personhood they have more than foetuses - or maybe they have a similar amount, but the mother's rights are less impacted by their existence? An infant can be given away and thus no longer be the parents' problem without killing it, unlike a foetus, though that does assume that there are people willing to care for it.
Circling back to the disability topic, I support (voluntary) euthanasia for sufficiently severe chronic illnesses, so even if I were persuaded to view infants as equal to adults there would be cases like Tay Sachs where prolonging life is simply prolonging suffering.
"I became more aware that some people think “Yes, this is false, but you don’t seem to understand that we’re using this false thing as propaganda” is some kind of extenuating factor that makes it okay. I’m against this, but I understand there’s lots of very convincing-sounding propaganda arguing I should be for it."
It feels like you're still not getting it. People aren't saying that it's an unalloyed good, they're saying that it's a lesser evil that's justified in the circumstances. I understand that the rationalist movement had normative issues with this from the start, first with "dark arts" rhetoric and then with "asymmetric weapons", but, well, the real world just doesn't work that way. Maybe it's because, like you said in that post, "ignorant armies" haven't yet seen the light and there's actually a better way, but so far it's purely aspirational and theoretical.
There's no reason for other utilitarians to respect the words of the admittedly dishonest (though such utilitarians may well lie when it suits their purposes)
There's the sort of Kant-style argument that lying decreases trust, but I think there's another relevant argument here too. In using lies and propaganda, you're attempting to manipulate people, to substitute your judgement for their own. In the normal sort of lying, this is because you're being selfish and you want them to do something that's good for you instead of them. In the case of attempted pro-social propaganda, it's because you think they're making the wrong decisions and you know better than them. There's an issue that it's not very narrowly targeted at just people who actually are making worse decisions than the propagandist would though. It's kind of just targeted at everyone. I'm not saying I necessarily agree that narrowly targeted social model of disability propaganda would be a good thing, just that the targeting is a necessary condition that I don't get the impression is being fulfilled.
To put it another way, Scott is arguing against the social model of disability presumably because knowing that it's false is a pre-requisite for making good decisions in the related areas. Using the social model as propaganda anyway is one possible decision you could make with this information, but you still need to make an informed choice, so that's not really a good argument against the original point, that it's actually false.
I see what you're saying, I think, and yeah, this is a more down-to-earth objection than the deontological one. Of course, I suspect a universal-audience propagandist (in the general case, not necessarily the social-model-of-disability case) would simply answer that the trade-off can be worth it. The flawed decision-making that comes of people we expect to know better also acting as if the false thing were true can still lead to superior (by some favoured measure) outcomes than everyone acting as if the false thing were indeed false.
Anyway, I'm not really aiming to play consistency gotcha with our host. No one's a walking textbook of one particular moral theory. I was just surprised - maybe a little amused - at where his intuition went with this.
Like, utilitarian rationalists will tie themselves in repugnant knots, and propound all kinds of not-Ivan-Karamazov things (like whatever Eliezer Yudkowsky was doing with the torture vs dust specks argument) as long as the utilons add up in the end. But, it seems a trade-off involving lying just hits differently from a trolley squish.
I feel like objecting to lying even when its useful is a reasonable stance to take - obviously some people will disagree, and I think there are situations where even the most honest person would avoid the truth, but I expect that "I will lie whenever it is expedient, and that's OK" will be much more controversial to express in public (hint: this is one of the times when lying about your intentions is advantageous).
Sure, that would normally be my reaction to such a statement. But rationalists are notorious for their quokka-ness (https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1276138522123161600 for reference), and Scott is probably the biggest quokka of them all, so I'm taking him at his word. In a way, it's astounding that the world still hasn't beaten this attitude out of him, and it would be a sad day if/when it does.
I'm sure Scott knows that people lie, I think the surprise is more that people think he'll just go along with it when he's clued in that it's purely for political expediency. The whole point of signalling quokka-ness is to avoid people making that kind of faux paux around you, I want people around me to bring out their best defences for their expedient lies!
It's only a Nash equilibrium if you think people in general are incapable of noticing the lie. The long-term equilibrium is that people go back to mocking and stigmatizing the disabled, while remembering the campaign of lies they once tried to pull off. It'd be a return to the charity model, except that everyone would have good reason to hate the disabled.
There's also a meta-equilibrium of every side in the culture war fielding their most effective propaganda on every controversial issue. Some lies end up obsolete with time, but the game remains the same.
I think you can sometimes make this argument, you just have to justify it really hard. "Here's why there's a clear and pressing danger unless we make this propaganda point, here's why the false propaganda is the only way to do it and people wouldn't believe the true thing." I'm still not sure I'd agree with this, but I'd understand they were at least making an argument.
The line of reasoning as stated seems almost trivial. Most false political positions are around because they're useful to someone. If someone says - I don't know - "Joe Biden's college degree is fraudulent", and I do some investigative reporting and find it's real, and tell them, and they say "Oh yeah, I was only saying that because it would hurt Joe Biden, which I think is an important political goal", it seems like I have done some useful work in establishing this and we should be less happy with the person who said this. If you can get out of *anything* by saying "Yes, you are right that it's false, I was saying it for propaganda reasons" then it seems like we lose the whole practice of caring about the distinction between true and false statements.
But also, I am utilitarian but try to be the smart, somewhat-SBF-proof kind of utilitarian. Yes, you can mug someone for $50 and donate it to orphans, but a world where everybody steals quickly becomes unmanageable. I think in practice I end up much less utilitarian than other people on the crucial "can you do bad harmful things and then justify them later?" question. I'm grateful to FTX for providing a good example of why doing bad things for utilitarian reasons really does tend to end badly and I'm not just making it up.
I'd say that most false political positions that stick around are there because they passed some kind of memetic selection, with factors like plausible deniability playing a role. The level of justification that you require would be an isolated demand for rigor in the ordinary political process, but, credit where credit's due, you demand it from everyone, so you have standing to make such demands.
What is it you think Scott doesn't get? The situation doesn't seem that complicated. The people who support teaching and propagating the social model (as defined in the original post) think that though the model isn't true, i.e. the model makes false claims, it has more persuasive power and has a higher likelihood to bring about their desired outcome. This is exactly the way advocates of propaganda (a good example is perhaps Salazar) justify their use of it. While it's not true that people from country X are better than people not from country X, it helps the outcomes in country X to persuade people this is the case. Similarly, while Santa Claus doesn't exist, persuading your kids he does and he rewards good behaviour might lead to a beneficial outcome. What is it that's missing from this analysis?
What's missing is that Scott claims that those propagandists are bad and wrong, without making that case. I suppose it's a question of priors - Scott's null hypothesis is that such propaganda is almost always bad and the onus is on his opponents to prove that in this particular case they're justified, whereas I claim that politics has always worked this way, and saying that something is false isn't grounds enough to disqualify it, you need to prove that this particular lie is much more harmful than ordinary propaganda.
But why do you think he doesn't understand this? To me the passage you quoted seems totally consistent with what you just stated. Do you think proponents of social model would defend your prior of "saying that something is false isn't grounds enough to disqualify it, you need to prove that this particular lie is much more harmful than ordinary propaganda"?
Yes? You just said it yourself, "this is exactly the way advocates of propaganda justify their use of it." I expect that at least some of them would reconsider if you proved to them that this instance of false propaganda actually leads to bad outcomes by their lights.
Choosing to communicate something that is factually wrong is not necessarily lying. If you need to do calculations quickly in your head pi=3=sqrt(10). Provably wrong, but useful. In this example, limited capacity forces us to use an approximation. Limited capacity is encountered not only in storing and processing numbers but everywhere. People have limited emotional capacity, limited empathy, limited time or interest to deal with subtle distinctions. Half of the people are stupider than the median. Rationalists tend to score high on standardized tests and the like, so they tend to believe that these issues are not important. But they are. Also the fact that you don’t need to learn quantum mechanics in full to do chemistry is not controversial -no one would say that the orbital model is propaganda- but as soon as something has political implications people assume the worst.
The other issue is that different people have different beliefs and experiences, and so what is a really important message to one audience sounds obviously wrong to another.
I don't think that's obvious at all. It probably would be a disadvantage in the ancestral environment, but not necessarily a decisive one, especially when the deaf evolve better peripheral vision and the like to compensate.
You're also privileging the hypothesis. It's easy to imagine an alternate universe where say, humans evolved the ability to see in ultraviolet or sense magnetic fields or whatever, and they have the same argument and say "an organism with the inability to see UV would have never survived to become homo sapiens."
Well, if you want to posit an entirely different physical world then anything is possible. I suppose, if every organism around us as we were developing, couldn’t hear either we have a fighting chance, but I don’t really see how it can go very far. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
If we evolve without hearing, I don’t really see why we would’ve been able to make sounds. It would be rather pointless, wouldn’t it? So the path to any kind of language communication becomes rather difficult to my mind. Vibrations of all sorts are a condition of this physical world, so perhaps being able to sense vibrations in an a way other than hearing is a possibility but how does this creature turn into something like us?
> I suppose, if every organism around us as we were developing, couldn’t hear either we have a fighting chance, but I don’t really see how it can go very far.
The animal kingdom provides many examples of real-life evolved animals with various sensory abilities superior or inferior to humans, so your naive assumptions about what are necessary for the survival of all animals are likely to be falsified if you look.
In this case, one obvious point of comparison is snakes. Snakes aren't *completely* deaf, but they don't have ears and can only sense low frequency sounds and they're effectively deaf by human standards. And yet, they evolved and got along in nature just fine. So at the very least hearing is not a necessary condition for survival in nature. Do you really think that it would be impossible for say, humans with snake-like hearing to evolve in some alternate timeline?
> In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
Maybe, but we're not talking about blindness here.
> So the path to any kind of language communication becomes rather difficult to my mind.
Are you seriously not aware that Deaf people have language too?
> but how does this creature turn into something like us?
It's pretty easy to imagine what a hypothetical society of deaf humans might look like because real life history provides multiple examples of communities with significant deaf populations. They're not much different from hearing communities, they just use sign languages instead of oral languages.
> The animal kingdom provides many examples of real-life evolved animals with various sensory abilities superior or inferior to humans, so your naive assumptions about what are necessary for the survival of all animals are likely to be falsified if you look.
Naive am I? Ok, whatever.
I wasn’t talking about all animals. I was talking about Homo sapiens and I am well aware of all the creatures on this earth that have a wide variety of sensory abilities, and they have all found their niche. What I am saying is I don’t think Homo sapiens finds its niche under the conditions that you are positing. iI’s fine to talk about communities that exist where everyone’s deaf and can communicate with one another but they’ve already gotten to be human beings haven’t they? They did not arise from the mud in that condition.
>Am I seriously not aware that deaf people have a language?
No. What does sign language arise from?
What if I were to say a whole bunch of shared concepts that can be encoded in different ways? To whit, all the languages that Homo sapiens has devised once given the ability to do so. The deep ocean is full of blind, deaf and dumb creatures.. still waiting for them to evolve a sign language. Anyway, seeing as you lay the groundwork for this tone of discussion, I will say that I think you’re really not taking the big picture into consideration at all. You keep starting the game somewhere near the end instead of at the beginning;
Sentient, conscious beings who have accrued a symbolic relationship to the world are capable of all kinds of things. The question is, how do you get there from a primordial slime without some serious ability to perceive the world around you with sight and sound and touch? Would it be naïve of me to say that sign language is a difficult thing without a very flexible hand an opposable thumb?
Perhaps we should discuss the whole community of three legged cheetahs while we’re at it.
Also, I might add you are unnecessarily rude in your way of addressing this discussion. If you think I am full of shit, just say so; it would be simpler for all concerned.
Now you're asking how humans evolved? Obviously they would evolve the same way they did in our own timeline. I don't understand why you think hearing has anything to do with that.
P.S I'm not trying to be rude. I'm curious which parts seemed rude and whether there would have been a better way to phrase things. Was it the "are you seriously unaware" part? I guess I did let my frustration get to me there. If so, I'll try to keep that in mind and avoid that language in the future.
“In the 1500s, Pedro Ponce de Leon, a Spanish Benedictine monk, adapted these signs to help him educate deaf students in Spain. He is the first recognized teacher of the deaf and his work paved the way for the creation and instruction of a formal sign language.”
Imagine that; a person with hearing invents sign language.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to respond to or what argument you're trying to make. Is your claim that deaf people would somehow not be able to invent language on their own? Because if so, it's worth noting that in our world the *one documented case of language spontaneously arising* was at a school for the deaf.
“In the 1500s, Pedro Ponce de Leon, a Spanish Benedictine monk, adapted these signs to help him educate deaf students in Spain. He is the first recognized teacher of the deaf and his work paved the way for the creation and instruction of a formal sign language.”
Imagine that; a person with hearing invents sign language.
I don't get the examples in the first few comments... at all. In a world designed for people with wheelchairs, a person who can walk normally wouldn't be "disabled", they would be the equivalent of Usain Bolt and Mike Tyson rolled into one. That's *why* there isn't a civilization where most people use wheelchairs to begin with -- because being able to walk is such a major advantage for any organism living in a human-like way that it will inevitably evolve to be the dominant phenotype. The same applies for the people who can see/hear in the other thought experiments mentioned.
The only way I can see these arguments having any validity is if I'm meant to be imagining something like a society of blind cave trolls that never venture up to the surface or something like that. If that's what's meant by "a society where 99% of people are blind", then sure, being able to see wouldn't be much of an advantage there. But then the conclusion just reduces to the claim that our understanding of disabilities is rooted in human biology, which is clearly true but not an especially interesting or useful claim.
It’s also a little odd to talk about “wheelchair users” at all in the context of the social model, since a wheelchair is itself a medical/technological intervention directed at the disabled individual!
A wheelchair user going up a ramp is in fact a great example of the intersectionist model - it combines both a social accommodation (build ramps) and a medical treatment (provide a wheelchair and teach them to use it).
A purely social intervention wouldn’t work well - it’s fairly easy to make a building wheelchair accessible. Much harder to make it accessible to a paraplegic without a wheelchair. But a purely medical model isn’t great either, at least not yet, since wheelchairs still can’t go everywhere a person with fully functional legs can.
More generally I can't endorse literally saying false things in the service of some social cause, but I do think this is a more complex issue than the rationalist community treats it as.
Zvi Mowshowitz did a series of posts about this - people use statements for a variety of reasons, only one of which is "conveying truth." A common reason to say true things, perhaps more common than conveying truth, is persuasion.
I'm bad at persuasion! I have a compulsive need to point out weaknesses in my own arguments, explain that there are exceptions to general rules, and otherwise undermine myself at every turn. A world of people who think and argue like me would be directionless. We need zealous soldiers *and* thoughtful debaters.
Consider a case where an issue has two sides - one if which tends to attract debaters and the other of which appeals to soldiers. Almost certainly the debaters are right! They're the ones who actually want to be right more than they want to win, after all. But the soldiers will be more convincing.
So a worldview that says "only say true things and do not mislead" is a worldview where we have correct people and winning people and they're often on opposite sides.
Wouldn’t a big part of saying true things be to protect your credibility, not an unimportant thing for social creatures? The boy who cried wolf comes to mind.
> There is nothing inherently better about being sighted versus being blind. There is nothing inherently better about walking versus using a wheelchair.
Of course there is. A sighted person can choose to put on a blindfold if they wish. A blind person cannot choose to see no matter how much they want to. A person who can walk can sit in a wheelchair if they wish and wheel around. A paraplegic cannot walk no matter how much they want to. One of the pair in each example is simply _more able_ to do things and can do _more things_.
That's at the root of the conventional understanding of disability - there is a common ability which is lacking. All things being equal, more ability is better than less because you are more likely to be able to do the things you would like to do, it's easier for you to be self-actualized and flourish, etc. And that's without even getting into some of the most pernicious disabilities like chronic pain of various kinds which can literally be a living hell with no possible argument for any upside.
Does society have an obligation to enable everyone to lead a life of dignity and purpose, and help them to be their best self? Of course. But let's not pretend that being not-disabled isn't strictly superior to being disabled, and that any disabilities which can be removed, should be.
I'm sure there are and will be a lot of comments dunking on this take but I just had to be one of them because wow is it wrong...
"Of course there is. A sighted person can choose to put on a blindfold if they wish. A blind person cannot choose to see no matter how much they want to. A person who can walk can sit in a wheelchair if they wish and wheel around. A paraplegic cannot walk no matter how much they want to. One of the pair in each example is simply _more able_ to do things and can do _more things_."
I think this is mostly true and important, but I don't know if it's literally right. I'm very sound-sensitive, and although you'd think I could solve this problem when wearing earplugs as needed, in fact:
- they only work about 50%
- earplugs plus giant construction earmuffs work about 90%, but the remaining 10% still hurts
- earplugs start irritating my ears after 12+ hours, and the giant construction earmuffs start hurting after about an hour
- I can't sleep in the giant construction earmuffs because they don't let me put my head in a comfortable position
- It's hard to bring these everywhere I go
I think there would be real advantages to me being deaf over the current situation, although of course they're outweighed by the disadvantages.
Mostly true is on the mark. It's definitely not universally true, the examples I was responding to were more or less perfectly picked to fit into a paradigm of being not-disabled as strictly superior. As others have said, sound is pretty hard to block out, so deafness doesn't fit into the paradigm as well.
I think that sound sensitivity probably does fit into that paradigm, though, better maybe than deafness - most people have an "ability" (unbothered by most noise(s)) that is more or less just superior to being sound sensitive. The person who isn't sound sensitive can go more places, enjoy more things, etc. I don't know that there's really any advantage the being bothered by sound (correct me if I'm wrong!).
It's definitely not a paradigm that perfectly fits every disability, but it is as you say, mostly true. If it wasn't, we likely wouldn't be having this conversation because disability wouldn't be a concept we would have developed.
People seem to have the idea that being able to sense things at a low level corresponds with experiencing pain when that stimulus is at a more intense level, and that's just not true.
On a more practical level, you need to get better fitting external earpro. If they begin hurting _before_ the insertable ones bother you, something is very wrong with your fitment.
None of the plus points of the social model people have set out seem to require the social as opposed to biopsychosocial (holistic?) model. Apart from those about fighting being a good thing.
Even the meta point about the model itself being more dignified - disabled advocates in favour of disability ramps are also generally in favour of disability benefits, in other words of a holistic model, and don't consider that dignity is undermined by realism, any more than a monarch will accept homage but disdain taxpayer support.
In addition to the fighting, it could also be about the irrationality - a display of power, the deadening effect of paying lip service to the ludicrous, the deliberate strengthening of the kind of people who like controlling the thoughts of others, that sort of thing. Easier for a king to take people's money if they're all having to say in public and private that his rule is anointed by God, when everyone knows his grandfather was a peasant and he's only in charge because someone else got unlucky with a blacksmith. That might be overthinking it, though.
I just had my aversion to Continental philosophy refreshed by Tyler Cowen linking to Kevin Munger's critique of him. Hard to give a fair shake to others bringing it up now.
Another issue with the Social Model is that it can be quite non-compassionate to people whose lives are dominated by *other people's* disabilities. For example, I have a teenage relative who is severely autistic. He can barely speak to indicate his needs; he throws violent self-harming tantrums; he can only eat three things; he cannot deal with a large and random array of sensory stimuli, which must be kept out of the home; etc, etc, etc. His parents' lives completely revolve around trying to meet his needs. When disability advocates say "autism is not a problem! it's just a different way of being!", this can feel like gaslighting to a family that has to accept numerous and constant limitations on their own lives due to their child's condition.
I genuinely wonder (no snark) how the Social Model advocates would respond to your example. How many would say "If your autistic relative's parents feel put upon, then they are ableist and are part of the problem!" and how many would say "Society should help accommodate your autistic relative *and* his parents, e.g., by providing trained volunteers to do respite care."
Quite a bit of pearl-clutching at the idea that the model could be wrong but still useful. It's a model, that's the point, there's a whole aphorism about it :)
It's not "wrong" in the way regular models are wrong, and not useful in the way most models are. It's a literally false thing, and it's use is as emotionally manipulative political propganda, not a tool for making iteratively better predictions about the world (i.e. what most models are useful for). So it's at the least very misleading to compare it to other models in this way. "Model" is not even really an accurate description of what it is. It's more just a theory.
That the Earth is spherical is literally false too. It’s a model, and it works for making maps via projections. Models are controlled lying. The difference is that a scientific model tends not to have much emotional and political baggage attached. Except for economics perhaps.
It’s usefulness is not as a “model”, which would imply that one could use it to make accurate observations or predictions about the reality that it models.
But as a “model” it’s no more accurate than the thing it’s supposedly replacing, the medical model. Both are equally wrong, just in opposite directions.
In fact the utility of the social model only exists as a rhetorical counterbalance to the medical model. Absent the medical model as a “baseline” the social model falls down like a lean-to with nothing to lean on.
So it’s terrible as a “model” to be taught as a first principle, because it’s woefully incomplete unless you are also familiar with the model it argues against.
I believe the tendency until the mid twentieth century to force children in schools to learn to write with their right hand was mostly to make life more convenient for them in a world with slow drying ink. With a pencil or a ball point pen, there is no problem writing left-handed, but if you are dipping a steel pen into an inkwell things are not so easy.
My sister is left-handed, and a much better penwoman than I'll ever be. At school we were both required to write with fountain pens.
Long story short: it's possible to write using an ink pen when you're moving your hand over what you just wrote, but it's a lot easier to avoid smudging the ink if you're constantly moving your hand *away* from the most recently written (and hence: still wet) parts.
I know this from personal experience, because one of the langauges I was learning to write at that time was Arabic.
It might be prudent to consider that the various writing systems were developed under a quite different set of circumstances, than those to be found in a mid-twentieth century classroom. For one thing, it is quite plausible that they were intended for use by people who had access to a better writing surface than a school desk, and - most importantly - more time.
Speaking as someone who had to learn penmanship with a fountain pen in the 60s there is reason in this . I was taught an elaborate system of tilting the paper and curling my arm and hand just so. I was pretty bad at it and wrecked a lot of shirts.
I was *allowed* to write with my left (after they'd made me try right-handed and seen that it didn't work), but I wasn't taught anything about it. I just hold my hand below the line I'm writing on. But my handwriting is never going to win any prizes, and it's slow, as well; and my hand starts to hurt after only a little while.
Ink is one problem, and the directionality of the nib is another. Cursive, and at least Western calligraphic letterforms, are designed around these issues: as an overall pattern, the hand drags the nib from the top left to the lower right, to maintain ink flow and prevent driving the nib into the paper.
Ultimately, I think this writing practice derives from left-to-right text.
I started toying with these ideas in the last comment section, but: Some version of the medical model is pretty much universal and uncontroversial in cases where we can actually reliably fix the problem medically. I don't hear anybody, even the staunchest proponent of the social model, who say that we should stop surgically fixing cleft palates in infancy and instead accommodate people with that condition. There are plenty of things that were once debilitating disabilities that we now medically correct as a matter of course, and approximately nobody has any problem with that. (the opposition of some deaf people to the use of cochlear implants being an interesting exception.) Even something like a wheelchair ramp presupposes the use of a medical device (the wheelchair) to ameliorate the disability.
I guess I would boil my thoughts on this down to: Medically correct disability whenever possible. Also understand that every accommodation, no matter how trivial, has a nonzero cost, and sometimes hard choices need to be made about whether the cost is actually worth it. And at least in the case of government action, non-disabled people do in fact get a say in this conversation, seeing as it's (largely) their money being spent.
Tinnitus is one of the most common causes of disability in US combat veterans. It also seems to be a uniquely difficult condition to shoehorn into the Social Model.
[I started writing a reply comment and argued myself halfway to sympathizing with the social model.]
Level of permanent/persistent combat-related disability is compensated by the US government. For many other conditions, the VA can provide prosthetics, medications, etc. For tinnitus there's nothing you can really do, except hold a ceremony, write a monthly check, and say thank you for your service.
In one sense, society is directly to blame for many cases of traumatic tinnitus. If your buddy unloads his gun right next to your ear he might be saving your life in combat, while giving you permanent hearing damage and a ringing in your ear that will never go away. You got that injury in combat, and it was the government that sent you to combat in the first place.
More commonly, men tend to get tinnitus as a result of domestic violence. While men tend to punch, women are more likely to slap. A hard slap across the ear can cause traumatic tinnitus that may become permanent. (We were doing a clinical trial looking for traumatic tinnitus a few years back.)
I guess viewed in this way, we see the real appeal of the "social model" as a bastardized kind of tort that's specifically oriented toward permanent body differences/changes, where blame can't rightly be attached to one guilty person. Instead of focusing on a specific plaintiff, SM targets the government for relief. I think there's a motte form of this argument that could play well with public sympathies and honest logic (i.e. combat injury), as well as a bailey that clearly takes the concept too far.
"But it sounds like some people in the field of chronic pain have focused on the “psycho-” part and are using it to insist on therapy and prevent people from getting their chronic pain medications."
I interpret this as more directly a result of the overcorrection to the opioid crisis than as a specific reliance on a model. In other words, the rationale is not driving the practice of withholding opioids. It's the other way around: the desire to withhold opioids latches onto any available rationale, however tenuous. But you can always fabricate a justification when working from motivated reasoning. I don't think getting rid of the biopsychosocial rationale would have any impact on people seeking to withhold opioids. They'd just turn to something else - like bureaucracy.
The commenters that are cool with propaganda, or retreating to meta positions regarding "what's politically effective is more important than what's true" are badly underestimating how corrosive those positions are to society. Yes, it's socially inept to take people literally all the time, or to prefer truth over friendship. But people hate being bullshitted, and they really really hate being obviously, brazenly bullshitted, to the point where they stop trusting not just the bullshitter, but all their friends, then all the people that ever said anything nice about them, and then eventually everyone that refuses to condemn them.
I'd hoped the experience of COVID would have dampened enthusiasm for this style of thinking for a generation. I get there's an is/ought crux, but seeing people talk about the "is" like there's no downside is unsettling.
An important thing to remember is that the whole practice of "it doesn't matter if its true if it serves the cause and gets me what I want" is not normal. Or rather, to the extent that it's normal, it's normal in the way that beating your wife is normal, or demanding bribes to do your job is normal. It might be normal in the sense that it is both common and accepted within a particular community—but there are other communities where it is neither. You don’t have to live like that. Just as importantly, we don’t have to live like that, and nobody has any right to expect the rest of us to tolerate abusive and destructive behavior just because they’re used to it.
I mean, once some one has declared or demonstrated a willingness to lie for gain, then the only sensible reaction is to never trust anything they say ever again.
It never ceases to amuse me (cause it has long ceased to surprise), when people lament the loss of trust in media, science, the academia, etc. Newsflash: in order for people to trust you, you actually have to be trustworthy.
I would make a distinction between the building of a shared ideological framework (deliberate or otherwise) and straight lying/bullshitting. Shared “lies” have been considered instrumental to strengthening society in many cases, religion being the most obvious example.
Yeah, how to react to 'we are using this false thing for propaganda' is one tactic that always got under my skin. I'm still not sure how to react to it, but my native instinct is to try to deny a place at the intellectual bargaining table to anyone who uses it.
Gonna be honest. I didnt have "scott alexander comes out against metaphors" on my bingo card for the day.
To be charitable, maybe he is just reading some of these not the same way I am reading them. Like i am reading a lot of people trying to emphasize that the distinction between medical-2 and social-2 model is in the ought viewpoint of where primary locus of solutions to any impairment should be. So the social model would include people who hold the social-1 model described in the article but also include people who hold the interaction-1 model. Meanwhile while Kaplan holds the social-1 model he actually almost certainly holds the medical-2 model
> I suppose the boring real explanation is that left-handers were never that discriminated again and there’s no left-hander genocide or anything to memorialize.
This... can't be right. Left-handedness was viewed in extremely negative terms. That's the reason everyone who was left-handed was forced to act as if they were right-handed. "Sinister" is the Latin word for "left".
I agree there were strong negative feelings, but my impression is at least since the founding of the USA, the worst thing that happened was people had to get yelled at by teachers, use their nondominant hand and be somewhat less agile. Nobody was killed or enslaved or segregated over it (right?)
In my preschool they served a hot lunch and I was made to hold a fork and eat with my incompetent right hand. This would be 1970 in Los Angeles. They wouldn't let me eat if I picked the fork up with my left hand (ie, took the fork out of my hand, told me I couldn't eat unless I held the fork in my right hand). My mom went ballistic when she found out about it but that was my mom and it was after a few weeks of my trying to eat in a short period of time using a hand that didn't work for the purpose while experiencing public shaming in front of my peers while they enjoyed their lunches.
Not slavery nor segregation, but significant nonetheless. I vaguely remember at the time learning from my mom that this was a not uncommon thing done in some schools and families up to that point.
IIUC, actively breaking bones on the left hand was not unheard of until around the middle of the 20th century, in Western nations. I shudder to think what was considered normal in societies with stronger (religious?) taboos on the issue, and in less civilised times.
IMO it's probably comparable in discrimination level to homosexuality, in that it's a tendency you're born with but could with great effort act against and hide, to avoid societal punishment?
I feel like it was much closer to nose-picking, or scratching your butt. It's impolite to use your left hand, we're going to smack you until you learn propriety and then we'll view it as solved.
> I became more aware of the fact that it’s hard to define “disabled” in a sense where things we consider abled (eg hearing) wouldn’t be disabilities in some other society.
You cited a bunch of examples that assumed without argument that hearing in a world of deaf people would be disadvantageous. This is not actually true. Being around big industrial machines (we have those in reality!) is unpleasant because of the noises they make. But being deaf around them is still worse, not better; those noises carry important information about what the huge, dangerous machines are doing, and you can use that information to improve your own safety.
On the assumption that you don't care about your safety and neither does anyone else, you can also use that information to detect both problems in - and the normal operation of - the machinery, which will make you more productive in your job supervising and/or operating it.
I'm very sympathetic to those people's arguments because I have noise processing issues and have sometimes fantasized about being deaf - I agree that overall the advantages of hearing outweigh the disadvantages, but it's pretty visceral to me that I can imagine a world where that isn't true.
Do you have an article re: noise processing issues and your methods for dealing with them?
(I very much relate to the above -- having spent a fortune on soundproofing, purportedly noise-cancelling gear, all the way through buying a house with a basement specifically so that I was able to move the computers there, with the displays etc. a floor up, driven via fiber cables!)
Unfortunately no. Mine are mostly not being able to work when there's noise; I handle it through a combination of good earplugs, construction earmuffs, and a big box fan for my room / white noise machine for travel - plus accepting I'm probably not going to get much work done in most environments. I'm very lucky to have enough money that I can live in a separate house without flatmates, and to have a wife who's pretty quiet and takes my sensitivities seriously.
> I appreciate this explanation, but I hope I’m not being too hostile by summarizing it as “Yes, it may be false, but people are promoting the false thing for propaganda purposes.” How is that an extenuating factor?
I'm so confused when you do this. You quote it and use language as though you are being generous and charitable, in the very same sentence as being basically totally ungenerous and uncharitable. Can you just.. not tell you're doing it? It is confusing the same way it is confusing when you aggressively fail to steelman or pull a motte-and-bailey, which you do a lot despite having as far as I know coined the terms.
Yes, that is a hostile summary. Their whole reply was full of points like "there's a spectrum" "it has a lot of value" "you can't really understand it without the political history" "it's not entirely false or true but it is somewhat absolutist" etc. The words 'false' and 'propaganda' are just totally wrong ways to summarize any of it.
Time and time again this blog plays the trick of "pretending to understand a subject in order to pass negative judgment on it", and time and time again it fails to understand or sympathize any opposing viewpoints, but cleverly *pretends* to understand them which is, I guess, good enough for the readership. The people who know about this blog but *don't* read it are the ones who can see through this pattern of deception.
Seriously, if you can't understand where other people are coming from, you're not in a position to credibly disagree with them. You can try but you're just going to fail, because your disagreement doesn't *encompass* the other view. Instead it just fails to notice it entirely. The result sounds like a parody, and that's what having a debate with a few static articles on your own blog sounds like. If you want to find out what the point of this other model of disability is for, go argue with some actual people and then demonstrate that you understand their positions and that yours somehow supersedes theirs. Here you have demonstrated that you physically can't comprehend other positions, but are eager to pretend to so that, presumably, you sound more credible to a bunch of people who already agree with you.
I think Scott's summary makes perfect sense and I feel like your comment is using language as though you are being generous and charitable, while being being basically totally ungenerous and uncharitable. I feel like you're comment is stuck in the meta without addressing the actual argument. Can you explain concretely why "It's false but people are promoting the false thing for propaganda purposes" is a bad summary?
Not OP but I believe the summary glosses over a few important points. Imagine a world where people can either believe A) the medical model or B) the social model, in their purest, most extreme form. What would you pick? Now, our world is arguably different from this imagined world, but not as much as rationalists may assume. Storing bits of information has a cost. Nuance comes with non negligible cognitive demands. Having people believe the thing that will result in some desirable behavior rather than the thing that is true according to some abstract, objective standard may be more a necessity than a choice. The people who are smart enough and have enough time to process a nuanced view will get there eventually anyway, while the others are spared the cost of useless (or even detrimental) thinking. Or to put it in a different way: those who can understand the limits of a metaphor will be fine anyway; those who can’t help but take it literally should be fed a metaphor that, when interpreted literally, results in desirable behavior.
Thanks for the explanation, but I would still summarize it as “Yes, it may be false, but people are promoting the false thing for propaganda purposes".
I think you need to cover the inferential distance of "Having people believe the thing that will result in some desirable behavior rather than the thing that is true according to some abstract, objective standard may be more a necessity than a choice". This is not obvious to me, and you can't just assume this without stating it or arguing for it (like the person I was responding to). Sure, nuance has costs (which you include) but lack of nuance also has costs (which you omit). I think the cost/benefit is on the side of "speak the truth", and so does Scott:
>I became more aware that some people think “Yes, this is false, but you don’t seem to understand that we’re using this false thing as propaganda” is some kind of extenuating factor that makes it okay. I’m against this, but I understand there’s lots of very convincing-sounding propaganda arguing I should be for it.
« This is not obvious to me, and you can't just assume this without stating it or arguing for it » You are absolutely right. This makes all the difference, in fact. If you assume a world where either people believe pi=3 or pi=4 and they cannot parse the statement that 3<pi<4 then telling them that pi does not equal 3 is irresponsible because they will assume that pi = 4. The burden of the proof that the world is indeed like this is on the proponents of the social model.
Psychologically, rationalists hate being lied to because the liar is assuming that they can be lied to. Their highest value being intelligence, this is the worst offense imaginable, like holding the door open for a feminist woman. This is also the reason why most despise religion. But they are not the target audience of either the social model or religion, it’s just that in a world of one-to-many communication, lies cannot be tailored to the audience and everyone gets the pi=3 treatment.
I am not really disagreeing with you except for the fact that propaganda is a proper subset of this. Certainly telling a kid that pi=3.14 is not propaganda? Yet it’s subtly false and it’s motivated by the desire to get the kid to act in a certain way (e.g. by solving math tests).
"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. "
If every human was born with the same level of physical ability that she now lives with, the last human would have been eaten by wolves not long after the first human was born.
If we imagine that some alien civilization with approximately our level of technology were to stop by and take pity on the differently-abled protohumans, building them the technological infrastructure to survive, I doubt they'd be able to keep the machinery running more than a century or two. And if they could, I expect it would be a Vaal-like Servants of the Machine dystopia. If we set it at early industrial technology or before, then I'm even more confident of that.
We live in meatspace. And approximately the full "normal" set of human abilities, is required for humans to *keep* living in meatspace, to establish dominance over the wolves, to build and maintain industrial civilization, to grow food, etc. Because, we basically didn't do any of those things, had a much more precarious existence, until we got the full modern set of human abilities, and then we went and doggified the wolves, built that industrial civilization, etc, in an incredibly short time once we did. "Normally abled" is not an arbitrary social choice, it's a minimum requirement for survival without dependency.
I think "dominance over meatspace" is easier than you set it out to be, the hard task is to do that in competition with other humans. A society of deaf people would probably survive fine in a state of nature on a deserted island, but they would quickly be subjugated once canoes arrive with warriors who can throw spears and communicate at the same time. Which unexpectedly brings us back to the social model.
I feel this hinges on the sort of desert island you assume, because one of the key skills conducive to flourishing in a state of nature is the ability to respond appropriately when someone yells "duck!" (IOW, being able to respond to auditory warnings of danger to life and limb, because a lot of the time, they're the only ones you're gonna get.)
The Polynesian seems to have been able to flourish in the state of nature quite easily, since they had plenty of time left after ensuring basic survival to build giant war canoes, create elaborate weapons, train for years to become formidable warriors and fight each other in destructive raids and wars. I'm pretty sure deaf people could have managed to thrive on similar islands if they didn't have to put 30% (ish?) of their cultural output into war.
I think many, maybe a majority, of pre-historic humans would have happily traded their ability to hear for magical protection from their enemies.
The key word here is "magical". Yes, in the theoretical world where all humans live on idyllic islands with plentiful food, no hearing predators, and no life-or-death disputes over resources, they could probably get by just fine while being deaf. That isn't the environment in which humans evolved, nor is it the environment in which the vast majority of humans have ever lived.
Absent "magical protection", had pre-historic humans lost their hearing, they would have quickly been out-competed and rendered extinct by other species.
>Absent "magical protection", had pre-historic humans lost their hearing, they would have quickly been out-competed and rendered extinct by other species.
We just have to disagree about that. "Pre-historic humans" is a broad category, but it includes people with agriculture, horses, iron and large complex societies. They are already dominating nature and predators are not on the top 30 of their issues, and it wouldn't suddenly become an issue just because they went deaf.
Other humans aren't the only threat you are going to be facing.
Deafness not only means you can't hear audible warnings of non-human dangers, but you are also limited to line-of-sight communication with your fellow tribesmen. Which means you won't notice their desperate attempts to warn you just before the rock that has broken off the cliff crushes your skull, because your back happened to be turned at the time.
Every sense we have confers a *massive* evolutionary advantage. If it weren't we wouldn't have it, because there wouldn't be enough selective pressure to ensure it gets cemented in our genome. If it didn't matter whether one can hear or not, congenital deafness would be a lot more common than it is (currently estimated at 1-3 children per one thousand newborns, source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22538062/; by way of comparison, left-handedness, which doesn't appear to affect evolutionary fitness a lot - as far as we can tell - appears in around 10% of humans, source: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-45297-004 - a two-order-of-magnitude difference.)
You'll note that we have reached a level of prosperity where a disability on the level of deafness is not treated as disqualifying one as a member of society. A 'state-of-nature' community, which depends on contributions from every member, would likely kill congenitally disabled infants as soon as the disability was discovered, and even if they lived, they would be highly unlikely to reproduce, so the prevalence may have been even lower than it is now.
In short, I expect an isolated tribe composed solely of deaf people to succumb to various misfortunes rather quickly - within a number of generations we can count on one hand - even if they meet no other humans during this time.
>Which means you won't notice their desperate attempts to warn you just before the rock that has broken off the cliff crushes your skull, because your back happened to be turned at the time.
I can assure you that pre-historic Polynesians didn't worry much about skull-crushing rocks.
>Every sense we have confers a *massive* evolutionary advantage. If it weren't we wouldn't have it, because there wouldn't be enough selective pressure to ensure it gets cemented in our genome.
I completely agree. But my claim is that most of this advantage manifests in competition with other humans, since pre-historic peoples are already masters of nature.
>In short, I expect an isolated tribe composed solely of deaf people to succumb to various misfortunes rather quickly - within a number of generations we can count on one hand - even if they meet no other humans during this time.
Obviously I disagree. I feel like I've made my case well, your arguments seem pretty weak to me and doesn't bring anything that the top post of this thread didn't already have.
I can't tell if you're being wilfully obtuse or are so completely divorced from existence in a state of nature that you are unable to apprehend the issue even as an act of imagination.
"Rock falling on your head" is shorthand for:
- you fell down a hole and can't get out,
- an infant child ran off, as children are won't to, and now they have no idea how to get back home and the parent has no idea where to look for them,
- a fire has broken out while everyone was sleeping, and the person who spotted it must choose between either trying to put it out or rousing the others, and they can only rouse one person at a time unless everyone is sleeping in a big huddle.
In short, the only way your tribe of deaf people is thriving on an isolated tropical island is if it is a completely fantasy one constructed just so that the absolutely massive (I really can't stress this part enough; we're literally talking life-and-death here) disadvantage of being deaf isn't an issue.
> I completely agree. But my claim is that most of this advantage manifests in competition with other humans, since pre-historic peoples are already masters of nature.
Yes, and - this bit is important - prehistoric peoples could hear, and would probably kill/banish tribesmen who couldn't as being a curse, or at least an unbearable burden.
Let's start with the obvious: hunting. If you can't hear that something's there, then the ability to remain unseen becomes a superpower against you, regardless of whether you're the hunter or prey.
Most animals already know to hide from predators or the prey they're stalking - are quite adept at it, in fact - which is why you'll notice that pretty much everything living in the same sorts of environments as humans happens to have well developed hearing on top of decent eyesight. Hell, most animals can hear better than they can see, because hearing is so much more useful in practice.
Remember, audible cues tell you not only that something is out there - even if you can't presently see it - but can also give you a pretty good idea *where* it is.
If it's just deafness, and if you are on a desert island without any dangerous animals, yes, that's probably survivable. But I think the OP was talking about more substantial disabilities. And desert islands without dangerous animals are not a plausible place for humans to evolve in the first place.
I still think your post is missing that the most dangerous threat to meatspace humans is other humans. I think even the level of disability that OP stated would be survivable without that threat.
Scott, I don't think you can simultaneously claim that you have used the terms correctly according to Social Model of Disability, and also that you refuse to participate in the annoying game of redefining words which you accuse SMD of doing.
Also I'd like to push back on the “what if we force you to use a new word for the common-sense definition of the term and restrict the word you already have strong connotations with to a new definition”
People were not using "disability" to mean what SMD now means by "impairment". People were using the "disability" to mean the amalgamation of both biological and environmental factors, often without realizing it. It's not immediately clear whether biological related use was more often than environmental and even how to properly compare them. That's why it's helpful to have two different words for this kind of thing - more accuracy and more awareness of what you actually mean. Now is it annoying that in the transitional period their may be ambiguity between old and new definitions? Sure. But that's the way that language evolves and I don't think there is much utility in trying to oppose it.
Or... they could have created an entirely new term to go with their new meaning, but then they wouldn't have been able to take advantage of the connotative values that the term they were hijacking had.
It happened to be easier in this case to shift the meaning of one term and come with a new term for the part of the meaning that was abandoned than invent two new terms, in this case. Which points to the fact that the term "disabled" was used in the environmental context enough so that this shenanigan succeeded
Except... it's not how language works in my profession. When we have a new concept, technology, process, failure mode or whatever, we very much do NOT use extant terminology if and unless that previously-defined term exactly applies. I'd say it's the difference between a hard science/engineering/manufacturing mindset and a soft/social/pseudo science one, but even that doesn't really seem to match. Off the top of my head, USPSA has specific definitions for "class," "division," and "category."
It's possible inside of fairly constrained professions to maintain reasonably precise and agreed on meanings, even within the social sciences. But disability policy-making and the social model raised in that context is squarely in the realm of politics and society at large, and definitions are very often up for debate there. People are jockeying for the moral high ground, to establish new boundaries around rights and entitlements and ideas of fairness -- society's responsibility to individuals and vice versa is actively being fought over and the same words get harnessed to opposing goals.
Which is also to say that I think Scott's black and white framing of "lies in service of propaganda" is simplistic. It's a space in which people are constructing stories that are favorable to their interests. The "models" aren't aimed at explanatory accuracy; they're aimed at winning debate. That doesn't make them lies; it makes them rhetoric.
Good for you if so, though I suspect you may just just have a blind spot here.
Take math, for instance. What science can be harder? And yet the same terms (addition, multiplication) are used for the operations in any finite field, despite such operations being quite different.
Math... isn't science. It's not subject to external verification.
A subset of math bears an unreasonably good relation to (and predictive power about) the external world but math also gives you things like the Alcubierre drive and n-dimensional sphere packing arrangements (where n >3). And to our best observations the external universe is in fact self-consistent and complete.
The common thought experiment seems to be to imagine a sighted or hearing person in a world of blind or deaf people, which is certainly interesting. I can imagine a very stressed out hearing person who never gets any sleep because night time is the obvious time to complete road works (/similar). However, I also suspect the reality may be less akin to disability and more akin to 'every superpower has it's kryptonite'.
We can also reverse this by imagining a future or alien society where everyone has an ability we don't, and whether the lack of that ability would constitute a disability/impairment.
Imagine you woke from cryonic sleep to be informed that your illness had been treated. However, they also inform you that they were unable to do anything about your impairment: you will never be able to fly. It turns out that humans have since evolved to fly, and it's just a normal ability that everyone is assumed to have. You then find yourself in a society and urban landscape where you are unable to live a normal life without a 24-hour carer who carries you from place to place.
We would of course hope that the new society we find ourselves in might make 'reasonable accommodations' for the flightless, which might involve installations of stairs and ladders where space and cost allows, but would we really go so far as to say that society is at fault for designing itself around the near-universal ability to fly? Yes, we might want to discuss what measures could be taken to work around this problem, but the problem is very obviously related to our inability to fly.
The idea of a left-handed world seems stronger, because that seems symmetrical to the actual situation: a right-handed person in a world of left-handed people would be in the exact same position as the inverse, so it's genuinely a case of being differently-abled rather than more or less abled. However, I also suspect that's why we tend to think of being left-handed as a difference rather than a disability.
I'm glad to see from Adesh Thapliyal's comments that we do not have the situation I feared: Nobody actually believes the Social Model but everybody is required to publicly proclaim their belief in it or be pilloried.
I would expect a deeper analysis along these lines: Some people have disabilities, but that class depends on what society generally expects/requires of people. So one alternative is to alter society so that the people with a particular limitation aren't disabled, and the other is for those people to be disabled. Assuming that the problem is "large", an important question is which course of action is "more expensive": losing the productivity of the disabled or society paying the costs of adaptation.
Of course, that's a heartless, capitalistic way of looking at it. But the societies that will be around in a century or two are descended from the societies today that are most productive. There is a continuous competition between societies for the allegiance (physical presence, really) of humans, and it's clear that a major determinant of which societies humans choose is material prosperity.
The left-handed catchers in MLB since 1989 has a decent explanation which seems obvious after it's been explained. 1st, there are catchers in MLB that bat left handed (e.g. Tyler Soderstrom of Oakland); the fact that needs to be explained is that there are now left throwing catchers. This was explained to me as down to comparative advantage. A catcher needs to be able to throw the ball quickly, hard, and accurately from home to 2nd base to prevent runners on first from stealing. However, if someone could do that with their left hand, they will almost certainly be more valuable to the team as a left handed pitcher than they would be as a catcher. This is because left handed pitchers have an advantage against right handed hitters, which are more common in the game.
This explanation doesn't really leave any mystery on the table except for "why were there ever left throwing catchers?" If I'm taking a guess, I think its down to the increasing competitiveness at the little-league and college level. If players start the game as kids mostly outside of organized leagues and choose their positions without input from coaches, it's not impossible for a catcher who throws left handed to develop their skills as catcher to the point that it's no longer a good move to convert them to LHP. But if adults are running the show from the get-go, everyone who's good enough at throwing left handed to be a catcher will be asked to pitch instead.
"This is because left handed pitchers have an advantage against right handed hitters"
No, left-handed pitchers lack the platoon advantage against right-handed hitters. (Most baseball hitters hit about .030 batting average points higher against a pitcher using the opposite hand from them.) Hence left-handed hitters generally enjoy a sizable platoon average since most pitchers are right-handed.
Left-handed pitchers do tend to have a modest unfamiliarity advantage over right-handed pitchers. It used to be believed that left-handed pitchers threw pitches with more movement, but the new scanners show that's not true. Apparently, batters just have less practice hitting against left-handers.
But catchers don't get as much of an advantage from being tall as pitchers do. The average MLB pitcher is 6'3" compared to the average MLB catcher at 6'0." For example, Will Smith of the Dodgers, is a 5'10" All Star catcher. If he were left handed, he'd have to be either a first baseman, DH, slow outfielder, or short pitcher. I could imagine him making the MLB as one of those things, but not lasting as long as he is likely to last as a catcher.
I reject the example of the hearing-capable person born into a deaf world.
I mean, yes, that person would face challenges in life, and would require accommodations (i.e. earplugs) a lot of the time. But what everyone seems to be missing is that he possesses a bona fide superpower. He has an entirely new (to the deaf denizens) sense that can detect all kinds of things that normal (i.e. deaf) humans cannot. So, yes, in the short term it makes sense to provide accommodations; in the long term, however, the reasonable thing to do would be to embark on an accelerated research program to give everyone in this society air-vibration-detection superpowers.
The opposite is true of a deaf person born into a hearing-capable society. Yes, he would also require accommodations and special consideration; but it would not make sense to embark on a research program to deprive everyone of their hearing (not unless you're some kind of a Bond-type supervillain, that is). The need for accommodations and disability are correlated, but not identical; and objectively, having more powers -- enhanced senses, higher physical strength, faster mental calculation speed, etc. -- is always (meaning, 100% of time +- epsilon) better than the alternative.
The 1 trillion estimate is probably closer than the 1 billion one, even before accounting for regular maintenance. Extrapolating costs from lower elevations is not fruitful, because as the latter comment indicates, costs increase rapidly with elevation. Given how much time entities like the Colorado DOT spend repairing roads (the possible work season is short), I'm not even sure an outdoor road like that is physically possible with current technology. It would degrade faster than it could be repaired.
Many machines don't work properly at those altitudes. If you try to build only a narrow path, not wide enough to support them, then are you doing all of the work by hand? Carrying bags of cement up and down? Not to mention specific sections where people have to take ladders over ice chasms, which move regularly, or thin ridges where you can't fit a path let alone workers, or steep slopes requiring technical climbing... by the time you were done, if it were even possible, you would have destroyed the very thing you are trying to make accessible.
I checked after I left that comment, and larger infrastructure projects like The Big Dig in Boston run well into the tens of billions. The failed HSR project in CA ate up at least 6B. Can you imagine the environmental impact report for the Everest Ramp?!
I have to say that I had fun for the rest of the day trying to be really thorough about the challenges of the EWR, but I never thought I'd get a call out from our host!
A striking aspect of Cleverbeast's response is that time starts with advanced human society. Human evolution on Earth's environment is presumed to have been successful without the advantage of hearing, so important that at least most vertebrates have it. Is this not a deal-breaking omission? Psychologically, it is intriguing. I wonder how many people do diminish our animal nature.
The problem with the "not being deaf would be a handicap in a world where most people were deaf" argument is that the downside of being able to hear can be eliminated at the trivial cost of wearing hearing protection, as people at gun ranges commonly do, and the advantages when hearing was useful would remain. There is no comparable way to eliminate the disadvantage of being deaf. I take the fact that people defending the model fall back on such a weak example as evidence that the model is not defensible.
A number of the comments come down to "the model is a lie that can be used to persuade people to do things we want them to do," which does not strike me as a defense.
> the downside of being able to hear can be eliminated at the trivial cost of wearing hearing protection,
You sound like someone who has never actually tried that. Speaking as someone who actually *has* tried ear protectors, I can confirm that they are a decidedly imperfect mitigation.
Most obviously, ear protectors only reduce noise, they don't "eliminate" it. For example, I recently went to a restaurant where the music was way too loud and even wearing ear protectors was only enough to reduce it to a tolerable level. And even then, I would get blasted whenever I turned my head because a rigid object can't perfectly conform to your head under all circumstances and small gaps would open up around the side of the muffs. There really is nothing a hearing person can do to completely block out sound, and insisting so just makes you look foolish.
Furthermore, as you'll quickly discover if you ever try to actually wear ear protectors, they are uncomfortable and limiting. It's not easy to wear glasses with them, since glasses are supposed to go over your ears, so the glasses have to get pushed up to an awkward angle. You also can't lie down with them, because the ear protector is in the way between your head and the pillow, so either it gets pushed off or else your head can't make normal contact with the bed. And even without those limitations, they just get uncomfortable to wear after a while.
It's not like I'm even unusual in pointing this out. Scott independently wrote about the same issues elsewhere in this thread. And that's not surprising because these issues are obvious to anyone who actually has personal experience in the matter.
I don't normally say stuff like this, but comments like this make me wish that someone sets up noisy machinery outside your house.
I frequently wear hearing protection for work and various hobby pursuits (and earplugs to concerts), and I will attest that it interferes with situational awareness and verbal communication to a great degree, probably sufficient for David's thought experiment. I've also never had a problem with glasses, although that probably depends on the frames, the earmuffs, and the wearer's anatomy.
But perhaps a better example would be the opaque eyewear used by sighted persons in training to assist the blind.
I think you missed the point of this discussion. The point is that it is impossible to fully mitigate the downsides of hearing (loud noises, distractions) on the occasion that comes up, even in the world we live in, which was designed by the hearing for the hearing and has a lot of effort put into noise reduction. Nobody disputes that there are *advantages* to hearing, as that is too obvious to mention. The problem here is Friedman's bizarre and indefensible claim that there are never any *disadvantages* to hearing.
This is notably *not* true for sight, where you can obviously just close your eyes and wear a blindfold. (Or wear opaque contacts I guess, if you want to fancy and don't like having a blindfold on your face.) But nobody was talking about that in the first place here, so I'm not sure why you brought that up.
one point that I have not seen addressed _at all_ is the fact that everyone will be disabled/impaired/whatever at some point in their lives. When we are born, we are unable to walk and society accommodates us by carrying us around until things improve.
Live long enough, and you will regress to the point where you are
- unable to walk
- hard of hearing/completely deaf
- vision impaired/blind
- in chronic pain
... so the accommodations that we build _now_? There's a minority who uses them all the time, but they're for _everyone_.
Ignoring that fact seems extremely short-sighted to me.
No need to wait. Anyone could be disabled tomorrow. For several people I've known, that's exactly how it happened.
I'm not into barring entry to historical architecture or destroying people's livelihoods because not everyone can participate. But I've heard people militate against curb cuts, wheelchair ramps, and other accommodations, which struck me as short-sighted and not even self-interested.
If the courthouse proposes to be in charge of me, I'd damn well better be able to get into it.
“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.”
Are there any examples where that was actually a good idea?
The meta point seems to be "Is it allowable to lie (or if you want to shade over the issue) to exaggerate, omit, and mislead" for political purposes (ie what I claim to be a good cause). It seems that plenty of people seem to think so.
I don't know what we do about this. The flaws in this logic are so obvious.
1) We can no longer have any sort of useful conversation if I don't trust a word out of your mouth.
2) Historically this sort of behavior has not gone down well. Life is an iterated game, and sooner or later people catch on to what's being done. This happened to the Jesuits repeatedly (there is a reason they were expelled so often, even from Catholic countries).
We also see this today in America. America, since the late 50s has done more than any society on earth to try to improve itself. The only thing comparable is Britain's ending slavery and then spending years stopping the trade. And what has been the result of this ~70 years of self-improvement? Zero acknowledgement that it happened, zero gratitude, and an endless litany of complaints that America is the worst society in human history and that every little thing, no matter what the issue, is motivated not by personality conflicts, or mistakes, or genuine disagreements, but by some sort of -ism.
The consequence of this is exactly what any normal human who understands normal human emotions would predict. If I get exactly the same (hostile, non-empathic, furious) response no matter what I do, then fsck you, I'll do whatever is most convenient for me. That's the basic stance today of 50% of Americans, and that, more than anything else, is why Trump was popular.
Not his policies per se, but the fact that he is pretty much the only politician who is willing to say "America just is not as evil as you claim; and if you insist on this nonsense I don't feel I owe you an apology for anything".
In other words, is the poisoning of our politics worth it? Worth it to achieve something that would probably be achieved anyway (perhaps a few years later, but also perhaps a few years earlier)? Both ADA and Gay Marriage are probably the most "neutral" of current civil rights, the ones that generate the least fury and ongoing litigation – and they're both the ones that were achieved primarily by rational, honest persuasion, not by lies and demonization of opponents.
In evolutionary terms, we are best adapted to our environment with our full faculties. It shouldn’t be seen as any sort of capitulation to say that folks with a disability are at a disadvantage - it clearly makes the world more difficult to navigate. We should support all reasonable accommodations to help them enjoy full lives, but we don’t have to accede to the social theorist’s denialism.
Re. CleverBeast's claim that "There is nothing inherently better about being sighted versus being blind. There is nothing inherently better about walking versus using a wheelchair." :
Scott's answer was polite and reasonable. I feel, though, that we may be playing a sucker's game by responding politely and with an extended argument to claims that are obviously, objectively wrong. This has been happening often lately. We're told that black people can't be racist, that it's fair for cis women to have to compete with trans men in weightlifting, that printing money can't cause inflation (see Freddie deBoer's blog for a recent example), that it's racist not to capitalize Black but racist to capitalize white, that math is white, that every Black in America should receive $100 million in repayments, and that being able to hear and to walk isn't desirable.
I think this is just a tactic of the left to shift the Overton window, by centering debate around obviously insane ideas until only-slightly-insane ideas, like defunding the police or studying Marx in English Lit, seem almost reasonable. I don't know, but perhaps we should stop responding to utterly insane claims, or respond with laughter and derision rather than polite responses. Debating insane opinions seems only to legitimize them.
Getting people to nod along (including by mere engagement, as if it were a "reasonable" position worth discussing with "fairness and balance") with obvious nonsense, i.e. notions in screaming contradiction with physical reality -- whether in ancient Egypt ("pharaoh is a god") or today ("printing money doesn't cause inflation") is one of the ways the powerful exercise their power; and, more interestingly, ferret out those who are not playing along, not clapping with sufficient enthusiasm.
>I appreciate this explanation, but I hope I’m not being too hostile by summarizing it as “Yes, it may be false, but people are promoting the false thing for propaganda purposes.” How is that an extenuating factor?
I still don't really understand why you say it is false... I don't think there are any empirical predictions that the social model would make that the biopsychosocial model wouldn't also make, or the medical model for that matter.
Given that the models have no empirical disagreements, it seems wrong to say that one is true and the other is false. Rather, they just disagree on framings, semantics, and recommendations - precisely the stuff that propaganda is made of.
I'd suspect that we'd hear a lot more about the oppression of lefthanders in the past if there was a way to make money off lefthand identity politics. But handedness is not a protected category in American law and there are no checkboxes for handedness on government forms, so there are very few handedness discrimination attorneys feeding pre-cooked storylines to reporters.
> 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)
I think there are two meanings of "blindness is advantaged", and this mixes them up.
* Blindness can (perhaps) be advantageous in an absolute sense, in environments where all visual signals are meant to impair and misdirect. I know of no such environments.
* Evolutionary, the costs of having eyes may be higher than the fitness benefit they provide. In such environments, mutations which do not maintain costly eyes will win out.
Blind humans still pay most of the costs of having eyes. And crucially, all of them live in habitats where having working eyes would actually be beneficial. This is not surprising: like most species, humans are ultimately dependent on photosynthesis for their energy, and there are only a few habitats where the products of photosynthesis exist but sunlight does not (like the deep seas, which is not well suited for humans). Most vertebrae species, as well as many other animal species have eyes of some sort.
If the reason most blind people were blind was that their ancestors were living near deep sea hydrothermal vents for generations and lost their useless eyesight in evolution, then the claim that "both sightedness and blindness are sometimes advantageous (given the costs of eyes)" might be fair to make. But that is just not the world we live in.
It's dismaying to see you characterize "stating a position on one end of a spectrum when the truth is somewhere in the middle" as "deliberately lying for the sake of propaganda" when you yourself wrote a much better explanation of the relevant dynamics 10 years ago.
I read the article that @HalfRadish linked to, "The Bad Patient". The author tells a philosophical story about any medical diagnosis being a result of some negotiation and round-table discussion where poor, oppressed and disadvantaged patients struggle to "have their voices heard" while Doctors fail to honestly listen to his authentic pain and are dimissive and impatient.
Actual language:
"Illness is a matter of testimony. You tell somebody else — generally, somebody who has more degrees than you — how you feel, and they, ideally, have the ability to recognize in your testimony something you lack the expertise to identify....Illness is also a social negotiation between what you have to say and what your doctor is willing to hear — and the diagnosis that results from this dynamic isn’t exactly your illness, but a mutually agreed-upon fiction."
This story is grounded and informed by his year of occasional, severe episodes of gastrointentinal pain and distress. He went to a lot of different MedPros, tests found nothing, he was blaming himself for a psychosomatic illness and musing on the illness fetishists of the Internet and the Chronic Everything shut-ins.
About 3/4 of the way through the piece, another severe attack sends him to the ER, and he learns:
*****HE HAD F***ING GALLSTONES!******
GALLSTONES!!! But now, after a year of nobodody thinking of this well-known possibility, he has necrotizing damage to his pancreas, might not survive (as of the writing of the article.)
People, how in the name of God and science did 5+ doctors over a year not find this? How is it that highly educated, wealthy adult Americans in 2023 get so caught up in stories of "testimony" and "advocacy" and self-actualization that EXTREMELY BASIC MEDICAL SH!T is mysterious, never even occurs to you? Everybody is so introverted and narcissistic that the physical world is just a Plato's Cave? It's no wonder that ideas like "non-binary gender" and homeopathic medecine are widespread.
(What is the point of medical licensing ? I feel like a good old-school auto mechanic could have caught this if they were motivated, but somehow the "check engine" light and scanning OBD codes made them say, "Golly! It's a mystery!")
Something is very broken in medicine when stuff a GP in 1956 could have found and fixed for $100 tops gets imagined as a spectum of faddish disorders, tabled, and then the patient almost dies.
I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere, so I'll point it here:
If we observe that the issues of a fact itself are conflated with the issues of that fact being in a small minority, say 1%-99%, then more interesting than imagining a counterfactual world where the minority status is reversed, 99%-1%, is to imagine a counterfactual world where the minority status is abolished, 50%-50%.
If you're refuting a motte and bailey argument, you need to be specific what you're denouncing and not get sucked into debating both at once. Because if you shout down the thing they're saying as a whole, they'll act as if you're arguing against the motte and draw in everyone else.
Sometimes that's hard to maintain if it's really obvious that they really want the bailey and the defensible motte is only there for cover. People arguing for the existence of God with the ontological argument are usually people who ARE really invested in the existence of God, and there's not a lot of people who innocently found a simple one-step logical inference to be profound and are genuinely shocked that some people pretending to be on their side replace "A" with "God" at the end.
"social model of disability" accidentally forms a motte and bailey between the extreme position "EVERY bad condition is bad because of how society treats people, chronic pain sufferers aren't relevant" and the defensible position "MANY conditions are bad because of how society treats people, it's worth pushing to improve this" . (I think it's a motte and bailey by accident, not on purpose, because the people pushing the extreme version of the argument seem to more be activists who want societal discrimination to be recognised, the people who want to use deaf people as cover to make people with chronic pain suffer I don't think have the lingo sufficiently yet.)
But I think it has the same effect as a motte and bailey. If you make an entirely legitimate argument against the extreme position, then whether or not we agree how many people believe it in reality, I understand we may differ in this and I don't have a very strongly held concept, if you used "social model" to mean only the extreme position (even with high-profile examples of people using it that way), and entitle it "SOCIAL MODEL IS BAD SOCIAL MODEL IS BAD" and you think but don't say "SOCIAL MODEL ALWAYS MEANS THE EXTREME VERSION THE MODERATE POSITION DOESN'T EXIST", then you will start a big pointless fight over terminological differences with people like me who believe the moderate version and who use "social model of disability" to mean the moderate version.
"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."
This is always a spectrum.
Plenty of people with sufficiently rare problems do get personalised accommodations (e.g. a full time carer) because that's cheaper than making everywhere possible to navigate by themselves.
But lots of universal accommodations are much more efficient. Do we say "why don't we pay everyone a water allowance, rather than having the government regulate or run water companies?" Well, we might, but even if it had some advantages we'd usually be wrong because almost everyone needs tap water and there are massive massive efficiencies of scale by having a specific organisation piping water to everyone rather than having everyone make separate arrangements with different water-carrying-taxis or whatever.
There's some sort of cut-off of "how common". Not 100% of people need ramps. But a lot of people benefit from them, most people under 2, many people over 60, everyone with pushchairs or carts, everyone who's temporarily impaired, not only people who can ONLY use them. Same for "plain text versions of things" or "ingredients lists" etc. The "average able bodied adult" might be barely a majority, if you design public spaces for the modal person, not the mean person.
Given the amount of coordinated effort necessary to get people to agree to any universal accommodations, I suspect that the ones that there are very much worth the investment in the long term and more would probably be better.
There's probably *some* errors in both directions for things which are mandated but shouldn't be as well as things that aren't mandated but should be, but I think those are probably more the exceptions, although there's probably some I've forgotten.
"if it would be easy to give disabled people a direct grant" I think is true in some cases, where accidentally unhelpful or non-existent accommodations are offered.
But I'm also leery of it because it's the sort of thing a lot of people would think about when they mainly just want less accommodations, and don't particular care whether these grants would exist or not.
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So the medical model (thesis) that Mrs Grundy believes in is at the bottom of the barberpole, the social model (antithesis) is in the middle and the interactionist model (synthesis) is right at the top being discussed by academics.
Sounds like pretty normal trendyness-dialectics to me.
From CleverBeast's cited comment:
> I tend to agree, physical disabilities are “mere difference.” There is nothing inherently better about being sighted versus being blind.
I have a blind friend who would be the first to tell you otherwise. The thought experiment about "civilization designed for" blind people can jump right out the window, because before you can even begin to design a civilization you have to get past a bunch of earlier steps. And out in the uncivilized natural world of prerequisites, a sighted person has any number of advantages.
Just for starters, let's take one of the most fundamental attributes of animal life, locomotion. I can walk much more quickly than my blind friend. Not because I'm particularly stronger or more physically fit than her, but simply because *I can see where I'm going,* whereas she has to take special care to not run into things or trip over them. By any measure, that's an inherent, objective advantage.
I, for one, am willing to go directly to "capability is always inherently and objectively better than incapability" and die on that hill¹.
People tell me that this isn't even the Medical Model of Disability, it's the Cavil Model of Transhumanism, to which I find invariably myself replying "So? It seems trivially obvious to me that it would be a better world in which everyone could perceive the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and smell dark matter too, while we're at it. Engineers, go to."
1. Albeit with a small side valley labeled "Except for people who conflate capability and moral worth, who should please not talk to me kthx."
Oh, definitely. One person being physically superior to someone else is a simple, objective matter; being morally superior is an entirely unrelated value judgment.
Thank you Bob Frank. Advanced societies based on humans with mostly no vision, hearing, legs, or capability to stay conscious? It's an interesting thought experiment if it could get past evolution, nature, and reality. It doesn't. After 150+ years of tripping over Marxist inspired thought it's time to be more deeply suspicious of the magic realism that it so often appeals to.
I do think you have to be careful about that. Sensory hypersensitivity is an acknowledged disability: https://www.aruma.com.au/about-us/blog/6-facts-about-sensory-hypersensitivity/
It's a fair point, and one I should probably have thought of myself. (As mentioned back in my own post, I suspect my light-sensitivity, although of different origin, qualifies as a varietal.)
On the other hand, I think there is some valid logic-chopping one might do on the extent to which a capability which causes you harm, or pain, or which you simply can't process the data from/to qualifies as a capability at all. I mean, I would *love* to be able to get that much information about the texture of fabric, or gather aromas as well as my dog, or hear pins drop a street away, *if* I could actually understand it and filter it without it breaking my brain.
So maybe the correct perspective here is that it's not the enhanced senses (per se) that are the disability, but the sensory processing deficiency that flips them from useful to stressful/painful?
This is a good moment to mention Feynman: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1998/can-humans-smell-if-a-book-has-been-opened
I think there's a meaningful distinction between having a sense and having hypersensitivity, this specific arguement feels like responding to someone with an insensitivity to pain by pointing out how bad chronic pain is - both are bad actually, I prefer to have normal human pain sensitivity, even though this is the sense that people most strongly wish they didn't have! (Being immune to pain does sound like a superpower, until you realise it's why the limbs of people with leprosy get infected and need amputating)
As I recall, the life expectancy of people who have CIPA, essentially complete pain-immunity, is estimated at somewhere around 25 even if they're extremely careful about trying to fill the gap with other senses.
But I think the point is that what counts as "hypersensitivity" rather than "normal" rather than "deficiency" is going to be determined in large part by the environment you live in. There is no objectively correct level of sensitivity to have to various stimuli, independent of environment.
Wait, hang on. Hypersensitivity, as a disability, is essentially defined as "that level of sensitivity which causes people having it to suffer stress and pain".
The objectively correct answer here would seem to me be "all of the sensitivity you can have that doesn't do that".
(The objectively correct meta-answer is "basically, we should fix things such that even always-on perfect omniscience doesn't do that, because being able to effectively handle arbitrarily large quantities of arbitrarily complex input is a really awesome superpower everyone should have".)
Which we fix by defining "sensory hypersensitivity" as a disability that, ideally, can be engineered/medicalized out of existence (either by better senses or by a better brain).
Do those with hypersensitivity perform better on quantifiable metrics than neurotypical people? If not why categorize it as a capability when it isn't?
I took CleverBeast to be saying that it’s hard to define “capability” outside of a specific environmental context. Maybe a counterexample to the desert island thought experiment would be the subterranean world of the Morlocks or drow or whatever. Like blind cave fish, maintaining the ancestral trait in the new environment would be expensive in evolutionary terms, perhaps to the detriment of developing compensatory adaptations like lateral lines, echolocation, or other novel senses.
I think my response there would be that evolution is, by definition, a blind idiot designer that will cling to whatever local maxima it stumbles into.
Situationally, sure, if you're living in Morlock country *and* you have a limited budget of whatever to work with, then you may be better off throwing vision away if you develop some superior local adaptation.
But in the non-local big picture, where the environment is the Universe (one cannot stay in Morlockville forever!), it's optimal to have vision and echolocation and electroception and whatever else your cunning little brain can gin up, 'cause that way you can hang with the Morlocks and the Eloi and whoever we haven't met yet.
(Maybe this is the Veruca Salt Model of Capability.)
All/most of your statements in this thread seem to imply that trade offs don't exist, while it's quite obvious and well documented that they do, in fact, exist because while we don't exactly have stat points to be distributed, there's a cost to everything.
Do you really not consider trade offs in your thinking, or is this a thought experiment of some sort where you're not considering the idea that optimisation is typically happening under constraints?
Trade-offs determine what's possible (an is); they don't determine what's desirable (an ought).
Deciding what concessions have to be made to the annoying coquetries of [local, circumstantial] physical reality is something both secondary and posterior to deciding what is actually desirable in the first place.
If you start writing off things that you might not be able to have before you even know what you want, you will be led into error, because you will never even consider whether or not you could have had that impractical-seeming thing after all.
That's a point of view, certainly.
That's a good example. Visual processing requires oxygen and calories. We tend to assume that those things are abundant. But in some environments they absolutely are not.
This is true in the literal sense, but I still give it a lot of pushback because as an argument, I think it's both:
a) so trivially true as to be functionally meaningless. Just because there is a theoretically conceivable world in which it would be "better" to be blind than to see does not change the fact that in *this* world, that is decidedly not the case. It's like arguing about what we mean by the color orange, since on a different planet in a different atmosphere, the wavelengths of light we interpret as being orange might appear differently. So what? If we go to that planet, we can have that conversation. Until then, everybody knows what "orange" means.
b) The motte in the motte/bailey used by proponents of the social model when discussing "disabilities". If your response to "being blind is a disability" was to suggest that, well, it wouldn't be a disability if humanity had evolved to live in caves, then I would think you were borderline trolling. When discussing these things, we are generally talking about reality as it actually exists, and we should not have to qualify every statement we make by clarifying that beforehand.
Even having a debilitating, painful chronic illness may be an advantage in a world where a superintelligence tortures everyone who doesn’t have a debilitating, painful chronic illness.
If someone brought this up in the context of an online discussion of whether it is “objectively” better to not have a debilitating, painful chronic illness, I’d call it pedantry. In the context of whether or not we should try to develop cures for the illness, I’d call it trolling. In the context of whether parents should be able to deliberately cause their child to have said illness, sociopathy.
>"...if humanity had evolved to live in caves, then I would think you were borderline trolling..."
Intentional or not, bravo.
> I took CleverBeast to be saying that it’s hard to define “capability” outside of a specific environmental context.
So you define it as a ratio across all possible environmental contexts. Clearly someone sighted is more capable across a much broader range of environments than a blind person, so the capable:disabled ratio is much higher for sight than blindness. In fact, there are arguably very, very few environments where that may not the case.
I think to conclude that capability is always better than incapability, you have to be prepared to attach some significant qualifiers. There are abilities which one might have where ability to cope with them can't be taken for granted.
For instance, if you have the ability to hear people's thoughts, which you can't turn off any more than your regular hearing, and you find this stressful and disorienting, and it makes people not want to associate with you, you're probably much worse off than if you didn't have the ability to hear people's thoughts.
Even if you set aside the idea of abilities we might not be equipped to deal with, in some cases, having extra capabilities can leave you worse off from a game theoretic standpoint. If you have the power to rain down mass destruction on the scale of a nuclear arsenal, and this makes you a target for preemptive destruction because your abilities don't come with second-strike capability and your mere existence makes everyone fear for their safety, you'd probably wish you didn't have that ability.
On the former, as with the case of sensory hypersensitivity upthread, or that of the "constant awareness of stimuli" downthread, I would model those as two distinct things: the capability to hear thoughts, and the incapability of controlling/filtering it. And as in those cases, my preferred outcome of any solution to the problem is to have the former preserved and the latter removed.
If that's not possible, then we have to move to the ugly world of trade-offs, but ceteris paribus, still...
On the latter, in view of limited time this morning and an objectivity problem from recent events in my life, I'll merely reflect that in this case, as in that of Guy's similar comment in this thread, where I am living in a world where people are inclined to murder you for what you _might_ do on the grounds of ability alone, I'm gonna cling extremely tightly to my first-strike capability. Maybe even get some preemption up in that.
"Always" is problematic once you introduce other people. In Game Theory, there are plenty of examples where having a move available to you can result in a worse payoff. A sighted may be a threat to others in a way that a blind person isn't, and end up being killed, whereas the blind person is spared. In such an environment, it is objectively better to be blind.
Yes. The fact that there are multiple people quoted who apparently think that hearing has no value outside of language is bizarre. Perhaps these people are the ones I see driving or biking with headphones on. Just so we’re all clear: trying to navigate a dangerous environment at high speeds is MUCH more dangerous if you can’t hear than if you can. This has nothing to do with society, and everything to do with literally just being able to hear someone in your blind spot before you collide with them.
Is it possible that there’s an entire generation of people who have never interacted with the world outside of their electronic devices? Reading this stuff makes me think there might be.
Exactly! And even in the realm of languages, if I can see and sign, I can talk with someone in front of me. If I can hear and speak, I can talk with anyone around, even if they're behind me and have their back to me so neither of us can see the other.
The fact that animals have hearing without having language should be enough to indicate that hearing does actually have value outside of speaking to each other.
I’ve encountered this mindset multiple times in different contexts. There seems to be a cohort who don’t think that the natural world is… real, I guess? It’s not just the “social model of disability” people, I’ve also seen someone (in some sort of political anarchist context) argue that “the word ‘power’ always means power over people”. I pointed out that the use of “power” to refer to social power was in fact figurative, and that the word originally referred to physical power, ie power to affect the physical environment. This person refused to acknowledge that as the primary, or even a legitimate, use of the word “power”. He accused me of playing word games.
What do the kids say? “Touch grass”?
I often think society would be better if we made people spend a few years performing some kind of unpleasant, physically demanding task (like national service, but not -- necessarily -- in the military), just to hammer home the message that yes, physical constraints are real and meaningful, and no, abundance and comfort is not the default state of humanity.
That's a bizarre take. Everyone knows that hearing evolved way, way before language, right?
Even at low speeds. There's a reason rattlesnakes have that name, for example.
You're missing the point, though. The contention isn't "hearing is useful." Obviously, in this society, hearing is useful. It's that, in a world set up differently, hearing would be less useful, or even not useful or somewhat harmful.
Yes, hearing is useful when you're driving. But in a society where everyone is deaf, driving isn't going to look the same as in our society.
If we all had electroception, society would be built differently. Maybe we would not touch when we shake hands, because we'd have evolved using electrical signals to determine if another person is healthy or a good mate or whatever. Maybe we'd have settled on carved potatoes for reading or something equally strange. If you were stuck in such a society, you'd be disabled.
I'm mostly blind, and had to spend a bunch of time sitting around redisigning tools so I could do my job. The issue wasn't that I couldn't do specific things because I'm blind, but that I have to interface with all this stuff created by quite different people. My way of doing things is pretty solid and for some workflows better, but I had to develop a lot of it myself, or learn how to use other people's tools that aren't always well supported. So yeah, it's a disability, but from where I'm sitting, I could pretty easily imagine doing things like construction in a less ad hoc way that would work fine for blind people. A lot of piloting and technical work is already about sensory replacement (radar/sonar/oscilloscopes), you'd mostly be using different input modalities. There's actually something weirdly ad hoc and arbitrary about a lot of sighted construction, blind people tend to go about things in a more logical way by necessity and value things that are good for other uses, like APIs and structured markup.
I know a lot of this just sounds like woo, and it's obvious that being blind is bad. I would choose to be sighted, seeing things is pretty great. But if everyone were blind there would be nothing to miss, the stuff I can't really do that I want to (mostly just playing video games) would be built in a different way, and I'd have AAA audiogames. And maybe I'd be navigating my city by pulling myself around on ropes with braille on them or whatever, and cars wouldn't be driving all over trying to run me over, it would all be trains, etc. etc.
> The contention isn't "hearing is useful." Obviously, in this society, hearing is useful. It's that, in a world set up differently, hearing would be less useful, or even not useful or somewhat harmful.
The problem is that that contention is obviously false.
> If we all had electroception, society would be built differently. Maybe we would not touch when we shake hands, because we'd have evolved using electrical signals to determine if another person is healthy or a good mate or whatever. Maybe we'd have settled on carved potatoes for reading or something equally strange. If you were stuck in such a society, you'd be disabled.
And you're illustrating a problem that was probably shared by the shockingly many commenters willing to claim that hearing would be a disability if most people couldn't do it. That example doesn't support your contention! You're saying that someone without electroception would suffer relative to someone with it in a society that assumed electroception. Everyone agrees on that.
But you've failed to make the argument that would support your actual claim, which is that someone with electroception would suffer in the world we've got, where nobody else has electroception. The obvious reason not to make that argument is that it's false. But it takes your "contention" down with it.
" But if everyone were blind there would be nothing to miss"
I don't understand how you can believe this.
I think the stock response here would be to say that you could get around even faster if you could fly, but despite occasional daydreams we don't spend much time thinking about that.
I feel like deconstructing the word disability itself is handy here - it's the lack of an ability. But we lack many abilities that we don't consider disabilities. So pretty obviously, a disability isn't just the lack of an ability - it's the lack of an *expected* ability. There's some set of abilities that we consider "normal" and disability is what happens when someone is missing one of those "normal" abilities.
Where I think the social model fails is that the set of abilities we consider "normal" is not an arbitrary social construct. There is a pretty clear telos to how the human body is constructed and organized. We have legs so we can walk around, we have arms and hands to grab things, we have eyes so we can see where we're going, etc. These are all "expensive" parts and evolution would not have furnished us with them if they didn't do anything useful. In a sense the design of the human body is value-laden.
We can if we want reject those values, but I don't think most people want to. We're humans first and foremost and we value doing human things like walking around and talking to each other and picking things up. It sucks when someone isn't able to do that stuff.
I've flown plenty of times, and it most definitely is faster. Expensive and tedious, but generally worth it. I'm just glad that we've had people in our past who *did* spend much time thinking about it!
"despite occasional daydreams we don't spend much time thinking about that." - In fact people have spent considerable amounts of time designing planes, helicopters, hang-gliders, parachutes (and I still hear people yearning after flying cars).
In a way, much of humanity's history revolves around going beyond our natural abilities.
Makes me curious if a society of blind flighted humans would be considered more or less capable than our society
I think flight would be net-negative for sightless people lol
Bats managed sightless flight, the real question is would a society of the flighted blind humans run around shouting “because I’m Batman” all the time
They're flying by sonar, right? They would HAVE to.
And all bat species still have perfectly functional eyes anyway.
This is refreshing and well stated! Sometimes, I think the question we should ask, say, Deaf people, is not ‘Do you want to be able to hear?’ But rather ‘How would you feel if you were blind?’
This is interesting because I actually think deaf people have a fairly unique situation.
A pretty natural and normal human thing is to form communities around a shared language. To a very large extent, language = culture and culture = language.
Deaf people are unique in disability groups in having a unique language of their own, and therefore a genuinely separate and distinct culture. And I think it is super normal and natural for cultural groups to seek their own preservation across time and generations.
So I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to deaf worries about cochlear implants. Maybe not enough to actually ban them. That would amount to telling parents their children can be randomly kidnapped to fill the ranks of some totally different cultural group. But I feel like I get the visceral fear of seeing your entire culture wiped out.
I very much agree with you! I shouldn’t have made Deaf people seem like any random example when I mentioned them for exactly this reason. Many Deaf people do not consider themselves disabled at all because of the rich language, community and history they have built.
However, I would guess that your average Deaf person would see being blind, losing a limb, or having a chronic condition as being ‘disabled’
Similarly, I don’t think anyone who doesn’t have all limbs (whether born that way or otherwise) would be thrilled to also be Deaf or Blind.
Maybe this does speak to the power of ‘community’ after all? And the Deaf community can provide some guidance?
Community is obviously important. I really do think the deaf situation is qualitatively different from any other disability though, specifically because they have their own bespoke language(s) all their own. But that said, I am sympathetic to anyone who grieves for the loss of their community.
Agreed and I genuinely (IRL!) share your sympathy for what the Deaf community is grappling with.
What your friend is noticing is that there's a *wide range of environments* in which having sight is much more beneficial than being blind. But one could come up with some environments though (ones that we, living in our environment, would consider "extreme" and "unusual") in which it would be a disability. It's much easier to do for senses of sound and smell, but possible for sight as well.
It's not an inherent, objective advantage, unless you assume an environment with similar amounts of light to the ones we are used to, and a good number of objects that interact in relatively simple ways with light.
<i>It's not an inherent, objective advantage, unless you assume an environment with similar amounts of light to the ones we are used to, and a good number of objects that interact in relatively simple ways with light.</i>
Given that we do in fact live in such an environment, it would seem that sight is indeed an "inherent, objective advantage".
I think you must be using "inherent, objective" in a different way from how I am. I would call this an "extrinsic, relational" advantage, because it depends on the environment, not an "inherent, objective" advantage.
Given that the places being sighted is not an advantage are purely hypothetical, I think inherent and objective advantage is quite correct. We live in this world, with these laws of physics, and this natural environment. Within every human context we have experienced and seem likely to experience, being sighted is simply better.
But even more than that, there is no environment (e.g. one where it is too bright to see and it causes discomfort) where you cannot get the full "benefit" of being blind by temporarily blinding yourself (e.g. with a blindfold), whereas there are reams of environments where being blind is a huge impediment with no workaround.
Being sighted is a _superset_ of being blind. A sighted person can become blind and become sighted more or less at will. A blind person is only blind. That is an inherent, objective advantage in every environment, even your hypothetical ones.
That last paragraph in particular. Yes.
I think that you're assuming perfect reaction speeds. A very bright light can be stunning and painful, enough so that flashbangs are used in warfare. I'm fairly light sensitive, so when I step outside on a particularly bright day, I sometimes recoil in pain, and then navigate to wherever I'm going with my eyes pretty much closed. A blind person would navigate to wherever they are going without sight as well, but without the initial delay and pain.
I'm not claiming that I don't think that on average being sighted is better than being blind. But since bright, blinding lights donexist in the world, there are some small, clear scenarios in which a sighted person would fare worse than a blind person if they failed to predict the light.
You can't get the full advantage of being blind just by temporarily blinding yourself as sustained lack of vision causes changes in a person that take time to develop. But the range of environments were having a persistent lack of sight is an advantage are just much more narrow than the reverse. The fact that we can construct a thought experiment version of an oppressive society where sight is a disadvantage doesn't mean that disability exists only relative to social construction. Indeed, a sighted society will be at an advantage over our hypothetical blind one.
Perception is inherently relational. It's an interpretation of environmental stimuli, after all. But we can assume that the sorts of environments where visual perception are advantageous are fixed enough that we can shorten up the claim to saying vision is advantageous to have.
I wouldn't call a lack of vision a disability in a world where few if any people had it. But when most people have the power of sight, then I think it is fair to call the lack of it a form of disability. How challenging that disability happens to be is going to depend on how society is structured and what accommodations exist, but that's a softer claim than saying the disability exists entirely within social relations.
If you have to imagine up a counterfactual that doesn't match the reality we live in in order to disprove the idea that it's an objective advantage, I have to agree with Mr. X that that doesn't do much to disprove the idea. Objectivity is about reality, not wild imaginations.
> It's much easier to do for senses of sound and smell, but possible for sight as well.
Sound, maybe. Smell, not so much, because noxious smells correlate pretty well with legitimate chemical/biological hazards. Someone who can't smell nasty things and avoid them is much more likely to end up sickened or poisoned without realizing it.
Coming up with a counterfactual that doesn't match reality is precisely what it takes to prove that something is only a relative advantage, in our actual environment, rather than an intrinsic, objective advantage, that would apply in any environment.
Smell is the one where I think this is clearest - some workplaces actually do have overwhelming perfumes, or sewage scent, that makes them really hard to work in for people with unusually strong senses of smell. There are very few ways in which a strong sense of smell socially benefits people, and many ways in which it socially harms people, in our actually existing society, so that extra-strong smell actually functions in many ways as at least as much of a disability as lack of smell.
Hrm.
The context that initially came to my mind here is mining, with reference to assorted noxious gases and suchlike found underground, but it also probably applies to sewer work, because a lot of those become dangerous a lot more quickly than they become obvious to the stock human sense of smell.
On the one hand, sure, it makes life very unpleasant for Nick the Nose to have an unusually strong sense of smell under those circumstances.
On the other hand, when the Nose picks up those tell-tale traces of stinkdamp before they cause anosmia, poison everyone, and explode, it's going to save his life, and possibly a whole bunch of others.
Not sure I'd be willing to call that a disability.
(Also, on a brief personal-experience digression: my retinae lack normal pigmentation, which makes me unusually sensitive to light. Regular natural light, as found outdoors more or less anywhere, hurts. Sunward glances, bright reflections, and glare hurt a *lot*.
I wear dark photochromic glasses basically all the time because of this; at least I get good night vision out of the deal when there isn't a lot of glare around.
Empirically, I'm still not even slightly inclined to trade in my eyeballs for a pain-free existence.)
Yeah, in the case of Nick the Nose, I think you're imagining a social context that makes this feature have a positive function. That's precisely the point. If you imagine a society where all of the anosmia/poison/etc things were already taken care of mechanically, but cities just do garbage pickup like New York and everyone wears extra strong perfume, I think it becomes more of a disability.
And of course, disability activists will be the first to say that something functioning as a disability in a particular society doesn't mean that people would be inclined to trade it in - and not being inclined to trade it in doesn't mean that society isn't set up in a way that constitutes it as a disability!
I'm not sure I would consider it a matter of social context, myself.
After all, even in the hypothetical society in which all these things are taken care of mechanically, Nick the Nose *still* has the superpower of not getting dead when the automatic poison snoopers break down. It's a rarer positive function (which lowers its relative value), but it's still a positive function (in absolute terms).
And, honestly, having been to New York, I would find it a real stretch to consider it an advantage to *not* be aware of the godawful stench of filth all around you, because much like pain as discussed elsethread, that stench is an important signal to get the hell out of New York that you really shouldn't miss.
(Seriously. That's the smell of hanging-by-a-thread infrastructure.)
On second consideration, I suspect a major sticking factor here is that this depends in general on environmental ignorance being a positive, and I'm very strongly predisposed against finding ignorance in any context a positive.
The existence of dogs would imply that humans could function very well with increased olfactory capabilities.
My dog does not seem particularly disabled by their senses.
If you were floating in a void empty of anything to sense or interact with, no hypothetical configuration of your body would be "better" than any other. In order to make any kind of statement about the quality of different bodies you have to make *some* assumptions about the environment the bodies exist in. It is reasonable (to the point of being taken for granted by about 70% of commenters) that you would assume the environment to be something like Earth pre-civilization.
Personally, I'm red-green color-blind, which means that my eyes are just like anyone else's except that they give me less information about the environment. The only scenario I can come up with where being color-blind gives me an advantage is one where I am saved from witnessing unpleasant messages written as Ishihara tests for some reason.
Yes, if we lived our eyes in total darkness or blinding light eyesight would be pointless, as many eyeless cave-dwellers are happy to demonstrate.
That said, I don't find this retort particularly convincing, the fact that all adjectives are relative to something doesn't mean they can't refer to meaningful realities in the physical world. If we could all fly I bet that someone with the inability to fly would struggle to navigate the built environment, but I still don't think I'd consider that as "society has disabled them". I'd attribute it more to a defective wing muscle, and we could still discuss ways to improve accessibility by adding stairs to public buildings, but it's never going to be able to fully make up for the capacity that person lacks.
Yeah like, actually completely one-sided strictly better differences are rare, but in most case one side is better in the vast majority of plausible situations. For example I observe that:
-In the example of a society designed by and for deaf people to be optimized for convenience for the deaf majority, I expect I would still prefer to be able to hear unless they *intentionally* went out of their way to make it hostile to hearing people.
-In the example of a society designed by and for blind people to be optimized for convenience for the blind majority, I expect that *even if* they intentionally went out of their way to make it hostile to sighted people, there's *still* a good chance they'd fail to make it hostile enough that I'd rather be blind.
-And I notice that CleverBeast didn't even *try* to convince us that being able to walk could ever be a disadvantage compared to being wheelchair-bound.
You might be surprised on that first point.
Did you know that deaf people enjoy music? The way they experience it is typically to crank the volume up extremely high and place the speaker on a surface that transmits tactile vibrations. Combine that mental image with the fact that the music itself wouldn't be composed with hearing ears in mind.
You would also probably be surprised at how much louder and more unpleasant the machinery of modern life would sound if there weren't any resources directed toward engineering everything for acoustic characteristics. There's some efficiency benefit in reducing noise, but diminishing returns kick in pretty quickly, and there's no benefit outside of human comfort from engineering for pleasant frequency profiles.
You also wouldn't automatically have the benefit of research and development motivated by the needs of hearing people. There'd be no good earplugs or earmuffs or noise-cancelling headphones; no guidelines on safe noise exposure; no recognition of tinnitus as a disorder.
I think a hearing person in a deaf society would find themselves in something almost analogous to the position of many autistic people with sensory sensitivity in our current society. You wouldn't necessarily want to trade your way of being for the dominant one, but you'd be acutely aware that your unusual sensitivities limited your options for housing, work, and recreation and caused you to behave strangely.
Yeah, maybe. There would still be substantial advantages as well though. At minimum I think being hearing in a deaf-oriented society would still be less of a disadvantage than being deaf in a hearing-oriented society.
"You would also probably be surprised at how much louder and more unpleasant the machinery of modern life would sound if there weren't any resources directed toward engineering everything for acoustic characteristics. "
How many people (especially people who post here!) interact with industrial machinery? And the problem of the hearing person in the loud land of the deaf is self-correcting.
Do you have a car? Live near a road? Have an HVAC system in your home? An elevator in your office building? Do you ever fly? Everyone in the developed world interacts with machinery, and the closer it is to the average person's life, the more its acoustic characteristics were taken into account in the design process.
Industrial machinery is actually a good mental model here: the engineers who design it don't worry much about acoustics because they can just make everyone who interacts with it wear ear protection. If everyone were deaf, consumer equipment would sound a lot more like industrial equipment, so in this hypothetical world the answer to your question would be "everyone."
The "self-correcting" idea is...sorry, I don't even know how to address this charitably...it's just wrong. Noise pollution causes psychological stress long before it causes physical damage; the physical damage takes years or even decades to produce total deafness; and the resulting deafness isn't the same subjectively-neutral absence of sound perception as congenital deafness.
A hearing child born into a deaf world would spend her critical early-childhood years under a barrage of sensory overstimulation, which would probably be treated as a psychological disorder. It might be lumped under autism if people thought the child was just hypersensitive to tactile vibrations, but if he were too insistent on it being a separate sense localized to his ears, he might get tagged as delusional. In any case, this child would definitely be treated as disabled from toddlerhood when it became clear that he was distressed by normal stimuli, and the parents would be able to recall signs of the disability dating back to early infancy: poor sleep, inconsolable crying, distractibility.
As he grew up, he'd develop coping strategies, but these would have social consequences. His insistence on sleeping in a "low-vibration" room would mark him as strange and possibly crazy. Some people might compare his foam earmuffs to a tinfoil hat. He'd feel pressure to leave them off for important events and gatherings, and over time he'd probably accumulate hearing damage.
But damage isn't silence. The auditory cortex of a hearing person relies on auditory input to calibrate itself. When it stops detecting input in a given frequency range, it essentially "turns up the gain," resulting in tinnitus. Hearing damage is loud. (This is well-established; we understand it well enough to temporarily suppress tinnitus with magnetic stimulation of the auditory cortex https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17691335/ ).
Hearing damage also doesn't affect all frequencies equally. The 3000-6000hz frequency range is affected first, regardless of the frequency that caused the damage.
So in an environment with a lot of low-frequency unpleasant noise, the early stages of hearing damage are marked by tinnitus, a loss of sensitivity to potentially-useful or pleasant sounds (birdsong, rustling leaves, etc.), and no increase in tolerance for the unwanted noise. (In fact, this stage of hearing loss is sometimes characterized by hyperacusis.)
Our hypothetical hearing person will be middle-aged or older before he can match deaf people's tolerance for sound. Reaching that point won't undo all of his prior experiences (especially not early childhood development). And the faster he gets there, the more disabling and traumatizing the process will have been.
I've built midget racers. I spent a couple of decades sitting in front of the trombones in an orchestra. I am deaf in my left ear from that. So I know very well that the level at which hearing loss occurs is far below that level which causes pain. I also know that this idea that there is a correlation between noise sensitivity and auditory acuity is bogus.
But of course this entire argument is a silly exercise akin to children playing each declaring they are using superweapons and new kinds of force fields in order to win the game. A race of deaf people would hardly develop the structures that we call "hearing" as opposed to some other variation of touch or pressure sensitivity.
> One could imagine, for example, a world where deaf people are the norm. 99% of people are deaf, whereas 1% of people are sighted.
Contra-Contra, Contra; Contra, Contra=Contra the social theory of disability.
What if some things are entirely social like left handed or entirely real like a society of deaf people with a minority sighted who will basically have super powers and rob all them blind. What is a deaf bank guard going to when the person with hearing and sight walks around them will unbelievable skill, and knows when to start and stop lock picking.
I really dont get this argument, how can society oppress a sighted person so hard they cant just run circles around everyone else.
You just have flashing lights in lots of places, sometimes next to low light places, and with lots of mirrors and lenses and gels and other things that make the light confusing and unuseful.
why would the blind society know a) to do that b) know its working and not someone threw a rock at it last week and c) wear sunglasses
I agree that it seems unlikely that a blind society would have bright flashing lights in enough places to make much of a difference, and that, in the worst case, it's possible to completely block out light. But neither of those things is true about sound so the deaf/hearing example is more obviously true. It seems quite obvious to me that a almost entirely deaf society would have loud, obnoxious noises almost _everywhere_, given how much effort our current society puts into noise dampening and mitigation. It would certainly be the case that in _many_ places, having hearing would give almost no advantage and often be a detriment in a society which did not care about the soundscape. Hell, in our own society, where we very much do care about noise, we have tons research in how noise can negatively affects performance in both schools and workplaces. And that's in a situation where we all _know and care_ about sounds!
And yes, ear plugs can _to a degree_ help. But I have never heard of or found _fully_ noise canceling/filtering ear protection and I'm quite certain that, without mitigation, there would be lots of places that, regardless of ear plugs, would be unpleasant and distracting for a hearing person to be around (again, I've been in such places in our own world), so it's not as simple as "well they just will be reduced down to the same capability". No, they will be worse off because the fully deaf people won't have the distractions.
Re the flashing lights: we've done a great job of splattering data-laden garp all over the rest of the EM spectrum, and visible light is certainly eligible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Fi
Similarly, "seeing" in the GHz range would no doubt seem like a superpower. At first.
A society of blind people could oppress sighted people by having no lights in public buildings, or flashes of extreme blinding light.
A society of deaf people could oppress sighted people by, as Scott suggests, having extremely grating noises.
> by having no lights in public buildings
That only starts to equalizes things, the sighted person still has the option to carry around a flashlight
> or flashes of extreme blinding light.
it can only impair to blindness, and may be interfered with
The reason it hurts your ears/eyes to see bright lights or hear loud noises is because if you aren't careful about those intense stimuli they will affect your ability to see/hear. Thus, in a society that doesn't care about a hearing/sighted person's sensitivities everyone will eventually be deaf/blind anyway and the 'disability' goes away. That's not the case if the situation is reversed.
I can imagine it being worse for sound than hearing since loud noise is hard to ever truly block out, but I actually have this amazing ability to block out light any time I want, so I'm still up for being the One-Eyed King of the Land of the Blind (at least during the day). I promise to use my power benevolently.
"Loud noise is particularly harmful to the inner ear (cochlea). A one-time exposure to extreme loud sound or listening to loud sounds for a long time can cause hearing loss. Loud noise can damage cells and membranes in the cochlea. Listening to loud noise for a long time can overwork hair cells in the ear, which can cause these cells to die."
https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/hearing_loss/how_does_loud_noise_cause_hearing_loss.html
Yeah. If the worst society can do to oppress you is bring you down to their level then you don't have a disability, you have a superpower.
This is why I think that explanation fails. It really doesn't work to reverse roles. Indeed, if the only thing society can do to a hearing person, with their collective malicious apathy aimed at them, is restore equality then that seems like further proof that the social model fails.
I wrote my own somewhat-inspired-by-the-original post (which is over here at https://noiseinmysignal.substack.com/p/the-antisocial-model-of-disability , although I disclaim that it is less a reasoned argument and more a rant inspired by a lingering urge to punch one of its more persistent advocates elsenet), but one thing I talk about there that seems worth mentioning over here is a certain fundamental problem with building wheelchair ramps up Everest.
Specifically, my lingering childhood ambition to climb Fuji, as wise men should once.
Which is, very specifically a desire to *climb* Fuji, which my spine won't let me do.
A wheelchair ramp up to the summit, or to pick the example that I seem to recall might actually be available, a helicopter ride up to the summit, can't give that to me, because what I want is *to climb* the mountain, the experience and the achievement, not *to sit at the top of the mountain*, the state.
The very large number of scenarios isomorphic to this one, while they obviously don't render accommodations valueless, do put a very distinct cap on exactly what they can do for anyone.
Regarding wheelchair ramps and the like being sneaky charity, to the degree they are, aren't there also lots of other things that should be considered charity then? Roads, sidewalks, streetlamps are built in just the same way and accommodate most people, but no one considers them charity. Building out similar things that accommodate others, even if they're a minority, doesn't seem like it should be called charity then. Or to put it another way, yes it's something that society owes wheelchair users, to the same degree that society owes everyone.
There may be a discussion of how much it makes sense to spend for how many people, but at that point it's a different argument. (Yes I know those things are often tax funded, but everyone pays taxes.)
>Roads, sidewalks, streetlamps are built in just the same way and accommodate most people, but no one considers them charity.
Because they're paid for and used by everyone. But no disabled minority = no wheelchair ramps.
>Or to put it another way, yes it's something that society owes wheelchair users, to the same degree that society owes everyone.
The other stuff if being paid for by people who use it. If wheelchair people could fund everything themselves, we wouldn't be having as much of this conversation (you would still need to convince/force people to accept the wheelchair ramp even if you're paying for it yourself).
Sidewalks aren't used by everyone, but they still have to pay for them. Same with bike lanes, water fountains, public parks, crosswalks, beach showers, bike pumps along trails, public trash cans (though you can argue this one is just a positive externality), dog parks, and landscaped median strips. Are those all considered charity too? After all, if bikers/walkers/swimmers/dog owners could fund everything themselves we wouldn't need to have this conversation.
I note that my local council specifically taxes dog ownership; I don't know whether that tax is actually equal in magnitude to the cost of making the local park a dog park, but it seems quite plausible that it is - choosing to use a dog-safe fertiliser on the oval and having water bowls for dogs are not huge costs.
Most of the rest are used by the vast majority of the relevant taxpayers, especially considering they're often paid for by local councils rather than being state level infrastructure.
This applies to so many things society builds and shares that you either go full libertarian or it seems unjustified to draw the line at wheelchair ramps. No one ever sued me nor did I ever sue anyone. Yet courts exists and I am indirectly paying for them (assuming simplistically that the salaries of judges come from my taxes). So is the existence of courts forced charity?
I think the difference is whether some significant percentage (almost always a majority, sometimes a supermajority) of people would choose to implement something for their own needs. Even people who don't go anywhere benefit from roads, boats, and planes. They bring stuff to them that they need. Wheelchair ramps, on the other hand, are a benefit to a minority, required by a smaller minority, and are not needed by the majority. I think it's safe to say that most people would not independently build them (which is why before the ADA was passed, there were very few wheelchair ramps).
If we build it anyway, it's charity, at least by this definition.
I think this isn't quite right. The fact that many buildings have a single step at the entryway indicates that people often don't implement level entries entirely for their own needs. But just putting the building at ground level so that you can eliminate this step is a really easy accommodation, that results in a benefit in many ways for most people, even if it has some slight costs, and so it doesn't seem like charity, even though by your definition it is.
From a Chesterton's Fence perspective, the fact that so many buildings have slightly raised entrances suggests some sort of benefit (less likely to have water seep through in heavy rain?), which I'd want to find out before doing away with the practice.
Floor height has to be above the prevailing ground height for a damp-proof course to work to prevent rising damp.
Well, or you have to dig a trench around the building, and put in a sealant up to the prevailing ground height before filling the trench in, which is expensive and so is worthwhile for public buildings with lots of pedestrian circulation but not for private houses.
My understanding is that the main reason why building floors are usually at a slightly higher level than the roadway is to do with water. If the roadway and the building floor level are the same then a heavy rainfall would have water trying to flow into the building. So you want the floor level inside the building to be somewhat higher than the floor level outside. In regions where rising damp is a problem, you can put in a damp proof course or damp proof membrane below the floor level of the building and above the road level and so block the capillary action that causes rising damp.
Not having a step at the entrance is common with buildings that get a lot of foot traffic like shops. With pedestrianised streets, there are approaches to building that solve this, but they're more expensive than a step into the building (you reverse the camber on the street, so the centre is the lowest part and put a drain there; water then runs away from the building instead of building up under the entrance step: the solution to the damp-proof course is that you have a narrow gap between the building and the street (a few mm) that is stuffed with a waterproof sealant (rubber or something) that extends down into the gap to connect to the damp-proof course.
Steps slow people down (even going down), which can create crowding if there is heavy footfall into and out of a building, so you want level entry if the building is busy enough - regardless of disability (also there are lots of people not in wheelchairs who have problems with steps, e.g. parents with children in buggies).
If "only of use to a minority" is our definition of charity, then are dog parks and bikes lanes also charity?
Good question. I think that depends on whether the minority has the power/money/political clout to get something implemented on their own, instead of asking a majority. Within that, there's also a question of cost verses benefit. The larger the minority and the cheaper the accommodation or convenience, the more likely they can get their way.
I did include in my previous post that it's usually a majority, but minorities often get their way, especially when the rest of the population is ambivalent or don't have to care. Wheelchair ramps existed before the ADA, and I wouldn't consider them charity in those cases. They just weren't enforced on a wide range of buildings whether they were needed/wanted or not.
Dog parks are ghettos implemented by anticanites to keep dogs out of public spaces.
Wheelchair ramps are attempted charity. Putting destinations at ground level and having level entry is universal design. The kinds of accommodations that we build for the majority tend to be much more like the latter, and it's what we should at least *aim* for in general disability accommodations.
Roads should require a fee to use, but we are stupidly averse to that.
Practically speaking, they're about 50% paid for via gas taxes which is a roundabout use fee. In a different time, such taxes were much easier to collect.
Why were they easier to collect then?
I think there are two ways to answer this.
1. Automated toll collection is faster and less expensive, now. Today, someone just drives slowly through a toll booth and is automatically charged thanks to a device in their car. If they cheat the system a photo of their license is mailed to them with a request to pay. (Yes, large toll roads do still have one or two human operated booths for those who need them.) Coin operated toll booths with automated arms also existed in the past. But then you run into the peril of someone not having change for the booth. Failures to register payment might have been more common. Enforcement was less effective. I suspect that there were more jams that needed to be repaired when one is dealing with actual coins. Etc.
2. In the past you didn't have the potential for electric vehicles or hybrids. So fuel usage was a more reliable proxy for road usage. It seems reasonable that cars which are at least partly powered by electricity will become more common as time goes on, meaning that fuel usage will become an increasingly unreliable proxy for road usage.
Note also that fuel usage correlates with the weight of the vehicle, and thus with the wear and tear it inflicts on the road - motor vehicles are very much not equal in this regards, and a fair user-pays scheme should see goods trucks pay far far more per unit distance than commuter cars
Right. It’s essentially “make our built environment in such a way to maximize the functionality of the maximum number of people”. Which is not really charity.
If you hand a disabled person a stack of cash, they might be able to use it to have a comfortable life. But they probably won’t be a “productive member of society” in the sense that they will be precluded from most forms of productive labor (much less true today with digital technology and remote jobs - one wonders, if the ADA happened today, would we get ramps and elevators in office buildings, or just more work-from-home?).
So mandated ramps etc. aren’t “charity” so much as they are solving a coordination problem that individual disabled people could not solve.
Roads make moving trade goods easier. Sidewalks keep pedestrians off the road, which makes moving trade goods easier. Streetlamps let people drive at night more safely, making it possible to move trade goods longer. They're not considered charity because they directly increase monetary value.
None of that applies to residential roads though, unless you're counting things like groceries as trade goods? And it also doesn't apply to a host of other things, like art exhibits, hiking trails, or play structures.
Publicly funded art could certainly be seen as charity. And charity which privileges certain kinds of art above others, also.
I am absolutely counting groceries as trade goods, as well as anything else that's brought in to be sold for money. Groceries are the most important good of all; you're not doing anything if you can't get food.
I would say hiking trails* and play structures serve the sidewalk purpose of funneling people away from places you don't want them; without hiking trails you get people wandering across the whole of the woods, without play structures you get children climbing window ledges. Art exhibits aren't really charity, they're a statement by the maker; once they put it up, everyone has to look at it, whether they like the art or not. You'd prefer having a Lord Liberty over Lady Liberty? Tough shit.
*(The hiking trail I know the story of was privately constructed, and was indeed charity.)
That logic seems somewhat contorted? There are well known ways to keep people out of places you don't want them, and a fence or keep out sign is cheaper than maintaining something. And public art usually isn't funded by the maker, it's the opposite and they get paid to do it. The fact that not everyone likes art is the whole reason I'm drawing the comparison here.
But sure, then I submit that ramps facilitate the passage of trade goods by allowing easy access for wheeled devices, including wheelchairs and carts, for various activities involving transporting groceries and, like, going to your job (is labor a trade good?). Not to mention they keep wheeled devices users users from attempting the stairs where they're more likely to hinder foot traffic and cause a scene.
>Humans can't fly (without machines), but we don't consider our flightlessness a problem, just a fact of life.
I think problems vs facts of life is a false dichotomy. Yes, flightlessness is a fact of life, but we spend a lot of money on planes and drones to get around this fact of life because it is a problem that we are mostly land bound, and we are able to complete novel tasks or current tasks much more easily by taking advantage of flight. In the other examples with blindness or wheelchair using admirals, likewise technology that expanded the capabilities of the user would change the facts of life such that not being able to use those abilities would become a problem
I feel like I've seen the pattern a few times now where the absolute dumbest stuff happens in spaces one or two levels removed from academia. Actual academics are generally quite smart and extremely invested in their field. But then weird things happen when academic ideas escape containment and lose all their qualifiers and nuance and baggage. Or like, one academic with an axe to grind will make the rounds but leave out the gigantic pile of controversy that surrounds their particular position.
It sort of turns into an accidental motte and bailey, with a bunch of consultants and hangers-on occupying the bailey and academics vigorously working to fortify the motte.
This is a great observation
Re: the first comment, it seems to me that the thought experiment only works if you assume a post-industrial first-world country where functionally no-one has to do dangerous or strenuous manual labour. If you're living in a society of hunter-gatherers -- the form of organisation that prevailed for the majority of human history -- being deaf or blind or wheelchair-bound presents obvious problems. You can't hunt prey very well if you can't see, hear, or chase it, after all. Similarly, if you're a farmer in a peasant village -- the second-longest form of organisation -- you're going to find it much easier to sow, weed, and harvest crops if you can walk around and see what you're doing. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, if you're a factory worker operating heavy machinery, or a craftsman trying to produce something by hand.
I don't think, therefore, that the sort of society CleverBeast imagines could actually come about, because its members wouldn't be able to pass through the previous stages of social/economic/technological development necessary to reach it. Even if it did somehow happen, it would suffer greater constrains than ours does -- farming, manufacturing, and operating machinery are still vital to modern society, after all, even if we sometimes forget this because most of the work gets outsources to poorer countries.
I was confused about that as well, as though postindustrial society came into being fully formed or something.
Maybe it's possible for a being that never developed sight to do as well as humans and eventually develop a technologically sophisticated civilization. But those beings would most likely be very different from humans. Hearing less so -- maybe we would have an even closer connection with dogs or something in that case. I could imagine a world where nothing ever developed hearing or sight (I remember something like that in A Wrinkle in Time), but that seems more the realm of science fiction than a realistic question of how humans should or can live.
This was my exact thought. You can go back further than the hunter-gatherer stage; Any evolutionary branch of large land animals unable to see would have gone extinct tens of millions of years ago. I think the fact that, with a tiny handful of exceptions, every single surface dwelling land animal has developed at least rudimentary sight is a pretty strong indicator of what an advantage it is. Sure, I guess if I want to go truly imaginative I could imagine a world where advanced life evolved in giant underground caves or whatever, but that world is so different from ours that there's no real comparison.
>I became more aware of the fact that it’s hard to define “disabled” in a sense where things we consider abled (eg hearing) wouldn’t be disabilities in some other society.
Most of the 'accomodations' demanded of social model advocates are literally impossible to provide without the ability of people considered non-disabled today. Blind people literally could not survive without sighted people, and any hypothetical society that somehow allowed the blind to live without the sighted could only be built...by the sighted. If all the sighted people were killed by a virus that spared blind people, 'society' would still be 'oppressing' blind people, but now 'society' is....just blind people!
If you cannot provide for yourselves in the absence of a certain category of abled people, then yes, you are inherently disabled. It is INHERENTLY better to be sighted because sighted people are capable of independent survival (i.e. as a group they can survive in the absence of any other group), blind people are not. If this does not count as 'inherently better', then 'inherently better' is a meaningless, useless term being used by someone trying to be 'technically right' in a way divorced from anything that actually matters. If the model doesn't account for reality as it is, as SOCIETY actually is, then it's not saying anything meaningful. If a hunter gatherer tribe literally cannot provide 'accommodations' to a disabled person, how is it possibly meaningful to blame 'society' for 'making' disabled people disabled? The social model purports to describe disability in the context of human society, but then appeals to an entirely abstract notion of 'society' divorced from the majority of societies that ever existed (and in some cases, may never exist).
Do you believe it would be impossible for an intelligent society to evolve anywhere in the universe, from any creatures that didn't have biological sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation in the 380 to 700 nanometer range?
Switching to my SF-writer hat for a moment (and thus needing to spend a bunch of time thinking about the diversity of sophonts in the 'verse), my conclusion was that while it's certainly possible, it's probably mostly limited to extremophiles living in environments where 380-750 nm EM is absent, on the grounds that it's such an absurdly useful part of the EM spectrum and relatively easy for evolution to stumble onto.
(i.e.; it's short enough to produce detailed representation of the environment around you in a way that the modalities of most senses are poorly equipped to, while courteously refraining from mucking up most of your molecules.)
Being creative for a moment: It might be impossible for a civilization to evolve with creatures that cannot perceive, with a high level of accuracy, objects that are not in current contact with the body but are of interest. How would a species work with metal, fire, chemicals, or electricity, if you could not know with precision how to touch them safely? When you think about it, a great deal of civilization is precise knowledge of how to work with dangerous but useful tools and products.
Perhaps there is another sense that could sense those things with precision at a distance. But then the society would be reliant on that sense, and any creature that had a deficit in that sense would be disabled. Does it have to be sight? I don't know, but it probably has to be something.
That seems very plausible to me!
How is that relevant? We're talking about human society - that's what 'social' means. Intelligent beings inherently capable of existing without sight would not be recognisably human.
If sighted people were wiped out, blind people would die out before there was any chance of evolution.
This is what I think OP is talking about being 'technically right' - you're appealing to something that may hypothetically be true, and then bizarrely using that as a justification for political policies in the here and now, but there's no real link between them.
It cannot be the case that blind people are being 'opppressed' by sighted people if sighted people ceasing to exist would make things catastrophically worse for the blind. There's exceptions to this line of reasoning, obviously, if you imagine for example somebody prevented from learning to walk. They may be unable to fend for themselves if mobile people disappeared. But this isn't analogous to blindness, because blindness is an inherent weakness, people by and large are not blind because somebody imposed this on them. The only way blind people can survive is through sighted people using their sight.
I'm not going to use the word "oppressed" here, and I don't believe I did in any of my comments. I also didn't advocate specific political policies.
My claim was just that there is no "inherent, objective" way in which these things are disabilities - they are always disabilities *relative to an environment*.
I'm not going to claim "the environment should always be changed to make things not be disabilities" - I suspect that this would even be impossible, for precisely some reasons that are central to the social model of disability (since different people with different embodiments are going to need different environments in order to not be disabled, so we can't make things work for everyone).
Impossible, anywhere in the universe? Certainly not. But it would require an environment so different from ours that I'm not sure the point of the comparison. I've mentioned this elsewhere but it's no coincidence that (with a tiny number of exceptions) every surface dwelling land animal has at least rudimentary vision.
"Anywhere in the universe" is all well and good, but on the planet I live on vision happens to be a pretty profound evolutionary advantage (precise wavelength range arbitrary to a point).
Anywhere else in the universe seems not relevant. Anywhere, anytime ever is so far removed from our earthly primate-base experience that too many other factors would likely be different for our comparison to be meaningful. (Like talking about "individual rights" and "gender roles" in a civilization that functioned like a bee hive.)
Here on Earth, it is perhaps conceivable to have intelligent beings that get around the physical world and search for food via, say, echolocation, vision in another part of the spectrum like infrared, touch, smell, etc. But their adaptations would have to be very different - say, much better hearing and smell than humans have now - to be able to survive in the world as we know it, and eat the food that these methods make accessible.
Just taking humans as they are now or were thousands of years ago but without sight, at current normal levels of function of the other senses, would be a difficult hurdle to survival.
"If you cannot provide for yourselves in the absence of a certain category of abled people, then yes, you are inherently disabled. "
I think that is a little too simple. Suppose there is some talent that is essential for the survival of a society but survival only requires one percent of the population to have it. Someone who doesn't have it lacks an ability just as someone who can't swim the English channel lacks the ability to swim the channel, but I wouldn't describe either as disabled.
I think implicit in the concept of "disability" is something that significantly reduces what you can do unless other people bear costs to help you do things.
>Humans can't fly (without machines), but we don't consider our flightlessness a problem, just a fact of life.
Humans can survive without flight. Blind humans cannot survive without sighted humans. Quadraplegic humans cannot exist without mobile humans. THAT is the difference. This isn't anything 'social', it's the raw reality of human life. Unless you're saying 'preferring life to death is just a value judgement', then something like blindness is necessarily an inherent disability.
Humans cannot survive without other humans, in almost any environment on the planet. That's why this is *all* social.
Actually, there are hermits who have survived in solitude away from other people. Such "the man of the hole", a tribe of 1 in the Amazon.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/28/amazon-activists-mourn-death-of-man-of-the-hole-last-of-his-tribe
Huh are there really no blind hermits? Seems like it could be doable
I know in Frankenstein the creature encounters a blind hermit, but I don't know of any in real life.
I always assumed that someone from the church or something was coming by with supplies periodically.
Categorically false - individual sighted humans are capable of survivng by themselves - not always, but it's possible. And sighted individuals have a better chance of survival than large groups of blind people do (in the absence of sighted people).
But in any case, all this shows is that sight is necessary but insufficient for survival. Blindness procludes survival independent of the sighted. And we'retalking about GROUPS of people. Blind people AS A GROUP cannot exist without sighted people. Blind people need not only other humans, but humans of different fundamental abilities. That's obviously what we're talkin about here. A million people with my exact intelligence, skills, knowledge etc. would very likely be able to survive. It probably wouldn't be much of a society compared to the current e.g. US, but most of us would survive (beyond some certain time horizon). This is not analogous to blind people being inherently depndent on the sighted.
Humans can survive by foraging and fishing for multiple decades at a time. That still happens today. Other humans are not a requirement.
It's necessary to receive the training that enables you to do this, so you have to have had parents at some point. But you'll be fine without them, once you're trained.
Although I am still not a fan of the social model, I do appreciate the input of those in favor of its use. I honestly feel like I learned some things about potential disability accommodations that somewhat changed my view on them.
Ultimately I agree with the commenters who say that some accommodations would be incredibly inefficient in a society where very few people would need or use those accommodations.
I do also feel as though at least some proponents of the social model treat a certain standard of living as obviously possible no matter how we order society, when I don't think that's true. If we became inefficient enough, everyone would have a lower standard of living - including those that are asking for accommodations - such that even with an accommodation they are worse off than in a more efficient society that is more thoughtful about which things to accommodate and how.
Paul Ingraham at PainScience.com on the widespread tendency of healthcare providers to BPS badly:
https://www.painscience.com/blog/bps-ing-badly-how-the-biopsychosocial-model-fails-pain-patients.html
“[Consider] any poorly understood or hard-to-diagnose illness that causes malaise and pain (e.g fibromyalgia, Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, post-Lyme disease syndrome, endometriosis, celiac disease, and many more). Healthcare providers, often oblivious to the great diversity of ‘bio’ possibilities, shift the diagnostic burden onto the easier scapegoat of the ‘psychosocial,’ and pat themselves on the back for doing it. Worse, they often do this in an insidiously gaslighting way, e.g. ‘You’ve stressed yourself into chronic illness, it’s self-inflicted burnout, you poor self-sabotaging thing!’
“The pseudo-diagnosis of burnout just puts a coat of BPS paint on incompetence, but it’s so common that it’s the only influence of BPS that many patients have ever seen.“
I’ve even seen something as commonplace and “bio” as asthma “psychosocialed” as, “Maybe the asthma symptoms you describe as interfering with your sleep lately aren’t asthma but never-before-diagnosed anxiety pretending to be asthma.” (Spoiler: they weren’t.)
Ingraham concludes, “Rocket science is hard, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with rocket science, and I don’t think there's anything wrong with BPS itself. It’s a vision of really great healthcare; it would be weird if it was gracefully, consistently implemented across the land. It’s aspirational.”
Unrelated but I think it would be preferable to avoid links to twitter-, I mean, X until they allow unregistered people to view stuff. Just in case people with accounts forgot this was still a thing.
Although I guess in this case (the dog in fire meme) there was no other option if you were linking directly to the creator and not just where you found it.
Interesting, I hadn't realised this had happened. The last change I observed had been that Twitter had gotten _less_ obnoxious about it after the acquisition (the undismissable nag screen that would appear if you scrolled down far enough had been removed). Shame that it's now actually gotten worse than it was and is completely unusable without an account.
I wonder if they also still auto-ban accounts that sign up just to read? (Source: I did this once for work to stop being annoyed by the nag screens; after two days or so the account got disabled because of "suspicious tweeting activity" (i.e. they decided no tweeting was suspicious). Had to go through Twitter support to get the account re-enabled. Unsurprisingly, I found it deeply hypocritical at the time.)
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I guess I would have noticed at some point, but it's nice to be emotionally prepared. :)
No, it wouldn't. If somebody says something interesting/relevant on twitter, it should be included even if not everyone can see it
Thanks for the thought. I cannot embed X links directly in Substack because Elon is still angry about Notes and has banned automatic interaction between the two sites, so I don't have a great way to give credit without a link.
Maybe you could use a link redirection service, such as TinyURL?
"Yes, this is false, but you don’t seem to understand that we’re using this false thing as propaganda"
The version of this that makes some sort of sense to me is something like:
The truth is a complex compromise between multiple models of disability (so the Social Model, the Medical Model, the Biophysical Model, the Charity Model, etc). Each of the models is individually pretty simple to explain and understand, so the best way to aid people's understanding is to emphasize the model(s) that that are non-dominant in order that the model in people's heads becomes a more accurate compromise.
I think that the dialectical argumentation style - reach for an opposite of something you don't like, then use it as a challenge, rather than trying to actually be right - tends to result in people getting locked in to the challenging (but inaccurate) idea and not accepting the synthesis when it emerges. Hegel did the best-known expression of the dialectic, and you can see how badly it worked because his most famous pupil, Marx, set up communism as an antithesis (opposing idea) to capitalism and then got locked in to the antithesis and never got to the synthesis that is the mixed economy or social democracy or whatever you want to call capitalism with a welfare state and some regulations of large corporations, and his successors started calling people who did support that "social fascists".
I think the dialectical argumentation style can work with individuals or small groups, but on a society-wide scale it tends to, as you say, lock people into the antithesis rather than get to the true synthesis. Introducing the social model of disability might be a good idea in a tutorial or research seminar, but it probably won't work for wider society.
I kinda like the idea of models as 'lenses', to use another academic term. The point of them is to generate novel hypotheses.
You ask "if we treat disabilities as medical illnesses to be cured or treated, what solutions does that suggest?" And then you ask "if we treat disabilities as a form of oppression and assume all possible accomodations are owed by society, what does that suggest", and then we take those hypotheses and evaluate them for what good we can do with them.
I also read "Unspeakable Conversations" between the last post and this one and one thing I think that essay revealed is that behind the question of what's a disability is really a question as to the validity and nature of preference itself.
Specifically, Peter Singer and I share a lot of the same attitudes around what makes a person a person, and as a consequence of that is that infants don't really have more rights than fetuses, only their parents have rights. What I hadn't realized is that Peter Singer then goes on to make the perfectly logically consistent argument that there's really no ethical problem with killing disabled infants, provided the parents can demonstrate a legitimate preference for a non-disabled child.
In this specific case, I think disability advocates are upset by this argument as much because it seems a slippery slope to euthanizing all disabled people as to their vested interest in more disabled people being born, but if you take out the infantacide part and only frame it as the slightly less morally itchy question of "should an adult couple be able to abort a fetus just because of a disability and for no other reason" I can't see how you can get around this without a robust social model of disability.
Because essentially, the argument has to be that the preference for a non-disabled child is sort of nonsensical in a world where we agree all disabilities are social constructs created by various cultural and economic forces. There's no such "thing" as disability to create a valid preference, it would be like aborting a child because you wanted one to have blue eyes instead of brown.
Of course, perhaps one day the technology will exist to easily tell what eye color your baby will have and some small percentage of people will want to have abortions based slowly on such considerations, and then, as I said at the top, advocates and opponents of such things will be applying all of the same arguments to the very nature of preference itself. How much of wanting a tall child is because tallness conforms to real medical benchmarks of what healthy looks like, and how much of it is structured by arbitrary economic and cultural forces that make it easier to navigate the world in a tall body?
I can't stress how deep a rabbit hole this sent me down. I've always known that I would be uncomfortable (although not necessarily unable) to provide parental care for a disabled child, and I've also always been comfortable with people having abortions for basically any reason. I hadn't thought about the intersection of these two ideas, nor about how if you abort a potential life solely on the basis of them being disabled, at least part of what you are acknowledging is that the world is not shaped as well for disabled people. Which might not be unjust in itself, but it is certainly an acknowledgement that the world could be built better than it is. When we imagine a utopian future, what's the difference between imagining one where everyone is tall and symmetrical and contain no genetic disorders that impact their ability to navigate, vs one where basically everyone, regardless of the circumstances of their biology, has the kind of miraculous personal accommodations that allow them to live a full and happy life? Because the first one seems more enactable to me, but the second one seems in a weird way, more beautiful. But that itself is a preference and I don't know where it comes from.
"In this specific case, I think disability advocates are upset by this argument as much because it seems a slippery slope to euthanizing all disabled people as to their vested interest in more disabled people being born, but if you take out the infantacide part and only frame it as the slightly less morally itchy question of "should an adult couple be able to abort a fetus just because of a disability and for no other reason" I can't see how you can get around this without a robust social model of disability. "
I think you can get around it easily.
Aborting a fetus is some specific level of bad. If you're very pro-life, it's exactly as bad as killing an adult human; if you're very pro-choice, it might be zero bad. I am pretty close to zero bad - I think it's inherently as bad as killing any other creature with that amount of consciousness/intelligence/selfhood, which is low - I don't think it has as much C/I/S as a cow, and although I'm semi-mostly-vegetarian I'm not going out of my way to prevent cows from dying if it's important for something.
If you think killing a fetus doesn't matter much, you should be willing to tolerate it for small reasons, whether that's "the parents don't feel ready to be parents right now" or "it would be disabled and they want to try again for a non-disabled one", or "the parents want an athletic kid, but the genetic tests say the current kid will be slow and clumsy". I'm not sure I'm entirely ready to accept this last one, but I think I'm being inconsistent in not doing so and would have to plead not wanting to set a bad precedent for more important cases.
On the other hand, not killing an adult matters a lot, so our threshold for killing one should be extremely high and maybe unreachable.
"nor about how if you abort a potential life solely on the basis of them being disabled, at least part of what you are acknowledging is that the world is not shaped as well for disabled people"
This also doesn't seem true. If you abort a kid because they have Tay-Sachs (condition where you can't do basic metabolism things and die painfully before age 1) that just seems like a reasonable choice that doesn't imply anything about the world except that it's cosmically unjust, which you already knew.
Yeah, I think you misunderstood (or I didn't write my point very well). The specific critique of disabled people advocating against aborting disabled infants comes mostly from fear of genocide. If you don't think that's a rational fear, then you can construct (as you did) a perfectly valid model of abortion where its okay to *at least* abort most disabled fetuses, and probably fetuses that don't meet many more arbitrary criteria.
Which is just to say, I didn't expect you (Scott) to have much of a problem with it. My real point was that the preference for a non-disabled child over a disabled child has to come from somewhere, and whether its a preference for a happier child, or a less burdensome life raising a child, it is probably a preference predicated on an assumption that life is harder for disabled people and the families who give support to disabled people. Which is an assumption disability advocates dispute as being made too casually in many cases, but is hardly indefensible. But if you were certain that whatever disability your child faced could be completely ameliorated or essentially neutralized by society than that decision does look harder to justify.
Imagine aborting a fetus you would otherwise want because it won't have full use of its legs in a world where motorized wheelchairs are free and ramps are Ubiquitous and people in wheelchaors generally report happiness consistent with their unparalyzed peers. You are probably still allowed to make that decision, but wouldn't it feel more arbitrary?" I will grant you that as a doctor, you can probably come up with many conditions that are fundamentally not like this. Some conditions can't be ameliorated, they either will kill you or render you perpetually unhappy. But I think disability advocates mainly argue that we lump too many conditions in the "fundamentally unhappy" category instead of the "needs accommodation from technology and society to be happy" camp. Which is something I think I was guilty of. Apparently Peter Singer is also guilty of this. He really did seem in conversations with the person he was talking to to take it for granted that a paralyzed person in a motorized chair must have obviously suffered internally from tbe difference between themselves and nondisabled people.
Ask a bunch of paralysed people with fancy wheelchairs how much they'd give to be able to walk. I bet it's a lot.
I think I do get your underlying point, in that some 'disabilities' like myopia are sufficiently easily mitigated by current technology that we don't much care about them; I'd still prefer to have better eyesight, mind you, and a lot of people opt for corrective surgery now that that's a thing that's available.
I would say that all these things are qualitatively bad, but some are much worse than others due to the availability and cost of mitigation. I feel that abortion is a certain level of bad and while most things society regards as 'disabilities' are worse there are things like myopia that are "too small" to justify an abortion. (Infanticide is obviously worse than abortion, in the same way that 3rd trimester abortions are obviously worse than 1st trimester abortions, fwiw). I would still choose to embryo select or gene edit away even minor impairments, ceteris paribus.
What if they were flying wheelchairs? Obviously you could want both, but then what you want is as much choice as possible in your mobility, not some obvious preference for the default baseline human experience.
" (Infanticide is obviously worse than abortion, in the same way that 3rd trimester abortions are obviously worse than 1st trimester abortions, fwiw)."
I don't take this as obvious, and I don't think all bioethicists do either. The point at which a human life obtains some ethical/moral dimension of personhood is probably around the time it starts having an awareness of itself as a being in time, I can't poinpoint the moment that process begins, and I'm willing to grant plenty of slack, but based on newborns I'm seen, they aren't there yet. I agree most people have some sentiment that makes them act as if newborns are categorically distinct from fetuses, but I think this is mostly an aesthetic thing, biologically hardwired thing, as opposed to something logically consistent.
> Obviously you could want both, but then what you want is as much choice as possible in your mobility, not some obvious preference for the default baseline human experience.
One wants more *abilities*, ceteris paribus, yes. If I could fly I would like it, and being able to fly would not make me ambivalent about losing the ability to walk, especially if it's the sort of flight that cares about the laws of physics and isn't pure magic.
I possibly shouldn't have used the word "obviously" there. To me, personhood is not a binary, and while babies lack full personhood they have more than foetuses - or maybe they have a similar amount, but the mother's rights are less impacted by their existence? An infant can be given away and thus no longer be the parents' problem without killing it, unlike a foetus, though that does assume that there are people willing to care for it.
Circling back to the disability topic, I support (voluntary) euthanasia for sufficiently severe chronic illnesses, so even if I were persuaded to view infants as equal to adults there would be cases like Tay Sachs where prolonging life is simply prolonging suffering.
"I became more aware that some people think “Yes, this is false, but you don’t seem to understand that we’re using this false thing as propaganda” is some kind of extenuating factor that makes it okay. I’m against this, but I understand there’s lots of very convincing-sounding propaganda arguing I should be for it."
It feels like you're still not getting it. People aren't saying that it's an unalloyed good, they're saying that it's a lesser evil that's justified in the circumstances. I understand that the rationalist movement had normative issues with this from the start, first with "dark arts" rhetoric and then with "asymmetric weapons", but, well, the real world just doesn't work that way. Maybe it's because, like you said in that post, "ignorant armies" haven't yet seen the light and there's actually a better way, but so far it's purely aspirational and theoretical.
That bit gave me pause, too. It's a sudden Kantian turn on the question of lying, which seems like a strange choice for a utilitarian.
There's no reason for other utilitarians to respect the words of the admittedly dishonest (though such utilitarians may well lie when it suits their purposes)
There's the sort of Kant-style argument that lying decreases trust, but I think there's another relevant argument here too. In using lies and propaganda, you're attempting to manipulate people, to substitute your judgement for their own. In the normal sort of lying, this is because you're being selfish and you want them to do something that's good for you instead of them. In the case of attempted pro-social propaganda, it's because you think they're making the wrong decisions and you know better than them. There's an issue that it's not very narrowly targeted at just people who actually are making worse decisions than the propagandist would though. It's kind of just targeted at everyone. I'm not saying I necessarily agree that narrowly targeted social model of disability propaganda would be a good thing, just that the targeting is a necessary condition that I don't get the impression is being fulfilled.
To put it another way, Scott is arguing against the social model of disability presumably because knowing that it's false is a pre-requisite for making good decisions in the related areas. Using the social model as propaganda anyway is one possible decision you could make with this information, but you still need to make an informed choice, so that's not really a good argument against the original point, that it's actually false.
I see what you're saying, I think, and yeah, this is a more down-to-earth objection than the deontological one. Of course, I suspect a universal-audience propagandist (in the general case, not necessarily the social-model-of-disability case) would simply answer that the trade-off can be worth it. The flawed decision-making that comes of people we expect to know better also acting as if the false thing were true can still lead to superior (by some favoured measure) outcomes than everyone acting as if the false thing were indeed false.
Anyway, I'm not really aiming to play consistency gotcha with our host. No one's a walking textbook of one particular moral theory. I was just surprised - maybe a little amused - at where his intuition went with this.
Like, utilitarian rationalists will tie themselves in repugnant knots, and propound all kinds of not-Ivan-Karamazov things (like whatever Eliezer Yudkowsky was doing with the torture vs dust specks argument) as long as the utilons add up in the end. But, it seems a trade-off involving lying just hits differently from a trolley squish.
Someone might have made a post about "whisper networks" and a parable of lightning that might apply in this situation.
I feel like objecting to lying even when its useful is a reasonable stance to take - obviously some people will disagree, and I think there are situations where even the most honest person would avoid the truth, but I expect that "I will lie whenever it is expedient, and that's OK" will be much more controversial to express in public (hint: this is one of the times when lying about your intentions is advantageous).
Sure, that would normally be my reaction to such a statement. But rationalists are notorious for their quokka-ness (https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1276138522123161600 for reference), and Scott is probably the biggest quokka of them all, so I'm taking him at his word. In a way, it's astounding that the world still hasn't beaten this attitude out of him, and it would be a sad day if/when it does.
I'm sure Scott knows that people lie, I think the surprise is more that people think he'll just go along with it when he's clued in that it's purely for political expediency. The whole point of signalling quokka-ness is to avoid people making that kind of faux paux around you, I want people around me to bring out their best defences for their expedient lies!
I don't expect him to go along with it, I expected him to grudgingly admit by now that it's a Nash equilibrium, distasteful but predictable.
It's only a Nash equilibrium if you think people in general are incapable of noticing the lie. The long-term equilibrium is that people go back to mocking and stigmatizing the disabled, while remembering the campaign of lies they once tried to pull off. It'd be a return to the charity model, except that everyone would have good reason to hate the disabled.
There's also a meta-equilibrium of every side in the culture war fielding their most effective propaganda on every controversial issue. Some lies end up obsolete with time, but the game remains the same.
What if most people engage in doublethink about most beliefs, and on some level expect everyone else to be cynically maneuvering for advantage?
Agreed that this seemed like a strange position to take.
I think you can sometimes make this argument, you just have to justify it really hard. "Here's why there's a clear and pressing danger unless we make this propaganda point, here's why the false propaganda is the only way to do it and people wouldn't believe the true thing." I'm still not sure I'd agree with this, but I'd understand they were at least making an argument.
The line of reasoning as stated seems almost trivial. Most false political positions are around because they're useful to someone. If someone says - I don't know - "Joe Biden's college degree is fraudulent", and I do some investigative reporting and find it's real, and tell them, and they say "Oh yeah, I was only saying that because it would hurt Joe Biden, which I think is an important political goal", it seems like I have done some useful work in establishing this and we should be less happy with the person who said this. If you can get out of *anything* by saying "Yes, you are right that it's false, I was saying it for propaganda reasons" then it seems like we lose the whole practice of caring about the distinction between true and false statements.
But also, I am utilitarian but try to be the smart, somewhat-SBF-proof kind of utilitarian. Yes, you can mug someone for $50 and donate it to orphans, but a world where everybody steals quickly becomes unmanageable. I think in practice I end up much less utilitarian than other people on the crucial "can you do bad harmful things and then justify them later?" question. I'm grateful to FTX for providing a good example of why doing bad things for utilitarian reasons really does tend to end badly and I'm not just making it up.
I'd say that most false political positions that stick around are there because they passed some kind of memetic selection, with factors like plausible deniability playing a role. The level of justification that you require would be an isolated demand for rigor in the ordinary political process, but, credit where credit's due, you demand it from everyone, so you have standing to make such demands.
What is it you think Scott doesn't get? The situation doesn't seem that complicated. The people who support teaching and propagating the social model (as defined in the original post) think that though the model isn't true, i.e. the model makes false claims, it has more persuasive power and has a higher likelihood to bring about their desired outcome. This is exactly the way advocates of propaganda (a good example is perhaps Salazar) justify their use of it. While it's not true that people from country X are better than people not from country X, it helps the outcomes in country X to persuade people this is the case. Similarly, while Santa Claus doesn't exist, persuading your kids he does and he rewards good behaviour might lead to a beneficial outcome. What is it that's missing from this analysis?
What's missing is that Scott claims that those propagandists are bad and wrong, without making that case. I suppose it's a question of priors - Scott's null hypothesis is that such propaganda is almost always bad and the onus is on his opponents to prove that in this particular case they're justified, whereas I claim that politics has always worked this way, and saying that something is false isn't grounds enough to disqualify it, you need to prove that this particular lie is much more harmful than ordinary propaganda.
But why do you think he doesn't understand this? To me the passage you quoted seems totally consistent with what you just stated. Do you think proponents of social model would defend your prior of "saying that something is false isn't grounds enough to disqualify it, you need to prove that this particular lie is much more harmful than ordinary propaganda"?
Yes? You just said it yourself, "this is exactly the way advocates of propaganda justify their use of it." I expect that at least some of them would reconsider if you proved to them that this instance of false propaganda actually leads to bad outcomes by their lights.
Choosing to communicate something that is factually wrong is not necessarily lying. If you need to do calculations quickly in your head pi=3=sqrt(10). Provably wrong, but useful. In this example, limited capacity forces us to use an approximation. Limited capacity is encountered not only in storing and processing numbers but everywhere. People have limited emotional capacity, limited empathy, limited time or interest to deal with subtle distinctions. Half of the people are stupider than the median. Rationalists tend to score high on standardized tests and the like, so they tend to believe that these issues are not important. But they are. Also the fact that you don’t need to learn quantum mechanics in full to do chemistry is not controversial -no one would say that the orbital model is propaganda- but as soon as something has political implications people assume the worst.
The other issue is that different people have different beliefs and experiences, and so what is a really important message to one audience sounds obviously wrong to another.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/
Late-stage enlightenment.
Yes! A deaf organism would never have survived to become homo sapiens. To my mind it’s a rather useless thought experiment.
I don't think that's obvious at all. It probably would be a disadvantage in the ancestral environment, but not necessarily a decisive one, especially when the deaf evolve better peripheral vision and the like to compensate.
You're also privileging the hypothesis. It's easy to imagine an alternate universe where say, humans evolved the ability to see in ultraviolet or sense magnetic fields or whatever, and they have the same argument and say "an organism with the inability to see UV would have never survived to become homo sapiens."
Well, if you want to posit an entirely different physical world then anything is possible. I suppose, if every organism around us as we were developing, couldn’t hear either we have a fighting chance, but I don’t really see how it can go very far. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
If we evolve without hearing, I don’t really see why we would’ve been able to make sounds. It would be rather pointless, wouldn’t it? So the path to any kind of language communication becomes rather difficult to my mind. Vibrations of all sorts are a condition of this physical world, so perhaps being able to sense vibrations in an a way other than hearing is a possibility but how does this creature turn into something like us?
> I suppose, if every organism around us as we were developing, couldn’t hear either we have a fighting chance, but I don’t really see how it can go very far.
The animal kingdom provides many examples of real-life evolved animals with various sensory abilities superior or inferior to humans, so your naive assumptions about what are necessary for the survival of all animals are likely to be falsified if you look.
In this case, one obvious point of comparison is snakes. Snakes aren't *completely* deaf, but they don't have ears and can only sense low frequency sounds and they're effectively deaf by human standards. And yet, they evolved and got along in nature just fine. So at the very least hearing is not a necessary condition for survival in nature. Do you really think that it would be impossible for say, humans with snake-like hearing to evolve in some alternate timeline?
> In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
Maybe, but we're not talking about blindness here.
> So the path to any kind of language communication becomes rather difficult to my mind.
Are you seriously not aware that Deaf people have language too?
> but how does this creature turn into something like us?
It's pretty easy to imagine what a hypothetical society of deaf humans might look like because real life history provides multiple examples of communities with significant deaf populations. They're not much different from hearing communities, they just use sign languages instead of oral languages.
> The animal kingdom provides many examples of real-life evolved animals with various sensory abilities superior or inferior to humans, so your naive assumptions about what are necessary for the survival of all animals are likely to be falsified if you look.
Naive am I? Ok, whatever.
I wasn’t talking about all animals. I was talking about Homo sapiens and I am well aware of all the creatures on this earth that have a wide variety of sensory abilities, and they have all found their niche. What I am saying is I don’t think Homo sapiens finds its niche under the conditions that you are positing. iI’s fine to talk about communities that exist where everyone’s deaf and can communicate with one another but they’ve already gotten to be human beings haven’t they? They did not arise from the mud in that condition.
>Am I seriously not aware that deaf people have a language?
No. What does sign language arise from?
What if I were to say a whole bunch of shared concepts that can be encoded in different ways? To whit, all the languages that Homo sapiens has devised once given the ability to do so. The deep ocean is full of blind, deaf and dumb creatures.. still waiting for them to evolve a sign language. Anyway, seeing as you lay the groundwork for this tone of discussion, I will say that I think you’re really not taking the big picture into consideration at all. You keep starting the game somewhere near the end instead of at the beginning;
Sentient, conscious beings who have accrued a symbolic relationship to the world are capable of all kinds of things. The question is, how do you get there from a primordial slime without some serious ability to perceive the world around you with sight and sound and touch? Would it be naïve of me to say that sign language is a difficult thing without a very flexible hand an opposable thumb?
Perhaps we should discuss the whole community of three legged cheetahs while we’re at it.
Also, I might add you are unnecessarily rude in your way of addressing this discussion. If you think I am full of shit, just say so; it would be simpler for all concerned.
Now you're asking how humans evolved? Obviously they would evolve the same way they did in our own timeline. I don't understand why you think hearing has anything to do with that.
P.S I'm not trying to be rude. I'm curious which parts seemed rude and whether there would have been a better way to phrase things. Was it the "are you seriously unaware" part? I guess I did let my frustration get to me there. If so, I'll try to keep that in mind and avoid that language in the future.
From the internet:
“In the 1500s, Pedro Ponce de Leon, a Spanish Benedictine monk, adapted these signs to help him educate deaf students in Spain. He is the first recognized teacher of the deaf and his work paved the way for the creation and instruction of a formal sign language.”
Imagine that; a person with hearing invents sign language.
I think you are lost in translation, my friend.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to respond to or what argument you're trying to make. Is your claim that deaf people would somehow not be able to invent language on their own? Because if so, it's worth noting that in our world the *one documented case of language spontaneously arising* was at a school for the deaf.
From the internet:
“In the 1500s, Pedro Ponce de Leon, a Spanish Benedictine monk, adapted these signs to help him educate deaf students in Spain. He is the first recognized teacher of the deaf and his work paved the way for the creation and instruction of a formal sign language.”
Imagine that; a person with hearing invents sign language.
I think you are lost in translation, my friend.
I don't get the examples in the first few comments... at all. In a world designed for people with wheelchairs, a person who can walk normally wouldn't be "disabled", they would be the equivalent of Usain Bolt and Mike Tyson rolled into one. That's *why* there isn't a civilization where most people use wheelchairs to begin with -- because being able to walk is such a major advantage for any organism living in a human-like way that it will inevitably evolve to be the dominant phenotype. The same applies for the people who can see/hear in the other thought experiments mentioned.
The only way I can see these arguments having any validity is if I'm meant to be imagining something like a society of blind cave trolls that never venture up to the surface or something like that. If that's what's meant by "a society where 99% of people are blind", then sure, being able to see wouldn't be much of an advantage there. But then the conclusion just reduces to the claim that our understanding of disabilities is rooted in human biology, which is clearly true but not an especially interesting or useful claim.
It’s also a little odd to talk about “wheelchair users” at all in the context of the social model, since a wheelchair is itself a medical/technological intervention directed at the disabled individual!
A wheelchair user going up a ramp is in fact a great example of the intersectionist model - it combines both a social accommodation (build ramps) and a medical treatment (provide a wheelchair and teach them to use it).
A purely social intervention wouldn’t work well - it’s fairly easy to make a building wheelchair accessible. Much harder to make it accessible to a paraplegic without a wheelchair. But a purely medical model isn’t great either, at least not yet, since wheelchairs still can’t go everywhere a person with fully functional legs can.
More generally I can't endorse literally saying false things in the service of some social cause, but I do think this is a more complex issue than the rationalist community treats it as.
Zvi Mowshowitz did a series of posts about this - people use statements for a variety of reasons, only one of which is "conveying truth." A common reason to say true things, perhaps more common than conveying truth, is persuasion.
I'm bad at persuasion! I have a compulsive need to point out weaknesses in my own arguments, explain that there are exceptions to general rules, and otherwise undermine myself at every turn. A world of people who think and argue like me would be directionless. We need zealous soldiers *and* thoughtful debaters.
Consider a case where an issue has two sides - one if which tends to attract debaters and the other of which appeals to soldiers. Almost certainly the debaters are right! They're the ones who actually want to be right more than they want to win, after all. But the soldiers will be more convincing.
So a worldview that says "only say true things and do not mislead" is a worldview where we have correct people and winning people and they're often on opposite sides.
Wouldn’t a big part of saying true things be to protect your credibility, not an unimportant thing for social creatures? The boy who cried wolf comes to mind.
I would think so but people really really really don't seem to care about this.
I think it has a lot to do with proximity; lying about things far away and somewhat abstract as opposed to lying in your immediate sphere.
For lots and lots of people, proclaiming the right lies is how you signal your membership in the group and opposition to enemy groups.
Well that’s a damn shame.
Just wanted to note that the last section was great, and if you could include it whenever possible and appropriate it would be amazing.
From the quoted comments:
> There is nothing inherently better about being sighted versus being blind. There is nothing inherently better about walking versus using a wheelchair.
Of course there is. A sighted person can choose to put on a blindfold if they wish. A blind person cannot choose to see no matter how much they want to. A person who can walk can sit in a wheelchair if they wish and wheel around. A paraplegic cannot walk no matter how much they want to. One of the pair in each example is simply _more able_ to do things and can do _more things_.
That's at the root of the conventional understanding of disability - there is a common ability which is lacking. All things being equal, more ability is better than less because you are more likely to be able to do the things you would like to do, it's easier for you to be self-actualized and flourish, etc. And that's without even getting into some of the most pernicious disabilities like chronic pain of various kinds which can literally be a living hell with no possible argument for any upside.
Does society have an obligation to enable everyone to lead a life of dignity and purpose, and help them to be their best self? Of course. But let's not pretend that being not-disabled isn't strictly superior to being disabled, and that any disabilities which can be removed, should be.
I'm sure there are and will be a lot of comments dunking on this take but I just had to be one of them because wow is it wrong...
"Of course there is. A sighted person can choose to put on a blindfold if they wish. A blind person cannot choose to see no matter how much they want to. A person who can walk can sit in a wheelchair if they wish and wheel around. A paraplegic cannot walk no matter how much they want to. One of the pair in each example is simply _more able_ to do things and can do _more things_."
I think this is mostly true and important, but I don't know if it's literally right. I'm very sound-sensitive, and although you'd think I could solve this problem when wearing earplugs as needed, in fact:
- they only work about 50%
- earplugs plus giant construction earmuffs work about 90%, but the remaining 10% still hurts
- earplugs start irritating my ears after 12+ hours, and the giant construction earmuffs start hurting after about an hour
- I can't sleep in the giant construction earmuffs because they don't let me put my head in a comfortable position
- It's hard to bring these everywhere I go
I think there would be real advantages to me being deaf over the current situation, although of course they're outweighed by the disadvantages.
Mostly true is on the mark. It's definitely not universally true, the examples I was responding to were more or less perfectly picked to fit into a paradigm of being not-disabled as strictly superior. As others have said, sound is pretty hard to block out, so deafness doesn't fit into the paradigm as well.
I think that sound sensitivity probably does fit into that paradigm, though, better maybe than deafness - most people have an "ability" (unbothered by most noise(s)) that is more or less just superior to being sound sensitive. The person who isn't sound sensitive can go more places, enjoy more things, etc. I don't know that there's really any advantage the being bothered by sound (correct me if I'm wrong!).
It's definitely not a paradigm that perfectly fits every disability, but it is as you say, mostly true. If it wasn't, we likely wouldn't be having this conversation because disability wouldn't be a concept we would have developed.
People seem to have the idea that being able to sense things at a low level corresponds with experiencing pain when that stimulus is at a more intense level, and that's just not true.
On a more practical level, you need to get better fitting external earpro. If they begin hurting _before_ the insertable ones bother you, something is very wrong with your fitment.
None of the plus points of the social model people have set out seem to require the social as opposed to biopsychosocial (holistic?) model. Apart from those about fighting being a good thing.
Even the meta point about the model itself being more dignified - disabled advocates in favour of disability ramps are also generally in favour of disability benefits, in other words of a holistic model, and don't consider that dignity is undermined by realism, any more than a monarch will accept homage but disdain taxpayer support.
In addition to the fighting, it could also be about the irrationality - a display of power, the deadening effect of paying lip service to the ludicrous, the deliberate strengthening of the kind of people who like controlling the thoughts of others, that sort of thing. Easier for a king to take people's money if they're all having to say in public and private that his rule is anointed by God, when everyone knows his grandfather was a peasant and he's only in charge because someone else got unlucky with a blacksmith. That might be overthinking it, though.
I just had my aversion to Continental philosophy refreshed by Tyler Cowen linking to Kevin Munger's critique of him. Hard to give a fair shake to others bringing it up now.
Another issue with the Social Model is that it can be quite non-compassionate to people whose lives are dominated by *other people's* disabilities. For example, I have a teenage relative who is severely autistic. He can barely speak to indicate his needs; he throws violent self-harming tantrums; he can only eat three things; he cannot deal with a large and random array of sensory stimuli, which must be kept out of the home; etc, etc, etc. His parents' lives completely revolve around trying to meet his needs. When disability advocates say "autism is not a problem! it's just a different way of being!", this can feel like gaslighting to a family that has to accept numerous and constant limitations on their own lives due to their child's condition.
+100 excellent point.
I genuinely wonder (no snark) how the Social Model advocates would respond to your example. How many would say "If your autistic relative's parents feel put upon, then they are ableist and are part of the problem!" and how many would say "Society should help accommodate your autistic relative *and* his parents, e.g., by providing trained volunteers to do respite care."
Quite a bit of pearl-clutching at the idea that the model could be wrong but still useful. It's a model, that's the point, there's a whole aphorism about it :)
>It's a model, that's the point,
It's not "wrong" in the way regular models are wrong, and not useful in the way most models are. It's a literally false thing, and it's use is as emotionally manipulative political propganda, not a tool for making iteratively better predictions about the world (i.e. what most models are useful for). So it's at the least very misleading to compare it to other models in this way. "Model" is not even really an accurate description of what it is. It's more just a theory.
That the Earth is spherical is literally false too. It’s a model, and it works for making maps via projections. Models are controlled lying. The difference is that a scientific model tends not to have much emotional and political baggage attached. Except for economics perhaps.
It’s usefulness is not as a “model”, which would imply that one could use it to make accurate observations or predictions about the reality that it models.
But as a “model” it’s no more accurate than the thing it’s supposedly replacing, the medical model. Both are equally wrong, just in opposite directions.
In fact the utility of the social model only exists as a rhetorical counterbalance to the medical model. Absent the medical model as a “baseline” the social model falls down like a lean-to with nothing to lean on.
So it’s terrible as a “model” to be taught as a first principle, because it’s woefully incomplete unless you are also familiar with the model it argues against.
I believe the tendency until the mid twentieth century to force children in schools to learn to write with their right hand was mostly to make life more convenient for them in a world with slow drying ink. With a pencil or a ball point pen, there is no problem writing left-handed, but if you are dipping a steel pen into an inkwell things are not so easy.
Oh, interesting!
...but then I wonder what the Hebrews and Arabs did.
My sister is left-handed, and a much better penwoman than I'll ever be. At school we were both required to write with fountain pens.
Long story short: it's possible to write using an ink pen when you're moving your hand over what you just wrote, but it's a lot easier to avoid smudging the ink if you're constantly moving your hand *away* from the most recently written (and hence: still wet) parts.
I know this from personal experience, because one of the langauges I was learning to write at that time was Arabic.
It might be prudent to consider that the various writing systems were developed under a quite different set of circumstances, than those to be found in a mid-twentieth century classroom. For one thing, it is quite plausible that they were intended for use by people who had access to a better writing surface than a school desk, and - most importantly - more time.
Speaking as someone who had to learn penmanship with a fountain pen in the 60s there is reason in this . I was taught an elaborate system of tilting the paper and curling my arm and hand just so. I was pretty bad at it and wrecked a lot of shirts.
I was *allowed* to write with my left (after they'd made me try right-handed and seen that it didn't work), but I wasn't taught anything about it. I just hold my hand below the line I'm writing on. But my handwriting is never going to win any prizes, and it's slow, as well; and my hand starts to hurt after only a little while.
Ink is one problem, and the directionality of the nib is another. Cursive, and at least Western calligraphic letterforms, are designed around these issues: as an overall pattern, the hand drags the nib from the top left to the lower right, to maintain ink flow and prevent driving the nib into the paper.
Ultimately, I think this writing practice derives from left-to-right text.
Insisting on truthfulness above all things is very deontological of you, Scott.
See https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-social/comment/21329888
I started toying with these ideas in the last comment section, but: Some version of the medical model is pretty much universal and uncontroversial in cases where we can actually reliably fix the problem medically. I don't hear anybody, even the staunchest proponent of the social model, who say that we should stop surgically fixing cleft palates in infancy and instead accommodate people with that condition. There are plenty of things that were once debilitating disabilities that we now medically correct as a matter of course, and approximately nobody has any problem with that. (the opposition of some deaf people to the use of cochlear implants being an interesting exception.) Even something like a wheelchair ramp presupposes the use of a medical device (the wheelchair) to ameliorate the disability.
I guess I would boil my thoughts on this down to: Medically correct disability whenever possible. Also understand that every accommodation, no matter how trivial, has a nonzero cost, and sometimes hard choices need to be made about whether the cost is actually worth it. And at least in the case of government action, non-disabled people do in fact get a say in this conversation, seeing as it's (largely) their money being spent.
Tinnitus is one of the most common causes of disability in US combat veterans. It also seems to be a uniquely difficult condition to shoehorn into the Social Model.
Are there any accomodations that people with tinnitus want but sometimes don't get?
[I started writing a reply comment and argued myself halfway to sympathizing with the social model.]
Level of permanent/persistent combat-related disability is compensated by the US government. For many other conditions, the VA can provide prosthetics, medications, etc. For tinnitus there's nothing you can really do, except hold a ceremony, write a monthly check, and say thank you for your service.
In one sense, society is directly to blame for many cases of traumatic tinnitus. If your buddy unloads his gun right next to your ear he might be saving your life in combat, while giving you permanent hearing damage and a ringing in your ear that will never go away. You got that injury in combat, and it was the government that sent you to combat in the first place.
More commonly, men tend to get tinnitus as a result of domestic violence. While men tend to punch, women are more likely to slap. A hard slap across the ear can cause traumatic tinnitus that may become permanent. (We were doing a clinical trial looking for traumatic tinnitus a few years back.)
I guess viewed in this way, we see the real appeal of the "social model" as a bastardized kind of tort that's specifically oriented toward permanent body differences/changes, where blame can't rightly be attached to one guilty person. Instead of focusing on a specific plaintiff, SM targets the government for relief. I think there's a motte form of this argument that could play well with public sympathies and honest logic (i.e. combat injury), as well as a bailey that clearly takes the concept too far.
"But it sounds like some people in the field of chronic pain have focused on the “psycho-” part and are using it to insist on therapy and prevent people from getting their chronic pain medications."
I interpret this as more directly a result of the overcorrection to the opioid crisis than as a specific reliance on a model. In other words, the rationale is not driving the practice of withholding opioids. It's the other way around: the desire to withhold opioids latches onto any available rationale, however tenuous. But you can always fabricate a justification when working from motivated reasoning. I don't think getting rid of the biopsychosocial rationale would have any impact on people seeking to withhold opioids. They'd just turn to something else - like bureaucracy.
The commenters that are cool with propaganda, or retreating to meta positions regarding "what's politically effective is more important than what's true" are badly underestimating how corrosive those positions are to society. Yes, it's socially inept to take people literally all the time, or to prefer truth over friendship. But people hate being bullshitted, and they really really hate being obviously, brazenly bullshitted, to the point where they stop trusting not just the bullshitter, but all their friends, then all the people that ever said anything nice about them, and then eventually everyone that refuses to condemn them.
I'd hoped the experience of COVID would have dampened enthusiasm for this style of thinking for a generation. I get there's an is/ought crux, but seeing people talk about the "is" like there's no downside is unsettling.
An important thing to remember is that the whole practice of "it doesn't matter if its true if it serves the cause and gets me what I want" is not normal. Or rather, to the extent that it's normal, it's normal in the way that beating your wife is normal, or demanding bribes to do your job is normal. It might be normal in the sense that it is both common and accepted within a particular community—but there are other communities where it is neither. You don’t have to live like that. Just as importantly, we don’t have to live like that, and nobody has any right to expect the rest of us to tolerate abusive and destructive behavior just because they’re used to it.
Edited: Fixed typo.
I mean, once some one has declared or demonstrated a willingness to lie for gain, then the only sensible reaction is to never trust anything they say ever again.
It never ceases to amuse me (cause it has long ceased to surprise), when people lament the loss of trust in media, science, the academia, etc. Newsflash: in order for people to trust you, you actually have to be trustworthy.
I would make a distinction between the building of a shared ideological framework (deliberate or otherwise) and straight lying/bullshitting. Shared “lies” have been considered instrumental to strengthening society in many cases, religion being the most obvious example.
Yeah, how to react to 'we are using this false thing for propaganda' is one tactic that always got under my skin. I'm still not sure how to react to it, but my native instinct is to try to deny a place at the intellectual bargaining table to anyone who uses it.
Gonna be honest. I didnt have "scott alexander comes out against metaphors" on my bingo card for the day.
To be charitable, maybe he is just reading some of these not the same way I am reading them. Like i am reading a lot of people trying to emphasize that the distinction between medical-2 and social-2 model is in the ought viewpoint of where primary locus of solutions to any impairment should be. So the social model would include people who hold the social-1 model described in the article but also include people who hold the interaction-1 model. Meanwhile while Kaplan holds the social-1 model he actually almost certainly holds the medical-2 model
I think Scott is frustrated with people who refuse to distinguish between metaphor and reality.
> I suppose the boring real explanation is that left-handers were never that discriminated again and there’s no left-hander genocide or anything to memorialize.
This... can't be right. Left-handedness was viewed in extremely negative terms. That's the reason everyone who was left-handed was forced to act as if they were right-handed. "Sinister" is the Latin word for "left".
I agree there were strong negative feelings, but my impression is at least since the founding of the USA, the worst thing that happened was people had to get yelled at by teachers, use their nondominant hand and be somewhat less agile. Nobody was killed or enslaved or segregated over it (right?)
In my preschool they served a hot lunch and I was made to hold a fork and eat with my incompetent right hand. This would be 1970 in Los Angeles. They wouldn't let me eat if I picked the fork up with my left hand (ie, took the fork out of my hand, told me I couldn't eat unless I held the fork in my right hand). My mom went ballistic when she found out about it but that was my mom and it was after a few weeks of my trying to eat in a short period of time using a hand that didn't work for the purpose while experiencing public shaming in front of my peers while they enjoyed their lunches.
Not slavery nor segregation, but significant nonetheless. I vaguely remember at the time learning from my mom that this was a not uncommon thing done in some schools and families up to that point.
IIUC, actively breaking bones on the left hand was not unheard of until around the middle of the 20th century, in Western nations. I shudder to think what was considered normal in societies with stronger (religious?) taboos on the issue, and in less civilised times.
IMO it's probably comparable in discrimination level to homosexuality, in that it's a tendency you're born with but could with great effort act against and hide, to avoid societal punishment?
Um... There's more than one society where it seems historically it would get you witch-hunted.
It's just that, like atheism, it's reasonably possible to fake being a member of the privileged group when required.
I feel like it was much closer to nose-picking, or scratching your butt. It's impolite to use your left hand, we're going to smack you until you learn propriety and then we'll view it as solved.
> I became more aware of the fact that it’s hard to define “disabled” in a sense where things we consider abled (eg hearing) wouldn’t be disabilities in some other society.
You cited a bunch of examples that assumed without argument that hearing in a world of deaf people would be disadvantageous. This is not actually true. Being around big industrial machines (we have those in reality!) is unpleasant because of the noises they make. But being deaf around them is still worse, not better; those noises carry important information about what the huge, dangerous machines are doing, and you can use that information to improve your own safety.
On the assumption that you don't care about your safety and neither does anyone else, you can also use that information to detect both problems in - and the normal operation of - the machinery, which will make you more productive in your job supervising and/or operating it.
I'm very sympathetic to those people's arguments because I have noise processing issues and have sometimes fantasized about being deaf - I agree that overall the advantages of hearing outweigh the disadvantages, but it's pretty visceral to me that I can imagine a world where that isn't true.
Do you have an article re: noise processing issues and your methods for dealing with them?
(I very much relate to the above -- having spent a fortune on soundproofing, purportedly noise-cancelling gear, all the way through buying a house with a basement specifically so that I was able to move the computers there, with the displays etc. a floor up, driven via fiber cables!)
Unfortunately no. Mine are mostly not being able to work when there's noise; I handle it through a combination of good earplugs, construction earmuffs, and a big box fan for my room / white noise machine for travel - plus accepting I'm probably not going to get much work done in most environments. I'm very lucky to have enough money that I can live in a separate house without flatmates, and to have a wife who's pretty quiet and takes my sensitivities seriously.
> I appreciate this explanation, but I hope I’m not being too hostile by summarizing it as “Yes, it may be false, but people are promoting the false thing for propaganda purposes.” How is that an extenuating factor?
I'm so confused when you do this. You quote it and use language as though you are being generous and charitable, in the very same sentence as being basically totally ungenerous and uncharitable. Can you just.. not tell you're doing it? It is confusing the same way it is confusing when you aggressively fail to steelman or pull a motte-and-bailey, which you do a lot despite having as far as I know coined the terms.
Yes, that is a hostile summary. Their whole reply was full of points like "there's a spectrum" "it has a lot of value" "you can't really understand it without the political history" "it's not entirely false or true but it is somewhat absolutist" etc. The words 'false' and 'propaganda' are just totally wrong ways to summarize any of it.
Time and time again this blog plays the trick of "pretending to understand a subject in order to pass negative judgment on it", and time and time again it fails to understand or sympathize any opposing viewpoints, but cleverly *pretends* to understand them which is, I guess, good enough for the readership. The people who know about this blog but *don't* read it are the ones who can see through this pattern of deception.
Seriously, if you can't understand where other people are coming from, you're not in a position to credibly disagree with them. You can try but you're just going to fail, because your disagreement doesn't *encompass* the other view. Instead it just fails to notice it entirely. The result sounds like a parody, and that's what having a debate with a few static articles on your own blog sounds like. If you want to find out what the point of this other model of disability is for, go argue with some actual people and then demonstrate that you understand their positions and that yours somehow supersedes theirs. Here you have demonstrated that you physically can't comprehend other positions, but are eager to pretend to so that, presumably, you sound more credible to a bunch of people who already agree with you.
I think Scott's summary makes perfect sense and I feel like your comment is using language as though you are being generous and charitable, while being being basically totally ungenerous and uncharitable. I feel like you're comment is stuck in the meta without addressing the actual argument. Can you explain concretely why "It's false but people are promoting the false thing for propaganda purposes" is a bad summary?
Not OP but I believe the summary glosses over a few important points. Imagine a world where people can either believe A) the medical model or B) the social model, in their purest, most extreme form. What would you pick? Now, our world is arguably different from this imagined world, but not as much as rationalists may assume. Storing bits of information has a cost. Nuance comes with non negligible cognitive demands. Having people believe the thing that will result in some desirable behavior rather than the thing that is true according to some abstract, objective standard may be more a necessity than a choice. The people who are smart enough and have enough time to process a nuanced view will get there eventually anyway, while the others are spared the cost of useless (or even detrimental) thinking. Or to put it in a different way: those who can understand the limits of a metaphor will be fine anyway; those who can’t help but take it literally should be fed a metaphor that, when interpreted literally, results in desirable behavior.
Thanks for the explanation, but I would still summarize it as “Yes, it may be false, but people are promoting the false thing for propaganda purposes".
I think you need to cover the inferential distance of "Having people believe the thing that will result in some desirable behavior rather than the thing that is true according to some abstract, objective standard may be more a necessity than a choice". This is not obvious to me, and you can't just assume this without stating it or arguing for it (like the person I was responding to). Sure, nuance has costs (which you include) but lack of nuance also has costs (which you omit). I think the cost/benefit is on the side of "speak the truth", and so does Scott:
>I became more aware that some people think “Yes, this is false, but you don’t seem to understand that we’re using this false thing as propaganda” is some kind of extenuating factor that makes it okay. I’m against this, but I understand there’s lots of very convincing-sounding propaganda arguing I should be for it.
So we are kind of back to where we started.
(I feel like Scott should have some post somewhere arguing for truth over "utility", but I can't seem to find it. Maybe https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/ ?)
« This is not obvious to me, and you can't just assume this without stating it or arguing for it » You are absolutely right. This makes all the difference, in fact. If you assume a world where either people believe pi=3 or pi=4 and they cannot parse the statement that 3<pi<4 then telling them that pi does not equal 3 is irresponsible because they will assume that pi = 4. The burden of the proof that the world is indeed like this is on the proponents of the social model.
Psychologically, rationalists hate being lied to because the liar is assuming that they can be lied to. Their highest value being intelligence, this is the worst offense imaginable, like holding the door open for a feminist woman. This is also the reason why most despise religion. But they are not the target audience of either the social model or religion, it’s just that in a world of one-to-many communication, lies cannot be tailored to the audience and everyone gets the pi=3 treatment.
That sounds exactly like “Yes, this is false, but you don’t seem to understand that we’re using this false thing as propaganda”
I am not really disagreeing with you except for the fact that propaganda is a proper subset of this. Certainly telling a kid that pi=3.14 is not propaganda? Yet it’s subtly false and it’s motivated by the desire to get the kid to act in a certain way (e.g. by solving math tests).
>The people who know about this blog but *don't* read it are the ones who can see through this pattern of deception.<
This is incredibly ironic coming from someone claiming we should stop challenging their propaganda.
"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. "
If every human was born with the same level of physical ability that she now lives with, the last human would have been eaten by wolves not long after the first human was born.
If we imagine that some alien civilization with approximately our level of technology were to stop by and take pity on the differently-abled protohumans, building them the technological infrastructure to survive, I doubt they'd be able to keep the machinery running more than a century or two. And if they could, I expect it would be a Vaal-like Servants of the Machine dystopia. If we set it at early industrial technology or before, then I'm even more confident of that.
We live in meatspace. And approximately the full "normal" set of human abilities, is required for humans to *keep* living in meatspace, to establish dominance over the wolves, to build and maintain industrial civilization, to grow food, etc. Because, we basically didn't do any of those things, had a much more precarious existence, until we got the full modern set of human abilities, and then we went and doggified the wolves, built that industrial civilization, etc, in an incredibly short time once we did. "Normally abled" is not an arbitrary social choice, it's a minimum requirement for survival without dependency.
I think "dominance over meatspace" is easier than you set it out to be, the hard task is to do that in competition with other humans. A society of deaf people would probably survive fine in a state of nature on a deserted island, but they would quickly be subjugated once canoes arrive with warriors who can throw spears and communicate at the same time. Which unexpectedly brings us back to the social model.
I feel this hinges on the sort of desert island you assume, because one of the key skills conducive to flourishing in a state of nature is the ability to respond appropriately when someone yells "duck!" (IOW, being able to respond to auditory warnings of danger to life and limb, because a lot of the time, they're the only ones you're gonna get.)
The Polynesian seems to have been able to flourish in the state of nature quite easily, since they had plenty of time left after ensuring basic survival to build giant war canoes, create elaborate weapons, train for years to become formidable warriors and fight each other in destructive raids and wars. I'm pretty sure deaf people could have managed to thrive on similar islands if they didn't have to put 30% (ish?) of their cultural output into war.
I think many, maybe a majority, of pre-historic humans would have happily traded their ability to hear for magical protection from their enemies.
The key word here is "magical". Yes, in the theoretical world where all humans live on idyllic islands with plentiful food, no hearing predators, and no life-or-death disputes over resources, they could probably get by just fine while being deaf. That isn't the environment in which humans evolved, nor is it the environment in which the vast majority of humans have ever lived.
Absent "magical protection", had pre-historic humans lost their hearing, they would have quickly been out-competed and rendered extinct by other species.
>Absent "magical protection", had pre-historic humans lost their hearing, they would have quickly been out-competed and rendered extinct by other species.
We just have to disagree about that. "Pre-historic humans" is a broad category, but it includes people with agriculture, horses, iron and large complex societies. They are already dominating nature and predators are not on the top 30 of their issues, and it wouldn't suddenly become an issue just because they went deaf.
Other humans aren't the only threat you are going to be facing.
Deafness not only means you can't hear audible warnings of non-human dangers, but you are also limited to line-of-sight communication with your fellow tribesmen. Which means you won't notice their desperate attempts to warn you just before the rock that has broken off the cliff crushes your skull, because your back happened to be turned at the time.
Every sense we have confers a *massive* evolutionary advantage. If it weren't we wouldn't have it, because there wouldn't be enough selective pressure to ensure it gets cemented in our genome. If it didn't matter whether one can hear or not, congenital deafness would be a lot more common than it is (currently estimated at 1-3 children per one thousand newborns, source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22538062/; by way of comparison, left-handedness, which doesn't appear to affect evolutionary fitness a lot - as far as we can tell - appears in around 10% of humans, source: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-45297-004 - a two-order-of-magnitude difference.)
You'll note that we have reached a level of prosperity where a disability on the level of deafness is not treated as disqualifying one as a member of society. A 'state-of-nature' community, which depends on contributions from every member, would likely kill congenitally disabled infants as soon as the disability was discovered, and even if they lived, they would be highly unlikely to reproduce, so the prevalence may have been even lower than it is now.
In short, I expect an isolated tribe composed solely of deaf people to succumb to various misfortunes rather quickly - within a number of generations we can count on one hand - even if they meet no other humans during this time.
>Which means you won't notice their desperate attempts to warn you just before the rock that has broken off the cliff crushes your skull, because your back happened to be turned at the time.
I can assure you that pre-historic Polynesians didn't worry much about skull-crushing rocks.
>Every sense we have confers a *massive* evolutionary advantage. If it weren't we wouldn't have it, because there wouldn't be enough selective pressure to ensure it gets cemented in our genome.
I completely agree. But my claim is that most of this advantage manifests in competition with other humans, since pre-historic peoples are already masters of nature.
>In short, I expect an isolated tribe composed solely of deaf people to succumb to various misfortunes rather quickly - within a number of generations we can count on one hand - even if they meet no other humans during this time.
Obviously I disagree. I feel like I've made my case well, your arguments seem pretty weak to me and doesn't bring anything that the top post of this thread didn't already have.
I can't tell if you're being wilfully obtuse or are so completely divorced from existence in a state of nature that you are unable to apprehend the issue even as an act of imagination.
"Rock falling on your head" is shorthand for:
- you fell down a hole and can't get out,
- an infant child ran off, as children are won't to, and now they have no idea how to get back home and the parent has no idea where to look for them,
- a fire has broken out while everyone was sleeping, and the person who spotted it must choose between either trying to put it out or rousing the others, and they can only rouse one person at a time unless everyone is sleeping in a big huddle.
In short, the only way your tribe of deaf people is thriving on an isolated tropical island is if it is a completely fantasy one constructed just so that the absolutely massive (I really can't stress this part enough; we're literally talking life-and-death here) disadvantage of being deaf isn't an issue.
> I completely agree. But my claim is that most of this advantage manifests in competition with other humans, since pre-historic peoples are already masters of nature.
Yes, and - this bit is important - prehistoric peoples could hear, and would probably kill/banish tribesmen who couldn't as being a curse, or at least an unbearable burden.
Let's start with the obvious: hunting. If you can't hear that something's there, then the ability to remain unseen becomes a superpower against you, regardless of whether you're the hunter or prey.
Most animals already know to hide from predators or the prey they're stalking - are quite adept at it, in fact - which is why you'll notice that pretty much everything living in the same sorts of environments as humans happens to have well developed hearing on top of decent eyesight. Hell, most animals can hear better than they can see, because hearing is so much more useful in practice.
Remember, audible cues tell you not only that something is out there - even if you can't presently see it - but can also give you a pretty good idea *where* it is.
If it's just deafness, and if you are on a desert island without any dangerous animals, yes, that's probably survivable. But I think the OP was talking about more substantial disabilities. And desert islands without dangerous animals are not a plausible place for humans to evolve in the first place.
I still think your post is missing that the most dangerous threat to meatspace humans is other humans. I think even the level of disability that OP stated would be survivable without that threat.
Scott, I don't think you can simultaneously claim that you have used the terms correctly according to Social Model of Disability, and also that you refuse to participate in the annoying game of redefining words which you accuse SMD of doing.
Also I'd like to push back on the “what if we force you to use a new word for the common-sense definition of the term and restrict the word you already have strong connotations with to a new definition”
People were not using "disability" to mean what SMD now means by "impairment". People were using the "disability" to mean the amalgamation of both biological and environmental factors, often without realizing it. It's not immediately clear whether biological related use was more often than environmental and even how to properly compare them. That's why it's helpful to have two different words for this kind of thing - more accuracy and more awareness of what you actually mean. Now is it annoying that in the transitional period their may be ambiguity between old and new definitions? Sure. But that's the way that language evolves and I don't think there is much utility in trying to oppose it.
Or... they could have created an entirely new term to go with their new meaning, but then they wouldn't have been able to take advantage of the connotative values that the term they were hijacking had.
Again, that's just how the language works.
It happened to be easier in this case to shift the meaning of one term and come with a new term for the part of the meaning that was abandoned than invent two new terms, in this case. Which points to the fact that the term "disabled" was used in the environmental context enough so that this shenanigan succeeded
Except... it's not how language works in my profession. When we have a new concept, technology, process, failure mode or whatever, we very much do NOT use extant terminology if and unless that previously-defined term exactly applies. I'd say it's the difference between a hard science/engineering/manufacturing mindset and a soft/social/pseudo science one, but even that doesn't really seem to match. Off the top of my head, USPSA has specific definitions for "class," "division," and "category."
It's possible inside of fairly constrained professions to maintain reasonably precise and agreed on meanings, even within the social sciences. But disability policy-making and the social model raised in that context is squarely in the realm of politics and society at large, and definitions are very often up for debate there. People are jockeying for the moral high ground, to establish new boundaries around rights and entitlements and ideas of fairness -- society's responsibility to individuals and vice versa is actively being fought over and the same words get harnessed to opposing goals.
Which is also to say that I think Scott's black and white framing of "lies in service of propaganda" is simplistic. It's a space in which people are constructing stories that are favorable to their interests. The "models" aren't aimed at explanatory accuracy; they're aimed at winning debate. That doesn't make them lies; it makes them rhetoric.
Good for you if so, though I suspect you may just just have a blind spot here.
Take math, for instance. What science can be harder? And yet the same terms (addition, multiplication) are used for the operations in any finite field, despite such operations being quite different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_field
Multiple different though similar things are called "integral". And don't even get me started on variable "x".
Math... isn't science. It's not subject to external verification.
A subset of math bears an unreasonably good relation to (and predictive power about) the external world but math also gives you things like the Alcubierre drive and n-dimensional sphere packing arrangements (where n >3). And to our best observations the external universe is in fact self-consistent and complete.
The common thought experiment seems to be to imagine a sighted or hearing person in a world of blind or deaf people, which is certainly interesting. I can imagine a very stressed out hearing person who never gets any sleep because night time is the obvious time to complete road works (/similar). However, I also suspect the reality may be less akin to disability and more akin to 'every superpower has it's kryptonite'.
We can also reverse this by imagining a future or alien society where everyone has an ability we don't, and whether the lack of that ability would constitute a disability/impairment.
Imagine you woke from cryonic sleep to be informed that your illness had been treated. However, they also inform you that they were unable to do anything about your impairment: you will never be able to fly. It turns out that humans have since evolved to fly, and it's just a normal ability that everyone is assumed to have. You then find yourself in a society and urban landscape where you are unable to live a normal life without a 24-hour carer who carries you from place to place.
We would of course hope that the new society we find ourselves in might make 'reasonable accommodations' for the flightless, which might involve installations of stairs and ladders where space and cost allows, but would we really go so far as to say that society is at fault for designing itself around the near-universal ability to fly? Yes, we might want to discuss what measures could be taken to work around this problem, but the problem is very obviously related to our inability to fly.
The idea of a left-handed world seems stronger, because that seems symmetrical to the actual situation: a right-handed person in a world of left-handed people would be in the exact same position as the inverse, so it's genuinely a case of being differently-abled rather than more or less abled. However, I also suspect that's why we tend to think of being left-handed as a difference rather than a disability.
I'm glad to see from Adesh Thapliyal's comments that we do not have the situation I feared: Nobody actually believes the Social Model but everybody is required to publicly proclaim their belief in it or be pilloried.
I would expect a deeper analysis along these lines: Some people have disabilities, but that class depends on what society generally expects/requires of people. So one alternative is to alter society so that the people with a particular limitation aren't disabled, and the other is for those people to be disabled. Assuming that the problem is "large", an important question is which course of action is "more expensive": losing the productivity of the disabled or society paying the costs of adaptation.
Of course, that's a heartless, capitalistic way of looking at it. But the societies that will be around in a century or two are descended from the societies today that are most productive. There is a continuous competition between societies for the allegiance (physical presence, really) of humans, and it's clear that a major determinant of which societies humans choose is material prosperity.
The left-handed catchers in MLB since 1989 has a decent explanation which seems obvious after it's been explained. 1st, there are catchers in MLB that bat left handed (e.g. Tyler Soderstrom of Oakland); the fact that needs to be explained is that there are now left throwing catchers. This was explained to me as down to comparative advantage. A catcher needs to be able to throw the ball quickly, hard, and accurately from home to 2nd base to prevent runners on first from stealing. However, if someone could do that with their left hand, they will almost certainly be more valuable to the team as a left handed pitcher than they would be as a catcher. This is because left handed pitchers have an advantage against right handed hitters, which are more common in the game.
This explanation doesn't really leave any mystery on the table except for "why were there ever left throwing catchers?" If I'm taking a guess, I think its down to the increasing competitiveness at the little-league and college level. If players start the game as kids mostly outside of organized leagues and choose their positions without input from coaches, it's not impossible for a catcher who throws left handed to develop their skills as catcher to the point that it's no longer a good move to convert them to LHP. But if adults are running the show from the get-go, everyone who's good enough at throwing left handed to be a catcher will be asked to pitch instead.
"This is because left handed pitchers have an advantage against right handed hitters"
No, left-handed pitchers lack the platoon advantage against right-handed hitters. (Most baseball hitters hit about .030 batting average points higher against a pitcher using the opposite hand from them.) Hence left-handed hitters generally enjoy a sizable platoon average since most pitchers are right-handed.
Left-handed pitchers do tend to have a modest unfamiliarity advantage over right-handed pitchers. It used to be believed that left-handed pitchers threw pitches with more movement, but the new scanners show that's not true. Apparently, batters just have less practice hitting against left-handers.
But catchers don't get as much of an advantage from being tall as pitchers do. The average MLB pitcher is 6'3" compared to the average MLB catcher at 6'0." For example, Will Smith of the Dodgers, is a 5'10" All Star catcher. If he were left handed, he'd have to be either a first baseman, DH, slow outfielder, or short pitcher. I could imagine him making the MLB as one of those things, but not lasting as long as he is likely to last as a catcher.
I’m going to guess that pick-off throws to second and third favor right-handed throwers.
I reject the example of the hearing-capable person born into a deaf world.
I mean, yes, that person would face challenges in life, and would require accommodations (i.e. earplugs) a lot of the time. But what everyone seems to be missing is that he possesses a bona fide superpower. He has an entirely new (to the deaf denizens) sense that can detect all kinds of things that normal (i.e. deaf) humans cannot. So, yes, in the short term it makes sense to provide accommodations; in the long term, however, the reasonable thing to do would be to embark on an accelerated research program to give everyone in this society air-vibration-detection superpowers.
The opposite is true of a deaf person born into a hearing-capable society. Yes, he would also require accommodations and special consideration; but it would not make sense to embark on a research program to deprive everyone of their hearing (not unless you're some kind of a Bond-type supervillain, that is). The need for accommodations and disability are correlated, but not identical; and objectively, having more powers -- enhanced senses, higher physical strength, faster mental calculation speed, etc. -- is always (meaning, 100% of time +- epsilon) better than the alternative.
The 1 trillion estimate is probably closer than the 1 billion one, even before accounting for regular maintenance. Extrapolating costs from lower elevations is not fruitful, because as the latter comment indicates, costs increase rapidly with elevation. Given how much time entities like the Colorado DOT spend repairing roads (the possible work season is short), I'm not even sure an outdoor road like that is physically possible with current technology. It would degrade faster than it could be repaired.
Many machines don't work properly at those altitudes. If you try to build only a narrow path, not wide enough to support them, then are you doing all of the work by hand? Carrying bags of cement up and down? Not to mention specific sections where people have to take ladders over ice chasms, which move regularly, or thin ridges where you can't fit a path let alone workers, or steep slopes requiring technical climbing... by the time you were done, if it were even possible, you would have destroyed the very thing you are trying to make accessible.
>you would have destroyed the very thing you are trying to make accessible.
Well now there's an idea! Raze all the mountains and use the material to fill all the valleys. The perfectly accessible future is within our grasp!
I checked after I left that comment, and larger infrastructure projects like The Big Dig in Boston run well into the tens of billions. The failed HSR project in CA ate up at least 6B. Can you imagine the environmental impact report for the Everest Ramp?!
I have to say that I had fun for the rest of the day trying to be really thorough about the challenges of the EWR, but I never thought I'd get a call out from our host!
A striking aspect of Cleverbeast's response is that time starts with advanced human society. Human evolution on Earth's environment is presumed to have been successful without the advantage of hearing, so important that at least most vertebrates have it. Is this not a deal-breaking omission? Psychologically, it is intriguing. I wonder how many people do diminish our animal nature.
The problem with the "not being deaf would be a handicap in a world where most people were deaf" argument is that the downside of being able to hear can be eliminated at the trivial cost of wearing hearing protection, as people at gun ranges commonly do, and the advantages when hearing was useful would remain. There is no comparable way to eliminate the disadvantage of being deaf. I take the fact that people defending the model fall back on such a weak example as evidence that the model is not defensible.
A number of the comments come down to "the model is a lie that can be used to persuade people to do things we want them to do," which does not strike me as a defense.
> the downside of being able to hear can be eliminated at the trivial cost of wearing hearing protection,
You sound like someone who has never actually tried that. Speaking as someone who actually *has* tried ear protectors, I can confirm that they are a decidedly imperfect mitigation.
Most obviously, ear protectors only reduce noise, they don't "eliminate" it. For example, I recently went to a restaurant where the music was way too loud and even wearing ear protectors was only enough to reduce it to a tolerable level. And even then, I would get blasted whenever I turned my head because a rigid object can't perfectly conform to your head under all circumstances and small gaps would open up around the side of the muffs. There really is nothing a hearing person can do to completely block out sound, and insisting so just makes you look foolish.
Furthermore, as you'll quickly discover if you ever try to actually wear ear protectors, they are uncomfortable and limiting. It's not easy to wear glasses with them, since glasses are supposed to go over your ears, so the glasses have to get pushed up to an awkward angle. You also can't lie down with them, because the ear protector is in the way between your head and the pillow, so either it gets pushed off or else your head can't make normal contact with the bed. And even without those limitations, they just get uncomfortable to wear after a while.
It's not like I'm even unusual in pointing this out. Scott independently wrote about the same issues elsewhere in this thread. And that's not surprising because these issues are obvious to anyone who actually has personal experience in the matter.
I don't normally say stuff like this, but comments like this make me wish that someone sets up noisy machinery outside your house.
I frequently wear hearing protection for work and various hobby pursuits (and earplugs to concerts), and I will attest that it interferes with situational awareness and verbal communication to a great degree, probably sufficient for David's thought experiment. I've also never had a problem with glasses, although that probably depends on the frames, the earmuffs, and the wearer's anatomy.
But perhaps a better example would be the opaque eyewear used by sighted persons in training to assist the blind.
I think you missed the point of this discussion. The point is that it is impossible to fully mitigate the downsides of hearing (loud noises, distractions) on the occasion that comes up, even in the world we live in, which was designed by the hearing for the hearing and has a lot of effort put into noise reduction. Nobody disputes that there are *advantages* to hearing, as that is too obvious to mention. The problem here is Friedman's bizarre and indefensible claim that there are never any *disadvantages* to hearing.
This is notably *not* true for sight, where you can obviously just close your eyes and wear a blindfold. (Or wear opaque contacts I guess, if you want to fancy and don't like having a blindfold on your face.) But nobody was talking about that in the first place here, so I'm not sure why you brought that up.
one point that I have not seen addressed _at all_ is the fact that everyone will be disabled/impaired/whatever at some point in their lives. When we are born, we are unable to walk and society accommodates us by carrying us around until things improve.
Live long enough, and you will regress to the point where you are
- unable to walk
- hard of hearing/completely deaf
- vision impaired/blind
- in chronic pain
... so the accommodations that we build _now_? There's a minority who uses them all the time, but they're for _everyone_.
Ignoring that fact seems extremely short-sighted to me.
No need to wait. Anyone could be disabled tomorrow. For several people I've known, that's exactly how it happened.
I'm not into barring entry to historical architecture or destroying people's livelihoods because not everyone can participate. But I've heard people militate against curb cuts, wheelchair ramps, and other accommodations, which struck me as short-sighted and not even self-interested.
If the courthouse proposes to be in charge of me, I'd damn well better be able to get into it.
That's a wonderful last sentence there.
“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.”
Are there any examples where that was actually a good idea?
The meta point seems to be "Is it allowable to lie (or if you want to shade over the issue) to exaggerate, omit, and mislead" for political purposes (ie what I claim to be a good cause). It seems that plenty of people seem to think so.
I don't know what we do about this. The flaws in this logic are so obvious.
1) We can no longer have any sort of useful conversation if I don't trust a word out of your mouth.
2) Historically this sort of behavior has not gone down well. Life is an iterated game, and sooner or later people catch on to what's being done. This happened to the Jesuits repeatedly (there is a reason they were expelled so often, even from Catholic countries).
We also see this today in America. America, since the late 50s has done more than any society on earth to try to improve itself. The only thing comparable is Britain's ending slavery and then spending years stopping the trade. And what has been the result of this ~70 years of self-improvement? Zero acknowledgement that it happened, zero gratitude, and an endless litany of complaints that America is the worst society in human history and that every little thing, no matter what the issue, is motivated not by personality conflicts, or mistakes, or genuine disagreements, but by some sort of -ism.
The consequence of this is exactly what any normal human who understands normal human emotions would predict. If I get exactly the same (hostile, non-empathic, furious) response no matter what I do, then fsck you, I'll do whatever is most convenient for me. That's the basic stance today of 50% of Americans, and that, more than anything else, is why Trump was popular.
Not his policies per se, but the fact that he is pretty much the only politician who is willing to say "America just is not as evil as you claim; and if you insist on this nonsense I don't feel I owe you an apology for anything".
In other words, is the poisoning of our politics worth it? Worth it to achieve something that would probably be achieved anyway (perhaps a few years later, but also perhaps a few years earlier)? Both ADA and Gay Marriage are probably the most "neutral" of current civil rights, the ones that generate the least fury and ongoing litigation – and they're both the ones that were achieved primarily by rational, honest persuasion, not by lies and demonization of opponents.
In evolutionary terms, we are best adapted to our environment with our full faculties. It shouldn’t be seen as any sort of capitulation to say that folks with a disability are at a disadvantage - it clearly makes the world more difficult to navigate. We should support all reasonable accommodations to help them enjoy full lives, but we don’t have to accede to the social theorist’s denialism.
Re. CleverBeast's claim that "There is nothing inherently better about being sighted versus being blind. There is nothing inherently better about walking versus using a wheelchair." :
Scott's answer was polite and reasonable. I feel, though, that we may be playing a sucker's game by responding politely and with an extended argument to claims that are obviously, objectively wrong. This has been happening often lately. We're told that black people can't be racist, that it's fair for cis women to have to compete with trans men in weightlifting, that printing money can't cause inflation (see Freddie deBoer's blog for a recent example), that it's racist not to capitalize Black but racist to capitalize white, that math is white, that every Black in America should receive $100 million in repayments, and that being able to hear and to walk isn't desirable.
I think this is just a tactic of the left to shift the Overton window, by centering debate around obviously insane ideas until only-slightly-insane ideas, like defunding the police or studying Marx in English Lit, seem almost reasonable. I don't know, but perhaps we should stop responding to utterly insane claims, or respond with laughter and derision rather than polite responses. Debating insane opinions seems only to legitimize them.
Getting people to nod along (including by mere engagement, as if it were a "reasonable" position worth discussing with "fairness and balance") with obvious nonsense, i.e. notions in screaming contradiction with physical reality -- whether in ancient Egypt ("pharaoh is a god") or today ("printing money doesn't cause inflation") is one of the ways the powerful exercise their power; and, more interestingly, ferret out those who are not playing along, not clapping with sufficient enthusiasm.
>I appreciate this explanation, but I hope I’m not being too hostile by summarizing it as “Yes, it may be false, but people are promoting the false thing for propaganda purposes.” How is that an extenuating factor?
I still don't really understand why you say it is false... I don't think there are any empirical predictions that the social model would make that the biopsychosocial model wouldn't also make, or the medical model for that matter.
Given that the models have no empirical disagreements, it seems wrong to say that one is true and the other is false. Rather, they just disagree on framings, semantics, and recommendations - precisely the stuff that propaganda is made of.
I'd suspect that we'd hear a lot more about the oppression of lefthanders in the past if there was a way to make money off lefthand identity politics. But handedness is not a protected category in American law and there are no checkboxes for handedness on government forms, so there are very few handedness discrimination attorneys feeding pre-cooked storylines to reporters.
As a left-handed person I resemble that remark.
Why are right- handed people so irritable?
> 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)
I think there are two meanings of "blindness is advantaged", and this mixes them up.
* Blindness can (perhaps) be advantageous in an absolute sense, in environments where all visual signals are meant to impair and misdirect. I know of no such environments.
* Evolutionary, the costs of having eyes may be higher than the fitness benefit they provide. In such environments, mutations which do not maintain costly eyes will win out.
Blind humans still pay most of the costs of having eyes. And crucially, all of them live in habitats where having working eyes would actually be beneficial. This is not surprising: like most species, humans are ultimately dependent on photosynthesis for their energy, and there are only a few habitats where the products of photosynthesis exist but sunlight does not (like the deep seas, which is not well suited for humans). Most vertebrae species, as well as many other animal species have eyes of some sort.
If the reason most blind people were blind was that their ancestors were living near deep sea hydrothermal vents for generations and lost their useless eyesight in evolution, then the claim that "both sightedness and blindness are sometimes advantageous (given the costs of eyes)" might be fair to make. But that is just not the world we live in.
It's dismaying to see you characterize "stating a position on one end of a spectrum when the truth is somewhere in the middle" as "deliberately lying for the sake of propaganda" when you yourself wrote a much better explanation of the relevant dynamics 10 years ago.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/
I read the article that @HalfRadish linked to, "The Bad Patient". The author tells a philosophical story about any medical diagnosis being a result of some negotiation and round-table discussion where poor, oppressed and disadvantaged patients struggle to "have their voices heard" while Doctors fail to honestly listen to his authentic pain and are dimissive and impatient.
Actual language:
"Illness is a matter of testimony. You tell somebody else — generally, somebody who has more degrees than you — how you feel, and they, ideally, have the ability to recognize in your testimony something you lack the expertise to identify....Illness is also a social negotiation between what you have to say and what your doctor is willing to hear — and the diagnosis that results from this dynamic isn’t exactly your illness, but a mutually agreed-upon fiction."
This story is grounded and informed by his year of occasional, severe episodes of gastrointentinal pain and distress. He went to a lot of different MedPros, tests found nothing, he was blaming himself for a psychosomatic illness and musing on the illness fetishists of the Internet and the Chronic Everything shut-ins.
About 3/4 of the way through the piece, another severe attack sends him to the ER, and he learns:
*****HE HAD F***ING GALLSTONES!******
GALLSTONES!!! But now, after a year of nobodody thinking of this well-known possibility, he has necrotizing damage to his pancreas, might not survive (as of the writing of the article.)
People, how in the name of God and science did 5+ doctors over a year not find this? How is it that highly educated, wealthy adult Americans in 2023 get so caught up in stories of "testimony" and "advocacy" and self-actualization that EXTREMELY BASIC MEDICAL SH!T is mysterious, never even occurs to you? Everybody is so introverted and narcissistic that the physical world is just a Plato's Cave? It's no wonder that ideas like "non-binary gender" and homeopathic medecine are widespread.
(What is the point of medical licensing ? I feel like a good old-school auto mechanic could have caught this if they were motivated, but somehow the "check engine" light and scanning OBD codes made them say, "Golly! It's a mystery!")
Something is very broken in medicine when stuff a GP in 1956 could have found and fixed for $100 tops gets imagined as a spectum of faddish disorders, tabled, and then the patient almost dies.
BR
I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere, so I'll point it here:
If we observe that the issues of a fact itself are conflated with the issues of that fact being in a small minority, say 1%-99%, then more interesting than imagining a counterfactual world where the minority status is reversed, 99%-1%, is to imagine a counterfactual world where the minority status is abolished, 50%-50%.
If you're refuting a motte and bailey argument, you need to be specific what you're denouncing and not get sucked into debating both at once. Because if you shout down the thing they're saying as a whole, they'll act as if you're arguing against the motte and draw in everyone else.
Sometimes that's hard to maintain if it's really obvious that they really want the bailey and the defensible motte is only there for cover. People arguing for the existence of God with the ontological argument are usually people who ARE really invested in the existence of God, and there's not a lot of people who innocently found a simple one-step logical inference to be profound and are genuinely shocked that some people pretending to be on their side replace "A" with "God" at the end.
"social model of disability" accidentally forms a motte and bailey between the extreme position "EVERY bad condition is bad because of how society treats people, chronic pain sufferers aren't relevant" and the defensible position "MANY conditions are bad because of how society treats people, it's worth pushing to improve this" . (I think it's a motte and bailey by accident, not on purpose, because the people pushing the extreme version of the argument seem to more be activists who want societal discrimination to be recognised, the people who want to use deaf people as cover to make people with chronic pain suffer I don't think have the lingo sufficiently yet.)
But I think it has the same effect as a motte and bailey. If you make an entirely legitimate argument against the extreme position, then whether or not we agree how many people believe it in reality, I understand we may differ in this and I don't have a very strongly held concept, if you used "social model" to mean only the extreme position (even with high-profile examples of people using it that way), and entitle it "SOCIAL MODEL IS BAD SOCIAL MODEL IS BAD" and you think but don't say "SOCIAL MODEL ALWAYS MEANS THE EXTREME VERSION THE MODERATE POSITION DOESN'T EXIST", then you will start a big pointless fight over terminological differences with people like me who believe the moderate version and who use "social model of disability" to mean the moderate version.
Interesting point about left handed acceptance.
OTOH
"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."
This is always a spectrum.
Plenty of people with sufficiently rare problems do get personalised accommodations (e.g. a full time carer) because that's cheaper than making everywhere possible to navigate by themselves.
But lots of universal accommodations are much more efficient. Do we say "why don't we pay everyone a water allowance, rather than having the government regulate or run water companies?" Well, we might, but even if it had some advantages we'd usually be wrong because almost everyone needs tap water and there are massive massive efficiencies of scale by having a specific organisation piping water to everyone rather than having everyone make separate arrangements with different water-carrying-taxis or whatever.
There's some sort of cut-off of "how common". Not 100% of people need ramps. But a lot of people benefit from them, most people under 2, many people over 60, everyone with pushchairs or carts, everyone who's temporarily impaired, not only people who can ONLY use them. Same for "plain text versions of things" or "ingredients lists" etc. The "average able bodied adult" might be barely a majority, if you design public spaces for the modal person, not the mean person.
Given the amount of coordinated effort necessary to get people to agree to any universal accommodations, I suspect that the ones that there are very much worth the investment in the long term and more would probably be better.
There's probably *some* errors in both directions for things which are mandated but shouldn't be as well as things that aren't mandated but should be, but I think those are probably more the exceptions, although there's probably some I've forgotten.
"if it would be easy to give disabled people a direct grant" I think is true in some cases, where accidentally unhelpful or non-existent accommodations are offered.
But I'm also leery of it because it's the sort of thing a lot of people would think about when they mainly just want less accommodations, and don't particular care whether these grants would exist or not.
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