However, I endorse also explicit policy of 'I observe that you habitually lie all the time, and that the strategy is partially motivated by consuming my resources into focusing on what you want me to focus on, instead of focusing on what I want to focus on, so that instead of you have a 5% advantage in lying, I end up with a -100% advantage in focus. Therefore, I will somehow check your lies 10% of the time, and demand that when I catch you in a 5% lie people treat you as if you lied by 50%'
I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that one of the advantages of lying in this sense is that whoever is correcting the lies has to spend all their time and energy focusing on the topic of the liar and probably making some concessions?
In that case I completely agree. You have to pick your battles, and you can't let the dishonest person dictate the conversation and play offense 100% of the time.
I think so. And so doing spot checks and finding lies means that the full extent of lying has to be extrapolated by the checker, rather than exhaustively checking every claim.
(Although, I've also seen people make all sorts of deniable claims, which, when denied in detail, are responded to by calling a "Gish Gallop!" and concluding that their claims are valid. Or making one or two claims that rely on a mass of deniable claims and calling Gish on a similar response. I've got this working hypothesis that any of the popular argument response devices making the rounds like Gish Gallops, sealioning, etc. have important caveats, but I don't have a handy term for it yet.)
Also known as Brandolini's Law or the Bullshit Asymmetry principle. "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
>partially motivated by consuming my resources into focusing on what you want me to focus on
Don't think this is true though. Think like the vast majority of the effect is just that it's very psychologically tempting to exaggerate claims in favor of a conclusion you want.
I think that sometimes things are psychologically tempting because evolution "noticed" that they caused problems for your opponents and reinforced the behaviors. And so even if the person isn't consciously using the evil strategy, or even aware of its evilness, the fact that it is an effective evil strategy is still (indirectly) the causal reason that they are doing it.
(For example, I have a suspicion that this is the reason most people are much more willing to deceive with technically-true statements than to tell outright lies. It's harder to trash someone's reputation for a technically-true deception than for an outright lie (harder to prove bad intent). Most deceivers aren't consciously thinking about this, but evolution "noticed" that technically-true deceptions are statistically safer than outright lies, and programmed humans to favor them.)
The reason I mention this is: When someone is doing a bad thing on purpose, it's important to calibrate the punishment to be harsh enough that continuing to do the bad thing (and just accepting the punishment) is a bad strategy. Like, if someone can earn $100 every time they wreck your lawn, then fining them $50 won't make them stop, you need to fine them at least $100.
We often waive this requirement if we're pretty sure the bad thing was unintended, because fining someone the maximum value that an evil genius could have extracted from their crime can be pretty harsh when someone just makes an honest mistake.
But if evolution programmed people to make the "honest mistake" specifically BECAUSE they are benefiting from it, then we need people to put in the effort to notice this and fight against it instead of just doing what comes naturally, and it's not fair to the people who actually put in that effort to allow the lazy people who don't put in the effort to profit from their laziness. You need to apply the harsher punishment that makes it not worth doing, even for people who "didn't notice" that they were "inadvertently" doing an evil thing.
I am not sure if it is actually advantageous to make your opponents focus on your lies instead of the 95% that is actually true. If you want to convince them, this is a terrible strategy. I sometimes get the impression that somewhere along the way people forgot that debates are actually about convincing a majority and not about preaching to the choir or getting a "win" or "owning" the other side.
I understand what you're saying, but I think the conversation is about something else.
That would apply if someone was endorsing lying by 100%, X% of the time.
But what's actually going on, is 'in a war, A and B each commit 10 war crimes, but A claims B committed 11 war crimes. By doing so, the conversation tilts to whether B committed 10 or 11 war crimes, and the 10 war crimes of A get relatively little attention.'
I guess it depends on what your goal is here. If your goal is to make progress in the debate about war crimes then this is still a terrible strategy, because then you are only discussing if it were 10 or 11 and not about the fact that your opponent was committing war crimes.
Picture this as happening not in a truth-seeking debate but in a political argument among non-nerds. The goal isn't to progress the debate about war crimes, it's to win the debate about war crimes by winning the support of as many onlookers as possible. So if you can make more of the talking be about the other person's war crimes and less about your own, that's an effective strategy.
This is kinda my point, that you focus so much on "winning" that you lose track of what should be the goal, which is making progress. I guess, this is a problem with bad incentive structures, where the strategy that makes you successful is not the same strategy as the one that makes you get things done.
I agree that I prefer to take part in truth-seeking rather than point-scoring debates when given the chance. But the world is large and we live in a society that contains many people, most of whom just follow normal human instincts around discussion and so seek status and stuff. It's worthwhile to think about what ways are best to interact with them because they are so numerous that such interactions are practically unavoidable.
I think this strategy can be advantageous when you are trying to convince a third party -- an audience that is separate from your opponent. In that case, distracting your opponent and forcing them to expend time and effort on pedantic-seeming rebuttals of obscure points can be an effective way to 'win' the debate in the sense of appearing more capable and competent in the eyes of the audience.
I don't think this is true. I think the third party will also be paying way more attention to the discussion around you lying than to the actual point you are making.
After the Brexit debate it was widely considered that Leave's masterstroke was to falsely inflate the money paid to the EU. The Remain campaign got stuck saying "We don't send £350m a week to the EU, it's only £290m gross, £190m net", and a lot of their audience thought "but I don't want to send £200m ish/wk to the EU.
I think this is true but not for the reason you are saying. Let's say Adam and Bob are debating. Adam repeatedly makes claims, Bob responds by claiming they are false or exaggerated. Bob probably can't refute everything Adam says and doesn't get to make any sort of positive case of his own.
It's like a football game where one team is playing offense on every possession. Even if the defense stops them 80% of the time the offense will still score some points and the other team never even gets the ball.
That's a very good way of putting it. I was trying to say something along those lines, but I failed to explicitly state that fact-checking a claim is almost always more time-consuming than making that claim in the first place. Therefore, a debate format in which both sides have approximately equal time to present their case generally favours a strategy of 'make lots of claims, and rarely bother explicitly refuting the other side's claims.'
Of course, most internet argument aren't formal debates with predetermined rules, but the same principle applies.
"Hey, you claimed that PersonUnderDiscussion committed 10 murders and 7 kidnappings and he *really* only committed 5 murders and 3 kidnappings."
The debate/discussion now has spent 2x as much time focusing on the murders and kidnappings as it would have. And 5 murders still sounds pretty bad so I expect that the takeaway from "random internet lurker" is that the bad thing really happened. That's what everyone is talking about, right?
The details are less important than the direction.
And a number of people won't even remember the correction ... just that lots of people were murdered. Maybe even 20.
Sometimes I make a blatantly weak point and place it front and center with my better points taking a second seat. The opposing counsel often takes the bait and spend their time refuting the weak point, because it's easy and makes them look good in front of their client, while providing little rebuttal against my stronger points.
The judges don't care about overkill when you refuted one point, especially if it's blatantly weak, but that you thoroughly refute them all.
There is also the need to pick out deliberate lies from rhetorical exaggeration or heat of the moment inaccuracies. Goodness knows I've used language that has been "well actually" checked, but I didn't mean it as a lie - I was mad as hell and just doing the equivalent of waving my arms around and ranting.
I should be, and generally am, glad to be corrected. But sometimes the corrections are "well you said X did three bad things but in fact X only did two bad things (if you could even call them bad), so in fact you are totally incorrect about X doing bad thing and should admit you are only booing your outgroup" which is even more aggravating (at least to me).
I remember from my business law class that the relevant legal concept in the context of advertising under American law is "puffery", i.e. claims that are made in such a way that reasonable listeners should be able to clearly understand that they're intended to be figurative or hyperbolic rather than literally true.
For example, if you think that Exxon gasoline will literally put a tiger in your gas tank, or if you are disappointed that you are unable to fly after partaking of Red Bull energy drink, then that's a "you" problem, and if you try to sue for false advertising, the judge will dismiss the case and rebuke your lawyer for filing based on such a frivolous claim.
More ambiguous cases in the context of political arguments and the like can still be worth correcting. For example, I heard many people claim c. 2006-2008 that Dick Cheney was the most dangerous VP in American history. If meant as hyperbole, I can see where people are coming from even though I disagree with it, but at least some people probably meant it literally, and those people needed to be reminded of the existence of Burr, Calhoun, Tyler, Breckenridge, and Agnew.
Not that this was the main point of your comment, but since I like talking about American presidential history: Burr and Calhoun I would accept (they had treasonous ideas); Breckenridge maybe (since he would go on to join the Confederacy); Tyler and Agnew I don't know about. In particular, I'm not aware that Agnew was especially powerful or threatening -- maybe people found him repugnant and his cultish fan club was unsettling, but I think people's point about Cheney being dangerous was that he was a particularly *overpowered* VP who held a heavy sway over Bush Jr. Coming up with a superlative like that for Cheney doesn't seem so out of place if it wouldn't apply to Agnew or anyone else from the previous 140 years of VPs.
Tyler also went on to join the Confederacy. Agnew I included partly because of his cultish fan club and partly because he seems to have been unusually corrupt relative to the time period: he resigned the Vice Presidency in 1973 as part of a deal to avoid criminal prosecution for bribery. But I'll concede that Agnew was a significant step down in danger from the likes of Burr and Calhoun and a less clear-cut example of a VP who was more dangerous than Cheney.
I also considered adding Andrew Johnson to the list, based on his undermining of Reconstruction after he ascended to the Presidency, and also based on his conduct during the crisis over the Tenure of Office Act. In particular, he tried to make some fishy military preparations during the crisis that Sherman suspected at the time were preparations for a military coup, but the factual waters there are muddy enough that I decided against counting that.
I'll grant your points about Cheney arguably having an unusually dangerous concentration of de facto power for a VP, which is part of why I think the "most dangerous VP" label is defensible in meant hyperbolically. Another factor cutting in favor of Cheney being more dangerous is that he is the only one beside Burr to have shot someone during his term as VP.
Interesting about Andrew Johnson; I didn't know all of the facts that you described. (I did know that he showed up drunk at the 1865 inauguration, didn't distinguish himself in his very short time as VP, and proved himself somewhat of a narcissistic psychopath as a president who halted civil rights as much as he could.)
I had a feeling someone was probably going to mention that Tyler joined the Confederacy, but I feel like this hardly counts for much when evaluating him as a VP (a position he also held for an extremely short time), as this was around two decades earlier; the nation wasn't on the brink of crisis like it was during Breckenridge's term; and I don't know of Tyler expressing any treasonous ideas in the earlier 1840's. I don't know of anything in particular that distinguished Tyler as a dangerous VP during his short time as VP or a dangerous president during the rest of those four years. The way he wound up handling the secession crisis the decade after next (which by the way was followed by leading some last-ditch efforts to get the North and South to reconcile) feels to me like a mostly separate issue.
My recall from reading about Tyler says as follows:
* He established the precedent for how a VP should be treated when assuming the Presidency office through normal secession. His party (the Whigs) assumed any such VP should be considered an "acting P", and their decisions need not be treated as authoritatively. (Specifically, Tyler was expected to defer to the Whigs' co-founder and then-Speaker, Henry Clay.) Tyler firmly argued, no, the VP is now the P, as if he'd been elected by the People (which, after all, he was).
* He antagonized Clay and the other Whigs enough to get ejected from the party before his first year was even finished.
* He wanted Texas annexed, badly enough to run for re-election with that as a campaign promise, and badly enough that when he learned it was also promised by the Democrat James Polk, Tyler dropped out of the race.
These political positions strike me as the opposite of dangerous, in terms of the survival of the Union, and at worst dangerous to the survival of the Whig Party.
Reading his interaction with the Confederacy just now, I see he led a Peace Conference, and then opposed its ultimate resolution, on grounds that it did not adequately address concerns held by slave states. He then voted for secession. That certainly seems dangerous on its face, but I also get the impression that he may have seen an amicable divorce as less dangerous than insisting the South stay in the Union, fomenting riots, Bloody Kansas, etc. I can't tell from my cursory reading.
I had to laugh at the Harris campaign. Dems back then: Cheney is bloodthirsty profiteering war criminal who made Bush his puppet to prosecute the unnecessary wars! Dems now: hey, guys, you like Dick Cheney don't you? well he likes our girl! so you'll vote for her, right? now that one of the few Decent Republicans has endorsed her!
I know campaigns are all about "what is the biggest wad of bullshit we can force the public to choke down?" but that one was really special.
To be fair, there's an argument to be made that Biden (historically) has had more in common with Bush-era Republicans than either of them have with either modern progressives or MAGA Republicans, so it's not entirely unreasonable to try the same argument with their VPs.
> if you are disappointed that you are unable to fly after partaking of Red Bull energy drink, then that's a "you" problem
Or if there is "no sugar" written on an obviously sweet soda, I guess.
(In EU it is legally required to disclose the numbers, so you can see stuff with big letters "no sugar" on the front side, and tiny letters "sugar: 5%" on the back side. That's because the tiny letters are regulated, but the rest of the packaging is not.)
I'm pretty sure that would be actionable false advertising in the US. The closest you can reliably get away with is calling something "sugar free" when it has less than 0.5g of sugar per serving (you are allowed to round down) or saying "no added sugar" when it's made of something that has plenty of sugar without adding any more.
Well, one thing that Cheney had going compared to Burr, Calhoun, Tyler and Breckenridge was being one step away from nuclear weapons. Also applies to Agnew, of course.
For what it's worth, Mehti Hasan (a journalist who does in-person interviews) says the strategy for dealing with Gish gallops is to keep hammering on the weakest claim. Hobble that horse! Don't let it gallop!
If I find a party to be intentionally lying in the described manner, said party loses credibility to me, so I then discount whatever that party says because it isn't worth fact-checking. This doesn't include things like hyperbole, such as Trump-speak, but does include retroactive justifications like claiming to be Jew-ish.
Integrity means something. If you have lost your integrity, I no longer care what your arguments are, so you had better convince someone more credible to fact-check you and then have that person make your case.
The strategy for dealing with gish gallops in their original habitat - the online debate - was, of course, creating the term "gish gallop" to throw at any perceived gallopers to take control of the debate.
You should stop *crediting* them. You shouldn't necessarily stop *paying attention* because their lies could be harmful if ignored, e.g. if they're falsely telling other people that you're a criminal.
Almost all lies are harmful to the community if some members of the community believe them. Even if the *content* of the lies is utterly inconsequential, people use heuristics like "this person provided a lot of information that didn't *appear* false" to decide who to trust and value, which distorts the social fabric of the community.
There's another form of this as well, that I have some sympathy for even though it's also very scheming.
Let's say politician A claims that illegal immigrants commit twice as many crimes as citizens. Then politicican B responds that this is a total lie, and actually illegal immigrants are just as law-abiding as everyone else, and this shows that politician A's deportation proposals are grounded in baseless fearmongering. Well, politician A has now tricked politician B into admitting he has no problem with illegal immigration on its own, and doesn't even see it as incompatible with being "law-abiding"!
And that was A's plan all along. Because if A had instead said "I think politician B has no real problem with illegal immigration" then B would have responded with something like "of course I am against illegal immigration, of course something needs to be done about it, but A's proposed deportations won't be an effective solution etc".
The reason I'm sympathetic is that B was being dishonest first, though in a less obvious way, by obscuring his real values. And really, the voters absolutely deserve to know what B's real feelings about illegal immigration are. But the only way to get him to implicitly reveal them was to bait him by telling a lie. And while A can be justly angry at B's dishonesty and want to expose it, doing so with his own scheming dishonesty just escalates the cycle, causing B to escalate further, and I don't know what the solution is.
I used a right-wing example, but I'm sure there are plenty of left-wing ones as well, I just couldn't think of one as clear-cut as that.
I would have a lot more sympathy for politician A in your example if, after accomplishing their goal, they admitted that they lied, apologized for the temporary deception, and made a strong effort to ensure that no one was persistently deceived. If they're not willing to do that, then I don't see them as being on the side of truth, even if their stratagem ends up revealing an important truth.
(Also, in the event that the stratagem fails and B doesn't reveal what A wants them to reveal, A still needs to do all of that same stuff, in a reasonably short time frame. Ideally, they should have some sort of precommitment mechanism that forces their deception to be revealed on a specific date and that they don't have the ability to stop after they've started this plan, so observers can verify that they definitely always planned to come clean regardless of how things played out.)
Though I'm not entirely comfortable with the premise that voters need or deserve to know a politician's true feelings. There's a magistrate character in a book I've read who just really desperately wants people to like and respect him, and so he governs really well and does all sorts of great things for his people just so that they'll like him. If someone "cunningly exposed" the fact that the magistrate is doing all these genuinely-awesome things for purely selfish reasons rather than out of altruism, I don't think that would help anyone (except the magistrate's opponents).
If someone says they're going to do X, and then they actually do X, I kinda feel like that should be enough, and we don't "deserve to know" whether they genuinely believed in the cause or did it just because voters wanted them to do it.
Though I also do have some sympathy for the fact that some actions are difficult to verify, and knowing someone's incentives is useful for being able to trust that they're really doing the thing when you can't verify it directly. Maybe I need to think about this some more.
Also, I...kinda feel like your characterization of politician B's remarks is pretty at odds with your description of what they said. Obviously you made up both parts, so your example could have made politician B as bad as you want them to be. But your example seems to equate "focusing (for the moment) entirely on A's lie, rather than talking about other stuff" with "admitting that B has no real problem with immigration", and also equate "claiming illegal immigrants are EQUALLY law-abiding as average citizens" with "claiming that illegal immigration isn't a crime", both of which strike me as highly malicious interpretations of relatively reasonable statements. A major problem with tricking people into admitting things is that clear communication is actually fairly hard, misunderstandings are somewhat common even when everyone is trying to be clear and forthright, and the probability of misunderstanding goes way up when people start trying to trick each other.
One reason why I sometimes correct small lies (or errors) in public spaces is because, distributed across the entire audience, it's often not that much work per person, per lie, on average. So if you and 9 other people each check the lies 10% of the time, you don't really need the 5% to 50% magnification. I realize this is a very simplistic model, but in general I do think the shared load in public spaces can offset things quite a lot, in practice. Like, this is part of what makes community notes on Twitter good.
Because the effort required to research a lie is much larger than the effort required to propagate a lie the reputational damage for propagating lies should be very high.
To add my own statement though, I don't think this system can really work without a respected neutral arbiter.
“okay, but everyone knows that something vaguely similar is true”
Or, in a particularly infuriating variation: "OK, so this particular example isn't true, but the fact that people found it perfectly believable kind of proves my point, doesn't it?"
Yes this is infuriating! Perhaps people believe the example because there are tons of lies on the subject that many people believe, not because there are a lot of true examples.
Haha that was a good one! I think the redheaded guy deserves credit for conceding that the article is false when the other guy presents evidence to this effect. Of course, he still insisted his overall worldview was correct but an instant 180 might be too much to ask.
I come back to this comic several times a month. "Poe's law" is a concept which has been abused into meaninglessness by both progressives and conservatives.
But… isn't the example of the imaginary too-woke-to-be-real dialogue actually kind of an example of this? In an article about the dangers of "heightening the truth for rhetorical effect" that's a pretty glaring issue
Question is can you maintain a consistent policy of doing it equally for all sides. Including ones you support. Otherwise you have the same asymmetry problem.
I think the criticism of "well actually" is from a suspicion that it's being done unevenly. (At least in the original less stupid pre-memeification version). If you fact check Alice but not Bob you are advantaging Bob
Every online space I'm in today is full of people falsely claiming that rioters have burned down half of downtown LA and therefore it's totally reasonable to send in the military against civilian protestors.
But somehow the most salient and obvious example is still woke people talking about racism.
If you have an allegiance to aside -or a trauma response against a side - then who you do and don't correct can lead to almost as much distortion of the truth as who you do or don't lie for.
The criticism of the 'well aksually' guy isn't *just* because being pedantic is annoying, it's because that guy often has ideology-based ulterior motives (whether those motives are conscious or habitual), and everyone can tell that and knows that applying isolated demands for rigor is not a neutral or friendly act.
This looks a lot like you doing the thing that is named in the post.
"Every" online space you are in, including this one, is "full of" (presumably this means, like, >25% of the occupants?) people claiming that rioters have burned "half of downtown LA"?
can you give an example of even a single person claiming that, in so many words? I estimate maybe 50% that there is even a single example; <1% that your full statement is literally true.
I wish darwin had been more precise here, as indeed this type of 'directionally correct conversational exaggeration' is part of what this post is about.
That being said, the most recent (public) Open Thread is dominated by a thread on the LA riots, including arguments over the level and extent of violence. (To be fair, also a veganism thread, always a classic!)
Spent a bunch of time failing to come up with something better to say, but I'd just pare darwin's statement you're objecting to down to "This space has right wing partisans who make exaggerated claims."
This is sort of a self-solving problem so long as everyone cares about the truth, though. It's not like we can't divide the responsibilities; I'll go after the people who say "CICO doesn't work!" and you can go after the people who say "CICO is all you need!" and we'll meet in the middle utopia area.
"You can't correct ANY lie unless you correct EVERY lie!" seems like a really weird angle to take on this. If lies are bad, eliminating a lie from play is good. Everyone is going to prioritize lies they particularly dislike, sure. If one side doesn't do the work to correct lies of the other side, that's going to lead to a disproportionate/unbalanced situation, probably.
The alternative seems to be "Nobody corrects lies ever as we await the perfect messiah of honesty who corrects every lie on both sides exactly evenly", which is never going to happen. And "Our norm is to let the perfect be the enemy of the good here, leaving every lie alone forever" seems like the kind of maximum-bad outcome you'd normally have to design on purpose.
This is unrelated, but where can I find a good well-researched text on why CICO works (that address all the studies on very large proportion of people being unable to lose weight in the long term through dietary changes)?
> This is unrelated, but where can I find a good well-researched text on why CICO works (that address all the studies on very large proportion of people being unable to lose weight in the long term through dietary changes)?
People can't lose weight in the long run because they don't adhere to their diets, it's a matter of "long term execution" failing, not a matter of "eating fewer calories doesn't lead to weight gain."
I have a couple of posts that might be relevant to you, that point to a number of actual studies if you want to dig deeper.
The maximally pessimistic obesity and weight loss argument:
A review of Dan Lieberman's Exercised, where he goes over the paleoanthropological reasons why we get fat and require movement, and other great apes don't:
Any GLP-1 study that shows longterm changes in patient weight does this.
It's tricky, though, which is why I referenced liars on both sides. GLP-1 drugs make it easier to adhere to CICO; adhering to CICO makes you lose weight. Some people say CICO doesn't work full stop because of hormones or metabolic adaptation - the GLP experience shows this to be at least mostly false.
Others say CICO just works, but ignore that it's really, really hard to do CICO and the vast majority of people who try it fail. Then the anti's come in and point that out, refusing to acknowledge that ALL diets fail when they are "advice from doctors to do diet X as given to people accustomed to a lifestyle that makes that advice necessary", and so on.
Anything that answers to "inpatient food controlled study" or "starvation study" or "GLP-1 study" proves out CICO as sound in a dry, math and figures way. The history of the last hundred years proves it doesn't work as a medical intervention, because it's hard to eat less and nobody does it (absent GLP-1 or being locked in a sweat-box).
True, but then the other side can point this out and/or fact check Alice/me, so overall we're all receiving some healthy skepticism. Which is better than if noone does (not that you've argued otherwise). I do agree that an uneven approach is an issue, however.
This assumes symmetry in numbers, debating ability, and social status between the two sides. In practice (within a given setting) one side might correct the other side a lot more than the reverse.
Good points, I agree. Still, I think it's better for an asymmetrical amount of critique to flow than none.
Also, I'd like to point out that your comment shifts the focus from evenhandedness of an individual to the balance of critique between two sides. Related, but not the same.
I agree completely that an asymmetrical amount of critique is better than none. As for shifting the focus to the balance between two sides, I was referring to the beginning of your post when you said "the other side can point this out and fact check Alice/me". Reading back it looks like you meant your counterpart in the discussion, not the other side overall, so I might have misunderstood.
I don't think equal representation is needed here, or helpful. If the Green Team lies about math and the Orange Team lies about trees, a forester will call out only the Orange Team's lies.
I don't think you have to do it perfectly equally for all sides, as long as you're willing to listen and take it seriously when somebody else does it for sides you support. With the caveat that you need to have enough exposure to honest, well-informed others that you'll actually see such pushback when its available.
Of course you are going to make mistakes and fall for lies and bad interpretations sometimes. So is everyone. But different people are going to fall for different lies and bad interpretations, and the collective bullshit detector is much stronger than the individual one.
It's most important to run checks on your own side's rhetoric. But those checks need not consist of you trying to evaluate it all yourself. And, indeed, they probably should not. It's much easier harder to be sufficiently rigorous and detail-oriented when you are trying to critique positions you're strongly biased towards agreeing with. I expect that finding trustworthy people who aren't "on your side" and seeing what *they* have to say about it will turn up issues that you could never find by yourself.
"Question is can you maintain a consistent policy of doing it equally for all sides. Including ones you support. Otherwise you have the same asymmetry problem. "
Interestingly, I find this sort of mis-representation more annoying when it is from "my side".
I have come to the belief that most people don't actually care if what they say (online, but also for some contexts in real life ... ) is true or not. If the claim advances their position then they are mostly fine with it. No, I am not happy about believing this :-(
I like to think that *I* want to know what is really going on (and how things actually work) so I treat this distributing wrong information (on purpose or because you don't care) as a form of information warfare directed against me. I get more upset when I think that folks on "my team" are doing this to me than I do when I think that folks on the "other team" are doing so.
Yes! This is disturbingly true in my experience. Many people make statements without caring at all whether they're true, and respond with confused annoyance when someone calls them out on incorrectness, as if it were irrelevant. Horrifyingly, my child's primary school teacher works like this. "Miss, the text says 'features' there, not 'feathers'..." "Oh be quiet, it doesn't matter!"
Thankfully there are several communities that actively encourage people to be truthful not just in that community context but everywhere in life. I think of rationalists, Christian discipleship, and certain what I guess you could call self-improvement organisations. The truth may be unfashionable in some places, but not everywhere.
I entirely agree that there are people who apply scrutiny unevenly, and that this causes issues.
However, claiming that this is the true motivation for the people who criticize "well actually" seems like a rationalization. On average, I don't think those critics are being any more even-handed than the people they criticize, and you should apply the same skepticism to them that you applied to the original group.
At least fact-checking requires you to find an actual weakness in the thing you are criticizing, while objecting "but do you apply your scrutiny evenly?" is a fully-general counter-argument to any correction you don't like (unless you can point out a specific, concrete instance of them being uneven). That makes fact-checking slightly harder to abuse.
This was updated to "The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma" in the 2009 TMBG song "Why Does the Sun Really Shine?" after fact-checking their previous song "Why Does the Sun Shine?"
This comment made me weirdly happy. Everyone likes to dunk on Babbage's "sufficiently accurate for poetry" comment but good poets can translate poems between languages, which has a much broader set of constraints, and they're celebrated. I certainly don't mind gas/plasma errors, but I can't help but smile when they dial things in.
I assumed that was why Scott followed it up with the 'technically some sort of plasma' line. Either way, science is real, and here it comes correcting its own 5% lies one by one.
Plasma physicists get in fights about whether it's wrong to say that plasmas are just ionized gasses. I, as a former plasma physicist, think it's basically fine, and "the sun is a mass of incandescent gas" is basically correct. But there are non-crazy objections from informed people.
Not a plasma physicist (and only a BS in Physics overall), but I would also argue "the sun is a mass of incandescent gas" is fine. But mostly for linguistic reasons rather than physical ones.
In short: laypeople's usage of the word "gas" pretty clearly covers plasma as well. It's fine for physicists to have a specialized usage that excludes plasma in the same way its fine for them to have a specialized usage of the word "work" which excludes which excludes picking up a box and setting it back down again. But outside of the context of a technical physics discussion, it seems silly to insist that people use the stricter formal definition.
> laypeople's usage of the word "gas" pretty clearly covers plasma
I'm not sure that's true, and in fact, I'd argue precisely the opposite: even though it might technically be true that plasmas are a kind of gas, they're distinct enough from what laypeople imagine when they speak of a "gas" that it'd be misleading to use the term for them.
It's possible that I'm not modelling laypeople very well here, but I would assume that basically any mass of stuff that isn't obviously a liquid or a solid would simply go into the "gas" bucket by default. So, for example, many aerosols would go into the "gas" bucket simply because they don't behave like liquids or solids, but hang around in the air in amorphous blobs and spread out and move with the air currents and all that good stuff. And so too with plasmas, modulo some fairly intuitive stuff about how hot things behave.
Now, I'd say anyone who *has* a distinct, well-formed and consistently-applied mental bucket for "plasma" is going to easily be able to recognize a plasma as a plasma.[1] But I don't really expect that's a very large fraction of laypeople.
[1] Though even then I'd expect that "is it a special type of gas or its own thing" is a question of subtle enough physics that many such people wouldn't say it *isn't* a gas.
I don't have any particular reason to believe I'm modeling laypeople any better than you, but I think you're wrong about plasmas. I completely agree with you that aerosols fit very well in the "gas" bucket, but since you're calling them "fairly intuitive," I think plasmas are weirder than you think. The long-range electromagnetic interactions between the particles along with magnetohydrodynamic effects (relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1851/) allows from strange phenomena very different from any in a typical gas.
Also, classically, fire was considered distinct from air/wind, so without quibbling about phase transitions, that's perhaps a reason to think people are naturally inclined to think of plasmas/ionized gases as as meaningfully distinct a category apart from regular gases as liquids/condensed gases.
Hmm, I'm not sure I fully agree. In the past, I saw some people commenting that "the babies were shot, and not burned" (or the opposite I don't remember) as a correction and it was true, but I couldn't help feeling that in the context of the internet forums I've seen this on, the fact that their comment didn't contain anything else (except maybe some admonishments of the "other" side) strongly made me think that their internal feelings about it are not appropriate in some sense to the events (in terms of how people ought to feel about them).
So as a synthesis I would say that You are always allowed to correct incorrect information, but people are also allowed to infer things about you that are not explicit and react to that (just like in any kind of social interaction), but I don't think they should react negatively purely because you corrected some incorrect information.
I'm not entirely sure I follow your example, but it seems that "ought to feel" is a very risky concept upon which to make any determination of where correction of falsehood is warranted. In fact, it seems to me to be precisely the sort of motivation to lie whose lies Scott is arguing should be countered.
I think it's very natural to infer feelings from utterances for other people in most social interactions and internally judge those feelings, but to be clear, I'm not saying you should not correct falsehoods, instead I say that in some cases if you do, you should take some care to convey appropriate sentiments along with your correction.
Natural doesn't mean correct. Racism is very natural too, as is tribalism. Expecting people to convey the "appropriate" sentiments when they correct a falsehood is just asking for virtue signaling that appeals to base tribalistic instincts and get in the way of clear thinking.
This expectation you put forth is exactly why almost every facet of discourse in today's society has descended into a never ending vortex of virtue signaling and struggle sessions where every argument immediately descends into a meta level debate about who can be inferred to have the "appropriate" beliefs and who can be inferred to be an unvirtuous piece of shit with the bad thoughts (c.f. everything is a "dog whistle"), rather than any facts of the matter.
It's true that natural doesn't mean correct, but I strongly think that inferring feelings from utterances and judging those is both correct and universal for humans and not something that can even be changed.
You believe that the current bad state of public discourse is an inevitable conclusion of inferring feelings, but I don't think it is or that you have show that it is.
You put forth that inferring feelings should be part of the game and validated just as much as analysing facts.
We see from public discourse that when people adopt this model, all discourse tends towards maximizing inferring feelings and minimizing analysis of facts, because proving facts is hard whereas inferring feelings is easy and unfalsifiable (your protests are only further proof that you secretly harbour the feelings I infer for you, which incidentally always show that I'm correct and good and you're wrong and bad).
If this is how you believe the game should be correctly played, then perhaps the current state of affairs, where all debates are games of maximizing feeling inference rather than truth seeking, is the world you deserve.
EDIT: and to be clear I'm not even saying you're wrong that this is how people naturally play the game, in fact the state of public discourse shows that you are right. But this isn't the world I want to live in, so I disagree with the normative assertion that it is also the correct way to value inferred feelings vs. facts.
It is natural and caters to human instincts to play the game this way, but I'm arguing that rational people should know better and be able to see that it leads to a bad place, so we should put more value in facts than inferred feelings.
I imagine scott would say this is true, but also true things can be harmful. Or that particular commenter or egregore has a double standard i.e. nitpicking every the holocaust was real argument, while letting denialism float by.
No, it was connected to Palestine and Israel if I recall correctly, but please don't ask details, It's not something I'm well-versed in, just saw some comments on reddit.
There is a lot of fake atrocity propaganda on the pro-israel side, and also a very high double standard in terms of evidence that is required to prove a particular atrocity.
The game, unfortunately, being played here is that, unusually, both sides have a record of being highly deceitful, and so when you correct one-side (and conversations are almost always about one thing at a time), it is reasonably inferred you are not a good faith actor.
I think if personal attacks are not involved, it's still healthy to have one-sided epistemic humility.
Let's assume that israel is held to a different standard. So, for example, it's harder for them to get away with 'X babies were beheaded or burned alive' even if it started with a foreign reporter in a fog of war situation, but it's easy for the other side to get everyone to run with 'Israel bombed a hospital killing hundreds of people for no reason' when it was a failed rocket launch by the other side that hit a parking lot.
It is *healthy and good* to have an incentive structure that corrects individual pro-israel folks who believe the propaganda, because it harms their cause when they are observed saying false things.
Another important dynamic is that it seems to me that the majority of people believe the propaganda of their own side, rather than being motivated liars.
So, Hamas/Israel's government will generally say false things they believe they can get away with, and then a huge body of sympathetic actors assist them in spreading that message. If you work in good faith to correct the sympathetic actors, that will work to improve information hygiene in terms of incentives.
It also helps that, even if it is worth it to you to lie by 5%, it could be because it is easy to lie, not because lying is super important.
I've had hundreds of conversations on the topic, and almost all core beliefs are not contingent on knowable, correctable falsehoods, but rather a morality framework, a collection of a thousand cultural impressions, a tribal affiliation, a risk assessment or world model where 'it is not even close,' etc.
Inferring how people don't have the "appropriate" beliefs and reacting negatively is exactly how we got to the point where no one feels like arguing against "if Trump gets elected he will send all the gays to death camps".
I didn't say appropriate beliefs, I said appropiate feelings. Like (not meant to be a description of the previous example, just an extreme version to convey the point) if you observe a human who is visibly cheerful while watching another human in pain, you can infer that they don't have appropriate feelings and further, that they are not a good person and in some cases implement various levels of social punishment.
Yes, but these assumptions will be correct for almost everyone. If someone displays "inappropriate feelings", it's decent Bayesian evidence that they're cruel/whatever associated bad thing, at least in that moment. Not sure how we should handle the autistic case, but it's asking a lot for people to disregard a real signal.
This is an extremely dangerous philosophy but also you're completely right.
There is a rationalist value of "saying true things" that I think is wildly better than most values. But as a former attorney, "truth" is only part of the picture. There are almost infinite true things I can say in any situation, and most are inappropriate. It is entirely valid to ask, "why are you speaking this truth at this time?" In fact, if you aren't asking yourself that pretty much constantly, I suspect you are failing at the work of truth-finding.
A more honest analysis asks what the relevance is, whether the truth you're telling appeals more to our rationality or our biases, and yes, unfortunately, whether you're telling a truth that will be weaponized against vulnerable people. That doesn't mean you never "hurt your side" in an argument by recognizing weaknesses or caveats, just that there is a weighing that needs to be done.
Once you start down that road though, boy does it become easy to dismiss really good arguments that should change your mind.
I think that weighing is hard to do well, and very subject to putting a thumb on the scales. For decades, I've seen people make arguments that amounted to "yes that is true and relevant but you should not say it for <reasons>," and they are approximately always whose side would be harmed by discussing those true things.
I'd agree, but let me give you a counter-example that's so ridiculous it might be dismissible, just to emphasize my point.
There is a tiger. The tiger is coming towards us. I have seen the tiger. It's approaching you silently. Just as it's about to pounce I say "did you know ducks don't have thumbs?"
There are one infinity true things you can say in any given moment. You do the weighing anyway. If you don't know you're doing it, you're just not aware of what your weights are.
Scott's point seemed to be about correcting lies that you use to make your story stronger. There's a mean dog coming toward us, I've seen it and know it's mean and might bite someone. But nobody takes me seriously when I tell them there's a dog coming, so I say there's a hungry tiger coming to eat us all.
There are real-world parallels with AGW--it really does seem like a bad idea to keep dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and changing the climate, and the long-term consequences do look unpleasant, but plenty of activists will spin this as the end of civilization or the end of the world or something, because people weren't reacting strongly enough to the actual defensible predictions.
"the fact that their comment didn't contain anything else (except maybe some admonishments of the "other" side) strongly made me think that their internal feelings about it are not appropriate in some sense to the events"
That seems fraught.
Maybe they don't feel like expressing what everyone already agrees on, instead focusing on the unique addition they can make to the discussion. For example, I don't like having to add performative "obviously, I condemn this", and I'm pretty sure Scott made a similar point once, although I don't remember where.
Your attitude strikes me as functionally indistinguishable from Bulverism. Alice says something, Bob points out that it's untrue. Because Bob neglected to include any mealy-mouthed soothing qualifications like "I understand why you might feel that way, but..." or "I understand that this is a personal issue for you, but...", Carol infers that Bob is Not One of the Good Ones. All of this is very convenient for Alice, as it serves as a convenient distraction from the object-level question of whether or not her claim was factually true, towards the meta-level question of whether Bob is a bad guy for pointing out that it wasn't true.
I'm not saying the missing mood framing (https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.html) is useless: you can draw accurate inferences about a person's beliefs and motivations by the manner in which they discuss something. But if Alice tells a lie, and a member of her audience knows it's a lie, she should fully expect to be forcefully called out on it, and it's a bit rich for her to complain that the person who called her out didn't handle her with kid gloves. I'd go so far to say that, if you're in a community in which correcting lies or false information is responded to, not with gratitude, but with accusations of bad faith or ill intent - it's probably a red flag that you're in an extremely toxic community, or at least a community in which truth is not a top priority.
I think that example is still fine. If you suspect that people react differently to babies being shot rather than burned, and the truth is that babies were burned, then you owe it to people to let them react in a way that represents their feelings on what really happened.
And if people don't perceive there to be a difference between shooting and burning babies, then no one should feel accosted when they're corrected on the facts - after all, if there's no moral difference, then the factual inaccuracy doesn't seem malicious or deliberate, you're not being accused of changing the gravity of what happened.
>And if people don't perceive there to be a difference between shooting and burning babies, then no one should feel accosted when they're corrected on the facts - after all, if there's no moral difference, then the factual inaccuracy doesn't seem malicious or deliberate, you're not being accused of changing the gravity of what happened.
Logically speaking, claiming that someone has made a morally neutral mistake is not an accusation of anything bad. If you're Spock, anyway.
Actual human beings don't behave like Spock. Claiming that someone has made this kind of mistake implicitly claims they did a really bad thing. The fact that they didn't *actually* do a really bad thing doesn't change the implicit claim.
I think you can correct people in a way that is gentle enough that most people wouldn't feel "attacked" if the falsehood is truly amoral. Something like "hey, I agree with your broader point, but that's a common misconception: it turns out that protest actually happened in 1973 and not 1976". Psychologically healthy people should be able to accept /that/ without getting all prickly.
YMMV but I only ever seem to get pushback on mild corrections when people suspect I'm correcting them to shift the gravity of the situation in either direction. And if they're right to believe that the correction shifts the gravity of the situation (because often the falsehood serves a rhetorical purpose), then their anger at the correction should be a sign that the person is deliberately polluting the discourse and is not operating in good faith. Those are the most important corrections to make
>And if they're right to believe that the correction shifts the gravity of the situation (because often the falsehood serves a rhetorical purpose), then their anger at the correction should be a sign that the person is deliberately polluting the discourse and is not operating in good faith.
They may believe that the person making the correction is *inaccurately framing* it as shifting the gravity of the situation. They don't have to think it *actually* shifts the gravity of the situation in order to object to the inaccurate framing.
A performs a magical ritual making a contract with a devil (or the Devil) for powers in exchange for her soul. The contract works and she gets the real powers.
B performs the same ritual and believes she's got the powers and lost her soul, when actually nothing objectively changed.
C performs the same ritual without knowing whether it would work, and does not think it did. But she did commit to losing her soul that would have worked if the Devil existed and was inclined to take her offer.
D performs a ritual calling on forces that are not correctly described by Christianity, and receives supernatural power from them.
E does the same, with no effect.
F has supernatural power without explicitly doing anything anti- or un-Christian. (She is due a letter from Hogwarts.)
G is a time traveler and performs something involving some glowing powder that results in a lot of people getting sick for non-supernatural reasons they are 200+ years away from understanding.
I expect 0 witches were burned or hanged in Salem but that depends on one's definitions.
"escalate all the way to the point we actually escalated to, where people have said in all seriousness that Trump might try to put all minorities in camps and murder them.
(sorry - I’ve genuinely heard people say he was going to put minorities in camps, but I’m not sure they specified all minorities, and I don’t think they ever said they would get murdered there. Would you have let me get away with that exaggeration?)"
I'm sort of taking this as " dont let me get away with any exaggerations" is that the intent?
(Also i would have let it slide) i've noticed similar ish exaggerations in other posts, however you seem to be nicer about your exaggerations that 99% of other people. I think thats the reason why i read your stuff and not others
I interpreted it as motivated by the low quality of discussion concerning the situation in Los Angeles, but omitting that out of a desire to focus on the meta-level point instead of the object-level dispute. No guarantee that I'm right, of course.
I agree. The major difficulty is related to linear diffusion of sparse lognormals: often the useful way to parse the world is such that one disregards the overwhelming majority of cases as negligible, and focuses exclusively on the extremes. But it's harder to talk about truth in this ontology since it's not very amenable to induction, and this is made worse by the fact that people don't tend to describe clearly enough why and how they are doing this.
This reaches its most aggravating zenith when you make it clear that you agree with the overall point but are correcting the misinformation to try and strengthen the actual argument, and then people *still* accuse you of being against the overall point. The only silver lining is it provides a very clear signal that this will not be a productive internet discussion and I don't need to spend an hour acting like it will be.
Yup. The Gish Gallop is a common tactic, bad actors who don't care about the truth will waste your time by throwing out a thousand false statements that each take them a second to invent and take you a minute to correct.
Not only does this waste your time, but when they are making confident statements and you are making pedantic titchy corrections, it looks like they are on the offense and you are meekly trying to weasel your way out of their accusations. It makes it look like they are dominant, winning the argument, and directionally correct to the audience watching you debate.
"sorry - I’ve genuinely heard people say he was going to put minorities in camps, but I’m not sure they specified all minorities, and I don’t think they ever said they would get murdered there. Would you have let me get away with that exaggeration?"
I would say that the world is barely 10% into Trump II; if the L.A. situation is any indication, he's not yet done escalating. Let's not count the chickens before they exhausted all chances to be put into camps and murdered.
Also the Venezuelans who have been put in CECOT certainly seem like a minority which has been rounded up and put in a camp, as have various other groups that have been stashed in immigration detention...
I mean if we really want to get into it then Biden and Obama and Clinton all rounded minorities up and put them into camps as well (by which I of course mean that soldiers in the Army are frequently ordered to go to various camps, and some of them are minorities).
This is exactly the kind of exaggeration that the article rails against - you could have made a reasonable analogy with eg incarcerated minorities held on charges they can't afford bail for, but calling orders given to a voluntary military force similar is a huge stretch.
"you could have made a reasonable analogy with eg incarcerated minorities held on charges they can't afford bail "
Uh, no you really couldn't, because that isn't what anyone on the face of the earth thinks of when they hear "minorities put in camps", and everyone using the phrase knows that full well. Same with immigration detention.
I mean, I'm half-thinking your comment here must be ironic (given the topic), but it doesn't seem like it is. If it is, my mistake and good job, but if not...do you think someone saying "I have been stolen from" to mean "I have had to pay taxes" is a sane and honest thing to say? If not, do you realise the distance between those two statements is literally identical to the distance between "minorities being put in camps" and "people charged with crimes who happen to be minorities being held as part of the normal operation of the criminal justice system, in a way that has nothing to do with their minority-status and is also done to non-minorities"? And that conflating them is exactly the kind of unhinged extremism that Scott is warning about here, and that is doing so much damage to the world?
I think you've misunderstood me - I'm saying the distance between 'people rounded up and put in camps' and 'people rounded up and put in immigration detention, or especially being sent to a harsh foreign prison in a third country, when they had previously been tolerated / without due process' is not very much, that 'this is just the same as arresting people and holding them on remand' would be a stretch further but still a reasonable argument as something vaguely similar that had been happening all along, and 'sending military to duty stations' was a complete non sequitor that suggested not debating on good faith.
1. My read of the above argument (which may be incorrect) is that Melvin was using an obviously absurd equivalence to satirise what he regarded as your obviously absurd equivalence. Essentially "if you can call immigration detention basically camps for minorities, then I can call military stations basically camps for minorities, it's just as logical". Insofar as you didn't mean remand was really equivalent to camps, neither did he.
2. I think your "immigration detention" comparison is just as absurd as the remand one, (and I did say so above), and all the same points apply to it. It's the normal operation of the justice system, the people being detained are credibly accused of having broken the country's laws, and there's nothing to suggest the laws are being unfairly applied in a different way to minorities in the same category (is there? I don't imagine white Canadians who behaved in the exact same way as Mexican illegal immigrants--sneaking over the border, hiding for years from immigration authorities--would be exempt from detention and deportation, but I don't know and could be wrong). And the only reason they were previously tolerated is that previous administrations and the last one in particular were deliberately not enforcing the unambiguous laws.
3. The foreign prison thing is in a very different category. I'd be happy to say it's *as bad as* putting a handful of random citizens in a camp (on the grounds that the lack of due process means there's no assurance that it can't be done to citizens, though I don't think there's any evidence it has been) but it seems to differ in a number of substantial (not necessarily morally significant) ways to that, to the extent that calling it equivalent seems pretty unhelpful to me. But I can accept the comparison if necessary. I definitely can't accept the immigration comparison, which I maintain is extremist hyperbole.
I mean yes, it is exactly the kind of exaggeration the article rails against, that was my point. Saying "Trump is rounding up minorities and putting them into camps" is just as silly as saying "Biden rounded up minorities and putting them into camps".
I disagree - sure this is a pretty early and limited version, but it's much closer than what Biden was doing, and eg Japanese internment (and more towards an edge case, the original concentration camps in the Boer war) was a much more limited version of this than Nazi concentration camps, but still alarmingly similar.
Also if I was using the tactic in the article, I wouldn't be saying that there is a spectrum of putting minorities in camps and I think Trump has just stepped onto it, I'd be counter accusing you of not caring about the problems with immigration enforcement and ignoring due process - instead we are having a civilised debate about where the line is.
OK let's agree that the Boer War example and the two WW2-era examples are central examples of "rounding up minorities and putting them into camps", and that the Trump and Biden examples are non-central examples, and that the Trump example is ever so slightly closer to the centre than the Biden example.
Overall it's still a silly example. It's still an example of trying to argue that Trump is bad by classifying what he's doing as some kind of non-central example of a particular type of bad thing.
What people should do instead is to agree on exactly what is happening, and agree on the correct words to use to describe it, and only _then_ get on with arguing about things like whether it's bad, or how bad it is, or whether the level of badness is a necessary evil to achieve a greater good, or whatever. Argue about ground truth, not about labels.
It was impossible to predict exactly what was going to happen, but the people that said "minorities being rounded up by masked goons and sent to camps" are much closer to the truth than the people that dismissed it.
I mostly agree with this but it seems weird to point the finger at 'wokeness' specifically when this is just a problem universal to all politics. Politicians lie and exaggerate constantly because the corrections are often less catchy and don't undo the initial damage the lie caused.
The point is that the evidence was very slim, apparently only a single image of some hobo with a vaguely suggestive shape on a cooking spit. But yes, the sheer irony of the ostensibly pro-diversity faction also clutching pearls at the implication that unusual dieting might have occurred was amusing.
The implication was that people were abducting their neighbors' pets, killing them, and eating them. "Unusual dieting" was not the claim that raised their ire. Surely you know and understand that, so I don't know what your comment (and the one you're replying to) is supposed to do other than demonstrate the very thing Scott is warning against here.
Well, that's an implication, but another one is "could you believe those ridiculous savage customs", and I haven't seen anybody coming out and saying that it's alright to eat pets if they happen to be your own.
No, that's not *an* implication, that's *the* implication. Nobody was outraged at reports that Haitians were eating their own pets, because there were no such reports. The reports were that they were eating their neighbors' pets. Yes, some people juked it by saying, "Just because we don't have credible reports of them eating their neighbors' pets, doesn't mean they're not doing it. After all, plenty of cultures eat cats and dogs." But most respondents to that didn't address whether or not that's okay, because *it wasn't the point*. The point was people were being slandered, and if people justified the slander by pointing out an irrelevant fact about a completely different group of people, going down the rabbit hole about what cuisines are and aren't acceptable was not going to do anything for the slandered group.
So you didn't know what the person was quoting, didn't bother looking it up, didn't bother finding out who "they" in the quote referred to? Wouldn't those facts bear on your analysis on whether or not it was "a lie, or even bad"?
Donald Trump said, "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people that live there." By "they" and "the people that came in" he was referring to Haitian immigrants, based on false social media and television reports that they were eating other people's pets in Springfield, Ohio. It has a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_pet-eating_hoax
The rumors gave rise to increased threats, vandalism, and swatting toward Haitian communities in the US and especially Ohio. Note, I'm not making any claim about the proportion of blame for that going to Donald Trump.
The rumor was not just that the Haitians were eating dogs and cats, it was that they were stealing pet dogs and cats out of people's homes and eating them.
If someone stole a chicken from someone and ate it, that would be a crime already. To add on top of that that the animal in question is a pet animal, to which a family has formed an emotional bond, you can see why this a very serious crime even regardless of any "dietary custom."
(Not that anyone I know of actually committed this "very serious crime" just saying that it was an accusation of a very serious crime.)
I think the one episode near to this anyone could find was a mentally disturbed homeless person in Ohio who was not an immigrant or of any "foreign" extraction.
"The author of the Facebook post later deleted it and expressed regret that the story fueled conspiracy theories.[52][53] The neighbor who initially relayed the story said that she wasn't "the most credible source", and clarified that it was not her daughter's friend but just a rumor she heard from a friend's acquaintance.[7][8]"
It's terrible to take a person's pet and slaughter them for your own use, whether they're an animal traditionally kept for slaughter or not.
It's a lie because it wasn't *true*. Trump nationalized a rumor that slandered immigrants in a way that suited his agenda, and he didn't particularly need it to be true to accomplish this. It was suspicious that he picked a small trend that was especially disgust-loaded to talk about, instead of picking an especially humanizing or credible example of a general claim. It was also very suspiciously precisely the correct size kernel of truthiness for a local hoax or ghost story—the sort of thing that'll sounds plausible of a group of imported poors you already distrust given you know, like, 1.5 factoids about foreign cultures—and lo-and-behold, when people investigated they found no actual victims of this rumored crime spree.
He specifically said, "they are eating the pets of the people who live there" -ie, that they are stealing people's pets, killing them, and eating them. It was not simply a commentary on culinary practices. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5llMaZ80ErY
It was a lie that was "directionally correct" for one side in an ongoing debate. For healthy debates/discussions, we need even the people whose side the "directionally correct" lies support to call them out as lies. And indeed, some anti-immigration people did this, though not as many as I'd have liked.
directionally correct is a useful term of art for people selling lies. I hadn’t heard any variation on it till people started saying that they know Trump is lying but is directionally honest.
I guess that means he’s spouting bullshit but the lies convey his true feelings or something. Never fully worked out the meaning beyond “True or not I like what he is saying.” The lie causes some frisson of pleasure for the listener.
I was explicitly going to point out the haitians-eating-pets example as a case study on where refuting the claim maybe helps but is still insufficient to counter the broader narrative shift. e.g.:
>"Haitians in ohio are eating cats and dogs!"
>No, they are not!
>Well maybe they aren't but there is still clearly deep rooted problems of culture-clashing between Haitian refugees and the residents of Ohio!
Even though the eating-cats has been refuted, the political salience of Haitians in Ohio has now been elevated, at the expense of perhaps less convenient political issues (e.g. a particular candidate's respect for electoral integrity).
And it's not just politicians. The news media does this too, issuing corrections that will be seen by few after the original lie is widely disseminated. It's an effective strategy.
Wait, what do you propose as the alternative? Are you mad that the corrections don't get enough play? Isn't that more due to people's attention spans and engagement algorithms than anything related to what's in the control of a particular media outlet?
Not lying in the first place. Or if you'd quibble over the term "lie," disregard for the truth.
As further evidence that this general strategy of publishing deceptive statements while, later or elsewhere, adding corrections that they know will be seen by far fewer people is employed by media outlets, this is standard practice with headlines.
If a news organization continues to make mistakes at a high rate after the mistakes have been repeatedly pointed out, then it suggests that the news organization is not optimizing for truth and is instead focused on some other goal.
Whether they are actively malicious (deliberately spreading propaganda) or passively harmful (eschewing verification because it costs time and money), the end result is the same. The news organization should not be trusted.
I agree, and this is also irrelevant to my question. OP is mad about retractions, and implies the act of issuing retractions is itself indicative of their propensity to lie. I'm not sure why, or what he thinks is a good alternative.
(Also, like, far be it from me to defend most mainstream media, but this seems very relevant given Scott's most recent post. Why exaggerate? Any institution willing to publish a retraction is strictly more epistemologically honorable than one that doesn't.)
Progressives are particularly egregious about it, probably because it's a female-driven ideology and women are emotionally shrill and non-analytical debaters. (Directionally, that is. I'm aware there are counter-examples. They're not representative.)
Every side does this but our current polarization has been 80% caused by woke/progressive-initiated histrionics. They're the ones that relentlessly drove the public discourse to the lowest common denominator. Social media was the perfect vector for that. The reason the Left has dominated over the past 20 years is because conservative ideology was too complex and unemotive to fit through the low-intellectual-bandwidth delivery system. Shrillness wins on Twitter ("Oppression! Racism! Unfair!" vs "well actually if you do a factor analysis you find..."). The Left was already optimized for it so they had a structural advantage for a decade. It took 10 years for someone like Trump to figure out how to do it from the Right and now the rest of the Right is following his lead and reorganizing their intellectual infrastructure for the new media environment. As always the medium is the message.
I'm not sure what "emotionally shrill" even means, but personally I do not notice a difference in how emotional vs analytical men and women are in debates.
I do notice a difference in *which* emotions tend to drive the more emotionally driven debaters - men tend to be more driven by anger and defensiveness and egotism, and women tend to be more driven by sadness and fear and compassion and playing-the-victim and pulling-at-heartstrings.
It's unfortunate that we've allowed men to define anger and defensiveness and egotism as "not being emotional".
But given your phrasing I suspect you were just intentionally being inflammatory, tbh.
If you don't notice consistent differences in communication style between men and women then I think you're overlooking a well-documented pattern. On average, male discourse tends to be more analytical and outcome-focused, while female discourse tends to rely more heavily on emotional appeals and social context. This doesn't mean all men are logical or all women are emotional, but the distribution is directionally skewed, and that skew has real implications.
You can see the effects in how social media evolved. Platforms like Twitter select for content that is emotionally charged and easily digestible. Political messaging built around moral urgency, personal grievance, and emotive storytelling performs better than more complex, analytical content. That gave a structural advantage to progressives, who already tended to frame issues in terms of harm, empathy, and identity. This is also why social media platforms skew female in both usage and rhetorical style, and why advertising disproportionately targets women.
As for emotional displays, I agree that men are not unemotional. But there's a distinction in how emotion is used rhetorically. Male-coded emotion, like anger or defiance, tends to reinforce a position: it signals commitment to an argument or a boundary. Female-coded emotion often attempts to reframe the conversation entirely by appealing to empathy or social pressure. That may be effective in personal contexts, but when scaled up into public discourse it can blur the boundary between persuasion and manipulation. Another way to put this is that female competition is indirect and zero-sum; male competition is direct but positive-sum. In my view this is why cultural norms systematically deride feminine emotive styles: they're objectively maladaptive in the public sphere.
This has broader implications. When competition in political discourse selects for emotive storytelling rather than clarity and accountability, it risks privileging tactics that are persuasive but epistemically corrosive. In contrast, systems that reward direct, falsifiable claims and strength of argument tend to produce more robust outcomes. That's one reason why male-dominated hierarchies have historically been more stable in public leadership roles. Even women, when choosing leaders, often gravitate toward traits associated with that style, because they produce clearer and more decisive governance.
The version of your comment that I got in my email is pretty different than the one I am seeing above, which I think means you edited it? Anyway, that's why I deleted my reply - it was formulated as a response to what I saw in my email, and now I need to re-read your new phrasing in order to respond more directly.
Yes, I rewrote it. Sorry I just do that a lot. I write impulsively and then immediately re-think it or edit for tone. Normally people don't respond quickly enough for it to matter but occasionally it happens. Mea culpa, it's just my process. FWIW they're not substantively different, I just tried to make the tone less aggressive.
Yeah I think it is more likely to matter in the Substack framework because they send replies as emails, which don't get edited along with the comments on the site, so even if I had not seen the email for hours or days I'd still have seen the original version. (The same is true of the actual blog posts - I've occasionally seen a mistake in an ACX post in my email, gone to the comments to report it, only to find it had already been edited to correct it)
I don't really see how getting someone to back down with a display of anger (they haven't really changed their mind on the issue, they're just afraid) is any less manipulative, or more positive-sum, than getting them to back down by making them feel bad for you?
It's because it's an honest strength/commitment signal. The analytical message defines the territory and the anger defends it. It says "yes, this is really my territory, if you want it you'll have to defeat me in open combat." I think that selects for objective strength (in a broad socio-political sense) and I think that makes for better leadership. I think if your competition selects for who is more empathetically believable then you wind up with worse leaders. (Not that the locus of good/bad is strictly about the leaders themselves, it's more about what terms the battles are fought under and that is ultimately reflected in things like party platforms.)
In your response to v1 of my comment you mentioned empathy's role in social cohesion and I do think that's central to my point. My view is that empathy IS important for social cohesion ... but only in small groups. That's where it evolved. The problem with empathy is that it requires a high level of mutual information and social trust to function properly. Otherwise it runs into the free rider problem. When someone imposes on the collective by saying "I need help", the leader has to be confident that a) they're not lying and b) they're worth helping, meaning that they're not an alcoholic or inveterate loafer who will just "need help" again every 6 months. That requires a lot of information.
In CS terms I think of empathy as an n^2 algorithm for resource allocation. It scales very badly when you get beyond communes and small towns. When you get beyond that scale you need hard-headed realpolitik leadership because it's impractically costly to verify signals of need. That's both because they're easily falsifiable and because rewarding them creates a moral hazard. Going down the empathic path at scale leads to endless stuff like "we need to spend even MORE money on the minorities because they just can't seem to catch up." That causes politics to devolve into zero-sum competitions for empathically-distributed resources. "I'm more deserving! No I'M more deserving! No I'VE been oppressed more! No I'M INTERSECTIONAL!" Sound familiar?
On a family- or small community-scale, empathy is essential. On a large scale it's a cancer. It does nothing but open the door to free riders. In my view this is the key structural criticism of progressivism. It's bad for the same reason communism is bad: they both represent versions of central planning.
I often see a lot of focus from conservatives on "free riders" and the idea that someone will get help who doesn't need or deserve it. This seems to me a case of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". A more realistic way of looking at it is treating such people as a form of overhead. It should still be discouraged, of course, but so much focus on preventing people who don't need help from getting it often just ends up putting barriers in front of people who do.
In your example of the leader, I think what needs to be evaluated is the chance of the person being a freeloader vs what would be done with the materials/assistance otherwise. If you need every scrap of food you can get, you have nothing to donate. If the person is almost certainly scamming you, you should probably turn them away. Notably, though, if you have a massive surplus of food, you can afford to give to those who are less likely to need it - people you are only 90, 80, 70% confident on.
Many groups lie. The woke camp famously invests lots of energy in attacking and cancelling those who would correct those lies. There are many examples of liars brushing of criticism of their lies, but not as many for vigorously attacking correctors.
Yeah it's frustrating when "slight exaggeration of the facts" is the focus of the criticism while the President still claims Kilmar Abrego Garcia's knuckles literally have MS13 tattooed onto them
My intuition here that it is definitely *not* worth your time to correct them, because you should not be wasting your time arguing with fools!
Occasionally stooping to debate with culturally important idiots might be worthwhile, but I just think you should be at a higher level than this whenever possible.
A meta-point here: I like almost all of your posts, but all your worst posts are in this category of "arguing with fools". It seems comparable to the trap of r/atheism.
Yeah but when everyone adopts the strategy of not bothering to argue with or correct the fools, we get to the present situation where fools have taken over every institution of power and almost all facets of discourse in society just consists of fools engaging in emotionally charged struggle/virtue signal sessions with each other instead of discussing any facts of the matter.
I don't think the situation we are currently in arose from the American Left being too slow to "argue with or correct" the American Right, and I think the American Right has been quite enthusiastic for a few years in doing the same to the American Left.
No, the situation we are currently in arose from the fools on both sides taking over all discourse, and now the main mode of discussion is fools making foolish emotional virtue signal arguments at each other, and nobody can figure out what's real or actually important anymore. The problem isn't left vs. right, it's the rational people getting crowded out by the fools on all sides and when their response is just throwing their hands up because it's a waste of time to argue with fools, it only spirals further in that direction.
That's well and all, but you keep alleging that it would help to "argue with fools" and I think we both agree that a lot of people already have been, so I'm not sure what you're arguing for.
I don't think the rational reasonable people put in enough effort to expose foolishness where they see it, rather they conclude that it's a waste of time as the fools will not appreciate the argument and will not change their minds in any case, so they're content to let the fools play their foolish games. The result is that everyone now has to live in a circus.
I'm arguing that perhaps it is not a waste of time to expose foolishness, not for the benefit of the fools themselves but for the other rational people out there who might recognize and appreciate and perhaps even be inspired by it to themselves engage in rational discourse to crowd out the foolish. Because as someone else pointed out, it is a tragedy of the commons issue, where nobody wants to themselves waste time arguing with fools, but we would all be better off if rational reasonable people did so. So I think if enough rational people put in more effort to call out foolishness where they see it, we would all be better off and maybe make the public discourse less foolish overall.
But this didn't happen because nobody was arguing against them, just that the fools were more convincing. Non-fools should really up their game at some point...
It might be a tragedy of the commons situation. Individually you're better off not arguing with fools, but collectively we would all be better off if smart reasonable people corrected fools as much as possible.
I rarely engage dishonest people's arguments, so if this is correct then I'm certainly part of the problem.
But correcting lies doesn't stop people from making them. People will keep believing what they want to believe. The correct lesson to learn from all of this is that free speech was a mistake.
Perhaps the problem is that the non-fools are wasting all their time engaging directly with the fools instead of just doing useful stuff.
It's like if the Apollo Program had decided to spend all its time and resources arguing with half a dozen Flat Earthers who say you can't possibly go to the Moon, instead of just going to the Moon.
It's an overreaction to assume that an exaggeration is a deliberate lie. Often exaggerations are caused by enthusiasm or not having enough time to fact check.
Thank you for putting in words what has been bothering me for a long while now. I was just thinking about it a few days ago, though the central example - and most other cases I've encountered on the same lines, too, that have earlier come to mind - is from the other side: the people who have seen something like the infamous "Muslim Demographics" video that circulated a lot a decade ago, go around saying "Europe is getting conquered by Muslims, Muslim women have on average 8 kids per woman!" and when one points out that actual numbers in Europe are nowhere close to eight, go "Well, the number is usually still higher than that of non-Muslims, why care if it's actually right if it is directionally correct?"
Edit: another example that has often been in my mind is the claim that Stalin killed 60 million people or something like that - the most credible actual estimates including Holodomor are something like 10 million people, but stating that will get pushback and "well, that's still a huge number, why care?", or accusations of outright Soviet sympathies. And that's not even getting into the "Bolshevik Jews killed 60 million Christians" variety...
I’ve wondered if it was okay to mention the losses sustained by Belarus owing to the Nazis. That one is trickier I guess. We learned nothing about it in school. But I’m old so perhaps the scale of it was not known.
If you think that's bad, try nitpicking some of the Holocaust-related numbers.
I work on the assumption that "six million" is probably some kind of overestimate, because all the incentives are on the side of overestimation. But damned if I'd ever say so, because all the incentives are on the side of overestimation.
There's a difference between saying 'here is some credible research which suggests the number was probably more like X' (which is fine, dependent on quality of research) and 'I assume it wasn't 6 million, that's probably some kind of overestimate due to incentives'.
My conclusion is that most of these arguments proceed from emotion, rather than analysis, and as a result when you criticise the facts that someone postulates, the statistics they use or the conclusions they draw, their ego is involved and so you are implicitly making a personal criticism of them. It's a truism, after all that the conscious mind exists, at least in part, to provide rationalisations for opinions that we have already reached emotionally. This is why it's so hard to change peoples' minds. If you do this consistently, of course, you get spat on from both sides: in some quarters I'm considered a hopelessly conventional apologist for the West, in others a radical critic of the same West, for writing the same thing.
I'll add a couple more examples. One is the argument from absence of evidence, which is surprisingly common. For example:
- The CIA set up, armed and trained the Islamic State in Syria.
- I don't think there's any evidence for that at all. We know ...
- Well that just goes to show how clever they are and how well hidden the evidence is.
Or the argument independent of facts at all:
- Not nearly enough attention is given to murders of women in this country.
- You may be right, but how do numbers of killings compare between men and women?
- I suppose you think it's all right to murder women then. You look like a violent person yourself.
The path of argument from facts is a lonely and a stony one.
Exactly, and the issue is every pretty much every discussion today immediately starts off with all the participants emotionally invested in proving who is a virtuous person and who is a piece of shit, almost no one seems to care about just getting to the facts.
I've been simultaneously called a degenerate Magat Trumple and a TDS libtard just for comparing Trump's proposed tariffs against Kamala's proposed tax on unrealized gains while criticizing both, how are we to have any sensible policy discussion in this day and age outside of rationalist spheres is beyond me.
I think part of the problem here is that in large parts, public online discourse *has* been taken over by bots and bad actors and engagement farmers to the point where they consider it a success if they get you to hit reply, regardless of content, changing minds, or reality.
You notice this particularly on e.g. large subreddits, where the barrier to entry for anonymous commenters is too low, and the successful proliferation of artificially generated comments and content too high. Even if you do meet another person, they're primed to engage with the same strategy as the bots.
I've had debates about policy in real life, in person, sometimes with low-level local city officials (this sounds a bit pretentious but I mean like... my buddy who works with transportation policy), and it never gets that bad or weird, even when we fundamentally disagree. I'm sorry to say it, but the olden days of forum discourse between humans that just want to debate actual policy are gone, at least outside of heavily moderated comment sections that select for actual humans. There will still be some spaces for it, but they'll have to be small.
I'm reminded of the 'scissor statements' work of short fiction Scott wrote here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ - it's more profitable for platforms to promote divisive statements that increase engagement, so they will. It's easy to blame 'the way people are these days', but as a species we're being warped by the manipulation of for-profit algorithms - and we're too prideful/foolish to believe it possible of ourselves, like the maverick who declares "advertising doesn't work on me!"
I can recall specific examples of anti-woke flat out lying, i.e. claiming DVIDS didn't in fact remove various images and videos under a Trump order when it's extremely well documented and I literally posted the exact text from Trump from whitehouse.gov as well as documents straight from the DVIDS website saying "we did this." Like talking to a brick wall.
This is how the slippery slope argument should be made.
"This problem may be small, but it could easily escalate. Here's the mechanism how the escalation would happen."
Instead of: "This problem is small and I don't have enough evidence to make my point of view prevail, so let's just assert that things are going to get much worse."
I tend to see the slippery slope argument as "okay, I don't have evidence yet because the thing hasn't happened yet but given similar events in the past and their results, and the fact that the group pushing for this 'one teeny tiny small little change' admit they want even bigger changes to come in future and are trying this to see if further activism will work, then yeah I think we're in slippery slope territory".
It's hard to provide evidence of "the house will burn down if you do that" when the other party is arguing "but the house hasn't burned down yet, why are you saying that plugging just one more piece of equipment into the outlet will cause it to burn down?" before the house burns down, and afterwards when the house is a smoking ruin, the damage has already been done. And it won't even work as a warning because the next time will be "but I'm not overloading an outlet, I'm just lighting candles next to flammable materials all over the new house! this is totally different!"
On the other hand, flawed slippery slope arguments often look more like "We have established that plugging hundreds of pieces of equipment into the same outlet might burn down the house, therefore you should not plug any pieces of equipment into any outlets".
This is adjacent to "I agree with your conclusion but your argument is locally invalid" in terms of things that we need to defend as social necessities. You're not obligated to correct anyone, but if the argument doesn't need to be locally valid I don't need to read it, just assert the conclusion.
As always, the problem is that we in the US are dominated by a hugely polarized two-party system, and whichever side comes up with reasonableness and accuracy norms and enforces them on their own people *first* is setting down their rhetorical gun in a total war for political and cultural dominance.
Any community who succeeds at enforcing these norms internally will just become irrelevant to the national discussion until they drop them again, because rhetoric constrained by the truth can't reliably compete with completely unrestrained rhetoric.
Scott suggests this analysis is weak in his post entitled something like "In Favor of Niceness". For what it's worth, I think "completely unrestrained rhetoric" is completely useless to hear or make space for and would be dropped by any serious person. Even the most biased news sources tend to avoid outright lies (see Scott's other post about that idk you can Google for it).
> As always, the problem is that we in the US are dominated by a hugely polarized two-party system, and whichever side comes up with reasonableness and accuracy norms and enforces them on their own people *first* is setting down their rhetorical gun in a total war for political and cultural dominance.
I often feel like it's the opposite -- the war is won by whoever best controls the loonies on their own side. Trump was having a bad few weeks, but then the far-left loonies starting rioting and now Trump looks like the sensible one again. If the far-right loonies start rioting next week then Trump will look bad again.
How often do you hear someone use the phrase "So you're saying" and it's followed by an accurate representation of what you've just said? How do you not end up in an infinite loop of having to repeat yourself?
By repeating yourself in different ways. I usually find that when someone says that they want clarification, and going back and forth a few times usually helps them understand whatever it is I was trying to say.
> How often do you hear someone use the phrase "So you're saying" and it's followed by an accurate representation of what you've just said?
rarely
> How do you not end up in an infinite loop of having to repeat yourself?
this may sound somewhat polemic, but many people explain for themselves, without regard for their audience's perspective, and then wonder why they got misunderstood.
If your 2nd (and 3rd and 4th) try is identical to your first try, then you defeinitly did not take your audience into account.
The article makes a good point. However, actually, I think it's possible to improve upon it ;)
In my field of work (experimental physics) and in my experience, it is important to distinguish between concepts and details. Sometimes it can be valuable to communicate a concept, that gives the correct intuition about some experiment and thus leads to a clear visualization of the path forward (in terms of measurement strategy or similar). It is well possible, though, that the concept is inaccurate to some extent and needs to be improved along the way and a deeper or more rigorous theory has to be consulted in detail.
Scott tries to gesture at this with the list of exceptions he provides. For the moment (and this certainly can be improved), I would suggest the following characteristic: If, in terms of complexity of the statement or concept, a very small or zero penalty is incurred for higher precision, one should try to aim for the higher precision. This perfectly captures Joe Criminal then, on the one hand, where the complexity (in some metric) is basically the same for the precise statement if one talks to the unrelated law and order proponent, but the amount of additional emphasis that no disrespect is meant towards victims would incur a large penalty when talking to relatives or victims. I think this heuristic does a decent job in other examples as well, at least the ones that come to my mind from the top of my head.
This is a category error, same as the person who interrupts a group singing "Happy Birthday to You" to clarify "but really, we want you to be virtuous, not just hedonistic, and definitely don't, like, steal anything just to make yourself happy."
The point of news stories (I'd argue, from the beginning - but certainly in the present moment) is to build feelings of positive community by helping your audience affiliate sentimentally around a shared core of narrative meaning. The person who clarifies facts is "not even wrong"; they're just rude, interrupting a social ritual with something irrelevant. That's why the response tends to be to call out the person's social priorities rather than their logic.
I'm confused. Wouldn't it then be rude to show up at a guy's blog to tell him that he's fact-checking wrong?
Anyway, some of us certainly read news because we're curious about what's really going on, and fact-checking can certainly with that. And if people who lie in the interest of tribalism are offended by that, well, so be it.
>Wouldn't it then be rude to show up at a guy's blog to tell him that he's fact-checking wrong?
Not if he's doing it as a drive-by critique of your community's sacred stories. Skeptical outside critique profanes the story and ruins the moment for everybody. This is why in many traditional societies, non-initiates can be severely punished if they accidentally observe the insiders' religious rituals.
>Anyway, some of us certainly read news because we're curious about what's really going on, and fact-checking can certainly with that.
Hot take: it is fundamentally not possible for commercial news stories to teach you "what's really going on."
The reality of the politics even in a mid-sized elementary school is unfathomably more complex than could be conveyed in the handful of pieces NYT puts out per week. Thus, reporters at most create grossly reductive cartoon stories *inspired* by (what little they see of) reality. And if the audience exercises any choice at all in which stories they read, then by Moloch's agency those stories will necessarily be shaped more by the pleasure they give the reader than by any fidelity to reality. If you pride yourself on valuing "complexity," then fact-checking might make the story more satisfying to you, but don't kid yourself: it's still basically an entertainment experience.
Your hot take is stupid. Honestly, if you want to go with "I literally have no idea who the president of the US is because I don't trust anything in the news", then fine. Or accept that you read stuff in the news and accept that it's right, and also, sure they screw lots of stuff up. And say that, instead of a silly take about how you can't trust anything.
My friend, it is charming that you believe you follow news to learn the Truth, and charming that you believe the news mostly supplies this. It's hard to know how else to respond, because you don't give clear justifications for this belief. But I sincerely hope that you turn out to be right, and I turn out to be wrong.
The point of Scott Alexander's post was to build feelings of positive community by helping his audience affiliate sentimentally around a shared core of narrative meaning. The fact that you are clarifying facts about it is "not even wrong." It's just rude. You're interrupting a social ritual with something irrelevant.
Given the norms of this community, surely a contrarian counter-framing is working with the grain of the social ritual rather than against it? It's not impolite to add harmony to "Happy Birthday," and you're allowed to cap a Latin quotation with a different Latin quotation.
This is largely true, but the media pretend to communicate truth, not stoke sentiments, so at the very least it's worthwhile to puncture their hypocrisy.
Your critique is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't account for emergent imperatives downstream of the narrative.
The shared narrative includes a partial commitment to factual accuracy. That commitment is qualified and the execution is flawed, but it is nonetheless part of the story. The social meaning of the news isn't even accessible unless there are people actually striving to fulfill its aspirations. Kayfabe isn't sustainable and the equilibrium can only sustain a certain amount of cynicism.
Putting South American illegal immigrants who have committed no other crime in foreign concentration camps is kind of that. Trump is putting South American immigrants into camps is true and not particularly misleading. You could say illegal immigrants but we don't actually know that because they weren't given due process
Doesn't it make sense to be a consequentialist with nitpicking? We know that disagreeing with people on subjects they're passionate about reinforces their beliefs ~95% of the time. "Acktually"-ing someone on something related to the "color wars" (my umbrella term for politics, culture wars, and everything related), only feeds those wars. "Don't feed the color wars" has been, more or less, my self-censorship rule for the last 3 years.
As a result, I can see I'm having a bigger impact on epistemics than otherwise. When people put me in this iridescent category, they feel more comfortable opening up about their nuanced stances on things, which helps do the work of healing the world. Plus, it brings me closer to everybody, making it easier for me to do social work than if I were separated.
I enjoy this perspective. Perhaps I am in general less exposed to culture wars due to reasons of social milieu, but whenever I am confronted with cw topics anyway I try to engage with the "spirit" of the argument rather than the facts and correct only where I think it really can make an impact. This "good-faith" approach often leads to my conversation partner to include nuance into the discussion by themselves, making everybody the better for it.
Asking yourself whether it's really cost-effective to correct this or that exaggeration and concluding it isn't on occasion is probably fine, so long as you also consider the possibility that people who exaggerate will continue to do so. It might be easier to correct them at scale; OTOH, they might be self-reinforcing once established.
Hmm, what does "correct them at scale" refer to? Do you mean by writing, and thus reaching a broad audience? Or do you mean through iterative correcting?
More the broad audience approach. Once a crowd of people are all yelling "the dress is green!", it's cheaper to make a general announcement that it's really purple than to take them each aside individually as they came.
The catch, again, is that if you wait and announce "you're all wrong; it's purple", they'll notice there's twenty of them and only one of you, and suspect you can't be right. Even if their epistemology is no stronger than yours, it might not look that way by then.
Interesting. But when you disagree with anybody politically, they always double-down. Maybe later they'll correct a fact when asked in some cold environment, sure. But the next day they're deeper in into their camp. I'm open to being proven wrong though. Philosophy Bear brought up some interesting studies about how you can convince people, actually.
If the backfire effect is true, and people are more likely to believe false statements after someone corrects them with a true statement, then the opposite should also be true: people are more likely to believe true statements after someone confronts them with a false statement.
One that especially makes me crazy is a left-wing consensus that it's alright to say JD Vance masturbated with sofa cushions. It wasn't something he said, it was a lie/joke someone made up. And people persisted in saying it "because it's funny" even though they knew it was false.
They even said Vance had the face of a sofa-schtupper, even though there's no such thing as a sofa-schtupper, let alone them having a distinctive face..
I think everyone knew that was a joke though, I don't think anyone really thought worse of him for it.
Enough people seriously believed it this time around, and also the left seem to relish in taking every angle to shit on Vance no matter how ridiculous (c.f. the fat boy memes) in a way that seems deliberate and coordinated.
Wait is that really not true? Damn, I completely believed it! They even mentioned the source (autobiography or memoir, I don't remember)! What monster would mention a source for a falsehood?
I looked it up after reading your comment already and then commented to convey my sincere surprise. Thanks for corecting misinformation! (I'm not American, and in a much more conservative culture than the USA. I regularly hear various sexual behaviour discussed as normal online that does not exist (or exists to an insignificant degree and not discussed at all) in my culture, so the JD Vance story did not seem improbable in comparison to me)
It was like the David Cameron pig-loving thing; a former Tory bigwig co-wrote a biography of Cameron allegedly revealing all sorts of dirty laundry, including "someone told me that someone told them" story that as part of an initiation rite at university he put his penis into the mouth of a pig's head. There seems to be no evidence whatsoever for this, but for everyone who disliked Cameron (and many who didn't care one way or the other), it was too good a story to ignore, whether or not it was true.
Same with Vance and the sofa story; for the media and online types and others who dislike the Republicans, this was just leaning into Tim Walz' messaging that "The Republicans are *weird*" and who cares if it's true or not?
I think this is slightly different from the original problem (though still morally wrong) because nobody I know of actually believed this. It was more like a mass social ritual of mockery rather than an attempt to spread a real lie.
But of course it's still terrible, and making up something fake to accuse someone of is equivalent to admitting you've lost the argument.
Lies about high-status members of your outgroup are like candy-coated poison. They taste so delicious that it takes a lot of willpower to read the label carefully and see that arsenic is the third ingredient.
I don't consider sex with sofas an evidence for or against good political leadership, so I ignored that.
I admit I assumed that it was based on some kind of true story, I just didn't draw any conclusions from it. I filed it under "Americans are obsessed about sex again".
I assumed it was probably based on something, because it's too specific and too mild to make up.
If you tell me that he did a 10/10 weird sex (like fucking a pig) act then I'll probably assume it's a lie. But that's a 3/10 weird sex act at best, it sounds like the sort of thing someone might admit to in a Howard Stern interview or something.
It was implied that I marginalize autistic people with my proposed norms of discourse AND also that I'm a hyper autist myself in the comments of a single ACX post. I love the internet!
>"because it's funny" even though they knew it was false
... and not ackshually funny?
Not that there can't be group enjoyment of not-funny things. I once listened to a few cringey minutes of "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" and the audience brayed with laughter at everything. Or maybe their own laughter made them laugh? Kind of like the Laughter Yoga they offered at my local library? - led by a lady librarian who had gotten certified for the purpose. I ackshually liked her, but would have described her as the most humorless person there, which inevitably gave the sounds coming from Laughter Yoga an Emmanuel Goldstein vibe.
I distinctly remember somebody saying that it was written in an early edition of Hillbilly Elegy and was later taken out, and wasn't disabused of this notion until months after the election. The sheer volume of drivel on the internet these days is almost impossible to sift through, especially if a lot of people have a vested interest in circulating said drivel.
Yeah, the deliberate and coordinated efforts to lie about and smear Vance in every manner possible, no matter how ridiculous (c.f. the fat boy memes), is really bizarre to me because as far as I could tell, there's nothing really egregiously offensive about the guy other than his bending of the knee to Trump. His VP debate performance and subsequent speeches were pretty good even!
I think the thing is, in my memory there used to be a feeling of "hey, maybe politics should be about more than just slinging shit at the other side" amongst normal people, but the way that left leaning people around me relished in the coordinated waves of shitting on a seemingly pretty normal guy (and even his minority wife!), instead of pointing out how weird it all is (c.f. also the coordinated effort to call him "weird"), was kind of a wake up moment for me. It made me think there's currently something really wrong with the left in general, from news media to the Democrat party, which was a feeling I used to reserve for insane people on Twitter. This is making me genuinely worry we're in a political doom spiral.
I think you go too far. You don't have to believe he fucks sofas to believe that he's got weird beliefs of the world, and it seems totally reasonable to round that off as "weird". This is the guy who did exactly what Scott is complaining about! After Trump's insane "eating the dogs, eating the cats" quip, he went on Twitter and openly said "well, this may have been a lie, but I'll happily lie any day of the week in order to get people to pay attention to this problem!" But it wasn't a problem, like, even a little bit. What do *you* call someone who vigorously believes and defends slanderous conspiracies without evidence, possibly for political convenience? "Weird" is arguably too generous.
I mean, as much as I hate it, toeing the party line is the name of the game in the extremely partisan political environment today, it doesn't seem egregious enough to single him out as a weirdo over that when the vast majority of politicians on both sides do the same.
And my point was more how weirdly coordinated each wave of attacks was, like "a committee decided to produce a bunch of this particular genre of fat boy Vance memes and you will all find it funny now because it's politically advantageous for our side", then adherents eagerly slurping it up. It's cultish.
I don't agree with the both sidesism here. I think MAGA politicians lie more often and more egregiously than any other politicians in the US. We can debate about whether the lies are intentional, but I think it would be tough to defend “tariffs are a tax other countries pay”, “the country is being invaded“, and of course, “they're eating the dogs”
I don't think there's any reason to attribute the Vance face photoshop memes to a conspiracy. That sounds very much like the kind of the thing that would happen organically.
Is this comment serious? I could honestly mistake this for satire. You go from:
"I mean, as much as I hate it, toeing the party line is the name of the game in the extremely partisan political environment today..."
to
"And my point was more how weirdly coordinated each wave of attacks was, like "a committee decided to produce..."
Within the space of a paragraph without so much as a pause or a stumble. Do you not notice that you are literally *describing the same thing* here? In a very Russell-conjugation sense. "Our playing the game and toeing the party line, their creepily coordinated attacks."
(Personally I'd love to see a return to a more civil and truth-based politics. But I can't for a single instant believe in the sincerity of anyone who claims the same but also handwaves away toeing the line for Trump. No single human being has done more to damage civility or the relevance of facts in modern politics than Trump has.)
If you don't see the difference and chalk it down to "ours" vs. "theirs" when I never identified with either, then I also doubt your sincerity to try to understand rather than play tribal politics, so I guess there's no point in further conversation.
I mean, I see lots of differences. In one case it's a individual auditioning for a job of enormous personal responsibility knowingly and blatantly lying for personal gain. On the other case it's random people on the internet passing around memes. Those are very different things.
It is, in this case, your framing that makes them seem so similar. "Here's something Vance is doing to try to succeed at politics. Here's something the other side is doing to try to succeed as politics." But you describe them with totally different affect as if it *should be* clear to the reader why one is despicable and the other is business as usual.
So yes, I assumed it was an "ours" vs "theirs" thing because you didn't leave me any other obvious reading. At no point do you explain why knowingly and blatantly lying to toe the party line is morally different than any other sort of lying. At no point do you explain why memes spreading (the way memes are prone to do) is sinister or unusually egregious. You just load them up with affect as if the affect itself proves your point. In my experience, people who do that are partisans stuck so deep into their side's worldview that it seems to obvious to bother explaining.
If I was mistaken about your political leanings I sincerely apologize. But having re-read your comment several times, I'm genuinely unsure what else it was I was supposed to glean from it.
> there's nothing really egregiously offensive about the guy other than his bending of the knee to Trump.
Trump attempted to overthrow the government and Vance rationalizes it as, "Twitter suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story for one day so 2020 was stolen." Come on, bruv.
I mean, yes. This is exactly the sort of thing people do with politicians they don't like, and it is absolutely 'political action'. Once upon a time there were handbills about Andrew "the blood thirsty Jackson began again to show his cannibal propensities, by ordering his Bowman to dress a dozen of these Indian bodies for his breakfast, which he devoured without leaving even a fragment."... The Cincinnati Gazette discussing how "General Jackson’s mother was a COMMON PROSTITUTE brought to this country by British soldiers. She afterwards married a MULATTO MAN, with whom she had several children, of which General JACKSON IS ONE!!!"
If you take a single glance at literally any of history, the Vance goss is nowhere even close to beyond the pale. More recently, look at AOC getting photoshopped on denigrating porn... Clinton "drinking blood" and baby-eating etc.
People who wring their hands about it cannot possibly be so confused as they project. If anything, it's a return to our roots.
I have a Charles Mingus record that was recorded in France in 1964 where, between songs, he said that he thought the government was building concentration camps for protestors.
Very well taken, though I’d caution that rigor deployed asymmetrically becomes its own form of manipulation. The line between correcting error and signaling allegiance is thin—and often felt more than seen.
Largely agree, and thank you for policing, as it is a public good. Are you as interested in self-policing? For instance:
"Matthew Talamini
Feb 5
My family is in danger from the national debt. So's yours. 60-80% is a safe debt-to-GDP ratio. The US is at 123%. This article reads like it comes from an alternate universe where governments never have debt crises. Where interest rates don't affect anybody's lives. Where no country has ever played chicken with macroeconomic forces and ditched just a smidge too late."
"Scott Alexander
Feb 5
Trump obviously doesn't care about the debt or he wouldn't be promising massive tax cuts. If I thought there was any hope of decreasing the debt, I'd . . . well, I'd hope it would go for the worst government programs first, but I'd understand if they wanted to give everything a haircut. Getting rid of the best ones first, not touching lots of the stupid ones, and we all know they'll increase the debt anyway just seems dumb."
The first half of your first sentence strikes me as going too far. A lot of us care profoundly about the debt. A lot of us think tax cuts may still be important even in a debt crisis (for instance, to prevent a recession, or because we believe in Laffer, or because we play political games to try to get elected, or a million other reasons). I fully expect Trump is amongst that crowd and am not sure I would trust an debate opponent as sincere if they didn't think that. Perhaps you're a lot better psych than I assumed and you know us more than we know us, but I'd have bet against that. Perhaps you're speaking 5% too aggressively here?
YOU might care profoundly. But Trump is a very different story, who has served an entire term as President prior to his recent re-election, and hasn't acted to cut overall spending (his relative acceptance of the welfare state is how he got perceived as relatively moderate & electable for a Republican).
The flip side of this is that information doesn't get transmitted perfectly, and people pick up minor errors and dismiss the truth of the broader point, sometimes with memes like this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah.
I agree that if someone *LIES* you ought to correct them and that's not nitpicking.
However, not every knowingly uttered untrue statement is a lie. Yes, we could try to say only full technical truth, but then what could be 2 sentences would end-up being 10 nuanced pages of text. Yes, sometimes that nuance is necessary—but demanding it 100% of time is silly. We can't talk like that.
Think of conversation as a lossy compression. WAV vs. MP3, PNG vs. JPEG.
And this is done in science all the time! We physicists simplify all the time—otherwise we wouldn't be able to get any job done. Our models are knowingly untrue (e.g. Newtonian mechanics), yet useful. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Let's look at your examples:
1. You say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes.
Here, you lied. It's not a simplification, 10 vs 6 changes nothing on complexity axes. And you lied a lot, common factor of 2? (Notice, I am simplifying here! It's actually 2 factors, one of 5/3 and second 5/2, but this is OK, 5/3 is roughly 2, and so is 5/2. This should be allowed!)
2. Joe Target shouted a racial slur and punched a black guy in the face because he hates minorities so much! This proves that we need hate crime legislation immediately!
This is full lie, there is nothing "slightly incorrect about this". The *central claim* of the statement is untrue. Refuting it is not a nitpick, it's not about making some argument 5% weaker. So again, this is a full lie, no need to haggle about this.
3. Where people have said in all seriousness that Trump might try to put all minorities in camps and murder them. (I’m not sure they specified all minorities, and I don’t think they ever said they would get murdered there.)
Here, the murder is off—that's a clear lie and you shouldn't get away with that. The *all* part depends on the context. What did you hear? Do you have an idea what those people meant? Did they mean almost all minorities and you simplified to all? Then I guess it's ok. Or did they mean *some minorities* and you simplified to all? Then I think that's over the line.
I think this perspective vibes extremely well with what I suggested a bit above. Probably not coincidentally we come from a similar background, I think.
Saying the truth about the number of murders and rapes vs. the falsehood is similarly demanding (for some definition of demanding), so saying the falsehood is basically non-excusable.
In the case of Joe Target it becomes even worse, making the wrong claim is in some sense more complex/demanding than making the (boring) true one, because you need to take a more or less neutral story and in addition invent angles that are somehow enraging to a imagined audience.
Same goes for, e.g., the example of Trump and the purported consumption of household pets. Since there was no basis in reality, the amount of work needed to invent this (bizarre) lie was much higher than to just not say it, so here correction is almost a moral duty: Under no framework that comes to my mind is this statement a justifiable simplification of a more complex situation, so nothing is gained by making this statement.
And this is exactly why people hate pedants. The degree of the hate is proportional to how much that much that person try to make a big deal of a signal out of a noise.
"(sorry - I’ve genuinely heard people say he was going to put minorities in camps, but I’m not sure they specified all minorities, and I don’t think they ever said they would get murdered there. Would you have let me get away with that exaggeration?)"
Don't worry, Gunflint would chime in with "well I don't know where you heard that, *I* never read/heard anything like that and I'm surrounded by liberal people, are you sure this isn't just one crazy guy saying that, or maybe you're mistaken?", at least that's how my interactions generally go when I quote the latest woke flapping 😀
This is a meme recycled from the Obama presidency. A member of my extended family said FEMA was building camps for bad people, not immigrants, I think the implication was they were for the more heinous Republicans. After a bit more of that stuff I just closed my Facebook account for good.
I think conspiracy theories about secret FEMA internment camps date back at least as far as the 90s. I remember them being part of the lore of the original Deus Ex (2000), which was based on a pastiche of 90s counterculture memes.
and I’ll add that while I did delete my Facebook account, what I didn’t do is start claiming my not so bright relative was representative of conservatives or Republicans because she simply isn’t. That would just have been a cheap dunk that added nothing to the conversation.
She’s just a dummy who bought into a preposterous conspiracy theory.
Thank you for making this point. We could use a better culture and better technology for giving and accepting corrections, but I do believe some online communities are moving in that direction.
I think there are lots more dimensions to consider here, though, than the ones suggested by your caveats. Tone, spirit, context (both of original claim and comment). Is it sincere or performative? Who’s it really meant for? Would you still bother to make the point in a one-on-one conversation? Is the correction made respectfully and constructively? Is it actually a correction, or just a different interpretation/belief/unsourced claim/oversimplification/lie?
It’s good to want to help recalibrate the baseline for truth, but anyone who adds 25% extra toxicity, hostility or confusion to solve for a 5% exaggeration, is making a net negative contribution, IMO.
> "Would you still bother to make the point in a one-on-one conversation?"
This is a particularly good question. A lot of what is said in online debate is intended only to influence the audience, without a good-faith attempt to engage with the substance of the opponent's argument.
Or as Scott put it a few years ago, "If you hold the conversation in private, you’re almost guaranteed to avoid [social shaming and gotchas]. Everything below that is a show put on for spectators."
i feel like some of the "is Joe Criminal a racist" fits the recent murder of Jonathan Joss and whether its a hate crime, or a crime provoked by longstanding beefs over crazy behavior from Joss where the slurs are just icing on the cake
I think internet comment culture is at more extreme risk for this - at least I am personally.
The motivation for comments is strongest immediately after reading (or visiting) an article, and weakens over time. This privileges immediate impression over careful analysis, half-remembered evidence over sourced and thoughtful proof, and confidence over caveats.
Ultimately I think this gives a bad impression of people who disagree with you. You're likely visiting sites that mostly privilege your bias. Commenters then make arguments that might be directionally true but outsized, containing a ton of inaccuracies, and emotionally loaded.
Of course, this comment is immune from this effect and is 100% reliable :P
"What could be more cringe than telling small lies, then bullying anyone who tries to correct you, in the hopes that future audience will be too cowed to speak up?"
It might be cringe at first, but if you do cow people into accepting your little lies, that means you've successfully gaslighted (gaslit?) them, which is a flex, and therefore not cringe. Therein lies the problem.
Likely because of the ideological circles more close/adjacent to my own, I see this CONSTANTLY with progressive/left people exaggerating the negativity of economic conditions in the US.
The overwhelmingly common (but not only) form of this I see on social media is "The average person only makes $35,000 a year! And people dare to call that livable!"
And I know if *shouldn't* bother me this much, but it does.
And doing my part as you would suggest, I responded saying that isn't actually the average and household is...blah blah blah.
For the trouble, the first response was that I was a boot-licker. Whose boot? The US Census Bureau? The FED's economic reporting wing?
I inquired and was told correcting thing that way moves attention away from the point (which, I will remind everyone, was incorrect in the first place!)
Anyway, it's pretty damn close to exactly what you laid out so decided to share.
Oh, I am very aware! And the US is wealthier than it used to be at (minus small perturbations) any point previously! Etc etc. That’s why the economic doomism I see all the time (mostly from the left but that could be incidental sampling bias by me) drives me nuts.
OTOH if someone is saying, say, "we are being taxed to DEATH!!", is the correct response going "ackchually, tax levels in [insert Western country here] surely are not such that anyone will literally die of taxes", or treating this as a colorful turn of phrase expressing that the interlocutor thinks that their taxes are too high?
I feel like it depends on context. Like, if it’s in service a more specific point or call to action beyond “I don’t like taxes”.
And depending on the country, I feel like the correction is not “it won’t actually kill you” it would be something about the actual tax rate relative to historical norms or relative to government services or something.
I don't think people object to bloggers correcting lies, I think they object to exclusively focusing on ragging on one group of relatively mild offenders, thereby implying they're the worst. So say one were to spend years attacking woke people on their blog while ignoring or even praising people like Musk and the "techbros". Readers of that blog will get the impression that woke people lie more and are bigger threat to society. This is especially dangerous if the actual biggest liars have vastly more power than others. A blogger who spends years attacking random woke tweets and journalists nobody has ever heard of is doing a worse job combating misinformation than a blog who spend that time not defending but actively correcting people like Musk, Thiel, SBF... since their lies matter a lot more.
> I’ve genuinely heard people say he was going to put minorities in camps
At least for some minorities, _his administration_ has said that's what they're going to do (e.g. RFK Jr with some varieties of mental health). Maybe they're being honest about their intentions, or maybe they're just exaggerating for posturing's sake, but I find that when someone says they're going to do a bad thing, it's best to believe them, spread the word, and take action against it.
Institutionalising severely mentally ill, schizophrenic patients who are a danger to themselves and others is a pretty normal middle of the road health service/political position. I live in a country where this is expected and normal. It’s crazy to me that California doesn’t do it.
Not especially relevant, since that's not actually what RFK Jr was talking about. People with depression and ADHD are not, in general, dangers to themselves or others. RFK has just decided that safe, effective, time-tested medication is inferior to, y'know, sticking people on a farm and telling them to suck it up.
Oh right, you’re talking about the “wellness farms,” but describing these as “involuntary institutions” for people with mental health conditions is misleading. They are more accurately described as a type of detox center. You can be opposed to the proposal, that’s fine, but it’s crazy to say they are a camp for unwanted minorities. Everything is Hitler! Would you say that we lock up alcoholics against their will currently, because sometimes psychiatrists recommend that they go to detox? Even worse, detox is sometimes court mandated!?
"They are more accurately described as a type of detox center."
No, they are not "accurately" described as anything, because they don't exist yet. To the best of my knowledge even RFK Jr himself has been pretty vague on the subject to date. And since he is not exactly the world's most truthful individual, it's very hard to gauge *what* they would be until they are actually operating[1].
"Would you say that we lock up alcoholics against their will currently,"
Is that supposed to be a gotcha? Yes, very obviously, if the court mandates and alcoholic goes to detox (which they can't leave without completing), then that alcoholic has been locked up against their will. Friggin obviously. Call a spade a spade. That might well be a net utilitarian good, but it's one that's only available when there's very high trust in the system because it, y'know, involves locking people up against their will.
"You can be opposed to the proposal, that’s fine, but it’s crazy to say they are a camp for unwanted minorities."
Crazy why, exactly? I think they would fit most formal definitions of "camp," and they would be intended to house people whose existence would *almost immediately* become politically inconvenient for RFK[2]. It's not at all clear in advance how voluntary they would actually be. Inpatient mental health has a *very* sketchy record around coercion and consent, and handing it over to liars and grifters seems unlikely to improve it. It need not involve jackbooted gestapo dragging people off in the middle of the night to become a moral nightmare.
"Everything is Hitler! "
I believe by Godwin's Law you have just forfeited the argument ;-)
But since you brought it up, Hitler wasn't Hitler at first either. Auschwitz didn't open the day after the Reichstag fire. The current U.S. government is not going to open Auschwitz 2.0 tomorrow, but they are (I note with dismay from the outside, but not nearly far enough outside) many more steps along that path than any U.S. government of my lifetime. It is lead by a man who has spent years spewing fascist rhetoric, was involved in an attempt to seize control of the government by force. A man who has repeatedly threatened and attempted to coerce his political rivals and is currently wielding the powers of his office in a number of *extremely unprecedented ways* in order to suppress dissent. A man who is making constant attempts to circumvent the checks and balances inherent to U.S. government and weaken both congress and the judiciary. And who is now deploying the national guard to a state whose governor does not want them there, in a way that seems pretty deliberately inflammatory. So when that government puts a dangerous charlatan in charge of HHS and that person starts talking about treating extremely common disorders with medically unsound practices that involve housing people in separate (apparently remote) locations *some concern is damn well appropriate.*
[1] And even then, only if journalists are allowed to collect independent information on them.
[2] Assuming, of course, that methods with absolutely no medical basis do *not* actually prove to be magic cure-alls and the recovery rate is as abysmal as anyone with an ounce of sense would expect.
Bright light therapy has a moderate effect size on depressive symptoms - most trials in this meta analysis used light boxes, but sunlight during the day would have a similar or greater impact (measured in lux)
Being outside in nature has a positive effect on depressive symptoms
And in terms of the physical tasks associated with farming - cognitive behavioural therapy is among the best characterised, most robust treatments for depression, and an essential component is setting measurable, achievable goals such that the patient learns to challenge their beliefs of guilt and worthlessness. “I milked a cow today and fed the chickens” is a concrete thing that correlates with improvement. (Of course it doesn’t have to be farming related tasks! “I did the shopping today and cleaned the bathroom” is also fine! But there’s clearly benefit to nature and sunlight, as discussed above.)
"Re your claim that farming (being active outdoors with specific tasks to complete) has no basis in evidence to treat mental illness"
Pretty weird to see you throwing out links about a claim that I did not actually make.
(For the nitpicky: I did say something sorta similar in a comment that posted *after* this reply of Turtle's. But first, it's still very plainly lying w.r.t. the comment Turtle was actually answering--the other comment hadn't even been written yet--and second, "sorta similar" still isn't "the same." The differences are still relevant.)
I think, more often than not, the liar is unaware. I find it more effective to couch the correction as potentially strengthening their argument by elimination of the falsehood.
Great! Then let me take the opportunity to once again point out how using a term like "wokeness" is terrible communicative practice that hurts clarity and actively aids in the sort of deceptions you're railing against. I mean, look at how you used it here: if "racism is bad and you shouldn't defend it" qualifies as "wokeness"--and not just incidental wokeness, but such a central example that you felt the need to apologize for ragging on it specifically before using it as an example--then apparently "wokeness" has been around for decades upon decades and is shared by quite a large slice of the political spectrum. When leftists say "wokeness is just a right wing term for 'basic decency'" this is *exactly* what they're talking about.
Obligatory disclaimer: on the object level I do agree that framing a bar fight as being distinctly racially charged is bad and dishonest and its perfectly fair to push back against it as a lie. I'll even agree that if someone did deliberately frame it that way, that person was likely motivated by some more radical political agenda *not* shared by a large fraction of the political spectrum. But I pretty much guarantee the average person spreading such a misinterpretation--regardless of how it originated--would be motivated by the more ordinary sort disgust for racism, with carelessness and short attention spans letting the lie/mistake slip through.
(If you were referring to an actual specific incident here, you neither provided a link nor any clear way to find it, so I apologize if there are pertinent details I'm simply unaware of.)
It makes more sense if read as using 'defend' in the sense just alluded to in the opening paragraph, i.e. the act of trying to correct lies about [X] in a way that would even partially mitigate the offense described in the lie. (If the scare quotes on "defend" were retained, that reading might surface more easily, but yes, as written it does look more the way you read it.)
It is similar to calling me petty for caring about political messages you took great care to slip into art, advertisements, or other facets of culture.
It's not worth your time to correct lies, because the default is lying. Instead it's better to look at incentives and increase uncertainty in any case with a moral justification to lie. To quote Mark Twain (and my stats prof) there's three kinds of lies: "lies, damn lies, and statistics." My contacts in science labs confirm that lying with statistics is the norm; advancement requires lying while honest researchers are held back. What's the harm after all? Just do one experiment then use statistics to turn it into as many as you need to get the p value required for publishing. Save time, money, and stress. And science is probably the most honest field: my experiences in business, rural living, and government indicate at least the same level of rampant deception. This has nothing to do with our time and everything to do with human nature; like Diogenes, the search for an honest man even with both lamp and daylight turns up only a blush.
Where does the line fall between lying and condensing a shorthand descriptor?
The example I'm thinking of is the infamous phrase "open borders."
Alice accuses Bob of being in favor of "open borders." Bob says "I've never said the phrase 'open borders' and don't support that!" So they go back and forth, Bob is opposed to approximately any border enforcement, doesn't want illegal immigrants deported, supports recurring amnesties, but continues to dislike the phrase "open borders."
Is Alice *lying* to say that *functionally* Bob supports open borders? Should she waste her breath saying instead "Bob appears to hold a stance indistinguishable from but not actually called due to some unstated technicality 'open borders'"?
You've said before that lying is quite a narrowly defined concept, so I'm curious how narrowly.
This also works the other way with phrases like "defund the police," where people using the shorthand descriptor argue against what it sounds like it means.
> Is Alice *lying* to say that *functionally* Bob supports open borders?
Alice and Bob are speaking different languages. Bob supports what is called 'open borders' in Alice's dialect but those words describe a different policy in his own.
To Bob, the border is a door, and whether a door is open or closed is fundamentally a separate matter from how closely you guard it or how you treat people who pass through it uninvited.
To Alice, the border is an invitation, and whether an invitation is open or closed is much more strongly determined by how widely the invitation is extended and how the uninvited who try to enter are treated.
Thanks for the very good point. Definitional differences can defintely cause misunderstanding.
To check my assumptions, I searched for the definition of Open Borders. Based on the search, it seemed that somebody could claim that they are not for Open Borders if they support checkpoints at the border that only allow people with the right documentation in and no other immigration enforcement. There would still be de jure borders and enforcement. In ProfGerm's example, I am not sure if Bob would be against my border checkpoint requirement. If he is not, then I think there is a misunderstanding. Alice should not say Bob supports "Open Borders" if she wants to 100% correct.
Though, in the setup given, I have no issues with Alice saying Bob supports "functionally open borders". I view that as an accurate description. A more fancy wording would be "de facto open borders", which would communicate that even though there are laws, in reality, the border is open.
Yeah, besides Alice and Bob, there is a Charlie in Bob's party who explicitly wants open borders, saying moving from Mexico to Texas should be roughly as frictionless and unsupervised as moving from New Mexico to Texas. When Bob says he is against open borders, he is saying he is not Charlie. Bob wants an immigration process, but one with less draconian enforcement than the one Alice envisions.
(The issue with saying Alice saying Bob supports 'functionally open borders' is that when she does so Charlie laughs at both of them and says 'I wish'.)
Laws punish the lawbreakers but they also steer the law-abiding. A library that does away with late fees does not thereby declare open season on plundering its shelves.
Bob's model of an immigration lawbreaker is someone he focuses on sympathy towards, so he does not want the law to be harsh on them and thinks poorly of Alice for doing so, but (unlike Charlie) he does still want the law-abiding steered to follow immigration processes.
Alice's model of an immigration lawbreaker is someone she focuses on threat from, so she does want the law to be firm in its application; she feels the process of filtering for the law-abiding is doing loadbearing work and thinks poorly of Bob for appearing to ignore it.
In most cases I've seen where the Alices of the world use the phrase "open borders" it is not the claimed position of Bob, it's just an immigration policy two steps less restrictive than what Alice would like.
In a good faith discussion between sensible people, Alice and Bob would acknowledge that they are using the term "open borders" slightly differently, and would agree to set that term aside for now and clarify what their actual differences are. This would be dealt with quickly and they could get on with the actual discussion of their policy preferences.
This almost never happens in real life, but if it does then you might have found yourself in one of those very rare political discussions which is actually worth your time.
"You should obviously remain kind and sensitive in contexts where that’s relevant. If Joe Criminal was 5% less psychopathic than the rumors say, you can correct some unrelated tough-on-crime advocate about it, but I wouldn’t bother his victims."
Why shouldn't we bother his victims, they are the most likely ones to lie. I don't like the rule of not bothering with victims due to some perceived emotional sensitivity, most people who lie like this will be doing it because of some emotional attachment to the issue.
Presumably because it does more damage than it helps the world. A creature like David Hogg is an exception to this rule because of how he was anointed.
A few people have commented (imo correctly) that it's important to be selective about who you take the time to correct, because some people may maliciously be trying to distract you or may just be a crank. I want to add one additional angle, which is that you also want to make sure your response doesn't accidentally end up signal boosting the original bad take. "Lending legitimacy by deigning to respond" is a real thing.
Among other rules, I try to follow a rule of only criticizing up, that is, responding and correcting those who have more followers/subscribers/clout/impact than I do. This is in large part why I think engaging with people like, say, Yarvin, is a mistake for someone like Scott.
> "Lending legitimacy by deigning to respond" is a real thing.
I don't agree: I think this is a phantasmal concern.
Most people are badly miscalibrated about what has legitimacy among other social groups, and often their own (due to social desirability bias). Indeed, Curtis Yarvin probably has a higher profile than Scott right now, in the USA of 2025, and that is certainly true among certain subcultures.
Scott spent considerable time rebutting the idea, in "Contra Kavanaugh on Fideism" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism). If you want to promote it here, I'm not going respect your argument unless you show that you've at least grappled with the counter-arguments.
1) Just on face, Scott doesn't argue against the idea of signal boosting -- that is, the possibility that rebuttal results in the spread of the original idea. He says "you should do it anyway for abc reasons."
2) Everyone implicitly chooses what to respond to all the time. This is a basic requirement of existing. Scott has, afaik, never responded to the bad takes of anonguy2353, who has exactly 2 followers. For that matter, he also has never responded to Alex Jones. Maybe I can't speak for Scott. Maybe he would respond to the whole world if he had time. But the reason *I* don't respond to the random schizophrenic spouting conspiracies on the subway is because I don't think the perspective is legitimate enough to justify a response. I suspect this is true for most people.
3) As an intuition pump, imagine that we were discussing a podcast or interview instead of a blog. If Scott brought a neonazi into his podcast, and the neonazi used the time to spout racist bullshit, I think it's reasonable to say that Scott's platform gave the man reach and legitimacy. *EVEN IF* Scott's goal is to debunk the Nazi. Linking to someone's blog is imo the same.
I explicitly say that you should criticize up for this reason. Scott's analysis of ivermectin is important because he was criticizing the position of a man with a much larger reach than himself: Trump. More generally, I think it is a great public service to use your writing to push back on things that are wrong that a great many people believe in. But also, I believe that someone with a following has to be thoughtful about what he ends up spreading to that audience.
Misc other things:
- who are you that I should care about whether you respect my argument?
- Scott has 4x the number of followers as Yarvin, last I checked. I'm open to hearing some other method of measuring clout, but one upside of Twitter is you can pretty directly get a sense of someone's reach.
Likewise. I was familiar with the concept, and with some examples of McNamara committing it, but not with the specific name for it.
I'd previously thought of it as a corollary of Goodhart's Law ("When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") in cases where the measure was a useful proxy for most of the harder-to-measure stuff when you were only passively observing, or a special case of the Drunkard's Search Fallacy (a reference to the old joke about searching for dropped car keys under a lamppost because the light is better than the area where they fell) in cases where the metric was never a particularly good one..
Yes, this is the one I was familiar with too. I found the McNamara one linked on the Wikipedia page for the Streetlight effect, and thought it was more precisely what I had in mind.
The McNamara fallacy: "the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist." (Yankelovich 1971)
1 - It's true that Scott spends far more time on the positive case for investigating and writing about outlandish ideas than he does rebutting your idea about "lending legitimacy by deigning to respond". But he does not spend zero time. In fact, "lending legitimacy" is the entire motivation for Kavanaugh's criticism of Scott. Here's one of the tweets Scott was responding to (emphasis mine):
> It's indulgent & potentially misleading as 𝘪𝘵 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘢 𝘰𝘧 𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘺 when it is much more akin to debating with 9/11 truthers. If studies had supported Ivermectin as an effective treatment it would have been adopted... [https://x.com/C_Kavanagh/status/1625401031390814208]
2 - "Everyone implicitly chooses what to respond to all the time". All true, but also irrelevant. I haven't argued otherwise.
3 - You wrote:
> Scott's analysis of ivermectin is important because he was criticizing the position of a man with a much larger reach than himself: Trump.
But Scott was criticizing Alexandros Marinos, not Trump. Maybe you could stretch a bit and say 𝘉𝘳𝘦𝘵 𝘞𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘪𝘯 was his real target. But if you want to say he's arguing with Trump because Trump shared Alexandros' / Weinstein's position, doesn't that defeat your argument?
If you allow transitive targeting, you can characterize nearly any argument as "criticizing up", since it's easy to find someone with tremendous reach who holds weird view X.
Additionally, I disagree with this: "I think it's reasonable to say that Scott's platform gave the man reach and legitimacy." Reach, yes. Legitimacy, no.
Here's an intuition pump for you: would a critical documentary about young-earth adherents legitimize it? Would watching it make you update in their direction? What about flat-earthers? I don't think so, unless the subjects were people you already respected, or they brought new, inconceivably compelling evidence to light.
Misc responses:
- I'm just an internet rando. You can take it or leave my respect, and maybe I should have put it another way, but my point would have been the same.
- "Scott has 4x the number of followers as Yarvin, last I checked." This is availability bias. Twitter is a reasonable first approximation for certain kinds of figures, but Yarvin now has direct access to people in positions of political power, and acknowledged influence on more. At any rate, didn't you just write that Scott's rebuttal of Alexandros was tantamount to criticizing Trump? Well, Yarvin to Trump is an even shorter hop.
> "Everyone implicitly chooses what to respond to all the time". All true, but also irrelevant. I haven't argued otherwise.
I think this is important, and shouldn't be easily dismissed. The reason I bring this up is because given that you are already making decisions about what you respond to, concerns about signal boosting ought be one of the factors that goes into that decision. I think there can be many other factors.
> If you allow transitive targeting, you can characterize nearly any argument as "criticizing up", since it's easy to find someone with tremendous reach who holds weird view X.
A few misc thoughts and reactions.
First, a some clarifications that I hope will make my point more clear.
- I think that many people definitely hold weird views that they mostly keep to themselves. Responding to someone just because they have a weird view they keep to themselves isn't really worthwhile, and I wouldn't recommend that. For e.g., Tom Cruise is a scientologist, but afaik he doesn't tell everyone to convert to scientology, so making a big thing about scientology *just because Tom Cruise is a scientologist* doesn't really make sense (and likely has the same signal boosting effect I mentioned earlier).
- I also think that many people hold weird views that they do evangelize, but they do so in a way where *your particular response* is not going to move the needle. Alex Jones says the water makes frogs gay and Sandy Hook didn't happen. Ok...nothing Scott or I or anyone writes is going to really change people who believe this. "Sandy Hook did happen", no duh?
As I said originally, my take is "you shouldn't respond to people with bad takes if your response is just going to signal boost the original bad take." I think that one heuristic to determine whether or not you will end up signal boosting or not is by looking at your relative follower counts, but it's not a perfect heuristic by any means (as other people have pointed out, how influential the followers are matters, though imo its hard to judge)
> Here's an intuition pump for you: would a critical documentary about young-earth adherents legitimize it? Would watching it make you update in their direction? What about flat-earthers? I don't think so, unless the subjects were people you already respected, or they brought new, inconceivably compelling evidence to light.
Unfortunately, I do think that a critical documentary about young-earth adherents would legitimize it. It wouldn't necessarily make *me* update in their direction, but I no longer really believe that I am modal. Say you have a group of 100 people who have never heard of young-earth creationism before. And then you show them all the documentary you're talking about. Do you think all 100 people would think that young-earth creationism is now wrong? Or is it likely that 95 would think that its wrong, and maybe 5 are, for whatever reason, now convinced that it's right? What if you showed it to 1000 people? What about 10000 people? If you showed it to 10000 people, and the same percentages hold, there are now ~500 people who think young-earth creationism is correct. That's a lot of people. More than enough to become self-propagating, Chinese Robbers style. Exposure of ideas matters! (you can also cf social contagion as a more well studied version of this phenomenon)
Sure, but generally speaking I think it's quite difficult to evaluate the quality of someone's audience, compared to the quantity. I tend to assume that the clout of any particular person's following is more or less normally distributed. Scott too has a readership that includes some very important people.
Seconding theahura's point here - remember the NYT petition letter? There were a LOT of heavy hitters signing that thing, Scott has some really influential readers.
This is the rock in the stream which I have spent much of my life dashing myself against. I was a European-style socialist in the early 70s, then started taking my childhood Christianity seriousl,y in the late 70s, hanging out with both evangelicals and mainstreamers, immersing myself in CS Lewis. I worked in a state psychiatric hospital among very liberal people who did this type of lying-by-exaggeration frequently. It was part of the culture of criticising gun-owners, Christians, pro-lifers, conservatives, and those icky (I'm sorry, "salt-of-the-earth") blue-collar people. This dragged me continually rightward, as a perhaps childish and obsessive Fair Play ethic dominated my politics. Psychiatrists and social workers sniggered when someone tried to assassinate Reagan and Bush Jr. But they gasped and were horrified when some acute patient said that Clinton or Obama should die and wonder if we should call the FBI (which they knew was against confidentiality without a direct threat.)
As you note, this has only gotten worse over time, with wokeness being the worst of examples. I went off FB because of my own family self-righteously and viciously doing this
However...
I had always heard at least some of this lying-by-exaggeration from conservatives, and sadly, more often from Christian conservatives. It pains me to see it and admit it, but it is so. And this also has gotten worse over time and is currently the worst I have seen. The character reasons I left liberalism about are now increasing in conservatives.
Who to correct? What should be challenged? If I enter the mudwrestling can I stay above it? I am very mindful of the command to remove the log from my (our) own eye before removing the speck in another. In practice, I find that both methods fail, at least in terms of changing minds. I accept that minds are seldom changed, and then only by those who were close to your POV to being with. I continue to do both. I continue to choose poorly most of the time.
I am very grateful for you noticing this and expressing it cleanly.
In my opinion, if you just get honest with yourself and treat the sides with the same level of skepticism and engagement, you will enter the discussions with Christian conservatives and end up pushed leftwards in the exact same way as you were pushed rightwards.
As another (Anglican, rank-and-file, imperfect) Christian I can suggest a specific starting point. Read the sermon that Bishop Mariann Budde delivered to Trump. Leave aside the "is she a lawful Bishop and can she preach at all as she is female" debate, just read the sermon itself, compare it to your basic Christian faith. Then discuss with the Christian conservatives.
You really misunderstood me here. I am in constant conversation with Christian conservatives and have been for years. Some have always been difficult, some have become difficult over the past decade, but the group as a whole remains the only group I can generally have a discussion with that will be polite and listen to both sides and is able to articulate their opponent's POV.
So if I "just get honest with myself," eh? No tone problems and condescension there? It is my long experience that liberals let sneering creep in (as opposed to conservatives, who let pronouncements creep in) because it is the water that they swim in and don't notice.
Bishop Budde is an excellent example of this. She has supported nothing but liberal causes but tells Trump not to be partisan. Log. Speck. Remember? I can find her nowhere on record of asking any prominent Democrat to have mercy on the people who were afraid of them. Not Obama, not Biden, not Hillary. How much money would you put down that she will admonish the protestors to have mercy on those who fear them? She loves thinking that she is trying to take down the powerful, showing her fearlessness by telling her tribe what they want to hear and nothing more. She gives not an inch about excesses on her side - not even a polite nod - and bids others listen to her spiritual authority.
As for matching up with the gospel, it is simply tiring at this point to keep saying that Jesus did not advocate for Christians to transfer their good works to the government. ("Oh well, BUT...") yes, I have heard it many times. The motte-and-bailey arguments Scott quoted above are good examples.
Saying that I don't want conservatives to become as vicious as liberals have been for fifty years is not likely to be well-countered by you telling me "Oh, but if you just listened to them, you would find that the liberal Christians have basically got this gospel thing down just fine and aren't vicious at all."
I do doubt your objectivity when you say you "don't want conservatives to become as vicious as liberals" - if, and that's an important qualifier, we're talking of the people of the movements that identify as Christians.
Hardline purist leftists/progressives ("liberals" is sometimes used in the US but is a misnomer for them *and they often admit as much*) are usually expressly not Christian. But hardline purist conservatives are usually expressly Christian. Tht's what creates this imbalance rather than a hypothetical inner quality of progressives-as-a-class.
Havind said that, I agree that there is, in the more traditionally conservative circles, a certain decorum, which I do appreciate. It is not widely visible in the public square lately, because the peanut gallery is just that loud, but it is often there if conversations get personal (in my experience, this is more common with Roman Catholics, but maybe I have limited exposure).
However, sadly, one *can* be pretty vicious in policy matters while also keeping a civilized face. This particular duality happens more often to conservatives, the progressive mirror is probably the "kindness to all ... except" shtick.
And that's where my "honest with yourself" part comes back in. I would suggest that, apart from personality/style issues, the viciouisness pushed *in policy* by the conmservatives among Christians is much worse. And if we exclude certain foreign policy matters (Israel/Palestine), then even when comparing wide sides in general and not just Christians, the conservative viciousness might be much worse. And I think that if you let yourself compare the actual policies suggested to the basic faith you hold, that would push you left-ward, not all the way of course.
This is not to say there is no viciousness on the progressive side; notably, censorious tendencies are just outright shared by both sets of hardliners.
Last point: on "Jesus did not advocate for Christians to transfer their good works to the government". This is very familiar from the tax-and-spend debate of the Bush/Clinton/maybe Obama era. If all, or most, Trump did was pull tax money, if the reason why people feared Trump was just that he would take away their entitlements, I would certainly see the point - "why are well-off liberals lamenting that instead of organizing direct charitable aid to replace the lost funds?"
But Trump isn't Bush. He's not "just cutting welfare", he's sending people to foreign concentration camps without due process and refuses to obey direct court orders to require at least one innocent person freed from such a camp. And "evangelical Christians" cheer this on and libel the innocent person as a "gangster". Trump is also detaining people who are legal permanent residents solely for speech that is Constitutionally legal - and "evangelical Christians" cheer this on beacuse they don't like the speech.
No direct charitable aid can fix *this*. It *is* a matter of the civil power staying within the limits in Romans 13. "Not transferring good works to the government" doesn't mean "don't limit government coercion".
Thank you for this honest comment. I think faith and family are much more important than politics. I have managed to find a church where the pastor basically never discusses politics (unless you count praying for peace in the Middle East and Ukraine as “political.”)
So, I don’t think it’s worth losing sleep over what people on “your side” believe. Build a small community of like minded people, choose love and community, always seek to remove the plank from your own eye first, etc.
I can see what you see - people on both sides are more hypocritical and partisan than ever - but I think this too is temporary. We are in a global war, not of weapons, but of information. But the war will eventually end and truth will eventually come out.
My church has few political bumper stickers or decals, but they come from both sides. The sermons occasionally get a little more political than your place, but not much. It is indeed the case that for Christians, getting the right political answer may not be as important as the way we got there and how we treated each other along the way. As with all denominations (we are ECC), the clergy is more liberal than those in the pews, but it is manageable and not a bad thing. The challenges are usually fair. This was deeply untrue when I was Lutheran.
I keep looking for ways to articulate why truth and accuracy are important. This helps a bit but I worry that people who exaggerate or lie in this way either don’t think they are doing that or don’t care, and I am not sure if this argument will convince them. But I’m glad you spelled it out.
"we escalate all the way to the point we actually escalated to, where people have said in all seriousness that Trump might try to put all minorities in camps and murder them" you write, as an example of unreasonable escalation.
Trump is factually putting people from minorities into camps. Into *foreign* camps too, on his direct orders, and when the Supreme Court orders him to order a person released from tje camp, he refuses to do so. Meanwhile his vocal supporters libel the innocent victim of this lawlessness (Garcia) as a gang member - I do think this is actual malice, but his lawyers dont have the resources for defamation lawsuits, they are trying to get him out from what *can* very well be a deatrh camp (because it totally lacks accountability except to a dictator).
Now, I do understand that "bad things are happening so radical conclusion must be true" is a fallacy. I've fallen out with at east one anti-Zionist beacuse she thought I was very unreasonable to refuse to go from "Israel, led by Netanyahu, is doing specific bad things" to "Israel under any leadership should not exist".
But can we at least agree that Trump proves that "the woke" *have a point* in some things that originally seemed outlandish? Yes. they can over-labour the point. but they do have one.
Also: if we now see that their views have some reasonable basis, then maybe entertain an alternate theory to "they are lying" when they do exaggerrate, as in your "racism vs bar fight" example? I would suggest that a much more feasible theory is "they have tunnel vision". Also known as "if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Unlike lying (a wilful, rightly ethically suspect act), tunnel vision is often not chosen and not necessarily culpable.
The tunnel vision theory also creates a platform for constructive engagement. To run with the bar fight, one can actually remember how privilege theory works (not the same as agreeing with it) and suggest a comparator - "imagine they were both white, what would have been different, what would remain the same". That's a start on common ground, while "you're lying" is adversarial and shows no common ground even if qualified with "in 5% of what you say".
>But can we at least agree that Trump proves that "the woke" *have a point* in some things that originally seemed outlandish?
No, because this is an *extremely noncentral* example of putting minorities in camps, to the point where describing it in a way that implies central examples amounts to a lie by normal people's standards.
How is it in any way "noncentral"? Unless, that is, you swallow the propaganda lies that they are all some kind of violent gangsters. If it was *remotely close to the truth* there would be a string of prosecutions instead, much more politically expedient, much less legally risky.
Dot gov sites have rapidly become a propaganda arm of the Trump administration. It’s truly incredible. By tradition these have been non partisan public service information. Now it’s all MAGA speak.
The CapLocked words in the headline should have tipped you off. Ordinary writers for government web sites have never done that goofy tabloid presentation. You are reading a Truth Social post. The typography not to mention tone give it away immediately.
‘THE REAL STORY’ indeed.
Why do you seem so compelled to LARP as someone who has a direct stake in the game anyway? This isn’t just an amusing debate topic for life long US citizens. The institutions will likely hold but a slide into authoritarianism is uncomfortably possible.
You takes tend toward the glib and flippant. We don’t see it so casually here because we live with the direct consequences.
I believe in basic liberal constitutional principles such as "legally presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law".
The text at the link is blatant, Soviet-level propaganda. The worst part of it is a US government arm openly claiming "he belongs behind bars" while refusing him due process and even refusing a direct court order to require him returned to the US to stand trial.
The last time the US Federal government fully leaned into the premise that people should be deprived of freedom in times of peace without due process was in 1850 with the blatantly unconstitutional "Fugutive" "Slave" "law". The result was the Civil War. Thankfully the Supreme Court is not the Taney clown circus this time, but Trump seems to be descending to Andrew Jackson's level of ignoring the courts.
“There must have been some reason it was worth your time to lie.” I think this is the key point here. The exchange should go like this: “[Lie].” “[correction of lie].” “You really think that makes a difference?” “Yes, i do, and i think you do too, or else you would have told the truth.”
How do you know it's a lie? In the hypothetical example given it seems not implausible to infer from a racial slur that racial animus was a motivating factor even given additional circumstances. And even if it were implausible plenty of people believe implausible things without necessarily being liars. You are doing the exact thing you are warning about where you dislike woke people so you interpret their actions in a 20% or whatever more negative light than justified by the facts.
I think the point of that example was that a bar fight was going to happen regardless of whether he used a racial slur or merely called him an asshole, so portraying it as a random hate crime is misleading.
That's Scott view of these sets of facts, but my point is that someone could see the same facts and have a different view without being a liar. The motivation of the person who punched the guy is not actually knowable with certainty. And the use of a slur is relevant evidence; the woke person's view is not coming out of nowhere.
“Hey everyone, Joe Target shouted a racial slur and punched a black guy in the face because he hates minorities so much! This proves that we need hate crime legislation immediately!”
The statement Scott objects to relies on asserting that Joe Target’s motivations *are* known with certainty. So that’s a problem.
The other problem is that the woke person in the example is excluding relevant information - ignoring that the punch occurred as part of a fight frames it falsely as a random assault. It’s a lie by omission.
A lie has to be deliberately misleading. A lie of omission would mean leaving out information in order to give an impression to others that you believe to be false. But I don't think we are compelled to read the woke person's claim as deliberately misleading. They genuinely believe this is a case of racial motivated violence (and not without reason) and they are focusing on the aspect of the event that they find most significant. The other details are, from their perspective, extraneous and unnecessary in their short message.
I think that’s being excessively charitable. In any case, the omission is still worth correcting because it’s potentially relevant to a neutral observer even if the woke person disagrees. The woke person would be in the wrong if they objected to someone providing this additional context.
"In any case, the omission is still worth correcting" -- Yes I fully agree but the whole point of Scott's post that even if a person is in the wrong it's important to push back on exaggeration in just how in the wrong they are. So Scott exaggerating how bad his enemies are is equally worth correcting.
Anyways, I don't think Scott is accusing them of lying just because of missing context. He thinks the whole claim that Joe's attack was racially motivated is a lie: "But if your only real point is that racism exists and causes harm, you could have said that racism exists and causes harm, and that wouldn’t have been a lie. Instead you chose to talk about how Joe Target punched the black guy because of racism." I think this is just a huge misreading of how woke people think. Even given all the additional context, if someone attacks a black person after calling them a racial slur they will genuinely see that as racist. They aren't lying just because Scott disagrees with them. People genuinely have different perspectives on things.
I agree it’s good to have a culture like this and rationalists do in fact have a culture like this. If you live outside a rationalist bubble, I advise you to not do this, because everyone will be annoyed at you and you’ll be less persuasive overall. Most people hate “well actually” people, so if you want those people to like you, it’s better to not be that guy.
A problem happens when the "lie" *doesn't* make the argument 5% stronger, because it's something that to a close approximation nobody cares about in relation to the point of the "lie". If you claim that Scott Alexander ate pineapple on pizza on Tuesday and your audience is made up of pizza fanatics who really hate pineapple on pizza but don't care what day of the week it is, going "well, *actually* it was Wednesday" may be correcting an untruth, but correcting this untruth in this context is bad behavior and absolutely deserves all the disdain you say such things shouldn't get.
In this connection also remember that people are able to lie and say "I honestly think that being on Wednesday is material to the point" when they really don't and just want to derail the argument. So you can't just be a quokka and automatically believe everyone who claims their nitpick is really material.
I generally agree, but need to call out these sentences: "I hate to rag on wokeness further in the Year Of Our Lord 2025, but they’re still the best example I’ve ever seen. You weren’t supposed to defend racists. And so:" Okay, at least Scott qualified this with "I've ever seen", but I doubt that's true -- if so, he hasn't been listening to anything since January. How about Pamela Bondi on Judge James Boasberg (March 19): "And the question should be, why is the judge trying to protect terrorists who invaded our country over American citizens?” Calling Kilmar Abrego Garcia a terrorist is a lie. Calling due process something that non-citizens aren't entitled to is another lie. And calling a judge a terrorist sympathizer when he rules against your boss is exactly the behavior that Scott is calling out. The problem with ragging on wokeness in 2025 is that the best current examples of "wokeness" are the statements coming out of the Trump administration -- only speech which is "pro-American" (as defined by them) is allowed. The only real victims of discrimination are Afrikaaners.
> Calling Kilmar Abrego Garcia a terrorist is a lie. Calling due process something that non-citizens aren't entitled to is another lie. And calling a judge a terrorist sympathizer when he rules against your boss is exactly the behavior that Scott is calling out.
These are all opinions, and they are very important opinions, as they are the opinions of people calling the shots in this country. There is no physical law that dictates that non-citizens are entitled to due-process. And written laws are a compromise that falls apart when it stops suiting all parties with leverage.
The words of the Constitution are plain: citizenship status is not mentioned in the 5th Amendment, which reads "No person ..." I may hold the opinion that it doesn't say that, but until SCOTUS interprets it differently, or the amendment is repealed or otherwise changed, my opinion is false.
Garcia is, to our best knowledge, a member of a designated terrorist group, see https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/04/16/kilmar-abrego-garcia-ms-13-gang-member-history-violence. You can argue with the designation of ms 13 as terrorist, you can argue that the legal burden of proof should be higher and that it's not enough to merely be engaged in human trafficking, work together with other members of MS-13, being arrested while holding cash and drugs, wear gang symbols known to be associated with MS-13 and to publicly claim yourself to be persecuted by a rival gang of MS-13, in addition to other evidence that he is violent and criminal (though in a way unrelated to MS-13), but calling this a lie is quite bold.
When DHS has every motive to make up something – anything – that will allow them to save face in the aftermath of all these contradictions?
And when the crux of the judicial pushback against his deportation was only ever that he deserved due process, which he still deserves, even if he is all of the things you accuse him of being, because the 5th amendment guarantees due process to all people, citizen or not?
Nope. But you’ve caused me to call into question one thing: I no longer am sure that I agree with Scott’s argument. It sure doesn’t feel worth my while to take the time to refute all these falsehoods.
Well, another problem with sloppy facts meant as evidence for your social justice pet cause is that sometimes the actual facts point to another type of social injustice which is being neglected in the cultural discourse. The most stunning example that comes to my mind is the shooting spree that took place in Atlanta in March 2021, in which the victims were predominantly Asian. It was highlighted far and wide as an example of anti-Asian racism (which was a real issue that, during the brief 2020-21 period when COVID dominated the scene, there was some market for). I knew people who saw the headlines and assumed without question that the mass murderer did it out of hatred for Asians, because why else would most of his victims be Asian? Practically every mention of it on social media was accompanied by a StopAsianHate hashtag. I even remember, for a many months afterwards, a video advertisement I kept seeing (on YouTube? some streaming website I frequented) which briefly stated what the shooter did and then said, in a self-assured voice, "He killed them because they were Asian."
And yet, I remember knowing, within a day or two of the tragedy, just from hearing details of it come out, that all evidence points to the motive being nothing of the kind: the young man had some sort of sex addiction and frequented massage parlors (which do tend to be disproportionately run by people of East Asian ethnicity and background*) and one day confronted his demons by snapping and going on a shooting spree *against the sex workers in that type of massage parlor*. If his behavior was any evidence of a larger-scale bigoted attitude, it was clearly about sexism (almost all of his murder victims were women, although what I didn't know until much later was that a couple of men were shot as well) and more specifically (arguably) a hate crime against sex workers. But since racism was the main issue de jour in 2020-21 -- with feminism having faded in the background and with no large-scale concern for sex workers never really having entered the picture in the first place -- everyone glommed onto the assumption that this was about anti-Asian hate.
Correcting the wrong assumptions and characterization of this tragedy isn't so much about "stopping the woke from exaggerating" or about dialing back concern over anti-Asian racism (which had come on people's radars so briefly, thanks to COVID, that amplifying concern about it was not a bad thing in and of itself); it's about directing concern towards other social ills that *also* deserved concern and tended to be neglected.
*It would be valid to instigate a conversation about this phenomenon -- namely that certain categories of sex work are associated with Asian women -- in the wake of the tragedy, and how it fits into a model of anti-Asian racism and so on. But this seems quite secondary among the issues the event pointed to.
In a vacuum, you are not wrong. But it seems odd how the corrections are not correlated to the number or severity of lies, but appear highly correlated to the politics behind the lie.
Like, I get you don't want to do culture war stuff, but the leadership of one group lies outrageously, all the time, about everything. The other group also lies, less frequently in the form of cringy exaggerations. Make the moral case for why the latter group needs to be held to stricter account than the former.
I recently got "well actually"ed in regards to literal frog boiling. I was sitting in a hot tub at a rural airbnb thing with my wife and I told her about how frogs don't actually stay in water as the temp gets raised. They're smart enough to jump out. I guess I was "well actually"ing her now that I think of it. Anyway, a few seconds later we found a boiled frog on the side of the tub, apparently dead trying to climb out. I suppose it could have jumped into an already hot tub, so I "actually" am still too ignorant to talk about this phenomenon.
> if you _want_ to correct it, people don’t get to call you “cringe” or describe it as “well acktually”.
Unfortunately, the notion of “cringe” isn’t wholly based on objective facts, but is often defined by a high-status member of the group. So yes, they do get to call you “cringe,” because then if you dig your heel in and ask them “What could be more cringe than telling small lies, then bullying anyone who tries to correct you, in the hopes that future audience will be too cowed to speak up?”, they can simply respond, “well acktually, exhibit A,” while pointing at you. And at the best case you gnawed at a few percent of their followers, because anyone who would stoop so low already had enough character flaws to filter out the morally just members of their audience.
I enthusiastically endorse your main point, but, quite ironically, I pedantically disagree with your example.
In the racism example, I think--even if it's a bar fight and the black guy insulted his wife--without knowing more context, the mere fact that he shouted a racial slur in your example seems to indicate the fight was at least in part about race. Racism might not be a necessary or sufficient cause, but it's reasonable to infer it's a cause. "Because" does not necessarily refer only to precipitating causes. (If you didn't mention the racial slur, I would think it's a good example.)
I would tend to agree; I can't really imagine a scenario where I call someone an identity based slur even if they're literally like, an evil toddler-killer, because it's not about them, it's about that whole demographic. You don't refrain from using slurs just because it might hurt the person you're using it on - if that was the full effect, there'd be no reason to refrain from using slurs on people you hate!
I wonder how you feel about the following philosophical proposals:
(1) Knowing the truth is valuable in itself (here I'm just channeling Aristotle); hence it is intrinsically worthwhile to remove impediments to its achievement, e.g., falsehoods (however minor).
(2) Knowing the truth is de facto preeminently practically valuable because practice is about making the world different (perhaps better), and you can't reliably make the world different in any specific way without accurately grasping how the world is at baseline.
Trump is putting minorities in camps. Not all or even most minorities. There's no murder involved. But he's literally shipped people to a torture prison in defiance of court orders.
To speculate that he might escalate in the future isn't a lie, it's reading the room and knowing that past authoritarian regimes started with less than the excesses that made them infamous. Comparing that to the hypothetical example of lying about Joe Target is misleading, since you miss the difference between "we've seen where this might go" and "this is already happening."
I think this is a post about Philosophical Kitsune. Which makes a lot of sense with internet culture because kitsune would hide their true name.
Also, one argument I see commonly is "Before the Equal Opportunity Credit Act it was illegal to give loans to women." It wasn't illegal, it was uncommon. Most lenders didn't want to do it. But it was not illegal. And people become very angry at anyone who points out the difference. I wonder if there's some recognition of 'passing laws to force people to do things they don't want to do is objectifying so deny we're doing it' or if there's something else going on.
There's a funny way the impulse to nitpick can be maliciously exploited to trick the nitpicker into amplifying the message he opposes.
For example, Dominic Cummings' Brexit campaign had a bus driving all over London with a message that said "We send the EU £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead." Naturally, Remainers kept talking about the bus and how the real number was more like £270 million a week, reaching hundreds of times more people with that than who saw the bus with their own eyes.
I believe that the "eating cats and dogs" thing was a deliberate strategy to bring forth and amplify the underlying message of "Why are there 10,000 Haitians in Springfield, Ohio?" Mendacious, but it worked.
That’s how Vance spun it after it was shown to be untrue. I think you give Trump too much credit though. In the moment he said it he might have believed it himself. He acts like the sort of compulsive liars I’ve known.
The most memorable form is by Trump, but I was also referring to the general eating pets rumor that was first started by right-wing anons until reaching the campaign.
I think this is like, the realist's notion of how dialogue should happen. The reality of popular discourse is that people are going to call you autistic for repeatedly doing this, and the general affect of this phenomena is much too strong to combat. It's just living in a society where hyperbolic notions of everything are commonplace. In fact, it is true that he put the minorities in camps, he is authoritarian in his usage of political power, and he is favoring the rich in his tax policy, ergo he is a fascist (I don't wholly believe this). Just like Obama was a filthy socialist (I don't believe this) for giving us healthcare. It's an arms race in terms of rhetoric that nejther side can afford to give up due to the propogandized nature of discourse and such is living in modern society. Hell, news is guilty of this--playing everyday accidents can give the impression that accidents happen all the time, though most times riding on a train or plane doesn't lead to death.
The reality of popular discourse is that someone doing this probably *is* autistic, or is a bad actor pretending to be autistic. And the latter category predominates.
In the real world, nitpicking a 5%-relevant fact is used as a weapon, either to imply that the whole idea is bunk to a degree much greater than 5%, or to just waste people's time and attention so they pay less attention to the other 95%. And of course let's not forget the misleading news article or clickbait title which just reports the whole thing as if the 5% error is the only part of it worth discussing.
One thing people forget about "arguments as soldiers" is that just because *you* don't use arguments that way doesn't mean that other people don't, and it certainly doesn't mean you shouldn't *recognize* that they do. Nitpicking something that's 5% of the argument is usually arguments as soldiers, and when it isn't, it's some quokka autist who doesn't understand that he looks so much like a soldier that people are going to fire at him. Or maybe the worst of both worlds--some guy who uses a lot of motivated reasoning to convince himself that he's just autistically correcting facts, when he's using arguments as soldiers but doesn't want to admit it even to himself.
I think this is somewhat uncharitable to Scott, who I am hopefully assuming is some kind of realist regarding things like political dialogue, or popular dialogue. Which, well, I disagree with wholeheartedly. I think one as a realist necessarily has to set some kind of topological boundary on where sources of the truth come from. I really doubt the libs and the cons and the fash and the commies all hold the truth, given that they mutually contradict. Empirically speaking, popular discourse isn't truth bearing even in contemporary times. I would hesitate to say this article is acting as a soldier, but even if it wasn't, it goes against what I feel is the stronger method of debate in popular discourse (that is, trying to use an opponent's worldview against them, since they very likely have a different view than you on the truth). Coherentism is practical!
There have been cases where I see motivated reasoning from Scott, but he usually seems closer to the autists.
Example: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/26/high-energy-ethics/ where Scott thinks that because something can be parsed as "I'm just asking why atheists should care about violence to their loved ones", there's nothing objectionable about it, as if people don't phrase hatred and contempt in the syntactic form of a rational argument. He also couldn't comprehend that Cade Metz might have been a bad actor from the start, even when people warned him.
Agree on nitpicking but I think you picked a bad example?
Let's say someone disagrees with you on AI alignment (or you insult their wife, whatever), and they call you a racial slur. Is that not symptomatic of anti-Semitism desipute the argument's not being primarily (or at all) racially/ethnically motivated?
Sorry to go this obnoxious direction but, I'm perfectly happy to defend the claim that "There is a significant risk that Trump will put *some* minorities into camps and that there will be *some level of* systematized intentional killing."
A steel man reading of "he was going to put minorities in camps" requires that you take this interpretation, and I think this interpretation is a very reasonable claim on the object level, and that this is a dangerous enough path with a high enough likelihood that to not take it seriously is highly dangerous.
Fair enough, I should have quoted that more accurately. I didn't really notice the distinction in part because what does "all minorities" even mean? Like I'm not going to say that literally nobody says that, but feels like a pretty silly straw man of leftism.
That's right! It is serving as an example of the phenomenon that the blog post is about. He states an exaggeratedly untrue thing, then plays the role of his ideal interlocutor and corrects it, then ends that paragraph with "Would you have let me get away with that exaggeration?" to indicate he is inviting people to think it should be normal to push back on such things in the way he illustrated.
Yes but in the framing of that paragraph, as I read it, this is representing the "less farcical but still ridiculous" claim. I don't know what I'm trying to say here, this corner of the blog post feels extremely semantic and like it loses the plot a little bit, and I'm getting hung up on a kind of dumb example case.
you don't communicate with someone to correct their lies, as a superior to inferior. By doing so you immediately create loss of face, so instead you try to maintain face while introducing the correct data.
"that's odd, the sources i read, like (source a) say its only six murders. Where did you see the info?"
this keeps face while letting him realize he has no source, or letting him provide something of value. If you work sales, you learn you generally walk aside someone, not stand apart pushing.
generally behind an error is some personal need or lack, and ppl get defensive over it. giving face defuses it. you take it on you to defuse.
The only caveat I'd make is that there is also a phenomenon of correcting errors that are not germane to the argument, merely to catch out the speaker in an error and deflect the conversation away from his real claim. In other words, errors that don't make the speaker's argument 5% stronger, but rather are irrelevant to his argument.
Making that kind of correction can serve as a bad debating technique and should be avoided.
"Trump said multiple times during this most recent election that his plan is to deport 20 million illegal immigrants from this country. Many people have pointed out that all our best metrics seem to show that the total number of illegal immigrants in this country is closer to 11.7 million. Although no one seems interested in holding Trump to the same standard that Scott insists anonymous internet commentators should be held to, one implication of Trump's plan is that, should he follow through with demanding deportation quotas based on the 20 million number, many vulnerable immigrants, quite a few of whom are legal, some of whom were previously in one or more forms of protected status, are going to be rounded up and put in immigration detention centers at least temporarily prior to deportation, which some people might characterize as "being put in camps." In fact, we are seeing that the current mass mobilization of ICE is causing them to make many dubious arrests which are being challenged in courts, although not at a speed which is deterring ICE or guaranteeing just results for the people actually being detained, and it is not impossible to foresee a trendline where, as Trump continues to escalate ICE raids in cities that have large immigrant populations, leading to greater and greater numbers of immigrants being put in detention without due process, violating their well-being and the well-being of their communities. There is zero evidence that Trump or the people working under him on this policy have any concern at all for the moral hazard involved in this operation, or are worried about accidentally violating the civil liberties of people who are here legally but are in the same ethnic and economic class as people who are here illegally, and in fact one could hypothesize (but literally never prove to any skeptic's satisfaction) that one intended consequence of these policies is to make everyone who shares that economic and ethnic class less pre-disposed to attempting to enter or stay in this country even by legal means, much in the way that policies isolating Jews in Nazi Germany were originally an attempt to force them to self-deport before things escalated to putting them in camps (which everyone agrees were camps, and of course no other historical parallel dare be drawn). There is not set of facts under which a policy can be judged a moral crime, because moral judgements are not objective, and there are people in this very comment section who would defend much stronger sanctions with greater unintended consequences against illegal immigrants in the same way that they would advocate for the death penalty for shoplifting, so at the end of the day a population to which no regular commentator on this blog shares any close kinship or empathy will ultimately be subject to a great deal of federal action which will disrupt their lives and cause undeniable harm and suffering, but no one who feels the need to vociferously disagree with the undeniably false proposition "Trump would like to put all immigrants in camps" will ever agree that this is a moral outrage but will instead continue to spin it as a justifiable response under a rational cost-benefit analysis schema."
There, my swing at a take worthy of Scott's high-minded ideals. Its a wall of text, admittedly badly written, it contains just as much, if not more room for disagreement even though it represents my best attempt at an honest appraisal of the situation. I'd be genuinely surprised if anyone wanted to engage in it, and to the extent that they do, I would be shocked if any the responses rate make me, any respondent, or any third-party observer feel as if they have engaged in something constructive.
> Many people have pointed out that all our best metrics seem to show that the total number of illegal immigrants in this country is closer to 11.7 million
According to the source you yourself shared, based on the number of people who applied for legalization when it was offered in the mid 80s, the 10-12 was off my an order of magnitude at that time. So its possible its only just catching up to what people were exaggerating 30 years ago.
I'm not an expert, if you want to dive into the statistics and find a credible source for the 20 million claim, I'll at least look at it. But my questions are A) would it be that out of character for Donald Trump to have pulled a number he thought sounded good out of a hat? And more importantly B), on this blog, supposedly a shrine to rationalism and skepticism of mass narratives, are so many people comfortable repeating the claim that we are overrun with illegal immigrants committing crimes and consuming our resources, without at least acknowledging at the very least that the data is in dispute?
> according to this source... people were saying 10 to 12 million back in the 1982 as well
The literal next sentence of that source says those 1982 estimates were way high: "The exaggerated inflation of those numbers was exposed with the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1987 (IRCA). A total of 3 million applied for legalization.".
(Obviously there were more than 3 million illegals because not all of them applied for legalization. But that still suggests 10-12m is an overestimate.)
Pew estimated 3.5m illegals in 1990. Taking that at face value and subtracting the 3m IRCA former-illegals, that puts the 1987 upper bound at 6.5 million illegals. Then it rises for two decades, levelling off at the familiar 10-12m in 2010.
"Trump might try to put all minorities in camps and murder them" isn't a factual statement about history, so how can it be a lie? It's a fear/concern about a possible future, and one I honestly share, as it would seem to be the logical escalation of his actions thus far. Deporting minorities to brutal 3rd world gulags, presumably for life, who were here legally and convicted of no crime is something he has already done, which is a difference in degree, not in kind from "all minorities in camps and murder them."
A bunch of these problems are downstream of money. Lies matter more when they are amplified. When the state has access to a money printer, it can amplify a series of narrative lies designed to bolster its power. And that’s why the woke stuff was all about: justification for infinite state power to accomplish whatever the left wanted. Reality will re-assert itself eventually, as fiscal austerity will start to be mandatory, and tax money will stop flowing to propagandists.
I agree with the principle but I think the specific example is poor. The reason I don't call every person I dislike a rancid piece of shit is because I don't always want to provoke the consequences of doing so. The reason I don't call black people I don't like the N-word is because I'm opposed to the use of racial slurs in general, not because I haven't reached the necessary threshold of disdain to be willing to deploy the nuclear option. I think it's reasonable to paint someone who is willing to use a racial slur as long as they're sufficiently angry at the target as at least a little bit more racist than someone who never would.
For the same reason that “manslaughter” and “premeditated murder” are legally distinct, fighting words should be treated differently from unprovoked utterances.
Sure, someone saying the N word after strong provocation is less indication of virulent racism than someone who says it unprovoked. But I should hope a lot of people manage to not say the N word even when they come to blows with a black person. I also imagine a lot of people never come to blows with anyone, period, no matter how strongly provoked. So this hypothetical bar fight N-worder has shown himself to be both more violent and more racist than at least some portion of the population.
"You said this man is a violent racist, whereas in fact he may only be a little racist and violent, and the two independent of each other, since he was provoked!" strikes me as a pretty terrible example of a worthwhile correction.
Right, the example would have been much better without the slur. There's plenty of examples where the "woke" and even the mainstream have been willing to portray white-on-black violence as racially motivated even in the absence of any evidence whatsoever (eg George Floyd)
I wonder about focusing on the 5-10% amount of lying. Although I am personally often annoyed and frustrated when people exaggerate in storytelling, in this instance I wonder whether it makes sense to appreciate hyperbole as a strategy to get attention for something that the person wielding said hyperbole finds horrific — like, say, deporting innocent (or at least not-proven-guilty) people of a particular ethnicity to a known torture prison. Likewise, some who exaggerate or use some percentage of lying do so to make a rhetorical connection between shitty acts of the moment (see prev. example) and known, historical strategies of dictators and autocrats, which may start small to gauge public reaction or to get people used to novel behaviors. (See famous quotation of Catholic priest, WWII, "And then they came for me.")
Another maybe minor, maybe not so minor point — which may be too "woke" for this thread — is that you identify person A as Black without giving him a name while naming without offering any (ethnic or visual) description of "Joe Target." I am left, then, with the labor of deciding that Joe Target is likely white, as I imagine you are (since I have not met you nor am I taking the time to google you). I perceive this asymmetry is a form of quiet racism.
Using analogies and hyperbole are fine, but the line gets crossed when you’re essentially hoping that your hyperbole gets taken literally (or at least, you expect people to react if what you said is literally true).
And the facts still matter, otherwise how do you distinguish between the hyperbole of upset people on one side (“Garcia is a totally innocent minority being sent to a torture concentration camp”) and the hyperbole of upset people on the other (“He’s a violent criminal being deported to a prison in his home country to face justice”)?
So your point is that if you interact with people who value ideology over objective truth, you should have a duty to challenge their exaggerations without being made to feel “cringe”, since these exaggerations can compound in dangerous and mysterious ways? But later you basically say “do this at your discretion.” Which is it? An option? A duty? How are these percentages calculated? This post is just really sloppy.
I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to conclude that Joe Target was racist in that hypothetical. It would just mean assuming that the conflict wouldn't have escalated that way if race wasn't a factor. This is difficult to prove so someone's priors matter a lot.
For a real life example, consider someone like George Zimmerman. Do you think he would have acted the same way if he saw a white teenager instead of Trayvon Martin? If so, then you'd consider Trayvon's death just ordinary vigilantism and Trayvon's race was just incidental. If not, then you'd consider Zimmerman's actions to be racially motivated (even if he wouldn't describe them as such). It's impossible to know what Zimmerman's behavior would have been if he saw a white teenager acting like Trayvon, so your prior beliefs are going to heavily influence what you think he would have done. This leads to the prior being reinforced so the next time there's a controversy about whether someone's motivation was racist, you're even more likely to believe what you previously believed.
Anyways, if someone believes that many violent white alcoholics have racist tendencies, then it'd be reasonable for someone to conclude that race was a precipitating factor, even if there was something that could be considered a more immediate cause of Joe's behavior. I think you'd have to dispute the strawman's unstated assumption about the type of white people that get in bar fights in order to dismiss their explanation for Joe's behavior.
This reminded me of the example of people claiming that Biden let in 20 million illegals. Kelsey Piper has talked about how this is an implausibly large number. https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1912610296461693360
But it keeps getting repeated and the number keeps getting bigger! I saw someone claim 30-50 million illegals today.
Well, it's certainly an example of poor reasoning. The official CBP statistics for nationwide border encounters with illegal aliens in FY 2021-24 are about 10 million, or half that number. If you assume that CBP interdicts 100% of illegal entries, then add up the number of expulsions at the border with deportations from the interior, you get about 4.5 million (my cursory search only went up to Feb 2024, missing half the FY, so let's call it 5 million to be generous). That means in the best possible (and utterly unrealistic) scenario that every single person crossing the border was caught, there was a net gain of 5 million illegals.
If we assume CBP only caught 1/2 of the people illegally entering, there were 15 million total new illegals. Catching 1/4 gets us 35 million, etc*. Obviously we won't know what the real percentage is here, because the whole point of people entering illegally is that we don't know about or have documentation of their entry. 20 million is speculative, and I guess it comes down to your priors about how effective CBP is at finding people trying to sneak across the border.
But this isn't anything like the actual argument Kelsey makes. It's like she wants to reverse engineer the murder rate when we don't know how many people were murdered. And then she concludes that the murder rate must be equal to the number of people arrested for murder. Yeah, this works out great... in a world where 100% of murderers are arrested. But she just states the 10 million number as a hard cap and never even mentions the underlying assumption.
*The math is a little complicated because some of the deportations will be people not included in the border encounters, but caught after they entered the country. I don't think this number is significant but, eh.
After reading enough of this thread I think the main thing I'm coming away with is the impression that calling out someone else's incorrect statements is very very unlikely to be a good use of my time.
There are definitely circumstances where it's worthwhile (where this person's incorrect statement is likely to directly affect my life) but these sum up to a truly miniscule fraction of all the random bullshit I could be correcting on any given day.
If someone starts spouting random bullshit then this should be my cue to disengage from the conversation, not to engage. Correcting it won't even necessarily decrease the total number of uncorrected bullshit in the world, because they'll probably just respond with more bullshit.
thank for your thoughtful response to my comment. I would say it’s hard to know what anyone’s intention is in a given communication unless they themselves name it. how would you distinguish a hope to be taken literally from misguided belief in something unproven from facts acquired from a source you aren’t familiar with?
genuine ask (not snarky): would you offer a statement that you consider wholly truthful around the Garcia example? because to me the first version isn’t especially hyperbolic. revealing a lot about my news sources. thanks.
Totally agree. On a side note, I'm kind of surprised you are (if you in fact are) finding yourself around people who think the "actually" meme is clever, and so feel the need to write this semi-defense of ... carefulness and truthtelling? I'd have thought you would have cut such people out of your life. The only people I have seen wield the meme have been immature people online -- often young people, redditors, or idiots -- who are the exact same kind of people who think they have said something powerfully dismissive by calling it "cringe." "Cringe," in its fashionable modern sense, is essentially an utterly empty slang word: it is nothing more than a way to say, "I find this vaguely or strongly yucky or bad, you should too!" And so every single thing in the world has been called cringe. Polyamory is cringe. Marriage is cringe. Blogging is cringe. Trying hard is cringe, but failing and being a loser in life is also cringe. Complaining about "cringe" is cringe. Etc., etc. Timonthy Williamson has written a nice indirect defense of pedantry when it is pursued in philosophy for the sake of truth, "Must Do Better": https://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/assets/pdf_file/0012/1317/Must_Do_Better.pdf
An interesting variant is where the correction is actually the point.
I.E. politician lies and says 95% of something is bad, hostile media then issues corrections and says 75% of something is bad to make them look bad...but now they're trumpeting the fact that 75% of something is bad.
One thing that I think is becoming clear to me is that there are some people for whom very large numbers function like a kind of metaphor. So when they say 'Biden let in 20 million illegals!', what that really means to them is 'he let in too many, and it was bad'. I think for them, someone trying to correct the number is like someone arguing about the exact brightness of the light at the end of the tunnel: it's ignoring the important point that there were too many, and it was bad!
I would add that lies are more damaging the more controversial or partisan a topic is. If I claim that the sun being made of incandescent gas or that the atomic mass of Xenon is 130u, these are imprecisions which are relatively harmless in most contexts, because these topics are not contested, and there is a broad consensus on what the correct answers are.
By contrast, people disagreeing about the facts is one of the major drivers of the culture war. If you lie or exaggerate about a CW or politics topic, you are burning epistemic commons to fuel that war. Your side will be worse off because they will believe a false thing, while the other side will be less inclined to listen to any arguments from your side given that you are willing to lie. You actively decrease the consensus reality overlap between the bubbles, which makes it less likely that a compromise based on the shared reality can be reached.
I think nobody lying is not enough to end the CW, it can also be waged very well using spins and narratives (see "the media very rarely lies") as arguments-as-soldiers. But it would be a first step.
“Truth does not do as much good in the world as the appearance of it does evil” Le Rochefoucauld. Thank you, Scott, and all others who care about truth, even if it turns out to be less powerful than we hoped it would be. If speech was song, most lyrics would be best understood as verbal music, uttered for emotional effect, irrespective of semantic content.
I was just thinking about an example I've thought about many times: the sarcastic "mostly peaceful protests" sneer related to the Summer of Floyd, and how the sneer itself seems like the people using it think it's enough to debunk the claim that the protests were, indeed, mostly peaceful. A great example is this National Review article I found while Googling around (https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/a-misleading-attempt-to-bolster-the-mostly-peaceful-riots-narrative/): the article writer refers to a study showing that the protests were, indeed, mostly peaceful, does not attempt to debunk the study and indeed admits themselves that "None of this is to say that the many peaceful protesters who have participated in marches around the country have no legitimate grievances, or to call those participants violent criminals."
(Yes, I know about the news clip where the phrase originated, but the sneer-phrase itself has long since left that specific context and generalized.)
I think what you are saying is true but also for dialectical cases like the 'sun a bowl of gases'. It can lead to similar cases of misunderstanding and wrong ideas. One example that's always stuck in my mind was COVID. I agree COVID was dangerous and the measures at the time were a net positive, but I wish public health officials conveyed their uncertainty and the different unknown variables more accurately, and I think ironically that led to a breakdown of public trust and less people following safe distancing measures
I wonder how often people do not lie but simply don't care about the truth of their statements. Just like LLMs are hallucinating, though I want to quote another blog here:
What are often described as “hallucinations” by large language models are, as these researchers (and many others) have pointed out, “better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by [philosopher Harry] Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs.”
People use facts to communicate, not the facts, which are ultimately unimportant to most people most of the time, but an underlying theory about someone or something, which is the thing that matters. If Joe is an evil person because the murdered and raped X number of people, the specific number isn't important. That the facts (whatever they are) support the contention that Joe is evil is what matters.
Except that something else also matters, maybe even more so. Which is that some person (Jane) is expressing her opinion that Joe is evil. That other people hear her and acknowledge her right to express and opinion, and therefore assert her place and role within whatever relationships she happens to be involved in, isn't even a matter of opinion to Jane, it's a matter of survival and success. Nitpicking her sounds like you don't care about her underlying theory, which by extension feels like you don't care about her. You can only be attacking her facts on a basis that doesn't matter (because the specific numbers aren't germane) because you really want to attack *her*.
There is a well understood diplomatic way around this conundrum: You acknowledge agreement with her thesis before mentioning in passing, "Oh, by the way, it was Z number of rapes and murders." Since "everyone" (that is, a plurality of people in Jane's social group), you failing to adhere by it is evidence (to her) that you are engaged in something underhanded. It's a classic error of manners.
And everyone does this, not just "Woke People" (by which you mean liberals, right?).
As for his example, that's just extreme defensiveness, which is a human trait, not a liberal one. Anybody could generate a counter-hypothetical involving a conservative mob.
The solution, in both cases, is the one I outlined above.
I endorse this.
However, I endorse also explicit policy of 'I observe that you habitually lie all the time, and that the strategy is partially motivated by consuming my resources into focusing on what you want me to focus on, instead of focusing on what I want to focus on, so that instead of you have a 5% advantage in lying, I end up with a -100% advantage in focus. Therefore, I will somehow check your lies 10% of the time, and demand that when I catch you in a 5% lie people treat you as if you lied by 50%'
I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that one of the advantages of lying in this sense is that whoever is correcting the lies has to spend all their time and energy focusing on the topic of the liar and probably making some concessions?
Correct
In that case I completely agree. You have to pick your battles, and you can't let the dishonest person dictate the conversation and play offense 100% of the time.
I think so. And so doing spot checks and finding lies means that the full extent of lying has to be extrapolated by the checker, rather than exhaustively checking every claim.
cf. Gish Gallops.
(Although, I've also seen people make all sorts of deniable claims, which, when denied in detail, are responded to by calling a "Gish Gallop!" and concluding that their claims are valid. Or making one or two claims that rely on a mass of deniable claims and calling Gish on a similar response. I've got this working hypothesis that any of the popular argument response devices making the rounds like Gish Gallops, sealioning, etc. have important caveats, but I don't have a handy term for it yet.)
"30 second accusations with 30 minute refutations"
That’s a good one! I’ve never heard that before.
It was (at least decades ago when I was involved) a common phrase in the nuclear power industry bemoaning the nature of their PR challenges.
Also known as Brandolini's Law or the Bullshit Asymmetry principle. "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
That’s true. Albert Einstein explained that in his inauguration speech when he was elected president.
What? President of what?
Well played.
That's ridiculous, have you somehow confused the famous nuclear physicist Alfred Einstein with some random political figure?
Newman complained of the problem in his *Apologia*. He was writing a book to refute a pamphlet.
Lol, that is a nice way to think about it.
>partially motivated by consuming my resources into focusing on what you want me to focus on
Don't think this is true though. Think like the vast majority of the effect is just that it's very psychologically tempting to exaggerate claims in favor of a conclusion you want.
I think that sometimes things are psychologically tempting because evolution "noticed" that they caused problems for your opponents and reinforced the behaviors. And so even if the person isn't consciously using the evil strategy, or even aware of its evilness, the fact that it is an effective evil strategy is still (indirectly) the causal reason that they are doing it.
(For example, I have a suspicion that this is the reason most people are much more willing to deceive with technically-true statements than to tell outright lies. It's harder to trash someone's reputation for a technically-true deception than for an outright lie (harder to prove bad intent). Most deceivers aren't consciously thinking about this, but evolution "noticed" that technically-true deceptions are statistically safer than outright lies, and programmed humans to favor them.)
The reason I mention this is: When someone is doing a bad thing on purpose, it's important to calibrate the punishment to be harsh enough that continuing to do the bad thing (and just accepting the punishment) is a bad strategy. Like, if someone can earn $100 every time they wreck your lawn, then fining them $50 won't make them stop, you need to fine them at least $100.
We often waive this requirement if we're pretty sure the bad thing was unintended, because fining someone the maximum value that an evil genius could have extracted from their crime can be pretty harsh when someone just makes an honest mistake.
But if evolution programmed people to make the "honest mistake" specifically BECAUSE they are benefiting from it, then we need people to put in the effort to notice this and fight against it instead of just doing what comes naturally, and it's not fair to the people who actually put in that effort to allow the lazy people who don't put in the effort to profit from their laziness. You need to apply the harsher punishment that makes it not worth doing, even for people who "didn't notice" that they were "inadvertently" doing an evil thing.
Sure. Still though, I'd say it's not specifically about wasting your opponent's attention, it's about pushing the narrative in your favor.
I am not sure if it is actually advantageous to make your opponents focus on your lies instead of the 95% that is actually true. If you want to convince them, this is a terrible strategy. I sometimes get the impression that somewhere along the way people forgot that debates are actually about convincing a majority and not about preaching to the choir or getting a "win" or "owning" the other side.
I understand what you're saying, but I think the conversation is about something else.
That would apply if someone was endorsing lying by 100%, X% of the time.
But what's actually going on, is 'in a war, A and B each commit 10 war crimes, but A claims B committed 11 war crimes. By doing so, the conversation tilts to whether B committed 10 or 11 war crimes, and the 10 war crimes of A get relatively little attention.'
I don't think, I understand what you mean.
That was supposed to go under the main article and it somehow got posted as a reply to you. I will delete it.
I guess it depends on what your goal is here. If your goal is to make progress in the debate about war crimes then this is still a terrible strategy, because then you are only discussing if it were 10 or 11 and not about the fact that your opponent was committing war crimes.
Picture this as happening not in a truth-seeking debate but in a political argument among non-nerds. The goal isn't to progress the debate about war crimes, it's to win the debate about war crimes by winning the support of as many onlookers as possible. So if you can make more of the talking be about the other person's war crimes and less about your own, that's an effective strategy.
This is kinda my point, that you focus so much on "winning" that you lose track of what should be the goal, which is making progress. I guess, this is a problem with bad incentive structures, where the strategy that makes you successful is not the same strategy as the one that makes you get things done.
I agree that I prefer to take part in truth-seeking rather than point-scoring debates when given the chance. But the world is large and we live in a society that contains many people, most of whom just follow normal human instincts around discussion and so seek status and stuff. It's worthwhile to think about what ways are best to interact with them because they are so numerous that such interactions are practically unavoidable.
I think this strategy can be advantageous when you are trying to convince a third party -- an audience that is separate from your opponent. In that case, distracting your opponent and forcing them to expend time and effort on pedantic-seeming rebuttals of obscure points can be an effective way to 'win' the debate in the sense of appearing more capable and competent in the eyes of the audience.
I don't think this is true. I think the third party will also be paying way more attention to the discussion around you lying than to the actual point you are making.
After the Brexit debate it was widely considered that Leave's masterstroke was to falsely inflate the money paid to the EU. The Remain campaign got stuck saying "We don't send £350m a week to the EU, it's only £290m gross, £190m net", and a lot of their audience thought "but I don't want to send £200m ish/wk to the EU.
I think this is true but not for the reason you are saying. Let's say Adam and Bob are debating. Adam repeatedly makes claims, Bob responds by claiming they are false or exaggerated. Bob probably can't refute everything Adam says and doesn't get to make any sort of positive case of his own.
It's like a football game where one team is playing offense on every possession. Even if the defense stops them 80% of the time the offense will still score some points and the other team never even gets the ball.
That's a very good way of putting it. I was trying to say something along those lines, but I failed to explicitly state that fact-checking a claim is almost always more time-consuming than making that claim in the first place. Therefore, a debate format in which both sides have approximately equal time to present their case generally favours a strategy of 'make lots of claims, and rarely bother explicitly refuting the other side's claims.'
Of course, most internet argument aren't formal debates with predetermined rules, but the same principle applies.
It isn't just distracting the opponent.
It is also choosing the focus.
"Hey, you claimed that PersonUnderDiscussion committed 10 murders and 7 kidnappings and he *really* only committed 5 murders and 3 kidnappings."
The debate/discussion now has spent 2x as much time focusing on the murders and kidnappings as it would have. And 5 murders still sounds pretty bad so I expect that the takeaway from "random internet lurker" is that the bad thing really happened. That's what everyone is talking about, right?
The details are less important than the direction.
And a number of people won't even remember the correction ... just that lots of people were murdered. Maybe even 20.
That's close to how I use this trick in court.
Sometimes I make a blatantly weak point and place it front and center with my better points taking a second seat. The opposing counsel often takes the bait and spend their time refuting the weak point, because it's easy and makes them look good in front of their client, while providing little rebuttal against my stronger points.
The judges don't care about overkill when you refuted one point, especially if it's blatantly weak, but that you thoroughly refute them all.
There is also the need to pick out deliberate lies from rhetorical exaggeration or heat of the moment inaccuracies. Goodness knows I've used language that has been "well actually" checked, but I didn't mean it as a lie - I was mad as hell and just doing the equivalent of waving my arms around and ranting.
I should be, and generally am, glad to be corrected. But sometimes the corrections are "well you said X did three bad things but in fact X only did two bad things (if you could even call them bad), so in fact you are totally incorrect about X doing bad thing and should admit you are only booing your outgroup" which is even more aggravating (at least to me).
I remember from my business law class that the relevant legal concept in the context of advertising under American law is "puffery", i.e. claims that are made in such a way that reasonable listeners should be able to clearly understand that they're intended to be figurative or hyperbolic rather than literally true.
For example, if you think that Exxon gasoline will literally put a tiger in your gas tank, or if you are disappointed that you are unable to fly after partaking of Red Bull energy drink, then that's a "you" problem, and if you try to sue for false advertising, the judge will dismiss the case and rebuke your lawyer for filing based on such a frivolous claim.
More ambiguous cases in the context of political arguments and the like can still be worth correcting. For example, I heard many people claim c. 2006-2008 that Dick Cheney was the most dangerous VP in American history. If meant as hyperbole, I can see where people are coming from even though I disagree with it, but at least some people probably meant it literally, and those people needed to be reminded of the existence of Burr, Calhoun, Tyler, Breckenridge, and Agnew.
Not that this was the main point of your comment, but since I like talking about American presidential history: Burr and Calhoun I would accept (they had treasonous ideas); Breckenridge maybe (since he would go on to join the Confederacy); Tyler and Agnew I don't know about. In particular, I'm not aware that Agnew was especially powerful or threatening -- maybe people found him repugnant and his cultish fan club was unsettling, but I think people's point about Cheney being dangerous was that he was a particularly *overpowered* VP who held a heavy sway over Bush Jr. Coming up with a superlative like that for Cheney doesn't seem so out of place if it wouldn't apply to Agnew or anyone else from the previous 140 years of VPs.
Tyler also went on to join the Confederacy. Agnew I included partly because of his cultish fan club and partly because he seems to have been unusually corrupt relative to the time period: he resigned the Vice Presidency in 1973 as part of a deal to avoid criminal prosecution for bribery. But I'll concede that Agnew was a significant step down in danger from the likes of Burr and Calhoun and a less clear-cut example of a VP who was more dangerous than Cheney.
I also considered adding Andrew Johnson to the list, based on his undermining of Reconstruction after he ascended to the Presidency, and also based on his conduct during the crisis over the Tenure of Office Act. In particular, he tried to make some fishy military preparations during the crisis that Sherman suspected at the time were preparations for a military coup, but the factual waters there are muddy enough that I decided against counting that.
I'll grant your points about Cheney arguably having an unusually dangerous concentration of de facto power for a VP, which is part of why I think the "most dangerous VP" label is defensible in meant hyperbolically. Another factor cutting in favor of Cheney being more dangerous is that he is the only one beside Burr to have shot someone during his term as VP.
Interesting about Andrew Johnson; I didn't know all of the facts that you described. (I did know that he showed up drunk at the 1865 inauguration, didn't distinguish himself in his very short time as VP, and proved himself somewhat of a narcissistic psychopath as a president who halted civil rights as much as he could.)
I had a feeling someone was probably going to mention that Tyler joined the Confederacy, but I feel like this hardly counts for much when evaluating him as a VP (a position he also held for an extremely short time), as this was around two decades earlier; the nation wasn't on the brink of crisis like it was during Breckenridge's term; and I don't know of Tyler expressing any treasonous ideas in the earlier 1840's. I don't know of anything in particular that distinguished Tyler as a dangerous VP during his short time as VP or a dangerous president during the rest of those four years. The way he wound up handling the secession crisis the decade after next (which by the way was followed by leading some last-ditch efforts to get the North and South to reconcile) feels to me like a mostly separate issue.
My recall from reading about Tyler says as follows:
* He established the precedent for how a VP should be treated when assuming the Presidency office through normal secession. His party (the Whigs) assumed any such VP should be considered an "acting P", and their decisions need not be treated as authoritatively. (Specifically, Tyler was expected to defer to the Whigs' co-founder and then-Speaker, Henry Clay.) Tyler firmly argued, no, the VP is now the P, as if he'd been elected by the People (which, after all, he was).
* He antagonized Clay and the other Whigs enough to get ejected from the party before his first year was even finished.
* He wanted Texas annexed, badly enough to run for re-election with that as a campaign promise, and badly enough that when he learned it was also promised by the Democrat James Polk, Tyler dropped out of the race.
These political positions strike me as the opposite of dangerous, in terms of the survival of the Union, and at worst dangerous to the survival of the Whig Party.
Reading his interaction with the Confederacy just now, I see he led a Peace Conference, and then opposed its ultimate resolution, on grounds that it did not adequately address concerns held by slave states. He then voted for secession. That certainly seems dangerous on its face, but I also get the impression that he may have seen an amicable divorce as less dangerous than insisting the South stay in the Union, fomenting riots, Bloody Kansas, etc. I can't tell from my cursory reading.
I had to laugh at the Harris campaign. Dems back then: Cheney is bloodthirsty profiteering war criminal who made Bush his puppet to prosecute the unnecessary wars! Dems now: hey, guys, you like Dick Cheney don't you? well he likes our girl! so you'll vote for her, right? now that one of the few Decent Republicans has endorsed her!
I know campaigns are all about "what is the biggest wad of bullshit we can force the public to choke down?" but that one was really special.
To be fair, there's an argument to be made that Biden (historically) has had more in common with Bush-era Republicans than either of them have with either modern progressives or MAGA Republicans, so it's not entirely unreasonable to try the same argument with their VPs.
> if you are disappointed that you are unable to fly after partaking of Red Bull energy drink, then that's a "you" problem
Or if there is "no sugar" written on an obviously sweet soda, I guess.
(In EU it is legally required to disclose the numbers, so you can see stuff with big letters "no sugar" on the front side, and tiny letters "sugar: 5%" on the back side. That's because the tiny letters are regulated, but the rest of the packaging is not.)
I'm pretty sure that would be actionable false advertising in the US. The closest you can reliably get away with is calling something "sugar free" when it has less than 0.5g of sugar per serving (you are allowed to round down) or saying "no added sugar" when it's made of something that has plenty of sugar without adding any more.
Well, one thing that Cheney had going compared to Burr, Calhoun, Tyler and Breckenridge was being one step away from nuclear weapons. Also applies to Agnew, of course.
It also commends Harry Truman to our consideration as the most dangerous VP.
>There is also the need to pick out deliberate lies from rhetorical exaggeration or heat of the moment inaccuracies.
And can you offer a more or less foolproof method to that effect that can be applied to strangers on the internet? I remind you of Poe's Law.
A single vice can lead to a whole cascade of sin across society, so there's also a need for forgiveness against liars, even if they continue to lie.
Yes, the gish-gallop is real. It might not _be_ worth your time to correct lies - that takes longer than making them, so the other side wins.
For what it's worth, Mehti Hasan (a journalist who does in-person interviews) says the strategy for dealing with Gish gallops is to keep hammering on the weakest claim. Hobble that horse! Don't let it gallop!
Well, acktually,
If I find a party to be intentionally lying in the described manner, said party loses credibility to me, so I then discount whatever that party says because it isn't worth fact-checking. This doesn't include things like hyperbole, such as Trump-speak, but does include retroactive justifications like claiming to be Jew-ish.
Integrity means something. If you have lost your integrity, I no longer care what your arguments are, so you had better convince someone more credible to fact-check you and then have that person make your case.
The strategy for dealing with gish gallops in their original habitat - the online debate - was, of course, creating the term "gish gallop" to throw at any perceived gallopers to take control of the debate.
If some source of information lies all the time, ISTM that you should just stop paying attention to them.
You should stop *crediting* them. You shouldn't necessarily stop *paying attention* because their lies could be harmful if ignored, e.g. if they're falsely telling other people that you're a criminal.
Almost all lies are harmful to the community if some members of the community believe them. Even if the *content* of the lies is utterly inconsequential, people use heuristics like "this person provided a lot of information that didn't *appear* false" to decide who to trust and value, which distorts the social fabric of the community.
There's another form of this as well, that I have some sympathy for even though it's also very scheming.
Let's say politician A claims that illegal immigrants commit twice as many crimes as citizens. Then politicican B responds that this is a total lie, and actually illegal immigrants are just as law-abiding as everyone else, and this shows that politician A's deportation proposals are grounded in baseless fearmongering. Well, politician A has now tricked politician B into admitting he has no problem with illegal immigration on its own, and doesn't even see it as incompatible with being "law-abiding"!
And that was A's plan all along. Because if A had instead said "I think politician B has no real problem with illegal immigration" then B would have responded with something like "of course I am against illegal immigration, of course something needs to be done about it, but A's proposed deportations won't be an effective solution etc".
The reason I'm sympathetic is that B was being dishonest first, though in a less obvious way, by obscuring his real values. And really, the voters absolutely deserve to know what B's real feelings about illegal immigration are. But the only way to get him to implicitly reveal them was to bait him by telling a lie. And while A can be justly angry at B's dishonesty and want to expose it, doing so with his own scheming dishonesty just escalates the cycle, causing B to escalate further, and I don't know what the solution is.
I used a right-wing example, but I'm sure there are plenty of left-wing ones as well, I just couldn't think of one as clear-cut as that.
I would have a lot more sympathy for politician A in your example if, after accomplishing their goal, they admitted that they lied, apologized for the temporary deception, and made a strong effort to ensure that no one was persistently deceived. If they're not willing to do that, then I don't see them as being on the side of truth, even if their stratagem ends up revealing an important truth.
(Also, in the event that the stratagem fails and B doesn't reveal what A wants them to reveal, A still needs to do all of that same stuff, in a reasonably short time frame. Ideally, they should have some sort of precommitment mechanism that forces their deception to be revealed on a specific date and that they don't have the ability to stop after they've started this plan, so observers can verify that they definitely always planned to come clean regardless of how things played out.)
Though I'm not entirely comfortable with the premise that voters need or deserve to know a politician's true feelings. There's a magistrate character in a book I've read who just really desperately wants people to like and respect him, and so he governs really well and does all sorts of great things for his people just so that they'll like him. If someone "cunningly exposed" the fact that the magistrate is doing all these genuinely-awesome things for purely selfish reasons rather than out of altruism, I don't think that would help anyone (except the magistrate's opponents).
If someone says they're going to do X, and then they actually do X, I kinda feel like that should be enough, and we don't "deserve to know" whether they genuinely believed in the cause or did it just because voters wanted them to do it.
Though I also do have some sympathy for the fact that some actions are difficult to verify, and knowing someone's incentives is useful for being able to trust that they're really doing the thing when you can't verify it directly. Maybe I need to think about this some more.
Also, I...kinda feel like your characterization of politician B's remarks is pretty at odds with your description of what they said. Obviously you made up both parts, so your example could have made politician B as bad as you want them to be. But your example seems to equate "focusing (for the moment) entirely on A's lie, rather than talking about other stuff" with "admitting that B has no real problem with immigration", and also equate "claiming illegal immigrants are EQUALLY law-abiding as average citizens" with "claiming that illegal immigration isn't a crime", both of which strike me as highly malicious interpretations of relatively reasonable statements. A major problem with tricking people into admitting things is that clear communication is actually fairly hard, misunderstandings are somewhat common even when everyone is trying to be clear and forthright, and the probability of misunderstanding goes way up when people start trying to trick each other.
One reason why I sometimes correct small lies (or errors) in public spaces is because, distributed across the entire audience, it's often not that much work per person, per lie, on average. So if you and 9 other people each check the lies 10% of the time, you don't really need the 5% to 50% magnification. I realize this is a very simplistic model, but in general I do think the shared load in public spaces can offset things quite a lot, in practice. Like, this is part of what makes community notes on Twitter good.
To rephrase this:
Because the effort required to research a lie is much larger than the effort required to propagate a lie the reputational damage for propagating lies should be very high.
To add my own statement though, I don't think this system can really work without a respected neutral arbiter.
impact to lie % isn't linear, though
When I was a newbie on the internet, I apprenticed under a digital Machiavelli, a masterful troll of the highest order.
The Master once told me: "Anything is possible when you lie." And in that moment, I was enlightened.
“okay, but everyone knows that something vaguely similar is true”
Or, in a particularly infuriating variation: "OK, so this particular example isn't true, but the fact that people found it perfectly believable kind of proves my point, doesn't it?"
Yes this is infuriating! Perhaps people believe the example because there are tons of lies on the subject that many people believe, not because there are a lot of true examples.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah encapsulates that sentiment quite well.
Haha that was a good one! I think the redheaded guy deserves credit for conceding that the article is false when the other guy presents evidence to this effect. Of course, he still insisted his overall worldview was correct but an instant 180 might be too much to ask.
It's a central facet of SMBC cosmology that red-haired men are irredeemably evil, so no, he deserves nothing.
I think Scott was motivated to write today's post by the positive example of the redheaded guy admitting his first argument was wrong.
My smarter brother does this often.
I come back to this comic several times a month. "Poe's law" is a concept which has been abused into meaninglessness by both progressives and conservatives.
But… isn't the example of the imaginary too-woke-to-be-real dialogue actually kind of an example of this? In an article about the dangers of "heightening the truth for rhetorical effect" that's a pretty glaring issue
https://www.reddit.com/r/AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA/
People who do that ought to be subject to some kind of Stalinist terror-purge.
Situationally, this can be a perfectly valid form of argument - if you're arguing about reputation, for example.
"Wow, this made-up story that agrees with my priors shows that my priors were correct all along!"
Question is can you maintain a consistent policy of doing it equally for all sides. Including ones you support. Otherwise you have the same asymmetry problem.
I think the criticism of "well actually" is from a suspicion that it's being done unevenly. (At least in the original less stupid pre-memeification version). If you fact check Alice but not Bob you are advantaging Bob
One might call this isolated demands for rigor
Yeah, that was going to be my post.
Every online space I'm in today is full of people falsely claiming that rioters have burned down half of downtown LA and therefore it's totally reasonable to send in the military against civilian protestors.
But somehow the most salient and obvious example is still woke people talking about racism.
If you have an allegiance to aside -or a trauma response against a side - then who you do and don't correct can lead to almost as much distortion of the truth as who you do or don't lie for.
The criticism of the 'well aksually' guy isn't *just* because being pedantic is annoying, it's because that guy often has ideology-based ulterior motives (whether those motives are conscious or habitual), and everyone can tell that and knows that applying isolated demands for rigor is not a neutral or friendly act.
I think you’re being a little unfair to Scott here; imho he is just about as good as it gets at universally demanding rigor.
This looks a lot like you doing the thing that is named in the post.
"Every" online space you are in, including this one, is "full of" (presumably this means, like, >25% of the occupants?) people claiming that rioters have burned "half of downtown LA"?
can you give an example of even a single person claiming that, in so many words? I estimate maybe 50% that there is even a single example; <1% that your full statement is literally true.
I wish darwin had been more precise here, as indeed this type of 'directionally correct conversational exaggeration' is part of what this post is about.
That being said, the most recent (public) Open Thread is dominated by a thread on the LA riots, including arguments over the level and extent of violence. (To be fair, also a veganism thread, always a classic!)
Spent a bunch of time failing to come up with something better to say, but I'd just pare darwin's statement you're objecting to down to "This space has right wing partisans who make exaggerated claims."
This is sort of a self-solving problem so long as everyone cares about the truth, though. It's not like we can't divide the responsibilities; I'll go after the people who say "CICO doesn't work!" and you can go after the people who say "CICO is all you need!" and we'll meet in the middle utopia area.
"You can't correct ANY lie unless you correct EVERY lie!" seems like a really weird angle to take on this. If lies are bad, eliminating a lie from play is good. Everyone is going to prioritize lies they particularly dislike, sure. If one side doesn't do the work to correct lies of the other side, that's going to lead to a disproportionate/unbalanced situation, probably.
The alternative seems to be "Nobody corrects lies ever as we await the perfect messiah of honesty who corrects every lie on both sides exactly evenly", which is never going to happen. And "Our norm is to let the perfect be the enemy of the good here, leaving every lie alone forever" seems like the kind of maximum-bad outcome you'd normally have to design on purpose.
This is unrelated, but where can I find a good well-researched text on why CICO works (that address all the studies on very large proportion of people being unable to lose weight in the long term through dietary changes)?
> This is unrelated, but where can I find a good well-researched text on why CICO works (that address all the studies on very large proportion of people being unable to lose weight in the long term through dietary changes)?
People can't lose weight in the long run because they don't adhere to their diets, it's a matter of "long term execution" failing, not a matter of "eating fewer calories doesn't lead to weight gain."
I have a couple of posts that might be relevant to you, that point to a number of actual studies if you want to dig deeper.
The maximally pessimistic obesity and weight loss argument:
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/the-maximally-pessimistic-obesity?r=17hw9h
A review of Dan Lieberman's Exercised, where he goes over the paleoanthropological reasons why we get fat and require movement, and other great apes don't:
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/dan-liebermans-exercised-review?r=17hw9h
A review of Herman Pontzer's Burn, which goes over why exercise doesn't actually work for weight loss:
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/book-review-herman-pontzers-burn
Any GLP-1 study that shows longterm changes in patient weight does this.
It's tricky, though, which is why I referenced liars on both sides. GLP-1 drugs make it easier to adhere to CICO; adhering to CICO makes you lose weight. Some people say CICO doesn't work full stop because of hormones or metabolic adaptation - the GLP experience shows this to be at least mostly false.
Others say CICO just works, but ignore that it's really, really hard to do CICO and the vast majority of people who try it fail. Then the anti's come in and point that out, refusing to acknowledge that ALL diets fail when they are "advice from doctors to do diet X as given to people accustomed to a lifestyle that makes that advice necessary", and so on.
Anything that answers to "inpatient food controlled study" or "starvation study" or "GLP-1 study" proves out CICO as sound in a dry, math and figures way. The history of the last hundred years proves it doesn't work as a medical intervention, because it's hard to eat less and nobody does it (absent GLP-1 or being locked in a sweat-box).
I read Scott’s old SSC about this first time yesterday. It was a great one. “Well are you feeling lucky, punk?”
That is exactly what this article reminds me of. It's a thin line, that I think is treaded better in that previous article compared to this one.
True, but then the other side can point this out and/or fact check Alice/me, so overall we're all receiving some healthy skepticism. Which is better than if noone does (not that you've argued otherwise). I do agree that an uneven approach is an issue, however.
This assumes symmetry in numbers, debating ability, and social status between the two sides. In practice (within a given setting) one side might correct the other side a lot more than the reverse.
Good points, I agree. Still, I think it's better for an asymmetrical amount of critique to flow than none.
Also, I'd like to point out that your comment shifts the focus from evenhandedness of an individual to the balance of critique between two sides. Related, but not the same.
I agree completely that an asymmetrical amount of critique is better than none. As for shifting the focus to the balance between two sides, I was referring to the beginning of your post when you said "the other side can point this out and fact check Alice/me". Reading back it looks like you meant your counterpart in the discussion, not the other side overall, so I might have misunderstood.
Ah I see. Yes, I meant the counterpart rather than a group of people, sorry for the confusion
I don't think equal representation is needed here, or helpful. If the Green Team lies about math and the Orange Team lies about trees, a forester will call out only the Orange Team's lies.
Also, Alice may be his neighbor, so he hears from Alice more often.
Or maybe his neighbors agree that Bob is stupid, but believe that Alice is wise.
I don't think you have to do it perfectly equally for all sides, as long as you're willing to listen and take it seriously when somebody else does it for sides you support. With the caveat that you need to have enough exposure to honest, well-informed others that you'll actually see such pushback when its available.
Of course you are going to make mistakes and fall for lies and bad interpretations sometimes. So is everyone. But different people are going to fall for different lies and bad interpretations, and the collective bullshit detector is much stronger than the individual one.
In fact, it's probably most important to do it to your own side's rhetoric.
It's most important to run checks on your own side's rhetoric. But those checks need not consist of you trying to evaluate it all yourself. And, indeed, they probably should not. It's much easier harder to be sufficiently rigorous and detail-oriented when you are trying to critique positions you're strongly biased towards agreeing with. I expect that finding trustworthy people who aren't "on your side" and seeing what *they* have to say about it will turn up issues that you could never find by yourself.
"Question is can you maintain a consistent policy of doing it equally for all sides. Including ones you support. Otherwise you have the same asymmetry problem. "
Interestingly, I find this sort of mis-representation more annoying when it is from "my side".
I have come to the belief that most people don't actually care if what they say (online, but also for some contexts in real life ... ) is true or not. If the claim advances their position then they are mostly fine with it. No, I am not happy about believing this :-(
I like to think that *I* want to know what is really going on (and how things actually work) so I treat this distributing wrong information (on purpose or because you don't care) as a form of information warfare directed against me. I get more upset when I think that folks on "my team" are doing this to me than I do when I think that folks on the "other team" are doing so.
Yes! This is disturbingly true in my experience. Many people make statements without caring at all whether they're true, and respond with confused annoyance when someone calls them out on incorrectness, as if it were irrelevant. Horrifyingly, my child's primary school teacher works like this. "Miss, the text says 'features' there, not 'feathers'..." "Oh be quiet, it doesn't matter!"
Thankfully there are several communities that actively encourage people to be truthful not just in that community context but everywhere in life. I think of rationalists, Christian discipleship, and certain what I guess you could call self-improvement organisations. The truth may be unfashionable in some places, but not everywhere.
I entirely agree that there are people who apply scrutiny unevenly, and that this causes issues.
However, claiming that this is the true motivation for the people who criticize "well actually" seems like a rationalization. On average, I don't think those critics are being any more even-handed than the people they criticize, and you should apply the same skepticism to them that you applied to the original group.
At least fact-checking requires you to find an actual weakness in the thing you are criticizing, while objecting "but do you apply your scrutiny evenly?" is a fully-general counter-argument to any correction you don't like (unless you can point out a specific, concrete instance of them being uneven). That makes fact-checking slightly harder to abuse.
Well actually your user name is a lie (and your profile pic is exactly what I thought it would be).
> The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
This was updated to "The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma" in the 2009 TMBG song "Why Does the Sun Really Shine?" after fact-checking their previous song "Why Does the Sun Shine?"
So you can still update artistic statements.
This comment made me weirdly happy. Everyone likes to dunk on Babbage's "sufficiently accurate for poetry" comment but good poets can translate poems between languages, which has a much broader set of constraints, and they're celebrated. I certainly don't mind gas/plasma errors, but I can't help but smile when they dial things in.
If you enjoy the strangeness of poetry translation, I have to wonder if you've read about various translations of Jabberwocky.
In the late 80s there was a competition amongst a group of Israeli army intelligence, who translates Jabberwocky to Hebrew better.
Speaking of translations of Lewis Carroll things, I really liked this Arabic translation of White Rabbit that I heard on the radio a couple weeks ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=osA_0XMTONY&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD
I assumed that was why Scott followed it up with the 'technically some sort of plasma' line. Either way, science is real, and here it comes correcting its own 5% lies one by one.
Plasma physicists get in fights about whether it's wrong to say that plasmas are just ionized gasses. I, as a former plasma physicist, think it's basically fine, and "the sun is a mass of incandescent gas" is basically correct. But there are non-crazy objections from informed people.
Not a plasma physicist (and only a BS in Physics overall), but I would also argue "the sun is a mass of incandescent gas" is fine. But mostly for linguistic reasons rather than physical ones.
In short: laypeople's usage of the word "gas" pretty clearly covers plasma as well. It's fine for physicists to have a specialized usage that excludes plasma in the same way its fine for them to have a specialized usage of the word "work" which excludes which excludes picking up a box and setting it back down again. But outside of the context of a technical physics discussion, it seems silly to insist that people use the stricter formal definition.
> laypeople's usage of the word "gas" pretty clearly covers plasma
I'm not sure that's true, and in fact, I'd argue precisely the opposite: even though it might technically be true that plasmas are a kind of gas, they're distinct enough from what laypeople imagine when they speak of a "gas" that it'd be misleading to use the term for them.
It's possible that I'm not modelling laypeople very well here, but I would assume that basically any mass of stuff that isn't obviously a liquid or a solid would simply go into the "gas" bucket by default. So, for example, many aerosols would go into the "gas" bucket simply because they don't behave like liquids or solids, but hang around in the air in amorphous blobs and spread out and move with the air currents and all that good stuff. And so too with plasmas, modulo some fairly intuitive stuff about how hot things behave.
Now, I'd say anyone who *has* a distinct, well-formed and consistently-applied mental bucket for "plasma" is going to easily be able to recognize a plasma as a plasma.[1] But I don't really expect that's a very large fraction of laypeople.
[1] Though even then I'd expect that "is it a special type of gas or its own thing" is a question of subtle enough physics that many such people wouldn't say it *isn't* a gas.
I don't have any particular reason to believe I'm modeling laypeople any better than you, but I think you're wrong about plasmas. I completely agree with you that aerosols fit very well in the "gas" bucket, but since you're calling them "fairly intuitive," I think plasmas are weirder than you think. The long-range electromagnetic interactions between the particles along with magnetohydrodynamic effects (relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1851/) allows from strange phenomena very different from any in a typical gas.
Also, classically, fire was considered distinct from air/wind, so without quibbling about phase transitions, that's perhaps a reason to think people are naturally inclined to think of plasmas/ionized gases as as meaningfully distinct a category apart from regular gases as liquids/condensed gases.
Hmm, I'm not sure I fully agree. In the past, I saw some people commenting that "the babies were shot, and not burned" (or the opposite I don't remember) as a correction and it was true, but I couldn't help feeling that in the context of the internet forums I've seen this on, the fact that their comment didn't contain anything else (except maybe some admonishments of the "other" side) strongly made me think that their internal feelings about it are not appropriate in some sense to the events (in terms of how people ought to feel about them).
So as a synthesis I would say that You are always allowed to correct incorrect information, but people are also allowed to infer things about you that are not explicit and react to that (just like in any kind of social interaction), but I don't think they should react negatively purely because you corrected some incorrect information.
I'm not entirely sure I follow your example, but it seems that "ought to feel" is a very risky concept upon which to make any determination of where correction of falsehood is warranted. In fact, it seems to me to be precisely the sort of motivation to lie whose lies Scott is arguing should be countered.
I think it's very natural to infer feelings from utterances for other people in most social interactions and internally judge those feelings, but to be clear, I'm not saying you should not correct falsehoods, instead I say that in some cases if you do, you should take some care to convey appropriate sentiments along with your correction.
Natural doesn't mean correct. Racism is very natural too, as is tribalism. Expecting people to convey the "appropriate" sentiments when they correct a falsehood is just asking for virtue signaling that appeals to base tribalistic instincts and get in the way of clear thinking.
This expectation you put forth is exactly why almost every facet of discourse in today's society has descended into a never ending vortex of virtue signaling and struggle sessions where every argument immediately descends into a meta level debate about who can be inferred to have the "appropriate" beliefs and who can be inferred to be an unvirtuous piece of shit with the bad thoughts (c.f. everything is a "dog whistle"), rather than any facts of the matter.
It's true that natural doesn't mean correct, but I strongly think that inferring feelings from utterances and judging those is both correct and universal for humans and not something that can even be changed.
You believe that the current bad state of public discourse is an inevitable conclusion of inferring feelings, but I don't think it is or that you have show that it is.
You put forth that inferring feelings should be part of the game and validated just as much as analysing facts.
We see from public discourse that when people adopt this model, all discourse tends towards maximizing inferring feelings and minimizing analysis of facts, because proving facts is hard whereas inferring feelings is easy and unfalsifiable (your protests are only further proof that you secretly harbour the feelings I infer for you, which incidentally always show that I'm correct and good and you're wrong and bad).
If this is how you believe the game should be correctly played, then perhaps the current state of affairs, where all debates are games of maximizing feeling inference rather than truth seeking, is the world you deserve.
EDIT: and to be clear I'm not even saying you're wrong that this is how people naturally play the game, in fact the state of public discourse shows that you are right. But this isn't the world I want to live in, so I disagree with the normative assertion that it is also the correct way to value inferred feelings vs. facts.
It is natural and caters to human instincts to play the game this way, but I'm arguing that rational people should know better and be able to see that it leads to a bad place, so we should put more value in facts than inferred feelings.
Is this in reference to the holocaust?
I imagine scott would say this is true, but also true things can be harmful. Or that particular commenter or egregore has a double standard i.e. nitpicking every the holocaust was real argument, while letting denialism float by.
No, it was connected to Palestine and Israel if I recall correctly, but please don't ask details, It's not something I'm well-versed in, just saw some comments on reddit.
No, that story was from the October 7 attacks.
There is a lot of fake atrocity propaganda on the pro-israel side, and also a very high double standard in terms of evidence that is required to prove a particular atrocity.
The game, unfortunately, being played here is that, unusually, both sides have a record of being highly deceitful, and so when you correct one-side (and conversations are almost always about one thing at a time), it is reasonably inferred you are not a good faith actor.
I think if personal attacks are not involved, it's still healthy to have one-sided epistemic humility.
Let's assume that israel is held to a different standard. So, for example, it's harder for them to get away with 'X babies were beheaded or burned alive' even if it started with a foreign reporter in a fog of war situation, but it's easy for the other side to get everyone to run with 'Israel bombed a hospital killing hundreds of people for no reason' when it was a failed rocket launch by the other side that hit a parking lot.
It is *healthy and good* to have an incentive structure that corrects individual pro-israel folks who believe the propaganda, because it harms their cause when they are observed saying false things.
Another important dynamic is that it seems to me that the majority of people believe the propaganda of their own side, rather than being motivated liars.
So, Hamas/Israel's government will generally say false things they believe they can get away with, and then a huge body of sympathetic actors assist them in spreading that message. If you work in good faith to correct the sympathetic actors, that will work to improve information hygiene in terms of incentives.
It also helps that, even if it is worth it to you to lie by 5%, it could be because it is easy to lie, not because lying is super important.
I've had hundreds of conversations on the topic, and almost all core beliefs are not contingent on knowable, correctable falsehoods, but rather a morality framework, a collection of a thousand cultural impressions, a tribal affiliation, a risk assessment or world model where 'it is not even close,' etc.
It is all priors at this point.
Inferring how people don't have the "appropriate" beliefs and reacting negatively is exactly how we got to the point where no one feels like arguing against "if Trump gets elected he will send all the gays to death camps".
I didn't say appropriate beliefs, I said appropiate feelings. Like (not meant to be a description of the previous example, just an extreme version to convey the point) if you observe a human who is visibly cheerful while watching another human in pain, you can infer that they don't have appropriate feelings and further, that they are not a good person and in some cases implement various levels of social punishment.
allistics always be assuming terrible things about why an autistic is emoting in the vicinity of other people
Yes, but these assumptions will be correct for almost everyone. If someone displays "inappropriate feelings", it's decent Bayesian evidence that they're cruel/whatever associated bad thing, at least in that moment. Not sure how we should handle the autistic case, but it's asking a lot for people to disregard a real signal.
This is an extremely dangerous philosophy but also you're completely right.
There is a rationalist value of "saying true things" that I think is wildly better than most values. But as a former attorney, "truth" is only part of the picture. There are almost infinite true things I can say in any situation, and most are inappropriate. It is entirely valid to ask, "why are you speaking this truth at this time?" In fact, if you aren't asking yourself that pretty much constantly, I suspect you are failing at the work of truth-finding.
A more honest analysis asks what the relevance is, whether the truth you're telling appeals more to our rationality or our biases, and yes, unfortunately, whether you're telling a truth that will be weaponized against vulnerable people. That doesn't mean you never "hurt your side" in an argument by recognizing weaknesses or caveats, just that there is a weighing that needs to be done.
Once you start down that road though, boy does it become easy to dismiss really good arguments that should change your mind.
Also, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2129/
I think that weighing is hard to do well, and very subject to putting a thumb on the scales. For decades, I've seen people make arguments that amounted to "yes that is true and relevant but you should not say it for <reasons>," and they are approximately always whose side would be harmed by discussing those true things.
I'd agree, but let me give you a counter-example that's so ridiculous it might be dismissible, just to emphasize my point.
There is a tiger. The tiger is coming towards us. I have seen the tiger. It's approaching you silently. Just as it's about to pounce I say "did you know ducks don't have thumbs?"
There are one infinity true things you can say in any given moment. You do the weighing anyway. If you don't know you're doing it, you're just not aware of what your weights are.
Scott's point seemed to be about correcting lies that you use to make your story stronger. There's a mean dog coming toward us, I've seen it and know it's mean and might bite someone. But nobody takes me seriously when I tell them there's a dog coming, so I say there's a hungry tiger coming to eat us all.
There are real-world parallels with AGW--it really does seem like a bad idea to keep dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and changing the climate, and the long-term consequences do look unpleasant, but plenty of activists will spin this as the end of civilization or the end of the world or something, because people weren't reacting strongly enough to the actual defensible predictions.
"the fact that their comment didn't contain anything else (except maybe some admonishments of the "other" side) strongly made me think that their internal feelings about it are not appropriate in some sense to the events"
That seems fraught.
Maybe they don't feel like expressing what everyone already agrees on, instead focusing on the unique addition they can make to the discussion. For example, I don't like having to add performative "obviously, I condemn this", and I'm pretty sure Scott made a similar point once, although I don't remember where.
Maybe they're just the guy from this comic: https://xkcd.com/386/
Even if you're correct about their feelings, so what? It doesn't affect the merit of their point.
Your attitude strikes me as functionally indistinguishable from Bulverism. Alice says something, Bob points out that it's untrue. Because Bob neglected to include any mealy-mouthed soothing qualifications like "I understand why you might feel that way, but..." or "I understand that this is a personal issue for you, but...", Carol infers that Bob is Not One of the Good Ones. All of this is very convenient for Alice, as it serves as a convenient distraction from the object-level question of whether or not her claim was factually true, towards the meta-level question of whether Bob is a bad guy for pointing out that it wasn't true.
I'm not saying the missing mood framing (https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.html) is useless: you can draw accurate inferences about a person's beliefs and motivations by the manner in which they discuss something. But if Alice tells a lie, and a member of her audience knows it's a lie, she should fully expect to be forcefully called out on it, and it's a bit rich for her to complain that the person who called her out didn't handle her with kid gloves. I'd go so far to say that, if you're in a community in which correcting lies or false information is responded to, not with gratitude, but with accusations of bad faith or ill intent - it's probably a red flag that you're in an extremely toxic community, or at least a community in which truth is not a top priority.
I think that example is still fine. If you suspect that people react differently to babies being shot rather than burned, and the truth is that babies were burned, then you owe it to people to let them react in a way that represents their feelings on what really happened.
And if people don't perceive there to be a difference between shooting and burning babies, then no one should feel accosted when they're corrected on the facts - after all, if there's no moral difference, then the factual inaccuracy doesn't seem malicious or deliberate, you're not being accused of changing the gravity of what happened.
>And if people don't perceive there to be a difference between shooting and burning babies, then no one should feel accosted when they're corrected on the facts - after all, if there's no moral difference, then the factual inaccuracy doesn't seem malicious or deliberate, you're not being accused of changing the gravity of what happened.
Logically speaking, claiming that someone has made a morally neutral mistake is not an accusation of anything bad. If you're Spock, anyway.
Actual human beings don't behave like Spock. Claiming that someone has made this kind of mistake implicitly claims they did a really bad thing. The fact that they didn't *actually* do a really bad thing doesn't change the implicit claim.
I think you can correct people in a way that is gentle enough that most people wouldn't feel "attacked" if the falsehood is truly amoral. Something like "hey, I agree with your broader point, but that's a common misconception: it turns out that protest actually happened in 1973 and not 1976". Psychologically healthy people should be able to accept /that/ without getting all prickly.
YMMV but I only ever seem to get pushback on mild corrections when people suspect I'm correcting them to shift the gravity of the situation in either direction. And if they're right to believe that the correction shifts the gravity of the situation (because often the falsehood serves a rhetorical purpose), then their anger at the correction should be a sign that the person is deliberately polluting the discourse and is not operating in good faith. Those are the most important corrections to make
>And if they're right to believe that the correction shifts the gravity of the situation (because often the falsehood serves a rhetorical purpose), then their anger at the correction should be a sign that the person is deliberately polluting the discourse and is not operating in good faith.
They may believe that the person making the correction is *inaccurately framing* it as shifting the gravity of the situation. They don't have to think it *actually* shifts the gravity of the situation in order to object to the inaccurate framing.
Number of witches burned in Salem: 0
Well, acktually, they were hanged.
Well actually, who is a witch?
A performs a magical ritual making a contract with a devil (or the Devil) for powers in exchange for her soul. The contract works and she gets the real powers.
B performs the same ritual and believes she's got the powers and lost her soul, when actually nothing objectively changed.
C performs the same ritual without knowing whether it would work, and does not think it did. But she did commit to losing her soul that would have worked if the Devil existed and was inclined to take her offer.
D performs a ritual calling on forces that are not correctly described by Christianity, and receives supernatural power from them.
E does the same, with no effect.
F has supernatural power without explicitly doing anything anti- or un-Christian. (She is due a letter from Hogwarts.)
G is a time traveler and performs something involving some glowing powder that results in a lot of people getting sick for non-supernatural reasons they are 200+ years away from understanding.
I expect 0 witches were burned or hanged in Salem but that depends on one's definitions.
H, one is found guilty of witchcraft by a court of law.
Everyone knows that if you weigh the same as a duck, then you're made of wood, and therefore a witch.
"escalate all the way to the point we actually escalated to, where people have said in all seriousness that Trump might try to put all minorities in camps and murder them.
(sorry - I’ve genuinely heard people say he was going to put minorities in camps, but I’m not sure they specified all minorities, and I don’t think they ever said they would get murdered there. Would you have let me get away with that exaggeration?)"
I'm sort of taking this as " dont let me get away with any exaggerations" is that the intent?
(Also i would have let it slide) i've noticed similar ish exaggerations in other posts, however you seem to be nicer about your exaggerations that 99% of other people. I think thats the reason why i read your stuff and not others
I interpreted it as motivated by the low quality of discussion concerning the situation in Los Angeles, but omitting that out of a desire to focus on the meta-level point instead of the object-level dispute. No guarantee that I'm right, of course.
I agree. The major difficulty is related to linear diffusion of sparse lognormals: often the useful way to parse the world is such that one disregards the overwhelming majority of cases as negligible, and focuses exclusively on the extremes. But it's harder to talk about truth in this ontology since it's not very amenable to induction, and this is made worse by the fact that people don't tend to describe clearly enough why and how they are doing this.
This reaches its most aggravating zenith when you make it clear that you agree with the overall point but are correcting the misinformation to try and strengthen the actual argument, and then people *still* accuse you of being against the overall point. The only silver lining is it provides a very clear signal that this will not be a productive internet discussion and I don't need to spend an hour acting like it will be.
Evergreen: https://x.com/AustingrahamZ1/status/1029385497213366279?lang=en
This assumes, among other things, that the value of your time and my time is the same, and that the rewards are equal.
Yup. The Gish Gallop is a common tactic, bad actors who don't care about the truth will waste your time by throwing out a thousand false statements that each take them a second to invent and take you a minute to correct.
Not only does this waste your time, but when they are making confident statements and you are making pedantic titchy corrections, it looks like they are on the offense and you are meekly trying to weasel your way out of their accusations. It makes it look like they are dominant, winning the argument, and directionally correct to the audience watching you debate.
"sorry - I’ve genuinely heard people say he was going to put minorities in camps, but I’m not sure they specified all minorities, and I don’t think they ever said they would get murdered there. Would you have let me get away with that exaggeration?"
I would say that the world is barely 10% into Trump II; if the L.A. situation is any indication, he's not yet done escalating. Let's not count the chickens before they exhausted all chances to be put into camps and murdered.
Also the Venezuelans who have been put in CECOT certainly seem like a minority which has been rounded up and put in a camp, as have various other groups that have been stashed in immigration detention...
I mean if we really want to get into it then Biden and Obama and Clinton all rounded minorities up and put them into camps as well (by which I of course mean that soldiers in the Army are frequently ordered to go to various camps, and some of them are minorities).
This is exactly the kind of exaggeration that the article rails against - you could have made a reasonable analogy with eg incarcerated minorities held on charges they can't afford bail for, but calling orders given to a voluntary military force similar is a huge stretch.
"you could have made a reasonable analogy with eg incarcerated minorities held on charges they can't afford bail "
Uh, no you really couldn't, because that isn't what anyone on the face of the earth thinks of when they hear "minorities put in camps", and everyone using the phrase knows that full well. Same with immigration detention.
I mean, I'm half-thinking your comment here must be ironic (given the topic), but it doesn't seem like it is. If it is, my mistake and good job, but if not...do you think someone saying "I have been stolen from" to mean "I have had to pay taxes" is a sane and honest thing to say? If not, do you realise the distance between those two statements is literally identical to the distance between "minorities being put in camps" and "people charged with crimes who happen to be minorities being held as part of the normal operation of the criminal justice system, in a way that has nothing to do with their minority-status and is also done to non-minorities"? And that conflating them is exactly the kind of unhinged extremism that Scott is warning about here, and that is doing so much damage to the world?
I think you've misunderstood me - I'm saying the distance between 'people rounded up and put in camps' and 'people rounded up and put in immigration detention, or especially being sent to a harsh foreign prison in a third country, when they had previously been tolerated / without due process' is not very much, that 'this is just the same as arresting people and holding them on remand' would be a stretch further but still a reasonable argument as something vaguely similar that had been happening all along, and 'sending military to duty stations' was a complete non sequitor that suggested not debating on good faith.
Okay, but:
1. My read of the above argument (which may be incorrect) is that Melvin was using an obviously absurd equivalence to satirise what he regarded as your obviously absurd equivalence. Essentially "if you can call immigration detention basically camps for minorities, then I can call military stations basically camps for minorities, it's just as logical". Insofar as you didn't mean remand was really equivalent to camps, neither did he.
2. I think your "immigration detention" comparison is just as absurd as the remand one, (and I did say so above), and all the same points apply to it. It's the normal operation of the justice system, the people being detained are credibly accused of having broken the country's laws, and there's nothing to suggest the laws are being unfairly applied in a different way to minorities in the same category (is there? I don't imagine white Canadians who behaved in the exact same way as Mexican illegal immigrants--sneaking over the border, hiding for years from immigration authorities--would be exempt from detention and deportation, but I don't know and could be wrong). And the only reason they were previously tolerated is that previous administrations and the last one in particular were deliberately not enforcing the unambiguous laws.
3. The foreign prison thing is in a very different category. I'd be happy to say it's *as bad as* putting a handful of random citizens in a camp (on the grounds that the lack of due process means there's no assurance that it can't be done to citizens, though I don't think there's any evidence it has been) but it seems to differ in a number of substantial (not necessarily morally significant) ways to that, to the extent that calling it equivalent seems pretty unhelpful to me. But I can accept the comparison if necessary. I definitely can't accept the immigration comparison, which I maintain is extremist hyperbole.
I mean yes, it is exactly the kind of exaggeration the article rails against, that was my point. Saying "Trump is rounding up minorities and putting them into camps" is just as silly as saying "Biden rounded up minorities and putting them into camps".
I disagree - sure this is a pretty early and limited version, but it's much closer than what Biden was doing, and eg Japanese internment (and more towards an edge case, the original concentration camps in the Boer war) was a much more limited version of this than Nazi concentration camps, but still alarmingly similar.
Also if I was using the tactic in the article, I wouldn't be saying that there is a spectrum of putting minorities in camps and I think Trump has just stepped onto it, I'd be counter accusing you of not caring about the problems with immigration enforcement and ignoring due process - instead we are having a civilised debate about where the line is.
OK let's agree that the Boer War example and the two WW2-era examples are central examples of "rounding up minorities and putting them into camps", and that the Trump and Biden examples are non-central examples, and that the Trump example is ever so slightly closer to the centre than the Biden example.
Overall it's still a silly example. It's still an example of trying to argue that Trump is bad by classifying what he's doing as some kind of non-central example of a particular type of bad thing.
What people should do instead is to agree on exactly what is happening, and agree on the correct words to use to describe it, and only _then_ get on with arguing about things like whether it's bad, or how bad it is, or whether the level of badness is a necessary evil to achieve a greater good, or whatever. Argue about ground truth, not about labels.
It was impossible to predict exactly what was going to happen, but the people that said "minorities being rounded up by masked goons and sent to camps" are much closer to the truth than the people that dismissed it.
I mostly agree with this but it seems weird to point the finger at 'wokeness' specifically when this is just a problem universal to all politics. Politicians lie and exaggerate constantly because the corrections are often less catchy and don't undo the initial damage the lie caused.
"They're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the pets" comes to mind. Remember that?
Why you think it is a lie, or even bad?
Different cultures have different dietary customs.
For Muslims, it seems despicable you eat Pigs, For a lot of Asians, Eating Cheese seems disgusting.
Why eating Cats or Dogs any worse?
The point is that the evidence was very slim, apparently only a single image of some hobo with a vaguely suggestive shape on a cooking spit. But yes, the sheer irony of the ostensibly pro-diversity faction also clutching pearls at the implication that unusual dieting might have occurred was amusing.
The implication was that people were abducting their neighbors' pets, killing them, and eating them. "Unusual dieting" was not the claim that raised their ire. Surely you know and understand that, so I don't know what your comment (and the one you're replying to) is supposed to do other than demonstrate the very thing Scott is warning against here.
Well, that's an implication, but another one is "could you believe those ridiculous savage customs", and I haven't seen anybody coming out and saying that it's alright to eat pets if they happen to be your own.
No, that's not *an* implication, that's *the* implication. Nobody was outraged at reports that Haitians were eating their own pets, because there were no such reports. The reports were that they were eating their neighbors' pets. Yes, some people juked it by saying, "Just because we don't have credible reports of them eating their neighbors' pets, doesn't mean they're not doing it. After all, plenty of cultures eat cats and dogs." But most respondents to that didn't address whether or not that's okay, because *it wasn't the point*. The point was people were being slandered, and if people justified the slander by pointing out an irrelevant fact about a completely different group of people, going down the rabbit hole about what cuisines are and aren't acceptable was not going to do anything for the slandered group.
No one (at least in the comment) said anything about pets.
Is shooting a random stray deer and eating eat so much worse than eating a random stray dog and eating it?
I think so, of course, but that is my culture, not theirs.
You replied to a comment that said
"They're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the pets"
so I think someone mentioned pets
So you didn't know what the person was quoting, didn't bother looking it up, didn't bother finding out who "they" in the quote referred to? Wouldn't those facts bear on your analysis on whether or not it was "a lie, or even bad"?
Donald Trump said, "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people that live there." By "they" and "the people that came in" he was referring to Haitian immigrants, based on false social media and television reports that they were eating other people's pets in Springfield, Ohio. It has a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_pet-eating_hoax
The rumors gave rise to increased threats, vandalism, and swatting toward Haitian communities in the US and especially Ohio. Note, I'm not making any claim about the proportion of blame for that going to Donald Trump.
In case you missed it. 15 seconds of a presidential debate
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5llMaZ80ErY
The rumor was not just that the Haitians were eating dogs and cats, it was that they were stealing pet dogs and cats out of people's homes and eating them.
If someone stole a chicken from someone and ate it, that would be a crime already. To add on top of that that the animal in question is a pet animal, to which a family has formed an emotional bond, you can see why this a very serious crime even regardless of any "dietary custom."
(Not that anyone I know of actually committed this "very serious crime" just saying that it was an accusation of a very serious crime.)
I think the one episode near to this anyone could find was a mentally disturbed homeless person in Ohio who was not an immigrant or of any "foreign" extraction.
We believe it is false because the original source said it was, and at best it was a third-hand rumor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_pet-eating_hoax
"The author of the Facebook post later deleted it and expressed regret that the story fueled conspiracy theories.[52][53] The neighbor who initially relayed the story said that she wasn't "the most credible source", and clarified that it was not her daughter's friend but just a rumor she heard from a friend's acquaintance.[7][8]"
It's terrible to take a person's pet and slaughter them for your own use, whether they're an animal traditionally kept for slaughter or not.
It's a lie because it wasn't *true*. Trump nationalized a rumor that slandered immigrants in a way that suited his agenda, and he didn't particularly need it to be true to accomplish this. It was suspicious that he picked a small trend that was especially disgust-loaded to talk about, instead of picking an especially humanizing or credible example of a general claim. It was also very suspiciously precisely the correct size kernel of truthiness for a local hoax or ghost story—the sort of thing that'll sounds plausible of a group of imported poors you already distrust given you know, like, 1.5 factoids about foreign cultures—and lo-and-behold, when people investigated they found no actual victims of this rumored crime spree.
He specifically said, "they are eating the pets of the people who live there" -ie, that they are stealing people's pets, killing them, and eating them. It was not simply a commentary on culinary practices. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5llMaZ80ErY
It was a lie.
It was a lie that was "directionally correct" for one side in an ongoing debate. For healthy debates/discussions, we need even the people whose side the "directionally correct" lies support to call them out as lies. And indeed, some anti-immigration people did this, though not as many as I'd have liked.
directionally correct is a useful term of art for people selling lies. I hadn’t heard any variation on it till people started saying that they know Trump is lying but is directionally honest.
I guess that means he’s spouting bullshit but the lies convey his true feelings or something. Never fully worked out the meaning beyond “True or not I like what he is saying.” The lie causes some frisson of pleasure for the listener.
Whether it's true and whether it's bad are two separate questions, this is a distraction.
I was explicitly going to point out the haitians-eating-pets example as a case study on where refuting the claim maybe helps but is still insufficient to counter the broader narrative shift. e.g.:
>"Haitians in ohio are eating cats and dogs!"
>No, they are not!
>Well maybe they aren't but there is still clearly deep rooted problems of culture-clashing between Haitian refugees and the residents of Ohio!
Even though the eating-cats has been refuted, the political salience of Haitians in Ohio has now been elevated, at the expense of perhaps less convenient political issues (e.g. a particular candidate's respect for electoral integrity).
And it's not just politicians. The news media does this too, issuing corrections that will be seen by few after the original lie is widely disseminated. It's an effective strategy.
Wait, what do you propose as the alternative? Are you mad that the corrections don't get enough play? Isn't that more due to people's attention spans and engagement algorithms than anything related to what's in the control of a particular media outlet?
Not lying in the first place. Or if you'd quibble over the term "lie," disregard for the truth.
As further evidence that this general strategy of publishing deceptive statements while, later or elsewhere, adding corrections that they know will be seen by far fewer people is employed by media outlets, this is standard practice with headlines.
I'm still confused. "Not lying in the first place" implies everything is malicious. What about mistakes?
If a news organization continues to make mistakes at a high rate after the mistakes have been repeatedly pointed out, then it suggests that the news organization is not optimizing for truth and is instead focused on some other goal.
Whether they are actively malicious (deliberately spreading propaganda) or passively harmful (eschewing verification because it costs time and money), the end result is the same. The news organization should not be trusted.
I agree, and this is also irrelevant to my question. OP is mad about retractions, and implies the act of issuing retractions is itself indicative of their propensity to lie. I'm not sure why, or what he thinks is a good alternative.
(Also, like, far be it from me to defend most mainstream media, but this seems very relevant given Scott's most recent post. Why exaggerate? Any institution willing to publish a retraction is strictly more epistemologically honorable than one that doesn't.)
Progressives are particularly egregious about it, probably because it's a female-driven ideology and women are emotionally shrill and non-analytical debaters. (Directionally, that is. I'm aware there are counter-examples. They're not representative.)
Every side does this but our current polarization has been 80% caused by woke/progressive-initiated histrionics. They're the ones that relentlessly drove the public discourse to the lowest common denominator. Social media was the perfect vector for that. The reason the Left has dominated over the past 20 years is because conservative ideology was too complex and unemotive to fit through the low-intellectual-bandwidth delivery system. Shrillness wins on Twitter ("Oppression! Racism! Unfair!" vs "well actually if you do a factor analysis you find..."). The Left was already optimized for it so they had a structural advantage for a decade. It took 10 years for someone like Trump to figure out how to do it from the Right and now the rest of the Right is following his lead and reorganizing their intellectual infrastructure for the new media environment. As always the medium is the message.
I'm not sure what "emotionally shrill" even means, but personally I do not notice a difference in how emotional vs analytical men and women are in debates.
I do notice a difference in *which* emotions tend to drive the more emotionally driven debaters - men tend to be more driven by anger and defensiveness and egotism, and women tend to be more driven by sadness and fear and compassion and playing-the-victim and pulling-at-heartstrings.
It's unfortunate that we've allowed men to define anger and defensiveness and egotism as "not being emotional".
But given your phrasing I suspect you were just intentionally being inflammatory, tbh.
If you don't notice consistent differences in communication style between men and women then I think you're overlooking a well-documented pattern. On average, male discourse tends to be more analytical and outcome-focused, while female discourse tends to rely more heavily on emotional appeals and social context. This doesn't mean all men are logical or all women are emotional, but the distribution is directionally skewed, and that skew has real implications.
You can see the effects in how social media evolved. Platforms like Twitter select for content that is emotionally charged and easily digestible. Political messaging built around moral urgency, personal grievance, and emotive storytelling performs better than more complex, analytical content. That gave a structural advantage to progressives, who already tended to frame issues in terms of harm, empathy, and identity. This is also why social media platforms skew female in both usage and rhetorical style, and why advertising disproportionately targets women.
As for emotional displays, I agree that men are not unemotional. But there's a distinction in how emotion is used rhetorically. Male-coded emotion, like anger or defiance, tends to reinforce a position: it signals commitment to an argument or a boundary. Female-coded emotion often attempts to reframe the conversation entirely by appealing to empathy or social pressure. That may be effective in personal contexts, but when scaled up into public discourse it can blur the boundary between persuasion and manipulation. Another way to put this is that female competition is indirect and zero-sum; male competition is direct but positive-sum. In my view this is why cultural norms systematically deride feminine emotive styles: they're objectively maladaptive in the public sphere.
This has broader implications. When competition in political discourse selects for emotive storytelling rather than clarity and accountability, it risks privileging tactics that are persuasive but epistemically corrosive. In contrast, systems that reward direct, falsifiable claims and strength of argument tend to produce more robust outcomes. That's one reason why male-dominated hierarchies have historically been more stable in public leadership roles. Even women, when choosing leaders, often gravitate toward traits associated with that style, because they produce clearer and more decisive governance.
The version of your comment that I got in my email is pretty different than the one I am seeing above, which I think means you edited it? Anyway, that's why I deleted my reply - it was formulated as a response to what I saw in my email, and now I need to re-read your new phrasing in order to respond more directly.
Yes, I rewrote it. Sorry I just do that a lot. I write impulsively and then immediately re-think it or edit for tone. Normally people don't respond quickly enough for it to matter but occasionally it happens. Mea culpa, it's just my process. FWIW they're not substantively different, I just tried to make the tone less aggressive.
Yeah I think it is more likely to matter in the Substack framework because they send replies as emails, which don't get edited along with the comments on the site, so even if I had not seen the email for hours or days I'd still have seen the original version. (The same is true of the actual blog posts - I've occasionally seen a mistake in an ACX post in my email, gone to the comments to report it, only to find it had already been edited to correct it)
I don't really see how getting someone to back down with a display of anger (they haven't really changed their mind on the issue, they're just afraid) is any less manipulative, or more positive-sum, than getting them to back down by making them feel bad for you?
It's because it's an honest strength/commitment signal. The analytical message defines the territory and the anger defends it. It says "yes, this is really my territory, if you want it you'll have to defeat me in open combat." I think that selects for objective strength (in a broad socio-political sense) and I think that makes for better leadership. I think if your competition selects for who is more empathetically believable then you wind up with worse leaders. (Not that the locus of good/bad is strictly about the leaders themselves, it's more about what terms the battles are fought under and that is ultimately reflected in things like party platforms.)
In your response to v1 of my comment you mentioned empathy's role in social cohesion and I do think that's central to my point. My view is that empathy IS important for social cohesion ... but only in small groups. That's where it evolved. The problem with empathy is that it requires a high level of mutual information and social trust to function properly. Otherwise it runs into the free rider problem. When someone imposes on the collective by saying "I need help", the leader has to be confident that a) they're not lying and b) they're worth helping, meaning that they're not an alcoholic or inveterate loafer who will just "need help" again every 6 months. That requires a lot of information.
In CS terms I think of empathy as an n^2 algorithm for resource allocation. It scales very badly when you get beyond communes and small towns. When you get beyond that scale you need hard-headed realpolitik leadership because it's impractically costly to verify signals of need. That's both because they're easily falsifiable and because rewarding them creates a moral hazard. Going down the empathic path at scale leads to endless stuff like "we need to spend even MORE money on the minorities because they just can't seem to catch up." That causes politics to devolve into zero-sum competitions for empathically-distributed resources. "I'm more deserving! No I'M more deserving! No I'VE been oppressed more! No I'M INTERSECTIONAL!" Sound familiar?
On a family- or small community-scale, empathy is essential. On a large scale it's a cancer. It does nothing but open the door to free riders. In my view this is the key structural criticism of progressivism. It's bad for the same reason communism is bad: they both represent versions of central planning.
I often see a lot of focus from conservatives on "free riders" and the idea that someone will get help who doesn't need or deserve it. This seems to me a case of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". A more realistic way of looking at it is treating such people as a form of overhead. It should still be discouraged, of course, but so much focus on preventing people who don't need help from getting it often just ends up putting barriers in front of people who do.
In your example of the leader, I think what needs to be evaluated is the chance of the person being a freeloader vs what would be done with the materials/assistance otherwise. If you need every scrap of food you can get, you have nothing to donate. If the person is almost certainly scamming you, you should probably turn them away. Notably, though, if you have a massive surplus of food, you can afford to give to those who are less likely to need it - people you are only 90, 80, 70% confident on.
Many groups lie. The woke camp famously invests lots of energy in attacking and cancelling those who would correct those lies. There are many examples of liars brushing of criticism of their lies, but not as many for vigorously attacking correctors.
Yeah it's frustrating when "slight exaggeration of the facts" is the focus of the criticism while the President still claims Kilmar Abrego Garcia's knuckles literally have MS13 tattooed onto them
My intuition here that it is definitely *not* worth your time to correct them, because you should not be wasting your time arguing with fools!
Occasionally stooping to debate with culturally important idiots might be worthwhile, but I just think you should be at a higher level than this whenever possible.
A meta-point here: I like almost all of your posts, but all your worst posts are in this category of "arguing with fools". It seems comparable to the trap of r/atheism.
Yeah but when everyone adopts the strategy of not bothering to argue with or correct the fools, we get to the present situation where fools have taken over every institution of power and almost all facets of discourse in society just consists of fools engaging in emotionally charged struggle/virtue signal sessions with each other instead of discussing any facts of the matter.
I don't think the situation we are currently in arose from the American Left being too slow to "argue with or correct" the American Right, and I think the American Right has been quite enthusiastic for a few years in doing the same to the American Left.
No, the situation we are currently in arose from the fools on both sides taking over all discourse, and now the main mode of discussion is fools making foolish emotional virtue signal arguments at each other, and nobody can figure out what's real or actually important anymore. The problem isn't left vs. right, it's the rational people getting crowded out by the fools on all sides and when their response is just throwing their hands up because it's a waste of time to argue with fools, it only spirals further in that direction.
That's well and all, but you keep alleging that it would help to "argue with fools" and I think we both agree that a lot of people already have been, so I'm not sure what you're arguing for.
A lot of fools have been.
I don't think the rational reasonable people put in enough effort to expose foolishness where they see it, rather they conclude that it's a waste of time as the fools will not appreciate the argument and will not change their minds in any case, so they're content to let the fools play their foolish games. The result is that everyone now has to live in a circus.
I'm arguing that perhaps it is not a waste of time to expose foolishness, not for the benefit of the fools themselves but for the other rational people out there who might recognize and appreciate and perhaps even be inspired by it to themselves engage in rational discourse to crowd out the foolish. Because as someone else pointed out, it is a tragedy of the commons issue, where nobody wants to themselves waste time arguing with fools, but we would all be better off if rational reasonable people did so. So I think if enough rational people put in more effort to call out foolishness where they see it, we would all be better off and maybe make the public discourse less foolish overall.
>fools on both sides taking over all discourse
But this didn't happen because nobody was arguing against them, just that the fools were more convincing. Non-fools should really up their game at some point...
It might be a tragedy of the commons situation. Individually you're better off not arguing with fools, but collectively we would all be better off if smart reasonable people corrected fools as much as possible.
I rarely engage dishonest people's arguments, so if this is correct then I'm certainly part of the problem.
Yes, exactly.
But correcting lies doesn't stop people from making them. People will keep believing what they want to believe. The correct lesson to learn from all of this is that free speech was a mistake.
Free speech is fine, it's universal suffrage that was the mistake.
Fools' foolish opinions are inconsequential when they're properly disempowered.
Unfortunately, it's especially the most foolish who want to limit free speech so that they do not get corrected.
Perhaps the problem is that the non-fools are wasting all their time engaging directly with the fools instead of just doing useful stuff.
It's like if the Apollo Program had decided to spend all its time and resources arguing with half a dozen Flat Earthers who say you can't possibly go to the Moon, instead of just going to the Moon.
It's an overreaction to assume that an exaggeration is a deliberate lie. Often exaggerations are caused by enthusiasm or not having enough time to fact check.
Thank you for putting in words what has been bothering me for a long while now. I was just thinking about it a few days ago, though the central example - and most other cases I've encountered on the same lines, too, that have earlier come to mind - is from the other side: the people who have seen something like the infamous "Muslim Demographics" video that circulated a lot a decade ago, go around saying "Europe is getting conquered by Muslims, Muslim women have on average 8 kids per woman!" and when one points out that actual numbers in Europe are nowhere close to eight, go "Well, the number is usually still higher than that of non-Muslims, why care if it's actually right if it is directionally correct?"
Edit: another example that has often been in my mind is the claim that Stalin killed 60 million people or something like that - the most credible actual estimates including Holodomor are something like 10 million people, but stating that will get pushback and "well, that's still a huge number, why care?", or accusations of outright Soviet sympathies. And that's not even getting into the "Bolshevik Jews killed 60 million Christians" variety...
>Stalin killed 60 million people
Personally, at that.
I’ve wondered if it was okay to mention the losses sustained by Belarus owing to the Nazis. That one is trickier I guess. We learned nothing about it in school. But I’m old so perhaps the scale of it was not known.
If you think that's bad, try nitpicking some of the Holocaust-related numbers.
I work on the assumption that "six million" is probably some kind of overestimate, because all the incentives are on the side of overestimation. But damned if I'd ever say so, because all the incentives are on the side of overestimation.
There's a difference between saying 'here is some credible research which suggests the number was probably more like X' (which is fine, dependent on quality of research) and 'I assume it wasn't 6 million, that's probably some kind of overestimate due to incentives'.
I had a go at this problem in one of my essays a couple of months ago:
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/another-country
My conclusion is that most of these arguments proceed from emotion, rather than analysis, and as a result when you criticise the facts that someone postulates, the statistics they use or the conclusions they draw, their ego is involved and so you are implicitly making a personal criticism of them. It's a truism, after all that the conscious mind exists, at least in part, to provide rationalisations for opinions that we have already reached emotionally. This is why it's so hard to change peoples' minds. If you do this consistently, of course, you get spat on from both sides: in some quarters I'm considered a hopelessly conventional apologist for the West, in others a radical critic of the same West, for writing the same thing.
I'll add a couple more examples. One is the argument from absence of evidence, which is surprisingly common. For example:
- The CIA set up, armed and trained the Islamic State in Syria.
- I don't think there's any evidence for that at all. We know ...
- Well that just goes to show how clever they are and how well hidden the evidence is.
Or the argument independent of facts at all:
- Not nearly enough attention is given to murders of women in this country.
- You may be right, but how do numbers of killings compare between men and women?
- I suppose you think it's all right to murder women then. You look like a violent person yourself.
The path of argument from facts is a lonely and a stony one.
Exactly, and the issue is every pretty much every discussion today immediately starts off with all the participants emotionally invested in proving who is a virtuous person and who is a piece of shit, almost no one seems to care about just getting to the facts.
I've been simultaneously called a degenerate Magat Trumple and a TDS libtard just for comparing Trump's proposed tariffs against Kamala's proposed tax on unrealized gains while criticizing both, how are we to have any sensible policy discussion in this day and age outside of rationalist spheres is beyond me.
I think part of the problem here is that in large parts, public online discourse *has* been taken over by bots and bad actors and engagement farmers to the point where they consider it a success if they get you to hit reply, regardless of content, changing minds, or reality.
You notice this particularly on e.g. large subreddits, where the barrier to entry for anonymous commenters is too low, and the successful proliferation of artificially generated comments and content too high. Even if you do meet another person, they're primed to engage with the same strategy as the bots.
I've had debates about policy in real life, in person, sometimes with low-level local city officials (this sounds a bit pretentious but I mean like... my buddy who works with transportation policy), and it never gets that bad or weird, even when we fundamentally disagree. I'm sorry to say it, but the olden days of forum discourse between humans that just want to debate actual policy are gone, at least outside of heavily moderated comment sections that select for actual humans. There will still be some spaces for it, but they'll have to be small.
I'm reminded of the 'scissor statements' work of short fiction Scott wrote here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ - it's more profitable for platforms to promote divisive statements that increase engagement, so they will. It's easy to blame 'the way people are these days', but as a species we're being warped by the manipulation of for-profit algorithms - and we're too prideful/foolish to believe it possible of ourselves, like the maverick who declares "advertising doesn't work on me!"
I can recall specific examples of anti-woke flat out lying, i.e. claiming DVIDS didn't in fact remove various images and videos under a Trump order when it's extremely well documented and I literally posted the exact text from Trump from whitehouse.gov as well as documents straight from the DVIDS website saying "we did this." Like talking to a brick wall.
This is how the slippery slope argument should be made.
"This problem may be small, but it could easily escalate. Here's the mechanism how the escalation would happen."
Instead of: "This problem is small and I don't have enough evidence to make my point of view prevail, so let's just assert that things are going to get much worse."
I think the argument was more "where we are today is the evidence that we already slid all the way down the slope".
I tend to see the slippery slope argument as "okay, I don't have evidence yet because the thing hasn't happened yet but given similar events in the past and their results, and the fact that the group pushing for this 'one teeny tiny small little change' admit they want even bigger changes to come in future and are trying this to see if further activism will work, then yeah I think we're in slippery slope territory".
It's hard to provide evidence of "the house will burn down if you do that" when the other party is arguing "but the house hasn't burned down yet, why are you saying that plugging just one more piece of equipment into the outlet will cause it to burn down?" before the house burns down, and afterwards when the house is a smoking ruin, the damage has already been done. And it won't even work as a warning because the next time will be "but I'm not overloading an outlet, I'm just lighting candles next to flammable materials all over the new house! this is totally different!"
The argument with the outlet sounds more like a "slippery step" argument :)
On the other hand, flawed slippery slope arguments often look more like "We have established that plugging hundreds of pieces of equipment into the same outlet might burn down the house, therefore you should not plug any pieces of equipment into any outlets".
This is adjacent to "I agree with your conclusion but your argument is locally invalid" in terms of things that we need to defend as social necessities. You're not obligated to correct anyone, but if the argument doesn't need to be locally valid I don't need to read it, just assert the conclusion.
That's a good way to put it
As always, the problem is that we in the US are dominated by a hugely polarized two-party system, and whichever side comes up with reasonableness and accuracy norms and enforces them on their own people *first* is setting down their rhetorical gun in a total war for political and cultural dominance.
Any community who succeeds at enforcing these norms internally will just become irrelevant to the national discussion until they drop them again, because rhetoric constrained by the truth can't reliably compete with completely unrestrained rhetoric.
Scott suggests this analysis is weak in his post entitled something like "In Favor of Niceness". For what it's worth, I think "completely unrestrained rhetoric" is completely useless to hear or make space for and would be dropped by any serious person. Even the most biased news sources tend to avoid outright lies (see Scott's other post about that idk you can Google for it).
> Even the most biased news sources tend to avoid outright lies
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies
> As always, the problem is that we in the US are dominated by a hugely polarized two-party system, and whichever side comes up with reasonableness and accuracy norms and enforces them on their own people *first* is setting down their rhetorical gun in a total war for political and cultural dominance.
I often feel like it's the opposite -- the war is won by whoever best controls the loonies on their own side. Trump was having a bad few weeks, but then the far-left loonies starting rioting and now Trump looks like the sensible one again. If the far-right loonies start rioting next week then Trump will look bad again.
How often do you hear someone use the phrase "So you're saying" and it's followed by an accurate representation of what you've just said? How do you not end up in an infinite loop of having to repeat yourself?
That's usually followed by an inaccurate representation.
Scott talked about this before: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/08/varieties-of-argumentative-experience/ Ctrl-F "clarifying"
By repeating yourself in different ways. I usually find that when someone says that they want clarification, and going back and forth a few times usually helps them understand whatever it is I was trying to say.
> How often do you hear someone use the phrase "So you're saying" and it's followed by an accurate representation of what you've just said?
rarely
> How do you not end up in an infinite loop of having to repeat yourself?
this may sound somewhat polemic, but many people explain for themselves, without regard for their audience's perspective, and then wonder why they got misunderstood.
If your 2nd (and 3rd and 4th) try is identical to your first try, then you defeinitly did not take your audience into account.
So you're saying you rarely hear the phrase so you're saying followed by an accurate representation of what you've just said?
The article makes a good point. However, actually, I think it's possible to improve upon it ;)
In my field of work (experimental physics) and in my experience, it is important to distinguish between concepts and details. Sometimes it can be valuable to communicate a concept, that gives the correct intuition about some experiment and thus leads to a clear visualization of the path forward (in terms of measurement strategy or similar). It is well possible, though, that the concept is inaccurate to some extent and needs to be improved along the way and a deeper or more rigorous theory has to be consulted in detail.
Scott tries to gesture at this with the list of exceptions he provides. For the moment (and this certainly can be improved), I would suggest the following characteristic: If, in terms of complexity of the statement or concept, a very small or zero penalty is incurred for higher precision, one should try to aim for the higher precision. This perfectly captures Joe Criminal then, on the one hand, where the complexity (in some metric) is basically the same for the precise statement if one talks to the unrelated law and order proponent, but the amount of additional emphasis that no disrespect is meant towards victims would incur a large penalty when talking to relatives or victims. I think this heuristic does a decent job in other examples as well, at least the ones that come to my mind from the top of my head.
Excellently put.
This is a category error, same as the person who interrupts a group singing "Happy Birthday to You" to clarify "but really, we want you to be virtuous, not just hedonistic, and definitely don't, like, steal anything just to make yourself happy."
The point of news stories (I'd argue, from the beginning - but certainly in the present moment) is to build feelings of positive community by helping your audience affiliate sentimentally around a shared core of narrative meaning. The person who clarifies facts is "not even wrong"; they're just rude, interrupting a social ritual with something irrelevant. That's why the response tends to be to call out the person's social priorities rather than their logic.
I'm confused. Wouldn't it then be rude to show up at a guy's blog to tell him that he's fact-checking wrong?
Anyway, some of us certainly read news because we're curious about what's really going on, and fact-checking can certainly with that. And if people who lie in the interest of tribalism are offended by that, well, so be it.
> some of us certainly read news because we're curious about what's really going on
Seems misguided. Why would you not use more reliable means of finding out, like reading entrails or tea leaves?
There are reliable alternative news sources. Understandingwar.org is a bit better than tea leaves, which of course is better than CNN.
Okay, fair. There ARE some sources of information better than tasseomancy, but I wouldn't call something like that site "news."
>Wouldn't it then be rude to show up at a guy's blog to tell him that he's fact-checking wrong?
Not if he's doing it as a drive-by critique of your community's sacred stories. Skeptical outside critique profanes the story and ruins the moment for everybody. This is why in many traditional societies, non-initiates can be severely punished if they accidentally observe the insiders' religious rituals.
>Anyway, some of us certainly read news because we're curious about what's really going on, and fact-checking can certainly with that.
Hot take: it is fundamentally not possible for commercial news stories to teach you "what's really going on."
The reality of the politics even in a mid-sized elementary school is unfathomably more complex than could be conveyed in the handful of pieces NYT puts out per week. Thus, reporters at most create grossly reductive cartoon stories *inspired* by (what little they see of) reality. And if the audience exercises any choice at all in which stories they read, then by Moloch's agency those stories will necessarily be shaped more by the pleasure they give the reader than by any fidelity to reality. If you pride yourself on valuing "complexity," then fact-checking might make the story more satisfying to you, but don't kid yourself: it's still basically an entertainment experience.
Your hot take is stupid. Honestly, if you want to go with "I literally have no idea who the president of the US is because I don't trust anything in the news", then fine. Or accept that you read stuff in the news and accept that it's right, and also, sure they screw lots of stuff up. And say that, instead of a silly take about how you can't trust anything.
My friend, it is charming that you believe you follow news to learn the Truth, and charming that you believe the news mostly supplies this. It's hard to know how else to respond, because you don't give clear justifications for this belief. But I sincerely hope that you turn out to be right, and I turn out to be wrong.
The point of Scott Alexander's post was to build feelings of positive community by helping his audience affiliate sentimentally around a shared core of narrative meaning. The fact that you are clarifying facts about it is "not even wrong." It's just rude. You're interrupting a social ritual with something irrelevant.
They never said they weren't.
Given the norms of this community, surely a contrarian counter-framing is working with the grain of the social ritual rather than against it? It's not impolite to add harmony to "Happy Birthday," and you're allowed to cap a Latin quotation with a different Latin quotation.
This is largely true, but the media pretend to communicate truth, not stoke sentiments, so at the very least it's worthwhile to puncture their hypocrisy.
Your critique is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't account for emergent imperatives downstream of the narrative.
The shared narrative includes a partial commitment to factual accuracy. That commitment is qualified and the execution is flawed, but it is nonetheless part of the story. The social meaning of the news isn't even accessible unless there are people actually striving to fulfill its aspirations. Kayfabe isn't sustainable and the equilibrium can only sustain a certain amount of cynicism.
Putting South American illegal immigrants who have committed no other crime in foreign concentration camps is kind of that. Trump is putting South American immigrants into camps is true and not particularly misleading. You could say illegal immigrants but we don't actually know that because they weren't given due process
Doesn't it make sense to be a consequentialist with nitpicking? We know that disagreeing with people on subjects they're passionate about reinforces their beliefs ~95% of the time. "Acktually"-ing someone on something related to the "color wars" (my umbrella term for politics, culture wars, and everything related), only feeds those wars. "Don't feed the color wars" has been, more or less, my self-censorship rule for the last 3 years.
As a result, I can see I'm having a bigger impact on epistemics than otherwise. When people put me in this iridescent category, they feel more comfortable opening up about their nuanced stances on things, which helps do the work of healing the world. Plus, it brings me closer to everybody, making it easier for me to do social work than if I were separated.
I enjoy this perspective. Perhaps I am in general less exposed to culture wars due to reasons of social milieu, but whenever I am confronted with cw topics anyway I try to engage with the "spirit" of the argument rather than the facts and correct only where I think it really can make an impact. This "good-faith" approach often leads to my conversation partner to include nuance into the discussion by themselves, making everybody the better for it.
Asking yourself whether it's really cost-effective to correct this or that exaggeration and concluding it isn't on occasion is probably fine, so long as you also consider the possibility that people who exaggerate will continue to do so. It might be easier to correct them at scale; OTOH, they might be self-reinforcing once established.
Hmm, what does "correct them at scale" refer to? Do you mean by writing, and thus reaching a broad audience? Or do you mean through iterative correcting?
More the broad audience approach. Once a crowd of people are all yelling "the dress is green!", it's cheaper to make a general announcement that it's really purple than to take them each aside individually as they came.
The catch, again, is that if you wait and announce "you're all wrong; it's purple", they'll notice there's twenty of them and only one of you, and suspect you can't be right. Even if their epistemology is no stronger than yours, it might not look that way by then.
> We know that disagreeing with people on subjects they're passionate about reinforces their beliefs ~95% of the time.
As a note, if this statement is based on the backfire effect, it's likely that it's not real (disappears on bigger more precise studies)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7462781/
Interesting. But when you disagree with anybody politically, they always double-down. Maybe later they'll correct a fact when asked in some cold environment, sure. But the next day they're deeper in into their camp. I'm open to being proven wrong though. Philosophy Bear brought up some interesting studies about how you can convince people, actually.
Well clearly now I have to believe in the backfire effect even harder!
If the backfire effect is true, and people are more likely to believe false statements after someone corrects them with a true statement, then the opposite should also be true: people are more likely to believe true statements after someone confronts them with a false statement.
Therefore, lying is actually a public good.
There is Cunningham’s Law, after all
One that especially makes me crazy is a left-wing consensus that it's alright to say JD Vance masturbated with sofa cushions. It wasn't something he said, it was a lie/joke someone made up. And people persisted in saying it "because it's funny" even though they knew it was false.
They even said Vance had the face of a sofa-schtupper, even though there's no such thing as a sofa-schtupper, let alone them having a distinctive face..
Reality-based community?
Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer was an earlier version of that.
I think everyone knew that was a joke though, I don't think anyone really thought worse of him for it.
Enough people seriously believed it this time around, and also the left seem to relish in taking every angle to shit on Vance no matter how ridiculous (c.f. the fat boy memes) in a way that seems deliberate and coordinated.
Per 2016 Trump ‘people are saying so there must be something to it’ Ted Cruz’s dad was in on the Kennedy hit.
Wait is that really not true? Damn, I completely believed it! They even mentioned the source (autobiography or memoir, I don't remember)! What monster would mention a source for a falsehood?
I can't tell whether you're joking.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jd-vance-couch-cushions/
I looked it up after reading your comment already and then commented to convey my sincere surprise. Thanks for corecting misinformation! (I'm not American, and in a much more conservative culture than the USA. I regularly hear various sexual behaviour discussed as normal online that does not exist (or exists to an insignificant degree and not discussed at all) in my culture, so the JD Vance story did not seem improbable in comparison to me)
The reason you appear to be joking is this endline:
> What monster would mention a source for a falsehood?
Anyone who will tell a falsehood will do this. The question makes absolutely no sense.
It was like the David Cameron pig-loving thing; a former Tory bigwig co-wrote a biography of Cameron allegedly revealing all sorts of dirty laundry, including "someone told me that someone told them" story that as part of an initiation rite at university he put his penis into the mouth of a pig's head. There seems to be no evidence whatsoever for this, but for everyone who disliked Cameron (and many who didn't care one way or the other), it was too good a story to ignore, whether or not it was true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggate
Same with Vance and the sofa story; for the media and online types and others who dislike the Republicans, this was just leaning into Tim Walz' messaging that "The Republicans are *weird*" and who cares if it's true or not?
I think this is slightly different from the original problem (though still morally wrong) because nobody I know of actually believed this. It was more like a mass social ritual of mockery rather than an attempt to spread a real lie.
But of course it's still terrible, and making up something fake to accuse someone of is equivalent to admitting you've lost the argument.
Taleuntum and Sin (both in this thread) actually believed it. And they are ACX readers. I would guess a huge number of ordinary people fell for it.
Lies about high-status members of your outgroup are like candy-coated poison. They taste so delicious that it takes a lot of willpower to read the label carefully and see that arsenic is the third ingredient.
I have nothing for or against JD Vance, he means nothing to me. I believed it until this very thread.
I don't consider sex with sofas an evidence for or against good political leadership, so I ignored that.
I admit I assumed that it was based on some kind of true story, I just didn't draw any conclusions from it. I filed it under "Americans are obsessed about sex again".
I assumed it was probably based on something, because it's too specific and too mild to make up.
If you tell me that he did a 10/10 weird sex (like fucking a pig) act then I'll probably assume it's a lie. But that's a 3/10 weird sex act at best, it sounds like the sort of thing someone might admit to in a Howard Stern interview or something.
Hyper autists not getting a joke? Wow, who would have guessed!
It was implied that I marginalize autistic people with my proposed norms of discourse AND also that I'm a hyper autist myself in the comments of a single ACX post. I love the internet!
>"because it's funny" even though they knew it was false
... and not ackshually funny?
Not that there can't be group enjoyment of not-funny things. I once listened to a few cringey minutes of "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" and the audience brayed with laughter at everything. Or maybe their own laughter made them laugh? Kind of like the Laughter Yoga they offered at my local library? - led by a lady librarian who had gotten certified for the purpose. I ackshually liked her, but would have described her as the most humorless person there, which inevitably gave the sounds coming from Laughter Yoga an Emmanuel Goldstein vibe.
I thought that one was debunked almost immediately.
I distinctly remember somebody saying that it was written in an early edition of Hillbilly Elegy and was later taken out, and wasn't disabused of this notion until months after the election. The sheer volume of drivel on the internet these days is almost impossible to sift through, especially if a lot of people have a vested interest in circulating said drivel.
Hmmm… i heard that it was nonsense right away. There were people making winking jokes about, like Bill Maher, but I knew they were bullshit.
Yeah, the deliberate and coordinated efforts to lie about and smear Vance in every manner possible, no matter how ridiculous (c.f. the fat boy memes), is really bizarre to me because as far as I could tell, there's nothing really egregiously offensive about the guy other than his bending of the knee to Trump. His VP debate performance and subsequent speeches were pretty good even!
I think the thing is, in my memory there used to be a feeling of "hey, maybe politics should be about more than just slinging shit at the other side" amongst normal people, but the way that left leaning people around me relished in the coordinated waves of shitting on a seemingly pretty normal guy (and even his minority wife!), instead of pointing out how weird it all is (c.f. also the coordinated effort to call him "weird"), was kind of a wake up moment for me. It made me think there's currently something really wrong with the left in general, from news media to the Democrat party, which was a feeling I used to reserve for insane people on Twitter. This is making me genuinely worry we're in a political doom spiral.
I think you go too far. You don't have to believe he fucks sofas to believe that he's got weird beliefs of the world, and it seems totally reasonable to round that off as "weird". This is the guy who did exactly what Scott is complaining about! After Trump's insane "eating the dogs, eating the cats" quip, he went on Twitter and openly said "well, this may have been a lie, but I'll happily lie any day of the week in order to get people to pay attention to this problem!" But it wasn't a problem, like, even a little bit. What do *you* call someone who vigorously believes and defends slanderous conspiracies without evidence, possibly for political convenience? "Weird" is arguably too generous.
I mean, as much as I hate it, toeing the party line is the name of the game in the extremely partisan political environment today, it doesn't seem egregious enough to single him out as a weirdo over that when the vast majority of politicians on both sides do the same.
And my point was more how weirdly coordinated each wave of attacks was, like "a committee decided to produce a bunch of this particular genre of fat boy Vance memes and you will all find it funny now because it's politically advantageous for our side", then adherents eagerly slurping it up. It's cultish.
I don't agree with the both sidesism here. I think MAGA politicians lie more often and more egregiously than any other politicians in the US. We can debate about whether the lies are intentional, but I think it would be tough to defend “tariffs are a tax other countries pay”, “the country is being invaded“, and of course, “they're eating the dogs”
I don't think there's any reason to attribute the Vance face photoshop memes to a conspiracy. That sounds very much like the kind of the thing that would happen organically.
Yeah the right was also indulging in Vance memes, in the spirit of male friendship (I make fun of you because I love you)
Is this comment serious? I could honestly mistake this for satire. You go from:
"I mean, as much as I hate it, toeing the party line is the name of the game in the extremely partisan political environment today..."
to
"And my point was more how weirdly coordinated each wave of attacks was, like "a committee decided to produce..."
Within the space of a paragraph without so much as a pause or a stumble. Do you not notice that you are literally *describing the same thing* here? In a very Russell-conjugation sense. "Our playing the game and toeing the party line, their creepily coordinated attacks."
(Personally I'd love to see a return to a more civil and truth-based politics. But I can't for a single instant believe in the sincerity of anyone who claims the same but also handwaves away toeing the line for Trump. No single human being has done more to damage civility or the relevance of facts in modern politics than Trump has.)
If you don't see the difference and chalk it down to "ours" vs. "theirs" when I never identified with either, then I also doubt your sincerity to try to understand rather than play tribal politics, so I guess there's no point in further conversation.
I mean, I see lots of differences. In one case it's a individual auditioning for a job of enormous personal responsibility knowingly and blatantly lying for personal gain. On the other case it's random people on the internet passing around memes. Those are very different things.
It is, in this case, your framing that makes them seem so similar. "Here's something Vance is doing to try to succeed at politics. Here's something the other side is doing to try to succeed as politics." But you describe them with totally different affect as if it *should be* clear to the reader why one is despicable and the other is business as usual.
So yes, I assumed it was an "ours" vs "theirs" thing because you didn't leave me any other obvious reading. At no point do you explain why knowingly and blatantly lying to toe the party line is morally different than any other sort of lying. At no point do you explain why memes spreading (the way memes are prone to do) is sinister or unusually egregious. You just load them up with affect as if the affect itself proves your point. In my experience, people who do that are partisans stuck so deep into their side's worldview that it seems to obvious to bother explaining.
If I was mistaken about your political leanings I sincerely apologize. But having re-read your comment several times, I'm genuinely unsure what else it was I was supposed to glean from it.
People who will lie in their own interests and credulously believe nasty things about their outgroup are the opposite of weird.
> there's nothing really egregiously offensive about the guy other than his bending of the knee to Trump.
Trump attempted to overthrow the government and Vance rationalizes it as, "Twitter suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story for one day so 2020 was stolen." Come on, bruv.
So let's make an artificial meme out of photoshopping him with a fat face, giggle about it, and pretend it's political action?
Come on, bruv.
I mean, yes. This is exactly the sort of thing people do with politicians they don't like, and it is absolutely 'political action'. Once upon a time there were handbills about Andrew "the blood thirsty Jackson began again to show his cannibal propensities, by ordering his Bowman to dress a dozen of these Indian bodies for his breakfast, which he devoured without leaving even a fragment."... The Cincinnati Gazette discussing how "General Jackson’s mother was a COMMON PROSTITUTE brought to this country by British soldiers. She afterwards married a MULATTO MAN, with whom she had several children, of which General JACKSON IS ONE!!!"
If you take a single glance at literally any of history, the Vance goss is nowhere even close to beyond the pale. More recently, look at AOC getting photoshopped on denigrating porn... Clinton "drinking blood" and baby-eating etc.
People who wring their hands about it cannot possibly be so confused as they project. If anything, it's a return to our roots.
ISTR a story about LBJ along these lines--he wanted to float the rumor that his opponent had f--ked a pig, just to force him to deny it.
The other thing is that... let's face it, that's not even *that* weird and embarrassing, as far as weird and embarrassing sex acts go.
I have a Charles Mingus record that was recorded in France in 1964 where, between songs, he said that he thought the government was building concentration camps for protestors.
I don’t think anyone will be able to compete with this for the most esoteric cultural reference of the thread.
Very well taken, though I’d caution that rigor deployed asymmetrically becomes its own form of manipulation. The line between correcting error and signaling allegiance is thin—and often felt more than seen.
Largely agree, and thank you for policing, as it is a public good. Are you as interested in self-policing? For instance:
"Matthew Talamini
Feb 5
My family is in danger from the national debt. So's yours. 60-80% is a safe debt-to-GDP ratio. The US is at 123%. This article reads like it comes from an alternate universe where governments never have debt crises. Where interest rates don't affect anybody's lives. Where no country has ever played chicken with macroeconomic forces and ditched just a smidge too late."
"Scott Alexander
Feb 5
Trump obviously doesn't care about the debt or he wouldn't be promising massive tax cuts. If I thought there was any hope of decreasing the debt, I'd . . . well, I'd hope it would go for the worst government programs first, but I'd understand if they wanted to give everything a haircut. Getting rid of the best ones first, not touching lots of the stupid ones, and we all know they'll increase the debt anyway just seems dumb."
The first half of your first sentence strikes me as going too far. A lot of us care profoundly about the debt. A lot of us think tax cuts may still be important even in a debt crisis (for instance, to prevent a recession, or because we believe in Laffer, or because we play political games to try to get elected, or a million other reasons). I fully expect Trump is amongst that crowd and am not sure I would trust an debate opponent as sincere if they didn't think that. Perhaps you're a lot better psych than I assumed and you know us more than we know us, but I'd have bet against that. Perhaps you're speaking 5% too aggressively here?
YOU might care profoundly. But Trump is a very different story, who has served an entire term as President prior to his recent re-election, and hasn't acted to cut overall spending (his relative acceptance of the welfare state is how he got perceived as relatively moderate & electable for a Republican).
The flip side of this is that information doesn't get transmitted perfectly, and people pick up minor errors and dismiss the truth of the broader point, sometimes with memes like this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah.
“The truth of the broader point” is called a narrative, which is a useful tool for understanding the world but not the same as truth.
The "truth" is not merely a list of disconnected facts.
What "truth of the broader point" is there in that meme?
How much time do you have?
I agree that if someone *LIES* you ought to correct them and that's not nitpicking.
However, not every knowingly uttered untrue statement is a lie. Yes, we could try to say only full technical truth, but then what could be 2 sentences would end-up being 10 nuanced pages of text. Yes, sometimes that nuance is necessary—but demanding it 100% of time is silly. We can't talk like that.
Think of conversation as a lossy compression. WAV vs. MP3, PNG vs. JPEG.
And this is done in science all the time! We physicists simplify all the time—otherwise we wouldn't be able to get any job done. Our models are knowingly untrue (e.g. Newtonian mechanics), yet useful. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Let's look at your examples:
1. You say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes.
Here, you lied. It's not a simplification, 10 vs 6 changes nothing on complexity axes. And you lied a lot, common factor of 2? (Notice, I am simplifying here! It's actually 2 factors, one of 5/3 and second 5/2, but this is OK, 5/3 is roughly 2, and so is 5/2. This should be allowed!)
2. Joe Target shouted a racial slur and punched a black guy in the face because he hates minorities so much! This proves that we need hate crime legislation immediately!
This is full lie, there is nothing "slightly incorrect about this". The *central claim* of the statement is untrue. Refuting it is not a nitpick, it's not about making some argument 5% weaker. So again, this is a full lie, no need to haggle about this.
3. Where people have said in all seriousness that Trump might try to put all minorities in camps and murder them. (I’m not sure they specified all minorities, and I don’t think they ever said they would get murdered there.)
Here, the murder is off—that's a clear lie and you shouldn't get away with that. The *all* part depends on the context. What did you hear? Do you have an idea what those people meant? Did they mean almost all minorities and you simplified to all? Then I guess it's ok. Or did they mean *some minorities* and you simplified to all? Then I think that's over the line.
I think this perspective vibes extremely well with what I suggested a bit above. Probably not coincidentally we come from a similar background, I think.
Saying the truth about the number of murders and rapes vs. the falsehood is similarly demanding (for some definition of demanding), so saying the falsehood is basically non-excusable.
In the case of Joe Target it becomes even worse, making the wrong claim is in some sense more complex/demanding than making the (boring) true one, because you need to take a more or less neutral story and in addition invent angles that are somehow enraging to a imagined audience.
Same goes for, e.g., the example of Trump and the purported consumption of household pets. Since there was no basis in reality, the amount of work needed to invent this (bizarre) lie was much higher than to just not say it, so here correction is almost a moral duty: Under no framework that comes to my mind is this statement a justifiable simplification of a more complex situation, so nothing is gained by making this statement.
And this is exactly why people hate pedants. The degree of the hate is proportional to how much that much that person try to make a big deal of a signal out of a noise.
"(sorry - I’ve genuinely heard people say he was going to put minorities in camps, but I’m not sure they specified all minorities, and I don’t think they ever said they would get murdered there. Would you have let me get away with that exaggeration?)"
Don't worry, Gunflint would chime in with "well I don't know where you heard that, *I* never read/heard anything like that and I'm surrounded by liberal people, are you sure this isn't just one crazy guy saying that, or maybe you're mistaken?", at least that's how my interactions generally go when I quote the latest woke flapping 😀
Well I hadn’t planned to…
This is a meme recycled from the Obama presidency. A member of my extended family said FEMA was building camps for bad people, not immigrants, I think the implication was they were for the more heinous Republicans. After a bit more of that stuff I just closed my Facebook account for good.
I think conspiracy theories about secret FEMA internment camps date back at least as far as the 90s. I remember them being part of the lore of the original Deus Ex (2000), which was based on a pastiche of 90s counterculture memes.
and I’ll add that while I did delete my Facebook account, what I didn’t do is start claiming my not so bright relative was representative of conservatives or Republicans because she simply isn’t. That would just have been a cheap dunk that added nothing to the conversation.
She’s just a dummy who bought into a preposterous conspiracy theory.
Thank you for making this point. We could use a better culture and better technology for giving and accepting corrections, but I do believe some online communities are moving in that direction.
I think there are lots more dimensions to consider here, though, than the ones suggested by your caveats. Tone, spirit, context (both of original claim and comment). Is it sincere or performative? Who’s it really meant for? Would you still bother to make the point in a one-on-one conversation? Is the correction made respectfully and constructively? Is it actually a correction, or just a different interpretation/belief/unsourced claim/oversimplification/lie?
It’s good to want to help recalibrate the baseline for truth, but anyone who adds 25% extra toxicity, hostility or confusion to solve for a 5% exaggeration, is making a net negative contribution, IMO.
> "Would you still bother to make the point in a one-on-one conversation?"
This is a particularly good question. A lot of what is said in online debate is intended only to influence the audience, without a good-faith attempt to engage with the substance of the opponent's argument.
Or as Scott put it a few years ago, "If you hold the conversation in private, you’re almost guaranteed to avoid [social shaming and gotchas]. Everything below that is a show put on for spectators."
(https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/08/varieties-of-argumentative-experience/)
i feel like some of the "is Joe Criminal a racist" fits the recent murder of Jonathan Joss and whether its a hate crime, or a crime provoked by longstanding beefs over crazy behavior from Joss where the slurs are just icing on the cake
I think internet comment culture is at more extreme risk for this - at least I am personally.
The motivation for comments is strongest immediately after reading (or visiting) an article, and weakens over time. This privileges immediate impression over careful analysis, half-remembered evidence over sourced and thoughtful proof, and confidence over caveats.
Ultimately I think this gives a bad impression of people who disagree with you. You're likely visiting sites that mostly privilege your bias. Commenters then make arguments that might be directionally true but outsized, containing a ton of inaccuracies, and emotionally loaded.
Of course, this comment is immune from this effect and is 100% reliable :P
"What could be more cringe than telling small lies, then bullying anyone who tries to correct you, in the hopes that future audience will be too cowed to speak up?"
It might be cringe at first, but if you do cow people into accepting your little lies, that means you've successfully gaslighted (gaslit?) them, which is a flex, and therefore not cringe. Therein lies the problem.
I’d go with gaslighted the same way most people talk about computer mouses rather than mice or multiple skeezy people as louses rather than lice.
Amen to this!
Likely because of the ideological circles more close/adjacent to my own, I see this CONSTANTLY with progressive/left people exaggerating the negativity of economic conditions in the US.
The overwhelmingly common (but not only) form of this I see on social media is "The average person only makes $35,000 a year! And people dare to call that livable!"
And I know if *shouldn't* bother me this much, but it does.
And doing my part as you would suggest, I responded saying that isn't actually the average and household is...blah blah blah.
For the trouble, the first response was that I was a boot-licker. Whose boot? The US Census Bureau? The FED's economic reporting wing?
I inquired and was told correcting thing that way moves attention away from the point (which, I will remind everyone, was incorrect in the first place!)
Anyway, it's pretty damn close to exactly what you laid out so decided to share.
https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/the-great-divergence
Oh, I am very aware! And the US is wealthier than it used to be at (minus small perturbations) any point previously! Etc etc. That’s why the economic doomism I see all the time (mostly from the left but that could be incidental sampling bias by me) drives me nuts.
OTOH if someone is saying, say, "we are being taxed to DEATH!!", is the correct response going "ackchually, tax levels in [insert Western country here] surely are not such that anyone will literally die of taxes", or treating this as a colorful turn of phrase expressing that the interlocutor thinks that their taxes are too high?
I feel like it depends on context. Like, if it’s in service a more specific point or call to action beyond “I don’t like taxes”.
And depending on the country, I feel like the correction is not “it won’t actually kill you” it would be something about the actual tax rate relative to historical norms or relative to government services or something.
Hyperbole is distinct from exaggeration.
I don't think people object to bloggers correcting lies, I think they object to exclusively focusing on ragging on one group of relatively mild offenders, thereby implying they're the worst. So say one were to spend years attacking woke people on their blog while ignoring or even praising people like Musk and the "techbros". Readers of that blog will get the impression that woke people lie more and are bigger threat to society. This is especially dangerous if the actual biggest liars have vastly more power than others. A blogger who spends years attacking random woke tweets and journalists nobody has ever heard of is doing a worse job combating misinformation than a blog who spend that time not defending but actively correcting people like Musk, Thiel, SBF... since their lies matter a lot more.
> I’ve genuinely heard people say he was going to put minorities in camps
At least for some minorities, _his administration_ has said that's what they're going to do (e.g. RFK Jr with some varieties of mental health). Maybe they're being honest about their intentions, or maybe they're just exaggerating for posturing's sake, but I find that when someone says they're going to do a bad thing, it's best to believe them, spread the word, and take action against it.
Institutionalising severely mentally ill, schizophrenic patients who are a danger to themselves and others is a pretty normal middle of the road health service/political position. I live in a country where this is expected and normal. It’s crazy to me that California doesn’t do it.
Not especially relevant, since that's not actually what RFK Jr was talking about. People with depression and ADHD are not, in general, dangers to themselves or others. RFK has just decided that safe, effective, time-tested medication is inferior to, y'know, sticking people on a farm and telling them to suck it up.
Oh right, you’re talking about the “wellness farms,” but describing these as “involuntary institutions” for people with mental health conditions is misleading. They are more accurately described as a type of detox center. You can be opposed to the proposal, that’s fine, but it’s crazy to say they are a camp for unwanted minorities. Everything is Hitler! Would you say that we lock up alcoholics against their will currently, because sometimes psychiatrists recommend that they go to detox? Even worse, detox is sometimes court mandated!?
"They are more accurately described as a type of detox center."
No, they are not "accurately" described as anything, because they don't exist yet. To the best of my knowledge even RFK Jr himself has been pretty vague on the subject to date. And since he is not exactly the world's most truthful individual, it's very hard to gauge *what* they would be until they are actually operating[1].
"Would you say that we lock up alcoholics against their will currently,"
Is that supposed to be a gotcha? Yes, very obviously, if the court mandates and alcoholic goes to detox (which they can't leave without completing), then that alcoholic has been locked up against their will. Friggin obviously. Call a spade a spade. That might well be a net utilitarian good, but it's one that's only available when there's very high trust in the system because it, y'know, involves locking people up against their will.
"You can be opposed to the proposal, that’s fine, but it’s crazy to say they are a camp for unwanted minorities."
Crazy why, exactly? I think they would fit most formal definitions of "camp," and they would be intended to house people whose existence would *almost immediately* become politically inconvenient for RFK[2]. It's not at all clear in advance how voluntary they would actually be. Inpatient mental health has a *very* sketchy record around coercion and consent, and handing it over to liars and grifters seems unlikely to improve it. It need not involve jackbooted gestapo dragging people off in the middle of the night to become a moral nightmare.
"Everything is Hitler! "
I believe by Godwin's Law you have just forfeited the argument ;-)
But since you brought it up, Hitler wasn't Hitler at first either. Auschwitz didn't open the day after the Reichstag fire. The current U.S. government is not going to open Auschwitz 2.0 tomorrow, but they are (I note with dismay from the outside, but not nearly far enough outside) many more steps along that path than any U.S. government of my lifetime. It is lead by a man who has spent years spewing fascist rhetoric, was involved in an attempt to seize control of the government by force. A man who has repeatedly threatened and attempted to coerce his political rivals and is currently wielding the powers of his office in a number of *extremely unprecedented ways* in order to suppress dissent. A man who is making constant attempts to circumvent the checks and balances inherent to U.S. government and weaken both congress and the judiciary. And who is now deploying the national guard to a state whose governor does not want them there, in a way that seems pretty deliberately inflammatory. So when that government puts a dangerous charlatan in charge of HHS and that person starts talking about treating extremely common disorders with medically unsound practices that involve housing people in separate (apparently remote) locations *some concern is damn well appropriate.*
[1] And even then, only if journalists are allowed to collect independent information on them.
[2] Assuming, of course, that methods with absolutely no medical basis do *not* actually prove to be magic cure-alls and the recovery rate is as abysmal as anyone with an ounce of sense would expect.
Re your claim that farming (being active outdoors with specific tasks to complete) has no basis in evidence to treat mental illness
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36731907/
Large meta-analysis showing that exercise is comparable to anti-depressant medication or psychotherapy in terms of effect size on depressive symptoms
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27835725/
Bright light therapy has a moderate effect size on depressive symptoms - most trials in this meta analysis used light boxes, but sunlight during the day would have a similar or greater impact (measured in lux)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8125471/
Being outside in nature has a positive effect on depressive symptoms
And in terms of the physical tasks associated with farming - cognitive behavioural therapy is among the best characterised, most robust treatments for depression, and an essential component is setting measurable, achievable goals such that the patient learns to challenge their beliefs of guilt and worthlessness. “I milked a cow today and fed the chickens” is a concrete thing that correlates with improvement. (Of course it doesn’t have to be farming related tasks! “I did the shopping today and cleaned the bathroom” is also fine! But there’s clearly benefit to nature and sunlight, as discussed above.)
"Re your claim that farming (being active outdoors with specific tasks to complete) has no basis in evidence to treat mental illness"
Pretty weird to see you throwing out links about a claim that I did not actually make.
(For the nitpicky: I did say something sorta similar in a comment that posted *after* this reply of Turtle's. But first, it's still very plainly lying w.r.t. the comment Turtle was actually answering--the other comment hadn't even been written yet--and second, "sorta similar" still isn't "the same." The differences are still relevant.)
I think, more often than not, the liar is unaware. I find it more effective to couch the correction as potentially strengthening their argument by elimination of the falsehood.
If I think my interlocuter is genuinely mistaken, I'll often say "ok, that's directionally correct" so we can get on to substantive disagreements.
If I think they're trying to dominate me, I'm more likely to fight the lie.
Great! Then let me take the opportunity to once again point out how using a term like "wokeness" is terrible communicative practice that hurts clarity and actively aids in the sort of deceptions you're railing against. I mean, look at how you used it here: if "racism is bad and you shouldn't defend it" qualifies as "wokeness"--and not just incidental wokeness, but such a central example that you felt the need to apologize for ragging on it specifically before using it as an example--then apparently "wokeness" has been around for decades upon decades and is shared by quite a large slice of the political spectrum. When leftists say "wokeness is just a right wing term for 'basic decency'" this is *exactly* what they're talking about.
Obligatory disclaimer: on the object level I do agree that framing a bar fight as being distinctly racially charged is bad and dishonest and its perfectly fair to push back against it as a lie. I'll even agree that if someone did deliberately frame it that way, that person was likely motivated by some more radical political agenda *not* shared by a large fraction of the political spectrum. But I pretty much guarantee the average person spreading such a misinterpretation--regardless of how it originated--would be motivated by the more ordinary sort disgust for racism, with carelessness and short attention spans letting the lie/mistake slip through.
(If you were referring to an actual specific incident here, you neither provided a link nor any clear way to find it, so I apologize if there are pertinent details I'm simply unaware of.)
It makes more sense if read as using 'defend' in the sense just alluded to in the opening paragraph, i.e. the act of trying to correct lies about [X] in a way that would even partially mitigate the offense described in the lie. (If the scare quotes on "defend" were retained, that reading might surface more easily, but yes, as written it does look more the way you read it.)
It is similar to calling me petty for caring about political messages you took great care to slip into art, advertisements, or other facets of culture.
It's not worth your time to correct lies, because the default is lying. Instead it's better to look at incentives and increase uncertainty in any case with a moral justification to lie. To quote Mark Twain (and my stats prof) there's three kinds of lies: "lies, damn lies, and statistics." My contacts in science labs confirm that lying with statistics is the norm; advancement requires lying while honest researchers are held back. What's the harm after all? Just do one experiment then use statistics to turn it into as many as you need to get the p value required for publishing. Save time, money, and stress. And science is probably the most honest field: my experiences in business, rural living, and government indicate at least the same level of rampant deception. This has nothing to do with our time and everything to do with human nature; like Diogenes, the search for an honest man even with both lamp and daylight turns up only a blush.
Where does the line fall between lying and condensing a shorthand descriptor?
The example I'm thinking of is the infamous phrase "open borders."
Alice accuses Bob of being in favor of "open borders." Bob says "I've never said the phrase 'open borders' and don't support that!" So they go back and forth, Bob is opposed to approximately any border enforcement, doesn't want illegal immigrants deported, supports recurring amnesties, but continues to dislike the phrase "open borders."
Is Alice *lying* to say that *functionally* Bob supports open borders? Should she waste her breath saying instead "Bob appears to hold a stance indistinguishable from but not actually called due to some unstated technicality 'open borders'"?
You've said before that lying is quite a narrowly defined concept, so I'm curious how narrowly.
This also works the other way with phrases like "defund the police," where people using the shorthand descriptor argue against what it sounds like it means.
> Is Alice *lying* to say that *functionally* Bob supports open borders?
Alice and Bob are speaking different languages. Bob supports what is called 'open borders' in Alice's dialect but those words describe a different policy in his own.
To Bob, the border is a door, and whether a door is open or closed is fundamentally a separate matter from how closely you guard it or how you treat people who pass through it uninvited.
To Alice, the border is an invitation, and whether an invitation is open or closed is much more strongly determined by how widely the invitation is extended and how the uninvited who try to enter are treated.
Thanks for the very good point. Definitional differences can defintely cause misunderstanding.
To check my assumptions, I searched for the definition of Open Borders. Based on the search, it seemed that somebody could claim that they are not for Open Borders if they support checkpoints at the border that only allow people with the right documentation in and no other immigration enforcement. There would still be de jure borders and enforcement. In ProfGerm's example, I am not sure if Bob would be against my border checkpoint requirement. If he is not, then I think there is a misunderstanding. Alice should not say Bob supports "Open Borders" if she wants to 100% correct.
Though, in the setup given, I have no issues with Alice saying Bob supports "functionally open borders". I view that as an accurate description. A more fancy wording would be "de facto open borders", which would communicate that even though there are laws, in reality, the border is open.
Yeah, besides Alice and Bob, there is a Charlie in Bob's party who explicitly wants open borders, saying moving from Mexico to Texas should be roughly as frictionless and unsupervised as moving from New Mexico to Texas. When Bob says he is against open borders, he is saying he is not Charlie. Bob wants an immigration process, but one with less draconian enforcement than the one Alice envisions.
(The issue with saying Alice saying Bob supports 'functionally open borders' is that when she does so Charlie laughs at both of them and says 'I wish'.)
Laws punish the lawbreakers but they also steer the law-abiding. A library that does away with late fees does not thereby declare open season on plundering its shelves.
Bob's model of an immigration lawbreaker is someone he focuses on sympathy towards, so he does not want the law to be harsh on them and thinks poorly of Alice for doing so, but (unlike Charlie) he does still want the law-abiding steered to follow immigration processes.
Alice's model of an immigration lawbreaker is someone she focuses on threat from, so she does want the law to be firm in its application; she feels the process of filtering for the law-abiding is doing loadbearing work and thinks poorly of Bob for appearing to ignore it.
In most cases I've seen where the Alices of the world use the phrase "open borders" it is not the claimed position of Bob, it's just an immigration policy two steps less restrictive than what Alice would like.
Then Alice should just say, “your position is ‘open borders’, for all practical purposes”. The distinction is important and should be voiced.
In a good faith discussion between sensible people, Alice and Bob would acknowledge that they are using the term "open borders" slightly differently, and would agree to set that term aside for now and clarify what their actual differences are. This would be dealt with quickly and they could get on with the actual discussion of their policy preferences.
This almost never happens in real life, but if it does then you might have found yourself in one of those very rare political discussions which is actually worth your time.
"You should obviously remain kind and sensitive in contexts where that’s relevant. If Joe Criminal was 5% less psychopathic than the rumors say, you can correct some unrelated tough-on-crime advocate about it, but I wouldn’t bother his victims."
Why shouldn't we bother his victims, they are the most likely ones to lie. I don't like the rule of not bothering with victims due to some perceived emotional sensitivity, most people who lie like this will be doing it because of some emotional attachment to the issue.
Presumably because it does more damage than it helps the world. A creature like David Hogg is an exception to this rule because of how he was anointed.
A few people have commented (imo correctly) that it's important to be selective about who you take the time to correct, because some people may maliciously be trying to distract you or may just be a crank. I want to add one additional angle, which is that you also want to make sure your response doesn't accidentally end up signal boosting the original bad take. "Lending legitimacy by deigning to respond" is a real thing.
Among other rules, I try to follow a rule of only criticizing up, that is, responding and correcting those who have more followers/subscribers/clout/impact than I do. This is in large part why I think engaging with people like, say, Yarvin, is a mistake for someone like Scott.
> "Lending legitimacy by deigning to respond" is a real thing.
I don't agree: I think this is a phantasmal concern.
Most people are badly miscalibrated about what has legitimacy among other social groups, and often their own (due to social desirability bias). Indeed, Curtis Yarvin probably has a higher profile than Scott right now, in the USA of 2025, and that is certainly true among certain subcultures.
Scott spent considerable time rebutting the idea, in "Contra Kavanaugh on Fideism" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism). If you want to promote it here, I'm not going respect your argument unless you show that you've at least grappled with the counter-arguments.
I've read the piece before. A few responses.
1) Just on face, Scott doesn't argue against the idea of signal boosting -- that is, the possibility that rebuttal results in the spread of the original idea. He says "you should do it anyway for abc reasons."
2) Everyone implicitly chooses what to respond to all the time. This is a basic requirement of existing. Scott has, afaik, never responded to the bad takes of anonguy2353, who has exactly 2 followers. For that matter, he also has never responded to Alex Jones. Maybe I can't speak for Scott. Maybe he would respond to the whole world if he had time. But the reason *I* don't respond to the random schizophrenic spouting conspiracies on the subway is because I don't think the perspective is legitimate enough to justify a response. I suspect this is true for most people.
3) As an intuition pump, imagine that we were discussing a podcast or interview instead of a blog. If Scott brought a neonazi into his podcast, and the neonazi used the time to spout racist bullshit, I think it's reasonable to say that Scott's platform gave the man reach and legitimacy. *EVEN IF* Scott's goal is to debunk the Nazi. Linking to someone's blog is imo the same.
I explicitly say that you should criticize up for this reason. Scott's analysis of ivermectin is important because he was criticizing the position of a man with a much larger reach than himself: Trump. More generally, I think it is a great public service to use your writing to push back on things that are wrong that a great many people believe in. But also, I believe that someone with a following has to be thoughtful about what he ends up spreading to that audience.
Misc other things:
- who are you that I should care about whether you respect my argument?
- Scott has 4x the number of followers as Yarvin, last I checked. I'm open to hearing some other method of measuring clout, but one upside of Twitter is you can pretty directly get a sense of someone's reach.
> the number of followers
See also: McNamara fallacy.
I had to look that one up. I learn something new everyday here.
Likewise. I was familiar with the concept, and with some examples of McNamara committing it, but not with the specific name for it.
I'd previously thought of it as a corollary of Goodhart's Law ("When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") in cases where the measure was a useful proxy for most of the harder-to-measure stuff when you were only passively observing, or a special case of the Drunkard's Search Fallacy (a reference to the old joke about searching for dropped car keys under a lamppost because the light is better than the area where they fell) in cases where the metric was never a particularly good one..
> a special case of the Drunkard's Search Fallacy
Yes, this is the one I was familiar with too. I found the McNamara one linked on the Wikipedia page for the Streetlight effect, and thought it was more precisely what I had in mind.
> I'm open to hearing some other measure of measuring clout
Did you have one?
The McNamara fallacy: "the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist." (Yankelovich 1971)
It sounds like your answer is "no, I don't have another measure"
1 - It's true that Scott spends far more time on the positive case for investigating and writing about outlandish ideas than he does rebutting your idea about "lending legitimacy by deigning to respond". But he does not spend zero time. In fact, "lending legitimacy" is the entire motivation for Kavanaugh's criticism of Scott. Here's one of the tweets Scott was responding to (emphasis mine):
> It's indulgent & potentially misleading as 𝘪𝘵 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘢 𝘰𝘧 𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘺 when it is much more akin to debating with 9/11 truthers. If studies had supported Ivermectin as an effective treatment it would have been adopted... [https://x.com/C_Kavanagh/status/1625401031390814208]
2 - "Everyone implicitly chooses what to respond to all the time". All true, but also irrelevant. I haven't argued otherwise.
3 - You wrote:
> Scott's analysis of ivermectin is important because he was criticizing the position of a man with a much larger reach than himself: Trump.
But Scott was criticizing Alexandros Marinos, not Trump. Maybe you could stretch a bit and say 𝘉𝘳𝘦𝘵 𝘞𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘪𝘯 was his real target. But if you want to say he's arguing with Trump because Trump shared Alexandros' / Weinstein's position, doesn't that defeat your argument?
If you allow transitive targeting, you can characterize nearly any argument as "criticizing up", since it's easy to find someone with tremendous reach who holds weird view X.
Additionally, I disagree with this: "I think it's reasonable to say that Scott's platform gave the man reach and legitimacy." Reach, yes. Legitimacy, no.
Here's an intuition pump for you: would a critical documentary about young-earth adherents legitimize it? Would watching it make you update in their direction? What about flat-earthers? I don't think so, unless the subjects were people you already respected, or they brought new, inconceivably compelling evidence to light.
Misc responses:
- I'm just an internet rando. You can take it or leave my respect, and maybe I should have put it another way, but my point would have been the same.
- "Scott has 4x the number of followers as Yarvin, last I checked." This is availability bias. Twitter is a reasonable first approximation for certain kinds of figures, but Yarvin now has direct access to people in positions of political power, and acknowledged influence on more. At any rate, didn't you just write that Scott's rebuttal of Alexandros was tantamount to criticizing Trump? Well, Yarvin to Trump is an even shorter hop.
> "Everyone implicitly chooses what to respond to all the time". All true, but also irrelevant. I haven't argued otherwise.
I think this is important, and shouldn't be easily dismissed. The reason I bring this up is because given that you are already making decisions about what you respond to, concerns about signal boosting ought be one of the factors that goes into that decision. I think there can be many other factors.
> If you allow transitive targeting, you can characterize nearly any argument as "criticizing up", since it's easy to find someone with tremendous reach who holds weird view X.
A few misc thoughts and reactions.
First, a some clarifications that I hope will make my point more clear.
- I think that many people definitely hold weird views that they mostly keep to themselves. Responding to someone just because they have a weird view they keep to themselves isn't really worthwhile, and I wouldn't recommend that. For e.g., Tom Cruise is a scientologist, but afaik he doesn't tell everyone to convert to scientology, so making a big thing about scientology *just because Tom Cruise is a scientologist* doesn't really make sense (and likely has the same signal boosting effect I mentioned earlier).
- I also think that many people hold weird views that they do evangelize, but they do so in a way where *your particular response* is not going to move the needle. Alex Jones says the water makes frogs gay and Sandy Hook didn't happen. Ok...nothing Scott or I or anyone writes is going to really change people who believe this. "Sandy Hook did happen", no duh?
As I said originally, my take is "you shouldn't respond to people with bad takes if your response is just going to signal boost the original bad take." I think that one heuristic to determine whether or not you will end up signal boosting or not is by looking at your relative follower counts, but it's not a perfect heuristic by any means (as other people have pointed out, how influential the followers are matters, though imo its hard to judge)
> Here's an intuition pump for you: would a critical documentary about young-earth adherents legitimize it? Would watching it make you update in their direction? What about flat-earthers? I don't think so, unless the subjects were people you already respected, or they brought new, inconceivably compelling evidence to light.
Unfortunately, I do think that a critical documentary about young-earth adherents would legitimize it. It wouldn't necessarily make *me* update in their direction, but I no longer really believe that I am modal. Say you have a group of 100 people who have never heard of young-earth creationism before. And then you show them all the documentary you're talking about. Do you think all 100 people would think that young-earth creationism is now wrong? Or is it likely that 95 would think that its wrong, and maybe 5 are, for whatever reason, now convinced that it's right? What if you showed it to 1000 people? What about 10000 people? If you showed it to 10000 people, and the same percentages hold, there are now ~500 people who think young-earth creationism is correct. That's a lot of people. More than enough to become self-propagating, Chinese Robbers style. Exposure of ideas matters! (you can also cf social contagion as a more well studied version of this phenomenon)
Surely how influential the followers are counts for as much as their number.
Sure, but generally speaking I think it's quite difficult to evaluate the quality of someone's audience, compared to the quantity. I tend to assume that the clout of any particular person's following is more or less normally distributed. Scott too has a readership that includes some very important people.
Seconding theahura's point here - remember the NYT petition letter? There were a LOT of heavy hitters signing that thing, Scott has some really influential readers.
This is the rock in the stream which I have spent much of my life dashing myself against. I was a European-style socialist in the early 70s, then started taking my childhood Christianity seriousl,y in the late 70s, hanging out with both evangelicals and mainstreamers, immersing myself in CS Lewis. I worked in a state psychiatric hospital among very liberal people who did this type of lying-by-exaggeration frequently. It was part of the culture of criticising gun-owners, Christians, pro-lifers, conservatives, and those icky (I'm sorry, "salt-of-the-earth") blue-collar people. This dragged me continually rightward, as a perhaps childish and obsessive Fair Play ethic dominated my politics. Psychiatrists and social workers sniggered when someone tried to assassinate Reagan and Bush Jr. But they gasped and were horrified when some acute patient said that Clinton or Obama should die and wonder if we should call the FBI (which they knew was against confidentiality without a direct threat.)
As you note, this has only gotten worse over time, with wokeness being the worst of examples. I went off FB because of my own family self-righteously and viciously doing this
However...
I had always heard at least some of this lying-by-exaggeration from conservatives, and sadly, more often from Christian conservatives. It pains me to see it and admit it, but it is so. And this also has gotten worse over time and is currently the worst I have seen. The character reasons I left liberalism about are now increasing in conservatives.
Who to correct? What should be challenged? If I enter the mudwrestling can I stay above it? I am very mindful of the command to remove the log from my (our) own eye before removing the speck in another. In practice, I find that both methods fail, at least in terms of changing minds. I accept that minds are seldom changed, and then only by those who were close to your POV to being with. I continue to do both. I continue to choose poorly most of the time.
I am very grateful for you noticing this and expressing it cleanly.
In my opinion, if you just get honest with yourself and treat the sides with the same level of skepticism and engagement, you will enter the discussions with Christian conservatives and end up pushed leftwards in the exact same way as you were pushed rightwards.
As another (Anglican, rank-and-file, imperfect) Christian I can suggest a specific starting point. Read the sermon that Bishop Mariann Budde delivered to Trump. Leave aside the "is she a lawful Bishop and can she preach at all as she is female" debate, just read the sermon itself, compare it to your basic Christian faith. Then discuss with the Christian conservatives.
You really misunderstood me here. I am in constant conversation with Christian conservatives and have been for years. Some have always been difficult, some have become difficult over the past decade, but the group as a whole remains the only group I can generally have a discussion with that will be polite and listen to both sides and is able to articulate their opponent's POV.
So if I "just get honest with myself," eh? No tone problems and condescension there? It is my long experience that liberals let sneering creep in (as opposed to conservatives, who let pronouncements creep in) because it is the water that they swim in and don't notice.
Bishop Budde is an excellent example of this. She has supported nothing but liberal causes but tells Trump not to be partisan. Log. Speck. Remember? I can find her nowhere on record of asking any prominent Democrat to have mercy on the people who were afraid of them. Not Obama, not Biden, not Hillary. How much money would you put down that she will admonish the protestors to have mercy on those who fear them? She loves thinking that she is trying to take down the powerful, showing her fearlessness by telling her tribe what they want to hear and nothing more. She gives not an inch about excesses on her side - not even a polite nod - and bids others listen to her spiritual authority.
As for matching up with the gospel, it is simply tiring at this point to keep saying that Jesus did not advocate for Christians to transfer their good works to the government. ("Oh well, BUT...") yes, I have heard it many times. The motte-and-bailey arguments Scott quoted above are good examples.
Saying that I don't want conservatives to become as vicious as liberals have been for fifty years is not likely to be well-countered by you telling me "Oh, but if you just listened to them, you would find that the liberal Christians have basically got this gospel thing down just fine and aren't vicious at all."
I do doubt your objectivity when you say you "don't want conservatives to become as vicious as liberals" - if, and that's an important qualifier, we're talking of the people of the movements that identify as Christians.
Hardline purist leftists/progressives ("liberals" is sometimes used in the US but is a misnomer for them *and they often admit as much*) are usually expressly not Christian. But hardline purist conservatives are usually expressly Christian. Tht's what creates this imbalance rather than a hypothetical inner quality of progressives-as-a-class.
Havind said that, I agree that there is, in the more traditionally conservative circles, a certain decorum, which I do appreciate. It is not widely visible in the public square lately, because the peanut gallery is just that loud, but it is often there if conversations get personal (in my experience, this is more common with Roman Catholics, but maybe I have limited exposure).
However, sadly, one *can* be pretty vicious in policy matters while also keeping a civilized face. This particular duality happens more often to conservatives, the progressive mirror is probably the "kindness to all ... except" shtick.
And that's where my "honest with yourself" part comes back in. I would suggest that, apart from personality/style issues, the viciouisness pushed *in policy* by the conmservatives among Christians is much worse. And if we exclude certain foreign policy matters (Israel/Palestine), then even when comparing wide sides in general and not just Christians, the conservative viciousness might be much worse. And I think that if you let yourself compare the actual policies suggested to the basic faith you hold, that would push you left-ward, not all the way of course.
This is not to say there is no viciousness on the progressive side; notably, censorious tendencies are just outright shared by both sets of hardliners.
Last point: on "Jesus did not advocate for Christians to transfer their good works to the government". This is very familiar from the tax-and-spend debate of the Bush/Clinton/maybe Obama era. If all, or most, Trump did was pull tax money, if the reason why people feared Trump was just that he would take away their entitlements, I would certainly see the point - "why are well-off liberals lamenting that instead of organizing direct charitable aid to replace the lost funds?"
But Trump isn't Bush. He's not "just cutting welfare", he's sending people to foreign concentration camps without due process and refuses to obey direct court orders to require at least one innocent person freed from such a camp. And "evangelical Christians" cheer this on and libel the innocent person as a "gangster". Trump is also detaining people who are legal permanent residents solely for speech that is Constitutionally legal - and "evangelical Christians" cheer this on beacuse they don't like the speech.
No direct charitable aid can fix *this*. It *is* a matter of the civil power staying within the limits in Romans 13. "Not transferring good works to the government" doesn't mean "don't limit government coercion".
Thank you for this honest comment. I think faith and family are much more important than politics. I have managed to find a church where the pastor basically never discusses politics (unless you count praying for peace in the Middle East and Ukraine as “political.”)
So, I don’t think it’s worth losing sleep over what people on “your side” believe. Build a small community of like minded people, choose love and community, always seek to remove the plank from your own eye first, etc.
I can see what you see - people on both sides are more hypocritical and partisan than ever - but I think this too is temporary. We are in a global war, not of weapons, but of information. But the war will eventually end and truth will eventually come out.
My church has few political bumper stickers or decals, but they come from both sides. The sermons occasionally get a little more political than your place, but not much. It is indeed the case that for Christians, getting the right political answer may not be as important as the way we got there and how we treated each other along the way. As with all denominations (we are ECC), the clergy is more liberal than those in the pews, but it is manageable and not a bad thing. The challenges are usually fair. This was deeply untrue when I was Lutheran.
Amen
I keep looking for ways to articulate why truth and accuracy are important. This helps a bit but I worry that people who exaggerate or lie in this way either don’t think they are doing that or don’t care, and I am not sure if this argument will convince them. But I’m glad you spelled it out.
"we escalate all the way to the point we actually escalated to, where people have said in all seriousness that Trump might try to put all minorities in camps and murder them" you write, as an example of unreasonable escalation.
Trump is factually putting people from minorities into camps. Into *foreign* camps too, on his direct orders, and when the Supreme Court orders him to order a person released from tje camp, he refuses to do so. Meanwhile his vocal supporters libel the innocent victim of this lawlessness (Garcia) as a gang member - I do think this is actual malice, but his lawyers dont have the resources for defamation lawsuits, they are trying to get him out from what *can* very well be a deatrh camp (because it totally lacks accountability except to a dictator).
Now, I do understand that "bad things are happening so radical conclusion must be true" is a fallacy. I've fallen out with at east one anti-Zionist beacuse she thought I was very unreasonable to refuse to go from "Israel, led by Netanyahu, is doing specific bad things" to "Israel under any leadership should not exist".
But can we at least agree that Trump proves that "the woke" *have a point* in some things that originally seemed outlandish? Yes. they can over-labour the point. but they do have one.
Also: if we now see that their views have some reasonable basis, then maybe entertain an alternate theory to "they are lying" when they do exaggerrate, as in your "racism vs bar fight" example? I would suggest that a much more feasible theory is "they have tunnel vision". Also known as "if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Unlike lying (a wilful, rightly ethically suspect act), tunnel vision is often not chosen and not necessarily culpable.
The tunnel vision theory also creates a platform for constructive engagement. To run with the bar fight, one can actually remember how privilege theory works (not the same as agreeing with it) and suggest a comparator - "imagine they were both white, what would have been different, what would remain the same". That's a start on common ground, while "you're lying" is adversarial and shows no common ground even if qualified with "in 5% of what you say".
>But can we at least agree that Trump proves that "the woke" *have a point* in some things that originally seemed outlandish?
No, because this is an *extremely noncentral* example of putting minorities in camps, to the point where describing it in a way that implies central examples amounts to a lie by normal people's standards.
How is it in any way "noncentral"? Unless, that is, you swallow the propaganda lies that they are all some kind of violent gangsters. If it was *remotely close to the truth* there would be a string of prosecutions instead, much more politically expedient, much less legally risky.
> Meanwhile his vocal supporters libel the innocent victim of this lawlessness (Garcia) as a gang member - I do think this is actual malice
Would your opinion on any of this change if it turned out that Garcia was not innocent and was in fact a gang member?
If not, then why mention his supposed innocence if it's irrelevant?
If so, then would you be interested in going through the evidence supporting the assertion? https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/04/16/kilmar-abrego-garcia-ms-13-gang-member-history-violence
Dot gov sites have rapidly become a propaganda arm of the Trump administration. It’s truly incredible. By tradition these have been non partisan public service information. Now it’s all MAGA speak.
The CapLocked words in the headline should have tipped you off. Ordinary writers for government web sites have never done that goofy tabloid presentation. You are reading a Truth Social post. The typography not to mention tone give it away immediately.
‘THE REAL STORY’ indeed.
Why do you seem so compelled to LARP as someone who has a direct stake in the game anyway? This isn’t just an amusing debate topic for life long US citizens. The institutions will likely hold but a slide into authoritarianism is uncomfortably possible.
You takes tend toward the glib and flippant. We don’t see it so casually here because we live with the direct consequences.
And this is where I miss the ol' "Like" button, so take the even older "+1"
I believe in basic liberal constitutional principles such as "legally presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law".
The text at the link is blatant, Soviet-level propaganda. The worst part of it is a US government arm openly claiming "he belongs behind bars" while refusing him due process and even refusing a direct court order to require him returned to the US to stand trial.
The last time the US Federal government fully leaned into the premise that people should be deprived of freedom in times of peace without due process was in 1850 with the blatantly unconstitutional "Fugutive" "Slave" "law". The result was the Civil War. Thankfully the Supreme Court is not the Taney clown circus this time, but Trump seems to be descending to Andrew Jackson's level of ignoring the courts.
“There must have been some reason it was worth your time to lie.” I think this is the key point here. The exchange should go like this: “[Lie].” “[correction of lie].” “You really think that makes a difference?” “Yes, i do, and i think you do too, or else you would have told the truth.”
How do you know it's a lie? In the hypothetical example given it seems not implausible to infer from a racial slur that racial animus was a motivating factor even given additional circumstances. And even if it were implausible plenty of people believe implausible things without necessarily being liars. You are doing the exact thing you are warning about where you dislike woke people so you interpret their actions in a 20% or whatever more negative light than justified by the facts.
I think the point of that example was that a bar fight was going to happen regardless of whether he used a racial slur or merely called him an asshole, so portraying it as a random hate crime is misleading.
That's Scott view of these sets of facts, but my point is that someone could see the same facts and have a different view without being a liar. The motivation of the person who punched the guy is not actually knowable with certainty. And the use of a slur is relevant evidence; the woke person's view is not coming out of nowhere.
“Hey everyone, Joe Target shouted a racial slur and punched a black guy in the face because he hates minorities so much! This proves that we need hate crime legislation immediately!”
The statement Scott objects to relies on asserting that Joe Target’s motivations *are* known with certainty. So that’s a problem.
The other problem is that the woke person in the example is excluding relevant information - ignoring that the punch occurred as part of a fight frames it falsely as a random assault. It’s a lie by omission.
A lie has to be deliberately misleading. A lie of omission would mean leaving out information in order to give an impression to others that you believe to be false. But I don't think we are compelled to read the woke person's claim as deliberately misleading. They genuinely believe this is a case of racial motivated violence (and not without reason) and they are focusing on the aspect of the event that they find most significant. The other details are, from their perspective, extraneous and unnecessary in their short message.
I think that’s being excessively charitable. In any case, the omission is still worth correcting because it’s potentially relevant to a neutral observer even if the woke person disagrees. The woke person would be in the wrong if they objected to someone providing this additional context.
"In any case, the omission is still worth correcting" -- Yes I fully agree but the whole point of Scott's post that even if a person is in the wrong it's important to push back on exaggeration in just how in the wrong they are. So Scott exaggerating how bad his enemies are is equally worth correcting.
Anyways, I don't think Scott is accusing them of lying just because of missing context. He thinks the whole claim that Joe's attack was racially motivated is a lie: "But if your only real point is that racism exists and causes harm, you could have said that racism exists and causes harm, and that wouldn’t have been a lie. Instead you chose to talk about how Joe Target punched the black guy because of racism." I think this is just a huge misreading of how woke people think. Even given all the additional context, if someone attacks a black person after calling them a racial slur they will genuinely see that as racist. They aren't lying just because Scott disagrees with them. People genuinely have different perspectives on things.
I agree it’s good to have a culture like this and rationalists do in fact have a culture like this. If you live outside a rationalist bubble, I advise you to not do this, because everyone will be annoyed at you and you’ll be less persuasive overall. Most people hate “well actually” people, so if you want those people to like you, it’s better to not be that guy.
A problem happens when the "lie" *doesn't* make the argument 5% stronger, because it's something that to a close approximation nobody cares about in relation to the point of the "lie". If you claim that Scott Alexander ate pineapple on pizza on Tuesday and your audience is made up of pizza fanatics who really hate pineapple on pizza but don't care what day of the week it is, going "well, *actually* it was Wednesday" may be correcting an untruth, but correcting this untruth in this context is bad behavior and absolutely deserves all the disdain you say such things shouldn't get.
In this connection also remember that people are able to lie and say "I honestly think that being on Wednesday is material to the point" when they really don't and just want to derail the argument. So you can't just be a quokka and automatically believe everyone who claims their nitpick is really material.
I generally agree, but need to call out these sentences: "I hate to rag on wokeness further in the Year Of Our Lord 2025, but they’re still the best example I’ve ever seen. You weren’t supposed to defend racists. And so:" Okay, at least Scott qualified this with "I've ever seen", but I doubt that's true -- if so, he hasn't been listening to anything since January. How about Pamela Bondi on Judge James Boasberg (March 19): "And the question should be, why is the judge trying to protect terrorists who invaded our country over American citizens?” Calling Kilmar Abrego Garcia a terrorist is a lie. Calling due process something that non-citizens aren't entitled to is another lie. And calling a judge a terrorist sympathizer when he rules against your boss is exactly the behavior that Scott is calling out. The problem with ragging on wokeness in 2025 is that the best current examples of "wokeness" are the statements coming out of the Trump administration -- only speech which is "pro-American" (as defined by them) is allowed. The only real victims of discrimination are Afrikaaners.
> Calling Kilmar Abrego Garcia a terrorist is a lie. Calling due process something that non-citizens aren't entitled to is another lie. And calling a judge a terrorist sympathizer when he rules against your boss is exactly the behavior that Scott is calling out.
These are all opinions, and they are very important opinions, as they are the opinions of people calling the shots in this country. There is no physical law that dictates that non-citizens are entitled to due-process. And written laws are a compromise that falls apart when it stops suiting all parties with leverage.
The words of the Constitution are plain: citizenship status is not mentioned in the 5th Amendment, which reads "No person ..." I may hold the opinion that it doesn't say that, but until SCOTUS interprets it differently, or the amendment is repealed or otherwise changed, my opinion is false.
Garcia is, to our best knowledge, a member of a designated terrorist group, see https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/04/16/kilmar-abrego-garcia-ms-13-gang-member-history-violence. You can argue with the designation of ms 13 as terrorist, you can argue that the legal burden of proof should be higher and that it's not enough to merely be engaged in human trafficking, work together with other members of MS-13, being arrested while holding cash and drugs, wear gang symbols known to be associated with MS-13 and to publicly claim yourself to be persecuted by a rival gang of MS-13, in addition to other evidence that he is violent and criminal (though in a way unrelated to MS-13), but calling this a lie is quite bold.
To the best of our knowledge? When multiple non-administration sources contradict DHS’s account? (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k4072e3nno https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/abrego-garcia-and-ms-13--what-do-we-know) When DHS first admitted that he was deported due to an administrative error (https://www.axios.com/2025/04/01/el-salvador-erroneous-deportation-trump-mistake) but said that they couldn’t retrieve him from El Salvador because that was up to Bukele (https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-administration-says-cant-return-kilmar-abrego-garcia-s-false-rcna201198) and then said they could, but wouldn’t? (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-abrego-garcia-back-el-salvador/story?id=121298276) When he was stopped in Tennessee in 2022 and the cop suspected trafficking but he was let go, and only after the embarrassment of the administrative error and the legal standoff between the Trump administration and the judiciary had gone on for months did they persuade a federal judge to indict him on those trafficking charges? (why did it take months for them to gin up a pretext?) When the claims of gang attire and the significance of his tattoos were called into question by other experts? When it stands to reason that *refusal* to join a gang resulted in persecution and is a really good reason to fear future persecution, at least as good a reason as to have been a member who betrayed the gang?
When DHS has every motive to make up something – anything – that will allow them to save face in the aftermath of all these contradictions?
And when the crux of the judicial pushback against his deportation was only ever that he deserved due process, which he still deserves, even if he is all of the things you accuse him of being, because the 5th amendment guarantees due process to all people, citizen or not?
Nope. But you’ve caused me to call into question one thing: I no longer am sure that I agree with Scott’s argument. It sure doesn’t feel worth my while to take the time to refute all these falsehoods.
Well, another problem with sloppy facts meant as evidence for your social justice pet cause is that sometimes the actual facts point to another type of social injustice which is being neglected in the cultural discourse. The most stunning example that comes to my mind is the shooting spree that took place in Atlanta in March 2021, in which the victims were predominantly Asian. It was highlighted far and wide as an example of anti-Asian racism (which was a real issue that, during the brief 2020-21 period when COVID dominated the scene, there was some market for). I knew people who saw the headlines and assumed without question that the mass murderer did it out of hatred for Asians, because why else would most of his victims be Asian? Practically every mention of it on social media was accompanied by a StopAsianHate hashtag. I even remember, for a many months afterwards, a video advertisement I kept seeing (on YouTube? some streaming website I frequented) which briefly stated what the shooter did and then said, in a self-assured voice, "He killed them because they were Asian."
And yet, I remember knowing, within a day or two of the tragedy, just from hearing details of it come out, that all evidence points to the motive being nothing of the kind: the young man had some sort of sex addiction and frequented massage parlors (which do tend to be disproportionately run by people of East Asian ethnicity and background*) and one day confronted his demons by snapping and going on a shooting spree *against the sex workers in that type of massage parlor*. If his behavior was any evidence of a larger-scale bigoted attitude, it was clearly about sexism (almost all of his murder victims were women, although what I didn't know until much later was that a couple of men were shot as well) and more specifically (arguably) a hate crime against sex workers. But since racism was the main issue de jour in 2020-21 -- with feminism having faded in the background and with no large-scale concern for sex workers never really having entered the picture in the first place -- everyone glommed onto the assumption that this was about anti-Asian hate.
Correcting the wrong assumptions and characterization of this tragedy isn't so much about "stopping the woke from exaggerating" or about dialing back concern over anti-Asian racism (which had come on people's radars so briefly, thanks to COVID, that amplifying concern about it was not a bad thing in and of itself); it's about directing concern towards other social ills that *also* deserved concern and tended to be neglected.
*It would be valid to instigate a conversation about this phenomenon -- namely that certain categories of sex work are associated with Asian women -- in the wake of the tragedy, and how it fits into a model of anti-Asian racism and so on. But this seems quite secondary among the issues the event pointed to.
FWIW, They Might Be Giants did eventually issue a correction: https://youtu.be/sLkGSV9WDMA?feature=shared
I endorse it for other reason also: if you make checking details on plausible-sounding claims a habit, it's a good habit to have.
It seems like the Straussian reading of this is that it's about Scott's recent argument with Tyler Cowen.
In a vacuum, you are not wrong. But it seems odd how the corrections are not correlated to the number or severity of lies, but appear highly correlated to the politics behind the lie.
Like, I get you don't want to do culture war stuff, but the leadership of one group lies outrageously, all the time, about everything. The other group also lies, less frequently in the form of cringy exaggerations. Make the moral case for why the latter group needs to be held to stricter account than the former.
I recently got "well actually"ed in regards to literal frog boiling. I was sitting in a hot tub at a rural airbnb thing with my wife and I told her about how frogs don't actually stay in water as the temp gets raised. They're smart enough to jump out. I guess I was "well actually"ing her now that I think of it. Anyway, a few seconds later we found a boiled frog on the side of the tub, apparently dead trying to climb out. I suppose it could have jumped into an already hot tub, so I "actually" am still too ignorant to talk about this phenomenon.
> if you _want_ to correct it, people don’t get to call you “cringe” or describe it as “well acktually”.
Unfortunately, the notion of “cringe” isn’t wholly based on objective facts, but is often defined by a high-status member of the group. So yes, they do get to call you “cringe,” because then if you dig your heel in and ask them “What could be more cringe than telling small lies, then bullying anyone who tries to correct you, in the hopes that future audience will be too cowed to speak up?”, they can simply respond, “well acktually, exhibit A,” while pointing at you. And at the best case you gnawed at a few percent of their followers, because anyone who would stoop so low already had enough character flaws to filter out the morally just members of their audience.
I enthusiastically endorse your main point, but, quite ironically, I pedantically disagree with your example.
In the racism example, I think--even if it's a bar fight and the black guy insulted his wife--without knowing more context, the mere fact that he shouted a racial slur in your example seems to indicate the fight was at least in part about race. Racism might not be a necessary or sufficient cause, but it's reasonable to infer it's a cause. "Because" does not necessarily refer only to precipitating causes. (If you didn't mention the racial slur, I would think it's a good example.)
I would tend to agree; I can't really imagine a scenario where I call someone an identity based slur even if they're literally like, an evil toddler-killer, because it's not about them, it's about that whole demographic. You don't refrain from using slurs just because it might hurt the person you're using it on - if that was the full effect, there'd be no reason to refrain from using slurs on people you hate!
I wonder how you feel about the following philosophical proposals:
(1) Knowing the truth is valuable in itself (here I'm just channeling Aristotle); hence it is intrinsically worthwhile to remove impediments to its achievement, e.g., falsehoods (however minor).
(2) Knowing the truth is de facto preeminently practically valuable because practice is about making the world different (perhaps better), and you can't reliably make the world different in any specific way without accurately grasping how the world is at baseline.
Trump is putting minorities in camps. Not all or even most minorities. There's no murder involved. But he's literally shipped people to a torture prison in defiance of court orders.
To speculate that he might escalate in the future isn't a lie, it's reading the room and knowing that past authoritarian regimes started with less than the excesses that made them infamous. Comparing that to the hypothetical example of lying about Joe Target is misleading, since you miss the difference between "we've seen where this might go" and "this is already happening."
I think this is a post about Philosophical Kitsune. Which makes a lot of sense with internet culture because kitsune would hide their true name.
Also, one argument I see commonly is "Before the Equal Opportunity Credit Act it was illegal to give loans to women." It wasn't illegal, it was uncommon. Most lenders didn't want to do it. But it was not illegal. And people become very angry at anyone who points out the difference. I wonder if there's some recognition of 'passing laws to force people to do things they don't want to do is objectifying so deny we're doing it' or if there's something else going on.
There's a funny way the impulse to nitpick can be maliciously exploited to trick the nitpicker into amplifying the message he opposes.
For example, Dominic Cummings' Brexit campaign had a bus driving all over London with a message that said "We send the EU £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead." Naturally, Remainers kept talking about the bus and how the real number was more like £270 million a week, reaching hundreds of times more people with that than who saw the bus with their own eyes.
I believe that the "eating cats and dogs" thing was a deliberate strategy to bring forth and amplify the underlying message of "Why are there 10,000 Haitians in Springfield, Ohio?" Mendacious, but it worked.
Yeah, that's another great example.
That’s how Vance spun it after it was shown to be untrue. I think you give Trump too much credit though. In the moment he said it he might have believed it himself. He acts like the sort of compulsive liars I’ve known.
The most memorable form is by Trump, but I was also referring to the general eating pets rumor that was first started by right-wing anons until reaching the campaign.
Endorsed. Sometimes it's quite hard to not excuse this sort of thing when it's one's own "side," but one must try and hold the line.
I think this is like, the realist's notion of how dialogue should happen. The reality of popular discourse is that people are going to call you autistic for repeatedly doing this, and the general affect of this phenomena is much too strong to combat. It's just living in a society where hyperbolic notions of everything are commonplace. In fact, it is true that he put the minorities in camps, he is authoritarian in his usage of political power, and he is favoring the rich in his tax policy, ergo he is a fascist (I don't wholly believe this). Just like Obama was a filthy socialist (I don't believe this) for giving us healthcare. It's an arms race in terms of rhetoric that nejther side can afford to give up due to the propogandized nature of discourse and such is living in modern society. Hell, news is guilty of this--playing everyday accidents can give the impression that accidents happen all the time, though most times riding on a train or plane doesn't lead to death.
The reality of popular discourse is that someone doing this probably *is* autistic, or is a bad actor pretending to be autistic. And the latter category predominates.
In the real world, nitpicking a 5%-relevant fact is used as a weapon, either to imply that the whole idea is bunk to a degree much greater than 5%, or to just waste people's time and attention so they pay less attention to the other 95%. And of course let's not forget the misleading news article or clickbait title which just reports the whole thing as if the 5% error is the only part of it worth discussing.
One thing people forget about "arguments as soldiers" is that just because *you* don't use arguments that way doesn't mean that other people don't, and it certainly doesn't mean you shouldn't *recognize* that they do. Nitpicking something that's 5% of the argument is usually arguments as soldiers, and when it isn't, it's some quokka autist who doesn't understand that he looks so much like a soldier that people are going to fire at him. Or maybe the worst of both worlds--some guy who uses a lot of motivated reasoning to convince himself that he's just autistically correcting facts, when he's using arguments as soldiers but doesn't want to admit it even to himself.
I think this is somewhat uncharitable to Scott, who I am hopefully assuming is some kind of realist regarding things like political dialogue, or popular dialogue. Which, well, I disagree with wholeheartedly. I think one as a realist necessarily has to set some kind of topological boundary on where sources of the truth come from. I really doubt the libs and the cons and the fash and the commies all hold the truth, given that they mutually contradict. Empirically speaking, popular discourse isn't truth bearing even in contemporary times. I would hesitate to say this article is acting as a soldier, but even if it wasn't, it goes against what I feel is the stronger method of debate in popular discourse (that is, trying to use an opponent's worldview against them, since they very likely have a different view than you on the truth). Coherentism is practical!
>I think this is somewhat uncharitable to Scott
There have been cases where I see motivated reasoning from Scott, but he usually seems closer to the autists.
Example: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/26/high-energy-ethics/ where Scott thinks that because something can be parsed as "I'm just asking why atheists should care about violence to their loved ones", there's nothing objectionable about it, as if people don't phrase hatred and contempt in the syntactic form of a rational argument. He also couldn't comprehend that Cade Metz might have been a bad actor from the start, even when people warned him.
Agree on nitpicking but I think you picked a bad example?
Let's say someone disagrees with you on AI alignment (or you insult their wife, whatever), and they call you a racial slur. Is that not symptomatic of anti-Semitism desipute the argument's not being primarily (or at all) racially/ethnically motivated?
I love this point so much. I am always trying to make it, and it makes me very happy that I now have an ASX post to back it up with.
"You don't think it's important? I guess you thought it was important when you went to the trouble to say the thing in the first place!"
> The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
Funny, I was just reading the comment section on "Another Brick in the Motte" <https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/> yesterday where they got into the same argument there.
Sorry to go this obnoxious direction but, I'm perfectly happy to defend the claim that "There is a significant risk that Trump will put *some* minorities into camps and that there will be *some level of* systematized intentional killing."
A steel man reading of "he was going to put minorities in camps" requires that you take this interpretation, and I think this interpretation is a very reasonable claim on the object level, and that this is a dangerous enough path with a high enough likelihood that to not take it seriously is highly dangerous.
He started with the statement "Trump might try to put all minorities in camps".
"He was going to put minorities in camps" was the self-corrected version after taking "all" out, not the version he was reading "all" into.
Fair enough, I should have quoted that more accurately. I didn't really notice the distinction in part because what does "all minorities" even mean? Like I'm not going to say that literally nobody says that, but feels like a pretty silly straw man of leftism.
That's right! It is serving as an example of the phenomenon that the blog post is about. He states an exaggeratedly untrue thing, then plays the role of his ideal interlocutor and corrects it, then ends that paragraph with "Would you have let me get away with that exaggeration?" to indicate he is inviting people to think it should be normal to push back on such things in the way he illustrated.
Yes but in the framing of that paragraph, as I read it, this is representing the "less farcical but still ridiculous" claim. I don't know what I'm trying to say here, this corner of the blog post feels extremely semantic and like it loses the plot a little bit, and I'm getting hung up on a kind of dumb example case.
you don't communicate with someone to correct their lies, as a superior to inferior. By doing so you immediately create loss of face, so instead you try to maintain face while introducing the correct data.
"that's odd, the sources i read, like (source a) say its only six murders. Where did you see the info?"
this keeps face while letting him realize he has no source, or letting him provide something of value. If you work sales, you learn you generally walk aside someone, not stand apart pushing.
generally behind an error is some personal need or lack, and ppl get defensive over it. giving face defuses it. you take it on you to defuse.
I agree with this post.
The only caveat I'd make is that there is also a phenomenon of correcting errors that are not germane to the argument, merely to catch out the speaker in an error and deflect the conversation away from his real claim. In other words, errors that don't make the speaker's argument 5% stronger, but rather are irrelevant to his argument.
Making that kind of correction can serve as a bad debating technique and should be avoided.
Okay, how about this:
"Trump said multiple times during this most recent election that his plan is to deport 20 million illegal immigrants from this country. Many people have pointed out that all our best metrics seem to show that the total number of illegal immigrants in this country is closer to 11.7 million. Although no one seems interested in holding Trump to the same standard that Scott insists anonymous internet commentators should be held to, one implication of Trump's plan is that, should he follow through with demanding deportation quotas based on the 20 million number, many vulnerable immigrants, quite a few of whom are legal, some of whom were previously in one or more forms of protected status, are going to be rounded up and put in immigration detention centers at least temporarily prior to deportation, which some people might characterize as "being put in camps." In fact, we are seeing that the current mass mobilization of ICE is causing them to make many dubious arrests which are being challenged in courts, although not at a speed which is deterring ICE or guaranteeing just results for the people actually being detained, and it is not impossible to foresee a trendline where, as Trump continues to escalate ICE raids in cities that have large immigrant populations, leading to greater and greater numbers of immigrants being put in detention without due process, violating their well-being and the well-being of their communities. There is zero evidence that Trump or the people working under him on this policy have any concern at all for the moral hazard involved in this operation, or are worried about accidentally violating the civil liberties of people who are here legally but are in the same ethnic and economic class as people who are here illegally, and in fact one could hypothesize (but literally never prove to any skeptic's satisfaction) that one intended consequence of these policies is to make everyone who shares that economic and ethnic class less pre-disposed to attempting to enter or stay in this country even by legal means, much in the way that policies isolating Jews in Nazi Germany were originally an attempt to force them to self-deport before things escalated to putting them in camps (which everyone agrees were camps, and of course no other historical parallel dare be drawn). There is not set of facts under which a policy can be judged a moral crime, because moral judgements are not objective, and there are people in this very comment section who would defend much stronger sanctions with greater unintended consequences against illegal immigrants in the same way that they would advocate for the death penalty for shoplifting, so at the end of the day a population to which no regular commentator on this blog shares any close kinship or empathy will ultimately be subject to a great deal of federal action which will disrupt their lives and cause undeniable harm and suffering, but no one who feels the need to vociferously disagree with the undeniably false proposition "Trump would like to put all immigrants in camps" will ever agree that this is a moral outrage but will instead continue to spin it as a justifiable response under a rational cost-benefit analysis schema."
There, my swing at a take worthy of Scott's high-minded ideals. Its a wall of text, admittedly badly written, it contains just as much, if not more room for disagreement even though it represents my best attempt at an honest appraisal of the situation. I'd be genuinely surprised if anyone wanted to engage in it, and to the extent that they do, I would be shocked if any the responses rate make me, any respondent, or any third-party observer feel as if they have engaged in something constructive.
I don't know, I'm feeling pretty bummed out guys.
I for one appreciated this post, but I already agree with you sooo
> Many people have pointed out that all our best metrics seem to show that the total number of illegal immigrants in this country is closer to 11.7 million
I've been hearing this number for an implausibly long time; according to this source https://cmsny.org/us-undocumented-population-increased-in-july-2023-warren-090624/ people were saying 10 to 12 million back in the 1982 as well and it seems implausible that there's been one leaving for one entering ever since.
According to the source you yourself shared, based on the number of people who applied for legalization when it was offered in the mid 80s, the 10-12 was off my an order of magnitude at that time. So its possible its only just catching up to what people were exaggerating 30 years ago.
I'm not an expert, if you want to dive into the statistics and find a credible source for the 20 million claim, I'll at least look at it. But my questions are A) would it be that out of character for Donald Trump to have pulled a number he thought sounded good out of a hat? And more importantly B), on this blog, supposedly a shrine to rationalism and skepticism of mass narratives, are so many people comfortable repeating the claim that we are overrun with illegal immigrants committing crimes and consuming our resources, without at least acknowledging at the very least that the data is in dispute?
> according to this source... people were saying 10 to 12 million back in the 1982 as well
The literal next sentence of that source says those 1982 estimates were way high: "The exaggerated inflation of those numbers was exposed with the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1987 (IRCA). A total of 3 million applied for legalization.".
(Obviously there were more than 3 million illegals because not all of them applied for legalization. But that still suggests 10-12m is an overestimate.)
Pew estimated 3.5m illegals in 1990. Taking that at face value and subtracting the 3m IRCA former-illegals, that puts the 1987 upper bound at 6.5 million illegals. Then it rises for two decades, levelling off at the familiar 10-12m in 2010.
"Trump might try to put all minorities in camps and murder them" isn't a factual statement about history, so how can it be a lie? It's a fear/concern about a possible future, and one I honestly share, as it would seem to be the logical escalation of his actions thus far. Deporting minorities to brutal 3rd world gulags, presumably for life, who were here legally and convicted of no crime is something he has already done, which is a difference in degree, not in kind from "all minorities in camps and murder them."
Anyone "might try to" do anything, it's true but vacuous and not worth saying.
No, when someone makes a statement like that, it's because they think it's likely enough to be worth saying, or being concerned about.
A bunch of these problems are downstream of money. Lies matter more when they are amplified. When the state has access to a money printer, it can amplify a series of narrative lies designed to bolster its power. And that’s why the woke stuff was all about: justification for infinite state power to accomplish whatever the left wanted. Reality will re-assert itself eventually, as fiscal austerity will start to be mandatory, and tax money will stop flowing to propagandists.
I agree with the principle but I think the specific example is poor. The reason I don't call every person I dislike a rancid piece of shit is because I don't always want to provoke the consequences of doing so. The reason I don't call black people I don't like the N-word is because I'm opposed to the use of racial slurs in general, not because I haven't reached the necessary threshold of disdain to be willing to deploy the nuclear option. I think it's reasonable to paint someone who is willing to use a racial slur as long as they're sufficiently angry at the target as at least a little bit more racist than someone who never would.
For the same reason that “manslaughter” and “premeditated murder” are legally distinct, fighting words should be treated differently from unprovoked utterances.
Sure, someone saying the N word after strong provocation is less indication of virulent racism than someone who says it unprovoked. But I should hope a lot of people manage to not say the N word even when they come to blows with a black person. I also imagine a lot of people never come to blows with anyone, period, no matter how strongly provoked. So this hypothetical bar fight N-worder has shown himself to be both more violent and more racist than at least some portion of the population.
"You said this man is a violent racist, whereas in fact he may only be a little racist and violent, and the two independent of each other, since he was provoked!" strikes me as a pretty terrible example of a worthwhile correction.
Right, the example would have been much better without the slur. There's plenty of examples where the "woke" and even the mainstream have been willing to portray white-on-black violence as racially motivated even in the absence of any evidence whatsoever (eg George Floyd)
> Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to correct it.
I think you're deeply mistaken about the comparative value of my time vs yours.
I wonder about focusing on the 5-10% amount of lying. Although I am personally often annoyed and frustrated when people exaggerate in storytelling, in this instance I wonder whether it makes sense to appreciate hyperbole as a strategy to get attention for something that the person wielding said hyperbole finds horrific — like, say, deporting innocent (or at least not-proven-guilty) people of a particular ethnicity to a known torture prison. Likewise, some who exaggerate or use some percentage of lying do so to make a rhetorical connection between shitty acts of the moment (see prev. example) and known, historical strategies of dictators and autocrats, which may start small to gauge public reaction or to get people used to novel behaviors. (See famous quotation of Catholic priest, WWII, "And then they came for me.")
Another maybe minor, maybe not so minor point — which may be too "woke" for this thread — is that you identify person A as Black without giving him a name while naming without offering any (ethnic or visual) description of "Joe Target." I am left, then, with the labor of deciding that Joe Target is likely white, as I imagine you are (since I have not met you nor am I taking the time to google you). I perceive this asymmetry is a form of quiet racism.
Using analogies and hyperbole are fine, but the line gets crossed when you’re essentially hoping that your hyperbole gets taken literally (or at least, you expect people to react if what you said is literally true).
And the facts still matter, otherwise how do you distinguish between the hyperbole of upset people on one side (“Garcia is a totally innocent minority being sent to a torture concentration camp”) and the hyperbole of upset people on the other (“He’s a violent criminal being deported to a prison in his home country to face justice”)?
I agree with this post, so long as it’s kept in mind that correcting a 5% lie/exaggeration is not the same as providing a 100% refutation.
A gigantic nuclear furnace
So your point is that if you interact with people who value ideology over objective truth, you should have a duty to challenge their exaggerations without being made to feel “cringe”, since these exaggerations can compound in dangerous and mysterious ways? But later you basically say “do this at your discretion.” Which is it? An option? A duty? How are these percentages calculated? This post is just really sloppy.
I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to conclude that Joe Target was racist in that hypothetical. It would just mean assuming that the conflict wouldn't have escalated that way if race wasn't a factor. This is difficult to prove so someone's priors matter a lot.
For a real life example, consider someone like George Zimmerman. Do you think he would have acted the same way if he saw a white teenager instead of Trayvon Martin? If so, then you'd consider Trayvon's death just ordinary vigilantism and Trayvon's race was just incidental. If not, then you'd consider Zimmerman's actions to be racially motivated (even if he wouldn't describe them as such). It's impossible to know what Zimmerman's behavior would have been if he saw a white teenager acting like Trayvon, so your prior beliefs are going to heavily influence what you think he would have done. This leads to the prior being reinforced so the next time there's a controversy about whether someone's motivation was racist, you're even more likely to believe what you previously believed.
Anyways, if someone believes that many violent white alcoholics have racist tendencies, then it'd be reasonable for someone to conclude that race was a precipitating factor, even if there was something that could be considered a more immediate cause of Joe's behavior. I think you'd have to dispute the strawman's unstated assumption about the type of white people that get in bar fights in order to dismiss their explanation for Joe's behavior.
This reminded me of the example of people claiming that Biden let in 20 million illegals. Kelsey Piper has talked about how this is an implausibly large number. https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1912610296461693360
But it keeps getting repeated and the number keeps getting bigger! I saw someone claim 30-50 million illegals today.
Well, it's certainly an example of poor reasoning. The official CBP statistics for nationwide border encounters with illegal aliens in FY 2021-24 are about 10 million, or half that number. If you assume that CBP interdicts 100% of illegal entries, then add up the number of expulsions at the border with deportations from the interior, you get about 4.5 million (my cursory search only went up to Feb 2024, missing half the FY, so let's call it 5 million to be generous). That means in the best possible (and utterly unrealistic) scenario that every single person crossing the border was caught, there was a net gain of 5 million illegals.
If we assume CBP only caught 1/2 of the people illegally entering, there were 15 million total new illegals. Catching 1/4 gets us 35 million, etc*. Obviously we won't know what the real percentage is here, because the whole point of people entering illegally is that we don't know about or have documentation of their entry. 20 million is speculative, and I guess it comes down to your priors about how effective CBP is at finding people trying to sneak across the border.
But this isn't anything like the actual argument Kelsey makes. It's like she wants to reverse engineer the murder rate when we don't know how many people were murdered. And then she concludes that the murder rate must be equal to the number of people arrested for murder. Yeah, this works out great... in a world where 100% of murderers are arrested. But she just states the 10 million number as a hard cap and never even mentions the underlying assumption.
*The math is a little complicated because some of the deportations will be people not included in the border encounters, but caught after they entered the country. I don't think this number is significant but, eh.
After reading enough of this thread I think the main thing I'm coming away with is the impression that calling out someone else's incorrect statements is very very unlikely to be a good use of my time.
There are definitely circumstances where it's worthwhile (where this person's incorrect statement is likely to directly affect my life) but these sum up to a truly miniscule fraction of all the random bullshit I could be correcting on any given day.
If someone starts spouting random bullshit then this should be my cue to disengage from the conversation, not to engage. Correcting it won't even necessarily decrease the total number of uncorrected bullshit in the world, because they'll probably just respond with more bullshit.
thank for your thoughtful response to my comment. I would say it’s hard to know what anyone’s intention is in a given communication unless they themselves name it. how would you distinguish a hope to be taken literally from misguided belief in something unproven from facts acquired from a source you aren’t familiar with?
genuine ask (not snarky): would you offer a statement that you consider wholly truthful around the Garcia example? because to me the first version isn’t especially hyperbolic. revealing a lot about my news sources. thanks.
Totally agree. On a side note, I'm kind of surprised you are (if you in fact are) finding yourself around people who think the "actually" meme is clever, and so feel the need to write this semi-defense of ... carefulness and truthtelling? I'd have thought you would have cut such people out of your life. The only people I have seen wield the meme have been immature people online -- often young people, redditors, or idiots -- who are the exact same kind of people who think they have said something powerfully dismissive by calling it "cringe." "Cringe," in its fashionable modern sense, is essentially an utterly empty slang word: it is nothing more than a way to say, "I find this vaguely or strongly yucky or bad, you should too!" And so every single thing in the world has been called cringe. Polyamory is cringe. Marriage is cringe. Blogging is cringe. Trying hard is cringe, but failing and being a loser in life is also cringe. Complaining about "cringe" is cringe. Etc., etc. Timonthy Williamson has written a nice indirect defense of pedantry when it is pursued in philosophy for the sake of truth, "Must Do Better": https://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/assets/pdf_file/0012/1317/Must_Do_Better.pdf
An interesting variant is where the correction is actually the point.
I.E. politician lies and says 95% of something is bad, hostile media then issues corrections and says 75% of something is bad to make them look bad...but now they're trumpeting the fact that 75% of something is bad.
One thing that I think is becoming clear to me is that there are some people for whom very large numbers function like a kind of metaphor. So when they say 'Biden let in 20 million illegals!', what that really means to them is 'he let in too many, and it was bad'. I think for them, someone trying to correct the number is like someone arguing about the exact brightness of the light at the end of the tunnel: it's ignoring the important point that there were too many, and it was bad!
I would add that lies are more damaging the more controversial or partisan a topic is. If I claim that the sun being made of incandescent gas or that the atomic mass of Xenon is 130u, these are imprecisions which are relatively harmless in most contexts, because these topics are not contested, and there is a broad consensus on what the correct answers are.
By contrast, people disagreeing about the facts is one of the major drivers of the culture war. If you lie or exaggerate about a CW or politics topic, you are burning epistemic commons to fuel that war. Your side will be worse off because they will believe a false thing, while the other side will be less inclined to listen to any arguments from your side given that you are willing to lie. You actively decrease the consensus reality overlap between the bubbles, which makes it less likely that a compromise based on the shared reality can be reached.
I think nobody lying is not enough to end the CW, it can also be waged very well using spins and narratives (see "the media very rarely lies") as arguments-as-soldiers. But it would be a first step.
“Truth does not do as much good in the world as the appearance of it does evil” Le Rochefoucauld. Thank you, Scott, and all others who care about truth, even if it turns out to be less powerful than we hoped it would be. If speech was song, most lyrics would be best understood as verbal music, uttered for emotional effect, irrespective of semantic content.
I was just thinking about an example I've thought about many times: the sarcastic "mostly peaceful protests" sneer related to the Summer of Floyd, and how the sneer itself seems like the people using it think it's enough to debunk the claim that the protests were, indeed, mostly peaceful. A great example is this National Review article I found while Googling around (https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/a-misleading-attempt-to-bolster-the-mostly-peaceful-riots-narrative/): the article writer refers to a study showing that the protests were, indeed, mostly peaceful, does not attempt to debunk the study and indeed admits themselves that "None of this is to say that the many peaceful protesters who have participated in marches around the country have no legitimate grievances, or to call those participants violent criminals."
(Yes, I know about the news clip where the phrase originated, but the sneer-phrase itself has long since left that specific context and generalized.)
I think what you are saying is true but also for dialectical cases like the 'sun a bowl of gases'. It can lead to similar cases of misunderstanding and wrong ideas. One example that's always stuck in my mind was COVID. I agree COVID was dangerous and the measures at the time were a net positive, but I wish public health officials conveyed their uncertainty and the different unknown variables more accurately, and I think ironically that led to a breakdown of public trust and less people following safe distancing measures
I wonder how often people do not lie but simply don't care about the truth of their statements. Just like LLMs are hallucinating, though I want to quote another blog here:
What are often described as “hallucinations” by large language models are, as these researchers (and many others) have pointed out, “better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by [philosopher Harry] Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs.”
People use facts to communicate, not the facts, which are ultimately unimportant to most people most of the time, but an underlying theory about someone or something, which is the thing that matters. If Joe is an evil person because the murdered and raped X number of people, the specific number isn't important. That the facts (whatever they are) support the contention that Joe is evil is what matters.
Except that something else also matters, maybe even more so. Which is that some person (Jane) is expressing her opinion that Joe is evil. That other people hear her and acknowledge her right to express and opinion, and therefore assert her place and role within whatever relationships she happens to be involved in, isn't even a matter of opinion to Jane, it's a matter of survival and success. Nitpicking her sounds like you don't care about her underlying theory, which by extension feels like you don't care about her. You can only be attacking her facts on a basis that doesn't matter (because the specific numbers aren't germane) because you really want to attack *her*.
There is a well understood diplomatic way around this conundrum: You acknowledge agreement with her thesis before mentioning in passing, "Oh, by the way, it was Z number of rapes and murders." Since "everyone" (that is, a plurality of people in Jane's social group), you failing to adhere by it is evidence (to her) that you are engaged in something underhanded. It's a classic error of manners.
And everyone does this, not just "Woke People" (by which you mean liberals, right?).
As for his example, that's just extreme defensiveness, which is a human trait, not a liberal one. Anybody could generate a counter-hypothetical involving a conservative mob.
The solution, in both cases, is the one I outlined above.