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The author is not arguing that online life is better for kids/people than offline life. She's arguing that it's unhelpful to frame the problems of modern life a

The author is not arguing that online life is better for kids/people than offline life. She's arguing that it's unhelpful to frame the problems of modern life as a result of a departure from an Edenic "offline" or "wilderness" -- that just as white explorers in North America were not really entering an uninhabited wilderness, people who grew up with live TV and landlone phones were not really disconnected -- that the solution is not to temporarily "return" to an unspoiled wilderness that never really existed, but to bring ordinary life into alignment with the natural world -- not to go on an occasional digital detox that many of us can't afford, but to build an online life that doesn't hurt our self-esteem, attention spans, etc. She's tracing the history of the concepts of "wilderness" and "offline" so that she can deconstruct them as categories. In general, very few important disagreements are actually about facts. More often, they're about the framing of the issue itself. Is spending on social services "Big Government," or is it a "social safety net"? Are trans women as unfortunate women trapped in male bodies or weird men who enjoy pretending to be women? Is restricting immigration more like redlining a neighborhood or asking an unwanted guest to leave your home? These questions are about attitudes and interpretations, not facts. If you try to change someone's mind on such questions by presenting then with data, you're likely to fail. People who work with words and narratives intuitively understand this; people who work with data and numbers do not.

dash2 5y ago
> In general, very few important disagreements are actually about facts. I disagree. In fact, behind each of your examples are real empirical questions. This form of thinking just hides them. There are real questions about what makes people want to change sex; about the effects of immigration; and about the effects of social spending. It's perfectly true that people's minds are hard to change, and that they can be swayed by the manipulative techniques of advertising and PR. The jump from that to accepting it as a valid, or the only possible, form of argument harms public debate and democracy, and we end up in the cynical, post-truth world of Peter Pomerantsev - or Trump - where all there is is competing narratives.
- pgcj_poster 5y ago
  > There are real questions about what makes people want to change sex There is no widely-accepted empirical answer to this question, and even if there was, it wouldn't tell us how we should treat such people. Arguments on trans issues hinge almost entirely on one's level of sympathy for trans people and willingness to accept what they tell us about how the feel. It's not a coïncidence that those who personally know a trans person are much more supportive of trans rights. > about the effects of immigration; and about the effects of social spending Let's suppose that the data came in and we learned that immigration is slightly good for the economy as a whole, really good for immigrants, but bad for native blue-collar workers. Based on that hypothetical information, people would reach different conclusions about immigration policy based on their relative sympathy to immigrants and native workers. The framing device is also extremely important: "should America put our own people first?" vs "should the state condemn people to poverty because of where they were born?" > we end up in the cynical, post-truth world of Peter Pomerantsev - or Trump - where all there is is competing narratives. Trump managed to beat Clinton without uttering a single fact during his entire campaign. If you want to beat the Trumps of the world, you need to know how to deconstruct a narrative. Also, do you have any data suggesting that narrative-centric arguments employed by writers and humanities PhDs resulted in the rise of Trump -- or did you conclude that based on your value system?
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > There are real questions about what makes people want to change sex But they aren't what drive either side of the trans rights debate... > about the effects of immigration ...or the immigration debate... > and about the effects of social spending. ...or most social spending debate. In all of those cases, the differences are primarily over values, and the factual views often are overlapping between the sides and quite diverse within each side. And where there are important fact disputes, often one (or both) sides rejects (often explicitly) empricism in favor of some other source of understanding on the issue, making fact debate fruitless. (It doesn't help you reach consensus that your opponent's position is grounded in a falsifiable fact claim if they view the fact belief as justified by divine revelation and not subject to empirical inquiry.) Empirical inquiry into facts is good for resolving policy disputes between people who agree on the relevant value criteria and agree on empiricism as the correct epistemic framework for the fact inquiry, but, as it turns out, most important policy disputes are not between sides where that is the case. (Policy disputes within certain factions sometimes have this quality, but those between political—usually ideological—factions tend not to.)

dash2 5y ago

> In general, very few important disagreements are actually about facts. I disagree. In fact, behind each of your examples are real empirical questions. This form of thinking just hides them. There are real questions about what makes people want to change sex; about the effects of immigration; and about the effects of social spending. It's perfectly true that people's minds are hard to change, and that they can be swayed by the manipulative techniques of advertising and PR. The jump from that to accepting it as a valid, or the only possible, form of argument harms public debate and democracy, and we end up in the cynical, post-truth world of Peter Pomerantsev - or Trump - where all there is is competing narratives.

pgcj_poster 5y ago
> There are real questions about what makes people want to change sex There is no widely-accepted empirical answer to this question, and even if there was, it wouldn't tell us how we should treat such people. Arguments on trans issues hinge almost entirely on one's level of sympathy for trans people and willingness to accept what they tell us about how the feel. It's not a coïncidence that those who personally know a trans person are much more supportive of trans rights. > about the effects of immigration; and about the effects of social spending Let's suppose that the data came in and we learned that immigration is slightly good for the economy as a whole, really good for immigrants, but bad for native blue-collar workers. Based on that hypothetical information, people would reach different conclusions about immigration policy based on their relative sympathy to immigrants and native workers. The framing device is also extremely important: "should America put our own people first?" vs "should the state condemn people to poverty because of where they were born?" > we end up in the cynical, post-truth world of Peter Pomerantsev - or Trump - where all there is is competing narratives. Trump managed to beat Clinton without uttering a single fact during his entire campaign. If you want to beat the Trumps of the world, you need to know how to deconstruct a narrative. Also, do you have any data suggesting that narrative-centric arguments employed by writers and humanities PhDs resulted in the rise of Trump -- or did you conclude that based on your value system?
dragonwriter 5y ago
> There are real questions about what makes people want to change sex But they aren't what drive either side of the trans rights debate... > about the effects of immigration ...or the immigration debate... > and about the effects of social spending. ...or most social spending debate. In all of those cases, the differences are primarily over values, and the factual views often are overlapping between the sides and quite diverse within each side. And where there are important fact disputes, often one (or both) sides rejects (often explicitly) empricism in favor of some other source of understanding on the issue, making fact debate fruitless. (It doesn't help you reach consensus that your opponent's position is grounded in a falsifiable fact claim if they view the fact belief as justified by divine revelation and not subject to empirical inquiry.) Empirical inquiry into facts is good for resolving policy disputes between people who agree on the relevant value criteria and agree on empiricism as the correct epistemic framework for the fact inquiry, but, as it turns out, most important policy disputes are not between sides where that is the case. (Policy disputes within certain factions sometimes have this quality, but those between political—usually ideological—factions tend not to.)