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The fact that we know some people don't naturally A-decouple is exactly why in public, political debates we have to be careful about D-decoupling or allowing ot

The fact that we know some people don't naturally A-decouple is exactly why in public, political debates we have to be careful about D-decoupling or allowing others to do it without challenging them. There are an infinity of things we could assume for the sake of argument and the act of choosing and assuming a particular one of those options is often not a purely academic one, especially when done in public.

philwelch 5y ago
“Don’t make sophisticated arguments in public because they might confuse stupid people” is reasonable, but you need to work out the implications. Do non-stupid people have some alternative forum to have sophisticated discussions with each other? If so, you’ve replaced an open society of free expression with a society with a gatekeeping intellectual elite that does everything behind closed doors. And if not, you’ve literally imposed an artificial cognitive handicap on your whole society.
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  This is a great point and definitely something to think about, but I don't think it really captures quite what I intended to say. It's more like "don't let people get away with appeals to emotion and other fallacies, just because they disguise them as sophisticated arguments - call them out". This is true in all kinds of debates, but it's particularly important in broad political debates. The appropriate level of charity to give the person you're debating with depends on the context and just how much good faith it's reasonable to assume. As to 'alterative fora', I don't think that's quite as bad as your comment seems to suggest. An academic paper is an 'alternative forum' to a time-constrained panel discussion on a TV show, but acknowledging that the kinds of arguments that are appropriate in one might not be appropriate in the other, is not "replacing an open society of free expression with a society with a gatekeeping intellectual elite that does everything behind closed doors".
  - dpark 5y ago
    > "don't let people get away with appeals to emotion and other fallacies, just because they disguise them as sophisticated arguments - call them out" That’s much better stated than my response. Don’t let them abuse the platform they’re being granted.
  - philwelch 5y ago
    > An academic paper is an 'alternative forum' to a time-constrained panel discussion on a TV show… And if I were to set up a gatekeeping intellectual elite that does everything behind closed doors, I would create a system where academic papers could easily be accessed within university networks but would otherwise cost some exorbitant amount of money to read. It turns out that this is approximately how academic publishing works, and I genuinely think this is an accident created by economic incentives, but it does somewhat undermine the point here. I think you raise some different and interesting questions about engaging with suspicious or bad faith interlocutors, but I’m not actually sure that this tactic works in that case. Usually the point of adopting an assumption you disagree with “for the sake of argument” is to demonstrate that the assumption is actually irrelevant to the point that you’re trying to make. For instance, consider the following argument (which is intentionally ridiculous but nonetheless morally objectionable): 1. People who ate grilled cheese sandwiches on January 20, 2022 should be sentenced to death. 2. Phil ate a grilled cheese sandwich on January 20, 2022. 3. Phil should be sentenced to death. In this case, point 1 is a moral principle (an evil one but it is intended as a moral judgment), while point 2 is a claim of fact. Unfortunately, my interlocutor is not willing to cede ground on point 2, and I don’t have the evidence to prove a negative. What’s the more productive line of argument? Refusing to even consider the possibility that I ate a grilled cheese sandwich, or saying, “even if I ate the sandwich, that doesn’t justify the death penalty”? In other words, the entire point of this sort of moral decoupling is usually to defuse the troubling implications that you’re worried about in the first place. Now, maybe there are stupid people in the audience who will get confused, misunderstand my argument as an admission that I ate the sandwich, and come away even more convinced that I should be put to death. But at that point, in my opinion, we have already moved away from intellectually honest discourse and towards manipulation and propaganda, which sort of lands us at the same place that we started.
- dpark 5y ago
  I don’t think it’s nearly that cut-and-dry. A core question is whether or not it’s useful to engage in the discussion. If I were involved in a public debate for some reason and someone asked me, “suppose that blacks ares naturally inferior to whites…”, I would likely also decline the “discourse decoupling”. It’s hard to see how that conversation is going to go anywhere useful and it feels very much like granting a platform for a white supremacist to speak to white supremacy supporters.
  - burntsushi 5y ago
    I probably would too. And I think that's unfortunate. Such a premise could be interesting to explore, particularly in the realm of an argument by contradiction. It seems unlikely for an adult to find that interesting, but a child? Maybe. I think the situation would be much better if the worst thing that happened is that people simply declined to have the conversation. But things often escalate beyond that.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  Discussions as in debates probably don't influence society enough to call the people having them elites. The elites don't have discussions with people they disagree with, they buy entire campaigns to discredit them. So to speak.

philwelch 5y ago

“Don’t make sophisticated arguments in public because they might confuse stupid people” is reasonable, but you need to work out the implications. Do non-stupid people have some alternative forum to have sophisticated discussions with each other? If so, you’ve replaced an open society of free expression with a society with a gatekeeping intellectual elite that does everything behind closed doors. And if not, you’ve literally imposed an artificial cognitive handicap on your whole society.

kybernetikos 5y ago
This is a great point and definitely something to think about, but I don't think it really captures quite what I intended to say. It's more like "don't let people get away with appeals to emotion and other fallacies, just because they disguise them as sophisticated arguments - call them out". This is true in all kinds of debates, but it's particularly important in broad political debates. The appropriate level of charity to give the person you're debating with depends on the context and just how much good faith it's reasonable to assume. As to 'alterative fora', I don't think that's quite as bad as your comment seems to suggest. An academic paper is an 'alternative forum' to a time-constrained panel discussion on a TV show, but acknowledging that the kinds of arguments that are appropriate in one might not be appropriate in the other, is not "replacing an open society of free expression with a society with a gatekeeping intellectual elite that does everything behind closed doors".
- dpark 5y ago
  > "don't let people get away with appeals to emotion and other fallacies, just because they disguise them as sophisticated arguments - call them out" That’s much better stated than my response. Don’t let them abuse the platform they’re being granted.
- philwelch 5y ago
  > An academic paper is an 'alternative forum' to a time-constrained panel discussion on a TV show… And if I were to set up a gatekeeping intellectual elite that does everything behind closed doors, I would create a system where academic papers could easily be accessed within university networks but would otherwise cost some exorbitant amount of money to read. It turns out that this is approximately how academic publishing works, and I genuinely think this is an accident created by economic incentives, but it does somewhat undermine the point here. I think you raise some different and interesting questions about engaging with suspicious or bad faith interlocutors, but I’m not actually sure that this tactic works in that case. Usually the point of adopting an assumption you disagree with “for the sake of argument” is to demonstrate that the assumption is actually irrelevant to the point that you’re trying to make. For instance, consider the following argument (which is intentionally ridiculous but nonetheless morally objectionable): 1. People who ate grilled cheese sandwiches on January 20, 2022 should be sentenced to death. 2. Phil ate a grilled cheese sandwich on January 20, 2022. 3. Phil should be sentenced to death. In this case, point 1 is a moral principle (an evil one but it is intended as a moral judgment), while point 2 is a claim of fact. Unfortunately, my interlocutor is not willing to cede ground on point 2, and I don’t have the evidence to prove a negative. What’s the more productive line of argument? Refusing to even consider the possibility that I ate a grilled cheese sandwich, or saying, “even if I ate the sandwich, that doesn’t justify the death penalty”? In other words, the entire point of this sort of moral decoupling is usually to defuse the troubling implications that you’re worried about in the first place. Now, maybe there are stupid people in the audience who will get confused, misunderstand my argument as an admission that I ate the sandwich, and come away even more convinced that I should be put to death. But at that point, in my opinion, we have already moved away from intellectually honest discourse and towards manipulation and propaganda, which sort of lands us at the same place that we started.
dpark 5y ago
I don’t think it’s nearly that cut-and-dry. A core question is whether or not it’s useful to engage in the discussion. If I were involved in a public debate for some reason and someone asked me, “suppose that blacks ares naturally inferior to whites…”, I would likely also decline the “discourse decoupling”. It’s hard to see how that conversation is going to go anywhere useful and it feels very much like granting a platform for a white supremacist to speak to white supremacy supporters.
- burntsushi 5y ago
  I probably would too. And I think that's unfortunate. Such a premise could be interesting to explore, particularly in the realm of an argument by contradiction. It seems unlikely for an adult to find that interesting, but a child? Maybe. I think the situation would be much better if the worst thing that happened is that people simply declined to have the conversation. But things often escalate beyond that.
DarylZero 5y ago
Discussions as in debates probably don't influence society enough to call the people having them elites. The elites don't have discussions with people they disagree with, they buy entire campaigns to discredit them. So to speak.