2017-11-13 RRG Notes
- The original use of motte-and-bailey is intended as a critique of postmodernism
- Postmodernists start out by saying that our perception of reality is influenced by the categories and prejudices of our society
- They then follow this up by saying that beliefs that are at odds with scientific evidence are just as valid as beliefs upheld by scientific evidence
- The originators of the motte-and-bailey doctrine compare this approach to a medieval motte-and-bailey castle
- Field of desirable and productive land - bailey
- Tower in the middle - motte
- Economic activity goes on in the bailey
- When threatened, retreat to the motte until the threat goes away
- Examples
- Religion
- Religious group acts like God is a singular supernatural being, capable of performing miracles - bailey
- When confronted, they say that "God" is a word for the beauty and order in the universe
- Feminism
- Some feminists say that you can't be a "real" feminist without supporting a controversial policy
- When confronted, they retreat to saying that feminism just implies women deserve the same rights as men
- When the threat goes away, they go back to advocating for the controversial policy
- Pseudoscience
- Proponents of pseudoscience will claim that their quack remedies are the cure for all sorts of ailments
- When confronted, they say that they're just trading on the placebo effect
- Rationality
- Rationalists push all sorts of complicated concepts like Bayesian decision-making and and utilitarian ethics
- When confronted, they retreat to the claim that rationality is whatever helps you achieve your goals
- Singularitarianism
- Claim that there is an imminent AI explosion
- When confronted, retreat to claiming that at some point in the future technology will be too weird to predict
- Motte-and-bailey is a perfect mirror-image of the weak-man fallacy
- Weak-man is like a straw-man, only you're taking a non-representative extremist position to be representative of your adversary
- Motte-and-bailey replaces a weak but representative position with a strong but non-representative position
- Both motte-and-bailey and weak-man result from people's tendencies to debate vague clouds of beliefs rather than specific beliefs
- To get around them, taboo vague words and replace symbols with substance
- Have an actual thing that you're trying to debate
- Hypocrisy is when an action is ostensibly about advancing belief X, but is truly about advancing belief Y
- What are some possible responses to hypocrisy
- Do nothing
- Ask the person privately about your suspicions while supporting their efforts
- Confront the person privately and act mildly offended
- Expose the hypocrisy publicly, acting deeply offended
- Ask a mutual friend to ask the other person about the hypocrisy
- If you like the person that's behaving hypocritically and want them to be less of a hypocrite, what's the best approach?
- The safest approach is to do nothing
- Exposing hypocrisy publicly is probably the worst approach - likely to make the hypocrite do the opposite of the thing you want them to do
- The problem with Effective Altruism is that by exposing hypocrisy, it's equally likely to make people give less to charity as it is to to make them give more
- We should be careful about exposing hypocrisy until we better understand the effects of exposing hypocrisy
- Why do we place so much stock in self-consistency?
- Self-consistency is a measure of reliability - if I don't think that you'll believe the same thing tomorrow that you did today, then why should I trust you with anything?
- Placing too much emphasis on consistency led The_Duck to completely ignore animal rights, on the grounds that anyone who ate meat could not discuss animal rights
- We can either back down from high moral ideals or be more comfortable with hypocrisy
- Calling someone out for hypocrisy is too meta
- Completely ignores the truth or moral value of their actual argument
- Hypocrisy is a valid claim to make regardless of the actual facts
- If someone is saying P while acting as if !P is true, one of their beliefs is false, so just attack the false belief
- Charges of hypocrisy discourage updating and nuance
- The best way to avoid hypocrisy is to say nothing substantive at all
- Knowing that you can be called out for hypocrisy prevents people from changing or updating their views
- Calling a group out for hypocrisy reduces the intellectual diversity of the group
- Every group will have a range of opinions
- If there are two members whose opinions diverge sufficiently, the group as a whole can be called out for hypocrisy
- Prevents people from associating with people who hold less defensible versions of their views
- Ambitious goal-setting and self-improvement can look like behavioral hypocrisy
- Accusing people of hypocrisy just encourages low standards
- It's hard to talk about what virtues you want your community to have without pretending to have those virtues, even if you don't have them yet
