Coolio, some people are sending their responses to Sam Harris’s request for examples of Political Correctness run amok publicly, so that we can read them. This fella on Facebook for example.
Sam Harris, remember back when Richard Dawkins “ranked rape”?
Well, he tried to make a point about logic and then everyone said they understood what he meant, but still did the exact opposite of what a person who understood would.
The media wrote about how he ranked rape, even though rape was only a hypothetical example in his argument about logic, not at all the main point of what he said.
We’re not allowed to have logical discussions about anything that’s emotionally sensitive, or even use it as an example to illustrate a point.
http://www.independent.co.uk/…/richard-dawkins-says-date-ra…
#PoliticalCorrectness#PC#freedom#freespech#freedomofspeech#logic#liberal#p2#progressive
Totally. Absolutely. Because Richard Dawkins for sure no question felt an urgent need to explain to people that saying X is worse than Y does not equal saying Y is good. Just that. No reference to anything else, just a purely about-logic point. He just happened to use rape as an example, but it could have been anything else, anything at all. It’s only politically correct chumps who miss the purely about-logic point and zero in on the example, which is completely beside the point.
Also, Twitter is the best possible medium for making points about logic, including while using rape as an example. The very best possible. Nothing could ever possibly go wrong; it is always perfectly easy to make your points clear, and engage with questions and criticism, and say everything that needs to be said. Nothing ever goes haywire on Twitter, and it’s just amok political correctness to suggest that Twitter isn’t the place for discussions of comparative rape.
If Sam Harris is writing a book on Political Correctness run amok, there is every sign that it will be a humdinger of a good book, probably his best since The Moral Landscape.
Well, of course not. And gays have no reason to feel proud of, you know, just being unremarkably who they are. Because logic.
It is fair to say that Dawkins was using logic when he was in the abstract. He arsed it up with the specific rape examples he used to then actualize his abstraction. The syllogism he used did not apply to his example. THAT is what was wrong, not his logic, but his argument claiming to use said logic.
That said, citing one specific FB commenter to project what an as yet unwritten book by someone other than the commenter might resemble is a logical fallacy of its own: Hasty Generalization.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you Shripathi, but …. Ophlia’s jump from Harris’s very bad book about science and morality, to the sarcastic remark that Harris’s book on PC run amok will doubtless be a humdinger, is not a hasty generalisation; it is a reasonable expectation, given Harris’s record.
And there was nothing wrong with Dawkins’ logic. Saying that X is worse than Y does not mean that Y is good, is doubtless true. Dawkins’ example was tendentious and (it is fair to say) sexist and anti-feminist, even though it quite plainly exhibited the claim that “Saying X is worse than Y does not mean that Y is good.” By using this to illustrate a point of logic Dawkins made it clear that logic was not the main emphasis of his “tweet.” Nor is this a syllogism, by the way; it is simply a point about the meaning of ‘worse than’. However, if he really wanted to make the point about the meaning of words, Dawkins could have chosen a less contentious example.
In addition, it is not at all clear that what he says about date rape and stranger rape at knife point is true. Being raped is always to fear for your life, whether a weapon is produced or not; for rape is the forcible sexual abuse of someone by another with greater strength or power. Dawkins simply has no idea what he is talking about, except that he wants to minimise the harm that sexual abuse can do, just as he did in the case of so-called “mild” paedophilia. There is no objective standard of what constitutes mild paedophilia or mild rape. What counts is how it affects the victim. If Dawkins doesn’t recognise this, then he should go away and learn to think. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that Dawkins has trouble thinking about issues like this, and simply does not understand what harm sexual abuse (even of the supposedly “mildest” form) can do to a person.
I’m tired of seeing intellectually bankrupt men claiming that their lack of personal experience and any meaningful research means that they’re coming at an issue “objectively” and applying logic to it. All they’re actually doing is presenting their unexamined biases as fact, and then having over-emotional defensive reactions when they aren’t taken seriously by people who actually know things about the subject.
Well, gee. Dawkins tries to make a point about ranking, and gives an example so spectacularly wrong-headed that one’s teeth ache just thinking about it.
Shripathi @ 2
Actually no, you have the chronology reversed. He talked about comparative rape first and only then – after he got a lot of pushback – translated it into the abstract. I don’t believe it was ever the abstract point that was on his mind.
Also: every statement should be taken simply for its face value. There are no such things as subtext, context, or historical usage. No statement is racist, sexist, or otherwise problematic as long as the speaker prefaces it with “I’m not a racist/sexist, whatever, but….”
Really. I’ve definitely used the old “saying X is worse than Y doesn’t mean Y is good” logic before, myself. Of course, I generally use examples more like “breaking my leg hurts worse than stubbing my toe, but that doesn’t mean stubbing my toe doesn’t hurt.” So, you know, there seems to be a noncontentious way to address the issue, for one. And secondly, and this seems the most important, I use that example when I’m talking about why people shouldn’t tell me to not complain about stubbing my toe just because it could have been a broken leg: because it still hurts. The problem Dawkins makes, and why it’s not inappropriate at all to call him out on it, is that he seems to think that if there exists greater injuries than our own out there somewhere, we should just suck it up and not worry about why we keep stubbing our toes everywhere we go or focus time or energy into stopping that from happening.
I sense sarcasm here… As if you don’t actually believe it. Next you’ll be suggesting all those guys who say they’re “just asking questions” actually weren’t.
As a philosopher, Harris isn’t even a very good neuroscientist.
(If I’m later proven wrong about Sam Harris’ intentions with this PC amok roundup, I would consider apologizing. But if he’s headed down the conventional and popular road of tut-tutting, then I think he deserves some pretty strong ridicule.)
(Ridicule mode engaged)
Way to fight fiercely for the status quo, Sam. How edgy.
Social change and divergence in discourse that doesn’t feel ‘just right’ to your gut emotions is clearly too much progress to be contemplated or broached in polite society. Let’s not rock the boat.
Rocking might lead to slightly more vigorous wiggling and then, gosh, we’d be on a dangerous and slippery slope that is too fearsome to contemplate. Let’s frown on that. The right thinking people in power should control the status quo, and they should brook no argument from below that they don’t feel just peachy keen about brooking. Your emotional responses clearly trump mine.
Shutting down people whose ideas “feel” wrong or silly to those who like the status quo is a rational sorting mechanism for what’s worth talking about? I don’t think so. (I’m older than Sam Harris and I remember the “a woman can’t be a chairman” argument. It’s hard to fight logic based on exclusionary words when people tell you words don’t constrain you and word usage doesn’t tend to channel thought narrowly.
We don’t need a stinking word for zero. We don’t even need the idea. It’s really about nothing. It’s clearly trivial. We’ve done fine so far.
I snark, of course, but who the fuck gave you the righteous crayon and told you to draw the exact line of thus far an no farther? Who calibrated the “this is what I feel” deciding mechanism in your brain and gut, and is it calibrated to an exact and reproduceable standard? How can you be the arbiter of what is reason and what is folly without being rather arbitrary and even (gasp) biased and fallible?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Even if it really was, he has to admit to being a shitty communicator; obscuring a simple point by using an emotionally charged example that wasn’t at all necessary. If you can’t clearly say what you mean, you don’t get to blame the audience when you’re misunderstood. If you don’t want to talk about subject X, don’t bring it up. If you do bring it up, don’t act surprised if people assume that it’s because you wanted to talk about it.
If don’t really buy his excuse either, but even if we accept it, he still fucked up and the response he got was entirely appropriate.
@10: Has Harris ever walked back his credulity towards Rupert Sheldrake? I ask because I don’t pay attention to him, so wouldn’t know.
What exactly did Harris say about Sheldrake? Do you have a link or reference?
@14: See The End of Faith, pg 41 in Norton paperback edition, during a discussion of spirituality:
(That last sentence is boilerplate pseudoscience special pleading.)
End note 18 is a list of haf-a-dozen references, presumably supporting “the reality of psychic phenomena”, the second of which is R. Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind”. I haven’t checked any of the references (Sheldrake was the one name I recognized), but a couple of items further on, Harris says “There may even be some credible evidence for reincarnation. See I. Stevenson….” [three references elided because I’m a lazy transcriber].
And this guy is a neuroscientist? He’s a pseudo-skeptic, and I expect whatever he winds up writing about PCness will be similarly bad.
Thanks for the reference, Eamon Knight. I was in a discussion once where someone cited Sheldrake and I actually read one of his published articles, on telephone telepathy. It was trash so bad, I’d give it an F if it came from a first year university student. There were zero controls. It was open for deliberate fraud and unconscious bias in a dozen ways, to the point where it amounted to little more than a survey on the question “do you think you’ve got psychic powers”.
I was honestly surprised that a person with a degree was willing to put his name to it. I have more regard for my scientific reputation than that and I don’t have a single publication to my name. For Harris to give even remotely positive publicity for Sheldrake is a sign of either sloppy thinking or sloppy research.
But sam was just being logical too!
Meera Nanda wrote a piece about the pseudoscience and woo in The End of Faith for the ur-B&W. I’ll have to find the link.
Here we go:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2005/trading-faith-for-spirituality-the-mystifications-of-sam-harris/
@17: Thanks for the RationalWiki ref; the excerpt they give is fascinating. Apparently the works (Radin and Stevenson) he considered not worth the time to authenticate the data of, he still thought worth citing in the TEOF end note I cite above. And “gradations of certainty”? More special pleading.
This the sort of thing Harris means? Surprised Harris hasn’t leaped to Hopkins’ defence.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2829730/Calls-arrest-Katie-Hopkins-inciting-racial-hatred-series-anti-Muslim-anti-Palestinian-Tweets-sent-account.html