The backlash against debate is in full throttle

Good. Here’s another article exposing the facile shallowness of the “debate me” crowd.

A famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language — of all the endless combinations of words in all of history — “debate me” is the most badass.

Or that’s what a cohort of online dudes appear to believe. The way a drunk roughneck might square up to you for a fight in a seedy roadhouse, the “debate me” dude pops into your Twitter mentions to demand a formal argument. Ignoring that people debate shit on the internet as automatically as one might breathe or blink, he is oddly constrained by the notion that disagreement has rules, or at least a chivalrous code of honor befitting a pistol duel in the countryside. Simply tussling over this or that question is beneath him. Debate, meanwhile, is a gentleman’s contract, holy ground, a noble anachronism.

I also appreciate the categorization of two kinds of debates: the ones where it’s solely an appeal to emotion (ironically, most of the online objective reality gang’s outcomes rely entirely on emotion — see Ben Shapiro for on-point examples), and the ones that rely on formal technicalities.

Besides, it’s not as if the lad insistent on a volley of conflicting ideas is willing to be convinced by his rival. He wouldn’t be doing this if he weren’t assured a victory, and so the provocation signals the egoist’s pride — as well as the almost charmingly naive certainty that competing ideologies can be vanquished by scoring enough points in a virtual joust. Of the two main models for American debate — political and extracurricular — he favors the airless academicism of the high school debate club, where he first learned some of his favorite fallacies: straw man, ad hominem, the appeal to authority. Whereas a presidential debate is decided on the intangibles, with voters swayed by gut reaction, the after-school debates play out in the technicalities, with naturally quarrelsome young men learning to fetishize what they consider their powers of logic and deduction. If they do well, they may conclude that others lack such faculties. Indeed, the “debate me” dude often behaves as if he’s the last “rational” person on Earth.

Ultimately, that’s the problem with debate: it turns discussion into a contest that requires some method of tallying up “points” to determine who “wins”, and the methods never rest on substance. Shouldn’t there be the equivalent of a TKO when someone lies or misinterprets a source, or doesn’t provide verifiable evidence, or just yells a conclusion? There are an awful lot of creationists and Republicans who’d be lying flat on the mat immediately after the opening bell, so no, those will never be criteria for success.

Now struggling to avoid falling for the naturalistic fallacy

The last two years have coarsened me. I read this story of the demise of a chimpanzee leader, and realized I’ve changed.

Chimps have been spotted killing and then eating their former tyrannical leader.

Jill Pruetz, an professor of anthropology, said that she found it “very difficult and quite gruesome to watch” the group of chimpanzees kill a member of their own community and then abuse the animal’s dead body.

Professor Pruetz has described how she saw a group of the animals discover the body of a chimp called Foudouko, a former leader of the Fongoli community who had since been exiled for five years and who was probably killed by members of the group. After they came across the dead body, they abused and ate it for nearly four hours, the Iowa State University anthropologist described.

Once I would have been horrified and thought this was a terrible, awful act.

Now I’m thinking, well, maybe this was a reasonable response. Perhaps this is simply a normal group of young chimps reacting appropriately. Maybe this is how state funerals ought to be conducted in the future.

Both sides. Both sides on this issue would have good people.

(Warning: there is video at the link.)

Friday Cephalopod: Why are some cephalopods so clever?

I’m just ruined for some things. Here’s this article that’s smack dab in my wheelhouse: Grow Smart and Die Young: Why Did Cephalopods Evolve Intelligence? It’s a topic I’m very interested in, but the article fell flat for me. I’m going to be a bit nit-picky here.

The good part of the story is that it’s a review of various hypotheses for the evolution of intelligence in various clades. They propose 3 general classes of hypotheses.

  1. The Ecological Intelligence hypothesis. Intelligence arose in response to food foraging challenges. You’ve got to have a detailed knowledge of your environment in order to take advantage of scarce or difficult to extract food sources.
  2. The Social Intelligence hypothesis. Animals with complex social interactions build complex brains to match.
  3. The Predator/Prey hypothesis. Avoiding predation in some organisms might require an intelligence comparable to that required to negotiate social interactions.

Not mentioned is an alternative sort-of null hypothesis: there was no selection for intelligence at all. It hitch-hiked along with an expansion of neural tissue associated with morphological changes — intelligence is something that just emerges with a surplus of brains that arose for other reasons.

OK. With my addition, I think this is a reasonable framework for discussing the evolution of intelligence. Unfortunately, the paper has a couple of problems. One is that, well, it’s a review paper that doesn’t have any data or experiments or even any real evidence. It’s speculative, which is fine, but I went into it with higher expectations.

The one piece of information I found useful, though, was this table, which gathers together information about groups of animals with a reputation for intelligence and puts them in a comparative context. That’s what I like to see!

But. Here’s what bugs me: it’s comparing a whole taxonomic class, the cephalopods, with a couple of families. The cephalopods are diverse, with some impressively intelligent representatives, like the octopus. But market squid? Are they particularly bright? I don’t think so. We could say the same of primates — are we really going to compare Galago with Homo? This table would have benefited from a much tighter focus.

It also leaves out some features unique to various groups. Can we compare complex active camouflage with complex language? It seems to me that maybe there are different preconditions that can lead to intelligence, and maybe an illustration of the significant differences between them would be more informative? There could be many, radically different paths that lead to increased demands for more flexibility and intelligence — maybe all three of their hypotheses, and more, are all true.

For instance, look at the last rows of the table, on life history. That part is really interesting, and the paper does discuss it at length. Some cephalopods are intelligent creatures that are cruelly cursed by their nature with very short lifespans of 1 or 2 years, where reproduction is often a death sentence, and the opportunity to educate offspring is non-existent. What intelligence they do have has to be inherent, because there is so little opportunity for learning.

Also compare social lives. Cephalopods, depending on the species, are either solitary or live in large schools, and do not seem to form long-term social bonds; the vertebrates on the list are all social to various degrees, and do pair-bond. After reading the paper, I came away thinking that I mainly saw diversity and different forces that could all lead to intelligence, and don’t have much unity of mechanisms. There is at least a nice summary of cephalopod evolution.

Around 530 Mya a group of snail-like molluscs experienced a major shift in their morphology and physiology: their protective shell became a buoyancy device. The comparison with nautiluses, the only extant cephalopods that retained the external shell, suggests that this key event co-occurred with the emergence of arms, funnel, and crucially, a centralized brain. The increase in computational power at this stage might have been selected to support arm coordination for locomotion and object manipulation, as well as navigation in the water column and basic learning processes. Next, around 275 Mya the external shell was internalised (in the ancestors of cuttlefish and squid) or lost (in those of octopuses). It has been speculated that competition with marine vertebrates was a driving factor that led to dramatic changes in the lifestyles of these animals. First, the disappearance of the external shell allowed animals to occupy a wide array of ecological niches. Consequently, modern cephalopods are found in all marine habitats, from tropical to polar waters, and from benthic to pelagic niches. Second, the loss of the protective shell drastically increased predatory pressures and consequently the rates of extrinsic mortality. These novel ecological conditions might not have only played a major role in the emergence of sophisticated biological adaptations (e.g., lens eye, and chromatophores) but also in the coevolution of intelligence and fast life history of cephalopods.

Maybe intelligence is something that just arises in response to complex life strategies, where “complex” is an all-purpose buzzword for any of a million situations. If we ever meet aliens on a distant planet, this tells me you’d be unwise to try and predict what they’d look like or how they live or what the mechanisms behind their intelligence might be.

When scams get pretentious

Pangburn (Pangburnt, am I right?) Philosophy has officially thrown in the towel. Here’s their final statement:

Who is to blame? Not Pangburn! Confirmed speakers decided to back away from their commitment, the lousy no-good bastards.

And then…This two year endeavor has led us to successfully produce what we believe to be some of the most important conversations in human history. Wow. In human history. Pretty impressive for a hodge-podge of racists, edgelords, pompous assholes, and alt-right cheerleaders, say what?

But have no fear.

Effective immediately, the Pangburn Philosophy Corporation will be folding as a result of this cancelled conference.

And there was much rejoicing! But wait. A “Philosophy Corporation”? Have those two words ever been paired before? Maybe this is the end of something unique.

Also, I doubt that all the people who bought overpriced tickets to this shitpile are rejoicing. They’re never going to see that money again. I’m trying hard to feel sympathy for the gullible simpletons who paid money to see Peterson, or Weinstein, or Harris, or any of the deplorables slated as speakers, and failing.

Our CEO Travis Pangburn plans to reanimate Pangburn Philosophy under a new business model, which will focus on Pangburn Documentaries.

Oy. So another Prager U, I’ll guess.

A couple of suggestions. It’s obvious that Travis Pangburn has a bit of an ego, but after your distinctively-named enterprise has just imploded under the weight of debt, leaving your most ardent fans without recompense, and you’re trying to slither away, it’s not smart to keep the name “Pangburn”. Too obvious. You should at least try to slip out from under the PR taint. Find a fresh taint.

You built your ramshackle empire not on your talent, but the appeal of your center-right speakers. I presume you’d like to bring them back under “Pangburn Documentaries”? Then it’s a bad idea to blame them for your failure.

Oh, and speaking of pretentiousness, you have to look at the Pangburn “about” page. It’s mostly a close-up photo of Travis’s handsome, serious face, a paragraph of grade-school “philosophy” about saving the planet with art and science, and an equation. Can I just say how much I despise the attempt to come up with a pseudo-sciencey equation with vague and immeasurable variables and invented relationships between the parameters? It’s a great metaphor for the nonsensical crap they’ve been peddling.

Fruitfulness multiplied by humanism equals peace greater than suffering? What kind of ludicrous bullshit is this? Who gets snowed by that kind of nonsense?