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gemcodeI've been spending a fair bit of time, lately, on the Culture War threads on /r/slatestarcodex. Terrible habit. Don't go there. I mean, if you're interested in hearing an unusually broad spectrum of political viewpoints, it's kind of impressive in a lot of ways (if somewhat right-leaning), but, still, it cannot be denied that "the CW thread", as it's called, is a never-ending temptation to engage in vexatious argumentation. In theory, the thread is not for fighting the culture war, merely for reasoning about it. I try to respect this by disengaging if I have little more to add, or if the conversation is likely to be repetitive and unhelpful. I am not alone in occasionally failing at this endeavour.
Still, there's a lot about the CW thread that fascinates me, and by far the most fascinating thing about it is the principle of charity on which it (theoretically) operates. "Charity", as a rationalist virtue, is the practice of assuming that people mostly mean what they say. They hold the views they say they hold, for the reasons they say they hold them. So, for example, if someone says "I oppose abortion because I think fetuses are fully human and have a right to life," it would be uncharitable to respond to this with "No you don't, you just want to force women to have babies as punishment for having sex."
People certainly do sometimes lie about what they believe and why they believe it. Far more often, however, they genuinely believe they are telling the truth about their views, and uncharitable argumentation just devolves into a never-ending spiral of dodgy psychoanalysis of people's "real" motivations, often treating it as broadly irrelevant whether those people are even aware that those are their real motivations or not.
I never realised, until I was engaging with a community that had rationalist charity as a virtue, how incredibly rare charity has become when dealing with some topics. It's so rare, in fact, that the presumption of charity can be a brilliant and enlightening intellectual exercise even when it is applied too broadly. Sure, sometimes you just end up pretty sure that the person you are talking to is, say, 100% prejudiced in exactly the way they claim they're not. But at other times, I can walk into a conversation thinking "This person is clearly obfuscating their true motivations, but, sure, I'll take them at their word for now," and walk out of it going "Dang, they are far less evil than I thought. Albeit clearly misguided. And they don't pay enough attention to this one really important thing. But I feel a lot better about the world now that I know they don't mean the horrible thing that I was initially pretty sure they were trying to get at."
If I applied the principle of charity more often, I'd probably be better at seeing where it doesn't apply. But I, and many of the people whose writing I read on the internet, have operated largely without such a principle for long enough that I wasn't even aware that I frequently can't predict when people I strongly disagree with are being perfectly sincere. I really like learning about this!
(And, of course, it's much easier to learn this virtue in a community that (a) usually reciprocates, and (b) understands the principle explicitly and can call me out when I fall short).
Still, there's a lot about the CW thread that fascinates me, and by far the most fascinating thing about it is the principle of charity on which it (theoretically) operates. "Charity", as a rationalist virtue, is the practice of assuming that people mostly mean what they say. They hold the views they say they hold, for the reasons they say they hold them. So, for example, if someone says "I oppose abortion because I think fetuses are fully human and have a right to life," it would be uncharitable to respond to this with "No you don't, you just want to force women to have babies as punishment for having sex."
People certainly do sometimes lie about what they believe and why they believe it. Far more often, however, they genuinely believe they are telling the truth about their views, and uncharitable argumentation just devolves into a never-ending spiral of dodgy psychoanalysis of people's "real" motivations, often treating it as broadly irrelevant whether those people are even aware that those are their real motivations or not.
I never realised, until I was engaging with a community that had rationalist charity as a virtue, how incredibly rare charity has become when dealing with some topics. It's so rare, in fact, that the presumption of charity can be a brilliant and enlightening intellectual exercise even when it is applied too broadly. Sure, sometimes you just end up pretty sure that the person you are talking to is, say, 100% prejudiced in exactly the way they claim they're not. But at other times, I can walk into a conversation thinking "This person is clearly obfuscating their true motivations, but, sure, I'll take them at their word for now," and walk out of it going "Dang, they are far less evil than I thought. Albeit clearly misguided. And they don't pay enough attention to this one really important thing. But I feel a lot better about the world now that I know they don't mean the horrible thing that I was initially pretty sure they were trying to get at."
If I applied the principle of charity more often, I'd probably be better at seeing where it doesn't apply. But I, and many of the people whose writing I read on the internet, have operated largely without such a principle for long enough that I wasn't even aware that I frequently can't predict when people I strongly disagree with are being perfectly sincere. I really like learning about this!
(And, of course, it's much easier to learn this virtue in a community that (a) usually reciprocates, and (b) understands the principle explicitly and can call me out when I fall short).