Hmm. Another very interesting article by Scott Alexander. Ironically, I've found myself in both positions, usually whichever is the opposite of whoever I'm arguing with. :P
@kai Neh, more that things usually go "I think <this> and <that>!" "I disagree with <that>!" "Excellent! Let us focus all our efforts on disagreeing about <that> instead of agreeing about <this>!" "Yes! Excellent!"
@Angle I liked that article, though I'm pretty definitely (as is pretty obvious to anyone who knows me) on the disagreement side.
It's very difficult for me to take the 'conflict' side even remotely seriously as a /thing people actually believe/ instead of as…some weird disorder of indigestion that manifests as a form of temporary insanity.
@Azure I think its actually a pretty accurate way to view many things? I mean, politics often does come down to groups with different goals trying to have their way. Sure, you can argue that in the end everyone just wants to be happy and they only disagree on implementation, but when that implementation happens to include things like slavery, conflict theory is generally a bett3r way of viewing things. :/
@Angle NOW and again. I think it's more the exception than the rule. And even where it seems to fit, I suspect a lot of people tend to /pursue/ a conflicting goal out of misunderstanding. Or would like something else just as much, or at least as a pretty close second.
@Angle To be fair, I guess when I think of 'mistake' I include a lot of things that aren't entirely /mistakes/ of knowledge. Like being overwrought, inertia, fear. A lot of what might be thought of as /real/ conflicts I think of at least partly as some people being overwrought and cranky and not stopping to think about how other things might be more in their interest or rejecting the idea out of tribalism.
@Azure Mmm, I'm willing to count that as a mistake - as long as it seems reasonable that they might be convinced by mistake theory methods. After that, it's time to fall back to conflict theory. :/
@Azure Eh, I'd argue it's more common than that. Most of the culture wars are conflict based, for example. You can argue that everyone has the well being of society at heart, but in practice that still works out to conflict. Same with many economic or other details - we've had more than enough evidence for climate change. It's a conflict now, not a mistake. All it all, I'd say politics come down to 65% conflict and only 35% mistake. :/
@Angle CULTURE WARS are interesting. Climate, well, I'm not sure. I think there's certainly a conflict-based portion. People who /really/ want profit in the immediate term, but that seems to me like it can only include the richest folks. I'm not sure how to model the average person in the street who opposes global warming regulation. I can imagine it as being some combination of basic ignorance about how science works, the general human difficulty in considering that the future exists…
@Azure It comes down to tribalism, in large part. But of course, sufficiently entrenched tribalism makes is effectively conflict.:/
@Angle @Azure
They are sociological lenses.
I mean this is basically the post-modernist railing against meta-narratives when you boil it down. We're going to try to organize things into these sort of ideologies but in the end we're just looking at text. We need to be aware of our lens and the limits of it because we have no method to see beyond them and engage with the 'objective' truths that underlay the interpretation.
@Irick @Angle SO! We can argue that they're sociological models, but the question still comes down to /which/ model more accurately models objective truth, or at least which makes better predictions about how people behave. (I am a bit of a post-modernism skeptic, at least when it comes to various 'strong' forms, though I wonder how much of that is not being able to see which parts of 'post modernism' have been effectively incorporated into modernism.)
@Azure @Angle
They each model a truth. There isn't 'objective truth', or if it exists we can't directly engage with it. The question is which tool is better for the task at hand. This question reveals the complexity of the analysis, because some of those tasks can be rhetorical or, as the author points out, meta-referential. This is similar to the concept of language games if not a direct analogue.
@Irick @Angle That kind of thing is one of the reasons I'm not really much of a postmodernist. I can accept that one model may not actually do a very good job of describing the motivations of the people involved /and yet/ be useful in that people who believe it will act in certain ways.
But when people ask 'Who benefits from you believing X?' or 'What is the most useful when trying to accomplish task Y?' both questions seem to rely on there being an actual truth and what it is.
@Azure @Angle
Well, consider the meaning of 'gender equality'. It's a loaded term and your view on it is going to entirely stem from how you are thinking about it at the time. In some linguistic circles it is going to encompass the women's movement. In others it's going to be representative of defanging feminism as a movement. In others it's going to represent the surveillance state. The process of clarifying between any two of those communities is going to produce an entirely new meaning.
@Angle @Azure
because the discussion can not take place outside of the contextual meaning, each one of the viewpoints is going to remain 'true' in the prior context but the consensus will shift to a new one. It's not simply a matter of limited to more global domain, so the idea of progress there is probably not a useful one. It's just changing meaning. The consensus will not necessarily shift toward the point of view that best models reality, because it's not just a modeling tool.
@Irick @Angle You are an excellent mousecat by the way, and I would like to point out that my agreeing or disagreeing with you on any particular point does not diminish my estimation of your excellence.
That said this seems…not wrong? But incomplete to me. There seems to be a missing middle somewhere between my agreement with you that terms can vary on social context and needing to hammer them down so you're talking about similar things, and how well those things describe reality?
@Azure @Angle
Which reality? There is a reality wherein we are all fluctuations in fundamental force fields. There is a reality were we are all particles in space. They are equally true sometimes and we can't really see beneath them.
Similarly there are multiple social realities. Language is a very general tool. Hammering out what you are talking about is a good idea, but then you'd have to globally enforce the resultant cultural context and assumptions for the findings to to be generalizable.
@Irick @Angle Actually, there's something I want to ask you on this subject. One of the worries I've had with this kind of thing is that when people disallow appeals to reality and truth and instead think in terms of power and advantage and arbitrary language, it seems /likely/ that this makes conflict resolution more difficult. People who disagree with you are choosing different power arrangements and goals. And I've noticed this tends to be a thing that happens, where people who seem more…
@Angle @Irick …postmodernish seem more likely to decide that the people they disagree with are Bad and must be yelled at/fought/shut down/declared war on.
You, on the other hand, seem very willing to try to find common ground and understand people and value lots of diverse points of view and generally seem to have very good discourse norms.
What is the piece that I'm misunderstanding, or, another way, how do you think about your views of postmodernism that leads to your practice of discourse?
@Azure @Angle
I find the critique of meta-narratives that Derrida laid out a valuable check to my tendency to systematize. I saw habermas's criticism of the extreme relativism that some of those theories could support and ended up accepting his proposal that consensus is probably the best moral basis. Foucault's analysis of mental health showed me the injustice in attempting to objectify human relations. I really, really like Philip K. Dick :3
@Irick @Angle I really like Philip Dick. I have not read either Derrida and I have read enough ABOUT Habermas to have an idea that I have /some/ similarities with him. I tend to think the Enlightenment just needs a tune-up to be a better Enlightenment.
I really dislike Foucault quite an awful lot, to be honest. I'm sympathetic to the idea of people critiquing 1950s psychiatry on standards of effectiveness and humaneness, but Foucault didn't /do/ that.
@Azure @Irick @Angle
Lumping Foucault in with anti-psychiatry is fairly reductive. His work is very important in terms of analyzing institutional soft power in general, and while he used medicine (and psychiatry in particular) as a source for specific illustrations, we generally use foucaldian terms and ideas when talking about other areas of life.
Like, more than half the discourse about mastodon vs fediverse vs twitter is firmly grounded in popularizations of Foucault's ideas b/c applicable.
@Azure @Irick @Angle
For instance, call-out culture can't really be critiqued without adopting Foucauldian techniques and assumptions. (Our playbook for looking at that is Discipline and Punish.)
It's one of those things that was groundbreaking when Foucault introduced it but is so useful that it's become part of 'common sense' and disconnected from his name.
@enkiv2 @Irick @Angle WELL. As part of the goal of trying to understand the appeal of this sor of thing more, I'll write down as much of why I think call-out culture is bad as I can read a bit on it then re-read Discipline and Punish and see how much of what seems like common sense to me is there. It seems more concrete goal that would focus my attention to find points of value than "Here is a book people like a lot."
@Angle @Irick @enkiv2 Which I haven't really tried before. There's the general "This makes no sense to me and I don't see why anyone would like it" heuristic I try to follow, but simply reading it assuming there's something to like in it doesn't always work, so having a concrete framework to guide inspection would probably improve matters a great deal.
@Angle @Irick @enkiv2 Also, sorry for belaboring this, but I did also realize why I like Nietzsche more than most of the other continentals. It's /not/ simply because I think 'Yay!' is a more appropriate response to a lack of meaning than '*snffle*'.
But because he seemed to be /very/ obvious and honest about how he was making stuff up and putting it /into/ the world.
Whereas many of the later continentals seemed, to me, to be making stuff up but claiming to FIND IT in the world.
@Azure @Angle @Irick
re: lack of meaning -- I think this is where I diverge with Roderick's take.
For the mid-century french existentialists this was maybe a burden. (Not a tragedy, but a responsibility.) By Derrida and Deluze and such, it's hard to imagine that they were shocked by this lack of inherent meaning, and indeed it's hard to imagine anybody living in the latter half of the 20th century in the industrialized west & in atheistic academia who *ever* believed life had meaning.
@enkiv2 @Angle @Irick That at least sums up my feelings about Marx. (WELL, I guess it depends on how systematic you think Adam Smith was…) But I'm perfectly willing to give Marx his due as having made a perceptive analysis of capitalism even if I don't agree with his recommendations/predicted future history.
@Azure @Angle
He questioned the construction of madness as a historical institution. It's a different goal that only happens to brush on the 1950s practices. It's generalizable to basically the power of institutional gatekeepers, and it's probably most useful when considered as a commentary on the unilaterality and power of social norms.
@Angle a devil's advocate