Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Effective communication is an effortful but splendid thing

This is kind of an intriguing case study in communication and rationality. Kicking off the case is this tweet from Emma Hart.


Glanced at, it seems at the surface to be a plausible hypothesis. Not just plausible but a reasonable assertion. It would be easy to mentally nod the head and pass on to the next tweet, link, article in search of more interesting information - things that are substantive, true and consequential. But Hart gets pushback to her plausible assertion.


Pluckrose also seems, on the surface, to have a plausible hypothesis. Not just plausible but a reasonable assertion.

It's on. A dialectical discourse. These seemingly correct but contradictory assertions call for resolution primarily because they both seem true and yet cannot both be true. Or can they?

When you actually engage with Hart's proposition, you immediately see an issue that was easily overlooked. The tweet is cast in the identity language of the left: Gender, Class, Race, Orientation. Seen from that perspective, you can immediately see this as simply a tweet, not to explore insight and truth, but as an exercise in advancing an ideology.

This brings home how necessary is context towards understanding communication. Where is the person coming from? What are they trying to say? What are the priors they carry that underpin the logic of their argument? What are their motives? These are useful things to know if you want to attack their argument, either rhetorically or logically. But they are also useful things to know in order to understand exactly what is the argument they are making in the first place. In this instance Emma Hart describes herself as:
Slutty boozy tattooed kinky liberal freelancer. Suburban cooking gardening solo mother. Author of The Isis Knot. Owner of the worst cat in the world.
And apparently, The Isis Knot is not a published book. It is a story she has written which is online but not formally published.

Nothing in that self-description which is necessary to know but it is suggestive to some degree about how she sees herself and sees the world.

Now to her argument.
I have this theory that cycling is as close as a middle-class straight white guy can get to understanding Being Female. People have a reckless disregard for your safety, you have to treat everyone like they might hurt you, and if you do get hurt people will blame you for existing
Recast it into a proposition form in order to make the priors more explicit.
Women are always in constant danger from everyone else and will be blamed by everyone else if they suffer injury at the hands of men. The only time men experience a similar level of danger and fear is when they are bicycling. Bicyclists are in constant danger from all drivers and if they are injured, they will be blamed.
Hart's Version One seems entirely plausible as an insight. Version Two, with the priors made explicit, seems reasonably insane on empirical grounds. She assumes all women are always in constant terror, mostly from the actions of men. Does that sound plausible? Is that what most women feel?

Men suffer disproportionately greater, indeed multiples greater, than women from murder, aggravated assault, workplace accidental death, workplace injury, general morbidity, suicide, drug overdose deaths, etc. This is what Pluckrose is getting at with
I'm so much more likely to have my safety considered than men are & much less likely to get hurt or blamed for being hurt.
Indeed, men live lives at far greater risk than women. Pluckrose also alludes ("have my safety considered") to the mainstream cultural default position in the anglophone that the Birkenhead Drill is the operative response when women are in danger. Not always honored in action but usually aspired to.

Hart's apparently reasonable and plausible hypothesis suddenly becomes a revealing assertion without any support. Her argument is null despite seeming imminently sensible.

The case illustrates the importance of competition and free speech and careful attention to the details and context of how we communicate. It would be so easy to accept Hart's ideological proposition as obviously true if not for the pushback from empirical rationalists.

Caroline McCarthy's response to Hart is interesting and suggests a rich insight that is not developed.


Separate from empirical evidence there is the clash of worldviews. Hart sees women as victims of a violent and oppressive patriarchy (it seems reasonable to infer) whereas McCarthy takes the Classical Liberal position that might be characterized as:
I am an individual who might be constrained, but is not defined, by the realities of the world. I will not live in fear but in confidence in myself.
I agree. Hart's ideology casts her into a state of victimhood which is not a healthy position. But the interesting, and unexplored, insight is that all individuals have different risk profiles, regardless of how they internalize those risks. Rather than looking to victimhood, which focuses on creating guilt as a means of obtaining power, perhaps the more productive approach is looking at risk profiles as a means of lowering those risks. I suspect that consideration of risk profiles would cast a dramatically different light on how politics and policies are seen.

I come back to the original point. What this exchange between Hart, Pluckrose and MacCarthy highlights is:
How easy it is to be deceived by plausible propositions when not investing the effort to understand the priors and the evidence.

How necessary it is to have free speech and competition in order to not allow ourselves to be deceived.

How critical it is to confront the ideology of victimhood with the confidence of individual rights and responsibilities.
Thank you to Pluckrose and McCarthy for counterbalancing Hart's misdirection with revealing pushback.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)