I likewise mostly agreed with+ appreciated the post, while also agreeing with Ozzieâs caveat/âpushback.
One additional counterpoint to this post that Iâd add is âBut engagingness is a symmetric weapon!â (I donât think that means we should avoid engagingness, but it feels worth noting.) To explain via a long Slate Star Codex quote:
Logical debate has one advantage over narrative, rhetoric, and violence: itâs an asymmetric weapon. That is, itâs a weapon which is stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys. In ideal conditions (which may or may not ever happen in real life) â the kind of conditions where everyone is charitable and intelligent and wise â the good guys will be able to present stronger evidence, cite more experts, and invoke more compelling moral principles. The whole point of logic is that, when done right, it can only prove things that are true.
Violence is a symmetric weapon; the bad guysâ punches hit just as hard as the good guysâ do. Itâs true that hopefully the good guys will be more popular than the bad guys, and so able to gather more soldiers. But this doesnât mean violence itself is asymmetric â the good guys will only be more popular than the bad guys insofar as their ideas have previously spread through some means other than violence. Right now antifascists outnumber fascists and so could probably beat them in a fight, but antifascists didnât come to outnumber fascists by winning some kind of primordial fistfight between the two sides. They came to outnumber fascists because people rejected fascism on the merits. These merits might not have been âlogicalâ in the sense of Aristotle dispassionately proving lemmas at a chalkboard, but âfascists kill people, killing people is wrong, therefore fascism is wrongâ is a sort of folk logical conclusion which is both correct and compelling. Even âa fascist killed my brother, so fuck themâ is a placeholder for a powerful philosophical argument making a probabilistic generalization from indexical evidence to global utility. So insofar as violence is asymmetric, itâs because it parasitizes on logic which allows the good guys to be more convincing and so field a bigger army. Violence itself doesnât enhance that asymmetry; if anything, it decreases it by giving an advantage to whoever is more ruthless and power-hungry.
The same is true of documentaries. As I said before, Harford can produce as many anti-Trump documentaries as he wants, but Trump can fund documentaries of his own. He has the best documentaries. Nobody has ever seen documentaries like this. Theyâll be absolutely huge.
And the same is true of rhetoric. Martin Luther King was able to make persuasive emotional appeals for good things. But Hitler was able to make persuasive emotional appeals for bad things. Iâve previously argued that Mohammed counts as the most successful persuader of all time. These three people pushed three very different ideologies, and rhetoric worked for them all. Robinson writes as if âuse rhetoric and emotional appealsâ is a novel idea for Democrats, but it seems to me like they were doing little else throughout the election (pieces attacking Trumpâs character, pieces talking about how inspirational Hillary was, pieces appealing to various American principles like equality, et cetera). Itâs just that they did a bad job, and Trump did a better one. The real takeaway here is âdo rhetoric better than the other guyâ. But âsucceedâ is not a primitive action.
Unless you use asymmetric weapons, the best you can hope for is to win by coincidence.
That is, thereâs no reason to think that good guys are consistently better at rhetoric than bad guys. Some days the Left will have an Obama and win the rhetoric war. Other days the Right will have a Reagan and theyâll win the rhetoric war. Overall you should average out to a 50% success rate. When you win, itâll be because you got lucky.
And thereâs no reason to think that good guys are consistently better at documentaries than bad guys. Some days the NIH will spin a compelling narrative and people will smoke less. Other days the tobacco companies will spin a compelling narrative and people will smoke more. Overall smoking will stay the same. And again, if you win, itâs because you lucked out into having better videographers or something.
Iâm not against winning by coincidence. If I stumbled across Stalin and I happened to have a gun, I would shoot him without worrying about how itâs âonly by coincidenceâ that he didnât have the gun instead of me. You should use your symmetric weapons if for no reason other than that the other sideâs going to use theirs and so youâll have a disadvantage if you donât. But you shouldnât confuse it with a long-term solution.
Improving the quality of debate, shifting peopleâs mindsets from transmission to collaborative truth-seeking, is a painful process. It has to be done one person at a time, it only works on people who are already almost ready for it, and you will pick up far fewer warm bodies per hour of work than with any of the other methods. But in an otherwise-random world, even a little purposeful action can make a difference. Convincing 2% of people would have flipped three of the last four US presidential elections. And this is a capacity to win-for-reasons-other-than-coincidence that you canât build any other way.
(and my hope is that the people most willing to engage in debate, and the ones most likely to recognize truth when they see it, are disproportionately influential â scientists, writers, and community leaders who have influence beyond their number and can help others see reason in turn)
I worry that Iâm not communicating how beautiful and inevitable all of this is. Weâre surrounded by a a vast confusion, âa darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by nightâ, with one side or another making a temporary advance and then falling back in turn. And in the middle of all of it, thereâs this gradual capacity-building going on, where what starts off as a hopelessly weak signal gradually builds up strength, until one army starts winning a little more often than chance, then a lot more often, and finally takes the field entirely. Which seems strange, because surely you canât build any complex signal-detection machinery in the middle of all the chaos, surely youâd be shot the moment you left the trenches, but â your enemies are helping you do it. Both sides are diverting their artillery from the relevant areas, pooling their resources, helping bring supplies to the engineers, because until the very end they think itâs going to ensure their final victory and not yours.
Youâre doing it right under their noses. They might try to ban your documentaries, heckle your speeches, fight your violence Middlebury-student-for-Middlebury-student â but when it comes to the long-term solution to ensure your complete victory, theyâll roll down their sleeves, get out their hammers, and build it alongside you.
A parable: Sally is a psychiatrist. Her patient has a strange delusion: that Sally is the patient and he is the psychiatrist. She would like to commit him and force medication on him, but he is an important politician and if push comes to shove he might be able to commit her instead. In desperation, she proposes a bargain: they will both take a certain medication. He agrees; from within his delusion, itâs the best way for him-the-psychiatrist to cure her-the-patient. The two take their pills at the same time. The medication works, and the patient makes a full recovery.
(well, half the time. The other half, the medication works and Sally makes a full recovery.)
I likewise mostly agreed with+ appreciated the post, while also agreeing with Ozzieâs caveat/âpushback.
One additional counterpoint to this post that Iâd add is âBut engagingness is a symmetric weapon!â (I donât think that means we should avoid engagingness, but it feels worth noting.) To explain via a long Slate Star Codex quote: