Hacker News Reader

Comment by boona | Hacker News Reader

>we have an arrogant economic royalist lamenting the consequences of women having a political voice ... but equally clear that he has no novel, reasonable justification for disenfranchising women.

Hilarious! This is exactly what I'm talking about! You have no idea how he got to his position, but you've already made up your mind as to how he got there. And to top it off, you go on this big rant that places you above him in terms of virtue because obviously he's "an arrogant economic royalist" and you're not therefore you're better.

It's fine with me if you want to behave that way. All I'm suggesting is that if you want to be intellectually honest, then you need to explore the 'why' of a person's viewpoint, rather than commit the fundamental attribution error and simply make up the 'why'.

View on HN

Your description of "intellectually honest" is actually intellectually dishonest.

In the United States, we generally understand the right to political autonomy, and the right to vote in particular, to come from a citizen's existence as a citizen (which itself is derived from Enlightenment principles of inalienable human rights). There are nearly no philosophical exceptions to this and only a few pragmatic ones (e.g. age of majority).

The question of women's suffrage is by itself a reasonable litmus test of whether someone is politically sensible and, by this measure, Mr. Thiel can be judged insensible.

To judge Mr. Thiel as politically insensible on the basis of his opposition to women's suffrage is by definition intellectual honesty. Given the long history of philosophical, political, and jurisprudential consensus that produced the 19th Amendment, it is in fact intellectually dishonest to entertain the possibility that Mr. Thiel has a novel set of arguments that could justify the disenfranchisement of women as a class.

People are justified in being skeptical of Thiel based on his radical assertion that women's suffrage is a mistake and they are behaving sensibly when they express wariness about other claims he might make based on his established predilection for asserting dangerous claims against the political autonomy of others.

EDIT: grammar, readability.

Shall we discuss hard epistemology? Fine.

> You have no idea how he got to his position

False. I cannot prove how. The objection is pure sophistry. Were I to ask him, "how did you arrive at this position", his answer could be a lie. Would you commit the fundamental attribution error and assume that he would tell the truth? Perhaps he secretly doesn't even believe what he claimed to believe!

I doubt very much that you live your life doubting all things beyond your own thoughts. Trotting out a single fallacy mode and applying it in a scope carefully limited to bolster your argument is a rhetorical method for scoring debate points, not sound logic.

You are attempting to use "intellectual honesty" as a cudgel. Who wouldn't want to be intellectually honest?! Of course, you'll be the judge of when someone has met the criteria for honesty, and that will depend on whether they agree with you or not.

I am under no misunderstanding as to what I can and cannot know. I am completely comfortable with using mental shorthand to navigate the world. I do not need to stop and listen to every individual born-again christian to discover if they are the one that holds the key to my finally knowing the truth.

I do, in fact, have a very good idea as to how Thiel arrived at his position. I have a very good idea about why Strom Thurmond opposed the civil rights act of 1964. I have a very good idea that the sun will rise tomorrow.

> you go on this big rant that places you above him in terms of virtue

Yes, precisely. We all hold values. I find his to be in conflict with mine.

^ And this is why the intellectually honest always lose. Sometimes a troll is just a troll. Sometimes a genius is just self-interested.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com