Decoupling as a moral decision
atis.substack.com
atis.substack.com
It is not an intellectual or rhetorical shortcoming to then answer with "No, I agree neither with your premise nor with your conclusion."
On the other hand, if you do D-Decouple and agree, then the mugger will either proceed to rob you immediately, or if an audience is present, they will first read aloud a well-prepared statement that 'proves' how you indeed don't have any right to your possessions - before inevitably proceeding to rob you. Not robbing you was never in the cards, they just made it seem that way by phrasing the question to provide an illusion of openness to discussion.
People who accept D-Decoupling during a debate get steamrolled by bad-faith counterparts, and the audience on average will never remember that there was an "if" hypothetical in front of the question to begin with.
In practice, the "If we accept X, then we must do Y" maneuver is seldom performed in good faith. It's merely a vehicle to move on to the Y part without concerning yourself with X, and it's mostly performed for the benefit of an audience who will only remember the Y part, or those who already agree with X. A side effect is also the gradual normalization of X through repetition.
People who already agree with the premise will see nothing wrong with this, and that's not necessarily unethical. It only becomes unethical if the proposition has negative consequences and the "hypothetical" becomes a deniable position that allows the speaker to retreat behind if challenged.
In other words, I do think the implications of the hypothetical part matter. Not all "If we accept X, then Y" have X's or Y's worthy of consideration. I would also argue that it's probably valid to look at the Y part in isolation. If Y is unethical or nonsensical, I believe there is no intellectual duty to consider any part of the argument.
In the example given in the article, the question of IQ heritability can be "safely" abstracted into a population study question without referencing specific groups or populations. Of course, a serious biologist would use higher-resolution concepts like "breeding population" with defensible boundaries.
It seems disingenuous (or maybe naive?)to expect discussions about American racial groupings to remain neutral and freely "de-couplable".
It's like honestly expecting people to adhere to "is !== ought". There is a political implication to any conclusions derived about race, as it is mostly a sociological concept. Discussing it is especially difficult because the people who discuss racial differences (as opposed to other groupings like: family, class, height, religion, etc...) generally employ it in a political context (eugenics, affirmative action, etc...)
If one were to challenge this statement, it would be a good example of the challenges involved in choosing when to discourse-decouple.
It's just covarience with genes -- this might seem like it means "X is genetic" -- but it *doesnt*. Consider accents (eg., the scottish accent) this is highly heritable: typically only people with the genetic profiles of those localised to scotland have it.
Consider using heritability to determine genetic vs. envrionmental causation (largely: you just cant use it to do this). Eg., even in the case of height: it would seem that the genes of people in poor-nutrition countries were the cause of their low height.
The movement from "heritability" to "genetic causation" *asssumes* (and always, by assertion *assume*) that the trait studied is already genetically caused. IF we know this, THEN hertiability is a somewhat reliable measure of "to what degree".
But in almost all cases we have no grounds whatsoever to independently assume this. Rending most heritability studies basically useless.
A quick aside:
I'm curious why it's gene vs environment (either/or), and not gene + environment (emergent)? If the latter, then I'd think heritability would necessarily factor both genes and environment -- as genes don't express in a vacuum.
For example, the heritability of "general skin cancer risk" is both genetic (melanin) and environmental (latitude, sun irradiance...). Due to differences in UV exposure, the genetic influence is probably greater at lower latitudes than higher.
The answer to this is not so obvious to me. What if Anne is divorced or or widowed? Unmarried can mean "not married," but it also could mean "never married," as in the following example:
> Crude incidence rates of stroke (per 1000 per year) among the four marital status categories were as follows: 1.96 (married), 1.52 (unmarried), 2.36 (divorced), and 5.43 (widowed). Compared to married persons, adjusted risk of stroke was significantly increased for divorced (RR 1.23; CI 1.19-1.27) and unmarried men (RR 1.07; CI 1.03-1.11) but not for widowed men (RR 1.02; CI 0.98-1.06); risk was slightly increased for divorced women (RR 1.10; CI 1.06-1.15) while not for widowed (RR 1.0; CI 0.97-1.03) and unmarried women (RR 0.97; CI 0.97-1.03).
Ie., in ordinary conversation when one says, roughly, "heres some information, what do you think?" one doesnt expect the question itself to be a puzzle -- ie., that the answer is in some formal sense about the information as information.
I think likewise, in ordinary conversation, "shall we just kill all the ants?" means kill all the ants. It is a very unusual (academic) conversation in which the question is read as a sort of "ethical puzzle".
If you just told people in both cases, "this question is a puzzle" -- then I imagine it would trigger the decoupling mechanism more reliably.
Logically the question can be cut down to:
Given an alphabet {A, B} is there an symbol x such that for the string "AxB" an A is not followed by a B.
In this case, it's not a trick question per se, but it certainly does something to trick the mind into not enumerating the possibilities. It would be interesting to see how the majority of programmers respond to it, as compared to say the majority of mathematicians. I suspect the question tricks people into abstracting too early: 'one variable in this system is undefined, hence I can't say!'
It's in the same bag of tricks as screaming to stop someone from being heard, sticking your fingers in your ears, bluntly changing the subject over and over, Gish galloping, or disconnecting someone's microphone.
Obviously a choice to do any of these things is a moral decision. It is a moral decision to try to prevent discourse from happening; prevent people from thinking things through because you think they might end up at a conclusion you dislike.
Often it's a way to prevent yourself from thinking things through.
Generally I think that if you're choosing to block the discussion in order to win it, you're no longer participating in good faith and should be censured and then ignored because of it. We have a moral imperative to discuss ideas in good faith, not play thought-blocking power tactics.
The decoupler says “put aside your objections to my proposal for a moment so that you can better understand it; then later you can reflect on these objections with a fuller understanding.”
And the person blocking the decoupling says “no, the objections are valid and therefore should be kept firmly in mind whenever you are considering anything to do with the proposal.”
Both approaches are trying to achieve something in terms of discourse. I don’t believe it’s possible to say that one approach is more fair or valid or better in all circumstances.
"Rhetor" means teacher. A rhetorical device is a way to explain, communicate, teach.
Blocking this was is an attempt to prevent explanation, communication, and learning. That isn't a rhetorical device - it's an anti-rhetorical device.
Perhaps better called an argumentative tactic.
A good discussion is one where ideas are most fully-examined, questioned, and understood from the maximum number of angles. If the goal is to have a good discussion, you must encourage and support devices that increase understanding.
If the goal is simply to win for a specific agenda, you don't care about having a good discussion, and you should use whatever argumentative/blocking/interruption tactics you can.
Ultimately it's a question of whether you value finding truth and mutual understanding, or the dominance of your pre-existing beliefs.
There's an old adage that tells us that what is discussed frequently seems more acceptable. I think there's a fear that if we start discussing how an IQ difference between races WOULD looks like, the notion might start feeling more "right".
It’s not a given that the opponent attempting to use decoupling is operating in good faith.
There are an infinity of things we could assume for the sake of argument and the act of choosing and assuming a particular one of those options is often not a purely academic one, especially when done in public.
Do non-stupid people have some alternative forum to have sophisticated discussions with each other? If so, you’ve replaced an open society of free expression with a society with a gatekeeping intellectual elite that does everything behind closed doors. And if not, you’ve literally imposed an artificial cognitive handicap on your whole society.
It's more like "don't let people get away with appeals to emotion and other fallacies, just because they disguise them as sophisticated arguments - call them out".
This is true in all kinds of debates, but it's particularly important in broad political debates. The appropriate level of charity to give the person you're debating with depends on the context and just how much good faith it's reasonable to assume.
As to 'alterative fora', I don't think that's quite as bad as your comment seems to suggest. An academic paper is an 'alternative forum' to a time-constrained panel discussion on a TV show, but acknowledging that the kinds of arguments that are appropriate in one might not be appropriate in the other, is not "replacing an open society of free expression with a society with a gatekeeping intellectual elite that does everything behind closed doors".
That’s much better stated than my response. Don’t let them abuse the platform they’re being granted.
And if I were to set up a gatekeeping intellectual elite that does everything behind closed doors, I would create a system where academic papers could easily be accessed within university networks but would otherwise cost some exorbitant amount of money to read. It turns out that this is approximately how academic publishing works, and I genuinely think this is an accident created by economic incentives, but it does somewhat undermine the point here.
I think you raise some different and interesting questions about engaging with suspicious or bad faith interlocutors, but I’m not actually sure that this tactic works in that case. Usually the point of adopting an assumption you disagree with “for the sake of argument” is to demonstrate that the assumption is actually irrelevant to the point that you’re trying to make. For instance, consider the following argument (which is intentionally ridiculous but nonetheless morally objectionable):
1. People who ate grilled cheese sandwiches on January 20, 2022 should be sentenced to death.
2. Phil ate a grilled cheese sandwich on January 20, 2022.
3. Phil should be sentenced to death.
In this case, point 1 is a moral principle (an evil one but it is intended as a moral judgment), while point 2 is a claim of fact. Unfortunately, my interlocutor is not willing to cede ground on point 2, and I don’t have the evidence to prove a negative. What’s the more productive line of argument? Refusing to even consider the possibility that I ate a grilled cheese sandwich, or saying, “even if I ate the sandwich, that doesn’t justify the death penalty”?
In other words, the entire point of this sort of moral decoupling is usually to defuse the troubling implications that you’re worried about in the first place.
Now, maybe there are stupid people in the audience who will get confused, misunderstand my argument as an admission that I ate the sandwich, and come away even more convinced that I should be put to death. But at that point, in my opinion, we have already moved away from intellectually honest discourse and towards manipulation and propaganda, which sort of lands us at the same place that we started.
If I were involved in a public debate for some reason and someone asked me, “suppose that blacks ares naturally inferior to whites…”, I would likely also decline the “discourse decoupling”. It’s hard to see how that conversation is going to go anywhere useful and it feels very much like granting a platform for a white supremacist to speak to white supremacy supporters.
I think the situation would be much better if the worst thing that happened is that people simply declined to have the conversation. But things often escalate beyond that.