Scattershot: Ad Hominem, "Human nature", and "Hate hypocrisy" · 5:12am Jul 25th, 2020
Cynewulf said some very good things today, and Heartshine did a great thing on oral vs print culture divides, so I want to cover some very basic things instead.
1: Ad Hominem is not in and of itself a fallacy. That's not what a fallacy is.
Ad Hominem, just latin for 'to the person', just means that you're directly addressing the character of the person you're talking to. Here is when it's a fallacy: "Person said X, I think person is an asshole, ergo X is invalid because Person is an asshole". That's it.
- If someone says: "The sky is purple" and I reply: "It's blue, you moron" - That is ad hominem, but it's not a fallacy. The 'moron' is not the argument.
- If someone says: "The sky is very green today" and I reply: "It's not, you're colourblind" - That is ad hominem, but it's not fallacy. If they are colourblind, it is relevant to their interpretation of the evidence. This also goes for proving someone's a habitual liar, or a pattern of behaviour.
- If someone says: "The sky is blue today" and I reply "You're an asshole" - that is ad hominem, but it's not a fallacy. I'm not refuting an argument or building a case.
Arguments are a social interaction. The fact that someone is presenting information, or a case, does not stop it from being a social context. If someone is insulting you in a social context, it's not because they're intimidated by your amazing brain powers and debate skills, and it's not because they can't refute what you have to say. It just means they hold you in contempt.
Don't start calling for the ref. when that happens, comments sections aren't debate club. Think about what's happening at a social level instead. As Heartshine talks about so wonderfully in her own piece: Some people don't seperate the argument from the person making it, and that's important. They haven't tripped an "I lose" button when they do it, because you don't get to decide how much other people care about your personal character in the context of arguments you make.
The things you're saying are only being said because you're saying them. You aren't seperate from the arguments you're making, and other people are free to address you and not your arguments. Aragon did a great piece on this.
This isn't carte blanche to add insults into your arguments, mind you. Putting insults into the argument you're making escalates it on both sides and opens you up to the same in response. But here's how I've been seeing this happen in the last few weeks:
Person 1: "[Horrible thing]"
Person 2: "You're horrible"
Person 1: "Ah ha. I see. You resort to ad hominem because you can't address the facts. I have remained calm and civil and you're insulting me. How interesting. I am very intelligent."
Yeah, nah.
2: "Human nature" is bullshit.
Here's the rub; Do you expect the same behaviours from the average man as the average woman? The average person from today as 500, 1,000, 5,000, 50,000 years ago? The average person in America today to the average person from Japan 500 years ago to the average person in Rome 2,000 years ago?
The average rich person to the average poor person to the average-
You obviously don't. Different contexts make different people.
So you have two options here: Either "human nature" is so malleable as to be a useless diagnostic and prescriptive tool, or some humans are "more natural" than others - or more capable of 'overcoming' their nature than others - in which case I will have to direct you towards the article on phrenology I was forced to write a while back.
I see 'human nature', I hear the click-clack of calipers.
Game theory, marketplace design and systemic analysis are all valid though. If you do genuinely subscribe to the 'human nature' ideas, I would recommend the following: "Who Gets What and Why" by Alvin E Roth for a great book on how systems influence behaviour, Nick Case for short and brilliant games about game theory, and The Dictators Handbook for a more pop-culturey introduction into why "Evil" isn't human nature - it's different power structures optimizing for different environmental conditions.
Here's the common thread; Human behaviour is largely responsive to the environment it's placed in. Humans have an amazing capacity for creating and shaping their own environments - at creating what feels 'natural' as a result. If you're seeing bad behaviours, it's usually behaviour that has been optimized in the context of its environment.
If you see bad behaviour, don't blame humanity - look at what's making it optimal.
3: Hate's not hypocrisy
Here's a line I've seen three different people tell me three different ways this week, using the same keywords;
"The left claims to stand for compassion, but it's actually full of hate. It's amazingly hypocritical."
This one's layered. Lefty journalist Alexander Cockburn - fantastic name - famously used to ask prospects in job interviews; "How pure is your hate?" - Hate's as much as a tradition as empathy is. "Wholesome Rage" appealed to me as a brand for a reason.
Hate's not mutually exclusive to compassion. If I got a friend, and someone hurts that friend, my hatred for that other person was caused by my compassion for my friend. There's no contradiction there, no hypocrisy. And the left, being broadly a community built around shared weaknesses and vulnerability, is full of a lot of people who get hurt in a lot of ways.
In short; Yeah, "the left" hates a lot of people. There's a lot of stuff worth getting angry about. It's only hypocritical if you only think of the left as an emotional position, devoid of context. Which, unfortunately, a lot of otherwise very smart people seem to.
Next time just tell me I'm prettier when I smile, at least I'll agree with the premise.
But Numbers, you're always pretty.
Really did a number with that smile-
God this really sums up a number or arguments I have had used on me or seen used on others. I gotta keep these things in mind, especially the one about Human Nature.
Insightful as always.
My only issue is in the human nature and what I’m talking about doesn’t actually apply to the kinds of things you’re arguing against.
See, it has been my experience from living in other countries and what I know of history that people are basically people. Someone from fifty thousand years ago will live in a wildly different way from me, but they’ll still dance and tell stories. Kids playing in a South African village look and sound like kids everywhere else. Vikings and romans make both make dumb graffiti. People have friends, they laugh, they fall in love, they die and they worry about it. There’s an enormous amount of common ground we share as humans, regardless of time and place.
Now starting from that there’s staggering variation, what you value and how you live and who your in group is and how you treat your friends and enemies and family. Far too many to go into here. But that’s also just details. The core is more or less the same.
The stuff people are likely to argue with you about, like racism and sexism and shit, that’s details. That’s cultural. But the human nature underlying it isn’t.
Great blog post. This is something people need to realize. People calling TD an idiot isn't an acceptance of his argument—or a refutation. It's a dismissal of his argument being worth addressing at all.
problem is .. if only small % of humans can change their behavior if asked nicely (for changing human development environment! and for this you need quite a lot of time, not year, more like 5 to 15 years, I guess, of quite consistent behavior) - this lead to very ....sad overall picture for many next generations. And I have no idea if such change will survive or not.
Thanks for pointing out 'debates are social interaction' - hopefully it will help ..some. (but because knowing something obviously only lead to different behavior in some cases .... and because we tend to do many interactions per day or month - some negativity can build up, so further interactions nosedive).
Minor thing I wish to append here (due to higher viewcount of this blog vs my own blog):
It seems (for me) we better to present to others somewhat 'lesser' version of what we are, so when other humans discover our real thing (and they will try!) they will have positive kind of surprise, comparing to case when we present overblown image of ourselves, only to crashland later when truth come out in moment of tension! Undervalue yourself, not overvalue ... at least this is my thinking for the morning.
PS: thanks for being even ''just" online activist (braving 4chan and other such places) - I can't do even this :(
Example:
Some excellent counterpoints for common themes I've seen lately. (I do think there are some underlying common tendencies in human behavior and cognition across disparate cultures and eras, but mostly in things like... well, falling back on simple non-explanations like "human nature" for complex phenomena.
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Just quickly; I get the temptation here, but the problem is you're working backwards from "what could reasonably be called 'human nature'" which isn't what I'm talking about. I agree with very broad statements like; "It is human nature to want personal expression". How often is that how you see it used, though?
What I'm against is how it's used as a bludgeon: "Socialism sounds great in theory, but it's just not in human nature" being the ur example, but it's also 90% of any conversation with the word 'tribalism' in it, anyone who takes Jonathan Chait seriously, and anyone who tries to draw any sociological conclusion from evopsych.
As an aside; evopsych can be good - it's just that most people use evopsych how eugenicists use Darwinism
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Ah, I didn't grasp the context there and was working off of the wrong definition as a result. Thanks for the clarification.
Yeah, I had a lot of people throwing that my way too, for reasons I'm sure you can guess. The problem is that once somebody forms their belief set, getting them to change it is next to impossible. So far, the best solution I've come up with is to get all these supremacy groups their own colonies on Mars or somesuch. It's win-win: they get to have millions of miles of hard vacuum between them and the nearest person of of a different race, religion, or whatnot they don't like, and the rest of us get to live in peace.
Haha the final note on that Wholesome Rage article has aged super well over the last few months.
I mostly agree with the points you're making here, but I primarily wanted to comment that your "phrenology" article (which I just read for the first time) is excellent. People who argue for scientific racism nearly always ignore the potential influence of outside social factors because it substantially weakens the argument.
I wonder if TD has read what you wrote there. Unrelated, it's vexing to write a bunch of words and know that people who want them to be wrong will go sifting carefully through them just to find the ones that are easiest to rebut by selective example, and ignore the implications of the rest.
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That was actually more or less my point, except that was already my definition of human nature (not working backwards) and I think people mistake nature for culture all the time. So we’re pretty much on the same page.
But it’s useful, when arguing on that topic, to be able to say someone is mistaking culture for human nature rather than trying to refute the idea itself. One argument is much less fundamental to how they see the world than the other.
I agree, Cynewulf's blog is actually pretty nice.
Thanks for linking that!
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A good sentiment, but at this point in time we might want to claim the Mars colony ourselves and leave Earth to shed itself of the idiots over the next decades.