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“But I Worked in News Media and Studied Politics!”
Just watched the new Crowder Change My Mind installment. I love these videos and I highly recommend watching all of them. They can be infuriating but they can also be instructive. But I’m not posting this to be an unpaid promoter. Watching the most recent video, Trump Is Not Racist: Change My Mind,
I was struck by something one of the conversants said. She was incredulous that Crowder didn’t believe her and was providing a different version or interpretation of what the facts were.
“I worked in news media. I studied politics.”
She used these phrases like a talisman to ward off the distasteful hateful conservative (or liberal, heh) and his lying hateful views. I’m sure most of us have intuited the importance that leftists put on these institutions of media and academia. Well, their importance now that they have been dominated by leftism, anyway. This was striking to me because it was so explicit. I worked in the media and so what I believe to be true actually is true. I studied politics from some school and so what I believe to be true actually is true. Conversely, whatever you believe must be untrue. You must be a liar or hater.
This woman eventually came back around to some kind of reasonable discussion, but only to eventually totally write off Crowder’s view of free speech as inferior “liberalism”. She did so in a reasonable tone for the discussion, but I’m stunned that she actually dismissed the concept of free speech so blithely. She didn’t strike me as either dumb or evil – so what gives? Has she merely been effectively propagandized? Is she a useful idiot? Has she really not been exposed to real conservative (liberal, heh) ideas and arguments even after having studied politics and having worked in news media? At some point doesn’t history, especially her German history, shout out self-evident truths in opposition to her default leftism? Maybe more importantly – is it better to try to convert people like this, or are we better off exposing them?
Published in General
Appeals to authority are common on the left. I just had a slight skirmish with a leftist lawyer who advised me to learn physics to understand how bad coal is. I never knew Physics was required for law school. It is for Engineering and medical school. Thank God I attended college and medical school over 50 years ago. Even Purdue now has a school of “Engineering Education” staffed by the sort of people to be found in”Studies” departments.
If he understood “Physics”(and it’s sub science Chemistry) he would know that ~30% of our industrial base use of coal is for steel, concrete, and fertilizer, none of which can be replaced with “Solar or Wind” power (or even Nat Gas, or Nuclear). So if he willing to live without the foundational materials that make up our cushy materialist livelihood, perhaps he should try living in one of those a pre industrial societies in Africa or central Asia.
He can take his “lawyer-ing” skills and ruin their societies before they can join the circle of first world civilizations.
Free speech is hard. No one on the left wants anything to be hard.
And the proliferation of “credentialing” is part of that appeal to authority. If I have the right credentials, you have to accept what I say, or at least believe me more than you believe the other guy. “I went to Yale; he only went to Podunk State.”
Responding to sentences like hers or like the example you cite, which appear to be, or could be taken as, appeals to authority, is tricky.
If you are attempting to persuade a proponent of a leftist position, it’s sometimes best not to counter. If the person is (or seems to be) appealing to his own authority, it’s even more reason to let it slide. Acknowledge the other party’s accomplishments and value as an expert witness, and then try to get him or her to re-focus on the question itself (facts and logic), ignoring the authority question.
In attempting to persuade others to come over to our side, we must acknowledge their credentials, and then show them by facts and logic why their positions, though backed by credentials, are incorrect.
It might be history, especially her German history, which is causing this impasse in communication.
Is she a native of Germany? Because the German constitution does protect something called free speech, but its idea of free speech is different from ours, much more limited, so that speech which would be legal in America, such as Holocaust denial and “Volksverhetzung” (a category much broader than our very narrow idea of “incitement”), is outlawed.
If a German told an American, “Your idea of free speech is inferior,” that may not be correct, but it would be understandable considering what the German idea of free speech is.
Even someone who wasn’t well-acquainted with Germany itself, but whose ancestors emigrated from Germany during or after Hitler’s rise to power, might be understandably uncomfortable with some of the jargon popular on the right these days. (Someone who quite naturally finds the example of “nationalism” most salient to their own identity Hitler’s vicious ethno-nationalism can’t be expected to turn off their discomfort with nationalist rhetoric just because someone says, “Trust us, we don’t mean it that way.” People usually take more convincing than that.)
Or maybe we’re better off first listening to our interlocutors?
Agreed. Leftists are people too, and there’s no need to glibly disregard their experience and efforts. That would needlessly antagonize. Instead, we should subtly disregard their experience and efforts like Crowder eventually did by wielding facts and logic.
That is exactly Crowder’s project.
But really, my question assumes this as the first step. How else do we know what they already think?
You can go for that, but know what mindset you are up against:
No. It was clear that they were talking about the concept of having a line, who gets to decide where the line is, and who enforces and how. Regardless of the labels or the words in either constitution.
You’re muddying things here.
First, being uncomfortable with jargon is quite different from expecting government to punish jargon you don’t like.
Second, BS. You’re smearing “the right” as being somehow similar to the nazis in speech and aim. BS.
Yep. The Golden Rule helps here. When thinking of how to respond to an argument, ‘in the absence of expertise of your own, you must give at least some weight to my credentials,’ consider how you would react if the roles were reversed.
The above covers the case of the opponent’s appeals to his own credentials. But the Golden Rule applies to the other case, too. Where the advocate of a left-wing position says, ‘in the absence of expertise of your own and my own…’
How? By simply observing that two people’s extraordinarily different life experiences may cause each to react differently to some words??
How is this relevant? MFR did not say anything at all about punishment, only about discomfort. Aren’t you putting words in MFR’s mouth?
Its credentialism through and through and its everywhere on the left.
You can’t state your opinion unless you are a certified expert. But the certified experts use their certified expertise to sell lies.
You have to preface everything with your resume. Women are qualified for women subjects, blacks for black subjects, gays for gay subjects.
You have to be a scientist to have a valid opinion on science, etc.
Mark, my “first” and “second” points in response amount to my view of the “how”.
Honestly, I don’t know how any of it is relevant. It’s certainly vague. People who left Germany because of Hitler might be uncomfortable with some unnamed jargon popular on the right these days? Ok….. I guess. Which jargon? Who specifically? Are you sure these people spouting uncomfortable jargon are on the same “right” as a typical conservative or libertarian? What does it have to do with nazi Germany? Is this discomfort a reliable indicator that the two are related in any way? Is this discomfort relevant to the question of which system of free speech is better? Are these hypothetical people even justified in their discomfort?
Dropping that mess qualifies as muddying things, IMO.
And the difference in question is about whether a system where speech isn’t punished is preferable to the German system where it is. And that’s before we even get to the allusions to nazi Germany where there were punishments. I’m not putting words into anyone’s mouth.
I talk to lots of people with political science degrees who cannot answer simple questions about how my country’s legislature works. I therefore come to the conclusion that PoliSci degrees are fundamentally useless.
“I studied PoliSci, and I don’t understand why you guys don’t just do x!”
“Well, for one thing, the legislature isn’t currently in session.”
And you have to have the correct opinion to count as a scientist/woman/gay/etc
It is pure circular logic.
I recommend SCOTT Adams on persuasion. We ‘right wingers’ disproportionately understand logic and reason. These are not the muscles these mental waifs exercise.
However. We are all vulnerable. It’s toxic education, toxic art and toxic games/news/opinion/talk/sports infecting our ….epistemology (?) every day.
He’s sometimes tedious, sometimes dreaming utopian systemic solutions, sometimes just wrong, but he has a very valid perspective to offer. It takes a little time for us logical types, but I understand it now.
They have grown up living in this world of feelings and anti-logic.
There are forces trying to destroy logic. They aren’t just trying to refute your point. They are trying to make logic irrelevant and pretend whatever you’re saying is worthless.
First person to say, “read a book” or “educate yourself” wins the argument, no matter how illiterate or ignorant he may be.
There are two professions that are in the information biz whose members mistakenly believe that their ability to convey pre-digested information to others makes them experts on that information. These are teacher and journalist.
These are valuable professions and the people in them aren’t (necessarily) stupid.
But they do tend to dramatically overestimate the quality of the processed information they receive, and their own accrued knowledge base once they have received it.
I’ve heard this kind of thing. Some are smart enough to pick out – or at least claim to have – a fallacy and then claim that everything the supposed fallacy user said is rendered completely void.
I understand that impulse, but that is simply not how it works.
Is the woman in this video one of those trying to make logic irrelevant? Or can she be woken up? How do we tell the difference?
What on earth, Ed? Where are you getting the accusation I bolded from?
It looks like you’re not engaging me in good faith, and if so, what’s the point?
Since people can only judge new information based on their prior experience, if your goal is to change their mind (rather than “win an argument” in a game of rhetorical chicken), it doesn’t work too set ignoring their experience, even subtly, as a goal.
Which is one reason I suggested listening. Actual listening, to see where they’re coming from. Not just listening hard enough to tell them where they’re coming from is invalid.
This is a good point.
And, I would add, that people whose credentials really do correspond to expertise that usually is much righter than you are in their general field, still have blind spots. Worse, they may or may not be the blind spots we think they have.
Take doctors, for example. When doctors do a differential diagnosis, the maxim, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras,” is usually right. But it fails in the presence of a zebra. Similarly, when deciding between diagnoses, sometimes the tiebreaker is, which one is easier to cure? (especially if the “harder to cure” one is that way because it has no cure). To be a patient misdiagnosed for these reasons is understandably frustrating, even enraging, and in a better world, it wouldn’t happen. But this is not a better world, and when doctors get it wrong, it’s unlikely to mean they’re all are over-credentialed quacks, or that you can medicine better than they can. It’s more likely to mean you’re unlucky enough to be a tough case.
In the world of politics, some political positions are “tougher cases”, perhaps because they aren’t widely known or understood, perhaps for other reasons. Just like it’s common for someone with a rare, easily-misunderstood disease to mistaken for a hypochondriac, someone with a rare or less commonly understood political position can expect to have it misunderstood in insulting ways. Perhaps misunderstood as a “Nazi” position. Perhaps misunderstood as an “accuses-others-of-being-Nazis-for-no-reason” position, as apparently happened here.
Midge, maybe I’m being dense here, but what is your point in saying that some hypothetical person’s indirect or ancestral experience with nazis would make them “understandably uncomfortable with some of the jargon popular on the right these days”? Aren’t you making a connection between the two? I didn’t say that you said they were the same thing, but it seems pretty clear that you’re saying there’s some similarity which makes any discomfort understandable. Where am I going wrong?
Hitler was vegan too, or so I’ve heard. Are you going to make the same case that someone “whose ancestors emigrated from Germany during or after Hitler’s rise to power, might be understandably uncomfortable with some of the jargon popular on the” vegetarian community these days?
Good advice.
Did you watch the video I linked? Also, the question I actually posed in the OP is whether such a person as the one in the video – who we’ve already listened to as she made her case – should be persuaded or merely exposed. This is a question about what to do once we’re down the path a bit and discover such an illiberal mindset, we’re not just starting out the conversation.
Ignoring her experience is not my goal. I’m not sure why you think I’m suggesting it. The goal is truth, whether that results in persuasion, exposure, or me changing my mind.
There is a sort of meta-concern; when the cameras are rolling it is not always a good idea to yeild ground. That is to say, a meeting of minds often requires conciliation and if you are, for example, the kind of guy who has a web series where you are a “thought leader” it might not be good for viewership to make compromises. Indeed most of what passes for debate is nothing of the sort.
Crowder is one of the fairest people in his medium but he’s gotta stay in business.
There is a point at which you shake the dust of a place from your shoes.
Her mind may be just such a place.