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Dicks, niceness and evil: a rant

The ongoing blogbattle over whether to be nice or a dick skeptic continues. Phil Plait gave a speech suggesting that niceness works better. There was blowback, of course, which he discusses here and here. The Great Tone Debate seems to resolve down to those who think that minds are changed mostly by civil debate, and those who think that one ought to be a dick, and be angry and outraged. I name no names. If you know what I’m talking about, then you know who I’m talking about.

But is it even important? I fully agree with what Phil said, but does reason work?

Consider the question Phil asked: what is our goal? Why are we being pro-science and critical skeptics?

So far as I am concerned, I want our society to allow science and reason without it being either constricted by the beliefs of others, or forcing people into it. The reason why I don’t want to force people to be reasonable is because that’s like forcing someone to have morally pure thoughts: it is something of a contradiction in terms. People will be reasonable if they are shown how, and they (more or less reasonably) estimate that it is in their best interests. Simply asserting, in the classroom or in the media, that reason is the One True Way to Enlightenment fails to get over the threshold and out the door.

So, if that is my goal, how do we achieve it? I think Phil is right that you will convince more people by a steady and polite response than by calling them idiots and fools (“When two principles really do meet that cannot be reconciled, each man calls the other a fool and a heretic”: Wittgenstein in On Certainty), but I take issue with one of his and many others’ major premises: that we even can reason people out of their false beliefs about the world.

This is not some postmodern claim, and it is not a claim that people are irrational panicky animals, contrary to Z in Men in Black. Sure, sometimes they are, but that’s not what we are talking about. We are talking about how beliefs are formed, and how to make them conform to the world as best we can. Dickness fails the test – you may have the right to get angry and abusive, and others may lack the right not to be offended (I agree with both of these, by the way), but is it a good bit of practical wisdom? How are beliefs formed?

We have run this debate on the assumption, that very Enlightenmental assumption, that people are swayed by reasons and dialectic, and this is just not the case most of the time. The alternative, however, is that people can be swayed by rhetorical flourish, and while this is true, it is equally true for the nutbars as for the skeptical or informed, and indeed that is the very reason why antivaccination, global warming denialism, and other such anti-realist views are so popular (as documented in Oreske’s and Conway’s Merchants of Doubt); so we want to use this sparingly and rely on the critical reasoning that produces science and eliminates woo.

But beliefs are not in general formed from reason. On the other hand, it is my observation that rhetoric serves only to organise those who are already gathered about that banner, perhaps at best tipping those who are already inclined in a particular direction to slide into the sandtrap. Both reason and rhetoric affect attitudes, but I think they are poor ways to influence basic beliefs. Once you are already a skeptic, or a believer, they affect which particular beliefs you may own, but your core beliefs are not arrived at that way.

Instead, beliefs are acquired as you develop and become enculturated. I have a paper in Synthese in which I argue that due to constraints on reasoning, people employ some dispositional heuristics to decide what to believe. Fundamentally, we are born with these “fast and frugal” heuristics because none of us have the time to reflect on everything carefully and to any semblance of rational equilibrium. So we do a few tricks. Now there are two broad fields of tricks we do. One is tricks for dealing with our ecology: things that stop us from dying or failing to reproduce. Call these ecological heuristics; they are the kinds of things that Gigerenzer and Todd study in the last link. The heuristics include: “take the best [example]”, “recognition”, and using simple cues to reduce the options rapidly. This is something that allows us to negotiate the physical world. For example, we should “take the best” from our social context, because, quite simply, those we are emulating do well.

But there is another domain to which we have to adapt our beliefs, and it is the social domain. We use social heuristics to decide what to believe in a social context and here the heuristics are less reliable if they are neutral with respect to our survival and reproductive capacities. We tend to believe what everyone around us believes, for example. Why? Well it is because they are not dead, and people who are not dead are unlikely to impart beliefs to you that will make you dead. Moreover, since a leading cause of being dead are people who disagree with you, it pays to believe what those around you believe.

This is a way of farming out the doxastic labour to specialists, a division of cognitive labour. [“Doxastic” is philosophese for “opinion-related” or “belief-related”). It works for ecological rationality – you take the bow maker’s expertise for granted when learning to make a bow. They have centuries of tradition behind them, and so their bows will be much better than yours are likely to be. This means better dinner, more often.

But when the lack of deadness is not correlated with the beliefs, when beliefs are so distant from everyday exigencies that one can carry quite a load of false beliefs, then the social cues fail to provide true beliefs. My life is not going to depend on the correctness of the Copernican theory, for example. Take this passage from A Study in Scarlet:

His [Holmes’] ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”

“To forget it!”

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

“But the Solar System!” I protested.

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

Of course, most of us know things that are not of direct use and import, but typically we pick them up as part of our cultural traditions, not from any reasoned deliberations. While our brains may not be rigid timber rooms as Holmes describes, the cost of populating those rooms is inelastic. We develop our impractical ideas through cultural osmosis. We grow into them.

Our social heuristics include a number of strategies that reflect our social biological nature. One is related to “take the best” – I think of it as “follow the famous”. High status individuals have access to resources we ordinary low status peons do not, so you should emulate whatever of them that you can. Who knows but carrying a small dog in a handbag maybe the route to status. Another is “accept the authorities”. By this I mean that you should believe whatever the most respected figures in your social context believe to be the case or the right thing. This is a variant on the “not dead” rationale, but also means that if the high status individual is high status in virtue of having succeeded doxastically, you improve your chances by copying them.

But one heuristic trumps everything in both ecological and social rationality: personal experience. Call this the “I believe it when I see it” heuristic. A simpler term might be “learning from experience”. No matter who tells me what, if I have experience to the contrary I am going to let it carry the day. The trouble is that little of my experience will tell one way or the other for the majority of socially derived beliefs.

So, I argued in my Synthese paper, someone who lacks experience early on will tend to invest, so to speak, in the consensual views of their immediate social context and community unless they experience things to the contrary. It’s a good conservative strategy for forming beliefs. Once you have your belief set, or basic beliefs, or doxastic values, however you want to characterise them, reason will run up against a wall and rhetoric will tend to reinforce it; hence Phil’s problem.

What to do? I argued in the paper that the only real solution was to ensure that in education, particularly early education, one should encourage experiential learning rather than factual learning, at least in science. If you spend you time making things blow up reliably, and finding out first hand what the structure and properties of things are (ordinary, everyday things are best, because that will undercut intuitions derived from social consensuses), then you will come to accept the reliability of empirical learning and experimental study, so that when it is challenged from an ideological perspective, the student will be less inclined to fall back on “follow the famous” and “accept the authorities”. If Jenny McCarthy (both famous and an authority for that community) tells you that vaccines are dangerous, and you are given experimental reason to think that it isn’t, then you will not farm out doxastic tasks to the wrong “specialist”.

I think that we should not teach scientific facts as such until quite late. Let kids name parts of organisms by direct observation. Let them mix chemicals under supervision so they make small explosions (few chemists will have been inspired by colour changes, and many will have been inspired by making things go “boom!”, I warrant). Start teaching them the factual stuff only when they have already come to trust the scientific process.

So, as the religious, doubt manufacturers, and conspiracy theorists know intuitively, the real battlefield is education, not the media. If you can dampen down experiential learning, all the public debate and discourse resolves down to duelling authorities, and competing communities. Evolution, medicine, astronomy and so forth all become “just another religion”. I sometimes suspect that the drive to general curricula, and the subsequent uniformity of teaching to the tests, is a clever ruse to prevent students from actually experiencing science and learning in general.

The real debate is over who gets to control, or not control, education, just as the real debate over morality is about who gets to determine who can mate with whom. And therefore I think that the most pressing goal of skeptical thinkers and the pro-science is to ensure that education is not interfered with or controlled by special interests and lobbies. And that debate must happen in the public sphere, urgently. And yes, our only weapon is reason there. You can’t convince a creationist that evolution happens through simple recitation of facts and argument, but you may be able to ensure that those who set the law and policy for education come to see, through argument, that biases in education will have bad outcomes.

The extremism of modern debate is dangerous. It tends to make the options impossible and irrational. I am very concerned about this post on how the irresponsibility of both conservative and liberal commentators in part contributed to the failure of the Weimar Republic. It can happen again.

Oh, and as to Tone, I think it is just good manners to treat your discussant with politeness and respect, until they get nasty. And then you have the right to walk away. Being a dick is something that you only need to do when you do not have that option.

Epilogue

Don’t be a Dick. Or Stan.

59 Comments

  1. brian brian

    “The Great Tone Debate seems to resolve down to those who think that minds are changed mostly by civil debate, and those who think that one ought to be a dick, and be angry and outraged.”

    That’s not my perception. The DBAD side has framed the issue as whether to be a dick all of the time, or polite all of the time. However, the rejoinder is a rejection of their absolutist idea that one should not ever act impolitely…the message sent with the word “don’t” instead of “sometimes”. Of course, “Align your methods with your goals, which usually means being polite,” would have been a dull speech, and every critic of the DBAD speech would have agreed.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      If you listen to what Phil has to say, and read his blog pieces that I linked to, you will find that this is exactly the opposite of what he is suggesting.

  2. ‘Dick by name, but not by nature’, that’s my new motto.

  3. I think Phil is right that you will convince more people by a steady and polite response than by calling them idiots and fools

    Oh not that poor strawman again, it’s dead, buried and cremated already, as Tony Abbott would say ! As if “calling people idiots and fools” was all the Gnu atheists ever do.*eyeroll*

    Interesting points about the origin of beliefs.And yes, you probably can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t arrive at by reasoning in the first place.

    The extremism of modern debate is dangerous. It tends to make the options impossible and irrational. I am very concerned about this post on how the irresponsibility of both conservative and liberal commentators in part contributed to the failure of the Weimar Republic. It can happen again.

    Thanks for that link.Glenn Beck comes to mind.
    And thanks for the blog link…..:-)

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      This is not aim at Gnu Atheism; it’s aimed at skeptics. And whether or not you think this is dead and buried, my experience is that skeptics do this much more than occasionally.

      • Red Red

        Where do you experience this? Online? Is it really fair or accurate to use blog comments as your measuring stick? And even if it were, it’s my experience that those comments are dickish a small percentage of the time.

        As far as ridicule goes, could that not be used to create a new social heuristic? In other words if enough people receive enough public scorn for professing magical thinking, might we create a sea change in the way people view those beliefs and in the way people feel about expressing them publicly.

        Of course we’re just speculating right now, and for people who claim to be big time science promoters, that’s really a shame. Why don’t we quit arguing our opinions and do some real science? That way, we’ll know without a doubt what the best methods are and we can get to work on making real progress.

        After all, we didn’t go to the moon with our FEELINGS, we got there with FACTS.

      • Mike Haubrich Mike Haubrich

        Or, as someone once wrote at talk.origins (for a well-earned Chez Watt) “they will beat the ground where a dead gnu horse once was.”

      • brian brian

        “After all, we didn’t go to the moon with our FEELINGS, we got there with FACTS.”

        Many people FEEL we never got there…yet how do we prevent most people from thinking that? Do we teach it that well and/or hold debates with each side represented…or do we mock those who disagree?

  4. For a rant, that was exceedingly polite.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      I didn’t want to be a dick.

  5. Ambidexter Ambidexter

    Oh, and as to Tone, I think it is just good manners to treat your discussant with politeness and respect, until they get nasty. And then you have the right to walk away. Being a dick is something that you only need to do when you do not have that option.

    I’m willing to treat my discussants with politeness (respect is another matter I’ll consider below) up to the point where they stop being polite to me. Telling me lies is impolite, regardless of how civil and courtly the lie is given. Likewise telling me I’m going to Hell because I disagree with my opponent is impolite, even if the condemnation is delivered in tones of regret and diplomacy. There are several other instances where the opponent gives up any expectation of politeness from me. One that comes immediately to mind is when one tries to withdraw from a discussion turning nasty and the opponent claims victory “because you can’t take it.”

    When a person shows invincible ignorance then they have forfeited my respect. We’re all ignorant about a lot of things. My knowledge of astrophysics and Sri Lankan history are pretty well nil. But I’m willing to learn about these disciplines. It’s the people like Rick Warren who say “if given a choice between the Bible and science I have to go with the Bible” who are invincibly ignorant. I’ve got no problem with someone willing to change their mind upon learning new data, that’s respectable. I cannot respect the “my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts” folks. I’ll be polite to them but they’ve not only not earned my respect, they qualify for disrespect.

    There’s one further point. Too many people confuse ad hominem with insult. “You’re wrong because you’re an idiot” is ad hominem. “You’re wrong because of fact A, you idiot” is insult. All too often the insultees complain of ad hominem when they’ve only been insulted.

  6. How to be a polite Dick! (or Ginger)

    The Jonas Hellborg Trio with the legendary Giger Backer on drums was on tour in Germany A reporter was interviewing Hellborg backstage as Ginger Backer entered the room. The reporter wishing to be polite said, “Good evening Mr Backer”. To which the drummer replied, “Would you please be so kind and fuck off!”

  7. That should of course read Ginger Baker! I’m tired!

    • Mike Haubrich Mike Haubrich

      From what I understand he hasn’t mellowed with age.

  8. A couple of things. The first is that the Synthese paper is precisely what I needed for the very bit of my book that I’m writing right now. Perfect, thank you.

    The second is much more to do with the main topic of your post. Somewhat similarly to you, I do not see the option of being a ‘Dick’ as a live option. That has as much to do with my character as my views. However, there is an approach that sometimes looks very much like it that I see as very much necessary, and that is the stategic use of humour. Similarly to you I am very fond of the Enlightenment and keep thinking back to the way that Enlightenment figures used rational argument as well as humour in their struggle against ‘Superstition’. Voltaire wrote a series of philosophical treatises as well as Candide, a piss-take that has rarely been equalled. The determining factor as to whether rational argumentation or humour is required is, I think, the intellectual character of the person opposed. If one is dealing with a Ken Ham type of character, for example, I think irony and satire are much more appropriate than analysis. But they are usually very much out of place when opposing views that do have a properly thought-through basis. Not necessarily always, however. Some of Karen Armstrong’s views call for as sharp a pin as that wielded by Voltaire.

    The problem is knowing when each of these approaches is more appropriate. Using the wrong one it is all too easy ending up looking the fool.

    This is made all the more difficult by the fact that there is a great temptation to use a humourous or even a dickish response on all occasions. This is something that I think PZ, among others, has been falling into more and more. On a number of occasions I have seen him treat with contempt people about whom he knows close to nothing. On a couple of those occasions I also happened to know the people in question and was in the position to tell that neither they nor their views deserved the contempt PZ heaped upon them. This can but make me wonder how many others PZ ends up unfairly maligning with his broad brush.

    One can compare humour to bombing. It is an important part of the arsenal but should be used with great forethought and care for innocent bystanders.

    • I should have perhaps added that my views concerning religion are actually in many ways closer to PZ’s than John’s. I do, for example, think that science and religion are profoundly incompatible and that it is only our capacity for inconsistency that allows some people to engage in both. Not surprisingly, then, I think that the issue of tone is quite seperable from the question of how hardnosed an atheist position one holds.

    • My comment regarding PZ referred in part to what he’d recently said about Nicholas Humphrey, who is actually a first rate UK psychologist and has, among other things, developed a very insightful evolutionary explanation for why the placebo effect occurs. Well, even though I did not mention earlier that it was PZ’s comments about Humphrey that I was partly referencing, I should say that PZ has recognised his mistake and apologised for he’d said about Humphrey: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/i_owe_nicholas_humphrey_an_apo.php

  9. Chris' Wills Chris' Wills

    You say that this is about skeptics, but a number of people in response to Phil’s blog claimed that to be a skeptic one must also be an atheists , similar to their claim that no true scientist can be religious. So I suspect that this is an extension of the Gnus general claim to be the holders of The Truth.
    They aren’t so much interested in defending science, rather they wish to convert others.

    I do sometimes wonder how they actually relate with reality and general people, rather than how they describe their beliefs and actions online.

    No matter, if they’re as impolite in real life as they are online they won’t do well in their evangelising.

    On the education, I agree that whoever controls this can form the next generation this worries me, especially if some of the Gnus take control.

    • brian brian

      “…a number of people in response to Phil’s blog claimed that to be a skeptic one must also be an (atheist)…”

      No one I know of has claimed that. Please cite an example. What people have said is that you can’t honestly claim to be skeptical about everything if you aren’t skeptical about everything, specifically, if you aren’t skeptical about religious claims (as a general rule, or for some favored religion(s)), then you can’t truthfully claim to be unwaveringly skeptical. This disqualifies as total skeptics people who are religious on faith (as well as those who are atheists on faith, a much smaller number, and those who believe unrelated propositions on faith) but not those who justify religious beliefs (or irreligious beliefs) with reason and not faith.

      “…similar to their claim that no true scientist can be religious.”

      This is similar to you other assertion insofar as I have never heard it expressed ever before.

  10. DiscoveredJoys DiscoveredJoys

    A very interesting post (I particularly liked the ‘fast and frugal’ references). I believe that a lot of what you say is true, especially the value of dickishness, but I’m not sure your conclusion is sufficient.

    I suspect that a lot of our ecological and social heuristics are also unconscious and ballistic. We seem to learn a lot of our heuristics by imitation and play when we are very young. Whole clusters of low level heuristics fire and channel behaviour or emotions in a mechanistic way. Only then does our limited rational capacity run a sanity check (and often makes up a validation story to justify what we have just done or said).

    Now someone who has many heuristics that combine into a strongly channelled belief pathway (whether religious, scientism, or political belief) is unlikely to find any rational sanity check sufficient to break out of the default heuristics. By the time the individual is exposed to formal education (even of the exploratory nature you describe) they have already built up many non-conscious heuristics. Which may explain the ubiquity of ‘magical’ thought. Trying to influence these beliefs will not work on the strongly channelled. Being a ‘dick’ will only strengthen the opposition to novel thoughts.

    My best guess is that to become more rational as a society we have to show the very youngest children that there are no magical forces at work. We have to show them by our own daily behaviour. Of course we are going to find this very difficult to do – no exclamations like ‘Oh God!’, no talk of dead relatives or pets living in heaven, no complaints about bad luck or wishes for good luck. No superstitious behaviour about spilt salt or walking under ladders. No Easter Bunny, no Santa Claus. All of which will be quite contrary to our own learned heuristics. Damn. Hell’s Teeth.. This is going to be trickier than I thought.

  11. At this point I think that the phrase “don’t be a dick” isn’t helping matters. Different people are unpacking the phrase in different ways. PZ for example seems to strongly disagree but it seems that what he and Phil Plait are talking about aren’t quite the same forms of dickishness.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      If that’s how Paul is unpacking it, and I concur, then he had better try watching Phil’s talk without preconceptions. But it is a common error to read into what is said what one expects to find there.

      • MalcolmW MalcolmW

        Perhaps if either Phil or you would stop being coy and cite some examples of dickish behavior, we wouldn’t have to guess which sort of dicks you don’t like. I got the sense from Phil’s speech that making people uncomfortable was being a dick, but I’m not sure since he only gave extreme examples such as yelling in someone’s face. At some point in the future, someone will think you’re a dick, Phil is a dick, and PZ is a dick. So what?

      • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

        Yes, that’s kind of what Phil says: sometimes you have to be a dick; but not as a first strike. Consider Konrad’s metaphor above: dickishness is like bombing. You want to minimise the casualties, and anyone who likes bombing for the hell of it is a cowboy. To head off the obvious response: I am not saying PZ or anyone in particular is a cowboy. Okay, maybe Jerry Coyne.

        As to examples, once you go down that road it becomes a case by case battle about whether this is dickish or not, and who has misread whom. It’s a kind of Gish Gallop strategy. I think that by keeping it abstract Phil has done us all a service.

      • brian brian

        The burden is on someone criticizing a behavior and decrying its prominence to cite examples of it so people know what he’s talking about.

      • Red Red

        Are there really that many people who like bombing for the hell of it? I’m very skeptical of that suggestion, yet it’s the basis for Phil’s message.

  12. John Harshman John Harshman

    It seems to me that a lot of the problem lies in responses to the first wave of NA books, along the lines of “you’re a dick if you criticize religion; oh, and you’re ignorant too”. It’s just like all those strident, shrill feminists. Tends to make one defensive.

    Now, I do think there’s a balance between assertiveness and rudeness. Dawkins is generally in about the right spot Hitchens and Myers a bit toward the rudeward tail. (Sometimes.) But the fact that Dawkins attracts so much of the ire suggests to me that tone isn’t the main motivator.

    I also suggest that dickish comments are most properly interpreted not at attempts to convert non-atheists but as community-building efforts for current atheists. (And really, this isn’t about skeptics.)

  13. I am not sure that “we even can reason people out of their false beliefs about the world” is really one of Phil’s major premises. In many public (and private) debates the target of persuasion is a third party who may not yet have committed fully to belief in either side of the argument and I think your identification of the social component of the process of persuasion is especially important here. Audience members will often work hard to persuade themselves of the rightness of the party they find most likeable and it is for getting these people on side that “don’t be a dick” becomes most important.

    But the problem with Phil’s presentation is that the language is open to too wide a range of interpretations. Many have taken offense to “don’t be a dick” as a serious insult to a specific person or persons rather than a relatively minor quibble about a fairly common behaviour. I suspect that one reason Phil didn’t cite examples was because we’re all dicks sometimes and he wanted us to look for examples in our own behaviour and watch for them in future rather than to go out and try to flag who is a dick and who is not.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      Good point about the uncommitted (the “lurkers” of an earlier era). But I wonder how many actual lurkers there ever were. Sure, we heard of the occasional lurker who was tipped into a rational belief because of arguments both logical and rhetorical being made in this or that forum, but basically they were so rare that the few examples were cited over and over.

      Also a good point about Phil making a “mote in your own eye” case rather than attacking anyone in particular.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      I’m so sorry. Give me the right link!

      • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

        Oops, you did. I didn’t see it on my iPhone.

  14. Wait… you link to my verse, but you link to it at somebody else’s blog?

    That was in fact funny…..;)

  15. Red Red

    The main point, to me, is that we’re not going to ‘convert’ any believer by the force of our efforts, be they dickish or nice. There’s no slick new argument, no previously undiscovered bit of information that’s going to change someone’s mind about magic. The absolute best we can do is direct that person to a place where they can consider their beliefs, but my ‘conversion’, and everyone else’s that I’ve talked to, was a very private, personal event. It didn’t happen overnight or in the presence of a lot of competing voices. It was just me being curious about what I believed and searching out more information (which, by the way is readily available and easily accessible).

    If someone is capable of ‘converting’ I think they will do so nearly every time regardless of what we do or how we treat them.

    So as I said I think our main focus should be on moving believers to a point where they will actually consider their beliefs. Sometimes that’s done by calm, reasoned argument. Sometimes that’s done by laughing at those beliefs. What we shouldn’t get caught up in is worrying about how those actions are perceived. We’re already dicks for pointing out that their beliefs are incorrect.

    • I agree that we won’t convert many (not “any” – that’s way too extreme a view; some people do change their minds on the basis of measured argument. Me, for example); that was the point of the article above.

      And I also agree that we will be called “dicks” for challenging someone’s views (the point of the poem linked to).

      But I really doubt that mockery does anything at all to shift people’s deeply held views. At best it is a way of marginalising the holders of those views. Whether that is useful depends a lot on the social situation. There are no absolute strategies in the public forum. What works depends on who you face and how.

      But nobody seems to be discussing my main claim: that debate, for all it is politically useful and fun, and community building and whatnot, is not the basis for changing minds. If we should be doing anything, it is arguing and fighting for good education (and in particular retreating from the “teach to the standardised test” propaedeutics that are common in western societies today).

      • @John,
        I think that (in your reply to my earlier comment) you underestimate the number of uncommited non-religious. Some may be silent “lurkers” but others are actually quite outspoken. And many of them aren’t “lurkers” because they just aren’t interested in the debates and so aren’t even listening.

        However, with regard to your request for comment on the utility of debate, those that *are* listening, such as myself, are probably interesed in and persuadable by argument (or otherwise they wouldn’t be listening). Different members of the “audience” are of course listening for different things, but what I in particular am listening for is reasons for and against various levels of “accommodationism”. And, although I try not to be ruled by emotional responses to “dickishness”, if someone does too much of it, then I am likely to start ignoring them and so may miss anything useful that they may subsequently have to say.
        For anyone insisting on examples, both Jerry Coyne and (now that he’s out of the woods I can say also) PZMeyers have said things recently that make me doubt the utility of listening to them on these issues. Which may be a loss to me to some extent, but I don’t have too much time to waste on sifting wheat from chaff.

        • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

          It is my view that uncommitted lurkers are not uncommitted because they have been listening to argument, but because they have not been exposed over the course of their lives to biases with respect to this particular set of issues, and been placed in a position where they had to choose. So argument may sway them one way or the other, and this is a complex process that depends a lot on which view they first hear and adopt, and what doxastic commitments they build around it.

          But my point is that they should be able to be swayed, and as things stand that is rarely the case. And if they aren’t, neither reason nor abuse and mockery are effective at remedying the situation. Every teacher knows that the first thing you have to do is uneducate people out of what they think they know before you can educate them. It is this that we should rely upon the heuristics for.

      • Re: “It is my view that uncommitted lurkers are not uncommitted because they have been listening to argument, but because …”
        I agree that it’s usually not debate that has brought them to the state of uncommittment, but my point was that they are the ones who might actually be moved as a result of what is said in the debate.

        My second point is that while debate may have little utility for direct conversion from belief, it may well be useful for clarifying and maybe even resolving strategic issues about how to respond to belief. Positions on “accommodationism” are more likely to be opinions than fixed core beliefs and so may be much more worthy of serious debate.

  16. Kirk Job Sluder Kirk Job Sluder

    Plait’s talk rubs me the wrong way, because scolding atheists and skeptics for perceived and vague rudeness appears strikes me as much more common than actual rudeness. The rude skeptic and atheist has become something of a stereotype used to avoid or displace discussion,. I don’t bother trying to convince people I’m right, because my own beliefs came about as a result of 30 years of thought and evolution. Instead, I struggle to make the case that I’m not a dick (of various flavors) when it comes to my multi-faith family and community.

    Plait is, by far, the most reasonable one of the bunch. But I get rather tired of scolds who attempt to set themselves up as the most reasonable people in the room by engaging in attacks on both sides.

    • brian brian

      “But I get rather tired of scolds who attempt to set themselves up as the most reasonable people in the room by engaging in attacks on both sides.”

      The apparently irresistible impulse many liberals have to always either a) attack both sides or b) agree with both sides as their primary conversational move is what makes conservatives generally more fun to “have a beer with”. I agree (if such was your intent and I am not reading it in) it often comes from merely wanting to appear reasonable rather than a genuine desire to be reasonable. Stop being so insecure and grow a fucking spine, tone trolls ! (See what I just did there?) If you have misgivings about Democrats’ achievements in…well my lifetime at least…perhaps you can see (in that entity separate from your core identity group and towards which you are presumably less biased) how contemptible, despicable and ineffectual it is.

      • Kirk Job Sluder Kirk Job Sluder

        I wasn’t exactly thinking along those lines, but it certainly could fit. Thank you.

      • Susan Silberstein Susan Silberstein

        Seriously? More fun with beer? The only thing I want to do with beer and those fun conservatives like Beck, Limbaugh, Bush, the Kochs and the rest of those wacky guys is shove it down their throats with a sharp instrument. And that’s when I’m feeling all fluffy and nice.

      • brian brian

        I am alluding to the metric of evaluating people that originated in 2000: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2000_Oct_17/ai_66149137/ It is a proxy for likability.

        The DBAD tone trolls are telling us that they have the best strategy for influencing people. Their argument would be more compelling if they weren’t so pretentious and unlikeable…not to mention unconvincing.

        • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

          It is fairly clear that you have a prior commitment to being a dick. I wouldn’t expect you to have your mind changed.

      • brian brian

        “It is fairly clear that you have a prior commitment to being a dick.”

        I’m not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean that my comments here have been dickish? If so which? In the absence of so much as a nebulously defined standard, I continue to perceive myself as acting almost exclusively in a non-dickish way, even according to what I imagine are the standards of (most of?) the DBAD crowd.

        What I do have a commitment to is defending dickish work of others like this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ0w6Z4QdUs. I think rhetoric like this is helpful, and I think this is what is meant by “being a dick”-his youtube channel’s description is “I rape god’s face off”-though of course I am only guessing, since I can’t compare it to established, agreed upon examples of someone being a dick as none have been provided.

  17. Jim Thomerson Jim Thomerson

    I’ve known of a couple of situations where the bad person came out ahead just because the good person treated the bad person in a disrespectful manner.

    • brian brian

      Me too. That’s why the implicit, clearly understood and basically universal approach of the skeptic community has always been to vary their tone based on the forum and audience. Of course, this is done while recognizing that most offense by the religious is taken from content and not tone, different people respond to different stimuli so others with a different style may have a valid one, and that there is a time and place for even deliberate offense, etc.

      In the face of this, enter the DBAD speech, alleging a rampant and increasing problem of (gratuitously?) being a “dick”, without proffering a single example.

      The thing proceeds almost like an argument from equivocation. First, get an issue in which everyone agrees there can be too much of one thing (abrasiveness), despite the fact that there isn’t a consensus on how much is too much. It helps to obfuscate your chicanery by choosing something in which there not only isn’t a consensus on how much is too much for an individual case, but for which most will agree the proper amount varies from case to case. Then, get the audience to meditate on the bare fact that all agree too much is too much. What a brilliant insight, everyone knew it all along and only had to be reminded! At all costs, refuse to provide an example, maintaining that examples are obvious and abound. This keeps the content of the argument constructed by the audience, such that all will agree with their own definition of what constitutes too much. After a brief (or not) two minutes’ (or longer) hate, the equivocation clicks. The speaker’s argument was compelling, but he *couldn’t* have just been intending the whole speech’s subject to be a comment someone once made while drunk on his blog that has two followers, one of which is his cat. He *must* intend more with his lengthy and obviously correct argument. Could it be…some of the more steadfast and irreverent skeptics such as P.Z.? The equivocation lies in transferring the sense of agreement from a trivial nearly content-free and obviously correct straw man created in the listener’s mind to a substantial claim being made implicitly by the speaker, and avoiding an analysis of the speaker’s intent.

      Let’s give it a go.

      Don’t be a Rice Man! People are eating too much rice to the detriment of other nutritional foods, it’s a growing problem. Imagine not getting all of your vitamins and protein because you were hitting the rice too hard. Has anyone here ever prospered doing that? Please consider how too much rice is simply TOO MUCH. We all agree and I think it’s very important to reiterate that again and again for the next half hour. Let’s bask in mutual agreement for a while. (Crowd leaves with this policy question foremost on their minds, talking about rice eating habits instead of other issues. Audience is disposed to negatively view the state of Asian nutrition, because really, what else could he possibly have meant? )

      When confronted later, speaker has the following to say: What is a rice man you ask? It’s hard to describe. Do I mean the guy who ONLY ate rice and had to go to the hospital? Yes, but I won’t tell you who else. No, I neither meant nor didn’t mean the people of Burma. I was just raising the issue because it’s a worrying trend. The examples are all around, you don’t need me to point them out. Why do people keep asking me about Burma? I just don’t understand. No, I don’t think I need to define what a Rice Man is. It’s contextual. It’s a serious issue and I hope we all consider what is happening with rice and peoples’ bodies more, that’s all. Me thinking it is serious does not imply I meant the largest identifiable consumers of rice in particular, no. Why would you think that?

  18. Perplexed in Peoria Perplexed in Peoria

    It is just like good-cop/bad-cop; except that it is not really like that at all.

    Still, we need both dicks and nice guys to get the job done, except that the nice guys sometimes have to act like dicks and tell the dicks that they are not helping, and then the dicks can just take their criticism like nice guys, though it is probably more effective if they take it like dicks.

    Don’t you all agree?

    • John Harshman John Harshman

      Did you leave out the link on purpose to sustain the sadness? Anyway, it’s too obvious. And y’know, I find most South Park speeches boring and preachy, the Team America speech included. The kinky marionette sex was a nice touch, though.

      • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

        I edited it to add the link. But I agree: preachy. Also quite ridiculous and stupid. There may be irony in my mentioning this…

  19. John Harshman John Harshman

    You are devilish quick.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      I have no life.

  20. Jim Thomerson Jim Thomerson

    One of Charles Darwin’s characteristics was that he was a really nice guy. His strongest critics were concerned that their criticism did not hurt his feelings, and were relieved when he thanked them for their illuminating and helpful comments.

  21. J.J.E. J.J.E.

    I think John is being a tad too coy. It isn’t the names in particular that are important, but explicit vignettes of behavior that are both common and dickish would be extremely illuminating. I suspect that most such behavior takes place in various types of electronic communication of limited reach and rarely elsewhere. But that’s testable. John could easily challenge it.

    And also, I think John is conflating some rather important points. People are immovable in opinion conditional upon them having formed an opinion. That is well established in the psychological literature. But it isn’t clear to me that people are immovable when they have yet to form an opinion. And the Gallup data for the U.S. (and certainly poll data for Europe; sorry Australia, I don’t know about you) indicate that religious commitment isn’t very deeply held for quite a large number of people. (And of course it is also deeply held for quite a large number of people as well.) I think this fact, at the very least, undermines the conclusion that being a dick can’t work. Again, bystanders who aren’t deeply committed (and there are many of them. This is fact, not conjecture) may very well have their attentions drawn by rhetorical flourishes. This is a conjecture: Such people come for the rhetorical show but stay for the arguments.

    And of course, in the absence of any concrete examples for the aphallic contingent, we are left wondering what exactly does it take to be a phallus. Everyone knows of Bertrand Russell’s CCNY trial where he was removed because of “uncivil” writings. We’d like to agree (I assume) that such discourse isn’t dickish. So what is the standard? Is it simply the vibrations of molecules in the air? The volume and tone of voice? (The bullshit cop-out of unidentified people yelling in unidentified others’ faces. In fact, in face to face meetings, I rather think the tone is dependent on the experience of the debater and largely independent on what stand they take). Is it an absence of ad hominems? Or is it a refusal to broach cherished beliefs?

    Again, I wouldn’t have to ask so many hypotheticals if we had something more to work with in terms concrete dickishness. But alas, outside of the blogosphere, such examples are about as real as fairies at the bottom of the well. (That’s of course hyperbole, just turn on Bill O’Reilly. But it is a real stretch to say that challenging the compatibility of theology and the scientific method or arguing against religion is more dickish than any other debate resolution.)

    • @JJE”explicit vignettes of behavior that are both common and dickish would be extremely illuminating”

      ok Let me have a go at this.
      But first let me say that, as I understand it, “dick” is a relatively mild insult, more akin to smug pretensiousness than malice, and to claim that in a certain act someone is “being” a dick does not have the same permanence or weight as saying that they “are” a dick.

      Also, I find it hard to believe that anyone who argues about anything can avoid sometimes being a dick. So the named examples below shouldn’t be taken as particularly damning – they are just being used because they are people we all know.

      One kind of what I would call dickishness is deliberately using a “straw man” or other invalid device – especially when tied to some form of mockery. So in my opinion when Jerry Coyne mocked a misstatement of what Michael Graziano said he was being a dick.

      Another kind is the “ad hominem”, so when PZMeyers started a critique of an article by Harriet Bieber with a gratuitous sneer against philosophers he too was being a dick.

      And using pejorative terms that are ambiguous and inclined to be inflammatory is another example, so when Phil Plait used the phrase “being a dick” to describe such behaviour, he too was being a dick.

      The only problem with being a dick is that it often doesn’t work very well. I’m sorry I don’t have a published research study to back this up, but I do know (from doing it a lot) that when I am a dick it usually doesn’t work, and (from getting it a bit) that when people do it to me it I don’t *let* it work.

      I think the most telling case for this was made (perhaps inadvertently) in an earlier comment:
      @brian”The DBAD tone trolls are telling us that they have the best strategy for influencing people. Their argument would be more compelling if they weren’t so pretentious and unlikeable….” – or in other words *if they weren’t being dicks* – EXACTLY! So the fact that DBAD may have gone “off the rails” as an argument is actually a proof of its thesis.

      • J.J.E. J.J.E.

        As far as this goes, I agree to some degree, though if someone were to claim that this is an especially important property of those who criticize theism, I would call bullshit. For the rest of this comment, I will restrict myself to the assumption that being “dickish” isn’t effective and is actually undesirable. This concession is arguable.

        The fact is that activist movements of all stripes (good, evil, effective, impotent, modern, ancient) are prone to such so-called “dickish” behavior. And it is the precious rare individual who can communicate a fundamentally revolutionary idea that challenges people’s cherished ideas with minimal dickish behavior towards those he/she disagrees with (this is why streets are named MLK as he was a remarkable individual).

        It is entirely unremarkable, indeed highly predictable, that strenuous disagreement will exist in activist movements and that some of it will be channeled into “dickish” rhetoric. So, in general, the dickishness of “New Atheists” it is entirely within the bounds of human nature, and is barely remarkable. However, the criticisms of atheists seem to be consist of a particularly high proportion of such anti-dick arguments. It is a rare day indeed when I hear of some other group being accused of being too dickish in their activism.

        So what is it? Is the atheist “movement” doing so well that the only criticisms remaining are those of tone? Or is it that we really oughta be asking ALL activists to stop being dicks? Is it something wrong with the atheist “movement” itself?

        Or perhaps is it that this emphasis about tone is due to a deeply ingrained cultural taboo about criticizing religion at all? Is it so potent a taboo that the discomfort in hearing criticism of religion can only be salved by using the most indirect and excessively polite delivery that disguises the point of the criticism in the first place? And why is the relatively trite criticism of religion leveled by everyone in the 20th and 21st centuries deserve so much attention? Surely by the time Bertrand Russell was getting booted from CCNY, intellectuals could already find almost every iteration of religious criticism used by him and subsequent authors in books dating from the 18th century and before?

        Really, what is it that makes this such a big freaking deal? I think it is because criticizing religion is taboo. And even those who are atheists (like John) and agnostics (like John) are highly trained to avoid violating the taboo. When I rhetorically slam any topic, I feel small pangs of “outsiderness” just for the sheer act of criticizing somebody. That’s natural, but I get over it. However, when I even mildly speak up about something obvious, like the unreliability of scripture, or the implausibility of articles of faith, I feel like I’m running around yelling the N-word or the C-word. That taboo is very powerful, and I suspect very strongly that the objections to dickishness isn’t as a result of true concern for the strategic consequences of tone. I think it is our internalized acceptance of the taboo of religious criticism making itself known.

      • J.J.E. J.J.E.

        And in fairness, thanks for providing examples. I didn’t emphasize this, but I agree that they are good examples. What they do practically for my side of the argument however, isn’t to refute an absence of dickishness (as clearly dickishness exists) but to make it quantifiable. My point is that as soon as someone makes particular instances of dickishness concrete, they go from being potentially unacceptable in any circumstance (yelling in people’s faces) to quite pedestrian (the examples you gave).

        This is why people are asking for examples. Is dickishness the real problem here? Is it particularly unique or particularly bad for atheists? Or is the real issue a reluctance to violate taboos?

      • brian brian

        Allow me to clarify my statement. In my experience, people do not generally get offended over process/tone. They *actually* get offended by content/disagreement, of which the most extreme is censorship. I perceive the DBAD crowd as offensive because their argument pretentiously declares a wide swath of others’ discourse harmful for its tone alone, and tells others to talk as they do. Similarly, Christians sweetly telling me “God’s opinion, not my opinion,” or about how humble they are while adhering to Christian theology (something virtually impossible in my opinion) come across rather more poorly than buffoons with confederate flags on their trucks.

        My message to most people of the world is that the central tenets of their philosophy are bullshit, their tithes made the world a worse place, their dead relatives/pets are gone, they have no chance at eternal life,good deeds done when no one was looking are unnoticed and will be uncompensated, there is no higher purpose to their mild suffering nor the extreme suffering undergone throughout history…the list goes on and on. If this doesn’t cause offense to the average human being no matter how nicely I say it, they probably aren’t paying attention. My tone will not affect most people’s level of offense.

        The last thing I need to do is futilely limit my rhetorical arsenal, waste my energy censoring/censuring like minded people, and losing my status as a normal/potentially worth listening to human being by becoming “that guy”. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=that+guy

        Tone trolls aren’t being “dicks”. They’re being “that guy”.

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