Though I rarely have time, I occasionally check out what’s being produced in atheism. And thus I went on a binge of Noel Plum videos recently. My entryway was researching what happened to The Atheist Conference, which collapsed almost as soon as its planning began, and whose promoters weirdly slagged off MythCon while simultaneously claiming to do exactly what MythCon was doing: promoting civil dialog among divided atheists along the socio-political spectrum. Plum has two useful videos on the debacle (I recommend watching the second, Atheist Wars; and then going to the first, Worse Than Kilroy, only if you want to dive deeper). I then watched a random sample of his other stuff.
He’s a bit shouty, which is hard to keep listening to for hours on end on long drives. But otherwise I like a lot of his stuff; and his avowed critical approach to things. He sometimes sounds a bit like a social conservative (in the European sense), but really he’s more like a liberal critic of the far left. I agree with him sometimes. And I disagree with him other times. But I’m also okay with listening to reasonable people I disagree with, even when they drop the evidence ball really badly (though I very much prefer when they don’t). But as I went through cataloguing the difference between his good arguments and bad, I noticed something. A rather consistent thing kept happening.
When Plum cites evidence, and specific actual examples, he tends to be right—or at least make a worthy point; when he just makes abstract assertions and generalizations and doesn’t present any data or real examples, he tends to be wrong. And I realized…this explains a lot of things that have happened over the last half decade of movement atheism.
Trolls & Demagogues vs. The Merely Wrong
Plenty of folk who voice bizarre or implausible or outdated beliefs, when they do “cite” evidence in support of their arguments, it’s typically cherry picked, or made-up, or massaged, or there is some fallacious disconnect between what they claim as evidence and the conclusion they want to reach. These are fraudulent reasoners. And fraudulent reasoners are immune to evidence. I believe each side of any political or values debate in atheism—both conservative and liberal—mistakenly assumes everyone on the other side is a fraudulent reasoner. Because they encounter so many who are, and too often when they encounter those who aren’t, those who aren’t still fail to correctly attend to evidence, the one thing that would correct them if they were a good reasoner, because everyone is fallible, and unconsciously subject to prejudice and bias…while fraudulent reasoners will never be corrected in this, because they have no intention of actually formulating sound arguments; they will simply invent endless excuses to ignore the evidence. Which looks very similar. So uncharitably, everyone assumes they are the same. This makes it difficult for either side to listen to and learn from the other. And that creates tribalism and division.
A good example in Plum’s case is his video Want Sports Gender Equality? Stop Whining and Do Something. Eyerollingly ridiculous, and in result, inadvertently sexist. Notably, he never cites any examples of anyone ever saying the thing he is criticizing. So what happens? Immediately he goes off the rails of reality. He instead attacks some sort of fictional feminist he invented in his head. Had he actually done research on this, and committed to the first rule of good reasoning—never criticize fictional people; always give a real example of the real person whose arguments or claims you are challenging—he would have produced a much more useful and correct piece of criticism.
But even that would only be half good. It would have been really good, if he committed to the second rule of good reasoning—don’t just pick the idiot in the room; make sure you steel man the opposition, by finding its best representative, not its worst. It can be fun, and useful, to pick on the idiot. Quality entertainment. And educational. But if you don’t mention the better opposition (at least to acknowledge it, if you aren’t going to voice any criticism of it), you will come across as someone who thinks the idiot is the best opponent you could have taken on. Which doesn’t make you look great. People will read your having done that as disingenuous. They will categorize you as a fraudulent reasoner. When really, you just screwed up. You let your biases run that episode. Rather than applying your own avowed principles to every show you do.
Apart from village idiots, amateur activists and internet fools—and not, for example in this case, the actual athletes in question or a professional journalist or analyst—no one has ever said all women in sports should always get paid the same as men regardless of associated revenue. In some cases revenue isn’t even relevant (e.g. national Olympics teams do not exist to earn revenue). But when it is—free market commercial sports—disparities aren’t all explained by revenue. The gender pay gap in sports has actually narrowed a lot in the last ten years (most reports show it went from achieving effective equity in about 20% of all sports to now over 80% of them), but in many cases it remains in defiance of any proportion to revenue. If one team brings in the same revenue as another, those teams should be paid the same. But sometimes that isn’t happening. And that’s what angers people. People who know what they’re talking about.
For example, in America women’s soccer is more successful than men’s (and by literally every measure now). Yet women players are paid a mere fraction as much (or were: a lawsuit just ended in a negotiated settlement of equitable pay). See this article in Forbes. And this article in Bloomberg Business. And certainly this article in The New York Times. (Those right there? The kind of things Plum could have read had he followed the rule of never arguing in the absence of evidence: always check first). Even the WNBA, which obviously earns vastly less than the NBA (so we certainly shouldn’t expect equal pay by gender there, any more than we’d expect bottom ranking men’s teams to earn as much as top), is still not at parity in pay even in proportion to revenue: NBA payroll is 50% of its revenue; WNBA payroll is 33%. That raises some eyebrows.
Audience bias is also a thing (there isn’t any objectively coherent reason we should be so much more interested in men’s competitions than women’s), though that’s only curable culturally (audience interests would have to change). But endorsements can also be gender biased—from direct corporate bias (e.g. marketing departments simply assuming female athletic endorsers don’t appeal to the market, even when that actually hasn’t been demonstrated), and from bias in media coverage underplaying women (e.g. shows and magazines will under-cover women relative to men, thus making them less attractive as product endorsers). Not all that disparity is bias—much of it is simply in expected proportion to audience and revenue. But some of it is bias. Reality is complicated that way. And reasoners who attend to evidence before making arguments, tend to figure that out. And after they keep finding that out a lot, they become humbled by it.
But on top of all that: look at what the Women’s Sporting Foundation is asking for…
- Attend women’s sporting events
- Support companies that advocate for women’s athletics
- Encourage television stations and newspapers to cover women’s sports
- Sign up to coach a girls’ sports team, whether at the recreational or high school level
- Encourage young women to participate in sports
- Become an advocate: if you are or know a female athlete that is being discriminated against—advocate for her rights.
Notice what’s not on the list: asking for equal pay regardless of revenue draw (there is now a similar discussion of sexism as a problem in eSports). They well know the gap is more a product of women being ignored, than of their being paid inequitably (even though there is evidence many still are, hence the points above; although note: progress on that score has also been moving fast). It makes no logical sense, for example, to say women aren’t as strong as men, ergo they should be paid less, because that actually isn’t how sports enthusiasm is measured. When women are competing with women, the only game on is strength-equal. And trust me, women’s hockey is just as exciting as men’s. You wouldn’t even notice a difference, if no one told you which you were watching.
Plum’s argument is thus just as illogical. Women are accomplishing quite a lot. They are exceptional athletes, putting on amazing performances, and filling seats. So they aren’t filling fewer seats because they suck. They are filling fewer seats, because we suck. We aren’t paying them the kudos and fandom they are due. We should get over our biases, and realize it’s as much fun watching women play, as men. So then women can finally have as many opportunities to excel at sport as men do. But you can’t legislate that. It’s just a matter of asking people to think about it; until enough generations absorb the message.
So Plum completely hosed this one, because he didn’t base anything he said on any evidence. He argued against no actual opponent, and checked no facts. And in the absence of facts as a corrective, all that came out of his mouth was bias. The same sexist bias most people have, no matter how much they insist they don’t. But that doesn’t make him a demagogue or a troll. He’s not a fraudulent reasoner. Nor is he a Nazi or a sexist pig. He’s just wrong.
Contrast that with Plum’s treatment of a fallacious argument made by feminist Steve Shives, in Peak Tinfoil Hat. Here Plum is criticizing not just a specific real world example of something an actual feminist said (and not some rando, either, but an influential voice in movement atheism)—which is already looking like we’re on track for something actually good for a change—but he focuses on an argument that actually appears disturbingly often in feminist circles. So it’s not a straw man. It’s not a steel man, either. But rather a solid example of something that happens a lot. Not all feminists are this uncritical. But enough of them are, that Plum has a point to make that’s worth hearing.
In this video, Plum catches Shives arguing as an example of sexism, something that happened that actually has well known explanations other than sexism, and Shives did nothing to rule those out, before jumping straight to an assumption about cause, without evidence for his assumption. Shives is no different than Plum. He’s not a fraudulent reasoner. He just screwed this up. He’s just wrong. Just like Plum is from time to time. But I expect neither will ever listen to the other, because they each think the other is a fraud. So nothing gets learned. And nothing gets better.
In this case, Shives reports a single instance of a single professional email sent by a woman, that when followed up by a man got a reply. This could have happened even had she sent the follow-up. So we can’t actually tell the correlation is causation here. (Remember that lesson? Correlation is not causation? You have many more methodological hoops to jump through before you can confirm a correlation indicates a cause. Science is all about that.) Plum covers every angle of this. And he’s completely right. Shives hosed this. In fact, Shives hosed it twice—because it sounds weirdly similar to another case in the media around the same time, in which steps were taken to confirm the correlation was likely causal. It certainly seems odd to me that with a really good example floating around, almost identical to the one Shives used, that he would instead use this totally dismal example, that’s easily destroyed with a minute of common sense. Evidently, like Plum above, Shives didn’t do any research either. They’re pretty much the same dude. Just on opposite ends.
That good example? The office experiment run by Martin Schneider and Nicole Hallberg. They switched email signatures, each pretending to be the other, and compared productivity results and client behavior over a whole week, with prior weeks. The result was pretty damning. Clients were treating the woman like shit and forcing her to spend more time and do more work. Even when she wasn’t actually a woman. They only thought she was. Had Shives used that example (or…correctly described it, if in fact he was at the wrong end of a telephone game on this one), Plum would not have needed to make any video about it.
Of course, we well know, that the most pernicious thing about unconscious bias, is that targets of that bias can’t tell when things are going against them for other reasons, or because of sexism or racism, or any other axis of prejudice. To find out, you have to run controlled tests, like what Schneider and Hallberg did. And indeed, even formal scientific tests have verified biases exist, along many axes of targeted discrimination, and usually unconsciously (the people acting with the observed bias, are not even aware of it). But those same studies have also found that the same actions (e.g. not hiring or promoting someone; treating someone with more distrust; etc.) are also often caused by reasons having nothing to do with bias. And because both look identical, you can’t tell them apart. Not individually. You can only tell something is going on by looking at actions in aggregate. And even that won’t tell you which acts were a result of bias. Only that some percentage of them were. Frustrating, I know. Imagine that. You know you are being discriminated against, but never know who is doing it or when. Get Out made a horror story out of that.
So critics of feminism can be disastrously wrong…and feminists can be disastrously wrong—and their critics entirely right to point that out. Feminists need to reason better, to persuade anyone they’re right. So they should be listening to critics, precisely so they can up their game. Feminists shouldn’t want bad reasoning or backfiring rhetoric in their ranks any more than any other advocacy movement would.
If only they’d listen to each other.
And that pattern plays out the whole way through. Plum does logic way better than Shives. He just doesn’t always do evidence better than Shives. Plum often gets things right—just look at his latest video on Social Justice, where evidence isn’t important, he’s just exploring conceptual space and explaining his values and policy goals; or his exposing the egregious misrepresentation of Steven Pinker by P.Z. Myers (where Plum’s evidence is extensive, and his conclusion a slam-dunk); or this video on the gender pay gap, where even if you disagree with his conclusions as to policy, as to facts he makes well-sourced points that certainly any social justice advocate needs to take seriously and think about. But often he gets things wrong. And I find the frequency of his getting things wrong, corresponds to the frequency with which he fails to bring in actual specific evidence. Which means even a good reasoner, with good values, can be wrong. And that might even be you.
Appreciating that is key to making civil engagement possible.
Replacing Listening with Hysteria, Nukes All Progress
Okay. So both sides suck. They both don’t listen when they should. They both over-rely on fantasies. They both vilify critics rather than learn from them. They both use fallacies. They both forget to fact-check. They both forget to base arguments on real examples; and to steel-man instead of straw-man. They both lose track of nuance and complexity. They are pretty much the same people. It’s that horseshoe all over again. They just root themselves in competing dogmas. Which neither will allow to be questioned. Of course #NotAllOfThem. But enough on both sides to be a problem. And usually the loudest, thus drowning out any reasonable voice—in fact, all to often turning on any reasonable voice as a traitor, burning bridges to allies left and right. Both sides have done this.
See The Left and Anti-Left Both Have Much Still to Learn.
But I also wrote about this last year in Why Mythicist Milwaukee Is Right and Their Critics Wrong:
What I actually said years ago about Atheism Plus, for example, does not match what any of my critics said I had said. Just see for yourself: actually watch my video on the subject and try to find any objectionable thing in it; look at my Sobrado interview (an Atheism Plus critic who—shock!—actually tried discussing it with me); even my own repeated efforts to make clear what I said—all ignored. The term was instead hijacked by opponents into something it wasn’t until it became useless.
…
Atheism Plus in its original form was falsely attacked as promoting a feminist purist extremism when in fact it wasn’t; it was only after that false attack rendered it a useless term that some of its advocates became those very feminist purist extremists, thus destroying the entire enterprise by turning it into what its enemies accused it of being. Consequently, I abandoned it as betrayed and dead. I now just stick with saying we need to be atheists, skeptics, and humanists, and to share the common values of compassion, honesty, and reasonableness. Which is what it was originally supposed to be about. This avoids the “baggage fallacy” of assuming I mean things I don’t. But honestly, I shouldn’t have to do that. I should be able to be listened to and believed to think only things I’ve actually said. And all should be ashamed who didn’t pay me that courtesy.
Noel Plum does this in a recent video: PZ Myers, Winters, and Logan. Watch where he brings up my original Atheism Plus blog post (all the way back in 2012), at timestamp 15:34. He shows it and quotes it to make a point about how, he claims, I had called for an unbridgeable divide between moderate/conservative and liberal atheists…but at the crucial point where he says what the sentence he quotes was about…Plum drops his methodology of basing his claims on specific actual facts, and just inserts his own words. Based on no evidence whatever. At the very moment he stops relying on evidence for his views, he gets reality entirely wrong. Funny that. Hm. Maybe we should only base our opinions on, like, evidence? And maybe, given that—I don’t know, but maybe, just maybe—we should actually go check what the evidence is first…and then (!) change our views when we find the evidence doesn’t align with what we thought.
So Plum uses exact quotes, even shows my words, about expelling and denouncing horrible people, and then just adds what isn’t there, his own comment, “Bear in mind, he’s talking about what clearly turned out to be the great majority of our community here, including myself, not some fringe group of sociopaths.” Um. No, Noel. That wasn’t about you. Or anyone like you. And you’d know that, if you’d first stop and ask yourself: Wait, who was Richard Carrier talking about there? And your often strong standard of presenting evidence—like, exact quotes of me, for example—would have served you well here. So why did you drop that ball at this point? Strange.
Notice the screencap Plum shows: he highlights the words of mine he quotes, but leaves unhighlighted the first parenthesis of the first sentence: “(I mean people like these and these).” Why didn’t Plum click through to see who “these” and “these” are? Why didn’t he tell his audience who I actually outright said I was talking about? Because he replaced his usual drive to find evidence and base claims on specific actual facts, with his own mythology and ideology. And didn’t even notice he did that. Just like all the feminists he criticizes. He did the exact same thing he complains they do.
And this is the point of my distinction earlier. Do I think Plum is a liar? Is he a fraudulent reasoner, who knows darned well what’s behind those two links, but is deliberately hiding it and lying about it instead? No. For some folks, I have enough evidence to say it’s yes. But in Plum’s case it’s the other way around. I think Noel is a totally sincere guy. Indeed, from his many other videos, even the ones I disagree with, I can confirm he’s overall a fairly reasonable guy. He’s someone who will listen to evidence more often than not; who will have a civil discussion when asked to. He makes mistakes, he is wrong about things, he has biases (like maybe a bit of sexism) that he is shielding himself against realizing the same way most people do. In other words, he’s not evil. He’s just wrong. He screwed up.
What’s behind those links, BTW? Accounts of atheists joking about raping a teenager in her own online thread about getting a Dawkins book as a gift. Atheists calling women cunts to their face. An atheist who compared one woman’s civil criticism of Dawkins to “child abuse” and published “graphic pictures of abused children to prove his point,” then engaged in wanton defamation, asked people to harass her on social media, and joked about how she can’t complain about strange men hitting on her in confined spaces because she shows cleavage. Remember your remark about sociopaths, Noel? Yeah. That’s who I was talking about.
But tons of people didn’t listen. They just jumped to the weird conclusion Noel did, based on no evidence whatever. And despite my making extensive efforts to correct the myths they kept spreading, with detailed explanations of what I did and didn’t mean (like here and here), all was ignored. No one listened. Noel, if you are frustrated that we don’t listen to you; well, we are frustrated that you don’t listen to us.
It took me a while in fact to even realize this was going on. When people started flaming me out for that post, because it was about sociopaths doing horrible things to people, I assumed that’s what they were defending. So I flamed out on them. Why on earth would it have occurred to me that anyone would think I was attacking libertarians or conservatives or centrists or egalitarians or anyone other than people who outright abandon respect for women, gays, and minorities, people who denounce humanism, and joke about raping a woman to her face? Once I realized we had been talking past each other for days, I apologized, and tried correcting the miscommunication. But by then, no one listened. Because not listening is what most people do. And that’s the problem. Plum is guilty of it. Shives is guilty of it. I used to do it too. I’m done with that now. And so should you be. Good skeptics listen. And ask. And engage civil discourse, not avoid it.
The Harris Example
It all reminds me of a conversation I actually had recently about a speech recorded by Sam Harris, his podcasted statement about Lawrence Krauss. Which was actually surprisingly sensible and nuanced. I often don’t agree with Harris. In fact, I’m a pretty harsh critic of the man’s ideas (as people know even by a recent example). I usually find his reasoning sloppy and terrible, and I think he suffers from some sexist and racist bias. Not as much as many of his critics do, but still; I’m no Harris fanboy, is what I’m saying. This podcast? Exactly the sort of thing I expected him to get face-palmingly wrong. So that he nailed it was a surprise.
A feminist man I encountered had a different take. Our conversation went something like this (paraphrasing):
Them: What Harris said on the Krauss matter was disgusting and sexist, all rape apologetics.
Me: Really? That’s a baffling comment. I watched it. It seemed very sensible to me.
Them: You must be a sexist pig then.
[Degenerated into an angry exchange until…]
Me: Wait a minute. All this time, and…hold on…what do you think Harris argued??
Them: He said all accusations of sexual harassment were just women who didn’t like ugly men hitting on them, but who’d totally be into it if the same guy were good looking.
Me: Um. That’s not what Harris said. At all.
Them: Yes it is.
Me: No it isn’t.
[Degenerated into an angry exchange until…]
Me: Look, Harris spent practically ten minutes walking through numerous, and I mean numerous, levels of a whole spectrum of sexual harassment realities, from Weinstein abuse on the top, through progressively less egregious but still bad behavior, all the way down to what Harris was saying was on the complete bottom of possible examples, the least of offenses imaginable, which would be when (and this really does happen sometimes), a woman reacts negatively to a flirtatious comment from someone she finds unattractive, when she would have reacted positively to the exact same comment if he were handsome. Harris specifically said that that was on the bottom of the scale, as an example of the least concerning event; he never said that was a large proportion or even beyond a negligible example of what does happen. He was specifically looking for what would be the weakest kind of occurrence imaginable, and then describing it. He was not saying any occurrences are that weakest kind (nor even that any of the incidents with Krauss were). He was simply describing a scale of possible things that can happen, and saying we should investigate to make sure we know where on the scale a given incident lies, and proportion our response accordingly. A perfectly sensible point to make, and surprisingly detailed and clear in its structure and logic.
Them: Well that’s not what I heard.
Me: Maybe you should actually listen to the recording this time. Actually listen. Try to get right what he said from now on. Don’t go spreading around the myth that Harris said all sexual harassment claims were just the idle complaints of unflattered women. He never said that.
[Dude leaves and never talks to me again.]
This is exactly the same thing that happened to me when I was attacked for what I said about Atheism Plus. At first I thought my attackers were defending actual rape threats and harassment campaigns and things like explicit homophobia and transphobia and blatant racism (indeed, atheists had just recently mocked a fellow blogger as a ‘coal burner’ because she had a black boyfriend…they were fucking defending that, I was thinking?). Because that’s what I was talking about. I never said anything about denouncing mere critics of feminism, for example. It took me almost a day or more to finally figure out they thought I’d said something completely different. Since I had never said such a thing, it remains baffling. Hence why it took so long for me to figure out they had gone so irrationally off the rails of reading into what I said things that I never said.
I then published a clarification, and apologized for my excessive reactions to them, because all along I had mistook them as defending sociopaths. But once I cleared that misunderstanding, no one ever listened, or even knew that it had been corrected. Every “Them” in that conversation just kept going on spreading the myth. Even after it was debunked. And it remains the mythology to this day—confused, like Jesus, for fact. Notice, that’s how anti-feminists treated me. It’s exactly the same way that that feminist treated me in the conversation about Harris: he completely fails to get correct what Harris said, and absolutely refused to ever be corrected on it. They are probably to this day still spreading the myth that Harris said all sexual harassment claims are just unflattered women who’d have “totally gone for it had he been hot.”
Both sides. Same people.
Modeling a Rational Conversation
Here is how a rational conversation would have gone:
Them: It’s unclear who you mean. Who are you condemning?
Me: [Answers the question. And now they know]
That’s it. Pretty simple, right?
So why isn’t that what anyone does?
Many other questions could have evoked valuable and productive communication and understanding like:
- It’s unclear. Do you mean just anyone who criticizes feminism?
- It’s unclear. Do you mean anyone who won’t label themselves a feminist?
- It’s unclear. Do you mean people who disagree with feminists?
- It’s unclear. Do you mean we have to see sexism everywhere or only just admit it’s out there?
- It’s unclear. Do you mean we have to agree to certain legislative solutions or affirmative action or something?
Almost no one asked those questions. And those few who did, the only people who actually engaged with me sincerely, and thus found out—like Tony Sobrado—no one paid attention to.
Let’s stop doing that.
Model in your head what a rational conversation looks like. Then please try sticking to that model in the future.
What It Was Supposed to Be
Atheists need to have values and not be sociopaths. They need to be better than theists, not worse. That should not be a controversial thing to say. Right?
Atheists also need to be good skeptics. That means critical thinking about ourselves as well as woo, supernaturalism, and religions, and also politics and policies, ideologies and popular beliefs, science, pseudoscience, everything. That should not be a controversial thing to say. Right?
And of course atheists need to just be atheists.
Yes, P.Z. Myers is an idiot for trying to argue atheism “is” more than just unbelief in gods—because the argument is supposed to be that atheists need to be more than just atheists, not that atheism is itself already that. We need to exclude wooish charlatans who are atheists, anti-science atheists, pseudoscientific atheists, supernaturalist atheists, flat earth atheists, though we needn’t ban them, but we’re certainly going to roast them with criticism. Meanwhile, atheists who are members of the Nazi party or the KKK, who send rape or death threats, who engage in criminal activity, violate civil and human rights, and create a toxic waste dump of any community they enter, those folks have to go. The first group of people aren’t getting the message of evidence-based reasoning, and we are just always going to make fun of them, and criticize them as wrong, and rightly. The second, is simply abhorrent.
That shouldn’t be controversial. And indeed we pretty much have always agreed that was the case. There wasn’t any rift over that, as if a horde of anti-vaccination atheists were outraged we didn’t want them in our movement, that we were very much going to be criticizing and making fun of them as part of the problem that we, as organized atheists, were trying to overcome in society, every bit as much as religion. Atheists of all political and social positions agreed: the anti-vaxxers are a joke and do not represent what we want the atheism movement to be and be known for. Likewise people who mocked gay and trans people rather than engaged with those communities respectfully and critically. Likewise people who defended rape as something various women deserved.
It’s obvious most of the time. There is a reason Moby was not invited to the Reason Rally despite him being an atheist and a lot of atheists recommending him: he is a Scientologist. Sorry, we don’t want Scientologists in our movement. Which does not mean we wouldn’t have debates or interfaith conversations with them at conferences, or that we wouldn’t be civil to them, but it would always be with the understanding that they are the outsiders and not what we want normed in our movement. Those conversations, even on stage, would always be about why we don’t want them running our organizations, dictating their policy, or commanding or populating our conferences, meetups, and events.
Now carry the same point to human values.
So it’s not that we want atheism (as a concept or a description) to be defined as “skeptical, critical, scientific, empiricist, rationalist, and humanist.” That would be stupid. Like insisting democracy be “defined” only as mob rule, so that we can say no democracy exists today, because we are now defining-out-of-existence constitutional, rights-bounded, representative democracy. No. What we mean is, we don’t want our organizations controlled by Scientologists, or anti-vaxxers, or ethno-statists; we don’t want meetups and conferences in our movement promoting woo or villainy, or accepting the idea of calling women “coal burner” or “cunt.”
We don’t want anti-scientism or explicit defenses of fascism or genocide or apartheid in our movement. These should not be controversial things to say. Just as we don’t want a democracy anymore that is a mob rule, because we know now why we need democracy bounded by constitutional rights and run by dedicated experienced personnel whom we elect (which really means democratically hire) to represent us and write and vet our legislation and bylaws. That does not mean we want the word “democracy” redefined. It means we want democracy to be more than merely democracy. And we want that because we believe in rational, evidence-based reasoning, and in structuring democracy as a movement on the learned facts of history. So, too, atheism as a movement. It’s no good by itself, any more than mob rule is. Despite being nevertheless the dictionary definition of democracy, mob rule is dangerous and shitty. Hence it is democracy, yet still not enough by itself. We have learned by how that it needs to be more than that. It needs to be bounded by constitutional rights and experience-based governance.
This should allow lots of room for differences and debate. Republicans and Democrats, Libertarians and straight-up Marxists, should be able to compromise and get along and debate with civility and still work together to better our country, even while disagreeing and never yielding on some things. This is just as true in Congress as much as anywhere else. Hence all such people should be able to get along at conferences. Simply by sharing basic human values, and thus always enacting a civil engagement. And organizations should help all of them (Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Marxists, Whoever) in matters relevant to atheism (such as atheist rights, atheist interests, and atheist welfare and community, or whatever their mission).
But that does not mean Democrats should compromise with the KKK or Stormfront, or Republicans compromise with Antifa or Ecoterrorists. The “big tent” cannot include them. And even that does not mean dehumanizing or killing them, or stripping them of their rights, or sending them rape threats. Atheists can express any hatred of them they have and ridicule them and criticize them and exclude them from conferences and organizations, yet at the same time fully stand by the fact that they still get all their human and civil rights. We should even defend every last one of their rights, even as we loathe and denounce what they do with them—calling for it to be otherwise, is exactly the kind of criminal and nightmarish thinking the atheist community should stand against. But we should also be against equating “being a Republican” with “being a member of the KKK” and against equating “supporting BLM” with “supporting terrorism.” Do you get that? Or do I honestly have to explain this further?
Let’s Progress From Here
Acknowledging that sexism is sometimes a problem in the atheist community is simply evidence-based reasoning. And yet at the very same time assuming everything you think is sexism is sexism is still just as wrong as thinking nothing is. Both extremes are false. Both are divorced from reality. Both are a complete failure of competent skeptical reasoning.
Debating what is or might be sexist, and what is reasonable to do about it, should still be possible, and not only possible, but valued, and pursued as valuable, by every atheist who wants to be a part of organized or movement atheism. The assumption that we must either defend, platform, and embrace explicit misogynists like Stefan Molyneux or else ban anyone who refuses to call themselves a feminist or doesn’t agree with every single thing any feminist says—as if those were the only options and you had to pick a side between them—is fucking absurd. It’s the very irrationality I was against in everything I wrote about Atheism Plus.
And do note: this was an irrationality manifest on both sides. And still is. Too many atheist feminists absurdly think we must ban anyone who so much as disagrees with anything they say or any judgment they make. Likewise too many atheist non-feminists absurdly think I ever said we must ban anyone who so much as disagrees with anything feminists say or any judgment feminists make. Both sides have lost the capacity for civil discourse, civil disagreement, and honest and considerate discussions of logic and evidence. That is the world now that both have wrought. And that is why atheism is collapsing as a movement, and more or less just aging out into oblivion. If you think that’s the path to progress, you have a bizarre notion of progress.
As good humanists and skeptics, atheists need to start caring more about knowing—and understanding—why each of these disagreements exist in the community, than about just skipping that part and punishing those disagreements with coercive puritanism. And yes, the non-feminists are doing this too. Just as much as the feminists are. This myth about what I said about Atheism Plus is an example. But their campaigns of abusive harassment that led to my vitriol were real too. And continued thereafter. Now the feminists are using the same vile tactics—using lies and threats, for example, to shut down venues, and using coercion to compel people to agree with them, and campaigns of harassment, and every other like tactic. They’ve become their own enemy. Both sides ought to be wringing their hands about this. They ought to be speaking out against the abuses coming from their own side. Not just the abuses coming at them from the other.
That’s the atheism movement we all need to be working toward and advocating the embrace of. You all have that responsibility now. Stop complaining about the other side, unless you are also cleaning up your own. And take seriously this task: to learn what civil and productive discourse actually means, and what it actually looks like. Then embody it.
The right and the left nuked Atheism Plus. The right by not listening to what it was actually about, and not participating productively in its evolution and improvement. The left by becoming the divisive, puritanical bludgeoners the right had feared. They both destroyed a very basic idea: that we should all agree on the core values of reasonableness, compassion, and honesty, and be good skeptics and humanists as well as atheists. The left abandoned those ideals. The right never heard they were on offer.
on the sports topic, you don’t factor in the ability of the men and the ability of the women at the sport, a wnba team would lose to some high school teams. It makes sense that an audience would like to watch athletes with more ability than athletes with less ability. As you point out in professional sports better teams often make more revenue than worse teams.
saying you personally find it just as entertaining is anecdotal nonsense, that irrelevant.
As for mens soccer team vs womens soccer team. The men get paid higher at their pro teams than women so it makes sense for the usa team to pay the men a salary that is competitive with their pro team salary.
women soccer players make less at their pro teams so their salary doesn’t have to be as high as mens team.
That’s not true though.
Like I said, if I didn’t tell you and could prevent any indications tipping you off, you would never notice the difference between a men’s game and a woman’s.
Which is why indeed so many people watch high school and college basketball! And minor league sports. And so on.
It’s not as if because their local team or college team couldn’t beat a top pro team, that the seats then all end up empty and no one cares anymore.
That’s literally not how it works. So your theory is illogical.
And there is no logic in saying women are paid less in soccer because women are paid less in soccer. Payroll should be the same percentage of revenue. There is the same competition for positions, proportional to the revenue base. It’s illogical to say that because male teams bring in less money–e.g. last year they made no profit and lost a million dollars, while women’s soccer turned a five million profit–therefore teams should pay more for male players. That’s ass backwards. Clearly they are paying too much for the men, because quality is declining. So should pay.
Loved the article, hope it leads to lots of productive discussions between reasonable people on both sides.
I respectfully disagree with your point on not being able to tell the difference between a men’s game and a women’s game, in any sport. I know barely anything about hockey, so I would not dare to challenge you on this particular point.
I would however argue that there are several sports where rules, combined with gender differences, generate noticeable disparities in the success rates/spreading of different styles of play/strategies between men and women. And as different styles of play can be more or less appealing to the spectator, this can skew his viewing habits in favor of one or the other, to the point where one barely watches one while extensively watching the other.
My example would be tennis, which I know quite well and is dear to my heart, and comparing men’s singles and women’s singles :
* Gender differences imply a deficit in power for women, making the ball travel the court at a substantially slower pace.
* Court dimensions are the same for both.
* Players typically run relatively small distances, so that agility can counter-balance raw athletic capabilities, thus not giving men a big edge on women regarding the amount of time it takes to get to the ball.
As a result, there is generally way better court coverage in a women’s game, because they have more time in average to reach the ball, and there is no other aspect that would compensate enough for that. Hence playing offensive is harder in the women’s game, and therefore rallies are longer, and female players with an offensive style of play experience more struggle to thrive at the top level than their male counterparts.
For similar reasons, serve is less of an advantage as well, which also increases the average rally length and makes breaking the opponent’s serve more frequent.
Now, what appeals to me most when watching tennis is offensive play and short rallies. Therefore, while I highly enjoy watching female players such as Navratilova, Mauresmo, Sharapova, Henin, and the Williams sisters, to name a few, the fact remains that in the current era of tennis 95% of top 100 male match-ups are more appealing to me than 95% of top 100 female match-ups.
Still not saying that this accounts for everything, of course, especially since one could well be skewed one way or another depending on one’s style of play preference, for the same reasons.
That’s all true but not relevant to anything I actually said.
(For some reason, I can’t reply to your answer. So I’ll just a put a comment under mine.)
Wow, look at me providing you with another example of conflating 2 sentences you said and attributing a point to you that you didn’t make.
Indeed, having read again, I clearly realize your point was that one couldn’t tell the difference between a men’s game and a women’s game in hockey, and you didn’t generalize this to other sports.
I acknowledge my mistake and apologize.
It turns out the only way my post could be relevant to your article is in contributing to your overarching point : it is amazing how one’s mind can trick them when on ‘arguing mode’, and prevent them from properly listening. In that case, imagining someone is making a point we heard somewhere else and don’t agree with, while they are actually not arguing it at all.
I’ll try to be more wary of that in the future.
I can’t attend Mythcon because of the distance, but I can’t wait to see your events there. Keep up the good discussions between reasonable people !
“So I’ll just a put a comment under mine” — Yes! That’s the best way to do it. Because of formatting defects in my WordPress suite, I had to set a limit on how many levels of threading can be entered. Getting around that requires a workaround like yours.
I wholeheartedly agree with your take and what needs to happen in order to correct the problem and thereby progressing the movement. BUT…
There’s another factor involved in both the problem and the solution that you didn’t address and unfortunately may be the reason the movement is doomed and progress, unattainable. Well, actually, there’s two factors.
First and foremost, the problem with humanism is humans. In much the same way as true socialism is unattainable, so is humanism. On paper they work. In reality, when you enter people into the equation, it becomes something else entirely. An impossible dream.
Secondly, the very thing we use to easily spread these dreams and try to advance change, is the very reason they can never be a reality… A connected world. Again, on paper, a 24 hr news cycle, the internet, social media, could (and should) foster a greater understanding of our fellow man and woman and bring us closer together, has instead created even greater seperation and schisms on just about every issue imaginable. You need only harken back to the time (not so long ago) when everyone got their news twice a day, from the newspapers and either one of 3 channels or the radio, to realize that the world was far less divided and more united on whichever front they stood. It was far easier to enact change on a widespread scale because there were fewer voices being heard. Expanding the number of messages being delivered has now only hindered progress. Too many cooks in the kitchen, one could say.
A wise man (or maybe it was a woman) once said, opinions are like assholes, everybody has one. Now I know, an opinion of course isn’t a fact. But that fact hasn’t stopped humans from presenting them as such and in today’s connected world, that part of the problem will only continue to get worse, not better.
I really don’t want to sound like a doomsayer, although I know I am, but humans and the connected world are doing far more damage to these issues, rather than advancing them. They are both the problem and the solution and rectifying those differences may be next to impossible.
Facts and reasoning, all well and good. But maybe a little faith is called for here. And a little less pride as well. Faith in our fellow man and a clear understanding that pride goeth before a fall. (One of the few lines from the Bible that actually holds true) Maybe then, the messages would finally get through…
First, that’s not relevantly true. That humans are never perfectable, does not mean they aren’t improvable. We have plenty of scientific and historical evidence refuting that conflation. Humans clearly are improvable. And we know a lot about what actually works and what doesn’t in improving them (it’s just most folks ignore all the science we’ve acquired about that, and just sit in the armchair and pontificate about what they think works or doesn’t…kind of like you just did).
Second, nothing in your second point is demonstrably true. You have constructed a fantasy about the past. In reality, the more connected the world gets, the faster change occurs (compare slavery, women’s suffrage, and Jim Crowe, to gay marriage, trans rights, and women’s liberation from harassment). There is certainly no evidence of it going any slower (it’s always been slow).
In reality, the internet is leading to a transformation in people’s ability to arm themselves against manipulation and disinformation. Grandpa Trump Voter may be an easy mark for internet control; but his grandson and granddaughter are proportionally far more immune. They grew up with the internet. They’ve learned how to interact with it critically. Hence why after 250 years since the first amendment, for the first time in American history, the “Nones” have soared from not even ten percent, to over forty percent…among the younger generation now. Things are changing possibly too fast now. But it’s still going to be measured in decades, not years. Significant change has never moved in the timeframe of mere years.
Now wait a second, I never said that humans aren’t improvable. That would be, well, insane. After all, we no longer live in caves, hunt for our food or wonder what those shiny things in the night sky are. The problem as I presented it is, that advancement of the species has slowed to a crawl. Should not this era of an openly connected world, have sparked a second Renaissance? Possibly, but because of the flaw in the equation (human nature) it has instead fueled an unintended movement. Let’s just call it individualism.
Let me interject a bit about myself here and state, although I never had the opportunity to advance very far in my secondary education, I have long been a student of the human condition. I’ve done it since I was a child. Studied, observed and noted human behavior, almost obsessively. Call it a hobby. And what I’ve seen in the past 10 years, is far more terrifying than even growing up in the 80’s with the constant threat of nuclear annihilation looming over our heads! Given the tools to connect and unite hearts and minds like never before, and what are we doing with it? Arguing opinions instead of facts, spreading hate instead of love, sowing the seeds of distrust and bigotry instead of acceptance.
You are correct, change is happening too fast. And in case you missed it, look a little closer at the faces of the humans that are stagnating our advancement. They ARE the young people! Everyone’s a You Tuber now. Everybody’s a blogger. This internet generation isn’t’ immune to manipulation and disinformation, they’re leading the charge! Take a minute, step back and look at those voices happily being offended by everything instead of listening and compromising.
For all our technological advancement that should be moving us down a path of enlightenment and understanding, this internet generation has picked up the ball and run in the other direction. The group is no longer their focus and it has now settled on the individual. And its going to take far more than decades to reverse this little hiccup, it’s going to take generations.
And as for my constructed fantasy, just exactly how much change and advancement have we made on the issues of gay marriage, trans-rights and women’s (ahem) liberation from harassment, in this era of a connected world? They certainly have been put on everyone’s radar because of it, that fact no one can deny. But awareness does nothing without activism, and unfortunately everyone’s a little too busy being offended by the latest trending topic, to actually do anything about it.
My point in making that old to new comparison was, although the issues were not always centered on social injustices (in fact very few even were), back when the world was a much quieter place, it was far easier to unite the masses around a singular goal than it is today. Even if the goal was just for God and or Country and even if they didn’t all agree on the means, they certainly understood that the goal was for the greater good.
Thanks for what you’re doing, by the way. Or at least trying to do. There are those of us out here, listening, understanding and making every attempt to advance the message. It’s just often nearly impossible to get these damn humans to hear it, as well…
I don’t see where or when. In what period of history was it any faster? And if it was never faster, how can it have “slowed” to a crawl? You aren’t making any historically intelligible statement here.
Actually, most of them are doing the latter. You are confusing the loudest and most persistently immovable, with the actual population majority.
And as my article says, the people doing the former, exist in equal numbers on both sides of every debate now. Certainly they are obstacles to progress. That’s the very thesis of my article. But we don’t have any evidence yet that they are “slowing things down” relative to any past era in human history. They are simply “the obstacles” this generation faces; just as every generation before us had to face obstacles of its own.
Activism is awareness. Building awareness, is how progress happens. That’s almost the only useful activism there is now. We have shrunk the number of legislative solutions available for many things, by having obtained a lot (even if not all) of the legislation we needed, and are now at the tying-up-loose-ends phase, e.g. cleaning up cognitive biases, cultural resistance, etc. And most of that can only be effected in the meme-sphere: we need to persuade people to change. That’s a field of discourse; not a field of legislation.
Once the Irish and the Chinese had all the legal equity we could generate for them, we still had a hundred plus years of racism left over to cleanse. For the Irish, it’s almost entirely evaporated now. For the Chinese, it’s still there but enormously weakened compared to where it was a century ago (much less two). This is how progress works. You can’t accomplish most of it with legislation. Most of it requires activism in the form of awareness building and provoking people to think and rethink their social programming, of themselves, and of the next generation.
That’s how it has always been. That’s how it will always be.
And it has always been excruciatingly slow. I am not aware of it ever being faster, ever in any previous era of humanity. But it doesn’t just happen. It is only produced on the energy of activism, of various kinds, which has to be sustained for decades, or even centuries.
This was very interesting and I wanted to comment to say that, having heard you outline your position here, I can see that I misrepresented you somewhat in that video (and have laboured under misconceptions the last six years on these issues wrt yourself).
There was a lot of hostility back in 2012 and that undoubtedly coloured my perception of what you had said and led to a conflation of a number of things and assumptions that were misguided.
I would like to revisit some of this in video sometime during this month and will attempt to set the record straight.
I know exactly where you are coming from. I was swept up in all that too.
Note: Plum and I ran through a long Twitter thread on the one issue of the pay gap in sports (starting here, and then spinning off several more threads from individual posts within that thread). I’m not sure when he landed on any point. But I don’t think he had any arguments left in the end against what I actually argued in this article, which I am summarizing here in twelve points:
-:-
1. Some unjustified gendered pay inequities do exist in sports, e.g. even after controlling for revenue or audience (through various causes, from bias in owners to bias in marketing and media), though this is not the case in all sports, and it has been declining decade by decade (both in the disparities, and in number of sports);
2. Female athletes aren’t even asking for equal pay regardless of revenue, but proportional;
3. Except in revenueless sports: e.g. The Olympics, where as a matter of national pride we should fund both equally;
4. Gender-limited enthusiasm (men only watching men; women only watching women) has no plausible biological or evolutionary explanation, as evidenced by the rapid change in it over the last century (decade by decade, more men watching women play; more women playing), and by sports where gender-limited enthusiasm now doesn’t even exist or is shrinking (it’s also rendered implausible by sports enthusiasm not having existed when we evolved);
5. If it can’t be biological, it’s cultural;
6. Cultural change is slow (maybe only 5-15% attitude shift per decade or generation, judging from other examples, e.g. attitudes toward the gay community);
7. Cultural change is beyond many individuals’ control (so they can’t be blamed for being unable to change their subliminal programming);
8. But cultural change is within some individuals’ control (they can re-program themselves, as all other cultural change in history demonstrates);
9. Reprogramming mostly only happens when individuals are inspired and encouraged to engage in the sustained process of self-reflection and exploration that produces it;
10. Therefore, we need to spread the meme that such reprogramming may be possible, fruitful, and beneficial to all (the individual included), and to encourage as many who can, to try it (sometimes in fact even just mentioning how odd it is that we’d only want to watch sports performed by one gender, is enough to spawn an exploration and rising interest in women performing; as much in sports as in music or dance or acting or comedy, for example);
11. That’s how all change in attitudes in history has happened;
12. But those who can’t reprogram themselves, should not be morally condemned for that. As long as they work to keep their cognitive (as distinct from aesthetic) decisions as free of bias as they can (e.g. hiring, judging, competence assessments; management, behavior, listening; etc.), they are doing what they can.
-:-
If Plum still disagrees with any of that, he may say in future. But I found mostly his concerns are with the fear of being morally condemned for himself not “liking” women’s sports, which I agree should not be how any feminist frames the issue. Nor should he be condemned for rationalizing his personal preferences (as everyone will always do that for any belief; it’s what we evolved to do); and his fear of burdensome and futile policy recommendations (e.g. trying to do something with taxpayer money or business regulation or maybe even commercial coercion, e.g. boycotting, when no evidence exists the policy change will even work, or is justified in doing, e.g. it may have more harmful effects than beneficial). The latter requires paying attention, close attention, to what people are actually proposing. Only a specific actual policy should ever be criticized (and maybe it warrants criticism; but you can’t honestly know, if you don’t even know what it is).
Otherwise, Plum sticks admirably as much as possible to evidence (the nature of the gender breakdown in many sports, for example). So more evidence, IMO, would advance the debate.
I think the biggest disconnect is the result of conflating different voiced concerns about gendered pay gaps in sports: they aren’t all the same. And they don’t all entail the same solution. A lot of what’s going on is, as I noted in my article above, a matter of culture, not management, and thus beyond any ability to legislate; it can only change slowly over time through education and influence: spreading the meme that causes self-reflection and exploration in potential sports audiences and future sports generations, of both audiences and athletes. This can’t be effected by anger or coercion or shaming.
This is different from, for example, some guy reacting angrily to sports news increasing coverage of women’s sports (as if women didn’t deserve equal coverage in the media, especially as their sports are gaining audience and popularity). Or trying to insist, despite there being no evidence of the fact, that women aren’t “good enough” at anything to bring in audience and revenue (we have too many examples refuting that claim), or that no changes in our system or culture would in any way change women’s representation and success in sports (the evidence of change over the last century already refutes this assumption). Plum didn’t do any of those things.
Above all, there is no sense in which changing audience interest in sports, probably the only thing Plum and I really argued the most about, should be a function of watching what doesn’t interest you, as if for some greater good. Rather, changing audience interest in sports should be a function of expanding aesthetic awareness (see my discussion of this in Sense and Goodness without God VI.3.2, pp. 362-63): inspiring people to actually appreciate something they weren’t appreciating before; the same way high enthusiasm in wine or scotch often arises in people who previously abhorred them, not by being shamed into it, but by learning how to appreciate it and wanting to experiment with that, and ending up an avid enthusiast. For some, they won’t end up an enthusiast. For many, they will.
All cultural change operates this way. And unlike wine or scotch, in whom enthusiasm doesn’t really matter outside the realm of aesthetics, enthusiasm that opens up equality of opportunity to half the human population is a bit more important an achievement for the future good.
I don’t agree with every detail of this post (see what I did there), but I do think it’s broadly completely correct. The point about culture, especially. If I say something on social media about equal pay for equal work, inevitably at least one dude will tell me that it’s ridiculous for the government to force employers to pay men and women equally. ??? Straw man much? No, that isn’t what I said; I want society to stop having different norms and expectations for men and women, and that will have the added benefit of solving the pay problem on its own. And just as you say, you can’t legislate that. It has to just happen naturally, by changing the conversation. Anyway, thanks, this was a good read.
Yep. That. All that.
The only quick point i would bring up is in relation to point 2. i hadn’t claimed female athletes were overlooking revenue in demands for pay parity but that I had heard people in online articles make that demand.
We both agree i did not evidence that, we both agree I should have. As things stand this was not something we covered on twitter and so ought not be in this list, in my opinion. i will do what I should have done in due course with a subsequent video on the same subject but with some examples.
Just for point of clarification, I am big tennis fan. I however, hardly ever watch the women’s game (I used to, but not so much now, but at that time I used to watch a lot more in general).
Are you saying I ought to try to watch it more because it would be a moral good? Because there is a cultural bias for which we are all, to some extent, programmed and one way to combat it is to defy it.
Its hard to judge tone in text, so I want to say this isn’t written in disagreement (“are you saying” shouldn’t be read as “you can’t possibly be saying”). I just wanted you to clarify how the cultural bias is actionable on an individual level.
On just that one issue—the gendering of aesthetics in our social programming, limiting people’s opportunities (both players and enjoyers)—it works like this:
We’ve all been damaged by sexist social programming. Some of us can escape that (owing to sneak circuits left in); many of us can’t (owing to the programming being too wired in to change; and one can’t be morally judged for not doing the impossible).
The only way to get to those of us out who can escape, is to trigger the escape cascade by injecting the meme into them. We have to put the meme in everyone (thus, communicate the idea as widely as possible), because we can’t know in advance who it will help and who it won’t.
Progress generation over generation requires continuing to do this, generation after generation.
An analogy is drinking wine or scotch: plenty of people think those things are gross; until they work to develop an appreciation for them, then they love them. Not everyone though. Just a lot of folks; far more than would be the case, if no one experimented with or bothered to cultivate the appreciation. (If, for example, people put up moral or superstitious barriers and rejected any such efforts in themselves; then no one, or hardly any one, would appreciate a fine scotch, and the industry would probably evaporate.)
A principle difference in the analogy is that wine and scotch appreciation does not inequitably affect genders, as if (for some reason) only women could manufacture scotch, or we were rejecting scotch manufactured by women (even when there was no difference from scotch made by men, or the differences were not significant enough to warrant the bias).
The upshot is: everyone should take seriously an internal effort in themselves to de-program their sexist bias for only watching men compete with men and not women compete with women. Not everyone will succeed, and thus no one should be judged for being unable. But the world improves the more they do succeed.
And the process is not solely in the programmed individual, but in the programmers: we can also look into how we are inequitably programming children with this sexist bias, and slowly work on changing that as well (just as we do every other social attitude adjustment, e.g. acceptance of gay and trans people). But the same principles apply: aesthetic programming is socio-cultural, but notoriously difficult to get at, identify, or change.
Another analogy would be to variants of homophobia:
There is a difference between someone for whom the idea of men having sex grosses them out, but they do not allow this to affect their respect for or treatment of gay men and their sexual activity (they actively work to eliminate bias in decisions they have cognitive control over); and someone who simply justifies their bias on the grounds of their aesthetic programming (and thus treats gay people or their sexlives with disrespect or bias). The latter is a cognitive failure and as such, immoral (because the agent is consciously aware of what they are doing and could be behaving differently). The former is not.
So there is homophobia in the sense of mistreating gay people, or maintaining false cognitive beliefs about them that affects how you treat them, either of which is bigotry; and there is homophobia in the sense of just feeling grossed out by the idea of other people engaging in gay sex. The latter is an aesthetic program, which is not under cognitive control (or to be more precise: not reliably enough to count on everyone being able to reprogram their code on this). But over time, generation after generation, fewer and fewer people will have the aesthetic (noncognitive) homophobia, precisely because those who can deprogram it, do, and don’t pass it on, thus earning by compound interest a continual decline in the aesthetic (noncognitive) homophobia.
Sexism, racism, all the same. There is noncognitive stuff, and the cognitive stuff. How we treat, handle, and react to each is fundamentally different, because they are fundamentally different in respect to our cognitive access to them.
Regarding P.Z.: The only thing I’ve ever heard him say regarding atheism being more than atheism is his point that almost no one reasoned in a vacuum to atheism (that is, they didn’t just randomly one day say “I bet there’s not an invisible man in the sky”). He points out that real human beings in the actual world overwhelmingly arrive at atheism due to values and commitments that go beyond atheism, and that trying to dance around that is disingenuous even if it’s technically correct. Do you have an example of P.Z. saying anything beyond that?
The Plum video I am talking about, and link to, shows PZ saying just what Plum is critiquing. I’ve heard him say it on other occasions as well, but this is the one instance I know of it being documented.
PZ was using the term “Dictionary Atheism” as a, well, derogatory term for Atheism without the plus years ago. I don’t have an exact link but do remember having really annoying arguments about it on scienceblogs (I was an occasional commenter!).
Great article. I would like to chime in by saying that the misrepresentation of both sides as well as the venomous loud voices make those that might be moderate or even on the fence not want to get involved and just shy away from the matter entirely.
That’s sadly very true. I have lost count of the number of moderates I know personally, whom the extremists have silenced or even driven out of the movement. By simply making it “too expensive” (esp. in time and emotional labor) to communicate their views in any effective way.
So, how does one become “a select person”? Agree with everything you say? Don’t challenge your biases? (Of which you have more than a few).
Most reliably it means: become a paying patron (among the perks being you always get to post blog comments, even without waiting in a moderation queue; so, paying, even trivially, for the privilege, gets you in).
Secondly: be a person I am writing the blog about (e.g. the person I’m criticizing or whose work I’m reviewing etc.). That’s guaranteed to pass moderation.
Thirdly: anyone who doesn’t waste everyone’s time here by being a troll…a.k.a. ask what you honestly know I will regard as a good question, or say something true, relevant, and productive. That’s my call.
But none of those conditions require anyone to agree with me or not to challenge my biases (you’ll see that happening a lot in comments on my blogs). But dishonesty, insincerity, pointless insults, a.k.a. bullshit, doesn’t get in.
Well, well, well – thanks for responding; kind of unexpected but still welcome. And I might even consider becoming a patron though you tend to be a rather prolific blogger – which still may add up.
So I won’t go into much detail at the moment since this might not see much light of day, but a couple of points you yourself might consider. To begin with, I certainly think you’ve made some reasonable points, and that you’re probably correct to argue that there was (is) “irrationality manifest on both sides”, and that many of us got “swept up in hostility” some 4 to 6 years ago. Apropos of, you might consider too an old SMBC cartoon – “How Internet Fighting Works”; kind of prescient given its date – that I’ve been tweeting thither and yon for some time:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07
However, I kind of get the impression, from recollection and a perusal of your 2012 post on Atheism Plus, that your recent post is engaging in a bit of “historical revisionism”:
https://archive.is/1GvWh
As you said, you too “got swept up”, but that 2012 article looked rather remarkably dogmatic and self-righteous – rather off-putting at best. No doubt there were and are a great many assholes – as SMBC suggested – in the atheism “movement”, but I don’t think a them [CHUDs!!] versus us helped matters much at all. And not sure that you’ve really backtracked all that far from that dogmatism.
For instances, not sure if you realize that atheism, particularly the strong variety, is little better than a conjecture or hypothesis at best. And while it is particularly gratifying to see you suggest if not argue that not all feminists walk on water, that very questionable arguments “appear disturbingly often in feminist circles”, I rather doubt you’d go so far as to agree with a review of “Professing Feminism” by “Feminist Critics” that various “Women Studies departments” – if not much of feminism itself – is characterized by:
“a virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students”.
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2009/07/27/professing-feminism-noh/
And finally, I kind of wonder whether you’ve abandoned the transactivist dogma, their article of faith, that simply identifying as a woman makes one so. At least since your 2015 article where you insisted, absent much evidence that “People should get to represent as and be identified as the gender that suits them”, and suggested that Ophelia Benson was to be anathematized for refusing “to say she believed trans women were women” – The Horror!!:
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/8246
Apropos of which, you might consider a tweet by Cathy Young where she says:
https://twitter.com/CathyYoung63/status/735417064257683456
“#BathroomWars 2020: Otherkin who identify as dogs challenge public urination bans b/c they should be able to piss on fire hydrants”
Don’t think many people quite get the idea there’s a difference between appearance and substance, between surfaces and essences – as Douglas Hofstadter put it.
So while it is also gratifying to see you backtracking a bit from your somewhat “intemperate” Papal Encyclicals of 6 years ago, particularly in emphasizing the importance of evidence, I wonder whether or not many of your positions still qualify as highly questionable – and dogmatic – “subjective narratives”. Apropos of which, you may wish to check out a post by lawyer and “adjunct professor of philosophy” Elizabeth Finne at Quillette titled The Tyranny of the Subjective. And my rebuttal/variation-on-the-theme at Medium titled Horns of a Dilemma: Tyrannies of the Subjective and Objective Narratives:
http://quillette.com/2018/03/19/the-tyranny-of-the-subjective/
https://medium.com/@steersmann/horns-of-a-dilemma-tyrannies-of-the-subjective-and-objective-narratives-dd84461fb764
Other than when you slip into false generalization from cherry picked examples and espouse some extremist opinions on inadequate evidence, I see nothing factual to object to here.
Except for one factual error: Benson left (she was not expelled), and she left because people caught her (a) lying and engaging dishonestly, rather than in the productive manner I advocate for even in the article here, and (b) opposing trans rights and endorsing calling trans women rapists (and not for merely dissembling on what vocabulary applies to the trans community or what the ontology of transgenderism is). As I detailed. All while trying to hide or deny this.
Well, well, well; wonders will never cease.
Though “extremist opinions on inadequate evidence” looks like an ipse dixit, and I don’t see much evidence of your supposed commitment to that principle in the way of a justification for that assertion. You maybe think it “extremist” to argue that there’s “a virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment” that characterizes much of feminism? If so then you might want to take that up with professor Daphne Patai and “philosopher of science” Noretta Koertge who, more or less, gave a voluminous justification for that argument.
And you likewise think it “extremist” to challenge transactivist dogma that transwomen are actually women? Do you believe, yes or no, that transwomen are women? Are actually female as Zinnia Jones dementedly argues? Y’all – including the other benighted bloggers you refererenced (Zvan & Lousy Canuck) – are so busy virtue signalling, so busy pandering to the trans lobby, that you haven’t spent any time trying to understand whether those claims hold any water or not – and they don’t. For an elaboration on that theme, you might check out my (well evidenced) post at The Post Millennial – under my IRL name – on the topic:
https://www.thepostmillennial.com/discussion-transgender-issue/
You might also note a link to a “spirited discussion” with and attempted rebuttal there by Anjuli Pandavar – another “victim” of P.Z. Myers’ predilection for cutting off his nose to spite his face. But the shorter version: gender is largely incoherent twaddle, and is hardly anything more than a synonym for personality, for masculinity and femininity – which, as Wikipedia credibly argues, are those phsyiological and psychological attributes that correlate to a greater or lesser extent with being male or female. Egregious equivocation to be using male & female to refer to both a sex and a gender.
As for the “Benson issue”, while she may well have been “difficult” and not as circumspect as she should have been, it kind of looks like the three of you – among many others – have been all too quick to try moving the goal posts, to refuse to actually engage “honestly and in a productive manner” with the central question of what it means to be a woman (AKA “human female”), to be a female – reproductively speaking at least since having a concave mating surface, as with electrical connectors and plumbing fittings, hardly counts.
Rant rant rant. No relevant facts. Just more extremist opinions.
And lies. For example, Zinnia Jones has never said transwomen are women in the sense of having reproductive capability. She has said literally exactly the opposite: that plenty of women, including ciswomen, lack reproductive capability (either by losing their womb or its function, or, as in the case of women with AIS, never born with one to begin with). Therefore “reproductively speaking” is a category error. It’s not an innate property of being a woman.
For those who want a scientifically correct account of all this instead of your bizarre lunacy, I’ve written it up in detail already.
But the basic logical formula is simple: “woman” is a superset referencing gender not sex; within that superset are the subsets transwomen and ciswomen. Thus, in the domain of gender, not sex, both types of women are women. No one who knows what they are talking about, has ever argued anything but that. Zinnia Jones included.
Sex does not reliably correlate with gender. Chromosome type doesn’t count, because AIS makes an xy into a biological female sans only a womb; yet many an xx also lacks a womb. And morphology doesn’t count, because variation makes many a man more feminine and many a woman more masculine by any measured morphological trait, eliminating any possibility of identifying a clear binary division between men and woman in this way, other than by arbitrarily, i.e. culturally, just choosing how many fits to an arbitrarily chosen standard you want to count. Which, being arbitrary, is socially constructed, not objectively real apart from that. Morphology is also surgically or chemically alterable, throwing a wrench into any standard you tried to fabricate. And we pack way more into gender than morphology that isn’t even biological (such as cosmetics, clothing, body language, roles, mannerisms, and spheres of interest).
Hence arbitrarily choosing genitals as the only distinguishing trait, is a choice, not some cosmic truth about anything. Other than genitals. And if you are obsessed with genitals, and always need desperately to know what genitals everyone you meet has, that tells us more about you, than anyone else.
RC: And lies. For example, Zinnia Jones has never said transwomen are women in the sense of having reproductive capability. She has said literally exactly the opposite ….
Oh really? You might want to do a bit of research before making such bold – and untenable – assertions. Starting with: https://web.archive.org/web/20151101065024/http://genderanalysis.net/2015/06/stop-calling-trans-women-male-gender-analysis-07/
Wherein he bravely, if foolhardily, crosses the Rubicon in style by asserting “Trans women are female”. Y’all can play your childish weasel-word games, largely based on junk science and anti-intellectualism, by insisting, since there’s a wide spectrum of physiological and psychological attributes that correlate to a greater or lesser extent with the terms and attributes “male” and “female”, that there’s absolutely no “essence” to those terms, or to the related ones, “man” and “woman”. That you are thereby free to make them mean anything and everything that you want them to, and whenever you want – willy nilly, without rhyme or reason. With the result then that the words mean absolutely diddly-squat, and their collection – “tales told by idiots, signifying nothing”.
So, pray tell, what else do you think that the term “female” can mean, in a biological sense, other than “the organism that produces ova”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female
Do you seriously think that Zinnia Jones and Riley Dennis and all of their demented ilk have any justification at all for their claims to be members of that class? Which I note that Zinnia never does define at all. So maybe they are in fact seriously deluded, and y’all are little better than enablers? Being charitable.
However, while you are certainly to be commended for actually engaging with me – even if somewhat dishonestly, I seriously doubt that you read much if any of my Post Millennial or Medium articles – a bit “surprising” given your vaunted claim to be “steel-manning the opposition”, and your fulsome if hypocritical calls to be “listening to and learning from the other”.
But the crux of the matter and of those articles – and of mathematics and of much if not all of philosophy – is that to talk meaningfully about a subject, you have to define your terms at the outset. And I note that absolutely nowhere in your Lycanthropic Transsexuals article do you actually specify what you mean by the terms “male” and “female”, only longwinded dissertations, which are largely barking up the wrong tree, on what they correlate with. How in the hell do you think you can possibly specify what something correlates with if you haven’t defined those terms – precisely – to begin with?
And you blathering on about how “woman is a superset referencing gender not sex; within that superset are the subsets transwomen and ciswomen” is a case in point: you simply can not reasonably talk about transwomen and ciswomen if you haven’t defined – precisely – what you mean by the superset “woman” in the first place. Analogously, you simply cannot talk about even and odd and prime numbers if you haven’t defined “number” to begin with. And, pray tell, of what use is a class definition if it includes every last person on the planet? “And we are all together … I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob”. Hardly what any reasonable and rational person would consider a coherent and useful perspective or framework.
So you may wish to actually try reading my articles – and with an open mind – before responding; reflecting on Oliver Cromwell’s “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken” may be a useful precursor.
And you might also read salient elements of the two introductory sections, Introduction and Definitions, in The Role of Mathematical Definitions in Mathematics and in Undergraduate Mathematics Courses:
https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/defaults/qz20st055
A salient quote or two therefrom:
… their acceptance and understanding of the role of mathematical definitions, that the words of the formal definition embody the essence of and completely specify the concept being defined. … definitions are often used as a vehicle toward a more robust understanding of a given concept.
Moreover, when a term is defined by stipulation, it is to be free from connotation, that is, free from all the associations the term may have acquired in its non-technical use. ….
However, in formal mathematics we do not leave the meaning of a term to contextual interpretation; we declare our definition and expect there to be no variance in its interpretation in that particular work. …
Indeed. Given your touting of “good reasoning”, you may wish to give some thought to the underpinnings of that process, and question whether or not your definitions, particularly those related to the concepts “woman” and “female”, are seriously and badly flawed if not egregiously incoherent.
Now you are just ignoring every fact and repeating the same falsehoods and weirdo views.
Gender is not a statement about biology. Sex is not gender. And sex is already referenced in the prefixes trans- and cis-. This refutes everything you are saying. And you’ve had this explained to you repeatedly.
So I won’t let through any other comment by you that continues to ignore this fact.
But you still don’t have enough guts, enough intellectual honesty, to actually define sex – i.e., “male” and “female” – do you? Nor to address the standard biological one, i.e., the ability to produce sperm or ova. Nor to acknowledge that Zinnia was insisting that transwomen are female – despite your earlier claim to the contrary.
While you’re to be commended for changing your tune a bit from days of yore, you still look rather remarkably narrow-minded and dogmatic – the fatal flaw that led to the demise of Atheism-Plus itself.
???
Dude. I wrote a whole article on defining sex and gender. And just did again in comments here.
And I already told you Zinnia was not talking about reproduction, never was, and she has explicitly said so several times. You are insanely obsessed with genitals. But she isn’t talking about genitals. Nor are genitals determinative of sex (many people have no genitals or ability to reproduce). And gender is not sex.
Continue to pretend you haven’t been told this three times now, and you are done here.
I’m interested in the sex vs. gender distinction. Dr. Carrier, you say, “sex is not gender.” What I assume you mean by that (and I might be wrong) is that “sex” refers to reproductive potential (and I say “potential” deliberately, because not everyone has the desire or health that’s required to reproduce, even if they own the appropriate parts), and “gender” refers to a social role. Is this accurate, or am I misunderstanding? I would not want to misrepresent anyone’s take here.
Sex does not reference reproductive ability, because wombs can become lost or nonfunctional, as can ovaries and testicles. You’ll notice we don’t “de-sex” someone who is missing a womb or gonads, or any organ. Animals also can be classified by sex, and also can lack reproductive ability regardless of sex.
Indeed, sexual reproduction precedes even the existence of distinct sexes. And even once sexing existed, hermaphroditism became functionally common in the biosphere (e.g. many kinds of flowers are innately both male and female in respect to sex; and, obviously, non-hermaphoroditic flowers have a sex but no gender).
Fundamentally sex is a property of chromosomes, not organs. Because organs can be missing or lost or disabled. If you cut all the stamens out of a flower, you haven’t changed its sex. You’ve just sterilized it. But we still can use sexing to reference morphology, since we usually can’t examine chromosomes and can only sex organisms by visible structures. However, visible structure does not reliably match chromosome structure. So observational sexing is less reliable than genetic sexing.
Thus male sexed (XY) humans with AIS assemble as morphologically female in the womb. They are born with all the same statistically distributed morphology you would think is female (vaginas, muscle and bone structure, fat distribution, body chemistry, ovaries), and have bodies indistinguishable from those generated by a genetic female (XX), except for the absence of a womb. These folks are sexed both male (chromosomally) and female (morphologically) and usually present and are raised female in respect to gender. Many women in this category, don’t even know it; nor do their partners (you will likely never know, no matter how intimate you get; nor might even they). Because there is no obvious way to tell (without specific scientific tests most people never have to take).
Sex is therefore not terribly useful in a social context. You never know nor ever need know what chromosomes someone has or what internal organs they have. Much less what genitals they have. None are externally visible or perform any social function. And these don’t reliably line up. There are XY biological females (a chromosomal male with AIS) and XX biological males (a chromosomal female with XXMS), as well as full and partial hermaphorodites, and persons with ambiguous or missing genitalia (regardless of chromosomal sex), and of course chemically or even surgically altered transsexuals (emulating the AIS or XXMS conditions artificially).
Gender is the only thing that has any social use. Because it’s the only thing that’s socially detectable, and that has any social effect. Because it is behavioral (even in respect to altering or maintaining appearance) and externally signaled according to local cultural norms and expectations (dress, hair, cosmetic, vocal habits, body language, scale of adherence to paradigms, etc.). And yet gender is becoming more and more fluid over time as we less and less require anyone to adhere to norms. Some would argue we shouldn’t even have genders in that case. Just people mixing and matching chosen attributes any way they want without stigma or stereotype. But we are centuries away from a society even capable of that. But a society that did that is functionally conceivable. It would find our notion of gender peculiar. Gender wouldn’t exist in their world. And sex would be socially irrelevant (as it pretty much is already).
ah OK, now I understand what you meant.
I thought it was interesting how you went on and on about presenting arguments with evidence, but here you’ve presented that women’s pay should be proportional to revenue. That’s not necessarily true at all. It could very well be that the performance of the athletes is actually less of a factor in the revenue generated in their particular field, then other departments in their business.
It is analogous to saying a smaller car should have proportionally less wheels; if the players in the game are the chassis and their support; marketers, managers, camera operators, etc are the wheels.
Even if we take at face value that you’re right that women’s soccer players earn less even as a proportion of revenue, where is your evidence that they aren’t given their earned wages?
Indeed, the very existence of women’s soccer teams exist suggests that they are given enough wages or too much. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to fill a team.
That last sentence is a non sequitur. On the same logic you could say “the very existence of slavery entails everyone had clothes on their back and plenty to eat so why are you complaining?” Or “the very fact that 19th century children could get jobs in factories means there is no way they could have been underpaid.” And so on. I see no sense here. There are countless examples of people being underpaid for their work, regardless of gender. It’s a well established concept in the science of economics. And it’s precisely why people try to bargain for raises using peers’ pay scales as their benchmark. Everyone knows this. (Except you, apparently.)
Your first point, however, remains unintelligible to me. The most I can make out, you are trying to say something about wages being defined by the demand; but revenue is the indicator of demand. Yet you are somehow trying to separate what a person is worth, from how much they earn. And I am missing what the justification for that separation is. You never clearly say. The analogy to car wheels is just bonkers and makes no sense. Nearer to would be that a smaller car should have a smaller gas tank, which, surprise, they tend to do, contrary to what you had wished for; but even that analogy fails to make sense, as there is no correct analog between fuel capacity and market value of work. Even less between that and wheel number.
I’ll try to fix your confused muddle.
We can figure a different industry, which is not all about the players and their performance (without which the whole shop closes). Let’s say Amazon. Those working Amazon warehouses are not like athletes because they are just cogs, invisible and completely replaceable. No one chooses Amazon over Barnes & Noble because they “have the most amazing warehouse workers.” So there, the revenue of Amazon is not necessarily directly tied to warehouse labor. And yet, their warehouse workers are in fact underpaid, relative to what is necessary for a healthy economy. Underpaid work puts strains on the community and social services and contributes to poverty that undermines social functionality, e.g. school budgets are strained as workers can’t afford to fund them and thus the next generation becomes less educated and disciplined and thus less capable of competing in the global economy, and it undermines productivity and, ironically, the ability of people to shop at Amazon. Plus it’s just simply unfair. It is an unjust world where the actual objective difference between a CEO and a laborer (even factoring in cost to train up and rarity of ability) is no longer anywhere near proportional to their pay. Income disparity is a major cause of economic decline, and always has been throughout all history. Even rich people agree; and yet are too irrational to act in their own self-interest to fix it.
Now imagine Amazon was paying women warehouse workers less than male. For the same exact output and work performance. That would be unjust. And unjustifiable. (Also in fact illegal.)
Shift back now to athletic team sports. How is it any different? And yet, in athletic team sports, they are not even invisible interchangeable cogs. They are actually defining the entire ability of the shop to make revenue at all, wholly by their ability to excel in performance and attract audience to watch them. (Amazon does not earn revenue by selling seats to watch its warehouse workers.) More importantly, they are doing so in a system identical to male teams (thus any differences of contribution by other areas of the shop, e.g. marketing, is already analogous to the male team’s shop and thus already accounted for). So being paid less than their peers for exactly the same output and performance is unjust. And unjustifiable. (It’s only not illegal because it isn’t the exact same owners doing it.)
Another way to think of it is that any shop is a team. Not just the players, but marketers and everyone else. They are all pulling together to generate a successful enterprise and share the profits. Teams that screw their own members over by not sharing revenue justly are shitty teams. And we get to call them shitty teams. And if they don’t like that, they will just have to do something about it. Something other than trying to hide their shame. Because that makes them even shittier. And we’ll call them out for it all the worse.
“…confused, like Jesus, for fact.”
You don’t deny the existence of historical Jesus…do you?
I am the author of the first peer reviewed academic monograph arguing Jesus probably did not exist. Conclusion: at best a 1 in 3 chance there ever was a real Jesus.
But the remark you are quoting can mean the Jesus of faith, not history. All mainstream scholars agree the Jesus depicted in the Gospels and worshiped by Christians did not exist; that if any Jesus existed, he was a very different person, or a person about whom we can know next to nothing.