Scott Adams made what is unquestionably a very bad argument and got crapped on from all sides for doing so. He entered into one of those special areas where we respond to arguments we don't like with moral outrage. And that is interesting.
The argument in question is here. Lots of people have responded to it by reaching moral conclusions. See, for example, The Last Psychiatrist's take. (You can also find some links to other moral attacks on Adams at that link as well.)
Here is a sentence that shows us what upset people:
The central issue is pretty simple, what if the natural instincts of men and women combined with rational choices don't lend themselves to civilized social behaviour? Wolves naturally form packs and sheep naturally herd together in flocks but you don't see many natural societies made up of both wolves and sheep.
Of course, putting it that way makes Scott Adams argument look pretty stupid because male and female wolves have no trouble forming packs and male and female sheep have no trouble forming flocks. And even if you didn't want to base human society on either of those models (and practically no one would) it is still reasonable to suggest that there might be a natural form for human society.
And there it gets a little tricky because, as I noted above, there are lots of historical examples of societies that felt plenty natural to the people in them that we find repulsive. For a long time, most people thought that slavery was natural. Racism and sexism too. The enlightenment moral solution was to replace natural societies with one based on rational choices.
And here we can begin to see what Scott Adams is really getting at. This may come as a surprise to him but he is an anti-enlightenment thinker. The classic Enlightenment view was that morality was a matter of making decisions based on rules that are arrived at on purely rational grounds. What you were naturally inclined to do simply didn't enter into the equation. Is lying wrong? If your answer is yes, then perfectly natural instincts such as lying to avoid of shame, lying to spare other people's feelings and lying to maintain a private sphere are irrelevant.
In the extreme case, that being Kant, the Enlightenment argument was that the right thing to do was the right thing to do even if it was impossible for you to actually do it.
In opposition to this, Adams favours a view that takes human nature into account and his blog is full of references to recent science suggesting that the Enlightenment understanding free will is bunk. Adams doesn't actually believe we have no choices, although he often talks as if he believes that. What he really believes is that what science tells us about human nature should play a big role in how we think about morality.
I'm not sure how carefully he has thought it out, for he is a crude and unsophisticated thinker about both morality and science. He has strong opinions about both and tends to think that anyone who disagrees with him is an idiot. But he makes crude and poorly evidenced arguments all the time so it is hard to take him very seriously.
Take a look at this paragraph from the post that caused so many people to get offended at him for example:
And here you can begin to see why people responded angrily. The two examples he dwells upon at any length are Hugh Hefner and Anthony Weiner and he clearly thinks these examples tells us something about the natural instincts of the human male.
Marriage didn't work for Hefner? Actually, Hefner showed zero interest in marriage for decades. Then he got married around the time when his ability to get and maintain erections began to fail. Then someone invented a drug to deal with his erection problems and he started to cheat on his wife and she didn't think that was acceptable so the marriage ended. Just recently, he tried to get married again and he seems to have been taken for a ride by a woman who set out to exploit a foolish old man.
The Last Psychiatrist says that Adams's premises are false but that is too generous. He doesn't have premises. The arguments above are so poorly framed and drawn on evidence that is so fragmentary that you can't really call them premises. A premise can be wrong or right. Those two paragraphs are just confused nonsense that can't even be wrong.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people have assumed that some psychological projection is at work here. They have assumed that Adams identifies with Hefner and Weiner and that his irrational premises reflect his own sexual frustrations. I don't think so given that his very next move is this:
The puzzle here is that Scott Adams doesn't know things about human nature that any preschooler can demonstrate an instinctive grasp of. That may be why he is so funny. Like a lot of comedians, Adams is perpetually alienated from people around him. he also has a very poor understanding of where the sorts of "solutions" he proposes above have tended to lead in the past.
Of course, the solution that Adams finds so convincing has an unexpressed premise which is that society will be run by people who share the same values as he does. He doesn't consider the possibility that we might get a society in which low-status males are all chemically castrated in order that high status males can maintain huge harems. And he certainly doesn't consider the possibility that the solution that seems benign to him might be pure horror in practice.
(He also seems utterly unaware of how much women want sex and it's impossible not to suspect that his views are shaped by, sorry to be so brutal, a history of poor success in relating to women sexually.)
He does consider the possibility that the world he considers might sound horrible to us but he doesn't seriously consider the possibility that it might actually be horrible.
Should that scare us? For an awful lot of the outrage at his argument is driven by fear. It would be scary if Scott Adams and people like him get to be the dominant political and cultural class. But we don't live in such a world. I'm fairly confident that won't happen but it could. It's one of the risks you have to live with.
Part 2 tomorrow
The argument in question is here. Lots of people have responded to it by reaching moral conclusions. See, for example, The Last Psychiatrist's take. (You can also find some links to other moral attacks on Adams at that link as well.)
Here is a sentence that shows us what upset people:
The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable.Now that is a bizarre claim but at most times in history it wouldn't have raised any eyebrows (although it was more often asked the other way around leading to societies in which women were cloistered and forced to wear veils and given very few rights.) Why is our era different?
The central issue is pretty simple, what if the natural instincts of men and women combined with rational choices don't lend themselves to civilized social behaviour? Wolves naturally form packs and sheep naturally herd together in flocks but you don't see many natural societies made up of both wolves and sheep.
Of course, putting it that way makes Scott Adams argument look pretty stupid because male and female wolves have no trouble forming packs and male and female sheep have no trouble forming flocks. And even if you didn't want to base human society on either of those models (and practically no one would) it is still reasonable to suggest that there might be a natural form for human society.
And there it gets a little tricky because, as I noted above, there are lots of historical examples of societies that felt plenty natural to the people in them that we find repulsive. For a long time, most people thought that slavery was natural. Racism and sexism too. The enlightenment moral solution was to replace natural societies with one based on rational choices.
And here we can begin to see what Scott Adams is really getting at. This may come as a surprise to him but he is an anti-enlightenment thinker. The classic Enlightenment view was that morality was a matter of making decisions based on rules that are arrived at on purely rational grounds. What you were naturally inclined to do simply didn't enter into the equation. Is lying wrong? If your answer is yes, then perfectly natural instincts such as lying to avoid of shame, lying to spare other people's feelings and lying to maintain a private sphere are irrelevant.
In the extreme case, that being Kant, the Enlightenment argument was that the right thing to do was the right thing to do even if it was impossible for you to actually do it.
In opposition to this, Adams favours a view that takes human nature into account and his blog is full of references to recent science suggesting that the Enlightenment understanding free will is bunk. Adams doesn't actually believe we have no choices, although he often talks as if he believes that. What he really believes is that what science tells us about human nature should play a big role in how we think about morality.
I'm not sure how carefully he has thought it out, for he is a crude and unsophisticated thinker about both morality and science. He has strong opinions about both and tends to think that anyone who disagrees with him is an idiot. But he makes crude and poorly evidenced arguments all the time so it is hard to take him very seriously.
Take a look at this paragraph from the post that caused so many people to get offended at him for example:
Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems right. Obviously we shouldn’t blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society’s tools for keeping things under control.An alarming trend in the news? Meaning what? That news reporters have shown an alarming tendency to treat circus sideshows as if they were important news? Because Adams cannot reasonably expect us to believe that a few recent news stories tells us something about how powerful men in general behave can he? Well, actually, that is exactly what he wants us to believe.
And here you can begin to see why people responded angrily. The two examples he dwells upon at any length are Hugh Hefner and Anthony Weiner and he clearly thinks these examples tells us something about the natural instincts of the human male.
Consider Hugh Hefner. He had every benefit of being a single man, and yet he decided he needed to try marriage. Marriage didn’t work out, so he tried the single life again. That didn’t work out, so he planned to get married again, although reportedly the wedding just got called off. For Hef, being single didn’t work, and getting married didn’t work, at least not in the long run. Society didn’t offer him a round hole for his round peg. All it offered were unlimited square holes.Elsewhere Adams says, " I don't draw conclusions from anecdotal evidence". Well, actually you do Mr. Adams. and worse than that you draw this anecdotal evidence from sketchy anecdotes.
To be fair, if a man meets and marries the right woman, and she fulfills his needs, he might have no desire to tweet his meat to strangers. Everyone is different. But in general, society is organized as a virtual prison for men’s natural desires. I don’t have a solution in mind. It’s a zero sum game. If men get everything they want, women lose, and vice versa. And there’s no real middle ground because that would look like tweeting a picture of your junk with your underpants still on. Some things just don’t have a compromise solution.
Marriage didn't work for Hefner? Actually, Hefner showed zero interest in marriage for decades. Then he got married around the time when his ability to get and maintain erections began to fail. Then someone invented a drug to deal with his erection problems and he started to cheat on his wife and she didn't think that was acceptable so the marriage ended. Just recently, he tried to get married again and he seems to have been taken for a ride by a woman who set out to exploit a foolish old man.
The Last Psychiatrist says that Adams's premises are false but that is too generous. He doesn't have premises. The arguments above are so poorly framed and drawn on evidence that is so fragmentary that you can't really call them premises. A premise can be wrong or right. Those two paragraphs are just confused nonsense that can't even be wrong.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people have assumed that some psychological projection is at work here. They have assumed that Adams identifies with Hefner and Weiner and that his irrational premises reflect his own sexual frustrations. I don't think so given that his very next move is this:
Long term, I think science will come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated for as long as they are on it. It sounds bad, but I suspect that if a man loses his urge for sex, he also doesn’t miss it. Men and women would also need a second drug that increases oxytocin levels in couples who want to bond. Copulation will become extinct. Men who want to reproduce will stop taking the castration drug for a week, fill a few jars with sperm for artificial insemination, and go back on the castration pill.That is not, I'm fairly confident, the choice that either Hefner or Weiner would make.
That might sound to you like a horrible world. But the oxytocin would make us a society of huggers, and no one would be treated as a sex object. You’d have no rape, fewer divorces, stronger friendships, and a lot of other advantages. I think that’s where we’re headed in a few generations.
The puzzle here is that Scott Adams doesn't know things about human nature that any preschooler can demonstrate an instinctive grasp of. That may be why he is so funny. Like a lot of comedians, Adams is perpetually alienated from people around him. he also has a very poor understanding of where the sorts of "solutions" he proposes above have tended to lead in the past.
Of course, the solution that Adams finds so convincing has an unexpressed premise which is that society will be run by people who share the same values as he does. He doesn't consider the possibility that we might get a society in which low-status males are all chemically castrated in order that high status males can maintain huge harems. And he certainly doesn't consider the possibility that the solution that seems benign to him might be pure horror in practice.
(He also seems utterly unaware of how much women want sex and it's impossible not to suspect that his views are shaped by, sorry to be so brutal, a history of poor success in relating to women sexually.)
He does consider the possibility that the world he considers might sound horrible to us but he doesn't seriously consider the possibility that it might actually be horrible.
Should that scare us? For an awful lot of the outrage at his argument is driven by fear. It would be scary if Scott Adams and people like him get to be the dominant political and cultural class. But we don't live in such a world. I'm fairly confident that won't happen but it could. It's one of the risks you have to live with.
Part 2 tomorrow
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