debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

13.1.06

Consensual Promiscuity

Hugo Schwyzer has a post up arguing that pro-feminist men can't be promiscuous. I won't bother responding to Schwyzer's post, since he manages to write 11 paragraphs without ever offering any evidence or arguments in support of his central idea that one cannot see another as "extraordinarily precious" in the context of a short-term sexual encounter. More interesting -- in part because it has echoes of the theory of structuration, and in part because it does not seem vulnerable to the charges of paternalism leveled against Schwyzer -- was a reply by commenter AB, who offered an alternative pro-feminist argument for why men should refrain from consensual one-night stands.

I'll restate AB's argument in more general terms, since I think it's potentially applicable to many cases of interactions bewteen dominant and oppressed groups. In AB's comment, "group A" is men, "group B" is women, and "X" is "use solely for short-term sexual gratification."

(1) In our current society, group A feels entitled to do X to group B.
(2) In many cases, members of group B do not consent* to having X done to them.
(3) Anytime a member of group A does X to a member of group B, it reinforces (1).
(4) Therefore, any member of group A who sees (2) as being bad is obligated to try to undo (1). Given (3), then, such a member of group A is unable to do X to a member of group B -- even a consenting one -- until such time as (1) is eliminated.

The crux of the argument here is the word "any" in point (3). Is it truly the case that consensual use of a woman for sexual gratification reinforces the belief that many men have that they are entitled to use women for sexual gratification even without consent? It all depends on how people define their categories of thought. If a consensual one-night stand is percieved to be basically the same sort of thing as a nonconsensual one-night stand, then the practice of the former will reinforce the practice of the latter. If not, not.

AB's argument may become easily overbroad. After all, one could easily create an argument against all sex on the same lines. Having a long-term relationship is certainly no guarantee that the man won't feel entitled to sex. And I see no reason to think that consensual one-night stands would be interpreted as endorsement of all one-night stands whereas consensual marital sex would be interpreted as endorsing only consensual marital sex.

What AB's argument gives us is, I think, not so much an argument against one-night stands as an argument for being attentive to how our acts are framed. Insofar as we carry out acts that resemble acts we despise, we must emphasize the criteria that make the meaningful difference.

*Here "do not consent" covers not only overt acts -- in the case of sex, rape -- but also situations in which group A uses its superior power to trick, entice, pressure, or otherwise push unwilling members of group B into giving formal consent.

Stentor Danielson, 22:25, ,

The Truthiness Of Cultural Theory

I was reminded of Stephen Colbert's recent coinage of "truthiness" when I read John Adams's attempt to defend Cultural Theory from those who point out that it has fared poorly in empirical tests. "Truthiness" is the quality posessed by an idea that feels so right, that accords so well with who we want to be, that quibbling little things like facts don't matter. Adams says:

Cultural theory might best be viewed in the uncertain world we inhabit as the anthropologists' myth of myths. The validity of such a super-myth is not to be judged by the statistician's correlation coefficients and t-tests, but by the degree to which it accords with people's experience. And its utility can be judged only by the extent to which people find it helpful in their attempt to navigate the sea of uncertainty.

Cultural Theory is, in a way, a theory of truthiness. It argues that when the uncertainty is high and the stakes are large -- the types of problems that Funtowicz and Ravetz call "post-normal" -- the gap in science's ability to provide truth is filled by culture's ability to provide truthiness. CT goes on to propose an explanation for why different people are drawn to different types of truthiness, why certain ideas are truthy to some people but not others.

Of course, just because CT is a theory of truthiness doesn't mean that truthiness is the appropriate standard for judging CT's validity. But a certain understanding of CT can give us a more charitable understanding of why CT should be examined for its truthiness.

(Adams himself seems ambivalent about whether he understands CT in the more sophisticated way I'm about to describe. He certainly advocates it in his more theoretical chapters, such as the one the above quote came from. Nevertheless, in his empirical work on seat belt laws, he slips into a sort of "vulgar CT." In vulgar CT, the CT typology of ways of life is drawn on to show why one's opponents are so blinded by their ideologies that they are unable to recognize the plain objective facts that you, having cast off the shackles of bias, are able to present.)

A more sophisticated understanding of CT recognizes that culture is not simply a distortion of reality, an unfortunate set of misconceptions that should be cleared away by good objective science. It argues that there are many arenas of thought that are inherently the domain of truthiness, arenas that are necessarily value-laden and hence not amenable to a final objective scientific answer. Adams's argument, then, can be taken as a claim that CT itself lies in this post-normal realm. (It's unclear which of the four ways of life should be expected to find CT truthy -- certainly not hierarchy, since hierarchy is committed to the view that objective science can and should find the answer to everything. I suspect that CT's appeal is greatest to fatalists, since it easily feeds their view that agreement and cooperation between people of different views is a pipe dream.)

The big question, then, is whether CT really does lie in the post-normal realm. I suspect it does not, particularly when talking about the proposed typology of worldviews (which is the element of CT that has been subjected to the most empirical scrutiny). The choice of adopting one typology of worldviews over another is not particularly high-stakes so far as I can tell (outside of the small group of researchers who have built their careers on it). And it does not seem like a question that uncertainty need remain high on, since widely used psychological research methods should be quite applicable to discerning the validity of any proposed way of grouping worldviews. Of course, I may be misled by the understandable truthiness of this perspective to someone who, like myself, has staked the next few years of their career on doing an empirical test of CT.

Stentor Danielson, 21:42, ,

12.1.06

Repetitive Academics

Spend enough time reading a specialized segment of the literature on any issue, and you'll start to hit repetition -- people using the same examples, the same illustrations, and even the same jokes. A good example of the latter in the social science of risk is the story of Sydney Smith. As John Adams tells it in his book Risk:

Over 150 years ago the Reverend Sydney Smith was being taken on a conducted tour of an Edinburgh slum. Down a narrow alley between two high-rise tenements he came upon two women shrieking abuse at each other across the alley. Smith stopped, looked up, and listened. He then shook his head and walked on, lamenting "they'll never agree; they're arguing from different premises.

The worst part about this case is that it's the non-punning sense of "arguing from different premises" that's being illustrated when writers tell this story. That is, you have to already understand the concept in order to get the joke that's supposed to illustrate it. I suppose, though, that I should just be grateful I don't have to sit through yet another telling of the story of the blind men and the elephant.

Stentor Danielson, 20:39, ,

8.1.06

A Better Precautionary Principle, But It's Beside The Point

I've had some harsh words to say about the Precautionary Principle in the past. But I realized today that this was based on a particular interpretation of what the PP means. Typically, the PP is presented as a statement of conservatism or risk aversion, mandating that the burden of proof be on those who want to change things (e.g. by introducing a new chemical that might be carcinogenic). But a paper I just read by Jurskis, Bridges, and de Mar (warning: pdf and academic language) offers an appealing alternative formulation:

The precautionary principle has often been misinterpreted as a caution against taking action where there is risk, however it actually cautions against delaying action to prevent environmental degradation because there is uncertainty.

In other words, the PP advocates a particular hierarchy of values, rather than an attitude toward change. Under the PP, environmental values are given priority over other values in situations where there is doubt. This can be understood as either being an ethical principle of its own, or coming from an ontological view that preservation of nature underlies preservation of other values, e.g. that the economy will collapse if promoting it undermines ecosystems. This formulation of the PP makes it an environmental principle without either unjustifiably limiting its application to environmental risks or depending on questionable assumptions about the environmental effects of technological progress.

Interestingly, though, this alternative PP does not actually help Jurskis et al's argument. Their paper is a strong promotion of the "frequent, low intensity fires are the answer" philosophy, in reaction to the tendency of Australian fire ecologists in recent decades to emphasize the ecological dangers of such fires and the potential benefits of high-intensity fires or fire exclusion. Jurskis et al claim that the PP mandates that we return to low-intensity burning to preserve the environment.

However, the argument made by anti-burning fire ecologists (notably Rob Whelan and Ross Bradstock) is not that we should hold off on environment-preserving actions until more is known -- the counter-argument implicit in the invocation of the precautionary principle. Rather, they argue that not burning is itself the precautionary course of action, and that we shouldn't wait around for ironclad proof before we stop firing the bush all the time.

The precautionary principle as stated by Jurskis et al is only relevant when the potentially more environment-protecting course of action is clear, but its effectiveness or necessity is uncertain. Thus it applies easily to classic cases like climate change mitigation or caution in introducing new chemicals. However, it is beside the point when the issue being debated is which of two courses of action is the environment-preserving one. Neither Jurskis et al nor Whelan and Bradstock are interested in "delaying action to prevent environmental degradation," but there is no agreement about which actions -- increasing burning or decreasing burning -- we should avoid delaying.

Stentor Danielson, 17:46, ,

2005 Was Good To The GOP

I don't know why everyone seems to think 2005 was such a rough year for the Republican Party. Or rather, I do know, but it's based on a unjustifiably large helping of wishful thinking. Let's take a look at two things widely claimed to indicate the GOP's difficulties last year:

1. Falling poll numbers. What happened in 2005 was actually worse than high poll ratings for the Republicans. If Bush was getting 60% approval, we could still tell ourselves that things would get better once we convince another 20% of the people that the GOP is evil. In 2005, the polls bottomed out, and nothing changed. 2005 was the year that we learned that it doesn't matter how many scandals the government gets involved in, they can still do whatever they want. The only disapproval that matters is armed rebellion. And the GOP has figured out that it can get what it wants without making anyone mad enough to push them over the line from telling a pollster that they don't like things to buying ammo and a bus ticket to DC. Indeed, they've become skilled at creating the kind of disapproval that makes people get fed up with politics and focus on Desperate Housewives, rather than the kind that energizes active opposition.

2. The failure of Social Security privatization. The problem with this idea is that Social Security privatization didn't fail. Sure, it didn't make it onto the lawbooks. But you wouldn't call a 30-yard pass a failure just because it didn't score a touchdown. 2005 was the year that privatization became a respectable position. An idea that a few years ago was the province of a handful of wild-eyed libertarians is now a mainstream viewpoint. It will be reintroduced again and again as long as the GOP controls Congress (i.e., for the forseeable future), until President Romney signs it into law perhaps early in the next decade.

Stentor Danielson, 12:40, ,