Ooh, this post is yielding all sorts of interesting examples of things I wanted to talk about but didn’t have examples for.
I think this is a good example of the limitations of the principle “don’t do things to people without their consent”1. Here Jim has said pretty clearly that he doesn’t want people to steelman his arguments. And here we are, taking one of his arguments and steelmanning it2. We are using something he made in a way he explicitly didn’t consent to.
But I’m pretty sure we’re not doing anything wrong. We are having new and interesting thoughts and discussing them in a way we likely wouldn’t have otherwise; we’re learning3. And I suppose I can see why that would be upsetting; I certainly wouldn’t be too happy if Jim read one of my arguments and then blogged something about how it gave him this great new argument for why homosexuality is bad.
That wouldn’t be a violation of my consent though, even if I told people not to use my arguments in ways incompatible with my beliefs4. I guess mostly I’m just saying that you don’t get to claim ownership of your arguments after making them. Especially as it would be bad to say that Jim believed [your steelmanned argument] — once you’re asserting that he does still own the argument, it’s screwing with his consent to mess around with the argument in a way he doesn’t want.
I feel like this has some bearing on appropriation as well, but I can’t really figure it out. Something about rituals/ways of expressing oneself being part of culture but beliefs not being part of culture, so therefore you shouldn’t appropriate the former but you can the latter? I don’t like calling beliefs not a part of culture though, that seems wrong. Something about not appropriation only being problematic if you do it to a non-dominant culture? That would say we shouldn’t “appropriate” racists’ arguments that black people shouldn’t marry white people to show that arguments against gay marriage are bigoted, since the former belief is not dominant nowadays. That seems wrong too. I guess what I’m saying in this paragraph is that it seems like this example should illustrate some limits on the scope of “don’t appropriate,” but I don’t actually seem to be able to figure out anything new5.
A good principle in general, I’m not trying to say not to use it; I’m just trying to figure out limitations on its scope. And I think the fact that I didn’t have a handy example is that this isn’t a principle that’s applied too broadly very often; “consent” isn’t at the point of something like “freedom” where everyone claims they’re protecting it. ↩
Probably, anyway. I’m not sure we really are strengthening his argument, we mostly seem to be saying it’s not right, but I guess we’re debating against points that are not quite he said but rather something stronger (to us at least), and hence implicitly steelmanning his argument. ↩
I guess I shouldn’t speak for all of us on this point. I, at least, am learning (and having new and interesting thoughts, etc). ↩
Which, by the way, I like my beliefs and think they are right, and if you manage to interpret one my arguments so that it says that homosexuality is bad, it’s very very very likely that I’ve either said something really stupid or that you’re coming from a really messed up worldview. And in the latter case you should change your worldview to something that isn’t wrong. (In the former case you can just tell me that my arguments prove things they shouldn’t, and then I/we/you can try to sort out what the problem is.) ↩
But maybe someone else can? If you have thoughts, I’m interested. ↩
Ooh yay this is interesting. I feel like exchange and cross-pollination of ideas is really important so I’m skeptical of any limits on it except limits necessary to incentivize content creation (you can’t copypaste my book and then sell it). I don’t think Jim is going to stop coming up with ideas just because we steelman them. This is also why I get annoyed at authors who don’t want fanfic of their work written, and why I can’t suggest any new limits on “don’t appropriate,” because I don’t really get what’s bad about appropriation in the first place.
Maybe I just haven’t had the arguments against cultural appropriation properly explained to me? And I also think I lack the “being offended” gene. Like if I were an author and someone wrote terrible fanfic of my characters I don’t think I would mind at all, and on St Patrick’s Day (I was raised Irish Catholic) I recognize that there are lots of appropriation and bad Irish stereotypes going on but I don’t feel bothered by it.
I wonder if the not being offended thing has more to do with Scott’s latest post about identifying with different ingroups? I used to think I was difficult to offend because attacking many of my identities (sexuality, religious, national, political) did not offend me. It turns out I’m average difficulty to offend, I just draw the lines of my tribe in strange places.
(I think the argument against cultural appropriation is, more or less, that lots of people are in fact offended by it, often not just because their national/cultural/racial identity is important to them but because there’s a history of the people who think it’s unimportant being people who do horrifically shitty things to them. So if people say that a particular behavior is appropriative and they are offended, continuing to do it signals not caring that you’ve hurt them.
I present this argument with the caveat that I see people who are not members of an affected group being indignant on behalf of those who are pretty often and I think obligations to stop doing things that make one group of people offended on behalf of another are not sustainable at all.)
Hmm, the first suggestion is interesting. Now that I think about it, I can think of times I’ve been slightly offended at people insulting nerds/math majors/whatever. Not offended enough to ask them to stop or write angry blog posts about it or anything, though.
And to add yet another Slate Star Codex reference to this thread, okay, I get cultural appropriation being bad in the way it’s bad to show pictures of salmon to British people. Even if I don’t understand why my actions are making people upset, I should stop unless I think the importance of what I’m doing outweighs their suffering.