Derailing for dummies

[pozorvlak]

[Everything herein will be extremely old hat to many regular readers, but it's new to me and so I thought I'd share. Consider this part of my ongoing project of self-education.]

Charlie Stross, in the comments to his most recent blog post, posted a link to the site Derailing for Dummies. The conceit is that it's a guide to arguing with members of marginalised groups for people who want to drive them to apoplexy and/or despair as quickly as possible - this allows the author to explain why such conversational gambits as "you're just being oversensitive" won't help your interlocutor's blood pressure.

As a "white, heterosexual, cisgendered, cissexual, upper-class male" (plus a bunch of other things besides - able-bodied, literate...) I've only had conversations about race, sexuality, etc, from the perspective of a member of the privileged¹ group [from which perspective the conversations often look like this :-( ]. So I found the site to be rather uncomfortable reading, but also very educational, and I'm glad the author chose to ignore their first two points (If You Won't Educate Me How Can I Learn? and If You Cared About These Matters You'd Be Willing To Educate Me). I've definitely used the lines

If You Won't Educate Me How Can I Learn
You're Just Oversensitive
You're Interrogating From The Wrong Perspective
Aren't You Treating Each Other Worse Anyway
Well I Know Another Person From Your Group Who Disagrees!
You Are Damaging Your Cause By Being Angry

from the page (in all innocence! And with the best of intentions!), and probably a bunch more. If I've said that to you, I'm sorry, and can only plead that I didn't know how upsetting it would be. Now I have some idea of how that feels to the other person, I'll try not to do it any more.

¹ "Privilege" in this context is a term of art that (AIUI) means something like this. Suppose group X is in some way marginalised. Then the world will be set up in such a way that non-X people benefit from their non-Xness in all sorts of ways, big and small, that the non-X people simply don't notice, because they've known them all their lives and think that that's just how the world works for everyone. This means that (a) they simply don't realise many of the ways in which life sucks for X people, unless they've made a positive effort to find out, (b) they are almost certainly unwittingly contributing to the further marginalisation of X people, because they don't understand the effects of their actions - as non-X people, they never experience said effects. Hence, if you haven't made an effort to educate yourself about the lives and difficulties experienced by X people, you're probably part of the problem.

This effect could, I suspect, be understood as an especially unfortunate interaction of various well-understood cognitive biases. To my utter lack of surprise, I am not the first person to think of this.

Non-X privilege also applies to people who are non-X but members of some other marginalised group Y: while the difficulties experienced by X and Y people will probably have some overlap, they won't be identical, and privilege applies to those experienced by X but not Y. The D4D author actually wrote the piece after observing exactly this: conversations in which X¬Y people used the same lines on Y people that ¬X people had previously used on them.

Comments

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

This deserves a longer response (and will hopefully get one later today, when I have more time). But for now, I'll just note that the struggle for equality and human rights is Serious Business, and by comparing its activists to moon-landing truthers and flat-earthers you're (no doubt unintentionally) trivialising it and them.

...

[lesslucid.livejournal.com]

I guess it depends on what you mean by "comparing" - it has two senses, one being to suggest that something is like another thing, and the other being to examine two things in search of both commonalities and differences. I think the question about cranks (ie, people whose views we can reasonably dismiss without fully examining every part of their argument) is conceptually important even if we are not really talking about cranks, or we are talking about "camps" that contain both cranks and non-cranks. Because it's about establishing the boundaries of rational discourse; in some senses, a commitment to truth requires of us that we treat as infinite our own capacity to listen attentively to ideas with which we disagree, to patiently consider viewpoints we are unfamiliar with, to examine and re-examine the basis of our present understanding and that of others and to search for ways to correct and improve both, &c. And yet, in reality these capacities are not infinite, and by failing to dismiss some ideas we may diminish our capacity to address ideas which genuinely deserve deeper consideration. And yet, of course, the tendency as soon as we have allowed the possibility of dismissing some ideas out of hand is to use this as a tool to let ourselves off the hook for thinking seriously at all, since whichever ideas most deeply threaten a framework in which we are ego-invested are likely to be the first we label as crank-ideas. Anyway, I think it is genuinely a Hard Problem and not just an easy excuse to avoid uncomfortable questions.

Re: ...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Excellent point. Thanks!

Re: ...

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

Thanks - you did a better job of explaining my point than I did :) I considered using climate change as an example, but it's entirely possible that there are climate change sceptics reading this blog, and then the whole discussion would get sidetracked. So, I deliberately chose an example which everyone would agree is ridiculous. That way, it's a spectrum: "sensible ideas that need further investigation" at one end, and "crackpot theories that should be ignored" at the other. As you say, the question is where do you draw the line? And how do you know when you've selected a representative sample?

I've come across feminists who claim (apparently in all seriousness) that it's impossible for women to consent to sex because of the Patriarchy; she might think that she's consenting, but she's wrong. Therefore any man who has sex with a woman is a rapist, and any other man who doesn't condemn the sexually active people is tacitly endorsing rape ("silence is alliance"). However, I'm guessing (hoping!) that there are other feminists who would be embarrassed to be associated with those views. If I lump the whole group together, that seems unfair, e.g. I wouldn't want people to dismiss NASA based on the "Louis Armstrong went to the moon" idiots. On the other hand, if I say "Well I Know Another Person From Your Group Who Disagrees!" then that's one of the forbidden techniques from the list at the top. That's why I think that "bingo cards" like that aren't particularly helpful.

Re: ...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see. With you now.

Louis Armstrong went to the moon

He did? Zomg. I thought that was his cousin Neil :-)

that's one of the forbidden techniques from the list at the top

I think at least one of us has misunderstood the point of the list, but need to think further.