Richard Dawkins opens mouth, inserts foot, mumbles something about "mild pedophilia" again

I feel like logic and emotion are two different modes of truth. Neither is inherently better or more truthful than the other, and both can (and often are) used inappropriately as a weapon rather than a tool to get at the truth.

You’re pretty clearly crossing the line when you attack emotion (or logic) simply for not being the mode you would rather be using. You’ve got to also have an argument for why emotion (or logic) has no place here. “Your emotions are wrong because they are not logic” doesn’t fly, unless you are writing a mathematics proof or something like that 🙂

He must have been worried that after his co statement with Ophelia benson he was coming dangerously close to relevancy again.

Can someone explain to me why emotion is always irrational? I hear my fellow atheists (typically the white straight cis male ones surprise, surprise) say things like this a lot and I strongly disagree.

Emotion can be adaptive and completely rational. Does it not occur to Dawkins and his fan boys that being strongly invested in keeping children from harm is beneficial to the human race? Of course most people have intense emotional reactions to child abuse. It’s a healthy instinct. How is this different than a non-human mother animal behaving nervously and aggressively when she feels that her young are threatened? It would be faulty biology to make the claim that humans are higher and better creatures that don’t operate on animal instinct after all.

Kirbywarp has some good thoughts. As do you!

My answer is: “No, I can’t, sorry, but here’s words anyway”

I can give it a try. It’s not often I get to use relevant parts of my epistemology classes.

TL:DR – essentially, people doing this assume Logical Is Superior, instead of a tool. So conclusion arrived at using logic are SUPERIOR to other kinds of conclusions (heuristically arrived, emotionally sounded up, blind selection, etc). This then allows them to say that anything not 100 % logical is unsound, wrong and worst of all, silly. English languages backs this up by way of accident, because “reason” is used to mean “logic and rational” nine times out of ten.

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The assumption is that emotions are a naturally obstructive force that interferes with objective analysis of facts as they relate to a case, and then cloud your logical chains of thought. I think the idea is that because they arise from instincts that trigger based on stimuli, that stimuli might be irrelevant to the case at hand or just a subject of transference. False positives, really.

So you get that, and then you add about two millenias worth of ideas relating to stoic willpower being THE MANLIEST THING and rational, distanced observation being so cool you gaiz, and how reason is a fortress built from the bedrock of eternity yet emotions are mere flights of fancy. And suddenly, the kind of asshole who says: “Ah, but you’re just emoting, you’re not looking at this logically” gets a leg up because they are indirectly calling you literally incapable of presenting an argument that ties into the reality of the situation.

You’re letting mere biology and the tricksy interplays of volatile neurochemicals get in the way of Braining Things Out Properly. Since scientist types are often pretty big on empiricism (which makes sense, given the work), you’re essentially subject to having emotions phrased and parsed as an obstructive force between you and some Most Optimal Solution To The Problem that these vile, wily chemicals in your head are preventing you from seeing (an optimal solution that often coincides neatly with exactly what the other speaker wants you to do or agree to).

Ie:

“Stranger rape is worse than date rape”

Is, on its own, just a statement of priorities bereft of any emotional impact on actual people. It’s fucking stupid, too. But that’s what it is to Super Rational People. (hint: this is not correct)

But it’s never on its own, and it’s not a quantitative statement about the exact temperature at which concrete will become brittle and flake into bits like sugar.

(Incidentally, this is usefl information if you, say, play a mage in Shadowrun or intend to make some really interesting urban art )

Because it’s a social problem, he fucks up thinking it’s a quantitative quality he’s trying to mark out in absolute terms relative to each other, and not a normative value judgement he has already made using his emotions and value system.

The exact reasons for that are probably something like minor superiority and the assumption that having your person violated by some uncouth thug is much, much more demeaning than other people you trust touching you inappropriately. That’s the parody version of an Upper Class Nit in my head speaking, but I write it out so you see what logical premises might have gone into arriving at the logical conclusion that logically stranger rape is worse than date rape, logically. But if you then view those premises, you find they’re based on other, emotional values.

So because he thinks he’s speaking in absolute terms about objective reality, emotion gets sideline as being an obstructive force. A film of misconception that is obviously keeping us from understanding his words, because if only we’d listen properly and try to reason it out without getting our emotions rilled up, we’d see that he was completely factually correct:

Emotions are a useful guideline in decision marking processes of all kinds, because without a value system by which to judge our “most fit” criterion on reason, we have no grounds to go on in relation to trying to make a judgement. Logic is a tool for arriving at conclusions, not a superior way of life.

And you arrive at conclusion deemed fit by the case at hand by way of defining certain absolute goals.

There’s all kinds of fascinating research on just how pant-destroyingly, city-crumpling, life-endingly bad decisions human beings make when unable to use emotional cues in their reason. Because emotional causes underpin the reasons we fucking reason in the first place.

It also allows someone trying to do this Argumentum Ad Logic-piss to be exactingly specific in their statements to the great fury of everyone else.
Because they’re trying to treat their statements as single sum no ambiguity statements in a chain of logical premises, they allow themselves to ignore “false” leads like any possible interpretation of their words.

That “noble prize” thing above twofortyseven points out is a prime example.

And because they can then ignore any of these “emotional interpretations of their specific statements”, they can actually go right on to perform an awesome, awesome fallacy, and not have their conclusions flow from their premises, so long as they don’t directly state that conclusion. Let me demonstrate a magic trick.

I have written more poems on this site than the entire Manosphere combined.
Other mammothers have written great and awesome stuff here, more than the entire Manosphere combined.
There are more examples on We Hunted The Mammoth of fantastic cake recipes than in the entire manosphere.

These are all true statements.

My unstated conclusion to all this is that not one soul in the manosphere writes poetry, likes songs or eats cakes. Much to my own chagrin, I know for a fact that all of this is wrong (MRA Poets, my soul weeps).

Bothersome kettle of fish.

Fibinachi:

My unstated conclusion to all this is that not one soul in the manosphere writes poetry, likes songs or eats cakes. Much to my own chagrin, I know for a fact that all of this is wrong (MRA Poets, my soul weeps).

Or, to borrow from the “noble prize” example, “MRAs, because of their identity as MRAs or because of the culture of the manosphere, are unable to write poetry, like songs, or eat cakes.”

Its the same as when people make vague threats that aren’t really threats but totally are. Pretending that only most superficial meaning of your words matters when facing criticism, then encouraging the hidden meaning among your friends.

So because he thinks he’s speaking in absolute terms about objective reality, emotion gets sideline as being an obstructive force.

This is actually a great illustration of the “male gaze” as well as one of “oh-I’m-so-logic” assholes.

Naltia — exactly, “relative privation” is itself a logical fallacy. So is “ad hominem” which is what he’s doing when he insults the intellect and character of those who disagree with him.

It’s an insult to both logic and science to pretend that there is some obvious and well-understood objective measure of what activities will cause what degree of psychological and emotional trauma in humans, which other people are simply ignoring because they’re incapable of logic.

For example, it’s very well understood that most people will find it traumatic to have killed someone, even in a combat situation where killing is expected. Sociopaths, however, will not find it particularly traumatic. And why should they? It’s “illogical” to feel remorse for killing an enemy combatant during wartime.

This causes me to assume that when people try to argue that a person shouldn’t find something upsetting because it’s “illogical” to do so, the person making that argument might be a sociopath.

@fibinachi: “Because emotional causes underpin the reasons we fucking reason in the first place.”

So very well said.

I think the general knock on emotion is that it’s so frequently subjective and untestable. That’s an understandable concern, but application of logic to real life so often fails that the concerns about emotion start to fade if “pure” logic is the alternate tool being proposed.

@CerberusXt:

Great. He’s gone and made the exact argument that everyone here has agreed is a bad one, pretending his statement was simply one of logic with no implications whatsoever. An argument that every single blog post I’ve read has already considered and dismissed.

*sigh*

@Ally S : Exactly, every time I saw somebody bring up this argument, it was always to imply “your problem is not important/painful enought to be worth considering”.

@kirbywarp : He may be thinking that if he repeats it enough time, he will magically be right, who knows. Anyway, when he says :

“It seemed barely plausible that such an obvious point needed making, but the subsequent tsunami (as one tweeter called it) of agonised attacks, not only on Twitter but in some blogs and even some newspapers, actually demonstrated the opposite.”

He clearly doesn’t understand what’s the problem is and what triggered the “tsunami” (not to say shitstorm).

Does Dick get royalties for the use of Michael Scott (“the office”) – a character based on Dick?

Ha! In the comments under his ‘but I so logic, why r upset?’ article someone basically says ‘you must have known what you were doing so if this was all for publicity you’ve succeeded’. TBH its either the publicity or he just loves being an arse. Possibly both.

The only–and I mean ONLY–time it becomes appropriate to speak in such relative terms is when you’re discussing how to allocate scarce resources to address the distinct problems.

QFT