on the worst argument in the world

> Abortion is murder.

The opponent used Worst Argument in the World™. It’s super effective!

Or is it?
Okay, first of all, what is Worst Argument in the World? The idea originates from Scott Alexander’s
post on lesswrong. To quote the author himself:

> "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."

In this case, X is abortion and the said category is ‘murder’. The category ‘murder’ clearly gives us a negative emotional reaction. Hence, by association, we will apply the same reaction to abortion, even though when we think of murder, we imagine a reckless psychopath slashing his knife in the blood lust, or something equally heinous.

What a nice rhetorical trick, innit?

Well, let us apply the principle of charity to it first.

Take a pro-lifer, who honestly believes that the foetus has a right to life, not qualitatively distinct from that of an adult human. She’s not playing a game in rhetorics, she expresses her strong belief. She needn’t advocate total ban in the case where mother’s life is endangered, say, she is against abortion on demand. And the conviction that it should be illegal comes from her inner judgment, that abortion in fact is murder. So, her argument is as follows:

Premise. Abortion is murder.
Conclusion. Abortion is wrong.

And we can construct a range of parallel arguments just like that:

Pr. Homosexuality is not normal.
C. Homosexuality is wrong.

Or:

Pr. Taxation is theft.
C. Taxation is wrong.

Pr. There’s a difference in intelligence between races.
C. That’s why Japan won with Senegal at the World Cup 2018.

And so on.

Scott claims using a premise of that type in an argument is literally the worst thing you can do. And others get pretty, pretty, pretty incited about those too. They rush to use such counter arguments as follows:

> So, when you ejaculate in a tissue, that’s a genocide.

> It is normal. Gosh, my country is so homophobic.

> No, it’s not, kucu.

> Well, that’s racist.

What is common to all those replies is that they attack the premise of the argument. And there are two grave mistakes in that.

First, an implication is false if and only if the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. Given “if X, then Y”, you assume X and see if Y follows. It doesn’t? Well then, the implication is false. It does? It’s true, you’re good. What you do not is claim “but X is false”. To give an example:
E. If Donald Trump is a reptilian, he should be impeached.

To claim he is not does not tell us anything about whether he should be impeached or not. On the other hand, if you assumed that he was a reptilian indeed, but he should not be impeached even in the face of it, well then, you’ve got your answer. The argument is false.

With that in mind, assume that all those premises in the arguments listed are true. I can myself sign under any of them. The thing is, in no way does any actually make the argument valid.

1. Abortion is murder.
2. Meat is murder.
3. Eating meat is okay, wouldn’t you say. [One hardly ever meets someone who claims both abortion and meat are murder, it’s more of a xor thing at most.]
4. So, it doesn’t seem that murder actually is wrong just-like-that.
5. So, we haven’t learnt anything about the moral status of abortion.

What we do is attack the ridiculous inference that’s pushed, instead of battling with premises which actually are, or very well may be true. Another example:

1. Homosexuality is not normal.
2. Normal meaning typical, well, neither is being fabulous.
3. And being fabulous certainly is fine.

Or:

1. There are differences in intelligence between races.
2. There are so many more important factors to soccer than the coach’s intelligence. Do you even know what an offside is?

Don’t go after the premise. Go after the hidden inference.

prevention is better than cure. except suicide

There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that.

A. Camus 

Kate Spade. Anthony Bourdain. Those are the names that started Debate On The Badness Of Suicide in 2018. The previous year, it was Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington. 2014, Robin Williams.

Did I say "debate"? My bad, I meant "pandering". Children and fish don't talk. Neither do the suicides. So, presented below is an idea you're going to hear only in the outskirts. Obscure, not suburban.

Prevention is better than cure. It is hardly a controversial claim; far from it, it's almost a truism. There is, however, a caveat to it, that has remained unnoticed. It simply does not apply to suicide.

Let's consider some standard examples first, where the proverb is patently obvious. It is better to get vaccinated against measles than to be treated for it. It is better not to be obese than to suffer from diabetes. It is better not to smoke than have chemotherapy. Because disease sucks. There are very simple chains of causation applying:

unhealthy behaviour => increased risk of disease

disease => inferior quality of life

It is not unhealthy behaviour that is intrinsically bad, but the probability of resulting diseases. Those are bad. So, rather than deal with the effect, we address the cause. It is easier. It is cheaper. It treats you before you experience any syndromes of sickness. It works.

How does suicide prevention fit into this scheme, however?

suicide => ?

Suicide prevention prevents suicide instead of curing... what, exactly? There is nothing to be cured if suicide is not prevented, because there is no agent to be treated anymore. Suicide is not the cause. It is the effect. Thus, this is the revised scheme:

unfortunate circumstances => suicide

Suicide prevention is not prevention, it is cure.

But, wait a minute. It's not even that, is it? When we treat infection with antibiotics, we desire to restore individual's health, not merely keep him alive. Suicide prevention, on the other hand, does exactly what the name implies. It prevents suicide, but it does not address the underlying causes. Those remain unchanged and those are the precise reason why one would want to kill themselves in the first place.

What is suicide prevention, then? It is a social cure.

We don't give a single damn about the quality of life of would-be/have-been suicides. That strongly suggests that we are not actually after their well-being, but rather magically eradicating the problem of suicide. Just having it disappear, like with it there would be no more suffering existing either.

The problem with suffering is, it isolates. It isn't vocal. Suicide, on the other hand, given the existing taboo on it, hits the headlines like a wrecking ball. Only then do we consider the suicide may have been suffering.

Or do we? Well, here it is how the knee-jerk reaction looks like, judge it for yourself. Reddit is having a thread on suicide prevention (just remember to keep in line or you'll be thrashed). Or if you prefer classic journalism, an article on suicide necessarily includes a hotline number and a cliche.

This is all we can do. Provide a number to a suicide hotline. Claim you are not alone. And that it gets better. And that your loved ones will miss you, you egoistic piece of shit. Now, we've done something good, we have that empowering feeling of efficacy. We've signalled how much we care. We've saved lives. We are good people.

And as for the closing remark for you, reader:

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

E. M. Cioran

sexist vs wrong

The most interesting aspect of suffering is the sufferer's belief in its absoluteness. He believes he has a monopoly on suffering. I think that I alone suffer, that I alone have the right to suffer [...]

E.M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

    Consider yoga classes. I've come across an article on that the other day. The author claims "the practice seriously lacks diversity", because "more than four-fifths of them [Americans who practice yoga] are white". A quick look at wikipedia, apparently 76.9% of American population is white. That doesn't seem like too much of a difference now. On the other hand, the survey the author links mentions that 82.2% are women. About 51% of the whole state's population is female. That seems to be much more of a difference. However, the author omits that fact completely. Is the existence of such a gender chasm a proof that yoga is sexist? No, I don't think so. Women are attracted to yoga more and I am completely fine with that. There's no evidence of any other reason behind it, any intentionality that I take as a criterion for sexism. You may disagree with this premise. My verdict is, however: non-sexist-and-alright.

    How about women-only gyms? Are those sexist and/or wrong? There's over a dozen in my city alone. I hear no outrage about them, nor do I think there should be any. A cynical answer may be that while sauntering, I prefer to ogle fit women. A more reasonable conclusion is that there is no rational reason to feel discriminated against. Even though it is written in stone (or at least in the gym's name): women only. It is a private enterprise. Free market will satisfy my desire to work out anyway, or so I hope. Perhaps I should rather apologise for the male race, if their behaviour is so abhorrent to warrant such popularity of women-only gyms. The whole thing is sexist by definition, but in the descriptive sense, not normative. There's a clear intention to bar members of one of the genders from the enterprise. Sexist-but-alright.

    Let's move on to another case:

John and Sarah attend the genetics clinic after the diagnosis of an autosomal-recessive condition in their newborn baby. The disorder is severe and debilitating and there is a high chance that the child will die in the first year. The gene for this disorder has just been mapped and there is a possibility that prenatal diagnosis would be possible in a future pregnancy. John and Sarah give their consent for a blood sample to be taken for DNA extraction, from themselves and their affected child. Molecular analyses of these samples shows that John is not the biological father of the child. At their first consultation, when the condition was explained to them, they were told that there is a 25% chance that any future baby of theirs will be affected. The carrier frequency for this condition is about one in 1000 and thus the chance that John is also a carrier (since he is not the biological father) is in fact negligible. Should the geneticist disclose the finding of nonpaternity to the parents when they come back to the clinic as part of their on-going counselling? (Lucassen and Parker 2001) 

    We're in a bit of a pickle. What does the law say about such situations? Well, nothing much. What about professional guidelines and the counsellors' attitudes? The former are contradictory (Hercher and Jamal 2016). While the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Biomedical and Behavioral Research in 1983 recommended that misattributed paternity be disclosed to both the mother and the father, in 1994, an Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee suggested only the mother should be informed. Then, there have been several surveys conducted amongst genetic counsellors. From that data it follows, that it is the latter guidelines that are currently prevailing. In Pencarinha et al., 1992, 98.5% of respondents would not disclose misattributed paternity to the father. Similar results were obtained by Wertz and Fletcher, 1991, where 96% of respondents (geneticists) claimed they would not tell the father, while 81% would tell the mother.
 
    Consider the demographics of genetic counsellors. Gender-wise, it is an unusually homogenous group. Here is some data I dug up, references at the end of the text. Lega et al. 2005 surveyed genetic counselling students, 97.4% of them are female. According to Lewis 2010, females account for 98% of the students and 97.1% of the graduates. The Professional Status Survey conducted by the Canadian Association of Genetic Counsellors thrice between 2006 and 2016 claims that between 97% and 98% of the professionals are female.

Now, I believe this factor is of utmost relevance in the context of misattributed paternity. I base this claim on the research by Lowe et al. 2017. There was a questionnaire developed, which presented two short stories on misattributed paternity. The participants (non-professionals) were to judge how ethical various actions that may be undertaken by the counsellor are. Finally, there was additional question if all children should be given a paternity test soon after birth, and father be informed of the result. After performing statistical analysis, some statistically significant differences were observed. In both presented scenarios, the idea to inform the father even if the mother does not want that, was deemed not ethically permissible more often by females (scenario 1: p=0.01, scenario 2: p=0.05). Furthermore, a similar difference was observed in regards to the last question: males were more approving of informing the father of the result (p=0.01).

  Let us further consider the opinion of the lay people on the issue, because it too is wildly different from the one amongst the professionals. According to Wertz 1999, 75% of the patients thought that the doctor should reveal the fact of misattributed paternity, if the man asked, even though the majority of this group were women. Had it been controlled for gender, this number would have probably been even higher, given the findings from the previous paragraph.

    Based on this data, I would like to present certain hypothesis. It may be so that the seeming consensus amongst the genetic counsellors is heavily influenced by the fact that they are homogenous in respect to the gender. It is the very case of informing the father of misattributed paternity where males hold a statistically significant different opinion, but those voices are not heard because of their lack of representation among the counsellors. Therefore, it is not simply the case that women decide about men’s issues, which, I believe, would not be intrinsically bad. The problem is that the issue being decided on is precisely the issue on which opinions heavily diverge, depending on the gender of the person holding the opinion. On the basis of Hare’s notion of universalizability, I believe that the counsellor should give great deal of attention to the father’s preference, regardless whether it is diverging from their personal opinion on the matter.

    Thus, I conclude that this is the case of non-sexist-but-wrong. Non-sexist, because it is not the case that men are in any way prevented from becoming genetic counsellors, neither are female genetic counsellors sexist: they act according to their honest beliefs, their value systems that run orthogonal to those of men's. But there is no intention on harming men; there is no sexist agent whatsoever. However, the resulting situation is wrong in the sense that men clearly are disadvantaged by the fact that the resulting outcomes are orthogonal to their dispositions.

    There's only one combination remaining: sexist and wrong. Sexual harassment is a no-brainer example, so let us consider something slightly more obscure. There are postgraduate studies offered by the public institution. The exact course happens to be gender studies. So far, so good. A look at the list of the lecturers, however, and we can see it is 16 women and 0 men. I would not have an issue with that if the course was on painting or creative writing; gender studies, however, is one of these few cases where gender actually is of utmost relevance. Not to include men in it raises suspicion of that being an intentional act. Why is it also wrong? Because it's no longer a private venture, but one funded by the public. Therefore, men in fact do deserve a voice in that matter.

    Thus, this is our scheme, where sexist is independent of wrong:

    *of course, I mean this concrete example, not the subject as a whole

    With the set up framework in mind, we can refer to a range of other cases on these issues. Say, why the outrage at the gender imbalances in conferences? It is claimed that those are at the intersection of sexist and wrong (the assumption that sexist => wrong is generally taken without a question). How does it compare to the cases mentioned above, however? Consider the differences between gender studies and yoga classes. The former are (1) financed by the public, (2) bar members of one of the genders from them in the context where gender actually matters. What about IT - because they are targeted most often - conferences? First, they are private enterprises. Second, women are free to apply and there is literally no sign whatsoever of any conspiracy, or an intention not to accept them. Third, gender is irrelevant to programming. I would not mind a panel discussion composed of ten women on running, knitting or hacking. What I find condemnable would be a committee on abortion composed of 16 males only.

    So, next time you hear that X is sexist, you may want to answer not one, but two separate questions: is it sexist? - is there an intention to discriminate one of the genders? is it wrong? - does anyone actually experience a non-negligible loss in their utility function? The results may be surprising.

References

 Canadian Association of Genetic Counsellors. (2012). 2011 Professional Status Survey. Retrieved from https://www.cagc-accg.ca/doc/2011 PSS report - English (1).pdf
 Canadian Association of Genetic Counsellors. (2016). CAGC 2016 Professional Status Survey Summary. Retrieved from https://www.cagc-accg.ca/doc/CAGC 2016 PSS Summary.pdf

Hercher, L., & Jamal, L. (2016). An old problem in a new age: revisiting the clinical dilemma of misattributed paternity. Applied & translational genomics, 8, 36-39.
Lega, M., Veach, P. M., Ward, E. E., & LeRoy, B. S. (2005). Who are the next generation of genetic counselors? A survey of students. Journal of Genetic Counseling, 14(5), 395-407. Lewis, H., (2010). The genetic counseling profession: a study of factors that influence career choice and training program selection. Unpublished master’s thesis, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. Lowe, G., Pugh, J., Kahane, G., Corben, L., Lewis, S., Delatycki, M., & Savulescu, J. (2017). How should we deal with misattributed paternity? A survey of lay public attitudes. AJOB Empirical Bioethics, 8(4), 234-242.
Lucassen, A., & Parker, M. (2001). Revealing false paternity: some ethical considerations. The Lancet, 357(9261), 1033-1035. Pencarinha, D. F., Bell, N. K., Edwards, J. G., & Best, R. G. (1992). Ethical issues in genetic counseling: a comparison of MS counselor and medical geneticist perspectives. Journal of Genetic Counseling, 1(1), 19-30. Wertz, D. C., & Fletcher, J. C. (1991). Privacy and disclosure in medical genetics examined in an ethics of care. Bioethics, 5(3), 212-232.