[Commenting note: As one may tell from the title, use of the forbidden words “motte” and “bailey” is permitted in this comment thread. Please do not abuse this privilege.]
One thing I’ve noticed is that all three of the movements closest to my heart have standardized definitions that are, well, things everyone can agree with. Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. Rationality is systematized winning. Effective altruism is the use of evidence and reason to make the world the best place it can be. Why is this such a common impulse?
One common explanation is that it’s public relations. No one disagrees with the idea that women are people; no one doesn’t want to win; no one thinks that we shouldn’t use evidence or that it’s a good idea to make the world a worse place. Therefore, we can get people to agree that rationality, or feminism, or effective altruism is a good thing under one definition, and then while they’re not looking smuggle in our more controversial claims about Bayesian reasoning, structural sexism, or culices delendi sunt.
However, I don’t think that that’s all of it. I think, when one is looking to characterize a movement, the easiest way is to characterize it by its goals. Effective altruism is evidence-based do-gooding, feminism is about fighting sexism against women, and rationality is about improving people’s thinking. While there’s a certain amount of PR in characterizing “fighting sexism against women” as “believing women are people”, it doesn’t seem like an absurd mischaracterization to me– particularly if you believe (as many feminists do) that a common form of sexism is treating women as Pure Perfect Angels Of The Home and/or Sex And Children Dispensing Objects.
The problem is that a lot of movements’ goals are pretty uncontroversial. The red pill‘s goal is to help men reach their relationship goals; Communism intends to end exploitation of workers; the anti-gay-marriage movement intends to preserve families. I don’t think most people who oppose those groups object to helping men reach their relationship goals, ending exploitation of workers, or preserving families. They object to the empirical claims associated with those groups, like the alpha/beta/omega theory of dating, the labor theory of value, and the gay cooties theory of family dissolution.
So defining a movement by its goals inherently ends up presenting a more palatable version of the movement, because you’re leaving out the empirical claims people find controversial– whether it’s the idea that the differences between men and women are caused by sexism, that volunteering is a less effective way of doing good than charitable donations, or that going to CFAR will improve your thinking.
Thing of Things 
A modest proposal (from someone resolutely uninformed about feudal warfare): ‘motte’ and ‘bailey’ should be replaced by ‘bait’ and ‘switch.’
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Or just use ‘town’ and ‘castle’, which makes the same “this is where you want to live, this is where you go to defend yourself if attacked” analogy but in more familiar language. But it doesn’t sound as interesting.
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I kinda want to just use a word-replacer extension to do that automatically, but “bailey” is also a common name. thank u language
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I remember the first time I saw the M&B argument described was using the “bait and switch” terminology. It was the Libertarian Reform Caucus, which pointed out that a lot of libertarians used a a bait and switch definition of libertarian. “Wants to reduce the size of government” was the bait, “agrees with the Non-Agression Principle” was the switch.
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“Motte and Bailey” carries the connotations of a siege battle – retreat from what you really want when attacked to something that can be defended easily, hold out, when the enemy breaks themselves on your fortress or retreats due to lack of resources, retake the ground you lost. “Bait and Switch” suggests something more “offensive” in nature.
The confusion around motte and bailey is that, well, it’s fairly esoteric. I mean, I know about medieval warfare, and I mix up which is which. “Town and Castle” is definitely better, because it doesn’t rely on knowledge of a particular early form of medieval fortification.
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I deliberately avoided using the terms in the body of the post for accessibility reasons.
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I think “bait and switch” implies malice on the part of the arguer, where “motte and bailey” doesn’t.
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I think that there’s an additional advantage in that “town and castle” makes it easier to assume a lack of malice or intentional trickery. “Bait and switch” implies that the person knows what ze’s doing, while “town and castle” leaves open the possibility that it’s an honest case of poor reasoning and arguing.
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Honestly… even if it really does all reduce to public relations, I don’t think that’s something to which many people can validly object. I don’t think we’ve got any right to expect advocacy movements we reject to describe themselves in terms a critic, or even a neutral third party, would accept.
I know people do the little game you’re describing, and try to bully others into agreeing that their movement is good by claiming that rejecting it means rejecting the soft sell. But I suppose I feel like being able to get through that attack is a relatively minimal burden. It sucks dealing with people who are willing to bully and hurt you to make an example of you to others, but if you don’t like that, disassociate from activists. Few of us are in a position where we can’t get away from Amanda Marcotte or Germaine Greer (pick your boogeyman) by just turning off our computers.
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Pat: “bait/switch” makes sense if you think your conversational partner is a consumer-of-ideas to be duped; “motte/bailey” makes more sense if you think of your conversational partner as an attacker to fight against. (e.g. “Every time I bring up the issues with [X], he just retreats to the ‘bait’!” doesn’t actually make much sense.)
(I don’t think that either of these are models that are useful for having good conversations, but many people use them regardless.)
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This makes me wonder what terms would be relevant to a productive conversation.
A mediation workshop I once attended made much of the distinction between the problem and peoples’ proposed solutions, and how often we waste energy fighting for one particular solution rather than productively discussing the problem and the desired outcome. Perhaps those would be good terms for this context.
They would also address what I see as the dishonesty of formulating a problem as if it were the equivalent of the preferred solution. (I think the ‘feminism=treating women as people’ is one of those, myself. But that’s a different problem…)
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Yeah, I’m not sure how to use the “bait” analogy to describe someone going “no, you can’t make [object-level criticism], [thing] is [meta-level description].
Actually, I’m not sure this is exactly the same thing.
“Rationality is systemized winning, so if that worked a rationalist would do it” seems to function, in practice, more like “that’d just be part of your utility function, then, so you should still be a utilitarian”. I’ve never seen a feminist person *retreat* to the whichever-it-is, just stand there as a better position to attack someone outside.
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My feminist friends do that retreat whenever I complain about some extremist version of feminism. It’s very frustrating to deal with a poorly defined movement – at least until you realize that you have as much right to define it as any other participant 🙂
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I think that this view of the issues ignores that a lot of people have entirely different goals while insisting on the same definitions.
Also, neither Effective Altruism nor Rationality can properly be viewed as being well-encapsulated as goals, or even sets of goals; they’re systems by which goals may be achieved, but the goal isn’t part of the definition of them.
Feminism, meanwhile, routinely violates the goal of ending sexism against women, in what a hundred years ago might have been a strategic decision (using people’s perception of women as victims/subjects to inspire sympathy), but today has become dogma. There is definitely a sense of bait-and-switch there; women are fully-realized human beings — who have no or limited responsibility for their actions or the state of the world because they’re subjects of men’s agency. You can see where the strategy originated, and why – but it became the actual belief, transforming feminism into a mirror image of traditional gender conservatism. The very idea that women need special protections is a very un-feminist idea, by the definition of feminism, yet is almost entirely what feminism is about today.
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Agreed. One of the big problems with Motte/Bailey thinking is that it ignores that ideological bloc consists of individuals with distinct beliefs and goals.
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Christianity is the radical notion that all lives matter.
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Can you elaborate, please?
I don’t think “Catholicism is about helping people reach their ultimate purpose in life” is a particularly unfair definition (although perhaps incomplete without “loving God and their neighbor”).
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I mean I’d never grant the bible any moral authority,but I think one can soundly argue that care for the underprivileged and the excluded is the most central message of the original christian gospel. (I will only be referring to the material relating to biblical jesus in the new testament)
This goes from the general statement that the poor and disadvantaged will be the first to enter heaven to more specific examples:
Most importantly, Jesus has a habit of associating with people who count as inferior in their society – poor and sick people, tax collectors, women who lead what was then considered a “sinful life”- and it hardly ever feels like it is out of charity but rather because of respect and interest in the person themselves.
Besides that, you can also find some pretty radical notions of justice in the stuff he tells. There is even a parable specifically advocating a living wage (matthew 20).
As to the catholic church; they’re to christian philosophy what … China is to Marxism? In any case, following a strict set of rules and ignoring the lived reality of the people is explicitly condemned by biblical jesus, so I don’t think he would be too happy about them.
It’s kind of a bad example for motte-and-baily/bait-and-switch though, since the more notorious christian churches generally don’t claim that this is what christianity is about.
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One of my guilty pleasures is a novel called Joseph, where Jesus comes back and criticizes the Christians in some town for distorting his message. It isn’t quite as… angry, as I would like, but I haven’t found anything better in that vein.
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#NotMyChristian
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The Latin geek in me is in love with you for “culices delendi sunt”.
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This construction reminds me a lot of the “Noone believes they’re the villain” concept. It’s not literally true (sometimes people do actually have diametrically opposed end-goals, and sometimes people really do think they’re black-hearted), but it’s a good general heuristic for how people think on opposing sides of arguments/philosophies/actual wars.
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People who make a lot of noise about how evil and dark they are have, however, done a lot less damage than people who earnestly believe that what they are doing is for the best. It’s kind of amusing, actually.
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C.S. Lewis’ quote about Robber Barons applies here.
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I find it genuinely excruciating to hear anyone use one of these deifntions:
“Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. Rationality is systematized winning. Effective altruism is the use of evidence and reason to make the world the best place it can be.”
Using these definitions seems completely anti-thinking. Among people with good intentions these definitions often literally apply to everyone (at least the rationalist and feminist definitions apply to everyone). The existence of these deifntions makes it much, much harder to try to actually talk about what movements are. And especially they make it very difficult to crticize the above movements. Whenver you try to make a substantitive criticism someone will derail you with the PR-definition.
The last issue is the serious one. So I do not think these deifntions are remotely ok. Their existence makes clear thinking and clear discussion dramatically harder.
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I’m a feminist, a rationalist, and only kind of barely an effective altruist, but the EA one sounds way more defensible than the others.
Probably because the EA movement *does* in practice seem to have a lot of people pursuing different goals in an evidence-based manner, but it’s extremely rare to see a Rationalist (when did we drop the Aspiring-, anyway?) using a radically different “system” or pursuing an unusual end-goal, or people organising the feminist movement to fight slavery.
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> it’s extremely rare to see a Rationalist (when did we drop the Aspiring-, anyway?)
Thanks for pointing that out.
/will work on doing better at making that distinction
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Guess what happened back in the 1800’s…
(Though I agree with you about the present day.)
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In my opinion, movements are not best defined by their goals, their methods, nor empirical claims. They are best defined by a tradition. Any idea within a movement can change over time, even core ideas (although usually they just become less important).
Like Theseus’ ship, you might prefer to draw the line somewhere and say that once enough of the ideas in a movement are replaced it’s become something new. But also like Theseus’ ship, there isn’t any one true line to draw.
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My google-translation of “culices delendi sunt” is “kill all mosquitoes”.
Is that correct?
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Almost; it’s ‘Mosquitoes must be destroyed’ and is a reference to Cato’s similar declaration against Carthage (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est)
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I am extraordinarily tempted to end all my blog posts with “culices delendi sunt” from now on.
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At the very least it should be used for all of those articles and papers that discuss the matter. >;]
/suddenly wonders how many movements would have failed without good taglines, mottoes, or pithy summaries to rally around.
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@Ozy, do it! It’ll be so awesome!
“…ceterum, censeo culices delendi sunt.”
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It’s not just a matter of controversial empirical claims, but also of the substance of movements’ goals not being captured by these short summaries. For example, “the radical notion that women are people” contains within itself a certain conception of personhood that has normative aspects. If you replace the symbol with the substance, some sexists would say that women aren’t [meaning of “people”], and traditionalist conservatives would go on to add that no one – not even men – is a person in this sense. Similarly, the anti-gay-marriage movement seeks to preserve not what we mean by “families” but a particular familial arrangement.
A lot of movements’ goals are controversial in themselves, apart from their empirical claims. If you had a magic wand that could change people’s minds about empirics, it could eliminate some movements, but not all of them. Deontological egalitarians could still oppose markets even if they believed them to be effective and beneficial, nationalists could still call for immigration restrictions to preserve their culture, etc.
The motte comes from people’s use of the same words being different enough to have significant implications but similar enough to not be flagged as “this person is using a word differently from me”. It takes time and effort to disentangle the meaning of a word from how it intuitively feels to the speaker.
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This seems to relate to a fundamental distinction betwen an idea and an ideology.
People normally have lot of ideas, and these ideas are dependent on each other in a structuralist way: changing one idea changes the whole system, so that many people can have the idea that “women are people” and yet arrive at really different conclusions on what this actually means because they have different ideas about *other things*.
Ideology, however, is when a single idea becomes the unique source and nexus of a holistic and prescriptive wordview. All ideas that do not proceed from this main tenet are either rejected or violently reframed to fit the centralised, hierarchised structure of thought that is thus created. The resulting mode of thinking is so radically different from how most people normally think that the central idea takes on a substance that has become completely mutually inintelligible to people outside the ideology.
So it can remain true that “woman are people” is the central principle of feminism even though simultaneously the mindset associated with feminism makes this idea completely unrecognizable for people who do not share this mindset.
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This sort of discussion is what I thought the internet would be all about, back when the world and I were young.
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So I think that at least two problems that this ends up being relevant to are ~allies-by-parts (not allies in the SJ sense, and that isn’t the best word but I could find better),
and the movement analogy of language chains.
~Allies-by-parts is like – so, to me, ‘systemic sexism exists, is a huge problem and very bad, and we want to fight it’ is a core of feminism. It’s super important to me, etc, etc. I would really like it if there was a word for *that* meaning specifically, so that I could get that information about people easier!
But, say somewhere around there’s a place that has a dress code that says women are not allowed to wear t-shirts but men are. And, there’s also a campaign against this dress code. The people in this particular campaign have in fact never heard of the ‘systemic sexism’ thing and don’t have an opinion on it at the moment. Their campaign just came out of going ‘hey that’s unfair, it needs to change’. And, they’re using ‘feminist’ as a term in their campaign.
Well, [unless there’s some various issues going on], I’m certainly not about to object or try to ‘kick them out’! I think what they’re doing is good, is in fact fighting against sexism and improving things for women, and that we’re totally on the same side here.
So general definitions helps you with this problem of ‘ok, these people don’t share my core thing, but also I want them here, so…’
And language chains is like – so, in linguistics, language chains are when you have dialects geographically like this
X Y Z W A B
And people with ‘adjacent’ dialects understand each other, but for instance people with X dialect and people with W dialect might not.
And that makes it hard to decide where to draw the line of ‘actually different languages’ and stuff.
So I think that can happen in movements, where at any point there’s people adjacent to your particular opinion who you’d want to include. And people farther away who you wouldn’t. But for someone in a slightly different place, those lines are different.
So then sometimes you say ‘ok, I don’t even know, let’s go with ‘all these people speak the same language”.
Except then you get someone speaking dialect Y and people go ‘hey, you understand dialect A right? Because this label says you totally do. So you should totally have this conversation with me in dialect A’. And decide to get get annoyed and complain when the person says ‘um, no, I don’t speak dialect A, I speak dialect Y, go away’.
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I don’t think this is really the main goal… certainly they generally believe in preserving families and think not having gay marriages will help with that, but it seems to me that almost all anti-gay marriage people are either against homosexuality as a terminal value, or want to obey God as a terminal value and think God exists and is anti-gay, and so would continue being anti-gay marriage even if you got them to accept that “family” and society would be otherwise unchanged.
I think Communism and red pill work like this here because the former is (from what I can tell, but I haven’t read Marx) an individualistic, egalitarian, utopian ideology descended from the enlightenment, similar to that of most people here, while the red pill is sort-of kind-of a (misogynistic) self help movement. Other examples work like this too, but I think clashes of terminal values, not difference in empirical data and predictions, is the main source of political disagreement. At least in my experience this seems to be the case…
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Err, just to be clear because looking back at this comment it looks like it could be taken the wrong way, I did not mean to imply that people here are misogynistic (the “self help” part was the part that I meant could make their goals sympathetic seeming, because self help would tend to sound mostly politically neutral), and I include myself as an “individualistic egalitarian utopian”
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Maybe it would good to have something a bit longer and more controversial than “rationalism is systematized winning,” “feminism is the belief than women are people,” etc, but not so long that you come across as saying “before you dispute any of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s controversial claims, read this link to this 50-page LessWrong essay!” which comes across as a rather imperiously imposed burden on anyone attempting to discuss these ideas as an outsider, and possibly an attempt to disqualify any debate.
Something like the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the Five Pillars of Islam, the Apostles’ Creed of Christianity, etc. Obviously, it doesn’t quite work with things that aren’t actually religions, but the aim is to avoid platitudes that command universal agreement like “use evidence and reason to make the world a better place,” and get to something that has much higher (not necessarily universal) agreement within the group than outside of it.
I think “elevator pitch” might be how some business-oriented people refer to this, but frankly, I am pretty sure trapping someone in an elevator and then evangelizing them regarding your ideology is really, really awful etiquette.
My rough draft for, e.g., Effective Altruism:
1. It is possible to quantitatively assess the impact of charitable donation, with commensurable units (such as Disability Adjusted Life Years) between causes, to determine to what degree donations improve lives.
2. Units of improved life should be weighted equally. Weighting some lives as more valued or worthy than others — such as weighting the lives of disabled veterans more highly than others with equivalent disabilities, people from one’s own nation more than people outside of it — is wrong.
3. The economic gains from specialization and division of labor are as applicable to charity as they are to the commercial world. Volunteering to do unskilled labor, if and when one is capable of performing more highly-paid, profitable labor and using the resulting funds to hire workers for your cause, is wasteful and ineffective at improving the world.
4. A great deal of current charity is not cost-effective, for a variety of reasons (deployment of resources in low-impact-per-marginal-dollar developed nations, low-impact-per-marginal-dollar projects within developing nations (.e.g, a state-of-the-art hospital in Nepal), charities that are publicity obsessed like the Komen foundation, etc), We should shift resources within the charitable sector away from such charities toward ones with maximum impact per marginal dollar, like AMF and GiveDirectly.
5. In addition to maldistribution of resources within the charitable sector, the charitable sector is too small. Middle class and up people in the developed world should be significantly more charitable than they are on average (maybe donating in the ~10% of income range).
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Something like the 12 Virtues of Rationality?
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I have a suggestion for the elevator pitch: do not speak too unfavorably of people who are (as yet) ineffectively charitable. Overcoming the initial status quo of inaction seems way rarer and more difficult to me than the second step of overcoming the status quo against doing triage math.
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Er, well, I guess it can’t literally be rarer given the data we have, but becoming charitable in the first place is still difficulty and praiseworthy.
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Is there a single concise term for all movements which would be willing to reject reality if it conflicts with their movement-specific beliefs?
Examples would be things like Lysenkoism in the soviet union or the reaction to Galileo by the catholic church.
Groups unwilling to do this are pretty rare, I’ll grant that. It’s one of the reasons I like the rationality crowd, I find it hard to imagine even hypothetical results which the group would reject outright for ideological reasons.
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I tend to model it as the speed at which a group updates its priors. The Soviet Union and Catholic Church are pretty slow updaters, but they update.
(As George Carlin might have said, anyone who updates their priors faster than you do is a randomist and anyone who updates slower is a reality-denier).
My pet peeve with science oriented types is that it’s rational to apply extra scrutiny to evidence that contradicts strongly held beliefs, but that tends to be reinforcing. (The rationalists seem to do the best job in recognizing and challenging this, however).
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People are awful, terrible creatures who will take any opportunity to be despicable so long as they can rationalize it.
Hiding hatred of men behind “gender equality” or hatred of homosexual behind “family values” or hatred of women behind “relationship success” or pretty much anything behind “religious beliefs” or “how I was raised” is just.. people showing their true colors once untethered.
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