Don’t fall for the Activist’s Fallacy

Intent is not the only thing to judge policies or theories on.

Source: https://www.iied.org/climate-activism-time-covid-19

Within the expanding debate and political controversies over CRT (Critical Race Theory), the Activist’s Fallacy is regularly on display.

The Activist’s Fallacy operates as follows:

We are doing X because we are against Y.
You are against X
Therefore
You are for Y.

The Fallacy can be recast in negative terms:

We are doing X because we are for Z.
You are against X.
Therefore
You are against Z.

Either way, the Activist’s Fallacy is about making declared intent the dimension on which the entire controversy turns.

It also comes in cry-bully versions, such as:

We want to control speech to stop trans folk harming themselves.
You are against such control of speech.
Therefore
You are against stopping trans folk harming themselves.

In the case of Critical Race Theory, the Activist’s Fallacy comes in versions such as:

Critical Race Theory seeks to confront racism.

You are against Critical Race Theory.
Therefore
You are against confronting racism.

Or:

Critical Race Theory allows us to learn about racism.
You are against Critical Race Theory.
Therefore
You are against learning about racism.

The Activist’s Fallacy relies on declared intent being the only important motivational feature of whatever theory or policy is being put. With motivation being the dimension that all responses have to be graded on.

As a rhetorical and status strategy, this is highly effective. As long as everything can be construed as being first and foremost about intent, then any opposition becomes opposition to the declared intent, just as support becomes support for the declared intent.

Since the intent is, of course, going to be noble, that elevates the nobility of those pushing the theory or policy and de-legitimises any critics. They become malicious, callous, some sort of -ist or -phobe.

There is a lot of colonising of people’s decency going on. As well as people not wishing to have their status as one of the smart and good stripped from them by use of stigmatising labels against them: the submit-or-be-stigmatised choice.

So, by making intent the dimension upon which the controversy turns, motivation becomes the key grading factor. You can’t decide you are against Critical Race Theory because it is false, or because you think it has pernicious social implications. No, it is all about the declared intent of Critical Race Theory and whether you are “anti-racist” or not.

If one accepts the theory that society is a structure of oppression and domination, and that social interactions (including discussions) are all about power relations, then the Activist’s Fallacy is not merely a rhetorically useful status play, it is a natural implication of your world-view.

Which, of course, implies that there are things deeply wrong with your world-view. For the Activist’s Fallacy is still a fallacy. It is still bad reasoning, no matter how rhetorically useful it is. Nor how much of a congenial status play it is.

There are a whole lot of things wrong with Critical Race Theory, starting with it simply not being true that racism is pervasive in contemporary Western societies, or that disparities between groups are primarily the result of current racism, or that persistent disparities demonstrate systemic racism. It is a false analysis of social dynamics. Critical Race Theory’s racialisation of everything is also deeply pernicious in its effects on social dynamics and public policy.

Structural roles

Something that is very clear from the history of investing grand social meanings onto race, aided by “race” having visible physical markers, is that elite race talk is always a divide-and-dominate mechanism. And Critical Race Theory is very much elite race talk: it came out of elite universities.

We tend to over-rate the importance of conscious intent in human actions. As Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski (1921–2007) noted:

Unconscious psychological processes outstrip conscious reasoning, both in time and in scope, which makes many psychological phenomena possible…
Political Ponerolology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, p.163.

The over-rating of the role of conscious intent tends to be particularly likely when there are powerful social, institutional or organisational feedbacks and incentives in play. We find it very easy to tell congenial narratives about ourselves — to ourselves and to others — about beliefs (and actions) that may have other reasons to resonate with us. Especially if they also resonate with other folk in similar social positions, so that there are selection processes in favour of developing mutually congenial patterns of action and accompanying justifying narratives.

Instead of asking about conscious intent, let’s consider interests and feedbacks. Let’s instead ask the Who-Whom? question; the who benefits? question.

Who benefits if Critical Race Theory is not subject to searching critique about its factual accuracy and its social implications? Who benefits if US society is more intensely racialised? Who benefits if race-delineated divisions increase? Who gains status and career opportunities from spruiking up such racialising? Probably not workers, local residents or the general citizenry.

Those wielding the Activist’s Fallacy want to tell a noble story about their own intentions and a malicious story about the intentions of those who disagree with them. If they want to play that game, a deeper look at incentives and interests, about why certain narratives are so appealing and to whom, may not take analysis where they want to go.

Recognise the Activist’s Fallacy for what it is: a self-serving evasion. And don’t fall for it. Be prepared to call it out for the dishonest, self-aggrandising, rhetorical ploy it is.

[A previous version was posted on Medium.]

The existence of intersex people illustrates how sex is biological and binary

Folk are intersex because of how their biology is within complex and varied manifestations of two sexes.

Participants at the third International Intersex Forum held in Malta, December 2013.

There is this rather tedious game that is sometimes played where the existence of intersex people is somehow taken to indicate that either sex is not biological or that sex is not binary.

Any suggestion along the former lines is easily dealt with: a person is intersex if they have a specific type of pattern of biological features. That is, in the words of the UN OHCHR (the UN Human Rights Office):

Intersex people are born with sex characteristics (including genitals, gonads and chromosome patterns) that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies.

Those sex characteristics are, of course, biological. It is the biological structure of their body that makes someone intersex.

Use-referent confusion

The wording typical binary notions of male or female bodies is a genuflection towards sex as a socially constructed category. That categorisation within a language is a social act does not make the thing being referred to thereby socially constructed. To act as if it does is to confuse use of a term with the referent of the term.

This use-and-referent confusion, this confusion between category and object, is not a case of failing to distinguish between use (“I like eating cheese”) and mention (“'cheese' has six letters”), but it is similar level of logical error. That the practice has evolved of calling a particular set of dairy products cheese does not mean those dairy products are socially constructed by that act of categorising. However socially embedded cheese-making may be, such dairy products are created by a series of physical processes and have a physical existence not dependant on the categorising conventions of particular languages.

Both types of logical error come from the aboutness of language and thought; from us using language to speak, and categories to think, about other things.

Sex existed long before anyone was developing categories about sex. Sex continues in the biological world all around us, regardless of what categories we may choose to use, and how.

It’s all about the gametes

If your body is structured to produce small, self-moving (motile) gametes, you are male; regardless of whether any viable gametes are actually produced. If your body is structured to produce large, not self-moving (sessile) gametes, you are female. Also regardless of whether any viable gametes are actually produced. A gun does not stop being a gun by removing its firing pin or filling in the barrel.

At its base, sex is defined by reproductive function. Such a pattern of only two types of gametes means that sex is, at its base, in its biological function, binary.

If the evolutionary die were to be thrown to generate new genetic combinations, there had to be at least two gametes. If there were more than two gametes, that would greatly increase the difficulty in successfully reproducing. If there was going to be two gametes, one that was injected (so was small and self-moving) and one that received (so was large and not self-moving) also maximised the chance of successful reproduction. Hence, male and female gametes.

Given certain basic conditions, if a species reproduces through the combining of gametes (i.e. reproduces sexually) then having two types of gametes — small, self-moving (motile) gametes and large, not-self-moving (sessile) gametes — is the only evolutionary stable outcome. Hence, in our biosphere, sex is binary because there are only two types of gametes.

Thus, there is no third sex at the level of gametes. There are neuter forms of females in eusocial insects. In some species, an individual can change sex. But there are only two sexes in the sense of only being structured to produce one of two types of gametes. Some individuals partake of characteristics typical of both sexes. That does not make them a third sex.

While, in its base evolutionary function, sex is binary, the manifestations of the binary nature of sex in organisms can get quite complex. That sex is binary doesn’t mean that bodies are. In a way, that is probably the evolutionary point. A widely accepted hypothesis among biologists about why species adopt sexual reproduction via gametes is that it was an evolutionary adaptation to deal with pathogens. By sexually reproducing, the genetic die are being thrown again and again, giving sexually reproducing species a much better chance of having genetic lineages that could survive a particular pathogen.

In us Homo sapiens, as mammals, there is a set of characteristics that are specifically typical of the male-body structure and a set of characteristics that is specifically typical of the female-body structure. If you have some characteristics from both sets, you are intersex. But it is precisely the existence of these two sets of sex-typical biological characteristics that creates (1) the possibility of being intersex and (2) enables identification as intersex.

So, the existence of intersex people does not confound either the biological or the binary nature of sex. On the contrary, it refers to a set of people with various patterns of biological characteristics that can only be identified as falling within the set of intersex people because of the binary and biological nature of sex. Human bodies are bimodally distributed, but with sufficiently fuzzy boundaries that some folk are intersex, they overlap the distributions somewhat.

Evolutionary pressure

Arguments about, for instance, the concept of binary being binary — something is either perfectly binary or it is not binary — are ways of avoiding grappling with the biology. For biology has lots of fuzzy boundary concepts (e.g. species). Defining binary in a way that means nothing biological of any complexity is likely to meet it is not a proof that sex is not binary. The small self-moving gamete/large not-self-moving gamete difference is binary in the sense that counts in terms of reproductive function. Reproductive function that is subject to, and shaped by, evolutionary pressures.

It is that evolutionary pressure that makes, sex, in its base evolutionary function, binary and its physical manifestation in human bodies bimodally distributed. 

If there were actual hermaphrodites in a species with males and females, there would be grounds for calling them a third sex, as their bodies would be structured to produce both gametes. That would not, however, change the binary nature of sex in its evolutionary function.

The key confusion is failing to grasp that the binary nature of sex applies to its evolutionary function. If conjoining gametes is how reproduction happens, and there are only two sorts of gametes in play, then sex is binary. It is that simple.

This is not a claim that individual organisms cannot have a mixture of features. It is not even a claim that individual organisms cannot move across the boundary from one sex to another. It is also not a claim about animals conforming absolutely to to two, and only two, rigidly distinguished physical structures. It does not even preclude an organism producing both types of gametes, either sequentially or simultaneously.

The binary nature of sex is not defined from structures of bodies inwards. It arises from reproductive function outwards. As a biological process, reproduction has consequences for physical structures, but these can be quite complex and varied. A complexity and variance that does not in anyway change the binary nature of sex, though it does considerably complicate its expression in biological structures.

Animals have sex roles: the behavioural manifestation of sex. The manifestation of sex in a deeply cultural species is even more complex, hence gender: the cultural expression of sex. With gender we are in much more varied, and culturally evolved, territory.

In summary, there are only two sexes at the level of basic reproductive dynamics, defined by there being only two types of gametes. There is no third sex at the level of reproductive dynamics because there is no third type of gamete. Hence, sex is binary, however complex the manifestations in bodies of that underlying only-two-types-of-gametes pattern may be.

So, when folk say that sex is binary, what they should mean is that there are two types of gametes. And when folk say that sex is not binary, what they should mean is that the biological expression in actual bodies of the binary nature of sex is bimodal rather than binary. Though it is a clumsy and misleading way of doing so.

The rest is just tedious word games, with more than a dash of logical confusion.

[Previous version posted on Medium.]

Wielding the mask of science

Official health has a persistent pattern of presenting as science-based things that are not.

Source. Taken from here, original research and data from here.

Despite the efforts of the wilder shores of critical theory and its critical constructivist derivatives (such as critical race theory) to present science as white, patriarchal, heteronormative and similar morally-disabling things, science retains a great deal of authority in Western societies. Particularly in areas of policy concern that clearly should be based on good science. Hence public policy, and policy advocacy, regularly presents itself as being based on sound science.

Thus uses of terms and phrases such as trust the science, scientific consensus and, as terms of de-legitimisation, science denialism.

The evolution test

In areas such as health, nutrition, medicine, dentistry there is, in fact, a pretty reasonable rule-of-thumb to apply about how well science is being applied: the evolutionary lens. Ask yourself: does this claim make sense in the light of human evolutionary history? If the answer is no, there is a good chance that it is wrong. If the answer is yes, there is a much higher chance of it being correct.

So, if humans have been eating something for thousands of generations (meat, fish, saturated fat, salt, tubers) then there is a good chance that it is fine in your diet. (Nutritional-value or health-risk claims against them typically have very poor evidentiary bases.) Though differences in how they are cooked or when, including how often, they are eaten provides a complicating factor.

If humans have been eating something for only a few decades (seed oils, ultra-processed food), then there is an good chance that it is not good for you.

A similar point applies to eating patterns. If an eating pattern has been common for thousands of generations (one, two, maybe three, meals a day, little or no snacking), it is probably good for you. If an eating pattern is much, much more recent (eating several times a day due to regular snacking), then it is probably not good for you.

Modern Westerners have about the same daily energy expenditure as hunter-gatherers, so levels of physical activity are less of a factor in explaining rising obesity than one might expect. Which strongly suggests that changes in diet and eating habits has been the main factor in rising obesity.

It is frightening how much of the nutrition advice from official health sources does not pass the test of the evolutionary lens. Then again, a fair bit of medicine and dentistry also fails the test of the evolutionary lens. (For instance, the silly claim that it makes evolutionary sense that we grow redundant teeth, especially as foraging populations are generally known for their wide jaws and healthy teeth.)

The mask of science (nutrition)

Much of the nutrition advice from official health (i.e. government health departments and regulatory bodies) wields the mask of science. It presents itself as being based on the science, when it is not. Or, at least, is not based on good science.

The problem is, it is hard to do nutrition science well, because of nutrition’s inherent complexity. That means it is easy to do nutrition science badly, and even easier to do it to an agenda.

As the food industry (using the term ‘food’ somewhat loosely) is huge, there are enormous revenues at stake. So the capacity to fund, present and cherry-pick poor or misleading science is great. And, indeed, frequently done.

Unfortunately, official health also has perverse incentives. Not only are there the pressures of very well-funded influence-peddling but there are the inherently perverse incentives due to the tax-funding of health departments.

We pay organisations to do what makes their income go up, because that will have by far the strongest reinforcing incentives and feedbacks on what they do. If the metabolic health of the population gets worse, then health expenditure, including tax-funded health expenditure, goes up.

So, official health gets more revenue if they give us metabolically counter-productive advice and they get less revenue if they give us metabolically sound advice.

This is what economists call perverse incentives. Evolutionary biologists would call it adverse selection.

Unfortunately, welfare states are full of perverse incentives and processes of adverse selection. We can define the welfare state as:

a structure whereby taxes are spent to reduce or ameliorate social harms via various tax-funded bureaucracies that receive more revenue if the social pathologies tend to increase and less if they tend to decrease.

If we want to define the welfare state in terms of the state apparatus itself, then the welfare state represents:

a process whereby the state apparatus colonises (i.e., expands into, and receives increased revenue from) its own society rather than other societies.

Government health departments, in effect, colonise our collective ill-health. It is perhaps not a shock that the metabolic health of Western populations has been getting worse, and has been getting worse faster since governments started promulgating official nutrition guidelines in 1980.

If you are wondering what specific mechanisms have led to the official nutrition guidelines making our collective metabolic health worse, they can be summarised as:

1. Encouraging us to eat more frequently, leading to our bodies being chronically flooded with insulin, driving up rates of insulin resistance.
2. Encouraging more consumption of carbohydrates, leading to more fat storage (as set out in the chart at the top of this post).
3. Paying no attention to the massive increase in use of (highly inflammatory) seed oils.
4. Demonising saturated fat on the basis of no good scientific evidence. (And eating less fat means eating more carbohydrates.)

The official nutrition guidelines have been structured, by feedback and selection processes, to generate deteriorating metabolic health in a way that permits the use of the mask of science to cover nutrition guidelines that no one concerned for their health, or the health of their family, should actually follow. US defence forces, for example, are suffering adverse health consequences, likely due to following the official nutrition guidelines.

Indeed, without the mask of science, more folk would be come aware of what a diabolically bad job the nutrition guidelines have done, if improving the health of the population was the goal.

Of course, if the aim is to increase government health expenditure, then they have been excellently effective. Which appears to be precisely how the selection pressures have operated.

As we contemplate the deteriorating metabolic health of Western populations, Thomas Jefferson proved to be prophetic in his 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia:

Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.

The mask of science (Covid 19)

We can also see the mask of science being use to cover policies not grounded in good science in the official responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Covid-19 is a respiratory (so seasonal) illness of metabolic distress. That is likely why children and adolescents have been largely immune: their metabolisms are generally sufficiently healthy that they are far less vulnerable.

One of the things that became clear relatively early is that outdoor transmission is not a significant vector for spreading the virus. Conversely, Vitamin D deficiency is a vector for increasing the likelihood of suffering badly from the virus. (Likely a major factor in why darker-skinned folk in northern latitudes had higher rates of illness and death.) Also, social interaction is well known to reduce stress and so increase capacity to resist disease.

So, we should not have been telling people to stay out of the sun and the fresh air, or to wear masks outdoors, as airborne transmission risk is about effective volume of air. Yet, using the mask of science, this is precisely what has been done in many jurisdictions. The case for lockdowns is also much weaker than is often recognised. (See also here.)

Masks do, however, operate as a strong social signal. A signal that gets its power from use of the mask of science.

A tale of two (US) States

Florida and California are both large population US states, (21m to 40m people) at similar latitudes (so similar seasonal patterns). Florida has a higher population density, though California’s population is slightly more urbanised (95% to Florida’s 91.2%). Florida has an older population (median age of 42.5 to 37) as you would expect from a well-known retirement destination.

So, other things being equal, you would expect Florida to have a higher pandemic death rate than California. California has a death rate of 1,595 per million people. Florida has a death rate of 1,721 per million people. So, higher, as one would expect. But not very much higher: 126 more deaths per million or 8% higher. Rather less of a difference than one might expect, given that Florida’s median age is 15% higher than California’s.

Yet the measures in California to combat the pandemic have been way more intrusive and expensive than what has been done in Florida. Moreover, California’s death rate has been closing on Florida’s, as California’s second (seasonal) wave was much worse than its first.

Florida not discouraging people to go outside and enjoy the sun, and not requiring masking outside, does not seem to have had significantly adverse effects. As, one would expect, if one was following the actual science rather than those wielding the mask of science.

The systematic attempts to suppress any public consideration of the lab leak hypothesis was another, particularly egregious, case of the use of the mask of science against actual science. Also egregious has been the suppression of discussion of a potentially viable treatment for Covid-19, Ivermectin (longer discussion here). I have no idea about whether Ivermectin is effective, or in what circumstances. But suppression the discussion is nonsense and not in any way "doing science". 

Advice not given

It was clear relatively early on in the pandemic that Covid-19 was a respiratory (thus seasonal) disease of metabolic distress, with poor metabolic health greatly increasing your risk factors. By changing your eating habits, you can improve some markers of metabolic health in a few days, some in a few weeks, the rest within a few months.

These changes needn’t be all that expensive. Indeed, simply eating less frequently (aka time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting) to give your body a rest from being flooded with insulin can be very effective.

As far as I am aware, at no stage did official health tell us that. Either they didn’t know the above or they didn’t want to admit what crap their official nutrition guidelines are.

Either way, the selection processes operating on official health did not favour optimising the policy response to the pandemic. But they certainly did involve much use of the mask of science. Rather less use of actual science.

Stop and consider how many unnecessary deaths there may have been from the Covid-19 pandemic because official health has perverse/adverse incentives.

They are a mere fraction of the premature deaths every year from using the mask of science to push bureaucratically (and corporately) convenient nutrition guidelines rather than providing nutrition advice well-grounded in our evolutionary history, so in actual science.

[An earlier version was posted on Medium.]