Against The Dunkers

Merely sneering at a view that you don't like doesn't discredit it

A dunk, for those above 65 or not on social media, is a display of public mockery. Good dunks are concise, snippy, and mean. The following is a pretty good example of the genre:

Dunking has become the activity du jour on Twitter. People on both the left and the right love dunking. Good dunks get retweeted thousands of times. Recently, some fellow named Kitten attempted to “dunk” on me on Twitter over my views on insects:

I find this annoying for a bunch of reasons. I mean, first of all, I wrote the article about the utility monster in high school. I agree with it still, but it’s poorly written—like most of what I wrote in high school. Reaching back to stuff people wrote when they were seventeen is a bit silly. As is the unflattering photo of my face!

But more irritating was the utter lack of substance. In fact, I challenged the fellow posting the dunk to a debate about the importance of insects. He, despite having a substack roughly 10% as large mine, declined the debate. The debate for him would be pure upside, allowing his views to be exposed to a much larger audience. He declined, no doubt, because he knows such a debate would go very poorly for him.

Having a serious dialogue about insect importance was clearly too much for him. He’s not in the business of giving arguments, and would get eviscerated in a debate on the subject. He merely feels visceral disgust towards certain positions, pulls together a hackneyed insult, and flees from real disagreement. A friend of mine put it well, in saying that Kitten is one of the people who thinks “just confidently denying something based on their strongly held intuitions is unassailable and that anyone who persists in asserting X because of their argued-for-reasons is ‘gay’ and ‘retarded.’”

Steve Sailer—someone whom I don’t otherwise like—coined the phrase “point and sputter” to describe this tactic. Pointing and sputtering involves taking an unintuitive or unpopular claim someone makes, not engaging with the reasons they believe it, and simply treating it as obviously objectionable and verboten. All you have to do to point and sputter is quote a view out of context and then whine about it—you don’t have to do the hard work of arguing against it.

Pointing and sputtering may be a good way to become a popular Twitter snark-dispenser, but it’s a terrible way to go through the world. Some claims are unintuitive but correct. For example, each of the following claims is true:

1. Actions that prevent bad things from happening in the future don’t actually improve the lives of the people that come to exist.

2. Your great, great, great, great…great grandfather was a single-celled organism.

3. Collective meat eating causes as much suffering every few years as all the suffering that has ever existed in human history.

4. If everything is knowable then everything is known.

One could produce many more examples. Many of the moral claims that we find intuitive would have been shocking historically. Few people thought that members of distant tribes had moral worth, and that plundering and pillaging other lands was wrong. Gregory of Nyssa was the first person to argue that slavery was immoral. Few people agreed with him. The permissibility of slavery was taken for granted for almost all of history.

Our naive disgust reactions are a terrible guide to discovering the world. While intuitions don’t tell us nothing, we shouldn’t cling to them even in the face of decisive counterarguments. If you get strong evidence against a position, you shouldn’t dogmatically stick to it just because it’s intuitive.

Kitten—who is fittingly named, given that he’s willing to publicly mock me for my views on a subject that he’s too scared to debate—dunked on my views about insects. But I don’t just assert that insect welfare matters: I give reasons for it. Now, maybe those reasons are wrong. But in order to figure out if the position is right, one must see if the reasons stand up to scrutiny. The fact that the position sounds silly two seconds after you first hear it tells us little about whether it’s true, especially since there are a great number of reasons to think that our direct intuitions about insect importance are wildly unreliable. I’m reminded of the following dialogue from Huemer’s Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism (M is a hypothetical meat-eater, V is a vegan):

M: Oh, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying the threshold for having moral status is above the intelligence level of cows, chickens, or pigs. Or any other animal that we commonly eat.

V: I see. And how do we know that? Assuming there is such a threshold, how do you know that the threshold isn’t lower?

M: Again, intuition.

M: Yep, I’m sure.

V: You didn’t think about that very long.

M: Sorry, I’m being too cavalier. Let me think about it. (pauses for three seconds, furrows brow) Okay, I just introspected very carefully, and I assure you that I’m not being at all influenced by self-interest. By thinking about it purely intellectually, I just directly see that none of the animals whose flesh I like to eat have any moral status.

…

V: Are you sure you’re not just saying what is convenient for you, and declaring that to be intuitive?

M: Wait, did I say a thousand? I meant a million. Human interests are a million times more important than animal interests.

V: Where did you get the “one million” figure from?

M: Intuition. I just thought about it, and it seemed obvious.

V: Are you sure you’re not just picking numbers for convenience? Like, just saying whatever is required to justify your current practices?

M: Yep. Wait. (pauses for three seconds) Okay, I thought about it. I didn’t notice any bias on my part.

If Twitter existed in 1600, you’d find lots of people dunking on those who opposed slavery. Based on their intuitions after thinking about the subject for two seconds, they would deduce that the position is absurd and doesn’t even need to be debated. If Twitter existed in the time before Darwin, there could be a lot of easy dunks on Darwin. Darwinian evolution sounds ridiculous—who would have guessed that we all originate from a common ancestor. But despite how crazy it sounds, it’s true!

I feel about dunking the way I feel about insulting people. In general, you shouldn’t do it. In rare cases, if a person is particularly unreasonable, it’s fine to do. But you shouldn’t use it as a substitute for arguing against a view. While lots of people think you fallaciously do an ad hominem every time you insult someone—as if calling someone stupid is automatically fallacious—the real error is in using personal insults to dismiss someone’s arguments.

(Regarding the claim that “you could make a ridiculous consequentialist argument for publicly mocking people for expressing controversial views,” I’m reminded of another funny passage from Huemer):

Block retorts that almost any action has some nonzero probability of causing some enormous harm. E.g., maybe sitting on chairs causes unfathomable agony to the chairs. Therefore, by appealing to expected utility reasoning, one can show that it’s wrong to sit on chairs.

Reply: The probability that chair-sitting causes agony is negligible. Also, there is no reason why that should be more likely than the hypothesis that chair-sitting relieves agony, or that refraining from sitting causes agony.

It’s fine to dunk on a person’s views if you have real substantive criticisms. But if you only have the dunk—only vitriol, only snarling and biting like a rabid dog—dunking is cheap and pathetic. It rots the soul and the faculty of reason. If I spent lots of time going on about how stupid Christians were, it would be pretty embarrassing if I ran whenever a Christian challenged me to a debate, and had no genuine criticisms of Christianity—if I only had mockery. If a person can only mock and cannot argue, they have in an important sense abdicated the cause of reason.

It would be one thing if only Kitten argued this way. But as I’ve written before, this has become the primary way of arguing on the modern online right. Just as the woke left before them argued by simply quoting things out of context and declaring them problematic, the postmodern right is wholly unable to fathom the possibility that a view might be unintuitive but might still be true. Dunks are more entertaining and digestible than lengthy explanations of why people are wrong.

It’s also a lot easier to dunk than to argue against a view. It’s easy to mock Christians by saying they believe in a magic sky daddy—much harder to argue against the fine-tuning argument. It’s easy to mock people who believe in evolution by saying they think they came from primates—much harder to address the mountain of evidence for evolution. It’s easy to mock the insect welfare people, but much harder to explain why we should be totally indifferent to a quantity of agony that outstrips all the suffering in human history every single week.

For this reason, I suspect that there’s a good deal of correlation between infrequency of dunking in a political movement and quality of their thought. After cannibalizing its own brain, the hyper-online right has been reduced to dunks—in the rare event they try to explain why others are wrong, it’s always by dunk, never by argument. In contrast, effective altruists never argue by cheap dunks, and are consistently among the smartest and most thoughtful groups on the internet.

In short, if you spend a large amount of time attacking a view, you should at least have something serious to say about why it’s wrong. If you spend your time complaining about the nefariousness of a view, but can’t explain why it’s wrong and flee from debates with its proponents, you are probably both cowardly and stupid. The replacement of serious debates with facile dunks has done serious damage to the quality of public thought.