I've been meaning to write on this question from a slightly different angle. While you're right that this charge tends to get applied selectively and in bad faith, I do think it's worthwhile for people to give more thought to their dialectical priorities, and nudging oneself more in the direction of covering important, neglected, and tractable topics would surely be all to the good!
There's actually an interesting analogy here to EA condemnations of ineffective charity. Mediocre donations may be better than spending on personal entertainment, but they're an easier target for getting people to do more good with their efforts. I wonder if similar thoughts may underlie condemnations of suboptimal moralizing discourse. Even if it's better than entertainment discourse, insofar as its competing for limited moral attention, we might especially want to promote norms of moralizing optimally?
The key difference, of course, is that suboptimal moralizing discourse can actually serve as a form of entertainment (more so than suboptimal donations), which may undermine the case for seeing it as a "lost opportunity" for doing better. It may just be funging against other forms of entertainment, rather than against even better moral discourse.
I agree! I think it's very important for people with public platforms to spend some time talking about important stuff. But it's also perfectly fine to not exclusively cover important subjects.
Your first point was my first thought too. Insofar as the aggregation of public discourse on different topics reflects the (rough) actual prioritization of issues people have in mind, it is good to challenge people to prioritize more explicitly and rationally.
I think there’s some merit to the claim that what people choose to talk about reflects other variables, such as controversy and personal interest, independently of people’s assessments of how important different topics are. But I think a compelling aspect of EA criticism of “normie” thinking is that the choice of what to discuss can create or reinforce a warped idea of what’s really important, especially when one’s actual prioritization is left implicit. Most people are in fact confused to some extent by controversy and intrigue into mistaking highly visible issues for highly important ones. One sign that this is true is that, controlling for tractability, there is way more political organizing around visible, controversial issues than around more important but less flashy ones. This is what I would expect if public discourse tracks people’s implicit issue prioritization fairly closely.
A related consideration not conclusively answered in the article is the question of whether the standard should vary by the level of analysis. I think it’s fair to say that we should strive for the aggregate of journalism, media commentary, academic work, etc to track actual importance in its distribution of issue coverage. It’s also fair to say that we shouldn’t hold random individual people to such an exacting standard, though we may urge them to try to improve their sense of priorities as an ideal. It seems reasonable to me to ask individual journalists to land somewhere in between: accounting for specialization across different beats, journalists should try to keep a sense of perspective about relative importance in choosing what to cover and how much (as well as what beat to choose if specializing), though it’s valid to find any subject interesting and a subject’s relative lack of importance is obviously not a reason a claim about it is wrong.
To add to this, I think Michael Huemer's thought experiment of the school that exclusively talks about wrongdoings committed by Jews comes to mind. No information in it is incorrect, for any sufficiently large group you can fill every lesson with their malicious actions for a long time. However the undue focus on it colors perceptions about the level of crimes/wrongdoings Jews are responsible for, so in that sense it'd probably be reasonable to call it an antisemitic school.
"It’s valuable to talk about things that matter. I think people should do it more. But it’s not some minimal prerequisite to permissible speech. It’s perfectly alright to talk about issues even if you recognize those aren’t the most important issues in the world."
This seems right, but it doesn't follow (tbf, not sure if you meant to suggest this?) that there are no legitimate norms governing how we allocate our attention and political speech. It would not be perfectly alright, for example, for me to think and talk exclusively about international issues, and nothing about the issues facing my nation or my local community. This is because I have little power to influence international issues, as interesting as they are to me, and so focusing exclusively on them does not represent an effective and virtuous allocation of my political efforts. The attention and speech one allocates to some issue, I think, should be (at least in part) determined by the expected value of doing so. Speaking up about Gaza is justified over protesting tuberculosis because there's much more to be gained, in expectation, from doing the former (and thereby, it's hoped, influencing the US government, etc.), than from doing the latter (your protesting will not curb the spread of tuberculosis).
The expected value of talking about some issue is determined in part by how many other people are talking about it, who those people are, and what they're saying. Jesse Singal plausibly fills a valuable niche as a liberal skeptic of popular practices in gender-affirming care, and has good reason to think he can push the needle on that issue by focusing his journalism on it--much more so than if he had become another dime a dozen liberal political journalist writing about Trump or whatever. (Similarly, it's good for academics to specialize in neglected topics because they stand to generate more knowledge in their specializations than they might have in a more objectively important field.) On the other hand, issues that already have more public attention may be more likely to get to critical mass with your engagement--so sometimes they'll be the right issues to focus on. Where your political attention, speech, and action are likely to go the furthest will be highly context-dependent.
Imagine, if you will, having an asserted strong opposition to factory farming as immoral.
But then you only focus on say chickens. Never cows. Never shrimp. Just chickens. In fact most of EA is really focused hugely on chickens.
The original tweeted complaint is that Israel is chickens. Caring about a class of issues but consistently disproportionately focusing on one instance is the matter of concern here. See also: Israel's record at the UN.
People’s opinions are affected by how prevalent they think an issue is. Because of availability bias, people assume news coverage = prevalence. For example, people vastly overestimate the probability an unarmed person will get killed by the police, and this influences their position of police reform.
Americans think that 21% of the population is transgender when only 1% is.
This is false equivalence. Journalists are indeed allowed to talk about things other than the biggest issue in the world.
But accepting the merit of journalism on Gaza despite the existence of tuberculosis does not imply journalism on all issues is equally likely to be legitimate. In other words, the less important an issue, the more we have reason to question the motivations of the writer and the objectivity of their conclusions.
If I were to write a long article arguing that undergraduate philosophy students are more overconfident than students in other disciplines, you might reasonably question whether I have some sort of bias that prompted the focus.
In the context of very hot political topics, there is even greater reason to question a writer's motivation. Less than 1% of the country is trans, even less than the amount of people with natural red hair. Imagine that gingers became a hot topic political issue, and then some journalist with no connection to the community started spending a great deal of time arguing that ginger children should be forced to wear hats at all times, regardless of what the children or their parents think is best for them. If you were a parent of that child, wouldn't you be suspicious and resentful of the potential political motivations of this journalist? Wouldn't you reasonably wonder as to why he focuses so much on this "small" issue that he has no obvious reason to write about, as opposed to either "small" issues he has a connection to or "bigger" issues?
I think your argumentation is pretty weird here. The title and subtitle of your post are, of course, true - journalists can and de facto do talk about whatever they want all the time, regardless of importance.
It is still strange and interesting that people e.g. single out one particular war to focus on to deeply care about and that analyzing the potential reasons they do this can be fruitful, including an analysis that is suspicious of motives.
Interesting piece that I notice I disagree with instinctively.
"I think this is a completely ridiculous charge! You don’t need to talk about issues proportional to how important they are. Tuberculosis is pretty bad. It kills more than a million people every year. It’s way more important than the war in Gaza, gender-affirming care, or pretty much everything that anyone talks about. Does this mean that anyone who talks about anything other than tuberculosis is ethically compromised?"
Yes, in many ways, I think it is broadly ethically wrong to talk at length about the issues you mentioned rather than TB- at least, to the extent that you're having a serious discussion that's aiming to change minds, provoke action.
"In practice, no one actually dedicates coverage to problems in the world proportional to how important they are"
I wish they would. I would be prepared to pay a reasonable amount for a news source that took this approach; the closest I've come so far is the Wikipedia home page, which at least leaves significant problems (ongoing conflicts etc) "In the News" while they continue.
Just append "Furthermore, I think that tuberculosis should be eradicated" to the end of all your posts. Boom. Nobody can say you're focused on tiny issues.
Furthermore, I think that tuberculosis should be eradicated.
It's not just importance, but it's not just controversy either. I like the EA framework of focusing on causes that are important, neglected, and tractable. Taking those other two factors into account shows Jesse is doing important work: the issue of bad gender science and healthcare was certainly neglected for a time, largely due to organisations like GLAAD and WPATH attempting to suppress it. And obviously that issue is more tractable to journalists than many of the other important issues you've mentioned.
You repeatedly make the claim that one can talk about relatively important issues but I don’t actually see a justification for it in this article. From an EA/utilitarian perspective it seems pretty unjustifiable to spend time talking about relatively unimportant issues, especially if they don’t affect you personally.
Regarding the animal suffering example: It would indeed be INSANELY weird if you had only a single article on the topic. What I would reasonably conclude is that you don't genuinely think it is the most important issue, but are just posturing. This seems completely common sensical to me.
Lance is a clown, but Singal's obession with trans stuff IS suspicious. Very suspicious in fact.
Yeah, often because they are obsessed with said topic. Or because they think it's incredibly important. Or maybe because they have a unique expertise in said topic (which Singal certainly lacks for trans issues).
Do you genuinely not think it would be suspicious if you claimed "The meat industry is the worst thing humanity has ever done and we can do something against it", yet you basically never talk about it in your blog?
Singal has a general focus on science reporting. Has a whole book on it.
The fact he was even willing to touch the trans issue, specifically medical treatments for minors, made him one of the very few journalists to do so. So he has specialized in it.
That's not "very suspicious" that's "product-market fit" in an adversarial ideological environment for journalism.
And I'd agree with him. Without his willingness to brave conflict with his entire professional, political, and social milieu, we'd be far less informed about the travesty of poor medical science in this incredibly divisive niche.
Jesse could have been a successful run-of-the-mill journalist, as he was before he wrote that Atlantic article. But he leaned into the tradeoffs of controversy and put facts above ideological precommitments. I'm happy to pay him money for his efforts. Keep in mind though that he could almost certainly make a lot more money if he actually was anti-trans and catered to the MAGA Right they way they would prefer.
So nitwits like you can say "wow Jesse obsessed much???" because the vast majority of journalists will only ever toe the party line on controversial topics. You can't engage with the facts, so character assassination is all you have.
Which is why Lance was so obsessed with rhetorical tricks of guilt by association, arguments from authority, and aiding the enemy instead of the actual facts of the matter.
"Suspicious" meaning, he has mastered a scientific literature on a controversial culture al issue, and written a book about it, and has continued to write about, and invite debate about it, , not because he feels strongly about the topic but mainly because he's interested in money? Or suspicious, because he's actually a right wing transphobe, pretending to be liberal? Or suspicious because whatever his motive, his work gives succor to transphobes? Please explain.
BTW, I'd heard of/read Singal before he blew up, if you can say he's done that. Because I've been reading mainstream center left organs like the Times, Atlantic, New York Magazine that he wrote for, since long before he had a Substack.
Lance would freely admit that he thinks trans issues are incredibly important. There's nothing suspicious about caring about a topic per se. What's suspicious is identifying as a liberal when you spend a huge amount of your time propagating right-wing talking points.
In ordinary English there is no such thing as a right-wing liberal. "Being a liberal" at least in US politics, means left-leaning. Also, Singal would never ever classify himself as right-wing, obviously.
I've been meaning to write on this question from a slightly different angle. While you're right that this charge tends to get applied selectively and in bad faith, I do think it's worthwhile for people to give more thought to their dialectical priorities, and nudging oneself more in the direction of covering important, neglected, and tractable topics would surely be all to the good!
There's actually an interesting analogy here to EA condemnations of ineffective charity. Mediocre donations may be better than spending on personal entertainment, but they're an easier target for getting people to do more good with their efforts. I wonder if similar thoughts may underlie condemnations of suboptimal moralizing discourse. Even if it's better than entertainment discourse, insofar as its competing for limited moral attention, we might especially want to promote norms of moralizing optimally?
The key difference, of course, is that suboptimal moralizing discourse can actually serve as a form of entertainment (more so than suboptimal donations), which may undermine the case for seeing it as a "lost opportunity" for doing better. It may just be funging against other forms of entertainment, rather than against even better moral discourse.
I agree! I think it's very important for people with public platforms to spend some time talking about important stuff. But it's also perfectly fine to not exclusively cover important subjects.
Your first point was my first thought too. Insofar as the aggregation of public discourse on different topics reflects the (rough) actual prioritization of issues people have in mind, it is good to challenge people to prioritize more explicitly and rationally.
I think there’s some merit to the claim that what people choose to talk about reflects other variables, such as controversy and personal interest, independently of people’s assessments of how important different topics are. But I think a compelling aspect of EA criticism of “normie” thinking is that the choice of what to discuss can create or reinforce a warped idea of what’s really important, especially when one’s actual prioritization is left implicit. Most people are in fact confused to some extent by controversy and intrigue into mistaking highly visible issues for highly important ones. One sign that this is true is that, controlling for tractability, there is way more political organizing around visible, controversial issues than around more important but less flashy ones. This is what I would expect if public discourse tracks people’s implicit issue prioritization fairly closely.
A related consideration not conclusively answered in the article is the question of whether the standard should vary by the level of analysis. I think it’s fair to say that we should strive for the aggregate of journalism, media commentary, academic work, etc to track actual importance in its distribution of issue coverage. It’s also fair to say that we shouldn’t hold random individual people to such an exacting standard, though we may urge them to try to improve their sense of priorities as an ideal. It seems reasonable to me to ask individual journalists to land somewhere in between: accounting for specialization across different beats, journalists should try to keep a sense of perspective about relative importance in choosing what to cover and how much (as well as what beat to choose if specializing), though it’s valid to find any subject interesting and a subject’s relative lack of importance is obviously not a reason a claim about it is wrong.
Oh so you think this talking point is the worst thing that’s ever happened?
Lol 😅
I'm leaning more Israeli myself and use the argument you are criticising sometimes but yeah your counter argument is good
To add to this, I think Michael Huemer's thought experiment of the school that exclusively talks about wrongdoings committed by Jews comes to mind. No information in it is incorrect, for any sufficiently large group you can fill every lesson with their malicious actions for a long time. However the undue focus on it colors perceptions about the level of crimes/wrongdoings Jews are responsible for, so in that sense it'd probably be reasonable to call it an antisemitic school.
"It’s valuable to talk about things that matter. I think people should do it more. But it’s not some minimal prerequisite to permissible speech. It’s perfectly alright to talk about issues even if you recognize those aren’t the most important issues in the world."
This seems right, but it doesn't follow (tbf, not sure if you meant to suggest this?) that there are no legitimate norms governing how we allocate our attention and political speech. It would not be perfectly alright, for example, for me to think and talk exclusively about international issues, and nothing about the issues facing my nation or my local community. This is because I have little power to influence international issues, as interesting as they are to me, and so focusing exclusively on them does not represent an effective and virtuous allocation of my political efforts. The attention and speech one allocates to some issue, I think, should be (at least in part) determined by the expected value of doing so. Speaking up about Gaza is justified over protesting tuberculosis because there's much more to be gained, in expectation, from doing the former (and thereby, it's hoped, influencing the US government, etc.), than from doing the latter (your protesting will not curb the spread of tuberculosis).
The expected value of talking about some issue is determined in part by how many other people are talking about it, who those people are, and what they're saying. Jesse Singal plausibly fills a valuable niche as a liberal skeptic of popular practices in gender-affirming care, and has good reason to think he can push the needle on that issue by focusing his journalism on it--much more so than if he had become another dime a dozen liberal political journalist writing about Trump or whatever. (Similarly, it's good for academics to specialize in neglected topics because they stand to generate more knowledge in their specializations than they might have in a more objectively important field.) On the other hand, issues that already have more public attention may be more likely to get to critical mass with your engagement--so sometimes they'll be the right issues to focus on. Where your political attention, speech, and action are likely to go the furthest will be highly context-dependent.
Imagine, if you will, having an asserted strong opposition to factory farming as immoral.
But then you only focus on say chickens. Never cows. Never shrimp. Just chickens. In fact most of EA is really focused hugely on chickens.
The original tweeted complaint is that Israel is chickens. Caring about a class of issues but consistently disproportionately focusing on one instance is the matter of concern here. See also: Israel's record at the UN.
Credit to this reddit comment for pointing out the framing issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/1m5tlzk/comment/n4ewqs5/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
People’s opinions are affected by how prevalent they think an issue is. Because of availability bias, people assume news coverage = prevalence. For example, people vastly overestimate the probability an unarmed person will get killed by the police, and this influences their position of police reform.
Americans think that 21% of the population is transgender when only 1% is.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population
I'm sincerely not trying to "get you" with this comment, but not too long ago I read this post of yours: https://benthams.substack.com/p/dead-kids-matter-more-than-navigating. It sounds like you're arguing from the other side now. How do you reconcile these two positions?
Those just seem like completely different points!
Alright. Maybe user error on my part. Have a good Monday.
This is false equivalence. Journalists are indeed allowed to talk about things other than the biggest issue in the world.
But accepting the merit of journalism on Gaza despite the existence of tuberculosis does not imply journalism on all issues is equally likely to be legitimate. In other words, the less important an issue, the more we have reason to question the motivations of the writer and the objectivity of their conclusions.
If I were to write a long article arguing that undergraduate philosophy students are more overconfident than students in other disciplines, you might reasonably question whether I have some sort of bias that prompted the focus.
In the context of very hot political topics, there is even greater reason to question a writer's motivation. Less than 1% of the country is trans, even less than the amount of people with natural red hair. Imagine that gingers became a hot topic political issue, and then some journalist with no connection to the community started spending a great deal of time arguing that ginger children should be forced to wear hats at all times, regardless of what the children or their parents think is best for them. If you were a parent of that child, wouldn't you be suspicious and resentful of the potential political motivations of this journalist? Wouldn't you reasonably wonder as to why he focuses so much on this "small" issue that he has no obvious reason to write about, as opposed to either "small" issues he has a connection to or "bigger" issues?
I think your argumentation is pretty weird here. The title and subtitle of your post are, of course, true - journalists can and de facto do talk about whatever they want all the time, regardless of importance.
It is still strange and interesting that people e.g. single out one particular war to focus on to deeply care about and that analyzing the potential reasons they do this can be fruitful, including an analysis that is suspicious of motives.
Interesting piece that I notice I disagree with instinctively.
"I think this is a completely ridiculous charge! You don’t need to talk about issues proportional to how important they are. Tuberculosis is pretty bad. It kills more than a million people every year. It’s way more important than the war in Gaza, gender-affirming care, or pretty much everything that anyone talks about. Does this mean that anyone who talks about anything other than tuberculosis is ethically compromised?"
Yes, in many ways, I think it is broadly ethically wrong to talk at length about the issues you mentioned rather than TB- at least, to the extent that you're having a serious discussion that's aiming to change minds, provoke action.
"In practice, no one actually dedicates coverage to problems in the world proportional to how important they are"
I wish they would. I would be prepared to pay a reasonable amount for a news source that took this approach; the closest I've come so far is the Wikipedia home page, which at least leaves significant problems (ongoing conflicts etc) "In the News" while they continue.
Just append "Furthermore, I think that tuberculosis should be eradicated" to the end of all your posts. Boom. Nobody can say you're focused on tiny issues.
Furthermore, I think that tuberculosis should be eradicated.
It's not just importance, but it's not just controversy either. I like the EA framework of focusing on causes that are important, neglected, and tractable. Taking those other two factors into account shows Jesse is doing important work: the issue of bad gender science and healthcare was certainly neglected for a time, largely due to organisations like GLAAD and WPATH attempting to suppress it. And obviously that issue is more tractable to journalists than many of the other important issues you've mentioned.
You repeatedly make the claim that one can talk about relatively important issues but I don’t actually see a justification for it in this article. From an EA/utilitarian perspective it seems pretty unjustifiable to spend time talking about relatively unimportant issues, especially if they don’t affect you personally.
Regarding the animal suffering example: It would indeed be INSANELY weird if you had only a single article on the topic. What I would reasonably conclude is that you don't genuinely think it is the most important issue, but are just posturing. This seems completely common sensical to me.
Lance is a clown, but Singal's obession with trans stuff IS suspicious. Very suspicious in fact.
That seems deeply silly. Lots of people have a specific topic they cover a lot. Nothing suspicious about that!
Yeah, often because they are obsessed with said topic. Or because they think it's incredibly important. Or maybe because they have a unique expertise in said topic (which Singal certainly lacks for trans issues).
Do you genuinely not think it would be suspicious if you claimed "The meat industry is the worst thing humanity has ever done and we can do something against it", yet you basically never talk about it in your blog?
Singal has a general focus on science reporting. Has a whole book on it.
The fact he was even willing to touch the trans issue, specifically medical treatments for minors, made him one of the very few journalists to do so. So he has specialized in it.
That's not "very suspicious" that's "product-market fit" in an adversarial ideological environment for journalism.
If you are saying that Singal is primarily in this niche for the money, then I absolutely agree!
That's how jobs work, yes.
Wait until you find out about how the medical establishment gets incentivized for providing goods and services to the trans community.
I mean no, that's not how jobs work. I certainly didn't pick my job to maximise money, but to make the world a better place, primarily.
Huh, I bet Jesse would say the same.
And I'd agree with him. Without his willingness to brave conflict with his entire professional, political, and social milieu, we'd be far less informed about the travesty of poor medical science in this incredibly divisive niche.
Jesse could have been a successful run-of-the-mill journalist, as he was before he wrote that Atlantic article. But he leaned into the tradeoffs of controversy and put facts above ideological precommitments. I'm happy to pay him money for his efforts. Keep in mind though that he could almost certainly make a lot more money if he actually was anti-trans and catered to the MAGA Right they way they would prefer.
So nitwits like you can say "wow Jesse obsessed much???" because the vast majority of journalists will only ever toe the party line on controversial topics. You can't engage with the facts, so character assassination is all you have.
Which is why Lance was so obsessed with rhetorical tricks of guilt by association, arguments from authority, and aiding the enemy instead of the actual facts of the matter.
If you genuinely think Singal's focus on trans issues has *harmed* his influence as a public figure, then it is definitely you who is the "nitwit".
"Suspicious" meaning, he has mastered a scientific literature on a controversial culture al issue, and written a book about it, and has continued to write about, and invite debate about it, , not because he feels strongly about the topic but mainly because he's interested in money? Or suspicious, because he's actually a right wing transphobe, pretending to be liberal? Or suspicious because whatever his motive, his work gives succor to transphobes? Please explain.
BTW, I'd heard of/read Singal before he blew up, if you can say he's done that. Because I've been reading mainstream center left organs like the Times, Atlantic, New York Magazine that he wrote for, since long before he had a Substack.
Lance would freely admit that he thinks trans issues are incredibly important. There's nothing suspicious about caring about a topic per se. What's suspicious is identifying as a liberal when you spend a huge amount of your time propagating right-wing talking points.
In ordinary English there is no such thing as a right-wing liberal. "Being a liberal" at least in US politics, means left-leaning. Also, Singal would never ever classify himself as right-wing, obviously.