The Bluesky Way of Arguing

And in defense of "debate bros"

I spent a lot of the last few days arguing with people on Twitter about continental philosophy. Well, I say arguing, but there were not very many arguments made in reply. It was mostly smug, condescending, sneering—suggesting that I haven’t read enough books or been alive enough years to be able to have an opinion, and that I’m too much of an unserious dilettante to even be worth engaging with. Many of the dismissals didn’t even try to argue I was wrong but just called me names. For example:

(I’m 21, for the record, soon to be 22.)

The last one was particularly funny for several reasons:

1. I gave linear algebra as an example of a thing I didn’t understand not as a thing that was especially hard to understand. I don’t know if it’s hard to understand because I haven’t taken a linear algebra class.

2. Linear algebra is a pretty advanced math class, and one typically takes it in college after Calc 3. A person who hasn’t taken linear algebra isn’t thereby an idiot.

3. Most hilariously, the person who was making fun of me for not understanding linear algebra did not understand linear algebra and was unable to answer a simple linear algebra problem when prompted to by a mathematician. It’s perfectly respectable not to know linear algebra, but if you don’t, you shouldn’t mock people for being so silly as to not know linear algebra.

4. The Tweet also included a major mangling of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem that was later pointed out by a continental-sympathetic mathematician.

5. To assert something is just to assert that it’s true. If I say “Mexico is a country,” that has the same meaning as “it’s true that Mexico is a country.” So to assert that it isn’t true that 1+1=2 is to assert that 1+1 doesn’t equal 2. Now, criticizing people for mathematical ignorance is a perfectly respectable endeavor, but it is curious to do so while being unaware that 1+1=2!

6. It is especially funny to do so while suggesting that one’s reason for such a judgment is Gödel’s incompleteness theorem in light of the fact that Gödel’s incompleteness theorem was behind the major shift in the 20th century in favor of mathematical Platonism. In addition, if there are no mathematical truths, then Gödel’s incompleteness theorem isn’t true! Claiming it defeats mathematical truth is thus self-defeating.

This one was pretty funny too, especially demonstrative of the kinds of smug, drive-by potshots that were common.

It is notable that many more people’s responses made fun of me for not understanding linear algebra than even attempted to address what I said in the article. Those who suggested that continental philosophy is, by and large, very serious, seemed strangely unwilling to defend it.

This illustrates well a point that Timothy Williamson made about non-analytic philosophy: it operates in a much more authoritarian way than analytic philosophy. Several years ago, I went to an analytic conference at my university. When I—a lowly, unknown undergraduate—asked questions to Gideon Rosen, a very well-respected analytic philosopher, he took them seriously. Even when someone totally confused tries to ask a nonsense question of someone as eminent as David Chalmers, he answers in a serious way, rather than dismissing them.

It would have been unreasonable, and regarded by everyone as such, if Rosen had dismissed me for being young. An exhortation to read more books wouldn’t have been seen as a serious reply. Yet continental philosophy is much more opaque, and if one raises obvious objections, they are often likelier to be dismissed than seriously answered. Philosophers are much more of celebrities, and the person is often championed over the idea.

It was particularly ironic that in response to an article accusing continental philosophers of covering up absence of argument with rhetoric, the response consisted mostly of rhetoric and insults. Many people thought the appropriate way to respond to claims that continental philosophers don’t make arguments was to make a snarky remark or insult my intelligence.

There were, to be fair, some serious responses. Silas Abrahamsen and James both wrote interesting pieces defending continental philosophy which have made me think that there are some insights to be had (though on the whole, even the best continental philosophy tends to make people more confused, and the insights are not very interesting). But the substantial majority of the responses involved firing off some quip and then not rebutting any of my claims.

It would be one thing if these were just random people on Twitter. But many of them are professors at serious universities. If one said that analytic philosophy was nonsense, analytic philosophers wouldn’t need to exhort the person to read, nor insult them. They could simply describe clear successes—inventing the field of anthropics, the simulation argument, infinite ethics, the drowning child argument, many arguments for veganism, population ethics, and so on. That continentals are unwilling to do that is suspicious.

This way of arguing is very common in left-wing academic circles, especially when arguing with people who don’t share one’s politics. Those who argue this way don’t feel like they need to substantively engage with outsiders. As long as there is an opinion that they and all their lefty friends make fun of, they don’t feel it needs real refuting. Dismissals and insults are enough.

We can call this the Bluesky way of arguing (Blueskys🎵crying 🎵in🎵 the🎵 rain). It’s not really a way of arguing, so much as a way of not arguing—of instead dismissing people and acting like it isn’t necessary to argue against one as silly as them. David Bentley Hart, much as I like him, also employs this way of arguing routinely. One employing this method complains about the cosmic unfairness of having to argue against one’s critics, suggests it would be very easy to refute them, and then vaguely gestures at what such a refutation would look like, ideally in a way as pompous as is humanly possible that suggest that one’s critics are ignorant of very basic things. Dustin Crummett captured the style well (he was talking about Hart, whom both Dustin and I like, but the point generalizes):

I think that, even when Hart is doing “philosophy,” usually he is not even doing philosophy—by which I mean not that he does it badly, but that he literally does not do it. What he likes best is instead a sort of performance where he tries to convince you that he did a lot of philosophy offscreen, but it would be too exasperating to spell it all out right now for someone as incorrigible as you. But that is not doing philosophy any more than Tenacious D wrote the greatest song in the world when they wrote their song about writing the greatest song in the world. What he likes second best is going on at great length saying things that sort of sound like they might turn out to be relevant to his conclusion if you thought about them long enough before declaring that he’s given a logically incontrovertible argument. But that is not doing philosophy either, just as writing a bunch of numbers on a page is not ipso facto doing math.

The style also includes constant use of irony. One arguing in the Bluesky way must demonstrate just how unseriously they take their opponents by making cheap little jokes at their opponents’ expense—typically ones that rely on obvious misreadings of what the person they’re rebutting said. If someone asserts, say, that economic value is commensurable with other values, this kind of dunking would say something like “so true, go off!! 💅 let’s start liquidating grandmas for optimal efficiency.”

This is one of the major things that makes left-wing spaces intellectually unhealthy. All too many leftist act like to refute a view, you only need to show that it is low-status among their friends. This results in left-wing spaces becoming intellectual monocultures where no one can meaningfully challenge completely bogus views. The emperor, in many cases, has no clothes. And this is a shame, in part because I agree with a lot of these left-wing conclusions. I just wish people didn’t argue for them so badly.

When a person argues this way, they typically have nothing very useful to say. If someone has a good objection, they don’t need to resort to this cocksure sniping. They can just make the objection! People argue this way when their desire to assert that a view is wrong vastly exceeds their ability to argue it is so. Instead of rebutting it they huff and puff about how silly it is and how easy it is to refute, and maybe take a few obviously confused potshots.

During the recent interaction, I did a Twitter space, in which anyone was free to join and argue with me. I informed the people who had been ankle-biting that they were all free to come debate. Only one of them joined. Apparently, despite having enough confidence to dismiss me as a barely literate moron, none of them were willing to defend their views in verbal debate—against, mind you, someone with a large platform yet a curious inability to read. Surely one should be able to trounce, in a debate, someone who can’t read and stupidly dismisses an entire field. I’d like my chances in a debate against someone who was illiterate and thought all of physics was bullshit.

The one dunker who joined the spaces didn’t do too well. Even though he suggested that I was an idiot for not getting the deep coherence in continental philosophy, he also seemed to think there was deep coherence in a randomly generated nonsense passage that I got from Chat-GPT—generated from the prompt “Do an impersonation of Butler’s style of writing but make sure it’s not saying anything meaningful.” (I of course told him it was from Butler). He was similarly unable to defend the obviously fallacious inference in the Butler passage that I cited in my first article.

This is the problem for the ill-informed sneerers with verbal debates. If you are completely full of shit—if you have nothing other than mockery and scorn—you will implode completely. There are a great many examples of a snarky Twitter poster having a debate with someone they’ve criticized and making a complete ass of themselves.

This is not to say that you have to debate everyone you disagree with. But if you are going on—repeatedly, confidently, publicly, and at length—about how someone is a blithering idiot, then you shouldn’t run from a debate with them. If someone is wrong enough to insult publicly, they are wrong enough to debate.

Those who dodge verbal debates do it for a few reasons. Some people just don’t like debates. On many corners of the internet, there’s a disdain for debates. If you suggest that people back up their claims in a discussion, they accuse you of being a debate bro, which is apparently a very dreadful thing—a bit like being a child murderer.

People don’t typically make clear what’s so bad about being a debate bro. Certainly it is bad to be overconfident and wrong, but talking with people who are right is one of the better ways to stop being wrong. People are much more sensible and kind when discussing than when snarking on the internet. A Twitter mudslinger has all the vices of a debate bro and none of the virtues. They proceed with the unearned confidence of one who is very competent, but unlike someone who debates, never have to do anything to demonstrate their competence against those who disagree.

But the biggest reason people dodge debates with those they mock is that such debates can’t go well. If you repeatedly suggest that a person is irredeemably idiotic, and then debate them, either:

1. You win the debate resoundingly. But beating an idiot who can’t read isn’t very impressive.

2. You do okay and sort of hold your own. But again, if someone is a complete moron, you shouldn’t just hold your own—you should crush them. So for the Twitter snarker, a draw is a defeat.

3. You get trounced. Getting humiliated in a debate by a person you claim is borderline mentally impaired is seriously embarrassing.

I suspect, in fact, that many of the people recognize that if they’d accepted the debate offer, there’s a reasonable chance that things would have gone the third way. Perhaps this is why none of them accepted, preferring to claim that my suggesting they back up their dozens of snarky Tweets was indicative of an unhealthy parasocial relationship (with people many of whom I’d never heard of before yesterday)…yikes, yikes, not a good look chief.

This is not a serious way for a person to conduct themself. If you are going to insult someone as hopelessly braindead, you had better be able to convincingly argue that they are, at the very least, wrong. If you can’t do that, you are both a bloviating bullshitter and a coward; you are trafficking in unearned intellectual superiority, and you should not be taken seriously.