This is a repost of a comment from LessWrong. In response to Zack critiquing the rhetorical tactic of “You’ll Never Persuade People Like That”, I bring up its applicability to Blanchardianism.
Blanchardianism makes claims about trans women which trans women disagree with. For instance that trans women are primarily motivated by autogynephilia.
Given this disagreement, it’s possible to analyze it in a cooperative manner, for instance maybe Blanchardians and trans women have observed different pieces of the puzzle, and by sharing information with each other, they can get a more accurate picture of things. However the fact that the disagreement has been stuck for a while now suggests that this is not a very likely explanation.
So another possibility is that one of the sides is trolling the other side. If one of the sides is trolling, then we should expect that side to make bizarre and misleading arguments. And I would claim that the Blanchardian side regularly does so, e.g. with emphasizing menstruation fetishism, or by doing deceptive sampling.
These are the sorts of things that would make me go “You’ll Never Persuade People Like That”.
You counterargue:
This would seem to be an odd change of topic. If I was arguing for this-and-such proposition, and my interlocutor isn’t, themselves, convinced by my arguments, it makes sense for them to reply about why they, personally, aren’t convinced. Why is it relevant whether I would convince some third party that isn’t here?
What’s going on in this kind of situation? Why would someone think “You’ll never persuade people like that” was a relevant reply?
In this sort of case, I personally have a bunch of evidence about the validity of autogynephilia theories that makes me unlikely to change my mind a lot on the topic. However, I might be able to provide feedback of what sorts of arguments normatively should change people’s minds, among those on the fence.
And in these cases, the arguments are really trollish. So normatively, when people see those arguments, they should go “huh, I guess the Blanchardians are a trollish side in this debate”, and un-update away from whatever they’ve “learned” from the Blanchardians.
Originally I was annoyed by the trollish arguments, since I was trying to argue for autogynephilia theory. However I have mostly given up with pushing for autogynephilia theory, for various reasons including the fact that the people involved are terrible trolls. But it’s kind of frustrating because I didn’t originally have much way of proving the trollishness, since I had learned that they were trollish through trollish arguments private emails/private conversations and through their lack of updates on my critiques. So at this point I feel a sense of reassurance and validation when Blanchardians push obviously trollish points and I get to point them out in a low-context way.
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