Democracy in America

Really, really excellent post Will. Absolutely nailed the salient points that Mr Landsburg missed entirely. Hats off.

Well done.

Loved this post.

I completely understand Mr Landsburg, because it is true that we, humans as a whole, keep answering statistical questions with anecdotes. It just grates on my nerves.

But that's the way it is, and that's how you win some arguments. At least anecdotes do not trump hard statistics when emotions are not involved.

And how would Mr. Landsberg feel about arguments about slavery in early America?

"This slave may be well spoken, but one cherry-picked case (his own) is not evidence that slaves are capable of self-reliance.

What’s particularly disturbing to me is all the chatter about how eloquent this slave is, as if eloquence in the service of intellectual misdirection were somehow something to be admired."

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Huh? This is horribly confusing. First, there are people that argue that "gay people, on average, are less successful as parents." In fact, they are more successful, likely because they tend to be wealthier. Then there are people that define "successful" as meaning morally, as in not gay. But anyway, there really is no reason you have to argue against statistics with more statistics. Statistics in fact are pretty weak and unconvincing. Mr. Landsburg doesn't know what he's talking about. Agreed. This is unreasonable contrariarism

Damn these contrarians!

LaContra.

Theodore Olson and David Boies demolished the other side of this coin, if that is what Professor Landsburg wants to hear.

"injure his family by voiding his mothers' marriage of its legal standing and stripping his family of the status and respect that flow from that."

Judging by Mr Wahls' age, his two mom's weren't legally marriage when they raised him. So using the same anecdotal evidence we're talking about, he was not injured by the lack of gay marriage.

"it is based on a conviction of faith that homosexuality is a sinful perversion inherently corrosive to the values that make healthy families possible. Mr Wahls' upstanding, A-student, Eagle-Scout character together with his normatively wholesome family life is sufficient to cast rational doubt on this rather sweeping article of faith."

I don't think anyone argues that being raised by a gay couple will make you a worse student. The "values" that opponents talk about are moral values. If Mr Wahls believes homosexuality is not sinful then, according to some opponents, his parents have failed to instill in him that moral precept.

"Fallacious arguments can be the best means to noble ends."

Lying works too. I'm not sure Landsburg would advocate any means to an end, even if it were rational.

Landsburg is technically right that Mr Wahls' personal story doesn't provide any meaningful evidence in favor of gay marriage and some people need reminding that anecdotes aren't sufficient. Landsburg's sin may be that he thinks he's stumbled upon some great discovery, not realizing that maybe most people are already aware that anecdotes aren't sufficient but that that's not why they liked Mr Wahls' speech.

"let me congratulate him instead for his inspiring opposition to fallacious arguments from anecdote."

An awful lot of posts around here lately are based on arguments from anecdote but without the accompanying anecdote. I recall one recently predicated on the premise that it is impossible to convince a liberal to accept a tax and spending scheme that paid for a fantastic safety net through accelerated growth. I'm still trying to think of a living Democrat who wouldn't claim that agenda. I'm not even sure American socialists wouldn't get on that train.

"I take it that Mr Wahls' problem, the problem he was addressing in his uplifting oration, is that a powerful political faction convinced of the essential evil of homosexuality by *a magical book* seeks to injure his family by voiding his mothers' marriage of its legal standing and stripping his family of the status and respect that flow from that."

Wow. Nothing like the intolerance of those pushing for tolerance. "A magical book"? You don't believe it. Fine. But that book informs the morals of a large fraction of the country; those people are, arguably, more moral for attempting to follow it. On this issue, you assert that it makes them *less* moral rather than more. Again, fine, that issue may be worth discussing. Your deliberately being needlessly offensive, however, has no place in a post that is, to a large degree, about tolerance for those who are different.

"My guess is that, like a number of right-leaning economists, Mr Landsburg has a regrettable tendency toward tone-deaf, context-dropping, contrarian provocation based on an unexamined assumption that this is what it means to be bravely rational."

So they're a lot like the left-leaning pundits? Nice to see some common ground among the two sides.

People rightfully ridicule arguments along the lines of "It's snowing today; so much for global warming," because a single snowstorm is not sufficient evidence to rebut an argument about a single trend.

In the same way, the argument against SSM is not that same sex couples are incapable of parenting, either in particular or in specific. It is that a model of marriage that includes same sex couples undermines the norms marriage was created to support, and we ought to be careful about changing that. Celebrating Mr. Wahls for pointing to his own family as evidence of the goodness of Same Sex Marriage is akin to celebrating someone for pointing to a snowstorm to demontrate that global warming is a hoax.

Perhaps Mr. Wahls was making the different argument that WW implies - that banning same sex marriage would harm his family. Ok, most policies have some losers. Mr. Wahls must also demonstrate that this harm outweighs any benefit. But he doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of any benefit, unless you count his single anecdotal evidence.

Celebrate Mr. Wahls if you want, but then don't roll your eyes the next time someone makes a stupid comment about global warming during a snowstorm.

"those people are, arguably, more moral for attempting to follow it."

Citation needed.

JohnJMcG wrote: "Perhaps Mr. Wahls was making the different argument that WW implies - that banning same sex marriage would harm his family. Ok, most policies have some losers."

That's an insultingly blithe dismissal of his point.

"It is that a model of marriage that includes same sex couples undermines the norms marriage was created to support, and we ought to be careful about changing that."

How does gay marriage undermine the heterosexual marriage?

I think the point is that the oppression of a certain group of people based on their sexuality is not an argument to be won or lost on statistics. It is an argument based on justice and human rights.

Whether or not an anecdote is used to support/deny global warming has nothing to do with it.

Great post. A couple of thoughts:

One (factually accurate) anecdote trumps one magical book. An 'n' of one beats an 'n' of zero.

And if the argument really was that "potentially unsuccessful parents should be prevented from marrying", then surely this would apply to all individuals whatever group they were in. Even if "gay people, on average, were less successful as parents", there would still be some gay parents who were more successful than straight parents. (But of course, the argument has nothing to do with facts.)

W.W.,

As many moral conservatives will tell you, forbidding poor people from marrying each other does NOT violate their equal rights because they are still just as free as anyone else to marry a rich person.

WW, you killed it.

While doing my math assignments and being asked to prove or disprove a conjecture, the questions that were often the most interesting weren't the ones I knew were true and could prove, or knew were false and could disprove, but those odd ones that I knew were false, but I couldn't for the life of me disprove. Why? Because I knew that even if I was struggling with the material, all I had to do to get the question right was find one configuration, one example in which the statement didn't hold.

It feels kind of like cheating, because you can simply dumbly stumble upon such an example and still get full marks - you don't need to do the grunt work of wholly understanding the concepts surrounding the conjecture. This is why Zach Wahls' use of his own anecdotal experience must irk Mr Landsburg, because it does feel a bit like cheating. One example doesn't make a trend, but when disproving an absolute, one contrary example is not only valid and relevant to the discussion, it's critical.

"...eloquence in the service of intellectual misdirection were somehow something to be admired."

Atheists have been making this argument for a very long time.

The flip side to it is that we also live in a culture where being inarticulate is proof of authenticity.

Oh well.