I tend to have the opposite reaction. All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and indiosyncratic to me. It’s like it has to conform to some very narrow “edgy” journalism standard that immature college kids writing screenplays in Starbucks would find compelling.
I once described my ideal way to hear about news or human interest stories like this: take that old robotic voice from ~1997 era Mac computers and just have it read off a list of declarative sentences.
To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy, especially idiosyncratic empathy for individual sex workers that invites me to indulge all sorts of cognitive biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives.
You need to approach this kind of important topic in the Scroogiest, wet-blanketiest possible way.
> To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy,
Honestly, this is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you. Maybe, if you look into it, there's something going on there that would be worth knowing about yourself?
You sound very sanctimonious and unwilling to consider the idea that in order to be compassionate on a large scale, such as population ethics, you have to minimize the effect of idiosyncratic stories and consider aggregate measures of well-being or harm.
> “Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you.”
This is just egregious trolling. Seriously, you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to equivocate my point of view with finding human empathy “abhorrent.” In all seriousness, that is borderline psychotic of you to say.
Far from finding human empathy abhorrent, I care a great deal about human empathy. In fact, it is because I care about human empathy that I don’t attach nearly as much importance to idiosyncratic stories as I do to large scale measurable outcomes and statistical understanding of how policies are actually likely to relate to outcomes that help people.
You are never going to get to constructive policy decisions that have high chances of success across large cohorts of people if you make up your opinions from idiosyncratic emotional journalism.
You’re just going to lobby for bad policies driven by emotional thinking and end up hurting people with policy contrary to your intentions.
(First, a small aside. This is petty, but... the words "equivocate" and "psychotic" don't mean what you think they mean and you should probably look them up.)
Atrocities have been committed by those who believed they were being "compassionate on a large scale" but somehow didn't want to get into the messy details of what people affected by their policies thought and felt on an individual level.
> All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and indiosyncratic to me.
You chose to reject her lived personal experience accumulated over decades as having any weight or relevance to policy because it bored you and you apparently prefer dry statistics. Or, as you put it, declarative sentences read by a robot voice.
You sound like you've had a sheltered life and you lack the life experience to have an informed opinion on policy around sex work. (That's perfectly fine, by the way. It can be quite liberating to accept the fact that you don't have to have an opinion about everything.)
What's unfortunate is that you think you're the enlightened one with your insistence on solid statistical aggregate data only, when in reality you're exactly what she's describing -- blindly locked in your own narrative, sure that you know what's best for other people while refusing to listen to those same people when they tell you you're wrong.
Now honestly you probably don't need to have an opinion on this topic, and you'd probably be a lot better off if you just admitted that you don't know and don't need to know what's up. But if for some reason you do, and you're worried that just one "idiosyncratic emotional story" is going to bias you, then you always have the option of doing some research or even going out and talking to the people affected by these policies and buying them a coffee in exchange for a piece of their mind on these topics. I'm guessing you wouldn't, and the very idea probably terrifies you, but feel free to prove me wrong.
Now I don't suppose you're going to take advice from a "sanctimonious" asshole like me, but in case some of this is getting through to you, consider that rather than being unwilling to consider your ideas, I might just know a few things you don't. People who look at measurable metrics but refuse to listen to individual people never get the outcomes they really want, and have done incalculable damage along the way in human history, much of it in the name of "science".
It seems like an extreme false dilemma to end with the sentence “We’re not and should not be robots.”
What has that got to do with anything I said?
Dispassionately trying to understand the situation with careful skepticism, focus on facts and holistic data, and calculated consideration for the type of human flourishing outcome we want is compassionate not robotic.
It’s a way of arriving at correct and optimal social policy instead of feel-good social policy that ultimately hurts people.
Compassion is well known to be biased in various ways (towards people more similar to you, attractive people, etc. - not even speaking of towards e.g. your relatives and friends) and completely scope insensitive; and is also plausibly completely irrational. If you want to base it on compassion, /stay away from my social policy/.
> Ultimately, humanity is one and this small planet is our only home, If we are to protect this home of ours, each of us needs to experience a vivid sense of universal altruism. It is only this feeling that can remove the self-centered motives that cause people to deceive and misuse one another.
> I believe that at every level of society - familial, tribal, national and international - the key to a happier and more successful world is the growth of compassion. We do not need to become religious, nor do we need to believe in an ideology. All that is necessary is for each of us to develop our good human qualities.
Society isn't a machine, it's a cultural-social-economic ecosystem that ebbs and flows according to emotions, beliefs, desires, imaginations, as well as 'facts'.
Should we create policies that disregard facts and are based on emotions, beliefs, desires and imaginations? My impression is that we're typically actively trying to keep the non-factual out of the law-making. "I had a dream once that a great evil will come if we tax corporations more" shouldn't be an argument against new tax laws.
Reasoning can tell you how to achieve an objective. It can't tell you what the objective should be.
In the case of sex workers, getting people to agree that they don't deserve violence from clients or police is the difficult bit, and only once we can get people to agree that can we make progress on how to achieve it.
Moreover this is not attempting to present anecdotal data, but to explain her position eloquently, to illustrate why exactly people might choose sex work, why it isn't black and white. I think it's the grey that hurts people's brains.
You are confusing anecdotal data (a collection of individual experiences, possibility collected in a systematic way, with structured sampling etc), individual anecdotes ("but when I did went there... ")(which people sometimes call 'anecdata'). It is wrong for anecdata to be given equal weight in an argument to systematic collection, whether qualitative or quantitative. She is not doing either of these things. Instead she explains her history, and then explains the impact of shutting down 3rd party sites has on risk to sex workers. Like many experts in a field, she sees that simple solutions are not going to work.
I do not agree with you. The entire portions of the article that you say are “[explaining] her history” are indeed anecdotes that she is relying on to drive a willingness to then take her other observations more seriously. This clearly qualifies as presenting a collection of anecdotal data as support for a point of view.
To be clear, there is nothing at all wrong with her choosing to do this or with anyone choosing to publish it.
The part I feel is wrong is the attention paid to it and the endorsement that it is valuable. These come at a great expense because they invite people to decide that the emotional mental portrait it paints in their mind is a reasonable basis to form opinions for the general kinds of policies or actions they would support.
> Even as we reach for the less terrible of two terrible ideas, we’re constantly reminded of how little say we have at all. Neither liberal feminists nor libertarians, radical feminists nor the religious right, can hear us speak in our own words. They do not want to hear us; they want to collect the scraped-bare “facts” of our lives and call them data.
The author laments that data and statistics have not proven effective tools unto themselves. And to quote you:
> To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy
What the article does is provide real-life anecdata of how public policy has been harmful to sex-workers. This is useful information: seeing a law or policy, and then seeing a counter-example of how it didn't work in practice, some times even in spite of good-intentions, from people who have access to data.
A scientist will build their hypotheses first, then build the data to either affirm or refute their intuition. And this article can inform future policy-making and data acquisition.
> “This is useful information: seeing a law or policy, and then seeing a counter-example of how it didn't work in practice, some times even in spite of good-intentions, from people who have access to data.
A scientist will build their hypotheses first, then build the data to either affirm or refute their intuition. And this article can inform future policy-making and data acquisition.”
I suspect it’s just an agree-to-disagree situation, but I disagree very strongly about all this, and in particular I disagree very much that any aspect of this piece offers useful anecdata to either inform, confirm or refute policy. A single narrative, the interpretation of which I’m likely to overstate because of the emotional weight of the person’s experiences, just cannot count for much.
What is the emotional equivalent of multiplying this article by ~1 / 50 million to give it around the right amount of weight in my opinion-forming analysis?
>emotional weight of the person’s experiences, just cannot count for much.
I'm not talking about the emotional content, I'm talking about the recount of actual happenings (re: facts), of which the article is overwhelmingly composed of. Perhaps you should read it.
Edit:
> I disagree very strongly about all this
You should remove the emotional weight from your arguments, though I'm not sure what your argument is exactly. Perhaps it is that there's nothing to be gleaned from the world of human experience that can inform policy in democratic institutions? It begs the question.
> “I'm not talking about the emotional content, I'm talking about the recount of actual happenings”
This doesn’t make sense. All the recountings of facts in the article are heavily couched within emotional language, statements of feeling and perception.
If you think this article offers a clear explanation of facts, then either you didn’t really read it, you read it but are just taking the piss / trolling, or your understanding of what counts as presenting facts is so wildly different from the ubiquitous notion of it that we scarcely could communicate about it given your extreme and unusual set of standards.
> “You should remove the emotional weight from your arguments, though I'm not sure what your argument is exactly.“
This sounds like you’re looking for some kind of rhetorical flair to justify what actually is a poor and uncharitable attitude to try to just gainsay me. Seems most likely not worth it to engage further if you won’t be reasonable.
You seem to be deliberately trying to not understand my clear points.
Yes, there are facts in the article. They are presented in unison with emotional retellings of difficult circumstances from the author’s subjective perceptions.
Because of this, it’s not easy to extract meaning about the facts that is not biased by the emotional presentation.
Yet when dealing with an issue of this importance, where there is great potential to do harm to a large cohort of people if we design ineffective or incorrect policies, it is paramount to consider just the facts and understand quantitatively how those facts would relate to measurable outcome changes society would value.
That makes it so much worse when a subjective narrative story creates a mixed picture of what the facts mean.
>You seem to be deliberately trying to not understand my clear points.
You imagine you speak in pure axiomatic terms, and that I am incapable of reason. It's not the case. You make baseless assertions, one after the other. Consider this:
> it is paramount to consider just the facts and understand quantitatively how those facts would relate to measurable outcome changes society would value.
Maybe pick this apart. Why is it paramount? I agree that it is important, but you offer no reasoning for your opinion - built not on facts, but your moral standing.
And how does one 'understand quantitatively'?
These are rhetorical questions for you to answer. I think you're right that our views of the world are at odds with one another.
I believe that appeals to emotion are unavoidable, and part and parcel of unpacking the social compact, and coming to consensus on what is morally important - and that consensus will endlessly shift. Whereas you have some notion of moral realism, where moral facts emerge - 'ought' becomes 'is' - and are quantifiable. You'd probably be a fan of Sam Harris' Moral Landscape. But even Sam admits their can be equal peaks and valleys, and here we enter the world of subjectivity.
I suggest you dig deeper into the rabbit hole of philosophy and get out of the scientism local maxima you've caught yourself in.
I found the narrative very useful. For example, she asserts that rape and prostitution feel very different, and that American laws (compared to UN ones) consider them similar in that there can be no consent in either case. But if she had just said they are different, it would just be a meaningless opinion.
Instead she tells her whole story and gives you the facts and feelings that occurred when she was raped, and the ones that occurred when she was a prostitute, the helps you understand for yourself why they are different. That's a much stronger effect on the reader than just reading person A asserts fact B without them showing the work.
Similarly the story about the drudgery of other jobs she performed that were not prostitution helps you compare what her life would be like if she didn't have that option. Then the same thing happens for filming porn vs. doing privates. A lot of people without experience might think porn stars/models don't often also do prostitution, so it's important to bring up in the narrative that a lot of the film stars were also doing privates the whole time, which makes the film work seem less pure and separate from other sex work just because it is legal.
> “That's a much stronger effect on the reader than just reading person A asserts fact B without them showing the work.”
Exactly. That stronger effect is a very bad thing. In this article maybe it was used for morally good purposes to help you understand the differences in treatment of consent in rape cases or prostitution cases.
But then tomorrow someone uses the same rhetorical trick to have an emotionally “stronger effect” on the reader because of some one-off harrowing tale about a consensual prostitution story that turned out very badly, and now suddenly readers’ emotional judgments have swung back the other way and they feel like so-and-so’s gripping op-ed justifies a belief that prostitution cannot contain consent.
It’s naive to think this kind of “dress up the facts with a narrative” approach would only serve “good” purposes, rather than being used to reinforce existing harmful biases or prejudices, fan the flames of nationalism, etc. It’s pretty much equally naive to think you can personally identify when it is “good” emotional rhetoric vs when it is bad. It’s like saying, “advertising doesn’t work on me.”
This is why regardless of the effect in this one idiosyncratic situation it has got to be systematically ignored and boiled down to analytical judgment not significantly affected by emotional or situational window dressing.
This process of boiling down to facts has got to be elevated as a more important social norm in our world.
If you can't see a structure in something and it feels like idiosyncratic noise, does that mean that it's noise or that there's a structure you're failing to identify? In general, I'd say it depends, but in this case, you may be missing the point. If you read through the entire thing, you'll see that she presents her story of how she got involved with sex work, and how that particular vocation for her changed over time, highs and lows, major and minor characters included.
There's a problem with the kind of mentality associated with privileging "facts totally divorced from human empathy, especially idiosyncratic empathy" because it oversimplifies the problem. You have a plurality of testimonials, you can have patterns, you can have structures, but to say that you need facts to be able to even reason about things seems like a little lazy to me, even if it comes from an honest attempt to avoid "all sorts of cognitive biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives." To use an imperfect analogy, how would you imagine lawyers and judges to ever be capable of doing their jobs when they need facts but they only ever receive testimonials and arguments? How does even flawed justice ever work itself out from the process of any kind of legal arbitration or intermediation?
I think it's because you learn quite a lot just by listening to someone's account of things, even if it doesn't tell you exactly everything you need to know. Even details that seem irrelevant can, if you're paying attention, illustrate something later on that might not add up. On the other hand, a seemingly irrelevant detail could give a crucial element needed to see something form a pattern that maybe wasn't explained in a manner where that pattern would come across as obvious. Even if you consider a large collection of anecdota to be partially falsehoods and partially truths, if you begin to see patterns come up over and over again in stories told by people who do not know each other, what do you think the statistical likelihood is of all of them colluding to lie versus it actually happening at least occasionally?
I think that to actually reckon with cognitive biases, availability heuristics, and invented narratives, you need to reckon with those as an individual and learn to see past those, whether it's by broadening your world of folks you talk to or whose narratives you read about, or by reflection on how you think about things, so that your internal judge starts becoming more intrinsically fair and even-handed. If one's internal judge struggles with those issues when reasoning and commenting and exploring testimonials, what is to make us think that adding data and determinations made by others to be facts to the mix is going to help that internal judge rather than amplify its intrinsic biases?
All those "accoutrements of interspersed narrative" and "details about random other people she met along the way" are all purported details of a sequential account. When accounts are inconsistent, they begin to leaking narrative directions perhaps they were not intended to. My admittedly subjective impression here was that this was not the case, and my broader impression of how this narrative integrates into those of others I've heard or read about is that she is largely accurate, and presenting a story in a way that honestly shines a light on the catch-22 societal situation that sex workers in America are trapped in.
I once described my ideal way to hear about news or human interest stories like this: take that old robotic voice from ~1997 era Mac computers and just have it read off a list of declarative sentences.
To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy, especially idiosyncratic empathy for individual sex workers that invites me to indulge all sorts of cognitive biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives.
You need to approach this kind of important topic in the Scroogiest, wet-blanketiest possible way.