How Not to Read with Charity

Michael Drew says:

Continued from an exchange with Jason above: [ed: This became much, much longer than I intended, so I don’t particularly expect or recommend for you (Jason) or anyone to read it in its entirety, or even beyond this point, unless you are very interested in my thoughts on this exchange between DeLong and yourself.]

I would say this, Jason. A fair (as opposed to a charitable) reading of DeLong could take his post as a challenge to your intellect, but, more plausibly, it would read it as a challenge to your forthrightness in representing your own intellectual relationship to matters of scientific consensus as compared to that of other laypeople who claim such an understanding – i.e. that laypeople who claim to understand the part of relativity theory you are talking about likely don’t understand it greatly better than you, but that they are right to say that they do, and you are wrong to say that you don’t, understand it at a legitimate lay-level. I don’t believe that DeLong actually has a low opinion of your intellect; rather I think he judges you to be of far higher than average intellect — easily as high as most educated people he knows in his life who express no problem understanding (at a lay level) Special Relativity. I think he’s saying you’re either (a) disingenuously under-representing your understanding of (Special, at least) Relativity, or (b) overstating the level of understanding that the layperson needs in order to be able to express a layperson’s acceptance of a Scientifically Accepted Fact (or both), and thereby doing unneedful rhetorical damage to the place of such “Fact” in popular discourse, all in the service of something for which none of that is necessary: a call for charity as to what drives people away from a layperson’s acceptance of Scientifically Accepted Fact as accepted scientific fact.

On this reading, DeLong, in saying, “lets not tell Jason[…],” was questioning whether you chose an example of a ‘difficult’ scientific concept which you have found yourself unable even to acquire a lay-understanding of on par with the one you have of evolution that went somewhat beyond actual believability in your case. I.e., that raising quantum mechanics might have made the point well, but that it’s just not plausible to think that you’ve made an effort to understand Special Relativity (at least), but find yourself unable even to arrive at a layman’s understanding of it that is in the ballpark of your layman’s understanding of evolution.

But you claimed as much, so what choice do your readers (including DeLong) have? If it is really true, then the only possible things to conclude (other than that you have claimed in inability to understand relativity, when in fact what is the case is that you have not made a real effort to do so) are these: that either, (1) you are intellectually unable to understand relativity at a lay level, which would indeed make your intellect, by your own admission, below that of DeLong and most people he knows who have made an attempt to gain a lay-understanding of the subject (including hundreds of high school students a year), or (2) that you are in this argument implicitly, and for a rhetorical purpose that didn’t require it, making an argument that the quality of understanding at which a critical mass of the public must truly understand a scientific concept in order for society to legitimately make acceptance of it a social more’ is much higher than we commonly think it to be, with the effect of such argumentation being (if it were widely exposed and accepted) that public acceptance of scientific understanding would be thrown open to question, in a way that DeLong very much doesn’t want to have happen, with various motivation, including ones other than honest desire to come to lay-understanding of the best thinking to date on a given question, – i.e. to include wanting to find ways in which the portion of scientific understanding that also enjoys wide social acceptance as “scientific fact” in the popular mind can be made less inconsistent with worldviews conceived outside of science.

In this reading, faced with these choices, DeLong in his response preferred to give this latter reading no credence, even though he may indeed have thought it was the one you intended, because he thought it would have negative rhetorical consequences if it were to become accepted. And so he structured his response so that it took you up on the other possible reading of your post, i.e. the one in which you claim not to be intellectually equal to a lay understanding of the theory of relativity – but did so in a way that only propositionally questioned you intellectual ability, and only truly did so to the extent we think it diesnt simply question whether you are accurately representing yourself has lacking that ability. (FWIW, your inability on legitimate effort to gain such an understanding, if it were actually real, would cause me for one, in any case, to have to reassess my prior estimation of your intellectual prowess, but be that as it may,) I think a charitable (and indeed merely an alive) reading of DeLong would have read him not to be questioning your intellect, but rather merely(?) your ingenuousness in your representation of your intellectual capacity, or else your efforts to date to understand Special Relativity — or else to be arguing for a standard for lay-understanding that is a great deal higher than what we tend to think of it as being.

I think a charitable reading of DeLong sees that, given the choice between an unacceptable concession that the fact that lay-understanding of most scientific knowledge is, in general, less-than-scientifically-airtight syntheses of theory and evidence should have a bearing on how we interact with people making extra-scientifically-motivated inquiry vis-a-vis science; accepting your self-portrayal as unable to grasp a concept that many high-school graduates can and do; alleging that you claimed that inability when in fact you have simply not made a serious effort at it; or concluding that you are misrepresenting either your own intellectual ability or else the level of understanding that is typically understood to constitute a valid lay-understanding of a scientific concept; that concluding the last of these and subtly suggesting that you may have chosen a poor example about which to perhaps feign such inability (or else argue for a higher-than-is-typically-understood standard for lay-understanding) by propositionally (arguably with tongue in cheek) taking you up on the claim — given these choices, a charitable reading does not necessarily conclude that DeLong can only be interpreted to be disparaging your intellect. Indeed, I think the most plausible reading doesn’t read him that way; rather it reads him to be questioning your forthrightness. This doesn’t that his reading was charitable, but then that’s your standard, and, having read his blog for a year or two now, I can say, not his. But his lack of charity is not the claim of yours I’m addressing; it’s that he unduly disparaged your intellect. I think a number of other readings are available, and if a low assessment of your intellect is a particularly odious thing in your mind for him to have written, then, charitably speaking, I can’t agree that no other interpretations were available to you.

Reflecting a moment more, though, it strikes me as a superfluous question in any case whether DeLong in particular disparaged your intellect. You laid your intellectual cards on the table, at least where relativity is concerned. You don’t *really* get relativity – or at least much less than you “get” evolution in any case. There it is. We can all judge for ourselves whether that makes you dim or not, based on our experiences trying to understand relativity ourselves. I tend to agree with DeLong’s (and some commenters’ here) propositional assessment about that. But then, I also tend to agree with DeLong on his assessment (that I read him to be making, in any case) of whether you are representing yourself fully accurately in that claim, at least in proper comparison with what is the average level of public understanding of relativity among those who claim to understand it in a lay context. And everyone else can judge that for themselves as well. And, most importantly, we can all judge for ourselves whether you are making a point about what should constitute legitimate lay-understanding of science that would have dangerous, snowballing implications for pubic acceptance of science if it came to be generally accepted: to wit, that the more people in society lack a proper lay-understanding of science – which raising the quality of what a lay-understanding entails would bring about – the more those hostile to science could claim that it was a realm of belief that was being pushed socially as “fact” by elites, that the lack of public belief could legitimate those claims, and that as a result we would all have to be all the more charitable toward these claims the more this process ensued.

Bottom line: DeLong (plausibly) doesn’t think you’re dumb (indeed: that’s his beef); he thinks you’re concern-trolling without regard to potential destructive (if unlikely) consequences if your maxim here were advanced beyond this small arena; and he even suspects that you may be misrepresenting your own intellect to do it. If that interpretation in your view is less objectionable than some other one, then it seems to me that, if you want to be charitable, you are at least loosely bound to make it (or another one you are now spurred to conjure perhaps as a result of reading this one) the one you adopt.Report