a.k.a. "Stefan the (strawmanned) determinist"

Just came across this interesting thread on FDR:

http://hiderefer.com?http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/forums/t/29136.aspx?PageIndex=1

Stefan contends that parents are fully responsible for how their children develop. What about this non-causal free will thing he's always going on about?

Furthermore, denying the possibility of his child being significantly influenced by an outside source seems to me to be naive. Even I, as a determinist, wouldn't make this contention. Determinism is not nearly as simplistic as Stefan strawmans it to be. There are so many factors that influence development, and due to the complexity of the process, there is no way for us non-omniscient humans to predict with complete certainty the effects of any experiences. Once a child has an experience, it becomes part of their being. No matter how "negative" a parent might decide it was in hindsight, they can't just go in and remove the experience. They can't even force the child to work through it in therapy. Therefore, I don't think it is possible for a parent to be in total control of how a child turns out. Decades of parents with career dreams for their children have found this out the hard way. I see no reason why "philosophical parenting" should give you any more control in this regard. (I haven't listened to the parenting podcasts, but I get the sense that Stefan advocates teaching children "reason and ethics" not just as tools to use how the child wishes, but with expectations of achieving certain outcomes, i.e. the child coming to exactly the same political conclusions the parents have. Again, this seems like a naive expectation.)

If Stefan believes that his approach to parenting has never been tried before, how certain can he be about its outcomes? He has no empirical evidence; he just has his philosophy. I could put forward a competing hypothesis which says that people who don't have to struggle to gain their freedom but are instead handed it (and expected to take it) not only do not get as much out of it as those who took personal responsibility for developing it in their own lives, but may rebel against it. That would certainly explain why anarchism hasn't propagated, despite the myriad benefits Stefan claims it has.

I feel like there is more that could be said about this topic, both in regards to the defooing process, and to parenting in general. I'd love to hear others' thoughts (parents especially).

Here is the first post in the thread:

Quote:

I recently exchanged e-mails with Stef, asking him if there were any circumstances in which he would deFOO his own daughter. Stef responded, but as I'm sure you're all aware, Stef is an extremely busy guy and naturally isn't going to be able to thoroughly tackle every philosophical issue put in front of him, even if he may want to. Hence, I'm taking to the FDR boards and asking for your insights on this issue to see if we can't move this discussion along. I've posted the correspondence I had with Stef below. Len Schulwitz Sent: Jan 17, 2011 02:35 PST Hey Stef, I want to ask you a few yes or no questions. Will you cut off your daughter: 1. If she becomes a politician? 2. If she becomes an advocate for the state? 3. If she votes? No time or will to answer? If so, no problem, but please REFUND my $25. Much appreciated, your work is great! -Len Stefan Molyneux Sent: Jan 17, 2011 06:08 PST deFOOs are always unjust from parent to child, because I am responsible for teaching her reason and ethics, and if she learns badly, that is my fault. Thank you for the very kind donation! J Best wishes, Stefan Molyneux, MA Host, Freedomain Radio http://www.freedomainradio.comost Len Schulwitz Sent: Jan 17, 2011 07:31 PST Hey Stef, Thanks for the response, you more than earned the $25. I really thought I might have stumped you with this one, but your reasoning is impressively sound. Frankly, I'm very surprised to see you advocating for unconditional love. Certainly even if you succeed in teaching a child reasoning and ethics (as I'm sure you will do with your child), she still has the choice, as an adult, to act unethically. Shouldn't there be a point at which you dissociate from someone who consciously chooses to act unethically, even if that person is your own child? Hypothetically, if she were stacking up corpses in her apartment and told you "i know it's wrong Dad, but i enjoy it", isn't there a point where you've gotta throw your hands up in the air and call it quits? Or, is the parent-child relationship so unique that those ethical boundaries which limit all other relationships simply aren't applicable? Sorry to be so morbid, but such is the nature of philosophical inquiries I suppose Best, -Len Stefan Molyneux Sent: Jan 17, 2011 10:16 PST I strongly believe that violence is a language that must be taught, I would no more expect her to stop murdering people unless there had been some physical brain injury than I would expect her to start speaking Mandarin without ever having learned… Best wishes, Stefan Molyneux, MA Host, Freedomain Radio http://www.freedomainradio.comost Len Schulwitz Sent: Jan 17, 2011 11:32 PST I've communicated my question poorly. I'll try to clarify. For my hypothetical violent-daughter-scenario, the issue of whether violence is learned or not misses the philosophical principle I'm trying to get at. Let's say for the sake of argument that your daughter becomes inspired by Nathan Leopold, or maybe she has a bad LSD trip and starts shooting people, or perhaps she experiences the violence of a government prison system firsthand and becomes a bloodthirsty killer. Are these scenarios unlikely? Absolutely. Nevertheless, they are valid potential hypothetical possibilities as long as you accept the premises that: * Humans have freewill * The universe is nondeterministic. Ok, now that we've successfully spawned a violent antichrist in our hypothetical future universe... Is your statement: "deFOOs are always unjust from parent to child" still applicable? -Len Stefan Molyneux Sent: Jan 17, 2011 16:48 PST The universe may be nondeterministic, but it is not random, a happy teenager does not do drugs or become inspired by psychopaths Best wishes, Stefan Molyneux, MA Host, Freedomain Radio http://www.freedomainradio.com Len Schulwitz Sent: Jan 17, 2011 18:36 PST Again, Stef, I think you're circumventing the philosophical principle here. Certainly, you'd agree with me that it's completely possible for a rational and happy teenager to unjustly end up in an irrational and violent prison system? Also, by responding to my hypothetical with "a happy teenager does not...", you're introducing deterministic a priori premises into our hypothetical future universe. Is it known with absolute certainty that your child will necessarily be a "happy teenager"? The notion that as children age, they will never be influenced by people or ideas outside of their parents' control, seems to me, to be a silly fantasy modern parents utilize to justify overcontrolling parenting practices. Based on your lectures, I presumed you'd reject such not-my-kid suppositions. If you don't wish to address the "parents never deFOO" philosophical principle I'm trying to get at here, because you are of the belief that my hypothetical scenarios are absolutely impossible, just say so. -Len

Back when I hung out on FDR, Stef explained his views re determinism and parenting. He talked to me a couple of times in private, so I think it might have been in one of those conversations. Or it could have been on a call-in show.

In any case, if I remember rightly, he DOES believe (and admit that he believes) in a kind of determinism -- a kind that affects most people but not all people. It's not a physics-based determinism. It's psychological. He believes that bad parenting produces robotic people. They are determined in the sense that they were brainwashed by their parents and now can't help acting in various pathological ways. It's not a choice for them.

But people who deFoo or whatever (people who see the truth as Stef defines it) can throw off these shackles and achieve freedom.

I am a full-out determinist, but I agree with him about this -- if I take what he says metaphorically and ignore the Stef's-way-is-the-way-to-freedom part. Certainly bad parenting tends to put various restraints on people.

However, to me that's a pretty obvious, un-profound idea. It basically just means what happens in your childhood shapes who you become as an adult. Duh!

As a determinist, I would also add that good parenting constrains you. Just as abused kids tend to become abusers, I could never abuse my kids at least partly because I was never abused. It's weird to think of not-abusing-your-kids as a choice, but of course it is.

I like to think that I don't abuse people because I realize it's wrong. Though that's true, a bigger influence on my behavior is that I don't have it in me. I just am not the kind of person who abuses. And that's at least partly due to the way I was raised.

Ha!

On page 4 of this Never DeFOO thread, there's a complaint that a call-in show conversation has been heavily edited and puts the caller's comments out of context. People wonder if that has ever happened before, and Molyneux says that he has only done it once or twice, particularly when a person tried to argue that it was OK to have sex with children.

He says that he edited out the end of this conversation because he found them offensive and untrue, and has a "responsibility" to keep his shows "relevant and factual" to his audience.

Interesting turn of events. According to the caller, (some of?) the parts that were cropped out were:

Quote:

For instance, the principles of deFOOing and our discussion of the term "deFOO" are non-existent. The part where we talk about Stef's philosophy and the way it is perceived has also been removed.

Those topics don't sound inherently offensive to me. In fact, Stefan continually extols the virtues of searching for underlying principles and trying to understand philosophies. I wonder what was said that bothered him. Stefan has the right to exclude offensive material from his podcasts (say, if someone calls into his show to scream obscenities -- I can certainly understand not wanting to make oneself a target for those kind of people by allowing their comments to remain), but I don't think the editing of a conversation in such a way that the other person feels things are now represented out-of-context is justifiable. It's bound to raise questions in listeners' minds about whether other podcasts have been edited. It's likely to scare off potential callers/interviewees who don't wish to be similarly misrepresented. Actions like this kill trust and shut down open discourse. He suggests that he did it to protect his listeners, but it seems more like he did it to protect himself. Probably hoping no one would notice. Otherwise, I think the least he could have done would be to edit in a comment about how he had removed portions of the conversation.

P.S. Someone should invite Len over here!

This is why I quit Stef's site -- because he (a) cut me from his published call-in show, and, (b) didn't have the courtesy to tell me he was going to do so or explain why he did so.

I didn't shout obscenities. I was polite throughout. But what I DID do was bring up criticisms of him and his community that I'd heard here and other places. I didn't accuse. But I did ask him about them.

As far as I'm concerned, Stef can promote any ideas he wants on his site, whether I agree with them or not. But when he ardently promotes free inquiry but then squelches criticism, he's created a contradiction. You can't have free inquiry without (polite) criticism. Impossible.

I went to Freedomain for the Philosophy. I left because it became clear to me that the site's leader had created a site where Philosophy couldn't possibly flourish. What I learned was that Freedomain was a soap box for one person. That's fine. I have nothing against that. What I'm against is a soap box that masquerades as a free exchange.

Yeah, I don't believe that anything obscene was said in this case. I know nothing obscene was said in your case, and that you did indeed conduct yourself with politeness and respect, because I listened to your conversation live.

From later comments in the thread, it sounds like the parts that were cut out bear extreme similarity to the conversation you had with him: the caller tried to bring up criticisms of Stefan published on other sites.

I had always been skeptical of a lot of stuff that went on at FDR, but I too lost hope that it could be a place where philosophy could flourish soon after I found out about liberatingminds. The fact that discussing it with anything other than disdain made you a persona non grata at FDR, and signing up earned you a banning, really put me off. One of the pillars of my own personal growth has been the willingness to seriously consider ideas that oppose my own. I bet this is why FDR has been helpful for so many people: it exposed them to ideas in direct opposition to ones they were raised with. The thing is though that personal growth is an ongoing process. Thinking they have discovered the truth and can now shut out anyone who disagrees is a huge trap, in my opinion. I hope to be challenging myself and my ideas until the day I die.

Stefan has made it so that not only does FDR itself not include serious consideration of criticism in its "conversation," but it also scares listeners off from doing this individually. I bet those who do read LM, FDRLiberated, etc. have the distinct feeling that this is something never to be admitted at FDR if they don't want to be ostracized. That, to me, is nowhere near freedom.

And now, because of how Stefan has handled LM et. al in the past, he really can't afford to publish anything that would encourage people to check these sites out, because doing so would probably lose him a fair chunk of respect, if not a fair chunk of his listenership.

People could argue that Stefan is not opposed to criticism itself but to sites like this that do it "behind his back." But really, I think the fact that most critiques are published off-site is a direct consequence of how he has handled critics/criticism from otherwise enthusiastic members. He's run them off and shut it out. They often say that Stefan is happy to discuss criticism on his Sunday show, but his actions here seem to indicate otherwise.

I can't think of a better concluding statement than yours, Marcus. On the money!

mgeduld wrote:

I went to Freedomain for the Philosophy. I left because it became clear to me that the site's leader had created a site where Philosophy couldn't possibly flourish. What I learned was that Freedomain was a soap box for one person. That's fine. I have nothing against that. What I'm against is a soap box that masquerades as a free exchange.

What I find interesting is how my relationship with FDR has changed. My history with it is different than many of the other members here. I had a brief (just a few weeks) flare up of interest in it, and that's all. There are other online communities I'm part of, and, even if FDR had turned out differently (e.g. better), those other communities would have remained more important to me, just because I have a longer investment in them.

And, at 45, my relationship with my parents is not big a factor in my life. Stef would say "Yes it is," and maybe he's right -- maybe it is on a subconscious level -- but what I mean is that they live thousands of miles from me, and I talk to them maybe once a month (via email). They don't enter my conscious thoughts much. In any case, I'm not likely to get closer to them or defoo them.

For me, FDR was "just" a place to discuss philosophy. Now that I see it's not a useful tool for that, I don't visit the site any more. I haven't gone there for months, and the idea of browsing its message board just bores me.

For a while, after I'd stopped posting and reading stuff, I still went there to listen to Stef's interviews. But now, though I know it's possible for an author or expert to say stuff that doesn't stick to the FDR party line, I am too aware of Stef's aggressive editing (and rhetoric) techniques to trust even the interviews. If someone I really trust -- like Richard Dawkins -- gets interviewed by Stef, I don't trust that Stef won't edit the interview to bring Dawkns' view more in line with his own.

I know that there's value in even some of the stuff Steph says, but I'm not willing to wade through the bullshit to find it.

So FDR is now completely useless to me. Sorry, but as a result, I don't read LM much any more, either. If I did, I would be like a someone bored by football reading a football blog. This saddens me, because I like and respect many people here. I wish we had something else to talk about.

I have great respect for this site and it's members, and I think you're all doing a necessary job, as there will always be newbies falling for Stef's bullshit. But, for me, the critiques get repetitive. Via Stef's editing and propaganda techniques, he has rendered his site pointless. I'M already convinced of that. The end (for me).

The only thing that still interests me is the human drama of it all. So I DO check LM, once every month or so, to see if anything fun is going on. I guess the whole FDR thing has become a reality show to me, and I'm interested in seeing who gets kicked off the island.

Which makes me wonder, from a dramatic point of view, where this will all end. Please note that what I'm about to say sees FDR and LM purely as players in a drama. I am not really a selfish person. I don't wish ill will on anyone. On the other hand, I'm a theatre director, and I can't help having a part of me that longs for forward dramatic movement.

If things just go on and on the way they've been going, I'll TOTALLY lose interest after a while. The status quo is that Stef has a small band of followers and a trickle of hoodwinked new members. And there are sites like LM that act as watchdogs.

But Stef never breaks through and becomes super-powerful. He's not a national figure. He hasn't toppled government. He's devastated a few families, and that's sad, but it's not like he's the number-one threat to family life in America.

Meanwhile, LM hasn't toppled Stef's little empire.

I can see things staying this way forever -- until Stef dies. It will be really sad if he winds up being 96 years old, still doing with what he's doing, still having the same number of members, still pulling his same shit, still being nipped at by LM. I'm imagining a post on LM in 2036: "What Steph says on page 11 of his book on teleporters is illogical! We need to warn the three people who read it!"

So, when I come here once a month, the drama hound in me keeps hoping to see threads like, "It's true! Stef HAS terminal cancer!" or "How should we respond to Stef's decision to run for governor?" or "What do you think life will be like for Stef in jail?" or "Stef's book hits best-seller list!" or "Stef admits that he's been lying and bullshitting for years, and he apologizes before taking down his site!" (Yeah, right!)

In a way, the best thing that can happen to Stef is for the status quo to stay in place. He has a small, frightened intellect, but he's smarter than a lot of his members. If he was ever on a national stage, smarter people would demolish him in seconds. To stay in power, he'd then be forced to pull a Scientology move. He'd have to give up pretenses of being a philosopher and come full out a a religious guru. As long as he wants to position himself as an atheist and a rationalist, he's much better off being a big fish in a small pond.

Which means that LM is always going to be expending lots of energy scrutinizing that big fish and his small pond.

Thank God you're doing it!

And I hate to say this, but "Thank God you're doing it so I don't have to!"