ciphergoth | You are not entitled to your opinion

I'm torn between wanting people to stop saying it because it's annoying, and preferring they keep saying it as it's a clear marker that the person is immune to reason on that point and probably a fuckwit in other respects too. See also 'at the end of the day', 'I'm not being funny or anything', and 'I'm not racist but'.

This. "I'm entitled to my opinion" is the call by which a non-rationalist identifies him/herself. If you can't get them to read and understand the linked articles first, you're pretty much done.

*laughs*

The third article I find ... problematic in places (although good in many others). For example: "You’re not entitled to believe an author means X, when the words on the page are communicating that he means Not X," seems to me to be a qualitatively different statement than "you’re not entitled to believe the moon is made of cheese." There is often a lot more disagreement about what a given set of words on a page mean - and that even goes when the author's available to be asked - than there is about what 'cheese' is and how we could tell whether or not the moon is made of it.

I certainly believe "You may be entitled to believe that an author means X, when the words on the page are communicating to many other people that he means Not X." I don't go so far as to think "all readings are equally valid" - which is probably the extreme post-modernist position he's attacking there - but without a lot of further clarification, I take issue with the way he states it.

And I see from the comments that he prefers Keats to Hume, and thinks that "beauty is truth and truth beauty" is a good counter to "Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them." I mean, what the fuck? If you're using the "beauty is truth" line to counter Hume's assertion that beauty is not an intrinsic quality in things, and if (like Mike Bock) you're not inclined to let people differ about what "truth" might be even when interpreting Shakespeare, then presumably not only do you think that beauty is an independent quality that exists outside of people's minds (OK, show me something that isn't a mind that can measure it), but you think there is one true standard for beauty, and someone who thinks an ugly thing is beautiful is simply wrong.

Perception of beauty is one of those areas where I think it might be reasonable for someone to say "I'm/You're entitled to my/your opinion". It's certainly not at all clear to me why I should think my opinion about whether any given thing is beautiful is any more or less valid then your opinion, or anyone else's. I do still have the "entitled by whom?" issue a little, but in the case of beauty I think it's fair to say "entitled by me, and I'm the only one who gets a say in what I'm 'allowed' to find beautiful, so that's all the permission I need."

Interesting - I didn't read the comments. I agree that believing in one true standard of beauty is weird - borrowing a term from E T Jaynes, Eliezer Yudkowsky calls this the "mind projection fallacy".

I'm not so sure about the qualitative difference between statements about the moon's composition and those about author intent, but I think that would take quite a long comment to pick apart and I need to think about it more first!

How could I have been more explicit about this? There's only one complete sentence in the post above which isn't a link or a poll or a title, and it addresses this point.

If you think I'm advocating totalitarianism here, then you're not reading anything I've said or any of the articles I link to, and instead of replying to what I actually think you've picked an unpopular viewpoint that contains some of the same words and replied to that instead.

Please read at least one of the articles I linked to, and reply to what they actually say.

Edited 2009-06-05 07:18 (UTC)

"I definitely do think people do have a right to whatever belief they want and I think that can be worth affirming sometimes."

Please read the second linked article. If this right exists, what duty does it impose on whom?

You should have bought a Mac in the first place.

Entitled to your opinion? I'd contact the Department for Work and Pensions; I'm sure you must be entitled to something worth more than that.

Oh, they're entitled to their opinion.

:-)

This thread is closest to what I was thinking when I read your poll. I wondered at first why you would ask the question. But that's because I was interpreting 'opinion' to mean something like 'thoughts and interprations about things that are open to interpretation'. Where in fact you are more talking about belief systems, and the use of the phrase to shut down debate.

To take a trivial example, I am of the opinion that The Apprentic is worth an hour-and-a-half or so of my time once a week while it's on, and I think the world would be a better place if Big Brother were not on at all. Others are equally entitled to hold their own opinions about various reality TV prgrammes; and that entitlement places no duty on anyone else, as far as I can see.

But use of the phrase to shut down debate on important matters -- in particular, matters where there is objective truth to be found -- should definitely be discouraged.

Ok i still haven't properly looked at the links due to a lack of spoons but in an ideal world i'm enough of a hippy to want to have this discussion with the people who say it! But mostly i'm not going to because it useing the phrase is usually an alarm bell that the speaker is a nutjob (as a person with mental health problems myself i did try to think of an lterntive wording for nutjob but nothing else seems to fit quite so well!)

i did try to think of an lterntive wording for nutjob but nothing else seems to fit quite so well - Daily Mail reader?

:)

So yes i woundn't entirely want to discourage poeple from saying it because it's a useful marker of situations where this stuff needs more discussion

I don't think I agree that rights necessarily entail duties. The article states it as a fact but doesn't produce any reasoning why it should be so.

In some cases it is clearly so. A person can't have a right to medical care without there being someone obliged to provide it. However, in the case of the right to an opinion there's no need for anyone to support or uphold that right.

The only major thing that would seem to need to be avoided is criminalising certain opinions.

It's a bit meaningless though. "I have a right to do something that no-one could stop me from doing anyway." Who cares?

And if people can stop you, then having the right imposes a duty on them not to, surely?

I found the last article particularly problematic. Statements like "No one is “entitled” to hold an opinion that something is true when patently it is false" translates, as far as I can see, as "I am entitled to assert what I/the majority know to be true. If what another individual or minority of people knows to be true is in direct conflict with the prevailing version of truth, then they are not entitled to that belief."

It is impossible not to have one's own opinion, so in that sense it is more a fact than an entitlement. It is also probably not possible to respect all the different opinions that exist, as some will seem bizarre and/or offensive. I think that giving a basic level of respect to all people, even though you dislike or fail to understand the logic of their opinions, is the ideal response to their "entitlement".

When I am told something like this, I try to take it as a reminder to try and have more humility. There are many things I am so sure that I am right about, I simply have to act on the basis that they are fact. If someone disagrees with such apparently obvious facts and can't show me any evidence that causes me to reconsider, I still take that as a cue to aim for a little humility, the crux of which is:

Remember a time, however insignificant or long ago, when you were convinced you were right and then discovered you weren't, or it wasn't as simple as you thought? There may be loads more occasions like this that you never find out about.

Well, I wouldn't say meaningless but, in the strictest sense, it is rather moot, yes. It's not very easy to try to force someone to change their mind except under rather extreme conditions.

But the whole 'freedom of belief' thing tends to come hand in hand with freedom of expression (of those beliefs), which is much more important and seems to come down to mostly the same thing.

A state that recognises freedom of belief (and free expression thereof) is one that (hopefully) won't make certain viewpoints and ideologies illegal.

Doesn't matter much in regards to individuals interacting mind as the sorts of thing a person could to do to stop a person freely expressing themselves are likely illegal for other reasons anyway. :o)

I hesitated to answer this poll for a while because of discomfort with something in its premises, which I've now figured out what it was. On balance I do want to discourage people from saying that...

but

I think that there is a right to be left alone by others, and I think it extends to a right to refuse to enter debate. If presented with a counterargument to something I believe, I may not have the energy and/or time to dispute it, or I may believe that arguing the point is socially inappropriate in context, or whatever. I'd generally express it in those terms ("I disagree with you but I don't want to discuss it right now").

Example: I was at a pastry shop one time wearing a fairly provocative shirt (http://store.xkcd.com/xkcd/#Science) and the cashier tried to lay an argument for young-earth creationism on me. I was too tired for it and the discussion would have pissed off everyone behind me in line. I said something along the lines of "I don't want to hold up the line arguing about it" which she accepted with good grace.

Addendum: I would also allow a right to exit an argument on grounds of fatigue, without conceding the point. Again, the phrasing I'd choose is more like "I still disagree but I don't want to argue about it any more".

The last article is by far the weakest; it might have been a mistake to add it, but I thought it was interesting all the same.

There's a lot of empirical evidence that we all in general habitually underestimate our chances of being wrong about a lot of things, though I'm trying to change my habits on this after being presented with the evidence. But this is exactly why we should discourage people from having "fully general counterarguments" with which to defend what they believe: it's because of this tendency that we should all be doing our best to make our beliefs as vulnerable as possible to being overthrown by better evidence or better arguments.

As I discuss above, I think some sort of wording along the lines of "let's agree to disagree" is a lot less problematic!

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