It ain't what you don't know that hurts you...

[avram]

OK, here’s something to be annoyed about. (We could all use more of that, right?) Thanks to kathrynt, I looked up this MSNBC story about a recent poll on American attitudes towards gays and the freedom to marry, and then looked up the poll report itself. (This is always a good idea, if you can manage it. Newspapers often leave out important details; television always does.) On page two I found the following information:

Why are people homosexual?	1985	2003
Something born with	20%	30%
Way people are brought up	22%	14%
Way some prefer to live	42%	42%
Don’t know	16%	14%

Only 14% knew the right answer, and that’s down from 16% in 1985!

Comments

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

Why is "don't know" the only "right" answer? There may not be a scientific consensus on the issue, but that doesn't mean you can't take a guess. (These are called "opinion polls" for a reason.)

Note, too, that interviewers usually discourage "don't know" answers. (They often respond with a spiel like this: "We're interested in your opinions, and there are no right or wrong answers...")

[avram]

Because this is a matter of fact, not one of opinion. “Is buttfucking sinful?” is a matter of opinion, because sin exists solely as a mental category. “What’s the boiling point of pure water at your current air pressure?” isn’t a matter of opinion; you know the answer (and two people might have different answers, if they live at different altitudes) or you don’t. You don’t get to vote on it.

Even the question is poorly formed. Why assume that male and female homosexuality have the same cause? Why assume that the desire of one man for effeminate men has the same cause as the desire of another man for butch men? Come to think of it, why assume that the desire of one man for slender women has the same cause as the desire of another man for smart women?

I hereby assign everyone in the US to read Raphael Carter’s short story “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation”.

[redbird]

Agreed that it's stupid to take an opinion survey on factual questions.

When they do, however, there's no "show your work" section. If I asked a bunch of people "What is the square root of 841?" and some of them say "29", it doesn't matter whether they did the math on the spot, have it memorized, or remember hearing the question on a Buffy rerun yesterday: there is a correct answer and they've given it. Conversely, if someone does the math and makes a mistake, that they tried doesn't make 23 correct.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

Avram, there's no firm dividing line between "facts" and "opinions." There are plenty of questions that we can't answer with certainty. (Some philosophers would say we can't answer any questions with certainty, but we'll ignore that possibility for the moment.) There are other questions we think we know the answers to, but which will be proven wrong sometime in the future. By your standard, we'd have to answer "don't know" to any question unless it's unanswerable, or true or false by definition. That's silly.

(And yes, there are other possible answers than the ones they provide. That doesn't mean one can't agree with one of the listed options.)

[avram]

There’s no firm dividing line, but there is a dividing line. Sure, there are questions that sit on that line, but this isn’t one of them. This is just yet another case of people being encouraged to think they can vote on the nature of reality.

Sexual behaviors have some number of causes. Some of those causes are known, some not yet known. But what’s the point of asking for people’s opinions about them? Honest answers would be along the lines of “Some evidence I’ve read points in this direction” or “The evidence I’ve read implies strongly that it’s such-and-such” or “I dunno, I haven’t been following the scientific debate”. I’m pretty sure that at least 90% of Americans, answering honestly, would be in that last category. Even if this is knowable, even if it’s known, most people don’t actually know it.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

> There's no firm dividing line, but there is a dividing line. Sure, there are questions that sit on that line, but this isn't one of them.

... And you have to decide this on the basis of bald-faced assertion, because epistemology and the philosophy of science agree that it's otherwise impossible.

> This is just yet another case of people being encouraged to think they can vote on the nature of reality.

It is? We ask people about homosexuality and, before you know it, everyone thinks they live in the Mage universe. Yeah, right.

> What's the point of asking for people's opinions about them?

There are plenty of reasons. For one thing, it's easier to change opinions if you understand them first.

[avram]

I’m pretty confident with that assertion. Are you actually claiming that there’s no way to tell fact from opinion? That “The Matrix was better than the X-Men movie” is the same kind of statement as “It’s warmer right now in Houston, TX than in Nome, AK”? (65°F vs 25°F at the moment, according to the Weather Underground website.)

I don’t much care about changing people’s opinions about the origins of sexual orientation. Which would you prefer to have writing your laws: A guy who reads all the latest scientific articles about sexual orientation, and thinks gays should be imprisoned; or a guy who thinks sexual desire comes from magic moon rays, but thinks gays should have the same rights as straights?

In my experience, based on seeing way too many arguments online, bigots stay bigoted no matter where they think sexual orientation comes from.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

> Are you actually claiming that there's no way to tell fact from opinion?

No, although many philosophers would argue that it's impossible, and their arguments can't be cavalierly dismissed. My position is that it's matter of degree, and some positions are more "reasonable" than others. Even a statement like "it's warmer right now in Houston, TX than in Nome, AK" can be challenged (although the challenges wouldn't seem reasonable to you, to me, or to anyone reading this page). And that's an extreme example.

Few scientific questions are that cut-and-dried. Do we know, with absolute, 100% certainty, that smoking causes lung cancer? We don't, even though that's by far the most reasonable conclusion we can draw from the evidence. (One could say we're 99.9999% certain.) Fortunately, we don't need absolute certainty to make claims about the world. If someone said "smoking causes lung cancer," I wouldn't say that person was "wrong," even though there's infinitesimal room for doubt.

Now studies have been conducted over the years, and people have claimed that sexual orientation can be explained by a person's genetic inheritance. Are these claims credible? I haven't studied these issues, so I don't know. I'll take your word for it that no one has made an ironclad case, one way or another. But that does not mean that all opinions on the issue are "wrong." People are allowed to look at the evidence around them and choose the answer that seems best. We don't have to wait, and suspend all judgment, until a scientific consensus is reached.

[avram]

Sure, but I’m pretty damn sure that at least 90% of the people who answered that survey haven’t got the least idea what the current scientific consensus is on the origins of sexual orientation. That question had 14% answering honestly, perhaps some smattering of folks who had actually done some reading on the matter at some point in the past decade, and the vast majority who were talking out of their asses.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

OK, sure, but your argument has changed...

[avram]

See my answer to Redbird, up near the top of the page.