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.
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.