The Steelwool Scrub – A Fallacy

Addressing the city of Hoschton case, they don’t even have their own argument. If the city had an opening for a custodian, being black would not have been a problem. The problem wasn’t race mixing, it was having a black man in a position of authority. Dick Gregory summed it up in his stand up routine back in the 60’s: “In the South they don’t care how close I get so long as I don’t get big. In the North they don’t care how big I get so long as I don’t get close.”

Oh, and the mayor is on-record (in the quote in the OP) as being 100% OK with -hiring- black people. Just not …. one presumes, for supervisory positions (again, as noted by Dr. Hilarius).

As is often the case with John Holbo’s pieces I don’t understand the point being made here (my problem, doubtless).

There’s lots of bad stuff in the Bible. (Lots of good stuff too! But lots of bad stuff). It seems weird, therefore, to go out of your way to pick out something that the Bible does not, in fact, say. It is not, in actual fact, true, that the Bible, at any point, forbids ‘race mixing’ or ‘interracial marriage’ or anything like that in any sense that we would understand.

When Joe McBigot, or whatever his name is, says: ‘I’m a Christian and my Christian beliefs are you don’t do interracial marriage’…it’s the word ‘my’ that’s important. This is not a mainstream Christian belief and hasn’t been for many decades. Indeed, I believe that almost every modern Christian church, of any persuasion, would condemn these beliefs unequivocally, and as I say, if you look for Biblical support, it ain’t there.

So this seems like a bizarre example to pick, when there’s plenty of objectionable stuff that really is in the Bible (mainly about sexuality) and which modern day Christian churches really do believe.

This guy is a racist nutjob, and whether he’s ‘sincere’ in his racism is irrelevant. I would also argue that his Christian beliefs are probably irrelevant too. If he were an atheist he would doubtless find some other meaningless half-assed argument to justify his racism.

@
”This case is picture-perfect for making a simple point in debates about religious liberty: ‘sincere religious belief’ is not a ‘get out of bigotry free’ card”.

It shouldn’t be – but it could make somebody who spend a half year in Egypt – explaining to tourists from teh homeland – that ‘sincere religious belief’ – has to –
if not being ”respected” at least being ”understood” – especially if you are visiting the country where ‘sincere religious belief’ might leads to… something – what in other countries might be considered ‘bigotry’… Ups – where am I? –
oh yes – I remember approaching the problem from a… a more ”anthropological perspective” where I actually… have to confess that I kind of… smiled -(shame on me) – about ‘sincere religious belief’ – which supposedly made me -(as a woman) the target of really terrible bigotry?

But how do you explain to a (truly charming) ”Beduin” -(or an ”American Religious Nut) that we should solve this problem for once and all by – please not being ”bigot” anymore?

Somehow, if there is one steelman – or even if there just could be one – everyone actually gets scrubbed clean by proxy
Isn’t that how reality works, though? If there is a good reason for something, you get the benefit even if you don’t understand the reason well. If 99% of people avoid swamps because they have miasmas, and only 1% because they have mosquitos, all of them still don’t get malaria.

It seems you are starting with the premise that swamps don’t cause malaria, and pointing out that most people think that they cause malaria because they have bad air, and some ingenious scientific test (staying in a screen tent in a swamp doesn’t cause malaria) shows bad air doesn’t cause malaria. But the whole argument depends on the premise–that swamps don’t cause malaria, or that active homosexuality doesn’t cause any harm to society; otherwise, the one careful thinker explaining how it does would be more important than the 99 confused people who remember that it’s harmful but are not clear on the mechanism.

I certainly agree that something is not right or even excusable just because it’s a sincerely held religious belief. I also recognize that steel manning (steel personing?) is a thing.

Where I see it differently is that most bigotry seems, to me, to be a mixture of (for lack of better words) animus pure and simple, “sincere” but misguided* beliefs about the way the world is and should be, and maybe something like a steel manned objection, based on more nuanced and possibly decent reasoning. Perhaps I’m too optimistic, but I don’t see people as only bigots, and I don’t see bigotry as only or purely bigotry, except in perhaps some very extreme cases.

I think we forget those complications (as I see them) at our peril. If we need to build anti-racist coalitions or need to engage in dialogue for rights for transgender persons, or whatever, we need to recognize the common humanity we share with the bigoted person.

I don’t offer this as a criticism of the OP, but an elaboration on it. Maybe the linked-to article qualifies as such an extreme case. I also realize it’s easy for me to adopt the position I do in this comment because I only rarely am the direct target of anything that can be called bigotry.

*By whatever standard we’re measuring “misguided.” One possible standard is “conflicts with other supposedly held beliefs.” For example, most people in the US claim to believe in equality. I suspect that the people in the linked to article probably claim that they also believe in racial equality. We even see a hint of that in the article: in addition to the ridiculous claim that race-mixing goes against Christianity, we also see the argument not that the black candidate was unqualified because he was black, but that the town “wasn’t ready.”

I like your metaphor of money laundering, and I like the idea of a human wall that prevents the blame from getting through even more!

But I think “sincere belief” may actually have to be a get out of jail free card, because it was designed to be. However, it’s in a way a declaration that one shouldn’t be taken seriously, that the real world is all too much for one, and one would prefer to live quietly and let someone else make the important decisions.

In other words, I’m not sure there are any (defensible) defenses of “sincere belief” that don’t amount to a patronizing explanation that the person holding the belief doesn’t really matter and can’t have a real effect on the world. People like Linker aren’t proponents of democracy! They’re not even, as far as I can tell, proponents of public reason, or people who think “logic” and “rhetoric” are opposed and people have a right to know what principles their society runs along. People like Linker like to oppose the assumed white Christian majority to everyone else—who presumably are either elites or have rights only because the elites see fit to grant them rights—and thus have an obligation to be more responsible and charitable than the majority. The majority aren’t bigots because the majority set the definitions, and the majority ought to set the definitions as proved somehow by Thomism.

(This may be overthinking but I think it’s important because Linker’s reasoning is a temptation for a lot of people.

This is true up to a point. I certainly agree with your two end-points.

But I don’t think it takes us very far. Everything you write is generically true of politics. Most political opinions held by most people do not have supporting reasons that would withstand proper scrutiny. We mostly come by our political beliefs lazily, with a generous helping of self-interest and conformity bias. Why should the religious be held to a different standard than the rest of us? Or should we view all participants in large socio-political movements as malign? It’s not obvious that this would be helpful.

And it’s not clear why theorists should be angrier at their badly-motivated supporters than their opponents. Why is it more important that people have good reasons for their opinions, than that they have good opinions? And aren’t good acts more important than both? Don’t you want to win, and isn’t that more important than social opprobrium among your opponents? You rarely win political battles by rejecting supporters because they aren’t pure enough.

Successful political movements need to exist on multiple levels. You need some people writing academic papers. You need others drawing popular cartoons. The arguments will probably not be the same in both. You might argue that academics are laundering popular prejudices. You could equally argue that the ordinary people are providing popular heft to the academic ideas. Ultimately, what matters is (1) whether it was a good idea and (2) whether you were successful.

Treating bigoted beliefs as sincerely held reasoned opinions does no harm to the anti-bigotry cause. We can accuse them of making a mistake of reason just as easily as we can accuse them of possessing the moral flaw of bigotry. In any case, expecting the reasoned man to first rail against the bigots is to ask of him a severe strategical blunder. If he does so, he will get eviscerated for bigotry all the same – except he will have driven away any bigot who, believing him to be a kindred soul, would have supported him. The ideological climate of the day has greatly diminished – with articles like this one! – the opportunity for being a respected, well-treated opponent. If the punishment for being wrong is the same as for being evil, then why not make bedfellows with evil? At best you can force a ceasefire and be left in peace; at worst, you won’t die alone.

Dipper is merely engaging in standard “whataboutism”, an all too common response when someone’s ox is adjacent to goring.

Also you’re supposed to be “brave” and “edgy” and take on those eeevil Mooslems. “Then you’ll see the real bigots, amirite??” Especially when said bigots are far away, not white, and demonstrably more evil than the nearby, white bigots we’re discussing.

So apparently we cannot criticize them for using their “religious” belief as a weapon to dehumanize people here until we storm abroad and deal with the more evil ones there

There are examples of that precise argument everywhere, along with the puffed-up indignation when the perpetrators get called upon it.

(Also, the entire basis for the Religious Right’s rise to political power in this country centered on racial animosity and the desire to maintain Jim Crow.

It’s hardly surprising that in this day of greatly emboldened open white supremaacy that this is coming out like this )

Orange Watch @12
“… really only need some sincerely held fundamentalist minority religious beliefs to suddenly come to Jesus re: the problem with their claims.”

Firstly, every fundamentalist religious belief is a minority belief (fundamentalism is a peculiar view of the relationship of words – words being inherently ambiguous and temporally unstable in connotation – to reality). And this defense of the rights coming with this belief are essentially justified as minority protection. The point is more that there must be a distinction in law between the right to hold a belief and the right to act on that belief. We cannot allow people the right to act any belief or we have no laws at all, since everybody can be exempt.

Given the diversity of political opinions out there I kind of have to hedge this a lot because I can’t comment on “what people REALLY think” without dozens of counter examples being instantly located.

Additionally, the thesis of this post is a little murky. Is it just a claim that it’s ok for a Holbo to privately think that religiously motivated beliefs are bad? Surely that’s easier to make- there are zero religious people who think otherwise when considering their own religions versus others. Is it the claim that racist actions in hiring for a public job are still condemnable even if religiously motivated? I think very few religious people truly believe otherwise. Some might claim they think otherwise but switch religions and watch them howl.

TLDR the biggest problem in discussing whether we should “respect” a point of view is defining the terms of that respect, and I’m not sure how OP means that.

So… interpreting this sort of generally as a discussion of HOW FAR we ought to do in prosecuting the culture war against religiously motivated bigotry… I do think that there’s an aspect to this that isn’t getting addressed, and that’s the different approaches people will want to take to the existence of bigotry based on their overall view of how society works and how bigotry works.

A lot of liberals have essentially accepted a sort of Dark Satanic Organic Society Conservatism in which everything is interconnected and evolved and touching one thread of society vibrates countless others including ones we could never have predicted in advance. But unlike conservatives who think this evolved web evolved for success and is great and we shouldn’t fiddle with it without great caution, the Dark Satanic version preaches that the web evolved to preserve and further power relationships between social groups that exist on axes of oppressors and the oppressed. And so we should start tearing it up as fast as possible, typically by changing the terms of privilege preserving discourse into privilege undermining discourse.

So the thing is, if you think the entire organic society model is dumb no matter which political spin you put on the construct… it kind of changes the terms of this debate. The idea of creating a sort of carve out detente for religiously motivated bigotry is at least plausible, because we have a lot less reason to care about other people’s privately held religious beliefs in the first place, and some reason to value the social calm that we can have if we lower hostilities in this way. This isn’t the same as approving of religiously motivated bigotry…

It’s just a sort of social secularism.

I accept that there’s a church down the road that preaches that eternal cosmic justice requires that I suffer maximal unending agony, and that the Muslim guy I still know from school goes to a mosque with conservative attitudes about gender and sexual orientation, and I leave them alone anyways so long as they leave me alone. And we accept that privately thinking or even saying that each other’s beliefs are vile still counts as leaving each other alone.

Detente still needs policed. The differentiation of public and private is a key component of a secular world view in which we live and let live, and the linked news article shows a violation of that detente. But OPs post seemed to go beyond that and it’s worth noting that how we think of these issues really does affect the question of “is this bigotry (of the sort we ought to battle)”, dramatically.

Dipper at 2

1. “Surely the point about religious belief is that it is not arrived at through discussion of what is reasonable, but through faith in a text as the word of god no matter what that text says. If it wasn’t so, it wouldn’t be a religious belief, it would be a considered opinion.”

No matter what the text says, huh? Go read Mark 12:10, where the text clearly delineates what a Christian should do with their property and tell us how social conservatives in the US follow the text to the letter.

2. When Islamic or Hindu or Jewish fundamentalists are elected officials using their authority to discriminate in hiring, mandating that physicians lie to their patients, and depriving Americans in the United States of their fundamental rights, I’m sure Professor Holbo will take them on.

3. For example, given the religious bigotry evident in Saudi Arabia and Israel, I recommend that we cut US military assistance to them immediately.

That do ya?

Yes, the US government offering this kind of steelman cover on behalf of corporations is one of the reasons Burwell v. Hobby Lobby was such an unfortunate decision.

I keep trying to track down this ticklesome quotation which I think I first saw on pharyngula at least a decade ago, something to the effect of: Just because you think your misogynistic and homophobic views are commanded by god doesn’t make you not a misogynist or homophobe.

Anyway, the argument puts me in mind of some questions. Like, what are we to do with/think of the belief launderer oneself? Whether or not the beliefs are sincerely held and the arguments are used by others to wash themselves of their guilt, does the launderer (whether Ryan T. Anderson or some academically idealized stand-in) get to be judged separately (and perhaps less harshly) for trying (perhaps not very hard, but we’re all learning, right?) to subject the articulation of one’s own bigoted beliefs to analytic methodology. Perhaps not intentionally to provide cover for the would-be closet Thomists, and perhaps not even to sleep well at night with one’s own bad beliefs, but because one values the methods of analytic philosophy and wants to practice and apply them wherever one can.

I’m trying to construct the most sympathetic character here even if there is no such specific instantiation on this earth because I want to then figure out how to think about the more realistic cases. For example, when one’s arguments are (or, murkier still, could be) used by others to launder their beliefs completely independently of the original intention of the author. In other words, I have an intuition that Ryan T. Anderson is in some sense a bad actor but Rebecca Tuvel is not in any sense a bad actor, but it seems both could claim a laudable commitment (even if executed more or less skillfully) to practicing philosophy (writ very large).

bianca @17 has it right, I think.

I mean, if your profoundly sincere beliefs render you dysfunctional in civil society, you would probably be better off just staying home and taking your medications.

Seems relevant to Harry’s post about teaching applied ethics, where the goal is to give students the best possible arguments for views they may disagree with, which seems like it would have similar steelwool scrub issues in practice.

Sincerity is over-valued.

The existence of the expression ‘sincerely held beliefs’ illustrates the point. The addition of the qualifier ‘sincerely held’ is not to distinguish from insincerely held beliefs, because, by definition, there are no insincerely held beliefs. There are such things as insincere statements of belief, but what makes them insincere is precisely that they are not backed by belief.

If I affirm that people like you are vermin who should be exterminated, it doesn’t make things better (or my position more worth of respect) if I am profoundly sincere; if anything, it makes things worse.

Statements do not become any more worthy of respect solely because people believe in them, no matter with what depths of sincerity.

It’s people who deserve some default minimum of respect; you should exercise some care in how you express your views about a person’s religious beliefs not out of respect for the beliefs but out of respect for the person who holds them. That extends even to some respect for people who express bigoted attitudes; but that respect should not outweigh (among other things) respect for the people who are the targets or victims of that bigotry.

Take same-sex marriage (more recently, trans issues): you can always rustle up some Ryan T. Anderson-type to spin up some Thomistic-ish natural law (Christian anthropology etc.) argument. Even if this is weak ‘steel’ (I would judge), belated scholasticism, wandering the modern world, looks ornamental – harmless, innocent, unassuming. At worst, a curious mooncalf; at best, considerably more academically polished than old-school fag-bashing. Now comes the bait-and-switch (indulgence-by-proxy, steelman-to-absolve-all-sins.)

In my experience, sophisticated theological arguments are not steelmanned versions of crude ones, but rather the reverse: they depend on weasel words for the usual function of weasel words, disguising the absence of clear meaning.

But isn’t it awfully mean, ad hominem and unfair if thoughtful Christian philosophers and theologians, Thomistic would-be anthropologists, get lumped in with bog-standard bigots?

Rod Dreher thinks so. Damon Linker thinks so, too.

There IS an element of unfairness.

I disagree. Bigoted positions dressed up in fancy language deserve no more respect than bigoted positions plainly avowed. In this instance, Rod Dreher and Damon Linker are defending positions which deserve no respect or, if you prefer, they’re full of it.

Thomistic theologians, as people, deserve the minimum default respect that all people deserve, but then so do bog-standard bigots.

Who should Ryan T. Anderson-types be indignant with, by rights, for unfairly trashing his reputation? Well, that would obviously be, first and foremost, the bigots he is consistently mistaken for.

You have a society in which certain forms of bigotry are endemic. You have, by hypothesis, a few rare eccentrics who exhibit outwardly similar attitudes, allegedly on a completely alternate, inwardly entirely bigotry-free basis of rather outré philosophical argument. These eccentrics should fully expect to be mistaken for the bigots. How not? Therefore, they should rail first against the bigots whose bigotry is not merely dragging down their reputations but surely serves as the single greatest obstacles to the spread of their allegedly good teachings.

Those who lie down with dogs can expect to get up with fleas; but should they blame the dogs, or themselves?

Dipper

Surely the point about religious belief is that it is not arrived at through discussion of what is reasonable, but through faith in a text as the word of god no matter what that text says.

I may be veering off-topic to make the point, but this is not correct. I could illustrate the point with multiple examples from various religions, but I’ll confine myself to one for now. The people who wrote (and/or compiled) the New Testament were Christians: therefore there were Christians before there was any New Testament, and those Christians, at least, did not arrive at their faith by reliance on the New Testament.

J-D @37
I’ll go further than you. This “…. but through faith in a text as the word of god no matter what that text says” is further wrong because no Christian actually believes the New Testament is the word of God, but only that it is inspired by God – Paul wrote the epistles as a letter to existing congregations and the letter was specifically a letter from him (Paul) to the addressed congregation. Paul never claimed to be speaking for God directly (even he wasn’t so arrogant).

FWIW, my personal experience online is that steelman arguments are often received as strawman arguments if the contribution isn’t felt to be welcome. No sincere populist believer wants a Jewess from the big city using big words like Thomist at them. They want to hear that they’re right and it’s wrong to make them feel otherwise.

On the other hand, if I’m roleplaying a Buddhist I’m probably going to avoid making my argument critically rely on the assumption that Nagarjuna or Siddharta actually historically existed and said the things that they are reputed to have said. I might have dreamed the whole thing…

Your post gave me an odd case of cognitive double vision. I wasn’t familiar with the term Steelman argument, but I was familiar with the thing via a text by Daniel Dennett that used to float around on the ‘nets (reprinted in the Guardian) but disappeared when some sort of limited copyright term expired. He advocates precisely this process, under a slightly different spin: attacking the strongest point of your opponent rather than the weakest. Because everyone is bound to have a weak point, and personally I get annoyed by people pulling out, say, a feminist who says something stupid and then use her as a case study to discredit feminism.

But there are limits. I don’t think it’s by chance that the example in the link ends up being a *man* using the Steelman style effectively to take apart #gamergate. I find it a lot harder to follow down this path when I’m not only a debate participant, but also an exhibit to be debated on. “Should incarcerated people vote?” (being that I’ve never been incarcerated, a topic whose outcome won’t directly affect my own rights) or “how should we act in the face of climate change” (a topic that, more or less, affects all participants in similar ways” carry much less threat to my psychological and physical integrity than “should same-sex couples be allowed to marry” (being that I’m married to another woman) or “are women just as apt as man to make good scientists, engineers, intellectuals, musicians etc.”.

John lays out the argument against giving points for sincerity very well. I’d add that quite obviously a racist may be sincerely outraged at the idea that a black person is of equal dignity, intellect, and rights. Or that a homophobe is sincerely offended by seeing a gay couple hold hands or kiss.

Moreover, a lot of the so-called religious stuff is actually just *Christian* stuff, or even particular strains of Christianity. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg had a very good Twitter thread on Judaism and abortion the other day (https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1125877688877625347 ) . People who want legal accommodations for sincerely held religious beliefs frequently would get into conflict with other just as valid religious beliefs from other religions… if Christianity wasn’t so dominant that, at least in the US, it is often considered synonymous with religion.

The problem doesn’t just affect practitioners of Christianity. Many proud atheists look to me like people whose notion of what religion is has been deeply tainted by Christianity, to a degree that I think of them less as atheists rather than of people who construct their attitude towards faith in opposition to Christianity. They have no mental tooling for religions that aren’t primarily based on faith in a deity or a set of beliefs.

None of the insight into the overratedness of sincerity, however, should justify out-of-hand dismissing, or condescending treatment of, all opponents in matters of ideology or opinion. I’d still want bars raised.

Also, since when is knowing what makes your opponent/enemy tick a bad thing?

@JH Intellectually, it IS unfair to strawman a position by conflating it with its least thoughtful, most irrational, animus-afflicted exponents. Yet descriptively – sociologically – it’s absurd to steelman a socio-cultural order-or-group by conflating its practices and norms with unrepresentative, intellectual outliers.

Furthermore, there is a distinction to be made along the same lines between academic discussions of a given topic, and public interventions in a topic of political interests. As the two have different functions and purposes, follow different norms and obey different standards, it is disingenuous to (implicitly) switch from one to the other e.g to require academic style standards of rigor in the discussion of arguments, but reverting to public intervention standards when passing to concrete questions of implementations (and vice-versa, of course). For instance, even if there are sophisticated, not obviously flawed arguments against same-sex marriage (something that, like J-D, I actually doubt), I bet they operate at a level which is systematically considered inadmissible when discussing for instance laws against stealing or against public littering. So I’m happy to be proven wrong about their non-existence, and to engage in a long discussion of the relevance of Aquinas theology to the question of whether two women can marry – a discussion that I will try to consider with the usual standards of rigor and fairness -, but only insofar as my interlocutor is equally happy to discuss the relevance of Peter the Venerable theology on whether actual buildings to congregate are required to pray or if it is admissible to pray at home, and with exactly the same impact on actual policies.

J-D
The passage you quote is internally inconsistent (as well as being absurd). Yes, I was always thought that Homo Sapiens is a misnomer – it should be Homo Credulus.

Hidari @ 30:

“Sincerely held beliefs” is a term of art. For example.

Not “all” beliefs must be accommodated, but there’s very little pushback on their sincerity.

Oh Birdie, you and me both. Steelmanning words admirably when there is a moderator whose word is as unto the word of god, but outside of that context it is an invitation to the bigot to expound at length and never yield the floor. In meetings the honest form goes “this is more of a statement…” but in my somewhat exasperated experience it goes “since you have failed to accept what I say at face value, I will restate my position first in slightly different words and then again in the original form, before going off on a tangent and finally settling into a string of anecdotes until the audience goes away”.
It is also incredibly vulnerable to bad faith arguments, at worst of the Trumpian “I did not say {statement of record}” variety.
I think it’s excellent practice to critique the best form of someone’s argument rather than the worst, but I prefer to phrase it as the obligation of generosity. In other words, this is something I choose to do because I am a nice person, not something I owe you merely because you’re present. I specifically don’t phrase that as “because you are human” because that veers close to talk of human rights, and those are not universally accepted or recognised. And specifically, if someone refuses tom acknowledge my humanity I feel no obligation to respect theirs (this includes killing in self defence, because as implied by Chris above, there exist people who will happily kill me “out of sincerely held religious belief”).
The “respect mah religion” nonsense is IME easily revealed as bigotry by mentioning Rastifarians. Just as Christians must be exempted from laws banning discrimination, Rastifarians must be exempted from laws banning cannabis cultivation and use… oh boy and now watch the “relgious freedom” Christians get all excited. (you can get similar results using biblical marriage*, peyote, corporal punishment for adultery etc)
* biblical marriage comes in two broad forms: old testament marriage where a man was allowed as many wives as he could support (also concubines and sex slaves), and new testament marriage which is monogamous, ideally celibate and definitely childless. Neither is practiced by any major christian denomination I am aware of.

Reminded of Karl Popper in another thread . He had his own version of steel manning, which was on display in the work that made his reputation in the English speaking world, The Open Society and its Enemies. The amazing thing was how his version of the best arguments of the enemies of the open society were not easily recognizable as their arguments at all. Not sure why steelmanning has a good rep. But then, Popper is very much the Ryan Anderson of right wing politics, isn’t he?

The notion that a Ryan Anderson has demonstrated some moral proposition, like the wrongness of same-sex marriage, is a possibility means that the proposition of the moral rightness of same-sex marriage has not been proven as a logical necessity in all cases. And nothing can prove empirical inductions (See…Poppper!) Therefore the practical opposition cannot be dismissed. As the OP says, such steelmanning is about defending the practice.

The thing is, as near as I can see, the OP’s argument that abstract principles aren’t real motivators kind of does away with philosophy’s relevance, in favor of common sense. We know where that goes. Aristotle uses common sense to see the inferiority of women and slaves. A Stoic like Seneca is the millionaire servant of Nero. A Berekley or Hume go to bed relying on common sense in order to wake up as Tories. Popper is a cofounder of the Mont Pelerin Society. The real problem seems to me to be a defective conception about the role of tested experience (which is not common sense!) in philosophy.
Common sense isn’t good enough for science (hence measurement etc.) I don’t think it’s good enough for anything but complacency.