Making Fun of Things is Easy

Related on LW: Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale.

I changed my mind in a Cairo cafe, talking to a young Muslim woman. I let it slip during the conversation that I was an atheist, and she seemed genuinely curious why. You've all probably been in such a situation, and you probably know how hard it is to choose just one reason, but I'd been reading about Biblical contradictions at the time and I mentioned the myriad errors and atrocities and contradictions in all the Holy Books.

Her response? "Oh, thank goodness it's that. I was afraid you were one of those crazies who believed that monkeys transformed into humans."

I admitted that um, well, maybe I sorta kinda might in fact believe that.

It is hard for me to describe exactly the look of shock on her face, but I have no doubt that her horror was genuine. I may have been the first flesh-and-blood evolutionist she ever met. "But..." she looked at me as if I was an idiot. "Monkeys don't change into humans. What on Earth makes you think monkeys can change into humans?"

Also, on Yvain's old blog:

On r/atheism, a Christian-turned-atheist once described an "apologetics" group at his old church. The pastor would bring in a simplified straw-man version of a common atheist argument, they'd take turns mocking it ("Oh my god, he said that monkeys can give birth to humans! That's hilarious!") and then they'd all have a good laugh together. Later, when they met an actual atheist who was trying to explain evolution to them, they wouldn't sit and evaluate it dispassionately. They'd pattern-match back to the ridiculous argument they heard at church, and instead of listening they'd be thinking "Hahaha, atheists really are that hilariously stupid!"

[...]

There are lots of good arguments against libertarianism. I have collected some of them into a very long document which remains the most popular thing I've ever written. But when I hear liberals discuss libertarianism, they very often head in the same direction. They make a silly face and say "Durned guv'mint needs to stay off my land!" And then all the other liberals who are with them laugh uproariously. And then when a real libertarian shows up and makes a real libertarian argument, a liberal will adopt his posture, try to mimic his tone of voice, and say "Durned guv'ment needs to stay off my land! Hahaha!" And all the other liberals will think "Hahaha, libertarians really are that stupid!"

Many of you will recognize this as much like the Myers Shuffle. As long as a bunch of atheists get together and laugh at religious people who ask them to read theology before criticizing it, and as long as they have an easily recognizable name for the object of their hilarity like "Courtier's Reply", then whenever a religious person asks them to familiarize themselves with theology the atheist can just say "Courtier's Reply!" and all the other atheists will crack up and think "Hahaha, religious people really are that stupid!" and they gain status and the theist loses status and at no point do they have to even consider responding to the theist's objection.

This tendency reaches its most florid manifestation in the "ideological bingo games". See for example "Skeptical Sexist Bingo", feminist bingo, libertarian troll bingo, anti-Zionist bingo, pro-Zionist bingo, and so on. If you Google for these you can find thousands, which is too bad because every single person who makes one of these is going to Hell.

Let's look at the fourth one, "Anti-Zionist Bingo." Say that you mention something bad Israel is doing, someone else accuses you of being anti-Semitic, and you correct them that no, not all criticism of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic and you're worried about the increasing tendency to spin it that way.

And they say "Hahahahahhaa he totally did it, he used the 'all criticism of Israel gets labeled anti-Semitic' argument, people totally use that as a real argument hahahaha they really are that stupid, I get 'B1' on my stupid stereotypical critics of Israel bingo!"

"everything is bad" is only a crappy thinking mode when unaccompanied by the obvious next step of "optimize all the things."

If you can correct your beliefs by thinking up a good argument against them, isn't that a good thing? I'm unsure why you're terming it "warning."

I concur with you.

Also, you have an unlikely ally. I think it was C.S. Lewis that said that it was hard work to make a joke, but effortless to act as though a joke has been made. (google help me, yes, Screwtape Letters, number 11.) I generally try to let that guide me.

I think that genuinely funny jokes typically need some participation from the an aspect object of the joke. If you're mocking a policy by pointing out an incongruent consequence of that its certainly funny, but it wouldn't be possible if the root wasn't there to start with.

Say I'm an authority figure have a policy that everyone must wear two shoes. You draw a cartoon of someone with just one leg gamely wearing the other shoe on his hand. I think that this is a joke of the first flavor. It criticizes me, but it does so by pointing out my laughably bad policy.

By contrast I consider 'making fun of', to be humor that merely derides, that doesn't point out anything or rely on its substance at all. Its something humans do to Out-Tribe symbols, and I try not to let it signify beyond that.

Say I don't like a particular politican. I restate his latest speech in a sardonic mockery of his distinctive speaking style, then roll my eyes. I think this is "making fun of". It doesn't bring anything new to the conversation, I can do it about anyone and it, as you say, breeds contempt.

Hrr...the above wasn't as clear as I'd like it to be. How about this then? If a joke of the first (good) sort is made and I laugh I'm laughing at the joke. It indicates my approval of the cleverness of the witticism's author and the joy that I find in the paradoxical. If I laugh at a joke of the second sort I'm laughing not at the joke itself, but at its subject. My laughter indicates my derision towards the Hated/Scorned enemy.

Optimally, only bad things would get made fun of, making it easy to determine what is good and bad-- but this doesn't appear to be the case.

How do you differentiate between benign comedy and "making fun of"? Is it just the implied intent? I've found this is an incredibly difficult line to draw, people are so variably calibrated. Many times couldn't have helped myself and have inadvertently insulted people. Later I have learned that quite a few laughs are not worth one wrongly placed offence, so I mostly joke among friends.

While that's all true, using humor can be a socially acceptable way to point out the flaws in someone else's "sacred cows" without them getting angry. By avoiding the anger response using humor, sometimes you can short-circuit the whole knee-jerk reaction and get someone to think in a more rational way, to actually take a closer look at their own beliefs. Political satirists have used this technique for a long time, and still do.

So it can be a positive and socially useful thing to do. Like all of these kinds of tools, it can either be used to get to the truth or to hide it, to think more deeply or to avoid thinking. It all depends on the details.

How many people actually did the exercises katydee suggested? I know I didn't.

katydee, perhaps you could take a semi-random sample of things in relevant reference classes (politicians/organizations) and demonstrate how easy it is to make fun of them? Otherwise I suspect many people will take you for your word that things are easy to make fun of.

Here's my semi-random sample of organizations and politicians. I'll take the most recent 3 Daily Show guests) I recognize the names of and the largest 3 charities I recognize the names of.

• Richard Dawkins

• Chelsea Clinton

• Robert Reich

• Salvation Army

• American National Red Cross

• American Cancer Society

Here are my brief attempts to make fun of them.

• Richard Dawkins: He wasn't satisfied with being an eminent biologist, he just had to stir up controversy by provoking religious people. And his arguments apparently aren't even very philosophically sound. Stick to biology next time, Dawkins.

• Chelsea Clinton: Good luck finding a man who's higher status than you to marry.

• Robert Reich: Is he liberal because he's short or is he short because he's liberal?

• Salvation Army: Ineffective charity that spreads religious lies. Chumps.

• American National Red Cross: We're all going to die eventually anyway. Organizations like the Red Cross just prolong our misery.

• American Cancer Society: Clearly cancer is just a side effect of aging and your money is better sent to SENS. Also, just how much money have we poured in to cancer research without finding a cure yet? They should call it the "American Cancer Researcher Welfare Program".

It seems to me that the things I can make fun of the most easily are the ones that have legitimate arguments that reflect poorly on them (e.g. the Salvation Army and American Cancer Society). But maybe I'm just bad at making fun of things.

The best conversations are in places that put a low value on humour. Unfortunately in wider society disliking humour is seen as a massive negative.

This example pushed me into formulating Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal: Any explanation that is subtle enough to be correct is turbid enough to make its sarcastic dismissal genuinely funny.

Skinner had a subtle point to make, that the important objection to mentalism is of a very different sort. The world of the mind steals the show. Behaviour is not recognized as a subject in its own right.

I think I grasped Skinner's point after reading something Feynman wrote on explanations in science. You can explain why green paint is green by explaining that paint consists of a binder (oil for an oil paint) and a pigment. Green paint is green because the pigment is green. But why is the pigment green? Eventually the concept of green must ground in something non-green, wavelengths of light, properties of molecules.

It is similar with people. One sophisticated way of having an inner man without an infinite regress is exhibited by Minsky's Society of Mind. One can explain the outer man in terms of a committee of inner men provided that the inner men, sitting on the committee, are simpler than the outer man they purport to explain. And the inner men can be explained in terms of interior-inner-men, who are simpler still and whom we explain in terms of component-interior-inner-men,... We had better have remember that 1+1/2+1/3+1/4+1/5+1/6+... diverges. It is not quite enough that the inner men be simpler. They have to get simpler fast enough. Then our explanatory framework is philosophically admissible.

But notice the anachronism that I am committing. Skinner retired in 1974. Society of Mind was published in 1988. Worse yet, the perspective of Society of Mind comes from functional programming, where tree structured data is processed by recursive functions. Does your recursive function terminate? Programmers learn that an infinite regress is avoided if all the recursive calls are on sub-structures of the original structure, smaller by a measure which makes the structures well-founded. In the 1930's and 1940's Skinner was trying to rescue psychology from the infinite regress of man explained by an inner man, himself a man. It is not reasonable to ask him to anticipate Minsky by 50 years.

Skinner is trying to wake psychology from its complacent slumber. The inner man explains the outer man. The explanation does indeed account for the outer man. The flaw is that inner man is no easier to explain than the outer man.

We could instead look at behaviour. The outer man has behaved before. What happened last time? If the outer man does something unexpected we could look back. If the usual behaviour worked out badly the time before, that offers an explanation of sorts for the change. There is much to be done. For example, if some behaviour works ten times in a row, how many more times will it be repeated after it has stopped working? We already know that the inner man is complicated and hence under-determined by our experimental observations. This argues for caution and delay in admitting him to our explanations. We cannot hope to deduce his character until we have observed a great deal of his behaviour.

But let us return to humour and the tragedy of Sidney Morgenbesser's sarcastic dismissal

Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn't anthropomorphize people?

The tragedy lies in the acuteness of Morgenbesser's insight. He grasped Skinner's subtle point. Skinner argues that anthropomorphizing people is a trap; do that an your are stuck with folk psychology and have no way to move beyond it. But Morgenbesser makes a joke out of it.

I accept that the joke is genuinely funny. It is surely a mistake for biologists to anthropomorphize cats and dogs and other animals, precisely because they are not people. So there is a template to fill in. "It is surely a mistake for psychologists to anthropomorphize men and women and other humans, precisely because they are not people." Hilarity ensues.

Morgenbesser understands, makes a joke, and loses his understanding somewhere in the laughter. The joke is funny and sucks every-one into the loss of understanding.

whether or not people are making fun of it is not necessarily a good signal as to whether or not it's actually good

Correct.

Optimally, only bad things would get made fun of

Incorrect. Being too serious is a deadly disease. Everything should be made fun of -- it's fun!

Second, if you want to make something sound bad, it's really easy.

"making something sound bad" is not at all the same thing as "making fun of"

This sort of premature cynicism tends to be a failure mode I've noticed in many otherwise very intelligent people.

As usual, balance is important. Rainbows, kittens, and unicorns also tend to be a failure mode in many people, especially young. Tales of disillusionment are... common.

I'm not sure if this post is meant to be taken seriously. It's always "easy" to make fun of X; what's difficult is to spread your opinion about X by making fun of X. Obviously this requires a target audience that doesn't already share your opinion about X, and if you look at people making fun of things (e.g. on the net), usually the audience they're catering to already shares their views. This is because the most common objective of making fun of things is not to convince people of anything, but to create a group identity, raise team morale, and so on. There is zero point talking about the difficulty of that because there is none.

Someone would have to be very susceptible to be influenced by people making fun of things. I guess rationality doesn't have all that much to do with how influenceable you are, but this post strikes me as overly naïve concerning the intentions of people. If someone makes fun of X, they're clearly not interested in an objective discussion about X, so why would you be swayed by their arguments?

Whether or not people are making fun of it is not necessarily a good signal as to whether or not it's actually good.

Gee, you think?

All the comments responding to this post deserve to be mocked mercilessly.