If Huemer believes that moral behavior doesn’t comes from this non natural thing and it affects our behavior, then how exactly does it interact with the world? He might say something about our rationality but there was clearly moral behavior before any kind of reflection on it.
Why would making copies of oneself be even metaphorically selfish, anyhow? Replicators replicate through physical causation. Is a rock selfish when it rolls down a hill instead of up?
I think there are two ways to read the title, with different pronunciations.
The SELFISH gene (a book about the gene/s for selfishness, which is loosely adjacent in meaning to the false idea that evolution inevitably leads to selfish organisms - but this view requires a massive misreading of the entire book).
The selfish GENE (a book about the causal fulcrum of evolution, which can be seen as benefiting a blind molecule without foresight or moral agency, which is itself forced to be 'selfish' in its algorithmic expansion, but can - under the right conditions - create altruism in the organisms it creates.)
It is not enough to argue, as some commenters to your note have, that kin selection is not itself unselfish or moral, implying that Dawkins was wrong. What's important is whether structures that are evolutionarily adaptive can include behaviours and cognitive biases that overlap with altruism. It could well be the case that there is an advantage for neural circuits that engage in limited altruism because of kin selection, and there is a spillover effect such that we often help unrelated strangers. We end up being better moral agents than a perfectly selfish approach to reproduction would suggest, because evolution mediated by analogue neural circuits deals with broad instincts, not finely crafted precise genetic calculations.
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins did not claim that shared genes would cause general altruism. He said that individual selfishness was the general expectation, although he might now be backing off from those claims. Specifically, he said:
"Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to."
Now he repudiates that claim -- but why? What is the argument? I don't think he has one. I think he is just dodging the implications of his own theory, due to a changing moral climate.
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins argued for kin selection theory, which predicts a very selective type of altruism toward close relatives. This is not the kind of altruism considered "moral" in modern Western morality -- far from it.
His argument for kin selection theory, and the theory itself, are bogus. So is the "selfish gene" concept, which is based on a misleading metaphor. Evolution selects for reproductive selfishness at the individual level, not the gene level. Dawkins was wrong, and the selfish gene is a huge blunder in evolutionary biology.
But that's another story.
If you accept the concept of the selfish gene as originally presented, then you should expect mostly individual selfishness at the organism level, with maybe some altruism toward kin based on relatedness.
And yes, the book was about selfishness. It was about both selfishness and genes. In Chapter 1, he specifically set up an opposition to group selection theory, which predicts altruism toward members of the same species.
From watching the YouTube clip, Huemer appears to say explicitly that evolution selects for behaviors that “benefit the individual or more specifically that benefit the particular gene”. The more specific claim appears to be exactly what Dawkins argues. I don’t see how Huemer is misinterpreting Dawkins here.
It does not. Huemer’s remarks about distinguishing group selection from selection at the individual or genetic level just indicates further misunderstanding on Huemer’s part, and serves to explain how he made the error I correctly described in the first place.
Huemer seems to expand on the claim that The Selfish Gene (which favors a gene-centric approach) predicts “selfishness” by, first, correctly recognizing that Dawkins rejects group selection, but then mistakenly taking group selection to (by implication) predict altruism/non-selfish behavior, but a gene-centric approach to predict selfishness. This is indicated by Huemer saying this:
“Basically, the group selection model is wrong. Evolution does not select for behaviors that benefit the group, right, it selects for behaviors that benefit the individual or more specifically that benefit the particular gene that’s being selected, so genes tend to predominate in the population when that gene causes individuals who have it to produce more copies of it.”
He then continues:
“So now if you understand that then what you would anticipate from people’s moral values is you would think that everyone should be an ethical egoist.”
This is categorically false. Huemer is conflating selection at the level of genes with behavior at the level of individual organisms. Dawkins is very clear about this, and goes to great lengths to draw a distinction between genes as the unit of selection and organisms as the “vehicles” genes construct, in cooperation with one another, to produce more copies of himself.
Huemer appears to have mistakenly taken group selection, which has been proposed as an explanation for altruism/non-selfishness, to be representative of such a prediction, and, by negation, taken a gene-centric approach to not similarly make such a prediction. But this is just wrong. And the fact that it is wrong is something Dawkins explicitly states in the introduction of the book and is made abundantly clear to anyone familiar with the text. One of the central purposes of the book is to show how altruistic and non-selfish behavior is completely consistent with and predicted by the gene-centric approach. Huemer clearly doesn’t understand this.
Second, you said this: “From watching the YouTube clip, Huemer appears to say explicitly that evolution selects for behaviors that “benefit the individual or more specifically that benefit the particular gene”. The more specific claim appears to be exactly what Dawkins argues.”
You appear to be taking the quote you provided as a clarification of the claim about evolution predicting selfishness. But that isn’t what it was. It’s not that when Huemer says, “You learn from evolutionary theory that evolution selects for selfishness. This is what you learn if you read great books like The Selfish Gene,” that all he means is that natural selection operates at the level of individuals/genes. Rather, the quote you provide is an explanation for *why* the gene-centric approach predicts selfish behavior at the level of individuals (which, again, it doesn’t). If this weren’t what he was doing, the remarks that immediately follow this, where he says:
“So now if you understand that then what you would anticipate from people’s moral values is you would think that everyone should be an ethical egoist.”
…wouldn’t make any sense. What Huemer is doing is saying group selection predicts non-selfishness, gene selection predicts selfishness. And that’s incorrect and is not what Dawkins claims at all.
Thanks for elaborating evermore. To be clear, I am not attempting to know what Huemer himself meant with what he said, and I agree with you that hopefully he can shed light on that aspect. My goal is to add the context which makes what he said make sense, at least to me. In regard to the last quote, he adds:
"Or maybe you know even more you'd expect them to have the view that the good is reproduction . . . that everybody's main goal in life should be to produce as many offspring as possible."
I think selfish genes would lead to exactly this as the moral good if that is where our morality came from. An individual altruistic account of an organism would sacrifice itself to save offspring or kin or whatever in order to increase reproduction in the long run. Fwiw, I also think most egoists would value their friends as well as their kin, so I don't see how ethical egoism is excluded from the biological explanation found in The Selfish Gene.
Lastly, I think Dawkins himself argues that the biological explanation he provides does not account for moral choices humans make, for example he says:
"A question that sociologists and psychologists sometimes ask is why blood donors (in countries, such as Britain, where they are not paid) give blood. I find it hard to believe that the answer lies in reciprocity or disguised selfishness in any simple sense. It is not as though regular blood donors receive preferential treatment when they come to need a transfusion. They are not even issued with little gold stars to wear. Maybe I am naïve, but I find myself tempted to see it as a genuine case of pure, disinterested altruism."
Thanks for the exchange! There's lots to say about all this so I am glad someone is pushing me to do so. Regarding the moralization of reproduction: yea, that's a separate claim though, and not one I sought to address here. My main concern is with mischaracterizing The Selfish Gene. As far as whether one would predict moralizing reproduction:
First, I think it is at least sometimes moralized in certain contexts (be fruitful and multiply is one of God's first directives in the Bible), though I grant that's a weak point. People clearly don't reliably prioritize childbearing.
But second, and more importantly, I don't think it's any sort of implication of natural selection that we should expect people to moralize reproduction. It's not at all clear that it'd be in our adaptive interests to do want to optimize having as many offspring as possible. Natural selection doesn't typically shape adaptive behavior by creating a direct desire to optimize for reproductive fitness. As I say in the video, dogs don't eat to optimize nutrition for maximum reproductive fitness. They eat because they are hungry. Natural selection shapes behavior in ways that motivate behavior that tends to be adaptive, but they do so through simple and indirect intermediaries like hunger, lust, and territoriality. Humans inherited millions of years of these inclinations, and only recently began developing a capacity for devising norms. One may then ask what norms are and how and why they arose.
Many standard approaches emphasize their role in devising standards that facilitate cooperation. So, insofar as evolution has influenced our normative predispositions, there is little reason to think it should be specifically adapted to directly acting in a way that would optimize for reproductive fitness. That strikes me as a weird and naive assumption to make. It isn't an assumption Dawkins would make, and I doubt it's an assumption anyone who studies evolutionary theory in much detail would presume. And the goal "reproduce as much as possible" is too general and abstract to be all that actionable, anyway. Instead, people are motivated to be attractive, compete, and obtain status. This gives them access to better mates and greater reproductive opportunities. And people do clearly moralize significant elements of such practices. But more generally, one's status and role within a society is a significant factor in facilitating reproductive fitness. Norm acquisition capacities centering on internalizing one's local cultural standards and perhaps some shared, evolved predisposition to hold certain standards have more to do, in a direct fashion, with maintaining one's status and reputation within a group, and not being exiled, which are important preconditions to reproductive success. Humans are social organisms. We need to work with our group to survive. Why not think morality would have something to do with this? And lo and behold: it does.
Lastly, I think Dawkins himself argues that the biological explanation he provides does not account for moral choices humans make [...]
I agree, but note that Dawkins doesn’t propose accounting for all and every instance of human morality by appeal to kin selection and reciprocity. Humans can and do act in surprising ways that don’t seem to fit either of these explanations. But Dawkins also gestures in this direction of a potential explanation with his discussion on memes. Critically, for humans, we are not merely subject at the behavioral level to the direct influence of our genes, but are, on his view, also subject to the behavioral influences of memes. And memes are transmitted socially, or culturally. Culture can therefore pick up the slack in explaining human behavior where direct adaptation doesn’t get the job done. Dawkins didn’t explore this in as great of detail as others would in the decades that followed the publication of The Selfish Gene, but gene-coevolutionary accounts of altruism and other aspects of human morality are not inconsistent with his approach and in fact synergize quite well with it (even if his account turns out to have limitations).
More importantly, this is consistent with my objections to Huemer. That Dawkins and others have observed that humans behave in ways that are difficult to account for by appeal to kin selection and reciprocity (and I agree, and would go further and say that they aren’t adequate), does not indicate that Dawkins would predict that natural selection favors selfishness. Huemer simply got that wrong, and dichotomized the implications of group versus gene level selection wrong, too.
I would bet Dawkins would agree that we could account for human morality via mundane biological, psychological, sociological, and anthropological explanations without appeal to e.g., non-natural moral facts as Huemer might propose (and has, in his arguments for moral realism by appeal to moral convergence). That’s a bit speculative on my part but I’m familiar enough with his general views to be willing to bet he is or would be a moral antirealist and would not think human morality is inexplicable by conventional means. If I’m right, then he’s not a great person to invoke to make the point Huemer sought to make.
One of the more depressing aspects of revealed morality is how frequently it has taken two inconsistent and often antithetical forms, depending on whether the context is "us" or "them". This is something which seems to present more of a problem for moral realism than it does for the notion that a capacity for moral judgement may have arisen, contingently, as a response to evolutionary pressure, as the latter would have been inherently local (physically and culturally) in scope.
A lot of people misinterpret his words on purpose to use it for their own means. Funny coincidence I’m literally listening to him talk about the title as I saw your article. I’m listening to “Books do furnish a life”. Aside from the selfish part being misunderstood, Sapolsky suggested it should have been called the Selfish Genome.
Regardless of all of this, The Selfish Gene is one of the most paradigm shifting books/ideas I’ve heard. Thinking of life forms as conduits for the genes they have.
I really do think the title was a mistake. Many people lock in on the names of things. The title was too clever. It should have been more direct and explicit, and I think Dawkins has come to realize this. Then again, in a strange way, perhaps the misleading title prompts misinterpretations and corrections in a way that has increased the book's reach.
>>I don't know if you're just neurodivergent or socially awkward, but this confrontational yet defensive and pedantic style is really annoying.
Whether or not I was neurodivergent, do you think it's appropriate to float such a possibility in an overtly disparaging context? I don't. You may want to reconsider how you engage others online. Remarks like this aren't welcome here.
I'll be honest Lance I have thought the same thing, and it’s the opposite of disparaging it’s a way of trying to be understanding towards someone who engages in a way that does not come across well. Your responses here sort of make the point, as does the list of people I know you’ve blocked who I have found to be nothing but good faith engagers. How you want to be perceived is up to you ultimately.
I like this
If Huemer believes that moral behavior doesn’t comes from this non natural thing and it affects our behavior, then how exactly does it interact with the world? He might say something about our rationality but there was clearly moral behavior before any kind of reflection on it.
Why would making copies of oneself be even metaphorically selfish, anyhow? Replicators replicate through physical causation. Is a rock selfish when it rolls down a hill instead of up?
I find this misinterpretation frustrating.
I think there are two ways to read the title, with different pronunciations.
The SELFISH gene (a book about the gene/s for selfishness, which is loosely adjacent in meaning to the false idea that evolution inevitably leads to selfish organisms - but this view requires a massive misreading of the entire book).
The selfish GENE (a book about the causal fulcrum of evolution, which can be seen as benefiting a blind molecule without foresight or moral agency, which is itself forced to be 'selfish' in its algorithmic expansion, but can - under the right conditions - create altruism in the organisms it creates.)
It is not enough to argue, as some commenters to your note have, that kin selection is not itself unselfish or moral, implying that Dawkins was wrong. What's important is whether structures that are evolutionarily adaptive can include behaviours and cognitive biases that overlap with altruism. It could well be the case that there is an advantage for neural circuits that engage in limited altruism because of kin selection, and there is a spillover effect such that we often help unrelated strangers. We end up being better moral agents than a perfectly selfish approach to reproduction would suggest, because evolution mediated by analogue neural circuits deals with broad instincts, not finely crafted precise genetic calculations.
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins did not claim that shared genes would cause general altruism. He said that individual selfishness was the general expectation, although he might now be backing off from those claims. Specifically, he said:
"Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to."
Now he repudiates that claim -- but why? What is the argument? I don't think he has one. I think he is just dodging the implications of his own theory, due to a changing moral climate.
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins argued for kin selection theory, which predicts a very selective type of altruism toward close relatives. This is not the kind of altruism considered "moral" in modern Western morality -- far from it.
His argument for kin selection theory, and the theory itself, are bogus. So is the "selfish gene" concept, which is based on a misleading metaphor. Evolution selects for reproductive selfishness at the individual level, not the gene level. Dawkins was wrong, and the selfish gene is a huge blunder in evolutionary biology.
But that's another story.
If you accept the concept of the selfish gene as originally presented, then you should expect mostly individual selfishness at the organism level, with maybe some altruism toward kin based on relatedness.
And yes, the book was about selfishness. It was about both selfishness and genes. In Chapter 1, he specifically set up an opposition to group selection theory, which predicts altruism toward members of the same species.
From watching the YouTube clip, Huemer appears to say explicitly that evolution selects for behaviors that “benefit the individual or more specifically that benefit the particular gene”. The more specific claim appears to be exactly what Dawkins argues. I don’t see how Huemer is misinterpreting Dawkins here.
The part I quoted is a clear misinterpretion.
The “evolution selects for selfishness” quote? That seems to be exactly clarified by the quote I provided.
It does not. Huemer’s remarks about distinguishing group selection from selection at the individual or genetic level just indicates further misunderstanding on Huemer’s part, and serves to explain how he made the error I correctly described in the first place.
Huemer seems to expand on the claim that The Selfish Gene (which favors a gene-centric approach) predicts “selfishness” by, first, correctly recognizing that Dawkins rejects group selection, but then mistakenly taking group selection to (by implication) predict altruism/non-selfish behavior, but a gene-centric approach to predict selfishness. This is indicated by Huemer saying this:
“Basically, the group selection model is wrong. Evolution does not select for behaviors that benefit the group, right, it selects for behaviors that benefit the individual or more specifically that benefit the particular gene that’s being selected, so genes tend to predominate in the population when that gene causes individuals who have it to produce more copies of it.”
He then continues:
“So now if you understand that then what you would anticipate from people’s moral values is you would think that everyone should be an ethical egoist.”
This is categorically false. Huemer is conflating selection at the level of genes with behavior at the level of individual organisms. Dawkins is very clear about this, and goes to great lengths to draw a distinction between genes as the unit of selection and organisms as the “vehicles” genes construct, in cooperation with one another, to produce more copies of himself.
Huemer appears to have mistakenly taken group selection, which has been proposed as an explanation for altruism/non-selfishness, to be representative of such a prediction, and, by negation, taken a gene-centric approach to not similarly make such a prediction. But this is just wrong. And the fact that it is wrong is something Dawkins explicitly states in the introduction of the book and is made abundantly clear to anyone familiar with the text. One of the central purposes of the book is to show how altruistic and non-selfish behavior is completely consistent with and predicted by the gene-centric approach. Huemer clearly doesn’t understand this.
Second, you said this: “From watching the YouTube clip, Huemer appears to say explicitly that evolution selects for behaviors that “benefit the individual or more specifically that benefit the particular gene”. The more specific claim appears to be exactly what Dawkins argues.”
You appear to be taking the quote you provided as a clarification of the claim about evolution predicting selfishness. But that isn’t what it was. It’s not that when Huemer says, “You learn from evolutionary theory that evolution selects for selfishness. This is what you learn if you read great books like The Selfish Gene,” that all he means is that natural selection operates at the level of individuals/genes. Rather, the quote you provide is an explanation for *why* the gene-centric approach predicts selfish behavior at the level of individuals (which, again, it doesn’t). If this weren’t what he was doing, the remarks that immediately follow this, where he says:
“So now if you understand that then what you would anticipate from people’s moral values is you would think that everyone should be an ethical egoist.”
…wouldn’t make any sense. What Huemer is doing is saying group selection predicts non-selfishness, gene selection predicts selfishness. And that’s incorrect and is not what Dawkins claims at all.
Thanks for elaborating evermore. To be clear, I am not attempting to know what Huemer himself meant with what he said, and I agree with you that hopefully he can shed light on that aspect. My goal is to add the context which makes what he said make sense, at least to me. In regard to the last quote, he adds:
"Or maybe you know even more you'd expect them to have the view that the good is reproduction . . . that everybody's main goal in life should be to produce as many offspring as possible."
I think selfish genes would lead to exactly this as the moral good if that is where our morality came from. An individual altruistic account of an organism would sacrifice itself to save offspring or kin or whatever in order to increase reproduction in the long run. Fwiw, I also think most egoists would value their friends as well as their kin, so I don't see how ethical egoism is excluded from the biological explanation found in The Selfish Gene.
Lastly, I think Dawkins himself argues that the biological explanation he provides does not account for moral choices humans make, for example he says:
"A question that sociologists and psychologists sometimes ask is why blood donors (in countries, such as Britain, where they are not paid) give blood. I find it hard to believe that the answer lies in reciprocity or disguised selfishness in any simple sense. It is not as though regular blood donors receive preferential treatment when they come to need a transfusion. They are not even issued with little gold stars to wear. Maybe I am naïve, but I find myself tempted to see it as a genuine case of pure, disinterested altruism."
Thanks for the exchange! There's lots to say about all this so I am glad someone is pushing me to do so. Regarding the moralization of reproduction: yea, that's a separate claim though, and not one I sought to address here. My main concern is with mischaracterizing The Selfish Gene. As far as whether one would predict moralizing reproduction:
First, I think it is at least sometimes moralized in certain contexts (be fruitful and multiply is one of God's first directives in the Bible), though I grant that's a weak point. People clearly don't reliably prioritize childbearing.
But second, and more importantly, I don't think it's any sort of implication of natural selection that we should expect people to moralize reproduction. It's not at all clear that it'd be in our adaptive interests to do want to optimize having as many offspring as possible. Natural selection doesn't typically shape adaptive behavior by creating a direct desire to optimize for reproductive fitness. As I say in the video, dogs don't eat to optimize nutrition for maximum reproductive fitness. They eat because they are hungry. Natural selection shapes behavior in ways that motivate behavior that tends to be adaptive, but they do so through simple and indirect intermediaries like hunger, lust, and territoriality. Humans inherited millions of years of these inclinations, and only recently began developing a capacity for devising norms. One may then ask what norms are and how and why they arose.
Many standard approaches emphasize their role in devising standards that facilitate cooperation. So, insofar as evolution has influenced our normative predispositions, there is little reason to think it should be specifically adapted to directly acting in a way that would optimize for reproductive fitness. That strikes me as a weird and naive assumption to make. It isn't an assumption Dawkins would make, and I doubt it's an assumption anyone who studies evolutionary theory in much detail would presume. And the goal "reproduce as much as possible" is too general and abstract to be all that actionable, anyway. Instead, people are motivated to be attractive, compete, and obtain status. This gives them access to better mates and greater reproductive opportunities. And people do clearly moralize significant elements of such practices. But more generally, one's status and role within a society is a significant factor in facilitating reproductive fitness. Norm acquisition capacities centering on internalizing one's local cultural standards and perhaps some shared, evolved predisposition to hold certain standards have more to do, in a direct fashion, with maintaining one's status and reputation within a group, and not being exiled, which are important preconditions to reproductive success. Humans are social organisms. We need to work with our group to survive. Why not think morality would have something to do with this? And lo and behold: it does.
Lastly, I think Dawkins himself argues that the biological explanation he provides does not account for moral choices humans make [...]
I agree, but note that Dawkins doesn’t propose accounting for all and every instance of human morality by appeal to kin selection and reciprocity. Humans can and do act in surprising ways that don’t seem to fit either of these explanations. But Dawkins also gestures in this direction of a potential explanation with his discussion on memes. Critically, for humans, we are not merely subject at the behavioral level to the direct influence of our genes, but are, on his view, also subject to the behavioral influences of memes. And memes are transmitted socially, or culturally. Culture can therefore pick up the slack in explaining human behavior where direct adaptation doesn’t get the job done. Dawkins didn’t explore this in as great of detail as others would in the decades that followed the publication of The Selfish Gene, but gene-coevolutionary accounts of altruism and other aspects of human morality are not inconsistent with his approach and in fact synergize quite well with it (even if his account turns out to have limitations).
More importantly, this is consistent with my objections to Huemer. That Dawkins and others have observed that humans behave in ways that are difficult to account for by appeal to kin selection and reciprocity (and I agree, and would go further and say that they aren’t adequate), does not indicate that Dawkins would predict that natural selection favors selfishness. Huemer simply got that wrong, and dichotomized the implications of group versus gene level selection wrong, too.
I would bet Dawkins would agree that we could account for human morality via mundane biological, psychological, sociological, and anthropological explanations without appeal to e.g., non-natural moral facts as Huemer might propose (and has, in his arguments for moral realism by appeal to moral convergence). That’s a bit speculative on my part but I’m familiar enough with his general views to be willing to bet he is or would be a moral antirealist and would not think human morality is inexplicable by conventional means. If I’m right, then he’s not a great person to invoke to make the point Huemer sought to make.
One of the more depressing aspects of revealed morality is how frequently it has taken two inconsistent and often antithetical forms, depending on whether the context is "us" or "them". This is something which seems to present more of a problem for moral realism than it does for the notion that a capacity for moral judgement may have arisen, contingently, as a response to evolutionary pressure, as the latter would have been inherently local (physically and culturally) in scope.
A lot of people misinterpret his words on purpose to use it for their own means. Funny coincidence I’m literally listening to him talk about the title as I saw your article. I’m listening to “Books do furnish a life”. Aside from the selfish part being misunderstood, Sapolsky suggested it should have been called the Selfish Genome.
Regardless of all of this, The Selfish Gene is one of the most paradigm shifting books/ideas I’ve heard. Thinking of life forms as conduits for the genes they have.
I really do think the title was a mistake. Many people lock in on the names of things. The title was too clever. It should have been more direct and explicit, and I think Dawkins has come to realize this. Then again, in a strange way, perhaps the misleading title prompts misinterpretations and corrections in a way that has increased the book's reach.
It comes across that you haven’t read the selfish gene, read it.
He says this:
"You learn from evolutionary theory that evolution selects for selfishness. This is what you learn if you read great books like The Selfish Gene."
...This is what I am saying is false. I don't know what this has to do with group selection, so I'm not sure what you think I am not misunderstanding.
I'm not sure how what I've said has to do with group selection.
>>I don't know if you're just neurodivergent or socially awkward, but this confrontational yet defensive and pedantic style is really annoying.
Whether or not I was neurodivergent, do you think it's appropriate to float such a possibility in an overtly disparaging context? I don't. You may want to reconsider how you engage others online. Remarks like this aren't welcome here.
I'll be honest Lance I have thought the same thing, and it’s the opposite of disparaging it’s a way of trying to be understanding towards someone who engages in a way that does not come across well. Your responses here sort of make the point, as does the list of people I know you’ve blocked who I have found to be nothing but good faith engagers. How you want to be perceived is up to you ultimately.