Cutting Apart Scissor Statements

In retrospect, there is something quite fitting about the concept of a "scissor statement." Rationalists are fond of it; just hanging around them over the years, I've heard brought up as casual shorthand many times. I myself have used it! It was coined by Scott Alexander almost eight years ago in the short story "Sort By Controversial". There's something so amusingly Scott Alexander about it. If nothing else, it makes for a pretty good story. Four thousand words, yet it's a brisk, casual read. By turns amusing and disturbingly plausible. If I had to give a blind pitch, think Lovecraft by way of machine learning, stripping away all the gods and monsters without losing that spark of horror beyond comprehension. If anything, it elevates it. Having long ago familiarized myself with the "twist," I didn't expect to find it this compelling on reread, yet I can almost say it holds up. (And as occasionally happens with rationalist writing, when it speaks of AI, it sounds borderline prescient. Eight years ago means it was about a year before [OpenAI would claim][gpt2] their GPT-2 model was too powerful to release, and remember, it took until around GPT-4 for the world at large to really start to appreciate what LLMs were capable of.) [gpt2]: https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/openai-gpt2-text-generating-algorithm-ai-dangerous.html But I don't bring up that story to glaze its author. The story itself is almost irrelevant. The concept has gained a life of its own, much like "taking the red pill" is divorced from The Matrix (1999). So, what is a scissor statement? The idea's simple and evocative. See, a lot of statements you'll find yourself saying are innocuous, obviously true things we can accept without issue. But of course, there's plenty of contentious things you know will start a fight. A scissor statement is that rare chimera that seems totally innocuous... ...and now suddenly half the room is at your throat like one of those John Wick with ten guns pointed at him images used for engagement farming unpopular opinions on social media. (Incidentally, ragebaiting is exactly what Shiri's scissor was invented to do.) It is downright impossible to understand why someone would get mad at you after uttering a scissor statement. Isn't this a settled matter we can all agree on? And on that point, they do agree! It's obviously false! The concept of scissor statements reflects a real frustration. Haven't we all been there? You say something like "Christian bakers shouldn't have to serve gay weddings" or "Colin Kaepernick should have knelt for the anthem" or "Brett Kavanaugh belongs on the supreme court regardless of those allegations, boys will be boys" and suddenly people look at you like you're some kind of bigot! (Real examples, by the way; in the fiction, these issues are all the product of scissor statements.) But wait, have we all been there? If you have any familiarity with the issues, those statements seem pretty clearly contentious! Only ignorance could blind you to their implications, let alone their literal content. But okay, we aren't born omniscient, maybe you're one of today's lucky 10k, and just didn't know. You made a blunder, but you can learn and not slip up again. Let me emphasize: scissor statements do not exist. This is not me being polemic --- we're talking about fiction, Scott made it all up, this is basically an SCP. But again, the idea has outgrown the story that spawned it. I can search through rationalist chats and subreddits and easily find repeated references to this as a meaningful category of thing. (Sure, you can't literally take the red pill, but you can wake up from the matrix, metaphorically. So aren't there things that metaphorically behave like scissor statements?) The natural conclusion is this idea caught on because people felt seen by the frustration and confusion it portrays. But why? To quote a climatic passage:

If you just read a Scissor statement off a list, it’s harmless. It just seems like a trivially true or trivially false thing. It doesn’t activate until you start discussing it with somebody. At first you just think they’re an imbecile. Then they call you an imbecile, and you want to defend yourself. Crescit eundo. You notice all the little ways they’re lying to you and themselves and their audience every time they open their mouth to defend their imbecilic opinion. Then you notice how all the lies are connected, that in order to keep getting the little things like the Scissor statement wrong, they have to drag in everything else. Eventually even that doesn’t work, they’ve just got to make everybody hate you so that nobody will even listen to your argument no matter how obviously true it is. Finally, they don’t care about the Scissor statement anymore. They’ve just dug themselves so deep basing their whole existence around hating you and wanting you to fail that they can’t walk it back. You’ve got to prove them wrong, not because you care about the Scissor statement either, but because otherwise they’ll do anything to poison people against you, make it impossible for them to even understand the argument for why you deserve to exist. You know this is true. Your mind becomes a constant loop of arguments you can use to defend yourself, and rehearsals of arguments for why their attacks are cruel and unfair, and the one burning question: how can you thwart them? How can you convince people not to listen to them, before they find those people and exploit their biases and turn them against you? How can you combat the superficial arguments they’re deploying, before otherwise good people get convinced, so convinced their mind will be made up and they can never be unconvinced again? How can you keep yourself safe?

This would resonate with you if you've repeatedly run up against this sort of interminable argument, ever felt a schism down the deepest axioms and definitions. Or to put it bluntly, if you find you keep stumbling into rhetorical blunders --- almost like you're making a habit of it. I'd argue this utter incomprehension of controversy can only be so persistent in one's experience if one has a lot of ignorance of others' perspective (i.e. privilege), or if after stepping on a rake once, you fail to internalize the presence of rakes enough to look before you step. There's an interesting take on The Room (2003) which posited that the movie was a great portrayal of an abusive relationship --- by accident, in spite of itself. Because the way it portrays the protagonist's girlfriend as this inexplicably treacherous force tearing apart a man who never did anything wrong is deeply revealing --- a self-portrait of how the world looks through a warped and ignorant perspective. Take a closer look at that passage from the story quoted above. It's inane, preoccupied with the statements themselves, with the words. It takes its own perspective for granted (trivially true) and all that opposes it are fleeting lies cooked up to support a trivial falsehood. Now saying this alone, I admit, would just be nitpicking. But the words you hear are just a tail, not the dog wagging it. They are the output of another perspective and worldview. People are penetrable to analysis; you can understand them! I called this passage inane, and I mean that in a etymological sense. It is empty, vacuous, starved of meaning. Where are the stakes? Statements about gay weddings and systemic racism protests and rape culture are not trivial. Maybe they seem that way if you don't care, if you uttered your "scissor statement" heedless of its implications. But these thing matter. Have your critics "dug themselves so deep basing their whole existence around hating you," for no reason other than you uttered a trivial statement, or did that "trivial" statement naturally hook into a prefigured, entrenched system of conflict you were already unwittingly a part of? (One can imagine a very different, more conscious horror story, where instead of the big reveal being that banal trivialities can tear the world apart, you find that speaking certain words reshapes the world in ways you don't understand, culminating in a grand reveal that wielding this strange power required that you be at birth drafted into a power struggle you knew nothing about and never asked to be a part of.) A scissor statement isn't just someone disagreeing about something you think is self-evident. To believe in even the weak, metaphorical existence of "scissor statements" requires dumbfounding yourself about the source of your disagreements, reifying it into the fruit of some magical, malign influence. In the story, scissor statements are deployed like weapons, inflicted upon us by an unknown faction to manipulate our world's politics. It's like all the feminists arguing with you are pawns in service to some nefarious agenda... There's a distinct rhetorical effect to calling something a scissor statement --- scissors cut symmetrically. It's neutral, agnostic, blaming both sides equally. If you call something a "ragebait" or "dogwhistle", there's an implicit accusation of bad faith. If you call something "misinformation," you acknowledge that one side is right. If you call something a "scissor statement", which side you end up on feels as arbitrary as whether you have the gene for tasting cilantro. Politics is an alien force acting on you, not a system working through you. Rationalists were well-primed to accept this sort of framing. After all, politics is the mind-killer. It's this insidious evolutionary glitch able to flip off the brains of even high INT rationalists and turn them into "slogan-chanting zombies." Earlier, I wrote that believing in a scissor statement requires a deep ignorance, or a skill issue in the face of opportunities to learn more. But there's a third possibility. That the incomprehension here is purely rhetorical, a deliberate dumbfounding. You treat these d