I was reminded of the above line (it’s from a Leonard Cohen song) after reading something stupid on the internet regarding some technical issue, and various people were trying to place the dispute in the context of a so-called academic “war.” I won’t get into the details because there are a million such arguments on the internet, and here I want to focus on a general problem in communication that this example illustrates.
I’ve been involved in lots of academic disagreements over the years, and I pretty much never think it’s a good idea to frame any of them as a “war,” even as a joke.
Indeed, I suspect the technical error that got that discussion going arose from a misguided “war” framing.
Here’s the problem. If you’re in a “war,” or you think you’re in a war, then maybe it’s ok to consider some people as your opponents and attribute to them positions that they have never taken. It’s “war,” right? The other side has surely done much worse, no? Never back down and all that.
So that’s a good reason to avoid the “war” framework. There are lots of better ways to move forward, especially in science, by focusing on areas of legitimate disagreement and admitting where we’ve messed up.
Good point. In war the other side is the enemy and must be destroyed by fair or foul means. The life, the other side is an opponent who is essential. You can’t play tennis if there is no one on the other side of the net. Is surgery mandatory in prostate cancer? To achieve the right answer is a dialectical process that needs proponents and opponents to arrive at the best outcome. This requires respect and following rules by all.
When I used the “statistics wars” a long time ago (I’m guessing I wasn’t the first) it was because the disagreement had all the hallmarks of a particular type of ideological, philosophical, or cultural-political disagreement that makes it a good candidate for the “___ wars” label. I was clearly influenced by my involvement in “the science wars” of the 1990s about the roles of science in society, and especially between scientific realists, and post-modernists and relativists. Remember the Sokal hoax? As with other “____wars,” by and large, no one expects these philosophical, cultural , or ideological disagreements to be resolved. I once set out to try and identify the features that made certain disagreement apt examples of “___ wars”, and I think I blogged about it somewhere. I recall “the mommy wars” between stay at home and working mothers—perhaps that one’s over? During the pandemic I wrote about the mask wars” which contains many of the crucial elements—not just about wearing them, but about types of masks.
https://errorstatistics.com/2021/02/02/the-covid-19-mask-wars-hi-fi-mask-asks/
Last year I wrote about “The Barbie Wars”.
https://errorstatistics.com/2023/08/19/the-barbie-wars-a-philosophical-deconstruction/
That also fits swimmingly. By and large there is a semi-humorous sense intended, because of the recognition that such wars of ideas are rarely settled, and there are good points on all sides. (The movie “Barbie” might have helped with the Barbie wars.) They can take a serious turn, of course, especially if one side foists their view on others and starts banning words and practices. Perhaps the statistics wars became more polarized when some decided “that scientific argumentation alone had not been sufficiently effective and that in order to address what they viewed as a cultural/political problem, a cultural/political solution (i.e., a petition) was justifiable” (Hardwicke and Ioannidis 2019 discussing Amrhein et al. 2019). Their article is currently on my blog. I might reach the threshold of 3 in posting the link, but here goes:
https://errorstatistics.com/2024/05/04/5-year-review-hardwicke-and-ioannidis-gelman-and-mayo-p-values-petitions-practice-and-perils/
There are commercial examples that have a different meaning as with the toothpaste wars and the coffee wars. As far as Andrew’s point, participants in intellectual disagreements in general do not always present opposing ideas in a fair or charitable light. In many cases, by placing the disagreement under the banner of ‘another philosophical or cultural war’, in my mind, it can (and should) foster the attitude of letting all sides have a say because there is no one right position on these. This may also be so in the most serious cases: the climate wars, the abortion wars, the gender wars, the meat wars. I’d be glad to hear of more examples.
Unfortunately, there are too many military wars. That doesn’t change the aptness of “___ war metaphors”.
I’ve got to say that whenever I come across this metaphor, I wonder how people involved in real military wars, particularly against their will, would feel about this.
+1
Absurd. My military relatives/ friends can’t believe anyone would feel that way about “wars of ideas”. There are surely uses of the metaphor out there, but the ones I mention serve a function. Often we don’t have a choice here either. The “science wars” was the perfect term. The “statistics wars” is a term I got from Popper.
Deborah:
Again, I think this metaphor works for you, in that you’re happy to recognize the existence of other views and debate them without misrepresentation. In many other cases, I’ve seen people using metaphors of war and conflict who misrepresent other views and avoid confronting their own errors. That’s what motivated the above post.
Deborah:
I still don’t like the “war” metaphor, for reasons discussed in the above post.
That said, I don’t think that everyone who uses the metaphor of war uses counterproductive and warlike forms of arguments.
In your writings, sometimes you say things with which I agree, sometimes you say things with which I disagree, and sometimes you say things I don’t completely follow, but in no case have I seen you follow the all-too-common internet behavior of grossly mischaracterizing others’ positions, nor I have I seen you follow the other all-too-common internet behavior of not correcting mistakes when they’ve been pointed out to you.
Andrew:
I couldn’t use the reply.
I don’t know any case where dubbing a war of ideas a “war” caused misrepresentations of other’s views to any degree more than without the term. I had pondered for a time on the key elements where “___wars” served as an apt, brief way to capture a great many essential features of a particular type of philosophical or value-laden disagreement, including giving it a slight degree of ironic humor. But they’re all slightly different. And then there are the Berger wars.
When we were planning to hold my “The Statistics Wars and Their Casualties” conference in person at the London School of Economics in 2022, there was a scheduler there who asked whether “wars” should be used because of the Russian invasion. I was prepared to modify the title, but fortunately everyone involved just laughed that person off. In some ads I would insert (of ideas) after “wars”, just because of that one complaint.
I suspect that Ms Mayo – do you want fries with that? – has suffered an acute overdose of Lakoff&Johnson(1980), a book which did not impress me much at the time of publication and fails to do so to this day. I do, however concur with Bronowski: “War is Theft!”
Others have written about this, for example Sterner and Lidgard, Moving past the systematics wars: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44980374
I totally agree with this; language matters. It really is an incorrect metaphor in addition to being harmful. Do you really want the people on the other side to die? Or to submit to your rule? Or to have their language and ethnicity merged into yours? Or to be expelled from some territory? Whatever you would consider the academic version of those? Unless you really want to shut down other departments or take away their tenure, I don’t think so, and so I don’t think it’s useful.
Elin:
Well, it’s a little late, because the “war” metaphor is steeped in the language and culture from the science wars to the toothpaste wars to other ideological disagreements of a certain special type, and as I’ve explained, I think people are well aware of how to understand such memes.
This is a peculiarity of USAmerican English language usage, which has taken root in semi-erudite circles. Please don’t generalize.