This is the only postmortem I've found anywhere that's been worth reading. Nothing I haven't said a thousand times before, but ad hominem thinkers might be more inclined to believe it if Scott Alexander says it:
It's not that the word is being used in a way to specifically convey minimal information, it's that the word describes a singular, specific characteristic of an individual.
I hardly think the words "specific" or "singular" are applicable to a situation where the information being conveyed is insufficient to distinguish between a rock, a person, the side of a right triangle, the color purple, the taste of umami, or the feeling of a spring breeze -- but there I go again, thinking words are more useful when they have clear and distinct meanings.
That's actually the point. "Atheist" shouldn't convey much information.
I suppose, then, that what we disagree on is the fundamental ethics of discourse. I say that when you use words in such a way as to convey minimal information, you waste the time of the other parties.
All being an atheist says about me is that I don't hold one very very specific belief. Period. It says nothing about my values, my beliefs, my attitude, my sense of morality, NOTHING else.
Yes, you can use words in any way you like -- but the price for endorsing this broad-minded-sounding platitude is that sentences like "The square of the atheist is the sum of the squares of the two remaining atheists." start to become true. Don't be so openminded that your brain falls out of the hole.
A general good practice for laying semantic groundwork before a discussion is that words should be defined so as to make useful distinctions between classes of things.
If you choose to define "atheist" in such a way as to make babies and rocks into atheists, you are encompassing a class of objects so large that it's not useful. Because so many things meet the criteria, calling something "atheist" conveys a very low amount of information.
Laying faulty epistemic groundwork ruins useful conversations before they even begin. You don't need to look very far to find examples of the ensuing collapse of discourse that can result.
Really? That's your play here? No link to the actual post you got that from, no direct quotes of what I said, no explanation of how your ravings follow logically from anything I actually wrote?
But then again, I'm not sure what else we could have expected, since you were lying anyway.
It's certainly never been my belief that the claims of SJWs and other people with whom I disagree shouldn't be examined. It's not only been my consistent position, but also my lifelong practice, to allow everyone to have their say and to deliberately seek out opposition to my positions and give them as fair a hearing as I can. Why else would I even be on a debate forum? In fact, my opposition to SJWism is a result of examining SJW claims and finding them to be both false and consistently arising from a particular broken thought pattern.
You will not find any contrary position from me. Not in that thread or, indeed, anywhere else. You are a liar. As an example of how consistent I am in my practice of examining disparate positions, I read most of what you write here, even though to do so is tantamount to torture to any rational mind. Almost all of the things you present as if they were arguments are in truth complete nonsense. I offer this interaction as a case in point.
This coming from the person who is arguing that he should be allowed to dismiss anyone as a "SJW" without ever having to examine their arguments, because he can automatically declare them wrong with a label without ever having to examine whether their claims are true or false. Yay hypocrisy!
I'm done tolerating this idiotic rhetorical bull*****. This isn't even a straw man; a new word would have to be invented to adequately describe how far away from any position I've actually expressed this is. Show me where I said this, or else retract it immediately.
They try to defend themselves by basically saying, "it's not racist, it's true. [Race here] really IS [racist statement here]."
This isn't doing a good job of convincing people you aren't racist. You're just arguing that being racist isn't bad. Good luck with that.
Seeking the truth is the highest possible moral imperative. Any other moral imperative you might care to name necessarily relies on your being able to determine truth or falsity of its subject matter.
The only reason something can *ever* be bad is if it's not true. The truth can never be bad. Therefore, if you are operating on some notion of racism that makes some true statements out to be racist, then in fact racism isn't always bad.
The moral opprobrium that was associated with racism when that word was being used properly was there precisely because properly-identified racist claims are false. Now people are using "racist" purely to direct that echo of moral opprobrium at their enemies, without regard to the ultimate reasons why anyone ever attached that moral opprobrium in the first place.
"Black people commit five times more violent crime than white people" isn't racist, because it's true. "Mexicans can't be judges because they have special biases above and beyond those of other humans" IS racist, because it's false.
I think you’re deliberately cherry-picking examples where constitutional protections apply in the other direction. The rules of Criminal Procedure, based on 4th amendment, prohibits unlawful “search and seizure”. The 5th amendment protection against self-incrimination and the Religious Test clause of Article VI, taken together, prevent essentially any type of compulsory process like you’re describing. These things seem intuitively unfair to you, based on your use of these examples, but I’d submit that the reason they seem unfair is related to the fact that they’re constitutionally prohibited.
It is always perilous to guess at why someone believes what they do. Often it is better simply to ask.
I was making a logical argument, not a legalistic one. My claim was that it was an invalid inference to conclude guilt based on refusal to give a statement, which is a claim concerning pure logic. This statement is uncontroversially true and I am amazed that I am getting the slightest pushback on it. It would remain true even if we lived in a legalistic regime that did not explicity lay out this logic in its founding document.
You say that the reason these things seem unfair to me is because they're in the Constitution. Not so -- in fact, the converse is true. I believe they are in the Constitution because they are unfair. Their unfairness is a matter of logic and objective moral rights, anterior to and altogether separate from the government and its actions. And something that's unfair for the government to do is likewise unfair for you to do. This shared delusion that prevails in this age of moral nihilism -- that the Constitution is somehow the origin of rights, and that the government is somehow the only entity obliged to behave morally -- is something I reject altogether.
On the other hand, Trump is offering himself as a candidate for an office that is sworn to uphold the Constitution, part of which holds ideas that are directly opposed to the message of the KKK, like the abolition of slavery, equal protections, and due process. It’s not a right of Trump’s to be a presidential candidate, much less to actually be president. So yes, the burden is now on him to prove to us that he will uphold the Constitution as President. People have asked him for nothing more than to repudiate those groups that are explicitly opposed to Constitutional freedom, and specifically on points that many fear Trump is also opposed to. If he were taking his burden seriously of proving himself as a candidate who will uphold the constitution, he would have repudiated the KKK with alacrity. That he did not is fair to take as evidence that he is not such a candidate.
Even if I granted this analysis, it doesn't speak to the point, which is that the inference is invalid. Alger Hiss signed the McCarthyist loyalty oaths. The ones that didn't sign it were the conscientious objectors to the concept of loyalty oaths. If you were to grant credence to the kind of madness you are suggesting here, as they did during the last outbreak of McCarthyism, you would have completely missed the actual communist spies while blacklisting the very people who most loved the Constitution.
Refusing to sign SJW loyalty oaths is exactly in comportment with the moral principles underlying the Constitution. There are plenty of other, unrelated reasons to question Trump's commitment to it, but this just isn't one of them. Sorry.
Nobody is using the force of government to compel him to self-incriminate, or anything like the examples you set out. They were asking a candidate to speak to his qualifications for President. He certainly did so. It’s plain for anyone to conclude that Trump does not support the constitution to the degree that the American voter should hold a candidate to do.
That may be so in the end, but we cannot conclude it from this particular argument. It is invalid.
On the other hand, I think that when a person is asked to make a statement that is in agreement with basically all of the reasonable people on the planet, it costs nothing to make that statement. Refusing to make the statement says a lot about who you are.
Okay, I'll bite. What exactly does it say about who you are, and why exactly does it say that?
I'll violate the rhetorical tactics manual for a moment here and say that before you answer, you should consider carefully the following examples where similar reasoning might apply:
- Loyalty oaths to the United States (or whatever). What does it say about someone if they refuse to sign when asked? Are they disloyal?
- Submitting to a voluntary property search by the authorities. What does it say if you decline when asked? Do you have something to hide?
Being asked to respond to endorsements you've received is not "virtue signalling" or "loyalty oaths".
Not all requests to respond to endorsements need take the form of virtue signalling, but in the circumstances that obtain in this particular case, it is an exactly correct characterization. Trump was being being asked to perform an action that is meant to get other people to conclude, from his performance of that action, that he possessed a particular virtue. The action is unrelated to the actual virtue and could as well have been performed by someone who either possessed or lacked the virtue in question. That is a direct instantiation of the definition of virtue signalling.
No one is suggesting that we infer "lack of virtue" (or whatever asinine codeword you want to come up with next) based on a lack of "virtue signalling".
Highroller is not merely suggesting but directly stating that we should infer racism (which I myself would call a lack of virtue, though based on the timbre of this reply I'm no longer sure that you would) from Trump's failure to virtue signal on demand.
Are you being deliberately obtuse here, or are you trying to make some subtle point? If it's the latter, you're going to have to be much clearer.
He never said Trump was endorsing the KKK or David Duke, nor implied that endorsement is symmetric (I assume you mean symmetric instead of reflexive).
Yes, I meant symmetric, good catch.
He's saying Trump demurred when offered the opportunity to repudiate them. Certainly we can't go around explicitly repudiating every bad thing in the world, but when you're asked point-blank, it doesn't seem unreasonable to say, "I reject the KKK and David Duke".
No, Highroller's express claim was that we could conclude, from his refusal to virtue-signal in this fashion, that Donald Trump is racist. In fact, he asks point blank: "how would you argue that this isn't racist?"
Well, that's how I would argue. I reject the notion that we can infer, from a lack of virtue-signalling, a lack of virtue. Of course, since SJWs identify these two things it is easy to see how they might be confused, but I do believe I have basic logic on my side here.
On the broader point, no, I don't consider it reasonable that we demand loyalty oaths and virtue signalling from everyone at every turn. I think it is corrosive to discourse. I think it should simply be presumed, by default, that nobody endorses the KKK, or the Nazis, or whatever nonsensical SJW demonization-by-analogy happens to prevail at any given time -- unless they actually say specifically that they do.
But I don't see how you can possibly argue ignorance of his being racist with regards to his comments on the KKK. The man was asked point-blank whether or not he would repudiate the KKK and white supremacy. He wouldn't. Had it just been a matter of him being asked to repudiate David Duke, and him genuinely forgetting who David Duke was with no one clarifying it for him, that would be one thing, but it was explained to him that the KKK and white supremacist groups were endorsing him, and he was being asked to repudiate them, and he would not do it despite being asked several times.
Now, how would you argue this isn't racist?
Okay, so, the word "endorse," per the Oxford dictionary, means "declare one's public approval or support of."
Some things immediately fall out of this definition as a matter of pure logic. The first thing is that endorsement isn't a symmetric relation. Just because someone declares their public support for you, it doesn't follow that you declare your public support for them.
Endorsing someone is an overt act whereby you, personally, explicitly say that you endorse someone or something. You don't implicitly endorse everyone who endorses you. You don't implicitly endorse everything you don't overtly repudiate. And it's a good goddamn thing too, because there are so many evil things in this world that we would spend every waking breath from birth to death repudiating evils and still not get down the whole list, and we'd all die monsters.
The rest of the stuff you cite (particularly the bit about Mexicans) I would say is at least within the realm of reason to call racist. But this is SJW guilt-by-association nonsense. From the perspective of real, non-rhetorical debate, there actually isn't even an argument here. You are wrong as a matter of straightforward application of the definition of the word and basic logic.
Euler and Lagrange proved that Lagrangian mechanics is derivable from Newton's laws, and vice versa. If you think about this relationship carefully, it is telling you exactly and unequivocally what the metaphysical implications of the action principle are. They are the same, no more and no less, than the metaphysical implications of Newton's laws. The same goes for action principles of other theories of physics. In each case, stating the theory in terms of an action principle is exactly equivalent to stating the theory in terms of classical differential equations.
The value of the action principle is that it affords a different perspective on physical problems that is often clearer than alternatives. For instance, many problems in classical mechanics involving multiple interconnected bodies are easier to solve using Lagrangian mechanics. Converting Dirac's equation for the electron to Lagrangian form famously led Feynman to the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics.
But in both of those cases, as well as all others without exception, the problem could have been solved using the good old "crank out the differential equations" approach -- it just would have been harder. The math is unequivocal. "Nature searches for the path of least action" and "Nature locally executes these differential equations at each instant" are logically equivalent statements.
That philosophy paper about the metaphysics of the action principle was written by a BS artist. Even if you didn't know the math, you could tell from all the weasel words and hedging. I would hold that paper up as an archetypical example of why Richard Feynman had such a contempt for philosophy.
In context, listen and believe is advice to the friends of rape victims if they go to a friend for help, right? It's not the be all and end all of legal process.
Some people might mean it that way, but even then, it should be shortened to just "listen."
But in this context, no, it's absolutely not meant that way. Look at the reactions to the verdict from that side of the fence. The narrative is that the judicial process is broken, that this man should have been convicted in spite of the evidence solely on the accounts of the women, and that his acquittal is the result of patriarchy and institutional misogyny. Googling "ghomeshi verdict misogyny" gives about 10 pages of this.
I'll point out here that my own standards of evidence required for me to stop trusting people are lower than that of the legal system, so my earlier post isn't supposed to incite anything. I'm just not going to trust him from now on.
Even if you were primed to always believe accusers in such situations, and hence had a very high level of distrust for Ghomeshi in your prior, the acquittal verdict should cause you to adjust your posterior probability towards trusting him...
SJW is a phrase I mainly see used by the alt-right to turn basic respect into a political act that can be challenged. If that was your intent, nice job~
The conflation of the acceptance of a delusional cod-Marxist political philosophy with "basic respect," and the concomitant well poisoning, is diagnostic of stage 5 SJWism. Prognosis: terminal.
I disagree with your conclusion that what he said was particularly reasonable. Yes, it makes a sort of simplistic sense that if X is illegal, you should punish X, but the world is a little more complicated than that.
A+ rhetoric, D- dialectic. The thing you are questioning is a proposed deontological rule, and the entire purpose of deontological rules is to mask the complexity of the world, which is intractable in almost all cases, by giving a guideline that can actually be followed by mortals. Consider my favorite example, "don't run with scissors." There might be some times where it's okay to run with scissors, like "nurse, this man is dying, bring me the scissors, stat" or something -- exceptions arising from complexity. But those exceptions don't vitiate the rule.
If such a legal package were ever to be developed, it would almost surely be the case that the sentence for the woman would be reduced compared to the sentence for the doctor, and the sentencing guidelines would be very broad so that the judges and juries in particular cases could account for exceptions. All of this is important, taking into account the complexities of life when we can do so is a good thing, but none of this vitiates the principle that we can't effectively deter crime if we let people freely suborn it.
So bottom line: of course the basic rule is simple. It was designed by dumb mortals for dumber mortals. That doesn't make it wrong.
I don't think this is true. There are limits to what Trump can stick with - it only works if there's a sizeable chunk of people who want to hear the thing he said, and believe that the liberals or the MSM or the SJWs or whoever are repressing that opinion. Trump can stick with his ill-conceived "ban the muslims" plan because there's a big block of people who really do believe that. He had to back off of "let's kill the families of terrorists" because the number of people willing to go that far is pretty small. And the number of people who want to punish women who have abortions is also pretty small. It's not a case where the stick-with-it gambit is profitable.
The question I'd ask (and I admit I don't have the data to answer it) is whether he lost more from the flip-flopping than he gained from moderating his position. I think a lot of Trump's allure is grounded in NOT moderating his positions. Though you may be right here at the end of the day.
Given that the idea of punishing women who get abortions was unacceptable even pre-Roe, I have a hard time believing that it's been pushed out of the window by some imagined recent extreme liberalization.
It doesn't matter to me when or how it was pushed outside the window, it matters to me that it's (a) true and (b) outside the window. Any standard for "acceptable" discourse that excludes the truth has to be eliminated. Trump by his very existence -- by spouting mostly complete gibberish -- has done more for that cause in 8 months than decades of principled dialectical debate by thousands of people. I feel like I have wasted my time and intellectual output debating with SJWs, and my contempt for the present intellectual state of human race has been amplified a hundred fold, but here we are.
This isn't a knee-jerk reaction. This issue has been debated, reasoned about, and more-or-less settled within the anti-abortion lobby. It's not like this is some unheard of proposal that Trump pulled out of thin air and everyone lost their minds and refused to consider it.
I haven't seen those debates, but my guess is they went something like "well, we'll get more voters if we present the opposition with a Solomonic compromise," not "it's actually morally superior to let people get away with suborning crime."
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
I hardly think the words "specific" or "singular" are applicable to a situation where the information being conveyed is insufficient to distinguish between a rock, a person, the side of a right triangle, the color purple, the taste of umami, or the feeling of a spring breeze -- but there I go again, thinking words are more useful when they have clear and distinct meanings.
I suppose, then, that what we disagree on is the fundamental ethics of discourse. I say that when you use words in such a way as to convey minimal information, you waste the time of the other parties.
Yes, you can use words in any way you like -- but the price for endorsing this broad-minded-sounding platitude is that sentences like "The square of the atheist is the sum of the squares of the two remaining atheists." start to become true. Don't be so openminded that your brain falls out of the hole.
If you choose to define "atheist" in such a way as to make babies and rocks into atheists, you are encompassing a class of objects so large that it's not useful. Because so many things meet the criteria, calling something "atheist" conveys a very low amount of information.
Laying faulty epistemic groundwork ruins useful conversations before they even begin. You don't need to look very far to find examples of the ensuing collapse of discourse that can result.
Really? That's your play here? No link to the actual post you got that from, no direct quotes of what I said, no explanation of how your ravings follow logically from anything I actually wrote?
But then again, I'm not sure what else we could have expected, since you were lying anyway.
It's certainly never been my belief that the claims of SJWs and other people with whom I disagree shouldn't be examined. It's not only been my consistent position, but also my lifelong practice, to allow everyone to have their say and to deliberately seek out opposition to my positions and give them as fair a hearing as I can. Why else would I even be on a debate forum? In fact, my opposition to SJWism is a result of examining SJW claims and finding them to be both false and consistently arising from a particular broken thought pattern.
You will not find any contrary position from me. Not in that thread or, indeed, anywhere else. You are a liar. As an example of how consistent I am in my practice of examining disparate positions, I read most of what you write here, even though to do so is tantamount to torture to any rational mind. Almost all of the things you present as if they were arguments are in truth complete nonsense. I offer this interaction as a case in point.
I'm done tolerating this idiotic rhetorical bull*****. This isn't even a straw man; a new word would have to be invented to adequately describe how far away from any position I've actually expressed this is. Show me where I said this, or else retract it immediately.
Seeking the truth is the highest possible moral imperative. Any other moral imperative you might care to name necessarily relies on your being able to determine truth or falsity of its subject matter.
The only reason something can *ever* be bad is if it's not true. The truth can never be bad. Therefore, if you are operating on some notion of racism that makes some true statements out to be racist, then in fact racism isn't always bad.
The moral opprobrium that was associated with racism when that word was being used properly was there precisely because properly-identified racist claims are false. Now people are using "racist" purely to direct that echo of moral opprobrium at their enemies, without regard to the ultimate reasons why anyone ever attached that moral opprobrium in the first place.
"Black people commit five times more violent crime than white people" isn't racist, because it's true. "Mexicans can't be judges because they have special biases above and beyond those of other humans" IS racist, because it's false.
It is always perilous to guess at why someone believes what they do. Often it is better simply to ask.
I was making a logical argument, not a legalistic one. My claim was that it was an invalid inference to conclude guilt based on refusal to give a statement, which is a claim concerning pure logic. This statement is uncontroversially true and I am amazed that I am getting the slightest pushback on it. It would remain true even if we lived in a legalistic regime that did not explicity lay out this logic in its founding document.
You say that the reason these things seem unfair to me is because they're in the Constitution. Not so -- in fact, the converse is true. I believe they are in the Constitution because they are unfair. Their unfairness is a matter of logic and objective moral rights, anterior to and altogether separate from the government and its actions. And something that's unfair for the government to do is likewise unfair for you to do. This shared delusion that prevails in this age of moral nihilism -- that the Constitution is somehow the origin of rights, and that the government is somehow the only entity obliged to behave morally -- is something I reject altogether.
Even if I granted this analysis, it doesn't speak to the point, which is that the inference is invalid. Alger Hiss signed the McCarthyist loyalty oaths. The ones that didn't sign it were the conscientious objectors to the concept of loyalty oaths. If you were to grant credence to the kind of madness you are suggesting here, as they did during the last outbreak of McCarthyism, you would have completely missed the actual communist spies while blacklisting the very people who most loved the Constitution.
Refusing to sign SJW loyalty oaths is exactly in comportment with the moral principles underlying the Constitution. There are plenty of other, unrelated reasons to question Trump's commitment to it, but this just isn't one of them. Sorry.
That may be so in the end, but we cannot conclude it from this particular argument. It is invalid.
Okay, I'll bite. What exactly does it say about who you are, and why exactly does it say that?
I'll violate the rhetorical tactics manual for a moment here and say that before you answer, you should consider carefully the following examples where similar reasoning might apply:
- Loyalty oaths to the United States (or whatever). What does it say about someone if they refuse to sign when asked? Are they disloyal?
- Submitting to a voluntary property search by the authorities. What does it say if you decline when asked? Do you have something to hide?
Not all requests to respond to endorsements need take the form of virtue signalling, but in the circumstances that obtain in this particular case, it is an exactly correct characterization. Trump was being being asked to perform an action that is meant to get other people to conclude, from his performance of that action, that he possessed a particular virtue. The action is unrelated to the actual virtue and could as well have been performed by someone who either possessed or lacked the virtue in question. That is a direct instantiation of the definition of virtue signalling.
Highroller is not merely suggesting but directly stating that we should infer racism (which I myself would call a lack of virtue, though based on the timbre of this reply I'm no longer sure that you would) from Trump's failure to virtue signal on demand.
Are you being deliberately obtuse here, or are you trying to make some subtle point? If it's the latter, you're going to have to be much clearer.
Yes, I meant symmetric, good catch.
No, Highroller's express claim was that we could conclude, from his refusal to virtue-signal in this fashion, that Donald Trump is racist. In fact, he asks point blank: "how would you argue that this isn't racist?"
Well, that's how I would argue. I reject the notion that we can infer, from a lack of virtue-signalling, a lack of virtue. Of course, since SJWs identify these two things it is easy to see how they might be confused, but I do believe I have basic logic on my side here.
On the broader point, no, I don't consider it reasonable that we demand loyalty oaths and virtue signalling from everyone at every turn. I think it is corrosive to discourse. I think it should simply be presumed, by default, that nobody endorses the KKK, or the Nazis, or whatever nonsensical SJW demonization-by-analogy happens to prevail at any given time -- unless they actually say specifically that they do.
Okay, so, the word "endorse," per the Oxford dictionary, means "declare one's public approval or support of."
Some things immediately fall out of this definition as a matter of pure logic. The first thing is that endorsement isn't a symmetric relation. Just because someone declares their public support for you, it doesn't follow that you declare your public support for them.
Endorsing someone is an overt act whereby you, personally, explicitly say that you endorse someone or something. You don't implicitly endorse everyone who endorses you. You don't implicitly endorse everything you don't overtly repudiate. And it's a good goddamn thing too, because there are so many evil things in this world that we would spend every waking breath from birth to death repudiating evils and still not get down the whole list, and we'd all die monsters.
The rest of the stuff you cite (particularly the bit about Mexicans) I would say is at least within the realm of reason to call racist. But this is SJW guilt-by-association nonsense. From the perspective of real, non-rhetorical debate, there actually isn't even an argument here. You are wrong as a matter of straightforward application of the definition of the word and basic logic.
The value of the action principle is that it affords a different perspective on physical problems that is often clearer than alternatives. For instance, many problems in classical mechanics involving multiple interconnected bodies are easier to solve using Lagrangian mechanics. Converting Dirac's equation for the electron to Lagrangian form famously led Feynman to the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics.
But in both of those cases, as well as all others without exception, the problem could have been solved using the good old "crank out the differential equations" approach -- it just would have been harder. The math is unequivocal. "Nature searches for the path of least action" and "Nature locally executes these differential equations at each instant" are logically equivalent statements.
That philosophy paper about the metaphysics of the action principle was written by a BS artist. Even if you didn't know the math, you could tell from all the weasel words and hedging. I would hold that paper up as an archetypical example of why Richard Feynman had such a contempt for philosophy.
Some people might mean it that way, but even then, it should be shortened to just "listen."
But in this context, no, it's absolutely not meant that way. Look at the reactions to the verdict from that side of the fence. The narrative is that the judicial process is broken, that this man should have been convicted in spite of the evidence solely on the accounts of the women, and that his acquittal is the result of patriarchy and institutional misogyny. Googling "ghomeshi verdict misogyny" gives about 10 pages of this.
Even if you were primed to always believe accusers in such situations, and hence had a very high level of distrust for Ghomeshi in your prior, the acquittal verdict should cause you to adjust your posterior probability towards trusting him...
The conflation of the acceptance of a delusional cod-Marxist political philosophy with "basic respect," and the concomitant well poisoning, is diagnostic of stage 5 SJWism. Prognosis: terminal.
A+ rhetoric, D- dialectic. The thing you are questioning is a proposed deontological rule, and the entire purpose of deontological rules is to mask the complexity of the world, which is intractable in almost all cases, by giving a guideline that can actually be followed by mortals. Consider my favorite example, "don't run with scissors." There might be some times where it's okay to run with scissors, like "nurse, this man is dying, bring me the scissors, stat" or something -- exceptions arising from complexity. But those exceptions don't vitiate the rule.
If such a legal package were ever to be developed, it would almost surely be the case that the sentence for the woman would be reduced compared to the sentence for the doctor, and the sentencing guidelines would be very broad so that the judges and juries in particular cases could account for exceptions. All of this is important, taking into account the complexities of life when we can do so is a good thing, but none of this vitiates the principle that we can't effectively deter crime if we let people freely suborn it.
So bottom line: of course the basic rule is simple. It was designed by dumb mortals for dumber mortals. That doesn't make it wrong.
The question I'd ask (and I admit I don't have the data to answer it) is whether he lost more from the flip-flopping than he gained from moderating his position. I think a lot of Trump's allure is grounded in NOT moderating his positions. Though you may be right here at the end of the day.
It doesn't matter to me when or how it was pushed outside the window, it matters to me that it's (a) true and (b) outside the window. Any standard for "acceptable" discourse that excludes the truth has to be eliminated. Trump by his very existence -- by spouting mostly complete gibberish -- has done more for that cause in 8 months than decades of principled dialectical debate by thousands of people. I feel like I have wasted my time and intellectual output debating with SJWs, and my contempt for the present intellectual state of human race has been amplified a hundred fold, but here we are.
I haven't seen those debates, but my guess is they went something like "well, we'll get more voters if we present the opposition with a Solomonic compromise," not "it's actually morally superior to let people get away with suborning crime."