Sirducer comments on Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics - Less Wrong

62 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 July 2009 07:22AM

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Comment author: Sirducer 21 July 2009 06:55:58PM 5 points [-]

I don't want to have to be socially calibrated on LW.

Social calibration for the seduction community has a very simple rule about talking about pick-up techniques: don't do it, except with other trusted members of the community. If someone outside the community brings it up, just don't mention it, because society has conditioned them to start going into a feminist death-spiral about it.

So if I follow that rule, I will just have to not mention it here.

Comment author: gjm 21 July 2009 09:57:31PM 4 points [-]

I don't want to have to be socially calibrated on LW.

That seems awfully close to "I want to act like an asshole on LW and not care what effect it has on anyone else". I hope that if you do then you'll get voted into the ground.

just don't mention it, because society has conditioned them to start going into a feminist death-spiral about it.

I think that holding a belief of the form "You mustn't admit to X outside our inner circle, because the unenlightened have been conditioned by society to hate and fear it" should be treated as a warning sign that one might have been sucked into something unpleasant. I expect the members of various cults have similar rules.

(Of course, sometimes it might be perfectly correct; see, e.g., Paul Graham's essay on what you can't say. But my guess is that such occasions are outnumbered considerably by ones where the reason why you'd get in trouble for saying X in public is because X is stupid or unpleasant or something of the kind, and people who haven't been desensitized to it will notice.

Comment author: Sirducer 21 July 2009 10:31:45PM 4 points [-]

I expect the members of various cults have similar rules.

Fully general counterargument against any unpleasant truth.

Comment author: gjm 21 July 2009 11:11:41PM 2 points [-]

That sentence wasn't an argument. The two paragraphs containing the sentence do constitute an argument or something like one; they are not "fully general" in any sense that seems problematic to me. The most one can say is this: they claim that if a proposition is socially unacceptable to state then it's less likely to be true. I'm happy to stand by that: I think "unacceptable" propositions are less often true than "acceptable" ones. Do you really disagree with that?

Incidentally, I wasn't primarily thinking of X as being a proposition but as a behaviour or an attitude. I bet that among, say, politicians, advertisers, tobacco company executives, television evangelists, there are common habits or ways of thinking that "of course we wouldn't mention in public -- they wouldn't understand". And that neither you nor I would be keen to defend those habits or ways of thinking, even if we're pretty sure we do understand them.

For the avoidance of doubt, let me repeat something I already said. Of course, some "unacceptable" ideas, behaviours and attitudes are in fact perfectly sensible and are unacceptable only because of silly social traditions or whatever. I claim only that such unacceptability is a useful warning signal.