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SilasBarta comments on Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics - Less Wrong
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Sure, until it results in:
"Women might be less willing to take dangerous jobs because in the EEA[1], there was less return to taking big risks."
"Hey, that's disempowering to women and we agreed not to be like that here."
"Sorry, didn't notice. Edit: Women can do every job a man can."
[1]Environment of evolutionary adaptation aka ancestral (ETC wrong word) environment aka where most modern human psychology was molded
By the way: ancestral environment.
Come now. "Less willing to take risks" is a probabilistic statement, not a statement about every female or any individual female. To consider that disempowering is wrong (though some might mistakenly).
I would encourage prefacing potentially mis-interpreted statements with a reminder genetic or evolutionary pressures do not determine any individual's behavior.
It should be the responsibility of the person who presents a fact or theory to at least take steps to make sure it's not intentionally or unintentionally misused. If you discover something about ethnicity and IQ, or nurture and homosexuality, or anything else that's potentially explosive, you should be sure you make an effort to disarm the dark side from abusing it.
Sure, just like to consider it disempowering to say, "getting rich will get you women" is wrong.
But you don't get to make that call. It will be up to the special class of feminist censors to (arbitrarily) decide what counts as "objectifying". Who can then use that power to taboo any argument they don't like, since that topic is "beyond the pale". Because who's going to stop them, right?
I understand your objection to granting immunity from criticism certain ideological preferences (and I didn't vote your comment down). However, my thought is that here at LW we can identify the difference between "women can't do the same jobs as men" and "many women don't do the same jobs as men, perhaps in part because of prehistorical environments."
"Getting rich will get you women" isn't disempowering; it's just lame. "Research/theory suggests that getting rich will make you more attractive to potential mates, if you are male" is at least defensible.
That's a complete non-sequitur. The first statement is not the sort of thing we've been talking about, and its 'rephrasing' has an entirely different meaning. Are you just trying to keep this conflict going?
Maybe my point wasn't clear. Of course there are differences between the Obviously Offensive Statements that are Unquestionably Scaring Away Women, and the example I gave. However, once you give a few LW censors the power to make topics off limits based on their secret, inscrutable reasons, what's to stop them from using it as a "get out of justification free" card?
Common sense? And the fact that there aren't any censors?
The advice is to be nice, on your own accord, when someone points out that you're not doing so, if you feel like that's okay, and there's a way to do it without hurting the level of discourse. How hard is that?
Maybe we're having different discussions here. I thought the discussion was about whether to make a certain topic off-limits for the site. Whatever enforcement mechanism for that decision is "the censors". And since the criteria for something being objectifying is still unclear to most posters (and it's unclear that Alicorn's position is even representative of women), any enforced restriction on future will appear just as arbitrary as the examples I gave above.
Point being, it's a bad, bad path to go down. If someone's comment is Obviously Beyond the Pale and Driving Women Away, you should have to explain it to the commenter, not just rule it off limits.
I think you're arguing against something that nobody has suggested. Eliezer has suggested a specific topic that he thinks is worth making off-limits on LW (maybe even temporarily), since it seems to bring us all off-track, just like he did with AI and the Singularity when LW started. He did not suggest that this should happen automatically every time someone thinks something is objectionable.
Separate from this was the idea that if someone mentions to you that you're being inconsiderate and suggests an alternate phrasing that does not distort your meaning, it might be a good idea to fix it. In short, "don't be a jerk".
Could you or someone else cite some specific examples of where discussion of pickup has brought things off track, and explain why this is worse than any other tangents we have here?
Did you give any thought to how to "off-limits" decision would be enforced? From what I read, Eliezer_Yudkowsky was hinting that this be enforced by -5 downmods. So, there's a consensus to majorly downmod people violating that limit, with many members participating.
... and you're telling me this isn't going to be used against people arbitrarily, far outside the scope of where you think it applies?
I guess I underestimated the inferential distance of what I was saying when I came into this subthread. Does that justify the downmods I've gotten, or are some downmodding for the wrong reason?
The problem is that there is nothing close to a consensus on whether the statements in question are "being a jerk". Most people here still don't see how "be a millionaire to get hot women" is being a jerk. (Or they don't see how to generalize the prohibition on that statement, which amounts to the same thing.)
We've also seen examples where Alicorn has suggested changes that do change the meaning, like "If I were a millionaire I'd have a gardener" to "...I'd have a garden", which is not the same thing.
Put simply, giving in to this request to unquestioningly reword posts is not going to be limited to removing jerkiness, and it's definitely going to change meanings.
He wasn't hinting any such thing. He said explicitly that downvoting is sufficient, and there is no reason to go around banning anything. I didn't see any reason to read any more than that into it. He was reassuring any alarmists out there that nothing needs to be done at the level of admin-level censorship.
Note: we can already downvote whatever we want!
sigh The request is not to "unquestioningly reword posts". The request is to be considerate, and if everybody is telling you over and over that you're not being considerate and you still don't get it, then maybe you should just realize you have a problem and make suggested edits.
We're not on some "slippery slope". We're not wielding banhammers or introducing official censors. There are no nazis with dogs dragging you out in the middle of the night. Eliezer just made a request that people make a genuine effort to be nice where possible, and let's not get into any affective death spirals.
Yes, the "hinting" was in reference to the specific level of -5, not the downvoting as such. -5 is the threshold for hiding from view, and shifts the comment to the bottom in the absence of (rarely used) changes in preferences.
Geez.
But we aren't officially encouraged to do it en masse on specific -- to become less specific -- topics!
People are ALREADY being considerate, and this topic is NOT in reference to people who are being told by many that they are inconsiderate, but rather, being told by one person, Alicorn. The question, then, is whether to elevate this specific concern to something of an endorsed downvote policy, because hey, Alicorn might be representative of all women, please ignore the immense success of PUAs.
If that's all you got out of it, let me remind you that policy debates should not appear one-sided, and politics is the mind-killer.
That's not true at all. If you think Alicorn was the only person bothered by this, then you haven't been paying attention to the discussion - lots of other people have weighed in on it. I was going to say something before she did, and for reference, I'm not a woman. I don't think this is just about driving women away from the site, because the issue was in danger of driving me away from the site as well.