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SilasBarta comments on Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics - Less Wrong
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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.
Every non-Alicorn commenter "bothered" by it was only bothered because Alicorn claimed to be -- which just regresses to the question of whether Alicorn is typical enough of a female to make us worry about scaring away females. If the women's magazine's cited by pjeby are representative -- and they are -- she's not. As evidenced by such magazines, women do not, in general, find it "beyond the pale" to think in terms of "getting a man" as a predictable result of attaining certain attributes (looks rather than money).
At most, they might not like it when it's used against them. But -- remind me why such hypocrisy carries moral weight?
Many commenters have also been extremely considerate in trying to isolate what exactly what the offensive content was, and how to know if their statement is offensive. But because it's so inscrutable, the best they can do is ask Alicorn to tell them when they've gone over the line, at which point they promise to change it to what she asks.
But if your "standards for behavior" necessitate giving you a unilateral veto over others' statements in order to be adhered to, You're Doing It Wrong. And in that case, you're certainly not representative of your gender, your class, or your century.
Not true.
You're not listening. I was going to say something before Alicorn did. I was bothered.
What. The. Hell.
There have been a lot of comments lately about "feminists like Alicorn" and frankly based on my number of contributions to the conversation it would make a lot more sense to be talking about "feminists like thomblake".
Part of my day job is looking at every major magazine every week. I'm not sure what you mean by 'representative', but most magazines, and even most magazines targeted at women, do not read like Cosmo. And even if they did, that would not tell us anything about how women in general feel, just about what the magazine company thought might entice the target audience of the magazine to buy the magazine.