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thomblake comments on Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics - Less Wrong
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Comments (647)
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.
Oh, I was listening. I heard you make an all-too-convenient claim about what you were, like, totally about to do before Alicorn jumped in and make the exact feminist claim that you were going to make, and yet you still don't understand well enough to teach to others how to know whether their statements objectify women without resorting to "I'll tell you when I see it".
Please understand why self-serving statements about what you would have done in the past are not good evidence.
Yeah, why should anyone think Cosmo knows anything about how women think?
From the movie Legally Blonde:
ELLE He means well. He's really brilliant and all. Brooke sits, not looking convinced.
BROOKE He better be, for what I ' m paying him. Elle pushes her basket forward.
ELLE I brought you some necessities. Pink sheets. Aromatherapy candles. Loofah. And The Bible.
She holds up a "Cosmopolitan".
I sent thomblake a draft of "Sayeth the Girl" before I posted it and he offered to post something to the same effect in my place because he thought I would get more heat for it than he would.
I submit that the movie "Legally Blonde" is also not compelling evidence of how women think. I have no idea how to read that suggestion charitably.
So, one of the most-read women's magazines isn't suggestive of how women think, a major high-grossing film that describes Cosmo as "the Bible" and expects viewers to get the joke isn't suggestive of how women think, the success of PUAs isn't suggestive of how women think.
Now, stuff that agrees with thomblake's noble defense of Alicorn ... that is the real evidence.
Oh, and to the downmod squad: check out this comment before you view me as just another bad guy on the other team worthy of lower karma. Any of you confessed that much with your name on it?
It's not an uncommon practice to refer to this or that book or publication as "the Bible of X". The fact that Elle thinks Cosmo is the Bible of things relevant to her life is revealing of her character, not her gender.
Okay, so now your position is that the makers of Legally Blonde were trying to portray Elle as a member of a tiny, outlier subculture that regards Cosmo as authoritative. And therefore expected the audience to laugh about "hah, that strange, tiny subculture that revolves around Cosmo!" rather than, "heh, women sure do depend on Cosmo a lot!"
:-/
Like any bad lie, your position has forced you into defending ever-more-absurd positions entangled with it. Please reconsider.
I agree that Cosmopolitan knows a lot about how many women think, but this isn't the same thing as Cosmo being representative of women-in-full-generality. The qualifier really does seem important here. Compare: Sports Illustrated or Esquire know a lot about how many men think, but (I submit) we wouldn't want to say that these publications represent men-in-general. I mean, I would bet that most of the men here given their choice would rather read, oh, let's say, IEEE Spectrum.
Considering that the linked comment presently has 9 points, I wouldn't rule out the hypothesis that your comments are largely being voted on by their perceived individual merit, rather than an aspersion cast upon everything you write as the words of a "bad guy."
It isn't necessary for the latter claim to be true to make my point. (See below)
Let's go over this again:
1) Alicorn claimed that viewing women as something to "get" once you achieve a certain status, is objectifying and thus obviously beyond the pale. Not some idiosyncratic preference on her part, but something we really need to discourage, wherever it occurs.
2) Cosmo was brought up to show that, no, clearly women generally don't find it beyond the pale to think of other humans in exactly these terms. Even if Alicorn is bothered, it is therefore not the case that women agree with her, and this language is therefore not something we should worry about in terms of scaring away women.
3) Alicorn and thomblake go to herculean efforts to downplay the relevance of such an obscure, poorly-regarded publication as Cosmo.
Now, your turn:
4) You say there's a difference between the kind of woman who reads Cosmo and the kind who reads (???), just as there's a difference between the kind of guy who reads Esquire vs. the guy who reads IEEE Spectrum.
Now for the hard part! For this comparison to make any point in your favor, you need to show how there's a kind of language used in Sports Illustrated, etc., that most men here consider beyond the pale in its offensiveness, no matter who uses it.
Can you do it? No? Then you don't have a point.
Look again: the downmods are concentrated in this thread. Why do all my good posts just happen to fall in the other thread and accumulate upmods gradually, while the bad ones fall in this thread -- and get modded minutes after they're made.
Oh, and go on up/down rollercoasters, apparently being defended by some people trying to restore sanity. While again, the other thread has no such rollercoaster effect.
I avoid modding commenters in exchanges I'm directly involved in. I guess not everyone has that kind of restraint? (Alicorn, this is where you learn the dangers of unilateral disarmament.)
Straw man. I haven't been pointing to evidence about 'how women think'. I think it's irrelevant to the discussion.
Well, I'd upvoted that comment, but I don't see what your point is. What did you 'confess' there, and what does that have to do with people downvoting you?