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djcb comments on AndrewH's observation and opportunity costs - Less Wrong
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Comments (56)
After all the controversy about exclusionary language, gender-neutrality and so on, it seems that beggars are a different case -- I think the kind of stereotyping, de-personification would not be accepted for some other groups.
I'm not trying to heat up the offense-debate once more, but the difference in approach is striking.
Could you be a little more specific about what exactly you perceive the problem to be here? I see a discussion treating beggars as human beings whose welfare we are interested in, that assumes that they respond to incentives. I'm not sure how accurate people's begging models are, but I didn't notice anything particularly offensive about them. It's possible I'm missing something though, so would appreciate being enlightened.
This is a valid question, but I think you also need to allow the possibility that these things are not what the beggar most needs right now. Not all attempts to substitute one's own decisions for someone else's involve "impos[ing] your values on the person." Sometimes people make decisions that do not further their own values, and in such cases, I think it is morally justified to try to respect their values rather than just their choices. Not to say that this is easy, and that we shouldn't be incredibly wary of the possibility that we're actually just projecting our own values on others. But claiming that others' decisions are morally inviolable seems like an overreaction to me (albeit one that is founded in a legitimate concern).
It's worth noting that a non-trivial percentage of homeless individuals are considered mentally ill, which generally means that society has, for better or worse, deemed them systematically incapable of making appropriate choices.
A lot of the homelessness problem in the USA came about from the big deinstitutionalization push in the 60s that... didn't really work as intended. Policy on homelessness since then has mostly been built around "make them go somewhere else".
I am uneasy with that sentiment although I'm having a hard time putting my finger one exactly why. But this is how I see it: there are vastly more people in the world than I could possibly ever help and some of them are so poor and downtrodden that they spend most of their money on food since they can't afford luxuries such as drugs. Eventually, I might give money to the drug user if I had solved all the other problems first, but I would prefer my money to be spent on something more essential for survival first before I turn to subsidizing people's luxury spending.
Imposing my values on somebody seems to more aptly describe a situation where I use authority to compel the drug user to not use drugs.
I didn't see anything that I would find offensive in this discussion.
However, if I would apply some the criteria mentioned in some of the other debates; for example, take the The Nature of Offense; examples of things that people find insulting are:
I would argue that this applies to beggars too. They may not be the intended audience, but they are definitely put in 'the group being analyzed'; and they are treated as a 'non person' in a way that is not too different from what some in the 'gender discussion' considered inappropriate for women.
Note, I personally haven't seen anything that is offensive, and I think LW is a very friendly and stimulating environment. It just suggests that rules like the ones above are untenable.
I'm afraid that I still don't really see the supposed double standard - bear with me!
In particular, I'm interested in what specific aspects of the discussion you think treat beggars as "non-persons".
As for points 2 and 3, I took these to be primarily issues of effective writing for one's audience. As such, they just don't seem especially relevant here, and I'm unclear why they're supposed to be untenable in general.
Sorry if I was unclear.
Regarding the non-person issue: in previous discussions, the objection was raised (see above) that some comments treat women like non-persons, objects. My point is that the comments about beggars are of the same kind. Either they are both offensive, or they both aren't.
Points 2-3 are not just about effective writing; they are about the kind of statements that should be avoided because they are considered offending. Once more, my point was that if we consider these sufficient indicators for 'offense', this would also apply to the beggars discussed here.
So, my point would be that if we would really want such rules, it would be hard to have the discussion like we had here involving beggar without breaking them... that is why I called them 'untenable'.
Sorry for being dim, but I'm still struggling to see why you would think this. My impression is that they are not of the same kind. But I am interested to know why somebody else would think differently. Would you mind pointing to specific examples of comments you think treat beggars as non-persons/objects, and explain how/why they do so?
(FWIW, if you can convince me that they do so, I probably will agree that they are, to that extent, "offensive".)
I do not expect people to go significantly out of their way to write in a manner that is inclusive of people not in their audience. I do expect people to make a reasonable effort to write in a way that is inclusive of people who are in their potential audience. I don't think these expectations constitute a double standard of any sort. Is there anything we disagree about here?
To be fair, it's not inconceivable that a homeless person could be reading Less Wrong--internet access in public libraries is pretty common these days, for instance.
Probably not likely, though.
I've been homeless twice while a student, and often slept in computer rooms.
Let me try once more; I am a bit sorry for bringing up this debate here. But I appreciate your persistence.
There have been many comments about the kind of comments we should avoid in the last few days, and there is no group opinion.
I think Sayeth the Girl has some posts which were considered offensive. The one linked as 'jerkitude' really goes a step further -- about manipulating people to make them do what you want. But the others (like the one named 'objectification') is not more about objectifying women than some of the post were about beggars.
In The Nature of Offense this is referred to, as well as in Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics
One important point - and your persistance pays off here - is that the latter two articles do emphasize the importance for the target audience. So if we consider beggars not to be target audience, then there is not really an inconsistency. They can't be choosers, after all.
I agree with you that we should try to be inclusive for the target audience -- although I think that generally trying to be rational (which includes avoiding biases, stereotyping and so on) should also select for the target audience.
Unfortunately, we seem to be coming from quite different places here, so I still don't understand why you think this. Could you please try to explain? I don't mean to be belligerent, but from my perspective it seems as though you're just repeatedly restating your conclusion, when what I need to understand are your reasons for reaching that conclusion.
FWIW, my take on what constitutes "objectification" can be found here: I think it corresponds roughly to treating other people as means to an end, without regard for their interests.* I did not notice anything in the discussion of begging that appeared to do this (though jajvirta raised a legitimate concern). Do you think I've missed something in the discussion here?
Or is it rather that you don't think the behaviour Alicorn originally objected to was objectifying in this sense? In the claimed instance of "jerkitude" I think it pretty clearly was (and I assume from your comment that you'd agree). The claimed instance of "objectification" is less extreme. It's true that talk about "getting" members of the opposite (or indeed the same) sex doesn't necessarily mean that the speaker doesn't care about their interests. But I do think that the language Roko used, and in the context it was used, tended to promote thinking about women as trophies rather than human beings. Again, I may be missing something, but the parallel to the begging discussion isn't obvious to me.
* As noted here I do not think that objectification in this sense is always and everywhere problematic. Whether it is or not also depends on context.
ETA: I just noticed that you'd been voted down above. FWIW, this is not me.
Did it promote you thinking that way?
And what do you mean by "promote", anyway?
Hm. I think I'm beginning to see something about the whole social status and offense thing that I didn't see before.
See, that sentence doesn't "promote" in the sense of "encourage others to think" or "put that idea in their heads". It simply is a statement that would make sense to people who already have the idea of women being trophies in their head.
IOW - if you don't on some level already have the idea in your head (and I do not), the statement can't mean that to you, so it clearly means something else.
And this is independent of whatever the original speaker actually meant. In other words, it could easily be that Roko meant something that is not what either I or Alicorn took him to mean -- we are each simply using whatever interpretation of his words "makes sense" in our own model of the world. To me, women are not trophies, and the statement does not say that, so it's impossible for me to take it that way.
At the same time, I can see how somebody who does think of women as trophies might take Roko's statement as implicitly supporting their position. And further, that someone else, who is sensitized to the existence of a faction of people who think that way, might then treat Roko's statement as explicitly supporting that position, or defining him as a member of that fashion.
After all, in that person's world, the "trophies" definition is more emotionally salient (albeit negative), and our brains are biased to retrieve the most emotional (especially negative) interpretations of current events... leading to it being as impossible for them to take seriously the idea that the comment was innocent, as it is for me to take seriously the idea that it was objectifying.
Hm. Interesting.
Interesting. I agree with you that the effects of statements are independent of the original speaker's intentions. (At least in the sense of not being necessarily related; I would expect the two to be statistically dependent). For that reason I can easily accept that the comment was innocently intended, but at the same time think that such statements, in general, are not innocent in effect, and that they should ideally be reduced.
However, I don't agree with this at all:
I wonder whether part of the reason is that I think that both the attitudes in question (e.g. "thinking of women as trophies") and the means of their promotion can be (and probably are) less conscious than your analysis suggests. It seems perfectly possible to me that someone could both consciously affirm the proposition "women are not trophies", and that they could nonetheless think about women in a way that bears problematic resemblance to the way they would think about trophies. (For the avoidance of doubt, I do not intend to accuse anybody here of this.)
As a result, it also seems perfectly possible for language to promote thinking of women as trophies even if (a) individuals' do not consciously interpret its meaning as affirming the proposition "women are trophies", and/or (b) the individuals would consciously deny such a proposition themselves. I do think that the extent to which someone consciously believes "women are not trophies" should reduce any subconscious effect of this sort, but I see little reason to think that it must necessarily have no effect for that reason; and it's not at all clear to me why the idea that women are trophies must already be in somebody's head for such an effect to occur at all. In part from personal experience, it seems to me that the cumulative effect of language that normalizes particular patterns of thought can be quite strong.
NB: As a vaguely related aside, one thing that has struck me about many defenses made here of particular forms of language use is the extent to which they rely on claims about how reasonable people should consciously interpret a statement's meaning. For a site that so frequently discusses issues of subconscious priming and bias, this focus has always struck me as a little odd.
Indeed, it's the 'Or'-paragraph in your comment.
I do agree with her that some of the posts went a bit overboard -- in particular, the ones about manipulating people ('jerkitude'). But, for example, Roko's comment about 'manipulation' seemed benign -- it seems to me that it's used in the sense of 'interaction' rather than 'trickery'.
But, as you suggest, I did not agree with the 'objectification'-part, and I saw (albeit) tacit support for that in Elizier's and Wei_Dai's posts, as I have been trying to show.
I couldn't see much difference from (with regards to their 'objectification-value') between:
and some of the comments about beggars -- which jajvirta has already explained much better than I can.
Note, that my point is not that these comments are somehow inappropriate, but really that they are can be seen as similarly 'objectifying'. And furthermore, that you can disagree with some of the comments, but you can do so on rationalist grounds, for example by challenging unsupported statements (esp. generalizations).
Thanks for persisting with me. I appreciate it!
Unfortunately I still don't feel as though I've gotten an explanation of your position as much as another restatement of it. You seem to have just reiterated that you can't see much difference between the cases, rather than actually explaining how they are relevantly similar.
I've tried to explain why I don't see the comments about beggars and women as equivalent according to my (perhaps idiosyncratic) definition of objectification. The discussion about beggars seemed to me to assume that beggars are people with interests, and that we are generally concerned to further those interests - the question was how best to do that. This stands in stark contrast to talk about "getting" women, which (I think) promotes thinking about them as prizes whose main value is their instrumental value to the men "getting" them.
This seems to me to provide a clear distinction between the two conversations. You seem to disagree, but I still can't tell exactly why. Is it that:
In order to try to make some progress here, could you perhaps tell me (a) which of these you believe, and (b) why you believe it? (Alternatively, if you don't think any of these is the source of our disagreement, then perhaps you could let me know what you think the actual source is.)
Thanks!
ETA: I realise that you appear to state at the beginning of your previous comment that it's 1(a), but the rest of your comment suggests to me that it might actually be something else, and in any event, I'm still not sure why you think 1(a) (if you do).
Quite right. But if you translate most objections to that kind of stereotyping into "I have power and I demand status privelidges" then things start making sense again! (This, by the way, is not to suggest that demanding respect is a bad thing. Just that it is in most cases completely irrelevant to any of the ideals that the demands themselves may make reference to.)
We need some good high status beggars to set us straight. Where's David Eddings when I need him?