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RobinZ comments on Open Thread: November 2009 - Less Wrong
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I hate to say it, but your analysis seems rather thin. I think a productive discussion of social attitudes toward feminism would have to start with a more comprehensive survey of the facts of the matter on the ground - discussion of poll results, interviews, and the like. Even if the conclusion is correct, it is not supported in your post, and there are no clues in your post as to where to find evidence either way.
Agreed. The post is almost without content (or badly needed variation in sentence structure, but that's another point altogether) - there's no offered reason to believe any of the claims about what anti-feminists say or what justifications they have. No definition of terms - what kind of feminism do you mean, for instance? Maybe these problems are obviated with a little more background knowledge of your blog, but if that's what you're relying on to help people understand you, then it was a poor choice to send us to this post and not another.
I'm tickled that Less Wrong came to mind as a place to go for unbiased input, though.
Indeed. And even more so that she seems to be getting it.
I now have a wonderful and terrible vision of the future in which less wrong posters are hired guns, brought in to resolve disagreements in every weird and obscure corner of the internets.
We should really be getting paid.
How would you stop this from degenerating into a lawyer system? Rationality is only a tool. The hired guns will use their master rationalist skills to argue for the side that hired them.
Technically, you cannot rationally argue for anything.
I suppose you could use master rationalist skillz to answer the question "What will persuade person X?" but this relies on person X being persuadable by the best arguer rather than the best facts, which is not itself a characteristic of master rationalists.
The more the evidence itself leans, the more likely it is that a reasonably rational arbiter and a reasonably skillful evidence-collecter-and-presenter working on the side of truth, cannot be defeated by a much more skillful and highly-paid arguer on the side of falsity.
A master rationalist can still be persuaded by a good arguer because most arguments aren't about facts. Once everyone agrees about facts, you can still argue about goals and policy - what people should do, what the law should make them do, how a sandwich ought to taste to be called a sandwich, what's a good looking dress to wear tonight.
If everyone agreed about facts and goals, there wouldn't be much of an argument left. Most human arguments have no objective right party because they disagree about goals, about what should be or what is right.
One obvious reply would be to hire rationalists only to adjudicate that which has been phrased as a question of simple fact.
To the extent that you do think that people who've learned to be good epistemic critics have an advantage in listening to values arguments as well, then go ahead and hire rationalists to adjudicate that as well. (Who does the hiring, though?) Is the idea that rationalists have an advantage here, enough that people would still hire them, but the advantage is much weaker and hence they can be swayed by highly paid arguers?
If the two parties can agree on the phrasing of the question, then I think it would be better to hire experts in the domain of the disputed facts, with only minimal training in rationality required. (Really, such training should be required to work in any fact-based discipline anyway.)
If there's a tradition of such adjudication - and if there's a good supply of rationalists - then people will hire them as long as they can agree in advance on submitting to arbitrage. Now, I didn't suggest this; my argument is that if this system somehow came to exist, it would soon collapse (or at least stop serving its original purpose) due to lawyer-y behavior.
You know, this actually makes (entirely unintended) sense. If the rationalists are obliged to express their evaluations in the form of carefully designed and discrete bets then they are vulnerable to exploitation by others extracting arbitrage.
Presumably, "arbitration"--and that's a good point, and with clear precedents in the physical world. Nevertheless, "lawyer-y" behavior hasn't prevented a similar mutual-agreement-based system from flourishing, at least in the USA.
The biggest difference is that arbitrators are applying a similarly mutually-agreed-upon law, where rationalists mediating a non-rationalist dispute would be applying expertise outside the purview of the parties involved. That's where your point about advocacy-like behavior becomes important.
Parties to the dispute can split the cost. Also, if the hired guns aren't seen as impartial there would be no reason to hire them so there would be a market incentive (if there were a market, which of course there isn't). Or we have a professional guild system with an oath and an oversight board. Hah.
Actually, here's a rule that would make a HELL of a lot of sense:
Either party to a lawsuit can contribute to a common monetary pool which is then split between both sides to hire lawyers. It is illegal for either side to pay a lawyer a bonus beyond this, or for the lawyer to accept additional help on the lawsuit.
And you don't see any issues with this? That would seem to be far worse than the English rule/losers-pay.
I pick a random rich target, find 50 street bums, and have them file suits; the bums can't contribute more than a few flea infested dollars, so my target pays for each of the 50 suits brought against him. If he contributes only a little, then both sides' lawyers will be the crappiest & cheapest ones around, and the suit will be a diceroll; so my hobos will win some cases, reaping millions, and giving most of it to me per our agreement. If he contributes a lot, then we'll both be able to afford high-powered lawyers, and the suit will be... a diceroll again. But let's say better lawyers win the case for my target in all 50 cases; now he's impoverished by the thousands of billable hours (although I do get nothing).
I go to my next rich target and say, sure would be a shame if those 50 hobos you ran over the other day were to all sue you...
How is this different from how things currently are, beyond a factor of two in cost for the target?
It's not an issue of weakening the defense/target, but a massive strengthening of the offense.
Aside from the doubling of the target's defense expenses (what, like that's irrelevant or chump change?), I can launch 50 or 100 suits against my target for nothing. At that point, a judge having a bad day is enough for me to become a millionaire. Any system which is so trivially exploitable is a seriously bad idea, and I'm a little surprised Eliezer thinks it's an improvement at all.
(I could try to do this with contingency-fees, but no sane firm would take my 100 frivolous suits on contingency payment and so I couldn't actually do this.)
Surely that only works if the probability of winning a case depends only on the skill of the lawyers, and not on the actual facts of the cases. I imagine a lawyer with no training at all could unravel your plan and make it clear that your hobos had nothing to back up their case.
Also, being English myself, it hadn't dawned on me that the losers-pay rule doesn't apply everywhere. Having no such system at all seems really stupid.
It also occurs to me that hiring expensive lawyers under losers-pay is like trying to fix a futarchy: you don't lose anything if you succeeded, but you stand to lose a lot if you fail.
If facts totally determine the case, then my exploit doesn't work but Eliezer's radical change is equally irrelevant. If facts have no bearing on who wins or loses, and it is purely down to the lawyers, then Eliezer's system turns lawsuits into a coin flip, which is only an improvement if you think that the current system gets things right less than 50% of the time, and you'd also have to show there would be no negating side-effects like people using my exploit. If facts determine somewhere in-between, then there is a substantial area where my exploit will still work.
Suppose I have to put up a minimum of 10k for each hobo lawsuit asking for 1 million; then I need only have a 1% chance of winning to break even. So if cases with lousy lawyers on both sides wind up with the wrong verdict even 2% of the time, I'm laughing all the way to the bank. And it's very easy for bad lawyering work to lose an otherwise extremely solid judgement. A small slipup might result in the defendant not even showing up, in which case the defendant gets screwed over by the default judgement against him. Even the biggest multinational can mess up: consider this recent case where Pepsi is contesting a $1.26 billion default judgement which was assessed because a secretary forgot a letter. They probably won't have to pay, but even if they settle for a tiny fraction of 1.26 billion, how many frivolous lawsuits do you think one fluke like that could fund?
For that matter, consider patent trolls; they have limited funds and currently operate quite successfully, despite the fact that they are generally suing multinationals who can spend far more than the troll on any given case. How much more effective would they be if those parasites could force their hosts to mount a far less lavish & effective defense than they would otherwise?
I did some reading; apparently it's long-standing tradition all the way back to colonial times. The author said the Americans likely wanted to discourage litigation, which I suppose is the polite way of saying that early Americans were smuggling indebted IP-infringing scofflaws who didn't want civil justice to work too well.
I don't really follow?
If the defending party is only required to match the litigating party's contribution, the suits will never proceed because the litigating bums can't afford to pay for a single hour of a lawyer's time. And while I don't know if this is true, it makes sense that funding the bums yourself would be illegal.
Well, the original said you could only not fund the legal defense; I don't see anything there stopping you from putting the bums up in a hotel or something during the lawsuits.
But even if defendants were required to spend the same as the plaintiff, we still run into the issue I already mentioned: So now I simply need to put up 5 or 10k for each bum, guaranteeing me a very crappy legal team but also guaranteeing my target a very crappy legal team.
The less competent the 2 lawyers are, the more the case becomes a role of the dice. (Imagine taking it down to the extreme where the lawyers are so stupid or incompetent they are replaceable by random number generators.) The most unpredictable chess game in the world is between the 2 rankest amateurs, not the current World Champion and #2.
But maybe your frivolous win-rate remains the same regardless of whether you put in 10k or a few million. There's still a problem: people already use frivolous lawsuits as weapons: forcing discovery, intrusive subpoenas, the sheer hassle, and so on. Those people, and many more, would regard this as a massive enhancement of lawsuits as a weapon.
You have an enemy? File a lawsuit, put in 20k, say, and now you can tell your crappy lawyer to spend an hour on it every so often just to keep it kicking. If your target blows his allotted 20k trying to get the lawsuit ended despite your delaying & harassing tactics, now you can sic your lawyer on the undefended target; if he measures out his budget to avoid this, then he has given into suffering this death of a thousand cuts. And if he goes without? As they say, someone who represents himself in court has a fool for a client....
I would contribute nothing to the pool, hire a lawyer privately on the side to advise me, and pass his orders down to the public courtroom lawyer. If I have much more money than the other party, and if the money can strongly enough determine the lawyer's quality and the trial's outcome, then even advice and briefs prepared outside the courtroom by my private lawyer would be worth it.
Then your lawyer gets arrested.
It sometimes is possible to have laws or guild rules if the prohibited behavior is clear enough that people can't easily fool themselves into thinking they're not violating them. Accepting advice and briefs prepared outside the courtroom is illegal, in this world.
I agree with Alicorn. Even if you pass the law, there's no practical way to stop people from getting private advice secretly, especially in advance of the court date. If you try real hard, private lawyers will go underground (and as the saying goes, only criminals will have lawyers :-) People will pass along illegal samizdat manuals of how to behave in court, half of them actually presenting harmful advice and none of them properly attributed. Congratulations: you have just forced lawyering to become a secret Dark Art.
Any other advice? What if I want to go to my Ethical Culture Society leader to ask him or her about whether something my in-court lawyer suggests would be right? What if my spouse is a lawyer? What if I'm a lawyer - a really expensive one?
That is frelling brilliant.
Have a karma point for using Farscape profanity.
I'm just waiting for LW to develop its own variants of profanities.
I would totally join a rationalist arbitration guild. Even if this cut into the many, many bribes I get to use my skills on only one party's behalf ;)
Perhaps records of previous dispute resolutions can be made public with the consent of the disputants, so people can look for arbitrators who have apparently little bias or bias they can live with?
What are you talking about, we have our first customer already!
Please see my reply to wedfrid above.
More or less, because both sides have to agree to the process. Then the market favours those arbiters that manage to maintain a reputation for being unbiased and fair.
This still doesn't select for rationality precisely. But it degenerates into a different system to that of a lawyer system.
Yes, but if a side can hire a rationalist to argue their case before the judge, then that rationalist will degenerate into a lawyer. (And how could you forbid assistance in arguments, precisely? Offline assistance at least will always be present.)
And since the lawyer-like rationalists can be paid as much as the richest party can afford, while the arbiter's fees are probably capped (so that anyone can ask for arbitration), the market will select the best performing lawyers and reward them with the greatest fees, and the best rationalists who seek money (which is such a cliched rational thing to do :-) will prefer being lawyers and not judges.
Edit: added: the market will also select the judges who are least swayed by lawyers. It still needs to be shown that the market will have good information as to whether a judge had decided because the real rational evidence leaned one way, or because a smart lawyer had spun it appropriately. It's not clear to me what this will collapse to, or whether there's one inevitable outcome at all.
Would a lawyer by any other name still speak bullshit? Yes. But why are we talking about lawyers and judges?
You have explained well the reason that capping is a terrible idea. Now it is time to update the 'probably capped' part.
It's not clear to me either. I also add that I rather doubt that the market, even with full information, would select for the most rational decisionmakers. That's just not what it wants.
Because I think that in the proposed scenario, where people hire master rationalists to arbitrate disputes, these arbitrators and other rationalists who would be hired by each side independently for advice would start behaving like judges and lawyers do, respectively. (Although case law probably wouldn't become important.)
I didn't mean they would be capped by guild rules or something like that, but rather, that the effective market prices would stay low. I've no proof of this, economics is not my strong suit, but here are the reasons I think that's likely to happen:
I see, so rationalist arbitration of a dispute raises the stakes in status and neutral-party persuasion and that would lead to a market for lawyers? In what sense would this be damaging/ harmful?
Edit: Obviously it would be really bad if lawyers were causing the arbitrators to make bad decisions. But presumably the arbitrators are trained to avoid biasing information, fallacies etc. If you want to persuade and arbitrator you have to argue well-- referencing verifiable facts, not inflaming emotions or appealing to fallacies. If all online disagreements did that than the internet would be a much better place! If arbitration leads to better standards all the better. Now, the system might be unfair to those who couldn't afford a lawyer and so can't present as much data to further their cause. But 1) presumably the arbitrator does some independent fact checking and 2) there are already huge class barriers in arguments. Arguments an average high school drop outs and an average Phd are already totally one sided. The presence of arbitration wouldn't change this.
If that's so then there's no point to arbitration. He with the best lawyer wins.
Put it this way: take, in the general (average) case, any decision made by an arbitrator. For simplicity, suppose it's "A is right, B is wrong." Now suppose party B had employed the services of the very best rationalist ever to live as a lawyer. What is the probability the arbitrator would have given the opposite judgment instead? How high a probability are you willing to accept before giving up on the system? And how high a probability do you estimate, in practice?
The purpose of arbitration isn't to establish the truth of a question. If that were the case there would be no reason for the arbitrator to even listen to the disagreeing parties. She would be better off just going off and looking for the answer on her own. This would also take much, much longer since she wouldn't want to leave any information out of the calculation.
Rather, the purpose of arbitration is to facilitate agreement. Not just any agreement but a kind of pseudo- Aumann style agreement between the two parties. The idea is that since people aren't natural Bayesian calculators and have all kinds of biases and incentives that keep them from agreeing they'll hire one to do the calculating for them. This means we want the result to be skewed toward the side with better arguments. If the side with weak arguments doesn't end up closer to the side with strong arguments then we're doing it wrong. This is true even if one side puts a lot more time or money into their arguments. Otherwise you'd have to conclude that arguing never has a point because the outcomes of arguments are skewed toward those who are the smartest, have done the most research and thought up the best arguments.
Did Robin make a post on how free market judicial systems could work or am I just pattern matching on what I would expect him to say, if he got around to it?
I don't know if Robin has said anything on this but it is a well-tread issue in anarcho-capitalist/individualist literature. Also, there already are pseudo-free market judicial systems. Like this. And this!
Also, the irony of a feminist coming to an overwhelmingly male community for advice. :)
Oh, sorry. To clarify, I know my original post was never substantiated with any evidence based analysis for the true motivations behind anti-feminism. What I was referring to was the latter part of the comment thread between a commenter, Sabril and a few other commenters and me.
I think their attacks on my capacity for objective reasoning are a bit hypocritical.
You should rectify that as soon as possible.
Hypocrisy doesn't make one wrong. An assertion that murder is wrong is not falsified by it being said by a murderer.
Especially if you catch a hint of a sinister, sadistic pleasure in his eyes.
" An assertion that murder is wrong is not falsified by it being said by a murderer."
No, but saying that there is no point in arguing with a woman because women are not capable to discerning objective truth is an instance of making an assertion which is not based on objective truth (unless you can provide evidence that being female necessarily prevents capacity for objective reasoning in all cases and subsequently prevents the ability to arrive at objective truth).
It is like saying, "you rely on personal attacks, therefore your perspective on the environment is not correct"
What I'm saying is that you should make sure you're right before calling other people wrong lest you be a hypocrite just like them.
That's not an argument against anyone even if it is true. The relative liklihood of one person vs another arriving at a correct outcome is irrelevant when you see the actual argument and conclusion before you. At that point, you must evaluate only on the merits of the argument and the conclusion.
Secondly, that's not a reasonable interpretation because it is too vague to determine whether it is true or not. Less capable or reliable on average? At the extreme ends of capability? Less capable or reliable in what percentage of endeavors? What kind of endeavors?
I would not define this behavior as hypocrisy. Being wrong does not make an accusation of a logical fallacy erroneous, nor does it make it hypocritical. And being wrong does not mean the opponent is correct, so calling them wrong is truthful and perhaps a demostration of superior rationality.
What I call hypocrisy is relying on the very logical error you accuse another person of when you accuse them. The merit of the ultimate conclusion is not what I am discussing. I am only referring to the argumentation.
... Actually, forget the whole hypocrisy thing. Forget about the commenters. Correct your mistakes, learn the facts, put more effort into writing clearly. If you do all that, your next post will be much more persuasive and will consequently attract comments of higher quality.
Heck, it might even attract us! :)
Just out of curiosity, were you familiar with this post before you wrote the above? (And who wrote "This is a bit strong: a more reasonable interpritation..." ? It doesn't currently appear in the parent to your post.)
Cyan, the poster Larks wrote that response. I had not read that post before I made the comment.
Eliezer says that authority is not 100% irrelevent in an argument. I think this is true because 100% of reliance on authority can't ordinarily be removed. Unless the issue is pure math or directly observable phenomena. But removal of reliance on a particular individual's authority/competence/biological state etc. is one the first steps in achieving objective rationality.
This is a bit strong: a more reasonable interpritation is that women are simply much less capable or liable to discern the truth than men.
tu quoque, it's like ad hominem light.
*finds name "sabril" and reads from there*
This first comment, and the later ones, betray a repulsive attitude, and I wouldn't blame you for being furious and therefore slightly off your game thereafter. That said, Sabril makes several moderately cogent points - the numbered items in particular are things I've noticed with disapproval before. I'm about to go to bed, so I'm not going to delve too deeply into the history of your blog to find an exhaustive list or lots of context, but it looks like he also has a legitimate complaint or three about your data regarding the Conservative Party in the UK, your failure to cite some data, the apparently undefended implication about war, the anecdote-based unfavorable comparison of arranged marriage versus non-arranged, and your tendency to cite... uh... nothing that I've run across so far.
Also, this seems to beg your own question:
And now I've gotten to this part of the page and I've decided I don't want to read anything else you have to say:
"And now I've gotten to this part of the page and I've decided I don't want to read anything else you have to say:
I am a female supremacist, not a true feminist "
Why does this bother you so much? Why would it invalidate everything I have to say or render everything I say uninteresting?
It is indeed impossible to find someone who will remain detatched from the issue of feminism.
May I ask the moral difference between a female supremacist and a male supremacist?
Your pre-existing bias against males calls into doubt everything you say afterward. If you have already decided that men are oppressive pigs and women are heroic repressed figures who would be able to run the world better (I assume that is what female supremacist means, correct me if I'm wrong), you will search for arguments in favor your view and dismiss those contrary to your opinion. Have you ever seen an academic article discussing gender and dismissed it as "typical of the male dominated academic community?"
These articles might explain further:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/js/the_bottom_line/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ju/rationalization/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/iw/positive_bias_look_into_the_dark/
"May I ask the moral difference between a female supremacist and a male supremacist?"
What I call female supremacism does not mean that females should rule. I feel that the concept of needing a ruler is one based on male status hierarchies where an alpha rules over a group or has the highest status and most priviliges in a group.
To me, female supremacism means that female social hierarchies should determine overall status differences between all people. In my mind, female social hierarchies involve less power/resource differentials between the most and least advantaged persons. A "leader' is a person who organically grows into a position of more responsibility, but this person isn't seen as better, richer, more powerful or particularly enviable. They are not seen as an authority figure to be venerated and obeyed. I associated those characteristics with male hierarchies.
I think you overestimate the differences between male and female interpretations of status. Can you provide an example of one your female social hierarchies?
Also, what is a leader other than an authority figure to be obeyed?
"
Also, what is a leader other than an authority figure to be obeyed? "
In our world, that is what a leader must be. In the general human concept of an ideal world, I do not know if this is the case. I actually think that humans have some basic agreement about what an ideal world would be like. The ideal world is based on priorities from our instincts as mortal animals, but it is not subjected to the confines of natural experience. I think the concept of heaven illustrates the general human fantasy of the ideal world.
I get the impression that almost everyone's concept of heaven includes that there are no rich and poor- everyone has plenty. There is no battle of the sexes, and perhaps even no gendered personalities. There is no unhappiness, pain, sickness or death. I personally think there are no humans that hold authority over other humans in heaven (to clarify, I know that a theological heaven cannot actually exist). What this means to me is that to have a more ideal world, the power differential between leaders and the led should be minimized. I understand that humans with their propensities for various follies aren't as they are necessarily suited for the ideal world they'd like to inhabit, but striving for an ideal world would to me mean that human nature would in some ways be corrected so that the ideal world became more in tune with human desires for that state.
" Can you provide an example of one your female social hierarchies?"
Say a nursing floor. There is such a thing as a nurse with the most authority, but the status differential between head nurse and other floor nurses is sometimes imperceptible to all but the nurses that work there. The pay difference is not that great either. Sometimes the nurse who makes the most decisions is the one that chooses to invest the most time and has the longest experience, not necessarily one who is chosen to be obeyed. This is entirely unlike a traditionaly male structure like an army where the difference between general and a corporal.
You must not know your way around the actual heavens of the big religions (as officially described). For instance, an important and (according to many Christian theologists) necessary part of the Christian heaven is being able to view the Christian Hell and enjoy the torture of the evil sinners there. And an important part of Muslim Heaven, according to some, is a certain thing about female virgins you may have heard of. I could go on for a while in this vein if you want real examples... because I happen to have a thing for completely un-academically reading popular history of religion & thought in my free time.
Really, if we're going to get into religious (historical & contemporary) conceptions of heaven, the best one-line summary I can come up with is - heaven is just like Earth ought to be according to your cleric of choice and taken to an appropriate extreme. And most people's conception of how things "ought to be" is horrible to most other people. One of the most common issues for idealists to face is that most people don't want any part of their ideal world, no matter what that ideal happens to be.
If the difference is imperceptible, even to people who have experience with similar hierarchies but don't happen to work inside this one, then why is the difference at all important? Why are we even talking about such a minute difference? It sounds to me like "there are no real status hierarchies and no leader" is a pretty good summary of this situation.
I was hoping for an example of a large scale usage of your ideal. It seems to me that as social systems get larger, the difficult of co-ordination gets more difficult, necessitating more power into the hands of those who lead. Much as communism can work in a small village, but not on a national scale, I suspect your ideal fails at the large scale.
A theological heaven can actually exist, but shouldn't. See Fun theory, for this reference in particular Visualizing Eutopia and Eutopia is Scary.
I suggest that this is to constrain the natural dynamics of leadership, not to formalise it. It saves on the killing.
No gendered personalities? How many people strap bombs to themselves, working themselves into a frenzy by reminding themselves of their heavenly reward of 40 androgynous virgins?
And I should add that it was foolish of me to present that post, which was possibly my most biased, as an introduction to my blog. Actually, my blog gets more insightful than this. Please don't dismiss my entire blog based on the content of that post about the motivations for a visceral reaction against feminists as indicative of what my blog is usually about. That particular post was designed to spur emotional reactions from a specific set of readers I have.
Of what use is rationality, then?
Eh, just say "Oops" and get it over with. Excuses slow down life. Never expend effort on defending something you could just change.