Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Open Thread: November 2009 - Less Wrong
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Hi, I have never posted on this forum, but I believe that some Less Wrong readers read my blog, FeministX.blogspot.com.
Since this at least started out as an open thread, I have a request of all who read this comment, and an idea for a future post topic.
On my blog, I have a topic about why some men hate feminism. The answers are varied, but they include a string of comments back and forth between anti feminists and me. The anti feminists accuse me of fallacies, and one says that he "clearly" refuted my argument. My interpretation is that my arguments were more logically cogent that the anti feminists and that they did not correctly identify logical fallacies in my comments, nor did they comprehensivly refute anything I said. They merely decided that they won the debate.
Now, the issue is that when there is an argument between feminists and anti feminists on the internet, the feminists will believe that other feminists arguments include more truth and reason while anti-feminists will believe that anti-feminist arguments include more truth and reason. The internet is not a place where people are good at discussing feminism with measured equanimity.
But I wondered, who could be the objective arbiter of a discussion between feminists and anti feminists? Almost anyone has a bias when it comes to this issue. Everyone has a gender, and gender affects a person's thinking style, desires and determination of fairness in assessing behaviors between genders. Where in the world could I find intelligent entities that would not be swayed by gender bias and would instead attempt to seek out objective truth in a "battle of sexes" style discussion.
Well, I am not sure if unbiased people can exist regarding the issue but the closest thing I could think of was Less Wrong. Thus, I invite readers of Less Wrong to contribute to the admittedly inane thread on my blog, Why so much hate?
http://feministx.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-so-much-hate.html
I read through a couple of months worth of FeministX when I first discovered it...
(Because of a particular skill exhibited: namely the ability to not force your self-image into a narrow box based on the labels you apply to yourself, a topic on which I should write further at some point. See the final paragraph of this post on how much she hates sports for a case in point. Most people calling themselves "feminist" would experience cognitive dissonance between that and their self-image. Just as most people who thought of themselves as important or as "rationalists" might have more trouble than I do publicly quoting anime fanfiction. There certainly are times when it's appropriate to experience cognitive dissonance between your self-image and something you want, but most people seem to cast that net far too widely. There is no contradiction, and there should be no cognitive dissonance, between loving and hating the same person, or between being a submissive feminist who wants alpha males, or between being a rationalist engaged on a quest of desperate importance who reads anime fanfiction, etcetera. But most people try to conform so narrowly and so unimaginatively to their own self-image that there is little point in reading anything else they say, because it is all predictable once you know what "role" they're trying to play in their own minds. And among people who are unusually good at not conforming to their own images, their blogs often make for good reading because it is often surprising reading.)
...and I still don't know what is meant by the "feminist" in the title, so I have to agree with all the commenters who asked for a definition of "feminism". Definitions are oft overrated but in this case I literally do not know what is being talked about.
If it were me, I'd probably be saying something to myself along the lines of: "So long as such a large flaw exists in my own work, which I can correct myself without waiting for permission from anyone else, there is no point in asking whether others have done worse." This is by way of encouraging myself to do better, for which purpose it is unwise to focus on other people's flaws as consolation.
EDIT: Finished reading through the comments. Some commenters did better than you, some commenters did worse, e.g. Aretae's separate post gave you good advice. Definitely you've got more to learn about which arguments and evidence license which conclusions at what strength. None of the arguments including yours were noticeably up to LW standards and so there's not much point in trying to figure out who "won". The winners were the commenters who said "I don't know what is meant by 'feminism' here, please define". Some of the others could have carried part of their argument if they had been a bit more careful to say, "Here is something that 'feminism' could be taken to mean, or that many/most men take the label 'feminism' to mean, now I am going to talk about how many/most men react to this particular thing regardless of whether it is what you call 'feminism', and if it isn't, please go ahead and define what you mean by it." That would have been Step One.