= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ArisKatsaris comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1529)
I still consider myself relatively new here, only been around for a year -- but in that year I haven't seen any actual fact presented in LessWrong that's enflamed spirits one tenth as much as the obscure half-hints by trolls like sam and his "I can't say things, because you politically correct morons will downvote me into oblivion, but be sure that my arguments would be crushing, if I was allowed to make them, which I'm not, therefore I'm not making them" style of debate.
The "obscurantism" that Prismatic is talking about isn't yet as bad as that, but it has that same flavour, to a lesser degree. This sort of thing is... annoying -- hinting at evidence, but refusing to provide it -- and blaming this obscurity at the hypothetical actions by people who haven't actually done them yet.
If the issue is e.g. whether science seems to indicate that the statistical distribution of physical and intellectual characteristic isn't identical across racially-defined subgroups of the human race, or across genders, or across whatever, then it can be discussed politely, if the participants actually seek a polite discussion, instead of just finding the most insulting way possible to talk about them. And if the participants are willing to use words like "average" and "median" and "distribution" and things like that, instead of using phrases that are associated with the worst metaphorical Neanderthals that exist in the modern world.
What I think enflames things far far worse is when people imply that you are incapable of discussing topics, but nonetheless hint at them. If the topic can't be discussed, then don't discuss it or hint at it at all. If it can be discussed, then discuss it plainly, clearly, politely; not trollishly or deliberately offensively or carelessly offensively. Take a single minute to see if you can impart the same (or more) information in a less offensive mannere.g. "Is there a causal connection between the absence of Y chromosome and average levels of mathematical aptitude"? may need a couple seconds more to write, but it'll probably lead to a better discussion than "Why and how do women suck at math"?
You are presenting the situation as if such hints were coming out of the blue in discussions of unrelated topics. In reality, however, I have seen (or given) such hints only in situations where a problematic topic has already been opened and discussed by others. In such situations, the commenter giving the hint is faced with a very unpleasant choice, where each option has very serious downsides. It seems to me that the optimal choice in some situations is to announce clearly that the topic is in fact deeply problematic, and there is no way to have a no-holds-barred rational discussion about it that wouldn't offend some sensibilities. (And thus even if it doesn't break down the discourse here, it would make the forum look bad to the outside world.)
At the very least, this can have the beneficial effect of lowering people's confidence in the biased conclusions of the existing discussion, thus making their beliefs more accurate, even in a purely reactive way. However, you seem to deny that this choice could ever be optimal. Yet I really don't see how you can write off the possibility that both alternatives -- either staying silent or expressing controversial opinions about highly charged issues openly -- can sometimes lead to worse results by some reasonable measure.
You also seem to think that merely phrasing your opinion in polite, detached, and intellectual-sounding terms is enough to avoid the dangers of bad signaling inherent to certain topics. I think this is mistaken. It might lead to the topic in question being discussed rationally on LW -- and in fact, this will likely happen on LW unless the topic is gender-related and if it manages to elicit interest -- but it definitely won't escape censure by the outside world.
This.
I really really don't want such discussion to be very prominent, because they attract the wrong contrarian cluster. But I don't want LW loosing ground rationality wise with debates that are based on some silly premises, especially ones that are continually reinforced by new arrivals and happy death spirals!
Attracting the wrong people, and alienating some of the "right" people is a bigger concern to me than the reputation of the site as a whole (though that counts too). Another concern is that hot-button issues might eat up the conversations and get too important (they are not issues I care that much about debating here).
The current compromise of avoiding some hot-button issue, and having some controversial things buried in comment threads or couched in indirect academese seems reasonable enough to me.
I agree with this. But I wish to emphasise:
Some of us look at the state of LW and fear that punishment of this appropriate behaviour is slowly escalating, while evaporative cooling is eliminating the rewards.
I concur with this diagnosis -- and I would add that the process has already led to some huge happy death spirals of a sort that would not be allowed to develop, say, a year an a half ago when I first started commenting here. In some cases, the situation has become so bad that attacking these death spirals head-on is no longer feasible without looking like a quarrelsome and disruptive troll.
Could you give some examples? I don't like the thought of my brain being happy-death-spiralled without my noticing. I promise to upvote your comment even if it makes me angry.
(Eh, he's been inactive for the last three months anyway.)
Which is I think the current situation when it comes to criticism of say democracy.
Actually, general criticism of democracy isn't such a big problem. It can make you look wacky and eccentric, but it's unlikely to get you categorized among the truly evil people who must be consistently fought and ostracized by all decent persons. There are even some respectable academic and scholarly ways to trash democracy, most notably the public choice theory.
Criticisms of democracy are really dangerous only when they touch (directly or by clear implication) on some of the central great taboos. Of course, respectable scholars who take aim at democracy would never dare touch any of these with a ten foot pole, which necessarily takes most teeth out of their criticism.
I think criticism of democracy goes over less well if you have something specific that you want to replace it with.
That is true, but you get into truly dangerous territory once you drop the implicit assumption that your criticism applies to democracy in all places and times, and start analyzing what exactly correlates with it functioning better or worse.
I expect it depends on what distinctions you're using for what corelates with how democracies do. For example, claiming that there's an optimal size for democracies that's smaller than a lot of existing countries could get contentious, but I don't think it would blow up as hard as what I suspect you're thinking of.
Yes, of course, my above characterization was imprecise in this regard.
As a potshot, let's just fucking spell it out: genetics, and "Race" in particularly.
Sam dosen't do that. Sam trolls by stating his opinions fully. He then refuses to provide evidence.
Race differences have already been explicitly discussed with little problem, if not prominently so, do a search. Gender, sexuality and sexual norms are the great unPC problem of LessWrong.
Dishonest generalization, find two posters in addition to Sam who do this. I will wait.
Now contrast this to the average (even average anon double log in account) pro-hereditarian LW-er who brings up such points. There are far more Quirrells than Sams here, and Sams get heavily downvoted except on the rare occasions they make more reasonable posts (though the particular poster has probably burned out some people's patience and will get downvoted no matter what he says because he has consistently demonstrated an unwillingness to adapt to our norms).
This is quickly devolving into the worst kind of politicking one finds on otherwise intelligent forums.
But it is other people who keep dragging them up and discussing them. Politely stating that you disagree and they are wrong, getting then heavily up voted (which indicates a significant if far from majority fraction of LWers agree with the comment) is surely better than not interrupting what you see as a happy death spiral?
Have we been visiting the same forum? I have often up-voted your responses to Sam0345's posts, indeed you nearly always successfully rebuke him. But I think your extensive interactions with him may be leading you to mistake an individual for a group.
I've decided to bow out of this thread -- as I've not significantly studied either PUA, nor cared to read about previous PUA-related threads in LessWrong, I can barely understand what you're talking about. Perhaps you've noticed a real problem that I haven't, exactly because you're focusing on different type of threads than I do.
The thing I had in mind was things like e.g. the guy who repeatedly and deliberately kept using the diminutive word "girls" to refer to female rationalists but "men" to refer to the male counterparts. This by itself -- when I perceived he intended to belittle women in this fashion, or at least didn't give a damn about not insulting them -- prevented any meaningful discussion of the actual argument he was engaged in, (whether a male-only meetup would be useful or detrimental for the purposes of LessWrong).
OB and early LW consistently blew up whenever PUA and related issues where discussed.
He really shouldn't have done that.
I appreciate your point here, but you could have chosen a better example. Those two questions have the same capacity for offensiveness. They have the same content and are compatible with the same presuppositions and connotations. They just use different language.
Now perhaps there are people who, upon seeing "women suck at math", read "boo women!", and upon seeing words like "causal" and "Y chromosome", think about causes and effects. So if you're talking to one of those people, you'll want to use the fancier language. But not everyone is like that.
I care about this because I want to be able to talk about why so few of my mathematician colleagues are female, and why they feel so weird about it, and what can be done about it, without gratuitously offending people.
I am really curious how you can demonstrate equivalence between a question that follows the pattern "Why is (X) the case?" and a question that follows the pattern "Is (Y) the case?" -- even if (Y) is arguably equivalent to (X), only phrased in more polite language.
As far as I see, the first one asks for the explanation of something that is presumed to be an established fact, while the second one expresses uncertainty about whether (arguably) the same fact is true. How on Earth can these two be said to have "the same content" and be "compatible with the same presuppositions"?
However, you are quite right that these two questions have the same potential for offensiveness, in that outside a few quirky places like LW, neither the polite phrasing nor the expression of uncertainty will get you off the hook, contrary to what Aris Katsaris seems to believe.
Ah, I see, you're right; the content of the two questions are different. I noticed there was a substantial difference in language, and assumed that was the point of the example.
Surely that's a hyperbole. Now, I know lots of people would be offended by both questions, but I doubt most people would be equally offended by both, and plenty of people would be offended by one but not the other. As a woman who doesn't suck at math, I am down to discuss the first question, but the second one makes me want to slap you.
(Of course, by declaring myself a woman who doesn't suck at math, I have already proven my own nonexistence, so my opinion can, no doubt, safely be ignored.;) )
Is it ok to threaten (or declare the desire to do) physical violence upon someone if you don't get your way simply because you are a woman? Careful which stereotypes you support. You don't usually get "heh. Female violence is harmless and cute!" without a whole lot of paternalism bundled in.
Slaps, generally, are relatively harmless. Unfulfilled desires to slap, even more so.
On the other hand, hasn't there been some discussion of the idea that you have to believe something, however briefly, to understand it?
Even though expressing a desire to slap has no macro bodily effect [1], it still has an emotional effect which is going to affect how a conversation goes, however slightly. [2]
[1] Tentative phrasing used to respect the idea that everything is physical, including thoughts and emotions, but that some things affect people physically more than others.
[2] I believe that "just ignore it" leaves out that ignoring things is work.
If I said something to offend you over the internet, and you said it made you feel like hitting me, I would think it was no big thing, especially if you went on to explicitly clarify that you would never actually hit me. I would not perceive it as a serious threat in any case.
If you said something like that in real life, in full public view with many onlookers, I might depending on your body language be slightly more concerned, but I would probably just raise an eyebrow and imply that you were being a creep. If I said the same to you, I wouldn't look as ridiculous, since most likely you're bigger and stronger than me, but I doubt it would win anyone over either.
If you actually physically attacked me, I would do my best to see that criminal charges were brought, and I would not physically attack anyone myself if I were unwilling to defend my actions in court. That last scenario is so far from what actually happened here that it really seems like a red herring, though.
Really? My instincts anticipate a significant negative response if I said I wanted to hit someone around here. On the order of a substantial faux pas not a personal security risk. But to be honest I haven't exactly calibrated that intuition all that much. Because I just don't go around saying I want to hit people.
If another data point helps, I basically agree with you... if someone told me that what I'd said made them want to hit me, I'd consider it rude, possibly funny (depending on context), and not significantly changing my estimate that they would actually hit me.
What sort of thing would change your estimate of whether someone would actually hit you?
Hitting me.
Hitting others.
Demonstrating poor impulse control in general.
Physically intimidating me (e.g., looming up in my personal space).
In general, someone using their words increases my estimate that they will continue using their words.
That's uncalled-for. I am not asking either question. It's okay if you're offended by one but not the other.
Again, I care about this because I want to be able to talk about why so few of my colleagues are female, and why they feel so weird about it, and what can be done about it — without gratuitously offending people.
Those questions are not remotely equivalent. I suppose as a second order implication, if you assume that the average man is not very good at math, you could also assume that the average women is really not very good at math, but obviously both the male and female distributions have people above their respective means. In any case, "Why and how do women suck at math" sounds to me like "Why do all women suck at math," not like "Why does the average woman suck at math," even if the latter question was based on an accurate presupposition.
The distinction between gratuitously offending people, and inadvertently offending people, does not seem to be widely noticed, whether on Less Wrong or other places. Less Wrong has established implicit rules for what may be said, so there is a narrow class of things that can be said on Less Wrong without getting into trouble, that cannot be said elsewhere without getting into trouble, but that class is narrow and subject to change, so narrow, twisty, complex, and obscure, that I do not find it interesting, though Vladimir does seem to find it interesting.
To participate in consensus building on Occupy Wall Street, you need an Ivy League Education in political correctness. Less Wrong is not nearly as bad as that, but Less Wrongers that tread near forbidden topics as Vladimir does, are developing more expertise in what is permissible thought, and what means are permissible to express them, than they are developing expertise in forbidden topics.
Same capacity for offensiveness, perhaps -- in that some overly defensive people will surely choose to feel attacked ("be offended") just as much by either question. But same average offensiveness? I seriously doubt it.
Signalling is important. "Offensiveness" functions by signalling you an enemy. If you signal strongly enough that your question is about a desire to understand neurobiological causes of a statistical phenomenon, not about an attempt to attack groups of people, fewer people will feel attacked.
Now some people will surely argue that people just "ought grow tougher skins" instead. But that's an "ought"-argument, and I'm referring to an "is"-question, which choice of words and sentences leads to a better discussion.