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Vladimir_M comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong
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Comments (1529)
On a tangential note, if a man said to a woman that he wanted to slap her as a reaction to some offensive statement she made, would you consider it acceptable?
Mind you, I have no problem in principle with social norms that set different boundaries for the behavior of men and women. (In particular, if someone wants men's threats of violence to women, even humorous and hyperbolic ones, to be judged more harshly than vice versa, I certainly find it a defensible position.) I just find it funny to see egalitarians who profess principled opposition to such norms caught in inconsistencies, like for example here, where very few (if any) of them would react to your statement with the same visceral horror and outrage as if the sexes were reversed.
I don't know who you're talking about, but it isn't me. My husband sometimes jokes about beating me. I laugh.
I'm glad to hear that the two of you share a sense of humor, but the relevant comparison would be how you'd feel if a strange man mentioned slapping you in response to something you said, whether in the context of a public debate such as here or elsewhere. I would be surprised if you would be willing to take that nonchalantly. And even if you are an exception in this regard, there is no denying that the usual standards of discourse are highly asymmetric here, since there is no way that a similar statement by a man to a woman would not have caused firestorms of outrage.
Now, as I explained, I have no problem with this standard in principle. I am not expressing any condemnation of your words or attitudes. I am just using this opportunity to highlight the apparent contradiction with the general principle held by the contemporary respectable opinion that sex-asymmetric social norms are morally dubious, or worse -- and not because I wish to score a petty rhetorical point, but because I believe that if adequately considered, it would open some very important and general questions.
I don't consider this to be established, for one thing. For another, what I said hasn't exactly passed without comment, so I'm not very sympathetic right now to the idea that women get a free pass.
But though I think your example is weak, I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that double standards in both directions continue to flourish. I'm not sure why that's relevant here, or why people think they have to be so shady about saying this kind of thing on LW. It all seems sort of melodramatic to me; I live in the southern US, and there's probably no disreputable idea you'd dare hint at that I don't hear proudly trumpeted by many of my neighbors, and nobody seems to beat them up or fire them for it.
(On the other hand, if you gesture towards disreputable ideas, but don't state your position clearly or provide evidence, I'm liable to pattern-match you to rednecks. I won't do it on purpose, but I'm human, and it'll probably happen. Consider this!)
Not being American or part of the Anglosphere or Western European derived culture I read this as:
Noticed you assumed I'm a Yankee, considered challenging you to a duel, decided with this crowd it probably wouldn't go over.
Ah sorry, then it was just classism! :)
I think the crowd would love the idea. But I'm biased.
I think VM is quite open about the fact that his secret beliefs are low status. I've been wondering for a while, but I haven't been able to think of examples of ideas so reviled that they warrant secrecy besides "redneck ideas." I think it's interesting that you similarly lack examples. Maybe this is the only source of reviled beliefs, or maybe it's a US blind-spot.
Well, beliefs don't even need to be in the "reviled" category for one to conclude that it might be prudent not to express them openly. One might simply conclude that they're apt to break down the discourse, as has indeed happened on LW many times with statements that might be controversial, but fall short of "reviled" in the broader society.
Also, I think you're applying some popular but grossly inaccurate heuristics here. I can easily think of several beliefs that: (1) are squarely in the "reviled" category in today's respectable discourse in Western societies, (2) have been held by a large number of people historically, or are still held by a large number of people worldwide, and (3) are practically nonexistent, or exceptionally rare, among the segment of the U.S. population that can be labeled "rednecks" by any reasonable definition. (For beliefs that make sense only given some cultural background, I mean "exceptionally" relative to other local cultures that provide this background.)
In any case, think about the following. For any human society in history about which you have some reasonably accurate picture, except the present Western ones, you'll probably be able to think of some beliefs that are true, or at least defensible enough that one shouldn't be considered as malicious or delusional for holding them, but also unacceptable in that society. (So that even if expressing them is not outright dangerous, it would face blind hostility and no chance of rational consideration.) Either there are such beliefs in the modern Western societies too, or there is something outstandingly unique and exceptional about these societies that makes such cases impossible. But what could this be?
Let's link to it again: Paul Grahm's What You Can't Say.
"Redneck ideas" is certainly an oversimplification, but I am not sure it is such a grossly inaccurate one. The ideology behind bad treatment of women and minorities in parts of the third world also comes in for Western opprobrium, and might be likewise reviled by or at least of little consequence to rednecks depending on the instance. But it does not seem like an entirely different category -- what people despise about American rednecks, when that term is used pejoratively, is their bigotry.
In a separate category one has cruelty toward animals (which probably coincidentally I also associate with redneck stereotypes), and cruelty toward children. I can't think of any other categories of reviled ideas.
I see what you're getting at but I don't know enough to judge. Certainly there have been many famous superstitions and manias in history, but I worry that my models of them have been too much influenced by certain parts of modern culture. (It occurs to me I have never read an account of the Salem trials that was written in the two hundred fifty years between them and the Miller play.) As to what might be exceptional about modern society, it contains huge numbers of people who are not bored by ideas and who have some basic equipment, such as literacy, for analyzing them. This might be of some consequence when thinking about the content and enforcement of the rules for respectable discourse, now and then.
Looking from the outside it seems to me "Rednecks" are despised because they are poor and dysfunctional and don't have any extenuating circumstances (at least ones modern society would find acceptable) for being so.
That's an improvement on Sewing Machine's claim, but I don't think it goes far enough. Groups despise other groups. "Rednecks" form a group, it's predictably despised by another group. The low status are despised by the high status. Rednecks are low status, they're despised by SWPLs, who are high status. The term "redneck" refers to the condition of their neck, which is a way of referring to their occupation and therefore to their station in life. Someone with a red neck is originally probably a caucasian who works out of doors, likely to be looked down on by caucasians who work indoors. Probably rural, likely to be looked down on by the urban (who are urbane, sophisticated, in contrast to the rednecks who are rustic, unsophisticated).
People love to look down on other people. It's a pastime. It's a way to magnify one's own feeling of having high status. There's a site called "people of walmart" which is devoted to the pastime of looking down on other people. A lot of humor, possibly most humor, is devoted to ridiculing a group to which one does not belong. It's always easy to come up with rationalizations for the contempt after the fact.
Personally I prefer the humor of self-ridicule. I assume that the SWPL site is self-ridicule of high status whites. I also assume that Jeff Foxworthy's "you might be a redneck" routine is self-ridicule of rednecks. In contrast, "people of walmart" is not self-ridicule.
Reactionary elitism, for one (almost by definition not a redneck attitude).
This seems crazily optimistic — literacy and intellectualism, however widespread, don't do much to protect people from holding ideological taboos.
The term for racist - and anyone that is less enlightened than the wonderful ruling class - is "racist"
"redneck" literally means white guy who works outdoors, unlike their masters who work in offices, and when I see people use the term, it is clear that whatever they say they mean, that is what they do mean. For example: the discrimination of Ivy League universities against the sons of farmers. Does the Ivy League have reason to believe that the sons of farmers are more racist than others?
Cannibalism. Incest. Human sacrifice. Bestiality.
Any open supporter of any of the above would probably do well to hide it (at least if they're using their real-life name), but I wouldn't call any of the above "redneck ideas" (by which I understand you to mean racism/sexism/homophobia/etc)
Also: pedophilia; the Idea that the Chinese government system (technocratic dictatorship) is better (in terms of outcomes) than the US Government system.
I briefly read that as a colon...
"Sex between adults and young teenagers, as long as there is no obvious coercion involved, is not nearly as harmful as generally supposed" is definitely something that you can't say - and the fact that you can't say it has been demonstrated experimentally.
To clarify terminology here, pedophilia is sexual attraction to prepubescent children. There is a different word, which is escaping me at the moment, for a sexual preference for adolescents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebophilia or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebephilia depending on which stage of adolescence you're talking about.
It's very bad to have a single word that many people will interpret as "being attracted to people you can't have sex with, and having to live with a lot of fear and shame and stigma", and many other people interpret as "raping particularly vulnerable people".
No disagreement on that, though I suspect that even if everybody understood the first meaning, it would still be reviled.
(I know a (non-practicing) pedophile who attempted to "reclaim the word" by outing himself and distancing himself from child molesters. It - unsurprisingly - still didn't go well for him).
This guy is a hero. Okay, not a very effective hero, but still.
Unsurprisingly indeed. Still, somebody has to be first, and I admire his willingness to do so.
Which word is this?
Isn't it perfectly clear which one MixedNuts means?
This opinion is widely held by many active participants in mainstream US culture. "Reviled" should be replaced with "reviled by ___" in order for this conversation to be precise.
I downvoted this for mindkilling. I often see this view attributed to members of tribe USleft by members of tribe USright, but I've rarely encountered members of tribe USleft actually taking this position.
I was going to raise a similar objection, then observed that his claim was that people who believe this are typically "lefty types," not that "lefty types" typically believe this. The former might even be true, for all I know. (Though I can't quite see why anyone should care.)
I know exactly one person who has expressed an opinion even remotely like this; he is an ethnically Chinese American who identified as a Republican for most of his life but changed that identification in the last decade or so. I wouldn't call him a "lefty type" personally, but Vaniver might. Then again, I suspect he only expresses this opinion to screw with people in the first place. In any case, one case isn't much to draw on.
That said, I certainly agree that specifying who's doing the reviling usefully increases precision.
While I'm here, I will note that eliminating the comma between "types" and "who" would make the sentence noticeably less wrong.
I have deleted the relevant section. I went to a liberal university for undergrad and I got the sense that most of my classmates and professors held that position, and I often see comments to that effect on the xkcd forums (where the typical person is progressive and technocratic), but as I know more USleft types than USright types (and the USright types I know are typically libertarians, and thus anti-technocrats) and have rarely asked people about it directly, I can see that my experience may not be sufficient to identify the types of people who hold that opinion.
He's not exactly left (and not exactly right or centrist or...), but seems to take this tack. I am not sure just how much it is genuine, and how much it is "dance, monkeys, dance".
I'll come out and say I have no problem with cannibalism if the individual being cannibalized consented to it before they died. (Otherwise one is using property from their estate without permission and that's theft.) An argument can be made that in societies without abundant food, a cannibalism taboo is more useful, but that obviously doesn't apply today.
Incest I have more mixed views on, but assuming one is talking about adult siblings who are consenting and not going to have children, I don't see an issue, even though I personally find it disgusting. Parent-offspring incest even when they are both adults isn't ok because it is extremely difficult to remove the power-imbalance issues.
In practice, difficult to tell when an animal is consenting. But if we could confirm consent then I'd be ok with it. But, my view here isn't really fully consistent in that by this logic I should be worried about ducks not consenting to each other (a very large fraction of duck sex is rape). Regardless, whether or not I find it disgusting, consenting individuals should be allowed to do it.
Willing victim, sure why not? If we think it is ok for a Jehovah Witness to refuse blood transfusions or an Orthodox Jew to refuse a heart transplant, why not allow active sacrifice? In this case it might even have positive results. As Ellie Arroway observed, celibate clergy could help reduce inherited predispositions to fanaticism, and this might have a similar selective effect.
Cannibalism comes with some very nasty disease-transmission issues.
It's possible to be consistent about considering duck-on-duck rape bad and still assigning a relatively low priority to preventing it, compared to other societal problems, or more personal objectives.
It sounds to me like you picked ideas that were maximally superficially offensive under the constraint that at least one person might defend them, rather than ideas that were maximally defensible under the constraint that they were offensive.
Focusing on the ideas that are held by people stupid enough to blurt them out leaves you vulnerable to a selection effect. If there were classes of political ideas such that anyone rational enough to believe them was also rational enough not to tell, how would you know?
Was the latter what was desired? Then I could mention ideas like eugenics, weighting voting power by IQ, banning theism in general or monotheism in particular, panopticon cities (or other means for global surveillance).
I don't support the last two, but I bet I could make some good arguments about them. The first two I'd probably actually approve of, depending on the specific implementation.
But are these ideas really so offensive that it'd be dangerous for people to reveal them? I don't think so.
Right now the maximally defensible political idea that I'd not feel very safe to discuss in Greece is that my country should recognize the Republic of Macedonia under that name. I don't think that idea is offensive to anyone here, even though it's synonymous with treason in Greece.
Science fiction is useful in allowing people to describe political ideas but maintain plausible deniability.
Building Weirdtopia may be a relevant thread, though it'd be wrong for people to think that I actually support the weird ideas I mentioned there.
I don't have any objection to bestiality. Having sex with animals seems like a less harmful thing to do to an animal than killing it and eating it. I also don't object to other people who are consenting adults ignoring taboos regarding incest so long as they ensure that negative reproductive outcomes are avoided. For that matter cannibalism is fine by me as long as murder isn't involved (although I suggest avoiding the brain). Human sacrifice is a big no no though!
If we're just talking about what I have defensible objections to, I agree with most of this, except that I would also say that human sacrifice is fine as long as everyone involved consents (1).
That said, I nevertheless find the notion of human sacrifice deeply disturbing and I'm confident that my opinion of someone who participated in it would change significantly for the worse if I found out.
I also find most forms of cannibalism disturbing in much the same way, though not quite as extremely, and I can imagine fringe cases that might not disturb me much. The same is true for many forms of bestiality, though it's much easier to come up with cases that don't disturb me. (Unsurprisingly, a lot depends on how much I anthropomorphize the animal in question.)
Incest -- again, assuming consent (1) -- doesn't bug me much at all.
== (1) Admittedly, what counts as consent is not a simple question; I am assuming unambiguous examples of the category here.
I notice that this is something that I have instrumental reasons to support. Anybody who considers cryonics to be a rite of 'nerd religion' should thereby consider the early, voluntary preservation of someone with Alzheimers a ritual human sacrifice meant to purify them for the afterlife.
Legalize human sacrifice!
Fair point.
A related observation is that, since cryonics can (as you note) be framed as a 'nerd religion' form of human sacrifice, social norms opposing human sacrifice can be framed as opposing cryonics as well. It follows that if you support cryonics, you might do well to work against those norms, all else being equal.
I suppose something similar is true of Christian Scientists other sects that reject medical care, whose practices can similarly be framed as a form of human sacrifice. Also people who perform or receive abortions, I guess. We could all band together to form the Coalition to Support Things that Can be Thought of as Resembling Human Sacrifice (Including Of Course Human Sacrifice Itself).
Well, OK, maybe we should have a catchier name.
Also, there should be a convenient term to describe the social process whereby entirely unrelated groups come to share a common cause created entirely by the fact that they are classified similarly by a powerful third party.
Hmm. I'm not sure I'd consider that a sacrifice as such, even if I strain myself to view it through a religious frame. Ritual sacrifice seems to cluster around giving up something physical and valuable in order to sanctify some external object or concept; essentially costly signaling of devotion. There's no external sanctification going on here, and I'm not sure how valuable I'd consider continued life under those circumstances; early cryopreservation seems more like sokushinbutsu or something similar. "Mortification of the flesh" is probably the closest Christian analogy, although it's not a perfect one.
Hell, just legalize suicide. :P
I'd assign a high probability (about 80%) that a random person consenting to being sacrificed would not do so if they knew more, thought faster, and were more the person they wished they were.
But clearly the person they wished they were is someone who has been sacrificed!
So the objection, if based off this prediction, would be one of paternalism? ie. You think you know better about what they 'really' want than they do? (Not that I'm saying you don't.)
I think that's enormously underconfident. That said, I'm also not sure why it matters.
There's no way that consent could ever be simple or unambiguous here. Wanting to die might be a temporary state of mind, while death is a very permanent effect. The victim would have to be completely unable to change his/her mind ever in his/her life.
I don't think if a friend asks you to kill him, you should do it. No, clearly your friend needs mental help, and hopefully his suicidal urges are temporary.
The meaning of this 'consent' term seems to be drifting closer and closer to 'whatever it takes for the action to be considered morally right'.
I agree with you that consent is not simple... indeed, I said as much in the first place.
That said, I do believe that situations can arise where the expected value to a person of their death (1) is greater than the expected value of the other alternatives available to them. If I understood you, you disagree that such situations can arise, and therefore you believe that in all cases where a person thinks they're in such a situation they are necessarily mistaken -- either they're wrong about the facts, or they have the wrong values, or both -- and therefore it's better if they're made to choose some other alternative.
Did I understand you right?
==
(1) For conventional understandings of death. I acknowledge that many people on this site consider, for example, having my brain removed from my skull and cryogenically preserved to not be an example of death, because the potential for reconstituting me still exists. Personally, I'm inclined to still call that death, while allowing for the possibility of technologically mediated resurrection. That said, that's ultimately a disagreement about words, and not terribly important, as long as we're clear on what we're talking about.
I wouldn't call any of the above "ideas" at all. You are listing outlawed practices, not tabooed beliefs. True, "support for incest" is an idea, but if there is a covert ideology behind it it is not nearly as extensive and widespread as the ideology behind e.g. sexism.
Aw, no mention of Necrophilia? It's even a victimless crime!
Lifeist! (There are credible reasons why dead people can be considered victims - even if I don't happen to share them as values.)
Well, that's one way to pay the rent while you're in cryonic suspension.
Regardless of whether dead people can be considered victims or not, it's still really, really upsetting to a lot of living people. Whether it ought to be upsetting is another matter, but it is.
I don't see why not. If we consider the corpses of dead relatives to have reverted to just objects then necrophilarizing means having sex with our stuff. I would still find that somewhat upsetting!
From now on I shall assume Vladimir is a NAMBLA member who tends a small shrine to Pol Pot, regardless of the evidence.
So, p(Vladimir is a NAMBLA member who tends a small shrine to Pol Pot) = 1, as far as you're concerned?
Uh oh... I must quickly decide that you are not a truth-seeking agent, lest I be forced by Aumann to agree!
Whenever I see people say things like this, I always imagine Old Man Aumann standing behind them with a gun.
That's more or less what I was going for, yes.
I almost said "great minds think alike" before I realized that might be taken as a restatement of AAT.
Haha, I think you're displaying some serious prejudice (in multiple directions) by thinking that I'm supposed to mind this so badly.
"Prejudice" may not be the mot juste. If I filled one pickup truck with rednecks, and another with members of my own family, I'm not sure you'd be able to tell the difference. Hell, a few people would probably have to go in both trucks.
It wasn't so much that I expected you to be viscerally horrified by the association with low-SES rural Southern whites, as that being pattern-matched to rednecks has what I thought were obvious drawbacks. Just for one: this being Less Wrong, I'm pretty confident you don't think zygotes have souls. No doubt there are many other, less obviously incongruent beliefs in the redneck belief cluster you wouldn't remotely endorse.
There's a certain subset of mostly Western, white men, largely middle-class rather than extremely wealthy or poor, who see the existence of civil rights activism on behalf of various minorities and the fact that it has succeeded in making it somewhat more costly to signal prejudice socially in polite company, and quite a bit moreso to do so openly in an institutional capacity, and conclude that this therefore means that it is now beyond the pale to do anything other than adhere to rigid standards of political correctness for the sake of controlling thought.
These are people, by and large, who in coming of age and seeking to support themselves, didn't break through all their barriers to self-actualization or realize their wildest dreams of success, but managed to get some kind of payoff for their effort in terms of making ends meet (even if it's difficult and provides no insulation from suffering or strife in their lives), and certainly don't feel like they directly benefitted from any unethical practices or prejudices (even passively-conferred ones common in society). Since humans tend to model the emotions of others from their own baseline, they find it difficult to believe that anyone could genuinely have it that much worse, and conclude that activist groups of women and minorities are out to demonize them and censor them. They find it difficult to conceive that anybody else's life, at least in their own cultural sphere, could really be that bad, unless the person had just failed on merits, and wanted to blame someone else or hijack the fruits of their own effort out of laziness.
Then, in an environment dominated numerically by similar people, they find it similarly plausible to think that if they voice a belief that is uncharitable towards, or does not reflect well upon, some social minority or other, they will be...well, it's not clear what. Censored? Hunted down and sued? I'm not sure what they're really afraid of, but they're angry about the idea that it might happen to them.
Having certain topics discussed too openly on Lesswrong could result in several unfortunate things happening.
It could make certain potential rationalists be deterred from participating in the community.
It could attract the attention of certain contrarians who are less-than-rational and, for various reasons, should not necessarily be considered potential rationalists.
Most importantly, from the standpoint of the Singularity Institute (or, at least, what I think is its standpoint), it could increase the probability of human extinction by harming the SI's reputation.
Mm, those reasons do make some sense.
I think as far as 1 goes, it seems to me like that's already happening -- I know a few people not on this site (who discovered it independently of myself, none of whom know each other), and many more I've encountered about online, who explicitly view LW as essentially compromised by 2, hence they have no interest in being here. YMMV how much those people are reachable or desireable, of course, but it's difficult for me to disagree with their basic perception that this place is already full of contrarian-cluster types who're intellectuals but still quite biased.
I also wonder about signalling now, re: "less-than-rational" -- given what I understand of rationality as it's described and the reasons humans don't tend to display that trait most of the time, it seems like it's only asymptotically-reachable -- you can reduce the frequency of incorrect decisions and amend certain biases in short or long-term ways, but you probably can't get rid of it altogether. Who here is truly "rational?" Even Eliezer Yudkowsky still has his own biases -- the most you can hope for is, well, "less wrong", and that is work to achieve.
So assuming (big assumption here!) that I understand the about rationality and how LW views it, and why it's desireable and how much realistically a human being can self-optimize for that trait, it seems like "less than rational" should probably be avoided. Aren't we all? Aren't we all going to be until such time as we come up with some kind of game-breaking thing that allows a person to really just run rationality full-time if that's what they want?
I'm not sure I understood you correctly.
You seem to be suggesting that, since the community already falls short of its stated goal, there's no particular reason to avoid a practice that makes that goal less likely.
Confirm?
Deny.
I am suggesting two things, somewhat seperate:
First, that "we might draw people less-than-rational, and that's undesireable" seems to suggest, in a Sapir-Whorf kinda way, that the utterers consider themselves to be rational, rather than rationality being a thing which is valuable to increase in oneself, and that this suggests to me a degree of reflective incoherence on the part of those whose mental model can be described that way, which is at conflict with the goal of being less wrong.
Second, that members of this community should probably not give themselves too much credit for rationality or presume that any given proficiency in the methods of rationality has adequately compensated for their biases -- at any given point it is still overwhelmingly likely that their cognition is affected by some unnoticed, unaddressed and significant bias, which may not be obvious to other members of this largely-homogenous community. This also amounts to reflective incoherence.
Corollary: That this state of affairs is obvious to an unknown but possibly significant number of people who might be supportive of the community's aggregate goals and methods, but who are put off by the perception of such missed blind spots; that is, not everyone who looks at LW and rejects it is rejecting rationality, or unsuited for it, or just incapable of learning it -- and nobody here, even the seasoned and highly-upvoted contributors, is without bias.
"Less than rational" isn't the phrase I'd use; as you say, rationality really shouldn't be understood as a discrete state but as an asymptotic goal, and even then it's probably preferable to speak in terms of individual biases or cognitive skills as appropriate. But J_Taylor's second point doesn't lose much of its force if you cast it in terms of individuals seeking company in their specific contrarian beliefs, for whom this whole "rationality" business might be little more than a group-identifying label or a justifying habit of thought. Granted, it might eventually be possible to bring such a demographic around to actual truth-seeking, but it'll take more work than debiasing someone who's already posting in good faith -- and this site isn't so large or so stable that it can afford to spend a lot of time dragging people out of self-constructed ideological labyrinths in which they're quite comfortable.
It's a particularly nasty problem, though: ideology looks like common sense from the inside, and so it's hard to tell to what extent the site culture's already corrupted by arational ideas that've just happened to achieve local hegemony. I'd like to say that a careful and fearless examination of any beliefs that look like common sense to us should turn up the major problems, but frankly I don't think we're there yet -- and an outside view, unfortunately, isn't necessarily going to be helpful. There's plenty of motivated cognition out there, too.
Nornagest defended the point better than I probably could. Nonetheless, I would like to clarify that "less-than-rational" was myself being slightly too euphemistic. I meant to say that some contrarians are contrarians due to highly problematic reasons. Some of them should not even be considered contrarians, but merely individuals who retain the beliefs of tribes which are not respected within mainstream intellectual culture. These individuals, due to opportunity costs if nothing else, should probably not be considered potential rationalists at this time.
Gotcha - thanks for clarifying.
For the record, I agree with your last two paragraphs. I might agree with your first suggestion as well.... I agree that "rational" constantly runs the risk of becoming a mere tribal marker used to enforce in-group/out-group boundaries and thus detached from any actual improvement in decision-making skills, and that different people here succumb to that temptation to different degrees at different times.
I'm less confident about the idea that being concerned about the quality of people attracted to the site, or endorsing decisions on the basis of such concern, is particularly reliable evidence that the speaker is succumbing to that temptation... but I'm no longer confident you're even suggesting that.
The rhetorical sleight of hand here is that "prejudice" is used with an ambivalent meaning. On the one hand, this word is used for any application of certain kinds of conditional probabilities about people, which are deemed to be immoral according to a certain ideological view. On the other hand, it is supposed to refer to the use of conditional probabilities about people that are inaccurate due to biases caused by ignorance or malice. Now, it is logically possible that the latter category just happens to subsume the former -- but the real world, of course, is never so convenient.
And if the latter category does not subsume the former, as it clearly does not, then approving of penalties (of whatever sort) for expressing beliefs in the former category means that you approve of penalties for expressing at least some true beliefs. Even if you can make a good case for that, it requires much more than dismissing them as "prejudice" with all the ambiguity and rhetorical trickery that this term introduces -- and no matter how good a case you have, "controlling thought" will be a completely accurate description for what you advocate. (And for the record, I am completely open to the idea that some ways of controlling thought may be beneficial by some reasonable criteria, or even necessary for the functioning of human society. But if we're going to advocate this view on a forum like this, let's call it what it is.)
Note also that even without any idealistic pursuit of truth for its own sake, it is a non-trivial question what the practical consequences will be of suppressing the expression and use of certain correct beliefs about conditional probabilities. Wrong probabilities lead to wrong decisions, from the pettiest personal ones, up to and including decisions about grand projects by the government and other powerful institutions that are based on theories that assume these probabilities. On LW, of all places, the importance of this point should be clear.
I apologize for the confusion -- you seem to think that my using the noun constitutes an attempt to bill some unspecified set of statements and ideas as examples of the first thing you listed.
What I'm actually doing, just so you can read my post accurately, is saying that prejudice is a thing (as per your second definition which you apparently thought I was being sneaky about), that it exists (I presume this at least is uncontentious to you?), and that in general it's a true statement it's now more costly to signal certain forms of that openly, according to prevailing social mores.
In other words, if you have no objection to the assertion: "An employer in the US these days cannot generally refuse a job applicant by openly referring to the applicant's race as a disqualifying factor, without expecting some form of social reprisal", then you now understand what I meant when I used the word prejudice in that sentence.
So, just to be sure I'm absolutely clear, since this is apparently confusing:
When I say
I mean that it is now more difficult to signal certain forms of prejudice (not specific as to what particular things constitute prejudice; pick an example you find unobjectionable) casually or irrespective of one's audience, without garnering some social risk.
You are still obscuring the issue. Yes, of course that people frequently hold prejudiced beliefs that are biased due to ignorance or malice, and that some categories of such beliefs (though by no means all) have become more costly to signal in recent history. The question, however, is whether there are also some true beliefs, or uncertain beliefs that may turn out to be true given the present state of knowledge, that are also costly to express (or even just to signal indirectly) nowadays. Would you really assert that the answer to that question is no?
And if your answer to that question is yes, then what basis do you have for asserting that "a broader social pattern into which [you] see [my] behavior falling" consists of people who are unhappy because they find it costly to express prejudiced beliefs that are biased due to ignorance or malice?
I would not.
I am doubting your claim that your beliefs are really so beyond the pale to the social mores of your peers here, that you'd be unfairly suppressed and/or censored, or otherwise hurt "the cause" of LW any moreso than you might be saying what you already do freely.
I could be wrong about that, but I also have different estimates of the real, net social cost to signalling something unpopular, especially for someone who consistently signal-boosts in your observed patterns in this environment.
I would be unsurprised to learn you believe that IQ represents general intelligence and that it is primarily genetic, and that all personality traits are ultimately genetic or inconsequential in the scheme of things, and that they are linked to race, and that this could get people upset at you if you just said it at random at a party.
I would be very surprised if it got you successfully sued, persecuted in a tangible way, or indeed anything worse than flamed on the internet for voicing this openly. Or arrested, or fired from your job, or targeted by a group like Anonymous for ongoing harassment...
However, based on what you've said about your reasons for not revealing some subset of your beliefs here, you appear to fear consequences considerably more significant than just someone being mad at something you said on the internet, and this seems...disproportionate, incorrect, biased -- a skewed misunderstanding of the reality of your likely risks and costs.
What do you think happened to Stephanie Grace - don't you think a private email sent to a few friends has affected her career prospects ? James Watson and Lawrence Summers also got lynched for their opinions.
I don't think anybody risks getting sued or arrested, but they can have their careers harmed.
For example, just to lower my Karma even further, could it be that the fact that old fashioned standards of credit worthiness had disparate impact on certain races and neighborhoods, not be a sign that those standards were "racist", but rather a sign that certain races and neighborhoods, were, on average, no damned good.
Could it be that the prohibition against certain thoughts has cost the American taxpayer over a trillion dollars, about ten thousand dollars per tax payer.
The evidence for this proposition is overwhelming, but no one is allowed to discuss it.
I'd like to see your math on that point.
While I think that political and regulatory decision making as to which loans were risky and which were not is guaranteed to lead to disaster even in the absence of affirmative action, affirmative action is particularly deadly, because a financial system requires truth and that lies be punished, whereas affirmative action requires lies and that truth be punished, so when affirmative action meets finance, it is like matter and antimatter.
When official truth meets finance, the financial system is likely to implode. When the official truths of affirmative action meet finance, the financial system is guaranteed to implode.
And it did.
I don't think there is any connection between affirmative action and the recent "financial crises". If you do, you may have been mindkilled by your dislike of affirmative action. Maybe this idea sounded ridiculous at first, but you flinched away from betraying an ally, and now you actually believe it?
You are in denial. Search Trulia.com for foreclosure sales, for suburbs for which you know the racial distribution.
If we look at where the defaults were, they were where the Hispanics were, and to a lesser extent, where the blacks were.. In the first year of the crisis lily white suburbs had less than one percent as many defaults as suburbs with a significant black or Hispanic population.
Why, did the banks lower the their lending standards? There were a pile of government papers telling them that lending standards were racist, since they had disparate impact. Beverly Hills Bank failed to lower its standards, and was condemned as "Substantially non compliant with the CRA", which is to say, "racist".
The gap between Hispanics and whites was extreme in the first year or so of the crisis, because most Hispanics never made a single payment, while whites took a while to get into trouble. So today the ratio is about twenty to one, while shortly after the crisis it was about one hundred to one. But the ratio is still extreme and glaringly obvious, though not quite as extreme and glaringly obvious as it was in 2008-2009
Gilroy (Hispanic) Palo Alto (White and North East Asian)
...
...
From Wikipedia, but still in accord with what I've read elsewhere, and there are plenty of cites for you to check in their Community Reinvestment Act article.
Besides that, even if the bad loans were made because of 'affirmative action' that doesn't make the crisis the fault of affirmative action, just as if I loan my hypothetical shifty brother-in-law $100 that I don't expect back in order to keep peace with my equally hypothetical wife, it wouldn't be my wife's fault if I don't have rent money at the end of the month because I was budgeting as if I would get that money back.
Trent Lott's Senate career was destroyed because he praised Strom Thurmond. I'm not saying that sort of thing happens often, but it's not nothing.
I wish more people would extrapolate from their own vulnerability to insults to the idea that people in general are vulnerable to insults, but this doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.
You forgot cis-hetero.
Obligatory XKCD explaining how hypothetical situations work.
How would you defend it?
Most effectively by insulting the masculinity of any male who disagrees with you. I've actually seen this done. It was almost comical in the degree it went to.
I'm not interested in debating this particular issue, but clearly a reasonable argument could be made based on the disparities in physical strength.
What makes the broader context interesting, however, is that issues like these demonstrate that principled egalitarianism is not a viable Schelling point for basing social norms. This however clearly leads to some very problematic questions.
It is far from "clear" to me that such an argument would be reasonable.
If I chose to defend such a position, I'd defend it by arguing it's more dangerous to indirectly encourage the physically-stronger group to exert violence on the physically-weaker group than vice-versa. The words "on average" to be inserted as appropriate in the preceding sentence.
Still, I'd rather discourage violence altogether.