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Konkvistador comments on Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance - Less Wrong
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If this was applied consistently for all low status groups I wouldn't mind it.
I'd certainly prefer it that way myself, and try to implement that in my approach to such discussions.
If your objection is over our perceptions of which groups are low-status and in what contexts, say that.
I'm not saying I object (at least not in the way some have). What I'm implicitly refering to is that these kind of usage disputes only ever arise when it comes to gender relations.
Can't speak for anyone else, but I've brought this up re: race and sexual orientation as well in conversations on this site. I don't go looking for it, so the conversation usually has to be fairly current (ie, comments are showing up on the sidebar or it was recently posted to Discussion).
In general I don't start conversations about such things here because I'm well aware my own beliefs and perspective on issues like this are in the minority on this site, and if there's one thing I don't need more of in my life it's arguing with a population comprised mostly of wealthy, white Libertarian-esque cisgendered/heterosexual men whether or not you can be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot.
I'm much more apt to get involved in an existing conversation when some comment grabs my attention and I feel able to reply (or provoked to annoyance by it -- that happens). I critique what passes into my attention, assuming I've get the energy and wherewithal to get into what will most likely be another unproductive argument about it (unproductive because apparently it just feels like mind-killing politics to many of the posters here, who don't have some hands-on experience with being in a social minority and are not apt to readily grasp the difference between "I am angry/hurt by this AND think it is incorrect" and "my disagreement is purely emotional").
Downvoted for formulating the question in a way that treats vaguely defined classes of ideological transgressions as having an independent Platonic existence, implying that their properties should be discussed as if they were independently existing elements of reality, rather than a matter of definition. (And in this case there isn't even anything resembling a standard, precise, clearly stated, and consistently used definition.)
Platonic?
If I step on your toe unintentionally, and you're in pain, just because I don't feel that pain (it wasn't my toe) doesn't mean that any harm done occurred either in a Platonic sense or not at all. It sure as heck doesn't mean that you're an ideologically-motivated, irrational zealot for getting mad when my response is anything other than "Whoops, sorry."
I do not think we share sufficient premises to make discussion worthwhile.
Yes, Platonic -- and it's easy to demonstrate that it follows in a straightforward manner from your phrasing.
To stick with the (relatively) less incendiary of the two, consider the notion of "sexism." Discussing whether some institution, act, or claim is "sexist" makes sense only if at least one of these two conditions applies:
There is some objectively existing Platonic idea of "sexism," so that whether something is "sexist" is ultimately a question of fact that must have an objectively correct yes or no answer.
There is a precise and agreed-upon definition of "sexism," so that whether something is "sexist" is, assuming agreement on questions of fact, ultimately a question of logic (i.e. whether the given facts satisfy the definition), which also must have an objectively correct yes or no answer.
Now, the option (2) is clearly out of the question. This is because the term inherently implies that any "sexist" claim does not belong to the set of reasonable and potentially correct claims and a "sexist" institution or act is outside the bounds of what is defensible and acceptable -- while at the same time nobody has ever given any definition of "sexism" that wouldn't be either so restrictive as to make most of the common usage of the term inconsistent with the definition, or so broad as to make many reasonable and defensible claims and institutions "sexist," thus again contradicting this essential implication of the term. Also, the very fact that you talk about "arguing [...] whether or not you can be [...] sexist [...] without [property X]" implies that there exists some Platonic idea of "sexism," since otherwise it would be a trivial question of whether property X is included in the definition.
Replace "sexism" by "X". Do you think this alternative is still valid?
Or maybe you should elaborate on why you think "sexism" gives rise to this alternative.
Of course it is still valid, unless X corresponds directly to some observable and clearly identifiable element of physical reality, so that its existence is not Platonic, but physically real. Obviously it wouldn't make sense to discuss whether someone has, say, committed theft if there didn't exist a precise and agreed-upon definition of what counts as theft -- or otherwise we would be hunting for some objectively existing Platonic idea of "theft" in order to see whether it applies.
Now of course, in human affairs no definition is perfectly precise, and there will always be problematic corner cases where there may be much disagreement. This precision is ultimately a matter of degree. However, to use the same example again, when people are accused of theft, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the only disagreement is whether the facts of the accusation are correct, and it's only very rarely that even after the facts are agreed upon, there is significant disagreement over whether what happened counts as theft. In contrast, when people are accused of sexism, a discussion almost always immediately starts about whether what they did was really and truly "sexist," even when there is no disagreement at all about what exactly was said or done.
Of course? There must be a miscommunication.
Do you think it makes sense to discuss, say, intelligence, friendship or morality? Do you think these exist either as physically real things or Platonic ideas, or can you supply precise and agreed-upon definitions for them?
I don't count any of my three examples physically real in the sense of being a clearly identifiable part of physical reality. Of course they reduce to physical things at the bottom, but only in the trivial sense in which everything does. Knowing that the reduction exists is one thing, but we don't judge things as intelligent, friendly or moral based on their physical configuration, but on higher-order abstractions. I'm not expecting us to have a disagreement here. I wouldn't consider any of the examples a Platonic idea either. Our concepts and intuitions do not have their source in some independently existing ideal world of perfections. Since you seemed to point to Platonism as a fallacy, we probably don't disagree here either.
So I'm led to expect that you think that to sensibly discuss whether a given behaviour is intelligent, friendly or moral, we need to be able to give precise definitions for intelligence, friendship and morality. But I can only think that this is fundamentally misguided: the discussions around these concepts are relevant precisely because we do not have such definitions at hand. We can try to unpack our intuitions about what we think of as a concept, for example by tabooing the word for it. But this is completely different from giving a definition.
This only reflects on the easiest ways of making or defending against particular kinds of accusations, not at all on the content of the accusations. Morality is similar to sexism in this respect, but it still makes sense to discuss morality without being a Platonist about it or without giving a precise agreed-upon definition.
It is trivial. Jandila's definition of sexism and racism does not include the speaker being a bigot as a necessary criterion. Now, I often complain to my anti-subordination activisty friends that a lot of people don't realize their definitions of racism and sexism don't imply that. It's a problem since people tend to get more defensive than they need to be when someone points out something they did or said that is racist, sexist, anti- gay, etc. But people getting defensive after they know these words don't imply bigotry really is silly. And yet it still happens-- which is why Jandila doesn't always have the patience to deal with it.
That's because words like "bigot, racist, sexist, anti- gay" are frequently used to sneak in conotations that the argument in question (and by extension the person making it) is somehow immoral and can be dismissed without looking at its validity, or at the very least requires us to engage in motivated continuation until the argument has been "rationally" dismissed. If you and Jandila don't mean to sneak in these connotations, say so; however, in that case you should probably pick a word that doesn't have these connotations in common usage.
I didn't mind being told my behavior pattern matches with that of bad people's by people who I thought think probabilistically.
If someone were to see me handcuffed in the back of a police car with blood all over me, they should think me more likely to have killed someone than if they hadn't seen that. If they concluded I killed someone because they saw me there, they would just be stupid.
I am reticent to discuss this without there being any object level issue-- I don't trust either side's claims about how these words are 'frequently used'. I would be comfortable evaluating a specific instance of the use of these words but I suspect discussion of how they tend to be used will just leave people insisting on generalities that flatter their own ideology. Both sides have ways of framing the other's rhetorical techniques as harmful and destructive to honest communication. And both sides are often oblivious to what the other side is saying. Usually when words like sexist and racist are thrown out the users usually have reasons why they used those words instead of others despite (or I guess sometimes because of) connotations. But again, those reasons can't be evaluated in abstract.
Btw, Could you provide your definition of "bigot"? I've gotten a vague idea of what you mean by the word from context, but I'd like to see your formulation. (Note: be prepared to explain why being a "bigot" is obviously a "very bad thing".)
Wikipedia looks fine:
I am not so prepared-- though it doesn't seem especially controversial to me I am vaguely open to an argument that it isn't obvious. But I don't see why I should be expected to explain why.
the problem is that the pain is not caused by someone stepping on your toe, but by someone showing subtle but detectable signs of thinking thoughts that you disagree with.
The pain caused by someone committing thought crime against you has a more dubious ontological status than the pain caused impact upon your toe.
A typical example of this is the word "gay", the latest polite euphemism for male homosexual, the latest of a great many. Like every other polite euphemism for anything, it has become a swear word, a swear word that unlike Carlin's list of seven words you used not to be able to say on TV, still has the power to shock.
Indeed, as soon as one creates a new euphemism, it implies that the thing that it is a euphemism for is unmentionably disgusting, thus becomes good swear word, depriving the euphemism of the niceness that is the essential characteristic of a euphemism, while rendering all previous euphemisms for the thing (of which there are usually large number) too disgusting to speak.
The pain caused by the inevitable and inexorable transition from euphemism to curse word is fundamentally different from the pain caused by stepping on your toes. It is more like the pain caused by losing an election, or someone banging a prettier girl than you banged. The tenth commandment forbids you to experience or admit to experiencing certain kinds of pain. Not all pains have equal status as cause for complaint. You cannot help feeling pain if someone steps on your toes, but you can and should help feeling certain other forms of pain, which forms of pain are therefore less real.
The problem is that some insults (and this is currently true about those relating to homosexuality) get backed up with violence and/or with serious social exclusion-- they aren't "just words".
Also, people don't reliably put abuse behind them. Their reactions to threats that it might start up again are quite strong. The situation is complicated by the fact that these reactions can be amplified by social effects.
Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness has the thesis that, because overt racism isn't socially acceptable but covert racism still goes on, both black and white Americans search for more and more subtle clues to whether people are racist. This looks insane, but is a rational response to a difficult situation.
It is unclear to me that those consequences were unintended.
I think you're overestimating people's competence, but it's hard to tell about that sort of thing.
What's your line of thought?
Hmm... I'd have guessed it was less about being a euphemism and more about English-speakers wanting to have a one-syllable word instead of a five-syllable one, much like "straight" is a one-syllable word for "heterosexual", without this meaning that hetero sex is "unmentionably disgusting".
Even from childhood we know that pain caused by deliberate insults often hurts more than physical fights. People should not seek to take offense where none was meant -- but when offense is meant, and you know it's meant, not being hurt is often harder than ignoring a merely stepped-upon toe. A deliberate insult can linger all day in your mind when a toe is soon forgotten.
We already have more one syllable euphemisms for male homosexual than I can shake a stick at, each of which became a curse word, and each of which was supplanted by another euphemism. The most recent one previous to gay was "queer".
The same usually happens with other euphemisms for other undesirable characteristics - for example "retard".
Euphemisms do not work. If the thing being referred to was OK, we would not be looking for euphemisms, thus euphemising merely draws attention to the fact that the thing being referred to is not OK.
Supporting evidence: American English speakers weren't even content with a two syllable word meaning that homo sex is "unmentionably disgusting", and it's been shortened to one syllable.
But the original word was "queer"... which is now not a curse after having been reclaimed.
But very rarely is someone in trouble for making a deliberate insult. When people get in trouble for being politically incorrect, they are accused of wrongthink, not intentionally insulting any specific identifiable person.
"Wrongthink" is oldspeak. Say 'ungoodthink'.
Also, I'm curious whether you think your assertion holds in cases where an activist organization of (Group X) is the entity that accuses a speaker of political incorrectness towards Group X.
Marginalizing or diminishing people due to the socially enforced classes they belong to is not at all the same thing as "showing subtle signs of thinking thoughts you disagree with".
Feeling demeaned or socially excluded is a fundamentally different kind of pain than that caused by having one's toe stepped on: it is a much more damaging one.
Feeling demeaned is painful and can be worse than having one's toe stepped on. But some people are allowed to complain about it, and other people are not.
It's like saying that stepping on someone's toe is bad, but some people by definition don't have toes. If they claim to have toes too, it only proves their malice -- by pretending to have toes they want to make us less sensitive about the pain of the real toe owners.
If you officially don't have a toe, then everyone is free to step on your toe, because officially it didn't happen. Other people then tell you how lucky you are for not having a toe. Then they accuse you of lack of empathy towards people who have their toes stepped on.
If you mean that there are classes of marginalized people who aren't allowed or aren't capable of objecting to mistreatment I agree. And I would agree that the cluster of people that cares a lot about racism, sexism, etc. often doesn't see such people as deserving justice. When male victims of domestic violence feel excluded by feminist discussions of domestic violence which vilify men for example-- I think that counts as a real harm.
But that does not mean everyone's claim to having had their toe stepped on deserves equal respect or credibility. Claims of harm due to anti-white racism, as if it were equivalent to anti-black racism are really implausible and people taking offense to the suggestion of equivalence is reasonable. This is why I don't agree with the anti-subordination activist's position of privileging first person accounts of dis-empowered people when defining the scope of bigotry and injustice. I think neutral principles of some sort are required to sort out claims of injustice-- but of course I don't know how to arrive at such principles and think it is likely that any criteria I propose will be based on concern for protecting my politically favored groups. And that would be bad. In short, this stuff is really complicated and I'm not really aligned with much anyone on the subject.
And by abduction: lack of empathy for people who have thorns in their side, lack of empathy for those weak at the knees, and eremikophobia (fear of sand).
When someone uses "gay" as a curse word, he is not "marginalizing blah blah blah". He is inadvertently revealing that he thinks homosexuality is a bad thing - or inadvertently revealing that he thinks the frequent change of euphemism is an indication that most people think it is a bad thing. You are punishing him for his beliefs, not for his actions. He is not intentionally attacking anyone.
No one is saying he is. In fact, the context of this entire thread is someone saying explicitly that no one is saying he is.
Jandila:
When people say "that shit is gay" gay people feel marginalized and diminished. They feel hurt. Whether or not it was intentional (and certainly it often is).
Or he could be advertently revealing that fact.
Whether you feel pain or not is a fact. It's territory, not map.
Whether someone is racist/sexist depends on definitions. These are categories -- which are map, not territory.
I'd guess that whatever value is derived by arguing over whether someone is racist or sexist can be produced better by tabooing those words, and arguing more specifically over what the specific claim is ("would his words be offensive to a significant number of member of such group" "is he trying to increase his own group's relative power/privilege over the other group", "does he believe in an innate inferior moral worth for that group", etc, etc)
I notice a glaring omission from your list of questions. Namely "are his words if interpreted as a factual claim and/or argument true and/or valid"
Back in the days when incorrect beliefs about the trinity could get you into trouble, it became heresy to doubt that Jesus was god. Shortly thereafter some people stopped believing he was man, which in due course also became heresy. Much drama ensued on the question of whether Christ was cosubstantial with god, or consubstantial with god, and whether the holy ghost proceeded from Christ, or God, or both, and whether God was three or one or both.
Discussions of racism are apt to develop a similar character.
On a conservative blog, the blogger will say something politically incorrect, which in less right wing circles would be deemed "racist". Then one of the commenters too plainly says something horribly racist, which is clearly implied by and logically follows from the original post on which he is commenting. The right wing blogger, of course, firmly denies his post has such horrid implications, denounces the commenter as disgustingly racist, and bans him.
However, in the historical discussions of the Trinity, the opposing sides at least made it clear what exact beliefs they considered as orthodox and which heretical, and spelled out the criteria for orthodox beliefs and their official justifications at length, always ready to elaborate still further if any details remained ambiguous. (However arbitrary and illogical these official justifications may have been.)
In contrast, in the modern discussions of racism, sexism, and other ideological transgressions, it is never spelled out explicitly and clearly what exact beliefs one is supposed to profess to remain orthodox. Rather, there exists a pretense that there is a certain set of beliefs that will be accepted by all people who are not malevolent or delusional -- and if you ask for a precise and clear statement of what exactly these beliefs are (and let alone how they are justified), this is by itself considered as strong evidence of ideological transgression, since only a malcontent would ask so many annoying questions about things that are supposed to be plainly obvious to sane and honest people.
A clear and explicit list of official doctrine that it is forbidden to question, such as the those pronounced by various parties in historical trinitarian disputes, is at least honest and upfront in what it demands. What we see today however is the utterly mendacious and delusional insistence that the official doctrine is a product of pure rationality and free thinking that can be denied only out of insanity or malicious dishonesty.
On the other hand, the long lists of condemned theses, censured theses, and prohibited articles of the thirteenth century gave no real indication of what was not condemned, not censured, and not prohibited.
I think that the differences you perceive are because the analogies you and sam0345 make to "religious heresy" are really really bad ones. Christ wasn't truly around to be offended or not offended if someone got his nature wrong. Demanding adherence to a particular theology was basically just a demand by the church for complete monopoly of thinking. Disagreements about the nature of Christ were effectively attacks on the authority of the church.
The best modern-day analogy to such issues of religious heresy, are probably the intra-Communist squabbles about Stalin and Trotsky and Mao and revisionism and whatever...
But in regards to racism and sexism though, it's not about lowering the status of institutions like the Church or the Communist Party, but about lowering the status of groups of actual people. It's a much more... decentralized defection, and similarly it gets a much more decentralized punishment -- in Western states there's no single "punishing authority" as there used to be in Communist regimes for defections against communist ideology, or there still is in Theocratic regimes for defections against theocratic ideology.
I agree these are helpful paraphrases-- but as a practical matter increasing the burden on the person trying to point out the offense or marginalization isn't necessarily a good idea since it often very difficult for people to call their friends and acquaintances on such matters. For example, I imagine it is very difficult for a black person surrounded by white people to call out behavior that makes them feel marginalized-- there is a great deal of social pressure against this. In normal social contexts a minority should be free to express how something makes them feel without being expected to enter into an extended defense of the matter.
Here at Less Wrong, I almost always translate "is x-ist" in the way you suggest and think it is worthwhile where the goal of the discussion is truth seeking (I'm not a member of many relevant minorities, though)
Why is this being downvoted?
Dunno. Didn't cite any sources I guess. ;p
I downvoted it for the following claim:
"many of the posters here, who don't have some hands-on experience with being in a social minority and are not apt to readily grasp the difference between "I am angry/hurt by this AND think it is incorrect" and "my disagreement is purely emotional")."
I think it is unfair to say they do not understand when they may simply believe that motivated cognition is occurring or similar.
I tried.
I'd be intrigued to see an example of an argument for the statement:
"You can't be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot"
because I have never seen that sentiment expressed in my life. And I find it hard to see many people agreeing with it. Reasoning that it is false is far too simple.*
*(imagine a world where the general belief is that green people are brutish and ignorant, and should be killed on sight. Now imagine a farmer who has been told this, and believes it, and has never seen any evidence to the contrary. Has he ever made a decision of the form "Should I be bigoted? Yes I should"?)
You raise a good point, and that's that definitions are unclear and there is little consensus on them. I'm not making my meaning explicit enough, and should probably taboo the words I'm using here.
I've often observed people defend themselves or others against accusations of racism, sexism, and whatever by replying that they are not intentionally being bigoted.
It's not ridiculous to infer from that observation that many people believe that, in order to be racist/sexist/whatever, one must be intentionally bigoted.
That said, I think it's the wrong inference. What I infer from it is instead that many people emotionally reject such accusations and grab whatever arguments they can think of to counter them, even arguments that depend on premises that many of those same people would rightly reject as absurd when phrased in the abstract.
(Comment retracted because it was based on a misreading.)
So, according to you, what is the definition of being "racist/sexist/whatever" that would allow us to draw the conclusion that this inference is wrong? And what is the reason why we should agree on this definition?
To consider a less controversial analogy, if you are accused of theft, there are multiple necessary conditions in the standard definition of theft that you can use to counter the accusation if your act did not involve any one of them. For example, you might argue that the property claim of the accuser is invalid, that the taking was unintentional or done under duress or out of life-saving necessity, that the act is excusable under the de minimis principle, etc., etc.
Now, if it often happens that there is a complete agreement on facts but there is still a disagreement on whether a given act constitutes theft, we can only conclude that the definition of "theft" is controversial and non-standardized, so it doesn't make any sense for people to talk about "theft" before they've made it explicit what exact definition they apply. Which indeed may be the case -- sometimes there are conflicts between people coming from cultures or milieus that have very different ideas on what constitutes a valid property claim, what counts as duress or necessity, what is excusable under de minimis, and so on. Such conflict has no objectively correct resolution, and the outcome depends on who will prevail by means other than rational discussion of facts and logic. And if it makes sense to accuse someone of theft, it is only under the assumption that there is an agreed-upon definition of theft that is clearly satisfied by the fact asserted in your accusation.
Yet unlike this analogy, you seem to believe that there is some objective sense in which someone is "racist/sexist/whatever," despite the evident lack of agreement on what these terms are supposed to mean, or even whether they make any sense at all.
Nope, I don't believe that "racism" (etc.) is any more objectively defined a category than "theft", and I don't think there's any particular definition of it we should all agree on. I agree with you that disagreements about category membership can arise even when there's agreement on facts, both with respect to "racism" (etc.) and more or less every other human category.
(This is not surprising, given that the way human brains categorize percepts and concepts maps very imperfectly to how we imagine definitions working; the whole idea of categories having definitions is a very poor approximation of what's going on. But that's a digression.)
If anything I've said implies that "racism" or any other category has an objective definition in the sense you seem to mean here, I've completely missed that implication and am likely very confused. If you feel inclined to unpack what it was I said that implies that, I'd be appreciative.
Looking back, it seems like I misunderstood your comment. Specifically, I misinterpreted what exactly the "wrongness" in the last paragraph refers to, which makes my criticism inapplicable. My apologies.
No worries; glad the confusion was easily remediable.