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Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance - Less Wrong
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So if I believe that, say, religion X is wrong and its teachings are immoral, do I qualify as a bigot under this definition?
Only if you are therefore hostile to its members.
Depending on what you mean by "hostile" that may be a perfectly reasonable course of action.
Thats a unique example in that definition, that, in retrospect I should have perhaps left out. Unlike the other groupings religion partly consists in beliefs and values which I think it is often important to be hostile to. Those beliefs and values are closely tied to the culture of a religion which I don't think people should be hostile to. I would not call someone a bigot for criticizing, mocking or insulting the beliefs and values associated with a particular religion. Doing the same to the people themselves or the culture, purposefully, and not the result of merely being uninformed or temporarily blinded would make a person a bigot.
What exactly is the criterion for being an element on the list?
Obviously it's specific contents are political and I don't necessarily think it is complete (or as we seen without mistakes)-- but the criteria for an ideal list is something like 'classes of people that agents cannot help but be members of'.
And that's the problem given that politics is the mindkiller.
Yeah. It's a mess of a hard problem. Thats why I try not to talk about it here because nobody is good at talking about it rationally. I'm not defending every instance of someone calling something racist, sexist etc. I'm not defending everything the people who tend to do it nor the list of groups they do it for.
That being the case I don't think the solution is to deny the harms people are talking about when they complain about racism, sexism etc. And it's going to get talked about at some point just like all politics.
Nor is the solution to suppress discussion of statements that could be construed as bigoted. Even statements about race and IQ, or whether homosexuality is a sexual deviance.
To be fare, the main problem on LessWrong, as opposed to the world in general, is people engaging in motivated stopping and motivated continuation when discussing these topics in an attempt to avoid being sexist (for some reason race is less of a problem) and/or bigots.
Does this question have empirical content that constrains my anticipated experiences? Or is it just a value judgment?
I don't think there is a lot of room or reason to discuss terminal or near-terminal value judgments. I find that criticism along the lines of "Stop valuing that, it's a character defect" is a perfectly reasonable response to terminal value judgments that I disagree with (though I try not to penalize people for value disagreement here since people with bad values can still be insightful about factual matters).
With something like race and IQ I don't think they should be suppressed and haven't tried to suppress them (I have comments elsewhere lamenting such suppression). But do think it is reasonable to expect those conversations to occur at a higher level than they have so far. For whatever reason the most vocal advocates of genetic inheritance as an explanation for the race IQ gap have been worse than average commenters. A while back I linked to an article Steve Hsu wrote on the subject, he showed up and there was briefly a really good back and forth on the subject. But for the most part discussion of the subject here consists of anecdotal evidence, baseless claims and people on both sides paying no attention to the relevant studies or population genetics. It is worthwhile in these cases, I think, for people to do what they can to avoid pattern matching with something designed to demean or oppress people. Both to avoid hurting people unnecessarily and to avoid triggering mind-killing. You don't have to sound like George Cuvier to argue for a genetic explanation of the race IQ-gap.
Edit: Though apparently we can't even talk about talking it without the both of us being downvoted.
I had in mind something like this.
About race and IQ, that really hasn't been a problem here.
Part of the problem is how politicized population genetics has become.
I should probably have listed as an example something like talking about PUA and whether it works, because that has caused problems here, despite being less controversial in the outside world.
Welcome to my reality. ;)
The only thing that offended me was the one value judgment in the bunch:
And I'm not offended on behalf of homosexuals but on behalf of BDSMers and kinky people who take those styles and practice them, but only between consenting adults. The rest of the piece, I think, exhibited a lot of ignorance about modern homosexual and heterosexual sex and desire and an overconfidence in historical records about romantic homosexuality. But I think you might be surprised at how similar his point is to that made by some radical queer theorists I've read.
Many comments like this one get net upvotes. Are you concerned with total or net votes? What are your net votes from such discussions? How possible would it be for you to reshape downvoted-type comments into upvoted-type comments, particularly because any one downvoted comment is unlikely to have received much of your editing attention?
Comments expressing the lament of "people on both sides" are likely to be downvoted by me. I have many similar loose heuristics, such as "vote down people arguing by definition", "vote up people changing their mind", "vote up people citing sources", "vote down people who do not apply the principle of charity", and "vote up comments in which people correctly use the word 'literally'".
You're unlikely to avoid tripping any if you make multiple comments, but I think each is fair and generally the type of content I want to see gets communicated. Consequently I suggest being less concerned by total downvotes, even if your only other change is to be more concerned with net downvotes. It's not really supposed to be possible to avoid tripping any wire any reader has.
But I don't see you getting net downvotes, so I'm not sure if that is instead your complaint...because that would be weird, as getting a near balance of favorable and unfavorable reviews isn't too harsh a form of censorship.
I'm concerned not with my karma total but with the net-negative karma score for individual comments. A net negative karma for a comment signals that Less Wrong does not want to see that comment. When I see net negative comments I try to figure out why. For any one comment there are lots of possible explanations for downvoting. But when I see a trend that suggests downvoting heuristics I think are bad I sometimes publicly lament those heuristics. For example, I see a lot of bad pattern matching downvoting where people say things that unexamined resemble theistic apologist arguments. Taking any position that could be considered political also seems to be subject to downvoting. Especially when that position is inconsistent with the values of the local demographic cluster. Laments of downvote heuristics seems to be a rather unpopular comment type as well. These heuristics have a chilling effect on the discussions of those subjects and partly explain Eugine's complaint:
Fair enough as a heuristic, though I'll note I made it pretty clear which side I thought was worse in the preceding sentences. But don't worry about your downvote- the heuristic you used was fine by me.
What do you label with that symbol? How do you know no aspect of any of them should be criticized, mocked, or insulted?
Good point. Consider it striked.
I had assigned what felt like a 10% probability to your defending that without falling to the no true Scotsman fallacy, so I am disappointed.