FiftyTwo comments on I'd like to talk to some LGBT LWers. - Less Wrong
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It's true that there is a lot of painfully bad epistemology in feminist discourse. However, the proportion of bad epistemology is typical of most human discourse concerned with advocacy. Theorists concerned with advocacy often fail to work according to the following dictum:
That said, I think that I've benefited from reading feminist theory. I think that I sympathize with its claims more often than most people. Reading feminists helps me to overcome the Typical Mind fallacy. For example, the "put myself in a woman's shoes" heuristic wouldn't be enough to make me realize how uncomfortable some women are with being propositioned by an undesirable person in an elevator.
Also, I'm struck by the extent to which feminism and PUA theorists provide independent confirmation for each other. They often join each other in opposition to the conventional wisdom. For example, feminists and, say, PUAs of the Roissy variety will agree that some innocuous-seeming action is intended to infantilize women. The feminists and Roissy just disagree about whether it is right to act that way with that intent. They agree about the "is" claim; they just disagree about the "ought" implications. I typically side with the feminists on the "ought" questions in these cases, but I can appreciate the PUAs for corroborating the underlying "is" claim.
A related issue is that a lot of rather bad philosophy has labelled itself 'feminist' as a way of avoiding the same level of scrutiny it would otherwise have (e.g. look up feminist epistemology or metaphysics). [I'm not saying theres nothing good in them, but theres little benefit from lumping it together outside the mainstream debates.]
This damages 'real' feminism because its associated with these, when most proper feminist statements are fairly logically coherent (e.g. the morally relevant things about humans are found in both genders, therefore we should treat both genders as equal).
I would wager that current epistemology labelled 'feminist' is not reliably worse than mainstream epistemology.