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Viliam_Bur comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong
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I've asserted occasionally that post-modern moral theories (like the worthwhile parts of feminism) are consistent with empiricism. That is, they look at what as happened before and make predictions about will happen in the future.
That is often down-voted. I suspect that this is because taking feminism seriously would require people to re-think their methods of interacting with others, in a way that would be extremely challenging to their personal identities. That way leads to mindkilling (By the transitive property: The personal is political + Politics is the Mindkiller => The personal is the mindkiller).
I would love to see a rational discussion about feminism.
I guess there are many ideas where I should update, but also a lot of BS... and I have trouble separating these two parts, mostly because saying that "there is a lot of BS" means that I am an evil person not worth discussing with. Asking for evidence is a proof that I don't believe everything, which of course means that I am an ignorant evil male. So I would like to participate in a discussion where my comment "I don't think this is enough evidence for X" or "I think there is an alternative explanation" is countered by more evidence, instead of just pointing out that I don't get it, because I am privileged (because somehow the non-privileged person could never be wrong).
Here is a start at what I'd call empirical feminist. I'm not sure what you mean by rational, if you don't mean empirical.
More generally, I rely on feminist thought to say:
From there, I move on to say:
For arguments-are-soldiers reasons, many feminists are particularly provocative in their redefinition of worlds. Also for arguments-are-soldiers reasons, other feminists are reluctant to call them on being provocative. That's a bug, not a rationalist feature.
But notice that redefinition can be quite powerful, like how "queer" has been reclaimed from being a slur to being a positive label. If you weren't a feminist, would you have predicted this was possible? Keep in mind hindsight bias.
Those "unstated assumptions" seem to me like an analogy to individual "compartmentalization". First thought: they should be made explicit. Second thought: maybe they serve some purpose; most likely to prevent public disorder (read: in worst case thousands of people killing each other). Many of them are probably very outdated, so exposing them would just lead to their removing. Some of them may be sensitive, and making them explicit would bring an open conflict.
As an example, I guess many feminists would be very uncomfortable with public discussion of "pick-up arts" (of course unless they could control the whole discussion). Irony is that PUAs are also trying to expose some unstated rules, for the sake of hacking them.
English is not my first language and I don't live in English-speaking environment, so I don't clearly see the changes of emotions associated with this word. But are you sure it is the feelings about the word that have changed, instead of feelings towards the queers themselves?
To compare: If drinking beer is socially unacceptable in some society, and then decades later drinking beer is acceptable (even though most people there don't drink beer), I certainly wouldn't describe it as "reclaiming the word beer". Of course the connotations of word beer would be changed from "something illegal that only strange people drink" to "something people drink", but that would be just a side effect of the real change.
Similarly, there is a lot of effort to invent and popularize gender-neutral pronouns in English, because it is expected to change something, namely to reduce sexism. However, there already are languages that "naturally" contain gender-neutral pronouns, for example Hungarian. So does this theory predict that Hungarians are less sexist than other nations? Can we measure it somehow?
I think the causality is reversed; it's not like "if we use gender-neutral pronouns, we become less sexist" but "if even the suspicion of being sexist becomes socially unacceptable, then people will use gender-neutral pronouns to signal their non-sexism". People use gender-neutral pronouns because they are sensitive about something, not the other way around; though perhaps the use of those pronouns can further increase their sensitivity.
Feminists would say the conflict already exists, but the majority demands that everyone pretend there is no conflict at all, partially as a beneficial tactic in the conflict. We can make arguments about whether society as a whole is better off masking certain conflicts. But the minority has no reason to respect a tactic that is aimed at, and often achieves the goal of suppressing them.
Well, I suspect that PUA want to learn the unstated rules in order to take advantage of them. They do not want the rules to become explicit common knowledge because that could/would remove the power and effectiveness of the PUA skill set. Aside from the general feminist principle that unstated assumptions should always be made explicit, one can't ignore that the particular unstated assumptions PUA aim to hack are precisely some of the normative expectations about how young women should think that feminists oppose even in the absence of PUA.
All I can do is assert that the feelings about the word have changed. 20-30 years ago, queer and faggot were only slurs. From 2003-2007, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was a reality show playing on TV. But faggot is still a slur.
Alternatively, compare n#@@#r. Given how the word is deployed today, there's no way "N#@@#r Eye for the White Guy" (helping clueless nerds get in touch with their popular culture side, or something) would ever play on television.
This is probably right, and I think feminists learned some of this lesson from the utter failure of the "spelling to reduce sexism (i.e. womyn)" experiment. Have you read this Hofstadter essay? I think it helps show what might be a stake in the vocabulary sensitivity issue.
Some unstated assumptions can be good for minority. Consider for example the idea of religious tolerance, which appeared when society was highly religious. The unstated assumption is that having the right religion does not matter too much, because people not mass-killing each other is more important than believing in the right kind of deity. Now say it too loudly, and religious people will have to oppose this idea, to signal their faith.
More generally, an inconsistent person may be friendly with you in a "near mode", but your opponent in a "far mode" (IMHO people generally are friendly and believe many strange things). When you point out their inconsistency, you may have manufactured yourself an enemy. Or not. Anyway, it involves some risk, so it is better to think about it first.
If enough people already know the rules and discuss them online, it would be difficult to protect the secret. So why not make some money teaching it before it all becomes common sense? However, there is still hope that the rules are so much against what our society teaches us, that you could shout it from the rooftops and still 90% of men would either ignore them or somehow rationalize their akrasia.
Historically, one secret that on average worked in benefit of women, was men's general ignorance (and frustration) about what women want. Simply said, an average heterosexual male would like to have sex with some attractive female, he would like to increase his chances, but he has no idea what is her decision algorithm. So by saying: "X is part of my algorithm", or more politely: "you know, we women really love X" she can manipulate him into giving her X. It is like playing a game where your opponent can lie about their rewards, and thus manipulate you into suboptimal strategy. Some PUAs are trying to "scientifically" discover the true algorithm, so this one specific advantage is removed, and men can finally play this game with full information.
Alternative explanation: If you use the offensive word with the offended person present, how do you estimate the probability of being physically harmed, if the word is (a) "faggot" or (b) "n#@@#r"? I am trying to say, it's not about how tolerant we are, but how dangerous it is to offend someone. Though this explanation does not explain the difference between "queer" and "faggot". I'd like to ask: 20-30 years ago were both these words equally offensive, or if you'd have to choose one of them, would "queer" be somehow less offensive?
Yes, I did, and it made a big impression on me. Then I realised some parts of feminism have value. But perhaps it also set my expectations for other feminist texts too high. Well, not everyone can write like Hofstadter.
Simply put, I disagree that this is an accurate summary of history. People explicitly and publicly argued for toleration on exactly the basis you identified. And it was sometimes implemented. Further, I don't think there is any example in history of the toleration of a community failing because the tolerant were so vocal about it that the intolerant suddenly noticed that the wool was being pulled over their eyes. In short, you've identified the assumption/foundation of tolerance, but this foundation was hardly unstated in the sense I mean.
Without agreeing on mechanism, I can certainly agree that some women conceal their desires in order to manipulate others. It probably extends to everyone in her social circle, but examples include expecting free drinks and insincerely saying "Nothing is wrong." when asked. This type of manipulation is bad, and would be much more difficult if the underlying unstated assumptions went away.
It is not inevitable that the changes I desire will ever happen. Further, PUA functions to support the unstated assumptions it seeks to exploit. PUA Bob has beliefs about how women should behave, and he behaves consistent with those beliefs. Bob's behavior tends to reinforce those beliefs in others. That would be true even if the beliefs were not considered "unstated" by society. But because society does consider them unstated (and punishes making them explicit), reinforcing the beliefs includes reinforcing that they should be unstate-able.
Some of this is before my time, and some of it is far back in my memory. Nonetheless, I'd say that "queer" and "faggot" were about equally offensive when they were both slurs. Queer might even have been worse. (~50% + epsilon for those assertions).
And your discussion of when to expect violence is unlikely to measure offensiveness of different phrases. The culture of poverty is more accepting of violence than the culture of wealth. That is, we would expect an equally offensive statement to cause violence from a culture of poverty when we would not expect violence from a culture of wealth. Stereotypical blacks live in a culture of poverty (because they are poor), and stereotypical homosexuals do not (because the stereotype is that they aren't poor).
The assumptions of society are not the same as assumptions of PUAs. For example, society assumes that men should buy women drinks; but PUAs assume that women prefer men that assertively step out of the crowd -- for example by not buying them drinks when socially expected to.
I fail to see how exactly PUA Bob by not buying women drinks reinforces the societal beliefs. He exposes them and invalidates them, though he does not do it explicitly, so it leaves open door to alternative interpretations, such as: "If you are Bob, you don't have to buy women drinks, but otherwise you have to"; but then is it really Bob's fault if someone comes to this anti-Occam conclusion?
Bob has assumptions that he perhaps shares on his website, such as "if you [man] step out of the crowd, you become more attractive to a [typical] [heterosexual] woman". Are these assumptions secret? No. By being a minority opinions, they are not as widely known as "men should buy women drinks", but if every other PUA writes them on their webpage, I wouldn't call them "unstated".
So it seems to me that the only unstated thing is that Bob, while refusing to buy a drink to Alice, did not explicitly say: "Alice, I am not buying you a drink, because I would like to have sex with you, and according to my hypothesis (which if you are interested to know more you can find fully explosed on my website "www.bob.pua"), not buying you a drink makes you percieve me as standing out of the crowd, which increases my chances." This would be most honest. But can we really expect everyone to speak like this in any situation?
I admit I chose "not buying drink" as the most harmless example. For other examples the analysis may be different. I'm trying to say that a PUA may be etically OK, while still essentially remaining a PUA -- a person trying to increase their sexual pleasure by analyzing human true sexual preferences and optimizing according to them. Again, I admit other people may disagree with this definition of PUA, but this is how I perceive it.
My takeaway from this is that we still don't share a definition of what an unstated assumption is.
PUA has some explicit techniques to seem more appealing to target women. Some of the power of some of those techniques is that they transgress certain norms. I assert that one property of those norms is that society disapproves of discussing them.
But that's independent of the empirical question that I'd state as follows:
I guess the circumstance is: does exhibiting behavior X make the norm A stronger or weaker?
This needs to be analyzed further. Naively, any behavior that transgresses a norm seems to weaken it, but that's not necessarily the case. First, the transgression must be known. Secret transgression weakens the norm for the person who did it, but has no influence on others. Second, the transgression must be rewarded. If people see the transgression and then see punishment, that makes the norm stronger.
In this case, not buying a drink is a public act, and (when successfully done by PUA) it is rewarded, so I conclude that it hurts the norm.
As I write this, this post is at -3. I don't see what reasoning mistake I made in this specific post, because I use the same reasoning in all the rest of my posts in this conversation.
Can someone help me understand why this comment got different treatment.
Yes, the "queers" were by no means the first group to reclaim a slur. The Dutch "Beggars" were going it back in the 14th century, see the real life section of this tvtropes page for more examples.
The important part of reclaiming a word is changing the negative connotation. Once, queer's only meaning was negative. Now, the word is neutral in general society. That's a little different with naming yourself ironically based on the comments of your opponent. That is, I suspect the Dutch Beggars still had negative opinions of actual beggars of the Dutch ethnicity. Or if some religious group called LessWrong members "Arrogant Assholes." It wouldn't be intensely surprising for some of us to adopt that as an unofficial moniker. But that probably wouldn't change our (or society's) prior beliefs about being arrogant or being an asshole.
Regardless, the interesting point about "queer" is not that reclamation as I've described it actually occurred. If empirical feminism is true, there's every reason to think it has happened lots of times before. Sans-culottes appears to be one such example. What is particularly interesting about "queer" is that someone wrote an essay saying, "Let's reclaim 'queer' because it has a negative connotation and that's bad for homosexuals" and the reclamation effort worked. That doesn't seem to be the same process as "sans-culottes" or other historical examples.