wedrifid comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong

157 Post author: Yvain 27 August 2012 03:36AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (1742)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: wedrifid 27 August 2012 05:06:28PM 0 points [-]

...in increasing order of sophistication, I guess.

I was trying to think of the right word to use for the kind of thought on the subject. Unfortunately all the most natural descriptions that sprung to mind like "prejudiced, hypocritical, sexist, inconsistent" were far more loaded than I wanted in the context. I settled on sophistication, which is at least at least subjective enough that we could consider "sophisticated in terms of adhering to the arbitrary ideal of treating people equally independently of superficial stereotyped features". Of course often 'sophistication' actually means being better at implementing convoluted and hypocritically self serving value systems so I'm still not comfortable using the word here. Should have gone with "more betterer".

Comment author: DaFranker 27 August 2012 05:18:47PM 1 point [-]

Yeah, I was facing the same problem. Perhaps a sufficient reduction would be "progress in their personal understanding of the causes and harms of sexism".

Oddly enough, I usually don't find the term "sophisticated" to have nearly as much negative connotation as other readers.