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Said Achmiz70

You raise some interesting points about slander/libel. I don't dispute the empirical issue (though differences between American and British law here shouldn't be overlooked), but I don't think I'm convinced on the normative front, though your examples have made me less certain of my stance.

As for your last point: whether we as a society agree that the target is entitled to take offense seems like the straightforward operationalization of implementing the two-place function of offense as a one-place function. So when I say "I don't think X should be considered offensive", I'm not making any sort of claim about whether any particular person will in fact take offense; the claim I am making is something along the lines of "we should not consider offense taken at X to be justified, and we should not care about said offense, or modify our behavior (i.e. stop saying X) on the basis of said offense".

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satt40

I don't dispute the empirical issue (though differences between American and British law here shouldn't be overlooked),

Fair enough.

but I don't think I'm convinced on the normative front, though your examples have made me less certain of my stance.

That's all I can realistically hope for on a wide-ranging normative issue like this.

Your one-place operationalization of offence sounds reasonable, as does your unpacking of what you mean by "I don't think X should be considered offensive". (Although even with your definition, I still think there exists X such that X is both true & offensive.)

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by daenerys
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99

Standard Intro

The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.

About two months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post.  There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts. 

Seven women submitted, totaling about 18 pages. 

Crocker's Warning- Submitters were told to not hold back for politeness. You are allowed to disagree, but these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post

To the submittrs- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.

Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)

Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.

Minimizing the Inferential Distance

One problem that I think exists in discussions about gender issues between men and women, is that the inferential distance is much greater than either group realizes. Women might assume that men know what experiences women might face, and so not explicitly mention specific examples. Men might assume they know what the women are talking about, but have never really heard specific examples. Or they might assume that these types of things only happened in the past, or not to the types of females in their in-group

So for the first post in this series, I thought it would be worthwhile to try to lower this inferential distance, by sharing specific examples of what it's like as a smart/geeky female. When submitters didn't know what to write, I directed them to this article, by Julia Wise (copied below), and told them to write their own stories. These are not related to LW culture specifically, but rather meant to explain where the women here are coming from. Warning: This article is a collection of anecdotes, NOT a logical argument. If you are not interested in anecdotes, don't read it.

 

Copied from the original article (by a woman on LW) on Radiant Things:

It's lunchtime in fourth grade. I am explaining to Leslie, who has no friends but me, why we should stick together. “We're both rejects,” I tell her. She draws back, affronted. “We're not rejects!” she says. I'm puzzled. It hadn't occurred to me that she wanted to be normal.

…................

It's the first week of eighth grade. In a lesson on prehistory, the teacher is trying and failing to pronounce “Australopithecus.” I blurt out the correct pronunciation (which my father taught me in early childhood because he thought it was fun to say). The boy next to me gives me a glare and begins looking for alliterative insults. “Fruity female” is the best he can manage. “Geek girl” seems more apt, but I don't suggest it.

…..................

It's lunchtime in seventh grade. I'm sitting next to my two best friends, Bridget and Christine, on one side of a cafeteria table. We have been obsessed with Star Wars for a year now, and the school's two male Star Wars fans are seated opposite us. Under Greyson's leadership, we are making up roleplaying characters. I begin describing my character, a space-traveling musician named Anya. “Why are your characters always girls?” Grayson complains. “Just because you're girls doesn't mean your characters have to be.”

“Your characters are always boys,” we retort. He's right, though – female characters are an anomaly in the Star Wars universe. George Lucas (a boy) populated his trilogy with 97% male characters.

…................

It's Bridget's thirteenth birthday, and four of us are spending the night at her house. While her parents sleep, we are roleplaying that we have been captured by Imperials and are escaping a detention cell. This is not papers-and-dice roleplaying, but advanced make-believe with lots of pretend blaster battles and dodging behind furniture. 

Christine and Cass, aspiring writers, use roleplaying as a way to test out plots in which they make daring raids and die nobly. Bridget, a future lawyer, and I, a future social worker, use it as a way to test out moral principles. Bridget has been trying to persuade us that the Empire is a legitimate government and we shouldn't be trying to overthrow it at all. I've been trying to persuade Amy that shooting stormtroopers is wrong. They are having none of it. 

We all like daring escapes, though, so we do plenty of that.

…...............

It's two weeks after the Columbine shootings, and the local paper has run an editorial denouncing parents who raise "geeks and goths." I write my first-ever letter to the editor, defending geeks as kids parents should be proud of. A girl sidles up to me at the lunch table. "I really liked your letter in the paper," she mutters, and skitters away.

................

It's tenth grade, and I can't bring myself to tell the president of the chess club how desperately I love him. One day I go to chess club just to be near him. There is only one other girl there, and she's really good at chess. I'm not, and I spend the meeting leaning silently on a wall because I can't stand to lose to a boy. Anyway, I despise the girls who join robotics club to be near boys they like, and I don't want to be one of them.

................

It's eleventh grade, and we are gathered after school to play Dungeons and Dragons. (My father, who originally forbid me to play D&D because he had heard it would lead us to hack each other to pieces with axes, has relented.) Christine is Dungeonmaster, and she has recruited two feckless boys to play with us. One of them is in love with her.

(Nugent points out that D&D is essentially combat reworked for physically awkward people, a way of reducing battle to dice rolls and calculations. Christine has been trained by her uncle in the typical swords-and-sorcery style of play, but when she and I play the culture is different. All our adventures feature pauses for our characters to make tea and omelets.)

On this afternoon, our characters are venturing into the countryside and come across two emaciated farmers who tell us their fields are unplowed because dark elves from the forest keep attacking them. “They're going to starve if they don't get a crop in the ground,” I declare. “We've got to plow at least one field.” The boys go along with this plan.

“The farmers tell you their plow has rusted and doesn't work,” the Dungeonmaster informs us from behind her screen. 

I persist. “There's got to be something we can use. I look around to see if there's anything else pointy I can use as a plow.” 

The Dungeonmaster considers. “There's a metal gate,” she decides.

“Okay, I rig up some kind of harness and hitch it to the pony.”

“It's rusty too,” intones the Dungeonmaster, “and pieces of it keep breaking off. Look, you're not supposed to be farming. You're supposed to go into the forest and find the dark elves. I don't have anything else about the farmers. The elves are the adventure.” Reluctantly, I give up my agricultural rescue plan and we go into the forest to hack at elves.

…............................

I'm 25 and Jeff's sister's boyfriend is complaining that he never gets to play Magic: the Gathering because he doesn't know anyone who plays. “You could play with Julia,” Jeff suggests. 

“Very funny,” says Danner, rolling his eyes.

Jeff and I look at each other. I realize geeks no longer read me as a geek. I still love ideas, love alternate imaginings of how life could be, love being right, but now I care about seeming normal.

“...I wasn't joking,” Jeff says. 

“It's okay,” I reassure Danner. “I used to play every day, but I've pretty much forgotten how.”

 

…............................

 

A's Submission

 

My creepy/danger alert was much higher at a meeting with a high-status (read: supposedly utility-generating, which includes attractive in the sense of pleasing or exciting to look at, but mostly the utility is supposed to be from actions, like work or play) man who was supposed to be my boss for an internship.

The way he talked about the previous intern, a female, the sleazy way he looked while reminiscing and then had to smoke a cigarette, while in a meeting with me, my father (an employer who was abusive), and the internship program director, plus the fact that when I was walking towards the meeting room, the employees of the company, all men, stared at me and remarked, “It’s a girl,” well, I became so creeped out that I didn’t want to go back. It was hard, as a less articulate 16 year-old, to explain to the internship director all that stuff without sounding irrational. But not being able to explain my brain’s priors (incl. abuses that it had previously been too naïve/ignorant to warn against and prevent) wasn’t going to change them or decrease the avoidance-inducing fear and anxiety.

So after some awkward attempts to answer the internship director’s question of why I didn’t want to work there, I asked for a placement with a different company, which she couldn’t do, unfortunately.

 

B's Submission

 

Words from my father’s mouth, growing up: “You *need* to be able to cook and keep a clean house, or what man would want to marry you?”

…................

Sixth grade year, I had absolutely no friends whatsoever. A boy I had a bit of a crush on asked me out on a dare. I told him “no,” and he walked back to his laughing friends.

…................

In college I joined the local SCA (medieval) group, and took up heavy weapons combat. The local (almost all-male) “stick jocks” were very supportive and happy to help. Many had even read “The Armored Rose” and so knew about female-specific issues and how to adapt what they were teaching to deal with things like a lower center of gravity, less muscle mass, a different grip, and ingrained cultural hang-ups. The guys were great. But there was one problem: There was no female-sized loaner armor.

See, armor is an expensive investment for a new hobby, and so local groups provide loaner armor for newbies, which generally consist of hand-me-downs from the more experienced fighters. We had a decent amount of new female fighters in our college groups, but without a pre-existing generation of female fighters (women hadn’t even been allowed to fight until the 80s) there wasn’t anything to hand down. 

The only scar I ever got from heavy combat was armor bite from wearing much-too-large loaner armor. I eventually got my own kit, and (Happy Ending) the upcoming generation of our group always made sure to acquire loaner armor for BOTH genders.

…................

Because of a lack of options, and not really having anywhere else to go, I moved in with my boyfriend and got married at a rather young age (20 and 22, respectively). I had no clue how to be independent. One of the most empowering things I ever did was starting work as an exotic dancer. After years of thinking that I couldn't support myself, it gave me the confidence that I could leave an unhappy marriage without ending up on the street (or more likely, mooching off friends and relatives). Another Happy Ending- Now I'm completely independent.

…................

Walking into the library. A man holds open the door for me. I smile and thank him as I walk through. He makes a sexual comment. I do the Look-Straight-Ahead-and-Walk-Quickly thing. 

“Bitch,” he spits out.

It’s not the first of this kind of interaction in my life, and it most certainly won’t be the last (almost any time you are in an urban environment, without a male). But it hit harder than most because I had been expecting a polite interaction.

Relevant link: http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/why-men-catcall/

…................

 

 

 

The next post will be on Group Attribution Error, and will come out when I get around to it. :P

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[-][anonymous]580

I'm not going to spend much effort in the comment section here because my activity will only empower the ideological dynamic at work. I refuse to engage in a losing strategy. Read Mencius Moldbug on why Conservatism always fails (this isn't a good place to start reading him, seek other recommendations then return to the linked piece) to see which losing strategy I mean. While I hold some right wing positions I'm not talking about mainstream Conservatism here but conservatism towards the LessWrong culture and ethos as I knew them. Even this comment is likely a mistake but I just can't keep quiet on this because of internal anguish.

It is not the opening material that bother me so bitterly, since I found that it had interesting examples of experience to share. Gathering and posting it also seemed a good idea to me in my optimism some weeks ago. The comment section however... I disagreed about it being too nitpicky, but now I wonder if I was wrong. I think some are plain avoiding attacking the fundamental assumptions, in a way similar to how I'm about to briefly do, in order to avoid the gender drama LW is infamous for. If so the game is already over.

The personal experiences shared bas... (read more)

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[-]NancyLebovitz280

I agree that what gets foregrounded matters, and that people can learn to foreground different things. Furthermore, I know by experience that the current feminist and anti-racist material I've read has cranked up my sensitivity, and not always in ways that I like.

One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don't seem to have a vision of what success would be like. (I've asked groups a couple of times, and no one did. One person even apologized for my getting the impression that she might have such a vision.)

However, it's not obvious to me that it's impossible to raise the level of comfort that people have with each other. The same dynamics isn't identical to the same total ill effect.

I'm hoping that the current high-friction approach will lead to the invention of better methods. I'm pretty sure that a major contributor to the current difficulties is that there is no reliable method of enabling people to become less prejudiced. I've wondered whether reshaping implicit association tests into video games would help.

I'm very grateful to LW for being a place where it seems safe to me to raise these concerns.

Reply
[-]JoshuaZ110

One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don't seem to have a vision of what success would be like.

This is connected to a more general issue: Institutions and movements very rarely acknowledge when the issue they've dealt with is essentially solved. You see this in other examples as well organizations to prevent animal cruelty would be one example. When an organization goes completely away it is more often because they were on the losing side of political and social discourse (e.g. pro-prohibition groups, anti-miscegenation organizations). The only example I'm aware of where the organizations simply died out after essentially a success is organizations to help deal with polio, and even that still exists in limited forms.

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[-]NancyLebovitz100

I've got some sympathy for people who don't want to shut down organizations merely because they've succeeded.

Stable organizations are hard to create, and people apt to have a lot of valuable social relationships in them.

Ideally, an organization which has achieved a definitive win would find a new goal.

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[-]JoshuaZ120

Ideally, an organization which has achieved a definitive win would find a new goal.

Yes, but this seems to happen extremely rarely. The only example I'm aware of is how some abolitionist groups helped transition into pro-black rights groups in the post Civil War era.

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2TimS
That's a reasonable point - but are there lessons to be learned from organizations that continued to be disproportionally powerful even after their problem was solved? I'm thinking of groups like the Sierra Club. My impression is the group is less powerful than it once was - and the problem is more solved than it was.
3JoshuaZ
Global warming might suggest otherwise. As to political power- if one is judging by amount of discussion in political discourse, in many ways, the environmental movement has substantially lost power in the last 40 years, at least in the US. It used to have broad, bipartisan support, whereas now it is primarily an issue only supported on the contemporary left. But yes, the general situation in many respects is much better (we don't have rivers catching on fire obviously.)
4Randy_M
I think it would be more accurate to say that environmentalism is a broad label; the facets that used to have bipartisan support still do, generally, but new issues have arisen under the label that are supported by a much smaller group.
2JoshuaZ
That's probably true to some extent, but not universally. For example, in the early 1970s, having fuel efficient cars was a bipartisan issue, whereas now attempts to minimize gasoline consumption are more decidedly on the left.
4Randy_M
Due to the law of diminishing marginal returns, fuel efficiency itself is a broad issue. You could, if you were charitable, see the parties a representing a search for absolute improvements in all areas, vs searching for the current most efficient improvements; such that when technology improved so that improving fuel efficiency was cheaper & safer then it would again be bi-partisan. Most likely, neither is that rational about the matter, but there is an inkling of truth to it.
1JoshuaZ
Diminishing marginal returns may have something to do with it. Fuel efficiency for passenger cars has increased by about a third, and larger increases have occurred in vans and small trucks.Relevant graph. But, compared to the maximum efficiency for their types, efficiency is still extremely low. And efficiency for large trucks is essentially unchanged. So I'm not sure we've really hit that point that substantially.
1Eugine_Nier
Yes, fuel efficiency can be increased at the expanse of something else, e.g., cost, safety, etc.
8Kaj_Sotala
I'm not sure whether this is particular to those groups. I would expect that most Democrats, Republicans, environmentalists, animal rights activists, human rights activists, transhumanists, LW-style rationalists, or for that matter anyone who wants to change society in a certain direction, don't have a clear vision of what success would be like, either. Nor do I know whether I'd consider that an issue. To some extent, not having such a vision is perfectly reasonable, since there are lots of opposing forces shaping society in entirely different directions, and it can be more useful to just focus on what you can do now instead of dreaming up utopias. Of course, a concrete vision could help - but people could also be helped if they had a clear vision of where they want to be (with their personal lives) in ten years, and most people don't seem to have that, either. Humans just aren't automatically strategic.
[-]NancyLebovitz130

My reason for being concerned about the lack of a positive vision is related to my experience reading RaceFail-- it felt like being on the receiving end of "I can't explain what I want you to do, I just want to stop hurting, and I'm going to keep attacking until I feel better".

This does not mean they were totally in the wrong-- one of the things I realized fairly early is that there are two kinds of people who could plausibly say "you figure out how not to piss me off"-- abusers and people who are trying to deal with a clueless abuser.

Reply
4thomblake
I submit that the latter who react that way are still abusers - abuse in self-defense is still abuse.
1saturn
Are you saying that abuse victims have an obligation to coach their abusers in how not to be abusive?
4Eugine_Nier
I think people complaining about things like implicit association tests are missing the fundamental problem. The problem isn't that people's system I has 'racist' aliefs, it's that those aliefs do in fact correspond to reality.
6NancyLebovitz
Why do you believe that people's prejudices are generally accurate?
3Eugine_Nier
Look at the statistics for race and IQ (or any other measure of intelligence), or race and crime rate.
4A1987dM
They show that East Asian are smarter in average than White Americans, and I'm not sure that many people alieve that. Any such statistic would also reflect any bias in the law-enforcement system. How do we know how many white people commit crimes but don't get caught?
5Jayson_Virissimo
I do; am I mistaken to do so? Asian-Americans also have lower crime rates than White Americans. Are you saying this is likely due to "bias in the law-enforcement system"?
1A1987dM
Probably not; but IMO the criterion of mistakenness for aliefs (unlike for beliefs) is not being instrumentally useful (rather than not being epistemically accurate). If I'm trying to attract women, alieving that I'm unattractive would be a mistaken alief (though the linked article doesn't use the word “alief”). I've written before about how aliefs about races can be problematic even when epistemically accurate. (My own aliefs about these things happen to be wrong even epistemically, so I need to be extra careful to compensate for them when I notice them.)
6Eugine_Nier
Having good aliefs about criminality, for example, is instrumentally useful.
1CCC
My idea of an anti-racial society is one in which skin colour and race don't matter - where they're considered about as relevant as (say) hair colour is today. I haven't really thought through the consequences of this in detail, but that's what I'd consider a victory condition for an anti-racial agenda. Now that I think about it, though, it implies that an important step towards this result might be the production and commercialisation of 'skin dyes' for aesthetic purposes.
8NancyLebovitz
The problem there is that skin color is also fairly well correlated with groups of sub-cultures, so skin color not mattering at all might mean that the all the sub-cultures have dissolved. This might or might not be a loss in the utilitarian sense, but it would look like a huge loss to many of the people who are in those sub-cultures now. I mean this in a fully general sense-- white represents a group of sub-cultures, and so does Christian.
1CCC
I don't want to dissolve the richness of the subcultures (and I don't think that's possible, in any case). I want to dissolve the correlation.
8NancyLebovitz
Minor note: In that case, you wouldn't just need fast, safe, cheap, and easy skin dye, you'd need similar change to be available for at least faces and hair and possibly for skeletons-- it might be easier for people to just live as computer programs than to do this physically.
6Qiaochu_Yuan
I don't understand what you mean by "matter." People don't care about hair color because hair color is not very predictive of other traits that people care about, but this doesn't seem to be true of race.
5Emile
You mean like in some African countries where women apply skin-whitening products to look "prettier"? I'm not sure that's the best example of a step towards a world where skin color doesn't matter.
2CCC
I'm thinking of products that (safely, and temporarily) allow anyone to make their skin bright purple. Or blue. Or orange. Or, yes, black or white. I'm thinking that when such products are widely known and used by a sufficiently large percentage of the population, then there will always be enough of a question (is he "really" black, or is that skin dye?) to cause most people to either re-think their assumptions, or at least to apply them a little more cautiously.
4MichaelVassar
Dr. Seuss wrote about this.
[-][anonymous]210

Read Mencius Moldbug on why Conservatism always fails (this isn't a good place to start reading him, seek other recommendations then return to the linked piece) to see which losing strategy I mean.

Summary for people who don't have infinite amounts of time to waste (unlike me):

  1. The political struggle between conservative and progressive ideology is essentially of religious character, evolving from the ancient conflict between Catholics and Protestants respectively; that conflict, the Catholics mostly lost.
  2. Progressives in general are more or less unaware that they are upholding a religious doctrine.
  3. Conservatives either have been or are incapable of being successful in convincing progressives of this fact, or alternatively, are themselves unaware of its essentially religious content.
  4. Therefore, in engaging in political discourse, conservatives have already conceded the main point.
  5. The proper course of action is to switch venues (e.g., refuse to participate in elections) or to convince Progressives that "while they may think they're rebels, they're actually loyal servants of a theocratic one-party state."
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6buybuydandavis
For those seeking to undermine Progressives, shouldn't you be trying to convince most everyone that Progressives are theocrats, and not just Progressives? And I thought Moldbug said Progressives win because their politics empower the media, academia, and government, creating a positive feedback loop for Progressive opinions in those arenas. Not being recognized as theocrats is an advantage they have against conservatives, but that advantage is not as decisive as having a positive feedback loop.
4[anonymous]
This is what I consider among his most important insights. Probably yes, but I'm not that confident. Some strategies to weaken the loop if it is understood probably do exist and are probably similar to those of fighting the influence of a particular religion in society. Think Dissolution of the Monasteries.
5buybuydandavis
Not that confident of what? Something I said? I agree that the positive feedback loop can weaken. I think it already has. There's a lot more media outside the official channels, and higher education is in the midst of a huge bubble. Maybe government too, with the unsustainable government debt levels throughout the western world. Will the debt holders basically take control of governments and force them to run their tax farming businesses more efficiently? The IMF has been doing that to countries for years. That seems a more likely future than a Moldbug restoration.
1[anonymous]
Not that confident the media/academia belief pump cycle is a greater advantage than the hidden nature of their theocracy.
4buybuydandavis
If the hidden nature of the theocracy is the main problem, we'll have to wait for a societal wide embrace of Stirner for relief. I'm not holding my breath on that one. I had hoped that Hitchens might someday turn on his fellow "atheists", and bring the fight to moral theocracies as he had to supernatural theocracies. Guess not. Can you think of any moderately prominent person or group who might make the case, and might be listened? I can't. EDIT: On further review of Moldbug, he has a short series of Anti-Idealism blog posts that makes some of the same basic points that Stirner does. He even makes a similar point to what I have above about the New Atheists. http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/why-do-atheists-believe-in-religion.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/our-planet-is-infested-with-pseudo.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/idealism-is-not-great.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/unlikely-appeal-of-nonidealism.html
2Eugine_Nier
If not for said belief pump, would "theocracy" necessarily even be a boo light?
1Kaj_Sotala
I don't understand this (and don't have the time to read Moldbug): if the whole struggle is essentially of religious character, then aren't both sides upholding religious doctrines? So how does engaging with the progressives mean "conceding the main point" - aren't the progressives likewise conceding the main point when engaging with the conservatives? Maybe the intended meaning is that the progressives denounce conservatives for being religious, while actually being religious themselves? That would make some sense, but not all conservatives are actually basing their arguments in religion. After all, Konkvistador was talking about "conservatism on Less Wrong", which certainly wouldn't fit the bill.
[-]Bugmaster140

And I find it obvious that nearly any kind of social standard will produce nearly exactly the same dynamics, just for people with different sets of traits, since these are features -- not bugs -- of how social apes work.

The other things you say sound convincing, but this particular sentence sounds like the Naturalistic Fallacy. There are lots of "features" built into humans, such as old age and Alzheimers, myopia, inability to multiply large numbers very quickly, etc. But humans have been working steadily over the ages to mitigate these weaknesses with technology, and thus I find it difficult to believe that any specific weakness is unfixable a priori.

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[-][anonymous]120

I didn't mean to say they are how things should work, merely how I think they do work, they are the unfortunate compromises we end up nearly always making. A feature need not be desirable in itself to be necessary or the best out of a bad set of options.

Up voted for pointing this out though, since I suspect others may have read it that way as well.

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4Bugmaster
Yes, you are probably right about that. Still, "tricky" is not the same as "impossible". Humans have made sweeping social changes before, after all; for example, outright slavery is considered to be immoral by a large proportion of humans currently living on Earth, which did not use to be the case in the past. Though, admittedly, such changes would probably be more difficult to effect than, say, the cure for Alzheimers...
9[anonymous]
Fixing human biology or conditioning is easy with the right technology, but the game theory that often pushed the biology or the conditioning there in the first place can be more tricky.
7ewbrownv
Very true. Also, the 'right technology' does not currently exist, and isn't likely to in the next decade. Social reformers often don't seem to understand that pushing a society far away from 'default' human modes of conduct is a bit like pushing a boulder up an increasingly steep slope - you spend more and more energy fighting just to stay in place, while creating an increasingly dangerous pool of potential energy that acts to oppose your efforts. Push hard enough for long enough, and eventually you get crushed as the boulder rolls back downhill.
[-]TorqueDrifter110

Exactly, this is why there haven't been any successful social reforms, and people who try to effect reform are successful at first but lose momentum as the reform gets more and more established before being crushed by powerful historical forces. At least that's the word in my local Baron's court.

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[-]Nornagest120

You have a Baron? We just talk things out over the campfire while pounding willow bark and sucking the marrow out of aurochs bones.

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6TorqueDrifter
Grunt grunt grunt, ook ook.
8[anonymous]
performs mitosis
6TorqueDrifter
You say there was what size bang?
2[anonymous]
I would say having a Baron is more civilized than having a popularity contest. I bet the latter is how things around the stone age camp-fire where worked out.
[-]NancyLebovitz160

You know what it's like living with popularity contests Have you lived with a Baron?

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3Nornagest
My post was not meant as an endorsement of that lifestyle, nor as a condemnation; I was mainly trying to point out that it existed and was quite different from most stratified post-Neolithic social systems. Honestly, we don't know enough about what the average Paleolithic social structure looked like to advocate effectively for it, even if we wanted to.
5[anonymous]
I agree with this. Even modern examples of tribes with tech not far above that level aren't representative due to marginal terrain and interaction with other groups.
2NancyLebovitz
Also, modern paleolithic societies might be different from early paleolithic societies due to change over time-- it would surprise me if there wasn't gradual improvement in their tools, and there would also be random cultural changes.
2Multiheaded
It is near-impossible to compare the space of all possible human "barons" with the space of all possible human "popularity contests" and decide which one is more "civilized" across multiple criteria.
2CharlieSheen
Apply this argument to the politics of suffering Konkvistador talked about.
9[anonymous]
This seems a straw man.He didn't say they where always or often unsuccessful. Just that this can happen. And we clearly do have examples of unsuccessful attempts. See the USSR or the Puritan Colonies in the Americas.
[-]TorqueDrifter130

That would have been more reasonable, though also trivial and irrelevant (yes, some reformers fail. what of it? this comment wouldn't make sense in context). But the claim in the great-grandparent is made in absolute terms, a claim about the nature of the world - if you push society from default modes, then it will get harder and harder to accomplish nothing much and eventually you will be crushed.

One might feel compelled to interpret this as an error, and say that the intent was to say something trivial instead of wrong. But I thought that unlikely based on the user's posts in this topic: one about how reformers are crushed by history, one about how "the PC hive mind" is trying to silence them in order to establish themselves as the unquestioned masters of reality, and one misinterpreting and mocking a post about how you can insult people with facts.

Comments about how one's "opponents" are doomed to horrible violent retribution by the very nature of the universe are not unheard of. See, for example, the Men's Rights Movement, branches of which prophecy a coming time of inevitable violent revolution against our feminist overlords, or Communism, under some versions of which the success of the movement and the overthrow of all opposition is an (eventual) immutable fact.

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[-]Bugmaster110

What is a "default" human mode, though ? As I said on a sibling thread, there do exist examples of apparently successful social engineering efforts. For example, in most of the developed world, outright slavery was not only eliminated but rendered morally repugnant, and this change does not show any signs of reversal. To use an older example, monogamy became the social norm sometime during the Middle Ages (IIRC), and it persists as such to this day -- despite the fact that humans are biologically capable of polygamy.

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[-]Nornagest100

Social reformers often don't seem to understand that pushing a society far away from 'default' human modes of conduct is a bit like pushing a boulder up an increasingly steep slope...

The more charitable (and less fully general) interpretation seems to be that they disagree about where the local maxima are. To say nothing of the difficulty of describing default human behavior given the differences between post-Neolithic environments and the EEA.

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[-]Multiheaded100

This comment is interesting but needlessly long-winded.

In one sentence, did you mean something like "Status-based oppression and emotional violence will always exist and some group will always get the worst of it; therefore, we shouldn't get worked up about the victims currently in the spotlight and shouldn't waste community attention on their particular problems - but it's impolite to just tell them to shut up and suffer quietly"?

If phrased like that, then yes, your post is already causing me a deep emotional disturbance.

(And you wonder why decent people don't like reactionaries.)

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[-][anonymous]350

Nope I take the argument further. You are about to experience more distress. What I'm saying is that we already ignore the suffering of those who suffer the most. What I'm saying is that magnitude or widespread nature of suffering has no strong consistent relation in itself to which group gets our public attention. I'm surprised you missed that.

I'm also saying that often the signalling and politics allegedly done to reduce the kind of "micro-suffering" of group X does nothing of the kind. At worst merely increasing their sensitivity to it making them miserable and resentful of other members of society, while propping up new structures of deprivilege for other groups. A clear utilitarian fail.

Having politics about such microaggression and privillige based suffering be acceptable means that the groups least capable of defending themselves with such politics will suffer at best just as much as before and simply have to pay the additional opportunity cost and at worst will suffer more. Having a taboo on such politics improves the position. It doesn't seem obvious to me why should groups bad at politics be more deserving of suffering than groups good at politics? Why do you think the former are more numerous or more sensitive than the latter?

Recall that everyone is a member of many such classes and groups. Deep down this kind of attempt at justice in society is based on nothing more than might makes right powered by human intuitions based on sacredness and holier than thou signalling.

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6NancyLebovitz
Probably true, and possibly a tautology. However, I think it's the same fallacy as judging societies only by how the lowest status people are treated. It's ignoring what happens to a large proportion, perhaps the majority of people. Also, if better treatment can be figured out for some groups, then perhaps the knowledge can be applied to other suffering when it gets noticed. Life with people isn't entirely zero-sum.
4Bugmaster
If you see life solely (or even merely primarily) in terms of status, as I believe Konkvistador does, then it is indeed a zero-sum game, since a person's status is a relative ranking, and not an absolute measure (as contrasted with, say, top running speed).
[-]NancyLebovitz130

Even if life is solely a zero-sum game, it would still be possible to narrow the status differences. It's one thing to have most people think you're funny-looking, and another to be at risk of being killed on sight.

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2Multiheaded
...“Mercer,” Rick said. “I am your friend,” the old man said. “But you must go on as if I did not exist. Can you understand that?” He spread empty hands. “No,” Rick said. “I can’t understand that. I need help.” “How can I save you,” the old man said, “if I can’t save myself?” He smiled. “Don’t you see? There is no salvation.” “Then what’s this for?” Rick demanded. “What are you for?” “To show you,” Wilbur Mercer said, “that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go and do your task, even though you know it’s wrong.” “Why?” Rick said. “Why should I do it? I’ll quit my job and emigrate.” The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.” “That’s all you can tell me?” Rick said... (-Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
6Bugmaster
That is the interpretation I made, as well, but perhaps I was mistaken ? I upvoted your comment primarily because I want Konkvistador to clarify whether this interpretation is correct.
[-]Salemicus100

Nearly anyone not living hermits life experiences situations like these but we are incredibly selective about which ones get our attention. I say how much attention they get is based not on actual subjective suffering but on the most viable political coalitions.

I quite agree, and considered posting along these lines myself. Perhaps you were right to be oblique; I'd have been a lot more explicit.

In fact, I will. A large part of this isn't just about forming viable political coalitions - which is perhaps benign - it's about suppressing alternate coalitions. It's about making it impossible for people with a different understanding of the world to co-ordinate. For example, the reason that men catcall women is, or should be, well known to everyone (see e.g. Berne)) but the discussion below consists of a strenuous wish to avoid the obvious explanation. And of course anyone who gives it will be the designated patsy and thereby validate the feelings of moral superiority the coalition has been endowing itself with.

It's also about a wish to avoid responsibility, but that's a post in its own right.

The solution, of course, is to form a higher status coalition against it. For instance:

"... (read more)

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[-]thomblake200

For example, the reason that men catcall women is, or should be, well known to everyone

Has any other reader figured out yet what this obvious reason is supposed to be? I'm mystified.

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[-]NancyLebovitz150

I'm mystified, too. Furthermore, I bet there isn't just one reason.

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3Eugine_Nier
I suspect that statement was meant to be semantically equivalent to "the reason that men go to strip clubs is, or should be, well known to everyone".
8thomblake
I'm confused. Are you suggesting that catcalling is a strategy for seeing naked women?
2Eugine_Nier
Ok, a better way to phrase that would be "the reason that men like looking at naked women is, or should be, well known to everyone".
3NancyLebovitz
Actually, that depends on what you mean by 'known'. Everyone knows that most men like looking at naked women, and many who don't feel the attraction themselves can more or less understand it by extrapolation. However, I don't think much if anything is known about physiological basis (eyes to brain) for men liking to look at naked women.
1Eugine_Nier
Agreed. I suspect that Salemicus's statement was meant to be interpreted in the same way.
[-]Bugmaster160

For example, the reason that men catcall women is, or should be, well known to everyone (see e.g. Berne))

I realize that I'm being lazy, but is there a way you can summarize this reason ? I have not read the book, and I fear I may not have the time to do so.

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6Viliam_Bur
Let me guess (I read the book years ago). Humans, in any situation, invent something to do, simply because "doing nothing" is not an option. A stupid social interaction is usually preferable to no social interaction. On the other hand, an intimate interaction increases the risk of being hurt, so with strangers people prefer rituals. Ritual provides some small social interaction at almost zero risk. If I understand it correctly, Salemicus suggests that catcalling is simply a ritual. It is more than nothing. It is less than a personalized message. It is what other people (of the same social group) in the same situation would do. Why exactly this ritual instead of something else? Dunno. Tradition. You usually don't invent rituals, you inherit them from your ancestors. Somewhere in the past, there was some reason. Maybe a good reason, maybe a random incident. Doesn't matter today. This is the ritual we have. This is what we do when we want to do something, but not something personal.
[-]A1987dM150

For example, the reason that men catcall women is, or should be, well known to everyone (see e.g. Berne)) but the discussion below consists of a strenuous wish to avoid the obvious explanation.

Are you sure you're not generalizing from one example? Just because it's obvious to you doesn't mean it must be obvious to everybody, especially on a website with average AQ in the high twenties. Hanlon's razor, guys.

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[-]JoshuaZ110

Unfortunately, I fear that this troll has already been done.

Can you explain how what you are implying has anything to do with with Third Wave Feminism? Because I'm not seeing it.

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[-]Salemicus150

One of the key third-wave critiques is that second-wave feminism was only ever really about middle-class white women. Obviously, an actual third-wave feminist wouldn't have concluded that feminism is about white privilege; they'd have said we need to change the direction of feminism to make it more inclusive of "diverse perspectives" or some such.

I was joking when I implied they were trolling feminism, but if a group of saboteurs had gone undercover to make the movement irrelevant, I don't think they could have done any better.

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8ialdabaoth
Regarding my own comment, I was not condemning afghan customs in the context of their treatment of women, but in their treatment of thievery and other such crimes (I was specifically thinking of the process of escalating blood feuds that often result from that process).
1satt
"If It Weren't For Him"? "Rapo"? "Now I've Got You, You Son of a Bitch"?
[-]Richard_Kennaway100

None of the above.

It's too long since I read the book to recall all of the Games in detail, and the list on the book's home page (linked from the Wiki article) doesn't seem to have this game, but no matter: Berne did not claim to be presenting an exhaustive taxonomy and encouraged his readers to discover more Games.

I recommend the book. I think it's essential reading for anyone confused (as so many LWers profess to be, and there's a Game right there) about aspects of social life that are not usually explicitly described. (The reasons why people don't talk about them form yet more Games.) Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them. Once you have this, what is going on with catcalling will be transparent.

The theoretical background of the book, Transactional Analysis, you can take or leave; it gives Berne a conceptual vocabulary to talk about Games, but one need not make any ontological commitment to TA, to make use of the book.

Here's Kurt Vonnegut's review, from 1965.

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[-]satt100

I bought & read a copy of Games People Play some years ago. (But thanks for the recommendation.) Although I've read the book, "the" reason why men catcall remains opaque to me. I can think of multiple reasons, and multiple ways to describe catcalling as a Game, so merely pointing at the book tells me nothing new.

By the principle of charity, I figured Salemicus had something more usefully specific in mind. So I looked at the table of contents, guessed at some Games they might have been thinking of, and put them out there as a starting point. I wasn't about to reread the whole book just to try making Salemicus's comment click.

[Belated edit to fix that dangling modifier.]

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8zaph
"Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them." From Berne: "Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him." So, you can debate the validity, but my take on the Berne-ian view would be that the game Catcall is the attempt to create a social boost for males by gaining a female's (albeit negative) attention.
7[anonymous]
Speaking of which, a tweet by Sister Y I liked a lot: "the men are competing amongst themselves to see who can loudestly inform the lady that she is a viable rape target"
8wedrifid
That's a solid dig at people who perform a particular kind of behavior that one deprecates. But it just isn't true!
2DaFranker
I'm not sure I grasp at all what you're referring to by those "dynamics". The nitpicking? The pointing at small things rather than the fundamental assumption(s)? (if so, what's the perceived fundamental assumption(s) and which are the small things? Is the fundamental assumption the claim "Women have a larger inferential distance to LW because difference in life experiences"?) I disagree on this, ISTM that many of those are displaying things substantially different, such as "helping people in general" or "protecting people being harassed". That whole paragraph rings very true, and deserves upvotes IMO, contingent of me having any idea what "dynamics" you're pointing at.
2TimS
How could we test this? (Also, this issue might be address somewhat via shorter paragraphs)
2MugaSofer
You seem to be using jargon I am unfamiliar with. Are you saying that sexism is merely one a way to increase one's status, indistinguishable from other status plays?
[-][anonymous]260

Are you saying that sexism is merely one a way to increase one's status, indistinguishable from other status plays?

Among other things.

A normal person living life will receive micro aggressions with some regularity, but views these aggressions through a lens shaped by current political thinking. Thus, those aggressions which are aligned with political perspectives on the evilness of sexism will have greater salience than those which are just random aggressive events. Even if the probability of receiving a micro aggression is equal for both men and women, only those which are towards women and seem to be caused by their sex will be elevated to the level of explicit political discourse.

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[-]Vaniver230

Even if the probability of receiving a micro aggression is equal for both men and women, only those which are towards women and seem to be caused by their sex will be elevated to the level of explicit political discourse.

Consider the D&D example given in this post. The DM saying "no, you're playing my game wrong" is easy to interpret as a micro aggression, but to gamers (especially ones who've sat at both sides of the table) it's seen as part of gaming, and someone who gets upset about it probably shouldn't be at the table (in part because they can probably find a DM more suited to their interests). This particular example is being discussed publicly because a poster thought it was an example of sexism; if someone had posted a similar anecdote on the site outside of the context of LW Women it would not be seen as anywhere near as relevant.

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6Multiheaded
Please consider just how strongly the likelyhood of such microaggressions is inversely correlated with a person's conformity to any given implicit norm! That's why I find it more than purple prose to refer to the victims of oppression as "the weak"; by not conforming, they simply start in a much much weaker position than someone who reasonably fits within the norms. The current beneficiaries of identity politics- like transfolk - certainly have the field tilted against them, and talking to them of "equal opportunity" or "equality before the law" is outright cruel; you've got to privilege those worst off to end up with a remotely fair outcome. (Which leads to the problem of incentives, which leads me to questioning capitalism and meritocracy altogether, but that's another story.) So it would be unfair of you to view all consequences of similar microaggressions as morally equal and cancelling each other out. A rock that's thrown downwards at someone hurts much more - and is easier to hit with - than the same rock thrown back up with equal force! The fact that a few people might try to profit politically from redefining "up" and "down" doesn't make the objective social circumstances less real. (Sorry if this all sounds like banal platitudes.)
7Eugine_Nier
And what is your grounds for believing that the groups whose victimhood from acts of microaggressions it is currently politically fashionable to emphasize are at all correlated with the people who are actually more likely to be on the receiving end of microaggression? To see why this is highly unlikely it helps to make an outside view: if I randomly picked some culture from human history, how strong do you think this correlation would be? What makes you think the currant culture is any different?
9NancyLebovitz
I think people are somewhat more likely to complain when they're hurt.
9Eugine_Nier
True, there are other things that arguably have a bigger impact, e.g., whether they'll be punished for complaining, whether their complaint is likely to change anything. For example, frequency human rights complaints against governments tends to be inversely proportional to how bad that government actually is at human rights.
8NancyLebovitz
I'd expect a maximum somewhere in the middle of the range for internally generated complaints. The countries and regions which are best at human rights get few or no complaints. The countries and regions which are bad but not horrendous get the most complaints. The countries which have a strong pattern of punishing complainers get a few complaints. The most vicious countries get no complaints. That's just for internally generated complaints. Outsiders may be saying that conditions are very bad in the worst countries.
4Eugine_Nier
I think your underestimating how many complaints get generated in countries with good human rights that would be considered frivolous by an international standard, e.g., arguing that refusing to subsidize condoms constitutes a "war on women".
2beoShaffer
[citation needed]
4TimS
It is not particularly controversial to note that nations concerned about human rights focus their advocacy / attention / pressure on countries that care somewhat about human rights themselves. (i.e. the US pressures Turkey about human rights problems, not North Korea). That said, I don't think that was Eugine_Nier's point. I suspect that I disagree with his intended assertion (denotatively if not connotatively).
5MugaSofer
So ... don't trust anecdotal evidence, basically.
2[anonymous]
Yeah. We overestimate their importance.
5MugaSofer
The purpose of this, if I understood correctly, was to increase empathy with and understanding of the emotions of women in these situations. It's less evidence than neurohacking.
4[anonymous]
Please be specific. In the post I had already quickly explained a few terms like "microaggression" and used relevant links. I assume familiarity with some terms like "signalling" because they are standard on LessWrong/Overcoming Bias.
3evand
I'm not sure what it is about your post that I'm missing, since I thought I knew what all those terms meant (except microaggression, and WP says my guess was basically right). Maybe you're using terms in ways I'm not used to, or maybe I'm just confused as to what your overall point is. MugaSofer's question seems like a good distillation of mine, so I'm hoping you'll answer it.
1JoshuaZ
I'm curious if you buy into Moldbug's narration about Catholic v. Protestant as being an overarching framework for liberal v. conservative issues. Frankly, the idea of conservativism always failing seems to be more an issue of what ideas survive: If a change or proposal goes through, then we think of it as liberal/progressive. Changes to society which get rolled back become more or less forgotten and don't come up in how we think of it. Alcohol prohibition would be one example, where excepting a very tiny group the issue has simply fallen out of contemporary political discourse.
4Douglas_Knight
I think you are mixing up different issues. Certainly conservatives manage to roll back some stuff, but that is not relevant to: MM claims that all net changes are originated on the progressive side, which is a well-defined side with centuries of coherence. Do you claim that there are net changes that originated on the conservative side and were written into the history of liberals? Prohibition is certainly not an example of this. Do you even claim that there are any net changes originated by conservatives? Or do you disagree that there are two clear sides, and it is anachronistic to identify the parties of successful changes in different eras? Prohibition certainly shows that there is not complete identify of proposed changes across time, but that is hardly evidence of discontinuity. If you dispute continuity, what are two such parties that you think do should not be identified?
2JoshuaZ
I don't think there are two clear sides at all, and yes the anachronism issue is a problem also. Moreover, in so far as there's almost anything like two clear sides, a lot of changes have come from what is commonly identified as the conservative end. For example, over the last seventy years in the US in many ways we moved more in the direction of free markets, a conservative ideal. One example is how it used to be outright illegal in the US to own gold bullion where now there's a thriving market.
[-]cata540

Being male, I never had any visibility into experiences like these until I first began reading anecdotes like this online, and then started talking with women I knew about how things were for them. So thanks for taking the effort to put this together.

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[-]Nisan180

This should be taught in schools.

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[-]sketerpot160

Instead of what? There are a finite number of school hours; from what other subject would you take the hours to cover this? Ideally everything would be taught in schools, but there are constraints.

(This question isn't entirely rhetorical, and I would not be surprised to hear a good answer. Schools are far from optimal.)

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[-]evand160

English classes are usually designed to teach skills like reading comprehension, critical thinking, and writing. There is no particular need for the subject matter to be historical literature, and discussions of topics like this would fit right in.

In fact, some English teachers try to do just that, by selecting literature with the appropriate subject matter.

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2Desrtopa
I suspect that this subject matter would do a better job at teaching reading comprehension and critical thinking than covering historical literature would anyway, at least if the students have already done analysis of historical literature in some previous semester.
2undermind
In my opinion, the standard English/Math/Science that we expect elementary and high school students to learn are not difficult. I mean this as more than just "they were easy for me"; I think that with good teachers, the right motivation, curiosity, clear relations to other knowledge or interests, and paying attention, any reasonably intelligent child can learn them with far fewer hours of class time dedicated to the task than the current average. This would free up a lot of time to learn such "supplementary" material. In fact, I think that the supplementary material is really, really helpful for developing interests in the core subjects. Reading and writing are, to a fairly large extent, the practice of thinking. If someone has had experiences facing discrimination and wants to relate their experience or what they think is going on societally, they will generally (or can easily be led to) learn to write well to express this. If someone is puzzled by what's happening with the population of some animal around their house, they will be willing to learn basic ecological models and the associated math. Of course, actually implementing any of these - especially good teachers - would require rather large changes to education as it is currently done, which seems difficult, to say the least.
[-]undermind150

It is - obscurely, and too late, and to those who already know.
It's called Women's Studies (though it's about more that women's experiences).

And people (for whom the inferential distance is too great) love to hate on it.

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[-]JoshuaZ350

And people (for whom the inferential distance is too great) love to hate on it.

I don't think that's all that's going on here. A lot of Women's Studies has other ideas and claims which are much more questionable, and the good points (such as the substantial differences in women's experience v. men) can get easily lost in the noise.

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[-]Swimmy420

From my wife:

I learned many interesting and useful things from my Women's Studies class, and am glad I decided to try it out. However, I became a pariah when I questioned the professor's account of sexism in biology textbooks. "Eggs are portrayed as passive, while sperm compete to reach them." In my experience, textbooks say what actually happens in the reproductive system, with no sexism to be found. She stuck to her guns. It was unfortunate that she used that example, because there are real examples of gender bias in biology publications.

And back to me:

Just thought it would be useful to provide an example of a questionable claim. She says other people in the class hated her for pointing it out.

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2A1987dM
Like what? Just curious.
6Swimmy
Here is a chapter from a book about feminism and evolutionary biology. Many pages are missing but you can get the general picture. Examples from the chapter: Marzluff and Balda sought an "alpha male" in a flock of pinyon jays. The males rarely fight, so they tempted them with treats and considered instead glances from male birds as dominant displays and birds looking in the air as submissive displays. (This is actually plausible, since apparently the "dominant" males would get to eat the treat after doing this.) About bird fighting, they wrote, "In late winter and early spring. . . birds become aggressive towards other flock members. Mated females seem especially testy. Their hormones surge as the breeding season approaches giving them the avian equivalent of PMS which we call PBS (pre-breeding syndrome)!" The obvious alternative explanation is that dominance hierarchies may have been more fierce among females and that they instead should have been looking for an alpha female that determines hierarchies among the men. That one is a bit old. There's a 2010 book of theirs on pinyon jays but I couldn't tell if it kept the same interpretation. So for something from the 90s the author points out that Birkhead's work on magpies shows a similar gender bias. Female magpies can store sperm for later use, and "cheating" is common. Birkhead focuses almost entirely on males nest-hopping for extra mates, and treats female cheating as a curious anomaly: "Interestingly, some [female] magpies. . . appear to seek extra-male matings." When you actually examine the data, "some" is not quite as accurate as "most." There are other examples in the chapter. Some are better than others.
2Blueberry
See this article on Sarah Hrdy.
6undermind
Agreed. To clarify: in my experience (and supported by other anecdotes on this thread), Women's Studies is, unfortunately, often very badly done. There are big problems around being less concerned with contrary evidence than is appropriate, its often very un-rigorous, and though they are undoubdetdly a small minority, women who unconditionally hate men are drawn to it. It is legitimate to criticize Women's Studies on these grounds. However, I originally meant people who seem to think it should not exist. It should, and this post illustrates why.
6Eugine_Nier
I think a better statement of our position, is that we think it's currently so full of BS and anti-epistomology that it's better to throw the whole thing out and start from scratch.
[-]Barry_Cotter230

I read an introduction to women's studies textbook and it was all inside baseball commentary. It was not like reading this. At all. It was a survey of all the different fields that Women's Studies engages with, but it did not teach this, it assumed it. This is consistent with some male acquaintances experience of some such courses as hostile to them. Also, Hugo Schwyzer is a dick.

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[-]Said Achmiz130

I've made a number of comments on this post that were addressing specific, somewhat-tangential issues, and though I think those are important too, I just want to echo cata here:

Thank you for this post, daenerys, and for collecting these anecdotes. I think it's quite valuable and look forward to subsequent posts in the series.

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2MugaSofer
When you say "experiences like these" ... experiences of sexism? Experiences narrated by women? Experiences of Dungeons and Dragons?
3cata
Experiences in which women describe things that I don't ever experience or witness (e.g. catcalls, poor treatment based on gender, personal harassment) or in which women perceive something in light of their gender in a way that I don't (e.g. predominance of males in art, male-centric language, safety in public spaces.)
[-]thomblake400

For me, this post is not doing any favors for the "women's experiences are fundamentally different" camp. Most of these sound like stories from my own life. Of course, "Why are your characters always girls?" is probably a harder question for a boy than a girl.

I'd guess these mostly work as stories of "growing up geeky".

The only ones that didn't resonate were the last one about not playing M:tG anymore (probably since I've never stopped appearing like a geek) and the "Star wars characters are mostly male", which does seem worth mentioning.

MLP:FiM is probably a good available example of the reverse phenomenon. The positions of power are occupied by females. There are very few male characters (though a significantly more even ratio than Star Wars), and they seem to be shoehorned in as male stereotypes. I suggest male readers ruminate on this aspect of the show until it seems a bit disturbing. And then notice that females can experience this when watching most things.

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[-]woodside200

For those that don't want to do a google search, MLP:FiM = My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (I had to look it up)

Is this one of those kid shows that adults watch these days? A show that a decent fraction of male LW readers know enough about to "ruminate on"?

I already have to navigate through my social world with the handicap of counting a work of Harry Potter fanfiction among my favorite books. If I end up owning seasons of My Little Pony because of this site I'm going to be very upset.

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9TorqueDrifter
The show is actually fairly popular amongst the male internet nerd demographic. The original creator, Lauren Faust, was a well-liked animator beforehand, and something about it just caught the popular imagination ('nerdy' references, characters and animation, well-timed slanderous editorials, etc.). There's a huge fandom that constantly produces ludicrous streams of stuff. There's been some discussion of it on LW, and I expect there's a not-insignificant population of fans here. Or "bronies", as some style themselves.
6MugaSofer
Yup. Try watching a few episodes, it's pretty good.
5Luke_A_Somers
Start at the beginning. Don't throw the dice with the more recent stuff.
4thomblake
Updating usefulness of the abbreviation. My initial consideration was whether I should just abbreviate it MLP, since of course people would know I was referring to Friendship is Magic. It gets enough references around here I figured it was in the popular consciousness. In my opinion, it's not an exceptionally good show. Though from what I've read so far, Fallout:Equestria is awesome. Find better friends!
3Bugmaster
I have never heard of Fallout:Equestria, but I started laughing out loud as soon as I read the title. Is this the authoritative source for the story ? War. War never changes...
7MugaSofer
Not sure about definitive, but it seems to be complete. F:E is surprisingly, serious, gritty, and well-written. It's also longer than War and Peace.
2Strange7
First, share your respective definitions of "better" with regard to friends.
4thomblake
Not exhaustive, but "friends for which liking awesome things is not a handicap" is a good start.
4NancyLebovitz
Also, look for friends who are at least happy for your sake if you're enthusiastic about something non-harmful.
[-]Risto_Saarelma120

MLP:FiM is probably a good available example of the reverse phenomenon. The positions of power are occupied by females. There are very few male characters (though a significantly more even ratio than Star Wars), and they seem to be shoehorned in as male stereotypes. I suggest male readers ruminate on this aspect of the show until it seems a bit disturbing.

I'm not entirely convinced by this argument.

To spell it out for those who don't know the shows, anime series that have a mostly female cast doing more or less random stuff and have a significant male audience are a thing. There's also the type of anime series that has a mostly male cast and is aimed at a female audience.

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4Bugmaster
Not to mention Serial Experiments Lain (I am not providing a link due to spoilers). All of these are examples of anime, though. An average person doesn't watch anime, so maybe it would disturb him more to encounter MLP (which, after all, is heavily influenced by anime).
3DaFranker
Never checked the numbers, but always felt that shoujo and josei manga and anime were way more widespread and likely to be successful than equivalent male-oriented counterparts (though the top ones in popularity are, of course, shounen stuff).
9[anonymous]
Same here.
5Vaniver
Mmm. Part of the issue here is that the male characters tend to be aspirational stereotypes. When I'm thinking of leaving work early, or I'm bothered by something petty, I ask myself, "What would Big Mac do?" and I smile and keep working. Shining Armor and Fancy Pants are both less relevant for my life at present, but are still good examples. Perhaps it's significant that I'm focusing only on the stallions and not on the colts- Snips, Snails, and Pip have gotten comparable airtime and lines, and the first two are stereotypical schoolboys (named after the famous rhyme)- but the primary female characters seem to be the adults, not the Cutie Mark Crusaders, and so it seems fair to do the same for the primary male characters. For most fictional characters that are female stereotypes, it's not as clear that they're aspirational. I'm not sure what "What Would Princess Leia Do?" would look like, but from my first guess it doesn't appear to be a very useful guide to life.
5Eliezer Yudkowsky
Er... what if it still doesn't seem disturbing after rumination? Discord is male, more powerful than the Princesses, and evil. Er, I don't seem to be finding this very disturbing either. (Admittedly, I haven't actually watched the show, only read fanfiction based on it.)
[-]A1987dM110

Er... what if it still doesn't seem disturbing after rumination?

Yes. There are certain very common tropes whose gender-reversed version offends me (thereby making me realize that the original version is fucked up too), but almost all characters in a work of fiction being the same gender isn't one of those.

Examples: 1) When a woman posts some mysandrist generalization about “all men” on her Facebook wall, I am deeply offended¹ -- so I can guess how women feel when a man posts some mysogynist generalization about “all women”, which happens more often IME. 2) The latest episode of How I Met Your Mother, in which na nggenpgvir znyr ynjlre gevrf gb jva n ynjfhvg ol syvegvat jvgu gur whebef, jub ner nyy srznyr, kind-of bothered me (though I'm not sure I endorse that feeling) because it reminded me of the gender-reversed version, which is a very common trope and offends me. But sometimes is the asymmetry itself that bothers me: when a woman posts pictures of sexy men in underwear on their Facebook wall, I'm not directly offended by that (I occasionally do the gender-reversed version of that myself), but I am bothered by the fact that no-one seems to flinch whereas when a man posts pic

... (read more)
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8NancyLebovitz
Hypothesis: Body dysmorphia for men is only starting to become a serious problem. Wait a generation or so.
5A1987dM
People get envious when they see a picture of someone much sexier that they ((possibly incorrectly) think they) are? I had thought of that... as a joke, but it hadn't occurred to me to take that seriously. (Wait, why does my brain think that what's funny cannot be plausible? It must be that, since if an idea is neither funny nor plausible I forget it shortly after hearing/thinking it, within the pool of ideas I do remember, being funny does negatively correlate with being plausible due to Berkson's paradox. Or something like that.) I'm thinking of how to test for this. (If this were right, women who think are ugly would object to such pictures more often than those who don't; also, objecting to such pictures wouldn't correlate much with religiosity, unless for some reason religious people are more likely to think they're ugly. Neither of these seems to be the case IME, but the sample size is small, I cannot always be sure whether someone thinks they're ugly, etc.) I do have a feeling that if I thought I was much uglier than I actually think I am, seeing pictures of half-naked sexy men would bother me much more, but I'm very bad at guessing what my feelings would be in counterfactual situations. (Hey, I do know a version of me with something like body dysmorphia -- that's myself from two years ago! Unfortunately, I can't remember any specific instance of seeing such a picture back then, and also I have changed in lots of other ways too so even if I could there would still be huge confounders.) Another hypothesis is that one version is more offensive than the gender-reversed version because it's more common. Maybe I'm not bothered by pictures of sexy men because I don't see them that often, but I would get fed of them if I saw them several times a day; and maybe certain women are annoyed by pictures of sexy women because they see them all the time, but they wouldn't be if they only saw them a couple times a month. Edit: OTOH, “just because you are right doesn't mean
6NancyLebovitz
Speaking only for myself, I've had a bit of a fight to calm down about my appearance-- I'm 59 and apparently more or less look it. It's been work (pretty successful recently) to not feel like a failure because I don't look like I'm 30. From what I can gather, this isn't uncommon among women, and frequently in stronger form. Your frequency argument is relevant, but needs a bit more causality added-- the reason the pictures are so common is presumably because they're what's preferred.
1A1987dM
“A generation” might be an overestimation. A few hours ago, a Facebook page in Italian about “destroying other people's dreams by exposing the objective truth” published a status “let's tell our gym-going friends that it's cold on Facebook too”, it's been liked by 81 people so far a sizeable fraction of whom are male, someone (using a gender-neutral pseudonym, but with a male cartoon character as profile picture) commented complaining about an “exponential” increase of pictures and videos of people in underwear, and that comment has been liked by 6 people so far of whom 4 males. EDIT: I commented “Envy?”, and my profile picture is bare-chested. Let's see how many flames I'll get. (For all I'm concerned, if you're the kind of person who resents cynicism, you do not subscribe a page about “destroying other people's dreams by exposing the objective truth”.)
7Bugmaster
To be fair, this scenario probably should bother you, because it amounts to hacking a critically important social system through the use of the Dark Arts. The gender of the participants is, IMO, less important than the realization of how easily our social infrastructure can be exploited.
7Bugmaster
To play Feminist's Advocate for a moment: Some feminists argue that gender reversal is not a valid technique, since there is a huge power differential between men and women. Thus, when a man says "all women are X", he is implicitly wielding his power in order to dehumanize women even further and reinforce his privilege -- which is what makes the action sexist, and therefore exceptionally offensive. When a woman says "all men are X", her statement may be technically wrong, but it is not sexist, because the woman does not wield any power, due to being a woman. Thus, her statement is only mildly offensive at worst.
5DaFranker
I would argue that most proponents of this argument do not grok much of mathematics, or at least are inappropriately compartmentalizing. Sum total differences as single absolute numbers over wide populations are poorly suited to context-sensitive power valuations (judged in terms of available game-theoretic actions and the expected utility results) in individual situations like those statements or the examples in the grandparent. They may have a point in that when there exists and expected power differential the (A set / B set) reversal technique is not valid, but their actual arguments usually break down when there are four armed women and two hungry men on an otherwise-deserted island with only one line of communication with the outside world (controlled by the women) given a typical patriarchal society in the outside world. Most real-world situations are more similar to this than to the model they use to make their argument.
7Bugmaster
Agreed; I'm not a terribly good Feminist's Advocate. That said, I believe they'd disagree with this statement: I've seen feminists argue that situations where women unequivocally hold power over men are much more rare than men think. Some of the reasons given for this proposition are that: a). Women are socially conditioned to defer to men, and do so subconsciously all the time, even when these women are nominally in charge, and b). Men are used to their privilege and see it as the normal state of affairs; and therefore, men tend to severely underestimate its magnitude, and thus overestimate the amount of power any given woman might hold.
9A1987dM
I might agree, provided they're talking about group averages rather than about all women and all men -- this guy doesn't sound “used to his privilege” to me. And if they're talking about group averages, I can't see their relevance to interactions between individuals. Suppose that blue-eyed people are taller in average than brown-eyed people, and everyone knows this. Suppose there are two people in a room, one with blue eyes and one with brown eyes. They need to take something off a shelf, and the taller one was the easier it would be to do that. It would be preposterous to say “the blue-eyed person should do that, and if she lets the brown-eyed person do that she's an asshole, as she could much more easily do that herself, given that brown-eyed people are shorter”, if the blue-eyed person happens to be 1.51 m (5') and the brown-eyed person happens to be 1.87 m (6'2'').
7DaFranker
Yes, indeed. That's the whole source of the disagreement once all the confusions and bad arguments are shaved off. However, IME they (nearly always, only exception I've ever seen was on LW) make the opposite claim on the basis of their own experiences, perceptions of power balance, limited (often cherry-picked) data, and/or personal moral intuitions. From what little (read: I suspect much more than a typical student who has taken a college course in Feminism or Cultural Studies and goes on to join the feminist movement in some way) social science and serious-psychology I've read and understood, it seems that most multiviewpoint analyses and calculations (I've seen the term 'intersectional analysis' thrown around, but AFAICT it's basically just computing multiple subjective judgments of power in a combined utilitarian fashion) end up with much higher variation and fluctuation in both nominal agent power and psychologically perceived power balance than the above feminists would even consider plausible. What I've read also seemed to indicate a very important (though not incredibly strong, but enough to be a turning point) correlation between the "normalcy" of an individual and how much those feminist claims will apply to them - IIRC, an IQ more than a standard deviation above the norm is enough to bring the "subconscious advantage" and "landed privileges" difference to statistically insignificant levels of correlation with gender. Other forms of abnormality presumably have similar effects (LBGT, for instance), though I only have anecdotal data there. Admittedly, I don't have much more to show either in terms of hard evidence and clear numbers, but I'd largely attribute this to my poor memory. The difference is that I've argued for many positions and many claims, a good portion of which were similar to those feminist arguments given in support of the claim that the subconscious domination and privilege conditioning is almost always applicable... and I've changed my
6Bugmaster
Yes, just because I can play Feminist's Advocate, doesn't mean I actually agree with them :-) That said, I've never taken a feminism course, nor am I a sociologist, so my opinion probably doesn't carry much weight. These kinds of debates can't be conclusively resolved with words alone; it's a job not for words, but for numbers.
4A1987dM
Sometimes, when mentally gender-reversing a situation in my mind, some part of my brain pops up and says, “But... $stereotype_about_men, whereas $stereotype_about_women!”. I try to ignore it because the stereotypes are often wrong. (E.g. the slut-shaming one: IIRC, a survey --with WEIRD sample, but people I interact with are also usually WEIRD anyway-- found that 1. people who frown upon sexually promiscuous women, but not upon sexually promiscuous men, 2. people who frown upon sexually promiscuous men, but not upon sexually promiscuous women, 3. people who do both, and 4. people who do neither comprise more or less 10%, 10%, 40% and 40% of the population respectively, and IME that's not obviously wrong.)
4TimS
Totally off topic, sorry. How did you do footnotes? I'm so jealous.
5A1987dM
I use Unicode characters for superscript numerals (on an Italian keyboard under Ubuntu it's AltGr-1 and AltGr-2), four hyphens for the horizontal rule, and regular Markdown for lists (1., 2. etc.).
6Asymmetric
If male readers feel uncomfortable with the lack of characterization and stereotyping of male characters, and subsequently realize that female readers can feel similarly uncomfortable with all media that fails the Bechdel test (a significant amount), then they can conclude that it's disturbing to think of a world where a gender is reduced to those kinds of stereotypes. Of course, it's possible to miss one of those elements of the chain -- not feeling uncomfortable in the first place, for example. But then, it's also possible for them to recognize that some people feel uncomfortable while experiencing specific media and feeling enough empathy to relate to them, even if they don't feel uncomfortable themselves.
3Bugmaster
I agree with Eliezer, though. I'm a man, and I don't find the lack of fully realized male characters in MLP particularly disturbing (*). I think it would be unreasonable to demand every work of fiction to forgo the use of stock characters. MLP is a show about female ponies and their female pony overlords ("overladies" ?), and that's already about 7 characters right there, so it's reasonable that the rest would end up as stock archetypes. There's only so much attention to go around. (*) Though I only watched the first season plus the s02 pilot, so I could be missing something.
2Bugmaster
To be fair, Discord probably isn't anything. It has a male voice purely for convenience. In reality, it would probably sound like The Many (warning: link contains System Shock 2 spoilers).
3listic
I'm afraid I easily skipped my chance to be disturbed by this, with any amount of rumination. When I watched several episodes, I noticed that the overwhelming majority of characters are female, which seemed strange. Then I got interested enough to read some interviews with Lauren Faust and found how she grew up with three brothers and no sisters and had to watch boys' shows which were mostly about boys. Then I remembered some shows which are full of boys, realized that I took that for granted and understood that making a good show for girls about girls, for a change, makes sense and it didn't bother me anymore. What bothers me a bit is the recognition of the fact that I couldn't accept how some of the cast are actually female. "Wait, so Applejack is a girl? And Rainbow Dash? And Scootaloo? I can't believe it. Does it make me a male chauvinist?" Of course, I want to count myself as a male chauvinist no more than the other guy, so my unability to accept the whole spectrum of female gender roles that Lauren Faust presents us in the show bothers me. Of course, I deeply respect her for being able to think up and defend such diverse female role models for a girls' show that I still have trouble accepting.
2Viliam_Bur
Not sure whether we think about the same thing, but to me it seems that inventing many diverse female characters is actually very easy, under one condition... you don't fill all the roles with male characters first. As an example, imagine that a male author is going to write a story or a movie with the typical fantasy settings. First step, he designs a party, and his planning might go like this: "So, we need a warrior guy, a strong one with a hammer or an axe. But we could also have one guy shooting arrows; let's make him an elf. And of course a wizard, a guy who will shoot fireballs at enemies. That's it, basicly. Oops... I guess I should add some women too. So, there will also be a woman. No, that's not enough. Let's have two women; let's call them Woman#1 and Woman#2. Now I wish I could find some meaningful way to make them differ from each other..." The problem is not that there is not enough place in fantasy setting to have two different female characters. The problem is that the author already assigned the male gender to all the archetypes he knew, and then there was no archetype left for women. The outcome would be completely different if the author started like this: "So, we will have a strong warrior girl, with a hammer or an axe. Also a girl shooting arrows; let's make her an elf. And of course also a wizard girl who will shoot fireballs at enemies." This is exactly the same shallow character party design algorithm as in the previous example... but suddenly, it has enough space for different female characters. (A better author would certainly invent better characters than this, but the idea is that you can think about N meaningful characters, and then it is your choice whether you make them male or female.)
2ialdabaoth
Reframing your post: "male" is so overwhelmingly default of a choice that people have to make conscious effort to remember that there is a choice, and choose otherwise. "Unless otherwise specified, an agent is a gender-normative male" seems to be a cognitive bias, but possibly a bias that we inherit from culture instead of from biological instinct.
[-]moridinamael380

I'm a male LWer with an infant daughter. I'd like to request some specific advice on avoiding the common failure modes.

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[-]David_Gerard560

Look for female role models and characters, wherever you can. My daughter is dinosaur-mad. The Usborne Big Book of Big Dinosaurs includes little cartoon palaeontologists - and she was delighted some were women. "I like the girl dinosaur scientist!" And then she came out with "When I was a three I wanted to be a princess, but now I am a five I want to be a dinosaur scientist." I CLAIM VICTORY. (so far.)

I suspect the problem there is that children are natural Platonic essentialists and categorise everything they can. (That big list of cognitive biases? Little kids show all of them, all of the time.) Particularly by gender. "Is that a boy toy or a girl toy?" It really helps that I have her mother (a monster truck pagan who knows everything and can do everything) to point at: "What would mummy think?" So having female examples on hand seems to have helped here. So I have this little girl who likes princesses and trains and My Little Pony and dinosaurs and Hello Kitty and space and is mad for anything pink and plays swordfighting with toy LARP swords. And her very favourite day out is the Natural History Museum.

(yeah, bragging about my kid again. You'll cope.)

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[-]daenerys210

This isn't a how-to, but I thought you might find these articles cute:

Linky- Story of how parents of toddler boys keep their kids from playing rought with the author's toddler girl, because "you have to be gentle with girls".

Linky- Dad tired all video game heroes are male. Reprograms Zelda to make Link a female for little daughter.

Linky- Video- A What Would You Do? episode, where you see how people in a costume store react when a little boy (actor) wants to dress as a princess, and a little girl (actress) wants to dress as Spiderman for Halloween

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[-]woodside250

I can see the point the author is trying to make in the story about having to be gentle with girls, but I think I'd be conflicted about it if I had a son. Later in life there are severe social and legal consequences for a man that is too rough with women and I'd hate to set my kid up for failure.

I realize there is a difference between "playing rough" and abuse but there can be grey areas at the border. There are many situations were I would physically subdue a man (both playful and serious) but not a woman, partly for fear of causing harm but mainly because of the social blowback and potential for getting arrested.

I might be overly sensitive to this line of thinking because I have a military background, but I think teaching a son that he should behave as if girls and boys are the same physically is sub-optimal (in terms of setting him up for success and long-term hapiness).

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4sketerpot
It's actually kind of remarkable how gender-neutral Link is in The Wind Waker, the game he reprogrammed. The storyline, the dialogue, even Link's sound effects work equally well for all major genders.
[-]daenerys180

We're into holiday season again, so here's a link to a post I made a year ago, that includes, among other things, NOT always commenting on "How cute" all your little nieces (and nephews) are.

How To Talk To Children- A Holiday Guide

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7moridinamael
I remember this post well, thanks for reminding me. I've already been conditioning myself to focus on the right things by complimenting the hard work that goes into her lifting her head or briefly controlling her hands, even though she doesn't have any idea what I'm saying yet. It's frustratingly difficult to buy any clothes for baby girls that aren't completely pink.
[-]Alicorn230

It's frustratingly difficult to buy any clothes for baby girls that aren't completely pink.

Aren't babies kind of shaped alike? Surely there exist inoffensive onesies in pastel green or whatever, even if they are not officially intended for girls.

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[-]moridinamael370

They exist, but it's like this: you walk into the store. To your left, there are forty pink dresses and onesies with Cutest Princess or somesuch printed on them. To your right, there are forty blue onesies and overall combos, often with anthropomorphic male animals printed on them. In the middle, there are three yellow or green onesies.

On top of that, well-meaning relatives send us boxes of the pink dresses.

When I dress her, I avoid the overtly feminine outfits. But then I worry that I'm committing an entirely new mistake. I imagine my daughter telling me how confused she felt that her father seemed reluctant to cast her as a girl. "Did you wish I was a boy, Daddy?" There don't seem to be many trivially obvious correct choices in parenting.

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[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky260

Actually, this seems a lot less disturbing to me than if, say, there were many different colors for boy clothes, but only pink clothing for girls. If you wouldn't feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby boy in blue, why feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby girl in pink? None of this has the moral that gender differences in general should be downplayed; it's when you start saying that male-is-default or 'people can be nerds but girls have to be girls' that you have a problem. In general, I think the mode of thought to be fought is that males are colorless and women have color; or to put it another way, the deadly thought is that there are all sorts of different people in the world like doctors, soldiers, mathematicians, and women. I do sometimes refer in my writing to a subgroup of people called "females"; but I refer to another subgroup, "males", about equally often. (Actually, I usually call them "women" and "males" but that's because if you say "men", males assume you're talking about people.)

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[-]David_Gerard190

Other. (See, postmodernism being good for something.) "Despite originally being a philosophical concept, othering has political, economic, social and psychological connotations and implications." Othering on the Geek Feminism wiki. See also grunch.

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7MugaSofer
I think clothing of both genders gets more varied with age, but faster for males, at least at first. I note that women actually come out ahead, with both pants and dresses, yet young boys wear noticeably more varied outfits. Clearly it clearly varies a lot with age.
2freyley
It's less the colors available to the kid and more the way the outside world responds to the kid in those colors, I think. I've seen there be much more color variation among boys clothes, yes, but more importantly, a toddler wearing pink is gendered by others as female, and talked to as if female, and all other colors are generally talked to as if male. Occasionally yellow is gendered female too.
[-]NancyLebovitz140

I've seen complaints about how much harder it is to find non-gendered clothing than it used to be.

I think the solution on clothes is that when the child is old enough to have opinions about how they want to dress, follow their lead.

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7shokwave
I have no experience in raising kids, but maybe the important part is having a wide range of outfits - have an overtly feminine outfit, but also a blue onesie with a tiger, and two or three green/yellow ones.
6Luke_A_Somers
You don't need to eradicate pink. Just reducing it to a reasonable level won't spur any 'Did you wish I was a boy' ideas.
5David_Gerard
Mine loves pink. We make sure to let her interest in non-pink things run free too (dinosaurs, space, trains, etc).
9palladias
Learn to sew! You can do a lot just topstitching appliques (great way to make superhero onesies).
[-]Athrelon160

I'm a male LWer with an infant daughter. I'd like to request some specific advice on avoiding the common failure modes.

Don't take your parenting approach from ideology, because it's not optimized for being a reflection of reality. (Extreme example here)

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6sangbean31
I'm coming from the perspective of a daughter who was and is pretty gender non-conforming, so my advice may not be useful generally, but I hope it helps anyway. I think other commenters have talked about not saying "Girls do this" and "Girls don't do that", and an important aspect of that is to not be inherently dismissive of feminine/masculine attributes as whole. If she ends up being the only geek-ish type girl she knows, it becomes easy to dismiss the "feminine" interests of her peers as lesser compared to her own. So, expose her to media with significant female characters, but not just those who resemble her or share her interests. Actually, come to think of it, expose her to real women with varied interests, to avoid the whole categorising thing as much as possible. Regarding clothes,which is an area in which I have frustrated both my parents very much, follow her lead where possible from young. If you have an occasion where a dress is required because of formality but she's clearly upset/angry at wearing a dress, see if there's an appropriate alternative. Whatever the outcome, don't make it feel like it's her fault for being uncomfortable in dresses. Also, children can change rather quickly, so remember that both the little girl who loves MLP and the little girl who loves Star Wars may not stay that way when they grow up. I'd just like to add that I sincerely respect you for choosing to ask for this advice at all, since most parents never bother.
6Tripitaka
To clarify: you want to avoid to gender-stereotype your child? Specific advice for starters: the LGBT/Queer-scene tries to do some of that, so draw on their resources: Wikipage with LGBT/Queer childbooks Maybe get in contact with your local queer/LGBT-scene? With 2 minutes of googling I found http://www.queerparents.org/. Good luck!
2moridinamael
I want to avoid harm and let my daughter have the happiest possible life. If avoiding gender-stereotyping her will accomplish those things, then I want to do that. Thanks for the resources!
[-]steven0461370

this is your warning that Crocker's Rules apply to the following content

That's not how Crocker's Rules work; they're supposed to be declared by the listener, who thereby takes responsibility for any hurt feelings caused by the content. You can't declare Crocker's rules on behalf of others.

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[-]daenerys280

That's why I called it Crocker's Warning and not Crocker's Rules. I am implying that by reading the content you are agreeing to Crocker's Rules. It's just a way of saying that the submitters were told not to hold back, and if you want it sugar-coated, you shouldn't read it.

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[-]Said Achmiz150

Upon consideration, I think I have pinpointed what bothers me about the bit in the post about Crocker's Rules. It's the imposition on the reader, not just of potentially offensive content, but also of a waiver of the right to object to the content as being offensive.

That is, I don't object to this part:

Submitters were told to not hold back for politeness

Fine and well. A good warning.

, so this is your warning that Crocker's Rules apply to the following content

But this part seems to suggest that by reading this, I'm waiving my right to say, e.g., "Wait a bit, this isn't just impolite, this is offensive! This reads like an insult!" It seems like the warning is saying: "If you find this offensive, too bad. By reading this, you're agreeing to shut up and take it" — and I don't think that prefacing your post with that is conducive to good discussion, not at all.

Note: I don't actually think any of the anecdotes in this post are offensive.

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[-]Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) 180

Note: I don't actually think any of the anecdotes in this post are offensive.

Me neither. I think the post needs a more specific set of ground rules, something like "the anonymous submitters are putting themselves out on the line here, and in order to have the most honest and useful discussion, they were told not to hold back for politeness...but they'll probably be reading all your comments and replies, so in order to encourage future honest and useful discussions, please don't respond angrily or rudely, since that will discourage submitters in the future from being honest." Which isn't quite in the spirit of Crocker's Rules. (I don't know if 'Crocker's Warning' is a concept that has actually been elaborated...is it?)

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2Said Achmiz
These ground rules seem reasonable. In general when people say "I want to tell you something, but you have to promise not to get angry/offended/etc.", my response is along the lines of: "I can't and won't promise that. I do promise that I will make an effort to temper any knee-jerk reaction I might have, and to give thought to your words and to my response before I say anything. I try to do this in all of my interactions with people whom I respect, but in this case I promise to make a special effort." And if that's not good enough... well, then it seems my interlocutor doesn't care that much about telling me whatever it is they wish to tell me.
7steven0461
Neat, can I put one of those on my comments feed?
5[anonymous]
"You can speak to me candidly and I won't throw a fit" is a concession. "I'm about to speak candidly" is a warning. "I'm about to speak candidly, and that might upset you, but you have to be nice when you respond anyway, and if you're not going to be nice, then I don't want to play with you" is an ultimatum. "I'm about to speak candidly, so you're going to agree to not throw a fit" is an ultimatum with extra squick factor.
[-]daenerys130

You might want to try reading what I actually wrote, instead of putting words in my mouth.

What you think I said:

...but you have to be nice when you respond anyway, and if you're not going to be nice, then I don't want to play with you"

"...so you're going to agree to not throw a fit"

These are not at all what I said. Your own definition of a warning ("I'm about to speak candidly') is pretty much exactly what I said (with the addendum that I added in the grandparent "so if you don't want to hear candidness, don't read it.")

So let's look exactly at what I said:

Crocker's Warning- Submitters were told to not hold back for politeness, so this is your warning that Crocker's Rules apply to the following content

Notice how I DON'T AT ALL say the types of ultimatums you seem to think I said.

I am tapping out of the Crocker's Warning discussion, because I feel like it has fallen to logical rudeness

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[-]Vaniver270

Notice how I DON'T AT ALL say the types of ultimatums you seem to think I said.

I think the confusion comes from your use of the phrase "Crocker's Rules" in the explanation (the word "Crocker" shows up twice; I'm referring to the second time). If what you meant was "these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post," then you should have just said that.

As it is, the warning seems incoherent, because you refer to a known concept (Crocker's Rules) incorrectly. When I first read it, the impression I got was that we could respond to the anonymous anecdotes without any consideration for politeness, which seemed really bizarre.

It was especially bizarre because, for this post at least, there doesn't seem to be anything about LW in particular. There's just a reasonable explanation of inferential distance and anecdotes about people being mistreated in their day to day lives to lower that distance.

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[-]daenerys220

Thank you. I think that this comment is the most constructive criticism on the topic, and have edited my post to include your wording.

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[-]Vaniver100

You're welcome! Glad I could help.

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5[anonymous]
I thought that my last examples were, respectively, a fair paraphrasing of social consequences for not respecting the warning and a fair desugaring of your original statment when "Crocker's rules" is tabooed. However, this is not the first time I have been accused of putting words into others' mouths, so I will provisionally accept that I have acted rudely. I am sorry that I misrepresented your position, and misrepresented it to your disadvantage. My prior comment is retracted.
2Dias
Suppose a hypothetical LW user wanted to say something very racist, or bigoted against some other group.Would it suffice for her to avoid censure for her to preface her comments with such a warning?
3TimS
Suppose someone posted a comment that implied kicking puppies was good. Responses that only made that premise explicit would be unhelpful and probably hostile. Daenerys' warning might be sufficient to ward of those responses. But substantive engagement with the argument - including criticism - would be welcome and normal in this community.
[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky130

I think the concept is that content is included from trusting volunteers who were told to expect Crocker's Rules in the audience, and if you're not willing to abide by that trust, you shouldn't read.

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[-]Said Achmiz120

If true, that (telling the volunteers to expect Crocker's Rules in the audience) seems at worst disingenuous and at best unwarranted. Taken literally, it translates to:

"I promise that the audience which will read your writings will consist entirely of people who don't get offended by anything you say, up to and including things almost universally considered to be directly and personally insulting." (Because that's what Crocker's Rules are, yes?)

And in general I don't think that "I have things to say, but I'm only going to say them to people who promise not to be offended by anything I say" is in the spirit of Crocker's Rules. I also don't think that it's a good attitude to take, period.

ETA (from http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Crocker's_rules):

Crocker emphasized, repeatedly, in Wikipedia discourse and elsewhere, that one could only adopt Crocker's rules to apply to oneself, and could not impose them on a debate or forum with participants who had not opted-in explicitly to these rules, nor use them to exclude any participant.

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4steven0461
So it sounds like the content can't be posted under Crocker's rules, because it's unreasonable to unilaterally exempt oneself from all ordinary social norms of politeness, even when people (sort of) have the option not to read; and the content can't be posted not under Crocker's rules, because the authors were promised that if it were posted, it would be under Crocker's rules. Maybe that means that if we're serious about upholding norms, it means daenerys has torpedoed her own project by making a promise she couldn't keep.
[-]Daniel_Burfoot360

Words from my father’s mouth, growing up: “You need to be able to cook and keep a clean house, or what man would want to marry you?”

I assume most people find this statement offensive and objectionable. If you are such a person, can you provide a rational justification for your response? It seems to me that the father is simply making a set of empirical claims about reality, and so at worst the statement is just inaccurate.

Also, imagine a father telling his son "You need to get a good job and learn how to dress well, or else no woman will want to marry you." Is this statement similarly objectionable? If so, why?

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[-]Alicorn500

There's a few parts. Let's charitably assume that the father is just making an empirical statement, to shorten the list.

  1. He assumes that his daughter needs to achieve the prerequisites of marriage - that she needs to get married. (And that it's his job to prepare her for this, even if only informationally.)

  2. He assumes she's going to marry a man.

  3. He describes her future marriage in terms of the wants of her hypothetical husband, as opposed to hers (compare something like, "You need to be able to dump guys over long-term dealbreakers without dating them for years, or how will you find a man you want to marry?")

  4. He is wrong as a statement of fact, because there exist men who would marry a woman who doesn't clean and cook - and this isn't just a harmless falsehood (compare the implausible "you need to wear cunning knitted hats and eat parsley, or what man would want to marry you?"), but one that draws attention to evaluating his daughter's value in terms of her domestic skills - a pattern that is reinforced elsewhere, while cunning knitted hats and parsley are not.

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[-]Emile220

Some of those objections disappear if you treat the father's advice as a heuristic and not an absolute rule - something like "being able to cook and keep a house clean increases your chances of finding a desirable long-term partner"; especially objection 2 (I would expect a woman would also prefer a partner who can cook and keep a house clean, all else being equal) and 4 (even if some men are perfectly okay with a wife that can't cook, I would expect that all else being equal being able to cook still makes one a more desirable partner).

"There are exceptions to that rule" is close to a fully general counterargument, because there are exception to pretty much any rule (outside the hard sciences), and I'm a bit annoyed when such an exceptions is used to triumphantly "refute" an argument (for example "once there was this guy who would have died if he had been wearing a seat belt!").

I do agree that the statement is sneaking in some iffy connotations like "your value as a woman is who you marry" and "you don't pick a husband, you get picked", and even if knowing how to cook does make increase the chances one ends up in a happy long-term relationship, other traits probably have more bang for the buck.

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[-]JoachimSchipper290

If you interpret the father's statement as "all else being equal, being a better cook is good" and you completely divorce it from a historical and cultural context, it is indeed not really problematic. But given that we are, in fact, talking culture here, I do not think that this is the interpretation most likely to increase your insight.

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9Emile
(not disagreeing, but note that I'm not saying the statement isn't problematic, merely saying that some objections are better than others)
[-]Daniel_Burfoot130

Let's charitably assume that the father is just making an empirical statement, to shorten the list.

But my whole point was that if it's an empirical statement, then we shouldn't be offended by it. That position seems fundamental to the whole rationalist project - a minor corollary of the Litany of Tarski is "If X is true, I want people to tell me that X is true [1]". X can be "the sky is blue" or "women who can cook and clean have better marriage prospects", it really shouldn't matter.

Think about the precedent you are setting when you get offended by an empirical statement. First of all, you are attacking the messenger - the fact that potential suitors will evaluate a woman in part based on her domestic skills is perhaps deplorable, but it's hardly the father's fault. Second, you are giving your allies an incentive to hide potentially important social information from you, since you have established the fact that you will sometimes get angry at them for telling you things.

[1] A better statement of this idea would be "If the probability of X is p(X), I want the proportion of people who tell me X is true to be p(X)". The people who advocate the minority positions (i.e. iconoclasts) are actually crucial to forming a well-calibrated picture of the world - without them you will become disastrously overconfident. You should take a moment today to thank your friendly neighborhood iconoclast.

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[-]daenerys400

When epistemic rationality is counter to instrumental rationality

Epistemic rationality is about knowing the truth. Instrumental rationality is about meeting your goals.

The general case is that the more truth you know, the better you are at meeting your goals (and so instrumental and epistemic rationality are heavily tied to each other), however there exist rare occurrences where this is not the case.

More importantly, there are many times when SPEAKING the truth is counter to your goals.

For an absurd example: Say you are in a room full of angry convicts with knives. It probably is counter to your goal of staying alive and healthy to start proclaiming TRUE but insulting statements.

More realistically, raising children is one example where, if your goal is to raise happy, sane, well-adjusted adults, there are many statements that should NOT be spoken, no matter how true they are.

Examples:

  • No, that's a horrid drawing. I can't tell at all what it is. I could do better in 5 seconds. I will probably throw it away as soon as you forget about it.
  • Your mom and I just had sex on the living room couch. What's sex? Well...
  • Let's learn about the history of torture! Or how about I tell you
... (read more)
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[-]A1987dM130

Your mom and I just had sex on the living room couch. What's sex? Well...

Why? I was under the impression that not telling children about sex was usually the result of an emotional hangup on the part of the parents and/or a culturally cached thought that originally arose from the “sex is dirty” meme from the medieval/early modern Christianity memeplex (possibly both things reinforcing one another), rather than a rational expectation that the child would be worse off if they knew about sex based on any kind of actual evidence. Am I wrong? (How common is that taboo among non-European-derived cultures?)

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[-]Alicorn170

Telling children how sex works is important. You can do this when they ask about it or when they reach some level of sophistication that will let them understand the explanation you're ready to give. Telling anyone - especially your child - that you just had sex on the couch is a poor choice (outside of some plausible dynamics that consenting unrelated adults could set up). It's none of their business, and a psychologically typical child won't want it to be their business or will be embarrassed to have so wanted when they get older.

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[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky190

I looked up 'sex' in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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[-]David_Gerard120

How old were you? Did it tell you anything that seemed useful, anything that in fact turned out to be useful? (Did you have a Britannica at home?)

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3A1987dM
Okay. For some reason I had focused on the "What's sex? Well..." (and assumed the dots stood for a truthful answer) rather than the "Your mom and I just had sex on the living room couch" part. (I'm reminded of parents customarily making shit up when asked what condoms are or how children are born -- even just saying "I'll tell you when you're older" would make more sense IMO.)
6daenerys
Sorry, that was partially my bad. The purpose of the "What's sex?" part was to illustrate that this was a younger child. (In my mind these were all preschoolers in the examples). I didn't consider that people might read that to mean that I don't think sex should be discussed truthfully with children. I do! But at a certain age, and in the right context (NOT in the context of parents discussing their own sexcapades.)
[-]Eugine_Nier110

But at a certain age, and in the right context (NOT in the context of parents discussing their own sexcapades.)

Why? Can you justify this without appealing to the traditions about sex and gender that you've just been arguing against?

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3Multiheaded
IMO: Traditions or not, the role of a child doesn't "by default" include any script for interaction, even as an unwilling observer, with the parents' sex life. A child simply wouldn't be sure how to process and break down something they see or hear from it. People instinctively appear to see familial and sexual intimacy as two separate kinds of bonds, and the mind-screw that comes with mixing them might be one of the reasons for having incest fantasies. Such a mind-screw could easily be discomforting/unpleasant in everyday contexts!
3Eugine_Nier
Why should a child have a predefined role or script? People also instinctively appear to see men and women as two different kinds of people.
[-]Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) 120

•Let's learn about the history of torture! Or how about I tell you about factory farming and where your hamburger came from. Or poverty!

I don't think this example is in the same class as the other ones...as in, there's a certain age at which I would think that it is a good idea to tell your child, at the very least, that torture/factory farming/poverty exist. Preferably in a "let's think of something small that you could do about nasty situation XYZ" format. I wouldn't recommend telling 4-year-olds about these things-they aren't at an age to understand them-but 10-11 year olds is a different story. To do otherwise is to raise children to unconsciously ignore these issues, as most adults do. These issues exist.

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3daenerys
In my mind, the examples were for preschoolish age children, but now that you mention it, I see that I didn't include anything specifying age in the grandparent. I'll edit to say so.
[-]Vaniver100

Even if it the cooking and cleaning statement were epistemically true, it is not instrumentally rational to tell this to your child if your goal is to have her grow into an independent adult who can support herself, and does not feel bound by the "traditional" gender roles (which are falling out of favor anyway).

Indeed. But why suppose those goals? I would value my daughter's happiness above her being independent and untraditional, in part because the former seems absolute while the latter two seem relational. When there are conflicting goals, all we can discuss are the empirical results of polices, and it's not clear to me that this is a case where accomplishing goals and speaking the truth conflict.

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9Said Achmiz
All of those examples are cases of the hearer being insufficiently intelligent, insufficiently sane, or insufficiently mentally developed, and thus not equipped to hear truth-statements without taking unreasonable offense. Into which of those categories do you think the women on LW fall...? I'm going to guess "none of the above". But that leaves you with an absence of examples that actually support your point. Also: the empirical statement "making this statement will probably lead to this-and-such bad outcome for me" is not equivalent to the value judgment "this statement is offensive [to this-and-such part of my audience]".
[-]Emile110

All of those examples are cases of the hearer being insufficiently intelligent, insufficiently sane, or insufficiently mentally developed, and thus not equipped to hear truth-statements without taking unreasonable offense. Into which of those categories do you think the women on LW fall...?

Back at the top of this thread, what is discussed is "A father tells his daughter X. Some here may find that objectionable." - what would be obejctionable wouldn't be X, but the fact that a father tells his daughter X.

Daenerys's examples are analogous to X - things that may not be particularly offensive as truth statements, but that one still may not want to tell small children.

(I think in this subthread some don't pay enough attention to the differences between "what's okay for discussion on LW" and "what's okay for a father-daughter discussion")

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6Said Achmiz
Hmmm, a fair point. I took the people objecting to said statement as saying that it's offensive/objectionable in general, or offensive/objectionable to them specifically, rather than saying "maybe so, but perhaps not something you should say to your kid". If my interpretation was incorrent, I apologize.
9A1987dM
IME certain topics are so mind-killing that few people are sufficiently intelligent, sane and mentally developed for them -- even on LW.
4handoflixue
Speaking as a woman of LessWrong, when I was 16, I was insufficiently sane and insufficiently mentally developed. If you go back to 14 and assuming my journals aren't a practical joke I played on myself, I'd say I was also insufficiently intelligent/rational. It's key to remember the context here: these things are often said to children and adolescents.
6Said Achmiz
So was I. I don't think we disagree that when speaking to children, adolescents, and other people who aren't equipped to hear truth-statements without taking unreasonable offense, we should suitably modify our statements. But the original question was whether we (here at Less Wrong) — who are more or less sane, intelligent, and mentally developed — ought to take offense, or even whether we should consider the statements to be "offensive" in the sense of saying that any offense taken to them is justified. In other words, which of these scenarios is closer to what should be going on: Father: You need to be able to cook and keep a clean house, or what man would want to marry you? LW Observer, looking on from the sidelines: What an offensive statement! I am offended. or Father: You need to be able to cook and keep a clean house, or what man would want to marry you? LW Observer, looking on from the sidelines: That statement is probably poorly suited to its intended audience. The thing about offense is that it's an emotional reaction, and one that prompts us to certain sorts of behaviors toward the person or group who caused the offense. We should be careful to be offended by those things that we actually think should prompt us to the resulting behaviors. I happen to think that there are very few kinds of actions or statements that deserve the sort of response that we see to "offensive" things these days, certainly much fewer than actually get such a response. This suggests that we should get offended at fewer things. Emotions have consequences. Edit: How the heck do I put in a line break...? Is there an equivalent to here?
1handoflixue
I would say 75-95% of all white, male, fathers in the United States currently have at least some gender biases that they will pass down to their kids. I would say that people who phrase things in that way are likely to either be "very cool person who will happily take to correcting and clarify their meaning" or else "actually trying to pass down gender biases (whether due to ignorance or active sexism)". The cool people are more likely to phrase it in a way that signals "I am a cool person", and thus avoid phrasing that are prone to give people offense, but obviously no one has a perfect map of what is currently offensive. Therefor, given this statement, and given that "bias spreader" is the more common group, and given that the "bias spreader" is more likely to say this, I can, with fairly high confidence (call it 95%?) say that if I get offended, I am getting offended at someone who is spreading a gender bias that I strongly disagree with. The other 5% of the time, as long as I don't go in guns blazing, I'm unlikely to seriously offend the other person. Therefor, I can fairly safely act as though the person is spreading a gender bias. Since they are a hypothetical person, I obviously can't investigate them further to confirm this, but I CAN model the group of people who say offensive things, and conclude that it is perfectly rational and reasonable to treat them as though they were saying offensive things. NOW, there's still the open question: given that I am offended, what should I do? You believe my emotions prescribe a specific set of actions, and I'd bet you can even do the same priors I just did to demonstrate that 95% of all people who cry "that's offensive" do something stupid. BUT, I am not a hypothetical, so you can interact with me and learn what my actual response would be. Which, as it turns out, boils down to "I'm offended. If I think speaking up will help, I will." If both of them already understood it in the non-offensive context, then I have
4Said Achmiz
And here's the minor quibble: Why specify "white"? Your statement is probably true, but there appears to be an implication that it doesn't apply to the non-white population. That has not been my experience (if you construe "white" to mean "as opposed to black/Asian/Hispanic/etc., my experience is by observation and word of mouth; "white" could also be interpreted as more like "WASP", in which case my contrary experience is also personal).
4Said Achmiz
I more or less agree with what you said, especially this: and this and I certainly support this And in general I am a big fan of actually having conversations with people, and clarifying each other's viewpoints; not barging ahead and drawing strong conclusions and acting on them on the basis of the only evidence you've gotten so far, but trying to get more evidence, especially when it's easy to do so. So in that, I think, we are in agreement. I have a minor quibble which I'll address in another reply, but for now I'd like to say that I am not a big fan of the "bias spreader" vs. "cool person" dichotomy. I get the impression from your comment that you didn't, exactly, mean to suggest that everyone who has any sort of a gender bias is necessary a bad person... but that is an all-too-common meme these days; and I disagree with it. Basically, if we allow that biases can be largely or even entirely unconscious, it seems slightly absurd to suggest that "bias spreader" and "cool person" don't overlap. Like, maybe the guy in the hypothetical didn't just pick a poor turn of phrase, maybe he actually has unconscious gender biases... but it doesn't follow that being offended is the reasonable response. The question is this: is this a person who would, upon full consideration, prefer not to have biases and unjustified prejudices? Or is he ok with being biased? It seems to me that many more "bias spreaders" fall into the first category than the second. And taking offense does not seem like the optimal way to rectify the situation (that is, to fix this person's biases, which is what they themselves would want). Then again, it seems that you, personally, react to taking offense in a calmer and more reasonable way than do many other people, which is great. I think (based on what you've said) what you refer to as "being offended" is a lot closer to my scenario #2 than it is to how most people react to "offensive" things, so again, I do not think we actually have a great deal
1handoflixue
That was lazy writing on my part, and I apologize for it. It seems like we are pretty much on the same page :)
7A1987dM
See also Bostrom (2011).
4MugaSofer
As a vegetarian, I am obligated to point out that you shouldn't have to hide torture from your kids because there shouldn't be torture. How would you like it if it turned out that your car was secretly powered by a forsaken child, but the government covered it up because it might make you depressed? You wouldn't thank them for protecting your mental health, you would condemn them for allowing a horrible injustice to continue by suppressing the populace's natural horror. Ahem. You're absolutely right, concealing lovecraftian mindbreaking knowledge is a good thing, because duh. Thank you for pointing this out, it's easy to forget "what we should say" is not the same as "what we should believe".
3[anonymous]
Man, except for the 'I could do better' part (I can't), I tell my kid this all the time.
3Emile
That's harsh! Do you have a particular reason to do that? (I'm genuinely curious; my personal inclination wouldn't be to do that, though of course it is true of my kid's current drawings, he's two years old)
6Strange7
Praise means more when it has to be earned.
4NancyLebovitz
Especially for little kids, you don't want to make praise too hard to get.
8ialdabaoth
Exactly. "What is it? I think I see it! I bet you can do even better next time!" is far less discouraging than "that's horrible, I can't even tell what it is!" Assuming that your goal is to construct a well-functioning mind, that is. (Which I hope is the goal of everyone who decides to make a child)
2Strange7
It's a tricky balance. I don't agree with Esar's strategy, but I can see the logic behind it and was trying to share that understanding with Emile.
3[anonymous]
Well, the kid I'm talking about is 8, so he can handle criticism better than a preschooler. To my credit, he is an awesome artist.
[-]Kindly260

An empirical statement, even a true one, can place undue emphasis on a particular fact. There's a hundred things in the same reference class that the father could have said; this particular one isn't being picked out because it is more true than the others, but because it conforms to gender stereotypes.

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[-]Alicorn230

But my whole point was that if it's an empirical statement, then we shouldn't be offended by it.

Yes, well... I don't agree with your point!

Some empirical statements, orthogonal to truth or falsity, are offensive. Virtually any claim can be made in an inappropriate way even if it's not intrinsically problematic (if someone shouted the multiplication tables at the top of their lungs in a public space for an hour, I might not use the word "offended" to describe my reaction, but I would sure want it to stop). Some claims can be made in a normal tone of voice during a conversation between consenting conversational partners and still be offensive. Many insults are empirical in nature. Slander/libel is generally empirical, although it's false if it can be described by those words. "I fucked your mom" is a claim about reality, true or false though it may be in any given instance; most people will be offended by it and they aren't wrong.

The particular statement under evaluation here is problematic for the reasons I outlined. Even if the statement is true and its content is appropriate - even if we assume that the man's daughter wants to grow up and marry a man a... (read more)

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[-]Daniel_Burfoot170

I completely accept that the father's statement was framed poorly and that he should have been more tactful and diplomatic, but that seems like a relatively minor misdemeanor and is also unrelated to the points raised in your original comment.

I am going to stand by my basic claim that rationalists should try to build an environment where people can make statements about their perceptions of reality without fear of social repercussions.

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[-]simplicio200

I am going to stand by my basic claim that rationalists should try to build an environment where people can make statements about their perceptions of reality without fear of social repercussions.

The flip side of that is building an environment where people clearly differentiate normative claims from empirical ones. The father (I would guess intentionally) failed to do this, which is a moral failing on his part - he seems to be trying to guide his daughter into a traditional gender role, not disinterestedly providing her anthropological facts about her (assumed) future dating pool. When doing the latter, he should use more objective language and also explicitly state his moral position on the status quo.

As to making empirical statements without the fear of social disapproval, I don't think that's possible. All statements are speech acts - affecting our emotions and values - and empirical statements are no different. Trying to build a community that is tone-deaf to the implications of a technically true empirical statement like "Jews are apes" is not a particularly desirable goal. If you want to transmit empirical truths with a potentially nasty social undertone, there is no shortcut but to try your best to disavow the undertone.

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9satt
I reserve the right to publicly spurn insults, nagging, implicit normative claims, misleading innuendoes, and outright falsehoods, whether or not they're presented as statements about someone's perceptions of reality.
[-]Said Achmiz100

The slander/libel case seems instructive: truth is an absolute defense against the accusation of slander or libel; it's the falsehood of a slanderous statement that harms.

Shouting the times-tables is a problem because of the delivery mechanism, not the content. Shouting anything at the top of your lungs for an hour in a public space is harmful to bystanders, and as you said, "offensive" is not what is wrong here.

"I fucked your mom", if true, is only potentially offensive for something like the following reasons:

  • Swearing in polite company is frowned upon; "I had sex with your mother" is qualitatively different despite having the same content.
  • It's an implication of promiscuity (or low selectiveness of sexual partners) on the part of the target's mother, and our society's views on sexuality derogate promiscuity, turning this empirical statement into an insult. Arguably, this is a problem with society's views on sexuality ("slut shaming"), rather than the fact that informing someone about their sexual encounters with that person's mother is inherently offensive.

In short, I don't think I buy your claim that "Some empirical statements, or... (read more)

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[-]simplicio270

In short, I don't think I buy your claim that "Some empirical statements, orthogonal to truth or falsity, are offensive." At least, I'd like to see it supported better before I consider it.

Some examples of empirical statements with questionable-to-bad ethical undertones. I present them to you as food for thought, not as some sort of knock-down argument.

  • "Your husband's corpse is currently in an advanced stage of decomposition. His personality has been completely annihilated. Remember how he sobbed on his deathbed about how afraid he was to die?" (Reminding a person of a bad thing they don't want to think about.)
  • "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, here are twenty police case files on convicted child murderers, all of them Albanian just like the defendant, without any statistical context." (Facts presented in a tendentious manner.)
  • "Just thought it might be interesting for you to know that women tend to do about 10% worse on this test than men. Anyway, you may turn your papers over now - good luck!" (Self-fulfilling prophesies.)
  • "You're the only asian in our office." "Did you notice how you're the only asian in our office?&q
... (read more)
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[-]Said Achmiz150

Some examples of empirical statements with questionable-to-bad ethical undertones. I present them to you as food for thought, not as some sort of knock-down argument.

These are food for thought indeed. My thoughts on some of them, intended as ruminations and not refutations:

"Your husband's corpse is currently in an advanced stage of decomposition. His personality has been completely annihilated. Remember how he sobbed on his deathbed about how afraid he was to die?" (Reminding a person of a bad thing they don't want to think about.)

I'm not sure what I think about this one. I do note that it would probably be perceived differently by someone who was aware of its truth (this person would certainly be hurt by the reminder of the bad thing), than by someone who was not (i.e. a religious person).

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, here are twenty police case files on convicted child murderers, all of them Albanian just like the defendant, without any statistical context." (Facts presented in a tendentious manner.)

Exploitation of cognitive biases in the audience. Certainly an unethical and underhanded tactic, but note that its effectiveness depends on insuffi... (read more)

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[-]simplicio130

As an aside, I almost forgot a really good example of the phenomenon of "harmful facts," which is that the suicide rate in a region goes up whenever a suicide is reported on the news. Indeed, death rates in general go up whenever a suicide is reported, because many suicides are not recognized as such (e.g., somebody steers into oncoming traffic).

For this reason, police tend to hush suicides up (at least, they did in my old hometown & I think it's widespread).

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6simplicio
Maybe, although I strongly suspect religious people alieve that their relatives are gone (otherwise, as others have noted, a funeral would be more like a going-away party). Good question. Wikipedia turns up this link, which would seem to say "Yes." So happily, the corrective for this contextually harmful empirical statement is a contextually helpful empirical statement. Oh yes, certainly. Refusing to notice ingroup/outgroup differences is just the opposite failure mode. I am still philosophically confused about this issue, although I have been thinking about it for a while. You are probably objecting to the fact that ex hypothesi, less revealing clothing leads to fewer sexual assaults, so why wouldn't we follow that advice - yes? As I say, I don't have a full account of that. All I wanted to draw attention to is the ethical questionable-ness of making such a statement without any acknowledgement that one is asking potential victims to change their (blameless) behaviour in order to avoid (blameworthy) assault from others. Compounding the issue is the suspicion that statements like this ALSO tend to be a form of whitewashed slut-shaming. Yes, in my experience this is very common in muggle society. Right. The rubric that I try to use in such situations is essentially a consequentialist one. Roughly speaking, the idea is that you should try to predict how your statements might be misinterpreted by a (possibly silly) audience, and if the expected harm of the misinterpretation is significant as compared to the potential benefit of your statement, then reformulate/be silent/narrow your audience/educate your audience about why they shouldn't misinterpret you. I sympathize, believe me! It's incredibly annoying to be read uncharitably. But if you know how to prevent an uncharitable/harmful reading, and don't as a matter of principle because the audience should know better... I think the LW term for that would be "living in the should-universe." As it happens, I broadly
9Eugine_Nier
Would you have similar objections if I advised you to lock your house to reduce theft?
9fubarobfusco
Doesn't that depend on the context of the advice? If the context is that you (or others) are telling me that it wasn't the thief's fault that they stole my TV, or that the fact that my house was unlocked is evidence that I consented to the taking of my TV, that context may make the advice seem part and parcel of the blame-shifting. For that matter, the reason to lock your house may well be to avoid being low-hanging fruit — IOW, someone else's TV gets stolen, not yours; theft is not actually reduced, just shifted around. There's no guarantee that everyone locking their house would reduce theft. The thieves learn to pick locks and everyone's costs are higher — but now a person who doesn't pay that cost is stigmatized as too foolish to protect themselves. As an old boss of mine used to say, "locks are to keep your friends out." They work against casual intruders, not committed ones.
5Eugine_Nier
That also depends. An insurance company would be well within its rights to charge you a higher premium if you refused to lock your house.
2fubarobfusco
Right — but an insurance company would do that even if it didn't reduce theft overall, but merely shifted theft away from their insured customers onto others. It could even be negative-sum thanks to the cost of locks. If we actually want to reduce theft overall, shifting it around doesn't suffice.
3NancyLebovitz
One counter-example: In Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God (an account of how Bible study eventually led a Catholic to become an atheist) , she says that accepting that there is no afterlife led to her having to mourn all her relatives again. Perhaps there is something between verbal belief and gut-level alief.
2MugaSofer
Alternative hypothesis: some religious people are mourning the fact that they will never be able to interact with the person again, not the fact that the person's mind has been irrevocably destroyed.
9Eugine_Nier
What moral theory are you using in the parenthetical comment? For example, according to naive utilitarianism it makes no sense to divide causal links leading to harm into "blameless" and "blameworthy".
4simplicio
Right, because naive utilitarianism sees 'blame' as more or less a category error, since utilitarianism is fundamentally just an action criterion. My own moral system is a bit of a hodgepodge, which I have sometimes called Ethical Pluralism. As I say to Said below, I don't have a full theory of blame and causality, although I think about it most every day. But I do think that there is something wrong/incomplete/unbalanced about blaming somebody for being part of a causal chain leading to a bad outcome, even if they are knowingly a part of that chain. For example, Doctor Evil credibly commits to light a school on fire if you don't give him $10 million. I would consider refusal to pay up in this situation as non-blameworthy, even though it causally leads to a bunch of dead schoolchildren.
[-]Eugine_Nier110

For example, Doctor Evil credibly commits to light a school on fire if you don't give him $10 million. I would consider refusal to pay up in this situation as non-blameworthy, even though it causally leads to a bunch of dead schoolchildren.

You may want to look at various decision theories particularly updateless decision theory and its variants.

The difference between the Dr. Evil example and the revealing clothing example is that if everyone precomits to not negotiating with hostage takers, Dr. Evil wouldn't even bother with his threat; whereas a precomitment to ignore the presence of sexual predators when deciding what to wear won't discourage them. The clothing example is in fact similar to the locked house example, I mentioned here.

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3A1987dM
Yes. I think that all deontological or virtue-ethics rules that actually make sense are actually approximations to rule consequentialism when it'd be too computationally expensive to compute from scratch and/or fudge factors to compensate for systematic errors introduced by our corrupted hardware.
3NancyLebovitz
I got away with a mild version of that one-- A friend's mother had just died, and I said "This is a world where people die", and it went over well. However, my friend had been doing meditation seriously for a while. I actually got hit with a version of that-- right before I started college there was an assembly where they handed out papers with correlations between SATS, high school average, and success in college. I had a bad combination with my SATS much better than my GPA. I can remember thinking "Then I might as well give up." That wasn't a sensible thought, but it wasn't sensible for them to give out those papers without saying something like "and here's counselling" or "high SAT/low GPA means you need to develop better work habits" or some such. Aside from the issues you've raised, it also implies that there's nothing to be done, not even martial arts school.
8satt
Not in my jurisdiction. Here, accurately reporting the details of spent criminal convictions with demonstrably malicious intent can be defamatory. Innuendoes can be too, even if the explicit statements (or images) involved are basically accurate.
[-]Said Achmiz120

Ah yes, thank you for mentioning this; I'd heard that such things are the case in British law, but had forgotten. A quick googling informs me that certain recent court rulings may have undermined truth as an absolute defense in the United States as well.

All I can say in response is that I think such laws are quite wrong. Truth should be an absolute defense. It is my opinion that most situations where making the truth known harms someone, are cases that highlight some systemic or widespread injustice, rather than cases of the truth being inherently harmful.

I can think of at least one major exception: matters related to privacy. That is quite a different thing, however, from something being offensive... an inherently offensive truth is something of whose existence I've yet to be convinced.

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[-]satt130

All I can say in response is that I think such laws are quite wrong.

But now we've moved from the original empirical claim I disputed ("The slander/libel case seems instructive: truth is an absolute defense") to a normative one. Sticking with the empirical for a moment, I think the way our libel law is actually designed is instructive: it acknowledges that someone can build misleading and/or normative implications into words or images which, taken literally, are wholly, objectively true.

Truth should be an absolute defense.

Maybe I'm burning my Rationalist Conspiracy membership card here, but I don't agree. Suppose a plumber visits a brothel merely to fix the pipes, but gets photographed by a journalist as they go in & out of the building. If a newspaper used the photographs as part of an exposé of the brothel, giving the pictures a technically truthful caption like "one visitor to the brothel coming and going", should the plumber lose a libel case because the article & pictures are true, despite the misleading implication that the plumber patronized the brothel?

It is my opinion that most situations where making the truth known harms someone, are c

... (read more)
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7Said Achmiz
You raise some interesting points about slander/libel. I don't dispute the empirical issue (though differences between American and British law here shouldn't be overlooked), but I don't think I'm convinced on the normative front, though your examples have made me less certain of my stance. As for your last point: whether we as a society agree that the target is entitled to take offense seems like the straightforward operationalization of implementing the two-place function of offense as a one-place function. So when I say "I don't think X should be considered offensive", I'm not making any sort of claim about whether any particular person will in fact take offense; the claim I am making is something along the lines of "we should not consider offense taken at X to be justified, and we should not care about said offense, or modify our behavior (i.e. stop saying X) on the basis of said offense".
4satt
Fair enough. That's all I can realistically hope for on a wide-ranging normative issue like this. Your one-place operationalization of offence sounds reasonable, as does your unpacking of what you mean by "I don't think X should be considered offensive". (Although even with your definition, I still think there exists X such that X is both true & offensive.)
7TorqueDrifter
"I could rape you right now, and there's nothing you could do about it."
5Said Achmiz
Interesting example. My intuition here is that while this is phrased as a statement, the implication is that of a threat. That does not seem to be the case for the other examples in this thread. Question: is the main problem with "I could rape you right now" that it's offensive, or that it's threatening, i.e. that it makes the hearer feel unsafe in the presence of the speaker?
8TorqueDrifter
So, then, I guess I provisionally agree that a factual statement minus any sort of opinion, implication, social role, etc., including the fact that it was stated instead of nothing or instead of other statements, is probably not offensive. This is a pretty weak claim, though!
2A1987dM
I'd rather there existed no such thing as slut shaming in my society, but in most situations I would still be pissed off if someone had sex with you while in a committed monogamous relationship with someone else without their knowledge and consent, in particular if said someone else is someone I know e.g. my father.
5Said Achmiz
I'm having a bit of trouble parsing your comment. Are you saying that if Bob had sex with your mother, you'd be pissed off at Bob, because this would mean that your mother has cheated on your father with Bob...? Fair enough, I suppose, though it seems to me that Bob in this situation isn't the one who's broken any promises/agreements; in general the blame for cheating seems like it should be assigned to the cheater, not the person he/she is cheating with. ... but this thread is probably fast approaching an entirely too tangential state relative to the main post.
4A1987dM
Yes, it'd be my mother I'd mainly be pissed off at; but if Bob was aware she was married (and in that hypothetical he definitely is aware she's my mother -- though he might have found that out later)... Agreed.
[-]lucidian150

The truth is not immutable. It seems that many people on this site would elevate empirical facts (what is) into normative rules (what ought to be). Clearly, if X is just the Way Things Are, then there's no use fighting it; a good rationalist learns to accept that X is true, and work with that knowledge instead of ignoring its reality. (X could be anything from atheism to "black people statistically commit more crimes" to "most men refuse to marry a woman who can't cook".)

But just because something is empirically true now doesn't mean it has to be true forever. This is especially the case with social norms. Feminists aren't trying to say "men really don't care about a woman's cooking skills, and fathers who tell their daughters this are wrong". They're not denying that the world is this way, they're just denying that it ought to be this way. And a reliable way to change social norms is to teach new social norms to the next generation!

Be aware that when you speak a truth such as "Men only marry women who can cook", you are not just acknowledging a fact but perpetuating it. You are not just an objective scientific observer of a fact, but a subjective participant in that fact.

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[-]A1987dM140

And a reliable way to change social norms is to teach new social norms to the next generation!

Er, not necessarily. Local maxima can be dangerous to venture away from.

Suppose that it'd be safer for everybody to drive on the right side of the road than for everybody to drive on the left side (as a consequence of most people being right-handed), and you're living in a country where it's customary to drive on the left side. You wouldn't teach your children to drive on the right side, would you?

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[-]Viliam_Bur100

And a reliable way to change social norms is to teach new social norms to the next generation!

And would you teach those new social norms as something that is or something that ought to be? Also, if different people have different opinions on what ought to be, what is / ought to be the algorithm for selecting the "correct" one?

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8Plasmon
I don't think this is the case. In fact, most criticism of the original statement centres around the fact that it was insufficiently clear whether it was empirical or normative. A cursory search reveals at least two relevant posts: 'Is' and 'Ought' and Rationality and SotW: Check Consequentialism Nonetheless, people should indeed pick their battles, and fight those unpalatable truths they think most worth fighting.
[-]Emile130

But my whole point was that if it's an empirical statement, then we shouldn't be offended by it.

I'm going to sidestep the talk of "offense" because I think it's sufficient to talk about whether a statement is morally right or wrong ("offensive" seems to be "morally wrong" with some extra baggage).

Two cases in which I might judge an empirical statement as morally wrong:

1) the statement is false, and yes, saying false things is usually considered morally wrong

2) the statement is true, but is used in a context where it will have negative repercussions - for example, telling your kid a huge amount of factually true statistics that cast a bad light upon a group you don't like (blacks, jews, women, etc.), or teaching a madman how to make explosives, etc.

In this case we're talking about the value a statement not in the abstract, but as life advice given from a father to his daughter. The important part isn't as much the truth of that particular piece of advice, but of what it allows us to infer about the general quality of the life advice given.

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[-]A1987dM110

A better statement of this idea would be "If the probability of X is p(X), I want the proportion of people who tell me X is true to be p(X)".

Er... if p(anthropogenic global warning is occurring | all publicly available evidence) is 85%, I'm not sure what I want is 85% of the people to tell me anthropogenic global warning is occurring and 15% of the people to tell me it's not.

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5PeterisP
Why not? Of course, the best proportion would be 100% of people telling me that p(the_warming)=85%; but if we limit the outside opinions to simple yes/no statements, then having 85% telling 'yes' and 15% telling 'no' seems to be far more informative than 100% of people telling 'yes' - as that would lead me to very wrongly assume that p(the_warming) is the same as p(2+2=4).
2A1987dM
Why?
[-]juliawise380

Both messages are only about the past/current state of things and leave no room for "The old model stinks, and I hope your generation will continue changing it."

I prepared for adulthood/marriage on the old model, and it did not serve me well. It was like getting a job only to find that my typewriter skills weren't needed. Early on we had a series of dinnertime arguments that boiled down to: "Have some more food." "No, thanks, I'm done." "I cooked you this Good Food because I am a Good Wife! Why can't you appreciate the work I put into being good at this? Eat the damn food!"

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[-]Emile160

I prepared for adulthood/marriage on the old model, and it did not serve me well.

As an extra anecdote, my wife says she prepared on the old model, and that it did serve her well (or at least, she doesn't regret).

I can see two perspectives:

A) The "traditional" model is good advice for a majority of the population, but is useless or harmful for a minority, in which case situations (like yours) where the advice failed may not be enough evidence that the advice was bad.

B) The "traditional" model may have been useful in the past, but society has changed too much (we live in large cities and know few of our neighbors; there's less physical work, a single earner can not usually support a family any more, many house tasks have been automated or outsourced), that the "traditional" model is about as useful as career advice from the 1920s.

I expect it's a mix of both, with the second effect probably being a bit stronger.

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[-]Viliam_Bur150

Good cooking skills provide a lot of utility for all members of the family. The costs of cooking are mostly the time spent cooking and the time spent learning cooking. The benefits of good cooking are pleasant experiences of eating tasty food, better health because of using more healthy ingredients, and saving some money (depends on cost of cook's time, and the size of family).

The traditional heuristic reduces the total costs of learning cooking by assigning the task to one gender. Also, in the context of traditional society, it is the gender with less income from work, therefore the opportunity costs of learning cooking are smaller.

On the other hand, contemporary society increases the opportunity costs for women, and also provides relatively cheap cooked food (probably still not as good as a good cook can make at home, but the difference is getting smaller). Also the costs of learning cooking are smaller because of available semiproducts and internet recipes; you can get mediocre results with trivial costs.

My (male) opinion is that the best solution today would be for everyone to learn some basic cooking (pasta, rice, soup...), at least the trivial recipes of form "put all in... (read more)

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7A1987dM
This might be why my grandma gets very annoyed when I don't eat all of the food she cooks.
4Dias
Are statements about the current state of affairs in general objectionable? If I tell my child not to be openly homosexual in Saudi Arabia, is this bad advice, even though the current Saudi Arabian model stinks and I hope their generation will continue changing it?
[-]JoshuaZ150

The issue is that language is often imprecise, and so people often make a descriptive statement which has normative connotations. Thus, when making that sort of thing it is important to be clear not just descriptively what is happening but normatively what one thinks about it.

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[-]juliawise110

It depends on how close things are to changing (or whether they have already changed). "You need to learn to cook and keep house" was more practical advice in the 1930s than in the 1980s. "Don't be openly gay" is practical advice in Saudi Arabia but probably not in New York.

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4Strange7
Whenever possible, separate the normative from the objective, and consider costs as well as benefits. For example, "if you're considering being openly homosexual in Saudi Arabia, remember that however much more personally fulfilling a life it is, statistically and legally speaking, it's also going to be quite a bit shorter."
2cousin_it
Hmm, I'd eat the food. Not just to show appreciation, but to keep up the good husband/good wife roleplay. The traditional model makes a lot of sense to me, as long as both parties buy into it.
[-]A1987dM220

Words from my father’s mouth, growing up: “You need to be able to cook and keep a clean house, or what man would want to marry you?”

I assume most people find this statement offensive and objectionable. If you are such a person, can you provide a rational justification for your response?

I think the sexism isn't telling that to your daughter -- it's not also telling that to your son.

ISTM that, until a few generations ago, people traditionally lived with their parents until they got married (in their early twenties, sometimes even in their late teens), and lived with their spouses thereafter. The husband traditionally had a full-time job, and the wife stayed home and was in charge of the housework (incl. cooking). Therefore, a man never actually needed to know how to do housework, because he would always live with a woman (his mother until he married, then his wife) who would do that for him. (Conversely, a woman never actually needed to work, because she would always live with a man (her father until she married, then her husband) who would bring home the bacon for her.) So, within the traditional gender roles, a male would never need to be told those words Julia Wise heard fro... (read more)

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[-]ChristianKl130

Her father had the goal of her learning how to cook. Cooking is a valuable skill and it makes sense for parents to want their children to learn valuable skills.

He could have simply said: "You need to learn how to cook".

If you want to persuade someone it's better to say "You need to learn how to cook, because it helps you to achieve important goal X" than to just say "You need to learn how to cook". A dad that thinks that getting married is one of the goals of his daughter will use the example.

If you tell a guy to learn cooking it sense to frame the reason differently.

Take Tim Ferriss in his new book "The 4-Hour Chef" with targets geeks:

Cooking is the mating advantage. If you're looking to dramatically improve your sex life, or to catch and keep "the one," cooking is the force multiplier. Food has a crucial role in well-planned seduction for both sexes, whether in longterm relationships or on first dates.

There no sexism inherent in giving a girl different reasons than a boy.

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8ialdabaoth
There most definitely is. The sexism is not generated by giving a girl different reasons than a boy, but it is absolutely inherent in the entire process that causes one to give a girl different reasons than a boy. True: There is no sexism inherent in giving child A different reasons from child B. Possibly true: There is no sexism inherent in giving particular-girl-Alice different reasons from particular-boy-Bob. False: There is no sexism inherent in giving girls-in-general different reasons from boys-in-general. The problem is that your statement has definitional ambiguity. Reframing to make it clear which specific case you're talking about will help cool down this debate.
[-]Randy_M130

Sexism has the same problem, as a word, that racism has. Is it believing in a contextually significant difference between groups OR is is believing that one group is universally superior to another OR is it actively working to support or harm an individual based on group affiliation? Examples of the latter are used to make the word have revulsion which is then used to discredit those who hold the former.

Those may be correllated, but are not identical positions.

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9ialdabaoth
Absolutely not. But this is why I keep using terms like "poisoning the discourse". Questions about contextually significant differences between groups are valid and important directions of inquiry, but people have deliberately decided (for political reasons) to so conflate them with actively supporting or harming individuals based on group affiliation that it's impossible to have a scientific discussion without feeding a bunch of people who aren't qualified to interpret the data. Because we don't have anything like HPMOR's "Bayesian Conspiracy", we need to be sensitive to the fact that certain factual conjectures cause damage when released into the wild. And because I don't know how rational you(collective) are, I need to make sure that you(collective) understand the social weight of certain conjectures before I'm willing to bandy them about. And unfortunately, responding with "but it seems factually true to me!" seems to be missing the point of the communication, which is "you are tugging on the end of a fact-string that is connected to a really nasty bit of primate pack-behavior, can we please tug more gently on it?". (I acknowledge that many people have responded with "but look how gently I'm already tugging"; I've attempted to respond with "seriously dudes, you need to tug even more gently than that.") This is a seriously recursive process, so almost all of the facts have to be evaluated in terms of the correlative matrix they operate within, instead of their mere correspondence-with-personally-available-evidence. All of these facts shape the process by which we gather evidence about them.
8ewbrownv
But the whole point of the process is to force anyone with an unpopular opinion to tug more and more gently, until finally they cease to tug at all. Then the PC hive mind can move the goalposts forward a bit, and start silencing a more moderate group of critics, and then another, and another, until ultimately the keepers of the received wisdom can say or do anything they like and no one dares to question them. So no, I'll continue on with my ironclad opposition to such transparent ploys. Anyone who whines about how their delicate sensibilities can't stand an open, honest discussion of the facts of an issue has given up the right to have anyone care what they think.
7ialdabaoth
That is emphatically not the "point" of the process. That may be a consequence of the process, but it is not the point of it - and if it does happen to be a consequence of the process, it's clear that you can be relied on to say so and we'll negotiate a new equilibrium. That... doesn't appear to be what actually happens. Are there "PC hive minds"? definitely. But right now, they most assuredly don't have the level of power that the old-guard conservatives do. Once they become the dominant force against rationality, if they don't evolve into milder strains in response to evolutionary pressure on their own, then it makes sense to start fighting them too. But right now, I have a seriously hard time seeing them as worse than what they're fighting. (Who knows - maybe that makes me part of the PC hive mind myself? It would be good to get a solid argument for that, if it were the case; I'd rather not fall into a loyalty trap if I can avoid it).
[-]ewbrownv130

I don't want to death-spiral into a discussion of politics, so I'll refrain from naming specific groups. But in most Western nations there are large, well-funded political activist groups that have consciously, explicitly adopting the tactic of aggressively claiming offense in order to silence their political opponents. While the members of such groups might be honestly dedicated to advancing some social cause, the leaders who encourage this behavior are professional politicians who are more likely to be motivated by issues of personal power and prestige.

So I'll certainly concede that many individuals may feel genuinely offended in various cases, but I stand by my claim that most of the political organizations they belong to encourage constant claims of offense as a cynical power play.

If you don't believe the ratcheting effect actually happens, I invite you to compare any random selection of political tracts from the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s. You'll find that on many issues the terms of the debate have shifted to the point where opinions that were seriously discussed in the 1950s are now considered not just wrong but criminal offenses. This may seem like a good thing if you happen to agree with the opinion that's currently be ascendant, but in most cases the change was not a result of one side marshaling superior evidence for their beliefs. Instead it's all emotion and political gamesmanship, supplemented by naked censorship whenever one side manages to get a large enough majority.

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2MugaSofer
You know, it sounds like you're claiming that the fact that certain behaviors - generally accepted to be harmful - are no longer considered acceptable as proof of a conspiracy cynically piggybacking on this change to impose (self?)censorship , furthering some unspecified agenda. This feels like a strawman of your actual beliefs; could you explain what you meant?
5Emile
I don't see a good reason to believe that's true - or at least, whether "conservatives" hold power is strongly function of what place you're talking about, and of what you mean by "power". Remember, not everybody here lives in the US like I assume you do (I live in France, as a first approximation it looks like you're all crazy over there). The impression I get is that both liberals and conservatives enjoy whining about how they are oppressed by their all-powerful opponents, and if you add the right caveats (what kind of oppression and where), they might both be right. In this thread, I've seen some distasteful justifications of "lying for the Greater Good" (or even just to defend "people in my coalition"), and in one (heavily downvoted) case, someone claiming they'd rather see the world destroyed rather than seeing it continue to exist with the current value systems ... all of that under the flag of feminism or LGBT advocacy. That has done very little to convince me that the biggest threats are from "old guard conservatives". It may be the case in some crapholes in Alabama, but probably not among the bright and educated.
8NancyLebovitz
You might be interested in a book called Racial Paranoia. It argues that since overt racism is publicly unacceptable in the US, people are focusing on tinier and tinier clues about who they can trust, resulting in a paranoid style which is actually a rational response to weird conditions.
6Nornagest
That sounds like a stretch. While public racism is unacceptable, acting in ways consistent with racial prejudice usually goes without comment as long as plausible deniability exists.
6[anonymous]
I don't disagree with the substance of your comment, but I'm not sure that public racism is as widely unacceptable as you'd like to think: http://i.imgur.com/vcYuy.png
3NancyLebovitz
The text was too small for me to read easily in your link, so I just sampled it. I suppose it depends on what you mean by public-- my handy example is that Trent Lott's political career was destroyed (severely damaged?) because he made a racist comment. ETA: And even his comment was mild compared to what people say when prejudice is considered the default.
2Nornagest
Hard to tell from this. Facebook and Twitter exist in an odd kind of limbo where they're treated as somewhere between public and private depending on how wide someone's network is, how sensitive their life is to dumb crap they might say online, and how aware they are of online privacy issues, so the stuff that crosses your feed isn't necessarily representative of what the people behind it might stand behind in a more traditional environment. Then there's contextual issues. The linked image clearly isn't a conversation, or even a time slice of a hashtag somebody's following -- it's out of chronological order and any replies aren't shown, so it doesn't tell us much about how representative this is of opinion in general or about how people usually respond to opinions like these, both of which are important when trying to gauge public acceptability.
3NancyLebovitz
I think such paranoia is in play in politics and sometimes online, where most or all of what you know about someone is what they say.
1Emile
That's a plausible hypothesis - I do get the impression that overt racism is slightly more acceptable in France, and definitely more acceptable in China. I also noticed that Americans tend to have a perspective on Arab Immigrants in France that seems weird and could be explained by the fact that they suppose "French"-Arab relationships are like the White-Black relationship in the US (or at least, that was one hypothesis I had at the time after some weird conversations).
3MugaSofer
"Point"? Or what? Are you worried that disagreeing with these "keepers of the received wisdom" will be criminalized? Bearing in mind that Fred Phelps is a real person and his actions are, as yet, legal. Transparent. Right. Because anyone who disagrees with you simply must have an ulterior motive. Indeed. Those toddlers are just trying to hide away from the truth about where babies come from.
1Randy_M
"people have deliberately decided (for political reasons) to so conflate them with actively supporting or harming individuals based on group affiliation that it's impossible to have a scientific discussion without feeding a bunch of people who aren't qualified to interpret the data." The opposite is done too, though--for instance, when one assumes there is no differences between boys and girls, then dressing girls up in pink or giving them baby dolls is seen as abetting a (sometimes emergent) conspiracy which deserves great efforts to combat
[-]ialdabaoth120

The opposite is done too, though--for instance, when one assumes there is no differences between boys and girls, then dressing girls up in pink or giving them baby dolls is seen as abetting a (sometimes emergent) conspiracy which deserves great efforts to combat

Perhaps; I think part of the issue there is that there is a political debate and a sociological engineering project, and they keep shitting all over each other.

"I think if we raise boys and girls in gender-neutral environments, their inherent gender biases will be far less noticeable" is part of the sociological engineering project.

"No! You're turning them into lesbo feminazis and fairy faggots!" is the political-debate response.

"Fuck you! I'm dressing everyone unisex and attacking everyone who doesn't!" is the political-debate counter-response.

Note that while the counter-response is crazy, it's a predictable emotional response to the prior crazy, and shouldn't be blamed on its own. My assertion is that attacking people who say "I'm dressing everyone unisex and attacking everyon who doesn't!" isn't nearly as effective as attacking the people who set them off in the first place, and hoping that they'll calm down once they're not under severe stress from people who are crazier than they do and attack them without provocation.

Does that make sense?

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3Randy_M
(I haven't read everyone elses responses, and I will shortly, but first my initial reaction): There are political debate responses and political debate responses; one can discuss policy politely and even, theoretically, rationally. Given that, I think a political debate is absolutely essential before any sociological experiment is undertaken, save for the small scale model of what you are doing to your own children, which others may comment on as noble or foolish but we should have a high bar for interference of. But if you are trying to, say, create a pressure group which coerces toy-makers to have only boys hold the dolls in their catalogues (heard about that in sweeden yesterday) I would prefer the political debate prior to a quixotic quest to rewrite human nature. In other words, I think the social engineers are more worrisome than the "crazy" people debating them.
2Eugine_Nier
Modulo your deliberate use of slurs, why is that not a valid objection. In other words, are you sure you understand the full implications of this "sociological engineering project" and why should the child be one of its test subjects?
[-]TimS200

Chesterton's fence and similar Burkean arguments are generally a reasonable position. But in this case, we know:

1) There are people who desire to do things that are not acceptable within their gender roles (i.e. cross-dressing)
2) Internalizing gender narratives makes those people miserable
3) Those people (as a group) are not more likely to engage in unacceptable behaviors (i.e. molest children)
4) Prior changes to gender and other social norms have occurred without society falling apart
5) Plausible arguments exist that those changes were net benefits for society (preventing Condoleezza Rice or Hilary Clinton from being Secretary of State is wasting talent)

In short, there is obvious and significant suffering that these changes could plausibly alleviate. Comparing these changes to similar changes suggests the downside risks are low. Even Burke acknowledged that change was sometimes necessary - otherwise Burkean conservatism becomes a fully general counter-argument.

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2Randy_M
In response to 1&2, I'd point out that 2 things: there are many gender norms,which may range from frivolous or harmful cultural baggage to valuable or vital biological or sociological adaptations. And, establishing a norm can be done with a range of incentives, and we should be open to optimizing them to minimize the misery while still promoting the norms that lead to a more harmonious society. I don't believe #3 is the main argument for establishing gender roles. For 4, there's a lot of apart in a society to fall. Some trends that worry me I do find plausible links to prior changes to gender norms. While I'm not sure I'm prepared to argue that here, I don't think the converse is firmly established, either. 5-Probably (there are probably arguments, I mean) but I don't find simply listing two names of women in high office to be one of them.
2TimS
Fine. How do we tell the difference? Also, how do we tell the difference between norms-masquerading-as-facts and facts?
5wedrifid
I have to support and emphasize your response here. The attempt to make those that disagree appear to be bigoted just isn't reasonable. Even those who endorse without judgement the lifestyle of being---and overtly displaying---what some people may call a "fairy faggot" have good reason to be wary of artificially forcing particular gender identities on test subjects. In fact, it is those who have or have in the past had their gender relevant identity features crushed who are in the best position to understand the risk of this kind of intervention. Actively changing the environment and---explicitly or implicitly---enforcing expectations about how people should behave has significant consequences, not always good. And "gender neutral" isn't a neutral intervention but instead an artificial intervention towards someone else's arbitrary ideal. Even the described intent of the project hints at this: "their inherent gender biases will be far less noticeable" is very similar to "the gender identity they are instinctively drawn to will be crushed out of them". If "sociological engineering projects" are to be done around this area I endorse only those that engineer towards freedom to choose one's own gender role and actively crushing prejudice, judgement and presumptive influence of any party over the expression of another. Whether or not said party happens to be an authority with a conformity agenda.
3JoshuaZ
It seems that there's a qualitative difference between "crushing" gender roles (David Reimer?) and simply being gender neutral (e.g. giving the same kids both dolls and space shuttle model, not just the one judged gender appropriate).
2Nornagest
That seems reasonable if there are no endogenous incentives rewarding crazy, but that seems like a questionable assumption for any ideology once it's gotten used to having crazy in its internal ecosystem.
4ialdabaoth
I'd rather deal with that after the primary and initial source of crazy has been removed. Otherwise, it's too easy to accidentally mistake one for the other.
[-][anonymous]200

"You need to get a good job and learn how to dress well, or else no woman will want to marry you."

I would endorse giving this advice if I thought marriage was a good deal for men. Currently I plan to strongly advise my future sons against marriage. I'm unsure whether to advise my daugthers to marry or not, since it will give them greater power over their partners which may destablize such relationships.

I think its pretty crappy that cohabitation laws are now basically converging with marriage laws. I wish there was a "state please get your grubby hands out of my romantic relationships" wavier I could sign.

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7Richard_Kennaway
I'm curious about (a) your present age, and (b) how old you expect to be by the time you're advising your children about these things.
2[anonymous]
a) early 20s b) 40s Obviously much can change in 20 years.
3Shmi
While it makes sense to explicate the current gender disparity in the legal practice once your male hetero children are of the relevant age, brainwashing them (that's how I interpret "strongly advise" coming from a (future) parent) in any area is generally a bad idea. The best parents can do is to give their children the tools to make optimal decisions and then watch them screw up and stumble regardless, but hopefully not as painfully.
[-][anonymous]230

I meant strongly advise as in educate on the risks and benefits. Though to be perfectly honest I don't see much of a difference between "brainwashing" and "educating".

I educate, you inform, he brainwashes.

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9taelor
I've personally been mildly amused at the arbitrary distinctions that people make between "education/socialization" and "brainwashing". Generally, I find that the later term is used for influence that is percieved as low status or otherwise not socially acceptable.
2NancyLebovitz
Does this imply that you favor (or at least are neutral about) long term relationships, but are opposed to marriage? Do you think marriage itself is a bad deal for men, or do the problems mostly show up with divorce?
5wnoise
Altering the structure of divorce alters the payoff-matrix for behaviors inside the marriage itself.
[-]JoshuaZ200

Alicorn gave an excellent summary. But there's another issue also. When people say this sort of thing it is often with implicit premises that it is a massively important part of a woman's life to get married, to an extent that doesn't exist as much with men (with exceptions to some extent to certain ethnic and cultural groups which emphasize grandchildren). If you scratch this sort of thing beneath the surface you often find beneath the surface something like "Women exist to cook, clean, and pump out babies. If they go to college it should be to get an MRS degree."

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[-]dspeyer110

I suspect the word "need" is highly relevant here. It was emphasized in the original after all. And "need" doesn't mean "this is one way" it means "the other ways don't work (or are really hard)". Being happy in singleness or attracting a partner with your super-sexy aikido and topology skills are not viable options. That's a very disempowering message.

As a test, let's rewrite the sentence without "need":

It will help you to be able to cook and keep a clean house, because this will make it easier to attract a husband, and having one will make your life more fun.

By your emotional reaction, is this version [pollid:209]

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8Larks
Poor question framing. Some people would say it was both equally offensive and not offensive, if they didn't think the former was offensive.
6dspeyer
Point. If you did not find the original offensive, please do not vote at all. The purpose of the poll was to investigate why people found this original offensive. So if you did not, applying this introspective probe serves no purpose. I would edit this into the post, but ISTR that editing posts with polls is bad.
2Eugine_Nier
Also since the only way to see the results of a poll is to vote in it, it's considered polite to add a "don't want to vote but want to see the results option".
6MBlume
I skimmed the options too quickly -- I'd have picked "not offensive" if I'd noticed it.
5therufs
I voted "equally offensive". Framing useful skills as being primarily relevant insofar as they fulfill cultural imperatives that a dependent has probably not yet decided whether or not to comply with is harmful both in terms of denigrating the useful skill and in terms of reinforcing the expectation that the cultural imperative will be fulfilled. Assuming the speaker is someone the dependent believes has their best interests at heart, saying "it will help you" instead of "you need" is just a different way of being manipulative. In a void, either statement is offensive regardless of the dependent's gender. In actuality, I'd submit that it is somewhat more offensive to suggest cooking and cleaning to a female dependent simply because it does not do anything to encourage the dependent to question what everyone else is telling her, whereas I'd guess that there are plenty of cultural messages deterring males from cooking and cleaning.
[-]Scott Alexander200

Framing useful skills as being primarily relevant insofar as they fulfill cultural imperatives that a dependent has probably not yet decided whether or not to comply with is harmful both in terms of denigrating the useful skill and in terms of reinforcing the expectation that the cultural imperative will be fulfilled. Assuming the speaker is someone the dependent believes has their best interests at heart, saying "it will help you" instead of "you need" is just a different way of being manipulative.

Would you feel the same way about "It would help you to do your math homework so you can graduate high school and get a decent job?" After all, the idea that everyone should graduate high school is a cultural imperative, and some teenagers may not yet have decided whether this is important to them.

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[-]Zack_M_Davis120

Would you feel the same way about "It would help you to do your math homework so you can graduate high school and get a decent job?" After all, the idea that everyone should graduate high school is a cultural imperative, and some teenagers may not yet have decided whether this is important to them.

I'll sort of bite this bullet---I have to say "sort of", because I know that social science is extremely difficult, and that radical changes that sound like a good idea to the speaker often have disastrous unforeseen consequences, such that I should be very prepared to modify my current opinions in light of new empirical evidence---but yes, the cultural imperative that everyone must graduate high school regardless of individual circumstances (e.g., "I want to devote myself to studying this particular topic that happens to not be taught at local high schools") causes a lot of real harm for the same reasons that the cultural imperative that all women must learn domestic skills regardless of individual circumstances (e.g., "I don't want to be a housewife") causes a lot of real harm.

Currently-existing social norms do serve real functions, the detail... (read more)

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6Eugine_Nier
I think you may be underestimating how hard it is to do better than tradition.
[-]Zack_M_Davis120

(I don't know; my own life has gotten a lot better (not monotonically, but the trendline is clear) over the last five years as I've learned to think for myself more and more, and trust my unreflective moral instincts and the local authorities less and less. Moreover, this process seems likely to continue as long as I make sure to abandon contrarian strategies when it looks like they're not working. But your mileage may vary.)

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5Eugine_Nier
Implicit in Szabo's argument is that you may be doing the equivalent of picking up pennies on railroad tracks.
8Zack_M_Davis
I like that metaphor, but, you know, decision under uncertainty: we're on the railroad tracks already, and I'm going to pick up as much free money as I think I can get away with, because I no longer trust the schoolteachers and cops who taught me to sit still and wait for the train.
[-]Douglas_Knight110

When invoking that advice, check whether something really is a tradition!

This may be a good response to Zack's general approach, but if you apply it to Yvain's question, the conclusion is that Zack is not going far enough. Marriage is a very old and widespread tradition, while the imperative that everyone should graduate high school is extremely young, and schools themselves fairly young. Thus you should be much more willing to make marriage an imperative than school.

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2Eugine_Nier
I'm inclined to agree.
3TimS
Inter-subjective truths need not be Schelling points. And even if they are, that doesn't make them actually true in an empirical sense. The fact that everyone does it, but no one can verify it (due to computational limits) might be meaningful, as long as one doesn't use that to justify ignoring later evidence. In short, what is the difference between firm commitment to inter-subjective truths notwithstanding evidence and moral relativism?
6therufs
Not quite -- mainly because finishing high school even if you didn't want to/really give it much thought is more likely to be an overall benefit, whereas getting married even if you didn't want to/give it much thought is unlikely to turn out happily. Without more information, I'm not sure that "do your math homework" is going to be as useful as "learn to cook and clean". I think the VERY best outcome would be to train children as early as possible to make independent and well-informed decisions, and then a better phrasing would be "If your plans [still] involve graduating high school, it would help you to do your math homework", or possibly "it would help you to drop this class, since you are obviously not inclined to do your math homework". But I'm not sure how long before ~graduating-age that's even developmentally possible.
4ChristianKl
Given how much people use the skills they learned during math homework later in life I think it would be fair to argue that cooking and cleaning skills are more valuable for the majority of people.
[-]DaFranker120

The only skills I ever learned during math homework were:

"How do I rephrase this question so that the answer becomes retrospectively obvious?"

"I don't know where to even start; let's try something that's been useful before to see if I can break down the problem and identify a path towards the solution."

I might not quite be an unbiased, population-representative sample, but given how much I use these skills versus how much I use my cooking skills (about half an hour per month, on average), and the respective impacts they have on my life, I think it would be fair to argue that what I learned while doing math homework would be far more valuable for the majority of people.

The key turning point being that not all people learn the above from math homework - not all people learn the above at all.

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2Randy_M
"Not quite -- mainly because finishing high school even if you didn't want to/really give it much thought is more likely to be an overall benefit, whereas getting married even if you didn't want to/give it much thought is unlikely to turn out happily" The speaker isn't trying to get his daughter to marry whether she wants to or not. He is trying to get her to want to, or to not question whether she wants to (or more likely not considering whether she wants to, but nevermind that at the moment). What influences the desires a person has? Few people choose to choose their desires, and while a lot is innate, I don't think there is anything wrong, fundamentally, with trying to influence your childrens desires and assumptions toward what you understand to be good ends.
4therufs
I have friends who were protested outside of abortion clinics before they were old enough to vote, and I doubt one could swing a cat on LessWrong (if one were so inclined) and not hit someone who came to rationality feeling like they wasted (n) years of their life following Jesus and not asking questions. So I am unconvinced that there couldn't be rather a lot wrong with trying to influence your children's desires & assumptions towards what you understand to be good ends. (eta:) I could be way off base here, but isn't drawing your OWN conclusions kind of what rationality is about?
[-]Cyan100

This comment is directed to the LW commentariat, not just Daniel_Burfoot.

Fill in the blank with responses covering reasonable prior probability mass:

Father: You need to be able to cook and keep a clean house, or what man would want to marry you?
Daughter: I'm not interested in getting married -- I'm going to focus on my career instead.
Father: __________

Father: You need to be able to cook and keep a clean house, or what man would want to marry you?
Daughter: I'm not interested in getting married -- to a man.
Father: __________

Father: You need to get a good job and learn how to dress well, or what woman would want to marry you?
Son: I'm not interested in getting married -- I'm going to focus on my hacking skills and RPG game design.
Father: __________

Father: You need to get a good job and learn how to dress well, or what woman would want to marry you?
Son: I'm not interested in getting married -- to a woman.
Father: __________

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9Salemicus
All my answers would be variants on:
3Cyan
Do you mean these are the answers you expect the father in the scenario would give, or the answers you personally would give? The former is what I'm after; eliciting the latter is not the point the grandparent.
8thomblake
I'm guessing example #4 was supposed to have a character named "Son"?
4Icehawk78
Personally, I (and I assume many others) would have a drastically different response than any of these four. Parent: You need to [cook/clean, job/dress well], or what person would want to marry you? Child: Why should I learn these skills for the benefit of someone else, rather than for myself? Regardless of the interest or not in marriage, these are skills/actions that are useful for anyone, marriage-oriented or not, to have, simply to live as a socially well-rounded adult. (Obviously, alternate options are available, such as getting such a well-paying job that you can pay for a maid/chef, or some alternate situation in which "getting a good job" is unnecessary to your well-being, as well.)
9shokwave
Partially. It isn't as objectionable because when this was said to me, and I replied "Well, I don't want to get married", nobody tried to tell me that I was wrong to think so.
2ikrase
I'd say that's probably the crux of the matter.
8Will_Newsome
What you should probably be looking for is people who didn't find the statement offensive or objectionable but who understand the psychology and game theory of the situation well enough to calmly explain it. The sort of human that gets offended isn't generally the sort of human that is worth asking questions. Presumably you know this but you're making a political (in a broad sense of 'political') point about the importance of having the automatic habit (at the zero-point-two-second level) of making clean distinctions between empirical and normative claims. But come on dude, that's just baby town frolicks. Shouldn't you be making comments on a higher level and about more important things?
8Daniel_Burfoot
I would like to see LW become a place where people don't get offended by empirical statements - that seems like an achievable goal. But you are probably right that this kind of debate usually doesn't lead anywhere productive.
8Plasmon
Yes, and for very similar reasons.
6MBlume
See also: success myth
5NancyLebovitz
I think both are offensive because they're implying that the child should see themselves as only valuable if they can fulfill hypothetical strangers' wants. It's also off-key because the focus is on getting married rather than on the more important aspect of having a good marriage. How does "If you don't learn to do household repairs and tech support, no woman will want to stay married to you" come off? I think it's positing getting married as what would be called a terminal value here, or what I've also heard called an uncontexted absolute. I don't know whether there's any more accessible way of phrasing the idea of something which is posited to be so important that other considerations should be ignored. I would say that the advice for the girl is somewhat more offensive because it's less true. Unless I've missed something, cooking is a much less important part of courtship than it used to be. Once upon a time, most of what a married man ate would be cooked by his wife, but it hasn't been like that for a while. Mind you, it would be a different and possibly better world if people took helpmeet considerations more seriously before getting married-- while you aren't necessarily dependent on your spouse's cooking, you will probably need your spouse to wrangle medical personnel for you at some time. Discussion of traits, including a degree of self-sufficiency, which make people better company
2Daniel_Burfoot
Do you get offended by the many articles floating around in recent months that deplore the dearth of "marriageable men"? Are you offended by the fact that a Google search for "marriageable men" returns about 8x more hits than a search for "marriageable women"?
3Asymmetric
It seems as though most responses to this comment talk about how learning to cook is a good thing because it helps one pursue other, more universally valuable goals. I definitely agree with this! But honestly, the thing that makes women angry about the statement is not the first part. It's the second. Because there are many good reasons to learn how to cook, but the father is only focusing on the pursuit of marriage, as if that's the foremost goal she should have. The fact that cooking is so important in general exacerbates this -- it means that, regardless of all of those other vastly more important reasons, the only one women should care about is their obligation to get married.
[-]Vaniver350

In general, what percentage of comments on LW would you expect to be posted by men?

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[-]Vaniver320

It bothers me how many of these comments pick nits ("plowing isn't especially feminine", "you can't unilaterally declare Crocker's Rules") instead of actually engaging with what has been said.

What would differentiate picking nits and engaging with what was said?

Like SaidAchmiz points out, there's not all that much to say when someone shares information. I'm certainly not going to share the off-site experiences of female friends that were told to me in confidence, and my experiences are not particularly relevant, and so I don't have much to add.

One of the issues that has poisoned conversations about feminism I have been in previously, and which I sincerely hope does not happen here, is that the feminists in the conversation did not have a strong ability to discern between useful and useless criticisms. I understand that many people don't listen to women, especially about their experience as women; I understand that many people dismiss good feminist arguments, or challenge them with bad arguments.

But when people do listen, and respond with good arguments- and then their good arguments are trivialized or dismissed- then we're not having a conversation, but a le... (read more)

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[-]Said Achmiz150

Especially in the context of minimizing inferential distance, it's important to have experience exchange both ways. For example, DMs shutting down a player's attempt to deviate from the script is a common enough experience that I expect more than half of D&D players can relate, and letting the person who shared the anecdote know that "yep, this is a common problem" is valuable information that can help them feel less singled out. Of course, this can be interpreted as a status-reduction move; they're trivializing the concerns and making the speaker less special! This is the uncharitable interpretation and so in general I recommend against it.

I think this is an excellent point, and in the interests both of minimizing inferential distance and perhaps making some other points relevant to smart/geeky women's issues, I offer a personal anecdote:

My early experiences as a D&D player included some memorable instances when I tried to "deviate from script", though at the time I didn't entirely understand that there was a script and that I was deviating from it; I was doing what seemed to make sense in my character's situation. My DMs would sometimes be unprepare... (read more)

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3Randy_M
Maybe we need a "minimize inferential distance to DMs" thread?
9fubarobfusco
See "Better Disagreement". Nitpicking occupies level DH3-4: mere contradiction and responding to minor points, but not addressing the central point of the post. (If you disagree with the rubric presented in "Better Disagreement", respond there.)
[-]Vaniver360

I think Better Disagreement uses a confrontational lens that isn't particularly suited to these situations. If the central point of the post is "these are real female experiences that you should be aware of," DH7 seems like a cruel joke at best: "This is what a real real female would experience, and even then we shouldn't be aware of it!"

It seems to me that helpful complaint comments will often come in two forms: error correction and alternative perspectives. If, say, an anecdote about EY in one of these posts spelled his name "Elezer," pointing out that they missed an "i" could be labeled as nit picking, but it doesn't seem like a helpful label: fix it, say thanks, and be happy that the post is better! If most of the comments are minor corrections, but the post is highly upvoted, remember that each of those upvotes is a short comment saying "I want to see more posts like this post." (If most of the comments are corrections and the post has low karma, the post has deeper problems that should get fixed.)

Alternative perspectives are trickier territory. Suppose that Anonymous Alice writes a story about how she was hurt that she said &q... (read more)

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[-][anonymous]130

"This is what a real real female would experience, and even then we shouldn't be aware of it!"

I'm pretty sure there is an awesome steel man some of the epic level contrarian rationalists here could make for this. I would totally pay money to read it for the entertainment value.

Too bad it would cause epic drama too.

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4ChristianKl
Of course it's always possible to argue both sides of debate. So let's try it for the sake of the argument: Every human is unique. Effective social interactions means that you listen to the other person. It's about being in the moment and perceiving the other person without preconceived notions. Being empathic is not about having an intellectual concept of what the other person is going through. It's about actually feeling the emotion that the other person is feeling with them. If you want that men and woman interact better with each other you should encourage them to treat each individual uniquely. If a man learns an intellectual concept according to which he should do X whenever a woman does Y, the man isn't authentically interacting with the woman. If the man uses an intellectual rule for the interaction he will pay less attention to his own emotions. How does a man get better at being in the moment? How does he get more in touch with his own emotions, to get a better feeling for the interaction? Meditation is a way where we have good research that shows that mediation improves the ability of people to be in the moment by dealing more effectively with their emotions. In Zen Buddhism there the concept of the "beginners mind". The practioner tries to let go of any preconceived notions to be more in touch with the moment. He doesn't add additional mental rules. In my own experience my interactions with women are much better for both parties when I'm in the moment and in touch with my emotions than when I'm in my head and think "I don't want to do anything to upset the woman I'm interacting with". How do I know that the interaction is better for the woman and not only myself? When I'm dancing the woman likes to dance closer when I'm in touch with myself instead of being in my head. She also smiles more. There are a lot of Asbergers people who know a lot about what a "real female would experience" on a intellectual level. When it comes to real interaction they a
4JoachimSchipper
If a post has 39 "short comments saying "I want to see more posts like this post."" and 153 nitpicks, that says something about the community reaction. This is especially relevant since "but this detail is wrong" seems to be a common reaction to these kinds of issues on geek fora. (Yes, not nearly all posts are nitpicks, and my meta-complaining doesn't contribute all that much signal either.)
[-]Vaniver120

This is especially relevant since "but this detail is wrong" seems to be a common reaction to these kinds of issues on geek fora.

It feels to me like we both have an empirical disagreement about whether or not this behavior is amplified when discussing "these kind of issues" and a normative disagreement about whether this behavior is constructive or destructive.

For any post, one should expect the number of corrections to be related to the number of things that need to be corrected, modulated by how interesting the post is. A post which three people read is likely to not get any corrections; a post which hundreds of people read is likely to get almost all of its errors noticed and flagged. Discussions about privilege tend to have wide interest, but as a category I haven't noticed them being significantly better than other posts, and so I would expect them to receive more corrections than posts of similar quality, because they're wider interest. It could be the case that the posts make people more defensive and thus more critical, but it's not clear to me that hypothesis is necessary.

In general, corrections seem constructive to me; it both improves the quality of the post and helps bring the author and audience closer together. It can come across as hostile, and it's often worth putting extra effort into critical comments to make them friendlier and more precise, but I'm curious to hear if you feel differently and if so, why you have that impression.

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5JoachimSchipper
All of what you say is true; it is also true that I'm somewhat thin-skinned on this point due to negative experiences on non-LW fora; but I also think that there is a real effect. It is true that the comments on this post are not significantly more critical/nitpicky than the comments on How minimal is our intelligence. However, the comments here do seem to pick far more nits than, say, the comments on How to have things correctly. The first post is heavily fact-based and defends a thesis based on - of necessity - incomplete data and back-projection of mechanisms that are not fully understood. I don't mean to say that it is a bad post; but there are certainly plenty of legitimate alternative viewpoints and footnotes that could be added, and it is no surprise that there are a lot of both in the comments section. The second post is an idiosyncratic, personal narrative; it is intended to speak a wider truth, but it's clearly one person's very personal view. It, too, is not a bad post; but it's not a terribly fact-based one, and the comments find fewer nits to pick. This post seems closer to the second post - personal narratives - but the comment section more closely resembles that of the first post. As to the desirability of this effect: it's good to be a bit more careful around whatever minorities you have on the site, and this goes double for when the minority is trying to express a personal narrative. I do believe there are some nits that could be picked in this post, but I'm less convinced that the cumulative improvement to the post is worth the cumulative... well, not quite invalidation, but the comments section does bother me, at least.
[-]Nornagest300

That strikes me as a remarkably uncharitable reading, and in any case a false one -- the suffering of undersocialized straight white dudes gets plenty of public attention, albeit much of it in "point and laugh" form (cf. Big Bang Theory).

The most marginalized groups on the planet, almost by definition, are the ones you've never heard of. Take Burkina Faso for example -- small West African country, #181 of 187 in Human Development Index, and the only reason I know I've read about it before is that the Wikipedia link's purple instead of blue in my browser. #187, the absolute bottom of the barrel, is the Democratic Republic of the Congo: slightly better-known, but extremely underserved by Western media relative to the magnitude of all the bad shit going down there. The Second Congo War (1998 - 2003) was the single worst conflict by body count since World War II, but I couldn't describe a single major news report on it that reached my ears.

And those are entire countries -- if I wanted to dig up serious contemporary misery and oppression at the subculture level, I'm almost sure that the famous examples, while certainly terrible, wouldn't be the worst I could find.

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[-]lukeprog300

Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.

Recommend putting this sentence in bold.

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[-]daenerys140

Good idea. Done!

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[-]fubarobfusco280

I think gwern's expressed attitudes toward transsexuals are both harmful and not rationally defensible — i.e. if he thought about them sensibly with access to good data, he'd want to change them rather than parading them.

However, I don't think LW should ban people on the basis of that sort of attitude. Everyone is an asshole on some topic. (Me, I can be an asshole about open source. Some of my best friends are Windows users, but ....)

Coercing "apology and reparations" is counterproductive because of the example it sets. It would mean that anyone who takes sufficient control here is in a position to make that sort of demand of others. That's an undesirable concentration of power and opportunity for blackmail.

FYI, we have racists and misogynists here, too. I sure wish they would recognize that they should stay the hell off of the topics upon which they are cranks.

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9[anonymous]
We agree that there are cranks on race and sex here; we just disagree on which side it is. It is hard to differentiate being a crank and there being pervasive irrationality on a forum dedicated to human rationality.
[-][anonymous]270

Okay, so... you're going to argue that undersocialized straight white males in 1st world countries currently suffer the most?

Eh no. I'm saying we ignore the groups who suffer the most. Under-socialized white males have weak counter-cultures working in their favour. But generally I think you underestimate how much suffering say white people experience in places like South Africa what with the racially motivated farm murders and economic discrimination against them.

Because I already agree that they have it bad, and I can't for the life of me think of any other oppressed group that is denied publicity.

That you can't think of them is very weak evidence they aren't there. May I remind you that if we where having this debate in the 1920s people might talk about women as such a group but not homosexuals. The thought wouldn't even occur to them. Today you are shunned for questioning the thought.

I can give you many many examples but it will get me into trouble. One controversial example: Paedophiles who want to avoid having sex with children. Our society is not optimized to help them with that humanely at all. And it is the very social changes that we have experienced in the sexual marketplace of the past 50 years done supposedly to reduce suffering that have intensified pure hatred and paranoia towards them.

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[-]ialdabaoth210

One controversial example: Paedophiles who want to avoid having sex with children. Our society is not optimized to help them with that humanely at all. And it is the very social changes that we have experienced in the sexual marketplace of the past 50 years done supposedly to reduce suffering that have intensified pure hatred and paranoia towards them.

This is, indeed, an excellent example of a place where the process has utterly failed to produce a humane and compassionate outcome.

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[-]CCC150

But generally I think you underestimate how much suffering say white people experience in places like South Africa what with the racially motivated farm murders and economic discrimination against them.

As a white South African male, I think that if those are the sorts of articles that you're relying on for a true idea of what goes on in this country, then you may be over-estimating it.

In short; South Africa is a country polarised into two groups, with all that that entails. Actually, there's at least four groups (counting "foreigners" and the nearly extinct "Khoisan" as seperate groups), but two of those groups are loud enough to drown out all the others. For quite some time, one of those groups (those who were officially "white") was dominant, despite the fact that said group was not numerically superior. However, one of the means of retaining said dominance was by providing substandard education to all other groups (along with pretty brutal repression, not being allowed to vote, and so on).

Then, in 1994, everyone was allowed to vote. There was a sudden and very predictable change of government without most of the negative effects of actual revolut... (read more)

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8[anonymous]
Disagree, since the sources used for articles like the lined one seem reliable. If anything I in think in general Western reports let alone regular Western ideas about life in South Africa are likely to be underestimating white South African suffering. In addition I would argue there are gains in signalling games for well off white South Africans to downplay the suffering of their group. I do agree South Africa in general has been rather lucky but there is potential for major problems because white South Africans are a market dominant minority. We have a clear example of what could have and still some day might happen in Mugabe's Zimbabwe.
[-]CCC120

Disagree, since the sources used for articles like the lined one seem reliable.

I didn't say that anything in the linked article was directly false - merely that the evidence is biased, having been picked out by one group, and therefore that it gives an overall false impression.

Consider, for example, from the article on farm murders:

in 2001 61% of farm attack victims were White, yet White people make up only 9,2% of the population.

I'm willing to believe that both of those statistics are correct, individually, but put together like that they present an incorrect impression. To obtain a correct impression, one needs to find the answer to this question: in 2001, what percentage of South African farmers were white?

Due to the aftereffects of Apartheid, I can say with extremely high probability that it's higher than the 9.2% figure quoted; indeed, it would not surprise me to learn that it was more than 70% (which completely changes the significance of that first figure). Unfortunately, in a few minutes' googling, I was unable to find any source for the figure in question (census data is supposed to be available, but not necessarily in an easily searched format).

As for BEE, it is (a... (read more)

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[-]ialdabaoth110

On further reflection regarding the pedophile example:

How many studies are you aware of that research the neurobiological origins of homosexuality? sociopathy? schizophrenia? ADHD? autism?

Now, how many studies are you aware of that research the neurobiological origins of pedophilia?

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[-]Nornagest100

Now, how many studies are you aware of that research the neurobiological origins of pedophilia?

Googling those terms found a few, though most of them seem pretty tentative right now.

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[-]ialdabaoth140

Thanks!

Anecdote: I didn't search as well as I should have because I had a weird emotional "what if some automated FBI filter flags me for googling 'pedophilia'?" reaction - which also seems to be part of the problem.

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6NancyLebovitz
I agree with your last paragraph.
[-]Emile270

Until the child tells you their gender identity, don't assume it matches their body

I'll disagree with that one - it seems such an assumption is more than 99.9% likely to be true; and we assume less likely things all the time. Being aware of transsexuality and of the problems transfolk deal with should be enough until you have particular reasons to believe your child may identify with a different gender.

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4Alicorn
I think 99.5% is probably a reasonable upper bound on how confident you should be (with 0.5% of that being a Gettier case). Physical intersexuality of various sorts has an incident of about 1%, I have read, and in the absence of studies on the subject I'm inclined to deploy an ignorance prior about the mature gender identification of a random intersexed person. Garden-variety transfolk only cut this probability from there.
5A1987dM
Even if instead of 99.9% Emile had said 95%, he would still have a point.
4Nornagest
I'd think a parent would be aware of physical intersexuality, so I'm not sure that's relevant in this thread's context; physically ambiguous sex would certainly be a reason to be cautious about assuming gender! I'm having a hell of a time finding consistent prevalence data for psychological transsexuality, though; estimates seem to vary from 1 in 21000 to around one in 500 (taking the low estimate in the latter because it seems to be running on MtF numbers, which appear to skew a bit higher).
[-]Alicorn260

I'd think a parent would be aware of physical intersexuality

This is not reliably true. I have a friend who is a genetic chimera (fraternal twins, fused early enough in development to turn into one basically normal-shaped person). She was considered anatomically male and normal at birth and well past, and didn't find out she had female organs too until her twenties, when they finally did an ultrasound to track down her irregular abdominal cramping, then did genetic tests to explain why there was a uterus in there. This gave her a relatively socially acceptable excuse to assume a female social role.

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9Eliezer Yudkowsky
I don't mean to trivialize any problems she may have gone through but at least on a first reading that sounds awesome. I mean, I'm sure it wasn't but it still sounds that way.
9MugaSofer
Yay! Someone high-status said it so I don't have to!
[-]Vaniver270

How is gwern still allowed on this site without making a significant apology and reparations?

Are you suggesting banning users from LW if they make any unwelcoming comments anywhere else without apologizing for them? The absence of that policy seems to be the "how," and I think I much prefer not having that policy to having that policy.

It is making me seriously reconsider any funding that I would give to CFAR or SIAI.

Is your true rejection to funding CFAR or SIAI that they don't have a policy in place for the forum affiliated with them? I'm having a hard time picturing the value system which says "AI risk is the most important place for my charitable dollars, and SIAI is well-poised to turn additional donated dollars into lowered AI risk, but donations should go elsewhere until they alter the policy on their associated internet forum so that a user apologizes for trans-unfriendly comments made offsite."

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[-]JoshuaZ220

Is your true rejection to funding CFAR or SIAI that they don't have a policy in place for the forum affiliated with them? I'm having a hard time picturing the value system which says "AI risk is the most important place for my charitable dollars, and SIAI is well-poised to turn additional donated dollars into lowered AI risk, but donations should go elsewhere until they alter the policy on their associated internet forum so that a user apologizes for trans-unfriendly comments made offsite."

He could instead mean something closer to "AI risk seems to be an important contribution for charitable dollars, but the SIAI's lack of careful control and moderation of their own fora even given its potential PR risk makes me question whether they are competent enough or organized enough to substantially help deal with AI risk."

But I suspect the value system in question here is actually one where charity is intertwined with signaling and buying fuzzies. In that context, not giving charity to an organization that has had some connection to an individual who says disgusting things (or low-status things) makes sense.

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6Vaniver
Agreed, but I suspect that if one is donating to charity for signaling and buying fuzzies, they are unlikely to donate to CFAR or SIAI in the first place, since there are other places that offer warmer fuzzies and signals that resonate with wider audiences.
9JoshuaZ
It may be difficult to actually decide which makes the most sense to donate to to maximize signaling (especially because doing so consciously can itself be difficult). Moreover, if one is trying to maximize signaling it may make sense to donate to a bunch of different causes. And some degree of signaling and fuzzy-buying is likely mediated by one's peer group, so if one spends time on LW or in closely aligned circles then CFAR and SIAI may be effective places to purchase signaling credibility with the people one cares about.
[-]shokwave270

This feels like Main material, both in the "well written and based on collected data" sense and the "something the whole community benefits from reading" sense.

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9daenerys
Thanks! This comment got more upvotes than I predicted it would, so I'll try moving it to Main, but I understand if the mods want to move it back to discussion, because there's going to be quite a number of posts on this topic, and I can see how they wouldn't want that clogging up the front page.
[-]shokwave210

wouldn't want that clogging up the front page.

Personally, I would be distraught if the front page got clogged up with well-written, interesting, and informative posts.

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8Bugmaster
I have to respectfully disagree. The articles on Main are usually a bit more structured: they have a specific point to make, and they outline the reasoning and evidence that would lead one to conclude that the point is true. This article doesn't seem to have a central point, and it doesn't offer any reasoning. It contains a bunch of interesting anecdotes, and it is great for creating discussion, but it doesn't belong in Main. Please don't misunderstand: I'm not saying that the article is bad (in fact, I do like it), only that it doesn't belong in Main.
5shokwave
I had the impression, reading the post, that this does have a specific point to make ("many of the problems of a male-dominated culture stem from availability biases and can be mitigated by providing information"). Rather than reason that it would be true, they're simply undertaking to carry it out.
4NancyLebovitz
This might be a case of prototype vs. definition. I tend towards definition: articles belong in Main if they likely to be of sufficient interest to the whole community. Articles with structure and citation are much more likely to be of sufficient interest, but that's only an indicator, not the point of having a Main section.
[-]Scott Alexander260

It sounds like you are complaining that people are treating arguments as logical constructions that stand or fall based on their own merit, rather than as soldiers for a grand and noble cause which we must endorse lest we betray our own side.

If that's not what you mean, can you clarify your point better?

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[-]David_Gerard130

That it would be more epistemically and instrumentally productive not to throw up a cloud of nitpicking which closely resembles quite common attempts to avoid getting the point that there is actually a problem here.

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8[anonymous]
Why are you defending scoundrels again? :P
7JulianMorrison
The counterpoint to that is "If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents' arguments. But if you're interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents' arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you [also] must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse." http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=155
5JoachimSchipper
Mostly, what David_Gerard says, better than I managed to express it; in part, "be nice to whatever minorities you have"; and finally, yes, "this is a good cause; we should champion it". "Arguments as soldiers" is partly a valid criticism, but note that we're looking at a bunch of narratives, not a logical argument; and note that very little "improvement of the other's arguments" seem to be going on.
[-]MugaSofer250

I have to say, I found most of these to be either standard geek fare (I play D&D and the DM railroads me towards combat) or pretty obvious sexism-is-bad (Dad says I need to cook or I wont get a man.) Is is possible that you're overestimating the inferential distance here?

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[-]JoshuaZ240

So to be clear, you are claiming that the destruction of all life on Earth is a better alternative than life continuing with the common current values?

(5) We create an AI which does not correspond to my values.

So part of the whole point of attempts to things like CEV is that they will (ideally) not use any individual's fixed values but rather will try to use what everyone's values would be if they were smarter and knew more.

If LW is not trying to eradicate the scourge of transphobia, than clearly SIAI has moved from 1 to 5, and I should be trying to dismantle it, rather than fund it.

If your value set is so focused on the complete destruction of the world rather than let any deviation from your values to be implemented, then I suspect that LW and SI were already trying to accomplish something you'd regard as 5. Moreover, it seems that you are confused about priorities: LW isn't an organization devoted to dealing with LGBTQE issues. You might as well complain that LW isn't trying to eradicate malaria. The goal of LW is to improve rationality, and the goal of SI is to construct safe general AI. If one or both of those happens to solve other problems or result in a value shif... (read more)

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[-]asparisi230

I had an interesting experience with this, and I am wondering if others on the male side had the same.

I tried to imagine myself in these situations. When a situation did not seem to have any personal impact from the first person or at best a very mild discomfort, I tried to rearrange the scenario with social penalties that I would find distressing. (Social penalties do differ based on gender roles)

I found this provoked a fear response. If I give it voice, it sounds like "This isn't relevant/I won't be in this scenario/You would just.../Why are you doing this?" Which is interesting: my brain doesn't want to process these stories as first-person accounts. Some sort of analysis would be easier and more comfortable, but I am pretty sure would miss the damn point.

I don't have any further thoughts, other than this was useful in understanding things that may inhibit me from understanding. (and trying to get past them)

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[-][anonymous]230

“It's rusty too,” intones the Dungeonmaster, “and pieces of it keep breaking off. Look, you're not supposed to be farming. You're supposed to go into the forest and find the dark elves. I don't have anything else about the farmers. The elves are the adventure.” Reluctantly, I give up my agricultural rescue plan and we go into the forest to hack at elves.

I got a very similar response when my Lawful Neutral Cleric wanted to set up a formal inquisition to root out the evil cultists in the city rather than go to the big bad's cave and whack them on the head. Also a barbarian of mine wanted to run a brothel after the party defeated the gang that controlled it before. It mysteriously burned down the following night.

In general some DMs have a hard time dealing with characters that want to weave baskets instead of going hack and slash.

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[-]Larks220

My lawful neutral character attacked the rest of the party when they assaulted a group of innocent (until proven guilty) goblins in the first encounter.

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5[anonymous]
Did he win?
3MugaSofer
Aren't goblins almost exclusively Evil?
6shokwave
A DM needs to improvise 95% of their session, I've found.
54hodmt
D&D rules are mostly combat rules. If somebody says they want to play D&D, most people assume they want to play in such a way that the D&D rules are relevant. This isn't a safe assumption, because the name "Dungeons and Dragons" is famous enough that some people will claim they want to play it without knowing what it involves. DMs should clarify to new players that D&D is heavily combat focused, and point out more suitable systems if the player isn't interested in that.
8mfb
The DM could let the elves attack during plowing. Should be a strong incentive to get into a fight.
5[anonymous]
I may be an outiler here, but while combat being a minor part of the overall campaign I want to play I'm incredibly annoyed if its broken or simplistic. Roleplay never struck me as the kind of thing that needed rules as detailed as combat. Say negotiating with someone in game is already complex enough since you can do nearly anything you can in a real conversation including optimizing body language or having other people to suggest the same idea as you have.
7Bugmaster
I disagree -- up to a point. Roleplaying is all about playing a character who is different from yourself. In real life, I can't wield a two-handed battleaxe (or a shotgun, for that matter). Almost no one can. However, many people can do other things I can't, such as seducing enemy spies, lying convincingly to a room full of people, or piecing together esoteric knowledge gleaned from ancient texts written in seven dead languages. Therefore, I cannot realistically roleplay a character who does these things. This is where the rules come in. Instead of "optimizing body language", which I can't do in real life, I roll a d20 and add my Charisma modifier along with my Bluff rank. If the result is high enough, then everyone in the room is convinced that I am the Grand Vizier and they should do what I say. This includes the NPCs, who are controlled by the GM, as well as the PCs, who are not convinced in real life, but pretend to be for the purposes of the game. This way, I can play the character I want to play, who is different than my real-world self -- and I can do so fairly, because everyone follows the same rules. Combat works the same way, except that it can be even more fun if done properly. Of course, if you aren't a fan of turn-based strategy games such as X-Com or even chess, then you might want to stay away from detailed combat rules and stick to something more cinematic. Of course, some combat (as well as social) systems are simply way too complicated (f.ex., Rifts and Earthdawn, IMO). I shouldn't need to consult three different tables just to swing my sword or tell a convincing white lie. But that's a problem with specific dice systems, not with dice systems as a general category.
6thomblake
Now that I'm thinking about it, I want to see a system that explicitly timeskips combat encounters. Like maybe do fights like Risk, with perhaps charts for who got injured and how badly. Ideally, fighting would be generally bad for all involved.
2thomblake
Thanks, this matches my impressions of D&D perfectly but I haven't actually been able to articulate it before. In general, a system needs rules for resolving disputes about what is going to happen, and that's mostly combat. The roleplaying part doesn't need a 'system' at all.
5Emile
It bloody well does need a system! It's just that often the "system" doesn't take pages of rules, it may be "the Dungeon Master has the last say on everything", or even not be an implicit assumption. Some roleplaying systems are made to encourage the players to take a major hand in the world building, especially their character's relationship to it. Not only "what town does my guy come from", but also things like "is the mayor of that town a villain?", "Why did the Gods abandon the world?", etc. Those aspects are important, especially when you have creative players that want to do that kind of stuff - good rules around that can prevent it from getting out of hand. Check out this for more specific examples.
3thomblake
It doesn't sound like you're actually disagreeing with me. I said: The concept of the Dungeon Master having "last say" doesn't even come into question until there's a dispute. See also SpookyBeans, which nicely refines all dispute resolution into a single mechanism.
4Bugmaster
It's not really about combat, but rather about the GM's narrative. In any game, the GM usually has some story designed, with pre-determined events, locations, characters, etc. When the players deviate too far from the plot, the GM is in trouble, because he's got nothing prepared. He can improvise up to a point, but the overall gaming experience will suffer. A good GM will gracefully handle whatever crazy thing the players want to do, and channel them back toward the prepared plot tree in a way that feels seamless. A bad GM (such as, sadly, myself) will flail around for a while, employing increasingly desperate measures to get the players back on track. A truly terrible GM will flat out tell his players, "no, you can't do this, for no better reason other than that I told you so".
[-]Multiheaded210

Everyone has been treated badly by members of a different group at some point in their life, and responsible adults are expected to get over it and get on with things.

This may be the way now, but it doesn't have to be the way always. Max Hastings, my favourite WW2 historian, says in his All Hell Let Loose:

One of the most important truths about the war, as indeed about all human affairs, is that people can interpret what happens to them only in the context of their own circumstances. The fact that, objectively and statistically, the sufferings of some individuals were less terrible than those of others elsewhere in the world was meaningless to those concerned. It would have seemed monstrous to a British or American soldier facing a mortar barrage, with his comrades dying around him, to be told that Russian casualties were many times greater. It would have been insulting to invite a hungry Frenchman, or even an English housewife weary of the monotony of rations, to consider that in besieged Leningrad starving people were eating each other, while in West Bengal they were selling their daughters. Few people who endured the Luftwaffe’s 1940–41 blitz on London would have been comfor

... (read more)
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[-]NancyLebovitz150

Another angle on context: when I was a kid, I read a book by a holocaust survivor. Towards the end, she wrote about her current situation, which included being worried about heart disease.

I remember being surprised, and then realizing that I'd assumed that if you'd been through the holocaust, nothing much smaller could frighten you, and that my assumption was wrong.

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1ewbrownv
The problem with this seemingly high-minded ideal is that every intervention has a cost, and they add up quickly. When oppression is blatant, violent and extreme it's relatively easy to identify, the benefits of mitigating it are large, and the cost to society is low. But when the 'oppression' is subtle and weak, consisting primarily of personal conversations or even private thoughts of individuals, the reverse is true. You find yourself restricting freedom of speech, religion and association, creating an expanding maze of ever-more-draconian laws governing every aspect of life, throwing out core legal principles like innocent until proven guilty and the right to confront one's accusers - and even then, success is unlikely. Another important factor is the fact that those who consider themselves victims will never be satisfied, and indeed this whole campaign in their name quickly ceases to improve their lives to any measurable degree. As you noted yourself, individuals tend to rate the trauma of an unpleasant incident relative to their own experiences. So once you stamp out the big, easily measured objective forms of oppression, you find yourself on a treadmill where working harder and harder to suppress the little stuff doesn't do any good. Each generation feels that they're as oppressed as the one before, even if objectively things have changed dramatically in their favor. The only way off the treadmill is for the 'victim' group to stop viewing every experience through the lens of imagined oppression.
9MugaSofer
Do you seriously think that proves we shouldn't try to stop what we asses to be "oppression"? Diminishing returns do not equal zero returns.
8DaFranker
You either missed the point of the grandparent, or are missing some of the prerequisite concepts needed to think clearly about this subject, it seems to me. I'm quite certain that Multiheaded is well aware of the law of diminishing returns and its implications, and has a fairly good grasp of how to do expected utility evaluations. Everything else you said in your post was, AFAICT, already all stated or implied by the grandparent, except: I find this claim dubious. I consider myself a victim of the oppressive historical patriarchy and dominance of gender-typing, and yet I'm fully satisfied with the current, ongoing efforts and measures that people all around the world are doing to fix it, as well as my own personal involvement and the efforts of my close circles. Those are not particularly convincing examples of Good Principles that we'd want to have in an ideal society that we should aspire towards. My own brain is screeching at the first three in particular, and finds the named legal principles crude and unrefined when compared to other ideals to aspire to.
5TimS
That has not been my impression. Some advocates might think things are as bad as they were 5 years ago, but I'm not aware of anyone with influence who thinks things are as bad as 50 years ago. Or any advocate at all who thinks no improvement has happened in the last 500 years.
3Eugine_Nier
That wasn't ewbrownv's assertion. His assertion is that if you scanned the brain of a victim 50 or 500 years ago you'd find the same amount of subjective "oppressed feeling" as scanning a modern victim, i.e., that people have an "oppression set point" similar to the happiness set point.
4ewbrownv
Well, 500 years ago there was plenty of brutal physical oppression going on, and I'd expect that kind of thing to have lots of other negative effects on top of the first-order emotional reactions of the victims. But I would claim that if you did a big brain-scan survey of, say, Western women from 1970 to the present, you'd see very little correlation between their subjective feeling of oppression and their actual treatment in society.
[-][anonymous]210

Have you read the comment sections on this site before? I don't think LWers where any more nitpicky than usual.

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6[anonymous]
So, I just wanna be sure I understand the substance of your reply: JoachimSchipper is expressing frustration with nitpicking, and your (nitpicky) reply is that it's not unusually nitpicky?
[-][anonymous]250

Yep. And you responded by nitpicking one meta level up. I love this site.

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5[anonymous]
Just one? EDIT: Okay, okay. ;p
[-]Oligopsony210

I daresay this is the least terrible discussion of gender we've ever had. Good job, LW!

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7[anonymous]
Was it? Or did one side just give up.
1Oligopsony
Ha! Victory!
5[anonymous]
I'm trying to decide if you are serious with that statement. Are you?
7Oligopsony
I'm serious about the propositional content and implied emotional attitude towards it, but not about my means of expressing it or choosing to do so in the first place. I thought it sincerely, and assumed you would assume that I thought it sincerely, and so I posted it because verbalizing socially inappropriate thoughts that everyone-knows-one-is-thinking-anyway is funny, and because we've had friendly enough interactions in the past (whilst acknowledging mutual indexical evil) that I didn't think you would infer that it constituted a "real" social attack. Does that make sense? (It's also about the limit in terms of how many orders of intentionality I can work with, if you want to run circles around me in our next/this interaction.)
7[anonymous]
Yes it did make me laugh. I just wasn't sure about the intent.
5Multiheaded
We just shot the messenger, regardless of the message's value. If Konkvistador is right about oppression and emotional torment being necessary features of human interaction, then we cannot even take satisfaction in that. Of course, that would only increase our ressentiment. I hate it.
5TimS
Why do we think that suffering is a necessary feature of human experience? Suffering's presence throughout human history can be more easily explained by society's unwillingness or inability (lack of appropriate knowledge) to take necessary steps, rather than the thesis that humans must suffer to be human.
5Nick_Tarleton
"Society" is not an agent.
1TimS
A parallel point: Corporations do not act directly, they always act through their officers, directors, and misc employees. Yet it is perfectly coherent to say "Papa John's Pizza, Inc. negligently hit my car." Every knows that means something like "A Papa John's delivery driver drove negligently and hit my car." In short, the usage you complain of is isomorphic to "Powerful members of past society have been unwilling or unable to take the necessary steps to prevent human suffering." Pretending you misunderstood me is logically rude.
4Multiheaded
I have no outstanding personal reasons to think so. I am simply being a good Bayesian and placing a high prior on Konkvistador's wisdom.
3TimS
For the reasons I stated, I'm unsure that Konkvistador's assertion is entitled to a high prior. It does not seem to be the simplest explanation, and there doesn't seem to be compelling evidence that differentiates it from competing theories.
1[anonymous]
Both of these seem like bad explanations for suffering.
2Bugmaster
The first explanation looks fairly plausible to me. We live in a hostile universe where pretty much everything is trying to kill or maim us, including our own bodies which eventually die of old age. That's a lot of suffering, right there, and we have barely begun to develop technologies which mitigate a small portion of it. If that is true, then we should not be surprised to find suffering throughout human history.
1[anonymous]
I didn't understand TimS to be only saying that there has been a lot of suffering in history. I understood him to be saying that the cause of this suffering was "unwillingness and inability" (by "society") to prevent it. Now perhaps it is true that if society was willing and able to prevent suffering, there would have been less of it. But it's equally true that if society was willing and able to prevent hurricanes or sunrises there would have been less of them. These are bad explanations.
2Bugmaster
I took his statement to mean society was, on some occasions, (a) able but unwilling to prevent suffering; (b) willing but unable to prevent suffering; or (c) both unwilling and unable to prevent suffering; and, therefore, suffering was (and still is) present. My point was that, regardless of (a), (b) and (c) happen all the time, since our technology simply isn't at a quasi-godlike level yet.
[-]daenerys200

Let's just agree to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

I am typing. I am also eating Thanksgiving leftovers. I think my puppy is cute. His name is Gryffin. He is 12 years old. My tank top is grey. I just created a discussion group for the Coursera course on critical thinking. These are all truthful statements. I hope you see the issue with what you are saying that I am trying to illustrate here. I am running out of truthful things to say. My boyfriend is awesome. He asked me to type that. Then he said "No, don't put that! It negates the social capital!.. Meh, go fuck yourself." My hairbrush is pink.

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[-][anonymous]190

I think you just aren't getting it. Putting some effort towards carving a niche has bad returns for these groups. See paedophiles.

Because they lose the political battle their very efforts to organize along these lines are seen as more evidence at how dangerous and weird they are you instantly categorize them as deserving their fate.

Also to put it in familiar terms the false conspicuousness of members of the group experience may make such activism unthinkable for them. If there is no force that weakens or breaks down that memeplex the political war can't get started.

And again! Why do you assume might makes right? Why do you assume that any group with a genuine grievance and suffering shall be victorious in the long run? What possible reason would you have for this in a non-caring non-Christian universe.

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[-]JoshuaZ190

So this looks pretty nasty and is frankly disappointing. But he's acknowledged the irrational aspect of it and hasn't brought the statements himself to LW. Moreover, as Gwern correctly notes, IRC is a medium where people are often lacking any substantial filter. The proper response would be for Gwern to just avoid discussing these issues (which in fact he says he does). In any event, I fail to see how this comments mandate "reparations". If people on IRC want to appropriately rebuke him when he says this sort knee-jerk stupid shit when it comes up, that makes sense. The connection this has to SI or CFAR is pretty minimal.

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[-]Emile190

I don't know what you expect when you say "actually engaging what has been said" - the post is a collection of interesting and well-written anecdotes, but it doesn't actually have a strong central point that is asking for a reaction.

It's not saying "you should change your behavior in such-and-such a way" or "doing such-and-such a thing is wrong and we should all condemn it" or asking for help or advice or an answer or even opinions ...

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[-]Bugmaster180

It is not "obvious" to me. I am a man, and I've never had the desire to catcall; from my perspective, catcalling is something cartoon characters do.

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[-]Said Achmiz180

Perhaps an instance of Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate; people who agree, do not respond... as for me, I find myself with two kinds of responses to these anecdotes. For some, I think "Wow, what an unfortunate example of systemic sexism etc.; how informative, and how useful that this is here." Other people have already commented to that effect. I'm not sure what I might say in terms of engaging with such content, but perhaps something will come to me, in which case I'll say something.

For others... well, here's an example:

It's lunchtime in fourth grade. I am explaining to Leslie, who has no friends but me, why we should stick together. “We're both rejects,” I tell her. She draws back, affronted. “We're not rejects!” she says. I'm puzzled. It hadn't occurred to me that she wanted to be normal.

My response is a mental shrug. I am male. I can relate to this anecdote completely. I, too, have never much understood the desire to be "normal", and I find that as I've gotten older, I disdain it more and more.

But what has this to do with minimizing the inferential distance between men and women...?

Here's another:

It's Bridget's thirteenth birthday, and four of us are spen

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[-][anonymous]180

.

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[-]Dias190

What is an epistemic root system, and how can they be dense?

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[-][anonymous]270

.

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[-]Morendil160

Here's hoping LW can do better at this than my own professional community.

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[-]JoachimSchipper140

That's not a high bar. I love my IT job, but IT is shamefully bad at this.

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6JoshuaZ
You know, I've noticed issues and heard about problems in math and the sciences before of this sort, but it seems like much more of a problem in IT. Any idea why?
[-]JoachimSchipper110

One relevant datum: when I started my studies in math, about 33% of the students was female. In the same year, about 1% (i.e. one) of the computer science students was female.

It's possible to come up with other reasons - IT is certainly well-suited to people who don't like human interaction all that much - but I think that's a significant part of the problem.

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[-]Nornagest220

I never consciously noticed that, but you're right. From what I remember the proportion of women in my CS classes wasn't quite that low, but it was still south of 10%. 33% also sounds about right for non-engineering STEM majors in my (publicly funded, moderately selective) university in the early-to-mid-Noughties, though that's skewed upward a bit by a student body that's 60% female.

It seems implausible, though, that a poor professional culture regarding gender would skew numbers that heavily in a freshman CS class -- most of these students are going to have had no substantial exposure to professional IT or related fields beforehand. I think we're looking at something with deeper roots. Specifically, CS is linked to geek subculture in a way that the rest of STEM isn't: you might naturally consider a math major if you were undecided and your best high-school grades were in mathematics, but there's no such path to IT. You generally only go into it if you already identify with the culture surrounding it and want to be part of it professionally.

With this in mind it seems likely to me that professional IT's attitudes are largely determined by the subculture's, not the other way around, and that gender ratios in CS aren't going to change much unless and until the culture changes.

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[-]fubarobfusco130

CS and IT have become less gender-balanced (more male) in the past 20-30 years — over the same time frame that the lab sciences have gotten more balanced.

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6A1987dM
IME maths is the most feminine STEM field excluding life sciences. The first few math students I know personally that spring to my mind are all female. (Of course, since I am a straight guy, "springs to my mind" will be a biased criterion, but if I do the same with (say) engineering students, most of the first few are male.)
6Morendil
Uh, I'm pretty sure this assertion is the result of the particular culture that's developed in IT, rather than its truth being a cause of it. Is this claim actually even close to true? To the extent that there are in fact professions "well-suited to people who don't like human interaction", by virtue of which problems the professionals are working to solve, I would think of farming or legal medicine first, not IT. IT jobs require constant interaction with people, because they are mainly about turning vague desiderata into working solutions; on the "solution" end you are interacting a lot with machines, but you absolutely can't afford to ignore the "desiderata" side of things, and that is primarily a matter of human communication. Our current IT culture has managed to make it the norm that much of this communication can take place over cold channels, such as email or Word documents. I think of that as pathological; but more importantly, this still counts as human interaction! Then there's the extra implication in your statement - that jobs "well-suited to people who don't like human interaction" will attract males more. That may well be true, but it'll take actual evidence to convince me.
6NancyLebovitz
A lot of people in IT interact plenty with other people in IT, so they like and can sustain some types of human interaction.
5Barry_Cotter
Hey, people on the autistic spectrum and those with overwhelmingly poor social experiences have to get jobs too. Now that I am done being a sarcastic bastard; many people have social anxiety, are terrible at reading subtle social cues including body language and are less hesitant and more eloquent communicators using text rather than face to face or over the phone. These people are disproportionately male. I strongly suspect that this is for the same reason autistic spectrum people are disproportionately male. If it is currently true that IT is friendly er to people who are not great socially it will attract more people like that by at least two channels; reputation/common knowledge and affinity chains, people with bad social skills being friends with similar people who get each other, who have much less in the way of communication issues with each other than they do with normal people. I think IT jobs currently attract people with poor social skills more for the above reasons. I am much more confident that said prevalence deters some people from those careers who could do them and that the deterrence/repulsion effect is stronger for the average female than the average male. How IT got into the situation where it was abnormally hospitable to people who are bad at normal human interaction I hesitate to speculate upon.
7Nornagest
This doesn't appear to be true for the clinical definition of social anxiety. What you're describing sounds more like a mix of social anxiety and autistic traits than pure social anxiety disorder, but although there is a substantial gender gap in autism diagnosis, it doesn't look wide enough to account for the observed ratios. Autism rates combined with the observed gender gap in the rest of STEM come close, but for this to be the whole story we'd need almost no non-ASD folks to go into IT, and that doesn't seem to be the case.
[-]Bugmaster120

It's just a shame that dense epistemic root systems tend to produce an equally dense foliage of jargon :-)

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[-]Said Achmiz170

Your comments on this thread seem to be evidence that there is no such "obvious" reason, and that you are in fact pretending that such an "obvious" reason exists, as some sort of status play, or perhaps for didactic reasons. Do you agree that this is the reasonable conclusion that readers of this thread should reach? If not, why not?

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[-]JoshuaZ140

It is also possible that he's operating here under an illusion of transparency.

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[-]NancyLebovitz170

The interesting question is what measures will pay off best in the long run.

Actually lying about the science might blow up later. On the other hand, saying that we don't know what causes gender dysmorphia, but it begins very young, is not a matter of choice, and gets relieved by living as the gender that feels right to the dysmorphic person-- and living in that way is not harmful-- is harder to say forcefully than to say "born that way".

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[-]Desrtopa170

The reason this doesn't happen is the same one that keeps anti-racism off the curriculum

I'd say that anti-racism was very much part of the curriculum at my schools. It wasn't until college that it got past "racism is bad, read these books about growing up discriminated against," and reached the point of "these are some of the ongoing issues regarding race relations today on which there is actual public disagreement, here are some sources to inform your position on them," but I did have one class which covered racial issues in this way (among other issues) which was a required course.

I don't know to what extent my education was atypical, only that the schools I attended up to high school were pretty good as far as public schools go.

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[-]Strange7170

You're supposed to go into the forest and find the dark elves. I don't have anything else about the farmers. The elves are the adventure.

Did... did she completely fail to comprehend the one thing she does know about the farmers, namely that they are being repeatedly attacked when they attempt to do any actual farming? The correct response here was something more like:

"A few minutes after you've got the plow hitched, there's a 'swish' noise and the horse falls down, an elven arrow protruding from it's neck. Roll initiative."

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3MugaSofer
Yup. Clearly not the most experienced DM.
[-]CCC160

If a lie makes them back off, lying is good.

Be cautious. Be extremely cautious.

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[-]A1987dM160

Why are you writing that here? Did you mean to reply to some other comment or am I missing something?

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[-]Alicorn160

why someone living on their own wouldn't need those skills?

Economics! You can substitute those skills for the ability to earn money to pay people who have them.

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4A1987dM
I dunno how much it'd cost to hire someone to clean up my house, but ISTM that cooking my own dinner takes less time and much less stamina than earning the money to eat a similar dinner in a restaurant.
7Alicorn
Buying frozen prepared food or whatever is also a form of paying someone to cook for you. Restaurants are just one option.
2A1987dM
That tends to be either much more expensive than the ingredients or absolutely awful. (But it's still what I usually do when I can't be bothered to cook a meal from scratch.)
3Alicorn
I'm with you - I cook most things I eat from scratch - but some people seem indifferent to the disadvantages of making the tradeoff here.
[-]CharlieSheen150

Okay, so... you're going to argue that undersocialized straight white males in 1st world countries currently suffer the most? And what else? Because I already agree that they have it bad, and I can't for the life of me think of any other oppressed group that is denied publicity.

Consider the context of this debate. Are you really sure (mostly) white (mostly) heterosexual (mostly) middle class women are really the most depriviliged group present on LessWrong?

Yet clearly they are the ones with the most explicit political activism and seem to be winning the popularity contest here. See any kind of controversy over sex/romance/gender/PUA we've had over the past oh... 5 years?

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[-]Eugine_Nier150

snip "trans is a choice"

It shows up on brainscans.

How is the second sentence at all evidence against the first?

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1MugaSofer
... because you don't, as a rule, choose your own neurophysiology. Certain structures in transsexuals' brains are closer to the form they take in cisgendered members of the sex they identify with than the sex they appear to be.
4Richard_Kennaway
Become a taxi driver and grow your hippocampus. The boundary between what you can change and what you can't is not as clear as you seem to think. Do we know what these structures do?
1MugaSofer
As I have said elsewhere, there is a sliding scale involved. This is decidedly towards the "unchosen" end, and considering that transsexuals report having changed their lifestyle as a result of preexisting problems, it seems reasonable to call this one for the "nature" side. Besides this? No.
4Eugine_Nier
You have some control over it. Everything you do and every thought you have affects your neurophysiology. How much control you have over it is an interesting question, which can't be answered simply by pointing to differences on brain scans.
2MugaSofer
There's a sliding scale. At one end, we have things like frontal lobes. At the other, we have imagination. This is the kind of structure that doesn't alter without external stimuli, and even then it's bloody hard.
[-]ewbrownv140

As a data point for the 'inferential distance' hypothesis, I'd like to note that I found nothing in the above quotes that was even slightly surprising or unfamiliar to me. This is exactly what I'd expect it to be like to grow up as a 'geeky' or 'intellectual' woman in the West, and it's also a good example of the sorts of incidents I'd expect women to come up with when asked to describe their experiences. So when I write things that the authors of these anecdotes disagree with, the difference of opinion is probably due to something else.

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[-]Eugine_Nier140

Once your cause has embraced the dark arts how can you be sure what you're doing is actually saving people from hurting? Are you sure the evidence for this belief, or the evidence that convinced you to join that cause in the first place wasn't just another 'pious lie'?

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[-]ialdabaoth140

That confusion exists strongly within the social landscape; perhaps what is needed is a more rigorous distinction between "views that have to be constantly defended against" and "facts which happen to be true", whenever the two happen to be bound together by some form of social assumption.

The problem is "well, I don't think that way" has turned into a poor signaling mechanism, so stronger (and more expensive) signals need to be developed.

EDIT: In the past 5 minutes, every post and comment I have ever made on this site has been downvoted, including ones made weeks ago, and including posts and comments which have nothing to do with this topic.

Can we please try to have a discussion, rather than engage in petty anonymous retribution?

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[-]MugaSofer120

EDIT: In the past 5 minutes, every post and comment I have ever made on this site has been downvoted, including ones made weeks ago, and including posts and comments which have nothing to do with this topic.

Since you were replying to me, I'd like to take this opportunity to condemn this. Seriously, people, this defeats the whole purpose of the karma system. Play by the rules.

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[-]fubarobfusco110

EDIT: In the past 5 minutes, every post and comment I have ever made on this site has been downvoted, including ones made weeks ago, and including posts and comments which have nothing to do with this topic.

This sort of thing happens from time to time. It means you're posting the kind of thing that petty abusers don't like.

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4TorqueDrifter
Similar thing happened to me earlier today after a post on this same topic. C'mon lesswrong.
8ialdabaoth
Okay then. I'm submitting a bug report, requesting that the karma system be updated to prevent mass-downvoting. Ideally, if a single user downvotes multiple comments or articles by a specific other user within a short timespan, and the downvoted posts are spread across multiple articles, then some sort of flag should be raised to review the downvoter's actions. Is there a sort of meta-lesswrong discussion where we can discuss stuff like this? I feel like it's something of a derail of the current topic.
[-]JoshuaZ140

That is indeed my concern. If CFAR can't avoid a Jerry Sandusky/Joe Paterno type scenario (which I am reasonably probable it is capable of, given one of its founders wrote HPMOR), then it is literally a horrendous joke and I should be allocating my contributions to somewhere more productive.

This confuses me. First of all, the probability of such a scenario is tiny (how many universities have the exact same complete lack of safeguards and transparency and how many had an international scandal?) Second, the difference between writing HPMR and the difference between being associated with one of the most prominent universities in the US seems pretty large. A small point that does back up your concerns somewhat- it may be worth noting that the SI early on did have a serious embezzlement problem at one point. But the difference of "has an unmoderated IRC forum where people say hateful stuff" and the scale of a massive coverup of a decade long pedophilia scandal seems pretty clear. Finally, the inability to potentially deal with an unlikely scandal, even if one did have evidence for that, isn't a reason to think that they are incompetent in other ways.

Frankly, it seems as a... (read more)

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6Barry_Cotter
Lesswrong does not have an unmoderated IRC forum. There is an IRC forum called #lesswrong on freenode which is mostly populated by people who read lesswrong but it has no official LW backing or involvement. SIAI/FHI/CFAR or whoever is in charge of LW should ask the #lesswrong mod to close it and take ##lesswrong if they want it. This is how freenode rules treat unofficial IRC channels. Anything that seems like support for Dallas or Ritalin/Rational_Brony was unintentional.
5Shmi
As I said before, appealing to an online forum crowd from an associated chat channel, whether official or not, is invariably a bad idea, because of the difference in the expectations of privacy. It harms the forum (but usually not the channel) and so is often a bannable offence in the forums which support banning users. Anyone bringing the same issue up in an unrelated thread, like Dallas did, ought to be banned for trolling.
[-]FAWS140

I don't understand how Christine the female dungeon master who has apparently consistently been playing with approximately gender-balanced groups not accommodating plowing fits in here. Plowing doesn't even seem like a particularly feminine activity (compared to e. g. trying for peaceful relations with the elves).

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[-]juliawise110

Christine understood the game to be about combat, so she had planned an adventure that led us toward combat with the elves. But when she gave us details about starving farmers, my wanting to feed them was considered off-mission.

I don't have much data on what D&D is like with groups of different gender mixtures. At the time, we considered agricultural forays and many stops for "okay, now we make tea" to be things that probably didn't happen when boys played.

Addendum: approximately 900 people have now told me that this kind of thing happened in their groups too and is not a girl thing. Point taken.

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[-]Said Achmiz100

Addendum: approximately 900 people have now told me that this kind of thing happened in their groups too and is not a girl thing. Point taken.

Sounds like we've successfully reduced the inferential distance a bit, eh? ;)

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7Vaniver
My (normally all-male) groups have had a few forays into "make don't break," and many forays into "the DM wants us to do X? Y is the most important thing in the world right now." In general, something I talk about with players is asking them how much of their ideal session is spent on combat, and how much is spent on role-playing. You get people who prefer 100% combat, and people who prefer 100% roleplaying, and seating those people at the same table is a bad idea. (I tend to go for >80% roleplaying myself, these days.) I would surprised if there weren't a male skew towards combat and a female skew towards roleplaying, but I also expect both distributions to be positive everywhere. There's also a wealth of tabletop roleplaying systems out there these days, such that if you find your group prefers to mostly roleplay, you should play a game designed for mostly roleplay, rather than D&D, which is basically designed for >95% combat.
4Bugmaster
FWIW, I don't know about tea, but the kind of plot derailing you describe happens about ten times per session in our current all-male roleplaying group. Some GMs are better at handling it than others...
4Manfred
The writer and danerys thought so, apparently, and it made sense when I read it. Maybe you mean cultural_expectation_feminine, and that diverges from what geeky girls playing D&D are more likely to do than geeky boys?
[-]daenerys130

The writer and daenerys thought so, apparently

I want to make a point now (while we're still into the less controversial stuff), that I do not necessarily agree with everything I am going to be posting in this series, and (except for dividing some of the longer submissions, to put it in the proper themed post) I am, in general, not editing anything out of the submissions. I will edit the Intro part to specify this.

That said, in this particular instance, I do think what Julia Wise is saying is very worthwhile (Obviously, since she didn't submit that post. I found it on her blog and thought it was useful.) But note she didn't write that blog post specifically for this series. So some of the anecdotes rely less on gender than others. Overall, though, it is exactly the sort of thing that I think is a good start to this series of communication.

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7FAWS
My point is that I don't know what exactly they were thinking and that's why I'm asking. If they think that plowing in particular is a feminine activity that would make it somewhat more understandable, but it's not at all obvious to me from the post that this (their thinking so) is actually the case, and even then I don't quite see what was supposed to be signified since Christine was already regularly including things like making tea. Occams razor would suggest a single misapprehension the absence of which leads to the whole section to making sense more likely than multiple misapprehensions.
[-]NancyLebovitz130

I don't think the idea is that real-world plowing is feminine so much as that choosing a non-violent activity in a role-playing game is a more likely choice for female players.

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2Randy_M
And therefore what, though? The DM was female. The players were female. I'm unlcear if this is just supposed to be a vignette on how females may view the world, or illustrating some difficulty women have interacting with the world because their viewpoints are otherwise ignored, which if that's the intent, I'm lost as to what should have been different in order to bring a more harmonious game session to the momentarily frustrated female players.
2Luke_A_Somers
... if only because an aggressive team might use plowing to draw the elves out in a trap rather than trying to hunt them on their own turf!
[-]Nornagest130

Honestly, I'm curious too -- I can think of several candidate reasons, but nothing blindingly obvious.

If you're concerned about looking like a patsy, or about possible retributive behavior from being un-PC or perhaps excessively PC, there's nothing stopping you from spinning up a throwaway account and using that. I'd say sockpuppetry is acceptable in that case.

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[-]A1987dM110

It's not even obvious to me that only one of several reasons is right (i.e., I suspect there are several different reasons each of which explain a sizeable fraction, but not the near-totality, of cases of catcalling).

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[-]NancyLebovitz120

I'm not downvoting this comment because I don't want to increase the chance of people being penalized for answering it.

From my point of view, you're punishing Will because he's learning something, but not quite in the way you want him to. He's made himself somewhat vulnerable by asking a question.

Everyone has been treated badly by members of a different group at some point in their life, and responsible adults are expected to get over it and get on with things.

Depends on the venue. In some places, telling the truth about your internal states is valued more highly.

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[-]NancyLebovitz120

How do you tell whether someone has unshakable beliefs?

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[-]NancyLebovitz120

I was thinking of something smaller-- I don't see people talking about a social group or organization which was both diverse and safe (or perhaps even just reliably safe for non-privileged people), even if it was just for a short but extraordinary period.

And as for weirdtopia, in some ways we're already there. It took me three or four years to stop thinking that having gay marriage as a serious political issue wasn't something out of 1950s satirical science fiction. I was never opposed to it, just surprised that it ever got on the agenda.

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3[anonymous]
Uh. This might be an outside context problem. I see people talk about that plenty -- I've been within groups and organizations that tried, in varying ways and with varying success, to realize that idea. They're usually support groups or nonprofit organizations that provide services to marginalized populations, and the idea of broadly-safe space as a core goal is built right in.
2NancyLebovitz
It could well be an outside view problem. Also, we may be talking about somewhat different things-- do the groups you mention talk about it as a goal, or do they ever talk about having succeeded, even for moderate periods of time?
1[anonymous]
Hey, sorry it took a while to reply. The groups in question had it as just a basic matter of operating policy. It was often a balancing act, and it wasn't without hiccups, but it worked pretty well. Example: A support group at which I facilitated for a while; the going approach was "safer space": they knew they couldn't ensure it was safe, full stop, for everybody in all situations -- safety in this context being construed as "a buncha different people from a bunch of different backgrounds with varying experiences of oppression need to use this space, and they won't always speak each other's language about that, and we want to minimize the sense that this place is a hostile environment." It usually ran pretty smoothly. I can only recall one person who really ran afoul of it, and they did blatantly insult about half the group in the space of a couple minutes on their first visit, and escalated badly in response to people saying something about it.
2JulianMorrison
Yes, I remember when as a teen I first read Diane Duane's "Door into..." series and found it a beautiful idea, but completely implausible, that a woman could have a wife. And yet it happened. And it isn't a tenth of the way to what a world would be like without patriarchy. Let me put it this way - I think that the endpoint would be a culture that doesn't even socially mark sex as a category, treating it as (in any given pair of a mated group) "biologically compatible as-is" or "biologically compatible with medical help" (such as stem cell gametes, in-vitro organ-printed wombs, etc) that latter encompassing both homogamete and infertile pairs, that does mark gender identity but doesn't assume there are only two nor does it correlate them with gametes, and in which clothing style, or femme versus butch, doesn't correlate either with either gametes or gender identity.
[-]Multiheaded120

We're willing to do any damn thing to find a sense of closure, of vindication. We don't actually care to reduce evil, since we're subconsciously quite aware that it would require us to take unacceptable measures.
To enforce a ruthless order and violate the sanctity of the individual, to disarm the weak and make them submit to their fate. Many here have been hinting darkly at this for a long time.
The reactionaries are completely correct in their bleak worldview. There is no deliverance. Good intentions are a self-righteous delusion, in a sense. Suffering can only be minimized by monstrous and inhuman policies. Someone will always scream and scream behind locks, walls and chains, behind a facade of normality. Finding happiness in slavery is the best that most people can count on.

...For fuck's sake, donate to SIAI.

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2Oligopsony
I think the former paragraphs here presume that politics is the domain of deluded do-gooders, rather than people (including those at the bottom of the heap) fighting self-consciously for their interests (or the interests of a broader alliance, TDT and all that.) It doesn't strike me as hypocrisy to throw one's enemies into the gulag, or to decieve them in warfare, even as you attempt to avoid the gulag and see through deceptions yourself.
[-]Richard_Kennaway110

It shows up on brainscans.

If you take physicalism seriously, every experience can be expected to show up eventually, on sufficiently advanced brain scans. That has no bearing on what is a choice and what is not. Choices and non-choices will both have physical correlates.

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[-]Nornagest110

Generalize that to "if you're discussing a topic with people likely to perceive themselves as victimized by factors related to that topic, it behooves you to be careful with your presentation" and it looks a lot less sexist.

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[-]MugaSofer110

  1. I asked how it helps. When I meet someone who appears male, I assume they identify as male, and if they don't then they tell me so. If I treated everyone I met as of indeterminate gender ... I would be ignoring people's established gender far more than accommodating people's insecurities. Besides, I'm going to have to name the kid at some point.

  2. Giving your boy a skirt is implicitly teaching him that wearing one does not signal gender. I may personally be fine with them wearing underpants on their head, but I don't teach them to go to school like that.

  3. I'm still unclear as to why ignoring the biological gender of your child will help them be more tolerant in later life.

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1TimS
Solving this type of problem is one reason that I advocate differentiating gender and biological sex. Once that distinction is made, I think many of these problems are analytically clearer. FWIW, I think JulianMorrison is using "gender" when "sex" is meant in at least some of the comments.
[-]steven0461110

And if you look at the meta-complainy ones, they were all posted by you!

(ETA: Turns out I was wrong.)

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[-]lukeprog110

From the final hyperlinked article:

Why do men catcall women?

I've never understood this, either. Any good guesses?

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[-]JoshuaZ490

Six options:

1) Low rate of success is coupled with a very low investment level. 2) The behavior isn't to try to pick up the woman at all but rather to engage in shared bonding among the males. (Note how this behavior seems to generally occur when there is a group of males.) 3) Lack of self-restraint. The people in question who do this are typically low status and low income. There's a large body of evidence that people with lack of self-control have less life success. (The marshmallow studies and all that.) Some of these people may have little self-control or bother so little to exercise self-control that clearly unsuccessful behavior is still attempted. 4) Attempts to harass the people in question, possibly to blow off steam at one's own lack of sexual success. 5) A well-meaning attempt to actually complement people for being good looking and well-dressed. They may just be unaware of how uncomfortable this behavior often makes women feel. 6) Possibly combining with any combination of the above possibilities- cultural behavior. Once there's some small fraction doing something, how long does it take before the same behavior is imitated in the general group?

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[-]Morendil100

The marshmallow studies and all that.

Take those with a grain of salt.

The people in question who do this are typically low status and low income.

There's plenty of evidence (e.g.) of higher-income people engaging in similar behavior.

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[-]Rob Bensinger260

Yes. The take-away point is that the children's patience with marshmallow promises and their long-term life success may be correlated because they're mutually determined by whether adults and peers in their life are trustworthy and reliable, more so than by a variable of Intrinsic Self-Discipline.

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[-]drethelin200

As a man who doesn't catcall, it seems really obvious to me: Whenever I see someone really attractive, I want to shout out that they are to them. I'm well aware that my well-meaning comment about how great someone's ass is or how I love their hair would be weird or uncomfortable, and so I don't do it. But it's very easy to imagine someone less aware who does.

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2Zaine
If I notice someone has effortfully made one physical aspect of their superficial appearance (which only includes transient things - pretty much just hair and clothes, but sometimes eyes), I feel guilty for thinking a compliment without uttering it for that person's benefit. If it were me, I would like to hear if someone thought I was doing something especially right that day. To alleviate this guilt, and for other reasons as well, I've instituted a policy of conveying these compliments to the people in whom I notice an impressive display of personal style. I will not go far out of my way (greater than ten meters) to tell people these things, but if I am near them I will casually mention, "That's a really cool hat," or "That scarf's awesome." I only pay particular attention to and am willed to compliment aspects of a person's appearance that are easily changed and not likely to be part of that person's identity. Maybe after I've known them for a month may I compliment their general style (dyed hair, cleverly matched outfits, always exuding a certain alluring or mystically compelling atmosphere, etcetera). These compliments are uttered in passing, from an average of one to two meters distant, with eye contact and only a bit more than a hint of a smile. Would any here be off-put by such a compliment?
8drethelin
Part of the reason I like going to nightclubs or cons is that it's approved to tell people how awesome they look because part of the context is people deliberately going out of their way to be noticed looking awesome.
[-]Viliam_Bur200

I guess we could understand catcalling better by seeing its equivalent in more primitive societies, or preferably at apes. Or perhaps by putting a hidden camera on a person who does it frequently, and examining the consequences.

My guesses:

1) Some women react positively to catcalling. Even if one in a hundred, then it would be enough, because the cost is low. As an analogy, receiving spam is also annoying, but a tiny fraction of humans react by sending their money, which rewards the spammers.

2) Catcalling may be a defection in a Prisonners' Dilemma of a group of men meeting a woman. A more polite group would be more likely to impress her positively. But even in the best case scenario, she would most likely choose only one of them as her sexual partner. By catcalling, a man positions himself as a "speaker" of the group, as the dominant male. He slightly increases his personal chance by decreasing the chances of the group as a whole.

3) In its most primitive form, catcalling could be an encouragement to a group rape. It is not a signal for the woman. It is a signal for the fellow men to join the action.

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[-]NancyLebovitz250

Additional hypothesis-- for some people, being disliked is preferred to being ignored.

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[-]Oscar_Cunningham170

1) Some women react positively to catcalling. Even if one in a hundred, then it would be enough, because the cost is low. As an analogy, receiving spam is also annoying, but a tiny fraction of humans react by sending their money, which rewards the spammers.

Note that the catcallers only need to believe that it's worthwhile; it needn't actually be.

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5A1987dM
As for 1), the article linked to at the end of the post says: (EDIT: But maybe there are women who respond positively, but not in large cities, and the men who catcall grew up somewhere where certain women did.) As for 2), it's not clear to me which side of the evolutionary-cognitive boundary. Are you saying that men believe (or, at least, alieve) that nowadays by catcalling they make each other less likely to get laid but themselves more likely to get laid, or are you saying that their brain is wired to find catcalling fun, and the reason why it is is that their ancestor who did so had more children than those who didn't?
6knb
Seems obvious to me: it's fun. People enjoy teasing and flirting, and catcalling is both. The main reason people avoid both of those behaviors is the risk of rejection/social punishment. Catcalling is overwhelmingly done to strangers, unlike most types of flirting, you don't lose face if rejected. Catcalling as teasing is also low-risk, since you aren't offending someone you know, possibly making new enemies. There's a reason catcalling is usually done by guys on public streets, somewhat isolated from their targets. At my college, guys like to sit in their dorm windows (3rd floor or higher) in groups and yell stuff like "HEY CUTIE I LIKE UR BOOBS." Girls occasionally yell stuff back, which the guys seem to love.
[-]Kindly280

It's rather obnoxious of guys at your college to misspell "your" even while talking.

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[-]Vaniver150

It's actually plausible that they pronounce it "ər" instead of "jɔr," given the amount of internet-related slang that has made it into the speech of the youth.

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[-]Sabiola120

Seems obvious to me: it's fun. People enjoy teasing and flirting, and catcalling is both.

To the woman (this one, at least), it is neither. It is humiliating and frightening, and no fun at all. And I'm sure that is just what the catcallers find fun. It's a dominance thing.

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2MugaSofer
If I may; why do you assume malicious intent?
7Sabiola
Well, because they can see - despite my best attempts at hiding it - that it makes me feel very uncomfortable, and yet they go on doing it. (I'm writing 'me' here, but I bet I'm speaking for the vast majority of women here.) Reading further along, I see that you were thinking that maybe I was assuming bad intent about all men, but that wasn't what I meant at all. But those jerks who shout things about ones breasts or legs, or crude invitations - yes, I have a hard time believing they think it's fun for the woman that is directed at.
8Benquo
That just screams illusion of transparency to me.
6Sabiola
You may be right there, I might not have been as easy to read as I though I was.
5NancyLebovitz
I agree. Women usually try to conceal how much they dislike it-- for fairly good reasons. They assume that the purpose of street harassment is to cause discomfort, so they want to deny reinforcement to the harassers. At least some men who do street harassment have a belief that women secretly like street harassment, which mean that they (the men) discount such indications of dislike as they might notice. I believe that people in general are much less clueful about other people's emotions than it feels like they should be from the inside. Now that I think about it, I've only known one person who could read me accurately when I was shielding (some of the time), or at least only one who talked about what he was seeing. When I was going through a very bad spell, I was interested to notice that the way I was treated didn't seem to change at all. Now it's plausible that I was missing some subtleties in other people's reactions and/or that they could see something was wrong but didn't know how to address it, but I concluded that people generally don't see very much.
7zaph
Moreover, no woman is ever going to be drawn to that, at least that I've ever heard. So it doesn't make sense as a grossly misguided pick-up strategy. Thinking about it and reading the thread, the more I think something along the lines of the Berne Games People Play dynamic is at work. It's the most charitable reading you can give to the behavior at least; the jerks taking part in this are getting some kind of attention from the woman they're targeting, even though it's negative attention. Still extremely hurtful behavior, but I can believe (or at least kid myself into believing) that men can gain insight into the behavior, realize what's going on, and stop doing it. One of the more humiliating moments of my adult life was when two guys were making lewd comments to a female friend of mine across a parking lot. I felt absolutely helpless (I'll be blunt, they were far away and it was obvious they would kick my a__), and I can only imagine what my friend went through. She weathered it, but I'm sure that came at some cost to her psyche that women spend to much time and effort bearing. I can only say it's in the best interests of men and women if this was all curtailed.
[-]NancyLebovitz100

My theory is that there are behaviors which build alliances within one sex to the detriment of individual relationships with the other sex.

I have no strong opinion about whether this contributes to individual reproductive chances, though I can make up some theories about why it might.

People don't just need to produce babies, they need to support themselves and their children-- alliances within one's own gender can quite useful. It's also conceivable that intra gender alliances are good tools for limiting the mating opportunities of low-status competitors of one's own gender.

A female example might be women who spend a lot of time commiserating with each other about how awful men in general and their husbands in particular are. This is not to deny that sometimes men are a problem for women, but putting a strong availability bias on their negative traits can push somewhat bad situations towards worse.

For both sexes, a fair amount of work is put into convincing low status members of one's own sex to not even try to attract someone. I don't know how much this is in play in societies where people aren't as expected to get their own mates.

It's also conceivable that catcalling is a spandrel-- it's a side effect of homophobia, with men trying to prove to other men (who can be quite dangerous) that they are attracted to women. Doing something low-cost to prove that one is attracted to women is easier than than doing something which might actually attract women.

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2Sabiola
You may be on to something, there. The times it happened to me, there always (IIRC) were at least 2 of them.
3Tripitaka
In feminist circles, its called Street Harassment, there are movements to stop it, and for those males like me who never experienced it personally, there are videos- but what worked best for me was talking to female friends. Street Harassment happens a lot less to women in mixed groups, so I was unaware of the consistency with which it happened to females without male companionship.
7MugaSofer
I'm just not sure what you think their motivation in this is, if not some sort of instinctual male delight in humiliating women. No offense, here, I'm genuinely asking. I'm sure it's unpleasant to suffer this sort of BS, and I certainly don't condone it. I just doubt the perpetrators are actually motivated by your discomfort.
9NancyLebovitz
I'm not sure that it's instinctual-- the amount of catcalling has a lot of local variation.
4MugaSofer
Well, yes. I'm arguing against that.
7Sabiola
I don't know about instinctual male delight. But yes, some people do like to make others suffer, probably because it makes them feel powerful and in control. Catcalling is just a male way of doing that. I'm shy and timid, and used to be even more so back when I was in school, and there I was more often bothered by the girls, who used to surround me and say nasty hurtful things about/to me (that I fortunately don't remember).
2MugaSofer
Oh, I see. Sorry, it's just that such assumptions about men are relatively common in our society, and can actually be more common in otherwise progressive communities. While, again, I can't claim to direct knowledge of these people's motivations, have you considered that they may have been motivated by status concerns rather than pure evil? Not that such motivations are impossible, of course, it just seems unlikely that all such actions are rooted in pure schadenfreude.
7NancyLebovitz
One way of increasing one's (felt?) status is by proving that one can get away with making other people feel bad.
2MugaSofer
Good point. ... but that's a rather different explanation to "some people do like to make others suffer [...] Catcalling is just a male way of doing that", isn't it?
2Sabiola
Yes, I think you are right, it probably is more about status.
5NancyLebovitz
Why do you think they know how uncomfortable you are?
3Sabiola
Because I suck at hiding my emotions, especially strong ones like that. OTOH, I've never thought about that before, but suppose I'm better at it than I thought. That would be really neat. And them persisting with it would be less bad too, if they didn't know I hated it but just thought I was indifferent or just didn't hear them.
6Richard_Kennaway
Why are you assuming she's assuming it?
6NancyLebovitz
I think it's fair to describe that as assuming malicious intent. My guess is that some catcallers assume that what they're saying is a compliment even if women don't admit it, and others know it's at least somewhat unpleasant for women but underestimate the total negative effect or believe that women deserve it.
4MugaSofer
I'd say that's pretty clearly what I meant by "malicious intent". For the record, I think it's a membership thing. "Look at me, I'm one of the boys, I'm so heterosexual, see how I am attracted to this woman". But then, I've never catcalled (or discussed it with someone who has.) EDIT: Ninja'd by NancyLebovitz.
5Richard_Kennaway
Of course. What I meant was, why are you assuming she's assuming it rather than speaking from personal experience and the experience of others?
7MugaSofer
Oh, that ... makes a lot more sense, actually. Honestly, it's because it conforms to a stereotype of male psychology that is common, almost certainly wrong, and rarely challenged. More generally, the notion that men find humiliating and frightening women "fun" seems like calling them Evil Mutants, which is almost always an assumption (and wrong.)
8NancyLebovitz
I think it's pretty clear that some fraction of people enjoy upsetting other people, though it would surprise me if most of them wildly underestimate how much damage they do. ETA: That should have been "That wouldn't surprise me. (Can a small amount of noise destroy a message? Yes, if it's leaving out a negation.) Is there any information about what proportion of men catcall? How do we want to define catcalling? I haven't run into any of the worst stuff that I know of. (My hearing is not spectacularly good, so I may have failed to make out the words in some cases.) However, I've had a lot of guys just say "How are you doing?", which is a pain in the ass even though they weren't remotely threatening. It took me a while to figure out a good strategy, such just ignoring them was hard on me-- it's an effort to break social rules. Saying "Fine. And you?" works well enough. They smile and answer briefly. However, my feeling is "Keep moving. This isn't a conversation I want to be in." It took me longer to figure out what I didn't like about it-- "how are you doing?" is a mildly intrusive greeting which assumes at least a minor connection. ETA: I run into more and worse harassment for being a middle-aged woman riding a bike with sidebaskets. And when I say more and worse, I mean one instance when I was shoved and one or two more when I was frightened by people demanding a ride in my baskets.
6MugaSofer
Oh, I know there are people who would probably deliberately catcall just to annoy - I just assumed it was related to the idea that men enjoy humiliating and denigrating women just ... because we're men. It's surprisingly common once you start noticing it, and almost never challenged, so I make a point of speaking up about these things whenever possible. "Men's Rights" may attract misogynists, but that doesn't mean we should ignore stereotypes of men (not saying you're saying we should - it's just a common assumption and a pet peeve of mine.) As for the catcalling thing ... I think everyone gets random people saying, basically, "hi". It can be weird when you don't know them, but I think it's distinct from catcalling - which seems to vary geographically, judging by other comments here.
3A1987dM
When people I don't recognize greet me, I assume that either they mistook me for somebody else, or I met them but I don't remember them. (The fact that I'm not very good at recognizing faces of people I haven't spent a nontrivial amount of time with does not help.) I usually just greet them back and walk on, or ask "have I met you before?" if I'm not in a hurry and they look interesting.
5MugaSofer
I get it all the time, and have all my life. I always put it down to people I don't know but who recognize me; I'm fairly recognizable and tend to end up doing high-profile things (speeches etc.)
2JulianMorrison
There's an element of "claiming ownership" in cat calling and in "how are you doing" and "smile baby" too. It means "I have the right to your time, I have the right to your attention, I have the right to have you be pretty for me by smiling" Replying politely only confirms that, they think they have you trapped in a conversation now. And witness how this "right" is backed by indignation "bitch, think you're all that" and gendered tear-down-confidence insults "slut" and "fat ugly cow" as soon as the man is refused. Which is why women learn counter strategies that don't throw back his claim in his face (as he rightly deserves).
6A1987dM
I've heard that argument (in a thread on a feminist blog about a particular xkcd issue), but it triggers my "not the true rejection" warning light. If Alice was asked for directions by another woman, I wouldn't anticipate Alice to resent that.
6NancyLebovitz
Asking for directions is a different case, because most people may be assumed to need directions from strangers at some time, so there's a degree of long term reciprocity. I think street harassment is in a different category because it's an attention grab while not being part of a benevolent social net or giving anything back.
5evand
I think it's a different case, but not completely. When a stranger asks me for directions, I feel imposed upon and uncomfortable. In large part this is because I've learned that the frequency of the person using it as a pretext for panhandling is high. Which has a certain similarity to why the greetings make you uncomfortable, I think: both are used as pretexts to start a conversation we'd rather not be involved in. Clearly there's some context dependency here: if the person is standing on a sidewalk, I feel far more uncomfortable than if they just rolled down their car window in a parking lot. I also recall a time a man on a bike asked me for directions, appeared genuinely thankful, made sure he'd got them right, and then asked me for money. When I refused, he was annoyed (though more polite than is common) and then left in the direction I had indicated. Anyway, seeing as offering random greetings to strangers along the lines of "how are you doing" is something I (hetero male, in case you hadn't inferred that) do occasionally, I'm trying to ponder what contexts I do it in. I think I'm generally shy and awkward enough that I basically do it a context something like I made eye contact, and then some external cause means the other person isn't just leaving, and now I'm feeling awkward and like I should say something. I'm assuming this basically isn't the sort of context you're talking about? Actually, on further reflection, I suspect I do it in the situation described in the main article of when holding the door for someone, which is not something I had ever really thought of as potentially offensive before. (For the record, I don't follow it up with sexual remarks and slurs.)
2Desrtopa
Really? I've been asked directions a lot of times, and this hasn't happened to me even once. I haven't had this happen at all in New York City, the place I've spent the most time where I would expect panhandlers, but it might be different elsewhere given that Manhattan is practically impossible to get lost in. Being asked for directions makes me uncomfortable, but only because I have the worst sense of direction of anyone I know, and hate feeling unhelpful.
5MugaSofer
Source please. So ... male passersby are "claiming ownership" of me? Great, now I'll be even more uncomfortable. (I'm male & het, if that wasn't clear.)
2evand
Why would this surprise you? As I understand it, most of the damage is caused by the pattern, not by any single instance, and the inferential distance in such a case is extremely high. (I find it fairly high personally, as a man who is trying to be sympathetic and has read discussion about this more than once. I'm having trouble estimating how high it would be among the sort of person who would actually engage in the behavior.)
6NancyLebovitz
See the edit-- I'd accidentally left out a negation. I think most people who tease, harass, and/or abuse have no idea how much damage they cause.
7Dahlen
Also, since it's usually a male(s)-on-female occurrence, there's the superior physical strength of the harassers, often backed by strength in numbers. Suppose the conflict escalates; what could the victim possibly do to the harasser, that the harasser can't return with even greater force? Suppose she has a strong, visible negative reaction; you know what the catcallers will do? Laugh, ridicule and humiliate her. From their point of view, the behavior has all the benefits it could have, and none of the drawbacks. It's as low-risk an offense as you can possibly get. Maybe that's where one can act to reduce instances of the behavior. Increase expected associated risk by a significant amount. Make it so that it no longer pays off. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to actually enforce a law or norm against street harassment, or to take any action that is both 1) a sufficiently strong deterrent and 2) within the bounds of legality and legitimate self-defense.
6JulianMorrison
The trouble with "Increase expected associated risk" is that catcalling is normalized in this culture as a thing men are allowed to do to women against their will - a response that treats it as an assault (pepper spray to the eyes, for example) would be considered an over-reaction.
6NancyLebovitz
I thought there were websites for uploading catcalling to embarrass the people doing it, but I haven't found them. I did find Hollaback.
1ikrase
My guess is that it's some kind of corrupted form of compliment often combined with peer-pressure and/or signalling about virility.
[-]MugaSofer100

The misogyny mostly comes from the fact that this situation happens much more often to girls than to boys (i.e. boy-groups are much more likely to have one of their members ask out a girl on a dare than the reverse, along with associated connotations and social implications).

My (admittedly limited) experience reveals no such trend, and indeed suggests the opposite. There is likely a great deal of variation.

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[-]MixedNuts100

To any catcalling experts:

I look female. I go out on my own or with other female-looking young adults rather often. I live in a poor neighborhood. Why have I never gotten catcalled? I am ugly and dress unfemininely and shabbily, but Internet feminists claim this doesn't reduce catcalling much, and men do sometimes politely hit on me.

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[-]A1987dM190

Maybe you live somewhere other than where the Internet feminists live. I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of such behaviours varied by an order of magnitude from one region to another, even within the western world.

EDIT: Indeed, a couple months ago an Italian friend of mine living in Barcelona posted something on Facebook about being constantly catcalled whenever she went in a particular district, from which I guess it hadn't happened to her (or hadn't happened that often) elsewhere.

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5Dustin
I can't say I recall ever hearing men participating in catcalling. I live near St. Louis, but in a rural area.
3NancyLebovitz
I agree that regional variations are likely. A problem with reporting on all the bad interactions is that you don't get a feeling for how common they are (just that they aren't extremely rare), let alone much detail about demographic features.
[-]thomblake120

I am ugly and dress unfemininely and shabbily, but Internet feminists claim this doesn't reduce catcalling much

Anecdotally, this seems wrong. Having observed some groups catcalling, they did not catcall every woman who walked by, only the more-conventionally-attractive ones. So there should be notably lower incidence of catcalling with unattractiveness.

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8MixedNuts
This raises the uncomfortable question of "If you hate it so much, why do you try so hard to look hot?". Common escape routes are "It doesn't actually impact frequency", which is apparently false, and "I have a right to look hot, they have no right to catcall me", which is pure should-universe thinking, and from people who avoid flaunting their wealth to avoid getting mugged. This should be distinguished from questions like "Since the benefits of looking hot outweigh the costs of increased catcalling, why are you complaining that you can't have it both ways?".
[-]daenerys220

I think we need to taboo "looking hot", as opposed to "looking nice", because of the cultural baggage that comes with the idea of "hot". If you describe a woman as "hot" people assume more sexual clothes, and an effort to be "sexy" looking. "Hotness" does not effect levels of catcalling as much as "looking decent-ness". For example, I would still get catcalled almost as much while wearing generic nice-looking clothes, as while wearing something "hot".

To avoid catcalling, the level of "looking good" has to be extremely low. As in, lower than I would want to go out in public in. For example if I don't shower, wear baggy sweatpants and stained sweater, and have lanky uncombed hair in my face, then yeah, I can avoid catcalling, probably. If I am at all dressed decently (not necessarily "hot"), street harassment will occur.

Regarding "flaunting" how "hot" you are: I can think of some middle eastern cultures that have solved the problem this way. "Let's blame the women for making men feel lustful, so have the women all walk around in big black tents that only show t... (read more)

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[-]MixedNuts110

You're the second commenter who didn't get that I'm saying that "Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, better pick the latter" might be reasonable, but that "Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, you shouldn't want to, stop complaining" is stupid assholery. I thought my second paragraph was quite clear!

We have a Problem with the immense overlap in female fashion between "flattering" and "sexy". Do you think that's related? I can't see a woman in a men's business suit getting catcalled (though I'm no expert), whereas women's business attire is all "LOOK, LEGS AND BOOBS!".

There's definitely a tragedy of the commons going on here. If women all decide to dress more conservatively to be left alone, the standard just drops until just being out of the house is immodest. And any women who don't follow suit might as well wear a "victim-blame me!" sign. So you can't fix harassment that way. But an individual woman acting selfishly would apparently benefit from it.

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5ialdabaoth
Stop! Bayesian time! does stupid dance in baggy pants An environment exists. In that environment, creatures called Oogs often say things that aggregate to "'Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, better pick the latter' might be reasonable". Many of them also often say things that aggregate to "Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, you shouldn't want to, stop complaining". When called on it, many of them attempt to argue that they did not actually mean "Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, you shouldn't want to, stop complaining" (by saying things that aggregate to "'Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, better pick the latter' is stupid assholery"), but later go immediately back to saying things that aggregate to "Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, you shouldn't want to, stop complaining". In this same environment, there are other creatures called Arghs who say things that aggregate to "'Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, better pick the latter' might be reasonable". They also say things that aggregate to "'Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, better pick the latter' is stupid assholery". Oogs utilize aggressive mimicry to appear to be Arghs. Someone shows up who begins saying Argh-like things. Should a smart Bayesian who does not want to get eaten by an Oog assume it is dealing with an Oog, or an Argh? Conversely, this is, to me, an EXCELLENT point. It would be nice if women weren't punished for wearing men's business clothes (which they often are - in college-level debate competitions, for example, there are strong norming pressures for women to show leg).
5Emile
To stick to your metaphor, Arghs have the right to complain about being treated like Oogs, especially if they suspect that Oogs-pretended-to-be-Arghs may not exist, and that the Oog-hunter caste seems to be gaining suspicious amounts of power and influence from how it gets to boss people around. Though I'm not a huge fan of that phrasing either, the whole thing begins to turn into an oppression contest.
7ialdabaoth
Also, this is a theoretically valid concern. I hope I have not implied at any point that people who disagree with me deserve to be bossed around, only that what they perceive of as 'bare facts' have teleological and deontological implications within the social environment, and those need to be examined with the eye of an engineer before addressing the facts as 'bare facts'.
3ialdabaoth
:( Welcome to primate politics. It's... nasty. The best I can suggest is to look at the people on each side, and say "what does the world look like if they are in charge?" Because if the discourse has become so polluted that you can't tell who's oppressing who, at a certain point it's time to just pick a side and hope for the best.
7Emile
Dear lord no I don't want to pick a side! That's the road to brain damage! And I don't care much about who's oppressing who, it's not a very useful frame for looking at things (as if being oppressed made anybody more likely to be right!). A more interesting question is determining what a disagreement is about, and on what points disagreeing sides can agree. Often loud advocates on either side of a disagreement couldn't even describe accurately what their opponents think!
6ialdabaoth
This is important and valid. Thank you for saying it. I will reexamine the processes that led to that statement and report back, but this may take a bit of time. Is that acceptable?
4Emile
Sure! These threads are getting kinda tentacular, and I don't think anybody will be very offended by a lack of answer. (I'm constantly surprised at how many threads here don't degenerate into shouting matches)
[-]fubarobfusco190

"If you hate being bullied for being a nerd, why do you study physics and watch anime so much?"

"'I have a right to study physics and watch anime; they have no right to bully me' is pure should-universe thinking."

"Since the benefits of studying physics and watching anime outweigh the costs of being bullied, why are you complaining that you can't have it both ways?"

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7A1987dM
"If you hate being bullied for being a nerd, why do you study physics and watch anime so much?" puts consequentialist jersey on If I expect to be better off studying physics and watching anime, I should do so. Otherwise, I shouldn't. puts acausal wristband on Considering what I would want to have precommitted to wouldn't matter much -- I would likely be bullied even if I had precommitted to study physics and watch anime no matter how much I was bullied, as it's not likely that they bully me in order to deter me from studying physics and watching anime. (And it's extremely unlikely that a man catcalls a woman in order to deter her from dressing up.) Considering that people sufficiently similar to me in sufficiently similar situations will make similar choices -- well, the world would be a worse place if more people had refrained from studying physics for fear of being bullied. OTOH watching anime doesn't have any important externalities (that, say, watching Hollywood sitcoms doesn't also have), as far as I can tell. If I expect to be better off if I complain/have precommitted to complain (and so have people sufficiently similar to me in sufficiently similar situations), then I should complain, otherwise I shouldn't. ISTM that complaining gives visibility to the issue of people being bullied, which can't be bad. (Well, bullies might retaliate, but if I had precommitted to complain whether or not I fear they retaliate...) "I have a right to X" translates into consequentialistese as "I had better not be deterred from X". Should we deter people from studying physics, so that they won't be bullied? Of course not -- they are already taking into account that they might be bullied when deciding whether to study physics; plus, if fewer people studied physics, bullies would likely just vent off their frustrations on someone else. (OTOH we should tell/remind people that unfortunately studying physics may lead to being bullied, in case they don't already know/have forgott
3MixedNuts
Do you actually know anyone who could have avoided bullying and chose not to? (Not counting taking the fall for someone else.) Nerdiness is a deep-seated personality trait. Given that you can't change it in a couple years while you're busy surviving bullies, you might as well make the most of it. If you avoided physics and anime, they'd pick on you on some other pretext. Internet feminists claim that avoiding looking attractive is like shunning physics and anime; it won't help, because they're after women and are just using attractiveness as a pretext. This appears not to be true in reality.
2MugaSofer
Study whenever the benefits outweigh the risks, work to reduce the risks. Obviously.
[-]ialdabaoth180

"I have a right to look hot, they have no right to catcall me", which is pure should-universe thinking

We need to get rid of the idea that should-universe thinking is bad. Should-universe thinking is a piss-poor way to make predictions, but it's the only way we've got for making goals.

Should-universe thinking is a necessity for engineers.

"I have a right to look hot, they have no right to catcall me, they do catcall me if I look hot, THEREFORE I should re-engineer the universe so that the process that leads from looking hot to catcalls is interrupted or replaced by a differentially preferred process."

Now you have a goal: Create a universe where a woman looking hot --/--> catcalls.

Now you need to form hypotheses and collect experimental evidence about the process you're attempting to effect (woo science!). Then, you need to work out strategies for effecting that process (woo engineering!). Then, you need to work out support systems to implement those strategies (woo economics!). Then, you need to implement those strategies (woo politics!).

This sounds remarkably like what's happening.

In the science phase, you have three-plus "waves" of feminist theo... (read more)

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4MixedNuts
Sure, if they said "I could be spared catcalls by looking ugly, but I refuse to save my own neck until the problem is fixed for all my sisters", like straight couples refusing to marry until gay marriage is legal or something. But they appear to be rejecting the premise, either by denying it (which seems inaccurate) or claiming it's evil to say it.
8ialdabaoth
I disagree with that statement. Those who seem to be denying the premise, or claiming that it's evil to say it, are actually attempting to attack a social process, not a truth-finding process. The problem is that the fact "agents who perform tend to have higher incidences of happen to them", where means "send signals that can be interpreted as sexual availability by a male audience" and means "sexual assault", is that it isn't simply a statement of fact - it's also an attempt at social norming. It's a direct process of rectifying is-ought, by saying "see? you sluts deserve it", without having to actually say "see? you sluts deserve it". When facts gain sufficient social baggage that they tend to imply behavior associated with the people speaking them, those facts have become memetically corrupted. At that point, you can no longer deal with them as pure facts; you HAVE to deal with the meme. Engaging with the "pure fact" allows people with an agenda to slip in the meme like a trojan horse, in the guise of "just stating the facts". Don't blame the people who appear to be fighting the facts in this case; blame the people who deliberately conflated the fact with the meme vector, because they deliberately corrupted the factual landscape in order to promote their agenda. And yes, in these cases, concepts like "blame" are important, because we're talking about competing social agendas, and humans are notoriously bad at abstract consequentialism. If you must step back all the way, examine the kinds of worlds that both sides are supporting, and then evaluate whether speaking the truth is possible given the strategies employed by both sides - and if it isn't, encyst the truth and wait for the environment to shift to be more truth-favorable, THEN examine it in the light of that environment.
8MixedNuts
I tried to explicitly distinguish "this sounds like a sensible policy for the selfish individual, given that douchebags aren't yet under control" and "anyone who doesn't apply that policy deserves douchebags unleashed upon them". That went over everyone's heads. Is there any way to disclaim? It should at least be possible in theory - if someone chooses driving over flying because they get sick in planes, nobody will be less than sympathetic if their car crashes.
5ialdabaoth
The problem is that we've had 50+ years of "dog whistle" politics applied explicitly to social justice discussions, so even if you try to explicitly distinguish your statement as the former and not the latter, it is more rational to assume that you are lying than that you are telling the truth. If you are telling the truth, then this is not your fault - but it is also not the fault of your audience, who are receiving your communication on a poisoned channel. Luckily, there is an newish Overcoming Bias article about this very subject: Can a Tiny Bit of Noise Destroy Communication? EDIT: Note to whomever just systematically downvoted the last 25 articles and posts I made to this site over the course of 8 minutes: is that behavior actually in any way helpful? Does it, in fact, increase the probability that you, or I, or anyone else becomes more rational? If not, why do it?
4MixedNuts
Inorite! But I'd expect it to be possible for a politician, and, a fortiori, a Less Wronger, to say something along the lines of: "We have too much centralized legislation, and states should be more autonomous. And yes, I know the last time someone said that he was implying that segregation was okay. But I'm seriously talking about the denotation of 'states' rights' here, and obviously 'not being super racist' is part of the stuff I'm not proposing to leave up to states, like, duh. So about giving states more power...". Dog-whistles rest on, perhaps not subtlety, but at least subtext - explicitly disclaiming it looks sufficient in my model. What did I miss?
6ialdabaoth
You missed the inevitable arms-race between mimics and legitimate signalers. We're in an evolutionary environment, and assuming that any communication can be taken at face value is a kind of naïveté. If you want to construct an argument where state's rights (or women sensibly protecting themselves) is important, you have to spend extra effort in your signaling. You need to START by explicitly acknowledging all of the things you might be accused of, BEFORE you present your actual point. You then have to specifically display all of the ways in which your point differs from the false (dog-whistle) signal. For example: This is the wrong order, and expends insufficient effort in its signaling process to demonstrate that it is not a false signal. This works better: "A. Most state's rights arguments are, in fact, racist dog-whistles. Unfortunately, some actual, legitimate situations in which states' rights are being trampled upon are swept under the rug, due in part to the poisoning of the discourse by those very dog-whistles. B. Here is why states should be more autonomous... C. Here is how we prevent the abuses of state autonomy that happened in the past, while rescuing the needed autonomy that I'm advocating..." Your system starts with B, then inserts a weak form of A, then jumps back to B - while nearly-completely ignoring C. This is insufficient to distinguish you from a false signaller. By providing a good A, B, and C, you establish that you are willing to expend effort to not be seen as a false signaller (A), clearly present your position (B), and indicate that you recognize the dangers of the false signalers' agenda and are willing to help fight against it as a concession to getting the things you want (C). Does all that make sense?
5Emile
As far as I can tell the idea that catcalling and rape are unrelated to the way girls dress is stupid, and it's as useless to pay attention to the arguments of stupid feminists as it is to the arguments of stupid liberals, conservatives, christians, atheists, etc. I would expect a reasonable feminist to argue that yes, clothes and makeup have an effect, but that the blame still lies fully on the shoulders of the men.
[-]DaFranker120

Taking this line to the extreme:

Even if the way they dress and instances of catcalling and rape were 100% correlated (that is, their odds of getting catcalled/raped depend only and always on how 'hot'/'slutty'/whatever they are dressed), the blame still would lie fully with the rapists.

It's like asserting that it's your fault you were victim of theft, because you owned things, and the more things you own the more likely you are to be a victim of theft, so you shouldn't ever have anything to steal; having things means you deserve to be stolen from.

To rephrase, perhaps more clearly, if X increases the odds that (Amoral Agent) K does Y to you instead of to someone else (i.e. K selects for X as targets to do Y upon), where Ks are some subset of the population, are you morally obligated to not-X, else you deserve Y?

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4MixedNuts
How much is rape displaced vs reduced, when a potential rapist decides not to target a potential victim? You're sort of assuming 100% displacement here. As "blame" goes, of course you jail rapists and support victims and only then collect "what were you wearing?" data for statistical research. "How do my clothing choices influence my likelihood to get raped?" is a rather salient question for many people, and girls at my school certainly avoid some actions they (usually mistakenly) believe increase risk.
2Morendil
...if they had f-ing evidence to back that up. Otherwise "opinionated" is the label you want, not "reasonable". Before advancing an opinion, a reasonable person would go look for data.
3Emile
True, my use of "stupid" and "reasonable" may have been a bit careless, my main point wasn't that believing that was stupid, but rather that one shouldn't pay too much attention to stupid arguments - in this context, MixedNuts was saying that feminist claimed X, though none in the thread who seem to identify as feminists agree with X. But I still think that dressing in a "sexy" way does increase the chances of catcalling (for rape, probably too, but that covers a wider range of things than catcalling does). I'm not aware of any rigorous studies (your link seems like weak evidence in that favor, and most anecdotes in this thread and outside are in the same direction). (I agree with the core of your criticism; even if my main point wasn't about stupidity in practice I was still sneaking in connotations)
[-]thomblake100

Yes. It would be oh-so-convenient if "It doesn't actually impact frequency" were true, but I suspect we don't live in such a convenient world. And made more uncomfortable if the calculation were made explicitly ahead of time, and benefits-plus-catcalling was a conscious choice.

To increase the squick factor of this discussion by orders of magnitude, substitute "catcalling" with "rape".

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7NancyLebovitz
I've seen claims that the way women dress doesn't affect their risk of getting raped, but I haven't seen any cites on the subject, nor do I have any strong intuitions. I've seen enough evidence to be sure that there's no way of dressing which drives the risk down to zero.
3DaFranker
This seemed too obvious to mention to me. But to put in context of inferential distance, I've seen enough evidence to be sure that there's no way to eat or even act which drives the risk down lower than 1%, let alone getting near zero using only superficial changes in appearance like clothing. This comes partially from groundbreaking-sounding study results like "overweight women don't actually have statistically-significant lower chances of being abused, even sexually!"¹, which isn't nearly as surprising when you approached the question from "How do rapists select their victims?" or more generally "Who rapes who and why?" instead of the default internal model that translates to "Which women would I (men) want to have sex with?". ¹. Read two studies to that effect years ago, do not remember sources. Strong possibility of cherry-picking / other biases.
7MixedNuts
Yeah, that's the fairly heavy subtext here. But here the Internet feminists seem correct in saying that looking like easy prey - pressure not to fight back or not to report rape, plausible deniability for the rapist, physical weakness or incapacitation, circumstances favoring victim-blaming - is a much stronger factor than attractiveness. Never heard of anyone getting catcalled in a nursing home.
3[anonymous]
Just curious: do you intentionally look female? My subconscious picture of you was more masculine. (Possibly due to the pseudonym "MixedNuts.") EDIT: Just to be crystal clear, I don't mean that judgmentally.
8MixedNuts
I prefer neutral pronouns and will tolerate male ones. I can't pass for anything other than female right now, so I don't usually try. I expect that will change in the future.
2Emile
For an extra anecd, I mean, datapoint, I asked my wife - she remembers being catcalled once, when she was wearing some extra-short shorts - which she stopped wearing after that.
2Rubix
I'm curious about this as well.
[-]Shmi100

That's quite eye-opening, thank you!

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[-]TimS90

without putting inequalities to rights just hides the issue from sight.

That's one conclusion - but there's a whole debate about how best to move forward that your conclusion just ducked. Making descendents pay for the mistakes of the ancestors vs. wiping the slate clean of all cultural baggage.

In practice, the distinction matters less because we haven't found any successful (or even partially successful) technique that wipes out all cultural baggage. But if I found a pill that could restart all cultural baggage for everyone but prevented all reparations, I'd be sorely tempted to use it.

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[-]Will_Newsome90

is this what oppression feels like? i can't write a comment reply to the daenerys post because it's like the subculture i'm in is so trigger-happy with demonization that i'm too afraid to even try to move them

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[-][anonymous]120

is this what oppression feels like?

...ish? Kinda? Not really, it's more like the experience you're describing maps to an occasional part of what oppression feels like -- but it captures only a very narrow slice of the picture. It would be like touching your own arm, and then wondering if this is what sex feels like.

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9Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
I for one would like to hear what you have to say about the post, and I won't downvote you. If you don't want to get down voted by others, send me a PM and I promise I will read it thoughtfully no matter what my intuitive response is.
8wedrifid
Yes, that is what oppression feels like. (Albeit it is oppression only within a community that does not form a significant part of your life.) This is no comment either way about whether or not people's treatment (or expected treatment) of your comments is undesirable or inappropriate. I haven't seen them and have very little inclination to personally get involved (or read) this post given the politics vs insight ratio the subject produces. Nevertheless, and right or wrong, what you experience can be accurately described as what oppression feels like.
5NancyLebovitz
I agree. Will, would you be willing to describe how this sort of social disapproval is different from the fun sort of disapproval of trolling?
2DaFranker
Not even close. Constructive suggestion regarding the rest: PM someone (e.g. me?) who doesn't seem to be being demonized or downvoted much in this article/thread and ask them if they're willing to help by posting for you / reviewing / pointing out where people are likely to block while reading and just downvote you.
[-]TimS90

I think it is important not to conflate desirability risk and getting-away-with-it risk.

Being targeting because the perpetrator will get away with it - even if caught - is a societal failure mode. Often, it comes in the form "Society does not believe you are a crime victim because you were not behaving the social role that society expected of you." I challenge you to come up with even one other defensible (or actually defended) circumstance where failure to follow social roles leads to a captured perpetrator being released without appropriate p... (read more)

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2MugaSofer
... how? Yes, it is. That's the whole point of this discussion: dressing a certain way can, to a certain extent, increase risk of rape; and it is reasonable to take this into account when choosing clothing. Obviously. Until then, however...
2TimS
Dressing in a certain way will make people believe you that you actually didn't consent to sex. But other than judging based on social rules, what is the relationship between consent and dress? I'm open to additional evidence, but I suspect a rapist given a choice between the tipsy but extremely hot girl and the falling-down drunk but average girl will pick the average girl >90% of the time. This analysis assumes hotness is related to dress - which I think we all agree is true. But the advice "don't get falling-down drunk" is totally unrelated to "don't dress so that you look hot." Plus, "Don't get falling-down drunk" is very controlling advice. And we don't acquit muggers because the victim was drunk.
4MugaSofer
No-one here is claiming that dress can absolve the rapist of blame.
2ialdabaoth
No, but what is being claimed is that the very discussion of whether certain behaviors have an effect on the likelihood of rape creates groundwork that others often use to absolve the rapist of blame, and that it's far better to salt those fields than risk a derailing, even a Rationalist one. To clarify: I'm not saying your argument isn't rational, or even factually correct. I'm attempting to provide information that will allow you to empathize with people who dismiss your argument out of hand, so that you can better see their map of the social landscape.
5Emile
If sexy skirts increase the chances of rape, I want to believe that sexy skirts increase the chances of rape. If sexy skirts don't increase the chances of rape, I want to believe that sexy skirts don't increase the chances of rape. I don't care whether it creates a "groundwork" that some hypothetical others may use.
7ialdabaoth
And if believing that "sexy skirts increase the chances of rape" increases the chances of rape, I want to believe that believing that "sexy skirts increase the chances of rape" increases the chances of rape. If believing that "sexy skirts increase the chances of rape" doesn't increase the chances of rape, I want to believe that believing that "sexy skirts increase the chances of rape" doesn't increase the chances of rape. I mean that statement directly, AND as a reminder that social systems are rife with metacognition. To explain more explicitly: because you and I are not perfectly rational beings, each belief that we hold does not operate in a vacuum. Holding a belief influences how we interact with other beliefs, in a cascade of interdependent loops. It is entirely possible for a fact to be technically true in the sense that you think you mean it, but to have implications when it interfaces with the rest of your belief system that are not, in fact, rational on the whole. Being rational about fact X is less important than winning (by which I mean "achieving your goals", not "proving your superiority in an internet debate").
5Emile
I agree with the gist of that, but: 1) I don't see very solid reasons for believing that "me believing sexy skirts increase the chances of rape" actually increases the chances of rape. There are probably cases where true beliefs have bad consequences, but this isn't on the top of the list. 2) When evaluating whether to believe a lie for the Greater Good, one shouldn't just consider the consequences of that lie considered in isolation, but also the consequences of increasing one's willingness to believe lies.
[-]ialdabaoth130

1) I don't see very solid reasons for believing that "me believing sexy skirts increase the chances of rape" actually increases the chances of rape. There are probably cases where true beliefs have bad consequences, but this isn't on the top of the list.

2) When evaluating whether to believe a lie for the Greater Good, one shouldn't just consider the consequences of that lie considered in isolation, but also the consequences of increasing one's willingness to believe lies.

And here's where the problem actually lies:

It's not that "sexy skirts doesn't increase the chance of rape" is a lie. It's that "sexy skirts doesn't increase the chance of rape" is irrelevant when we're discussing the wrongness of rape, which is where that argument often pops up. The problem isn't that this argument is wrong, it's that this argument is hacking everyone's availability bias.

One of the more common tactics is in shifting the argument from the relevance of a fact, back onto the truth of a fact, and then relying on the fact that the human cognitive system will forget about the shift, and uptick both whenever an argument is made about either.

Does that make any sense?

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3Emile
Sure, I agree it's irrelevant to the discussion of the wrongness of rape (though not to discussions of specific strategies for avoiding rape or catcalls) - which is why in a grand-cousin-nephew-great-aunt of this subthread I was telling MixedNuts to stop paying attention to "stupid" feminist arguments, and focus on the strong ones. Note though that this discussion didn't start from a discussion of the wrongness of rape, but from a discussion of what kind of dress triggered catcalls - so that point isn't completely irrelevant! (though not very interesting) If in a discussion of the wrongness of rape someone brings up the question of sexy skirts, my reaction wouldn't be to tell them that it's a shifty strategy, it would be to say "okay, let's assume for argument's sake that girls with sexy skirts are more likely to get raped - now what?" - because I don't think any important disagreements actually hinge on that fact (unless the discussion is the tactics of rape-avoidance).
4wedrifid
It would seem to decrease the chance of rape. I mean... "Believe X has negative consequence Y. Consider Y when evaluating when to do X. Influence others to do the same. Expect less Y." There are negative consequences of this true belief when held by people that also have false (and abhorrent) beliefs like "If sexy skirts increase the chance of rape then less blame, shame and punishment should be directed at rapists when they rape women (or men, I suppose) in sexy skirts". Personally I prefer to see those abhorrent beliefs actively punished and shamed rather than forcing people to believe false things that put them or those they speak to in increased personal danger.
[-]Bugmaster90

“It's rusty too,” intones the Dungeonmaster, “and pieces of it keep breaking off. Look, you're not supposed to be farming. You're supposed to go into the forest and find the dark elves.

This is off-topic, but that anecdote should go right on top of the list of things every GM should avoid doing. Regardless of anyone's gender.

If your players want to plow the field, let them plow the field. If your players want to sit in the tavern getting drunk all day, let them sit there for a bit. When the inevitable dark elves attack and burn the fields for the tenth ... (read more)

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[-]Desrtopa90

From the linked article

We have to do better than this. I have to do better than this. I can think of multiple examples of men harassing or catcalling women, but rarely have I intervened to say something.

I'd like to ask, would speaking up and intervening be an appreciated behavior? When I envision this scenario, I see this as likely to incite further discomfort, for "white knighting." I'd like to know what sort of responses people who've been subject to catcalling would like to see from other men who happen to be present.

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[-]Manfred120

I see this as likely to incite further discomfort

Gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette.

According to no authority, here is what I think is the standard protocol. If you know the offender, you pull their strings a bit - if they care how they appear to the people who they know, say it makes you want to avoid being seen with them, if they care about being high-class, say it's low-class, if they regularly care about strangers as people, use an ethical argument, if they care about being hard-working, say they're damaging the image of the company, etc.

If you don't know the offender you can't be so nuanced or even very friendly, but eggs, omelette, yadda yadda. If you or they are passing by with limited potential for escalation, feel free to insult their choice creatively. If it's a "sharing the elevator" kind of situation, you're going to have to put on your big boy britches (relative to the insults) and tell them politely that they're being incredibly uncool.

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6Viliam_Bur
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Knowing this, forget about the "appreciated behavior" and simply do what you believe is the right thing.
6NancyLebovitz
Helping people is a complicated matter, and I don't think it's just a male-female issue. If someone is extremely conflict-averse, then the offer of help might be unwelcome because it's likely to lead to more conflict in the short run. Needing to be helped can be seen as having one's status lowered even further than it was lowered by the initial attack/insult. And on the other hand, sometimes help works. Sometimes it's welcome. Sometimes the lack of offers of help is seen as a betrayal. I don't have general principles for telling when help is welcome, though asking the person whether they want help isn't a bad idea if it's a slow-moving situation. I also suspect that there are subtleties of body language which affect whether help will be welcomed.
3DaFranker
If taking action expected to reduce future instances of catcalling is negatively received, doesn't that seem quite irrational and counter to feminist long-term goals? Is the social-expectation impact of "white-knighting" higher than the impact of letting catcalling go on? ("Ah, women need a man to defend them from catcalling, they're helpless on their own.", or maybe "It's alright to catcall as long as some other men aren't present - it's a social status thing of men") I think this also sidesteps a ton of other considerations: Some women (edit: "people" would be more appropriate and representative, but within context we're talking about helping women who are being catcalled) have grown up all along as merely victims of various forms of various kinds of abuse and sexism, of which this is sometimes among the lesser ones. If no boys or men have ever stood up for them, and all girls they knew were also victims, what is the default model of the world these women will have, if the subconscious and instincts are left to their own devices? How are they going to feel, in this cruel, unchangeable, hopeless world in which they are helpless and everything they suffer is supposedly their own fault because they "tempt" the males? I think the long term emotional impact of never having anyone help is far greater than the momentary impact she might feel from being white-knighted and the one the man might feel from the reaction. How true this is also depends on many other factors. Society (social interactions) is needlessly horrible and complicated. By default.
2Asymmetric
Responses that directly refer to your desire to see the women as a person, as opposed to objectifying her through catcalls etc. or putting her on a pedestal because of her gender. Therefore, responses that don't work are motivated out of a desire to protect the woman because she is a woman, rather than because she is a person. "That's a rude thing to say to a woman" is therefore worse than a simple "that's rude". The idea of "white knighting" is distasteful because people consider white knights to be motivated to protect women because they are women. Removing that aspect gets rid of the white knighting. If anyone still thinks you're motivated by a desire to protect women because they are women, you could retort with, "she's a person. She has feelings like anyone else."
5Desrtopa
Ideally yes, but not necessarily in practice. I've been accused of white knighting before for engaging in behaviors that I not only would, but had, engaged in on behalf of men (exclusively in such cases, in fact, since I don't do much for women that I don't also do for men.) Of course, people can only read observed behaviors, not intents or past actions, but I was hoping to get a wider response to my question, in the form of "this is the sort of response I would like to see," more than "responses motivated in this way are better than responses motivated in this other way." The example that you provided helps, but it's not always easy for a person to tell how their actions would appear to be motivated from the outside. It's not something I would personally be likely to say, but I can easily see someone responding with "that's a rude thing to say to a woman" simply because the thing they're responding to is rude to say to a woman, whereas to say it to a man would simply be bizarre
[-]Athrelon90

Relevant:

The “Anonymous Narratives by LW Women” thread will receive >100 comments,

The “Anonymous Narratives by LW Women” thread will receive >500 comments

Consider this easy-to-predict eventuality as an indictment of how incredibly ineffective and mindkilled LessWrong is about sex, for obviously ideological reasons (though we may disagree about which side it is that is mindkilled).

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[-]JoshuaZ190

In addition to the problems already pointed out with this comment, another thing I'd like to address is:

(though we may disagree about which side it is that is mindkilled)

If one suspects that mindkilling is happening, the most likely result isn't that it is happening on one "side" but rather with pretty much both "sides"- thinking in terms of sides is already to some extent a sign of mindkilling. But large scale discussion is not, and better not be, in any reasonable setting a sign by itself of mindkilling but just evidence of levels of interest.

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[-]NancyLebovitz170

What's your line of thought that large numbers of comments are a clear indication of a mind-killed community?

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6TorqueDrifter
Probably: controversy -> lots of comments. If you think that, for example, feminism should be trivial or trivially dismissed, then controversy indicates a problem.
9Multiheaded
"Feminism" in its colloquial understanding covers so much beliefs and memes at this point that it's possible to consider some of them trivial (e.g. "the traditional gender structure is unjust, immoral and insidious") while trivially dismissing others (e.g. "most men are currently privileged over most women", "male sexuality is inherently aggressive/antisocial").
7A1987dM
Relevant (I'm getting addicted to linking to posts by Yvain. Maybe I should beemind to not doing that more than twice per day or something.)
8beoShaffer
I think its fine. More people should read posts by Yvain, and your links seem topical.
4TorqueDrifter
Okay, fair enough. Personally, I would say that, yeah, men do have gender-related "privilege", that this is trivial once it's pointed out, and that it's basically part of why "the traditional gender structure is unjust, immoral and insidious". So there you go.
2A1987dM
Yup, but the arrow pointing the other way (the one NancyLebovitz asked about) is likely waaay thinner and noisier than that.
[-][anonymous]160

Consider this easy-to-predict eventuality as an indictment of how incredibly ineffective and mindkilled LessWrong is about sex, for obviously ideological reasons (though we may disagree about which side it is that is mindkilled).

Doesn't follow. The base rate for getting more than 100 comments on a main, non-announcement article is already something like 70%.

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3NancyLebovitz
I predicted with 90% certainty that there would be over 500 comments. On the other hand, quite a few of the comments are mine. On the remaining hand, I'm also 90% certain that the comments will go over 500 even not including mine.
3A1987dM
“Just because the two of you disagree doesn't mean one of you is right”¹; IOW, I think both sides are mindkilled to some extent -- though surprisingly much less than usual. ---------------------------------------- 1. I'm having a hard time finding the original wording and attribution of this on Google; can anybody help?
3Multiheaded
Presumably you consider every more-or-less-polite forum on sex/gender issues to be mind-killed too, then? The fact that people tend to get incensed about, strongly condemn and downvote things that they deem to be politically extremist/misanthropic/misogynistic... is it really the standard by which to judge mind-killedness? Or should we rather look at the quality of empirical and moral arguments used in the discussion, without showing undue tolerance to attacks on the Enlightenment values that LW's mission implicitly includes? Would you show the same tolerance to overt racism and political extremism in a thread on group differences in intelligence? In my opinion, LW handles that controversy admirably, and has never let the moral issues inherent in it out of the discussion.
[-]Vaniver90

If CFAR can't avoid a Jerry Sandusky/Joe Paterno type scenario

So, I agree that any organization that works with minors should be held to high standards (and CFAR does run a camp for high schoolers). I don't think the forum policy gives much evidence about the likelihood of children being victimized by employees, though.

which I am reasonably probable it is capable of, given one of its founders wrote HPMOR

It's not clear to me how skill at writing HPMOR is related skill at avoiding PR gaffes. Have you looked at EY's okcupid page? There are a lot of things there that don't look like they're written with public relations in mind.

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[-]Salemicus90

Can you please explain what this comment refers to.

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[-]JoshuaZ90

It is possible for people to criticize or comment on specific (possibly minor issues) while still learning from or getting the overall set of points made by something.

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[-]A1987dM90

Some of those don't sound terribly gender-specific to me -- but then again, I've had a less stereotypically masculine life than typical. (In particular, I answered Yes to plenty of these questions (the ones in black) --probably more Yes than No, though most were N/A or "What the hell is wrong with you"-- in spite of being male.)

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[-]simplicio220

Setting aside how poisonously spiteful the linked author seems to be (see his homepage), the funny thing about the author's criticisms of 'feminism' as seen in that list, is that most of the complaints that have any justice behind them actually support bog-standard feminist theory. For example:

If I have children and provide primary care for them, I’ll be praised for extraordinary parenting if I’m even marginally competent. (Perhaps one might also call this the soft bigotry of low expectations. --NG)

If I have children and pursue a career, no one will think I’m selfish for not staying at home. (If a man has children and decides not to pursue a career, he will be thought of as lazy and irresponsible for exploiting his hardworking wife. --NG)

If I have a wife or live-in girlfriend, chances are we’ll divide up household chores so that she does most of the labor, and in particular the most repetitive and unrewarding tasks. (Not to mention we'll also 'divide' who will make most of the spending decisions. Forgot that one, didn't we? --NG)

The boilerplate feminist line here would be that society conditions us to habitually think in paired gender stereotypes, such as "women are natura... (read more)

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[-]Nornagest190

Gender issues alone are bad enough, but I strongly suggest we avoid discussing them in terms of their support for/conflict with any particular ideology of gender; that strikes me as industrial-strength mind-killer.

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3simplicio
You're right; I oughtn't to have labeled the beliefs.
[-]ikrase100

The thing that frustrates many people might be that some feminists tend to pay some amount of lip service to the idea that men may get hurt but angrily suppress men who talk about it enough, esp in existing feminist forums; in the worst cases men get told that these issues are always peripheral matters of patriarchy and if men want to escape rigid male gender roles the right thing to do is to totally subordinate themselves to feminism even when it's not helping them.

Further, there is a certain kind of mind to which feminism helping women but not men looks like feminism gradually acquiring the power to oppress men.

A further annoyance is that the movements that are interested in dealing with the male issues in the Overly Restrictive Overall Male Favoring Gender Ssytem often have one of the following drawbacks: - Have their own stereotypes - are too vague, tend to make 'masculinity' a zero-meaning term - or are focused on an unpopularly high level of gender-nonconformity for men. For example, I find it frustrating when discussions about the boringness and lack of self-expression inherent in modern men's clothing leads to alternative men's clothing that is effeminate (another taboo that should break, but not for me) but not expressive.

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[-]fubarobfusco140

The thing that frustrates many people might be that some feminists tend to pay some amount of lip service to the idea that men may get hurt but angrily suppress men who talk about it enough, esp in existing feminist forums

The response I've usually seen to this is more along the lines of "That's true but it's off-topic here" or "You're disrupting the conversation; we're talking about problems that women have here" — more and more heatedly as the off-topic posters persist.

Part of the trouble seems to be that these men give the impression that they are not willing to allow women (or specifically feminist women) to have a forum that belongs to them, where those women get to define "on-topic" in terms of their own standards, without permission from any man who passes by. That a forum just about women's issues cannot be allowed to exist.

Suppose that every time Less Wrong had a thread about UFAI, a bunch of people showed up talking about fighting breast cancer; how UFAI wasn't the only problem in the world — breast cancer is bad, too! They'd not be wrong — breast cancer is indeed bad — but it's not on topic in a thread on UFAI. And when told "this is ... (read more)

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8[anonymous]
This. Also, it's probably worth noting that many feminists do want to discuss the way sexism impacts men, but find that self-invited men who wish to participate aren't necessarily contributing in a positive way to that. Continuing your analogy, it would be like people who want to talk about UFAI found themselves fielding responses from people who think merely discussing AI makes you shills for the DOD who secretly work on drones and like bombing brown babies.
4Viliam_Bur
I understand (and agree with) the "off-topic" objection, but there is still one thing that does not make sense to me. Approximately this: When men start talking about "men have problems too" within a feminist platform, they are told to shut up, because that is off-topic, an "oppression olympics", etc. On the other hand, when men start talking about "men have problems too" outside of feminist platform (on their own platform), they are also told to shut up, because either a) their ideas are compatible with feminism, so they should consider themselves a subset of feminism and not start a distinct platform, or b) their ideas are not compatible with feminism, which makes them evil oppressors. So the discussion about men's problems within feminist circles is labeled off-topic, but the discussion outside feminist circles is labeled anti-feminist, therefore evil. Where exactly is then this discussion supposed to happen? Nowhere? I apologize for the simplification of the problem, but essentially the question is this: If I notice that feminists complain that X happens only to women, and I am honestly convinced that X happens to men too, which is the best way (preferred by the feminists) to discuss this? (The analogy with FAI and breast cancer would be if FAI proponents constantly labeled the breast-cancer awareness websites and their participants as evil, because their petty concerns remove attention and resources from the serious problems of x-risks. Also: "cancer olympics" "No, seriously, what about teh boobz?" etc.)
1ikrase
I completely agree actually, although in the specific issue of gender the two sides are bound more to each other, and each side's decision has more externalities, than with most conflicts of bigotry. One frustration is that most of the male-centric counterparts SUCK compared to the feminist communities, many of the better ones desire an end to gender norms that I do not neccesarily desire, and others and get slagged by feminists even if they don't attack the feminists very much.
4Nornagest
The two are pretty closely linked. Obviously I don't have a good idea of what examples you have in mind, but if you don't take considerable care with presentation, a lot of the more obvious tweaks to men's fashion would end up looking femme before they look masculine-but-expressive. For example: high-contrast patterns are femme unless they're plaids or appear on a necktie. Pastels are femme. A lot of fabrics are femme, especially thin or shiny ones. Embroidered or other eye-catching details are femme, except in the context of Western wear or a few Asian-inspired designs. Most jewelry is femme. Tight clothing is femme except for two or three specific undershirt cuts, and those are borderline. Anything that looks like it's trying to be sexy is femme. The list goes on. There's enough constraints, in fact, that I'm tempted to just throw this all into a generalization and say that being sufficiently innovative or expressive is considered femme by American sartorial culture (though European fashion seems somewhat better about this, and Asian significantly so). That does sort of break down when you start looking at punk and metal fashion, but for a variety of reasons I'm inclined to treat those as a special case.
1A1987dM
The third way is retro style.
[-]DaFranker80

I will, however, suggest that you might do well to spend some time thinking about what your ideal society will be like after the principle that society (i.e. government) can dictate what people say, think and do to promote the social cause of the day becomes firmly entrenched. Do you really think your personal ideology will retain control of the government forever? What happens if a political group with views you oppose gets in power?

False dilemma. You're also strawmanning my argument.

Freedom of religion is trivially equivalent to freedom of anti-epist... (read more)

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2MugaSofer
In fairness, the claim that removing these freedoms is extremely dangerous isn't the same as the claim that no conceivable society could function without them. You may now continue with your regularly scheduled being right.
[-]Nornagest80

The above is perfectly consistent with my thesis, which is simply that a major theme of 20th-century social movements was the belief that you can change individual behavior pretty much however you want by changing the society that people live in.

I feel like I'm explaining this poorly. You can't make arbitrary changes to behavior under the Marxist worldview by making social reforms. You can get people to further the interests of their social class more effectively by changing their perception of class, or get them to further the interests of other soci... (read more)

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[-]Qiaochu_Yuan80

That depends on what you mean by "strongly." I would tentatively posit that even if race isn't strongly predictive in an absolute sense of other traits that people care about, it is relatively predictive compared to other traits that are easy to unambiguously learn about a person. For example, if I wanted to predict the performance of a high school student on standardized tests, I think race would be a better predictor than height or weight, and I don't know enough to confidently say whether it would a better predictor than income level.

I've rec... (read more)

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4CCC
Hmmm. It seems to me that what is happening here is that race is reasonably correlated with culture, and culture is very strongly correlated with upbringing, and upbringing is very strongly correlated with academic performance. (Note that income level->culture is also a fairly strong correlation). Race is also highly visible, and (often, but not always) easily discerned. Hence, a correlation (via culture) between race and academic performance would be very visible. If the correlation between race and culture is thus dissolved, or at least dramatically reduced, then race will become far weaker evidence as to (say) academic performance, eventually dipping below random noise levels. Once the correlation between race and non-aesthetic traits that people care about is generally recognised as being below the level of random noise, then I would say that race will no longer matter. (Culture, of course, will still matter. I don't really see any good way around that).
7Qiaochu_Yuan
Why does it matter to you how strong the correlation between race and culture is? Isn't the real problem that people are mishandling Bayesian updates based on race? That could be solved by teaching people how to perform Bayesian updates more accurately. It wouldn't be a world in which "race doesn't matter," but it would be a world in which the extent to which race does matter is recognized and not exaggerated or ignored. I can think of at least two other causal paths from race to academic performance. One is the attitudes a person's peer group is likely to hold towards academic performance (even if they don't make a point of affiliating with other people based on race, other people may make a point of affiliating with them based on race), and more generally how the people around a person treat them based on race. The other is genetics. (I imagine this is not a particularly popular thing to say but I recently realized that I do not have a solid statistical foundation for dismissing it.)
7Eugine_Nier
At this point I think the problem is that they are updating correctly.
6TorqueDrifter
I disagree. Many statistical effects of race are screened off by fairly easily obtained information, but people act as though this is not the case. Moreover, if you, say, beat someone for being black, that's really not tied to any sort of problem with your use of Bayesian updating.
[-]Eugine_Nier110

Many statistical effects of race are screened off by fairly easily obtained information,

Or would be if people weren't actively rigging said information such that this is not the case. And that's before getting into tail-effects.

Moreover, if you, say, beat someone for being black,

Which really doesn't happen these days. (It's certainly much rarer than someone being beaten up for being white.)

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7TorqueDrifter
Some such information is degraded, yes, but not all, and not to uselessness. And yes, people are beaten in the first world in this day and age for being black or for being white, and I find it difficult to blame either of those on the use or misuse of Bayesian updating (except to the extent that observing a person's race might tell you "I can get away with this"). I do not accept your contention that people just happen to be exactly the correct degree of racist.
[-]Viliam_Bur120

I do not accept your contention that people just happen to be exactly the correct degree of racist.

People are usually not "exactly correct" about anything, so statements like this are almost automatically true. But is this your true rejection?

Imagine that tomorrow some magic will turn all people into exactly the correct degree of racists. That means for example that if a person with a given skin color has (according to the external view) probability X to have some trait, they will expect that trait with probability exactly X, not more, not less.

Would such society be more similar to what we have now, or to a perfectly equal society?

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5NancyLebovitz
I'd bet on closer to a perfectly equal society, but it's rather hard to do the experiment.
3TorqueDrifter
It's certainly my (a) true rejection of "the problem is that [people] are updating correctly". What did you expect I was rejecting? I dunno what that society would be more similar to. I expect it'd be a fair distance from either, and that there would remain significant problems apart from inequality of social status, economic status, etc. Eugine_Nier's assertion was that it would be identical (read: very similar) to what we have now. I disagreed.
2Eugine_Nier
I confess, I was sacrificing some precision for snark. I meant "the problem is that [people] are updating correctly, to the extant they are".
2Eugine_Nier
Taboo "perfectly equal society".
1NancyLebovitz
Evidence? Also, are you including assault by the police in your comparison?
1Eugine_Nier
Look at crime statistics. Sure, it doesn't change its truth.
2NancyLebovitz
There are at least two confounding factors for the crime statistics. One is that the justice system is pretty sloppy, and more so for black men. Another is that even if your crime statistics are accurate, it's hard to identify a criminal's exact motives. Was a beating part of a robbery? Was it a simple attack initiated by one side, or was it a quarrel that escalated?
6NancyLebovitz
Another possibility is that race affects how many people are treated in the educational system, and that affects how much effort they put into schoolwork.
1CCC
I don't care about the correlation between race and culture in and of itself. I want to remove or reduce (preferably remove) the percieved correlation between race and academic performance; and it seems to me that the best way to do this is to remove the correlation between race and culture (as the correlation from culture to academic performance does not look removable). That is a good strategy, and quite possibly superior to my suggestion. The biggest trouble is that it requires a substantial majority of people to be willing to learn how to properly perform Bayesian updates, which I fear may make it less practical. (Not that my idea was necessarily all that practical to begin with). Hmmm. This is a possible path; intuitively, I'd expect it to matter about as much as the neighbourhood one grows up in. That is, I would expect any non-cultural effects to be more or less random noise. That is also possible. Intuitively (which is very poor evidence, I know) I would expect this to matter less than culture. I do know some very intelligent people of many races; so individual variance seems large enough to defeat any systemic genetic bias that may exist. Experimental evidence of the effects of culture versus genetics could be discovered by studying people of one race raised in the culture of another race (e.g. by adoption).
3Eugine_Nier
I think a better strategy is to remove the actual correlation between race and academic performance, and possibly the one between race and criminality for that matter. One place to start is to change the culture that leads to said problems.
[-]Nornagest80

For example, I'd feel less masculine wearing a pink shirt around North America, but guys in China did so fairly commonly, and I'd expect to find considerable variation in this across time and cultures, so I consider it a bad idea, or at least pointless, for color based gender norms to be overtly encouraged.

You'd be right; the association of pink with femininity is fairly recent.

It's not clear to me that putting a lot of effort into eliminating overt caste markers is the best way to go if you're interested in weakening caste, though.

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[-]Jayson_Virissimo80

Based on these anecdotes, I have significantly less geek-cred than female Less Wrongers. Are female Less Wrongers extra geeky or am I just a community outlier?

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[-]NancyLebovitz100

The stories were selected for being about geekiness. It might be worth having (in other words, I'm not doing it) t a post in discussion about geek cred.

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[-]MugaSofer80

I have the experience of being a male and having other males make unsolicited greetings, which makes me uncomfortable and generally resembles what Nancy reported. Since I doubt the same phenomenon is responsible for the greetings I receive and the "catcalling"many women report, I suggested that Nancy's experiences had a different cause to regular, sexual catcalling. I may have made some sort of error, but if so I would prefer you point it out rather than baldly accuse me of a failure of empathy.

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8NancyLebovitz
For what it's worth, every stranger who's given me an unwanted "How are you doing?" has been male, and the incidence has dropped off strikingly as I've hit menopause. I do think there's a sexual element, and for all I know, there was one in the unwanted greetings from men that you've gotten. However, please note that I raised the question about whether the relatively mild "How are you doing?" should be counted among catcalls. The thing that people usually complain about is more overtly sexual and/or gendered, and frequently hostile to start with or becomes hostile if rejected.
5MugaSofer
I wasn't trying to make any claims about catcalling, merely supplying evidence that "how are you doing" is a different phenomenon. ... I have to say, the possibility that it's sexual is there - I have long hair, long enough that I've been mistaken for female (more so before I hit puberty, of course.) But my name is used fairly often, so I suspect I'm just more recognizable than skilled at recognizing others.
7TorqueDrifter
This seems like an important detail.
[-]JulianMorrison80

People don't see their attitudes as anything but "normal" because being a sexist or a racist doesn't feel like villainy, doesn't even feel like a moral choice, it just feels like facts.

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[-]ialdabaoth80

You have an implicit assumption: that there are actions that you can take which assume that gender identity matches body, that do not enforce stereotypes and which cannot be co-opted to enforce stereotypes.

There is strong evidence to suggest that that is not true, within the current social landscape.

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4MugaSofer
Referring to them by gendered pronouns, basically.
[-]JoshuaZ70

Oppression? No. Calling these sorts of incidents 'oppression' trivializes the suffering of the disenfranchised millions who live in daily fear of beatings, lynching or rape because of their religion or ethnicity, and must try to survive while knowing that others can rob them and destroy their possessions with impunity and they have no legal recourse. You might as well call having to shake hands with a man you don't like 'rape'.

I was going to upvote this until I got to the last sentence which seems both needlessly inflammatory and not accurate. The essen... (read more)

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[-]ialdabaoth70

This may be pedantic, but even your edited statement strikes me as false. There SHOULD be reasonable and widespread moral disapproval of the practice, but in point of fact there isn't, really. (Nor with drugs, actually). "Scared Straight" is still a STRONGLY favored tactic for most authoritarian regimes in the United States. "Sex Ed"/Health classes love showing disgusting pictures of advanced STD cases; high school principles love inviting DARE officers to come arrest kids and drag them to jail to teach them how horrific it would be to ... (read more)

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[-]TimS70

Sure.

But rapists are people, not forces of nature. And the particular worrying about environmental risk that comes out as "Don't dress too sexy" increases the getting-away-with-it-even-when-caught risk much more than it decreases environmental risk.

Plus, it emboldens the let's tolerate the local rapist vibe that makes reporting a rapist you know so much more difficult. Rapists aren't just environment. They are people in a community that the community needs to address directly - hard as that is.

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1Bugmaster
As I said, I think these are two separate issues. From the point of view of a woman who is planning her night out, rapists are as environmental as blizzards, because there's absolutely nothing she can personally do to reduce their numbers in the short term. However, in the long term, that same woman could sponsor legislation and/or community measures aimed at making rape easier to report and harder to perpetrate. Similarly, a skier who is planning his cross-country trip can't do anything in the short term to make the weather milder or the road safer. However, in the long term, he could sponsor the construction of additional cell towers, emergency shelters, ranger stations, etc., to make skiing safer for everyone.
1TimS
There's no particular reason to think stranger rape is more frequent than acquaintance rape. The opposite appears to be true. Focusing on an infrequent type of rape while ignoring more comment types does not seem aimed at decreasing the frequency of the problem.
[-]MichaelVassar70

My most immediate question is whether you think your more rapidly increasing desire to be normal was due to biological differences, more cultural pressure, or something else.

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[-]Said Achmiz70

Well... if that's the intended point, then I just don't think it's well-supported by the anecdote.

I tell the story here of a D&D gaming group I ran which was over half female. I play D&D with several more women on a semi-regular basis. There are some differences in play style between some of the guys I play with and some of the girls I play with, but there's no monolithic bloc such that I can even begin to generalize, even ignoring the small sample size and selection effects.

To put it another way, the anecdote in question justifies an existentially... (read more)

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[-][anonymous]60

I (male) am reminded of an incident as I was leaving from work one night. It was raining at least moderately, and I had an umbrella with me. There was a (female) coworker who was leaving right behind. (She works at a different office location, but we see and greet each other occasionally.) She did not appear to have an umbrella or other rain gear, and in any case was carrying a decent amount of stuff and had both hands full. I asked if she wanted to share my umbrella and she declined; we talked for a bit until we parted ways but I didn't push the issue fur... (read more)

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[-]NancyLebovitz140

Speaking only for myself, I think asking whether help is welcome and taking rejection politely is a good combination.

Any thoughts about whether the world would be a better place if men were comfortable offering each other that sort of help and accepting it some of the time?

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3A1987dM
Now I'm starting to wonder whether there might be cultural differences. ISTM that where I am (Italy), offering to share an umbrella with someone you know is just politeness, and people do it pretty often regardless of gender. (Likewise, people of either gender hold doors open for people (including strangers) of either gender all the time, and it would have never occurred to me that this might have anything to do with sexuality if I hadn't read that on the internet.)
3[anonymous]
I can't imagine it would be a /worse/ world, in any case. If it were raining harder, I would theoretically be more willing to offer help, regardless of gender (and despite at least one personal anecdotal experience agreeing with Alicorn's comment). It just seems "wrong" (cold, unfriendly) if I hadn't offered, in my situation, regardless of whether aid was accepted or not.
5Shmi
If you ask and she agrees, it appears to create an implicit favor she was probably uncomfortable with. The term "share" also conveys an uncomfortable connotation of closeness. I bet that if you simply held an umbrella over her head matter-of-factly, she would not have objected and possibly even thanked you later.
3[anonymous]
(I don't remember my exact phrasing of the question.) Your view is interesting, because to me that action would fall into borderline-creep behavior - intruding on personal space without asking.
[-][anonymous]110

Indeed, and yet it may also work.

The "creepyness" rules are not formulated to make one effective at social interaction, they are formulated to prevent creepy behaviour. Those goals may conflict.

More cynically (not necessarily my opinion), the stated rules are damaging to people who follow them, because when people think them up, they think of someone they wouldn't like, and then think of rules that they would like such a person to follow. No incentive to think of the misliked person's best interests.

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2Shmi
I suppose some women could misinterpret it this way. But given that "we see and greet each other occasionally" she should be brave enough to refuse your unsolicited umbrella if she felt uncomfortable. But yes, you would be running a bit of a risk.
4christina
Why wouldn't you offer to assist a male who had no umbrella? That seems rather uncharitable of you.
2[anonymous]
It does, and the fact that I have implicit gender norms/behaviors like that bothers me. There's also other factors to take into consideration; all things being equal I'd prefer to associate with people in my age group (I'm on the low end of the age scale here - edit: I mean at my workplace, not on LW), and if she wasn't at a different site but rather a direct higher-up over me, it would be extremely awkward to offer the umbrella.
2christina
My thought is that it would be best not to offer in the particular situation you gave. That is, it was night, and presumably there was no life-threatening danger to her from the rain. Of course, there is nothing wrong with being generous, but there are always other factors to consider. If, for example, you want to hold doors open for people or offer to carry heavy things, that is fine, as long as you do that for everyone consistently and don't take offense if anyone refuses. Also, you may want to consider the context. Even if you are not a scary person, offering to help somone with a minor task if the area is dark and/or deserted can be perceived much differently than in a more typical context. I would advise you to continue to make the effort to recognize when you may be conforming to undesireable cultural norms, as you have been doing here. That is the first step to taking action on this extremely pervasive issue.
3Alicorn
I wouldn't share an umbrella even with someone I'm perfectly comfortable intersecting space with. It's hard and awkward and you get rained on anyway.
4thomblake
Well the trick is, the offerer holds the umbrella over the recipient's head and gets wet.
1Qiaochu_Yuan
I agree with shminux (about the analysis, not about the recommended action). This is something I didn't fully understand until I read Cialdini. There's a section in there about reciprocation that really helped me grok the basic idea that people generally feel that they should return favors, and some people in some situations don't want to receive favors because they don't want the corresponding debt. This is particularly the case for women receiving favors from men, where the debt is usually at least implicitly sexual in nature (e.g. buying a woman a drink at a bar). I think you just shouldn't have said anything. If she wanted to make use of your umbrella she could've initiated that instead.
4DaFranker
People can be atrociously and remarkably bad at asking for help, or even noticing that they need or could use some help. This is independent of and multiplied by all the social complications and signalling factors involved. As per schminux's explanation, asking for help (use of the umbrella) in this case would socially be interpreted as even more of a favor-debt, and possibly even as a signal of implicitly-romantic-interest (like a woman asking you to buy her a drink at a bar).
9Qiaochu_Yuan
Yes, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea to point this out. Let me put it in more LW-friendly terms: when a woman sees an unfamiliar man offering to help her in some way, she assigns nontrivial probability to the hypothesis that the man is offering to help her for sexual reasons, and she assigns nontrivial probability to the hypothesis that the man is going to be angry and possibly violent if she rejects the sexual advances she expects, with nontrivial probability, to occur later if she accepts that help. This situation has sufficiently negative utility that it is worth avoiding even if the probability of it happening is not all that high.
3DaFranker
Haha, that's an awesome way to word it. But yeah, I was already agreeing with that part. My point is only that, to the same woman, it's my understanding that many cases of initiating the interaction will look even worse. Thus, the real problem to find a solution for is "How does one credibly signal need or offer for help while optimizing the chances that it will have a positive result and avoid social failure modes?", or something close to that, and the solution definitely doesn't look like "Do your own thing and don't ask for help or offer help".
[-]TimS60

I'm a big believer in the power of examining history to understand current society. For example, Gordon Craig makes an interesting case that the particular results of the Revolution of 1848 in Prussia were a substantial cause of the rise of the Nazis.

But it is important to recognize the limits of historical analysis across long periods of time. First, multiple causes blend together, making it very difficult to disentangle causation. More importantly for this conversation, moral changes are not discrete events.

Thus, trying to figure out the moral change... (read more)

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[-]Eugine_Nier60

What traits, aside from skin colour and immunity or vulnerability to sunburn, are strongly correlated with race and cared about in more than an aesthetic sense?

Intelligence and criminality, to give the two most important examples.

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1CCC
I'd be interested to see a citation for the intelligence claim. I could believe a very weak correlation to genetics, but find a strong one unlikely. There may be a strong correlation to intelligence via culture; which implies that some cultures are flawed, holding people back from achieving what they might in a better culture; implying in turn that flawed cultures should be improved/debugged. Citation? Again, I suspect - though I'm not certain - that what we have here is a cultural tendency pretending to be a racial tendency. If that is correct, then a member of the wrong race faces severe and unfair disadvantages even if he belongs to a less-criminality-inclined culture.
2Eugine_Nier
I never said anything about causation or genetics. I was just talking about correlation.
[-]NancyLebovitz60

It also depends on just how much narrowing we're doing. I think that eliminating "able to literally get away with murder" wouldn't be a great loss.

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[-]Nornagest60

Most of the major social reform movements of the 20th century explicitly claimed that the human mind is a blank slate that can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning

That's the special case of "every point in the state space", isn't it?

And I'm not even sure it's true. Marxist ideology, for example, explicitly disclaims that sort of neuroplasticity: its big idea (oversimplifying like crazy here) is that people unconsciously act as agents of large-scale social groups, and that this sort of group agency is stable enough to be exploited ... (read more)

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[-][anonymous]60

I generally try to use probability when interacting with people. I know they are not as likely to jump of a bridge as to cross it. Amazingly it seems to help me have good relations with them. Incredible I know. I hear statistical reasoning about humans is evil though so maybe I shouldn't be sharing this advice.

I never did get why that is though.

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[-]A1987dM130

In certain cases, it's evil (i.e. there should be an ethical injunction against it) because, due to corrupted mindware, certain people tend to overdo it (e.g., if they know that black people have a lower average IQ than white people, they'll consider a black person significantly stupider than a white person in the same situation even though the evidence race provides about intelligence is likely almost completely screened off by information about what they say, wear, and do).

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4NancyLebovitz
That's not even the worst possibility-- a racist may resent black people who are smarter than they "ought" to be.
5A1987dM
One might argue that that's not even a version of “statistical reasoning” corrupted by cognitive biases, that's just being an asshole.
[-]Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) 100

Are the specific examples that JulianMorrison gave things that are statistically true about girls versus boys. Is it statistically true that girls don't climb trees? (I'm a girl, and tree climbing is awesome!)

Also, there's a difference between what you're talking about (using probability to predict behaviour when you know nothing else about others) and ways to raise children, since parents in part determine the future behaviour of their children. Even if it is statistically true, right now, that girls don't wear Spider-Man suits as often as boys, and get upset rather than angry, I don't think those states are the ideal world states. Treating your children like these stereotypes are true might be a self fulfilling prophecy.

Note that there are some examples that I think would be true. I do think that, on average, girls are more likely to get upset than angry when in a situation of conflict. But not always: I get upset more often, my brother gets angry, my sister gets angry, my dad gets upset. I do think that the average boy, if given a Barbie, is more likely to re-enact battles with it than dress it. But that doesn't mean it's a good parenting strategy to yell at your son because he's an outlier who likes to dress Barbies. (From a purely predictive view, you could probably make a boy happier by giving him something other than a Barbie for his birthday, but that's if you're not the parent and your actions aren't influencing his future preferences.)

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[-][anonymous]100

This is what I was criticizing:

Until the child tells you their gender identity, don't assume it matches their body

learn the standard ways that parents treat children differently by gender (assuming girls are upset where they'd assume boys are angry, for example) and proactively refuse to do, or permit them done by other adults.

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5Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
I also disagree with the first paragraph. If I have a daughter someday, I'm not going to treat her as gender-neutral-it's too much work and probably wouldn't work. I guess I just think that the examples in the second group aren't "gender identity" examples. At most they're gender stereotypes. I will treat my daughter as a girl, unless she tells me not to, but I'll happily climb trees with her, I wouldn't tell her to be polite because "girls are polite" (boys should be too!) and I won't encourage or expect her to be upset rather than angry.
4JulianMorrison
BTW, by "assuming girls are upset where they'd assume boys are angry" I am referring to unconscious fact judgements about infants too young to verbalize the problem. (Cite: "pink brain blue brain" by Lise Eliot). Macho emotions are attributed to babies in who appear male and gentle ones to babies who appear female. Since baby sex is almost unmarked, that means going by the colour of the clothes. (And google "baby Storm" for an example of adults panicking and pillorying the parents if the cues that allow them to gender the baby are intentionally witheld.)
4Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Ohh. Oops. Not how I interpreted it. Your original meaning is much less likely to be a true-ish stereotype than my interpretation.
2NancyLebovitz
What's your distinction between upset and angry?
2Athrelon
Apply Bayes to making decisions in real life, in ways that the cool people don't? That idea will never fly on LessWrong!
2TimS
There's not as much reason to pay attention to statistical reasoning when we have insight into causal mechanisms. Particularly when our knowledge of the causal mechanisms suggests that the statistical results are very susceptible to misleading interpretations.
6[anonymous]
Incidentally we have essentially perfect insight into the causal mechanisms of what makes a number prime, and yet this sort of reasoning is spectacularly successful:
[-]wedrifid60

It bothers me how many of these comments pick nits ("plowing isn't especially feminine", "you can't unilaterally declare Crocker's Rules") instead of actually engaging with what has been said.

Those are things that actually are said. If a point is blatantly wrong or the entire usage of "Crocker's Rules" is, in fact, inappropriate then those things are wrong and inappropriate and can be declared as such. If it happened that nobody engaged with the intended point of the article that would perhaps just indicate that people weren't interested (or weren't interested in discussing it here). That is... not the case.

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[-]Nornagest60

We could control for that by looking through the records of past civilizations and trying to get an idea of whether changes to gender or social norms were reliably associated with collapse.

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[-][anonymous]60

Christianity really does have less influence there than in a great many other countries.

Not the point under question.

The part which is less certain is the influence on portrayals of sex, but it doesn't seem crazy to me that the taboos against portraying sex (for various values of sex) which are in play (much less than they used to be) in countries with a heavier Christian influence would be weaker or non-existent there.

Christianity is not the only religion with sexual taboos. I thought this was just a thinko or something, but after reading your elucidation, I'm even more bewildered.

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3Tenoke
I think her point makes sense. Shinto( the main religion in Japan) does have a lot less taboos and is a lot more open towards sex than other religions (including Christianity). It might be the case that there is another factor responsible for the lesser inhibitions towards sex in the Japanese culture which also caused Shinto to be formed the way it is, but nonetheless unless I am missing something NancyLebovitz's point makes sense.
2[anonymous]
Reducing Japanese religious experience to Shinto is almost even more wrong than reducing it to "not really Christian." I'm done. Anyone who cares can read what the IES has to say about the matter.
3DaFranker
But feudal/imperial japanese culture had very different attitudes on sexual matters than almost every religion with sexual taboos. Even the buddhism-branched traditions, religions and cultures didn't have the same views, even though it still resulted in practical terms in "Monks (Priests) should abstain from sex and thoughts of sex". AFAIK throughout most of post-genpei japanese history up until slightly after the beginning of Meiji, it was perfectly acceptable (and sometimes recommended) for a woman who liked a man but could not "be with" (aka have a romantic relationship or sexual interactions) that man for social, status, etc. reasons to instead designate a "replacement" - in rude terms, a whore hired by the woman to have sex with the man as a sign of affection. This is portrayed in a very crude fashion at some point in the popular movie "Shogun", IIRC. However, the whole thing about how this is directly related to them not being a Christian nation somewhat baffles me still. Modern Japan has heavy taboos of all sorts on portrayals of sex (see last year's fiasco about the Tokyo ban on porn, or their stringent laws on censoring of all erotic content), but where sex is accepted, they're apparently much more liberal in which kinds can be represented or even done.
[-][anonymous]60

manja

Manga.

A thing I've heard about Japan is that it was never a Christian country, and therefore doesn't have a background belief that people's imaginations have to be controlled.

How is this even remotely credible?

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2MugaSofer
It isn't.
[-]JulianMorrison60

I strongly recommend against deploying a weapon as an empty threat. Don't pull a gun unless you expect to have both the intent and the willingness to kill. Otherwise you just gave them a weapon and an excuse.

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[-]Bugmaster60

I think the point of the Star Wars anecdote is: Woman do engage in roleplaying but when they do they don't focus on papers-and-dice fighting and instead have a discussion about moral issues.

Is that actually true, though ? This seems to fit the pattern of "men are combative, women are nurturing", which is often denounced as a stereotype; at the very least, there is a lot of debate on whether or not this principle is generally applicable.

I'm not saying that the statement is wrong, necessarily; only that I require more evidence to be convinced.

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4Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
I would read it more as "men like to model situations, women like to model people." This may be a stereotype, but I've noticed it to be anecdotally true. Men, when spending time together socially, tend to talk more about sports and politics than women do; women spend more time talking about other people (i.e. gossip) and analyzing their motivations. Fighting elves is a situation; you don't have to try to understand the elves' motivations and 'drama' in order to fight them.
1Randy_M
"This may be a stereotype, but I've noticed it to be anecdotally true." "but" What do you think sterotypes are? Generally they tend to be statements that are true 30-90% of the time, which should provide plenty of room for confirming annecdotes.
[-]Vaniver60

There was an attempt by someone to change the forum policies (about censorship, that time) by doing something terrible if the policies weren't changed. EY and company said "we don't give in to blackmail," the policies were not changed, and the person possibly carried through on their threat. It's worth bringing up only to discourage future attempts at blackmail.

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2TorqueDrifter
Rather, I meant to say: I expect LW posters to largely agree that it can be correct to select an option which has lower expected utility according to naive calculation so as to prevent such situations from arising in the first place (in that it is correct to have a decision function that selects such options, and that if you don't actually select such options then you don't have that decision function). It seems possibly reasonable to construe an organization having access to high utility but opposing specific human rights issues as creating such a situation (I do not comment on whether or not this is actually the case in our world).
[-]dspeyer60

why someone living on their own wouldn't need those skills?

They probably would. But it's a very different statement.

In fact, shortly before I graduated college my mother said to me (a male) that I should learn to cook because it would make me more independent. She was right.

There is also some difference between learning to cook and clean for yourself and for someone else. With one, you can follow your own taste. With the other, you need to memorize typical taste.

But mostly it's a very different statement.

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[-]AlexanderD60

Some of these anecdotes really illustrate the loss suffered when a group is insufficiently diverse. This one in particular struck me as a demonstration of the high value of a range of perspectives:

On this afternoon, our characters are venturing into the countryside and come across two emaciated farmers who tell us their fields are unplowed because dark elves from the forest keep attacking them. “They're going to starve if they don't get a crop in the ground,” I declare. “We've got to plow at least one field.” The boys go along with this plan. ...

“It's r

... (read more)
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[-]JoshuaZ350

This story struck me more as an indication of a really bad DM than anything gender related. If I were running a campaign where players stopped to try to actually help plow, I'd be really happy with them. Of course, in my own campaign world, I've also set up a complicated tea culture with some of the high noble families trying to out-do each other by finding expensive teas from exotic locales to show off. So I may not be very representative.

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[-]CronoDAS370

(In which I solve the wrong problem)

"Obviously", you have the dark elves attack the farm while the adventurers are trying to help get the field plowed. ;)

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9lavalamp
"Did I say rusty? I meant the elves have stolen the plow blade, and the spare plow blade, and everything that could be used as a makeshift plow blade!"
[-]Vaniver150

This story struck me more as an indication of a really bad DM than anything gender related. If I were running a campaign where players stopped to try to actually help plow, I'd be really happy with them.

Yes and no. It could also be a sign of a broken group- If two of the people love killing dark elves and hate farming, and two of the people love farming and like killing dark elves, the group should be killing dark elves, or there should be two groups, one which farms, while the other one kills dark elves.

I also didn't get the gender-related feeling; one of my wizards got called "Angseth from Accounting" because he kept the party records, treasury, and was constantly trying to buy / found businesses and do other economic things, rather than just murdering for fun and profit.

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[-]Emile100

Yeah, a creative DM might treat this as an opportunity for a campaign in which the players are more involved, as opposed to a railroaded dungeon crawl. But that demands a good deal of preparation or improvisation skills.

In that situation I'd probably have the farmers tell the players that the harvest is doomed because the Harvest Goddess is displeased with the Dark Elves' Unholy Rituals, and will not bless the land - a situations the players can solve by either kicking Dark Elf ass as originally planned, or by having the group's Cleric bless the lands, or by doing something to please the Harvest Goddess (organize a great feast, bake a legendary apple pie, find the rare Papilla Gourd that grows deep in the forest), or even having the farmers convert to the Dark Elves' Nature Goddess who will bless the crops (for a small price).

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[-]gwern200

Plow one of their fields, and you might feed some of them for some time (if they can get some more farming done in between attacks). Kill their dark elves, and they can feed themselves just fine.

I'd call that reasoning the epitome of shortsightedness; but the DM should've been more flexible and let you plow their field and later contrive a way for your party to learn that the crop failed anyway and everyone was killed or enslaved or starved to death.

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9AlexanderD
The plan was to sow one field and then kill the dark elves, as far as I can tell. I agree that it would not have been a good idea to just plow their field, since obviously that was what had already not been working, but it also seems to me like a very perceptive insight to realize that even if the elves were killed, the already-emaciated farmers might still die without help on the farm. It's also an insight that appears, within the story, to have derived from the presence of an alternative viewpoint.
[-]gwern150

Why would plowing one field make a difference to their survival or death? Especially when plowing one field is taking up time to the detriment of going after the dark elves. Indeed, if they cared about the farmers, wouldn't a cash transfer make infinitely more sense? No, this looks like the usual signaling about caring: "but they care so much, they even went and plowed a field to help them out!" (As opposed to working on the real problem, or giving them a gold coin which is probably worth several fields of food given the medieval setting and also doesn't have the minor problem of it likely failing anyway since it's going to be plowed by complete amateurs with broken equipment at the wrong time...)

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[-]AlexanderD220

I can't testify as to the actual value of the planting or whether or not this was necessarily the best plan. There are probably many more plans that would be better, including giving them a gold coin. Or perhaps the farmers in the magical world of dark elves who make armed sorties against impoverished serfs could have been better served by a political upheaval and the installation of democracy. Or maybe because the farmers plant only the magical dubbleboo bean, they would have been able to reap a harvest only if they planted before the next evening's full moon.

There are all kinds of factors or problems that might have complicated the additional idea of plowing the field, and we shouldn't forget that this is a bunch of teenagers, so it's probably not whether this idea was really the optimal emaciated-farmer-assistance program. But instead of exploring these and determining what was the best option, the entire avenue of helping the farmers in a domestic sense was blocked off. It was a set of ideas that was unknown and unwelcome, even though it might actually have been interesting to solve that problem, as well.

Yes, these eleventh-graders might not have been practicing an ideal f... (read more)

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6JoshuaZ
This does seem to start falling pretty heavily into something very close to the MST3K mantra with the note that this was a highschool game. And given my above suggestion, I'm going to refrain from ranting about how little sense D&D economics make other than to note that adventuring parties seem to be one of the strongest argument in favor of fiat currency ever.
3gwern
If someone wants to say 'this is a great insight which demonstrates the value of diverse viewpoints!', it'd better be a great insight, and not one that fails multiple ways.
3JoshuaZ
Well, how much would killing the dark elves have helped either? In the context we have two proposed solutions, neither of which really actually does much. One of the solutions is arguably obvious to the traditional male gamer, and the other (which makes about as much or as little sense) does seem to show some degree of diverse viewpoint arguably (although as I commented above, I don't think this one is really gendered related as much as it is to bad DMing).
8gwern
It is specified the dark elves are the entire problem. The crops are now not being planted or tended because the dark elves are raiding and there weren't raids before. I uh can't see how killing them would not help.
[-]JoshuaZ140

If the farmers already are emaciated they aren't going to be able to survive that long even if they do plow and plant (it takes a long time). Moreover, plowing takes a lot of effort. The most likely result if they do kill the dark elves in a marginally realistic situation is that the farmers will still starve. The whole situation is poorly thought out (and becomes even more poorly thought out as the DM claims that the farmers don't even have functioning farm equipment and thus that the dark elves aren't the only problem).

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3[anonymous]
It seems obvious to me that even if many had died in the famine, not all would have. Once the famine was over there still wouldn't be any dark elves causing them problems. Also a good way to help them is to share some of the stuff you looted from the dark elves.
3thomblake
And delicious dark elves.
1Randy_M
Ironically as far as signaling goes, unless the DM is at least fair-to-middlin', the time spend plowing is a rather cost-less signal, since it can be handwaved away, unlike real life.
5MugaSofer
This was clearly not a very good DM.
[-]Scott Alexander170

All too often, people focus on how gender discrimination is unfair to those who are excluded or minimized, but it's also a loss to the group and its goals as a whole.

I don't see how this story has anything to do with gender discrimination, unless it's trying to reinforce some stereotype of "Women can come up with peaceful solutions to problems, but men always resort to violence immediately."

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[-]MileyCyrus110

It's not just a stereotype, it's the (exaggerated) truth. For example, in polls about whether citizens approve of whatever war is happening that decade, men are generally more in favor of the war than women.

EDIT: Changed "not a stereotype" to "not just a stereotype".

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[-]Scott Alexander360

I don't think "it's the exaggerated truth" is necessarily an excuse to perpetuate stereotypes.

For example, suppose the writer was a white person who played games with a black dungeon master, who had himself previously played mostly with other black people. One game, the writer tries to solve a problem through negotiation when the DM had planned things so that you were supposed to shoot the bad guys. The writer phrases this not as "The DM had failed to plan for this contingency" but instead as "This is why it's hard to be a white person trying to hang out around black people; they just try to solve every problem by shooting at it and don't accept that we white people might think differently than that."

When someone notices this is perpetuating a stereotype, I don't think it would remove the problem to say "No, seriously, black people are involved in a disproportionate number of shootings", even if this were true. The point isn't that every group is demographically exactly the same, it's that we are trying to avoid creating a climate where we immediately and unreflectingly associate certain groups with the worst characteristics they contingently... (read more)

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7Viliam_Bur
I assume that just like the DM in the story, those polls also don't allow people to choose a "let's plow their fields" option. Although in some situations it could actually be a very good choice.
9AlexanderD
The socialization of children into gender roles of conciliation and confrontation begins very early, as can be seen in a study by Clearfield and Nelson. Accordingly, it is not surprising (and jibes with our common sense) to note that men and women tend to respond to challenges in different ways. I think it's probably too broad to say that men "always" resort to violence "immediately," which seems like a deliberately weak phrasing. Rather, I'd say that men and women find different solutions, because of their different perspectives.
4Scott Alexander
Yes, I agree that contingently there is statistically more aggression in men. I don't think that's the point; see my response to Miley.
4JoachimSchipper
From AlexanderD's comment: "The point, though, is that the narrowness of focus in the adventure precluded exploration of a large set of options." If playing D&D with a bunch of girls consistently leads to solutions being proposed that do not fit the traditional D&D mold, that can teach us something about how well that mold fits a bunch of girls. More generally, the author is a pretty smart woman who thought this was a good example - you'd do well to take a second look.
[-][anonymous]50

Ultimately, these [and other] stereotypes wind up being self-fulfilling prophecies. If one is chastized for being a nerd despite not being one, one figures "If I'm gonna be made fun of for being a nerd either way, I might as well actually be one". If one were to group gender differences into [unavoidable] biological differences and [avoidable] behavioral differences, I doubt either would be responsible for causing the other. The only conclusion I can see is that behavioral differences were only caused by expectations of behavioral differences. If we stop expecting to see differences, in time we actually won't. Even a RNG will seem to exhibit patterns to one who looks with the expectation of seeing patterns.

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[-]wedrifid50

Calling these sorts of incidents 'oppression' trivializes

Look more closely at the context, in particular the description of the experienced internal feeling and the resulting self-suppression of identity. Regarding triviality I refer you to the word "albeit" which prefaces a more than adequate acknowledgement of scope. You may further observe that I explicitly refrained from judging whether the treatment of Will was appropriate or not, much less to what degree it was inappropriate---because getting caught up with how "bad" the people... (read more)

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[-]Nick_Tarleton50

The three interpretations I mean are:

  • (1) People's behavior is accurately predicted by modeling them as status-maximizing agents.
  • (2) People's subjective experience of well-being is accurately predicted by modeling it as proportional to status.
  • (3) A person is well-off, in the sense that an altruist should care about, in proportion to their status.

Is that clearer?

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[-]Nick_Tarleton50

If we measure quality of life solely in terms of status

Is there a reason we might want to do this? It feels like your comments in this thread unjustifiably privilege this model.

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4Bugmaster
Again, as far as I understand, Konkvistador believes that humans are driven primarily by their desire to achieve a higher status, and that this is in fact one of our terminal goals. If we assume that this is true, then I believe my comments are correct. Is that actually true, though ? Are humans driven primarily by their desire to achieve a higher status (in addition to the desires directly related to physical survival, of course) ? I don't know, but maybe Konkvistador has some evidence for the proposition -- assuming, of course, that I'm not misinterpreting his viewpoint.
[-]Nick_Tarleton100

Konkvistador believes that humans are driven primarily by their desire to achieve a higher status, and that this is in fact one of our terminal goals.

This needs to be considered separately as (1) a descriptive statement about actions (2) a descriptive statement about subjective experience (3) a normative statement about the utilitarian good. It seems much more accurate as (1) than (2) or (3), and I think Konkvistador means it as (1); meanwhile, statements about "quality of life" could mean (2) or (3) but not (1).

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[-]TorqueDrifter50

This claim does not appear in the post you responded to. There is in fact no gendered language except with reference to a previously-established example (and a brief additional example in which the genders of the interlocutors are not stated).

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[-]ialdabaoth50

Very true. So then the question becomes, given that:

  • bare facts can be semantically poisoned
  • coalitions can be semantically poisoned
  • error-correcting processes can be semantically poisoned

is there, in fact, any way to prevent this process from occuring? or do we just have to cast our lots and hope for the best?

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[-]ialdabaoth50

Sure we do. Have you ever heard of "Red Asphalt"? It was an entire series of rather disgusting videos produced in the 80's to show teenagers who were about to get their drivers' licenses. It didn't just talk about the incentive of life-threatening injuries; it exploited them.

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[-]TorqueDrifter50

Not a very sturdy assumption. That's true in a minority of cases.

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[-]gwern50

As far as I know, the conventions have been racking up record growth throughout the 2000s and 2010s, so unless you've run the numbers you can't really say anything about the proportion - since everything has been increasing so much.

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[-]TorqueDrifter50

Yep. They don't see themselves as sexist, but they are. That makes it more difficult to effect change.

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3MugaSofer
... I have to admit, I was implicitly defining "sexist" as someone who holds sexist beliefs, not someone who is unconsciously biased. Hell, most people in our society are subconsciously biased against black people, but since we know this to be a bias we will try to work against this if we realize it.
[-]undermind50

That's too simplistic IMO... I think it's more a desire to avoid "politicizing education", and people not making sufficiently convincing arguments in favour of its inclusion, rather than just terrible people having power.

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7JulianMorrison
You hear "sexists" and think terrible people, I think ordinary people. Giving a higher salary offer to Mike Smith and judging his work better than Mary Smith. Picking "someone like us" for promotion the board, so you end up with single digit female representation at CEO level. Having to do orchestra auditions behind a screen, or you won't hire any women. Catcalling or saying "smile luv" on the street, and then calling her a bitch when she won't respond. Taking "no" as "keep asking". Bothering her in Starbucks when she's trying to read. Having a dress code that requires a shower and a suit from guys, but an hour's makeup and high heels from women. Interrupting her and ignoring her in meetings. Treating women as a "special interest group". Getting angry about "political correctness" and "man hating feminists" when somebody tries to start a women's studies class. Sexism saturates this culture. It feels normal. It's accepted by men and laughed off by women who don't want to be the party pooper. If you are not female and have not been following feminism, your inferential distance may be large indeed.
3undermind
True. Sexism is frickin pervasive, and that is the underlying problem. Though it's only pointless quibbling at this point, I still think your previous comment was too simplistic - if nothing else, it doesn't have any of the depth of this, and, though it is perfectly consistent with the view "most people, even good people, have sexist tendencies due to our culture", it appears to be coming from a less well-developed view, which is why it has been downvoted. This again may be a question of inferential distance, which thus demonstrates itself to be a very useful concept.
4JulianMorrison
I think it's not. Basically, I think what I called "racists and sexists" are people of whom only a minority foams on /r/mensrights and A Voice For Men, or listens to right wing talk radio, or believes in "male headship under God", or attends the local Klan. The majority are people who think they are normal, whose biased ideas don't even show unless provoked by a situation where their privileges are under threat (AKA "political correctness gone mad"). Feminism that isn't about shopping provokes them. Anti-racism that is neither anodyne nor cap-in-hand provokes them. And they react, often in ways that look like incidental decisions, to exclude the threat. Such as, here, by marginalizing equality for half the species into an academic backwater.
2A1987dM
Just because something is ordinary doesn't mean it's not terrible. :-)
[-]MrMind50

These anecdotes are interesting as specific instances of discrimination applied to vex relative minorities, but I don't find them tipically far on the inferential distance. Being a shy and obese know-it-all during the formative years I guess helped at closing the gap on any possible kind of discriminations (humorously speaking: if you think being a geek girl is hard, remember that geek boys paved the way ;)). With this I hope that more females post their own experiences and more men compare those experiences with their own: my prediction is that any boy who has suffered mild-to-severe discrimination for any other reason wouldn't find any of this particularly surprising.

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9NancyLebovitz
I agree that these aren't especially difficult examples. However, I think these were chosen to be easier to take than some material which will come along later.
[-]TimS40

He does have influence, but I don't read that as saying things are as bad as they were in the 1950s. He's pointing out that a lot of the power structure of the Confederacy is still around, to the point that imagining if the Confederates had won is less different from now than many folks ignorant of history believe.

Ta-Nehisi has written very pointedly about DT's victory, but even then I don't read him as saying things are the same as 50 years ago. Factually, I don't see how anyone could claim that. Leading protest in 1950-1960s was literally life threatenin... (read more)

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[-]MugaSofer40

Do you think Alicorn's polyhacking would be a better example? I don't really know that many good examples of neurohacking.

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3NancyLebovitz
I think so, but it's been a while since I've read it. Her work on being happier would definitely qualify. I've seen claims that cognitive psychology has the effect of calming the over-excitable part of the brain in people with OCD.
[-]Nornagest40

I don't see how "people unconsciously act as agents of large-scale social groups" contradicts "the human mind can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning". To me it seems that one implies the other.

It's less about social conditioning and more about the extent to which people pursue group interests regardless of social conditioning. To people subscribing to Marxist ideas of class, behaviors which we might perceive as individualistic ambition in fact serve partly -- even primarily -- to further the interests of the social cla... (read more)

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[-]NancyLebovitz40

I think it's one thing to let a child do both gender stereotypical and non-gender-stereotypical activities that they want, and quite another to try to keep them from doing gender-stereotypical activities.

As I recall, pink shirts for men were a fad in the US in the 60s and/or 70s, but googling doesn't turn up quite what I remember-- business-style shirts in fairly light pink.

More than I knew about pink shirts for men.

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1Randy_M
I agree. (worthless comment, but I decided against saying more and don't see how to delete).
[-]TimS40

Everyone thinks Nietzsche is an asshole, but I think he's a badly misinterpreted sensitive soul. The idea of an agent entitled to make promises because the agent could guarantee to follow through appeals to me a great deal.

That's probably a lot closer to Buddha than wirehead.

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[-]wedrifid40

Why?

You tell me. It's not my confusion.

From what I infer, people who think deontologically already seem to reason "The most effective decision to make as evaluated by UDT is Cooperate in this situation in which CDT picks Defect. This feels all moral to me. UDT must be on my side. I claim UDT is deontological because we agree regarding this particular issue." This leads to people saying "Using UDT/TDT reasoning..." in places where UDT doesn't reason in any such way.

UDT is "deontological" if and only if that deontological sy... (read more)

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1Eugine_Nier
Rather what distinction are you drawing between UDT/TDT-like decision theories and Kant's CI?
[-]wedrifid40

My point is that once you add UDT to consequentialism it becomes very similar to deontology.

UDT doesn't need to be added to consequentialism, or the reverse. UDT is already based on consequentialist assumptions and any reasonably advanced way of thinking about consequences will result in a decision theory along those lines.

It is only people's muddled intuitions about UDT and similar reflexive decision theories that makes it seem to them that they are remotely deontological. Particularly those inclined to use UDT as an "excuse" to cooperate whe... (read more)

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[-]ialdabaoth40

Right. And at the moment, I'm not sure if that's even ideal. Here's something like my thinking:

In order to advance social justice (which I take as the most likely step towards maximizing global utility), we need to maximize both our compassion (aka ability to desire globally eudaimonic consequences) and our rationality (aka ability to predict and control consequences). This should be pretty straightforward to intuit; by this (admittedly simplistic) model,

Global Outcome Utility = Compassion x Rationality.

The thing is, once Rationality raises above Compassio... (read more)

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2Nornagest
That seems true -- if you've got the right path to maximizing global utility. Making this call requires a certain baseline level of rationality, which we may or may not possess and which we're very much prone to overestimating. The consequences of not making the right call, or even of setting the bar too low whether or not you happen to pick the right option yourself, are dire: either stalemate due to conflicting goals, or a doomed fight against a culturally more powerful faction, or (and possibly worse) progress in the wrong direction that we never quite recognize as counterproductive, lacking the tools to do so. In any case eudaemonic improvement, if it comes, is only going to happen through random walk. Greedy strategies tend to be fragile.
[-]ialdabaoth40

Do you think I'm overly optimistic in my estimation?

I very, very much do. Want to help devise a sociology experiment to find out?

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3TimS
After collecting additional data (just one date point, but I trust my wife), I'm forced to concede that I was wildly overestimating the percentage of Americans who would disapprove. My new estimate is well into "Aliens are real" / "Elvis is alive" territory. Sigh.
4ialdabaoth
I'd still feel better if there were formal studies we could both point to, to verify or refute our assumption (and hopefully to shed some light on why it happens). My instinct is that it has to do with favor for authoritarian parenting and similar primate dominance hierarchies, but I'd need to do way more research to be able to speak with any kind of confidence on the matter.
[-]ialdabaoth40

Effective disincentives can have secondary consequences that make them Bad Things overall, even if they have a small positive net utility in specific contexts.

Example: Tribal law in Afghanistan might actually have a {real} deterrent effect on thievery, but it comes with a world of heinous secondary consequences, so altogether it is a Bad Thing.

Prison rape is presumably similar. Remember, a decision's net utility is equal to its TOTAL future utility gains and losses.

Suppose you have a bunch of different utility equations, each of which contributes to the t... (read more)

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[-]gwern40

Eh, databases. Convention records are much more convincing.

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[-]Viliam_Bur40

One part of the result will be someone criticizing you, either for speaking up, or for not speaking up. You already know this.

Now what about the other parts? Are there any other reasons to either speak up or not speak up, besides avoiding someone's critique?

(Possibly related.)

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7Desrtopa
It's not the criticism I care about so much as the feelings that incite it. I don't expect it to affect the catcaller's behavior much, because the rate of negative reinforcement relative to the frequency with which they engage in the behavior is so low (not counting that which they receive from the women they do it to, which obviously hasn't stopped them so far.) I think that explaining to them why the behavior is rude and hurtful is less likely to make them reevaluate their actions than it is to make them think "Some dick got all up on my case today." If it doesn't make the woman feel less like all the men in the world are aligned against her, and just reinforces that feeling, then I wouldn't want to bother.
3zslastman
When I was in high school there was a guy who was in the habit of catcalling who moved in to our school. It wasn't typical behavior in our peer group. When he called at a women from the car, or similar, people would react with laughter and a derisive "what the fuck are you doing Louis?". He stopped quickly enough. You might not be able to implement that if you are in the minority, but I could imagine it working.
[-]NancyLebovitz40

'Ownership' might be putting it too strongly, but it's definitely a claim on the other person's attention for something which is of no conceivable value to the person who's attention is being claimed.

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[-]NancyLebovitz40

I read a long discussion of bullying by girls in school, and it looked as though the version committed by girls was usually inviting another girl to a party or somesuch-- but the offer was a setup for humiliation.

Possibly other (and possibly fictional) sources: girl bullies telling their victim that a boy liked her and pushing her to ask him out.

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3MugaSofer
I have had the exact same thing happen to me, but gender-reversed. I may be unusual in this respect.
[-]MugaSofer40

strawmanning (sigh sexist language)

I think it comes from the fact that a genderless figurine looks male to our eyes - you can see it doesn't have breasts, and any other pieces of anatomy it's missing are either routinely stylized away or covered up.

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3A1987dM
Also, waist-to-hip ratio -- it would be harder to make a scarecrow with wider hips than the waist.
[-]MugaSofer40

Once again, the fact that clothing can influence whether a rapist will choose you is not the same as the claim that this somehow shifts the blame to you if he does choose you. As it were.

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[-]JulianMorrison40

  1. They might be full blown trans, whether the kind that's so intense it forces people to transition despite all the grief they get, or the kinds that are less intense or more messy (and probably loads more common, like bisexual is more common than gay).

  2. They might want to pick and mix their gender presentation or have a non-traditional way of expressing their identity. Like being a "tomboy" or a boy who likes dresses.

  3. They will learn to behave in a non-assuming, non-policing way themselves.

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2MugaSofer
1. How does treating a child as genderless help if they prove to be transexual? 2. Surely this is covered by "not enforcing stereotypes"? 3. I don't follow.
[-]chaosmosis40

The misogyny mostly comes from the fact that this situation happens much more often to girls than to boys

I don't know why you think that is true, I guess. Experience, probably, but in my experience I've never seen either happen.

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[-]DaFranker40

I dislike this emphasis on gender identity. I haven't seen enough non-anecdotal evidence of this to be >0.8 confident, but my model predicts that this strategy wouldn't achieve all that much, and has much more risk of being damaging (due to biases and two-steps-removed complications) than a strategy of behaving as non-sexist as possible (and 'teaching' this to the child, but that is most effective by example during childhood AFAIK).

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[-]William_Quixote40

My mother, who is retirement age has been writing short memoirs and recollections. Having read some of those, a lot of these seem disappointingly familiar. Things have obviously changed a lot in the last 60 years, but less than one might have hoped.

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[-]A1987dM40

Do you think that classifying statements on such topics as "offensive" is the appropriate conclusion?

I was about to ask you to taboo “offensive”, but you say...

I do not, but perhaps we are operating under different notions of "offensive".

Well, “X is offensive” is not something I'd normally say -- I'd specify who is offended (e.g. “I'm offended by X”, or “X might offend [class of people]”), even though sometimes “[class of people]” is as generic as “someone”.

fixing the listener's deficiencies (intelligence, sanity, mental devel

... (read more)
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[-]katydee40

This is one of the worst posts that I've ever seen on LW. Though I agree completely that gwern's comments are inappropriate and unacceptable, they're off-the-cuff remarks in a private setting not intended for the record, and he shouldn't be pilloried for them.

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[-]MugaSofer30

Was the next post in this sequence ever actually submitted?

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[-]OrphanWilde30

Consider the number of people on this forum looking for ways to overcome personality defects, and repeatedly failing.

Not to say that abused people owe it to their abusers; they may or may not owe it to themselves, however. The number of abused people who go out of one abusive relationship directly into another suggests they need coaching/counseling just as much, and perhaps examining where they are is a good place to start in getting to where they need to be.

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8TimS
I agree that providing support for abuser self-improvement is likely to reduce the frequency of abuse - and thus a very worthwhile policy. Why should abuse victims be responsible for providing the support themselves? For example, if anger management course are effective, is there reason to think they are more effective if taught by an abuse victim? Further, expecting good results from a victim attempting to educate his own abuser seems particularly unlikely to work - because of all the other social dynamics and history at play. Even if your father was the best therapist in the country, would you feel comfortable doing talk therapy with him?
1OrphanWilde
(Alternatively, mandatory counseling for both abusers and abuse victims. As odd as it seems, I think this would be harder to push on a societal level, however.)
[-]BrassLion30

I'm male. The anecdoes above are only not shocking to me because I've read a bunch of geek feminism / feminism by geeks before.

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[-]CCC30

Thank you, that was exactly the sort of citation I was asking for.

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[-]A1987dM30

I'd say “It's complicated.” Sometimes making someone less biased will make them more of a asshole.

BTW, I'm curious how Cognitive Reflection Test scores correlate with Big Five personality traits. I'd guess cbfvgvir pbeeryngvba jvgu Bcraarff naq Pbafpvragvbhfarff naq artngvir pbeeryngvba jvgu Arhebgvpvfz, ohg V unir ab vqrn nobhg Rkgebirefvba naq Nterrnoyrarff.

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[-][anonymous]30

... Spells are also categorically Good or Evil?

If said cleric casts that Evil spell, but does it unknowingly (e.g. mind control, or other more convoluted scenarios, perhaps involving magical sensory deprivation), are they still considered to have done an Evil act?

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2thomblake
Yes, though it's usually not much of an Evil act. More to the point, in most versions, clerics are prohibited from using opposed-alignment spells, which nicely insulates them from accidental alignment shifts due to spellcasting. A good wizard, on the other hand, can actually cast protection from good (an evil spell) every day until he feels like committing horrible atrocities.
[-]thomblake30

Nevertheless, if you know that the target is Evil, then you know that they will actively try to perform Evil acts - which, if you're Lawful Good, should be against the law. If your resident legal system is letting off Evil goblins, then it is broken, if not actively evil itself.

Still not necessarily true. Take Jim the reforming criminal. Jim already served his time, so should not be arrested just for having committed evil acts. And since he still detects as evil, he can still feel the evil impulses tearing at his soul at every turn. But he fights th... (read more)

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[-]TimS30

My core assertion is that discussion of skirt length increases getting-away-with-it-even-if-caught risk. There's factual dispute about its effect on environmental risk.

I think the best predictor of rape (especially acquaintance rape) is opportunity. Generally, it isn't an accident when a guy ends up alone with a very drunk girl at a party. By contrast, pure sexiness is orders of magnitude less likely to increase rape risk.

Therefore, focusing on skirt-length in discussion of rape risk doesn't do much good in reducing rape risk. If pure sexiness is low e... (read more)

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3MugaSofer
And my core assertion is that refusing to take into account skirt length, as you put it, is irrational and not the winning thing to do, which seems like a bad thing when losing results in, y'know, rape. Not that rapists are somehow innocent because their victim failed to discourage them. Their choices are their own, but so are ours; the universe doesn't care that they broke the rules, you still lose.
[-]MugaSofer30

Correspondence with reality is a subgoal of many other goals, but it is not the only purpose neurohacking can serve. The claustrophobe knows they are perfectly safe in small spaces; they still want to leave them.

EDIT: A better example, courtesy of NancyLebovitz.

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[-]TimS30

Isn't the way to properly judge a civilization exactly what is under dispute in this discussion?

Measured by time, the Roman Republic lasted longer than the modern version of the United States government - dating from ~1865 or ~1936 depending on how one wants to count.

Measured by per-capita wealth, modern day Sweden might do better than the US in the 1950s.

I'm not opposed to measuring according to moral correctness, but first we need to agree on what actually is morally correct.

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2NancyLebovitz
The US government (and many others) have lasted as long as they're had a chance to last, so it seems unfair to judge by duration.
[-]TimS30

how much they desire [to violate gender norms] is how they were brought up.

This argument would have more force if you had specific examples of different things parents do that affect the existence of the desire to violate gender norms.

For example, J. Edgar Hoover was born in 1895 (and was a cross-dresser). There's no plausible argument that second-wave feminism (circa 1960s) or third-wave feminism (circa 1990s) had any effect on his upbringing.

If society could affect the frequency of the desire, reducing the frequency might be a viable solution. B... (read more)

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3Eugine_Nier
The cross-dressing think was probably a black legend. In any case a single anecdote isn't strong evidence and it's pretty clear that the amount of cross dressing and other gay/trans phenomena has gone up since the 1960s and the 1990s.
[-]Emile30

In this community? You don't need a lot of evidence that something "may not exist", if it hasn't been observed so far. What's your evidence that Jews plotting the downfall of Western Civilization may not exist?

If you're talking about the world and general then yeah, they exist, sure.

If you're talking about imaginary Oog and Argh-land, then I'm not sure what kind of evidence you're expecting.

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7TimS
So, X% of the world is sexists willing to assert quasi-reasonable arguments that are either fully general counter-arguments or not-true-rejection behavior. And we seem to agree that X > 30. The LW community is drawn from that world. I'm not aware of anything in the selection process that selects against the attitudes described. Even if there is some selection pressure, the assertion that literally no one with the problematic attitudes makes in through that process is an extraordinary claim. Consider that LW strongly selects for people who want to think about the problems inherent in hard-takeoff AGI. Yet there is a substantial component in this community that is skeptical that hard-takeoff AGI is possible. From an object level point of view, I think that some of the motivation for discussing whether short skirts increase stranger rape risk is not-true-rejection behavior to avoid discussing acquaintance rape - a far more frequent kind of rape that requires very different responses.
3wedrifid
Or it requires the same response but it is much harder and less likely for people as individuals and as a community to actually perform in practice. That response obviously being "lock the @#%@ up then when the term expires take whatever rehabiliation and recurrence prevention measures research finds to be most effective with criminals for ensuring the safety of others."
1Nornagest
I'm not certain how different the responses actually are in this particular context. We might expect effective risk-minimization behavior to look different overall, but if there's anything to the theory that victims' social presentation styles are a risk factor for rape in general, I'd expect them to be a risk factor for acquaintance rapes unless we have some particularly good reason to think that rapists of strangers have unique psychology in this respect. Indeed, the only empirical data I remember being linked in this thread found its strongest links for date and spousal rape, though the association looks to be on the weak side either way.
3NancyLebovitz
The study looked as though it was pretty hypothetical. There's one I can't find at the moment which was based on interviewing rapists, and it concluded that rapists select for vulnerability (a drunk woman at a bar who's by herself) rather than by clothing.
[-]cata30

I certainly had much less empathy a few years ago, prior to paying attention to these kind of posts. I wasn't aware how common the former kind of experience was, and I didn't notice (and still don't) a lot of the latter kind.

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[-]gwern30

One indicator here is their erotic manga specifically, which have been featuring terrifyingly high amounts of exactly what's said in the quote in the past couple years, and in growing proportion.

There are numbers for this?

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[-]JulianMorrison30

A not-loaded gun is still a weapon, it's just one that isn't useful to somebody lacking in upper-body strength. And they might have loaded guns, and then you're in a western standoff (cue whistling, tumbleweed) and you've brought an awkward metal club to a gunfight. Lets not do that either.

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[-]NancyLebovitz30

It's not that sexual harassment of men by women never gets depicted, it's that it isn't seen as a problem.

Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" is what would now be seen as a textbook case of sexual harassment, but I had to do some searches to eventually find a critic (a contemporary woman, probably not by coincidence) who saw it that way. Instead, I was running into other interpretations... was it supposed to be funny? Was Adonis' refusal of Venus an example of virtuous chastity?

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5DaFranker
One possible cause of this: Just as society (the "patriarchal" one, a feminist might say) brainwashes girls and women into thinking sex should only be done out of love for their partner, sexual things are services to men, and too many other related things to list here, men also get programmed by social expectations, the most relevant here probably being: All men enjoy sex (at least that "given" or "obtained" from women) in any form, and always do, and are always ready and willing and desiring of it. Thus, no man can possibly logically ever be sexually harassed or raped by a woman, because all men will always in all circumstances be willing unless there's a complication factor directly attached (e.g. life threatening situations). And even when there's a complication attached, it isn't "rape" or "sexual harassment" of any sort, it's dereliction of duty or willful distraction endangering others or some other thing directly about increasing the risk or causing whatever complication factor was attached. The above is the most common answer I've seen; "Men can't be raped because men always want sex." Arguably, the only form seen as a "problem" (and a very insignificant one, at that) is prison inmates bending over to pick up the soap and getting a surprise present. Just the imagery and terminology used should be representative of how little people take this seriously as a "problem" - it's usually only seen as an anecdotal deterrent against doing less-morally-damaging crimes that might still get you in jail (e.g. bank cracking or money laundering).
2A1987dM
The way this is usually handled is asking the men stating that to imagine a very ugly/elderly/morbidly obese woman stripping them using force.
9DaFranker
Out of six women with whom I tried this, all six responded by the social equivalent of laughing in my face. It just seems too ridiculously absurd: If a man doesn't want sex, he won't be turned on, if he's not turned on, he won't be erect, if he's not erect, no sex can ensue. In all cases, the man is (apparently) turned on and erect, therefore willing, therefore no rape. So they assume the explanation is that some men have weird preferences and enjoy sex with ugly/elderly/morbidly obese women, which is true on its own but completely irrelevant and completely ADBOC-stuff, and that this man was one of them and is just seeking to abuse society or the legal system to get free money or attention (or both).
9MugaSofer
That's ... not how arousal works. At all. Did you tell them this?
[-]DaFranker100

I tried. And then something happened where I realized I had to explain stuff about arousal. And then I had to explain some biology. And then some psychology. And then they went back and destroyed 3/4 of all of that based on something a priest once told their father, sixty years ago. I gave up that approach and tried telling them "You're wrong, read this on why arousal doesn't work that way" instead. Predictably, they didn't read it.

There's so much inferential distance to cross in most cases that I think this is a reasonably serious social problem.

Edit: Also, one of them had already read quite a bit of PUA material "for fun". Which kind of explicitly includes: "Arousal is separate from wanting sex." Then again, PUA is specific towards men seducing women, and I shouldn't expect the average person to infer that this also happens to be a humanwide universal.

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8shokwave
I have found better luck by telling them to imagine the woman has toys.
[-]DaFranker30

As Emile said, I was attempting to stress the point that people do confuse these, but it does not follow logically by any means (and isn't even remotely implied by any reasonable moral theory I've ever read about other than "Obey The Bible" (If you accept that moral theory as reasonable)).

The second paragraph compares my distinction with "what this confusion would look like if it were about theft"; a reductio ad absurdum attempt of the conflation of risk-factors with moral deservingness.

Edit: On that note, I apologize if my use of the ";" punctuation is nonstandard. I'll try to be more careful in my use of it in the future.

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4MugaSofer
... oops. Guess I misread that.
[-]evand30

I find "source please" only somewhat dismissive, but I would find it similarly so if the claim was a more direct, less empirical one.

I read "source please" as a statement that your interpretive claim is too strong to be supported by the quantity of interpretation you have provided. There is no reason your source could not be an essay instead of a pile of data and statistics. Hopefully such an essay would make use of at least some quantity of data.

Non-obvious interpretations need justification for all the same reasons that non-obvious di... (read more)

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[-]Emile30

Is he actually confusing those? It seems to me that he's taking pains to stress the difference!

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2MugaSofer
... oops.
[-]MugaSofer30

Then you are perpetuating cissexism.

... how so?

there is no brain scan for trans

The fact that we cannot currently diagnose gender dysphoria [EDIT: in a living subject] with a brain scan does not change the fact that it is caused by a neurological disorder, and as such is biological, not a choice.

if you experience yourself as trans and the scan says "nope" it's the scan that's wrong. The individual is the sole authority and the diagnosis is by telling a shrink what you experience.

Are you saying that cisgendered people should be eligible ... (read more)

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4JulianMorrison
I am saying that a trans person can only be diagnosed by saying "I experience myself as [fill in the blank]" because that unspoken, personal experience is what trans is. Not the brain stuff. That may be what trans is caused by. It's like having a sore toe, that can be caused by a dropped hammer or kicking the door, but the essence of sore toeness can't be determined by testing for hammers and a negative test for a dropped hammer would not disprove it, the essence of sore toeness is the ouch.
4MugaSofer
I'm pretty sure that the ouch is merely evidence that someone is experiencing pain. We're perilously close to arguing definitions here, though. If someone developed such a scan and there were a lot of trans people coming up as cis that would be warning sign, but it is not impossible (merely unlikely) that there are "trans" people who have more in common with cis people than "real" trans people. EDIT: it may help to consider autism here. FURTHER EDIT: dammit, stupid karma toll cutting off my discussions.
4Bugmaster
If someone developed such a scan, and it labeled a bunch of trans-identified people as cis, then IMO that would be good evidence for the proposition that the scanner is buggy.
[-]MugaSofer30

That is, no-one here is arguing for that position. I am well aware that there are people out there who hold all sorts of unjustifiable beliefs, but conflating then with my reasonable claims is logically rude.

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[-]undermind30

Hmm. My attempt at answering this: The "incidental decisions" is about such actions as choosing male candidates over female candidates with identical qualifications, ignoring women`s contributions at meetings and then agreeing strongly when a man later says the exact same thing, and so on. As for "excluding the threat", maybe it refers to perceptions of women as being less skilled, rather than having the cognitive dissonance involved in admitting you're picking the man because he is male.

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[-]MugaSofer30

But when you choose your clothing, do you really care why he will choose you if you wear that particular item?

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3ialdabaoth
No, but you DO care why other people will shift the blame, because that's part of the process you're (hopefully) trying to re-engineer.
[-]juliawise30

Yeah, I'm revising my opinion on how gendered this experience actually was.

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[-]TorqueDrifter30

X is obviously stupid. Not-X.

Actually, data suggests X, or at least the issue is non-obvious.

That's not really the point.

???

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4Kindly
Keep in mind which way the arguments are going. The feminist position is Y. One objection is that X isn't true and therefore Y can't be true either. However, Emile's reasonable feminists argue that even though X isn't true, Y is still true for unrelated reasons. So it's less relevant to bring up the possibility that X might be true after all.
[-][anonymous]30

In order to estimate the base rate, I looked at the first page of recent posts, which goes back to October 2011.

I suspect a similar thing is true of Discussion, but the reference class would need to be more precise. (i.e., non-link, established user author, longer than X words).

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[-]Vaniver20

This sounds like "I wouldn't use the word obligation, but I would make the prediction that if abuse victims coach their abusers in how not to be abusive, they would make the abuse less likely to occur." Would you agree with that restatement?

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[-]A1987dM20

I've been assuming that the fictional situation you described was plausible enough to have a good chance of occurring in real life

People getting their way to the unfair detriment of others through arse-licking does happen a lot where I am, and not always in sexualized ways. (And it's not the “sexualized ways” part that bothers me,¹ it's the “unfair detriment of others” part.)

  1. Ten hours before writing the grandparent, I was getting free beer and free cake after dancing with a group of women (none of whom I had ever met until a few hours prior) and letting them take my shirt off. And I can see no good reason to feel bad about that, at least in the situation I was in.
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1Eugine_Nier
Picture that situation gender-swapped.
2A1987dM
Hmm... Yeah; my intuition says the people involved would be frowned upon a lot more in that case. But then again, before the first time I did something like that, my intuition had said I would be frowned upon a lot more than actually happened; so I don't trust it so much anymore, IOW I'm not sure I should have updated my intuition about the male stripper case but not also that about the female stripper case in the same direction. (When someone does something that makes me update my model of humans, it usually doesn't occur to me to only update my model of their gender and not that of the other gender -- but in situations like this one there are potential confounders aplenty.)
[-]TimS20

If that's really the dogma of this (extremely hypothetical) religion, why is it important that the government be religiously based?

Traditionally, religions wanted a slice (or more) of political power to (a) avoid persecution and (b) implement their preferred policies. If (a) is not already resolved, this religion is in no position to argue about what the nation would look like if it were in charge.

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[-]Eugine_Nier20

Just for the record, my estimate is that it would be cca 70% as much "racist" as what we have today.

Really? I'd estimate more like 120%.

Edit: especially consider affirmative action and the desperate impact doctrine.

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[-]Viliam_Bur130

I think that affirmative action hurts both ways. And it also keeps the feeling of resentment alive, which again hurts people.

As a simple example, in my country most people in IT are male. So on one hand you have the "prejudice" that women in general are not good with computers, but on the other hand, if you meet a female programmer, you know that she specifically is good enough. She passed the filter.

I imagine that in an alternative reality where IT companies would be legally required to have 50% female programmers, the "prejudice" would expand, and it would say that women programmers are not good with computers. A female programmer would have to work harder to pass the filter. Even participating in a successful project would not be enough, because others would think that the males in her team did most of the work, and she was there mostly for political reasons. To prove herself, she would have to win some programming competition (and tell everyone about it). But those who can do it, they have no problem finding a programming job in our world, too.

Affirmative action would work best if you could legislate it and make everyone forget that it exists. Perhaps legisl... (read more)

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6NancyLebovitz
I'd have expected affirmative action to have substantial ill effects, but no one seems to be saying that the quality of American goods has dropped noticeably since the late sixties. My tentative explanation is that hiring and promotion are much more random than people want to think.
2Eugine_Nier
Well two points: 1) There is a huge confounding factor, namely technological progress. 2) In general, labor intensive goods aren't even produced in America anymore.
[-]TimS20

I meant what happened to societies X years after they adopted various moral positions.

Do you have a specific example in mind? For X<20, no obvious examples leap to my mind.

And in the modern era, X>5 means that any consequences could be so overdetermined that pointing to particular moral changes is hindsight basis at best - particularly because moral changes tend to be gradual rather than sudden. For example, Brown v. Bd. of Edu didn't come out of nowhere, legally speaking.

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[-]satt20

You are pointing to the unique and quite narrow exception to the truth defense that was introduced in 1974.

I pointed to two classes of exception: the spent convictions exception (which is certainly narrow, but an exception nonetheless), and the more general class of exceptions for defamatory implications too.

When people say that British libel law is tough, what they mean is not the written law, which is essentially the same as, say, American law, but the interpretation of the law;

I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. SaidAchmiz & I wer... (read more)

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1Douglas_Knight
I ignored your comment about innuendo because it is simply not an exception.
[-]Richard_Kennaway20

After all, talking about the incentives of life threatening injuries from serious car accidents towards safer driving is creepy.

Eh? The possibility of life threatening injuries from serious car accidents is the primary reason for requiring people to acquire and prove their competence before being allowed to drive on the public roads. What's creepy about that?

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[-]ialdabaoth20

will do, thanks.

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[-]MugaSofer20

Larks indicated that that is not the case: goblins are considered innocent until proven guilty.

I got the impression that he assumed this was the "Lawful" attitude to take.

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[-]Desrtopa20

It seems like a coherent position to me to assign negative utility to the lives of "evil" creatures in the first place, even if they haven't committed something that would legally be a hanging offense.

You might say that you target evil creatures because they're likely to commit offenses that are punishable under law by death, but then, you might say that certain crimes are punishable by death because they show that the perpetrators are Evil.

As a moral theory, it may not make a very good legal foundation in our world, but when we're dealing with a world where you can actually cast Detect Evil, and look at people, or even magical objects, and tell if they're Evil, things may be kind of different.

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7ialdabaoth
In a world in which you can cast "Detect Evil", but don't know which of these two is true, the word "Evil" attached to your "Detect Evil" spell may not have the semantic weight you think it does. All you know is that you have a particular sensory action that you can perform, which returns a quantitative result when applied to a given target. We have chosen to call this quantitative value "Evil". To be clearer, let's call it their EQ (for "Evil Quotient"). You happen to know, experimentally, that beings with a high EQ tend to commit actions that decrease general utility in the population whose utility you care about. Now, you have an important question to ask yourself: is high EQ causative of that net decrease in general utility, or is it merely correlative? You then have a further philosophical question: Should the utility of high-EQ individuals be weighed the same as the utility of other individuals when aggregating your global utility function? (This will depend on many things, one of which is the potential for "false positives", but another of which is the base assumption of whose utilities are worth considering).
4Desrtopa
You know a lot more than that. You know that they go to different afterlives than Good or Neutral beings, that they can be affected by different spells and abilities, and that depending on their class their own abilities might be affected by their evilness. A moral theory that supports the eradication of Evil beings need not be utilitarian. I don't think a conventional paladin would function as a utilitarian, for example.
1TorqueDrifter
And these afterlives tend to be less pleasant, as I understand it. As an added wrinkle, there are also Evil energies and spells, for example the energy animating a non-evil undead, or certain spells cast by a non-evil cleric.
4MugaSofer
No. That's not how alignment works in D&D, you're either Evil or you're not. If you are, then you will actively seek to perform Evil acts.
6thomblake
Even in core, there is some concept of quantitative evil. For starters, look up detect evil. Evil supernatural beings and evil clerics are notably more evil than the evil bartender. And you can expect the kind and amount of evil acts they perpetrate to be much worse. It's noted prominently in some sourcebook (though I can't remember if it was a core one) that normal evil people might opportunistically steal but probably won't eat your babies, in contrast to (say) demons. Also, depending on the edition you should expect to see a scalar alignment chart somewhere in the Dungeon Master's Guide, commonly used for tracking alignment drift. A character can be obviously evil and in no danger of an alignment shift (say, 0 out of 100 good points in Neverwinter Nights terms) or right on the cusp of switching to neutrality (30 out of 100 good points).
5ialdabaoth
Different DMs (and even different publications) might disagree with you. Moreso, if that is always true, then the addition of certain other sourcebooks and adventure modules produce an incoherent universe (regrettably I forget which ones) - which is part of my original point.
2MugaSofer
I was using the standard definition from Core. IIRC there are books specifically dedicated to alignment issues that contradict this, but those are optional and frankly have issues of their own. (The Book of Vile Darkness and the Book of Exalted Deeds spring to mind.)
9ialdabaoth
Ok then, let's define this more rigorously, so we have something unambiguous to talk about. If we're going with the idea that D&D "Good" and "Evil" are objective measures that follow your definition, then does the following make sense as a rigorous definition of them: A being's 'Alignment' on the good-evil spectrum is a measure of how well its utility function is coupled to the utility functions of other beings in general. A "Good" being is compassionate - that is, its utility function has a positive coupling constant (between 0.00 and 1.00, say) to the utility function of other beings in general; it seeks to maximize others' utility functions as a subset of maximizing its own. Likewise, an "Evil" being is sadistic - that is, its utility function has a negative coupling constant (between -0.00 and -1.00, say) to the utility function of other beings in general; it seeks to minimize others' utility functions as a subset of maximizing its own. Interestingly, once it becomes mathematically spelled out like that, the paladin's dilemma is just math - "slay evil" isn't a primary goal, it's just the only way to resolve the feedback oscillation inherent in wanting to maximize everyone's utility, including the utility of those whose utility is coupled to minimizing everyone else's utility.
8Nornagest
That would clear up a lot of philosophical issues with the alignment scale (at the cost of making Evil beings rare outside of "a wizard did it" and very hard to play), but it's not especially consistent with the way D&D uses the words. D&D products tend to conflate Evil with selfishness; some (usually supernatural) Evil beings are described as taking the suffering of others as what we'd call a terminal value, but often they just have a weak coupling constant and happen to be pursuing zero- or negative-sum goals. Then there are other complicating factors: a few zero-intelligence creatures (mostly undead) are described as Evil even though they don't have goals, for example. It's a mess, honestly; a hash of consequentialism and virtue ethics and deontology, and let's not even talk about how messy it gets once you take the Law/Chaos axis into account. (Horrible nerd mode: DISABLED.)
4thomblake
(Complete rationalization mode: ENGAGED.) That's just equivocation. Being evil (in ialdabaoth's sense) in D&D attaches some negative energy to the soul (it's detectable with a Detect Evil spell) which happens to be the same thing that animates undead. So it's not so much that mindless undead are actually evil, so much as that tests and effects for evil also work on undead.
5ialdabaoth
See, now we're actually approaching something like a coherent system! Okay, so this lends evidence to the idea that there's essentially two different phenomena at work in the D&D world, BOTH of which have been labeled "evil" simply because the only detector that could be constructed, detected both of them. Now, how could we prove this theory? What would be different if it were true or false?
2[anonymous]
The correct answer is obviously "Ask your GM." That aside, maybe you could convince a good or neutral cleric to raise undead, then Detect Evil? (Disclaimer: I have only a basic understanding of D&D mechanics, and the alignment system never made sense to me either.)
2NancyLebovitz
How does this system handle having strong loyalty to a group but being neutral to negative towards outsiders who are themselves not especially evil?
2Bugmaster
That sounds like the True Neutral alignment (Neutral on both axes). Druids are quite fond of it, and, in some sourcebooks, it's compulsory for them. Depending on how loyal they are to the group, they could edge into Chaotic Neutral; they could also edge toward Lawful Neutral if they are more attached to the ideals of the group than the group itself.
1MugaSofer
That's not bad, actually. Hmm... Yup, seems to work. I wonder how this ties into the cosmology ...
2Bugmaster
It depends on the interpretation, which differs from setting to setting (and from GM to GM, of course). In some of settings, the Law/Chaos axis determines your behavior as much, if not more, as the Good/Evil axis does. A Chaotic character is practically compelled to perform Good/Evil acts; a Lawful character, on the other hand, will follow the Law as much as he's able, even when doing so would prevent him from achieving his short-term Good/Evil goals. Furthermore, "Evil" is sometimes defined as something closer to "selfish", whereas "Good" is something closer to "altruistic". Under this model, an Evil character would seek to increase his own wealth and power, or possibly just sit in the tavern all day getting drunk and playing tricks on the other patrons -- depending on what he's into. A Good character, on the other hand, will seek to help the villagers to live better lives, according to his definition of "better". This makes "Chaotic Good" a truly terrifying combination (f.ex. see Planescape Torment), because a Chaotic Good character will seek to reshape the world in his own image regardless of whether anyone asked him to do it or not. If a few villages (or towns, or nations) need to be burned to the ground for the Greater Good, then so be it.
[-][anonymous]20

Unwanted female attention toward men exists, but is certainly less threatening, less pervasive, and more socially acceptable.

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3NancyLebovitz
More socially acceptable is part of the problem-- a man who says he didn't want advances from/sex with a woman who's at least reasonably attractive will mostly be told he doesn't appreciate his good luck.
2DaFranker
I don't know quite how relevant and which way the causal arrows are pointing, but this seems to add up somehow with the fact that on average women get more dates and more mates than men, explained by the phenomenon that fewer men date and mate way more women. It also seems to clash up weird with the social notion that women should be more selective of their partners while men should go for whatever's hottest or, failing that, available. (terminology intentionally representative of what I perceive to be social norm)
[-]JulianMorrison20

whereas it is still so for men.

So break it.

Are you saying gender identity is not determined by biology? Because I have some transsexuals who would like to talk to you.

The etiology of trans is unknown. There are suggestions that hormones in the womb may play a part, with the brain and body controlled by hormone flushes at different times, resulting in something like "intersex of the brain". But what I meant was more simply, that social categorization of bodies as "male or female" doesn't determine their gender identity. Bear in mi... (read more)

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[-]Eugine_Nier110

BTW: trans being inborn and immutable is a political thing. It is easier to get rights if your discriminated-against attribute is "not your fault" so you can't be "blamed" for it.

Ok, so you admit your movement is willing to lie, BS and corrupt social science for "the greater good". Given that, why should I believe any of the empirical claims your movement makes?

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[-]JoshuaZ220

So, this is the sort of thing that's true for almost any advocacy group: They will present the evidence that helps them and not present the evidence that doesn't. That means that for any political advocacy or organization you need to look at the evidence with that in mind and judge it carefully and accordingly. This makes the groups under discussion no different than any other similar group.

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[-]Eugine_Nier140

There is a difference between selectively presenting true evidence (or at least evidence they believe to be true) and telling things you know to be false.

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2JoshuaZ
Valid point in this context. I'm not sure if Julian was claiming to present things that are known to be false, although the wording of the comment certainly could be interpreted that way.
6[anonymous]
Wasn't he basically just saying that these kinds of statements radically lower his epistemic confidence in empirical claims the movement makes which are politically convenient?
[-]JoshuaZ100

Wasn't he basically just saying that these kinds of statements radically lower his epistemic confidence in empirical claims the movement makes which are politically convenient?

Well, there's the connotative issue involved. But my point is that he seems to be making a strange adjustment here: Making a radical adjustment to one group when it should apply to all political groups. Moreover, the comment struck me (and it is possible that I've misinterpreted it here) as essentially dismissing any claims made rather than doing what one should actually do in such contexts- carefully examine the claims, and look for omitted evidence.

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[-]JulianMorrison20

The reactions are driven by social instinct reacting with defensive in-group cohesion to out-group threat, so they have effects without feeling like attempts to achieve effects. They feel like righteous indignation, or wanting someone who looks like us, or fear, or moral disapproval, or dismissal as uninteresting, etc.

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[-]JulianMorrison20

That refers to "I still think your previous comment was too simplistic".

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[-]thomblake20

Aha. SpookyBeans used to be a 1-page download. The dispute resolution mechanism is extremely simplistic and flexible, and is more about disputes between players rather than characters, like the kind you mentioned. Basically, anything can happen if anyone says it happens, and then the rules come into play when people disagree about what happens.

I agree that meta-level disputes about "what the story should be about" and such are outside the scope of the D&D rules. But I still haven't seen anything that addresses those better than "have the players work that out somehow".

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[-]gwern20

If humans are 'long pork', and elves stereotypically taller than humans, does that make elf 'longer pork'?

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[-]A1987dM20

I'm not sure I agree -- Yvain in “Offense versus harm minimization” seems to have a good point.

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4Said Achmiz
Having read the linked post... much as I usually love and agree with Yvain's writing, no, I really don't think he has a good point. Several good reasons to reject almost everything Yvain says there are extensively pointed out in the comments to that post.
[-]David Althaus20
Sorry about your experiences.
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[-]DaFranker160

This isn't actually representative of how misogynistic society still is IMO. This is very tame, and examples I would consider similar to this occur with lower frequency than situations I would consider much, much worse.

If you want to take the long worldwide view, the very specific case of "7 year old girls being sold into sexual slavery when a boy of that age wouldn't" likely happens at about a 5:1 frequency ratio to the specific quoted example above (i.e. "sixth-grade girls being asked out on a dare when a boy that age wouldn't") by my best-guesstimates (with very wide confidence margins, mind you, but my goal is to counter bias by making mentally available things much worse that probably happen with much higher frequency).

At the mean, our society (north-america in this case) informally still considers that when a woman complains ( / cries / seeks comfort / otherwise attempts to get over in some manner that involves other humans) about getting raped instead of "dealing with it / getting over it on her own", she probably deserved it, or is a weakling, or some other strong negative affect. Of course, admitting this view overtly is very low-status, and consequently acknowledging anything like this as "true" is politically-incorrect.

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[-]NancyLebovitz210

I agree with you, though I'd phrase it as "men's problems should be taken more seriously" rather than "it's unfair that women's problems are taken seriously."

It's taken a lot of work (not yet complete) over a long period to get women being raped taken seriously, let alone lesser issues.

Hypotheses about why the abuse of men is barely on the agenda: There's even more prejudice against men who've been hurt than against women who've been hurt. Men aren't as good at organizing to be heard, which overlaps the first hypothesis. Women have formed an interest group on the subject which is preventing men from being heard. Other suggestions? Suggestions for action?

For what it's worth, I believe that men frequently have a worse deal than is publicly acknowledged. I've been expecting sexual abuse of men and boys by women to show up on the public agenda. No one seems to believe me.

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6Viliam_Bur
I think this is the large picture of power balance between the sexes. In the past, physical strength was the most important thing, therefore men got the unfair bonus points. Currently, communication is the most important thing, therefore women get the unfair bonus points. And, that's basicly it. (You didn't expect Azathoth to care about fairness, did you?) Of course the official narrative is different, but that's just business as usual. The ancient patriarchy also had their narrative about why women are responsible for everything bad, because Eve listened to devil and ate the apple in the garden of paradise. Plausible? Well, at the time this story was invented, it was easy to believe it; and also if you didn't, you were punished. Today we have another narrative, written for the contemporary society, about why men are responsible for everything bad, because... you know, the usual story preached in the modern equivalents of churches. Men, learn to communicate, both as individuals and as groups. (Before it is made illegal. EDIT: Specifically, I mean: Before the male-only groups discussing men's problems from the men's point of view are forbidden, on pretext of sexism. I have read an article about a university officially forbidding an unofficial "male studies" students' group for this reason, while women studies remains part of the official curriculum. But I can't find the link now.) EDIT: But I would still bet my money on men losing against Azathoth. And although it sucks to be on the losing side, I don't think that men being the losing side is intrinsically worse than women being the losing side. The important thing is impact on the humanity as a whole, which yet needs to be determined experimentally.
8A1987dM
Well, as far as I've heard that happens to an even greater extent when a man complains about getting raped (outside the prison system).
[-]NancyLebovitz100

Well, as far as I've heard that happens to an even greater extent when a man complains about getting raped (outside the prison system).

That seems over-optimistic to me-- as far as I can tell, a lot of Americans (at least) believe that male prisoners deserve to get raped. Female prisoners get raped by male guards, but that isn't on the public radar at all.

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3MugaSofer
At least it's considered a coherent possibility and a disincentive to actions that risk jail time.
9TimS
Rape isn't something that "just happens" in prison. It's something that we, as a society allow to happen - in a similar way to the fact that the US Bureau of Prisons doesn't allow conjugal visits or running your business in prison. We have a moral responsibility for what happens in prisons, whether we cause it, allow it, or prevent it.
3MugaSofer
My point was that the male-on-male rape in prisons is considered something most men would want to avoid, unlike female-on-male rape. Obviously prison rape is a Bad Thing.
4NancyLebovitz
It's a serious sort of torture, and a possible death sentence. It happens to younger and weaker prisoners, not to whoever law-abiding citizens think ought to be punished the most. And it means that rapists get away with it. Also, the justice system isn't all that reliable about determining guilt and innocence.
2DaFranker
I touch on something relevant to that here. Basically: "It's silly for a man to complain about getting raped, because it's simply logically and physically impossible for a man to get raped by a woman." The causes are very different, AFAICT.
5MugaSofer
I interpreted that as sarcasm. There doesn't seem to be any sexism in the quote.
2Randy_M
"At the mean, our society (north-america in this case) informally still considers that when a woman complains ( / cries / seeks comfort / otherwise attempts to get over in some manner that involves other humans) about getting raped instead of "dealing with it / getting over it on her own", she probably deserved it, or is a weakling, or some other strong negative affect." I have, literally, never heard this expressed (and I hang wit h/read some rather traditional people). " Of course, admitting this view overtly is very low-status, and consequently acknowledging anything like this as "true" is politically-incorrect." Ah, 'of course', that's why. They all (or the mean of them all) secretly think it but don't want to say so. Can I politely ask how you came to this conclusion? Not related ones, but this specifically.
5DaFranker
Experimentally by making ideological statements under a social persona in the presence of two biased samples: random internet people, and high school students not part of my circle of friends. Yes, I deliberately made disgusting statements like "Girls should shut up about rape, if they can't do anything about it on their own they deserved it." in the presence of strangers for the sake of science. Responses ranged from the traditional Internet-chat "..." catchall to "...Wow, you should go hang yourself" (in person, with stares of disgust and/or incredulity), along with a "HOLY FUCKING SHIT!" followed by immediate ban by an admin in one internet case. I think it's clear the above is evidence of the denotational claims. (specifically: Admitting this view is low status, claiming that people do believe this view is politically incorrect) As for whether people are "secretly" thinking this while disclaiming the above, well... court cases, public media, gossip about public media about court cases, and lots of general gossip or offhand comments. While the first dataset included mostly males, this second dataset includes mostly adult women. Also, please do make sure you've noticed (I think you did, but your observations / response if I assume that you did are unexpected to me) that I'm mainly talking about "some strong negative affect" (of any kind, in general), not necessarily the specific "She deserved it!". The most common statements I hear to this effect go along the lines of "Okay, she should shut up about this, stop bugging people, and move on, she's just worsening her case". In general, most less-rational people looking at it in Far mode seem to believe by default that the best strategy after being raped is to send a post-it note to the local police in the magical wishthinking that they'll catch the rapist silently without media attention, and then the woman should shut up and not do anything else beyond that. One could explore in the direction "The less we hear a
1Randy_M
To be clear, it was only the first part I doubted (that most people believe that women psychologically harmed by rape deserved it or is a weakling), not the second (that people recognize that sentiment as socially disapproved). That people don't want to themselves discuss it with a particular victim, or think the woman would be better off not dwelling on it (which is a different model of psychological healing, not of the justifiability of the rape, imo), or that rape is over publicized in relationship to other problems, are different sentiments than your 7:35 comment seems to be arguing for, both more credible that people believe it, and less offenisive on the face of it if they do. "Also, please do make sure you've noticed (I think you did, but your observations / response if I assume that you did are unexpected to me) that I'm mainly talking about "some strong negative affect" (of any kind, in general), not necessarily the specific "She deserved it!". " Hyperbole, then? I don't see how one would notice what you were mainly talking about, when "she deserved it" was the first judgement described.
3DaFranker
Really? Is that the message I'm sending? Wow. (in case of doubt: Not sarcastic) I usually read enumeration statements of the form 'A or B or some other C', where C includes A and B, as "Here are two examples of C things to avoid confusion, and it's one of the C things". If I'm either not interpreting this right at all or I wasn't actually communicating this for some reason, I really want to know.
9chaosmosis
I can't tell if this is sarcasm because that story doesn't reveal misogyny, but on the other hand your comment isn't funny.
9jasticE
This particular instance needn't have much to do with misogyny. I was in a similar situation once in school.
3MugaSofer
Not sure if serious ... upvoted on the assumption of sarcasm.
[-]A1987dM10

Generally it does, but IME higher-status people can pull off a higher level of “weird” than lower-status people. A very unpopular guy wearing a fedora wouldn't look more “interesting”, but many (most?) guys would.

EDIT: There also are geographical differences. In certain cities pretty much all guys in the same age group dress and groom more or less the same way, in others there's much more variation.

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[-]Eugine_Nier10

Really, I'm impressed it took this long for someone to point out one of the fundamental problems of the gender-swap test.

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4fubarobfusco
Yep — human reproduction is not an equal deal for the participants. In the most basic sense possible, it is not fair. Nobody promised humanity that our alien-god-given bodies would perfectly implement the rules of morality that we might later derive — such as reciprocity; or for that matter not using another person merely as a means to your ends. This bug has been acknowledged many times before, and various technical and social workarounds have been proposed and deployed. The underlying bug still needs work, though it may not be fully fixed before humans are ported to a new platform.
[-]Nornagest10

People with an ideology frequently manage to come up with stuff that looks more femme than 17th century clothing does, and which looks more femme than a woman wearing a tuxedo does. In particualar, I am a little bit annoyed by the praise being heaped on Yoko Ono by somebody I normally respect.

I think I may have read that article. With a couple of exceptions the Ono line mainly struck me as silly, but that's at least as outre as being overtly femme in menswear. (Imagine Brad Pitt in a dress. Then imagine Tom Green wearing a skinned Muppet.)

Then again,... (read more)

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[-]A1987dM10

Caveat - IME it's mostly women doing the shaming, so if your friends are mostly male you might not see this trend.

I can't recall the topic ever coming up with my friends (more or less equal number of males and females) in the last couple years, so I don't know for sure about them. (From what little I can infer indirectly, the difference between the average male and the average female is less than differences within each gender, or between the average practising Catholic and the average atheist/agnostic/etc.) The friends I usually hang around with in hig... (read more)

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5TimS
Resume studies: Some researcher sent identical resumes with different names to apply for similar positions. Some resumes had names that code as white in the US, while other resumes had names that coded as black. The rate of interviews scheduled was substantially different based on the apparent ethnicity of the applicant. Summary.
2A1987dM
Okay. That also answers the "I'm not sure we should care about prejudices people don't want to have" thing -- such a discrimination is Bad whether or not the interviewers are consciously aware of it, and whether or not they endorse it.
[-]Eugine_Nier10

Why do people believe "theocracy" to be bad? The proximate cause is that it's what they've been taught.

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3TimS
If your brother tries to tell you why [your social theory is wrong], then do not debate him or set forth your own evidence; do not perform replicable experiments or examine history; but turn him in at once to the secret police. Theocracy doesn't exactly have a self-correction mechanism to avoid that problem.
2JoshuaZ
Is that a problem of theocracy per se? That's a problem in a lot of systems. And there's no reason one can't in principle have a theocracy with robust free speech rights. It may well be that that hasn't happened more because the ideas which are generally anti-theocratic are often clustered with ideas about open discourse. That said, it does seem plausible that a theocracy will be more likely to run into the sort of problems you discuss, purely because if one is thinking in religious terms, then the already high stakes involved in politics become even higher.
4TimS
I've yet to hear an argument for free speech that didn't lean heavily on the risk that any particular policy or belief might be erroneous. My impression is that theocracy is defined as government based on the principal that there are some (divinely revealed?) facts for which there is no risk of error. If we were sure (risk of error epsilon) of some set of facts and could unambiguously determine whether an assertion conflicted with those facts, why would we tolerate opposition? As Eliezer noted in the piece I cited, this is a problem of most political systems.
1Bugmaster
I personally think that theocracy is bad because it combines the worst features of a totalitarian dictatorship on the one hand, and uncritical thinking on the other. As such, it could potentially turn out much worse than even a run-of-the-mill totalitarian dictatorship; in the latter case, at least the dictator and his politburo have some sort of a real plan...
3Eugine_Nier
Which came first, that argument, or you believing that theocracy is bad?
[-]Multiheaded10

Or you simply want to propagate something that seems important throughout your belief network (e.g. a moral injunction against too-convenient dubious actions), or move your values towards reflective equilibrium.

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[-]Bugmaster10

Good point. In addition, Rangers get a "Favored Enemy" class feature built-in, which means that they hate some specific species (which may include, say, Goblins or Elves) so much that they get combat bonuses against them.

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2BerryPick6
Interesting to note though, if I'm not mistaken, that only Evil Rangers can pick their own race as a favored enemy, so there is something else going on there as well...
[-]Bugmaster10

Druids are loyal to trees and/or other Druids, but not to much of anyone else?

They are also quite fond of squirrels. Can't forget the squirrels. Heh. But speaking more accurately, Druids are dedicated to nature, and nature is quite Neutral. At the same time, most Druids do realize that sentient beings (such as Humans or Elves or whomever) are part of Nature. Thus, the Druids seek to uphold some sort of a balance between civilization and wilderness, as opposed to, say, flooding the entire world with squirrels.

Is there much of what you might call ordina

... (read more)
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[-]CCC10

That viewpoint, in itself, is at least partially cultural.

Yes, there are other means of oppression; people can be oppressed for having the wrong sort of noses, or living on the wrong side of the river, or coming from the wrong family. These I see as seperate, though related problems; resolving the issue of race will do nothing directly about the other problems (and may even throw them into sharper relief), but I don't think it's a good idea to refuse to solve one problem just because others might still exist.

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[-]A1987dM10

I'd put it as TDT, UDT etc. being attempts to formalize rule consequentialism rigorously enough for an AI.

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[-]Emile10

You mean political power here, or in general?

If it's here, I'm not very concerned about that; I'm more concerned about evaporative cooling, or outrage and indignation becoming acceptable modes of communication, or contemporary political issues becoming more prevalant than outlandish scenarios.

If it's in general, eh, I must admit I don't care that much, I don't have very strong opinions on who of "the left" or "the right" does the most damage when they're elected; I don't expect high value of information from looking at that, the whole field is polluted with partisan politics. I find figuring out what people agree and disagree on much more interesting.

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[-]TimS10

He certainly like hyperbole - and I don't defend his writings on women. I'm not sure if hyperbole and "play the asshole" have the same meaning or implication.

Nietzsche's theory of the overman / superman is viewed with hostility because a bowdlerized form was used to support Nazi ideology - giving Nietzsche's philosophy a negative reputation in the English speaking philosophy community. I think that Nietzsche would have be horrified by the Nazis because he was more of a proto-existentialist.

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3taelor
Nietzsche refused to attend his sister's wedding on the grounds that she was marrying an anti-semite, and admitted in one of his letters that the thought of his sister having sex with that man made him physically ill.
3NancyLebovitz
I think Nietzsche liked teasing people he considered to be his inferiors, and he did it by saying things that were easy to misinterpret. I think that's at least in the neighborhood of playing the asshole. Walter Kaufmann's book on Nietzsche says that Nietzsche liked Jews better than Germans. My impression of Nietzsche was that he was trying to get at the roots of individual judgement and thriving (which I suppose in in the neighborhood of existentialism if you ignore the thriving part), and would have been revolted by Nazi collectivism.
1TimS
I always understood Nietzsche's references to Jews to be purely metaphorical. Their main purpose in the narrative is to convince the Romans to accept Jesus. That does not sound like any Jews that actually existed. (I justify ignoring the debate in early Christianity over whether they were Jews by leaping ahead to their conclusion that they weren't.) Thus, I'm not sure whether Nietzsche's writings give any useful evidence over whether he preferred Jews or Germans. That's a really good short paraphrase.
[-]A1987dM10

I count rule consequentialism as a flavour of consequentialism, not as a flavour of deontology.

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[-]A1987dM10

I didn't intend any snark.

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2TorqueDrifter
My bad! Probably just oversensitive because of what thread we're in. Apologies!
[-]satt10

After all, talking about the incentives of life threatening injuries from serious car accidents towards safer driving is creepy. I think there is very reasonable and widespread moral disapproval of the practice.

Dunno, thinking of serious injury risk as an incentive seems implicit in the idea of risk compensation, which is quite popular:

Notable examples include observations of increased levels of risky behaviour by road users following the introduction of compulsory seatbelts and bicycle helmet [sic] and motorists driving faster and following more clos

... (read more)
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[-]gwern10

Yes, Comiket is the most mainstream, but perhaps for this reason (countersignaling involved?) I've read various comments that point towards: Don't go there if you're looking for good ero-doujin.

You're just trying to diagnose a trend, right? I think a bias like that would only be important if you were trying to estimate the absolute amount or if the bias itself were changing over time so the early figures were more/less biased toward ero-doujin; also, the bias sounds like it would be to decrease any increases in ero-doujin ratios so the increases would b... (read more)

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[-]TimS10

That does make the sentence true, and morally less objectionable. But "legitimate" is not usually a synonym for "real," particularly in this context.

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1MugaSofer
Huh. It didn't occur to me to interpret it any other way until you mentioned it, TBH. I guess because they're manifestly agreeing with me.
1TimS
The whole political science concept of legitimacy is under appreciated in this community.
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