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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
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.
You have a Baron? We just talk things out over the campfire while pounding willow bark and sucking the marrow out of aurochs bones.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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:
"...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm a male LWer with an infant daughter. I'd like to request some specific advice on avoiding the common failure modes.
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.)
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
There's a few parts. Let's charitably assume that the father is just making an empirical statement, to shorten the list.
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.)
He assumes she's going to marry a man.
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?")
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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?)
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.
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?
•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.
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.
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")
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.
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...
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.
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.
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:
In short, I don't think I buy your claim that "Some empirical statements, or...
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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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."
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]
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.
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...
(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.)
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.
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.
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: __________
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...
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...
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...
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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...
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)
“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.
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.
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
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.
Have you read the comment sections on this site before? I don't think LWers where any more nitpicky than usual.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It's just a shame that dense epistemic root systems tend to produce an equally dense foliage of jargon :-)
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?
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".
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.
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."
Why are you writing that here? Did you mean to reply to some other comment or am I missing something?
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.
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?
snip "trans is a choice"
It shows up on brainscans.
How is the second sentence at all evidence against the first?
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.
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'?
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?
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
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? ;)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm still unclear as to why ignoring the biological gender of your child will help them be more tolerant in later life.
From the final hyperlinked article:
Why do men catcall women?
I've never understood this, either. Any good guesses?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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?"
"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...
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?
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".
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.
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
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.
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...
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?
“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 ...
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.
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.
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).
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.
What's your line of thought that large numbers of comments are a clear indication of a mind-killed community?
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%.
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.
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.
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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.)
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 ...
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.
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.
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...
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...
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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).
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
(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. ;)
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.
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).
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.
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...)
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...
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).
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."
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".
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...
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.
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...
The three interpretations I mean are:
Is that clearer?
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.
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).
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).
Very true. So then the question becomes, given that:
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?
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.
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.
Yep. They don't see themselves as sexist, but they are. That makes it more difficult to effect change.
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.
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.
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...
Do you think Alicorn's polyhacking would be a better example? I don't really know that many good examples of neurohacking.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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...
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...
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?
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...
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?
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
They will learn to behave in a non-assuming, non-policing way themselves.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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?
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...
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
Is he actually confusing those? It seems to me that he's taking pains to stress the difference!
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 ...
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.
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.
But when you choose your clothing, do you really care why he will choose you if you wear that particular item?
X is obviously stupid. Not-X.
Actually, data suggests X, or at least the issue is non-obvious.
That's not really the point.
???
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).
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
Unwanted female attention toward men exists, but is certainly less threatening, less pervasive, and more socially acceptable.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
If humans are 'long pork', and elves stereotypically taller than humans, does that make elf 'longer pork'?
I'm not sure I agree -- Yvain in “Offense versus harm minimization” seems to have a good point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Really, I'm impressed it took this long for someone to point out one of the fundamental problems of the gender-swap test.
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,...
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...
Why do people believe "theocracy" to be bad? The proximate cause is that it's what they've been taught.
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.
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.
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
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.
I'd put it as TDT, UDT etc. being attempts to formalize rule consequentialism rigorously enough for an AI.
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.
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.
I count rule consequentialism as a flavour of consequentialism, not as a flavour of deontology.
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
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...
That does make the sentence true, and morally less objectionable. But "legitimate" is not usually a synonym for "real," particularly in this context.
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