= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Konkvistador comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1254)
You seem to be using jargon I am unfamiliar with. Are you saying that sexism is merely one a way to increase one's status, indistinguishable from other status plays?
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.
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.
So ... don't trust anecdotal evidence, basically.
Yeah. We overestimate their importance.
The purpose of this, if I understood correctly, was to increase empathy with and understanding of the emotions of women in these situations. It's less evidence than neurohacking.
If you neurohack, presumably you want to move yourself towards more correspondence with reality.
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.
That depends on what you mean by 'know'. It's one thing to know something on a verbal level, and another to have your whole nervous system believe it.
Do you think Alicorn's polyhacking would be a better example? I don't really know that many good examples of neurohacking.
I think so, but it's been a while since I've read it. Her work on being happier would definitely qualify.
I've seen claims that cognitive psychology has the effect of calming the over-excitable part of the brain in people with OCD.
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.
Please consider just how strongly the likelyhood of such microaggressions is inversely correlated with a person's conformity to any given implicit norm! That's why I find it more than purple prose to refer to the victims of oppression as "the weak"; by not conforming, they simply start in a much much weaker position than someone who reasonably fits within the norms. The current beneficiaries of identity politics- like transfolk - certainly have the field tilted against them, and talking to them of "equal opportunity" or "equality before the law" is outright cruel; you've got to privilege those worst off to end up with a remotely fair outcome. (Which leads to the problem of incentives, which leads me to questioning capitalism and meritocracy altogether, but that's another story.)
So it would be unfair of you to view all consequences of similar microaggressions as morally equal and cancelling each other out. A rock that's thrown downwards at someone hurts much more - and is easier to hit with - than the same rock thrown back up with equal force! The fact that a few people might try to profit politically from redefining "up" and "down" doesn't make the objective social circumstances less real.
(Sorry if this all sounds like banal platitudes.)
And what is your grounds for believing that the groups whose victimhood from acts of microaggressions it is currently politically fashionable to emphasize are at all correlated with the people who are actually more likely to be on the receiving end of microaggression?
To see why this is highly unlikely it helps to make an outside view: if I randomly picked some culture from human history, how strong do you think this correlation would be? What makes you think the currant culture is any different?
I think people are somewhat more likely to complain when they're hurt.
True, there are other things that arguably have a bigger impact, e.g., whether they'll be punished for complaining, whether their complaint is likely to change anything. For example, frequency human rights complaints against governments tends to be inversely proportional to how bad that government actually is at human rights.
I'd expect a maximum somewhere in the middle of the range for internally generated complaints.
The countries and regions which are best at human rights get few or no complaints. The countries and regions which are bad but not horrendous get the most complaints. The countries which have a strong pattern of punishing complainers get a few complaints. The most vicious countries get no complaints.
That's just for internally generated complaints. Outsiders may be saying that conditions are very bad in the worst countries.
I think your underestimating how many complaints get generated in countries with good human rights that would be considered frivolous by an international standard, e.g., arguing that refusing to subsidize condoms constitutes a "war on women".
[citation needed]
It is not particularly controversial to note that nations concerned about human rights focus their advocacy / attention / pressure on countries that care somewhat about human rights themselves. (i.e. the US pressures Turkey about human rights problems, not North Korea).
That said, I don't think that was Eugine_Nier's point. I suspect that I disagree with his intended assertion (denotatively if not connotatively).
(I think this was intended as an observation of high noise levels, not a moral judgement of sexism generally.)