Multiheaded comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong

58 [deleted] 25 November 2012 11:33PM

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Comment author: Multiheaded 30 November 2012 07:44:54PM *  12 points [-]

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 comforted by knowledge that the German and Japanese peoples would later face losses from Allied bombing many times greater, together with unparalleled devastation. It is the duty and privilege of historians to deploy relativism in a fashion that cannot be expected of contemporary participants.

In other words, a boy being bullied at school or a girl shrinking in disgust and fear from a drunken man's cat-call do experience suffering and negative emotion on their own scale of awfulness - and the fact that millions of people in the 3rd world have it much worse "objectively" doesn't take away from the trauma of a "minor" incident in a happier life.

Of course, the objectively worse suffering in the 3rd world should be dealt with as a higher priority. But this doesn't mean that, given a choice of spending a bit of resources and attention on relief from such "minor" evils (at a low enough alternative cost), we should tell their victims: "Stop whining, we don't care."

If we stop aspiring to treat every individual according to our ideals - as sacred, an end in themselves - then there's no Schelling point to stop at; we might as well come to some absurd hedonic utilitarianism, painting smiles on souls, or overwriting people's brains with a simple utility function, or such! Did you, perchance, choose specks on torture vs. specks? If you did, please think and reflect hard before discounting "minor" oppression.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 December 2012 12:56:49PM 11 points [-]

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.

Comment author: ewbrownv 03 December 2012 07:30:48PM -1 points [-]

The problem with this seemingly high-minded ideal is that every intervention has a cost, and they add up quickly. When oppression is blatant, violent and extreme it's relatively easy to identify, the benefits of mitigating it are large, and the cost to society is low. But when the 'oppression' is subtle and weak, consisting primarily of personal conversations or even private thoughts of individuals, the reverse is true. You find yourself restricting freedom of speech, religion and association, creating an expanding maze of ever-more-draconian laws governing every aspect of life, throwing out core legal principles like innocent until proven guilty and the right to confront one's accusers - and even then, success is unlikely.

Another important factor is the fact that those who consider themselves victims will never be satisfied, and indeed this whole campaign in their name quickly ceases to improve their lives to any measurable degree. As you noted yourself, individuals tend to rate the trauma of an unpleasant incident relative to their own experiences. So once you stamp out the big, easily measured objective forms of oppression, you find yourself on a treadmill where working harder and harder to suppress the little stuff doesn't do any good. Each generation feels that they're as oppressed as the one before, even if objectively things have changed dramatically in their favor. The only way off the treadmill is for the 'victim' group to stop viewing every experience through the lens of imagined oppression.

Comment author: MugaSofer 24 December 2012 05:34:35AM 4 points [-]

So once you stamp out the big, easily measured objective forms of oppression, you find yourself on a treadmill where working harder and harder to suppress the little stuff doesn't do any good. Each generation feels that they're as oppressed as the one before, even if objectively things have changed dramatically in their favor. The only way off the treadmill is for the 'victim' group to stop viewing every experience through the lens of imagined oppression.

Do you seriously think that proves we shouldn't try to stop what we asses to be "oppression"? Diminishing returns do not equal zero returns.

Comment author: DaFranker 03 December 2012 07:49:51PM *  3 points [-]

You either missed the point of the grandparent, or are missing some of the prerequisite concepts needed to think clearly about this subject, it seems to me.

I'm quite certain that Multiheaded is well aware of the law of diminishing returns and its implications, and has a fairly good grasp of how to do expected utility evaluations. Everything else you said in your post was, AFAICT, already all stated or implied by the grandparent, except:

Another important factor is the fact that those who consider themselves victims will never be satisfied, and indeed this whole campaign in their name quickly ceases to improve their lives to any measurable degree.

I find this claim dubious. I consider myself a victim of the oppressive historical patriarchy and dominance of gender-typing, and yet I'm fully satisfied with the current, ongoing efforts and measures that people all around the world are doing to fix it, as well as my own personal involvement and the efforts of my close circles.

You find yourself restricting freedom of speech, religion and association, creating an expanding maze of ever-more-draconian laws governing every aspect of life, throwing out core legal principles like innocent until proven guilty and the right to confront one's accusers - and even then, success is unlikely.

Those are not particularly convincing examples of Good Principles that we'd want to have in an ideal society that we should aspire towards. My own brain is screeching at the first three in particular, and finds the named legal principles crude and unrefined when compared to other ideals to aspire to.

Comment author: TimS 03 December 2012 07:40:28PM -1 points [-]

Each generation feels that they're as oppressed as the one before

That has not been my impression. Some advocates might think things are as bad as they were 5 years ago, but I'm not aware of anyone with influence who thinks things are as bad as 50 years ago. Or any advocate at all who thinks no improvement has happened in the last 500 years.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 12:31:41AM *  2 points [-]

That wasn't ewbrownv's assertion.

His assertion is that if you scanned the brain of a victim 50 or 500 years ago you'd find the same amount of subjective "oppressed feeling" as scanning a modern victim, i.e., that people have an "oppression set point" similar to the happiness set point.

Comment author: ewbrownv 04 December 2012 08:41:39PM 2 points [-]

Well, 500 years ago there was plenty of brutal physical oppression going on, and I'd expect that kind of thing to have lots of other negative effects on top of the first-order emotional reactions of the victims.

But I would claim that if you did a big brain-scan survey of, say, Western women from 1970 to the present, you'd see very little correlation between their subjective feeling of oppression and their actual treatment in society.