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

58 [deleted] 25 November 2012 11:33PM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 07:52:40AM 7 points [-]

So it would be unfair of you to view all consequences of similar microaggressions as morally equal and cancelling each other out.

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?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 December 2012 12:50:40PM 4 points [-]

I think people are somewhat more likely to complain when they're hurt.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 12:58:01AM 8 points [-]

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 02 December 2012 11:10:36AM *  3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 10:04:22PM 5 points [-]

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".

Comment author: beoShaffer 02 December 2012 01:37:10AM *  0 points [-]

For example, frequency human rights complaints against governments tends to be inversely proportional to how bad that government actually is at human rights.

[citation needed]

Comment author: TimS 02 December 2012 01:48:57AM *  1 point [-]

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).