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LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance
Standard Intro
The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.
About two months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post. There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts.
Seven women submitted, totaling about 18 pages.
Crocker's Warning- Submitters were told to not hold back for politeness. You are allowed to disagree, but these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post
To the submittrs- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.
Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)
Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.
Minimizing the Inferential Distance
One problem that I think exists in discussions about gender issues between men and women, is that the inferential distance is much greater than either group realizes. Women might assume that men know what experiences women might face, and so not explicitly mention specific examples. Men might assume they know what the women are talking about, but have never really heard specific examples. Or they might assume that these types of things only happened in the past, or not to the types of females in their in-group
So for the first post in this series, I thought it would be worthwhile to try to lower this inferential distance, by sharing specific examples of what it's like as a smart/geeky female. When submitters didn't know what to write, I directed them to this article, by Julia Wise (copied below), and told them to write their own stories. These are not related to LW culture specifically, but rather meant to explain where the women here are coming from. Warning: This article is a collection of anecdotes, NOT a logical argument. If you are not interested in anecdotes, don't read it.
Copied from the original article (by a woman on LW) on Radiant Things:
It's lunchtime in fourth grade. I am explaining to Leslie, who has no friends but me, why we should stick together. “We're both rejects,” I tell her. She draws back, affronted. “We're not rejects!” she says. I'm puzzled. It hadn't occurred to me that she wanted to be normal.
…................
It's the first week of eighth grade. In a lesson on prehistory, the teacher is trying and failing to pronounce “Australopithecus.” I blurt out the correct pronunciation (which my father taught me in early childhood because he thought it was fun to say). The boy next to me gives me a glare and begins looking for alliterative insults. “Fruity female” is the best he can manage. “Geek girl” seems more apt, but I don't suggest it.
…..................
It's lunchtime in seventh grade. I'm sitting next to my two best friends, Bridget and Christine, on one side of a cafeteria table. We have been obsessed with Star Wars for a year now, and the school's two male Star Wars fans are seated opposite us. Under Greyson's leadership, we are making up roleplaying characters. I begin describing my character, a space-traveling musician named Anya. “Why are your characters always girls?” Grayson complains. “Just because you're girls doesn't mean your characters have to be.”
“Your characters are always boys,” we retort. He's right, though – female characters are an anomaly in the Star Wars universe. George Lucas (a boy) populated his trilogy with 97% male characters.
…................
It's Bridget's thirteenth birthday, and four of us are spending the night at her house. While her parents sleep, we are roleplaying that we have been captured by Imperials and are escaping a detention cell. This is not papers-and-dice roleplaying, but advanced make-believe with lots of pretend blaster battles and dodging behind furniture.
Christine and Cass, aspiring writers, use roleplaying as a way to test out plots in which they make daring raids and die nobly. Bridget, a future lawyer, and I, a future social worker, use it as a way to test out moral principles. Bridget has been trying to persuade us that the Empire is a legitimate government and we shouldn't be trying to overthrow it at all. I've been trying to persuade Amy that shooting stormtroopers is wrong. They are having none of it.
We all like daring escapes, though, so we do plenty of that.
…...............
It's two weeks after the Columbine shootings, and the local paper has run an editorial denouncing parents who raise "geeks and goths." I write my first-ever letter to the editor, defending geeks as kids parents should be proud of. A girl sidles up to me at the lunch table. "I really liked your letter in the paper," she mutters, and skitters away.
................
It's tenth grade, and I can't bring myself to tell the president of the chess club how desperately I love him. One day I go to chess club just to be near him. There is only one other girl there, and she's really good at chess. I'm not, and I spend the meeting leaning silently on a wall because I can't stand to lose to a boy. Anyway, I despise the girls who join robotics club to be near boys they like, and I don't want to be one of them.
................
It's eleventh grade, and we are gathered after school to play Dungeons and Dragons. (My father, who originally forbid me to play D&D because he had heard it would lead us to hack each other to pieces with axes, has relented.) Christine is Dungeonmaster, and she has recruited two feckless boys to play with us. One of them is in love with her.
(Nugent points out that D&D is essentially combat reworked for physically awkward people, a way of reducing battle to dice rolls and calculations. Christine has been trained by her uncle in the typical swords-and-sorcery style of play, but when she and I play the culture is different. All our adventures feature pauses for our characters to make tea and omelets.)
On this afternoon, our characters are venturing into the countryside and come across two emaciated farmers who tell us their fields are unplowed because dark elves from the forest keep attacking them. “They're going to starve if they don't get a crop in the ground,” I declare. “We've got to plow at least one field.” The boys go along with this plan.
“The farmers tell you their plow has rusted and doesn't work,” the Dungeonmaster informs us from behind her screen.
I persist. “There's got to be something we can use. I look around to see if there's anything else pointy I can use as a plow.”
The Dungeonmaster considers. “There's a metal gate,” she decides.
“Okay, I rig up some kind of harness and hitch it to the pony.”
“It's rusty too,” intones the Dungeonmaster, “and pieces of it keep breaking off. Look, you're not supposed to be farming. You're supposed to go into the forest and find the dark elves. I don't have anything else about the farmers. The elves are the adventure.” Reluctantly, I give up my agricultural rescue plan and we go into the forest to hack at elves.
…............................
I'm 25 and Jeff's sister's boyfriend is complaining that he never gets to play Magic: the Gathering because he doesn't know anyone who plays. “You could play with Julia,” Jeff suggests.
“Very funny,” says Danner, rolling his eyes.
Jeff and I look at each other. I realize geeks no longer read me as a geek. I still love ideas, love alternate imaginings of how life could be, love being right, but now I care about seeming normal.
“...I wasn't joking,” Jeff says.
“It's okay,” I reassure Danner. “I used to play every day, but I've pretty much forgotten how.”
…............................
A's Submission
My creepy/danger alert was much higher at a meeting with a high-status (read: supposedly utility-generating, which includes attractive in the sense of pleasing or exciting to look at, but mostly the utility is supposed to be from actions, like work or play) man who was supposed to be my boss for an internship.
The way he talked about the previous intern, a female, the sleazy way he looked while reminiscing and then had to smoke a cigarette, while in a meeting with me, my father (an employer who was abusive), and the internship program director, plus the fact that when I was walking towards the meeting room, the employees of the company, all men, stared at me and remarked, “It’s a girl,” well, I became so creeped out that I didn’t want to go back. It was hard, as a less articulate 16 year-old, to explain to the internship director all that stuff without sounding irrational. But not being able to explain my brain’s priors (incl. abuses that it had previously been too naïve/ignorant to warn against and prevent) wasn’t going to change them or decrease the avoidance-inducing fear and anxiety.
So after some awkward attempts to answer the internship director’s question of why I didn’t want to work there, I asked for a placement with a different company, which she couldn’t do, unfortunately.
B's Submission
Words from my father’s mouth, growing up: “You *need* to be able to cook and keep a clean house, or what man would want to marry you?”
…................
Sixth grade year, I had absolutely no friends whatsoever. A boy I had a bit of a crush on asked me out on a dare. I told him “no,” and he walked back to his laughing friends.
…................
In college I joined the local SCA (medieval) group, and took up heavy weapons combat. The local (almost all-male) “stick jocks” were very supportive and happy to help. Many had even read “The Armored Rose” and so knew about female-specific issues and how to adapt what they were teaching to deal with things like a lower center of gravity, less muscle mass, a different grip, and ingrained cultural hang-ups. The guys were great. But there was one problem: There was no female-sized loaner armor.
See, armor is an expensive investment for a new hobby, and so local groups provide loaner armor for newbies, which generally consist of hand-me-downs from the more experienced fighters. We had a decent amount of new female fighters in our college groups, but without a pre-existing generation of female fighters (women hadn’t even been allowed to fight until the 80s) there wasn’t anything to hand down.
The only scar I ever got from heavy combat was armor bite from wearing much-too-large loaner armor. I eventually got my own kit, and (Happy Ending) the upcoming generation of our group always made sure to acquire loaner armor for BOTH genders.
…................
Because of a lack of options, and not really having anywhere else to go, I moved in with my boyfriend and got married at a rather young age (20 and 22, respectively). I had no clue how to be independent. One of the most empowering things I ever did was starting work as an exotic dancer. After years of thinking that I couldn't support myself, it gave me the confidence that I could leave an unhappy marriage without ending up on the street (or more likely, mooching off friends and relatives). Another Happy Ending- Now I'm completely independent.
…................
Walking into the library. A man holds open the door for me. I smile and thank him as I walk through. He makes a sexual comment. I do the Look-Straight-Ahead-and-Walk-Quickly thing.
“Bitch,” he spits out.
It’s not the first of this kind of interaction in my life, and it most certainly won’t be the last (almost any time you are in an urban environment, without a male). But it hit harder than most because I had been expecting a polite interaction.
Relevant link: http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/why-men-catcall/
…................
The next post will be on Group Attribution Error, and will come out when I get around to it. :P
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Comments (1254)
Was the next post in this sequence ever actually submitted?
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.
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 (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 further. I felt a little bit guilty afterwards, but brushed it off eventually because she made her choice.
Did I make the correct choice by asking? I cannot picture myself asking if the coworker had been a man. I can only speculate reasons she might have declined... She was suspicious of me? She likes the rain? Would you do anything different if you were in her situation, or mine?
Why wouldn't you offer to assist a male who had no umbrella? That seems rather uncharitable of you.
It does, and the fact that I have implicit gender norms/behaviors like that bothers me. There's also other factors to take into consideration; all things being equal I'd prefer to associate with people in my age group (I'm on the low end of the age scale here - edit: I mean at my workplace, not on LW), and if she wasn't at a different site but rather a direct higher-up over me, it would be extremely awkward to offer the umbrella.
My thought is that it would be best not to offer in the particular situation you gave. That is, it was night, and presumably there was no life-threatening danger to her from the rain.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with being generous, but there are always other factors to consider. If, for example, you want to hold doors open for people or offer to carry heavy things, that is fine, as long as you do that for everyone consistently and don't take offense if anyone refuses. Also, you may want to consider the context. Even if you are not a scary person, offering to help somone with a minor task if the area is dark and/or deserted can be perceived much differently than in a more typical context.
I would advise you to continue to make the effort to recognize when you may be conforming to undesireable cultural norms, as you have been doing here. That is the first step to taking action on this extremely pervasive issue.
If you ask and she agrees, it appears to create an implicit favor she was probably uncomfortable with. The term "share" also conveys an uncomfortable connotation of closeness. I bet that if you simply held an umbrella over her head matter-of-factly, she would not have objected and possibly even thanked you later.
(I don't remember my exact phrasing of the question.) Your view is interesting, because to me that action would fall into borderline-creep behavior - intruding on personal space without asking.
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 suppose some women could misinterpret it this way. But given that "we see and greet each other occasionally" she should be brave enough to refuse your unsolicited umbrella if she felt uncomfortable. But yes, you would be running a bit of a risk.
I agree with shminux (about the analysis, not about the recommended action). This is something I didn't fully understand until I read Cialdini. There's a section in there about reciprocation that really helped me grok the basic idea that people generally feel that they should return favors, and some people in some situations don't want to receive favors because they don't want the corresponding debt. This is particularly the case for women receiving favors from men, where the debt is usually at least implicitly sexual in nature (e.g. buying a woman a drink at a bar).
I think you just shouldn't have said anything. If she wanted to make use of your umbrella she could've initiated that instead.
People can be atrociously and remarkably bad at asking for help, or even noticing that they need or could use some help.
This is independent of and multiplied by all the social complications and signalling factors involved. As per schminux's explanation, asking for help (use of the umbrella) in this case would socially be interpreted as even more of a favor-debt, and possibly even as a signal of implicitly-romantic-interest (like a woman asking you to buy her a drink at a bar).
Yes, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea to point this out. Let me put it in more LW-friendly terms: when a woman sees an unfamiliar man offering to help her in some way, she assigns nontrivial probability to the hypothesis that the man is offering to help her for sexual reasons, and she assigns nontrivial probability to the hypothesis that the man is going to be angry and possibly violent if she rejects the sexual advances she expects, with nontrivial probability, to occur later if she accepts that help. This situation has sufficiently negative utility that it is worth avoiding even if the probability of it happening is not all that high.
Haha, that's an awesome way to word it.
But yeah, I was already agreeing with that part.
My point is only that, to the same woman, it's my understanding that many cases of initiating the interaction will look even worse.
Thus, the real problem to find a solution for is "How does one credibly signal need or offer for help while optimizing the chances that it will have a positive result and avoid social failure modes?", or something close to that, and the solution definitely doesn't look like "Do your own thing and don't ask for help or offer help".
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?
Now I'm starting to wonder whether there might be cultural differences. ISTM that where I am (Italy), offering to share an umbrella with someone you know is just politeness, and people do it pretty often regardless of gender. (Likewise, people of either gender hold doors open for people (including strangers) of either gender all the time, and it would have never occurred to me that this might have anything to do with sexuality if I hadn't read that on the internet.)
I can't imagine it would be a /worse/ world, in any case. If it were raining harder, I would theoretically be more willing to offer help, regardless of gender (and despite at least one personal anecdotal experience agreeing with Alicorn's comment). It just seems "wrong" (cold, unfriendly) if I hadn't offered, in my situation, regardless of whether aid was accepted or not.
I wouldn't share an umbrella even with someone I'm perfectly comfortable intersecting space with. It's hard and awkward and you get rained on anyway.
Well the trick is, the offerer holds the umbrella over the recipient's head and gets wet.
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.
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 basically give examples of "privilege" and "microaggressions". That is, relatively small but pervasive uncomfortable or inconvenient defaults and related status moves which one notices from time to time. People with low social awareness don't see when they occur to them, so hearing them described explicitly they go "wow this is horrible, how X group suffers". The voting shows systematic appreciation for a male posture of "protecting women". This posture does little good for women, much like like signalling how much you hate child molesters does the opposite of helping child abuse victims.*
For nearly anyone not living hermit's life experiences like these are common, but we are incredibly selective about which ones get our public attention. I say how much attention they get is based not on actual subjective suffering, but on the most viable political coalitions. 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. Ah, but this kind of observation violates sacred norms that prevail in our society. Indeed, my entire post is probably already practically glowing red in the minds of some people reading it, causing a deep emotional disturbance.
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.
I think people complaining about things like implicit association tests are missing the fundamental problem. The problem isn't that people's system I has 'racist' aliefs, it's that those aliefs do in fact correspond to reality.
Why do you believe that people's prejudices are generally accurate?
Look at the statistics for race and IQ (or any other measure of intelligence), or race and crime rate.
They show that East Asian are smarter in average than White Americans, and I'm not sure that many people alieve that.
Any such statistic would also reflect any bias in the law-enforcement system. How do we know how many white people commit crimes but don't get caught?
I do; am I mistaken to do so?
Asian-Americans also have lower crime rates than White Americans. Are you saying this is likely due to "bias in the law-enforcement system"?
I'm not sure whether this is particular to those groups. I would expect that most Democrats, Republicans, environmentalists, animal rights activists, human rights activists, transhumanists, LW-style rationalists, or for that matter anyone who wants to change society in a certain direction, don't have a clear vision of what success would be like, either.
Nor do I know whether I'd consider that an issue. To some extent, not having such a vision is perfectly reasonable, since there are lots of opposing forces shaping society in entirely different directions, and it can be more useful to just focus on what you can do now instead of dreaming up utopias. Of course, a concrete vision could help - but people could also be helped if they had a clear vision of where they want to be (with their personal lives) in ten years, and most people don't seem to have that, either. Humans just aren't automatically strategic.
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.
I submit that the latter who react that way are still abusers - abuse in self-defense is still abuse.
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.
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.
That's a reasonable point - but are there lessons to be learned from organizations that continued to be disproportionally powerful even after their problem was solved?
I'm thinking of groups like the Sierra Club. My impression is the group is less powerful than it once was - and the problem is more solved than it was.
I'm curious if you buy into Moldbug's narration about Catholic v. Protestant as being an overarching framework for liberal v. conservative issues.
Frankly, the idea of conservativism always failing seems to be more an issue of what ideas survive: If a change or proposal goes through, then we think of it as liberal/progressive. Changes to society which get rolled back become more or less forgotten and don't come up in how we think of it. Alcohol prohibition would be one example, where excepting a very tiny group the issue has simply fallen out of contemporary political discourse.
I think you are mixing up different issues. Certainly conservatives manage to roll back some stuff, but that is not relevant to:
MM claims that all net changes are originated on the progressive side, which is a well-defined side with centuries of coherence. Do you claim that there are net changes that originated on the conservative side and were written into the history of liberals? Prohibition is certainly not an example of this. Do you even claim that there are any net changes originated by conservatives? Or do you disagree that there are two clear sides, and it is anachronistic to identify the parties of successful changes in different eras? Prohibition certainly shows that there is not complete identify of proposed changes across time, but that is hardly evidence of discontinuity. If you dispute continuity, what are two such parties that you think do should not be identified?
I don't think there are two clear sides at all, and yes the anachronism issue is a problem also. Moreover, in so far as there's almost anything like two clear sides, a lot of changes have come from what is commonly identified as the conservative end. For example, over the last seventy years in the US in many ways we moved more in the direction of free markets, a conservative ideal. One example is how it used to be outright illegal in the US to own gold bullion where now there's a thriving market.
If the problem of identifying two sides is not just continuity, what is an example of its difficulty at a single point in time?
Owning gold bullion seems to me a poor example. First, it was rolled back in 45 years, longer than prohibition, but not very long. Second, it was only a means to the end of devaluing the dollar. When Nixon moved entirely off of the gold standard, it became irrelevant. Nixon moving completely off of the gold standard might qualify as a non-progressive doing something, though.
In general, rolling back FDR's policies is not a net change.
MM would probably say that conservatives don't have ideals. They talk in terms of ideals because they don't know how else to fight progressives who have ideals. Or because they have been infected with progressive ideologies. I believe that free trade and the free market are Whig ideas. Certainly they were in the 19th century, though if you trace them to the French, they no longer fit in the Tory/Whig divide.
Summary for people who don't have infinite amounts of time to waste (unlike me):
I don't understand this (and don't have the time to read Moldbug): if the whole struggle is essentially of religious character, then aren't both sides upholding religious doctrines? So how does engaging with the progressives mean "conceding the main point" - aren't the progressives likewise conceding the main point when engaging with the conservatives?
Maybe the intended meaning is that the progressives denounce conservatives for being religious, while actually being religious themselves? That would make some sense, but not all conservatives are actually basing their arguments in religion. After all, Konkvistador was talking about "conservatism on Less Wrong", which certainly wouldn't fit the bill.
For those seeking to undermine Progressives, shouldn't you be trying to convince most everyone that Progressives are theocrats, and not just Progressives?
And I thought Moldbug said Progressives win because their politics empower the media, academia, and government, creating a positive feedback loop for Progressive opinions in those arenas.
Not being recognized as theocrats is an advantage they have against conservatives, but that advantage is not as decisive as having a positive feedback loop.
This is what I consider among his most important insights.
Probably yes, but I'm not that confident. Some strategies to weaken the loop if it is understood probably do exist and are probably similar to those of fighting the influence of a particular religion in society.
Think Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Not that confident of what? Something I said?
I agree that the positive feedback loop can weaken. I think it already has. There's a lot more media outside the official channels, and higher education is in the midst of a huge bubble. Maybe government too, with the unsustainable government debt levels throughout the western world.
Will the debt holders basically take control of governments and force them to run their tax farming businesses more efficiently? The IMF has been doing that to countries for years. That seems a more likely future than a Moldbug restoration.
Not that confident the media/academia belief pump cycle is a greater advantage than the hidden nature of their theocracy.
If the hidden nature of the theocracy is the main problem, we'll have to wait for a societal wide embrace of Stirner for relief. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
I had hoped that Hitchens might someday turn on his fellow "atheists", and bring the fight to moral theocracies as he had to supernatural theocracies. Guess not.
Can you think of any moderately prominent person or group who might make the case, and might be listened? I can't.
EDIT: On further review of Moldbug, he has a short series of Anti-Idealism blog posts that makes some of the same basic points that Stirner does. He even makes a similar point to what I have above about the New Atheists.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/why-do-atheists-believe-in-religion.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/our-planet-is-infested-with-pseudo.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/idealism-is-not-great.html
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/unlikely-appeal-of-nonidealism.html
If not for said belief pump, would "theocracy" necessarily even be a boo light?
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.
Yes, you are probably right about that. Still, "tricky" is not the same as "impossible". Humans have made sweeping social changes before, after all; for example, outright slavery is considered to be immoral by a large proportion of humans currently living on Earth, which did not use to be the case in the past. Though, admittedly, such changes would probably be more difficult to effect than, say, the cure for Alzheimers...
Fixing human biology or conditioning is easy with the right technology, but the game theory that often pushed the biology or the conditioning there in the first place can be more tricky.
Very true. Also, the 'right technology' does not currently exist, and isn't likely to in the next decade.
Social reformers often don't seem to understand that pushing a society far away from 'default' human modes of conduct is a bit like pushing a boulder up an increasingly steep slope - you spend more and more energy fighting just to stay in place, while creating an increasingly dangerous pool of potential energy that acts to oppose your efforts. Push hard enough for long enough, and eventually you get crushed as the boulder rolls back downhill.
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.
This seems a straw man.He didn't say they where always or often unsuccessful. Just that this can happen. And we clearly do have examples of unsuccessful attempts. See the USSR or the Puritan Colonies in the Americas.
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.
You have a Baron? We just talk things out over the campfire while pounding willow bark and sucking the marrow out of aurochs bones.
I would say having a Baron is more civilized than having a popularity contest. I bet the latter is how things around the stone age camp-fire where worked out.
You know what it's like living with popularity contests Have you lived with a Baron?
My post was not meant as an endorsement of that lifestyle, nor as a condemnation; I was mainly trying to point out that it existed and was quite different from most stratified post-Neolithic social systems. Honestly, we don't know enough about what the average Paleolithic social structure looked like to advocate effectively for it, even if we wanted to.
I agree with this. Even modern examples of tribes with tech not far above that level aren't representative due to marginal terrain and interaction with other groups.
Also, modern paleolithic societies might be different from early paleolithic societies due to change over time-- it would surprise me if there wasn't gradual improvement in their tools, and there would also be random cultural changes.
It is near-impossible to compare the space of all possible human "barons" with the space of all possible human "popularity contests" and decide which one is more "civilized" across multiple criteria.
Apply this argument to the politics of suffering Konkvistador talked about.
Grunt grunt grunt, ook ook.
performs mitosis
You say there was what size bang?
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.
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.
Probably true, and possibly a tautology.
However, I think it's the same fallacy as judging societies only by how the lowest status people are treated. It's ignoring what happens to a large proportion, perhaps the majority of people.
Also, if better treatment can be figured out for some groups, then perhaps the knowledge can be applied to other suffering when it gets noticed. Life with people isn't entirely zero-sum.
If you see life solely (or even merely primarily) in terms of status, as I believe Konkvistador does, then it is indeed a zero-sum game, since a person's status is a relative ranking, and not an absolute measure (as contrasted with, say, top running speed).
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.
That is the interpretation I made, as well, but perhaps I was mistaken ? I upvoted your comment primarily because I want Konkvistador to clarify whether this interpretation is correct.
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:
"As an Arab and a Muslim, I feel the concept of feminism is an Orientalist dog-whistle. You only need to look down this thread to see the real targets are always the Otherized women wearing burkas - whose perspective is totally missing. The venom is just barely below the surface - a discussion of a boy asking a girl out quickly becomes a ritual condemnation of Afghan customs. Analysing a father's advice quickly leads to back-slapping about how much Saudi Arabia "stinks". Anyone who calls themselves a feminist is perpetuating white privilege and racism."
Unfortunately, I fear that this troll has already been done.
EDIT: Edited to include links.
Has any other reader figured out yet what this obvious reason is supposed to be? I'm mystified.
I suspect that statement was meant to be semantically equivalent to "the reason that men go to strip clubs is, or should be, well known to everyone".
I'm confused. Are you suggesting that catcalling is a strategy for seeing naked women?
I think the point is that feminism tends to assume that it's for some kind of sinister toxic masculinity sex thing?
Ok, a better way to phrase that would be "the reason that men like looking at naked women is, or should be, well known to everyone".
Actually, that depends on what you mean by 'known'.
Everyone knows that most men like looking at naked women, and many who don't feel the attraction themselves can more or less understand it by extrapolation.
However, I don't think much if anything is known about physiological basis (eyes to brain) for men liking to look at naked women.
Agreed. I suspect that Salemicus's statement was meant to be interpreted in the same way.
I'm mystified, too. Furthermore, I bet there isn't just one reason.
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.
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.
Regarding my own comment, I was not condemning afghan customs in the context of their treatment of women, but in their treatment of thievery and other such crimes (I was specifically thinking of the process of escalating blood feuds that often result from that process).
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.
Let me guess (I read the book years ago).
Humans, in any situation, invent something to do, simply because "doing nothing" is not an option. A stupid social interaction is usually preferable to no social interaction. On the other hand, an intimate interaction increases the risk of being hurt, so with strangers people prefer rituals. Ritual provides some small social interaction at almost zero risk.
If I understand it correctly, Salemicus suggests that catcalling is simply a ritual. It is more than nothing. It is less than a personalized message. It is what other people (of the same social group) in the same situation would do.
Why exactly this ritual instead of something else? Dunno. Tradition. You usually don't invent rituals, you inherit them from your ancestors. Somewhere in the past, there was some reason. Maybe a good reason, maybe a random incident. Doesn't matter today. This is the ritual we have. This is what we do when we want to do something, but not something personal.
Speaking of which, a tweet by Sister Y I liked a lot:
"the men are competing amongst themselves to see who can loudestly inform the lady that she is a viable rape target"
That's a solid dig at people who perform a particular kind of behavior that one deprecates. But it just isn't true!
How could we test this?
(Also, this issue might be address somewhat via shorter paragraphs)
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Please be specific. In the post I had already quickly explained a few terms like "microaggression" and used relevant links. I assume familiarity with some terms like "signalling" because they are standard on LessWrong/Overcoming Bias.
I'm not sure what it is about your post that I'm missing, since I thought I knew what all those terms meant (except microaggression, and WP says my guess was basically right). Maybe you're using terms in ways I'm not used to, or maybe I'm just confused as to what your overall point is. MugaSofer's question seems like a good distillation of mine, so I'm hoping you'll answer it.
I'm not sure I grasp at all what you're referring to by those "dynamics". The nitpicking? The pointing at small things rather than the fundamental assumption(s)? (if so, what's the perceived fundamental assumption(s) and which are the small things? Is the fundamental assumption the claim "Women have a larger inferential distance to LW because difference in life experiences"?)
I disagree on this, ISTM that many of those are displaying things substantially different, such as "helping people in general" or "protecting people being harassed".
That whole paragraph rings very true, and deserves upvotes IMO, contingent of me having any idea what "dynamics" you're pointing at.
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
...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 for one would like to hear what you have to say about the post, and I won't downvote you. If you don't want to get down voted by others, send me a PM and I promise I will read it thoughtfully no matter what my intuitive response is.
Yes, that is what oppression feels like. (Albeit it is oppression only within a community that does not form a significant part of your life.)
This is no comment either way about whether or not people's treatment (or expected treatment) of your comments is undesirable or inappropriate. I haven't seen them and have very little inclination to personally get involved (or read) this post given the politics vs insight ratio the subject produces. Nevertheless, and right or wrong, what you experience can be accurately described as what oppression feels like.
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'.
Incidents on the level of those mentioned here are inevitable in any society that has even the slightest degree of diversity. 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.
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.
Depends on the venue. In some places, telling the truth about your internal states is valued more highly.
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:
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.
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.
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 are behaving to the person completely misses the point
No. I might not. And not just because the scale of the outrage. Primarily because that implies that the man is a "rapist" when we have no indication that it is him who is forcing the other to have the hand shaking (or have sex). If neither the disliked man nor "you" wishes to have sex but for some reason you are coerced to have sex with each other then he is not raping you.
I was going to upvote this until I got to the last sentence which seems both needlessly inflammatory and not accurate. The essential point you've made does however seem to have some validity: There's a scale difference in different types of mistreatment, and using the same word for all of them is something that can easily cause connotative problems.
Yes, but how common are those actions? For example, as someone who is of Ashkenazic Jewish descent in the US, I occasionally get mistreatment based on my obvious ethnic heritage. But such events are extremely rare- I can literally count the ones I remember on one hand. That's distinct from some other groups- for example if I were a black man living in the US I'd likely have a list of incidents orders of magnitude larger.
I agree.
Will, would you be willing to describe how this sort of social disapproval is different from the fun sort of disapproval of trolling?
Not even close.
Constructive suggestion regarding the rest: PM someone (e.g. me?) who doesn't seem to be being demonized or downvoted much in this article/thread and ask them if they're willing to help by posting for you / reviewing / pointing out where people are likely to block while reading and just downvote you.
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.
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 time (after stealing all the mead from the tavern), the combat you (the GM) crave will develop naturally.
The 3rd edition WFRP takes a more structured approach to the problem. The minions of Chaos (let's face it, it's always Chaos) get a track, with a pointer on it. Each time the players make a mistake, waste time, or bicker amongst themselves, the pointer moves up a notch. There are markers along the track; once the pointer passes the marker, certain events are set in motion, and the situation grows worse for our heroes; the exact details depend on the scenario. When the pointer reaches the end of the track, all hell breaks loose and the PCs get to make one desperate last stand against the forces of Chaos whom they failed to stop.
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."
Yup. Clearly not the most experienced DM.
Since my comment has been obsoleted, have cow.
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.
I'm afraid I easily skipped my chance to be disturbed by this, with any amount of rumination.
When I watched several episodes, I noticed that the overwhelming majority of characters are female, which seemed strange. Then I got interested enough to read some interviews with Lauren Faust and found how she grew up with three brothers and no sisters and had to watch boys' shows which were mostly about boys. Then I remembered some shows which are full of boys, realized that I took that for granted and understood that making a good show for girls about girls, for a change, makes sense and it didn't bother me anymore.
What bothers me a bit is the recognition of the fact that I couldn't accept how some of the cast are actually female. "Wait, so Applejack is a girl? And Rainbow Dash? And Scootaloo? I can't believe it. Does it make me a male chauvinist?" Of course, I want to count myself as a male chauvinist no more than the other guy, so my unability to accept the whole spectrum of female gender roles that Lauren Faust presents us in the show bothers me. Of course, I deeply respect her for being able to think up and defend such diverse female role models for a girls' show that I still have trouble accepting.
Mmm. Part of the issue here is that the male characters tend to be aspirational stereotypes. When I'm thinking of leaving work early, or I'm bothered by something petty, I ask myself, "What would Big Mac do?" and I smile and keep working. Shining Armor and Fancy Pants are both less relevant for my life at present, but are still good examples.
Perhaps it's significant that I'm focusing only on the stallions and not on the colts- Snips, Snails, and Pip have gotten comparable airtime and lines, and the first two are stereotypical schoolboys (named after the famous rhyme)- but the primary female characters seem to be the adults, not the Cutie Mark Crusaders, and so it seems fair to do the same for the primary male characters.
For most fictional characters that are female stereotypes, it's not as clear that they're aspirational. I'm not sure what "What Would Princess Leia Do?" would look like, but from my first guess it doesn't appear to be a very useful guide to life.
Same here.
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.
Not to mention Serial Experiments Lain (I am not providing a link due to spoilers).
All of these are examples of anime, though. An average person doesn't watch anime, so maybe it would disturb him more to encounter MLP (which, after all, is heavily influenced by anime).
Never checked the numbers, but always felt that shoujo and josei manga and anime were way more widespread and likely to be successful than equivalent male-oriented counterparts (though the top ones in popularity are, of course, shounen stuff).
Er... what if it still doesn't seem disturbing after rumination?
Discord is male, more powerful than the Princesses, and evil.
Er, I don't seem to be finding this very disturbing either.
(Admittedly, I haven't actually watched the show, only read fanfiction based on it.)
Yes. There are certain very common tropes whose gender-reversed version offends me (thereby making me realize that the original version is fucked up too), but almost all characters in a work of fiction being the same gender isn't one of those.
Examples: 1) When a woman posts some mysandrist generalization about “all men” on her Facebook wall, I am deeply offended¹ -- so I can guess how women feel when a man posts some mysogynist generalization about “all women”, which happens more often IME. 2) The latest episode of How I Met Your Mother, in which na nggenpgvir znyr ynjlre gevrf gb jva n ynjfhvg ol syvegvat jvgu gur whebef, jub ner nyy srznyr, kind-of bothered me (though I'm not sure I endorse that feeling) because it reminded me of the gender-reversed version, which is a very common trope and offends me. But sometimes is the asymmetry itself that bothers me: when a woman posts pictures of sexy men in underwear on their Facebook wall, I'm not directly offended by that (I occasionally do the gender-reversed version of that myself), but I am bothered by the fact that no-one seems to flinch whereas when a man posts pictures of sexy women in underwear on their Facebook wall (which happens much more often IME) plenty of people boo that.²
To be fair, this scenario probably should bother you, because it amounts to hacking a critically important social system through the use of the Dark Arts. The gender of the participants is, IMO, less important than the realization of how easily our social infrastructure can be exploited.
Hypothesis: Body dysmorphia for men is only starting to become a serious problem. Wait a generation or so.
“A generation” might be an overestimation. A few hours ago, a Facebook page in Italian about “destroying other people's dreams by exposing the objective truth” published a status “let's tell our gym-going friends that it's cold on Facebook too”, it's been liked by 81 people so far a sizeable fraction of whom are male, someone (using a gender-neutral pseudonym, but with a male cartoon character as profile picture) commented complaining about an “exponential” increase of pictures and videos of people in underwear, and that comment has been liked by 6 people so far of whom 4 males.
EDIT: <troll>I commented “Envy?”, and my profile picture is bare-chested. Let's see how many flames I'll get.</troll> (For all I'm concerned, if you're the kind of person who resents cynicism, you do not subscribe a page about “destroying other people's dreams by exposing the objective truth”.)
People get envious when they see a picture of someone much sexier that they ((possibly incorrectly) think they) are? I had thought of that... as a joke, but it hadn't occurred to me to take that seriously. (Wait, why does my brain think that what's funny cannot be plausible? It must be that, since if an idea is neither funny nor plausible I forget it shortly after hearing/thinking it, within the pool of ideas I do remember, being funny does negatively correlate with being plausible due to Berkson's paradox. Or something like that.) I'm thinking of how to test for this. (If this were right, women who think are ugly would object to such pictures more often than those who don't; also, objecting to such pictures wouldn't correlate much with religiosity, unless for some reason religious people are more likely to think they're ugly. Neither of these seems to be the case IME, but the sample size is small, I cannot always be sure whether someone thinks they're ugly, etc.) I do have a feeling that if I thought I was much uglier than I actually think I am, seeing pictures of half-naked sexy men would bother me much more, but I'm very bad at guessing what my feelings would be in counterfactual situations. (Hey, I do know a version of me with something like body dysmorphia -- that's myself from two years ago! Unfortunately, I can't remember any specific instance of seeing such a picture back then, and also I have changed in lots of other ways too so even if I could there would still be huge confounders.)
Another hypothesis is that one version is more offensive than the gender-reversed version because it's more common. Maybe I'm not bothered by pictures of sexy men because I don't see them that often, but I would get fed of them if I saw them several times a day; and maybe certain women are annoyed by pictures of sexy women because they see them all the time, but they wouldn't be if they only saw them a couple times a month.
Edit: OTOH, “just because you are right doesn't mean I am wrong”, i.e. it could still be that each of several causes plays a substantial role. What I've observed so far seems compatible with a model where that indignation is caused by:
Speaking only for myself, I've had a bit of a fight to calm down about my appearance-- I'm 59 and apparently more or less look it. It's been work (pretty successful recently) to not feel like a failure because I don't look like I'm 30. From what I can gather, this isn't uncommon among women, and frequently in stronger form.
Your frequency argument is relevant, but needs a bit more causality added-- the reason the pictures are so common is presumably because they're what's preferred.
To play Feminist's Advocate for a moment:
Some feminists argue that gender reversal is not a valid technique, since there is a huge power differential between men and women. Thus, when a man says "all women are X", he is implicitly wielding his power in order to dehumanize women even further and reinforce his privilege -- which is what makes the action sexist, and therefore exceptionally offensive. When a woman says "all men are X", her statement may be technically wrong, but it is not sexist, because the woman does not wield any power, due to being a woman. Thus, her statement is only mildly offensive at worst.
Sometimes, when mentally gender-reversing a situation in my mind, some part of my brain pops up and says, “But... $stereotype_about_men, whereas $stereotype_about_women!”. I try to ignore it because the stereotypes are often wrong. (E.g. the slut-shaming one: IIRC, a survey --with WEIRD sample, but people I interact with are also usually WEIRD anyway-- found that
comprise more or less 10%, 10%, 40% and 40% of the population respectively, and IME that's not obviously wrong.)
I would argue that most proponents of this argument do not grok much of mathematics, or at least are inappropriately compartmentalizing.
Sum total differences as single absolute numbers over wide populations are poorly suited to context-sensitive power valuations (judged in terms of available game-theoretic actions and the expected utility results) in individual situations like those statements or the examples in the grandparent.
They may have a point in that when there exists and expected power differential the (A set / B set) reversal technique is not valid, but their actual arguments usually break down when there are four armed women and two hungry men on an otherwise-deserted island with only one line of communication with the outside world (controlled by the women) given a typical patriarchal society in the outside world. Most real-world situations are more similar to this than to the model they use to make their argument.
Agreed; I'm not a terribly good Feminist's Advocate. That said, I believe they'd disagree with this statement:
I've seen feminists argue that situations where women unequivocally hold power over men are much more rare than men think. Some of the reasons given for this proposition are that:
a). Women are socially conditioned to defer to men, and do so subconsciously all the time, even when these women are nominally in charge, and
b). Men are used to their privilege and see it as the normal state of affairs; and therefore, men tend to severely underestimate its magnitude, and thus overestimate the amount of power any given woman might hold.
I might agree, provided they're talking about group averages rather than about all women and all men -- this guy doesn't sound “used to his privilege” to me.
And if they're talking about group averages, I can't see their relevance to interactions between individuals. Suppose that blue-eyed people are taller in average than brown-eyed people, and everyone knows this. Suppose there are two people in a room, one with blue eyes and one with brown eyes. They need to take something off a shelf, and the taller one was the easier it would be to do that. It would be preposterous to say “the blue-eyed person should do that, and if she lets the brown-eyed person do that she's an asshole, as she could much more easily do that herself, given that brown-eyed people are shorter”, if the blue-eyed person happens to be 1.51 m (5') and the brown-eyed person happens to be 1.87 m (6'2'').
Yes, indeed. That's the whole source of the disagreement once all the confusions and bad arguments are shaved off.
However, IME they (nearly always, only exception I've ever seen was on LW) make the opposite claim on the basis of their own experiences, perceptions of power balance, limited (often cherry-picked) data, and/or personal moral intuitions.
From what little (read: I suspect much more than a typical student who has taken a college course in Feminism or Cultural Studies and goes on to join the feminist movement in some way) social science and serious-psychology I've read and understood, it seems that most multiviewpoint analyses and calculations (I've seen the term 'intersectional analysis' thrown around, but AFAICT it's basically just computing multiple subjective judgments of power in a combined utilitarian fashion) end up with much higher variation and fluctuation in both nominal agent power and psychologically perceived power balance than the above feminists would even consider plausible.
What I've read also seemed to indicate a very important (though not incredibly strong, but enough to be a turning point) correlation between the "normalcy" of an individual and how much those feminist claims will apply to them - IIRC, an IQ more than a standard deviation above the norm is enough to bring the "subconscious advantage" and "landed privileges" difference to statistically insignificant levels of correlation with gender. Other forms of abnormality presumably have similar effects (LBGT, for instance), though I only have anecdotal data there.
Admittedly, I don't have much more to show either in terms of hard evidence and clear numbers, but I'd largely attribute this to my poor memory. The difference is that I've argued for many positions and many claims, a good portion of which were similar to those feminist arguments given in support of the claim that the subconscious domination and privilege conditioning is almost always applicable... and I've changed my mind upon realizing that I was wrong many times. When I talk to these feminists, I often quickly realize that they have never changed their mind on this subject.
Given that I've read more balanced samples of evidence than it seems most of them have, and that I've noticed I was wrong and changed my mind much more than them, I'm very strongly inclined to believe that my beliefs are... well, Less Wrong.
Also, you're a pretty good Feminist's Advocate as far as people not devoting their entire life to the cause usually go, IME. And now I'm exhausted for doing so much beisu-ryuu belief-questioning. Whew. Not as productive in terms of belief updating and propagation as I'd hoped, but at least it was good mental exercise.
I haven't studied those issues, but what you say is more or less what I have inferred from my experience in meatspace.
Yes, just because I can play Feminist's Advocate, doesn't mean I actually agree with them :-) That said, I've never taken a feminism course, nor am I a sociologist, so my opinion probably doesn't carry much weight. These kinds of debates can't be conclusively resolved with words alone; it's a job not for words, but for numbers.
Totally off topic, sorry. How did you do footnotes? I'm so jealous.
I use Unicode characters for superscript numerals (on an Italian keyboard under Ubuntu it's AltGr-1 and AltGr-2), four hyphens for the horizontal rule, and regular Markdown for lists (
1.,2.etc.).If male readers feel uncomfortable with the lack of characterization and stereotyping of male characters, and subsequently realize that female readers can feel similarly uncomfortable with all media that fails the Bechdel test (a significant amount), then they can conclude that it's disturbing to think of a world where a gender is reduced to those kinds of stereotypes.
Of course, it's possible to miss one of those elements of the chain -- not feeling uncomfortable in the first place, for example.
But then, it's also possible for them to recognize that some people feel uncomfortable while experiencing specific media and feeling enough empathy to relate to them, even if they don't feel uncomfortable themselves.
I agree with Eliezer, though. I'm a man, and I don't find the lack of fully realized male characters in MLP particularly disturbing (*). I think it would be unreasonable to demand every work of fiction to forgo the use of stock characters. MLP is a show about female ponies and their female pony overlords ("overladies" ?), and that's already about 7 characters right there, so it's reasonable that the rest would end up as stock archetypes. There's only so much attention to go around.
(*) Though I only watched the first season plus the s02 pilot, so I could be missing something.
To be fair, Discord probably isn't anything. It has a male voice purely for convenience. In reality, it would probably sound like The Many (warning: link contains System Shock 2 spoilers).
THEN YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
Seriously, though, considering the large numbers of male fans who aren't bothered by this, character seems to be a bigger consideration than gender. Which is strange, since we all know that no woman could enjoy a show with an all-male cast ...
I'm totally lost here. There must be irony in your post, but where?
Minus the catcalling, too, I assume?
Unwanted female attention toward men exists, but is certainly less threatening, less pervasive, and more socially acceptable.
More socially acceptable is part of the problem-- a man who says he didn't want advances from/sex with a woman who's at least reasonably attractive will mostly be told he doesn't appreciate his good luck.
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.
Yup. Try watching a few episodes, it's pretty good.
Start at the beginning. Don't throw the dice with the more recent stuff.
Couldn't have said it any better.
The show is actually fairly popular amongst the male internet nerd demographic. The original creator, Lauren Faust, was a well-liked animator beforehand, and something about it just caught the popular imagination ('nerdy' references, characters and animation, well-timed slanderous editorials, etc.). There's a huge fandom that constantly produces ludicrous streams of stuff.
There's been some discussion of it on LW, and I expect there's a not-insignificant population of fans here. Or "bronies", as some style themselves.
Updating usefulness of the abbreviation. My initial consideration was whether I should just abbreviate it MLP, since of course people would know I was referring to Friendship is Magic. It gets enough references around here I figured it was in the popular consciousness.
In my opinion, it's not an exceptionally good show. Though from what I've read so far, Fallout:Equestria is awesome.
Find better friends!
I have never heard of Fallout:Equestria, but I started laughing out loud as soon as I read the title. Is this the authoritative source for the story ?
War. War never changes...
Not sure about definitive, but it seems to be complete.
F:E is surprisingly, serious, gritty, and well-written. It's also longer than War and Peace.
First, share your respective definitions of "better" with regard to friends.
Not exhaustive, but "friends for which liking awesome things is not a handicap" is a good start.
Also, look for friends who are at least happy for your sake if you're enthusiastic about something non-harmful.
From the linked article
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.
Helping people is a complicated matter, and I don't think it's just a male-female issue.
If someone is extremely conflict-averse, then the offer of help might be unwelcome because it's likely to lead to more conflict in the short run.
Needing to be helped can be seen as having one's status lowered even further than it was lowered by the initial attack/insult.
And on the other hand, sometimes help works. Sometimes it's welcome. Sometimes the lack of offers of help is seen as a betrayal.
I don't have general principles for telling when help is welcome, though asking the person whether they want help isn't a bad idea if it's a slow-moving situation. I also suspect that there are subtleties of body language which affect whether help will be welcomed.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Knowing this, forget about the "appreciated behavior" and simply do what you believe is the right thing.
Well, as a utilitarian my idea of the right thing depends on what I expect the results to be.
One part of the result will be someone criticizing you, either for speaking up, or for not speaking up. You already know this.
Now what about the other parts? Are there any other reasons to either speak up or not speak up, besides avoiding someone's critique?
(Possibly related.)
It's not the criticism I care about so much as the feelings that incite it.
I don't expect it to affect the catcaller's behavior much, because the rate of negative reinforcement relative to the frequency with which they engage in the behavior is so low (not counting that which they receive from the women they do it to, which obviously hasn't stopped them so far.) I think that explaining to them why the behavior is rude and hurtful is less likely to make them reevaluate their actions than it is to make them think "Some dick got all up on my case today." If it doesn't make the woman feel less like all the men in the world are aligned against her, and just reinforces that feeling, then I wouldn't want to bother.
When I was in high school there was a guy who was in the habit of catcalling who moved in to our school. It wasn't typical behavior in our peer group. When he called at a women from the car, or similar, people would react with laughter and a derisive "what the fuck are you doing Louis?". He stopped quickly enough.
You might not be able to implement that if you are in the minority, but I could imagine it working.
It depends substantially on the cat-callers' motivation. If he thought the behavior was high status, how should others indicate the behavior is low status?
As you say, some proportion of cat-callers will code your intervention as low status and therefore not worth listening to. But some people really don't have a good sense of what the appropriate behavior is, and it is hard to classify three distinction with only behavioral data.
If taking action expected to reduce future instances of catcalling is negatively received, doesn't that seem quite irrational and counter to feminist long-term goals? Is the social-expectation impact of "white-knighting" higher than the impact of letting catcalling go on? ("Ah, women need a man to defend them from catcalling, they're helpless on their own.", or maybe "It's alright to catcall as long as some other men aren't present - it's a social status thing of men")
I think this also sidesteps a ton of other considerations: Some women (edit: "people" would be more appropriate and representative, but within context we're talking about helping women who are being catcalled) have grown up all along as merely victims of various forms of various kinds of abuse and sexism, of which this is sometimes among the lesser ones. If no boys or men have ever stood up for them, and all girls they knew were also victims, what is the default model of the world these women will have, if the subconscious and instincts are left to their own devices? How are they going to feel, in this cruel, unchangeable, hopeless world in which they are helpless and everything they suffer is supposedly their own fault because they "tempt" the males?
I think the long term emotional impact of never having anyone help is far greater than the momentary impact she might feel from being white-knighted and the one the man might feel from the reaction. How true this is also depends on many other factors.
Society (social interactions) is needlessly horrible and complicated. By default.
Responses that directly refer to your desire to see the women as a person, as opposed to objectifying her through catcalls etc. or putting her on a pedestal because of her gender.
Therefore, responses that don't work are motivated out of a desire to protect the woman because she is a woman, rather than because she is a person. "That's a rude thing to say to a woman" is therefore worse than a simple "that's rude".
The idea of "white knighting" is distasteful because people consider white knights to be motivated to protect women because they are women. Removing that aspect gets rid of the white knighting.
If anyone still thinks you're motivated by a desire to protect women because they are women, you could retort with, "she's a person. She has feelings like anyone else."
Ideally yes, but not necessarily in practice. I've been accused of white knighting before for engaging in behaviors that I not only would, but had, engaged in on behalf of men (exclusively in such cases, in fact, since I don't do much for women that I don't also do for men.)
Of course, people can only read observed behaviors, not intents or past actions, but I was hoping to get a wider response to my question, in the form of "this is the sort of response I would like to see," more than "responses motivated in this way are better than responses motivated in this other way." The example that you provided helps, but it's not always easy for a person to tell how their actions would appear to be motivated from the outside. It's not something I would personally be likely to say, but I can easily see someone responding with "that's a rude thing to say to a woman" simply because the thing they're responding to is rude to say to a woman, whereas to say it to a man would simply be bizarre
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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
I predicted with 90% certainty that there would be over 500 comments. On the other hand, quite a few of the comments are mine. On the remaining hand, I'm also 90% certain that the comments will go over 500 even not including mine.
“Just because the two of you disagree doesn't mean one of you is right”¹; IOW, I think both sides are mindkilled to some extent -- though surprisingly much less than usual.
What's your line of thought that large numbers of comments are a clear indication of a mind-killed community?
Probably: controversy -> lots of comments. If you think that, for example, feminism should be trivial or trivially dismissed, then controversy indicates a problem.
Yup, but the arrow pointing the other way (the one NancyLebovitz asked about) is likely waaay thinner and noisier than that.
"Feminism" in its colloquial understanding covers so much beliefs and memes at this point that it's possible to consider some of them trivial (e.g. "the traditional gender structure is unjust, immoral and insidious") while trivially dismissing others (e.g. "most men are currently privileged over most women", "male sexuality is inherently aggressive/antisocial").
Relevant
(I'm getting addicted to linking to posts by Yvain. Maybe I should beemind to not doing that more than twice per day or something.)
I think its fine. More people should read posts by Yvain, and your links seem topical.
Okay, fair enough. Personally, I would say that, yeah, men do have gender-related "privilege", that this is trivial once it's pointed out, and that it's basically part of why "the traditional gender structure is unjust, immoral and insidious". So there you go.
Presumably you consider every more-or-less-polite forum on sex/gender issues to be mind-killed too, then? The fact that people tend to get incensed about, strongly condemn and downvote things that they deem to be politically extremist/misanthropic/misogynistic... is it really the standard by which to judge mind-killedness? Or should we rather look at the quality of empirical and moral arguments used in the discussion, without showing undue tolerance to attacks on the Enlightenment values that LW's mission implicitly includes?
Would you show the same tolerance to overt racism and political extremism in a thread on group differences in intelligence? In my opinion, LW handles that controversy admirably, and has never let the moral issues inherent in it out of the discussion.