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gwern comments on LW Women Entries- Creepiness - Less Wrong
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Comments (472)
Who is in the clown suit, then?
Newsome?
I could certainly buy that one...
Serious Marxian and feminist theory, in any sphere. Not that someone's been seriously trying to post about those on LW and met with hostility, oh no - LW in general just can't bridge the inferential distance to those schools of thought, so what we're getting here is a strawman in a clown suit. We aren't so much failing to extract value from those traditions, we aren't even trying - because it's much easier and more fun to mock it all as self-absorbed non-truth-tracking ivory-tower nonsense.
I've been reading lots of good stuff on both fronts lately, and attempting to mark what's appropriate and good for LW (analysis of systemic behavior, self-perpetuating structures of power, etc), so that I can at least provide some good links eventually. Translating any serious insights into LW-speak by myself is a bit of a daunting task; again, a lot of Marxist/feminist context as seriously studied by those schools of thought is nothing like the strawman version that many people have likely absorbed through pop culture.
But at least I can say that, while the inferential gap between the transhumanist/geek discourse of LW and the discourse of left-wing academia that tech geeks love to deride is great, there is a lot to be gained on the other side. We are ignoring some vast intellectual currents here.
I look forward to your further posts.
my limited research on these topics has been very negative.
I'm skeptical, but I haven't investigated either of those things at all, so I would try to read something about them if you posted it. Has knowing things about those theories been useful to you?
There's a reason it is easier to dismiss some things as non-truth-tracking ivory-tower nonsense. A good one.
This is a feature, not a bug. (Although I don't necessarily claim that the set of vast intellectual currents ignored is perfect, just that there is such a set and that there is non-trivial overlap.)
Yeah. Unfortunately all of that stuff is covered with a thick level of mindkilledness, plus some other incredibly messy stuff, anti-epistemology, etc.
I was really disappointed by the way that rather than adapting the valuable stuff, Atheism Plus just assimilated.
I do think that looking at this stuff would be pretty useful, although it should be scrubbed first.
In many academic fields (including some social sciences, although obviously not econ), Marxist theory is still considered the go-to theory for what most people would simply consider "the economic way of thinking". This means that there's an absolutely huge amount of "Marxist analysis" of culture and society with uncertain status, because economically-literate folks simply haven't had a chance to look at it. Much of this analysis probably makes a lot of sense from the POV of modern economics; much of it is probably utterly nonsensical.
The situation when referring to other branches of "Continental" theorizing (and AIUI, this includes feminist theory) is roughly analogous, except that this particular kind of philosophy spans the range from utterly worthless stuff ("Uncle Bob's musings on life, the human mind and society!") to stuff which is probably valuable but we can't understand it properly because we lack more modern tools wrt. these topics (Freudian psychology might actually be a case in point here, especially in the light of cognitive-behavioral theory, perceptual-control theory and similar) and stuff which just needs some sort of cleanup, like Marxist analyses.
Worth noting that as far as I can tell, the phrase 'cultural marxism' refers to a strawman, and a strawman alone.
Wikipedia seems to disagree, actually. It is used to refer both to a political strawman, and to a legitimate school of thought - which need not have political implications persay[1]. The generally used label seems to be "critical theory", or even "theory" for short (talk about ambiguity!); which definitely includes Marxist ideas in addition to other stuff.
[1] Considering how ubiquitous the use of Marxian theory is in the humanities and social sciences, expecting everyone who uses such theories to be a radical socialist is kind of like expecting all business or econ professors to be extreme conservatives or libertarians.
Hmmm. I have never heard the exact phrase used in a non-politically-smearing context.
I like to think my entire tenure here has been something of an attempt at this, although of course I can't say how successful it's been.
(I'd also characterize it as in black rather than clown suits, at least from the inside. Will Newsome and muflax are the clown suit guys here, God bless them.)
Can I just note I'm amazed by the commenters in this post who are libertarians about money but appear to be socialists with other people's time and attention. The world does not owe you a social living.
Worth noting that libertarians on Less Wrong tend to be libertarians because they think free markets produce more utility without government intervention-- not because they believe a story about taxation being unjustified coercion or wealth redistribution being theft. There is nothing necessarily hypocritical about thinking that wealth shouldn't be redistributed but social status should.
Though I suspect there are pro-free market arguments that would cross apply.
True, it also isn't entitled to stop us from trying to acquire one by imposing arbitrary rules.
Edit: I could equally well turn the question around and ask why liberals aren't trying to make social livings more fair.
I gotta ask: how's your present approach working out for you?
Do you mean the present approach to markets, or to dating?
How your present approach to everything works out in terms of dating.
Is there any chance that there are people who want your company that you've been ignoring?
While I agree with your fundamental point, you seem too be confusing libertarian political philosophy with libertine ethics.
give me three simple examples on the order of length of sequence posts of what there is to be gained from these vast intellectual currents there.
Again, please understand that this is a little frustrating for me. Just throwing some goddamn links without further comment for now, OK? The below is entirely random, just the stuff I had in nearby tabs - I have no idea of what links to pick for a proper LW-style introduction to a subject.
Structural power as applied to decision theory:
http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/AJS1994.pdf
Erik Olin Wright's works on Marxist social analysis:
http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/selected-published-writings.htm
Gender:
http://isreview.org/issues/02/engles_family.shtml
Econ:
http://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2012/10/27/a-brief-anti-economist-history/
http://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/why-does-capital-have-more-bargaining-power-than-labour/
http://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/is-economics-a-gun-that-only-fires-left/
(Also check out Chris Dillow's blog.)
Responding to these in the order I look at them which is not the order you linked them: The gender one fails literally in the first 2 paragraphs.
Women aren't oppressed and haven't STARTED being oppressed due to 18th or 19th century cultural regimes like the bourgeois. This is like explaining black oppression as a consequence of the KKK despite african slavery having been a thing for centuries before that.
can you show me ONE post you read (not at random) that seemed as awesome and sense-making as http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/ or http://lesswrong.com/lw/nu/taboo_your_words/ or http://lesswrong.com/lw/ny/sneaking_in_connotations/ or etc.
http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/AJS1994.pdf this seems good but not actually about Marxism?
http://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/why-does-capital-have-more-bargaining-power-than-labour/ This is good but seems pretty self-evident to me?
Hi,
In the interests of policing every comment about my blog anywhere on the internet thought I'd comment.
@drethelin
It is self evident, but posts like that are intended to communicate the point to libertarians in a way they can understand (eg weird reductionist economist speak). I wish we lived in a world where nobody denied employers have power over their employees, but alas it is not the case.
@orphan
Work is necessary; working for a man in a moustache under hierarchical conditions is by no means natural (in fact, historically people have been incredibly resistant to wage labour and in many cases were effectively forced into it). It isn't about people being free from consequence; it's about their livelihoods and even life depending on whether someone who happens to own, legally, the means of production, decides to 'grant' them the 'privilege' of enough money for basic rights.
Holy shit, that sounds exhausting. How do you find the time?
I was semi-joking, sometimes I just don't bother.
But the short answer to your question is: I'm a student.
People who don't believe that beliefs should pay rent? People who think math interferes with understanding reality?
People who think Eliezer is wrong about MWI, and that his wrongness is likely to interfere with raising the sanity line?
Those might work.
I seem to see more criticism of that than support.
Right. On LW, thinking Eliezer is wrong on QM and that it matters is a clown suit belief.
There's no reason to think a belief is right just because it is a clown suit belief in a particular context.
Edit: Gwern, I think I misread you, so this post accurately states my position, but probably isn't responsive to your comment.
You think that those of us who disagree with EY on QM look ridiculous to most members of LW? I think gwern was saying that criticism of EY's stance is the majority opinion on this website
I think that the locally respectable position is that EY's mistakes describing QM don't matter. I think the purpose of describing QM was to articulate a position in philosophy-of-science.
Whether EY made particular errors is irrelevant to the philosophy-of-science point. And any errors in the philosophy-of-science point are probably irrelevant to raising the sanity line.
Oh, well-clarified. Thank you.
I personally find EY's arrogance regarding MWI off-putting, but I suppose I stuck around the site anyway, so I don't know whether it's driving away others.
yeah. I... antipredict that EY is wrong on QM, but don't expect it to matter.
Are there such people? On LessWrong??
We drove off the most recent one. But it took an unfortunate long time.
People who say: "I think science doesn't support either way yet (and I don't want to make wild guesses about sensitive topics)"?
That sounds completely sober, mainstream, and establishment. (Think of medicine.)
"Clown suit" implies something being extremely low-status. So, no, the example you gave really doesn't qualify.
Will_Newsome is an example of someone who has worn the occasional clown suit here; not about this topic, mind you.
Continental philosophy.
Hmmmm....
Not sure who 'people who expect Super AI or AI in general to have low impact' or 'ditto to have much less impact than typically predicted' are, but they seem between black and clown suit to me. Maybe the person who goes to school in flashy, multi-colored Manic Pixie Dream Girl attire. (I actually was friends with this person.)
Also, I'm not sure if 'scientific racism' is necessarily the one it black all on its own. There's a spectrum from 'more evo-psych than is politically correct' to racist HBD.
Would you mind tabooing 'racist'?
Theists?
They're only out of place on LW; the whole rest of the world is pretty much theist. To use the clothing analogy, theism would be like wearing a business suit to high school.
Plus I don't think I've ever actually seen a theist argue his case on LW. I do know of at least two Catholics who use our shibboleths though.
I've seen theists explain why they're theists and be well-received for it. Actual attempts at conversion tend to end badly -- the community interprets them as disruptive and broadly equivalent to trolling -- but they're also very rare.
Based on this pattern, I'd say the right clothing metaphor would be neither black nor a clown suit, but something more along the lines of wearing a thawb and matching headdress in the US or western Europe: quaint, exotic, interesting, and vaguely backward and threatening in stereotype if not in reality.
Too well received at times. The 'open-mindedness' signalling impulse is such that even terrible arguments in favour of theism are defended from criticism. (Kind of like the privileges given to disabled people.)