= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jandila comments on Factions, inequality, and social justice - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (171)
It is more than a bit disturbing to me how much this perspective appears to be absent from the analysis, and indeed, most such discussion threads about the subject.
It's kind scary when you realize these people are picturing Harrison Bergeron, the movie, not realizing that the original work was a parody of that mindset.
I suppose this is a bit of a sideline, but I was only able to identify Harrison Bergeron (the book; I haven't seen the movie) as satire by placing it in the context of Kurt Vonnegut's other works. It can be read as sincere on its own, if more than a bit heavy-handed.
Political empathy is hard, and the principles motivating a particular ideology - especially if the LW consensus that we underestimate individual variance in thinking styles is correct - can be frequently nonobvious. Factors exacerbating this include that persuasion of the uncommitted often proceeds "cynically," along appeal to values held by centers rather than tails, and that people seem predisposed to constructing the image of the enemy as a photo negative of themselves (or elsewise just incoherent and insane.)
Oftentimes, sea shifts in social values are driven by (as a necessary but insufficient condition) a disciplined ideological core with a coherent set of principles - consider feminism or what would be called neoliberalism. When successful such movements tend to be much more successful at popularizing object-level intuitions (even when grouped under vague headers like "freedom") than the framework that motivates them.
There's something to that, although I think LW's homogeneity matters here -- the aggregate impression LW leaves me as someone who lies outside most elements of the demographic core cluster is that most LWers live in a fairly similar bubble of ideas about the world, and have little idea what the world outside it is actually like, relying mostly on third-hand distillations of pop-sci for information about stuff beyond their areas of expertise.
Pragmatically, when it comes to social justice, LWers in general also seem to be allergic to history -- this post is a good example; the author is talking about the "How come equality" thing (regarding race in a US context, say) and all I can think is "Well, it may have something to do with how a buncha Europeans decided to declare each other off-limits for slavery, created the very modern idea of race to justify it, stole land, stole people, used pretty much everybody else to build a country on the cheap, and used it to create a game rigged in their favor." That's essentially what anti-racists in the US are on about -- they want to de-rig the game or to have viable alternatives to participating in it -- but here I see people speculating about which evopsych dynamics explain the ostensible desire for equality.
I'm all for intellectual curiosity unrestrained by social fashions, but this is not a big mystery. It's just something LW in aggregate knows very little about. The answer is both more simple (in terms of how hard you'd have to work to render it legible to a lay person) and more complex (in terms of the actual underlying process) than that.
I haven't commented directly to the post because it seemed weirdly abstract to me.
It might be worth looking at when inequality is used as a basis for change, as distinct from "we're us! and we ought to be in charge!" (possibly more useful for coups than revolutions) or "we're wonderful! and we've been mistreated! we ought to be in charge!".
I think you vastly overestimate the prevalence and credibility of "...and we ought to be in charge!", and the fact that I've unpacked this specifically as "We want to unrig the game, or be able to ignore you when you play it" in the post above makes me wonder if you concretely realize and/or believe this.
Do you think anti-racists primarily want to replace a white-centric society with a <some other group>-centric one that otherwise looks the same? Do you think this is a significant subset of anti-racist movements? If so, why?
I haven't studied anti-racists in general. I've seen some trends I don't like (setting up prejudice against white people in general and white men in particular, claiming that the pain unprivileged people feel must always trump the pain they cause to privileged people-- I get especially suspicious if that's accompanied by being enthusiastic about eventually getting a demographic win), but I don't know whether that sort of thing will turn out to be the major result of anti-racism.
I've seen some moderation of the excesses I saw during RaceFail (less "Educate yourself!" as educational materials were developed, more realization that allies are useful for talking with people in their own groups who don't listen to Others, and less of a habit of dumping rage). I honestly don't know what the long run is going to look like.
The weird thing is, when I posted about "we ought to be in charge!" I was thinking about people who aren't anti-racists-- in fact I very specifically had Nazis in mind for the second bunch, and was just being a bit coy.
The general trend of my thinking (the question was pretty fuzzy at my end, which may explain part of why my comment seems to have been a Rorschach blot) was to wonder whether there'd been a historical shift in the reasons for trying to change hierarchies.
Some of them would like to see a Brahmin-centric society. A society where being black isn't a reason to deny a person a prestigious job, but speaking incorrect thoughts is. (The second link is not about racism, but the concept is similar.)
I am not sure how to estimate the number of such people. Also, some people in the movement are leaders and some are followers, so it would be important to know the number among leaders.
So he said something empirically true as far as he could tell ("there is research indicating...") but connotationally-loaded (the equivalent of a statement like "All Jews are apes"), in a public forum (billing it as "an attempt at provocation" no less). At best, it's inept communication; at worst it's deliberate shit-stirring and then as a result...
What, people got angry at him? And it didn't come to much except that there were some people angry at him? Seriously, look at what happened in this article you're citing. The guy got a large number of people griping his direction, a lot of support, not even the administrative equivalent of a slap on the wrist, and Stephen Pinker passionately defending him with confused comments about "the difference between a university and a madrassa" (protip, Pinker: a university is a madrassa, because madrassa means "school.")
All of this, while also being implicated in a conflict of interest scandal, and losing the university lots of money on derivates? This is simply amazing job protection. It's not like he was removed forcibly from his position -- the guy resigned a year later, with a year's paid sabbatical and a university-subsidized million-dollar loan on his house! Whereupon he was immediately given a prestigious position as professor at another university and management over a hedge fund, and even put onto the National Economic Council until more conflicts of interest did him in.
This is your example of the PC brigade denying someone a job?
I'm pretty sure Pinker was aware of that. He's relying on the connotations of words. His point (which seems valid) is that the ideal of a university as it is commonly understood allows more free inquiry and statements that may turn out to be wrong, as opposed to for example an institution which has a large amount of theological dictation about what may be studied or proposed.
(For what it is worth, I think almost everything that Summers said was wrong, and is demonstrably wrong given the differences between American and Western European university demographics, but it does seem like he was attacked in an essentially ideological fashion.)
Edit: I do however agree with a fair bit of your analysis, I think that what happened to Summers was to a large extent connected to other ongoing problems, and is in many ways pretty removed from any strong notion of censorship. There were a lot of problems with his administration and focusing purely on these comments misses how many things were going wrong, and misses how he was in practice actually treated.
Really? I doubt most Anglophones, even educated ones, know that -- certainly the way the term is bandied about in the English-speaking press as though it were synonymous with "Extreme Islamist Indoctrination Centre" would make me guess that he's less likely to be aware of that; it seems like very few people I hear using the term that way realize that a madrassa is often explicitly secular.
That's not totally accurate. While in some dialects of Arabic 'madrassa' simply means 'school' in both secular and religious settings, in other dialects the word refers only to where religious Islamic teaching takes place, and not secular schools.
Well, I did, and my impression is that Steven Pinker is in general substantially more educated than I am, especially where issues of culture are concerned. So I would assign a high prior to him knowing any piece of cultural knowledge that I would. (Although I probably know substantially more Arabic than a random English speaker).
At the same time, there's another relevant direction here: Words can have different meanings than they do in their native tongues, and it isn't unreasonable to use in English the word madrassa just to mean the Islamic universities even though in Arabic the word just means university. In that context, the intended meaning of Pinker's statement is clear. In that context, a possibly more relevant worry is the use of an Islamic example as the go-to rather than say a yeshiva where the point would work even better since both Hebrew and Yiddish have common, distinct words for universities v. schools devoted to religious study. But in that context, Pinker's point is probably balanced by general pithiness given how much most Americans know (I suspect a lot more have heard the word madrassa than have heard the word yeshiva for example).
Also, my feeling is that big social changes are twenty years or more in the future, and highly dependent on decisions that haven't been made yet.