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TimS comments on Politics Discussion Thread January 2013 - Less Wrong
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This post about jokes and attitudes the provide cover for bad social actors really caught my interest. But the blogger's position is one that is often met with hostility round these parts, for reasons that are unclear to me.
The point of the blog post is that jokes about certain gender and relationship stereotypes (men are idiots, women are the ball-and-chain) allow actual abusers slide by under the radar by asserting that they are joking whenever they are publically called out on inappropriate behavior. It really resonated with me - and to be frank, it seems aimed at the parts of social engineering that I think LW is worst at.
I object most to is what is left unsaid. For a faint second the author talks in gender balanced ways, then she drops it to spend the rest of the discussion showing how men do this thing wrong. The author could have used an additional anecdote about how women the equivalent, or a gender neutral anecdote, or an offhanded comment noting where women do it too.
But she didn't.
Instead we're left with the impression that unconscious oppression is something men perpetrate on women. It's a similar trick to what she's talking about in her post. Her post is still insightful regarding feminism, but it could have been more. Underneath the overt message I hear her saying that oppression and abuse is a male thing, and her responses in the comments reinforce that. Again, a very good post for feminism, but I had been hoping for humanism, and I left disappointed.
I thought she was saying it was a consent problem. The specific example involves a man, but I didn't see her as saying that women can't violate consent. In fact, her mocking of the January issue of Cosmo magazine includes calling out glamorizing of female-perpetrator identity theft.
More generally, can't an advocate notice that the plurality or majority of the perpetrators of this type of problem are male, even while calling for a better social dynamic for both sexes? I don't think the blogger would disagree.
I don't think the majority of the people who do this are male. I can think of half a dozen occasions just over the holidays where this was done by a woman (and I can recall only one male counterexample). She probably sees it otherwise given her politics, but I'd say it's equally split at best.
I do not expect her to make an equal opportunity blog post. However, you wanted to know why it's met with hostility by some people. The post sends out hostility towards men in an unspoken way, so it is responded to in kind.
One reason gender politics is especially "mind-killing" is that the two least interesting/statistically significant/improbable positions (males are more THIS than females, females more THAT than males) also happen to be the two positions seen as the "strongest".
You have high standards. (shrug).
It looks to me like Not-Your-True-Rejection, but it would look that way to Mindkilled-Me whether it were true or not. (shrug).
Thanks for articulating your reasoning.
I was in the past a regular reader of her blog, until an incident (inspired in large part by a rebuke authored by me, in point of fact) which is still referred to on other feminist blogs as evidence of her... unbalanced perspective, to put it politely. Holly is not a rationalist by any stretch of the imagination, and her blog is very "Our team versus their team."
You mean this? Sorry - don't agree with your position.
Potential downvoters - would you rather a long argument or a polite expression of disagreement that doesn't spawn into a huge debate?
That title looks correct, but I do not visit her blog anymore as a rule - I was asked to leave, and I won't violate that - so I'm not 100% certain. It wasn't my position in the argument; the worst apparently came after I had left, when she started attacking random commenters. AFAIK my main role in the debacle was getting her riled up. My information on what happened after I left is secondhand, however, so I can't point you at specific comments.
This may come back to haunt me re: prisoner's dilemma but- I don't respect rules that have vanishingly small chance of negative consequence if violated.
Surely she's not monitoring IP addresses to call you out in public that you visited her blog when you said you didn't? And even if she were- proxies! Google cache!
I'm an egoist, specifically of Objectivist bent; my rules exist and are followed for my sake, not hers. And I don't stay where I'm not wanted; I can go where I am wanted, and it will be both a more productive use of my time, and more emotionally healthy for me.
I think some of it is a defensive reaction to perceived possible vaguely-defined moral demands/condemnation. Here's a long comment I wrote about that in a different context.
Also simple contrarianism, though that's not much of an explanation absent a theory of why this is the thing people are contrarian against.
What are those?
More sympathetically, people might (well, I'm sure some people do) see avoiding stereotype-based jokes as a step towards there being things you can't say, and prefer some additional risk of saying harmful things to moving in that direction (possibly down a slippery slope).
On the object level, it isn't a success of rational discussion that assertions like "privilege is a social dynamic which exists" turn immediately to the defensive reaction you mentioned. Reversing the discrimination is an extreme remedy, and like all extreme remedies, it gets deserved push-back. But there's no sustained discussion of middle ground positions.
Although I may be mindkiled about this, I think that I am open to discussion of less extreme ways of reducing the pernicious effects of the privilege social dynamic. But even if one thinks that this social dynamic is not pernicious, it booggles my mind that people don't acknowledge the dynamic occurs.
I think a significant amount of that hostility isn't necessarily denying the existence of privilege, but denying that it's a useful way of framing problems.
I also suspect a lot of it is backlash from over-enthusiastic social justice advocates trying to shoehorn absolutely every social problem imaginable into a context of unilateral power dynamics.
It once was the case that privilege was seen as unilateral and one dimensional. I'm not sure this is the case anymore on the cutting edge of so-called privilege theory.
A black man in the United States might suffer from some effects of white-privilege (vs. white men) while benefiting from some aspects of speaking-English-privilege (vs. recent immigrants).
More generally, I'm not aware of any other framing analysis that is (1) acceptable to anti-feminists and (2) sufficiently nuanced to be useful. Hansonian status analysis is not really capable of providing insight into what we should do to solve the perceived problem - even if it is descriptively accurate (at a high level).
Speaking for myself, I find the privilege framework to be the one lacking in nuance or pragmatic application. I use the term "unilateral" because its core mechanic appears to be "person A has power person B doesn't, and person B suffers as a result". Coming from a game-theoretic perspective, which routinely deals with unexpected and perverse outcomes from agents being given different sets of choices, this seems crude in the extreme.
On the subject of multidimensionality, I've read up on intersectionality in good faith, and made an effort to engage with it, but it seems to boil down to multivariate analysis, only instead of using data, simply making stuff up.
So we have no agreed framework? That . . . kinda sucks.
Is there anything we can do about it?
What do you want out of a framework? What should it do, and why is agreement important?
I will quite happily construct a model to try and capture the behaviour of real-world social problems, drawing on a variety of methods and disciplines. I'm not sure I need agreement from any other party to do that. How well it describes or predicts real-world events is an empirical question.
When I see people talking about privilege, it generally isn't because they want to go out and solve social problems, but because they want to show how sophisticated and moral and liberal they are, or to identify other sophisticated moral liberal people by engaging in exclusive dialogue with them. If that's what such a framework is used for, I'm not entirely sure the absence of one is all that important.
I want analysis that tells me what to do to create the changes that I want in society. Not just imposed top-down, but deeply settled as part of how society works - on the level of "get a job" or "be polite." The sort of thing "equal-pay-for-equal-work" aspires towards, but maybe hasn't reached.
The privilege-framework says that the way to do that is to call out privilege when you see it. If someone makes the non-consent joke the blogger highlighted, say "Wow! That's not right." (Then change the topic, probably).
Do you think that response won't work, isn't worth the effort, is aimed at a non-problem, or other criticism?
Assuming the counter-parties share terminal values but are applying inconsistent interventions, at least one party is doing something that doesn't help solve the problem, and may even be interfering with the good solution. Worst case scenario is that both parties are doing it wrong.
I have a lot of time for the sentiment in the blog post you linked to, but don't think privilege is a necessary concept in order to appreciate it. I don't even believe it's the most obvious criticism of the behaviour in question.
By way of analogy, lets say Pat wanders around everywhere with a sword and Chris doesn't wander around everywhere with a sword. If Pat stabs the defenceless Chris in the chest with a sword, you could frame this in the context of power dynamics, and bemoan how Pat has "sword privilege", but this doesn't really get to the core of the problem.
Calling out Pat's sword privilege doesn't offer any explanation as to why Pat has the sword, or why Pat was motivated to stab Chris. It provides us with a narrative for establishing blame and victimhood, but it doesn't actually tell us anything about the underlying situation or how to remedy it, at any level.
EDIT: WTF, copypaste. I meant to quote this bit:
Be careful not to confuse "Online SJ-oriented callout culture" with "the idea of power gradiants and institutionalized privilege as a tool for analyzing complex social and cultural phenomena."
I generally find it worthwhile to separate the action-motivating aspects of a framework from the universal-acceptance aspects.
That is, if I endorse the privilege framework because I believe it effectively motivates right action according to my values better than the alternatives, then one option is to embrace it and act accordingly. If my belief is correct, one consequence of that will be that I am more reliably motivated to act rightly by my values. If I also talk about my actions and my motivations for those actions, I will provide evidence of that to others, thereby encouraging them to also embrace the privilege framework (at least, insofar as they share my values, and possibly even if they don't).
In the meantime, they won't, and (as you say) we won't be perfectly efficient. Hysteresis is like that.
The advantage of hysteresis is that if it turns out I'm wrong and the privilege framework doesn't optimally motivate right action, there's a greater chance of collecting evidence of that truth before we've collectively invested too much in a suboptimal practice.
Given how often we're wrong about stuff, that seems like a worthwhile advantage to preserve.
I could probably word that more succinctly as "Practice beats proselytizing."
I'd generalize the point more broadly to say that jokes are a good way to get things you otherwise can't say past the radar.
That's the opposite of the point being made in the post, not a generalization of it.
At least, if I've understood you correctly — you're saying that when people make jokes about coercive/irresponsible men and passive-aggressive/nagging women, they are expressing a universal truth that society refuses to hear stated. To grossly oversimplify, we could state the blurred view proposed by the jokes being referred to as "All relationships are abusive".
The post TimS links to asserts, rather, that these jokes represent a blurring of distinctions that society fails to recognize. There actually do exist relationships that are more consensual and ones that are more abusive — the distinction — but insofar as everyone pretends that all men are coercive and all women passive-aggressive, they blur this distinction.
Moreover, blurring this distinction provides cover for the actual abusers by making the good relationships out to be just as bad as the abusive ones. If everyone is required to talk about their relationships in nonconsensual/abusive terms, then the people in consensual relationships cannot distinguish themselves as such. Hence, the post: "Even though Rowdy's brother-in-law wasn't really coercing his wife into a major responsibility she didn't want, he was cheerfully playing into a story created by, and validating for, men who really would."
It's a little like Soviet-era "moral equivalence" arguments, or more generally the tu quoque fallacy, when tu don't actually do quoque!
There's a lot of truth in stereotypes. Not all women nag, but more do than men. Not all men are irresponsible, but more are than women. Since it's very difficult to make statements like that seriously in modern society - usually, you can only say it either anonymously or in groups of close friends whom you trust to not take it personally - a lot of people embed it in comedy, where the filters are lower, and where there's more reason for it to come up in the first place than just expressing bias.
It's not a harmless practice, of course, but it does provide a useful safety valve sometimes.
I seriously doubt that most people who make up jokes or stereotypes truly have enough data on hand to reasonably support even a generalization of this nature.
Stereotypes are largely consensus-based, which gives them a larger data pool than any individual would have. If a comedian starts making jokes about the foibles of a large group, and most people haven't experienced those same foibles, they're not going to find it funny. Now, smaller groups can get a lot nastier treatment, both because there's less evidence to contradict a stereotype, and because they can turn into the token butt of jokes(Newfies being the stereotypical example where I'm from - nobody actually believes the jokes, but everybody makes them just because they're the group you make dumb-people jokes about). But "women" is a far too common group to get much in the way of false stereotypes, for example.
At this point, I should also point out the dangers of stereotypes that are true only because culture forces them to be. For example, saying that women needed protection in the 19th century was basically true, but it was largely true because we didn't let women protect themselves. Feedback loops are a real danger.
I think you are discounting effects such as confirmation bias, which lead us to notice what we expect and can easily label while leading us to ignore information that contradicts our beliefs. If 99 out of 100 women don't nag and 95 out of 100 men don't nag, given a stereotype that women nag, I would expect people think of the one woman they know that nags, rather than the 5 men they know that do the same.
Frankly, without data to support the claim that:
I would find the claim highly suspect, given even a rudimentary understanding of our psychological framework.
It's a system seriously prone to false positives, of course. But I think the odds of a true stereotype getting established are sufficiently higher than the odds of a false one getting established that it still counts as positive evidence.
What are you envisioning this "safety valve" averting?
Groupthink.
Edit: Per discussion below, I should clarify that I'm referring to a particular think that a particular group engages in("political correctness"), not the psychological phenomenon in general.
Ah, I see what you mean. Thanks for explaining.
And, sure, if nobody can seriously express the sentiment that women nag more than men do, or that men are more irresponsible than women, then being able to humorously express the sentiment that all women nag and all men are irresponsible is, as you say, a useful way of averting groupthink. It's not good, but it's better than nothing.
I'm not nearly as confident as you sound that the premise is true, but I agree that the conclusion follows from it.
If people are making a large number of similar jokes, then that's another sort of group think.
(nods)
It's sometimes helpful to draw a distinction between "lots of people do X" and "nobody is allowed to do Y."
The groupthink Alsadius is positing is the latter; it involves nobody being allowed to express certain sentiments. As I said, I don't see where he's getting his confidence that this is true, as I don't see much compelling evidence for it, but accepting it as a hypothetical I agree that the "safety valve" theory he's talking about follows from it.
The groupthink you're positing is the former and suggests different tactics.
FWIW, I don't think it is true - you don't have far to go to find a claim that, say, women are crazy, or black people steal, or half a dozen other terribly politically incorrect things(true ones and false ones). But a big part of the reason is because we have these unofficial lines of communication. Good luck finding official data on things like racial crime stats - self-censorship has basically destroyed that. Chris Rock is all we're left with.
Yes, it's amazing how easy it is to dismiss opposing arguments when you start by "grossly oversimplifying" them into something clearly false.
I didn't think I was dismissing an opposing argument; rather, pointing out that the article TimS linked to was making the opposite of the claim that you stated as a generalization of its point: not "these jokes express unstated general truths" but rather "these jokes express false generalizations ... and thereby leave significant distinctions unstated and, indeed, more difficult to state."
This is true regardless of whether the "things you can't say" are true. Furthermore, the whole contrarian/red pill/pretty lies/uncomfortable truths meme is toxic. It's a death spiral. All opposition demonstrates your superior insight, and all agreement demonstrates your superior insight. Everything demonstrates your superior insight, which together with the normal repertoire of human biases makes it pretty much impossible to encounter any evidence that you're wrong.
There are no red pills, only blue pills with red sugar coatings.
Not quite. The joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience.
Nevertheless, I agree that the joke is no substitute for an argument. It's necessary to get society to the point where it's possible to make the argument without being declared unfit for polite company.
Nonsense. All it takes is that the audience want to believe it. Experience is not truth; a large part of people's "experience" is their own beliefs. This is just the same death spiral again. If they laugh, that proves I'm right; if they boo, that proves I'm right.
The argument for what, in the context of the original posting? That in a marriage, the natural and desirable order of things is that man shall be the absolute ruler and woman the slave, and that any other arrangement is a futile struggle against our fundamental biological nature that if pursued will bring only doom and destruction?
Heck, a large part of people's "experience" is fiction.
For instance: By the age of fifteen, if there are no doctors and nobody chronically ill in your immediate family, you've likely spent more time watching and reading fiction about doctors and medicine than you've spent discussing medicine with actual doctors. So your ideas of what doctors do are going to be based more directly on fiction than reality. One consequence of this is that there are a lot of common false beliefs promulgated by medical fiction. (Warning, TVTropes.)
For that matter, I suspect many fifteen-year-olds have heard more lawyer jokes than they have heard sentences spoken by an actual lawyer other than a politician. (Though one can hope they've taken more of an impression from Atticus Finch than from kill-all-the-lawyers jokes.)
(And yet, many fifteen-year-olds decide to become doctors ... and lawyers ... and other professions whose reputation and habits they have learned about chiefly through fiction, jokes, and stories rather than through observation.)
For that matter, the claim that "the joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience" implies that the erstwhile popularity of jokes about Poles being stupid and impractical was good evidence that Poles actually were stupid and impractical.
Ceteris paribus yes.
This seems like heresy to me from a Bayesian perspective.
Note the difference in meaning between the two italicized phrases?
What did I say that could reasonably be interpreted this way?
(Edit: thinking about it, I think I see how you got that impression: Laughter is evidence that you're right, an extreme negative reaction is weaker evidence that you're onto something. Indifference, or a non-extreme negative reaction is thus evidence that you're wrong.)
Seriously, could you at least try not to straw-man my position?
Consider "proves" replaced by "is evidence in favour of". It doesn't change my point.
That's the other half of the pattern -- which you obligingly go on to complete:
Did you read the sentence I wrote after that one?
Yes. The whole argument's a crock.
This seems a straw man.
Maybe it's just me, but your comments here seem a bit hostile.
I don't think you should call an idea a death spiral. It is vulnerable in the way you say, but that doesn't reflect on the idea, it just means we humans have to be really careful with it.
We do have a whole sequence on how to deal with such ideas. None of the advice is "don't believe it".
Again, we have plenty of material on LW for conserving expected evidence and watching for biases.
If you are arguing that things you can't say are toxic outside LW for the untrained masses, I recommend that you spend your time convincing them to study rationality instead of convincing them to believe things for reasons other than truth.
Come on, this is a straw man. The OP was talking about abusers, not fictional extremists. Eugene had explicitly generalized to other taboo issues anyway.
There are idiots who say such things, but there are also a lot of really interesting ideas (in the sense that they are important and debateable) that don't get discussed enough because people punish anyone who brings them up. Censorship of whole topics doesn't really seem like a good way to handle a few vile idiots.
Tone is usually uninteresting, but I think it's worth noting in the case of these "red pill" ideas; The red-pill types tend to use careful argument (because they have to to be taken seriously) while the maintream responders use weak arguments and social bullying (because they are surrounded by fellow believers). This apparent difference in the power of the arguments can confuse naive open-minded people (like myself a few days ago). Please consider this when responding to dumb ideas.
I'm expressing disagreement with a common meme around here. Of course that will seem a bit hostile. But I shall not engage in any red-pill framing of that uninteresting fact.
I'm not talking about the things you can't say, but about the idea of things you can't say. That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men's rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
That is not my observation. The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting. The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: "ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them", "to give is to receive", etc., and in other places it would be. There's not much argument there, careful or otherwise. Of course not -- it's cracked.com, that's the sort of thing that people go there for. I previously linked another example of the genre here.
Working through the Google hits for "red pill" turns up few specimens of conspicuous rationality, and to talk about "mainstream responders" is already to have yielded to the tainted insight of the red pill pusher.
This is a good point. Thanks for pointing it out to me. I've been having a crisis of faith on quite a few of those "red pill" ideas recently and I'm sure this will be useful next time I think about any of it.
That said, it seems to me that the standard cult attractor advice and conservation of expected evidence is sufficient to diffuse this effect. Do you think so, too? Or do you think we are not good enough at it such that we have to add extra caution? Or something else?
Basically what do you recommend for a well-sequenced LWer to do to entangle their beliefs with reality on these sorts of issues?
Huh. I wonder why. I don't really hang out anywhere like PUA forums or racist blogs or anything like that, so maybe I only encounter the good stuff that has enough sensibleness to it to filter into the rest of the internet? I guess then we would see the opposite on PUA forums; mostly average idiots who can't handle the is-ought distinction, and a few intelligent mainstreamers coming in and poking holes in people's tripe (I also might expect a few more troll raids from mainstreamers than there are troll raids from PUA to mainstreamer areas, though this could easily be confounded by other factors)
That article is fucking gold. Thanks for the link. Now unfortunately that was not the point you were trying to make...
I did notice (since you sent me there looking for it) that it was callous and condescending and such (even for cracked). I also noticed that I don't usually notice that kind of stuff outside LW and other "intellectual areas". If you hadn't pointed it out, I would have just filtered the crusty crap and kept the good advice at it's core. I guess it's a habit I picked up from 4chan.
I've got a better one. I summed up the whole thing with "Just Do It!". However, I don't think it's a good idea to dismiss an article because you can say the same thing without 99% of the article. Here's why:
I run into pieces of genuine good advice all the time, on LW and elsewhere, and I've noticed that I can't really learn or take advice from just a summary of it. Summaries of ideas works really well to precipitate concepts that you already have all the support for, and to convey dry facts, but not for advice and experience. See moral truth in fiction for an analogous argument. As an example, When I read truly a part of you, I was like "yeah that's cool", it wasn't until later that I figured the idea out for myself and realized "holy crap someone already told me this."
So with that said, even if you can boil down the essential idea of an article to a single sentence, it may still have substantial value as something that creates the experience required for you to actually get the idea. I think that cracked article works like this. It's a simple idea (not even 6 simple ideas), but all the added inflammatory crust create an experience the actually communicates the idea, instead of just saying it.
I can believe that that article is not written in a way that works for everyone, but I think that for some people (the target audience, for example), it's exactly what they need to hear, and anything nicer wouldn't get the point across.
I will throw in that the "come on aren't you man enough to hear the truth?" thing is toxic as a rhetorical device, as it can make otherwise worthless stuff more compelling. (because if you don't even read this then you are weak).
Like cracked.com and 4chan? Sensibleness is not the filter for popularity on the internet.
Different people respond to different forms. Some are suckers for a man in a white coat intoning "studies have shown". Some will lap up Deep Wisdom from anyone in Tibetan robes. Some will believe anyone who shouts at them loudly enough. (Makes for some interesting dynamics on PUA and NLP forums, where assertion is alpha, but both agreement and disagreement are beta.)
It's more that you can write the same content with a completely different 99%, with many completely different 99%s. Ayn Rand, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Feynman could have written the same content, in different ways. How does one determine whether one is responding to the clothing of the message, rather than the content? The red pill idea is particularly attractive to anyone who thinks they're smarter than those around them. And look where we are, LessWrong, where "contrarian" is a compliment, as if reversed consensus were intelligence.
Skilful means, as the Buddhists put it. But of those who think they learned something from that article, how many would have learned whatever message the writer might have expressed in the same style?
Can you link to an example of someone using it as a compliment? I don't think this is actually the case. It's simply much less of an insult here than it is in most "skeptic" communities.
For what it's worth, I agree that this poster is at least as characteristic of the meme cluster we're talking about as its more polite/locally celebrated/refined advocates. What's worse, I suspect that it's the locally celebrated "red-pill" contrarians who are shrinking from the conclusions of many of their (anti-egalitarian, etc) memes and that this poster just logically extrapolates the "red-pill" premises to produce his alarming view of gender, "deviancy", etc.
Another far more famous example is Theodore Beale/Vox Day... and a few other bloggers whom I'd rather not link to.
Or their biases, or their culturally-acquired beliefs...
I think you may have quoted the wrong thing here?
Yes. Had that happen over on the other one too. Thanks for pointing it out.
I've been thinking of making a new political slogan aimed at the "thoughtcrime" crowd: "What you need is red ink, not red pills!" Meaning that there really aren't horrible truths about society that are hidden from the ignorant masses but revealed to the brave and sufficiently cynical few; most people (even the "average" ones) do actually perceive all the information they might need about the society they live in, but cannot articulate and communicate it, so on some topics only a scrambled message of discontent and anger can be heard.
Meh.
Elaborate please.
(Sorry for getting into tribal matters, but this is explicitly about tribalism:)
In particular, a long time ago I asked you and your alt-right associates: why do they think liberals are so adamantly in denial about the possiblity of racial differences in intelligence. All the alt-right/reactionary commenters everywhere seem to think that it's clear-cut: liberals hate Truth in all its forms, and "elite" liberals especially hate it, and they simply want to speed the collapse of decent society with such anti-Truth policies.
I tentatively suggested, however, 1) that there are no real contradictions between the ideology of modern liberalism/progressivism (as it is preached and written), and, say, the average Jew having higher IQ than the average European having higher IQ than average black people - and 2) that the semi-official ban on the topic in liberal academia exists because of complicated self-image and methodology issues going back to the Enlightenment era, and because of sincere, well-intentioned fear of resurgent racist oppression.
So, essentially, nobody is deliberately spreading lies, deliberately concealing truths, making up stories about a dragon in the garage, etc. Instead we have a complex, silent carpet brawl around the meta question on the proper relation of the normative and the descriptive in politics - e.g. given how much we value moral equality, should we try to justify it with facts/axioms about our environment, or with a deontological, non-disprovable position? - where neither side is even psychologically able to state the issue. That's how hard sufficient levels of reflection are.
How'd you say? (And btw, do you think that my meltdown about all this meta crap qualifies as evidence? I realize that my thinking is... not very close to "standard" liberal or right-wing thought, but might there be similar psychological tension generated in their long-standing conflicts?)
"Me and my allies."
I refuse to frame a debate in such terms for obvious reasons and am despondent you have chosen them. Honestly I think you are being mind-killed about this and are pattern matching my positions to ones I just don't hold.
You are completely correct. This was indeed indefensible and inexcusable of me, and pretty much a direct spit upon your goodwill. I was frustrated by my inability to "get even" with an opposing group that has long trumpeted its honesty and accused my views of hypocrisy. I let this primitive emotion get the better of me.
Such little things are what shits up the whole discourse. I understand and agree. I'm sorry.
Up voted. I hope you know you have no more hard feelings from me on this.
No. On the topic you mentioned they quite obviously are.
For someone who's done as much well-known and controversial stuff in his life as Gould, you're really going to have to narrow it down for me. I'm not sufficiently familiar with this debate to know what you're referring to.
See discussion related to Gould's book Mismeasure of Man in this thread.
Why do you think religious conservatives are so adamant about abortion or contraception?
I think you haven't understood the exact question. Opposition to abortion or contraception are policies; racial differences in intelligence are an entirely external fact which should only affect policy after you filter it through the lens of your ethics. A better analogy would be confronting a Catholic with a claim that allowing abortion would make for much less poverty and death in the 3rd world. And even then, a liberal confronted with race differences in intelligence would not be similarly pressured to allow e.g. apartheid, if there is an explicit and sufficiently high value for moral equality between the races in the liberal mindset, and this moral equality demands some sort of practical egalitarianism!
What I claim in this particular example is that, since the secularization of progressivism/liberalism around the Enlightenment - and its pragmatist/utilitarian posturing - it has been having trouble deriving moral equality from first principles here, and deep down there's awareness of that. So liberals desperately try to derive an egalitarian "ought" from an inconvenient "is" - even though nobody's forcing them to!
It wasn't exactly analogous, but it wasn't meant as such. If I wanted to do that I would have brought up Creationism among Protestant Americans.
I fundamentally think there are very strong sacredness based feelings around this that are not based on consequences in the real world any more than other kinds of religious thinking is. There obviously are good secular conservative arguments in favour of religious thinking guiding how our society develops though.
Throughout the 19th century, there have been leftist thinkers - from moderate and "respectable" ones to hardcore radicals - who either had no problem acknowledging differences in average intelligence, or were even outright racists/white supremacists. E.g., I've read that many American abolitionists either acted xenophobic towards actual black people when they met them, believed that blacks can never match whites in ability or achievement, etc. Yet their moral and religious opposition to slavery - all men are created in God's image, and ought to be treated as such - covered the immorality of one race subjugating another. So... eh, it's contradictory and messy. But ultimately egalitarianism, like all moral emotions, need not be chained to any particular empirical belief.
This seems like an ok model to describe what his happening.
It is not at all obvious to me that any other hypothesis is needed to explain Gould. Why, he practically says that he kept telling himself "human equality is a contingent fact of history" until he believed it.
But Jared Diamond does appear to me to be deliberately concealing truths, because he is fairly careful not to outright lie (and because he used to be into human biodiversity).
To address the average racial IQ thing, I think that a big part of the left's dislike of it is cognitive dissonance, in a similar fashion to the right's reflexive denial of climate change. They're facts that tend to get used in ways that they find repulsive, and it's easier to deny the fact than it is to make a claim of "It's true, but let's not worry too much about it". In both cases, deniers tend to deny even when questioned in private in my experience(and I'm using friends as my reference group here, so I assume they'd fess up to it being tactical if it was). In both cases, there seems to be a more intellectual strain(which I'm a part of in both cases) that actually does make the "It's real, but who cares?" argument.
(Hopefully that illustrative parallel doesn't turn into an AGW flame war...)
No.
Humans are neither smart or sane enough to be likely do what they want to do with the information available to them. As a whole we have a only minuscule chance of ordering matter in the next few million years in a way likeable to our values.
We are playing in a universe set to difficulty setting without an eye for human ability. Normal people can't even predict the weather for a few days in advanced, and our entire civilization can't in principle do so for more than a few weeks, yet here we are arguing about things like the economy or a culture or governments made up of millions of human brains and algorithms running on computers that can predict the weather for several days.
You are forgetting the basic fact that most of our intelligence evolved for the purpose of winning at socialization and navigating tribal politics! Weather is weather, and huge centralized societies really are impossible to take in at a glance, and very hard to make predictions for - but there are still ansectrally familiar patterns everywhere, even where they aren't needed so much - say, ancient structures of dominance being replicated in the workplace - and human instincts can derive a lot of information from observing those patterns.
Although much of this information is going to be garbled or changed by the context, I still claim that people already have lots of "unknown knowns" about the tribal politics, families, work relations, etc that surround them - all simmering somewhere in the back on their minds - and that consciously interpreting and articulating these "unknown knowns" can, (as Zizek suggests in a few places, AFAIK), be more useful than trying a strictly positivist approach to social dynamics.
We have no reason to trust human intuitions for societies orders of magnitude beyond the Dunbar number. They are feedback as to how individual humans are going to end up feeling in any society and that is important since humans are presumably what we care about but there is very little sense in giving much weight to such heuristics as usable maps for political action or institution reform.
The fact that people have lot of "unknown knowns" in no way implies that they don't have many "unknown unknowns".
People frequently tend to think the know more than they actually do. When it comes to knowledge people are frequently overconfident.
This is, simply put, the usual rallying cry of hatred: the claim that the Enemy knows the truth but denies it; knows the good and hates it, deliberately works to corrupt it; etc. — see, e.g., Torquemada or Luther regarding Jews, Kramer and Sprenger regarding "witches", Lenin regarding kulaks; Pol Pot regarding intellectuals; and so on. It's not a factual claim based on evidence; it is a form of dark cheerleading.
(It is also not specific to a particular ideology or political faction — left, right, "Third Way", secular, religious. It is, however, a common precursor to the dark times when adherents of an ideology decide to stop arguing and start killing.)
Lets begin with this. Do you take this argument seriously? Or is it just armament? I refuse to think you don't have any clue as to how utterly devastating this argument is when applied to the left in the 20th century.
Let alone how this applies to the Dickian Gnosticism we talked about just a few days ago!
Okay, this joke's totally on you! Dick (and some earlier Gnostics) essentially made the very same suggestion on metaphysical knowledge that I entertain here about social knowledge; it's an unknown known that most people already happen to possess, but which must be brought to the forefront of consciousness via a revelation event he called "Anamnesis".
Actually you are right, here I was doing the pattern matching.
I think this is because how I see Gnostic like beliefs working out in the world. Humans being social will tend to share them and such movements spiritual or otherwise consist in a large part of an enlightened guru with special gnosis telling you what you have "forgotten" and must learn relearn.
I would like an answer to the tribal question I posed. Do you see how this argument applies to leftism?
That leftists were wrong to force their propaganda, clever and logically superior as it might appear, upon the masses who wisely stuck to conservatism since forever and understood conservative wisdom on a gut level? Yeah, yeah, you'd say that it's just as bad or worse than the modern "thoughtcrime" currents I mentioned - but I think there is a significant difference.
For the last 200 years, lots of revolutionary/populist left-wing movements, even non-Marxist ones (incl. ultimately triumphant ones like 1st/2nd-wave feminism or abolitionism), have been using variations on class consciousness as a theoretical foundation for their agitation and rabble-rousing. And at least their official descriptions of "consciousness-raising" have been much like what I mean - and what I assume Zizek means - by "articulating the unknown knowns".
Of course, reality is messy and politics fucks shit up, but ultimately I feel that the idea of consciousness-raising is not a clever trick, a deception of the masses who know better but are led astray. In the right hands it can serve as social psychoanalysis of sorts, to resolve deep-seated exploitation and oppression by dragging them from the collective unconscious into the light. A good example is how Western countries are practically at the end of homophobia. It was first systematically opposed by the Left's critical theory and Freudo-Marxism; now it's vanishing even on the right. Of course, there have been failures, which naturally resound louder - such as the reckless politics of "national liberation" leading to rivers of blood and zero liberty in the decolonized countries.
But here, before you say: "Aha, so you admit that this radical meddling is irresponsible and unaccountable!", I'd ask you to consider, what if the masses have always had a desire for emancipation, what if the ideas of left intellectuals could never have been so transformative without a mute but powerful demand for them?
Every revolution has a fundamentally real reason! It might not even be a "good" reason - see the "men's rights movement" and their politics of bitterness - but a revolutionary trend cannot be kicked off with simply propaganda, mass psychosis or shallow moral fashion! This reason can stay deep and strong under a calm surface, dormant for ages. Slaves did have fundamental overwhelming discontent about their position in America; women did have fundamental overwhelming discontent about their position before feminism. This fundamental psychosocial reality of oppression is what the oft-derided Marxist Historical Materialism is clear-headed about, and what can lead a right-wing thinker to denial (e.g. Moldbug on the Russian revolution) or biting bullets (e.g. Chesterton on the French one).
And, like Gramsci said, the oppressed masses can and do generate their own intellectuals who are driven to become a voice for the voiceless - by their origins, not by whim or ethical abstractions. Who taught racial equality or feminism to Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave (who must've simply got a jackpot in the genetic lottery)? Evil power-hungry Northern abolitionists?
No, it must be the same process by which a black PUA-practicing guy commenting on a men's issues blog can realize how his struggle is very similar to that of women, despite all the public hostility between feminists and PUAs. When he articulates the prejudice and oppression that have been a personal concern in his life, he can't help but notice that other groups face very similar oppression. Grassroots leftism!
P.S.: Konkvistador asked if Nazism could count as a catastrophic and evil consequence of this sort of thing. The communist terror in China could, I think - but not Nazism. The Nazis killed and enslaved people under a wholly illusory cover of fighting an arbitrary Other. Their violence was not directed at the real social system.
A more compelling example of a social revolution causing catastrophic evil things would be the Red Terror and the Cultural Revolution in China. It was indeed mostly driven from below with encouragement from Mao; it was a part of sweeping systemic changes; it concluded decades of chaos and strife, and centuries of misery and exploitation; this still doesn't justify an orgy of slaughter and cannibalism. I don't know in what way to talk about it.
Perhaps this is happening in the system as a whole, but I wouldn't call this a silent brawl if none of the involved know what the fight is about. And since you posit such a complex explanation...
Show me the evidence!
I said meh because meh was what I meant. I feel a very strong moralizing dimension to the post and the link that just left me shaking my head. A kind of projection of internal life to a universe, assuming it that runs on stories.
I'm used to being at least intrigued by your posts, that one proved an exception.
It is certainly an attractor people here would find themselves vulnerable to given the support for contrarian positions like cryonics.
As a rule of thumb, I assume that anyone claiming to be only joking is lying. They are saying exactly what they think while pretending not to.
So you endorse calling them on it, ceteris paribus?
What you do about any particular instance will obviously depend on the situation. Some things are worth speaking up about. Some things are worth making non-verbal indications that their joke is bombing. Some just deserve to be ignored. You don't want to be this guy.
I don't? If the expected social improvement exceeds my personal cost (taking into account my opportunity cost), why shouldn't I act? Taking that xkcd to mean what you assert suggests you think all social advocacy is wasted.
More generally, the blogger I linked is complaining that the joke didn't bomb and generally doesn't bomb.
You have just defined the set of cases in which you should. Deciding when you are looking at such a case and what to do about it is the non-trivial part.
I've all but explicitly been asserting that this is a time to act.
You seem to agree there is a problem (Jokes are statements of true belief / in vino veritas), yet you seem to disagree that taking action is a good idea.
I obviously misunderstand your position in some way.
I was just saying that seeing something objectionable, and deciding whether and how to object to it, are two separate things. I do find "jokes" like the one in the original article objectionable, but if I was present at Rowdy telling this joke about the dog, I don't know how best to tackle it, even having the leisure of taking as long as I want to consider the hypothetical, let alone face-to-face with about one second in real time to get my brain in gear. But that's just me.
Or to put it another way, my short answer to your question:
is "yes".