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TimS comments on Politics Discussion Thread January 2013 - Less Wrong
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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.
Ultimately, I think that a lot of ordinary social injustice arises because no one speaks out loud "Don't do that." Essentially, unwillingness to discuss social rules.
Saying "Parental Abuse is Wrong" is a useless Applause Light for most people.
Saying "It is not normal to be afraid of your parents, and not normal to be unhappy whenever you're at home" is more likely to be effective at creating good change.
In case it isn't clear, I agree that calling out sword-privilege is only worthwhile if it reduces similar sword-privilege-abuse in the future. It's an empirical question whether (1) calling out privilege reduces abuse or (2) explaining why Pat has the sword is helpful to anything (figuring out what the abuse is, how to response effectively, or anything else). I suspect yes for both. But even if the answer to (2) is no, that doesn't demonstrate the answer to (1) is no.
Does it not seem odd to you to view the case of an unarmed person being stabbed by an armed assailant as an issue of social justice by default?
This is perhaps an unfair question, because I placed it in that context to begin with, but one of the things that's so maddening about the whole subject is how (for want of a better term) privilege is so privileged as an explanatory mechanism. There are certainly circumstances where it has merit, but it seems a ridiculous weapon of choice in circumstances where more appropriate explanatory mechanisms exist.
Perhaps? :)
I choose not to fight your hypothetical and you get upvotes for closing the trap. Not a big deal, but not cool.
I'm interested in hearing about them, and using them to figure out how to be more effective in figuring out what social changes are better for my terminal values and causing those changes.
Edit: Also, let's not forget that there are high status locals who deny that the problem we are talking about even exists.
It wasn't intended as a trap. Part of the point of the hypothetical was that "sword-privilege" is a bit of a silly idea, and not an obvious go-to choice for reasoning about people stabbing other people. I genuinely didn't expect you to put up a defence for it.
As for explanatory mechanisms, I tend to favour explanations from economics and systems-based sciences, as they have a rich catalogue of unusual behaviour patterns that arise from interacting parties being given different choices. I'm generally quite cautious in their application, though, because it doesn't take much for an elegant and aesthetically-pleasing model to be subtly wrong.
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."
This raises a problem I've seen in other forms.... is it fair to ask how an idea works out in practice?
Absolutely, but it's not necessarily as simple as patternmatching to "claims label" and "is visible and obvious to me personally." Especially when you're dealing with stuff like religion, ideology, culture or politics, it can be hard to make any really meaningful statements that generalize usefully.
How does socialism work out in practice? It's tempting for some folks to point to the USSR, but that's just because it's a big obvious thing with the word "Socialism" prominently emblazoned on it. The EU is pretty darn relevant there as well.
When most Westerners think "Islam", they don't think "polyandric, matrifocal, highly-educated pluralists comfortable with secularism" either, but the Minangkabau people outnumber al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban combined. Those latter have a lot more to do with the first things that spring to mind when Westerners hear the word "Islam" though.
What I'm saying is, "How does this work out in practice" is terribly vulnerable to the availability bias.
For what it's worth, I don't think socialism (State Communism) and socialism (western Europe-- I'm not sure what the best name is for democracies with strong safety nets) are the same thing-- they have extremely different practices and trajectories. I think this supports your point that you need to actually know something before you try to address the question of how an idea works out in practice.
If it's any consolation, I don't just wonder that sort of thing for social justice. I've thought how Atlas Shrugged, a novel which is an extended attack on crony capitalism, has led to people who support corporations in general.
Now that I think about it, Rand's "concrete bound mentality" (grabbing on to a specific and not necessarily relevant example-- she's against it) is a special case of availability bias.
Social democracy.
nod But they both draw from a common wellspring of thought, and are influenced by many of the same formative works (having since developed themselves in greatly different directions). They're both socialism, in the same sense that a platypus (lays eggs, sweats milk, senses electricity, has simple teeth) and a human (gives live birth to well-developed offspring, has dedicated milk glands, no electroception at all, complex teeth) are both mammals: it's a fact of their origins. They've simply diverged substantially -- but this divergence isn't so great that it's meaningless to speak of them as both forms of mammal (has hair, endothermic metabolism, produces milk, three middle ear bones, has neocortex, is of amniote clade -- the critical bit is that these commonalities are not coincidental, they are not convergent traits).
If I'm doing something analytically wrong here, please feel free to give specifics. Crocker's Rule: I promise not to withdraw or lash out simply because I'm defensive about your criticism - I'm saying this to you, not the world.
PS. I don't understand the relevance of the quoted text.
PPS. "SJ-oriented callout culture" --> SJ = ?
SJ = abbreviation for "social justice."
The discussion here appears to be talking about "privilege" in a way that looks, from the outside of the conversation, like the use of the term "privilege" by both participants is based on attempting to reverse-engineer its theoretical structure from the way it's used online by social justice activists.
The idea of "privilege", as an academic notion within critical theories, does not boil down to "the thing that when you see it, you should call it out." Exploring and unpacking the idea may or may not come with exhortations to any particular course of action; this is especially so in the case of texts where the idea is being formulated, criticized, elaborated upon or revisited. That isn't even necessarily implied.
On the other hand it's very common to the use of the term by a certain subset of online activists, and it seems like for a lot of LWers group is their first or primary exposure to the idea. The result is akin to talking about socialism in general, by modelling it in terms of the Red Guard youth movement during China's Cultural Revolution.
Here was my attempt at a brief articulation, early in this conversation. I'm trying not to just reverse engineer from social justice blogging. But if I screwed things up, I'm open to suggestion.
I agree that privilege isn't inherently unjust. It just turns out that certain kinds of privilege are antithetical to my terminal values - and calling out appears to be the best response.
Yes - I suspect this causal story is the reason why my original complaint - that LW is bad at this type of social engineering theory - is true.
Well, I didn't say that (I'm not aware offhand of a plausible instance of the thing the term refers to that doesn't strike me as undesirable/wrong insofar as Jandila's morality function ouputs wrong).
From the bit you linked:
Your wording makes me wince a little but I'm not sure if I can unpack why here (something about the implied model of intellectual discourse). In any case, you are quite correct that a simplistic analysis of the idea is not the best that critical theory has to offer, although LW doesn't have many people in the cluster (it's more than a matter of just reading a couple texts).
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."
Whatever happened to the corresponding-to-reality aspect?
It didn't seem directly relevant to TimS's comment.
That said, it would be a remarkable coincidence if a framework reliably motivated right action without corresponding to reality.
Depends, how are you judging which action is "right", do you have any way to judge independent of the framework?
A lot of religions motivate a lot of right actions. They motivate even more if you let a religion judge the rightness of the action it motivates.
Agreed that if the only metric for right action is whether the action is motivated by my framework, then it's not a coincidence at all that my framework motivates right action.
It's also true that if I know of no metric at all for right action, then I can't know whether a framework reliably motivates it.
Some of my motive is reducing inferential distance. Some of the response to daenerys' recent post on female experiences was essentially "I didn't realize that type of harm was occurring." Ideally, having a useful framework will help others notice those types of harms more easily.
Also, I think there's a certain amount of hypocrisy inherent in some anti-feminist frameworks. To use a totally different example, I expect most Republicans in the US House of Representatives hate Alinsky, but they sure seem to have learned his lesson that procedural rules benefit the status quo - and therefore, those who oppose the status quo have less reason to respect them.