Yes; apology is an underrated consequentialist tool among nerds.
Some of the social function of apology can be understood game theoretically: Apology explicitly disavows a past action, allowing the one to whom the apology was made to leverage that confession in future: If someone apologises for something then does it again, then response can escalate because we have evidence that they are doing it even knowing that it's 'wrong'. The person who apologised knows this, and often the implicit threat of escalation if they do the same thing checks their future behaviour. Therefore apology is (possibly among other things) a signal, where the cost to apologising is the greater susceptibility to escalation in future cases.
Apology falls into a class--along with other things such as forgiving misdeeds, forgetting misdeeds, retribution, punishing an agent against its will, compensation for misdeeds--of things that would make no sense among sufficiently advanced and cooperative rationalists. Some things in that class (e.g. forgiveness) might already have been transcended by LW, and others (e.g. apology) are probably not possible to transcend even on LW, because the knowledge of other participant...
My first reaction to this video is that it's pretty crappy. Its main message is to insist on the following sequence as everyone's moral responsibility: once you say something that someone perceives as hurtful, you're morally obliged not to "question their feelings", but to perceive that you screwed up, to feel bad, to apologize, and change your behavior so this doesn't happen again. The video repeatedly insists that your own thoughts about whether what you've done was improper are irrelevant.
Now, it should be completely obvious that this sequence is not going to be used as prescribed by anyone including the author of the video. If you were to approach him and say, "In your video, you identified my position as that of a fartbag, repeatedly, and that was very hurtful to me", he's not going to say, "Oh, thanks for telling me that, I'm sorry I screwed up, I feel really bad and will never do this again". He is, in fact, going to use his own judgement about the appropriateness of his behavior to decide whether or not he should apologize.
Why, then, is there no mention of your own moral judgement in the video, and instead, you're repeatedly encouraged not to ...
I don't anticipate that. Seems like a perfectly acceptable hypothetical.
Not sure I understand you correctly. Are you saying that, for instance, if Hank Green were to correctly call someone's words racist, and that person were to complain to Hank Green that this labeling hurt them, Hank Green would thereupon feel bad, apologize, and refrain from using the word "racist" henceforth? I find that ridiculously unlikely.
social-justice-warriors terminology here, which is or course very much misaligned with rationality
Wait, what? How so?
In a myriad of ways, really. Off the top of my head, and I'll stop at five examples, and will skip "check your privilege", because that's just shooting fish in a barrel:
Status-seeking through Oppression Olympics is endemic.
The concept of "ally" seems to involve wilful submission to others' critical judgements and suspension of your own critical faculties. Witness the burgeoning genre of explanations of what a "good ally" must or must not do, which usually involve "shut up" and other similar admonishments.
Habitual pattern-matching of any opposition. Hence "derailing", the practice of
Are you saying that, for instance, if Hank Green were to correctly call someone's words racist, and that person were to complain to Hank Green that this labeling hurt them, Hank Green would thereupon feel bad, apologize, and refrain from using the word "racist" henceforth?
I guess he would. Well, at least if the complaining person was a woman, or black, or disabled, or homosexual, or whatever. He would probably not stop using the word "racist", but he would be more careful to use it in a way that makes obvious that the word applies only to white straight males.
Ok, I was joking here, but here is a thing that really happened on a feminist blog: There was a discussion about trans people. All people were super politically correct, except for one person who repeatedly asserted that trans people are against the nature, because the Spirit of Nature told her so. When other people finally attacked that as cis-ism (or how exactly they call that), the person defended by saying that she was a Native American, and those were her Native American beliefs; and that the people who offended her beliefs should check their privileges and apologize. And... however incredibly that felt to me... they really apologized. I was completely shocked. So yes, this kind of behavior really is possible. It might not make sense to you or me, but it exists.
What are Oppression Olymptics?
People "competing" by claiming they are more oppressed than other people, because of the group they're in.
What is "check your privilege"?
In its worst form, the position that you're not allowed to have a view on an issue (or that any possible view is invalid) because you are not the oppressed party.
I've only started hearing the term "social justice" this November, in relation to Kill la Kill of all things (which, by the way, is insanely awesome), but I know I am pretty committed to the promotion and advancement of gender and racial equality.
Hah. The cluster I think of as SJW would, I'm pretty sure, say you couldn't possibly be committed to the advancement of gender equality if you have a positive view on Kill la Kill.
It is also because I selfishly want to be able to enjoy poetry, flowers, fashion, be a vegetarian, drive an electric car, and, why not, fuck a dude if I feel like it, among many other things, without getting harassed and belittled and found undesirable for it by men and women alike, without it diminishing my social status and getting in the way of me getting things done.
I think that's an inadequ...
There's a much saner form that's worth noting, when it is shorthand for "You overlap through at least one of the following categories:heterosexual, male, white, high socioeconomic bracket, and so you are less likely to have personal experience of the sort of problem that is going on here and might not notice when it occurs." This is essentially an issue of an illusion of transparency, in that often members of specific groups have issues that they are more aware of, and the amount of share experience leads to problems of inferential distance.
Essential agreement that the other two meanings are deeply counter-rational. Unfortunately, exactly what someone means by it isn't always clear.
I think that "privilege" (in its more reasonable forms) basically refers to a special case of the Typical Mind Fallacy, one where people are prone to dismissing or understating the problems of one group because they don't personally experience them in the same way. For a relatively neutral example, there's this bit in Yvain's post:
I can't deal with noise. If someone's being loud, I can't sleep, I can't study, I can't concentrate, I can't do anything except bang my head against the wall and hope they stop. I once had a noisy housemate. Whenever I asked her to keep it down, she told me I was being oversensitive and should just mellow out. I can't claim total victory here, because she was very neat and kept yelling at me for leaving things out of place, and I told her she needed to just mellow out and you couldn't even tell that there was dust on that dresser anyway. It didn't occur to me then that neatness to her might be as necessary and uncompromisable as quiet was to me, and that this was an actual feature of how our minds processed information rather than just some weird quirk on her part.
I would say that these are pretty much perfect examples of privilege: situatio...
You're right about the ignorance part of privilege-- and contrary to SJW, it's quite possible for people in the less privileged categories to be ignorant about at least some of the problems of people in the more privileged categories.
I'd love to find a way to disentangle the ignorance part of the idea of privilege from the power grab, but I haven't figured out how to do it.
That when I have advantages you don't, I am less likely to notice the problems in our shared environment that my advantages compensate for than you are, and therefore when you discuss a problem in our shared environment that I don't experience, I ought not treat my own experience as definitive on the matter.
EDIT: When used in the second person imperative specifically, as here, it carries the additional implication that the person to whom it is addressed is violating that normative rule.
An example, by way of "The Root of All Evil" by Richard Dawkins:
Science is about testing, comparing and corroborating this mass of evidence, and using it to update old theories of how things work. I do remember one formative influence in my undergraduate life. There was an elderly professor in my department who had been passionately keen on a particular theory for a number of years. And one day an American visiting researcher came, and he completely and utterly disproved our old man's hypothesis. The old man strode to the front, shook his hand and said, "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these 15 years." And we all clapped our hands raw. That was the scientific ideal of somebody who had a lot invested, a lifetime almost invested in a theory, and he was rejoicing that he had been shown wrong, and scientific truth had been advanced.
Relevant post from YVain's blog: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/14/giving-and-accepting-apologies/
One thing that always confused me was forcing others to apologize. Starting from school, putting two kids who hate each other's guts, and demanding that they apologize to each other whether they mean it or not. What's the point? Who does this help? What does this achieve?
What's the point? Who does this help? What does this achieve?
It helps the teacher establish their own authority over the children.
This is an important skill that it would be good for us to get better at! Thanks for sharing this thing that tries to help.
I don't think this is quite enough, though - it's advice on a very abstract level, without examples, and without advice on how to recognize occasions where apology is necessary. And it felt like being browbeaten and told I was bad, not like being given helpful advice.
Please someone else let me know if you learned how to implement a specific behavior from this, that you otherwise wouldn't have learned how to implement.
But thanks again f...
Here are some issues I'd like to see covered in the future:
[I accidentally posted a comment I was still thinking about. Apparently I can't delete it, so I just removed the content a few seconds after posting. I'll repost it when it's done.]
Now, it is said we all here pride ourselves on our intelligence, rationality, and moral sense. It is also said, however, that we are a fiercely independent bunch, and that we can let this pride of ours get the better of us. There have also been comments that the live communities that appear at meetups provide much more positive interactions than what goes on on this site's discussions; this might merit further investigation.
My point is; we've done a lot of research on how to do proper ethical and metaethical calculations, and on how to achieve self-empowerment and deal with our own akrasia, which is awesome. We've also done some work on matters of gender equality, which is very positive as well. But I haven't seen us do anything about the basic details of human interaction, what one would call "politeness" and "basic human decency". And I think it might be useful if we started tackling these, for our own sakes, that of those who surround us, and that of easing our mission along, which is, as I understand it so far, to save the world (from existential risk (at the hands of (unfriendly and self-modifying) artificial intelligence))).
What inspired me to propose this post was a video I just saw from Hank Green of the famed and fabled vlogbrothers. I hold these two individuals in very high esteem, and I would expect many here to share my feelings about them, on account of their values and sensibilities largely overlapping with ours; namely the sense that intelligence, knowledge and curiosity are awesome, and that intellectuals ought to use their power to help improve themselves and the world around them.
Here it is; I hope you enjoy it