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JoshuaZ comments on The Craft And The Community: The Basics: Apologizing - Less Wrong
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Comments (191)
While you have a lot of valid points here, I don't think your conclusions about Imm are at all justified. Imm is making arguments in good faith, and I see no evidence that Imm is acting based on any underlying prejudices.
I haven't reached any conclusions about him, I've just got these hypotheses, these plausible explanations to what's in front of me, that are based on previous experiences with other people, and that give me enough pause not to attempt to tackle this discussion with someone I don't know well.
Does it help if I say as someone reading the conversation and agrees with many of your points that I think you are giving too much weight to those hypotheses?
Sure. But it still seems to imply that I'm morally at fault for making the best hypothesis I could from what little data I had at the time. Confusing heuristics with willful prejudice muddles the discussion, puts people on the defensive, etc.
In fact, I'm brewing up a discussion post on that very topic, because I have seen the difference between an honest mistake based on imprefect heuristics, and a willful misinterpretation of the facts, being the source of much unnecessary conflict.
The difference between someone defending unconventional views for the sake of truth, and someone who uses the guise of the former to push an inhumane agenda, is also worth examining.
And another topic that has me baffled is the very existence of racists, sexists, and other such sorts. The sort that would say to women engineering students "it's fine if you've come here because you wish to marry an engineer, it's a good plan, but don't ever expect to become engineers on your own; women shouldn't become engineers" (this actually happened to one of my teachers). What motivates them? How do they think?
Moral fault isn't the issue here. Accuracy is.
Sure, I make honest mistakes based on imperfect heuristics. That Blue over there? They engage in willful misinterpretations of the facts.
So first, it is noteworthy that Imm hasn't said anything like that at all. But more to the point, if you can't understand some group's motivation, does that not cause you to doubt more whether a given individual is in that group?
As to sexism, there are a variety of different motivations. One motivation is thinking that intrinsically there are differences between men and women that matter in some context, and that those differences are so large that they cannot be overcome in the relevant context. That's a factual question. In your example, you and I think they are factually wrong, but that's a statement about the universe we live in. And there are conceivable universes where that isn't the case. Second, there are motivations extending from values. These values can range from thinking that whatever is traditional should continue, to thinking that division of labor is a good thing, to simple cultural holdovers of earlier values that actually made sense at one point. That's complicated by the common failure to distinguish carefully between terminal and goal-oriented values. But this has little to do with the actual issue at hand. that you are making claims about Imm's values and beliefs that are not justified by the evidence.
One more-- this is a theory which I think explains a lot, but I'm not sure I'm right.
There seems to be a fairly large proportion of heterosexual men who don't like being around women, especially women who aren't family members or potential sexual partners.
Have an evo-psych explanation, for what little that's worth. If men improve their reproductive chances by succeeding in competition with other men, what good does it do them to double the number of potential competitors?
"Don't like" or "are uncomfortable with", mostly because they don't know how to deal with them?
There are a number of possibilities. One of my male friends says (if I understand him correctly) that women are just distracting for men, and men would like some time off from being aroused under circumstances when they aren't supposed to show it. I'm sure he's accurate about himself, but he assumes he's typical of men, and I'm not sure he's right.
I've heard claims that groups of men behave differently if there's 10% or more women present. (Sorry, no cite.) If women have even moderate amounts of status, they may have a civilizing effect, and men could find that tiresome. The civilizing effect would vary according to culture-- it might be something like cursing is unwelcome, or at least must be apologized for. Or (specific example from the source I can't remember), if there are women associated with a fraternity (?), the men quit doing things like having indoor beach parties with huge piles of sand.
Really, I don't know, and there could be a number of reasons. It just seems like there's a tendency which shows up in many cultures for men to want men-only space.
Joshua, I am beginning to think that you willfully decide to ignore what I say. I have never claimed that Imm is a racist. I have not called him a racist. I have not decided that he is a racist. I've only said that there appeared to me to be enough of a chance of him being one that I wouldn't risk spending time, effort, and emotional capital engaging him in debate over those topics.
Ironically, I find myself attempting to convince you that my thinking was sound, even though you believe I arrived at the wrong conclusion. In the meantime, I anticipate that every post I add to this discussion will earn me some amount of negative karma. Perhaps I would have been better off biting the bullet and engaging him on those things?
Where?
I wasn't talking about Imm's post anymore. But I would argue that it is not worthy of note: we live in a society where racism is so discredited-but-not-extinct that even presenting empirical facts that might support it is taboo. Open normative statements such as the one I mentioned occurred often in back when one could comfortably be open and cruel in one's sexism, because back then that was the norm, and women engineers, challenging it, came under fire.
Nowadays, racists and such are under a lot of pressure not to leave any evidence at all of their affiliation. As a result, the probability that someone showing weark evidence of belonging to that group actually belongs to that group increases, because you don't expect to find strong evidence, and because you expect most people not to want to be associated with it that they'd go out of their way to show even weak evidence of it. Thus, what would otherwise be weak evidence becomes much stronger.
Just raising the possibility of somebody being part of a low-status group is often enough to damage their image in the eyes of others, and many conversational norms treat raising such a possibility as the same thing as an outright accusation - for good reason. (Bullies would love the freedom to go around implying bad things about people while facing no risk of censure.)
I've just paid five Karma to answer this: all I wanted was for Imm to understand where I came from when I dropped the discussion, and to show him that it is not an entirely irrational train of thought that would draw people away from discussing these topics with him. I failed to consider the fact that I was talking to him in public, and that what I was saying had implications on a level above that of the discussion. From what I've seen so far, I gather that I should have either ignored him outright without saying anything at all (perhaps it would have looked like I had forgotten the discussion altogether?) or continued via PM as soon as those topics were broached.
So in addition to Kaj's point, I'm also curious what percentage that attitude triggers at. Is that a 5% chance, 10%? 55%, 99%? And more to the point, when you say racist, what do you mean by it? That's a term that not only has a lot of connotative baggage, it also is a term that has a lot of different meanings.
Have you read the story of blues and greens?
I hadn'f thought you were referencing that. It might please you to know that I actually usually do not accuse other political colours of willfully misrepresenting facts, at least not initially.
I've met xenophobes who have simply never dealt with the objects of their contempt outside of the kind of menial work filled by the uneducated, or in the context of media portrayals that focus on crime and such, politicians who blame them for taking benefits or jobsm; spending a little time with me has made them question their beliefs, spending a lot of time has made them change them outright.
As for me, I used to be a sexist myself (of the "we're different but not unequal; complimentary" type... ugh...), because of the memeplex that surrounded me, but, because of my irrepressible curiosity, I began finding out what the world looked like from the eyes of a woman : I am obviously not one anymore. I also used to be kind of a racist: the first time I saw a black kid, I hid inside my car. And I used to remain instinctually scared of the darker-skinned type, because my entire exposure to them was in media, as criminals and delinquents (muthafucka!) until I actually spent some time with some, in a context of equality. And I was raised anti-semitic, of the conspiracy-theorist sort, but then I met and befriended several jewish persons, and updated my views according to the immediate, personal evidence.
By the way, thank you for making me specify the definition of racism, because now I can finally relax. According to Wikipedia
If Imm believes that the results of these unspeakable studies (namely, "some races are, by and large, stupider than others, and some are more crime-prone") are correct, he is a racist. If his beliefs happen to be correct, he is a racist who is right, but none the less a racist. And if, from there, he believes that the smarter, more law-abiding races should be granted a disproportionate amount of power over the others, that makes him a racial supremacist.
And, you know what? I hadn't thought of that before, Joshua. It's your asking me to define "racist" that made me go and check, and report my findings. Before your intervention, I wouldn't have dreamed of calling Imm a racist, being too afraid of inaccurately placing thim in a bad group. Now I can call him that without feeling uncomfortable at all. Nice job breaking it, hero.
EDIT: Just to be extra-precise, that he's a racist doesn't make him a Klanner burning crosses, or a skinhead beating up black people at night, no more than Martin Luther King being a criminal (he broke the law, he went to jail) makes him a burglar in the night threatening families with a gun. That would be fallacious reasoning. Moreover, if he is right, we would all have to become racists, as we all wish to believe that which is true.
However, I do not think we need to fear too much. Racism has been scientifically discredited; I don't know why it was discredited, but I would bet that it wasn't just ideological egalitarianism that brought this outcome about, and that there is some solid empirical basis for this change in paradigm.
How did you come to this conclusion?
An interesting approach. So, would you rather be right or be a non-racist?
Can you link to some generally accepted studies which show that IQ does NOT differ between large population groups?
I've only skimmed the Wikipedia article, but how about this?
I would rather be right; I can only hope that racism is wrong. If it were right, I (we?) would have to think long and hard about how precisely it is right, what the implications should be, and what I (we?) should do about it. Among others, there should be a debate on whether the general public should be trusted with this truth; what do you think they would do with it?
Assuming they would accept it, I can easily see the members of the groups branded as "better" looking down on the rest with condescendence and contempt, resentful feelings of entitlement from those of the "better" group that are "worse" than many members of the "worse" groups, and so on and so forth.
The Bell Curve suggests that intelligence (synergetically with wealth and power) is concentrating among an elite, a slowly-emerging "master race", if you will. Let's have a thought experiment, and assume this is true: should measures be taken against that?
The most obvious measure that comes to mind is to discourage making children among the "poor and stupid", and encourage it among the "bright and rich", so that eventually both wealth and intelligence even out from the top. However, it's not very hard to imagine this measure being extremely unpopular, and not just because of pattern-matching with the Nazis and other previous eugenic movements.
It would also require lots of secondary adjustments (the poor and stupid would need an extra-large pension to compensate for the lack of children to support them in their old age, for example).
So, yeah, it's no laughing matter, and most certainly not something to be treated lightly.