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Lumifer comments on The Craft And The Community: The Basics: Apologizing - Less Wrong
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Comments (191)
That definition is incomplete without having power mentioned in it.
For example, it's culturally difficult for "straight cisgendered male Americans" to show weakness. It's not a problem for women. Take the stereotypical situation when a couple is lost and the man refuses to ask for directions. The woman is annoyed at him. Can he tell her "check your privilege"?
I strongly disagree. It cannot be.
Depends on who you ask. I would say yes, some would say no.
Right, a literal "never allowed to have" cannot be. What I meant to say was that positions that might easily seem like "you are never allowed to have this opinion" might actually be positions of "this position is so likely to be wrong as to not be worth wasting our time with", which can sometimes (though definitely not always) be reasonable.
Sure, there are lots of those. But notice the difference in accents: "I think you have no clue to the extent that I am not going to bother and waste my time" -- vs. " You have no right to your opinion", especially if there's an explicit or implicit "because you belong to a privileged class".
What on earth could it possibly mean for you to have (or not have) "a right to your opinion"?
One possibility that occurs to me is that the expression "I have a right to my opinion!" has to do with whether people will give you the last word — it's a claim to power over other people in conversation. Asserting "I have a right to my opinion" is a way of saying, "Shut up! I'm not talking about this with you any more!" Thus, to say "you have no right to your opinion" is a way of saying, "No, I won't shut up; I will go on trying to convince you that you are wrong."
Another possibility is that "I have a right to my opinion!" is a statement that one intends to continue to confidently assert a view which has been undermined by evidence or argument, without acknowledging or responding to the criticism. Thus, to say "you have no right to your opinion" is to say "you are being epistemically rude; stop it."
A third possibility is that "I have a right to my opinion!" is an assertion that some topics are too socially volatile to be exposed to much criticism. This seems to be what people mean when they bring up "the right to your opinion" in matters of religious doctrine. Thus, to say "you have no right to your opinion" is to say "I'm not going to stop publicly debunking your religion just because you don't like me doing it."
Fourth, "I have a right to my opinion!" could be a demand to not be treated worse socially by others on account of one's opinion, even if others may fear that the opinion may lead you to treat them worse. This would seem to be a demand for unilateral disarmament: "I will go on being bigoted against Blues, and I demand that Blues not treat me badly, even if they fear that I will treat them badly." Thus, to say "you have no right to your opinion" is to say "Yes, I am going to treat your opinion as evidence about your character and your future actions, and treat you accordingly."
Lastly, "I have a right to my opinion!" could be an effort to tar one's (nonviolent) critics by associating them with some sort of (violent) censors — an Inquisition, a secret police — and to rally defenders of freedom to attack those critics. Thus, to say "you have no right to your opinion" is to say "I do not pose the kind of threat that you are claiming. You have no business invoking the defense of freedom on your opinion's behalf, since freedom is not threatened. This is not a matter of 'rights'; it is a matter of conversation, argument, and evidence. Stop trying to escalate it into a matter of 'rights'."
It's also possible that "I have a right to my opinion" can mean "I have a right to enough time to assimilate new information without being told I have to think differently because someone else is sure they're right."
It might be interesting, the next time you come across someone who says "I have a right to my opinion", to ask them what they mean.
For a trivial example, it turned out that Larry Summers did not have a right to his opinion about why women are underrepresented in certain fields.
After seeing your comment, I went and read what Wikipedia had to say about that incident.
I'd heard about Summers' resignation only at some remove, and only really from bloggers who had opinions on one side or the other on the women-in-science issue. As a result, I hadn't known that there were other contributing factors to Summers' resignation besides that one. It seems that there were — including other conflicts with the faculty ... and a corruption scandal involving Russia's post-Soviet privatization program that led to Harvard paying a $26.5 million settlement to the Federal government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Summers#President_of_Harvard
I guess that goes to show the consequences of getting news from partisan sources. The rest of the story is substantially less exciting to folks who care about the "Social Justice vs. Political Incorrectness" Blue-Green war, though, so it's no surprise it didn't get as much press.
Of course it didn't end there...
Sure. I didn't read the original as a literal quote but rather as a rough characterization of a perceived attitude, so I didn't pay much attention to the details of the exact wording, since I treated it as referring to a set of many different statements that include both of the variants in your comment, as well as others.
Are you simply going to say you disagree with Kaj here on this last part or actually respond to their comment, especially say the end of the sentence you cut off where Kaj said:
I am going to point out that "you're not allowed to have any other opinion" and "I believe your opinion is wrong because of A, B, and C" are very different statements.
How much depends on what one means by allowed? For example, it isn't unreasonable to say that I shouldn't have an opinion on whether or not sterile neutrinos exist- because I have nowhere near the physics background to remotely understand the question beyond at an extremely basic level.
That depends on who's doing the talking.
It's not unreasonable for you to decide that you shouldn't have an opinion on X until you found out more about X.
When another party tells you that you are not allowed to have an opinion on X the very first issue that pops up is what power/authority does that other party have to decide which opinions you are allowed to have and which not?
CYP doesn't come up in discussions of neutrinos, it comes up in discussion of sociopolitical issues and in that context allowing or not allowing people to have certain opinions has a long and ugly history.
Is it similarly true, if another party tells me that the very first issue that pops up under certain circumstances is X, that the very first issue that pops up is what power/authority does that other party have to decide what the very first issue is and isn't?
This seems to me a silly way to treat ordinary discourse.
When you tell me that X is the very first issue to pop up, I take that to mean you're more interested in discussing X than anything else. If someone tells me I shouldn't have an opinion about X, I take that to mean they're not interested in hearing about my opinion. Yes, in both cases they are expressing themselves as though their personal preferences were facts about the world, but I just treat that as a fairly basic rhetorical maneuver to establish their conversation status.
Generally speaking, no, it doesn't mean that I'm more interested in X. What it means is that the answer to X will influence and affect discussions of Y and Z so we might as well start with X because we'll end up there anyway.
I take that differently -- I understand that as containing a moral judgment as to which opinions are acceptable/allowed and which are not. After all in this case you can have an opinion as long as it is the correct "social justice" one. Any color as long as it's black.
So it sounds like on your account, if I were to rail against you for deciding that we're going to talk about X now and that I'm not allowed to talk about Y and Z, I would be missing the point, because what's really going on has nothing to do with who is deciding what and who has the power.
Rather, you're just pointing out that, since the answer to X will influence and affect discussions of Y and Z, there is a conversational failure mode we can avoid by talking about X first. On your account, you aren't expressing a moral judgment about what topics are acceptable/allowed, you're just saying that some topics will cause the conversation to proceed more usefully (by addressing the fundamental issues first) and others will cause it to proceed less usefully.
Yes?
By contrast, on your account, the "social justice" warriors who say that, for example, men aren't entitled to an opinion about the prevalence of sexism against women in our culture, aren't making any such claim. There is no model of conversational dynamics they operate from such that such expressions of opinion can be expected to cause a conversation to proceed less usefully. In that case it really is about who is deciding what and who has the power.
So the two aren't comparable.
Yes?
Not so much even a failure mode, as an observation that the optimal path is X -> Y -> Z and if you start anywhere else you'll have to come back to X soon, anyway.
Yes.
More than that, CYP generally aims at putting a full stop to a particular branch of a conversation. It's like "This here is a Sacred Truth, all you can do is accept it, and we will tolerate no doubts about it".
Claims to power, yes, not necessarily the actual power.
Yes.
OK; thanks for clarifying.
I don't agree with your position generally, but I certainly agree that there exist individuals who have the kind of "This here is a Sacred Truth, all you can do is accept it, and we will tolerate no doubts about it" attitude towards what we've been calling "social justice", and there exist many communities where such individuals exert disproportionate power.
I think you may want to see Kaj's comment here, which I think clarifies what is going on.