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Locaha comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong
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Two unrelated things (should I make these in separate posts or...?):
1.) Given recent discussion on social justice advocates and their... I don't know the best way to describe this, sometimes poor epistemological habits? I thought I would post this
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Concern_troll
Is this it just me, or is this, like, literally the worst concept ever? It literally just means "someone slightly to the right of me" or "someone does anything that could be considering cheering for the other side", backed with a dubious claim that these people are usually acting in bad faith. Is that even a thing people actually do, go on websites with people they disagree with and "troll" by claiming that they mostly agree except on certain issues? Outside of this context I have never seen this or had any reason to consider the possibility. Isn't it more likely, that you know... people mostly agree with you except on certain issues?
"Concern trolling is frequently banned in feminist communities."
"Concern trolling is frequently banned in feminist communities."
"Concern trolling is frequently banned in feminist communities."
I just don't get it. How does a movement with motives so noble become this horrible? I mean, I kind of do get it, but still... fuck.
2.) How can I train myself to speak more eloquently? Like most people my generation, I say "like" every ten words or so (although I've gotten better at avoiding this), say um and other filler sounds a lot, and often say "you know", "you see what I mean", etc. I also tend to repeat phrases for "filler" - I'll say things like "Yeah, I've been, I've been, I've been thinking about this a lot recently." (This looks really weird written out, trust me, it's not that weird in real life.) I want to stop doing this because doing so will let me sound more authoritative, and also I'm kind of disgusted by this pattern of speech even though everyone does it.
Note that I don't want to be one of those people who fetishizes the past and goes around forcing old-timey turns of phrase like "Great Scott!" into conversation and wears (yes) a fedora. I just want to be better at communicating concrete ideas in complete sentences in my daily life.
It may help if you consider the possibility that some feminist communities do not exist for the sake of rational dispassionate and balanced discussion of feminism. Rather, a feminist community may be a meeting place for the members of a feminist movement of some kind, which exists to achieve its goals. Like any other political movement.
TL;DR. LW is not the real world. In the real world, arguments are always soldiers (even if you pretend them not to be), discussion requires resources, and resources are finite.
Mere fact that the resources are finite is enough reason to use heuristics and -- inevitably -- biases.
If there are hundreds of comments I am not able to fully reaseach, I need to use some filters. Such as "trust the comments from people from the beginning of the alphabet and ignore the comments from people from the end of the alphabet" or "trust the comments from respected long-time users and ignore the comments from unknown new users". Obviously, some of these heuristics are much reliable than the others, but none of them is perfect.
Then, as abstractly thinking people we may play the game on a higher level, inventing meta-heuristics for accepting or rejecting heuristics. Such as: "if a more experienced member of my tribe recommends me a heuristic, I will use it; and I will ignore the heuristics promoted from unknown people or other tribes". Actually, this seems like a decent heuristic; you probably won't find a better one with comparable simplicity. And one of its consequences is that when an experienced member says "ignore concern trolls", you follow that. Plus you need some operational definition of what a concern troll is, which is something like: "expresses concern for our tribe, but does not pattern-match to a typical member of our tribe". There.
It's imperfect because all heuristics are imperfect.
And of course smart people always find a way to abuse it. Because all imperfect rules can be abused creatively. For example some people may start using it as a fully general counteragument against anyone who disagrees with them and happens to have lower status in given community.
And the only way to fix it would be to send all internet users to CFAR's reeducation camps. Which, unfortunately, are still under construction. :P
This is implies that all discussions are adversarial and cannot be anything else. I do not think this is the case.
And they're not here?
Well, you tell me: have you seen examples here of people engaging each other in order to learn from each other rather than convince each other of the rightness of their views?
It's not a rhetorical question. When I first joined this site there was rather a lot of that, which was largely what pulled me in. These days it's largely displaced by various other things, and it's quite possible that a new arrival simply won't notice it amidst all the noise. So I'm asking.
Oh there's plenty of people engaging to learn from each other, right alongside a major echo chamber of people pushing a very particular cluster of mythologies and ideologies. I like it here a lot for the former and enjoy watching the latter go on while its participants insist it is something else.
(nods) Ah. So you're agreeing that they're not always soldiers here, you're merely asserting additionally that they are not never soldiers? Yeah, that's certainly true. Thanks for clarifying.
They're also not always soldiers elsewhere.
Yes, that's true too.
Hush, you. :-)