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Viliam_Bur comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
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A side note to your otherwise excellent comment:
As someone from the other side of the fence, I should warn you that your model of how liberals think about social justice seems to be subtly but significantly flawed. My experience is that virtually no liberals talk or (as far as I can tell) think in terms of "good" vs. "bad" people, or more generally in terms of people's intrinsic moral worth. A more accurate model would probably be something like "we should only be helping the standard 'oppressed' people (women, black, trans, etc.)". The main difference being that real liberals are far more likely to think in terms of combating social forces than in terms of rewarding people based on their merit.
My model is that it's: "we want to help everyone who is suffering" but also: "the only real suffering is the suffering according to our definitions".
Or more precisely: "the suffering according to our definitions influences millions of people, and anything you said (assuming you are not lying, which is kinda dubious, considering you are not one of us) is merely one specific weird exception, which might be an interesting footnote in an academic debate, but... sorry, limited resources".
I understand that with given model of reality, this is the right thing to do. But unfortunately, the model seems to suffer horribly from double-counting the evidence for it and treating everything else (including the whole science, if necessary) as an enemy soldier. A galaxy-sized affective death spiral. -- On the other hand, this is my impression mostly from the internet debates, and the internet debates usually show the darker side of humanity, in any direction, because the evaporative cooling is so much easier there.
(Off-topic: Heh, I feel I'm linking Sequences better than a Jehovah's Witness could quote the Bible. If anyone gets a cultish vibe from this, let me note that I am translating the whole thing these days, and I have just finished the "Politics is the Mindkiller" part, so it's all fresh in my memory.)
Okay, your model is better than I thought. Sorry for nitpicking your hyperbole :-)
It's good to sometimes say the obvious things explicitly. (Also, some other person could have said the same thing non-hyperbolically.)
Cultish? No, it's how you signal that you're a rationalist and your readers are rationalists, and they should therefore actually consider what you're saying, rather than dismissing you as some kind of mainstream Traditionally Rational idiot with a snide recitation of "Bro, do you even Bayes?"