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Azathoth123 comments on Link: quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy - Less Wrong
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Comments (163)
The problem with this definition is that it's very possible for someone's explicit beliefs to be false and "implicit beliefs" to be true. Thus it is problematic to call this a "bias" without establishing that the underlying beliefs are false.
"Microaggression" strikes me as an epicycles attempting to rescue the theory that race and gender don't correlate with anything. Original theory: all these differences are due to differences in the way society treats these people, so we bad treating them differently and even implement laws requiring preferential treatment. However, the achievement gaps remain, they can't be due to innate differences because that would be racist and sexist, hence they must be because t̶h̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶e̶v̶i̶l̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶c̶h̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶c̶u̶r̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶ these evil white men are engaging in microaggressions.
A different approach: Are my aliefs interfering with my agentiness? For instance, if I'm trying to get a project done with a team of programmers, and my aliefs keep identifying the women on my team as "mothers" instead of as "coders" (or more generally "workers"), that might interfere with my ability to usefully work with them towards my explicit goal.
In other words, even if it is true that those women could very well be or become mothers, in the context of deliberately pursuing a goal involving writing code, that isn't pertinent. (It's not as if they're choosing to flash their motherliness at me!) The implicit association of "woman" with "mother" and not "worker" might be encumbering me from being as agenty as I would like to be.
I'm having difficulty reconciling your comment about microaggressions with how I hear the term used, to the extent that I don't think we're talking about the same thing at all. I'm reminded of Davidson on beavers, as cited by Eliezer here.
A better example is: if there are women on the team and my aliefs keep identifying them as worse coders but my beliefs tell me that women are just as good a coding as men.
In this case it very much matters whether the beliefs or aliefs are true.
In principle it is possible that women in general are just as good a coding as men in general but the particular women on your team happen to be worse than the particular men on your team.
On the contrary, if you're in a situation of collaborating with someone, then it's pretty widely recognized as a bad social habit to be constantly trying to judge them. Even worse if you're judging them on their group memberships (or other generalities) rather than their actual individual performance in the collaboration!
It's impractical to build consensual working relationships with people who notice that you're treating them as inferiors. (Oh hey, are we talking about microaggressions again? Maybe ...)
Have you ever actually worked with people on a coding project? Have you ever worked with idiots on a coding project? It's very important to know who you can trust and whose code has to be double checked. Also I have a question I need to know who I can ask to get an answer and who would simply be a waste of time.
If we work with people on a coding project letting their code speak for them is probably a lot more useful then making your assessment based on prior information that has nothing to do with coding.
Agreed, the problem is that when you do that "what the code says" tends to be correlated with all kinds of other stuff that it is politically incorrect to notice.
Yep! I've been in the industry for fifteen years, and you've almost certainly benefited from stuff I've worked on. But you're acting hostile, so I don't care to give you any more stalker fodder.
As far as I can tell, some of the worst people I've worked with were ① the judgmental, arrogant, abusive assholes; and ② people who had been victims of said assholes, and so had taken a "heads down gotta look busy" attitude out of fear and shame, instead of a transparent, work-together attitude.
Or to put it another way, ① the people whom you can't ask questions of, because they will call you an idiot and a waste of time; and ② the people who have been called idiots and wastes of time so much that they don't ask questions when they should.
The technical incompetents are straightforward to filter out. Tests like FizzBuzz weed out the people who claim that they can code but actually cannot. It's the attitude incompetents, the collaboration incompetents, — the ones who harm other people's capability rather than amplifying it — that are more worth worrying about.
(Oh, and everyone's code has to be double-checked.)
Also, stop downvoting comments that you also respond to. That's logically inconsistent — downvoting means something doesn't belong on the site, not that you disagree with it. If it doesn't belong on the site, then responding to it and continuing the conversation also doesn't belong.
I agree that this is generally good advice, but question your assumption (unless you have inside information?) that Azathoth123 is doing that. He's getting an awful lot of downvotes on his comments in this discussion too.
[EDITED to add: The reason why that's evidence against the Azathoth123-mass-downvoting hypothesis is that it increases the credibility of a different explanation for those downvotes, namely that some third party doesn't want this sort of discussion at all and is downvoting everyone involved.]
Azathoth123, if you're reading this: Would you care to comment on whether you've been dealing out dozens of downvotes to people who have disagreed with you in this discussion? (My guess is that you haven't, but explicit confirmation would be nice to have.)
Whoever is doing it, if you're reading this: If you are aiming to stop the discussion or to stop participants on one or the other side, it isn't working and I don't think it's likely to work. If you are aiming to stop discussion of mindkilling topics, again it isn't working and I think the actual effect is that you are increasing the mindkillingness of the topic by making people feel more under attack. If you are aiming to make people feel harassed and upset in the hope that they will leave LW, or something of the kind, then fuck you; that kind of behaviour is not welcome here and I hope you get kicked off with extreme prejudice.
I have sent a private message to Villiam Bur asking him to check whether Azathoth123 is posting from the same IP as Eugine_Nier.
Azathoth appeared shortly after Eugine was banned, and holds similar political opinions. They have similar posting patterns, and both have been accused of downvote abuse. This is only a hypothesis based on circumstantial evidence, but I think it needs to be investigated.
I sympathize with Azathoth's willingless to have a rational discussion about this publicly, and have frequently upvoted him. However, this downvote abuse thing is ruining the community and needs to be dealt with.
To add to the circumstantial evidence: -Nicknames that end in numbers are a minor sign of inauthentic accounts. -Naming an account after a Cthulhu God would fit in the general neoreactionary pattern. -Both accounts like to quote Nassim Taleb in the quotes thread.
I feel a bit embarrassed for not noticing it earlier but I think it's with 90% Eugine.
Also, Azatoth123 is knowledgeable about modern physics at a deeper-than-teacher's-passwords level (see e.g. the thread where he and I were trying to disabuse Thomas of his misconceptions about special relativity), as was Eugine.
10:1 s/he isn't Eugene Nier.
1:1 he is, but I don't object to him making a clean start as long as he behaves himself this time around. The recent downvote “abuse” doesn't actually sound that egregious to me.
I've also noticed a pretty strong tendency for my posts to be downvoted at about the same time that Azathoth posts a dissenting reply (in previous conversations). The association is strong enough that I have some reflexive negative feelings about dialogue with them- I'm distinctly getting 'trained' not to reply to Azathoth's comments, whether or not it's Azathoth who is actually doing the downvoting.
EDIT: Normally, I wouldn't ask who it was that downvoted this comment. But for obvious reasons, a -1 score on this post isn't a very clear signal. If you downvoted this comment and are not Azathoth, then letting me know who you are would help avoid misunderstandings.
OK, so my probability estimate for Azathoth123 being Eugine redivivus is increasing.
Anyway, for anyone else who is feeling that same sense of being "trained not to reply" (to Azathoth123 or anyone else), I strongly recommend fighting it. Don't let abusive manipulators win!
(For the avoidance of doubt, this is not a general recommendation to ignore downvotes. Only to ignore them in situations where it's reasonably clear that they don't in fact carry much signal and there's strong reason to suspect that someone is trying to exploit the system.)
I don't think this follows. If a comment contains a glaring logical fallacy, I could consistently both downvote it and point out the flaw in the argument. Not claiming that's what's happening here, though.
Everybody's. Including my own.