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Salemicus comments on Towards a theory of nerds... who suffer. - Less Wrong
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Comments (115)
I predict this post will attract a lot of negative comments, but I want to give it the most charitable reading I can. That, of course, is the Straussian reading.
What DeVliegendeHollander is really saying is that nerds are right to hate themselves, and that they deserve to suffer, because they are not truly men. By turning away from the traditional masculine skills and values of leadership, rhetoric, and prowess in combat they (and by extension, Western society) are unworthy of respect. Note in particular the distinction the OP draws between the Western sport of boxing, and the Eastern sport of karate - this distinction between the masculine, self-reliant West and the feminized, exotic East is an ancient trope. But here this trope is inverted, with "nerdiness" being seen as a disease of the West. A further problem is people looking inwards rather than outwards for validation; "gaining validation from respectable looking people choosing to discuss the weather" is presented as a better step. But of course, what the OP really implies is that martial prowess (the obsession of the post) must be turned outwards too. We need a purifying war.
In short, the author is not calling for a New Athens, but a New Sparta, where young boys pass through a series of initiation rituals to take their place in a homosocial, hyper-masculine warrior society. "Nerds" and other unfit individuals must be weeded out, leading to "the bravest, bolderst, cruelest, most aggressive fighters being on top." How this ideal society would treat women is only hinted at obliquely in the post, but I believe that some variant of "Kinde, Kuche, Kirche" is most likely.
I understand why DeVliegendeHollander should feel that such a message could only be delivered esoterically.
I sincerely hope I am seeing an excellent parody of extremely irrational SJW attitudes here.
For what it worths, or if it is not the case, the central idea here is self-help for people who suffer. This is certainly missing from this reply. If this is a seriously meant as an SJW response, then I would translate it to that lingo as being hurt by patriarchy, and learning to undo this hurt by adapting to it.
A social, political response, New Athens or New Sparta is NOT a major point here, because for some people like me adapting to society is more important to changing it because we have one life, thrown into society (Heidegger).
But actually what little I wrote about a social-political response was less patriarchy, less toxic mascuilinity and less bullying, so it seems to be a misresponse at that. I think I am being pretty progressive here as a far social change is covered except that I simply don't care as much about social change helping future gens rather than self-help, adaptation for people who suffer NOW.
I think I am in a community of people who don't have very high fertility rates. I actually have a daughter and I have this impression - parenting hardly ever discussed on LW - that most of the community has no children.
From this it seems logical to me that social change is way way less important than self-help. We are not making many people to live in a future society where everything is right. People with 4 kids may sacrifice their happiness for their sakes. For no-children and few-children people and I think it is the case for us, adapting to society must be more valuable than changing it.
The East vs. West aspect sounds valid but only superficially so - relevant only to the letter, not the intent. Obviously it is about Westernized karate - and obviously to everybody who knows these stuff Muay Thay works just as well. One could raise the same parallel with Greek wrestling not training self-confidence (courage) enough and MT yes.
Let me give you an alternate explanation. Being a parent is very time-consuming. It also tends to draw one's interest to different topics than are typically discussed here. In consequence, LW readers aren't a random sample of nerds or even of people in the general social orbit of the LW crowd. I would not draw any adverse inferences from the fact that a non-parenting-related internet forum tend to be depleted of parents.
This isn't adverse. I don't really care much what is the actual reasons of other people's reproductive choices, my point is simply that after having made them, and it is like 0 or 1 kids, it makes more sense to adapt to society than to change it.
(BTW not actually that time consuming. Only if you believe fashionable bullshit that throwing gigantic amounts of attention to kids is necessary for them to turn into succesful and well-adjusted adults. In reality if every second evening is like "shut up and read a book and leave dad in peace to write one", that is not actually harmful in any way. 50% of the outcome is genes and 50% is outside-the-family environment.)
Re the no kids thing: as of the latest survey, LW is 81% childless but with a median age of 27.67. It's possible that a lot of the people on here today will be parents in 10 years.
DeVliegendeHollander writes a post on how nerds could be protected from bullying and you interpret this to mean that:
?
This is the exact opposite of what he is saying.
I guess this is what "Straussian reading" means. Something like postmodern reading -- the text always says exactly what you want it to say, regardless of what it said originally -- except that with postmodern reading the resulting interpretation is always left-wing, while with Straussian reading the resulting interpretation is always right-wing. :D
Um, no, he writes a post on how nerds can become "real men" X-/
That is actually only a subset. The core thing is to solve self-hatred, to love one's self well enough to retreat from the fantasy world and inhabit the real one. My martial arts solution is only a part of gaining self-respect. I also mentioned communication skills etc.
Having said all that, why is this "real men" thing even wrong? Why do intellectuals tend to hate it? I remember how intellectuals hated it around 1910 or so (at least in Europe, see Stefan Zweig etc.) but today science backs it up better - there are all sorts of casual relationships between prenatal and serum T and various other traits. To put it differently, things like courage and not being depressed seem to be related, although the causal chain is not clear.
Still, courage training, conquering fears, should not be something intellectuals should laugh on as something uncivilized, reactionary or barbarous.
And yeah, courage training, by its very nature, looks like that.
One more though and maybe I should put that in as an edit: basically nerds need to learn from feminists, it is basically the very same ideas for the very same set of problems - the lack of self-respect, confidence. The whole feminist stuff about how to feel empowered and confident and speak up and all that is 100% valid for nerds too. In fact I know women who do exactly this, who conquer their internalize suppression by communication training (Toastmasters), dressing professional, yes, even things like boxing, I know women who gain a feeling of empowerment and confidence from this kind of courage trainig, and it works.
So yeah, nerds need to become "real men" in the sense feminist women aim to become "real men" - or rather, "real persons", who are not afraid, do not feel suppressed, but feel empowered and brave.
Men die younger because testosterone is harmful to health. See, even nature hates real men. We are just accepting the discoveries of natural sciences. :D
Okay, more seriously (still I feel that this topic inspires me to come up with crazy theories, some of which might incidentally point towards something profound), maybe it is a consequence of game theory and fragmentation of modern society. Think about it this way: if a random person X gains more strength, who benefits from this, and who loses? The person X and their allies benefit, their enemies lose. Maybe it is the structure of the society today that we have very few personal allies and a lot of competitors. Therefore, anyone gaining power is perceived as a loss to most people. In such environment, memes like "do not get stronger, that's evil" flourish. (Maybe this is not necessarily the culture as a whole, just the subculture of social-science intellectuals, that has few friends and a lot of backstabbing.)
It was different in the past where people were divided into tribes, so when your neighbor become stronger you felt your tribe is becoming stronger, which was a good thing.
It is different for women, because feminism is a powerful tribe today, and when feminists speak about "women", they usually mean "women who accept (or will accept) feminism". -- To explain this: imagine the last time when you heard feminists speaking about how we need more women in politics. Did anyone mention Margaret Thatcher or Susan Palin as positive examples of women in politics? Probably no. But they probably mentioned Hillary Clinton. Just saying that "women" in certain contexts does not include literally all women, only those belonging to the tribe. Of course there are also situations where meaning literally all women is the convenient Shelling point, e.g. letting women vote.
Shortly: It is all about selfish motivation. If other people believe they will benefit from you getting stronger, they will support you to become stronger. Today intellectuals don't believe this when they talk about men, which is why they discourage it.
Exactly this. However, it needs to be "do as I do", instead of "do as I say" kind of learning. Nerds don't need to learn feminist theory, because that is a theory constructed to support feminism, not to support nerds. Nerds need to learn feminist practice: supporting each other, constantly shaming the enemies, i.e. bulding a modern tribe. -- Okay, preferably with less mindkilling, if such thing is a real political option.
No, frankly, this is a much older story, not something from the recent decades. Strains of European humanism rejected "macho" attitudes as far back as 1900-1950, I know it from reading authors like Stefan Zweig (E.g. The World Of Yesterday) or Erich Fromm (The Anatomy Of Human Destructiveness). The issue is, largely, that back then the problems to ponder were not the relatively peaceful ones pondered today, but major war and genocide was attributed to a rather bull-headed gung-ho spirit - and I actually think it was correctly attributed so. The European attitudes were basically so in this period that the world around you is full of spilled gas and you do NOT want any sparks to go into it. So it seemed there is so much aggression trying to break out, in major conflicts killing millions that all the sparks better be extuingished - so it is better for everybody to be a bit of a "limp dick" rather than to risk that. And this influenced European literature and intellectualism a lot.
The story was different in America where simply these attitudes were not so dangerous, however, the latest in the 1960's this strain of European literature also hit America and influenced "hippie" attitudes - Vietnam played an important role in this, the desire for pacifism generate a desire to do away with traditionally masculine attitudes.
Meanwhile, from the 1970's - 80's on, there is the opposite trend. During the late Cold War it was understood that traditional war is not much on the table but either pressing the launch buttons or not, and probably nobody will be stupid enough to press those just to play macho. Thus, the world started to seem less dangerous and these attitudes were allowed to come back. Hippie music gave way to punk and Metallica, road movies to action movies, and so on.
However, intellectuals still resist it, because all they see is what Fromm saw - that it is hardly more than a celebration of destructiveness. So there is this apparent rule that to create is good and moral and anything tending towards destructiveness even a bit is wrong and immoral, we are supposed to make but not to unmake. So competition is bad, cooperation is good etc. etc.
This is sort of complicated to explain and understand but probably it is not simply not wanting others to become stronger.
I think overly "limp" intellectualism is connected with nerdiness. The issue seems to be that boys from kindergarten on engage each other in increasingly scarier and scarier challenges and competitions. As long as you keep up, it is sort of fun enough. If you take time out to read books, because you have intellectual interests, you fall back in this kind of thing and then it becomes something not exciting and challenging but rather scary. Then the bullying starts.
So overally it is the process I described about nerds, but I think the aversion to "real men" attitudes is largely the aversion to becoming like the bullies (who were often stupid and anti-intellectual) or an aversion to the fact that indeed there is something not properly developed in one's own self.
Nevertheless, I think what needs to be done here is to try to formulate the view clearly that not everything that tends towards the destructive, the unmaking, is necessarily wrong. That a world intellectuals often dream about - where everybody is only creative and productive, and never destructive - is the social equivalent of cancer, runaway growth without keeping creating and destroying in balance. But this is not exactly easy to formulate in a generally acceptable way. Purely economically, it can be explained, perhaps, if people think endless economic growth endangers the planet, yet you don't want to deny people the right to make things, then someone should unmake things, break windows, so to speak, and any group of people assigned that kind of role will obviously have, how to put it, rather "barbarous" morals.
So, essentially it is the reverse stupidity. We have seen that one extreme is harmful, therefore we must go to the opposite extreme.
Yet there are situations which require someone being on the middle of the scale -- not a bully, but also not someone scared of conflicts. For example, when people are doing things wrong, someone has to tell them. If everyone is avoiding conflicts all the time, then one incompetent employee can ruin a company, or one incompetent government official can ruin a country. The conflict doesn't necessarily have to be personal; one possible way of saying "your company is horribly inefficient" is to found a competing company.
However, it is not true that all aggressivity is frowned upon by intellectuals. The taboo applies more strongly to men, and covers only physical violence plus speech that feels like it would incite physical violence. Other forms of violence are tolerated. -- For example, if you hear some guy saying something politically incorrect, it would be unacceptable to slap him, but it is acceptable to call his boss, make him fired, and let his children starve. (That is: physical violence = not okay; social and economical violence coming from the right kind of people = okay.) Actually, if you were a women with the right kind of credentials, it would probably be even acceptable to slap him; and he would be frowned upon for fighting back.
By which I am saying, that the idea of "let's make everyone unable to fight", although it leads to some negative consequences, is actually just a facade for something more complicated, roughly "let's make people unable to fight, unless they are members of our tribe". Disarming your opponents is not a new idea; the original part here is the one which also calls for disarming everyone neutral. (People mostly don't care about neutrals, they focus on their enemies. But it is more strategical to first disarm everyone using the memes of global disarming, and then find excuses for why your members belong to a different magisterium.)
I'm puzzled by your fixation with testosterone. It may be the thing that gives you and me our nether parts, but testosterone does not a man make.
It's a hypothesis. If there are any hormones or other biological pathways that are better predictors for being a "hero", like, courage, confidence, emotional strength, fierceness in situations appropriate, then I am happy to use them.
Why the interest in heroism?
Being the complete opposite of the neckbeard who hates himself because he was a coward to bullies and thus does not have the confidence to find a girlfriend - I think this is the primary reason of the suffering of nerds. But hey, isn't it exacty what I explained in the article?
Who being the opposite? You?
Me 20 years ago, I am 37. I sorta-kinda solved it about 70% during 20 years. Not efficient at all. Room for improvement. And yes, all the other "neckbears" we played AD&D with and obsessed over videogames - back then it meant Champions of Krynn - with. And their currently 17 years old versions. Mr "euphoric of my own intelligence", if you seen the photo, if not google it.
I did skim this post and it caused me to spend some time thinking... but what I can't escape is the way the whole speculation is framed is entirely missing the point. I mean, "Merely by asking the question you show you couldn't possibly understand the answer."
Let me try 3 ways to illustrate my point:
1) I wrote a short story some time ago about an unattractive girl who was lamenting her unpopularity. She was crying to herself, and out loud she wished she could go somewhere where people loved her for her mind, where appearance didn't matter. So out pops her Fairy Godmother who transports her to an island filled with people who want the same thing. They are all immediately loving and accepting of the girl, but she's still miserable. Her fairy godmother reappears and asks why she is so unhappy on the island. The girl says, "Because they're all so ugly!"
2) Even neckbeards (your term) do not find each other attractive.
3) The neckbeard wants his sexual appeal to be based on the beauty and purity of this mind and his thoughts and his character, and not on his physical appearance. But the only people he really cares about viewing himself that way are hot, sexy, young girls.
As a final thought, I have concluded (from experience) that my right hand gives me 99.8% of the pleasure I could ever hope to get from a woman, without all the baggage. The question you should be asking is not why isn't the girl interested in you, the question is why should you be interested in the girl at all?
As an aside, I joined this website within the past 2 days. I am almost to the point of abandoning it. There is a clear environment of intellectual inbreeding here. Groupthink. I long for a place where people are devoted to individualism.
This place isn't that. It has a collectivist feel. Original thoughts are not tolerated here. Rather, conformity is a requirement.
Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong. You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all different!
Man in crowd: I'm not...
Man in crowd: Shhh!
Brian: You've all got to work it out for yourselves.
The Crowd: Yes! We've got to work it out for ourselves!
Brian: Exactly!
The Crowd: Tell us more!
Brian: No! That's the point! Don't let anyone tell you what to do!
Brian is wrong about about a few things. We're not "all different". We have differences, and we have similarities. And it's simply stupid to try to work everything out for yourself. Other people have brains too. Why not leverage them?
Yes, the intellectual influences here tend to be a subset of what is generally available. That's why I came here. Intellectual influences like Jaynes, Kahneman, and Korzybski are in good taste. That's the shared epistemological influences.
There is some inbreeding in the sense of a history and culture that has developed over the years on top of that. Is that surprising? Would it impress you more if being a member of the list had no discernible effect on members?
If you're looking for devotional prayers to individualism, you've come to the wrong place. Though I and others will take our individualist hobby horses out for a jaunt every now and again. There are a pretty high percentage of individualists here, and something like a third of the list self identifies as libertarian. I'm of the Stirnerite egoist variety myself.
But there are plenty of collectivists here. You've got that right. I'd say they're the majority. Ideological utilitarians, no less. But they can have good ideas too, and it's actually interesting to get a peek into their alien minds, to be in a culture where ideological individualists and collectivists actually interact.
If you instead want everyone singing from the individualist hymnal, you've come to the wrong place. There is not a shared moral philosophy, and it would not be individualism if there were. We're hardly an average cross section either. I'd say this is more one of the few meeting grounds of moral ideological extremists.
There are some other forums that complain about a certain "SJW takeover" of LW. I think it is not entirely true, still, reading e.g. Star Slate Codex comments, who are generally from the LW community, sometimes make me go "holy fuck". The issue is, the whole SJW thing has little influence here in Europe and I swear it had little influence on the English-speaking, American-majority Internet before 2009. But I think around that date basically liberal college students decided that their former collective political hobby, namely: hating Bush, is no longer relevant and hating religious conservatives is a too low hanging fruit, and basically decided to hate each other as a new hobby, and thus even people with good liberal/progressive credentials got called stuff like transphobic or not a staunch enough feminist ally or whatnot, and it is a death spiral of hate, posturing and small-team squabbling. Resembing the groupuscules, mini-groups of the French student revolutionaries in 1968.
I don't think this takeover happened entirely, still the fact that Scott Alexander has to fight against the worst, least compassionate, least understanding, and least intellectual honest aspects of SJWism suggests that even the LW community cannot entirely shut out this new social phenomenon, is not entirely waterproof to it.
The "entryism" some right-winger babble about seems to be unfortunately and surprisingly, true. There are SJWs entering "neutral" institutions and generate hatred and faction inside. And I think I do see some "entryism" in LW.
Look at what "entryism" in science fiction in America. When shit like this deserves a Nebula and is nominated for Hugo then yes, SJW "entryism" does lower quality: http://www.apex-magazine.com/if-you-were-a-dinosaur-my-love/
And it is IMHO sad, because I do think causes like feminism or trans-acceptance have very positive aspects to them. However SJWism is not that, it is rather that abusing these causes to generate hatred between generally good people who are generally sympethetic to these causes. And it lowers intellectual quality. And that is what is problematic. Above all, there is one thing Euro social democrats could never understand American liberals: their propensity to guilt-trip themselves and each other. To hate themselves for crimes they did not actually personally commit. Now with SJW stuff I see this behavior on steroids really, and this is where I draw the line. I won't hate myself being a largely masculine-oriented straight guy as long as I know I am not a bigot with women or gays. And I want to help people who suffer from self-hatred problems - although, admittedly, in this article the self-hatred was instilled in them by very masculine, patriarchical bullies, not by SJWs. Still, I am sensitive to self-hatred issues coming from other sources, like, this kind of guilt-tripping.
Entryism isn't new it's been around for at least a century (possibly longer):
Look at what entyism did to non-speculative fiction (or the visual arts) in the western world.
That's your problem right there. What do you mean by "bigot"? Do you even have a coherent definition for that word, since in practice it means whatever the SJW's say it does.
IMHO real bigotry is largely understood as trying to either increase one's status or feel better about one's status by undermining the status of others. A classic example is when people use excuses like "not enabling unhealthy habits" to be a huge prick to fat people online, largely to feel better about oneself comparatively. This is obviously a facade, "haha look at that hippo" is not really about worrying about the health of others but more like "I am better, I may be unemployed and single, but at least thinner". Sometimes it is about real status - using discrimination to undermine competition. I think it is not hard to understand.
For example, my non-bigotry about gays is plain simply not having the slightest interest in them their either way, not spending a second of my time on them. Let them marry a car for all I care or adopt an ox, it is no skin off my back. I am selfish enough to not be hateful - means, largely focusing on what I want, not really being much interested in loving or hating people who don't really have anything I want. And I don't need to crutch up my masculinity by calling some else a sissy. I am fairly certain in it anyway. With women, it is largely trying to evaluate coworkers etc. by their actual individual merits or faults. I don't need generalized heuristics. I don't to wonder about theories whether women in general make good leaders. I can just give a temporary leadership to every individual for two weeks and try them out. And in relationships I don't try some kind of exactly measured equality, I am not ideological, but I am simply trying to pay attention to the desires and views of my partner and not dismissing them thinking it is just woman-talk. That is all really, I consider it common sense, not ideology.
Non-speculative fiction: I am confused, isn't Ludlum, Clancy etc. actually kinda borderline conservative?
Visual arts: another name for bullshit, yeah, but I think they did not get ideologized, they got simply colonized by talentless self-congratulating snobbery of artists who could not draw a fruit bowl accurately.
This is a useless definition. Since status is more-or-less zero sum this means that anyone trying to increase his status is being a bigot. In practice of course, this definition is applied selectively, i.e., you're not a bigot if you're raising your status in an SJW-approved way or a member of an SJW-approved group.
For example, isn't the above sentence technically bigoted by your definition since you're raising your status by lowering the status of people who engage in "fat shaming"?
I meant high-brow fiction, e.g., Finnegan's Wake.
It was ideologically while the takeover was happening, i.e., in the first half of the 20th century. A lot of modern artists justified they're "art" by arguing how they were rebelling against bourgeoisie respectability.
I think the main issue is assuming that outside SJW groups nobody cares about things like bigotry, homophobia or sexism. I think they do - in obviously lower-profile, less incisive, less loud, unfortunately less noticable ways. But more functional and saner ways.
I agree that my definition of this later may not be very good, because ultimately it is not really an ideology outside that, just a sort of a common sense and common decency which is hard to nail down exactly.
One thing is certainly style and manners. I used the fat-shamer group as an example because the basic philosophy does not come accross as very wrong ("don't enable unhealthy habits by uncritically approving them") yet the style is both abrasive and puerile at the same time.
One weird thing I recently realized that 2-3 generations ago people may have had worse ethics, but better manners. For example a lot of people were racists but less obvious ways than today because they were still able to talk with POC in a polite way. They would not let their kids harass POC kids because in their mind being born so was something sort of a disability and a "well bred" kid would not harass e.g. people who were born blind either, right? At least not in 1950 or so.
So, weirdly enough, I think a large part of non-SJW non-bigotry is not even ethics but just resisting the poor manners of these times, just the common old-fashioned idea to not insult and offend people if you can avoid it. Terms like "tact" that somehow went out of fashion.
There is one other aspect I could identify. One, trying to treat people as individuals, not representatives of groups. In this sense, non-SJW non-bigotry is actually centrist, because both extremes seem to not do it, some folks dismiss the views of women in STEM, while SJWs dismiss the views of white straight men in politics. So this centrist attitude is simply giving everybody a chance or two to prove themselves as individuals. I would say, it is working from an experience of plenty - an attitude that things are not so hurried, time is not so expensive as to have to resort to prejudices, essentially heuristics, when individual "tests" can be used.
What do you mean by "just a sort of a common sense and common decency"? You yourself later admit that until extremely recently no one considered these ideas to be "common sense". What you are thinking of as "a common sense and common decency" is nothing more then SJW (and their predecessors') memes that you've acquired by osmosis.
What on earth are you talking about? You appear to have no idea either what the USA was like in the 1950's or what it's like now. The above statement has so little relation to reality I don't even know where to start. Really, you might want to look for sources of news about what's going on in other countries that don't have an absurd level of "left-wing/SJW" bias.
Except the groups people are members of is correlated with their properties as individuals. Thus, someone who treated people based on merit would still wind up treating members of different groups differently.
What evidence convinced you of this? That they oppose "women in STEM" initiatives? That they wind up hiring fewer women then men and when asked to justify this point out sex differences?
The former would seem to be the kind of opposition to "treating people as members of groups" that you seem to condone, the latter is a consequence of the kind hiring people based on merit you also claim to approve of. (Incidentally here is another case where it is useful to have true, as opposed to "non-sexist", beliefs in order to see what's going on.)
How are tests any less heuristics than what you dismiss as "prejudices"? For example, why aren't tests bigoted for treating people as members of the groups "passed" and "failed" rather than individuals?
But a large aspect of it is actually very old. Look at how a gentleman talks to a lady in any old movie. Politely etc. Or in novels from the 19th century. Monte-Cristo, whatever. Concepts like tact, polite and gentle behavior, and taking other people's feelings into account stems from much older times than SJW stuff. Imagine an old novel or movie hero like Monte-Crisot meeting a gay person. Likely he has a very, very negative opinion of it but he still does not go "lol look at the faggot, did you suck many dicks today lol" because that 4chan level behavior is not allowed to an old fashioned gentleman. Most likely he keeps a stiff upper lip, discusses the weather politely and does not say anything directly at all, although later on he may whisper in his friends eye "the Viscount is apparently practicing unspeakably unnatural vices".
I am still fairly "well bred", not on that 19th century level, but I was taught to be polite way before I ever heard about any other left wing or progressive idea than socialism. And I don't understand the confusion here. What are we even talking about? Isn't it obvious that for example Vox Day has the kinds of manners and style any people who were raised to be polite in a conservative family who never subscribed to progressive ideas still find repulsive? I am confused what is even the issue here.
The other way around. I am not from Internet Default Country (I actually hate the defaultism) and probably this is why we may have a misunderstanding of manners. Recently America got overally poor manners, e.g. calling places people eat burgers with their hands, not using utensils, still "restaurants". But I think this was not always so. William F. Buckley Jr. had acceptable gentleman manners to my standards, i.e. my parents could invite him over dinner and he would fit in. Would Buckley be anything but polite to minorities? Would he let his kids go all 4chan on POC kids? Contemplate this please.
That is theoretically acceptable - he is not treating groups a such at all, just individuals. In practice this is not an issue because there are early filter. If blue people have 30% lower IQ than green people, and to graduate from a university takes 110 and your job requirement is 110, every blue and green graduate has an equal chance at you: because of the university pre-filtering.
Excuse me? You have a team of 3 women 2 men. Instead of going "well women don't make good leaders" you can test every member as a temp leader for 2 weeks. How is that not better?
Now you got me thinking. I don't actually condone of the treating people as members of groups, I think if I was I would just join the SJWs :) Individuals it is. However, my biases of evaluating individuals are influenced by prejudice, and prejudice is one of the many things that affects the behavior of other individuals, like, internalizing it and so on. This simply means that you examine some individuals more carefully than others. Again I find it common sense and not ideology.
Our boxing trainer is a refugee from Kosovo, a hugely conservative society with zero SJW influence. Yet he does this instinctively, because it makes sense. Some big muscular 28 years old guy comes for the first training, T oozing out his ears, he quickly gets he is probably feels okay with all this and will not be very bad at it, so he does not need to invest much attention into him, just go through the routine training. Some meek and timid 14 years old girl comes for the first training, he invests a lot of attention, because he needs to figure out she is really clumsy or just needing encouraging, and similar things. She is in an environment that feels hostile for her due to gender roles and all that, she needs more investment to get up to speed. Does this feel like SJW ideology to you? To me it is such a common sense thing...
I don't think that story got a Nebula - the author won a Nebula for this:
http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/summer_2010/fiction_the_lady_who_plucked_red_flowers_beneath_the_queens_window_by_rache
[EDIT: My mistake, both stories won Nebulas.]
Nevertheless, that the same author would write a story which can be partially summerised as saying "Wouldn't it be awesome to be a T-Rex! You could kill homophobes! I'd laugh so hard!" is pretty disturbing.
But its not as disturbing as the people who decided that debating using logic is racist, and first rap should be allowed in formal debates, and then the US national debate championship was won by people screaming incoherently.
This is how civilisation dies.
Really?
:-)
As to LW, all self-selected groups show some signs of groupthink, but I think you're mistaken that "conformity is a requirement". I would recommend not paying much attention to your karma and up/down votes.
To be fair, I have some fears of losing the privilege to submit posts to Discussion. Currently at 39 and I think the threshold is 4? I could fuck it up with one unpopular post. Other than that, I would not care.
I guess the implied strategy is: post comments first, articles later. Posting comments will usually bring you positive karma quickly. (Note that this strategy works slowly when you mostly comment on old articles.) Other possible strategy is: post an uncontroversially good article.
For posting controversial articles you should get some karma capital first. Don't take this personally.
Gaining karma is not difficult. If you ever feel the need for more karma, recall that you are smarter than an average bear and should be able to figure out simple karma-acquisition strategies.
Yes, but I need to be smarter than the average LW user for that and that sounds hard. I don't think Reddit-style "look at that cute puppy" would work.
No, you don't -- it's neither a zero-sum game, nor competition for a limited resource. The average LW user has a lot of positive karma.
Now you have me wondering what a zero-sum game for karma would look like on LessWrong.
(Or on Reddit, for that matter.)
My guess goes to "pretty ugly".
Could be interesting, though. Maybe if we made it clear that the karma didn't actually stand for anything...
No, who am I kidding. We're humans; Pavlovian conditioning is a thing. In our society, numbers going up are in and of themselves a reward. It'd probably get pretty tribal, I'd imagine; LW's claims of rationality notwithstanding, we seem to devolve into heated arguments quite frequently.
(And speaking of of LW's "rationality": I registered an account here last November, but I've been a lurker long before that, and it seems like the signal-to-noise ratio of LW has dropped significantly since the "good old days". Any ideas on why? Is it because of people like Eliezer and Scott having mostly deserted LW? Or is it the influx of new users causing an overall decrease in average quality, because the gems are getting buried in heaps of dung, so to speak? Do we need more people going around downvoting everything, thomblake-style?)
To keep positive karma? Absolutely not. Upvotes are more frequent here than downvotes.
Articles are judged more harshly than comments, because there is the "does this deserve to be a separate article, instead of a comment in Open Thread?" factor. And karma gains/loses from an article are greater than from a comment.
Let me put it this way:
You wrote an article with strong questionable claims,
...that you admit are just random stuff which would work only through chance,
...and you also admit it is poorly written and edited,
...touching a politicized topic, which is kind of a taboo here,
...and your total karma is still positive, despite the losses from this article.
To me it seems that getting negative karma requires a lot of work. (Okay, we have a successful example in this very thread, but that is a rare situation.)
Wait a bit please - is nerdiness politicized now? Or is rather, you mention anything related to social gender (terms like "masculine") and it is automatically politicized? This really raises the question to what extent you want the personal become political. I rather would not want this.
There was a man who said "anything that affects a lot of people is political". But that man was Janos Kadar, a bolshevik dictator...
How about "Look at that cute quote of Paul Graham"? (Terry Pratchett might also be a good bet.)
I really hope there is not much over overlap with Hacker News... I find Paul Graham's essays, at least outside his domain (software engineering,investing, "startups") tedious and boring, with very little insight. Read this and count how many times you feel like you are being subjected to vacuous windbaggery: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
I mean, if LW needs heroes outside LW I would recommend Steven Dutch for starters: http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pscindx.htm
Zero.
Also given your hangups about believing anything that could be perceived as "racist" you would do well to study that article more carefully.
Nice suggestion, that I not pay so much attention to my karma and up/down votes. However there is a simple flaw: I have to care if I want the freedom to initiate an article, don't I?
This recent exchange sent my karma from +10 to -9. What am I supposed to learn from this? That I am expected to conform to this community's agenda, otherwise I'll be shunned.
OK, this is my last post. I accept that I have been shunned from this community. And I am now leaving. And I am very, very pleased with myself that it only took me 3 days of occasional attention to determine what a complete waste of time it would be to invest time here.
Have fun, all!
That trolling is not a particularly rewarding activity.
:-D