Yeah, it's nice when your opponents volunteer to remove from you the burden of proof whether they are irrational.
But seriously, I don't even know where to start. Perhaps here: Articles written on most popular websites are clickbait. It means that their primary purpose is to make you read the article after seeing the headline, and then share it either because you love it or because you hate it. And that's what you did. Mission accomplished.
Another article on the same website explains why animal rights movements are oppresive. (I am not going to link it, but here are the arguments for the curious readers: because it's wrong to care about animals while there are more important causes on this planet such as people being oppressed; because vegans and vegetarians don't acknowledge that vegan or vegetarian food can be expensive; because describing animals as male and female marginalizes trans people; and because protecting animals is colonialistic against native people who hunt animals as part of their tradition.) Obviously, the whole article is an exercise in making the reader scream and share the article to show other readers how crazy it is. This is exactly what the authors and editors...
I simply assume that almost everything they say is a metaphor for something (usually for their feelings).
It has taken me many years to realize that, but the more I look for it the more I notice it. I have a friend on Facebook who's a Syrian living in NYC, she keeps posting things like "Here's the proof Assad is actually a spy planted by the Israeli Mossad to cause genocide in Syria". I kept asking her how she could possibly believe it and got very confusing responses that didn't really address the question. And then it hit me: for her and for many Arabs "X is a Mossad spy" is simply an eloquent way of saying "I hate X", it has literally nothing to do with the Mossad at all. My friend was confused why I even bring facts about the Mossad into a discussion of whether Assad is a Mossad spy.
Viliam gave enough SJ examples, so I'll give one from the other side: there was a campaign by some famous PUA to boycott Mad Max: Fury Road because it's feminist propaganda. Hold on, isn't that the movie where the attractive women in skimpy clothes are called "breeders" whose job is to make babies? And then I realized:
Viliam gave enough SJ examples, so I'll give one from the other side: there was a campaign by some famous PUA to boycott Mad Max: Fury Road because it's feminist propaganda. Hold on, isn't that the movie where the attractive women in skimpy clothes are called "breeders" whose job is to make babies?
A lot of feminists agreed with the PUAs' assessment of the movie as being pro-feminist. The guy who treated women as breeding stock was the antagonist. You aren't supposed to sympathize with Immortan Joe.
famous PUA to boycott Mad Max: Fury Road because it's feminist propaganda.
I've seen PUA stuff and I've seen the movie. Whilst it's true that the protagonists are mostly female and the bad guy is male, I wouldn't say it's pushing a feminist message. I don't think that the film vilifies men as a whole. I'm much more annoyed about ghostbusters actually.
Well, this is exactly the problem. First step is that people say random things just because they reflect the emotions they have at the moment. Second step is that later they sometimes derive logical consequences of what they previously said. Then bad things happen as a result.
Usually there is a boundary; people often have crazy beliefs in far mode, while having quite sensible beliefs in near mode. They can keep talking bullshit as long as it does not concern them directly, but when it becomes personal they can either conveniently forget to apply the bullshit, or have some general excuse such as "but this specific case is different". This can work surprisingly well as long as there is a social norm of not requiring people to actually act on their abstract beliefs.
Nerds usually lack the social skills to follow this strategy (because no one tells them about it explicitly; because applying this strategy to itself means never talking explicitly about it), usually harming themselves as the result, by following the norms that everyone applauds but no one except a few nerds actually follows. Sometimes they harm the others as the result, for example when they take the norm of kill...
I think there is another reason SJWs (and others) may dislike “rationality” that is getting buried here:
- The author is not a good reasoner, and while arguing over these experiences, often says stupid things, and gets told ze is irrational
There is a difference between an argument not being phrased in a reasonable way and the argument itself being stupid. When my husband and I were first married I would win must of the arguments NOT because I was necessarily right (as later came to realize) but because I was a better rhetorician. I could lay out my case in an orderly fashion. I could work commonly agreed statements into my arguments. I could anticipate counter arguments and set-up to counter them. I could model possible external circumstances and present those that supported my view. This lead to a situation where my husband constantly felt steam rolled. He might not be able to articulate logical fallacies but he could feel the effects of his preferences constantly being overruled by mine. I needed to learn to back off and respect his views even if they weren’t phrased as elegantly as mine. Even though I could use a rationality is winning approach to maneuver the situation so th...
To the extent that some SJWs seem to want to say “I really, really want X,” and leave their argument at that, then rationality is irrelevant to them.
The problem is that some SJWs say "I really, really want you/everyone to do X" but the rest of the world is not married to them and is not particularly interested in their hedonic preferences. This means that they need to negotiate for what they want and at this point rationality jumps right back in.
"I really want X and don't care about anything else" is the attitude of a small child.
'men of good will can always come to a reasonable agreement' article of faith
That's an interesting observation given that SJWs are very... forceful about separating everyone into sheep and goats. They have come to heavily depend upon the existence of "the enemy" fighting which constitutes most of their raison d'etre. There are, of course, parallels with the devil, but the machinations of Satan figure much more prominently in Catholicism and are (almost?) completely absent in the UU doctrine.
this is an ancient value with regards to my family/my friends/my tribe... But I'm doubtful about how far beyond that it would extend.
For low-cost help I think pretty far. Imagine yourself travelling in some non-Christian country where you are clearly not a native (say, China for most people here). You had a minor accident and you are standing at the side of the road over, say, a broken bike and bleeding from a minor gash. You think random strangers won't stop and help you?
I do also think a lot of Social Justice thinking started out as a genuine desire to help people and make them happier
I've come to realize that my view of SJ is insufficiently steely. Do you happen to know o...
To the extent that some SJWs seem to want to say “I really, really want X,” and leave their argument at that, then rationality is irrelevant to them.
Rationality is also irrelevant to my daughter, and for the same reason, as for example in this exchange:
Daughter: I want TV. Me: No more TV now. Daughter: But I want it!
This is rather a common 'argument' of hers; from the outside it looks like she models me as not having understood her preference, and tries to clarify the preference. To be sure, she has the excuse of being four.
Phil, I think you're falling into the trap you accuse Pham of: getting confused about words and how people use them. Like you've noticed, Pham doesn't use "rationality" to mean the same thing we do. From the article:
What if those imperialism-driven Europeans, all passionate and roused about Manifest Destiny, were encouraged to stop and reconsider whether their violent plans were rational? We might possibly have a world that isn’t filled to the brim with oppression.
In the article Pham vacillates between using "rational" to mean "reasonably likely to be achieved" and to mean "culturally acceptable". The point of their article is that being told that decolonization is "irrational" (i.e. unlikely to be achieved and/or unpopular) doesn't mean that people shouldn't pursue it as a goal. Let's call these definitions Pham.rationality. They, especially the second one, have very little to do with "representing an accurate picture of reality" or however you want to define LW.rationality.
...But it isn't just a sign of how insane the social justice movement is—it has clues to how it got that way. The author came to hate "rationa
Getting five downvotes on this immediately after posting is bizarre, and I'd appreciate explanations from other people, except most likely they're just part of an anti-PhilGoetz contingent.
Having successfully asked for similar explanations before, I feel obligated to answer this. I downvoted this post because 1. the topic is known to be heavily mindkilling, 2. the post is devoid of the sort of context that might make it interesting, and 3. the motivation behind the post appeared to stem from a "My political enemies are Wrong on the Internet" mentality. I come here to get away from that sort of thing, not invite it.
Posting in Main did not help, although I think I would have downvoted it anyway.
For context, I don't attach any particular good or bad affect to you as PhilGoetz. I've seen both good and bad posts from you, although perhaps higher variance in that respect than most. This one seemed sufficiently trolly that I considered asking if someone had hijacked your account. It was only after checking your recent post history and noting this that I concluded it was probably legit. That suggests my opinion of you as a poster is considerably higher than my opinion of this ...
Getting five downvotes on this immediately after posting is bizarre
What's your prior probability for "at least five readers didn't like this article or didn't want to see a political discussion on LW"?
Without explanation, your downvotes do nothing except further convince me of the LessWrong community's irrationality and/or Machiavellan standards of behavior.
Nice try.
Getting five downvotes on this immediately after posting is bizarre, and I'd appreciate explanations from other people, except most likely they're just part of an anti-PhilGoetz contingent.
I didn't vote, but I considered downvoting because this article was somewhat short, about a touchy subject in a way that seemed unlikely to change minds, and had strange formatting (copied from the original article, probably).
You are absolutely allowed to make me uncomfortable about my tribal allegiances. But you must do so by making a point and explaining what conclusions you are drawing from your examples.
I would just like to note / point out that "SJW" is not a particularly neutral way to refer to the group of people in question -- it smuggles in (at least for some readers, and I suspect for most) a distinctly negative connotation about the group described.
Obviously if that's your intention, then by all means use the language you prefer; but if some of the commenters didn't mean it that way, and are just trying neutrally discuss a movement, I'd encourage picking a different term for it. (I normally say "the social justice movement".)
I will borrow from Error's very apt disclaimer in another comment, and note that my feelings toward the movement in question are more or less neutral -- "an affect borne of opinions that cancel out rather than a simple lack of same."
Perhaps that connotation is because of the group in question? I dislike playing word games, the words we use should be interchangeable if they refer to the exact same thing. It's kind of like how we went from Negroes to Black to African Americans in an attempt to combat racism, but the racism was the problem, not bad words, and it only gets confusing when you word police. I was talking to some social justice types before the term was used in a derogatory way online and they described themselves that way, and the first place I saw it online was as a self-description of those groups. Words get loaded with bad affect because people have negative thoughts about the thing being referred to. I think any decision to use a new word that predates changing the thing to which we are referring is premature.
I think it is worth pointing out that the article selected for 'review' is not entirely typical of the site (most articles seem to discuss lived experience, activism activities and how to get by in unfriendly circumstances rather than philosophy or logic per se).
Additionally, the Facebook thread for the article has a lot of discussion, dominated (in my view) by self-described "SJW"s who had big problems with the anti-rationality stance of the article and made strong arguments in favour of logic and reason.
...This article show that the bias of some
Here is an interesting personal account of a someone who was a Social Justice Warrior but then escaped (while still remaining a leftist social democrat). Sample:
...This particular brand of politics begins with good intentions and noble causes, but metastasizes into a nightmare. In general, the activists involved are the nicest, most conscientious people you could hope to know. But at some point, they took a wrong turn, and their devotion to social justice led them down a dark path. Having been on both sides of the glass, I think I can bring some painful bu
I've heard everydayfeminism.com mentioned before, and I think its meant to be a more mainstream feminist site - thus the name.
(The link from "decolonization" is to "Decolonization is not a metaphor", to make it clear s/he means actually giving the land back to the Native Americans.)
And they are arguing for ethnic cleansing.
I think it is interesting that what we call the far-right and the mainstream(ish) left are using almost isomorphic (meaning structurally identical) arguments. I've met people openly advocating for Maoist revoluti...
First, "Social justice" is a broad and very diverse movement of people wanting to reduce the amount of (real or perceived) injustice people face for a variety of reasons (skin color, gender, sexual orientation, place of birth, economical position, disability, ...). Like in any such broad political movement, subparts of the movement are less rational than others.
Overall, "social justice" is still mostly a force of reason and rationality against the most frequent and pervasive forms of irrationality in society, which are mostly religion-b...
Overall, "social justice" is still mostly a force of reason and rationality against the most frequent and pervasive forms of irrationality in society
Citation needed.
it might be very rational to make irrational demands
This is true. But then are you claiming that the irrational demands we are discussing in this thread are the result of such gaming of negotiations or dark-arting of the memesphere?
Hi. LessWrong purports to be about decision theory, cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and a whole hell of a lot of Bayesian statistics. It also purports to have a policy that "Politics is the Mind-Killer".
Since this post does not belong to any of the normal LW topics, and appears very very angry in a distinctly mind-killy way, I'm downvoting it.
It would perhaps be considered appropriate content on Rationalist Tumblr or /r/slatestarcodex. Enjoy your flame-war -- somewhere else.
Changing social conventions has a cost. When we extend social justice beyond respect for difference that people have no choice over, such as race or sex, to roles that they choose, such as religion or gender, the justification for allowing everyone to defy any particular social convention must be a rational cost-benefit assessment. Many people enjoy the ritual interactions specified by social roles; they are part of their identities and one of their terminal values.
Not to mention that many social conventions serve a purpose beyond people enjoying them.
should abolish prisons, police, and the American settler state
Maybe they should just create an SJW state somewhere, with no prisons, police, cishet males or white cis females? I'm all for empiricism on this one! I'm sure it'd be a world renowned centre of excellence for postmodernism and gender studies, as well as being economically vibrant and politically stable.
Meta-comment here. Fighting about Social Justice is just about the least Less Wrong thing I can think of. But on the other hand this post has a billion comments at a time when Less Wrong is kind of dying.
Any port in a storm?
he's an idiot
The juxtaposition between that and your username made me smile.
(I still haven't read that blog so it's quite possible I would agree, anyway.)
Cultural Revolution = SJWs + "Lord of the Flies"
Imagine the current student protests, except that they would happen during a revolution, so instead of getting teachers fired you could simply hang them and no one outside the school would really care. The accounts of Cultural Revolution that I have read were pretty much this.
Cultural revolutionaries had the options that SJWs currently don't have. (Similarly how current neo-Nazis don't put people into gas chambers, because they don't live in an environment where they would be allowed to build the gas chambers. That doesn't make them mentally different.)
I don't usually upvote top-level discussion posts but I'll lend you one upvote until you break even.
This is an important topic of discussion. I reckon your downvotes are because of your subpar formatting.
Based on my experiences as a marginalized person, being rational just means going easy on my oppressors.
shudders
Until someone demonstrates the utility of engaging in criticism of particular political groups, I will continue to treat it as noise.
We already know out groups don't use the word rationality the way we do. We also know that assuming others share our information and frame of reference is an error. There is no new information here.
a "good Trojan" is one who exhibits heroic virtues, of course, that makes it especially heroic for a Greek to kill him.
That's just a way of saying that Trojans are full player characters in the Iliad (and that is the key reason why their heroism matters and why killing a 'good Trojan' is seen as a true achievement), whereas Germans - good or bad - are just NPCs.
In that case, you appear to have no idea how most people behave.
I'll take your opinion under consideration.
Well, not really.
the Illiad
Fiction.
Arabian knights
Ain't no such thing.
the bahavior of modern gangs
And what percentage of modern society is a gang member?
Really, which bias are you referring to.
The bias of believing (to various degrees) that your in-group is children of the light and your out-group is the spawn of darkness.
Well, a lot of atheists are amoral.
A lot of people are amoral. So what?
Ok, define "bigotry",
Negative beliefs about a group of people based on weak evidence, and actions that derive from such beliefs, particularly when the group is defined by a characteristic that is difficult or impossible to change.
also explain why "bigotry" as you just defined it is a bad thing.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Claims that are similar to ones that have been proven false in the past and have led to lots of human misery count as extraordinary for these purposes.
during the period in question
During which period? SJ is a recent phenomenon, post-civil-rights movement for certain. And to believe the glorious Chinese utopia you had to make a real effort to not notice things.
Hey, I'm trying to explain my understanding of why leftists do what they do.
Well, there is enough evidence to conclude that at least some Maoists were, in fact, driven by the desire for power. Do you have any pointers to writings by UU luminaries where they express the idea that the intensity of emotion is a good way to distinguish whether it...
Yes, and look at the implicit morals that the fiction assumes.
Yes, and..?
You didn't have to go that far back. Pretty much most WW2 fiction books assume the peak of morality is to kill as many Germans as possible. So?
If you restrict to the ghetto classes.
Do rednecks qualify? What about white trash? X-) Or let's go global. Do you think Chinese peasants are particularly sophisticated people? India's slum dwellers?
tries to include at least one "good German".
And do you believe that in Iliad all Trojans are fully bad guys and gals..?
since they don't have an a priori reason to distrust them
Um, they don't..? As in, entirely unfamiliar with Chairman Mao and his ways?
such passion means the Maoist-types are expressing their "true desires"
That assertion strongly smells of straw.
What does social justice even stand for these days? It sounds like a noble cause but it's also somewhat unrefined.
The idea that everyone should be equal in the social sphere
Only eventually. In the meantime, right now, because there are terrible oppressive structures in place, SJ wants explicitly to take power away from some social groups and give it to other social groups. The goal is not NOT equality now, the goal is to create inequality which will compensate for the oppression and, to some extent, balance it.
Look at the lists of demands made by SJ students at colleges (Missouri, Yale, etc.). They don't want to be race-blind, for example. They want to be very very race-conscious to, um, hand-correct for oppression. They want racially segregated housing, FFS.
And, of course, everyone is to be equal except for the enemy which must be cast out and stoned.
It's most evident in the Unitarian Universalists
Very interesting. I had them pegged as The Mild Ones, those who got so wishy-washy and all-embracing about religion that the only thing left afterwards was the "Thou shall be nice" commandment. The SJWs look to have more of Maoist DNA...
Is it me or neither the article nor the comments actually address the elephant in the room?
The social justice movement, as aptly said at the end of the article, is a profoundly rational, radically rational movement. Overcoming bias is a strong goal in SJ.
But the SJM faces a huge, cohrent mass of unconsciously biased people and most people in the SJM aren't prepared as LWer could be to address the question of bias on an intellectual level. Which means that the mass of morons they face usually feel free to ridicule their vision of bias, labelling as either n...
Overcoming bias is a strong goal in SJ.
Except that what they mean by "bias" is much closer to what LW means by "priors" than what we mean by "bias".
The lead article on everydayfeminism.com on March 25:
3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism
The scenario is always the same: I say we should abolish prisons, police, and the American settler state— someone tells me I’m irrational. I say we need decolonization of the land — someone tells me I’m not being realistic.... When those who are the loudest, the most disruptive — the ones who want to destroy America and all of the oppression it has brought into the world — are being silenced even by others in social justice groups, that is unacceptable.
(The link from "decolonization" is to "Decolonization is not a metaphor", to make it clear s/he means actually giving the land back to the Native Americans.)
I regularly see people who describe how social justice activists act accused of setting up a straw man. This article show that the bias of some SJWs against reason is impossible to strawman. The author argues at length that rationality is bad, and that justice arguments shouldn't be rational or be defended rationally. Ze is, or was, confused about what "rationality" means, but clearly now means it to include reason-based argumentation.
This isn't just some wacko's blog; it was chosen as the headline article for the website. I had to click around to a few other articles to make sure it wasn't a parody site.
But it isn't just a sign of how irrational the social justice movement is—it has clues to how it got that way.
The author came to hate "rationality" because s/he thought "rationality" meant "conventionality".
In fact, by American standards, my very existence is irrational. For many, I simply do not exist as a queer, Vietnamese femme who is neither a man or a woman. Living in my body, wading through my truths, is not a rational act. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Based on my experiences as a marginalized person, being rational just means going easy on my oppressors.
The narrow bit of room that rationalism gave me wasn’t enough for me to envision new possibilities for my gender, to escape the confines of impending manhood. It wasn’t enough for me to understand my personhood as infinitely more complicated than the models of personhood fed to me by white cis people.
S/he didn't realize that white cis people don't use rationality either to understand their gender and social role. These are cultural values that parents deliberately program in before a child can become rational and come up with their own version.
Making my own inferences, I'd guess that
1. The author has had many unpleasant social experiences because of zis refusal to adopt a gender, and
2. The author is not a good reasoner, and while arguing over these experiences, often makes bad arguments, and gets told ze is irrational, and
3. The author is unable to distinguish discomfort with zis gender non-choice, from resistance to zis bad ideas, as having separate causes.
The 3 reasons are:
1. Being Rational Has No Inherent Value
2. Rationalism Is a Tool Made to Hurt Us
3. We Are Enough Without Rationalism
Also see the same site's recent article "4 Reasons Demanding ‘Objectivity’ in Social Justice Debates Can Be Oppressive".
ADDED, since I'm 50 karma in the hole anyway:
Ironically, today's "social justice" program demands a radical rationalism.
Social justice used to be a rationalist program on its surface, pointing out the irrationality of prejudice and the illogic in narratives used to justify oppression. But as society adjusted its pre-judgements closer to targets that were rational but still unequal, e.g., from "Women can't do engineering" to "Most women don't want to do engineering", the emphasis switched from being rational about our beliefs to irrationally assuming equality of everyone and everything, not just as a default starting point, but as a mandated endpoint. (Historically, this was tied to an influx of reality-denying continental philosophy into social activism in the 1960s.)
De-emphasizing rationality on its surface requires a more radical rationalism for its practical implementation. Changing social conventions has a cost. When we extend social justice beyond respect for difference that people have no choice over, such as race or sex, to roles that they choose, such as religion or gender, the justification for allowing everyone to defy any particular social convention must be a rational cost-benefit assessment. Many people enjoy the ritual interactions specified by social roles; they are part of their identities and one of their terminal values. A demand to give up these values must fall back onto consequentialist arguments.
(Is constant social pressure on the person doing the defying more important than thousands of irritations to the people who don't know how to deal with zim, and who feel their own identities inhibited in zis presence? I don't know. It's torture vs. dust specks.)
The new social justice program is ultimately to strip from human consciousness all shortcuts, biases, prejudices, pre-computations, and priors. This requires making each individual a rational consequentialist capable of reasoning zer way from every situation to a rational behavior. To know how to use social roles, people require either social heuristics (which will inevitably oppress somebody), or radical ends-based rationality. This is particularly true when people are allowed to unilaterally opt in or out of social roles, so that every situation has a mix of people demanding to be treated differently.
(It isn't clear whether priors are permissible in this rationality.)
Even the oppressed classes must be ideal rationalists (Homo economicus). If women are still allowed to prefer not to be computer programmers, or men are allowed to prefer not to raise children, a free market will make mandated equality cause, rather than alleviate, injustice.
Alternately, we could possibly say that social justice doesn't require radical rationality, provided that we allow no social roles (a commitment to radical individuality). This also imposes a cost in so far as social roles serve to increase social utility.