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PhilGoetz comments on "3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism" - Less Wrong
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Comments (247)
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:
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.
Let me get this straight: you define Insane = NOT(LW.rationality), see an article that says: SJ = NOT(Pham.rationality), and then happily conclude that SJ = Insane because "rationality".
You could have attacked the article for having an undesirable goal (i.e. abolishing the police). You could have attacked it for jumping between two definitions, and creating a deepity: one interpretation is banal (we should push for decolonialization even if it's unpopular), the other is plain false (we will achieve decolonialization even if it's utterly impossible). You could have attacked the article for incorrect facts, incoherent structure and extremely poor writing. There's enough ammunition there to make whatever denigrating point you want to make about SJ writing.
What you shouldn't get away with is seeing someone else define a word in a confusing/misleading way to make a point and then immediately doing the same thing.
My most charitable interpretation of your post is that you think that:
A is both unfounded speculation and unnecessary ad-hominem, B still fails as a logical argument because Pham doesn't use her friends' definition of rationality in the article.
Phil, I have read a lot of the great stuff that you've posted here on LW, this post does your reputation a disservice.
Criticizing the positions in the article would not be relevant to LessWrong. I posted this here for 2 reasons, and I pointed them both out:
It is of interest to LW as an indicator of the status of, and the level of, "rationality" in the social justice movement. I am always accused of straw-manning SJWs when I recount how they've actually behaved. This is a useful example to point to when accused of straw-manning. The author doesn't understand clearly what "rationality" means, but ze has learned to included under the umbrella of "rationality" everything I would call rationality. Ze is advocating irrational goals such as abolishing prisons and giving the land back to the Indians, and is saying the ze shouldn't defend these goals via rational argument. At this point, ze knows what ze's doing.
It suggests how Pham got zis prejudice against rationality, which I tried to explain, and which you noticed I tried to explain.
So I don't see the problem. But thanks for commenting.
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. Without explanation, your downvotes do nothing except further convince me of the LessWrong community's irrationality and/or Machiavellan standards of behavior.
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 specific post.
Also for context, my affect for the tribe you're attacking (or, perhaps, counterattacking) is neutral-to-slightly-negative -- an affect borne of opinions that cancel out rather than a simple lack of same.
That is a fact about you, not about the downvotes. If you don't understand the downvotes, by all means ask, but don't follow up with "if you don't answer I'll think bad things about you." That's appealing to exactly the same monkey brain crap that I thought we were trying to outwit, not encourage.
[Edited to add: I should modify complaint #2 above. Your post-downvote addition actually is interesting, although #1 and perhaps #3 would still apply. I'm not revoking the downvote, but you may be able to learn something by comparing that to what came before.]
I started to write a rebuttal and explanation of why I don't care to see this on LW, but then gave up and just downvoted. I try not to do so very often, but honestly it's happening more that it used to; I see something useless or irrelevant, and rather than taking the time to say why, I just downvote.
Sorry.
Now that I'm actually writing this, I guess I'll expand on my "useless or irrelevant" claim. I don't think LW is a reasonable community for the discussion of politics or specific in/out group behaviors. It's a fine place to talk about them in the abstract, and using SJ as examples would be fine, but that's not what this is. This is just "here's a group I disagree with, and here's an example of them being dumb".
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"?
Nice try.
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 surprised? LW automatically downvotes polarizing/uncomfortable content and that goes double for anything that mentions SJWs.
Or, to be a bit more precise, you are allowed here to make people uncomfortable with the scenario of a giant paperclip chasing them. But you are not allowed to make people uncomfortable about their tribal allegiances.
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 don't think LW is a hotbed of SJW activity. I could be wrong.
Mentioning SJWs is a microaggression and tends to trigger some individuals :-P
I would love to hear the evidence you have to back that very broadstatement. It sounds like you're against doing this yourself, and so am I, and so is Phil. That's 0/3 so far here.
I upvoted Phil's post about word per person and rigor because it was an interesting and novel idea backed by actual research and analysis (whether I agree with it or not). I downvoted this post because it's a trite idea backed by no analysis other than taking word definitions out of context.
If you really feel that LW is now entirely populated by people who wage petty wars over tribal grievances (like 90% of the rest of the internet), then what are you still doing here?
Except for the post itself being -6/+1 at the moment...
That's not what I said and adding straw to the discussion does not make it better.
Presenting proof that denouncing reason is acceptable within the social justice community isn't an "idea". It's data. That in itself is worth a post.
No, that was a single post/article and so an anecdote or an example. In any case, your conclusion seems obvious and self-evident to me, but we probably have different expectations with respect to SJWs...
lol
I hope someone will use "trigger warning: Clippy" in one of those articles.
I want an avatar of a smiling paperclip with bloody ends, like it just stabbed someone.
When people arguing with VoiceOfRa got several downvotes in a row, the conclusion drawn was sockpuppets.
So to be fair, lets assume there's an SJW with a sockpuppet army too. Now both sides can claim its just tit-for-tat.
There was substantially more evidence that VoiceOfRa was downvoting in a retributive fashion, including database evidence.