Viliam comments on Open Thread April 11 - April 17, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Sorry for mindkilling content, but I remember reading on LW long ago that the political left is supposedly morally different, because it doesn't use the "purity/disgust" moral axis.
Then I found these photos online, and I wonder whether that is the microexpression (except there seems to be nothing "micro" when these people do it) of disgust. Or am I reading the expression wrong?
My point is that if someone has this expression pretty much stuck on their face, I find it quite difficult to believe that they don't care about the "purity/disgust" axis.
So what exactly is the lesson here?
It is wrong. Or, rather, the original hypothesis was about which axis dominates in political discourse and yes, purity/disgust does not dominate, but it is not completely absent either.
A clear example of the left doing the purity/disgust axis is environmentalism, opposition to GMOs, organic food, etc.
If I take a few dozen pictures of one person talking, I can find in them most any microexpression you want including ridiculous ones. These expressions are not representative of anything.
By the way, there is Kling's three-axis model and there is Haidt's moral foundations model. They are different.
Tabloid news are a great example of this. If you take thousands of pictures of the most gorgeous and breathtaking people in the world, you can find one where they look like deranged freaks.
Yep. If you are interested in examples, look for pictures of Hillary and Trump on right- and left-wing sites respectively.
I gravely doubt that anyone has that expression permanently stuck on their face. The image you linked to was obviously created in order to show "SJWs" in a bad light, and I can't imagine that anyone wanting to do that would use typical photos rather than particularly bad-looking photos for that purpose.
(The SJWiest people I know do not generally wear that sort of expression.)
I'm sure you're right that treating impurity and disgustingness as moral is not confined to the political right.
I suspect that the things treated as disgustingly wrong in "social justice" circles tend not to be ones that arouse feelings of disgust, as such, in most people, whereas things treated as disgustingly wrong among traditionalist social conservatives are often more widely felt to be disgusting. To put it differently: I suspect that "moral disgust" takes different forms on the left and on the right: on the left it's usually moral disapproval that has engendered disgust, and on the right it's usually disgust that has engendered moral disapproval.
This is the most salient conclusion. Photography is — among other things — the art of selectively promoting some visual evidence to the viewer's consciousness.
I'm not so sure. For one thing, "the left" and "the right" are concepts far up the ladder of abstraction, whereas a lot of "moral disgust" seems to be trained System 1 responses. Here are some things that might elicit "moral disgust" responses by people with different trained responses:
I don't think there's any contradiction. (Compare: "introvert" and "extravert" are concepts far up the ladder of abstraction, but introverts and extraverts differ largely in their System 1 responses to various sorts of situation.)
(For what it's worth, reading your examples I feel strong moral disapproval about some of them but no disgust about any of them. I might consider describing some of them as "disgusting" but wouldn't mean it very literally.)
Well, there was more than just one photo; I have seen a few videos of one of them, that's why I said the expression is stuck. The photo was merely most convenient to share to illustrate the point.
But of course the same argument could be applied here, that the videos were selected for displaying the person in bad light.
And the people were probably selected for being easily displayed in a bad light.
I just did a totally scientific experiment. I determined a perfectly fair and unbiased sample of leading names in social justice by (1) thinking what names come to mind when I think about "SJ" or "feminism" and (2) putting "leading advocate of social justice" into Google. I then looked for pictures of the resulting people (once again, Google is my friend).
In the resulting images, there were maybe one or two wearing something a bit like that sourly-disapproving expression, and none anywhere near as bad as in the image you linked to. Which, by the way, doesn't seem to name the people whose pictures it's showing; are they in fact prominent SJ people?
So I don't know how much is selection of people and how much is selection of photos, but I'm pretty sure that that facial expression is not in fact "The Face of Social Justice" in any useful sense.
The photos you selected look more like the "hate" microexpression from your link. Also, why is Anna Kendrick considered an SJW?