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Eugine_Nier comments on Open thread, July 29-August 4, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think a lot of the disagreement between the left and the right boils down to disagreement about the appropriate form of the social welfare function. I think this applies not just to economic issues but also issues of gender and race.
While there quite likely is some degree of resolvable factual disagreement about the extent of certain inequities, and maybe-somewhat-resolvable disagreement about how those inequities might be lessened, there is also disagreement about how much those inequities should matter to us and affect our behavior, both political and personal. This is not the sort of disagreement I expect to see someone resolve in a blog post.
Now for a more blatantly left-wing argument: It is hard to get people to realize the extent and import of their privilege, to acknowledge that certain social inequities that are of minor significance when viewed from a privileged position are in fact deeply oppressive from the perspective of the marginalized. This is not the sort of thing that can be communicated by presenting scientific studies, because such studies may establish the existence of an inequity, but they do not fully convey the impact of that inequity on the lives and psyches of the population affected. The best way to acquire that sort of information is to listen to anecdotes from a number of marginalized people, a difficult thing to do on a website with demographics like LW has.
Also, while we're here, would you mind defining what you mean by "privilege"?
Guessing by how this word is typically used, it means: "My opponents are cognitively inferior. They can't understand my situation, because they have never experienced it. On the other hand, I can perfectly understand their situation (despite never experiencing it, too)."
I don't think it's implausible to believe that people pay more attention to those who have higher status than themselves, and less attention to those who have lower status. Furthermore, I believe in the snafu principle (people don't give accurate information if they'll be punished for it*).
Unfortunately, the true parts of the idea of privilege are apt to get swamped by the way it's used as a power grab.
*The original version framed this as an absolute. I'm quite willing to be probabilistic about it.
Do I read it correctly as: "..therefore, to focus on the opinions of lower-status people, it is necessary to exclude the higher-status people from the debate (because otherwise people would by instinct turn their attention only to what the higher-status people said -- which is probably not a new information for anyone -- and ignore the rest of the debate)."?
I would agree with that. -- And by the way, in some situations an average woman is actually higher-status than an average man, so perhaps we should debate those situations by excluding the women's voice. Actually, if a "dating market" is an example of such situation, that would explain the necessity of PUA debates (as in: the debate about dating is culturally framed by women's terms, so we need a place where men are allowed to explain how they feel without automatically taking a status hit for doing so).
Perhaps the problem is at not making a difference between "hypothesis generating" and "hypothesis debating" parts of reasoning. Excluding higher status people from some hypothesis-generating discussions is good, because it allows people to hear the opinions they would otherwise not hear. But when those hypotheses are already generated, they shouldn't be accepted automatically. (There is a difference between "you oppress me by using your status to prevent me from speaking my hypothesis" and "you oppress me by providing an argument against my hypothesis".) In theory, a group of lower-status people doesn't have a monolithic opinion, so they could make the debate among themselves. But sometimes the dissenting subgroup can be accused of being not-low-status-enough. (As in: "this topic should be only discussed by women, because only women understand how women feel. oh, you are a woman and you still disagree with me? well, that's because you are a privileged white woman!")
As an unpolitical analogy, it makes sense to use some special rules for brainstorming, to help generate new ideas. But it does not mean that the ideas generated by these special rules should be protected by them forever. It makes sense to use brainstorming for generating ideas, and then to use experiments and peer review for testing them. -- So while it can be good to use brainstorming to generate an idea for a peer-reviewed journal... it would be silly to insist that the journal must accept the idea uncritically, because otherwise it ruins the spirit of brainstorming.
I would like to point out that this is impossible by the definition of "high status".
I would like to point out that Yvain's post that progressive like to site elsewhere in this thread makes the exact opposite argument.
To phrase it in more statistical terms it would be something like "take into account how selection bias has changed your impressions of things."
E.g. as a white male in a liberal western nation I intuitively think buying food or finding a place to live is easy, so might not credit reports of someone else finding it difficult. But if prejudice against a group I am not part of was endemic I wouldn't be aware of it. So checking your privilege is a reminder that your experience may differ from others and to be aware of that.