Since it has suddenly become relevant, here are two results from this year's survey (data still being collected):
When asked to rate feminism on a scale of 1 (very unfavorable) to 5 (very favorable), the most common answer was 5 and the least common answer was 1. The mean answer was 3.82, and the median answer was 4.
When asked to rate the social justice movement on a scale of 1 (very unfavorable) to 5 (very favorable), the most common answer was 5 and the least common answer was 1. The mean answer was 3.61, and the median answer was 4.
In Crowder-Meyer (2007), women asked to rate their favorability of feminism on a 1 to 100 scale averaged 52.5, which on my 1 to 5 scale corresponds to a 3.1. So the average Less Wronger is about 33% more favorably disposed towards the feminist movement than the average woman (who herself is slightly more favorably disposed than the average man).
I can't find a similar comparison question for social justice favorability, but I expect such a comparison would turn out the same way.
If this surprises you, update your model.
the average Less Wronger is about 33% more favorably disposed towards the feminist movement than the average woman
Maybe that's exactly what makes LW a good target. There are too many targets on the internet, and one has to pick their battles. The best place is the one where you already have support. If someone would write a similar article about a website with no feminists, no one on the website would care. Thus, wasted time.
In the same way, it is more strategic to aim this kind of criticism towards you personally than it would be e.g. towards me. Not because you are a worse person (from a feminist point of view). But because such criticism will worry you, while I would just laugh.
There is something extremely irritating about a person who almost agrees with you, and yet refuses to accept everything you say. Sometimes you get angry about them more than about your enemies, whose existence you already learned to accept. At least, the enemies are compatible with the "us versus them" dichotomy, while the almost-allies make it feel like the "us" side is falling apart.
EDIT: Seems like you already know this.
There is something extremely irritating about a person who almost agrees with you, and yet refuses to accept everything you say. Sometimes you get angry about them more than about your enemies, whose existence you already learned to accept. At least, the enemies are compatible with the "us versus them" dichotomy, while the almost-allies make it feel like the "us" side is falling apart.
Upvoted for that.
In my experience, groups that want something to attack will attack groups that are generally aligned with them, rather than groups that are further away -- possibly due to the perceived threat of losing members to the similar group.
I've seen so many Communists get called Nazis by other Communist groups -- and those groups never go after people who actually call themselves Nazis.
Perhaps this is obvious already, but the positions people explicitly endorse on surveys are not necessarily those they implicitly endorse in blog comments.
Update: Likely that feminist-inclined LWers are less likely to comment/vote and more more likely to take surveys.
Meta-update: This hypothesis ruled highly-improbable based on more data from Yvain.
Among lurkers, the average feminism score was 3.84. Among people who had posted something - whether a post on Main, a post in Discussion, or a comment, the average feminism score was 3.8. A t-test failed to reveal any significant difference between the two (p = .49). So there is no difference between lurkers and posters in feminism score.
Among people who have never posted a top-level article in Main, the average feminism score is 3.84. Among people who have posted top-level articles in Main, the average feminism score is 3.47. A t-test found a significant difference (p < .01). So top-level posters were slightly less feminist than the Less Wrong average. However, the average feminism of top-level posters (3.47) is still significantly higher than the average feminism among women (3.1).
I update in the direction that the model of people I form based on LW comments is pretty inaccurate.
Possible, but I suspect the "Why our kind can't cooperate" both has a stronger effect and is more likely.
For the sake of simplicity, I used sex rather than gender and ignored nonbinaries. The average man on the site has a feminism approval score of 3.75; the average woman on the site has a score of 4.40. These are significantly different at p < .001.
The average man on the site has a social justice approval score of 3.55; the average woman on the site has a score of 4.21. These are, again, significantly different at p < .001.
I think it's worth noting that we are (yet again) having a self-criticism session because a leftist (someone so far to the left that they consider liberal egalitarian Yvain to be beyond the pale of tolerability) complained that people who disagree with them are occasionally tolerated on LW.
Come on. Politics is rarely discussed here to begin with and something like 65*% of LWers are liberals/socialists. If the occasional non-leftist thought that slips through the cracks of karma-hiding and (more importantly) self-censorship is enough to drive you away, you probably have very little to offer.
*I originally said 80%, but I checked the survey and it's closer to 65%. I think my point still stands. Only 3% of LWers surveyed described themselves as conservatives.
Only 3% of LWers surveyed described themselves as conservatives.
Interesting. I wonder why LW has so few conservatives. Surely, just like there isn't masculine rationality and feminine rationality, there shouldn't be conservative rationality and liberal rationality. It also makes me wonder how valid the objections are in the linked post if the political views of LW skew vastly away from conservative topics.
Full disclosure: I'm a black male who grew up in the inner city and I don't find anything particularly offensive about topics on LW. There goes my opposing anecdote to the one(s) presented in the linked blog.
At a guess, I'd say this is linked to religion. Once you split out the libertarian faction (as the surveys historically have), it's quite rare for people on the conservative side of the fence (at least in the US) to be irreligious, and LW is nothing if not outspokenly secular.
People in the rationality community tend to believe that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to be had in thinking rationally, and that the average person and the average society is missing out on this. This is difficult to reconcile with arguments for tradition and being cautious about rapid change, which is the heart of (old school) conservatism.
My steelman of the conservative position is 'empirical legislation' : do not make new laws until you have decent evidence they achieve the stated policy goals. "Ah, but while you are gathering your proof, the bad thing X is still happening!" "Too bad."
FAI is a conservative position.
To respond to the grandparent, I think in the US conservatives ceded all intellectual ground, and are therefore not a sexy position to adopt. (If this is true, I think one should view this as a bad thing regardless of one's political affiliation, because 'loyal opposition' is needed to sharpen teeth).
There is a big difference between what sex you are and what beliefs you profess: The first should not have anything to do with how rational you are...
Why not? Men and women are different in many ways. Why did you decide that a disposition to rationality can't possibly depend on your sex (and so your hormones, etc.)?
I think political differences come down to values moreso than beliefs about facts.
Sometimes it is difficult to find out what is the different value and what is essentially the same value but different models.
For example two people can have a value of "it would be bad to destroy humanity", but one of them has a model that humanity will likely destroy itself with ongoing capitalism, while the other has a model that humanity would be likely destroyed by some totalitarian movement like communism.
But instead of openly discussing their models and finding the difference, the former will accuse the latter of not caring about human suffering, and the latter will accuse the former of not caring about human suffering. Or they will focus on different applause lights, just to emphasise how different they are.
I probably underestimate the difference of values. Some people are psychopaths; and they might not be the only different group of people. But it seems to me that a lot of political mindkilling is connected with overestimating the difference, instead of admitting that our values in connection with a different model of the world would lead to different decisions. (Because our val...
Here, my honest answer would be that I presently have no evidence one way or the other.
At this point I would have to conclude that the guy is either very deliberately blind or is lying through his teeth.
He, of course, knows very well what the consequences for his career and social life would be were he to admit the unspeakable.
You're wrong.
First, about the consequences: the theatrics of the "unspeakable" are getting a little tiresome. Shalizi is a statistics professor at Carnegie-Mellon. The Mainstream Science on Intelligence was signed by 52 professors and included very clear statements about interracial IQ differences, lack of culture bias, and explicit heritability estimates. I would ask you to name the supposedly inescapable and grave "consequences for career and social life" these 52 professors brought on their heads.
Second, about the subject matter: this quote comes at the end of a long post in which Shalizi challenges the accepted estimates of IQ heritability, and criticizes at length the frequent but confused interpretation of heritability as lack of malleability. In his next post on the subject, he criticizes the notion of a single g factor as standing on a shaky ground, having been inferred by intelligence researchers on the basis of factor analysis that is known to statisticians to be inadequate for such a conclusion. Basically, Shalizi criticizes the statistical foundations employed by IQ researchers as being statistically unsound, and he carries out this critique on a muc...
The "Look Inside" button will give you the first two pages. I am not sure why the publisher of the journal is relevant unless you're going to claim the paper is an outright lie.
It's evidence.
It's evidence of what? That the paper fits well with the ideological orientation of the journal? Sure, but I'm not interested in that. Is it evidence that the paper incorrectly describes the relevant facts? I don't think so.
Testosterone levels in men and women are in completely different ballparks, and there is no overlap in healthy individuals of the different sexes beyond puberty. This would make me think the difference is mainly genetic.
I'm not arguing for anything beyond this point, so we don't have to go there.
I think that the fact that there is a debate and that the "good guys" use name-calling instead of scientific arguments, increases also the number of people in the group A.
It's a bit like telling people not to think of an elephant, and then justify it by saying that elephant-haters are most obsessed about elephants, therefore thinking of an elephant is an evidence of being an evil person. Well, as soon as told everyone not to think of an elephant, this stopped being true.
something like 80% of LWers are liberals/socialists
60%. But yes, it was funny to find out who the evil person was.
Actually, no, it was quite sad. I mean, when reading Yvain's articles, I often feel a deep envy of the peaceful way he can write. I am more likely to jump and say something agressive. I would be really proud of myself if I could someday learn to write the way Yvain does. ... Which still would make me just another bad guy. Holy Xenu, what's the point of even trying?
Politics is rarely discussed here to begin with and something like 65*% of LWers are liberals/socialists.
Yes, but people on the far right are disproportionately active in political discussions here, probably because it is one of the very few internet venues where they can air their views to a diverse and intelligent readership without being immediately shouted down as evil. If you actually measured political comments, I suspect you'd find that the explicitly liberal/social ones represent much less than 65%.
Turns out I was wrong, according to the 2012 survey only like 65% of LWers are socialist/liberals.
Apposite criticism. Most worrying excerpt:
...these environments are also self-selecting. In other words, even when the people speaking loudest or most eloquently don’t intentionally discourage participation from people who are not like them / who may be uncomfortable with the terms of the discussion, entertaining ‘politically incorrect’ or potentially harmful ideas out loud, in public (so to speak) signals people who would be impacted by said ideas that they are not welcome.
Self-selection in LessWrong favors people who enjoy speaking dispassionately about sensitive issues, and disfavors people affected by those issues. We risk being an echo-chamber of people who aren't hurt by the problems we discuss.
That said, I have no idea what could be done about it.
I'm not sure that anything should be done about it, at least if we look at it from whole society's perspective. (Or rather, we should try to avoid the echo chamber effect if possible, but not at the cost of reducing dispassionate discussion.) If some places discuss sensitive issues dispassionately, then those places risk becoming echo chambers; but if no place does so, then there won't be any place for dispassionate discussion of those issues. I have a hard time believing that a policy that led to some issue only being discussed in emotionally charged terms would be a net good for society.
Yes, the complaint strikes me as "Stop saying things we don't like, it might lead to disapproved opinions being silenced!
Wouldn't it be possible to minimize signaling given the same level of dispassionate discussion? That is, discourage use of highly emotionally charged/exosemantically heavy words/phrases if a less charged equivalent exists or can be coined and defined.
Say if you have a word X that means Y plus emotional connotation α and thede/memeplex/identity signaling effect β (not that emotional connotation is detached from the thedish/political/identity-wise context of the reader, of course), there's really no reason to use X instead of Y in dispassionate discussion. To give a concrete example, there's no reason to use 'sluttiness' (denotatively equivalent to 'sexual promiscuity' but carrying a generally negative connotational load, signaling against certain memeplexes/political positions/identities (though ideally readers here would read past the signaling load/repress the negative emotional response), and signaling identification with other positions/identities) instead of 'sexual promiscuity', which means the same thing but sheds all the emotional and thedish/tribal/whatever baggage.
(That shouldn't be read as an endorsement of the reasoning toward the same conclusion in the post, of course.)
I don't believe this is feasible. My impression is that emotional connotations inhere in things, not in words.
Over the decades, society has, over the decades, gone through a whole string of synonyms for "limited intelligence" -- none of which are emotionally neutral. Changing terms from "imbecile", to "retarded", "developmentally disabled" to "special needs", has just resulted in a steady turnover of playground insults. You can't make an insulting concept emotionally neutral, I think.
The two aren't contradictory: emotional connotations can inhere in things and words.
The euphemism treadmill is what you get when the emotional connotation inheres in a thing. But what emotional connotation inheres in 'sexual promiscuity'? Even if it is there (and its recommendation by someone sensitive enough to emotional connotations that inhere in words [from the perspective of a specific thede/tribe] seems to suggest that it isn't), certainly there's less negative connotation there than in 'sluttiness'.
Similarly, it's possible to find loaded equivalents, or at least approximations, for most (all?) of Mencius Moldbug's caste terms. (UR is a good place to mine for these sorts of pairs, since he coins emotionally neutral terms to replace, or at least approximate, emotionally loaded terms. Of course, if you use them, you're signaling that you've read Moldbug, but...)
I agree that this is by far the most interesting part of the piece. IIRC this site is pretty much all white men. Part of it is almost certainly that white men are into this sort of thing but I can't help but imagine that if I was not a white man, especially if I was still in the process of becoming a rationalist, I would be turned off and made to feel unwelcome by the open dialogue of taboo issues on this website. This has the obvious effect of artificially shifting the site's demographics, and more worryingly, artificially shifting the site's demographics to include a large number of people who are the type of person to be unconcerned with political correctness and offending people. I think while that trait in and of itself is good, it is probably correlated with certain warped views of the world. Browse 4chan for a while if you want examples.
I think that between the extremes of the SJW Tumblr view of "When a POC talks to you, shut the fuck up and listen, you are privileged and you know nothing" and the view of "What does it matter if most of us aren't affected by the problems we talk about, we can just imagine and extrapolate, we're rationalist, right?" is where the truth probably lies.
Like you said, I have no idea what to do about this. There are already a lot of communities where standard societal taboos of political correctness are enforced, and I think it's worthwhile to have at least one where these taboos don't exist, so maybe nothing.
I'm a white man who's done handsomely in the privilege lottery and I find quite a lot of LW utterly offputting and repellent (as I've noted at length previously). I'm still here of course, but in fairness I couldn't call someone unreasonable for looking at its worst and never wanting to go near the place.
If all you show a person is the worst of lesswrong, then yes, I could see them not wanting to have anything to do with it. However, this doesn't tell us anything; the same argument could be made of virtually all public boards. You could say the same thing about hallmark greeting cards.
This is roughly how I feel. There is a lot of good stuff here, and a lot of lot of horrible, horrible stuff that I never, ever want to be associated with. I do not recommend LessWrong to friends.
a lot of lot of horrible, horrible stuff that I never, ever want to be associated with.
As a lurker and relatively new person to this community I've now seen this sentiment expressed multiple places but without any specific examples. Could you (or anyone else) please provide some? I'd really like to know more about this before I start talking about Less Wrong to my friends/family/coworkers/etc.
Feel free to PM me if you don't want to discuss it publicly.
But but ... he posted a link to that (or some other video of him ranting at the camera), and then was downvoted to oblivion and demolished in the comments, while whining about how he was being oppressed.
Things like that don't seem remotely mainstream on LW, do they? (I don't read all the big comment threads ...)
A lie repeated a hundred times becomes available.
If we keep telling ourselves that LW is full of horrible stuff, we start believing it. Then any negative example, even if it happens once in a while and is quickly downvoted, becomes a confirmation of the model.
This is a website with hundreds of thousands of comments. Just because a few dozen of the comments are about X, it doesn't prove much.
EDIT: And I think threads like this contribute heavily to the availability bias. It's like an exercise in making all the bad things more available. If you use this strategy as an individual, it's called depression.
Just imagine that once in a while someone would accuse you of being a horrible human being, and (assuming they had a record of everything you ever did) would show you a compilation of the worst things you have ever did in the past (ignoring completely anything good you did, because that's somehow irrelevant to the debate) and told you: this is you, this is why you are a horrible person! Well, that's pretty much what we are doing here.
A pretty minor poster, but there was someone who was a fan of his who posted a lot of links to him for a while. I think he's gotten worse.
I'm at a loss regarding what you must consider 'horrible'. About the worst example I can think of is the JoshElders saga of pedophilia posts, and it only took two days to downvote everything he posted into oblivion and get it removed from the lists - and even that contained a lot of good discussion in the comments.
If you truly see that much horrible stuff here, perhaps your bar is too low, or perhaps mine is too high. Can you provide examples that haven't been downvoted, that are actually considered mainstream opinion here?
Most of these are not dominant on LW, but come up often enough to make me twitchy. I am not interested in debating or discussing the merits of these points here because that's a one-way track to a flamewar this thread doesn't need.
The stronger forms of evolutionary psychology and human-diversity stuff. High confidence that most/all demographic disparities are down to genes. The belief that LessWrong being dominated by white male technophiles is more indicative of the superior rationality of white male technophiles than any shortcomings of the LW community or society-at-large.
Any and all neoreactionary stuff.
High-confidence predictions about the medium-to-far-future (especially ones that suggest sending money)
Throwing the term "eugenics" around cavalierly and assuming that everyone knows you're talking about benevolent genetic engineering and not forcibly-sterilizing-people-who-don't-look-like-me.
There should be a place to discuss these things, but it probably shouldn't be on a message board dedicated to spreading and refining the art of human rationality. LessWrong could easily be three communities:
a rationality forum (based on the sequences and similar, fo
High confidence that most/all demographic disparities are down to genes. The belief that LessWrong being dominated by white male technophiles is more indicative of the superior rationality of white male technophiles than any shortcomings of the LW community or society-at-large.
I am not sure how much these opinions are that extreme, and how much it's just a reflection of how political debates push people into "all or nothing" positions. Like, if you admit that genes have any influence on population, you are automatically misinterpreted to believe that every aspect of a population is caused by genes. Because, you know, there are just two camps, "genes, boo" camp and "genes, yay" camp, and you have already proved you don't belong into the former camp, therefore...
At least this is how I often feel in similar debates. Like there is no "genes affect 50% of something" position. There is a "genes don't influence anything significant, ever" camp where all the good guys are; and there is the "other" camp, with everyone else, including me and Hitler. If we divide a continuous scale into "zero" and "nonzero" sub...
I even don't think that having a white male majority at this moment is some failure of a LW community
There are other options. I think there exist possible worlds where LW is less-offputting to people outside of the uppermiddleclasstechnophilewhitemaleosphere with demographics that are closer to, but probably not identical to, the broader population. Like you said, there's no reason for us to split the world into all-or-nothing sides: It's entirely possible (and I think likely) that statistical differences do exist between demographics and that we have a suboptimal community/broader-culture which skews those differences more than would otherwise be the case.
Edit: I had only skimmed your comment when writing this reply; On a reread, I think we mostly agree.
I should probably have generalized this to "community-accepted norms that trigger absurdity heuristic alarms in the general population".
Again, there should be a place to discuss that, but it shouldn't be the same place that's trying to raise the sanity waterline.
I find stuff like “if you don't sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent” more problematic than a sizeable fraction of what reactionaries say.
Datapoint: I find that I spend more time reading the politically-charged threads and subthreads than other content, but get much less out of them. They're like junk food; interesting but not useful. On the other hand, just about anywhere other than LW, they're not even interesting.
(on running a memory-check, I find that observation applies mostly to comment threads. There's been a couple of top-level political articles that I genuinely learned something from)
Continuing the argument though, I just don't think including actual people on the receiving end into the debate would help determine true beliefs about the best way to solve whatever problem it is. It'd fall prey to the usual suspects like scope insensitivity, emotional pleading, and the like. Someone joins the debate and says "Your plan to wipe out malaria diverted funding away from charities that research the cure to my cute puppy's rare illness, how could you do that?" - how do you respond to that truthfully while maintaining basic social standards of politeness?
Someone affected by the issue might bring up something that nobody else had thought of, something that the science and statistics and studies missed - but other than that, what marginal value are they adding to the discussion?
Someone affected by the issue might bring up something that nobody else had thought of, something that the science and statistics and studies missed
Aye !
but other than that, what marginal value are they adding to the discussion?
Is that not enough for You ? Especially in some discussions, which are repetitive on LW ?
Someone affected by the issue might bring up something that nobody else had thought of, something that the science and statistics and studies missed - but other than that, what marginal value are they adding to the discussion?
Thinkers - including such naive, starry-eyed liberal idealists as Friedrich Hayek or Niccolo Machiavelli - have long touched on the utter indispensability of subjective, individual knowledge and its advantages over the authoritarian dictates of an ostensibly all-seing "pure reason". Then along comes a brave young LW user and suggests that enlightened technocrats like him should tell people what's really important in their lives.
I'm grateful to David for pointing out this comment, it's really a good summary of what's wrong with the typical LW approach to policy.
(I'm a repentant ex/authoritarian myself, BTW.)
Well sure, but that doesn't count because we're pretty much all atheists here. Atheism is the default position in this social circle, and the only one which is really given respect.
I'm talking about criticisms of demographics and identities of non-marginalized groups that actually frequent Lesswrong.
If we're allowed to discuss genetically mediated differences with respect to race and behavior, then we're also allowed to discuss empirical studies of racism, its effects, which groups are demonstrated to engage in it, and how to avoid it if we so wish. If we're allowed to empirically discuss findings about female hypergamy, we're also allowed to discuss findings about male proclivities towards sexual and non-sexual violence.
But for all these things, there's no point in discussing them in Main unless there's an instrumental goal being serviced or a broader philosophical point being made about ideas...and even in Discussion, for any of this to deserve an upvote it would need to be really data driven and/or bringing attention to novel ideas rather than just storytelling, rhetoric, or the latest political drama.
Reactionary views, being obscure and meta-contrarian, have a natural edge in the "novel ideas" department, which is probably why it has come up so often here (and why there is a perception of LW as more right-wing than surveys show).
If we're allowed to discuss genetically mediated differences with respect to race and behavior, then we're also allowed to discuss empirical studies of racism, its effects, which groups are demonstrated to engage in it, and how to avoid it if we so wish. If we're allowed to empirically discuss findings about female hypergamy, we're also allowed to discuss findings about male proclivities towards sexual and non-sexual violence.
Speaking for myself, I would be happy to see a rational article discussing racism, sexism, violence, etc.
For example, I would be happy to see someone explaining feminism rationally, by which I mean: 1) not assuming that everyone already agrees with your whole teaching or they are a very bad person; 2) actually providing definitions of what is and what isn't meant by the used terms in a way that really "carves reality at its joints" instead of torturing definitions to say what you want such as definining sexism as "doing X while male"; 3) focusing on those parts than can be reasonably defended and ignoring or even willing to criticize those part's that can't.
(What I hate is someone just throwing around an applause light and saying: "therefore you must agree with me or you are an evil person". Or telling me to go and find a definition elsewhere without even giving me a pointer, when the problem is that almost everyone uses the word without defining it, or that there are different contradictory definitions. Etc.)
Some of my favorite feminist articles are the ones demonstrating actual statistical effects of irrational biases against women, such as http://www.catalyst.org/file/139/bottom%20line%202.pdf talking about women being undervalued as board members, or the ones talking about how gender blind audition processes result in far more women orchestra members.
For the record, I completely support anonymous evaluation of orchestra members, and many other professions. And students, etc.
This is how quickly I update in favor of feminism when presented rationally. :D
More meta: This is why I think this kind of debate is more meaningful.
Do the results of the blind tests give you some reason to think there might be harder-to-quantify irrational prejudice against women?
Yes.
That alone doesn't imply agreement with any specific hypothesis about what exactly causes the prejudice, nor with any specific proposal how this should be fixed. That would require more bits of evidence.
In general, I support things that reduce that prejudice -- such as the blind tests -- where I see no negative side-effects. But I am cautious about proposals to fix it by reversing stupidity, typically by adding a random bonus to women (how exactly is it quantified?) or imposing quotas (what if in some specific situation X all women who applied for the job really were incompetent? just like in some other specific situation Y all men who applied could be incompetent).
Also, there are some Schelling-point concerns, e.g. once we accept it is okay to give bonuses on tests to different groups and to determine the given group and bonus by democratic vote or lobbying, it will become a new battlefield with effects similar to "democracy stops being fair once people discover they can vote themselves more money out of their neighbors' pockets". It would be nice to have some scientists discover that the appropriate bonus on tests is exactly 12.5 points, but it is more like real wor...
Here's some empirical research on the actual causes of the pay gap. Executive Summary: The majority of the burden of child rearing still falls on women, and this can be disruptive to their careers prospects, especially in high paying fields like law and bussiness management; childless women and women who work in jobs that allow for flexible hours earn incomes much closer to parity.
Agreed, but we devote plenty of time to criticizing it, don't we? (Both reactionary criticism, and the more mainstream criticisms of the media/academia culture)
But the thing about the reactionary lens, especially Moldbug, is at the end of the day they side with the people in power. Moldbug even explicitly states as much. A central theme of his work is that we shouldn't keep elevating the weaker and criticizing the stronger, thus creating endless revolution. "Formalism" essentially means "maintaining the status quo of the current power heirarchy". The only exception to this is the Cathedral itself - because it is a power structure which is set up in such a way that it upsets existing heirarchies.
So the moldbug / reactionary ideology , at the core, is fundamentally opposed to carrying out the criticism which I just suggested against anyone who isn't part of "the cathedral" which keeps shifting the status quo (hence the meta contrarianism). It is an ideology which only criticizes the social critics themselves, and seeks to return to the dominant paradigm as it was before the social critics entered the scene.
I'm saying we need more actual real contrarianism, not more meta contrarianism against the contrarians. It is useful to criticize things other than the Cathedral. I'm being a meta-meta-contrarian.
I don't mind hearing from any level, as long as things are well cited.
-I've sort of gotten bored with level 0, but that could change if I see a bunch of really well done level 0 content. I just don't often see very many insightful things coming from this level.
-Level 2 holds my interest because it's novel. When it's well cited, it really holds my interest. However, it seldom is well cited. That's okay though - the ideas are fun to play with.
-Level 1 is the level I agree with. However, because I'm very familiar with it and its supporting data, and I hate agreeing with things, it has to work a lot harder to hold my interest.
My perception is that level 2, for reasons described, gets more attention than it merits. The shock value, twisty narrative, and novelty of it make it more interesting to people like me, who like reading compelling arguments even if they don't completely agree. However, it drives away people who are emotionally affected and/or perceive that have something to protect from what would happen if those viewpoints were to gain traction.
I was suggesting that maybe increasing good level one posts, which weren't boring, echo-chamber-ish and obviously true to to most peop...
the percentage of LW women has grown slightly (lazy to look up the census result)
It grew from 3% in 2009 to 8.9% (cis) + 1.3% (trans) in 2012.
Eh, yes and no. This attitude ("we know what's best; your input is not required") has historically almost always been wrong and frequently dangerous and deserves close attention, and I think it mostly fails here. In very, very specific instances (GiveWell-esque philanthropy, eg), maybe not, but in terms of, say, feminism? If anyone on LW is interested tackling feminist issues, having very few women would be a major issue. Even when not addressing specific issues, if you're trying to develop models of how human beings think, and everyone in the conversation is a very specific sort of person, you're going to have a much harder time getting it right.
This attitude ("we know what's best; your input is not required") has historically almost always been wrong
Has it really? The cases where it went wrong jump to mind more easily than those where it went right, but I don't know which way the balance tips overall (and I suspect neither do your nor most readers - it's a difficult question!).
For example, in past centuries Europe has seen a great rise in litteracy, and a drop in all kinds of mortality, through the adoption of widespread education, modern medical practices, etc. A lot of this seems to have been driven in a top-down way by bureaucratic governments who considered they were working for The Greater Good Of The Nation, and didn't care that much about the opinion of a bunch of unwashed superstitious hicks.
(Some books on the topic: Seeing Like a State; The Discovery of France ... I haven't read either unfortunately)
I don't see this as a problem, really. The entire point is to have high-value discussions.
High-value discussions here, so far as is apparent to me, seem to be better described as "High-value for modestly wealthy white and ethnic Jewish city-dwelling men, many of them programmers". If it turns out said men get enough out of this to noticeably improve the lives of the huge populations (some of which might even contain intelligent, rational individuals or subgroups), that's all fine and well. But so far, it mostly just sounds like rich programmers signalling at each other.
Which makes me wonder what the hell I'm still doing here; in spite of not feeling particularly welcome, or getting much out of discussions, I haven't felt like not continuing to read and sometimes comment would make a good response. Yet, since I'm almost definitely not going to be able to contribute to a world-changing AI, directly or otherwise, and don't have money to spare for EA or xrisk reduction, I don't see why LW should care. (Ok, so I made a thinly veiled argument for why LW should care, but I also acknowledged it was rather weak.)
Even with malaria nets (which seem like a very simple case), having information from the people who are using them could be important. Is using malaria nets harder than it sounds? Are there other diseases which deserve more attention?
One of the topics here is that sometimes experts get things wrong. Of course, so do non-experts, but one of the checks on experts is people who have local experience.
The entire point is to have high-value discussions.
Feminism and possible racial differences seem like pretty low-value discussion topics to me... interesting way out of proportion to their usefulness, kind of like politics.
Anecdote time:
I'm currently dispassionate about racial issues, and can (and have) openly discussed topics such as the possibility that racial discrimination is not a real thing, the possibility that genetically mediated behavioral differences between races exist, and other conservative-to-reactionary viewpoints. Some of those discussions have been on lesswrong, under this account and under an alt, some have been on other sites, and some have been in "real life".
Prior to the age of ~19, I would have been unable to be dispassionate about issues of race and culture. I would understand the value of being dispassionate and I would try, but the emotions would have come anyway. Due to my racial and cultural differences, I've fended of physical attacks from bullies in middle school and been on the receiving end of condescending statements in high school and college, sometimes from strangers and people whom I do not care about and sometimes from peers who I liked and from authority figures who I respected. When it came from someone i liked/respected, it hurt more.
The way human brains work, is when a neutral stimuli (here, racist viewpoints) is repeatedly paired with a negative sti...
You are positing that folks who are affected by some issues would not participate in frank, dispassionate discussion of these same issues... why exactly? To preserve their ego? It seems like a dubious assumption.
This doesn't really seem like a dubious assumption to me, practically everyone is more motivated to preserve their ego than to think rationally.
Because life, of which the Internet is a subset, of which LW is a subset, is full of blowhards who will tell you all about your problems and how you should solve them while clearly not having a trace of a clue about the topic, and life is too short to go seeking them out.
This is a bit of a tangential ramble on why diversity might be kind of a good idea.
Different evidence accrues to people with different experiences.
A Bayesian agent who goes through an upbringing as a boy and one who goes through an upbringing as a girl will probably not possess identical beliefs about society, the world, humanity, and so on. This is not because one has been held back or misled, nor because one is less rational than the other ... but because two different partial explorations of the same territory do not yield the same map.
This does not mean that "men's truth" and "women's truth" (or "European truth" and "African truth") are different truths. Nor does it mean that any map is just as good as any other. Some people really do sit down and scribble all over their map until it is useless.
But since nobody's map is equivalent to the territory, overall we can expect that we will navigate the territory better if we can get help from people whose maps are different from our own.
That means that if we spend our time hanging out only with people whose experiences are a lot like our own, and going all Robber's Cave on anyone whose map doesn...
A Bayesian agent who goes through an upbringing as a boy and one who goes through an upbringing as a girl will probably not possess identical beliefs about society, the world, humanity, and so on. This is not because one has been held back or misled, nor because one is less rational than the other ... but because two different partial explorations of the same territory do not yield the same map.
The apparent inconceivability (in this thread) of the notion that someone might disagree on a deep level with local memes without being insane is quite amazing. Typical mind fallacy, the lack of realisation that there exist unknown unknowns.
This matters if we care about possessing accurate maps; and it also matters a great deal if what we are trying to map includes things like "the good of humanity" or "coherent extrapolated volition of humankind" or things like that.
Yes. This thread reads like LW is aimed at realising the CEV of well-off programmers in the Bay Area. If you're serious about working for all of humanity, it may conceivably be useful to seriously listen to some who don't already agree with you.
The apparent inconceivability (in this thread) of the notion that someone might disagree on a deep level with local memes without being insane is quite amazing. [...] If you're serious about working for all of humanity, it may conceivably be useful to seriously listen to some who don't already agree with you.
I don't think that's the case. If people would find that notion inconceivability I doubt that the thread would be upvoted to 19 at the point of this writing.
I would also point out that the kind of ideology that expressed in the linked post comes from the Bay Area. As far as core differences in ideologies goes pitting one Bay Area ideology against another Bay Area ideology isn't real diversity of opinion.
The apparent inconceivability (in this thread) of the notion that someone might disagree on a deep level with local memes without being insane is quite amazing. Typical mind fallacy, the lack of realisation that there exist unknown unknowns.
I considered posting a third-hand account in the rationality quotes of a blind couple who, in a public park and not hearing anyone else nearby, decided to have sex. They told the judge they did not know that anyone could see them; maybe they didn't, what with plausibly having no idea what vision is capable of.
It felt too lengthy, and it wasn't originally intended as a parable, so I decided against posting it. I think it more easily explains itself in this context, though.
overall we can expect that we will navigate the territory better if we can get help from people whose maps are different from our own
Only if their maps are better than random. We should try to attract those people from the under-represented groups whose maps are better than random.
People with strong political identities usually have their maps systematically distorted. So while trying to attract the members of the under-represented groups, we should avoid political applause lights, to avoid attracting the most politically active members of these groups.
Specifically, I think LW would benefit from participation of many women, but we should avoid applause lights of feminism, social justice, or however it is called. Because that's just one specific subset of women. If a person with strong political opinions criticizes LW as not the best place for them... well, maybe in this specifical case, that's system working as intended.
Instead, invite all the smart women you know to the LW meetup, and encourage them to write an article on LW. Select them by smartness, not by political activity and willingness to criticize LW for not conforming to their party line. Analogically for any other under-represented groups. Invite them as individuals, not as political forces.
People with strong political identities usually have their maps systematically distorted.
Oh, certainly. Feminism points out, though, that the social mainstream is also a strong political identity which systematically distorts people's maps. They use somewhat unfortunate historical words for this effect, like "patriarchy". That's just a label on their maps, though; calling a stream a creek doesn't change the water.
So combining this with your guideline, we should be careful not to invite anyone who has a strong political identity ... but we cannot do that, because "ordinary guy" (and "normal woman") is a strong political identity too. It's just a strong political identity one of whose tenets is that it is not a strong political identity.
We don't have the freedom to set out with an undistorted map, nor of having a perfect guide as to whose maps are more distorted. Being wrong doesn't feel like being wrong. A false belief doesn't feel like a false belief. If you start with ignorance priors and have a different life, you do not end up with the same posteriors. And as a consequence, meeting someone who has different data from you can feel like meeting som...
Even if everyone's map is distorted, I think there is an important difference whether people try to update, or don't even try. Which is part of what this website is about.
In other words, I would be okay with an X-ist who says they could be convinced against X-ism by evidence, even if they obviously consider such evidence very unlikely.
(And I obviously wouldn't be okay with people suggesting that presenting an evidence against X-ism should be punished.)
Right. Refusing beforehand to consider certain types of argument/conclusion without looking at their merits, and having freely-acknowledged yet apparently-not-seen-as-a-problem-and-even-actively-justified emotional reactions to those arguments that trigger that refusal[1], seem like exactly the sort of things this site -- or any community dedicated to generating quality thought -- would want to discourage as much as possible. And when the justification is given in the language of a thede/tribe/political movement/identity that is opposed to the types of argument/conclusion being rejected... well, creating/promoting/incentivizing those emotional reactions is very useful to the movement, but not at all conducive to generating quality thought.
(The fun part about all of this is that it looks like it leads straight to a version of Marcuse's paradox (tolerance requires intolerance of intolerance): you have to refuse to update toward refusing to update.)
[1] I've been calling this sort of thing a memetic immune reaction, extending the memes-as-viruses metaphor. The justification for it isn't always present, and the emotional trigger to the refusal isn't always acknowledged, so that blog post is really an excellent case study. (edit: whoops, asterisks are bullet points, can't footnote that way)
I can see the problem you're trying to avoid-- the assumption that one sort of feminism is typical for women. And I think it's worth avoiding.
However, you seem to be implying that men aren't excessively clustered by politics at LW.
Also, the problem pointed to in the Not on the Master List article doesn't generally manifest at that level of fear. I think the more common negative reaction to LW is moderate revulsion, and I suspect that just inviting more women isn't going to solve it.
If anyone tried the experiment of inviting more women, it might be world posting about how it worked out.
Maybe it's just that when someone says: "I feel uncomfortable about X", my natural reaction is thinking about a possible fix; but when someone says: "I am a member of a tribe T and we dislike X", my natural reaction is: Fuck you, and fuck your tribe T!
Only later comes the rationalization, that improving a situation for a specific person, especially for someone who feels some discomfort and yet wants to be a member of the community, is good for the community. But obeying demands made in the name of a different tribe, just helps the other tribe conquer this territory; and the complaining person probably wasn't interested in membership too much, just wanted to plant a flag of the tribe T here.
My model of a person who wrote this article is that even if LW changed according to their wishes, they wouldn't join LW anyway (they would just tick off another internet battle won), or they would join but would contribute mostly by criticizing other things they don't like, making some existing members (including women) uncomfortable.
Still, there is a question: If we change according to this person's wishes, maybe this person will not join us, but perhaps some other person wou...
Maybe it's just that when someone says: "I feel uncomfortable about X", my natural reaction is thinking about a possible fix; but when someone says: "I am a member of a tribe T and we dislike X", my natural reaction is: Fuck you, and fuck your tribe T!
Not sure if you meant to imply this, but did the linked article read to you like, "I am a member of tribe T and we dislike X"? To me it just sounded like, "I feel uncomfortable about X."
Uhm, after reading the article again, I think you are right. It was written as: "I feel uncomfortable about X."
Yet I somehow perceived it completely differently. I wonder why exactly. Probably because it was long and not going to the point (which made the real point less obvious) and contained a lot of keywords typical for a specific tribe (so I assumed it was speaking in the name of the tribe).
Also because members of that tribe frequently argue that making them uncomfortable should be a punishable offense.
the cry of "Diversity!" is invoked exclusively by those who are trying to import to a group those demographics which tend to offer political support to the left.
I wouldn't mind "importing a demographics which tends to support X" assuming that we continue using the existing filters on content, and require rational comments and avoiding mindkilling politics. The difference between 55% and 44% seems unimportant, because we don't use majority voting in LW anyway. It's not like a 5% advantage would make someone win or lose an election. Unless we really lose our basic community values, it wouldn't even mean that the minority group would automatically get negative karma for every comment.
I am more concerned about "importing a subset of a demographics, selected by its support for X". As a strawman example, by suggesting that we need more Obama-voting women, but we actually don't care about Romney-voting women. As a more realistic example, by trying to optimize LW for women from the feminist / social justice warrior cluster, instead of for women in general. (Because, you know, there are also women who prefer free speech, and some changes would make LW even l...
With a bit more charitable interpretation, I think what we are talking about here is within-group variability vs between-group differences.
Just wanted to mention that an amazing amount of arguments in this thread and in the linked piece consists of misidentified non-central fallacies (in Yvain's labelling). None of the targets of the labels used ("racist", "eugenics", "feminist", what have you), correspond to a typical image evoked by using them.
I like Less Wrong-- there are courtesy rules here which keep it from going wrong in ways which are common in SJ circles. People get credit for learning rather than being expected to get everything right, and it's at least somewhat unusual to attack people for having bad motivations.
This being said, there are squicky features here, and I'm not just talking about claims that women are different from men-- oddly enough, it generally (always?) seems to be to women's disadvantage, even though there's some evidence that women are more trustworthy at running banks and investment funds.
I tolerate posts like this, but LW would seem like a friendlier place (to me) and possibly even be more rational if articles about gender issues would take utility for men and women equally seriously.
Reactionaries had something of a home here-- less so after the formation of More Right, I think. I haven't seen evidence of anything especially extreme on the egalitarian side, though there might be as good a rationalist case to be made for thorough reparations. Now that I think about it, I haven't even seen a case made for strong economic support for intelligent poor children.
Trolley problems..... I keep gettin...
It's funny, I am totally sympathetic to everything you wrote here, yet all I can think is, "my daily life is chock full of people incapable of grappling with trolley problems or discussing torture concretely, why are you trying to make LessWrong more like real life?"
This encourages me to think more about just what I was proposing....
A lot of what I was trying to do was demonstrate that I think the writer of the original link has a point. This is not quite the same thing as a call for action, even though I'd be happier without the trolley problems.
Another angle I was taking was that LW is theoretically open-minded, but is actually much more hospitable to some sorts of radical low-empathy ideas than others.
What I think is more feasible than changing LW (which is not to say very feasible) would be an empathy-tilted rationalist blog. It might be an independent development or started by disaffected LWers.
Have a probably empathic idea: HBD focuses on IQ, but there's little or no discussion of the possibility of tech for raising IQ from 90 or so to 110, even though that would make a large positive difference.
Meanwhile, I'll mention Hillary Rettig, a progressive who's good on instrumental rationality.
Are you talking about raising the IQ of a person, or the average IQ of a population? There's little discussion of the former because decades of failed interventions has made "you can't raise an existing person's IQ reliably" the default hypothesis. Once you've got past the easy childhood stuff like nutrition, lead paint and iodine deficiencies, there's not a lot you can do. Aside from some kind of Black Swan like a pill that raises you up a standard deviation, there's not much room for hope.
Raising the IQ of the next generations though, there's discussion on that since all the theory deems it totally possible. See here for example.
But yes, in absolute terms there's little discussion on how to solve the problem. Many writers assume the problem is politically intractable.
I was talking about raising the IQs of large numbers of existing people.
My impression is that there just isn't much interest is looking for physical solutions.
Compare the amount of interest in combating obesity to the amount of interest in becoming more intelligent.
Re: trolley problems and torture:
I seem to remember reading somewhere, I think it was something Daniel Dennett said, about the value of having philosophers willing to explore ideas that are (and maybe should be) taboo for ordinary people.
Take Peter Singer, for example. I don't buy the whole standard consequentialist package in ethics, but I really like Peter Singer. And he says things that are really shocking to many people, for example arguing that infanticide is often morally OK. But I suspect being willing to consider shocking ideas like that may be a prerequisite for being able to make progress on certain really important topics (see Singer's ideas about animal rights, charity, and some areas of medical ethics). Not everyone needs to be Peter Singer, but having a few Peter Singers - even a whole blog community of them - seems really valuable.
A couple other points: on torture, I don't think it's exactly being taken lightly. Rather, I suspect the reason it's used as an example is precisely because it an archetypal example of a really horrible thing.
As for seeming un-empathic, I don't think it's just rationality signaling. There's an issue that when you're making decisions that effect huge numbers of people, being too driven by your feelings about one case can lead to decisions that are really bad for the other people involved and that you wouldn't make if you really thought about it.
And torture seems to be taken too lightly. It's a real world problem, not just a token to be passed around in arguments.
What do you have against passing real world problems around as tokens in arguments?
LW historically has had a habit of choosing examples with shock value beyond what's necessary to make the point; granted, this no longer seems quite so fashionable for new top-level content, but it does remain noticeable in comments and in older posts, including parts of the Sequences. I view this habit as basically a social display: a way of signaling "I can handle this without getting mind-killed". Now, let me be very clear: I do not regard this as intrinsically destructive, nor do I place substantial terminal value on avoiding offense. But I do think its higher-order effects have avoidably reduced the quality of discussion here.
The fundamental issue is that not everyone here is equally able to avoid derailing discussions when exposed to topics like, say, torture. Even people who are generally very rational may find particular subjects intolerable; judging from experience, in fact, I'd say that most of the people here have one or two they can't handle, including myself. Avoiding these is part of our culture when they overlap with talking points in mainstream politics, and that's good; but there remains a wide scope of weakly politicized yet potentially mindkilling ones out there, many of which we've historically thrown around with the gleeful abandon of a velociraptor plunging into a vat full of raw meat.
I think we should stop doing that, at least to the extent that we avoid conventional politics and for most of the same reasons.
a habit of choosing examples with shock value beyond what's necessary to make the point
...
with the gleeful abandon of a velociraptor plunging into a vat full of raw meat.
:-D
I tolerate posts like this, but LW would seem like a friendlier place (to me) and possibly even be more rational if articles about gender issues would take utility for men and women equally seriously.
That post is by GLaDOS, who is female. I doubt GLaDOS values women less than men, but it would be nice if you would actually make a case for your insult/accusation rather than just throwing it in without any discussion.
Doesn't this problem gradually fix itself? For example, at the beginning I was interested in Moldbug's articles, but these days I just consider them boring. I have already heard the big picture; there is now nothing new, just reiterating what was already said; the lack of evidence or even clear explanations is very annoying, and I have already given up hope that it could be improved.
These days, if someone says something seemingly smart like "Cthulhu always swims left", my first though is: give me a definition of what the hell do you even mean by this, then give me an evidence that it really happens, and if you don't give any of it (which is my expectation based on previous experience) then just please shut up because you're wasting my time.
Speaking for myself, the neo-reactionaries had their chance (which I consider to be a good thing -- because I learned a few interesting things), and they wasted it.
The linked article is too long and it is not obvious what exactly its point is. I kept repeating to myself be specific, be specific while reading it.
I believe there was most likely one specific thing that offended the author... and rest of the long unspecific article was simply gathering as many soldiers as possible to the battle -- and judging by the discussion that started here, successfully.
The summary at the end hints that it was a use of word "eugenics" somewhere on LW, or maybe somewhere on some LW fan's blog. Unless that was just a metaphor for something. The author is probably disabled and feels personally threatened by any discussion of the topic, so strongly that they will avoid the whole website if they feel that such discussion would not be banned there. Unless that, too, was a metaphor for something.
(The main lesson for me seems to be this: If you want attention, write an article accusing LW of bad things. LW can't resist this.)
Most of the rest of the above comment seems to be insults accusing the author of bad faith, but this bit implied a question of fact:
The summary at the end hints that it was a use of word "eugenics" somewhere on LW, or maybe somewhere on some LW fan's blog.
We already practice eugenics, every time we do a genetic test and abort a fetus when it has some horrible transferrable genetic disorder. Frankly, we could do with a bit more of that - there are many, many horrible recessive genetic diseases which people should never have to endure, and which should be eliminated if at all possible. Not doing so strikes me as similar to not trying to cure polio.
Yes, they need to know our buttons and press them. Such as:
you are an unfriendly place for women;
you say that politics is the mindkiller, but secretly all of you are libertarians (or all of you are conservatives);
you are actually a cult;
...and for the best impact: all of the above, in a long article, with citations out of context from random parts of the website; quoting some offensive and heavily downvoted comments and presenting them as a typical LW content; claiming to be an expert on artificial intelligence or quantum physics and claiming that everything LW says on these topics is a pseudoscience. Did I forget something important? Oh yes, the basilisk! And end with a huge generalization that this all proves that LW is a horrible group of people, and that you will tell everyone you know to avoid LW: both your personal friends, and also any scientist or an organizer of an atheist or skeptic meetup.
(I am not saying this is what the linked article did. Just that this is what I would include into a troll manual, and bet money that LW couldn't resist discussing such article. But a subset of this is enough to succeed.)
Feminism in particular has a bad history of leaning on a community to make changes - to the point where the target becomes a feminist institution that no longer functions in its original capacity. I may be overreacting, but I don't even want to hear or discuss anything from that direction. It's textbook derailing. "But what you're doing is anti-woman" has been played out by feminists, over and over again, to get their demands met from community after community. From Atheism+ to Occupy Wall Street, the result is never pretty.
And honestly, attacking open discourse as anti-woman and anti-minority is very, uhh, squicky. I don't have a better way of putting my thoughts down on the matter - it's just very, very concerning to me. It feels like a Stalinist complaining that we aren't putting enough bullets in the heads of dissenters - except it's a feminist complaining that we aren't torpedoing the reputation of enough people who express "anti-woman" ideas. Just... ew. No. It doesn't help that this idea is getting obfuscated with layers and layers of complicated English and parenthetical thoughts breaking up the sentence structure.
Some choice quotes:
I thus require adherence to these ideas or at least a lack of explicit challenges to them on the part of anyone speaking to me before I can entertain their arguments in good faith.
Big warning flag right here. It's threatening to ignore, ostracize, or attack those who disagree with their sacred cows. That's an unconscionably bad habit to allow oneself.
I may be overreacting, but I don't even want to hear or discuss anything from that direction.
[later]
It's threatening to ignore, ostracize, or attack those who disagree with their sacred cows. That's an unconscionably bad habit to allow oneself.
throws hand in air
You'd think if we were such hot stuff at dispassionately debating things, we could handle outgroup criticism like this without either ignoring opposing views or devolving into tribal politics. But as Tarski would say, "if we can't, I want to believe we can't," and I admit I'd rather not discuss this sort of thing than always discuss this sort of thing.
To maximize open discourse, you have to close down discourse against open discourse.
It's just Marcuse's paradox (which I'm pretty sure I'm coining here): to maximize tolerance, you have to be intolerant toward intolerance. Or in the legal arena: "the Constitution is not a suicide pact."
There are two arguments in that post: "certain elements within the rationality thing signal more than is necessary", the correction of which would aid the goal of generating high-quality open discourse, and "certain conclusions should not even be considered, certain arguments should not be made, no matter their strength, because certain people have memetic immune reactions to them that drive them away from participating at all", the correction of which would mean an end to open discourse. Given that ThrustVectoring (presumably) values open discourse, the response of "I don't even want to discuss anything from that direction" is exactly correct.
That doesn't mean that it can't be discussed, of course; it just means that a community that values open discourse can't discuss it. If apophemi wants there to be a community based around limited rationality -- that is, rationality-minus-discourse-about-certain-things -- well, one can always be started. Secession is always an option, and online, you don't even have to figure out how to build a seastead to secede.
"the Constitution is not a suicide pact."
Humorous, off-topic response: But the Declaration of Independence is!
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
what does this mean?
In theory it means that it's better to NOT follow the (established / agreed-to) rules when it clearly leads to major negative consequences.
In practice it usually means "We really want to do this and we're not going to have mere laws stand in our way".
This is harsh, but I think it's basically right. A useful rule of thumb: any time you see the words "safe space" used in the context of deliberation or political discussion (as opposed to, y'know, providing actual, safe, spaces to people threatened with actual bodily harm) you can substitute "echo chamber" and see whether their argument still makes sense. Yes, sometimes echo chambers generate worthwhile political arguments, but that's kind of the exception, not the rule. And these arguments still need to be evaluated openly, if only because this is the only way of acquiring durable credibility in a political or deliberative context.
I agree about political discussion. But LessWrong isn't about political discussion. Far more important to a typical LessWronger would be something like community building, which correct me if I'm wrong but that's pretty much a textbook example of what "safe space" is good for. This criticism was not directed at us per se, but we can extract useful information from it.
But LessWrong isn't about political discussion ...
Fair point. It is about deliberation, though. And make no mistake, these folks use "safe space" in the political/echo-chamber sense all the time. To me, this makes their overall argument extremely problematic - they're showing no appreciation at all for the benefits of open discussion.
Also, yes, real-world communities, meetups etc. are quite different and some important concerns do come into play. But LW folks have been quite aware of this, and we've seen plenty of useful discussion about related issues, with very little controversy.
don't say/advocate for violence against others, don't be needlessly rude, don't use personal attacks.
But those already are the rules on LW......aren't they?
I think you are covering a lot of distance by stretching "don't advocate violence" into "don't say anything that someone feels the widespread adoption of could be potentially dangerous."
Are Atheism+ and Occupy Wall Street examples "where the target becomes a feminist institution that no longer functions in its original capacity"? Could you spell out what you mean or point to discussion of their changes?
The Occupy Wall Street example in particular was talking about their use of what they call "the Progressive Stack" to organize meetings. The general idea was this - people want to speak up, but not everyone can talk at the same time, so we need some sort of system for choosing who gets to speak when. First in first out isn't fair enough when you factor in things like minorities or women feeling more inhibited about speaking, so let's let them jump the queue and speak before people who are white and/or male.
It's an idea that sounds just fair enough to be considered, and has the benefit of both having passionate supporters on the left and of having an obvious path to paint opponents as sexist racists that want to silence women and minorities. The left won on this point at the cost of driving off much of their popular support, and the movement has been marginalized since.
The above is my understanding of what happened with this, synthesized over a fair amount of reading and research. It may well be wrong, and the situation may well be more complicated than I described. As far as I understand it, though, it's the major mistake that the movement made - it let itself be co-opted...
[Occupy Wall Street] let itself be co-opted into caring about social justice at the cost of their other goals.
When discussing OWS and similar political movements, the term "social justice" gets quite ambiguous. OWS has always been about social justice, by any reasonable meaning of the term. To be clear, you obviously mean identity politics, the notion that self-styled "minority" groups are more equal than everyone else.
Yeah, I'm talking about the more narrow definition that gets made fun of in /r/tumblrinaction. As opposed to what I think of as "economic justice", which involves things like banking reform, fairness in income distribution, taking care of the poor and homeless, etc.
As far as Atheism+ goes, it's an organized group spearheaded by people like Rebecca Watson who are outraged -- outraged -- at the behavior of atheists being insufficiently pro-woman and pro-social justice. Rebecca Watson in particular has a laser-like focus on sexism within the atheist and skeptic community, at the expense of the larger groups' nominal goals. She's responsible for the whole "elevatorgate" debacle, and responded to Richard Dawkins' claim that she was overreacting by going after Dawkins personally with this piece of loveliness.
It got worse.
Jen McCreight and PZ Myers have been circulating unverifiable accusations of rape, allegedly relied from anonymous sources, against big-name activists in the Skeptics movement, including Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer, who didn't happen to have jumped on the Atheism+ bandwagon.
As far as Atheism+ goes, it's an organized group spearheaded by people like Rebecca Watson who are outraged -- outraged -- at the behavior of atheists being insufficiently pro-woman and pro-social justice.
When women in the atheist movement still get sexually harassed by public figures, get rape and death threats, and when having a "no sexual harassment" policy creates a firestorm, all from other people within the atheist movement, the movement does need to be more pro-women and more pro-social justice.
(Link to a blog that has a source for all the incidents I'm talking about, plus a few more http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2012/08/30/atheism-plus-and-some-thoughts-on-divisiveness/)
Watson's response to Dawkins comes after he gave a response to her ridiculing her for feeling uncomfortable about getting asked out on an elevator.
And as for the mission statement, I don't think there's a problem with countering misogyny, racism, homo/bi/transphobia, or ableism. That sounds like a good thing. You may disagree with what they label as x-phobia, but the discussion should be about what is x-phobic, not whether we should care about x-phobia.
When women in the atheist movement still get sexually harassed by public figures, get rape and death threats, and when having a "no sexual harassment" policy creates a firestorm, all from other people within the atheist movement, the movement does need to be more pro-women and more pro-social justice.
False dilemma.
Social justice warriors are not the only kind of people on this planet who care about safety and well-being of other people. Also, feminists sometimes send death threats, too.
The sexual harassment by public figures certainly has to stop, the perpetrators have to be punished: legally when possible, and removed from positions of power within the community.
Giving more power to feminists and social justice warriors is not the only way to do this. It is one of the possible solutions, but not the only possible solution.
Except that the broad umbrella of ideas which even a reasonable person might construe to be "racist, misogynist, or queerphobic" covers a lot of things which are nowhere close to being settled questions the way theism is.
And furthermore, that umbrella of ideas is a moving target anyways. Social justice movements have fighting X-ism as a terminal goal, so when they run out of X-ist things in a community to fight, they move the goalposts until there are X-ist things to fight.
Street harassment takes some of the fun out of life.
Getting rape and murder threats on line really does distress and distract people, and it seems to be much more likely to happen to women.
Recurse a few levels, and what you're really saying is "After the Renaissance, Europeans took over the world and its resources, and the resource distribution has been slow to change since".
Remind me again, why do Han Chinese have higher IQ than Europeans?
There is an unfortunate American tendency to treat all issues of race in the purely white-and-black context.
The world is much more diverse than that. Most people are brown.
Perhaps what I was saying wasn't precise enough there. I'm talking about how when a community starts responding to certain arguments by vilifying their proponents, there's a chilling effect on the discourse in the community.
Openness of discourse is more of a matter of degree than on/off, anyways, much like a 'free' market.
There is no such thing as open discourse ... Implicit and explicit power and privilege always prevent both. People trying to create workarounds for this fact strikes me as a good thing.
What makes you think that this is a functional workaround, as opposed to compounding the problem? The underlying idea seems to be a preference for "safe spaces" - hardly a move towards more openness.
Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities.
There are individuals who comment on LW and who are avowed racists.
There are individuals who comment on LW and who obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities.
I'm not sure these are the same individuals.
Just because there are infinitely many even numbers, and infinitely many primes, does not mean there are infinitely many even primes. Just because the most common given name in the world is Muhammad, and the most common surname is Wang, does not mean that the typical human being is named Muhammad Wang. Just because Brooklyn has a notably unusual number of wild parrots for a northerly place, and a notably unusual number of Hasidim, does not mean that there are any Hasidic parrots in Brooklyn.
In the section you quoted, 'racist' seemed to include anyone who entertains ideas about the existence of average group differences in psychological traits. By that criterion I'd bet there are many LWers who fall into the intersection of those categories. I am certainly one of them.
Fair enough, I may have been overgeneralizing from my own experience. I read HBD blogs and effective altruism blogs and I have a monthly donation to GiveWell which I aim to increase as my income rises. I'm surely not the only person for whom this is true but maybe there aren't that many of us.
Would it actually be intellectually inconsistent if someone was both racist and donated heavily to African charities? Honest question.
"there are differences that are demarcated by ethnicity" and "it sucks when people suffer" seem orthogonal to me.
Let me have a go at this.
Fellow effective altruists! It is your moral duty to familiarize yourselves with biological realities, many of which are relevant to deciding the morally optimal course of action. For example, "findings from twin studies yield heritability estimates of 0.50 for prosocial behaviours like empathy, cooperativeness and altruism". (source) Please take this into account when deciding whether to have children.
Fellow HBDers! It is your moral duty to take up the white man's burden and donate to GiveWell today. If giving money directly to poor people in Kenya doesn't seem paternalistic enough then go for the deworming options.
Have I successfully alienated everyone yet?
Actually, that was pretty good; pithy and introduces actual object-level issues to debate rather than abstract ideological concerns.
Please take this into account when deciding whether to have children.
This is pretty important actually; you see a lot of EA talk around here which basically assumes children are fungible ("If I don't have any kids, but spend the money to save n African kids then I'm in the clear!") without taking into account that those n kids will likely need > 2n kids-worth of aid themselves in a few decades and you've squandered the human capital which would otherwise be able to support them.
If effective altruists can justify having a well paying full-time job for charity, why not raising morally-upright intelligent kids to be successful as well? It's a lot tougher to do emotionally and financially, but comparing one-time payouts to investments with reliable returns seems like a no-brainer.
Fellow HBDers! It is your moral duty to take up the white man's burden and donate to GiveWell today. If giving money directly to poor people in Kenya doesn't seem paternalistic enough then go for the deworming options.
You'd probably do better with a hook about...
No. A person may donate heavily to cure rare diseases in cute puppies without believing that puppies should have the vote.
It wasn't my point that the racists and the donors are non-overlapping, though — rather that they are not necessarily overlapping, and that the overlap — if it exists — should not be taken as defining the whole population. (Which is what the "But they're racists who ..." statement does.)
There are probably people named Muhammad Wang, after all; just not very many of them.
(I don't think there are any Hasidic parrots, though.)
Not necessarily, and in the case of "avowed racists of Less Wrong" almost certainly not. The "biological realism" concept is that there are genetic and physiological differences split so sharply along racial lines ("carves reality at its joints") that it is correct to say that all races are not born equal. Proponents of this concept would claim it is obviously true, and they would also be called racists. These people could donate heavily to African charities out of sympathy for what is, in their eyes, the "bad luck" to be born a certain race, and it would be consistent.
(I believe that biological realism is the main form of racism amongst LW posters, but I have nothing to back this assertion up except that I recall seeing it discussed)
but of sympathy for what is, in their eyes, the "bad luck" to be born a certain race
Or more to the point, sympathy for people with greater challenges than others, and finding that African charities, by targeting Africans, are more likely to target people with those challenges.
On the other hand, if you define racism as "any idea held by white people that PoC disapprove of", well, most white folks are racist.
Actually, it's some PoC. SJs claim to speak for all of a group, but actually, they don't.
Was that the post you intended to link? I am glad to have discovered that in Finland, you get a top hat and a sword when you are awarded a Ph.D., but I see nothing boneheaded in the comments.
Our caveman/cavewomen brains think that we will only ever interact with a very small number of people, and losing the respect of anyone could materially worsen our chances of survival in a crisis. Consequently, many are terrified of public speaking or even of contributing to Internet debates such as on LessWrong. I suspect that the lower you perceive your status to be in the tribe, the greater the fear you will have of further weakening your position by saying something that others criticize.
Some communities go out of their way to create "safe spaces" that limit criticism to attract participants who would otherwise be too fearful to join discussions. LW's implicit philosophy (which I don't disagree with) is that a cost of participating is that you are fair game for blunt criticism. Alas, such a philosophy probably repels some potential participants who would otherwise make intelligent comments.
I face a similar trade-off in my classes. (I teach at a women's college.) Giving honest/blunt feedback during class discussions or on papers can cause a very negative emotional reaction in some students. Interestingly, students who went to high school in Asia are much better (on average) than Americans at handling criticism because they got so much more of it in high school than their American counterparts did, but my Asian students are (on average) far more fearful of public speaking than Americans, because they did so much less of it.
Does it seem at all worrying that your explanation hinges on members of the in-group having a lot of positive characteristics that members of the out-group lack? "We're just too honest and unflinching in the face of criticism. If only the out-group were so gifted!"
There's probably more than one thing going on here; among them some evaporative cooling.
Shelve the meta-speculation until you've at least checked speculation-prime.
"Our problem is that we're too good" is a really, really, really suspicious thing for a human to say. Have you considered the possibility that it might not be true?
(Also, request to taboo the term "politically correct")
Alas, such a philosophy probably repels some potential participants who would otherwise make intelligent comments.
But the 'safe space' policy also repels potential participants - so, it's basically a wash. And only one of these policies is epistemically problematic - I'll let you guess which one.
Giving honest/blunt feedback during class discussions or on papers can cause a very negative emotional reaction in some students.
Obviously, when giving public feedback from a position of authority (being the course lecturer), you need to be quite thoughtful about the connotation of any statements on your part, specifically your impact on the students' perceived status. It's less clear that this would be a problem at LW, where few people speak with any overt authority and the karma system is an independent source of merit/status.
But the 'safe space' policy also repels potential participants - so, it's basically a wash. And only one of these policies is epistemically problematic - I'll let you guess which one.
Not that I'm much of a fan of "safe space" policies, but surely we should also be interested in how many potential participants each of these approaches repels. And potentially the quality or originality of their comments.
People are allowed to be repelled by true statements. For example, did you know that many people like to have sex with horses? Both men and women! Horses have very large penises and this is something that both intrigues and excites some people. Did you know that horse semen is available for purchase over the internet? I don't think someone who prefers not hear about horse sex is necessarily or even probably a low quality commenter.
But the 'safe space' policy also repels potential participants - so, it's basically a wash.
When you repel one member of an over-represented group and attract a member of a previously-absent group, you keep the same number of participants but increase the amount of information present in the discussion.
LW's implicit philosophy (which I don't disagree with) is that a cost of participating is that you are fair game for blunt criticism. Alas, such a philosophy probably repels some potential participants who would otherwise make intelligent comments.
Driving out the voices of the less privileged is potentially problematic when LW claims to be on a mission for the good of all of humanity.
Or to math this up, our mission is unlikely to succeed if we make joining harder and less pleasant for ~54% of the population (51% female, ~2-3% non-hetero male)
So, while agreeing with the principle of favoring open and blunt discourse, I for one intend to make more of a concerted effort to square the circle of being honest and blunt while being more welcoming.
Has joining actually been made harder and less pleasant for ~54% of the population? Has joining been made harder and less pleasant for ~54% of the population as a result of that ~54%'s membership in those two demographic groups?
There is no inherent quality of being female that would make one be viscerally repulsed by the use of the term 'sluttiness'. Apophemi cites that as an example of a term the use of which makes joining harder and less pleasant for... well, 55% of the population, as a direct result of their membership in those demographic groups:
If by “sluttiness” r-you mean “sexual promiscuity”, what is gained by using a gender-targeted insult that is likely to make a significant portion (i.e. women and/or queer people, who together are like… 55% of the world at least) of r-your potential audience uncomfortable and less likely to engage with r-your argument?
I hope it's obvious that "women and/or queer people" aren't the operative groups here. I certainly haven't noticed any inherent property of my not being straight that makes me necessarily uncomfortable with the use of the word "sluttiness" and less likely to engage with arguments that use it, and I'...
There a certain argument that I will call the glorification of self interest.
It goes like this: People who are subject to personal threats of their livelihood, tend to think about those threats and focus their mental energies on fighting those threats whenever possible. Because those people are indeed facing threats, they are they good guys which have to be defended. Anybody who isn't centrally concerned with threats against them, is privileged and should be ashamed for being privileged.
The only way to act utilitarian and care substantially about people in some far off country is because one doesn't have personal threats against oneself that need attention.
I don't think that's true. During the last US presidential election there were people who argued that Glenn Greenwald can afford to oppose Obama because of personal liberty issues and being a warmonger because Glenn Greenwald isn't subject of a minority for whom it's very important that Obama and not some Republican heads the White House.
At that point Glenn Greenwald lived in exile in Brazil because his homosexual partner couldn't legally live in the US. As far as being discriminated against being forced to live in exile seems ...
I don't know if the things that bother this feminist would also bother me, but I've been reading Less Wrong for several years and I'll say that with some delicate issues, Less Wrong is like a bull in a China shop. In some investigations, it's like trying to determine if there is life on a planet by bombing it. I just avoid these topics entirely.
Sometimes I like to drop in and just marvel at the trainwreckiness. It gets too tangled for me to even think about trying to point out the multiple failures and lacks of context and utter-missings-of-the-point.
EDIT: Including some moderate such tangles in several places below in this very thread...
That's not a bad discussion to have, though! What if showering more than two or three times a week causes your back to break out? What if rinsing every other day is good, but using shampoo/soap/etc that often causes unwanted side effects? What if the optimal frequency of showers for keeping body-odor minimized is every third day, and showering every day or every other day actually makes BO worse? We need data!
(I'm not being sarcastic. However, the optimal showering strategy is likely to vary from person to person, and be influenced by diet, physical activity, genetics, environment, etc.)
In other words, "like people I regard as low-status arguing seriously about whether assumptions unquestioned by high-status people like me are actually true".
Probably right.
like students arguing seriously about how often you really need to shower
If those students live in a society that mostly does not even wash their hands, I'd consider that an improvement.
(Yeah, I'm deliberately misrepresenting your analogy.)
The author apparently has the privilege of living in a bubble where everyone she knows fundamentally approves of all her opinions, but occasionally has one person out of 20 show up at a gathering who disagrees, and just may throw a fit if that person dare voice their opinions.
Me - atheist, egoist, libertarian - I'm lucky if one person out of 20 won't think I'm the devil if I'm open about my opinions. I weep for the discomfort she feels when my existence impinges on her awareness.
I note that a Christian or Muslim describing how they are hurt by those who dare openly(!) question their sacred values wouldn't receive such polite consideration, and certainly not by this blogger.
Me - atheist, egoist, libertarian - I'm lucky if one person out of 20 won't think I'm the devil if I'm open about my opinions. I weep for the discomfort she feels when my existence impinges on her awareness.
Are you ever in physical danger because of your opinions?
a male [...] does not experience a constant physical danger (and the associated stress of being aware of said danger) whenever he leaves the house.
With the exception of rape, which tends to be a special case in most senses, men are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of every other type of violent crime including homicide. In addition, men make up 92% of workplace deaths (and presumably a correspondingly high proportion of the injuries) and are also significantly more likely to die in an accident off the job (again, presumably a similar distribution of injuries).
The idea that men are somehow protected from physical danger by "male privilege" is simply a preposterous notion.
There's a very big difference between men being part of violent crime and dangerous jobs and needing to worry for your physical safety as you walk down the street.
No, no there isn't.
Most crimes, including most violent crimes, are not rape. Aside from rape, men are much more likely to be the victim of a crime, especially a violent crime. So if you're talking about how much someone should be worried about being the victim of a violent crime... how exactly is maleness supposed to protect someone when it predicts a much higher likelihood of being targeted by criminals?
And even beyond that, even mundane stuff like being hit by a car while on the shoulder of the road is more than twice as likely to kill a man as a woman. With no malice at all, a man is still in significantly more danger of dying or being injured just going about his everyday life, whether driving to work or walking down a flight of stairs. Again, no "dangerous job" needed; men are in greater physical danger even in commonplace situations.
Women have every reason to fear for their safety, and rape is a very serious problem, but it boggles the mind to see attitudes that men couldn't possibly understand how dangerous it is to be a woman when those very same men are the ones much much more likely to be hurt or killed "whenever he leaves the house".
I think you're being disingenuous when you talk about men being targeted by criminals. Men make up more than 90 percent of gang members (http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/demographics) and something like 90 percent of violent criminals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime) in the first place. Something like half of violent crimes are gang-related (http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/gang-related-offenses). This means that with no "targeting" needed, men are already WAY more likely to be injured or killed through violence if you look at sheer demographics, and yet the average man doesn't need to worry about being shot by an opposing gang member when he walks down the street at night. This is exactly why you immediately abandoned your point about workplace violence, since workplace is self chosen. You can't simply look at an inequality of outcome and totally discount the nature of the populations concerned.
Similarly, you can look at the ratio of male to female prostitutes (http://sex-crimes.laws.com/prostitution/prostitution-statistics) and see that a prostitute is far more likely to be female than male. We can talk about wha...
You seem to ascribe a fair amount of bad faith to me and I'm not sure why. Maybe because this line of argument pattern-matches to MRA thought?
Anyway I didn't "abandon" the jobs point so much as point out that men are universally, even ignoring job choice, more likely to get into and be hurt in accidents. Accidental death and injury being far far more common than homicide and assault, that alone blows the "physical danger" argument out of the water. Not quite as dramatic as an industrial accident or a robbery-gone-wrong sure, but then again shark attacks are more dramatic than dying of heart disease.
And with regards to crime, your statistics do not say what you think they say. The national gang center says half of law enforcement agencies reported an increase in gang crime, not that ~50% of violent crimes were committed by gang members. Looking at the FBI unified crime reports, I can only find clear breakdowns of victims / circumstances in homicide, but it looks like even subtracting the entire number of gang-related deaths from the male death total still leaves them with more than three times the number of homicide victims that women have (9,917 male victims - 8...
But I also think the average man walking down the average street at night is significantly safer than the average woman doing the same
Most sexual assaults are not committed by random strangers on the average street at night.
IIUC, if we exclude sexual assault, gang-related violence, and random fights/brawls, victimization rates for men and women are similar, and probably still higher for men.
The U.S. Department of Justice has a special report, Violent Victimization Committed by Strangers, 1993-2010:
In 2010, males experienced violent victimizations by strangers at nearly twice the rate of females (figure 2). The rate of violence against males by strangers was 9.5 victimizations per 1,000 males in 2010 compared to 4.7 victimizations per 1,000 females.
It goes on to say that the disparity seems to be shrinking, with crime against men falling more rapidly than crime against women.
One wonders if some of the difference in outcomes (as in the being hit by a car on the shoulder example) isn't partly a product of women generally taking less risks than men because of the fear of sexual assault.
The situation is made more complicated because women are encouraged to take risk seriously while men are encouraged to downplay risk, so you get different results depending on whether you're looking at risk or fear.
The former does not experience a constant physical danger (and the associated stress of being aware of said danger) whenever he leaves the house.
None of the women I know in real life "experience a constant physical danger" whenever they leave the house.
Presumably we're not talking about being hit by a bus.
I've seen it asserted in many places that most women are constantly aware of and distressed by the possibility of being raped. Now obviously women in general aren't always visibly on edge whenever they're out in public, but some proportion clearly do feel that way, or at least claim to. Unfortunately this is the kind of thing which it's rather socially difficult to conduct an informal poll on. Does anyone know of any studies or surveys or anything which might shed some light on the issue?
Edit: The most helpful thing turned up by a quick google scholar search was this. Table 2 on page 4 gives us a good rough estimate that ~38% of people worry "very/pretty frequently" about rape (this makes the rate for women possibly as high as ~76%, if we assume that men never worry about themselves or others being raped).
This paper seems to suggest that levels of fear of crime are about equal in males and females, although women are more likely to worry about rape specifically. It's based only on 64 qualitative interviews in Britain, but it also points to this conclusion being predominant in the literature.
Unfortunately this is the kind of thing which it's rather socially difficult to conduct an informal poll on.
You can start by asking your mother or your sister or your girlfriend. If none of them obsesses about being raped every time they venture out onto city streets...
Of course, this assumes a reasonably benign environment. If you live in inner-city Detroit, you should be aware of the dangers of going out of your front door, but that applies to both men and women. On the other hand if you live is a sleepy village with zero cases of rape during the last hundred years and you still are "constantly aware of and distressed by the possibility of being raped", a psychiatrist might be a good idea.
That's how I've arranged my life. I live in a civilized neighborhood in a civilized city.
I actually grew up in Hawaii, where the thing for young men to do was find the nearest young male "haole" (white) to harass, threaten, or beat.
That's one bit of violence that the blogger likely missed out on. Young men looking to prove their manhood often look to find other young men from some unpopular subgroup to victimize. But that's people with penises being victimized, so what the hell does that matter?
One of the unfortunate things about SJ as it currently exists is that they don't want to hear that privilege is local. Intersectionality is a step in the right direction, and I hope things will keep getting more fine-grained until it gets to what happens in individual lives.
I'm glad you liked it.
It's something I've been thinking for a while, but I believe this is the first time I've posted it.
All hail LW for being a place where I felt safe saying that privilege is local-- it took being a place where SJ language is understood without SJ being the dominant ideology.
We have no idea how much violence the blogger has actually experienced, but it might have something to do why they're so concerned about it. I'm more than a bit surprised that they find SJ (?) circles so emotionally safe, but maybe they haven't run into the nastier emotional attacks is a way that affects them personally.
I agree that violence by women against men is all too frequently treated as funny-- in popular art as well privately. Is there anyone here who follows popular art enough to have an opinion about whether this has changed and in what direction?
I think violence against men by women not being taken seriously is partly sexism against women-- an idea that women aren't strong enough to do real damage. The other half of the problem (this is probably obvious to you) is a highly mistaken belief about how tough men ought to be.
Most of the problems described in this post seem to be things that are not really practical to do anything about, but this caught my eye:
tl;dr: If you just typed in all honesty “I like eugenics”, even if I enjoy your posts about economics, congratulations, you freak me out and I really, really don’t know why I’m still reading your blog.
Really we need to stop using the word "eugenics." In the real world it really isn't smart to keep insisting on the "official" definition of a word decades after it acquired negative connotations for actually pretty good reasons.
My desire to hang onto familiar words reminds me of a joke.
"I'm a great communicator, people just keep misunderstanding me."
The problem isn't the word. If you describe a policy that meets the official definition, but don't use the word people still hate the thing you're talking about and know it is called eugenics.
People actually call things that are less controversial than actual eugenics, "eugenics". E.g. Project Prevention.
Given that there is a popular tendency for people to accuse even totally different things of being "eugenics" to discredit them, if you tried to rebrand eugenics as something else people would notice very quickly, they would "accuse" you of being eugenicist, and the debate about whether Plan Y is or is not a good idea would immediately shift to a debate about whether Plan Y is or is not eugenics - which you would lose, because it is.
This reminds me of an interesting analysis I heard about why Heartiste manages to hang on when many people who are much less horrible than he is get laughed off the Internet. If you write some very reasonable liberal enlightened essay about how maybe there's some reason to believe some women are such-and-such but we must not jump to conclusions, people will call you a sexist, you'll have to argue that you're not a sexist, and your opponents have spent their entire lives accusing people of sexism and are better at this argument than you are and will win (or at least reduce your entire output to defending yourself). If you're Heartiste, and people call you sexist, you can just raise an eyebrow, say "Well, yeah", and watch pe...
I don't think it assumes words have immutable meanings, just that they have some conventional meaning. You are proposing that we turn the debate from "Is eugenics plan x a good idea?" to "Does plan x, which fits the current conventional meaning of eugenics, sound like eugenics to you?" Unless you can unilaterally change the conventional meaning of eugenics, then for your purposes the meaning might as well be immutable - your argument will fail. And not only do people show no signs of being willing to shift the conventional meaning of eugenics in a pro-eugenics direction, but they seem very willing to shift the conventional meaning of eugenics in an anti-eugenics direction whenever anyone asks.
I think probably things inside and outside the Overton Window require different strategies. "Ballsy countersignaling" might work differently for things outside the window than for things inside of it. I agree that the politician shouldn't call abortion murder.
yeah I had this exact problem happen over twitter. "I like eugenics" "You're a monster!" "What? It's not like I advocate genocide to achieve it!" "Eugenics means advocating genocide!"
Affirmative Genetic Action; Fighting Against Genetic Unequality; Genetic Justice; No Mutant Child Left Behind...
Even better (or worse) than that. It was dysgenic for the German population. It was probably eugenic for the Jewish population. So what the Nazis managed to do was to help make the Jews racially superior to the Germans.
In other words, they managed to massacre 6 million people in order to achieve the exact reverse of what they said they wanted to do.
For the avoidance of doubt: (1) I think what they did was a horrible terrible thing, (2) although it was probably eugenic for the Jewish population it was dyseverythingelse for them, and in particular (3) I am certainly not suggesting, e.g., that Jewish people should be glad it happened or anything similarly monstrous. Also (4) of course neither "the Jews" nor "the Germans" is a particularly well-defined group biologically and I am not suggesting otherwise, and (5) I am not claiming that this sort of "racial superiority" is something anyone should be aiming at. Oh, and (6) I am also not suggesting that the worst thing about what they did is that it didn't achieve their goals. It would have been just as awful if it had.
I'm not sure my premises are correct, but this might be an example of LW's excessive emphasis on genes. I think you're saying that smarter Jews were more likely to survive the Holocaust. This might be true for German Jews (a lot of warning, a lot of people with resources to move-- and still, only 25% got out), but not so true about Polish Jews, where it happened very fast-- and that's where a very high proportion of the Holocaust happened.
Also, a major focus at LW is on extraordinarily smart people. Even if Ashkenazi Jews went from an average IQ of 115 to 117, where are the great mathematicians and physicists? I tentatively suggest that there was something special about Jewish culture (or possibly Jewish culture + surrounding Gentile culture when the latter was benign) in Germany, Austria, and possibly Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and it's gone.
excessive emphasis on genes.
When looking at the question of whether something intended as a eugenic program was in fact eugenic or dysgenic, an emphasis on genes seems highly appropriate, no? (I agree that the eugenic or dysgenic effect isn't the only or the most important thing we should care about -- the six million people murdered would seem like one other thing, for instance -- and I already said that as clearly as I could.)
I think you're saying that smarter Jews were more likely to survive the Holocaust.
Yes, I'm suggesting that probably smarter Jews were more likely to get out early and more likely to find ways to survive. (Of course plenty of smart ones died and plenty of not-so-smart ones lived too.) If so, then the Holocaust will have had a (probably rather small) eugenic effect on the Jewish population.
where are the great mathematicians and physicists?
26% of all Nobel prizewinning physicists to date, and 29% of all Fields medallists to date, are at least half-Jewish by ancestry, according to jinfo.org. I haven't checked their figures.
I'm not sure I understand your question, but eliminating the left tail of a bell curve would change the average but not necessarily extend the right tail.
The homepage says:
Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity in order to fix their own thinking.
Less Wrong users aim to develop accurate predictive models of the world, and change their mind when they find evidence disconfirming those models, instead of being able to explain anything.
So this person acknowledges their own biases, notes that some otherwise perfectly reasonable and in their opinion "Rational" people believe in HBD, and then (as far as I can tell) doesn't make any effort to investigate whether they might actually be true?
This is what motivated cognition looks like. If someone cannot change their mind because (sorry for the bluntness but there's no other way I can describe my impression in under a paragraph) their feelings might be hurt, and they are actively working against resolving this inner conflict, then they should not be in a rationalist community.
Really? Do you really think everyone who comes off as irrational based on a blog post of theirs that you read shouldn't be here? (There would be nobody left for you to talk to!) Or are you annoyed at this particular person because they said mean things about a group that contains you?
"This is what motivated cognition looks like. If someone cannot take criticism of their in-group without launching an ad-hominem attack on the critic, then they should not be in a rationalist community."
That sword cuts both ways.
Okay disclaimer - reading it did make me feel a little annoyed. Partly due to their writing style, partly due to me identifying with the specific subgroup of LW they're talking about, and partly on principle.
Really? Do you really think everyone who comes off as irrational based on a blog post of theirs that you read shouldn't be here?
No but when it's so clear-cut as in this case, yes.
If someone point-blank does not want to talk at the object-level about some controversial topic, and makes many veiled comments about what kind of nasty group I must belong to in order to entertain such beliefs, and has made it very clear they are happy to withdraw from the entire community surrounding it, what exactly am I supposed to do other than say "here's the door, have a nice day"?
what exactly am I supposed to do other than say "here's the door, have a nice day"?
Like you, I think that the linked blogger's position, as stated, is completely incompatible with the purpose of this community, but I think the point being made by some here is that steelmanning their criticisms, on the off-chance that their reaction might have been triggered by something legitimately criticism-worthy, is an option.
I think it makes a big difference if the preferred theory is gender/racial equality as opposed to fundamentalist Christianity, and whether the opposition to those perceived challenges result from emotional sensitivity as opposed to blind faith. At the very least, the blog post doesn't indicate that the author would be irrational about issues other than marginalization.
It's not clear to me that avowed racists (and sorry, that's what "HBD" is a euphemism for) make up any any significant portion of the LessWrong community, just a loud portion of it. Self-described "reactionaries" are certainly a very small (but loud) minority here.
Really we should get better at conveying when opinions held by a loud minority here are not by any means the opinion of the majority.
What do you mean by racist?
Edit: If by racist you mean "hate people who don't share the same skin color with them" then I would guess that there are almost no racists on LW.
If by racist you mean "think that some racial groups are superior and others inferior" then I would also guess that there are almost no racists on LW.
If by racist you mean "think that different populations of people differ significantly along various axes such as athletic ability, intelligence, memory etc." then yes there are a lot of racists on LW.
The third option does not imply either of the first two.
I think Chris is slightly mistating the problem, at least on Lesswrong. It would be sort of shocking if various genetically distinguishable population cohorts all happened to be exactly equal in average intelligence. But that's not what's so off-putting about the reactionaries. The problem comes with their reliance on extremely lazy statistical discrimination in individual cases. They have made quite clear that if they encounter a woman or an individual of African descent who has tested very high on an IQ test, they would still discriminate against that individual for jobs or educational slots, arguing that racial/gender averages swamp the evidence from the test, which might just regress to the mean.
To me, the individual IQ test is much stronger evidence and should swamp the cohort averages.
But that's not what's so off-putting about the reactionaries.
The underlying "off-putting" issue is that 'HBD' advocacy tends to attract some especially hateful people in droves - this is quite clear if you take a glance at even 'high-quality' "HBD" sites with open commenting. And this has literally nothing to do with the merit of the scientific question, does (literal) human biodiversity in intelligence, personality etc. exist. Honestly, it's not clear that we know one way or the other. It's a very tricky situation if you are committed to both truth-seeking and a reasonable ethical stance.
Lesswrong has actually had such individuals show up here, too, from time to time. They get downvoted into oblivion and/or Eliezer or one of the other high-status people shows up and encourages downvoting people who feed the troll. So the racists who are just using biodiversity as a rationalization for already-committed racism get driven off.
This does seem relevant when answering the separate question of whether the topic should just be taboo.
To the extent that I've been involved in these debates on LW, I'm almost always arguing for the anti-racist and anti-sexist position, but I still wouldn't want Lesswrong to adopt the norms of discourse that prevail at "safe space" feminist sites. Because that way really does lie madness (I've seen a feminist website drive off anyone who wanted to dispute the claim "rape is worse than murder," to give one egregious example).
The underlying "off-putting" issue is that 'HBD' advocacy tends to attract some especially hateful people in droves
Selection bias. Because of the taboo against voicing support of HBD, most of the less hateful voices simply shut up to avoid public censure. That only leaves those more concerned with the truth than being liked, and the dogmatic racist loons, who usually outnumber them by a wide margin.
What you believe in private versus what you're willing to advocate in public creates the selection bias, and this comment here seems to agree.
But I don't see why they would actually want, as oppose to merely pretend to want, a ban on publicly accepting HBD for signaling purposes. If they don't want to be perceived as a racist loon, they'll just avoid admitting to the view in public.
Also, there is no particular reason why learning that a group's average IQ is a standard deviation lower than you thought before should cause a decrease in your sympathy and empathy for that group. I see no one in that camp saying "How can we use this information to optimize charities?" which is the obvious first question if you care about the people you're talking about. Why would a fact about an innate feature that people can't control shrink your moral circle?! I'm sure there are exceptions, but it is eminently clear reading reactionary blogs just who they care about.
I have often heard the following charge against HBDers "You're just trying to prove your own superiority under a pathetic veil of pseudo-science that you call HBD".
Notably, that charge is typically leveled at Caucasians who, by HBD lights, are noticeably inferior to East Asians.
Here's the bit I hope folks will read and think about:
An example: I cannot in good faith entertain the argument that high-scarcity societies are right in having restrictive, assigned-sex-based gender roles, even if these social structures result in measurable maximized utility (i.e. many much kids). [...] This is because respect for said arguments and/or the idea behind them is a warning sign for either 1) passively not respecting my personhood or 2) actively disregarding my personhood, both of which are, to use some vernacular, hella fucking dangerous to me personally.
This is, yes, a signaling argument.
It is an argument that if you signal that it's A-OK for your friends and associates to waver on whether certain humans are to be treated as full persons (as opposed to baby-making machines, slaves, marks, or maybe food), then those certain humans are pretty likely to get the hell away from you and your friends and associates. Especially given the alternative of hanging out with people who clearly (and expensively) signal the opposite.
It's why you can hardly ever get honest answers to questions like "would you sleep with a member of the same sex for a million dollars."
If it came down to actually making the choice, I'm pretty sure most straight men would sleep with a man for a million dollars. Only the naive are going to admit to it when it's a hypothetical, though, because the hypothetical question leaks information about your character. Choosing between a million dollars and your hetero-normal reputation is one thing -- choosing between saying that you'd take the million dollars and saying that you're too hetero-normal to do so is another.
Let's play the money as dead children game for a bit. Now, when the article was written you could plausibly save 1life for about $1000, but these days I think the number is a bit higher. Let's say $10000 just to be safe.
Essentially, you're saying that you would sacrifice the lives of 100 people in order to avoid a brief homosexual experience, using basic consequentialism. Perhaps you won't change your mind even when thinking about the proposition from this perspective, but I know personally it would be too difficult ethically for me to refuse.
It doesn't have to be lives, of course. If you're more of a preferential consequentialist, you can help pay off your mates' crippling student debt or mortgage, or donate to a longevity charity to help your chances of not dying, or even MIRI or something.
In any case, a million dollars has a lot of potential utility. Refusing because you're not 'materialistic' is a bit short-sighted, I think.
I would enthusiastically answer yes to both questions. The first is a million dollars for 35 minutes of moderate discomfort. The second signals that I'm both tolerant and confident in my heterosexuality. I don't even have to ponder this.
It gets more interesting as the price comes down and I would have clarifying questions if we wanted to determine the exact level, and the answers would probably be different. I don't know how common my answer is, but I suspect very common among my demographic cohort (white, urban, mid-twenties, of the liberal tribe). A rationalist friend recently gave his price as $200, which would be too low for me.
The problem is how specifically we define what "treating as full persons" means. Because, you know, one gets internet activist points for exaggerating and taking offense.
For example, if the article about Asch's conformity experiment says that women conformed more to the social pressures... well, if a wrong person said this at the wrong moment, they could easily get accused of not treating women as full persons. Also anyone who would try to defend them.
rewarding the “ability” to entertain any argument “no matter how ‘politically incorrect’” (to break out of some jargon, “no matter how likely to hurt people”) results in a system that prizes people who have not been socially marginalized or who have been socially marginalized less than a given other person in the discussion
To paraphrase: Our community is exclusionary in the sense that its standards for what constitutes an information hazard (and thus a Forbidden Topic) are as stingy as possible, which means that it can't be guaranteed safe for people more vulnerable to psychological damage by ideas than the typical LessWrong crowd.
It's possible that this problem could be resolved with a more comprehensive "trigger warning" tagging system and a filtering system akin to tumblr savior. Then there could be a user preference with a list of checkboxes, e.g.
Hide comments and posts about
[ ] Race
[x] Gender
[ ] Sexual Violence
etc.
This could also double as protection for people who want to participate in LessWrong but have, for example, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder which could be triggered by some topics.
Social justice rhetoric tends to lose me when it shifts from "I should be heard in the conversation because I can contribute to it" to "I should be heard in the conversation because I cannot contribute to it."
Any community that claims to be based on 'rationality' runs an extremely high risk of inappropriately automatically labeling opposing arguments to their in-group assessment as irrational and dismissing them as irrelevant. They themselves are inevitably irrational and will make the mistake.
Furthermore, in-groups want to co-opt any 'rationality' movement as their own, so that they have more soldiers to attack opposing viewpoints -- to wit, labeling it as disagreement with the 'rational' point of view. See rationalwiki for a horrific example of this.
Moreover, because people are not completely stupid, they probably won't put up a sign saying "I am recruiting soldiers to attack opposing viewpoints!"
Instead, they will point a finger and say "Look, over there! That person is recruiting soldiers to attack opposing viewpoints!"
I cannot in good faith entertain the argument that high-scarcity societies are right in having restrictive, assigned-sex-based gender roles, even if these social structures result in measurable maximized utility (i.e. many much kids).
Which argument is the blogger referring to? Does it make sense to have many kids in a high-scarcity society?
Any kind of utilitarianism entails every statement of the form "p, if it results in measurably maximized utility" (kinds of utilitarianism differ in what they mean by "maximized utility", since the phrase itself is underspecified), and I find it a bit disingenuous to instantiate p in a way that people wouldn't like in order to defame its proponents instead of saying straightforwardly that you just don't agree with utilitarianism.
Which is quite a different question from that of whether a given p does, in fact, result in maximized utility. Not idea if the above one does. So cousin_it's question makes perfect sense: does p in fact result in maximized utility? Because if it doesn't, then the blogger's statement is even more disingenuous.
I don't think that gets at the core of the criticism.
I think the position is: "You shouldn't be allowed to argue that policy X is good in the abstract scenario A if policy is is dangerous in the world in which you are living B and the fact that you argue that X is good in A increases the chances that X will be adopted in B."
I'd suggest unpacking that "shouldn't be allowed".
To me, it reads something like:
"Let's say that in abstract scenario S, policy X sounds like a utility-maximizing proposal; but in the world we're living, policy X would hurt our neighbors A, B, and C. If we spend our social time chatting about policy X and how great it would be, and chide people who criticize policy X that they are not being good utility maximizers, we should predict that A, B, and C will see us as a threat to their well-being."
That last bit is the part I think a lot of this discussion is missing.
Note that this community reacts badly to some topics as well.
The failing of being mind-killed by certain triggers is pretty common, and I have to give this author credit for recognizing it. I'd prefer an attempt to analyze and work with the emotional impact, to find ways to continue to discuss things where rationality is possible, rather than a set of examples that trigger this person specifically.
I do wonder if we should have a way to add trigger-warnings and filters to posts and comments. It can't be made perfect, and there are some interesting and s...
Who here thinks that the author of the blog post is female? I did.
Surprise(?)! The blog post doesn't seem to contain any information that would allow you to deduce the gender of the author. I briefly searched through the blog post and the comment found on Yvain's site, but I became none the wiser (I stopped searching at that point to respect the author's privacy). I wonder why I thought that the author of the blog post is female...
Who here thinks that the author of the blog post is female? I did.
I found gender conspicuously absent. Indeed, actual information about anything was conspicuously absent. I was strongly reminded of a curious feature of a flamewar that raged over SF-related blogs in 2009, which came to be called RaceFail.
I only came across that discussion a year after it had ended, through a chance mention somewhere, and was curious enough to look and see what it had all been about. You might think that easy: hyperlinks surely let one follow the discussion back all the way to the original postings that started it? Not at all. The curious pattern was this, and I observed it on all sides of the argument. People who were commenting on a blog post they agreed with would link directly to the specific post, and quote directly from it. People who were commenting on a blog post they disagreed with would not do that. They would link, if at all, only to the top level of the blog, and not quote but only paraphrase its content, or merely allude to it in terms that would convey little unless one had already read it -- and of course, upwards of a year after the event, there would be little possibility of track...
Who here thinks that the author of the blog post is female?
Given this sentence -- "...one person who has repeatedly misgendered me" -- from the second paragraph, it might be that the sex/gender of the blog author is... complicated.
If the would really care about being misgendered they would provide relevant information to make sure that people can easily know their gender.
The rather seem to have another goal, and if you don't agree with it, you can use Bayesian inference.
I am going to attempt to summarise this, hopefully fairly. A warning, for anyone to whom it applies: a cis white male is going to try and say what you said, but better.
I am doing this because I think social justice / equality is 1) important, 2) often written with an extreme inferential distance.
Parentheses with "ed:" are my own addition, usually a steelman of the author's position or an argument they didn't make but could have, although sometimes a critique. They aren't what the author said.
...This is inspired by Yvain's writing, in particular a
How did that blog post come to your attention? It appears to have just been created, and that is the only post on it.
I was following a thread from August on Yvain's site. The author of the blog post we are discussing added a comment there on January 4 and Yvain replied. I should have included this link in my original write-up. And since I've started criticizing myself, I should have left out my half-baked musings on racism and spent more effort on summarizing the post I was linking to. For example, it might have been a good idea to quote the following:
If you prefer to not have any truck with the word ‘privilege’, substitute ‘the less likelihood of having to anticipate culturally-permissible threats to their personhood they have lived with’, since that’s the specific manifestation of privilege I mean. Sadly, that is a long and unwieldy phrase.
This shows that the author is able to taboo words in order to improve readers' understanding. A communication skill justifiably prized on LessWrong.
After reading that post, I want to see a mathematical model of the thinking behind it. Instead of assigning a single numerical degree of belief to every proposition, as Bayesians do, this model would assign two numbers: "degree of belief" and "degree of respect". The degree of respect would affect the agent's willingness to listen to evidence for or against a belief, and would itself be affected by specific kinds of evidence (maybe evidence of suffering?) Many common results would need to be changed, e.g. Aumann's agreement theorem would become Apophemi's disagreement theorem, because agents using that model would end up disagreeing about many things.
A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
In other words, prizing discourse without limitations (I tried to find a convenient analogy for said limitations and failed. Fenders? Safety belts?) will result in an environment in which people are more comfortable speaking the more social privilege they hold.
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.