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[LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist
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.
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Comments (866)
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...
Damn. I've been referring to the author as female because other people were.
FTM transgender, I think. It's a bit unclear...
Because it's a valid Bayesian inference based on the content of the post.
It's really not. They refer to being misgendered, which should have been strong evidence your assumption was mistaken. And indeed, if you had clicked through to their "about" page you would have found they prefer to be referred to with male pronouns.
I don't really care - I'm fairly certain this is the work of a troll - but hey, you claimed it was an example of valid Bayesian inference, so naturally I'm going to leap on it.
Given the issue of being misgendered, the person seems to be a transperson who either was female in the past and is now male or who was male and is now female. To you think post indicates which of those are the case?
I think the post makes clear that the person is no cis-male, but it's difficult to say things that are more specific.
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.
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I found the original post pretty unreadable, so thank you for summarizing it. Upvoted for helpfulness.
While this comment may be helpful, I would advise that you only read it after reading and trying to understand the original.
Here's the bit I hope folks will read and think about:
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.
However, the EA subgroup will not force her into assigned-sex-based gender role. They will tell her it is comparatively immoral to have children. Another way the subcultures on LW are not overlapping.
As a woman, I am annoyed at both approaches, but I can cope.
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.
I'm curious what your confidence level about the counterfactual is here. I both would answer that question no, and would honestly expect most other men to genuinely refuse this offer if actually presented with it.
Possibly I'm hitting myself with the typical mind fallacy here (I test as purely-straight when taking analyses of sexual preference, so maybe men who test as mostly-straight would behave differently; I'm also much less materialistic than most people -- I could have chosen more lucrative careers but preferred to do something I enjoy.)
Is there really any experimental evidence for your assertion?
That's more of an issue with making sure that the logistics work right - the prior for someone going around with a million dollars to spend to get straight men to sleep with them is so low that "this is obviously a scam or a ruse of some sort" eats up the remaining probability mass.
Imagine instead of some guy coming up to you with the offer, you get a phone call from your attorney. He says he is in the room with some %celebrity's attorney with a million dollar check on the table, and lays out the offer for you.
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.
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.
How does that simile make sense? You can destroy the life by bombing it, I don't see what you supposedly destroy by posting on a blog.
I chose this simile because I did want to capture how destructive and upsetting I find these discussions. (Though I then preferred the humor of the word, 'trainwreckiness'). Another analogy I had in mind was that of astronauts drinking tea (the astronauts capture the overly cerebral cluelessness better, and for sure imagine a 'high tea' with little cups and little knives for spreading jam that keep getting fumbled) but I wanted to also have it immediately understood that the porcelain cups were imploding like eggshells in their oversized white mittens. The bull was a better symbol for this.
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...
A friend described LW as "like students arguing seriously about how often you really need to shower".
The homepage says:
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.
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.
Would you mind defining what you mean by "superior" and "inferior"?
I dunno, 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". I'd rather not talk about superiority and I'd rather talk about the specific axes along which populations might differ, and how that might inform policy decisions (an even more volatile topic).
Notably, that charge is typically leveled at Caucasians who, by HBD lights, are noticeably inferior to East Asians.
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.
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.
Almost every community has a large share of crazies, and fringe political communities are certainly going to have a lot of them. I think the difference is the content of what reactionaries say. Their rhetoric isn't so much worse than extreme social justice types or extreme atheists (I'm thinking of the freethoughtblogs type), but what they say is completely alien and horrifying to most people.
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).
waves
Am I going to be "downvoted into oblivion"?
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.
You might have a point here, but it's not clear what the counterfactual is. As HBD advocates like to point out, many and perhaps most people (including minorities) behave in private as if they believed in HBD (for instance, by buying housing in "good" neighborhoods, choosing "good" schools and the like, where "good" is defined by demographics).
By this argument, the "less hateful voices" who are silenced include most of the population, even though these same people might want to enforce a ban on publicly accepting HBD, for social signaling reasons (i.e. not wanting to be perceived by others as a dogmatic racist loon). Interestingly, it's not clear to me how stable this equilibrium is.
Whoa. The "demographics" people are choosing on are income, not race. Faced with a choice between living in a middle class majority-black neighborhood and a (forgive the term) white trash neighborhood, I think most people would choose the former. This fact may get obscured by the relative paucity of middle class majority-black neighborhoods, but at least in the US, that has at least as much to do with redlining, the legacy of sundown towns, and such as it does with HBD.
Except those behaviors express belief in statistics, not that those statistics are biological in nature. Biological diversity does not have to be the cause for statistical trends. Have HBD adherents falsified other explanations for the statistics?
You do not have to eliminate other explanations to accept genetic causes. A combination is likely. Bu you have to prove other causes explain all the effect in all cases to prove genetic equivalence.
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.
Quite a number of people pooh pooh the reliability of IQ tests, most usually people in dogmatic denial about HBD. Are they also horrible people for their "lazy statistical discrimination"?
Your comment is basically a non sequitor boo light, unless there is some obscure second meaning to the term "statistical discrimination" with which I am unfamiliar.
In any case, IQ tests can be less-than-perfect measures of intelligence and still be far more reliable than the evidence on which the reactionaries are relying.
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.
There's irrationality and then there's faith-based epistemic insanity. This person actually states that he cannot accept any perceived challenge to their preferred theories. Seriously, read the blogpost. He/she is as rational as the most extreme Christian fundamentalist. Do you really think such folks could ever be productive contributors to this site?
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.
Does fundamentalist Christianity indicate that the believer would be irrational about issues other than religion?
If yes, what's the difference?
They can be, but it's not worth trying to seek them out. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't lukeprog have pretty serious Christian beliefs at one point?
I find your mismatched pronouns painful.
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.
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"?
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.
That definition of 'racist' is what Yvain calls a non-central fallacy: http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst_argument_in_the/
If you can definitively prove "the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits", then the true and rational position to take would be racism. Now, as far as I know or have researched, no conclusive arguments have been made for accepting racism. However, when you say 'racist', it conjures up images like this:
(EDIT: this picture was embedded; it's now linked instead)
http://motherboard-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/content-images/article/ironically-a-mans-face-can-tell-you-if-hes-likely-to-act-like-a-racist/048156b6350757d5b198262bdfb53d92_vice_630x420.jpg
This picture of a lynching is closer to my "why I think racism is bad" image.
Didn't downvote you, but I'm willing to bet it was because you embedded an image rather than linking it.
Would it actually be intellectually inconsistent if someone was both racist and donated heavily to African charities? Honest question.
It depends on the definition of "racist" that you use. Anyone who self-identifies as "racist" is probably in a hateful enough place that the idea of saving African children from malaria doesn't even cross their mind as a possibility. 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.
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.)
I agree with Romeo Steven's comment that the issues seem orthogonal. As an example, (caveat YMMV), Steve Sailer believes in HBD. However, he frequently cites lower growth in african american wages as a reason to shut the american borders down to low skilled workers.
However, in today's environment, I'm not sure how many top-rated charities are HBD believing. A neoreactionary charity aiming at improving Africa might do many things differently. And being a relatively new ideology, most policies would not have substantial support of data. Hence, atleast in the current scenario, you would not find many people that were HBD aware and contributed greatly to african charities. However, it is not intellectually inconsistent.
Of course! Racism is evil and charity is good! If you try to mix them you get an explosion.
Depends on the type of racist.
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:
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.
[later]
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.
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.
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.
Yes, creating a safe space does prevent an entirely open discussion. So downvoting to oblivion people to talk about the merits of killing everyone in Asia, or the validity of Christianity. As a community, we have decided that there are certain discussions we don't want to have, and certain topics we don't want to discuss.
Not all safe spaces are equal. A safe space for a support group for trans folk would have a different meaning for a safe space for African Americans. I think Less Wrong could have its own version of a safe space, with the spirit behind the rules being something like "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?
Yeah, in theory. This leads to two things:
1) We already do have a kind of safe space in theory, it's mostly the name "safe space" that turns people off more than the actual idea.
2) We're doing part of that wrong, because it was people advocating ideas that would be dangerous to the OP that turned her off from LW in the first place.
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."
Actually, this is something I've been a bit confused about the whole time. What posts is she talking about? The OP says Yvain's posts, but from the substance of the article the article it sounds like she's talking about reactionaries.
Considering the much higher than average rate of homocide towards trans people based on todays standards, a reinforcement of gender roles would almost certainly increase that rate.
I AM AN IDIOT, THEY ARE REAL AND TELLING THE TRUTH.
Original comment, for your viewing pleasure: (I hate it when people delete comments so you can't understand what was going on.)
Well be embarrassed, past me. Unwilling to accept the lack of evidence, I looked around for some more, and they are either a real person, or a truly spectacular hoax that spanned years building up a fake history.
So ... there you go, folks.
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.
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.
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:
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.
What word would You suggest instead of eugenics ?
(Btw, I find it hilarious, having the discussion about inventing newspeak at LW, of all forums !)
The mainstream media seems less terrified of the idea of "designer babies", which is not specifically eugenics, but related enough that I wonder if Eugenics shouldn't quietly respawn in the Designer Babies category?
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.
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 to be something serious. That still didn't prevent social justice warriors from saying that Glenn opposed Obama because of his privilege as a middle class white American man.
If you are an African American and get support from some sort of charity, then you are in danger if somebody comes and says that you shouldn't get that support because it's higher utility to spend that money on a charity that actually operates in Africa.
If you do the utility calculation you will stop supporting many of the programs that social justice warrorism favors.
I once had a conflict in an online community about whether an African is allowed to say in that community: "Just because some countries legalized homosexuality doesn't mean that it isn't still a crime." The person lived in a country in which it was a crime. We had a split that those who were white heterosexual males favored allowing the African his free expression and a US upper-middle-class woman and homosexual male wanted to censor that person.
The kind of safety belts that US social warriors want are policies that keep the majority of the world from participating.
If you are a member of an US minority group than of course you have to fear someone who makes clear utility calculations and comes to the conclusion that resources are better directed at helping poor Africans than members of US minority groups because in contrast the fate of the poor African is simply worse.
That doesn't mean that members of US minority groups don't suffer to some extend. but showing that you suffer just isn't enough. If you however suffer and don't want to make clear utility calculations because you don't want to weaken your tribe, then you will find it hard to fit into this community.
I don't think the claim that the only way to do those clear utility calculations is to have no self interest and thus have privilege. I think that unfair to those people in minorities.
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't look like ours, we are probably going to end up kinda ignorant. At the very least we will not have as complete a picture of the landscape as a group who has shared maps from lots of different paths.
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.
Your argument is cogent, and yet I find the overwhelming majority of calls for diversity to be somehow underhanded. I suspect that your true motives are invisible to you. Consider this: is your motivation for valuing diversity really a product of your philosopher's thirst for pure, pristine knowledge, or do you just want every social group you see as important to be loaded with demographics which support your political faction? (Think carefully--the truth might not be obvious from casual introspection; we are masters at self-delusion when politics is at play.)
I say this because I cannot help but notice that 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. What's more, the frequency which with this cry is invoked correlates positively with the degree to which that demographic supports the left. Consider the following data from the 2012 presidential election:
Whites voted 39% for Obama, and 59% for Romney. Blacks voted 93% for Obama, and 6% for Romney. Hispanics voted 71% for Obama, and 27% for Romney. Asians voted 73% for Obama, and 26% for Romney.
Source
When I encounter someone singing the praises of diversity, I more often find that they are lobbying for Blacks than Hispanics, rarely for Asians, and never for Whites. Blacks offer overwhelming support to the left, Hispanics are more lukewarm, Asians' support proportionally resembles that of Hispanics' (but they are a smaller group overall so it is less important for the left to signal respect for their faction), and Whites support the right. Coincidence? Unlikely.
Now consider gender (same source as above):
Men voted 45% for Obama, 52% for Romney. Women voted 55% for Obama, 44% for Romney.
Again, women support the left and men do not. Again, the cry of "Diversity!" is invoked for those trying to add women to a group, and rarely for men. I seem to encounter such arguments invoked as often for women as I do for racial minorities. While women do not favor the left as heavily as Hispanics or Blacks do, they are a larger group than all racial minorities combined, and so it is highly important for the left to signal respect for this demographic, and to ensure that they occupy positions of prestige and influence.
The overwhelming majority of people shouting, "Diversity!" are not motivated by epistemology at all. They are subconsciously (sometimes even consciously) making a power grab. That is all. You can tell by who, exactly, they are trying to include and in what they are trying to include them. For one, they are always lobbying for a demographic on the grounds that said demographic will bring additional knowledge to a discussion, but not for someone from a specific field of expertise which would be relevant to said discussion. There is likely to be more intellectual diversity between an exclusively middle class white male group comprising a physicist, a lawyer, a mathematician, a programmer, a chemist, a politician, an economist, and a businessman than there is between a demographically diverse group of eight people randomly selected from the general population. And you regularly see the pro-diversity crowd lobbying for their favored demographics to occupy positions in which being demographically distinct cannot possibly be an advantage, such as in the hard sciences. I find the champions of diversity disingenuous in the extreme.
Consider these two theories:
How would you tell which of these theories is true?
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.
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.
Taboo "diversity". Specifically are you saying that having norms that prevent certain views from being expressed increases diversity by making the community more welcoming for members of minorities or are you saying that preventing certain views from being expressed decreases diversity.
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.
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 someone who is just plain wrong about a lot of things!
Also ... I wonder what a person whose maps of the social world were really "no better than random" would look like. I think he or she would be vastly more unfortunate than a paranoid schizophrenic. He or she would certainly be grossly unable to function in society, lacking any ability to model or predict other people. As a result, he or she would probably have no friends, job, or political allies. Lacking the ability to work with other people at all, he or she would certainly not look like a member of any political movement.
As such, I have to consider that when applied to someone who clearly does not have these attributes, that expression is being used as merely a crude insult, akin to calling someone a "drooling moron" or "mental incompetent" because they disagree with you.
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.
Are you ever in physical danger because of your opinions?
I don't believe the blogger was in any danger because of her opinions at a dinner party either.
My guess is that she travels in a terribly civilized circle where watching a boxing match would induce fainting spells. I travel in fairly pansified circles myself, and that's the way I like it. I like civilization.
As for actual violent crime, all the crime statistics I've seen show that men are at least as likely to be victimized as women.
Even in terms of partner violence, all of it of which I'm aware in my circles are of females acting out against their partners in rather dangerous ways. We've been laughing for years about how a female friend gave her boyfriend a shove down a staircase right in front of me in college. He managed to catch himself on the sloping ceiling above and avoid crashing to his death. The look he gave her in return was priceless.
Because you see, it's funny when women try to hurt men. When it's the other way around, it's a crime against humanity. And we all have to be thrown into a tizzy at the thought of violence used against a woman. The mere thought of the possibility of it entitles the blogger to have all opinions that give her a twinge of worry shut down. No matter that the statistics show that the evil enpenised person she shuts down faces the same or more risk of actual violence.
Not really a valid question; I feel similarly, but you quickly learn to suppress it when the situation becomes questionable. Anyone who reacts strongly to my more mainstream opinions, is almost certainly going to be a lost cause when it comes to my extremist opinions. I can't say I've been in physical danger because I've never pushed it to that point. However, I can think of instances where physical danger was on the table of options (the KKK in minnesota is a good example.)
Apposite criticism. Most worrying excerpt:
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.
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.
http://imgur.com/ZaYq9Y5
hard to be frankly dispassionate when you're affected by an issue. That tends to encourage self-serving passion.
Oh, that's quite right. But the original question here is whether they'll even want to join the conversation at all. To me, it's not at all clear why they wouldn't. (And I see this as a mixed bag from a goals perspective, for reasons others have pointed out.)
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.
Maybe invite blacks or other members of marginalized communities explicitly ?
Some time ago, Eliezer wrote a post, which made it clear he would be glad to see more women on LW. I thing his article was well written. Did any of You guys, the opponents of crazier versions of feminism, feel annoyed by that ? Later, there were other efforts to drag women here. (It does feel flattering, I tell You). Now, the percentage of LW women has grown slightly (lazy to look up the census result), athough we are still a minority.
I don't think simple invitations are going to make much difference.
If some marginal group didn't drift here spontaneously because they're inherently interested in the community, then we must provide them other incentives. Unfortunately this might mean privileging them some way, which to be honest I usually find so unjust and contrary to truth seeking it pisses me off.
Perhaps there are benign forms of such privileging, but none are cognitively available to me at the moment.
What if they visit the website and feel hesitant, whether the atmosphere is welcoming enough for them, considering all the HBD staff ? I do not imply we should censor HBD away, I am interested in it too. If there is some thruth to it, we will have to face it sooner or later anyway, taking into account all the DNA sequencing projects etc. In the world outside, I got yelled at for my interest a couple time, it is my interest to have clear discussion here, so that I know, where things stand. But, anyway, regardless of nature or nurture, all the data agree, there is a significant portion of intelligent individuals in all marginalised groups, and LW would very much benefit from them. If I only could express something like that, and not sound creepy... Some analogy of this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ap/of_gender_and_rationality/
It grew from 3% in 2009 to 8.9% (cis) + 1.3% (trans) in 2012.
1.3% trans! That's super cool
Given that a large part of LW is drawn from the Bay Area, which IIRC has significantly higher trans density than the at-large 1%, that's actually under where I would expect.
Wait, 1.3% trans women. Depending on the number of trans men, that may be much closer to representative of the broader likely-to-encounter-LW population. (Which I'd expect to have 2x-5x as many trans people as the general population.)
I don't see this as a problem, really. The entire point is to have high-value discussions. Being inclusive isn't the point. It'd be nice, sure, and there's no reason to drive away minority groups for no reason.
I mean, I don't see us trying to spread internet access and English language instruction in Africa so that the inhabitants can help discuss how to solve their malaria problems. As long as we can get enough input about what the problem is actually like, we don't need to be inclusive in order to solve problems. And in the African malaria case, being inclusive would obviously hurt our problem-solving capability.
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.
That's an incredibly short-sighted attitude. Feminism and race realism are just the focus of the current controversy. I'm pretty confident that you could pick just about any topic in social science (and some topics in the natural sciences as well - evolution, anyone?) and some people will want to prevent or bias discussions of it for political reasons. It's not clear why we should be putting up with this nonsense at all.
My argument is: (1) Feminism and race realism are interesting for the same reasons politics are interesting and (2) they aren't especially high value. If this argument is valid, then for the same reasons LW has an informal ban on politics discussion, it might make sense to have an informal ban on feminism and race realism discussion.
You don't address either of my points. Instead you make a slippery slope argument, saying that if there's an informal ban on feminism/race realism then maybe we will start making informal bans on all of social science. I don't find this slippery slope argument especially persuasive (such arguments are widely considered fallacious). I trust the Less Wrong community to evaluate the heat-to-light ratio of different topics and determine which should have informal bans and which shouldn't.
"some people will want to prevent or bias discussions of it for political reasons" - to clarify, I'm in favor of informal bans against making arguments for any side on highly interesting but fairly useless topics. Also, it seems like for some of these topics, "people getting their feelings hurt" is also a consideration and this seems like a legitimate cost to be weighed when determining whether discussing a given topic is worthwhile.
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.)
My LW reading comes out of my Internet-as-television time, and so does Hacker News. The two appear very similar in target audience.
Maybe I'm being dense, but I don't see why this is obviously true.
There's obviously a level of exclusivity that also hurts our problem-solving, as well. At some point a programmer in the Bay Area with $20k/yr of disposable income and 20 hours a week to spare is going to do more than a subsaharan african farmer with $200/yr of disposable income, 6 hours a week of free time, and no internet access.
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.
Can you provide some links? I haven't followed what you've said previously about this.
Why? If the answer is, as appears to be the case from context, that we say true things that make you feel uncomfortable, well I recommend treating your feeling of discomfort with the truth rather than the people saying it as the problem. This is a community devoted to rationality, not to making you feel comfortable.
Truth isn't enough.
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.
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, focused on technique and practice rather than applying to particular issues)
a transhumanist forum (for existential risk, cryonics, FAI and similar)
an object-level discussion/debate forum (for specific topics like feminism, genetic engineering, neoreactionism, etc).
I'm not sure that would work. After all, Bayes's rule has fairly obvious unPC consequences when applied to race or gender, and thinking seriously about transhumanism will require dealing with eugenics-like issues.
“rather than applying to particular issues”
That would simply result in people treating Bayesianism as if it's a separate magisterium from everyday life.
Think of it as the no-politics rule turned up to 11.The point is not that these things can't be reasoned about, but that the strong (negative/positve) affect attached to certain things makes them ill-suited to rationalist pedagogy.
Lowering the barrier to entry doesn't mean you can't have other things further up the incline, though.
I can't see this as part of the problem. You don't have to discuss it, but I'm bewildered that it's on the list.
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 don't think this hypothesis is supported by the evidence, specifically past LW discussions.
My vague recollections of LW-past disagreements, but I don't have any readily available examples. It's possible my model is drawing too much on the-rest-of-the-Internet experiences and I should upgrade my assessment of LW accordingly.
I've definitely experienced strong adverse reactions to discussing eugenics 'cavalierly' if you don't spend at least ten to fifteen minutes covering the inferential steps and sanitising the perceived later uses of the concept.
Good point about the possible three communities. I haven't posted here much, as I found myself standing too far outside the concepts whilst I worked my way through the sequences. Regardless of that, the more I read the more I feel I have to learn, especially about patterned thinking and reframes. To a certain extent I see this community as a more scientifically minded Maybe Logic group, when thinking about priors and updating information.
A lot of the transhumanist material have garnered very strong responses from friends though, but I've stocked up on Istvan paperbacks to hopefully disseminate soon.
I hesitate to suggest this, but I've noticed most of the "sensitive but discussed anyway" issues have been on areas where socially weaker groups might feel threatened by the discussion. Criticism of socially strong groups is conspicuously absent, given that LW demographics are actually far-left leaning according to polls.
If the requirement that one must be dispassionate would cut in multiple directions simultaneously (rather than selectively cutting in the direction of socially marginalized groups) then we'd select for "willing to deal intellectually with emotional things" rather than selecting for "emotionally un-reactive to social problems" (which is a heterogeneous class containing both people who are willing to deal intellectually with things which are emotionally threatening and people who happen to not often fall on the pointy end of sensitive issues)
The reason I hesitate to suggest it is that while I do want an arena where sensitive issues can be discussed intellectually without driving people away, people consciously following the suggestion would probably result in a green-blue battleground for social issues.
There's lots of talk about religion which is almost the definition of a socially strong group.
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).
The Cathedral, to use Moldbug's terminology, is certainly a non-marginalized group and LW is full of its adherents.
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 think I'm a bit confused now.
Let's say Cathedral is mainstream. Then Moldbug is a contrarian. Then Yvain's anti-reactionary FAQ is contrarian against a contrarian. Are you saying we need more stuff like Yvain's FAQ?
Or do you want some actual direct criticism of an existing power structure, maybe something along these lines?
So the contrarian food chain goes
Mainstream America (bulk of the American population)
-> radical egalitarian critique of mainstream america (feminists, anti-racists, the Left, moldbug's "Cathedral")
-> Reactionary critique of egalitarian movements (Moldbug, Manosphere, human biodiversity, Dark enlightenment)
-> Critique of Reactionary anti-egalitarian stances (Yvain, this post).
I'm advocating good old-fashioned contrarianism - stuff like radical egalitarianism, sex positivism, etc.
(No, obviously, not along those lines - but yes, that link is at the correct level of contrarianism.)
OK. Let me try to sort this out.
We start with a base. You are saying this is the mainstream US which you understand to be conservative. So, level 0 -- US conservatives -- mainstream.
Level 1 is the Cathedral which is contrarian to level 0 and which is US liberals or progressives.
Level 2 are the neo-reactionaries who are contrarian to level 1 (Cathedral)
Level 3 is Yvain's FAQ which is contrarian to level 2 (Reactionaries).
So we are basically stacking levels where each level is explicitly opposed to the previous one and, obviously, all even layers are sympathetic to each other, as are all odd layers (I find the "meta-" terminology confusing since this word means other things to me, probably "anti-" would be better).
And what you want more of is level 1 stuff -- basically left-liberal critique of whatever stands in the way of progress, preferably on steroids.
Do I understand you right?
EDIT: LOL, you simplified your post right along the lines I was extracting out of it...
Ah, sorry for the real time simplification! I realized I was writing spaghetti as soon as I looked it over.
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 people on Lesswrong, would remedy this. (I'm taking the LW poll as indications that most LWers, like me, agree with Level 1)
Edit: Even layers are not necessarily sympathetic to each other, even if they are ideologically aligned. Mainstream conservatives would likely not be sympathetic to reactionary's open racism/sexism etc, and the impression I get is that reactionaries think mainstream conservatives are fighting a losing battle and aren't particularly bright. There's really only one Odd Layer, practically speaking, since Yvain is the only person on hypothetical layer 3.
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.)
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.
Side note: I can't really tell, but some evidence suggests the total time spent on childcare has increased in the past 40-50 years. Now, when I look at people raised back then and try to adjust for the effects of leaded gasoline on the brain, they seem pretty much OK. So we should consider the possibility that we're putting pointless pressure on mothers.
Who is the we there? I'm not declaiming responsibility, but interested in who these women feel is pressuring them. I'd wager it's largely a status competition with other women.
As you said, "much closer to parity". There are probably multiple causes, each responsible for a part of the effect. And as usual, the reality is not really convenient for any political side.
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?
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.)
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 getting an impression that the point is that people don't have enough inhibitions against killing for the greater good. (By the way, how easy do you think it would be to move an unwilling person who weighs a good bit more than you do?)
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 the original post made me realize is that what I consider most certain to be valuable at LW is the instrumental rationality material, and it would be a good thing for there to also be an online site for instrumental rationality without the "let's do low-empathy discussions to prove how rational we are" angle.
Your examples remind me of this thread on suicide, which is the most distressing thing I've read on less wrong. (Though it is not exactly an example of "low empathy.")
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.
That post struck me as ignoring any advantages divorce might have (like getting out of bad marriages) for women.
It seems clear to me that the post was not about weighing the pros and cons of divorce in total (something which would take a lot more than a short post). The post makes a more abstract point about the way incentive changes can have large impacts even without people coordinating to deliberately change behavior. That seems like a very appropriate topic for Less Wrong.
I believe that the "problem" is that Lesswrong loves contrarians.
If a smart-sounding article espousing conservative opinions on social issues appears, most lesswrongers will disagree but be interested in reading anyway because it's novel and there is a dearth of smart conservative opinions in the world, and the exciting chance to "actually change their mind" looms.
If a smart-sounding article espousing liberal opinions on social issues appears, most lesswrongers will agree but be disinterested in reading because they've heard it all before, and it's preaching to the choir, and it's political and mind-killing, etc.
This reversal of traditional attitudes to disagreement has its merits, but we're seeing the downsides too. (one of the many reasons I advocate having separate feedback buttons for agreement, interest, and quality assessment)
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.
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.
...
:-D
Well, since that post quotes liberally from a "manosphere" website, you'd be justified for assuming that it does take men's welfare more seriously than women's. But for what it's worth, it's mostly concerned with trying to predict men's strategically reasonable response to a change in institutions, and determining the resulting equilibrium. Whether you value men's and women's welfare equally doesn't much affect how bad the projected outcome is.
Why? A standard result in the trolley-problem literature is that folks deviate from utilitarian ethics in a way that's suggestive of just such a moral injunction. People on LW are different, in that they tend to be highly committed to utilitarianism. But we already knew that - the way trolley problems are discussed here is just more evidence of this fact.
I don't really like trolley problems either, but I don't think they can be waved away. When programming a self-driving car's decision algorithm for reacting when a car full of people skids in front of it while there is a single pedestrian on the sidewalk where it would have to swerve, you are essentially dealing with a real -world trolley problem.
Better to hit the other car rather than the pedestrian. The people in the car are protected by a lot of metal and will tend to suffer much less damage.