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gothgirl420666 comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
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.
A lot of this content is concentrated among the users who eventually created MoreRight. Check out that site for a concentrated dose of what also pops up here.
Politics, eh? I'm confused.
This guy was a pretty big poster on LW, I think. Best example I can come up with, I'm sure there are better ones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq5vRKiQlUQ
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 ...)
Oh, okay. For some reason I thought he was fairly respected here.
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.
That was awesome!
The dark secrets thread like a year ago was one of my favorite threads to read
Any key words I should use to find that one?
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.
And thus, more entertaining.
That guy is funny. Definitely not someone who would be well respected here. His model of the world is broken and he's trying to make the world fit his model, instead of the other way around.
In one of his videos there's a part where he argues that cigarettes are actually good for you. LOL
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 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" subsets, then of course 0.1 and 0.5 and 1 and infinity all get into the same subset. But that's looking through the mindkilling glasses. I could start explaining how believing that genes can have some influence on thinking and behavior is not the same as attributing everything to the genes, and is completely nothing like advocating a genocide... but I already see all the good guys looking at me and thinking: "Nice try, but you are not going to fool us. We know what you really believe." -- Well, the idea is that I actually don't.
I even don't think that having a white male majority at this moment is some failure of a LW community. I mean -- just try imagine a parallel universe where someone else started LW. How likely it is that in the parallel universe it is perfectly balanced by ethnicity and gender? What exactly does your model of reality make you predict?
Imagine that you are a visitor from an alien species are you are told the following facts: 1) Most humans are irrational, and rationality is associated with various negative things, like Straw Vulcans. Saying good things about rationality will get you laughed at. But paradoxically, telling others that they are not very rational, is offensive. So it's best to avoid this topic, which most people do. 2) Asch's conformity test suggests that women are a bit more likely than men to conform. 3) Asians have a culture that discourages standing out of the crowd. 4) Blacks usually live in the most poor countries, and those living in the developed countries were historically oppressed. -- Now that you know these facts, you are told that there is a new group of people who tries to promote rationality and science and technology. As the alien visitor, based on the given data, please tell me, which gender and which race would you bet would be most represented in this group?
If the LW remains forever a group of mostly white males, then yes, that would mean that we have failed. Specifically that we have failed to spread rationality, to increase the sanity waterline. But the fact that LW started with such demographics is completely unsurprising to me. So, is the proportion of other groups increasing on LW? Looking at the surveys for two years, it seems to me that yes. Then the only question is whether it is increasing fast enough? Well, fast enough compared with what? Sure, we could do more about it. Surely, we are not automatically strategic, we have missed some opportunities. Let's try harder. But there is no point in obsessing over the fact that LW started as a predominantly white male group, or that we didn't fix the disparities in the society within a few years.
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'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 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.
Yes, I am specifically talking about LW. With respect to the usual 'net forums I agree with you.
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'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.
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)
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.
Can you provide some links? I haven't followed what you've said previously about this.