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James_Miller comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong Discussion
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Our caveman/cavewomen brains think that we will only ever interact with a very small number of people, and losing the respect of anyone could materially worsen our chances of survival in a crisis. Consequently, many are terrified of public speaking or even of contributing to Internet debates such as on LessWrong. I suspect that the lower you perceive your status to be in the tribe, the greater the fear you will have of further weakening your position by saying something that others criticize.
Some communities go out of their way to create "safe spaces" that limit criticism to attract participants who would otherwise be too fearful to join discussions. LW's implicit philosophy (which I don't disagree with) is that a cost of participating is that you are fair game for blunt criticism. Alas, such a philosophy probably repels some potential participants who would otherwise make intelligent comments.
I face a similar trade-off in my classes. (I teach at a women's college.) Giving honest/blunt feedback during class discussions or on papers can cause a very negative emotional reaction in some students. Interestingly, students who went to high school in Asia are much better (on average) than Americans at handling criticism because they got so much more of it in high school than their American counterparts did, but my Asian students are (on average) far more fearful of public speaking than Americans, because they did so much less of it.
Determining for how many people that caveperson assumption is valid is difficult, since their lack of support network-building ability also makes them easy to overlook. Such people do exist, however, and I would not be surprised if they appear at higher frequencies among marginalized demographics, especially the sort that would otherwise have interest in communities such as LessWrong.
I doubt that the author of the linked article is in such a situation, however; when a blog post directed at one individual gets linked at a larger community blog and receives \>70 comments discussing it and its message, my prior probability for "someone with an unstable social network and an inability to repair damage to said network" is adjusted way downward.
I don't think laboring under ancestral-style social assumptions necessarily implies a weak or unstable social support network, or problems maintaining social links. Particularly not the latter; if you're working with a set of unremediated instincts telling you that losing rapport with anyone in your ingroup is a disaster, then it follows that you should invest heavily in repairing any damage to it.
It does suggest some failure modes that wouldn't be present in the network of someone more willing to burn bridges, but we're talking differences in style and overall optimization, not being strictly worse at everything social.
But the 'safe space' policy also repels potential participants - so, it's basically a wash. And only one of these policies is epistemically problematic - I'll let you guess which one.
Obviously, when giving public feedback from a position of authority (being the course lecturer), you need to be quite thoughtful about the connotation of any statements on your part, specifically your impact on the students' perceived status. It's less clear that this would be a problem at LW, where few people speak with any overt authority and the karma system is an independent source of merit/status.
Not that I'm much of a fan of "safe space" policies, but surely we should also be interested in how many potential participants each of these approaches repels. And potentially the quality or originality of their comments.
Well, one of the groups is being repelled because certain true statements make them uncomfortable. That is evidence against the quality of their comments.
People are allowed to be repelled by true statements. For example, did you know that many people like to have sex with horses? Both men and women! Horses have very large penises and this is something that both intrigues and excites some people. Did you know that horse semen is available for purchase over the internet? I don't think someone who prefers not hear about horse sex is necessarily or even probably a low quality commenter.
I'll bite your horse penis: I think someone who would get upset or angry at your statement, who would avoid LW because of it, or ask that LW act to stop such statements being posted here, would indeed be a low quality commenter.
I sort of agree with you in that I think the highest quality of commenters won't be super squicked out by either horse sex or talking about cranial capacity differences between races or whether a trolley should run over 3 babies or 2 toddlers. But that's too high a bar! I think plenty of people are disgusted by certain topics and it's worth acknowledging that even smart, mostly well reasoned commenters can be scared away or simply feel unwelcome. Reddit can be a home to various mutually hating subgroups because of its structure, but we use a much less divided system and it's worth considering what topics attract what sorts of commenters.
Plus I don't actually want to talk about horse sex all the time as a filter.
Rationality, Islam, donkey fucking.
Upvoted for making me laugh.
Then I started thinking about how this relates to the six moral foundations, especiallly to the hypothesis that the Purity dimension is only important for conservatives. I mean, if that hypothesis is true, then liberals should insist on discussing this topic as much as possible, to make sure the horses are treated fairly, that people who like to have sex with them are not marginalized in internet debates; and they should insist on discussing technical details to minimize the possible harm resulting from such sex. -- Any objection to this means that the person is not sufficiently liberal, or that the hypothesis of liberals not caring about the Purity dimension is not true.
Even Haidt no longer believes this. See the green movement, for example.
:-D
When you repel one member of an over-represented group and attract a member of a previously-absent group, you keep the same number of participants but increase the amount of information present in the discussion.
You're assuming that the new arrival has more information to offer than the departing one. I suspect the opposite is true. There's probably a sizable negative correlation between one's reluctance to hear uncomfortable ideas and the quality of the information one has to offer.
I think you missed the argument.
If you have a subculture or other group of people whose experience is strongly correlated with one another, and their conduct repels or silences anyone whose experience disagrees with theirs, then their view of the world will be missing a lot of information and will contain systematic biases.
We have words for this in various areas, such as "groupthink", "filter bubble", "circlejerk" ....
I don't think that LW is such a space. On LW people disagree on many issues and we do have controverse discussions.
I'm no neoreactionary. If we have a safe space policy that doesn't allow neoreactionary thought than I'm not exposed to the neoreactionary perspective which is quite different from my own.
So let me get this straight? You're trying to argue that we should avoid saying things that make people feel uncomfortable in order to prevent groupthink?
It doesn't repel "anyone whose experience disagrees", it repels anyone unwilling to hear opposing viewpoints. While having had different experiences may correlate with an unwillingness to hear opposing viewpoints, it's highly dubious that this correlation is strong enough to completely exclude the former category.
Imagine that you are a Foo — a member of some arbitrary demographic group. (You can't stop being a Foo.)
Now, imagine that there exists an online community — let's call it Open Minds — that you're moderately interested in. But when you go there, you find that (alongside the interesting parts), viewpoints such as "Foos are not really people", "it's okay to torture Foos for fun", and "non-Foos who speak up in defense of Foos are traitors" are repeatedly aired there by a minority of community members.
Many others in Open Minds disagree strongly with these anti-Foo views; and consider them nasty, false, and uninformative. But for this disapproval, those folks are often denounced as closed-minded — even by others who do not themselves hold anti-Foo views.
Meanwhile, there are other communities, perhaps just as interesting as Open Minds, where treating Foos as non-persons is considered obviously wrong both as a matter of moral norms and as a matter of self-evident fact. In those communities, a person who expresses the idea "Foos are not really people" thereby excludes him- or herself from reasonable discussion. That person is considered a troll or an asshole, and possibly banned if they don't shape up — or, at least, shut up on that particular topic.
Given that you are a Foo, where would you choose to spend your time? In Open Minds, the community where a small minority repeatedly calls you a non-person, and "open-mindedness" is taken to include considering that possibility? Or in the community where calling you a non-person is considered to be obviously wrong?
(Consider also that you know that you are a person, and that it is not okay with you if someone tortures you for fun. In other words, you know that the anti-Foo views are false. As far as you are concerned, those views aren't a matter of abstract speculation; they really are people using obviously false ideas to justify doing horrible things to you and others like you. Besides, you've heard those ideas before, and you don't learn anything from hearing them again.)
Now, consider further that Foos may have particular experience or information that non-Foos lack — merely because two paths through the same territory do not yield the same map. (It isn't that Foos are better or smarter than non-Foos, and it certainly isn't that everything Foos believe is true ... just that they have had access to different data.)
In effect, Open Minds has chosen to prioritize ensuring the community's access to anti-Foo views over ensuring the community's access to any information that Foos themselves may possess.
How open-minded is that?
I fail to see the relevance of your example.
It's an exaggerated version of how (e.g.) some women or black people might feel on coming to LW and finding (e.g.) people vigorously defending the idea that it's perfectly sensible for an otherwise identical job application to be viewed as evidence of lower competence if it comes from a woman, because women are so much less able than men that all the other information on the application doesn't screen off sex from competence. Or writing in a manner that simply takes it for granted that black people are unintelligent and prone to crime.
I repeat, it's an exaggeration. I'm pretty sure fubarobfusco isn't claiming that there are actual demographic groups that are actually seriously regarded by a lot of LW people as non-persons or fit objects for torture. But I think it's entirely defensible to say that some real demographic groups are likely to experience something similar in kind, although distinctly less in intensity, here, and to be concerned that that will produce an effect similar to the one fubarobfusco describes.
Would you apply the same logic to someone with a low IQ who objects to people thinking that its acceptable to reject an otherwise identical low IQ applicant to favor of a high IQ applicant? Also quite frankly the application you described had very little other useful information that its not at all surprising that it doesn't screen of sex.
Is your argument that if we pretend these differences don't exist they'll go away. Also as far as crime, as a rational black person should be more worried about getting killed by my fellow blacks than by "white racists".
Just out of curiosity, would you be willing to apply the same logic to all the stuff on LW that could make Christians feel uncomfortable?
If someone can't distinguish between a categorical statement ("all demographic X people have trait T") and a statement about statistical tendencies ("the demographic X average for trait T is N standard deviations below that of demographic Y") , I question their ability to contribute to any community that's based around rigorous thinking.
Or maybe you repel ten members of some group, hoping to attract one member of another group... and even then the person decides not to come, because something else bothers them.
Does it seem at all worrying that your explanation hinges on members of the in-group having a lot of positive characteristics that members of the out-group lack? "We're just too honest and unflinching in the face of criticism. If only the out-group were so gifted!"
There's probably more than one thing going on here; among them some evaporative cooling.
The politically correct response to your valid objection would be to claim that the positive characteristics come from discrimination, historical oppression, and unjust privileges.
Shelve the meta-speculation until you've at least checked speculation-prime.
"Our problem is that we're too good" is a really, really, really suspicious thing for a human to say. Have you considered the possibility that it might not be true?
(Also, request to taboo the term "politically correct")
"Our problem is that we're too good" is exactly what any community based around values uncommon in the world at large -- or at least not visibly common and visibly commonly not held -- would say. Epistemic rationality is not visibly common and visibly commonly not held.
Upvoted for having my favorite rationality quote of the last month.
Driving out the voices of the less privileged is potentially problematic when LW claims to be on a mission for the good of all of humanity.
Or to math this up, our mission is unlikely to succeed if we make joining harder and less pleasant for ~54% of the population (51% female, ~2-3% non-hetero male)
So, while agreeing with the principle of favoring open and blunt discourse, I for one intend to make more of a concerted effort to square the circle of being honest and blunt while being more welcoming.
Has joining actually been made harder and less pleasant for ~54% of the population? Has joining been made harder and less pleasant for ~54% of the population as a result of that ~54%'s membership in those two demographic groups?
There is no inherent quality of being female that would make one be viscerally repulsed by the use of the term 'sluttiness'. Apophemi cites that as an example of a term the use of which makes joining harder and less pleasant for... well, 55% of the population, as a direct result of their membership in those demographic groups:
I hope it's obvious that "women and/or queer people" aren't the operative groups here. I certainly haven't noticed any inherent property of my not being straight that makes me necessarily uncomfortable with the use of the word "sluttiness" and less likely to engage with arguments that use it, and I've heard women use the word in the exact same sense the reactionaries Yvain was arguing against in that post used it.
After rectifying the names, it emerges that the operative group is a political identity -- one that may be (and probably is) more likely to contain a higher percentage of those demographics than the population at large, but one that is neither identical to nor inherent in those demographics.
"I speak for the entirety of this demographic" is a really suspicious thing for a human to say -- triply so when it's about something politically charged.
Our mission already requires that we keep out ~95% of the population, i.e., the people who would destroy our ability to have rational discussions.
Why do you think that 95% of the population would destroy our ability to have rational discussions? This seems like a fairly subtle judgement, and it seems difficult to be confident a subtle judgement applies to 95% of the population.
Look at a randomly chosen discussion forum on the internet.
Randomly chosen discussion forums on the internet are not environments for rational discussions. While I remain what I think of as reasonable wherever I go, there are definitely fora where producing a rational discussion is not one of my priorities.
That's evidence that 70% of the population would destroy our ability to have rational discussions, but I don't see 95%. Perhaps I should read more randomly chosen discussion forums to understand your point of view.