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Manfred comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
To maximize open discourse, you have to close down discourse against open discourse.
It's just Marcuse's paradox (which I'm pretty sure I'm coining here): to maximize tolerance, you have to be intolerant toward intolerance. Or in the legal arena: "the Constitution is not a suicide pact."
There are two arguments in that post: "certain elements within the rationality thing signal more than is necessary", the correction of which would aid the goal of generating high-quality open discourse, and "certain conclusions should not even be considered, certain arguments should not be made, no matter their strength, because certain people have memetic immune reactions to them that drive them away from participating at all", the correction of which would mean an end to open discourse. Given that ThrustVectoring (presumably) values open discourse, the response of "I don't even want to discuss anything from that direction" is exactly correct.
That doesn't mean that it can't be discussed, of course; it just means that a community that values open discourse can't discuss it. If apophemi wants there to be a community based around limited rationality -- that is, rationality-minus-discourse-about-certain-things -- well, one can always be started. Secession is always an option, and online, you don't even have to figure out how to build a seastead to secede.
Humorous, off-topic response: But the Declaration of Independence is!
Completely tangentially, what does this mean?
In theory it means that it's better to NOT follow the (established / agreed-to) rules when it clearly leads to major negative consequences.
In practice it usually means "We really want to do this and we're not going to have mere laws stand in our way".
Got it, thanks. It's a nice pithy way of phrasing it.