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Eugine_Nier comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong Discussion
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Disagree here. Unless your terminal values include things like "everyone believing X regardless of it's truth value" or "making everyone as equal as possible even at the cost of making everyone worse off", the SJ policy proposals don't actually promote the terminal values they claim to support. One could equally well claim that opposition to cryonics is based on terminal values.
Or for that matter religious views by non-theologian theists.
Your model of Feminism/SJ differs from mine. Most of the cluster of my-model-of-SJ-space consists of the terminal value "people should not face barriers to doing what they want to do on account of factors orthogonal to that goal" (which I endorse).
My model of SJ also includes (as a smaller component) the terminal value "no one should believe there are correlations between race/sex/gender and any other attribute or characteristic", which I don't endorse.
What kind of factors count as "orthogonal to that goal"? If my goal is to become a physicist, say, does the fact that I'm not very intelligent count as an "orthogonal factor"? If the answer is no, then this is one form of my claim of them trying to make everyone as equal as possible even at the cost of making everyone worse off.
If the answer is yes, the question arises what they're objection is to some disciplines having demographics that differ from the general population. Given that they tend to take this as ipso facto evidence of racism/sexism/etc. this shows that denial of correlations between race/sex and other attributes is in fact much more central to their belief system then you seem to think.
BTW, the other form of my claim can be seen in the following situation: You need to choose between three candidates A, B and C for a position, you know that A is qualified and that one of B or C is also qualified (possibly slightly more qualified then A) but the other is extremely unqualified (as it happens B is the qualified one but you don't know that). However, for reasons beyond either A or B's control it is very hard to check which of B or C is the qualified one. Does hiring A, even though this is clearly unfair to B, count as "creating a barrier orthogonal to the goal"?
No.
If "they" believe that. If you know of a large number of people who believe this, I am not aware of them.
Hiring isn't creating the barrier; the barrier - the inability to determine which candidate is qualified - is already there.
Did you mean to say "Yes" and get confused by the double negative? (That would be more consistent with the rest of your comment.)
I never said they believed that, at most they alieve that. My claim is that is what you get if you try to steel man their position as based on terminal values rather than factual confusion.
Confused: There doesn't appear to be a double-negative.
If you're not very intelligent, that is relevant to your physicist aspirations. It is not orthogonal.
I do not understand how your description is a steel man. It may be an attempt to extrapolate instrumental values from a certain set of terminal values, but that doesn't help us in our matter-of-fact disagreement about the terminal values of the SJ cluster.
If you want to steel man social justice, substitute the entire works of John Rawls.
Sorry, my mistake.
The part of his work that I have read, consisted of him making a social contract-type argument saying that since the contract must be made before risk preferences, i.e., whether one is risk averse to risk loving are assigned, we should treat everyone as maximally risk averse. There was also some talk about utility that mostly consisted of him misunderstanding the concept. This did not leave me particularly inclined to read the rest.
Could you talk a little more about/give an example of what you have in mind here?