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Kawoomba comments on Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't know which comment you're responding to; I'm not sure it was mine. If it was, please explain how you could possibly get the impression that "sexual harassment doesn't matter" from my comment, or where I was "conflating" anything.
If you got caught stealing, and in return your students got barred from using your library, and some of those students protested their lack of access, would a reasonable line of debate be "are you arguing that stealing doesn't matter"? Obviously not.
It is not that the punishment doesn't fit the crime in that it is "merely" excessive, it is that it is incongruent in kind. Deleting learning material because of sexual online messages (I'm sorry, sexual harassment, or cyber abuse, or whichever label sounds most dramatic) is simply a non sequitur, it doesn't accomplish anything other than placate the mob, at great cost.
These matters can be dealt with internally and aren't worth destroying someone's intellectual heritage over, nor punishing online learners who lose a valuable and non-harassing resource: videos of his lectures. The guy through his teaching of generations has done more for the common good than you and I ever will. To have that legacy publicly marred -- and access to his recorded lectures revoked -- because of inappropriate chat messages is simply bonkers.
And yes, the above does imply that I consider grouping his probable transgressions with sexual harassment and then referring to the whole affair by that umbrella term to be a classic case of the noncentral fallacy, which rightly is called The Worst Argument In The World. No, that does not mean that, say, unsolicited online sexual messages "don't matter". Nor was such an extreme and nonsensical position contained in the grandparent comment.
If he murdered his student still I would protest his lectures being taken offline. In that case, he should go to jail. There is no need to punish aspiring physics students in either case.
The logical analogue of supporting MIT's actions would be supporting that libraries be purged of any books authored by someone convicted of a serious crime. Condemning such a course of action does not imply condoning any such crime.
You wrote "Blood and games, keeps us busy from dealing with the issues that matter." Do you want to clarify what you meant there then?
Since we're in agreement that MIT overreacted, I fail to see the relevance of the vast majority of your comment.
Stealing is bad. We should not spend our collective attention on discussing some shmoe (nor a professor) stealing. Unrequited sexual chat messages are bad. We should not spend our collective attention on discussing some shmoe (nor a professor) sending unwanted sexual chat messages. (If you think this was sufficiently bad to warrant public attention of any kind, never ever visit Twitch.tv's chat of any female streamer. Oh Lordie (or oh Kappa, for the in-group).)
The terminal problems all around us which desperately require collective attention are in such a state of being neglected (be they oeconomical, environmental, political, societal, technological or in intersections thereof) and they cannot be solved by experts without mass support (because of the vestiges of democracy) that it is comical (or, since we're in the same boat, tragicomical) to collectively talk about someone's sexual chat messages instead ("instead" because attention is a painfully finite resource). It really is.
It's like seeing someone bleed out in front of your eyes and focussing on a pimple on his/her forehead. I'm not saying this particular outbreak of hysteria (and all the other nonsense we spend our hysteria on) is all some sinister plot/smokescreen from the powers-that-be to keep (part of) the bottom 99% busy. More like a happy coincidence, for them.
I'm not sure if the problem is connotation v. denotation here or possibly a motte/bailey fallacy, but I'm fairly confident that something like that is happening, or some massive failure of communication.
You wrote:
At minimum, the connotation of these phrases is a deliberate attempt to distract from the "serious" issues, which is an extremely different claim than the one you are apparently making above that this simply should be an extremely low priority issue. I'm also confused if you think this should be such a low priority why you persist in discussing it.
I'm also highly uncovninced that this should be such a low priority issue. Sexual harrassment and associated problems contribute to fewer women in the STEM fields, which means in general fewer people going in to STEM fields than would be otherwise. All of the issues you describe as serious problems are issues where solutions, if they arise or exist, will arise out of technology and research.
I'm deeply confused by this. Who are these powers-that-be and how is this in any way shape or form to their advantage? You mention the 99%, a specific idea that is in most contexts refers to a 1% income v. 99%. I'm not sure how that would be relevant to many of the serious issues that currently are issues (such as the enviromental ones you note) or others you didn't note such as existential risk. So be more explicit, who do you think benefits from this "happy coincidence" and what specific issues do you think it is distracting from that should be a higher priority?
Evidence? Because, the typical argument I've seen for this claim tends to boil down to "If you even have to ask you're an evil misogynistic sexist".
I'm not aware of any studies specifically. The basic argument isn't that complicated though: A) there are women who attribute their lack of involvement in the STEM fields to extremely bad experiences at an early age and B) there's an obvious way this would be causally related. Note also that some other fields such as medicine have taken more active steps to deal with sexual harrassment issues and they do have more women going into those fields.
There are several problems with that theory.
1) A lot of people who deice not to go into STEM had bad experiences. (In fact bad experience may very well mean wasn't good at it).
2) The kind of things they wind up pointing to as "sexual harassment", e.g., wearing a bad 50's sci-fi shirt with 'ray-gun-babes' or happening to overhear a not-quite g-rated conversation between two men, don't seem like the kind of things people should be too bothered about.
3) Women have less variance on IQ scores then men and thus we would expect fewer of them to show up in at high levels in IQ-intensive fields.
(Feminists dispute the last point, but they're arguments tend to boil down to "you're sexist for even suggesting this").
I'm not sure what you mean by 1. Can you clarify?
As for 2, sure there's a range of behaviors and it is worth discussing that which ones do or don't matter. At the same time, the mild behavior is the one set of behavior that we actually do have studies showing it has an impact. In particular, women who have been stared at by men then perform more poorly on math tests(PDF).
Yes, up to a point. No one here is asserting that this is the only cause or the primary cause of differences in gender ratious. That's not the same thing as asserting that it isn't a cause. And IQ variance is clearly insufficient: different disciplines requiring similar needs have radically different gender ratios. And there's real evidence that in at least some cases, cultural issues are having much more of an impact than IQ- look at how the percentage of women in IT and computer related fields was steadily going up and then started dropping when personal computers appeared. See discussion here.
This is now the second time you've made a comment like this- bringing up an argument that hasn't been made so you can knock it down. That might be rhetorically fun but it isn't helpful. Bad arguments are made for pretty much any position possible. The fact that such arguments are being made somewhere isn't relevant for fairly obvious reasons.
That's a paywall, so I assume you have not read it. Here's a jailbroken copy: "When What You See Is What You Get: The Consequences of the Objectifying Gaze for Women and Men ", Gervais et al 2011 (Libgen; PDF.yt; Dropbox).
This paper inherits the usual defects of the 'stereotype threat' literature. It takes place in no-stakes situations, while stereotype threats have failed to generalize to any situations that actually matter, and blinding is questionable (they bring the subjects in, then "They also learned that they may be asked to report their feelings about themselves and others and to complete word problems", and do math problems? Gee, I'm sure none of these undergrads recruited from psychology classes figured out what the real experiment was!) The results are also a little bizarre on their face: "...the objectifying gaze also increased women’s, but not men’s, motivation to engage in subsequent interactions with their partner...the objectifying gaze did not influence body surveillance, body shame, or body dissatisfaction for women or men". Huh?
And finally, this is social psychology.
That does not follow. If different disciplines have non-identical needs, then depending on the exact differences in distribution shape, the correlation between IQ, and the cutoff for success (see for example the table of r vs cutoff in "What does it mean to have a low R-squared ? A warning about misleading interpretation") - not to mention the other variables which also vary between gender (Conscientiousness; degree of winner-take-all dynamics; expected work hours) - may well be sufficient to explain it. You'll need to do more work than that.
See discussion here.
Sure. It is extremely difficult to test these situations in high-stakes situations for obvious reasons.
This is an intrinsic problem in almost all psychology studies. Is there anything specific here that's worse than in other cases?
I don't see what your point is. What do you find is bizaare about this and how do you think that undermines the study?
That's a reason to be skeptical of the results, not a reason to a priori throw them out.
You are correct. The word clearly is doing too much work in my comment. At minimum though, the fact that other similar disciplines don't have that situation even though they historically did is evidence that IQ variance is not all that is going on here. And that's especially the case when many of those disciplines are ones like medicine that have taken many active steps to try to encourage women to be interested in them.
Now seen. Having read that discussion, I agree with Kaj there. Do you have any additional point beyond which you said to Kaj there?
On the other hand, the fact that such arguments are used to intimidate anyone who dares question a certain position is relevant (possibly successfully remember what happened to Summers). In particular it affects what arguments we expect to have been exposed to.
Furthermore in Lewin's case we have no idea what he actually did, thus the only evidence we have is that a committee at MIT decided what he did was bad. Thus to evaluation how much we should trust their conclusion it is necessary to look at the typical level of argument.
It isn't at all relevant. To use a different example (coming from the other side of the poltiical spectrum)- one argument made against releasing the recent torture report was that anyone wanting it released was "anti-American" which is essentially the same sort of thing. The presence of such arguments is in no way relevant to any actual attempt to have a discussion about whether releasing the report was the right thing. No matter what position you discuss someone will be using bad arguments to intimidate people into silence. Rise above it.
The typical level of argument isn't that when it comes to sexual harassment though. The typical level is a massive mix with some universities overreacting, and other's underreacting. For every example of a university overreacting there's an example of it underreacting. For example here.
But this also isn't relevant for another reason: this entire subthread isnt even discussing the specifics of the Lewin case but a more general question of whehether such issues matter and are worth discussing. It is a red herring to go back to the original situation. But if you really do care about that situation, it might be worth looking at what Scott Aaronson has said on it, I'm curious if this adjusts your estimate at all that this is a minor situation being overblown?
Yes, we evidently disagree on that. Let's identify that as "area of contention #1", before we dive into the specifics.
I do disagree with your chain of reasoning of "(sexual harrassment) leads to (fewer women in STEM fields) leads to (fewer/worse technological solutions to the 'all the issues I described')" playing a role commensurate with the hubbub we spend on the topic.
There are many aspects to each of the causal links (for example: is the sexual harassment situation in STEM fields particularly bad, as opposed to other university courses, or as opposed to non-university occupational choices?), and I doubt a few paragraphs will suffice to cause either of us to update. I don't mind delving into #1 by any means, but let's divide and conquer, since #1 could keep a serious discussion going for months.
If you saw the public discourse and the attention of the public raptly focussed on the welfare of ponies, to the exclusion or at least neglect of all other pressing problems, you'd discuss such a misallocation of resources as well, even if you didn't care about ponies one bit. "This is not what we should spend our attention on" would probably be your message, or what other reaction to a hypothetical pony craziness would you implement?
This is just an edge case to illustrate the principle; concerning sexual harassment, which is a serious issue overall (though less so when we're talking about chat messages), the message would be "This isn't what we should spend such a huge amount of our attention on" (versus "no attention at all on").
Everyone who profits from the status quo. Which is disproportionally the global elites, those who neither suffer from droughts, nor from a lack of healthcare, nor from transmittable diseases (comparatively), nor from job insecurity, nor from ... you get the picture. Those who bought and paid for government initiatives (or the lack thereof) via myriad lobby groups. This isn't some conspiracy theory; there are many different groups with many different aims. But they have plenty of game theoretic reasons not to see the boat rocked. So all the better if the plebs keeps itself busy with lynching professors over lewd online messages.
Cui bono, you ask? Again, everyone who profits from the status quo. Everyone who'd rather not see the electorate be galvanized by issues such as Citizens United (lobby groups and the industry behind them), effective Wall Street oversight (banks), Carbon Taxes (energy giants), single payer healthcare (health care industry), gerrymandering (basically most of the elected members of The House) etc. If you are the king, you (general you) wouldn't want to roll the dice either, since you'd have nowhere to go but down, relative to the rest of society.
Not all comparisons translate well from a small scope to the big leagues, but this one does: just as your attention is a finite resource, so is society's as a whole. When your whole home is a mess, you can't clean up all the rooms at the same time. Though, of course, some amount of parallelisation is possible, you can't do all at once. For example, Obama political capital in his first term was mostly spent on the ACA (and that kind of worked against all odds). So it goes for the sexual harrassment hysteria. Which doesn't mean it's not an issue. It's just not first in line, not by a long shot (goes back to our disagreement about #1).
Then again, if humanity doesn't survive the various Malthusian (and related) disasters coming our way, there'd be no more lewd text messages, so we got that going for us, which is nice.
As it happens half the issues you raise there are also distractions, but best. A number of them are also ways for the elite to con the populace into giving them more power. Keep in mind that just because you've seen through one smoke screen doesn't mean there aren't others.
To take the example of Citizens United, the question there is whether a group of average individual citizens can pool their resources to create lobbying groups that have a chance to compete with individual wealthy and/or well-connected citizens.
Sure. I'm curious, by the way, if you saw my reply to Alienist which discussed some of the basic evidence for this being an issue.
Sure, but it doesn't need to be substantially worse as a whole to have a disparate impact. Sexual harassment can combine with other problems (e.g. a pre-existing gender imbalance as well as larger cultural issues).
Ignore it completely, just as you and I are ignoring what the vast majority of people really do seem to care about- e.g. celebrities. In general, if there really is a problem and some humans are putting resources into handling that problem, it isn't likely to be productive to spend time telling them that they should go do something else. It also isn't helpful to then use language that essentially compares caring about a cause to being somehow complcit in Roman style bread-and-circuses keeping the people down.
How does being well-off and not suffering from any of those problems mean that one somehow benefits from the status quo? If global warming becomes a serious enough problem, it is inconvenient to everyone. If a paperclip maximizer turns all into paperclips everyone has the same problems. And at the same time, if more people are in the STEM fields or more people who can succeed at it, we all benefit.
The problem with that is that the over-focus isn't harmless, it's already having negative effects, e.g., Lewin's videos being taken down. Also this is not the kind of thing that's smart to ignore for them same reason that someone living in Salem Village in 1692 probably should not ignore the increasingly popular silly belief that a lot of their problems are caused by witches.
Sure. For any given problem, some degree of focus, whether it is an overfocus or not is going to have some negative side-effects. That's essentially just the non-onesided nature of policy issues. So the question becomes where do you balance it? And moreover, how do you decide that it really has gone over too far in one direction or aother?
Can you expand on this logic?
Eh, I'm not gonna call "women being stared at" and such sexual harassment, which is what we are talking about. As I've mentioned, to discuss sexual harassment in general when our starkest disagreement lies in the sexual chat messages and the like is a Worst Argument In The World situation in any case.
If you have a phenomenon with multiple causes I wouldn't characterize a minor causal node as having a "disparate impact" just because it contributes to a much larger phenomenon.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. If you saw MIRI going off on a dead-end tangent, and you are invested in its fate, "ignore it completely" is a bad choice. Same dynamic.
If the resources were allocated appropriate to the problems, where would the money come from? For carbon licenses and other Pigovian taxes? Yea, from the powers-that-be.
Solving it inconveniences ExxonMobil more, for the next few hundred quarterly reports.
Certainly. The first step for that should be creating better role models, getting rid of the ridiculous "I'm a fragile flower waiting for good things to happen to me, since I deserve everything"-entitlement attitude people are developing, and creating more of a meritocracy (e.g. not turning people away because they have the wrong gender / wrong nationality etc.). Not becoming hysteric over sexual chat messages, when there are already rules in place against that sort of thing (and yes, the professor should be reprimanded and, if repeated, suspended, but goddamn that should not be national news).
The point here should be clear: of course it isn't sexual harassment. Yet the data shows that even that limited form of negative interaction can have a substantial impact on performance. A fortiori you'd expect the same thing for more serious situations.
Huh? First of all, it is highly likely that what happened with Lewin went well beyond any sort of mildly sexual chat messages. Second, the primary argument isn't even about that but the claim that in general, sexual harassment shouldn't be a high priority.
Missing the point. It may not be a minor causal node. The ability to identify one cause among many isn't a reason to think that it is a minor node. I can identify hundreds of ways humans die: it doesn't make cancer a minor node just because it is one among them. Moreover, in this sort of context different nodes can interact to have an impact substantially larger than any single one would.
Sure, but that's a specific organization with a specific set of goals. If you think this sort of thing is important then why don't you go around telling everyone who talks about celebrities or Hollywood movies or whatnot how they are wasting their time? Is wasting time your true objection?
Ok. So it is a problem for almost everyone, and anyone at ExxonMobile who cares about their children. There's still no large set of "Powers that be" that all these problems apply to. Yes, there are small, specific groups that have interests which are counter to the interests of the general population for specific issues. But none of those will see eye-to-eye on the same issues.
This seems more like a series of boo lights and labels for people you don't like then a substantial point. I am however curious if you've been subject to unwanted sexual attention from people in a position of power. Have you? How frequently? How did you react? How did it make you feel? And what makes you so confident that in the actual situation in question that this was so mild that anyone who reatced can be labeled as engaging in hysterics while being a fragile flower?
This seems inconsistent with your earlier comments. Is your primary problem simply that it happened to become a news story? That seems strange given that everyone else here (and I thought you) saw the primary reason this was on the news as the same as the primary reason that this was an overreaction; that taking down the videos was unnecessary.
Beware the man of one study who uses that study for conclusions concerning different phenomena. That's not how evidence works, the correct Bayesian update "a fortiori" on different behavior would be negligible. How does that even work, "if they are sexually messaged they do worse on math tests"?
Hello there "mildly", I didn't see you in my original quote. That must be because you came out of thin-air. It can be explicit enough to fit right into some Gangsta rap song, it's still a chat message which shouldn't be discussed in the same breath as e.g. violent sexual assaults.
I reject logic along the lines of "A belongs to B, C belongs to B. We should deal with A because C is really serious, and we'll transfer that association with seriousness to A via B". If you want to talk about men staring at women, and what policies and punishments we should have for that, we can do that. Or for when an authority figure writes sexual messages to a college student. These are neither in kind nor in degree the same thing as many other forms of assault, sexual or otherwise.
You probably agree, so let's not strawman "sexual harassment shouldn't be a high priority" out of "sexual chat messages shouldn't be a high priority". Don't slippery-slope your way from "men staring at women" to sexual harassment as a whole (including e.g. violent rape), these are different problems requiring different solutions and most importantly different amounts of societal attention and anxiety.
What you said was "Sure, but it doesn't need to be substantially worse as a whole to have a disparate impact. Sexual harassment can combine with other problems (e.g. a pre-existing gender imbalance as well as larger cultural issues)" which I understood as "even if the difference was minor, combined with other factors the overall impact can be large". If you only intended to say "if it is a significant causal link on its own, it is a significant causal link on its own", that would merely be a tautology and a reminder that we disagree on #1.
Those topics don't replace other policy initiatives, elections aren't decided on who liked which movie best. There is an ever dwindling budget of attention for "this is unjust and must be changed" issues, and it's that budget which is spent on the 'rampant sexual harassment' chimera. I feel similarly when the news cycle about a climate conference rapidly shifts to some celebrity wedding, or when a candidate's "celebrity endorsements" outweigh his/her fiscal policies. That is my main objection, though I certainly don't enjoy the divisive toxic climate that's created as a side effect of the prominence of the topic.
They don't have to. It is convenient for all elites who have a disproportionate share of (capital/influence/market share in their sector/etc.) to not see that redistributed. Since such massive undertakings for the public good are the domain of politics, one would predict that elites take great care to capture the political parties. And that's precisely what we observe. Yes, many of them have different aims (Google versus the MPAA, etc.), but all of them profit from the public spotlight being on something more inconsequential to their interests, not their privileged position specifically.
Is this where my opinion is only valid if I have the right gender and am a rape survivor or something? Because you probably haven't been exterminated by an unfriendly AI to date, yet you presumably care about that risk.
Ahem, would you read the grandparent comment again? These were general recommendations on how to increase STEM enrollment. The "The first step (to get people in the STEM fields)" should have clued you in on that. It was not meant to refer to someone "in the actual situation", least of all the student in question.
Is this so you can go off saying "that guy called people who were harassed or who engaged with the situation 'fragile flowers'", because in that case this discussion would be worthless?
It would be preposterous to put someone who received online harassment from an old MIT professor, probably in a different state, in the same category as e.g. victims of traumatic physical rape and then discuss the topic 'as a whole'. Again, Worst Argument In The World if there ever was one. Have you ever seen TwitchChat? So many future PTSD victims!
My problem is that the topic dominates public discourse to an unwarranted degree. As Time Magazine and RAINN succinctly put it: "It's time to end rape culture hysteria", see also Myth 4 in this Time article. The degree to which public perception is overemphasizing the topic is actively harmful, including to prospective female STEM students. Men at playgrounds being reported to the police for being potential pedophiles is a new phenomenon, arising out of the general hysteria about the "sexual harassment/violence"-boogeyman.
MIT taking down the videos was a reaction to get ahead of the inevitable media attention and head off any potential reputational shitstorm. In absence of such societal hysteria, the videos would not have been taken down. This is nothing but a cover-your-ass kneejerk reaction, which isn't even unreasonable given that MIT is reacting to the toxic public discourse on the topic, which is the root problem for the video removal.
That's relevant when you have other studies that show something in the other direction and one is picking one study exactly. Do you have any similar studies to mention? Since you've mentioned exactly zero studies about behavior or any links to any stats in this conversation, my guess no.
Really? This seems pretty clear. If weak examples of A cause some amount of X, then one should expect that more extreme amounts of A cause more of X, and in this case we have an easy causal model that supports that.
You're right. Poor rephrasing on my part.
But no one here is claiming they are the same as "violent sexual assaults". Did you see anywhere I or anyone else in this subthread tried to make that claim?
That's not what I said. Please reread what I said without trying to make it the stupidest argument you can.
I'm confused. Do you see the celebrities and movies as in the same category or not? And if you don't why don't you spend time telling people to stop focusing on them?
In general, politically involved topics lead to toxic climate. There's nothing special about the topic in question.
And in your view they coordinate that how? Google and Exxon have wildly different goals as do the MPAA and Google and any other two major powers you can name.
No. A thousands times no. As should pretty obvious since I made zero comment about your gender. But here's the thing: it is really easy to label people as "fragile flowers" or the like when they've had bad experiences you have not.
What this reminds me of is an old English teacher I knew in highschool who used to complain that it was no longer acceptable for students who had a disagreement to just leave the class-room and settle things "out doors"- he thought that this was making a weak generation of students. I believe he actually used the word "sissies" and said that the solution was for nerdy students to "man-up". But we've decided that that's not acceptable, and I suspect that you agree there. And we've all benefited. Let me suggest that maybe you should ask yourself if your comments about sexual harassment fall into the same category.
So who are you talking about? Be specific. Are you claiming that the solution is to make students more willing to put up with sexual harassment and act less like "fragile flowers"? Because it certainly sounds like that, and having reread your statement it still sounds like that.
The pedophile hysteria is a distinct problem which is not in general related to issues of sexual harassment. You won't even see the same people talking about it in general.