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Odysseus comments on Towards a theory of nerds... who suffer. - Less Wrong Discussion
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I did skim this post and it caused me to spend some time thinking... but what I can't escape is the way the whole speculation is framed is entirely missing the point. I mean, "Merely by asking the question you show you couldn't possibly understand the answer."
Let me try 3 ways to illustrate my point:
1) I wrote a short story some time ago about an unattractive girl who was lamenting her unpopularity. She was crying to herself, and out loud she wished she could go somewhere where people loved her for her mind, where appearance didn't matter. So out pops her Fairy Godmother who transports her to an island filled with people who want the same thing. They are all immediately loving and accepting of the girl, but she's still miserable. Her fairy godmother reappears and asks why she is so unhappy on the island. The girl says, "Because they're all so ugly!"
2) Even neckbeards (your term) do not find each other attractive.
3) The neckbeard wants his sexual appeal to be based on the beauty and purity of this mind and his thoughts and his character, and not on his physical appearance. But the only people he really cares about viewing himself that way are hot, sexy, young girls.
As a final thought, I have concluded (from experience) that my right hand gives me 99.8% of the pleasure I could ever hope to get from a woman, without all the baggage. The question you should be asking is not why isn't the girl interested in you, the question is why should you be interested in the girl at all?
As an aside, I joined this website within the past 2 days. I am almost to the point of abandoning it. There is a clear environment of intellectual inbreeding here. Groupthink. I long for a place where people are devoted to individualism.
This place isn't that. It has a collectivist feel. Original thoughts are not tolerated here. Rather, conformity is a requirement.
Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong. You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all different!
Man in crowd: I'm not...
Man in crowd: Shhh!
Brian: You've all got to work it out for yourselves.
The Crowd: Yes! We've got to work it out for ourselves!
Brian: Exactly!
The Crowd: Tell us more!
Brian: No! That's the point! Don't let anyone tell you what to do!
Brian is wrong about about a few things. We're not "all different". We have differences, and we have similarities. And it's simply stupid to try to work everything out for yourself. Other people have brains too. Why not leverage them?
Yes, the intellectual influences here tend to be a subset of what is generally available. That's why I came here. Intellectual influences like Jaynes, Kahneman, and Korzybski are in good taste. That's the shared epistemological influences.
There is some inbreeding in the sense of a history and culture that has developed over the years on top of that. Is that surprising? Would it impress you more if being a member of the list had no discernible effect on members?
If you're looking for devotional prayers to individualism, you've come to the wrong place. Though I and others will take our individualist hobby horses out for a jaunt every now and again. There are a pretty high percentage of individualists here, and something like a third of the list self identifies as libertarian. I'm of the Stirnerite egoist variety myself.
But there are plenty of collectivists here. You've got that right. I'd say they're the majority. Ideological utilitarians, no less. But they can have good ideas too, and it's actually interesting to get a peek into their alien minds, to be in a culture where ideological individualists and collectivists actually interact.
If you instead want everyone singing from the individualist hymnal, you've come to the wrong place. There is not a shared moral philosophy, and it would not be individualism if there were. We're hardly an average cross section either. I'd say this is more one of the few meeting grounds of moral ideological extremists.
There are some other forums that complain about a certain "SJW takeover" of LW. I think it is not entirely true, still, reading e.g. Star Slate Codex comments, who are generally from the LW community, sometimes make me go "holy fuck". The issue is, the whole SJW thing has little influence here in Europe and I swear it had little influence on the English-speaking, American-majority Internet before 2009. But I think around that date basically liberal college students decided that their former collective political hobby, namely: hating Bush, is no longer relevant and hating religious conservatives is a too low hanging fruit, and basically decided to hate each other as a new hobby, and thus even people with good liberal/progressive credentials got called stuff like transphobic or not a staunch enough feminist ally or whatnot, and it is a death spiral of hate, posturing and small-team squabbling. Resembing the groupuscules, mini-groups of the French student revolutionaries in 1968.
I don't think this takeover happened entirely, still the fact that Scott Alexander has to fight against the worst, least compassionate, least understanding, and least intellectual honest aspects of SJWism suggests that even the LW community cannot entirely shut out this new social phenomenon, is not entirely waterproof to it.
The "entryism" some right-winger babble about seems to be unfortunately and surprisingly, true. There are SJWs entering "neutral" institutions and generate hatred and faction inside. And I think I do see some "entryism" in LW.
Look at what "entryism" in science fiction in America. When shit like this deserves a Nebula and is nominated for Hugo then yes, SJW "entryism" does lower quality: http://www.apex-magazine.com/if-you-were-a-dinosaur-my-love/
And it is IMHO sad, because I do think causes like feminism or trans-acceptance have very positive aspects to them. However SJWism is not that, it is rather that abusing these causes to generate hatred between generally good people who are generally sympethetic to these causes. And it lowers intellectual quality. And that is what is problematic. Above all, there is one thing Euro social democrats could never understand American liberals: their propensity to guilt-trip themselves and each other. To hate themselves for crimes they did not actually personally commit. Now with SJW stuff I see this behavior on steroids really, and this is where I draw the line. I won't hate myself being a largely masculine-oriented straight guy as long as I know I am not a bigot with women or gays. And I want to help people who suffer from self-hatred problems - although, admittedly, in this article the self-hatred was instilled in them by very masculine, patriarchical bullies, not by SJWs. Still, I am sensitive to self-hatred issues coming from other sources, like, this kind of guilt-tripping.
Entryism isn't new it's been around for at least a century (possibly longer):
Look at what entyism did to non-speculative fiction (or the visual arts) in the western world.
That's your problem right there. What do you mean by "bigot"? Do you even have a coherent definition for that word, since in practice it means whatever the SJW's say it does.
IMHO real bigotry is largely understood as trying to either increase one's status or feel better about one's status by undermining the status of others. A classic example is when people use excuses like "not enabling unhealthy habits" to be a huge prick to fat people online, largely to feel better about oneself comparatively. This is obviously a facade, "haha look at that hippo" is not really about worrying about the health of others but more like "I am better, I may be unemployed and single, but at least thinner". Sometimes it is about real status - using discrimination to undermine competition. I think it is not hard to understand.
For example, my non-bigotry about gays is plain simply not having the slightest interest in them their either way, not spending a second of my time on them. Let them marry a car for all I care or adopt an ox, it is no skin off my back. I am selfish enough to not be hateful - means, largely focusing on what I want, not really being much interested in loving or hating people who don't really have anything I want. And I don't need to crutch up my masculinity by calling some else a sissy. I am fairly certain in it anyway. With women, it is largely trying to evaluate coworkers etc. by their actual individual merits or faults. I don't need generalized heuristics. I don't to wonder about theories whether women in general make good leaders. I can just give a temporary leadership to every individual for two weeks and try them out. And in relationships I don't try some kind of exactly measured equality, I am not ideological, but I am simply trying to pay attention to the desires and views of my partner and not dismissing them thinking it is just woman-talk. That is all really, I consider it common sense, not ideology.
Non-speculative fiction: I am confused, isn't Ludlum, Clancy etc. actually kinda borderline conservative?
Visual arts: another name for bullshit, yeah, but I think they did not get ideologized, they got simply colonized by talentless self-congratulating snobbery of artists who could not draw a fruit bowl accurately.
This is a useless definition. Since status is more-or-less zero sum this means that anyone trying to increase his status is being a bigot. In practice of course, this definition is applied selectively, i.e., you're not a bigot if you're raising your status in an SJW-approved way or a member of an SJW-approved group.
For example, isn't the above sentence technically bigoted by your definition since you're raising your status by lowering the status of people who engage in "fat shaming"?
I meant high-brow fiction, e.g., Finnegan's Wake.
It was ideologically while the takeover was happening, i.e., in the first half of the 20th century. A lot of modern artists justified they're "art" by arguing how they were rebelling against bourgeoisie respectability.
I think the main issue is assuming that outside SJW groups nobody cares about things like bigotry, homophobia or sexism. I think they do - in obviously lower-profile, less incisive, less loud, unfortunately less noticable ways. But more functional and saner ways.
I agree that my definition of this later may not be very good, because ultimately it is not really an ideology outside that, just a sort of a common sense and common decency which is hard to nail down exactly.
One thing is certainly style and manners. I used the fat-shamer group as an example because the basic philosophy does not come accross as very wrong ("don't enable unhealthy habits by uncritically approving them") yet the style is both abrasive and puerile at the same time.
One weird thing I recently realized that 2-3 generations ago people may have had worse ethics, but better manners. For example a lot of people were racists but less obvious ways than today because they were still able to talk with POC in a polite way. They would not let their kids harass POC kids because in their mind being born so was something sort of a disability and a "well bred" kid would not harass e.g. people who were born blind either, right? At least not in 1950 or so.
So, weirdly enough, I think a large part of non-SJW non-bigotry is not even ethics but just resisting the poor manners of these times, just the common old-fashioned idea to not insult and offend people if you can avoid it. Terms like "tact" that somehow went out of fashion.
There is one other aspect I could identify. One, trying to treat people as individuals, not representatives of groups. In this sense, non-SJW non-bigotry is actually centrist, because both extremes seem to not do it, some folks dismiss the views of women in STEM, while SJWs dismiss the views of white straight men in politics. So this centrist attitude is simply giving everybody a chance or two to prove themselves as individuals. I would say, it is working from an experience of plenty - an attitude that things are not so hurried, time is not so expensive as to have to resort to prejudices, essentially heuristics, when individual "tests" can be used.
What do you mean by "just a sort of a common sense and common decency"? You yourself later admit that until extremely recently no one considered these ideas to be "common sense". What you are thinking of as "a common sense and common decency" is nothing more then SJW (and their predecessors') memes that you've acquired by osmosis.
What on earth are you talking about? You appear to have no idea either what the USA was like in the 1950's or what it's like now. The above statement has so little relation to reality I don't even know where to start. Really, you might want to look for sources of news about what's going on in other countries that don't have an absurd level of "left-wing/SJW" bias.
Except the groups people are members of is correlated with their properties as individuals. Thus, someone who treated people based on merit would still wind up treating members of different groups differently.
What evidence convinced you of this? That they oppose "women in STEM" initiatives? That they wind up hiring fewer women then men and when asked to justify this point out sex differences?
The former would seem to be the kind of opposition to "treating people as members of groups" that you seem to condone, the latter is a consequence of the kind hiring people based on merit you also claim to approve of. (Incidentally here is another case where it is useful to have true, as opposed to "non-sexist", beliefs in order to see what's going on.)
How are tests any less heuristics than what you dismiss as "prejudices"? For example, why aren't tests bigoted for treating people as members of the groups "passed" and "failed" rather than individuals?
But a large aspect of it is actually very old. Look at how a gentleman talks to a lady in any old movie. Politely etc. Or in novels from the 19th century. Monte-Cristo, whatever. Concepts like tact, polite and gentle behavior, and taking other people's feelings into account stems from much older times than SJW stuff. Imagine an old novel or movie hero like Monte-Crisot meeting a gay person. Likely he has a very, very negative opinion of it but he still does not go "lol look at the faggot, did you suck many dicks today lol" because that 4chan level behavior is not allowed to an old fashioned gentleman. Most likely he keeps a stiff upper lip, discusses the weather politely and does not say anything directly at all, although later on he may whisper in his friends eye "the Viscount is apparently practicing unspeakably unnatural vices".
I am still fairly "well bred", not on that 19th century level, but I was taught to be polite way before I ever heard about any other left wing or progressive idea than socialism. And I don't understand the confusion here. What are we even talking about? Isn't it obvious that for example Vox Day has the kinds of manners and style any people who were raised to be polite in a conservative family who never subscribed to progressive ideas still find repulsive? I am confused what is even the issue here.
The other way around. I am not from Internet Default Country (I actually hate the defaultism) and probably this is why we may have a misunderstanding of manners. Recently America got overally poor manners, e.g. calling places people eat burgers with their hands, not using utensils, still "restaurants". But I think this was not always so. William F. Buckley Jr. had acceptable gentleman manners to my standards, i.e. my parents could invite him over dinner and he would fit in. Would Buckley be anything but polite to minorities? Would he let his kids go all 4chan on POC kids? Contemplate this please.
That is theoretically acceptable - he is not treating groups a such at all, just individuals. In practice this is not an issue because there are early filter. If blue people have 30% lower IQ than green people, and to graduate from a university takes 110 and your job requirement is 110, every blue and green graduate has an equal chance at you: because of the university pre-filtering.
Excuse me? You have a team of 3 women 2 men. Instead of going "well women don't make good leaders" you can test every member as a temp leader for 2 weeks. How is that not better?
Now you got me thinking. I don't actually condone of the treating people as members of groups, I think if I was I would just join the SJWs :) Individuals it is. However, my biases of evaluating individuals are influenced by prejudice, and prejudice is one of the many things that affects the behavior of other individuals, like, internalizing it and so on. This simply means that you examine some individuals more carefully than others. Again I find it common sense and not ideology.
Our boxing trainer is a refugee from Kosovo, a hugely conservative society with zero SJW influence. Yet he does this instinctively, because it makes sense. Some big muscular 28 years old guy comes for the first training, T oozing out his ears, he quickly gets he is probably feels okay with all this and will not be very bad at it, so he does not need to invest much attention into him, just go through the routine training. Some meek and timid 14 years old girl comes for the first training, he invests a lot of attention, because he needs to figure out she is really clumsy or just needing encouraging, and similar things. She is in an environment that feels hostile for her due to gender roles and all that, she needs more investment to get up to speed. Does this feel like SJW ideology to you? To me it is such a common sense thing...
Those are two very different social registers. 4chan/8chan is the analogue of what people say in say a wild west saloon. (Keep in mind most westerns you saw cleaned up the language to be kid-friendly).
Outside of the chans there is very little overt "bigotry" in America. Heck careers have been ended because someone said something the could be interpreted as "racist/sexist/etc." if you squinted enough.
Except universities aren't actually doing this pre-filtering. Also, what if your job requires 120?
1) Would you mind actually answering my question.
2) Assuming you mean that trying people out for 2 weeks gives you more data then just the gender, I agree. Of course, it also takes 2 weeks per person and you might have problems under some of the less competent test-leaders, not to mention potential for drama.
In particular, he's using all the information available to him, including gender, in determining how to treat the person. This is what I'm advocating. Of course if he leads her to believe she'll ever be as strong as the typical man, that's borderline fraud and I wouldn't approve.
In another thread you mentioned that merely knowing how race and sex correlated with other important characteristics constituted being a bigot. Here you seem to be trying to back-paddle.
I don't think that story got a Nebula - the author won a Nebula for this:
http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/summer_2010/fiction_the_lady_who_plucked_red_flowers_beneath_the_queens_window_by_rache
[EDIT: My mistake, both stories won Nebulas.]
Nevertheless, that the same author would write a story which can be partially summerised as saying "Wouldn't it be awesome to be a T-Rex! You could kill homophobes! I'd laugh so hard!" is pretty disturbing.
But its not as disturbing as the people who decided that debating using logic is racist, and first rap should be allowed in formal debates, and then the US national debate championship was won by people screaming incoherently.
This is how civilisation dies.
Really?
:-)
As to LW, all self-selected groups show some signs of groupthink, but I think you're mistaken that "conformity is a requirement". I would recommend not paying much attention to your karma and up/down votes.
To be fair, I have some fears of losing the privilege to submit posts to Discussion. Currently at 39 and I think the threshold is 4? I could fuck it up with one unpopular post. Other than that, I would not care.
I guess the implied strategy is: post comments first, articles later. Posting comments will usually bring you positive karma quickly. (Note that this strategy works slowly when you mostly comment on old articles.) Other possible strategy is: post an uncontroversially good article.
For posting controversial articles you should get some karma capital first. Don't take this personally.
Gaining karma is not difficult. If you ever feel the need for more karma, recall that you are smarter than an average bear and should be able to figure out simple karma-acquisition strategies.
Yes, but I need to be smarter than the average LW user for that and that sounds hard. I don't think Reddit-style "look at that cute puppy" would work.
No, you don't -- it's neither a zero-sum game, nor competition for a limited resource. The average LW user has a lot of positive karma.
Now you have me wondering what a zero-sum game for karma would look like on LessWrong.
(Or on Reddit, for that matter.)
My guess goes to "pretty ugly".
Could be interesting, though. Maybe if we made it clear that the karma didn't actually stand for anything...
No, who am I kidding. We're humans; Pavlovian conditioning is a thing. In our society, numbers going up are in and of themselves a reward. It'd probably get pretty tribal, I'd imagine; LW's claims of rationality notwithstanding, we seem to devolve into heated arguments quite frequently.
(And speaking of of LW's "rationality": I registered an account here last November, but I've been a lurker long before that, and it seems like the signal-to-noise ratio of LW has dropped significantly since the "good old days". Any ideas on why? Is it because of people like Eliezer and Scott having mostly deserted LW? Or is it the influx of new users causing an overall decrease in average quality, because the gems are getting buried in heaps of dung, so to speak? Do we need more people going around downvoting everything, thomblake-style?)
Are you sure it was what you thought it was in the good old days rather than the dazzle of the new (or at least newly phrased)?
To keep positive karma? Absolutely not. Upvotes are more frequent here than downvotes.
Articles are judged more harshly than comments, because there is the "does this deserve to be a separate article, instead of a comment in Open Thread?" factor. And karma gains/loses from an article are greater than from a comment.
Let me put it this way:
You wrote an article with strong questionable claims,
...that you admit are just random stuff which would work only through chance,
...and you also admit it is poorly written and edited,
...touching a politicized topic, which is kind of a taboo here,
...and your total karma is still positive, despite the losses from this article.
To me it seems that getting negative karma requires a lot of work. (Okay, we have a successful example in this very thread, but that is a rare situation.)
Wait a bit please - is nerdiness politicized now? Or is rather, you mention anything related to social gender (terms like "masculine") and it is automatically politicized? This really raises the question to what extent you want the personal become political. I rather would not want this.
There was a man who said "anything that affects a lot of people is political". But that man was Janos Kadar, a bolshevik dictator...
How about "Look at that cute quote of Paul Graham"? (Terry Pratchett might also be a good bet.)
I really hope there is not much over overlap with Hacker News... I find Paul Graham's essays, at least outside his domain (software engineering,investing, "startups") tedious and boring, with very little insight. Read this and count how many times you feel like you are being subjected to vacuous windbaggery: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
I mean, if LW needs heroes outside LW I would recommend Steven Dutch for starters: http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pscindx.htm
Zero.
Also given your hangups about believing anything that could be perceived as "racist" you would do well to study that article more carefully.
Nice suggestion, that I not pay so much attention to my karma and up/down votes. However there is a simple flaw: I have to care if I want the freedom to initiate an article, don't I?
This recent exchange sent my karma from +10 to -9. What am I supposed to learn from this? That I am expected to conform to this community's agenda, otherwise I'll be shunned.
OK, this is my last post. I accept that I have been shunned from this community. And I am now leaving. And I am very, very pleased with myself that it only took me 3 days of occasional attention to determine what a complete waste of time it would be to invest time here.
Have fun, all!
That trolling is not a particularly rewarding activity.