= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Lumifer comments on The horrifying importance of domain knowledge - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (236)
I don't know about that. You don't interpret common statements along the lines of "Only you have the right to decide your gender identity" or, in the negative form, "No one can tell you which gender you are" this way?
The other direction, which I assume would have been represented by "God will burn you in hell forever, your freaks!" and/or "You need to be fixed and re-educated, this is for your own benefit" is strangely absent on LW :-) I doubt even VoiceOfRa would express the desire to go back to the ways of dealing with "sexual deviants" popular in the early and mid XX century.
More importantly, in my social circles (both meatspace and online) the left is the aggressor and tends to take the "If you're not with us you're against us. KILL!!!!" approach. If I were stuck in a small town in America's Bible Belt, for example, I would expect my emphasis to be different.
That's a separate question that touches on a whole bunch of other issues. It's related to the question of what the proper way of dealing with the guy who insists he's Jesus is.
No, I don't interpret "only you have the right..." etc. that way. I would guess that people saying it usually mean something like this: your gender is whatever it is, it's reasonably stable over time, and it's not something other people can know by looking at you or doing medical tests; so people should beyond what you say. But if you change your professed gender every five minutes no one is going to believe you are sincere and take you seriously.
Well, he seems to me to be quite far in "the other direction".
Here on LW, it seems to me the nearest thing to aggression on this topic has been VoR ranting about delusions, hallucinations, "trannies", etc., etc. There's some very aggressive "social justice" out there, for sure, but it's pretty much completely unrepresented on LW, whereas neoreaction is alive and well here even though there aren't very many neoreactionaries.
[EDITED to fix the typo mentioned two comments downthread.]
Rants are not aggression but free speech :-) Confusing the two is a common mistake/tactic :-P
I think that used to be true, but is no longer true. As far as I can see, VoiceOfRa is the lone neoreactionary actively posting.
He isn't. Neoreactionaries are normal people.
Ouch! No need to be mean :-P
So is "God will burn you in hell for ever". So is "You are a bigot and I hope no one buys anything from your bakery". So is "If you're not with us you're against us". Or (I think more accurately) all of these are both aggression and free speech.
If mere ranting doesn't count as aggression, what is it that "the left" has been doing in your social circles lately? Issuing death threats?
Maybe no one else here explicitly identifies as nrx. (For that matter, I don't know whether VoR actually does.) But when topics come up of the sort where neoreactionaries and social-justice enthusiasts tend to disagree dramatically, I see none of the characteristic tropes of the SJ movement (anything a member of an Oppressed Group says about their situation must be accepted unquestioningly; anything that talks about "men" and "women" is perpetuating the gender binary and therefore bad; mumble mumble patriarchy burble; etc.) and plenty of those of neoreaction (take for granted that black people are less intelligent than white people and women less intelligent than men; treat homosexuality, transgender, etc., as instances of deviance that we should be working against, etc.). Comments that (explicitly) even contemplate the possibility that the social conservatives might be wrong on this stuff get lots of disagreement and usually (on balance) negative karma. Comments that agree with the nrx position on this stuff get less disagreement and usually (on balance) positive karma.
Maybe it's mostly plain ol' social conservatism, with only a tiny fraction of nrx. But whatever it is, there's more of it than there is of the "social justice" that lies at the other end of one political spectrum. I certainly don't see any possible way that "the left is the aggressor" here on LW; am I missing something?
(Of course "above and well" was a typo -- I was posting from a mobile device and not paying enough attention to its autocompletion. I'll fix it.)
Your arguments are getting... sloppy. Keep in mind that we are taking a stroll through a mindkill minefield, so a modicum of care is advised :-) Look:
You countered the statement that "rants are not aggression but free speech" by pointing out that the Venn intersection of aggression and free speech is not null. That is true, but not a counterargument.
You said that "neoreaction is alive and well here" and when I pointed out that no, it is not, you countered by saying that SJWs do not thrive on LW. Again, true, but not a counterargument.
You put in the same list things like "take for granted that black people are less intelligent than white people and women less intelligent than men". One of these two is a very well-supported position with lots of research behind it, a position that a great many people tried to knock down for decades, and yet they did not succeed. The other position I never heard anyone express on LW (are you sure you not confusing means and variances, by any chance?).
So. Back to the topic. I have a very low opinion of the somewhat fashionable approach that the exposition of views you don't agree with constitutes aggression (or a "microaggression"). Rants are rarely aggression, but ad hominem attacks often are. It's a good thing that LW has strict community norms about ad hominem.
Note, by the way, that I did not say that the left is aggressive on LW -- I consider LW to be reasonably balanced and it is not really a political battleground anyway. I disagree that LW has a "conservative" tilt, I think it has an "against the stupid" tilt and if you think this makes LW more conservative, well... X-)
Of course, the whole discussion of LW being less or more something critically depends on the coordinate system in which you are looking at the issue.
I do agree. I am not sure I agree about which of us is being sloppier :-).
I think you misunderstood my point, but maybe what happened is that I misunderstood yours and so my comments weren't such as to make sense to you. So let me be slower and more explicit and see if that helps.
Of course rants are (in the relevant sense) speech, and if we value free speech then we should want not to forbid rants. However, that doesn't stop them being aggression too; you offered no grounds other than rants' being speech for thinking they shouldn't be classified as aggression, and my best guess -- perhaps wrong? -- was that you were suggesting that if they are free speech then they can't also be aggression. Hence the counterexamples.
Perhaps in fact you hold that something else stops rants from being aggression. If so, what and how? (It seems clear to me that some of the comments VoiceOfRa has made are aggression, but maybe we have different criteria for aggression or something.)
Again, I think you misunderstood my point. I think the fault is mine; I wasn't as clear and explicit as I could have been. So, again, let me try again more slowly and clearly and see if that helps.
First of all, the context is relevant. I'd taken your statement that "the left is the aggressor" (for what I think were good reasons but apparently wrongly given your other comments since) to be describing LW as well as your other social circles. So it went like this: "The left is the aggressor." "For sure there's aggressive leftism out there, but here on LW there's basically none of that but there is aggressive rightism." "Nah, there are hardly any neoreactionaries on LW these days." To which I replied by comparing how near LW gets to SJ and NRx and what the reactions tend to be.
So (1) I wasn't only saying that SJWs don't thrive on LW, I was comparing SJ and NRx; and (2) that wasn't meant to be a response to your "hardly any neoreactionaries any more" statement in isolation, but in the context of what I thought was a discussion of whether "the left is the aggressor" on LW.
(Which, again, may in fact not have been the discussion you thought we were having, but I hope that on reflection it's obvious how I came to take it that way.)
Elsewhere in this thread I posted a link to one recent discussion in which the topic came up. Someone else made much the same mean-versus-variance comment, but the discussion in question was about a specific role that isn't very tail-y and for which I'm pretty sure a difference in variance alone clearly couldn't have the required effect.
Is anyone here saying or implying that? I certainly don't intend anything of the kind, and I gravely doubt that anyone seriously thinks what you say they do. I think some people do think that (1) the exposition of the opinion that such-and-such a group's members are inferior, evil, crazy, etc., constitutes aggression, and (2) exposition of such opinions using needlessly pejorative terms constitutes aggression. Of these, I'm ambivalent about #1 and agree with #2.
So, e.g., when VoiceOfRa characterizes transgender people as suffering "delusions or hallucinations", that's certainly #1 and probably #2. It seems pretty aggressive to me. When he suggests that it's unreasonable to treat those "delusions or hallucinations" any more generously than those of someone who thinks he's simultaneously Jesus and John Lennon, that seems pretty aggressive to me. When he calls them "trannies" (er, actually "trannys" but never mind) that's certainly #2 rather than #1 and it's hard to see how it's not being deliberately rude; again, in my book that's aggression. Etc.
Of course this is all much milder aggression than, say, beating the people in question up with a baseball bat. But it's pretty aggressive, and it seems to me much more aggressive than anything I've seen from "the left" on LW lately, and I think all those comments are currently sitting with positive karma. Which is one reason why I think that LW currently leans right (to which I don't object, for the avoidance of doubt, even though that happens not to be my own leaning) and that here it's much nearer the truth to say "the right is the aggressor" than "the left is the aggressor".
(Note 1: Again, I do appreciate that you've indicated that your comment about leftist aggression wasn't in fact intended to apply to LW. I'm just explaining where my comments were coming from. Note 2: I am not claiming that LW's participants lean right; past surveys have suggested not, and I would guess not. But if we weight by actual participation in politically loaded discussions, I think that's the way it goes. I have the impression that one or more right-leaning LWers have a very deliberate policy of trying to make things unpleasant for left-leaning LWers; if so, that may be a partial explanation.)
I think it has both. As someone who has been heavily downvoted (I think by exactly two people, one much more than the other) in recent politically-fraught discussions, I am curious: Do you think my comments in this thread are stupid? Do you think they are stupider than comments with a different sociopolitical leaning that have been upvoted?
(I take it you have sufficient brain to distinguish "stupid" from "in disagreement with my politics", but I will explicitly remind you of your own caution about mindkill minefields.)
So do you claim that crazy people don't exist? Or that they do but we shouldn't point this fact out? In any case you don't seem overly concerned by the general social aggression against people who think they're Jesus.
Of course not.
I generally prefer to leave that to the psychiatrists. But: 1. calling someone crazy is a more aggressive act when they are not in fact crazy than when they are, and 2. even when they are, yes, there is something aggressive about it. I did not say (and do not believe) that aggression is always wrong.
Actually, I'm not sure I've seen any. Perhaps because those people are (1) extremely rare and (2) usually confined in mental institutions because their thinking is sufficiently generally and seriously disordered that they can't well cope with life in the world at large. Transgender people are much more common and are generally about as capable of rational thought as the rest of the population.
Transgender people are less then .01% of the population. Also being transgender the the currently fashionable form of insanity, if you go back 50-60 years you'd see even fewer "transgender" and a lot more Messiahs.
What percentage of the population would you guess is made up of people who think they are Jesus?
Incidentally, more recent studies tend to find much higher proportions of transgender people, which presumably is not unrelated to what you describe as its being "the currently fashionable form of insanity". I don't think you get to claim both <0.01% and that it was a lot fewer 50 years ago.
The fact that society does confine someone to a mental institution is a strong statement.
Would you care to elaborate?
On aggression (with apologies to Konrad Lorenz):
I was hoping to avoid getting into the definitions debate, but that looks inescapable now. We seem to understand aggression differently.
First, let me point to tension in your position. On the one hand you say that "It seems clear to me that some of the comments VoiceOfRa has made are aggression" and "When he suggests that it's unreasonable to treat those "delusions or hallucinations" any more generously than those of someone who thinks he's simultaneously Jesus and John Lennon, that seems pretty aggressive to me." On the other hand, you strongly deny that the exposition of one's views (presumably, even on controversial topics) is aggression, saying that "I certainly don't intend anything of the kind, and I gravely doubt that anyone seriously thinks what you say they do."
I see problems in this position of yours. You might be able construct a definition of "aggression" which twists and turns enough to accommodate you, but I suspect it will be neither a good nor a robust definition.
For example, you think that considering transsexuals to be mentally ill is "aggression". Or is it aggression only if you call them crazy (a "needlessly pejorative term"), but if you, following DSM-IV, diagnose them with a Gender Identity Disorder that's not aggression any more?
I can't make sense of your position, it does not look consistent to me.
Re women's IQ:
The case with the lab manager's resume has a lot of confounding factors (other than IQ) in play. Hiring managers are often more concerned with whether the new hire will get pregnant and go on maternity leave than with IQ, for example. And, well, this is an empirical question, there is a lot of data about the IQ of men and women.
Re LW tilts:
You say that "I think that LW currently leans right" but that critically depends on where you zero point is :-) I suspect that LW actually doesn't tilt anywhere politically -- most people here don't care (some "naturally" and some explicitly to avoid mindkills). It is not a useful exercise to assign a political tilt to LW -- that's not what this place is about.
Re "Do you think my comments in this thread are stupid?":
LOL. I have actually been upvoting your comments in this subthread back to zero because we are having a very nice polite conversation and ideological downvotes are not welcome in it (and are quite silly, anyway).
But to be explicit -- no, I don't think so at all. If if did, this conversation wouldn't exist.
What I strongly disagreed with is the following claim (your description of an allegedly "fashionable approach" which you may or may not have been ascribing to me)
It sometimes happens that an exposition of some view or other constitutes aggression-as-I-understand it. It sometimes happens that it doesn't. Whether I agree with the view has nothing to do with whether a given exposition of it constitutes aggression.
If you'd instead said that some people think "that sometimes an exposition of a particular view can constitute aggression" then I wouldn't have disagreed with it. Perhaps that's what you actually meant to say some people think -- but in that case I suggest that you said it very badly. (Perhaps from a desire to make those people sound sillier?)
No, I don't, and I respectfully suggest that you retrace whatever mental steps led you to think I think that looking for errors.
I think that calling them (not merely considering them) delusional and hallucinating (not merely mentally ill) is "aggression". You can consider anyone you like anything you like and it will not constitute aggression; how could it. And "mentally ill" is a very broad category, covering e.g. things like depression and anxiety as well as outright craziness.
And: yes, words like "crazy" and "delusional" and "hallucinating" are pejorative in ways in which e.g. "suffering from gender identity disorder" is not, which makes statements that use the former terms more aggressive than otherwise similar ones that use the latter.
So I think the tension and inconsistency you perceive in my position is the result of misunderstanding it. (There might of course be tensions or inconsistencies even when it's correctly understood; maybe we'll find out.)
True. I'm sure hiring managers are rarely concerned with IQ as such at all. But they do care about competence in the job, and that's the scale on which they rated applicants called "Jennifer" 0.7 points lower (out of 5) than otherwise identical applicants called "John". I personally would not classify "unlikelihood of disappearing on maternity leave" under the heading of competence; would you expect university science faculty hiring a lab manager to do so?
Yup. That's a large part of why I am not bothered by LW (in my perception) leaning right.
You may recall that I was only talking about this because I thought you were implying that politlcally-motivated aggression on LW tends to come from "the left". I don't at all mind LW's tilting rightward (if indeed it really does).
I'm pleased to hear it! But you will find that in any political thread my comments (which I'm fairly sure are not generally any stupider than they are in this one) attract more than averagely many downvotes even when (as it seems to my of-course-perfectly-unbiased judgement) they are conspicuously reasonable and not-stupid. So do comments from other people with political leanings resembling mine. And that's part of what I mean by saying that LW has a conservative, not merely and anti-stupid, tilt.
I think that particular phenomenon is due to a very small number of users -- in my less charitable moments I suspect one with intermittent sockpuppets. But it's there, and I think it affects the overall flavour of discussion on LW, even if that's not what LW should be about. And, more generally, I think the left and the right have their characteristic unpleasantnesses, and those of the left are (1) largely absent and (2) heavily criticized and downvoted when they show up, whereas those of the right are (1) distinctly more common and (2) generally approved by the LW community, so far as one can tell from replies and karma.
(Again: I'm not saying there's anything very terrible about that. And LW is indeed distinctly less unpleasantly political than many other venues.)
That would have been fairly useless. The phrase "some people think.." can be followed by pretty much anything at all and still be true.
I am still confused by your understanding of aggression -- right now it seems to me that it means just being impolite. Let's take Alice who may or may not have some issues. Bob says "She is mentally ill". Charlie says "She is delusional and hallucinating". Duncan says "Man, she's just batshit crazy". Is it you position that Bob is fine, Charlie is mildly aggressive, and Duncan is highly aggressive?
I find it strange that you pay so much attention to the form and relatively little to the content.
Let's get a bit more precise. Does LW as a whole have such a tilt, or does your karma have such a tilt? I think you're extrapolating your personal situation a bit too much.
Think of LW as a place of refuge, a "safe zone" to use an SJ term :-D A neo-reactionary who wanders into a wrong Tumblr neighbourhood will get a lot of detailed descriptions of how exactly he should die in a fire :-/
From my perspective, the dilemma you face is that you could say "a lot of people think that expressing opinions that disagree with theirs constitutes aggression", which would be non-content-free but ridiculous, or you could say "some people think that some expressions of opinion constitute aggression", which would be true but almost content-free; I'm having trouble figuring out what you could have meant that would be contentful but in any way plausible.
They're closely related. Aggression is (among other things) one variety of impoliteness. (In ordinary social contexts. If you're facing an opponent in a boxing ring, aggression isn't impolite.)
Is A listening to B, C, and D? Or are they saying this in some venue that records what they say, where A might come across it later? Or perhaps not A but some of her friends and family?
If not, I don't think I'd call their comments aggressive at all. So let's suppose B, C, and D know that their comments are likely to be heard by A. Then yeah, all else being equal I would say B<C<D in aggression.
I find it strange that you say that, for two reasons. Firstly, there most certainly is a difference in content between what B, C, and D are saying. (And, referring back to the original discussion, between "Transgender people suffer from gender identity disorder, which I classify as a mental illness" and "Transgender people are delusional and hallucinating".) Just as there is a difference between "Lumifer has some unusual political opinions" and "Lumifer is a fascist". (Note for the avoidance of doubt: I do not think you are a fascist and have no idea how usual your political opinions are.)
Secondly, there's a lot of information in the form. The difference between "Joe has difficulty understanding some things" and "Joe is a fucking moron" is largely one of form, and mostly what it indicates is hostility. Similarly, it's easy enough to see how someone could express opinions about transgender people quite similar to VoiceOfRa's with a much less hostile tone. That would (as I use the word) be less aggressive. It would be less likely to make any trans people reading LW feel attacked; less likely to make them expect that if their trans-ness became known they'd be met with hostility and contempt.
I tried to make it clear that I'm well aware of the difference (acknowledging that my judgement of my own comments is far from impartial; citing what happens to other leftish-leaning comments; "part of what I mean". Did I really fail so badly? (Or: did I succeed but do you think I'm disastrously self-deceiving or something?)
See, this is why I find it odd that you say LW doesn't lean right. Because providing a "safe place" for neoreactionaries would, I think, generally be regarded -- even by people who consider themselves right-wing -- as evidence of either (1) rightishness or (2) fanatical refusal to make anyone unwelcome on account of their sociopolitical views. And if you think it's #2, then I invite you to imagine the roasting that the residents of that "wrong Tumblr neighbourhood" would get if they turned up on LW.
You don't need to be neoreactionary to not agree with that claim. I would guess >75% of the public don't agree with that claim.
I don't think anybody here argued lately that the average woman is less intelligent than the average man. I also doubt that's standard nrx.
It's quite easy to get lots of disagreement on LW by saying things about IQ that are not in line with the academic research about the subject. Quite a few people on LW actually read relevant research papers. Don't confuse pro-science with nrx.
On the other hand I haven't seen strong disagreement with people who question whether "homosexuality is a deviance that should be worked against".
Opinion that are by the admission of the author not well thought out deserve to be challenged. If you don't challenge badly thought out opinions on charged topics you don't get high quality discourse.
Given how different the distributions are, it's hard to say (and not very meaningful) which has the higher average. It might even depend on which average you use.
Of course! I wasn't saying that everyone on LW is neoreactionary. I was saying (1) I don't see SJ-isms and (2) I do see NRx-isms.
In the lengthy discussion that started from this comment, there were a number of people (who were not all VoiceOfRa, though one of them was with a different username) arguing that it's credible that rating a prospective employee's likely competence much higher if the name on the application is John rather than Jennifer (with no other differences) is not evidence of prejudice, because being named John rather than Jennifer could be good evidence of a substantial difference in competence (even given the other information in the application indicating equal ability).
I don't know how to interpret that other than as men being more competent than women. (Not quite the same thing as intelligence but closely related. The job in question was as a lab manager in a university science department.)
And, guess what?, VoiceOfRa (operating at that time under the name of Azathoth123) was in fact saying in so many words that women are less intelligent than men. (Not, however, simply taking it for granted that everyone knows they are, so my description above isn't perfectly accurate. Sorry.)
Don't worry; I'm not.
I agree (with the caveat that if the author admits they're not well thought out, then "challenge" isn't exactly what's called for -- the author already knows they might be wrong -- but something more like analysis and critique) but I think you may be misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying "waaaah, leftist comments get challenged". I'm saying "moderately leftist comments get sharp disagreement and downvotes; immoderately rightist comments get less disagreement and fewer downvotes; therefore it doesn't seem right to categorize LW as a place where 'the left is the aggressor'".
So, in particular, I was not and am not saying (1) that it's bad that "progressive" comments get challenged, nor (2) that it's bad that they get downvoted, nor (3) that it's bad that "conservative" ones get a more positive reception. (As it happens I think 1 is good, 2 is bad in that the downvoting seems rather indiscriminate, and 3 is more or less neutral.) I just think 1,2,3 are clearly true and hard to reconcile with Lumifer's explanation of his own choice of what to take issue with, as being because "the left is the aggressor" in his circles.
That boils down to not understanding statistics which is something for which you can get downvoted on LW.
You don't need a general difference in intelligence for the average person in a given hiring poll with gender A being more capable than the average person in the same hiring poll with gender B.
Whether or not men are on average smarter than woman has nothing to do with a particular job. It's a general statement.
No, if someone posts rubbish the fact that they know they post rubbish doesn't mean they deserve less challenge.
We can turn this into a mathematical-skill pissing contest if you like; for what it's worth, I don't much favour your chances. If you're talking about means versus variances: this is only a large effect when you're hiring from the tails of the distribution, and a lab-manager post doesn't require really exceptional ability in any domain.
The point of my specifying the job is that it's a job on which performance is (1) likely to be a matter of general competence in some broad sense, rather than specialized skill that, e.g., men might be much more likely to spend a long time learning for some cultural reason, and (2) sufficiently related to general intelligence that if someone holds that men are systematically better at it, it's reasonable to guess that this indicates they think men are smarter.
Knowing you're posting rubbish is not the same thing as posting something you know isn't well thought out. The comment I guess you have in mind here is not "rubbish", and its author's acknowledgement neither says nor means "I know I was posting rubbish". (If we truly adopted a standard saying that every comment on LW needs to be carefully thought through and made watertight before posting, then "who should 'scape whipping?".)
I'm not even talking about that. People who apply for a job aren't randomly drawn from the general population. There no reason to assume that the average of the subset with applies for a job is the same as for the general population,
True enough. So, tell me: Do you think it credible that (1) there is little overall difference in the distribution of lab-managerial competence between men and women, but (2) among undergraduates applying for lab-manager positions there is a big enough difference between the competence of men and the competence of women to make it rational to rate the former 0.7 points above the latter on a 5-point scale given applications identical in every respect other than the name? (You can find the information the raters were given here; it's fairly brief but far from content-free.)
If so, what sort of differences do you think would do this? How big would they need to be, in your judgement?
[EDITED to fix a trivial typo.]
Especially on politics I would expect that people post what they consider to be carefully thought out or otherwise explicitly say that they haven't thought it through in the same post.
I accept that sometimes people think they have put careful thought into an issue but still end up wrong, but not even having the standard of careful thought before posting is bad.
I too would like to see more careful thought before posting, but that isn't the same as saying that any comment not fully thought through before posting is "rubbish".
I do. Men have a higher variance than women and the employer only hires from the tail end.
(You can say that that still counts as men in a subgroup being more competent, of course, but it's not what we normally mean by "men are more competent than women".)
You are making the assumption that my circles and LW are the same thing, I am not sure on which basis. I do hang out on LW, but not only here. And I did mention meatspace, too.
G: "I notice that although the sort of agitprop you complain of comes from all sides here on LW, you're only complaining about one of them."
L: "That's because in the circles I move in, the left is always the aggressor."
G: "Well, here on LW there seems to be distinctly more right than left."
L: "Oh, I wasn't talking about LW."
... Then what was the relevance of your original response?
Huh? You asked about me. I answered about myself. There is no narrowly-specialised clone of me for which LW is the entire world.
At least one of us is failing to understand the other, because I'm having trouble how that comments relates to anything I said. Unless you think I was taking "in the circles I move in" to mean "in LW, and only LW". I wasn't; but I was taking them to include LW.
To be more explicit, again: if you do something in LW and explain it by saying "in the circles I move in, X is true" then I don't see how that's a useful explanation unless you're saying that (1) LW is among the circles you move in and (2) it resembles the others in that X is true there.
Well, Jiro is posting from similar political position too (but I'm not sure either of them identifies as neoreactionary).