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NancyLebovitz comments on Open thread, Oct. 5 - Oct. 11, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (346)
I have banned advancedatheist. While he's been tiresome, I find that I have more tolerance for nastiness than some, but this recent comment was the last straw. I've found that I can tolerate bigotry a lot better than I can tolerate bigoted policy proposals, and that comment was altogether too close to suggesting that women should be distributed to men they don't want sex with.
I have mixed feelings about this. He was posting the same argument about being incel in every single open thread, and the repetitiveness seems more annoying than the content, to me. But OTOH he also posted some interesting cryonics stuff.
Incidentally, suppose someone posted on the forum to say "As an Indian, my cultural heritage says that parents should decide who a woman marries."
Should this person be banned?
I'm not saying to support AA's position, nor as an attempt to criticise Indian culture, I'm just trying to see if we can have a consistent position on what counts as unacceptably offensive.
Do they say it once, or do they keep mentioning it all the time despite the downvotes?
AA didn't even say it once. He said something that Nancy interpreted as implying he believed it.
If they only say that once, no they shouldn't. If they say it umpteen times and continue doing so even after being downvoted to oblivion umpteen times, maybe.
Seems reasonable and consistent.
No, but that might be because the hypothetical Indian is making a much weaker policy suggestion.
By the way, arranged marriage means that neither partner has a choice.
I'm not sure what policy suggestion AA was making. I thought that you thought he was proposing forced marriages. What do you think he was proposing?
And of course, a lot of pressure is put on men to go into arranged marriages, but at the end of the day they do have a little more freedom, as if it comes down to violence they are more able to defend themselves. And that's a possibility - I have heard an girl of Indian decent say "I can't be forced into marriage because I have no male relatives and I could take my mum in a fight."
AA didn't even make a policy suggestion, he said something that you interpreted as implying he supported said policy. The fact that you seem to be unable t see the difference strongly indicates that you shouldn't be deciding who to ban.
And that's better?
I also think that this sets a very murky precedent. I don't disagree at all with banning AA if it turns out he has abused voting privileges, but so far there's no hard evidence that he did. Putting that aside for now, all we're left with is a block being based on whether some individual moderator "can tolerate" some controversial comment (meaning that it attracts both downvotes and upvotes, as far as the LW userbase is concerned). This strikes me as careless.
That's a strawman. Nancy said "last straw". It wasn't a single comment that caused the ban.
This community doesn't suffer from being overmoderated. I think it's worthwhile to have a moderator who is in the position to moderate when they think it's necessary to do so.
I sympathize with your point of view, but I find it difficult to come up with rules. I don't know if this is enough, but I think the fact that I'm pretty tolerant about content (spam doesn't count as content) means people aren't at high risk of me losing my temper with them.
I'm not convinced I'm obligated to take my system 1 completely off-line when I'm dealing with ideas that are inimical to my interests.
For what it's worth, I have a long history at LW with a high karma score (typically 92% positive), I was offered the job of moderator rather than asking for it, and when I announced that I had become moderator, I got a lot of upvotes. I think these facts are evidence that I have a pretty good sense of the community.
Have a rule-- I detest it (though not to the point of banning people) when someone mentions something they saw online and doesn't offer a link, or at least apologize for not having one.
It sounds like we had an effective if unstated rule: "When someone does a bunch of stuff wrong, get rid of them."
AA checked four boxes:
We are missing some rules that might be useful to have, specifically 'what are the boxes' and 'how many do you need to check to get banned'. But quite frankly, looking at those four sins, I would think that any three should be enough to get someone banned. If anything, NancyLebovitz probably waited longer than necessary.
I would also say that making a rule based on only one of those factors would be counterproductive. I think most of us are forgiving (as far as bans go, albeit perhaps not in voting) when a user repeatedly fails on one of those, as long as they are also providing useful content in other posts.
I think, as a general rule, people in a decision-making capacity are best advised to recuse themselves from any choice whenever they feel that their System 1 is interfering. (In your case, I would've waited for some solid evidence on the karma-abuse question. After all, if the upvotes on that comment turned out to be genuine, that would definitely affect my own views.) I am aware that this is not always realistic. But make no mistake here - the thought process that led to this decision will also make LW less, not more trustworthy (however mildly) when dealing with issues that are unusually complex or politically contentious. Masculinity and involuntary celibacy are canaries in the coalmine - our treatment of them is direct evidence of how well we can treat everything else.
You care about false upvoting a great deal more than I do.
Is it worth mentioning that I was kinder to aa than most of the people who replied to him?
Check out the discussion at SlateStarCodex about banning Steve Johnson, a time-wasting fellow who wasn't quite breaking the rules.
I really want to hope I can say the same. I sort of took it as my personal mission to respond to every outrageous thing he said, and point out the problems with his politics and his theory of sexuality. As a former member of the online incel community, I thought I was in a better position to empathize with his situation, and could present alternative arguments in a way that he might be more receptive to than standard refutation. But AA never replied directly to me, so I don't know how he took my approach.
SlateStarCodex does not have a karma system, though.On LW, time wasters tend to be downvoted swiftly, so they don't really waste much time anyway. If someone who's broadly considered a "time-waster" is nonetheless upvoted, this tells me that what they're posting is unusually interesting.
You can have a voting ring.
In this case AA's post got downvoted swiftly but still wasted a lot of energy.
That depends very much on the audience. Some people will trust more others will trust less.
I'm pretty sure that the latter will outnumber the former quite a bit. Speaking generally, we want social norms that discourage excess political talk (politics is the mindkiller, and gender politics is no exception) but when it does come up, people should be allowed to speak freely if they have something worthwhile to say. Anything else is a recipe for severe bias (via "evaporative cooling" and factionalization).
Given that the post from him on that topic were constantly downvoted, the community seemed to feel that he didn't have something worthwile to say.
I think that's a really bad rule in almost any setting, including this one. It amounts to acting as a straw Vulcan.
Well, System 1 is a complicated beast. In most cases, it helps you reach better and quicker decisions than a Straw Vulcan would, and this is a good thing. But there are some times when you're fairly sure that it cannot be trusted - this is arguably one of these times.
It's funny, that this triggered up your system I in this case. Offensivness on LW...
No, it was the suggestion that women should be given to men they don't want to marry combined with a bad posting history which caused me to ban. I'm also none too fond of suggestions that people should mistrust their own motives from someone who shows no capacity for examining their own motives.
Also note that I said I wouldn't ban for failure to include links. (Or were you joking?)
My system 1 was rather activated. I don't normally flame people, but I had some ideas for flaming aa to a crackly crunch.
I would say that flaming is a lot more polite than blocking - at least insofar as "politeness" is actually something ethically worthwhile. But maybe that's just me.
That sounds to me like a system II analysis of the situation.
Not examine one's own motives and not including links is a sign of a kind of intellectual laziness, that alone wouldn't be ground for banning but is in combination with offensive content it has a different quality than carefully crafted posts that communicate offensive content.
If I'm putting it in words, especially for LW, system 2 is going to get involving. However, a proposition of a system of forcing women into sex is something that I take personally because I imagine myself (not in great detail) being mistreated that way. I'm against a military draft, but I don't react the same way to a proposal of a draft for men. Actually, I don't react the same way to a proposal of a military draft for women. This is a personal issue, and trust me, my system one was involved.
(Sidetrack: I liked The Rainbow Cadenza, a science fiction novel in which women are drafted for sex, as a rather clear parallel-to-create-outrage to the military draft for men.)
It wasn't just not examining one's own motives in general, it was pushing opposed people to think the worst of their own motives while not looking at one's own.
I don't actually see him as either saying or suggesting that women should be forced into sex. He seems to be saying that women (and all people) should be forced to not have sex outside of marriage, which would then lead to women settling for lower status partners.
Also, in this case the problem with your system 1 is that it affects your conclusions about what he means. He didn't, after all, make the bigoted proposal you decry. Rather, you interpret him as almost making it. It's a lot easier for bias to get in the way when banning someone for what they're almost-saying than when banning someone for what they're actually saying.
It's possible that what he meant was that women shouldn't be allowed to have sex with the men they choose. Instead, they can either be celibate or learn to tolerate sex with men they don't choose. Is this how you interpret what aa said?
He wanted to ban sex outside of marriage. Describing that as "can't have sex with the men you choose" is misleading, because it's such a noncentral example of that. It's literally true (if you choose someone outside of marriage, you're not allowed to have sex with him) but the same could be said for banning sex on public busses (if you choose someone on a public bus, you're not allowed to have sex with him).
Furthermore, I find it hard to accept that "ban sex outside of marriage" is such a bigoted policy that anyone who espouses it should not be allowed here. (And it's not even restricted to women--he just thinks the policy would affect women differently than men.)
While I'm deeply concerned about the possibility that AA has been engaging in vote-gaming which does seem to be a bannable offense, it isn't clear to me that, as reprehensible as that comment is, that it is enough reason by itself for banning, especially because some of his comments (especially those on cryonics) have been clearly highly productive. I do agree that much of the content of that comment is pretty disgusting and unproductive, and at this point his focus on incel is borderline spamming with minimal connection to the point of LW. Maybe it would be more productive to just tell him that he can't talk about incel as a topic here?
Why not ask advancedatheist to make his opinion clearer? My internal model of AA does not include him being especially supportive of, say, ISIS' sex slavery (to take one crystal-clear example of "women ... be[ing] distributed to men they don't want to have sex with"). Could it be that you're simply misinterpreting his original intent?
He has been sufficiently clear already. Nitpicking over the exact role he sees for women in society as he would arrange it is something that cannot possibly be to the benefit of this site and its community.
That's a strawman. AA speaks in favor of traditional partriarchy and that's a system that has arranged marriages where woman often have little to say about whom they want to marry and then have sex with.
Does it include him declaring that society must make sure that men get enough sex, whatever it takes, and then averting his eyes from the "whatever it takes" particulars?
Well, what should "whatever it takes" mean, exactly? Very few values are anything close to non-negotiable - EY's Sequences are unusually clear on this.
If I had to guess, I'd say that AA thinks "men getting enough sex" could be achieved cheaply enough, by improving male attitudes (and more broadly, societal attitudes) towards masculinity and sex. That would doubtlessly make some radical feminists uncomfortable, but this is clearly the sort of "policy" option that's actually on the table. Which means that even treating your "particulars" as if they could ever be meant seriously is a batshit-crazy misrepresentation of what incels are actually talking about.
Averting one's eyes means that you never ask yourself that question.
"Make it happen, I don't want to know how" is not a terribly uncommon sentiment.
I think you meant "improving female attitudes".
Well, I can't speak for the whole incel subculture, but I'm pretty sure I meant what I wrote above. Of course, the point of changing societal attitudes is that once you stop telling women that they're supposed to hate "toxic" masculinity, their attitudes will improve as well. But that's pretty much obvious.
No problem-- I was reacting aa's complaints that women are too picky about men, and also revolted by men.
A lot of this discussion has convinced me that communication is difficult.
Yeah well, this whole exercise starts making very little sense once you go into such specifics - Viliam is right about this. It might be that you're putting too much weight on that one single complaint (which would just be considered a typically 'edgy' throwaway remark if it came from within the incel 'community'), or that I'm oversimplifying in assuming AA shares the broader views of the incel subculture and, more generally, the "Dark Enlightenment" (incels, redpillars, puas, neoreaction, what have you).
I agree with the banning, given the fact that he was basically constantly commenting on the same issue, and one which is not particularly relevant to Less Wrong. But I disagree with this reason. Basically I think banning someone for the content of their proposals or implied proposals should be limited to the kind of the thing which might be banned by law (basically imminent threat of harm.)
LW self regulates the content of proposals via karma voting. In advancedatheist the communities desires were quite clearly expressed via karma votes and he still continued to bring up the topic.
Those post significantly reduce the likelihood that woman who read LW want to contribute. When the community karma votes that it doesn't want posts like this a user should accept that.
Yes, that's why I said I agreed with the banning.
Just a few thoughts:
I completely approve the ban. Although next time maybe getting a formal warning first would be better.
Let's not debate what exactly AA meant and what he didn't. He is not here to defend himself.
I... what? As I understand the comment, he wanted to ban sex outside marriage. Describing that as "women should be distributed to men they don't want sex with" seems ridiculously exaggerated.
I agree that his one-issue thing was tiresome, and perhaps there is some argument for making "being boring and often off-topic" a bannable offense in itself. But this moderation action seems poorly thought through.
Edit: digging through his comment history finds this comment, where he writes it would be better to marry daughters off as young virgins. So I guess he did hold the view Nancy ascribed to him, even if it was not in evidence in the comment she linked to.
Also, "monogamy versus hypergamy" has been discussed on Less Wrong since the dawn of time. See e.g. this post and discussion in comments, from 2009. Deciding now that this topic is impermissible crimethink seems like a pretty drastic narrowing of allowed thoughts.
In my opinion, the problem wasn't the topic per se, but how the author approached it:
comments in every Open Thread on the same topic, zero visible learning.
Sure, I think that was annoying. But it's not the stated reason for the ban.
I think that banning him was good from a consequentialist POV, but bad from deontological POV.
You may have a point. It turns out that at least one person would like to get in touch with aa, and I'm not sure how that's possible.
What's more (and this sounds like karma) I read something by a man who was involuntarily celibate, and discovered that hormone therapy helped. I'd have sworn I saw this on the most recent SlateStarCodex open thread, and now I can't find it. Meanwhile, it would be exactly like the usual human level of competence to treat a physical problem as though it has an emotional cause.
What deontological rule did you have in mind?
Try here: https://www.reddit.com/user/advancedatheist
I looked through his comments for a second, and at least on reddit he's talking about incel stuff in the relationship subreddits and cryonics in the transhuman subreddits.
Freedom of Speech seems most obvious.
I was expecting a rule like bans should be preceded by a warning and a chance to reply.
That's a rule I'd strongly support other than in cases of absolutely unambiguous spamming or clear sockpuppets of banned individuals.
But a rule like "don't ban people for opinions you disagree with" would also fit the bill, no?
It would, and I was following it for a while.
That would be a horrible rule -- no one would be able to ban me for my ardent desire to eat babies alive. I mean, unless you have some equally perverted moderators...
There is a debate like this- about, abortion. And you're right, I don't think that people should be banned for having the position that pro-lifers think of as "pro-killing babies",
Okay, so that was a bad example... (?) But the point still stands. If in order to ban someone we have to have a moderator who agrees with the person being banned, then some people will be much harder to ban than others. And we will most likely have to add some sub-optimal choices to the moderator pool, simply because now we are selecting for a factor that we otherwise wouldn't value.
I am surprised that my original comment was down-karma's so much -- if you have useful feedback onthis (especially 'bad point' vs. 'bad expression of point'), please respond or private msg me -- learning is good!
Ahh, I see what's happening. You're thinking of my suggestion as "Don't ban people who's opinion you disagree with."
But that's not actually what I meant. You're very welcome to disagree with the person you ban - it's just that you shouldn't ban them BECAUSE you find their opinion objectionable.
I've said things which could be interpreted as wanting to eat babies, at least if you go by Nancy's "altogether too close to saying" standard (I didn't actually say it, but I got close). I really would not want to be banned for such a thing, and I think banning people for such things is poisonous to the discourse here. The example of killing patients for their organs is another one.
He is free to continue speaking about the subject, just not on LW.
This is a very non-standard definition of freedom of speech.
No, it's the standard right of freedom of speech that's enshirned in the constitution.
In general an editor of a newspaper can decide which articles the newspaper is going to publish and a website can decide which posts to publish.
Classically nothing about the idea of freedom of speech compels other people to publish your opinions. Rather the idea is about giving people the choice to publish whatever they want to publish.
That's just plain not true. There's a long history defining the exact role of the media in relation to free speech, and the conversation does not end at "media can print what it wants."
There's an entire subfield of journalistic ethics about this relation, and how the media has a responsiblity to protect free speech, even WITHIN the media itself , because the media has a role in how ideas get shared. A personal website in this regard is very different then a discussion board, as the latter serves a similar purpose of allowing discourse. As reductio ad absurdem of your definition of free speech, imagine someone in Iran saying "The Iranian people have the right to free speech - just not within the country". Even though it's technically true, it still doesn't say anything about the EFFECT of the restriction of speech on discourse (which is the purpose of free speech in the first place).
LW exist for allowing discourse to refine the art of rationality. It's purpose is not that everybody can share whatever is on his mind.
Editorial and moderation choices are going to be directed by that goal. It's different than a medium like facebook that exist for everybody to share anything.
I doubt that's technically true. The Iranian government is going to punish speech by it's citizens that it doesn't like regardles whether that speech happens in Iran or whether it happens in another country.
That's not a deontological rule.
Thou shalt not restrict freedom of speech.
Sigh. Jerking knees are rarely the best responses.
Trolls. Spam. Speech inside your home. Big loudspeakers outside your windows. Etc. etc.
Freedom of speech is a right with a matching duty to not interfere with the speech owed by the government. It's not a general deontological rule applicable to all human interactions.
There's a concept of "free speech absolutism" which basically says that if you are in a venue that encourages discourse, you should allow any speech.
You're not a deontologist, so you might look at that rule and say "but what about the consequences". But, that's not what a free speech absolutist would do.
Unless you are arguing that you are a free speech absolutist, or, maybe, that LW should be run under such absolutism, I don't see the relevance. There are a LOT of fringe concepts around.
I'm not a free speech absoluist, but I do think that Advanced Atheist should not ahve been banned for the reason of free speech.
Regardless of what I believe though, I wasn't arguing for or against it, I was answering Nancy's Question.
Thank you.
I'm somewhat glad for aa's ban. I've lurked LW for a while now, and have found a lot of content posted here extremely interesting. Seeing aa's posts in open threads on incels every week being upvoted, containing content I felt was extremely prejudiced and malformed, with no apparent improvement over time, unnerved me quite a bit, and I felt like I was not only wasting my time reading his posts, but also gave me a negative impression of what LWers think. This was enough to stop me from browsing open-threads/browsing less wrong for a while.
Not being a constant user of LW, I was unaware of vote manipulation, but I did feel myself being confused by the apparent clash between aa's upvoted posts on incels and general concept I had of LW, so it shouldn't have been hard to conclude that there were alternative explanations for his upvotes.
I'm inclined to think there were some actual people who liked what aa was saying. They're a small proportion of LW, and there were a good many more people who didn't like what he was saying.
What do you mean by "prejudice"? The "textbook definition" basically amounts to "applying Bayesian priors to humans" and that doesn't seem like a bad thing.
There is nothing about Bayes in the "textbook definition". It boils down to "applying strong priors to humans" where "strong" means "resistant to change by evidence".
Ok, so what evidence was AA refusing to update on?
I'm not talking about AA, I'm talking about your understanding of prejudice.
I tend to ascribe a naïve etymology of pre-judgement to 'prejudice', so I suppose that is the sense I was using it there, but I really wasn't appealing to any "textbook definition" I know of.
The OED says "Preconceived opinion not based on reason or actual experience; bias, partiality; (now) spec. unreasoned dislike, hostility, or antagonism towards, or discrimination against, a race, sex, or other class of people." The further definitions given are either shades of this one or other senses not relevant here (e.g. legal terminology).
From a brief glance at the web, other dictionaries say the same. The second half of the OED's definition is but a currently prominent instance of the first half. That part is probably what you mean by "the textbook definition", but I don't know what textbooks you've been reading. Probably books by progressives that you study to keep your wrath warm.
"Not based on reason or actual experience." "Unreasoned." That is the core of the concept, is it not?
In Bayesian reasoning, that, without the pejorative overtones, is what your prior is. Your state of belief, represented as a probability distribution, before you have seen the data to which you intend to apply Bayesian reasoning.
I am not seeing that in your use of the phrase "Bayesian prior", which you seem to be waving as a rationalist password without noticing the step that it implies, of looking at data and updating from it. Without that, it is not a prior — there is nothing that it is prior to. No, for you "applying Bayesian priors to humans" means stopping at your priors without any awareness that a prior is an expression of ignorance to be improved on, not knowledge to be clung to.
The definition I learned in public school, which does have a rather extreme "progressive" bias.
Like the data on the relationship between sex and intelligence. The data on the relationship between how many men a women has had sex with and her ability to participate in future stable relationships.
In that case, you are talking about posteriors, not priors, and there is no need for the Bayes jargon. Beliefs, conclusions, from whatever sources and methods it may have been. "Bayes" is not a Power Word: Stun.
Of course, it's still prior to looking at the person in front of you and observing them.
It is, however, often used to fill in the phase 2 in the underpants gnomes business plan.
Good, I see you are making progress in understanding this.
I hope that one day I will be able to say the same of you.
For people you haven't interacted with it isn't, for other people it's the posteriors you should apply, not the priors.
You know what, if "nerves" were actual, reliable evidence of voting abuse I would have no issue at all with advancedatheist's ban. Unfortunately, I don't think that's how it works.
I disapprove.
Upvote because disapproval is not wrong around my universe. not sure if people are trying to downvote in support (aka they also disapprove) or against your disapproval.
Note that those that support the disapproval apparently have the decency not to downvote the approval.
How do we improve this?
Edit: wait - I support the show of approval too. I disagree with the disapproval but I support someone's ability to voice their opinion.
I don't support this ban, but I have to admit I'm more of a naturalist than a cultivator when it comes to gardens: weeds are plants too, right?
If there's significant evidence of karma fraud (even if that evidence isn't shared), that's a good reason. If it's just "annoying posts that don't get downvoted enough for our tastes", that's pretty weak.
I've seen quite a bit of evidence of karma fraud on their part.
I approve.
What definition of "bigotry" are you using? The "standard definition" amounts to "applying Bayesian priors to people". So is discussion of the policy implications of Bayesian reasoning now punishable by banning without notice? Also since you admit that he didn't actually make the proposal but was "close to suggesting" it does that mean that even being "close to suggesting" implications of Bayesian reasoning for policy is bannable?
Note to Eliezer or any super-administrators reading this: I strongly suggest that in the interest of keeping LessWrong a place where people can discuss rationality without fear of suddenly being banned, NancyLebovitz's administrative privileges be revoked immediately.
Huh, no it doesn't.
Lots of people had expressed annoyance at advandcedatheist talking about the same topic over and over again. That's hardly "sudden". (OTOH I would have preferred him to be officially warned by a moderator before being banned.)
Ok, looking at the first result we get:
Which was the standard meaning of "bigotry" a century ago. Ok, let's apply this definition to the current situation: it would appear that NancyLebowitz is more guilty of bigotry then AA. Does that mean she should be banned?
Again, ISTM NancyLebovitz (and other LW readers in general) are less intolerant of AA's ideas themselves than of his continuing to post them over and over again after people have made abundantly clear they're not interested in reading them for the zillionth time, so a response to an extraordinary situation and not a "habitual" state of mind. And AA does seem intolerant of the idea of women's sexual freedom.
That said, I'll tap out now.
Then Nancy should ban him based on his habit of repetitively posting, rather than what she actually banned him for, which is for "bigoted policy proposals" (and worse yet, for just almost making bigoted policy proposals). Banning him for that makes it much more dangerous for me to support limits on immigration, say almost anything concrete about how to use IQ tests that falls on the wrong side, connect vegetarianism to abortion, give many answers to the trolley problem, or otherwise speak about a lot of topics that turn up in discussions that have nothing to do with AA.
I wouldn't actually have a problem with the ban if she banned him for repetitively posting.
The leap from annoyance to a ban was quite sudden.
That's some terrible priors you have there.
Well, would you care to enlighten us as to your definition of "bigotry". Bonus if the definition refers to something obviously bad and something AA was guilty of.
If you focus on labels instead of on individuals, you're a bigot.
If your treatment of people is based on tribal allegiances, real or imagined, instead of what they've actually done, you're a bigot.
If you already have an opinion on someone you've just met, based on appearances only, before you've bothered getting to know them, you're a bigot.
If you blame an entire category of people for the actions of select outliers, you're a bigot.
If you believe all members of an arbitrarily defined category of people behave the same way or think the same way or can be expected to respond in the same way, you're a bigot.
If there's a group of people you especially like to hate, you're a bigot.
If you're an identity essentialist, you're a bigot.
If you believe there are "superior" and "inferior" classes of people, you're an über bigot.
Anybody who treats family members such as cousins differently because they are family is a bigot?
Look at all the effective altruism and utilitarian arguments that basically imply that you should consider the welfare of all people in the world equally and that putting more weight on yourself, your family, and people who are close to you or who resemble you is just not something that rational people are supposed to be doing.
And then they get called bigots, and then bigots get banned....
My aunts resent me for this, but you guessed right: I do not hold the accident of genetic closeness alone as a valid reason for preferential treatment. To quote Gabriel García Márquez,
That's not the point of the question*. The question is whether anybody who doesn't see things that way is a bigot.
*: Unless of course you define being a bigot as having different preference than you have.
In itself, treating your relatives nicely because they're family doesn't seem to sound too bad; it sounds like the obvious and natural thing everybody would do. The problem I have with it is that it means you're intentionally treating everybody else less nicely because they're not family, which to me is a very weak reason to withhold your good will. When taken to the field of real-life decisions, it takes the form of nepotism, which can be seen as bigotry against the entire rest of humanity.
How is that even relevant? I don't see anything about genetic closeness up there. I do see a reference to family, which is not the same thing and can easily include people with "friendship formed".
<waves> Hello! I'm a bigot! Pleased to meet you!
I'm guessing you disapprove of some of the things polymathwannabe lists, much as PMWB does, but think others are fine. It might be more interesting to know which.
I disapprove of assigning labels on the basis of checklists to start with, the same labels that polymathwannabe professes to dislike in his first sentence.
Any particular reason you ask? I'm not a big fan of purity/political correctness/ideological orientation tests either. Got to focus on the individual, y'know.. :-P
I can't see why you'd have posted as you did if you didn't want to (1) point out what you see as deficiencies in PMWB's list of alleged features of bigots and/or (2) tell us something about yourself; but what you've said so far doesn't provide enough information to identify the alleged deficiencies or determine much about you. So it seems like you haven't done what you intended to.
Also, I'm curious.
But I did: see the grandparent post. I just went one meta level up.
I also generally dislike the "people who believe <positions I disagree with> are <an insult>" lists.
Anyway, sorry, I'm not going to go down the list and jot down my attitude towards each point. It looks like a waste of time.
On that we agree.
This is what Baysian logic requires that you do.
I don't believe I've seen anyone do this. (Hint: sex, race, religion, etc., aren't arbitrary categories).
I have murderers and child-molesters.
Ok, now define "identity essentialism", I'm have a hard time coming up with a definition that's not largely true.
Does it matter if this is actually true for the metric under discussion.
Only for such a broad value of "opinion" that Bayesian logic requires you to have an opinion about the number of apples in a tree you haven't seen.
I take it you never interact with people you haven't interacted with before.
Sometimes I do, but then I update my beliefs about them based on the evidence (or at least I try to -- I'm not a Platonic spherical perfectly rational being). In any event, even with people I haven't interacted with before I usually have more information than "appearances only", e.g. where we are, who introduced us to each other, and whether I have already heard of them before.
Assuming someone introduced you and this isn't someone you're passing on the street.
Religion does sound pretty arbitrary to me.
There you go.
Ok, except this definition makes "identity essentialism" true.
Evidence?
Don't be silly.
Well, it's not like all member of the same sex/race/religion/etc. behave the same way or think the same way or can be expected to respond in the same way, either.
Not all, but most and their responses can be more similar than you'd think.
How do you know how similar I'd think their responses can be?
I don't mind this ban, but I think it would be a good idea to make a clearly defined ultimatum before making such bans. E.g. tell him any additional comments on the topic would result in a ban. Worst case scenario he gets to make one more annoying post before he gets banned, best case scenario he cleans up his act and we get to keep a positive-sum commenter. Was AA ever given such an ultimatum?
I just want to take a moment to point this out: the hypotheses people like advancedatheist push for why they're incel are very emotionally salient (a small number of men are monopolizing all of our women! omg!) So everyone, please don't let this very emotionally salient hypothesis prematurely crowd out other explanations for the same phenomenon.
Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo wrote a book called the Demise of Guys. Among other things, he discusses the sexual frustrations of modern men and offers some possible explanations:
He's also got a section on how men are being diagnosed with erectile dysfunction at younger and younger ages, linking to the site yourbrainonporn.com which discusses this.
Are we really supposed to believe that evolutionary factors like female hypergamy are responsible for increased shyness and erectile dysfunction among young men? Female hypergamy, insofar as it exists, is a mostly static biological phenomenon that's been around for 100s or 1000s of years. Are we really supposed to believe that right around the time when the world is changing faster than ever, suddenly female hypergamy goes from being a constant in the background to a destroyer of societies? I'm sure the liberation of women plays an important role here, but I think its role is frequently overstated. Think back to the 60s and 70s when the sexual revolution first happened. Where were the hopeless incels back then? Or think of forager societies where chastity was not held to be valuable... where were the "omega males" at that point?
Anyway, yourbrainonporn.com also has a page on how excessive porn use may destroy social confidence. Like most addictions, porn decreases your brain's dopamine receptor levels, and lower dopamine receptor levels have been shown to predict lower social status in monkeys. Anecdotally if I avoid porn completely for extended periods my social confidence and abilities with women improve significantly.
(This also matches perfectly with nerds being worse with women if they spend more time alone with their computers.)
Well, in other forums he suggested that women have systematically less intelligence than men. So I guess that to him women are not much more than domestic animals.
One side of me is happy that he is gone, the other side is mildly disappointed for the lack of a local bigot to study in a safe environment.
I don't think the second sentence follows from the first. Children certainly have less intelligence than adults, yet we shouldn't treat children as animals.
(Not that I agree with the first sentence)
Not per se, it follows from the first sentence and NancyLebovitz comment on him denying women autonomy.
This sentence is weird to me because I was not talking about what I think is right or how to steelman aa's thought.
Anyway, consider these:
- he believes that fully formed females have less intelligence than males;
- he attributes the difference to a systematic genetic trait;
- that he thinks women should be denied autonomy on a basic right.
How would you call the status of a sub-human non-autonomous being? Domestic or friendly animal seems to me quite precise.
Well children are both less intelligent than adults, and non-autonomous, in that they have no choice over whether they go to school etc., so I think my comparison still stands.
I also don't think that someone or some group having below-average intelligence means they are sub-human.
Also, does AA think that women have less general intelligence, or that they are less good specifically at STEM subjects? Because a lot of scientists do think that there are cognitive differences, but balanced, in that women have higher verbal & empathising intelligence.
I don't remember aa saying anything one way or the other about women's intelligence vs. men's.
Not here, in another forum. Quoting verbatim (regarding the ability to think abstractly):
"Women generally either lack, or fail to develop, that ability, so they don't think about right and wrong in the way men do."
Well, the evidence strongly indicates that is in fact the case, at least at the high end.
Could you define what you mean by bigot? Because, the definitions I've heard tend to boil down to "someone who applies Bayesian reasoning to humans".
Quoted from Wikipedia: "One study did find some advantage for women in later life, while another found that male advantages on some cognitive tests are minimized when controlling for socioeconomic factors. The differences in average IQ between men and women are small in magnitude and inconsistent in direction."
It seems a very thin thread to hang such a heavy prior, and it looks a lot more like a conclusion that someone wants desperately to be true.
Sure. I used it in the sense of: "aa is uncommonly out of synch with the contemporary sensibility about personal freedom, and refuses to explain why he believes what he believes".
So expressing contrarian opinions is grounds for banning?
Except he did explain why he believes what he does.
As always, it's a matter of degree and interaction on how well argumented your position is.
So yes, you can express a sufficiently contrarian opinion that would lead to banning. "All women should be treated as sex slaves", for example, is such an opinion.
I asked aa at least twice, possibly more, what evidence he had for his assertions and got nothing back. Can you point me to a place where he did so? A post mortem would still be useful.
But I don't think even you would argue that the reason for banning that opinion is its contrariness.
It sounded like he suggested that "we need to restore a healthy patriarchy where women can't get sexual experience until marriage." That doesn't mean "women should be distributed to men they don't want to have sex with". He is advocating prohibiting sex, not requiring sex, and more specifically that if society prohibits sex with lots of partners, women would be willing to settle for partners that they won't settle for now.
Also, prohibiting "bigoted policy proposals" is a really bad idea. All sorts of suggestions turn up here that could be put in that category, from cutting up travellers for their organs to valuing one's countrymen more than immigrants to letting employers hire based on IQ.
Possible karma fraud probably didn't help.