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lessdazed comments on Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance - LessWrong
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Do you mean "The fact is that there are a lot people who do think "women/men all want" when they hear someone saying "women/men want"? Because people who interpret the author as saying something stupid are interpolating in an unwritten determiner to do that just as much as those interpolate "generally" by reading him charitably and correctly figuring out what is meant from context.
Yes.
I'm having difficulty parsing this sentence.
The conscious or subconscious decision to read "women/men want" as "women/men all want" rather than "women/men generally want" is a mental step, just as the conscious or subconscious decision to read "women/men want" as "women/men generally want" rather than "women/men all want" is a step.
It's not obviously the default to read "women/men want" as "women/men all want".
In this context, to do so is a) obviously wrong to me, b) actually wrong according to the intent of the author and c) would result in the author saying something stupid rather than arguably true.
A critical reading skill is to read charitably such that the author is not saying something stupid, and I have trouble sympathizing with what I see as an abandonment of that duty by readers or commenters excusing and/or justifying that.
If I say in passing "men are taller than women", I hope I don't get assailed by people pointing out that at maturity, many women are taller than many men, or that men start as babies less than a foot or so tall, at which point almost every female is taller than they are*.
*And when I say "almost every female is taller than they are," I mean female human, as most females are of smaller species and our babies are taller than they are**.
**And when I say "most females are of smaller species and are babies are taller than they are" I mean of species so far discovered***.
***And when I say "of species so far discovered" I mean "discovered by humans," for other species may have discovered many more large species than we have discovered small species.****
****And when I say "discovered by humans," I mean as far as I know.*****
*****And when I say "as far as I know," I mean as far as I knew when typing this.
I hope that's enough disclaimers to protect from those determined to misread my words.
But this presumes that the reader does already realize that a claim of the type "all men want x" (or even "the overwhelming majority of men want x") is stupid, while my point was that for many people, "all men want x" is a perfectly reasonable claim.
Do you have examples of people agreeing with what they believe to be a claim of the type "all men want x"?
So far I've only seen people a) disagreeing with what they interpret as such claims on the grounds they are unreasonable and b) saying that others will mistakenly agree with the unreasonable interpretation and find it reasonable.
I seem to remember running into such people, but don't remember any particular occasion well enough to give a cite.
You can demonstrate an absurd case, but check this out:
"On average, men are taller than women."
Note the utter dearth of twisted, tortured forced phrasing and the way it totally requires no linguistic effort to generate that context if you just stop to think before you speak. If someone disputes that, they're either clearly wrong or have an interesting study to look at (and probably debunk).
I'm a woman and I'm 6'5'' (taller than 99.9999% of women last time I checked), but I can't see what's wrong with stating it that way. Your reply is kind of a straw example of what's being asked.
This was a good example, but I think you probably missed a part of the message. Or maybe I am imagining a part that did not exist.
Generally, people are speaking imprecisely. To state one's opinion with a mathematical precision as you did, is rare. (For example, writing this paragraph I would have a problem to precisely define what "generally" and "rare" mean in this context.) And when normally speaking, people tolerate this. ...uhm, usually.
Asking people to be precise is also a signal of something. We usually don't demand perfect clarity for every sentence we ever read or hear, even on LW. I suppose we usually demand it when we disagree with one's opinion.
Placing a burden of preciseness on some people or some opinions, provides their opponents cheap counter-attacks, when they don't have to discuss the argument, only point out the impreciseness.
Now, carefully crafting one's comments into precise sentences is possible, but has a non-zero cost. So by selectively asking people, whose opinion we don't like, to be more precise than usual, we make them pay for their dissent. All while pretending that we only care about the truth, without taking sides.
Of course, people learn that they are asked for higher precision only when expressing certain opinions, so if they want to avoid the costs of such speech, they avoid the sensitive topics. But that's the point, isn't it? By increasing standards of speech for certain opinion, we gradually make it disappear.
I think that people often feel when this is done to them, but it's kind of difficult for them to express what is happening, without seeming kind of paranoid. Also it's kind of difficult to express your feelings in a situation when an extra dose of preciseness is required.
Summary: It is possible to selectively use demands for precision as a form of censorship.
I don't want "perfect clarity* from people, I want for the people on this site who make declarative statements about groups of people they're not in (especially when the implications shape their behavior toward members of that group) to be factually-accurate and not misleading in their implications. This is not a complex or censorious idea.
I don't want "politically correct", I want actually correct. Do you see the difference? What I want to see is people not committing the ecological fallacy (Population X is statistically Y on average, ergo more members than not will be Y) and nobody pointing it out just because the conclusions are agreeable to a majority on this site.
I do not have the power, let alone the desire, to censor you or any other poster on this site (other than by means of downvoting a comment, and I only get the one downvote).
If this was applied consistently for all low status groups I wouldn't mind it.
I'd certainly prefer it that way myself, and try to implement that in my approach to such discussions.
If your objection is over our perceptions of which groups are low-status and in what contexts, say that.
I'm not saying I object (at least not in the way some have). What I'm implicitly refering to is that these kind of usage disputes only ever arise when it comes to gender relations.
Can't speak for anyone else, but I've brought this up re: race and sexual orientation as well in conversations on this site. I don't go looking for it, so the conversation usually has to be fairly current (ie, comments are showing up on the sidebar or it was recently posted to Discussion).
In general I don't start conversations about such things here because I'm well aware my own beliefs and perspective on issues like this are in the minority on this site, and if there's one thing I don't need more of in my life it's arguing with a population comprised mostly of wealthy, white Libertarian-esque cisgendered/heterosexual men whether or not you can be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot.
I'm much more apt to get involved in an existing conversation when some comment grabs my attention and I feel able to reply (or provoked to annoyance by it -- that happens). I critique what passes into my attention, assuming I've get the energy and wherewithal to get into what will most likely be another unproductive argument about it (unproductive because apparently it just feels like mind-killing politics to many of the posters here, who don't have some hands-on experience with being in a social minority and are not apt to readily grasp the difference between "I am angry/hurt by this AND think it is incorrect" and "my disagreement is purely emotional").
Precision is a way of fighting availability bias-- if all you see is "women are shorter than men" because most women are in fact shorter than most men, then it can be hard to remember that there are women who are taller than most men.
Agreed; this is also important.
It also seems to lead to treating actual examples (say, of taller women) as irrelevant, simply because they're in a numerical minority.
My point was that I suspect that a presence of "politically incorrect" ideas increases our desire for actual correctness, while an absence of such ideas makes us relax.
Perhaps this bias already has a name; I don't remember it. It means requiring stronger evidence to ideas you disagree with; and not being aware of it.
If you require the same level of proof for both "politically correct" and "politically incorrect" comments, then it is OK. But it seems to me that in many discussions the level of proof rises up at the moment that "politically incorrect" opinions are introduced.
EDIT: Of course, even if my hypothesis is true, this is not an evidence for "politically incorrect" ideas (that would just be trying to reverse stupidity).
EDIT2: I would like to taboo the term "politically incorrect" in this comment, but I can't find a short enough substitute with the same expressive power. I would like to make it more group-dependent, not outside-world-dependent. It is supposed to mean: something that a decent member of this group would hesitate to say, because the morality keepers of this group will obviously disagree.
It's pretty clear that if we're dealing with ideas whose incorrect versions have great potential to do harm, then we should be careful to only disseminate the correct versions. It's a question of epistemic hygiene and minimizing the effects of contaminated mindware.
If we were discussing the recipe for a food that tasted marvelous when prepared correctly, but could cause severe poisoning when prepared incorrectly, then I would want people to be precise and careful in their wording as well. "Requiring stronger evidence for ideas you disagree with" doesn't have much to do with it: it's a straightforward expected utility calculation.
Suppose someone made the comment that "men and women are equal." Would that statement be acceptable, or would it need revision for preciseness?
(To try and not bias your response, I'll hold off on explaining the utility calculation I made with regards to that statement.)
What would be the context of the comment, and what sense of "equal" is implied?
For instance, I probably wouldn't object to someone saying "men and women are equal" if it was clear from the context that they meant "men and women should have equal rights". On the other hand, there are a variety of well-documented statistical differences between men and women, and trying to deny some of those might be harmful.
E.g. I've often heard it claimed that the difference in average pay between women and men is mostly attributable to differences in ambition and time voluntarily spent at home with children. I haven't looked at the matter enough to know if this is true. But if it is, then denying any population-level differences between men and women seems harmful, because it implies that something that actually has an innocuous explanation is because of discrimination.
"Taboo" itself actually sounds about right, although it carries connotations of low value that may not be what you're going for.
I misread what you meant. Sorrry for adding noise.
Yeah, I'm familiar with Rationalist Taboo, and I was looking for a substitute for "politically incorrect" fitting the description provided. "Taboo", in its sense of "culturally forbidden" rather than its sense of "party game about avoiding words", is what I came up with. Sorry if that lacked clarity.
There are several reasons to play Rationalist Taboo, though; I'd assumed that the grandparent wanted to drop the phrase mainly because of its political loading (which seems to be causing some problems here), not because of any implicit assumptions or ambiguity of definition that needs to get aired out. In which case brevity would be no sin.
Misleading-ness isn't a property of a statement, but of a statement-interpreter pair.
So if people claim statements are misleading because some other minds will misinterpret it to the detriment of their in-group, when there is no sign such misinterpreters exist in significant number, that seems like a power grab (independent of the question of whether or not that group should have more power) at the expense of the principle of charity.
Thus wouldn't be the case if people were leaving comments arguing against what they thought were authors' beliefs with them wrong about the author's beliefs, or agreeing with what they thought were the authors' beliefs with them wrong about the author's beliefs.
Now now, insight like that might slow the evaporative cooling that has been happening on Lesswrong when it comes to gender and sexuality (and to a much lesser extent on all unPC matters). Thinkers here used to be much less burdened by this, makes even a fool hard pressed to chuckle.
This comment is shockingly insightful and I would like to thank you for it.