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ialdabaoth comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong
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We need to get rid of the idea that should-universe thinking is bad. Should-universe thinking is a piss-poor way to make predictions, but it's the only way we've got for making goals.
Should-universe thinking is a necessity for engineers.
"I have a right to look hot, they have no right to catcall me, they do catcall me if I look hot, THEREFORE I should re-engineer the universe so that the process that leads from looking hot to catcalls is interrupted or replaced by a differentially preferred process."
Now you have a goal: Create a universe where a woman looking hot --/--> catcalls.
Now you need to form hypotheses and collect experimental evidence about the process you're attempting to effect (woo science!). Then, you need to work out strategies for effecting that process (woo engineering!). Then, you need to work out support systems to implement those strategies (woo economics!). Then, you need to implement those strategies (woo politics!).
This sounds remarkably like what's happening.
In the science phase, you have three-plus "waves" of feminist theory, each with their own ideas of why social processes tend to impact women differently than men. This makes sense; it models the tendencies in other science to build on, revise, and sometimes even completely overthrow earlier models.
In the engineering phase, you have all sorts of activists movements, advocating for change in various directions. As the science improves, some of those activists cling to outdated notions, while others move on or are replaced by better-informed activists, and the landscape of solutions changes.
In the socioeconomic phase, those activist movements rally their allies and gather resources until they're ready to affect behavior, through legislation and marketing and awareness and outreach campaigns.
Then, in the political phase, those legislative and marketing and outreach initiatives get launched, and have their effects, and the social landscape changes - hopefully towards universal justice and away from Pareto concentrations of privilege.
Sure, if they said "I could be spared catcalls by looking ugly, but I refuse to save my own neck until the problem is fixed for all my sisters", like straight couples refusing to marry until gay marriage is legal or something. But they appear to be rejecting the premise, either by denying it (which seems inaccurate) or claiming it's evil to say it.
I disagree with that statement.
Those who seem to be denying the premise, or claiming that it's evil to say it, are actually attempting to attack a social process, not a truth-finding process.
The problem is that the fact "agents who perform <X> tend to have higher incidences of <Y> happen to them", where <X> means "send signals that can be interpreted as sexual availability by a male audience" and <Y> means "sexual assault", is that it isn't simply a statement of fact - it's also an attempt at social norming. It's a direct process of rectifying is-ought, by saying "see? you sluts deserve it", without having to actually say "see? you sluts deserve it".
When facts gain sufficient social baggage that they tend to imply behavior associated with the people speaking them, those facts have become memetically corrupted. At that point, you can no longer deal with them as pure facts; you HAVE to deal with the meme. Engaging with the "pure fact" allows people with an agenda to slip in the meme like a trojan horse, in the guise of "just stating the facts".
Don't blame the people who appear to be fighting the facts in this case; blame the people who deliberately conflated the fact with the meme vector, because they deliberately corrupted the factual landscape in order to promote their agenda.
And yes, in these cases, concepts like "blame" are important, because we're talking about competing social agendas, and humans are notoriously bad at abstract consequentialism. If you must step back all the way, examine the kinds of worlds that both sides are supporting, and then evaluate whether speaking the truth is possible given the strategies employed by both sides - and if it isn't, encyst the truth and wait for the environment to shift to be more truth-favorable, THEN examine it in the light of that environment.
I tried to explicitly distinguish "this sounds like a sensible policy for the selfish individual, given that douchebags aren't yet under control" and "anyone who doesn't apply that policy deserves douchebags unleashed upon them". That went over everyone's heads. Is there any way to disclaim? It should at least be possible in theory - if someone chooses driving over flying because they get sick in planes, nobody will be less than sympathetic if their car crashes.
The problem is that we've had 50+ years of "dog whistle" politics applied explicitly to social justice discussions, so even if you try to explicitly distinguish your statement as the former and not the latter, it is more rational to assume that you are lying than that you are telling the truth. If you are telling the truth, then this is not your fault - but it is also not the fault of your audience, who are receiving your communication on a poisoned channel.
Luckily, there is an newish Overcoming Bias article about this very subject:
Can a Tiny Bit of Noise Destroy Communication?
EDIT: Note to whomever just systematically downvoted the last 25 articles and posts I made to this site over the course of 8 minutes: is that behavior actually in any way helpful? Does it, in fact, increase the probability that you, or I, or anyone else becomes more rational? If not, why do it?
Inorite! But I'd expect it to be possible for a politician, and, a fortiori, a Less Wronger, to say something along the lines of: "We have too much centralized legislation, and states should be more autonomous. And yes, I know the last time someone said that he was implying that segregation was okay. But I'm seriously talking about the denotation of 'states' rights' here, and obviously 'not being super racist' is part of the stuff I'm not proposing to leave up to states, like, duh. So about giving states more power...". Dog-whistles rest on, perhaps not subtlety, but at least subtext - explicitly disclaiming it looks sufficient in my model. What did I miss?
You missed the inevitable arms-race between mimics and legitimate signalers. We're in an evolutionary environment, and assuming that any communication can be taken at face value is a kind of naïveté.
If you want to construct an argument where state's rights (or women sensibly protecting themselves) is important, you have to spend extra effort in your signaling. You need to START by explicitly acknowledging all of the things you might be accused of, BEFORE you present your actual point. You then have to specifically display all of the ways in which your point differs from the false (dog-whistle) signal. For example:
This is the wrong order, and expends insufficient effort in its signaling process to demonstrate that it is not a false signal. This works better:
"A. Most state's rights arguments are, in fact, racist dog-whistles. Unfortunately, some actual, legitimate situations in which states' rights are being trampled upon are swept under the rug, due in part to the poisoning of the discourse by those very dog-whistles.
B. Here is why states should be more autonomous...
C. Here is how we prevent the abuses of state autonomy that happened in the past, while rescuing the needed autonomy that I'm advocating..."
Your system starts with B, then inserts a weak form of A, then jumps back to B - while nearly-completely ignoring C. This is insufficient to distinguish you from a false signaller. By providing a good A, B, and C, you establish that you are willing to expend effort to not be seen as a false signaller (A), clearly present your position (B), and indicate that you recognize the dangers of the false signalers' agenda and are willing to help fight against it as a concession to getting the things you want (C).
Does all that make sense?
As far as I can tell the idea that catcalling and rape are unrelated to the way girls dress is stupid, and it's as useless to pay attention to the arguments of stupid feminists as it is to the arguments of stupid liberals, conservatives, christians, atheists, etc.
I would expect a reasonable feminist to argue that yes, clothes and makeup have an effect, but that the blame still lies fully on the shoulders of the men.
Taking this line to the extreme:
Even if the way they dress and instances of catcalling and rape were 100% correlated (that is, their odds of getting catcalled/raped depend only and always on how 'hot'/'slutty'/whatever they are dressed), the blame still would lie fully with the rapists.
It's like asserting that it's your fault you were victim of theft, because you owned things, and the more things you own the more likely you are to be a victim of theft, so you shouldn't ever have anything to steal; having things means you deserve to be stolen from.
To rephrase, perhaps more clearly, if X increases the odds that (Amoral Agent) K does Y to you instead of to someone else (i.e. K selects for X as targets to do Y upon), where Ks are some subset of the population, are you morally obligated to not-X, else you deserve Y?
How much is rape displaced vs reduced, when a potential rapist decides not to target a potential victim? You're sort of assuming 100% displacement here.
As "blame" goes, of course you jail rapists and support victims and only then collect "what were you wearing?" data for statistical research. "How do my clothing choices influence my likelihood to get raped?" is a rather salient question for many people, and girls at my school certainly avoid some actions they (usually mistakenly) believe increase risk.
Very much worth looking into more, IMO, but I'm not sure I assumed this that explicitly. If you change "to someone else" to "to someone else or not at all" in the last part of the grandparent, it counters the 100%-displacement notion more explicitly, but "K selects for X as targets to do Y" doesn't necessarily imply displacement.
Nevertheless, it's something worth distinguishing when trying to do utility estimations.
You seem to be confusing "you did X, which is a risk factor for Y" with "you did X, therefore you deserve Y".
That confusion exists strongly within the social landscape; perhaps what is needed is a more rigorous distinction between "views that have to be constantly defended against" and "facts which happen to be true", whenever the two happen to be bound together by some form of social assumption.
The problem is "well, I don't think that way" has turned into a poor signaling mechanism, so stronger (and more expensive) signals need to be developed.
EDIT: In the past 5 minutes, every post and comment I have ever made on this site has been downvoted, including ones made weeks ago, and including posts and comments which have nothing to do with this topic.
Can we please try to have a discussion, rather than engage in petty anonymous retribution?
Since you were replying to me, I'd like to take this opportunity to condemn this. Seriously, people, this defeats the whole purpose of the karma system. Play by the rules.
This sort of thing happens from time to time. It means you're posting the kind of thing that petty abusers don't like.
Similar thing happened to me earlier today after a post on this same topic. C'mon lesswrong.
Okay then. I'm submitting a bug report, requesting that the karma system be updated to prevent mass-downvoting. Ideally, if a single user downvotes multiple comments or articles by a specific other user within a short timespan, and the downvoted posts are spread across multiple articles, then some sort of flag should be raised to review the downvoter's actions.
Is there a sort of meta-lesswrong discussion where we can discuss stuff like this? I feel like it's something of a derail of the current topic.
Hm. Perhaps make a post in Discussion? This seems like a pretty good idea :)
Done
As Emile said, I was attempting to stress the point that people do confuse these, but it does not follow logically by any means (and isn't even remotely implied by any reasonable moral theory I've ever read about other than "Obey The Bible" (If you accept that moral theory as reasonable)).
The second paragraph compares my distinction with "what this confusion would look like if it were about theft"; a reductio ad absurdum attempt of the conflation of risk-factors with moral deservingness.
Edit: On that note, I apologize if my use of the ";" punctuation is nonstandard. I'll try to be more careful in my use of it in the future.
... oops. Guess I misread that.
Is he actually confusing those? It seems to me that he's taking pains to stress the difference!
... oops.
Except in the real world it's not a "risk factor" because if anything the causation works the other way around. People treat it like "asking for it" -> therefore nobody looks further than her to assign blame -> therefore she won't even bother to report it because the police would laugh at her -> therefore I will get away with it, again and again and again.
Once again, the fact that clothing can influence whether a rapist will choose you is not the same as the claim that this somehow shifts the blame to you if he does choose you. As it were.
I'm claiming he chooses women who have attributes that shift blame onto the victim. There is correlation, but the causation goes the other way from what you're thinking.
But when you choose your clothing, do you really care why he will choose you if you wear that particular item?
No, but you DO care why other people will shift the blame, because that's part of the process you're (hopefully) trying to re-engineer.
...if they had f-ing evidence to back that up. Otherwise "opinionated" is the label you want, not "reasonable". Before advancing an opinion, a reasonable person would go look for data.
True, my use of "stupid" and "reasonable" may have been a bit careless, my main point wasn't that believing that was stupid, but rather that one shouldn't pay too much attention to stupid arguments - in this context, MixedNuts was saying that feminist claimed X, though none in the thread who seem to identify as feminists agree with X.
But I still think that dressing in a "sexy" way does increase the chances of catcalling (for rape, probably too, but that covers a wider range of things than catcalling does). I'm not aware of any rigorous studies (your link seems like weak evidence in that favor, and most anecdotes in this thread and outside are in the same direction).
(I agree with the core of your criticism; even if my main point wasn't about stupidity in practice I was still sneaking in connotations)
That's not really the point, though. If clothes and makeup have no effect, then the blame is on the men by default, so the reasonable feminist only needs to consider the other case.
Or, of course, one could find data proving that the clothes and makeup definitely have no effect. But that's harder when you consider all the related issues: e.g. are women walking alone at night more likely to get raped? Our reasonable feminist might therefore be more interested in arguing that in all such cases the blame lies on the rapist (if for some reason this is being questioned) as opposed to nitpicking the concrete details.
???
Keep in mind which way the arguments are going. The feminist position is Y. One objection is that X isn't true and therefore Y can't be true either. However, Emile's reasonable feminists argue that even though X isn't true, Y is still true for unrelated reasons. So it's less relevant to bring up the possibility that X might be true after all.
I don't see why this merited such wide-target downvoting of my comments, but I'll bite: why didn't you direct your complaints to Emile for bringing up the apparently irrelevant tangent, rather than Morendil for correcting Emile's assumption?
I was responding to the claim that the feminists need "f-ing evidence" to claim that X is wrong.
So you think they should argue positively for "clothes and makeup have an effect", given no evidence?
Catcalling you can know through observations. It's hard to get data on rape. The studies in Morendil's conflict, though they seem to show that the effect depends on context. There's also the confounding factor that rapists select victims who will be blamed for their rape, and that clothing is related to that.
I don't think there's one identical motivation for all rapes, but I expect through enormous extrapolation and intuitive hand-waving that power is more often a motivation than sexual attraction.