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LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance
Standard Intro
The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.
About two months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post. There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts.
Seven women submitted, totaling about 18 pages.
Crocker's Warning- Submitters were told to not hold back for politeness. You are allowed to disagree, but these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post
To the submittrs- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.
Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)
Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.
Minimizing the Inferential Distance
One problem that I think exists in discussions about gender issues between men and women, is that the inferential distance is much greater than either group realizes. Women might assume that men know what experiences women might face, and so not explicitly mention specific examples. Men might assume they know what the women are talking about, but have never really heard specific examples. Or they might assume that these types of things only happened in the past, or not to the types of females in their in-group
So for the first post in this series, I thought it would be worthwhile to try to lower this inferential distance, by sharing specific examples of what it's like as a smart/geeky female. When submitters didn't know what to write, I directed them to this article, by Julia Wise (copied below), and told them to write their own stories. These are not related to LW culture specifically, but rather meant to explain where the women here are coming from. Warning: This article is a collection of anecdotes, NOT a logical argument. If you are not interested in anecdotes, don't read it.
Copied from the original article (by a woman on LW) on Radiant Things:
It's lunchtime in fourth grade. I am explaining to Leslie, who has no friends but me, why we should stick together. “We're both rejects,” I tell her. She draws back, affronted. “We're not rejects!” she says. I'm puzzled. It hadn't occurred to me that she wanted to be normal.
…................
It's the first week of eighth grade. In a lesson on prehistory, the teacher is trying and failing to pronounce “Australopithecus.” I blurt out the correct pronunciation (which my father taught me in early childhood because he thought it was fun to say). The boy next to me gives me a glare and begins looking for alliterative insults. “Fruity female” is the best he can manage. “Geek girl” seems more apt, but I don't suggest it.
…..................
It's lunchtime in seventh grade. I'm sitting next to my two best friends, Bridget and Christine, on one side of a cafeteria table. We have been obsessed with Star Wars for a year now, and the school's two male Star Wars fans are seated opposite us. Under Greyson's leadership, we are making up roleplaying characters. I begin describing my character, a space-traveling musician named Anya. “Why are your characters always girls?” Grayson complains. “Just because you're girls doesn't mean your characters have to be.”
“Your characters are always boys,” we retort. He's right, though – female characters are an anomaly in the Star Wars universe. George Lucas (a boy) populated his trilogy with 97% male characters.
…................
It's Bridget's thirteenth birthday, and four of us are spending the night at her house. While her parents sleep, we are roleplaying that we have been captured by Imperials and are escaping a detention cell. This is not papers-and-dice roleplaying, but advanced make-believe with lots of pretend blaster battles and dodging behind furniture.
Christine and Cass, aspiring writers, use roleplaying as a way to test out plots in which they make daring raids and die nobly. Bridget, a future lawyer, and I, a future social worker, use it as a way to test out moral principles. Bridget has been trying to persuade us that the Empire is a legitimate government and we shouldn't be trying to overthrow it at all. I've been trying to persuade Amy that shooting stormtroopers is wrong. They are having none of it.
We all like daring escapes, though, so we do plenty of that.
…...............
It's two weeks after the Columbine shootings, and the local paper has run an editorial denouncing parents who raise "geeks and goths." I write my first-ever letter to the editor, defending geeks as kids parents should be proud of. A girl sidles up to me at the lunch table. "I really liked your letter in the paper," she mutters, and skitters away.
................
It's tenth grade, and I can't bring myself to tell the president of the chess club how desperately I love him. One day I go to chess club just to be near him. There is only one other girl there, and she's really good at chess. I'm not, and I spend the meeting leaning silently on a wall because I can't stand to lose to a boy. Anyway, I despise the girls who join robotics club to be near boys they like, and I don't want to be one of them.
................
It's eleventh grade, and we are gathered after school to play Dungeons and Dragons. (My father, who originally forbid me to play D&D because he had heard it would lead us to hack each other to pieces with axes, has relented.) Christine is Dungeonmaster, and she has recruited two feckless boys to play with us. One of them is in love with her.
(Nugent points out that D&D is essentially combat reworked for physically awkward people, a way of reducing battle to dice rolls and calculations. Christine has been trained by her uncle in the typical swords-and-sorcery style of play, but when she and I play the culture is different. All our adventures feature pauses for our characters to make tea and omelets.)
On this afternoon, our characters are venturing into the countryside and come across two emaciated farmers who tell us their fields are unplowed because dark elves from the forest keep attacking them. “They're going to starve if they don't get a crop in the ground,” I declare. “We've got to plow at least one field.” The boys go along with this plan.
“The farmers tell you their plow has rusted and doesn't work,” the Dungeonmaster informs us from behind her screen.
I persist. “There's got to be something we can use. I look around to see if there's anything else pointy I can use as a plow.”
The Dungeonmaster considers. “There's a metal gate,” she decides.
“Okay, I rig up some kind of harness and hitch it to the pony.”
“It's rusty too,” intones the Dungeonmaster, “and pieces of it keep breaking off. Look, you're not supposed to be farming. You're supposed to go into the forest and find the dark elves. I don't have anything else about the farmers. The elves are the adventure.” Reluctantly, I give up my agricultural rescue plan and we go into the forest to hack at elves.
…............................
I'm 25 and Jeff's sister's boyfriend is complaining that he never gets to play Magic: the Gathering because he doesn't know anyone who plays. “You could play with Julia,” Jeff suggests.
“Very funny,” says Danner, rolling his eyes.
Jeff and I look at each other. I realize geeks no longer read me as a geek. I still love ideas, love alternate imaginings of how life could be, love being right, but now I care about seeming normal.
“...I wasn't joking,” Jeff says.
“It's okay,” I reassure Danner. “I used to play every day, but I've pretty much forgotten how.”
…............................
A's Submission
My creepy/danger alert was much higher at a meeting with a high-status (read: supposedly utility-generating, which includes attractive in the sense of pleasing or exciting to look at, but mostly the utility is supposed to be from actions, like work or play) man who was supposed to be my boss for an internship.
The way he talked about the previous intern, a female, the sleazy way he looked while reminiscing and then had to smoke a cigarette, while in a meeting with me, my father (an employer who was abusive), and the internship program director, plus the fact that when I was walking towards the meeting room, the employees of the company, all men, stared at me and remarked, “It’s a girl,” well, I became so creeped out that I didn’t want to go back. It was hard, as a less articulate 16 year-old, to explain to the internship director all that stuff without sounding irrational. But not being able to explain my brain’s priors (incl. abuses that it had previously been too naïve/ignorant to warn against and prevent) wasn’t going to change them or decrease the avoidance-inducing fear and anxiety.
So after some awkward attempts to answer the internship director’s question of why I didn’t want to work there, I asked for a placement with a different company, which she couldn’t do, unfortunately.
B's Submission
Words from my father’s mouth, growing up: “You *need* to be able to cook and keep a clean house, or what man would want to marry you?”
…................
Sixth grade year, I had absolutely no friends whatsoever. A boy I had a bit of a crush on asked me out on a dare. I told him “no,” and he walked back to his laughing friends.
…................
In college I joined the local SCA (medieval) group, and took up heavy weapons combat. The local (almost all-male) “stick jocks” were very supportive and happy to help. Many had even read “The Armored Rose” and so knew about female-specific issues and how to adapt what they were teaching to deal with things like a lower center of gravity, less muscle mass, a different grip, and ingrained cultural hang-ups. The guys were great. But there was one problem: There was no female-sized loaner armor.
See, armor is an expensive investment for a new hobby, and so local groups provide loaner armor for newbies, which generally consist of hand-me-downs from the more experienced fighters. We had a decent amount of new female fighters in our college groups, but without a pre-existing generation of female fighters (women hadn’t even been allowed to fight until the 80s) there wasn’t anything to hand down.
The only scar I ever got from heavy combat was armor bite from wearing much-too-large loaner armor. I eventually got my own kit, and (Happy Ending) the upcoming generation of our group always made sure to acquire loaner armor for BOTH genders.
…................
Because of a lack of options, and not really having anywhere else to go, I moved in with my boyfriend and got married at a rather young age (20 and 22, respectively). I had no clue how to be independent. One of the most empowering things I ever did was starting work as an exotic dancer. After years of thinking that I couldn't support myself, it gave me the confidence that I could leave an unhappy marriage without ending up on the street (or more likely, mooching off friends and relatives). Another Happy Ending- Now I'm completely independent.
…................
Walking into the library. A man holds open the door for me. I smile and thank him as I walk through. He makes a sexual comment. I do the Look-Straight-Ahead-and-Walk-Quickly thing.
“Bitch,” he spits out.
It’s not the first of this kind of interaction in my life, and it most certainly won’t be the last (almost any time you are in an urban environment, without a male). But it hit harder than most because I had been expecting a polite interaction.
Relevant link: http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/why-men-catcall/
…................
The next post will be on Group Attribution Error, and will come out when I get around to it. :P
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Comments (1254)
Was the next post in this sequence ever actually submitted?
Ultimately, these [and other] stereotypes wind up being self-fulfilling prophecies. If one is chastized for being a nerd despite not being one, one figures "If I'm gonna be made fun of for being a nerd either way, I might as well actually be one". If one were to group gender differences into [unavoidable] biological differences and [avoidable] behavioral differences, I doubt either would be responsible for causing the other. The only conclusion I can see is that behavioral differences were only caused by expectations of behavioral differences. If we stop expecting to see differences, in time we actually won't. Even a RNG will seem to exhibit patterns to one who looks with the expectation of seeing patterns.
I'm male. The anecdoes above are only not shocking to me because I've read a bunch of geek feminism / feminism by geeks before.
I (male) am reminded of an incident as I was leaving from work one night. It was raining at least moderately, and I had an umbrella with me. There was a (female) coworker who was leaving right behind. (She works at a different office location, but we see and greet each other occasionally.) She did not appear to have an umbrella or other rain gear, and in any case was carrying a decent amount of stuff and had both hands full. I asked if she wanted to share my umbrella and she declined; we talked for a bit until we parted ways but I didn't push the issue further. I felt a little bit guilty afterwards, but brushed it off eventually because she made her choice.
Did I make the correct choice by asking? I cannot picture myself asking if the coworker had been a man. I can only speculate reasons she might have declined... She was suspicious of me? She likes the rain? Would you do anything different if you were in her situation, or mine?
Why wouldn't you offer to assist a male who had no umbrella? That seems rather uncharitable of you.
It does, and the fact that I have implicit gender norms/behaviors like that bothers me. There's also other factors to take into consideration; all things being equal I'd prefer to associate with people in my age group (I'm on the low end of the age scale here - edit: I mean at my workplace, not on LW), and if she wasn't at a different site but rather a direct higher-up over me, it would be extremely awkward to offer the umbrella.
My thought is that it would be best not to offer in the particular situation you gave. That is, it was night, and presumably there was no life-threatening danger to her from the rain.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with being generous, but there are always other factors to consider. If, for example, you want to hold doors open for people or offer to carry heavy things, that is fine, as long as you do that for everyone consistently and don't take offense if anyone refuses. Also, you may want to consider the context. Even if you are not a scary person, offering to help somone with a minor task if the area is dark and/or deserted can be perceived much differently than in a more typical context.
I would advise you to continue to make the effort to recognize when you may be conforming to undesireable cultural norms, as you have been doing here. That is the first step to taking action on this extremely pervasive issue.
I agree with shminux (about the analysis, not about the recommended action). This is something I didn't fully understand until I read Cialdini. There's a section in there about reciprocation that really helped me grok the basic idea that people generally feel that they should return favors, and some people in some situations don't want to receive favors because they don't want the corresponding debt. This is particularly the case for women receiving favors from men, where the debt is usually at least implicitly sexual in nature (e.g. buying a woman a drink at a bar).
I think you just shouldn't have said anything. If she wanted to make use of your umbrella she could've initiated that instead.
People can be atrociously and remarkably bad at asking for help, or even noticing that they need or could use some help.
This is independent of and multiplied by all the social complications and signalling factors involved. As per schminux's explanation, asking for help (use of the umbrella) in this case would socially be interpreted as even more of a favor-debt, and possibly even as a signal of implicitly-romantic-interest (like a woman asking you to buy her a drink at a bar).
Yes, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea to point this out. Let me put it in more LW-friendly terms: when a woman sees an unfamiliar man offering to help her in some way, she assigns nontrivial probability to the hypothesis that the man is offering to help her for sexual reasons, and she assigns nontrivial probability to the hypothesis that the man is going to be angry and possibly violent if she rejects the sexual advances she expects, with nontrivial probability, to occur later if she accepts that help. This situation has sufficiently negative utility that it is worth avoiding even if the probability of it happening is not all that high.
Haha, that's an awesome way to word it.
But yeah, I was already agreeing with that part.
My point is only that, to the same woman, it's my understanding that many cases of initiating the interaction will look even worse.
Thus, the real problem to find a solution for is "How does one credibly signal need or offer for help while optimizing the chances that it will have a positive result and avoid social failure modes?", or something close to that, and the solution definitely doesn't look like "Do your own thing and don't ask for help or offer help".
Fair. I don't know a great solution to this problem, and "do your own thing" is at least not as bad as various other possibilities.
If you ask and she agrees, it appears to create an implicit favor she was probably uncomfortable with. The term "share" also conveys an uncomfortable connotation of closeness. I bet that if you simply held an umbrella over her head matter-of-factly, she would not have objected and possibly even thanked you later.
I guess that would depend, among other things, on what tone of voice you use and on which ways you've interacted with her so far. (I've had people who I'm sure beyond reasonable doubt they're not sexually attracted to me offer to share their umbrella as recently as this week.)
Anyway, I remember being offered to share an umbrella by a complete stranger of the gender other than mine when I was in my teens (and I understood pretty much f***-all about gender dynamics) -- I declined mostly because I was in a hurry and didn't want her to have to walk as fast as me.
(I don't remember my exact phrasing of the question.) Your view is interesting, because to me that action would fall into borderline-creep behavior - intruding on personal space without asking.
A non-sudden matter-of-fact move with a few words can help reduce the chances of that, especially if it's all done in a certain Notice ->BeginHelping / ShowYouCanHelp -> GiveAnEscapeRoute+OfferMoreHelp pattern.
If someone is carrying heavy bags and looks like they're about to fall a flight of stairs, I put up my arm to help and then ask if they want help, or some other signal of offer-for-assistance that gives some kind of opening to say "No thanks" or walk away.
If your actions and/or words pattern-match to this kind of intervention, then the vast majority of people will look positively upon it, IME.
Indeed, and yet it may also work.
The "creepyness" rules are not formulated to make one effective at social interaction, they are formulated to prevent creepy behaviour. Those goals may conflict.
More cynically (not necessarily my opinion), the stated rules are damaging to people who follow them, because when people think them up, they think of someone they wouldn't like, and then think of rules that they would like such a person to follow. No incentive to think of the misliked person's best interests.
I suppose some women could misinterpret it this way. But given that "we see and greet each other occasionally" she should be brave enough to refuse your unsolicited umbrella if she felt uncomfortable. But yes, you would be running a bit of a risk.
I wouldn't share an umbrella even with someone I'm perfectly comfortable intersecting space with. It's hard and awkward and you get rained on anyway.
It depends on how big the umbrella is. Some are large enough to cover two people without them even touching each other. (A pocket umbrella, on the other hand, I'd only share if the other person is someone I'm OK with hugging, or if it's raining so hard that getting wet would be even more uncomfortable.)
Well the trick is, the offerer holds the umbrella over the recipient's head and gets wet.
Speaking only for myself, I think asking whether help is welcome and taking rejection politely is a good combination.
Any thoughts about whether the world would be a better place if men were comfortable offering each other that sort of help and accepting it some of the time?
Now I'm starting to wonder whether there might be cultural differences. ISTM that where I am (Italy), offering to share an umbrella with someone you know is just politeness, and people do it pretty often regardless of gender. (Likewise, people of either gender hold doors open for people (including strangers) of either gender all the time, and it would have never occurred to me that this might have anything to do with sexuality if I hadn't read that on the internet.)
I can't imagine it would be a /worse/ world, in any case. If it were raining harder, I would theoretically be more willing to offer help, regardless of gender (and despite at least one personal anecdotal experience agreeing with Alicorn's comment). It just seems "wrong" (cold, unfriendly) if I hadn't offered, in my situation, regardless of whether aid was accepted or not.
As a data point for the 'inferential distance' hypothesis, I'd like to note that I found nothing in the above quotes that was even slightly surprising or unfamiliar to me. This is exactly what I'd expect it to be like to grow up as a 'geeky' or 'intellectual' woman in the West, and it's also a good example of the sorts of incidents I'd expect women to come up with when asked to describe their experiences. So when I write things that the authors of these anecdotes disagree with, the difference of opinion is probably due to something else.
is this what oppression feels like? i can't write a comment reply to the daenerys post because it's like the subculture i'm in is so trigger-happy with demonization that i'm too afraid to even try to move them
I would like to second Swimmer's request for a PM, if you're still interested in replying to this post.
I for one would like to hear what you have to say about the post, and I won't downvote you. If you don't want to get down voted by others, send me a PM and I promise I will read it thoughtfully no matter what my intuitive response is.
...ish? Kinda? Not really, it's more like the experience you're describing maps to an occasional part of what oppression feels like -- but it captures only a very narrow slice of the picture. It would be like touching your own arm, and then wondering if this is what sex feels like.
Yes, that is what oppression feels like. (Albeit it is oppression only within a community that does not form a significant part of your life.)
This is no comment either way about whether or not people's treatment (or expected treatment) of your comments is undesirable or inappropriate. I haven't seen them and have very little inclination to personally get involved (or read) this post given the politics vs insight ratio the subject produces. Nevertheless, and right or wrong, what you experience can be accurately described as what oppression feels like.
Oppression? No. Calling these sorts of incidents 'oppression' trivializes the suffering of the disenfranchised millions who live in daily fear of beatings, lynching or rape because of their religion or ethnicity, and must try to survive while knowing that others can rob them and destroy their possessions with impunity and they have no legal recourse. You might as well call having to shake hands with a man you don't like 'rape'.
Incidents on the level of those mentioned here are inevitable in any society that has even the slightest degree of diversity. Everyone has been treated badly by members of a different group at some point in their life, and responsible adults are expected to get over it and get on with things.
I'm not downvoting this comment because I don't want to increase the chance of people being penalized for answering it.
From my point of view, you're punishing Will because he's learning something, but not quite in the way you want him to. He's made himself somewhat vulnerable by asking a question.
Depends on the venue. In some places, telling the truth about your internal states is valued more highly.
Look more closely at the context, in particular the description of the experienced internal feeling and the resulting self-suppression of identity. Regarding triviality I refer you to the word "albeit" which prefaces a more than adequate acknowledgement of scope. You may further observe that I explicitly refrained from judging whether the treatment of Will was appropriate or not, much less to what degree it was inappropriate---because getting caught up with how "bad" the people are behaving to the person completely misses the point
No. I might not. And not just because the scale of the outrage. Primarily because that implies that the man is a "rapist" when we have no indication that it is him who is forcing the other to have the hand shaking (or have sex). If neither the disliked man nor "you" wishes to have sex but for some reason you are coerced to have sex with each other then he is not raping you.
This may be the way now, but it doesn't have to be the way always. Max Hastings, my favourite WW2 historian, says in his All Hell Let Loose:
In other words, a boy being bullied at school or a girl shrinking in disgust and fear from a drunken man's cat-call do experience suffering and negative emotion on their own scale of awfulness - and the fact that millions of people in the 3rd world have it much worse "objectively" doesn't take away from the trauma of a "minor" incident in a happier life.
Of course, the objectively worse suffering in the 3rd world should be dealt with as a higher priority. But this doesn't mean that, given a choice of spending a bit of resources and attention on relief from such "minor" evils (at a low enough alternative cost), we should tell their victims: "Stop whining, we don't care."
If we stop aspiring to treat every individual according to our ideals - as sacred, an end in themselves - then there's no Schelling point to stop at; we might as well come to some absurd hedonic utilitarianism, painting smiles on souls, or overwriting people's brains with a simple utility function, or such! Did you, perchance, choose specks on torture vs. specks? If you did, please think and reflect hard before discounting "minor" oppression.
The problem with this seemingly high-minded ideal is that every intervention has a cost, and they add up quickly. When oppression is blatant, violent and extreme it's relatively easy to identify, the benefits of mitigating it are large, and the cost to society is low. But when the 'oppression' is subtle and weak, consisting primarily of personal conversations or even private thoughts of individuals, the reverse is true. You find yourself restricting freedom of speech, religion and association, creating an expanding maze of ever-more-draconian laws governing every aspect of life, throwing out core legal principles like innocent until proven guilty and the right to confront one's accusers - and even then, success is unlikely.
Another important factor is the fact that those who consider themselves victims will never be satisfied, and indeed this whole campaign in their name quickly ceases to improve their lives to any measurable degree. As you noted yourself, individuals tend to rate the trauma of an unpleasant incident relative to their own experiences. So once you stamp out the big, easily measured objective forms of oppression, you find yourself on a treadmill where working harder and harder to suppress the little stuff doesn't do any good. Each generation feels that they're as oppressed as the one before, even if objectively things have changed dramatically in their favor. The only way off the treadmill is for the 'victim' group to stop viewing every experience through the lens of imagined oppression.
Do you seriously think that proves we shouldn't try to stop what we asses to be "oppression"? Diminishing returns do not equal zero returns.
You either missed the point of the grandparent, or are missing some of the prerequisite concepts needed to think clearly about this subject, it seems to me.
I'm quite certain that Multiheaded is well aware of the law of diminishing returns and its implications, and has a fairly good grasp of how to do expected utility evaluations. Everything else you said in your post was, AFAICT, already all stated or implied by the grandparent, except:
I find this claim dubious. I consider myself a victim of the oppressive historical patriarchy and dominance of gender-typing, and yet I'm fully satisfied with the current, ongoing efforts and measures that people all around the world are doing to fix it, as well as my own personal involvement and the efforts of my close circles.
Those are not particularly convincing examples of Good Principles that we'd want to have in an ideal society that we should aspire towards. My own brain is screeching at the first three in particular, and finds the named legal principles crude and unrefined when compared to other ideals to aspire to.
That has not been my impression. Some advocates might think things are as bad as they were 5 years ago, but I'm not aware of anyone with influence who thinks things are as bad as 50 years ago. Or any advocate at all who thinks no improvement has happened in the last 500 years.
That wasn't ewbrownv's assertion.
His assertion is that if you scanned the brain of a victim 50 or 500 years ago you'd find the same amount of subjective "oppressed feeling" as scanning a modern victim, i.e., that people have an "oppression set point" similar to the happiness set point.
Well, 500 years ago there was plenty of brutal physical oppression going on, and I'd expect that kind of thing to have lots of other negative effects on top of the first-order emotional reactions of the victims.
But I would claim that if you did a big brain-scan survey of, say, Western women from 1970 to the present, you'd see very little correlation between their subjective feeling of oppression and their actual treatment in society.
Another angle on context: when I was a kid, I read a book by a holocaust survivor. Towards the end, she wrote about her current situation, which included being worried about heart disease.
I remember being surprised, and then realizing that I'd assumed that if you'd been through the holocaust, nothing much smaller could frighten you, and that my assumption was wrong.
I was going to upvote this until I got to the last sentence which seems both needlessly inflammatory and not accurate. The essential point you've made does however seem to have some validity: There's a scale difference in different types of mistreatment, and using the same word for all of them is something that can easily cause connotative problems.
Yes, but how common are those actions? For example, as someone who is of Ashkenazic Jewish descent in the US, I occasionally get mistreatment based on my obvious ethnic heritage. But such events are extremely rare- I can literally count the ones I remember on one hand. That's distinct from some other groups- for example if I were a black man living in the US I'd likely have a list of incidents orders of magnitude larger.
I agree.
Will, would you be willing to describe how this sort of social disapproval is different from the fun sort of disapproval of trolling?
Not even close.
Constructive suggestion regarding the rest: PM someone (e.g. me?) who doesn't seem to be being demonized or downvoted much in this article/thread and ask them if they're willing to help by posting for you / reviewing / pointing out where people are likely to block while reading and just downvote you.
I'm not going to spend much effort in the comment section here because my activity will only empower the ideological dynamic at work. I refuse to engage in a losing strategy. Read Mencius Moldbug on why Conservatism always fails (this isn't a good place to start reading him, seek other recommendations then return to the linked piece) to see which losing strategy I mean. While I hold some right wing positions I'm not talking about mainstream Conservatism here but conservatism towards the LessWrong culture and ethos as I knew them. Even this comment is likely a mistake but I just can't keep quiet on this because of internal anguish.
It is not the opening material that bother me so bitterly, since I found that it had interesting examples of experience to share. Gathering and posting it also seemed a good idea to me in my optimism some weeks ago. The comment section however... I disagreed about it being too nitpicky, but now I wonder if I was wrong. I think some are plain avoiding attacking the fundamental assumptions, in a way similar to how I'm about to briefly do, in order to avoid the gender drama LW is infamous for. If so the game is already over.
The personal experiences shared basically give examples of "privilege" and "microaggressions". That is, relatively small but pervasive uncomfortable or inconvenient defaults and related status moves which one notices from time to time. People with low social awareness don't see when they occur to them, so hearing them described explicitly they go "wow this is horrible, how X group suffers". The voting shows systematic appreciation for a male posture of "protecting women". This posture does little good for women, much like like signalling how much you hate child molesters does the opposite of helping child abuse victims.*
For nearly anyone not living hermit's life experiences like these are common, but we are incredibly selective about which ones get our public attention. I say how much attention they get is based not on actual subjective suffering, but on the most viable political coalitions. And I find it obvious that nearly any kind of social standard will produce nearly exactly the same dynamics, just for people with different sets of traits, since these are features -- not bugs -- of how social apes work. Ah, but this kind of observation violates sacred norms that prevail in our society. Indeed, my entire post is probably already practically glowing red in the minds of some people reading it, causing a deep emotional disturbance.
I'm curious if you buy into Moldbug's narration about Catholic v. Protestant as being an overarching framework for liberal v. conservative issues.
Frankly, the idea of conservativism always failing seems to be more an issue of what ideas survive: If a change or proposal goes through, then we think of it as liberal/progressive. Changes to society which get rolled back become more or less forgotten and don't come up in how we think of it. Alcohol prohibition would be one example, where excepting a very tiny group the issue has simply fallen out of contemporary political discourse.
I think you are mixing up different issues. Certainly conservatives manage to roll back some stuff, but that is not relevant to:
MM claims that all net changes are originated on the progressive side, which is a well-defined side with centuries of coherence. Do you claim that there are net changes that originated on the conservative side and were written into the history of liberals? Prohibition is certainly not an example of this. Do you even claim that there are any net changes originated by conservatives? Or do you disagree that there are two clear sides, and it is anachronistic to identify the parties of successful changes in different eras? Prohibition certainly shows that there is not complete identify of proposed changes across time, but that is hardly evidence of discontinuity. If you dispute continuity, what are two such parties that you think do should not be identified?
I don't think there are two clear sides at all, and yes the anachronism issue is a problem also. Moreover, in so far as there's almost anything like two clear sides, a lot of changes have come from what is commonly identified as the conservative end. For example, over the last seventy years in the US in many ways we moved more in the direction of free markets, a conservative ideal. One example is how it used to be outright illegal in the US to own gold bullion where now there's a thriving market.
If the problem of identifying two sides is not just continuity, what is an example of its difficulty at a single point in time?
Owning gold bullion seems to me a poor example. First, it was rolled back in 45 years, longer than prohibition, but not very long. Second, it was only a means to the end of devaluing the dollar. When Nixon moved entirely off of the gold standard, it became irrelevant. Nixon moving completely off of the gold standard might qualify as a non-progressive doing something, though.
In general, rolling back FDR's policies is not a net change.
MM would probably say that conservatives don't have ideals. They talk in terms of ideals because they don't know how else to fight progressives who have ideals. Or because they have been infected with progressive ideologies. I believe that free trade and the free market are Whig ideas. Certainly they were in the 19th century, though if you trace them to the French, they no longer fit in the Tory/Whig divide.
I agree that what gets foregrounded matters, and that people can learn to foreground different things. Furthermore, I know by experience that the current feminist and anti-racist material I've read has cranked up my sensitivity, and not always in ways that I like.
One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don't seem to have a vision of what success would be like. (I've asked groups a couple of times, and no one did. One person even apologized for my getting the impression that she might have such a vision.)
However, it's not obvious to me that it's impossible to raise the level of comfort that people have with each other. The same dynamics isn't identical to the same total ill effect.
I'm hoping that the current high-friction approach will lead to the invention of better methods. I'm pretty sure that a major contributor to the current difficulties is that there is no reliable method of enabling people to become less prejudiced. I've wondered whether reshaping implicit association tests into video games would help.
I'm very grateful to LW for being a place where it seems safe to me to raise these concerns.
I think people complaining about things like implicit association tests are missing the fundamental problem. The problem isn't that people's system I has 'racist' aliefs, it's that those aliefs do in fact correspond to reality.
Why do you believe that people's prejudices are generally accurate?
Look at the statistics for race and IQ (or any other measure of intelligence), or race and crime rate.
They show that East Asian are smarter in average than White Americans, and I'm not sure that many people alieve that.
Any such statistic would also reflect any bias in the law-enforcement system. How do we know how many white people commit crimes but don't get caught?
I do; am I mistaken to do so?
Asian-Americans also have lower crime rates than White Americans. Are you saying this is likely due to "bias in the law-enforcement system"?
Probably not; but IMO the criterion of mistakenness for aliefs (unlike for beliefs) is not being instrumentally useful (rather than not being epistemically accurate). If I'm trying to attract women, alieving that I'm unattractive would be a mistaken alief (though the linked article doesn't use the word “alief”).
I've written before about how aliefs about races can be problematic even when epistemically accurate. (My own aliefs about these things happen to be wrong even epistemically, so I need to be extra careful to compensate for them when I notice them.)
Having good aliefs about criminality, for example, is instrumentally useful.
I'm not sure whether this is particular to those groups. I would expect that most Democrats, Republicans, environmentalists, animal rights activists, human rights activists, transhumanists, LW-style rationalists, or for that matter anyone who wants to change society in a certain direction, don't have a clear vision of what success would be like, either.
Nor do I know whether I'd consider that an issue. To some extent, not having such a vision is perfectly reasonable, since there are lots of opposing forces shaping society in entirely different directions, and it can be more useful to just focus on what you can do now instead of dreaming up utopias. Of course, a concrete vision could help - but people could also be helped if they had a clear vision of where they want to be (with their personal lives) in ten years, and most people don't seem to have that, either. Humans just aren't automatically strategic.
My reason for being concerned about the lack of a positive vision is related to my experience reading RaceFail-- it felt like being on the receiving end of "I can't explain what I want you to do, I just want to stop hurting, and I'm going to keep attacking until I feel better".
This does not mean they were totally in the wrong-- one of the things I realized fairly early is that there are two kinds of people who could plausibly say "you figure out how not to piss me off"-- abusers and people who are trying to deal with a clueless abuser.
I submit that the latter who react that way are still abusers - abuse in self-defense is still abuse.
Are you saying that abuse victims have an obligation to coach their abusers in how not to be abusive?
I would say... yes, actually, insofar as they want that abuse to end while changing nothing else about the dynamic.
This sounds like "I wouldn't use the word obligation, but I would make the prediction that if abuse victims coach their abusers in how not to be abusive, they would make the abuse less likely to occur." Would you agree with that restatement?
Fair enough, yes. My use of the word obligation tends to revolve strictly around the personal, so I can see why you'd prefer this version if you use the word in the more typical sense. (Sorry about the confusion. I tend towards egoism, and have a tendency to redefine words to fit the philosophy.)
That would only work if the abuser would prefer not to be abusive. (One characteristic of many abusive relationships is that the abuser gets angry regardless of what the victim actually does - there really isn't any way to avoid making them mad and "triggering" more abuse.)
Consider the number of people on this forum looking for ways to overcome personality defects, and repeatedly failing.
Not to say that abused people owe it to their abusers; they may or may not owe it to themselves, however. The number of abused people who go out of one abusive relationship directly into another suggests they need coaching/counseling just as much, and perhaps examining where they are is a good place to start in getting to where they need to be.
This is connected to a more general issue: Institutions and movements very rarely acknowledge when the issue they've dealt with is essentially solved. You see this in other examples as well organizations to prevent animal cruelty would be one example. When an organization goes completely away it is more often because they were on the losing side of political and social discourse (e.g. pro-prohibition groups, anti-miscegenation organizations). The only example I'm aware of where the organizations simply died out after essentially a success is organizations to help deal with polio, and even that still exists in limited forms.
I've got some sympathy for people who don't want to shut down organizations merely because they've succeeded.
Stable organizations are hard to create, and people apt to have a lot of valuable social relationships in them.
Ideally, an organization which has achieved a definitive win would find a new goal.
Yes, but this seems to happen extremely rarely. The only example I'm aware of is how some abolitionist groups helped transition into pro-black rights groups in the post Civil War era.
That's a reasonable point - but are there lessons to be learned from organizations that continued to be disproportionally powerful even after their problem was solved?
I'm thinking of groups like the Sierra Club. My impression is the group is less powerful than it once was - and the problem is more solved than it was.
Global warming might suggest otherwise. As to political power- if one is judging by amount of discussion in political discourse, in many ways, the environmental movement has substantially lost power in the last 40 years, at least in the US. It used to have broad, bipartisan support, whereas now it is primarily an issue only supported on the contemporary left. But yes, the general situation in many respects is much better (we don't have rivers catching on fire obviously.)
I think it would be more accurate to say that environmentalism is a broad label; the facets that used to have bipartisan support still do, generally, but new issues have arisen under the label that are supported by a much smaller group.
That's probably true to some extent, but not universally. For example, in the early 1970s, having fuel efficient cars was a bipartisan issue, whereas now attempts to minimize gasoline consumption are more decidedly on the left.
Due to the law of diminishing marginal returns, fuel efficiency itself is a broad issue. You could, if you were charitable, see the parties a representing a search for absolute improvements in all areas, vs searching for the current most efficient improvements; such that when technology improved so that improving fuel efficiency was cheaper & safer then it would again be bi-partisan.
Most likely, neither is that rational about the matter, but there is an inkling of truth to it.
Diminishing marginal returns may have something to do with it. Fuel efficiency for passenger cars has increased by about a third, and larger increases have occurred in vans and small trucks.Relevant graph. But, compared to the maximum efficiency for their types, efficiency is still extremely low. And efficiency for large trucks is essentially unchanged. So I'm not sure we've really hit that point that substantially.
Yes, fuel efficiency can be increased at the expanse of something else, e.g., cost, safety, etc.
My idea of an anti-racial society is one in which skin colour and race don't matter - where they're considered about as relevant as (say) hair colour is today. I haven't really thought through the consequences of this in detail, but that's what I'd consider a victory condition for an anti-racial agenda.
Now that I think about it, though, it implies that an important step towards this result might be the production and commercialisation of 'skin dyes' for aesthetic purposes.
I don't understand what you mean by "matter." People don't care about hair color because hair color is not very predictive of other traits that people care about, but this doesn't seem to be true of race.
What traits, aside from skin colour and immunity or vulnerability to sunburn, are strongly correlated with race and cared about in more than an aesthetic sense?
Intelligence and criminality, to give the two most important examples.
I'd be interested to see a citation for the intelligence claim. I could believe a very weak correlation to genetics, but find a strong one unlikely.
There may be a strong correlation to intelligence via culture; which implies that some cultures are flawed, holding people back from achieving what they might in a better culture; implying in turn that flawed cultures should be improved/debugged.
Citation?
Again, I suspect - though I'm not certain - that what we have here is a cultural tendency pretending to be a racial tendency. If that is correct, then a member of the wrong race faces severe and unfair disadvantages even if he belongs to a less-criminality-inclined culture.
I never said anything about causation or genetics. I was just talking about correlation.
It sounds like you're using the word "correlation" to refer to different modes of causation, which is potentially confusing; "correlation" just refers to certain kinds of association.
It's trivial to dig up citations for correlations between race & IQ. Distinguishing between the two causal models of racial genetic differences → IQ and racial genetic differences ↔ culture → IQ, which I think is what you're getting at, is a distinct and more vexed issue. Still, the first citation in that Wikipedia article is of a paper that clearly favours the first model over the second:
As it happens, I find this particular paper flawed in various ways, but it is a citation of the sort you're asking for.
Thank you, that was exactly the sort of citation I was asking for.
That depends on what you mean by "strongly." I would tentatively posit that even if race isn't strongly predictive in an absolute sense of other traits that people care about, it is relatively predictive compared to other traits that are easy to unambiguously learn about a person. For example, if I wanted to predict the performance of a high school student on standardized tests, I think race would be a better predictor than height or weight, and I don't know enough to confidently say whether it would a better predictor than income level.
I've recently begun to suspect that a possibly substantial amount of what gets labeled "racism" is just using race as weak Bayesian evidence in the spirit of http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq2/fallacies_as_weak_bayesian_evidence/ (edit: and then subsequently failing to distinguish between the probability of a statement being true having increased and the statement becoming true).
Hmmm. It seems to me that what is happening here is that race is reasonably correlated with culture, and culture is very strongly correlated with upbringing, and upbringing is very strongly correlated with academic performance. (Note that income level->culture is also a fairly strong correlation).
Race is also highly visible, and (often, but not always) easily discerned. Hence, a correlation (via culture) between race and academic performance would be very visible.
If the correlation between race and culture is thus dissolved, or at least dramatically reduced, then race will become far weaker evidence as to (say) academic performance, eventually dipping below random noise levels. Once the correlation between race and non-aesthetic traits that people care about is generally recognised as being below the level of random noise, then I would say that race will no longer matter.
(Culture, of course, will still matter. I don't really see any good way around that).
Why does it matter to you how strong the correlation between race and culture is? Isn't the real problem that people are mishandling Bayesian updates based on race? That could be solved by teaching people how to perform Bayesian updates more accurately. It wouldn't be a world in which "race doesn't matter," but it would be a world in which the extent to which race does matter is recognized and not exaggerated or ignored.
I can think of at least two other causal paths from race to academic performance. One is the attitudes a person's peer group is likely to hold towards academic performance (even if they don't make a point of affiliating with other people based on race, other people may make a point of affiliating with them based on race), and more generally how the people around a person treat them based on race. The other is genetics. (I imagine this is not a particularly popular thing to say but I recently realized that I do not have a solid statistical foundation for dismissing it.)
At this point I think the problem is that they are updating correctly.
I disagree. Many statistical effects of race are screened off by fairly easily obtained information, but people act as though this is not the case. Moreover, if you, say, beat someone for being black, that's really not tied to any sort of problem with your use of Bayesian updating.
Another possibility is that race affects how many people are treated in the educational system, and that affects how much effort they put into schoolwork.
My cousin is of mixed ethnicity (black father and white mother), and if half of what he says is true and not just teenaged exaggeration, a good chunk of his disciplinary record at school is probably (I'd assign over 70% assuming he's completely truthful) based on race, and nothing he does. He isn't as interested in academics as my sister or I were, but the only actual academic losses I've noticed were in his first quarter of mathematics in eighth grade (he wound up in the most advanced math class available, which he wasn't particularly thrilled about, and it was a new teacher and a new curriculum and the entire class was left in the dust for a few weeks).
Also, black people are usually not in such high academic standing as he is, and when I was his age, in the same school, I heard people talk about perceived racism from teachers toward the black minority that were in the honors/AP/etc classes.
All anecdotal hearsay, but it's strong enough evidence for me that I tend to agree with the idea that race correlates with intelligence and crime because the culture expects it to more than because of genetic reasons.
[edit] Oh, I'll also add that my evaluation of the likelyhood that my cousin is being completely honest in his accounts is only slightly above 50% at this point. He's way more honest than his younger brother (who is a pathological liar caught in a self-enforcing death-spiral (and they have different fathers--the younger one's father is white)), but is no stranger to trolling, and even when he's speaking truthfully his accounts might be muddled in bias. But a good number of them seem hard to interpret as anything but consistent unfair treatment in a context where what sticks out about him is race. He did not offer the explanation of racism, though; that was my conclusion after a dozen or so separate incidents.[/edit]
I'd say that this is another very strong possibility.
I don't care about the correlation between race and culture in and of itself. I want to remove or reduce (preferably remove) the percieved correlation between race and academic performance; and it seems to me that the best way to do this is to remove the correlation between race and culture (as the correlation from culture to academic performance does not look removable).
That is a good strategy, and quite possibly superior to my suggestion. The biggest trouble is that it requires a substantial majority of people to be willing to learn how to properly perform Bayesian updates, which I fear may make it less practical. (Not that my idea was necessarily all that practical to begin with).
Hmmm. This is a possible path; intuitively, I'd expect it to matter about as much as the neighbourhood one grows up in. That is, I would expect any non-cultural effects to be more or less random noise.
That is also possible. Intuitively (which is very poor evidence, I know) I would expect this to matter less than culture. I do know some very intelligent people of many races; so individual variance seems large enough to defeat any systemic genetic bias that may exist.
Experimental evidence of the effects of culture versus genetics could be discovered by studying people of one race raised in the culture of another race (e.g. by adoption).
I think a better strategy is to remove the actual correlation between race and academic performance, and possibly the one between race and criminality for that matter.
One place to start is to change the culture that leads to said problems.
Dr. Seuss wrote about this.
The problem there is that skin color is also fairly well correlated with groups of sub-cultures, so skin color not mattering at all might mean that the all the sub-cultures have dissolved. This might or might not be a loss in the utilitarian sense, but it would look like a huge loss to many of the people who are in those sub-cultures now.
I mean this in a fully general sense-- white represents a group of sub-cultures, and so does Christian.
I don't want to dissolve the richness of the subcultures (and I don't think that's possible, in any case). I want to dissolve the correlation.
Minor note: In that case, you wouldn't just need fast, safe, cheap, and easy skin dye, you'd need similar change to be available for at least faces and hair and possibly for skeletons-- it might be easier for people to just live as computer programs than to do this physically.
You mean like in some African countries where women apply skin-whitening products to look "prettier"? I'm not sure that's the best example of a step towards a world where skin color doesn't matter.
I'm thinking of products that (safely, and temporarily) allow anyone to make their skin bright purple. Or blue. Or orange. Or, yes, black or white. I'm thinking that when such products are widely known and used by a sufficiently large percentage of the population, then there will always be enough of a question (is he "really" black, or is that skin dye?) to cause most people to either re-think their assumptions, or at least to apply them a little more cautiously.
This comment is interesting but needlessly long-winded.
In one sentence, did you mean something like "Status-based oppression and emotional violence will always exist and some group will always get the worst of it; therefore, we shouldn't get worked up about the victims currently in the spotlight and shouldn't waste community attention on their particular problems - but it's impolite to just tell them to shut up and suffer quietly"?
If phrased like that, then yes, your post is already causing me a deep emotional disturbance.
(And you wonder why decent people don't like reactionaries.)
Nope I take the argument further. You are about to experience more distress. What I'm saying is that we already ignore the suffering of those who suffer the most. What I'm saying is that magnitude or widespread nature of suffering has no strong consistent relation in itself to which group gets our public attention. I'm surprised you missed that.
I'm also saying that often the signalling and politics allegedly done to reduce the kind of "micro-suffering" of group X does nothing of the kind. At worst merely increasing their sensitivity to it making them miserable and resentful of other members of society, while propping up new structures of deprivilege for other groups. A clear utilitarian fail.
Having politics about such microaggression and privillige based suffering be acceptable means that the groups least capable of defending themselves with such politics will suffer at best just as much as before and simply have to pay the additional opportunity cost and at worst will suffer more. Having a taboo on such politics improves the position. It doesn't seem obvious to me why should groups bad at politics be more deserving of suffering than groups good at politics? Why do you think the former are more numerous or more sensitive than the latter?
Recall that everyone is a member of many such classes and groups. Deep down this kind of attempt at justice in society is based on nothing more than might makes right powered by human intuitions based on sacredness and holier than thou signalling.
Probably true, and possibly a tautology.
However, I think it's the same fallacy as judging societies only by how the lowest status people are treated. It's ignoring what happens to a large proportion, perhaps the majority of people.
Also, if better treatment can be figured out for some groups, then perhaps the knowledge can be applied to other suffering when it gets noticed. Life with people isn't entirely zero-sum.
If you see life solely (or even merely primarily) in terms of status, as I believe Konkvistador does, then it is indeed a zero-sum game, since a person's status is a relative ranking, and not an absolute measure (as contrasted with, say, top running speed).
Even if life is solely a zero-sum game, it would still be possible to narrow the status differences. It's one thing to have most people think you're funny-looking, and another to be at risk of being killed on sight.
That is true, but narrowing the status differences would severely penalize anyone whose status is higher than the minimum (or possibly only those with above-average status, depending on the scale you're using). If we measure quality of life solely in terms of status, then such an action would be undesirable.
Granted, if we include other measures in our calculation, then it all depends on what weights we place on each measure, status included.
Is there a reason we might want to do this? It feels like your comments in this thread unjustifiably privilege this model.
Again, as far as I understand, Konkvistador believes that humans are driven primarily by their desire to achieve a higher status, and that this is in fact one of our terminal goals. If we assume that this is true, then I believe my comments are correct.
Is that actually true, though ? Are humans driven primarily by their desire to achieve a higher status (in addition to the desires directly related to physical survival, of course) ? I don't know, but maybe Konkvistador has some evidence for the proposition -- assuming, of course, that I'm not misinterpreting his viewpoint.
This needs to be considered separately as (1) a descriptive statement about actions (2) a descriptive statement about subjective experience (3) a normative statement about the utilitarian good. It seems much more accurate as (1) than (2) or (3), and I think Konkvistador means it as (1); meanwhile, statements about "quality of life" could mean (2) or (3) but not (1).
It also depends on just how much narrowing we're doing. I think that eliminating "able to literally get away with murder" wouldn't be a great loss.
...“Mercer,” Rick said.
“I am your friend,” the old man said. “But you must go on as if I did not exist. Can you understand that?” He spread empty hands.
“No,” Rick said. “I can’t understand that. I need help.”
“How can I save you,” the old man said, “if I can’t save myself?” He smiled. “Don’t you see? There is no salvation.” “Then what’s this for?” Rick demanded. “What are you for?”
“To show you,” Wilbur Mercer said, “that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go and do your task, even though you know it’s wrong.”
“Why?” Rick said. “Why should I do it? I’ll quit my job and emigrate.”
The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
“That’s all you can tell me?” Rick said...
(-Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
Okay, so... you're going to argue that undersocialized straight white males in 1st world countries currently suffer the most? And what else? Because I already agree that they have it bad, and I can't for the life of me think of any other oppressed group that is denied publicity.
Meanwhile, you'd seemingly like to deny the practical use of identity politics as self-defense for the "mainstream" cases like gender-based aggression - all for the greater good. Such a proposition indeed feels cruel and morally corrupt to me.
Consider the context of this debate. Are you really sure (mostly) white (mostly) heterosexual (mostly) middle class women are really the most depriviliged group present on LessWrong?
Yet clearly they are the ones with the most explicit political activism and seem to be winning the popularity contest here. See any kind of controversy over sex/romance/gender/PUA we've had over the past oh... 5 years?
That strikes me as a remarkably uncharitable reading, and in any case a false one -- the suffering of undersocialized straight white dudes gets plenty of public attention, albeit much of it in "point and laugh" form (cf. Big Bang Theory).
The most marginalized groups on the planet, almost by definition, are the ones you've never heard of. Take Burkina Faso for example -- small West African country, #181 of 187 in Human Development Index, and the only reason I know I've read about it before is that the Wikipedia link's purple instead of blue in my browser. #187, the absolute bottom of the barrel, is the Democratic Republic of the Congo: slightly better-known, but extremely underserved by Western media relative to the magnitude of all the bad shit going down there. The Second Congo War (1998 - 2003) was the single worst conflict by body count since World War II, but I couldn't describe a single major news report on it that reached my ears.
And those are entire countries -- if I wanted to dig up serious contemporary misery and oppression at the subculture level, I'm almost sure that the famous examples, while certainly terrible, wouldn't be the worst I could find.
Eh no. I'm saying we ignore the groups who suffer the most. Under-socialized white males have weak counter-cultures working in their favour. But generally I think you underestimate how much suffering say white people experience in places like South Africa what with the racially motivated farm murders and economic discrimination against them.
That you can't think of them is very weak evidence they aren't there. May I remind you that if we where having this debate in the 1920s people might talk about women as such a group but not homosexuals. The thought wouldn't even occur to them. Today you are shunned for questioning the thought.
I can give you many many examples but it will get me into trouble. One controversial example: Paedophiles who want to avoid having sex with children. Our society is not optimized to help them with that humanely at all. And it is the very social changes that we have experienced in the sexual marketplace of the past 50 years done supposedly to reduce suffering that have intensified pure hatred and paranoia towards them.
On further reflection regarding the pedophile example:
How many studies are you aware of that research the neurobiological origins of homosexuality? sociopathy? schizophrenia? ADHD? autism?
Now, how many studies are you aware of that research the neurobiological origins of pedophilia?
Googling those terms found a few, though most of them seem pretty tentative right now.
Thanks!
Anecdote: I didn't search as well as I should have because I had a weird emotional "what if some automated FBI filter flags me for googling 'pedophilia'?" reaction - which also seems to be part of the problem.
I agree with your last paragraph.
As a white South African male, I think that if those are the sorts of articles that you're relying on for a true idea of what goes on in this country, then you may be over-estimating it.
In short; South Africa is a country polarised into two groups, with all that that entails. Actually, there's at least four groups (counting "foreigners" and the nearly extinct "Khoisan" as seperate groups), but two of those groups are loud enough to drown out all the others. For quite some time, one of those groups (those who were officially "white") was dominant, despite the fact that said group was not numerically superior. However, one of the means of retaining said dominance was by providing substandard education to all other groups (along with pretty brutal repression, not being allowed to vote, and so on).
Then, in 1994, everyone was allowed to vote. There was a sudden and very predictable change of government without most of the negative effects of actual revolution (we had very good leadership at a critical time). The trouble now is that, in the eyes of far too many people, there are still two groups. If you listen to one side, then THEY robbed everyone during apartheid and refuse to help the people they once hurt; if you listen to the other side, then THEY are a bunch of violent, corrupt lunatics who will kill you as soon as you let your guard down for an instant. And both sides will gleefully report on any facts that appear to support their stance.
Disagree, since the sources used for articles like the lined one seem reliable.
If anything I in think in general Western reports let alone regular Western ideas about life in South Africa are likely to be underestimating white South African suffering. In addition I would argue there are gains in signalling games for well off white South Africans to downplay the suffering of their group.
I do agree South Africa in general has been rather lucky but there is potential for major problems because white South Africans are a market dominant minority.
We have a clear example of what could have and still some day might happen in Mugabe's Zimbabwe.
I didn't say that anything in the linked article was directly false - merely that the evidence is biased, having been picked out by one group, and therefore that it gives an overall false impression.
Consider, for example, from the article on farm murders:
I'm willing to believe that both of those statistics are correct, individually, but put together like that they present an incorrect impression. To obtain a correct impression, one needs to find the answer to this question: in 2001, what percentage of South African farmers were white?
Due to the aftereffects of Apartheid, I can say with extremely high probability that it's higher than the 9.2% figure quoted; indeed, it would not surprise me to learn that it was more than 70% (which completely changes the significance of that first figure). Unfortunately, in a few minutes' googling, I was unable to find any source for the figure in question (census data is supposed to be available, but not necessarily in an easily searched format).
As for BEE, it is (as I understand the original idea) an attempt to redress the "market dominant minority" problem without widespread suffering; yes, there is a certain amount of economic discrimination against me, but it's not an impossible barrier to overcome. And it does continually reduce the potential for the major problems that you describe. (What it has become is in some cases different to what was intended - sometimes because of the greed of a few, the new "black elite" who have got rather rich by exploiting any loopholes they could find - sometimes because of poorly drafted legislation - but there are enough voices in parliament calling for the original idea to keep pulling it back on course). I suppose it could be seen as a sort of 'social safety valve', giving the less-dominant majority a way to achieve part of the market without pulling the whole market down and rebuilding it from scratch.
And I should add that there are people (I know of several) who would take every word of those articles and mutter darkly that "you don't know the half of it". I personally don't always agree with them, but they are there (and may be suffering psychologically in ways that I hadn't fully considered until now).
So, I'm not saying that there is no suffering. I'm just saying that I think that it might be over-presented in some places.
Yes, and Zimbabwe is very much in the public eye here. Enough people are looking at it, and comparing it to the current situation, that any attempt to start moving down that same path will be highlighted mercilessly, and shied away from (no-one wants to end up in Mugabe's position, at least not as far as I can imagine). I'm not saying that we can't end up in similar straits (though I consider it unlikely), but at the very least we'll get there by a substantially different path.
This is, indeed, an excellent example of a place where the process has utterly failed to produce a humane and compassionate outcome.
So, literally an unknown unknown? This is a very empirical claim, and my prior on it is low. Unless such groups have unusual barriers placed against them socially and ideologically, you'd think that, over time, individuals in them would've made some effort to carve out a niche in identity politics.
I think you just aren't getting it. Putting some effort towards carving a niche has bad returns for these groups. See paedophiles.
Because they lose the political battle their very efforts to organize along these lines are seen as more evidence at how dangerous and weird they are you instantly categorize them as deserving their fate.
Also to put it in familiar terms the false conspicuousness of members of the group experience may make such activism unthinkable for them. If there is no force that weakens or breaks down that memeplex the political war can't get started.
And again! Why do you assume might makes right? Why do you assume that any group with a genuine grievance and suffering shall be victorious in the long run? What possible reason would you have for this in a non-caring non-Christian universe.
That is the interpretation I made, as well, but perhaps I was mistaken ? I upvoted your comment primarily because I want Konkvistador to clarify whether this interpretation is correct.
Speaking of which, a tweet by Sister Y I liked a lot:
"the men are competing amongst themselves to see who can loudestly inform the lady that she is a viable rape target"
That sounds wildly inaccurate. I think that the most violent and threatening catcalling happens with only one man
That's a solid dig at people who perform a particular kind of behavior that one deprecates. But it just isn't true!
Summary for people who don't have infinite amounts of time to waste (unlike me):
I don't understand this (and don't have the time to read Moldbug): if the whole struggle is essentially of religious character, then aren't both sides upholding religious doctrines? So how does engaging with the progressives mean "conceding the main point" - aren't the progressives likewise conceding the main point when engaging with the conservatives?
Maybe the intended meaning is that the progressives denounce conservatives for being religious, while actually being religious themselves? That would make some sense, but not all conservatives are actually basing their arguments in religion. After all, Konkvistador was talking about "conservatism on Less Wrong", which certainly wouldn't fit the bill.
For those seeking to undermine Progressives, shouldn't you be trying to convince most everyone that Progressives are theocrats, and not just Progressives?
And I thought Moldbug said Progressives win because their politics empower the media, academia, and government, creating a positive feedback loop for Progressive opinions in those arenas.
Not being recognized as theocrats is an advantage they have against conservatives, but that advantage is not as decisive as having a positive feedback loop.
This is what I consider among his most important insights.
Probably yes, but I'm not that confident. Some strategies to weaken the loop if it is understood probably do exist and are probably similar to those of fighting the influence of a particular religion in society.
Think Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Not that confident of what? Something I said?
I agree that the positive feedback loop can weaken. I think it already has. There's a lot more media outside the official channels, and higher education is in the midst of a huge bubble. Maybe government too, with the unsustainable government debt levels throughout the western world.
Will the debt holders basically take control of governments and force them to run their tax farming businesses more efficiently? The IMF has been doing that to countries for years. That seems a more likely future than a Moldbug restoration.
Not that confident the media/academia belief pump cycle is a greater advantage than the hidden nature of their theocracy.
If the hidden nature of the theocracy is the main problem, we'll have to wait for a societal wide embrace of Stirner for relief. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
I had hoped that Hitchens might someday turn on his fellow "atheists", and bring the fight to moral theocracies as he had to supernatural theocracies. Guess not.
Can you think of any moderately prominent person or group who might make the case, and might be listened? I can't.
EDIT: On further review of Moldbug, he has a short series of Anti-Idealism blog posts that makes some of the same basic points that Stirner does. He even makes a similar point to what I have above about the New Atheists.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/why-do-atheists-believe-in-religion.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/our-planet-is-infested-with-pseudo.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/idealism-is-not-great.html
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/unlikely-appeal-of-nonidealism.html
If not for said belief pump, would "theocracy" necessarily even be a boo light?
In what way does the existence or non-existence of a belief pump bear on whether "theocracy" is a boo light?
Why do people believe "theocracy" to be bad? The proximate cause is that it's what they've been taught.
I personally think that theocracy is bad because it combines the worst features of a totalitarian dictatorship on the one hand, and uncritical thinking on the other. As such, it could potentially turn out much worse than even a run-of-the-mill totalitarian dictatorship; in the latter case, at least the dictator and his politburo have some sort of a real plan...
If your brother tries to tell you why [your social theory is wrong], then do not debate him or set forth your own evidence; do not perform replicable experiments or examine history; but turn him in at once to the secret police.
Theocracy doesn't exactly have a self-correction mechanism to avoid that problem.
Probably, but the context of that particular quote was only about convincing progressives.
He might, but not here.
I quite agree, and considered posting along these lines myself. Perhaps you were right to be oblique; I'd have been a lot more explicit.
In fact, I will. A large part of this isn't just about forming viable political coalitions - which is perhaps benign - it's about suppressing alternate coalitions. It's about making it impossible for people with a different understanding of the world to co-ordinate. For example, the reason that men catcall women is, or should be, well known to everyone (see e.g. Berne)) but the discussion below consists of a strenuous wish to avoid the obvious explanation. And of course anyone who gives it will be the designated patsy and thereby validate the feelings of moral superiority the coalition has been endowing itself with.
It's also about a wish to avoid responsibility, but that's a post in its own right.
The solution, of course, is to form a higher status coalition against it. For instance:
"As an Arab and a Muslim, I feel the concept of feminism is an Orientalist dog-whistle. You only need to look down this thread to see the real targets are always the Otherized women wearing burkas - whose perspective is totally missing. The venom is just barely below the surface - a discussion of a boy asking a girl out quickly becomes a ritual condemnation of Afghan customs. Analysing a father's advice quickly leads to back-slapping about how much Saudi Arabia "stinks". Anyone who calls themselves a feminist is perpetuating white privilege and racism."
Unfortunately, I fear that this troll has already been done.
EDIT: Edited to include links.
Has any other reader figured out yet what this obvious reason is supposed to be? I'm mystified.
I suspect that statement was meant to be semantically equivalent to "the reason that men go to strip clubs is, or should be, well known to everyone".
I'm confused. Are you suggesting that catcalling is a strategy for seeing naked women?
I think the point is that feminism tends to assume that it's for some kind of sinister toxic masculinity sex thing?
Ok, a better way to phrase that would be "the reason that men like looking at naked women is, or should be, well known to everyone".
Actually, that depends on what you mean by 'known'.
Everyone knows that most men like looking at naked women, and many who don't feel the attraction themselves can more or less understand it by extrapolation.
However, I don't think much if anything is known about physiological basis (eyes to brain) for men liking to look at naked women.
Agreed. I suspect that Salemicus's statement was meant to be interpreted in the same way.
I'm mystified, too. Furthermore, I bet there isn't just one reason.
Regarding my own comment, I was not condemning afghan customs in the context of their treatment of women, but in their treatment of thievery and other such crimes (I was specifically thinking of the process of escalating blood feuds that often result from that process).
Are you sure you're not generalizing from one example? Just because it's obvious to you doesn't mean it must be obvious to everybody, especially on a website with average AQ in the high twenties. Hanlon's razor, guys.
Can you explain how what you are implying has anything to do with with Third Wave Feminism? Because I'm not seeing it.
One of the key third-wave critiques is that second-wave feminism was only ever really about middle-class white women. Obviously, an actual third-wave feminist wouldn't have concluded that feminism is about white privilege; they'd have said we need to change the direction of feminism to make it more inclusive of "diverse perspectives" or some such.
I was joking when I implied they were trolling feminism, but if a group of saboteurs had gone undercover to make the movement irrelevant, I don't think they could have done any better.
I realize that I'm being lazy, but is there a way you can summarize this reason ? I have not read the book, and I fear I may not have the time to do so.
Let me guess (I read the book years ago).
Humans, in any situation, invent something to do, simply because "doing nothing" is not an option. A stupid social interaction is usually preferable to no social interaction. On the other hand, an intimate interaction increases the risk of being hurt, so with strangers people prefer rituals. Ritual provides some small social interaction at almost zero risk.
If I understand it correctly, Salemicus suggests that catcalling is simply a ritual. It is more than nothing. It is less than a personalized message. It is what other people (of the same social group) in the same situation would do.
Why exactly this ritual instead of something else? Dunno. Tradition. You usually don't invent rituals, you inherit them from your ancestors. Somewhere in the past, there was some reason. Maybe a good reason, maybe a random incident. Doesn't matter today. This is the ritual we have. This is what we do when we want to do something, but not something personal.
"If It Weren't For Him"? "Rapo"? "Now I've Got You, You Son of a Bitch"?
None of the above.
It's too long since I read the book to recall all of the Games in detail, and the list on the book's home page (linked from the Wiki article) doesn't seem to have this game, but no matter: Berne did not claim to be presenting an exhaustive taxonomy and encouraged his readers to discover more Games.
I recommend the book. I think it's essential reading for anyone confused (as so many LWers profess to be, and there's a Game right there) about aspects of social life that are not usually explicitly described. (The reasons why people don't talk about them form yet more Games.) Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them. Once you have this, what is going on with catcalling will be transparent.
The theoretical background of the book, Transactional Analysis, you can take or leave; it gives Berne a conceptual vocabulary to talk about Games, but one need not make any ontological commitment to TA, to make use of the book.
Here's Kurt Vonnegut's review, from 1965.
I bought & read a copy of Games People Play some years ago. (But thanks for the recommendation.) Although I've read the book, "the" reason why men catcall remains opaque to me. I can think of multiple reasons, and multiple ways to describe catcalling as a Game, so merely pointing at the book tells me nothing new.
By the principle of charity, I figured Salemicus had something more usefully specific in mind. So I looked at the table of contents, guessed at some Games they might have been thinking of, and put them out there as a starting point. I wasn't about to reread the whole book just to try making Salemicus's comment click.
[Belated edit to fix that dangling modifier.]
"Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them."
From Berne: "Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him."
So, you can debate the validity, but my take on the Berne-ian view would be that the game Catcall is the attempt to create a social boost for males by gaining a female's (albeit negative) attention.
I'm not sure I grasp at all what you're referring to by those "dynamics". The nitpicking? The pointing at small things rather than the fundamental assumption(s)? (if so, what's the perceived fundamental assumption(s) and which are the small things? Is the fundamental assumption the claim "Women have a larger inferential distance to LW because difference in life experiences"?)
I disagree on this, ISTM that many of those are displaying things substantially different, such as "helping people in general" or "protecting people being harassed".
That whole paragraph rings very true, and deserves upvotes IMO, contingent of me having any idea what "dynamics" you're pointing at.
The other things you say sound convincing, but this particular sentence sounds like the Naturalistic Fallacy. There are lots of "features" built into humans, such as old age and Alzheimers, myopia, inability to multiply large numbers very quickly, etc. But humans have been working steadily over the ages to mitigate these weaknesses with technology, and thus I find it difficult to believe that any specific weakness is unfixable a priori.
Fixing human biology or conditioning is easy with the right technology, but the game theory that often pushed the biology or the conditioning there in the first place can be more tricky.
Very true. Also, the 'right technology' does not currently exist, and isn't likely to in the next decade.
Social reformers often don't seem to understand that pushing a society far away from 'default' human modes of conduct is a bit like pushing a boulder up an increasingly steep slope - you spend more and more energy fighting just to stay in place, while creating an increasingly dangerous pool of potential energy that acts to oppose your efforts. Push hard enough for long enough, and eventually you get crushed as the boulder rolls back downhill.
Exactly, this is why there haven't been any successful social reforms, and people who try to effect reform are successful at first but lose momentum as the reform gets more and more established before being crushed by powerful historical forces. At least that's the word in my local Baron's court.
This seems a straw man.He didn't say they where always or often unsuccessful. Just that this can happen. And we clearly do have examples of unsuccessful attempts. See the USSR or the Puritan Colonies in the Americas.
That would have been more reasonable, though also trivial and irrelevant (yes, some reformers fail. what of it? this comment wouldn't make sense in context). But the claim in the great-grandparent is made in absolute terms, a claim about the nature of the world - if you push society from default modes, then it will get harder and harder to accomplish nothing much and eventually you will be crushed.
One might feel compelled to interpret this as an error, and say that the intent was to say something trivial instead of wrong. But I thought that unlikely based on the user's posts in this topic: one about how reformers are crushed by history, one about how "the PC hive mind" is trying to silence them in order to establish themselves as the unquestioned masters of reality, and one misinterpreting and mocking a post about how you can insult people with facts.
Comments about how one's "opponents" are doomed to horrible violent retribution by the very nature of the universe are not unheard of. See, for example, the Men's Rights Movement, branches of which prophecy a coming time of inevitable violent revolution against our feminist overlords, or Communism, under some versions of which the success of the movement and the overthrow of all opposition is an (eventual) immutable fact.
You have a Baron? We just talk things out over the campfire while pounding willow bark and sucking the marrow out of aurochs bones.
I would say having a Baron is more civilized than having a popularity contest. I bet the latter is how things around the stone age camp-fire where worked out.
You know what it's like living with popularity contests Have you lived with a Baron?
My post was not meant as an endorsement of that lifestyle, nor as a condemnation; I was mainly trying to point out that it existed and was quite different from most stratified post-Neolithic social systems. Honestly, we don't know enough about what the average Paleolithic social structure looked like to advocate effectively for it, even if we wanted to.
I agree with this. Even modern examples of tribes with tech not far above that level aren't representative due to marginal terrain and interaction with other groups.
Also, modern paleolithic societies might be different from early paleolithic societies due to change over time-- it would surprise me if there wasn't gradual improvement in their tools, and there would also be random cultural changes.
It is near-impossible to compare the space of all possible human "barons" with the space of all possible human "popularity contests" and decide which one is more "civilized" across multiple criteria.
Apply this argument to the politics of suffering Konkvistador talked about.
Grunt grunt grunt, ook ook.
performs mitosis