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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)
Being male, I never had any visibility into experiences like these until I first began reading anecdotes like this online, and then started talking with women I knew about how things were for them. So thanks for taking the effort to put this together.
This should be taught in schools.
Instead of what? There are a finite number of school hours; from what other subject would you take the hours to cover this? Ideally everything would be taught in schools, but there are constraints.
(This question isn't entirely rhetorical, and I would not be surprised to hear a good answer. Schools are far from optimal.)
English classes are usually designed to teach skills like reading comprehension, critical thinking, and writing. There is no particular need for the subject matter to be historical literature, and discussions of topics like this would fit right in.
In fact, some English teachers try to do just that, by selecting literature with the appropriate subject matter.
It is - obscurely, and too late, and to those who already know.
It's called Women's Studies (though it's about more that women's experiences).
And people (for whom the inferential distance is too great) love to hate on it.
I don't think that's all that's going on here. A lot of Women's Studies has other ideas and claims which are much more questionable, and the good points (such as the substantial differences in women's experience v. men) can get easily lost in the noise.
From my wife:
I learned many interesting and useful things from my Women's Studies class, and am glad I decided to try it out. However, I became a pariah when I questioned the professor's account of sexism in biology textbooks. "Eggs are portrayed as passive, while sperm compete to reach them." In my experience, textbooks say what actually happens in the reproductive system, with no sexism to be found. She stuck to her guns. It was unfortunate that she used that example, because there are real examples of gender bias in biology publications.
And back to me:
Just thought it would be useful to provide an example of a questionable claim. She says other people in the class hated her for pointing it out.
I read an introduction to women's studies textbook and it was all inside baseball commentary. It was not like reading this. At all. It was a survey of all the different fields that Women's Studies engages with, but it did not teach this, it assumed it. This is consistent with some male acquaintances experience of some such courses as hostile to them. Also, Hugo Schwyzer is a dick.
I've made a number of comments on this post that were addressing specific, somewhat-tangential issues, and though I think those are important too, I just want to echo cata here:
Thank you for this post, daenerys, and for collecting these anecdotes. I think it's quite valuable and look forward to subsequent posts in the series.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Summary for people who don't have infinite amounts of time to waste (unlike me):
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.
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.
I didn't mean to say they are how things should work, merely how I think they do work, they are the unfortunate compromises we end up nearly always making. A feature need not be desirable in itself to be necessary or the best out of a bad set of options.
Up voted for pointing this out though, since I suspect others may have read it that way as well.
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.
What is a "default" human mode, though ? As I said on a sibling thread, there do exist examples of apparently successful social engineering efforts. For example, in most of the developed world, outright slavery was not only eliminated but rendered morally repugnant, and this change does not show any signs of reversal. To use an older example, monogamy became the social norm sometime during the Middle Ages (IIRC), and it persists as such to this day -- despite the fact that humans are biologically capable of polygamy.
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?
The more charitable (and less fully general) interpretation seems to be that they disagree about where the local maxima are. To say nothing of the difficulty of describing default human behavior given the differences between post-Neolithic environments and the EEA.
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'm mystified, too. Furthermore, I bet there isn't just one reason.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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's a solid dig at people who perform a particular kind of behavior that one deprecates. But it just isn't true!
I assume most people find this statement offensive and objectionable. If you are such a person, can you provide a rational justification for your response? It seems to me that the father is simply making a set of empirical claims about reality, and so at worst the statement is just inaccurate.
Also, imagine a father telling his son "You need to get a good job and learn how to dress well, or else no woman will want to marry you." Is this statement similarly objectionable? If so, why?
There's a few parts. Let's charitably assume that the father is just making an empirical statement, to shorten the list.
He assumes that his daughter needs to achieve the prerequisites of marriage - that she needs to get married. (And that it's his job to prepare her for this, even if only informationally.)
He assumes she's going to marry a man.
He describes her future marriage in terms of the wants of her hypothetical husband, as opposed to hers (compare something like, "You need to be able to dump guys over long-term dealbreakers without dating them for years, or how will you find a man you want to marry?")
He is wrong as a statement of fact, because there exist men who would marry a woman who doesn't clean and cook - and this isn't just a harmless falsehood (compare the implausible "you need to wear cunning knitted hats and eat parsley, or what man would want to marry you?"), but one that draws attention to evaluating his daughter's value in terms of her domestic skills - a pattern that is reinforced elsewhere, while cunning knitted hats and parsley are not.
Some of those objections disappear if you treat the father's advice as a heuristic and not an absolute rule - something like "being able to cook and keep a house clean increases your chances of finding a desirable long-term partner"; especially objection 2 (I would expect a woman would also prefer a partner who can cook and keep a house clean, all else being equal) and 4 (even if some men are perfectly okay with a wife that can't cook, I would expect that all else being equal being able to cook still makes one a more desirable partner).
"There are exceptions to that rule" is close to a fully general counterargument, because there are exception to pretty much any rule (outside the hard sciences), and I'm a bit annoyed when such an exceptions is used to triumphantly "refute" an argument (for example "once there was this guy who would have died if he had been wearing a seat belt!").
I do agree that the statement is sneaking in some iffy connotations like "your value as a woman is who you marry" and "you don't pick a husband, you get picked", and even if knowing how to cook does make increase the chances one ends up in a happy long-term relationship, other traits probably have more bang for the buck.
If you interpret the father's statement as "all else being equal, being a better cook is good" and you completely divorce it from a historical and cultural context, it is indeed not really problematic. But given that we are, in fact, talking culture here, I do not think that this is the interpretation most likely to increase your insight.
(not disagreeing, but note that I'm not saying the statement isn't problematic, merely saying that some objections are better than others)
But my whole point was that if it's an empirical statement, then we shouldn't be offended by it. That position seems fundamental to the whole rationalist project - a minor corollary of the Litany of Tarski is "If X is true, I want people to tell me that X is true [1]". X can be "the sky is blue" or "women who can cook and clean have better marriage prospects", it really shouldn't matter.
Think about the precedent you are setting when you get offended by an empirical statement. First of all, you are attacking the messenger - the fact that potential suitors will evaluate a woman in part based on her domestic skills is perhaps deplorable, but it's hardly the father's fault. Second, you are giving your allies an incentive to hide potentially important social information from you, since you have established the fact that you will sometimes get angry at them for telling you things.
[1] A better statement of this idea would be "If the probability of X is p(X), I want the proportion of people who tell me X is true to be p(X)". The people who advocate the minority positions (i.e. iconoclasts) are actually crucial to forming a well-calibrated picture of the world - without them you will become disastrously overconfident. You should take a moment today to thank your friendly neighborhood iconoclast.
When epistemic rationality is counter to instrumental rationality
Epistemic rationality is about knowing the truth. Instrumental rationality is about meeting your goals.
The general case is that the more truth you know, the better you are at meeting your goals (and so instrumental and epistemic rationality are heavily tied to each other), however there exist rare occurrences where this is not the case.
More importantly, there are many times when SPEAKING the truth is counter to your goals.
For an absurd example: Say you are in a room full of angry convicts with knives. It probably is counter to your goal of staying alive and healthy to start proclaiming TRUE but insulting statements.
More realistically, raising children is one example where, if your goal is to raise happy, sane, well-adjusted adults, there are many statements that should NOT be spoken, no matter how true they are.
Examples:
Even if it the cooking and cleaning statement were epistemically true, it is not instrumentally rational to tell this to your child if your goal is to have her grow into an independent adult who can support herself, and does not feel bound by the "traditional" gender roles (which are falling out of favor anyway).
Likewise, if you value having a higher percentage of women on this site, it is not instrumentally rational to make statements such as "You only got upvoted because you're a girl", or "<X> girls aren't as attractive as <Y> girls," EVEN IF you believe that said statements are true.
I highly value truth. But a prime reason I value it is because it allows me to meet my goals. When speaking the truth is harmful to my goals, it is wise to hold my tongue.
Why? I was under the impression that not telling children about sex was usually the result of an emotional hangup on the part of the parents and/or a culturally cached thought that originally arose from the “sex is dirty” meme from the medieval/early modern Christianity memeplex (possibly both things reinforcing one another), rather than a rational expectation that the child would be worse off if they knew about sex based on any kind of actual evidence. Am I wrong? (How common is that taboo among non-European-derived cultures?)
Telling children how sex works is important. You can do this when they ask about it or when they reach some level of sophistication that will let them understand the explanation you're ready to give. Telling anyone - especially your child - that you just had sex on the couch is a poor choice (outside of some plausible dynamics that consenting unrelated adults could set up). It's none of their business, and a psychologically typical child won't want it to be their business or will be embarrassed to have so wanted when they get older.
I looked up 'sex' in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
How old were you? Did it tell you anything that seemed useful, anything that in fact turned out to be useful? (Did you have a Britannica at home?)
Indeed. But why suppose those goals? I would value my daughter's happiness above her being independent and untraditional, in part because the former seems absolute while the latter two seem relational. When there are conflicting goals, all we can discuss are the empirical results of polices, and it's not clear to me that this is a case where accomplishing goals and speaking the truth conflict.
I don't think this example is in the same class as the other ones...as in, there's a certain age at which I would think that it is a good idea to tell your child, at the very least, that torture/factory farming/poverty exist. Preferably in a "let's think of something small that you could do about nasty situation XYZ" format. I wouldn't recommend telling 4-year-olds about these things-they aren't at an age to understand them-but 10-11 year olds is a different story. To do otherwise is to raise children to unconsciously ignore these issues, as most adults do. These issues exist.
All of those examples are cases of the hearer being insufficiently intelligent, insufficiently sane, or insufficiently mentally developed, and thus not equipped to hear truth-statements without taking unreasonable offense. Into which of those categories do you think the women on LW fall...? I'm going to guess "none of the above". But that leaves you with an absence of examples that actually support your point.
Also: the empirical statement "making this statement will probably lead to this-and-such bad outcome for me" is not equivalent to the value judgment "this statement is offensive [to this-and-such part of my audience]".
Back at the top of this thread, what is discussed is "A father tells his daughter X. Some here may find that objectionable." - what would be obejctionable wouldn't be X, but the fact that a father tells his daughter X.
Daenerys's examples are analogous to X - things that may not be particularly offensive as truth statements, but that one still may not want to tell small children.
(I think in this subthread some don't pay enough attention to the differences between "what's okay for discussion on LW" and "what's okay for a father-daughter discussion")
IME certain topics are so mind-killing that few people are sufficiently intelligent, sane and mentally developed for them -- even on LW.
An empirical statement, even a true one, can place undue emphasis on a particular fact. There's a hundred things in the same reference class that the father could have said; this particular one isn't being picked out because it is more true than the others, but because it conforms to gender stereotypes.
Yes, well... I don't agree with your point!
Some empirical statements, orthogonal to truth or falsity, are offensive. Virtually any claim can be made in an inappropriate way even if it's not intrinsically problematic (if someone shouted the multiplication tables at the top of their lungs in a public space for an hour, I might not use the word "offended" to describe my reaction, but I would sure want it to stop). Some claims can be made in a normal tone of voice during a conversation between consenting conversational partners and still be offensive. Many insults are empirical in nature. Slander/libel is generally empirical, although it's false if it can be described by those words. "I fucked your mom" is a claim about reality, true or false though it may be in any given instance; most people will be offended by it and they aren't wrong.
The particular statement under evaluation here is problematic for the reasons I outlined. Even if the statement is true and its content is appropriate - even if we assume that the man's daughter wants to grow up and marry a man and is perhaps actively soliciting advice about how to appeal to a wider pool of suitors - then he owed it to her to be gentler, less judgmental, and less endorsing of the stereotypical pattern about which he was trying to communicate information. Maybe "Well, a whole lot of men value domestic ability in a prospective wife - cooking, cleaning, that sort of thing." Same information, less harmful baggage.
I completely accept that the father's statement was framed poorly and that he should have been more tactful and diplomatic, but that seems like a relatively minor misdemeanor and is also unrelated to the points raised in your original comment.
I am going to stand by my basic claim that rationalists should try to build an environment where people can make statements about their perceptions of reality without fear of social repercussions.
The flip side of that is building an environment where people clearly differentiate normative claims from empirical ones. The father (I would guess intentionally) failed to do this, which is a moral failing on his part - he seems to be trying to guide his daughter into a traditional gender role, not disinterestedly providing her anthropological facts about her (assumed) future dating pool. When doing the latter, he should use more objective language and also explicitly state his moral position on the status quo.
As to making empirical statements without the fear of social disapproval, I don't think that's possible. All statements are speech acts - affecting our emotions and values - and empirical statements are no different. Trying to build a community that is tone-deaf to the implications of a technically true empirical statement like "Jews are apes" is not a particularly desirable goal. If you want to transmit empirical truths with a potentially nasty social undertone, there is no shortcut but to try your best to disavow the undertone.
I reserve the right to publicly spurn insults, nagging, implicit normative claims, misleading innuendoes, and outright falsehoods, whether or not they're presented as statements about someone's perceptions of reality.
The slander/libel case seems instructive: truth is an absolute defense against the accusation of slander or libel; it's the falsehood of a slanderous statement that harms.
Shouting the times-tables is a problem because of the delivery mechanism, not the content. Shouting anything at the top of your lungs for an hour in a public space is harmful to bystanders, and as you said, "offensive" is not what is wrong here.
"I fucked your mom", if true, is only potentially offensive for something like the following reasons:
In short, I don't think I buy your claim that "Some empirical statements, orthogonal to truth or falsity, are offensive." At least, I'd like to see it supported better before I consider it. This isn't simply contrarianism; I think that the ability and right to say true things regardless of whether someone finds those truths unpleasant is extremely important, and social norms to the contrary should not be adopted or perpetuated lightly.
Some examples of empirical statements with questionable-to-bad ethical undertones. I present them to you as food for thought, not as some sort of knock-down argument.
Not lightly, no. But as I was saying to Daniel_Burfoot above, there is just no avoiding the fact that statements, including statements of truth, are speech-acts. They will affect interlocutors' probability distributions AND their various non-propositional states (emotions, values, mood, self-worth, goals, social comfort level, future actions, sexual confidence, prejudices). Inconvenient as human mind-design is, it's really hard to suppress that aspect of it.
But there is a big asymmetry here - you (the speaker) know what you mean, so if it really needs to be said, take an extra second to formulate it in the way that has the least perlocutionary disutility.
These are food for thought indeed. My thoughts on some of them, intended as ruminations and not refutations:
I'm not sure what I think about this one. I do note that it would probably be perceived differently by someone who was aware of its truth (this person would certainly be hurt by the reminder of the bad thing), than by someone who was not (i.e. a religious person).
Exploitation of cognitive biases in the audience. Certainly an unethical and underhanded tactic, but note that its effectiveness depends on insufficient sanity in the listeners. Granted, however, that the bar for "sufficient sanity" is relatively high in such matters.
This one is interesting. A tangential thought: have there been studies to determine the power of stereotype threat to affect people who are aware of stereotype threat?
I think I'd have to agree that harping on such a fact would be annoying, at best. I do want to note that one solution I would vehemently oppose would be to forbid such statements from being made at all.
There's something wrong with your assessment here and I can't quite put my finger on it. Intuitively it feels like the category of "blame" is being abused, but I have to think more about this one.
The problem here, I think, is that some people use "X is going to happen" with the additional meaning of "X should happen", often without realizing it; in other words they have the unconscious belief that what does happen is what should happen. Such people often have substantial difficulty even understanding replies like "Yes, X will happen, but it's not right for X to happen"; they perceive such replies as incoherent. The quoted statement can well be true, and if said by someone who is clear on the distinction between "is" and "ought", is not, imo, offensive.
See above. Also, there's a difference between "A black man will never hold the highest office in this country, and therefore I will not vote for Barack Obama" and "A black man will never hold the highest office in this country; this is an empirical prediction I am making, which might be right or wrong, and is separate from what I think the world should be like."
If I think X will happen (or not happen), it's important (imo) that I have the ability and right to make that empirical prediction, unimpeded by social norms against offense. If people who are afflicted with status quo bias, or other failures of reasoning, fail to distinguish between "is" and "ought" and in consequence take my prediction to have some sort of normative content — well, it may be flippant to say "that's their problem", but the situation definitely falls into the "audience is insufficiently intelligent/sane" category. Saying "this statement is offensive" in such a case is not only wrong, it's detrimental to open discourse.
I happen to be reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate right now, and he comments on that well-known failing of twentieth-century social sciences, the notion that "we must not even consider empirical claims of inequality in people's abilities, because that will lead to discrimination". Aside from the chilling effect this has on, you know, scientific inquiry, there's also an ethical problem:
If you think that pointing out differences in ability will lead to discrimination, then you must think that it's not possible to treat people with equal fairness unless they are the same along all relevant dimensions. That's a fairly clear ethical failing. In other words, if your objection to "some people are less intelligent than other people" is "but then the less intelligent people will be discriminated against!", you clearly think that it's not possible to treat people fairly regardless of their intelligence... and if that's the case, then that is the problem we should be opposing. We shouldn't say "No no, all people are the same!" We should say, "Yes, people are different. No, that's not an excuse to treat some people worse."
Agreed. I just think that branding certain sorts of statements as "offensive" is entirely the wrong way to go about treating this issue with the care it deserves, because of the detrimental effects that approach has on free discourse.
Agreed, and I think this is a special case of the illusion of transparency.
(P.S. Today I learned the word "perlocutionary". Thank you.)
As an aside, I almost forgot a really good example of the phenomenon of "harmful facts," which is that the suicide rate in a region goes up whenever a suicide is reported on the news. Indeed, death rates in general go up whenever a suicide is reported, because many suicides are not recognized as such (e.g., somebody steers into oncoming traffic).
For this reason, police tend to hush suicides up (at least, they did in my old hometown & I think it's widespread).
What moral theory are you using in the parenthetical comment? For example, according to naive utilitarianism it makes no sense to divide causal links leading to harm into "blameless" and "blameworthy".
The truth is not immutable. It seems that many people on this site would elevate empirical facts (what is) into normative rules (what ought to be). Clearly, if X is just the Way Things Are, then there's no use fighting it; a good rationalist learns to accept that X is true, and work with that knowledge instead of ignoring its reality. (X could be anything from atheism to "black people statistically commit more crimes" to "most men refuse to marry a woman who can't cook".)
But just because something is empirically true now doesn't mean it has to be true forever. This is especially the case with social norms. Feminists aren't trying to say "men really don't care about a woman's cooking skills, and fathers who tell their daughters this are wrong". They're not denying that the world is this way, they're just denying that it ought to be this way. And a reliable way to change social norms is to teach new social norms to the next generation!
Be aware that when you speak a truth such as "Men only marry women who can cook", you are not just acknowledging a fact but perpetuating it. You are not just an objective scientific observer of a fact, but a subjective participant in that fact.
Er, not necessarily. Local maxima can be dangerous to venture away from.
Suppose that it'd be safer for everybody to drive on the right side of the road than for everybody to drive on the left side (as a consequence of most people being right-handed), and you're living in a country where it's customary to drive on the left side. You wouldn't teach your children to drive on the right side, would you?
And would you teach those new social norms as something that is or something that ought to be? Also, if different people have different opinions on what ought to be, what is / ought to be the algorithm for selecting the "correct" one?
I'm going to sidestep the talk of "offense" because I think it's sufficient to talk about whether a statement is morally right or wrong ("offensive" seems to be "morally wrong" with some extra baggage).
Two cases in which I might judge an empirical statement as morally wrong:
1) the statement is false, and yes, saying false things is usually considered morally wrong
2) the statement is true, but is used in a context where it will have negative repercussions - for example, telling your kid a huge amount of factually true statistics that cast a bad light upon a group you don't like (blacks, jews, women, etc.), or teaching a madman how to make explosives, etc.
In this case we're talking about the value a statement not in the abstract, but as life advice given from a father to his daughter. The important part isn't as much the truth of that particular piece of advice, but of what it allows us to infer about the general quality of the life advice given.
Er... if p(anthropogenic global warning is occurring | all publicly available evidence) is 85%, I'm not sure what I want is 85% of the people to tell me anthropogenic global warning is occurring and 15% of the people to tell me it's not.
Both messages are only about the past/current state of things and leave no room for "The old model stinks, and I hope your generation will continue changing it."
I prepared for adulthood/marriage on the old model, and it did not serve me well. It was like getting a job only to find that my typewriter skills weren't needed. Early on we had a series of dinnertime arguments that boiled down to: "Have some more food." "No, thanks, I'm done." "I cooked you this Good Food because I am a Good Wife! Why can't you appreciate the work I put into being good at this? Eat the damn food!"
As an extra anecdote, my wife says she prepared on the old model, and that it did serve her well (or at least, she doesn't regret).
I can see two perspectives:
A) The "traditional" model is good advice for a majority of the population, but is useless or harmful for a minority, in which case situations (like yours) where the advice failed may not be enough evidence that the advice was bad.
B) The "traditional" model may have been useful in the past, but society has changed too much (we live in large cities and know few of our neighbors; there's less physical work, a single earner can not usually support a family any more, many house tasks have been automated or outsourced), that the "traditional" model is about as useful as career advice from the 1920s.
I expect it's a mix of both, with the second effect probably being a bit stronger.
Good cooking skills provide a lot of utility for all members of the family. The costs of cooking are mostly the time spent cooking and the time spent learning cooking. The benefits of good cooking are pleasant experiences of eating tasty food, better health because of using more healthy ingredients, and saving some money (depends on cost of cook's time, and the size of family).
The traditional heuristic reduces the total costs of learning cooking by assigning the task to one gender. Also, in the context of traditional society, it is the gender with less income from work, therefore the opportunity costs of learning cooking are smaller.
On the other hand, contemporary society increases the opportunity costs for women, and also provides relatively cheap cooked food (probably still not as good as a good cook can make at home, but the difference is getting smaller). Also the costs of learning cooking are smaller because of available semiproducts and internet recipes; you can get mediocre results with trivial costs.
My (male) opinion is that the best solution today would be for everyone to learn some basic cooking (pasta, rice, soup...), at least the trivial recipes of form "put all ingredients together and cook for n minutes". After three experiments with each of them you learn to avoid the basic mistakes (too much salt, undercooking, overcooking) and get some basic confidence. From that point later: if you need to cook, cook; if you don't need to cook, at least do it once in a few months to preserve the skill. You have passed the psychological barrier, the rest is mostly about experience.
Perhaps one problem here is expecting too much too soon. A beginner cook may feel pressed to provide results on expert level. (An advice to the expert cooks: you are really not helping by providing thousand little unsolicited information. Inferential distances, et cetera.) This is why many people learn cooking when they are alone, cooking only for themselves. Also: Learning basic cooking is not a precommitment to get to the expert level. There is nothing wrong with mediocre cooking skills, they already give lot of utility; and if you later change your mind about this, you can complete your learning later.
This might be why my grandma gets very annoyed when I don't eat all of the food she cooks.
I would endorse giving this advice if I thought marriage was a good deal for men. Currently I plan to strongly advise my future sons against marriage. I'm unsure whether to advise my daugthers to marry or not, since it will give them greater power over their partners which may destablize such relationships.
I think its pretty crappy that cohabitation laws are now basically converging with marriage laws. I wish there was a "state please get your grubby hands out of my romantic relationships" wavier I could sign.
I'm curious about (a) your present age, and (b) how old you expect to be by the time you're advising your children about these things.
I think the sexism isn't telling that to your daughter -- it's not also telling that to your son.
ISTM that, until a few generations ago, people traditionally lived with their parents until they got married (in their early twenties, sometimes even in their late teens), and lived with their spouses thereafter. The husband traditionally had a full-time job, and the wife stayed home and was in charge of the housework (incl. cooking). Therefore, a man never actually needed to know how to do housework, because he would always live with a woman (his mother until he married, then his wife) who would do that for him. (Conversely, a woman never actually needed to work, because she would always live with a man (her father until she married, then her husband) who would bring home the bacon for her.) So, within the traditional gender roles, a male would never need to be told those words Julia Wise heard from her father.
Nowadays, instead, people (of either gender) who complete high school typically rent an apartment with roommates (often all of the same gender) in order to attend university, may (or may not) get married in their late twenties (sometimes even in their early thirties or later), and when they do, often both spouses have a job, so neither has the time/stamina/willingness to do all of the housework and they share it. So people of either gender will have to know how to do housework starting from college age. There is still a cliché that men can't cook, but it's mostly repeated tongue-in-cheek and hardly anybody seems to actually really believe it. (I'm talking about Italy -- YMMV.)
When my dad told me “I've heard that $bank is hiring -- why don't you apply there?”, I said “I'm not interested -- I'm going to start a PhD next year; if my ambition had been to work in a bank I wouldn't be studying physics” and he said “but it would be one of the best [i.e., highest-paying] jobs one could get!”, I kind-of freaked out -- and he hadn't even mentioned marriage!
(OTOH, when my mother told me the one about keeping a clean house (with “what woman” instead of “what man”), I just thought ‘Well, I hope not all women are as obsessed with cleanliness as you’ and IIRC said nothing in particular and smiled (i.e., pretended to think she was joking). So, in my case, it's the one about jobs that felt more objectionable. YMMV.)
Her father had the goal of her learning how to cook. Cooking is a valuable skill and it makes sense for parents to want their children to learn valuable skills.
He could have simply said: "You need to learn how to cook".
If you want to persuade someone it's better to say "You need to learn how to cook, because it helps you to achieve important goal X" than to just say "You need to learn how to cook". A dad that thinks that getting married is one of the goals of his daughter will use the example.
If you tell a guy to learn cooking it sense to frame the reason differently.
Take Tim Ferriss in his new book "The 4-Hour Chef" with targets geeks:
There no sexism inherent in giving a girl different reasons than a boy.
There most definitely is. The sexism is not generated by giving a girl different reasons than a boy, but it is absolutely inherent in the entire process that causes one to give a girl different reasons than a boy.
True: There is no sexism inherent in giving child A different reasons from child B.
Possibly true: There is no sexism inherent in giving particular-girl-Alice different reasons from particular-boy-Bob.
False: There is no sexism inherent in giving girls-in-general different reasons from boys-in-general.
The problem is that your statement has definitional ambiguity. Reframing to make it clear which specific case you're talking about will help cool down this debate.
Sexism has the same problem, as a word, that racism has. Is it believing in a contextually significant difference between groups OR is is believing that one group is universally superior to another OR is it actively working to support or harm an individual based on group affiliation? Examples of the latter are used to make the word have revulsion which is then used to discredit those who hold the former.
Those may be correllated, but are not identical positions.
Absolutely not. But this is why I keep using terms like "poisoning the discourse". Questions about contextually significant differences between groups are valid and important directions of inquiry, but people have deliberately decided (for political reasons) to so conflate them with actively supporting or harming individuals based on group affiliation that it's impossible to have a scientific discussion without feeding a bunch of people who aren't qualified to interpret the data.
Because we don't have anything like HPMOR's "Bayesian Conspiracy", we need to be sensitive to the fact that certain factual conjectures cause damage when released into the wild. And because I don't know how rational you(collective) are, I need to make sure that you(collective) understand the social weight of certain conjectures before I'm willing to bandy them about. And unfortunately, responding with "but it seems factually true to me!" seems to be missing the point of the communication, which is "you are tugging on the end of a fact-string that is connected to a really nasty bit of primate pack-behavior, can we please tug more gently on it?". (I acknowledge that many people have responded with "but look how gently I'm already tugging"; I've attempted to respond with "seriously dudes, you need to tug even more gently than that.")
This is a seriously recursive process, so almost all of the facts have to be evaluated in terms of the correlative matrix they operate within, instead of their mere correspondence-with-personally-available-evidence. All of these facts shape the process by which we gather evidence about them.
But the whole point of the process is to force anyone with an unpopular opinion to tug more and more gently, until finally they cease to tug at all. Then the PC hive mind can move the goalposts forward a bit, and start silencing a more moderate group of critics, and then another, and another, until ultimately the keepers of the received wisdom can say or do anything they like and no one dares to question them.
So no, I'll continue on with my ironclad opposition to such transparent ploys. Anyone who whines about how their delicate sensibilities can't stand an open, honest discussion of the facts of an issue has given up the right to have anyone care what they think.
Alicorn gave an excellent summary. But there's another issue also. When people say this sort of thing it is often with implicit premises that it is a massively important part of a woman's life to get married, to an extent that doesn't exist as much with men (with exceptions to some extent to certain ethnic and cultural groups which emphasize grandchildren). If you scratch this sort of thing beneath the surface you often find beneath the surface something like "Women exist to cook, clean, and pump out babies. If they go to college it should be to get an MRS degree."
This comment is directed to the LW commentariat, not just Daniel_Burfoot.
Fill in the blank with responses covering reasonable prior probability mass:
All my answers would be variants on:
I'm guessing example #4 was supposed to have a character named "Son"?
Poor question framing. Some people would say it was both equally offensive and not offensive, if they didn't think the former was offensive.
What you should probably be looking for is people who didn't find the statement offensive or objectionable but who understand the psychology and game theory of the situation well enough to calmly explain it. The sort of human that gets offended isn't generally the sort of human that is worth asking questions. Presumably you know this but you're making a political (in a broad sense of 'political') point about the importance of having the automatic habit (at the zero-point-two-second level) of making clean distinctions between empirical and normative claims. But come on dude, that's just baby town frolicks. Shouldn't you be making comments on a higher level and about more important things?
I would like to see LW become a place where people don't get offended by empirical statements - that seems like an achievable goal. But you are probably right that this kind of debate usually doesn't lead anywhere productive.
Partially. It isn't as objectionable because when this was said to me, and I replied "Well, I don't want to get married", nobody tried to tell me that I was wrong to think so.
I'm a male LWer with an infant daughter. I'd like to request some specific advice on avoiding the common failure modes.
Look for female role models and characters, wherever you can. My daughter is dinosaur-mad. The Usborne Big Book of Big Dinosaurs includes little cartoon palaeontologists - and she was delighted some were women. "I like the girl dinosaur scientist!" And then she came out with "When I was a three I wanted to be a princess, but now I am a five I want to be a dinosaur scientist." I CLAIM VICTORY. (so far.)
I suspect the problem there is that children are natural Platonic essentialists and categorise everything they can. (That big list of cognitive biases? Little kids show all of them, all of the time.) Particularly by gender. "Is that a boy toy or a girl toy?" It really helps that I have her mother (a monster truck pagan who knows everything and can do everything) to point at: "What would mummy think?" So having female examples on hand seems to have helped here. So I have this little girl who likes princesses and trains and My Little Pony and dinosaurs and Hello Kitty and space and is mad for anything pink and plays swordfighting with toy LARP swords. And her very favourite day out is the Natural History Museum.
(yeah, bragging about my kid again. You'll cope.)
This isn't a how-to, but I thought you might find these articles cute:
Linky- Story of how parents of toddler boys keep their kids from playing rought with the author's toddler girl, because "you have to be gentle with girls".
Linky- Dad tired all video game heroes are male. Reprograms Zelda to make Link a female for little daughter.
Linky- Video- A What Would You Do? episode, where you see how people in a costume store react when a little boy (actor) wants to dress as a princess, and a little girl (actress) wants to dress as Spiderman for Halloween
I can see the point the author is trying to make in the story about having to be gentle with girls, but I think I'd be conflicted about it if I had a son. Later in life there are severe social and legal consequences for a man that is too rough with women and I'd hate to set my kid up for failure.
I realize there is a difference between "playing rough" and abuse but there can be grey areas at the border. There are many situations were I would physically subdue a man (both playful and serious) but not a woman, partly for fear of causing harm but mainly because of the social blowback and potential for getting arrested.
I might be overly sensitive to this line of thinking because I have a military background, but I think teaching a son that he should behave as if girls and boys are the same physically is sub-optimal (in terms of setting him up for success and long-term hapiness).
Don't take your parenting approach from ideology, because it's not optimized for being a reflection of reality. (Extreme example here)
We're into holiday season again, so here's a link to a post I made a year ago, that includes, among other things, NOT always commenting on "How cute" all your little nieces (and nephews) are.
How To Talk To Children- A Holiday Guide
For me, this post is not doing any favors for the "women's experiences are fundamentally different" camp. Most of these sound like stories from my own life. Of course, "Why are your characters always girls?" is probably a harder question for a boy than a girl.
I'd guess these mostly work as stories of "growing up geeky".
The only ones that didn't resonate were the last one about not playing M:tG anymore (probably since I've never stopped appearing like a geek) and the "Star wars characters are mostly male", which does seem worth mentioning.
MLP:FiM is probably a good available example of the reverse phenomenon. The positions of power are occupied by females. There are very few male characters (though a significantly more even ratio than Star Wars), and they seem to be shoehorned in as male stereotypes. I suggest male readers ruminate on this aspect of the show until it seems a bit disturbing. And then notice that females can experience this when watching most things.
For those that don't want to do a google search, MLP:FiM = My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (I had to look it up)
Is this one of those kid shows that adults watch these days? A show that a decent fraction of male LW readers know enough about to "ruminate on"?
I already have to navigate through my social world with the handicap of counting a work of Harry Potter fanfiction among my favorite books. If I end up owning seasons of My Little Pony because of this site I'm going to be very upset.
The show is actually fairly popular amongst the male internet nerd demographic. The original creator, Lauren Faust, was a well-liked animator beforehand, and something about it just caught the popular imagination ('nerdy' references, characters and animation, well-timed slanderous editorials, etc.). There's a huge fandom that constantly produces ludicrous streams of stuff.
There's been some discussion of it on LW, and I expect there's a not-insignificant population of fans here. Or "bronies", as some style themselves.
Yup. Try watching a few episodes, it's pretty good.
I'm not entirely convinced by this argument.
To spell it out for those who don't know the shows, anime series that have a mostly female cast doing more or less random stuff and have a significant male audience are a thing. There's also the type of anime series that has a mostly male cast and is aimed at a female audience.
Er... what if it still doesn't seem disturbing after rumination?
Discord is male, more powerful than the Princesses, and evil.
Er, I don't seem to be finding this very disturbing either.
(Admittedly, I haven't actually watched the show, only read fanfiction based on it.)
Yes. There are certain very common tropes whose gender-reversed version offends me (thereby making me realize that the original version is fucked up too), but almost all characters in a work of fiction being the same gender isn't one of those.
Examples: 1) When a woman posts some mysandrist generalization about “all men” on her Facebook wall, I am deeply offended¹ -- so I can guess how women feel when a man posts some mysogynist generalization about “all women”, which happens more often IME. 2) The latest episode of How I Met Your Mother, in which na nggenpgvir znyr ynjlre gevrf gb jva n ynjfhvg ol syvegvat jvgu gur whebef, jub ner nyy srznyr, kind-of bothered me (though I'm not sure I endorse that feeling) because it reminded me of the gender-reversed version, which is a very common trope and offends me. But sometimes is the asymmetry itself that bothers me: when a woman posts pictures of sexy men in underwear on their Facebook wall, I'm not directly offended by that (I occasionally do the gender-reversed version of that myself), but I am bothered by the fact that no-one seems to flinch whereas when a man posts pictures of sexy women in underwear on their Facebook wall (which happens much more often IME) plenty of people boo that.²
To be fair, this scenario probably should bother you, because it amounts to hacking a critically important social system through the use of the Dark Arts. The gender of the participants is, IMO, less important than the realization of how easily our social infrastructure can be exploited.
Hypothesis: Body dysmorphia for men is only starting to become a serious problem. Wait a generation or so.
If male readers feel uncomfortable with the lack of characterization and stereotyping of male characters, and subsequently realize that female readers can feel similarly uncomfortable with all media that fails the Bechdel test (a significant amount), then they can conclude that it's disturbing to think of a world where a gender is reduced to those kinds of stereotypes.
Of course, it's possible to miss one of those elements of the chain -- not feeling uncomfortable in the first place, for example.
But then, it's also possible for them to recognize that some people feel uncomfortable while experiencing specific media and feeling enough empathy to relate to them, even if they don't feel uncomfortable themselves.
Same here.
That's not how Crocker's Rules work; they're supposed to be declared by the listener, who thereby takes responsibility for any hurt feelings caused by the content. You can't declare Crocker's rules on behalf of others.
That's why I called it Crocker's Warning and not Crocker's Rules. I am implying that by reading the content you are agreeing to Crocker's Rules. It's just a way of saying that the submitters were told not to hold back, and if you want it sugar-coated, you shouldn't read it.
Upon consideration, I think I have pinpointed what bothers me about the bit in the post about Crocker's Rules. It's the imposition on the reader, not just of potentially offensive content, but also of a waiver of the right to object to the content as being offensive.
That is, I don't object to this part:
Fine and well. A good warning.
But this part seems to suggest that by reading this, I'm waiving my right to say, e.g., "Wait a bit, this isn't just impolite, this is offensive! This reads like an insult!" It seems like the warning is saying: "If you find this offensive, too bad. By reading this, you're agreeing to shut up and take it" — and I don't think that prefacing your post with that is conducive to good discussion, not at all.
Note: I don't actually think any of the anecdotes in this post are offensive.
Me neither. I think the post needs a more specific set of ground rules, something like "the anonymous submitters are putting themselves out on the line here, and in order to have the most honest and useful discussion, they were told not to hold back for politeness...but they'll probably be reading all your comments and replies, so in order to encourage future honest and useful discussions, please don't respond angrily or rudely, since that will discourage submitters in the future from being honest." Which isn't quite in the spirit of Crocker's Rules. (I don't know if 'Crocker's Warning' is a concept that has actually been elaborated...is it?)
Neat, can I put one of those on my comments feed?
I think the concept is that content is included from trusting volunteers who were told to expect Crocker's Rules in the audience, and if you're not willing to abide by that trust, you shouldn't read.
If true, that (telling the volunteers to expect Crocker's Rules in the audience) seems at worst disingenuous and at best unwarranted. Taken literally, it translates to:
"I promise that the audience which will read your writings will consist entirely of people who don't get offended by anything you say, up to and including things almost universally considered to be directly and personally insulting." (Because that's what Crocker's Rules are, yes?)
And in general I don't think that "I have things to say, but I'm only going to say them to people who promise not to be offended by anything I say" is in the spirit of Crocker's Rules. I also don't think that it's a good attitude to take, period.
ETA (from http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Crocker's_rules):
This feels like Main material, both in the "well written and based on collected data" sense and the "something the whole community benefits from reading" sense.
Thanks! This comment got more upvotes than I predicted it would, so I'll try moving it to Main, but I understand if the mods want to move it back to discussion, because there's going to be quite a number of posts on this topic, and I can see how they wouldn't want that clogging up the front page.
Personally, I would be distraught if the front page got clogged up with well-written, interesting, and informative posts.
I have to respectfully disagree. The articles on Main are usually a bit more structured: they have a specific point to make, and they outline the reasoning and evidence that would lead one to conclude that the point is true.
This article doesn't seem to have a central point, and it doesn't offer any reasoning. It contains a bunch of interesting anecdotes, and it is great for creating discussion, but it doesn't belong in Main.
Please don't misunderstand: I'm not saying that the article is bad (in fact, I do like it), only that it doesn't belong in Main.
Recommend putting this sentence in bold.
Good idea. Done!
I have to say, I found most of these to be either standard geek fare (I play D&D and the DM railroads me towards combat) or pretty obvious sexism-is-bad (Dad says I need to cook or I wont get a man.) Is is possible that you're overestimating the inferential distance here?
I got a very similar response when my Lawful Neutral Cleric wanted to set up a formal inquisition to root out the evil cultists in the city rather than go to the big bad's cave and whack them on the head. Also a barbarian of mine wanted to run a brothel after the party defeated the gang that controlled it before. It mysteriously burned down the following night.
In general some DMs have a hard time dealing with characters that want to weave baskets instead of going hack and slash.
My lawful neutral character attacked the rest of the party when they assaulted a group of innocent (until proven guilty) goblins in the first encounter.
I had an interesting experience with this, and I am wondering if others on the male side had the same.
I tried to imagine myself in these situations. When a situation did not seem to have any personal impact from the first person or at best a very mild discomfort, I tried to rearrange the scenario with social penalties that I would find distressing. (Social penalties do differ based on gender roles)
I found this provoked a fear response. If I give it voice, it sounds like "This isn't relevant/I won't be in this scenario/You would just.../Why are you doing this?" Which is interesting: my brain doesn't want to process these stories as first-person accounts. Some sort of analysis would be easier and more comfortable, but I am pretty sure would miss the damn point.
I don't have any further thoughts, other than this was useful in understanding things that may inhibit me from understanding. (and trying to get past them)
I daresay this is the least terrible discussion of gender we've ever had. Good job, LW!
Was it? Or did one side just give up.
It's nice to see that LW's epistemic root system is dense enough to support explorations like these -- much better than freaking out and marring its own reputation a la the atheism vs. Atheism Plus flap. It sends a good message.
EDIT: This is the first thing I've read on LW that makes me think of it as a culture.
What is an epistemic root system, and how can they be dense?
It's an imperfect metaphor for everybody trusting each other to think real good. Dense root systems help prevent erosion (in this case of epistemic standards).
Here's hoping LW can do better at this than my own professional community.
That's not a high bar. I love my IT job, but IT is shamefully bad at this.
You know, I've noticed issues and heard about problems in math and the sciences before of this sort, but it seems like much more of a problem in IT. Any idea why?
One relevant datum: when I started my studies in math, about 33% of the students was female. In the same year, about 1% (i.e. one) of the computer science students was female.
It's possible to come up with other reasons - IT is certainly well-suited to people who don't like human interaction all that much - but I think that's a significant part of the problem.
I never consciously noticed that, but you're right. From what I remember the proportion of women in my CS classes wasn't quite that low, but it was still south of 10%. 33% also sounds about right for non-engineering STEM majors in my (publicly funded, moderately selective) university in the early-to-mid-Noughties, though that's skewed upward a bit by a student body that's 60% female.
It seems implausible, though, that a poor professional culture regarding gender would skew numbers that heavily in a freshman CS class -- most of these students are going to have had no substantial exposure to professional IT or related fields beforehand. I think we're looking at something with deeper roots. Specifically, CS is linked to geek subculture in a way that the rest of STEM isn't: you might naturally consider a math major if you were undecided and your best high-school grades were in mathematics, but there's no such path to IT. You generally only go into it if you already identify with the culture surrounding it and want to be part of it professionally.
With this in mind it seems likely to me that professional IT's attitudes are largely determined by the subculture's, not the other way around, and that gender ratios in CS aren't going to change much unless and until the culture changes.
CS and IT have become less gender-balanced (more male) in the past 20-30 years — over the same time frame that the lab sciences have gotten more balanced.
It's just a shame that dense epistemic root systems tend to produce an equally dense foliage of jargon :-)
Did... did she completely fail to comprehend the one thing she does know about the farmers, namely that they are being repeatedly attacked when they attempt to do any actual farming? The correct response here was something more like:
"A few minutes after you've got the plow hitched, there's a 'swish' noise and the horse falls down, an elven arrow protruding from it's neck. Roll initiative."
I don't understand how Christine the female dungeon master who has apparently consistently been playing with approximately gender-balanced groups not accommodating plowing fits in here. Plowing doesn't even seem like a particularly feminine activity (compared to e. g. trying for peaceful relations with the elves).
Christine understood the game to be about combat, so she had planned an adventure that led us toward combat with the elves. But when she gave us details about starving farmers, my wanting to feed them was considered off-mission.
I don't have much data on what D&D is like with groups of different gender mixtures. At the time, we considered agricultural forays and many stops for "okay, now we make tea" to be things that probably didn't happen when boys played.
Addendum: approximately 900 people have now told me that this kind of thing happened in their groups too and is not a girl thing. Point taken.
Sounds like we've successfully reduced the inferential distance a bit, eh? ;)
My (normally all-male) groups have had a few forays into "make don't break," and many forays into "the DM wants us to do X? Y is the most important thing in the world right now."
In general, something I talk about with players is asking them how much of their ideal session is spent on combat, and how much is spent on role-playing. You get people who prefer 100% combat, and people who prefer 100% roleplaying, and seating those people at the same table is a bad idea. (I tend to go for >80% roleplaying myself, these days.) I would surprised if there weren't a male skew towards combat and a female skew towards roleplaying, but I also expect both distributions to be positive everywhere.
There's also a wealth of tabletop roleplaying systems out there these days, such that if you find your group prefers to mostly roleplay, you should play a game designed for mostly roleplay, rather than D&D, which is basically designed for >95% combat.
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.
To any catcalling experts:
I look female. I go out on my own or with other female-looking young adults rather often. I live in a poor neighborhood. Why have I never gotten catcalled? I am ugly and dress unfemininely and shabbily, but Internet feminists claim this doesn't reduce catcalling much, and men do sometimes politely hit on me.
Maybe you live somewhere other than where the Internet feminists live. I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of such behaviours varied by an order of magnitude from one region to another, even within the western world.
EDIT: Indeed, a couple months ago an Italian friend of mine living in Barcelona posted something on Facebook about being constantly catcalled whenever she went in a particular district, from which I guess it hadn't happened to her (or hadn't happened that often) elsewhere.
Anecdotally, this seems wrong. Having observed some groups catcalling, they did not catcall every woman who walked by, only the more-conventionally-attractive ones. So there should be notably lower incidence of catcalling with unattractiveness.
This raises the uncomfortable question of "If you hate it so much, why do you try so hard to look hot?". Common escape routes are "It doesn't actually impact frequency", which is apparently false, and "I have a right to look hot, they have no right to catcall me", which is pure should-universe thinking, and from people who avoid flaunting their wealth to avoid getting mugged.
This should be distinguished from questions like "Since the benefits of looking hot outweigh the costs of increased catcalling, why are you complaining that you can't have it both ways?".
I think we need to taboo "looking hot", as opposed to "looking nice", because of the cultural baggage that comes with the idea of "hot". If you describe a woman as "hot" people assume more sexual clothes, and an effort to be "sexy" looking. "Hotness" does not effect levels of catcalling as much as "looking decent-ness". For example, I would still get catcalled almost as much while wearing generic nice-looking clothes, as while wearing something "hot".
To avoid catcalling, the level of "looking good" has to be extremely low. As in, lower than I would want to go out in public in. For example if I don't shower, wear baggy sweatpants and stained sweater, and have lanky uncombed hair in my face, then yeah, I can avoid catcalling, probably. If I am at all dressed decently (not necessarily "hot"), street harassment will occur.
Regarding "flaunting" how "hot" you are: I can think of some middle eastern cultures that have solved the problem this way. "Let's blame the women for making men feel lustful, so have the women all walk around in big black tents that only show their eyes!" This is not my preferred solution.
Yes, I do think the benefits of looking decent/ not looking like a homeless person outweigh the negatives of street harassment. However, this does not make street harassment an acceptable thing that shouldn't be complained about.
For example, say that people with blue eyes (and only people with blue eyes) had to get punched in the face every time they went on a date. Now, if they continue going on dates, they obviously find it a worth the punching, but that doesn't make the punching acceptable.
You're the second commenter who didn't get that I'm saying that "Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, better pick the latter" might be reasonable, but that "Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, you shouldn't want to, stop complaining" is stupid assholery. I thought my second paragraph was quite clear!
We have a Problem with the immense overlap in female fashion between "flattering" and "sexy". Do you think that's related? I can't see a woman in a men's business suit getting catcalled (though I'm no expert), whereas women's business attire is all "LOOK, LEGS AND BOOBS!".
There's definitely a tragedy of the commons going on here. If women all decide to dress more conservatively to be left alone, the standard just drops until just being out of the house is immodest. And any women who don't follow suit might as well wear a "victim-blame me!" sign. So you can't fix harassment that way. But an individual woman acting selfishly would apparently benefit from it.
"If you hate being bullied for being a nerd, why do you study physics and watch anime so much?"
"'I have a right to study physics and watch anime; they have no right to bully me' is pure should-universe thinking."
"Since the benefits of studying physics and watching anime outweigh the costs of being bullied, why are you complaining that you can't have it both ways?"
"If you hate being bullied for being a nerd, why do you study physics and watch anime so much?"
puts consequentialist jersey on
If I expect to be better off studying physics and watching anime, I should do so. Otherwise, I shouldn't.
puts acausal wristband on
Considering what I would want to have precommitted to wouldn't matter much -- I would likely be bullied even if I had precommitted to study physics and watch anime no matter how much I was bullied, as it's not likely that they bully me in order to deter me from studying physics and watching anime. (And it's extremely unlikely that a man catcalls a woman in order to deter her from dressing up.)
Considering that people sufficiently similar to me in sufficiently similar situations will make similar choices -- well, the world would be a worse place if more people had refrained from studying physics for fear of being bullied. OTOH watching anime doesn't have any important externalities (that, say, watching Hollywood sitcoms doesn't also have), as far as I can tell.
If I expect to be better off if I complain/have precommitted to complain (and so have people sufficiently similar to me in sufficiently similar situations), then I should complain, otherwise I shouldn't. ISTM that complaining gives visibility to the issue of people being bullied, which can't be bad. (Well, bullies might retaliate, but if I had precommitted to complain whether or not I fear they retaliate...)
"I have a right to X" translates into consequentialistese as "I had better not be deterred from X". Should we deter people from studying physics, so that they won't be bullied? Of course not -- they are already taking into account that they might be bullied when deciding whether to study physics; plus, if fewer people studied physics, bullies would likely just vent off their frustrations on someone else. (OTOH we should tell/remind people that unfortunately studying physics may lead to being bullied, in case they don't already know/have forgotten -- if we could find a way to put that whose drawbacks wouldn't outweigh the benefits.) Should we deter people from bullying nerds? Of course we should.
You're welcome. takes wristband and jersey off
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.
Yes. It would be oh-so-convenient if "It doesn't actually impact frequency" were true, but I suspect we don't live in such a convenient world. And made more uncomfortable if the calculation were made explicitly ahead of time, and benefits-plus-catcalling was a conscious choice.
To increase the squick factor of this discussion by orders of magnitude, substitute "catcalling" with "rape".
Yeah, that's the fairly heavy subtext here. But here the Internet feminists seem correct in saying that looking like easy prey - pressure not to fight back or not to report rape, plausible deniability for the rapist, physical weakness or incapacitation, circumstances favoring victim-blaming - is a much stronger factor than attractiveness. Never heard of anyone getting catcalled in a nursing home.
From the final hyperlinked article:
I've never understood this, either. Any good guesses?
Six options:
1) Low rate of success is coupled with a very low investment level. 2) The behavior isn't to try to pick up the woman at all but rather to engage in shared bonding among the males. (Note how this behavior seems to generally occur when there is a group of males.) 3) Lack of self-restraint. The people in question who do this are typically low status and low income. There's a large body of evidence that people with lack of self-control have less life success. (The marshmallow studies and all that.) Some of these people may have little self-control or bother so little to exercise self-control that clearly unsuccessful behavior is still attempted. 4) Attempts to harass the people in question, possibly to blow off steam at one's own lack of sexual success. 5) A well-meaning attempt to actually complement people for being good looking and well-dressed. They may just be unaware of how uncomfortable this behavior often makes women feel. 6) Possibly combining with any combination of the above possibilities- cultural behavior. Once there's some small fraction doing something, how long does it take before the same behavior is imitated in the general group?
Take those with a grain of salt.
There's plenty of evidence (e.g.) of higher-income people engaging in similar behavior.
Yes. The take-away point is that the children's patience with marshmallow promises and their long-term life success may be correlated because they're mutually determined by whether adults and peers in their life are trustworthy and reliable, more so than by a variable of Intrinsic Self-Discipline.
As a man who doesn't catcall, it seems really obvious to me: Whenever I see someone really attractive, I want to shout out that they are to them. I'm well aware that my well-meaning comment about how great someone's ass is or how I love their hair would be weird or uncomfortable, and so I don't do it. But it's very easy to imagine someone less aware who does.
I guess we could understand catcalling better by seeing its equivalent in more primitive societies, or preferably at apes. Or perhaps by putting a hidden camera on a person who does it frequently, and examining the consequences.
My guesses:
1) Some women react positively to catcalling. Even if one in a hundred, then it would be enough, because the cost is low. As an analogy, receiving spam is also annoying, but a tiny fraction of humans react by sending their money, which rewards the spammers.
2) Catcalling may be a defection in a Prisonners' Dilemma of a group of men meeting a woman. A more polite group would be more likely to impress her positively. But even in the best case scenario, she would most likely choose only one of them as her sexual partner. By catcalling, a man positions himself as a "speaker" of the group, as the dominant male. He slightly increases his personal chance by decreasing the chances of the group as a whole.
3) In its most primitive form, catcalling could be an encouragement to a group rape. It is not a signal for the woman. It is a signal for the fellow men to join the action.
Additional hypothesis-- for some people, being disliked is preferred to being ignored.
Note that the catcallers only need to believe that it's worthwhile; it needn't actually be.
Seems obvious to me: it's fun. People enjoy teasing and flirting, and catcalling is both. The main reason people avoid both of those behaviors is the risk of rejection/social punishment. Catcalling is overwhelmingly done to strangers, unlike most types of flirting, you don't lose face if rejected. Catcalling as teasing is also low-risk, since you aren't offending someone you know, possibly making new enemies. There's a reason catcalling is usually done by guys on public streets, somewhat isolated from their targets. At my college, guys like to sit in their dorm windows (3rd floor or higher) in groups and yell stuff like "HEY CUTIE I LIKE UR BOOBS." Girls occasionally yell stuff back, which the guys seem to love.
It's rather obnoxious of guys at your college to misspell "your" even while talking.
It's actually plausible that they pronounce it "ər" instead of "jɔr," given the amount of internet-related slang that has made it into the speech of the youth.
To the woman (this one, at least), it is neither. It is humiliating and frightening, and no fun at all. And I'm sure that is just what the catcallers find fun. It's a dominance thing.
That's quite eye-opening, thank you!
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
...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.
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.
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.
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?
This is off-topic, but that anecdote should go right on top of the list of things every GM should avoid doing. Regardless of anyone's gender.
If your players want to plow the field, let them plow the field. If your players want to sit in the tavern getting drunk all day, let them sit there for a bit. When the inevitable dark elves attack and burn the fields for the tenth time (after stealing all the mead from the tavern), the combat you (the GM) crave will develop naturally.
The 3rd edition WFRP takes a more structured approach to the problem. The minions of Chaos (let's face it, it's always Chaos) get a track, with a pointer on it. Each time the players make a mistake, waste time, or bicker amongst themselves, the pointer moves up a notch. There are markers along the track; once the pointer passes the marker, certain events are set in motion, and the situation grows worse for our heroes; the exact details depend on the scenario. When the pointer reaches the end of the track, all hell breaks loose and the PCs get to make one desperate last stand against the forces of Chaos whom they failed to stop.
From the linked article
I'd like to ask, would speaking up and intervening be an appreciated behavior? When I envision this scenario, I see this as likely to incite further discomfort, for "white knighting." I'd like to know what sort of responses people who've been subject to catcalling would like to see from other men who happen to be present.
Gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette.
According to no authority, here is what I think is the standard protocol. If you know the offender, you pull their strings a bit - if they care how they appear to the people who they know, say it makes you want to avoid being seen with them, if they care about being high-class, say it's low-class, if they regularly care about strangers as people, use an ethical argument, if they care about being hard-working, say they're damaging the image of the company, etc.
If you don't know the offender you can't be so nuanced or even very friendly, but eggs, omelette, yadda yadda. If you or they are passing by with limited potential for escalation, feel free to insult their choice creatively. If it's a "sharing the elevator" kind of situation, you're going to have to put on your big boy britches (relative to the insults) and tell them politely that they're being incredibly uncool.
Helping people is a complicated matter, and I don't think it's just a male-female issue.
If someone is extremely conflict-averse, then the offer of help might be unwelcome because it's likely to lead to more conflict in the short run.
Needing to be helped can be seen as having one's status lowered even further than it was lowered by the initial attack/insult.
And on the other hand, sometimes help works. Sometimes it's welcome. Sometimes the lack of offers of help is seen as a betrayal.
I don't have general principles for telling when help is welcome, though asking the person whether they want help isn't a bad idea if it's a slow-moving situation. I also suspect that there are subtleties of body language which affect whether help will be welcomed.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Knowing this, forget about the "appreciated behavior" and simply do what you believe is the right thing.
Relevant:
The “Anonymous Narratives by LW Women” thread will receive >100 comments,
The “Anonymous Narratives by LW Women” thread will receive >500 comments
Consider this easy-to-predict eventuality as an indictment of how incredibly ineffective and mindkilled LessWrong is about sex, for obviously ideological reasons (though we may disagree about which side it is that is mindkilled).
In addition to the problems already pointed out with this comment, another thing I'd like to address is:
If one suspects that mindkilling is happening, the most likely result isn't that it is happening on one "side" but rather with pretty much both "sides"- thinking in terms of sides is already to some extent a sign of mindkilling. But large scale discussion is not, and better not be, in any reasonable setting a sign by itself of mindkilling but just evidence of levels of interest.
What's your line of thought that large numbers of comments are a clear indication of a mind-killed community?
Probably: controversy -> lots of comments. If you think that, for example, feminism should be trivial or trivially dismissed, then controversy indicates a problem.
"Feminism" in its colloquial understanding covers so much beliefs and memes at this point that it's possible to consider some of them trivial (e.g. "the traditional gender structure is unjust, immoral and insidious") while trivially dismissing others (e.g. "most men are currently privileged over most women", "male sexuality is inherently aggressive/antisocial").
Relevant
(I'm getting addicted to linking to posts by Yvain. Maybe I should beemind to not doing that more than twice per day or something.)
Doesn't follow. The base rate for getting more than 100 comments on a main, non-announcement article is already something like 70%.
Based on these anecdotes, I have significantly less geek-cred than female Less Wrongers. Are female Less Wrongers extra geeky or am I just a community outlier?
The stories were selected for being about geekiness. It might be worth having (in other words, I'm not doing it) t a post in discussion about geek cred.
Some of those don't sound terribly gender-specific to me -- but then again, I've had a less stereotypically masculine life than typical. (In particular, I answered Yes to plenty of these questions (the ones in black) --probably more Yes than No, though most were N/A or "What the hell is wrong with you"-- in spite of being male.)
Setting aside how poisonously spiteful the linked author seems to be (see his homepage), the funny thing about the author's criticisms of 'feminism' as seen in that list, is that most of the complaints that have any justice behind them actually support bog-standard feminist theory. For example:
The boilerplate feminist line here would be that society conditions us to habitually think in paired gender stereotypes, such as "women are natural caregivers, men keep their children at arm's length" and "women are good at domestic duties, men are the heads of the house."
Thus, the unjust facts that e.g.,
the former complained about mainly by feminists, the latter mainly by MRA advocates, are all explained by the exact same gender role dynamic that feminism has sought to criticize.
The author thinks that feminism is all about saying how men's lives are great and women's lives suck. This is lowest-common-denominator, oppression-olympics feminism. Sophisticated feminism says "here are a bunch of cultural practices and expectations that, in different ways, make the lives of men, women and other genders shittier than they should be."
Gender issues alone are bad enough, but I strongly suggest we avoid discussing them in terms of their support for/conflict with any particular ideology of gender; that strikes me as industrial-strength mind-killer.
The thing that frustrates many people might be that some feminists tend to pay some amount of lip service to the idea that men may get hurt but angrily suppress men who talk about it enough, esp in existing feminist forums; in the worst cases men get told that these issues are always peripheral matters of patriarchy and if men want to escape rigid male gender roles the right thing to do is to totally subordinate themselves to feminism even when it's not helping them.
Further, there is a certain kind of mind to which feminism helping women but not men looks like feminism gradually acquiring the power to oppress men.
A further annoyance is that the movements that are interested in dealing with the male issues in the Overly Restrictive Overall Male Favoring Gender Ssytem often have one of the following drawbacks: - Have their own stereotypes - are too vague, tend to make 'masculinity' a zero-meaning term - or are focused on an unpopularly high level of gender-nonconformity for men. For example, I find it frustrating when discussions about the boringness and lack of self-expression inherent in modern men's clothing leads to alternative men's clothing that is effeminate (another taboo that should break, but not for me) but not expressive.
The response I've usually seen to this is more along the lines of "That's true but it's off-topic here" or "You're disrupting the conversation; we're talking about problems that women have here" — more and more heatedly as the off-topic posters persist.
Part of the trouble seems to be that these men give the impression that they are not willing to allow women (or specifically feminist women) to have a forum that belongs to them, where those women get to define "on-topic" in terms of their own standards, without permission from any man who passes by. That a forum just about women's issues cannot be allowed to exist.
Suppose that every time Less Wrong had a thread about UFAI, a bunch of people showed up talking about fighting breast cancer; how UFAI wasn't the only problem in the world — breast cancer is bad, too! They'd not be wrong — breast cancer is indeed bad — but it's not on topic in a thread on UFAI. And when told "this is off topic, please take it to the optimal medicine thread or something", they responded with hostility: "You FAI people must be bigoted against breast cancer survivors!" Over time, they made it clear that no discussion on LW would be allowed to not include breast cancer; that failing to mention breast cancer in every discussion would be taken as proof that LW was bigoted; that AI-folk had no right to hold discussions about ethics without breast cancer being on topic; and so on.
I think we would get a bit annoyed. Even those of us who care plenty about breast cancer.
This.
Also, it's probably worth noting that many feminists do want to discuss the way sexism impacts men, but find that self-invited men who wish to participate aren't necessarily contributing in a positive way to that. Continuing your analogy, it would be like people who want to talk about UFAI found themselves fielding responses from people who think merely discussing AI makes you shills for the DOD who secretly work on drones and like bombing brown babies.