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Eugine_Nier comments on Don't Get Offended - LessWrong
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Feminists frequently make "is" assertions, and justify their "ought" assertions on the basis of said "is" assertions.
In any case, you seem to be arguing that feminism will now be joining religion in the trying to survive by claiming to be non-refutable club.
They do, but their “is” assertions are stuff like “women have historically (i.e. in the last several millennia) been, and to a certain extent still are, oppressed by men”, which aren't actually contradicted by evolutionary psychology, which says stuff like “humans are X because, in the last several hundred millennia, X-er apes have had more offspring in average”. (And the “ought” assertions they justify based on “is” assertions are stuff like “we're further south than where we want to be, so we ought to move northwards”; IOW, they're justifying instrumental values, not terminal values.)
That wasn't my intention, but at the moment I can't think of a good way to edit my comment to make it clearer.
That's a far more complicated claim than it appears, with much of the complexity hiding inside the word "oppressed".
Another typical feminist claim is "differences between the behavior of boys and girls are due to socialization". This is, as you'd imagine, the kind of claim that is easily subject to falsification by evolutionary psychology. The related normative claim that "we ought to socialize boys and girls as androgynously as possible", becomes challenged by the evolutionary psychology claim that "we ought to socialize boys and girls in ways that take into account their inherent differences.
And both claims are wrong- The only correct way of phrasing the normative claim is "We ought to socialize boys and girls in the way that maximizes instrumental value."
It might have instrumental value to socialize boys and girls differently, even if there is no biological basis for the difference. It might be more valuable to socialize them the same, even if there is a biological reason why they are different.
I expect claim C1: "for all differences D between the behavior of boys and girls, D is due solely to socialization" is false, and I expect claim C2: "there exist differences D between the behavior of boys and girls such that D is due solely to socialization" is true.
I expect claim C3: "differences between the behavior of boys and girls are due to socialization" to generate more heat than light, by virtue of being ambiguous between C1 and C2.
If I assume by C3 you mean C1... I expect the claim C4: "there are people who would assert C1, and that the vast majority of such people self-label as feminist" is true, and I expect the claim C5: "the majority of people who self-label as feminist would assert C1" is false.
I expect the claim C6: "'differences between the behavior of boys and girls are due to socialization' is a typical feminist claim" to shed more heat than light, by virtue of being ambiguous between C4 and C5.
I suspect that many of the feminists who are willing to admit C1 is technically false will insist it applies to the particular D under discussion. In any case, claims of the form C1(D) "the difference D between boys and girls is due solely to socialization" work just as well for my point.
I suppose now you'll claim that most feminists never really believed that the differences in question where solely due to socialization, and this discussion will develop a tone similar to that of debating a theist who gradually dials down what his religion actually claims.
Out of curiosity, Eugine, what sort of background do you have with feminism, feminists, feminist texts, etc.? Many feminists define feminism as 'gender egalitarianism', 'activism for gender equality', or 'activism for gender equality plus belief that women are disproportionately disadvantaged by current sociocultural norms relative to men'. How would you define 'feminism'? What is your view of the importance of specifically anti-sexist intervention and memecraft, and/or on the prevalence of harmful or overapplied gender schemas? I want to get a clearer idea on the background and aims you're bringing to this conversation, rather than skirting around the heart of the matter.
Feminism has two common definitions
1) Someone who believes in equality of opportunity for women.
2) Someone who accepts the results of feminist critical theory.
A lot of feminists tend to play bait-and-switch games with the above two definitions. In this context I mean something closer to (2).
... Not quite. I'd say that the first definition is somewhat uncontroversial (People opposing it usually deny the continued existence of the problem rather than denying the feminists desire, reactionaries excluded) and the second may be mis-named and is extremely fragmentary with a whole bunch of different schools of thought, a few of which have thin coatings of anti-epistemology.
What reaction do you expect to get by pre-emptively putting words in my mouth with this kind of a sneering tone? Because my reaction is to immediately lose all interest in further discussion with you.
If that was the reaction you expected, then you're successfully predicting the results of your behavior, which is great.
If that wasn't the reaction you expected, then I hope this helps you calibrate your behavior better in the future.
Tapping out; downvoting.
I don't mean to criticize you choice here, because you certainly are entitled to set your own boundaries.
But I want to note for any readers of this thread that this is what evaporative cooling of group beliefs can look like on a particular topic.
To be fair (I'm not sure on who---maybe Dave, maybe everyone here) nothing that has gone on in this backwater of a subthread can be considered at all representative of a group position on anything. From the beginning this has been about slinging mud and taking offense at positions allegedly possessed by various groups of people that presumably exist somewhere on the internet. Most people just wouldn't touch this with an 11 foot pole.
I'm not sure I agree. This discussion is one example of what seems to me to be a representative pattern of behavior. Obviously, I am at substantial risk of mind-killed biased perception, but it seems to me that the local consensus is basically:
That has the effect of cutting out the extremists on both ends, but also cuts moderate-extremist social change activists out without addressing their counterparts on the other end of the continuum.
Behaviors that punish +5, +4, and -5 (on the continuum of positions) will skew what is said aloud so that it appears to outsiders that the local consensus is different than what is actually is. Much like the complaint about political correctness, that punishing +5, -4, and -5 will change what newcomers see as acceptable.
My position is that the quality of discussion on that particular subject is a disgrace that I don't want to be associated with and would prefer not to have to put up with here. Years of experience suggest improvement is unlikely and that suppressing the conversation is the least harmful outcome. I don't think I'm alone in that position (and so challenge your proposed 'consensus').
If newcomers were to see no conversation about moralizing sexual dynamics at all then they may be given the impression that this isn't a good place to moralize about sexual dynamics. That would seem to be the best outcome that is realistically attainable.
What group belief does my comment illustrate the evaporative cooling of?
There is dispute in this community (and society as a whole) about whether anything is wrong with gender dynamics, and how to talk about making changes.
Eugine has a fairly hostile position to the current methods of talking about what needs changing. You have a less hostile position to those methods. If he's the only person who talks about this topic in this venue, he gets to control this venue's position on reflexive examination of social norms, by moving the position towards more extreme hostility.
I'm not opposed to reflexive examination of social norms, although I do believe it should be done carefully. My objection is to the methods you seem to prefer for examining social norms don't correspond to reality.
Thanks for the clarification; this is not at all what I'd initially understood you to be saying.
In general it's worth staying aware of the differences between "nobody talks to X about gender dynamics" and "only X talks about gender dynamics," as it's the latter (or approximations thereof) that cause the problem you describe... but I agree that if X is consistent about involving themself in all discussions of gender dynamics, the former starts to approximate the latter.
So yeah, I'd say you're right, this is one of the ways evaporative cooling works. (And I understand that that's not meant as a personal criticism, except perhaps in the most technical of senses, and I'm not taking it as one.)
Edit: Hm. Annoyingly, actually, I do seem to be taking it as one. So let me say, rather, that I don't endorse taking it as one, and will work on getting over it. :-)
I was trying to preempt a way the discussion could go. As for how I expected you to react, I'm generally not in the habit of psychoanalyzing my interlocutors. Although here is an example of how I respond to words being put in my mouth without flipping out.
What would count as evidence that a particular behavior was caused solely by socialization? I'll admit that evidence of sex-linked behavior among non-human primates is evidence that the similar behavior in humans is sex-linked. But before we start talking about proof, we need to agree what sorts of things count as evidence.
There are many behavior differences that cannot be explained solely on the basis of socialization. The most obvious is that women generally sit to pee, while men generally do not. Or we could look to some pregnancy related behavior that is not performed by men since they generally don't get pregnant.
Likewise, there are some behaviors that we have strong reason to believe are pure socialization. For example, male preference for blue and female preference for pink is less than a century old.
But if I pick a more controversial example from history, shouldn't I predict that you will blow off that evidence by saying something sarcastic like: Because anthropology is not at all full of people doing shoddy work and using it to justify pre-concieved beliefs. <\sarcasm>.
In short, a reasoned discussion needs a more concrete rule for what counts as evidence than "I know it when I see it."
Something that is more likely to occur if the theory is true than if it is false. (Given the current state of cultural anthropology, this doesn't include the writing of modern cultural anthropologists.) As for what an appropriate filter to use in this context is, analogous to the filter of scientific evidence used in the hard sciences, I'm not sure. This is itself a hard problem, which probably deserves to be discussed somewhere more prominent than below the fold on a week old thread.
I read that second link, and I am confused. He criticizes cultural anthropolgy for using concepts he believes are politically infected. On of his examples is "heteronormativity." As I understand that word, it means something like:
I understand if you don't think that type of social pressure is bad, but do you deny it exists? What should we call it?
Citation needed. A more typical claim might be "socialization is the cause of the vast majority (but not the entirety) of the observed difference between boys' and girls' behaviors and skills," and this easily falsifiable claim is borne out by the available data, never mind evo psych just-so stories about what worked in the EEA.
A lot of nitpicky LW discussion could be avoided if we implicitly qualified absolute-sounding claims about relations in real life with "in most cases". It would be rare that someone would object to e.g. a claim such as "differences between the behavior of boys and girls are due to socialization" being amended by "in the vast majority of case", or by "... but there are exceptions."
We can default to claims as absolute when they refer to theoretical frameworks, for which absolute claims typically work out more, and are intended more often.
I've danced this dance before, with Robin Hanson no less.
Let me side with your youthful incarnation from five years ago:
Beyond just clarifying, you did seem to have taken the initial comment at face value, even though you probably suspected the intended meaning.
I agree with you regarding making the intended meaning as plain as possible as best practice; however, sidetracking the discussion in such a way often leads to "gotcha" continuations of minor details (minor because most people will side with you interpreting claims about human behavior as non-absolute by default, and follow the discussion correctly without such clarifications/rebuttals), which tend to replace other, more substantive discussions.
Sure. But it gets a little more sticky when one is attributing a false absolute claim to some other party, as Eugine did.
Or, you know, a google search. From memory even a google site search would be adequate.
(Which is not to say that such claim is inherent to feminism itself. Merely that the specific observation by Eugine that it is often made by feminists is not worthy of 'citation needed' stigma.)
Since the claim that is actually often made by feminists is both weaker and, according to current research, true, Eugine's "observation" is a strawman. And I snort at the notion that my reply imparts a "stigma".