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Eugine_Nier comments on Don't Get Offended - LessWrong
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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?
Khan's complaint is that "heteronormativity" is used as a boo light, just like the other words on his list: "Privilege. Oppression. Colonialism. Patriarchy."
Yes, he thinks heteronormativity is fine. I don't.
I asked you if it occurs, not if you disapprove of the phenomena of heteronormtivity.
Because if it occurs, then your argument that anthropology is unconnected to reality needs a better justification. Biased != unconnected with reality. Even biased evidence should have the potential to change a Bayesian reasoner's probability estimate in the direction that the producer of the evidence suggests.
I mean boo light in the technical LW sense. I don't know whether Khan approves of heteronormtivity, I'm more sure he doesn't approve of oppression, which is in the same list.
I'd add that 'heteronormativity' and the other words on the list are also sometimes used as spammable boo lights, sometimes leading to rather word-salad-like philosophies of condemnation, and that 'privilege' sometimes (but usually does not) forms part of an anti-epistemology.
I'd also add that specifically 'colonialism' and 'patriarchy' (also 'capitalism' when used as a quasi-boo-light) are occasionally treated as almost Platonic properties attached to society at large that automatically color every interaction, even among people who should be able to resist their influence or do not have a concrete reason to care.
That said, I think that all of these things have a very real meaningful existence and all of them are, usually, actually bad.
I think it's pretty dangerous to describe terms from other fields of study as merely being applause or boo lights. Consider how frequently LW-newbies use "rational" as an applause light until corrected by others. Instead of taking terms from other fields as merely being applause or boo lights, we should consider that the terms might be frequently misused by novices or in popular culture, in just the same way that terms like "rational" or "rationalist" are. (TVTropes link.)
Take "privilege", for instance.
It seems to be widely assumed that when social critics or activists attribute "privilege" to someone, that they are calling that person evil, arrogant, irresponsible, or something of the like. Because "privilege" is used in sentences that are spoken angrily, it is taken to be not merely a boo light but something akin to a swear word. And indeed it is sometimes used that way, because, well, people get angry sometimes when discussing starvation, rape, police brutality, and other things that activists talk about.
"Privilege" has a pretty specific meaning though. It means "social advantages that are not perceived as advantages but as the normal condition". In other words: Some people have X, while others don't; and those who do have X think that having X is unremarkable and normal.
To make up an artificial example:
Suppose that there are blue weasels and red weasels working in an office. For whatever reason, blue weasels are comfortable in a temperature range of 18–28C, while red weasels are comfortable in 22–32C. The office thermostat is set to "room temperature", the normal temperature, of 20C. So the red weasels are always cold and have to buy expensive sweaters (at their own expense) to avoid shivering, while blue weasels frolic about in the nude.
When anyweasel proposes turning up the heat, they are reminded that running the heater is expensive and that 20C is the established normal room temperature — it even says so on the Wikipedia article "room temperature"! That some weasels complain about the cold and how expensive sweaters are is their own problem — maybe if they frolicked about in the nude more, they would feel better? Besides, if we started turning up the heat, before too long it would be much too hot for anyweasel! 20C is normal, and if some weasels are unhappy with that, well, that's actually fortunate for the sweater-knitters, isn't it?
Note that noweasel is doing any cost-benefit analysis here — and they also aren't really treating all weasels' interests as equally worthwhile. They're just assuming that being cold is a fact about red weasels' deviation from the temperature sense that they should possess (a normative claim targeted at the underprivileged), as opposed to being about the differences between red and blue weasels and the historical control of the thermostat by certain blue weasels (a descriptive claim about the history and structure of weasel society).
Not only does the temperature setting of 20C advantage some weasels over others, but the way that weasels talk about temperature — the discourse — contains assumptions about what is normal that advantage some weasels over others.
For a while now, this has been my number-one example of a word that's useful to taboo. Since the definition is that succinct, and the word "privilege" has a tendency to derail what could have been a good conversation, we're probably better off simply not using the word.
That makes sense to me — but only for reasons analogous to why one might want to taboo "rationality", namely that it's easy to be misunderstood since the listener has heard lots of low-information uses of the word.
Still, if I were to tell someone else that they have to taboo their field's terminology — and start speaking in novel (albeit succinct) synonyms — in order to convince me that they're not simply emitting applause or boo lights, that would seem like a hostile move on my part. I'd be telling them that they have to take on the cognitive load of translating from their usual language (with words like "privilege" and "heteronormativity") into a language that I've deigned to accept (with words like "misnormalized advantages" or "opposite-sex assumptions").
Yeah, pretty much this.
When communication seems to be failing, my instinct is to taboo my own communication-disrupting language and adopt my interlocutor's language instead. When I don't understand my interlocutor's language well enough to adopt it, my instinct is to ask questions about it. When communication has failed so thoroughly that I can't ask such questions and understand the answers, I pretty much give up.
I've occasionally been given definitions of "privilege" by activists, and each time the definition is different. A more common one is "an unfair advantage that people have by virtue of being in certain groups".
You're right, and both definitions tend to be used interchangeably. I'll work on correcting that in my own speech, but I think in the meantime here's the essence of it:
Privilege is a phenomenon that occurs as the result of a special kind of status, but the term also gets used to describe the form of status that generates the phenomenon.
When a status based on group identity is pervasive enough to be invisible to members of that group, the resulting assumptions lead to a set of behavior called "privilege". It's probably even clearer to use the term "privileged status" than mere "privilege", when talking about the status itself rather than the resulting behaviors; I'm going to try using that myself for the next few weeks and see if I can anchor some critical self-analysis to the process.
That still doesn't work since the weasel example involves "privilege" in fubarobfusco's sense but as I pointed out here doesn't actually involve status.
It is perhaps worth noting that the word "status" often gets used on LW to describe position in a social structure, with the understanding that individuals with higher status get various benefits (not always obvious ones), and that a lot of human behavior is designed to obtain/challenge/protect status even if the individual performing the behavior doesn't consciously have that goal. I suspect that talking about the blue weasels as a high-status subgroup would not raise any eyebrows here, and would imply all the patterns you discuss here, even if talking about the "privilege" possessed by blue weasels raised hackles.
Somewhat to my amusement, I've gotten chastised for talking about status this way in communities of social activists, who "explained" to me that I was actually talking about privilege, and referring to it as status trivialized it.
When in Rome, I endorse speaking Italian.
That's an interesting complaint. It suggests that we might understand and talk about social organization in ways that're denotationally familiar to these communities of social activists, whoever they are, but that certain connotations are customary in that space that aren't customary here.
As others have noted I don't think status is all that good a term for what's going on in the weasel example, but insofar as our understanding of status does overlap with the activist scene's understanding of privilege, I think this is a good argument for preferring our own framing. At least unless and until we can decide that we actually want those connotations.
I might object since this is an abuse of the concept of status. Status is about how a person is thought of by other people. It is not about who happens to benefit from an established Schelling point, especially if the group benefiting had nothing to do with establishing it.
I'm assuming it's acceptable to treat weasels as "people" in this example. Can you clarify how, on your account, the way red weasels in this example are thought of by other weasels differs (or doesn't differ) from the way blue weasels are thought of?
"Privilege" has two disadvantages vis-à-vis "status", though. First, it suggests a binary distinction - privilege or no privilege -, as opposed to degrees of status. Second, status can be acquired, while the way I hear "privilege" used seems to exclude that.
Folks who use "privilege" as part of their usual vocabulary often note that people can have (and lack) different sorts of privilege, actually — for instance, racial, religious, or heterosexual privilege — that these are not projected onto a single dimension.
I frequently hear "privilege" used in ways that allow for it to be acquired or lost, and I frequently hear it used in ways that allow for different groups to have more or less privilege relative to one another (that is, degrees of privilege). But I'm willing to believe that other linguistic communities exist that behave as you describe.
Upvoted for pretty good description, and I agree that all of these are actually usually used in a meaningful (if not optimal) way.
It might be added that in some privilege cases, the experience of not having the privilege is totally alien and leads to things like lonely men envying sexual harassment.
By the way, if you're interested in what I consider a better analysis of your weasel example, I recommend looking at Thomas C. Schelling's Strategy of Conflict, particularly chapter 3. (I don't think I can do justice to his analysis in this comment.)
Is that about something similar to these posts?
For small values of similar I suppose.