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VoiceOfRa comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014) - LessWrong
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False beliefs in equality are also responsible for millions of people being dead, and in fact have a much higher body-count then racism.
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Actually falsely believing in equality of ability => being willing to kill to make equality happen. The chain of reasoning goes as follows:
1) As we know all people/groups are of equal ability, but group X is more successful then other groups, thus they must be cheating in some way, we must pass laws to stop the cheating/level the playing field.
2) We passed laws to level the playing field but group X is still winning, they must be cheating in extremely subtle ways, we must pass more laws to stop/punish this.
3) Group X is still ahead, we must presume members of group X are guilty until proven innocent, etc.
No that's not what I'm saying. In the grandparent you said:
My point is that not being able to read IQ-by-race-and-gender studies is likely to lead to a repeat of Mao/Pol Pot. Thus being extremely concerned about being able to read them is a perfectly rational reaction.
Unfortunately, as we've just established you have very false ideas about how to go about doing that. Furthermore, since these same false ideas are currently extremely popular in academia, going there to study is unlikely to fix this.
An excellent way to stop people from being killed is to make them strong or get them protected by someone who is strong. Strong in a broad sense here, from courage to coolness under pressure etc.
Here is a problem. To be a strong protector correlates with having the kind of transphobic and so on, long list of anti-social justice stuff or bigotry, because that list reduces to either disliking weakness or distrusting difference / having strong ingroup loyalty, and there is a relationship between these (a tribal warrior would have all).
Here is a solution. Basically moderate, reciprocal bigotocracy. Accept a higher-status, somewhat elevated i.e. clearly un-equal social role of the strong protector type i.e. that of traditional men, in return for them actively protecting all the other groups from coming to serious harm. The other groups will have to accept having lower social status, and it will be hard on their pride, but will be safer. This can be made official and perhaps more palatable by conscripting straight males, everybody claiming genderqueer status getting an exemption, and also after the service expecting some kind of community protection role, in return for higher elevated social status and respect. Note: this would be the basic model of most European countries up to the most recent times, status-patriarchy and male privilege explicitly deriving from the sacrifice of conscription.
This is not easy to swallow. However there seem to be not many other options. You cannot have strong protectors who are 100% PC because then they will have no fighting spirit. Without strong protectors, all you can hope is a utopia and hoping the whole Earth adopts it or else any basic tribe with gusto will take you over.
But I think a compromise model of not 100% complete equality and providing a proctor role in return should be able to work, as this has always been the traditional civilized model. In the recent years it was abandoned due to it being oppressive, and perhaps it was, but perhaps there is a way to find a compromise inside it.
Policeman don't need fighting spirit to be able to go after violent criminals. Being PC is no problem for them.
Eh... Rotherham?
The last time I read an article on Rotherham even the Telegraph said that the officers in question were highly chauvinistic and therefore don't really follow the usual ideal of being PC.
At the same time reading articles about Rotherham is still registers me: "This story doesn't make sense, the facts on the ground are likely to be different than the mainstream media reports I'm reading" instincts. Have you read the actual report about it in-depth?
(trigger warning for a bunch of things, including rape and torture)
The Rotherham scandal is very well-documented on Wikipedia. There have been multiple independent reports, and I recommend reading this summary of one of the reports by the Guardian. This event is a good case study because it is easily verifiable; it's not just right-wing sources and tabloids here.
What we know:
To substantiate that last claim, you can check out one of the independent reports from Rotherham's council website:
And there you have it: concerns about racism hampered the investigation. Authorities encouraged a coverup of the ethnic dimensions of the problem. Of course, there were obviously other institutional failures here in addition to political correctness. This report is consistent with the mainstream media coverage. And this is the delicate, officially accepted report: I imagine that the true story is worse.
When a story is true, but it doesn't "make sense," that could be a sign that you are dealing with a corrupted map. I initially had the same reaction as you, that this can't be true. I think that's a very common reaction to have, the first time you encounter something that challenges the reigning political narratives. Yet upon further research, this event is not unusual or unprecedented. Following links on Wikipedia, we have the Rochdale sex gang, the Derby sex gang, the Oxford sex gang, the Bristol sex gang, and the Telford sex gang. These are all easily verifiable cases, and the perpetrators are usually people from Muslim immigrant backgrounds.
Sexual violence by Muslim immigrants is a serious social problem in the UK, and the multicultural political environment makes it hard to crack down on. Bad political ideas have real consequences which result in real people getting hurt at a large scale. These events represent a failure of the UK elites to protect rule of law. Since civilization is based on rule of law, this is a very serious problem.
You say "immigrants" but in every case you mention it's specifically Muslims. I've not heard of Hindu or Buddhist or atheist immigrants causing the same problems.
That's correct; I will update my comment to be more explicit. Muslims have very different attitudes towards women and consent than Westerners.
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I'll like to start by backing up a bit and explaining why I brought up the example of Rotherham. You originally came here talking about your emphasis on preventing human suffering. Rotherham is a scary example of people being hurt, which was swept under the carpet. I think Rotherham is an important case study for progressives and feminists to address.
As you note, some immigrants come from cultures (usually Muslim cultures) with very sexist attitudes towards consent. Will they assimilate and change their attitudes? Well, first I want to register some skepticism for the notion that European Muslims are assimilating. Muslims are people with their own culture, not merely empty vessels to pour progressive attitudes into. Muslims in many parts of Europe are creating patrols to enforce Sharia Law. If you want something more quantitative, Muslim polls reveal that 11% of UK Muslims believe that the Charlie Hebdo magazine "deserved" to be attacked. This really doesn't look like assimilation.
But for now, let's pretend that they are assimilating. How long will this assimilation take?
In what morality is it remotely acceptable that thousands of European women will predictably be raped or tortured by Muslim immigrant gangs while we are waiting for them to get with the feminist program?
Feminists usually take a very hardline stance against rape. It's supremely strange seeing them suddenly go soft on rape when the perpetrators are non-whites. It's not enough to say "that's wrong" after the fact, or to point out biases of the police, when these rapes were entirely preventable from the beginning. It's also not sufficient to frame rape as purely a gender issue when there are clear racial and cultural dynamics going on. There perpetrators were mostly of particular races, and fears of being racist slowed down the investigation.
Feminists are against Christian patriarchy, but they sometimes make excuses for Muslim patriarchy, which is a strange double standard. When individual feminists become too critical of Islam, they can get denounced as "racist" by progressives, or even by other feminists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was raised as a Muslim but increasingly criticized Islam's infringement of women's rights. She was denounced by the left and universities revoked her speaking engagements.
After seeing Rotherham and Sharia patrols harassing women, there are some tough questions we should be asking.
This doesn't say much unless we know the corresponding fraction among Muslims worldwide is not much larger than 11%.
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And yet, they were remarkably uninterested in this story when it came out.
No, I'm fairly confident the neoreactionaries, for whatever reason you brought them up, would happily join in the plan to strip out the objectionable bits of Pakistani culture and replace it with something better. Also, demanding more integration and acculturation from immigrants. What they probably wouldn't listen to is the apparent contradiction of saying we don't need to get rid of multiculturalism, but we do need to push a certain cultural message until it becomes universal.
You guys are arguing over the definition of "culture".
Do you think that anyone who is against multiculturalism is a neoreactionary?
I.e. the immigrants adopt the culture of the host country. Are you sure you don't mean 'We don't need to get rid of multiracialism'?
Do you really think that proponents or opponents of "multiculturalism" are arguing over a well-defined program of action?
And how would we define "Pakistani culture" in such a way that it doesn't necessarily include patriarchy? Cultural evolution in response to moral imperative is a thing.
That a sentence that poses more question than it answers. What kind of influence do those councillors have? How many councillors of Pakistani heritage does Rotherham have? How many councillors of other heritage does it have?
If a powerful politician tries to prevent friends from being persecuted that's not what the standard concern about policemen being too PC is about. It's straight misuse of power.
Sexual violence by British MPs seems also to be a problem: http://www.rt.com/uk/170672-uk-politicians-pedophile-ring/
To what extend is this simply a problem of British politicians having too much power to cover up crimes and impede police work?
The idea that there are people from Immigrant backgrounds isn't what's surprising about the story of Rotherham or even that politicians act in a way to prevent reporting of tragedy. Politicians trying to keep tragedies away from the public is a common occurrence.
The thing that's surprising is the allegation of police inaction due to them being Muslim. Which happens something that you didn't list in your "what we know" list.
It would have to be true for the claim that PC policeman don't do their job properly to be true.
If indeed the coverup of the ethnic dimension was directed by British politicians, we might ask, why were they trying to hide this? In a child sex abuse scandal involving actual politicians, it's clear why they would cover it up. But why were these particular crimes so politically inconvenient? It's clear why Pakistani council members wanted to hide it, but why did the other council members let them?
We are not privy to the exact nature of the institutional dysfunction at Rotherham. But it's clear that the problem was occurring at multiple levels. One of my quotes does mentions that staff were nervous about being labelled racist, and that managers told them to told them to avoid mentioning the ethnic dynamics.
Here's another quote, which shows that reports were downplayed before politicians were even involved:
So there are multiple kinds of institutional dysfunction here. It's not just politicians, it's not just police being PC. But from the quotes in my previous post, it's obvious that political correctness was a factor. Police, social workers, and politicians, all the way up the chain know that being seen as racist could be damaging to their career.
In the UK, there is a lot of social and political pressure to support multiculturalism and avoid any perception of racism. Immigration is important for economic agendas, but also for left political agendas of importing more voters for themselves. It is not a stretch to believe that this political environment would make it difficult to address crimes involving immigrant populations.
You correctly note that there were factors beyond "PC", but fail to address the horrific corruption. At least two councilors and a police officer face charges of sex with abuse victims.
Another police officer, seen here being white, supposedly had an extensive child pornography collection. No word on whether this was related or whether the department just attracted pedophiles for some bizarre reason.
While I didn't predict this beforehand (nor, I think, did you) it seems both more credible, and more likely to protect the rape-gang, than does the idea of people seeing strong evidence of the crimes and somehow deciding that arresting immigrants was more likely to hurt their careers than ignoring a story which was bound to come out eventually. The "political correctness" you speak of apparently refers to people not wanting to believe their fellow police officers and council members were implausibly evil criminals.
There a huge difference between persecuting someone and then not writing his race or ethnicity into an official report and avoiding to prosecute them.
From what you quoted from the report the those Pakistani council members were influential people. Just like the politicians who covered up the child abuse in Westminster also were influential people.
In general politicians also never want that scandals and tragedy under their watch get public.
Regarding child victims with contempt does suggest a dysfunctional police but it's not about multiculturalism.
Have you tried updating your model to reflect reality?
In general the heuristic of not trusting mainstream media reports to accurately reflect reality is well based on what I know about how it works.
I gave enough interviews to have an idea of how what the journalist writes differs from what was said in the interview in those cases.
I frequently read reports on scientific studies that don't match reality.
In the past I knew the background of quite a bunch of political stories in Berlin and how it differs from facts on the ground.
Without a direction to the bias that's a universal counterargument. I'm perfectly aware of some the biases in reporting, my heuristics say that the media is likely underreporting the extent of the problem.
It's a universal counterargument when a newspaper stories that don't appear to make sense and you don't know the facts on the ground. You shouldn't believe those stories.
I haven't said anything about biases of reporting. I have spoken about journalists getting stories wrong. That quite often doesn't have anything to do with bias. Journalists in Berlin from time to time get the idea that it's the parliament and only the parliament that passes laws in Berlin wrong. That doesn't have anything to do with left or right bias.
Thinking in terms of bias isn't useful. My basic sense was that the story likely involves some form of corruption that didn't make it into the news articles I read. Garbage in Garbage out. You can't correct bad reporting by correcting for bias.
A police officer doesn't simply avoid persecuting a Muslim for rape because he's afraid of being called a racist. That simply doesn't make sense. On the other hand corruption can prevent crimes from being persecuted.
The UK is not a country where a newspaper can freely report on a story like this. But not because of multiculturalism. You can't sue a newspaper in the UK for that. The UK's insane defamation laws result in articles speaking about "influential Pakistani councilors" instead of naming the individuals in question. A US newspaper would have never done this and actually named the politicians who seem to have obstructed a rape investigation if this happened in any US city.
Of course you actually need to practice critical reading to get that. If you just take the story at face value and then try to correct a systematic bias you miss the juicy bits.
Given that the newspaper is effectively censored in speaking about the real story about corruption they make up a bullshit story about how it's multiculturalism that makes police officers afraid to go after Muslims. That's not to say that multiculturalism didn't do anything in that case. It reduced the reporting of the fact that the people were Muslim, but it very likely didn't prevent them from being persecuted.
Er.....Rotherham?
Typo fixed, thanks.
You know what else is a good way to stop people being killed? Create a liberal democracy where people are equal. So far in history, that has kinda correlated... really strongly... with less people dying. There is both less war and less crime. Forget strength, give them equality and elections. (I don't actually think democracy is the optimal solution, I think I advocate more of an economics-exam-based meritocratic oligarchy, but it is a really good one to put in place while we figure out what the optimal one is. And I need to read lots more books before I actually try and design an optimal society, if I'm ever qualified to try something like that.)
Being "strong" in a meaningful way, in the modern world, means being intelligent. Smart people can use better rhetoric, invent cooler weapons, and solve your problems more easily. Being well-educated and intelligent and academic actually strongly correlates with not being racist or sexist or transphobic or homophobic. Oh, and also liberal democracies seem to have much less prejudice in them.
Find me decent evidence that patriarchal societies are safer for everyone involved than liberal democracies where everyone is equal, and you'll have a valid point. But it kind of looks to me like, as a woman, I'm much safer in the modern Western democracies that prohibit sexism than I am in the patriarchal societies where women have no rights and keep getting acid thrown in their faces for rejecting advances. You say that in the recent years it was abandoned due to being oppressive but we should try and go back and compromise with it, but... why would we want to go back to that when literally everything has been improving ever since we abandoned those social models? To entertain your delusions of being a Strong Tribal Hero Protector Guy? Sorry, no.
I also don't see how we can't have strong protectors who are 100% PC. I'm not straight, male, neurotypical, traditional or even an adult. I try and protect and help those around me and on many occasions I succeed. I am the one in my friendship group who takes the lead down dark alleyways, carrying all the bags, reassuring my friends that it's safe because nobody's going to mug us while I'm there. Why exactly am I a weak and unworthy protector? Because I'm a girl? You're going to have to do an awful lot better than that. Put me in a physical fight with most boys of my age, and I would annihilate them. Every male who has picked a fight with me thinking that he'll be able to beat me because he's male has walked away rather humiliated. On exams and IQ tests I score far higher than your average male. Judging by how much I actually end up doing versus what I observe the boys around me doing, I have higher levels of inbuilt-desire-to-help-and-protect-others than the average male. (I suspect that the latter two facts at least are true of most women whom you might find on this specific website.) Why exactly does the average male, whom I can both outfight and outthink, get to protect me and not the other way around?
I think I will not discuss with you this for about 5-10 years, because you sound a lot like me when I was around 21, and I know how naive and inexperienced and entirely unrealistic I was. Ultimately you miss the experiences that would make you far more pessimistic. For example nobody talked about making Western liberal democracies like third-world hellholes, it was about making them like their former selves when crime levels were lower, violence was lower, people were politer, people were politer with women and so on. In fact, turning Western liberal democracies into third-world hellholes is actually happening, but through a different, asylum-seeking / refugee pathway, a perfectly idiotic counter-selection where instead of exercising brain drain, we drain the most damaged people and expect it to turn out good. But that is just a small part of how you probably need to get more pessimistic experience before we can discuss it meaningfully. I have no interest in engaging with angry rants, they are not able to teach me anything, they just sound like both people really sweating and trying to win something, but there is no actual prize to win. Being drunk on the idea of social progress and the improvability of human nature is just like other addictions, you really need to hit rock bottom before you see what is the issue, I think anything I would try to explain here would be pointless without such a wake-up happening. So I wish you luck and maybe re-discuss this again in 5-10 years where you maybe got influenced by more experience.
Telling your opponent that they are incapable of arguing with you until they are older is a fully general counterargument, and one of the more aggravating and toxic ones.
Even if it wasn't a fully general counterargument, it would be fallacious because it's ad hominem. There are plenty of people 5-10 years older than me who share my ideas, and you could as easily be arguing with one of them as you are arguing with me now; the fact that by chance you are arguing against me doesn't affect the validity/truth of the ideas we're talking about, and it's very irrational to suggest that it should. Attack my arguments, not me.
As for everything being better in "their former selves", do I seriously have to go find graphs? I have the distinct feeling that you won't update even if I show you them, so I'm tempted not to bother. If you've genuinely never looked at actual graphs of crime levels and violence over time and promise to update just a little, I can go dig those up for you. (For now, you're pattern matching to the kind of person who could benefit from reading http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ . I don't like SSC that much, but when the man's right, he's right.)
(As for "people were politer with women", my idea of polite is pretty politically correct, and I can guarantee you that political correctness doesn't increase if we look backwards in time...)
I am not your opponent, that is where it begins. Opponent means there is something to win and people compete over that prize. There is nothing to win here except learning, and this discussion quickly turned to be not conducive to it - you got all defensive and emotional instead of trying to understand use my models and see what you can do with them. Opponentism belongs to precise that kind of tribalism you are trying to want to overcome. Interesting, isn't it? Besides you keep being boringly solipsistic. Your strength instead of statistical strength differences, your idea of politeness instead of the social function of politeness... it seems you primarily subject you have useful information about is, well, you. Not interested. The first precondition to being interesting is to understand nobody gives a damn about you. I.e. to get out of the gravity well of the ego, to adopt viewpoints that don't depend strongly on personal desires. I am not even saying I would expect everyone to be able to do it, I am perfectly aware of how long it took for me, how much XP, read, suffering it took, so I don't even blame you for not having made it, it's just that it is seriously difficult to generate information interesting for others from that source. But if you think you can, then do it, say something genuinely interesting, try to offer any sort of a model or information from this utopian-progressivist school that is genuinely different and not the same stuff the mainstream media, BuzzFeed or Tumblr pouring on day and night. The only condition of interestingness is 1) it is not about you 2) it is not "done to death" a million times by the media or blogs.
If you read the list of her activities and speaking 6 languages at the age of 17 and being in the process of learning the 7th while also doing Judo to the point of being more fit than guys her age, having learned Java programming, doing filmmaking and being a DM and training other DMs she's not the person person to read through BuzzFeed and Tumblr day and night simply copying what other people are thinking.
Yes, being 17 means that she lacks experience but she's very capable of learning. You might not have been open to learning at 21 but you weren't speaking 6 languages either.
You're the one making all sorts of claims about the need for, and traits of, "strong protectors", without any statistics. You're the one simultaneously claiming you'd be fine with giving Acty higher status than you, and using social tactics blatantly aimed at reducing her relative status - sometimes in the same sentence.
This is a bit broader stuff than something reducible to a few stats. But on a basic common sense level, if the starting point is fewer people getting killed, the most basic solution is bodyguards and so on. So that is at least sensible as a starter instead of a Plan B rewiring everybody's brain to not be hateful.
As for status, come on, that is something that happens between real people, while DeVliegendeHollander, Acty and hairyfigment are mere accounts. For all people know it could even be the same person behind all three accounts. Playing status with accounts one could throw away at any second and register three new ones in its place would be really, really stupid, let's try to not accuse each other with at something that simplistic. At least if you want to assume evil, asssume a less banal kind. In fact I am thinking anyway that I should recycle DVH because it is getting too much karma and this account is developing something too much like a personality. I recycle on Reddit about every three weeks, maybe a three month or six month cycle would be good here. (The goal is of course to have ideas said by accounts that are not associated by former ideas said by accounts and thus their reception being less biased. Besides to not accumulate this completely ridiculous karma thing.)
Yup, playing status with accounts would be kinda stupid. (That's why you should stop doing it.)
You know what would be especially stupid? If we lived in a world that accorded me higher status than you because of my general level of aggression, and I could end this entire argument with "I'm high status, you're low status, I'm right, you're wrong, shut up now".
Now, wouldn't that be a really stupid world...?
So tell me again why giving status and prestige to aggressive people is a great idea?
You keep assuming there is a fixed background level of aggression, but that is just what left wing thinkers believe can be changed.
That assumes that the bodyguards never use violence and beat somebody to death. Simply increasing the amount of people who can beat other people up doesn't automatically reduce violence. South Africa has a lot of body guards and it's still a lot more violent then states in Europe.
Giving the government the monopoly on violence is a standard enlightenment idea that works well if your state highers enough policemen and the citizens believe in the rule of law.
Status interactions are deeply ingrained in the way humans interact with each other. It not something that get's shut down just because a discussion is online.
Opponent is a word. Here, it refers to the person advocating the opposite view to mine. If you would like, I can use a different word, but it will change very little. Arguing over semantics is not a productive way to cause each other to update. Though to be honest, I ceased having much hope that you were in this discussion for the learning and updates when you started using ad hominem and fully general counterarguments. (Saying that your opponent is defensive and emotional and "opponentist" is also a fully general counterargument and also ad hominem. "Not even blaming me" for not agreeing with you is another example with an extra dash of emotive condescension. You have a real talent.)
Quite often, people have useful information about themselves because they know themselves quite well. I'm a useful data point when I'm thinking about stuff that affects me, because I know more about myself than I know about other examples. But I could also point out other examples of women in my community who are protectors. For instance, I know a single mother who is not only a national-level athlete but had to rush each of her children to hospital for separate issues four times in the last week. Twice it was because their lives were threatened. She stays strong and protects them fiercely, keeps up with her life and her training, and is frankly astonishingly brave. She is far, far more of a "traditional strong figure" than any man I have ever met. Of course, this is still anecdata. I haven't got big quantitative data because I can't think of a test for protectorness that we could do on a large scale; can you suggest one?
Your idea, as I understood it, was that men can carry out protective roles and therefore they should have high social status and prestige. I think this is a pretty good example of what I've heard called the Worst Argument in the World. I believe that protective and self-sacrificing individuals should be accorded high prestige. I agree that protectiveness can loosely correlate with being male. But protective women exist in high numbers, and non-protective men exist in high numbers, and many women exist who are significantly better at protectiveness than the average male. According protective women low prestige because they are women, and according useless men high prestige because they are men, is an entirely lost purpose. It is irrational sexism, pure and simple. You're doing the same thing as people who say "Gandhi was a criminal, therefore Gandhi should be dismissed and given low social status." You're saying that it would be good if people said, "Individual X is a male, therefore he should be accorded high prestige and conscripted. Individual Y is a female, therefore she should be given low prestige and not conscripted" even if X doesn't fit the protective-and-strong criteria and Y does fit the protective-and-strong criteria. Forcing protective strong women to stop doing that and accept low prestige, and forcing non-protective weaker men to try and fill protective roles, just hurts everyone.
You still haven't answered my question. You want to make a society where men get conscripted (an astonishingly rare event in a modern liberal democracy, by the way...) and protect those around them, and in return get high prestige. I know, and I presume you also know, numerous men who would be unsuitable for conscription and don't protect those around them. Some women would be perfectly suitable for conscription, and protect those around them. Why do those women not deserve the prestige that you want to give all the men?
Can you also tell me why you think "the same stuff the mainstream media, BuzzFeed or Tumblr pouring on day and night" is necessarily uninteresting/wrong? Shouldn't a large number of people agreeing with an ethical position usually correlate with that ethical position being correct? I mean, it's not a perfect correlation, there are exceptions, but in general people agree that murder and rape and mugging are undesirable, and agree that happiness and friendship and knowledge are desirable. Calling a position popular or fashionable should not be an insult and I am intrigued by how you could have come up with the idea that something that is "done to death" must be bad. Has "murder is wrong" been "done to death"?
If this conversation keeps going downhill, I'm just going to disengage. It is rather low utility.
This is getting more interesting now. To sum the history of things, you had this discussion with VoiceOfRa and you stressed primarily you want to save people from getting killed. I butted in and proposed you don't have to redesign the whole world to do that, it is possible in a traditional setup as well. Turned out we are optimizing for different things, I am trying to preserve older-time stuff while also changing them to the extent needed to address real, actual complaints of various people and work out compromises (calling it moderatism or moderate conservatism would be OK), while you are more interested in tearing things down and building them up. OK. But I think there are more interesting things here lurking under the surface.
An offer: retreat a few meta levels up, and get back to this object level later on.
IRL I discuss pretty much everything with people inside my age range (30-60), which means we rely not only on our intelligence and book knowledge (you obviously have immense amounts of both) but on our life experience as well. That is a difficult thing to convey because it is something that is not even learned in words (so there are no good books that sum it up, to my knowledge) but non-verbal pattern recognition. Yet it is pretty much this thing, this life experience that makes the difference between your meta level assumptions and mine. What can one do? I will try the impossible and try to translate it into words. Don't expect it to go very well, but maybe a glimpse will be transmitted. Also my tone will be uncomfortably personal and subjective because it is per definition something happening inside people's heads.
When I was 17 I assumed, expected and demanded the world to be logical and ethical. I vibrated between assuming it and angrily demanding it when I found it is not the case. University did not help - it was a very logical and sheltered environment.
When I started working (25) I had to realize how truly illogical the world is, and not because it was waiting for mr smart guy to reorganize it but because most people are plain simply idiots. I worked at implementing business software, like order processing, accounting and MRP. Still do. I had to face problems like when order processing employees did not know the price of an item, they just invoiced it at zero price. Gave away for free. The managers were no better, instead of doing something sensible (such as incentive pay or entering a price list for everything into the software and not letting the employees change them), they demanded us to make a technical solution like not allow a zero price, just give out an error message. From them on, the folks used a price of 1 currency when they did not know the correct price. The irony was really breath-taking - if there is one thing that is supposed to be efficient in this sorry world, it is corporations chasing profits: and they were incompetent at that very basic level of not giving away stuff for free. (They were selling fertilizers to farmers, in the kind of place where paved roads are rare.)
My first reaction was rage and complaining about humanity's idiocy. I was sort of similar to Reddit /r/atheism. Full of snark.
I would say the life experience part was not as much as learning the basic rule, namely that most folks are idiots, but really swallowing and digesting it, learning to resign myself to it, accept it, and see what can be done. That was what took long. I had to accept a Heideggerian "we are thrown into this shit and must cope, anyhow". This is my sorry species. These zombies are my peers. If I want to help people, I need to help them on their level.
First of all, I had to accept a change in my ethics: making most people happy is an impossible goal. The best I can do is supporting ideas that prevent the dumbass majority shooting themselves in the foot in the worst ways. Give a wild guess, will the majority those types of ideas be more often classified as "liberal" or "conservative" ?
Second, I had to realize that I was a selfish ass when I was young and "liberal". I wanted things to be logical, hence I wanted things to suit people who are logical. I wanted things to suit people like me. I wanted a world optimized for me and my folk, for intellectuals. That would be a horrible world for the vast majority of people who can't logic. They need really foolproof and dumbed-down systems that cut with the grain of their illogical instincts, not against it.
The corollary of this all was that I should support rules and systems that I hate and I would never obey them. I had to become a hypocrite e.g. to support keeping drugs illegal (because I saw fools i.e. normal people would only get more foolish from them) while being perfectly accepting and supporting of my intellectual friends who got great philosophical insights for them. The non-hypocritical solution would have been, of course, different rules for different people. Yes, that is actually one thing liberal democracy is not so good at making, so hypocrisy was the only way to deal with it.
It was during this, my rather horrified awakening process when I came accross as really unusual book, Theodore Dalrymple's Life At The Bottom. It is a book that probably would be classified "conservative", but it was refreshingly non-ideological, it was about the experiences collected by decades of working as a psychiatrist treating the underclass of Birmingham, UK. I was actually living there, attracted by the manufacturing prowess of the region, was good for me career-wise, and the book was actually able to explain the high levels of WTFery I experienced every day, such as I smoke a cig outside (I have my own idiotic side as well), a mother with a small kid in a pram and with an about 9 years old boy, and the boy walks up to me and asks for a cigarette. I look at the mom completely astonished. Blank face. WTF I do now? At any rate, Dalrymple said the basic issue is that intellectuals made rules that worked very well for themselves, such as atheism, sexual liberty and similar things. He was of course atheist too. But according to him this wrecked misery amongst the low-IQ underclass, they really needed their old churches and traditions and Gods Of The Copybook Headings to restrain their impulsivity and bad choices. Rules that work well for intellectuals ("liberal" rules) don't work well for everybody else, at all. Maybe if I wanted to offer a book that is life experience translated to words, even though it is not really possible, that is that book, I can only add it is not made up, I really saw these folks.I had to change my political and social views completely. I could no longer demand the kind of stuff that makes sense for ethical and intelligent people. I had to learn to demand stuff I would personally dislike.
I either have to demand really dumbing things down, or maybe designing things from the assumption of stupidity up. Which means either intellectuals sacrificing their own interests and accepting a world made of stupid, or publicly supporting rules but privately wiggling out of them (Victorian era) or different rules for different people (aristocracy). Cont. below
Um, how exactly do you want to preserve older things while I want to tear everything down and build it back up again? I don't want to tear things down. I want the trends that are happening - everything gets fairer and more liberal over time - to continue. To accelerate them if I can. (To design a whole new State if and only if it seems like it will make most people much happier, and even then I kinda accept that I'd need to talk to a whole lot of other people and do a whole lot of small scale experiments first.) None of those trends are making society end in fire. They're just nice things, like prejudiced views becoming less common, and violence happening less. I'm trying to optimise for making people happy; if you're optimising for something else, then I'm afraid I'm just going to have to inform you that your ethics are dumb. Sorry.
The problem with "life experience" as an argument is that people use "life experience" as a fully general counterargument. If you're older than me, any time I say something you don't like, you can just yell "LIFE EXPERIENCE!" and nothing I can do - no book you can suggest, nothing I can go observe - will allow me to win the argument. I cannot become older than you. This would be fine as an argument if we observed that older people were consistently right and younger people were consistently wrong, but as you'll know if you have a grandparent who tries to use computers, this just ain't so.
Just because you have been made jaded and cynical by your experience of the world, that doesn't mean that jaded and cynical positions are the correct ones. For one thing, most other people of your own age who also experienced the world ended up still disagreeing with you. There's a very good chance that I get to the age you are now, and still disagree with you. And if you observe most other people your own age with similar experiences (unless you're old enough that you're part of the raised-very-conservative generation) most of them will disagree with you. What is magic and special about your own specific experience that makes yours better than all those people who are the same age as you? Why should I listen to your conclusions, backed up by your "life experience", when I could also go and listen to a lefty who's the same age as you and their lefty conclusions backed up by their "life experience"?
Life experience can often make people a lot less logical. Traumatised people often hold illogical views - like, some victims of abuse are terrified of all men. That doesn't mean that, because they have life experience that I don't, I should go, 'oh, well, I actually think all men aren't evil, but I guess their life experience outweighs what I think'. It means that they've had an experience that damaged them, and we should have sympathy and try and help them, and we should even consider constructing shelters so they don't have to interact with the people they're terrified of, but we certainly shouldn't start deferring to them and adopting their beliefs just because we lack their experiences. The only things we should defer to should be logical arguments and evidence.
"Life experience", as a magical quality which you accumulate more of the more negative things happen to you, is pretty worthless. Rationalists do not believe in magical qualities.
If there is a version of the "life experience" argument that can be steelmanned, it's "I've lived a long time and have observed many things which caused me to make updates towards my beliefs, and you haven't had a chance to observe that." But that still makes no sense because you should be able to point out the things you observed to me, or show your observations on graphs, so I can observe them too. If you observed someone being a total idiot, and that makes you jaded about the possibility of a system that requires a lot of intelligence to function, then you should be able to make up for the fact that I haven't observed that idiocy by pulling out IQ charts or studies or other evidence that most people are idiots. If you can't produce evidence to convince someone else, consider that your experience may be anecdata that doesn't generalise well.
Perhaps your argument is "I've lived a long time and have observed very many very small pieces of evidence, and all of those small pieces of evidence caused me to make lots of very small updates, such that I cannot give you a single piece of evidence which you can consider which will make you update to my beliefs, but I think mine are right anyway." However, even if you can't give me a single piece of evidence that I can observe and update on, you ought to be able to produce graphs or something. Graphs are good at showing lots-of-small-bits-of-evidence-over-time stuff. If you want me to change my beliefs, you still have to produce evidence, or at least a logical argument. Appeals to "life experience" are nothing more than appeals to elder prestige.
Now, to address your actual argument. It seems to be (correct me if I misunderstand): liberal views are correct and work, but there are many stupid people in the world and liberal views don't work well for stupid people. Stupid people need clear rules that tell them in simple terms what to do and what not to do.
But if I were going to make up a set of really clear simple rules to tell a stupid person what to do and what not to do, they would be something like: 1. Be nice to people and try not to hurt people. 2. Don't try and prevent clever people from doing things you don't understand. Listen to the clever people. 3. Try and be productive and contribute what you can to society.
I cannot see any evidence that adding more rules beyond those three, like, "Defer to males because male-ness is loosely correlated with prestige-wanting and protectiveness" (even though male-ness isn't correlated with prestige-deserving, that seems about equal between genders) would do any good whatsoever. Since there are just as many stupid males as stupid females - male average IQ is actually slightly lower than female average IQ - a rule like that wouldn't do any good, would certainly not prevent people letting young kids have cigarettes or people beating one another or anything like that, and would in fact just lead to a lot of stupid people going "oh, it must be okay to hurt and disparage females and not let them have education then" and going around hurting lots of women.
And the view of mine, that liberal views don't hurt people and sexist/racist views do hurt people... certainly seems to fit the evidence. Liberal views are increasing over time, and crime and violence are decreasing over time. I can't find any studies, but I predict that if we do a study, we'll find that holding the belief "women and men are equal" is strongly correlated with being non-violent and not hurting women, and almost all of the violence and abuse cases committed against women will be by people who don't think they are equal. Similarly, doing stupid things like giving cigarettes to children and giving away products for free will be correlated with holding conservative views - though admittedly that could just be 'cause being uneducated is correlated with holding conservative views. And because men are on average more violent and more likely to hurt people. But then, that's a very good argument against putting them in charge, isn't it...?
Continued form above
And now a bit closer to the object level of our previous discussion. Look at this mess about sex, gender, orientation and roles and whatnot. If it was about designing rules for an island where only smart people live, it would be fairly obvious: completely do away with terms like man, woman, feminine, masculine, straight, gay. Measure T levels and simply establish a hormonal gender based on that, a sliding scale, divided into maybe five quintiles or however you want to. Do away with straight or gay - people can date however they wish to, but expect that most people will choose a partner from the other end of the scale than themselves, because people naturally converge to dom-sub, top-bottom setups. Give high-T people more status because they really seem to crave it 1 while low-T people are comfortable enough with being deferential to them, in return make high-T people willing to risk their lives protecting low-T people who should have things safe and comfortable. Base everything on this - risky venture capital type stuff for the high end, predictable welfare/union job stuff for the low-end.
This would make sense, right? I must stress this hormonal scale would be independent of biological sex, social gender or orientation - those are abolished in this scenario. Why, I find it likely you would end up higher on the T-based gender scale than me although I am guy, but you seem to give out more aggressive vibes than I do (I don't mean it in a bad way, your engines are just more fired up, that is good if you use it for good things). And of course this scenario was made for an island populated by only smart people.
And then back to the real world. To have any chance of it working for sorry stupid species of humankind, it has to be dumbed down mercilessly. The average human's cognitive level is about Orwell's "two legs bad four legs good". Of course by dumbing down we lose accuracy and efficiency. Of course by dumbing down quite some people won't fit. Still it has to be done. And now you tell me, if you want to make it really, really primitive, if you want to dumb it down to the point where a blatantly obvious biological switch would determine if people are treated as belonging to the high end or the low end, what switch would that be? Which switch would be the most obvious?
And then of course you end up with a system you don't like, and most intellectuals don't like - it is a really poor fit for intellectuals. At this point the choices are: sacrifice humankind for intellectuals? Sacrifice intellectuals for humankinds? Make the rules that fit for humankind official while let intellectuals bend the rules in private? Establish an aristocracy and make different rules for intellectuals? Archipelago?
Huh. This would be the meta arch of these things. If you still want we can return to stuff like if it is the WATW or whether a large number of people aggreeing with something makes it usually ethically correct and so on, because I would then interpret these objections in these light, but I hope I managed to resolve those with this article.
Have things steadily been marching in the direction of greater liberalism, though? There are a bunch of things you can no longer get away with, such as spousal abuse.
I used as well. This is getting spooky.
Crime levels are lower in the West then they were in the past. It's only media mentions of crime that have risen and which result in a majority of the population believing that crime rates haven't fallen. Violence is down.
We haven't gotten increased politeness to woman measured by factors like the number of man who open doors for woman. On the other hand we have a lot more equality than we had in the past. Feminism was never about demanding politeness.
Levels, not rates. Rates are largely about the police trying to look good in numbers. It is seriously difficult to quantify these things properly. One distinct impression I have is that violent behaviors escaped the lower classes and middle-class people stopped being so sheltered from them. Perhaps if I could find a database relating to the education level of the victims of violent crimes I could quantify that better. The 1900 to 1920's idea of a romantic and dangerous "underworld" went away(example ), but yet it affects middle-class people far more, from their angle of life experience life got more dangerous.
It is true that feminism is not about politeness, however politeness and preventing specifically violence as seemingly this was the core issue raised are closely related. A normal fella is not going to "please, good sir/madam" and then suddenly head-butt him/her. Formality is a way to avoid the kind of offense that gets retaliated physically, or a way to see if the other is peaceful and reliable, because if the other does not talk in a non-aggressive way then he is more likely to behave physically more aggressively and thus avoidance is advised. This is why it matters, not that relevant to feminism but relevant to safety, people being physically hurt and so on.
There are victimization surveys that verify lower crime levels apart from amount of crime that the police deals with.
We can discuss whether it's lead or the new clever crime fighting techniques that's the cause for lower violence but the expert consensus on the subject is that crime is down just as the expert consensus on global warming is that temperatures are up.
How do you know?
But it's not the only way. I rather have a culture where people hug each other, are nice to each other and also openly speak about their concerns when that makes other people uncomfortable.
It might be that you personally prefer formality but other people don't. Don't project your desire for formality onto other people. It's a right wing value and right wing values lost ;) Right wing values losing is no reason why an idealistic youth should be pessimistic.
Um, if you want a society with less crime try Singapore or places like Shanghai. Hell, even Japan have much lower crime rates despite being more patriarchal then western liberal democracies.
Yes, and that will help you so much when someone tries to punch/rob/rape you.