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To have a stable social life, filter out those who get easily offended by offending them early on.
In response to
Rationality Quotes Thread May 2015
I like the sentiment, but the advice is too often not practical. Also, not much to do with rationality.
In response to
On desiring subjective states (post 3 of 3)
An internal combustion engine is like Carol's subjective cold-sensation in her left hand - one way among others to bring about the externally-observable behavior. (By "externally observable" I mean "without looking under the hood".) In Carol's case, that behavior is identifying 20 C water. In the engine's case, it's the acceleration of the car.
The subjective cold-sensation in her left hand should be part of the observable behavior, surely? To mix the analogies, if it were my job to disguise the fuel cell as a combustion engine, I certainly would feel like I had to include this subjective cold-sensation part.
But I'm not familiar enough with the discussions about uploading to know to what extent people intend to make the fuel cell keep the subjectively observable properties of a combustion engine.
In response to
Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015
Can anyone recommend good sources on the social dynamics of witch-hunts?
Not necessarily about witches, of course. I'm interested in the hand of Moloch in these situations: social incentives to go along, status rewards for being more morally outraged than your fellow citizen, self-protection by avoiding looking insufficiently outraged, the not necessarily intended but still unescapable prosecutorial traps, the social impossibility of denying the actual existence of the outrageous facts...
The grandfather's watch is a great example. Would you attribute essentialist thinking to someone who prefers that watch?
To the extent that there really are no perceivable differences
But there are readily perceivable differences. Just look under the hood.
Would you attribute essentialist thinking to someone who prefers that watch?
Yes, I don't see why not. The only difference is a mental tag on their map.
(not that I would look down on anyone who has these preferences, or feel particularly inclined to work on diminishing my own similar preferences).
But there are readily perceivable differences. Just look under the hood.
Ok, no differences that would make her prefer the actual combustion engine, besides it having the essence of a real combustion engine.
In response to
Gasoline Gal looks under the hood (post 1 of 3)
To the extent that there really are no perceivable differences, it looks like essentialist thinking. But I wouldn't call a desire irrational (or rather, I wouldn't call it especially irrational), even a desire for a perceived essence.
A similar example would be two identical watches, one of which was given to you by your grandfather. Or the loss of value when you discover that the autographed picture you bought on e-bay is a forgery.
(maybe it's because I'm primed by a discussion on the stupid questions thread, or because I perceived hints that the third part would be controversial, but the example I had in mind as I read the post was of a heterossexual man rejecting trans women)
it is believed among Gamergate fans
It appears to me that all kinds of things are believed among people highly invested in one side or other of the "Gamergate" flap, and that being so believed is not very strong evidence for the truth of anything.
(The people producing those videos say he's "producer and co-writer". Cynical-me suspects that "Gamergate fans" think he must be the real driving force because Anita Sarkeesian is a girl and therefore not to be taken seriously. I do hope cynical-me is wrong. Not-so-cynical me thinks Sarkeesian is more likely to be the real driving force because, other things being equal, a woman is more likely to feel strongly about this stuff than a man.)
the correct way to make money using Arthur Chu
No, the correct way to make money using Arthur Chu is to have him play Jeopardy!. That's been done and it seems to have worked pretty well.
I'm having trouble figuring out what you think is actually going on here. It seems to be something like this: some unscrupulous person decides that their goal is "to make money using Arthur Chu" (why?) and then decides that the best way to do that is via a focus on social justice (why??) but then fails to include a high-status-looking white girl as Viliam's Guide To Exploiting Social Justice People would have told him to and therefore fails, whereas if they had had a high-status-looking white girl as central character the Kickstarter would have made a load of money.
But that doesn't make a bit of sense to me, so probably my different political/social/psychological assumptions are stopping me working out what scenario you have in mind.
(The more likely scenario seems to me to be this, obtained by taking things more or less at face value. Scott Drucker sees that Arthur Chu has raised a bit of a ruckus, and been somewhat successful, by playing Jeopardy! in an unorthodox way; maybe he also thinks Chu is an interesting guy. So he decides to make a little documentary about Chu and his Jeopardy! playing. He contacts Chu. Chu is prepared to play along, but he has got very much into social justice and wants that front and centre in the documentary. Drucker is willing to go along with this because "Chu gets angry about stuff" fits his narrative pretty well, and also because he can't make the documentary without Chu's cooperation. They put up their Kickstarter page, and it turns out that actually the internet has mostly forgotten about Chu and people who are interested in unorthodox Jeopardy! tactics mostly aren't very interested in social justice. To first order, no one wants to back the project. The Kickstarter fails. The end. In my version of the scenario, making a cute rich white girl the central character would have made it no longer a documentary about Chu, hence uninteresting to Scott Drucker; would have been unacceptable to Chu for all kinds of reasons; and would have made little difference to the success of the Kickstarter unless it happened to get noticed by a lot of people who enjoy looking at cute white girls so much they'll fund anything with one in it. That audience might overlap somewhat with the Jeopardy! fans; maybe not so much with the social justice warriors.)
You didn't. The Kickstarter project called him "a spokesperson for social justice".
OK. So what conclusion am I supposed to draw from that plus the fact (assuming it is one) that he never happens to have defended a poor black woman by name in his writings online? I'd have thought it might be "Chu is insincere and isn't really interested in social justice", except that you have said several times that you think he is sincere.
(The people producing those videos say he's "producer and co-writer". Cynical-me suspects that "Gamergate fans" think he must be the real driving force because Anita Sarkeesian is a girl and therefore not to be taken seriously. I do hope cynical-me is wrong. Not-so-cynical me thinks Sarkeesian is more likely to be the real driving force because, other things being equal, a woman is more likely to feel strongly about this stuff than a man.)
Since it's been brought up...
As far as I can tell the best evidence they have for this is a widely circulated video (from before FemFreq) in which she says she's "not a fan of videogames".
And Mcintosh clearly "feels strongly about this", as much as any woman I've seen. The Gamergate people created a whole hashtag to display his tweets (#FullMcintosh), which also became, incidentally, what they use to indicate that they think someone has gone particularly far down the SJ rabbit hole.
Personally, I think the conclusion Viliam mentions doesn't rest in very solid evidence, but it's not far-fetched either. (meanwhile, the "because she's a girl" hypothesis looks very unlikely to me)
What, by the way, makes you think that Anita Sarkeesian doesn't truly believe in her cause? I've only seen a small quantity of her stuff, but what I've seen looks sincere (and fairly plausible) to me.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with videogames, or which of her videos you've seen. But I can't imagine how some of the ones I've seen could possibly have been made without outright dishonesty.
Have you actually seen people claiming to hate freedom?
It makes sense if you're talking about some specific understanding of it, e.g. free-market policies or gun rights, but for someone to declare themselves anti-freedom as a concept... Nope, it doesn't map to anything I've ever witnessed.
?
No, I mean people sometimes accuse leftists of holding positions motivated by hate. It's more common for this accusation to be made against right-wing positions (which is what the grandparent was talking about), but I don't think the reverse is all that rare.
Perhaps not that rare, dependent upon where you live and who you mix with. But in my experience, the left tries to frame everything as heroic rebels vs the evil empire, with an almost complete refusal to discuss or consider actual policies.
Oh, that's quite close to my experience as well. Any disagreement about policies is actually a smokescreen - people only oppose leftist policies because they benefit from the status quo, you see, but they will invent anything to avoid admitting that (including, I gather, the entire field of Economics).
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At last. Wouldn't miss it.