This post about jokes and attitudes the provide cover for bad social actors really caught my interest. But the blogger's position is one that is often met with hostility round these parts, for reasons that are unclear to me.
The point of the blog post is that jokes about certain gender and relationship stereotypes (men are idiots, women are the ball-and-chain) allow actual abusers slide by under the radar by asserting that they are joking whenever they are publically called out on inappropriate behavior. It really resonated with me - and to be frank, it seems aimed at the parts of social engineering that I think LW is worst at.
But the blogger's position is one that is often met with hostility round these parts, for reasons that are unclear to me.
I object most to is what is left unsaid. For a faint second the author talks in gender balanced ways, then she drops it to spend the rest of the discussion showing how men do this thing wrong. The author could have used an additional anecdote about how women the equivalent, or a gender neutral anecdote, or an offhanded comment noting where women do it too.
But she didn't.
Instead we're left with the impression that unconscious oppression is something men perpetrate on women. It's a similar trick to what she's talking about in her post. Her post is still insightful regarding feminism, but it could have been more. Underneath the overt message I hear her saying that oppression and abuse is a male thing, and her responses in the comments reinforce that. Again, a very good post for feminism, but I had been hoping for humanism, and I left disappointed.
But the blogger's position is one that is often met with hostility round these parts, for reasons that are unclear to me.
I think some of it is a defensive reaction to perceived possible vaguely-defined moral demands/condemnation. Here's a long comment I wrote about that in a different context.
Also simple contrarianism, though that's not much of an explanation absent a theory of why this is the thing people are contrarian against.
the parts of social engineering that I think LW is worst at.
What are those?
I think a significant amount of that hostility isn't necessarily denying the existence of privilege, but denying that it's a useful way of framing problems.
I also suspect a lot of it is backlash from over-enthusiastic social justice advocates trying to shoehorn absolutely every social problem imaginable into a context of unilateral power dynamics.
Speaking for myself, I find the privilege framework to be the one lacking in nuance or pragmatic application. I use the term "unilateral" because its core mechanic appears to be "person A has power person B doesn't, and person B suffers as a result". Coming from a game-theoretic perspective, which routinely deals with unexpected and perverse outcomes from agents being given different sets of choices, this seems crude in the extreme.
On the subject of multidimensionality, I've read up on intersectionality in good faith, and made an effort to engage with it, but it seems to boil down to multivariate analysis, only instead of using data, simply making stuff up.
That's the opposite of the point being made in the post, not a generalization of it.
At least, if I've understood you correctly — you're saying that when people make jokes about coercive/irresponsible men and passive-aggressive/nagging women, they are expressing a universal truth that society refuses to hear stated. To grossly oversimplify, we could state the blurred view proposed by the jokes being referred to as "All relationships are abusive".
The post TimS links to asserts, rather, that these jokes represent a blurring of distinctions that society fails to recognize. There actually do exist relationships that are more consensual and ones that are more abusive — the distinction — but insofar as everyone pretends that all men are coercive and all women passive-aggressive, they blur this distinction.
Moreover, blurring this distinction provides cover for the actual abusers by making the good relationships out to be just as bad as the abusive ones. If everyone is required to talk about their relationships in nonconsensual/abusive terms, then the people in consensual relationships cannot distinguish themselves as such. Hence, the post: "Even though Rowdy's brother-in-law...
This is true regardless of whether the "things you can't say" are true. Furthermore, the whole contrarian/red pill/pretty lies/uncomfortable truths meme is toxic. It's a death spiral. All opposition demonstrates your superior insight, and all agreement demonstrates your superior insight. Everything demonstrates your superior insight, which together with the normal repertoire of human biases makes it pretty much impossible to encounter any evidence that you're wrong.
There are no red pills, only blue pills with red sugar coatings.
The joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience.
Nonsense. All it takes is that the audience want to believe it. Experience is not truth; a large part of people's "experience" is their own beliefs. This is just the same death spiral again. If they laugh, that proves I'm right; if they boo, that proves I'm right.
It's necessary to get society to the point where it's possible to make the argument without being declared unfit for polite company.
The argument for what, in the context of the original posting? That in a marriage, the natural and desirable order of things is that man shall be the absolute ruler and woman the slave, and that any other arrangement is a futile struggle against our fundamental biological nature that if pursued will bring only doom and destruction?
Experience is not truth; a large part of people's "experience" is their own beliefs.
Heck, a large part of people's "experience" is fiction.
For instance: By the age of fifteen, if there are no doctors and nobody chronically ill in your immediate family, you've likely spent more time watching and reading fiction about doctors and medicine than you've spent discussing medicine with actual doctors. So your ideas of what doctors do are going to be based more directly on fiction than reality. One consequence of this is that there are a lot of common false beliefs promulgated by medical fiction. (Warning, TVTropes.)
For that matter, I suspect many fifteen-year-olds have heard more lawyer jokes than they have heard sentences spoken by an actual lawyer other than a politician. (Though one can hope they've taken more of an impression from Atticus Finch than from kill-all-the-lawyers jokes.)
(And yet, many fifteen-year-olds decide to become doctors ... and lawyers ... and other professions whose reputation and habits they have learned about chiefly through fiction, jokes, and stories rather than through observation.)
For that matter, the claim that "the joke is more l...
(Not sure whether this should go here or the Open Thread.)
We frequently discuss the difference between epistemic and instrumental rationality. Most political discussions seem to be "epistemic politics" - what political beliefs to have and why. I see very little discussion of "instrumental politics" - what kind of political actions to take and why. Beyond mind-killing, this is probably the main reason I currently have no interest in politics: I don't have a good conception of what kind of political actions are available to me. How would I go about fixing this?
A while ago I was in an online discussion with someone from an East European country who was demostrating to end the current government.
I asked the person for an article that explains the evils of the government. He told me that I didn't know of an English article that explained the issue in detail.
I told him that instead of being the 10,001st person at protest it would be much more effective to write a English article that explain the evil of the government and submit it to the Guardian's Comment is Free section.
He didn't think he was qualified to write the article and instead continued to demonstrate. Writing such an article is something that doesn't need special connections or money.
On the other hand it does take courage. You might come under attack. It takes real political understanding of the situation. It takes writing abilites.
Most other effective political action involves talking to people who have influence or donating money.
A response to Yvain's article An analysis of the formalist account of power relations in democratic societies.
Social Power and Utility
The things people actually care about, like money, success, influence, and psychological health, come entirely from structural/unconscious power.
No. Social Power is very much tied closely to Psychological Health. That people with lots of "structural power" are on average Psychologically healthier is mostly not the result of structural power. Higher IQ, conscientiousness, low time preference and other things tha...
Say Not Universalism, a criticism of Moldbug's position on Progressivisms ties to Christianity.
I disagree with it mildly, since I think there are features of Progressivism that are more or less uniquely attributable to its Christian heritage, but I do think Progressive like memes would have developed in a non-Christian descended implementation of what is often called The Cathedral (political belief pump associated with demotist forms of government).
It is a reminder to Reactionary readers that while the explicit justifications of modern political and socia...
China and the politics of human biodiversity
Half-Sigma's probably last post on his old blog. HBD has no future?
...I believe that the taboo against HBD will last indefinitely. As the scientific evidence mounts ever more so in favor of HBD, the taboos against speaking about it only seem to grow stronger. In 1994, the Bell Curve was published and generated massive coverage in the media. Now, if it were published today, it would be blacklisted and left unmentioned. I remember first becoming aware of HBD in 2005, when Cochran, Harpending, etc. published their ar
the best example of a successful non-democracy in the modern world is China. Their internal party system is extremely convoluted, but basically the party internally appoints members to positions, notionally on meritocratic grounds, though corruption and manipulation is endemic. Here is a more detailed summary.
Given the seeming economic success of this model would it be sensible for other countries to adopt it?
Is it possible to introduce sufficient additional safeguards against corruption and abuse of power?
the best example of a successful non-democracy in the modern world is China.
I thought the go-to example for a successful non-democracy was Singapore - it's a much nicer place to live in than China!
there's lots of reasons to think that a system that works in Singapore won't scale well
A couple of centuries ago, common wisdom was the opposite - Democracy was a nice idea but it could never work on something bigger than a city. From Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws:
...It is natural for a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise it cannot long subsist. In an extensive republic there are men of large fortunes, and consequently of less moderation; there are trusts too considerable to be placed in any single subject; he has interests of his own; he soon begins to think that he may be happy and glorious, by oppressing his fellow-citizens; and that he may raise himself to grandeur on the ruins of his country.
In an extensive republic the public good is sacrificed to a thousand private views; it is subordinate to exceptions, and depends on accidents. In a small one, the interest of the public is more obvious, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen; abuses have less extent, and of course are less protected.
[...] Excepting particular circumstances, it is difficult for any other than a republican government to subsist longer in a single town. A prince of s
Given the seeming economic success of this model would it be sensible for other countries to adopt it?
No. The gains from not being stupid about economics and not engaging in centralized planning and actually industrializing are so enormous that they compensate for even wretched leadership. Soviet Russia industrialized and grew for a long time despite having awful and wasteful leadership, and the same thing is happening to China.
The question is, can they, with their wretchedly corrupt non-democracy, reach similar per capitas as Japan and America? Or will they remain in a middle-income trap? If the former, then their government could indeed be considered something other countries might adopt; but if the latter, they will merely have demonstrated what all acknowledge: the Industrial Revolution is pretty damn awesome.
I think there's a valid alternative narrative where China's explosive growth is the result of enormous quantities of previously untapped natural resources and a previous lack of infrastructure. One could argue that prosperity was inevitable for China as soon as it eased up on its isolationism, almost regardless of what government was in place.
Just curious... who is downvoting this post, and why? Politics is the mind killer, I know... but this regularly-occuring thread is supposed to be an accepted exception, isn't it?
People who don't want a regularly-occurring exception.
The entertaining thing from my perspective is that the discussions here have been polite, informative, and honest, and overall I'd consider them to have been productive thus far. It is of course possible that the tone or nature of these debates will change over time, but it seems on current evidence to be that a lot of people are mindkilled about whether or not politics is in fact a mindkiller. Granted, the voting system here generally encourages controversy - fifty votes yay and forty nine votes nay is better than an uninteresting post with one vote nay, after all.
but this regularly-occuring thread is supposed to be an accepted exception, isn't it?
What do you mean by that? Supposed on what grounds, accepted by whom and in what sense? (There's also a distinction between following a rule and agreeing with it, and there is no rule in this case.)
I downvoted this post because I don't want to see more attention to politics here. I don't see it as an "accepted exception" but as a recent push for more political discussions.
It can be interesting to talk about social issues, but doing this under the explicit heading "politics" header is likely to prime people into paying more attention to the political implications of the topic.
It's been on my mind for some time that we obtain a lot of our sense of the world from fiction — for instance, that unless your family are unwell or are doctors themselves, you probably spend more time with medical fiction than with actual doctors. David Brin's recent Locus column applies a similar idea to our beliefs about the competence of our fellow-citizens and our social institutions, as reflected in popular fiction:
...If movies and novels were our basis for judging – say you were an alien relying only on the testimony of our adventure flicks beamed in
New political position:
John Derbyhsire's review of a collection of essays. The chosen title speaks volumes as Derbyshire is no optimist himself. It touches not so much on the content as a readable take on the life and positions of one of the Paleoconservative intellectuals I admire most.
On immigration, not necessarily limited to the united states. I find laws that discriminate based on national origin to be unfair, in the sense that they limit good outcomes arbitrarily. On the other hand, I do not know of a way to transition to more lenient immigration laws successfully (though I haven't thought about it much and it's far from my areas of interest). I want to know if there are arguments for limiting the rights of immigrants (legal or not) that aren't rooted in excessive self-interest ("they took our jobs!") Or perhaps xenophobia.
In a successful democracy, there is a process for electing the members of the government that appears, based on the past track record, to work.
If China has done any things right historically, perhaps it is education, and the cultivation of a disciplined workforce, and maybe a communication system that reaches into every village, and maybe these things are really quite big, esp. when combined with good natural resources.
China seems to have reasonably responsible leaders at the top for the moment, maybe because the most extravagant examples of corruptness at...
Let's get a bit meta. I posit that there are certain political discussions where rational debate is entirely useless, because they largely consist of choosing an axiom. Abortion is the most obvious of these - people who believe the right to life begins at conception(usually for religious reasons) are almost universally pro-life, and people who do not are almost universally pro-choice. It is not possible, even in principle, to convince either side of the other's position, because there's no argument that can change an axiom.
It's good to keep our limitation...
Even if we're talking about axiomatic disagreements, rational debate is still useful. Eg, we can still use rationality to help identify which axioms we're disagreeing with.
Case in point is your abortion example. I think you've messed up your lines of cause and effect there. Being anti-abortion either causes or has a common cause with believing that life begins at conception. Being pro-abortion causes or has a common cause with believing that life doesn't begin at conception.
Let me posit an axiom that causes anti-abortion. Instead of the whole 'soul' thing, lets go with "Women deserve to be punished for having sex," and that 'life-begins-at-conception' is just a rationalization. If this were true, anti-abortion should coincide with religiosity (it does) and pro-abortion should coincide with women's rights (also does). Both axioms correctly fit the existing data. How could we tell the difference... which axiom is the true axiom?
My rationalist shoes say we'd want to identify a differentiation point where these two axioms would cause different results. Have there been any occasions where "reduce number of abortions" and "punish women for having sex&quo...
Why do people insist on comparisons to -Viagra- when discussing birth control? Vasectomy would be a better comparison. Of course, it doesn't illustrate the same kind of point, because religious objections to vasectomy do exist (and get almost no media coverage compared to religious objections to comparable procedures in women).
I'm curious about the general stance towards alcohol, from Lesswrong. It (1) lowers the quality of life, and life expectancy (3rd highest cause of preventable death in the US), for almost all people drinking, or closely linked to people who drink, (2) costs a fair bit (The money spent per year in europe on alcohol-related damages could fund a manned mission to mars), (3) and offers little to no positive effects (Only proven short-term effects are temporary loss of motor control and some brain functions like balance and memory, anything else seems to be a placebo).
So, I'd like to know if you're for or against limiting alcohol (through laws lowering sales, altering public opinion etc.) and why.
[pollid:393]
That "offers little to no positive effects" comment suggests to me that you have limited personal experience with alcohol. The primary benefit I (and I think most drinkers my age) derive from alcohol is social: it helps me make new friends and connect more closely to existing friends. Lots of people drink, and it's easier to become friends with those people if you also drink. If that isn't enough LW lingo for you, drinking is a Schelling point.
Also, what do people have against placebo effects? Quoting myself seems dangerously egotistical, but "a placebo effect is still an effect." Maybe someone should write a top-level post about this.
Moderate drinking can offer some health benefits. Plenty of sources, here's one.
Just because many abuse alcohol does not mean it cannot confer health benefits in controlled doses.
John Derbyshire Wonders: Is HBD Over?
...The flourish of HBD books and talk in the years around 2000 was, to switch metaphors, early growth from seeds too soon planted.Had the shoots been nourished by a healthy stream of scientific results, they might have grown strong enough to crack and split the asphalt of intellectual orthodoxy.But as things turned out, the maintenance crew has had no difficulty smothering the growth.
Even the few small triumphs of HBD—triumphs, I mean, of general acceptance by cognitive elites—have had an ambiguous quality about them.
For
Quoted in the post A word of warning from Lev Navrozov:
...Tsar Nicholas II and his advisers. In 1914 the mere though that Russia might become a German colony was horrible for ethnic Russians. But after 1917 the Kaiser’s Germany seemed in Russia to have been an idyllic, humane, civilized country. Nicholas II should have made any concessions to the Kaiser rather than plunge into the war which undercut the European civilization perhaps forever and ushered in something no European could even imagine in his most fanciful diatribes against the existing regimes be
Edit: low quality rambling comment, sorry. Retracted, might redo it later.
An interesting post on some transhumanist blog/community about dominance and counter-dominance (and not equality/inequality or the method of governance per se) as the possible underlying political "drives" between Left and Right.
The blog itself is thoroughly unimpressive - all the standard transhumanist applause lights, and the modern progressivist ideology smuggled in as common sense. Yet my ears perked up at this particular argument. I've been thinking across similar lin...
As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.