I know nothing about this topic. In particular, I haven’t heard of Michael Bailey and Kevin Hsu before.
But I do know that there are terrible arguments on both sides of every issue—even issues where there is also healthy discourse and very good arguments.
Are Michael Bailey and Kevin Hsu the least-bad arguers for their position? Or are they especially well-known / famous / widely-respected figure-heads of that side of the debate? If so, you should say that somewhere.
Otherwise it sounds (to non-knowledgeable ears like mine) like you were just searching for an...
Michael Bailey is the most prominent and well-respect figure in this debate:
Hmm, my two-sentence summary attempt for this post would be: "In recent drama-related posts, the comment section discussion seems very soldier-mindset instead of scout-mindset, including things like up- and down-voting comments based on which "team" they support rather than soundness of reasoning, and not conceding / correcting errors when pointed out, etc. This is a failure of the LW community and we should brainstorm how to fix it."
If that's a bad summary, it might not be Duncan's fault, I kinda skimmed.
Strong upvoted for the effort it takes to write a short, concise thing. =P
I endorse this as a most-of-it summary, though I think the details matter.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
There's certainly something to that. But in the other direction, there's the Claudette Colvin vs Rosa Parks anecdote, where (as I understand it) civil rights campaigners declined to signal-boost and take a stand on a case that they thought the general public would be unsympathetic to (an unmarried pregnant teen ...
I want to say loud and clear that I don't think the only two options are (1) "saying X in a way that will predictably and deeply hurt lots of people and/or piss them off" and (2) "not saying X at all". There's also the option of (3) "saying X in a way that will bring anti-X-ers to change their mind and join your side". And also sometimes there's (4) "saying X in a kinda low-key way where anti-X-ers won't really care or take notice, or at least won't try to take revenge on things that we care about".
My sense is that there's safety-in-numbers in saying "obvi...
we are talking about the book’s provenance / authorship / otherwise “metadata”—and certainly not about the book’s impact
A belief that "TBC was written by a racist for the express purpose of justifying racism" would seem to qualify as "worth mentioning prominently at the top" under that standard, right?
And it would be quite unreasonable to suggest that a post titled “Book Review: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is somehow inherently “provocative”, “insulting”, “offensive”, etc., etc.
I imagine that very few people would find the title by itself insultin...
Hmm, I think you didn't get what I was saying. A book review of "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is great, I'm all for it. A book review of "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" which treats it as a perfectly lovely normal book and doesn't say anything about the book being a forgery until you get 28 paragraphs into the review and even then it's barely mentioned is the thing that I would find extremely problematic. Wouldn't you? Wouldn't that seem like kind of a glaring omission? Wouldn't that raise some questions about the author's beliefs and motives in writ...
...Hmm, I think you didn’t get what I was saying. A book review of “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is great, I’m all for it. A book review of “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” which treats it as a perfectly lovely normal book and doesn’t say anything about the book being a forgery until you get 28 paragraphs into the review and even then it’s barely mentioned is the thing that I would find extremely problematic. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t that seem like kind of a glaring omission? Wouldn’t that raise some questions about the author’s beliefs and motives in wri
I don't think my suggestions are getting pushback; I think that my suggestions are being pattern-matched to "let's all self-censor / cower before the woke mob" and everyone loves having that debate at the slightest pretense. For example, I maintain that my suggestion of "post at another site and linkpost from here, in certain special situations" is next-to-zero-cost, for significant benefit. Indeed, some people routinely post-elsewhere-and-linkpost, for no reason in particular. (The OP author already has a self-hosted blog, so there's no inconvenience.) Th...
Sorry, what? A book which you (the hypothetical Person A) have never read (and in fact have only the vaguest notion of the contents of) has personally caused you to suffer? And by successfully (!!) “advocating for racism”, at that? This is… well, “quite a leap” seems like an understatement; perhaps the appropriate metaphor would have to involve some sort of Olympic pole-vaulting event. This entire (supposed) perspective is absurd from any sane person’s perspective.
I have a sincere belief that The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion directly contributed to the ...
Your analogy breaks down because the Bell Curve is extremely reasonable, not some forged junk like "The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion".
If a book mentioned here mentioned evolution and that offended some traditional religious people, would we need to give a disclaimer and potentially leave it off the site? What if some conservative religious people believe belief in evolution directly harms them? They would be regarded as insane, and so are people offended by TBC.
That's all this is by the way, left-wing evolution denial. How likely is it that people separated for tens of thousands of years with different founder populations will have equal levels of cognitive ability. It's impossible.
Suppose that Person A finds Statement X demeaning, and you believe that X is not in fact demeaning to A, but rather A was misunderstanding X, or trusting bad secondary sources on X, or whatever.
What do you do?
APPROACH 1: You say X all the time, loudly, while you and your friends high-five each other and congratulate yourselves for sticking it to the woke snowflakes.
APPROACH 2: You try sincerely to help A understand that X is not in fact demeaning to A. That involves understanding where A is coming from, meeting A where A is currently at, defusing tension, ...
Imagine that Person A believes that Charles Murray is a notorious racist, and TBC is a book that famously and successfully advocated for institutional racism via lies and deceptions. You don’t have to actually believe this—I don’t—I am merely asking you to imagine that Person A believes that.
If Person A believes this without ever having either (a) read The Bell Curve or (b) read a neutral, careful review/summary of The Bell Curve, then A is not a reasonable person.
All sorts of unreasonable people have all sorts of unreasonable and false beliefs. Should ...
Approach 2 assumes that A is (a) a reasonable person and (b) coming into the situation with good faith. Usually, neither is true.
What is more, your list of two approaches is a very obvious false dichotomy, crafted in such a way as to mock the people you’re disagreeing with. Instead of either the strawman Approach 1 or the unacceptable Approach 2, I endorse the following:
APPROACH 3: Ignore the fact that A (supposedly) finds X “demeaning”. Say (or don’t say) X whenever the situation calls for it. Behave in all ways as if A’s opinion is completely irrelevant....
I like the norm of "If you're saying something that lots of people will probably (mis)interpret as being hurtful and insulting, see if you can come up with a better way to say the same thing, such that you're not doing that." This is not a norm of censorship nor self-censorship, it's a norm of clear communication and of kindness. I can easily imagine a book review of TBC that passes that test. But I think this particular post does not pass that test, not even close.
If a TBC post passed that test, well, I would still prefer that it be put off-site with a li...
I like the norm of “If you’re saying something that lots of people will probably (mis)interpret as being hurtful and insulting, see if you can come up with a better way to say the same thing, such that you’re doing that.” This is not a norm of censorship nor self-censorship, it’s a norm of clear communication and of kindness.
I think that this is completely wrong. Such a norm is definitely a norm of (self-)censorship—as has been discussed on Less Wrong already.
It is plainly obvious to any even remotely reasonable person that the OP is not intended as any...
This is exactly the sort of thing we should not be doing.
I should also add that Duncan has a recent post enthusiastically endorsing the idea that we should try to anticipate how other people might misinterpret what we say, and clarify that we do not in fact mean those things. That post got a lot of upvotes and no negative comments. But it seems to me that Duncan's advice is in direct opposition to Robin's advice. Do you think Duncan's post is really bad advice? Or if not, how do you reconcile them?
Robin and Duncan are both right. Speakers and listeners should strive to understand each other. Speakers should anticipate, and listeners should be charitable. There are also exceptions to these rules (largely due to either high familiarity or bad faith), but we should as a whole strive for communication norms that allow for concision.
Recommending disclaimers, recommending almost-another-post's-worth-of-wrestling, censorship...all are on a spectrum. Reasonable cases can be made for the options before outright censorship. I am of the opinion that additional...
it is truly shocking to see someone endorsing this standard on Less Wrong
I don't think I was endorsing it, I was stating (what I believe to be) a fact about how lots of people perceive certain things.
I used the term "provocative" as a descriptive (not normative) statement: it means "a thing that provokes people". I didn't run a survey, but my very strong belief is that "provocative" is an accurate description here.
I do think we should take actions that achieve goals we want in the universe we actually live in, even if this universe is different than the un...
and where not provoking people is an eminently feasible alternative with minimal costs
Considering that your suggestion is getting pushback, isn't that indicative of this being a fabricated option? In suggesting to change the culture of Less Wrong, you inevitably get pushback from those who like the status quo. What's the option that offends nobody?
That said, if you just mean that the review could be written better, that may be the case; I haven't read it yet. In any case, I don't have the impression that lsusr's writing style is necessarily one for subtlet...
Hmm, maybe you’re from a different part of the world / subculture or something. But in cosmopolitan USA culture, merely mentioning TBC (without savagely criticizing it in the same breath) is widely and instantly recognized as a strongly provocative and hurtful and line-crossing thing to do.
This may or may not be true, but it is truly shocking to see someone endorsing this standard on Less Wrong, of all places. It’s difficult to think of a more neutrally descriptive title than this post has—it’s almost the Platonic ideal of “neutrally descriptive”! To su...
Strong-downvoted. I want lesswrong to be a peaceful place where we can have polite boring truth-seeking arguments without incurring reputational risk / guilt-by-association. I understand the benefit of having polite boring truth-seeking arguments about racism-adjacent topics that take sides in an incredibly incendiary culture war. However, there is also a cost—namely, there's a public good called "right now there is minimal reputational risk of being publicly IRL known as a lesswrong participant", and each time there's a post about racism-adjacent topics t...
I agree the post didn't address Murray's points that critically or look deeply into the long list of critiques of the book, but it's a useful summary of the main points (with some criticism here and there), which I think was the point.
I'm not sure how most of these options would ensure the benefit of summarizing without the cost of reputational risk: (1) This one might, until the connections are easily followed by, say, the NYT or any random internet sleuth; (2) Maybe the title has been edited (?), but I'm not seeing a provocative title or framing, most of...
Seconding this: When I did classified work at a USA company, I got the strong impression that (1) If I have any financial problems or mental health problems, I need to tell the security office immediately; (2) If I do so, the security office would immediately tell the military, and then the military would potentially revoke my security clearance. Note that some people get immediately fired if they lose their clearance. That wasn't true for me—but losing my clearance would have certainly hurt my future job prospects.
My strong impression was that neither the...
I don't specifically know about mental health, but I do know specific stories about financial problems being treated as security concerns - and I don't think I need to explain how incredibly horrific it is to have an employee say to their employer that they are in financial trouble, and be told that they lost their job and income because of it.
Elaborating on Teerth Aloke's answer, I think you should be more, um, consequentialist about this whole thing. "...To think in terms of desired outcomes, and to ask: “What is the likeliest way that the outcome in question might occur?” ...then repeat this process until we backchain to interventions that actors can take today." (ref)
So the first step is for you to decide: what is my goal? In principle, there can be a lot of possibilities:
I think it would be both more effective and more LessWrong-norm-ish to argue that there was no widespread election fraud rather than claim that there was no widespread election fraud. Like, describe and refute specific claims, or at least tell readers that you dug into them before dismissing them (I assume you did). It only takes a sentence or two! You link to the best arguments on both sides, and then say you read them both, and this one checks out, and that one is full of easily-refuted lies and confusions. Or whatever. Otherwise what's the point? Most of your audience already agrees with you, the rest will assume you're just another sucker who blindly trusts the lamestream media... :-P
I'm concerned that these efforts are just delaying the inevitable. (Which is still very worthwhile!!) But in the longer run, we're just doomed!
Like, the people in the military and defense contractors developing autonomous drone navigation systems are doing the exact same thing as probably dozens of university researchers, drone agriculture technology companies, Amazon, etc. In fact the latter are probably doing it better!
So ideally we want a high technological barrier between what's legal and the weapons that we don't want to exist, otherwise anyone can im...
I'd recommend against buying firearms: there's a lot of practice that goes into using them well, and if you don't know what you're doing you're probably going to make things worse.
Anyone know anything about buying pepper spray??
I have a 1000+ karma non-anonymous lesswrong account (not this one obviously) and I can tell you that if lesswrong got a reputation as a hereditarian hangout, I would delete that account and move my blog posts to WordPress or something instead. I don't want to take that risk to my reputation, to my current and future jobs, and to my current and future relationships.
Sadly, for people who need a job, the only free speech is anonymous speech.
There should be a big warning against using your real name in the account creation dialog. I feel more comfortable online since I stopped using my full name.
That’s helpful, thanks!