Agreed on both counts, yeah. I still don't think this is actually evidence against the possibility of the political nexus shifting away from social justice (in fact, I would count it as evidence we're near peak intensity) and I still think there is a lot of value to trying to understand and capture interesting insights from the social justice movement, but I don't think a real concerted effort do do this is possible until things relax a bit.
If someone can think of reasonable ways to verify whether the cultural toxicity of the SJ fight has &a...
Given that politics is problematic it's worthwhile to discourage people from posting low quality political posts on LessWrong
I did not say "low quality" and I do not think this post is low quality. I think it is of middling quality, around what I would expect an average LessWrong member to be capable of writing. It is less specific than I would like and I think overreaches in the amount the key insight is able to explain but there is a key insight. One I found useful and novel and well constructed.
Further, while it would be very bad to have ...
All math, world languages, and all visual and performing arts courses should have an ethnic studies equivalent.
Ah, I think you're right. It seems like they want an "ethnic studies" version of everything and students have to take at least one ethnic studies course per year. I'm not a huge fan of that and it seems like it is taking some well-deserved criticism.
Looking at this presentation through the lens of the original post, it seems like what the Ethnic Studies Board is trying to do is create safe spaces and reduce perceived harms agai...
Right, so, a few things:
The curriculum isn't mandatory
There is a huge difference in my mind between forcing teachers to adopt a specific curriculum with political implications and providing them the resources to include political topics as they see fit.
I'll admit, looking over the framework itself feels pretty icky. There are a few things I like about it, though.
SWBAT identify ancient mathematicians and their contributions to mathematics
I've long felt that more history of mathematics should be included in math curriculum (for much the same r...
It might be that nobody gets a degree in education without professing allegiance to SJ and those teachers then go to bring SJ into all the subject at school.
This sounds unlikely, uncharitable, and frankly more than a little conspiratorial. I'm not even sure if this is something most social justice advocates would even want.
What comes next might be a version that's even more radical.
I would not consider this an actual paradigm shift in the way the atheism->SJ shift occurred and I do not think it will actually happen.
My model of culture wars is ...
Where do we go from here? I’m not sure. The socialist wing of the Democratic Party seems to be working off a model kind of like this, but hoping to change the hamartiology from race/gender to class. Maybe they’ll succeed, and one day talking too much about racism will seem as out-of-touch as talking too much about atheism does now; maybe the rise of terms like “woke capitalism” is already part of this process.
This is what I was referencing, I think it is unlikely social justice will remain the political center it has been for th...
I'd like to thank you for writing this up. I have a strong intuition that many of the ideas central to social justice would work well alongside the rationalist movement if it were less politically charged. Maybe if Scott Alexander's thesis about New Atheism transforming into Social Justice is correct (and the corollary that a new hamartiology will show up soon and take its place) then it is plausible social justice ideology will become less toxic and more amenable to an approach at the object-level (which is where I think we excel).
I am not sure ...
Hmm, that might be worth exploring. Thanks
It was, as I admitted, a mistake. I was being inexact as it was not critical for my central point, if it was I would have looked it up, failed to find it, and adjusted my approach (or more likely, left out IQ altogether). I'm unsure what continuing to belabor this accomplishes aside from chastising me for insufficiently respecting numbers.
Amusingly, the article you linked redirected to a different article which seems to reinforce your first point and I think helped clarify for me the exact dynamics of the situation. The author defends Dr. Littman's paper on what she terms 'rapid-onset gender dysphoria' against the heavy backlash it received (mostly on twitter, it seems) and especially Harvard's response to that backlash.
I find it difficult to imagine that healthy academic discourse could take place in an environment that conflict-heavy. Critically, this does not require ...
This is a stronger case than the one Anderson made, I think, and it is one I take seriously (which is why I plan to approach this problem by reading material first to see what the landscape is actually like).
Any field that has dogma's that aren't allowed to be publicly debated has a problem with the kind of open discussion we are having here.
I agree with this statement, but the question is whether modern gender studies is actually such a field. Trying to make bold claims about the quality of academic discussion in a field neither I nor my convers...
We lost a room in which we held LW meetups in Berlin because LW discusses topics that shouldn't be discussed. The discussion in itself is 'unsafe' regardless of how you discuss or what conclusions are reached.
That's norms for using a meeting room. When it comes to norms that the gender studies community expects there own members to follow, a person who has a reputational stake in the community has a lot more to lose from violating norms in that way.
This isn't even a question of the academic quality of their discourse. a/atheism doe...
I agree, that was a confused point for me to make that didn't advance my main argument. The initial claim Anderson made was that the field of gender studies advocated total social determination of all observed differences between genders, I argued that this was not the case and provided an instance of a gender communications researcher discussing the biological influences on gendered behavior.
The point about IQ was a half remembered factoid from a metastudy I read a while back and I've been unable to find subsequently so it's likely misremembered. It's irrelevant to the discussion though, I think.
I'm afraid that's the case.
Alright, a different angle then. If we did find some academic feminists or gender studies researchers who were willing to engage in good faith, serious discussion without trying to be activist or throwing around accusations of -isms or -phobics, would you object to their presence in the community? The hostility you've shown towards an entire field is something I find deeply concerning.
Perhaps you and I just have fundamentally different approaches towards outgroups since I honestly cannot think of a single group I w...
I contest that those are not actually claims made by sociologists. Or if they are, they are minority opinions (in which case there would be other sociologists debunking them).
As a test, if you provide links to sociologists (or academic feminists/gender studies researchers) making each of those claims I will try to find others within the same field arguing against them.
Are you claiming that none of the differences between men and women are cultural? To me, that seems as obviously incorrect as saying all of them are. Not to go all 'fallacy of the grey' here but this really does seem to be an issue where both sides are a major influence. IQ is around 50% heritable, the other 50% also matters, though.
My view is that if we accept both biological and cultural influences on behavior then behavioral geneticists, neurologists, evolutionary psychologists, etc. focus their effort on the biological side and sociologists a...
IQ is around 50% heritable, the other 50% also matters, though.
This sounds like it's written by a person who's not quite clear what X percent heritable means. Apart from that making up numbers like this for rhetorical purposes and treating them as if they are factual is bad form.
The right answer to the nature vs. nature debate isn't it's 50-50 but: That's a bad question and a bad frame for understanding reality.
Instead of debating nature vs. nature one should look at the empirical findings we have and build up a view on the world based on them.
the second you step into the sociology department you're not only expected to ignore that, you're expected to deny it and attribute it to *oppression* without a single shred of supporting evidence.
To be perfectly honest, I've never stepped into a sociology department except to take classes that happened to be scheduled in the sociology building. The closest I've studied to sociology or gender studies in a formal setting was an introductory folklore course.
That being said, your statement sounds concerningly weakmanish, like the sort of c...
I understand and to largely share your concerns. Theoretically, there's a distinction between academic and activist gender studies and while the latter probably has almost nothing to offer and would likely just cause toxicity even if acting in good faith the former might have more value. I am not confident about the degree to which this distinction between academic study and activist action exists in actual fact, though.
>This is a discipline that can only exist by the deliberate denial of the medical and psychological fields and all the reproducibl...
Any reasonable scholar who's in gender studies faces a high reputational risk if they would debate on LessWrong in a reasonable way about their field. Any field that has dogma's that aren't allowed to be publicly debated has a problem with the kind of open discussion we are having here.
Again, I'm not super confident in this and I think there is a decent chance that this will wind up being pointless but it still seems worth spending a little time investigating.
The question is not just whether it's pointless but about whether it's potentially harmful.
I'd make an argument for 'soft-sciences' and humanities. Philosophy, cultural anthropology, history, political science, sociology, literature, and maybe even gender studies. Computer science, mathematics, economics, and other STEM-heavy fields are already pretty well represented within the current LW community.
The focus on group rationality and developing a thriving community seems like it could benefit from the expertise these fields bring to the table. This might also reduce the amount of 'reinventing the wheel' that goes on (whi...
-
Perhaps we need a list of inadequate equilibria. I've thought before it could be interesting to have some curated set of (ideally well-researched and discussed) 'hey this thing is dumb'. Things like higher education cost disease, paywalled scientific journals, first-past-the-post voting in democratic elections, etc. Even if we don't have coherent solutions yet, it would be good to be able to easily see the scope.
Thank you! That's exactly what I was looking for! They even have an open API.
Out of curiosity, is there any tool to facilitate personal predictions? When I've tried to do this in the past (using a Google Sheet) I tend to forget to score my predictions. I did some basic searching for a short-term prediction tracker (ideally something that would let you mark the outcome of a prediction and then calculate your calibration over time) and couldn't find anything. This seems like the sort of thing that could be languishing in someone's Github.
Alternatively, if this tool doesn't already exist, should it?
One thing you might look at is the Brier Score, particularly the 3-component decomposition.
Score = Reliability - Resolution + Uncertainty
The nice thing about this decomposition is that it gives you more information than a single score. The uncertainty is a sort of 'difficulty' score, it doesn't take predictions into account and is minimized when the same outcome occurs each time.
The resolution tells you how much information each prediction gives. For an event that occurs half of the time you could predict 0.5 probability for everything but i...
I think you might be overlooking the widespread cultural effects of Christian memes. When I had a similar discussion with a friend I argued "imagine a society in which the 12 Virtues had the place the 10 Commandments (or maybe the Beatitudes) do in ours".
Not everyone or even most people actually _follow_ the 10 Commandments and it is debatable whether Christians follow them any more frequently than non-Christians but if you compare a ours to a society that had basically _never heard_ of the 10 Commandments I think it is hard to imagine that othe...
I expect this is where much of the challenge and nuance of this technique lies. A few questions come to mind when I try this. How do you handle terminal vs instrumental value? How do you handle various kinds of uncertainty? (expected value calculations can require your whole world-model if you don't limit scope!)
Do you have any specific examples of how you perform this measurement on a real decision?