When I read Alicorn's post on problems vs tasks, I immediately realized that the proposed terminology helped express one of my pet peeves: the resistance in society to applying rationality to socializing and dating. In a thread long, long ago, SilasBarta described his experience with dating advice: > I notice...
An insect tries to escape through the windowpane, tries the same again and again, and does not try the next window which is open and through which it came into the room. A man is able, or at least should be able, to act more intelligently. —George Polya, How To...
To a certain degree, different brands of feminism could function as different parties (certainly in academic feminism they do).
You are quite correct. There are large disagreements and fissures within feminism. These disagreements might not be obvious or cared about by non-feminists (similar to how many feminists don't recognize the differences within MRAs and PUAs). See out-group homogeneity bias.
As you also observe correctly, there are some common premises (and biases) even within these different groups of feminists. Although there are widely varying feminist opinions on porn, trans people, race issues, etc, there unfortunately seems to be a lot of homogeneity in how feminists view men's issues.
For example, the notion that "men are... (read more)
So, what would be an example of a "gender politics" that is "liberal" and "progressive", but not represented by any "party"?
The men's rights movement and pickup are both gender politics movements. Some segments of those movements are "progressive" (defined later), and some are not (just like feminism: some of it is progressive, some of it is not). These movements are not "parties" because they have very little political power. Feminism has quite a lot of political power.
First, some definitions.
In gender politics, a "traditionalist" is someone who believes that our ideas and cultural practices around gender are better the way they are, or were better in the past. A "progressive" is someone who... (read 492 more words →)
But is feminism unusually biased for the level of its status?
I'm not sure.
If feminism weren't occupying that position of status, some other ideology would be, and I wouldn't expect this other ideology to be less biased.
An alternative is that feminism would share space with other gender political ideologies in liberal political dialogue. Just like both liberalism and conservatism share status among different parts of the population, feminism would share status with other gender political movements.
Unfortunately, in white middle/upper class, educated liberal gender politics, feminism is the single party in a one-party system. I would like to see more forms of gender politics that are progressive, so there can be competition in the gender politics space.
It's true that there is a lot of painfully bad epistemology in feminist discourse. However, the proportion of bad epistemology is typical of most human discourse concerned with advocacy.
That's true. As far as ideologies go, feminism isn't that bad. It's really in a similar category to men's rights, and pickup. Mainstream politics (democrat vs. republican) are at least as ideological, and religion and multi-level marketing organizations are much worse.
What makes feminism special is that in white, middle / upper class society, people often don't look on feminism with the level of skepticism that they might apply in mainstream politics. Feminism has very high status relative to how ideologically biased it is. Pickup and men's rights are also ideologically biased, but they aren't high status, and pickup artists and MRAs don't have a powerful government lobby like feminists do.
Hi Ozy!
Part of what's been going on is that your advocacy has left me feeling as though my fears about PUA were being completely dismissed. ... I don't know if it was unfair of me to assume that you hadn't performed a moral calculus--
On LW in general I've spilled gallons of ink engaging in moral analyses of pickup, and of potential objections to pickup techniques. In my PUA FAQ, I made a whole section on ethics. In general, I have trouble reconciling your above perceptions with my participation in pickup discussions on LW.
But my memory of those discussions isn't perfect, so it's possible that I've been lax in replying to you personally. If you raised... (read 1091 more words →)
Hi daenerys! Welcome to the PUA Moderates club.
Nancy, I'm a bit confused by your comment.
From my point of view, the PUA believers have the advantage at LW
What does "PUA believer" mean? Out of the folks who discuss pickup positively on LessWrong, I doubt any of them "believe" in it uncritically. However, they may feel motivated to defend pickup from inaccurate characterizations.
I do not see people who want to discuss pickup in a not-completely-negative way on LW as having an obvious advantage. The debate is not symmetrical. Anyone who can be painted as a defender of pickup is vulnerable to all sorts of stigma. Yet the worst they can say in their defense is to call the attackers close-minded or... (read 549 more words →)
If "pussy" is a sexist slur, isn't "dick", also?
When I read Alicorn's post on problems vs tasks, I immediately realized that the proposed terminology helped express one of my pet peeves: the resistance in society to applying rationality to socializing and dating.
In a thread long, long ago, SilasBarta described his experience with dating advice:
I notice all advice on finding a girlfriend glosses over the actual nuts-and-bolts of it.
In Alicorn's terms, he would be saying that the advice he has encountered treats problems as if they were tasks. Alicorn defines these terms a particular way:
... (read 1131 more words →)It is a critical faculty to distinguish tasks from problems. A task is something you do because you predict it will get you from one state of
An insect tries to escape through the windowpane, tries the same again and again, and does not try the next window which is open and through which it came into the room. A man is able, or at least should be able, to act more intelligently. —George Polya, How To Solve It
Intelligence makes humans capable of many impressive feats. Unlike flies and birds, we don't bang up against windows multiple times trying to get out of our houses. We can travel to the moon. We have taken over the planet. Why? Because intelligence enables us to solve problems.
All problems start the same way. They start unsolved. Each fact humans have figured... (read 678 more words →)
That's been my observation, also. But if it's true, I wonder why?
It could be because intelligence is useful for moral reasoning. Or it could be because intelligence is correlated with some temperamental, neurological, or personality traits that influence moral behavior. In the latter case, moral behavior would be a characteristic of the substrate of intelligent human minds.