All of Multiheaded's Comments + Replies
I say "damages in the case of breach" and I am confronted with people suggesting I mean specific performance, dragging people off in chains, or slavery. It's so strange.
Pattern-matching is often rational in politics just because it's so cheap, as long as the pattern makes sense in the first place. I'm sorry, but the pattern of reactionary rhetoric about marriage has these very deliberate connotations. People who discuss this tend to discuss punishing sinners (vicariously so), not holding rational economic actors accountable for damages on underrecognized-but-valid contracts.
a two-tier society, with the virtuous Vickies behaving themselves and keeping each other in check, and the other types reverting to the Somalia that Kennaway etc so fervently desire
I personally call this phenomenon "the Regressive Cost of Virtue" (virtue in the descriptive, not the normative sense). Too lazy to write a good comment on it, I'll just quote myself from IRC.
...06:00 < Multiheaded> anyway, the thesis: not only is poverty insanely cognitively expensive, etc, but wealth and cultural capital are very very good fo
Once people realised that marriage wasn't enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
Would social conservatives and social liberals please both attempt to explain and steelman/criticize this assertion? Because it has always been among my biggest gripes with the conservative account of why divorce is so bad. It just doesn't seem plausible, especially given how over-optimistic most people are about the prospects of their marriage! And frankly, I'd be creeped out by people who start a marriage for affection or companionship and already think about enforcing ...
Would social conservatives and social liberals please both attempt to explain and steelman/criticize this assertion?
So, it seems to me that there is a terrible disconnect between property-splitting during a divorce and the existence of no-fault divorce, making marriage a tremendously costly move for the wealthier of the two parties (especially if they're male). If in order for Bob to marry Alice, he has to give her the unilateral option to take half of his things and leave, then marriage seems unwise.
In the era of fault divorce, Bob is safer- he needs t...
But cheating on spouses in general undermines the trust that spouses should have in each other, and the cumulative impact of even 1% of spouses cheating on the institution of marriage as a whole could be quite negative.
In the comments on Scott's blog, I've recently seen the claim that this is the opposite of how traditional marriage actually worked; there used to be a lot more adultery in old times, and it acted as a pressure valve for people who would've divorced nowdays, but naturally it was all swept under the rug.
This is among the best political comments on LW.
Many internet libertarians aren't very consequentialist, though. And really, just the basic application of rule-utilitarianism would expose many, many problems with that post. But really, though: while the "Non-Aggression Principle" appears just laughably unworkable to me... given that many libertarians do subscribe to it, is lying to voters not an act of aggression?
Don't know; it's quite intellectually consistent, sure, but my point is that the argument in favour of poverty was pure 110% motivated cognition, and its full absurdity can be seen much better in retrospect . At the very most, I'd suspect that someone paid lip service to the latter part after a long attack on the poor - like, say, a right-libertarian like Tyler Cowen spends much more time condemning labour regulation (and I agree with him that private companies shouldn't be charities in disguise) than he does advocating for more ample welfare to compensate the proletariat.
Let me just bring up one historical parallel to put complaints like this ("if we ease up on controlling and punishing some particular group, this will greatly decrease society's productivity") in context. Such rhetoric was very common in the 18th and early 19th century, and its object was the proletariat and poverty. Here's a paper and an article about old-time Malthusian/anti-worker beliefs held by elites.
..."The possession of a cow or two, with a hog, and a few geese, naturally exalts the peasant. . . . In sauntering after his cattle, he a
Someone affected by the issue might bring up something that nobody else had thought of, something that the science and statistics and studies missed - but other than that, what marginal value are they adding to the discussion?
Thinkers - including such naive, starry-eyed liberal idealists as Friedrich Hayek or Niccolo Machiavelli - have long touched on the utter indispensability of subjective, individual knowledge and its advantages over the authoritarian dictates of an ostensibly all-seing "pure reason". Then along comes a brave young LW user ...
There's only a certain amount of emphasis to go around. The more things you italicize, the less important each italicized word seems, and then when something's really important it doesn't stand out.
I keep trying to tell my mom exactly this, every time we need to design some kind of print materials for the family business. She just doesn't get that emphasis is about the relative share of a reader's attention to different parts within a text, a positional good of sorts.
Please note that this answer does not include the "culture" part, because that's the part I don't have a reasonable definition for.
Oh! It's ok, it sounds like you've simply never heard it explained. In a nutshell, my analogy here is that women in grown-up society who suffer some kind of sexual violation or threat are overwhelmingly likely to meet the same blind/wilfully ignorant/worse-than-useless response that is typical of adults overlooking bullying. (It sounds like you and me both have suffered from the latter.)
We didn't have a political thread on LW for a long time, did we? Would be a more appropriate place for this discussion. On one hand, I do not want to ignore your question, on the other hand, I have no desire to make this a long off-topic thread. Unfortunately, political topics are usually heavily mindkilling, they have thousands of connotations, so unless one writes a full book about the topic, there are many ways to misinterpret their answer.
Here are a few things that would deserve a longer discussion, but I don't want to have all of those discussions rig...
Also, one important step is that the parents must believe the child's report of bullying. As opposed to e.g. thinking "this is an exaggerated version of something that is probably harmless". (This was a mistake my parents were making all the time.)
Quick, what are your thoughts on the concept of rape culture?
If you add that middle school lasts for three or four years, and after that most people are no longer in middle school, I think 'short' applies.
Not to one's subjective experience. Oh no.
...the ranks of US liberals have included 9/11 Truthers, Marxists, etc., etc.
In spite of being a conservative Catholic apologist, what Chesterton is saying here isn't crazy...
Withholding my upvote until you rephrase that. People can be highly intelligent and rational not "in spite" of being a conservative Christian - indeed, they can take some good ideas characteristic of classical conservatism and Christianity while avoiding the bad stuff. E.g. from what I know, cousin_it here on LW is a conservative, and Will Newsome is Catholic (?), and bot...
Withholding my upvote until you rephrase that. People can be highly intelligent and rational not "in spite" of being a conservative Christian...
Intelligent, yes, rational, color me extremely skeptical. My reason for the comment about Chesterton was also partly because the fence quote trips my "this sounds like someone trying to come up with a clever justification for their knee-jerk prejudices" alarm. Until the second paragraph, it seems a bit fuzzy on whether Chesterton acknowledges there are no good reasons for some social institut...
People can be highly intelligent and rational not "in spite" of being a conservative Christian
This seems false as a matter of plain fact. It isn't especially different to being highly intelligent and rational despite believing Pi=4. It may be a rude thing to say, or unnecessary or inflammatory but it isn't an incorrect thing to say.
FWIW, I would unpack "conservative Catholic apologist" not as an apologist who happens to be a conservative and happens to be Christian, as you seem to be reading here, but rather as someone who regularly engages in apologetics for conservative Catholicism.
"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
-- Abraham Lincoln
in other words, the suffering of a lifetime of slavery is evidently worth 18.75% of the death of a free person in a horrific war.
Leaving aside all moral considerations of collective responsibility and individual complicity... and switching to my rough model of preference utilitarianism, which I generally don't use... this would sound like an incredible, unbelievably lucky bargain with this cruel universe at HALF a life for a fre...
Would anyone care to dispute the object-level claim I made, or are people just spree-downvoting?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_determinism
Wikipedia seems to be pretty unambiguious about Marx being the first notable theorist here. It's not about "neutrality", there just isn't any evidence that this claim is mistaken.
name the Editor of the NY Times the Pontifex Maximus of the Church of Progress and have a synod to lay out the canon of responsible journalism
Oh, hahahahahaha, if that ever happened in some wacky weird moldbuggy universe... that'd be like Vatican trying to grab supreme jurisdiction over all Christian denominations by proclaiming the Pope to be the spiritual heir of Martin Luther and "interpreting" Luther's theses to show how all modern-day Protestants need to forget about their minor disagreements and follow the RCC.
Which is to say... you do r...
So you mean... I could really use another drink right now? Yeah, sure, that's what I was thinking too! Can't hurt...
democracy and marxism are absolutely religious in character
I have 0.75 confidence that you've never read even a review of a book by, say, Jurgen Habermas, or Amartya Sen, or Barbara Ehrenreich, or Eric Hobsbawm. These people have nothing in common, someone might object; their fields are vastly different - that is so, but all are considered eminent scholars, all offer nuanced arguments in favour of greater democracy, and all have explicitly Marxist or at least hard-left views on socioeconomic matters.
Frankly, you strike me as a walking, talking example of Dunning-Kruger.
Dividing work in a family not about what people like, or about what's equal, it's about what works
To paraphrase Lenin, "Works for whom? To achieve what?" Cui prodest in any particular social arrangement? My personal go-to default hypothesis is that it's always the side that can harness greater bargaining power through having more overall control of resources. Apply to workplace/labor relations, families, tribal clashes etc.
(Citation! Citation! A very favourable review - by Satoshi Kanazawa of all people - of a book on the game-theoretical causes and consequences of power inequalities.)
I know, I know. If I was writing this with any actual goal-oriented hope for positive change on LW, I would've tried to bridge the inferential distance. But hell, I'm just a miserable and depressed cranky guy. Not even in gender studies. Sigh.
You know part of why I've been posting such low quality, counter-productive (passive)-aggressive remarks recently? I still remember that buzz, that breathtaking feeling of half-delight and half-awe when I discovered the LW community and read the Sequences two years ago. Here are some of the most insightful, kickass pe...
Ann Coulter, suffrage pessimist?
Well, you're going to find literally hundreds of women with outspoken feminist ideas to one outspoken Ann Coulter, so... Okay, let's be generous and say that she and Andrea Dworkin, a fierce critic of anti-feminist women, cancel each other out. Then you're still going to get far more women with explicitly and implicitly feminist aliefs. Even when they self-identify as "conservative" for cultural or political reasons, have a negative perception of feminist activism, etc. The public image of "feminism" m...
HUGE SPOILER: Technically, historical materialism and economic determinism was first... yup, a core Marxist idea.
Said the Tailor to the Bishop:
Believe me, I can fly.
Watch me while I try.
And he stood with things
That looked like wings
On the great church roof-
That is quite absurd
A wicked, foolish lie,
For man will never fly,
A man is not a bird,
Said the Bishop to the Tailor.
Said the People to the Bishop:
The Tailor is quite dead,
He was a stupid head.
His wings are rumpled
And he lies all crumpled
On the hard church square.
The bells ring out in praise
That man is not a bird
It was a wicked, foolish lie,
Mankind will never fly,
Said the Bishop to the People.
--Bertold Brecht (...
If you oppose a government policy that personally benefits you, you are a hypocrite who bites the hand that feeds you.
If you support the policy that benefits you, you are a greedy narcissist whose loyalty can be bought and sold.
...but neither of these are meaningfully bad things according to post-Machiavellian political thought. Machiavelli dismantled the virtue-centric, moralizing system of "naive" political thought - finding wise, moral and incorruptible men to control society, as argued by Plato or Aquinas - and showed how the strength of a...
Haha, no shit.
(Source: family experience.)
That there are a few racial pseudoscience believers in the audience doesn't change genocide being wrong, just as there being a few homeopathy users in the audience doesn't change fraud being wrong.
Perhaps you haven't read much of those folks? (Not that I blame you, it can be stomach-turning.) They claim that they're the voice of Actual Science on human sociobiology. It is the accepted consensus of polite society today - that xenophobia is wrong and immoral and destructive, that non-"white" people aren't, as a group, cognitively inferior/inhere...
I must say this is a bit... awe-inspiring, in the older sense of the word. As in, reading this gave me a knot in the stomach and I shivered. People who played as the AI and won, how is it that you're so uncannily brilliant?
The very notion of a razor-sharp mind like this ever acting against me and mine in real life... oh, it's just nightmare-inducing.
On the subject of massively updating one's beliefs where one was previously confident that no argument would shift them: yes, it happens, I have personal experience. For example, over the last year and a half ...
A somewhat related, incredibly badass quote.
..."...I hear some one of my audience say,... ...you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is
...For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn't. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsibl
And that's it. No arguing about who cleaned it last. No debating whether it really needs to cleaned. No room for misogynist cultural machines to pressure the wife into doing more than her fair share. Just a market transaction that is efficient and fair.
P.S.: those last two sentences ("No room for misogynist cultural machines to pressure the wife into doing more than her fair share. Just a market transaction that is efficient and fair.") also remind me of "If those women were really oppressed, someone would have tended to have freed them by then."
The polyamory and BDSM subcultures prove that nerds can create new social rules that improve sex. Of course, you can't just theorize about what the best social rules would be and then declare that you've "solved the problem." But when you see people living happier lives as a result of changing their social rules, there's nothing wrong with inviting other people to take a look.
I don't understand your postscript. I didn't say there is no inequality in chore division because if there were a chore market would have removed it. I said a chore market...
Of course it has. But the issue is that the society isn't going to come out and say that -- it will deliberately distort the map and make claims that are not true in reality.
So, reason dictates that... "we" should shove our offended senses of intellectual consistency and naively understood "honesty" up our collective butt, and just do whatever helps people.
And we should absolutely not help people "equally"! Whatever you think of the abstract moral/political ideal of equality, in practical terms people's circumstances in an...
(OT: Ms. Evans certainly has a very good opinion of herself...)
Feminism is what you get when you assume that all gender differences are due to society.
Hahahahahahaha, hell no. Read up on Shulamith Firestone!
(A longer review/liveblog of her Dialectic of Sex coming soon... honestly. I'm reading it right now, and loving it. Amazing book.)
If, however, you're drunk
Yeah.
If you want to leave this board, but suspect you lack the willpower to do so
I feel like I have a duty before a community that I see massive potential in. To stand up for my values and denounce all the shit I hate here in an articulate, reasoned manner. But I'm very much not up to the task, and this makes me feel frustrated and miserable. And angry at my own impotence in the matter.
It'd be a big amount of work to even call out the most egregious shitty shit here on a regular basis, with some citations and explanations for why I did so. And it feels like people hardly even care.
I feel like I have a duty before a community that I see massive potential in. To stand up for my values and denounce all the shit I hate here in an articulate, reasoned manner.
Then collect the worst examples and make an article of them. Preferably the ones that were upvoted (because if they were downvoted it means the community already disagrees with them). If the situation is so horrible, you should have an easy job. Just create a text file on your desktop, and anytimes something pisses you off, put the permalink there. Wait until you have enough mater...
I understand. However, there isn't some binary pass/fail criterion. This community can become incrementally better (obligatory "less wrong") or worse. Your contributions are helping steer it along a good path (ahem, usually).
If you've set extremely ambitious goals for yourself ("I will make this community live up to its full potential"), and those then stop you from pursuing more realistic milestones along that trajectory, then you've shot yourself in the foot:
The perfect is the enemy of the good, and all that. Compare "Can't stop ...
I hate drunken hate-filled rants, so I'm downvoting you.
There's a certain breed of progressives that want to push widely-held positions out of the Overton window. While I feel a few shitloads more comfortable around such people than around people who are sympathetic to said positions, this worries me.
Shutting up debate (in every place Proper Decent People talk, not just specialised places where people want to move past the basic questions) is always somewhat dangerous, though admittedly that applies to every position. This can be circumvented by yelling at people who imply or baldly state these ideas are true
If you could write up an intelligent post arguing for progressivism, then you would probably get a lot farther on convincing the far-right faction of this site than by telling them they are evil for holding their beliefs without giving reasons as to why. (The problem, of course, is that it requires time and effort.)
For what it's worth, you seem like a cool person... one of the few people on this site who I could see myself wanting to hang out with in real life. (I don't necessarily have a real reason to believe this, I just see the name Multiheaded and my...
If you want to leave this board, but suspect you lack the willpower to do so, then there's a better way than Suicide By Cop. Just scramble your password, add a firewall filter for LW (or a new "lesswrong.com 127.0.0.1" entry in your hosts file) and be done with it.
No need to burn the commons on your way out.
If what you're looking for are reassurances, PMs to those you've positively interacted with are the way to achieve that (no bystander effect, less drama etc.).
If, however, you're drunk, um, don't comment while drunk? Yea, I'm not too good with...
Albert Speer, Werner von Braun, Robert McNamara, John von Neumann and many others like them would likely qualify as "tech people". I'm terrified of people like them forming a stable and entrenched ruling caste, despite any "value overlap" they might display. Based on prior performance... I'd say it could potentially be just as bad as e.g. a Stalinist dictatorship.
Fun fact: There is a RedPillWomen group on Reddit. Are those women misogynists too?
No shit, Sherlock. Internalized sexism exists. Luckily, one lady who just wanted "traditional gender roles" in her relationship, and less of the fucked-in-the-headedness, has escaped that goddamn cesspool and reported her experience:
http://www.reddit.com/r/TheBluePill/comments/1hh5z5/changed_my_view/
Credibly dissociate yourself from people you don't want to be pattern-matched to, and show that you understand the reasoning by which your audience opposes them (in this case, for example, Salemicus should at least acknowledge that at-fault divorce can - to put it mildly! - increase underlying gender inequality without any explicitly gendered provisions), and that you're not going to defend them in that particular battle. Leftists do it all the time, to the extent that they have the opposite problem of not being able to unite while agreeing with each other on 95% of everything.