All of orthogenesis's Comments + Replies

It's unclear to me why you would make such an accusation without bringing any examples of what uninformed things about non-white non-Western ciswomen are supposedly said on LessWrong.

 

The phrase "I don't see people in terms of race" is such an example. 

 

I don't have any stats on this, but while I wouldn't be surprised that groups considered the default say this (e.g. white, western males in the west), this seems less asymmetrical in principle in some other situations (e.g. I could see in principle a non-western non-white person being the maj... (read more)

It's the premature transhumanist idea that "whether you are an  doesn't matter". A world without racism would be nice. But we live in a world with racism. Therefore pretending race doesn't matter exacerbates racial inequity and brings us further away from actually bringing about a transhumanist utopia.

To be charitable, in many types of human conversation, statements that sound like mere descriptions of people or society ("this is not who we are as a nation", "adults don't act like children", "in life, friends are more important than money") are ... (read more)

This seems pretty tough because humans easily form associations with negative events, relative to positive events (for instance, refusal to visit a place ever again that they were robbed in, or eat a food that made them terribly sick, even if later on they intellectually realize it was a chance thing). 

I wonder if more positive encounters would help gradually change the bias, also for your own well-being (for example, having experiences where you were helped by, or have friendly relations with people who happen to be black, and overall being further e... (read more)

5alexgieg
Ah! I have plenty of extremely positive experiences with black people, from black friends, to coworkers, to acquaintances, to (awesome!) teachers, to college friends. For me, people are all individuals, no exception, and I cannot think in terms of groups or collectivities even if I tried forcing myself to do so. As such, I have always been extremely careful not to allow this irrational trigger to affect anything real, and this is why I described this quirk as "extremely annoying". It'd be an easy but deeply flawed pseudo-solution to keep the problem at bay by distancing myself from situations that trigger it, but I refuse to do that. If it helps to visualize it, imagine walking around and suddenly noticing a tiger looking at you growling at their signature 18Hz, or a snake rising their head. Your body would react in a split instant, much faster than your conscious mind registers it, by pumping you with adrenaline in order to increase to the max your chances of survival. That, more or less, is what happens, so the most I can do, and this I make myself do all the time, is to forcefully shut the adrenaline pump down once it opens, and carry on as if it hadn't opened up. The mechanism by which it opens, though, that one is beyond my conscious control, and while familiarity reduces its triggering, it unfortunately doesn't fully eliminate it. Which is why I linked it to PTSD. When a person suffers a trauma and develops PTSD, their brain physically rewires as a defense mechanism. Barring some very experimental psychotropic treatments being currently researched, this physical rewiring cannot be reversed. It can at most be eased, but fully reversed, not yet, no.

The phrase keep your identity small is a good thing to tell yourself when your identity is trivial and superficial. It is a harmful, insensitive thing to tell a discriminated-against minority when you are a member of the majority.

 

I think the ideal would be the majority (or the powerful, capable of doing the discriminating) keeps their identity small AND the minority (or the less powerful, the target of the discriminating) keeps their identity small (without said discrimination, there then would be lowered need for defensive identity-forming). Thus, m... (read more)

but outside of these exceptional cases of misassignment, using these expressions gives the impression the assignation is incorrectly made way more often than it in fact is.

 

I see what you mean, but perhaps to be charitable (if not pedantic), I feel like the term "assigned" doesn't necessarily tell you about accuracy, reliability (or perhaps goodness) of an assignment. For example, if I hear someone say "the policy-maker assigned a high economic value to X" or "the scientist assigned a high probability to the chance of a drought", I wouldn't think absent more info, that it was likely correct or incorrect, just that someone was reporting someone else's judgement. 

I don't know about the majority, but I can say for at least a few, when they say "I don't see people in terms of race", they're being literal, not metaphoric. I was like this until my late teen years, when it changed, in a bad way -- which I can detail if there's interest. But the point is, until that moment I really couldn't see race, at all. I evidently noticed people had different skin colors, hair types, and eye shapes, but this didn't register with me as significant in any way, shape or form, concrete or abstract.

 

I can totally relate to this des... (read more)

I would indeed be interested in your mention of this sort of thing having "changed in a bad way".

Well, in my case it came due to robbery. Until my late teens / early adulthood I was robbed four times, which wasn't uncommon in the region of Brazil I lived at the time (crime rates have diminished a lot in the intervening decades). From those, three were by black thieves, blacks being a very discriminated-against group here, even if not as much as in the US. The third time has caused in me what I suppose I could describe as a "micro-PTSD", because from tha... (read more)

I only know of children and elderly people not eating the crust because it's harder to chew.

 

Interesting explanation, but does that hold for other foods -- do kids/adults that don't enjoy the crust because it's harder tend to also dislike other difficult-to-chew foods? Anything from jerky to raw vegetables? And those that do enjoy it, enjoy chewing other harder foods?

Clearly, there are lots of crunchy/chewy foods kids are willing to eat or at least are not stereotyped as off-putting the way bread crusts are for kids.

It'd be interesting to tease apart what is causing the dislike -- is it really texture, or taste or something else?

When I try to look up the question of why kids (often) don't like crusts, there is the occasional person that frames it as an "American" thing. Other disagree pointing out Brits, Europeans etc. also feel this way.

But is there any evidence that this varies by country, culture or nationality? If so why might this be -- differences in type of bread/baking styles?

I'm not sure if outside (ha!) the "rationalist sphere", other people have independently invented the phrase "outside view" or not but I feel there's some spillover of the term "outside view" with similarity to "outsiders' view" which I think is common enough in layperson speak.

An outsider's view (or third party view, attempt to be objective and look "outside" your current situation as an "other") as conceived of in daily life does have elements that are pointed at in this post for popular interpretations of outside view ("Bias correction, in others or in o... (read more)

In particular, "boldness" and "daring" seem to me as if they have very little to do with nonconformity

So, for instance, you could be bold and risk-taking but doing so because you want to live up to a norm (or are heavily driven by chasing an ideal that's "conventional")? 

For instance, a manly warrior taking risks to show off his manliness or lack of cowardice, or desire to fill the warrior role in his tribe. Would that count? 

2gjm
I think so. Or, taking the specific kind of boldness lsusr mentions -- making statements without qualifications that might make them sound weaker -- this is a thing one will very often hear from religious or political fanatics, who may well have arrived at their views by pure conformism. Or maybe a bunch of your friends join a secret society with a scary initiation ritual, and you go ahead with it because you want to be like your friends. Or you're part of a culture in which men who reach adolescence are expected to go and hunt a tiger or stay in the wilderness for a week or something, and you go ahead and do it because that's what everybody does. (Of course you might also be doing it because if you don't the tribal elders will kill you, in which case it wouldn't count as daring.) Or you're a member of the Westboro Baptist Church and you go with everyone else to picket military funerals with signs saying GOD HATES FAGS and GOD HATES AMERICA, even though you're worried that someone in the crowd may pick a fight. (This one is marginal, because someone in that position is nonconformist relative to the culture at large but conformist relative to what directly surrounds them. I think the latter is probably the thing that's both harder and more important to escape.)

Here is just an example (from a fairly mainstream media source, NPR), of what I was thinking about when it comes to motivation, titled  A Daughter's Journey To Reclaim Her Heritage Language, and discussing a third-generation Chinese American who never previously spoke a Chinese language trying to learn at age 30 to reconnect with her roots.

Back in the days (perhaps even not so long ago as the 90s), it feels like this -- along with liberal arts folks, cultural intellectuals like humanities professors --  was far closer to an archetype if not one o... (read more)

Also, l needed to show a specific example of a bully taking the extra effort to do extra harm, and giving a real example would be, well, problematic.

I think also that any bully who goes far enough to do something really bad gets called other things and becomes a non-central example of a bully (e.g. a bully that resorts to murder is labelled a murderer, not a bully). It seems bully often evokes images of doing mean-but-not-to-the-point-of criminal things where laws get involved and where the label on a kid shifts from bully to juvenile delinquent, even if the non-illegal things are still bad and traumatizing to victims.

Depends on if you mean by that, as shorthand that the evil (insert person or thing) must be destroyed if possible.

You could get rid of something 'evil' by reforming or changing it to be 'non-evil' by whatever means, that don't involve literally annihilating it.

Unless your definition of evil thing implies unreformable (don't know if that matches intuition -- I can image stories where an 'evil' villain sees the light and becomes good) and destruction is the only option.

I will admit my goal was primarily more about the second, about popular usage precisely because I perceived a mismatch with the "self-identity" emphasis which (many) more academic sources seem to focus on. 

I wanted to interrogate if this mismatch fit people's perceptions and the usage on blogs, online and in related circles.

And also if it had any implication for clearer thinking when conflicting usages arise between people talking about ingroups and outgroups.

Well, I thought the rationality-and-adjacent community emphasizes and would be a good place to clarify and disentangle concepts and meanings. These are major places, on blogs etc., where ingroup and outgroup are popularly used online.

And I don't mean to bring too much whataboutism into this, but I find it noteworthy that of criticism of two posts that I got recently downvoted for, one seemed to center around not enough explicitness and usage of common language (over the term "stereotype") but the other about asking for too much explicitness (over the term "ïngroup"). 

2ChristianKl
If someone uses a term, it makes sense to ask them what they mean with the term. Discussing terms in a vaccum is generally not productive. Thomas Kuhn makes the point that physicists and chemists use different notions of what "molecule" means. That's in hard sciences. Different scientific paradigms usually operationlize terms differently. There are likely plenty of different academic disciplines that likely use the term "ingroups" / "outgroups". There's a good chance that many of them have their own operationalizing and some field likely even have multiple ones.  If you ask what's concept of molecule is the most frequent we have to count physics papers and papers by chemists. You likely get into some problems because some papers aren't specific about their notion. You likely can write a academic paper about it in history of science and philosophy or in linguistics but you wouldn't write that paper in physics or chemistry. I asked you to move from focusing on words to focusing on empiric reality. Your post has the same problem. If you made a post asking "What do people mean when they say 'tree' without saying much about why that's a useful question you are likely going to get downvoted on LessWrong. On the other hand a post like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fRwdkop6tyhi3d22L/there-s-no-such-thing-as-a-tree-phylogenetically says interesting things about the concept of 'tree'.

Well, first, maybe in academic settings, what is the usage most commonly accepted and understood in social science?

And second, though there's no one authority, I want to know what usage(s) is most commonly understood or widespread broadly (even outside academia) by the public. 

And if popular usage conflicts with it (not to say that it's wrong, that's just usage), I also want to know. Just like how "anti-social"can describe introverted, asocial people in popular speech but in psychology or sociology mean actively harmful or adversarial to society. ... (read more)

2ChristianKl
Why are you asking the question? If your goal is to understand the underlying science, why not go directly to the science and read papers?
2ChristianKl
Why are you surprised that common usage of terms isn't very explicit? That's frequently how people use words in common language.

The thing that's always been weird to me about American food is that they serve you a giant slab of meat as your meal, and then everything else is sides, which leads to the whole "eat your vegetables" problem in the first place.

I think "American food" is a bit too diverse to generalize. You have your steaks and your meatloafs, but plenty of chilis, fajitas, stir fries, beef stews, soups with bits of meat in them, spaghetti-and-meatballs, chicken cut up and put-in-a-salad sort of thing, and plenty of other examples of meat "not in a big slab".

And yes, I wou... (read more)

Learning Chinese because you love China and Chinese culture is a stupendous idea

There seems to be a definite shift in the last decade or two (or maybe generation) from the perception that people who are into Chinese-related things like culture/language are doing it for heritage and cultural interest reasons vs. doing it because of the perceived importance of China geopolitically, business-wise, science-wise etc. and because China is seen as "the future". 

Whether it's really practical or not, it appears claimed practical (careerist) reasons have increa... (read more)

1orthogenesis
Here is just an example (from a fairly mainstream media source, NPR), of what I was thinking about when it comes to motivation, titled  A Daughter's Journey To Reclaim Her Heritage Language, and discussing a third-generation Chinese American who never previously spoke a Chinese language trying to learn at age 30 to reconnect with her roots. Back in the days (perhaps even not so long ago as the 90s), it feels like this -- along with liberal arts folks, cultural intellectuals like humanities professors --  was far closer to an archetype if not one of the central examples of the average American interested in Chinese culture or language.  Now this sort of thing is heavily swamped by the perception that interest in China is all political/business/realpolitik related. The heritage/culture side -- both Chinese Americans interested in so-called "reconnecting with their roots" or anyone of any heritage for that matter interested in the subject -- seems pretty drowned out by comparison.

On the lingua franca of science issue, I get the impression that for scientific careers over the last few generations, going out of one's way to learn foreign languages to read/communicate with non-English-speakers seems to have become less prevalent, rather than more, among English speakers.

For instance, mandatory foreign language requirements in US PhD programs are rarer and rarer (perhaps only in elite schools, and more or more restricted to humanities, not STEM) for fields like hard science.

Of course this is in comparison to and a holdover from when no... (read more)

2ChristianKl
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1089 is a paper that describes language distribution in scientific papers and the share of non-English papers is currently falling. Knowing non-English languages falls in importance for science.  It's worth noting that Chinese is an impractical language for science. When coining a new term in English a reader has a good idea of how to pronounce it while the same isn't true in Chinese as far as I understand.  Given the political enviroment in China, the government howerver can decide to set standards even if those aren't good. Wouldn't be the first time that internal politics reduced China's technological capacity ;)

Wait what?

What planet are these psychologists from where if you walk away from a bully, they suddenly become stuck in place and give up?

I think the "walk away" thing works better, broadening the situation to not just school bullies, if you stretch the definition or I suppose steelman it to mean do actions where you can leave the bully behind and it's costly for the bully to follow unless they stalk or resort to means or risks that are too troublesome. 

e.g. Quit a workplace full of harassers or leave a club or an organization full of jerks. In some set... (read more)

It worth noting here that people who form their opinion by "generalizing from one example" instead of by listening to common media are not stereotyping in your classification when they judge people by that generalization. 

Yes, indeed it would run counter to it. I didn't mean that "generalizing from one example" is "like stereotyping"in that they are similar in what type of reasoning they are, but meant to say they are similar as an example of something people could rationally admit to doing (admit to stereotyping, just like admit to generalizing from one example) and acknowledge the existence of or debate the usefulness of. 

Though if very few people besides you and I are participating, then I'd concede this conversation is not that fruitful and go discuss something else, I thought your point (2) was very interesting but I feel the ground the term "stereotype" covers is still a bit more narrow than this.

"2. When you are faced with a person about whom you have little information, to what extend are you willing to have an explicit model of the person. How strongly does that model influence your actions in the context of the person."

Stereotypes aren't just any explicit model base... (read more)

I don't know a better way of phrasing the central example of category of thinking that is "social generalizations about categories of human that are statistical but commonly discussed in mass media, culture etc." in a clear and concise way other than "stereotypes" or "stereotyping". (One of the most common examples I started off with was fast, physical-appearance-based processing of demographic attributes like sex, appearance, accent, dress etc., which then trigger assumptions about people like personality, dispositions etc. most agree are a component in w... (read more)

2ChristianKl
When people engage in bad reasoning because politics mind-killed them it's generally not because they try to reason badly.  It's not just that, it's also potentially costly to have the discussion on LessWrong. Given that there are bailey-and-motte issues, it's not a clear term. Why do you believe you need a concise way instead of tabooing and explain the cluster that you mean? Having political charged conversations in less concise ways reduces the potential costs of having them. It worth noting here that people who form their opinion by "generalizing from one example" instead of by listening to common media are not stereotyping in your classification when they judge people by that generalization. 

I think it goes without saying that more data is good. But the quality or strength of the data is important too. I think some debates over stereotypes rest on if they count as good quality data, or data that should override other data (firsthand experience) on how to update your prior. For instance, if you get data from mass media that "all women like chocolate more than men" but get data from most of the men and women you know that both like chocolate equally, which trumps which in if you are more likely to consider chocolate as gift to male or female fri... (read more)

2Viliam
Sometimes there are clever things you could try, for example find out whether female chimpanzees like chocolate more than male chimpanzees... but of course there are situations where the rational answer is simply "I don't know". That doesn't necessarily mean no data, but could mean data that you strongly suspect are filtered or fake, without being able to sort out this mess. In other words, all evidence you have is very weak evidence: personal evidence may be weak because it is likely to be a result of your bubble (you are more likely to associate with people who like chocolate as much as you do), media evidence may be weak because media do not have sufficient incentives to say true things. EDIT: Of course, saying "I don't know" can make both sides angry that you don't see how the stereotype of obviously true/false. Sometimes it is smarter to not say what you actually believe, even if the actual belief is "I don't know".

Any other, alternative hypotheses to explain why Europeans and European-descended peoples drink far more than most others (this holds true for country to country comparisons though some places like Nigeria with little European descent are high, and less so but somewhat true within places like the US where whites seem to drink a bit more than racial minorities)?

I'm struck that "Europeans drink more than most of the world" is a bigger thing than "East Asians drink less than most of the world" by a long shot. That still seems to ask for an explanation, even if not genetic (e.g. cultural, historical etc.).

I don't know why this is being downvoted so much as I am trying to argue in good faith (I hopefully had tried to give the impression I'm not deliberately stoking culture war but want a clearer rational discussion about this) even though "stereotype" is a fuzzy set. 

Clearly stereotyping is enough of a "thing" that academics (e.g. Lee Jussim etc., people arguing about the validity or invalidity of things like stereotype threat, how important mass media perpetuating stereotypes matter vs. "common sense, people seeing what's in front of them") heavily cit... (read more)

2ChristianKl
You proposed a definition that's more global. Bailey-and-Motte issues are highly problematic, especially when it comes to politically charged terms.  You provide no justification for why it would be useful to discuss the issue in those terms instead of using terms that are less politically charged. You provide no explanation about what motivates you to frame the debate this way.

Yes, but it seems like the genetic predisposition hypothesis is about or at least usually framed as "East Asians vs. others (unless there are other groups where genetic predispositions are relevant)". Implying to test the protective effect of one trait, you want to see if East Asians who have the trait at higher levels differ from all others (presumably not having the trait at all, or at lower levels?). Yet the patterns/statistics for alcohol consumption or problems with alcoholism doesn't line up with "East Asian vs. the rest" as opposed to the West and t... (read more)

I don't know if wikipedia's entry helps here but hopefully I'll try to formalize or at least give some central examples: 

In social psychology, a stereotype is a generalized belief about a particular category of people.[2] It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. The type of expectation can vary; it can be, for example, an expectation about the group's personality, preferences, appearance or ability. Stereotypes are sometimes overgeneralized, inaccurate, and resistant to new information, but can sometimes be... (read more)

4ChristianKl
By that definition I'm stereotyping a lot when I think that other people who belong to a certain group breath air. I and every other human is stereotyping a lot in that sense.  It seeems like there are multiple questions that might be interesting compared to the question you asked. 1. Do you form a belief of about a person that's resistant to updating at a point where you have relatively little information about them? 2. When you are faced with a person about whom you have little information, to what extend are you willing to have an explicit model of the person. How strongly does that model influence your actions in the context of the person. 3. How much entropy do you see in the information that's assessible in a few seconds.

Looking at alcohol consumption by country, however, East Asia seems pretty middle of the pack. The main trends seem to be Europe and majority European-settled countries are rather high, and the Middle East and North Africa are very low (religious prohibition). 

https://ourworldindata.org/alcohol-consumption

Since the west is high, the rest is low, or not so-high, with parts of East Asia overlapping parts of the west, it seems like these genetic predispositions aren't as strong in effect as someone might predict given the culture. I have heard Japanese a... (read more)

1reallyeli
I don't think observing that folks in the Middle East drink much less, due to a religious prohibition, is evidence for or against this post's hypothesis. It can simultaneously be the case that evolution discovered this way of preventing alcoholism, and also that religious prohibitions are a much more effective way of preventing alcoholism.

That context is still relevant to a lot of people, but for many it makes a lot less sense, and work-life balance more seems to be refer to not letting work consume your life when you can be contacted anytime anywhere day or night.

Right -- though you could say the underlying core sentiment is still somewhat similar in that regard.

 "Old work-life balance" -- work and life are separate spheres, don't let the work sphere (a time block of say 9-5) expand to take up space at the expense of the other sphere, a separate time block. 

"New work-life balance... (read more)

Well, it seems like it's still the case in situations where people can't (or won't) leave their tribes. For example, men and women aren't usually each other's outgroup and in situations where no one plans or gives indication of "leaving" a gender, it's still bad for say men who have all intentions of remaining men to signal too much knowledge of girly movies, chick flicks etc.. But that works in the other cases I brought up -- the local citizen who is too into foreign stuff might pack up and leave, or a nerd/jock/artsy person who is too into the other cliq... (read more)

It's mainly about associations.

The outgroup is bad. There are beliefs and behaviors associated with the outgroup.
Therefore these beliefs and behaviors are bad. If I show any of these beliefs and behaviors people might think I'm bad.

Fair, but I mentioned examples where the (not necessarily outgroup in an rivalrous way but non-ingroup) outsiders are not seen as bad per se, but neutral whereas the ingroup is good. 

For instance a local citizen might not be seen as "bad" for being interested in foreign stuff (if the foreign countries in question are not se... (read more)

I know this wasn't the main point but some thoughts on this.

There is a secret game Asian-Americans play among ourselves called the "What kind of Asian are you?" game.

This is a topic that is much discussed (often labelled under the term "microaggression") but I get the impression in contemporary American society, it's increasingly seen as rude to ask in an unsolicited manner about someone's ancestry in that way. Perhaps it's different among familiars than strangers.

Whenever an Asian-American meets another Asian-American we try to guess each other's national... (read more)