I think it’s pretty dangerous to describe terms from other fields of study as merely being applause or boo lights. Consider how frequently LW-newbies use “rational” as an applause light until corrected by others. Instead of taking terms from other fields as merely being applause or boo lights, we should consider that the terms might be frequently misused by novices or in popular culture, in just the same way that terms like “rational” or “rationalist” are. (TVTropes link.)
Take “privilege”, for instance.
It seems to be widely assumed that when social critics or activists attribute “privilege” to someone, that they are calling that person evil, arrogant, irresponsible, or something of the like. Because “privilege” is used in sentences that are spoken angrily, it is taken to be not merely a boo light but something akin to a swear word. And indeed it is sometimes used that way, because, well, people get angry sometimes when discussing starvation, rape, police brutality, and other things that activists talk about.
“Privilege” has a pretty specific meaning though. It means “social advantages that are not perceived as advantages but as the normal condition”. In other words: Some people have X, while others don’t; and those who do have X think that having X is unremarkable and normal.
To make up an artificial example:
Suppose that there are blue weasels and red weasels working in an office. For whatever reason, blue weasels are comfortable in a temperature range of 18–28C, while red weasels are comfortable in 22–32C. The office thermostat is set to “room temperature”, the normal temperature, of 20C. So the red weasels are always cold and have to buy expensive sweaters (at their own expense) to avoid shivering, while blue weasels frolic about in the nude.
When anyweasel proposes turning up the heat, they are reminded that running the heater is expensive and that 20C is the established normal room temperature — it even says so on the Wikipedia article “room temperature”! That some weasels complain about the cold and how expensive sweaters are is their own problem — maybe if they frolicked about in the nude more, they would feel better? Besides, if we started turning up the heat, before too long it would be much too hot for anyweasel! 20C is normal, and if some weasels are unhappy with that, well, that’s actually fortunate for the sweater-knitters, isn’t it?
Note that noweasel is doing any cost-benefit analysis here — and they also aren’t really treating all weasels’ interests as equally worthwhile. They’re just assuming that being cold is a fact about red weasels’ deviation from the temperature sense that they should possess (a normative claim targeted at the underprivileged), as opposed to being about the differences between red and blue weasels and the historical control of the thermostat by certain blue weasels (a descriptive claim about the history and structure of weasel society).
Not only does the temperature setting of 20C advantage some weasels over others, but the way that weasels talk about temperature — the discourse — contains assumptions about what is normal that advantage some weasels over others.
It is perhaps worth noting that the word “status” often gets used on LW to describe position in a social structure, with the understanding that individuals with higher status get various benefits (not always obvious ones), and that a lot of human behavior is designed to obtain/challenge/protect status even if the individual performing the behavior doesn’t consciously have that goal. I suspect that talking about the blue weasels as a high-status subgroup would not raise any eyebrows here, and would imply all the patterns you discuss here, even if talking about the “privilege” possessed by blue weasels raised hackles.
Somewhat to my amusement, I’ve gotten chastised for talking about status this way in communities of social activists, who “explained” to me that I was actually talking about privilege, and referring to it as status trivialized it.
Somewhat to my amusement, I’ve gotten chastised for talking about status this way in communities of social activists, who “explained” to me that I was actually talking about privilege, and referring to it as status trivialized it.
That’s an interesting complaint. It suggests that we might understand and talk about social organization in ways that’re denotationally familiar to these communities of social activists, whoever they are, but that certain connotations are customary in that space that aren’t customary here.
As others have noted I don’t think status is all that good a term for what’s going on in the weasel example, but insofar as our understanding of status does overlap with the activist scene’s understanding of privilege, I think this is a good argument for preferring our own framing. At least unless and until we can decide that we actually want those connotations.
I suspect that talking about the blue weasels as a high-status subgroup would not raise any eyebrows here,
I might object since this is an abuse of the concept of status. Status is about how a person is thought of by other people. It is not about who happens to benefit from an established Schelling point, especially if the group benefiting had nothing to do with establishing it.
Status is about how a person is thought of by other people.
I’m assuming it’s acceptable to treat weasels as “people” in this example. Can you clarify how, on your account, the way red weasels in this example are thought of by other weasels differs (or doesn’t differ) from the way blue weasels are thought of?
Can you clarify how, on your account, the way red weasels in this example are thought of by other weasels differs (or doesn’t differ) from the way blue weasels are thought of?
I don’t know, i.e., it’s not at all clear from the example, and that’s my point. Analyzing the example in terms of status doesn’t work.
It seems clear to me, for example, that red weasels are thought of in the example as possessing an abnormal temperature sense, and blue weasels are thought of as possessing a normal temperature sense. Would you disagree with this?
It seems clear to me, for example, that red weasels are thought of in the example as possessing an abnormal temperature sense, and blue weasels are thought of as possessing a normal temperature sense. Would you disagree with this?
Well fubarobfusco stipulated they are and it’s his hypothetical situation. Aside from that, I’m not sure what you’re asking.
As I mentioned here, I’d analyze the weasel example in terms of Schelling points. As fubarobfusco referred to the weasels using standard room temperature and citing Wikipedia, I assume the weasels chose their Schelling point based on human norms, most likely they’ve adopted any human norms wholesale in an attempt to emulate the successful human civilization. I realize I’ve just massively expended fubarobfusco’s hypothetical, but that’s the thing about Schelling points, they can make irrelevant aspects of the scenario relevant.
Well fubarobfusco stipulated they are and it’s his hypothetical situation. Aside from that, I’m not sure what you’re asking.
Yes, I agree that in fubarobfusco’s presentation of his hypothetical situation, the red red weasels are thought of in the example as possessing an abnormal temperature sense, and blue weasels are thought of as possessing a normal temperature sense. Which is why fubarobfusco’s presentation of his hypothetical situation seems to me to clearly provide enough information to determine at least some ways in which red weasels are thought of by other weasels differently from the way blue weasels are thought of. Which is why I was puzzled when you claimed fubarobfusco’s presentation didn’t provide enough information to determine that.
Hope that clarifies what I was asking. No further answer is required, though; I think I’ve gotten enough of a response.
WRT Schelling points, if properly understanding your analysis depends on reading Strategy of Conflict, I’ll defer further discussion until I’ve done so. Thanks for the pointer.
As fubarobfusco referred to the weasels using standard room temperature and citing Wikipedia, I assume the weasels chose their Schelling point based on human norms, most likely they’ve adopted any human norms wholesale in an attempt to emulate the successful human civilization.
I assumed the hypothetical took place in a world only populated by weasels, where Wikipedia was written by weasels, and the room temperature article ultimately reflected the historical thermostat setting standard set by blue weasels.
“Privilege” has two disadvantages vis-à-vis “status”, though. First, it suggests a binary distinction—privilege or no privilege -, as opposed to degrees of status. Second, status can be acquired, while the way I hear “privilege” used seems to exclude that.
Folks who use “privilege” as part of their usual vocabulary often note that people can have (and lack) different sorts of privilege, actually — for instance, racial, religious, or heterosexual privilege — that these are not projected onto a single dimension.
Yes, the usual term for this is “intersectionality,” but I have yet to see a good theory of how intersectionality actually works, that does not consist mainly of just repeating the word (as a teacher’s password).
Status does seem like a superior conceptual tool, for the reasons Creutzer cited. (It helps explain why, say, football players may have obvious ‘privilege’ only in certain situations and with certain people, and may actually be underprivileged in other situations.)
The only thing it is lacking is a widespread understanding & terminology to reflect the fact that people (especially high-status people) are often oblivious to status differentials & treat them as basic features of the universe.
The only thing it is lacking is a widespread understanding & terminology to reflect the fact that people (especially high-status people) are often oblivious to status differentials & treat them as basic features of the universe.
I’m not sure about that, in my experience it’s low status people who are more likely to treat status differentials as basic features of the universe. High status people seem to be more aware of status, as indicated by how much effort they put into fighting for it (mostly against other high status people).
Not sure. That may start to tie into Moldbug’s Cathedral a bit?
Alternatively, you may be ignoring the full scale. I’d say that the people most likely to ignore status or just consider it basic are those who are secure in their own status.
I didn’t say low status people ignore status, rather they tend to treat it as basic features of the universe, specifically I was referring to existentialism in this sense.
Yes, the usual term for this is “intersectionality,” but I have yet to see a good theory of how intersectionality actually works, that does not consist mainly of just repeating the word (as a teacher’s password).
As far I can tell, intersectionality is just the observation that if A is worse than Ā and E is worse than Ē, then AE is usually worse than ĀE and AĒ. Which of course isn’t always the case.
EDIT: IOW, intersectionality is the idea that this remotely makes sense.
Thinking about it I think the biggest problem with “intersectionality” and the concept of “privilege” in general is that it groups together many differences that actually have very little else in common and encourages people to apply ideas appropriate to one of these categories to others where they are frequently wildly inappropriate. To take three examples from the chart that are in some sense maximally different consider race, religion, and disability.
Race is an innate property that controversially correlates with certain abilities and behaviors. Disability is an innate property (or practical purposes at least) that perfectly and inherently correlates with ability. One way to see the difference between the two is to notice that a procedure that makes a blind person sighted is an unalloyed good that would more-or-less completely solve the problem, whereas a procedure that turns a black person’s skin white doesn’t solve any of the relevant problems.
Religion is a choice (subject to the person’s tradition). While there are in fact to reasons to avoid discriminating by religion except when its directly relevant they are somewhat different from the reasons for the other traits.
Religion is a choice (subject to the person’s tradition).
For some value of “choice” and “subject”, it is… OTOH, I think (though I’m extrapolating like hell, so I’m not very confident) that many fewer people convert to a different religion than dye their hair (at least among females), and still saying “hair colour is a choice (subject to the person’s genome)” would sound kind-of weird to me.
I frequently hear “privilege” used in ways that allow for it to be acquired or lost, and I frequently hear it used in ways that allow for different groups to have more or less privilege relative to one another (that is, degrees of privilege). But I’m willing to believe that other linguistic communities exist that behave as you describe.
Remember, just because people are using a term incorrectly does not mean that the term does not represent something empirically useful. In this case, the nuance between “Status” and “Privilege” is that “Privilege” is a special kind of status; it is status acquired based on group identity. There’s an entire branch of study called “Intersectionality” that touches precisely on the ideas that ‘privilege’ exists in degrees, can be gained and lost, and is often situational. Even there, though, there’s a lot of BS and politicking.
But remember that that doesn’t invalidate the usefulness of the concept, any more than “just-so stories” and BS justifications invalidate evolutionary psychology as a discipline. Intersectionality is clearly a fruitful area for cultural research that is in desperate need of a rationalist approach.
Intersectionality does need better rationalism. I’d add that some intersectioanlity has the drawback of fighting a War On Keeping Your Identity Small, and in many cases, when activist groups dedicated to a single purpose absorb the idea of intersectionality, they rapidly assimilate into the the greater Social Justice Bloc, with all the positives and all the negatives that entails. Furthermore, intersectionality sometimes appears to stand against utilitarian strict optimization.
Yes, one thing that bothers me about social justice folks is that they sometimes sound very essentialist (“they assume a homeless white man is more privileged than Oprah Winfrey”, as I’ve seen someone put it).
They do have their explanation there. The essentialim I have noticed usually comes from radical feminism (which is often taken to mean ‘extremist feminism’ but while nearly all radical feminists are extremist, the term when used by radical feminists actually refers to a specific and rather essentialist + one sided view of gender relations).
They have a tendancy to conceptualize patriarchy as a diffuse property of society that colors everything that even slightly involves gender, and tend to be unwilling to slice it up into its component parts. They also tend to ignore how immense the possible gender-relations-space is outside patriarchy/!patriarchy.
The thing I find most frustrating is how learning about intersectionality leads to groups being assimilated by the Equality Borg. It’s almost like an infohazard for progressives.
In this case, the nuance between “Status” and “Privilege” is that “Privilege” is a special kind of status; it is status acquired based on group identity.
I would like to point out that you’ve just swapped the definition of “privilege” from the one fubarobfusco gave to the one I mentioned in this comment.
“Privilege” has a pretty specific meaning though. It means “social advantages that are not perceived as advantages but as the normal condition”. In other words: Some people have X, while others don’t; and those who do have X think that having X is unremarkable and normal.
For a while now, this has been my number-one example of a word that’s useful to taboo. Since the definition is that succinct, and the word “privilege” has a tendency to derail what could have been a good conversation, we’re probably better off simply not using the word.
For a while now, this has been my number-one example of a word that’s useful to taboo.
That makes sense to me — but only for reasons analogous to why one might want to taboo “rationality”, namely that it’s easy to be misunderstood since the listener has heard lots of low-information uses of the word.
Still, if I were to tell someone else that they have to taboo their field’s terminology — and start speaking in novel (albeit succinct) synonyms — in order to convince me that they’re not simply emitting applause or boo lights, that would seem like a hostile move on my part. I’d be telling them that they have to take on the cognitive load of translating from their usual language (with words like “privilege” and “heteronormativity”) into a language that I’ve deigned to accept (with words like “misnormalized advantages” or “opposite-sex assumptions”).
When communication seems to be failing, my instinct is to taboo my own communication-disrupting language and adopt my interlocutor’s language instead. When I don’t understand my interlocutor’s language well enough to adopt it, my instinct is to ask questions about it. When communication has failed so thoroughly that I can’t ask such questions and understand the answers, I pretty much give up.
It seems like a lot of people don’t do this. I wonder why? It seems common for people to resist adopting any of the other party’s terminology. Some possible explanations:
I’m mistaken. It’s actually rare for people to resist adopting the other party’s terminology — I’m just exercising the availability heuristic.
This is like speciation. The cases where people don’t adopt the other’s terminology are those where it’s advantageous (to whom?) to pick one side of a language barrier (and defend it) instead of mixing. When that isn’t the case, people already have mixed their terminology — invisibly.
It’s a way of pushing cognitive costs around as a primate status fight — “I’m too important to bother to understand you; you have to understand me.” (In the extreme case this would lead to the creation of low-status roles that specialize in understanding without expecting to be understood. Do those exist? Some wag would probably say “wife” or “husband”, ha ha.)
It’s a way of defining and defending territories — “Yes, you get to insist on your language in that magisterium, and I get to insist on mine in this one.” (This seems to be more what goes on in academia than #3.)
People are ignorant of the benefits of understanding one another. Only awesome people like you and I have figured out that understanding other people is awesome. (This seems really unlikely, but it seems to be the premise of some schools of communication improvement.)
People are afraid that if they started using the other party’s language they would mess up their command of their current language. (Economists can’t afford to learn to talk like cultural anthropologists because they might slip up and use anthro-jargon in front of their economist buddies and seem ignorant of economics jargon.)
People are afraid that if they started using the other party’s language they would become disloyal to their current affiliations. (Economists can’t afford to learn to talk like cultural anthropologists because they might become convinced cultural anthropology is right and would lose all their economist buddies.)
In the extreme case this would lead to the creation of low-status roles that specialize in understanding without expecting to be understood. Do those exist?
9. Language carries with it many framings, assumptions, associations, and implicit value judgments (see: The Noncentral Fallacy). Letting the other side set the language lets them shape the playing field, which gives them a large home field advantage.
10. People are cognitive misers who mostly rely on cached thoughts. For example, the arguments that they make are arguments that they’ve thought about before, not ones that they’re thinking up on the spot. And their thoughts are cached in their own language, not the other party’s language. (Related to #3, but it’s not about status.)
/#1 might certainly be true, but if so it’s true of both of us; it seems common to me as well. I agree with you about #3 and #4, though I mostly think of #4 as a special case of #3. I find #5 unlikely, but if we’re going to list it, we should also note the symmetrical possibility that you and I overestimate the benefits of understanding one another. A variant of #7 is that using the other party’s language is seen as a signal of alliance with the other party’s tribe, which might cost them alliances with their own tribe… e.g., even if the economist isn’t convinced of cultural anthropology, their economist buddies might think they are. (Which arguably is just another special case of #3.)
As long as we’re listing lots of possibilities, I would add #8: They believe their language is superior to their interlocutor’s language, and that the benefits of using superior language exceed the benefits of using shared language. And, relatedly. #8b: Behaving as though they believe #8 signals the superiority of their language (and more generally of their thinking). Which arguably is just another special case of #3.
I see the difference between #8 and #3 being that using superior language might be positive-sum in the long run, whereas pushing cognitive costs onto someone else is zero- or negative-sum.
I suppose. That said, if your thinking is superior to mine then you gaining status relative to me (whether through cognitive-cost-pushing as in #3, or through some other status-claiming move) might be positive-sum in the long run as well. Regardless, I agree that #8 is distinct from #3.
I should also note that the strategy I describe often fails when people interpret my questions about their language as veiled counterarguments, which they then attempt to decipher and respond to. Since my questions aren’t actually counterarguments, this frequently causes the discussion to fall apart into incoherence, since whatever counterargument they infer and respond to often seems utterly arbitrary to me.
It’s not surprising that people do this, since people do often use questions as a form of veiled counterargument.
In the extreme case this would lead to the creation of low-status roles that specialize in understanding without expecting to be understood. Do those exist?
I don’t think “understanding without expecting to be understood” is quite it, but there are a number of relatively low-status roles, in domains with specialized vocabularies, whose job is basically to act as a translation layer between specialist output and the general public. Tech support is the obvious example. In medicine, family practice seems to have shades of this, and it’s low-status compared to the specialties. Grad students sometimes pick this up in their TA role. I’m not sure if anything similar happens in law.
11*. Each party suspects this (perhaps correctly) of the other.
(This is the same but with the usual ethical symmetry assumption that the other is at least in theory capable of occupying the same position towards us that we occupy towards them.)
“Privilege” has a pretty specific meaning though. It means “social advantages that are not perceived as advantages but as the normal condition”. In other words: Some people have X, while others don’t; and those who do have X think that having X is unremarkable and normal.
I’ve occasionally been given definitions of “privilege” by activists, and each time the definition is different. A more common one is “an unfair advantage that people have by virtue of being in certain groups”.
You’re right, and both definitions tend to be used interchangeably. I’ll work on correcting that in my own speech, but I think in the meantime here’s the essence of it:
Privilege is a phenomenon that occurs as the result of a special kind of status, but the term also gets used to describe the form of status that generates the phenomenon.
When a status based on group identity is pervasive enough to be invisible to members of that group, the resulting assumptions lead to a set of behavior called “privilege”. It’s probably even clearer to use the term “privileged status” than mere “privilege”, when talking about the status itself rather than the resulting behaviors; I’m going to try using that myself for the next few weeks and see if I can anchor some critical self-analysis to the process.
Privilege is a phenomenon that occurs as the result of a special kind of status, but the term also gets used to describe the form of status that generates the phenomenon.
That still doesn’t work since the weasel example involves “privilege” in fubarobfusco’s sense but as I pointed out here doesn’t actually involve status.
Upvoted for pretty good description, and I agree that all of these are actually usually used in a meaningful (if not optimal) way.
It might be added that in some privilege cases, the experience of not having the privilege is totally alien and leads to things like lonely men envying sexual harassment.
By the way, if you’re interested in what I consider a better analysis of your weasel example, I recommend looking at Thomas C. Schelling’s Strategy of Conflict, particularly chapter 3. (I don’t think I can do justice to his analysis in this comment.)
I think it’s pretty dangerous to describe terms from other fields of study as merely being applause or boo lights. Consider how frequently LW-newbies use “rational” as an applause light until corrected by others. Instead of taking terms from other fields as merely being applause or boo lights, we should consider that the terms might be frequently misused by novices or in popular culture, in just the same way that terms like “rational” or “rationalist” are. (TVTropes link.)
Take “privilege”, for instance.
It seems to be widely assumed that when social critics or activists attribute “privilege” to someone, that they are calling that person evil, arrogant, irresponsible, or something of the like. Because “privilege” is used in sentences that are spoken angrily, it is taken to be not merely a boo light but something akin to a swear word. And indeed it is sometimes used that way, because, well, people get angry sometimes when discussing starvation, rape, police brutality, and other things that activists talk about.
“Privilege” has a pretty specific meaning though. It means “social advantages that are not perceived as advantages but as the normal condition”. In other words: Some people have X, while others don’t; and those who do have X think that having X is unremarkable and normal.
To make up an artificial example:
Suppose that there are blue weasels and red weasels working in an office. For whatever reason, blue weasels are comfortable in a temperature range of 18–28C, while red weasels are comfortable in 22–32C. The office thermostat is set to “room temperature”, the normal temperature, of 20C. So the red weasels are always cold and have to buy expensive sweaters (at their own expense) to avoid shivering, while blue weasels frolic about in the nude.
When anyweasel proposes turning up the heat, they are reminded that running the heater is expensive and that 20C is the established normal room temperature — it even says so on the Wikipedia article “room temperature”! That some weasels complain about the cold and how expensive sweaters are is their own problem — maybe if they frolicked about in the nude more, they would feel better? Besides, if we started turning up the heat, before too long it would be much too hot for anyweasel! 20C is normal, and if some weasels are unhappy with that, well, that’s actually fortunate for the sweater-knitters, isn’t it?
Note that noweasel is doing any cost-benefit analysis here — and they also aren’t really treating all weasels’ interests as equally worthwhile. They’re just assuming that being cold is a fact about red weasels’ deviation from the temperature sense that they should possess (a normative claim targeted at the underprivileged), as opposed to being about the differences between red and blue weasels and the historical control of the thermostat by certain blue weasels (a descriptive claim about the history and structure of weasel society).
Not only does the temperature setting of 20C advantage some weasels over others, but the way that weasels talk about temperature — the discourse — contains assumptions about what is normal that advantage some weasels over others.
It is perhaps worth noting that the word “status” often gets used on LW to describe position in a social structure, with the understanding that individuals with higher status get various benefits (not always obvious ones), and that a lot of human behavior is designed to obtain/challenge/protect status even if the individual performing the behavior doesn’t consciously have that goal. I suspect that talking about the blue weasels as a high-status subgroup would not raise any eyebrows here, and would imply all the patterns you discuss here, even if talking about the “privilege” possessed by blue weasels raised hackles.
Somewhat to my amusement, I’ve gotten chastised for talking about status this way in communities of social activists, who “explained” to me that I was actually talking about privilege, and referring to it as status trivialized it.
When in Rome, I endorse speaking Italian.
That’s an interesting complaint. It suggests that we might understand and talk about social organization in ways that’re denotationally familiar to these communities of social activists, whoever they are, but that certain connotations are customary in that space that aren’t customary here.
As others have noted I don’t think status is all that good a term for what’s going on in the weasel example, but insofar as our understanding of status does overlap with the activist scene’s understanding of privilege, I think this is a good argument for preferring our own framing. At least unless and until we can decide that we actually want those connotations.
I might object since this is an abuse of the concept of status. Status is about how a person is thought of by other people. It is not about who happens to benefit from an established Schelling point, especially if the group benefiting had nothing to do with establishing it.
I’m assuming it’s acceptable to treat weasels as “people” in this example. Can you clarify how, on your account, the way red weasels in this example are thought of by other weasels differs (or doesn’t differ) from the way blue weasels are thought of?
I don’t know, i.e., it’s not at all clear from the example, and that’s my point. Analyzing the example in terms of status doesn’t work.
OK; thanks for the clarification.
It seems clear to me, for example, that red weasels are thought of in the example as possessing an abnormal temperature sense, and blue weasels are thought of as possessing a normal temperature sense. Would you disagree with this?
Well fubarobfusco stipulated they are and it’s his hypothetical situation. Aside from that, I’m not sure what you’re asking.
As I mentioned here, I’d analyze the weasel example in terms of Schelling points. As fubarobfusco referred to the weasels using standard room temperature and citing Wikipedia, I assume the weasels chose their Schelling point based on human norms, most likely they’ve adopted any human norms wholesale in an attempt to emulate the successful human civilization. I realize I’ve just massively expended fubarobfusco’s hypothetical, but that’s the thing about Schelling points, they can make irrelevant aspects of the scenario relevant.
Yes, I agree that in fubarobfusco’s presentation of his hypothetical situation, the red red weasels are thought of in the example as possessing an abnormal temperature sense, and blue weasels are thought of as possessing a normal temperature sense. Which is why fubarobfusco’s presentation of his hypothetical situation seems to me to clearly provide enough information to determine at least some ways in which red weasels are thought of by other weasels differently from the way blue weasels are thought of. Which is why I was puzzled when you claimed fubarobfusco’s presentation didn’t provide enough information to determine that.
Hope that clarifies what I was asking. No further answer is required, though; I think I’ve gotten enough of a response.
WRT Schelling points, if properly understanding your analysis depends on reading Strategy of Conflict, I’ll defer further discussion until I’ve done so. Thanks for the pointer.
I assumed the hypothetical took place in a world only populated by weasels, where Wikipedia was written by weasels, and the room temperature article ultimately reflected the historical thermostat setting standard set by blue weasels.
“Privilege” has two disadvantages vis-à-vis “status”, though. First, it suggests a binary distinction—privilege or no privilege -, as opposed to degrees of status. Second, status can be acquired, while the way I hear “privilege” used seems to exclude that.
Folks who use “privilege” as part of their usual vocabulary often note that people can have (and lack) different sorts of privilege, actually — for instance, racial, religious, or heterosexual privilege — that these are not projected onto a single dimension.
Yes, the usual term for this is “intersectionality,” but I have yet to see a good theory of how intersectionality actually works, that does not consist mainly of just repeating the word (as a teacher’s password).
Status does seem like a superior conceptual tool, for the reasons Creutzer cited. (It helps explain why, say, football players may have obvious ‘privilege’ only in certain situations and with certain people, and may actually be underprivileged in other situations.)
The only thing it is lacking is a widespread understanding & terminology to reflect the fact that people (especially high-status people) are often oblivious to status differentials & treat them as basic features of the universe.
I’m not sure about that, in my experience it’s low status people who are more likely to treat status differentials as basic features of the universe. High status people seem to be more aware of status, as indicated by how much effort they put into fighting for it (mostly against other high status people).
Not sure. That may start to tie into Moldbug’s Cathedral a bit?
Alternatively, you may be ignoring the full scale. I’d say that the people most likely to ignore status or just consider it basic are those who are secure in their own status.
I didn’t say low status people ignore status, rather they tend to treat it as basic features of the universe, specifically I was referring to existentialism in this sense.
As far I can tell, intersectionality is just the observation that if A is worse than Ā and E is worse than Ē, then AE is usually worse than ĀE and AĒ. Which of course isn’t always the case.
EDIT: IOW, intersectionality is the idea that this remotely makes sense.
Thinking about it I think the biggest problem with “intersectionality” and the concept of “privilege” in general is that it groups together many differences that actually have very little else in common and encourages people to apply ideas appropriate to one of these categories to others where they are frequently wildly inappropriate. To take three examples from the chart that are in some sense maximally different consider race, religion, and disability.
Race is an innate property that controversially correlates with certain abilities and behaviors. Disability is an innate property (or practical purposes at least) that perfectly and inherently correlates with ability. One way to see the difference between the two is to notice that a procedure that makes a blind person sighted is an unalloyed good that would more-or-less completely solve the problem, whereas a procedure that turns a black person’s skin white doesn’t solve any of the relevant problems.
Religion is a choice (subject to the person’s tradition). While there are in fact to reasons to avoid discriminating by religion except when its directly relevant they are somewhat different from the reasons for the other traits.
I agree with almost everything, but:
For some value of “choice” and “subject”, it is… OTOH, I think (though I’m extrapolating like hell, so I’m not very confident) that many fewer people convert to a different religion than dye their hair (at least among females), and still saying “hair colour is a choice (subject to the person’s genome)” would sound kind-of weird to me.
I frequently hear “privilege” used in ways that allow for it to be acquired or lost, and I frequently hear it used in ways that allow for different groups to have more or less privilege relative to one another (that is, degrees of privilege). But I’m willing to believe that other linguistic communities exist that behave as you describe.
Remember, just because people are using a term incorrectly does not mean that the term does not represent something empirically useful. In this case, the nuance between “Status” and “Privilege” is that “Privilege” is a special kind of status; it is status acquired based on group identity. There’s an entire branch of study called “Intersectionality” that touches precisely on the ideas that ‘privilege’ exists in degrees, can be gained and lost, and is often situational. Even there, though, there’s a lot of BS and politicking.
But remember that that doesn’t invalidate the usefulness of the concept, any more than “just-so stories” and BS justifications invalidate evolutionary psychology as a discipline. Intersectionality is clearly a fruitful area for cultural research that is in desperate need of a rationalist approach.
Mostly agreed.
Intersectionality does need better rationalism. I’d add that some intersectioanlity has the drawback of fighting a War On Keeping Your Identity Small, and in many cases, when activist groups dedicated to a single purpose absorb the idea of intersectionality, they rapidly assimilate into the the greater Social Justice Bloc, with all the positives and all the negatives that entails. Furthermore, intersectionality sometimes appears to stand against utilitarian strict optimization.
Yes, one thing that bothers me about social justice folks is that they sometimes sound very essentialist (“they assume a homeless white man is more privileged than Oprah Winfrey”, as I’ve seen someone put it).
They do have their explanation there. The essentialim I have noticed usually comes from radical feminism (which is often taken to mean ‘extremist feminism’ but while nearly all radical feminists are extremist, the term when used by radical feminists actually refers to a specific and rather essentialist + one sided view of gender relations).
They have a tendancy to conceptualize patriarchy as a diffuse property of society that colors everything that even slightly involves gender, and tend to be unwilling to slice it up into its component parts. They also tend to ignore how immense the possible gender-relations-space is outside patriarchy/!patriarchy.
The thing I find most frustrating is how learning about intersectionality leads to groups being assimilated by the Equality Borg. It’s almost like an infohazard for progressives.
I would like to point out that you’ve just swapped the definition of “privilege” from the one fubarobfusco gave to the one I mentioned in this comment.
Yup, agreed with all of this. (Not sure if you thought otherwise.)
For a while now, this has been my number-one example of a word that’s useful to taboo. Since the definition is that succinct, and the word “privilege” has a tendency to derail what could have been a good conversation, we’re probably better off simply not using the word.
That makes sense to me — but only for reasons analogous to why one might want to taboo “rationality”, namely that it’s easy to be misunderstood since the listener has heard lots of low-information uses of the word.
Still, if I were to tell someone else that they have to taboo their field’s terminology — and start speaking in novel (albeit succinct) synonyms — in order to convince me that they’re not simply emitting applause or boo lights, that would seem like a hostile move on my part. I’d be telling them that they have to take on the cognitive load of translating from their usual language (with words like “privilege” and “heteronormativity”) into a language that I’ve deigned to accept (with words like “misnormalized advantages” or “opposite-sex assumptions”).
Yeah, pretty much this.
When communication seems to be failing, my instinct is to taboo my own communication-disrupting language and adopt my interlocutor’s language instead. When I don’t understand my interlocutor’s language well enough to adopt it, my instinct is to ask questions about it. When communication has failed so thoroughly that I can’t ask such questions and understand the answers, I pretty much give up.
It seems like a lot of people don’t do this. I wonder why? It seems common for people to resist adopting any of the other party’s terminology. Some possible explanations:
I’m mistaken. It’s actually rare for people to resist adopting the other party’s terminology — I’m just exercising the availability heuristic.
This is like speciation. The cases where people don’t adopt the other’s terminology are those where it’s advantageous (to whom?) to pick one side of a language barrier (and defend it) instead of mixing. When that isn’t the case, people already have mixed their terminology — invisibly.
It’s a way of pushing cognitive costs around as a primate status fight — “I’m too important to bother to understand you; you have to understand me.” (In the extreme case this would lead to the creation of low-status roles that specialize in understanding without expecting to be understood. Do those exist? Some wag would probably say “wife” or “husband”, ha ha.)
It’s a way of defining and defending territories — “Yes, you get to insist on your language in that magisterium, and I get to insist on mine in this one.” (This seems to be more what goes on in academia than #3.)
People are ignorant of the benefits of understanding one another. Only awesome people like you and I have figured out that understanding other people is awesome. (This seems really unlikely, but it seems to be the premise of some schools of communication improvement.)
People are afraid that if they started using the other party’s language they would mess up their command of their current language. (Economists can’t afford to learn to talk like cultural anthropologists because they might slip up and use anthro-jargon in front of their economist buddies and seem ignorant of economics jargon.)
People are afraid that if they started using the other party’s language they would become disloyal to their current affiliations. (Economists can’t afford to learn to talk like cultural anthropologists because they might become convinced cultural anthropology is right and would lose all their economist buddies.)
… ?
In my experience, they’re called “employees”.
9. Language carries with it many framings, assumptions, associations, and implicit value judgments (see: The Noncentral Fallacy). Letting the other side set the language lets them shape the playing field, which gives them a large home field advantage.
10. People are cognitive misers who mostly rely on cached thoughts. For example, the arguments that they make are arguments that they’ve thought about before, not ones that they’re thinking up on the spot. And their thoughts are cached in their own language, not the other party’s language. (Related to #3, but it’s not about status.)
/#1 might certainly be true, but if so it’s true of both of us; it seems common to me as well.
I agree with you about #3 and #4, though I mostly think of #4 as a special case of #3.
I find #5 unlikely, but if we’re going to list it, we should also note the symmetrical possibility that you and I overestimate the benefits of understanding one another.
A variant of #7 is that using the other party’s language is seen as a signal of alliance with the other party’s tribe, which might cost them alliances with their own tribe… e.g., even if the economist isn’t convinced of cultural anthropology, their economist buddies might think they are. (Which arguably is just another special case of #3.)
As long as we’re listing lots of possibilities, I would add #8: They believe their language is superior to their interlocutor’s language, and that the benefits of using superior language exceed the benefits of using shared language.
And, relatedly. #8b: Behaving as though they believe #8 signals the superiority of their language (and more generally of their thinking). Which arguably is just another special case of #3.
I see the difference between #8 and #3 being that using superior language might be positive-sum in the long run, whereas pushing cognitive costs onto someone else is zero- or negative-sum.
I suppose. That said, if your thinking is superior to mine then you gaining status relative to me (whether through cognitive-cost-pushing as in #3, or through some other status-claiming move) might be positive-sum in the long run as well. Regardless, I agree that #8 is distinct from #3.
I should also note that the strategy I describe often fails when people interpret my questions about their language as veiled counterarguments, which they then attempt to decipher and respond to. Since my questions aren’t actually counterarguments, this frequently causes the discussion to fall apart into incoherence, since whatever counterargument they infer and respond to often seems utterly arbitrary to me.
It’s not surprising that people do this, since people do often use questions as a form of veiled counterargument.
I don’t think “understanding without expecting to be understood” is quite it, but there are a number of relatively low-status roles, in domains with specialized vocabularies, whose job is basically to act as a translation layer between specialist output and the general public. Tech support is the obvious example. In medicine, family practice seems to have shades of this, and it’s low-status compared to the specialties. Grad students sometimes pick this up in their TA role. I’m not sure if anything similar happens in law.
(Continuing Unnamed’s list)
11. They suspect (perhaps correctly) that the other side’s terminology has anti-epistemology embedded within it.
11*. Each party suspects this (perhaps correctly) of the other.
(This is the same but with the usual ethical symmetry assumption that the other is at least in theory capable of occupying the same position towards us that we occupy towards them.)
Is that not a special case of #8?
Would you be willing to do this in a discussion with say a theologian or a creationist?
Sure. I’ve done the former many times, the latter a few times.
I’ve occasionally been given definitions of “privilege” by activists, and each time the definition is different. A more common one is “an unfair advantage that people have by virtue of being in certain groups”.
You’re right, and both definitions tend to be used interchangeably. I’ll work on correcting that in my own speech, but I think in the meantime here’s the essence of it:
Privilege is a phenomenon that occurs as the result of a special kind of status, but the term also gets used to describe the form of status that generates the phenomenon.
When a status based on group identity is pervasive enough to be invisible to members of that group, the resulting assumptions lead to a set of behavior called “privilege”. It’s probably even clearer to use the term “privileged status” than mere “privilege”, when talking about the status itself rather than the resulting behaviors; I’m going to try using that myself for the next few weeks and see if I can anchor some critical self-analysis to the process.
That still doesn’t work since the weasel example involves “privilege” in fubarobfusco’s sense but as I pointed out here doesn’t actually involve status.
Upvoted for pretty good description, and I agree that all of these are actually usually used in a meaningful (if not optimal) way.
It might be added that in some privilege cases, the experience of not having the privilege is totally alien and leads to things like lonely men envying sexual harassment.
By the way, if you’re interested in what I consider a better analysis of your weasel example, I recommend looking at Thomas C. Schelling’s Strategy of Conflict, particularly chapter 3. (I don’t think I can do justice to his analysis in this comment.)
Is that about something similar to these posts?
For small values of similar I suppose.