Serious damage to who? Idiots who fail to adopt his advice because he calls it a name that is associated with other (even good) ideas that other idiots happen to be attracted to? That’s a tragedy, of course, but it hardly seems pressing.
Seems to me that people should be able to judge ideas on their quality, not on which “team” is tangentially associated with them. Maybe that’s asking too much, though, and writers should just assume the readers are morally retarded, like you suggest.
Maybe that’s asking too much, though, and writers should just assume the readers are morally retarded, like you suggest.
You’re not familiar with the whole “Red Pill” meme cluster/subculture, I take it? It strongly promotes misanthropic attitudes which most people would consider morally wrong, and it selects for these attitudes in its adherents.
I’m somewhat familiar. My impression is that the steelman version of it is a blanket label for views that reject the controversial empirical and philosophical claims of the left-wing mainstream:
Everyone is cognitively equal across race and sex and such
Cognition and desire are not embodied in predictable biology
Blank slate atomic agent model of relationships and such
(Various conspiracy theories)
democracy is awesome
etc.
Pointing out that an idea has stupid people who believe it is not really a good argument against that idea. Hitler was a vegetarian and a eugenicist, but those ideas are still OK.
It selects for these attitudes in its adherents
So?
Here’s why that’s true: “Red Pill” covers empirical revisionism of mainstream leftism. What kind of people do you expect to be attracted to such a label without considering which ideas are correct? I would expect bitter social outcasts, people who fail to ideologically conform, a few unapologetic intellectuals, and people who reject leftism for other reasons.
Then how are those people going to appear to someone who is “blue pilled” (ie reasonable mainstream progressive) for lack of a better word? They are going to appear like the enemy. The observer has been brought up with the assumption that anyone who disagrees on point X Y and Z are evil. Along comes a label that covers exactly disagreement with the mainstream on X Y and Z, so of course the people who identify with that label are going to appear evil.
Note that I’ve offered a plausible explanation for the existence of idiots and jerks in the red-pill cluster, and their appearance of evil without reference to the factual or moral accuracy of the “red-pill” claims. Your impressions are orthogonal to the facts.
Now of course, by the selection effect you mention and I explain, the “red pill” space is going to be actually filled with idiots and evil people, who will tend to influence things a lot. But I’m from 4chan, so I have the nasty habit of filtering out the background noise of idiots and evil to find the good stuff, and the “red-pill” space has a lot of good stuff in it, once you start ignoring the misogynists, conspiracy theorists, misanthropes, and antisocial idiots.
I’ve been reading a lot of red pill stuff lately (while currently remaining agnostic), and my impression is that most of the prominent “red pill” writers are in fact really nasty. They seem to revel in how offensive their beliefs are to the general public and crank it up to eleven just to cause a reaction. Roissy is an obvious example. About one third of his posts don’t even have any point, they’re just him ranting about how much he hates fat women. Moldbug bafflingly decides to call black people “Negroes” (while offering some weird historical justification for doing so). Regardless of the actual truth of the red pill movement’s literal beliefs, I think they bring most of their misanthropic, hateful reputation on themselves.
I haven’t read Athol Kay, so I don’t know what his deal is.
Moldbug bafflingly decides to call black people “Negroes” (while offering some weird historical justification for doing so). …
It’s not that baffling if you know where Moldbug’s ideas come from. Since he is effectively restating the ideas of Thomas Carlyle and other 19th century conservatives (admittedly in modernized terms), it’s quite fitting in a way that he should lift some of their lexicon as well.
Moldbug bafflingly decides to call black people “Negroes” (while offering some weird historical justification for doing so).
What is baffling to me is that it is ok to call black people black people. Both terms amount to labelling a race based on the same exaggerated description of a visible difference and in general requiring latin use is higher status than common English words. Prior to specific (foreign) cultural exposure I would expect “black people” to be an offensive label and so avoid it.
The euphemism treadmill is basically arbitrary most of the time. For example, “people of color” is very PC right now, but “colored people” is considered KKK-language. It is what it is.
Also black people is a kind of strange term. Pretty much all black people are okay with it, but a lot of white people are weirdly afraid of saying it, especially in formal settings.
Isn’t a similar dynamic involved anywhere where people are developing an idea that offensively contradicts the belief of a majority?
We could similarly ask why are some atheists so agressive, and whether it wouldn’t be better for others to avoid using the “atheist” label to avoid the association with these people, otherwise they deserve all the religious backlash.
There are two strategies to become widely popular: say exactly the mainstream thing, or say the most shocking thing. The former strategy cannot be used if you want to argue against the mainstream opinion. Therefore the most famous writers of non-mainstream opinions will be the shocking ones. Not because the idea is necessarily shocking, but because of a selection effect—if you have a non-mainstream idea and you are not shocking, you will not become popular worldwide.
I may sometimes disagree with how Richard Dawkins chooses his words, but avoiding the succesful “atheist” label would be a losing strategy. I disagree with a lot of what Roissy says, but “red pill” is a successful meme, and he is not the only one using it.
There are words which have both positive and negative connotations to different people. To insist that the negative connotation is the true one often simply means that the person dislikes the idea (otherwise they would be more likely to insist that the positive connotation is the true one).
Isn’t a similar dynamic involved anywhere where people are developing an idea that offensively contradicts the belief of a majority?
This looks like begging the question to me. Whether an idea offensively contradicts mainstream beliefs has a lot to do with the connotations that happen to be associated with it. Lots of reasonably popular ideas contradict mainstream beliefs, but are not especially offensive. Obviously, once an idea becomes popular enough to be part of the mainstream, this whole distinction no longer makes sense.
We could similarly ask why are some atheists so agressive, and whether it wouldn’t be better for others to avoid using the “atheist” label to avoid the association with these people …
Indeed, this explains why many non-theistic people steadfastly refuse to self-identify as atheists (some of them may call themselves agnostics or non-believers). It also partially explains why the movements “Atheism Plus” and “Atheism 2.0″ have started gaining currency.
Similarly, any useful and non-offensive content of “red pill” beliefs may be easily found and developed under other labels, such as “seduction community”, “game”/”PUA”, “ev psych” and the like.
Therefore the most famous writers of non-mainstream opinions will be the shocking ones.
It’s not clear why we should care whether a writer of non-mainstream opinions is famous especially when such fame correlates poorly with truth-seeking and/or the opinions are gratuitously made socially unpopular for the sake of “controversy”.
There are words which have both positive and negative connotations to different people.
Serious question, name a positive connotation of “The Red Pill”—which is not shared by “Game”/”PUA”/”seduction community” or “ev psych”.
I agree with your explanation about some people’s preference for the label “agnostic”. The “atheism plus” on the other hand feels to me like “atheism plus political correctness”—it is certainly not focused on not offending religious people. (So an equivalent would be a Game blog who cares about not offending… for example Muslims. That’s not the same as a Game blog trying not to offend feminists.)
Serious question, name a positive connotation of “The Red Pill”—which is not shared by “Game”/”PUA”/”seduction community” or “ev psych”.
Anyone who liked the movie Matrix? (Unless all of them are already in the seduction community.) I could imagine to use the same word as a metaphor for… for example early retirement, or any similar activity that requires you to go against the stereotypical beliefs of most people. I admit I never saw the word used in this context; I just feel like it would fit there perfectly. (Also it would fit perfectly to most conspiracy theories.)
The “atheism plus” on the other hand feels to me like “atheism plus political correctness”—it is certainly not focused on not offending religious people.
I don’t have that much knowledge of the Atheism Plus movement, but I have read some stuff that suggests they are concerned about how prominent atheists talk about Islam, at least. I also wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had expressed opposition to Dawkins’ description of religious upbringing as child abuse. I do know some feminists who were/are pissed about that.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing that the red pill writers are pursuing an effective strategy in disseminating their beliefs. To be honest, I can see it either way. On the one hand, offending people gets them to notice you, and emotionally charged arguments are more interesting. On the other hand, some of the rhetoric might needlessly alienate people, and to a certain extent it can discredit the ideas (e.g. someone recommends Athol Kay, someone says “isn’t he one of those red pill guys? I saw Roissy’s blog and it was appalling, no way I can listen to one of them”). I definitely don’t think that being deliberately offensive is literally the only way to spread a contrarian belief.
But I don’t think the red pill movement should be able to have their cake and eat it too. You can’t deliberately make your writing as offensive and obnoxious as possible in order to try to get it to spread, and then turn around and say “People are offended? This just shows that anyone who doesn’t think like the mainstream becomes a public enemy!”
Some movements are able to have their cake and eat it too. If a hundred years ago someone told the early feminists to be extra careful about not offending people, would they listen? Would it be a winning strategy?
I agree that it feels like people should choose between having their cake and eating it. But is this a description of how the world really works, or merely a just world fallacy? As a competing hypothesis, maybe it is all about power—if you can crush your enemies (for example make them unemployed) and give positions of power (and grant money) to your allies, then people will celebrate you as the force of good, because everyone wants to join the winner. And if you fail, the only difference between being polite and impolite is whether you will be forgotten or despised.
Let’s imagine that Athol Key would stop using the forbidden words like “Red pill” et cetera. What about the rest of his message? Would it stop feeling offensive for the “Blue pill” people, or not? If the blog would be successful, they would notice, and they would attack him anyway. (The linked article reacted to Athol’s description of a “red pill woman”, but would it be different if he just called her e.g. a “perfect woman”?) And if the blog would be unknown enough to avoid being noticed, then… it wouldn’t really matter what’s written there.
Compared with most blogs discussing the topic on either side, Athol Kay is extra polite. We can criticize him for not being perfect, while conveniently forgetting that neither is anyone else.
Let’s imagine that Athol Key would stop using the forbidden words like “Red pill” et cetera. What about the rest of his message? Would it stop feeling offensive for the “Blue pill” people, or not?
Um, the issue is not that he’s using “the red pill” or any other forbidden words, but that he’s expressly associating with and supporting a subculture of misanthropes, losers and misanthropic losers who happen to be using “The Red Pill” as their badge of honor. And yes, some people might still be offended by his other messages, even if he stopped providing this kind of enablement. But he would be taking their strongest argument against him off the table.
he’s expressly associating with and supporting a subculture of misanthropes, losers and misanthropic losers
Just thinking… is loser a gendered word or not? Would you feel comfortable to describe a group of women as losers, on a public forum?
If not, then what would be the proper way to describe a subculture of women who are not satisfied with how society works now, who feel their options are limited by the society, who discuss endlessly on their blogs about how the society should be changed, and use some keywords as their badge of honor?
Would you feel comfortable to describe a group of women as losers, on a public forum?
That’s an interesting question—I actually can’t think of any group where that would be an accurate description, so I don’t really have a good answer here. Sorry about that.
If not, then what would be the proper way to describe a subculture of women who are not satisfied with how society works now, who feel their options are limited by the society, who discuss endlessly on their blogs about how the society should be changed, and use some keywords as their badge of honor?
People who may or may not be on to something? Sure, lots of folks blame the failings of society for their comparative lack of success, and that’s sometimes unhelpful. But even that is a lot better than just complaining about how all other people—most specifically including women as well as ‘alpha male’ other guys—are somehow evil and stupid. That’s called sour grapes, and IMHO it is a highly blameworthy attitude, not least since it perpetuates and deepens the originally poor outcomes.
I actually can’t think of any group where that would be an accurate description
No real group, or even an imaginary group? I mean, take the “misanthropic losers” you described (and for the sake of debate, let’s assume your description of them is completely accurate), and imagine exactly the same group with genders reversed. Would it be okay to call those women publicly “losers”?
Or perhaps “loser” is a gendered slur. (Something like the word “slut” that you can use to offend women, but if you try it to describe a sexually adventurous man, it somehow does not have the same shaming power.) In which case, saying that the “Red Pill” readers are losers contains almost as much information as saying that they are men.
Sure, lots of folks blame the failings of society for their comparative lack of success, and that’s sometimes unhelpful. But even that is a lot better than just complaining about how all other people—most specifically including women as well as ‘alpha male’ other guys—are somehow evil and stupid.
Complaining achieves nothing, and people who complain without achieving anything are, yeah, losers.
How about a group that achieves real results? For example, there is a controversial movement, in an obscure part of the “manosphere”, behind a blogger Valentine Solarius, often criticized by feminists for writing things like “to be female is to be deficient, cognitively limited”; “the female is completely egocentric, trapped inside herself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, or love, friendship”; “her intelligence is a mere tool in the services of her drives and needs”; “the female has one glaring area of superiority over the male—public relations; she has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of men that women are men and men are women”; “every woman, deep down, knows she’s a worthless piece of shit”. -- He writes a lot about his desire to kill women. Actually, he attacked and almost killed one woman for not responding to his e-mail, but she survived so he only spent three years in prison. He seems to be a popular person among some men politically influential in the Republican party… so, let’s assume that his friends really succeed to create a political movement, change the way society perceives women, change the laws as they want to have them, etc. Then, they would no longer be losers, would they? Now, would that be better than merely blogging about the “Red Pill”? (See his blog for some more crazy ideas.)
No real group, or even an imaginary group? I mean, take the “misanthropic losers” you described (and for the sake of debate, let’s assume your description of them is completely accurate), and imagine exactly the same group with genders reversed. Would it be okay to call those women publicly “losers”?
Well, we can imagine anything we want to. It’s not hard to think of a possible world where some loose subculture or organized group of women could be fairly characterized as “losers” on a par with redpillers. You could basically get there if, say, radical feminism was a lot more dysfunctional than it actually is. No such luck, though.
How about a group that achieves real results?
Perhaps you’re missing the point here? By “achieving real results”, I obviously don’t mean committing assault. Even successfully influencing politics would be a dubious achievement, as long as their basic ideology remains what it is. However, it is indeed a stylized fact in politics and social science that such nasty subcultures and movements generally appeal to people who are quite low either in self-perceived status/achivement, or in their level on Maslow’s scale of human needs.
Your quotes from the Manosphere blogger were quite sobering indeed, but I’ll be fair here—you can find such crazies in any extreme movement, so perhaps that’s not what’s most relevant after all. If most redpillers stuck to what they might perhaps be said to do best, e.g. social critiques about the pervasive influence of feminized thinking, the male’s unrecognized role as an economic provider and the like, as well as formulating reform proposals (however extreme they might be), I don’t think they would be so controversial. Who knows, they might even become popular in some underground circles who are quite fascinated by out-of-the-box thinking.
Perhaps so, to some extent: you may like it or not, but guilt by association is a successful political tactic. But the problem is made even worse by the fact that his writings occasionally support the Greens’ nasty attitudes.
To take the analogy even further, imagine a respected scientist writing approvingly about “deep ecologists” and “Soylent Greens”, who believe in the primacy of natural wilderness, and argue that human societies are inherently evil and inimical to true happiness, excepting “naturally co-evolved” bands and tribes of low-impact hunter-gatherers. Such a belief might even be said to supported by evolutionary psychology, in some sense. But many people would nonetheless oppose it and describe it as nasty—notably including more moderate Greens, who might perhaps turn to other sciences such as economics, and think more favorably of “sustainable development” or even “natural capitalism”.
My impression is that the steelman version of it …
ALERT. Fully General Counterargument detected in line 1.
Seriously, how many people would actually refer to thoughtful critique and even rejection of mainstream views as “Red Pill” material? Basically nobody would, unless they are already committed to the “Red Pill” identity for unrelated reasons. That’s just not what Red Pill means in the first place.
And yes, the ‘Red Pill’ thing attracts jerks and losers, but that’s the least of its problems. A very real issue is that this ensures that ideas in the Red Pill space achieve memetic success not by their practical usefulness or adherence to truth-seeking best practices, but by shocking value and being most acceptable or even agreeable to jerks and losers.
Yes, you can go looking for diamonds in the mud: there’s nothing wrong with that and sometimes it works. But that does not require you, or anyone else, to provide enablement to such a deeply toxic and ethically problematic subculture.
Seriously, how many people would actually refer to thoughtful critique and even rejection of mainstream views as “Red Pill” material?
Mencius Moldbug
Athol Kay
High quality PUA
etc.
Arguing about what a term means is bound to go nowhere, but in my experience, “red pill” has been associated with useful and interesting ideas. Maybe that’s just me and my experience isn’t valid though.
I don’t think it’s fair to characterize an entire space of ideas by it’s strawest members (shock-value seeking “edgy” losers). I could use that technique to dismiss any given space of ideas. See for example Yvain’s analysis of how mainstream ideas migrate to crazytown by runaway signalling games.
I think there is a high proportion of valuable ideas in the part of “redpillspace” that I’ve been exposed to. Maybe we are looking at different things that happen to be called the same name, though.
But based on your terminology and attitude here, I think you are cultivating hatred and negativity, which is harmful IMO. In general, I think it is much better to actively look for the good aspects of things and try to like more things rather than casting judgement and being outraged at more things.
ALERT. Fully General Counterargument detected in line 1.
Correct, I attempt to see the good parts of things and ignore the crud with full generality.
This is beside the point, IMHO; Moldbug’s references to “taking the red pill” are well explained by his peculiar writing style. I think they are mostly unrelated to how Athol Kay, reddit!TheRedPill and others use the term. OTOH, Multiheaded’s comment upthread provides proof that Kay’s views are genuinely problematic, in a way that’s closely related and explained by his involvement in TheRedPill meme cluster. For the time being, I make no claim one way or the other about other “high quality PUAs”.
Do also note that I really am criticizing a subculture and meme cluster here. AIUI, this has nothing to do with idea spaces in a more general sense, or even factual claims about the real world. Again, connotations and attitudes are what’s most relevant here. Moreover, I’m not sure what gave you the feeling that I am “cultivating hatred and negativity”, of all things. While it’s quite true that I am genuinely concerned about this subculture, because of… well, you said it already, the real issue here is Kay’s providing enablement to it, with the attendant bad effects. (Of course, this may also apply to other self-styled PUAs).
Multiheaded’s comment upthread provides proof that Kay’s views are genuinely problematic
If you refer to the linked article, and by “proof” you mean “strawmanning and non-sequitur”...
Seriously: Imagine a comment or an article written in a similar tone on LW. How many votes would it get?
An example:
Athol Kay: [A Red Pill Woman] understands that there is a sexual marketplace, and that women have an earlier peak of sexual desirability than men do.
Man Boobz: Presumably if she forgets this, her manospherian swain will happily neg her back to a properly less-positive assessment of her rapidly decaying beauty as a woman over the age of 14.
Where exactly in Athol’s article, or even anywhere on his website, did anyone say that anything about women’s decaying beauty over the age of 14? Citation needed!
Athol Kay: [A Red Pill Woman] understands that divorce sucks and is more akin to getting treatment for cancer than having cosmetic surgery.
Man Boobz: I sort of agree with this one, actually: for women married to Athol Kay’s followers, getting divorced would be a lot like removing a malignant tumor.
Yeah, this is the argumentation style we refer to when saying “raising the sanity waterline”… not!
Who exactly is the manipulative hateful douchebag in this article? Are you sure it was Athol Kay?
Seriously: Imagine a comment or an article written in a similar tone on LW. How many votes would it get?
Um, I think this is a silly argument, honestly. As the name makes reasonably clear, Man Boobz is a humor and satire website. Unlike most articles posted here at LW, they do not claim to qualify for any standard of rational argument. What’s useful about them is in their pointing to some of Athol Kay’s published opinions, and perhaps pointing out some undesirable connotations of these opinions.
Athol Kay: [A Red Pill Woman] understands that there is a sexual marketplace, and that women have an earlier peak of sexual desirability than men do.
Let me try to steel-man MB’s critique of this statement. Why is it especially important for a RPW to understand this—especially when the basic notion is clearly understood by any COSMO reader (which is a rather low standard)? Athol Kay does not explain how this understanding is supposed to pay rent in terms of improved results. And it is clear that, unless some special care is taken (which Athol Kay does not point out), a naïve interpretation of such “understanding” has unpleasant and unhelpful connotations.
Keep in mind that PUA/game works best when it manages to disrupt the mainstream understanding of “sexual market value” as opposed to accepting it uncritically, and the seduction community is successfully developing “girl game” methods which can allow women to be more successful in the market. By failing to point this out, Kay is under-serving Red Pill women especially badly.
Athol Kay: [A Red Pill Woman] understands that divorce sucks and is more akin to getting treatment for cancer than having cosmetic surgery.
This falls under Bastiat’s fallacy of “what is seen and what is not seen”. We see that divorce sucks; what we do not see is that divorce is nonethess rational whenever not divorcing would suck even more.
Strawmanning could be a technique used in humor and satire, but even then it isn’t a “proof” that someone’s views are “genuinely problematic”.
Athol Kay does not explain how this understanding is supposed to pay rent in terms of improved results.
How about this: Two women in their 50s compare their husbands with men who were attracted to them when they were 18, and both see that their husband’s “market value” is lower. Let’s assume there is no other problem in the marriage; they just want to be maximizers, not merely satisficers.
One of them is a “Red pill woman”, she does not divorce and keeps a relatively good relationship. The other one is encouraged by success stories in popular media, gets a divorce… and then finds that the men who were interested in her when she was 18 are actually not interested anymore, and that she probably would have maximized her happiness by staying married. -- This is how the belief can pay its rent.
We see that divorce sucks; what we do not see is that divorce is nonethess rational whenever not divorcing would suck even more.
I wouldn’t advocate staying married for example in cases of domestic violence, and I guess neither would Athol Kay. So we are speaking about “sucking” in sense of “not being with the best partner one could be with”, right? In that case, understanding one’s “market value” is critical in determining whether staying or leaving is better. (By the way, a significant part of Athol’s blog is about how men should increase their “market value”, whether by exercise or making more money or whatever.)
And then, there is the impact on children. We should not expect that even if mommy succeeds to get a more attractive partner, that it will make them automatically happy. This trade-off is often unacknowledged.
I’m not sure that the subreddit enjoys any sort of official status, but it’s certainly representative of what I’m talking about. Do note that the central problem with the RP meme cluster is one of connotation and general attitude, although some factual claims can definitely be problematic as well.
Come to think of it, even the name ‘Red Pill’ embodies all sort of irrationality and negative attitudes. Apparently, it is based on the very ancient idea that female period blood is in some sense a magical substance—so one can fashion a “Red Pill” out of it using sympathetic magick, and thus acquire some sort of occult or arcane knowledge which is normally exclusive to women and disallowed to men.
Apparently, it is based on the very ancient idea that female period blood is in some sense a magical substance—so one can fashion a “Red Pill” out of it using sympathetic magick, and thus acquire some sort of occult or arcane knowledge which is normally exclusive to women and disallowed to men.
Well, you can find a lot of magickal or Neopagan symbolism in The Matrix if you know how to look for it. The word “matrix” itself means “something motherly” in Latin, and its use in the movie could be viewed as a reference to the Great Mother Goddess. (More specifically, the Great Mother is actually one archetype of the feminine Great Goddess of Neopaganism.)
Apparently, it is based on the very ancient idea that female period blood is in some sense a magical substance—so one can fashion a “Red Pill” out of it using sympathetic magick, and thus acquire some sort of occult or arcane knowledge which is normally exclusive to women and disallowed to men.
Serious damage to who? Idiots who fail to adopt his advice because he calls it a name that is associated with other (even good) ideas that other idiots happen to be attracted to? That’s a tragedy, of course, but it hardly seems pressing.
Seems to me that people should be able to judge ideas on their quality, not on which “team” is tangentially associated with them. Maybe that’s asking too much, though, and writers should just assume the readers are morally retarded, like you suggest.
You’re not familiar with the whole “Red Pill” meme cluster/subculture, I take it? It strongly promotes misanthropic attitudes which most people would consider morally wrong, and it selects for these attitudes in its adherents.
I’m somewhat familiar. My impression is that the steelman version of it is a blanket label for views that reject the controversial empirical and philosophical claims of the left-wing mainstream:
Everyone is cognitively equal across race and sex and such
Cognition and desire are not embodied in predictable biology
Blank slate atomic agent model of relationships and such
(Various conspiracy theories)
democracy is awesome
etc.
Pointing out that an idea has stupid people who believe it is not really a good argument against that idea. Hitler was a vegetarian and a eugenicist, but those ideas are still OK.
So?
Here’s why that’s true: “Red Pill” covers empirical revisionism of mainstream leftism. What kind of people do you expect to be attracted to such a label without considering which ideas are correct? I would expect bitter social outcasts, people who fail to ideologically conform, a few unapologetic intellectuals, and people who reject leftism for other reasons.
Then how are those people going to appear to someone who is “blue pilled” (ie reasonable mainstream progressive) for lack of a better word? They are going to appear like the enemy. The observer has been brought up with the assumption that anyone who disagrees on point X Y and Z are evil. Along comes a label that covers exactly disagreement with the mainstream on X Y and Z, so of course the people who identify with that label are going to appear evil.
Note that I’ve offered a plausible explanation for the existence of idiots and jerks in the red-pill cluster, and their appearance of evil without reference to the factual or moral accuracy of the “red-pill” claims. Your impressions are orthogonal to the facts.
Now of course, by the selection effect you mention and I explain, the “red pill” space is going to be actually filled with idiots and evil people, who will tend to influence things a lot. But I’m from 4chan, so I have the nasty habit of filtering out the background noise of idiots and evil to find the good stuff, and the “red-pill” space has a lot of good stuff in it, once you start ignoring the misogynists, conspiracy theorists, misanthropes, and antisocial idiots.
I’ve been reading a lot of red pill stuff lately (while currently remaining agnostic), and my impression is that most of the prominent “red pill” writers are in fact really nasty. They seem to revel in how offensive their beliefs are to the general public and crank it up to eleven just to cause a reaction. Roissy is an obvious example. About one third of his posts don’t even have any point, they’re just him ranting about how much he hates fat women. Moldbug bafflingly decides to call black people “Negroes” (while offering some weird historical justification for doing so). Regardless of the actual truth of the red pill movement’s literal beliefs, I think they bring most of their misanthropic, hateful reputation on themselves.
I haven’t read Athol Kay, so I don’t know what his deal is.
It’s not that baffling if you know where Moldbug’s ideas come from. Since he is effectively restating the ideas of Thomas Carlyle and other 19th century conservatives (admittedly in modernized terms), it’s quite fitting in a way that he should lift some of their lexicon as well.
What is baffling to me is that it is ok to call black people black people. Both terms amount to labelling a race based on the same exaggerated description of a visible difference and in general requiring latin use is higher status than common English words. Prior to specific (foreign) cultural exposure I would expect “black people” to be an offensive label and so avoid it.
The euphemism treadmill is basically arbitrary most of the time. For example, “people of color” is very PC right now, but “colored people” is considered KKK-language. It is what it is.
Also black people is a kind of strange term. Pretty much all black people are okay with it, but a lot of white people are weirdly afraid of saying it, especially in formal settings.
Black is a useful term for referring to people of African descent who aren’t African-American, e.g. Caribbean-Americans.
“People of color” currently means anyone other than white people, not black people exclusively.
Really? That is even more surprising to me.
My experience is it is the prefered term of the Social Justice Crowd on Tumblr and other websites for non-white people.
Language can be pretty arbitrary. It’s not as though science fiction reliably has any science in it, even fake science.
Isn’t a similar dynamic involved anywhere where people are developing an idea that offensively contradicts the belief of a majority?
We could similarly ask why are some atheists so agressive, and whether it wouldn’t be better for others to avoid using the “atheist” label to avoid the association with these people, otherwise they deserve all the religious backlash.
There are two strategies to become widely popular: say exactly the mainstream thing, or say the most shocking thing. The former strategy cannot be used if you want to argue against the mainstream opinion. Therefore the most famous writers of non-mainstream opinions will be the shocking ones. Not because the idea is necessarily shocking, but because of a selection effect—if you have a non-mainstream idea and you are not shocking, you will not become popular worldwide.
I may sometimes disagree with how Richard Dawkins chooses his words, but avoiding the succesful “atheist” label would be a losing strategy. I disagree with a lot of what Roissy says, but “red pill” is a successful meme, and he is not the only one using it.
There are words which have both positive and negative connotations to different people. To insist that the negative connotation is the true one often simply means that the person dislikes the idea (otherwise they would be more likely to insist that the positive connotation is the true one).
This looks like begging the question to me. Whether an idea offensively contradicts mainstream beliefs has a lot to do with the connotations that happen to be associated with it. Lots of reasonably popular ideas contradict mainstream beliefs, but are not especially offensive. Obviously, once an idea becomes popular enough to be part of the mainstream, this whole distinction no longer makes sense.
Indeed, this explains why many non-theistic people steadfastly refuse to self-identify as atheists (some of them may call themselves agnostics or non-believers). It also partially explains why the movements “Atheism Plus” and “Atheism 2.0″ have started gaining currency.
Similarly, any useful and non-offensive content of “red pill” beliefs may be easily found and developed under other labels, such as “seduction community”, “game”/”PUA”, “ev psych” and the like.
It’s not clear why we should care whether a writer of non-mainstream opinions is famous especially when such fame correlates poorly with truth-seeking and/or the opinions are gratuitously made socially unpopular for the sake of “controversy”.
Serious question, name a positive connotation of “The Red Pill”—which is not shared by “Game”/”PUA”/”seduction community” or “ev psych”.
I agree with your explanation about some people’s preference for the label “agnostic”. The “atheism plus” on the other hand feels to me like “atheism plus political correctness”—it is certainly not focused on not offending religious people. (So an equivalent would be a Game blog who cares about not offending… for example Muslims. That’s not the same as a Game blog trying not to offend feminists.)
Anyone who liked the movie Matrix? (Unless all of them are already in the seduction community.) I could imagine to use the same word as a metaphor for… for example early retirement, or any similar activity that requires you to go against the stereotypical beliefs of most people. I admit I never saw the word used in this context; I just feel like it would fit there perfectly. (Also it would fit perfectly to most conspiracy theories.)
I don’t have that much knowledge of the Atheism Plus movement, but I have read some stuff that suggests they are concerned about how prominent atheists talk about Islam, at least. I also wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had expressed opposition to Dawkins’ description of religious upbringing as child abuse. I do know some feminists who were/are pissed about that.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing that the red pill writers are pursuing an effective strategy in disseminating their beliefs. To be honest, I can see it either way. On the one hand, offending people gets them to notice you, and emotionally charged arguments are more interesting. On the other hand, some of the rhetoric might needlessly alienate people, and to a certain extent it can discredit the ideas (e.g. someone recommends Athol Kay, someone says “isn’t he one of those red pill guys? I saw Roissy’s blog and it was appalling, no way I can listen to one of them”). I definitely don’t think that being deliberately offensive is literally the only way to spread a contrarian belief.
But I don’t think the red pill movement should be able to have their cake and eat it too. You can’t deliberately make your writing as offensive and obnoxious as possible in order to try to get it to spread, and then turn around and say “People are offended? This just shows that anyone who doesn’t think like the mainstream becomes a public enemy!”
Some movements are able to have their cake and eat it too. If a hundred years ago someone told the early feminists to be extra careful about not offending people, would they listen? Would it be a winning strategy?
I agree that it feels like people should choose between having their cake and eating it. But is this a description of how the world really works, or merely a just world fallacy? As a competing hypothesis, maybe it is all about power—if you can crush your enemies (for example make them unemployed) and give positions of power (and grant money) to your allies, then people will celebrate you as the force of good, because everyone wants to join the winner. And if you fail, the only difference between being polite and impolite is whether you will be forgotten or despised.
Let’s imagine that Athol Key would stop using the forbidden words like “Red pill” et cetera. What about the rest of his message? Would it stop feeling offensive for the “Blue pill” people, or not? If the blog would be successful, they would notice, and they would attack him anyway. (The linked article reacted to Athol’s description of a “red pill woman”, but would it be different if he just called her e.g. a “perfect woman”?) And if the blog would be unknown enough to avoid being noticed, then… it wouldn’t really matter what’s written there.
Compared with most blogs discussing the topic on either side, Athol Kay is extra polite. We can criticize him for not being perfect, while conveniently forgetting that neither is anyone else.
Um, the issue is not that he’s using “the red pill” or any other forbidden words, but that he’s expressly associating with and supporting a subculture of misanthropes, losers and misanthropic losers who happen to be using “The Red Pill” as their badge of honor. And yes, some people might still be offended by his other messages, even if he stopped providing this kind of enablement. But he would be taking their strongest argument against him off the table.
Just thinking… is loser a gendered word or not? Would you feel comfortable to describe a group of women as losers, on a public forum?
If not, then what would be the proper way to describe a subculture of women who are not satisfied with how society works now, who feel their options are limited by the society, who discuss endlessly on their blogs about how the society should be changed, and use some keywords as their badge of honor?
That’s an interesting question—I actually can’t think of any group where that would be an accurate description, so I don’t really have a good answer here. Sorry about that.
People who may or may not be on to something? Sure, lots of folks blame the failings of society for their comparative lack of success, and that’s sometimes unhelpful. But even that is a lot better than just complaining about how all other people—most specifically including women as well as ‘alpha male’ other guys—are somehow evil and stupid. That’s called sour grapes, and IMHO it is a highly blameworthy attitude, not least since it perpetuates and deepens the originally poor outcomes.
No real group, or even an imaginary group? I mean, take the “misanthropic losers” you described (and for the sake of debate, let’s assume your description of them is completely accurate), and imagine exactly the same group with genders reversed. Would it be okay to call those women publicly “losers”?
Or perhaps “loser” is a gendered slur. (Something like the word “slut” that you can use to offend women, but if you try it to describe a sexually adventurous man, it somehow does not have the same shaming power.) In which case, saying that the “Red Pill” readers are losers contains almost as much information as saying that they are men.
Complaining achieves nothing, and people who complain without achieving anything are, yeah, losers.
How about a group that achieves real results? For example, there is a controversial movement, in an obscure part of the “manosphere”, behind a blogger Valentine Solarius, often criticized by feminists for writing things like “to be female is to be deficient, cognitively limited”; “the female is completely egocentric, trapped inside herself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, or love, friendship”; “her intelligence is a mere tool in the services of her drives and needs”; “the female has one glaring area of superiority over the male—public relations; she has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of men that women are men and men are women”; “every woman, deep down, knows she’s a worthless piece of shit”. -- He writes a lot about his desire to kill women. Actually, he attacked and almost killed one woman for not responding to his e-mail, but she survived so he only spent three years in prison. He seems to be a popular person among some men politically influential in the Republican party… so, let’s assume that his friends really succeed to create a political movement, change the way society perceives women, change the laws as they want to have them, etc. Then, they would no longer be losers, would they? Now, would that be better than merely blogging about the “Red Pill”? (See his blog for some more crazy ideas.)
Well, we can imagine anything we want to. It’s not hard to think of a possible world where some loose subculture or organized group of women could be fairly characterized as “losers” on a par with redpillers. You could basically get there if, say, radical feminism was a lot more dysfunctional than it actually is. No such luck, though.
Perhaps you’re missing the point here? By “achieving real results”, I obviously don’t mean committing assault. Even successfully influencing politics would be a dubious achievement, as long as their basic ideology remains what it is. However, it is indeed a stylized fact in politics and social science that such nasty subcultures and movements generally appeal to people who are quite low either in self-perceived status/achivement, or in their level on Maslow’s scale of human needs.
Your quotes from the Manosphere blogger were quite sobering indeed, but I’ll be fair here—you can find such crazies in any extreme movement, so perhaps that’s not what’s most relevant after all. If most redpillers stuck to what they might perhaps be said to do best, e.g. social critiques about the pervasive influence of feminized thinking, the male’s unrecognized role as an economic provider and the like, as well as formulating reform proposals (however extreme they might be), I don’t think they would be so controversial. Who knows, they might even become popular in some underground circles who are quite fascinated by out-of-the-box thinking.
So, is it more about that he has loser friends than about what he writes? And by losers, I mean Greens.
Perhaps so, to some extent: you may like it or not, but guilt by association is a successful political tactic. But the problem is made even worse by the fact that his writings occasionally support the Greens’ nasty attitudes.
To take the analogy even further, imagine a respected scientist writing approvingly about “deep ecologists” and “Soylent Greens”, who believe in the primacy of natural wilderness, and argue that human societies are inherently evil and inimical to true happiness, excepting “naturally co-evolved” bands and tribes of low-impact hunter-gatherers. Such a belief might even be said to supported by evolutionary psychology, in some sense. But many people would nonetheless oppose it and describe it as nasty—notably including more moderate Greens, who might perhaps turn to other sciences such as economics, and think more favorably of “sustainable development” or even “natural capitalism”.
ALERT. Fully General Counterargument detected in line 1.
Seriously, how many people would actually refer to thoughtful critique and even rejection of mainstream views as “Red Pill” material? Basically nobody would, unless they are already committed to the “Red Pill” identity for unrelated reasons. That’s just not what Red Pill means in the first place.
And yes, the ‘Red Pill’ thing attracts jerks and losers, but that’s the least of its problems. A very real issue is that this ensures that ideas in the Red Pill space achieve memetic success not by their practical usefulness or adherence to truth-seeking best practices, but by shocking value and being most acceptable or even agreeable to jerks and losers.
Yes, you can go looking for diamonds in the mud: there’s nothing wrong with that and sometimes it works. But that does not require you, or anyone else, to provide enablement to such a deeply toxic and ethically problematic subculture.
Mencius Moldbug
Athol Kay
High quality PUA
etc.
Arguing about what a term means is bound to go nowhere, but in my experience, “red pill” has been associated with useful and interesting ideas. Maybe that’s just me and my experience isn’t valid though.
I don’t think it’s fair to characterize an entire space of ideas by it’s strawest members (shock-value seeking “edgy” losers). I could use that technique to dismiss any given space of ideas. See for example Yvain’s analysis of how mainstream ideas migrate to crazytown by runaway signalling games.
I think there is a high proportion of valuable ideas in the part of “redpillspace” that I’ve been exposed to. Maybe we are looking at different things that happen to be called the same name, though.
But based on your terminology and attitude here, I think you are cultivating hatred and negativity, which is harmful IMO. In general, I think it is much better to actively look for the good aspects of things and try to like more things rather than casting judgement and being outraged at more things.
Correct, I attempt to see the good parts of things and ignore the crud with full generality.
This is beside the point, IMHO; Moldbug’s references to “taking the red pill” are well explained by his peculiar writing style. I think they are mostly unrelated to how Athol Kay, reddit!TheRedPill and others use the term. OTOH, Multiheaded’s comment upthread provides proof that Kay’s views are genuinely problematic, in a way that’s closely related and explained by his involvement in TheRedPill meme cluster. For the time being, I make no claim one way or the other about other “high quality PUAs”.
Do also note that I really am criticizing a subculture and meme cluster here. AIUI, this has nothing to do with idea spaces in a more general sense, or even factual claims about the real world. Again, connotations and attitudes are what’s most relevant here. Moreover, I’m not sure what gave you the feeling that I am “cultivating hatred and negativity”, of all things. While it’s quite true that I am genuinely concerned about this subculture, because of… well, you said it already, the real issue here is Kay’s providing enablement to it, with the attendant bad effects. (Of course, this may also apply to other self-styled PUAs).
If you refer to the linked article, and by “proof” you mean “strawmanning and non-sequitur”...
Seriously: Imagine a comment or an article written in a similar tone on LW. How many votes would it get?
An example:
Where exactly in Athol’s article, or even anywhere on his website, did anyone say that anything about women’s decaying beauty over the age of 14? Citation needed!
Yeah, this is the argumentation style we refer to when saying “raising the sanity waterline”… not!
Who exactly is the manipulative hateful douchebag in this article? Are you sure it was Athol Kay?
Um, I think this is a silly argument, honestly. As the name makes reasonably clear, Man Boobz is a humor and satire website. Unlike most articles posted here at LW, they do not claim to qualify for any standard of rational argument. What’s useful about them is in their pointing to some of Athol Kay’s published opinions, and perhaps pointing out some undesirable connotations of these opinions.
Let me try to steel-man MB’s critique of this statement. Why is it especially important for a RPW to understand this—especially when the basic notion is clearly understood by any COSMO reader (which is a rather low standard)? Athol Kay does not explain how this understanding is supposed to pay rent in terms of improved results. And it is clear that, unless some special care is taken (which Athol Kay does not point out), a naïve interpretation of such “understanding” has unpleasant and unhelpful connotations.
Keep in mind that PUA/game works best when it manages to disrupt the mainstream understanding of “sexual market value” as opposed to accepting it uncritically, and the seduction community is successfully developing “girl game” methods which can allow women to be more successful in the market. By failing to point this out, Kay is under-serving Red Pill women especially badly.
This falls under Bastiat’s fallacy of “what is seen and what is not seen”. We see that divorce sucks; what we do not see is that divorce is nonethess rational whenever not divorcing would suck even more.
Strawmanning could be a technique used in humor and satire, but even then it isn’t a “proof” that someone’s views are “genuinely problematic”.
How about this: Two women in their 50s compare their husbands with men who were attracted to them when they were 18, and both see that their husband’s “market value” is lower. Let’s assume there is no other problem in the marriage; they just want to be maximizers, not merely satisficers.
One of them is a “Red pill woman”, she does not divorce and keeps a relatively good relationship. The other one is encouraged by success stories in popular media, gets a divorce… and then finds that the men who were interested in her when she was 18 are actually not interested anymore, and that she probably would have maximized her happiness by staying married. -- This is how the belief can pay its rent.
I wouldn’t advocate staying married for example in cases of domestic violence, and I guess neither would Athol Kay. So we are speaking about “sucking” in sense of “not being with the best partner one could be with”, right? In that case, understanding one’s “market value” is critical in determining whether staying or leaving is better. (By the way, a significant part of Athol’s blog is about how men should increase their “market value”, whether by exercise or making more money or whatever.)
And then, there is the impact on children. We should not expect that even if mommy succeeds to get a more attractive partner, that it will make them automatically happy. This trade-off is often unacknowledged.
The Red Pill on Reddit. Is this the one you’re talking about?
I’m not sure that the subreddit enjoys any sort of official status, but it’s certainly representative of what I’m talking about. Do note that the central problem with the RP meme cluster is one of connotation and general attitude, although some factual claims can definitely be problematic as well.
Come to think of it, even the name ‘Red Pill’ embodies all sort of irrationality and negative attitudes. Apparently, it is based on the very ancient idea that female period blood is in some sense a magical substance—so one can fashion a “Red Pill” out of it using sympathetic magick, and thus acquire some sort of occult or arcane knowledge which is normally exclusive to women and disallowed to men.
Have you seen The Matrix?
Well, you can find a lot of magickal or Neopagan symbolism in The Matrix if you know how to look for it. The word “matrix” itself means “something motherly” in Latin, and its use in the movie could be viewed as a reference to the Great Mother Goddess. (More specifically, the Great Mother is actually one archetype of the feminine Great Goddess of Neopaganism.)
Citation Requested.