Don’t think that’d work. Traditional practices and attitudes are a sacred category in this sort of discourse, but that doesn’t mean they’re unassailable—it just means that any sufficiently inconvenient ones get dismissed as outliers or distortions or fabrications rather than being attacked directly. It helps, of course, that in this case they’d actually be fabrications.
Focusing on feelings is the right way to go, though. This probably needs more refinement, but I think you should do something along the lines of saying that exercise makes you feel happier and more capable (which happens to be true, at least for me), and that bringing tangible consequences into the picture helps people escape middle-class patriarchal white Western consumer culture’s relentless focus on immediate short-term gratification (true from a certain point of view, although not a framing I’d normally use). After that you can talk about how traditional cultures are less sedentary, but don’t make membership claims and do not mention outcomes. You’re not torturing yourself to meet racist, sexist expectations of health and fitness; you’re meeting spiritual, mental, and incidentally physical needs that the establishment’s conditioned you to neglect. The shock is a reminder of what they’ve stolen from you.
You’ll probably still get accusations of internalized kyriarchy that way, but it ought to at least be controversial, and it won’t get you accused of mansplaining.
I think this is still too logical to work. Each step of an argument is another place that can be attacked. And because attacks are allowed to be illogical, even the most logical step has maybe 50% chance of breaking the chain. The shortest, and therefore the most powerful argument, is simply “X offends me!” (But to use this argument, you must belong to a group whose feelings are included in the social justice utility function.)
Now that I think about it, this probably explains why in this kind of debates you never get an explanation, only an angry “It’s not my job to educate you!” when you ask about something. Using arguments and explanations is a losing strategy. (Also, it is what the bad guys do. You don’t want to be pattern-matched to them.) Which is why people skilled in playing the game never provide explanations.
I hope your rationalist toucan is signed up for cryonics. :P
In the linked article the author mentions that there are multiple definitions of racism and people often aren’t clear about which one they use; and then decides to use the one without ”..., but only when white people do it” as a default. And says that it is okay if white authors decide to write only white characters, but if they write also non-white characters they should describe their experiences realistically. (Then in the comments someone asks whether saying that every human being is racist doesn’t render the word meaningless, and there is no outrage afterwards. Other people mention that calling someone racist is usually used just to silence or insult them.)
I am not sure whether this even should be called “social justice”. It just seems like a common sense to me. (This specific article; I haven’t read more from the same author yet.)
Somewhat related—writing this comment I realized that I am kinda judging the sanity of the author by how much I agree with her. When I put it this way, it seems horrible. (“You are sane if and only if you agree with me.”) But I admit it is a part of the algorithm I use. Is that a reason to worry? But then I remembered the parable that all correct maps of the same city are necessarily similar to each, although finding a set of similar maps does not guarantee their correctness (they could be copies of the same original wrong map). So, if you spend some time trying to make a map that reflects the territory better, and you believe you are sane enough, you should expect the maps of other sane people to be similar to yours. Of course this shouldn’t be your only criterium. But, uhm, extraordinary maps require extraordinary evidence; or at least some evidence.
I am not sure whether this even should be called “social justice”. It just seems like common sense to me.
Perhaps social justice done right should just seem like common sense (to reasonable people). I mean, what’s the alternative? Social injustice?
It would be a pity to use the term “social justice” to describe only facepalming irrationality. I mean, you then get this No True Scotsman sort of thing (maybe we should call it No True Nazi or something) where you refuse to say that someone’s engaged in “social justice” even though what they’re doing is crusading against sexism, racism, patriarchy, etc., simply because no True Social Justice Warror would engage in rational debate or respond to disagreement with sensible engagement rather than outrage.
(Minor vested interest disclosure: I happen to know some people who are both quite social-justice-y and quite rational, and I would find it unfortunate to be unable to say that on account of “social justice” and “rationality” getting gratuitously exclusive definitions.)
even though what they’re doing is crusading against sexism, racism, patriarchy, etc., simply because no True Social Justice Warror would engage in rational debate or respond to disagreement with sensible engagement rather than outrage.
Slightly off topic, but can I ask why patriarchy is assumed to be obviously bad?
I can certainly see the negative aspects of even moderate patriarchy, and wouldn’t endorse extreme patriarchy or all forms of it, but its positive aspect seems to be civilization as we know it. It makes monogamy viable, reduces the time preferences of the people in a society, makes men invested in society by encouraging them to become fathers and husbands, boosts fertility rates to above replacement, likely makes the average man more attractive to the average woman improving many relationships, results in a political system of easily scalable hierarchy, etc.
So, like with “rationality” and “Hollywood rationality”, we could have “social justice” and, uhm, “tumblr social justice”? Maybe this would work.
My main objection would be that words “social justice” already feel like a weird way to express “equality” or something like that. It’s already a word that meant something (“justice”) with an adjective that allowes you to remove or redefine its parts, and make it a flexible applause light.
Historical note, as I understand things—the emotionally abusive power grab aspects didn’t happen by coincidence. A good many people said that if they were polite and reasonable, what they said got ignored, so they started dumping rage.
I propose an alternative explanation. Some people are just born psychopaths; they love to hurt other people.
Whatever nice cause you start, if it gains just a little power, sooner or later one of them will notice it and decide they like it. Then they will try to join it and optimize it for their own purposes. You will recognize that this happened when people around you start repeating memes that hurting other people is actually good for your cause. Now, in such environment people most skilled in hurting others can quickly rise to the top.
(Actually, both our explanations can be true at the same time. Maybe any movement that doesn’t open its doors to psychopaths it doomed in the long term, because other people simply don’t have enough power to change the society.)
I’d expect rage to be better at converting people already predisposed to belief into True Believers, but worse at making believers of the undecided, and much worse at winning over those predisposed to opposition.
The rage level actually drives away some of the people who would be inclined to help them, and has produced something that looks a lot like PTSD in some of the people in the movement who got hit by opposition from others who were somewhat on the same side..
Still, they’ve gained a certain amount of ground on the average. I have no idea what the outcome will be.
As far as I can tell, there’s very little in the way of physical threats, but (most) people are very vulnerable to emotional attacks.
As I understand it, that’s part of what’s powering SJWs—they felt (and I’d say rightly) that they were and are subject to pervasive emotional attack both from the culture and from individuals, and are trying to make a world they can be comfortable in.
That “as I understand it” is not boilerplate—I read a fair amount of SJ material and (obviously) spent a lot of time thinking and obsessing about it, but this is a huge subject (and isn’t the same in all times, places, and sub-cultures), and I’ve never been an insider.
That would be one option. Or (this is different because “Hollywood rationality” is not actually a variety of rationality) we could say that both those things really are varieties of social justice, but one of them is social justice plus a bunch of crazy ideas and attitudes that unfortunately happen to have come along for the ride in various social-justice-valuing venues.
I don’t think “social justice” is just a weirdly contorted way to say “equality”. The addition of an adjective is necessary because “justice” simpliciter covers things like imprisoning criminals rather than innocent bystanders, and not having kleptocratic laws; “social justice” means something like “justice in people’s social interactions”. In some cases that’s roughly the same thing as equality, but in others equality might be the wrong thing (because different groups want different things, or because some historical injustice is best dealt with by a temporary compensating inequality in the other direction). -- Whether such inequality ever is a good approach, and how often if so, is a separate matter, but unless it’s inconceivable “equality” can’t be the right word.
Still, I’m not greatly enamoured of the term “social justice”. But it’s there, and it seems like it means something potentially useful, and it would be a shame if it ended up only being applicable where there’s a whole lot of craziness alongside the concern for allegedly marginalized groups.
I realized that I am kinda judging the sanity of the author by how much I agree with her.
That doesn’t seem horrible to me. There are many ways of being insane, but one of them is having a very wrong map (and you can express the one of standard criteria for clinical-grade mental illness—interferes with functioning in normal life—as “your map is so wrong you can’t traverse the territory well”).
I think the critical difference here is whether you disagree about facts (which are, hopefully, empirically observable and statements about them falsifiable) or whether you disagree about values, opinions, and forecasts. Major disagreement about facts is a good reason to doubt someone’s sanity, but about values and predictions is not.
Since I’d have to overcome a really strong ugh field to read it again, I’d like to check on whether my memory of it is correct—the one thing I didn’t like about it was Mohanraj saying (implying?) that if you behave decently you won’t be attacked. She was making promises about people who aren’t as rational as she is.
Why an ugh field? Those essays came out when racefail was going on, and came with the added info that it took Mohanraj two and a half weeks to write them, and (at least as I read it) I should feel really guilty that a woman of color had to do the work. I just couldn’t deal. I’m pretty sure the guilt trip wasn’t from Mohanraj.
I read them later, and thought they were good except for the caveat mentioned above.
That line was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I wouldn’t go that far over the top in a real discussion, although I might throw in a bit of anti-*ist rhetoric as an expected shibboleth.
That being said, these people aren’t stupid. They don’t generally have the same priorities or epistemology that we do, and they’re very political, but that’s true of a lot of people outside the gates of our incestuous little nerd-ghetto. Winning, in the real world, implies dealing with these people, and that’s likely to go a lot better if we understand them.
Does that mean we should go out and pick fights with mainstream social justice advocates? No, of course not. But putting ourselves in their shoes every now and then can’t hurt.
This makes some sense. I think part of the reason my contribution was taken so badly was, as I said, that I was arguing in a style that was clearly different to that of the rest of those present, and as such I was (in Villam Bur’s phrasing) pattern-matched as a bad guy. (In other words, I didn’t use the shibboleths.)
Significantly, no-one seemed to take issue with the actual thrust of my point.
“These people” are not homogenous and there are a lot of idiots among them. However what most of them are is mindkilled. They won’t update so why bother?
However what most of them are is mindkilled. They won’t update so why bother?
Because we occasionally might want to convince them of things, and we can’t do that without understanding what they want to see in an argument. Or, more generally, because it behooves us to get better at modeling people that don’t share our epistemology or our (at least, my) contempt for politics.
Because we occasionally might want to convince them of things, and we can’t do that without understanding what they want to see in an argument.
So, um, if you really let Jesus into your heart and accept Him as your personal savior you will see that He wants you to donate 50% of your salary to GiveWell’s top charities..?
it behooves us to get better at modeling people that don’t share our epistemology or our (at least, my) contempt for politics.
True, but you don’t do that by mimicking their rhetoric.
True, but you don’t do that by mimicking their rhetoric.
The point isn’t to blindly mimic their rhetoric, it’s to talk their language: not just the soundbites, but the motivations under them. To use your example, talking about letting Jesus into your heart isn’t going to convince anyone to donate a large chunk of their salary to GiveWell’s top charities. There’s a Christian argument for charity already, though, and talking effective altruism in those terms might well convince someone that accepts it to donate to real charity rather than some godawful sad puppies fund; or to support or create Christian charities that use EA methodology, which given comparative advantage might be even better. But you’re not going to get there without understanding what makes Christian charity tick, and it’s not the simple utilitarian arguments that we’re used to in an EA context.
The point isn’t to mimic their rhetoric, it’s to talk their language
There is a price: to talk in their language is to accept their framework. If you are making an argument in terms of fighting the oppression of white male patriarchy, you implicitly agree that the white male patriarchy is in the business of oppression and needs to be fought. If you’re using the Christian argument for charity to talk effective altruism, you are implicitly accepting the authority of Jesus.
If you’re using the Christian argument for charity to talk effective altruism, you are implicitly accepting the authority of Jesus.
Yes, you are. That’s a price you need to pay if you want to get something out of mindkilled people, which incidentally tends to be the first step in introducing outside ideas and thereby making them less mindkilled. Reject it in favor of some kind of radical honesty policy, and unless you’re very lucky and very charismatic you’ll find yourself with no allies and few friends. But hey, you’ll have the moral high ground! I hear that and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee.
(My argument in the ancestor wasn’t really about fighting the white male patriarchy, though; the rhetoric about that is just gingerbread, like appending “peace be upon him” to the name of the Prophet. It’s about the importance of subjective experience and a more general contrarianism—which are also SJ themes, just less obvious ones.)
That’s a price you need to pay if you want to get something out of mindkilled people, which incidentally tends to be the first step in making them less mindkilled.
Maybe it’s the price you need to pay, but I don’t see how being able to get something out of mindkilled people is the first step in making them less mindkilled. You got what you wanted and paid for it by reinforcing their beliefs—why would they become more likely to change them?
some kind of radical honesty policy
I am not going for radical honesty. What I’m suspicious of is using arguments which you yourself believe are bullshit and at the same time pretending to be a bona fide member of a tribe to which you don’t belong.
And, by the way, there seems to be a difference between Jesus and SJ here. When talking to a Christian I can be “radically honest” and say something along the lines “I myself am not a Christian but you are and don’t you recall how Jesus said that …”. But that doesn’t work with SJWs—if I start by saying “I myself don’t believe in while male oppression but you do and therefore you should conclude that...”, I will be immediately crucified for the first part and no one will pay any attention to the second.
I don’t see how being able to get something out of mindkilled people is the first step in making them less mindkilled. You got what you wanted and paid for it by reinforcing their beliefs—why would they become more likely to change them?
You’re not substantially reinforcing their beliefs. Beliefs entangled with your identity don’t follow Bayesian rules: directly showing anything less than overpoweringly strong evidence against them (and even that isn’t a sure thing) tends to reinforce them by provoking rationalization, while accepting them is noise. If you don’t like Christianity, you wouldn’t want to use the Christian argument for charity with a weak or undecided Christian; but they aren’t going to be mindkilled in this regard, so it wouldn’t make a good argument anyway.
On the other hand, sneaking new ideas into someone’s internal memetic ecosystem tends to put stress on any totalizing identities they’ve adopted. For example, you might have to invoke God’s commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself to get a fundamentalist Christian to buy EA in the first place; but now they have an interest in EA, which could (e.g.) lead them to EA forums sharing secular humanist assumptions. Before, they’d have dismissed this as (e.g.) some kind of pathetic atheist attempt at constructing a morality in the absence of God. But now they have a shared assumption, a point of commonality. That’ll lead to cognitive dissonance, but only in the long run—timescales you can’t work on unless you’re very good friends with this person.
That cognitive dissonance won’t always resolve against Christianity, but sometimes it will. And when it doesn’t, you’ll usually still have left them with a more nuanced and less stereotypical Christianity.
You’re not substantially reinforcing their beliefs.
Well, yes, if we’re talking about a single conversation, especially over the ’net, you are not going to affect much anything. Still, even if you do not reinforce then you confirm. And there are different ways to get mindkilled, entangling your identity with beliefs is only one of them...
On the other hand, sneaking new ideas into someone’s internal memetic ecosystem tends to put stress on any totalizing identities they’ve adopted.
True, but the same caveat applies—if we’re talking about one or two conversations you’re not going to produce much if any effect.
In any case, my line of thinking in this subthread wasn’t concerned so much with the effectiveness of deconversion, but rather was more about the willingness to employ arguments that you don’t believe but your discussion opponent might. I understand the need to talk to people in the language they understand, but there is a fine line to walk here.
Traditional practices and attitudes are a sacred category in this sort of discourse, but that doesn’t mean they’re unassailable—it just means that any sufficiently inconvenient ones get dismissed as outliers or distortions or fabrications rather than being attacked directly.
That works a lot less well arguing against someone who is claiming to be from that culture.
It helps, of course, that in this case they’d actually be fabrications.
So? Most of the “traditional practices” SJ types sanctify are fabrications. That doesn’t stop them from sanctifying them.
That works a lot less well arguing against someone who is claiming to be from that culture.
I’ve more than once seen people accused of not really being whatever they claim to be. “You’re wrong about your culture’s traditional practices” isn’t a legal move, but “you’re obviously an imposter” is.
Don’t think that’d work. Traditional practices and attitudes are a sacred category in this sort of discourse, but that doesn’t mean they’re unassailable—it just means that any sufficiently inconvenient ones get dismissed as outliers or distortions or fabrications rather than being attacked directly. It helps, of course, that in this case they’d actually be fabrications.
Focusing on feelings is the right way to go, though. This probably needs more refinement, but I think you should do something along the lines of saying that exercise makes you feel happier and more capable (which happens to be true, at least for me), and that bringing tangible consequences into the picture helps people escape middle-class patriarchal white Western consumer culture’s relentless focus on immediate short-term gratification (true from a certain point of view, although not a framing I’d normally use). After that you can talk about how traditional cultures are less sedentary, but don’t make membership claims and do not mention outcomes. You’re not torturing yourself to meet racist, sexist expectations of health and fitness; you’re meeting spiritual, mental, and incidentally physical needs that the establishment’s conditioned you to neglect. The shock is a reminder of what they’ve stolen from you.
You’ll probably still get accusations of internalized kyriarchy that way, but it ought to at least be controversial, and it won’t get you accused of mansplaining.
I think this is still too logical to work. Each step of an argument is another place that can be attacked. And because attacks are allowed to be illogical, even the most logical step has maybe 50% chance of breaking the chain. The shortest, and therefore the most powerful argument, is simply “X offends me!” (But to use this argument, you must belong to a group whose feelings are included in the social justice utility function.)
Now that I think about it, this probably explains why in this kind of debates you never get an explanation, only an angry “It’s not my job to educate you!” when you ask about something. Using arguments and explanations is a losing strategy. (Also, it is what the bad guys do. You don’t want to be pattern-matched to them.) Which is why people skilled in playing the game never provide explanations.
I hope your rationalist toucan is signed up for cryonics. :P
I’m sure it depends on where you hang out, but I’ve seen plenty of explanations from social justice people. A sample
Impressive.
In the linked article the author mentions that there are multiple definitions of racism and people often aren’t clear about which one they use; and then decides to use the one without ”..., but only when white people do it” as a default. And says that it is okay if white authors decide to write only white characters, but if they write also non-white characters they should describe their experiences realistically. (Then in the comments someone asks whether saying that every human being is racist doesn’t render the word meaningless, and there is no outrage afterwards. Other people mention that calling someone racist is usually used just to silence or insult them.)
I am not sure whether this even should be called “social justice”. It just seems like a common sense to me. (This specific article; I haven’t read more from the same author yet.)
Somewhat related—writing this comment I realized that I am kinda judging the sanity of the author by how much I agree with her. When I put it this way, it seems horrible. (“You are sane if and only if you agree with me.”) But I admit it is a part of the algorithm I use. Is that a reason to worry? But then I remembered the parable that all correct maps of the same city are necessarily similar to each, although finding a set of similar maps does not guarantee their correctness (they could be copies of the same original wrong map). So, if you spend some time trying to make a map that reflects the territory better, and you believe you are sane enough, you should expect the maps of other sane people to be similar to yours. Of course this shouldn’t be your only criterium. But, uhm, extraordinary maps require extraordinary evidence; or at least some evidence.
Perhaps social justice done right should just seem like common sense (to reasonable people). I mean, what’s the alternative? Social injustice?
It would be a pity to use the term “social justice” to describe only facepalming irrationality. I mean, you then get this No True Scotsman sort of thing (maybe we should call it No True Nazi or something) where you refuse to say that someone’s engaged in “social justice” even though what they’re doing is crusading against sexism, racism, patriarchy, etc., simply because no True Social Justice Warror would engage in rational debate or respond to disagreement with sensible engagement rather than outrage.
(Minor vested interest disclosure: I happen to know some people who are both quite social-justice-y and quite rational, and I would find it unfortunate to be unable to say that on account of “social justice” and “rationality” getting gratuitously exclusive definitions.)
Slightly off topic, but can I ask why patriarchy is assumed to be obviously bad?
I can certainly see the negative aspects of even moderate patriarchy, and wouldn’t endorse extreme patriarchy or all forms of it, but its positive aspect seems to be civilization as we know it. It makes monogamy viable, reduces the time preferences of the people in a society, makes men invested in society by encouraging them to become fathers and husbands, boosts fertility rates to above replacement, likely makes the average man more attractive to the average woman improving many relationships, results in a political system of easily scalable hierarchy, etc.
I wasn’t assuming it’s obviously bad, I was describing it as a thing social-justice types characteristically crusade against.
As to whether moderate patriarchy is good or bad or mixed or neutral—I imagine it depends enormously on how you define the term.
The post reads very much like you are implying they are bad, but I’ll update on your response that you didn’t.
So, like with “rationality” and “Hollywood rationality”, we could have “social justice” and, uhm, “tumblr social justice”? Maybe this would work.
My main objection would be that words “social justice” already feel like a weird way to express “equality” or something like that. It’s already a word that meant something (“justice”) with an adjective that allowes you to remove or redefine its parts, and make it a flexible applause light.
Historical note, as I understand things—the emotionally abusive power grab aspects didn’t happen by coincidence. A good many people said that if they were polite and reasonable, what they said got ignored, so they started dumping rage.
I propose an alternative explanation. Some people are just born psychopaths; they love to hurt other people.
Whatever nice cause you start, if it gains just a little power, sooner or later one of them will notice it and decide they like it. Then they will try to join it and optimize it for their own purposes. You will recognize that this happened when people around you start repeating memes that hurting other people is actually good for your cause. Now, in such environment people most skilled in hurting others can quickly rise to the top.
(Actually, both our explanations can be true at the same time. Maybe any movement that doesn’t open its doors to psychopaths it doomed in the long term, because other people simply don’t have enough power to change the society.)
And then they complain when anybody else is ‘uncivil’.
I called it an emotionally abusive power grab because that’s how I see it.
Nonetheless, I still think they’re right about some of their issues.
I’d expect rage to be better at converting people already predisposed to belief into True Believers, but worse at making believers of the undecided, and much worse at winning over those predisposed to opposition.
The rage level actually drives away some of the people who would be inclined to help them, and has produced something that looks a lot like PTSD in some of the people in the movement who got hit by opposition from others who were somewhat on the same side..
Still, they’ve gained a certain amount of ground on the average. I have no idea what the outcome will be.
Well, if you can vaguely imply that it might be physically dangerous to disagree, a little rage can work wonders.
As far as I can tell, there’s very little in the way of physical threats, but (most) people are very vulnerable to emotional attacks.
As I understand it, that’s part of what’s powering SJWs—they felt (and I’d say rightly) that they were and are subject to pervasive emotional attack both from the culture and from individuals, and are trying to make a world they can be comfortable in.
That “as I understand it” is not boilerplate—I read a fair amount of SJ material and (obviously) spent a lot of time thinking and obsessing about it, but this is a huge subject (and isn’t the same in all times, places, and sub-cultures), and I’ve never been an insider.
That would be one option. Or (this is different because “Hollywood rationality” is not actually a variety of rationality) we could say that both those things really are varieties of social justice, but one of them is social justice plus a bunch of crazy ideas and attitudes that unfortunately happen to have come along for the ride in various social-justice-valuing venues.
I don’t think “social justice” is just a weirdly contorted way to say “equality”. The addition of an adjective is necessary because “justice” simpliciter covers things like imprisoning criminals rather than innocent bystanders, and not having kleptocratic laws; “social justice” means something like “justice in people’s social interactions”. In some cases that’s roughly the same thing as equality, but in others equality might be the wrong thing (because different groups want different things, or because some historical injustice is best dealt with by a temporary compensating inequality in the other direction). -- Whether such inequality ever is a good approach, and how often if so, is a separate matter, but unless it’s inconceivable “equality” can’t be the right word.
Still, I’m not greatly enamoured of the term “social justice”. But it’s there, and it seems like it means something potentially useful, and it would be a shame if it ended up only being applicable where there’s a whole lot of craziness alongside the concern for allegedly marginalized groups.
That doesn’t seem horrible to me. There are many ways of being insane, but one of them is having a very wrong map (and you can express the one of standard criteria for clinical-grade mental illness—interferes with functioning in normal life—as “your map is so wrong you can’t traverse the territory well”).
I think the critical difference here is whether you disagree about facts (which are, hopefully, empirically observable and statements about them falsifiable) or whether you disagree about values, opinions, and forecasts. Major disagreement about facts is a good reason to doubt someone’s sanity, but about values and predictions is not.
I’m glad you liked it.
Since I’d have to overcome a really strong ugh field to read it again, I’d like to check on whether my memory of it is correct—the one thing I didn’t like about it was Mohanraj saying (implying?) that if you behave decently you won’t be attacked. She was making promises about people who aren’t as rational as she is.
Why an ugh field? Those essays came out when racefail was going on, and came with the added info that it took Mohanraj two and a half weeks to write them, and (at least as I read it) I should feel really guilty that a woman of color had to do the work. I just couldn’t deal. I’m pretty sure the guilt trip wasn’t from Mohanraj.
I read them later, and thought they were good except for the caveat mentioned above.
I don’t think reinforcing stupidity is a good idea.
“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” ― Mark Twain
This is that level:
That line was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I wouldn’t go that far over the top in a real discussion, although I might throw in a bit of anti-*ist rhetoric as an expected shibboleth.
That being said, these people aren’t stupid. They don’t generally have the same priorities or epistemology that we do, and they’re very political, but that’s true of a lot of people outside the gates of our incestuous little nerd-ghetto. Winning, in the real world, implies dealing with these people, and that’s likely to go a lot better if we understand them.
Does that mean we should go out and pick fights with mainstream social justice advocates? No, of course not. But putting ourselves in their shoes every now and then can’t hurt.
This makes some sense. I think part of the reason my contribution was taken so badly was, as I said, that I was arguing in a style that was clearly different to that of the rest of those present, and as such I was (in Villam Bur’s phrasing) pattern-matched as a bad guy. (In other words, I didn’t use the shibboleths.)
Significantly, no-one seemed to take issue with the actual thrust of my point.
Of course, but only somewhat :-)
“These people” are not homogenous and there are a lot of idiots among them. However what most of them are is mindkilled. They won’t update so why bother?
Because we occasionally might want to convince them of things, and we can’t do that without understanding what they want to see in an argument. Or, more generally, because it behooves us to get better at modeling people that don’t share our epistemology or our (at least, my) contempt for politics.
So, um, if you really let Jesus into your heart and accept Him as your personal savior you will see that He wants you to donate 50% of your salary to GiveWell’s top charities..?
True, but you don’t do that by mimicking their rhetoric.
The point isn’t to blindly mimic their rhetoric, it’s to talk their language: not just the soundbites, but the motivations under them. To use your example, talking about letting Jesus into your heart isn’t going to convince anyone to donate a large chunk of their salary to GiveWell’s top charities. There’s a Christian argument for charity already, though, and talking effective altruism in those terms might well convince someone that accepts it to donate to real charity rather than some godawful sad puppies fund; or to support or create Christian charities that use EA methodology, which given comparative advantage might be even better. But you’re not going to get there without understanding what makes Christian charity tick, and it’s not the simple utilitarian arguments that we’re used to in an EA context.
There is a price: to talk in their language is to accept their framework. If you are making an argument in terms of fighting the oppression of white male patriarchy, you implicitly agree that the white male patriarchy is in the business of oppression and needs to be fought. If you’re using the Christian argument for charity to talk effective altruism, you are implicitly accepting the authority of Jesus.
Yes, you are. That’s a price you need to pay if you want to get something out of mindkilled people, which incidentally tends to be the first step in introducing outside ideas and thereby making them less mindkilled. Reject it in favor of some kind of radical honesty policy, and unless you’re very lucky and very charismatic you’ll find yourself with no allies and few friends. But hey, you’ll have the moral high ground! I hear that and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee.
(My argument in the ancestor wasn’t really about fighting the white male patriarchy, though; the rhetoric about that is just gingerbread, like appending “peace be upon him” to the name of the Prophet. It’s about the importance of subjective experience and a more general contrarianism—which are also SJ themes, just less obvious ones.)
Maybe it’s the price you need to pay, but I don’t see how being able to get something out of mindkilled people is the first step in making them less mindkilled. You got what you wanted and paid for it by reinforcing their beliefs—why would they become more likely to change them?
I am not going for radical honesty. What I’m suspicious of is using arguments which you yourself believe are bullshit and at the same time pretending to be a bona fide member of a tribe to which you don’t belong.
And, by the way, there seems to be a difference between Jesus and SJ here. When talking to a Christian I can be “radically honest” and say something along the lines “I myself am not a Christian but you are and don’t you recall how Jesus said that …”. But that doesn’t work with SJWs—if I start by saying “I myself don’t believe in while male oppression but you do and therefore you should conclude that...”, I will be immediately crucified for the first part and no one will pay any attention to the second.
You’re not substantially reinforcing their beliefs. Beliefs entangled with your identity don’t follow Bayesian rules: directly showing anything less than overpoweringly strong evidence against them (and even that isn’t a sure thing) tends to reinforce them by provoking rationalization, while accepting them is noise. If you don’t like Christianity, you wouldn’t want to use the Christian argument for charity with a weak or undecided Christian; but they aren’t going to be mindkilled in this regard, so it wouldn’t make a good argument anyway.
On the other hand, sneaking new ideas into someone’s internal memetic ecosystem tends to put stress on any totalizing identities they’ve adopted. For example, you might have to invoke God’s commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself to get a fundamentalist Christian to buy EA in the first place; but now they have an interest in EA, which could (e.g.) lead them to EA forums sharing secular humanist assumptions. Before, they’d have dismissed this as (e.g.) some kind of pathetic atheist attempt at constructing a morality in the absence of God. But now they have a shared assumption, a point of commonality. That’ll lead to cognitive dissonance, but only in the long run—timescales you can’t work on unless you’re very good friends with this person.
That cognitive dissonance won’t always resolve against Christianity, but sometimes it will. And when it doesn’t, you’ll usually still have left them with a more nuanced and less stereotypical Christianity.
Well, yes, if we’re talking about a single conversation, especially over the ’net, you are not going to affect much anything. Still, even if you do not reinforce then you confirm. And there are different ways to get mindkilled, entangling your identity with beliefs is only one of them...
True, but the same caveat applies—if we’re talking about one or two conversations you’re not going to produce much if any effect.
In any case, my line of thinking in this subthread wasn’t concerned so much with the effectiveness of deconversion, but rather was more about the willingness to employ arguments that you don’t believe but your discussion opponent might. I understand the need to talk to people in the language they understand, but there is a fine line to walk here.
That works a lot less well arguing against someone who is claiming to be from that culture.
So? Most of the “traditional practices” SJ types sanctify are fabrications. That doesn’t stop them from sanctifying them.
I’ve more than once seen people accused of not really being whatever they claim to be. “You’re wrong about your culture’s traditional practices” isn’t a legal move, but “you’re obviously an imposter” is.