I realize that, which is why I avoid anything to do with transexuals on LW: I won’t defend my feelings since I know perfectly well that objectively there is no reason to dislike such people, but my feelings exist anyway and mean that anything I might write on the topic is fruit of a poisoned tree.
IRC, on the other hand, is ephemeral and officially not publicly logged so I don’t put as much of a filter on my stream of consciousness.
Finally, I want to point out that I really don’t bring up the topic very often either in absolute numbers or as a percentage of my IRC comments, with 2 mentions in 2 or 3 days being an exception. Since while the channel is not publicly logged, I do keep private logs, I can substantiate this:
$ head -n1 .irssi/irclogs/freenode/#lesswrong.log
Log opened Sat Sep 25 10:12:30 2010
$ grep 'gwern>' .irssi/irclogs/freenode/#lesswrong.log | wc --lines
115,700
$ grep -e transexual -e trannie -e "trans " .irssi/irclogs/freenode/#lesswrong.log | wc --lines
79
$ grep -e transexual -e trannie -e "trans " .irssi/irclogs/freenode/#lesswrong.log |g 'gwern>'
16:23 < gwern> chelz: it is an obvious prediction to check, although I wouldn't want to compare the trannies to regular hetero males
16:27 < gwern> chelz: well, that's why I suggest comparing transexuals on testosterone suppressors and estrogen to those not on; they will hopefully both be equally oppressed, and the hormone difference will be reflected in how big a cut they take
= 22:31 < gwern> now with 23% less gwern, but 40% more trans fats
= 13:15 < gwern> (or maybe not. I don't actually know the details of transexual's equipment.)
= 14:52 < gwern> shminux: maybe she turned out to be a trannie
= 15:16 < gwern> 'One of the most interesting things about the effects of testosterone and trans men is that we have something else to compare it to. Non-trans men do not. And non-trans women do not, which is why I wrote the post “It’s the Testosterone: What Straight Women Should Know.” When I started testosterone a dozen years ago, I expected my sex drive to increase. The “horror” stories are a part of trans man lore, passed down from generation to ...
= 23:31 < gwern> realitygrill: could always become a transexual. asian guys seem to make good trannies :)
= 11:53 < gwern> haha '"Cardboard Box" (1974 venue unknown; trans David Lewis 1980) is an admirable evocation of his talent, and is an Absurdist SF autobiography of the titular container, from its creation on a factory conveyor belt, through its lifetime as a receptacle for various items. Eventually, the box is blown into a lake, where it exalts in Zen-like Transcendence, at last entirely filled, and disintegrating with such fullness.' ...
= 21:56 < gwern> as well say that transexuals happen 1:3000 so there must be a gene for being transexual!
= 13:16 <@gwern> partially women's rights? is that a new euphemism for rights for transexuals?
= 21:33 <@gwern> you hate trannies?
= 16:28 <@gwern> haha a transexual reincarnation love song - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCPsa0pkAHA how very japanese
= 23:20 <@gwern> … the two fundamental theorems of welfare economics whatsoever. Or I could point to Edward Prescott and say that being an economist means re-inventing statistical wheels, and deciding that they should be hexagons. Or I could point to D. McCloskey and whatever it is they’re into this decade.′ http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/09/brad-delong-resmackdown-watch-cosma-shalizi-argues-that-brad-delong-is-an-atypical-economist.html subtle trans burn
= 21:22 <@gwern> Kiba: if you could teach someone how to have balls, trannies would save a lot of money
= 19:15 <@gwern> ‘Gender: Male / Female *This cannot be changed after registration’ oh niconico, why are you so bigoted against trannies
= 20:55 <@gwern> startling: we won’t judge him for it. well, maybe you won’t, I find trannies really creepy
I won’t include any context here because Freenode’s “Channel Guidelines” strongly discourages public logging and even quotation without the permission of all parties involved:
If you’re considering publishing channel logs, think it through. The freenode network is an interactive environment. Even on public channels, most users don’t weigh their comments with the idea that they’ll be enshrined in perpetuity. For that reason, few participants publish logs. If you’re publishing logs on an ongoing basis, your channel topic should reflect that fact. Be sure to provide a way for users to make comments without logging, and get permission from the channel owners before you start. If you’re thinking of “anonymizing” your logs (removing information that identifies the specific users), be aware that it’s difficult to do it well—replies and general context often provide identifying information which is hard to filter. If you just want to publish a single conversation, be careful to get permission from each participant. Provide as much context as you can. Avoid the temptation to publish or distribute logs without permission in order to portray someone in a bad light. The reputation you save will most likely be your own.
(It would be tedious to get everyone’s permission for a reasonable context, and likely in some cases impossible as people appear & disappear.)
The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize and pledge not to use that kind of language on IRC in the future, rather than saying “Hey, I don’t do it that often” and subtly digging at startling for publishing your abhorrent comments.
It would also be nice to get an acknowledgement that the things you said aren’t just innocuous expressions of idiosyncratic preferences. They’re examples of the sort of language that has been consistently used to justify and motivate oppression and violence against trans people. Since you recognize that your feelings have no objective justification, your casual transphobia is inexcusable. If you can’t get over those feelings, keep them to yourself please.
The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize and pledge not to use that kind of language on IRC in the future
It would be appropriate to first announce that startling has been banned from the IRC channel until further notice for violating the rather clear privacy agreements. What the folks at #lesswrong decide to do after that about altering or enforcing norms about what may be said on #lesswrong then depends on said people’s preferences and any public relations concerns they may have.
My explicit use of “the folks at #lesswrong” above leads me to the more important point: Someone suitably official from here (lesswrong.com) should clearly disavow any affiliation with that IRC channel. As far as I know it is in no way official and is related to lesswrong.com only in as much as some of the users from lesswrong also have accounts there (just as some users from here also participate on RationalWiki). Those times that anything about #lesswrong has bled over to lesswrong.com the impression I’ve been given of the former is rather unappealing.
(It is probably unenforceable but asking the group politely to rename their channel seems like a wise move and is certainly what I would do were I a lesswrong.com authority!)
Quoting without permission was clearly a mistake, but describing it as a “rather clear privacy agreement” is not particularly apt; Freenode policy on this is written as strong advice rather than “rules” as such, and the channel itself had no clear policy. As it was, it was mostly a social convention violation. I thus have to disagree that an indefinite ban for ignorance of advice or an unwritten policy would be an appropriate or optimum response. What’s happened so far- the person being corrected quite sharply here and on the channel, and a clear privacy agreement added to the IRC channel topic for next time- seems like a reasonable remedy.
More specifically, the Freenode policy item in question is entitled “If you’re considering publishing channel logs, think it through.”, the section on constant public logging by the channel staff says “should” throughout, and the bit at the end about quoting publicly as a user ends with “Avoid the temptation to publish or distribute logs without permission in order to portray someone in a bad light. The reputation you save will most likely be your own.” rather than stating that it is actually a violation of anything in particular.
What is fairly solid Freenode policy, though, is that unofficial channels of things have to use the ## format, and # format is reserved for generally official project channels. I don’t know if the Less Wrong site admins and #lesswrong admins overlap, but if hypothetically Less Wrong wanted to disaffiliate #lesswrong, it is actually entirely possible for Less Wrong administrators to force #lesswrong to, at the least, migrate to ##lesswrong or a different IRC network.
As a #lesswrong user since I started reading the Sequences originally, though, I don’t think this is a good idea. Having a real-time discussion channel is a nice thing for those that benefit from it. The IRC channel, listed on the wiki, was the first place I gravitated towards for discussing LW stuff, preferring it to comments. It is fairly Less Wrong focused; links to and discussions of Less Wrong posts are the key focus, even with a lot of other interesting conversations, evaluations, thoughts, etc, perhaps having more actual conversation time. What you remember as having bled over is unrepresentative, I feel.
I thus have to disagree that an indefinite ban for ignorance of advice or an unwritten policy would be an appropriate or optimum response.
I’d end “indefinite” the moment the offending material was redacted with apologies. Stop breaking the rule, stop being excluded. Continue breaking the rule, stay excluded.
Ah, I see. That makes sense. They weren’t actually asked to remove the whole of the quoting, just to remove some unrelated lines, which has been complied with, so there’s no unimplemented requests as far as I know.
Of course, it might just have not asked for because having it pulled at this point could cause a worse mess than leaving it up, with more reputation damage. Some third party moderator could request it to avoid that issue, but I think at this point the horse is long gone and going to the work of closing the barn door might not be worth it.
It’d be reasonable for a hypothetical moderator taking an appropriate action to request they replace the whole thing with a summary, though; that makes sense.
subtly digging at startling for publishing your abhorrent comments.
Alright, since you are complaining about subtlety, I will be blunter; the point of that ‘digging’ was to say this: by publishing, startling is breaking decades-old IRC traditions and engaged in behavior flatout banned by Freenode rules—even as he quotes them at length for less clear violations—for very good reasons since real-time chat cannot and should not be held to the same high standards like, for example, LW posts or comments; publishing logs is tantamount to recording private conversations or emails and posting them online, which is a violation of their privacy that another IRCer was very upset by and why startling edited his comment. (In a more extreme example of why IRC logs are not public and have different standards than public comments, at least one IRCer has said he fears for his life if his IRC comments were to become known to his countrymen.)
It would also be nice to get an acknowledgement that the things you said aren’t just innocuous expressions of idiosyncratic preferences.
How exactly should someone bring to other LWers’ attention that there’s a hostile environment — where some folks can expect that they will be insulted about their bodies, and that such insults will be used as metaphors for random distaste or disliking — happening on IRC under the “Less Wrong” name, without quoting it? Be specific is considered a virtue hereabouts, and vagueness or imprecision a failing.
#lesswrong is not official, is not populated exclusively by LWers, is not frequently discussed here, and if you look on the wiki, you’ll see Eliezer specifically recommends against spending time in #lesswrong, so I think it’s questionable that it ought to involve LessWrong at all.
Who should it involve? Well, startling was quoting Freenode rules, so Freenode is the obvious party to involve....
Or he could’ve been clearer and not blindsided me. I had no idea startling was personally offended because none of his comments were anything out of the ordinary for that vein of mock offensive humor—I have made many mock ‘homophobic’ jokes to papermachine and papermachine sometimes responds back as mock offended, but I do not really think papermachine is offended & despises me as reactionary homophobic scum. (Those jokes are buried in the other 115,000 IRC lines I have written.)
Nor do I expect Alicorn to drop by #lesswrong and mention that papermachine has written a long comment about on LW that I should probably take a look at, which papermachine has not mentioned at all despite being active in IRC at the same time as me that night.
Or he could’ve been clearer and not blindsided me. I had no idea startling was personally offended because none of his comments were anything out of the ordinary for that vein of mock offensive humor
I suppose one difficulty with that kind of environment is that if someone actually tries to call someone else out for being insulting, it’s easy to miss the call-out or mistake it for a joke. In other conversational environments, if someone said “‘deceptive’ is a pretty terrible word to use for trans people” and “gwern, what a disgusting thing to say,” it might have sunk in that they were serious and you wouldn’t have later felt blindsided?
In other conversational environments, if someone said “‘deceptive’ is a pretty terrible word to use for trans people” and “gwern, what a disgusting thing to say,” it might have sunk in that they were serious and you wouldn’t have later felt blindsided?
Oh sure. For example: if someone says ‘what a horrible thing to say’ while simultaneously smiling, you would have to have Aspergers or something to not be certain that they were playing along; while if they furrowed their brow and frowned, it might be a good idea to immediately backtrack or alternately make the joke sufficiently outrageous that they’d realize that you couldn’t possibly believe that and were joking.
(Definitely one of the disadvantages of IRC, although in general I find it a very congenial environment.)
Sure. On the other hand, someone who’s used to being on the receiving end of hateful comments, and who’s used to not being taken seriously when they object to them, might pattern-match the same conversation onto that expectation.
It’s not uncommon for people to express derision or contempt honestly, then to back off by claiming to have been joking when someone calls them on it and they realize their contempt is not shared. Someone who’s used to being the target of that sort of thing may abandon attempts to “be clearer” sooner than you’d prefer, because what’s the point?
Simon: No, I didn’t mean — Kaylee: Yeah you did. You meant everything you just said. Simon: Well, no. Uh, actually I was being ironic, so in in in the strictest sense — Kaylee: You were being mean, is what. And if that’s what you think of this life, then you can’t think much of them that choose it, can you.
Typically when you want to break out of a language game, you use standard indicators like ‘no, seriously’ or going to personal messages (as I believe someone has already suggested that startling should’ve done) or anything like that. Like when you are roughhousing with your brother or sister and they say ‘that hurts’ and you continue since, well, you’re roughhousing, and then they say ‘no, seriously, that hurts!’ ‘Oh, whups!’
There are all sorts of things like that in ordinary social games; although taking things out of context and as literally as possible is a very LW thing to do, so I am not surprised that I am not getting a sympathetic hearing here (although it is enforcing on me an appreciation of Freenode’s Guidelines and Ivan’s new channel rule that logging or quoting is banworthy).
I really didn’t realize this whole thing was a thing—goes to show how little I’ve been paying to LW lately. Sorry to dig this up two weeks after the fact, but in the interest of being perfectly clear to any and all parties concerned or concerning themselves:
I have made many mock ‘homophobic’ jokes to papermachine and papermachine sometimes responds back as mock offended, but I do not really think papermachine is offended & despises me as reactionary homophobic scum.
This is also my understanding of those situations. Gwern (or anyone else on #lesswrong, for that matter) has never offended me in this context—though of course I cannot speak for all homosexuals everywhere, past or future, or in alternate universes.
For those of you who aren’t on irc, I realize now that publishing the logs unedited was the wrong thing to do. I’ve said so, apologized, removed things people have said on request, and am willing to do further. Past that, I don’t think it’s terribly relevant to this conversation.
I’ve already said as much.
Sorry, where? As far as I can tell, you’ve been steadfastly avoiding apologizing or even addressing things at all. All you’ve said to me is that you think my standard is too high.
Agreed that he shouldn’t have published the logs without seeking permission from any of the people involved. I do think it was legitimate (praiseworthy, even) for him to publish your comments without your permission. It is in the interest of this community that behavior of the sort you exhibited be curtailed. You did not respond well to his attempts to convey this to you on the IRC. Bringing this to the attention of the community at large, in the hope that the added pressure will have an impact, seems like an appropriate next step.
The violation of privacy is a concern, sure, but in this context it is outweighed by other factors. I mean the violation of your privacy, not the others involved. The violation of their privacy was unnecessary and an unmitigated bad thing, and startling should have been more careful about that, but your bringing that up in response to Alicorn’s comment just comes across as petty: “Yeah, but look at what he did!”.
I’ve already said as much.
Here’s what I was trying to say: If you genuinely recognized and cared about the negative impact beliefs like yours have had on the lives of trans people, then even if you could not control the fact that you have those beliefs you would refrain from airing them in any public forum, no matter how ephemeral, where there is a non-negligible chance they will be read by trans people or by cis people who know and love trans people. The utility boost you get from posting those comments, if any, is dwarfed by the expected harm. You not only expressed those beliefs, but when startling clearly indicated he found them offensive, you proceeded to double down on them.
I was hoping for an acknowledgment that this behavior was extremely ill-considered. The fact that you consider “I don’t do it that often and I only do it on IRC” an adequate defense indicates you haven’t really acknowledged (to yourself, even) the extent to which your comments differ from innocuous expressions of idiosyncratic preferences like, say, “Rationalists creep me out.” Perhaps you didn’t intend your comment to be a defense but it really reads that way to me.
ETA: You’re probably right that startling’s behavior is a clearer violation of Freenode rules than yours, but this is a pretty peripheral issue as far as I am concerned.
Here’s what I was trying to say: If you genuinely recognized and cared about the negative impact beliefs like yours have had on the lives of trans people, then even if you could not control the fact that you have those beliefs you would refrain from airing them in any public forum, no matter how ephemeral, where there is a non-negligible chance they will be read by trans people or by cis people who know and love trans people. The utility boost you get from posting those comments, if any, is dwarfed by the expected harm. You not only expressed those beliefs, but when startling clearly indicated he found them offensive, you proceeded to double down on them.
startling was not clear to me, but I have a more important problem with your comments and point of view:
I think you are quite wrong in your claims about utility and it is arrogant of you to presume to know what value I do or do not get out of IRC.
I am hard of hearing; no other medium lets me express myself as fluently or freely or easily or (let’s call a spade a spade) thoughtlessly as IRC. That is why I spend so much time there, because LW, email, forums, personal spoken interactions, telephones—all suck for me. My verbal jokes are unappreciated spoken; I am always a step behind in conversation, assuming I didn’t mishear someone; abstract discussions and subtle points go poorly; etc. And that’s if I even can find anyone to discuss these topics with, as I am nowhere near a LW meetup or a good university and live in the rural sticks.
On IRC, my fast reading skill means I am never a second behind everyone else and can talk faster and more clearly than anyone else; the people self-select for interesting conversation; quotes and references can be added; puns and written jokes go through without issue; and every problem mentioned above goes away. I’ve been on IRC ever since I learned of it as a kid, and as my previous statistics indicate, I talk a lot on IRC.
Nor am I the only IRCer who is hard of hearing—at least 2 other regulars in #lesswrong are hard of hearing too, and I believe those advantages are part of why they keep showing up too.
Putting a filter on myself destroys part of the value of IRC for me, in much the same way that people are complaining that LessWrong is over-moderated: filters and moderation always reduce ease & quantity, and increase fear & latency.
I cannot surgically excise the part of me that has issues with transexuals; I also cannot watch myself like a hawk 24⁄7 to catch that 0.001% or whatever of my comments that would offend anyone without destroying part of IRC’s value for me.
So when you get on your moral high horse and talk about what I should do if I ‘genuinely’ repent and this and that, all I can think is: you really don’t know what you’re so cavalierly asking of me. You’re asking me to damage the medium of most value in keeping me sane and reducing my social isolation, what keeps me going each day as I deal with the consequences of my handicaps and problems.
You’re right, I didn’t give sufficient consideration to the benefits you might get from IRC, and I’m sorry about that. I still think what you said about trans people (especially referring to them as “monstrous abortions”, even jocularly) is really bad, but if attempting to police that kind of language for yourself would seriously damage the value of IRC as a coping mechanism for you, then it is a more difficult situation than I imagined. Perhaps you could ask a trusted friend who’s also a regular on the channel to give you a heads up by PM if what you say gets a little too offensive? I don’t know… I do think you’re underestimating the extent to which comments of the sort you made are harmful. There are very few communities on the internet (or in real life, for that matter) that are even remotely welcoming to trans people, and I’d like LW to be one of them. But I’ve said my piece and I’m not going to push it. Sorry for getting too fighty. I should have appreciated that you feel a little blindsided and that piling on doesn’t help.
You’re right, I didn’t give sufficient consideration to the benefits you might get from IRC, and I’m sorry about that...I should have appreciated that you feel a little blindsided and the piling on doesn’t help.
It’s OK. There’s no reason you should’ve known I was hard of hearing or appreciate how much I get out of IRC, before I bared my heart.
Perhaps you could ask a trusted friend who’s also a regular on the channel to give you a heads up by PM if what you say gets a little too offensive?
That’s a good suggestion, but I can’t think of any. startling and Algo are the only 2 to express offense in the quoted conversations but I neither trust nor distrust them as guides.
This careful reconsideration of the subject, subsequent apology, and declaration of an intent to change your behavior are admirable—and a bit ironic, in this situation.
This seems like a red herring to me. Fine, IRC gives you the same kind of socialization opportunities that most people can get in meatspace, which you can’t get there, and so losing it would be particularly painful. But nobody is suggesting that you should lose it that I’ve seen; all you’re being asked to do is apply the same sorts of filters that people are expected to apply in any public social situation, or as pragmatist said, “any public forum”.
Can you say more about this process? I’m just wondering if there exists some relatively low-effort way to outright fix the discomfort; that seems like it would be the best solution all around.
I’m not really comfortable discussing since it’s a mix of holier-than-thou claiming (‘I’m less homophobic than thou, my reader’), anecdotage, and whatever, but since you asked...
I was fortunate enough to have a gay friend, and you know what, I’ll analogize it to when I went skydiving for the first time: as I sat there in the plane going up next to my tandem guy, I could feel my left thigh tensing up repeatedly and expressing my suppressed fear about jumping out of an airplane and falling thousands of feet through empty air, and I thought repeatedly to myself about how much I wanted to go skydiving and how this facility had never had a fatality and it was a beautiful day out and how the plane was full of people who were also going to jump out and how my tandem was a pro who jumped multiple times a day and probably didn’t want to die either so there was absolutely nothing to fear or be bothered by since I would definitely not die or be hurt significantly. And the jump itself was a crazy-awesome experience which totally vindicated my predictions and desire.
Hanging out with the friend and dealing with the small issue was like that, minus the crazy-awesome part, and spread out over much more time.
I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that if you need active filtering not to say awful things then you should fix that or be socially punished for it. Think “white people trying very hard and very obviously not to look racist”.
I don’t think you said anything particularly horrible. You are clearly underinformed about transsexuality (e.g. your equal oppression assumption), and the less-than-nice things you said most likely stem from that. I will now alienate the social justice blogosphere by saying that you do not have a duty to drop everything else until you are adequately informed. I do believe that you should learn the 30-second version:
“Tranny” is, as Alicorn said, a (somewhat mild) slur. I’m not sure how much filtering it requires to stop using it, but I’d be surprised it it were an unreasonable demand.
Other slurs include “shemale” (extreme slur), “hermaphrodite”, and any pronoun or combination of pronouns other that those used by the person.
For your purposes, a trans woman is and has always been completely a woman from the moment of conception, and her life as a boy was due to parental error (ditto for men and non-binaries). Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
There are a lot of stereotypes about transpeople. You cannot be reasonably expected to never propagate them. It is considered good form to say “Whoops, sorry” when they’re pointed out to you.
Hey, is that a Japanese cross-sex-reincarnation compersion song? Awesome.
a trans woman is and has always been completely a woman from the moment of conception, and her life as a boy was due to parental error (ditto for men and non-binaries). Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
This seems to me like an empirical question open to serious doubt. I certainly agree that people should be referred to by their preferred pronouns, that failing to do so is considered extremely rude, and that this social norm still seems like a good idea after thinking about it carefully, such that we shouldn’t hesitate to shame people who willfully violate it. But to insist on editing our descriptions of the past in order to fit the categories people belong to now just seems inaccurate, unless it’s actually the case that gender identity is innate and immutable in almost all instances, and I just don’t think that’s true.
For example, I don’t think we actually know what the demand curve for sex changes looks like: there are at least some people who frequently or occasionally fantasize about being the other sex, or non-binary, but don’t want it desperately enough to actually do anything about it given the constraints of currently existing medical technology and social norms, but who might consider doing something were those constraints to change. (Just—don’t ask me how I know this, and I won’t tell you.) Telling a closeted transvestite that he’s actually in fact been a woman this entire time by virtue of what he’d like to be in a glorious transhumanist possible future just seems untrue, for the same reason it seems untrue to say that an accomplished physicist was always a physicist, even before they learned how to read.
Well obviously it is false as a matter of fact. Anyone who does the slightest bit of research about transition finds a zillion cis(-ish) people who question their gender for any person who commits to transitioning, gender fluidity, effects of socialization, and a mountain of doubts and steps backwards in every trans person but the most poster-childish. Anyone who digs a bit deeper will find heavy philosophizing and introspection about how there is no “deep down” for gender or any other identity, the social construction of gender, the weird hangups and questioning about each step of social or medical transition, the hard choices between ideal gender expression and social pressure that makes the notion of real identity meaningless, and a bunch of people who detransition and sometimes kill themselves.
But someone who does not want to the research, and would even prefer to stop thinking about the creepy stuff as quickly as possible, is going to need a simplistic caricature, preferably one that doesn’t take apart the concept of little neat gender boxes at all. A mainstream one is “A man decides he’d rather be a woman, and becomes one”. (Another is “A man decides he’d rather be a woman, but of course he can never be”.) gwern basically seems to use that one. It’s not a very good one—it casts trans people as inexplicably making a weird choice, it misrepresents pre-transition people even worse than mine, and in basically all instances it’s too focused on physical sex. “A woman is misclassified as a man, finds out and corrects it” is a more useful approximation. It encourages approximately the right behaviors (e.g. shutting the fuck up about birth names), and is closer to the motivation of transpeople than the “choice to change” one.
“A woman is misclassified as a man, finds out and corrects it” is a more useful approximation [...] and is closer to the motivation of transpeople than the “choice to change” one.
I understand that some people don’t model themselves as being sufficiently agentlike to admit that their major life choices were in fact choices; it’s certainly politically convenient to claim to have an immutable innate identity that everyone needs to respect. But other people who domodel themselves as agents—sometimes even genuinely dysphoric people who might partially understand a little bit of what you’re going through!---might have an interest in defending social norms that let them describe their model of reality in non-contrived ways, even if that occasionally hurts some people’s feelings. You can and should edit your body and social presentation if that’s what you want to do. You cannot edit other people’s models of reality, and people might push back if you try to shame them into doing so.
We have some idea, actually, insofar as the number of trans people who get GRS is much smaller than the number of total trans people (the procedures are quite costly, often not covered or completely covered by health care providers, seldom available without travelling long distances and rarely performed on patients less than 18 years of age, or with certain medical contraindications). The number of people who’ve actually had SRS serves as a very crude lower limit against which you can check other numbers and get some idea of prevalence.
For your purposes, a trans woman is and has always been completely a woman from the moment of conception, and her life as a boy was due to parental error (ditto for men and non-binaries). Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
I find this comment much more damaging than anything else I’ve seen on LW this month. Probably ever. It is one thing to create a tolerant environment. It is quite another to demand that people rewrite their aliefs. I do have purposes and I refuse to subjugate them to yours.
For your purposes, the glass floor on the Grand Canyon Skywalk is completely safe to walk on, and the appearance of imminent falling is due to your sensory system not completely understanding how glass works. Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
There would be no need for anyone to cry “subjugation to others’ purposes” if someone said that. The Grand Canyon Skywalk is safe to walk on; your aliefs aren’t going to cooperate; if you can edit them, it makes sense to do so, but at any rate you shouldn’t act like you believe that it’s unsafe, for example by forcibly preventing loved ones from walking on the glass floor.
No one has ever prefaced such a statement with “for your purposes.” There is a reason for that.
It actually occurs fairly often. A good reason to prefix such a statement with “for your purposes”, is to indicate that modelling a statement as true is effective for achieving your purposes, without getting into a more complex discussion of whether it actually is true or not.
For example, “for your purposes, the movement of objects is described by Newtonian physics”. The statement after “for your purposes” is ill-defined (what exactly does ‘described’ mean?) as an actual claim about the universe, but the sentence as a whole is a useful empirical and falsifiable statement, saying that you can assume Newtonian physics are accurate enough for whatever you’re currently doing.
As a second example, it might be true to say to an individual walker arriving at a bridge, “for your purposes, the bridge is safe to walk over”, while for the purposes of a parade organiser, they cannot simply model the bridge as safe to walk over, but may need to consider weight tolerances and think in terms of more precise statements about what the bridge can support.
For your purposes as a human being in a typical situation who doesn’t want to signal negative things about and to any and all transgender people, you should behave in line with gender identity as innate. It is a reasonable piece of advice relating to social etiquette in this area.
It isn’t necessary to get into demonstrating the probable truth of this (including breaking down the definition of ‘innate’) to give this advice and the original quote decided to avoid starting that argument, which seems like a reasonable call.
Statements like this do make some assumptions about what your purposes are- in the bridge example I gave, the speaker is assuming the walker is not a parade organiser considering leading a parade over the bridge. Such assumptions and guesses about the audience’s purposes are unavoidable when giving advice, though, and this particular one seems quite reasonable. In no case do these assumptions “subjugate” you to make them correct.
What I’m trying to do is to say that (with the “for your purposes”) to the tourist, then turn to the engineer and say “And for your purposes, the glass floor is ridiculously unsafe and brittle, and possibly actively malicious, and your job is to prevent it from killing people”. See my reply to Zack.
I find this comment much more damaging than anything else I’ve seen on LW this month. Probably ever. It is one thing to create a tolerant environment. It is quite another to demand that people rewrite their aliefs. I do have purposes and I refuse to subjugate them to yours.
On a blog dedicated to refining the art of human rationality, where it is a widely-shared normative belief that human aliefs are frequently irrational to the detriment of the person holding them and moreover to net negative effect on the things we value in the world...telling someone that an alief which leads to repeated, harmful behavior and an inability to socially interact with some meaningful percentage of other members of the site (coupled with a high probability of incidentally causing them harm or stress indirectly as a result of that alief’s influence on their actions) is mistaken, is more damaging than anything else you’ve seen here lately?
I’ll keep those terminological points in mind. Shortness and brevity is a virtue for a word, but ‘trans’ is shorter than ‘trannie’ or ‘tranny’ so that would work while apparently not being offensive.
Hey, is that a Japanese cross-sex-reincarnation compersion song? Awesome.
Well, that video is something alright… Vocaloid is actually a bit relevant to discussions of moderation/censorship—because there’s essentially no filter on the music/video host NND and making Vocaloid songs or videos is open to anyone who wants to, you get plenty of poor quality or offensive videos (sexism, homosexual stereotyping, ethnocentrism) but you also get all sorts of bafflingly idiosyncratic or strange or unique gems. (To give a memorable example, a few days ago I was watching a pair of BDSM-themed songs pairing Miku as top and Luka as bottom, each song giving one’s perspective, with the usual cute drawings and short animation. Not one’s usual fare.)
I don’t think you said anything particularly horrible.
Quoth Gwern:
yeah, one is a monstrous abortion pretending to be
its opposite and deluding the eye thanks to the latest scientific
techniques, and the other is a weird fruit
How is that anything other than premeditated and malicious, deliberate bigotry? Gwern’s said he knows he has issues with trans people, so the idea that he just didn’t get the connotations here or how it would sound to someone who doesn’t share his feelings doesn’t apply. And he said it in a public venue without even bothering to feel his audience out, again, apparently in the knowledge that he has specific issues with the group in question, which means he was pretty confident that it was safe to do (and judging by the degree to which he’s managed to shift focus onto starling’s publishing of IRC logs and otherwise dodge the actual issue, he seems to have been right).
If that’s not horrible (in an everyday, pedestrian sort of way—the kind of horrible that doesn’t even vaguely imply par with $MindkillingHistoricalFigure but does imply the person shouldn’t exactly be surprised that other people think they’re a bit of a shithead), then what is?
There’s something… dissonant… about putting gwern on trial and deliberating on whether he’s guilty of second-degree shitheadedness. It doesn’t sound like the right question to ask; gwern has explained how the inside of his head works, and I’ve given advice for not acting like a dick taking his explanations into account. I don’t see the point of determining which mean names he should be called, even for the purpose of social punishment.
I’m confused by the ethics of inner prejudice. I would certainly prefer gwern not to need to control himself to be decent to transpeople, and barring that I would prefer him to control himself 24⁄7 without going wonky in the head. But since that is not to be, what are we supposed to do? Boycott his statistical analysis of Harry Potter fanfic?
There’s something… dissonant… about putting gwern on trial and deliberating on whether he’s guilty of second-degree shitheadedness
That’d be another point missed. I am not interested in a ritual condemnation of gwern, or advocating for it (or chastising you for failing to advocate for it). I am a bit confused at what exactly your standards are, such that the behavior described (do you feel my description is inaccurate?) doesn’t get to be fairly described in such terms.
It doesn’t sound like the right question to ask;
Then why did you ask it, and answer in the negative, by stating Gwern hadn’t done anything horrible? Isn’t that intrinsically subjective? Why the need to defend the behavior as something no reasonable person could take issue with? That’s what I’m getting at here.
But since that is not to be, what are we supposed to do?
Not go out of your way to absolve him of it either? This isn’t like, a ravening mob with pitchforks and torches calling for Gwern’s blood. Your options are not limited to a choice between offering sanctuary and tossing him to the wolves, and it’s kind of scary that you appear to view it that way.
The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize and pledge not to use that kind of language on IRC in the future, rather than saying “Hey, I don’t do it that often” and subtly digging at startling for publishing your abhorrent comments.
It’s not clear to me this is the case. It was inappropriate to publish the logs publicly, rather than pursuing a private resolution (by messaging gwern, a moderator of the channel, or so on) or asking about the issue in general terms, and seems generally unhelpful to claim that gwern intended to provoke the author of the great-great-grandparent.
I agree with you that now that the logs have been published, apologizing and pledging is more transfriendly than not, but it may be better for gwern’s reputation in general to point out that this is an isolated incident, rather than a trend (which apologizing is evidence for). I should note that the question of whether or not to apologize and the question of whether or not to publish logs are distinct, and that I am unsure about the right choice for gwern on the first (but would personally apologize) and agree with him on the second.
I suspect a contributor to this issue may have been that a new user was unsure how to deal with an established user; it may be useful to have an advertised ombudsman. To back up that suggestion with action, I’ll commit now to taking seriously the concerns any user would like to privately raise with the behavior of another LW user.
I remember watching a Newsnight debate between a reporter from the now-defunct News of the World and the reporter from the Guardian who revealed the extent of the NotW phone-hacking scandal. The NotW reporter kept accusing the Guardian guy of shoddy journalism for getting two facts about the story wrong, even though the vast majority of the story was uncontested. This struck me as contemptible, not because the accusations were incorrect, but because they were clearly motivated by pique at being called out (and perhaps a desire for deflecting the issue) rather than genuine concern about the quality of journalism. I wouldn’t have minded, in fact I would have been appreciative, if someone not involved with the scandal had pointed out the Guardian’s mistakes.
I got the same sense reading gwern’s response. Perhaps startling shouldn’t have published those logs—in fact, he certainly shouldn’t have published them in their original form—but hearing that from gwern as a response, in lieu of any serious demonstration of regret or contrition, struck me as contemptible (to be clear, I find the action comptemptible; I still have fairly high, though much diminished, regard for gwern). So from my perspective, at least, gwern didn’t do his reputation any favors by pointing this out. Similarly for not apologizing. Also, I don’t see how apologizing would be evidence for a trend. He would be apologizing for the specific behavior called out by startling.
In any case, the primary reason I called for an apology is not because of the consequences for gwern’s reputation. It is because an apology would indicate to trans people that even though LW is not always the most welcoming place, its members (especially its high-status members) are at least committed to fixing this, and curtailing hostile behavior when it’s pointed out. Trans people get enough shit from the rest of the world; they should be able to expect something better from a community committed to rationalism.
Also, thanks for volunteering to be an ombudsman (or at least, to play an ombudsman-like role)! It seems like a useful thing to do.
I agree with much of the sense you got, but I think there is a genuine question as to whether making unfriendly comments about transfolk in an irc channel or posting the logs of an irc channel without permission is a more serious breach of norms.
Similarly for not apologizing. Also, I don’t see how apologizing would be evidence for a trend. He would be apologizing for the specific behavior called out by startling.
I should be a bit clearer- apologizing requires acknowledging that the event occurred, which is stronger evidence for the trend than apologizing is evidence against it (if apologizing is even evidence against). Denying or belittling complaints is a fairly common status-protection impulse, as in many situations agreeing with complaints is status-lowering. One of the reasons it’s beneficial to raise issues as privately as possible is because that puts as little of the other person’s status on the line as possible, and makes it easier to resolve any interpretational disagreements.
In this particular situation, someone mentioned that the channel is an unfriendly place, and then posted comments by a specific user that are unfriendly. How likely is it that the user has made other, similar unfriendly comments? As it turns out, gwern keeps logs, and was able to substantiate the claim that those were basically isolated incidents.
For the apology to be specific, the apology has to be specific: instead of gwern publicly repenting for all unkind things he’s even said about transfolk in an LW open thread, it’s gwern acknowledging in front of the original audience that, yeah, that joke was ill done.
It is because an apology would indicate to trans people that even though LW is not always the most welcoming place, its members (especially its high-status members) are at least committed to fixing this, and curtailing hostile behavior when it’s pointed out. Trans people get enough shit from the rest of the world; they should be able to expect something better from a community committed to rationalism.
I am of mixed opinion on this; I think that LW should not welcome some behavior, and I pretty confidently include moralization as a behavior that should not be welcomed. There are times and places where honesty is more appropriate than reticence. The emphasis placed here on rationality and correctness has the cost of making it less friendly than if we did not have those focuses. That said, I think that friendliness is generally good, and would like to see more of it, and would like to take actions that increase it at acceptable cost.
Also, thanks for volunteering to be an ombudsman (or at least, to play an ombudsman-like role)! It seems like a useful thing to do.
I am of mixed opinion on this; I think that LW should not welcome some behavior, and I pretty confidently include moralization as a behavior that should not be welcomed. There are times and places where honesty is more appropriate than reticence. The emphasis placed here on rationality and correctness has the cost of making it less friendly than if we did not have those focuses. That said, I think that friendliness is generally good, and would like to see more of it, and would like to take actions that increase it at acceptable cost.
I agree. Furthermore, while I’m not an expert on irc culture I have the impression that it is meant to be a place were people can talk without worrying too much about the consequences of their words, thus freeing them from a significant psychological cost. I see this as a related, but separate concern and think it is reasonable for the two to stack when it comes to the LW irc channel. Basically, I don’t approve a Gwern’s comments per se., but think it is a reasonable social norm for people able to ‘get away with’ that sort of speech in LW irc channel.
I am of mixed opinion on this; I think that LW should not welcome some behavior, and I pretty confidently include moralization as a behavior that should not be welcomed. There are times and places where honesty is more appropriate than reticence. The emphasis placed here on rationality and correctness has the cost of making it less friendly than if we did not have those focuses. That said, I think that friendliness is generally good, and would like to see more of it, and would like to take actions that increase it at acceptable cost.
I’m not sure what you mean by “moralization”. The word has a connotation of disingenuousness, I think, and if that was intended then I dispute that it is an apt characterization of what I have said on this thread. If all you mean by “moralization” is “making moral judgments”, then I’m not sure why concern for honesty, rationality or correctness would conflict with moralization. My interpretation of your claim is that if users believe that expressing their controversial beliefs will lead to moral condemnation from other users, they will refrain from expressing those beliefs and that is a net loss to the community. But moral judgments, if honestly made, are also expressions of belief (at least if you’re a moral realist, which I am). So really a norm against moralization would discourage expression of one class of beliefs in order to encourage expression of another class of beliefs, and it doesn’t unambiguously promote honesty over reticence. Now, I do think that in many contexts moral language has a mind-killing effect; it’s often deployed in order to avoid thinking about uncomfortable ideas too deeply. But I haven’t noticed that being a significant problem here on LW, and it’s especially not a problem in this particular context.
If all you mean by “moralization” is “making moral judgments”, then I’m not sure why concern for honesty, rationality or correctness would conflict with moralization.
That is mostly what I mean as moralization. Moral beliefs seem more difficult to discuss, and especially more difficult to productively disagree with, than normal beliefs; rather than operating in the realm of expected values, they operate in the realm of trumps.
I’m glad you appreciate it! And, also, since no one’s said it yet, welcome! We’re glad to have you. There’s an intro thread over here where you can tell us about yourself.
The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize and pledge not to use that kind of language on IRC in the future
“The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do” would be to learn the difference between a chat and a public forum before jumping to hasty conclusions.
“The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do” would be to learn the difference between a chat and a public forum before jumping to hasty conclusions.
The conclusions drawn, while erroneous, were erroneous for reasons unrelated to the difference between an IRC channel and a public forum. They were not wrong to think that they were being insulted because they were wrong to post logs. Strongly establishing that they made an error in quoting from the channel here does not establish that their issue is groundless.
Conflation of issues like this is exactly why it is normally a faux pas to mention errors by a person unrelated to their complaint when responding to it, and bring them up separately.
Edit: To be more specific about the conflation I’m pointing at… the “hasty conclusions” they came to are not made less plausible by knowing about the “difference between a chat and a public forum”. Knowing that quoting is not socially normal does not make the conclusion “the things said were serious insults and there are unfriendly social norms here” less likely. That lack of knowledge thus does not invalidate the conclusion, or the presence of issues or mistakes leading them to that conclusion.
Edit 2: And to be more specific about why this matters… it’s a claim which doesn’t actually make any sense which is a snappy comeback. It’s not actually a rebuttal to what it’s replying to, because they don’t conflict, seeing as they’re talking about moral/socially correct actions for different people, but it takes the form of one, carrying negative signals about what it replies to which it doesn’t actually justify. It also conveys substantial negative connotations towards the person complaining, and rhetoric running people down isn’t nice. It not making sense is a thing which should be noticed, so it can be deliberately discounted.
I would say that if you don’t want to be thought of as the sort of person who propagates odious bullshit, the very first thing to do would be not to propagate odious bullshit, not to complain that the person who called you out on propagating odious bullshit didn’t touch third base. But perhaps that’s just me.
I think the shortest benign and obvious replacement I’ve seen is “transfolk;” “trans*” is shorter but not nearly as clear. Are there other replacements you would recommend?
As a trans person: Use trans as an adjective, and with about the same heuristics you would for noting some other aspect of a person.
“Cindy is a tall woman” is socially-comfy if it’s relevant that Cindy is tall. If you always refer to Cindy as a “tall woman” specifically, omitting opportunities to drop the adjective or including it even where it’s not obviously pertinent information, it usually comes across as awkward. If you emphasize it or bring it up pretty much at random even in situations where it’s clearly not relevant, people begin to notice the unusual emphasis you place on it and wonder if there’s some reason you’re doing it: Does Vaniver dislike tall women for some reason? Or find the idea so difficult to take at face value, when paired with the more obvious, mundane, un-adjectived noun that they cannot not notice it? The difference is that since most cis people don’t know anyone who’s trans and aren’t reliably given the cultural context for understanding and including us in their “just folks” category, the fact that someone is trans can seem disproportionately interesting or relevant. Your best bet is to counter for that—not necessarily ignoring that someone is trans, but not calling special attention to it either.
Different people also have different preferences, of course, but it tends to signal casual acceptance and respect for trans folk to a pretty thorough extent.
As a trans person: Use trans as an adjective, and with about the same heuristics you would for noting some other aspect of a person.
Sure. To make the purpose of the grandparent comment more explicit: I find that adding object-level positive examples to my suggestions makes people more likely to act on them. If all someone knows is that tranny is a slur, and they want to refer to trans people in general, then tranny is still the most available word. They have to choose in the moment between making their point conveniently and impolitely or spending time determining how to make that point politely (maybe ‘people who are trans’? Yeesh, that’s so long). Giving them a tool- “instead of using tranny, why not use ‘transfolk’?” that respects their concerns (it’s hopefully intelligible to outsiders, about as short, memorable, and they have another person’s judgment that it’s not likely to be considered a slur) signals mutual understanding and is more useful to them.
Except some fair portion of trans people do find it alienating and weird when it’s affixed to the word like that. “Use ‘trans’ like you’d use the words “tall” or “blonde” to describe somebody” doesn’t have nearly as wide an exceptional case and it’s also very easy to remember.
Well, m’self for one. Any number of other trans people I’ve met in person and online.
As for the why: one of the really core issues trans people face is invalidation of our identities, both overt and subtle. Marking us off as “other” in situations where it’s not relevant is a part of that—even non-bigoted folks often consciously or subconsciously perceive us as not really who we claim to be, and while they don’t wish to antagonize us directly, they can’t quite bring themselves to take our claims of being men or women at face value, at par with those of cis people. (Not even getting to what nonbinary folks face there.)
One thing some of us have observed is that using “trans-” as a prefix is a way to keep us comfortably-other, mostly in a subconscious way. Would you expect to ever see someone regularly and preferentially referring to Alice as a blondewoman, or Sally as a fatwoman, or Cheryl as a blackwoman? Not barring some kind of long-term shift in colloquial English use.
Basically, for some trans folks “transwoman” and “transman” just come off as fenced off from “woman” and “man” in a way that amounts to a sort of compromise, one we aren’t comfy with. This is not universal; even for people who have that pet peeve, it’s not something they always bring up at every juncture, but it’s probably worthwhile to know about.
But the term that was suggested in the ancestor to which you objected was “transfolk”. I can see—barely—the issue with “transman” and “transwoman”, but I don’t comprehend the implied extension to “transfolk”.
Further thought, now in relevant quote form (translate as appropriate):
“There are the occasions that men—intellectual men, clever men, engaged men—insist on playing devil’s advocate, desirous of a debate on some aspect of feminist theory or reproductive rights or some other subject generally filed under the heading: Women’s Issues. These intellectual, clever, engaged men want to endlessly probe my argument for weaknesses, want to wrestle over details, want to argue just for fun—and they wonder, these intellectual, clever, engaged men, why my voice keeps raising and why my face is flushed and why, after an hour of fighting my corner, hot tears burn the corners of my eyes. Why do you have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that’s so much fun for them is the stuff of my life.”
I am not arguing for fun, I don’t think I’m being some kind of intellectual bully—but I object to constraining my speech for reasons I do not understand.
I never found that one convincing. Clever arguing for fun seems to be a personality trait much more than a function of topic. I know I’ve toyed with the stuff of my life until my interlocutor with no stakes blew their top.
one of the really core issues trans people face is invalidation of our identities
One of the interesting sub-issues here is whether one naturalizes gender or regards it as a construct. That is, a person might defend their right to be regarded as female or male despite their birth anatomy, on the grounds that this has always been their true gender; or they might defend it on the grounds that gender is a person’s choice. I see much greater cultural receptivity to the first idea, and yet I also see fantasy, socialization, and escape from contingent gender norms playing a large role in why people want to transition.
I see much greater cultural receptivity to the first idea, and yet I also see fantasy, socialization, and escape from contingent gender norms playing a large role in why people want to transition.
I’m not quite sure what you’re pointing at, but suffice it to say, the dialogue around this is skewed by history: recognition of trans people as a distinct group (in the West) was pretty much driven by the psychiatric system, and controlled by gatekeepers who basically had veto authority over whether you’d get access to support, hormones and surgery. These gatekeepers used their own personal aesthetics to filter patients, often in very blatant ways (“could I see myself being attracted to this person if they were presenting en femme”, as an example); their theories and inside jargon also became the basis for what they told patients was going on with them, and what they felt constituted evidence of that.
The trans communities with seniority and connections mostly date back to this. They used to have nearly absolute power to shape the dialogue; that changed by and by, with the internet as a resource for gathering and talking, but the fingerprints of that period are still all over trans communities on and offline. There’s a generation gap effect; on one side you get mostly trans folks who remember those days directly and are much more likely to conceive of their identity in such terms, and on the other side you have a big scattering of various ideas about and attitudes to transition, facilitated imperfectly by medical practitioners who take a more pragmatic, nuanced line about the issue.
I realize that, which is why I avoid anything to do with transexuals on LW
If you were trying to avoid anything to do with it, why would you make transphobic comments apropos of nothing in unrelated discussions? That’s either not trying very hard at all, or failing really spectacularly despite one’s efforts. When I’m genuinely trying to avoid a topic—as opposed to merely claim avoidance for signalling reasons while actually wantiing to broach it in conversation—it doesn’t tend to suddenly crop up in the most random of places, unbidden, in crowds that haven’t been preselected for a willingness to hear it.
Without getting into whether you should be publishing IRC logs, I’ll just note that people are very apt to remember insults. This means that unless you want to hurt the people you’re insulting, you should avoid insults even in ephemeral media.
This is concerning. I am concerned. We have a bunch of transpeople hereabouts.
I realize that, which is why I avoid anything to do with transexuals on LW: I won’t defend my feelings since I know perfectly well that objectively there is no reason to dislike such people, but my feelings exist anyway and mean that anything I might write on the topic is fruit of a poisoned tree.
IRC, on the other hand, is ephemeral and officially not publicly logged so I don’t put as much of a filter on my stream of consciousness.
Finally, I want to point out that I really don’t bring up the topic very often either in absolute numbers or as a percentage of my IRC comments, with 2 mentions in 2 or 3 days being an exception. Since while the channel is not publicly logged, I do keep private logs, I can substantiate this:
I won’t include any context here because Freenode’s “Channel Guidelines” strongly discourages public logging and even quotation without the permission of all parties involved:
(It would be tedious to get everyone’s permission for a reasonable context, and likely in some cases impossible as people appear & disappear.)
The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize and pledge not to use that kind of language on IRC in the future, rather than saying “Hey, I don’t do it that often” and subtly digging at startling for publishing your abhorrent comments.
It would also be nice to get an acknowledgement that the things you said aren’t just innocuous expressions of idiosyncratic preferences. They’re examples of the sort of language that has been consistently used to justify and motivate oppression and violence against trans people. Since you recognize that your feelings have no objective justification, your casual transphobia is inexcusable. If you can’t get over those feelings, keep them to yourself please.
It would be appropriate to first announce that startling has been banned from the IRC channel until further notice for violating the rather clear privacy agreements. What the folks at #lesswrong decide to do after that about altering or enforcing norms about what may be said on #lesswrong then depends on said people’s preferences and any public relations concerns they may have.
My explicit use of “the folks at #lesswrong” above leads me to the more important point: Someone suitably official from here (lesswrong.com) should clearly disavow any affiliation with that IRC channel. As far as I know it is in no way official and is related to lesswrong.com only in as much as some of the users from lesswrong also have accounts there (just as some users from here also participate on RationalWiki). Those times that anything about #lesswrong has bled over to lesswrong.com the impression I’ve been given of the former is rather unappealing.
(It is probably unenforceable but asking the group politely to rename their channel seems like a wise move and is certainly what I would do were I a lesswrong.com authority!)
Quoting without permission was clearly a mistake, but describing it as a “rather clear privacy agreement” is not particularly apt; Freenode policy on this is written as strong advice rather than “rules” as such, and the channel itself had no clear policy. As it was, it was mostly a social convention violation. I thus have to disagree that an indefinite ban for ignorance of advice or an unwritten policy would be an appropriate or optimum response. What’s happened so far- the person being corrected quite sharply here and on the channel, and a clear privacy agreement added to the IRC channel topic for next time- seems like a reasonable remedy.
More specifically, the Freenode policy item in question is entitled “If you’re considering publishing channel logs, think it through.”, the section on constant public logging by the channel staff says “should” throughout, and the bit at the end about quoting publicly as a user ends with “Avoid the temptation to publish or distribute logs without permission in order to portray someone in a bad light. The reputation you save will most likely be your own.” rather than stating that it is actually a violation of anything in particular.
What is fairly solid Freenode policy, though, is that unofficial channels of things have to use the ## format, and # format is reserved for generally official project channels. I don’t know if the Less Wrong site admins and #lesswrong admins overlap, but if hypothetically Less Wrong wanted to disaffiliate #lesswrong, it is actually entirely possible for Less Wrong administrators to force #lesswrong to, at the least, migrate to ##lesswrong or a different IRC network.
As a #lesswrong user since I started reading the Sequences originally, though, I don’t think this is a good idea. Having a real-time discussion channel is a nice thing for those that benefit from it. The IRC channel, listed on the wiki, was the first place I gravitated towards for discussing LW stuff, preferring it to comments. It is fairly Less Wrong focused; links to and discussions of Less Wrong posts are the key focus, even with a lot of other interesting conversations, evaluations, thoughts, etc, perhaps having more actual conversation time. What you remember as having bled over is unrepresentative, I feel.
I’d end “indefinite” the moment the offending material was redacted with apologies. Stop breaking the rule, stop being excluded. Continue breaking the rule, stay excluded.
Ah, I see. That makes sense. They weren’t actually asked to remove the whole of the quoting, just to remove some unrelated lines, which has been complied with, so there’s no unimplemented requests as far as I know.
Of course, it might just have not asked for because having it pulled at this point could cause a worse mess than leaving it up, with more reputation damage. Some third party moderator could request it to avoid that issue, but I think at this point the horse is long gone and going to the work of closing the barn door might not be worth it.
It’d be reasonable for a hypothetical moderator taking an appropriate action to request they replace the whole thing with a summary, though; that makes sense.
Alright, since you are complaining about subtlety, I will be blunter; the point of that ‘digging’ was to say this: by publishing, startling is breaking decades-old IRC traditions and engaged in behavior flatout banned by Freenode rules—even as he quotes them at length for less clear violations—for very good reasons since real-time chat cannot and should not be held to the same high standards like, for example, LW posts or comments; publishing logs is tantamount to recording private conversations or emails and posting them online, which is a violation of their privacy that another IRCer was very upset by and why startling edited his comment. (In a more extreme example of why IRC logs are not public and have different standards than public comments, at least one IRCer has said he fears for his life if his IRC comments were to become known to his countrymen.)
I’ve already said as much.
How exactly should someone bring to other LWers’ attention that there’s a hostile environment — where some folks can expect that they will be insulted about their bodies, and that such insults will be used as metaphors for random distaste or disliking — happening on IRC under the “Less Wrong” name, without quoting it? Be specific is considered a virtue hereabouts, and vagueness or imprecision a failing.
#lesswrong is not official, is not populated exclusively by LWers, is not frequently discussed here, and if you look on the wiki, you’ll see Eliezer specifically recommends against spending time in #lesswrong, so I think it’s questionable that it ought to involve LessWrong at all.
Who should it involve? Well, startling was quoting Freenode rules, so Freenode is the obvious party to involve....
Or he could’ve been clearer and not blindsided me. I had no idea startling was personally offended because none of his comments were anything out of the ordinary for that vein of mock offensive humor—I have made many mock ‘homophobic’ jokes to papermachine and papermachine sometimes responds back as mock offended, but I do not really think papermachine is offended & despises me as reactionary homophobic scum. (Those jokes are buried in the other 115,000 IRC lines I have written.)
Nor do I expect Alicorn to drop by #lesswrong and mention that papermachine has written a long comment about on LW that I should probably take a look at, which papermachine has not mentioned at all despite being active in IRC at the same time as me that night.
I suppose one difficulty with that kind of environment is that if someone actually tries to call someone else out for being insulting, it’s easy to miss the call-out or mistake it for a joke. In other conversational environments, if someone said “‘deceptive’ is a pretty terrible word to use for trans people” and “gwern, what a disgusting thing to say,” it might have sunk in that they were serious and you wouldn’t have later felt blindsided?
Oh sure. For example: if someone says ‘what a horrible thing to say’ while simultaneously smiling, you would have to have Aspergers or something to not be certain that they were playing along; while if they furrowed their brow and frowned, it might be a good idea to immediately backtrack or alternately make the joke sufficiently outrageous that they’d realize that you couldn’t possibly believe that and were joking.
(Definitely one of the disadvantages of IRC, although in general I find it a very congenial environment.)
Sure. On the other hand, someone who’s used to being on the receiving end of hateful comments, and who’s used to not being taken seriously when they object to them, might pattern-match the same conversation onto that expectation.
It’s not uncommon for people to express derision or contempt honestly, then to back off by claiming to have been joking when someone calls them on it and they realize their contempt is not shared. Someone who’s used to being the target of that sort of thing may abandon attempts to “be clearer” sooner than you’d prefer, because what’s the point?
Simon: No, I didn’t mean —
Kaylee: Yeah you did. You meant everything you just said.
Simon: Well, no. Uh, actually I was being ironic, so in in in the strictest sense —
Kaylee: You were being mean, is what. And if that’s what you think of this life, then you can’t think much of them that choose it, can you.
Huh, that’s what emoticons are for.
Seriously? You think it’s plausible to interpret
and
as humorous mock offended responses? How much clearer do you want him to be?
Typically when you want to break out of a language game, you use standard indicators like ‘no, seriously’ or going to personal messages (as I believe someone has already suggested that startling should’ve done) or anything like that. Like when you are roughhousing with your brother or sister and they say ‘that hurts’ and you continue since, well, you’re roughhousing, and then they say ‘no, seriously, that hurts!’ ‘Oh, whups!’
There are all sorts of things like that in ordinary social games; although taking things out of context and as literally as possible is a very LW thing to do, so I am not surprised that I am not getting a sympathetic hearing here (although it is enforcing on me an appreciation of Freenode’s Guidelines and Ivan’s new channel rule that logging or quoting is banworthy).
I really didn’t realize this whole thing was a thing—goes to show how little I’ve been paying to LW lately. Sorry to dig this up two weeks after the fact, but in the interest of being perfectly clear to any and all parties concerned or concerning themselves:
This is also my understanding of those situations. Gwern (or anyone else on #lesswrong, for that matter) has never offended me in this context—though of course I cannot speak for all homosexuals everywhere, past or future, or in alternate universes.
For those of you who aren’t on irc, I realize now that publishing the logs unedited was the wrong thing to do. I’ve said so, apologized, removed things people have said on request, and am willing to do further. Past that, I don’t think it’s terribly relevant to this conversation.
Sorry, where? As far as I can tell, you’ve been steadfastly avoiding apologizing or even addressing things at all. All you’ve said to me is that you think my standard is too high.
Agreed that he shouldn’t have published the logs without seeking permission from any of the people involved. I do think it was legitimate (praiseworthy, even) for him to publish your comments without your permission. It is in the interest of this community that behavior of the sort you exhibited be curtailed. You did not respond well to his attempts to convey this to you on the IRC. Bringing this to the attention of the community at large, in the hope that the added pressure will have an impact, seems like an appropriate next step.
The violation of privacy is a concern, sure, but in this context it is outweighed by other factors. I mean the violation of your privacy, not the others involved. The violation of their privacy was unnecessary and an unmitigated bad thing, and startling should have been more careful about that, but your bringing that up in response to Alicorn’s comment just comes across as petty: “Yeah, but look at what he did!”.
Here’s what I was trying to say: If you genuinely recognized and cared about the negative impact beliefs like yours have had on the lives of trans people, then even if you could not control the fact that you have those beliefs you would refrain from airing them in any public forum, no matter how ephemeral, where there is a non-negligible chance they will be read by trans people or by cis people who know and love trans people. The utility boost you get from posting those comments, if any, is dwarfed by the expected harm. You not only expressed those beliefs, but when startling clearly indicated he found them offensive, you proceeded to double down on them.
I was hoping for an acknowledgment that this behavior was extremely ill-considered. The fact that you consider “I don’t do it that often and I only do it on IRC” an adequate defense indicates you haven’t really acknowledged (to yourself, even) the extent to which your comments differ from innocuous expressions of idiosyncratic preferences like, say, “Rationalists creep me out.” Perhaps you didn’t intend your comment to be a defense but it really reads that way to me.
ETA: You’re probably right that startling’s behavior is a clearer violation of Freenode rules than yours, but this is a pretty peripheral issue as far as I am concerned.
startling was not clear to me, but I have a more important problem with your comments and point of view:
I think you are quite wrong in your claims about utility and it is arrogant of you to presume to know what value I do or do not get out of IRC.
I am hard of hearing; no other medium lets me express myself as fluently or freely or easily or (let’s call a spade a spade) thoughtlessly as IRC. That is why I spend so much time there, because LW, email, forums, personal spoken interactions, telephones—all suck for me. My verbal jokes are unappreciated spoken; I am always a step behind in conversation, assuming I didn’t mishear someone; abstract discussions and subtle points go poorly; etc. And that’s if I even can find anyone to discuss these topics with, as I am nowhere near a LW meetup or a good university and live in the rural sticks.
On IRC, my fast reading skill means I am never a second behind everyone else and can talk faster and more clearly than anyone else; the people self-select for interesting conversation; quotes and references can be added; puns and written jokes go through without issue; and every problem mentioned above goes away. I’ve been on IRC ever since I learned of it as a kid, and as my previous statistics indicate, I talk a lot on IRC.
Nor am I the only IRCer who is hard of hearing—at least 2 other regulars in #lesswrong are hard of hearing too, and I believe those advantages are part of why they keep showing up too.
Putting a filter on myself destroys part of the value of IRC for me, in much the same way that people are complaining that LessWrong is over-moderated: filters and moderation always reduce ease & quantity, and increase fear & latency.
I cannot surgically excise the part of me that has issues with transexuals; I also cannot watch myself like a hawk 24⁄7 to catch that 0.001% or whatever of my comments that would offend anyone without destroying part of IRC’s value for me.
So when you get on your moral high horse and talk about what I should do if I ‘genuinely’ repent and this and that, all I can think is: you really don’t know what you’re so cavalierly asking of me. You’re asking me to damage the medium of most value in keeping me sane and reducing my social isolation, what keeps me going each day as I deal with the consequences of my handicaps and problems.
You’re right, I didn’t give sufficient consideration to the benefits you might get from IRC, and I’m sorry about that. I still think what you said about trans people (especially referring to them as “monstrous abortions”, even jocularly) is really bad, but if attempting to police that kind of language for yourself would seriously damage the value of IRC as a coping mechanism for you, then it is a more difficult situation than I imagined. Perhaps you could ask a trusted friend who’s also a regular on the channel to give you a heads up by PM if what you say gets a little too offensive? I don’t know… I do think you’re underestimating the extent to which comments of the sort you made are harmful. There are very few communities on the internet (or in real life, for that matter) that are even remotely welcoming to trans people, and I’d like LW to be one of them. But I’ve said my piece and I’m not going to push it. Sorry for getting too fighty. I should have appreciated that you feel a little blindsided and that piling on doesn’t help.
It’s OK. There’s no reason you should’ve known I was hard of hearing or appreciate how much I get out of IRC, before I bared my heart.
That’s a good suggestion, but I can’t think of any. startling and Algo are the only 2 to express offense in the quoted conversations but I neither trust nor distrust them as guides.
This careful reconsideration of the subject, subsequent apology, and declaration of an intent to change your behavior are admirable—and a bit ironic, in this situation.
This seems like a red herring to me. Fine, IRC gives you the same kind of socialization opportunities that most people can get in meatspace, which you can’t get there, and so losing it would be particularly painful. But nobody is suggesting that you should lose it that I’ve seen; all you’re being asked to do is apply the same sorts of filters that people are expected to apply in any public social situation, or as pragmatist said, “any public forum”.
In all sincerity: How hard have you tried?
About as hard as dealing with homosexuals; but that one worked much better.
Can you say more about this process? I’m just wondering if there exists some relatively low-effort way to outright fix the discomfort; that seems like it would be the best solution all around.
I’m not really comfortable discussing since it’s a mix of holier-than-thou claiming (‘I’m less homophobic than thou, my reader’), anecdotage, and whatever, but since you asked...
I was fortunate enough to have a gay friend, and you know what, I’ll analogize it to when I went skydiving for the first time: as I sat there in the plane going up next to my tandem guy, I could feel my left thigh tensing up repeatedly and expressing my suppressed fear about jumping out of an airplane and falling thousands of feet through empty air, and I thought repeatedly to myself about how much I wanted to go skydiving and how this facility had never had a fatality and it was a beautiful day out and how the plane was full of people who were also going to jump out and how my tandem was a pro who jumped multiple times a day and probably didn’t want to die either so there was absolutely nothing to fear or be bothered by since I would definitely not die or be hurt significantly. And the jump itself was a crazy-awesome experience which totally vindicated my predictions and desire.
Hanging out with the friend and dealing with the small issue was like that, minus the crazy-awesome part, and spread out over much more time.
Shouldn’t you be looking for a trans friend, then?
I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that if you need active filtering not to say awful things then you should fix that or be socially punished for it. Think “white people trying very hard and very obviously not to look racist”.
I don’t think you said anything particularly horrible. You are clearly underinformed about transsexuality (e.g. your equal oppression assumption), and the less-than-nice things you said most likely stem from that. I will now alienate the social justice blogosphere by saying that you do not have a duty to drop everything else until you are adequately informed. I do believe that you should learn the 30-second version:
“Tranny” is, as Alicorn said, a (somewhat mild) slur. I’m not sure how much filtering it requires to stop using it, but I’d be surprised it it were an unreasonable demand.
Other slurs include “shemale” (extreme slur), “hermaphrodite”, and any pronoun or combination of pronouns other that those used by the person.
For your purposes, a trans woman is and has always been completely a woman from the moment of conception, and her life as a boy was due to parental error (ditto for men and non-binaries). Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
There are a lot of stereotypes about transpeople. You cannot be reasonably expected to never propagate them. It is considered good form to say “Whoops, sorry” when they’re pointed out to you.
Hey, is that a Japanese cross-sex-reincarnation compersion song? Awesome.
This seems to me like an empirical question open to serious doubt. I certainly agree that people should be referred to by their preferred pronouns, that failing to do so is considered extremely rude, and that this social norm still seems like a good idea after thinking about it carefully, such that we shouldn’t hesitate to shame people who willfully violate it. But to insist on editing our descriptions of the past in order to fit the categories people belong to now just seems inaccurate, unless it’s actually the case that gender identity is innate and immutable in almost all instances, and I just don’t think that’s true.
For example, I don’t think we actually know what the demand curve for sex changes looks like: there are at least some people who frequently or occasionally fantasize about being the other sex, or non-binary, but don’t want it desperately enough to actually do anything about it given the constraints of currently existing medical technology and social norms, but who might consider doing something were those constraints to change. (Just—don’t ask me how I know this, and I won’t tell you.) Telling a closeted transvestite that he’s actually in fact been a woman this entire time by virtue of what he’d like to be in a glorious transhumanist possible future just seems untrue, for the same reason it seems untrue to say that an accomplished physicist was always a physicist, even before they learned how to read.
Well obviously it is false as a matter of fact. Anyone who does the slightest bit of research about transition finds a zillion cis(-ish) people who question their gender for any person who commits to transitioning, gender fluidity, effects of socialization, and a mountain of doubts and steps backwards in every trans person but the most poster-childish. Anyone who digs a bit deeper will find heavy philosophizing and introspection about how there is no “deep down” for gender or any other identity, the social construction of gender, the weird hangups and questioning about each step of social or medical transition, the hard choices between ideal gender expression and social pressure that makes the notion of real identity meaningless, and a bunch of people who detransition and sometimes kill themselves.
But someone who does not want to the research, and would even prefer to stop thinking about the creepy stuff as quickly as possible, is going to need a simplistic caricature, preferably one that doesn’t take apart the concept of little neat gender boxes at all. A mainstream one is “A man decides he’d rather be a woman, and becomes one”. (Another is “A man decides he’d rather be a woman, but of course he can never be”.) gwern basically seems to use that one. It’s not a very good one—it casts trans people as inexplicably making a weird choice, it misrepresents pre-transition people even worse than mine, and in basically all instances it’s too focused on physical sex. “A woman is misclassified as a man, finds out and corrects it” is a more useful approximation. It encourages approximately the right behaviors (e.g. shutting the fuck up about birth names), and is closer to the motivation of transpeople than the “choice to change” one.
I understand that some people don’t model themselves as being sufficiently agentlike to admit that their major life choices were in fact choices; it’s certainly politically convenient to claim to have an immutable innate identity that everyone needs to respect. But other people who do model themselves as agents—sometimes even genuinely dysphoric people who might partially understand a little bit of what you’re going through!---might have an interest in defending social norms that let them describe their model of reality in non-contrived ways, even if that occasionally hurts some people’s feelings. You can and should edit your body and social presentation if that’s what you want to do. You cannot edit other people’s models of reality, and people might push back if you try to shame them into doing so.
We have some idea, actually, insofar as the number of trans people who get GRS is much smaller than the number of total trans people (the procedures are quite costly, often not covered or completely covered by health care providers, seldom available without travelling long distances and rarely performed on patients less than 18 years of age, or with certain medical contraindications). The number of people who’ve actually had SRS serves as a very crude lower limit against which you can check other numbers and get some idea of prevalence.
I find this comment much more damaging than anything else I’ve seen on LW this month. Probably ever. It is one thing to create a tolerant environment. It is quite another to demand that people rewrite their aliefs. I do have purposes and I refuse to subjugate them to yours.
This defensiveness is uncalled for. Compare:
There would be no need for anyone to cry “subjugation to others’ purposes” if someone said that. The Grand Canyon Skywalk is safe to walk on; your aliefs aren’t going to cooperate; if you can edit them, it makes sense to do so, but at any rate you shouldn’t act like you believe that it’s unsafe, for example by forcibly preventing loved ones from walking on the glass floor.
No one has ever prefaced such a statement with “for your purposes.” There is a reason for that.
It actually occurs fairly often. A good reason to prefix such a statement with “for your purposes”, is to indicate that modelling a statement as true is effective for achieving your purposes, without getting into a more complex discussion of whether it actually is true or not.
For example, “for your purposes, the movement of objects is described by Newtonian physics”. The statement after “for your purposes” is ill-defined (what exactly does ‘described’ mean?) as an actual claim about the universe, but the sentence as a whole is a useful empirical and falsifiable statement, saying that you can assume Newtonian physics are accurate enough for whatever you’re currently doing.
As a second example, it might be true to say to an individual walker arriving at a bridge, “for your purposes, the bridge is safe to walk over”, while for the purposes of a parade organiser, they cannot simply model the bridge as safe to walk over, but may need to consider weight tolerances and think in terms of more precise statements about what the bridge can support.
For your purposes as a human being in a typical situation who doesn’t want to signal negative things about and to any and all transgender people, you should behave in line with gender identity as innate. It is a reasonable piece of advice relating to social etiquette in this area.
It isn’t necessary to get into demonstrating the probable truth of this (including breaking down the definition of ‘innate’) to give this advice and the original quote decided to avoid starting that argument, which seems like a reasonable call.
Statements like this do make some assumptions about what your purposes are- in the bridge example I gave, the speaker is assuming the walker is not a parade organiser considering leading a parade over the bridge. Such assumptions and guesses about the audience’s purposes are unavoidable when giving advice, though, and this particular one seems quite reasonable. In no case do these assumptions “subjugate” you to make them correct.
What I’m trying to do is to say that (with the “for your purposes”) to the tourist, then turn to the engineer and say “And for your purposes, the glass floor is ridiculously unsafe and brittle, and possibly actively malicious, and your job is to prevent it from killing people”. See my reply to Zack.
On a blog dedicated to refining the art of human rationality, where it is a widely-shared normative belief that human aliefs are frequently irrational to the detriment of the person holding them and moreover to net negative effect on the things we value in the world...telling someone that an alief which leads to repeated, harmful behavior and an inability to socially interact with some meaningful percentage of other members of the site (coupled with a high probability of incidentally causing them harm or stress indirectly as a result of that alief’s influence on their actions) is mistaken, is more damaging than anything else you’ve seen here lately?
Really?
Really??
I’ll keep those terminological points in mind. Shortness and brevity is a virtue for a word, but ‘trans’ is shorter than ‘trannie’ or ‘tranny’ so that would work while apparently not being offensive.
Well, that video is something alright… Vocaloid is actually a bit relevant to discussions of moderation/censorship—because there’s essentially no filter on the music/video host NND and making Vocaloid songs or videos is open to anyone who wants to, you get plenty of poor quality or offensive videos (sexism, homosexual stereotyping, ethnocentrism) but you also get all sorts of bafflingly idiosyncratic or strange or unique gems. (To give a memorable example, a few days ago I was watching a pair of BDSM-themed songs pairing Miku as top and Luka as bottom, each song giving one’s perspective, with the usual cute drawings and short animation. Not one’s usual fare.)
Quoth Gwern:
How is that anything other than premeditated and malicious, deliberate bigotry? Gwern’s said he knows he has issues with trans people, so the idea that he just didn’t get the connotations here or how it would sound to someone who doesn’t share his feelings doesn’t apply. And he said it in a public venue without even bothering to feel his audience out, again, apparently in the knowledge that he has specific issues with the group in question, which means he was pretty confident that it was safe to do (and judging by the degree to which he’s managed to shift focus onto starling’s publishing of IRC logs and otherwise dodge the actual issue, he seems to have been right).
If that’s not horrible (in an everyday, pedestrian sort of way—the kind of horrible that doesn’t even vaguely imply par with $MindkillingHistoricalFigure but does imply the person shouldn’t exactly be surprised that other people think they’re a bit of a shithead), then what is?
Well, I am a weird fruit.
There’s something… dissonant… about putting gwern on trial and deliberating on whether he’s guilty of second-degree shitheadedness. It doesn’t sound like the right question to ask; gwern has explained how the inside of his head works, and I’ve given advice for not acting like a dick taking his explanations into account. I don’t see the point of determining which mean names he should be called, even for the purpose of social punishment.
I’m confused by the ethics of inner prejudice. I would certainly prefer gwern not to need to control himself to be decent to transpeople, and barring that I would prefer him to control himself 24⁄7 without going wonky in the head. But since that is not to be, what are we supposed to do? Boycott his statistical analysis of Harry Potter fanfic?
That’d be another point missed. I am not interested in a ritual condemnation of gwern, or advocating for it (or chastising you for failing to advocate for it). I am a bit confused at what exactly your standards are, such that the behavior described (do you feel my description is inaccurate?) doesn’t get to be fairly described in such terms.
Then why did you ask it, and answer in the negative, by stating Gwern hadn’t done anything horrible? Isn’t that intrinsically subjective? Why the need to defend the behavior as something no reasonable person could take issue with? That’s what I’m getting at here.
Not go out of your way to absolve him of it either? This isn’t like, a ravening mob with pitchforks and torches calling for Gwern’s blood. Your options are not limited to a choice between offering sanctuary and tossing him to the wolves, and it’s kind of scary that you appear to view it that way.
It’s not clear to me this is the case. It was inappropriate to publish the logs publicly, rather than pursuing a private resolution (by messaging gwern, a moderator of the channel, or so on) or asking about the issue in general terms, and seems generally unhelpful to claim that gwern intended to provoke the author of the great-great-grandparent.
I agree with you that now that the logs have been published, apologizing and pledging is more transfriendly than not, but it may be better for gwern’s reputation in general to point out that this is an isolated incident, rather than a trend (which apologizing is evidence for). I should note that the question of whether or not to apologize and the question of whether or not to publish logs are distinct, and that I am unsure about the right choice for gwern on the first (but would personally apologize) and agree with him on the second.
I suspect a contributor to this issue may have been that a new user was unsure how to deal with an established user; it may be useful to have an advertised ombudsman. To back up that suggestion with action, I’ll commit now to taking seriously the concerns any user would like to privately raise with the behavior of another LW user.
I remember watching a Newsnight debate between a reporter from the now-defunct News of the World and the reporter from the Guardian who revealed the extent of the NotW phone-hacking scandal. The NotW reporter kept accusing the Guardian guy of shoddy journalism for getting two facts about the story wrong, even though the vast majority of the story was uncontested. This struck me as contemptible, not because the accusations were incorrect, but because they were clearly motivated by pique at being called out (and perhaps a desire for deflecting the issue) rather than genuine concern about the quality of journalism. I wouldn’t have minded, in fact I would have been appreciative, if someone not involved with the scandal had pointed out the Guardian’s mistakes.
I got the same sense reading gwern’s response. Perhaps startling shouldn’t have published those logs—in fact, he certainly shouldn’t have published them in their original form—but hearing that from gwern as a response, in lieu of any serious demonstration of regret or contrition, struck me as contemptible (to be clear, I find the action comptemptible; I still have fairly high, though much diminished, regard for gwern). So from my perspective, at least, gwern didn’t do his reputation any favors by pointing this out. Similarly for not apologizing. Also, I don’t see how apologizing would be evidence for a trend. He would be apologizing for the specific behavior called out by startling.
In any case, the primary reason I called for an apology is not because of the consequences for gwern’s reputation. It is because an apology would indicate to trans people that even though LW is not always the most welcoming place, its members (especially its high-status members) are at least committed to fixing this, and curtailing hostile behavior when it’s pointed out. Trans people get enough shit from the rest of the world; they should be able to expect something better from a community committed to rationalism.
Also, thanks for volunteering to be an ombudsman (or at least, to play an ombudsman-like role)! It seems like a useful thing to do.
I agree with much of the sense you got, but I think there is a genuine question as to whether making unfriendly comments about transfolk in an irc channel or posting the logs of an irc channel without permission is a more serious breach of norms.
I should be a bit clearer- apologizing requires acknowledging that the event occurred, which is stronger evidence for the trend than apologizing is evidence against it (if apologizing is even evidence against). Denying or belittling complaints is a fairly common status-protection impulse, as in many situations agreeing with complaints is status-lowering. One of the reasons it’s beneficial to raise issues as privately as possible is because that puts as little of the other person’s status on the line as possible, and makes it easier to resolve any interpretational disagreements.
In this particular situation, someone mentioned that the channel is an unfriendly place, and then posted comments by a specific user that are unfriendly. How likely is it that the user has made other, similar unfriendly comments? As it turns out, gwern keeps logs, and was able to substantiate the claim that those were basically isolated incidents.
For the apology to be specific, the apology has to be specific: instead of gwern publicly repenting for all unkind things he’s even said about transfolk in an LW open thread, it’s gwern acknowledging in front of the original audience that, yeah, that joke was ill done.
I am of mixed opinion on this; I think that LW should not welcome some behavior, and I pretty confidently include moralization as a behavior that should not be welcomed. There are times and places where honesty is more appropriate than reticence. The emphasis placed here on rationality and correctness has the cost of making it less friendly than if we did not have those focuses. That said, I think that friendliness is generally good, and would like to see more of it, and would like to take actions that increase it at acceptable cost.
You’re welcome!
I agree. Furthermore, while I’m not an expert on irc culture I have the impression that it is meant to be a place were people can talk without worrying too much about the consequences of their words, thus freeing them from a significant psychological cost. I see this as a related, but separate concern and think it is reasonable for the two to stack when it comes to the LW irc channel. Basically, I don’t approve a Gwern’s comments per se., but think it is a reasonable social norm for people able to ‘get away with’ that sort of speech in LW irc channel.
I’m not sure what you mean by “moralization”. The word has a connotation of disingenuousness, I think, and if that was intended then I dispute that it is an apt characterization of what I have said on this thread. If all you mean by “moralization” is “making moral judgments”, then I’m not sure why concern for honesty, rationality or correctness would conflict with moralization. My interpretation of your claim is that if users believe that expressing their controversial beliefs will lead to moral condemnation from other users, they will refrain from expressing those beliefs and that is a net loss to the community. But moral judgments, if honestly made, are also expressions of belief (at least if you’re a moral realist, which I am). So really a norm against moralization would discourage expression of one class of beliefs in order to encourage expression of another class of beliefs, and it doesn’t unambiguously promote honesty over reticence. Now, I do think that in many contexts moral language has a mind-killing effect; it’s often deployed in order to avoid thinking about uncomfortable ideas too deeply. But I haven’t noticed that being a significant problem here on LW, and it’s especially not a problem in this particular context.
That is mostly what I mean as moralization. Moral beliefs seem more difficult to discuss, and especially more difficult to productively disagree with, than normal beliefs; rather than operating in the realm of expected values, they operate in the realm of trumps.
I appreciate the ombudsman sentiment—it certainly would have helped if something like that had existed.
I’m glad you appreciate it! And, also, since no one’s said it yet, welcome! We’re glad to have you. There’s an intro thread over here where you can tell us about yourself.
“The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do” would be to learn the difference between a chat and a public forum before jumping to hasty conclusions.
The conclusions drawn, while erroneous, were erroneous for reasons unrelated to the difference between an IRC channel and a public forum. They were not wrong to think that they were being insulted because they were wrong to post logs. Strongly establishing that they made an error in quoting from the channel here does not establish that their issue is groundless.
Conflation of issues like this is exactly why it is normally a faux pas to mention errors by a person unrelated to their complaint when responding to it, and bring them up separately.
Edit: To be more specific about the conflation I’m pointing at… the “hasty conclusions” they came to are not made less plausible by knowing about the “difference between a chat and a public forum”. Knowing that quoting is not socially normal does not make the conclusion “the things said were serious insults and there are unfriendly social norms here” less likely. That lack of knowledge thus does not invalidate the conclusion, or the presence of issues or mistakes leading them to that conclusion.
Edit 2: And to be more specific about why this matters… it’s a claim which doesn’t actually make any sense which is a snappy comeback. It’s not actually a rebuttal to what it’s replying to, because they don’t conflict, seeing as they’re talking about moral/socially correct actions for different people, but it takes the form of one, carrying negative signals about what it replies to which it doesn’t actually justify. It also conveys substantial negative connotations towards the person complaining, and rhetoric running people down isn’t nice. It not making sense is a thing which should be noticed, so it can be deliberately discounted.
Sorry, I don’t understand. Is #lesswrong a private chatroom?
No. IRC supports invite-only channels (and anyone can create one), but #lesswrong is not one.
I would say that if you don’t want to be thought of as the sort of person who propagates odious bullshit, the very first thing to do would be not to propagate odious bullshit, not to complain that the person who called you out on propagating odious bullshit didn’t touch third base. But perhaps that’s just me.
You should probably be aware that “tranny” is frequently interpreted as a slur.
I think the shortest benign and obvious replacement I’ve seen is “transfolk;” “trans*” is shorter but not nearly as clear. Are there other replacements you would recommend?
As a trans person: Use trans as an adjective, and with about the same heuristics you would for noting some other aspect of a person.
“Cindy is a tall woman” is socially-comfy if it’s relevant that Cindy is tall. If you always refer to Cindy as a “tall woman” specifically, omitting opportunities to drop the adjective or including it even where it’s not obviously pertinent information, it usually comes across as awkward. If you emphasize it or bring it up pretty much at random even in situations where it’s clearly not relevant, people begin to notice the unusual emphasis you place on it and wonder if there’s some reason you’re doing it: Does Vaniver dislike tall women for some reason? Or find the idea so difficult to take at face value, when paired with the more obvious, mundane, un-adjectived noun that they cannot not notice it? The difference is that since most cis people don’t know anyone who’s trans and aren’t reliably given the cultural context for understanding and including us in their “just folks” category, the fact that someone is trans can seem disproportionately interesting or relevant. Your best bet is to counter for that—not necessarily ignoring that someone is trans, but not calling special attention to it either.
Different people also have different preferences, of course, but it tends to signal casual acceptance and respect for trans folk to a pretty thorough extent.
Sure. To make the purpose of the grandparent comment more explicit: I find that adding object-level positive examples to my suggestions makes people more likely to act on them. If all someone knows is that tranny is a slur, and they want to refer to trans people in general, then tranny is still the most available word. They have to choose in the moment between making their point conveniently and impolitely or spending time determining how to make that point politely (maybe ‘people who are trans’? Yeesh, that’s so long). Giving them a tool- “instead of using tranny, why not use ‘transfolk’?” that respects their concerns (it’s hopefully intelligible to outsiders, about as short, memorable, and they have another person’s judgment that it’s not likely to be considered a slur) signals mutual understanding and is more useful to them.
Except some fair portion of trans people do find it alienating and weird when it’s affixed to the word like that. “Use ‘trans’ like you’d use the words “tall” or “blonde” to describe somebody” doesn’t have nearly as wide an exceptional case and it’s also very easy to remember.
What, really? I have never seen this. Why? Who?
Well, m’self for one. Any number of other trans people I’ve met in person and online.
As for the why: one of the really core issues trans people face is invalidation of our identities, both overt and subtle. Marking us off as “other” in situations where it’s not relevant is a part of that—even non-bigoted folks often consciously or subconsciously perceive us as not really who we claim to be, and while they don’t wish to antagonize us directly, they can’t quite bring themselves to take our claims of being men or women at face value, at par with those of cis people. (Not even getting to what nonbinary folks face there.)
One thing some of us have observed is that using “trans-” as a prefix is a way to keep us comfortably-other, mostly in a subconscious way. Would you expect to ever see someone regularly and preferentially referring to Alice as a blondewoman, or Sally as a fatwoman, or Cheryl as a blackwoman? Not barring some kind of long-term shift in colloquial English use.
Basically, for some trans folks “transwoman” and “transman” just come off as fenced off from “woman” and “man” in a way that amounts to a sort of compromise, one we aren’t comfy with. This is not universal; even for people who have that pet peeve, it’s not something they always bring up at every juncture, but it’s probably worthwhile to know about.
But the term that was suggested in the ancestor to which you objected was “transfolk”. I can see—barely—the issue with “transman” and “transwoman”, but I don’t comprehend the implied extension to “transfolk”.
Not sure I have the energy at this point. Trying to explain stuff like this in a space like this feels a bit like whispering into a tornado.
Further thought, now in relevant quote form (translate as appropriate):
“There are the occasions that men—intellectual men, clever men, engaged men—insist on playing devil’s advocate, desirous of a debate on some aspect of feminist theory or reproductive rights or some other subject generally filed under the heading: Women’s Issues. These intellectual, clever, engaged men want to endlessly probe my argument for weaknesses, want to wrestle over details, want to argue just for fun—and they wonder, these intellectual, clever, engaged men, why my voice keeps raising and why my face is flushed and why, after an hour of fighting my corner, hot tears burn the corners of my eyes. Why do you have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that’s so much fun for them is the stuff of my life.”
I am not arguing for fun, I don’t think I’m being some kind of intellectual bully—but I object to constraining my speech for reasons I do not understand.
I never found that one convincing. Clever arguing for fun seems to be a personality trait much more than a function of topic. I know I’ve toyed with the stuff of my life until my interlocutor with no stakes blew their top.
One of the interesting sub-issues here is whether one naturalizes gender or regards it as a construct. That is, a person might defend their right to be regarded as female or male despite their birth anatomy, on the grounds that this has always been their true gender; or they might defend it on the grounds that gender is a person’s choice. I see much greater cultural receptivity to the first idea, and yet I also see fantasy, socialization, and escape from contingent gender norms playing a large role in why people want to transition.
I’m not quite sure what you’re pointing at, but suffice it to say, the dialogue around this is skewed by history: recognition of trans people as a distinct group (in the West) was pretty much driven by the psychiatric system, and controlled by gatekeepers who basically had veto authority over whether you’d get access to support, hormones and surgery. These gatekeepers used their own personal aesthetics to filter patients, often in very blatant ways (“could I see myself being attracted to this person if they were presenting en femme”, as an example); their theories and inside jargon also became the basis for what they told patients was going on with them, and what they felt constituted evidence of that.
The trans communities with seniority and connections mostly date back to this. They used to have nearly absolute power to shape the dialogue; that changed by and by, with the internet as a resource for gathering and talking, but the fingerprints of that period are still all over trans communities on and offline. There’s a generation gap effect; on one side you get mostly trans folks who remember those days directly and are much more likely to conceive of their identity in such terms, and on the other side you have a big scattering of various ideas about and attitudes to transition, facilitated imperfectly by medical practitioners who take a more pragmatic, nuanced line about the issue.
I sometimes say “transpersons”, but “transfolk” or just “trans people” is probably the best thing.
If you were trying to avoid anything to do with it, why would you make transphobic comments apropos of nothing in unrelated discussions? That’s either not trying very hard at all, or failing really spectacularly despite one’s efforts. When I’m genuinely trying to avoid a topic—as opposed to merely claim avoidance for signalling reasons while actually wantiing to broach it in conversation—it doesn’t tend to suddenly crop up in the most random of places, unbidden, in crowds that haven’t been preselected for a willingness to hear it.
Without getting into whether you should be publishing IRC logs, I’ll just note that people are very apt to remember insults. This means that unless you want to hurt the people you’re insulting, you should avoid insults even in ephemeral media.
Concurring.