What do you expect to learn over the next few decades of your life that you don’t understand well now?
Since I’ve reached my 50′s, I’ve come around to seeing how acquiring an adult man’s skill set (AMSS) at a developmentally appropriate (late teens/early 20′s in other words) has applications beyond getting into sexual relationships through dating. (And you probably wonder why I read PUA blogs and websites.) Namely, that the AMSS doesn’t exist in isolation, but it plays a role in projecting male presence and authority when you have to deal with women in other social situations, like the work place. Women tend to respect the sexually confident man more than the sexually in- or under-experienced man.
I’d like to tell younger men who have had problems with acquiring the AMSS that they need to think about these other consequences of its absence when they reach middle age. In a rational society (lots of luck getting that, despite what you LessWrong people fantasize about), parents wouldn’t leave their boys’ development of the AMSS to the haphazard. When they can see that girls don’t find their sons sexually attractive in their given state, the boys need some kind of intervention to correct that right away.
I’m going to give you some advice as a professional woman. I very deeply resent when male colleagues compete with each other to put on a display for women. This goes for social contexts (rationalists’ meetups) in addition to professional contexts (work meetings). Then women are trying to talk about code or rationality or product design. Rather than thinking about her contributions, the men are preoccupied with “projecting male presence and authority”. What does male presence even mean? Why does authority have anything to do with men, instead of, you know, being the most knowledgeable about the topic?
I’ll tell you how it comes across. It comes across as focusing on the other men and ignoring the women’s contributions. Treating the men as rivals and the women as prizes. Sucky for everyone all around. Instead of teaching boys to be “sexually attractive”, why don’t you teach them to include women in discussions and listen to them same as anyone else? Because we’re not evaluating your sons for “sexual attractiveness”. We’re just trying to get our ideas heard.
I’ll tell you how it comes across. It comes across as focusing on the other men and ignoring the women’s contributions. Treating the men as rivals and the women as prizes. Sucky for everyone all around.
Thank you for this. As a younger woman, I became reluctant to join conversations at conferences or other professional meetings because I had noticed that the dynamic of the group sometimes changed for the worse when I entered the discussion. As I get older, I’m no longer as much of a “prize”, so it doesn’t happen to me as often (which is honestly a relief), but I see it happen with other women. You’ve put nicely into words why it sucks so much—for everyone, not just women. I have to belief that it also sucks for the men who are just trying to have a good discussion, but are suddenly thrust into the middle of a sexual competition.
An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.
I find it also annoying when people cannot turn off their sexual behavior and focus on the topic, and instead disrupt the debate for everyone else. Both genders have their version.
The male version is what you described: focusing on status competition at all costs.
The female version is… essentially: “everyone, pay attention to me! I am a young fertile woman! look here! look here!”… giggling in a high-pitched voice at every opportunity, frequently inserting little “jokes” which other women often find annoying, turning attention to their body by exaggerated movements, etc. (Not sure if I described it well; I hope you know what I mean).
Not sure what to do with this. Seems like a multi-player Prisonner’s Dilemma. People who are doing this (if they are well-calibrated) receive some personal benefits at the expense of the group, so it would be hard to convince them to stop. Most likely, they would deny doing this.
But seems like men have an advantage here, because fighting for status in order to seem more attractive is trying to kill two birds with one stone. Even if it doesn’t make the man any more attractive to anyone, he still gets some status (unless he is doing it really wrong). On the other hand, when the woman fails to seem attractive, her behavior will only seem stupid.
giggling in a high-pitched voice at every opportunity, frequently inserting little “jokes” which other women often find annoying, turning attention to their body by exaggerated movements, etc. (Not sure if I described it well; I hope you know what I mean).
To me, that behavior connotes a combination of wanting to project femininity (not so much sexual behavior or attractiveness) and having lower-than-average self esteem (i.e. perceived status). It is mostly the latter that can be slightly annoying in the workplace, since such people are often unwittingly excluded from discussion (wobster109 also raises this point).
The root problem here is not so much the behavior itself, but lack of perceived status that then leads to that behavior as a kind of overcompensation. ISTM that high self esteem often boosts both social attractiveness and effectiveness in the workplace (as long as it doesn’t come with ‘Type-A’ overt aggressiveness, and even then sometimes), and that this broadly applies to both males and females.
Low self-esteem hypothesis is difficult to falsify, because whatever social role given person plays and however they behave, one could still say “but maybe deep inside they feel insecure”. Having said that… yes, this may be an instinctive reaction of a nervous woman, but I believe I have also seen high-status women doing that strategically.
Imagine a club that has informal lectures at its meetings (not LessWrong, but similar), and a 30-something woman, a long-term relatively high-status member of the club, interrupting the lectures every few minutes with some “witty” remark. That was the most annoying example I remember. It seemed to me like she was trying to immitate a behavior of a young girl, in my opinion not very successfully, exactly because some element of shyness was missing; it was only rude. Possibly she was projecting her authority against other present women. I just shrugged this behavior off as rude and forgot it afterwards, but my girlfriend later told me she wanted to kill that person. (Which I take as an evidence that the behavior was a way of intra-gender status fight.)
a 30-something woman, a long-term relatively high-status member of the club, interrupting the lectures every few minutes with some “witty” remark.
Not sure what you mean by “witty remark”, but wit and humor often connote fairly high status, as opposed to, e. g. just giggling at something or other things you mentioned. Could it be that your girlfriend was just annoyed at the sheer amount of interruptions? And yes, there may have been some intra-gender status competition involved, but males often compete in much the same way (Protip: don’t invite sealion specimens at clubs or conferences).
I’m going to give you some advice as a professional woman. I very deeply resent when male colleagues compete with each other to put on a display for women. … It comes across as focusing on the other men and ignoring the women’s contributions. Treating the men as rivals and the women as prizes. Sucky for everyone all around.
This is not what PUAs advocate as the best way of relating to women, much less in the workplace. The short version is that PUAs are advised to treat women like they would a male friend, and to see only themselves as a possible prize, never the women. While some measure of “projecting male presence and authority” might be involved, it would be a lot subtler than you are implying, and it would never get in the way of actual discussion.
You’re probably modeling your remarks on the common variety of “A-type” personalities, who also like to project dominance. But these folks are not PUAs—many things they do are just wrong and dysfunctional, particularly in a workplace environment. At the same time, we do need to care about these issues. Just focusing on “being the most knowledgeable about the topic” with no attention to social presence is not the answer. It will cause others to regard you as an obnoxious know-it-all, not a valuable asset in your team.
Some people are, sometimes. Most people are more usually either partly or entirely interested in boosting their social status and competing for mates, which are two intertwined activities.
I don’t really feel entitled to have my way in what goals others pursue in a social setting.
I think you’re projecting your feelings here into some sort of feeltopia.
For your first paragraph, can you use consequentalism to describe how well a man who doesn’t chase after the status and the women will do? In the dating market? In the job market? In the social market? Can you give me true data, that that man will have as much oppourtunities, as much chances, and as much friends as the guy that—god have mercy on our souls—does the forbidden and resentable sin of status competing?
Be aware that many men share the opposite view, and as you are A. not a man (and all that it brings with); B. have not admitted to have any insight to how men view the world; C. did not say if your views are based on researched evidence or anecdote evidence, and as such provided no reason as to why any man should review and perhaps even update considering you viewpoint, what merit do you think your view has that men are seemingly missing in the quest for statusdom?
For your second paragraph, it falls apart if you cannot bring ample evidence for the first as it’s a follow-up to it, and it also reads like generalizing from one example. I’m not a fan of superficial intelligence so I’ll explain why instead of linking you to post ZFA#24 and straight-out tell you that you seem to be in bad company if what you say is true, and that you cannot be called professional if that’s the kind of environment you are employed in daily.
I hope this post gets downvoted to oblivi.. ehrm, I mean, linked in order to solve this silly gender war bullcrap once and for all.
You’re presupposing implicit agreement from all men with the notion that women’s ideas have merit, and the agreement from all women with your notion of wanting to be included in the company of men as equals.
There is a more elegant solution that doesn’t involve your desired absurd levels of gender equality—gender self-segregation in situations where the purpose is not interacting with the opposite gender. That way. there is no pressure for competition between men, and no pressure for pretending to be men from women. Because that’s what modern “gender equality” ideology amounts to—pressuring women to act like men, disregarding their actual ideas and aspirations for the goal of eradicating femininity.
I agree with JoshuaZ. I find your solution to be a severe hindrance in real life. I am the SQL expert on my team, and my (male) coworker is the surgeries expert, and my (male) colleague across the hall is the infectious diseases expert. We all work together to make the best product possible. How can we get anything done if we are segregated by gender?
I don’t see why I need “implicit agreement from all men”. My ideas have merit because they reduce medical errors and save lives. Real-life results are the judge of that, not men. I also do not see why I need “agreement from all women”. They are not my coworkers, and they are free to live their lives as they wish. That said, I am a developer in a project meeting at a tech company. Safe to say, I want to be treated as an equal.
Finally, I don’t see what contributing to a great company has to do with “acting like men” or “pretending to be men”. My goal isn’t to “eradicate femininity”; it is to make a great product that will help people. If you think that is inherently masculine, then you’ll have to explain. So why don’t you start by telling me what “masculine” and “feminine” mean to you?
You’re presupposing implicit agreement from all men with the notion that women’s ideas have merit, and the agreement from all women with your notion of wanting to be included in the company of men as equals.
Nothing in wobster109′s comment presumed anything of the sort. Moreover, if there are men who are unable to see ideas coming from women as having merit then the problem seems to be with those men more than anything else.
But we can if you want steelman your statement slightly: If instead of the men having disagreement with the notion that women’s ideas have merit, it is possible that some men have problems at a basic level with accepting ideas from women. In that case, maybe there is an actual problem that needs to get dealt with, but even then, you need a lot more of an argument that the best solution is complete gender segregation and not trying to teach those men to accept ideas from women. And calling a solution “elegant” doesn’t make it so: indeed, this is a “solution” where we can empirically see what happens when countries like Saudi Arabia or places like Kiryas Yoel try to implement variants of it, and it isn’t pretty.
Because that’s what modern “gender equality” ideology amounts to—pressuring women to act like men, disregarding their actual ideas and aspirations for the goal of eradicating femininity
Aside from this being one of the most strawmanned possible notion of what constitutes gender equality, does it strike you at all as odd as that you are replying to an actual woman and telling her that what she wants is due to pressure from some ideology for her not act feminine? Do you see what might be either wrong with that or at least epistemologically unwise?
So, in your world, men reserve the right to define what femininity is, whereas in a gender-equal world, women get to define it. I don’t see why we should prefer your world.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m speaking of femininity as ordained by Gnon, not any human attempts to define or constrain it—in that sense, indoctrinating women into behaving like men and aspiring to masculine achievements does not amount to “gender equality”, but the systematic eradication of femininity.
There are several worrying, unquestioned assumptions in your argument: namely, that authority and competitiveness are exclusively male traits, that competition among men is inevitable in the presence of women, and that women who try to obtain and use power are “pretending to be men”. Actually, by restricting the admissible examples of femininity to those that best suit your ideal society, you are introducing your preferred definition of femininity. Shifting the blame to “Gnon” doesn’t succeed in hiding the fact that you’re the one defining “Gnon”.
But nature (because I refuse to anthropomorphize impersonal forces by giving them silly names) does not ordain a specific way of femininity or masculinity. The seahorse fish are gestated by the male, which during that period is full of prolactin. The jacana birds have a peculiar calendar of reproductive availability that resulted in the bigger and stronger females being selected by fighting over available males. The definitions of male and female aren’t cast in stone.
I’ll grant that those examples have little bearing on human societies, but even appealing to our primate past is no use: are you going with the patriarchal chimpanzee, or the matriarchal bonobo? Better, we could just abandon the naturalistic fallacy and let individual humans decide what patterns of behavior actually make them happiest.
There are several worrying, unquestioned assumptions in your argument: namely, that authority and competitiveness are exclusively male traits
Not exclusively, primarily. There’s certainly been little selection pressure for women to compete or lead as opposed to men, be it in the context of mating rights or broader societal interactions. Men are better adapted for such purposes, therefore, by taking them on, women are, by definition, acting like men.
That’s all I’m talking about—recognising the fact that men and women have certain complementary, non-overlapping aptitudes, are not literally the same, and, are better off apart in certain situations in which modern western societies force them together.
The environment we live in constitutes a new, different set of selection pressures. Features which were adaptive in the past (like dominance or aggressiveness) no longer ensure differential mating success. Willingness to negotiate roles and seek consensus is more incentivized now. Instead of promoting nostalgia for an ancestral environment that is not coming back, you could do what makes the most biological sense—adapt.
We disagree over how much it’s possible to adapt in a single generation then. Anyway, ideologies that force absurd levels of pretence at gender equality at us aren’t about adapting away these differences, they’re about pretending they don’t exist—and if you really wanted to reverse them, there are far more efficient processes to do so than ignoring them, given modern technology—but most would require acknowledging the inherent inequality in the first place. The only conclusion I can draw from the fact that nobody is pushing for this is that the gender equality movements are content to pretend to have accomplished anything by forcing people to pretend that the concept of gender equality corresponds to reality in any way.
Adaptation is actually quite efficient within one single generation: those who don’t mate, don’t mate. If enough women decide that they don’t want cavemen but feminist men, differential reproduction will sort out the results, and the next generation will feel more comfortable with a state of equality.
Edited to add: that is, assuming that opinions are genetic. They’re not. Memetics is even faster than genetics at changing attitudes toward gender roles. The son of a caveman can learn to become a feminist, and vice versa. Change can happen in less than one generation.
There will also be competition among the feminist men. Seems to me that the loudest of them are often… uhm, former cavemen who have “seen the light” and became extremists for the other side. Or guys like this one. If there is a genetic component, these guys would bring it to the future.
More generally, Goodhart’s law also applies to men signalling feminism.
When I read the phrase “adult man’s skill set”, I immediately thought about carpentry. Did everyone else think about sex, or are there other people that thought this was going to be a post about practical, traditionally manly things?
I expected it to be about what it was I think but that was more due to who the user was. I suspect if it were posted most other posters here I would have made your guess.
I can just imagine how this would’ve gone over if the gender was reversed.
I’d like to tell younger women who have had problems with acquiring the AWSS that they need to think about these other consequences of its absence when they reach middle age. In a rational society (lots of luck getting that, despite what you LessWrong people fantasize about), parents wouldn’t leave their girls’ development of the AWSS to the haphazard. When they can see that boys don’t find their daughters sexually attractive in their given state, the girls need some kind of intervention to correct that right away.
Also, I have a suspicion that advancedatheist is abusing the karma voting system in some manner because he went from −13 to 0 in a matter of a few hours.
Well, what is the best AWSS? We don’t seem to know much about this, and it strikes me as a very interesting question. Publications like COSMO try to provide women with useful advice but they are often ridiculed as useless, even a lot more than PUAs are (I guess the male equivalent would be mainstream “men’s” magazines). And there is no real female equivalent to the male PUA community—female PUAs exist but they’re such a tiny niche that we know almost nothing about the quality of their advice.
I find it strange that people get so irate over the suggestion that people develop interpersonal skills, and that their parents should help them do so if they see a lack.
You strike me as being incredibly charitable towards aa, and more to the point, incredibly uncharitable towards the people who are getting irate.
If you think I’m one of those people, I’d like to make it very clear that I do not think those particular suggestions are bad, and that is not what I’m irate about.
(Actually, I don’t think I was getting irate at aa or his posts. I’m getting irate at you, however.)
Can you really not see the difference between “if your child lacks interpersonal skills, you should help them develop them” and “if girls don’t find your son sexually attractive, he needs some kind of intervention to correct that right away”? Or do you just expect everyone to make the mental effort to read the latter as the former, regardless of the history of the person speaking?
I may be being uncharitable towards you right now, but I really have no conception of how you could be genuinely confused here.
Also, relevant to the thread: I have now been karma-bombed. (Not my most recent few comments, but ~15 of my comments in a row have suddenly been downvoted.)
incredibly uncharitable towards the people who are getting irate.
In general I’m not that sympathetic to people who feel entitled to charity from me, and get irate if they don’t get it.
Can you really not see the difference between “if your child lacks interpersonal skills, you should help them develop them” and “if girls don’t find your son sexually attractive, he needs some kind of intervention to correct that right away”?
I see lots of differences. Instead of me playing detective on the particulars of just what you find so offensive, could you just say it?
I may be being uncharitable towards you right now, but I really have no conception of how you could be genuinely confused here.
I have my theories, but much prefer not to shadow box with my own theories of someone else’s theories. Spell it out, and then we can both see how much and how we agree or disagree.
Or do you just expect everyone to make the mental effort to read the latter as the former, regardless of the history of the person speaking?
What I expect and what I recommend are different things. I recommend that when people read, they try to see what value they can extract from what they read.
If they’re spoiling for a fight against someone with a history, they should pick the battles where they have the clear upper hand based on the text as given. Arguing against supposed dog whistles either leaves you missing the point, or it plays right into any dog whistler’s hands, making you look like a putz to third parties. If he says horrific things, wait for when he does, then shit hammer him.
I recall a similar conversation with a guy I follow on youtube. He had a video attacking someone, which, given enough context, his attack made some sense, because his target was dog whistling up a storm. But I think to third parties, he ended up looking like a bozo, arguing against statements that were perfectly innocuous to the average reader. It’s a loser of a tactic, even when you’re right about the dog whistles. Especially when you’re right about the dog whistles.
I complained that you were uncharitably misrepresenting my position. You say I’m not entitled to charity, but your representation of my position doesn’t come close to anything I ever said. This isn’t merely you not-being-charitable, this is you being either actively uncharitable, or arguing against imagined dog whistles, or something that isn’t engaging with either what I said or what I meant.
(You may say that you never mentioned me, and that’s so. But if you weren’t including me in “people get so irate”, who specifically did you mean?)
I’m not here looking for a fight with aa. I mostly just ignore him. I replied to you, when you said “this seems like good advice”, and I said that the advice you had taken from aa’s post was a much weaker version of what he had actually said, and that aa’s history makes me disinclined to engage with him.
You’re telling me that I should attack aa based on the text he actually wrote, but you’re the one who turned “if girls don’t find your son sexually attractive, he needs some kind of intervention to correct that right away” into “if your child lacks interpersonal skills, you should help them develop them”.
When you say “I find it strange that...”, I want to know if you actually do find it strange. I don’t think it matters what differences I see in the two statements. Suppose it turns out that actually, aa’s advice-as-written is sensible and he was right all along and I’m wrong. Fine. Nevertheless, right now I think his advice-as-written is bad, and you’re telling us that advice he didn’t write is good, and I want to know if you can tell the difference between what he did and didn’t write. You don’t need to see the same differences as I do, you just need to be able to see enough differences that you understand why people might be okay with one and not the other.
Do you actually think that people are getting irate at “the suggestion that people develop interpersonal skills, and that their parents should help them do so if they see a lack”? Because if so, I claim that you are just flat out wrong. That is not what aa suggested, and it’s not what people are getting irate about.
(I don’t want to say exactly what it is that I don’t like about aa’s advice-as-written. I don’t want to put in the time to do it justice, I don’t want to write a not-quite-right version and open myself up to nitpicking, I don’t think it’s a productive avenue of discussion right now, and I’m not convinced that you aren’t just asking as a distraction. This is a can of worms that I decline to open.)
And actually, when I say “I want to know”, that’s a rhetorical flourish. I don’t really care. What I started this post trying to say was: I think you’re being (perhaps deliberately) obtuse, and I don’t think I want to continue engaging with you on this. I’ve put more time and emotional energy into this discussion than I care to admit, and I don’t think it’s paying off. There are probably things you can say in reply that would change my mind, but by default, I’m done here.
Dog-whistle politics: saying things that some subset of your audience will recognize as having a meaning special to their tribe (and of which they approve) but that go straight over the heads of the rest of your audience (which perhaps would be displeased if they noticed you paying special attention to that subset, or if they understood what you were saying to them).
Yes, I noticed that too. It seems to happen most frequently to me shortly after getting into political discussions (in a broad sense that includes e.g. questions of race and gender). The obvious hypotheses are (1) the quality of my comments goes way down when I post about politics, (2) there are trigger-happy downvoters out there of various political leanings, and (3) there are, more specifically, trigger-happy downvoters whose political leanings are opposed to mine. #1 might be true but (as you remark) the downvoting seems to be quite indiscriminate and to affect comments I can see no reasonable objection to. #2 and #3 are both fairly plausible but the clearest-but particular cases of mass-downvoting we’ve had happen to be from a neoreactionary, favouring #3. (And of course my political opponents are, as such, Objectively Evil and therefore that’s just the sort of thing they would do.)
My policy when I notice this sort of thing is to post more. Posting a comment has positive expected karma for me even when I’m being mass-downvoted, and my interpretation of mass-downvoting is that it’s meant to be intimidatory; for those who can afford it, the best response to attempted intimidation is to refuse to be intimidated.
For what it’s worth, I think those comments of yours were probably downvoted “honestly”—by which I mean not that I agree with the downvoters, but that I think each comment was downvoted by someone who specifically didn’t like that comment, rather than by someone who disliked something else you’d written and wanted to punish you harder than they could by downvoting just the thing they didn’t like.
(I do have the impression—to which your examples are relevant—that left-leaning comments get downvoted by right-leaning users here more often than the other way around, even though we have rather more left-leaning than right-leaning users. I don’t trust that impression very much since it’s easy to see how it could be wrong.)
Frequency is variable. Every few months, perhaps. I haven’t noticed multiple people (or sockpuppets) doing it concurrently—each downvoted comment just gets −1.
This is the theory. In reality, it’s mostly ideological opponents who accuse the speaker of using dog-whistles, whereas supporters understand the words at face values, which is precisely the opposite of what the theory would predict. So, for example, Democrats often say that Republican policies to restrain welfare spending are racist dog-whistles—but how would they know? Surely the very theory of dog-whistles should predict that Democrats wouldn’t recognise that these are racist claims. Whereas Republicans swear up and down that they really do believe in low government spending and not rewarding sloth. In the end, if you can hear the dog-whistle, you are the dog.
I think the real meaning of “dog-whistle politics” is trying to ascribe an unpleasant secret meaning to your ideological opponents’ straightforward positions, and therefore avoid the unpleasant task of having to consider whether their ideas may have merit.
For the avoidance of doubt, I was not endorsing any claim that anyone is dog-whistling, I was explaining what the term means. Having said which:
supporters understand the words at face value
I don’t think we know this is true. (It may be true that supporters generally say they understand the words at face value, but since dog-whistling accusations often concern things one is Not Supposed To Say it wouldn’t be surprising if supporters claim to take the words at face value even if they hear the whistling loud and clear.)
the very theory of dog-whistles should predict that Democrats wouldn’t recognise that these are racist claims
No, I don’t think that’s the claim—I think you’re taking the metaphor too literally. What it predicts is that these claims should have an innocent face-value meaning but also be understandable by their intended audience as saying something else that the speaker doesn’t want to say explicitly; that’s all.
I think the real meaning [...] is [...]
I think it is most likely that (1) it sometimes does happen that politicians and others say things intended to convey a message to some listeners while, at least, maintaining plausible deniability and/or avoiding overt offence to others, and (2) it sometimes does happen that politicians and others get accused of doing this when in fact they had no such intention. Because both of those seem like things that would obviously often serve the purposes of the people in question, and I can’t see what would stop them happening.
(In some cases the speaker may expect the implicit meaning to be clearly understood by both supporters and opponents, but just want to avoid saying something dangerous too explicitly. Maybe those cases shouldn’t be categorized as dog-whistling, but I think there’s a continuum from there to the cases where the message is intended not to be heard by everyone.)
When you say “In reality” and “the real meaning [...] is”, are you claiming that the phenomenon described on (e.g.) that Wikipedia page never, or scarcely ever, actually happens? To take a couple of prominent examples, would you really want to claim that
or that they don’t also intend “family values” to sound more warm-and-fuzzy-and-positive than, say, “opposition to same-sex marriage, treating transgender people as belonging to whatever gender they were assigned at birth, opposition to abortion”, and all the other specific things that actually distinguish those organizations dedicated to “family” and “values” from their ideological opponents?
during the US Democratic primaries in 2008, nothing Hillary Clinton’s campaign said and did was intended to highlight Barack Obama’s race in ways that would make him less appealing to white voters, and nothing Obama’s campaign said and did was intended to highlight his race in ways that would make him more appealing to black voters?
OK, that’s fair. It’s possible that the sympathetic hear the alleged dog-whistle but deny it, although I still think our default assumption should be to believe the supporters unless we have specific evidence otherwise. But we are still left with the puzzle of why opponents can hear the allegedly inaudible whistle.
What it predicts is that these claims should have an innocent face-value meaning but also be understandable by their intended audience as saying something else that the speaker doesn’t want to say explicitly; that’s all.
No. Let’s look at what wikipedia says:
Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup.
You’re now trying to water down dog-whistling to a mere ‘plausible deniablity.’ These are two distinct theories:
When I say ‘aqueducts are bad’ most people think I’m arguing about the government’s aqueduct-building. But members of the Anti-Bristol Society understand this to mean that I really want to persecute Bristolians, and so will vote for me. (Dog-whistling).
When I say ‘aqueducts are bad’ everyone understands that I really mean that I want to persecute Bristolians, and that I’m reaching out to the Anti-Bristol Society. But because I didn’t say I want to persecute Bristolians, I have just enough plausible deniability to not get thrown out of polite society. (Plausible deniability).
Note that these two ideas are essentially opposites.
When you say “In reality” and “the real meaning [...] is”, are you claiming that the phenomenon described on (e.g.) that Wikipedia page never, or scarcely ever, actually happens?
Scarcely ever. Consider the example from the UK—how on earth is that dog-whistling? Both the Conservative manifesto at the last election and the official policy of the Coalition government explicitly state the goal of limiting immigration. These policies have been criticised as, inter alia, racist. So they run adverts arguing that “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration.” Where’s the dog whistle? Isn’t the simpler story that they’re trying to defend their stated policies? If this is a dog-whistle, what is the content of the dog-whistle, over and above their policies? What’s the payoff? It doesn’t really make sense.
Regarding your specific examples:
I have no idea how those specific organisations, with which I have no particular familiarity, react to an individual phrase.
Republicans certainly intend “family values” to sound more warm-and-fuzzy and positive than “heteronormativity.” But there is a world of difference between using the most positive language to describe your own position and the most negative to describe the opposition (pro-choice vs pro-death, death tax vs estate tax, Obamacare vs Affordable Care Act, etc) and dog-whistling, or even plausible deniability. Social conservatives are not hiding anything by saying they favour “family values.” They are perfectly willing to defend each and every one of the policy planks, but they want one phrase to sum it all up.
I’ll never be able to prove that nothing they did was intended like that. But I certainly don’t believe that the most-remarked-on incident (Bill Clinton comparing Obama’s win in the South Carolina primary to Jesse Jackson’s win in the South Carolina primary) was in any way a dog-whistle, and I certainly do believe that what really happened there was that an innocuous comment was seized upon by people as a stick with which to beat Clinton, with the convenient excuse that the very innocuousness of the comment is the evidence for its malignity, because the evil is somehow hidden.
You’re now trying to water down dog-whistling to a mere ‘plausible deniability’
Actually, I said a couple of paragraphs later: “Maybe those cases shouldn’t be categorized as dog-whistling, but I think there’s a continuum from there to the cases where the message is intended not to be heard by everyone.” I disagree with your statement that these cases “are essentially opposites”; they have in common (1) an innocuous face-value meaning and (2) a less-innocuous meaning intended to appeal to a subset of the audience. In cases of either type I would expect the speaker to prefer the less-innocuous meaning not to be apparent to most listeners. The only difference is in how hard they’ve tried to achieve that, and with what success.
(And if a politician is sending not-too-explicit messages of affiliation to people whose views I detest, actually I don’t care all that much how hard he’s trying to have me not notice.)
we are still left with the puzzle of why opponents can hear the allegedly inaudible whistle.
Leaving aside (since I agree that it’s doubtful that they should be classified as dog-whistling, though I disagree that they’re “essentially opposite”) cases where the goal is merely plausible deniability: this is puzzling only if opponents in general can easily hear it, but I think what’s being claimed by those who claim to discover “dog-whistling” is that they’ve noticed someone sending messages that are clearly audible to (whoever) but discernible by the rest of the population only when they listen extra-carefully, have inside information, etc. (Of course once it’s been pointed out, the inside information is more widely available and people are prepared to listen more carefully—so fairly soon after an alleged dog-whistle is publicized it becomes less dog-whistle-y. If someone says now what Reagan said earlier about welfare abusers, their political opponents would notice instantly and flood them with accusations of covert racism; but when Reagan actually said those things before, they weren’t immediately seen that way. Note that I am making no comment here about whether he actually was dog-whistling, just pointing out that what’s relevant is how the comments were perceived before the fuss about dog-whistling began.)
Consider the example from the UK
An advertisement saying “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration” isn’t dog-whistling, and I don’t think anyone claims it is. (Some people might claim it’s lying, but that’s a different accusation entirely.) But if there are a lot of people around who are (but wouldn’t admit that they are) anti-immigration because they don’t want more black people in the UK, then vocal opposition to immigration may convey to those people the message “we prefer white people too”, and some of what a political party says about immigration may be designed to help the racists feel that way.
Whether any of what the Conservatives say about immigration would rightly be classified that way, I don’t know. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to what they’ve said about immigration. (I’m pretty sure they’re happy enough to get a slice of the racist vote, but that on its own isn’t dog-whistling.)
The payoff, if they are deliberately courting the racist vote, would be that racists in the UK feel that the Conservatives aren’t merely cautious about immigration in general but will pursue policies that tend to keep black people out of the UK (that would be the content of the dog-whistle over and above their explicit policies), and accordingly are more inclined to vote for them rather than turning to (say) the BNP or UKIP than they would have been without that reassurance.
“family values”
It seems likely to me that at least some social conservatives some of the time are intending this to suggest more than they would be happy defending explicitly—e.g., a willingness to get Roe v Wade overturned if it looks politically feasible, or to obstruct the teaching of evolution as fact in school science lessons, or to restrict the rights of same-sex couples.
(Imagine that you are a socially conservative politician. A substantial fraction of the votes you get are going to come from conservative Christians. If you have a choice of two ways to express yourself, no different in their explicit commitments, little different in their impact on people who will be voting against you anyway—but one of them makes it that bit more likely that your conservative Christian listeners will see you as one of them and turn out to vote for you … wouldn’t you be inclined to choose that one? And isn’t that exactly what’s meant by “dog-whistling”?)
An advertisement saying “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration” isn’t dog-whistling, and I don’t think anyone claims it is.
Yet according to the Wikipedia article you linked, that was claimed to be “the classic case of dog-whistling.” So I find this discussion frustrating because you don’t seem willing to come to terms with how the phrase is actually used.
What the page says was called the classic case of dog-whistling is a whole advertising campaign.
I checked what Goodin’s book (cited at that point in the Wikipedia article) actually says. It doesn’t reference any specific advertisements in the campaign, and in particular doesn’t describe the specific one you picked out as dog-whistling. It does, however, say this:
The fact that the practice is noticed, that it has acquired a name and a bad press, suggests that the message is not literally inaudible to others beyond its intended target. They have noticed it. And by identifying the trick and giving it a name, they have (after a fashion) worked out a way around it.
all of which seems to be in line with what I’ve been saying.
[EDITED to fix a spelling and add: I don’t have a copy of Goodin’s book; I checked it using Amazon’s “look inside” feature. This means that while I was able to look up the bit quoted in Wikipedia and the bit I quoted above, I couldn’t see the whole chapter. I did, however, search for “not racist” (two key words from the specific advertisement you mentioned) and get no hits, which I think genuinely means they don’t appear—it searches the whole book even though it will only show you a small fraction.]
Surely the very theory of dog-whistles should predict that Democrats wouldn’t recognise that these are racist claims.
That shows that they wouldn’t recognize a well done dog-whistle, but they may still recognize a poorly done one where the Republicans attempt to make it something only racists understand, but do not succeed at doing so.
I think the real meaning of “dog-whistle politics” is trying to ascribe an unpleasant secret meaning to your ideological opponents’ straightforward positions
You describe the flip side of dog whistle politics, which are false accusations of dog whistle politics. I think both happen.
Sometimes the accusations are justified, but it is an extremely poisonous tactic to the discussion, and even to your own thinking. It’s easy to project secret evil intent where you already have some fundamental disagreement with a person, and it relieves you of actually having to confront the argument as given. “He really means...”
As I noted before, in forums like these, where people come in and out of threads, and haven’t read all that goes on, I think the accusations are an extra loser, as you just end up looking like a putz, objecting to the unobjectionable.
Argue against posts as given.
if you can hear the dog-whistle, you are the dog
That’s a catchy comeback on the less than perfect metaphor, but not literally true. Sometimes people really do dog whistle, and sometimes you can hear it even if you’re not the dog (the intended audience).
I find it strange that people get so irate over the suggestion that people develop interpersonal skills, and that their parents should help them do so if they see a lack.
In our society I think there’s a belief that most instances where parents try to interfere with dating choices of their children it doesn’t help.
A lot of liberal minded parents don’t think that attempts by their parents to intervene in their dating lives were positive, so they don’t try to intervene for their children.
The choice to use an abbreviation for AWSS is also worth noting. People with normal social skills usually don’t speak about AWSS. Using language that produces emotional detachment is typical PUA-thing.
In our society I think there’s a belief that most instances where parents try to interfere with dating choices of their children it doesn’t help.
I think people children tend not to want their parents to try to choose their partners, but at least in my social circles, I think it was quite rare for parents to try to impart relationship/dating skills into their children.
People with normal social skills usually don’t speak about AWSS. Using language that produces emotional detachment is typical PUA-thing.
Specialized in group jargon and acronyms show up in a lot of places. One nearby that I can think of.
Specialized in group jargon and acronyms show up in a lot of places.
I’m not criticizing it for being jargon.
A word like “steelmanning” is also jargon. But it’s not in the same category emotional distancing as “AMSS”.
There are also times where intellectual distance is useful. In academia you don’t want emotions to interfere with your reasoning. In the case of PUA, the language allows suppression of approach anxiety. Intellectual distance allows a PUA to run his routine without interferes of his emotions. At the same time prevents real emotional connection to see interactions with the goal of maximizing the amount of k-close, n-closes and f-closes.
In our society I think there’s a belief that most instances where parents try to interfere with dating choices of their children it doesn’t help.
An excellent point, although I think this belief is much more widespread among liberals than conservatives. And I think it’s part of a larger point, which is that liberals seem to be far more negative across the board towards parental involvement in their children’s lives. I vividly remember my own shock and incomprehension when I first encountered this attitude—that young people need to challenge, overturn, or break free from parental authority. I still have to remind myself that some people think like this, because it’s so alien to my understanding of the world. For me it is completely natural that I would want my parents to intervene in my dating life—whether to set me up with someone they considered suitable, to warn me against someone unsuitable, to advise me that I am lacking, or whatever else—because they know me better than anyone else, and they can only have my best interests at heart. Of course I should try and adopt and carry on my parents values as best I can. And so on. I don’t think it’s purely a liberal/conservative thing, but I do think it’s part of it.
Examples: I recently saw this article cited as an example of unfit parenting because they see their kids as “raw materials for their culture cloning project,” and I saw this post heavily upvoted. My reactions were exactly opposite—my reaction was to applaud the Christians’ attempts to pass down their values (although I do not personally share them) and to sigh at what seemed like the narcissism of the Lesswrong poster.
Predictions (Because any theory is worthless if it doesn’t make them): I predict that conservatives would be much more willing than liberals to support statements like “Parents should make sure their sons grow up with manly skills” and “Parents should intervene when they see their children making bad choices in their romantic lives.”
I vividly remember my own shock and incomprehension when I first encountered this attitude—that young people need to challenge, overturn, or break free from parental authority. I still have to remind myself that some people think like this, because it’s so alien to my understanding of the world.
That’s interesting. I come from the entirely opposite side—it’s not really comprehensible to me how and why parents feel the need to run their childrens’ lives past late teens. And here you are, in the bit-flesh :-)
Being an adult is partly about taking responsibility for one’s own life.
The man who talks to a woman because his mother told him to do so, might lack qualities of manly social interaction.
Predictions (Because any theory is worthless if it doesn’t make them): I predict that conservatives would be much more willing than liberals to support statements like “Parents should make sure their sons grow up with manly skills” and “Parents should intervene when they see their children making bad choices in their romantic lives.”
I would say that there’s a version of advancedatheist’s comment (and many of his other comments) which is giving good advice based on truthful premises, but it’s not this version, and advancedatheist gets approximately zero benefit of the doubt at this point.
Like, yes, it is probably true that failing to develop a complete social skill set will cause you social problems later in life, even in those parts of life that are not to do with sex or dating. Turns out, social skills are also used in the workplace.
But taken in context, that advice reads more like “men should learn the skills to help them pick up women, and this will help them in the workplace”, which needs a lot more justification. And we also get “if girls aren’t attracted to your son, you need to fix your son”, which… there might be a nugget of value somewhere nearby in advice-space, but as written it has so many issues that all I feel like saying is “fuck that”.
(I don’t feel like continuing to pay the karma tax, so I probably won’t continue this.)
Edit (because I’d like to make an unrelated point without paying the tax twice): I also feel like there’s a common theme in aa’s posts in the open thread. He’ll ask a question that sounds fairly generally applicable and rationality-related. Then he’ll say something which is related to the question, but which mostly sounds like it’s about PUA from the perspective of assuming PUA is (good/true/praiseworthy/whatever).
And then consider the comment “some blogger wrote about AI. I don’t know why he bothers to blog, he doesn’t get as many comments as popular bloggers like ”. (Admittedly, I don’t actually recognise all those names.) Why those specific bloggers? If someone were to actually attempt to compile a list of blogs based on their popularity, would any of those names come up? Does Carrico have anything in common with those people? Why even bring up the question of why Carrico bothers?
aa doesn’t seem to be posting in good faith here. He just seems to have an agenda of popularising PUA (with perhaps a side order of neoreaction or something along those lines), and while I don’t dislike PUA as much as some, I would like him to shut up and go away.
I’m not saying this for the benefit of aa, because I’m pretty sure he knows what he’s doing and engaging with him would be unhelpful. But for the benefit of others who wonder why he seems to get downvoted so much: this is why I, personally, am quick to downvote him, and I imagine others are similar. (I don’t downvote him automatically, however.)
″...he doesn’t get as many comments as popular bloggers like ” [...] Admittedly, I don’t actually recognise all those names.
Most of those aren’t PUA bloggers, actually, although they do recognizably share a certain cluster of perspectives. Megan McArdle is a libertarianish policy blogger with the Atlantic. Vox Day is mainly a spec-fic blogger, lately notorious for association with what SSC readers might recognize as l’affaire du reproductively viable worker ants. Steve Sailer is hard for me to classify, but in this crowd he’d probably be best known for what I’ll politely describe as contrarian views on race.
If I had to guess, I’d say they’re probably just the most famous bloggers that a specific right-of-center geek happened to have read recently.
He just seems to have an agenda of popularising PUA (with perhaps a side order of neoreaction or something along those lines), and while I don’t dislike PUA as much as some, I would like him to shut up and go away.
Yeah, this is about what I thought.
It seems to me that ideologically based group karma bombing is a general violation of the norms necessary for a civilized community, but it happens here fairly frequently, and it happens predominantly in one ideological direction.
All sorts of people charge about on their hobby horses around here. Are you so quick to karma bomb the riders who are more ideologically sympatico with you? Not so much, right?
I suppose it’s rather useless of me to complain. You want him to shut up. You and your ideological compatriots have achieved the next best thing—disappearing his posts into the karma memory hole. Mission Accomplished.
What do you suppose would happen if people more of my ideological ilk started to respond in kind? Isn’t tit for tat the game theoretic appropriate response?
That’s both an unfair and unwarranted response. First of all, there’s been “karma bombing” of a variety of different forms by people of different political tribes here, the most prominent of course being Eugine_Nier and his sockpuppets systematic downvoting of all comments of people whose politics he disliked. Second of all, there’s a big difference between karma bombing in the Eugine sense and people as individuals downvoting individual comments that are overly political. Third of all, part of the problem here is that AA shoves his politics into almost every single post even when the connection is at most very tenuous. I suspect I’m thought of by people here as more on the “left” but I’m pretty sure that if someone was throwing into comments asides about how the Republican party was racist or sexist, or similar remarks, I’d downvote that person and they’d end up in a pretty similar situation. Fourth of all, at least one user below has made clear that they have some sympathies with AA’s viewpoints and downvoted him because the comment’s quality and general politics made it not good content.
Arguing that this is about one side downvoting people from the other side really misses what is going on here.
First: Indeed, Eugene violated civilized norms, and was booted. What a strange coincidence that it was an unprogressive fellow that got booted. That’s as much evidence for my thesis as against.
Second: Ah, so AA saying that people should attend to their game is being “overly political”. Seems a stretch. I guess for some people everything is political, but if so, complaining that a post is political makes little sense.
Third: I thought voting a person down was a no no. That was what made Eugine’s downvoting a crime, no? I thought we were supposed to be downvoting a post based on it’s own content. I note that the response I received “I would like him to shut up and go away” in justification of the downvoting. Where are the villagers and their pitchforks calling for banning the miscreant?
but I’m pretty sure that if someone was throwing into comments asides about how the Republican party was racist or sexist, or similar remarks, I’d downvote that person and they’d end up in a pretty similar situation.
Your certainty is misplaced. I was involved in exactly the kind of case you posit, where someone basically cast conservatives as in league with Lucifer, and he was upvoted to the moon. When I called him on it, I was downvoted to oblivion. He had the decency to engage the issue, and eventually agreed that he had unfairly maligned conservatives, and hadn’t really realized he had done it at the time. Would you be so surprised if you had been one of the people upvoting his original post with it’s slur against conservatives?
Fourth: “comment’s quality and general politics made it not good content.”
As for the quality, it was the clear expression of an idea relevant to winning that you don’t hear so often. I call it a good point. It is the Open Thread after all. I don’t expect dissertations here.
As for the “general politics”—what would that be? It’s political to suggest that your interpersonal skills have a large effect on your life, so you should see about getting good at them? We shouldn’t talk about interpersonal skills?
The equivalence I think you’re appealing to doesn’t look real to me. Let’s suppose you’re right about what’s happened to advancedatheist: he posts something with a particular political/social leaning, lots of leftish people don’t like it, and they pile on and downvote it into oblivion. Contrast with what Eugine is alleged (with good evidence, I think) to have done: someone posts something with a particular political/social leaning, Eugine doesn’t like it, and he downvotes 50 of their other comments. Two key differences: (1) In the first case, the thing getting zapped is the comment that these people disapprove of; in the second, it’s a whole lot of comments there’s nothing wrong with even by Eugine’s lights other than who posted them. (2) In the first case, each person is downvoting something they disapprove of; the total karma hit advancedatheist gets is in proportion to the number of disapproving people and the number of disapproved comments; in the second, Eugine is doing it all himself; the total karma hit his target gets is limited only by Eugine’s patience.
“I would like him to shut up and go away”
No doubt it’s very disagreeable to want someone to shut up and go away. But rather than cherrypicking those 10 words, let’s take a look at the context—which seems to me to have (again, by coincidence) two key differences from that of EN’s karmattacks. (1) philh is making a very specific accusation about advancedatheist: that he is not participating here in good faith because he seems only really to be interested in popularizing PUA, even in discussions that have basically nothing to do with it. I don’t know whether philh is right or wrong about this, but I’m pretty sure Eugine couldn’t and wouldn’t have claimed with a straight face that the people he karma-bombed here are (e.g.) only posting to spread left-wing ideas or feminist ideas or whatever. It seems to me that there’s a big, big difference between “X is on the wrong side politically; therefore, I would like him to shut up and go away” and “X is trying to force his pet single issue into every discussion on LW and contributing little else; therefore, I would like him to shut up and go away”. (2) What philh is owning up to doing to advancedatheist on account of this is not the same as what Eugine is alleged to have done to lots of people. Eugine: downvoting dozens of comments merely because they’re posted by one of his targets and afford an opportunity to inflict downvotes. philh: being quick on the trigger when he sees a low-quality comment from advancedatheist. Again: big difference between “I would like X to go away, so I’ll downvote all his comments until he does” and “I would like X to go away, so when he says something I think is of low quality I’ll downvote it more readily than I would a similar comment from someone else”.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not endorsing the behaviour I think philh has admitted to here. I think it would be better if he didn’t do it. Someone who’s abusing the community by spamming LW with single-issue stuff is going to get downvoted to hell purely on his comments’ actual merits, with no need for the itchy trigger finger, and that’s a good thing. (And I think it’s what’s been happening to advancedatheist.)
I was involved in exactly the kind of case you posit, where someone basically cast conservatives as in league with Lucifer
No, he really didn’t. Not remotely. This is the article in question. (Right?) There’s nothing there remotely like casting conservatives as in league with Lucifer. What there is—and I think this is what Kaj later agreed you were right about—is something much less stupid, less harmful, and less likely to be the result of ill will: in one place he gave an example involving social conservatives’ thinking about liberals’ legislative preferences regarding homosexuality, and he didn’t do a very good job of getting inside social conservatives’ heads, and consequently his description was inaccurate and made them sound sillier and more unreasonable than they (typically) actually are. That’s all.
(To put it differently: I suggest that nothing Kaj wrote was any more inaccurate or uncharitable than your description of him, just now, as having cast conservatives as in league with Lucifer.)
In any case, Kaj’s article is irrelevant here, and would be even if he’d been much ruder about social conservatives than he actually was. Because JoshuaZ’s complaint about advancedatheist is that he shoves highly-charged political asides into comments about other things. Whereas Kaj’s whole post was, precisely, about how people think about their political opponents. No matter what he said there, there’s no way it could have been an example of the behaviour JoshuaZ is criticizing advancedatheist for.
Contrast with what Eugine is alleged (with good evidence, I think) to have done: someone posts something with a particular political/social leaning, Eugine doesn’t like it, and he downvotes 50 of their other comments.
I confirm that this is what Azathoth123 has done. (I assume with high probability that Azathoth123 is Eugine, but I cannot confirm that. Since both are banned, I don’t care anymore.) Even towards new users. A new user comes, posts dozen comments, receives one downvote per each, leaves LW and doesn’t return again. One of the comments happened to be political, the remaining ones were just the kind of comments we usually have here. No other downvotes for that user from anyone else. This in my opinion is much more harmful than downvoting old users who usually have high enough karma that they are in no danger of returning to zero, and they understand that it is only one person punishing them for having expressed a political opinion, not a consensus of the whole website.
It is a completely different behavior from downvoting the political comment and leaving the other comments untouched. From this kind of feedback people can learn “don’t post this kind of comments”. From the Eugine’s kind of feedback, the only lesson is “someone here doesn’t like you (and doesn’t even bother to explain why), go away”. And Eugine’s algorithm for giving this feedback is far from representative for the LessWrong culture.
The equivalence I think you’re appealing to doesn’t look real to me.
It’s not identical, but similar.
In the first case, each person is downvoting something they disapprove of
First, I think there as a fair bit of disapproving because of a person they disapprove of, because of his views. The comments against the post seem to include a lot of analysis of AA’s general behavior, not specific textual analysis of the post.
advancedatheist gets approximately zero benefit of the doubt at this point.
That’s about the person, not about the particular post. A particular chunk of text doesn’t need a “benefit of the doubt”, it needs to be read.
Voting down a post because of the person, and not the post, was the primary charge against Eugine. If he voted down 50 votes, but detailed the specific failings of each post, what grounds would there have been to boot him?
Second, Eugine’s crime was the violation of list norms on the use of karma. Is it not a violation of the professed list norms to vote an article down just because you disapprove of their views?
that he is not participating here in good faith because he seems only really to be interested in popularizing PUA
Since when is it bad faith to have a particular hobby horse that one rides? I see a lot of “ethical altruism” posts and comments. You voting those down too?
And no, what people are doing here is not existentially identical to what Eugine did. “Not exactly the same as the tarred and feathered pariah” is not exactly the greatest defense.
Let’s suppose you’re right about what’s happened to advancedatheist: he posts something with a particular political/social leaning, lots of leftish people don’t like it, and they pile on and downvote it into oblivion.
OK, let’s suppose I’m right. That’s usually a good bet.
Do you consider such behavior acceptable? Desirable? Consistent with the professed norms of behavior of the list?
No, he really didn’t. Not remotely. This is the article in question. (Right?)
Argue with him about it if you like. I did my time on that one.
Kaj’s article is perfectly relevant to JoshuaZ’s claim here:
that if someone was throwing into comments asides about how the Republican party was racist or sexist, or similar remarks, I’d downvote that person and they’d end up in a pretty similar situation.
The scenario he described happened, and the author did not end up in a similar situation as AA. Far from it, he was applauded.
Yes, giving (or not giving) someone the benefit of the doubt on a particular occasion involves your opinions about the personally and not just what they’ve done on that occasion. No, I don’t see why that should be a problem. (Suppose an LW poster whom you know to be sensible and intelligent posts something that seems surprisingly stupid. I hope you’ll give serious consideration to the possibility that you’ve misunderstood, or they’re being ironic, or there’s some subtlety they’ve seen and you haven’t. Failing that, you’ll probably guess that for whatever reason they’re having a bad day. Whereas if someone whose contributions you regard as generally useless posts something stupid-looking you’ll probably just think “oh yeah, them again”. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that.)
The worst problem with mass-downvoting of the sort Eugine got booted for isn’t that his voting wasn’t completely blind to who wrote the things he was voting on. It’s that it ignored everything else.
(And: Yes, it is a violation of the professed norms around here to vote something down just because you disapprove of its author’s views. You ask that question as if we’re faced with a bunch of examples of people doing that, but I’m not seeing them.)
Hobby horses
LW has a bunch of pet topics. Effective altruism has (not always by that name) always been one of them. If someone only ever posts on LW about effective altruism, that in itself doesn’t make their contributions unhelpful. PUA is not in that situation; my impression is that a few people on LW are really interested in it, a (larger) few are really offended by it, and most just aren’t interested. So someone posting only about PUA is (all else being equal) providing much less value to LW than someone posting only about EA.
But all else is not equal. What advancedatheist is accused of isn’t merely posting only about PUA, it’s shoehorning PUA into discussions where it doesn’t belong. If someone did that with EA, I think there would be plenty of complaints and downvotes flying around after a while.
“Not exactly the same”
“Not exactly the same as the tarred-and-feathered pariah” is a pretty good defence, when the attack it’s facing is “see, you’re doing the same as the tarred-and-feathered pariah”. And actually what I’m saying is “Quite substantially less bad than the tarred-and-feathered pariah”. And you may recall that it was controversial whether Eugine should be sanctioned for his actions; so what I’m saying is actually “Quite substantially less bad than that guy whose behaviour we had trouble deciding whether to punish”.
Piling on
If someone posts something lots of people don’t like for political reasons and it gets jumped on for political reasons: no, I don’t like it much. Nor for that matter if they post something lots of people do like for political reasons and it gets upvoted to the skies.
It may at this point be worth remarking that, so far as I can see, advancedatheist’s comments are not heavily downvoted overall right now. Maybe that’s partly because of this discussion; I don’t know. But it doesn’t actually seem as if he’s being greatly harmed, or his comments being effectively silenced, on account of their political content.
Anyway: as I say, I think it’s a shame if something gets a huge pile of negative karma merely for being politically unpopular. But unacceptable or inconsistent with professed norms hereabouts? No, I don’t think so.
Kaj’s comments on social conservatives
I didn’t dispute that Kaj agreed he’d been too negative about social conservatives. I did dispute (and continue to dispute) that he did anything remotely resembling saying that they’re in league with Lucifer. What Kaj agreed with you about was the first of those; what you’ve claimed here and I’ve disagreed with is the second.
And no—for reasons I’ve already given, but you’ve completely ignored—it was not an instance of the scenario JoshuaZ described. Because
what JoshuaZ described was someone chucking in irrelevant anti-Republican comments into discussions they’re irrelevant to; whereas
Kaj’s article was all about dealing with political disagreement, a lot of it was about how important it is to understand your political opponents and not strawman them, and it just happened he didn’t do as good a job as he should have of doing that (even though, as I think we agree, he was trying to).
These are not remotely the same thing. Irrelevant politically-charged asides versus mentioning politics in an article about politics. Overt hostility to a particular group versus limited ability to portray a group accurately.
(Also: you can only cast one vote on a given article. The paragraph you didn’t like was one of dozens. I see no reason to think that what got Kaj’s article applauded and upvoted was that he misrepresented social conservatives rather than all the other stuff in it. Is it your opinion that if an article or comment contains anything in it that is less than perfectly charitable to the author’s political opponents, it should be downvoted? You might want to be careful about your answer.)
[I had mistakenly replied to my own post instead of yours. ]
Yes, giving (or not giving) someone the benefit of the doubt
It shouldn’t be about him, it should be about his post. Maybe he’s in league with Lucifer too, but that doesn’t make any of his posts any more true or false.
you’ll probably guess that for whatever reason they’re having a bad day. Whereas if someone whose contributions you regard as generally useless posts something stupid-looking you’ll probably just think “oh yeah, them again”. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that.
If having a bad day means writing a bad post, then you get a downvote.
You’re just letting your prior on the person determine your vote. Which you say you disapprove of.
Yes, it is a violation of the professed norms around here to vote something down just because you disapprove of its author’s views.
a (larger) few are really offended by it,
I’m not really big on giving offense utility monsters a veto. Once you pay the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.
People are offended at PUA. Do they really not comprehend that plenty of people find their views offensive in turn? Just as everyone is the hero in their own story, there’s a pretty good chance you’re the villain in the stories of a lot of other people.
But I admit that’s something of the clash of civilizations going on here. Many people feel that their group’s “offense” should tally up in the utility machine, and they should thereby get their way. I don’t.
where it doesn’t belong
So it doesn’t belong in the Open Thread?
Anyway: as I say, I think it’s a shame if something gets a huge pile of negative karma merely for being politically unpopular. But unacceptable or inconsistent with professed norms hereabouts? No, I don’t think so.
You just said:
Yes, it is a violation of the professed norms around here to vote something down just because you disapprove of its author’s views.
It shouldn’t be about him, it should be about his post.
When a post is somewhat ambiguous, it’s reasonable to consider its context. That includes considering who posted it and what their likely reasons were. (Because it influences what is likely to happen in the ensuing discussion, if any.)
I’m not really big on giving offense utility monsters a veto.
Just as well no one suggested that, then. If you’re suggesting that I am proposing giving offense utility monsters a veto, then I politely request that you reread the whole of the sentence from which you quoted eight words and reconsider what might be leading you to misinterpret so badly. (Incidentally: Kipling reference noted.)
Do they really not comprehend that plenty of people find their views offensive in turn?
I don’t see any reason to think otherwise. If someone came along who only wanted to talk about how awful the PUA crowd is, and wedged complaints about that into discussions in which they have no place, I don’t imagine that would be much more popular than advancedatheist’s alleged wedging of pro-PUA material into inappropriate contexts.
So it doesn’t belong in the Open Thread?
I think you are mixing levels here. I am not complaining about advancedatheist, I am commenting on philh’s complaints about him and on the parallels you’re drawing. The accusation being levelled at advancedatheist (or at least part of it) is that he tries to shove PUA advocacy into discussions of other things. If in fact all he’s been doing is saying “yay PUA” in top-level open thread comments, then it’s an unfair accusation (though I think “yay PUA” and “boo PUA” belong in LW open threads about as much as “yay President Obama” or “boo Manchester United Football Club”) but that’s an entirely separate question from whether there’s an inconsistency between complaining about Eugine Nier’s mass-downvoting and not complaining about the downvotes some of advancedatheist’s comments have received.
You just said: [...]
No contradiction. The distinction you may be missing is between “because you disapprove of its author’s views” and “because you disapprove of the views expressed in that comment”. If I post one comment saying “Adolf Hitler was an admirable leader and we should give his policies another try” and one saying “Kurt Goedel proved the relative consistency of CH with ZF by proving that CH is true in the constructible universe and that Con(ZF) implies Con(ZF & V=L)”, then it is a violation of local professed norms if the latter comment gets downvoted because the former is horrible, but not if the former one does.
These are not remotely the same thing. Irrelevant politically-charged asides versus mentioning politics in an article about politics. Overt hostility to a particular group versus limited ability to portray a group accurately.
It’s not that he was mentioning politics in an article about politics. Talking about political slurs would be relevant to an article about politics. Making political slurs generally wouldn’t be.
But altogether lost in the brouhaha over my original objections to Kaj’s post was that his false characterization made for a bad argument. He did worse than be uncharitable, he did worse than slur his opponents, he made a bad argument relying a smear for much of it’s force.
And as far as I was concerned, the people who upvoted him did much worse in circling the wagons around a bad argument dependent on a cheap slur, even after it was pointed out to them.
Is it your opinion that if an article or comment contains anything in it that is less than perfectly charitable to the author’s political opponents, it should be downvoted?
No, less than perfect is not my standard for downvotes.
Mischaracterizing your opponents as supporting something morally reprehensible probably qualifies. Making a bad argument based on such a mischaracterization certainly does. Defending the mischaracterization would as well.
that if someone was throwing into comments asides about how the Republican party was racist or sexist, or similar remarks, I’d downvote that person and they’d end up in a pretty similar situation.
The scenario he described happened, and the author did not end up in a similar situation as AA. Far from it, he was applauded.
It should be easy to see how these situations are different. A well-respected user made an article with a large amount of other content, and explicitly was trying their best to model a wide varity of people who they disagree with. (And mind you many people would likely upvote Kaj by default simply based on their general inclination. This clear happens with some of the more popular writers here. Heck, I’ve occasionally upvoted some of gwern’s posts before I’ve finished reading them). This is not the scenario in question where the comments are being put into repeated comments that have little or nothing to do with the topic at hand and where this is almost all the comments the user in question has. Kaj was specifically talking about how people think about politics and trying to be charitable (failing at properly doing so apparently but that’s not for lack of trying.) And now imagine Kaj kept doing shoving such comments in while going through apparently almost zero effort to actually respond to either questions or criticisms. That would be the scenario under discussion.
I (and I suspect many people here) would not react to you the way they’ve reacted to AA partially because you respond to comments and frankly when you do have political statements, they are generally more clearly laid out, more reasonable, and more interesting than the throw-away cheering remarks that AA has. I am however, surprised by how downvoted your initial comment was there- it does have serious issues such as the claim that Kaj doesn’t have regular conservative readers, but it is surprisingly downvoted; I do have to wonder if part of that is a status thing (Kaj being of relatively high status here and you being of status more in my range or slightly higher). However, that’s not a great explanation and it does make me update in the direction of their being some for lack of a better term, liberal pile-ons.
Incidentally, note that your guess that I had downvoted you in that thread was wrong: I had not seen that thread until it was pointed out here, and had not read Kaj’s piece either. So that prediction of yours was wrong. I’m curious, meanwhile, if you’ll take me up on my offer for a bet about your attitude about AA changing in the next few months.
Indeed, Eugene violated civilized norms, and was booted. What a strange coincidence that it was an unprogressive fellow that got booted.
Excuse me, but this seems like saying: “Indeed, Eugine was the person who was strategically downvoting his political opponents. But it is still a strange coincidence that he also happened to be the person who was banned for strategically downvoting his political opponents.” I fail to see the strangeness here.
I guess the charitable interpretation is that the list of bannable offenses is purposefully generated to include things done by unprogressive people, and to exclude things done by progressive people (which I guess means pretty much everyone who is not a neoreactionary). For example, if it would be instead someone else mass-downvoting neoreactionaries (not just for political comments, but having once made a political comment, then for everyrything, including meetup announcements), and Eugine would be posting pictures of kittens, then the moderators of LessWrong would decide that mass-downvoting is perfectly acceptable, however pictures of kittens deserve a life-time ban.
What a strange coincidence that it was an unprogressive fellow that got booted. That’s as much evidence for my thesis as against.
In what universe? Are you claiming that Eugine got booted by what? The evil cabal of moderators who want to push left-wing politics?
But if you want, I’ll make a fun related prediction: Within 3 months you’ll agree with me that AA has been violating community norms. What do you want to bet on that?
Second: Ah, so AA saying that people should attend to their game is being “overly political”. Seems a stretch. I guess for some people everything is political, but if so, complaining that a post is political makes little sense.
Don’t be daft. Making claims like he did falls flatly into PUA and neoreactionary claims. Moreover, the phrasing was political.
Third: I thought voting a person down was a no no. That was what made Eugine’s downvoting a crime
No. The problem with Eugine was he was a) repeatedly downvoting people’s comments which had nothing to do with anything to do with politics or controversial issues. For crying out loud, he was downvoting meetup announcements posted by people. b) he was using sockpuppets to get the karma to do it. (Note that for example, I’ve downvoted two of advanceatheist’s recent comments but not most of them, and upvoted one of the less political ones).
Your certainty is misplaced. I was involved in exactly the kind of case you posit, where someone basically cast conservatives as in league with Lucifer, and he was upvoted to the moon. When I called him on it, I was downvoted to oblivion.
Link?
As for the quality, it was the clear expression of an idea relevant to winning that you don’t hear so often.
Really? I could imagine much clearer and much more steelmanned, and frankly more interesting versions of the same idea. I can easily supply them if you want.
It’s political to suggest that your interpersonal skills have a large effect on your life, so you should see about getting good at them? We shouldn’t talk about interpersonal skills?
No. But it is politics to claim that interpersonal skills are intrinsically involved in issues of sex and gender, that those issues always come up in the way that he described and the like.
A lot of my reply has been covered already, so I’d just like to make a few points that I don’t think have been made so far.
It looks like I’ve downvoted fewer than a dozen of aa’s comments.
One more reason that I don’t think I’m like Eugine, is that if aa ever actually asked “I’m being downvoted a lot, what gives?” I would be happy to explain. As far as I know he’s never asked, which is one of the reasons that I think he’s acting in bad faith. Eugine didn’t do this. IIRC, at least one of his targets said that they PMed him asking for an explanation, and received another round of downvoting.
This particular post really does strike me as bad. Yes, one could steelman it into something reasonable. I don’t feel inclined or obligated to do that. There would be little benefit to me compared to the other things I could put effort into. And I’m not going to do it for aa’s benefit until he starts acting like a truth-seeker. This is part of what I meant by the benefit of the doubt.
(I think that this next paragraph is pointing in the direction of something true, but isn’t quite right:)
I don’t think aa’s problem is just being overly political, or what his specific politics are. (My opinions about PUA and neoreaction are slightly negative, but sympathetic.) The way he’s being political feels like an attempt at subversion. It’s like he wants to shift the LW Overton window, and the way he’s doing that is by acting like the Overton window is somewhere other than where it actually is. Maybe the Overton window should be wider, but the way to widen it is to argue for things that are outside it, acknowledging that they are currently not well regarded. If you act like PUA is inside the window when it isn’t, then current readers will get less value than they could if you spoke to the current window; and outsiders will get the wrong impression of LW, which could be the entire point (drive away people who dislike it, attract people who like it).
I downvoted despite the fact that I sympathize with the basic gist of AMSS (although maybe not some of the details). The reason I downvoted is because I don’t think LW is appropriate for discussions like this, at least not in this way.
If you want to make non-obvious statements like “Women tend to respect the sexually confident” then you need to 1) define what you mean by this, and 2) provide evidence or links to evidence. I’m all for a rational discussion based on psychological science about what causes sexual attraction in human beings. Nothing wrong with that.
I’m assuming the implied-to-be-already-known background here is something along the lines of “women find low-status men repulsive even in relatively non-sexual/non-romantic/etc. contexts”, which is both true and probably a special case of “people find low status repulsive”.
But it’s definitely not known, at least not to me, that “people find low status repulsive.” At the very least, I’d appreciate some evidence backing this up.
In my case, I was stuffed full of religious teachings that seem as if they were deliberately designed to make men unattractive. Ambition, money, and sexuality were literally demonized. I never saw my father kiss my mother without her turning away in disgust. I was discouraged from dating, from pride, from profitable careers, and in general from any actions that might lead to even moderate fame, fortune, or power.
What do you expect to learn over the next few decades of your life that you don’t understand well now?
Since I’ve reached my 50′s, I’ve come around to seeing how acquiring an adult man’s skill set (AMSS) at a developmentally appropriate (late teens/early 20′s in other words) has applications beyond getting into sexual relationships through dating. (And you probably wonder why I read PUA blogs and websites.) Namely, that the AMSS doesn’t exist in isolation, but it plays a role in projecting male presence and authority when you have to deal with women in other social situations, like the work place. Women tend to respect the sexually confident man more than the sexually in- or under-experienced man.
I’d like to tell younger men who have had problems with acquiring the AMSS that they need to think about these other consequences of its absence when they reach middle age. In a rational society (lots of luck getting that, despite what you LessWrong people fantasize about), parents wouldn’t leave their boys’ development of the AMSS to the haphazard. When they can see that girls don’t find their sons sexually attractive in their given state, the boys need some kind of intervention to correct that right away.
I’m going to give you some advice as a professional woman. I very deeply resent when male colleagues compete with each other to put on a display for women. This goes for social contexts (rationalists’ meetups) in addition to professional contexts (work meetings). Then women are trying to talk about code or rationality or product design. Rather than thinking about her contributions, the men are preoccupied with “projecting male presence and authority”. What does male presence even mean? Why does authority have anything to do with men, instead of, you know, being the most knowledgeable about the topic?
I’ll tell you how it comes across. It comes across as focusing on the other men and ignoring the women’s contributions. Treating the men as rivals and the women as prizes. Sucky for everyone all around. Instead of teaching boys to be “sexually attractive”, why don’t you teach them to include women in discussions and listen to them same as anyone else? Because we’re not evaluating your sons for “sexual attractiveness”. We’re just trying to get our ideas heard.
Thank you for this. As a younger woman, I became reluctant to join conversations at conferences or other professional meetings because I had noticed that the dynamic of the group sometimes changed for the worse when I entered the discussion. As I get older, I’m no longer as much of a “prize”, so it doesn’t happen to me as often (which is honestly a relief), but I see it happen with other women. You’ve put nicely into words why it sucks so much—for everyone, not just women. I have to belief that it also sucks for the men who are just trying to have a good discussion, but are suddenly thrust into the middle of a sexual competition.
Reminds me of this Aldous Huxley quote:
I find it also annoying when people cannot turn off their sexual behavior and focus on the topic, and instead disrupt the debate for everyone else. Both genders have their version.
The male version is what you described: focusing on status competition at all costs.
The female version is… essentially: “everyone, pay attention to me! I am a young fertile woman! look here! look here!”… giggling in a high-pitched voice at every opportunity, frequently inserting little “jokes” which other women often find annoying, turning attention to their body by exaggerated movements, etc. (Not sure if I described it well; I hope you know what I mean).
Not sure what to do with this. Seems like a multi-player Prisonner’s Dilemma. People who are doing this (if they are well-calibrated) receive some personal benefits at the expense of the group, so it would be hard to convince them to stop. Most likely, they would deny doing this.
But seems like men have an advantage here, because fighting for status in order to seem more attractive is trying to kill two birds with one stone. Even if it doesn’t make the man any more attractive to anyone, he still gets some status (unless he is doing it really wrong). On the other hand, when the woman fails to seem attractive, her behavior will only seem stupid.
To me, that behavior connotes a combination of wanting to project femininity (not so much sexual behavior or attractiveness) and having lower-than-average self esteem (i.e. perceived status). It is mostly the latter that can be slightly annoying in the workplace, since such people are often unwittingly excluded from discussion (wobster109 also raises this point).
The root problem here is not so much the behavior itself, but lack of perceived status that then leads to that behavior as a kind of overcompensation. ISTM that high self esteem often boosts both social attractiveness and effectiveness in the workplace (as long as it doesn’t come with ‘Type-A’ overt aggressiveness, and even then sometimes), and that this broadly applies to both males and females.
Low self-esteem hypothesis is difficult to falsify, because whatever social role given person plays and however they behave, one could still say “but maybe deep inside they feel insecure”. Having said that… yes, this may be an instinctive reaction of a nervous woman, but I believe I have also seen high-status women doing that strategically.
Imagine a club that has informal lectures at its meetings (not LessWrong, but similar), and a 30-something woman, a long-term relatively high-status member of the club, interrupting the lectures every few minutes with some “witty” remark. That was the most annoying example I remember. It seemed to me like she was trying to immitate a behavior of a young girl, in my opinion not very successfully, exactly because some element of shyness was missing; it was only rude. Possibly she was projecting her authority against other present women. I just shrugged this behavior off as rude and forgot it afterwards, but my girlfriend later told me she wanted to kill that person. (Which I take as an evidence that the behavior was a way of intra-gender status fight.)
Not sure what you mean by “witty remark”, but wit and humor often connote fairly high status, as opposed to, e. g. just giggling at something or other things you mentioned. Could it be that your girlfriend was just annoyed at the sheer amount of interruptions? And yes, there may have been some intra-gender status competition involved, but males often compete in much the same way (Protip: don’t invite sealion specimens at clubs or conferences).
This is not what PUAs advocate as the best way of relating to women, much less in the workplace. The short version is that PUAs are advised to treat women like they would a male friend, and to see only themselves as a possible prize, never the women. While some measure of “projecting male presence and authority” might be involved, it would be a lot subtler than you are implying, and it would never get in the way of actual discussion.
You’re probably modeling your remarks on the common variety of “A-type” personalities, who also like to project dominance. But these folks are not PUAs—many things they do are just wrong and dysfunctional, particularly in a workplace environment. At the same time, we do need to care about these issues. Just focusing on “being the most knowledgeable about the topic” with no attention to social presence is not the answer. It will cause others to regard you as an obnoxious know-it-all, not a valuable asset in your team.
Some people are, sometimes. Most people are more usually either partly or entirely interested in boosting their social status and competing for mates, which are two intertwined activities.
I don’t really feel entitled to have my way in what goals others pursue in a social setting.
I think you’re projecting your feelings here into some sort of feeltopia.
For your first paragraph, can you use consequentalism to describe how well a man who doesn’t chase after the status and the women will do? In the dating market? In the job market? In the social market? Can you give me true data, that that man will have as much oppourtunities, as much chances, and as much friends as the guy that—god have mercy on our souls—does the forbidden and resentable sin of status competing? Be aware that many men share the opposite view, and as you are A. not a man (and all that it brings with); B. have not admitted to have any insight to how men view the world; C. did not say if your views are based on researched evidence or anecdote evidence, and as such provided no reason as to why any man should review and perhaps even update considering you viewpoint, what merit do you think your view has that men are seemingly missing in the quest for statusdom?
For your second paragraph, it falls apart if you cannot bring ample evidence for the first as it’s a follow-up to it, and it also reads like generalizing from one example. I’m not a fan of superficial intelligence so I’ll explain why instead of linking you to post ZFA#24 and straight-out tell you that you seem to be in bad company if what you say is true, and that you cannot be called professional if that’s the kind of environment you are employed in daily.
I hope this post gets downvoted to oblivi.. ehrm, I mean, linked in order to solve this silly gender war bullcrap once and for all.
You’re presupposing implicit agreement from all men with the notion that women’s ideas have merit, and the agreement from all women with your notion of wanting to be included in the company of men as equals.
There is a more elegant solution that doesn’t involve your desired absurd levels of gender equality—gender self-segregation in situations where the purpose is not interacting with the opposite gender. That way. there is no pressure for competition between men, and no pressure for pretending to be men from women. Because that’s what modern “gender equality” ideology amounts to—pressuring women to act like men, disregarding their actual ideas and aspirations for the goal of eradicating femininity.
I agree with JoshuaZ. I find your solution to be a severe hindrance in real life. I am the SQL expert on my team, and my (male) coworker is the surgeries expert, and my (male) colleague across the hall is the infectious diseases expert. We all work together to make the best product possible. How can we get anything done if we are segregated by gender?
I don’t see why I need “implicit agreement from all men”. My ideas have merit because they reduce medical errors and save lives. Real-life results are the judge of that, not men. I also do not see why I need “agreement from all women”. They are not my coworkers, and they are free to live their lives as they wish. That said, I am a developer in a project meeting at a tech company. Safe to say, I want to be treated as an equal.
Finally, I don’t see what contributing to a great company has to do with “acting like men” or “pretending to be men”. My goal isn’t to “eradicate femininity”; it is to make a great product that will help people. If you think that is inherently masculine, then you’ll have to explain. So why don’t you start by telling me what “masculine” and “feminine” mean to you?
Nothing in wobster109′s comment presumed anything of the sort. Moreover, if there are men who are unable to see ideas coming from women as having merit then the problem seems to be with those men more than anything else.
But we can if you want steelman your statement slightly: If instead of the men having disagreement with the notion that women’s ideas have merit, it is possible that some men have problems at a basic level with accepting ideas from women. In that case, maybe there is an actual problem that needs to get dealt with, but even then, you need a lot more of an argument that the best solution is complete gender segregation and not trying to teach those men to accept ideas from women. And calling a solution “elegant” doesn’t make it so: indeed, this is a “solution” where we can empirically see what happens when countries like Saudi Arabia or places like Kiryas Yoel try to implement variants of it, and it isn’t pretty.
Aside from this being one of the most strawmanned possible notion of what constitutes gender equality, does it strike you at all as odd as that you are replying to an actual woman and telling her that what she wants is due to pressure from some ideology for her not act feminine? Do you see what might be either wrong with that or at least epistemologically unwise?
So, in your world, men reserve the right to define what femininity is, whereas in a gender-equal world, women get to define it. I don’t see why we should prefer your world.
As bad as that comment was, this isn’t one of its problems.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m speaking of femininity as ordained by Gnon, not any human attempts to define or constrain it—in that sense, indoctrinating women into behaving like men and aspiring to masculine achievements does not amount to “gender equality”, but the systematic eradication of femininity.
There are several worrying, unquestioned assumptions in your argument: namely, that authority and competitiveness are exclusively male traits, that competition among men is inevitable in the presence of women, and that women who try to obtain and use power are “pretending to be men”. Actually, by restricting the admissible examples of femininity to those that best suit your ideal society, you are introducing your preferred definition of femininity. Shifting the blame to “Gnon” doesn’t succeed in hiding the fact that you’re the one defining “Gnon”.
But nature (because I refuse to anthropomorphize impersonal forces by giving them silly names) does not ordain a specific way of femininity or masculinity. The seahorse fish are gestated by the male, which during that period is full of prolactin. The jacana birds have a peculiar calendar of reproductive availability that resulted in the bigger and stronger females being selected by fighting over available males. The definitions of male and female aren’t cast in stone.
I’ll grant that those examples have little bearing on human societies, but even appealing to our primate past is no use: are you going with the patriarchal chimpanzee, or the matriarchal bonobo? Better, we could just abandon the naturalistic fallacy and let individual humans decide what patterns of behavior actually make them happiest.
Not exclusively, primarily. There’s certainly been little selection pressure for women to compete or lead as opposed to men, be it in the context of mating rights or broader societal interactions. Men are better adapted for such purposes, therefore, by taking them on, women are, by definition, acting like men.
That’s all I’m talking about—recognising the fact that men and women have certain complementary, non-overlapping aptitudes, are not literally the same, and, are better off apart in certain situations in which modern western societies force them together.
The environment we live in constitutes a new, different set of selection pressures. Features which were adaptive in the past (like dominance or aggressiveness) no longer ensure differential mating success. Willingness to negotiate roles and seek consensus is more incentivized now. Instead of promoting nostalgia for an ancestral environment that is not coming back, you could do what makes the most biological sense—adapt.
We disagree over how much it’s possible to adapt in a single generation then. Anyway, ideologies that force absurd levels of pretence at gender equality at us aren’t about adapting away these differences, they’re about pretending they don’t exist—and if you really wanted to reverse them, there are far more efficient processes to do so than ignoring them, given modern technology—but most would require acknowledging the inherent inequality in the first place. The only conclusion I can draw from the fact that nobody is pushing for this is that the gender equality movements are content to pretend to have accomplished anything by forcing people to pretend that the concept of gender equality corresponds to reality in any way.
Adaptation is actually quite efficient within one single generation: those who don’t mate, don’t mate. If enough women decide that they don’t want cavemen but feminist men, differential reproduction will sort out the results, and the next generation will feel more comfortable with a state of equality.
Edited to add: that is, assuming that opinions are genetic. They’re not. Memetics is even faster than genetics at changing attitudes toward gender roles. The son of a caveman can learn to become a feminist, and vice versa. Change can happen in less than one generation.
There will also be competition among the feminist men. Seems to me that the loudest of them are often… uhm, former cavemen who have “seen the light” and became extremists for the other side. Or guys like this one. If there is a genetic component, these guys would bring it to the future.
More generally, Goodhart’s law also applies to men signalling feminism.
Wow, the notion that “women’s ideas have merit” is an “absurd level of gender equality”?
Riiiight...
Which skills comprises the AMSS?
When I read the phrase “adult man’s skill set”, I immediately thought about carpentry. Did everyone else think about sex, or are there other people that thought this was going to be a post about practical, traditionally manly things?
I expected it to be about what it was I think but that was more due to who the user was. I suspect if it were posted most other posters here I would have made your guess.
I can just imagine how this would’ve gone over if the gender was reversed.
Also, I have a suspicion that advancedatheist is abusing the karma voting system in some manner because he went from −13 to 0 in a matter of a few hours.
I’ve seen this happen several times over the last few weeks.
Well, what is the best AWSS? We don’t seem to know much about this, and it strikes me as a very interesting question. Publications like COSMO try to provide women with useful advice but they are often ridiculed as useless, even a lot more than PUAs are (I guess the male equivalent would be mainstream “men’s” magazines). And there is no real female equivalent to the male PUA community—female PUAs exist but they’re such a tiny niche that we know almost nothing about the quality of their advice.
It wouldn’t have needed to be said, because girls are pressured to be sexually attractive in a way that boys aren’t.
That sounds like good advice too.
I find it strange that people get so irate over the suggestion that people develop interpersonal skills, and that their parents should help them do so if they see a lack.
You strike me as being incredibly charitable towards aa, and more to the point, incredibly uncharitable towards the people who are getting irate.
If you think I’m one of those people, I’d like to make it very clear that I do not think those particular suggestions are bad, and that is not what I’m irate about.
(Actually, I don’t think I was getting irate at aa or his posts. I’m getting irate at you, however.)
Can you really not see the difference between “if your child lacks interpersonal skills, you should help them develop them” and “if girls don’t find your son sexually attractive, he needs some kind of intervention to correct that right away”? Or do you just expect everyone to make the mental effort to read the latter as the former, regardless of the history of the person speaking?
I may be being uncharitable towards you right now, but I really have no conception of how you could be genuinely confused here.
Also, relevant to the thread: I have now been karma-bombed. (Not my most recent few comments, but ~15 of my comments in a row have suddenly been downvoted.)
In general I’m not that sympathetic to people who feel entitled to charity from me, and get irate if they don’t get it.
I see lots of differences. Instead of me playing detective on the particulars of just what you find so offensive, could you just say it?
I have my theories, but much prefer not to shadow box with my own theories of someone else’s theories. Spell it out, and then we can both see how much and how we agree or disagree.
What I expect and what I recommend are different things. I recommend that when people read, they try to see what value they can extract from what they read.
If they’re spoiling for a fight against someone with a history, they should pick the battles where they have the clear upper hand based on the text as given. Arguing against supposed dog whistles either leaves you missing the point, or it plays right into any dog whistler’s hands, making you look like a putz to third parties. If he says horrific things, wait for when he does, then shit hammer him.
I recall a similar conversation with a guy I follow on youtube. He had a video attacking someone, which, given enough context, his attack made some sense, because his target was dog whistling up a storm. But I think to third parties, he ended up looking like a bozo, arguing against statements that were perfectly innocuous to the average reader. It’s a loser of a tactic, even when you’re right about the dog whistles. Especially when you’re right about the dog whistles.
I’m not sure how that’s a reply to me.
I complained that you were uncharitably misrepresenting my position. You say I’m not entitled to charity, but your representation of my position doesn’t come close to anything I ever said. This isn’t merely you not-being-charitable, this is you being either actively uncharitable, or arguing against imagined dog whistles, or something that isn’t engaging with either what I said or what I meant.
(You may say that you never mentioned me, and that’s so. But if you weren’t including me in “people get so irate”, who specifically did you mean?)
I’m not here looking for a fight with aa. I mostly just ignore him. I replied to you, when you said “this seems like good advice”, and I said that the advice you had taken from aa’s post was a much weaker version of what he had actually said, and that aa’s history makes me disinclined to engage with him.
You’re telling me that I should attack aa based on the text he actually wrote, but you’re the one who turned “if girls don’t find your son sexually attractive, he needs some kind of intervention to correct that right away” into “if your child lacks interpersonal skills, you should help them develop them”.
When you say “I find it strange that...”, I want to know if you actually do find it strange. I don’t think it matters what differences I see in the two statements. Suppose it turns out that actually, aa’s advice-as-written is sensible and he was right all along and I’m wrong. Fine. Nevertheless, right now I think his advice-as-written is bad, and you’re telling us that advice he didn’t write is good, and I want to know if you can tell the difference between what he did and didn’t write. You don’t need to see the same differences as I do, you just need to be able to see enough differences that you understand why people might be okay with one and not the other.
Do you actually think that people are getting irate at “the suggestion that people develop interpersonal skills, and that their parents should help them do so if they see a lack”? Because if so, I claim that you are just flat out wrong. That is not what aa suggested, and it’s not what people are getting irate about.
(I don’t want to say exactly what it is that I don’t like about aa’s advice-as-written. I don’t want to put in the time to do it justice, I don’t want to write a not-quite-right version and open myself up to nitpicking, I don’t think it’s a productive avenue of discussion right now, and I’m not convinced that you aren’t just asking as a distraction. This is a can of worms that I decline to open.)
And actually, when I say “I want to know”, that’s a rhetorical flourish. I don’t really care. What I started this post trying to say was: I think you’re being (perhaps deliberately) obtuse, and I don’t think I want to continue engaging with you on this. I’ve put more time and emotional energy into this discussion than I care to admit, and I don’t think it’s paying off. There are probably things you can say in reply that would change my mind, but by default, I’m done here.
You’re irate, but refuse to lay your cards on the table. That’s your prerogative.
Yes, people often don’t want to do that. A less flattering way of phrasing that is that you don’t want to open your opinions to scrutiny.
I’m not shy about my opinions, and I wasn’t going to play psychic detective with yours.
“Dog whistling”?
Dog-whistle politics: saying things that some subset of your audience will recognize as having a meaning special to their tribe (and of which they approve) but that go straight over the heads of the rest of your audience (which perhaps would be displeased if they noticed you paying special attention to that subset, or if they understood what you were saying to them).
I note that you’re downvoted when supplying the definition of a term that was specifically requested.
Not that the downvoter even read your post, as I see a trail of −1s.
Yes, I noticed that too. It seems to happen most frequently to me shortly after getting into political discussions (in a broad sense that includes e.g. questions of race and gender). The obvious hypotheses are (1) the quality of my comments goes way down when I post about politics, (2) there are trigger-happy downvoters out there of various political leanings, and (3) there are, more specifically, trigger-happy downvoters whose political leanings are opposed to mine. #1 might be true but (as you remark) the downvoting seems to be quite indiscriminate and to affect comments I can see no reasonable objection to. #2 and #3 are both fairly plausible but the clearest-but particular cases of mass-downvoting we’ve had happen to be from a neoreactionary, favouring #3. (And of course my political opponents are, as such, Objectively Evil and therefore that’s just the sort of thing they would do.)
My policy when I notice this sort of thing is to post more. Posting a comment has positive expected karma for me even when I’m being mass-downvoted, and my interpretation of mass-downvoting is that it’s meant to be intimidatory; for those who can afford it, the best response to attempted intimidation is to refuse to be intimidated.
I got a −1 for posting in the same discussion here, which suggests 3). I also got a −1 for answering a question that specifically asked to explain criticism, and lost a lot of karma for [trying to defend an opinion which is popular in the outside world but is unpopular here. (I got modded down for most of that, it’s just that several of them were counterbalanced by people moderating up. The last ones did not have anyone moderating them up and left me in the negatives.)
For what it’s worth, I think those comments of yours were probably downvoted “honestly”—by which I mean not that I agree with the downvoters, but that I think each comment was downvoted by someone who specifically didn’t like that comment, rather than by someone who disliked something else you’d written and wanted to punish you harder than they could by downvoting just the thing they didn’t like.
(I do have the impression—to which your examples are relevant—that left-leaning comments get downvoted by right-leaning users here more often than the other way around, even though we have rather more left-leaning than right-leaning users. I don’t trust that impression very much since it’s easy to see how it could be wrong.)
You didn’t defend an opinion. You just stated an opinion.
Does it happen that often? Is it, like in this case, −1? Or more negative tallies?
That’s the spirit!
I post harder. I take downvotes as a sign that there are readers are in need of my gentle tutelage. So many crosses to bear.
Frequency is variable. Every few months, perhaps. I haven’t noticed multiple people (or sockpuppets) doing it concurrently—each downvoted comment just gets −1.
This is the theory. In reality, it’s mostly ideological opponents who accuse the speaker of using dog-whistles, whereas supporters understand the words at face values, which is precisely the opposite of what the theory would predict. So, for example, Democrats often say that Republican policies to restrain welfare spending are racist dog-whistles—but how would they know? Surely the very theory of dog-whistles should predict that Democrats wouldn’t recognise that these are racist claims. Whereas Republicans swear up and down that they really do believe in low government spending and not rewarding sloth. In the end, if you can hear the dog-whistle, you are the dog.
I think the real meaning of “dog-whistle politics” is trying to ascribe an unpleasant secret meaning to your ideological opponents’ straightforward positions, and therefore avoid the unpleasant task of having to consider whether their ideas may have merit.
For the avoidance of doubt, I was not endorsing any claim that anyone is dog-whistling, I was explaining what the term means. Having said which:
I don’t think we know this is true. (It may be true that supporters generally say they understand the words at face value, but since dog-whistling accusations often concern things one is Not Supposed To Say it wouldn’t be surprising if supporters claim to take the words at face value even if they hear the whistling loud and clear.)
No, I don’t think that’s the claim—I think you’re taking the metaphor too literally. What it predicts is that these claims should have an innocent face-value meaning but also be understandable by their intended audience as saying something else that the speaker doesn’t want to say explicitly; that’s all.
I think it is most likely that (1) it sometimes does happen that politicians and others say things intended to convey a message to some listeners while, at least, maintaining plausible deniability and/or avoiding overt offence to others, and (2) it sometimes does happen that politicians and others get accused of doing this when in fact they had no such intention. Because both of those seem like things that would obviously often serve the purposes of the people in question, and I can’t see what would stop them happening.
(In some cases the speaker may expect the implicit meaning to be clearly understood by both supporters and opponents, but just want to avoid saying something dangerous too explicitly. Maybe those cases shouldn’t be categorized as dog-whistling, but I think there’s a continuum from there to the cases where the message is intended not to be heard by everyone.)
When you say “In reality” and “the real meaning [...] is”, are you claiming that the phenomenon described on (e.g.) that Wikipedia page never, or scarcely ever, actually happens? To take a couple of prominent examples, would you really want to claim that
when a US politician speaks of “family values”, they scarcely ever intend this to be understood as (at least) a friendly gesture by, e.g., supporters of organizations like the American Family Association, the Family Research Council, the Family Research Institute, the Traditional Values Coalition, the Values Voter Summit, etc.?
or that they don’t also intend “family values” to sound more warm-and-fuzzy-and-positive than, say, “opposition to same-sex marriage, treating transgender people as belonging to whatever gender they were assigned at birth, opposition to abortion”, and all the other specific things that actually distinguish those organizations dedicated to “family” and “values” from their ideological opponents?
during the US Democratic primaries in 2008, nothing Hillary Clinton’s campaign said and did was intended to highlight Barack Obama’s race in ways that would make him less appealing to white voters, and nothing Obama’s campaign said and did was intended to highlight his race in ways that would make him more appealing to black voters?
OK, that’s fair. It’s possible that the sympathetic hear the alleged dog-whistle but deny it, although I still think our default assumption should be to believe the supporters unless we have specific evidence otherwise. But we are still left with the puzzle of why opponents can hear the allegedly inaudible whistle.
No. Let’s look at what wikipedia says:
You’re now trying to water down dog-whistling to a mere ‘plausible deniablity.’ These are two distinct theories:
When I say ‘aqueducts are bad’ most people think I’m arguing about the government’s aqueduct-building. But members of the Anti-Bristol Society understand this to mean that I really want to persecute Bristolians, and so will vote for me. (Dog-whistling).
When I say ‘aqueducts are bad’ everyone understands that I really mean that I want to persecute Bristolians, and that I’m reaching out to the Anti-Bristol Society. But because I didn’t say I want to persecute Bristolians, I have just enough plausible deniability to not get thrown out of polite society. (Plausible deniability).
Note that these two ideas are essentially opposites.
Scarcely ever. Consider the example from the UK—how on earth is that dog-whistling? Both the Conservative manifesto at the last election and the official policy of the Coalition government explicitly state the goal of limiting immigration. These policies have been criticised as, inter alia, racist. So they run adverts arguing that “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration.” Where’s the dog whistle? Isn’t the simpler story that they’re trying to defend their stated policies? If this is a dog-whistle, what is the content of the dog-whistle, over and above their policies? What’s the payoff? It doesn’t really make sense.
Regarding your specific examples:
I have no idea how those specific organisations, with which I have no particular familiarity, react to an individual phrase.
Republicans certainly intend “family values” to sound more warm-and-fuzzy and positive than “heteronormativity.” But there is a world of difference between using the most positive language to describe your own position and the most negative to describe the opposition (pro-choice vs pro-death, death tax vs estate tax, Obamacare vs Affordable Care Act, etc) and dog-whistling, or even plausible deniability. Social conservatives are not hiding anything by saying they favour “family values.” They are perfectly willing to defend each and every one of the policy planks, but they want one phrase to sum it all up.
I’ll never be able to prove that nothing they did was intended like that. But I certainly don’t believe that the most-remarked-on incident (Bill Clinton comparing Obama’s win in the South Carolina primary to Jesse Jackson’s win in the South Carolina primary) was in any way a dog-whistle, and I certainly do believe that what really happened there was that an innocuous comment was seized upon by people as a stick with which to beat Clinton, with the convenient excuse that the very innocuousness of the comment is the evidence for its malignity, because the evil is somehow hidden.
There’s a continuum between the two forms of equivocation according to the percentage of the out group that can hear the dog whistle.
Actually, I said a couple of paragraphs later: “Maybe those cases shouldn’t be categorized as dog-whistling, but I think there’s a continuum from there to the cases where the message is intended not to be heard by everyone.” I disagree with your statement that these cases “are essentially opposites”; they have in common (1) an innocuous face-value meaning and (2) a less-innocuous meaning intended to appeal to a subset of the audience. In cases of either type I would expect the speaker to prefer the less-innocuous meaning not to be apparent to most listeners. The only difference is in how hard they’ve tried to achieve that, and with what success.
(And if a politician is sending not-too-explicit messages of affiliation to people whose views I detest, actually I don’t care all that much how hard he’s trying to have me not notice.)
Leaving aside (since I agree that it’s doubtful that they should be classified as dog-whistling, though I disagree that they’re “essentially opposite”) cases where the goal is merely plausible deniability: this is puzzling only if opponents in general can easily hear it, but I think what’s being claimed by those who claim to discover “dog-whistling” is that they’ve noticed someone sending messages that are clearly audible to (whoever) but discernible by the rest of the population only when they listen extra-carefully, have inside information, etc. (Of course once it’s been pointed out, the inside information is more widely available and people are prepared to listen more carefully—so fairly soon after an alleged dog-whistle is publicized it becomes less dog-whistle-y. If someone says now what Reagan said earlier about welfare abusers, their political opponents would notice instantly and flood them with accusations of covert racism; but when Reagan actually said those things before, they weren’t immediately seen that way. Note that I am making no comment here about whether he actually was dog-whistling, just pointing out that what’s relevant is how the comments were perceived before the fuss about dog-whistling began.)
An advertisement saying “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration” isn’t dog-whistling, and I don’t think anyone claims it is. (Some people might claim it’s lying, but that’s a different accusation entirely.) But if there are a lot of people around who are (but wouldn’t admit that they are) anti-immigration because they don’t want more black people in the UK, then vocal opposition to immigration may convey to those people the message “we prefer white people too”, and some of what a political party says about immigration may be designed to help the racists feel that way.
Whether any of what the Conservatives say about immigration would rightly be classified that way, I don’t know. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to what they’ve said about immigration. (I’m pretty sure they’re happy enough to get a slice of the racist vote, but that on its own isn’t dog-whistling.)
The payoff, if they are deliberately courting the racist vote, would be that racists in the UK feel that the Conservatives aren’t merely cautious about immigration in general but will pursue policies that tend to keep black people out of the UK (that would be the content of the dog-whistle over and above their explicit policies), and accordingly are more inclined to vote for them rather than turning to (say) the BNP or UKIP than they would have been without that reassurance.
It seems likely to me that at least some social conservatives some of the time are intending this to suggest more than they would be happy defending explicitly—e.g., a willingness to get Roe v Wade overturned if it looks politically feasible, or to obstruct the teaching of evolution as fact in school science lessons, or to restrict the rights of same-sex couples.
(Imagine that you are a socially conservative politician. A substantial fraction of the votes you get are going to come from conservative Christians. If you have a choice of two ways to express yourself, no different in their explicit commitments, little different in their impact on people who will be voting against you anyway—but one of them makes it that bit more likely that your conservative Christian listeners will see you as one of them and turn out to vote for you … wouldn’t you be inclined to choose that one? And isn’t that exactly what’s meant by “dog-whistling”?)
Yet according to the Wikipedia article you linked, that was claimed to be “the classic case of dog-whistling.” So I find this discussion frustrating because you don’t seem willing to come to terms with how the phrase is actually used.
What the page says was called the classic case of dog-whistling is a whole advertising campaign.
I checked what Goodin’s book (cited at that point in the Wikipedia article) actually says. It doesn’t reference any specific advertisements in the campaign, and in particular doesn’t describe the specific one you picked out as dog-whistling. It does, however, say this:
all of which seems to be in line with what I’ve been saying.
[EDITED to fix a spelling and add: I don’t have a copy of Goodin’s book; I checked it using Amazon’s “look inside” feature. This means that while I was able to look up the bit quoted in Wikipedia and the bit I quoted above, I couldn’t see the whole chapter. I did, however, search for “not racist” (two key words from the specific advertisement you mentioned) and get no hits, which I think genuinely means they don’t appear—it searches the whole book even though it will only show you a small fraction.]
That shows that they wouldn’t recognize a well done dog-whistle, but they may still recognize a poorly done one where the Republicans attempt to make it something only racists understand, but do not succeed at doing so.
You describe the flip side of dog whistle politics, which are false accusations of dog whistle politics. I think both happen.
Sometimes the accusations are justified, but it is an extremely poisonous tactic to the discussion, and even to your own thinking. It’s easy to project secret evil intent where you already have some fundamental disagreement with a person, and it relieves you of actually having to confront the argument as given. “He really means...”
As I noted before, in forums like these, where people come in and out of threads, and haven’t read all that goes on, I think the accusations are an extra loser, as you just end up looking like a putz, objecting to the unobjectionable.
Argue against posts as given.
That’s a catchy comeback on the less than perfect metaphor, but not literally true. Sometimes people really do dog whistle, and sometimes you can hear it even if you’re not the dog (the intended audience).
In our society I think there’s a belief that most instances where parents try to interfere with dating choices of their children it doesn’t help.
A lot of liberal minded parents don’t think that attempts by their parents to intervene in their dating lives were positive, so they don’t try to intervene for their children.
The choice to use an abbreviation for AWSS is also worth noting. People with normal social skills usually don’t speak about AWSS. Using language that produces emotional detachment is typical PUA-thing.
I think people children tend not to want their parents to try to choose their partners, but at least in my social circles, I think it was quite rare for parents to try to impart relationship/dating skills into their children.
Specialized in group jargon and acronyms show up in a lot of places. One nearby that I can think of.
I’m not criticizing it for being jargon. A word like “steelmanning” is also jargon. But it’s not in the same category emotional distancing as “AMSS”.
There are also times where intellectual distance is useful. In academia you don’t want emotions to interfere with your reasoning. In the case of PUA, the language allows suppression of approach anxiety. Intellectual distance allows a PUA to run his routine without interferes of his emotions. At the same time prevents real emotional connection to see interactions with the goal of maximizing the amount of k-close, n-closes and f-closes.
An excellent point, although I think this belief is much more widespread among liberals than conservatives. And I think it’s part of a larger point, which is that liberals seem to be far more negative across the board towards parental involvement in their children’s lives. I vividly remember my own shock and incomprehension when I first encountered this attitude—that young people need to challenge, overturn, or break free from parental authority. I still have to remind myself that some people think like this, because it’s so alien to my understanding of the world. For me it is completely natural that I would want my parents to intervene in my dating life—whether to set me up with someone they considered suitable, to warn me against someone unsuitable, to advise me that I am lacking, or whatever else—because they know me better than anyone else, and they can only have my best interests at heart. Of course I should try and adopt and carry on my parents values as best I can. And so on. I don’t think it’s purely a liberal/conservative thing, but I do think it’s part of it.
Examples: I recently saw this article cited as an example of unfit parenting because they see their kids as “raw materials for their culture cloning project,” and I saw this post heavily upvoted. My reactions were exactly opposite—my reaction was to applaud the Christians’ attempts to pass down their values (although I do not personally share them) and to sigh at what seemed like the narcissism of the Lesswrong poster.
Predictions (Because any theory is worthless if it doesn’t make them): I predict that conservatives would be much more willing than liberals to support statements like “Parents should make sure their sons grow up with manly skills” and “Parents should intervene when they see their children making bad choices in their romantic lives.”
That’s interesting. I come from the entirely opposite side—it’s not really comprehensible to me how and why parents feel the need to run their childrens’ lives past late teens. And here you are, in the bit-flesh :-)
Being an adult is partly about taking responsibility for one’s own life. The man who talks to a woman because his mother told him to do so, might lack qualities of manly social interaction.
I agree, that’s likely true.
From a guy pushing 50, I’d say you’re giving the younger men here good advice.
I don’t know what’s with all the downvotes. Mentions of PUA? Statements of politically incorrect truisms?
I would say that there’s a version of advancedatheist’s comment (and many of his other comments) which is giving good advice based on truthful premises, but it’s not this version, and advancedatheist gets approximately zero benefit of the doubt at this point.
Like, yes, it is probably true that failing to develop a complete social skill set will cause you social problems later in life, even in those parts of life that are not to do with sex or dating. Turns out, social skills are also used in the workplace.
But taken in context, that advice reads more like “men should learn the skills to help them pick up women, and this will help them in the workplace”, which needs a lot more justification. And we also get “if girls aren’t attracted to your son, you need to fix your son”, which… there might be a nugget of value somewhere nearby in advice-space, but as written it has so many issues that all I feel like saying is “fuck that”.
(I don’t feel like continuing to pay the karma tax, so I probably won’t continue this.)
Edit (because I’d like to make an unrelated point without paying the tax twice): I also feel like there’s a common theme in aa’s posts in the open thread. He’ll ask a question that sounds fairly generally applicable and rationality-related. Then he’ll say something which is related to the question, but which mostly sounds like it’s about PUA from the perspective of assuming PUA is (good/true/praiseworthy/whatever).
And then consider the comment “some blogger wrote about AI. I don’t know why he bothers to blog, he doesn’t get as many comments as popular bloggers like ”. (Admittedly, I don’t actually recognise all those names.) Why those specific bloggers? If someone were to actually attempt to compile a list of blogs based on their popularity, would any of those names come up? Does Carrico have anything in common with those people? Why even bring up the question of why Carrico bothers?
aa doesn’t seem to be posting in good faith here. He just seems to have an agenda of popularising PUA (with perhaps a side order of neoreaction or something along those lines), and while I don’t dislike PUA as much as some, I would like him to shut up and go away.
I’m not saying this for the benefit of aa, because I’m pretty sure he knows what he’s doing and engaging with him would be unhelpful. But for the benefit of others who wonder why he seems to get downvoted so much: this is why I, personally, am quick to downvote him, and I imagine others are similar. (I don’t downvote him automatically, however.)
Most of those aren’t PUA bloggers, actually, although they do recognizably share a certain cluster of perspectives. Megan McArdle is a libertarianish policy blogger with the Atlantic. Vox Day is mainly a spec-fic blogger, lately notorious for association with what SSC readers might recognize as l’affaire du reproductively viable worker ants. Steve Sailer is hard for me to classify, but in this crowd he’d probably be best known for what I’ll politely describe as contrarian views on race.
If I had to guess, I’d say they’re probably just the most famous bloggers that a specific right-of-center geek happened to have read recently.
Yeah, this is about what I thought.
It seems to me that ideologically based group karma bombing is a general violation of the norms necessary for a civilized community, but it happens here fairly frequently, and it happens predominantly in one ideological direction.
All sorts of people charge about on their hobby horses around here. Are you so quick to karma bomb the riders who are more ideologically sympatico with you? Not so much, right?
I suppose it’s rather useless of me to complain. You want him to shut up. You and your ideological compatriots have achieved the next best thing—disappearing his posts into the karma memory hole. Mission Accomplished.
What do you suppose would happen if people more of my ideological ilk started to respond in kind? Isn’t tit for tat the game theoretic appropriate response?
That’s both an unfair and unwarranted response. First of all, there’s been “karma bombing” of a variety of different forms by people of different political tribes here, the most prominent of course being Eugine_Nier and his sockpuppets systematic downvoting of all comments of people whose politics he disliked. Second of all, there’s a big difference between karma bombing in the Eugine sense and people as individuals downvoting individual comments that are overly political. Third of all, part of the problem here is that AA shoves his politics into almost every single post even when the connection is at most very tenuous. I suspect I’m thought of by people here as more on the “left” but I’m pretty sure that if someone was throwing into comments asides about how the Republican party was racist or sexist, or similar remarks, I’d downvote that person and they’d end up in a pretty similar situation. Fourth of all, at least one user below has made clear that they have some sympathies with AA’s viewpoints and downvoted him because the comment’s quality and general politics made it not good content.
Arguing that this is about one side downvoting people from the other side really misses what is going on here.
First: Indeed, Eugene violated civilized norms, and was booted. What a strange coincidence that it was an unprogressive fellow that got booted. That’s as much evidence for my thesis as against.
Second: Ah, so AA saying that people should attend to their game is being “overly political”. Seems a stretch. I guess for some people everything is political, but if so, complaining that a post is political makes little sense.
Third: I thought voting a person down was a no no. That was what made Eugine’s downvoting a crime, no? I thought we were supposed to be downvoting a post based on it’s own content. I note that the response I received “I would like him to shut up and go away” in justification of the downvoting. Where are the villagers and their pitchforks calling for banning the miscreant?
Your certainty is misplaced. I was involved in exactly the kind of case you posit, where someone basically cast conservatives as in league with Lucifer, and he was upvoted to the moon. When I called him on it, I was downvoted to oblivion. He had the decency to engage the issue, and eventually agreed that he had unfairly maligned conservatives, and hadn’t really realized he had done it at the time. Would you be so surprised if you had been one of the people upvoting his original post with it’s slur against conservatives?
Fourth: “comment’s quality and general politics made it not good content.”
As for the quality, it was the clear expression of an idea relevant to winning that you don’t hear so often. I call it a good point. It is the Open Thread after all. I don’t expect dissertations here.
As for the “general politics”—what would that be? It’s political to suggest that your interpersonal skills have a large effect on your life, so you should see about getting good at them? We shouldn’t talk about interpersonal skills?
The equivalence I think you’re appealing to doesn’t look real to me. Let’s suppose you’re right about what’s happened to advancedatheist: he posts something with a particular political/social leaning, lots of leftish people don’t like it, and they pile on and downvote it into oblivion. Contrast with what Eugine is alleged (with good evidence, I think) to have done: someone posts something with a particular political/social leaning, Eugine doesn’t like it, and he downvotes 50 of their other comments. Two key differences: (1) In the first case, the thing getting zapped is the comment that these people disapprove of; in the second, it’s a whole lot of comments there’s nothing wrong with even by Eugine’s lights other than who posted them. (2) In the first case, each person is downvoting something they disapprove of; the total karma hit advancedatheist gets is in proportion to the number of disapproving people and the number of disapproved comments; in the second, Eugine is doing it all himself; the total karma hit his target gets is limited only by Eugine’s patience.
No doubt it’s very disagreeable to want someone to shut up and go away. But rather than cherrypicking those 10 words, let’s take a look at the context—which seems to me to have (again, by coincidence) two key differences from that of EN’s karmattacks. (1) philh is making a very specific accusation about advancedatheist: that he is not participating here in good faith because he seems only really to be interested in popularizing PUA, even in discussions that have basically nothing to do with it. I don’t know whether philh is right or wrong about this, but I’m pretty sure Eugine couldn’t and wouldn’t have claimed with a straight face that the people he karma-bombed here are (e.g.) only posting to spread left-wing ideas or feminist ideas or whatever. It seems to me that there’s a big, big difference between “X is on the wrong side politically; therefore, I would like him to shut up and go away” and “X is trying to force his pet single issue into every discussion on LW and contributing little else; therefore, I would like him to shut up and go away”. (2) What philh is owning up to doing to advancedatheist on account of this is not the same as what Eugine is alleged to have done to lots of people. Eugine: downvoting dozens of comments merely because they’re posted by one of his targets and afford an opportunity to inflict downvotes. philh: being quick on the trigger when he sees a low-quality comment from advancedatheist. Again: big difference between “I would like X to go away, so I’ll downvote all his comments until he does” and “I would like X to go away, so when he says something I think is of low quality I’ll downvote it more readily than I would a similar comment from someone else”.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not endorsing the behaviour I think philh has admitted to here. I think it would be better if he didn’t do it. Someone who’s abusing the community by spamming LW with single-issue stuff is going to get downvoted to hell purely on his comments’ actual merits, with no need for the itchy trigger finger, and that’s a good thing. (And I think it’s what’s been happening to advancedatheist.)
No, he really didn’t. Not remotely. This is the article in question. (Right?) There’s nothing there remotely like casting conservatives as in league with Lucifer. What there is—and I think this is what Kaj later agreed you were right about—is something much less stupid, less harmful, and less likely to be the result of ill will: in one place he gave an example involving social conservatives’ thinking about liberals’ legislative preferences regarding homosexuality, and he didn’t do a very good job of getting inside social conservatives’ heads, and consequently his description was inaccurate and made them sound sillier and more unreasonable than they (typically) actually are. That’s all.
(To put it differently: I suggest that nothing Kaj wrote was any more inaccurate or uncharitable than your description of him, just now, as having cast conservatives as in league with Lucifer.)
In any case, Kaj’s article is irrelevant here, and would be even if he’d been much ruder about social conservatives than he actually was. Because JoshuaZ’s complaint about advancedatheist is that he shoves highly-charged political asides into comments about other things. Whereas Kaj’s whole post was, precisely, about how people think about their political opponents. No matter what he said there, there’s no way it could have been an example of the behaviour JoshuaZ is criticizing advancedatheist for.
I confirm that this is what Azathoth123 has done. (I assume with high probability that Azathoth123 is Eugine, but I cannot confirm that. Since both are banned, I don’t care anymore.) Even towards new users. A new user comes, posts dozen comments, receives one downvote per each, leaves LW and doesn’t return again. One of the comments happened to be political, the remaining ones were just the kind of comments we usually have here. No other downvotes for that user from anyone else. This in my opinion is much more harmful than downvoting old users who usually have high enough karma that they are in no danger of returning to zero, and they understand that it is only one person punishing them for having expressed a political opinion, not a consensus of the whole website.
It is a completely different behavior from downvoting the political comment and leaving the other comments untouched. From this kind of feedback people can learn “don’t post this kind of comments”. From the Eugine’s kind of feedback, the only lesson is “someone here doesn’t like you (and doesn’t even bother to explain why), go away”. And Eugine’s algorithm for giving this feedback is far from representative for the LessWrong culture.
It’s not identical, but similar.
First, I think there as a fair bit of disapproving because of a person they disapprove of, because of his views. The comments against the post seem to include a lot of analysis of AA’s general behavior, not specific textual analysis of the post.
That’s about the person, not about the particular post. A particular chunk of text doesn’t need a “benefit of the doubt”, it needs to be read.
Voting down a post because of the person, and not the post, was the primary charge against Eugine. If he voted down 50 votes, but detailed the specific failings of each post, what grounds would there have been to boot him?
Second, Eugine’s crime was the violation of list norms on the use of karma. Is it not a violation of the professed list norms to vote an article down just because you disapprove of their views?
Since when is it bad faith to have a particular hobby horse that one rides? I see a lot of “ethical altruism” posts and comments. You voting those down too?
And no, what people are doing here is not existentially identical to what Eugine did. “Not exactly the same as the tarred and feathered pariah” is not exactly the greatest defense.
OK, let’s suppose I’m right. That’s usually a good bet.
Do you consider such behavior acceptable? Desirable? Consistent with the professed norms of behavior of the list?
Yes. That was the article.
Much to his credit, Kaj admitted that he had unfairly cast his opponents as “morally reprehensible”. http://lesswrong.com/lw/dc5/thoughts_on_moral_intuitions/71uz
Argue with him about it if you like. I did my time on that one.
Kaj’s article is perfectly relevant to JoshuaZ’s claim here:
The scenario he described happened, and the author did not end up in a similar situation as AA. Far from it, he was applauded.
“Benefit of the doubt”
Yes, giving (or not giving) someone the benefit of the doubt on a particular occasion involves your opinions about the personally and not just what they’ve done on that occasion. No, I don’t see why that should be a problem. (Suppose an LW poster whom you know to be sensible and intelligent posts something that seems surprisingly stupid. I hope you’ll give serious consideration to the possibility that you’ve misunderstood, or they’re being ironic, or there’s some subtlety they’ve seen and you haven’t. Failing that, you’ll probably guess that for whatever reason they’re having a bad day. Whereas if someone whose contributions you regard as generally useless posts something stupid-looking you’ll probably just think “oh yeah, them again”. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that.)
The worst problem with mass-downvoting of the sort Eugine got booted for isn’t that his voting wasn’t completely blind to who wrote the things he was voting on. It’s that it ignored everything else.
(And: Yes, it is a violation of the professed norms around here to vote something down just because you disapprove of its author’s views. You ask that question as if we’re faced with a bunch of examples of people doing that, but I’m not seeing them.)
Hobby horses
LW has a bunch of pet topics. Effective altruism has (not always by that name) always been one of them. If someone only ever posts on LW about effective altruism, that in itself doesn’t make their contributions unhelpful. PUA is not in that situation; my impression is that a few people on LW are really interested in it, a (larger) few are really offended by it, and most just aren’t interested. So someone posting only about PUA is (all else being equal) providing much less value to LW than someone posting only about EA.
But all else is not equal. What advancedatheist is accused of isn’t merely posting only about PUA, it’s shoehorning PUA into discussions where it doesn’t belong. If someone did that with EA, I think there would be plenty of complaints and downvotes flying around after a while.
“Not exactly the same”
“Not exactly the same as the tarred-and-feathered pariah” is a pretty good defence, when the attack it’s facing is “see, you’re doing the same as the tarred-and-feathered pariah”. And actually what I’m saying is “Quite substantially less bad than the tarred-and-feathered pariah”. And you may recall that it was controversial whether Eugine should be sanctioned for his actions; so what I’m saying is actually “Quite substantially less bad than that guy whose behaviour we had trouble deciding whether to punish”.
Piling on
If someone posts something lots of people don’t like for political reasons and it gets jumped on for political reasons: no, I don’t like it much. Nor for that matter if they post something lots of people do like for political reasons and it gets upvoted to the skies.
It may at this point be worth remarking that, so far as I can see, advancedatheist’s comments are not heavily downvoted overall right now. Maybe that’s partly because of this discussion; I don’t know. But it doesn’t actually seem as if he’s being greatly harmed, or his comments being effectively silenced, on account of their political content.
Anyway: as I say, I think it’s a shame if something gets a huge pile of negative karma merely for being politically unpopular. But unacceptable or inconsistent with professed norms hereabouts? No, I don’t think so.
Kaj’s comments on social conservatives
I didn’t dispute that Kaj agreed he’d been too negative about social conservatives. I did dispute (and continue to dispute) that he did anything remotely resembling saying that they’re in league with Lucifer. What Kaj agreed with you about was the first of those; what you’ve claimed here and I’ve disagreed with is the second.
And no—for reasons I’ve already given, but you’ve completely ignored—it was not an instance of the scenario JoshuaZ described. Because
what JoshuaZ described was someone chucking in irrelevant anti-Republican comments into discussions they’re irrelevant to; whereas
Kaj’s article was all about dealing with political disagreement, a lot of it was about how important it is to understand your political opponents and not strawman them, and it just happened he didn’t do as good a job as he should have of doing that (even though, as I think we agree, he was trying to).
These are not remotely the same thing. Irrelevant politically-charged asides versus mentioning politics in an article about politics. Overt hostility to a particular group versus limited ability to portray a group accurately.
(Also: you can only cast one vote on a given article. The paragraph you didn’t like was one of dozens. I see no reason to think that what got Kaj’s article applauded and upvoted was that he misrepresented social conservatives rather than all the other stuff in it. Is it your opinion that if an article or comment contains anything in it that is less than perfectly charitable to the author’s political opponents, it should be downvoted? You might want to be careful about your answer.)
[I had mistakenly replied to my own post instead of yours. ]
It shouldn’t be about him, it should be about his post. Maybe he’s in league with Lucifer too, but that doesn’t make any of his posts any more true or false.
If having a bad day means writing a bad post, then you get a downvote.
You’re just letting your prior on the person determine your vote. Which you say you disapprove of.
I’m not really big on giving offense utility monsters a veto. Once you pay the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.
People are offended at PUA. Do they really not comprehend that plenty of people find their views offensive in turn? Just as everyone is the hero in their own story, there’s a pretty good chance you’re the villain in the stories of a lot of other people.
But I admit that’s something of the clash of civilizations going on here. Many people feel that their group’s “offense” should tally up in the utility machine, and they should thereby get their way. I don’t.
So it doesn’t belong in the Open Thread?
You just said:
When a post is somewhat ambiguous, it’s reasonable to consider its context. That includes considering who posted it and what their likely reasons were. (Because it influences what is likely to happen in the ensuing discussion, if any.)
Just as well no one suggested that, then. If you’re suggesting that I am proposing giving offense utility monsters a veto, then I politely request that you reread the whole of the sentence from which you quoted eight words and reconsider what might be leading you to misinterpret so badly. (Incidentally: Kipling reference noted.)
I don’t see any reason to think otherwise. If someone came along who only wanted to talk about how awful the PUA crowd is, and wedged complaints about that into discussions in which they have no place, I don’t imagine that would be much more popular than advancedatheist’s alleged wedging of pro-PUA material into inappropriate contexts.
I think you are mixing levels here. I am not complaining about advancedatheist, I am commenting on philh’s complaints about him and on the parallels you’re drawing. The accusation being levelled at advancedatheist (or at least part of it) is that he tries to shove PUA advocacy into discussions of other things. If in fact all he’s been doing is saying “yay PUA” in top-level open thread comments, then it’s an unfair accusation (though I think “yay PUA” and “boo PUA” belong in LW open threads about as much as “yay President Obama” or “boo Manchester United Football Club”) but that’s an entirely separate question from whether there’s an inconsistency between complaining about Eugine Nier’s mass-downvoting and not complaining about the downvotes some of advancedatheist’s comments have received.
No contradiction. The distinction you may be missing is between “because you disapprove of its author’s views” and “because you disapprove of the views expressed in that comment”. If I post one comment saying “Adolf Hitler was an admirable leader and we should give his policies another try” and one saying “Kurt Goedel proved the relative consistency of CH with ZF by proving that CH is true in the constructible universe and that Con(ZF) implies Con(ZF & V=L)”, then it is a violation of local professed norms if the latter comment gets downvoted because the former is horrible, but not if the former one does.
It’s not that he was mentioning politics in an article about politics. Talking about political slurs would be relevant to an article about politics. Making political slurs generally wouldn’t be.
But altogether lost in the brouhaha over my original objections to Kaj’s post was that his false characterization made for a bad argument. He did worse than be uncharitable, he did worse than slur his opponents, he made a bad argument relying a smear for much of it’s force.
And as far as I was concerned, the people who upvoted him did much worse in circling the wagons around a bad argument dependent on a cheap slur, even after it was pointed out to them.
No, less than perfect is not my standard for downvotes.
Mischaracterizing your opponents as supporting something morally reprehensible probably qualifies. Making a bad argument based on such a mischaracterization certainly does. Defending the mischaracterization would as well.
[Deleted post mistakenly posted as a reply to myself. Moved up one level.]
It should be easy to see how these situations are different. A well-respected user made an article with a large amount of other content, and explicitly was trying their best to model a wide varity of people who they disagree with. (And mind you many people would likely upvote Kaj by default simply based on their general inclination. This clear happens with some of the more popular writers here. Heck, I’ve occasionally upvoted some of gwern’s posts before I’ve finished reading them). This is not the scenario in question where the comments are being put into repeated comments that have little or nothing to do with the topic at hand and where this is almost all the comments the user in question has. Kaj was specifically talking about how people think about politics and trying to be charitable (failing at properly doing so apparently but that’s not for lack of trying.) And now imagine Kaj kept doing shoving such comments in while going through apparently almost zero effort to actually respond to either questions or criticisms. That would be the scenario under discussion.
I (and I suspect many people here) would not react to you the way they’ve reacted to AA partially because you respond to comments and frankly when you do have political statements, they are generally more clearly laid out, more reasonable, and more interesting than the throw-away cheering remarks that AA has. I am however, surprised by how downvoted your initial comment was there- it does have serious issues such as the claim that Kaj doesn’t have regular conservative readers, but it is surprisingly downvoted; I do have to wonder if part of that is a status thing (Kaj being of relatively high status here and you being of status more in my range or slightly higher). However, that’s not a great explanation and it does make me update in the direction of their being some for lack of a better term, liberal pile-ons.
Incidentally, note that your guess that I had downvoted you in that thread was wrong: I had not seen that thread until it was pointed out here, and had not read Kaj’s piece either. So that prediction of yours was wrong. I’m curious, meanwhile, if you’ll take me up on my offer for a bet about your attitude about AA changing in the next few months.
Excuse me, but this seems like saying: “Indeed, Eugine was the person who was strategically downvoting his political opponents. But it is still a strange coincidence that he also happened to be the person who was banned for strategically downvoting his political opponents.” I fail to see the strangeness here.
I guess the charitable interpretation is that the list of bannable offenses is purposefully generated to include things done by unprogressive people, and to exclude things done by progressive people (which I guess means pretty much everyone who is not a neoreactionary). For example, if it would be instead someone else mass-downvoting neoreactionaries (not just for political comments, but having once made a political comment, then for everyrything, including meetup announcements), and Eugine would be posting pictures of kittens, then the moderators of LessWrong would decide that mass-downvoting is perfectly acceptable, however pictures of kittens deserve a life-time ban.
Is this what you are suggesting?
In what universe? Are you claiming that Eugine got booted by what? The evil cabal of moderators who want to push left-wing politics?
But if you want, I’ll make a fun related prediction: Within 3 months you’ll agree with me that AA has been violating community norms. What do you want to bet on that?
Don’t be daft. Making claims like he did falls flatly into PUA and neoreactionary claims. Moreover, the phrasing was political.
No. The problem with Eugine was he was a) repeatedly downvoting people’s comments which had nothing to do with anything to do with politics or controversial issues. For crying out loud, he was downvoting meetup announcements posted by people. b) he was using sockpuppets to get the karma to do it. (Note that for example, I’ve downvoted two of advanceatheist’s recent comments but not most of them, and upvoted one of the less political ones).
Link?
Really? I could imagine much clearer and much more steelmanned, and frankly more interesting versions of the same idea. I can easily supply them if you want.
No. But it is politics to claim that interpersonal skills are intrinsically involved in issues of sex and gender, that those issues always come up in the way that he described and the like.
A lot of my reply has been covered already, so I’d just like to make a few points that I don’t think have been made so far.
It looks like I’ve downvoted fewer than a dozen of aa’s comments.
One more reason that I don’t think I’m like Eugine, is that if aa ever actually asked “I’m being downvoted a lot, what gives?” I would be happy to explain. As far as I know he’s never asked, which is one of the reasons that I think he’s acting in bad faith. Eugine didn’t do this. IIRC, at least one of his targets said that they PMed him asking for an explanation, and received another round of downvoting.
This particular post really does strike me as bad. Yes, one could steelman it into something reasonable. I don’t feel inclined or obligated to do that. There would be little benefit to me compared to the other things I could put effort into. And I’m not going to do it for aa’s benefit until he starts acting like a truth-seeker. This is part of what I meant by the benefit of the doubt.
(I think that this next paragraph is pointing in the direction of something true, but isn’t quite right:)
I don’t think aa’s problem is just being overly political, or what his specific politics are. (My opinions about PUA and neoreaction are slightly negative, but sympathetic.) The way he’s being political feels like an attempt at subversion. It’s like he wants to shift the LW Overton window, and the way he’s doing that is by acting like the Overton window is somewhere other than where it actually is. Maybe the Overton window should be wider, but the way to widen it is to argue for things that are outside it, acknowledging that they are currently not well regarded. If you act like PUA is inside the window when it isn’t, then current readers will get less value than they could if you spoke to the current window; and outsiders will get the wrong impression of LW, which could be the entire point (drive away people who dislike it, attract people who like it).
I downvoted despite the fact that I sympathize with the basic gist of AMSS (although maybe not some of the details). The reason I downvoted is because I don’t think LW is appropriate for discussions like this, at least not in this way.
If you want to make non-obvious statements like “Women tend to respect the sexually confident” then you need to 1) define what you mean by this, and 2) provide evidence or links to evidence. I’m all for a rational discussion based on psychological science about what causes sexual attraction in human beings. Nothing wrong with that.
I’m assuming the implied-to-be-already-known background here is something along the lines of “women find low-status men repulsive even in relatively non-sexual/non-romantic/etc. contexts”, which is both true and probably a special case of “people find low status repulsive”.
But it’s definitely not known, at least not to me, that “people find low status repulsive.” At the very least, I’d appreciate some evidence backing this up.
In my case, I was stuffed full of religious teachings that seem as if they were deliberately designed to make men unattractive. Ambition, money, and sexuality were literally demonized. I never saw my father kiss my mother without her turning away in disgust. I was discouraged from dating, from pride, from profitable careers, and in general from any actions that might lead to even moderate fame, fortune, or power.