I think it depends a lot on your population of women (e.g., you might get very different answers in San Francisco or Cambridge—either Cambridge, actually, but I’m thinking of the one in the UK—than in Memphis or Tunbridge Wells). But questions of the form “how shall we treat members of this distrusted minority group?” may not be best answered by majority vote.
two come to mind
First is #3 in my list; drawback is space and hence cost. Second is one I hadn’t thought of but should have; one drawback is space, another is that to make it work you presumably have to say that obviously-trans people must use these changing rooms which (1) is probably going to be unpleasant for them and (2) maybe make things a little too easy for potential assailants (as I remarked earlier, rates of sexual violence against trans people are high; suppose you’re someone who would assault trans people, and suppose you find that the gym you attend has a special room that any teams person attending has to use and will take their clothes off in, where nobody else is likely to be...)
Umm… how did you phrase it? Ah: “which I suggest is not an argument”.
I find many things in life unpleasant but I do not consider it sufficient reason to demand that the world be rearranged according to my sensitivities.
If you want a more general rule: self-selection into a group should not generate any additional rights (at least without matching responsibilities).
maybe make things a little too easy for potential assailants
That strikes me a bit too paranoid. A changing room in a gym is not the middle of a dark forest. Unisex bathrooms are pretty common by now and I haven’t seen any data about them encouraging sexual predators. If you are that concerned about safety, maybe install additional street lighting? And cameras! Don’t forget about cameras! Only beneath the watchful eyes can you be secure!!
So when I said that “ewww” isn’t an argument I was taking it to mean “I find contemplating X unpleasant” rather than “if X happens, people Y who experience it will find it unpleasant”. The former is a much much weaker argument than the latter.
(I should, of course, have considered the latter as well, and I’m not sure why I didn’t. If women at a gym find it unpleasant when someone who identifies as female but has male-looking anatomy uses their changing room—which they well might—that is a bad thing, and that fact does constitute an argument for not allowing that. I happen to think that the arguments the other way are stronger, but as I said before I think both sides are defensible.)
self-selection into a group should not generate any additional rights (at least without matching responsibilities).
In the case we’re discussing here, the additional right comes with a perfectly matched additional responsibility. If access to a gym’s changing rooms goes by expressed gender identity rather than anatomy, then identifying as female lets you into the women’s rooms at exactly the same time as it bars you from the men’s.
(One might argue that in fact someone with female identity but male anatomy should be allowed to use either to reduce the likelihood of their getting assaulted, or something. Members of unusually vulnerable groups sometimes get additional rights even if membership of the group is self-selected, and that’s not obviously unreasonable. The additional rights are compensating for additional risks rather than additional responsibilities they people in question have taken on.)
Don’t forget about cameras! Only beneath the watchful eyes can you be secure!!
Nice steelmanning of my position. No, wait, not steelmanning. The other thing.
But I’m a bit confused now about what your position is, because I think you’ve now said the following things:
A gym changing-room setup that seems to offer extra opportunities for sexual assault against trans people isn’t a problem; the risk is very small.
A gym changing-room setup that makes trans people feel uncomfortable and stigmatized isn’t a problem; no one should expect that the universe will be rearranged to accommodate their sensitivities.
A gym changing-room setup that lets trans women into the women’s changing room is a problem, because [...]
and I’m not sure how to fill in that [...] at the end. ”… because the (other) women may feel uncomfortable”? (But you just said that the fact that some people will feel uncomfortable shouldn’t count for much in designing gym changing rooms.) ”… because the (other) women may be at danger of assault”? (But you just said that we shouldn’t worry about assaults in gym changing rooms.)
A nitpick: it is not male-looking anatomy, it is male anatomy.
perfectly matched additional responsibility
Which responsibility? If I am of whatever gender I say I am, I can change genders at will. I am not “barred” from the other changing room any more than picking one door to walk through “bars” me from the other door.
Nice steelmanning
That didn’t involve transmuting your position into either steel or straw. That was just me amusing myself :-) I did not mean to imply anything about your views on widespread surveillance.
But I’m a bit confused now about what your position
I don’t have a well-developed position delineated by bright lines. Basically you have a conflict between two groups—let’s call them “trans” and “mainstream”. Such a conflict is nothing unusual and, indeed, the entirely normal state of a human society. Typically such conflicts are resolved according the the balance of power between the groups—the results vary from one side fully suppressing the other to an equally-unsatisfying compromise. Occasionally the stars align and it turns out that the conflict is easily fixable and can be “dissolved” in LW lingo.
In contemporary Western societies such conflicts are usually resolved politically which means that the sides wage a cultural war “for the hearts and minds”. This kind of war uses propaganda as weapons. Accordingly, the war involves loud screaming about morals, justice, fairness, God’s will, etc. etc. -- whatever is needed for the agitprop needs of the day. I tend to by very cynical about such agitprop.
Note, by the way, that a completely general answer to the there-is-a-tranny-in-my-shower problem does not exist. As you yourself observed, it all depends on the local culture. A good solution for the showers in San Francisco’s Castro district is likely to be different from a solution for downtown Salt Lake City—and that’s even staying inside one country.
What’s visible to, and possibly disturbing for, the people in the changing room is what it looks like. I don’t know, e.g., whether you would consider a post-op female-to-male transsexual person’s anatomy male or merely male-looking, but I take it it would be about as disturbing in that context as a straightforwardly cis man’s. So the relevant question is what it looks like.
I can change genders at will
I am pretty sure no one is in fact proposing that people be able to change their gender at will simply by saying “I’m a woman now”. (Yeah, you could read Fluttershy’s comment upthread that way, but I’m quite confident it wasn’t so intended.)
I tend to be very cynical about such agitprop.
Good! But I can’t help noticing that your cynicism has been deployed only in one direction in this discussion, even though (so it seems to me) there’s plenty of moral-outrage agitprop coming from elsewhere.
I am pretty sure no one is in fact proposing that people be able to change their gender at will simply by saying “I’m a woman now”.
No, you’re proposing that anyone can change genders at will by saying “I’m a woman now” and make an attempt to look like the other gender, dress like the other gender and insist on being referred to by opposite gender pronouns and name (that’s how you defined “presenting as the other gender” here). While this is technically slightly more then saying “I’m a woman now”, it’s only barely so.
And frankly, I doubt you’d refuse to take the word of someone who insisted that he was always a “she” but didn’t bother with changing name, clothing, or appearance.
While this is technically slightly more than saying “I’m a woman now”, it’s only barely so.
I think it’s very importantly different. It means, for instance, that
it’s not something you can just do on a whim
it requires actual inconvenience and commitment
both of which greatly decrease its utility to people wanting to ogle or assault women in public restrooms, gym changing rooms, etc. (The fact that it requires you to make yourself appear less “manly” probably also has that effect.)
And frankly, I doubt you’d refuse [...]
You may doubt whatever you please, I suppose.
(If someone declared themself female but made no sign of any attempt to “be” female beyond that declaration, I’d attempt to go along with their pronoun preferences but wouldn’t, e.g., let them into any female-only premises I was responsible for. I don’t think I would actually consider them female for any practical purposes, though further interactions might convince me that there was something more going on than a liking for feminine pronouns—e.g., maybe the person is young, still living with and dependent on parents, and the parents are very strongly opposed. In such a case I still wouldn’t let them into female-only premises but would be apologetic about it :-).)
it’s not something you can just do on a whim
it requires actual inconvenience and commitment
How so? The only things in that list that take any effort at all are dressing and looking like a women. The former isn’t that hard, it’s easy to get a dress, heck these days many women wear jeans and a T-shirt, or suites, or other “male clothing”, so anything a men would normally wear could count as “female clothing”. The latter also isn’t that hard, see the existence of drag queens, or any number of comedians.
It looks to me as if you are mixing up a number of different things (what makes someone male or female, versus what constitutes sufficient evidence to treat them so in a given case; what I think their gender is, versus what I would treat it as in a given difficult situtation; etc. I will try to disentangle these things.
The position I am defending here is as follows. (Individual points numbered for cross-reference.)
[EDITED to stop LW’s comment formatting messing up my numbers and to complete something I carelessly left unfinished after editing other bits.]
0. There is no single fact-of-the-matter about a person’s gender in general, because different notions of gender are appropriate in different circumstances. 1. Of course, for the great majority of people all reasonable such notions coincide; the questions here are about cases where they diverge. 2. For most purposes the best notion of gender is largely a matter of (a) internal mind-state and (b) social role occupancy. 3. The relevant internal mind-state doesn’t change rapidly; social role occupancy can in a sense change quickly but evidence of it accumulates more slowly. And of course anatomy and chromosomes and whatnot are even harder to change.
4. In many cases, if someone claims that their gender is not as it superficially appears, the best policy is to believe them. (Note: this is not only about trans people. There are people who are anatomically, chromosomally and hormonally female but look very much like men unless you take their clothes off.) 5. In many others (typically distinguished from those in #3 by the consequences being worse if you take them at their word and they’re lying) the best policy is to require stronger evidence of 2a and/or 2b (e.g., legal name change; evidence of having been consistently self-describing as female for some time; testimony of a psychologist who has examined them). 6. In some others (e.g., medicine, major sporting contests) 2a and 2b may be pretty much irrelevant and the only important thing may be genes or gross anatomy.
7. Every possible policy will make some mistakes, with the boring exception that if you define gender by easily visible external features then the policy of using those easily visible external features will not make mistakes. (But either you can’t execute that policy without looking in people’s pants, or else you will classify some people with female internal anatomy and chromosomes as male.)
So. Can someone’s gender, in my view, change on a whim? No (see #3). Can something they do on a whim suffice to make me treat them, at least provisionally, as of one gender rather than another? Yes, but only in “low-stakes” cases (see #4). Does this mean that if everyone thought as I do then our nations’ women’s restrooms would be flooded with men claiming to be women in order to assault or harass? No, because in higher-stakes cases I would be more cautious (see #5), and in any case the available evidence strongly suggests that even laws that straightforwardly let anyone use any restroom do not cause any increase in such crimes.
There is no single fact-of-the-matter about a person’s gender in general, because different notions of gender are appropriate in different circumstances.
So you agree that “gender” as distinct from “sex” doesn’t correspond to anything, but for some reason you still want to use the term, presumably for some of the connotations it inherits from the latter. Generally, using a word that has no referent solely for its connotations is very bad reasoning.
The relevant internal mind-state doesn’t change rapidly; social role occupancy can in a sense change quickly but evidence of it accumulates more slowly. And of course anatomy and chromosomes and whatnot are even harder to change.
Except you have no way to directly observe internal mind-state, and you are arguing against relying on anatomy and chromosomes, that means in practice your policy amounts to relying on “social role”. Of course, if you do observe internal mind state, e.g., by using sufficiently good brain scans or personality tests, you’d like find that most of the people claiming to be “trans” are clustered with their birth gender.
testimony of a psychologist who has examined them
I notice that this is the only item on your list that attempts to distinguish some notion of “innate gender” from all someone faking it out of whatever motive. Given the current state of the “science” of psychology, this doesn’t strike me as particularly reliable.
So. Can someone’s gender, in my view, change on a whim? No (see #3).
Given how you’ve explained your world view this doesn’t appear to be the case. Rather, I suspect someone could easily change his “gender” on a whim and keep convincing you that the current gender is the real one provided you didn’t remember your previous meeting.
you agree that “gender” as distinct from “sex” doesn’t correspond to anything
Nope. I think it corresponds to different things in different contexts. (So the rest of your paragraph is addressing an irrelevant strawman.)
in practice your policy amounts to relying on “social role”
To a great extent, yes. (Not entirely; we can often draw inferences about internal mind-state from externally observable behaviour, including things like what answers we get to questions about a person’s gender.) You say that as if it’s obviously a bad thing, but it’s not obvious why.
Of course [...] you’d likely find that most of the people claiming to be “trans” are clustered with their birth gender.
I think it’s very far from clear that we should expect that.
provided you didn’t remember your previous meeting
That’s quite a proviso. Take note also of point 5 and note its consequences for ability to change on a whim in cases where there’s more at stake than what pronouns I use to refer to someone.
The word “big” corresponds to different things in different contexts. (A big baby. A big skyscraper. A big problem.) Is “big” meaningless?
The majority of the population can be divided neatly into two fairly well defined groups according to anatomy, chromosomes, etc. We call that “sex”. There are social and psychological differences that mostly go along with sex, but diverge in some cases. We call those “gender”. In both cases, exactly which features we care about most will vary, which may change how some unusual people are classified. What’s the problem?
(To be explicit: sex has ambiguous and intermediate and anomalous cases just as gender does. Example: If you have XY chromosomes but complete androgen insensitivity, then you are chromosomally male, your externally-visible anatomy is female, and internally you have some features of both and in particular no uterus.)
So you agree that “gender” as distinct from “sex” doesn’t correspond to anything,
I’m pretty sure that ID cards and human interaction are territory, not map. Please don’t do the “social constructs basically don’t exist” thing, it’s very silly.
The discussion of a hypothetical person who wants to change gender (but nothing else) every five minutes is giving me a vibe similar to when someone asks “how does evolution explain a monkey giving birth to a human?” It doesn’t. That would falsify the model, much like our hypothetical person would falsify the “gender identity” model.
There exists a group of people who explicitly claim to have gender identities that are not stable over time, but this usually includes behaviors beyond requested pronouns.
Of course, if you do observe internal mind state, e.g., by using sufficiently good brain scans or personality tests, you’d like find that most of the people claiming to be “trans” are clustered with their birth gender.
Hey, an empirical disagreement! I think this research has in fact been done, I’ll go digging for it later this evening.
I’m pretty sure that ID cards and human interaction are territory, not map.
So a man getting an ID card with a typo in the gender field makes him female?
The discussion of a hypothetical person who wants to change gender (but nothing else) every five minutes is giving me a vibe similar to when someone asks “how does evolution explain a monkey giving birth to a human?” It doesn’t. That would falsify the model, much like our hypothetical person would falsify the “gender identity” model.
How about not “every five minutes”, but whenever he feels like going to the women’s bathroom to ogle/be generally creepy?
There exists a group of people who explicitly claim to have gender identities that are not stable over time, but this usually includes behaviors beyond requested pronouns.
Well, this fact itself seems like to should falsify gjm’s model. Let’s see what he says about it.
So a man getting an ID card with a typo in the gender field makes him female?
Legally, maybe so, at least until the error is corrected. You’d have to ask a lawyer to be sure.
ID cards are a physical object, which is not determined by biological sex, since as a question of legal fact one can get an ID card of one’s self-identified gender if one jumps through the appropriate hoops, even without sex reassignment surgery. (At least that’s how it works here in California. I have no idea how it works in other states or countries.)
This seems to me a counterexample to the claim that gender, as distinct from sex, doesn’t correspond to anything. Social interaction is another: for example, women are much more likely to ask each other if they want old clothes before giving/throwing them away, and much less likely to get asked to be someone’s Best Man at a wedding.
How about not “every five minutes”, but whenever he feels like going to the women’s bathroom to ogle/be generally creepy?
By far the dominant hypothesis here would be “you’re lying”, but failing that probably yes, gender identities aren’t supposed to be able to work that way.
“Your gender is whatever you say it is” is a social norm, not a factual claim. Saying you’re a woman doesn’t make you a woman. People just don’t generally assert it unless they actually want to be treated as a woman. Creeps, or other people lying for personal gain, seem exceptionally rare—probably because it’s a giant hassle, and the institutions they’d want to take advantage of don’t obey that norm anyway.
If transition ever became socially easy and stigma-free, we probably would need a different anti-creep mechanism.
I agree that genderfluid people might break gjm’s model, although he seems to have some wiggle room as written. Of course, I don’t know if this is a deliberate result of accounting for their existence, or a lucky accident.
Good I’m glad we agree on this. Now, why are you trying to defend positions that rely on denying this claim?
I’m not. I entered this discussion mostly to point out that you were equating “corresponds to social behavior” with “does not correspond to anything”, which is silly.
It’s worse than gender not corresponding to anything. Like in the standard example, it corresponds to multiple things, which don’t necessarily agree.
ETA:
Yes, and creeps, or example, want to be treated as a woman with respect to which bathroom they enter.
Do they? I mean, as a theoretical problem, sure. But to my knowledge this is a vanishingly rare event.
I am pretty sure no one is in fact proposing that people be able to change their gender at will simply by saying “I’m a woman now”.
I don’t know about that. You don’t interpret common statements along the lines of “Only you have the right to decide your gender identity” or, in the negative form, “No one can tell you which gender you are” this way?
your cynicism has been deployed only in one direction in this discussion
The other direction, which I assume would have been represented by “God will burn you in hell forever, your freaks!” and/or “You need to be fixed and re-educated, this is for your own benefit” is strangely absent on LW :-) I doubt even VoiceOfRa would express the desire to go back to the ways of dealing with “sexual deviants” popular in the early and mid XX century.
More importantly, in my social circles (both meatspace and online) the left is the aggressor and tends to take the “If you’re not with us you’re against us. KILL!!!!” approach. If I were stuck in a small town in America’s Bible Belt, for example, I would expect my emphasis to be different.
“You need to be fixed and re-educated, this is for your own benefit”
That’s a separate question that touches on a whole bunch of other issues. It’s related to the question of what the proper way of dealing with the guy who insists he’s Jesus is.
No, I don’t interpret “only you have the right...” etc. that way. I would guess that people saying it usually mean something like this: your gender is whatever it is, it’s reasonably stable over time, and it’s not something other people can know by looking at you or doing medical tests; so people should beyond what you say. But if you change your professed gender every five minutes no one is going to believe you are sincere and take you seriously.
even VoiceOfRa
Well, he seems to me to be quite far in “the other direction”.
in my social circles [...] the left is the aggressor
Here on LW, it seems to me the nearest thing to aggression on this topic has been VoR ranting about delusions, hallucinations, “trannies”, etc., etc. There’s some very aggressive “social justice” out there, for sure, but it’s pretty much completely unrepresented on LW, whereas neoreaction is alive and well here even though there aren’t very many neoreactionaries.
[EDITED to fix the typo mentioned two comments downthread.]
So is “God will burn you in hell for ever”. So is “You are a bigot and I hope no one buys anything from your bakery”. So is “If you’re not with us you’re against us”. Or (I think more accurately) all of these are both aggression and free speech.
If mere ranting doesn’t count as aggression, what is it that “the left” has been doing in your social circles lately? Issuing death threats?
As far as I can see, VoiceOfRa is the lone neoreactionary actively posting
Maybe no one else here explicitly identifies as nrx. (For that matter, I don’t know whether VoR actually does.) But when topics come up of the sort where neoreactionaries and social-justice enthusiasts tend to disagree dramatically, I see none of the characteristic tropes of the SJ movement (anything a member of an Oppressed Group says about their situation must be accepted unquestioningly; anything that talks about “men” and “women” is perpetuating the gender binary and therefore bad; mumble mumble patriarchy burble; etc.) and plenty of those of neoreaction (take for granted that black people are less intelligent than white people and women less intelligent than men; treat homosexuality, transgender, etc., as instances of deviance that we should be working against, etc.). Comments that (explicitly) even contemplate the possibility that the social conservatives might be wrong on this stuff get lots of disagreement and usually (on balance) negative karma. Comments that agree with the nrx position on this stuff get less disagreement and usually (on balance) positive karma.
Maybe it’s mostly plain ol’ social conservatism, with only a tiny fraction of nrx. But whatever it is, there’s more of it than there is of the “social justice” that lies at the other end of one political spectrum. I certainly don’t see any possible way that “the left is the aggressor” here on LW; am I missing something?
(Of course “above and well” was a typo—I was posting from a mobile device and not paying enough attention to its autocompletion. I’ll fix it.)
Your arguments are getting… sloppy. Keep in mind that we are taking a stroll through a mindkill minefield, so a modicum of care is advised :-) Look:
You countered the statement that “rants are not aggression but free speech” by pointing out that the Venn intersection of aggression and free speech is not null. That is true, but not a counterargument.
You said that “neoreaction is alive and well here” and when I pointed out that no, it is not, you countered by saying that SJWs do not thrive on LW. Again, true, but not a counterargument.
You put in the same list things like “take for granted that black people are less intelligent than white people and women less intelligent than men”. One of these two is a very well-supported position with lots of research behind it, a position that a great many people tried to knock down for decades, and yet they did not succeed. The other position I never heard anyone express on LW (are you sure you not confusing means and variances, by any chance?).
So. Back to the topic. I have a very low opinion of the somewhat fashionable approach that the exposition of views you don’t agree with constitutes aggression (or a “microaggression”). Rants are rarely aggression, but ad hominem attacks often are. It’s a good thing that LW has strict community norms about ad hominem.
Note, by the way, that I did not say that the left is aggressive on LW—I consider LW to be reasonably balanced and it is not really a political battleground anyway. I disagree that LW has a “conservative” tilt, I think it has an “against the stupid” tilt and if you think this makes LW more conservative, well… X-)
Of course, the whole discussion of LW being less or more something critically depends on the coordinate system in which you are looking at the issue.
we are taking a stroll through a mindkill minefield, so a modicum of care is advised
I do agree. I am not sure I agree about which of us is being sloppier :-).
You countered the statement that “rants are not aggression but free speech” by pointing out that the Venn intersection of aggression and free speech is not null. That is true, but not a counterargument.
I think you misunderstood my point, but maybe what happened is that I misunderstood yours and so my comments weren’t such as to make sense to you. So let me be slower and more explicit and see if that helps.
Of course rants are (in the relevant sense) speech, and if we value free speech then we should want not to forbid rants. However, that doesn’t stop them being aggression too; you offered no grounds other than rants’ being speech for thinking they shouldn’t be classified as aggression, and my best guess—perhaps wrong? -- was that you were suggesting that if they are free speech then they can’t also be aggression. Hence the counterexamples.
Perhaps in fact you hold that something else stops rants from being aggression. If so, what and how? (It seems clear to me that some of the comments VoiceOfRa has made are aggression, but maybe we have different criteria for aggression or something.)
you countered by saying that SJWs do not thrive on LW. Again, true, but not a counterargument.
Again, I think you misunderstood my point. I think the fault is mine; I wasn’t as clear and explicit as I could have been. So, again, let me try again more slowly and clearly and see if that helps.
First of all, the context is relevant. I’d taken your statement that “the left is the aggressor” (for what I think were good reasons but apparently wrongly given your other comments since) to be describing LW as well as your other social circles. So it went like this: “The left is the aggressor.” “For sure there’s aggressive leftism out there, but here on LW there’s basically none of that but there is aggressive rightism.” “Nah, there are hardly any neoreactionaries on LW these days.” To which I replied by comparing how near LW gets to SJ and NRx and what the reactions tend to be.
So (1) I wasn’t only saying that SJWs don’t thrive on LW, I was comparing SJ and NRx; and (2) that wasn’t meant to be a response to your “hardly any neoreactionaries any more” statement in isolation, but in the context of what I thought was a discussion of whether “the left is the aggressor” on LW.
(Which, again, may in fact not have been the discussion you thought we were having, but I hope that on reflection it’s obvious how I came to take it that way.)
The other position I never heard anyone express on LW (are you sure you not confusing means and variances, by any chance?)
Elsewhere in this thread I posted a link to one recent discussion in which the topic came up. Someone else made much the same mean-versus-variance comment, but the discussion in question was about a specific role that isn’t very tail-y and for which I’m pretty sure a difference in variance alone clearly couldn’t have the required effect.
the somewhat fashionable approach that the exposition of views you don’t agree with constitutes aggression
Is anyone here saying or implying that? I certainly don’t intend anything of the kind, and I gravely doubt that anyone seriously thinks what you say they do. I think some people do think that (1) the exposition of the opinion that such-and-such a group’s members are inferior, evil, crazy, etc., constitutes aggression, and (2) exposition of such opinions using needlessly pejorative terms constitutes aggression. Of these, I’m ambivalent about #1 and agree with #2.
So, e.g., when VoiceOfRa characterizes transgender people as suffering “delusions or hallucinations”, that’s certainly #1 and probably #2. It seems pretty aggressive to me. When he suggests that it’s unreasonable to treat those “delusions or hallucinations” any more generously than those of someone who thinks he’s simultaneously Jesus and John Lennon, that seems pretty aggressive to me. When he calls them “trannies” (er, actually “trannys” but never mind) that’s certainly #2 rather than #1 and it’s hard to see how it’s not being deliberately rude; again, in my book that’s aggression. Etc.
Of course this is all much milder aggression than, say, beating the people in question up with a baseball bat. But it’s pretty aggressive, and it seems to me much more aggressive than anything I’ve seen from “the left” on LW lately, and I think all those comments are currently sitting with positive karma. Which is one reason why I think that LW currently leans right (to which I don’t object, for the avoidance of doubt, even though that happens not to be my own leaning) and that here it’s much nearer the truth to say “the right is the aggressor” than “the left is the aggressor”.
(Note 1: Again, I do appreciate that you’ve indicated that your comment about leftist aggression wasn’t in fact intended to apply to LW. I’m just explaining where my comments were coming from. Note 2: I am not claiming that LW’s participants lean right; past surveys have suggested not, and I would guess not. But if we weight by actual participation in politically loaded discussions, I think that’s the way it goes. I have the impression that one or more right-leaning LWers have a very deliberate policy of trying to make things unpleasant for left-leaning LWers; if so, that may be a partial explanation.)
I disagree that LW has a “conservative” tilt, I think it has an “against the stupid” tilt
I think it has both. As someone who has been heavily downvoted (I think by exactly two people, one much more than the other) in recent politically-fraught discussions, I am curious: Do you think my comments in this thread are stupid? Do you think they are stupider than comments with a different sociopolitical leaning that have been upvoted?
(I take it you have sufficient brain to distinguish “stupid” from “in disagreement with my politics”, but I will explicitly remind you of your own caution about mindkill minefields.)
I was hoping to avoid getting into the definitions debate, but that looks inescapable now. We seem to understand aggression differently.
First, let me point to tension in your position. On the one hand you say that “It seems clear to me that some of the comments VoiceOfRa has made are aggression” and “When he suggests that it’s unreasonable to treat those “delusions or hallucinations” any more generously than those of someone who thinks he’s simultaneously Jesus and John Lennon, that seems pretty aggressive to me.” On the other hand, you strongly deny that the exposition of one’s views (presumably, even on controversial topics) is aggression, saying that “I certainly don’t intend anything of the kind, and I gravely doubt that anyone seriously thinks what you say they do.”
I see problems in this position of yours. You might be able construct a definition of “aggression” which twists and turns enough to accommodate you, but I suspect it will be neither a good nor a robust definition.
For example, you think that considering transsexuals to be mentally ill is “aggression”. Or is it aggression only if you call them crazy (a “needlessly pejorative term”), but if you, following DSM-IV, diagnose them with a Gender Identity Disorder that’s not aggression any more?
I can’t make sense of your position, it does not look consistent to me.
Re women’s IQ:
The case with the lab manager’s resume has a lot of confounding factors (other than IQ) in play. Hiring managers are often more concerned with whether the new hire will get pregnant and go on maternity leave than with IQ, for example. And, well, this is an empirical question, there is a lot of data about the IQ of men and women.
Re LW tilts:
You say that “I think that LW currently leans right” but that critically depends on where you zero point is :-) I suspect that LW actually doesn’t tilt anywhere politically—most people here don’t care (some “naturally” and some explicitly to avoid mindkills). It is not a useful exercise to assign a political tilt to LW—that’s not what this place is about.
Re “Do you think my comments in this thread are stupid?”:
LOL. I have actually been upvoting your comments in this subthread back to zero because we are having a very nice polite conversation and ideological downvotes are not welcome in it (and are quite silly, anyway).
But to be explicit—no, I don’t think so at all. If if did, this conversation wouldn’t exist.
What I strongly disagreed with is the following claim (your description of an allegedly “fashionable approach” which you may or may not have been ascribing to me)
that the exposition of views you don’t agree with constitutes aggression
It sometimes happens that an exposition of some view or other constitutes aggression-as-I-understand it. It sometimes happens that it doesn’t. Whether I agree with the view has nothing to do with whether a given exposition of it constitutes aggression.
If you’d instead said that some people think “that sometimes an exposition of a particular view can constitute aggression” then I wouldn’t have disagreed with it. Perhaps that’s what you actually meant to say some people think—but in that case I suggest that you said it very badly. (Perhaps from a desire to make those people sound sillier?)
you think that considering transsexuals to be mentally ill is “aggression”
No, I don’t, and I respectfully suggest that you retrace whatever mental steps led you to think I think that looking for errors.
I think that calling them (not merely considering them) delusional and hallucinating (not merely mentally ill) is “aggression”. You can consider anyone you like anything you like and it will not constitute aggression; how could it. And “mentally ill” is a very broad category, covering e.g. things like depression and anxiety as well as outright craziness.
And: yes, words like “crazy” and “delusional” and “hallucinating” are pejorative in ways in which e.g. “suffering from gender identity disorder” is not, which makes statements that use the former terms more aggressive than otherwise similar ones that use the latter.
So I think the tension and inconsistency you perceive in my position is the result of misunderstanding it. (There might of course be tensions or inconsistencies even when it’s correctly understood; maybe we’ll find out.)
confounding factors (other than IQ)
True. I’m sure hiring managers are rarely concerned with IQ as such at all. But they do care about competence in the job, and that’s the scale on which they rated applicants called “Jennifer” 0.7 points lower (out of 5) than otherwise identical applicants called “John”. I personally would not classify “unlikelihood of disappearing on maternity leave” under the heading of competence; would you expect university science faculty hiring a lab manager to do so?
that critically depends on where your zero point is
Yup. That’s a large part of why I am not bothered by LW (in my perception) leaning right.
It is not a useful exercise to assign a political tilt to LW—that’s not what this place is about.
You may recall that I was only talking about this because I thought you were implying that politlcally-motivated aggression on LW tends to come from “the left”. I don’t at all mind LW’s tilting rightward (if indeed it really does).
I don’t think [that gjm’s comments are stupid] at all
I’m pleased to hear it! But you will find that in any political thread my comments (which I’m fairly sure are not generally any stupider than they are in this one) attract more than averagely many downvotes even when (as it seems to my of-course-perfectly-unbiased judgement) they are conspicuously reasonable and not-stupid. So do comments from other people with political leanings resembling mine. And that’s part of what I mean by saying that LW has a conservative, not merely and anti-stupid, tilt.
I think that particular phenomenon is due to a very small number of users—in my less charitable moments I suspect one with intermittent sockpuppets. But it’s there, and I think it affects the overall flavour of discussion on LW, even if that’s not what LW should be about. And, more generally, I think the left and the right have their characteristic unpleasantnesses, and those of the left are (1) largely absent and (2) heavily criticized and downvoted when they show up, whereas those of the right are (1) distinctly more common and (2) generally approved by the LW community, so far as one can tell from replies and karma.
(Again: I’m not saying there’s anything very terrible about that. And LW is indeed distinctly less unpleasantly political than many other venues.)
That would have been fairly useless. The phrase “some people think..” can be followed by pretty much anything at all and still be true.
I am still confused by your understanding of aggression—right now it seems to me that it means just being impolite. Let’s take Alice who may or may not have some issues. Bob says “She is mentally ill”. Charlie says “She is delusional and hallucinating”. Duncan says “Man, she’s just batshit crazy”. Is it you position that Bob is fine, Charlie is mildly aggressive, and Duncan is highly aggressive?
I find it strange that you pay so much attention to the form and relatively little to the content.
that’s part of what I mean by saying that LW has a conservative, not merely and anti-stupid, tilt.
Let’s get a bit more precise. Does LW as a whole have such a tilt, or does your karma have such a tilt? I think you’re extrapolating your personal situation a bit too much.
whereas those of the right are (1) distinctly more common and (2) generally approved by the LW community
Think of LW as a place of refuge, a “safe zone” to use an SJ term :-D A neo-reactionary who wanders into a wrong Tumblr neighbourhood will get a lot of detailed descriptions of how exactly he should die in a fire :-/
From my perspective, the dilemma you face is that you could say “a lot of people think that expressing opinions that disagree with theirs constitutes aggression”, which would be non-content-free but ridiculous, or you could say “some people think that some expressions of opinion constitute aggression”, which would be true but almost content-free; I’m having trouble figuring out what you could have meant that would be contentful but in any way plausible.
it seems to me that [aggression] means [to gjm[ just being impolite.
They’re closely related. Aggression is (among other things) one variety of impoliteness. (In ordinary social contexts. If you’re facing an opponent in a boxing ring, aggression isn’t impolite.)
Alice [...] Bob [...] Charlie [...] Duncan
Is A listening to B, C, and D? Or are they saying this in some venue that records what they say, where A might come across it later? Or perhaps not A but some of her friends and family?
If not, I don’t think I’d call their comments aggressive at all. So let’s suppose B, C, and D know that their comments are likely to be heard by A. Then yeah, all else being equal I would say B<C<D in aggression.
I find it strange that you pay so much attention to the form and relatively little to the content.
I find it strange that you say that, for two reasons. Firstly, there most certainly is a difference in content between what B, C, and D are saying. (And, referring back to the original discussion, between “Transgender people suffer from gender identity disorder, which I classify as a mental illness” and “Transgender people are delusional and hallucinating”.) Just as there is a difference between “Lumifer has some unusual political opinions” and “Lumifer is a fascist”. (Note for the avoidance of doubt: I do not think you are a fascist and have no idea how usual your political opinions are.)
Secondly, there’s a lot of information in the form. The difference between “Joe has difficulty understanding some things” and “Joe is a fucking moron” is largely one of form, and mostly what it indicates is hostility. Similarly, it’s easy enough to see how someone could express opinions about transgender people quite similar to VoiceOfRa’s with a much less hostile tone. That would (as I use the word) be less aggressive. It would be less likely to make any trans people reading LW feel attacked; less likely to make them expect that if their trans-ness became known they’d be met with hostility and contempt.
LW as a whole [...] or your karma [...]?
I tried to make it clear that I’m well aware of the difference (acknowledging that my judgement of my own comments is far from impartial; citing what happens to other leftish-leaning comments; “part of what I mean”. Did I really fail so badly? (Or: did I succeed but do you think I’m disastrously self-deceiving or something?)
Think of LW as a place of refuge
See, this is why I find it odd that you say LW doesn’t lean right. Because providing a “safe place” for neoreactionaries would, I think, generally be regarded—even by people who consider themselves right-wing—as evidence of either (1) rightishness or (2) fanatical refusal to make anyone unwelcome on account of their sociopolitical views. And if you think it’s #2, then I invite you to imagine the roasting that the residents of that “wrong Tumblr neighbourhood” would get if they turned up on LW.
And if you think it’s #2, then I invite you to imagine the roasting that the residents of that “wrong Tumblr neighbourhood” would get if they turned up on LW.
Well this tumblr-style struggle session against gwen’s “transphobia” has rather disturbingly many upvotes for the PC-brigade.
Three years ago. I wonder how many of the people who upvoted those comments have since left LW because it’s an unpleasant place to be for anyone with “progressive” social opinions.
(FWIW, I have no recollection of that particular incident and I hope I didn’t upvote the boo-isn’t-gwern-awful comments. I think they were obnoxious, but I don’t see any reason why the right treatment for being obnoxious on IRC should be being crucified on LW.)
That particular thread was actually surprisingly civil and even occasionally productive, it seems to me on skimming through it now. I can’t help thinking a similar thread today would be more acrimonious.
FWIW, I have no recollection of that particular incident and I hope I didn’t upvote the boo-isn’t-gwern-awful comments.
You do realize you can check by looking at whether the thumbs up is colored green. Also, how about the “gwen must repent of his crimethink and confess his sins” comments?
That particular thread was actually surprisingly civil and even occasionally productive,
You have a very bizarre notion of civil.
I can’t help thinking a similar thread today would be more acrimonious.
To use your “speech as violence” analogy, it would only be more acrimonious in the sense that a mass beating where the target doesn’t even bother to defend himself is “less acrimonious” than a fight where he does. [Edit: fixed last sentence.]
D’oh, so I can. … It would appear that I neither upvoted nor downvoted anything in that thread (although I haven’t followed any of the “continue this thread” links on very deeply nested comments). My guess is that I never saw it.
how about the “gwern must repent of his crimethink and confess his sins” comments?
I’m not sure what you mean by “how about”, but if you mean did I upvote them: no, as I say, I don’t appear to have upvoted or downvoted anything in that discussion.
You have a very bizarre notion of civil.
Perhaps. (But note that “surprisingly civil” doesn’t mean “perfectly civil”.)
it would only be more acrimonious in the sense that [...]
I either don’t understand what you’re saying, or don’t have any idea on what grounds you say what you’re saying. (The latter if you mean that nowadays LW is so supersaturated with progressivism that gwern wouldn’t bother to defend himself. The former if you mean something else.)
I either don’t understand what you’re saying, or don’t have any idea on what grounds you say what you’re saying. (The latter if you mean that nowadays LW is so supersaturated with progressivism that gwern wouldn’t bother to defend himself. The former if you mean something else.)
He didn’t “beg for mercy”. He (1) criticized the person who reported what he’d done for breaking IRC norms by posting bits of logs; (2) agreed that what he said was unpleasant and rude; (3) explained why he thought he shouldn’t be expected to ensure that he doesn’t do it again.
I’m sure you’d prefer him to have said that it’s perfectly reasonable and correct to describe trans people in the way he (jokingly) did, but if we take him at face value (which I see no good reason not to) then he doesn’t think it is (or at least didn’t at the time). None the less, I don’t see how his response can be categorized as “begging for mercy”.
(In particular, I don’t think anyone threatened him with anything and I don’t think he made any kind of request for such threats not to be carried out. In which case, he certainly didn’t literally beg for mercy or even ask for it. I suppose it’s possible that you’re using the term extremely broadly, to cover any response more temperate than “I am completely in the right and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves”, but I don’t think that’s how the rest of the world uses “beg for mercy”.)
See, this is why I find it odd that you say LW doesn’t lean right. Because providing a “safe place” for neoreactionaries would, I think, generally be regarded—even by people who consider themselves right-wing—as evidence of either (1) rightishness or (2) fanatical refusal to make anyone unwelcome on account of their sociopolitical views.
I would like to point out the asymmetry hidden by the word “safe space”. A space is Neoreactionary-hostile if it actively censors their posts and deletes their accounts, a space is SJW-hostile if it fails to censor and delete the accounts of all other view points.
This reminds me of the old Cold War era joke:
An American and a Russian are discussing their respective countries. The American says “In America there is free speech, anyone can go up to the White House, yell ‘down with Reagan’ and everything will be OK”. The Russian replies “Well in Russia we also have free speech, anyone can go up to the Kremlin, yell ‘down with Reagan’ and everything will be OK”.
you could say “a lot of people think that expressing opinions that disagree with theirs constitutes aggression”, which would be non-content-free but ridiculous
How about “a lot of people alieve that expressing opinions that disagree with theirs constitutes aggression”?
Yes, “alieve” is certainly much more credible than “believe” here, and I bet it’s close to what I think Lumifer meant. It rather makes nonsense of his description of doing so as a “somewhat fashionable approach”, though.
(I in fact suspect that Lumifer knows perfectly well that that description is not reasonable, but found it rhetorically convenient. Which is one reason why I’ve been slightly bloody-mindedly querying what he meant on the assumption that the description is reasonable :-).)
Or are they saying this in some venue that records what they say, where A might come across it later?
Well, they are saying this on the ’net. That qualifies, right? But they are not addressing Alice directly. It’s third-person, not second. Alice might or might not stumble on their remarks.
B<C<D in aggression
Yes, but will you call Charlie “aggresive”? Duncan?
And let’s throw in a parallel example. As you well know, Christians expect atheists to burn in hell forever. Would there be an “aggressive” and a “non-aggressive” way of pointing this out on the ’net? Still talking in third person, not saying “you”.
there most certainly is a difference
It’s a difference is specificity. “Delusional and hallucinating” is a specific kind of “mentally ill”. Unless you are talking metaphorically, I don’t see why a specific description would be more aggressive than general. If I believe, for example, that Alice is a schizophrenic, both sentences—“Alice is mentally ill” and “Alice is a schizophrenic” sound very similar to me from aggression point of view.
and mostly what it indicates is hostility
Is “hostile” necessarily “aggressive”? These are somewhat different things to me.
I also notice that you haven’t mentioned the word “intent” yet. Do you think intent matters?
I invite you to imagine the roasting that the residents of that “wrong Tumblr neighbourhood” would get if they turned up on LW
Ah, but that’s the consequence of a the anti-stupid tilt :-) Neo-reactionaries, by and large, are not stupid at all. You may object to their value system, but they are capable of reason. Most of the inhabitants of the relevant Tumblr neighbourhoods are stupid and prone to form large screaming lynch mobs. There are good reasons why LW would reroute them to the woodchipper :-)
Christians expect atheists to burn in hell for ever.
Some Christians do. I know some [EDITED: previous word was “one” before; don’t know why I did that] who don’t. Anyway: yes, there are more and less aggressive ways for someone who believes that to say it. Of course however you say it it’s a much much nastier thing than anything VoR has ever said about transgender people (“these guys are likely to suffer worse torture than a million Auschwitzes, and it will be exactly what they deserve”), and contrariwise in many cases the person saying it will only half-believe it and will be deliberately avoiding thinking about it too much. But yeah, there’s a huge difference between “unfortunately temporal sin has eternal consequences, and the only way to escape eternal damnation is to put one’s faith in Christ” and “those godless suckers are going to burn in hell, and I look forward to watching them do it”, and again a large part of the difference is that the latter seems hostile and the former (if sincere) doesn’t.
Is “hostile” necessarily “aggressive”?
The two aren’t quite equivalent (e.g., I think you can be hostile purely inwardly, whereas aggression is necessarily an outward action) but they’re closely related.
I don’t see why a specific description would be more aggressive than general.
It wouldn’t be. If someone is acting oddly, then “Alice is suffering from depression” would be not at all aggressive and “Alice is fucking crazy” would be (if expected to reach Alice’s ears) quite aggressive.
you haven’t mentioned the word “intent” yet
Should I have? Yes, in general intent matters; to take an extreme example, if I am a speaker of a foreign language and some perfectly innocuous sentence in that languge happens to sound exactly the same as “I’m going to kill Lumifer and eat his brains” then there’s nothing aggressive about my saying that (unless e.g. I know full well how it sounds and say it with the intention that you should hear it and be intimidated, while preserving plausible deniability for me).
(Hostility implies intent, doesn’t it? It’s not as if nothing I have said so far addresses the question of whether intent is relevant.)
I’m pretty sure there are circumstances where it doesn’t matter whether something was intended aggressively but only whether its effect is the same as if it had been. But for the purposes of determining, e.g., whether “the left is the aggressor” here on LW, the actual intent is more important. Of course the effect may be easier to determine than the intent.
Most of the inhabitants of the relevant Tumblr neighbourhoods are stupid
I think you’re probably right that neoreactionaries tend to be intelligent. I don’t think Tumblr-SJWs are at all uniformly stupid, though (in fact my guess is that they’re less stupid than the population average in terms of raw brainpower), and I know some people who are both very clever and quite Tumblr-SJW-y. I think LW would probably route them to the woodchipper almost as directly as it would the stupid ones.
I know some people who are both very clever and quite Tumblr-SJW-y. I think LW would probably route them to the woodchipper almost as directly as it would the stupid ones.
And why do you think this would be the case? Purely because of the ideological bias?
I think one of the defining characteristics of Tumblr-SJW-y people is that they are highly aggressive, both by your and my definitions. I suspect that it is their intolerance which would make them not welcome here.
Some are highly aggressive and would get flayed for that here. Some are not at all aggressive … and would also be made very unwelcome here, I think. Still, at this point we’re just trading conjectures...
I think some people do think that (1) the exposition of the opinion that such-and-such a group’s members are inferior, evil, crazy, etc., constitutes aggression, and (2) exposition of such opinions using needlessly pejorative terms constitutes aggression. Of these, I’m ambivalent about #1 and agree with #2.
So do you claim that crazy people don’t exist? Or that they do but we shouldn’t point this fact out? In any case you don’t seem overly concerned by the general social aggression against people who think they’re Jesus.
Or that they do but we shouldn’t point this fact out?
I generally prefer to leave that to the psychiatrists. But: 1. calling someone crazy is a more aggressive act when they are not in fact crazy than when they are, and 2. even when they are, yes, there is something aggressive about it. I did not say (and do not believe) that aggression is always wrong.
the general social aggression against people who think they’re Jesus.
Actually, I’m not sure I’ve seen any. Perhaps because those people are (1) extremely rare and (2) usually confined in mental institutions because their thinking is sufficiently generally and seriously disordered that they can’t well cope with life in the world at large. Transgender people are much more common and are generally about as capable of rational thought as the rest of the population.
Actually, I’m not sure I’ve seen any. Perhaps because those people are (1) extremely rare and (2) usually confined in mental institutions because their thinking is sufficiently generally and seriously disordered that they can’t well cope with life in the world at large. Transgender people are much more common and are generally about as capable of rational thought as the rest of the population.
Transgender people are less then .01% of the population. Also being transgender the the currently fashionable form of insanity, if you go back 50-60 years you’d see even fewer “transgender” and a lot more Messiahs.
Transgender people are less than .01% of the population.
What percentage of the population would you guess is made up of people who think they are Jesus?
Incidentally, more recent studies tend to find much higher proportions of transgender people, which presumably is not unrelated to what you describe as its being “the currently fashionable form of insanity”. I don’t think you get to claim both <0.01% and that it was a lot fewer 50 years ago.
Terminology note: If I understand what is going on here, VoiceOfRa is probably using transgender to mean people who want to change male-to-female or female-to-male, and are making a serious attempt at it (sexual reassignment surgery, hormone therapy, or the like). This is not an uncommon usage, but is not the most precise usage; this would more specifically be referred to transsexual.
This may be relevant because the stats quoted appear to apply specifically to transsexuals, not to the larger class transgender (which includes anyone who feels that that their cis-gender does not apply to them). This is true regardless of whether you believe that either or both classes are delusional.
I am not certain if gjm intends to refer to transgender or transsexual folk in eir arguments.
Given that VoR has referred to the same people as “men claiming to be women”, “trannies”, “transgender people”, “people who are claiming to be ‘transsexual’”, and “trans-‘women’”, I think it’s reasonable to guess that he isn’t being super-careful about terminology.
I’ve been trying to make what I say broadly enough applicable that it applies to all trans people, except when replying to specific claims about a smaller group. I don’t guarantee that I’ve been careful enough every time.
(which includes anyone who feels that that their cis-gender does not apply to them)
How is that at all a workable definition? It strikes me as sufficiently vague that it could potentially apply to anyone with a little shoehorning. Is a boy who doesn’t want to play sports as much as the other boys “transgender”, probably not, but with a little creativity a school councilor who feels like being “progressive” could probably make argue that he is.
I don’t really care if it is workable. I was just clarifying what the statistics you two were using applied to. You can also have statistics on people who believe that they are Jesus, regardless of whether that is workable.
(2) usually confined in mental institutions because their thinking is sufficiently generally and seriously disordered that they can’t well cope with life in the world at large.
The fact that society does confine someone to a mental institution is a strong statement.
I see none of the characteristic tropes of the SJ movement (anything a member of an Oppressed Group says about their situation must be accepted unquestioningly
You don’t need to be neoreactionary to not agree with that claim. I would guess >75% of the public don’t agree with that claim.
take for granted that black people are less intelligent than white people and women less intelligent than men
I don’t think anybody here argued lately that the average woman is less intelligent than the average man. I also doubt that’s standard nrx.
Comments that (explicitly) even contemplate the possibility that the social conservatives might be wrong on this stuff get lots of disagreement
It’s quite easy to get lots of disagreement on LW by saying things about IQ that are not in line with the academic research about the subject. Quite a few people on LW actually read relevant research papers. Don’t confuse pro-science with nrx.
On the other hand I haven’t seen strong disagreement with people who question whether “homosexuality is a deviance that should be worked against”.
Opinion that are by the admission of the author not well thought out deserve to be challenged. If you don’t challenge badly thought out opinions on charged topics you don’t get high quality discourse.
You don’t need to be neoreactionary to not agree with that claim.
Of course! I wasn’t saying that everyone on LW is neoreactionary. I was saying (1) I don’t see SJ-isms and (2) I do see NRx-isms.
I don’t think anybody here argued lately that the average woman is less intelligent than the average man.
In the lengthy discussion that started from this comment, there were a number of people (who were not all VoiceOfRa, though one of them was with a different username) arguing that it’s credible that rating a prospective employee’s likely competence much higher if the name on the application is John rather than Jennifer (with no other differences) is not evidence of prejudice, because being named John rather than Jennifer could be good evidence of a substantial difference in competence (even given the other information in the application indicating equal ability).
I don’t know how to interpret that other than as men being more competent than women. (Not quite the same thing as intelligence but closely related. The job in question was as a lab manager in a university science department.)
And, guess what?, VoiceOfRa (operating at that time under the name of Azathoth123) was in fact saying in so many words that women are less intelligent than men. (Not, however, simply taking it for granted that everyone knows they are, so my description above isn’t perfectly accurate. Sorry.)
Don’t confuse pro-science with nrx.
Don’t worry; I’m not.
Opinions that are by the admission of the author not well thought out deserve to be challenged.
I agree (with the caveat that if the author admits they’re not well thought out, then “challenge” isn’t exactly what’s called for—the author already knows they might be wrong—but something more like analysis and critique) but I think you may be misunderstanding my point. I’m not saying “waaaah, leftist comments get challenged”. I’m saying “moderately leftist comments get sharp disagreement and downvotes; immoderately rightist comments get less disagreement and fewer downvotes; therefore it doesn’t seem right to categorize LW as a place where ‘the left is the aggressor’”.
So, in particular, I was not and am not saying (1) that it’s bad that “progressive” comments get challenged, nor (2) that it’s bad that they get downvoted, nor (3) that it’s bad that “conservative” ones get a more positive reception. (As it happens I think 1 is good, 2 is bad in that the downvoting seems rather indiscriminate, and 3 is more or less neutral.) I just think 1,2,3 are clearly true and hard to reconcile with Lumifer’s explanation of his own choice of what to take issue with, as being because “the left is the aggressor” in his circles.
I don’t know how to interpret that other than as men being more competent than women.
That boils down to not understanding statistics which is something for which you can get downvoted on LW.
You don’t need a general difference in intelligence for the average person in a given hiring poll with gender A being more capable than the average person in the same hiring poll with gender B.
The job in question was as a lab manager in a university science department.
Whether or not men are on average smarter than woman has nothing to do with a particular job. It’s a general statement.
with the caveat that if the author admits they’re not well thought out, then “challenge” isn’t exactly what’s called for—the author already knows they might be wrong
No, if someone posts rubbish the fact that they know they post rubbish doesn’t mean they deserve less challenge.
We can turn this into a mathematical-skill pissing contest if you like; for what it’s worth, I don’t much favour your chances. If you’re talking about means versus variances: this is only a large effect when you’re hiring from the tails of the distribution, and a lab-manager post doesn’t require really exceptional ability in any domain.
has nothing to do with a particular job
The point of my specifying the job is that it’s a job on which performance is (1) likely to be a matter of general competence in some broad sense, rather than specialized skill that, e.g., men might be much more likely to spend a long time learning for some cultural reason, and (2) sufficiently related to general intelligence that if someone holds that men are systematically better at it, it’s reasonable to guess that this indicates they think men are smarter.
the fact that they know they post rubbish
Knowing you’re posting rubbish is not the same thing as posting something you know isn’t well thought out. The comment I guess you have in mind here is not “rubbish”, and its author’s acknowledgement neither says nor means “I know I was posting rubbish”. (If we truly adopted a standard saying that every comment on LW needs to be carefully thought through and made watertight before posting, then “who should ’scape whipping?”.)
If you’re talking about means versus variances: this is only a large effect when you’re hiring from the tails of the distribution, and a lab-manager post doesn’t require really exceptional ability in any domain.
I’m not even talking about that. People who apply for a job aren’t randomly drawn from the general population. There no reason to assume that the average of the subset with applies for a job is the same as for the general population,
True enough. So, tell me: Do you think it credible that (1) there is little overall difference in the distribution of lab-managerial competence between men and women, but (2) among undergraduates applying for lab-manager positions there is a big enough difference between the competence of men and the competence of women to make it rational to rate the former 0.7 points above the latter on a 5-point scale given applications identical in every respect other than the name? (You can find the information the raters were given here; it’s fairly brief but far from content-free.)
If so, what sort of differences do you think would do this? How big would they need to be, in your judgement?
(If we truly adopted a standard saying that every comment on LW needs to be carefully thought through and made watertight before posting, then “who should ’scape whipping?”.)
Especially on politics I would expect that people post what they consider to be carefully thought out or otherwise explicitly say that they haven’t thought it through in the same post.
I accept that sometimes people think they have put careful thought into an issue but still end up wrong, but not even having the standard of careful thought before posting is bad.
not even having the standard of careful thought before posting is bad.
I too would like to see more careful thought before posting, but that isn’t the same as saying that any comment not fully thought through before posting is “rubbish”.
You are making the assumption that my circles and LW are the same thing, I am not sure on which basis. I do hang out on LW, but not only here. And I did mention meatspace, too.
At least one of us is failing to understand the other, because I’m having trouble how that comments relates to anything I said. Unless you think I was taking “in the circles I move in” to mean “in LW, and only LW”. I wasn’t; but I was taking them to include LW.
To be more explicit, again: if you do something in LW and explain it by saying “in the circles I move in, X is true” then I don’t see how that’s a useful explanation unless you’re saying that (1) LW is among the circles you move in and (2) it resembles the others in that X is true there.
To be more explicit, again: if you do something in LW and explain it by saying “in the circles I move in, X is true” then I don’t see how that’s a useful explanation
OK, let me reformulate things this way. Let’s say there is a variable s (which stands for snark) defined on the [-1..1] interval so that when it is at −1 the snark is entirely directed at the left wing, when it’s at 1 it is entirely directed at the right wing, and the intermediate values determine the proportions in which both left and right get snarked. This variable s is a function of two other variables: the subject who’s doing the snarking and the location in which the snarking takes place.
You assume that s is predominantly a function of location. This is not true in my case. For me, s is predominantly a function of the subject (me) and the influence of location is secondary.
In other words, the direction of my snark is heavily influenced by things that are happening outside LW, even though the snark which you observe happens at LW.
the direction of my snark is heavily influenced by things that are happening outside LW, even though the snark which you observe happens at LW.
I suggest that this is unwise; snark on LW won’t do anything to repair the opinions or attitudes of people elsewhere. If one place is Too Green and another Too Blue, then someone who frequents both does no favour to the place that’s Too Green by complaining about bluism there merely because they’re annoyed by the excessive bluism in the other place.
(Of course, you might not be able to help it; or you might not care. Fair enough, in either case. But if you do happen to care about the quality of discourse at LW and happen to be able to overcome your annoyance at overzealous progressives elsewhere, I suggest that you would do better to match the snark to the venue.)
But if you do happen to care about the quality of discourse at LW
I think you’re confusing the quality of discourse with political tilt. The former is not a function of the latter. Besides, as I mentioned in another comment, how you see the tilt depends on where you set your zero point. I do not consider LW to have a conservative tilt.
I think you’re confusing the quality of discourse with political tilt.
Why do you think that? I’m not suggesting that you match your snark to the venue because that would push LW politics in “my” direction. (At least, I don’t think I am.) I’m suggesting that you do it because it will tend to improve the quality of discussion at LW. I would make the same suggestion if we were in some left-leaning place where you were complaining at all the conservatives because you were annoyed by all the neoreactionaries elsewhere.
But if, as seems to be the case, you don’t share my perception that LW has a lot more right-wing nastiness than left-wing nastiness, then fair enough.
Anyway, it’s pretty rude of me to be trying to tell someone else whom he should be snarking at. Sorry about that.
Reason 1: Because I think that there’s some chance (maybe not very large) that if an LW denizen is wrong about something and gets snarked at, it may be what they need to improve; and that for any given quantity of snark this effect will be larger if the snark is aimed at a larger deserving subpopulation of LW; so that if there are more people wrong in way A and fewer wrong in way B, snarking about A is more likely to do good than snarking about B.
And, in the present instance, for reasons already discussed I think LW has more people in need of anti-far-right snark than people in need of anti-far-left snark.
(Of course—I repeat myself—if you’re snarking just for the fun of snarking then you needn’t care about that. And perhaps the chances of any good ever coming of snarking at anyone are negligible.)
Reason 2: Because if LW is welcoming to people in group A and hostile to people in group B, these groups playing roughly symmetrical roles on opposite ends of some spectrum, there is a risk of a positive-feedback loop that pushes LW further and further in the A direction and away from the B direction until it becomes severely and unfixably partisan, which (as you have already remarked) is not how LW is supposed to work and (as you haven’t remarked but I think is true) makes LW a less interesting and useful place by decreasing its intellectual diversity.
And, in the present instance, for reasons already discussed I think LW is welcoming to rightists and hostile to leftists. If so, then shifting that balance a bit would reduce the danger.
(How real is the danger? I don’t know. Maybe less real since the More Right folks left LW. Still there, though, I think.)
(An important note that perhaps I should have written some time ago: all this left/right stuff is of course a crude but useful one-dimensional simplification of reality and if taken too seriously raises the risk of the kind of us-versus-them thinking that we’re all too familiar with. And the axis we’re really looking at here doesn’t exactly correspond to the usual left/right political axis—it’s much more concerned with social, and less with economic, issues. Please be assured that I understand all this and am using terms like “left” and “right” only as a convenient shorthand.)
so that if there are more people wrong in way A and fewer wrong in way B, snarking about A is more likely to do good than snarking about B.
I am sorry, my life’s purpose is not to bring balance to the universe, one forum at a time. I am not in the re-education business.
for reasons already discussed I think LW has more people in need of anti-far-right snark than people in need of anti-far-left snark.
Well, go for it :-) As I already noted, I don’t think so.
there is a risk of a positive-feedback loop that pushes LW further and further in the A direction and away from the B direction until it becomes severely and unfixably partisan
Given that NRx used to inhabit LW and then almost all of them went away while LW stayed as it is, I consider this risk negligible. Unless, of course, direction A is leftward :-D
Also, don’t forget that LW is populated mostly by Americans. From the European point of view, both US Democrats and US Republicans are right-of-centre.
And the axis we’re really looking at here...
I don’t know which axis are we looking at. Is there an axis at all or you just dont’ like a particular thought cluster?
my life’s purpose is not to bring balance to the universe, one forum at a time.
Fair enough! As I said: you aren’t obliged to care about this stuff.
I don’t know which axis are we looking at.
Take one of those political questionnaires. Throw out all the questions about economics and foreign policy, and keep the ones about social issues. Administer the questionnaire to a representative sample of Americans and Western Europeans. Take the first principal component. That axis.
I wouldn’t put it that way because there’s a lot of ethics in economics and foreign policy, and because there are other areas of morality where the “social left” are the puritans (e.g., meat-eating and pollution).
Wow. I wonder what you mean by ethics, then. A change in economic or foreign policy may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths if there’s a war—how can these not be ethical matters?
Is your axis one of Haidt’s five moral axes
No, I don’t think so.
I am still not quite sure how do you see it.
I’m sorry about that. I’ve tried giving handwavy qualitative descriptions. I’ve told you how to identify it statistically. I’m really not sure there’s much more I can reasonably be expected to do.
Wow. I wonder what you mean by ethics, then. A change in economic or foreign policy may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths if there’s a war—how can these not be ethical matters?
Interesting. Our minds work sufficiently differently so that we hit minor misunderstandings on a very regular basis :-/
When I said “close to zero ethics in economics and foreign policy” I meant that decisions in this spheres are not driven by ethical considerations. Once you take out things like naked self-interest, desire for money and/or power, the necessity to keep up appearances, etc. the remaining influence of ethics, IMHO, is very small.
You, on the other hand, said “there’s a lot of ethics in economics and foreign policy” meaning that decisions in that sphere have meaningful consequences which we can evaluate ethically. That’s certainly true, but under this approach I can say that there is a lot of ethics in earthquakes. An earthquake “may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths”, but is it an ethical matter?
No one (so far as we know) chooses whether there are to be earthquakes.
People do choose whether to start wars, increase or decrease minimum wages, levy new taxes, etc. (Governments choose directly; in democracies, their electorates choose indirectly.)
I don’t know to what extent people in government are thinking ethically when contemplating foreign and economic policy, though they frequently claim they are. I am fairly sure that when I vote, I am greatly influenced by my estimates of the candidates’ parties’ likely foreign and economic policy, and that I am thinking in ethical terms about what policies would be best.
Of course I may be fooling myself about that, and the politicians may certainly be lying about what drives their policies. But the same is true on “social” issues. I don’t know of any reason to be more confident that (say) abortion policy is really more driven by politicians’ or voters’ ethics than (say) taxation policy.
I don’t know to what extent people in government are thinking ethically when contemplating foreign and economic policy, though they frequently claim they are.
You can examine their decisions (“revealed preferences”) and check whether they require ethical imperatives as an explanation or they can perfectly well be explained without considering ethics.
I appreciate that this is not a trivial exercise (e.g. distinguishing between “we cannot ethically do that” and “we cannot do that for the sake of keeping up appearances” is going to be difficult), but so is much of real-life analysis.
I don’t know how to interpret that other than as men being more competent than women.
I do. Men have a higher variance than women and the employer only hires from the tail end.
(You can say that that still counts as men in a subgroup being more competent, of course, but it’s not what we normally mean by “men are more competent than women”.)
I don’t think anybody here argued lately that the average woman is less intelligent than the average man.
Given how different the distributions are, it’s hard to say (and not very meaningful) which has the higher average. It might even depend on which average you use.
I think it depends a lot on your population of women (e.g., you might get very different answers in San Francisco or Cambridge—either Cambridge, actually, but I’m thinking of the one in the UK—than in Memphis or Tunbridge Wells). But questions of the form “how shall we treat members of this distrusted minority group?” may not be best answered by majority vote.
First is #3 in my list; drawback is space and hence cost. Second is one I hadn’t thought of but should have; one drawback is space, another is that to make it work you presumably have to say that obviously-trans people must use these changing rooms which (1) is probably going to be unpleasant for them and (2) maybe make things a little too easy for potential assailants (as I remarked earlier, rates of sexual violence against trans people are high; suppose you’re someone who would assault trans people, and suppose you find that the gym you attend has a special room that any teams person attending has to use and will take their clothes off in, where nobody else is likely to be...)
Umm… how did you phrase it? Ah: “which I suggest is not an argument”.
I find many things in life unpleasant but I do not consider it sufficient reason to demand that the world be rearranged according to my sensitivities.
If you want a more general rule: self-selection into a group should not generate any additional rights (at least without matching responsibilities).
That strikes me a bit too paranoid. A changing room in a gym is not the middle of a dark forest. Unisex bathrooms are pretty common by now and I haven’t seen any data about them encouraging sexual predators. If you are that concerned about safety, maybe install additional street lighting? And cameras! Don’t forget about cameras! Only beneath the watchful eyes can you be secure!!
So when I said that “ewww” isn’t an argument I was taking it to mean “I find contemplating X unpleasant” rather than “if X happens, people Y who experience it will find it unpleasant”. The former is a much much weaker argument than the latter.
(I should, of course, have considered the latter as well, and I’m not sure why I didn’t. If women at a gym find it unpleasant when someone who identifies as female but has male-looking anatomy uses their changing room—which they well might—that is a bad thing, and that fact does constitute an argument for not allowing that. I happen to think that the arguments the other way are stronger, but as I said before I think both sides are defensible.)
In the case we’re discussing here, the additional right comes with a perfectly matched additional responsibility. If access to a gym’s changing rooms goes by expressed gender identity rather than anatomy, then identifying as female lets you into the women’s rooms at exactly the same time as it bars you from the men’s.
(One might argue that in fact someone with female identity but male anatomy should be allowed to use either to reduce the likelihood of their getting assaulted, or something. Members of unusually vulnerable groups sometimes get additional rights even if membership of the group is self-selected, and that’s not obviously unreasonable. The additional rights are compensating for additional risks rather than additional responsibilities they people in question have taken on.)
Nice steelmanning of my position. No, wait, not steelmanning. The other thing.
But I’m a bit confused now about what your position is, because I think you’ve now said the following things:
A gym changing-room setup that seems to offer extra opportunities for sexual assault against trans people isn’t a problem; the risk is very small.
A gym changing-room setup that makes trans people feel uncomfortable and stigmatized isn’t a problem; no one should expect that the universe will be rearranged to accommodate their sensitivities.
A gym changing-room setup that lets trans women into the women’s changing room is a problem, because [...]
and I’m not sure how to fill in that [...] at the end. ”… because the (other) women may feel uncomfortable”? (But you just said that the fact that some people will feel uncomfortable shouldn’t count for much in designing gym changing rooms.) ”… because the (other) women may be at danger of assault”? (But you just said that we shouldn’t worry about assaults in gym changing rooms.)
A nitpick: it is not male-looking anatomy, it is male anatomy.
Which responsibility? If I am of whatever gender I say I am, I can change genders at will. I am not “barred” from the other changing room any more than picking one door to walk through “bars” me from the other door.
That didn’t involve transmuting your position into either steel or straw. That was just me amusing myself :-) I did not mean to imply anything about your views on widespread surveillance.
I don’t have a well-developed position delineated by bright lines. Basically you have a conflict between two groups—let’s call them “trans” and “mainstream”. Such a conflict is nothing unusual and, indeed, the entirely normal state of a human society. Typically such conflicts are resolved according the the balance of power between the groups—the results vary from one side fully suppressing the other to an equally-unsatisfying compromise. Occasionally the stars align and it turns out that the conflict is easily fixable and can be “dissolved” in LW lingo.
In contemporary Western societies such conflicts are usually resolved politically which means that the sides wage a cultural war “for the hearts and minds”. This kind of war uses propaganda as weapons. Accordingly, the war involves loud screaming about morals, justice, fairness, God’s will, etc. etc. -- whatever is needed for the agitprop needs of the day. I tend to by very cynical about such agitprop.
Note, by the way, that a completely general answer to the there-is-a-tranny-in-my-shower problem does not exist. As you yourself observed, it all depends on the local culture. A good solution for the showers in San Francisco’s Castro district is likely to be different from a solution for downtown Salt Lake City—and that’s even staying inside one country.
What’s visible to, and possibly disturbing for, the people in the changing room is what it looks like. I don’t know, e.g., whether you would consider a post-op female-to-male transsexual person’s anatomy male or merely male-looking, but I take it it would be about as disturbing in that context as a straightforwardly cis man’s. So the relevant question is what it looks like.
I am pretty sure no one is in fact proposing that people be able to change their gender at will simply by saying “I’m a woman now”. (Yeah, you could read Fluttershy’s comment upthread that way, but I’m quite confident it wasn’t so intended.)
Good! But I can’t help noticing that your cynicism has been deployed only in one direction in this discussion, even though (so it seems to me) there’s plenty of moral-outrage agitprop coming from elsewhere.
No, you’re proposing that anyone can change genders at will by saying “I’m a woman now” and make an attempt to look like the other gender, dress like the other gender and insist on being referred to by opposite gender pronouns and name (that’s how you defined “presenting as the other gender” here). While this is technically slightly more then saying “I’m a woman now”, it’s only barely so.
And frankly, I doubt you’d refuse to take the word of someone who insisted that he was always a “she” but didn’t bother with changing name, clothing, or appearance.
I think it’s very importantly different. It means, for instance, that
it’s not something you can just do on a whim
it requires actual inconvenience and commitment
both of which greatly decrease its utility to people wanting to ogle or assault women in public restrooms, gym changing rooms, etc. (The fact that it requires you to make yourself appear less “manly” probably also has that effect.)
You may doubt whatever you please, I suppose.
(If someone declared themself female but made no sign of any attempt to “be” female beyond that declaration, I’d attempt to go along with their pronoun preferences but wouldn’t, e.g., let them into any female-only premises I was responsible for. I don’t think I would actually consider them female for any practical purposes, though further interactions might convince me that there was something more going on than a liking for feminine pronouns—e.g., maybe the person is young, still living with and dependent on parents, and the parents are very strongly opposed. In such a case I still wouldn’t let them into female-only premises but would be apologetic about it :-).)
How so? The only things in that list that take any effort at all are dressing and looking like a women. The former isn’t that hard, it’s easy to get a dress, heck these days many women wear jeans and a T-shirt, or suites, or other “male clothing”, so anything a men would normally wear could count as “female clothing”. The latter also isn’t that hard, see the existence of drag queens, or any number of comedians.
It looks to me as if you are mixing up a number of different things (what makes someone male or female, versus what constitutes sufficient evidence to treat them so in a given case; what I think their gender is, versus what I would treat it as in a given difficult situtation; etc. I will try to disentangle these things.
The position I am defending here is as follows. (Individual points numbered for cross-reference.)
[EDITED to stop LW’s comment formatting messing up my numbers and to complete something I carelessly left unfinished after editing other bits.]
0. There is no single fact-of-the-matter about a person’s gender in general, because different notions of gender are appropriate in different circumstances. 1. Of course, for the great majority of people all reasonable such notions coincide; the questions here are about cases where they diverge. 2. For most purposes the best notion of gender is largely a matter of (a) internal mind-state and (b) social role occupancy. 3. The relevant internal mind-state doesn’t change rapidly; social role occupancy can in a sense change quickly but evidence of it accumulates more slowly. And of course anatomy and chromosomes and whatnot are even harder to change.
4. In many cases, if someone claims that their gender is not as it superficially appears, the best policy is to believe them. (Note: this is not only about trans people. There are people who are anatomically, chromosomally and hormonally female but look very much like men unless you take their clothes off.) 5. In many others (typically distinguished from those in #3 by the consequences being worse if you take them at their word and they’re lying) the best policy is to require stronger evidence of 2a and/or 2b (e.g., legal name change; evidence of having been consistently self-describing as female for some time; testimony of a psychologist who has examined them). 6. In some others (e.g., medicine, major sporting contests) 2a and 2b may be pretty much irrelevant and the only important thing may be genes or gross anatomy.
7. Every possible policy will make some mistakes, with the boring exception that if you define gender by easily visible external features then the policy of using those easily visible external features will not make mistakes. (But either you can’t execute that policy without looking in people’s pants, or else you will classify some people with female internal anatomy and chromosomes as male.)
So. Can someone’s gender, in my view, change on a whim? No (see #3). Can something they do on a whim suffice to make me treat them, at least provisionally, as of one gender rather than another? Yes, but only in “low-stakes” cases (see #4). Does this mean that if everyone thought as I do then our nations’ women’s restrooms would be flooded with men claiming to be women in order to assault or harass? No, because in higher-stakes cases I would be more cautious (see #5), and in any case the available evidence strongly suggests that even laws that straightforwardly let anyone use any restroom do not cause any increase in such crimes.
So you agree that “gender” as distinct from “sex” doesn’t correspond to anything, but for some reason you still want to use the term, presumably for some of the connotations it inherits from the latter. Generally, using a word that has no referent solely for its connotations is very bad reasoning.
Except you have no way to directly observe internal mind-state, and you are arguing against relying on anatomy and chromosomes, that means in practice your policy amounts to relying on “social role”. Of course, if you do observe internal mind state, e.g., by using sufficiently good brain scans or personality tests, you’d like find that most of the people claiming to be “trans” are clustered with their birth gender.
I notice that this is the only item on your list that attempts to distinguish some notion of “innate gender” from all someone faking it out of whatever motive. Given the current state of the “science” of psychology, this doesn’t strike me as particularly reliable.
Given how you’ve explained your world view this doesn’t appear to be the case. Rather, I suspect someone could easily change his “gender” on a whim and keep convincing you that the current gender is the real one provided you didn’t remember your previous meeting.
Nope. I think it corresponds to different things in different contexts. (So the rest of your paragraph is addressing an irrelevant strawman.)
To a great extent, yes. (Not entirely; we can often draw inferences about internal mind-state from externally observable behaviour, including things like what answers we get to questions about a person’s gender.) You say that as if it’s obviously a bad thing, but it’s not obvious why.
I think it’s very far from clear that we should expect that.
That’s quite a proviso. Take note also of point 5 and note its consequences for ability to change on a whim in cases where there’s more at stake than what pronouns I use to refer to someone.
This is looking like a distinction without a difference.
The word “big” corresponds to different things in different contexts. (A big baby. A big skyscraper. A big problem.) Is “big” meaningless?
The majority of the population can be divided neatly into two fairly well defined groups according to anatomy, chromosomes, etc. We call that “sex”. There are social and psychological differences that mostly go along with sex, but diverge in some cases. We call those “gender”. In both cases, exactly which features we care about most will vary, which may change how some unusual people are classified. What’s the problem?
(To be explicit: sex has ambiguous and intermediate and anomalous cases just as gender does. Example: If you have XY chromosomes but complete androgen insensitivity, then you are chromosomally male, your externally-visible anatomy is female, and internally you have some features of both and in particular no uterus.)
I’m pretty sure that ID cards and human interaction are territory, not map. Please don’t do the “social constructs basically don’t exist” thing, it’s very silly.
The discussion of a hypothetical person who wants to change gender (but nothing else) every five minutes is giving me a vibe similar to when someone asks “how does evolution explain a monkey giving birth to a human?” It doesn’t. That would falsify the model, much like our hypothetical person would falsify the “gender identity” model.
There exists a group of people who explicitly claim to have gender identities that are not stable over time, but this usually includes behaviors beyond requested pronouns.
Hey, an empirical disagreement! I think this research has in fact been done, I’ll go digging for it later this evening.
So a man getting an ID card with a typo in the gender field makes him female?
How about not “every five minutes”, but whenever he feels like going to the women’s bathroom to ogle/be generally creepy?
Well, this fact itself seems like to should falsify gjm’s model. Let’s see what he says about it.
Legally, maybe so, at least until the error is corrected. You’d have to ask a lawyer to be sure.
ID cards are a physical object, which is not determined by biological sex, since as a question of legal fact one can get an ID card of one’s self-identified gender if one jumps through the appropriate hoops, even without sex reassignment surgery. (At least that’s how it works here in California. I have no idea how it works in other states or countries.)
This seems to me a counterexample to the claim that gender, as distinct from sex, doesn’t correspond to anything. Social interaction is another: for example, women are much more likely to ask each other if they want old clothes before giving/throwing them away, and much less likely to get asked to be someone’s Best Man at a wedding.
By far the dominant hypothesis here would be “you’re lying”, but failing that probably yes, gender identities aren’t supposed to be able to work that way.
“Your gender is whatever you say it is” is a social norm, not a factual claim. Saying you’re a woman doesn’t make you a woman. People just don’t generally assert it unless they actually want to be treated as a woman. Creeps, or other people lying for personal gain, seem exceptionally rare—probably because it’s a giant hassle, and the institutions they’d want to take advantage of don’t obey that norm anyway.
If transition ever became socially easy and stigma-free, we probably would need a different anti-creep mechanism.
I agree that genderfluid people might break gjm’s model, although he seems to have some wiggle room as written. Of course, I don’t know if this is a deliberate result of accounting for their existence, or a lucky accident.
Ok, now I officially have no reason to care about Wes_W!gender.
So you agree this social norm has no factual basis to it.
Good I’m glad we agree on this. Now, why are you trying to defend positions that rely on denying this claim?
Yes, and creeps, or example, want to be treated as a woman with respect to which bathroom they enter.
I’m not. I entered this discussion mostly to point out that you were equating “corresponds to social behavior” with “does not correspond to anything”, which is silly.
It’s worse than gender not corresponding to anything. Like in the standard example, it corresponds to multiple things, which don’t necessarily agree.
ETA:
Do they? I mean, as a theoretical problem, sure. But to my knowledge this is a vanishingly rare event.
I don’t know about that. You don’t interpret common statements along the lines of “Only you have the right to decide your gender identity” or, in the negative form, “No one can tell you which gender you are” this way?
The other direction, which I assume would have been represented by “God will burn you in hell forever, your freaks!” and/or “You need to be fixed and re-educated, this is for your own benefit” is strangely absent on LW :-) I doubt even VoiceOfRa would express the desire to go back to the ways of dealing with “sexual deviants” popular in the early and mid XX century.
More importantly, in my social circles (both meatspace and online) the left is the aggressor and tends to take the “If you’re not with us you’re against us. KILL!!!!” approach. If I were stuck in a small town in America’s Bible Belt, for example, I would expect my emphasis to be different.
That’s a separate question that touches on a whole bunch of other issues. It’s related to the question of what the proper way of dealing with the guy who insists he’s Jesus is.
No, I don’t interpret “only you have the right...” etc. that way. I would guess that people saying it usually mean something like this: your gender is whatever it is, it’s reasonably stable over time, and it’s not something other people can know by looking at you or doing medical tests; so people should beyond what you say. But if you change your professed gender every five minutes no one is going to believe you are sincere and take you seriously.
Well, he seems to me to be quite far in “the other direction”.
Here on LW, it seems to me the nearest thing to aggression on this topic has been VoR ranting about delusions, hallucinations, “trannies”, etc., etc. There’s some very aggressive “social justice” out there, for sure, but it’s pretty much completely unrepresented on LW, whereas neoreaction is alive and well here even though there aren’t very many neoreactionaries.
[EDITED to fix the typo mentioned two comments downthread.]
Rants are not aggression but free speech :-) Confusing the two is a common mistake/tactic :-P
I think that used to be true, but is no longer true. As far as I can see, VoiceOfRa is the lone neoreactionary actively posting.
So is “God will burn you in hell for ever”. So is “You are a bigot and I hope no one buys anything from your bakery”. So is “If you’re not with us you’re against us”. Or (I think more accurately) all of these are both aggression and free speech.
If mere ranting doesn’t count as aggression, what is it that “the left” has been doing in your social circles lately? Issuing death threats?
Maybe no one else here explicitly identifies as nrx. (For that matter, I don’t know whether VoR actually does.) But when topics come up of the sort where neoreactionaries and social-justice enthusiasts tend to disagree dramatically, I see none of the characteristic tropes of the SJ movement (anything a member of an Oppressed Group says about their situation must be accepted unquestioningly; anything that talks about “men” and “women” is perpetuating the gender binary and therefore bad; mumble mumble patriarchy burble; etc.) and plenty of those of neoreaction (take for granted that black people are less intelligent than white people and women less intelligent than men; treat homosexuality, transgender, etc., as instances of deviance that we should be working against, etc.). Comments that (explicitly) even contemplate the possibility that the social conservatives might be wrong on this stuff get lots of disagreement and usually (on balance) negative karma. Comments that agree with the nrx position on this stuff get less disagreement and usually (on balance) positive karma.
Maybe it’s mostly plain ol’ social conservatism, with only a tiny fraction of nrx. But whatever it is, there’s more of it than there is of the “social justice” that lies at the other end of one political spectrum. I certainly don’t see any possible way that “the left is the aggressor” here on LW; am I missing something?
(Of course “above and well” was a typo—I was posting from a mobile device and not paying enough attention to its autocompletion. I’ll fix it.)
Your arguments are getting… sloppy. Keep in mind that we are taking a stroll through a mindkill minefield, so a modicum of care is advised :-) Look:
You countered the statement that “rants are not aggression but free speech” by pointing out that the Venn intersection of aggression and free speech is not null. That is true, but not a counterargument.
You said that “neoreaction is alive and well here” and when I pointed out that no, it is not, you countered by saying that SJWs do not thrive on LW. Again, true, but not a counterargument.
You put in the same list things like “take for granted that black people are less intelligent than white people and women less intelligent than men”. One of these two is a very well-supported position with lots of research behind it, a position that a great many people tried to knock down for decades, and yet they did not succeed. The other position I never heard anyone express on LW (are you sure you not confusing means and variances, by any chance?).
So. Back to the topic. I have a very low opinion of the somewhat fashionable approach that the exposition of views you don’t agree with constitutes aggression (or a “microaggression”). Rants are rarely aggression, but ad hominem attacks often are. It’s a good thing that LW has strict community norms about ad hominem.
Note, by the way, that I did not say that the left is aggressive on LW—I consider LW to be reasonably balanced and it is not really a political battleground anyway. I disagree that LW has a “conservative” tilt, I think it has an “against the stupid” tilt and if you think this makes LW more conservative, well… X-)
Of course, the whole discussion of LW being less or more something critically depends on the coordinate system in which you are looking at the issue.
I do agree. I am not sure I agree about which of us is being sloppier :-).
I think you misunderstood my point, but maybe what happened is that I misunderstood yours and so my comments weren’t such as to make sense to you. So let me be slower and more explicit and see if that helps.
Of course rants are (in the relevant sense) speech, and if we value free speech then we should want not to forbid rants. However, that doesn’t stop them being aggression too; you offered no grounds other than rants’ being speech for thinking they shouldn’t be classified as aggression, and my best guess—perhaps wrong? -- was that you were suggesting that if they are free speech then they can’t also be aggression. Hence the counterexamples.
Perhaps in fact you hold that something else stops rants from being aggression. If so, what and how? (It seems clear to me that some of the comments VoiceOfRa has made are aggression, but maybe we have different criteria for aggression or something.)
Again, I think you misunderstood my point. I think the fault is mine; I wasn’t as clear and explicit as I could have been. So, again, let me try again more slowly and clearly and see if that helps.
First of all, the context is relevant. I’d taken your statement that “the left is the aggressor” (for what I think were good reasons but apparently wrongly given your other comments since) to be describing LW as well as your other social circles. So it went like this: “The left is the aggressor.” “For sure there’s aggressive leftism out there, but here on LW there’s basically none of that but there is aggressive rightism.” “Nah, there are hardly any neoreactionaries on LW these days.” To which I replied by comparing how near LW gets to SJ and NRx and what the reactions tend to be.
So (1) I wasn’t only saying that SJWs don’t thrive on LW, I was comparing SJ and NRx; and (2) that wasn’t meant to be a response to your “hardly any neoreactionaries any more” statement in isolation, but in the context of what I thought was a discussion of whether “the left is the aggressor” on LW.
(Which, again, may in fact not have been the discussion you thought we were having, but I hope that on reflection it’s obvious how I came to take it that way.)
Elsewhere in this thread I posted a link to one recent discussion in which the topic came up. Someone else made much the same mean-versus-variance comment, but the discussion in question was about a specific role that isn’t very tail-y and for which I’m pretty sure a difference in variance alone clearly couldn’t have the required effect.
Is anyone here saying or implying that? I certainly don’t intend anything of the kind, and I gravely doubt that anyone seriously thinks what you say they do. I think some people do think that (1) the exposition of the opinion that such-and-such a group’s members are inferior, evil, crazy, etc., constitutes aggression, and (2) exposition of such opinions using needlessly pejorative terms constitutes aggression. Of these, I’m ambivalent about #1 and agree with #2.
So, e.g., when VoiceOfRa characterizes transgender people as suffering “delusions or hallucinations”, that’s certainly #1 and probably #2. It seems pretty aggressive to me. When he suggests that it’s unreasonable to treat those “delusions or hallucinations” any more generously than those of someone who thinks he’s simultaneously Jesus and John Lennon, that seems pretty aggressive to me. When he calls them “trannies” (er, actually “trannys” but never mind) that’s certainly #2 rather than #1 and it’s hard to see how it’s not being deliberately rude; again, in my book that’s aggression. Etc.
Of course this is all much milder aggression than, say, beating the people in question up with a baseball bat. But it’s pretty aggressive, and it seems to me much more aggressive than anything I’ve seen from “the left” on LW lately, and I think all those comments are currently sitting with positive karma. Which is one reason why I think that LW currently leans right (to which I don’t object, for the avoidance of doubt, even though that happens not to be my own leaning) and that here it’s much nearer the truth to say “the right is the aggressor” than “the left is the aggressor”.
(Note 1: Again, I do appreciate that you’ve indicated that your comment about leftist aggression wasn’t in fact intended to apply to LW. I’m just explaining where my comments were coming from. Note 2: I am not claiming that LW’s participants lean right; past surveys have suggested not, and I would guess not. But if we weight by actual participation in politically loaded discussions, I think that’s the way it goes. I have the impression that one or more right-leaning LWers have a very deliberate policy of trying to make things unpleasant for left-leaning LWers; if so, that may be a partial explanation.)
I think it has both. As someone who has been heavily downvoted (I think by exactly two people, one much more than the other) in recent politically-fraught discussions, I am curious: Do you think my comments in this thread are stupid? Do you think they are stupider than comments with a different sociopolitical leaning that have been upvoted?
(I take it you have sufficient brain to distinguish “stupid” from “in disagreement with my politics”, but I will explicitly remind you of your own caution about mindkill minefields.)
On aggression (with apologies to Konrad Lorenz):
I was hoping to avoid getting into the definitions debate, but that looks inescapable now. We seem to understand aggression differently.
First, let me point to tension in your position. On the one hand you say that “It seems clear to me that some of the comments VoiceOfRa has made are aggression” and “When he suggests that it’s unreasonable to treat those “delusions or hallucinations” any more generously than those of someone who thinks he’s simultaneously Jesus and John Lennon, that seems pretty aggressive to me.” On the other hand, you strongly deny that the exposition of one’s views (presumably, even on controversial topics) is aggression, saying that “I certainly don’t intend anything of the kind, and I gravely doubt that anyone seriously thinks what you say they do.”
I see problems in this position of yours. You might be able construct a definition of “aggression” which twists and turns enough to accommodate you, but I suspect it will be neither a good nor a robust definition.
For example, you think that considering transsexuals to be mentally ill is “aggression”. Or is it aggression only if you call them crazy (a “needlessly pejorative term”), but if you, following DSM-IV, diagnose them with a Gender Identity Disorder that’s not aggression any more?
I can’t make sense of your position, it does not look consistent to me.
Re women’s IQ:
The case with the lab manager’s resume has a lot of confounding factors (other than IQ) in play. Hiring managers are often more concerned with whether the new hire will get pregnant and go on maternity leave than with IQ, for example. And, well, this is an empirical question, there is a lot of data about the IQ of men and women.
Re LW tilts:
You say that “I think that LW currently leans right” but that critically depends on where you zero point is :-) I suspect that LW actually doesn’t tilt anywhere politically—most people here don’t care (some “naturally” and some explicitly to avoid mindkills). It is not a useful exercise to assign a political tilt to LW—that’s not what this place is about.
Re “Do you think my comments in this thread are stupid?”:
LOL. I have actually been upvoting your comments in this subthread back to zero because we are having a very nice polite conversation and ideological downvotes are not welcome in it (and are quite silly, anyway).
But to be explicit—no, I don’t think so at all. If if did, this conversation wouldn’t exist.
What I strongly disagreed with is the following claim (your description of an allegedly “fashionable approach” which you may or may not have been ascribing to me)
It sometimes happens that an exposition of some view or other constitutes aggression-as-I-understand it. It sometimes happens that it doesn’t. Whether I agree with the view has nothing to do with whether a given exposition of it constitutes aggression.
If you’d instead said that some people think “that sometimes an exposition of a particular view can constitute aggression” then I wouldn’t have disagreed with it. Perhaps that’s what you actually meant to say some people think—but in that case I suggest that you said it very badly. (Perhaps from a desire to make those people sound sillier?)
No, I don’t, and I respectfully suggest that you retrace whatever mental steps led you to think I think that looking for errors.
I think that calling them (not merely considering them) delusional and hallucinating (not merely mentally ill) is “aggression”. You can consider anyone you like anything you like and it will not constitute aggression; how could it. And “mentally ill” is a very broad category, covering e.g. things like depression and anxiety as well as outright craziness.
And: yes, words like “crazy” and “delusional” and “hallucinating” are pejorative in ways in which e.g. “suffering from gender identity disorder” is not, which makes statements that use the former terms more aggressive than otherwise similar ones that use the latter.
So I think the tension and inconsistency you perceive in my position is the result of misunderstanding it. (There might of course be tensions or inconsistencies even when it’s correctly understood; maybe we’ll find out.)
True. I’m sure hiring managers are rarely concerned with IQ as such at all. But they do care about competence in the job, and that’s the scale on which they rated applicants called “Jennifer” 0.7 points lower (out of 5) than otherwise identical applicants called “John”. I personally would not classify “unlikelihood of disappearing on maternity leave” under the heading of competence; would you expect university science faculty hiring a lab manager to do so?
Yup. That’s a large part of why I am not bothered by LW (in my perception) leaning right.
You may recall that I was only talking about this because I thought you were implying that politlcally-motivated aggression on LW tends to come from “the left”. I don’t at all mind LW’s tilting rightward (if indeed it really does).
I’m pleased to hear it! But you will find that in any political thread my comments (which I’m fairly sure are not generally any stupider than they are in this one) attract more than averagely many downvotes even when (as it seems to my of-course-perfectly-unbiased judgement) they are conspicuously reasonable and not-stupid. So do comments from other people with political leanings resembling mine. And that’s part of what I mean by saying that LW has a conservative, not merely and anti-stupid, tilt.
I think that particular phenomenon is due to a very small number of users—in my less charitable moments I suspect one with intermittent sockpuppets. But it’s there, and I think it affects the overall flavour of discussion on LW, even if that’s not what LW should be about. And, more generally, I think the left and the right have their characteristic unpleasantnesses, and those of the left are (1) largely absent and (2) heavily criticized and downvoted when they show up, whereas those of the right are (1) distinctly more common and (2) generally approved by the LW community, so far as one can tell from replies and karma.
(Again: I’m not saying there’s anything very terrible about that. And LW is indeed distinctly less unpleasantly political than many other venues.)
That would have been fairly useless. The phrase “some people think..” can be followed by pretty much anything at all and still be true.
I am still confused by your understanding of aggression—right now it seems to me that it means just being impolite. Let’s take Alice who may or may not have some issues. Bob says “She is mentally ill”. Charlie says “She is delusional and hallucinating”. Duncan says “Man, she’s just batshit crazy”. Is it you position that Bob is fine, Charlie is mildly aggressive, and Duncan is highly aggressive?
I find it strange that you pay so much attention to the form and relatively little to the content.
Let’s get a bit more precise. Does LW as a whole have such a tilt, or does your karma have such a tilt? I think you’re extrapolating your personal situation a bit too much.
Think of LW as a place of refuge, a “safe zone” to use an SJ term :-D A neo-reactionary who wanders into a wrong Tumblr neighbourhood will get a lot of detailed descriptions of how exactly he should die in a fire :-/
From my perspective, the dilemma you face is that you could say “a lot of people think that expressing opinions that disagree with theirs constitutes aggression”, which would be non-content-free but ridiculous, or you could say “some people think that some expressions of opinion constitute aggression”, which would be true but almost content-free; I’m having trouble figuring out what you could have meant that would be contentful but in any way plausible.
They’re closely related. Aggression is (among other things) one variety of impoliteness. (In ordinary social contexts. If you’re facing an opponent in a boxing ring, aggression isn’t impolite.)
Is A listening to B, C, and D? Or are they saying this in some venue that records what they say, where A might come across it later? Or perhaps not A but some of her friends and family?
If not, I don’t think I’d call their comments aggressive at all. So let’s suppose B, C, and D know that their comments are likely to be heard by A. Then yeah, all else being equal I would say B<C<D in aggression.
I find it strange that you say that, for two reasons. Firstly, there most certainly is a difference in content between what B, C, and D are saying. (And, referring back to the original discussion, between “Transgender people suffer from gender identity disorder, which I classify as a mental illness” and “Transgender people are delusional and hallucinating”.) Just as there is a difference between “Lumifer has some unusual political opinions” and “Lumifer is a fascist”. (Note for the avoidance of doubt: I do not think you are a fascist and have no idea how usual your political opinions are.)
Secondly, there’s a lot of information in the form. The difference between “Joe has difficulty understanding some things” and “Joe is a fucking moron” is largely one of form, and mostly what it indicates is hostility. Similarly, it’s easy enough to see how someone could express opinions about transgender people quite similar to VoiceOfRa’s with a much less hostile tone. That would (as I use the word) be less aggressive. It would be less likely to make any trans people reading LW feel attacked; less likely to make them expect that if their trans-ness became known they’d be met with hostility and contempt.
I tried to make it clear that I’m well aware of the difference (acknowledging that my judgement of my own comments is far from impartial; citing what happens to other leftish-leaning comments; “part of what I mean”. Did I really fail so badly? (Or: did I succeed but do you think I’m disastrously self-deceiving or something?)
See, this is why I find it odd that you say LW doesn’t lean right. Because providing a “safe place” for neoreactionaries would, I think, generally be regarded—even by people who consider themselves right-wing—as evidence of either (1) rightishness or (2) fanatical refusal to make anyone unwelcome on account of their sociopolitical views. And if you think it’s #2, then I invite you to imagine the roasting that the residents of that “wrong Tumblr neighbourhood” would get if they turned up on LW.
Well this tumblr-style struggle session against gwen’s “transphobia” has rather disturbingly many upvotes for the PC-brigade.
Three years ago. I wonder how many of the people who upvoted those comments have since left LW because it’s an unpleasant place to be for anyone with “progressive” social opinions.
(FWIW, I have no recollection of that particular incident and I hope I didn’t upvote the boo-isn’t-gwern-awful comments. I think they were obnoxious, but I don’t see any reason why the right treatment for being obnoxious on IRC should be being crucified on LW.)
That particular thread was actually surprisingly civil and even occasionally productive, it seems to me on skimming through it now. I can’t help thinking a similar thread today would be more acrimonious.
You do realize you can check by looking at whether the thumbs up is colored green. Also, how about the “gwen must repent of his crimethink and confess his sins” comments?
You have a very bizarre notion of civil.
To use your “speech as violence” analogy, it would only be more acrimonious in the sense that a mass beating where the target doesn’t even bother to defend himself is “less acrimonious” than a fight where he does. [Edit: fixed last sentence.]
D’oh, so I can. … It would appear that I neither upvoted nor downvoted anything in that thread (although I haven’t followed any of the “continue this thread” links on very deeply nested comments). My guess is that I never saw it.
I’m not sure what you mean by “how about”, but if you mean did I upvote them: no, as I say, I don’t appear to have upvoted or downvoted anything in that discussion.
Perhaps. (But note that “surprisingly civil” doesn’t mean “perfectly civil”.)
I either don’t understand what you’re saying, or don’t have any idea on what grounds you say what you’re saying. (The latter if you mean that nowadays LW is so supersaturated with progressivism that gwern wouldn’t bother to defend himself. The former if you mean something else.)
I made a typo. See the edited version.
OK, that makes more sense, but still not very much. gwern did defend himself. Maybe not in the way you’d prefer, but he did defend himself.
He begged for mercy, that’s very different than defending oneself.
He didn’t “beg for mercy”. He (1) criticized the person who reported what he’d done for breaking IRC norms by posting bits of logs; (2) agreed that what he said was unpleasant and rude; (3) explained why he thought he shouldn’t be expected to ensure that he doesn’t do it again.
I’m sure you’d prefer him to have said that it’s perfectly reasonable and correct to describe trans people in the way he (jokingly) did, but if we take him at face value (which I see no good reason not to) then he doesn’t think it is (or at least didn’t at the time). None the less, I don’t see how his response can be categorized as “begging for mercy”.
(In particular, I don’t think anyone threatened him with anything and I don’t think he made any kind of request for such threats not to be carried out. In which case, he certainly didn’t literally beg for mercy or even ask for it. I suppose it’s possible that you’re using the term extremely broadly, to cover any response more temperate than “I am completely in the right and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves”, but I don’t think that’s how the rest of the world uses “beg for mercy”.)
I would like to point out the asymmetry hidden by the word “safe space”. A space is Neoreactionary-hostile if it actively censors their posts and deletes their accounts, a space is SJW-hostile if it fails to censor and delete the accounts of all other view points.
This reminds me of the old Cold War era joke:
An American and a Russian are discussing their respective countries. The American says “In America there is free speech, anyone can go up to the White House, yell ‘down with Reagan’ and everything will be OK”. The Russian replies “Well in Russia we also have free speech, anyone can go up to the Kremlin, yell ‘down with Reagan’ and everything will be OK”.
That would indeed be an amusing and silly asymmetry. However, you just made it up; it is neither what I said nor what I meant.
How about “a lot of people alieve that expressing opinions that disagree with theirs constitutes aggression”?
Yes, “alieve” is certainly much more credible than “believe” here, and I bet it’s close to what I think Lumifer meant. It rather makes nonsense of his description of doing so as a “somewhat fashionable approach”, though.
(I in fact suspect that Lumifer knows perfectly well that that description is not reasonable, but found it rhetorically convenient. Which is one reason why I’ve been slightly bloody-mindedly querying what he meant on the assumption that the description is reasonable :-).)
Well, they are saying this on the ’net. That qualifies, right? But they are not addressing Alice directly. It’s third-person, not second. Alice might or might not stumble on their remarks.
Yes, but will you call Charlie “aggresive”? Duncan?
And let’s throw in a parallel example. As you well know, Christians expect atheists to burn in hell forever. Would there be an “aggressive” and a “non-aggressive” way of pointing this out on the ’net? Still talking in third person, not saying “you”.
It’s a difference is specificity. “Delusional and hallucinating” is a specific kind of “mentally ill”. Unless you are talking metaphorically, I don’t see why a specific description would be more aggressive than general. If I believe, for example, that Alice is a schizophrenic, both sentences—“Alice is mentally ill” and “Alice is a schizophrenic” sound very similar to me from aggression point of view.
Is “hostile” necessarily “aggressive”? These are somewhat different things to me.
I also notice that you haven’t mentioned the word “intent” yet. Do you think intent matters?
Ah, but that’s the consequence of a the anti-stupid tilt :-) Neo-reactionaries, by and large, are not stupid at all. You may object to their value system, but they are capable of reason. Most of the inhabitants of the relevant Tumblr neighbourhoods are stupid and prone to form large screaming lynch mobs. There are good reasons why LW would reroute them to the woodchipper :-)
Some Christians do. I know some [EDITED: previous word was “one” before; don’t know why I did that] who don’t. Anyway: yes, there are more and less aggressive ways for someone who believes that to say it. Of course however you say it it’s a much much nastier thing than anything VoR has ever said about transgender people (“these guys are likely to suffer worse torture than a million Auschwitzes, and it will be exactly what they deserve”), and contrariwise in many cases the person saying it will only half-believe it and will be deliberately avoiding thinking about it too much. But yeah, there’s a huge difference between “unfortunately temporal sin has eternal consequences, and the only way to escape eternal damnation is to put one’s faith in Christ” and “those godless suckers are going to burn in hell, and I look forward to watching them do it”, and again a large part of the difference is that the latter seems hostile and the former (if sincere) doesn’t.
The two aren’t quite equivalent (e.g., I think you can be hostile purely inwardly, whereas aggression is necessarily an outward action) but they’re closely related.
It wouldn’t be. If someone is acting oddly, then “Alice is suffering from depression” would be not at all aggressive and “Alice is fucking crazy” would be (if expected to reach Alice’s ears) quite aggressive.
Should I have? Yes, in general intent matters; to take an extreme example, if I am a speaker of a foreign language and some perfectly innocuous sentence in that languge happens to sound exactly the same as “I’m going to kill Lumifer and eat his brains” then there’s nothing aggressive about my saying that (unless e.g. I know full well how it sounds and say it with the intention that you should hear it and be intimidated, while preserving plausible deniability for me).
(Hostility implies intent, doesn’t it? It’s not as if nothing I have said so far addresses the question of whether intent is relevant.)
I’m pretty sure there are circumstances where it doesn’t matter whether something was intended aggressively but only whether its effect is the same as if it had been. But for the purposes of determining, e.g., whether “the left is the aggressor” here on LW, the actual intent is more important. Of course the effect may be easier to determine than the intent.
I think you’re probably right that neoreactionaries tend to be intelligent. I don’t think Tumblr-SJWs are at all uniformly stupid, though (in fact my guess is that they’re less stupid than the population average in terms of raw brainpower), and I know some people who are both very clever and quite Tumblr-SJW-y. I think LW would probably route them to the woodchipper almost as directly as it would the stupid ones.
And why do you think this would be the case? Purely because of the ideological bias?
I think one of the defining characteristics of Tumblr-SJW-y people is that they are highly aggressive, both by your and my definitions. I suspect that it is their intolerance which would make them not welcome here.
Not just that. It’s their intolerance backed by no rational arguments and lots of anti-epistemology.
It’s a veritable embarras de richesses as to why they wouldn’t do well here :-D
Some are highly aggressive and would get flayed for that here. Some are not at all aggressive … and would also be made very unwelcome here, I think. Still, at this point we’re just trading conjectures...
So do you claim that crazy people don’t exist? Or that they do but we shouldn’t point this fact out? In any case you don’t seem overly concerned by the general social aggression against people who think they’re Jesus.
Of course not.
I generally prefer to leave that to the psychiatrists. But: 1. calling someone crazy is a more aggressive act when they are not in fact crazy than when they are, and 2. even when they are, yes, there is something aggressive about it. I did not say (and do not believe) that aggression is always wrong.
Actually, I’m not sure I’ve seen any. Perhaps because those people are (1) extremely rare and (2) usually confined in mental institutions because their thinking is sufficiently generally and seriously disordered that they can’t well cope with life in the world at large. Transgender people are much more common and are generally about as capable of rational thought as the rest of the population.
Transgender people are less then .01% of the population. Also being transgender the the currently fashionable form of insanity, if you go back 50-60 years you’d see even fewer “transgender” and a lot more Messiahs.
What percentage of the population would you guess is made up of people who think they are Jesus?
Incidentally, more recent studies tend to find much higher proportions of transgender people, which presumably is not unrelated to what you describe as its being “the currently fashionable form of insanity”. I don’t think you get to claim both <0.01% and that it was a lot fewer 50 years ago.
Terminology note: If I understand what is going on here, VoiceOfRa is probably using transgender to mean people who want to change male-to-female or female-to-male, and are making a serious attempt at it (sexual reassignment surgery, hormone therapy, or the like). This is not an uncommon usage, but is not the most precise usage; this would more specifically be referred to transsexual.
This may be relevant because the stats quoted appear to apply specifically to transsexuals, not to the larger class transgender (which includes anyone who feels that that their cis-gender does not apply to them). This is true regardless of whether you believe that either or both classes are delusional.
I am not certain if gjm intends to refer to transgender or transsexual folk in eir arguments.
Given that VoR has referred to the same people as “men claiming to be women”, “trannies”, “transgender people”, “people who are claiming to be ‘transsexual’”, and “trans-‘women’”, I think it’s reasonable to guess that he isn’t being super-careful about terminology.
I’ve been trying to make what I say broadly enough applicable that it applies to all trans people, except when replying to specific claims about a smaller group. I don’t guarantee that I’ve been careful enough every time.
How is that at all a workable definition? It strikes me as sufficiently vague that it could potentially apply to anyone with a little shoehorning. Is a boy who doesn’t want to play sports as much as the other boys “transgender”, probably not, but with a little creativity a school councilor who feels like being “progressive” could probably make argue that he is.
I don’t really care if it is workable. I was just clarifying what the statistics you two were using applied to. You can also have statistics on people who believe that they are Jesus, regardless of whether that is workable.
That’s a perfectly workable definition, assuming you restrict to people who go around expressing this belief.
The fact that society does confine someone to a mental institution is a strong statement.
Would you care to elaborate?
You don’t need to be neoreactionary to not agree with that claim. I would guess >75% of the public don’t agree with that claim.
I don’t think anybody here argued lately that the average woman is less intelligent than the average man. I also doubt that’s standard nrx.
It’s quite easy to get lots of disagreement on LW by saying things about IQ that are not in line with the academic research about the subject. Quite a few people on LW actually read relevant research papers. Don’t confuse pro-science with nrx.
On the other hand I haven’t seen strong disagreement with people who question whether “homosexuality is a deviance that should be worked against”.
Opinion that are by the admission of the author not well thought out deserve to be challenged. If you don’t challenge badly thought out opinions on charged topics you don’t get high quality discourse.
Of course! I wasn’t saying that everyone on LW is neoreactionary. I was saying (1) I don’t see SJ-isms and (2) I do see NRx-isms.
In the lengthy discussion that started from this comment, there were a number of people (who were not all VoiceOfRa, though one of them was with a different username) arguing that it’s credible that rating a prospective employee’s likely competence much higher if the name on the application is John rather than Jennifer (with no other differences) is not evidence of prejudice, because being named John rather than Jennifer could be good evidence of a substantial difference in competence (even given the other information in the application indicating equal ability).
I don’t know how to interpret that other than as men being more competent than women. (Not quite the same thing as intelligence but closely related. The job in question was as a lab manager in a university science department.)
And, guess what?, VoiceOfRa (operating at that time under the name of Azathoth123) was in fact saying in so many words that women are less intelligent than men. (Not, however, simply taking it for granted that everyone knows they are, so my description above isn’t perfectly accurate. Sorry.)
Don’t worry; I’m not.
I agree (with the caveat that if the author admits they’re not well thought out, then “challenge” isn’t exactly what’s called for—the author already knows they might be wrong—but something more like analysis and critique) but I think you may be misunderstanding my point. I’m not saying “waaaah, leftist comments get challenged”. I’m saying “moderately leftist comments get sharp disagreement and downvotes; immoderately rightist comments get less disagreement and fewer downvotes; therefore it doesn’t seem right to categorize LW as a place where ‘the left is the aggressor’”.
So, in particular, I was not and am not saying (1) that it’s bad that “progressive” comments get challenged, nor (2) that it’s bad that they get downvoted, nor (3) that it’s bad that “conservative” ones get a more positive reception. (As it happens I think 1 is good, 2 is bad in that the downvoting seems rather indiscriminate, and 3 is more or less neutral.) I just think 1,2,3 are clearly true and hard to reconcile with Lumifer’s explanation of his own choice of what to take issue with, as being because “the left is the aggressor” in his circles.
That boils down to not understanding statistics which is something for which you can get downvoted on LW.
You don’t need a general difference in intelligence for the average person in a given hiring poll with gender A being more capable than the average person in the same hiring poll with gender B.
Whether or not men are on average smarter than woman has nothing to do with a particular job. It’s a general statement.
No, if someone posts rubbish the fact that they know they post rubbish doesn’t mean they deserve less challenge.
We can turn this into a mathematical-skill pissing contest if you like; for what it’s worth, I don’t much favour your chances. If you’re talking about means versus variances: this is only a large effect when you’re hiring from the tails of the distribution, and a lab-manager post doesn’t require really exceptional ability in any domain.
The point of my specifying the job is that it’s a job on which performance is (1) likely to be a matter of general competence in some broad sense, rather than specialized skill that, e.g., men might be much more likely to spend a long time learning for some cultural reason, and (2) sufficiently related to general intelligence that if someone holds that men are systematically better at it, it’s reasonable to guess that this indicates they think men are smarter.
Knowing you’re posting rubbish is not the same thing as posting something you know isn’t well thought out. The comment I guess you have in mind here is not “rubbish”, and its author’s acknowledgement neither says nor means “I know I was posting rubbish”. (If we truly adopted a standard saying that every comment on LW needs to be carefully thought through and made watertight before posting, then “who should ’scape whipping?”.)
I’m not even talking about that. People who apply for a job aren’t randomly drawn from the general population. There no reason to assume that the average of the subset with applies for a job is the same as for the general population,
True enough. So, tell me: Do you think it credible that (1) there is little overall difference in the distribution of lab-managerial competence between men and women, but (2) among undergraduates applying for lab-manager positions there is a big enough difference between the competence of men and the competence of women to make it rational to rate the former 0.7 points above the latter on a 5-point scale given applications identical in every respect other than the name? (You can find the information the raters were given here; it’s fairly brief but far from content-free.)
If so, what sort of differences do you think would do this? How big would they need to be, in your judgement?
[EDITED to fix a trivial typo.]
Especially on politics I would expect that people post what they consider to be carefully thought out or otherwise explicitly say that they haven’t thought it through in the same post.
I accept that sometimes people think they have put careful thought into an issue but still end up wrong, but not even having the standard of careful thought before posting is bad.
I too would like to see more careful thought before posting, but that isn’t the same as saying that any comment not fully thought through before posting is “rubbish”.
You are making the assumption that my circles and LW are the same thing, I am not sure on which basis. I do hang out on LW, but not only here. And I did mention meatspace, too.
G: “I notice that although the sort of agitprop you complain of comes from all sides here on LW, you’re only complaining about one of them.”
L: “That’s because in the circles I move in, the left is always the aggressor.”
G: “Well, here on LW there seems to be distinctly more right than left.”
L: “Oh, I wasn’t talking about LW.”
… Then what was the relevance of your original response?
Huh? You asked about me. I answered about myself. There is no narrowly-specialised clone of me for which LW is the entire world.
At least one of us is failing to understand the other, because I’m having trouble how that comments relates to anything I said. Unless you think I was taking “in the circles I move in” to mean “in LW, and only LW”. I wasn’t; but I was taking them to include LW.
To be more explicit, again: if you do something in LW and explain it by saying “in the circles I move in, X is true” then I don’t see how that’s a useful explanation unless you’re saying that (1) LW is among the circles you move in and (2) it resembles the others in that X is true there.
OK, let me reformulate things this way. Let’s say there is a variable s (which stands for snark) defined on the [-1..1] interval so that when it is at −1 the snark is entirely directed at the left wing, when it’s at 1 it is entirely directed at the right wing, and the intermediate values determine the proportions in which both left and right get snarked. This variable s is a function of two other variables: the subject who’s doing the snarking and the location in which the snarking takes place.
You assume that s is predominantly a function of location. This is not true in my case. For me, s is predominantly a function of the subject (me) and the influence of location is secondary.
In other words, the direction of my snark is heavily influenced by things that are happening outside LW, even though the snark which you observe happens at LW.
I suggest that this is unwise; snark on LW won’t do anything to repair the opinions or attitudes of people elsewhere. If one place is Too Green and another Too Blue, then someone who frequents both does no favour to the place that’s Too Green by complaining about bluism there merely because they’re annoyed by the excessive bluism in the other place.
(Of course, you might not be able to help it; or you might not care. Fair enough, in either case. But if you do happen to care about the quality of discourse at LW and happen to be able to overcome your annoyance at overzealous progressives elsewhere, I suggest that you would do better to match the snark to the venue.)
I think you’re confusing me with this guy.
I think you’re confusing the quality of discourse with political tilt. The former is not a function of the latter. Besides, as I mentioned in another comment, how you see the tilt depends on where you set your zero point. I do not consider LW to have a conservative tilt.
Why do you think that? I’m not suggesting that you match your snark to the venue because that would push LW politics in “my” direction. (At least, I don’t think I am.) I’m suggesting that you do it because it will tend to improve the quality of discussion at LW. I would make the same suggestion if we were in some left-leaning place where you were complaining at all the conservatives because you were annoyed by all the neoreactionaries elsewhere.
But if, as seems to be the case, you don’t share my perception that LW has a lot more right-wing nastiness than left-wing nastiness, then fair enough.
Anyway, it’s pretty rude of me to be trying to tell someone else whom he should be snarking at. Sorry about that.
Well, that would be a straightforward uncharitable reading :-D
Why do you believe this to be so?
Reason 1: Because I think that there’s some chance (maybe not very large) that if an LW denizen is wrong about something and gets snarked at, it may be what they need to improve; and that for any given quantity of snark this effect will be larger if the snark is aimed at a larger deserving subpopulation of LW; so that if there are more people wrong in way A and fewer wrong in way B, snarking about A is more likely to do good than snarking about B.
And, in the present instance, for reasons already discussed I think LW has more people in need of anti-far-right snark than people in need of anti-far-left snark.
(Of course—I repeat myself—if you’re snarking just for the fun of snarking then you needn’t care about that. And perhaps the chances of any good ever coming of snarking at anyone are negligible.)
Reason 2: Because if LW is welcoming to people in group A and hostile to people in group B, these groups playing roughly symmetrical roles on opposite ends of some spectrum, there is a risk of a positive-feedback loop that pushes LW further and further in the A direction and away from the B direction until it becomes severely and unfixably partisan, which (as you have already remarked) is not how LW is supposed to work and (as you haven’t remarked but I think is true) makes LW a less interesting and useful place by decreasing its intellectual diversity.
And, in the present instance, for reasons already discussed I think LW is welcoming to rightists and hostile to leftists. If so, then shifting that balance a bit would reduce the danger.
(How real is the danger? I don’t know. Maybe less real since the More Right folks left LW. Still there, though, I think.)
(An important note that perhaps I should have written some time ago: all this left/right stuff is of course a crude but useful one-dimensional simplification of reality and if taken too seriously raises the risk of the kind of us-versus-them thinking that we’re all too familiar with. And the axis we’re really looking at here doesn’t exactly correspond to the usual left/right political axis—it’s much more concerned with social, and less with economic, issues. Please be assured that I understand all this and am using terms like “left” and “right” only as a convenient shorthand.)
I am sorry, my life’s purpose is not to bring balance to the universe, one forum at a time. I am not in the re-education business.
Well, go for it :-) As I already noted, I don’t think so.
Given that NRx used to inhabit LW and then almost all of them went away while LW stayed as it is, I consider this risk negligible. Unless, of course, direction A is leftward :-D
Also, don’t forget that LW is populated mostly by Americans. From the European point of view, both US Democrats and US Republicans are right-of-centre.
I don’t know which axis are we looking at. Is there an axis at all or you just dont’ like a particular thought cluster?
Fair enough! As I said: you aren’t obliged to care about this stuff.
Take one of those political questionnaires. Throw out all the questions about economics and foreign policy, and keep the ones about social issues. Administer the questionnaire to a representative sample of Americans and Western Europeans. Take the first principal component. That axis.
So, basically morals, especially sexual morals? An axis with libertines at one extreme and puritans at the other?
I assume we’re throwing out “social” issues which are just economics in thin disguise, right?
I wouldn’t put it that way because there’s a lot of ethics in economics and foreign policy, and because there are other areas of morality where the “social left” are the puritans (e.g., meat-eating and pollution).
Funny :-/ I think there’s close to zero ethics in economics and foreign policy (there is some in handwringing and propaganda around them, though).
Is your axis one of Haidt’s five moral axes or it’s something different? I am still not quite sure how do you see it.
Wow. I wonder what you mean by ethics, then. A change in economic or foreign policy may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths if there’s a war—how can these not be ethical matters?
No, I don’t think so.
I’m sorry about that. I’ve tried giving handwavy qualitative descriptions. I’ve told you how to identify it statistically. I’m really not sure there’s much more I can reasonably be expected to do.
Interesting. Our minds work sufficiently differently so that we hit minor misunderstandings on a very regular basis :-/
When I said “close to zero ethics in economics and foreign policy” I meant that decisions in this spheres are not driven by ethical considerations. Once you take out things like naked self-interest, desire for money and/or power, the necessity to keep up appearances, etc. the remaining influence of ethics, IMHO, is very small.
You, on the other hand, said “there’s a lot of ethics in economics and foreign policy” meaning that decisions in that sphere have meaningful consequences which we can evaluate ethically. That’s certainly true, but under this approach I can say that there is a lot of ethics in earthquakes. An earthquake “may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths”, but is it an ethical matter?
No one (so far as we know) chooses whether there are to be earthquakes.
People do choose whether to start wars, increase or decrease minimum wages, levy new taxes, etc. (Governments choose directly; in democracies, their electorates choose indirectly.)
I don’t know to what extent people in government are thinking ethically when contemplating foreign and economic policy, though they frequently claim they are. I am fairly sure that when I vote, I am greatly influenced by my estimates of the candidates’ parties’ likely foreign and economic policy, and that I am thinking in ethical terms about what policies would be best.
Of course I may be fooling myself about that, and the politicians may certainly be lying about what drives their policies. But the same is true on “social” issues. I don’t know of any reason to be more confident that (say) abortion policy is really more driven by politicians’ or voters’ ethics than (say) taxation policy.
You can examine their decisions (“revealed preferences”) and check whether they require ethical imperatives as an explanation or they can perfectly well be explained without considering ethics.
I appreciate that this is not a trivial exercise (e.g. distinguishing between “we cannot ethically do that” and “we cannot do that for the sake of keeping up appearances” is going to be difficult), but so is much of real-life analysis.
I do. Men have a higher variance than women and the employer only hires from the tail end.
(You can say that that still counts as men in a subgroup being more competent, of course, but it’s not what we normally mean by “men are more competent than women”.)
That would be plausible if hiring, say, professors, but this was for a lab manager job. Not very tail-y.
Given how different the distributions are, it’s hard to say (and not very meaningful) which has the higher average. It might even depend on which average you use.
He isn’t. Neoreactionaries are normal people.
Ouch! No need to be mean :-P
Well, Jiro is posting from similar political position too (but I’m not sure either of them identifies as neoreactionary).
IIRC he doesn’t identify as a neoreactionary. Anyway, Jiro also posts from similar positions.
Read it as “is probably going to make them (and possibly their friends) less willing to spend money in my gym”.
That translation applies just as well to gjm’s original statement.